The Angry Wife (16 page)

“I came to talk with Bettina,” he said. “Bettina, I take back what I asked you. You can tell Tom everything I said. Tom, I’d like to see you tonight in my own study. We’ll thrash this thing out for fair and have an end to it.”

He snatched his hat and his stick and strode out of the house, looking neither to the right nor the left as he went.

In the room he left so silent Tom went to Bettina and knelt and put his arms about her and the child. But Bettina let the child down and leaned her head upon his shoulder and began to weep.

“My dear love,” Tom muttered.

“I know what he said was right,” she sobbed. “Oh, my mind tells me he is right! God give me the strength—”

“What do you want strength for?” Tom asked.

“Nothing—I don’t know—I love you too much, I reckon,” she whispered.

“You can’t love me too much,” Tom said. The child was sobbing and he took her in his arms and held her, rocking her a little while he talked.

“I know Pierce was here to badger you, but you mustn’t heed him. It’s Lucinda—I’m sure she’s behind it. Pierce is so easygoing—he wouldn’t care much.”

He sat down in the big chair. The love he had for this woman had changed from the wild first passion of his youth. But she was necessary to him, a part of his life. He never allowed himself to wonder whether he had done well in taking her. Having taken her he had kept her and would keep her. He respected her deeply. In her unchanging goodness he had refuge. She was selfless to the last drop of her blood. He had never found the same quality in any one else except in his own mother. His mother would have understood the quality of Bettina’s goodness. He knew, of course, that she would never have understood what he had done. He wanted to believe that she would have understood Bettina—that would have been enough. But he was glad she was dead. Living, she would never have entered this house. He did not pretend that what he had done was easy, nor that his life was not beset with complexity. Both he and Bettina were isolated from their communities and he was deeply troubled for the children. Bettina kept them away from other colored children, but he could not lead them to the children of his kind. Leslie, his son, was named for Bettina’s father. Both of them had avoided the names’ of his own family. He had toyed with the idea of naming the baby Laura, after his mother and then had not done so. They had named her Lettice instead.

Leslie came in now, flushed with the sun. “I’m hungry, Mother,” he said, hesitating at the door. He knew so well these long conversations between his parents and that in some fashion they concerned him. He had a strange feeling always of waiting for something to happen. He knew that whatever it was must be decided always by his father. Everything in this house waited upon his father.

“We must all eat,” Tom said, sighing. “I have to get back to the school.”

He did not often come here in the middle of the day, but he had been haunted with some sort of uneasiness when John came back and said his parents were home again. Bettina went out and the little girl slipped from his lap to follow her and he leaned back and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear Bettina moving about, setting the table, and pouring milk. Perhaps he had been at fault, too. He had taken his situation for granted—he had let this house become too much his home. Had he come only and occasionally at night, had he returned always for the day to the house at Malvern, had he not behaved as though Bettina were his wife, would it have been better?

She opened the door. “I have everything on the table,” she said softly. “I didn’t expect you, so there’s only what we’d have—cornbread and milk and salad greens.”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, and went in and sat down. He helped the children to food and helped her, and then himself. But every time he lifted his eyes he found the children watching him timidly. They were too sensitive. They had been born in doubt and they knew their fate was uncertainty. He did not speak and Bettina, too, was silent. He looked at her and saw the shadows under her eyes.

“You look tired,” he said. “You’d better rest yourself.”

“Will you come back tonight—after you’ve seen—him?”

“I’ll come back and tell you everything,” he promised.

He rose early from the meal, refusing the fruit she had taken from a hastily opened jar for dessert. He kissed her smooth forehead, and touched the children’s cheeks and went away.

In the long dining room at Malvern, Pierce sat at the head of his table and ate silently. He was aware of the children’s voices chattering about him and now and again he forced himself to listen and to answer a question, while Lucinda’s smooth voice rippled in and out of the children’s talk. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with what he had done. As usual, he told himself, he had been too hasty after too long delay. He put off a distasteful task endlessly and then when it could be put off no longer he did it badly. Now he had to talk with Tom tonight, when he would be tired and less patient than he ought to be.

He put down his fork and knife, aware that he was eating too much. When he was upset about something he ate without knowing what he was doing. He had consumed two helpings of the braised breast of guinea hen and too much sweet corn and mashed potatoes. Green stuff he could not abide. Lucinda’s salads he called rabbit food.

“What’s dessert?” he asked Marcus, the old butler, superintending the two young black boys who were waiting.

“Frozen raspberry custard, suh,” Marcus said in his politely gentle voice.

Pierce sighed. It was his favorite sweet. He wondered irritably if he were greedy. Sometimes, surveying his naked body in the mirror in the new bathroom, he saw unwillingly that he was growing heavy. Good food was an attribute of Malvern and its rich life. Not to have set a good table was unthinkable, not to have eaten would have been folly. If he were greedy it was not for food alone, but for all that meant life. He ate the frozen custard slowly, savoring it. He must remember not to eat hastily without tasting to the full what was in his mouth. There was no use in merely filling his belly.

Lucinda rose. “Come, my dears,” she said to the girls. “We will leave Papa and John. Pierce, I feel tired and shall make my siesta longer than usual.”

“I’ll be out in the stables,” he replied.

He reached out his arm and Sally stepped into its curve and he gave her a squeeze and brushed her cheek with his moustaches. “I have something for you,” he whispered. “Tonight when you’re in bed I’ll come up and give it to you.”

Her eyes shone and she nodded and skipped away, her skirts swinging above her ankles. He was left alone with John, and the boy, to his annoyance, began to talk about Tom.

“Uncle Tom says doubtless I shall make a better scholar than either Martin or Carey.”

Pierce poured himself a glass of French wine. Some day he planned to make better wine than this from his own grapes. He had fine grapes and he made wines, but he declared often that he had not yet learned the secret of the transubstantiation of their water into wine. Each year he tasted his product and threatened to import a French wine maker. Lucinda did not care for wine and protested at this further complication of their household. He poured half a glass of wine for John.

“But I don’t like wine, Papa,” the boy protested.

“Learn to drink like a man,” Pierce commanded him, “and don’t set yourself above your brothers. Books are a very little part in a man’s life. Your brother Martin has the best seat I ever saw on a horse and Carey is very clever.”

He had pricked John’s pride, for the boy had an instinctive and uncontrollable fear of horses. He said nothing but his face flushed as he touched the glass to his lips and set it down again.

“Even Sally rides much better than you do,” Pierce went on. He was always stern to his sons and now he realized unwillingly, for he wanted to be a just man, that he was sterner toward John than any of them.

“Sally likes to ride and I don’t,” John murmured.

“A man ought to ride well whether he likes it or not,” Pierce retorted.

“Uncle Tom doesn’t,” John murmured again.

“I hope you do not intend to model yourself entirely on your Uncle Tom,” Pierce said. He was aware again of his injustice, for he recognized, that the boy hurt him by admiring his uncle too much.

“Drink your wine,” he said abruptly. John’s face hardened but he lifted the glass and drank the wine down like medicine and took up his goblet and gulped down water after it. Pierce flung out his hand and knocked the goblet aside and it fell to the floor in a silvery crash of broken crystal.

“Don’t let me see you do such a thing again!” he shouted. “When I say learn to drink wine I mean learn to like wine!”

“That I cannot do!” John cried at him.

Pierce glared at his son an instant and was suddenly pleased to see that the boy was glaring back at him. He burst into laughter. “Well, never mind,” he said amiably. “Just get out of my sight for a bit.”

“Yes, Papa.” John rose, pushed in his chair and went out of the room slowly, his narrow shoulders held very straight. Pierce watched him, his eyes twinkling under his heavy brows. He might have expected rebellion from the two elder lads, but it was the first he had ever had from John. His own blood told, after all. He felt better.

Then he remembered Tom’s mulatto boy he had seen this morning in Bettina’s yard and he sobered again and got up, sighing noisily, and threw his napkin on the floor. He stalked up to his room and put on his riding clothes and went out into the hot afternoon sun which he loved.

As always when he did not know how to solve a problem, he went to his stables. There at least life was simple and uncomplicated, for horses were better than people. One could control their propagation, at least, he thought, and grinned at himself. Inside the cool and aromatic stable the stalls were empty, except for the one where his mare had foaled a week before. She had her foal with her, and he could hear Jake mumbling over it.

“What have you got them inside for, a day like this?” he called sharply. He belonged to the school of horse breeders who believed in the open.

“She was layin’ down and I brung her in to see was she snake bit or somethin’,” Jake replied. Snakes had become Jake’s obsession, ever since the young mare’s mother, Beauty, had died from the bite of a copperhead by the river where she had gone to drink.

Pierce himself was more nervous than he let himself acknowledge and he hastened to the stall and looked at the mare. She was standing with her colt beside her, and Phelan, Jake’s son, was rubbing her down. “She looks all right,” Pierce said. “The mare turned her beautiful head and whinnied at him and he fished out a lump of sugar from his pocket and fed it to her. The colt came up and smelled his hand and licked the sweet tentatively with its pink tongue. Phelan sat back on his haunches, a thin wisp of a boy, so black that his big mouth was in startling contrast.

“This yere colt is awful smart, Mas’ Pierce,” he said. “He ain’t just anybody’s business—he’s somebody, yassuh.”

Pierce surveyed this first colt of his young mare. It was not large, but it controlled its long legs with unusual skill. The color was chestnut without a mark, and the eyes were large and intelligent.

“We’ll watch him,” Pierce said. “Maybe there is something in him. Get him out in the open and let him learn to take care of himself and get his hoofs tough. We’ll see how much nerve he has and whether he likes to race. That’s the first thing. He’s got to like it.”

He had won races with Beauty and he was always looking for the perfect race horse. Malvern had everything for producing it. The blue grass of this river valley was good for horses as well as for cattle. He had exhibited one of his bulls in the second fair the county had held and it had weighed nearly four thousand pounds and was the second largest bull in the world. He had just as good a one to show next year. This colt would not be old enough to race then, but by the year after—

He stooped and examined the small exquisite body and ran his hands over its firm haunches and straight legs. “Its body is good enough, I do believe,” he said in some excitement.

They looked at one another solemnly. Was this to be known in history as the first moment that a great horse was recognized?

“Watch him, you two,” Pierce ordered. “And saddle Rex for me.”

“Yassuh,” Jake said gravely.

Pierce rode away in a few minutes on the horse he had bought for Tom, who so seldom used it that he had forgotten it was not his own. He was still thinking of the colt. So much more than a fine body was needed to make the perfect race horse, he reminded himself. Even good blood was not enough. There was the imponderable, unknowable character of the creature that had to be discovered. He had bred colts as fine as this one who had nevertheless no greatness in them. Beauty had had greatness, but she had had an own sister, sired as she had been by the famous Whirling Dervish, the dam for both of them Mary Malabar, and Beauty was a great horse and Silver Girl, though more exquisite to look upon, had been only a placid mare. He had not named this colt and he would not do so until he could discover more of its nature. If it had the intelligence for training, if it had the pride to win, he would give it a good name and as he watched the colt he’d watch Phelan for its jockey. There would be, of course, the question of who should be the trainer. He frowned over this, and decided on Henry Shulter in Charlestown. He’d send the colt to him to be looked at as soon as it was weaned.

He was quite happy again and restored to his usual mood of hearty good humor. There was nothing like horses, he thought—nothing, indeed, like going around and seeing Malvern for himself. He lifted his head and saw on the hillside meadow his shorthorn cattle, bred from the early stock brought here by his father fifty years before. Now he shipped hundreds of head abroad. Englishmen across the ocean were at this moment doubtless eating beefsteaks and roasts from Malvern cattle. But he was proudest of all of his bulls. He was wont to bet that his bulls, bred even to the common cattle of the mountains, would produce within a few generations the finest herds in the country. He wanted to share his pride with someone and he turned and rode back to the stable doors and shouted into its depths.