Tom did not look at him. He felt in his pockets for his short English pipe and answered out of sheer necessity to say something, anything, that was meaningless. “Railroads?”
He found the pipe and lit it, and sank down on the marble step at the top of the shallow long steps leading from terraces to the garden. “I was wondering if you wanted to be a schoolmaster,” Pierce said, with forced cheerfulness. “Maybe you’d like railroad business.” He saw Joe rounding a corner of the house and yelled at him.
“Here you, Joe, bring me another whiskey and water, boy!”
Joe shambled over to him and took his glass and Pierce cleared his throat and went on talking, because there had to be talk. “We have to get a school started somehow — the boys are getting to the place where they must be taught. But I’m no schoolteacher, God knows, and maybe you’re not. Lucinda put this railroad business into my head this morning, and though she doesn’t know anything, still, like most women, she hits on things at times.”
“I thought you were going to be a gentleman farmer,” Tom said absently. He was still seeing Bettina at his feet. Even there she had looked lovely and proud and not abased. Her body was straight and slender and soft.
“Well, Malvern isn’t going to make us a lot of money,” Pierce said frankly. “And Lucinda’s set her heart on a lot of things — so have I, for that matter. We want the best — why not?”
“Why not?” Tom echoed. His blonde reddish hair stirred in the wind, and he narrowed his blue eyes against the sun and lifted them to the mountains.
“You want to go into it with me, Tom?” Pierce inquired. All his life he had moved swiftly on an idea, either to accept or reject it. Now that he had made Lucinda’s thought his own, he felt it was a good one.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said slowly. “No, I believe I’d rather be a schoolmaster than a railroad man, Pierce. You wouldn’t bring a railroad near Malvern, I hope?”
They were both talking and talking, burying deep inside themselves the thing they were thinking about.
“I hope not,” Pierce said heartily. Joe was back again with his whiskey and water. “You tell Jake to have my horse saddled after lunch,” he ordered.
“Yassuh,” Joe said, and dragged himself away again.
Pierce watched him go. “Malvern will never make money if the help doesn’t move faster than Joe,” he said. Yes, railroads were a good idea. So were schools.
“We could start an academy right here in Malvern,” he said abruptly. “Why not? Take the garçonnerie there — we can throw a couple of rooms together, and make a real schoolroom. Martin and Carey will be your first two pupils. Levassie will send his boys and the Richards their three—”
Tom shook himself. “It’ll have to be for everybody’s boys if I teach it,” he said abruptly.
Pierce was disposed to be pleasant about everything except the one thing about which they must not speak. “Surely,” he said, “why not? A small tuition fee, and anybody can pay. I won’t charge you rent, schoolmaster.”
They stole looks at one another and a bell rang softly from inside the house and both men rose quickly, relieved that the talk was over. Then Tom was moved to truth.
“I suppose you know Bettina has moved to Millpoint,” he said. His mouth was as dry as ashes as soon as he had spoken.
“The less I know about that the better,” Pierce said.
“But I want you to know,” Tom insisted, out of his dry mouth.
“Well, you’ve told me,” Pierce said abruptly. They moved together and side by side they entered the house. Pierce clapped Tom’s shoulder heartily. “There’s a whole life to be lived without women, Tom,” he said. “The sooner you know it the better.”
Tom smiled and did not answer.
Chapter Three
RAILROADS! PIERCE LOOKED OUT of the window of the train sweeping over the rough landscape. He was aware of a region of irony somewhere in his being. Without intending it, certainly without planning it long ahead, he now found himself on this train, north bound for Wheeling. He reviewed the incidents, none of them important, which had led from his own comfortable house to the hard red plush seat upon which he now sat.
It had begun out of a letter he had written after Lucinda had first blown the word “railroads” at him like a rainbow bubble. He had written to John MacBain, in Wheeling, asking again for the rental of his idle lands. John had been willing enough now to rent and Pierce was busy for three months finding hired men enough to farm the five hundred acres. He had collected a conglomerate score of laborers, some black, some white, and had put them in the old slave quarters of the MacBain house. He had ridden over there often enough in the last months to oversee them, and always before his eyes MacBain House had stood gaunt and empty, its burned wing still shattered. Molly had gone to Wheeling and he had not seen her again. She had spent a day with Lucinda before she went, but it was a day when he had been riding over the country, hunting for seed corn. Seed was his treasure, hard to find, almost impossible to buy. He had gathered it by the handfuls, wherever he could find it, paying almost its weight in silver. The mountaineers had hoarded seed but they would take nothing for it except hard coin. He had ridden the mountains until he was stiff-legged, stooping through the doorways of the miserable cabins and tempting ragged men to divide the hidden stores of seed. But he had succeeded. Malvern today was planted to corn, and he had seed for the wheat of next year.
The sight of MacBain House, gaunt against the southern sky, had always made him think of John. Then John had inquired in a letter, “Why don’t you get into railroads? They’re the backbone of our trade. In the next fifty years all the great fortunes will be built upon railroads. You have your sons to think of, man.”
With John’s words clear upon his brain he thought of his sons very often. The two boys had grown that summer in one of the sudden spurts of childhood growth. Martin shed baby fat and showed the frame of his manhood, tall and strong, and Carey, because he could not keep up with his older brother, developed a canny hardness that was often shrewd beyond his years. There would be other children and it was true that Malvern would not be big enough to provide for them all, especially in the luxury which was a necessity to Lucinda. The old plantation days were gone. Perhaps John was right, that the fortunes of the next half century were in trade, not farming. Railroads from the East, building up the new West! There was profit in it, and why should he not have his share?
One clear cool September day, he set out for the nearest railway depot. Lucinda was nearing her time, and as always she disliked him as her pregnancy progressed. When this had happened before Martin’s birth, it had broken his heart and driven him half mad with grief. He had been desperately in love with her and ignorant of women. When she repulsed him he had been first hurt and then filled with fury. She was ignorant, too, and she could not explain herself. His anger and her disgust had risen to such crisis that one day she had demanded, screaming with tears, to go home to her mother. He had turned cold with fear, but he had taken her there himself, and she had stayed until Martin was nearly due. He insisted that his children be born at Malvern, as he and Tom had been. Lucinda’s mother and father had both come back with them. He would never forget Lucinda’s father. He had died during the war, but Pierce remembered the cynical, lordly old man when he had tried to tell his son-in-law that he must not think that Lucinda really hated him.
“Give her time, my boy,” the tall, angular Virginian had cried. “Dash it, Pierce, no man can understand a pregnant woman!”
“I suppose not,” Pierce had said drily. They had looked at one another and laughed.