Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “He says: ‘Paris grows more wonderful each day, particularly now that it is spring, and the plane-trees are in leaf, and the sky is so pure and blue. It is so easy here, so friendly and full of laughter. Every one eats and sleeps and drinks when he chooses, and there is no tightness or harshness anywhere.

  “‘I walk down the Bois, and look at the chestnut trees, and I think of home, and how the leaves must be coming out, so green and spreading, and the way the shadows and the sun run over the lawns and dance on the pool in the garden. And the old gray wall at the back, with the moss and the ivy on it, and the frogs at night under the moon, and my own room with the windows flung out and the wind coming in. And then I’m homesick just a little for all of you. [May noted, with a pang of sad tenderness, that the ‘all of’ had been inserted between the ‘for’ and the ‘you’.]

  “‘But I know you aren’t interested in my silly thoughts, and want to know how I’m getting on. Mama, we are to have a concert in the Academy of Music tomorrow night, and the opera orchestra is to play. Three compositions of the students are to be played, and one of them is mine! My Prelude in C major! It is a great honor, and my master thinks I may win the Grand Prix. You cannot realize what this means to me and for my future! It is the beginning of all your hopes for me, all that I want to be, all that I can be! Monsieur Edmund Brisson, the conductor, declares it the equal of anything similar of Mozart’s, and as he is the most brusque and ungracious of men, this is delirious praise.

  “‘Mama, darling, how can I ever repay you—’” May halted abruptly. Her voice had thickened and trembled as she had read. She cleared her throat, blinked.

  A tense and shining look had come into Gertrude’s beautiful dark eyes. Elsa was smiling politely, but with a superior lift to her brows. (Dear silly Frey, and his foolish, frittery music! When we are married, he’ll forget all this nonsense!) Lucy was bored, and though she tried to smile, her eye, fixed on Elsa, had an evil glint in it. She thought Godfrey the most stupid of silly boys, and the most tedious, and was not always tactful enough to conceal her opinion from his mother and sister. (Dear Uncle Ernest should have strapped some sense into his conceited head when he was a brat. Paris for the likes of him! I bet it’s just the French girls he likes so well, and not his absurd piano-playing!) Her smile became a little leering, a little cunning.

  “Well, I am sure you girls aren’t interested in Frey’s opinion of his Mama,” said May, now openly wiping her eyes. “So, I’ll go on with the rest of the letter: ‘Thank Papa for his last check; it was more than generous. I’m sending Reggie and Guy a box, and there is something in it for Joey, too. Tell the girls that rose and blue seem to be the colors in Paris this year; at least, that’s all the women seem to be wearing on the streets. And parasols as big as pancakes, and all frills.’” (Godfrey had made a painful point of consciously observing these phenomena for the dutifully remembered benefit of his sister and cousins.)

  “That’s absurd!” broke in Elsa in her loud, somewhat strident voice. “Mama’s latest copy of Les Modes definitely states that blue and rose are out, and it’s all yellow and heliotrope this year.”

  “And parasols are quite large, because the hats are so small, for all their plumes,” added Lucy, thrusting out her lip contemptuously. “Does he say anything about basques, whether the neck is high or low, or frilled or plain, this summer?”

  “I’m afraid,” said May, “that dear Frey is talking through his hat. It’s just his way of trying to be normal, poor lamb, and making an effort to do what is expected of him by us foolish women.”

  “Why should he do what any one expects?” demanded Renee shrilly.

  May regarded her whimsically. “‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—,’” she murmured. “Renee, my love, I’m sure I don’t know. If you guess the answer you’ll be wiser than any one on earth.”

  “Oh, Mama, do go on!” exclaimed Gertrude impatiently. She wanted to get away alone with her own little note.

  May pursed her mouth and scanned the pages in her hand. She was still very kind-hearted, and she felt sorry at the sight of Elsa’s eager and hungry expression, her parted lips into which a brighter color had come. The girl, thought May, trying to stifle her sympathy and compassion, looks almost beautiful just now. I believe she really loves Frey. As if my darling would ever look at the great noisy creature. Poor thing! So she dissembled, and pretended to read:

  “‘Give Elsa my love and tell her that I shall soon answer her most interesting letter. Assure her I have not forgotten her but I am a frightfully bad letter-writer. So she must forgive me, and not forget me until I come home for a visit next Christmas.’”

  Tears sprang into Elsa’s brilliant blue eyes, softening them, giving them an almost touching gentleness.

  “As if I could ever forget him!” she cried passionately. “Dear, dear Aunt May, can’t you tear off just those few little lines and give them to me?”

  Gertrude smiled thinly, and a little acidly. She looked at her flustered mother with a touch of malevolence. Mama must eventually learn not to lie like that, even to Elsa, even to give her some foolish pleasure. It was wrong, and an insult to Frey. She felt an edge of anger.

  “Darling,” stammered May, “I’m really sorry! But there is something on the back that is very, very private. You understand, dear?”

  Elsa was fiercely disappointed, but May’s manner was so gentle, so strangely soft, so almost appealing, that the exigent girl was mollified and touched.

  “Of course, Aunt May. I suppose I should not have asked—”

  May could not bear those drenched eyes, that tremulous mouth. She bent over the letter again. “Frey goes on to say that Paris is still quite sad since the War. After all, it only ended a short time ago. They have draped the statue of Alsace-Lorraine in black, and there is such poverty—It was really very hard for Frey, having to come home when the war broke out—and losing nearly two years.”

  “How inconsiderate of the Germans!” exclaimed Lucy ironically. “They should have remembered Frey and his music.”

  “Dear! That is so unkind,” said May indignantly. She had no humor where her Benjamin was concerned.

  “Papa says Barbour-Bouchard made millions, just millions, out of the war!” shrilled Renee excitedly, beginning to bounce up and down again on her seat.

  Lucy lifted her head alertly. The sun shone full into her eyes; they had widened, and showed themselves what they really were, not black, but a dark pointed blue. “That’s nothing to brag about, Renee,” she said, and her voice was strangely harsh and changed. May, looking at her in surprise, was struck. She had never before noticed any resemblance between the dead Martin and his daughters, but the resemblance had sprung out now, evanescently, tenuously, on Lucy’s suddenly grave young face. “It ain’t anything to be proud of, you kid, to know that your money comes from stuff that blows men you have no quarrel with into little bits. There’s no pleasure in getting rich at the price of the lives and blood—of others.”

  “Why, Lucy!” May was quite astonished; she felt a qualm. Surely she had misunderstood Lucy, after all. She was something more than just a hoyden.

  “You don’t have to worry,” said Gertrude, with a fine cool contempt. “Your Mama’s profits from the stock go into the Martin Barbour Memorial Hospital, so there’s no odium on you.”

  “Lucy’s just envious,” Elsa informed them in a bored voice. “She doesn’t give a hoot for ‘lives and blood.’ She’s just thinking of what she could do with the money.”

  May caught her breath hastily, expecting another furious outburst from Lucy. But to her increasing astonishment, the girl was silent. The look of Martin was fading from her face, but it was still just perceptible. There was a sort of dignity about her silence, as though she had not heard what her sister had said.

  May rose. “Well, darlings, it becomes hotter and hotter. And it is almost dinner time. Renee, I believe I saw your Papa drive up with Uncle Ernest, to take you home. Shall we go to the house
and have our punch and cakes?”

  CHAPTER LXIII

  May and the four young girls climbed up the long green-golden slope of the lawns toward the house, carefully lifting their skirts and avoiding the croquet hoops.

  The upper windows of the great gray house were sheets of steady fire. Light turned the ivy to bronze, made the chimneys ruddy. The white shutters blazed. From the stables came the whinney of horses; over the dull red hoofs of the house and its outbuildings a flock of pigeons were flying, carrying light on their wings under a sky of burning cobalt. Robins hopped on the thick grass; shadows like plushy indigo stretched far and thin from the bases of the immense and scattered trees. The west was a passion of throbbing scarlet radiance.

  As she climbed, a little breathlessly because of her increasing stoutness, May looked up at her house, and experienced, as always, a sense of benediction, a peace and enfolding. The pain might never completely leave her heart, where it had taken its place that night of the quarrel with Ernest, but at least it eased a little, became bearable, before the security, the beauty and steadfastness, of her home. These always remained.

  Gertrude looked up at the house where she had been born, and worshipped it silently. Sometimes she felt that it was a larger heart, holding in it all the larger things, the deeper and realer things, that her own heart was too small to hold. It was the vault that held her memories, a gallery full of pictures, an album containing faces and costumes, colors and prints, of all her life, some of them painted and vivid, hardly dry from the “bath” of emotion, some already dim—the poignancy vague. Some of them were confused, the lights and shades uncertain, and still others were sharp with bitterness and warped with tears. But this album of a house had from her a passion which was like her father’s, and she felt that it had a personality, vigorous and defined, that pervaded every room, every hall, every floor, as blood pervades every cell. When her parents lightly spoke of marriage to her, she was full of silent enraged protest, and sometimes, a terror. Leave her home? Never. Oh never!

  She knew that something was amiss between her parents, not that they quarrelled, were discourteous to each other, cold to each other, or even formal. Nor did they seem bored by each other’s company. They were exceedingly kind and considerate, listening attentively and with apparent pleasure when the other spoke, exceedingly polite in even the smallest matters, looking at each other with the fond interest one bestowed on near and liked relatives. She remembered earlier years, before Frey went to Paris; she recalled that her parents then often quarrelled with fury, that her mother wept stormily, her father raged and stamped, doors slammed, shutters banged. After this came laughter and affection, father and mother reappearing arm in arm, and the air, released from tension, seemed all the warmer and the sweeter, all the closer. Now they never quarrelled, and for all their kindness and courtesy, Gertrude felt a strange coldness between them, as though they had discovered that they were in reality not husband and wife, but brother and sister. The girl knew that her father never entered her mother’s room, and that her mother entered her father’s room only in his absence, to attend to some duty there. Gertrude’s knowledge of the marriage state was still somewhat vague, a threshold she could not approach without shrinking, but she knew there was something wrong. She had seen the double beds in the houses of her friends’ parents; she had seen the familiar ease between the husbands and wives, and recalled a similar ease that had once existed between her parents. It was gone, gone with the quarrels and the storms, the tears and the laughter. May smiled, sometimes laughed, joked a great deal, but Gertrude, remembering the vivacious turmoils of old laughter, recalled that it was gone. Uneasily, and selfishly, she wished everything were “all right” again; she disliked inexplicable things that disconcerted others not in the secret. She had once confided this to Frey, when he had come home from Paris because of the War; he had merely stared at her with the bright coldness of indifference, declared she was too fanciful, and turned away. Gertrude, stubbornly sure she was not mistaken, had begun to watch her parents, carefully noting the inexplicable thing between them, until it became an obsession with her, a compulsion to uneasiness and irritability. She resented this small dimness on the warmth of her home; also, she felt that her father was uneasy, too, and she blamed her mother for it.

  She was thinking of this as they all entered the cool wide gloom of the hall. With a tense tiredness of the nerves she thought: “Papa is home, and now I’ll have to watch him and Mama, and try to find out what it is. And it won’t really be anything, and it’ll be everything. Funny how a word or a gesture, the slightest bit below or above the usual, can be so significant, so compelling, so strange, that it can make you unreasonably happy or unreasonably sad. Mama will say: ‘Home early, love? I’ll ring for tea immediately,’ and Papa will kiss her forehead and ask her if she found it a tedious day, and he will tell her a little scrap of news about the shops and they’ll laugh, and the tea will come in and Mama will pour, and every one will be bright and affectionate. And there the Thing will be, destroying everything, warping everything, like a—like a leer on a nasty face in a room full of normal people.”

  “Home early, love? I’ll ring for tea immediately,” said May brightly, as she entered the library where Ernest sat with Eugene. The Venetian blinds shut out the glare of sunlight that lay on the grass, and only a green, watery-bright light filled the quiet room. Gertrude and the other girls followed her, Gertrude watching with that hateful compulsion, Renee struggling eagerly to get past her to her father. The child succeeded, almost knocking over her cousin in the rush, and bounded like a dark, bony young pup upon Eugene. She flung her arms about his neck, kissed his brown cheek, shouted in his ear, and pulled his cravat to one side with her feverish hugs.

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Eugene, laughing, and disengaging his young daughter’s arms. “Your arms are like razors, ma petite. And look at your frock! Your Mama will be annoyed with you. And your hands!” He pulled her to him and kissed her tenderly. She was his favorite child; let Dorcas love her two older sons, and the blond-angel twins: this child was flesh of his heart. He tweaked her ear, continued his scolding, smoothed his roughened gray hair. The years had not widened him, padded him, as they had Ernest; he had grown thinner, withering slowly and brownly, to his old father’s image. Armand lay beside his wife in the cemetery now, and Ernest, unconsciously struck by the resemblance between dead father and living son, sometimes called his friend “Armand.”

  Gertrude ran silently to her father’s chair, and as silently sat on the arm of it. He turned his face to her, kissed her without speaking. Gertrude glanced from him to her mother: the Thing, like a gauze veil that was barely visible, hung between them.

  “Do not get tea for me, May,” said Eugene, struggling to sit up with Renee’s hanging weight still on his neck. “You know I detest that beverage. Besides, it is dinner time. My landau will be here in a moment, and I will take this young savage home. No, May, we cannot stay for dinner. Dorcas would be excessively annoyed. She detests disarrangement of plans.”

  “Dorcas is entirely too rigid and inflexible,” said her brother, annoyed. “She is a slave to chalkmarks, and never allows for human fallibility. A school-marm of a woman.”

  Eugene laughed, but a line of vexation appeared between his small brown eyes. He pulled Renee’s slipping ribbon awkwardly into place, and said nothing.

  “Well, my dears,” said Ernest, smiling at his two nieces. Lucy, after she had kissed him with a flurry of skirts and flouncing of curls, collapsed on a stool near his knee, and Elsa had kissed him heartily, and sat on the other arm of his chair. Lucy looked up at him, pouting her lips and adoring him; Elsa looked down at him, absently straightened his cravat, and adored him. But Gertrude sat silently, without motion, her hand in his. Her fraility and delicacy made her look like a soft gray cloud temporarily taking a human shape. May, sitting down at a distance from them all, thought, with irritation, that Gertrude had no expression at all; sometimes the girl was as bl
ank as a stone.

  “Your cheek is scratched, Elsa,” said Ernest.

  “A cat did it,” she replied serenely. Lucy flung up her head, flushing, then bit her lip. Gertrude’s hand slipped deeper into her father’s warm grasp.

  “A letter came from Frey today, Ernest,” said May, beaming. (As if there was something determinedly affable behind her face, thought Gertrude wearily.)

  “Yes? What does he say?” Ernest puffed on a cigar which Gertrude had just lit for him. The veil lay on his face, now, like a faint gray web.

  May was very animated. “He is coming home for a visit at Christmas. He is to have a composition of his played at a concert.” She pulled the letter from her pocket, read the part.

  “Splendid!” said Eugene. “(Renee, my heart, you are choking me.) You are to be congratulated, May, on giving the world an apparent genius.” He seemed genuinely interested and understanding. Gertrude saw a luminous pale flash on her mother’s face, and the smile she gave her brother-in-law was a little pathetic.

  “I hope it is received well,” said Ernest. His words seemed forced, as though he had thought it over and had carefully picked the exact phrase, and was wondering if it sounded as wooden as he felt.

  “The composition? I am certain it will be. The Master would not have permitted it to be played had he had any doubts,” said May, with an increase in her determined affability and vivaciousness.

  Elsa caught Ernest’s eye and winked crudely. She was somewhat discomfited when this little pleasantry was not returned, and a little frightened when her uncle’s expression tightened and hardened against her. She felt affronted; she knew very well that Uncle Ernest did not approve of Frey’s silly music-making, that he was bitterly disappointed in his eldest son. There was no need of his making faces at her like that, as though she had committed a crime, she thought resentfully. (Elsa thought Gertrude drearily, is a pig. How can Papa abide her?)