Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

“And leaving Sybil out of it,” he continued, “there’s queer old Miss Haddon in Durham whom, as you know, we’ve taken care of for years; and there’s Cassie, who’s growing old and ill, I think. We can’t leave her to half-witted Miss Peavey. I know my sister Cassie has been a burden to you. … She’s been a burden to me, all my life. …” He smiled grimly. “I suppose you know that. …” Then, after a pause, he said, “But most of all, there’s my wife.”

His voice assumed a queer, unnatural quality, from which all feeling had been removed. It became like the voices of deaf persons who never hear the sounds they make.

“I can’t leave her alone,” he said. “Alone … with no one to care for her save a paid nurse. I couldn’t die and know that there’s no one to think of her … save that wretched, efficient Miss Egan … a stranger. No, Olivia … there’s no one but you. … No one I can trust.” He looked at her sharply. “You’ll promise me to keep her here always … never to let them send her away? You’ll promise?”

Again she was caught. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll promise you that.” What else was she to say?

“Because,” he added, looking away from her once more, “because I owe her that … even after I’m dead. I couldn’t rest if she were shut up somewhere … among strangers. You see … once … once. …” He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.

With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, “Stop! … Don’t go on!” But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.

“It’s odd,” he was saying quite calmly, “but there seem to be only women left … no men … for Anson is really an old woman.”

Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, “And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn’t think of him any longer. … But there’s Mrs. Soames. …” He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. “There’s Mrs. Soames,” he repeated. “I know that you understand about her, Olivia … and I’m grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we’ve given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years … but I don’t care about that. They’ve watched us … they’ve known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house … the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you … they see everything you do. They almost know what you think … and when they don’t know, they make it up. That’s one of the signs of a sick, decaying world … that they get their living vicariously … by watching someone else live … that they live always in the past. That’s the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland … the only reason that I had sympathy for him. It was cruel that he should have been born in such a place.”

The bitterness ran like acid through all the speech, through the very timbre of his voice. It burned in the fierce black eyes where the fire was not yet dead. Olivia believed that she was seeing him now for the first time, in his fullness, with nothing concealed. And as she listened, the old cloud of mystery that had always hidden him from her began to clear away like the fog lifting from the marshes in the early morning. She saw him now as he really was… a man fiercely masculine, bitter, clear-headed, and more human than the rest of them, who had never before betrayed himself even for an instant.

“But about Mrs. Soames. … If anything should happen to me, Olivia … if I should die first, I want you to be kind to her … for my sake and for hers. She’s been patient and good to me for so long.” The bitterness seemed to flow away a little now, leaving only a kindling warmth in its place. “She’s been good to me. … She’s always understood, Olivia, even before you came here to help me. You and she, Olivia, have made life worth living for me. She’s been patient … more patient than you know. Sometimes I must have made life for her a hell on earth … but she’s always been there, waiting, full of gentleness and sympathy. She’s been ill most of the time you’ve known her … old and ill. You can’t imagine how beautiful she once was.”

“I know,” said Olivia softly. “I remember seeing her when I first came to Pentlands … and Sabine has told me.”

The name of Sabine appeared to rouse him suddenly. He sat up very straight and said, “Don’t trust Sabine too far, Olivia. She belongs to us, after all. She’s very like my sister Cassie … more like her than you can imagine. It’s why they hate each other so. She’s Cassie turned inside out, as you might say. They’d both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live … vicariously.”

Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her … the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.

(She kept thinking, “Why must I know all these things? Why must I take up the burden? Why was it that I should find those letters which had lain safe and hidden for so long?”)

He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their nervous futile pattern. “You see, Olivia. … You see, she takes drugs now… and there’s no use in trying to cure her. She’s old now, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if she were young with all her life before her.”

Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, “I know that.”

He looked up quickly. “Know it?” he asked sharply. “How could you know it?”

“Sabine told me.”

The head bowed again. “Oh, Sabine! Of course! She’s dangerous. She knows far too much of the world. She’s known too many strange people.” And then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. “She ought never to have come back here.”

Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant drawing room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward her, asked, “Is that Sybil’s young man?”

“Yes.

“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?”

“A very nice boy.”

After a silence he asked, “What’s the name of the thing he’s playing?”

Olivia could not help smiling. “It’s called I’m in love again and the spring is a-comin’. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it … but names don’t mean anything in music anymore. No one listens to the words.”

A shadow of amusement crossed his face. “Songs have queer names nowadays.”

She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.

“There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia … things that will help you to understand. Someone has to know them. Someone. …” He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.