The Angry Wife (19 page)

She went on brushing the golden coils of Sally’s hair about her finger.

“No, sir,” she said. “Bettina didn’t tell me anything. It’s come as a—shock.”

She lifted her eyes to his and he saw them full of tears.

“Didn’t she tell you anything ever of such a possibility—if something went wrong?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said simply.

He had an uncomfortable conviction that he ought to tell her about yesterday. Bettina was all she had.

“Go away, Sally,” he ordered. “I want to talk to Georgia.”

“But why can’t I hear?” Sally objected. “I know everything, anyway.”

Pierce was appalled. “What do you mean by everything?” he demanded.

“I know Uncle Tom and Bettina have children together,” she said.

“Oh, my God,” Pierce groaned, “go on away, will you? Go and find your mother.”

Then his heart twinged. It was his own fault that he had not put a stop to the mess long ago. But who could have foreseen that Tom would be so serious? He ought to have remembered that Tom had always been serious. He seized Sally and kissed her loudly, sighed, then let her go. He faced Georgia.

“Georgia, I did talk to Bettina yesterday but she didn’t give me a hint of what’s happened. Now Bettina surely must have said sometime or other to you that she might go away,” he argued.

Georgia stood up. “No, sir, we didn’t talk much any more about things.”

“What do you mean—any more?”

“We did talk a lot—at first,” Georgia replied. “I mean—we used to try to think what was to become of us. I think she thought we’d never marry, of course.”

“What’s the ‘of course’ about it?” Pierce demanded.

“She didn’t want us to marry—just anybody,” Georgia said delicately.

“And do you think Bettina did well to allow Tom—to—to—”

“No, sir, I never thought so,” Georgia said. “I told her from the first that it would be an embarrassment to the family—and to us. She understood that. But to be fair to Bettina, I think I ought to tell you, sir, that Master Tom certainly did persuade her.”

“I am sure he did,” Pierce said drily. He sighed again and stood up. “Well, I don’t know what has happened to me,” he said unhappily. “I don’t know if I’ve lost a brother or not. I reckon we’ll find out where they’ve gone. If she writes you, you must tell me at once.”

He was too upset to notice that she was silent. She stood motionless while he walked heavily out of the room. Going down the stairs to his breakfast, it occurred to him that Georgia had spoken for herself his one thought of yesterday. If Bettina had properly married before Tom had come home none of this would have happened. Georgia ought to be married. Trouble came from unmarried females in a house—females that were young and beautiful and low enough in position to be at the mercy of men. He stood indecisive and then tramped back upstairs again. She was standing just where he had left her, her head drooping, her hands clasped behind her, as though in meditation. When he came in she looked up.

“Georgia, something you said made me think.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You ought to get married yourself. We haven’t any right just to absorb your life the way we do in this house.”

She blushed and lifted her head still higher. “I don’t want to marry, thank you, sir.”

“Haven’t you ever seen any man you wanted to marry?” he persisted.

“No, sir,” she said quietly. She hesitated a moment and then went on. “And it wouldn’t be any good if I did, I don’t intend to marry, sir—ever.”

“Georgia, every woman ought to marry,” he declared.

“I don’t want to bring another human being into the world—as I was brought here,” she said in a strange quiet voice.

“But—but—” he stammered, “if you married a man—of your own race—”

“What is my race?” she asked him.

“Well—” he began, “well—”

“Yes, I know,” she said in the same strange still voice. “Colored is where I belong—outside. But inside—I don’t.”

He was completely miserable in the presence of her soul thus bared before him and he retreated in haste. “You know, Georgia, if there was anything I could do—any single thing. My God, when I was fighting in the war I never dreamed of all it couldn’t settle! But what can I do, Georgia?”

“Not a thing, Master Pierce, except just go on being—kind.”

She was suddenly her usual self again and she turned to the bureau, opened the top drawer and began to sort Sally’s ribbons. He stared at her back and at her reflected face in the mirror. Her lashes were downcast and her soft mouth firm, and feeling that he was where he should not be, he turned and went downstairs again, confused and unhappy.

Tom and Bettina had grown silent as the night wore on. The children curled into the red plush seat and were asleep and Bettina held the baby in her arms. Tom sat beside her, his arm touching hers to the shoulder. At first they had talked much in the excitement of what they had done, but as dawn broke over the fleeing landscape they ceased. They were tired and Bettina was bewildered with doubt. They had acted in such haste. Could she make it up to him if some day he was sorry?

But Tom would allow himself no doubts. He wanted to build the foundations of his new life carefully and he meant first to find a decent place for his family to live. “My family,” he thought, and felt an unspeakable tenderness for this little group of human beings who depended upon him so wholly because he had created them. He had no worry about money. Bettina had enough of his savings for their immediate needs and he would write Pierce and ask for his share of their inheritance. He had a respectable amount of money left him by his mother, besides, if he wanted to use it. He was fortunate. Not every man could start a new life with such confidence.

Forgetting the constant, irritating motion of the train he pondered on what it was he wanted most for his children. It was simple enough—a place where they could grow up as other children did in this country of theirs—his children’s country. He had fought and nearly died to make it so. His jaw grew grim at the memories that crowded into his mind. Not he alone had died to make the children free. He remembered and would remember forever the young men’s bodies, carted out of the prison camps, dying and dead, and shoveled into shallow graves. These, too, had died for his children. God helping him, he would try to find a place where what they had done would count at last.

He turned to Bettina. “We shall live in Philadelphia,” he said.

“Oh, I would like that,” Bettina exclaimed.

“The City of Brotherly Love,” he said with a dry smile. “The variety may be better in the north.”

“If a slave got to Philadelphia, he was safe,” Bettina said simply.

The city became home to them from then on, although neither of them had ever seen it. When they stopped at the station the next afternoon it was home. Tom refused to notice the stares of the people around him as he marched through the waiting room. He carried the baby and the two older children clung to Bettina’s hands. A porter took their bags, his eyes bulging, too. It was to this porter that Bettina turned in private inquiry.

“Can we folks put up at the hotels here?” she whispered.

He caught the whisper and exchanged secret looks with her. He shook his head. “You can’t, nor the children,” he mumbled. “You gotta go to a boardinghouse—downtown—”

How could she convey this to Tom? She caught step with him and looked up to him pleadingly. “Honey, let’s sit down and rest a minute.”

They sat down on the nearest bench. She took a startled glance to see if she would be forbidden and was reassured by the sight of an old black woman in a creased grey cotton frock, drowsing at the end of the seat and clutching a worn carpetbag to her lean stomach.

“Tom, where are you going to take us, dear?”

“To a hotel,” he replied.

“Honey, they won’t let us in—me and the children.”

He stared at her and suddenly flushed. “They’d better.”

“No, Tom, honey—wait! Let’s not begin quarreling with folks here. Let’s find a quiet boardinghouse for me and the children, and you go to a hotel for a few days. Then we can look around and find the house we want. It would make me much happier that way, I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted—please, Tom!”

He yielded because he was tired and in spite of all, a stranger here. “Very well,” he said.

They started again, the porter following with the bags and he found them a horse cab outside on the street driven by a ragged black man. The porter leaned to whisper to him as he turned and stared at Tom. What he was saying was plain enough to Bettina, and she pressed a coin into his hand after Tom had paid him. “Thank you for helping me and my children,” she whispered.

“Woman, you shore needs help!” the porter whispered back.

It was the beginning of their new life.

Chapter Six

P
ERFORCE, PIERCE WAS COMPELLED
in the next years to put aside thinking of his family. The railroad stocks upon which Malvern still depended for the capital to expand its acres and to build the barns needed for housing greater crops suddenly weakened. In the last ten years the nation had gone wild over railroads. Little towns and villages had seen themselves swollen into cities and railroad centers, whirlpools of trade and commerce. In the years since Pierce had bought his first railroad shares, new roads had been incorporated almost every month. Railroad promoters rode east and west in palatial private cars, and dined and got drunk with promoters of stores and shops and locomotive works, and enthusiastic men sat far into the night mapping new cities which were never to exist except upon paper.

Pierce heard vaguely of these doings, but Malvern lay around him, so peaceful and so eternal, he could not believe that beneath Malvern, in banks and railroads, the foundations of his life were shaking. John MacBain had spoken out his fears and warnings half a dozen times, but Pierce, with the hearty good humor of a man who lives upon fertile lands, had taken them as manifestations of John’s old tendency toward secret despair.

One morning after mid-December, when Lucinda was superintending the making of the yards of holly wreath to hang along the halls for Christmas, Jake brought him a telegram from John. It contained few words. “Things are bad. Come quick. John.”

He took the telegram to Lucinda as she sat enthroned in a huge oak chair on the stair landing. At her feet Georgia crouched, weaving the holly twigs in and out with scarlet cord. Along the balustrade two or three young servants crawled, twining the wreath in and out of the banisters.

Lucinda read the telegram, her pretty brows knit in a frown. “Oh Pierce, of all things, just at Christmas!” she cried.

“Christmas is a week off,” he said gravely. “I’ve got to go.”

“I always count that Christmas begins when the boys come home,” she protested.

“John wouldn’t send for me unless he really needed me,” he replied.

“Probably Molly has been playing the fool,” she said sharply. Never before had she remarked on Molly’s escapades.

He lifted his eyebrows at her. “I don’t think it’s Molly,” he replied. “John can handle her. No, it’s the railroad. Things haven’t been going too well—”

Now she was alarmed. “Why, Pierce—”

“Too much expansion,” he said briefly. Then he bent and kissed her hair. “Never mind Luce—go on with Christmas—whatever it is we’ll have Christmas as usual.”

She nodded. Whatever it was, it was not her business.

Georgia stood up and red holly berries fell from her frock. “Shall I go and help pack, ma’am?” she asked in her gentle voice.

“Yes—well, I suppose so,” Lucinda said, vexed.

“Minnie can take my place,” Georgia suggested.

Pierce turned and went upstairs and behind him he heard Georgia’s soft footfall. He had come to take her presence so much for granted in his house that she was scarcely a creature apart now from its life. He went into his rooms and she followed. To his own bedroom in the last five years he had added a booklined sitting room, so that if he were wakeful he could get up and read. He did not sleep well since Tom had gone away. It would take years to convince him that Tom was never coming back. When once in six months he had one of Tom’s long letters he slept very badly indeed. Tom was perfectly happy as the headmaster of his own small private school. None of the retribution which should have fallen on his head had come. Pierce dared not show the letters to Lucinda, lest such happiness infuriate her. He locked them into a small strong box in his desk.

“I can pack your things, sir,” Georgia was saying. “Why don’t you sit down and rest yourself?”

He looked at her and yielded. “Well, maybe I will. I ought to look up some of my papers before I go.”

“Yes, sir.”

She went into his bedroom, leaving the door open between. He heard drawers open and shut, and the latch of his closet sounded once or twice. She knew where everything was, for it was she who kept his things in order. Joe was his valet, but Georgia kept his things neat. He was aware of a mild friendship between her and Joe. Joe had never married—

He got up and went into his bedroom. Georgia was folding his white evening shirts carefully. She looked up.

“I didn’t tell Joe I was going,” he said abruptly. “I’ll want him along, of course.”

“I’ll tell him, sir,” Georgia replied.

“‘I don’t even know where he is,” Pierce grumbled.

“I know,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled. “It’s safe enough that if he thinks you’re busy he’s in the kitchen.”

She lifted the speaking tube from its hook near his bed and called into it, “Joe?”

She looked at Pierce, still smiling. “He’s there,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t be working on the holly. He’s afraid of thorns.”

“Joe lazy?” he inquired. He enjoyed dimples in any woman’s cheeks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied.

The dimples were still there and he kept looking at them. Then he felt his old uneasiness toward her. “Why don’t you and Joe get married, Georgia?” he asked abruptly.

The dimples disappeared instantly. She hung up the speaking tube and flushed a deep rose. “I couldn’t marry—him,” she said in a low voice.

“It would be a good thing,” he argued, still looking at her. “I’d give you the stone tenant house to live in.”