Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

At the sight of Sabine’s green dress and red hair moving through the big hall below them, Aunt Cassie said, with a gleam in her eye: “Sabine seems to be worried about her daughter. The poor child doesn’t seem to be having a success, but I suppose it’s no wonder. The poor thing is very plain. I suppose she got the sallow skin from her father. He was part Greek and French. … Sabine was never popular as a young girl herself.”

And she fell to speculating for the hundredth time on the little-known circumstances of Sabine’s unhappy marriage and divorce, turning the morsels over and over again with a variety of speculation and the interjection of much pious phraseology; for in Aunt Cassie’s speech God seemed to have a hand in everything. He had a way of delivering trials and blessings indiscriminately, and so in the end became responsible for everything.

Indeed, she grew a bit spiteful about Sabine, for there was in the back of her mind the memory of an encounter, a day or two earlier, when she had been put completely to rout. It was seldom that Aunt Cassie met anyone who was a match for her, and when such an encounter took place the memory of it rankled until she found some means of subduing the offender. With Miss Peavey she was completely frank, for through long service this plump, elderly virgin had come to be a sort of confessor in whose presence Aunt Cassie wore no mask. She was always saying, “Don’t mind Miss Peavey. She doesn’t matter.”

“I find Sabine extremely hard and worldly,” she was saying. “I would never know her for the same modest young girl she was on leaving me.” She sighed abysmally and continued, “But, then, we mustn’t judge. I suppose the poor girl has had a great deal of misery. I pity her to the depths of my heart!”

In Aunt Cassie’s speeches, in every phrase, there was always a certain mild theatrical overtone as if she sought constantly to cast a sort of melodramatic haze over all she said. Nothing was ever stated simply. Everything from the sight of a pot of sour cream to the death of her husband affected her extravagantly, to the depths of her soul.

But this brought no response from Miss Peavey, who seemed lost in the excitement of watching the young people, her round candid eyes shining through her pince-nez with the eagerness of one who has spent her whole life as a “lady companion.” At moments like this, Aunt Cassie felt that Miss Peavey was not quite bright, and sometimes said so.

Undiscouraged, she went on. “Olivia looks bad, too, tonight … very tired and worn. I don’t like those circles under her eyes. … I’ve thought for a long time that she was unhappy about something.”

But Miss Peavey’s volatile nature continued to lose itself completely in the spectacle of young girls who were so different from the girls of her day; and in the fascinating sight of Mr. Hoskins, a fat, sentimental, middle-aged neighbor who had taken a glass too much champagne and was talking archly to the patient Olivia. Miss Peavey had quite forgotten herself in the midst of so much gaiety. She did not even see the glances of Aunt Cassie in her direction—glances which plainly said, “Wait until I get you alone!”

For a long time Aunt Cassie had been brooding over what she called “Olivia’s strange behavior.” It was a thing which she had noticed for the first time a month or two earlier when Olivia, in the midst of one of Aunt Cassie’s morning calls, had begun suddenly, quietly, to weep and had left the room without a word of explanation. It had gone from bad to worse lately; she felt Olivia slipping away from all control directly in opposition to her own benevolent advice. There was the matter of this very ball. Olivia had ignored her counsels of economy and thrift, and now Aunt Cassie was suffering, as if the champagne which flowed so freely were blood drawn from her own veins. Not for a century, since Savina Pentland purchased a parure of pearls and emeralds, had so much Pentland money been expended at one time on mere pleasure.

She disapproved, too, of the youthfulness of Olivia and of Sabine. Women of their ages ought not to look so fresh and young. There was something vulgar, even a little improper, in a woman like Sabine who at forty-six looked thirty-five. At thirty, Aunt Cassie herself had settled down as a middle-aged woman, and since then she had not changed greatly. At sixty-five, “childless and alone in the world” (save, of course, for Miss Peavey), she was much the same as she had been at thirty in the role of wife to the “trying Mr. Struthers.” The only change had been her recovery from a state of semi-invalidism, a miracle occurring simultaneously with the passing of Mr. Struthers.

She had never quite forgiven Olivia for being an outsider who had come into the intricate web of life at Pentlands out of (of all places) Chicago. Wisps of mystery and a faint sense of the alien had clung to her ever since. Of course, it wasn’t to be expected that Olivia could understand entirely what it meant to marry into a family whose history was so closely woven into that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the life of Boston. What could it mean to Olivia that Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell and Dr. Holmes had often spent weeks at Pentlands? That Mr. Emerson himself had come there for weekends? Still (Aunt Cassie admitted to herself), Olivia had done remarkably well. She had been wise enough to watch and wait and not go ahead strewing her path with blunders.

Into the midst of these thoughts the figure of Olivia herself appeared, moving toward the stairway, walking beside Sabine. They were laughing over something, Sabine in the sly, mocking way she had, and Olivia mischievously, with a suspicious twinkle in her eyes. Aunt Cassie was filled with an awful feeling that they were sharing some joke about the people at the ball, perhaps even about herself and Miss Peavey. Since Sabine had returned, she felt that Olivia had grown even more strange and rebellious; nevertheless, she admitted to herself that there was a distinction about them both. She preferred the quiet distinction of Olivia to the violence of the impression made by the glittering Sabine. The old lady sensed the distinction, but, belonging to a generation which lived upon emotion rather than analysis, she did not get to the root of it. She did not see that one felt at once on seeing Olivia, “Here is a lady! “—perhaps, in the true sense of the word, the only lady in the room. There was a gentleness about her and a softness and a proud sort of poise—all qualities of which Aunt Cassie approved; it was the air of mystery which upset the old lady. One never knew quite what Olivia was thinking. She was so gentle and soft-spoken. Sometimes of late, when pressing Olivia too hotly, Aunt Cassie, aware of rousing something indefinably perilous in the nature of the younger woman, drew back in alarm.

Rising stiffly, the old lady groaned a little and, moving down the stairs, said, “I must go, Olivia dear,” and, turning, “Miss Peavey will go with me.”

Miss Peavey would have stayed, because she was enjoying herself, looking down on all those young people, but she had obeyed the commands of Aunt Cassie for too long, and now she rose, complaining faintly, and made ready to leave.

Olivia urged them to stay, and Sabine, looking at the old lady out of green eyes that held a faint glitter of hatred, said abruptly: “I always thought you stayed until the bitter end, Aunt Cassie.”

A sigh answered her … a sigh filled with implications regarding Aunt Cassie’s position as a lonely, ill, bereft, widowed creature for whom life was finished long ago. “I am not young any longer, Sabine,” she said. “And I feel that the old ought to give way to the young. There comes a time. …”

Sabine gave an unearthly chuckle. “Ah,” she said, in her hard voice, “I haven’t begun to give up yet. I am still good for years.”