The Angry Wife (17 page)

“You Jake—get Lilly ready for Miss Sally! We’re going to ride around. Tell Phelan to take the horse and tell her I’ll meet her under the big oak.”

A quarter of an hour later he waited, his horse reined in sharply, under the big oak which his great-grandfather had brought as a sapling from Sussex and his eyes caught the first glimpse of his daughter, cantering over the grassy pathway from the house. She wore her sky-blue riding habit, and his heart beat when he saw her, graceful and erect upon the small bay horse. How lovely she was, how strong and proud! Where would he ever find a mate good enough for her? Somewhere, he supposed, a boy was growing up, God knew how or what! But if he were not good enough for Sally, he’d thrash him with his own hands and boot him out of the house.

She came up to him, her bright hair flying and her cheeks flushed. “Oh, Papa, you saved me!” she called. “Mama had just told me to take out my sewing.”

“That’s what I’m for,” he answered, “to save you always, my pet.”

They rode off together, and profound peace welled up from his heart. There was nothing in the world that could go wrong with him.

Nothing that Tom could say would rouse his anger, he told himself in the library late that evening. A distant thunderstorm skirted the mountain tops at sunset and the long room, scented with old leather, was cool and quiet. The children had gone to bed. He enjoyed the hour with them after dinner. John had read aloud for a quarter of an hour from Hamlet, and Sally had played the spinet charmingly. She did everything well, he had told himself, watching her proudly. Her little figure in the long white muslin dress tied with blue ribbons had sat slender and straight at the keyboard, and her curls had not hidden her pretty profile. He felt the music drift like fragrant incense through his dreaming mind, as he watched her. And little Lucie had recited a long poem that she had learned while they were away. He and Lucinda had exchanged amused looks after the careful curtsey she made at its end. When Georgia came to take them upstairs he had sat silent for a moment, unwilling to let the day go. There was the evening to face.

Then he remembered the ring he had bought for Sally, and he went upstairs. She was in her room and Georgia was brushing her hair with firm strokes. Lucinda was exacting about the girls’ hair, it must shine as though it were polished or she complained that Georgia was lazy. Sally’s hair was silvery-blonde and it flew out from beneath the brush. He went into his room and found the small box and went back again.

“Hold out your hand, my sweet,” he said with tenderness and she put out her little left hand. He slipped the ring on her third finger and the sapphire glowed on her white skin.

“That’s your ring finger, Sally,” he said playfully. “You must keep my ring on it until a handsome young man comes by, whom you’ll love better than me.”

If he thought to hear her protest that she would always love him best, he was to be disappointed. She held out her hand the better to admire her ring. “When will he come, Papa?” she asked.

He laughed and looked involuntarily at Georgia to share his amusement. She was smiling, too.

“I might not let him come,” he said, teasingly. “I might sit on the porch with my gun—I shot a lot of Yankees with that gun!”

“I wouldn’t marry a Yankee, Papa,” Sally declared.

“Of course not,” Pierce agreed. He looked at Georgia again and his smile faded. He remembered the evening that lay ahead. He did not want to tell her what he had said to Bettina. What if she asked? He decided to go downstairs.

“Goodnight, Sally, honey. Sapphires bring happiness—they brought me you.”

He kissed her and went back to the drawing room where Lucinda sat by a lamp crocheting a cobweb of lace.

“Tom is coming in to talk to me,” he told her abruptly.

“Where has he been all day?” Lucinda asked. “He’s usually here for dinner, at least.”

“We had a little set-to this morning,” Pierce replied. Tonight I’m going to have it out with him in the library.”

“I shall stay here, unless you want me,” Lucinda replied calmly.

“I think Tom and I had better be alone,” he replied.

“But you might ask Marcus to bring in some sherry and a couple of glasses. I’ll make Tom drink in spite of himself.”

He moved away lazily out of profound unwillingness and crossed the hall into the library. A few minutes later Marcus came in with a silver tray and the wine.

“When Tom comes, bring him straight in here,” Pierce ordered.

“Yassuh,” the old butler murmured.

He was about to leave the room when Pierce stopped him. Marcus had been in this house when he and Tom were born. His father had bought him in New Orleans, the year before, a young and slender man, trained in a famous plantation household that had been dispersed on the death of the master. Who knew Tom and himself so well as old Marcus?

“Marcus!” he called.

The man stood waiting, his hands hanging at his sides. “Yassuh?”

“Marcus, what do people say about my brother—and Bettina?”

Marcus let his underlip hang. “I don’t listen to talk, Mas’ Pierce.”

“They do talk?”

“Some folks always talk.”

“And others listen?”

“Some folks always got their y’ears stickin’ out like umbrellas.”

“Tom ought to marry—”

“Yassuh.”

“Do you think Bettina—will—would—go away—?” He could not go on.

“I don’t know these yere young folks nowadays, sir,” Marcus said sadly. “But one thing I does believe in and it’s stickin’ to your own kind. I believe in lettin’ othah folks alone, man and woman, and lookin’ for your own skin coloh. Yassuh, then they’s no trouble, high or low.”

“You’re right, Marcus.”

“Yassuh.” The old man went out and Pierce poured himself wine. Black folk didn’t like mixture any better than white folk. He was not going to be easy with Tom, “so help me God,” he muttered to himself. He lifted his glass and across the golden rim of the wine he saw his brother at the door, and put it down again.

“Come in, Tom,” he said drily.

Tom came in, very tall and inclined to lounge. He sat down in one of the old leather chairs and slid to the small of his back. All afternoon in the school he had worked intensely, but not for one moment had he forgotten that this hour loomed ahead of him. He had passed through various moods, mingled and complex, wherein one emotion and then another rose above the others. Fear and love of his older brother, distaste for Lucinda, anger at himself for having let the years slip by without doing anything definite about Bettina, remorse for the three children—and underneath, a growing determination to be himself and do what he liked. What that was he did not actually know. When he thought of leaving Malvern and his brother he was torn in two. He did not want to live anywhere but here. He groaned aloud that he could not bring his children into this house where he had been born. Leslie was as brilliant as John and more beautiful, but he could never cross the threshold of this door except as a servant. Nothing that he could do for his son would change his inexorable destiny. He had fought to make such children free but they were not free, and for him the war was lost. The victors had been vanquished by the stubbornness of the persisting enemy. There was no victory and no peace because the hearts of men and women had not changed. Futile war and futile suffering and death!

“Sherry?” Pierce asked.

“Thanks,” Tom said. He reached out his narrow white hand and took the glass by its thin stem and sipped the wine. He never drank, because Bettina hated the smell of it. Somewhere in her childhood her father had drunk increasingly of wine until he had stupefied his conscience. But tonight he would drink. He felt his nerves as tight as violin strings inside his body. The wine would relax him and help him to listen to Pierce reasonably and then to answer without passion. Above everything he did not want to quarrel with the brother he loved. He raised his eyes to Pierce’s face and waited for him to begin.

Meeting those troubled grey eyes, Pierce saw in a flicker of memory the brother whom he had protected and fought for through years of their common boyhood. He had been the favorite son of his father and Tom had always been the one wrong in any quarrel. The old instinct rose in him.

“I want to get you out of this trouble, Tom,” he said in his kindliest voice. “Let’s talk about it sensibly. I reckon Bettina told you about this morning.”

“She didn’t tell me anything,” Tom said calmly. “But after you went she cried a bit. That’s unusual for her.”

“I did wrong to go to her,” Pierce said honestly. “I don’t know what made me do it—something on the spur of the moment. Well, I should have waited to talk with you.” He paused and then went on with effort. “I suppose men never like to mess around in affairs like this. Of course I’ve known all these years that you and Bettina have—stayed together. Well, you and I had that out when it first began and I haven’t wanted to—speak again. But now Lucinda feels …”

“I thought it was Lucinda,” Tom said, and was instantly angry.

Pierce shot up his black eyebrows. “Lucinda naturally thinks further ahead for the children than I do,” he said. He was putting the restraint of patience upon himself, and Tom’s heart melted again. Pierce was so good!

“Forgive me, Pierce,” he said.

“Granted,” Pierce replied a little heavily. He tried to go on with what he was saying, but now Lucinda was clearly between them. He felt he must defend her. “I think Lucinda is right, Tom, and I must say so. When the children were little, it didn’t matter so much to the family. But now it’s different. John worships you, and I live in dread of his questions. It would be easy enough for me to explain it in a man-to-man fashion—he’s got to understand such things some day—but what I can’t explain is that this affair goes on and on, and that there are children in that house right on the road.”

Tom’s anger suddenly burst, white hot. “It is easy to explain—you can just tell him that Bettina and I love one another and that the children are ours as he is yours and his mother’s.”

“Tom, don’t be a fool—you know I can’t just say that—” Pierce’s voice was a groan.

“But it’s so,” Tom insisted.

“It isn’t really so,” Pierce retorted. “You can’t just act like Bettina was—was—”

“I can and do act as though Bettina were white,” Tom said, with fury so vast that his voice was low and cold. “That is what you have to understand, Pierce—I feel to Bettina as my wife. I will take no other.” Thus he declared himself. His anger, rising out of old rebellion in this house, crystallized his love and clarified his conscience.

Pierce rose half out of his chair, “Tom, do you mean to say that you will not marry a decent woman that we can be proud of as part of the family?”

“I mean I will never marry any other woman than Bettina. I’ve begged Bettina to marry me. She won’t—because of you and Lucinda. She knows how you feel, you two. She says our marriage would drag me down, out of this family where I was born. She won’t do it. God have mercy, she’s so good—she’s—she’d beg me to marry a white woman, I believe, if I would do it! Why, why she’s better than any woman in the world, and if this precious family of ours doesn’t know enough to know it—God help us all, what did we fight the war for? It’s worse now than it was before.” He was beside himself with pain. He got up out of his chair and thrusting his hands into his pockets he began to walk in distraction about the room.

Pierce stared at him. “Tom, what has come over you? You talk like a crazy man! Never in all my days have I heard such talk come from anybody: Why, the country would go to pieces if—if—why, damn you, Tom, I’ve a mind to shove you out of the house!” He got to his feet and clenched his fists.

“Pierce, I want to come in.” Lucinda stood at the door, a slender figure in her white poplin frock, her head held high. Both men turned at the sound of her voice. Tom sank into his chair, and Pierce turned to her.

“Come in, my dear—” He was glad for her help. He began to see that something very deep indeed separated him from Tom, something that went back into their childhood, that had sent them to opposite sides in the war, something perhaps that even Malvern could not heal. He did not want to lose his brother, and yet how could he keep him?

“I can’t help hearing what you two are saying when you talk so loudly,” Lucinda said in her cool high voice. She sat down and put her feet on a needlepoint footstool and crossed her hands on her lap. Oh her fingers were the diamond rings Pierce had given her when the two older boys were born and the sapphire brooch was on her breast. She turned her head with its piled blonde hair toward Tom. “Tom, I have never said anything to you. I don’t believe in inquiring into gentlemen’s affairs, but I do have to think of my children. Sally has already begun to ask questions and the niggras talk and she hears them, of course. I don’t intend to say anything now, either, but only to ask that whatever it is that is going on could be—put somewhere that it doesn’t show.”

Her manner, her appearance, were so pure and so impeccable that both men felt gross and uncomfortable. Lucinda was the good woman, protecting her children. Pierce who loved her felt himself humbled. But Tom did not love her.

“As long as there are women like you, Lucinda,” he drawled, restraining his fury, “there will be no justice on this earth. You will keep your foot on the neck of any woman who threatens your sacred position in the home.”

It was Lucinda who understood first what he meant. The quick red of her blonde coloring flowed up her slender white neck into her cheeks. “I certainly don’t feel myself threatened in my home by a niggra wench,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” Tom said, ruthlessly. “Why else do you care so much, you white women?”

“I don’t care—” she cried.

“You care,” he repeated, “because you’re afraid of losing your men and you keep the other women down under your feet, because if you don’t they’ll be your equals and they will invade your sacred homes and rival you and excel you because men love them and escape you.”

Lucinda screamed. “Tom, you stop—Pierce, make him stop that foul dirty talk—”

From sheer anger she began suddenly to cry and Tom clamped his jaws shut. “Sorry,” he said abruptly to Pierce. “I reckon that’s been shut up in me for a long time. I’d better go.”