For a moment Sabine’s face was lighted by a macabre enthusiasm. Her voice wavered a little. “It was a horrible, beautiful sight. For a moment they seemed almost to rise in the air as if the mare were flying, and then all at once they fell … into the bottom of the pit.”
Olivia was silent, and presently, as if she had been waiting for the courage, Sabine continued in a low voice, “But there’s one thing I saw beyond any doubt. At the edge of the pit the mare tried to turn. She would have turned away, but Cousin John raised his crop and struck her savagely. There was no doubt of it. He forced her over the elders. …” Again after a pause, “Higgins must have seen it, too. He followed them to the very edge of the pit. I shall always see him there, sitting on his horse outlined against the sky. He was looking down into the pit and for a moment the horse and man together looked exactly like a centaur. … It was an extraordinary impression.”
She remembered him thus, but she remembered him, too, as she had seen him on the night of the ball, slipping away through the lilacs like a shadow. Rising, she said, “Jean and Sybil will be back tomorrow, and then I’ll be off for Newport. I thought you might want to know what Higgins and I knew, Olivia.” For a moment she hesitated, looking out of the window toward the sea. And at last she said, “He was a queer man. He was the last of the great Puritans. There aren’t any more. None of the rest of us believe anything. We only pretend. …”
But Olivia scarcely heard her. She understood now why it was that the old man had talked to her as if he were very near to death, and she thought, “He did it in a way that none would ever discover. He trusted Higgins, and Sabine was an accident. Perhaps … perhaps … he did it to keep me here … to save the thing he believed in all his life.”
It was a horrible thought which she tried to kill, but it lingered, together with the regret that she had never finished what she had begun to tell him as they stood by the hedge talking of the letters—that one day Jean might take the name of John Pentland. He had, after all, as much right to it as he had to the name of de Cyon; it would be only a little change, but it would allow the name of Pentland to go on and on. All the land, all the money, all the tradition, would go down to Pentland children, and so make a reason for their existence; and in the end the name would be something more then than a thing embalmed in The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The descendants would be, after all, of Pentland blood, or at least of the blood of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane, which had come long ago to be Pentland blood.
And she thought grimly, “He was right, after all. I am one of them at last … in spite of everything. It’s I who am carrying on now.”
On the morning of the funeral, as she stood on the terrace expecting Jean and Sybil, Higgins, dressed in his best black suit and looking horribly awkward and ill at ease, came toward her to say, looking away from her, “Mr. O’Hara is going away. They’re putting up a ‘For Sale’ sign on his gate. He isn’t coming back.” And then looking at her boldly he added, “I thought you might want to know, Mrs. Pentland.”
For a moment she had a sudden, fierce desire to cry out, “No, he mustn’t go! You must tell him to stay. I can’t let him go away like that!” She wanted suddenly to run across the fields to the bright, vulgar, new house, to tell him herself. She thought, “He meant, then, what he said. He’s given up everything here.”
But she knew, too, that he had gone away to fight, freed now and moved only by his passion for success, for victory.
And before she could answer Higgins, who stood there wanting her to send him to Michael, Miss Egan appeared, starched and rigid and wearing the professional expression of solemnity which she adopted in the presence of bereaved families. She said, “It’s about her, Mrs. Pentland. She seems very bright this morning and quite in her right mind. She wants to know why he hasn’t been to see her for two whole days. I thought. …”
Olivia interrupted her quietly. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll go and tell her. I’ll explain. It’s better for me to do it.”
She went away into the house, knowing bitterly that she left Miss Egan and Higgins thinking of her with pity.
As she climbed the worn stair carpet to the north wing, she knew suddenly a profound sense of peace such as she had not known for years. It was over and done now, and life would go on the same as it had always done, filled with trickiness and boredom and deceits, but pleasant, too, in spite of everything, perhaps because, as John Pentland had said, “One had sometimes to pretend.” And, after all, Sybil had escaped and was happy.
She knew now that she herself would never escape; she had been too long a part of Pentlands, and she knew that what the old man had said was the truth. She had acted thus not because of duty, or promises, or nobility, or pride, or even out of virtue. … Perhaps it was even because she was not strong enough to do otherwise. But she knew that she had acted thus because, as he said, “There are things, Olivia, which people like us can’t do.”
And as she moved along the narrow hall, she saw from one of the deep-set windows the
