Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

And so Sabine had not been far wrong when she thought of him as the small boy sitting on the curbstone who had looked up at her gravely and said, “I’m playing.” He was at times very like such an image.

But in the end he was always brought up abruptly against the hard reality of the fact that she was already married to a man who did not want her himself but who would never set her free, a man who perhaps would have sacrificed everything in the world to save a scandal in his family. And beyond these hard, tangible difficulties he discerned, too, the whole dark decaying web, less obvious but none the less potent, in which she had become enmeshed.

Yet these obstacles only created a fascination to a mind so complex, so perverse, for in the solitude of his mind and in the bitterness of the long struggle he had known, he came to hold the whole world in contempt and saw no reason why he should not take what he wanted from this Durham world. Obstacles such as these provided the material for a new battle, a new source of interest in the turbulent stream of his existence; only this time there was a difference … that he coveted the prize itself more than the struggle. He wanted Olivia Pentland, strangely enough, not for a moment or even for a month or a year, but for always.

He waited because he understood, in the shrewdness of his long experience, that to be insistent would only startle such a woman and cause him to lose her entirely, and because he knew of no plan of action which could overcome the obstacles which kept them apart. He waited, as he had done many times in his career, for circumstances to solve themselves. And while he waited, with each time that he saw her she grew more and more desirable, and his invincible sense of caution became weaker and weaker.

In those long days spent in her room, Olivia had come slowly to be aware of the presence of the newcomer at Brook Cottage. It had begun on the night of Jack’s death with the sound of his music drifting across the marshes, and after the funeral Sabine had talked of him to Olivia with an enthusiasm curiously foreign to her. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse of him crossing the meadows toward O’Hara’s shining chimneys or going down the road that led through the marshes to the sea—a tall, red-haired young man who walked with a slight limp. Sybil, she found, was strangely silent about him, but when she questioned the girl about her plans for the day she found, more often then not, that they had to do with him. When she spoke of him, Sybil had a way of blushing and saying, “He’s very nice, Mother. I’ll bring him over when you want to see people. … I used to know him in Paris.”

And Olivia, wisely, did not press her questions. Besides, Sabine had told her almost all there was to know … perhaps more than Sybil herself knew.

Sabine said, “He belongs to a rather remarkable family … willful, reckless and full of spirit. His mother is probably the most remarkable of them all. She’s a charming woman who has lived luxuriously in Paris most of her life … not one of the American colony. She doesn’t ape anyone and she’s incapable of pretense of any sort. She’s lived, rather alone, over there on money … quite a lot of money … which seems to come out of steel mills in some dirty town of the Middle West. She’s one of my great friends … a woman of no intellect, but very beautiful and blessed with a devastating charm. She is one of the women who was born for men. … She’s irresistible to them, and I imagine there have been men in her life always. She was made for men, but her taste is perfect, so her morals don’t matter.”

The woman … indeed all Jean de Cyon’s family … seemed to fascinate Sabine as she sat having tea with Olivia, for she went on and on, talking far more than usual, describing the house of Jean’s mother, her friends, the people whom one met at her dinners, all there was to tell about her.

“She’s the sort of woman who has existed since the beginning of time. There’s some mystery about her early life. It has something to do with Jean’s father. I don’t think she was happy with him. He’s never mentioned. Of course, she’s married again now to a Frenchman … much older than herself … a man, very distinguished, who has been in three cabinets. That’s where the boy gets his French name. The old man has adopted him and treats him like his own son. De Cyon is a good name in France, one of the best; but of course Jean hasn’t any French blood. He’s pure American, but he’s never seen his own country until now.”

Sabine finished her tea and putting her cup back on the Regency table (which had come from Olivia’s mother and so found its graceful way into a house filled with stiff early American things), she added, “It’s a remarkable family … wild and restless. Jean had an aunt who died in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux, and his cousin is Lilli Barr … a really great musician.” She looked out of the window and after a moment said in a low voice, “Lilli Barr is the woman whom my husband married … but she divorced him, too, and now we are friends … she and I.” The familiar hard, metallic laugh returned and she added, “I imagine our experience with him made us sympathetic. … You see, I know the family very well. It’s the sort of blood which produces people with a genius for life … for living in the moment.”

She did not say that Jean and his mother and the ruthless cousin Lilli Barr fascinated her because they stood in a way for the freedom toward which she had been struggling through all the years since she escaped from Durham. They were free in a way from countries, from towns, from laws, from prejudices, even in a way from nationality. She had hoped once that Jean might interest himself in her own sullen, independent, clever Thérèse, but in her knowledge of the world she had long ago abandoned that hope, knowing that a boy so violent and romantic, so influenced by an upbringing among Frenchmen, a youth so completely masculine, was certain to seek a girl more soft and gentle and feminine than Thérèse. She knew it was inevitable that he should fall in love with a girl like Sybil, and in a way she was content because it fell in admirably with her own indolent plans. The Pentlands were certain to look upon Jean de Cyon as a sort of gypsy, and when they knew the whole truth. …

The speculation fascinated her. The summer in Durham, even with the shadow of Jack’s death flung across it, was not proving as dreadful as she had feared; and this new development interested her as something she had never before observed … an idyllic love affair between two young people who each seemed to her a perfect, charming creature.

It had all begun on the day nearly a year earlier when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérèse and Sabine to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment). And afterward she played in the garden with the dogs which they would not let her keep at the school in Saint-Cloud, and then she had gone into the house to find there a fascinating and beautiful woman of perhaps fifty—a Madame de Cyon, who had come to lunch, with her son, a young man of twenty-four, tall, straight and slender, with red hair and dark blue eyes and a deep, pleasant voice. On account of the day he was dressed in his cuirassier’s uniform of black and silver, and because of an old wound he walked with a slight limp. Almost at once (she remembered this when she thought of him) he had looked at her in a frank, admiring way which gave her a sense of pleasurable excitement wholly new in her experience.

Something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there … something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.