Fielding grinned easily. “You were never so wrong, Aunt Cornelia.”
But Miles looked contemplatively at his brother and fine wrinkles appeared on his forehead. “However,” said Cornelia, “I think we can manage.” She studied Fielding slowly, thoroughly. “There are two genuine railroaders here, Fielding, but you are not one of them.” She dismissed him, returned her attention to Miles. “Do you know, I think, with you and me, it will be almost like the old days. When Allan was young.”
Miles escorted her down to her car and assisted her inside. He stood on the bleak and icy sidewalk in silence. But she blew a kiss to him and laughed, and was driven away. Her last words were: “I’m going to enjoy tomorrow night’s party, in a way. And the next day, I’ll tell DeWitt.”
When Miles returned to the board room, one of the directors said, “I knew we could always rely on old Cornelia, in a pinch. I can’t remember her ever looking so brisk and young. It was as if she’d been given new life.”
“Yes,” said Miles. “For a few years she had forgotten what it was to be a real railroader. Now she has remembered.”
51
Archbishop Rufus Anthony Marshall supported his brother DeWitt along some of the gentle garden paths below the Portersville house. Full summer burned in the marigolds, the zinnias, the canna lilies, and the salvia. The trees, however, were not so bright green and lush as they had been in July; the grass had a dusty smell. Fountains leaped and glittered in the hot air, and there was a scent of stone near them. Here and there, in open places, the lawns were burned. The sunlight flamed on the windows of the old mansion above, and its red roof glowed as if on fire. Far down in the valley the city smoldered under a gray fog of heat and smoke, and the river between the mountains had dwindled.
“There’ll be an early fall,” said Tony, as he gently helped his brother to sit down on a marble bench beneath a tree. He smiled up at the poplar, which he had planted. It was so large now, so pointed, like a spire, every leaf turning in the soft wind, and sparkling. But DeWitt saw nothing; he did not hear the shrilling of the cicadas or the tinkle of the fountains. He sat sunken on the bench, his hands fallen between his thin knees, his head on his breast. His face was livid and shriveled, like an old leaf, and his eyes were dull as muddy stones.
He said, “I hate this house. I always hated it. As soon as my new house is finished in November, Mary and Shelley and Rufus and I are leaving. Leaving it to—her.”
His voice was very quiet, but loaded with sick rage and hatred. Tony sat beside him, and the sunlight struck on the large cross on his breast. His brother was just recovering from an illness suffered last March, but the doctors reported that he was “doing very well.” But his soul is “not doing very well,” thought Tony with a momentary pang of despair, for which he immediately prayed forgiveness. He had been with his brother for three days now; all his consolations, his sympathy, his love, had not stirred the mighty rock of loathing and anger in the younger man. Tony’s pale and ascetic face was like that of a statue’s under the light of the hot sky.
“I think it will be best for you to have your own home,” he said. He hesitated. “But you mustn’t leave without becoming at least slightly reconciled to Mother.”
DeWitt laughed, a thin and acrid laugh. “I haven’t spoken to her since the day she informed me that she would vote with the directors against me, and put in—him.”
Tony sighed. “It was expedient business, for her. I’ve heard all the arguments. I suppose they had to do it, considering everything. But, DeWitt, you are such a wealthy man. You will be wealthier. What more can you want?”
DeWitt’s dark little hands tightened to fists on his knees. He lifted his head and stared emptily before him. “You wouldn’t understand. It was the power, not the money. And now, this degradation, this public humiliation. …”
“No one,” said Tony with some wry bitterness, “regards it as degradation or public humiliation to be a multimillionaire.”
But DeWitt was speaking as if Tony had not spoken. “A man wants power because he despises other men. He wants to force them to admire and humble themselves before him. Money alone doesn’t accomplish that. Power does.” He turned a sick but almost baleful smile on Tony. “Surely you understand that. People kneel to you and kiss your ring, don’t they?”
Tony said, “It isn’t I who am honored; it is God.”
DeWitt nodded, and parroted him: “It isn’t I who was honored; it was my power.”
“DeWitt, you are ill, more than your body has been ill. There are other things in the world beside power.”
“I know; you’ve named them. What is the use of my talking to you? We don’t even use the same connotations. What is desirable to you is incomprehensible to me, and what is desirable to me is incomprehensible to you. We can never meet on the same semantic grounds. You’re wasting your time, Tony. It’s just enough for you to be here with me. I don’t want your arguments.”
“But you’ll have my prayers.”
“Good,” said DeWitt, and smiled again, as one smiles at a beloved imbecile. “Will God be very kind and restore to me the presidency of the company? That is all I want. Just a small matter.”
“Perhaps God has a merciful reason in permitting this thing to happen to you.”
DeWitt laughed, and the sound was acid and ugly. “I think ‘God’s mercy’ is just a little more than I can stand now. Could you ask Him to withdraw it, for my sake?” He hit his leg with his cane, and though the gesture was slight it expressed an inner violence. “You’ve said, Tony, that God permits painful things to happen to men in order that they may draw nearer to Him. I think I prefer not to draw nearer to Him. It’s too costly.”
He laughed again. “What nonsense we are talking! And I only upset you. Just be still and let me know you’re here.”
Someone was coming along the path, a tall, red-haired young man with high coloring and hazel eyes and a sullen expression. He saw DeWitt and Tony, and stopped. The sullen expression disappeared and dark anger and resolution replaced it.
“Rufus,” called Tony, and the young man approached unwillingly. DeWitt glanced with brief indifference at his son and looked away. He closed his eyes as if the very sight of this big young fellow was a weariness to him, as all other things were these days, except his brother. Rufus stood in silence before his father and his uncle, and Tony tried to remember whether DeWitt loved this strapping boy or was proud of him. He could not remember whether DeWitt had ever mentioned him in his letters, or had ever spoken of him except with the faint derision he used in speaking of everyone. To DeWitt, Rufus was just the son who might have controlled the Interstate Railroad Company.
“Sit down, Rufus,” said Tony in his grave and quiet voice. Rufus folded himself up on the grass. Tony recalled having very few conversations with his nephew; he feared that he bored the boy by his very existence. But now, as Rufus sat there on the grass, it seemed to Tony that his own sight sharpened, and he saw that Rufus, who resembled his grandmother and his great-grandfather so closely, in all their coloring, stature, and primitive splendor, was not in more imponderable ways like them at all. What Tony had taken for sullenness was somber concentration; what he had taken for boorish conduct was a hard young sincerity, what he had taken for insistent selfishness was a desperate if silent desire for tenderness and attention, all of which had been consistently denied him.
Tony continued his dazed study as if with preternatural sight. This was no hulking boy, preoccupied by facile things. He was intelligent, determined, and a trifle morose, full of great reserve and strength. Tony saw that Rufus had forgotten his presence; he was gazing at his father, and there was the strangest intensity in his tawny eyes.
Then Tony saw that the young man loved his little, dark, and crippled father who almost invariably ignored him.
Before this blinding revelation, this miracle revealed to him, Tony shut his own eyes, and there was a moisture behind his lids. Who could explain the marvel of love given to one
who could neither return it nor had desired it? But then, thought Tony, God gives His love unasked to mankind, and unknown to it. It is just there, like the sun itself. What Rufus feels for his father is a tiny reflection of what God feels for man, and that in itself is a miracle.
“Rufus,” said Tony very softly. Rufus started, frowned, then turned with bruskness to his uncle, and waited. The sun changed his eyes to the color of hard gold. “Your father has been very ill,” Tony went on, holding the boy’s attention with his willpower.
“Good God, he knows that,” said DeWitt in a spent voice. “Wasn’t he called from school?”
But Rufus was staring fixedly at his uncle. Tony repeated, “Your father has been very ill.”
Rufus nodded very slightly. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, and his big hands, so like Cornelia’s, trembled ever so little. Tony prayed inwardly for help, then began to speak slowly.
“I am reminded of what St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions.”
DeWitt stirred impatiently, but when he looked into his brother’s eyes he saw a strange and radiant light in them, which had the effect of impaling him.
“‘But I, being miserable, sought for things over which I could grieve, and over which I could shed tears. But that was no marvel, as I was a straying sheep from Thy flock, and so was infected with the sad disease of my soul. In the weariness of my heart I became inflamed with my own sorrow, which increased my original suffering. My life being such, was it life, O my God?’”
His voice seemed to dominate the hot silence of the gardens, to ring back from the clustered trees, the stone walls, the hillside, the very sky. The little crippled man on the marble bench could not move his body, but his head sank to his chest and his face was hidden. The cigarette burned unheeded in Rufus’s hand, and his eyes fastened themselves on his father.
Then DeWitt said with bitter mockery, “‘My life being such, was it life, O my God?’”
Tony put his hands on his brother’s shoulders and said in command, “Look up. But don’t look at me. Look at your son, for the first time in your life.”
DeWitt obeyed. Slowly he lifted his head and looked at Rufus. Across the little space of sunburned grass the father and the son regarded each other. Rufus did not move; he gazed at his father, and all his love—open now, offering, unashamed—stood on that broad young face, simple, not pleading, not demanding, but held out as a gift. And DeWitt stared at that gift, unbelieving, half-rejecting, incredulous. He put up his hand and touched his son’s cheek, his mouth, his lips, like a man in a dream.
“Yes,” said Tony, and his voice broke, “your son loves you. But you never looked at him before, and you never knew his love, for in your heart you have always believed that you were not worthy of love.”
Rufus got to his feet and came to his father and took one of the diminutive hands in his own. He said nothing.
“But we are all worthy of love, otherwise God would not love us,” said Tony. “Why did you cling to me all these years? Because you knew, deep in your soul, that I loved you. And now, there are two of us who love you, though you thought I was the only one.”
DeWitt said in a harsh voice like a cricket, “And now I know, too, that I have nothing to give my son, but money. What I had was taken from me.”
Then Rufus spoke, quick and sure and loud, “You never had it, Father. You never had the power you thought you had. It was Grandmother’s all the time. I don’t want any power such as you think you wanted for yourself and me. If it comes anyway, through my own efforts, well and good. If I don’t have the capacity for it, I don’t particularly care.” He hesitated. “I suppose it’s because I never hated anyone very much.”
DeWitt’s face twisted, but Tony saw that his small fingers were clinging to his son’s hand.
“Listen to me, Father,” pleaded Rufus. “No one has ever bothered to tell you the truth. When you had your nervous collapse, after being voted out as president, you spent four weeks in bed. Do you know that if you hadn’t been forced by accident into that bed you would not be alive now?”
DeWitt looked at him in disbelieving astonishment. Rufus nodded at him, and smiled. He knelt down near his father, and his face was on a level with DeWitt’s.
“You see, it seems that you’ve had a heart condition for years, probably since your childhood, and it was building up for a long time to what would probably have been a fatal heart attack. The enforced rest saved your life.” The young man averted his head. “Think what it would have meant to me if you had died. I—well, I’m not the religious type, but when your doctors told me, I went to a church, and I thanked. …”
DeWitt had turned very pale. He looked at his son for a long time; then, with an almost imperceptible movement, he lifted his hand and placed it on Rufus’s red head. Rufus knelt there, very still, and to Tony it seemed that something powerful and unbearably moving flowed between the two.
“Rufus,” said Tony, “I didn’t know, myself. Tell me, what is your father’s condition now?”
Rufus looked up at his uncle, and the golden eyes were wet. “I suppose Grandmother never thought it necessary to tell Father, for the resignation from the presidency had already been proffered by him. But if he had continued to attend board meetings, and to carry on the affairs as president, he would have died. Now he can live, possibly a full lifetime, if he lives quietly.”
So, Mother really has some compassion hidden away in her, thought Tony. But she was wrong; she should have told him that he could not have remained president under any circumstances. What does she know of real bitterness and grief? Is it possible that not experiencing them in herself she believes others do not experience them? Then Tony’s heart involuntarily hardened against Cornelia. She was still a powerful director; she attended every meeting of the board. Her voice was still loud and assured, still listened to with respect. While DeWitt, thought Tony, wanders in loneliness about this house and has no comfort from his mother, and no tenderness from his wife, whose one desire is pleasure and romping about the world and getting her parties prominently publicized in the newspapers, and trying to marry off her daughter advantageously.
“But what shall I do with my life?” asked DeWitt feebly. “With all the years I can live?”
“You are still chairman, and you can attend an occasional meeting,” said Rufus. He smiled at his father. “And you and I can be together. I have just another year at Harvard. And then I’ll be home, and you can teach me about the road, and we can travel comfortably, and we can find out everything about each other.”
“And you can read, and you can learn, and you can think a little about God,” said Tony. “Just a little, each day. That you must promise me.”
DeWitt began to laugh, at first faintly, and then with a stronger sound.
“You two!” he exclaimed. “What shall I do for amusement when you are both away?” He turned his eyes from his son to his brother, and they were like fragments of shining jet, glinting with new-born energy. “You’ll be the death of me.”
“No,” said Tony, “we’ll be the life.”
He helped his brother to his feet, and Rufus took his father’s arm. Side by side, with DeWitt in the middle, the three men—the priest, the red-haired young giant, the dry twig which was DeWitt—moved up the long garden path together. No one spoke; DeWitt appeared engrossed in bottomless thought. All at once he stopped, and turned to look up and down at the gardens, at the walls, at the trees and sky. A peculiar dark kindling ran over his face; his meager chest rose and fell quickly.
“It’s very funny,” he said, “but I never noticed that summer had come. In fact, I think I never noticed it ever came. Until now.”
Tony watched him, and it was as if some little shriveled bough on a tree had suddenly pointed with buds, as if the bough would open into flower, not swiftly, not all in one day, but through cool and quiet weeks, through frosts and through night
DeWitt linked his arm through his son’s, and tightened his fingers on the young flesh
. But he looked at Tony. “There’s something, perhaps, I can do about your charities. Put me on a board, or something.” He looked about him again, and he seemed bewildered. Then he began to laugh soundlessly. They watched him, deeply moved. He nodded at Tony. “There’s our Pa’s infernal Foundation. While I’ve been lounging around since March, I’ve been reading some of the literature, and the newspapers. I have an idea or two, myself.”
He pointed to the mighty poplar blowing in the sun. “You thought I didn’t know, but I knew you planted that. They’ve wanted to cut it down; shading the flowers, or something. But I prevented it. I’ve an idea, now, what it really means.”
He looked up at his son. “Rufe, we’ve a long way to go, the two of us. I think we’ll start tomorrow. You and I.”
Tony fell behind a pace or two and watched the big young man and his father go slowly up the path together. If man is never victorious, he is also never defeated, thought Tony.
The sun suddenly blazed on the cross on his breast.
A Biography of Taylor Caldwell
Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read American authors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned five decades, she wrote forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Caldwell captivated readers with emotionally charged historical novels and family sagas such as Captains and the Kings, which sold 4.5 million copies and was made into a television miniseries in 1976. Her novels based on the lives of religious figures, Dear and Glorious Physician, a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a panoramic novel about the life and times of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time.
Never Victorious, Never Defeated Page 77