The Angry Wife (18 page)

Lucinda took the handkerchief from her eyes. “Yes, go!” she cried, “go and never come back!”

Tom rose. “Very well, madam—”

Pierce woke from his daze. “Now Tom—now Luce—look, we’re one family! Luce didn’t mean that, Tom.”

Lucinda stabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Don’t call me Luce!” she sobbed.

“Lucinda doesn’t mean that, Tom,” Pierce began again. “Please, Tom, try to be reasonable. Try to see our side of it—the family side.”

He went over to Lucinda and took her right hand and held it. “Lucinda, honey, we’re going to fix things—don’t worry. Tom isn’t going to be unreasonable, honey—”

But Tom was walking to the door. He passed through it, and then paused in the hall. He lifted his head, and stood in one of those moments he knew so well, when the love and pain of living overwhelmed him. He had so nearly given up life once, in the prison, he had fought so hard for it again in this mighty old house which had sheltered him since his birth. Here he had found Bettina and without her he would have surely died. Even Pierce could not have stayed with him night and day through all the lonely hours of his weakness. The house had given him his life, but Bettina had saved that life. His eyes roamed over the hall, the stairs, which he and Pierce had climbed as children, the heavy walnut balustrade down which they had slid as little boys, Pierce always first and fearless and he coming after, terrified, but following Pierce. He could not bear to go.

And then in the midst of his pain and his longing he heard Lucinda’s voice lifted in wild reproach.

“Oh, Pierce, you’re standing up for him, you beast! You’re a beast like all the others—men are beasts—beasts—beasts—”

“I’m not!” Pierce roared. “Look here, Luce—if—if it were before the war and I could do it—I’d—I’d sell Bettina and her brats down the river and get rid of them all—”

“I wish it were before the war!” Lucinda sobbed.

“God dammit, so do I!” Pierce cried.

Tom heard his brother’s voice and hastened away. The house could shelter him no more.

Chapter Five

B
ETTINA LAY ASLEEP IN
the moonlight. Summer and winter she had her bed by the window where she could look out into the shrub-enclosed back yard. The lawn and the narrow flowerbeds which she tended so carefully by day were enchanting to her by night. When there was no moon she could smell the sweetness of the dark and the fragrance of dew. In winter the frost was fragrant. Like all women whose lives must be lived within boundaries, she had grown deeply and she had learned to make every small part of her life as large as the universe. Thus at night to single out a star and to lie in her bed gazing at it, to imagine its existence, enlarged her as a journey might enlarge a traveler. To dream of the one man she knew who possessed her, to ponder upon his qualities, his strength and his weakness, was enough for her whole life. Early in her life with Tom she had made up her mind to demand nothing of him. If he came it was her joy, but if he did not come, her life must go on. Sometimes he reproached her for this in one way or another. “I don’t believe you miss me, Bettina. You are just as happy when I am not here—you and the children.”

To which she answered out of her profound simplicity. “When you come it’s like the sun breaking through and taking hold of a day I thought was going to be dark. But if the sun don’t break through you have to go on living, Tom. Besides, I know you will come—sometime. So do the children.”

He had come to understand that reproach was folly. She was as fathomless as the sea and the sky, and as essential.

Now he hastened to her through the gathering night. Pierce’s words were a spur to his feet and with every step he took he swore that the path on which he walked would know him no more. Never again would he go to Malvern. He renounced his birthright.

He could see the low outlines of Bettina’s roof and the gate was still whiter than the darkness. He opened it and shut it loudly and then guided by the light of the candle that Bettina always kept in the window, he went into the house. If he came, he blew the candle out. If he did not come, it burned down into its pewter holder. Now, however, he lit the lamp in the living room and taking the candle with him he went upstairs into the room where she slept.

She lay on the wide bed by the window. He held the candle high and she opened her eyes and he was struck again by her extravagant beauty. Her pale face was set in the dark hair outspread on the pillow and her slender right arm was thrown above it. She made her nightgowns dainty and fine, and lace lay upon her bosom. She was fastidious even after all these years and she had her small reserves from him. Thus when the candlelight fell upon her she drew the sheet instinctively over her breasts. Then she smiled her slow and lovely smile. “Tom—I’d given you up tonight.”

He set the candle down on the table and sat down on the bed and began to speak urgently. “Listen, Bettina—understand quickly what I say. I want us to get up and go away—now.”

She sat up, instantly aware, and twisted her loose hair into a knot at her neck. She waited without speaking, her dark eyes wide.

Tom went on, “Pierce and I have quarreled. Lucinda came in. I don’t want to stay here another day. You and I and the children are going away together. We’re going now, because if I stay I might not be able to get away. And I want to go—I must go.”

“Darling, could you tell me?” She had dreamed often of going away with him, and there was nothing but joy in the thought. But she would not let him go in haste. She had to be sure that there was no other way and that it was what he wanted most.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Tom said abruptly. “But I know as I know my own soul that if I stay they will not rest until I am parted from you. I can’t part from you, Bettina.”

His hand searched for hers but she did not yield it to him.

“Did they want you to send me away?” she asked.

“They want me to marry another woman—” he said harshly.

“You aren’t married to me, Tom—”

“That’s not my fault—I’ve wanted you to marry me.”

“I can’t marry you, darling. The ministers wouldn’t marry us.”

“We’re going somewhere that I can marry you. Get up, Bettina, and get the children up. We’re going to catch the four o’clock train north.”

“Darling, I’ll go if you promise me one thing.”

“I can’t make promises now, Bettina—”

“Only this one, that if you want to come back, you will come back. I can’t take you away from Malvern forever, honey—you’ll hate me.”

“Malvern can burn down for all I care, and good riddance to all its old rubbish.”

“But you were born there!”

She bent her head on her knees and he stroked the soft nape of her neck upward with the sweep of her hair. “If it makes you feel better about going, I’ll promise,” he said: “But I know I’ll never want to come back. I’ve outgrown it. It’s dead—in the past.”

She lifted her head at his words. “You mean—”

“I mean you and I and our children are going to make our own world. It will be a good world, where everybody will be treated justly for what he is—even if it is only inside our own four walls.”

A good world! With these words he took her by the soul and only thus could he have won her to follow him. She had to know that what she did was for good, and now she believed him. She got out of bed and silently they packed his roundbacked trunk and two carpetbags with clothes for the children and themselves.

“I shall want my books from Malvern,” Tom said. “I don’t care about anything else. I’ll write Pierce that he can send them by railroad freight.”

“I’ll have to tell Georgia where we are, Tom.”

“Of course.”

He lit the lantern an hour later and walked down the road to the livery stable and roused Pete Calloway and asked for a vehicle. “I’ll leave it at the railway station and you can fetch it tomorrow,” he said.

Pete, in his long cotton nightshirt, leaned out of the window. “How come you ain’t using your brother’s vehicle?” he asked.

“I’m going away on my own business,” Tom said, “and here’s your money.”

Pete came out scratching his head. “You ain’t quarreled with him, have you?”

“Him” within fifty miles of Malvern meant only Pierce, and Tom smiled. “In a way,” he said. “But never mind.”

Pete was hitching up his second-best surrey. “Tell George I’ll come around early to the station,” he drawled. “Want me to meet you tomorrow night?”

“No, thanks—” Tom replied. Tomorrow Pete would tell over and over again how he had been roused in the night and how Tom had told him he had quarreled with his brother. But by tomorrow nothing that happened here would matter. He dropped two dollars into Pete’s outstretched palm, saw how dirty that palm was, and climbed into the surrey and drove down the road again.

At the house Bettina and the children were dressed and waiting. Leslie was silent with astonishment and Georgy was ready to cry.

“Don’t cry,” Tom said. He picked her up and put her in the front seat beside him. “We are going to live where Papa can be at home with you always, like other people. Bettina, have you the money?”

He had long ago brought to her what he earned and, she kept it for him, using it when she needed it. At Malvern he had needed nothing except an occasional book.

“I have it all,” she said. She turned her head to look at the little house that had sheltered her for so long. Within it she had been safe enough, but she knew that it could not shelter her children. She turned her head away again and climbed into the surrey, holding her baby in her arms. Leslie climbed in after her, and thus they drove away into the night, their faces set toward the north.

Pierce woke feeling tired. At his side Lucinda lay still asleep and he got out of the wide bed and went into the room next hers, which he called his own. Sometimes he slept here when Lucinda did not want him with her. He hesitated a few minutes at his window. The dawn was just beginning to break. It was an hour he loved. The mountains in the distance were purple and the grass on the lawns was silvery with small dew-sprinkled cobwebs. Had he not felt tired he would have put on his riding things and gone out. Instead he turned and slid his big body between the clean fresh sheets of his own bed. The quarrel with Tom was still to be mended but he did not want to think about it. He burrowed his head into the pillows and went to sleep again.

From this sleep he was wakened two hours later by Lucinda herself. It was so unusual an occurrence that at first he could not bring himself to believe it was she who stood over him.

“Wh-wha-what—” he muttered thickly, staring at her with sleep-bleared eyes. He was at the bottom of an ocean and she was hauling him up, calling his name over and over again.

“Pray tell!” she now said sharply. “I never did see anyone so stupefied! Anyone would think you had gone to bed drunk. Pierce, wake up—Tom’s gone!”

She flung this at him like a spear and he sat up in bed and gaped at her.

“Gone where?” he asked out of confusion.

“Nobody knows—just gone! Pete Calloway came to say so. They’ve all gone.”

“Who?”

“Bettina—everybody! I sent Jake down to see. The house is empty. Pete said that George told him they all came to the station and Tom bought tickets for Philadelphia.”

“Oh, my God!” He was awake now and he leaped out of bed. Lucinda sat down.

“You get out of here, Lucinda,” he ordered her. “You know I can dress faster if you’re not here.”

“Oh, Pierce—you’re so silly—as if I hadn’t seen you naked thousands of times—”

It was an old quarrel between them, petty and inexplicable and yet profound. Pierce had the excessive modesty of the big man, and Lucinda had no modesty at all. Lucinda’s brazenness about her own body had secretly troubled and astonished Pierce through all the years of their marriage. There had been times when he found it exciting, but when these times were over, he disliked it. A truly good woman ought to cover herself. Yet he would not allow himself to think that Lucinda was not good. Her lack of natural modesty made his own increase. He did not like her in the room with him when he washed himself and dressed. To shave in her presence was ignoble and to scrub himself with soap and sponge before her was humiliation. He wanted to appear, even before her—ah, perhaps especially before her—as always himself and whole. There was nothing childish in his love of her.

She sauntered out of the room, half scornfully. Married people surely need not be so foolish, she thought. But in a strange and unconscious fashion it was more than foolishness to her. She was jealous of everything in Pierce. She wanted no reserves in him. Full possession must be hers, his body hers, in jealousy rather than passion.

But she went into her room, for it was quite true that he could not or would not dress as quickly if she were with him and this morning he must be quick. She was not sure what it would mean to have Tom gone. There could be no school, of course. That meant the children would be underfoot all day. Well, Georgia must look after them then and teach them. What would she do with John? John would grieve, she thought with irritation. But he must get over it. She sat down before her mirror and examined the details of her hair and her eyelashes and skin, the silver hand mirror flashing a reflected sunlight upon her head. On the whole, it was good that Tom had gone for a while. She put down the mirror. Of course, she thought, that was it—he had simply taken Bettina away. Then he would come back again. It was not likely that he would leave Malvern and all its benefits.

Pierce came into the room a few minutes later shaved and dressed. “Where’s Georgia?” he demanded.

“I sent her to get the children up,” Lucinda replied.

“She may know something,” Pierce said and went off to find her.

But Georgia did not know. He did not doubt the truth of her troubled eyes. She was curling Sally’s hair about her finger. The children knelt before her and cried out when he came in, “Uncle Tom’s run away!”

Everyone knew it, of course. There was no keeping things from the children in a huge household like this. Someone always told them.

“Georgia, you know anything about this?” he demanded.