The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck Page A

from me!” he cried.
    “Only run away from the big house,” she corrected him.
    “Who says you can live here?” he asked.
    “I can rent it for five dollars a month. I went up to Walley’s place and her son is there—home from the war without his leg. He’s glad to have the cash.”
    “You haven’t five dollars a month,” he said cruelly.
    She clasped him about the waist as he stood before her.
    “You’re going to give me the money, dear love,” she said. “You’re going to house me and feed me and clothe me, because I’m your own. But I won’t marry you, for it would be wrong. I’ll live with you forever but I’ll not marry you and bring you down in the world to where I was born. I’ll kill myself before I do that, Tom.”
    He groaned because she was so beautiful and so wise and because she was stronger than he.
    “You’re going to stay at the big house and claim your birthright, my darling,” she said.
    He stared down at her, his heart cold in his breast. “You deny me a home of my own. I shall have to live in my brother’s house all my life.”
    She let her hands slide down his thighs and his legs and she bent until she was crumpled at his feet. “It was such bad luck for you to love me,” she mourned. “Bad, bad luck, my darling—I ought never to have let you love me.” She lifted her face, “Tom, promise me something?”
    “Why should I, when you will promise me nothing?”
    “Promise me, my dear—”
    “Well, maybe—”
    “If ever you see the white lady you could marry, dear heart—promise me you’ll marry her.”
    “I’ll never marry, Bettina—”
    Then for the first time she broke into weeping. “Oh me, oh me—” she wept.
    But she did not weep for long. She wiped her eyes on the skirt of her blue homespun dress and tried to smile. “It’s noon, and I haven’t any food for you fit to eat—”
    “What have you for yourself?” he asked.
    “Some bread and milk. But some day soon I’ll have chickens, Tom, and fresh eggs for you—maybe a cow—and a little garden. You’ll see—but not today, my dear.”
    “I’m not hungry—”
    He stared about the disordered house, and wondered bleakly if he really were in love. And she caught the bewilderment in his eyes and begged him to go away.
    “Go home, Tom darling. Come back when I’m all settled. Give me a couple of days, darling, and then see if there isn’t a fire blazing in the stove and something cooking, and a clean soft bed and a chair for your own. Tom, lucky the house is back from the road and the lilacs are so high. You don’t even need to come down the main road, my love—look, there’s a winding path along the little stream at the back—Deep Run, they call it.”
    She coaxed and pushed him to the back door on the pretext of showing him the stream and suddenly he found himself outside and he heard the bar drawn, and then she opened the door quickly again lest he feel shut out.
    “Come back to me day after tomorrow, in the evening, after the sun has set,” she said softly. She smiled her sad and brilliant smile and closed the door again. And he went soberly back to Malvern.
    Pierce was on the terrace sipping brandy and water. He had had a long talk with Lucinda. That is, he had sat listening to her for well over an hour, emitting cries of astonishment from time to time at what she told him and declaring that it was asking too much of him when she forbade him to say one word to Tom about Bettina’s running away.
    “Damn you, Luce, the fellow’s my brother, after all! I talk about everything with Tom.”
    “You’ll talk us all into a peck of trouble if you talk with him about this,” she counseled him. She looked so dainty as she sat in the shade of a pear tree that overhung the terrace, that he could have picked her up in his arms and squeezed her, except that nothing, he knew, would make her more furious. She became violently angry if, when she was dressed for the day, he disturbed the fastidious