George wished for a cigar to relieve his mingled annoyance and nervousness. He was to speak next. He unplugged his inner ear a moment to listen.
"— distinguished veteran of the war in Mexico, and the highly successful industrialist many of us know as our trusted friend, good neighbor, and generous employer —"
You won't get a raise that way, Blane.
The moment George thought it, he was ashamed. What a wretched cynic I've become. Then something else occurred to him. He leaned over to whisper to the man beside him.
"Had my mind on my remarks. Did he say I went to West Point?" The man shook his head. The omission irked George but didn't surprise him. The school, always falsely perceived as Southern-oriented, was even more unpopular now that so many graduates had left the regular army and gone over to the South.
"— Mr. George Hazard!"
Quickly he cleared his head of the burden of the telegraph message he had received that morning. He waved a fly away from his nose and stepped forward to loud applause, prepared for the sake of the cause to lie splendidly about the joys of war.
11
Halfway up the hill, Brett slowed the buggy. The nerve that had helped her through the encounter with the bullies was leaching away. She felt again, and more stingingly, the absence of the one person whose good sense and physical presence could help her get through these bad times.
She understood that Billy must go wherever duty took him. She'd promised to follow him here, Ruth after Boaz, and wait till he came home again. But her resolve was wearing away faster than ever this afternoon.
She had been the target of hostilities in Lehigh Station before this. Some were sly — little jibes she happened to overhear at social functions. Some were overt — derisive yells when she drove through the streets. Usually they didn't bother her. Like her brother Orry, she took pride in that kind of strength.
But this latest incident somehow pierced the armor. More unwelcome thoughts followed. Thoughts of her sister, Ashton, who had conspired with a would-be suitor of Brett's to have Billy murdered on their wedding day. The memory was too depressing to be held in mind for more than short periods, but now it came back, adding its burden.
She let the horse walk while feelings of defeat and loneliness consumed her. Trembling a little, she felt tears in her closed eyes. She opened them just in time to prevent the buggy's off wheel from slipping over into the drainage ditch.
She stopped the horse and sat motionless in the glaring light. The air was so still that the mountain laurel the Hazards loved so well looked petrified and faintly dusty on the summits above her. She wished the animosity of the local residents didn't upset her, but it did. She couldn't banish the feeling, only contain it.
Control returned in a minute or so. She shook the reins, and by the time she reached the big stable at Belvedere, she was composed again. Determined to say nothing about what had happened, she hoped George wouldn't hear about it by accident.
By the time he got home, the rest of the family had gathered for supper. He entered the dining room as Constance was speaking to their daughter in that friendly but firm tone she reserved for matters of discipline.
"No, Patricia, you may not spend any part of your allowance that way. As you well know, a glass or marble egg has just one purpose — to cool the palms of an overly excited young woman at a dance or a party. It will be a few years before you are in that position."
Patricia stuck out her lip. "Carrie King has one."
"Carrie King is thirteen, two years older than you. Furthermore, she looks twenty."
"Acts like it, too, so I hear," remarked William with a salacious grin. George was amused, but the parent in him didn't dare show it. He frowned at his sturdy, handsome son.
Behind his wife's chair, he bent to kiss her cheek. "Sorry I'm late. I stopped at the office." The explanation was familiar in these days of furious war production. He felt her move slightly beneath the affectionate hand he had placed on her shoulder. Damn. She smelled the spirits on him.
"Tell me about your speech," Constance said as he walked to his place at the other end of the long wooden table. "Was it a success?"
"Magnificent." He sat down.
"George, I really want to know." He responded with a tired shrug. "The rally, then. How did it go?"
"Predictably." One of the house girls set terrapin soup in front of him. "The rebs were consigned to perdition, the flag waved verbally several hundred times, then that pol from Bethlehem issued the call for volunteers. He got eight."
Some soup helped him relax and readjust himself to this confined but comfortable domestic universe. The dining room was bright with the shimmer of the gas mantles on fine silver and flocked wallpaper. He peeped at Constance over his spoon. What a lucky fellow he was. Her skin still had the smoothness of newly skimmed cream, and her eyes were the same vivid blue that had enchanted him the night they met, at a dance in Corpus Christi arranged for army officers temporarily stranded en route to Mexico. After the war, he had brought her to Lehigh Station to marry her.
Constance was two inches taller than her husband. He took that as a symbolic incentive to be worthy of her. Though Stanley had once predicted in a sniffy way that her practice of Catholicism would disrupt the marriage, it hadn't. Years of child rearing, intimacies shared, and troubles borne together had deepened their love and kept physical attraction strong in the marriage.
Patricia fidgeted. She stabbed her poached fish with her fork, as if the fish were responsible for her failure to get a hand cooler.
"Did the factory produce a lot of havelocks today?" George asked, addressing the question more to Brett than anyone. She sat on his left, her eyes downcast, her face fatigued. She hadn't said one word to him.
"Quite a few, yes," Constance said, simultaneously shooting out her left arm. She thwacked Patricia's ear with her middle finger. That ended the fish-stabbing.
The meal dragged to its finish. Brett remained quiet. After George gave the customary permission for the children to be excused, he spoke briefly to Constance, then followed his sister-in-law to the library. He closed the doors before he said: "I heard about the trouble today."
She looked up wearily. "I had hoped you wouldn't."
"It's a small town. And, regrettably, you are very much a center of attention."
She sighed, absently brushing her palms across the open Leslie's in her lap. George lit one of his strong dark brown cigars as she said, "I suppose I was foolish to think it would all pass unnoticed."
"Especially since Fessenden and his cousin are under arrest for assaulting you."
"Who charged them?"
"Pinckney Herbert. So, you see, you do have some friends in Lehigh Station." After telling her that he had already written orders discharging both of her attackers from their jobs at Hazard's, he said in a gentle voice, "I can't tell you how angry and sorry I am about the whole business. Constance and I care for you just as much as we care for any member of this family. We know how hard it is for you to be so far from home and separated from your husband —"
That broke through. She leaped up, spilling the illustrated paper on the carpet, and flung her arms around his neck like a daughter wanting a father's comfort. "I miss Billy so terribly — I'm ashamed to say how much —"