“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—”