Chapter Four

PIERCE DELANEY LOOKED DOWN the long table loaded with silver and fruits and flowers. He sat at one end and John MacBain at the other in the immense dining room of the mansion in Wheeling which had belonged to the Morgans and now belonged to the MacBains. At John’s right Lucinda lifted her blonde head. The fairness of her hair had not dulled in the ten years since Sapphira had been born — Sally, Pierce called her. There had been two others after her, his third son, and then last year, the baby. The light shone down from the great crystal chandeliers and Lucinda’s piled curls gleamed softly. She had rouged her cheeks a very little. He did not approve of it, and yet he had not the heart to reproach her when the touch of color added so much to her calm beauty. She was still slender. At his own right Molly MacBain leaned her elbows on the table. Her arms were bare and white and her elbows dimpled. He knew just how those dimples were placed in the outer curve of the smooth flesh but still the knowledge did not disturb him. His eyes rested with secure pleasure on her rosy face and bright black eyes.

“You’re prettier, than you were ten years ago, Molly,” he said genially.

She laughed at him. “I’ve never been quite pretty enough for you, Pierce,” she said frankly. “But it don’t matter to me as much as it did. Look at John — he’s like a hen ready to lay an egg! That means it’s time for the speech-making.”

Up and down the long table the faces of men and women turned reluctantly toward John MacBain. He had grown heavy and somber in the last ten years and his head was bald. Now he rose under the waiting eyes and stood an instant, gathering them into his power. They submitted, half amused, but a sigh, like the breath of a slow summer breeze, rose and died down. Here and there a pretty woman turned unwillingly from the man with whom she was talking and silence fell.

Pierce looked with affection and amusement at his old friend. Ten years ago he had taken the train to Wheeling in search of John. He had done it for Malvern’s sake. The hungry acres had eaten and drunk his money and were draining him. He knew that if he were to complete his dream and leave the inheritance as a great estate to his sons he would have to find money elsewhere. Malvern was repaying him richly now, thanks to his railroad shares. In less than a year he had repaid John’s loan, and he had insisted on high interest.

This was John’s dinner, John’s house, John MacBain, the vice-president of the greatest railroad in the East. When the president died, John might become president. Pierce was only half listening to the earnest heavy voice. He had heard scores of John’s after dinner speeches, and he always made the same halts between sentences.

“I am grieved to state that our president is not able to be with us this evening,” John was saying. “You may be sure only the most important affairs could have prevented him from taking the chairmanship here at this dinner of the Board of Directors and their ladies, at which I make a report on the new eight-wheel passenger engine of the 2-6-0 type. This engine, number 600, is the largest of the passenger locomotives in this country, and—”

“Oh dear — he’s off on engines,” Molly whispered to Pierce. Their eyes met, laughing. He was occasionally secretly astonished that in the years he had been John’s partner in the railroad business, he had not yielded to Molly. There had been times when he might have yielded to her in a mingled pity for her life and the fullness of his own vitality, and remembering always that John would have said nothing. It had been a temptation again and again. Had Lucinda ever denied herself to him, he might have taken revenge with Molly. But Lucinda, always silent, never denied him anything any more, even when the two younger children were born within three years. His dear little Sally was worth the sapphires hundreds of times over.

“You’re mine,” Pierce declared often to this his favorite child. “I bought you from your mama the first time I saw you.”

“Tell me how it was,” Sally always demanded with relish at the thought of her immense cost.

“Your mama sent me word that she had just finished you, down to the last little fingernail, and would I please come and see how I liked you. So I went into Mama’s room and Georgia brought you in, and you wore a long white dress. I looked at you and I thought you would do. So I said, ‘Well, here’s a pair of sapphire earrings for her two blue eyes, and a sapphire brooch for the rest of her.’”

Lucinda, wearing the sapphires at this moment, caught his eyes and smiled at him. He was aware of her cool and watchful smile whenever he and Molly sat together, and he smiled back at her.

It was one of Lucinda’s qualities never to utter her suspicions of him. But he could feel them, nevertheless. He retaliated by an amused silence equally unbroken. He did not tell her that he never intended to sleep with Molly MacBain. Let her continue to think that he might! He turned his eyes from Lucinda and looked calmly at John, who stood with his thumbs in his white waistcoat, and gazing at his partner’s bearded face, Pierce’s thoughts continued about himself.

When his third son was born he had named him John after John MacBain, but the youngest girl was Lucie, after Lucinda herself. He and Lucinda had decided together that they would not plan on more children, but if they came by accident, they would be welcome. Privately to himself he thought he would like to have seven children, another son and daughter. He was proud of Malvern and proud of the half-grown boys and girls of his family and proud, too, of his wife. Lucinda was a credit to him and she had helped to make Malvern what it was, a gentleman’s home, set in the midst of a thousand acres of rolling rich land. He had added two wings to the house, one on either side, and had thrown out a great porch to the west, where he could watch the sun set over the tops of the mountains beyond his fields. At evening the wide valley lay full of mellow light, and when the sun dropped, the twilight was purple. The deep softness of darkness over his land and the stars over the mountains made the night as living for him as the day. In quiet sleep was renewal. He was a fortunate man. Tom, his brother Tom, was the only thorn. He turned away involuntarily from the thought of Tom.

John MacBain’s voice took on an added importance. “We are now building our own sleeping cars and parlor cars. We are adding five hotels to the palatial hostels already operating at Deer Park, Relay and Cumberland. We are preparing to establish our own telegraph lines and our own express company. By the end of the decade there will be no railroad in the country so well equipped as our own to handle the transportation of passengers and goods. For this we have to thank not only the genius of our president, but the confidence of the stockholders and of the Board of Directors, during the long years of building, when faith had to be the evidence of things unseen. And now I call upon one of you — Pierce Delaney, old neighbor of mine, friend, partner.”

John MacBain sat down and glowed with relief in the midst of handclapping. He looked at Pierce and his thin lips lengthened into a smile. He nodded. The soft rush of women’s voices that had begun as soon as the clapping was over ceased as Pierce rose to his feet. Eyes that had turned to John MacBain with affectionate amusement turned now to Pierce with respect and envy.

He rose and stood for a second or two, looking at one face after another. All had become familiar to him in the ten years in which he had been part of the great railroad company from which he had drawn the money he needed for Malvern. He had none of John’s devotion to the iron framework which tied the Eastern states to the West. What had been John’s life had been for him only a means to an end. He had chosen to build for himself his own habitation. To live on his land as a gentleman, to breed fine children and fine horses and fine cattle, and when he had no guests, to spend his evenings in his library — all this had been good. His energies had flowed into such creation. But John, lacking children, had spent his energies in making the railroad.

Pierce smiled his famous smile and took his usual pleasure in seeing the faces around the table warm to him. He liked it that the men responded to him as instinctively as the women. He liked men better than women and men knew it and they admired him and liked him the more. He began in his amiable, informal fashion, “John is never satisfied unless I make some sort of speech at these shindigs of his, and yet he knows that I can’t make speeches. I’m a farmer — a West Virginia farmer.”

Low laughter murmured around the table. Pierce was quite aware of his own appearance, gentleman among gentlemen, and he laughed a little at himself. His white hand, holding his wineglass, was certainly not the hand of a farmer. “I’ve never been a railroad man,” he went on. “Ten years ago I came to find John MacBain in Wheeling, because I needed some money to fix up my place after the war and I wanted him to help me get it. Well, he did. Those were the years when our stock was begging to be bought. I borrowed enough money from John to get me a little stock and following his advice, I bought more with what it earned and let my wife and children starve awhile. It did them no harm. Well, the railroad has treated me — adequately — as it has the rest of you. The company deserves our loyalty. Furthermore—”

He smiled again, and again they smiled back at the tall handsome man, still young in his maturity. His voice grew grave.

“There is a magic in railroads these days. They bind our nation together with more than bonds of steel. They bring us together in trade and exchange and friendship. It is doubtful whether even the war could have achieved our unity as a nation had not the railroads come quickly to take up the task. Old hatreds still remain, for many of us. Particularly in the South, the Yankees remain the Yankees. Even the children will scarcely forget. But the railroads are a new force. No hatred is in their history. They heal the wounds of the past, and they reach toward the future. Men of great vision, and John MacBain is one of them, have guided their building westward, and westward our nation has grown. It has been the railroads, too, that have delivered us from the horrid danger of socialism, and it is John MacBain whom we must thank for the fact that labor unions have been kept out of our state. The poison of the northern industrial states must not enter our fair mountain land.

“We have been fortunate.” Pierce’s firm white hand lifted his wineglass again. “We have been spared the extremes into which our sister states have fallen. We have marched in steady progress upon the wheels of railroad development. Our great railroads have carried all of us to prosperity. Mines have been opened to provide steel and waterways have flourished in carrying the loads of lumber and ore we have needed. The produce of the land has been borne swiftly to all parts of the hungry nation, and we have profited by it all, from the first blow of the miner’s pick and the roll of the farmer’s wagon wheel, to the flow of gold into our coffers. Schools and churches have been built and cities grow. The force behind all our growth and all our wealth is the railroad. Ladies and gentlemen, let us drink to the new engine, the 600, the great eight-wheeler, designed especially for the bold slopes of our Mountain State!”

They rose, skirts rustling, chairs scraping, and glasses clinked. They sat down again and talk broke out. Grey-haired Jim McCagney leaned his tall Scotch-Irish frame upon his elbows and called out a question.

“Tell us something more about the engine, Pierce!”

Pierce smiled. “You ought to ask John that,” he said in his even voice. “But I’ll tell you what I know. It’s bigger than the Larkins engines. We thought the top had been reached in them. Now I dare to prophesy that we will build something bigger even than this 600, beauty though she is. She weighs eight thousand pounds more than the Larkins and has more than twelve thousand square feet beyond her heating surface.”

“Twelve thousand and fifty nine!” John MacBain shouted. “And she weighs one hundred and fifty three thousand pounds!”

“That’s enough about engines,” Molly cried, springing to her feet. “Let’s begin the dancing—”

Laughter broke out and the men rose to pull out the ladies’ chairs. They stood watching while the ladies lifted their ruffled skirts and walked out of the doors that were opened for them by footmen. Molly MacBain was proud that everything had gone so well. Her footmen, black as the West Virginia coal, were dressed in maroon uniforms, piped with yellow. She held her head high as she led her guests into her parlors. Beyond them doors opened into the ballroom.

“The men won’t be long,” she promised them. “I told John I would be real mad with him if he got talkin’.”

The ladies smiled and scattered, some to the powder rooms to mend their complexions, and some to sit by tables and look at albums. Lacey Mallows took out a tiny pipe and began to smoke it. Lucinda saw this and pointedly ignored it. The Henry Mallows, living so much in Paris, were rather fast. The others, following Lucinda’s lead, said nothing. Lucinda was always in the best of taste and those who followed what she did were sure to be right. She drifted toward a long mirror hung on the wall and saw that she was as fresh and lovely as when the evening began. She sat at its foot and fanned herself gently with a white ostrich feather fan, set in silver filigree and diamonds. It had been Pierce’s present when she had given him his third son, John.

In the dining room the men were talking of railroads in frank harsh terms. Cut-throat competition was the threat.

“I don’t see how you can keep it up, Mr. MacBain,” Henry Mallows said. He had inherited his share of the road from his father who had died last year and the sudden wealth had sent him hurrying home from Paris with his English wife. She was the daughter of the Earl of Marcy, but he tried not to mention it often. In the determinedly democratic atmosphere of his native state he had found it no advantage to him that his wife was titled in her own right in a foreign country.

“It’s outdo the other fellow or bust,” John MacBain said flatly. “We’ve got to keep the trade, even if we ship cattle and goods free from California and back again. If another road can afford to ship a cow from Chicago to the coast for five dollars, we’ve got to do better.”

The men looked at one another in consternation.

Pierce laughed. “The other roads are worse off than we are,” he said gaily. “They can’t afford to make their own rolling stock — we can and do! Of course these cut-throat ways can’t last. Some day we’ll all be ready to quit. Then we’ll act like gentlemen and keep to our agreements. But we won’t act like gentlemen until we have to. Human nature! I see it in my own older sons. Those boys of mine will fight about something until they’re like beaten cocks. Then when they can’t fight any more, they come to terms.”

Pierce’s children were his weakness, and his friends knew it. “I saw your eldest son the other day at the University,” a man said. “I went down to enter my own boy — fine looking fellow, yours! What’s he going to make of himself?”

Pierce inclined his head. “Martin will follow me at Malvern,” he said modestly. But the modesty deceived no one. Pierce met their smiling eyes and in the silence looked at John. He was sorry the talk had come around to sons. The look of suffering stillness that fell upon John when other men talked of their children was dark upon his face now. Pierce rose. “Let us join the ladies,” he said. “Mrs. MacBain extracted some sort of promise from John, I believe — she told me so.”

They went out, well-fed men, rich men, determined to hold their riches in a state still poor. They were confident that from their prosperity would flow the prosperity of all.

In the ballroom Pierce went to Molly as a matter of course. The hostess must have the first dance. She slipped easily into his arms, accustomed to the pose. She was growing a little solid, but she was still light and graceful enough when she danced. He was used to her step and he suited his rhythm to hers. They were old friends now, frank enough. He was accustomed to her frontal attacks and he was no longer afraid of her as once he had been in the days when he did not know if he wanted her. He knew now that he did not.

“You men left the table earlier than I dared hope,” she said. Her frankest talk was always behind the screen of music when they were dancing. The band she had hired was playing a Strauss waltz, bows sweeping long across violin strings and the piano throbbing.

“The talk got around to sons, and I saw John flinch as he always does,” Pierce said.

“I wish John would let me adopt a boy, but he won’t,” Molly said. “He says if he can’t have his flesh and blood he don’t want somebody else’s.”

“I can understand that,” Pierce replied. “I wouldn’t want Malvern inherited by any except my own.”

“If John would take a boy, I’d have one for him,” Molly said laughing. “I’d be glad to — especially if you’d father him for me, Pierce. Wouldn’t it be kind of nice? He’d inherit our place — next to yours.”

He was accustomed to these bold proposals and he smiled. “We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we?” he remarked. But he had never told her that John had once asked him the same thing.

“Only in words,” she said wickedly.

He laughed in spite of himself. “Molly, for God’s sake,” he protested. “You know what a fuss it would make in our families! Lucinda would leave me.”

“My Gawd, Lucinda needn’t know,” she declared.

“Lucinda always knows everything,” he said, in pretended rue.

“I can fix it,” she persisted.

“Please, lady, leave my life alone,” he begged in mock alarm.

Molly dropped into utter seriousness. “Of course I know — you don’t want me—”

“I don’t want you enough to roil up my life,” he countered.

“I’m not young enough — that’s the truth!” she declared.

She lifted her lashes and dared him, with eyes too bright, to deny it.

“You’ll always be young,” he said gaily. “Please, Molly, when your hair is white — and mine too — keep on asking me! Something would go out of my life if you stopped making proposals to me which I can’t accept.”

The waltz ended at exactly the right moment for him upon this casual gayety, which, affectionate though it was, he kept devoid of passion. She sighed, and he dropped his arms from about her and sighed in mimicry. Then he smiled and went to Lucinda and sat down beside her. She had been dancing with John and he had torn the ruffle of her skirt. She frowned at it. “I shall have to go and get it mended,” she said.

“Lend me your fan while you’re gone,” he begged. “The rooms are too close.”

“Sure it wasn’t Molly?” she inquired with malice.

“Not after all these years,” he returned.

“But you are so handsome, Pierce,” she murmured.

“Thank you, my dear,” he replied. He took the fan from her hand and sat fanning himself without embarrassment. “I shan’t dance until you come back,” he said calmly.

She was back in the middle of the next waltz, and took her fan away from him. “You mind looking silly less than any man I know,” she remarked. “Dance with me, please, Pierce!”

“Did I look silly?” he asked. They began waltzing slowly. Lucinda did not like flourishes, and neither did he. “But everybody knew it was my wife’s fan. Besides, I still love the perfume you use and the fan kept blowing it to me.”

She was mollified and smiled. “When shall we go home?” she murmured. Their steps matched perfectly. She saw Lacey Mallows watching them, and yielded herself a little more to Pierce’s embrace.

“I always want to go home,” he said.

“Molly wants us to stay until tomorrow,” she teased.

“Then let’s stay,” he said promptly. He knew that it was the surest way to get her to go.

She fell at once into his trap. “I sleep better in my own bed,” she said.

“So do I,” he said;—“with you,” he added.

She laughed. “Pierce, you aren’t a little drunk?”

“I think not,” he said, “but maybe—”

“If we are going home tonight, we’ll have to catch the twelve forty—” she reminded him.

“John has the car at the siding. It will be easy,” he replied.

At one o’clock they were going to bed in John MacBain’s private railroad car. Pierce in his fine linen nightshirt looked out of the window at the swiftly passing moonlit landscape. The whirling mountains were black against the dark blue sky. “God, what grades the men had to climb!” he murmured.

Lucinda came to his side and he put his arm around her to steady her. “The road is astonishingly smooth, considering the solid rock they hewed,” he went on. He had blown out the kerosene lamps the better to see into the moonlight. “Tons of dynamite,” he murmured. They could see the engine turning a curve and spitting sparks. It turned and curved again and a cliff hid it.

“Oh, stop thinking about railroads!” Lucinda cried.

He looked down at her. The filmy stuff of her nightgown flowed to her feet, and there were ruffles at her bosom and her wrists. Her long fair hair was loose on her shoulders. He lifted her into his arms. “The way you keep hold of me,” he murmured into her fragrant neck. “The shameful way you never let me go! How can you go on getting prettier every year? What chance has anybody else, you little selfish thing? Look here — don’t you blame me for anything that happens tonight—”

“I won’t,” she said sweetly. “Really, I won’t, Pierce.”

But he knew the reason for her willingness. She was afraid, a little afraid, of Molly MacBain. He smiled at his cynicism and accepted his Lucinda for what she was — a pretty woman, and his own.

He reached home in the full pride of possession. Jake met them at the station with the new surrey and the matched bay horses of Malvern breeding, and when they swept up the long drive of oaks which his grandfather had planted, he turned to Lucinda in profound pleasure.

“There isn’t a place even in Virginia to match Malvern,” he declared.

Lucinda, very composed in her dove-grey traveling dress, smiled. “I shan’t be satisfied until we have the new greenhouse and when that is finished I want a formal garden laid out below the slope.”

She lifted her parasol and pointed to the hollow at the foot of the knoll upon which the great house stood.

It was early summer and the green of grass and trees was bright. “It would be pleasant to sit on the terrace and look down on the garden,” she went on.

“You always want something more, my pet,” Pierce said with amiable sarcasm.

“Why not, when I can have it?” she replied.

He did not answer. The children had heard the surrey and were gathering on the top step to meet them. Martin and Carey were at school in Virginia, but Sally, John and little Lucie were standing and waiting. Georgia had dressed them in their best and she had curled Sally’s hair down her shoulders. The morning sunlight fell on them warmly and Pierce felt his throat catch in absurd sentimentality. “You’ve given me wonderful children, Luce,” he said. He tried to make his voice casual but he knew it was not.

Lucinda smiled and then frowned. “I wish John didn’t look so much like Tom. That means he won’t be as handsome as the other boys.”

As soon as she spoke Tom’s name the whole problem of their lives came back upon them. They put it aside again and again, now to go to Wheeling on railroad business, now to White Sulphur on a holiday, but when they came home it was always there waiting. Pierce did not answer her, but he remembered the promise he had given her this time before they went away. He had promised her that he would tell Tom firmly at last that he must marry and settle down. Whether he kept Bettina was no one’s business, but he had to keep her elsewhere than in that house by the road, where whenever there was another child, everyone knew it. Tom had now three children by Bettina, children who were own cousins to his children and Lucinda’s. This was what Lucinda could not endure. She had faced Pierce with it last week.

“If only our children didn’t love Tom so much and hang on his every word!” she complained.

“Tom’s their teacher and I reckon it’s only natural,” Pierce had replied.

“That’s what is so disgusting,” she had said angrily. “You pay Tom to run the Academy, and we send our children there, and everybody knows.”

“I don’t consider it my affair,” he had retorted to end the talk.

“But it is your affair when your own children are involved,” she had retorted in turn. “It isn’t as it used to be before the war, when a man could go to a black wench in the quarters or get her to his room and nobody be the wiser and little mulattos were only niggers with the rest. Things can’t be hidden the way they used to be — everybody knows about. Tom and Bettina. Why, it’s as bad as if they were married! As soon as that boy is ready for school — you mark my words, Pierce — Tom will want him to go to the Academy with our own children.”

He was outraged by Lucinda’s absurdity. “You know Tom wouldn’t mix white and black that way,” he grumbled.

She had laughed her cruelly light laughter. “Do you think Tom calls his children black?” she cried.

“But they are,” he had protested.

She had laughed again and suddenly he had hated her laughter. It occurred to him that Lucinda never laughed except at someone else.

“Tom’s no fool,” he had said loudly.

She had patted the ruffles of her skirt, and made her voice casual again.

“You’re too soft, Pierce. You always want to avoid trouble. But somewhere you have to make a stand, even with your own brother.”

“Well, well,” he had muttered. “Let it be until we get back from John’s shindig, then I’ll see what’s what.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Well, yes — it is.”

Now the children ran down the steps to meet them and in a moment he had his daughter in his arms. His first embrace was always for Sally and she knew it and all the others knew it. John and Lucie submitted to their mother’s kiss and waited until Pierce opened his arms to them. John was a quiet child, undeniably like Tom in his looks, and Lucie was a miniature of Lucinda. Her likeness to her mother disturbed Pierce sometimes, and occasionally it had occurred to him that if he watched Lucie he might understand Lucinda too well. The veneer of manners and behavior which covered Lucinda had not yet accumulated over Lucie, and the child was frankly selfish. Pierce was never willing to face Lucie’s faults because he loved his wife truly. He stopped now and kissed Lucie with gentleness. The little blonde girl returned the kiss demurely and without emotion. Pierce never kissed his sons. He put his arm on John’s shoulder and walked up the steps with him and Lucinda followed with the girl. John rubbed his head against his father’s solid body.

“Father, Uncle Tom is going to put me into Latin.”

“Good,” Pierce said heartily. “That means he thinks you are a clever fellow and so you are.”

He pressed the boy’s thin body to his and felt the wave of emotion that always swept him when he held his children. They were so young and touching, so dependent upon him. Their weakness made him strong, and quieted all that was wild and restless in him.

His eyes fell upon Georgia as he mounted the last step. She stood a little to the right, motionless in her peculiar still fashion. She was as quiet as a shadow in his house, but sometimes suddenly he saw her as now, human and alive. The strong summer sunlight falling upon her delicately golden skin and upon the soft waves of her fine black hair revealed her. She wore white, as Lucinda liked her maids to do in the summer, even though it meant that they washed and ironed late into the night, and the secret living quality of her dark eyes shone above the white fichu about her neck. He saw with surprise that her eyes were not black but a warm brown, clear enough to show the pupils. Her face flushed under his hard stare, and she looked away quickly. But her usual expression did not change. Her mouth was composed and its habitual look of sweetness came from the deepest corners.

“We’re glad to see you back, sir,” she murmured.

Pierce turned his eyes away. “We’re always glad to come home,” he said.

He passed into the cool shadows of the great hall of his house and John slipped from under his arm. “Uncle Tom said I must come back quickly,” he explained.

“Where is Tom?” Pierce asked.

“He’s in his study at the Academy,” John replied. “Goodbye, Father, I’ll see you at noon.”

He darted down the wide hall and out the door that stood open into the garden and across the garden to the Academy. Pierce had taken a piece out of his own land for the school building. He regretted it sometimes, for the academies that had been built so painfully after the war by citizens were now being taken over by the state and made into public schools, and he objected to a public school on his property. He was determined to keep the Academy private.

Lucinda was going up the stairs, and the little girls were following the billowing ruffles of her skirts, to see what she had brought them from the city. He hesitated, wanting to follow them himself. He and Lucinda had chosen gifts, a pink parasol for Lucie and a blue one for Sally. Then he remembered his secret gift for Sally, a little gold ring with a tiny sapphire set into the circle. No, he would give that to her later when he was alone with her. She would keep it and say nothing. She was used to having secrets with him and he loved her so much that he had to give her things sometimes just for herself.

Georgia had taken Lucinda’s mantle and parasol and was about to go upstairs. He remembered his promise to Lucinda to settle the problem of Tom. One of his impulses swept over him. Why shouldn’t he talk to Georgia once more and get her to persuade Bettina to move away? Then whatever Tom did would be his own business. He hated the thought of a quarrel with his brother, but he knew that Lucinda would force him to it unless he could circumvent her. He wanted peace in this house he loved so well, and he loved Tom as he loved all that belonged to him. He had only to remember still how Tom had suffered in the Confederate prison, and how he had looked when he came home to Malvern to feed a wave of new love for the only brother he had so nearly lost. Away from home Pierce was a hard man and he took pride in it. He drove his bargains so close that he had to hire lawyers to keep him inside the law. But his hardness in business was balanced by softness for his family. He did not love humanity but he loved his own, the love he had for Malvern, for his horses and his dogs and even his cattle and steadfast love he had for his family. He fought by any means he could for what he wanted elsewhere but he did not want to fight inside those walls — for anything.

“Georgia!” he said.

She halted at the foot of the stair, soft and obedient, and again he was uncomfortably aware of her as a beautiful woman. Indeed, Lucinda should long ago have married her to some good man.

“Yes, sir!”

Now how the devil would he go on? He plunged in brusquely. “I need some help from you again, Georgia — about Bettina. It upsets your mistress to have things as they are — all the children—”

He paused and felt heat under his collar. Georgia helped him at once.

“I can understand that, sir,” she said. “I’ve often told Bettina it would be better if she moved away somewhere.”

“That’s it exactly,” he said eagerly. “You know how it looks. I’m not talking about Bettina — she’s a good girl. I blame my brother entirely.”

“You mustn’t blame either of them, Master Pierce,” Georgia’s soft voice was tranquil and sad. “What they’re doing is natural, sir.” She paused and then went on, half-hesitatingly. “I’m afraid it was the way that our father treated us when we were little — that makes Bettina so — so independent.”

Pierce began to hate the moment he had brought on himself. He no longer told the servants to stop saying master and mistress. Lucinda had not approved his democratic ideas, and after the troubles in the South with the free slaves he had let the old ways slip back. It was better, perhaps, not to break down the barriers. He had come to see that the war had changed nothing that was fundamental in the relationship between whites and blacks.

Now in a sudden perception he did not often have he saw that some deep, insoluble, unreachable wrong had been done to Georgia by her white father. It was wrong to have given her this beautiful face, with nothing more than a faint tinge of the skin and duskiness in the hair and eyes to set her apart from white women. It was wrong to have given her the delicacy and the keenness of understanding which belonged to the best blood of the South. The dissipation of valuable blood suddenly made him angry — his blood, too, through Tom!

“I’m not blaming you or Bettina,” he said, “I’m just saying that we aren’t willing to go on like this any more. Now I can tell Tom to get out or Bettina can get out — one or the other. It’s a shame and disgrace to us as a family to have things as they are. The girls are getting big — I don’t want to have to answer Sally’s questions. Now you know it’ll be easier for you to tell Bettina how I feel than it will be for me to tell my brother—”

He made his voice harsh with anger and expected to see her yield as she had always yielded to command. To his astonishment she spoke with gentle firmness.

“I had rather not speak to my sister about how you feel, if you please,” she said. “Whether you speak to your brother is according to your own wish.” Then while he stared at her she added the syllable, as though she had forgotten it—“sir.”

He was so surprised that he was furious and the palms of his hands itched to slap her cheeks. But he had never struck either servant or child and he would not do so now.

“I’ll tell Bettina myself, damn the whole business,” he muttered.

She bowed her head and went up the stairs with a steady grace which matched Lucinda’s own.

He regretted at once that he had spoken to her. There was nothing he hated more than a quarrel with a woman. But having said he would talk to Bettina himself, he would do it now while his anger sustained him. He knew himself well enough to know that if he allowed his anger to cool he would postpone everything as he had so often. But Lucinda would give him no peace!

He picked up his hat and his stick and went out of the house and down the path. He stalked down the tree-covered road, conscious of looking sulky and finding release in it. He frowned hard at a small black boy scuffling along in the dust and the child stopped and stood, his face fixed in terror, but Pierce did not speak. He went on, his cane stirring up small whirlpools of yellow dust, until he reached Bettina’s gate.

He had seen the house almost daily in all these years but never once had he opened the gate nor had he seen Bettina except in glimpses of her tall woman’s figure, hanging up clothes, raking the leaves, sweeping away snow from her doorstep. A boy was cutting grass now with a shorthandled scythe, and when the latch lifted the child stopped and turned his head. He saw Tom’s son, a boy of seven, dark, but with Tom’s grey eyes and the Delaney mouth as clean-cut as his own. He would not have believed that he could be so confounded. The child stared, dropped his scythe and ran around the house.

“Luce is right,” Pierce told himself. “It’s a disgrace.”

He went to the closed door and thumped on it and a few seconds later it opened. Bettina stood there in a freshly starched dress of thin green stuff. He knew something was strange about her and then realized that it was the first time he had seen her without an apron.

She did not invite him to come in. “Can I do something for you, Mr. Delaney?” she asked.

He stood staring at her. She had gained a little weight and the thinness of her girlhood was gone. Her body was rounded and matured. She was extremely beautiful — there was no denying it. She was paler than Georgia, and her features were sharper. He took heed of such details because he was as used to scanning the physical details of such people as he was used to marking the looks of cattle and horses.

“Yes, you can do something for me, Bettina, and I’d like to come in,” he said abruptly.

She stood aside and he went in and stepped at once into the main room. He saw that the small house was not only clean, but it was kept as a home. There were curtains at the windows, rugs on the floor, a spinet against the inner wall. He saw a big chair which had once belonged to his father and which he had given Tom. It stood beside the south window, and by it were a table and a globe and on the table were books and writing paper. He looked away and saw through the open door opposite him the glimpse of a small cool-looking dining room, and a table set for six. A pot of flowers stood on the table.

He sat down in Tom’s chair and laid his hat and stick on the floor. She had not taken them when he came in. She followed him and sat down quietly and it was the first time that anyone like her had sat in his presence. He was disconcerted and sensible enough to be amused at his own disconcertment. A little girl of perhaps three came in, a pretty child, round and plump and fortunately reminding him of no one. She climbed on Bettina’s lap and gazed at him with placid eyes. He tried to ignore her but his uncontrollable love of children stirred in his heart. This little thing was a bonbon of a child, something to put on a valentine. He had to acknowledge that for sheer prettiness she outdid his own.

“That’s a pretty little trick,” he said suddenly.

Bettina ruffled the child’s short curls with her fingers. “She’s not a good little girl, I’m afraid,” she said gravely. “She gets into such mischief I don’t know what to do, sometimes.”

“What’s her name?” Pierce asked.

“Georgy, after my sister,” Bettina said.

“I am good,” Georgy said in a high little voice.

“Not when you run away down the road,” Bettina said.

“I went to find Papa!” Georgy told Pierce confidentially.

In his embarrassment Pierce did not speak. But Bettina said in the same grave voice, “We mustn’t go to find Papa. We just wait until he comes.”

Pierce could bear no more. “Send her away — I want to talk to you.”

Bettina rose silently and slipped the child to the floor and led her away into the dining room. The door closed and behind it he heard her quiet voice and the child’s high one, answering. He looked about the room and was deeply troubled. There was no doubt that Tom considered this his home. Above the simple wooden mantelpiece he had hung a small portrait of their mother. Their father had had one painted for each of his children. Pierce’s hung in his own room and he had supposed that Tom’s was in his. But Tom had brought it here, because this was his true home and not Malvern. Pierce looked at his mother’s face, a delicate irregular face, not beautiful — his father had had all the physical beauty — and too sensitive. What would she have thought had she known that she would preside over this house? Perhaps Tom had even taught these children to call her Grandmother. Lucinda was right — it could not go on.

The door opened and Bettina came back and closed it behind her. She crossed the room and closed the outer door, too. They were alone and for a moment after she sat down, he kept silent. Outside in the yard the boy was beginning to cut the grass again, and he could hear the soft swish of the blade.

“You have — three children?” he asked abruptly.

“The baby is asleep upstairs,” Bettina replied.

“What’s her name?” Pierce asked abruptly.

“Lettice, after my own mother,” Bettina replied.

Pierce cleared his throat. He was tired and it occurred to him that he ought to have postponed his affair because of his night on the train. He never slept well except at Malvern in his own bed. But here he was.

“Bettina, you’re a sensible woman,” he began.

“I hope so,” Bettina said quietly. Her black eyes were fixed on his face and the light from the window by which he sat showed them deep and dark. They held none of the golden lights of Georgia’s eyes.

“Now, Bettina,” he began and his voice took on the tone of argument. “I know you will understand why I felt I had to talk with you. You’ve been with us at Malvern and you know how things are. Mrs. Delaney is getting very worried about the children and how to explain to them — well, this house and you and — and these children and — and all that. We’ve always been unhappy about it, of course. As things go, I haven’t said anything. Young men usually have a fling, especially when they’re just out of the army. I didn’t want to say anything at first. I said to myself and I told Lucinda—‘it’s Tom’s own business.’ But now — well, it’s going on and it is time that things come to an end somehow. Tom ought to get married and settle down, you know.”

He stopped, looked at her and looked away. Her face was set in frozen quiet. She did not speak. He felt very unhappy. He resisted his awareness of her as a human being, but it made him uncomfortable.

“I don’t know what to suggest,” he said. “I still don’t feel I can presume to give orders to Tom — exactly. But I think I ought to tell you that when he marries and starts his own family, I’m willing to share Malvern with him or even build him a separate house on any of the land he chooses. When a man is well over thirty he has to get started.” He felt that he was right in his point and he gained confidence. “I want to see that you are treated well, Bettina, and I am going to suggest that you move away somewhere with these children of yours, and I’ll treat you very handsomely if you do so. You can go north if you like — I’ll buy you a house in some town there — and see that you get money every month as long as you live. I’ll even put that in my will.”

He felt that he could not be more generous and he leaned back in his chair, as he had often seen his father do. She sat in the same pose, her hands on the arms of the Windsor chair. She looked like Georgia, but her mouth was not so sweet. Something about the firmness of that well-cut mouth disturbed him. This was not an obedient woman and doubtless Tom had spoiled her. It always made a colored woman proud to belong to a white man. He pursed his lips and decided to be firm himself.

“That’s my proposition,” he declared.

She leaned forward a little, clasping her hands on her elbows. “I don’t feel it is for me to decide, Mr. Delaney.” Her voice was so pure, so cold, that it seemed empty of all feeling. “If — your brother — tells me to go, I will go.”

“Now, Bettina, let’s be sensible,” he complained loudly. “Tom isn’t going to tell you to go. We won’t pretend. I want you to help me persuade him that it’s the best thing.”

“Maybe it isn’t.”

They were beginning now really to talk. He had penetrated that cold shell of hers.

“Bettina, you know it is,” he insisted. He tried to keep anger out of his voice. “Surely you want what’s best for Tom — as I do.”

“You said Mrs. Delaney—” her voice trembled and sudden tears swam into her eyes. Something hurt and quivering looked at him out of those shimmering depths.

“Let’s put her aside — damn it all, I love my brother, too. I’m only going to talk about him. Tom deserves legitimate heirs, Bettina. He’s going to be a rich man some day, if he stays by the family.”

“I don’t just think of property,” she said in a low voice.

“No, nor I,” Pierce said swiftly. “But think of Tom when he’s old! He ought to be surrounded by children of his own—”

“These are his,”—she broke in.

“Of his own kind,” Pierce went on, “children who can be in his house and who can stand for him. Bettina, don’t think I don’t feel for you. I feel very sorry indeed, but you know how things are in this world. You can’t change them and I can’t change them, however much we might wish things were different. And I don’t mind saying that if they were different — if you hadn’t been — well, what you are — I wouldn’t have felt it was my business. But you know how things are — I can’t help it any more than you can — it’s just how things are—”

Just how things are — just how things are — with this phrase he beat her down. He saw her head droop, and the tears flowed over her lids and down her cheeks and she wrung her slender hands together. He saw her hands — it had often amazed him to notice that her people always had beautiful hands.

“I reckon I can go away,” Bettina sobbed.

He rose. “Of course you can,” he said cheerfully. “And I’m going to make it easy for you—”

What he had not counted on was Tom’s coming. He had thought it was the middle of the morning but the clock had run onto noon. He heard the gate click and saw his brother come into the yard and pick up the little girl and come to the door.

“Wipe your eyes,” he ordered Bettina and she obeyed.

But Tom was at the door and in the room. He had to face his brother. “Why are you here, Pierce?” Tom demanded. He put the child down and she ran to her mother and Bettina laid her cheek on her hair, her face turned away.

Pierce looked at his brother. He had seen Tom every day of these years, but he saw him now exactly as he was, a grown man, mature and dignified. He could not endure the steady, cold light of his blue eyes.

“I came to talk with Bettina,” he said. “Bettina, I take back what I asked you. You can tell Tom everything I said. Tom, I’d like to see you tonight in my own study. We’ll thrash this thing out for fair and have an end to it.”

He snatched his hat and his stick and strode out of the house, looking neither to the right nor the left as he went.

In the room he left so silent Tom went to Bettina and knelt and put his arms about her and the child. But Bettina let the child down and leaned her head upon his shoulder and began to weep.

“My dear love,” Tom muttered.

“I know what he said was right,” she sobbed. “Oh, my mind tells me he is right! God give me the strength—”

“What do you want strength for?” Tom asked.

“Nothing — I don’t know — I love you too much, I reckon,” she whispered.

“You can’t love me too much,” Tom said. The child was sobbing and he took her in his arms and held her, rocking her a little while he talked.

“I know Pierce was here to badger you, but you mustn’t heed him. It’s Lucinda — I’m sure she’s behind it. Pierce is so easygoing — he wouldn’t care much.”

He sat down in the big chair. The love he had for this woman had changed from the wild first passion of his youth. But she was necessary to him, a part of his life. He never allowed himself to wonder whether he had done well in taking her. Having taken her he had kept her and would keep her. He respected her deeply. In her unchanging goodness he had refuge. She was selfless to the last drop of her blood. He had never found the same quality in any one else except in his own mother. His mother would have understood the quality of Bettina’s goodness. He knew, of course, that she would never have understood what he had done. He wanted to believe that she would have understood Bettina — that would have been enough. But he was glad she was dead. Living, she would never have entered this house. He did not pretend that what he had done was easy, nor that his life was not beset with complexity. Both he and Bettina were isolated from their communities and he was deeply troubled for the children. Bettina kept them away from other colored children, but he could not lead them to the children of his kind. Leslie, his son, was named for Bettina’s father. Both of them had avoided the names’ of his own family. He had toyed with the idea of naming the baby Laura, after his mother and then had not done so. They had named her Lettice instead.

Leslie came in now, flushed with the sun. “I’m hungry, Mother,” he said, hesitating at the door. He knew so well these long conversations between his parents and that in some fashion they concerned him. He had a strange feeling always of waiting for something to happen. He knew that whatever it was must be decided always by his father. Everything in this house waited upon his father.

“We must all eat,” Tom said, sighing. “I have to get back to the school.”

He did not often come here in the middle of the day, but he had been haunted with some sort of uneasiness when John came back and said his parents were home again. Bettina went out and the little girl slipped from his lap to follow her and he leaned back and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear Bettina moving about, setting the table, and pouring milk. Perhaps he had been at fault, too. He had taken his situation for granted — he had let this house become too much his home. Had he come only and occasionally at night, had he returned always for the day to the house at Malvern, had he not behaved as though Bettina were his wife, would it have been better?

She opened the door. “I have everything on the table,” she said softly. “I didn’t expect you, so there’s only what we’d have — cornbread and milk and salad greens.”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, and went in and sat down. He helped the children to food and helped her, and then himself. But every time he lifted his eyes he found the children watching him timidly. They were too sensitive. They had been born in doubt and they knew their fate was uncertainty. He did not speak and Bettina, too, was silent. He looked at her and saw the shadows under her eyes.

“You look tired,” he said. “You’d better rest yourself.”

“Will you come back tonight — after you’ve seen — him?”

“I’ll come back and tell you everything,” he promised.

He rose early from the meal, refusing the fruit she had taken from a hastily opened jar for dessert. He kissed her smooth forehead, and touched the children’s cheeks and went away.

In the long dining room at Malvern, Pierce sat at the head of his table and ate silently. He was aware of the children’s voices chattering about him and now and again he forced himself to listen and to answer a question, while Lucinda’s smooth voice rippled in and out of the children’s talk. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with what he had done. As usual, he told himself, he had been too hasty after too long delay. He put off a distasteful task endlessly and then when it could be put off no longer he did it badly. Now he had to talk with Tom tonight, when he would be tired and less patient than he ought to be.

He put down his fork and knife, aware that he was eating too much. When he was upset about something he ate without knowing what he was doing. He had consumed two helpings of the braised breast of guinea hen and too much sweet corn and mashed potatoes. Green stuff he could not abide. Lucinda’s salads he called rabbit food.

“What’s dessert?” he asked Marcus, the old butler, superintending the two young black boys who were waiting.

“Frozen raspberry custard, suh,” Marcus said in his politely gentle voice.

Pierce sighed. It was his favorite sweet. He wondered irritably if he were greedy. Sometimes, surveying his naked body in the mirror in the new bathroom, he saw unwillingly that he was growing heavy. Good food was an attribute of Malvern and its rich life. Not to have set a good table was unthinkable, not to have eaten would have been folly. If he were greedy it was not for food alone, but for all that meant life. He ate the frozen custard slowly, savoring it. He must remember not to eat hastily without tasting to the full what was in his mouth. There was no use in merely filling his belly.

Lucinda rose. “Come, my dears,” she said to the girls. “We will leave Papa and John. Pierce, I feel tired and shall make my siesta longer than usual.”

“I’ll be out in the stables,” he replied.

He reached out his arm and Sally stepped into its curve and he gave her a squeeze and brushed her cheek with his moustaches. “I have something for you,” he whispered. “Tonight when you’re in bed I’ll come up and give it to you.”

Her eyes shone and she nodded and skipped away, her skirts swinging above her ankles. He was left alone with John, and the boy, to his annoyance, began to talk about Tom.

“Uncle Tom says doubtless I shall make a better scholar than either Martin or Carey.”

Pierce poured himself a glass of French wine. Some day he planned to make better wine than this from his own grapes. He had fine grapes and he made wines, but he declared often that he had not yet learned the secret of the transubstantiation of their water into wine. Each year he tasted his product and threatened to import a French wine maker. Lucinda did not care for wine and protested at this further complication of their household. He poured half a glass of wine for John.

“But I don’t like wine, Papa,” the boy protested.

“Learn to drink like a man,” Pierce commanded him, “and don’t set yourself above your brothers. Books are a very little part in a man’s life. Your brother Martin has the best seat I ever saw on a horse and Carey is very clever.”

He had pricked John’s pride, for the boy had an instinctive and uncontrollable fear of horses. He said nothing but his face flushed as he touched the glass to his lips and set it down again.

“Even Sally rides much better than you do,” Pierce went on. He was always stern to his sons and now he realized unwillingly, for he wanted to be a just man, that he was sterner toward John than any of them.

“Sally likes to ride and I don’t,” John murmured.

“A man ought to ride well whether he likes it or not,” Pierce retorted.

“Uncle Tom doesn’t,” John murmured again.

“I hope you do not intend to model yourself entirely on your Uncle Tom,” Pierce said. He was aware again of his injustice, for he recognized, that the boy hurt him by admiring his uncle too much.

“Drink your wine,” he said abruptly. John’s face hardened but he lifted the glass and drank the wine down like medicine and took up his goblet and gulped down water after it. Pierce flung out his hand and knocked the goblet aside and it fell to the floor in a silvery crash of broken crystal.

“Don’t let me see you do such a thing again!” he shouted. “When I say learn to drink wine I mean learn to like wine!”

“That I cannot do!” John cried at him.

Pierce glared at his son an instant and was suddenly pleased to see that the boy was glaring back at him. He burst into laughter. “Well, never mind,” he said amiably. “Just get out of my sight for a bit.”

“Yes, Papa.” John rose, pushed in his chair and went out of the room slowly, his narrow shoulders held very straight. Pierce watched him, his eyes twinkling under his heavy brows. He might have expected rebellion from the two elder lads, but it was the first he had ever had from John. His own blood told, after all. He felt better.

Then he remembered Tom’s mulatto boy he had seen this morning in Bettina’s yard and he sobered again and got up, sighing noisily, and threw his napkin on the floor. He stalked up to his room and put on his riding clothes and went out into the hot afternoon sun which he loved.

As always when he did not know how to solve a problem, he went to his stables. There at least life was simple and uncomplicated, for horses were better than people. One could control their propagation, at least, he thought, and grinned at himself. Inside the cool and aromatic stable the stalls were empty, except for the one where his mare had foaled a week before. She had her foal with her, and he could hear Jake mumbling over it.

“What have you got them inside for, a day like this?” he called sharply. He belonged to the school of horse breeders who believed in the open.

“She was layin’ down and I brung her in to see was she snake bit or somethin’,” Jake replied. Snakes had become Jake’s obsession, ever since the young mare’s mother, Beauty, had died from the bite of a copperhead by the river where she had gone to drink.

Pierce himself was more nervous than he let himself acknowledge and he hastened to the stall and looked at the mare. She was standing with her colt beside her, and Phelan, Jake’s son, was rubbing her down. “She looks all right,” Pierce said. “The mare turned her beautiful head and whinnied at him and he fished out a lump of sugar from his pocket and fed it to her. The colt came up and smelled his hand and licked the sweet tentatively with its pink tongue. Phelan sat back on his haunches, a thin wisp of a boy, so black that his big mouth was in startling contrast.

“This yere colt is awful smart, Mas’ Pierce,” he said. “He ain’t just anybody’s business — he’s somebody, yassuh.”

Pierce surveyed this first colt of his young mare. It was not large, but it controlled its long legs with unusual skill. The color was chestnut without a mark, and the eyes were large and intelligent.

“We’ll watch him,” Pierce said. “Maybe there is something in him. Get him out in the open and let him learn to take care of himself and get his hoofs tough. We’ll see how much nerve he has and whether he likes to race. That’s the first thing. He’s got to like it.”

He had won races with Beauty and he was always looking for the perfect race horse. Malvern had everything for producing it. The blue grass of this river valley was good for horses as well as for cattle. He had exhibited one of his bulls in the second fair the county had held and it had weighed nearly four thousand pounds and was the second largest bull in the world. He had just as good a one to show next year. This colt would not be old enough to race then, but by the year after—

He stooped and examined the small exquisite body and ran his hands over its firm haunches and straight legs. “Its body is good enough, I do believe,” he said in some excitement.

They looked at one another solemnly. Was this to be known in history as the first moment that a great horse was recognized?

“Watch him, you two,” Pierce ordered. “And saddle Rex for me.”

“Yassuh,” Jake said gravely.

Pierce rode away in a few minutes on the horse he had bought for Tom, who so seldom used it that he had forgotten it was not his own. He was still thinking of the colt. So much more than a fine body was needed to make the perfect race horse, he reminded himself. Even good blood was not enough. There was the imponderable, unknowable character of the creature that had to be discovered. He had bred colts as fine as this one who had nevertheless no greatness in them. Beauty had had greatness, but she had had an own sister, sired as she had been by the famous Whirling Dervish, the dam for both of them Mary Malabar, and Beauty was a great horse and Silver Girl, though more exquisite to look upon, had been only a placid mare. He had not named this colt and he would not do so until he could discover more of its nature. If it had the intelligence for training, if it had the pride to win, he would give it a good name and as he watched the colt he’d watch Phelan for its jockey. There would be, of course, the question of who should be the trainer. He frowned over this, and decided on Henry Shulter in Charlestown. He’d send the colt to him to be looked at as soon as it was weaned.

He was quite happy again and restored to his usual mood of hearty good humor. There was nothing like horses, he thought — nothing, indeed, like going around and seeing Malvern for himself. He lifted his head and saw on the hillside meadow his shorthorn cattle, bred from the early stock brought here by his father fifty years before. Now he shipped hundreds of head abroad. Englishmen across the ocean were at this moment doubtless eating beefsteaks and roasts from Malvern cattle. But he was proudest of all of his bulls. He was wont to bet that his bulls, bred even to the common cattle of the mountains, would produce within a few generations the finest herds in the country. He wanted to share his pride with someone and he turned and rode back to the stable doors and shouted into its depths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yassuh,” the old butler murmured.

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

“Marcus!” he called.

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

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

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

“They do talk?”

“Some folks always talk.”

“And others listen?”

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

“Tom ought to marry—”

“Yassuh.”

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

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

“You’re right, Marcus.”

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

“Come in, Tom,” he said drily.

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

“Sherry?” Pierce asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forgive me, Pierce,” he said.

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

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

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

“But it’s so,” Tom insisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t care—” she cried.

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

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

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

Lucinda took the handkerchief from her eyes. “Yes, go!” she cried, “go and never come back!”

Tom rose. “Very well, madam—”

Pierce woke from his daze. “Now Tom — now Luce — look, we’re one family! Luce didn’t mean that, Tom.”

Lucinda stabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Don’t call me Luce!” she sobbed.

“Lucinda doesn’t mean that, Tom,” Pierce began again. “Please, Tom, try to be reasonable. Try to see our side of it — the family side.”

He went over to Lucinda and took her right hand and held it. “Lucinda, honey, we’re going to fix things — don’t worry. Tom isn’t going to be unreasonable, honey—”

But Tom was walking to the door. He passed through it, and then paused in the hall. He lifted his head, and stood in one of those moments he knew so well, when the love and pain of living overwhelmed him. He had so nearly given up life once, in the prison, he had fought so hard for it again in this mighty old house which had sheltered him since his birth. Here he had found Bettina and without her he would have surely died. Even Pierce could not have stayed with him night and day through all the lonely hours of his weakness. The house had given him his life, but Bettina had saved that life. His eyes roamed over the hall, the stairs, which he and Pierce had climbed as children, the heavy walnut balustrade down which they had slid as little boys, Pierce always first and fearless and he coming after, terrified, but following Pierce. He could not bear to go.

And then in the midst of his pain and his longing he heard Lucinda’s voice lifted in wild reproach.

“Oh, Pierce, you’re standing up for him, you beast! You’re a beast like all the others — men are beasts — beasts — beasts—”

“I’m not!” Pierce roared. “Look here, Luce — if — if it were before the war and I could do it — I’d — I’d sell Bettina and her brats down the river and get rid of them all—”

“I wish it were before the war!” Lucinda sobbed.

“God dammit, so do I!” Pierce cried.

Tom heard his brother’s voice and hastened away. The house could shelter him no more.

Загрузка...