The Angry Wife (27 page)

John MacBain looked at him with the repulsion he would have showed a snake. “Oh hell,” he said suddenly. “I’m with Pierce Delaney, after all.”

“And I,” Pierce said quietly, “consider it the height of realism and self-interest for the rich to be generous to the poor. There is a point, Mallows, where it is good business to keep workingmen alive.”

But it was not until the next year, when the new decade began and the depression was over, that Pierce succeeded in establishing his relief department. Six thousand dollars were laid aside, and within the first five months almost six hundred people were aided in one way or another.

In his library at Malvern, Pierce read the reports and approved them and felt that with his own hands he was building a dam against the disaster of the future.

Chapter Eight

T
HE DANGEROUS DECADE PASSED, AND THE INEXPLICABLE
tides of prosperity rolled over the country again. At Malvern, Pierce put up new greenhouses and stables. When John MacBain came in January his land hunger grew beyond control.

Pierce had made the library into his business office, and was dreaming of a new south wing which would be the formal library for the house. The plans lay on the great oak table in the middle of the room. Less and less often now did Pierce leave home and more and more men came to Malvern to see him. They were glad to come for the house was famous. Secretly Pierce was somewhat ashamed of the new livery which Lucinda had designed for the men servants. The crimson and yellow seemed to him absurd. But he humored her in all things and laughed with his friends gently behind her back. Lucinda was still pretty enough to be excused for follies.

Pierce stood before the great window and surveyed his lands, now white under a foot of soft snow. “John, you might as well sell me your place—I’ve rented all these years.”

John, sitting in a wing chair by the roaring fire, was studying a sheet of paper. “I’ll leave the house as a summer place for you and Mollie,” Pierce went on.

John did not look up. “I don’t want that house,” he said drily. “I haven’t been in it for a handful of years and you know it.”

“Then I’ll let Carey have it some day,” Pierce said promptly. “I’ve been wanting to settle a house on him when he marries. Martin’s to have this one, of course.”

“You going to let him come here after he’s married?” John inquired. Martin’s engagement to Mary Louise Wyeth had been announced at the great Christmas party.

“The place is big enough for us all,” Pierce replied. He had been pleased with the small demure girl whom Martin had brought to Malvern for inspection. Martin had grown up handsome and strong and comfortably average as a young man. He had been graduated from the University decently but without honors. He danced beautifully and rode well. Lucinda was enormously proud of him. Carey was a shrewd thin young chap, already a skilled debater. It was useful to have a lawyer in the family—a good second son, prudent and contented with his place.

“What are you going to provide for your third son, you lord of the manor?” John inquired with affectionate sarcasm.

“So far John doesn’t seem to want anything of me,” Pierce replied. He sat down in the great chair opposite his friend.

“Every family has to have a radical,” John said absently. He pursed his lips over his papers. “You’re going to get a pretty piece of money this year, Pierce.”

“That’s why I want to buy your land,” Pierce retorted.

John grinned, and looked at him over his spectacles. “You’ve a lust for land. If I weren’t an honest man I could bleed you white!”

Pierce smiled. They were very close, he and John. He had learned to love this man as his own brother. John knew him through and through, all his softness as well as his ruthlessness. There was no softness in John. He was as hard and driving as his own beloved locomotives.

“Though some sons-of-guns are talking about laying down a strike road next to ours, by Gawd,” John said.

“I suppose we can buy them out,” Pierce said mildly.

“Hell no,” John said briskly. “Let them lay it and spend their money! Then we’ll run them out of business—make cars better than theirs and our engines faster. When they’re busted we’ll buy them out cheap.”

Pierce gazed into the flaming logs. When he built the new library he was going to make an even bigger chimney piece. He yielded to the meditative reflective mood which became more and more natural to him as he grew older. Had Malvern not belonged to him—and he to Malvern—what would he have been? A very different man! He did not deceive himself. In the night when he woke and lay alone with himself he remembered his youth and the troubled ideals and dreams that had stirred in him after the war. His heart still moved when he thought of the young men who had died under his command. As clearly as he saw the faces of his own sons he could see young Barnstable’s face as he lay dead, his left arm and shoulder torn away. Pierce had sworn in those days that he would make a better world. It had been a better world for him and for his children, but he was not sure of anything else. He had made Malvern fulfill only his own dreams for himself.

“You and Lucinda going to Baltimore in October for the big shindig?” John asked. He put down the papers and began to fill his pipe.

“Lucinda won’t want to miss it, I am sure.” Pierce replied. “But I confess, John, I hate more and more to leave Malvern.”

“I can’t blame you for that,” John said. “But you ought to go, Pierce. Not many American cities, can celebrate a hundred and fifty years—and they’re going to give the railroad a fine place in the parade.”

“You don’t expect me to join the parade, I hope,” Pierce said smiling.

The door opened and a man servant came in with fresh logs. He scarcely knew his own servants any more since Lucinda had hired an English housekeeper. He had only stipulated that the people on the place be kept in the house. But the children grew up fast. He had an idea that this young fellow was one of Joe’s younger brothers. Joe had married a pot-black young Negress the year after Georgia left. At the thought of Georgia he felt an old confusion, almost shy. But he did not allow himself to think of her.

“I’m going to try out that new engine in May,” John went on. “I expect it to make a mile in two minutes, maybe in one.”

Pierce got up restlessly. He paced the room, around the table, passed the window, and came back again to stand before the leaping flames that were roaring up the wide chimney. He said absently, “Strange that the last time we went to Baltimore the country looked as though it were going to pieces! Now we’re all riding high again—I’ll never understand the one or the other.” No, he would not see Georgia again when he went to Tom’s. It was too dangerous. Last time Lucinda—

“We are selling more abroad than we’re buying. That’s why,” John said confidently, “money is coming into the country.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Pierce mused.

He stood gazing into the fire. At one end of a pine log a narrow blue flame darted out like a sword and licked its way through the mass of coals, twice as hot and twice as fierce as ordinary flame.

What had become of the surging mobs of people who had risen to burn the roundhouses and the stations and the houses of the rich in the decade through which they had passed? They were silent now, but for how long? For his lifetime, perhaps—but would Martin be strong enough for the next generation? Nothing had been really solved. Nobody knew, nobody understood, why there had been a crisis or why now the crisis had passed, and until people understood causes—

“There has to be a topdog,” John was saying confidently. “If men like you and me don’t stay on top, Pierce, these radicals and socialists will ride us. And with that lot go the professional reformers and the internationalists—all enemies of the republic, I say.”

“I suppose so,” Pierce said absently. Had he been as single-minded as John MacBain he would have been able to enjoy even Malvern more than he had. His love for Malvern was terrifying, and he knew it was because he felt it always possible that he might lose it. The life he had built up so carefully in beauty and richness and success might collapse. It was more than the danger in the nation. The possibility of weakness was within himself. Lucinda never let him forget that he was Tom’s brother.

Lucinda came in at this moment, black velvet trailing to her feet. She was still so beautiful that he could not fail to see it and to admire her for preserving her gift.

“Are you two men going to spend the evening here?” she demanded. “The guests will come at any moment, Pierce—and Molly is back from her ride, John.”

As soon as Lucinda entered the room, doubt left it. She was sure of herself and of her right to enter and to stay. And then behind her the hall rose to life. The great front door opened with a swirl of snow, voices mingled with laughter, and at the same moment Molly came downstairs and into the library. Molly by heroism had kept her figure slim enough to ride her horse. Her full face was handsome and rosy and her red hair held no grey. She and John were still together but he had ceased to ask her what she did and she went away from him for weeks at a time. Pierce knew because he had found John alone at his Wheeling mansion, wintry and silent, one November day. They had talked business all evening and not once had he mentioned Molly until at midnight they had stood up to part.

“She’s left me for a while, Pierce,” John said with dry lips.

“On a visit,” Pierce said gently.

“Yes—just a visit—” John said. He looked at Pierce with such shame and agony in his eyes that Pierce had looked away.

“The war changed all of us,” he said. “I often wonder what I’d have been—without it. … And Tom, of course—”

“Yes, it wrecked Tom,” John said. He considered Tom as one dead. Then he cleared his throat. “I feel such awful pity for—for Molly, Pierce. I want you to know I don’t blame her. I’m only grateful—she’ll never leave me for good. She’s told me that—I didn’t ask it—but she promised me.”

“Molly’s a good woman,” Pierce had said gravely.

“Yes,” John had replied. Then after a second, “The war wasn’t her fault—nor mine.”

“No,” Pierce had said.

John had looked at him and a strange bewilderment came into his eyes. “Whose fault was it though, Pierce?”

“God knows, I don’t, any more,” Pierce had said. “All that we fought for seemed so clear when we were fighting—those fellows dying! But now—it’s all a murk. Even the ones who were slaves aren’t better off.” He had spoken savagely at that moment. Had there never been a war Tom would have been at Malvern.

Molly came up to him now and slipped her arm through his. Lucinda met his eyes with smiling tolerance. Long ago she had ceased to have any jealousy toward Molly. He knew that. But now sudden perception came into his mind. Had her tolerance begun after that first time he had gone to see Georgia? Had she said to herself, “Let him have anyone except Georgia?” He felt Molly’s plump shoulder pressing his arm and could barely keep himself from moving from her in repulsion at Lucinda’s duplicity.

“Come!” he said, forcing himself to heartiness. “The guests are waiting.”

“John was asking if you’d want to go to Baltimore in October,” he said to Lucinda that night. He sat watching her while she performed the last rites upon her skin. Her maid had brushed and braided her hair and gone away. It was past midnight. The guests were in their rooms.

Lucinda did not look at him. At the mention of Baltimore she stiffened. It had been on a visit to Baltimore that she had discovered that he sometimes saw Georgia. Not that he had to this day acknowledged it—he maintained that he went only to see Tom, and upon that they had quarreled.

“I hope I have the right to see my own brother!” he had insisted coldly.

She had turned to him with dreadful acumen. “As if you could lie to me!” she had cried. “Pierce Delaney, I can see through you as though you were made of glass! You want to see Georgia!”

He had been staggered. She had discovered what he himself had refused to know. Then she had spat out the words at him. “You and your brother Tom!”

He had stared at her, his blood frozen in his veins with terror. “How foul women are,” he had muttered, and he had left the room instantly. They had never spoken of Georgia again.

She did not speak of her now. “Everything depends upon when Martin and Mary Louise decide to be married,” she said lightly.

“I have no desire to go to Baltimore,” he said. “I’m getting too old for such shindigs.”

She laughed at this. “As if you didn’t know you are handsomer than ever!” She came and sat on a footstool at his knee. The glow from the coals in the small brass decorated grate, which she had brought over from England shone upon her face. He felt an amazing tenderness for her and put his hand on her neck. But she slipped from under his touch. “Not tonight,” she said firmly.

He withdrew his hand quickly and with anger. “You don’t allow me even to show you affection, without thinking I—” he broke off.

Lucinda laughed. “I know you too well, my dear,” she said—Then she yawned. “But I have nothing on my conscience. I am a very good wife to you, I’m sure—you are treated well, Pierce, and you know it.”

“I don’t want to be—treated well—as you call it—” he said.

“Now let’s not begin on what you want—at this hour of the night,” she said. She got up quickly and moved about, straightening one small object after another, a luster bowl on the table, a small French clock beside her bed, a Dresden china pair of figures on the mantel, the crystal-hung candlesticks on the mantel.

“I know it means nothing to you what I want,” he said somberly. “You’ve made out a formula for me, damn you, Luce! You run me on a schedule—a timetable—you don’t allow anything for my feelings—”

“Your feelings, my dear,” she interposed, “always have the same common denominator.”

He clasped his jaws shut and got up. “Good night,” he said.

“Now you are angry,” she said brightly. “You can’t bear the truth, can you, Pierce! You never could … So you’ll never get the truth from me … I promise you! Don’t worry!”

She was angry, too, and this was rare enough to make him pause. “I am not angry,” he said more mildly. “It’s just that you—think you know everything—about everything.”