Луис Бромфилд - Early Autumn - A Story of a Lady

“But that wasn’t a happy match … not too happy,” said Olivia; and immediately she knew that she had come near to betraying herself. A word or two more and he might have trapped her. She saw that it was impossible to add the burden of the letters to these other secrets.

As it was, he looked at her sharply, saying, “No one knows that. … One only knows that she was drowned.”

She saw well enough what he meant to tell her, by that vague hint regarding Savina’s elopement; only now he was back once more in the terrible shell; he was the mysterious, the false, John Pentland who could only hint but never speak directly.

The music ceased altogether in the drawing room, leaving only the vague, distant, eternal pounding of the surf on the red rocks, and once the distant echo of a footstep coming from the north wing. The old man said presently, “So she wasn’t falling in love with this man O’Hara, after all? There wasn’t any need for worry?”

“No, she never thought of him in that way, even for a moment. … To her he seems an old man. … We mustn’t forget how young she is.”

“He’s not a bad sort,” replied the old man. “I’ve grown fond of him, and Higgins thinks he’s a fine fellow. I’m inclined to trust Higgins. He has an instinct about people … the same as he has about the weather.” He paused for a moment, and then continued, “Still, I think we’d best be careful about him. He’s a clever Irishman on the make … and such gentlemen need watching. They’re usually thinking only of themselves.”

“Perhaps,” said Olivia, in a whisper. “Perhaps. …”

The silence was broken by the whirring and banging of the clock in the hall making ready to strike eleven. The evening had slipped away quickly, veiled in a mist of unreality. At last the truth had been spoken at Pentlands—the grim, unadorned, terrible truth; and Olivia, who had hungered for it for so long, found herself shaken.

John Pentland rose slowly, painfully, for he had grown stiff and brittle with the passing of the summer. “It’s eleven, Olivia. You’d better go to bed and get some rest.”

She did not go to her own room, because it would have been impossible to sleep, and she could not go to the drawing room to face, in the mood which held her captive, such young faces as those of Jean and Thérèse and Sybil. At the moment she could not bear the thought of any enclosed place, of a room or even a place covered by a roof which shut out the open sky. She had need of the air and that healing sense of freedom and oblivion which the sight of the marshes and the sea sometimes brought to her. She wanted to breathe deeply the fresh salty atmosphere, to run, to escape somewhere. Indeed, for a moment she succumbed to a sense of panic, as she had done on the other hot night when O’Hara followed her into the garden.

She went out across the terrace and, wandering aimlessly, found herself presently moving beneath the trees in the direction of the marshes and the sea. This last night of August was hot and clear save for the faint, blue-white mist that always hung above the lower meadows. There had been times in the past when the thought of crossing the lonely meadows, of wandering the shadowed lanes in the darkness, had frightened her, but tonight such an adventure seemed only restful and quiet, perhaps because she believed that she could encounter there nothing more terrible than the confidences of John Pentland. She was acutely aware, as she had been on that other evening, of the breathless beauty of the night, of the velvety shadows along the hedges and ditches, of the brilliance of the stars, of the distant foaming white line of the sea and the rich, fertile odor of the pastures and marshes.

And presently, when she had grown a little more calm, she tried to bring some order out of the chaos that filled her body and spirit. It seemed to her that all life had become hopelessly muddled and confused. She was aware in some way, almost without knowing why, that the old man had tricked her, turning her will easily to his own desires, changing all the prospect of the future. She had known always that he was strong and in his way invincible, but until tonight she had never known the full greatness of his strength … how relentless, even how unscrupulous he could be; for he had been unscrupulous, unfair, in the way he had used every weapon at hand … every sentiment, every memory … to achieve his will. There had been no fierce struggle in the open; it was far more subtle than that. He had subdued her without her knowing it, aided perhaps by all that dark force which had the power of changing them all—even the children of Savina Dalgedo and Toby Cane—into “Pentlands.”

Thinking bitterly of what had passed, she came to see that his strength rested upon the foundation of his virtue, his rightness. One could say—indeed, one could believe it as one believed that the sun had risen yesterday—that all his life had been tragically foolish and quixotic, fantastically devoted to the hard, uncompromising ideal of what a Pentland ought to be; and yet … yet one knew that he had been right, even perhaps heroic; one respected his uncompromising strength. He had made a wreck of his own happiness and driven poor old Mrs. Soames to seek peace in the Nirvana of drugs; and yet for her, he was the whole of life: she lived only for him. This code of his was hard, cruel, inhuman, sacrificing everything to its observance. … “Even,” thought Olivia, “to sacrificing me along with himself. But I will not be sacrificed. I will escape!”

And after a long time she began to see slowly what it was that lay at the bottom of the iron power he had over people, the strength which none of them had been able to resist. It was a simple thing … simply that he believed, passionately, relentlessly, as those first Puritans had done.

The others all about her did not matter. Not one of them had any power over her … not Anson, nor Aunt Cassie, nor Sabine, nor Bishop Smallwood. None of them played any part in the course of her life. They did not matter. She had no fear of them; rather they seemed to her now fussy and pitiful.

But John Pentland believed. It was that which made the difference.

Stumbling along half-blindly, she found herself presently at the bridge where the lane from Pentlands crossed the river on its way to Brook Cottage. Since she had been a little girl, the sight of water had exerted a strange spell upon her … the sight of a river, a lake, but most of all the open sea; she had always been drawn toward these things like a bit of iron toward a magnet; and now, finding herself at the bridge, she halted, and stood looking over the stone parapet in the shadow of the hawthorn bushes that grew close to the water’s edge, down on the dark, still pool below her. The water was black and in it the bright little stars glittered like diamonds scattered over its surface. The warm, rich odor of cattle filled the air, touched by the faint, ghostly perfume of the last white nympheas that bordered the pool.

And while she stood there, bathed in the stillness of the dark solitude, she began to understand a little what had really passed between them in the room smelling of whiskey and saddle soap. She saw how the whole tragedy of John Pentland and his life had been born of the stupidity, the ignorance, the hypocrisy of others, and she saw, too, that he was beyond all doubt the grandson of the Toby Cane who had written those wild passionate letters glorifying the flesh; only John Pentland had found himself caught in the prison of that other terrible thing—the code in which he had been trained, in which he believed. She saw now that it was not strange that he sought escape from reality by shutting himself in and drinking himself into a stupor. He had been caught, tragically, between those two powerful forces. He thought himself a Pentland and all the while there burned in him the fire that lay in Toby Cane’s letters and in the wanton look that was fixed forever in the portrait of Savina Pentland. She kept seeing him as he said, “I have never been unfaithful to her, not once in all the years since our wedding night. … I wanted you to know because, you see, you and Mrs. Soames are the only ones who matter to me … and she knows that it is true.”