Angry Wife

Chapter One

“WE ARE FORTUNATE,” PIERCE Delaney said to his wife.

She did not answer. Outside the window open by her couch, the deep stillness of late October afternoon lay across the landscape of Malvern. The air was warm and fragrant. The servants had been picking the purple grapes. She could not learn to call them servants instead of slaves. Pierce was going to pay them wages. Georgia, her own maid, would get wages!

“Aren’t we fortunate, Luce?” Pierce’s big voice demanded.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Luce,” she answered. “I like my own name.”

“Lucinda,” he said, smiling. “It’s such a prim name.”

“Nevertheless, it’s my name,” she replied.

But he could not quarrel even in fun. He wanted peace, now; as long as he lived he wanted only peace. He stood before the high window and gazed at the landscape for which he had been as homesick, all during the war, as he had been even for his family. There were not many in the world to match it for beauty. Beyond the rich level lands of his farms the foothills rose, softly wooded, into the blue heights of the Alleghenies. It was country fit for all his dreams of peace and he would spend his life in fulfilling them. Only to live, after these years, would be enough, but to live here was heaven.

Without turning he spoke. “The war is over, Tom and I are both alive, the house isn’t in ruins. Not many families have as much!”

“Pierce, darling—”

At the sound of Lucinda’s voice he wheeled. She was lying on her rose satin sofa, her white arms flung above her head, her white hands clasped. Her slender body was hidden in a froth of creamy lace and silk, except for her little bare feet.

He took off the stiff leather belt of his uniform, threw it on the floor and went across the bedroom. He knelt beside her and lifted her into his arms. The moment stood still for him, clear and deep. For the first time he felt sure of being alive. He was at home again, in his own house, with Lucinda, his wife. His two children, his sons, were sound and full of health. Even the work on the land had not stopped. Everything he possessed had miraculously escaped destruction. His mind raced back over the years through which he had just passed. They were already compressed into a single experience of torture, in which he saw the faces of his own men whom he had not often been able to save. They were not all dead — a few had escaped, many more lay in hospitals. But most of them were dead. Kneeling there with his face in the laces upon his wife’s bosom, he read upon his brain the figures of the dead. They were so young! This was their tragedy — so young to die for so vague a cause. Thousands of young boys in uniforms had died to compel the nation to remain a union, thousands in grey had died for the right of a state to be free if it liked. Somewhere between them the fate of black men and women had been entangled.

Feeling the beat of Lucinda’s heart under his lips, aware of the softness of her flesh, breathing in her scent, he asked himself if even the death of many could hold united those who wanted to be free of one another. It might have been easier if he and his family had lived in the high North or the deep South. But Malvern, his inheritance, lay in the borderland. Men from the south and the north had swept across the mountains to rest here in Malvern Valley, under the great oaks, even upon the verandas of the house. He had been home for a few days of furlough when Grant’s men had come marching by, and looking down on them from an attic window, hiding himself, he had been horrified to see how much his enemies looked like his own men, There was only the slight outward difference of the uniform. The boys’ faces were the same.

More than Malvern lay in the border country. In the months when the war drew nearer, grim and inevitable, he had had to decide whether, when war was declared, he would go North or South. He hated slavery, while he loved his own slaves. Some deep conservatism in his being, love of form and order, necessity to preserve and persist, made him know that union was essential for their country, still so new. A handful of states, flying apart in quarrels, would mean early death to the nation. But he had stayed by the South. The last moment had come, and in its clarity Lucinda and Malvern had outweighed all else. Heart and not head had decided. He knew that he would fight and perhaps die for her, here in his house. But Tom, his brother, had gone North.

“When do you think Tom will get home?” Lucinda asked.

She curled herself into his arms. When she made herself small in his arms his heart quivered with tenderness. It seemed impossible that she had borne him two sons. He thought of them playing somewhere about the place, sturdy, blond, gay and quarrelsome, affectionate and rebellious, as he and Tom had been in this house of their fathers. By her own strength Lucinda had kept them untouched by the miseries of the war. She was a strong little thing!

“Joe will be here at any moment with him,” he said. He laid her gently back on her silken pillows and got up and walked to the window. Almost unconsciously he had picked up his belt and now he stood by the window, strapping it about his waist again.

A slender, hard waist, Lucinda thought with pleasure. The war had done him good. She felt idly complacent. She was safe. The house needed new hangings and new carpets. She wanted to cover the mohair furniture in the parlors with satin as soon as she decently could. Enough of the slaves had stayed on, for wages, to make her life still possible. Nothing would be changed.

She felt joy running in her veins. Her heart softened, She got up and went over to the tall figure at the window. He was staring out into the sunshine, his face grave and his steel blue eyes tragic. She hated the look. He was remembering something she did not know.

“Pierce,” she said, “Pierce, darling—”

He turned to her quickly, seized her in his arms again and held her with pain and love. How much he could never tell her!

“Everything is going to be the same,” she whispered.

“I’ll make it the same,” he said passionately, and felt his throat grow tight over tears. Strange how a man could go through death again and again, could lose what he loved most! For in the hour of battle he had loved his men better than anything. There had been moments when if sacrifice of himself and his wife and his sons, his house and lands, all that he was fighting for, could have saved the losing day, he would have let them all go into the loss, for victory’s sake. Yet he had never wept, or wanted to weep, as he did now, when he had come home to his unchanged house. It was so exactly the same that he could not keep back his tears. But this Lucinda could not understand, and for no fault of her own. They would have had to live through the same things to have had the same understanding and he could only be thankful that she had stayed safely at home.

The door opened. Someone stood on the threshold an instant, saw them and closed the door.

Lucinda pulled herself out of his arms and smoothed her straight fair hair. “Come in, Georgia,” she called.

Georgia opened the door gently and stood, hesitating and shy, aware that she had interrupted a scene of love. Pierce saw the awareness in her dark eyes, in the half smile of her lips, in the timidity of her bearing. She looked at Lucinda and he saw what he had not known before, that she was afraid of her mistress.

“It’s all right, Georgia,” he said kindly.

“I declare I didn’t know you were in here, Miss Lucie,” the dark girl said.

“Don’t come in without knocking, Georgia,” Lucinda said sharply.

“I did knock, Miss Lucie,” Georgia said in her even, gentle voice. “When I heard no answer I came in. I was looking for you and Master Pierce to say that Joe has come ahead to tell that they’ll be here in just a few minutes. He says Master Tom isn’t hurt by wounds but he’s starved near to death.”

The tears brimmed her great eyes and hung on her lashes. These lashes, black and long, held the drops and she put up her hand and wiped them away.

“Starved?” Lucinda repeated.

“It’s that damned prison,” Pierce muttered. He turned to Georgia. “Tell Annie to have some warm milk ready. A half cup of milk with brandy will do him more good than anything. You can’t feed a starving man real food. God, I knew they were starving the Yankee prisoners — but my own brother!”

“It comes of his joining the North,” Lucinda said bitterly. “If he’d—”

“Never mind now, sweet,” Pierce interrupted her. “The war’s over.”

“I’ll hate the Yankees as long as I live,” she retorted.

Georgia went away. The moment which she had interrupted was gone and Pierce bent to kiss his wife quickly. “I’ll go along down myself, Luce, and see that everything’s ready. I wish I’d gone to meet him. But he sent word he was all right … Luce, who’s going to nurse him?”

“Bettina,” Lucinda replied. She sat down in her rose colored chair. The satin was grayed and Georgia had darned it carefully. “I couldn’t spare Georgia,” she went on, “but the boys are so big now I thought we could turn them over to Joe.”

“Good,” he said.

He hurried out of the room into the wide hall. At the door of the nursery he saw the two sisters, Georgia and Bettina, in whispering talk. They looked alike, both tall, both golden-skinned, dark-eyed, slender. But Bettina, the younger, showed the Indian blood in her black ancestry. Georgia did not. Georgia’s face was soft and oval, the cheeks smooth, the lips full. Bettina’s cheeks were flat, her nose sharper, her eyes keener, her hair less curly. Where the two girls had come from Pierce did not know, except that they had been part of Lucinda’s father’s estate, and when he died they were for sale. He had bought them because Lucinda wanted them. “Wonderful workers,” Lucinda had called them. He scarcely knew them, because a month after they had come into the house he had gone to war.

“Bettina!” he said abruptly. There was something so delicate, so sensitively aware of him in the faces the two women turned to him that he was disconcerted. He had seen this delicacy often enough in the faces of slaves, even wholly ignorant ones, a refinement of the human being so extreme that he was always made uncomfortable by it. It was the result of utter dependence, the wisdom of creatures who could only exist by pleasing their masters. But in these two women it was pathetic and shameful, because they were not ignorant. He must ask Lucinda why they were not ignorant.

“Did you want something, Master Pierce?” Bettina asked. Their voices were alike, deep and soft.

“You’re to take care of my brother.”

“Yes, Master Pierce,” Bettina said.

Pierce paused. “You two,” he said abruptly, “don’t call my brother and me masters. I lost the war — Tom won. I can’t be called master any more — Tom won’t want to be, if I know him.”

“What shall we call you, sir?” Bettina asked.

It was disconcerting that both of them spoke with a clear English accent, without a trace of the shambling dialect of slaves. It was suddenly monstrous that he had bought these women. But he had not heard them speak when he bought them. They had simply stood hand in hand, their heads downcast.

“You — you can just call me mister,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, sir,” they breathed. They looked at one another. He saw they would simply call him nothing, ending every sentence with “sir.”

He looked out of the window. A slow procession was winding along the road between the oaks — Tom! He ran down the stairs, threw open the front door, leaped the stone steps and lifted from the litter his brother. But could this be a human creature, this tall stick, this gangling monkey, this handful of bones, loose in a bag of skin?

“Tom!” he muttered strangling, “Tom, boy, you’re home!” Then he said sternly. “Look here, we’ll soon have you — you fed — well again—”

The dark skeleton face could not smile. The fleshless lips were drawn back from his teeth, fixed in a grin of agony. Tom’s voice came in a faint gasp:

“Home—”

Pierce carried his brother up the steps, and was horrified to feel the looseness with which Tom’s head upon the stem-like neck hung over his arm. His own people had done this — in a secessionist prison they had starved his brother! He had tried to reach through the walls of war to save Tom, but hatred had been stronger than love. Then he pushed aside anger and pain, in the way he had learned to do, to save his own being. Fifty thousand men had been starved to death in those prisons, but Tom was still one of the living. And the war was over.

“Everything is going to be all right, Tom,” he said gently.

He carried his brother through the great dim hall, up the stairs into the west bedroom. The room was full of late sunshine, and on the hearth a fire burned. Bettina stood at the bedside, holding the sheets ready, and Georgia moved the copper warming pan to and fro. Georgia was crying silently, but Bettina’s face was grave. She put out her arms and slipped them under Tom’s bony frame, and lowered his head gently to the pillows. Then she drew the covers over him.

“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.

“How is he?” she whispered.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Bettina whispered. “When he sleeps he hears nothing.”

They stood looking down at him, side by side.

“He’s so young,” Bettina said.

“I heard them say twenty-three,” Georgia answered.

“Then he went when he was nineteen. How long was he in prison — did you hear them say?”

“That I did not,” Georgia answered.

They lingered, looking at his face, at his hands, lying helpless on the white coverlet. “He has nice hands,” Georgia said, “I like a man to have nice hands. Remember Father’s hands, Bettina?”

Bettina nodded.

“Shan’t I take a turn with him, so you can sleep?” Georgia asked.

Bettina shook her head. “I want to be here when he wakes,” she said.

She gave her sister a gentle push. “You go to your bed,” she commanded her. “It’s me that she set to nurse him back to health and strength.”

She watched her sister’s figure glide across the floor and she watched while the door latched. Then she sat down again in her seat by the bed, her eyes fixed on his face.

Down the hall Georgia walked, barefoot, without sound. She passed “their” bedrooms — her mistress’s and master’s — She remembered what he had told her.

“Surely, I’m free,” she thought. “I could go away. I don’t have to take even their wages.” She heard voices murmuring, and under the door a crack of light showed. The high transom was bright. They were still awake! But she had waked, too, out of dreamless sleep. The house seemed strange now that the master had come home.

“That’s what he is,” she thought, “even though he tells me I’m not to call him that. A house must have a master.”

She had always come and gone into that room, and her mistress had never seemed to care. It was as though she were nobody at all, until now. But now the whole house was different. Her mistress was different, too. Women were always different when men came into the house.

She went noiselessly past the door. Then she reached the attic stairs. “God help me they don’t creak,” she thought.

It was the one thing she and Bettina had asked, that they might sleep in the house instead of out in the quarters. Her mistress had looked at them coldly. They had stood, hand in hand, waiting for her question. But she had not put the question.

“Very well,” she had said in her cool voice. “You may sleep in the attic. But you’ll have to be quiet. I don’t want to hear even your walking around.”

Up in the attic she and Bettina had made a home for themselves. They had found an old rope bottom bed and a discarded bureau. Rags they had made into rugs and they had crocheted covers for the bed and the bureau top. But they had learned to walk as softly as shadows in the top of the great house and to talk in whispers.

She took off her dressing gown and crept into the bed. Still she could not sleep. She lay quivering, aware, feeling, not thinking. There was no use thinking in a life like hers. She was a creature in the sea, tossed here and there by tides she did not understand.

“But wherever you are,” her mother had said, “begin to live right there and look after yourselves. Only thing, I hope you will always be together.”

Her mother had died so long ago she could remember her now only by summoning her consciously to memory. All she saw was a dim dark face, darker than her own or Bettina’s, dark but beautiful, more like Bettina than like her, more Indian than Negro. But her father she remembered well. He was an old white man, always old. They had lived with him in a great house with pillars to hold up the heavy roof of the porch. Once there had been a white mistress in the house but never had there been children. She and Bettina were his only children. He had treated them as his children, too, and had made the slaves treat them so after his white wife died. It had been easy, for there were no visitors. Long before Georgia’s memory visitors had stopped coming. She and Bettina both knew that it had happened when he took their mother into the house. She had not been one of the slaves. She was a stranger whom he had bought in New Orleans and she had kept herself a stranger always. But she had been wise. She had lived in the house but she allowed none of the slaves to wait on her or on the children. She had made herself a housekeeper, and she thanked the slaves carefully when they helped her, and she never gave an order. It was always “please, will you”—and “I’m sorry to ask you”—Behind the extreme courtesy they had lived together, the three of them, separate from everyone, even the father.

“He’s your father, but you can’t act like his children,” she had told them, “even if he does treat you right,” she had added.

So she and Bettina had grown up as solitary as orphans, even when the tall thin old Englishman had held them on his knees and kissed their smooth golden cheeks.

After their mother died, when she was eleven and Bettina nine, they had gone on alone together, growing up, slender, silent, obedient always to the old man. “Sir,” they had always called him, neither master nor father. He used to look at them. She remembered and never could she forget how he used to look at them, pitying and frightened, as though something he had done in a moment had surprised even himself.

“I don’t know what’s to become of you two girls,” he used to mutter. He was very old, then, too old to do anything but let them wait on him.

“Don’t worry about us, sir—” she had always said. That, too, was her mother’s teaching … “Don’t ever let men get to thinking you trouble, father or husband. Men don’t like trouble with women.”

She had kept these teachings in her heart and had taught them to Bettina who could not remember the least image of their mother.

After a while the old man had given up even his worry. He grew older and slept more often, and had taken much waiting upon, until the day when he died in a moment and they had found him dead.

“What’s goin’ to become of us, Georgia?” Bettina had asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” she had answered.

“Maybe he’s left his will for us,” Bettina whispered.

“Hush,” Georgia said. One of the teachings of her mother had been, “Don’t expect anything. Then what you get seems good and enough.”

But there was no will and no mention of them and when a cousin came as the next heir, he sold the house and the land and the slaves, and they were sold, too. If they had not been slaves before they now became slaves.

Thus had they gone into the next great house. It was no question there — they were slaves. And then, because they had worked well and always in that deep silence which they kept about them like a dark velvet curtain, Miss Lucie had brought them here when again the great house fell. Great houses always fell. She lay gazing up into the thick beams above her head. Would this great house fall, too?

Pierce, waking just after dawn, got out of the bed. He moved as stealthily as he knew how, but Lucinda waked.

“Go to sleep, Luce,” he commanded. “It’s the middle of the night for you.”

“Where are you going?” she asked. Her blue eyes opened wide at him.

“I’m going for a ride,” he said. “I’ll be back in time to breakfast with you.”

He stooped and kissed her mouth. Her breath was not quite sweet in the morning. He knew it and yet it always shocked him a little that it could be, so fastidious was she in every detail of her person. Inside the lovely shell of her body surely there should be no corruption. She was asleep again, lying placidly on her pillow, her hands on her breast. Lovely she was, and he had no complaint against her. By the time he got back she would have washed her mouth with one of her fragrant waters. He had no need to notice an offense not greater than the scent of a faded rose — he who was fresh home from the stench of dying men on a battlefield! Yet that stench had so pervaded him for four years that now his nostrils were always to the wind, like a dog’s. He smelled what he would never have noticed in the days before he had smelled death.

He splashed in his wash basin in his dressing room, blowing out gusts of bubbles through the water, he sponged his body, brushed his teeth and put on clean garments under his riding suit. Clean he would be so long as he lived. He had had enough of filth.

Clean to his marrowbones he went out of the door and into the great upper hall, down the winding stairs which were one of the beauties of Malvern, and into the lower hall. The hall ran through the house, and front and back doors were wide open to the morning.

At the table by the door Georgia was putting white and purple asters into a yellow bowl.

“Hello, Georgia,” he said.

She turned her head, and he saw with discomfort that she was really very beautiful. He did not want a beautiful slave in his house. Though she wasn’t a slave any more—“Good morning, sir,” she said.

“A fine morning,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, sir.”

“I suppose nothing’s been heard of Tom yet? I didn’t go in — didn’t want to wake him.”

“No, sir,” she replied. “Bettina hasn’t come out. Likely he’s sleeping.”

She pronounced her words so purely that he was curious to know where she had learned them so. But he refused himself the luxury of curiosity and went on down the steps, into the cool bright morning. At the stables his groom was already brushing his horse.

He looked up with a grin. “Sure is good to have somepin like a horse again, marster.”

“The stables are pretty sorry, Jake,” Pierce agreed. “But give me time — I’ll be looking around for some real horseflesh in a month or so.”

“Sure will be good to git the stables full,” Jake said.

He slipped the saddle on the mare, steadied her with his hand on her neck, murmuring and hissing through his teeth to soothe her.

“She’s raring to go,” Pierce said fondly. “But it won’t be to war any more, Beauty—”

“Sure is good they ain’t any mo’ wa’,” Jake said.

“You’re going to get wages from now on, Jake, like all the rest of the sl — servants,” Pierce said.

“I’d rawther you kep’ the money, please, marster,” Jake laughed, and his open mouth was like the inside of a watermelon.

“You’ll be having to buy your food, though, and clothes for you and Manda and the children,” Pierce said. He tested the stirrups as carefully as though he were going into battle. A horseman was no better than his stirrups. He heard a gasp from Jake.

“You ain’t goin’ to feed us no mo’?” Jake’s face was lined with terror.

“Now, Jake, what do I give you wages for?” Pierce demanded. He leaned against his horse. This sort of thing was going to take a mighty lot of patience!

“I don’t want no wages,” Jake wailed. “I wants our food and does like we allays had had!”

“Great day in the morning!” Pierce shouted, “why, the war was fought so you could be free, man!”

“But my food and cloes!” Jake moaned.

Pierce broke into sudden laughter and leaped on his horse. “Oh well, I reckon you won’t starve at Malvern,” he said. “And if you want, I’ll give you food and clothes instead of wages.”

“Thank you — thank you, marster!” Jake bellowed after him.

That was the trouble, Pierce thought. You fought a war for people, you all but died, or you rotted in a prison, the way Tom had rotted nearly to death, and you come home and the people don’t know what it’s all about, or why you fought and rotted. They want everything just the way it was before.

In the brilliant morning sunshine, cantering across his own lands, his face grew grim. “I’m going to live for myself from now on,” he muttered.

He looked across the lands of Malvern, his land. Two hundred years ago his great-grandfather had come from England, a landless young son, and had bought this valley set high in the mountains of the Alleghenies. He had cut the forests and ploughed the earth, he had built the foundations and the heart of the big house. The soil was rich, and the encircling fields were still fringed with virgin forest, great oaks and beeches and maples.

“I will restore my soul,” Pierce said to himself.

He turned his mare’s head away from the line of cabins to the north of the road. He did not want to see his own black folk, not even to hear their greetings. He was tired of them because he had fought to keep them. Hell, he had lost and they were free. He still believed that it was the wrong way to free them. That was what he would have liked to have told that tall gaunt man in the White House, had he not been killed. All during the war he wanted to go and tell Abe Lincoln, “Man, I don’t want slaves! I’ll be as glad as you could be to have everyone of them free and wage earning. But it’s got to be done slowly, the way our family has been doing it, freeing the men when they get to be thirty-five, freeing the women when they marry. Then they’re fit for freedom. The Delaneys have been freeing their slaves for fifty years.”

Well, almost freeing them! They had their papers, even if they didn’t get real wages. They were like Jake, still wanting their food and clothes and cabins. It scared them if they had only cold money in their palms. They couldn’t imagine money turning into food and clothes and cabins.

His horse picked her way delicately about something in the road and he looked down and saw a yellow backed turtle slowly making its way across the dusty stretch. It went on, regardless of the peril it had so narrowly escaped. He laughed at its earnest persistence. It was the comforting and delightful thing about land and forest, and beast and bird — they went on, oblivious of wars.

“I’m going to be like that,” he thought. He lifted his head, gave his mare rein and she broke into a gallop. He brought her home an hour later in a froth, and leaped up the steps to have breakfast with Lucinda and the little boys. They were already at the table, when he had washed and dropped into his seat. He had not changed his riding things. After breakfast he wanted to go out again, this time on business. But he must see Tom first.

“Hello, you two,” he said to his boys. He reached out his hands and rumpled both blonde heads. “See how pretty your mama is?” They turned at the question and stared at her.

“Are you pretty, Mama?” Martin asked, surprised.

“How pretty, Papa?” Carey asked.

Lucinda bore the scrutiny of three pairs of male eyes with lovely calm. She smiled at Pierce as the one most important.

“Awfully, awfully pretty, you little savage,” Pierce said and tweaked his son’s ear. “Heard anything of Tom, Luce?”

Georgia came in with a plate of hot beaten biscuits, and Lucinda turned to her.

“Has Bettina said anything about your master Tom?” she asked.

“She came out to wash herself,” Georgia replied in her soft voice. “I asked her then, Miss Lucie, and she said he was hungry and wanting real food. I was to ask you, please, sir, if you thought a beaten biscuit and soft-boiled egg would harm him.”

“Give him anything he wants,” Pierce said. “God knows he deserves it.”

“But, Pierce, a beaten biscuit?” Lucinda asked.

“Tell him to dunk it in milk,” Pierce said. “Yes, sir,” Georgia replied. She poured two cups of coffee, pure amber, from the silver pot on the buffet, set them on the table and went away.

He glanced at her back as she went out. She wore a white dress, much washed and soft, and she had her hair on top of her head, and her neck rose straight and golden.

“How much wage are we going to pay those two girls, Luce?” he inquired.

Lucinda fluttered her white hands. “Oh, Pierce, it’s so silly! Besides, how are we going to know? I always give Georgia my old dresses, and she eats the leftovers in the pantry — she and Bettina — they don’t eat in the kitchen. How are we going to count all that? I’d rather just give her pin money.”

“Have you asked her what she’d rather have?” he asked.

Lucinda frowned and shrugged her shoulders under her lace sack. “I don’t think Georgia would know.”

Georgia came in again, this time with a plate of ham, sliced thin, to go with the scrambled eggs and kidneys.

“Well, ask her,” Pierce said with sudden firmness. But Lucinda pressed her small red lips together firmly and ignored him and he was angry. The army had spoiled him for being ignored. Men had obeyed him to the tune of hundreds and he was not to be disobeyed at home.

“Georgia!” he said abruptly. She looked at him, half alarmed, and he saw into her black eyes, eyes so great and deep that he felt uncomfortable again. “Do you want to be paid wages?”

She answered, faltering. “Yes, sir, I do if you say so—”

“Georgia, you may leave the room,” Lucinda said sharply.

The girl disappeared from where she stood as though she had not been.

“You shouldn’t frighten her, Luce,” Pierce said.

“You shouldn’t interfere between me and my maid, Pierce,” Lucinda replied.

Then they thought of the children and fell into silence. Pierce ate heavily and in great bites, champing his jaws, his eyes on his plate. Lucinda was full of graceful movement She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, buttered a bit of the beaten biscuit split on her plate and she tucked in the end of Carey’s napkin into his neck. Between these feather soft motions of hands and arms, between the turns of her head and the lifting and lowering of her lids, she watched Pierce.

He threw down his napkin. “I’m going to see for myself how Tom is this morning,” he said abruptly.

“Do,” Lucinda said pleasantly. “And tell him I’ll be in as soon as I have the children settled.”

He opened the door into his brother’s room and the weight moved from his bosom. He had been away from women too long. It was going to take time to get used to them again, even to Lucinda. There was something secret about women living in a house when a man had been living in the open with men. He looked at Tom warmly.

“Why, you’re looking wonderful, Tom,” he said. “Great goodness, man, I didn’t know what you were yesterday — a scarecrow!”

Tom was lying against fresh pillows, his hair brushed, his nightshirt immaculately white. Bettina was folding a tartan shawl over his shoulders.

“I feel — good,” Tom said. His voice was faint enough but stronger than it had been yesterday.

“And you slept?”

“Without waking—”

Pierce sat down in the armchair by the bed. “Tom, you talk differently — more like the Yankees.”

“I’ve heard nothing but Yankees — except the prison guards.”

Pierce looked grave. His handsome face, always quick to show his feelings, fell into lines of concern. “Tom, did you know the names of any of those sons of bitches? I’ll challenge any man of them we know.”

Tom shook his head. “They had it in for me — because I’m from the South. They treated me worse than a Yankee.”

“Probably did,” Pierce said. “I feared for you. First I heard you were dead, Tom. Then I got word you were a prisoner. I moved heaven and earth, of course, but I couldn’t break through.”

“They had it in for me,” Tom said again slowly. “From the top down — not the slightest favor.”

“Tom, did they — hurt you?”

“Yes,” Tom said. He paused as though he would not go on and then the words burst out of him in a retch. “They whipped us, starved us — more of us died than were lost at the front. Pierce, you know how many men Grant lost? I mean from the Wilderness to the James River — I tell you it wasn’t anything to what we lost last July and August — in Andersonville — the awful heat — the miserable holes we lived in — and all around us woods to make cabins if they’d let us — but they wouldn’t let us.”

Tom was crying, the tears running down his cheeks at last. He had tears today to weep out his heart and Pierce felt his throat grow tight.

He threw his arms around his brother. “Tom, don’t you remember it! It’s all past. You’re home, boy. Why, you and me, we’re going to make Malvern like a heaven—”

“What’s the use of a spot of heaven — in the middle of a hell world—” Tom was shaking in a chill. “Here, Bettina,” Pierce cried in terror. Bettina came quietly to the bedside. “Leave him to me, sir. You’d best go away for a space, if you please.”

“I reckon you’re right. Give him something to calm him, Bettina—”

He hastened out of the room and paused at the door, remorseful at his own inability to endure the sight of his brother. It was a shameful sight. A man had to mend himself. Tom would thank him for going away when he was all in pieces. He closed the door softly, pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Got to get myself to work,” he muttered. He tiptoed through the halls and out of a side door to the stables again. He did not want to see Lucinda or the children. He’d get along down the lanes and across the country, be by himself awhile, maybe stop in at the town and get him some tobacco. Full of misery, he strode into the stable. It was a great empty place, inhabited once by a string of race horses and farm beasts, nearly all of which had been destroyed in the war. Cattle had been eaten except for two old cows, and horses had gone to the army. There was no sign of Jake and he must saddle his mare himself.

Then once more the good work of his hands comforted him. He brushed his horse’s coat and put on the saddle blanket and tightened the girth. Beauty looked at him gaily and tossed her tail. He was comforted by her simple presence, by her rolling dark eyes and her willingness to bear the burden of his body.

“You’re my sweetheart,” he told her and leading her into the yards he swung himself astride her back and touched her into a gallop. He had to get to work on Malvern, root himself here again, make it his being as once it had been before the war tore him out and threw him into the alien world. He had longed for Malvern every moment he was away. Even when he was at Charlottesville, at the University, he was always homesick. Now Lucinda, the children, all of them, and even himself, were only part of the place.

“I’ve got to get Tom on his feet,” he thought solemnly. “Get him on his feet and then on a horse! That’ll cure him. Then we’ll get Malvern going again—”

He was inspired by the thought of a horse for Tom. He would ride over to Jackson’s stable and see what they had in the way of horses. Twenty miles, a little over — he could do it easily by dinnertime. Then he would go in and tell Tom and cheer him up. Nothing was so cheering to a man as to know he had a good horse waiting for him. Given a few weeks and he and Tom would be riding over the land together. Then women and house would be left behind and in their right place.

“You have to tell somebody, sir, that I see, and you can tell me,” Bettina said to Tom when Pierce was gone. He looked into her grave dark eyes.

“I’m simply — dissolved,” he gasped. Yesterday it had been impossible to talk. Today with his first shred of strength he wanted to talk.

“That is right,” she said. Her voice was kind and warm but without pity. “That is natural.”

“I’ve — been through so much—” he whispered.

He looked up, searching for her contempt—“A man pitying himself,” he went on.

There was no contempt in her beautiful face. “Sometimes a man must pity himself. He alone knows what he’s been through.”

“You see that?”

His tears dried and he felt stronger. He cleared his throat. “It was unnecessary — what we went through—”

She drew the armchair to the side of the bed and sat down, her elbows leaning on the bed, her chin on her clenched hands. “Tell me,” she said.

“You can’t imagine—” he began.

“I know I can’t, so tell me—” she repeated.

“A poor dreary village — in the forests — in the morning — the sun would never come up. I used to wait for it — and then when it came it poured down so hot that you longed for night again, and when it went down it went down as though it had dropped into a well and all the mosquitoes and flies sprang at you like tigers out of the dark—”

“I know,” she whispered, “I was born in Georgia.”

“You know, all those forests — we could have built ourselves houses. The Confederate government owned all the sawmills — you know that? They could have put up houses for us — but we lived in holes and tents and there was a big pen—”

He pushed up his sleeve and showed her his bone-thin arms. They were covered with scars. “Burned,” he said, “they burned us with pine sticks lit into coals at the end. What did they do that for?”

“Men do such things,” she said. “I’ve seen men hang another man and burn him before he died.”

“But we were all white men,” Tom said.

“It doesn’t matter, white or black, when the feel for it gets in them. Happens to black more often because the black men are in the white men’s power. But I reckon when white men get under the power, the same things are done to them.”

“I couldn’t save myself,” Tom went on as though he had not heard her. “I used to curse and swear and rave and hit at them. After a while you learn better. You just look down at the ground and don’t even mumble. You just take it, whatever it is — think about something else if you can — but you take it.”

“I know,” Bettina said, “how I know!”

The room was full of peace and stillness. Years ago some ancestor had paneled it in white wood, and had set into the space above the mantel piece the portrait of a young girl, young as spring in her white and green gown. Her hair was the color of daffodils, but she held a gold cross in her hand. Why did a white girl hold a cross? What did she know about the meaning of a cross?

“You’ve never been a prisoner,” Tom said restlessly. “You can’t know.”

“I know how it feels to have to take things,” she answered. “I know how it feels to be helpless.”

He came out of his absorption in his own misery enough to look at her with faint curiosity. “Nobody is mean to you here — in our house.”

“I lived, a long time enough before I came here,” she said, sighing.

But his curiosity could not reach beyond himself today. His own body was still his chief concern. “How my back hurts me!” he muttered.

“Turn yourself over, sir. Turn over and I’ll rub you well.”

He turned himself painfully, groaning, and she helped him, half lifting him. Her slender arms were unexpectedly strong and he felt them so.

“You’ve got strength,” he murmured into his pillow.

“I’ve got to have strength,” she replied. She began to rub his back as she spoke, and the strokes of her hands were long and strong. He yielded himself to their comfort.

The lands of Malvern lay across a wide shallow valley and over two ranges of hills. Riding until noon Pierce had cut diagonally across from the northeast corner to southwest. Not too many of the fields were fallow, but the war had forced idleness on the land. With Tom and himself both away he could not expect to see the land looking as it should. But it was there and it still belonged to him. He was stripped and penniless, as every man on the Southern side was, but he could borrow for seed, and he knew his land. Give him a year, and it would be pouring out its gold again. Labor he would get somehow, for whatever pay. He wanted only to look ahead.

At the southwest corner Malvern joined its fields to that of his nearest neighbor, John MacBain. Pierce held his horse just short of the border and looked across a meadow. Part of the MacBain house had been burned down. He had heard of it, but he had not seen it. Now it was plain. The east wing was grey and gaunt, a skeleton attached to the main house. Strange how crippled the house looked — like a man with his right arm withered! No, he was not going to let himself think about crippled men.

He loosened the reins and went cantering over the meadow. He’d stop and see John MacBain. They had been good neighbors always, and their boyhood friendship had held.

He tied his horse to the hitching post by the stile near the front door and then mounted the wide stone steps. The front door was open and he was about to shout when he heard his own name called.

“Pierce Delaney — by Gawd!”

It was John himself — By-Gawd MacBain, people called him.

Pierce swung on his heel and saw him lying on a cot in the shadow of an ancient climbing rose that hung in festoons from the second story of the portico.

“Why, John,” he exclaimed. “What’s damaged you?”

“Sit down,” John said. His voice was still deep but the substance had gone out of it. It sounded hollow, as though it came from a cavern.

“I hadn’t heard you were sick,” Pierce said. He sat down and laid his whip on the floor.

“I’m not sick, I’m wounded,” John said. “Got a Yankee bullet in me.”

“Can’t a doctor get it out?” Pierce asked.

“Not to guarantee my life while he’s doin’ it,” John said.

“But you can’t just lie there!” Pierce protested.

“At least I’m alive,” John said. He gazed at Pierce from under the bushy red brows that gave ferocity to his deep-set grey eyes. “I aim to live,” he said doggedly.

“Of course,” Pierce replied. His determination never again to think of the wounded failed him. Here was John, wounded for life! He knew the look of the desperately wounded, the secret hopelessness behind the eyes, the hidden knowledge of death. He looked away and over the meadow to Malvern.

“Well, I just thought I’d stop by and see how you were, John,” he said at last.

“Thank you kindly, Pierce. I hear Tom’s home.”

“Starved nearly to death, John, but we’ll mend that as fast as we can.”

“You can’t hardly blame our side for starving Yankees in jail when our own folks lived on dried beans and cornmeal,” John said. He stared up at the cobwebby ceiling of the portico. “You ’member my twin boys?”

Pierce nodded. “Lucinda told me—”

“They’re both dead,” John said. His hollow voice tolled the words. “No milk, no eggs — nothing they could eat, poor little fellers! Well, that leaves me alone with Molly.”

“You’ll have more boys,” Pierce said.

“Nope — I reckon not.”

Pierce turned his head at the agony in John MacBain’s voice.

“No more boys,” John said. “The Yankees got me there, Pierce.”

“You mean—”

“Yes.”

Pierce felt the old insufferable weight in his breast. His chest grew tight when he was forced to face suffering. So often, when at the end of a day and the battle was over, he had scarcely been able to breathe when he had seen the rows of his men, the dead and the wounded, lying on the ground, waiting to be carried away. It had been his duty to see them, and he had done his duty.

“John, if I knew what to say—”

“There’s nothing to say, I reckon, Pierce. It’s my wife Molly I worry about. She’s still young.”

They heard Molly’s clear voice at this moment. She was talking to someone, directing and scolding at the same time. Her skirts rustled and she was at the door, “John—” she began and saw the visitor. “Why, Pierce Delaney!” she cried. Her round pretty face lit and she put out both hands to him. “John and I were just wondering — how is that poor Tom?”

“Nothing wrong except what some feeding will put right,” Pierce said. He felt her warm strong little hands in his and felt sorry for John MacBain and let them go.

“Well, it’s good to see you,” she said. Her eyes traveled frankly over his tall figure. “And you’re out riding? My Gawd, it’s good to see a man riding as though there hadn’t been a war.”

“My Gawd,” the ribald called Molly MacBain. By Gawd and My Gawd.

John MacBain, watching them, shouted suddenly. “Molly, go and fetch some of the blackberry wine! Pierce has rid half a day—”

She bustled away, and John closed his eyes. “What I told you, Pierce,” he muttered. “You dassent to tell. She don’t want a soul to know it. I don’t know why I told you. But I felt I had to have a man know it.”

“Surely I won’t tell,” Pierce promised.

“Not even your wife,” John said.

“Nobody,” Pierce promised.

But he could not forget it. Molly came back with wine and small cakes. “They’re only cornmeal and sweetened with molasses and riz with yeast,” she said in her busy gay voice. “My Gawd, what it will be to have baking powder and sugar! How long will it be, Pierce?”

“Who knows?” he said. He tasted the wine and bit into a cake. “These are good,” he said politely.

“Oh, I make do with what I have,” Molly said. She went to John’s cot and pulled a cover straight and Pierce watched them. Should he speak of the twins or should he not? What would be right for Molly — no, for John, for whom he cared far more? He looked across the sunny meadows where the two little boys used to play. They were just toddling around when last he saw them.

“I am mighty grieved to hear about the boys, Miss Molly,” he said abruptly. The cornmeal cake clogged his throat.

She turned and stood rigid for an instant. “Thank you—” she said at last. “Thank you kindly, Pierce. But I just — I just can’t think of them.”

Her small full mouth quivered, and her eyelids glistened. She gave him a look and ran into the house. John closed his eyes and lay rigidly still.

“If there is anything I could do,” Pierce began.

“There isn’t, thank you, Pierce,” John did not open his eyes. “We’ve just got to live along—”

“Yes, I reckon,” Pierce murmured sadly. “Well, John, maybe I could help you with the place, anyway. We’ll be ploughing again this spring, and I could make shift to do some of your fields if you’re short of help.”

John opened his eyes. “Short — I’m without help!” he cried. “Two old niggers — that’s what’s stayed with us. They can scratch a kitchen garden — that’s all.”

“Then I’ll rent your land from you, if you like, until you can get up and around once more.”

“How come you got help?” he demanded.

“I’m payin’ wages,” Pierce said simply.

“I ain’t goin’ to take your paid help,” John declared.

“There’s no other kind to be had, John,” Pierce told him.

John lifted his head from his pillow. “By Gawd, Pierce — what did we fight the war for, if you’re goin’ to pay niggers?”

“We lost the war, John—”

“Not me — I didn’t — so far as I’m concerned, the war is goin’ on forever.”

The voice was brave, but its hollowness made the words a boast. Pierce did not say what he thought. He had his two sons alive and Malvern must go on in the new times as it had in the old. He picked up his whip and got to his feet.

“Of course I know how you feel, John,” he said amiably. “And I’m not going to argue with you. I’ve had enough of fighting. I’m going to live in peace — with all men. And if I never set foot on any land except Malvern, I’ll be content. But I’ll farm yours if you want me to—”

There was a second’s silence. John’s head fell back.

“Your family all right?” he asked.

“Yes, they are — I don’t know why I’m lucky,” Pierce said. He tapped his riding boot softly with the crop of his whip. “I thank God,” he added simply.

“Not many of us got anything left to thank anybody for,” John said bitterly. “But I won’t put my burden on you, Pierce. I reckon I can carry it.”

“You are a strong man, John,” Pierce said kindly.

They were both silent again and then they had a common impulse to part.

“Well, goodbye,” Pierce said. “I’m going over to Jackson’s to look for a horse for Tom. If you change your mind about your land you have only to let me know.”

“Thanks — I can’t answer for myself — I might stay,” John replied. “Or I might go away.”

Pierce mounted his horse behind the rose bush to spare John the misery of seeing him ride off well and whole. He cantered south to Jackson’s, very grave and sorrowful. Of all men John was the least suited to such a wound, John who never willingly read a book, who lived to hunt and ride and eat and drink. And Molly was not like Lucinda. Luce could make shift without a man, he thought cruelly. Sapphires he had promised if it was a girl. Diamonds he had given her for the boys. She would never give herself entirely for her own passion. That was because she had none. Well, he was glad he had never liked Molly MacBain, since they were neighbors and likely to be neighbors all their lives. She was not quite pretty enough — a little on the common side, he thought, and cursed himself.

“I’m a damned difficult combination,” he thought ruefully. “I like them to look like queens and act like gypsies. The two don’t come together.”

The brief frankness with himself made him ashamed. He thought of Lucinda with tenderness, and suddenly feeling the sun beat down on him he touched the mare with his whip and she broke into a gallop. He had the decent man’s dislike of allowing himself to think secretly about women. It was a thing to struggle against after adolescence, a childishness to be outgrown.

He forgot women thoroughly when he reached Jackson’s horse farm. By some miracle, Jackson had a two-year-old bay.

“She ain’t quite gentled yet,” Jackson said. He stroked the bay’s shining bronze flanks and she tossed her head.

“Tom will want to do his own gentling,” Pierce said.

He examined her, from eye to tooth to fetlock, and settled on a price.

“Too high,” he thought as he rode homeward. He would be afraid to tell Lucinda.

“I don’t have to tell her,” he thought and rode on. He was astonished at his new freedom. Once he would have felt he had to tell her everything. But the war had separated him from her. He had learned to live to himself — or almost!

“Georgia, hurry — here comes your master!” Lucinda cried. She sat by the long window of her room on the rose satin hassock and Georgia knelt beside her, mending a torn ruffle. It was part of Lucinda’s pattern for herself that she always met her husband when he came home. She liked to think of herself throwing open the big door and standing there, a picture against the great hall.

“Hurry — hurry—” she said impatiently.

Georgia bent her dark head and her fingers flew at her task. The needle broke suddenly and she held it up, terror in her eyes.

“My thimble’s got holes in it, ma’am,” she said—“The needle caught.”

“Oh, Georgia,” Lucinda cried. “The very idea—”

“Yes, ma’am,” Georgia agreed. “Let me just pin it, ma’am.”

“You know we haven’t any pins—” Lucinda retorted.

“Yes, ma’am, but I’ll just use this broken needle, ’tis good for naught, now.”

“But do we have another needle? Really, Georgia, to break a needle—”

“I have two more, ma’am, I saved—”

“Well, then—”

Lucinda stood, shook her ruffles, and ran downstairs lightly. Behind her Georgia picked up bits of thread from the rose flowered carpet. She stood up and saw herself in the long oval mirror above the dressing table. It was an accident, and she hesitated. Then she tiptoed nearer and gazed at herself. She was pretty! She and Bettina were both pretty, but maybe she was a little prettier even than Bettina. But what use was it? Whom could they hope to marry?

“Unless we should go up north—” she thought.

Plenty of brown people were going north. Brown was what she called herself and Bettina. Their father had taught them. “Don’t you call yourselves niggers,” he had told them. “You’re my daughters, damn you! Brown — brown — that’s what you are. Brown’s a good color, isn’t it?” But when he got old and drowsy he had not cared what color they were.

“Wonder how would I look with my hair up high?” she thought.

She glanced at the door. They’d be downstairs now together — no danger of their coming up. The mirror in the attic was a cracked old thing and she could never see herself in it. Besides, she was ashamed to fuss with herself before Bettina. Bettina was younger, but she acted older.

She loosened her curly black hair and let it fall on her shoulders. “I daren’t use her combs and brushes, though,” she murmured. She was sorely tempted. She washed them out every day anyway, and she would wash them out right away. Upstairs she and Bettina shared a bit of broken comb. She didn’t know what a brush felt like in her hair though she brushed ma’am’s hair an hour every single night before bedtime until it shone like the copper kettle. She lifted the silver-backed brush on the toilet table and then jumped. There in the mirror she saw her master standing. She put the brush down softly and without turning around she bundled her hair back into her net.

“Are you beautifying yourself, Georgia?” Pierce asked, and laughed.

She did not answer nor did she turn. She was too honest to excuse herself.

“You better not let your — you better not let her see you,” he said.

“No, sir — I know I am doing wrong,” Georgia said in a faint voice.

He was watching her face in the mirror. It was downcast, and the heavy fringes of her black eyelashes lay on her pale gold cheeks. “Why, the girl is a beauty, poor thing,” he thought.

“Where’s your—” he stopped, and Georgia lifted her eyelashes.

“Hang it,” he swore, “I keep trying not to say ‘your mistress.’”

She turned and smiled at him with pity. “I wish you wouldn’t bother. I don’t mind,” she said.

“It was only yesterday I decided I wouldn’t let you say master and mistress any more,” he reminded her.

“Yes, sir, but I know how you want to do, and so I don’t mind,” she said.

The girl’s lips were red and her teeth very white. He did not remember ever having seen a brown girl’s lips so red.

“Then where’s your mistress?” he asked. He heard the harshness in his voice and could do nothing to quell it. For the first time the future loomed as something monstrous. The end of this war meant that Georgia and all like her were free and they were his and Lucinda’s equals. The distance that had once been between had been taken away. Anything could happen, and there were no laws to check it. If there were to be new barriers, they must be made by people like himself, or there were no barriers — he refused to think further. There must be barriers, of course, between white and black.

“Pierce!” Lucinda’s voice floated up the stairs.

“She’s downstairs to meet you, Master Pierce,” Georgia said. As though she felt new distance shaping between them she returned to her old shape of his name.

He turned and left her standing there. From the head of the stairs he looked down at his wife at the foot. She had left the big front door open and she stood against a silver screen of light. Her golden hair caught it and the whiteness of her skin caught it and her eyes were like the sapphires she loved. She saw him and ran up and he met her halfway and took her in his arms.

“Pierce — in broad daylight—” she protested.

“Day and night,” he muttered, “night and day—”

He held her and for once she stood pliant in his embrace. But it could not last. The boys were running in from outdoors and behind them Joe was making efforts to catch them.

“Mama, Mama!” Martin screamed, and then saw them on the stairs. Lucinda turned in Pierce’s arms and smiled down at her two sons proudly. They stood gaping up at her and Joe turned and pretended to look out the door. Let her sons remember their mother, young and beautiful, standing in their father’s arms!

“What you doin’, Mama?” Martin asked.

Carey put his thumb in his mouth and continued his stare.

Lucinda forgot her role. “Take your thumb out of your mouth, Carey Delaney!” she cried.

She freed herself, ran down the stairs and pulled his thumb out of his mouth. It came out with a soft plop and she wiped it dry on her lace handkerchief. “You want to have buckteeth when you grow up?” she inquired. “Girls don’t love men with buckteeth.”

Carey gazed at her placidly. She flicked his cheek with her thumb and finger, and walked away into the drawing room. As soon as her back was turned he put his thumb into his mouth again.

Pierce, watching from the stairs, laughed. “Don’t you obey your mother, sir?” he inquired of his younger son.

“Not when she ain’t here,” Carey replied. He took his thumb out for these words and put it back. Regarding his son’s round red cheeks and bright blue eyes, and seeing the small gold curls which perspiration plastered to his forehead, Pierce burst into laughter, loud and fond.

“You’re a man,” he declared.

His laughter penetrated to the drawing room and Lucinda stopped, listened and frowned. Pierce’s laughter! He laughed easily, at jokes to which she always listened without understanding them. Since he had come home he laughed more than ever, but about nothing.

She shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the laughter for something far more important. A deep discontent ate its way into the pleasure of her days. Malvern had been conceived and born in Virginia, even as she had been. It had never come into her imagination that at any time of her life she would be living outside Virginia. But the war had dealt cruelly with her. Malvern lay on the eastern edge of the western counties that had seceded to make a Union. Now, irrevocably, she lived in a state that was hateful to her. Virginia was old and stable and proud, the home of aristocrats. But West Virginia was an upstart.

She gazed moodily at the gray mohair of the drawing room furniture. It had come, a generation ago, from France and even its fine close texture had yielded to the war years. It looked well, but she knew that Georgia’s fine stitches were woven in and out of it. She would not allow the children to sit on it, and even now, alone in the room, she sat in a wooden Windsor armchair.

She turned her head and saw Pierce at the open door in the hall. He was standing, his feet wide apart, his hands in his pockets, staring out over the land.

“Pierce!” she called. “Come here!”

Once he would have come instantly but now the imperiousness in her voice stirred distaste in him.

“What do you want?” he called back.

She rose in a flutter of ruffles and lace and ran out into the hall and pausing behind him she reached up and slapped one of his cheeks lightly and then the other.

“You hear me call?” she demanded.

“I answered, didn’t I?” he replied.

“But I want you to come when I call!” she complained.

She clasped her hands through his arm and dragged him half-unwillingly, half-laughing, into the drawing room.

“I want to know when I can have new satin for the furniture,” she demanded.

Pierce shook himself free from her. “Jiminy, Luce, do I have to tell you again that we have no money? If you can raise your own stuff you can have it. But you can’t buy anything. Well, we’re going to raise sheep. Malvern hills can grow good wool.”

Lucinda pouted. “I don’t want wool. Moths will chew it. I want satin.”

“Then you’ll have to wait until we can trade wool for satin, my girl,” he said firmly.

“Pierce, I can’t believe you haven’t got anything!” she protested.

“I have money to burn, and that’s all it’s fit for,” he said. “We lost the war, honey! How come you can’t understand what I tell you over and over? Our money is worthless. But we’re lucky we have the house and the land and a fair number of slaves ready to work for wages. And thank God, we’re not in a Southern state. We can begin to build new railroads and factories and open up the mines;”

“And I hate it that we’re not in Virginia any more,” she cried.

“It’s the saving of us that we’re not,” he said gravely. “We’ll escape a lot of woes.”

It occurred to him that he had not seen Tom since he came home to tell him that he had bought a horse, and in his impetuous fashion he forgot his wife and turned and strode upstairs.

Lucinda watched him, her hands folded one over the other as years ago her English governess had taught her to hold them.

“Put the hands into graceful rest when not in use,” she had proclaimed. She had taken the small Lucinda’s hands and laid them one upon the other just beneath the place where later her breasts would bud. There Lucinda now held them unconsciously when she did not embroider or pour tea. Their quiet was deceiving. Both her sons knew that those slender white hands, lying as quiet as the two wings of a resting bird, could fly out and leave a smart upon a small boy’s cheek, and then in the next second lie at rest again. When she spoke, they watched not her face but her hands.

She listened and heard Pierce’s step enter the bedroom above the drawing room. Then she went and stood in the tall French window that opened upon the terrace. Malvern lands were spread before her eyes. Sheep! Yankees raised sheep. She stood, seeing nothing while within her something grew hard and firm. She would not allow Pierce to change her life. She belonged to the South and in her the South would live forever. She would keep it alive.

“I had nothing to do with the war,” she told herself. “It’s just the same as if it had never been — for me, anyway.” She sat down again and began to plan the colors of her satin.