The Angry Wife (11 page)

“Well, you’re not a farmer, Pierce Delaney,” Lucinda said.

“Well, I just am, Luce,” he said. “I don’t see myself living anywhere but at Malvern. Besides, what would I do?”

“Of course well live at Malvern, dummy,” Lucinda said with impatience. “But we can’t get rich on Malvern.”

“Who wants to get rich?” he inquired.

“I do,” Lucinda declared.

“On what, pray?”

She looked so pretty that he was charmed and amused by her audacity. Had she been tall and vigorous he would have been angered by it. But she was tiny, a toy of a woman, and he could never take her with full seriousness.

She leaned forward, held her breath an instant and then blew it out.

“Railroads!” The word came from her lips like a rainbow bubble.

He had been walking about lazily but now he sat down.

“Tell me, pray, just what you know about railroads,” he said.

“You can get rich on them,” she said confidently.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because John MacBain is going to get rich that way—Molly told me so.”

“Molly been here?” he asked abruptly.

She looked at him, and decided to tell. “I rode over there, and we talked and she told me.”

“You rode! When?”

“When you made me so mad—”

“Mad! I’m mad at you now—” he was suddenly swept with fury at her. “Lucinda, what right have you to risk the life of our child—my child?”

She smiled at him radiantly and stood up and put her hand on his lips. “Hush—you know how I am when I’m mad.”

The touch of her small fragrant palm against his lips made his knees weak. “But, Luce, darling—when I’ve got home and everything is perfect again—”

“I won’t any more—I won’t—I promise, Pierce.”

She knew the time had come for capitulation and she leaned against him and sighed and clung to him, and he lifted her and carried her into the house and put her on a couch.

“You’re tired,” he scolded her. “Now you lie there and rest, and don’t you get up until I say so.” He lifted his head and bellowed “Georgia!”

Georgia came into the room as softly as a shadow.

“Fetch your mistress a half glass of sherry.”.

“Yes, sir—”

She had been sewing. A thimble was on her finger but she slipped it into her pocket and went away.

“You behave yourself—” Pierce said sternly to his wife upon the couch.

Lucinda looked at him with meekness, well aware of her outstretched beauty. “I will,” she whispered. But he saw mischief playing about her lips and he dropped to his knees and kissed her hard.

“Oh you damned little Luce!” he muttered.

They heard the clop-clop of horses’ hoofs and she gave him a push.

“Tom’s coming,” she murmured. “Go on out and meet him. And Pierce, mind you don’t say a thing—”

He went out, committed to her demand, and sat down on the terrace and took up his half-finished glass. A wasp had fallen into it and he cursed it, and flung the drink away.

Ten minutes later he heard himself use Lucinda’s very words. They came out of his mouth as though they were his own. “Tom, I’ve been thinking—I believe the best way to get rich is railroads in this new state.”

He said the words not because he cared about being rich or about railroads but because he saw misery in Tom’s face and weariness in his eyes and he knew that whether Lucinda was right or wrong, he would not speak of Bettina because he did not want to speak of her. Tom’s heart had turned down a dead end.

Tom did not look at him. He felt in his pockets for his short English pipe and answered out of sheer necessity to say something, anything, that was meaningless. “Railroads?”

He found the pipe and lit it, and sank down on the marble step at the top of the shallow long steps leading from terraces to the garden. “I was wondering if you wanted to be a schoolmaster,” Pierce said, with forced cheerfulness. “Maybe you’d like railroad business.” He saw Joe rounding a corner of the house and yelled at him.

“Here you, Joe, bring me another whiskey and water, boy!”

Joe shambled over to him and took his glass and Pierce cleared his throat and went on talking, because there had to be talk. “We have to get a school started somehow—the boys are getting to the place where they must be taught. But I’m no schoolteacher, God knows, and maybe you’re not. Lucinda put this railroad business into my head this morning, and though she doesn’t know anything, still, like most women, she hits on things at times.”

“I thought you were going to be a gentleman farmer,” Tom said absently. He was still seeing Bettina at his feet. Even there she had looked lovely and proud and not abased. Her body was straight and slender and soft.

“Well, Malvern isn’t going to make us a lot of money,” Pierce said frankly. “And Lucinda’s set her heart on a lot of things—so have I, for that matter. We want the best—why not?”

“Why not?” Tom echoed. His blonde reddish hair stirred in the wind, and he narrowed his blue eyes against the sun and lifted them to the mountains.

“You want to go into it with me, Tom?” Pierce inquired. All his life he had moved swiftly on an idea, either to accept or reject it. Now that he had made Lucinda’s thought his own, he felt it was a good one.

“I don’t think so,” Tom said slowly. “No, I believe I’d rather be a schoolmaster than a railroad man, Pierce. You wouldn’t bring a railroad near Malvern, I hope?”

They were both talking and talking, burying deep inside themselves the thing they were thinking about.

“I hope not,” Pierce said heartily. Joe was back again with his whiskey and water. “You tell Jake to have my horse saddled after lunch,” he ordered.

“Yassuh,” Joe said, and dragged himself away again.

Pierce watched him go. “Malvern will never make money if the help doesn’t move faster than Joe,” he said. Yes, railroads were a good idea. So were schools.

“We could start an academy right here in Malvern,” he said abruptly. “Why not? Take the garçonnerie there—we can throw a couple of rooms together, and make a real schoolroom. Martin and Carey will be your first two pupils. Levassie will send his boys and the Richards their three—”

Tom shook himself. “It’ll have to be for everybody’s boys if I teach it,” he said abruptly.

Pierce was disposed to be pleasant about everything except the one thing about which they must not speak. “Surely,” he said, “why not? A small tuition fee, and anybody can pay. I won’t charge you rent, schoolmaster.”

They stole looks at one another and a bell rang softly from inside the house and both men rose quickly, relieved that the talk was over. Then Tom was moved to truth.

“I suppose you know Bettina has moved to Millpoint,” he said. His mouth was as dry as ashes as soon as he had spoken.

“The less I know about that the better,” Pierce said.

“But I want you to know,” Tom insisted, out of his dry mouth.

“Well, you’ve told me,” Pierce said abruptly. They moved together and side by side they entered the house. Pierce clapped Tom’s shoulder heartily. “There’s a whole life to be lived without women, Tom,” he said. “The sooner you know it the better.”

Tom smiled and did not answer.

Chapter Three

R
AILROADS! PIERCE LOOKED OUT
of the window of the train sweeping over the rough landscape. He was aware of a region of irony somewhere in his being. Without intending it, certainly without planning it long ahead, he now found himself on this train, north bound for Wheeling. He reviewed the incidents, none of them important, which had led from his own comfortable house to the hard red plush seat upon which he now sat.

It had begun out of a letter he had written after Lucinda had first blown the word “railroads” at him like a rainbow bubble. He had written to John MacBain, in Wheeling, asking again for the rental of his idle lands. John had been willing enough now to rent and Pierce was busy for three months finding hired men enough to farm the five hundred acres. He had collected a conglomerate score of laborers, some black, some white, and had put them in the old slave quarters of the MacBain house. He had ridden over there often enough in the last months to oversee them, and always before his eyes MacBain House had stood gaunt and empty, its burned wing still shattered. Molly had gone to Wheeling and he had not seen her again. She had spent a day with Lucinda before she went, but it was a day when he had been riding over the country, hunting for seed corn. Seed was his treasure, hard to find, almost impossible to buy. He had gathered it by the handfuls, wherever he could find it, paying almost its weight in silver. The mountaineers had hoarded seed but they would take nothing for it except hard coin. He had ridden the mountains until he was stiff-legged, stooping through the doorways of the miserable cabins and tempting ragged men to divide the hidden stores of seed. But he had succeeded. Malvern today was planted to corn, and he had seed for the wheat of next year.

The sight of MacBain House, gaunt against the southern sky, had always made him think of John. Then John had inquired in a letter, “Why don’t you get into railroads? They’re the backbone of our trade. In the next fifty years all the great fortunes will be built upon railroads. You have your sons to think of, man.”

With John’s words clear upon his brain he thought of his sons very often. The two boys had grown that summer in one of the sudden spurts of childhood growth. Martin shed baby fat and showed the frame of his manhood, tall and strong, and Carey, because he could not keep up with his older brother, developed a canny hardness that was often shrewd beyond his years. There would be other children and it was true that Malvern would not be big enough to provide for them all, especially in the luxury which was a necessity to Lucinda. The old plantation days were gone. Perhaps John was right, that the fortunes of the next half century were in trade, not farming. Railroads from the East, building up the new West! There was profit in it, and why should he not have his share?

One clear cool September day, he set out for the nearest railway depot. Lucinda was nearing her time, and as always she disliked him as her pregnancy progressed. When this had happened before Martin’s birth, it had broken his heart and driven him half mad with grief. He had been desperately in love with her and ignorant of women. When she repulsed him he had been first hurt and then filled with fury. She was ignorant, too, and she could not explain herself. His anger and her disgust had risen to such crisis that one day she had demanded, screaming with tears, to go home to her mother. He had turned cold with fear, but he had taken her there himself, and she had stayed until Martin was nearly due. He insisted that his children be born at Malvern, as he and Tom had been. Lucinda’s mother and father had both come back with them. He would never forget Lucinda’s father. He had died during the war, but Pierce remembered the cynical, lordly old man when he had tried to tell his son-in-law that he must not think that Lucinda really hated him.

“Give her time, my boy,” the tall, angular Virginian had cried. “Dash it, Pierce, no man can understand a pregnant woman!”

“I suppose not,” Pierce had said drily. They had looked at one another and laughed.

He had given her time, and Lucinda had returned to him sweetly and when Carey was born he had been ready for her hatred. That was during the war, and he was taking saltpeter like the rest of the men and they were all too busy to think about women.

But this time it had been hard. Lucinda was different. There could be no doubt that the war had made her self-sufficient and independent. She had got used to managing without him. She knew she could live without him—dangerous knowledge for any woman to know that she could live without a man! She had been more than usually absorbed in her pregnancy.

He frowned, remembering how often she was cruel to Georgia. Not that he cared what she did to her own servant, except that Georgia was a human being, after all, and unfortunately delicate and fine. Lucinda had lain abed on the long hot days, fretful and complaining, and commanding Georgia to fetch and carry, until the girl had looked faint with weariness. But Georgia never complained. Pierce wondered sometimes at her unvarying sweetness. She was too patient. He would not have blamed her had she flung out at them all He had been silent. He had not reproached Lucinda for a long time. He had not indeed meant to reproach her at all, but one day, before his eyes, her white hand had darted upward so quickly that it made him think of a snake’s tongue, and she had slapped Georgia’s cheeks.

Georgia stepped back, her palm on her cheek, her eyes wide. Pierce had been reading aloud to Lucinda. It was evening—night, in fact, and he had paused to light the lamp. His eyes had been turned from the bed, then the sound of the slap had made him start.

“For God’s sake, Luce!” he had shouted.

“I’ve told you not to shake my bed!” Lucinda said fiercely to Georgia.

The girl had looked from her mistress to him, and for one full second he had found himself gazing into her great brown eyes. Then she had turned and fled from the room, her soft white skirts flying behind her.

“She’s so clumsy,” Lucinda complained. She closed her eyes.

He had not answered for an instant. Why were women so cruel? Then, pondering, he suddenly understood Lucinda’s cruelty. She was revenging herself upon Georgia for Bettina. She never mentioned Bettina, she never reproached Tom, but she was taking her sharp revenge on Georgia. He went and stood beside the bed, and he looked down at her. He loved her, but into his love welled a deep sadness. She was so pretty, his Lucinda, his wife, often so good, a good mother, and to him, when she was herself, a good and dutiful wife. She had a dear and lovely body. But what was it that twisted her soul? He did not know. He only knew that something made her smaller than his love deserved. The war, perhaps, had shown him too much nobility among men, and he measured her by it.

She had opened her eyes and now looked up at him with her clear blue gaze. “Well?” she asked.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on Georgia, Luce,” he said gently. He had not wanted to reproach her. He only wanted her to be big enough for him to love utterly. He longed for wholeness of her soul and for largeness in her spirit, because he wanted her perfect for his love. He was loath to judge her or see her smaller than the image his love made of her.