“Call me any names you like,” he had returned.
He had enjoyed the big ball at Christmas but he saw not the slightest sign from Sally of interest in any of the young men who flocked about her fondly. He reproached her for this in the early hours of dawn when the last guest had gone and she yawned and drooped her eyelids.
“Aren’t you going to marry any of these poor young fellows?” he demanded.
“They’re tasteless in my mouth,” she complained.
“Sally, you can’t be an old maid!” he had cried in alarm. “Look here, honey, you pick yourself a pretty young man and I’ll settle twenty-five thousand dollars on you. Or you can pick a piece of Malvern for your own, if you like, and I’ll build you a house.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know one pretty young man from the other,” she declared.
In May, Sally suddenly broke his heart. It came so quickly that he was stricken before he knew it. In February she had accepted an invitation to a houseparty in New York. He had not wanted her to go. He himself had never been to New York, and Lucinda for all her talk had never been there but the once, before Martin was married, to get her frocks. She came back declaring that she hated it. Nobody knew who she was and they wouldn’t wait on her in the shops even when she said “Mrs. Pierce Delaney.” But Sally had friends who lived there, whom she had met when they all went to White Sulphur occasionally. People had strange friends nowadays. When he was young his friends were the children of his father’s friends.
So he had let her go to New York for a week, and had been heartily relieved when she came home, unchanged except for a brown sealskin coat and hat which horrified him when she told him what they cost. Of the amusements she had enjoyed she said nothing — or almost nothing. There had been a young Brazilian, the second son of a Portuguese family in Rio de Janeiro, who had come to New York with his father to sell diamonds.
“Diamonds!” Pierced echoed. “What for?”
Sally shrugged her shoulders. “Why does anybody sell diamonds?” she countered.
“But the people in Brazil are savages,” Pierce objected. “At least they’re all mixed up with Indians and niggras.”
“Alvarez Lopez de Pre’ is no savage,” she said, dimpling. She looked at her father sidewise with wicked eyes. “He’s a very pretty young man,” she had declared with emphasis.
He had thought nothing of it at the time. But when in May he got her letter, he remembered. He was alone at Malvern. Carey and John were still at the university and Lucinda, declaring she was rundown, had taken the girls to White Sulphur for two weeks.
“Dear Papa,” Sally wrote in her pretty, slanting handwriting. “When you get this I shall be on the high seas with my husband. Papa, I am Mrs. Alvarez Lopez de Pre’—a pretty name, is it not? You must come and see me in my Brazilian home. Alvarez tells me that the house is handsome and that in the patio there is a fountain which rises thirty feet into the air. Dear Papa, when you have finished being cross with me, then write me. I couldn’t marry any of the tasteless young men at home. Alvarez is tall and dark — his skin is quite brown. I adore his looks.”
This letter he found among all the letters on his desk one morning in August. He caught the next train out of the small depot near Malvern, which had been put in especially for his shipments of cattle to the coast. The road to White Sulphur he himself had done much to build, a decade ago and more, foreseeing that it would bring to the great watering place visitors from all over the world.
The spa had never looked more beautiful than it did this day when he stepped from the train in sore anxiety. The sky was cloudless, and the huge hotel sparkled under the sunshine, its paint as white as snow, its flags brilliant. Small guest cottages shone among the green of the trees and up and down the walk guests strolled, the women carrying bright parasols and the men bareheaded or wearing wide straw hats. He himself had visited here not long before in order to inspect the new game of golf which some Scotchmen had brought over.
But now he wanted only to find Lucinda quickly. He directed the carriage he had hired at the station to go straight to the cottage which he and Lucinda regularly used when they came here to drink the waters. It was the hour before the great afternoon dinner, and he knew that Lucinda would be there. He found her on the small piazza, Lucie and Mary Lou beside her. She was fanning herself with a silken Chinese fan and looked the picture of idle pleasure as he stepped from the carriage.
“Pierce!” she cried. “Of all things!”
But he could not greet her. “Lucinda, how could you let Sally leave you?” he demanded.
He had tried to think how to break the dreadful news, but when he saw her he forgot all he had planned.
“Mercy, Pierce,” Lucinda cried. “How you scare me! Where did you come from? Why didn’t you write me you were coming?”
“When did Sally leave you?” Pierce demanded.
Mary Lou looked down at the embroidery she was doing, and Lucie was silent with fright.
“Pray tell,” Lucinda said impatiently, “what is the matter with you, Pierce? Sally left two days ago to visit in New York. She went with the Carrington Randolphs — you know that Candace is her best friend. What is wrong with that?”
He held out Sally’s letter then and she took it. He stood waiting, watching her face, and he saw the blood drain away from her cheeks. She read it and looked up at him and he could not have asked for more horror than he saw there.
“Oh, Pierce!” she whispered—“oh — how could she—”
The letter dropped to the floor. Lucie in her small secret way reached for it. She read it and Mary Lou glanced over her shoulder.
“There is nothing we can do, Luce,” Pierce groaned. “Only, who is this fellow? The Randolphs? I shall go to them at once—”
“Here is a corner turned down and glued,” Lucie announced. “It has ‘For Mama’ written on it very tiny.”
“Give it to me,” Lucinda cried. She snatched the letter and tore the corner open. Inside Sally had written in small and clear letters, “Tell Mama for her comfort that the Lopez de Pre’ family is four hundred years old.”
Lucinda’s fair skin flushed rose-colored. “As if that matters!” she cried passionately—“when the man is black!”
She turned on Pierce in sudden fury. “This comes of you and your precious brother! Sally would never — never have done such a thing if it hadn’t been for Tom!”
There was such hatred in her bright blue eyes that he stepped back involuntarily. “Take heed what you say, Lucinda,” he said to her sternly.
“It’s true, it’s true!” she cried. “This is what happens when you treat niggras like white — they steal into your house—”
“Be silent!” he shouted, and taking her by the arm, he pulled her into the house and shut the door and put down the open windows.
But Lucinda would not listen to him. She flung herself on her bed and wept aloud. “I shall have nothing left,” she sobbed, “nothing — nothing—”
He accused her, “You think of yourself — only of yourself—”
She roused herself to shake her fists at him in her rage. “I do not think of myself, Pierce Delaney! I think of all — all of us white women fending off those niggras that men like you love so much — trying to keep them out of our homes — to keep them from robbing us of all we have left—”
She looked so absurd, so melodramatic in her anger and her weeping that he began to laugh loud, cruel laughter.
“Oh don’t be so silly, Luce!” he shouted. He threw a look of disgust at her grimacing tear-stained face. “Good God, women like you — you drive us — to — to—”
“To what?” she screamed. “Go on — say it!”
“I won’t!” he bellowed.