Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

The queer, stuffy motorcar appeared suddenly on the drive, the back seat filled by the rotund form of Miss Peavey surrounded by four yapping Pekinese. The intricate veils which she wore on entering a motorcar streamed behind her. Aunt Cassie rose and, kissing Olivia with ostentation, turned to Sabine and went back again to the root of the matter. “I always told my dear brother,” she repeated, “that twenty-five hundred a year was far too much for Horace Pentland.”

The motorcar rattled off, and Sabine, laying the letter on the table beside her, said, “Of course, I don’t want all this stuff of Cousin Horace’s, but I’m determined it shan’t go to her. If she had it the poor old man wouldn’t rest in his grave. Besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with it in a house filled with tassels and antimacassars and souvenirs of Uncle Ned. She’d only sell it and invest the money in invincible securities.”

“She’s not well … the poor old thing,” said Olivia. “She wouldn’t have had the motorcar come for her if she’d been well. She’s pretended all her life, and now she’s really ill she’s terrified at the idea of death. She can’t bear it.”

The old relentless, cruel smile lighted Sabine’s face. “No, now that the time has come she hasn’t much faith in the Heaven she’s preached all her life.” There was a brief silence and Sabine added grimly, “She will certainly be a nuisance to Saint Peter.”

But there was only sadness in Olivia’s dark eyes, because she kept thinking what a shallow, futile life Aunt Cassie’s had been. She had turned her back upon life from the beginning, even with the husband whom she married as a convenience. She kept thinking what a poor barren thing that life had been; how little of richness, of memories, it held, now that it was coming to an end.

Sabine was speaking again. “I know you’re thinking that I’m heartless, but you don’t know how cruel she was to me … what things she did to me as a child.” Her voice softened a little, but in pity for herself and not for Aunt Cassie. It was as if the ghost of the queer, unhappy, red-haired little girl of her childhood had come suddenly to stand there beside them where the ghost of Horace Pentland had stood a little while before. The old ghosts were crowding about once more, even there on the terrace in the hot August sunlight in the beauty of Olivia’s flowery garden.

“She sent me into the world,” continued Sabine’s hard voice, “knowing nothing but what was false, believing—the little I believed in anything—in false gods, thinking that marriage was no more than a business contract between two young people with fortunes. She called ignorance by the name of innocence and quoted the Bible and that milk-and-water philosopher Emerson … ‘dear Mr. Emerson’ … whenever I asked her a direct, sensible question. … And all she accomplished was to give me a hunger for facts—hard, unvarnished facts—pleasant or unpleasant.”

A kind of hot passion entered the metallic voice, so that it took on an unaccustomed warmth and beauty. “You don’t know how much she is responsible for in my life. She … and all the others like her … killed my chance of happiness, of satisfaction. She cost me my husband. … What chance had I with a man who came from an older, wiser world … a world in which things were looked at squarely, and honestly as truth … a man who expected women to be women and not timid icebergs? No, I don’t think I shall ever forgive her.” She paused for a moment, thoughtfully, and then added, “And whatever she did, whatever cruelties she practiced, whatever nonsense she preached, was always done in the name of duty and always ‘for your own good, my dear.’”

Then abruptly, with a bitter smile, her whole manner changed and took on once more the old air of indolent, almost despairing, boredom. “I couldn’t begin to tell you all, my dear. … It goes back too far. We’re all rotten here … not so much rotten as desiccated, for there was never much blood in us to rot. … The roots go deep. … But I shan’t bore you again with all this, I promise.”

Olivia, listening, wanted to say, “You don’t know how much blood there is in the Pentlands. … You don’t know that they aren’t Pentlands at all, but the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane. … But even that hasn’t mattered. … The very air, the very earth of New England, has changed them, dried them up.”

But she could not say it, for she knew that the story of those letters must never fall into the hands of the unscrupulous Sabine.

“It doesn’t bore me,” said Olivia quietly. “It doesn’t bore me. I understand it much too well.”

“In any case, we’ve spoiled enough of one fine day with it.” Sabine lighted another cigarette and said with an abrupt change of tone, “About this furniture, Olivia. … I don’t want it. I’ve a house full of such things in Paris. I shouldn’t know what to do with it and I don’t think I have the right to break it up and sell it. I want you to have it here at Pentlands. … Horace Pentland would be satisfied if it went to you and Cousin John. And it’ll be an excuse to clear out some of the Victorian junk and some of the terrible early American stuff. Plenty of people will buy the early American things. The best of them are only bad imitations of the real things Horace Pentland collected, and you might as well have the real ones.”

Olivia protested, but Sabine pushed the point, scarcely giving her time to speak. “I want you to do it. It will be a kindness to me … and after all, Horace Pentland’s furniture ought to be here … in Pentlands. I’ll take one or two things for Thérèse, and the rest you must keep, only nothing … not so much as a medallion or a snuff-box … is to go to Aunt Cassie. She hated him while he was alive. It would be wrong for her to possess anything belonging to him after he is dead. Besides,” she added, “a little new furniture would do a great deal toward cheering up the house. It’s always been rather spare and cold. It needs a little elegance and sense of luxury. There has never been any splendor in the Pentland family—or in all New England, for that matter.”

At almost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jean appeared against the horizon on the rim of the great, bald hill crowned by the town burial ground. Escaped at length from the eye of the curious, persistent Thérèse, they had come to the hill to eat their lunch in the open air. It was a brilliantly clear day and the famous view lay spread out beneath them like some vast map stretching away for a distance of nearly thirty miles. The marshes appeared green and dark, crossed and recrossed by a reticulation of tidal inlets frequented at nightfall by small boats which brought in whiskey and rum from the open sea. There were, distantly visible, great piles of reddish rock rising from the endless white ribbon of beach, and far out on the amethyst sea a pair of white-sailed fishing boats moved away in the direction of Gloucester. The white sails, so near to each other, carried a warm friendliness in a universe magnificent but also bleak and a little barren.

Coming over the rim of the hill the sudden revelation of the view halted them for a moment. The day was hot, but here on the great hill, remote from the damp, low-lying meadows, there was a fresh cool wind, almost a gale, blowing in from the open sea. Sybil, taking off her hat, tossed it to the ground and allowed the wind to blow her hair in a dark, tangled mass about the serious young face; and at the same moment Jean, seized by a sudden quick impulse, took her hand quietly in his. She did not attempt to draw it away; she simply stood there quietly, as if conscious only of the wild beauty of the landscape spread out below them and the sense of the boy’s nearness to her. The old fear of depression and loneliness seemed to have melted away from her; here on this high brown hill, with all the world spread out beneath, it seemed to her that they were completely alone … the first and the last two people in all the world. She was aware that a perfect thing had happened to her, so perfect and so far beyond the realm of her most romantic imaginings that it seemed scarcely real.