Chapter Two

“TOM!” PIERCE’S VOICE WAS softened to suit the pale face on the pillow. It was morning, a summer morning, and he was on his way to the farms.

Tom opened his eyes.

Pierce tiptoed in, and the boards creaked.

“You don’t need to do that,” Tom said. “I’m better.”

“You ought to be,” Pierce said, “after all these weeks.”

Bettina was sitting by a window darning a nightshirt. Now she rose and stood waiting.

“I’ll look after him awhile, Bettina,” Pierce said. “You can go and get some fresh air.” He sat down in the armchair near the bed.

“Yes, Master Pierce,” Bettina replied. She picked up a few threads, straightened the bed covers, and went out. Pierce, watching Tom’s face, saw his eyes follow the girl’s figure until the door closed. He coughed.

“Does she take good care of you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Lucinda says both those sisters are good at nursing,” Pierce went on.

“Bettina says she took care of their father for a long time,” Tom said.

Now that he was alone with Pierce, Tom did not know what to say.

“Their father was old Colonel Halford, who used to live down in Mississippi,” Pierce said. “Luce doesn’t know much about him, though.” He sighed. “It’s queer even for me to remember we don’t live in Virginia any more. Luce is taking it hard. But I can’t move Malvern.”

“When I look at Bettina,” Tom said strangely, “I know what the war was for. To think she could be bought and sold!”

Pierce said, “Now look here, Tom, you’re mighty weak. It’ll likely be months before you feel just right.”

“I’m weak,” Tom agreed. He lay listless for a moment. He felt now that he could not begin talking to Pierce. He felt crushed under his brother’s health and strength. The war had made Pierce coarse and tough. While he had been shut up in a Confederate prison, Pierce had commanded a regiment of men. Authority had hardened him. All the days and weeks and months that he had been idle and starving and struggling to live for his own sake and wondering every hour of the day and night why life was what it was, Pierce had been too busy to think. They had both been changed and in opposite directions. He closed his eyes.

“Tired?” Pierce asked.

“I reckon I’ll be tired forever,” Tom said.

“Now don’t you get to feeling sorry for yourself,” Pierce advised him. “Especially when you have as nice a horse as still lives outside a soldier’s stomach,” he added and laughed.

Anger burned under Tom’s eyelids and gave him strength. “I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for myself,” he said sharply. Then he relented. “Thanks for the horse — I reckon I’ll be riding again one of these days.”

“Of course you will,” Pierce declared. He went on, because he could not think of anything to say to that closed face. “Tom — your mare came today — ready to train to do anything you like. Canters naturally, like a girl waltzing.”

Tom opened his eyes, and Pierce went on with enthusiasm. “You’d better look, Tom. I’m going to pace her under your windows and you’ll be up and on her back in no time.”

The room was full of Pierce’s big voice. The noise of it echoed in Tom’s ears and made him faint. He had the feeling that Pierce was using up all the air in the room and he gasped. Pierce stood up in alarm. “Are you feeling worse, Tom?”

“Yes,” Tom whispered. He longed suddenly for Bettina. Bettina knew how to make him feel strong. She could lift up his head and put the pillows right.

“Bettina!” Pierce shouted out of the window. “Bettina, you come here right away!”

Out in the kitchen summerhouse Bettina was drinking a cup of sassafras tea. She had poured the boiling water from the kettle always hot on the range, and had taken her cup to be out of Annie’s way. She heard Pierce’s voice, and threw what was left of the tea on the roots of the climbing rose and went quickly upstairs.

Pierce was poised in anxiety and met her at the door. “Looks to me like Tom’s fainted,” he whispered. “Better see what you can do — quick.”

“Yes, sir,” Bettina said. She moved to the bed. Pierce paused in the doorway. He was no good in a sick room. Tom was sick, he supposed, weak, anyway. He had helped many a man to die, but he did not know what to do with a starving man.

“Better give him more real food,” he told Bettina. “Get him full of something strong.”

“Yes, sir,” Bettina said.

Pierce stood a moment longer and then could not bear to stay. “I’ll be downstairs in the library if you call,” he said. “Or I’ll be out at the stables.”

“Yes, sir,” Bettina said.

But she knew the moment that she looked at him that Tom had not fainted. She closed the door softly and then stood beside the bed, smiling. His eyelashes were quivering. He opened his eyes and saw her standing there.

“Kneel down,” he commanded.

She knelt, wondering. He turned himself and put out his arms and she drew back.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no, Master Tom—”

“Yes, Bettina, yes!”

A moment ago he would have said he was really fainting. But now he felt a strange tingling energy. He seized her arms and held her fast. “You belong to me,” he said. “I fought for you — I made you free.”

She pulled back and was amazed that she could not wrench herself from his hands. “Then leave me free!” she cried, and glanced fearfully at the door.

To her surprise he loosened her as suddenly as he had seized her. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Of course — I fought to make you free of everybody — me, too, God knows!”

He lay back on the pillows and flung out his hands. “Go on away,” he said. “I don’t own you—”

One of his hands fell near her breast. She put out her two hands and took it and held it pressed against her. On the pillow his thin face turned to her.

“You don’t own me—” she whispered. “Nobody owns me any more. I do belong to myself. But seeing I belong to myself — why, I reckon I can do what I like — with myself—”

She put her lips into the palm of his hand and he felt them soft and hot.

“I can give myself—” she faltered, “seeing how I am free—”

He turned to her and she leaned to him. He put his arms about her and kissed her full. She turned her face away at last.

“Oh, my Lord,” she breathed.

“Why didn’t you tell me you loved me?” he complained.

“’Tisn’t for me to tell. Oh, Master Tom, it isn’t even what I want—”

“Hush,” he said, “don’t call me master — never, so long as we live!”

The first harvests of Malvern were being reaped. Pierce rose at dawn for the joy of seeing his harvests, and rode about his fields. In his barns could be heard again the sound of cows lowing and the whinny of horses. Not all were paid for, but with the harvests he had money in his hand and he was not afraid.

The year had been an unusually good one. Winter had been mild toward the end, and spring had come with a rush of rhododendrons in the woods. He had forgotten all beauty in the years of war, and now it seemed to him he was seeing everything for the first time, the ruddy blossoms of the red maples, the early green of lilac, the redbud and the dogwood. During the spring he had searched avidly for each sign of life and growth. Sugar was still scarce and there was excuse for the making of maple sugar, as his father and grandfather had done before him, and as he had not done since he was master. He had ordered staple crops sown into the freshly ploughed fields, wheat for bread and corn and oats for man and beast, barley and rye. There was still no coffee to be had, but the rye made a fair drink when it was roasted slowly with black molasses. There were no dye stuffs to be had either, and he had superintended the making of dark brown dye from the black walnuts and saffron yellow from sulphur and red and purple from wild berries. Lucinda put up her nose at his household interests, but he could not sufficiently satiate himself with life after the years of death. He had even busied himself in the dairy, ordering great flagstones to be laid and new shelves to be built. It gave him solid comfort today when he rode over the land to know that in the dairy at Malvern crocks were full of butter and jugs full of buttermilk and that cheeses already stood in the presses.

He drew up his horse this July morning under an early-bearing apple tree and plucked a green-skinned sweet apple and ate it as though he sipped a glass of the finest wine. Come October he’d be having apple butter again, and this winter there would be hams and bacons. Give him five years and Malvern would be on its own feet once more and marching on! And with all this, scarcely a hundred dollars of real cash had lain in his palm during the year. He had worked without money, paying his help in kind, and feeding the family what Malvern had. It had been bare eating in the winter. He and Lucinda had sat down to a dinner table more than once where linen and silver were fine, but the Spode dinner set, which his grandfather had brought from England, had held nothing except cornmeal mush and black peas, and the soup had been brewed from cabbage.

Well, that was over. Malvern was in fruit again. They were eating roasting ears and greens and their first new potatoes, grown from a half bushel he had traded with Molly MacBain for a hen and a rooster. He smiled at the thought of Molly, and flushed under the summer sun. Lucinda was to have her child in early autumn. She had announced it to him last night, although it had been obvious to him for months that she was pregnant. But he knew better than to mention it to her before she chose to tell him.

“Mr. Delaney,” she had said last night in her room.

“Well?” he had asked. He was lounging in her low chair preparatory to dressing for dinner. She made him dress every night now as she had before the war.

She herself was already wearing her yellow taffeta, which she complained was in rags and tatters, except that Georgia held it together by delicate darning. She had looked neither ragged nor tattered, however, as she sat in her highbacked chair, her hands folded together like magnolia petals.

“You may expect an addition to your family, Mr. Delaney,” she said.

“Indeed!” he cried. He sat up and took his hands out of his pockets. “When, may I ask?”

“In the first two weeks of September, likely,” she said.

She sat very straight and full of dignity, and he smiled and went over to her and took her head between his hands and kissed her forehead.

“Careful of my pompadour, please,” she cautioned him.

He sat down again. “And what shall her name be, Luce?” he inquired.

“I had thought of Sapphira,” she replied. “It’s a Bible name,” she added.

He reflected. “Wasn’t she a liar, Luce?” he asked.

“She obeyed her husband, I believe,” Lucinda replied. “It is in my memory that her husband bade her tell a lie.”

He had burst out laughing. “Why, Luce, all women are liars! They don’t need to have men teach them.”

“Indeed they are not,” she had cried.

“Indeed they are,” he had cried back at her, “and if you plague me I shall utterly destroy your pompadour.”

He knew by now that a threat to disarrange her hair was the surest way to subjugate her, and she knew that since he came back from the war he was capable of doing it. Twice when she had plagued him he had tumbled and tossed her and left her half crying with rage.

Riding over the fields solitary in the morning he smiled, thinking of the evening. He was tender toward her always, even when he was rough, accepting her little tempers and tantrums with loud laughter, and holding her hands when she fell into a rage. For she could beat him when she was angry and this amused him mightily. It seemed to him that she was the essence of all that was feminine and he loved her profoundly, more he knew, although he would never acknowledge it, than she could possibly love him. He did not blame her for this. She loved him as well as she could, and she could love no one better, or so he believed. With that he could comfort himself. Yet he wondered if there were somewhere, in some women, something more than she could give him. He blushed now when he thought of this. Luce had given him sons and she would give him daughters. He had no reproach against her. But it was strange how war loosened the withers of a man’s soul. Many imaginings came into his own mind now which before the war he could not have had. He was beset by the continual knowledge of the shortness of time and the richness of life. War had shown him both.

He lifted his hand and drank in the morning sunshine. Once when he and Tom were children they had kept a pet crow, and on a fine morning like this one, the crow would bathe its body in the sun. It would ruffle its feathers and hold them apart for the sun to penetrate into the skin, and then, still unsatisfied, it would turn its beak to the sun and open it wide and let the sun pour down its throat, as though the light were food. He opened his own mouth now and felt the sun warm on his tongue. He could almost taste it, sparkling and pure.

At the boundaries of Malvern he found John MacBain, leaning on a fence, his straw hat pulled down over his eyes. He was on his feet again, thin as a withe and leathery, alive, but with a curiously dead look in his eyes.

“You there, John!” Pierce called and cantered his mare. Then he jumped down and threw the reins over the beast’s neck and sauntered toward his neighbor.

“Feeling well again?” he asked.

“Well as I’ll ever be,” John MacBain replied. He was chewing a twig of spice bush.

“You look pretty good,” Pierce said gaily. He was warmly aware of the blood coursing through his own potent body, and of his child in Lucinda’s womb. He was too kind to dwell upon his own good fortune. “Going to farm again, John?” he asked.

“No,” John MacBain said. “I’m thinking of moving away — take Molly to Wheeling, likely, and get me a job in the railroads. Railroads are the coming thing in the state, I hear. The city’ll give Molly life, I figure. It’s hard on her just fussing around an empty house.”

“I hear about the railroads, too—” Pierce said. He did not want to talk about Molly.

“Or mining,” John MacBain said moodily. “There’s coal mines opening toward the north of the state. I want to do something I never did before — start out fresh.”

“We’ll miss you for neighbors,” Pierce said.

“I’ll rent you the land but I shan’t sell the house,” John said. “I was born in it and so was my father. We’ll be back and forth, likely — summers, anyway.”

“That’s good,” Pierce said.

The bleakness in John’s eyes was a grey wall between them. He felt the constant knowledge of impatience that haunted them, and unable to think of further talk, he mounted his horse again.

“Well, see you again, John. Let me know before you go. Lucinda will want you both over for dinner.”

“It’ll be a while yet,” John said.

Pierce rode away, feeling the envy in John MacBain’s eyes burn into his back. War was cruel and unjust — as cruel and unjust as God, who gave down rain on the good and evil. He resolved that as little as possible would he consider anything except the joy of life itself, of food and sleep and riding and hunting, of wine and children and sunshine and earth and the seasons. He would live for himself and his own, “so help me God,” he thought, “from now until I die.” He hardened his heart toward John MacBain and toward every maimed and wounded creature, and was arrogantly proud that he was whole.

It was nearly one o’clock when he rounded the turn of the road and cantered up the avenue of oaks that led to the house. He dismounted and tossed the reins to Jake who came running out to meet him.

“She’s lathered, you see,” he reminded him.

“I’ll rub her down good,” Jake said.

Pierce mounted the steps of his house and took satisfaction in the mended terrace and the newly painted porches. He owed money everywhere, even for the fresh white paint on the house, but men trusted him and Malvern. Their confidence was in tomorrow, and tomorrow would come. He leaped up the last steps and met his brother coming down the stairs into the hall, and was struck again, as he continually was, with Tom’s good looks. The youthful sallowness and slimness were gone. He had actually grown taller this last year.

“Tom, you should have ridden out with me this morning!” he shouted. “God, how the land is producing!”

Tom smiled. “You should have called me, Pierce,” he replied. “I found you gone when I came down for breakfast. Bettina said you’d been gone an hour.”

“Oh well, I’ll let you be an invalid another month or two,” Pierce said indulgently. “Where’s Luce and the younguns? I’m starved clean to the bottom of me.”

“Lucinda has been sitting in the summerhouse,” Tom replied. He stood leaning against the door jamb. “Here comes Bettina with the children.”

Pierce turned and saw Bettina walking across the green lawns. She held a book in her hands, and the two boys were tugging at it. She stopped, and dropping on her knees she opened it, and they pored over it together.

“Queer how those two girls know their books,” he said. “I wonder who taught them.”

Tom did not answer and Pierce looked at him and saw what made him aghast. He had been trying not to think of it — but now Tom was well and it had better be said. Tom — Bettina! He felt suddenly sick.

“Reckon I’ll go and wash,” he said. “If you see Luce, tell her I’ll go straight to the dining room.”

“All right—” Tom’s voice was dreaming, and Pierce mounted the stairs on tiptoe. Did Lucinda know? Or was there anything to know? And what would he say to Tom? Nothing, probably! What a man did with a colored wench was his own business. Still — Tom! Here at Malvern!

He went into his dressing room and poured the water out of the jug into the ewer, and felt the blood suddenly begin to pound through his body. Tom was not at all the sort of fellow to take up with a wench. Damn Lucinda for bringing two such pretty girls into the house! Now there would be mulatto children running around, cousins to his own children, and nobody saying a word because nobody would dare.

“I shall ship that Bettina away,” he thought angrily. He scrubbed his hands and went down to the dining room and held his head very haughtily while his family gathered. Lucinda sat at the foot of the table and Tom at her right and the two boys opposite him. Pierce busied himself with his soup and then with carving the fowl. Lucinda asked him questions and he answered them. Yes, the wheat was very fine, as fine as the oats had been, and if the hot weather held the corn would be good, too. They were lucky.

“Then why are you so cross, Papa?” Martin asked.

Pierce cursed himself for not being able to hide his thoughts even from a child. “I have worries,” he said shortly.

They were all silent after that, and in silence they ate the green apple tart which was their dessert. He called for the new cheese and Georgia brought it to him, and he took it coldly from her. He would settle his house once for all.

Lucinda looked at him inquiringly when he rose.

“I wish you’d come into the office, Lucinda,” he said still coldly. “I have something to talk about with you.”

She followed him and Bettina came in for the children. He cast a swift look at her and imagined that under her gathered skirt her body swelled, and he grew deeply angry. How dared Tom do such a thing in this house!

He shut the office door firmly behind Lucinda and sat down at the desk and shuffled some papers. She sat down in the leather armchair which his father had brought over from London years ago for this very room.

“Well, Pierce?” she inquired.

Then he found himself unable to speak. The blood came up under his collar.

“Put down those papers,” she said. “Tell me what it is you have done.”

He put down the papers at once. “I haven’t done anything,” he said savagely. “It’s your own colored girl I want to talk about.”

“Georgia?”

“No, Bettina.”

Now he wished he had never begun. For it was not only Bettina of whom he must speak, but also his own brother. Instinctive loyalty beset him. Must he betray his own kind? Women never understood these things.

Lucinda’s face had grown sharp. “Pierce, what do you mean? Tell me this minute. What’s Bettina done?”

“Nothing that I know of. Probably just my imagination.”

But she knew him. The faint look of guilt that haunts a man’s face when he speaks to his wife of sex now haunted his and he was betrayed.

“Pierce Delaney, do you mean—”

He banged both fists on the table. “I don’t mean anything. I don’t know whatever got into me to think I had to tell you.”

But she pursued what she smelled as relentlessly as a cat pursues the scent of a mouse. “If I thought that Bettina could be carrying on right under my own eyes in my own house, I’d — I’d have her strapped. I don’t care how light-colored she is — she’s nothing but a nigger. What has she done? Why — why, Pierce, she hasn’t said anything to you?”

He sighed in a great gust. “Good God, no! Now I’ve got you started, I wish I hadn’t spoken.”

She forced him on. “Well, you have spoken, and you might just as well go on and tell me everything, because I’ll find out anyway.”

He now saw how slender was the proof of what he suspected. What had he seen? Nothing except such things as the look on Tom’s face when Bettina happened to be crossing the grass with the children.

“I haven’t seen a thing,” he protested, “not a living thing.”

“Pierce Delaney!” Lucinda screamed. “You stop!”

He began to sweat and he pulled out his silk handkerchief and mopped his forehead and his cheeks. “Well, nothing I could really say I saw,” he amended.

But she squeezed it out of him word by word and he told her.

“Maybe Tom was only smiling at the sunshine or something,” he groaned at last when he had faltered out his suspicion. “Maybe he was pleased because I said the crops were going to be good.”

“Oh, fiddle!” she cried, in such profound contempt that he felt allied to Tom as never before.

“Anyway, I certainly am not going to accuse my own brother,” he protested. “Not without some proof.”

“Pierce Delaney!” she said sternly. Her hands were clenched under her breasts. “You know as well as I do that you saw something or you wouldn’t have tried to tell me and then take it back. Whether you speak to Tom or not is just nothing. It’s I who will speak to Bettina.”

She rose, spread her skirts and floated out of the room like an outraged swan, and he groaned again and laid his head down on his arms and knew that he must go and warn his brother. For a moment even Malvern was filled with misery. Then suddenly he lifted his head. He had thought of escape. He Would go and find Georgia and warn her and she could warn Bettina, who would warn Tom. He jumped up, suddenly nimble at the thought of mercy for Tom, and went out into the hall.

At this hour of the day, where would Georgia be? In her room, maybe, in the attic, or maybe in the pantry, where Lucinda had said they took their fragmentary meals, standing at the tables. He walked softly through the halls toward the pantry. The front door was open as he passed and out on the lawn the children lay stretched on a blanket on the grass for their naps, while Joe sat near them, back against a tree, droning out a story. The air was still and hot and filled with noonday sleep. He opened the door to the pantry and saw no one. Beyond the door into the kitchen he heard the mumble of Annie’s voice complaining to her little slaveys, and he walked away again into the great front hall, and stood listening. Would Lucinda have found Bettina already? Where was Georgia?

He remembered that there was a winding little stair that went up out of the back porch and he walked there and began to mount it softly. It led, as he well remembered, straight past the second floor into the attic. When he had been a boy he had escaped his father’s wrath more than once by that stair, dragging little Tom after him by the wrist. Under the attic eaves they had hid until wrath was spent and they dared come down again. He had not climbed the stairs since he had first gone away to the university, the year before he was married. Now the steps creaked under his weight but he went on.

The door at the top was closed and he knocked softly.

Georgia’s voice called, “It’s not locked!”

He had a second’s wonder, “locked against whom?” and then he lifted the old-fashioned latch and looked in. She lay on the bed, dressed, but with her hair down and hanging over the pillow. At the sight of him she leaped up and gathered her hair together in one hand.

“Oh — I thought it was Bettina!” she gasped. Her cream-colored face went pale.

“Don’t be frightened, Georgia,” he said quickly. “I had to find you — I had to tell you. Look here, I say — please listen, Georgia, because I’ve got to tell you—”

She had her hair knotted now, looping the ends through without hairpins. “Yes, sir, please—”

“Your mistress thinks — she has an idea that there’s something going on between Bettina and my brother.”

Georgia’s very lips went pale. “How did she know?”

“Then there is something?”

“I can’t tell you, Master Pierce.”

Against his will he saw her black brows clear against her skin and the separate blackness of her long lashes set into her pale eyelids.

“I only wanted to warn you,” he said sternly. “I think Bettina ought to be prepared. It’s natural that her mistress can’t be pleased. I’m not pleased myself.”

Georgia’s dark eyes fell. Her narrow hands fluttered at her apron. “No, sir. I’m not pleased, either. I told Bettina so. And Bettina isn’t happy. She knows she can’t—” Georgia stopped.

He wanted to ask “Can’t what?” But his dignity would not allow him. He was in a dangerous place, and he wanted to be out of it.

“You had better find her and tell her,” he said severely.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, Master Pierce.”

He turned to the door abruptly and crept down the stair again. Once he wondered if the girl were staring after him and he turned and took a quick glance. But the door was shut.

He reached the back porch and then his office in safety and he opened a door in the panel and took out a decanter and a glass and drank deeply of wine. The smell of October grapes reminded him of the day when he had come home, he thought to peace at last. “God,” he muttered with bitterness, “what peace!” and drank again.

Upstairs in her own room Lucinda sat alone. She had come in, her skirts swirling, and had at once locked the door and sat down to think. Why she locked the door she did not know, but it was her first instinct. Now and then she locked it against Pierce in the night when she wanted to sleep, and in bed she lay wakened when she heard him turn the knob and find it locked and then curse and swear softly under his breath. He had learned that it was useless to call her. Nothing would persuade her to unlock the door after she had locked it. She would lie laughing into her pillow because she felt arrogant and powerful. She had a whip in her hand over Pierce, her husband, whom she loved.

She wanted the door locked now against him because she wanted to be alone. Her room was silent and safe, closing her in from everybody. She had made the room exactly what she liked, and somehow even during the war she had kept it so. The flowers on the carpet were clear against the deep white pile of the background. It had come from Paris, and it would last forever. Georgia cleaned it with cornmeal twice a year even when cornmeal was their only food. The dirty meal was given to the pigs so it was not all waste. But she would not have dared to let Pierce know.

So it was with the organdy curtains at the window. Somehow they were starched, even when there was no white bread. Georgia made the starch out of potatoes, long soaked.

She sat thinking and staring out of the window, and little darts of fear and premonition ran needling through her veins. She tried to ignore them. It was Tom, not Pierce. But Pierce had not been really angry with Tom. Pierce sided with Tom in his heart. Men stood together against women, and Pierce stood by Tom. She longed for a woman friend to talk with, a woman who would feel as she did against men, and made up her mind that she would ride over and visit with Molly MacBain. Maybe she would tell her and maybe she wouldn’t, but anyway it would be strengthening just to talk with a woman. When she came back she would decide about Bettina. She put aside an uneasy thought that maybe she ought not ride now that she was going to have a baby. Pierce would be cross with her about it. She had not ridden for a month — let him be cross, though! She wanted to disobey him. But she delayed decision, nevertheless, and went on thinking.

If she talked to Bettina it would set the girl up. Her own mother had never noticed her father’s mulatto children. They grew up in the servants’ quarters and everybody knew and nobody said anything. It was her father who had bought Georgia and Bettina and now that she thought of it she remembered how her mother had looked when he had come in and thrown down papers.

“I’ve brought you two likely house girls, Laura,” he had shouted.

Her anger against Bettina grew. Why, maybe even in her own mother’s house, her own father—

She began to cry softly. It was sadly hard to be a woman, so hard to hold her own when she had no real power at all and had to ask for everything she wanted, even new satin to cover the parlor furniture! She had to get what she wanted anyway she could. She thought of all the things she wanted. Every room in the house needed something new. Pierce didn’t understand that the house was her world, her place where she had to live. Men went out but women stayed at home and in the home they had to have new things sometimes or go crazy fretting and mending. She wiped her eyes and sighed and then got up suddenly and put on her grey riding habit and went downstairs, feeling sad and a little weak.

Out on the lawn Joe was waving a branch over the sleeping children and no one else was to be seen. She did not want to meet Pierce and she had a conviction that Bettina and Tom were together this very minute, probably up in his room. Bettina still came and went there. It made her physically sick to think of it, here where she lived, in her own home! She clenched her hands against her breast and thought of marching upstairs. But she did not. A woman had to think how to do a thing like that. Just to make a fuss wasn’t enough.

She went outside the open door and down the steps and Joe got to his feet. She motioned to him and he came softly across the grass.

“Tell Jake to bring a horse around quickly, and don’t wake the children.”

“Yassum,” Joe whispered. He went noiselessly away and she sat down on the bottom step and pulled her hat over her eyes to shade her skin from the sun. If she walked around the boys would wake out of sheer contrariness and she wanted to ride off by herself. Maybe she would go to see Molly. Maybe she wouldn’t. She just wanted the feeling of running away. If Pierce worried about her, let him be worried.

She saw Jake leading the horse and got up and went to meet him, so that the horse’s hooves would not clatter on the gravel. Joe stooped and she stepped into his hand and sprang into the side saddle and lifted her whip.

“If your master wants to know where I am, tell him I’ve gone for a ride and that’s all.”

“Yassum,” Joe said. He stood looking after her thoughtfully and scratching himself, his head, his armpits, the palms of his hands. “Reckon there’s some kinda ructions,” he mumbled to himself. He tiptoed back to the tree and looked down on the little sleeping boys. A small breeze had sprung up and he sniffed it. “Reckon it’ll keep off the flies,” he mumbled. He settled himself under the tree, his head on a root, folded his arms and dropped into instant sleep.

Upstairs in her room Georgia sat crying softly and waiting for Bettina. She was afraid of her younger sister, and yet the time had come when Bettina must tell her everything. If the two of them didn’t stand together, then what would happen? They had always told each other everything and had made their little world secure here in this room. But she knew Bettina had something hidden. Bettina didn’t talk any more. At night when they lay in bed where they used to talk, whispering so that nobody could hear, now only she talked, and Bettina lay listening and answering a word or two, and then lying awake. She knew Bettina lay awake, because in the night she heard her sigh.

“Honey, can’t you sleep?” Every night nearly she waked to ask the question.

“I can sleep after awhile, maybe,” Bettina answered.

In the morning she made excuses that the night air was hot or the moonlight too bright. But the real reason was that there was something always awake in Bettina nowadays. She couldn’t get to sleep any more, not the old deep sleep when they never even dreamed, because they were so tired when night came and morning came so quickly. And now she knew what it was in Bettina.

Still she did not come, and at last Georgia dared wait no longer, lest her mistress call and hear no answer. She washed her face and put on a fresh white cotton dress and went downstairs into the pantry and began to clean the silver.

In Tom’s room Bettina sat with her hands in her face, listening and shaking her head again and again while he talked. He still had to rest in the afternoon and she read to him to help him rest. But today he had begun talking and talking.

“Bettina, you’ve got to do what I say,” he insisted. “We can’t go on in the house like this. It’s horrible. It makes our — our relationship just like any — any—”

He tried to pull her hands away from her face and she struggled against him and then yielded suddenly and sat looking at him, her face all bare and quivering. They knew each other so well now. She knew him to the bottom of his soul. In the long hours when she had been caring for him he had told her everything, every suffering, every loneliness, from the pain of a younger brother growing up in this house, Pierce always the stronger and the handsomer and the more brilliant and the more loved, and he always second, to the agonies of the prison camp and the slow starvation of body and soul in the war.

And she had told him everything, too, and he knew what it was to be a woman like any other but inside a dark skin, and what it was to be a servant in this house and forever a servant somewhere. She told him of her mother and how her mother had taught Georgia and her to keep themselves apart and to cling always a little higher and nearer to the white people. But she did not tell him what her mother would have said now. Her mother had not known what it was to love a man so much that it no longer mattered that he was white. She had separated herself even from her mother because she loved Tom more than she loved herself.

“So I want you to marry me, Bettina,” Tom was saying, “and you’ll be my true wife.”

She was shaking her head again and he reached out his hands and took it between his palms and held it so that she could not shake it. “Yes, you will marry me,” he insisted. “The war was, fought so you could be free to marry me. It makes everything worth while to me — all I’ve been through. It makes me understand the good of suffering. We’re free to marry.”

“No, we’re not,” she said stubbornly.

They had been through all this before and would go through it again and she would always say no, over and over. For of course he couldn’t marry her. It would ruin him. He’d have to leave Malvern, and Pierce wouldn’t give him any money.

“Why not?” Tom demanded. He knelt in front of her and held her hands so that she could not cover her face again.

“The war didn’t change how people feel,” she said. “It’s how people feel that counts. They feel toward colored people just like they did before the war. Miss Lucie, she hasn’t changed. It doesn’t make any difference to her that Georgia and me get wages. She still thinks she owns us, I know.”

“But she doesn’t own you,” Tom said impatiently. “It’s your fault if you keep feeling she does.”

“I don’t feel she does,” Bettina said with patience. “What I’m saying is about her. You and she belong to the white people and I belong to the colored folks. She feels the colored folks still belong to the white people, and it don’t matter about the war or the law or anything so long as she feels that way and so long as you are white and I’m not. That feeling is going right on and the way she feels is the way she’s going to act, and she isn’t ever going to act like I was your wife, no matter if we marry, and if she don’t act that way, it won’t be that way, because she won’t let it.”

“Good God, Bettina, Lucinda isn’t everybody!” Tom cried.

“She’s like everybody,” Bettina said simply. She gazed at him sadly and smiled.

But he would not accept the smile. “You don’t love me enough,” he complained.

“I love you enough to have the baby and if you want more, I love you enough for any more,” she replied.

He groaned. “But what are we going to do? We can’t stay here—”

“You can stay here,” she said steadily. “And you can find me a little house somewhere near enough and there I’ll live, and you can come whenever you can. It’ll be my life.”

He was not strong enough for her. He bent his head on her knees and she laid her cheek against the back of his head.

“It’ll be a happy life for me,” she whispered. “Happy enough—”

Lucinda’s horse was tied to the fence and she and Molly were talking upstairs in the bedroom. She had decided suddenly that she would go and see Molly MacBain because she was disturbed by a thought which had come to her as she was cantering through the woods along the Malvern stream. Pierce had made a path for horses along the stream before the war and had ordered it cleared as soon as he came home, but she had not ridden along it until today.

“Maybe the war has really changed things,” this was the dreadful thought. “Maybe colored women aren’t any more just — property. Maybe Tom can really marry Bettina — legally!”

She had touched the horse with her whip and had decided to go and talk everything over with Molly.

“Honey, how glad I am to see you!” Molly had cried. “John’s gone to Wheeling and I’m all alone and lonesome.”

They had begun by blackberry wine and cookies on the porch and then Molly had taken her through the house and here in the bedroom, where no one was near, Lucinda had told her.

“Molly, I surely do need your help, honey,” she had said abruptly, sinking down on the window seat.

Molly had listened avidly.

“Tom has taken up with my girl Bettina,” Lucinda said.

“You don’t tell!” Molly breathed. “Why, when did it happen?”

“I shouldn’t have let her have the nursing of him, I reckon,” Lucinda said.

“You mean — there’s a baby?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know how far it’s gone,” Lucinda replied. “Of course if it’s begun, a baby will be the end of it and maybe half a dozen. It’s so sickening — not that I care about either of them, Molly. But what bothers me is whether Tom could make it legal.”

Molly looked puzzled. “Make what legal, honey?”

“I mean really — marry Bettina,” Lucinda said. She flushed with embarrassment. It sounded silly even to imagine such things.

Molly began to laugh. “Honey, whoever heard of a white man marryin’ a nigger?”

“Things are so queer now,” Lucinda said defensively. “It would be just — dangerous — for ladies like us — if colored wenches could be married — why, we wouldn’t have anything left — none of us would be safe in our own houses—”

“Now, honey, stop your foolishness,” Molly cried. “Men don’t marry women they can get without marryin.

The two women looked at one another. Each remembered the teaching of their mothers. “If Bettina’s given herself,” Molly went on; “what is there she can make him marry her for now?”

Lucinda smiled. The worry rolled from her mind.

“Maybe it’s a mercy that things have gone so far,” she said cheerfully. “Thank God, it’s not Pierce! But it’s still sickening. Molly, what do you suppose is the matter with men?”

She was a little shocked by the greedy interest in Molly’s blue eyes. Molly’s red lips were parted and she wet them.

“So long as it isn’t your Pierce, it isn’t so bad,” Molly agreed. She felt hotness creeping up her back, and her eyelids fluttered before Lucinda’s surprised look. “Men are — well, just that way,” she said. She patted both sides of her fluffy red hair. “We have to put up with them, Lucinda.” Then she laughed. “Maybe God felt sorry for women and gave us a little whip of our own to do the drivin’ with!”

She felt relieved to laugh because Lucinda was staring at her so hard. She considered telling Lucinda in return about John and how he was wounded and then decided she would not. She had a whip over John, too. John was afraid all the time. Poor old John! “What does Pierce say?” she inquired.

Lucinda shrugged. “Oh Pierce—”

“He can’t approve?” Molly cried.

“Oh, he doesn’t approve,” Lucinda said impatiently, “but after all, Tom is his brother — and when you come right down to it, men are all the same about that one thing, Molly.”

Molly laughed again, her eyes shining. She put out her soft plump white hand on Lucinda’s slender one. “Honey if I were you, I just wouldn’t pay any mind to it. I’d just live as though the whole thing was beneath my notice. That’s the way ladies have always done, you know, and it’s the best way. My own mother used to say that we had to realize men have a lower nature and the less it was noticed, the better.”

Lucinda drew her hand away gently. “I do believe you’re right, Molly,” she said with gratitude. “So long as you don’t think harm could come of it … It isn’t like it was before the war, you know. I get to worrying for fear Bettina would be uppity.”

“I wouldn’t notice anything,” Molly said smoothly. “If she gets uppity I would just send her away like a servant. There’s that good thing out of the war — you can send ’em away.”

“You could sell them before,” Lucinda reminded her. “I wouldn’t like to lose Georgia, and if Bettina went, Georgia would probably want to go, too. We’d lose two good house girls without getting a penny for them, though Papa could have sold them for a thousand dollars apiece. I know, because Mama scolded him so, when we didn’t need them. It isn’t fair, do you think, Molly? I mean, for that poor white in Washington just to write a few lines and say that your property isn’t your property!”

“I’m glad he was killed,” Molly said simply.

They rose, feeling, that everything had been said and decided, and went downstairs, their arms about one another like girls.

Lucinda kissed Molly when she went away. “You have certainly made me feel better,” she said. “I’m going home and I’m not going to speak of it again, not to Pierce or anybody.”

“I’m sure that’s best, honey,” Molly replied.

She looked at Lucinda a moment and then laughed. “Why do you stay way out here in the country, honey? We’re goin’ to Wheeling, John and me.”

Lucinda looked at her, speechless. “Why, Molly, leave your own house?”

Molly’s eyes flitted restlessly about the room. “I feel to change. I’d like to travel. I tell John he’s just got to get rich. Honey, he’s goin’ into the railroad.”

“Railroad!” Lucinda cried. She thought of the smoking, puffing, bell-topped little engine that ran choking and spluttering westward from Baltimore. “I don’t see how that’ll make him rich,” she declared.

“Railroads are goin’ to grow,” Molly said firmly. “We’ve borrowed money and bought stock—”

Lucinda felt a jealous envy of possible riches. She hid it behind her pretty smile.

“I certainly do hope you will get what you want, Molly dear,” she said. She rose as she spoke and brushed Molly’s red cheek with the palm of her hand. “Of course, I have the boys. Pierce would kill me if I didn’t let them be brought up at Malvern — and I’ve a girl here under my belt.”

She pressed her wrist. A flicker in Molly’s eyes made her suddenly smile. “Goodbye, honey!” she said and tripped away.

So meditating, Lucinda rode home through the mild evening air. An instinctive resolution was growing within her. She would say nothing at all about Bettina, not to Pierce, not to Tom, and not even to Bettina herself. She would ignore the whole matter, as generations of women before her had ignored the doings of their men. After all, Tom was only a brother-in-law. Sooner or later he might even be leaving Malvern. There was no use upsetting her house over Tom. Besides, she wanted to think about railroads. Why should Molly MacBain be rich?

When her horse ambled into the yard again, she smiled at the two boys who ran to greet her.

“Is your papa home yet?” she asked.

“He ain’t come,” Martin said.

“Don’t say ain’t,” she commanded him. She handed the reins to Joe, who came forward scratching himself. “You surely are going to have to start some schooling, Martin … Joe, have you got fleas?”

“No’m, I hope I don’t,” Joe answered grinning. “But maybe I has,” he added, and led the horse away. “I’m liable,” he muttered. “I shore am liable. Until there’s soap again, fleas take advantage.”

But Lucinda was walking toward the house, her long riding habit sweeping the grass, a hand on the shoulder of each son. She felt strong and clear for the future. The ride had not hurt her, and she would not even tell Pierce she had taken it.

When Pierce came home that night he found his house quiet, his children cleaned and fed their supper and ready for bed. Tom was outstretched on the long chair on the terrace, and opposite him, in the calmest of moods, Lucinda sat on a garden seat. The sun had set and a pure light flowed over the landscape.

Pierce approached, aware suddenly of the beauty of the scene, and warmth welled up in his heart. If things were quiet, it meant that Lucinda had decided to keep them so. He drew near, his intuition alert. Lucinda turned up her face for his kiss. He smelled a faint perfume upon her skin, and beneath his eyes hers were calm. Yes, she was all right. She was in a good mood. God knew why, after the fuss she had made after luncheon, but he was grateful. Maybe she had talked with Tom and they had decided something. He glanced at Tom.

“Hello, Tom,” he said. “You’re looking well enough to be your old self.”

“I feel well, at last,” Tom replied.

“The children are waiting for you to kiss them good night, Pierce,” Lucinda reminded him.

“I’ll go upstairs,” he said. He was bewildered by the utter peace, but he was too grateful for it to speak of it. He went upstairs slowly and turned into the nursery. Georgia was there with the boys, reading to them while they lay on their stomachs, listening. She ceased when he came in, and the boys shouted to her to go on.

But she rose and stood waiting, her eyes fixed on Pierce’s face. He saw her eyes, doubtful and defensive, and looked away.

“Tell your father good night,” she said in her soft voice. The boys rose and jumped up and clung to his legs and he leaned to them and kissed them, and then, his arms on their shoulders, he looked at her again, and made up his mind to be completely casual. “Had you a chance to talk to Bettina?” he inquired.

“No, sir,” Georgia said simply. “We’ve both been busy. Tonight, I’ll ask her, sir.”

“Good,” he said heartily. He looked down at his two sons. “How’d you like me to find you a pony?” he inquired.

They screamed their joy at him and he promised. Then as he went to the door, Martin called after him, “What’s school, Papa?”

“Who said school?” he asked.

“Mama said I need to go to school.”

“So you do,” Pierce replied.

“Then I could ride the pony to go,” Martin said.

“So you could,” Pierce agreed.

He went to his own room and changed his clothes into the semiformal garments that Lucinda required of menfolk in her house at dinner. The coat was tight. Outdoor life had thickened him. Must he struggle into the coat? To think he had a son old enough to go to school! Only, there were no schools! A tutor, he supposed, must be found, unless Tom wanted to teach the boys. The idea struck him as a happy one. Tom would make a good schoolmaster. Yes, it would give him something to do, take him out of the house.

He had one of his waves of simple happiness. The mellowness of the light in his room, the comfort of his bed and chair, the cleanliness of floors and walls and white curtains at the window, the reality of his home all conspired to make his mood. No, hang it, he would not disturb all this for a fancy that Tom had for Bettina. He tied his stock and ran lightly down the stairs, and at the sound of his step Lucinda and Tom rose and met him in the hall and they went into the oval dining room, she between the two of them.

That night after Lucinda had gone upstairs he turned to Tom. They had come into the drawing room after a pleasantly satisfactory dinner. The windows stood open to the terrace, and Lucinda had played her harp for them. He had watched her white hands on the strings and had admired her head in profile as she leaned it against the gilded frame. All his love for her had surged into his heart and melted his mind. In spite of her pregnancy her figure in its full skirt still looked graceful. She was a beautiful woman and he was proud of her. She plucked the strings and broke into occasional song. Her voice was light and musical, and he loved to hear her sing. He had a vision of himself, a happy man in a happy home, this pretty woman his wife, bearing his children. Such homes as his were the foundation of the re-established union in the nation.

When at last she had risen to leave them he went with her to the door and kissed her hand and watched her go upstairs. She paused on the landing and looked back at him and smiled, and so easily was his sense of romance stirred that even though he knew well enough that she saw herself in every act she did, yet he admired the picture she made.

He went back into the room and sat down and lit his pipe. “This autumn, thank God, we’ll have real tobacco of our own again,” he said to Tom. “But I never plant much, you know — it’s greedy stuff on the land.”

“It’s a wonder what you’ve done to Malvern already,” Tom said. He lay back in his chair lazily, not looking at Pierce. Outside the window the mountains were black against a dark and starlit sky. The light of the new oil lamps in the room was dim, for Lucinda had turned them down when she began to play.

He was thinking about Bettina. Should he tell Pierce what they had decided to do? He made up his mind that he would. He hated the thought of deception and hiding.

“Pierce,” he said.

“Well?” Pierce’s eyes, gleaming over his pipe, were suddenly aware.

Tom sat up. “I want to tell you something—”

“All right, Tom.”

“I suppose you know I’ve fallen in love with Bettina.”

Pierce drew hard on his pipe and blew out the smoke. “You don’t fall in love with a colored wench, Tom!”

“I’ve fallen in love with Bettina,” Tom said firmly. “I want to marry her.”

Pierce put his pipe down and faced his brother. “You can’t marry her, Tom.”

“I can, but she won’t have me,” Tom said.

“You mean you’ve proposed to her — as if she were—”

“I proposed to her, and she refused me,” Tom said stubbornly.

Pierce laughed loudly. “Good God, Tom! Then she’s got better sense than you!”

Tom gazed gravely at his brother’s laughing face. “To me, it’s the same as marriage,” he said in his even quiet voice. “I’ve told her so. I’m going to get a house for us to live in, Pierce.”

Pierce stopped laughing suddenly. “Tom, you can get a house for her, but you can’t live in it.”

“Yes, I can.”

“Not if you’re my brother,” Pierce said sternly. “Tom, for God’s sake, think of our family and the children!”

“I’m thinking of Bettina and myself,” Tom said in the same unchanging voice. “This is what I fought the war for, Pierce — so that I could marry Bettina.”

“You fool, you didn’t even know Bettina till you came home!”

“Nevertheless, it was for her I fought.” Pierce looked at his brother’s face. It was still the face of the little boy who had been his stubborn follower. Nothing would make Tom different, not even growing into manhood. He was stubborn to the bone.

“Well, Tom, there’s not a thing I can do about it,” he said, “except turn you out of the house and disown you as my brother.”

They looked at one another. “All right, Pierce,” Tom said.

They parted and Pierce went upstairs, and Tom went out on the terrace and paced up and down. Far up in the top of the house a dim light burned. It was in Bettina’s room, but he could not go up to it. In this house she was beyond his reach. He could only take her away.

In the attic room Georgia was crying softly.

“I don’t see how I can stay here all alone, sister.” But she was sobbing quietly lest she be heard downstairs.

Bettina sat on a box by the window, her cheeks on her hands, staring out into the tangled branches of the ancient trees that leaned against the house. “I never thought I’d love any man so much that I wouldn’t marry him,” she said. “Mother didn’t know what love was, Georgy. She told us to go quick with the whitest man we could get to ask us. Well, I’ve found the whitest man in the world, and he wants to marry me and I won’t let him—”

Georgia stopped crying and looked at Bettina sadly. “I wouldn’t know what to do with such love as that,” she said.

“I have to give in to it, because I know I can’t live without him,” Bettina went on, “but I don’t have to let it hurt him, and I never will.”

She had paid no heed to Georgia’s weeping. Georgia’s face took on a look of awe. Bettina was far away from her, in some world she did not understand. She was left alone behind. Her lips trembled again but she wiped her eyes and stopped crying. She sighed and rose and let down her long hair and began to comb it.

“Mother always said we were as good as anybody,” she said.

“We are, but it doesn’t make any difference, if other people don’t think so,” Bettina replied. “Anyway, I’m not thinking of us.”

“Will you tell her you’re going?” Georgia asked.

“No, I shall just go,” Bettina said.

“What’ll I say if she asks me?”

“She won’t ask you.”

“You mean she’ll pretend she doesn’t notice?”

“She’ll know, but she won’t say a word.”

“How do you know that, Bettina?”

“I know her.”

Georgia put down the comb and braided the thick waving mass down her back.

“When are you going, sister?”

“Tomorrow, honey, I’m going to move into Millpoint. There’s a little brick house there. I’ve seen it when we go to church. It’s been empty this long while. I’ve saved all my wages.”

“Does—he know?”

“No, he doesn’t. I’m going myself. I don’t want him to know when I go nor where. I want him to say he doesn’t know a thing about me. Maybe she’ll ask him, and that’s what I want him to say. But if he asks you, you can tell him.”

They undressed in silence and climbed into bed together and suddenly Bettina clung to Georgia. “I know I’m right,” she whispered. “I’m right — but tell me I am!”

Searching for words to comfort her Georgia laid hold on truth. “You’re free anyway, Bettina. If you don’t like it you can always move on.”

Bettina’s hold relaxed. “I hadn’t thought of that, Georgy — it’s true. If I don’t like it, nobody can hold me.”

They fell asleep, their arms wrapped about one another as they had slept always since childhood.

Lucinda knew before the day had begun that Bettina had left the house. She knew by the look on Georgia’s face. Georgia came into the big bedroom in the morning, tiptoeing, drawing a blind against the sun, glancing at the bed, opening the drawers softly to fetch clean garments.

“Why do you keep looking at me?” Lucinda asked sharply from behind closed eyelids.

“I’m not sure if you’re awake, ma’am,” Georgia answered, in the softest of voices.

Lucinda did not speak again. But she heard Georgia go into the boys’ room and call them and help them wash and dress. That was Bettina’s work. Bettina was gone!

She sat up in bed, smiling, listening. It was much the best way, of course. If Bettina had run away, it would save trouble. But she would not ask a word. It gave her tremendous power to know and to say nothing. If she said nothing, no one would know how much she knew. Let them wonder why she did not speak.

She called across the hall through the half-open door, “Don’t bother with those great boys, Georgia — they’re big enough to take care of themselves. They don’t need anybody.”

There was a pause and then Georgia’s voice answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

A moment later she was back again. “Shall I bring up your breakfast, ma’am?” Her cream colored face was flushed and her eyes were miserable, but she held herself very straight.

“No, I’m coming down,” Lucinda said briskly. She tossed back the covers, and slipped from the high bed to the floor. “Go on away,” she commanded, “I don’t want anybody either — it’s too nice a day. I’m going to dress in a hurry.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Georgia seemed to drift from the room and Lucinda shut the door, smiling.

The day was shining bright, the air so clear that the Alleghenies rose like alps against the brilliant sky. Tom was restless with new life. He felt completely and finally well at last. He had waked and felt himself strong enough for anything, strong enough to beat down Bettina’s fears and leave Malvern forever. He wanted to be free of Malvern and free of his family. They’d go away somewhere, he and Bettina, and start for themselves — change their names, maybe! Let Pierce keep the name of Delaney, if he wanted it. He’d take Bettina’s name. No, they’d take a name for themselves that no one had ever borne.

By mid-morning he knew that Bettina was not in the house. Never before had so many hours passed without their meeting somewhere, in a passageway or a corner of the garden, or in his own room which she came to make neat. He waited there until long past the hour for the making of his bed. Then he went out and lingered about the halls until he saw Georgia steal in swiftly and he came back and caught her spreading his sheets. He closed the door and leaned against it.

“Where is Bettina?” he demanded.

Georgia looked at him with sadness in her dark eyes. “She’s gone to Millpoint,” she said simply. “You’ll find her in that little brick house we pass on the way to church — that is, if so be she was able to rent it.”

“We can’t live in Millpoint,” he said sharply.

“No, sir, but she can,” Georgia replied. She went on spreading the sheets, tucking in the corners hard and square, making his bed. He watched her an instant then turned and went out to the stables, saddled his mare and cantered down the road to Millpoint.

He knew the road as he knew the palm of his own hand. Every Sunday of his childhood he and Pierce and their parents had driven over it in the carriage, on the way to church and home again. He knew the brick house. It had belonged to a widow, a seamstress who had come to Malvern every spring to mend and sew the dresses the house women wore. His mother had never trusted her own gowns to Minnie Walley. Old Walley was a poor white farmer up in the hills from Malvern, but his daughter had bettered herself and they had all called her Miss Minnie instead of just Minnie. When she died the house had belonged to nobody, he supposed. He did not know when she had died — during the war, maybe. It seemed to him she had been there always.

He found Bettina behind shut doors, scrubbing the floors of a small sitting room. There was still furniture in the house, Miss Minnie’s furniture, plain deal stuff except for a fine rosewood sewing table by the fireplace.

Bettina was on her hands and knees, and she sat back on her heels when he came in. He closed the door and stared down at her.

“We can’t live here,” he said abruptly.

“I can live here,” she said sweetly.

“Where you live, I’ll live,” he said.

“No, Tom,” she replied. Her red lips were firm and stubborn.

“Do we have to go over all this again?” he demanded.

“No, Tom.”

“But you’ve run away from me!” he cried.

“Only run away from the big house,” she corrected him.

“Who says you can live here?” he asked.

“I can rent it for five dollars a month. I went up to Walley’s place and her son is there — home from the war without his leg. He’s glad to have the cash.”

“You haven’t five dollars a month,” he said cruelly.

She clasped him about the waist as he stood before her.

“You’re going to give me the money, dear love,” she said. “You’re going to house me and feed me and clothe me, because I’m your own. But I won’t marry you, for it would be wrong. I’ll live with you forever but I’ll not marry you and bring you down in the world to where I was born. I’ll kill myself before I do that, Tom.”

He groaned because she was so beautiful and so wise and because she was stronger than he.

“You’re going to stay at the big house and claim your birthright, my darling,” she said.

He stared down at her, his heart cold in his breast. “You deny me a home of my own. I shall have to live in my brother’s house all my life.”

She let her hands slide down his thighs and his legs and she bent until she was crumpled at his feet. “It was such bad luck for you to love me,” she mourned. “Bad, bad luck, my darling — I ought never to have let you love me.” She lifted her face, “Tom, promise me something?”

“Why should I, when you will promise me nothing?”

“Promise me, my dear—”

“Well, maybe—”

“If ever you see the white lady you could marry, dear heart — promise me you’ll marry her.”

“I’ll never marry, Bettina—”

Then for the first time she broke into weeping. “Oh me, oh me—” she wept.

But she did not weep for long. She wiped her eyes on the skirt of her blue homespun dress and tried to smile. “It’s noon, and I haven’t any food for you fit to eat—”

“What have you for yourself?” he asked.

“Some bread and milk. But some day soon I’ll have chickens, Tom, and fresh eggs for you — maybe a cow — and a little garden. You’ll see — but not today, my dear.”

“I’m not hungry—”

He stared about the disordered house, and wondered bleakly if he really were in love. And she caught the bewilderment in his eyes and begged him to go away.

“Go home, Tom darling. Come back when I’m all settled. Give me a couple of days, darling, and then see if there isn’t a fire blazing in the stove and something cooking, and a clean soft bed and a chair for your own. Tom, lucky the house is back from the road and the lilacs are so high. You don’t even need to come down the main road, my love — look, there’s a winding path along the little stream at the back — Deep Run, they call it.”

She coaxed and pushed him to the back door on the pretext of showing him the stream and suddenly he found himself outside and he heard the bar drawn, and then she opened the door quickly again lest he feel shut out.

“Come back to me day after tomorrow, in the evening, after the sun has set,” she said softly. She smiled her sad and brilliant smile and closed the door again. And he went soberly back to Malvern.

Pierce was on the terrace sipping brandy and water. He had had a long talk with Lucinda. That is, he had sat listening to her for well over an hour, emitting cries of astonishment from time to time at what she told him and declaring that it was asking too much of him when she forbade him to say one word to Tom about Bettina’s running away.

“Damn you, Luce, the fellow’s my brother, after all! I talk about everything with Tom.”

“You’ll talk us all into a peck of trouble if you talk with him about this,” she counseled him. She looked so dainty as she sat in the shade of a pear tree that overhung the terrace, that he could have picked her up in his arms and squeezed her, except that nothing, he knew, would make her more furious. She became violently angry if, when she was dressed for the day, he disturbed the fastidious perfection of her gown and hair.

“There’s a time for all things, as the Bible says, Pierce!” she would cry at him.

Once he had exclaimed with violence, “Hang the Bible, Luce — you’re always bringing it up against me!” She was then genuinely and deeply shocked.

“Pierce! You aren’t a fit father for our children if you speak so about the Holy Bible!”

“The Bible’s all right in church, Luce — or on Sundays, but to lug it into our daily affairs—”

“Pierce, hush — and I mean it!” she had cried, stamping her foot.

He was continually bewildered by her genuine reverence for all the conventions of religion and her extraordinary ability to act swiftly with complete disregard for common morals when she felt inclined. She lied easily, laughing at herself and at him when he was shocked.

“But, Luce,” he had complained, after hearing her tell a neighbor’s wife that he was going to run for governor. “You know I haven’t any idea of going into politics. I wouldn’t demean myself.”

“Well, she was boasting so,” Lucinda said calmly.

“But it’s a lie, Luce,” he went on, “and I shall have to deny it — it’ll he talked about everywhere.”

Lucinda had laughed loudly. “Nobody’ll know whether you will or you won’t,” she said triumphantly. “They’ll watch you and wonder and be afraid maybe you will and they’ll be polite because they won’t know.”

“But to lie—” he had repeated feebly.

“Oh, hush up, Pierce,” she had said rudely. “Men do much worse things than lie, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know what,” but he had sputtered and turned red and subsided when she became hysterical with scornful laughter.

This morning after protesting he had subsided again, half-convinced that maybe she was right about Tom and that to talk about the affair with Bettina was to make it too important. He sat ruminating and idle on the terrace, putting off his riding about the farm, listening to her. Like most women she kept on talking after she had really finished everything she had to say. He let his mind wander. Then suddenly he was drawn back to attention by her changing the subject completely.

“And, Pierce, anyway, you aren’t going to just sit here at Malvern all our lives and play at farming.”

He came out of his vague reflections made up of pleasure in the warm sunshine, the safety of home and the beauty of the hills rolling away from the house, and a vague secret envy of Tom in his new romance with a beautiful female creature. In the heart of his own life he wanted romance — with Lucinda, of course. “Playing!” he shouted.

“Well, you’re not a farmer, Pierce Delaney,” Lucinda said.

“Well, I just am, Luce,” he said. “I don’t see myself living anywhere but at Malvern. Besides, what would I do?”

“Of course well live at Malvern, dummy,” Lucinda said with impatience. “But we can’t get rich on Malvern.”

“Who wants to get rich?” he inquired.

“I do,” Lucinda declared.

“On what, pray?”

She looked so pretty that he was charmed and amused by her audacity. Had she been tall and vigorous he would have been angered by it. But she was tiny, a toy of a woman, and he could never take her with full seriousness.

She leaned forward, held her breath an instant and then blew it out.

“Railroads!” The word came from her lips like a rainbow bubble.

He had been walking about lazily but now he sat down.

“Tell me, pray, just what you know about railroads,” he said.

“You can get rich on them,” she said confidently.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because John MacBain is going to get rich that way — Molly told me so.”

“Molly been here?” he asked abruptly.

She looked at him, and decided to tell. “I rode over there, and we talked and she told me.”

“You rode! When?”

“When you made me so mad—”

“Mad! I’m mad at you now—” he was suddenly swept with fury at her. “Lucinda, what right have you to risk the life of our child — my child?”

She smiled at him radiantly and stood up and put her hand on his lips. “Hush — you know how I am when I’m mad.”

The touch of her small fragrant palm against his lips made his knees weak. “But, Luce, darling — when I’ve got home and everything is perfect again—”

“I won’t any more — I won’t — I promise, Pierce.”

She knew the time had come for capitulation and she leaned against him and sighed and clung to him, and he lifted her and carried her into the house and put her on a couch.

“You’re tired,” he scolded her. “Now you lie there and rest, and don’t you get up until I say so.” He lifted his head and bellowed “Georgia!”

Georgia came into the room as softly as a shadow.

“Fetch your mistress a half glass of sherry.”.

“Yes, sir—”

She had been sewing. A thimble was on her finger but she slipped it into her pocket and went away.

“You behave yourself—” Pierce said sternly to his wife upon the couch.

Lucinda looked at him with meekness, well aware of her outstretched beauty. “I will,” she whispered. But he saw mischief playing about her lips and he dropped to his knees and kissed her hard.

“Oh you damned little Luce!” he muttered.

They heard the clop-clop of horses’ hoofs and she gave him a push.

“Tom’s coming,” she murmured. “Go on out and meet him. And Pierce, mind you don’t say a thing—”

He went out, committed to her demand, and sat down on the terrace and took up his half-finished glass. A wasp had fallen into it and he cursed it, and flung the drink away.

Ten minutes later he heard himself use Lucinda’s very words. They came out of his mouth as though they were his own. “Tom, I’ve been thinking — I believe the best way to get rich is railroads in this new state.”

He said the words not because he cared about being rich or about railroads but because he saw misery in Tom’s face and weariness in his eyes and he knew that whether Lucinda was right or wrong, he would not speak of Bettina because he did not want to speak of her. Tom’s heart had turned down a dead end.

Tom did not look at him. He felt in his pockets for his short English pipe and answered out of sheer necessity to say something, anything, that was meaningless. “Railroads?”

He found the pipe and lit it, and sank down on the marble step at the top of the shallow long steps leading from terraces to the garden. “I was wondering if you wanted to be a schoolmaster,” Pierce said, with forced cheerfulness. “Maybe you’d like railroad business.” He saw Joe rounding a corner of the house and yelled at him.

“Here you, Joe, bring me another whiskey and water, boy!”

Joe shambled over to him and took his glass and Pierce cleared his throat and went on talking, because there had to be talk. “We have to get a school started somehow — the boys are getting to the place where they must be taught. But I’m no schoolteacher, God knows, and maybe you’re not. Lucinda put this railroad business into my head this morning, and though she doesn’t know anything, still, like most women, she hits on things at times.”

“I thought you were going to be a gentleman farmer,” Tom said absently. He was still seeing Bettina at his feet. Even there she had looked lovely and proud and not abased. Her body was straight and slender and soft.

“Well, Malvern isn’t going to make us a lot of money,” Pierce said frankly. “And Lucinda’s set her heart on a lot of things — so have I, for that matter. We want the best — why not?”

“Why not?” Tom echoed. His blonde reddish hair stirred in the wind, and he narrowed his blue eyes against the sun and lifted them to the mountains.

“You want to go into it with me, Tom?” Pierce inquired. All his life he had moved swiftly on an idea, either to accept or reject it. Now that he had made Lucinda’s thought his own, he felt it was a good one.

“I don’t think so,” Tom said slowly. “No, I believe I’d rather be a schoolmaster than a railroad man, Pierce. You wouldn’t bring a railroad near Malvern, I hope?”

They were both talking and talking, burying deep inside themselves the thing they were thinking about.

“I hope not,” Pierce said heartily. Joe was back again with his whiskey and water. “You tell Jake to have my horse saddled after lunch,” he ordered.

“Yassuh,” Joe said, and dragged himself away again.

Pierce watched him go. “Malvern will never make money if the help doesn’t move faster than Joe,” he said. Yes, railroads were a good idea. So were schools.

“We could start an academy right here in Malvern,” he said abruptly. “Why not? Take the garçonnerie there — we can throw a couple of rooms together, and make a real schoolroom. Martin and Carey will be your first two pupils. Levassie will send his boys and the Richards their three—”

Tom shook himself. “It’ll have to be for everybody’s boys if I teach it,” he said abruptly.

Pierce was disposed to be pleasant about everything except the one thing about which they must not speak. “Surely,” he said, “why not? A small tuition fee, and anybody can pay. I won’t charge you rent, schoolmaster.”

They stole looks at one another and a bell rang softly from inside the house and both men rose quickly, relieved that the talk was over. Then Tom was moved to truth.

“I suppose you know Bettina has moved to Millpoint,” he said. His mouth was as dry as ashes as soon as he had spoken.

“The less I know about that the better,” Pierce said.

“But I want you to know,” Tom insisted, out of his dry mouth.

“Well, you’ve told me,” Pierce said abruptly. They moved together and side by side they entered the house. Pierce clapped Tom’s shoulder heartily. “There’s a whole life to be lived without women, Tom,” he said. “The sooner you know it the better.”

Tom smiled and did not answer.

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