The Angry Wife (31 page)

Standing beside Lucinda next day in the little Episcopalian church which had been built by a Wyeth two hundred years before, Pierce listened to Martin declare his vows to the little lace-veiled figure at his side. He was beset by doubts. Why had he not taken more pains to discover what sort of a woman Mary Lou was? Why had he merely accepted her as another pretty girl, sweet-tempered, yielding, feminine, charming—when actually she had the power to make his son happy or wretched?

It was too late—“I, Martin, take thee, Mary Louise, to be my wedded wife—”

It suddenly became more solemn, more portentous than his own marriage had been. For now he knew that marriage was heart and hearth in a man’s life. When it went wrong nothing was right. But his marriage had been good. He loved Lucinda and would love her until he died. What folly to ask more than he had! She had been true to him, faithful to the letter and to the spirit. Poor John MacBain! Lucinda had fitted Malvern as the queen fits the castle. She had given him sons and daughters, superbly she had given him these. Then why was he ungrateful and why was he fearful for his sons? Last night in bed, Lucinda had given herself—no, she had given her body. And he had taken her body. He had strained her in his arms, searching for what he did not have—her complete trust, her whole love.

And then he understood. These he would never have because he was man and she was woman. His maleness she would distrust until she died. His maleness was his weakness against which she would protect herself. Secretly, while she loved him, she hated him because he was a man. And yet as a man she needed him and depended upon him and must please him and sometimes serve him that she might be served, and for this she hated him. Above all men she preferred him—ah, there was no doubt of that—but she hated him.

The organ burst into triumphant music and he looked up, bewildered. While he had been mulling his bitter thoughts his son had been married. The young husband and wife turned and marched down the aisle, Martin’s head high, Mary Lou’s face downcast and tenderly smiling. She pressed her cheek for one brief second against Martin’s arm and he turned his head quickly and looked down at her. Pierce could not bear the sight. His yearning rose to agony.

“Let it be a good marriage!” he prayed suddenly, and stared down at his hands gripped upon the rail of the seat in front of him.

“Come, Pierce!” Lucinda whispered. She slipped her hand in his arm and they mingled with the slowly moving crowd.

“A beautiful wedding,” people said and looked at one another with wet eyes. “A lovely wedding!”

Wyeth met him at the door and seized his hand. “I can sleep nights,” he said to Pierce. “I know she’s going into a fine old Southern family—you never know, these days!”

“She is very welcome,” Pierce said with dignity and lifted his head high.

Chapter Ten

W
HEN HE WAS AT HOME
again he felt the necessity to build. Building Malvern gave him the conviction of growth and increase and substance and permanence. He determined to begin a new library at once and he considered the enlargement of the dairy barns. Hitherto he had grown cattle for beef for sale beyond the family use of milk and cream. But milk was a coming industry. He read of a new bottling machine which had been patented the year before and he toyed with the idea of a huge retail milk business. That would need more land and he called his head farmer Mathews and together they reviewed the outlying farms and who might be willing to sell.

Mathews was a white man, a tenacious, hardworking, greedy fellow who knew how to get work out of the hands—a poor white from Virginia. He was obsequious to Pierce and his sons and flattering to Lucinda and her daughters and ruthless to everyone else. He was married to a fat white woman and they had a half-grown family of children who stared hungrily at everyone from the big house. They lived in the stone tenant house.

Now in the office, beyond which he never went, Mathews talked. “We can get Blake’s farm cheap, Mr. Delaney. I know he can’t meet the mortgage.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Pierce inquired.

“His sons are no good—they buy a lot of machinery and let it lay around outside.”

“Machinery!” Pierce grunted. “Men think it will work for them but nothing takes the place of elbow grease.”

His faint mist of pity for the Blakes disappeared. “Get it as cheaply as you can,” he told Mathews.

He spent the next year in poring over plans and watching foundations rise. Martin came home from Europe with Mary Lou and they took their place in the house. When he could remember to do so, Pierce asked his son’s opinion about such small things as the placing of a gable and the piping of water into the new barn. Most of the time he forgot to ask. The hunting season came and Martin and Mary Lou were away day after day. He saw them canter off in the morning over the lawns silvered with frost and took a moment’s pride in their grace and bearing. Red coats on horseback were handsome on an autumn morning.

“Life can go peacefully if I only let it alone,” he told himself. He talked little with Lucinda, and being tired at night he slept heavily. He took on weight because he ate too much, and unaware of it himself, he drank more than he had before. He was out all day and the fresh air made him hungry. Business was excellent. He scarcely heard from John MacBain any more and his railroad dividends were steady. Tom wrote his letters twice a year, long and careful. Georgy was developing a real voice. It looked as though she and Georgia would not be coming home for three or four years.

Pierce told Lucinda with what he hoped was carelessness that Tom’s second daughter was going to be a singer.

“Pray tell,” Lucinda remarked, examining the needlepoint piece upon which she was working.

“They’re in Paris,” he went on.

Lucinda laughed. “Oh, the French!” she said. She did not look up. He wanted to tell her that Georgia was there, too. But she refused to show any interest and he was afraid that if he mentioned Georgia’s name she would revive her secret, undying anger.

“None of my family ever could sing,” he said instead.

“Singing and play-acting don’t come in good families,” Lucinda replied.

He gave up and went away. There was no use in trying to talk to Lucinda. He wanted to forget all women. Then he thought of Sally. Irritation mounted in him. Why didn’t Sally get married? She had beaux by the dozen, in and out of the house, hanging around. She had stopped school suddenly, declaring that she was tired of it, and he had expected that of course she would marry. Then she wanted him to travel with her, but he did not feel like traveling. She had suggested to him one evening when they were alone that he let her go to Paris and join Georgy.

“I might study something in Paris,” she said.

He looked at her grimly. Sally was now so pretty that she was a menace and he so considered her. “If you can persuade your mama to allow you to do that, I will say nothing,” he told her.

She made a face at him. “Coward!” she exclaimed.

“Call me any names you like,” he had returned.

He had enjoyed the big ball at Christmas but he saw not the slightest sign from Sally of interest in any of the young men who flocked about her fondly. He reproached her for this in the early hours of dawn when the last guest had gone and she yawned and drooped her eyelids.

“Aren’t you going to marry any of these poor young fellows?” he demanded.

“They’re tasteless in my mouth,” she complained.

“Sally, you can’t be an old maid!” he had cried in alarm. “Look here, honey, you pick yourself a pretty young man and I’ll settle twenty-five thousand dollars on you. Or you can pick a piece of Malvern for your own, if you like, and I’ll build you a house.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know one pretty young man from the other,” she declared.

In May, Sally suddenly broke his heart. It came so quickly that he was stricken before he knew it. In February she had accepted an invitation to a houseparty in New York. He had not wanted her to go. He himself had never been to New York, and Lucinda for all her talk had never been there but the once, before Martin was married, to get her frocks. She came back declaring that she hated it. Nobody knew who she was and they wouldn’t wait on her in the shops even when she said “Mrs. Pierce Delaney.” But Sally had friends who lived there, whom she had met when they all went to White Sulphur occasionally. People had strange friends nowadays. When he was young his friends were the children of his father’s friends.

So he had let her go to New York for a week, and had been heartily relieved when she came home, unchanged except for a brown sealskin coat and hat which horrified him when she told him what they cost. Of the amusements she had enjoyed she said nothing—or almost nothing. There had been a young Brazilian, the second son of a Portuguese family in Rio de Janeiro, who had come to New York with his father to sell diamonds.

“Diamonds!” Pierced echoed. “What for?”

Sally shrugged her shoulders. “Why does anybody sell diamonds?” she countered.

“But the people in Brazil are savages,” Pierce objected. “At least they’re all mixed up with Indians and niggras.”

“Alvarez Lopez de Pre’ is no savage,” she said, dimpling. She looked at her father sidewise with wicked eyes. “He’s a very pretty young man,” she had declared with emphasis.

He had thought nothing of it at the time. But when in May he got her letter, he remembered. He was alone at Malvern. Carey and John were still at the university and Lucinda, declaring she was rundown, had taken the girls to White Sulphur for two weeks.

“Dear Papa,” Sally wrote in her pretty, slanting handwriting. “When you get this I shall be on the high seas with my husband. Papa, I am Mrs. Alvarez Lopez de Pre’—a pretty name, is it not? You must come and see me in my Brazilian home. Alvarez tells me that the house is handsome and that in the patio there is a fountain which rises thirty feet into the air. Dear Papa, when you have finished being cross with me, then write me. I couldn’t marry any of the tasteless young men at home. Alvarez is tall and dark—his skin is quite brown. I adore his looks.”

This letter he found among all the letters on his desk one morning in August. He caught the next train out of the small depot near Malvern, which had been put in especially for his shipments of cattle to the coast. The road to White Sulphur he himself had done much to build, a decade ago and more, foreseeing that it would bring to the great watering place visitors from all over the world.

The spa had never looked more beautiful than it did this day when he stepped from the train in sore anxiety. The sky was cloudless, and the huge hotel sparkled under the sunshine, its paint as white as snow, its flags brilliant. Small guest cottages shone among the green of the trees and up and down the walk guests strolled, the women carrying bright parasols and the men bareheaded or wearing wide straw hats. He himself had visited here not long before in order to inspect the new game of golf which some Scotchmen had brought over.

But now he wanted only to find Lucinda quickly. He directed the carriage he had hired at the station to go straight to the cottage which he and Lucinda regularly used when they came here to drink the waters. It was the hour before the great afternoon dinner, and he knew that Lucinda would be there. He found her on the small piazza, Lucie and Mary Lou beside her. She was fanning herself with a silken Chinese fan and looked the picture of idle pleasure as he stepped from the carriage.

“Pierce!” she cried. “Of all things!”

But he could not greet her. “Lucinda, how could you let Sally leave you?” he demanded.

He had tried to think how to break the dreadful news, but when he saw her he forgot all he had planned.

“Mercy, Pierce,” Lucinda cried. “How you scare me! Where did you come from? Why didn’t you write me you were coming?”

“When did Sally leave you?” Pierce demanded.

Mary Lou looked down at the embroidery she was doing, and Lucie was silent with fright.

“Pray tell,” Lucinda said impatiently, “what is the matter with you, Pierce? Sally left two days ago to visit in New York. She went with the Carrington Randolphs—you know that Candace is her best friend. What is wrong with that?”

He held out Sally’s letter then and she took it. He stood waiting, watching her face, and he saw the blood drain away from her cheeks. She read it and looked up at him and he could not have asked for more horror than he saw there.

“Oh, Pierce!” she whispered—“oh—how could she—”

The letter dropped to the floor. Lucie in her small secret way reached for it. She read it and Mary Lou glanced over her shoulder.

“There is nothing we can do, Luce,” Pierce groaned. “Only, who is this fellow? The Randolphs? I shall go to them at once—”

“Here is a corner turned down and glued,” Lucie announced. “It has ‘For Mama’ written on it very tiny.”

“Give it to me,” Lucinda cried. She snatched the letter and tore the corner open. Inside Sally had written in small and clear letters, “Tell Mama for her comfort that the Lopez de Pre’ family is four hundred years old.”

Lucinda’s fair skin flushed rose-colored. “As if that matters!” she cried passionately—“when the man is black!”

She turned on Pierce in sudden fury. “This comes of you and your precious brother! Sally would never—never have done such a thing if it hadn’t been for Tom!”

There was such hatred in her bright blue eyes that he stepped back involuntarily. “Take heed what you say, Lucinda,” he said to her sternly.

“It’s true, it’s true!” she cried. “This is what happens when you treat niggras like white—they steal into your house—”

“Be silent!” he shouted, and taking her by the arm, he pulled her into the house and shut the door and put down the open windows.

But Lucinda would not listen to him. She flung herself on her bed and wept aloud. “I shall have nothing left,” she sobbed, “nothing—nothing—”

He accused her, “You think of yourself—only of yourself—”

She roused herself to shake her fists at him in her rage. “I do not think of myself, Pierce Delaney! I think of all—all of us white women fending off those niggras that men like you love so much—trying to keep them out of our homes—to keep them from robbing us of all we have left—”