Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  She swallowed, her sick-child eyes dilating more and more until they shone with a strained blue brilliance under the light. She visibly trembled. Elsa, furious at Paul, loving her niece with all her heart, thought suddenly of a crippled bird. And thinking of that bird, she remembered Godfrey, who had looked just like this, one terrible night, the last night she ever saw him, in the rooms where they had found him with that ghastly Frenchwoman. It was ages ago, but she remembered, and the tears ran into her throat. Swamped by the memory, she put her hand over Alice’s, and smiled down at her with infinite love and tenderness.

  “My lamb, if you don’t want to go to New York, you needn’t. And if you don’t like Thomas I’ll beat him off with my umbrella if he so much as looks at you! There now, eat your blanc mange and drink your tea. And don’t forget,” she added with a deeper smile and a touch on the young cheek, “you promised to read us your new sonnet.”

  Alice’s color returned. She smiled uncertainly. Paul, realizing his mistake, demanded more tea in an irate voice. He met his sister’s eyes; they were cold and hostile, and full of meaning.

  They went into the living room where Paul, still trying not to look at his daughter, stirred the fire with unusual vigor, though the early spring evening had turned warmish. Alice languidly picked up a book, then tried to crochet, wandered to the piano where she strummed a few discordant bars, yawned, sighed, glanced furtively at her father, and then at the clock on the mantelpiece. She knew he was angry at her: it had been her intention to ask him to let her run over to her Aunt Florabelle’s again, but she knew he was in no mood to consent. She yawned until her eyes were wet. Elsa, adjusting her spectacles, was reading the evening paper, Paul was reviewing some personal letters which had arrived at the house for him. He, too, wore spectacles while reading, and they made him seem older and heavier, less youthful, more middle-aged.

  “What a dull, dull home I have!” thought Alice passionately. Then, as she always did when she was feeling sorry for herself, she thought: “Oh, how I do wish my poor dear Mama had lived! I’m sure she would not have been unreasonable, like Papa; she would have understood how I loathe Thomas. She looks so frail and sad in her photograph in my room, but so understanding.” She thought of her grandmother, Amy, and the memory of her was sympathetic and beautiful; she had always been so sweet-smelling, so smiling, so serene. A certain other memory never failed to intrigue the girl: she remembered that her grandfather had wept at her grandmother’s funeral, openly, as though no one else were there. The tears had dropped, one after another, over his cheeks, and had run over his cravat and his waistcoat. It seemed strange to see a man weep, especially one so old and gray as grandfather. She sat idly on the piano stool, thinking and remembering, swinging one slim little foot, her mouth dropped open slightly and vapidly. Then her expression quickened; words formed in her mind:

  “O you, so old and gray, why do you weep?

  Because the flesh you love has turned to dust?

  Because the lonely fire yourself must keep,

  And all your hopes are—”

  The doorbell rang distantly. Alice scowled, the white transparent skin wrinkling over her nose and eyes. Some of Aunt Elsa’s dull friends, no doubt, and perfectly stupid girls. The butler brought in a telegram on a silver tray. Paul took it and read it.

  He glanced at Elsa swiftly. “Uncle Ernest and Aunt May are coming home. They landed this afternoon, and ought to be here tomorrow night.”

  Elsa put down her paper. “But they weren’t expected for another month.”

  “True. But he’s coming back on account of the impending war. Trust Uncle Ernest to smell powder a thousand miles away.”

  “Oh, is there going to be a war, really?” cried Alice, shining.

  Paul looked at her irritably over his spectacles. “And if so, why does it concern you, miss? Of course there’s going to be a war. We aren’t going to allow Spain to torture Cuba much longer, I can tell you.”

  Another thought struck Alice. She tossed her head. “It ought to be good for business, then, Papa,” she said.

  Paul glared at her, stupefied for a moment. “What the devil do you know about my ‘business,’ Miss Impertinent?”

  “Only that it’s a nef—nef—nefarious one,” responded Alice with defiance, but inwardly much frightened.

  Utterly unable to speak, outraged, Paul turned demandingly to his sister. Elsa gazed at her niece, shocked.

  “Whatever are you talking about, child?”

  Alice tossed her head again, and showed her fright now. “Well, François said munitions are nef—nefarious, Aunt Elsa. He—he said munitions makers are mass-killers, and that some day we’ll recognize that and drive them off the face of the earth. As a menace. A menace,” she added, in a failing but still courageous voice.

  “Well!” ejaculated Elsa, on an exhaling gush of breath. “I’m sure! François is certainly—certainly not very bright, I must say. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that he lives in idleness on the proceeds of munitions. A menace! I never!”

  “Go to bed,” said Paul in a quiet and deadly voice. His face was pale.

  Alice began to cry. “But, Papa, it’s only half past nine—”

  “Go to bed,” he repeated, and there was something in his face and voice that terrified the girl. She got up and ran out of the room, completely demoralized.

  When the door had shut behind the crying girl, Paul said to his sister in a tone of quiet violence: “You must keep her away from that house, Elsa. Do you hear me? I shall hold you responsible for this. If you can’t be trusted I shall have to send her away to some school, some institution. I’ve seen something the last few minutes!”

  Elsa, herself, was too shaken to be angered at her brother’s words and tone. She sat, swallowing dryly, very pale.

  “Get her to New York, if you have to drag her. Don’t bring her back until it is all settled. Get her married there, if you can, if it takes a year. Today’s Wednesday: get ready and take her Friday. In the meantime, don’t let her out of your sight.”

  He got up and began to walk heavily about the room, his hands behind his back, his thoughts violent, full of hatred and fear.

  He’s coming back! he thought. He’s coming back, and he’ll live a thousand years!

  CHAPTER CVIII

  Jules Bouchard, it was generally conceded, had married “a great I lady,” of which there were deplorably few left these strident days He had been about twenty-six when he had married Miss Adelaide Burgeon, who was then four years his senior, being thirty. She was the only daughter of an old man, who had been born in Windsor but who had moved to Philadelphia when Adelaide had been a child. The family was impeccable, going far back to a noble gentleman who had arrived in Maryland with a fortune in the early part of the seventeenth century—a Catholic gentleman leaving a hostile Protestant England. Later, his descendants had come to Pennsylvania, that is, one or two of them who were adventurous and greedy and restless. They had built one of the first steel mills in Pittsburgh, made a vast amount of money, resumed their gentility and moved to Philadelphia. Miss Adelaide’s father had had a quarrel with his relatives, had gone to Windsor and there married, in his middle age. Adelaide was the only result of that marriage. Her father had become homesick, eventually, and had returned to Philadelphia, only to come back to Windsor, there to remain until after his daughter’s marriage, when he died. His fortune was reputed to be over four million dollars. In reality, it was scarcely one million, but as Jules said philosophically, “it did very nicely.”

  Old Mr. Land Burgeon had been “a great rascal.” He had never engaged in business of any kind, but he was a brutal and savage old man, rapacious and merciless, snarling of speech, suspicious of the motives of everyone but his daughter, bad-tempered and insulting, irascible, and at times downright vicious. But no one questioned that he was a great gentleman, in spite of his roaring voice and bawdy insults. He had served two terms as Mayor of Windsor, and had been most merciless during the strikes. He carried
a heavy cane, which he brandished and frequently used on the backs of servants and sometimes others. He hated practically everything, especially Jules Bouchard, when that astute young man had come a-wooing Adelaide.

  “He’s after your money, girl,” he said to his daughter, sourly. “But then, who the devil would marry such a milk-face as you without money?” This, despite the fact that he had never loved any one but this meek, well-bred, delicate daughter of his, with the attenuated transparent face, big gray eyes and gentle voice. Mr. Burgeon had no reticences and the things he said to his daughter, in the presence of her friends, about her lack of bosom or narrowness of hips, often sent the poor girl off in an agony of shame, tears and red blushes. In fact, Mr. Burgeon was disappointed in his daughter: he liked lusty women, of vitality and laughter and flashing eyes, with bosoms “a man can lean his head on and not think he is up against the side of a barrel,” and “with a backside a man can smack in a joke without cutting his hand on bones.” He liked gaudy women, big women, full of zest and passion, witty women who could wink at a double entendre. Yet, chaste women, oddly. One of his chief and most ferocious complaints was that: “Either a woman is ‘good’ and has no blood in her damn skinny body, and no more zest than a slaughtered calf, or she is a whore, and has everything a man likes and needs to comfort him in the goddamn business of living!” He frequently became quite querulous because woman could not be a combination of Pallas Athene, Aphrodite and Diana.

  Sometimes he would look at Adelaide as she moved softly and silently about the house; he would watch her, his hands folded on his cane, his chin on the backs of his hands, and he would scowl, noting how the folds of her skirts showed the ridges of her slight fleshless hips, and how the ripples of her bodices could not conceal the fact that she had practically no breasts. Finally, he would grunt savagely: “Well, at any rate, you’ll bring me home no bastards!”

  He lived with his daughter in the old family house, rather tumbledown and inconvenient, damp under trees that drowned and strangled it in summer in a welter of steaming green and covered it with a skeleton tangled mass in the winter. He pottered in his gardens, rumbled, bellowed, roared, visited seldom and then was so ill-natured that his hosts were terrified of him and endured him only because of his family name and money. He frightened off with ridicule, blunt questions, sarcasm, rudeness and bullying any possible suitors who might have come for Adelaide. But he could not frighten off Jules Bouchard.

  “I don’t know what he comes for!” he would say to Adelaide. “God knows, it isn’t to seduce you! Not with the pretty little piece he has down there on Endicott Road, who’s worth twice of you, my girl. So it must be he wants to marry you—for your money, or my money—though a devil like that could have a dozen women better than you.”

  He swore at Jules, cursed him, quarrelled with him, ordered him from the house dozens of times, shook his cane at him. But Jules only laughed, replied in kind, tormented the old man with his witticisms and thrusts, and usually ended up by playing whist with him. One night the old man said, after a successful game: “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, you damned scheming Frenchman. I hate you and always will, and I know what you’re after.”

  Then one night Jules replied, smiling slightly: “If you know, my dear sir, what about it? Are you going to consent to Adelaide marrying me?”

  The old man glared at him with his red-rimmed and choleric eyes, blasphemed, consigned him to the depths of various hells. Then, in a suddenly and curiously mild voice, he asked: “Why the devil do you want to marry Addie? She’ll never give you brats, and God knows, she’ll be no pleasure to sleep with.” He peered at Jules cunningly: “It’s the money, eh?”

  “Possibly,” replied Jules calmly.

  “But you’re no gentleman.”

  “Neither are you.”

  Mr. Land Burgeon laughed loudly, with pure enjoyment, and called Adelaide, who had been crocheting in another room, finding her deepest pleasure in the distant sound of Jules’ voice, and waiting and living only for those moments when he would speak to her and hold her hand. She came into the room, blushing and smiling and trembling a little as her eyes met Jules’. She had long given up any hope of her father’s consent to her marriage, and when she saw the old man, frowning formidably, with his thick lips thrust outward together as they always were when he was enraged, she felt her heart turn over painfully.

  “Do you want to marry this scoundrel of a wily Frenchman?” he shouted at her. “This jackanapes with the priest’s face?”

  Poor Adelaide almost fainted in her tracks. She began to cry soundlessly, looking from Jules to her father.

  “Then stop your damned snivelling and have him!” Mr. Burgeon roared. “But mark my words, not a penny of my money shall either of you have unless I get a grandson.” He glowered at the paralyzed girl, glowered at Jules. “Bouchard! Butcher!” he muttered bitterly, and with contempt. “Well, the name’s appropriate.”

  So Jules, who treated Adelaide with delicacy, gallantry and kindness, but certainly did not love her, was married to the daughter of Mr. Land Burgeon. And in spite of the old man’s frequent and public announcements that his daughter didn’t have “the insides” to bear children, bear children Adelaide did, and with great promptitude. In 1886 Armand arrived, in 1887, Emile, and in 1888, Christopher. “He pulled them out of his hat!” old Land exclaimed, with characteristic lack of reticence. “He never got them out of Addie!”

  Jules had built a fine home in a very fashionable section of Windsor, a house all brick turrets and white balconies and porches. Jules liked gaiety about him, the flash of women’s eyes, the smooth broadcloth backs of men, but he was careful to invite to his house only those of impeccable social standing, and in consequence his visitors were frequently dull. Most of them were Adelaide’s friends, immaculate people, conservative people, unblemished and dimly polished people. Life at home was a succession of family dinners, correct, decorous dinners, dull and perfectly served, with heavy silver plate, Haviland china, silver soup tureens and urns, thick white napkins with monograms, decanters of sherry and Moselle. Adelaide was a splendid housekeeper, her servants excellently trained. Her voice was always soft, conciliating, pleasant and tender, her face shining with delicate sympathy and graciousness. Maternity had not rounded her figure in the least, but there was a well-bred vague maturity about her now. Her soft brown hair was drawn back smoothly and neatly from a central part, and even in 1898, when pompadours were the fashion, she wore a mass of shining brown braids coiled at the nape of her neck. There was no doubting the fact that Adelaide, with her neutral colored gowns and gentle words and quiet hands, was “a great lady.” She adored Jules and her sons, and was sadly but silently aware of the fact that none of them, except, perhaps, the cruel-faced, thin-lipped Christopher, loved her.

  She considered her husband’s family bewildering. She was too kind to find any one of them atrocious or impossible. One or two of them terrified her, notably Ernest, who was always amiable to her, and Florabelle. Having had little acquaintance with vulgarity and bad breeding, she did not recognize these things as such in her mother-in-law, and thought them merely incomprehensible and a little odd. She had been completely blind to them in her father, of whom she spoke as being “just a trifle blunt and outspoken, poor Papa!”

  Her whole day was focussed toward the dinner hour, when Jules, dark-raced and polite, always courteous and attentive, sat at the head of the table, and she at the foot, with the boys on each side. Then she felt happy and secure, sheltered. She discussed letters received by her that day, a coming dinner, an invitation, an amusing story about a servant. Her father had been dead a number of years, and she missed him greatly. Never a night passed that she did not mention him, with a faint wet brightening of her sweet eyes. At night, at her table, presiding over the teapots and the cups, she looked almost beautiful, in an anæmic, colorless and gentle way, and Jules, glancing at her, would think he had done very well, with a “lady’” for a wife, and her millio
n dollars in his keeping.

  She spoke tonight of “Aunt May,” whom she loved and found familiar. A letter had arrived from Montreal, in which May had written that she and Ernest expected to return very shortly. Jules looked up, alertly. But all he said was, absently: “How nice for you, my dear! You and Aunt May are very congenial.”

  Armand was a bulky, almost beefy, boy, with a round red face and auburn hair, narrow cunning black eyes, and a pleasant smile. He seemed older than his twelve years, for he was big-, if shapeless-, bodied, and he had a mature, measured way of speaking. Eleven-year-old Emile was small, quick and athletic, and laughed easily. He was much less to be trusted than Armand, who had a certain private code of honor. Christopher was the most like his father, but his skin was pale instead of brown, almost transparent, and he had “basilisk” eyes, gray and motionless and without passion. He was only ten, but his pale mouth was already fixed and settled in its fine cruelty. His nose resembled Jules’, as did his low, persuasive voice. Small-boned, inclined to silence, brown-haired, exquisite, he had an air of delicacy extremely like his father’s, yet also like his mother’s. Jules called him a “bloodless young devil,” and liked him the least of his sons. Without honor, himself, he preferred Armand, who had a certain honor, and disliked Christopher, who was most like himself.

  “Jules, dear, I’m so sorry you were detained last night,” said Adelaide, after a gentle warning glance at Emile, who was surreptitiously pinching Armand.

  “So was I,” said Emile. “I can’t stand Dickinson. He’s got hands that look and feel like cold boiled fish. And prim as an old maid, too. When he comes here to dine he’s always looking at his watch, and just at three minutes to ten he always announces he’s got to go. As if any one wanted him to stay.”

  “That’s enough,” replied Jules sharply though he smiled inwardly. Adelaide murmured reprovingly at her son. ‘I’m sorry, darling,” said Jules to his wife, “but I had considerable to detain me. But it was not necessary for you to stay home from Mrs. Sidway’s reception.”