Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Oh yes, Papa can,” said Gertrude, in a faint high voice. “You know he can, Mama.” She wrung her hands in her lap. May’s brows drew together and her lips tightened. She turned and gazed at the fire.

  “I thought you would always do what your Papa wanted, Gertrude. He was always fonder of you than of any of his other children, and you were devoted to him.” She was sorry immediately when she said this; it was like striking a terrified child who had appealed for help. She was ashamed of the little pinprick of malice that had made her say this to the poor girl. Gertrude knew what had occasioned this speech, and she knew that her mother regretted it. She smiled twistedly.

  “Papa has changed toward me the last year,” she said mournfully. “It’s always about Paul. Papa is beginning to harden; he hardly speaks kindly to me. I know it isn’t because he loves me less, but I am opposing him, and he’ll get harder and more inflexible until I give in. And it breaks my heart. And I’m so afraid that I will give in, just to have him love me again! Just to have him stop looking at me so sternly, and not answering when I speak. I can’t bear it.” She began to cry. May had turned to her and was watching her with an inscrutable expression. But she was full of pity and a sort of ironic appreciation.

  “You’re not a booby, Gertrude. You’re not soft and spineless. You don’t have to give in. It’s Philippe, isn’t it?”

  A bright flush ran under Gertrude’s tears, and she nodded. May’s face become somber and grave. “He’s only a boy, still, Gertrude, and younger than you. Of course, it is so little younger—And Philippe is so mature—” Her voice was preoccupied. “But it will be years, my dear, until he can marry you. I like Philippe, and like his mother. And before he went to Paris, Frey became quite attached to him. I believe they carry on quite a correspondence. I never could understand what Ernest had against him. I’m not advising you,” and involuntarily her tone hardened, remembering. “You’ve always taken all your troubles and problems to your Papa, and made me feel out in the cold. So, at this late day, I’m not going to advise you to turn against him and defy him. You must use your own judgment. It is your own life. You are a woman now. You must make up your own mind as to where your happiness lies, and I hope you will have the courage to stand by your decision.”

  Gertrude was silent. She thought of the long years of her childhood and girlhood, when she had resented every sign of affection her father had given his wife. Childishly, she had indeed excluded May, running always to her father. She had an insight, now, into the pain she had given May, and was bitterly sorry for it. Finally she spoke in a shaking voice: “Mama, I’m awfully sorry. You are quite right. I was a little selfish pig.” She held out her hands, the tears splashing down her white cheeks. “But I’m coming to you, Mama, now! Please help me! I haven’t any one else.”

  May took her hands, pressed them in her own, and smiled. She drew the girl down to her and kissed her cheek. But the years had run a cleft between them, and the soil was washed away. Instinctively, she would help Gertrude, but there would be more of duty in it than love.

  “Of course I’ll help you, child,” she said lightly, putting the hands aside with a gentle gesture. “But we must look at this from all sides. Paul is the son of your Uncle Martin, whom your father hated with all his might. You have often heard him mention Martin. Perhaps what he said has unconsciously affected your regard for Martin’s son.”

  “No, Mama. It is true that I have often heard Papa speak contemptuously of Uncle Martin. Almost as if he hated him, as you say. But I remember Uncle Martin quite well, before he went away. You used to take us to that dreadful farm where he lived. He was so gentle and kind to us all. I never heard him say a hard thing. And he was so beautiful, like one of the angels in Renee’s Catholic books. Or in Papa’s Dante’s Paradiso. We all loved him very much. Even Frey wasn’t afraid of him. So it isn’t what Papa has said about Uncle Martin that has kept me from liking Paul. It’s something else.”

  May listened thoughtfully, and with some curiosity. The vagaries of the sexual selection never failed to amuse and intrigue her. “But why, Trudie? He is far more of a man than Philippe, and looks much older. He is very handsome—they say. There is nothing at all negative about him, and one cannot call him a fool. He does everything extremely well, and will soon make himself a fortune. In fact, many people say that he is made in your father’s image.”

  “Oh, no, Mama. No! He is not like Papa, except that—except that you feel he’ll have his way with you, just as Papa does. That you can’t resist him. It would be like trying to resist a wall of lava. When he is near me I feel weak, as though all the resistance and strength has gone out of me, and I’m so frightened. Sometimes I’m so terribly afraid that I’m not strong enough to stand up against Paul and Papa, both. If it were just one of them—”

  May smiled again, that faint ironic smile, as though she were thinking that the scales were beginning to balance at last.

  “You have quite an imagination, Trudie! I’m sure Paul isn’t as formidable as all that. He can’t kidnap you. I assure you that your Papa won’t throw you into the street if you persist in refusing Paul. He might browbeat you and refuse to speak to you. But he loves you better than any one, still. And eventually, he will come around. At least, I believe so. And here is another thing, Trudie: Philippe is a Catholic, and an ardent one, I understand. I know he was always at church when he was a child—it was quite a family joke, along with Reggie’s buttons. Didn’t he always say he was going to be a priest? Well, then, how is he going to marry you, his cousin? The Catholic Church does not permit marriages between cousins.”

  Gertrude’s small white face became angular with the pressure of emotion upon it, and she seemed exceedingly distressed, as though she had been forced to look upon a dangerous place again. “Philippe and I have talked about all that, Mama,” she said painfully. “A long time ago. And Philippe has decided to leave the Church.” The memory of those long, sad, anguished struggles was too strong in her memory to be recalled without agitation, and she stood up, the wild fragile look upon her, once more.

  “Leave the Church?” May’s eyebrows rose and her forehead wrinkled. “Philippe? He must indeed love you very much, Trudie, if he can give up his Church for you. I understand that’s a very terrible thing for a Catholic. Is he happy about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Gertrude whispered. “But it was his own choice. He chose, himself. I told him I would not try to influence him. And after a month, he came to me and said he loved me better than he did his Church.”

  May suddenly lifted her head alertly. “Hush!” she murmured. “Someone is coming.” And footsteps indeed were coming down the hallway toward the door. Gertrude recognized them as her father’s. She glanced about her wildly, seized her skirts and fled toward the bed, crouched beside it, shut from a view from the door. Ernest knocked.

  “Who is it?” called May, rising and advancing toward the door. She opened it. Ernest stood on the threshold, frowning and annoyed. He glanced beyond his wife, and saw only firelight and an empty room.

  “I thought I heard Gertrude’s voice, my love,” he said. May held the door. He had not stepped into this room for years. He hesitated, glanced at the white arm that barred his entry. Quite irrelevantly, in spite of his annoyance, he wanted to enter that room again, to be invited to sit before that fire. But May was looking at him with a pleasant smile, and the arm still barred him.

  “I’m sure you were mistaken, Ernest,” she said, as if surprised. “I didn’t hear her go to her room. Besides, she always comes in to say good night first. But surely you remember that she was to stay at Dorcas’ tonight? Don’t you recall her mentioning it?”

  “Did she?” Ernest looked baffled and angry. “I forgot. And I’ve been keeping Paul waiting down there.” He looked again at the room through the half-opened door. He wanted to suggest that he would like to come in and discuss Gertrude with his wife. But he did not have the courage. He felt foolish standing there, like a st
ranger outside his wife’s door, barred out, like an importunate and improper stranger. Anger rose hotly in him, but whether it was against May or the situation, he could not tell. His voice was sharp and curt when he spoke again. “I’m going to New York tomorrow, May, and I’ll be gone before Gertrude comes home. Please tell her for me that she’ll have a week while I am away to make up her mind to obey me. I’m sick of this nonsense. Paul’s sick of it, too. She’s old enough to be married, and I expect her to think about a Christmas wedding.”

  “She’s quite young, yet,” said May. She thought suddenly of a young and piteous Juliet who had pleaded youth, and the memory of the sorrow she had felt for the tragic heroine during that play was absurdly poignant.

  “Nonsense. All her friends of her age have been married long ago. She’s practically an old maid. I won’t put up with this any longer. Playing about with a silly romping boy like that infernal Philippe! Please tell her what I’ve said.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said May, smiling sweetly. “Good night, Ernest.”

  He had turned away, and now he turned back. Husband and wife regarded each other steadfastly through the twelve-inch opening. The light from the room fell on Ernest’s face and quite-gray hair. He looked tired and haggard, but indomitable as ever. But he also looked lonely, and the light implacable eyes were almost pleading. “Good night,” May repeated, and closed the door softly in his face. Forgetting her daughter, she pressed her cheek against the wood of the shut door, and stood there for a long moment. When she turned away, there was a moisture upon the wood.

  Gertrude stood on the hearth, biting her lips, her hands clasped rigidly together. May put her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder. “We must not speak aloud,” she whispered. “And it is very late. Undress as quickly as possible, and we will go to bed. Now, no more talk, tonight! Take off that poor ruined frock, and get under the covers.”

  CHAPTER LXVIII

  Amy often thought that she had mothered four total strangers, a different species altogether. Once her pretty housecat had found four motherless little puppies and adopted them. Amy watched the incongruous family and told herself that she and her children offered as strange a sight.

  Her three older children were taller than she, and John Charles, fifteen years old, was well on the way to overtopping her. They were all big-boned and squarish, hearty-voiced and brutal and bluff of manner, exigent and selfish, cynical and high-tempered. There were a few times, clear in her memory, when she seemed to be able to meet Lucy on equal ground and understanding, but Elsa and Paul and John Charles were alien to her. Nor could she find, except in Lucy, any resemblance to Martin, and even then, Lucy’s resemblance was faint and nebulous.

  In her cousin May’s children, Amy found the same substance that formed herself, the same delicacy of perception, the same mental pattern. For Godfrey James and Gertrude she felt a real maternal love, and the alienation that had grown up mutely between herself and her cousin caused her the more pain because she was separated from the two children. In Reginald’s fanaticism she found a flavor of Martin, in Guy she discovered her old youthful gaiety and delight in living. But Joseph, or Joey, repelled her amusedly; he was so like her John Charles, so like his cousin Andre Bouchard. She called them The Three Bankers, with as much apprehension as laughter.

  The estrangement between May and Amy had been complete for nearly two years, and May had ceased her visits entirely to her cousin’s house. Gertrude, though she loved her aunt, had also ceased to visit her, because of Paul. When Lucy had been married, nearly three years ago, the families had met in the house on Quaker Terrace, but even the wedding had not eased the strain. Amy, lonely among her savage young aliens, Paul and Elsa and John Charles, sat for hours in her own little sitting room, or worked in her garden, or read or walked, her only joy stemming from Ernest’s visits. Her whole life now revolved about those hours with him, so that everything else became unreal, was like a pasteboard background beyond which was nothing but the bare props of existence. No one realized the insecurity, the danger and the psychic dissatisfaction of her life, the unreality of it, better than did Amy, but she seemed helplessly caught in it, without the will to extricate herself, She lived for her love as a drug addict lives for his morphine, and spent herself in the two dimensions of it, trying not to think too much. She realized that there was plenty of gossip: old friends were visiting her more and more infrequently. She hardly subscribed to Ernest’s casual impatience and declarations that if one refused to discuss a certain thing with others, or appeared unware of it, it remained below the surface, and improvable. But danger and gossip, ostracism that extended only to her, jeers and whispers, insecurity and loneliness, still seemed a small price to pay for the only thing that mattered to her. Not even the vague fear that her children must one day suspect, if they did not already, could frighten her for more than a few moments.

  She was feeling unusually lonely and depressed one damp autumn day, as she sat in her sitting room looking out into the garden. The grass and the denuded trees, the earth and the distant wall, were all of one uniformly brown tint. A few soaked red leaves lay on a garden path, their edges curled up, and the cups they made full of livid water. Mist wound its way over the muddy ground, seeming like a cold exhalation from the earth itself. The skies were gaseous; everything dripped, though it was not raining; long trickles of water ran down the tree trunks, hung on their shining bare branches, water dropped from the eaves, water lay in the little puddles everywhere. Even the canaries in the warm little room were silent, and the only other sounds were the melancholy dropping of water outside and the dropping of coals inside.

  Amy was all alone, trying to read. Elsa was somewhere in the house, listless as she always was on inclement days. She is twenty-two, thought her mother, sadly, and still unable to find another interest besides Godfrey Barbour, though he never writes to her and she has not seen him for two years. Amy, who had loved silently and miserably for so many years, could sympathize with this mute agony that waited and watched, and could sustain itself on the bitter crumbs of second-hand messages and anecdotes. And half of the messages are lies, thought Amy mournfully, because May is really too kind-hearted to hurt poor Elsa. Sometimes she wondered if it would not have been kinder to have killed this hopeless and wretched passion which the big red-cheeked girl felt for the delicate pale young man. “It is so incongruous!” exclaimed Amy aloud. She felt a sudden sharp resentment against Ernest, who encouraged Elsa to hope; he made no secret of the fact that he wanted Elsa to marry his son. “Knock the silliness out of him,” he said once. But Amy could not find anything that was not grotesque in the thought of such a union.

  She had half decided to send for Elsa (for none of the children were allowed in the sitting room of their mother without special invitation), and had tried to arrange in her mind a number of subjects on which she and her daughter could meet pleasantly, when she heard the front bell ring. She wondered, without much interest, who could be calling on such a day. When the maid knocked discreetly, and announced Miss Gertrude Barbour, Amy turned quite pale with surprise and pleasure.

  Gertrude came in, wrapped in an enveloping waterproof cape of black broadcloth, a hood over her head. Amy rose, and approached her with smiles and outstretched hands. “My dear Trudie! How delightful! Do come to the fire child. Bertha, take Miss Gertrude’s cloak and umbrella and dry them in the kitchen. Trudie! How pleased I am to see you!”

  She kissed the girl’s cheek; it was wet and chill under her lips. Then with her hands on Gertrude’s shoulders, she held her off and beamingly regarded her. Gertrude forced a smile; she looked rather wan and colorless in her brown wool dress and closely buttoned basque. Her lustreless dark hair lay smoothly but lankly on each side of her clear pale cheeks. Amy saw that there were smudges of violet under the dark eyes, and that the girl’s lips looked pinched and cold.

  “I’m so pleased, so happy, to see you again, dear Aunt Amy,” she murmured in her restless way. She regarded Amy intently.
Her aunt never seemed to grow older, she thought heavily. Her eyes were so limpid and brown, her skin so fresh, her bright brown hair so shining in its smooth waves and high piled roll on the top of her pretty head. Her dark blue wool frock, with its touch of lace at the throat, made her look young again. She looks much younger than Mama, said Gertrude to herself. She kissed Amy again. She loved the sweet odor of rose that came from Amy’s flesh and clothing; it seemed more a part of her very personality than an external fragrance.

  She sat down in a chair Amy drew for her to the fire. She waited, her small delicate hands in her lap, as Amy ordered tea. She stared at the fire, with such a quiet hopelessness that Amy was alarmed and touched. Pretending not to notice anything wrong, Amy assumed a sprightly tone and asked after May, and the children. She poked the fire, made a small joke, and laughed. Gertrude smiled painfully; her lips trembled.

  “How nice of you to visit a dull old lady!” said Amy, taking the girl’s hand, and holding its slight coldness between her warm palms. “Elsa and I are just not on speaking terms on days like these. I believe she is moping upstairs in her room. Shall I invite her to join us?”

  “Oh no, please, Aunt Amy!” Gertrude came to life in agitation. “I came to see just you.” She began to wring her hands desperately on her knee. She looked at Amy, who had become gently grave, and her distress was so marked, so pathetic, that the older woman felt alarm.

  “My dear,” she said softly. “What is it? Is it some trouble? Can I help you? If I can, please tell me. You can rely upon me.”

  “I know I can. Oh, I know I can, Aunt Amy!” Gertrude began to cry; the tears gushed from her eyes, fell over her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. She merely implored her aunt with hands and eyes, and Amy’s alarm increased.