Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/154



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."

And 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.

Aunt 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."

At 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