Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/69

 Olivia sighed and said quietly, "If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago."

"Yes, that's true."

She poured her coffee and he murmured, "It's about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He's dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it's a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family."

Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said, "What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?"

"It's nearly thirty years now that I've been sending him money to stay there. He's only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he'd be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn't buried here."

"There was Savina Pentland. . . ."

"Yes. . . . But she's buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible."

And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.

"Would he want to be buried here?" asked Olivia.

"He wrote and asked me . . . a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home."

Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. "Strange . . ." she murmured presently, "when people were so cruel to him."

The lips of the old man stiffened a little.

"It was his own fault. . . ."

"Still . . . thirty years is a long time."

He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. "You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?"