Let Love Come Last

by Taylor Caldwell

  Thomas gloated. So, he had aroused that image, had he? “Just intuition,” he replied, airily. “I’m not a fool. I’ve been watching that cutthroat for years. He’s after something. And Pa trusts him. But then, Pa always was stupid. I found that out when I was a kid. Who gives a damn for him, except Ma and old Oliver? He thinks he is surrounded by a big and loving family. Let him have his delusions.”

  Matthew now appeared both bored and tired. “I don’t believe you, Tom. Father isn’t bankrupt. Look at this house. Look at the money he spends. Incidentally, now that we are exchanging confidences, I might as well tell you that I’m not going back to Princeton.”

  Thomas stared. “You aren’t?” He burst out laughing. “Don’t shock me. You aren’t going to work, are you? In the lumber business?”

  Distaste made fine wrinkles spring out about Matthew’s eyes. “No. I want to go to Italy. I’ve never forgotten Italy. I can live cheaply there. I,” and his voice became very dim, “can live there.” He paused.

  “Italy!” roared Thomas.

  Matthew closed his eyes, leaned his head back against his chair. “Italy,” he repeated, softly.

  Thomas stood up. He threw his cigarette into the fire. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he said. “We must have a fine education, Pa says. We must be educated like gentlemen, Pa says. After my education, I can go into the business, Pa hopes. Well, I’m through with my education, and I’m going into the business. And you’re going to Italy. That ought to gratify Pa no end. One of his darling children leaving him!”

  Matthew turned his head aside. “I’m very tired,” he murmured. “Would you mind leaving me, Tom?”

  After Thomas had stamped away, Matthew resumed his slow and interrupted thoughts. He completely forgot his brother; he forgot what Thomas had said to him. He had this capacity to forget things. He could even forget himself, for to himself, he was a weariness, a great tiredness that filled not only his own mind but the whole universe.

  What can anyone do, he thought, who has never had a reason for living? Someone who, from earliest childhood, had had all reason for living taken away from him? For what could one strive, when there was no incentive to strive? To have no motive, no urge for existence; that was life in death. There was such a thing as smothering in gratification. I am not reproaching my father too much but, by giving me whatever I wished, he flattened life for me, destroyed in me all desire. I was told I was perfect. I now know that I am not perfect, that I am no genius. My only hope is to acknowledge this, to go away and let my imperfections plague and torment me, arouse in me the impulse to live. I don’t want to die. Or, do I? Is it possible that a man might kill himself because he had had given him instantly all that he ever coveted or dreamed?

  Matthew was now overcome by a real emotion of terror, but it was a terror he welcomed with a kind of exultation. The instinct of self-preservation had, then, not been entirely killed in him! He still wished to live. But if he was to live, he must go away, as soon as possible. He thought of Italy now as the land of his salvation. He might never paint there; his creative impulses might have been destroyed forever. He might be only a ghost in a land which teemed with creative spirits that had never really died. At least, in Italy he would see all his imperfections clearly, all his inferiorities, all his smallnesses.

  He thought of what Thomas had told him. It did not matter. The collapse of the family fortune meant little to him; the misery of his family did not move him; he cared for no member of it. He wished only to survive, himself. It had become a desperation in him. To this had he been reduced by excessive love and indulgence.

  He heard a soft knock upon his door. He sat very still. If he pretended to be asleep, or absent, whoever knocked would go away. But the door, after a second knocking, opened. Oliver stood there, smiling quietly. “Hello, Matt,” he said.

  Matthew did not reply. Oliver came in, shutting the door behind him. Oliver said: “I came to thank you for the miniature. How did you know I admired Voltaire so much?”

  It was an effort to Matthew to reply, even indifferently: “I saw your books, years ago. I remembered.”

  Oliver sat down, quietly and easily. His dark eyes regarded Matthew with thoughtfulness. “It was a wonderful thing for you to remember, and I’m grateful.”

  Matthew lifted a hand in acknowledgment; it was a weary gesture. Abruptly, he said: “I am going away. To Italy.”

  Matthew was astounded at his own words. He was even more astounded that he could speak so to Oliver, for his foster brother had been even less to him than his own family. In enormous confusion, he tried to remember how he had come to buy that miniature for Oliver, for never before had he given him a gift.

  “Italy,” repeated Oliver, reflectively.

  “You don’t think the idea is stupid?” asked Matthew, with an effort.

  “Stupid? No. Why should I think that?”

  Matthew was silent. He studied the backs of his hands, the fingers and palms, in that familiar way of his. He waited for the tiredness to return to him, the tiredness that always came when a member of the family spoke to him. It did not come. He said, haltingly; “I must go to Italy.” He looked at Oliver. “I may have some difficulty with my father. Mother is fond of you. Would you speak to her for me?” An expression of bitterness, entirely alien to him, touched his face. “Mother,” said Matthew, “always has such ‘common-sense’. Why hasn’t anyone told her that ‘common-sense’ is frequently just a lack of imagination?”

  Oliver said calmly: “Of course, if you want me to, I’ll speak to her. Though I think it might help if you did, too. I’m sorry, but I don’t think Mother lacks imagination. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, Matt, that it was she who insisted on taking you to Italy again, three years ago.”

  “I had forgotten,” muttered Matthew.

  “I think she’ll be glad,” added Oliver. But all at once he did not believe it. If William objected strenuously to his son’s leaving for an indefinite time, Ursula would immediately take William’s side, despite any convictions she might have. She had long ago ceased to fight for her children. Her husband, alone, existed for her now. I must speak to her, thought Oliver, frowning.

  Matthew’s voice had always been dim and uninterested, and it surprised Oliver to hear a sudden desperate note in the younger man’s voice: “You see, I’ve got to go. It doesn’t matter who objects, though I hate scenes and noises. It’s a matter of life and death to me. I don’t know where I’ll get the money to go but, if necessary, I’ll sell everything I have.”

  Oliver was quiet for some moments, then he said: “That might not be necessary. I’ve never spent all of my allowance. I have saved about four thousand dollars. It’s yours, Matt, if you want it.”

  Matthew stared at him, stupefied. He leaned forward toward Oliver. He stammered: “Thank—you. I don’t know how to thank you.” He looked at Oliver with a curious intentness, as if seeing him for the first time. “I—think you understand. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Oliver.

  Matthew’s hands moved restlessly. He stood up. He walked about the room. He lifted one canvas after another, dropped it back with a dull thud. He looked at the one on the easel. “I’ll never paint again,” he said.

  “You might,” said Oliver. “But even that doesn’t matter, if you once learn how to live, or want to live.”

  He was startled when Matthew, who always moved so slowly, swung upon him, his light blue eyes astonishingly vivid. “I wasn’t wrong!” he cried. “You do understand.”

  Oliver went on, as if Matthew had not spoken: “Even more important, you might possibly understand that others are living, too, that others have importance, also. In fact, I believe it’s more necessary to understand that than it is to want to live, yourself. You can’t affirm living without the affirmation of universal life, also.”

  Oliver stood up. “You’re not alone, Matt. You may think you are, and that you live alone, and are interested only in living alone. An attitude like that is annihilation
for you. But I know that you can’t suddenly say to yourself, ‘The whole world is part of me, and I am part of it.’ Help for you must now come from outside yourself. It’s too late for anything else. Perhaps that help may come to you in Italy.” He paused: “You may deny it, but I think that unconsciously you want to be a part of all life, because you know that anything else is death.”

  “No,” said Matthew. “No. You are wrong. I was never interested in anything at all. Except myself, perhaps, and even that is gone now.”

  He stood motionless, astonished. He waited for Oliver to speak, but Oliver merely gazed at him meditatively. He stammered: “You think that is ugly and self-centered of me, don’t you? You think I ought to be ashamed?”

  Oliver stood up. “I never condemn anyone,” he answered. “No one can ever fully understand anyone else.”

  He went out of the room as quietly as he had entered it. For a long time Matthew stood, perfectly still, looking at the fire.

  CHAPTER XLII

  Ursula always recognized Oliver’s knock and, no matter what the time or the occasion, always welcomed it. When Oliver now entered her sitting-room, she greeted him with a genuine love and pleasure, which lighted up a worn face chronically drawn in an expression of sleepless anxiety.

  “Dear Oliver,” she said, holding out her hand to him, and looking at him fondly. “Where have you been, all this dreary day? Walking in this weather?” She glanced through the leaded windows, and shivered at the dark snow.

  “No. Certainly not, Mother.” Oliver smiled. “I was never an athlete. You know that. Frankly, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Very unprofitable,” murmured Ursula, indicating a chair for Oliver. She spoke mechanically. The book that lay in her lap had already fallen shut. “How tedious it is, after the holidays! Christmas leaves a blankness after it. We ought to be thankful for New Year’s. A sort of breathing-space of pleasure before we plunge into the miserable new year.”

  Oliver sat down. “How is Father?” he asked, tactfully.

  “Well, he is lying down, until after tea-time,” replied Ursula. “He balks at it. Calls it coddling. But he welcomes it, I know.” She hesitated, and the anxiety made her face old and pinched. “That’s what worries me. I’d rather he refused—but there it is.”

  “I thought he looked gay and happy yesterday,” said Oliver.

  Ursula’s mouth became bitter. “He had his family all around him then, his children, to whom he has given his whole life. Oliver, is a delusion better than the truth?”

  “If it brings happiness,” he answered promptly. “What is the aim of life, anyway? Happiness, or at least the illusion of it. Anyway, I’d rather believe a lie that gave me pleasure than a truth that gave me a belly-, I mean, a headache.”

  Ursula laughed a little. Oliver went on: “Do you remember what Charles Lamb once said? ‘My theory is to enjoy life but the practice is against it.’ What practice? Our own conviction that we must find ‘truth’ at any cost. Truth-seekers are usually masochists, and very tiresome folk, too.”

  “What unorthodox ideas for a lawyer! I thought law was the unrelenting pursuit of truth.”

  “A fallacy usually entertained by those who know nothing of law,” said Oliver, smiling. “Why does a man consult a lawyer? In order to adjust himself and his affairs to an existing law? Nonsense. He wants a lawyer to show him how to get around a law. That’s how precedents are made. Think how dangerous any law could become if it weren’t frequently amended by precedents! Can you imagine how impossible the Constitution would be if we didn’t continually add amendments? Amendments are signs that the Constitution is in a healthy state, and growing constantly. Whenever a man, or a nation, changes its opinions, or enlarges them, he, or it, hasn’t as yet died.”

  The drawn lines on Ursula’s face softened. “You talk like my father,” she said. “He always had an argument. He once said that the Persian system of law collapsed, and the Persians with it, because they stood rigidly by outgrown laws. Oliver,” she added, “I was so delighted when you told me, the other day, that Scott, Meredith and Owens had given you an increase in salary, voluntarily. And the strangest thing of all,” she added, without thinking, “is that William, when I told him, was as proud as if—”

  “—I were his own son,” said Oliver, when Ursula, caught in an unusual breach of diplomacy, halted in confusion. “I’m happy to know that.”

  It was always easy to talk to Oliver; his asymmetrical eyes never lost their humorous twinkle. Ursula continued eagerly: “I told him just before we went to bed. He looked at me in the strangest way. But he only said: ‘Lawyers are wily scoundrels. I suppose they are thinking they might get something from my own table. But you can be sure they won’t; it’s no use their trying to toady to me. I’m not interested.’ But, Oliver, my dear, he knew they weren’t trying to ‘toady’ to him. It’s just William’s way.”

  “Your fire is a little low,” said Oliver. He stood up and threw coals upon the crimson embers. Again, as it had happened so many times before, Ursula was caught by some familiarity in Oliver’s movements, and the old nagging wonder came to her. Whom did Oliver resemble so closely? Now he stood on the hearth, his hands clasped behind his back. Ursula leaned forward to watch him. His lean cheek, though clear and dark, was the cheek of someone else. Someone she hated.

  Someone I hate! she cried to herself, with a revival of fear. The terror had rushed out into words in her mind. Oliver bent and poked at the fire. There was a certain long movement of his arm, a certain bend of his shoulders, a certain elegance. She was not looking at Oliver. She struggled with a shifting image, trying to focus it clearly. Oliver turned, his back to the fire, and smiled down at her.

  It was not Oliver smiling at her, but Eugene Arnold.

  Eugene Arnold! Now a thousand corroborative likenesses came to her, likenesses which she had unconsciously suppressed in the past. Oliver, walking towards her down one of the garden paths; Oliver’s faint laugh, when he was displeased; Oliver’s quiet relentlessness, tempered though it always was by humor and tolerance and affection; certain gestures, certain intonations of voice, certain turns of the head, a certain immovable coldness, rare, to be sure, but evident when offended.

  “What is the matter, Mother?” asked Oliver, quickly. She heard his tone with unbearable clarity. It was the echo of Eugene Arnold’s voice.

  Ursula’s hands clutched the arms of her chair. But Eugene resembled his mother, Alice. It was impossible to think that Alice—and then, out of the past rushed the memory of the young Chauncey Arnold. In his later years he had become gross and clumsy and boorish, heavily shapeless. Suddenly Ursula remembered Chauncey as a young man, dark and slender and charmingly courteous, before some secret avarice and ugliness in his character had become dominant. Ursula suddenly put her hands over her face.

  She felt Oliver beside her. Instinctively, she wanted to cry out, to push him away. I am going mad, she thought. I am seeing what is not there. For a few moments, at least, she dared not look up at a young man who might have been Chauncey Arnold as a youth.

  “Are you ill, Mother?” asked Oliver. I must control myself, thought Ursula. I am imagining what does not exist. She dropped her hands. And then a cold and awful conviction came to her, a conviction which needed no affirmation.

  “Please sit down, dear,” she said, in a stifled voice. Oliver sat down, but he leaned towards her, his clasped hands between his knees. It was Eugene’s old gesture. Because she had always hated Eugene, she had never recognized the resemblance before.

  “The strangest thoughts come to one—in the twilight—sometimes,” she stammered, trying to smile at her horror. She forced herself to go on. “Oliver, dear, have you ever thought who—who might be your real parents?”

  She waited for him to give a laugh of indulgent dismissal. To her fright, he looked down at his clasped hands and his face changed. “Yes,” he said, quietly. “For a reason of my own. It is very important to me.”

  She was terribly frig
htened. “Oliver!” she cried, and reached out and touched his hands so that they would lose their revealing pose. They did; he took her hand. “Oliver! Tell me why you want to know. Don’t look at me like that, my darling. You see, the—the reason is very important to me, too.”

  He looked at her for a long time. “Mother,” he said at last, with an effort. “You see, I can’t go on this way—” He regarded her; he had become grim. “You won’t mind, I’m sure. I love Barbie.”

  “Barbie,” repeated Ursula, dazed. The objects in the firelit room began to move in long circles about her.

  “Yes, Barbie,” said Oliver, very quietly. “I love Barbie. But I can’t tell her, because I know she loves me, too. She’s young. If—if I should go away, she’d probably forget me, though Barbie is like you, Mother; she is tenacious.” He tried to smile. “Yes, you’ll hate me, Mother, when I tell you that I am trying to find out whether Barbie is my sister. If she is—then—” He lifted a hand, let it drop. Once again, it was Eugene’s eloquent gesture.

  Ursula could hardly make her voice audible. “Oliver, are you afraid that—that—William might be your real father?”

  “Yes.”

  Ursula was silent. Too many thoughts, images, faces, were running through her mind. They confused and shocked her. She could not think of Barbara just yet. Ursula caught Oliver’s arm, and said, vehemently: “Oliver! Don’t be afraid of that. It isn’t true. William—” And then she could not continue for a few moments. Her face was haggard with wretchedness; now it became stern. “Oliver,” she said, “for many years something about you has plagued me. I put it out of my mind, because the very idea was loathsome. But it has just come to me, whom you resemble so—so terribly. And I’m convinced, now.”