“Mama — Mama!” Lucie’s frightened voice at the door recalled them both. “People can hear you and Papa!”
Lucinda got up from the bed and went to the washstand and poured water into the china basin and began to wash her face.
Pierce sat down. “I shall go straight after that fellow,” he muttered. “I shall fetch Sally home.”
Lucinda shouted. “It’s too late, you fool — I won’t have a black grandchild — I can tell you.”
“Brazilians aren’t black,” he retorted.
But he was not sure what they were, and he did not go. When he reached New York two days later, Carrington Randolph met him and took him to the hotel. There in the vast quiet parlor of a Waldorf suite he met Mrs. Randolph and Candace, who waited for them.
“I know how you feel,” Mrs. Randolph said gently. She was a tall thin Virginian with a pretty face too small and delicate for her long body. “Of course we’d all rawtheh have had our deah Sally mah’y a Virginia gentleman, and indeed I thought she was going to fancy our own son — he’s so in love with her. But she didn’t tell anybody — not even Candy, did she, honey?”
Candace shook her dark head. She was a year older than Sally, a rebellious, spoiled, secretly intelligent girl. “Sally didn’t tell anybody very much,” she said guardedly. She smiled. “But he is very rich,” she added.
“That would make no difference to Sally,” Pierce declared.
“Well, then he’s good-looking,” Candace said wilfully.
“Only so dark,” Mrs. Randolph mourned.
Carrington Randolph cleared his throat. “The tragic thing about it is that the fellow is Catholic, and so I suppose Sally’s tied for life. I assure you, if we had known — but we didn’t. She simply left us a note, saying she’d written you—”
Pierce looked from one to the other of them. “I can only hope and pray that he is good to her,” he said simply.
He went back to Malvern and tried to build over the emptiness which Sally had left. When he had told Lucinda all there was to tell, she looked at him in silence. She gave no sign of remembering the dreadful things she had said at White Sulphur, but he would never forget them as long as he lived. When Sally’s letters began to come from Brazil, long letters in which there was not the slightest hint of repentance or of missing him or indeed of thinking of them at all, Lucinda read them once and then put them aside.
But alone in his library Pierce read them again and again. He was unable to tell whether she was happy or unhappy. Sally had poured her life into an unknown household and she was absorbed with it. Mother-in-law, father-in-law, aunts and uncles and cousins, the vigorous, voluble, brilliant family, he came slowly to know them in a strange, imaginative fashion through her letters. But the one he wanted to know most of all was the man who was her husband and of him Sally spoke the least, except at the end of each letter to stress again the underscored words, “Papa, I am happy. Dear Papa, I am very happy—”
He went on soberly building. The library wing was finished, a noble room, high-ceiled and paneled in walnut that he had grown on his own land and that had been five years in seasoning. When the room was done he hung in it the best of his paintings, one of them a gentle green Corot his grandfather had bought in France, and another a Romney portrait from England, of one of his own ancestors. Over the mantel he put his own portrait, painted when he was forty by Dabney Williams.
It did not occur to him that he would ever see Sally again. He did not want to leave Malvern for so long and he was sure that Lucinda would never receive Alvarez Lopez de Pre’ here. Now that his dearest child was gone he tried conscientiously to know the children that were left. When Carey came home from law school at Christmas he made a chance to talk with him alone. He had always been uneasy with this son whose composure and cynicism, it seemed to him, had been born in his blood. Carey was like Lucinda’s father, and old Rutherford Peyton had intimidated all young men who came near him.
“Want Lucinda, do you?” he had said when Pierce came to ask for her. “Take her and welcome! Daughters are a drug in a man’s house after they’re sixteen.”
Lucinda had laughed but Pierce had been intensely indignant.
“Shall you practice in Richmond?” he now asked his second son one evening after dinner. According to Lucinda’s rite, she and Lucie and Mary Lou left the table after dessert and Pierce sat on with his sons over wine and walnuts. He cracked a nut with the silver nutcrackers.
“No, Father,” Carey replied. He had a clear tenor voice, pleasant but cold. “I’m going to set out for the new coal mines.”
Pierce crushed the nut and let it fall on the plate. “The coal mines!” he repeated, stupefied. It was betrayal. He hated the mines that were scarring the face of the State.
“I’m going to be a big corporation lawyer,” Carey said confidently. “My roommate’s father owns the Woodley holdings, and it’s a future for me. The way I see it”—Carey cracked a filbert with sharpness—“there is going to be increasing friction between capital and labor as unions develop—”
“Unions aren’t going to develop—”
“It’s my guess they are,” Carey replied. “That means corporations are going to want their own private lawyers to hold down the unions. There’s a fortune in it.”
Pierce looked at his son with distaste. Carey was fair, like Lucinda, and he had her cool quiet manners. “You’re going to get rich off the dissensions of men, are you?” he inquired.
Carey laughed. “There’s no surer way of getting rich,” he said lightly.
Martin poured his glass full of the port wine that Pierce was now making each year with increasing success. “Here’s to the future!” he cried. “May dissensions flourish and wars multiply on the earth!”
“I’ll drink no such toast,” Pierce declared. But he lifted his glass and passed it back and forth under his nose. “There’s real bouquet,” he murmured. He forgot the foolishness of his sons and drank the wine down with relish.
Nevertheless, he was not pleased with Carey, and two months later he still remembered his displeasure and took sides against him and Lucinda in a quarrel between Carey and his third son John.
Of all his children Pierce had paid the least heed to John. Named for John MacBain, the boy had grown up as little as possible like him. Once or twice John MacBain, in undying longing for his own children, dead and unborn, had tried to befriend the son that Pierce had named for him. But no friendship had developed. John had frankly disliked Molly. “She paws me all the time,” he said bluntly to Pierce, and he was impatient with old John. “He thinks about nothing but steel and locomotives and how to beat the unions,” he told Pierce.
But if no friendship had grown there had been a result. Pierce’s third son grew up with an intense disdain for business and business men, and a stern determination to hew his own life as he wanted it to be. Pierce knew that he went often to see Tom, and that he had long since ceased to ask permission or even to tell anyone when he went, and Tom’s letters now made no mention of the boy. That, Pierce knew, was because John did not want his mother to know what he did. This being true, Pierce asked himself if he should not inquire into it.
Uneasily one day he faced the young man, and John admitted it at once. Of all his sons John was still the most like Tom in looks, and Pierce had the strange feeling when he saw him, that he was gazing at Tom’s young self. But he could not or would not acknowledge that the likeness went deeper.
“Of course I don’t want Mama to know I go there,” John said. “I learned when I was small that I couldn’t tell her anything about myself — she has no sense of honor.”
Pierce said sternly, “You are speaking of your mother.”