And then Aunt Cassie was deeply hurt by her tone, and Peters had to be sent away for smelling-salts at the very moment that Sabine arrived, grinning and triumphant. It was Sabine who helped administer the smelling-salts with the grim air of administering burning coals. When the old lady grew a little more calm she fell again to saying over and over again, “Poor Sybil. … My poor, innocent little Sybil … that this should have happened to her!”
To which Olivia replied at last, “Jean is a fine young man. I’m sure she couldn’t have done better.” And then, to soften a little Aunt Cassie’s anguish, she said, “And he’s very rich, Aunt Cassie … a great deal richer than many a husband she might have found here.”
The information had an even better effect than the smelling-salts, so that the old lady became calm enough to take an interest in the details and asked where they had found a motor to go away in.
“It was mine,” said Sabine dryly. “I loaned it to them.”
The result of this statement was all that Sabine could have desired. The old lady sat bolt upright, all bristling, and cried, with an air of suffocation, “Oh, you viper! Why God should have sent me such a trial, I don’t know. You’ve always wished us evil and now I suppose you’re content! May God have mercy on your malicious soul!” And breaking into fresh sobs, she began all over again, “My poor, innocent little Sybil. … What will people say? What will they think has been going on!”
“Don’t be evil-minded, Aunt Cassie,” said Sabine sharply; and then in a calmer voice, “It will be hard on me. … I won’t be able to go to Newport until they come back with the motor.”
“You! … You! …” began Aunt Cassie, and then fell back, a broken woman.
“I suppose,” continued Sabine ruthlessly, “that we ought to tell the Mannering boy.”
“Yes,” cried Aunt Cassie, reviving again. “Yes! There’s the boy she ought to have married. …”
“And Mrs. Soames,” said Sabine. “She’ll be pleased at the news.”
Olivia spoke for the first time in nearly half an hour. “It’s no use. Mr. Pentland has been over to see her, but she didn’t understand what it was he wanted to tell her. She was in a daze … only half-conscious … and they think she may not recover this time.”
In a whisper, lost in the greater agitation of Aunt Cassie’s sobs, she said to Sabine, “It’s like the end of everything for him. I don’t know what he’ll do.”
The confusion of the day seemed to increase rather than to die away. Aunt Cassie was asked to stay to lunch, but she said it was impossible to consider swallowing even a crust of bread. “It would choke me!” she cried melodramatically.
“It is an excellent lunch,” urged Olivia.
“No … no … don’t ask me!”
But, unwilling to quit the scene of action, she lay on Horace Pentland’s Regence sofa and regained her strength a little by taking a nap while the others ate.
At last Anson called, and when the news was told him, the telephone echoed with his threats. He would, he said, hire a motor (an extravagance by which to guage the profundity of his agitation) and come down at once.
And then, almost immediately, Michael telephoned. “I have just come down,” he said, and asked Olivia to come riding with him. “I must talk to you at once.”
She refused to ride, but consented to meet him halfway, at the pine thicket where Higgins had discovered the foxcubs. “I can’t leave just now,” she told him, “and I don’t think it’s best for you to come here at the moment.”
For some reason, perhaps vaguely because she thought he might use the knowledge as a weapon to break down her will, she said nothing of the elopement. For in the confusion of the day, beneath all the uproar of scenes, emotions and telephone-calls, she had been thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the end the uproar had made little impression upon her. She had come to understand that John Pentland must have lived thus, year after year, moving always in a secret life of his own, and presently she had come to the conclusion that she must send Michael away once and for all.
As she moved across the meadow she noticed that the birches had begun to turn yellow and that in the low ground along the river the meadows were already painted gold and purple by masses of goldenrod and ironweed. With each step she seemed to grow weaker and weaker, and as she drew near the blue-black wall of pines she was seized by a violent trembling, as if the sense of his presence were able somehow to reach out and engulf her even before she saw him. She kept trying to think of the old man as he stood beside her at the hedge, but something stronger than her will made her see only Michael’s curly black head and blue eyes. She began even to pray … she (Olivia) who never prayed because the piety of Aunt Cassie and Anson and the Apostle to the Genteel stood always in her way.
And then, looking up, she saw him standing half-hidden among the lower pines, watching her. She began to run toward him, in terror lest her knees should give way and let her fall before she reached the shelter of the trees.
In the darkness of the thicket where the sun seldom penetrated, he
