Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

“Indeed, I hope so. …”

Then she kissed Sabine again and murmured, “I hope, my dear, that you will come often to see me, now that you’ve come back to us. Make my house your own home.” She turned to O’Hara, finding a use for him suddenly in her warfare against Sabine. “You know, Mr. O’Hara, she is a traitor, in her way. She was raised among us and then went away for twenty years. She hasn’t any loyalty in her.”

She made the speech with a stiff air of playfulness, as if, of course, she were only making a joke and the speech meant nothing at all. Yet the air was filled with a cloud of implications. It was the sort of tactics in which she excelled.

Sabine went with her to the door, and when she returned she discovered O’Hara standing by the window, watching the figure of Aunt Cassie as she moved indignantly down the road in the direction of Pentlands. Sabine stood there for a moment, studying the straight, strong figure outlined against the light, and she got suddenly a curious sense of the enmity between him and the old woman. They stood, the two of them, in a strange way as the symbols of two great forces—the one negative, the other intensely positive; the one the old, the other, the new; the one of decay, the other of vigorous, almost too lush growth. Nothing could ever reconcile them. According to the scheme of things, they would be implacable enemies to the end. But Sabine had no doubts as to the final victor; the same scheme of things showed small respect for all that Aunt Cassie stood for. That was one of the wisdoms Sabine had learned since she had escaped from Durham into the uncompromising realities of the great world.

When she spoke, she said in a noncommittal sort of voice, “Mrs. Struthers is a remarkable woman.”

And O’Hara, turning, looked at her with a sudden glint of humor in his blue eyes. “Extraordinary … I’m sure of it.”

“And a powerful woman,” said Sabine. “Wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. It is never good to underestimate such strength. And now. … How do you like your tea?”

He took no tea but contented himself with munching a bit of toast and afterward smoking a cigar, clearly pleased with himself in a naive way in the role of landlord coming to inquire of his tenant whether everything was satisfactory. He had a liking for this hard, clever woman who was now only a tenant of the land—his land—which she had once owned. When he thought of it—that he, Michael O’Hara, had come to own this farm in the midst of the fashionable and dignified world of Durham—there was something incredible in the knowledge, something which never ceased to warm him with a strong sense of satisfaction. By merely turning his head, he could see in the mirror the reflection of the long sear on his temple, marked there by a broken bottle in the midst of a youthful fight along the India Wharf. He, Michael O’Hara, without education save that which he had given himself, without money, without influence, had raised himself to this position before his thirty-sixth birthday. In the autumn he would be a candidate for Congress, certain of election in the back Irish districts. He, Michael O’Hara, was on his way to being one of the great men of New England, a country which had once been the tight little paradise of people like the Pentlands.

Only no one must ever suspect the depth of that great satisfaction.

Yes, he had a liking for this strange woman, who ought to have been his enemy and, oddly enough, was not. He liked the shrewd directness of her mind and the way she had of sitting there opposite him, turning him over and over while he talked, as if he had been a small bug under a microscope. She was finding out all about him; and he understood that, for it was a trick in which he, himself, was well-practiced. It was by such methods that he had gotten ahead in the world. It puzzled him, too, that she should have come out of that Boston-Durham world and yet could be so utterly different from it. He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since … that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.

They talked for a time, idly and pleasantly, with a sense of understanding unusual in two people who had known each other for so short a time; they spoke of the farm, of Pentlands, of the mills and the Poles in Durham, of the country as it had been in the days when Sabine was a child. And all the while he had that sense of her weighing and watching him, of feeling out the faint echo of a brogue in his speech and the rather hard, nasal quality that remained from those days along India Wharf and the memories of a ne’er-do-well, superstitious Irish father.

He could not have known that she was a woman who included among her friends men and women of a dozen nationalities, who lived a life among the clever, successful people of the world … the architects, the painters, the politicians, the scientists. He could not have known the ruthless rule she put up against tolerating any but people who were “complete.” He could have known nothing of her other life in Paris, and London, and New York, which had nothing to do with the life in Durham and Boston. And yet he did know. … He saw that, despite the great difference in their worlds, there was a certain kinship between them, that they had both come to look upon the world as a pie from which any plum might be drawn if one only knew the knack.

And Sabine, on her side, not yet quite certain about casting aside all barriers, was slowly reaching the same understanding. There was no love or sentimentality in the spark that flashed between them. She was more than ten years older than O’Hara and had been done with such things long ago. It was merely a recognition of one strong person by another.

It was O’Hara who first took advantage of the bond. In the midst of the conversation, he had turned the talk rather abruptly to Pentlands.

“I’ve never been there and I know very little of the life,” he said, “but I’ve watched it from a distance and it interests me. It’s like something out of a dream, completely dead … dead all save for young Mrs. Pentland and Sybil.”

Sabine smiled. “You know Sybil, then?”

“We ride together every morning. … We met one morning by chance along the path by the river and since then we’ve gone nearly every day.”

“She’s a charming girl. … She went to school in France with my daughter, Thérèse. I saw a great deal of her then.”

Far back in her mind the thought occurred to her that there would be something very amusing in the prospect of Sybil married to O’Hara. It would produce such an uproar with Anson and Aunt Cassie and the other relatives. …A Pentland married to an Irish Roman Catholic politician!

“She is like her mother, isn’t she?” asked O’Hara, sitting forward a bit on his chair. He had a way of sitting thus, in the tense, quiet alertness of a cat.

“Very like her mother. … Her mother is a remarkable woman … a charming woman … also, I might say, what is the rarest of all things, a really good and generous woman.”

“I’ve thought that. … I’ve seen her a half-dozen times. I asked her to help me in planting the garden here at the cottage because I knew she had a passion for gardens. And she didn’t refuse … though she scarcely knew me. She came over and helped me with it. I saw her then and came to know her. But when that was finished, she went back to Pentlands and I haven’t seen her since. It’s almost as if she meant to avoid me. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. … It must be a queer life for a woman like that … young and beautiful.”