Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running down her cheeks, and she thought, “Now I’m being a supreme fool. I’m pitying myself.” But she could not stop.

It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence, Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.

“I wanted you to know,” he said quietly, “that there was someone near you, someone who worships you, who would give up everything for you.” And after a time, “Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in through the piazza and powder your nose. I’ll go in through the door from the garden.”

And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, “It would be pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning.”

“But I haven’t been on a horse in years,” said Olivia.

Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with Sabine and O’Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the game into unaccustomed byways. It was not, she told herself, that she was even remotely in love with O’Hara; it was only that someone—a man who was no creature of ordinary attractions—had confessed his admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The whole affair was silly … and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson’s remarks about his father and old Mrs. Soames, “It’s a silly affair”and of Sybil saying gravely, “Only not middle-aged, like O’Hara,” and it occurred to her at the same time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient apple tree, young in spite of everything.

And aloud she would say, “Four spades,” and know at once that she should have made no such bid.

She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while, two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of bridge—the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O’Hara. She could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the sort of smile which made her face feel very tired, and for the first time she had a half-comic flash of pity for Miss Egan. The face of the nurse must at times have grown horribly tired.

The giddiness still clung to her as she climbed into the motorcar beside Sybil and they drove off down the lane which led from Brook Cottage to Pentlands. The road was a part of a whole tracery of lanes, bordered by hedges and old trees, which bound together the houses of the countryside, and at night they served as a promenade and meeting place for the servants of the same big houses. One came upon them in little groups of three or four, standing by gates or stone walls, gossiping and giggling together in the darkness, exchanging tales of the life that passed in the houses of their masters, stories of what the old man did yesterday, and how Mrs. So-and-so only took one bath a week. There was a whole world which lay beneath the solid, smooth, monotonous surface that shielded the life of the wealthy, a world which in its way was full of mockery and dark secrets and petty gossip, a world perhaps fuller of truth because it lay hidden away where none—save perhaps Aunt Cassie, who knew how many fascinating secrets servants had—ever looked, and where there was small need for the sort of pretense which Olivia found so tragic. It circulated the dark lanes at night after the dinners of the neighborhood were finished, and sometimes the noisy echoes of its irreverent mockery rose in wild Irish laughter that echoed back and forth across the mist-hung meadows.

The same lanes were frequented, too, by lovers, who went in pairs instead of groups of three or four, and at times there were echoes of a different sort of merriment—the wild, half-hysterical laughter of some kitchen maid being wooed roughly and passionately in some dark corner by a groom or a house servant. It was a world which blossomed forth only at nightfall. Sometimes in the darkness the masters, motoring home from a ball or a dinner, would come upon an amorous couple, bathed in the sudden brilliant glare of motorlights, sitting with their arms about each other against a tree, or lying half hidden among a tangle of hawthorn and elder bushes.

Tonight, as Olivia and Sybil drove in silence along the road, the hot air was filled with the thick scent of the hawthorn blossoms and the rich, dark odor of cattle, blown toward them across the meadows by the faint salt breeze from the marshes. It was late and the lights of the motorcar encountered no strayed lovers until at the foot of the hill by the old bridge the glare illuminated suddenly the figures of a man and a woman seated together against the stone wall. At their approach the woman slipped quickly over the wall, and the man, following, leaped lightly as a goat to the top and into the field beyond. Sybil laughed and murmured, “It’s Higgins again.”

It was Higgins. There was no mistaking the stocky, agile figure clad in riding-breeches and sleeveless cotton shirt, and as he leaped the wall the sight of him aroused in Olivia a nebulous, fleeting impression that was like half-forgotten memory. A startled fawn, she thought, must have scuttled off into the bushes in the same fashion. And she had suddenly that same strange, prickly feeling of terror that had affected Sabine on the night she discovered him hidden in the lilacs watching the ball.

She shivered, and Sybil asked, “You’re not cold?”

“No.”

She was thinking of Higgins and hoping that this was not the beginning of some new scrape. Once before a girl had come to her in trouble—a Polish girl, whom she helped and sent away because she could not see that forcing Higgins to marry her would have brought anything but misery for both of them. It never ceased to amaze her that a man so gnarled and ugly, such a savage, hairy little man as Higgins, should have half the girls of the countryside running after him.

In her own room she listened in the darkness until she heard the sound of Jack’s gentle breathing and then, after undressing, she sat for a long time at the window looking out across the meadows toward the marshes. There was a subdued excitement which seemed to run through all her body and would not let her sleep. She no longer felt the weariness of spirit which had let her slip during these last few months into a kind of lethargy. She was alive, more alive than she had ever been, even as a young girl; her cheeks were hot and flushed, so that she placed her white hands against them to feel a coolness that was missing from the night air; but they, too, were hot with life.

And as she sat there, the sounds from Sybil’s room across the hall died away and at last the night grew still save for the sound of her son’s slow breathing and the familiar ghostly creakings of the old house. She was alone now, the only one who was not sleeping; and sitting above the mist-hung meadows she grew more quiet. The warm rich scents of the night drifted in at the window, and again she became aware of a kind of voluptuousness which she had sensed in the air as she sat, hours earlier, on Sabine’s terrace above the sea. It had assailed her again as they drove through the lane across the low, marshy pastures by the river. And then in the figure of Higgins, leaping the wall like a goat, it had come with a shock to a sudden climax of feeling, with a sudden acuteness which even terrified her. It still persisted a little, the odd feeling of some tremendous, powerful force at work all about her, moving swiftly and quietly, thrusting aside and annihilating those who opposed it.