Read Online The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck - Free Book Online Page B

Lucinda know? Or was there anything to know? And what would he say to Tom? Nothing, probably! What a man did with a colored wench was his own business. Still—Tom! Here at Malvern!
    He went into his dressing room and poured the water out of the jug into the ewer, and felt the blood suddenly begin to pound through his body. Tom was not at all the sort of fellow to take up with a wench. Damn Lucinda for bringing two such pretty girls into the house! Now there would be mulatto children running around, cousins to his own children, and nobody saying a word because nobody would dare.
    “I shall ship that Bettina away,” he thought angrily. He scrubbed his hands and went down to the dining room and held his head very haughtily while his family gathered. Lucinda sat at the foot of the table and Tom at her right and the two boys opposite him. Pierce busied himself with his soup and then with carving the fowl. Lucinda asked him questions and he answered them. Yes, the wheat was very fine, as fine as the oats had been, and if the hot weather held the corn would be good, too. They were lucky.
    “Then why are you so cross, Papa?” Martin asked.
    Pierce cursed himself for not being able to hide his thoughts even from a child. “I have worries,” he said shortly.
    They were all silent after that, and in silence they ate the green apple tart which was their dessert. He called for the new cheese and Georgia brought it to him, and he took it coldly from her. He would settle his house once for all.
    Lucinda looked at him inquiringly when he rose.
    “I wish you’d come into the office, Lucinda,” he said still coldly. “I have something to talk about with you.”
    She followed him and Bettina came in for the children. He cast a swift look at her and imagined that under her gathered skirt her body swelled, and he grew deeply angry. How dared Tom do such a thing in this house!
    He shut the office door firmly behind Lucinda and sat down at the desk and shuffled some papers. She sat down in the leather armchair which his father had brought over from London years ago for this very room.
    “Well, Pierce?” she inquired.
    Then he found himself unable to speak. The blood came up under his collar.
    “Put down those papers,” she said. “Tell me what it is you have done.”
    He put down the papers at once. “I haven’t done anything,” he said savagely. “It’s your own colored girl I want to talk about.”
    “Georgia?”
    “No, Bettina.”
    Now he wished he had never begun. For it was not only Bettina of whom he must speak, but also his own brother. Instinctive loyalty beset him. Must he betray his own kind? Women never understood these things.
    Lucinda’s face had grown sharp. “Pierce, what do you mean? Tell me this minute. What’s Bettina done?”
    “Nothing that I know of. Probably just my imagination.”
    But she knew him. The faint look of guilt that haunts a man’s face when he speaks to his wife of sex now haunted his and he was betrayed.
    “Pierce Delaney, do you mean—”
    He banged both fists on the table. “I don’t mean anything. I don’t know whatever got into me to think I had to tell you.”
    But she pursued what she smelled as relentlessly as a cat pursues the scent of a mouse. “If I thought that Bettina could be carrying on right under my own eyes in my own house, I’d—I’d have her strapped. I don’t care how light-colored she is—she’s nothing but a nigger. What has she done? Why—why, Pierce, she hasn’t said anything to you?”
    He sighed in a great gust. “Good God, no! Now I’ve got you started, I wish I hadn’t spoken.”
    She forced him on. “Well, you have spoken, and you might just as well go on and tell me everything, because I’ll find out anyway.”
    He now saw how slender was the proof of what he suspected. What had he seen? Nothing except such things as the look on Tom’s face when Bettina happened to be crossing the grass with the children.
    “I haven’t seen a