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.