1The news reached Aunt Cassie only the next morning at ten and it brought her, full of reproaches and tears, over the dusty lanes to Pentlands. She was hurt, she said, because they had not let her know at once. “I should have risen from my bed and come over immediately,” she repeated. “I was sleeping very badly, in any case. I could have managed everything. You should have sent for Aunt Cassie at once.”

2And Olivia could not tell her that they had kept her in ignorance for that very reason—because they knew she would rise from her bed and come over at once.

3Aunt Cassie it was who took the burden of the grief upon her narrow shoulders. She wept in the manner of a professional mourner. She drew the shades in the drawing-room, because in her mind death was not respectable unless the rooms were darkened, and sat there in a corner receiving callers, as if she were the one most bereft, as if indeed she were the only one who suffered at all. She returned to her own cupolaed dwelling only late at night and took all her meals at Pentlands, to the annoyance of her brother, who on the second day in the midst of lunch turned to her abruptly and said: “Cassie, if you can’t stop this eternal blubbering, I wish you’d eat at home. It doesn’t help anything.”

4At which she had risen from the table, in a sudden climax of grief and persecution, to flee, sobbing and hurt, from the room. But she was not insulted sufficiently to take her meals at home. She stayed on at Pentlands because, she said, “They needed some one like me to help out....” And to the trembling, inefficient Miss Peavey, who came and went like a frightened rabbit on errands for her, she confided her astonishment that her brother and Olivia should treat death with such indifference. They did not weep; they showed no signs of grief. She was certain that they lacked sensibility. They did not feel the tragedy. And, weeping again, she would launch into memories of the days when the boy had come as a little fellow to sit, pale and listless, on the floor of her big, empty drawing-room, turning the pages of the Doré Bible.

5And to Miss Peavey she also said, “It’s at times like this that one’s breeding comes out. Olivia has failed for the first time. She doesn’t understand the things one must do at a time like this. If she had been brought up properly, here among us....”

6For with Aunt Cassie death was a mechanical, formalized affair which one observed by a series of traditional gestures.

7It was a remarkable bit of luck, she said, that Bishop Smallwood (Sabine’s Apostle to the Genteel) was still in the neighborhood and could conduct the funeral services. It was proper that one of Pentland blood should bury a Pentland (as if no one else were quite worthy of such an honor). And she went to see the Bishop to discuss the matter of the services. She planned that immensely intricate affair, the seating of relations and connections—all the Canes and Struthers and Mannerings and Sutherlands and Pentlands—at the church. She called on Sabine to tell her that whatever her feelings about funerals might be, it was her duty to attend this one. Sabine must remember that she was back again in a world of civilized people who behaved as ladies and gentlemen. And to each caller whom she received in the darkened drawing-room, she confided the fact that Sabine must be an unfeeling, inhuman creature, because she had not even paid a visit to Pentlands.

8But she did not know what Olivia and John Pentland knew—that Sabine had written a short, abrupt, almost incoherent note, with all the worn, tattered, pious old phrases missing, which had meant more to them than any of the cries and whispering and confusion that went on belowstairs, where the whole countryside passed in and out in an endless procession.

9When Miss Peavey was not at hand to run errands for her, she made Anson her messenger.... Anson, who wandered about helpless and lost and troubled because death had interrupted the easy, eventless flow of a life in which usually all moved according to a set plan. Death had upset the whole household. It was impossible to know how Anson Pentland felt over the death of his son. He did not speak at all, and now that “The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” had been laid aside in the midst of the confusion and Mr. Lowell’s desk stood buried beneath floral offerings, there was nothing to do but wander about getting in the way of every one and drawing upon his head the sharp reproofs of Aunt Cassie.

10It was Aunt Cassie and Anson who opened the great box of roses that came from O’Hara. It was Aunt Cassie’s thin, blue-veined hand that tore open the envelope addressed plainly to “Mrs. Anson Pentland.” It was Aunt Cassie who forced Anson to read what was written inside:

11“Dear Mrs. Pentland,

12You know what I feel. There is no need to say anything more.

13Michael O’Hara. ”

14And it was Aunt Cassie who said, “Impertinent! Why should he send flowers at all?” And Aunt Cassie who read the note again and again, as if she might find in some way a veiled meaning behind the two cryptic sentences. It was Aunt Cassie who carried the note to Olivia and watched her while she read it and laid it quietly aside on her dressing-table. And when she had discovered nothing she said to Olivia, “It seems to me impertinent of him to send flowers and write such a note. What is he to us here at Pentlands?”

15Olivia looked at her a little wearily and said, “What does it matter whether he is impertinent or not? Besides, he was a great friend of Jack’s.” And then, straightening her tired body, she looked at Aunt Cassie and said slowly, “He is also a friend of mine.”

16It was the first time that the division of forces had stood revealed, even for a second, the first time that Olivia had shown any feeling for O’Hara, and there was something ominous in the quietness of a speech made so casually. She ended any possible discussion by leaving the room in search of Anson, leaving Aunt Cassie disturbed by the sensation of alarm which attacked her when she found herself suddenly face to face with the mysterious and perilous calm that sometimes took possession of Olivia. Left alone in the room, she took up the note again from the dressing-table and read it through for the twentieth time. There was nothing in it ... nothing on which one could properly even pin a suspicion.

17So, in the midst of death, enveloped by the odor of tuberoses, the old lady rose triumphant, a phoenix from ashes. In some way she found in tragedy her proper rôle and she managed to draw most of the light from the other actors to herself. She must have known that people went away from the house saying, “Cassie rises to such occasions beautifully. She has taken everything on her own shoulders.” She succeeded in conveying the double impression that she suffered far more than any of the others and that none of the others could possibly have done without her.

18And then into the midst of her triumph came the worst that could have happened. Olivia was the first to learn of the calamity as she always came to know before any of the others knowledge which old John Pentland possessed; and the others would never have known until the sad business of the funeral was over save for Aunt Cassie’s implacable curiosity.

19On the second day, Olivia, summoned by her father-in-law to come to the library, found him there as she had found him so many times before, grim and silent and repressed, only this time there was something inexpressibly tragic and broken in his manner.

20She did not speak to him; she simply waited until, looking up at last, he said almost in a whisper, “Horace Pentland’s body is at the Durham station.”

21And he looked at her with the quick, pitiful helplessness of a strong man who has suddenly grown weak and old, as if at last he had come to the end of his strength and was turning now to her. It was then for the first rime that she began to see how she was in a way a prisoner, that from now on, as one day passed into another, the whole life at Pentlands would come to be more and more her affair. There was no one to take the place of the old man ... no one, save herself.

22“What shall we do?” he asked in the same low voice. “I don’t know. I am nearly at the end of things.”

23“We could bury them together,” said Olivia softly. “We could have a double funeral.”

24He looked at her in astonishment. “You wouldn’t mind that?” and when she shook her head in answer, he replied: “But we can’t do it. There seems to me something wrong in such an idea.... I can’t explain what I mean.... It oughtn’t to be done.... A boy like Jack and an old reprobate like Horace.”

25They would have settled it quietly between them as they had settled so many troubles in the last years when John Pentland had come to her for strength, but at that moment the door opened suddenly and, without knocking, Aunt Cassie appeared, her eyes really blazing with an angry, hysterical light, her hair all hanging in little iron-gray wisps about her narrow face.

26“What is it?” she asked. “What has gone wrong? I know there’s something, and you’ve no right to keep it from me.” She was shrill and brittle, as if in those two days all the pleasure and activity surrounding death had driven her into an orgy of excitement. At the sound of her voice, both Olivia and John Pentland started abruptly. She had touched them on nerves raw and worn.

27The thin, high-pitched voice went on. “I’ve given up all my time to arranging things. I’ve barely slept. I sacrifice myself to you all day and night and I’ve a right to know.” It was as if she had sensed the slow breaking up of the old man and sought now to hurl him aside, to depose him as head of the family, in one great coup d’état, setting herself up there in his place, a thin, fiercely intolerant tyrant; as if at last she had given up her old subtle way of trying to gain her ends by intrigue through the men of the family. She stood ready now to set up a matriarchy, the last refuge of a family whose strength was gone. She had risen thus in the same way once before within the memory of Olivia, in those long months when Mr. Struthers, fading slowly into death, yielded her the victory.

28John Pentland sighed, profoundly, wearily, and murmured, “It’s nothing, Cassie. It would only trouble you. Olivia and I are settling it.”

29But she did not retreat. Standing there, she held her ground and continued the tirade, working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. “I won’t be put aside. No one ever tells me anything. For years now I’ve been shut out as if I were half-witted. Frail as I am, I work myself to the bone for the family and don’t even get a word of thanks.... Why is Olivia always preferred to your own sister?” And tears of luxurious, sensual, self-pity began to stream down her withered face. She began even to mumble and mix her words, and she abandoned herself completely to the fleshly pleasure of hysterics.

30Olivia, watching her quietly, saw that this was no usual occasion. This was, in truth, the new Aunt Cassie whom Sabine had revealed to her a few days before ... the aggressively virginal Aunt Cassie who had been born in that moment on the terrace to take the place of the old Aunt Cassie who had existed always in an aura of tears and good works and sympathy. She understood now what she had never understood before—that Aunt Cassie was not merely an irrational hypochondriac, a harmless, pitiful creature, but a ruthless and unscrupulous force. She knew that behind this emotional debauch there lay some deeply conceived plan. Vaguely she suspected that the plan was aimed at subduing herself, or bringing her (Olivia) completely under the will of the old woman. It was the insect again beating its wings frantically against the windows of a world which she could never enter....

31And softly Olivia said, “Surely, Aunt Cassie, there is no need to make a scene ... there’s no need to be vulgar ... at a time like this.”

32The old woman, suddenly speechless, looked at her brother, but from him there came no sign of aid or succor; she must have seen, plainly, that he had placed himself on the side of Olivia ... the outsider, who had dared to accuse a Pentland of being vulgar.

33“You heard what she said, John.... You heard what she said! She called your sister vulgar!” But her hysterical mood began to abate suddenly, as if she saw that she had chosen, after all, the wrong plan of attack. Olivia did not answer her. She only sat there, looking pale and patient and beautiful in her black clothes, waiting. It was a moment unfair to Aunt Cassie. No man, even Anson, would have placed himself against Olivia just then.

34“If you must know, Cassie ...” the old man said slowly. “It’s a thing you won’t want to hear. But if you must know, it is simply that Horace Pentland’s body is at the station in Durham.”

35Olivia had a quick sense of the whited sepulcher beginning to crack, to fall slowly into bits.

36At first Aunt Cassie only stared at them, snuffling and wiping her red eyes, and then she said, in an amazingly calm voice, “You see.... You never tell me anything. I never knew he was dead.” There was a touch of triumph and vindication in her manner.

37“There was no need of telling you, Cassie,” said the old man. “You wouldn’t let his name be spoken in the family for years. It was you—you and Anson—who made me threaten him into living abroad. Why should you care when he died?”

38Aunt Cassie showed signs of breaking down once more. “You see, I’m always blamed for everything. I was thinking of the family all these years. We couldn’t have Horace running around loose in Boston.” She broke off with a sudden, fastidious gesture of disgust, as if she were washing her hands of the whole affair. “I could have managed it better myself. He ought never to have been brought home ... to stir it all up again.”

39Still Olivia kept silent and it was the old man who answered Aunt Cassie. “He wanted to be buried here.... He wrote to ask me, when he was dying.”

40“He had no right to make such a request. He forfeited all rights by his behavior. I say it again and I’ll keep on saying it. He ought never to have been brought back here ... after people even forgot whether he was alive or dead.”

41The perilous calm had settled over Olivia.... She had been looking out of the window across the marshes into the distance, and when she turned she spoke with a terrible quietness. She said: “You may do with Horace Pentland’s body what you like. It is more your affair than mine, for I never saw him in my life. But it is my son who is dead ... my son, who belongs to me more than to any of you. You may bury Horace Pentland on the same day ... at the same service, even in the same grave. Things like that can’t matter very much after death. You can’t go on pretending forever.... Death is too strong for that. It’s stronger than any of us puny creatures because it’s the one truth we can’t avoid. It’s got nothing to do with prejudices and pride and respectability. In a hundred years—even in a year, in a month, what will it matter what we’ve done with Horace Pentland’s body?”

42She rose, still enveloped in the perilous calm, and said: “I’ll leave Horace Pentland to you two. There is none of his blood in my veins. Whatever you do, I shall not object ... only I wouldn’t be too shabby in dealing with death.”

43She went out, leaving Aunt Cassie exhausted and breathless and confused. The old woman had won her battle about the burial of Horace Pentland, yet she had suffered a great defeat. She must have seen that she had really lost everything, for Olivia somehow had gone to the root of things, in the presence of John Pentland, who was himself so near to death. (Olivia daring to say proudly, as if she actually scorned the Pentland name, “There is none of his blood in my veins.”)

44But it was a defeat which Olivia knew she would never admit: that was one of the qualities which made it impossible to deal with Aunt Cassie. Perhaps, even as she sat there dabbing at her eyes, she was choosing new weapons for a struggle which had come at last into the open because it was impossible any longer to do battle through so weak and shifting an ally as Anson.

45She was a natural martyr, Aunt Cassie. Martyrdom was the great feminine weapon of her Victorian day and she was practised in it; she had learned all its subtleties in the years she had lain wrapped in a shawl on a sofa subduing the full-blooded Mr. Struthers.

46And Olivia knew as she left the room that in the future she would have to deal with a poor, abused, invalid aunt who gave all her strength in doing good works and received in return only cruelty and heartlessness from an outsider, from an intruder, a kind of adventuress who had wormed her way into the heart of the Pentland family. Aunt Cassie, by a kind of art of which she possessed the secret, would somehow make it all seem so.