Pierce woke feeling tired. At his side Lucinda lay still asleep and he got out of the wide bed and went into the room next hers, which he called his own. Sometimes he slept here when Lucinda did not want him with her. He hesitated a few minutes at his window. The dawn was just beginning to break. It was an hour he loved. The mountains in the distance were purple and the grass on the lawns was silvery with small dew-sprinkled cobwebs. Had he not felt tired he would have put on his riding things and gone out. Instead he turned and slid his big body between the clean fresh sheets of his own bed. The quarrel with Tom was still to be mended but he did not want to think about it. He burrowed his head into the pillows and went to sleep again.
From this sleep he was wakened two hours later by Lucinda herself. It was so unusual an occurrence that at first he could not bring himself to believe it was she who stood over him.
“Wh-wha-what—” he muttered thickly, staring at her with sleep-bleared eyes. He was at the bottom of an ocean and she was hauling him up, calling his name over and over again.
“Pray tell!” she now said sharply. “I never did see anyone so stupefied! Anyone would think you had gone to bed drunk. Pierce, wake up — Tom’s gone!”
She flung this at him like a spear and he sat up in bed and gaped at her.
“Gone where?” he asked out of confusion.
“Nobody knows — just gone! Pete Calloway came to say so. They’ve all gone.”
“Who?”
“Bettina — everybody! I sent Jake down to see. The house is empty. Pete said that George told him they all came to the station and Tom bought tickets for Philadelphia.”
“Oh, my God!” He was awake now and he leaped out of bed. Lucinda sat down.
“You get out of here, Lucinda,” he ordered her. “You know I can dress faster if you’re not here.”
“Oh, Pierce — you’re so silly — as if I hadn’t seen you naked thousands of times—”
It was an old quarrel between them, petty and inexplicable and yet profound. Pierce had the excessive modesty of the big man, and Lucinda had no modesty at all. Lucinda’s brazenness about her own body had secretly troubled and astonished Pierce through all the years of their marriage. There had been times when he found it exciting, but when these times were over, he disliked it. A truly good woman ought to cover herself. Yet he would not allow himself to think that Lucinda was not good. Her lack of natural modesty made his own increase. He did not like her in the room with him when he washed himself and dressed. To shave in her presence was ignoble and to scrub himself with soap and sponge before her was humiliation. He wanted to appear, even before her — ah, perhaps especially before her — as always himself and whole. There was nothing childish in his love of her.
She sauntered out of the room, half scornfully. Married people surely need not be so foolish, she thought. But in a strange and unconscious fashion it was more than foolishness to her. She was jealous of everything in Pierce. She wanted no reserves in him. Full possession must be hers, his body hers, in jealousy rather than passion.
But she went into her room, for it was quite true that he could not or would not dress as quickly if she were with him and this morning he must be quick. She was not sure what it would mean to have Tom gone. There could be no school, of course. That meant the children would be underfoot all day. Well, Georgia must look after them then and teach them. What would she do with John? John would grieve, she thought with irritation. But he must get over it. She sat down before her mirror and examined the details of her hair and her eyelashes and skin, the silver hand mirror flashing a reflected sunlight upon her head. On the whole, it was good that Tom had gone for a while. She put down the mirror. Of course, she thought, that was it — he had simply taken Bettina away. Then he would come back again. It was not likely that he would leave Malvern and all its benefits.
Pierce came into the room a few minutes later shaved and dressed. “Where’s Georgia?” he demanded.
“I sent her to get the children up,” Lucinda replied.
“She may know something,” Pierce said and went off to find her.
But Georgia did not know. He did not doubt the truth of her troubled eyes. She was curling Sally’s hair about her finger. The children knelt before her and cried out when he came in, “Uncle Tom’s run away!”
Everyone knew it, of course. There was no keeping things from the children in a huge household like this. Someone always told them.
“Georgia, you know anything about this?” he demanded.
She went on brushing the golden coils of Sally’s hair about her finger.
“No, sir,” she said. “Bettina didn’t tell me anything. It’s come as a — shock.”
She lifted her eyes to his and he saw them full of tears.
“Didn’t she tell you anything ever of such a possibility — if something went wrong?” he asked.
“No, sir,” she said simply.
He had an uncomfortable conviction that he ought to tell her about yesterday. Bettina was all she had.
“Go away, Sally,” he ordered. “I want to talk to Georgia.”
“But why can’t I hear?” Sally objected. “I know everything, anyway.”
Pierce was appalled. “What do you mean by everything?” he demanded.
“I know Uncle Tom and Bettina have children together,” she said.
“Oh, my God,” Pierce groaned, “go on away, will you? Go and find your mother.”
Then his heart twinged. It was his own fault that he had not put a stop to the mess long ago. But who could have foreseen that Tom would be so serious? He ought to have remembered that Tom had always been serious. He seized Sally and kissed her loudly, sighed, then let her go. He faced Georgia.
“Georgia, I did talk to Bettina yesterday but she didn’t give me a hint of what’s happened. Now Bettina surely must have said sometime or other to you that she might go away,” he argued.
Georgia stood up. “No, sir, we didn’t talk much any more about things.”
“What do you mean — any more?”
“We did talk a lot — at first,” Georgia replied. “I mean — we used to try to think what was to become of us. I think she thought we’d never marry, of course.”
“What’s the ‘of course’ about it?” Pierce demanded.
“She didn’t want us to marry — just anybody,” Georgia said delicately.
“And do you think Bettina did well to allow Tom — to — to—”
“No, sir, I never thought so,” Georgia said. “I told her from the first that it would be an embarrassment to the family — and to us. She understood that. But to be fair to Bettina, I think I ought to tell you, sir, that Master Tom certainly did persuade her.”
“I am sure he did,” Pierce said drily. He sighed again and stood up. “Well, I don’t know what has happened to me,” he said unhappily. “I don’t know if I’ve lost a brother or not. I reckon we’ll find out where they’ve gone. If she writes you, you must tell me at once.”
He was too upset to notice that she was silent. She stood motionless while he walked heavily out of the room. Going down the stairs to his breakfast, it occurred to him that Georgia had spoken for herself his one thought of yesterday. If Bettina had properly married before Tom had come home none of this would have happened. Georgia ought to be married. Trouble came from unmarried females in a house — females that were young and beautiful and low enough in position to be at the mercy of men. He stood indecisive and then tramped back upstairs again. She was standing just where he had left her, her head drooping, her hands clasped behind her, as though in meditation. When he came in she looked up.