“What are you going to provide for your third son, you lord of the manor?” John inquired with affectionate sarcasm.
“So far John doesn’t seem to want anything of me,” Pierce replied. He sat down in the great chair opposite his friend.
“Every family has to have a radical,” John said absently. He pursed his lips over his papers. “You’re going to get a pretty piece of money this year, Pierce.”
“That’s why I want to buy your land,” Pierce retorted.
John grinned, and looked at him over his spectacles. “You’ve a lust for land. If I weren’t an honest man I could bleed you white!”
Pierce smiled. They were very close, he and John. He had learned to love this man as his own brother. John knew him through and through, all his softness as well as his ruthlessness. There was no softness in John. He was as hard and driving as his own beloved locomotives.
“Though some sons-of-guns are talking about laying down a strike road next to ours, by Gawd,” John said.
“I suppose we can buy them out,” Pierce said mildly.
“Hell no,” John said briskly. “Let them lay it and spend their money! Then we’ll run them out of business — make cars better than theirs and our engines faster. When they’re busted we’ll buy them out cheap.”
Pierce gazed into the flaming logs. When he built the new library he was going to make an even bigger chimney piece. He yielded to the meditative reflective mood which became more and more natural to him as he grew older. Had Malvern not belonged to him — and he to Malvern — what would he have been? A very different man! He did not deceive himself. In the night when he woke and lay alone with himself he remembered his youth and the troubled ideals and dreams that had stirred in him after the war. His heart still moved when he thought of the young men who had died under his command. As clearly as he saw the faces of his own sons he could see young Barnstable’s face as he lay dead, his left arm and shoulder torn away. Pierce had sworn in those days that he would make a better world. It had been a better world for him and for his children, but he was not sure of anything else. He had made Malvern fulfill only his own dreams for himself.
“You and Lucinda going to Baltimore in October for the big shindig?” John asked. He put down the papers and began to fill his pipe.
“Lucinda won’t want to miss it, I am sure.” Pierce replied. “But I confess, John, I hate more and more to leave Malvern.”
“I can’t blame you for that,” John said. “But you ought to go, Pierce. Not many American cities, can celebrate a hundred and fifty years — and they’re going to give the railroad a fine place in the parade.”
“You don’t expect me to join the parade, I hope,” Pierce said smiling.
The door opened and a man servant came in with fresh logs. He scarcely knew his own servants any more since Lucinda had hired an English housekeeper. He had only stipulated that the people on the place be kept in the house. But the children grew up fast. He had an idea that this young fellow was one of Joe’s younger brothers. Joe had married a pot-black young Negress the year after Georgia left. At the thought of Georgia he felt an old confusion, almost shy. But he did not allow himself to think of her.
“I’m going to try out that new engine in May,” John went on. “I expect it to make a mile in two minutes, maybe in one.”
Pierce got up restlessly. He paced the room, around the table, passed the window, and came back again to stand before the leaping flames that were roaring up the wide chimney. He said absently, “Strange that the last time we went to Baltimore the country looked as though it were going to pieces! Now we’re all riding high again — I’ll never understand the one or the other.” No, he would not see Georgia again when he went to Tom’s. It was too dangerous. Last time Lucinda—
“We are selling more abroad than we’re buying. That’s why,” John said confidently, “money is coming into the country.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Pierce mused.
He stood gazing into the fire. At one end of a pine log a narrow blue flame darted out like a sword and licked its way through the mass of coals, twice as hot and twice as fierce as ordinary flame.
What had become of the surging mobs of people who had risen to burn the roundhouses and the stations and the houses of the rich in the decade through which they had passed? They were silent now, but for how long? For his lifetime, perhaps — but would Martin be strong enough for the next generation? Nothing had been really solved. Nobody knew, nobody understood, why there had been a crisis or why now the crisis had passed, and until people understood causes—
“There has to be a topdog,” John was saying confidently. “If men like you and me don’t stay on top, Pierce, these radicals and socialists will ride us. And with that lot go the professional reformers and the internationalists — all enemies of the republic, I say.”
“I suppose so,” Pierce said absently. Had he been as single-minded as John MacBain he would have been able to enjoy even Malvern more than he had. His love for Malvern was terrifying, and he knew it was because he felt it always possible that he might lose it. The life he had built up so carefully in beauty and richness and success might collapse. It was more than the danger in the nation. The possibility of weakness was within himself. Lucinda never let him forget that he was Tom’s brother.
Lucinda came in at this moment, black velvet trailing to her feet. She was still so beautiful that he could not fail to see it and to admire her for preserving her gift.
“Are you two men going to spend the evening here?” she demanded. “The guests will come at any moment, Pierce — and Molly is back from her ride, John.”
As soon as Lucinda entered the room, doubt left it. She was sure of herself and of her right to enter and to stay. And then behind her the hall rose to life. The great front door opened with a swirl of snow, voices mingled with laughter, and at the same moment Molly came downstairs and into the library. Molly by heroism had kept her figure slim enough to ride her horse. Her full face was handsome and rosy and her red hair held no grey. She and John were still together but he had ceased to ask her what she did and she went away from him for weeks at a time. Pierce knew because he had found John alone at his Wheeling mansion, wintry and silent, one November day. They had talked business all evening and not once had he mentioned Molly until at midnight they had stood up to part.
“She’s left me for a while, Pierce,” John said with dry lips.
“On a visit,” Pierce said gently.
“Yes — just a visit—” John said. He looked at Pierce with such shame and agony in his eyes that Pierce had looked away.
“The war changed all of us,” he said. “I often wonder what I’d have been — without it. … And Tom, of course—”
“Yes, it wrecked Tom,” John said. He considered Tom as one dead. Then he cleared his throat. “I feel such awful pity for — for Molly, Pierce. I want you to know I don’t blame her. I’m only grateful — she’ll never leave me for good. She’s told me that — I didn’t ask it — but she promised me.”
“Molly’s a good woman,” Pierce had said gravely.
“Yes,” John had replied. Then after a second, “The war wasn’t her fault — nor mine.”
“No,” Pierce had said.
John had looked at him and a strange bewilderment came into his eyes. “Whose fault was it though, Pierce?”
“God knows, I don’t, any more,” Pierce had said. “All that we fought for seemed so clear when we were fighting — those fellows dying! But now — it’s all a murk. Even the ones who were slaves aren’t better off.” He had spoken savagely at that moment. Had there never been a war Tom would have been at Malvern.