Luckily most of my burns were first-degree, with only a few second-degree. My hands had suffered most. To this day my righ hand is stiff and scarred, and I can no longer perform delicate operations. But I do not regret it; I can look at that hand and feel a deep content. It is the only thing in my life that has given me such soul-quietness.
Fortunately, I could feel nothing for a long time, until I was out of bed and getting around feebly again. I could think nothing clearly nor acutely. For this I was thankful. I knew a day was coming when I would feel again, and dreaded it. Livy told me gently one day that they had buried Dan beside Sarah Faire; Beatrice lay on her other side. I felt comforted even in my grief.
Livy gave me a letter that had come for me from Mr. John Semple president of the Ripley National Bank, in which he expressed regret for my injuries and asked me to call upon him as soon as I could. I put down the letter and looked at Livy. She seemed ill, worn out, and piteously white. I leaned towards her and put my bandaged hand on hers.
“Livy,” I began painfully. “Livy. Is it all right now?”
She smiled at me. Her smile did not waver, though tears ran down her cheeks.
“All right. Jim. Perfectly all right.”
Again. I was content. She put her arms around me and pressed her lips into my neck.
One day I told her what Dan had said, about not burdening me, and wondered aloud what it was he had started to tell me. But Livy put her hand on my mouth as though in fright.
“Let it go, Jim. He wanted to let it go. Don’t think about it anymore.”
But I did think about it. I shall always think about it. I have an idea—
Six weeks after Dan’s death I went over to Ripley to see Mr. John Semple of the First National Bank. He was a wizened, gold-hespectacled old man with a dry and pompous air. He received me in his private office and immediately got down to business. He importantly removed a thin sheet of paper from a blue envelope. I looked at it impatiently. He cleared his throat.
“You know, of course, Dr. Marcy, that Mr. Hendricks left quite an estate. Yes, if I may say so, quite an estate. His needs were small; he didn’t use up his income from the wells.”
“Yes. Yes,” I replied.
He cleared his throat again. “I have here the last will and testament of Mr. Daniel Hendricks. I will read it to you. It was made out three years ago. December eleventh, 1904, to be exact.”
He began to read. I listened dully for a few moments, then with intensity.
“I hereby will to my friend, Dr. James Marcy, of South Kenton, New York, the sum of ten thousand dollars outright, for his own personal use.”
“My God!” I whispered. Mr. Semple, unmoved, read on.
His property, containing the oil wells, was to be sold outright to the Ripley Gas Company, and the proceeds, which would amount to more than twenty thousand dollars, was to be given to our little free hospital. Dr. James Marcy was to be sole director as to how the money was to be used.
The gay and desolate house where he had lived with his wife, Beatrice, was to be torn down, and the land was left to the town of South Kenton on condition that upon the site was to be built a free circulating library. The sum of twelve thousand dollars was willed towards the building and stocking of the library.
He had left two thousand dollars and the farm to old Martha.
I was named sole executor of his estate.
I sat there, dumb and shaken, drawing my hand down over my face, and trembling. Mr. Semple, coughing, meticulously folded up the will. He tapped an arid finger on his desk.
“A very good will. A very kind will. Seems to me, Doctor, that you folks in South Kenton didn’t—er—appreciate Mr. Daniel Hendricks. A very good man. Very fond of him, myself.”
“We can’t take it!” I cried wildly, starting to my feet. “They hounded him—they tried to kill him! Somehow, I feel they did kill him!”
Mr. Semple clucked. No doubt he found me hysterical and childish. He shook his head.
“Well, that’s what the will says, Doctor. It isn’t in your hands. The property and money was left to the town of South Kenton, and I doubt, I very much doubt, that they will refuse it. Of course,” he smiled, “you are at liberty yourself to refuse your own specific legacy.” He seemed to find me absurd.
I called a meeting a few nights later in the town hall. I looked over the crowded room, experiencing in advance a bitter satisfaction. I read a copy of the will to them all. For a long time they sat motionless, dumbfounded, then gradually eye sought eye and looked away again. There was no cheer from the enemies of Dan Hendricks, no stereotyped motion of gratitude and thanks to the dead man. They filed out in silence. But I had the acrid pleasure of seeing that many an eye was dim, and that many men coughed and went away in subdued groups. I hated them all passionately.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Many years have gone by. I am getting old now, and there are two new young doctors to help me and to take my place, the place a son will never take. They live with Livy and me. They argue incessantly, and think me an old doddering country doctor whose day and theories are done. No doubt my time and ideas are done. I bear these young men no malice. I like to see their smart bags, listen to their learned new ideas. I like to visit the hospital, where I am chief of staff, and I take immense satisfaction in its perfect equipment, its shining operating rooms, the starchy whiteness of the nurses’ uniforms, its lines of white beds.
South Kenton has changed, become larger and very important. The old Baptist Church has been torn down, and a splendid garage stands in its place. South Kenton is on the main highway to New York, and that highway and our streets swarm with automobiles and interstate buses with their sonorous horns. The Great Depression has not hit us too badly, and our girls and young women dress as well as ever. Our evenings are noisy and hideous with the screamings of radios. Thick throngs of young people gather in ice cream parlors along Main Street of summer evenings, and over the New York Store is a garish dance hall where our youngsters dance three times a week to the unreconciled disapproval of their elders. Change. Change. Not always a pleasant change, but then, I am getting old.
The younger people are only vaguely familiar with the name of Dan Hendricks. They are not really interested. They think their parents are bores when mothers and fathers speak of Dan. His life is a tedious story to them. They crowd the Hendricks Public Library night after night and day after day, without a thought for the man who had made it possible for them to have this neat white stone building. When they are ill they go to our hospital, free if they cannot pay, and for a small fee if they can pay, and do not think of the one who gave them comfort and care.
Most of my friends are dead or half dead. We rarely speak of Dan Hendricks. He is like a book that has been read, a tale that has been told, a strange song that has been sung and forgotten. If we do speak of him, it is with vague gratitude and a distant uneasiness.
No one but Livy and myself visits his sunken grave. There had been a halfhearted suggestion about putting up a prominent monument to him, but I nipped the idea in the bud. Dan would have laughed at it. I felt that such a stone would have weighed him down, imprisoned him. But Livy puts the first flowers from her garden on his grave, and we often spend an hour or two in the summer Sunday afternoons, I kneeling stiffly to clip intruding grass, Livy to sprinkle water on the potted flowers with a green sprinkling can. We rarely speak of him, even when we are alone, but he will always be the most vital thought in our minds.
Livy is getting old, too, plump and gray-haired and quiet, but with the old resolute glance in her eyes and with the old honest mouth. We do not need to speak often, for we know each other’s thoughts.
I have no fear now of writing of my own part in Dan Hendricks’ life. No one will be interested. I told Livy I was writing it, and she did not answer for a long time.
“What can you write that would take more than a few hundred words?” she asked at last, very quietly.
I explained, but she did no
t seem to be listening. It was as though she were looking inward into thoughts that I could not share.
My life is complete. But sometimes I wonder if it is as complete as Dan’s was? There are so many things I might have done, might have said. I think we regret these things more than any “sins” we might have done, on the last day. I try not to think too much. I still think that saviors and heroes get pretty much what they deserve, for disturbing us.
No, Livy and I do not speak much of Dan Hendricks.
Yet, somehow, I think she could tell me a lot that I do not know, that I do not wish to know. I must have peace.
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.
Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, into a family of Scotch-Irish descent, she began attending an academically rigorous school at the age of four, studying Latin, French, history, and geography. At six, she won a national gold medal for her essay on novelist Charles Dickens. On weekends, she performed a long list of household chores and attended Sunday school and church twice a day. Caldwell often credited her Spartan childhood with making her a rugged individualist.
In 1907, Caldwell, her parents, and her younger brother immigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, New York, where she would live for most of her life. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, when she was twelve, although it was not published until 1975. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Combs and the birth of her first child, Mary Margaret—Peggy—did not deter her from pursuing an education. While working as a stenographer and a court reporter to help support her family, she took college courses at night.
Upon receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931, she divorced her husband and married Marcus Reback, her boss at the US Immigration Department office in Buffalo. Caldwell then dedicated herself to writing full time. Even as her family grew with the arrival of her second daughter, Judith, Caldwell’s unpublished manuscripts continued to pile up.
At the age of thirty-eight, she finally sold a novel, Dynasty of Death, to a major New York publisher. Convinced that a pre–World War I saga of two dynasties of munitions manufacturers would be better received if people thought it was written by a man, Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner—who also discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—advised her to use only part of her name—Taylor Caldwell—as her pen name. Dynasty of Death became a bestseller in 1938 and the saga continued with The Eagles Gather in 1940 and The Final Hour in 1944. Inevitably, a public stir ensued when people discovered Taylor Caldwell was a woman.
Over the next forty years, Caldwell often worked from midnight to early morning at her electric typewriter in her book-crammed study, producing a wide array of sagas (This Side of Innocence, Answer as a Man) and historical novels (Testimony of Two Men, Ceremony of the Innocent) that celebrated American values and passions.
She also produced novels set in the ancient world (A Pillar of Iron, Glory and the Lightning), dystopian fiction (The Devil’s Advocate, Your Sins and Mine), and spiritually themed novels (The Listener, No One Hears But Him, Dialogues with the Devil).
Apart from their across-the-board popularity with readers and their commercial success, which made Caldwell a wealthy woman, her long list of bestselling novels possessed common themes that were close to her heart: self-reliance and individualism, man’s struggle for justice, the government’s encroachment on personal freedoms, and the conflict between man’s desire for wealth and power and his need for love and family bonding.
The long hours spent at her typewriter did not keep Caldwell from enjoying life. She gave elegant parties at her grand house in Buffalo. One of her grandchildren recalls watching her hold the crowd in awe with her observations about life and politics. She embarked on annual worldwide cruises and was fond of a glass of good bourbon. Drina Fried recalls her grandmother confiding in her: “I vehemently believe that we should have as much fun as is possible in our dolorous life, if it does not injure ourselves or anyone else. The only thing is—be discreet. The world will forgive you anything but getting caught.”
Caldwell didn’t stop writing until she suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of eighty. Her last novel, Answer as a Man, was published in 1981 and hit the New York Times bestseller list before its official publication date. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1985.
William Combs, Taylor Caldwell’s first husband and father to Peggy, aboard a naval ship, circa 1926.
A portrait of Caldwell at the start of her career in the late 1930s.
A portrait of Caldwell taken before Scribner’s publication of Melissa on June 21, 1948.
Caldwell at her desk in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1949. She spent many winter months at Whitehall, a resort hotel on the property of Henry Flagler’s former estate, which is now the Flagler Museum.
Caldwell’s second daughter, Judith Ann Reback, during time with her mother at Whitehall in the 1940s.
Caldwell receiving an award in Los Angeles, California, for A Pillar of Iron after its publication in 1965.
Caldwell with her daughters, Peggy Fried and Judith Ann Reback (Goodman), and Ted Goodman in 1969 on the MS Bergensfjord.
Caldwell at a cocktail party with her daughter, Peggy, and the hostess of a research world cruise on the SS President Wilson in 1970.
Caldwell with her granddaughter, Drina Fried, at her home in Buffalo, New York, winter 1975. Soula Angelou, her personal assistant, insisted on taking this rare family picture.
An invitation from 1975 to one of Caldwell’s many cocktail parties. She hosted at least two parties a year in Buffalo, New York, before she moved to Connecticut.
Caldwell with her fourth husband, Robert Prestie, who cared for her in the last six years of her life in Connecticut.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1973 by Taylor Caldwell
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5324-2
This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
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TAYLOR CALDWELL
FROM AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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