The Angry Wife (13 page)

“You’re prettier, than you were ten years ago, Molly,” he said genially.

She laughed at him. “I’ve never been quite pretty enough for you, Pierce,” she said frankly. “But it don’t matter to me as much as it did. Look at John—he’s like a hen ready to lay an egg! That means it’s time for the speech-making.”

Up and down the long table the faces of men and women turned reluctantly toward John MacBain. He had grown heavy and somber in the last ten years and his head was bald. Now he rose under the waiting eyes and stood an instant, gathering them into his power. They submitted, half amused, but a sigh, like the breath of a slow summer breeze, rose and died down. Here and there a pretty woman turned unwillingly from the man with whom she was talking and silence fell.

Pierce looked with affection and amusement at his old friend. Ten years ago he had taken the train to Wheeling in search of John. He had done it for Malvern’s sake. The hungry acres had eaten and drunk his money and were draining him. He knew that if he were to complete his dream and leave the inheritance as a great estate to his sons he would have to find money elsewhere. Malvern was repaying him richly now, thanks to his railroad shares. In less than a year he had repaid John’s loan, and he had insisted on high interest.

This was John’s dinner, John’s house, John MacBain, the vice-president of the greatest railroad in the East. When the president died, John might become president. Pierce was only half listening to the earnest heavy voice. He had heard scores of John’s after dinner speeches, and he always made the same halts between sentences.

“I am grieved to state that our president is not able to be with us this evening,” John was saying. “You may be sure only the most important affairs could have prevented him from taking the chairmanship here at this dinner of the Board of Directors and their ladies, at which I make a report on the new eight-wheel passenger engine of the 2-6-0 type. This engine, number 600, is the largest of the passenger locomotives in this country, and—”

“Oh dear—he’s off on engines,” Molly whispered to Pierce. Their eyes met, laughing. He was occasionally secretly astonished that in the years he had been John’s partner in the railroad business, he had not yielded to Molly. There had been times when he might have yielded to her in a mingled pity for her life and the fullness of his own vitality, and remembering always that John would have said nothing. It had been a temptation again and again. Had Lucinda ever denied herself to him, he might have taken revenge with Molly. But Lucinda, always silent, never denied him anything any more, even when the two younger children were born within three years. His dear little Sally was worth the sapphires hundreds of times over.

“You’re mine,” Pierce declared often to this his favorite child. “I bought you from your mama the first time I saw you.”

“Tell me how it was,” Sally always demanded with relish at the thought of her immense cost.

“Your mama sent me word that she had just finished you, down to the last little fingernail, and would I please come and see how I liked you. So I went into Mama’s room and Georgia brought you in, and you wore a long white dress. I looked at you and I thought you would do. So I said, ‘Well, here’s a pair of sapphire earrings for her two blue eyes, and a sapphire brooch for the rest of her.’”

Lucinda, wearing the sapphires at this moment, caught his eyes and smiled at him. He was aware of her cool and watchful smile whenever he and Molly sat together, and he smiled back at her.

It was one of Lucinda’s qualities never to utter her suspicions of him. But he could feel them, nevertheless. He retaliated by an amused silence equally unbroken. He did not tell her that he never intended to sleep with Molly MacBain. Let her continue to think that he might! He turned his eyes from Lucinda and looked calmly at John, who stood with his thumbs in his white waistcoat, and gazing at his partner’s bearded face, Pierce’s thoughts continued about himself.

When his third son was born he had named him John after John MacBain, but the youngest girl was Lucie, after Lucinda herself. He and Lucinda had decided together that they would not plan on more children, but if they came by accident, they would be welcome. Privately to himself he thought he would like to have seven children, another son and daughter. He was proud of Malvern and proud of the half-grown boys and girls of his family and proud, too, of his wife. Lucinda was a credit to him and she had helped to make Malvern what it was, a gentleman’s home, set in the midst of a thousand acres of rolling rich land. He had added two wings to the house, one on either side, and had thrown out a great porch to the west, where he could watch the sun set over the tops of the mountains beyond his fields. At evening the wide valley lay full of mellow light, and when the sun dropped, the twilight was purple. The deep softness of darkness over his land and the stars over the mountains made the night as living for him as the day. In quiet sleep was renewal. He was a fortunate man. Tom, his brother Tom, was the only thorn. He turned away involuntarily from the thought of Tom.

John MacBain’s voice took on an added importance. “We are now building our own sleeping cars and parlor cars. We are adding five hotels to the palatial hostels already operating at Deer Park, Relay and Cumberland. We are preparing to establish our own telegraph lines and our own express company. By the end of the decade there will be no railroad in the country so well equipped as our own to handle the transportation of passengers and goods. For this we have to thank not only the genius of our president, but the confidence of the stockholders and of the Board of Directors, during the long years of building, when faith had to be the evidence of things unseen. And now I call upon one of you—Pierce Delaney, old neighbor of mine, friend, partner.”

John MacBain sat down and glowed with relief in the midst of handclapping. He looked at Pierce and his thin lips lengthened into a smile. He nodded. The soft rush of women’s voices that had begun as soon as the clapping was over ceased as Pierce rose to his feet. Eyes that had turned to John MacBain with affectionate amusement turned now to Pierce with respect and envy.

He rose and stood for a second or two, looking at one face after another. All had become familiar to him in the ten years in which he had been part of the great railroad company from which he had drawn the money he needed for Malvern. He had none of John’s devotion to the iron framework which tied the Eastern states to the West. What had been John’s life had been for him only a means to an end. He had chosen to build for himself his own habitation. To live on his land as a gentleman, to breed fine children and fine horses and fine cattle, and when he had no guests, to spend his evenings in his library—all this had been good. His energies had flowed into such creation. But John, lacking children, had spent his energies in making the railroad.

Pierce smiled his famous smile and took his usual pleasure in seeing the faces around the table warm to him. He liked it that the men responded to him as instinctively as the women. He liked men better than women and men knew it and they admired him and liked him the more. He began in his amiable, informal fashion, “John is never satisfied unless I make some sort of speech at these shindigs of his, and yet he knows that I can’t make speeches. I’m a farmer—a West Virginia farmer.”

Low laughter murmured around the table. Pierce was quite aware of his own appearance, gentleman among gentlemen, and he laughed a little at himself. His white hand, holding his wineglass, was certainly not the hand of a farmer. “I’ve never been a railroad man,” he went on. “Ten years ago I came to find John MacBain in Wheeling, because I needed some money to fix up my place after the war and I wanted him to help me get it. Well, he did. Those were the years when our stock was begging to be bought. I borrowed enough money from John to get me a little stock and following his advice, I bought more with what it earned and let my wife and children starve awhile. It did them no harm. Well, the railroad has treated me—adequately—as it has the rest of you. The company deserves our loyalty. Furthermore—”

He smiled again, and again they smiled back at the tall handsome man, still young in his maturity. His voice grew grave.

“There is a magic in railroads these days. They bind our nation together with more than bonds of steel. They bring us together in trade and exchange and friendship. It
is
doubtful whether even the war could have achieved our unity as a nation had not the railroads come quickly to take up the task. Old hatreds still remain, for many of us. Particularly in the South, the Yankees remain the Yankees. Even the children will scarcely forget. But the railroads are a new force. No hatred is in their history. They heal the wounds of the past, and they reach toward the future. Men of great vision, and John MacBain is one of them, have guided their building westward, and westward our nation has grown. It has been the railroads, too, that have delivered us from the horrid danger of socialism, and it is John MacBain whom we must thank for the fact that labor unions have been kept out of our state. The poison of the northern industrial states must not enter our fair mountain land.

“We have been fortunate.” Pierce’s firm white hand lifted his wineglass again. “We have been spared the extremes into which our sister states have fallen. We have marched in steady progress upon the wheels of railroad development. Our great railroads have carried all of us to prosperity. Mines have been opened to provide steel and waterways have flourished in carrying the loads of lumber and ore we have needed. The produce of the land has been borne swiftly to all parts of the hungry nation, and we have profited by it all, from the first blow of the miner’s pick and the roll of the farmer’s wagon wheel, to the flow of gold into our coffers. Schools and churches have been built and cities grow. The force behind all our growth and all our wealth is the railroad. Ladies and gentlemen, let us drink to the new engine, the 600, the great eight-wheeler, designed especially for the bold slopes of our Mountain State!”

They rose, skirts rustling, chairs scraping, and glasses clinked. They sat down again and talk broke out. Grey-haired Jim McCagney leaned his tall Scotch-Irish frame upon his elbows and called out a question.

“Tell us something more about the engine, Pierce!”

Pierce smiled. “You ought to ask John that,” he said in his even voice. “But I’ll tell you what I know. It’s bigger than the Larkins engines. We thought the top had been reached in them. Now I dare to prophesy that we will build something bigger even than this 600, beauty though she is. She weighs eight thousand pounds more than the Larkins and has more than twelve thousand square feet beyond her heating surface.”

“Twelve thousand and fifty nine!” John MacBain shouted. “And she weighs one hundred and fifty three thousand pounds!”

“That’s enough about engines,” Molly cried, springing to her feet. “Let’s begin the dancing—”

Laughter broke out and the men rose to pull out the ladies’ chairs. They stood watching while the ladies lifted their ruffled skirts and walked out of the doors that were opened for them by footmen. Molly MacBain was proud that everything had gone so well. Her footmen, black as the West Virginia coal, were dressed in maroon uniforms, piped with yellow. She held her head high as she led her guests into her parlors. Beyond them doors opened into the ballroom.

“The men won’t be long,” she promised them. “I told John I would be real mad with him if he got talkin’.”

The ladies smiled and scattered, some to the powder rooms to mend their complexions, and some to sit by tables and look at albums. Lacey Mallows took out a tiny pipe and began to smoke it. Lucinda saw this and pointedly ignored it. The Henry Mallows, living so much in Paris, were rather fast. The others, following Lucinda’s lead, said nothing. Lucinda was always in the best of taste and those who followed what she did were sure to be right. She drifted toward a long mirror hung on the wall and saw that she was as fresh and lovely as when the evening began. She sat at its foot and fanned herself gently with a white ostrich feather fan, set in silver filigree and diamonds. It had been Pierce’s present when she had given him his third son, John.

In the dining room the men were talking of railroads in frank harsh terms. Cut-throat competition was the threat.

“I don’t see how you can keep it up, Mr. MacBain,” Henry Mallows said. He had inherited his share of the road from his father who had died last year and the sudden wealth had sent him hurrying home from Paris with his English wife. She was the daughter of the Earl of Marcy, but he tried not to mention it often. In the determinedly democratic atmosphere of his native state he had found it no advantage to him that his wife was titled in her own right in a foreign country.

“It’s outdo the other fellow or bust,” John MacBain said flatly. “We’ve got to keep the trade, even if we ship cattle and goods free from California and back again. If another road can afford to ship a cow from Chicago to the coast for five dollars, we’ve got to do better.”

The men looked at one another in consternation.

Pierce laughed. “The other roads are worse off than we are,” he said gaily. “They can’t afford to make their own rolling stock—we can and do! Of course these cut-throat ways can’t last. Some day we’ll all be ready to quit. Then we’ll act like gentlemen and keep to our agreements. But we won’t act like gentlemen until we have to. Human nature! I see it in my own older sons. Those boys of mine will fight about something until they’re like beaten cocks. Then when they can’t fight any more, they come to terms.”

Pierce’s children were his weakness, and his friends knew it. “I saw your eldest son the other day at the University,” a man said. “I went down to enter my own boy—fine looking fellow, yours! What’s he going to make of himself?”

Pierce inclined his head. “Martin will follow me at Malvern,” he said modestly. But the modesty deceived no one. Pierce met their smiling eyes and in the silence looked at John. He was sorry the talk had come around to sons. The look of suffering stillness that fell upon John when other men talked of their children was dark upon his face now. Pierce rose. “Let us join the ladies,” he said. “Mrs. MacBain extracted some sort of promise from John, I believe—she told me so.”