Free The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck

thing,” he protested, “not a living thing.”
    “Pierce Delaney!” Lucinda screamed. “You stop!”
    He began to sweat and he pulled out his silk handkerchief and mopped his forehead and his cheeks. “Well, nothing I could really say I saw,” he amended.
    But she squeezed it out of him word by word and he told her.
    “Maybe Tom was only smiling at the sunshine or something,” he groaned at last when he had faltered out his suspicion. “Maybe he was pleased because I said the crops were going to be good.”
    “Oh, fiddle!” she cried, in such profound contempt that he felt allied to Tom as never before.
    “Anyway, I certainly am not going to accuse my own brother,” he protested. “Not without some proof.”
    “Pierce Delaney!” she said sternly. Her hands were clenched under her breasts. “You know as well as I do that you saw something or you wouldn’t have tried to tell me and then take it back. Whether you speak to Tom or not is just nothing. It’s I who will speak to Bettina.”
    She rose, spread her skirts and floated out of the room like an outraged swan, and he groaned again and laid his head down on his arms and knew that he must go and warn his brother. For a moment even Malvern was filled with misery. Then suddenly he lifted his head. He had thought of escape. He Would go and find Georgia and warn her and she could warn Bettina, who would warn Tom. He jumped up, suddenly nimble at the thought of mercy for Tom, and went out into the hall.
    At this hour of the day, where would Georgia be? In her room, maybe, in the attic, or maybe in the pantry, where Lucinda had said they took their fragmentary meals, standing at the tables. He walked softly through the halls toward the pantry. The front door was open as he passed and out on the lawn the children lay stretched on a blanket on the grass for their naps, while Joe sat near them, back against a tree, droning out a story. The air was still and hot and filled with noonday sleep. He opened the door to the pantry and saw no one. Beyond the door into the kitchen he heard the mumble of Annie’s voice complaining to her little slaveys, and he walked away again into the great front hall, and stood listening. Would Lucinda have found Bettina already? Where was Georgia?
    He remembered that there was a winding little stair that went up out of the back porch and he walked there and began to mount it softly. It led, as he well remembered, straight past the second floor into the attic. When he had been a boy he had escaped his father’s wrath more than once by that stair, dragging little Tom after him by the wrist. Under the attic eaves they had hid until wrath was spent and they dared come down again. He had not climbed the stairs since he had first gone away to the university, the year before he was married. Now the steps creaked under his weight but he went on.
    The door at the top was closed and he knocked softly.
    Georgia’s voice called, “It’s not locked!”
    He had a second’s wonder, “locked against whom?” and then he lifted the old-fashioned latch and looked in. She lay on the bed, dressed, but with her hair down and hanging over the pillow. At the sight of him she leaped up and gathered her hair together in one hand.
    “Oh—I thought it was Bettina!” she gasped. Her cream-colored face went pale.
    “Don’t be frightened, Georgia,” he said quickly. “I had to find you—I had to tell you. Look here, I say—please listen, Georgia, because I’ve got to tell you—”
    She had her hair knotted now, looping the ends through without hairpins. “Yes, sir, please—”
    “Your mistress thinks—she has an idea that there’s something going on between Bettina and my brother.”
    Georgia’s very lips went pale. “How did she know?”
    “Then there is something?”
    “I can’t tell you, Master Pierce.”
    Against his will he saw her black brows clear against her skin and the separate blackness of her long lashes set into her pale