The Angry Wife (2 page)

“Where’s the brandy milk?” Pierce demanded.

“Here, sir,” she said.

A spirit lamp stood on the table, and she poured the milk from a small skillet into a blue flowered cup set in a saucer.

The ghastly lips drew back still further over Tom’s strong white teeth. “My cup—” he whispered.

“Annie told me it was, sir,” Bettina said softly. She took up a thin old silver spoon and began to feed the milk to him.

“Don’t—know you,” Tom whispered.

“Bettina,” Pierce said. “I got her—and Georgia—after you left home, Tom, I reckon. It was just before the war. Of course, they’re free now, working for wages.”

“Sir,” Bettina begged him, “it doesn’t matter.”

Across the hall Lucinda’s voice floated clearly. “Georgia, Georgia!”

“Don’t let her come in yet,” Pierce said.

“No, sir,” Georgia agreed. She wiped her eyes and hurried out of the room.

Bettina slipped to her knees. Tom was swallowing drop by drop, as she fed him. He looked up at his brother from bottomless eyes.

“I can’t—eat,” he whispered, and two small thick tears forced themselves from under his papery eyelids.

“You’ll be eating everything a month from now,” Pierce said.

“I thought I’d die,” Tom whispered. He longed to speak, but Pierce would not let him.

“Don’t think about it,” he urged. “Just rest, Tom—it’s all over.”

Drop by drop from the silver spoon Bettina fed him. Pierce gazing down at Tom’s face saw her slender hand holding the spoon steadily, putting the drops between the waiting lips until the cup was empty.

In the warm silence Tom’s eyes closed. Bettina looked up. “He’s falling asleep, sir,” she whispered. “’Tis the best thing.”

She rose and noiselessly drew the old red velvet curtain across the western windows. “I’ve tried to get a doctor from Charlottesville,” Pierce whispered back. “But there’s not one even there.”

“We’ll heal him ourselves, sir,” Bettina said.

“It’ll be mainly on you, Bettina,” Pierce said. “Neither I nor Miss Lucie know much about such things.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” she said softly. “I’ll make it my task.”

Where did she get such words? He wasted a moment in wonder.

“I shan’t leave the house tonight,” he told her abruptly. “Call me when he wakes.”

“I will, sir,” she promised. She moved silently and swiftly across the room and held open the door, to his vague annoyance. She was so little like a slave. “You feel quite safe alone with him?” he demanded. “You think you can manage?”

“He’s safe,” she said calmly. Then she smiled a sweet and bitter smile. “I don’t forget it was to free me that he’s like this—”

He paused on the threshold, and comprehending these words, saw for an instant into her soul. He was made intensely uncomfortable. “Maybe,” he said drily and went on.

He went across the hall to his own bedroom. The door was open into Lucinda’s room beyond and he walked to the threshold.

“Ready for dinner?” he asked. It was an idle question. She had put on a pale blue satin, wideskirted. There was lace at her bosom and she was fastening about her neck the gold chain and locket he had given her when he went away to war. Inside it was his picture. He tried to fasten, it for her, and the locket flew open. He saw his own young face, smiling out of the small oval.

“The catch doesn’t hold,” she said.

“I don’t look like that now,” he said. “I’ll have to get another picture taken for you.”

“I like this one,” she said, looking up at him.

He looked down at her. “Meaning you don’t like the way I look now?”

“Of course I do,” she said. She closed the locket with a snap.

He turned away. He knew of old that she would not allow probing beneath the level of her serenity.

“Where are the boys?” he asked abruptly. The house was too quiet.

“They’re having their supper,” she said.

He was staring out the window again at the mountains and Lucinda saw the bitterness of his mouth.

“How is he, Pierce? Georgia says he looks awful. She said you said I wasn’t to come in.”

“I don’t think there’s any use in your seeing him just yet, Luce.” He turned, sat down, felt for his pipe and remembered that he was in his wife’s room and did not draw it from his pocket. “He’ll look a different fellow in a few days. Now he looks what he has been through—like hell.”

“Does he know people?”

“Yes—even knew he’d never seen Bettina before.”

“I don’t suppose he asked for anybody—the children—”

“He’s not up to that yet.”

Her eyes were fixed on him strongly. “What is it?” he asked, trying to smile.

“I have a queer feeling you haven’t really come home.”

“It takes time,” he agreed. “You know, Luce, I have to bring myself home—bit by bit. I’ve lived so many days and nights away. Sometimes the nights were the worse—wondering about you, when the letters didn’t come.”

“Pierce, you won’t be restless now? I mean—war’s awfully exciting, isn’t it?”

“No—unless you like horror,” he said gravely.

He looked around the room. “There’s nothing more exciting to me than this—being here at home—in your room. Luce, we’ll have lots more children, won’t we? That’s what’s exciting—you and me and our children growing up.”

She drooped her beautiful blonde head. Somehow she had managed to keep her skin like a child’s in spite of these years of war. She was young, and so was he—she twenty-six, and he not yet thirty. They could have a half dozen children, easily. Her shining yellow hair, real yellow, rare as gold, was twisted about her head in a crown, not braided or curled, and her eyes were blue like his, but more blue.

“How do you keep your dresses so pretty?” he muttered foolishly. He wanted to take her to bed now, this instant, and suddenly his physical need stupefied him with its intensity. He had been home for a week but it seemed to him he had only just seen her.

“Georgia irons them every day,” she said.

She was perfectly aware of what his look meant, the flame in the eyes, the concentration in his gaze, the slight tightening of his lips. But she saw no need to yield to it at this moment. After all, he was home to stay now. Old routines must be set up again. She rose, linked her hands together and yawned behind them prettily, smiling at him.

“Here come the boys,” she said and threw open the door.

The two boys were leaping up the stairs ahead of Georgia. They ran into the room, Martin, the elder, was eight and Carey five. “Where’s Tom?” Martin demanded. He was not afraid of his father because he had forgotten how it was to have a father in the house before. He had been loudly disappointed because Pierce declared himself too big and too old to play all the time.

“Hush—Uncle Tom’s asleep,” Lucinda said, smiling. She was very proud of the two handsome blond boys she had borne.

“How big is he?” Martin demanded.

“As big as I am,” Pierce said, “but very thin.”

“Big as you!” Martin wailed.

“Maybe taller,” Pierce said firmly. “Looks like Tom’s grown during the war.”

The interest went out of Martin’s face but he hid his disappointment by pushing his younger brother. Carey fell and cried.

“Oh, you naughty boy,” Lucinda said. “Pierce, why must they always fight?”

Pierce laughed. “Tom and I always fought,” he said. The small scene made him feel at home as nothing had. All of them were under one roof again, his children, Tom, he, his wife. They were a family. How passionately he had longed for the ties of a family about him! That was the worst of soldiering, after the sheer terror, horrible wounds—or death. A soldier was cut off from everything. He had not so much as a room of his own. He became only an atom, scarcely identified, adding his mite of energy to the great blind force of war.

“Shall I take the children to bed now, ma’am?” Georgia’s voice, sweet and deep, came from the door. She had been standing there in silence, waiting, and when Carey fell, she came in and picked him up. Now he clung to her.

“Go with Georgia, boys,” Lucinda commanded.

Georgia carried Carey away in her arms and Martin leaped froglike from flower to flower in the rose-patterned carpet on the floor. The door closed on them.

“They seem to like Georgia,” Pierce remarked.

“Oh, they like both the girls,” Lucinda said. “Maybe they like Georgia a little better. She’s gentler than Bettina.” She went to the mirror and examined her hair in a hand glass and tucked in a smooth end.

“Where did your father get them?” he asked.

“They were payment for a betting debt,” Lucinda said in a careless voice. “He went to the races in Kentucky—you know he always did. Mother scolded and he went just the same.” She laughed. “He always won, you know, so her scolding never did any good. But she was cross when he came home with two more colored wenches! We had so many already.”

“Good pair, though,” Pierce said.

“Yes, but Mother said they didn’t fit anywhere.”

“You mean—they were rebellious?”

“Oh no, Mother wouldn’t have stood for that. But they’d been taught to read and you never know—” her voice trailed. “For instance,” she said, looking over the top of the ivory glass at her husband. “Why should Georgia suddenly begin to say ‘ma’am’ to me, instead of ‘mistress,’ the way she always has?”

Pierce laughed, aware as he did so of something like an old timidity before Lucinda. Well, he wouldn’t be afraid of his wife, not after four years at war and two of being a major! “Why, I told her to do that, Luce,” he said. “I told her I didn’t want to be called master. We’ve lost the war. Our only hope for the future is to remember we’ve lost it and begin to live in the new way.”

“I haven’t lost any war,” she said.

He laughed at her. “You little Southern rebel,” he said. “Of course you have!”

He seized the mirror and put it down, swept her into his arms and kissed her hard. Then he held her at arm’s length. “You’re going to lose all your battles with me, hereafter,” he said. “I haven’t been a soldier for nothing all these years.”

Yes, he told himself—he was going to keep the upper hand in his own home.

“Pierce, you’re ruining my hair,” she wailed.”

“Damn your hair,” he said.

“Look here, my beauty,” he told her in the night “Don’t bear me a boy this time, if you please. I want some daughters—pretty ones! I shan’t keep the ugly ones.”

Lucinda laughed into her down pillow. “What will you give me for a girl, Pierce?” she asked. The room was flickering with firelight. He had heaped logs on the hearth and blown out the candles. They had no coal oil for the crystal lamps but plenty of candles. Georgia knew how to make them and scent them with bayberries and juniper.

“Girls actually aren’t worth as much in the market as boys,” he said. “Let’s see—I always give you diamonds for the boys, don’t I?”

“My diamond bracelet for Martin and the diamond brooch for Carey,” she said promptly.

“Pearls for the girls?” he suggested.

“Sapphires,” she bargained.

“Sapphires,” he promised. “But you’re greedy, you little wretch! Sapphires—I shall have to get them from Paris.”

“At that it’ll be less trouble for you than for me,” she said, laughing.

“All right, wretch,” he promised. He pulled her into his arms—“anything—anything—little wretch!”

But in the middle of this soft night, in the quiet of the house where he had been born and lived out all his childhood and youth, in the full sight of the thinnest crescent moon he had ever seen, a rim of silver at the edge of the shadowy full moon hanging, above the mountains, in the depth of the great bed where he lay with his wife, he knew that he was changed. War had made him hard. He valued as he never had the few good things of life, love and passion, sleep, morning, food, work, the wind and the sun. But he would never play again as he had played. He would never again be idle, never gay in the old unthinking fashion—

“You hurt me,” Lucinda said suddenly.

He paid no heed to her complaint until he heard her sob.

“What the devil is the matter with you?” he demanded.

“I don’t like you,” she sobbed childishly. “You weren’t like this—before.”

He released her instantly, “You can scarcely expect me to be exactly what I was before.” Lying naked in the bed his formality suddenly seemed ridiculous to him and he burst into loud laughter.

“Pierce, you stop laughing!” Lucinda cried. She beat his breast with her fists when he went on laughing. “Pierce, stop it—you’re crazy!”

He stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Oh well,” he said. “Maybe it’s worth a sapphire.”

He fell asleep as quickly as though neither passion nor anger had been. The war had taught him that.

In the bedroom across the hall Tom woke. Something warm and sweet was in his mouth. Food again! He began to eat with a new hunger and saw a woman’s face bent over him. It was a brown face, but the lamp shining from the table behind, lit the dark hair curling about it She was feeding him in teaspoonfuls and he was swallowing. His mind was clear, as it had been most of the time even in prison, but to know did not mean he would have strength to speak. Fellows had been taken out of the prison in the dead cart when they were alive and knowing, but too weak to protest against their own burial.

“More,” he said distinctly.

“There’s plenty more,” Bettina answered. “I made a full bowl.”

He wondered drowsily what it was. Something sweet and something smooth, slipping down his throat. A custard, maybe, with eggs and milk and white sugar. Only where did she get eggs and milk and white sugar in a war? He felt impelled to answer his own question. He opened his eyes with effort.

“We won—war,” he announced.

“Surely we did,” she agreed. She lifted another spoonful and put it to his mouth.

When he could swallow no more because sleep made it impossible, she put the dish down. The light fell on his face. The terror was already fading from it. In a few days, when his lips were not fleshless, he would not look so like a skeleton. Then the door opened and Georgia came into the room. She wore a long white dressing gown and she had loosened her hair. It flowed down over her shoulders, fine and curly and black.