“Do as you like,” he said absently.
She was suddenly angry. “Pierce, I don’t believe you care at all that Martin is going to be married — our eldest son!”
He roused himself at this. “I do care, Luce. Maybe that’s why I feel so troubled. I don’t believe the world is going to get easier for the children. I don’t know what’s ahead—”
“Really, Pierce!” Lucinda cried. “Of all times to talk so! Why, you said yourself only a few days ago that things were better — the strikes put down, and the depression over—” Her prettiness suddenly disappeared in a sharp look. “You’ve been to visit Tom again,” she said.
Her shrewdness confounded him. Then he recovered. “Yes, I have been to see Tom,” he said.
She flushed swiftly from neck to hair, a deep and furious pink. “I suppose Georgia is there,” she said.
He looked at her, not knowing how to answer her. She would never understand, however he tried to tell her, that she was not threatened by Georgia. He could never make her understand how he felt about Georgia, that it was not love — not love of a woman. He could never make her comprehend that Georgia was a revelation to him of a truth which he did not yet fully comprehend in himself. In his hesitation he was speechless. She stared at him, he saw the flush drain from her face until it was dead white and her eyes were the color of frost.
“Luce!” he cried in alarm.
But she did not answer. She went away and closed the door behind her.
He leaped to his feet to stride after her, to seize and compel her to listen to him. But what would he say? He did not know. He sat down again and so sat for a while, the house very silent about him. Would she tell Martin — whatever it was she feared? He pressed his lips together firmly, got up, washed, and changed his clothes. When he went downstairs he looked at himself — he made sure of himself before his mirror. At the bottom of the stairs he went into the dining room. A tray was on the table. Lucinda was there and with her Martin. He knew the moment he met his son’s eyes that she had said nothing. He glanced at her but she looked away from him and took her seat at the table and poured his coffee.
“Well, Martin,” he said gently. There was something tender and touching in the young man’s joy. Nothing must spoil it.
“Father—” Martin began. “I reckon I’m too excited to talk,” he said. He broke off, and their eyes met.
Pierce smiled. “I know, my son.”
So had he felt on the day when Lucinda had set the day for their marriage. He remembered her loveliness, slender and delicate. He turned to her. “We remember, don’t we?” he murmured.
She looked back at him with eyes so cold and hard that he all but gasped. Did she hate him? But for what? He hastened to hide himself and her from their son.
He lifted his wine glass. “I hope you’ll be happy, my son,” he said.
But he was increasingly disturbed as the days drew nearer to Martin’s wedding day. Lucinda did not forgive him, and yet there was nothing to forgive. He knew it and could not explain to her the state of his own feelings and the confusions and fears that filled his mind. A healthy rage might have cured them, a vast upheaval of open anger, a quarrel that would have cleansed them both of their secret thoughts. But she gave him no chance for such healing. She was constantly busy about the wedding, and she made her absorption into an icy covering for herself. Her voice was clear, her eyes calm, her whole bearing as composed as usual. But when he leaned to kiss her cheek it was cold beneath his lips. Twice he seized her in his arms and bent her like a reed to his body, and each time passion died out of him. Her whole body was cold, slim and smooth and unyielding. She knew it and she looked at him with malice that terrified him.
“Don’t look at me like that, Luce!” he implored her.
She turned her eyes away, lashes falling, and did not answer him. He could not reach her, and at last he tried to ignore her. Sometime, as soon as possible, he would have it out with her. But nothing now must spoil Martin’s wedding.
He was especially tender to his eldest son in all these days. He wanted Martin to have the life he had dreamed of when he came back from the war, which outwardly he had lived and yet had not realized within himself. Whether it was his fault or Lucinda’s he did not know. But he knew that somehow between them, while Malvern had been perfected in beauty, they who were its heart and its soul had not grown together into fulfillment, and by that much Malvern was empty within.
Nevertheless he went to his son’s wedding in state in his private car, and reproached himself for discontent. No man could have asked for a handsomer family than his. He saw them as his possession when one by one they stepped upon the platform at Wyeth. Lucinda was crisply composed; the mother of fine children. She looked as slender and almost as youthful as her daughters, her silver grey costume and her air of worldly wisdom were the chief signs of her being older than they. Sally was his darling, warm-skinned, bright-haired, taller and a littler plumper than her mother. She wore a soft blue frock and coat and a wide blue hat with a rosy lining. Lucie was a thin shoot of girl, pretty and cool in a cream-colored frock and a straw hat, and Carey and John were dressed alike in dark blue suits. Pierce took proud stock of their health and good color, of the soft smooth complexions of his daughters and of his sons’ height. He had no ugly duckling.
The love he felt for them overflowed and he pressed Lucinda’s hand inside his arm. “Thanks for handsome children, my dear,” he murmured, smiling down at her.
She flashed an upward look at him from under the tilted grey hat brim. “They are handsome,” she agreed, and softened toward him for the first time in all these days. “They have a handsome father,” she said. He was absurdly grateful and his spirits rose. Perhaps he and Lucinda could renew themselves in this young marriage.
Martin had come the day before. Mrs. Wyeth had invited them to stay the week, but Lucinda had refused. It would be more dignified, she announced, if they came in their own private railroad car and only spent the day before the wedding with the Wyeth family. She did not want to stay on after the wedding was over. “There is nothing so melancholy as a house after a wedding,” she declared.
Thus they proceeded in the middle of the bright summer afternoon to the long rambling white-painted house that stood conspicuously on a hill above the little town.
Two carriages had met them, driven by black coachmen in smart new uniforms. Mary Lou was the eldest daughter and the first child to be married and everything was at its best. Pierce felt himself being carried back into the old world in which he had grown up, far from the seething possibilities of the future. Wyeth village had not changed at all. He had used to drive through its single street when he went to see Lucinda in the days when he was courting her. Together they had gone sometimes to a Christmas ball at the Wyeth mansion or to a garden party on its lawns, the lawns which old Mr. Wyeth had struggled so valiantly to make into smooth green slopes. But the red Virginia soil refused to nourish grass seed from England, and the native crab grass had kept its voracious hold. Virginia could produce her own fabulous beauty of redbud and dogwood and apple-bloom, and Scotch heather flourished like a weed. But English lawns she would not grow.
The carriages rolled up the long avenue of beeches and approached the house he remembered. Nothing had changed but he had a strange sense of the passing years. He turned to Sally at his side.
“Sally, child, can you imagine your pa in a long-tailed blue coat, dancing with the prettiest girl in the world on that very porch?” He reached for Sally’s little hand. She still wore his sapphire ring upon her third finger but any day now he must expect to see it supplanted by another. She looked up at him with her warm violet eyes.