“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.