The Angry Wife (14 page)

They went out, well-fed men, rich men, determined to hold their riches in a state still poor. They were confident that from their prosperity would flow the prosperity of all.

In the ballroom Pierce went to Molly as a matter of course. The hostess must have the first dance. She slipped easily into his arms, accustomed to the pose. She was growing a little solid, but she was still light and graceful enough when she danced. He was used to her step and he suited his rhythm to hers. They were old friends now, frank enough. He was accustomed to her frontal attacks and he was no longer afraid of her as once he had been in the days when he did not know if he wanted her. He knew now that he did not.

“You men left the table earlier than I dared hope,” she said. Her frankest talk was always behind the screen of music when they were dancing. The band she had hired was playing a Strauss waltz, bows sweeping long across violin strings and the piano throbbing.

“The talk got around to sons, and I saw John flinch as he always does,” Pierce said.

“I wish John would let me adopt a boy, but he won’t,” Molly said. “He says if he can’t have his flesh and blood he don’t want somebody else’s.”

“I can understand that,” Pierce replied. “I wouldn’t want Malvern inherited by any except my own.”

“If John would take a boy, I’d have one for him,” Molly said laughing. “I’d be glad to—especially if you’d father him for me, Pierce. Wouldn’t it be kind of nice? He’d inherit our place—next to yours.”

He was accustomed to these bold proposals and he smiled. “We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we?” he remarked. But he had never told her that John had once asked him the same thing.

“Only in words,” she said wickedly.

He laughed in spite of himself. “Molly, for God’s sake,” he protested. “You know what a fuss it would make in our families! Lucinda would leave me.”

“My Gawd, Lucinda needn’t know,” she declared.

“Lucinda always knows everything,” he said, in pretended rue.

“I can fix it,” she persisted.

“Please, lady, leave my life alone,” he begged in mock alarm.

Molly dropped into utter seriousness. “Of course I know—you don’t want me—”

“I don’t want you enough to roil up my life,” he countered.

“I’m not young enough—that’s the truth!” she declared.

She lifted her lashes and dared him, with eyes too bright, to deny it.

“You’ll always be young,” he said gaily. “Please, Molly, when your hair is white—and mine too—keep on asking me! Something would go out of my life if you stopped making proposals to me which I can’t accept.”

The waltz ended at exactly the right moment for him upon this casual gayety, which, affectionate though it was, he kept devoid of passion. She sighed, and he dropped his arms from about her and sighed in mimicry. Then he smiled and went to Lucinda and sat down beside her. She had been dancing with John and he had torn the ruffle of her skirt. She frowned at it. “I shall have to go and get it mended,” she said.

“Lend me your fan while you’re gone,” he begged. “The rooms are too close.”

“Sure it wasn’t Molly?” she inquired with malice.

“Not after all these years,” he returned.

“But you are so handsome, Pierce,” she murmured.

“Thank you, my dear,” he replied. He took the fan from her hand and sat fanning himself without embarrassment. “I shan’t dance until you come back,” he said calmly.

She was back in the middle of the next waltz, and took her fan away from him. “You mind looking silly less than any man I know,” she remarked. “Dance with me, please, Pierce!”

“Did I look silly?” he asked. They began waltzing slowly. Lucinda did not like flourishes, and neither did he. “But everybody knew it was my wife’s fan. Besides, I still love the perfume you use and the fan kept blowing it to me.”

She was mollified and smiled. “When shall we go home?” she murmured. Their steps matched perfectly. She saw Lacey Mallows watching them, and yielded herself a little more to Pierce’s embrace.

“I always want to go home,” he said.

“Molly wants us to stay until tomorrow,” she teased.

“Then let’s stay,” he said promptly. He knew that it was the surest way to get her to go.

She fell at once into his trap. “I sleep better in my own bed,” she said.

“So do I,” he said;—“with you,” he added.

She laughed. “Pierce, you aren’t a little drunk?”

“I think not,” he said, “but maybe—”

“If we are going home tonight, we’ll have to catch the twelve forty—” she reminded him.

“John has the car at the siding. It will be easy,” he replied.

At one o’clock they were going to bed in John MacBain’s private railroad car. Pierce in his fine linen nightshirt looked out of the window at the swiftly passing moonlit landscape. The whirling mountains were black against the dark blue sky. “God, what grades the men had to climb!” he murmured.

Lucinda came to his side and he put his arm around her to steady her. “The road is astonishingly smooth, considering the solid rock they hewed,” he went on. He had blown out the kerosene lamps the better to see into the moonlight. “Tons of dynamite,” he murmured. They could see the engine turning a curve and spitting sparks. It turned and curved again and a cliff hid it.

“Oh, stop thinking about railroads!” Lucinda cried.

He looked down at her. The filmy stuff of her nightgown flowed to her feet, and there were ruffles at her bosom and her wrists. Her long fair hair was loose on her shoulders. He lifted her into his arms. “The way you keep hold of me,” he murmured into her fragrant neck. “The shameful way you never let me go! How can you go on getting prettier every year? What chance has anybody else, you little selfish thing? Look here—don’t you blame me for anything that happens tonight—”

“I won’t,” she said sweetly. “Really, I won’t, Pierce.”

But he knew the reason for her willingness. She was afraid, a little afraid, of Molly MacBain. He smiled at his cynicism and accepted his Lucinda for what she was—a pretty woman, and his own.

He reached home in the full pride of possession. Jake met them at the station with the new surrey and the matched bay horses of Malvern breeding, and when they swept up the long drive of oaks which his grandfather had planted, he turned to Lucinda in profound pleasure.

“There isn’t a place even in Virginia to match Malvern,” he declared.

Lucinda, very composed in her dove-grey traveling dress, smiled. “I shan’t be satisfied until we have the new greenhouse and when that is finished I want a formal garden laid out below the slope.”

She lifted her parasol and pointed to the hollow at the foot of the knoll upon which the great house stood.

It was early summer and the green of grass and trees was bright. “It would be pleasant to sit on the terrace and look down on the garden,” she went on.

“You always want something more, my pet,” Pierce said with amiable sarcasm.

“Why not, when I can have it?” she replied.

He did not answer. The children had heard the surrey and were gathering on the top step to meet them. Martin and Carey were at school in Virginia, but Sally, John and little Lucie were standing and waiting. Georgia had dressed them in their best and she had curled Sally’s hair down her shoulders. The morning sunlight fell on them warmly and Pierce felt his throat catch in absurd sentimentality. “You’ve given me wonderful children, Luce,” he said. He tried to make his voice casual but he knew it was not.

Lucinda smiled and then frowned. “I wish John didn’t look so much like Tom. That means he won’t be as handsome as the other boys.”

As soon as she spoke Tom’s name the whole problem of their lives came back upon them. They put it aside again and again, now to go to Wheeling on railroad business, now to White Sulphur on a holiday, but when they came home it was always there waiting. Pierce did not answer her, but he remembered the promise he had given her this time before they went away. He had promised her that he would tell Tom firmly at last that he must marry and settle down. Whether he kept Bettina was no one’s business, but he had to keep her elsewhere than in that house by the road, where whenever there was another child, everyone knew it. Tom had now three children by Bettina, children who were own cousins to his children and Lucinda’s. This was what Lucinda could not endure. She had faced Pierce with it last week.

“If only our children didn’t love Tom so much and hang on his every word!” she complained.

“Tom’s their teacher and I reckon it’s only natural,” Pierce had replied.

“That’s what is so disgusting,” she had said angrily. “You pay Tom to run the Academy, and we send our children there, and everybody knows.”

“I don’t consider it my affair,” he had retorted to end the talk.

“But it is your affair when your own children are involved,” she had retorted in turn. “It isn’t as it used to be before the war, when a man could go to a black wench in the quarters or get her to his room and nobody be the wiser and little mulattos were only niggers with the rest. Things can’t be hidden the way they used to be—everybody knows about. Tom and Bettina. Why, it’s as bad as if they were married! As soon as that boy is ready for school—you mark my words, Pierce—Tom will want him to go to the Academy with our own children.”

He was outraged by Lucinda’s absurdity. “You know Tom wouldn’t mix white and black that way,” he grumbled.

She had laughed her cruelly light laughter. “Do you think Tom calls his children
black?”
she cried.

“But they are,” he had protested.

She had laughed again and suddenly he had hated her laughter. It occurred to him that Lucinda never laughed except at someone else.

“Tom’s no fool,” he had said loudly.

She had patted the ruffles of her skirt, and made her voice casual again.

“You’re too soft, Pierce. You always want to avoid trouble. But somewhere you have to make a stand, even with your own brother.”

“Well, well,” he had muttered. “Let it be until we get back from John’s shindig, then I’ll see what’s what.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Well, yes—it is.”

Now the children ran down the steps to meet them and in a moment he had his daughter in his arms. His first embrace was always for Sally and she knew it and all the others knew it. John and Lucie submitted to their mother’s kiss and waited until Pierce opened his arms to them. John was a quiet child, undeniably like Tom in his looks, and Lucie was a miniature of Lucinda. Her likeness to her mother disturbed Pierce sometimes, and occasionally it had occurred to him that if he watched Lucie he might understand Lucinda too well. The veneer of manners and behavior which covered Lucinda had not yet accumulated over Lucie, and the child was frankly selfish. Pierce was never willing to face Lucie’s faults because he loved his wife truly. He stopped now and kissed Lucie with gentleness. The little blonde girl returned the kiss demurely and without emotion. Pierce never kissed his sons. He put his arm on John’s shoulder and walked up the steps with him and Lucinda followed with the girl. John rubbed his head against his father’s solid body.

“Father, Uncle Tom is going to put me into Latin.”

“Good,” Pierce said heartily. “That means he thinks you are a clever fellow and so you are.”

He pressed the boy’s thin body to his and felt the wave of emotion that always swept him when he held his children. They were so young and touching, so dependent upon him. Their weakness made him strong, and quieted all that was wild and restless in him.

His eyes fell upon Georgia as he mounted the last step. She stood a little to the right, motionless in her peculiar still fashion. She was as quiet as a shadow in his house, but sometimes suddenly he saw her as now, human and alive. The strong summer sunlight falling upon her delicately golden skin and upon the soft waves of her fine black hair revealed her. She wore white, as Lucinda liked her maids to do in the summer, even though it meant that they washed and ironed late into the night, and the secret living quality of her dark eyes shone above the white fichu about her neck. He saw with surprise that her eyes were not black but a warm brown, clear enough to show the pupils. Her face flushed under his hard stare, and she looked away quickly. But her usual expression did not change. Her mouth was composed and its habitual look of sweetness came from the deepest corners.

“We’re glad to see you back, sir,” she murmured.

Pierce turned his eyes away. “We’re always glad to come home,” he said.

He passed into the cool shadows of the great hall of his house and John slipped from under his arm. “Uncle Tom said I must come back quickly,” he explained.

“Where is Tom?” Pierce asked.

“He’s in his study at the Academy,” John replied. “Goodbye, Father, I’ll see you at noon.”

He darted down the wide hall and out the door that stood open into the garden and across the garden to the Academy. Pierce had taken a piece out of his own land for the school building. He regretted it sometimes, for the academies that had been built so painfully after the war by citizens were now being taken over by the state and made into public schools, and he objected to a public school on his property. He was determined to keep the Academy private.

Lucinda was going up the stairs, and the little girls were following the billowing ruffles of her skirts, to see what she had brought them from the city. He hesitated, wanting to follow them himself. He and Lucinda had chosen gifts, a pink parasol for Lucie and a blue one for Sally. Then he remembered his secret gift for Sally, a little gold ring with a tiny sapphire set into the circle. No, he would give that to her later when he was alone with her. She would keep it and say nothing. She was used to having secrets with him and he loved her so much that he had to give her things sometimes just for herself.

Georgia had taken Lucinda’s mantle and parasol and was about to go upstairs. He remembered his promise to Lucinda to settle the problem of Tom. One of his impulses swept over him. Why shouldn’t he talk to Georgia once more and get her to persuade Bettina to move away? Then whatever Tom did would be his own business. He hated the thought of a quarrel with his brother, but he knew that Lucinda would force him to it unless he could circumvent her. He wanted peace in this house he loved so well, and he loved Tom as he loved all that belonged to him. He had only to remember still how Tom had suffered in the Confederate prison, and how he had looked when he came home to Malvern to feed a wave of new love for the only brother he had so nearly lost. Away from home Pierce was a hard man and he took pride in it. He drove his bargains so close that he had to hire lawyers to keep him inside the law. But his hardness in business was balanced by softness for his family. He did not love humanity but he loved his own, the love he had for Malvern, for his horses and his dogs and even his cattle and steadfast love he had for his family. He fought by any means he could for what he wanted elsewhere but he did not want to fight inside those walls—for anything.