John smiled, his eyes scornful and held his peace
Pierce waited, and then took the lead again. “Your mother has been brought up in the old tradition,” he said formally. “I confess that I have, too. We cannot change—”
“Don’t put yourself in the same category,” John said. “You’re a very different person. She’s a woman.”
“Then you should honor womanhood,” Pierce said. His words made him uncomfortable as he spoke them. There was an echo in them of old dead grandeur.
“I feel sorry for women like Mama — that’s all.” John crossed his long legs.
Pierce thought, “This boy has the most honest eyes I have ever seen — far more honest than mine ever were.”
“Sorry?” he repeated aloud.
“They’re living in a world that’s gone,” John said. “They don’t know it — but they’re afraid. They might know.”
“That sounds like nonsense,” Pierce replied.
“It isn’t,” John said pleasantly. “It’s sad truth. Poor Mama, she’s hanging on by her fingernails to the old romance — pretty white ladies living in lovely houses, protected by white men! But we’ve betrayed them — we’ve sneaked out of the back doors, after making sure they were quite comfortable, their little slippered feet on satin footstools.” He got up and walked to the window. “God, how I honor my uncle Tom!” he cried to the mountains beyond.
The room was very silent. Pierce could not speak. John sat down again and looked at his father. “I propose to go North,” he said. “I want to get away from the South. It’s rotten. I don’t want to rot with it.”
Here in his beautiful library, the great windows facing the mountains, Pierce heard his son destroy his home. He made feeble defense. “But this isn’t the South,” he objected, “we separated ourselves in the war.”
“We’ve never dared to cut the placenta,” John said harshly. “I want to go where my children never hear that a man’s color dooms him and that because a woman is black, she is not a woman but a female.”
Pierce winced and then smiled. “Where will you go?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” John answered, “but I’ll go until I find the place.”
“What will you do?” Pierce asked.
“I’m going to be a brain surgeon,” John said. “I’m going to find out for myself that men’s brains vary from the imbecile to the brilliant, but not from white to black.”
Carey’s voice interrupted them from the door. It was the first week of the summer vacation and the two young men were home together. “Is the dreamer dreaming again?”
“It’s no dream,” John retorted.
“Then it’s madness and the same thing,” Carey said gaily.
The two brothers did not love one another, and John lost his temper vehemently. “Leave my life alone, damn you!” he roared. “I don’t say anything to your little pettifogging lawyer’s plans! I’d rather cut my throat than make my living the way you’re going to do!”
Lucinda, hearing the loud voice, came in from the terrace where she had been sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree.
“Pray tell!” she said sharply. “What’s the fuss now?”
John put his lips together until they were white, but Carey smiled his bitter smile. “John is having heroics, as usual,” he said. “He wants to go North where he won’t see the horrid ways we have.”
Lucinda turned to her third son. “Tell me instantly what you mean,” she demanded.
Pierce interposed, “My dear, young men always quarrel. I advise you to go back to your seat.”
But Lucinda did not heed him. “John, you are not going North!”
“Yes, I am, Mama,” he replied. He stood, towering above her fragile whiteness. “I hate it here—”
“Indeed? You hate your home?” Lucinda’s voice was tinkling ice.
“Not Malvern — exactly,” John muttered.
“Oh — not Malvern — exactly,” Lucinda repeated.
The mockery in her voice lit the wrath in her son again.
“I take it back,” he cried. “I do hate Malvern — and everything in it—”
“Oh!” Lucinda’s hands flew to their place under her breasts. “Pierce — you hear him?”
Pierce bent his head sadly. “My dear — he must be free,” he murmured. “We cannot make Malvern a cage—”
Lucinda turned from him and suddenly her hand flashed like the blade of a sword. She slapped John’s cheek as once she had slapped Georgia’s, Pierce thought in horror. “There!” she cried. “That’s what you deserve — you silly boy!”
John gazed at her, shocked to the soul, and then turned and strode away. They heard him rush up the stairs to his own room.
“Lucinda, you have done something that can never be undone,” Pierce said.
She burst into tears. “I don’t care!” she cried.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Carey said.
But Pierce answered, “Go away, my son. You ought not to be here.”
Carey, hesitating, saw the look in his eyes, and went away and Lucinda wept on and Pierce sat silent and let her weep for he could not comfort her. At last her anger dried her tears and she went away without a word to him, and shut herself in her rooms.
All day she did not come downstairs and John did not appear until he had found that his mother had shut herself in with a headache. Then he came downstairs and to his father.
“I want to go away,” he said.
“Of course,” Pierce said. “How much money do you need?”
“A hundred dollars or so,” John replied. His eyes were too bright, as though he had shed tears, and his cheeks were flushed. But Pierce asked no questions. He went to the safe behind the panels of his office and took out cash and gave it to his son.
“Tell me where you are and write to me every week,” he said.
“I will,” John promised him. And then in sudden gratitude, he cried out, “Papa, thank you — for — everything! And I’m going first to Uncle Tom’s house.”
“I thought so,” Pierce said, and let him go.
Chapter Eleven
THE YEARS SLIPPED PAST, and he marked them by the growth of trees he had planted in new orchards. The apple trees he had put in on the south hillside began to bear and the chestnuts he had put on the west knoll were burred. He had to order the sycamore over the east terrace cut back because it shaded the house and the rhododendrons were rich on the banks below the gardens.
There were more than trees to mark the years. Mathews’ children grew up and started livery stables and grocery stores in the nearby towns, and inside his own house he had two grandchildren and Carey, two years after he left home, married the daughter of a millionaire mine owner.
Pierce did not like his new daughter-in-law. She was effusive over the charm of Malvern but he heard her praise with grim calm.
“It’s delightful, isn’t it, Carey? Such a wonderful background—” she exclaimed. Listening to her, watching her, Pierce decided not to give Carey the MacBain house. It would allow this young woman to stay too near. He’d keep it. Maybe by some strange chance, Tom would come back to Malvern. He dreamed of such strange things these days, gazing at the mountains.
Pierce looked to the mountains increasingly now when he was bored or lonely. He was often both. His Sally was planted deep in South America, with children of her own. Those people apparently did not believe in birth control — it was their religion, he supposed. But he could not reach out to Sally any more. And Lucie was Lucinda’s own shadow. He had never found a way to communicate with the child, though she was child no more, and engaged now to a young fellow from Baltimore — but he had no interest in it.
He met John MacBain sometimes, but John was tired and he was worried now by the talk of automobiles. If people bought cars of their own what would railroads do? There was even talk of freight being hauled by motor vehicles.