Lucinda read the telegram, her pretty brows knit in a frown. “Oh Pierce, of all things, just at Christmas!” she cried.
“Christmas is a week off,” he said gravely. “I’ve got to go.”
“I always count that Christmas begins when the boys come home,” she protested.
“John wouldn’t send for me unless he really needed me,” he replied.
“Probably Molly has been playing the fool,” she said sharply. Never before had she remarked on Molly’s escapades.
He lifted his eyebrows at her. “I don’t think it’s Molly,” he replied. “John can handle her. No, it’s the railroad. Things haven’t been going too well—”
Now she was alarmed. “Why, Pierce—”
“Too much expansion,” he said briefly. Then he bent and kissed her hair. “Never mind Luce — go on with Christmas — whatever it is we’ll have Christmas as usual.”
She nodded. Whatever it was, it was not her business.
Georgia stood up and red holly berries fell from her frock. “Shall I go and help pack, ma’am?” she asked in her gentle voice.
“Yes — well, I suppose so,” Lucinda said, vexed.
“Minnie can take my place,” Georgia suggested.
Pierce turned and went upstairs and behind him he heard Georgia’s soft footfall. He had come to take her presence so much for granted in his house that she was scarcely a creature apart now from its life. He went into his rooms and she followed. To his own bedroom in the last five years he had added a booklined sitting room, so that if he were wakeful he could get up and read. He did not sleep well since Tom had gone away. It would take years to convince him that Tom was never coming back. When once in six months he had one of Tom’s long letters he slept very badly indeed. Tom was perfectly happy as the headmaster of his own small private school. None of the retribution which should have fallen on his head had come. Pierce dared not show the letters to Lucinda, lest such happiness infuriate her. He locked them into a small strong box in his desk.
“I can pack your things, sir,” Georgia was saying. “Why don’t you sit down and rest yourself?”
He looked at her and yielded. “Well, maybe I will. I ought to look up some of my papers before I go.”
“Yes, sir.”
She went into his bedroom, leaving the door open between. He heard drawers open and shut, and the latch of his closet sounded once or twice. She knew where everything was, for it was she who kept his things in order. Joe was his valet, but Georgia kept his things neat. He was aware of a mild friendship between her and Joe. Joe had never married—
He got up and went into his bedroom. Georgia was folding his white evening shirts carefully. She looked up.
“I didn’t tell Joe I was going,” he said abruptly. “I’ll want him along, of course.”
“I’ll tell him, sir,” Georgia replied.
“‘I don’t even know where he is,” Pierce grumbled.
“I know,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled. “It’s safe enough that if he thinks you’re busy he’s in the kitchen.”
She lifted the speaking tube from its hook near his bed and called into it, “Joe?”
She looked at Pierce, still smiling. “He’s there,” she said. “I knew he wouldn’t be working on the holly. He’s afraid of thorns.”
“Joe lazy?” he inquired. He enjoyed dimples in any woman’s cheeks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied.
The dimples were still there and he kept looking at them. Then he felt his old uneasiness toward her. “Why don’t you and Joe get married, Georgia?” he asked abruptly.
The dimples disappeared instantly. She hung up the speaking tube and flushed a deep rose. “I couldn’t marry — him,” she said in a low voice.
“It would be a good thing,” he argued, still looking at her. “I’d give you the stone tenant house to live in.”
She gazed back at him, her eyes suffering. “I — can’t,” she whispered. Her face, open and quivering before his gaze, was like a magnolia flower. Her eyes were enormous and wet with sudden tears. The moment grew long, too long, then suddenly seeing the look upon his face she yielded to herself. She ran across the room and knelt before him, and bent her head to his feet.
He was horrified and shaken. He looked down into her face and despised himself because he could not keep from seeing how beautiful she was. “I ought to send you away,” he said in a strange hard voice.
“I have no home in the world but here,” she whispered.
“Get up!” he commanded her. He stepped back and turned and strode toward the door. He looked back and she was there, on her knees still, her delicate hands clasped, looking at him with her dark and sorrowful eyes.
“I must leave in half an hour,” he told her, and heard his own voice dry and harsh.
“Yes, sir.” The words were a sigh.
He hastened downstairs to find Lucinda. She had left the landing and was in the library, still surrounded by holly wreaths and servants. She was standing by the mantelpiece, directing the placing of the decorations behind the portrait of his mother. He went and stood beside her silently, and looked at his mother’s face.
“Do you think that wreath is too heavy?” Lucinda inquired.
“Perhaps,” he said absently. He wanted to feel his mother’s presence and Lucinda’s. He put his arm about Lucinda’s waist and took her right hand and pressed it to his lips. She let him caress her and then pulled her hand away, lifting her eyebrows at the servants who were stealing looks at them.
“Come to the door with me, Luce,” he begged. “I shan’t be seeing you maybe for a week.”
“A week!” she echoed. “Pierce — that’s Christmas Eve!”
“I’ll try to get home sooner,” he said.
“Has Georgia got your things ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said shortly. The enormous complexity of his life suddenly appalled him. If he did not send Georgia away, how would he hide from Lucinda what he knew? And if he did send her away, what reason would he give? He heartily longed to tell Lucinda exactly what had happened and let her deal with Georgia as she would. But prudence forbade this. Lucinda would never believe that he had not done something to bring Georgia to her knees before him. Lucinda would never believe in his innocence — nor in any man’s where a woman was concerned. He felt sweat stir at the roots of his hair and along his upper lip under his moustache, and he dared not put himself at her mercy. She was his wife and she knew the secret weaknesses of his being and his life was with her and must be with her through the years until old age and death, and he could not be at her mercy.
“Goodbye, honey,” he said. “Don’t bother to come to the door, after all. The house looks lovely. And I’ll be back before Christmas Eve, for sure.”
Lucinda kissed him gratefully. “If you can get some champagne in Wheeling bring home a dozen bottles, Pierce. The boys won’t think it’s a real party without it.”
“I will, my dear,” he promised her.
He dreaded to go into the hall lest Georgia were there. But she was not. Joe was getting the bags into the carriage, and he grinned at Pierce.
“I shore did hustle myself,” he panted. Pierce climbed into the carriage and Joe arranged the fur robe over his knees and jumped on the driving seat and the coachman pricked the twin black carriage horses with his whip and they set off down the long avenue of oaks.
“We’ve been through trouble before,” John said. There had been no pretense at festivity this time when Pierce arrived at the great mansion set on a hill outside Wheeling, nor at any time during the days he had been here. On the fourth day, after an almost silent dinner, the three of them at one end of the huge oval dining table in an enormous dining room, Molly had gone upstairs and John had brought him to the dark paneled library. A fire burned in an English iron grate under a white marble mantlepiece where a wreath of marble was upheld by naked cupids. It was near midnight and they were still talking, and the burden of their talk was what it had been for hours on each of the days he had been here in John’s house. Financial depression threatened the country. Men had seen it coming in vague and inexplicable fashion, a storm on the horizon, a wind on the sea. Pierce had not felt it at Malvern, and soundly rooted in his lands, he had taken the warnings he read in newspapers as the nervousness of business men whose fortunes were in flexible money instead of in farms and cattle.