Let Love Come Last

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Let Love Come Last

  A Novel

  Taylor Caldwell

  This book is dedicated with compassion to all who are parents and to all who hope to be

  EPILOGUE

  “—My dear and beloved Children—”

  The words had a grave resonance, like the opening of the funeral Mass, like the organ sound of limitless mourning and the last murmur of futile tragedy. They were an epilogue to a man’s life, thought Ursula Prescott, her bent head throwing a shadow upon the paper in her hands. But then, Was there ever prologue or epilogue? In the beginning the end was already inherent; one might almost say it was simultaneous.

  Ursula’s fine and delicate hand touched the paper gently. She was not a woman who cried easily. She was not really crying now; she knew this. Not crying as a woman often cries, copiously and emotionally, and with a bursting relief.

  She folded the paper slowly, but not before she had again read the two terse words: “—my wife.” Those words struck her with fresh suffering for a moment. Then she said aloud, as a mother would say to a tormented child who at last begs for forgiveness: “Yes, yes, my darling. I understand. It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered, but that William might have peace. She had never been a religious woman. She had hoped, at one time, for personal immortality. But now, almost with passion, she hoped that William had found complete annihilation, complete darkness and nothingness.

  She stood up, went to the somber casement windows, and glanced out. The small private park swept before her, darkening steadily under the dark opal of a winter sky. The naked black trees were daubed with snow; the ground glimmered spectrally. Far off, she could just see the low gray wall that surrounded the grounds. Beyond them, the street lamps burned with a fugitive and blowing yellow. How often, through how many years, she had stood at this window, and had seen this exact scene, and had felt its desolation! She had hated it, for she had found something inimical in the sight, just as she had found something inimical in this house which she was leaving forever in less than an hour. She had always hated this huge and echoing house, dark and forbidding in its long narrow corridors, its false turrets and towers of swart and heavy stone, its grim walls and slits of high windows.

  Her thoughts ran on. She thought of Oliver, who would be coming with Barbara very soon, in that horrible bright-red automobile which they had just purchased, and of which they were inordinately proud. Involuntarily, and with sadness, she smiled. But the loud thunder and roar of the automobile would be a pleasant sound to her now, for all its stink of gasoline, and its smoke. Oliver, she thought.

  Ursula pressed her aching forehead against the cold leaded window. She strained for a first glimpse of the vivid red monster which would carry her away from this house forever. Behind her lay shrouded rooms, with only a single light burning far down in the entrance hall. The servants had all been dismissed. She was alone in this mansion, where four of her children had been born, and where William had died. She could hear the dull booming of vagrant echoes, which were not the echoes of anything living. The room in which she stood, her bedroom, was growing cold; the fire had died down to a heap of ash and sparks.

  Dear, dear Oliver. Had it not been for Oliver, this last night in this dreadful house would have been the most final of despairs.

  Restlessly, out of her intense weariness, Ursula walked back and forth before the great casement windows, watching for Oliver, listening for the sound of his bright infernal machine. She passed the table where she had laid the paper. She put her hand over it, quickly, protectingly. “Yes, dear,” she said, aloud, very gently, and as if comforting.

  The great house boomed and creaked. She had a vision of its many rooms, shuttered and arctic, the mirrors and the immense furniture covered with dust cloths. She saw again the white, the dark-blue, the brown, marble fireplaces, before which she would never stand again. She shivered.

  She heard a loud and staccato series of explosions. She turned to the window again. A pair of fiery eyes were rushing up the broad driveway. Oliver and Barbara had arrived for her. They would rescue her, and take her away.

  It would be a beginning again. Not the beginning of youth, with joy and anticipation. It was only the beginning of age. For her, however, it would, perhaps, also be the beginning of peace.

  PART ONE

  “Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.”

  PLATO

  CHAPTER I

  If all her life had indeed been complete from the first drawing of her breath, Ursula, in later years, often thought that a kind of beginning had taken place on a cool white twilight in late March, 1879, in the city where she had been born—Andersburg.

  Andersburg was never to grow larger than one hundred thousand souls. In 1879, it boasted a population of fifty thousand. There had been no impetus for any enormous growth, for Pittsburgh was less than one hundred miles away. Foothills, covered with fine forests (much of it first-growth timber), gave it a natural beauty, and even endowed it with the reputation of being an excellent summer resort for those curious creatures who must often fly from their fellowmen lest they kill them in a moment of frenzy, or of complete understanding. Even in 1879, many “lodges” had been built in the foothills, summer homes of refugees from New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and even of Bostonians who were tired of the quaint New England countryside. New England eyes automatically expected to see the clean white steeples, set among neat severe houses and gardens, to which they were accustomed. But even seen from the hills, Andersburg had a sprawling and untidy character, a burliness of brown stone, and its houses had an air of heavy crudeness and stolidity. The city was not too far from rich coal fields, and many of the owners lived here in mansions indescribably ugly and formless, but very opulent.

  Andersburg had a very small middle class, composed of small manufacturers, shopkeepers, wholesalers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, doctors and teachers. It was a smug and tight middle class, though it had little money. In compensation, it invented prestige, and affected, on the one hand, to despise the workers, whom it feared, and, on the other, pretended to laugh at the rich “outsiders” who drew their fortunes from coal and oil and rents and land.

  Ursula Wende’s father had been a teacher in the small private school in Andersburg; he had also been a philosopher. “There are only two ways a teacher can escape mass-murdering his pupils,” he had once said. “He can acquire a healthy hatred for them, or he can become a philosopher about them.”

  His pupils came, almost without exception, from the middle-class families. He acquired a philosophy about the middle class, also. He did not go so far as Aristotle in his admiration of this class, but he did believe, sincerely, that their survival was distinctly necessary to the survival of a nation. “As they are without imagination,” he would say, “they often smite, like a good sound club, on the delirious brains of fanatics and malignant idealists who would destroy any order for the mere love of anarchy. And they serve another harmless purpose: they furnish material for writers; they are the straw-men who can safely be knocked about by lunatics with missions, without harm either to themselves or to society in general.”

  August Wende had come of a sound “Pennsylvania Dutch” family, and as he was not completely free from affectation himself, he affected to find his antecedents “amusing” and rather base. But, in truth, they had been a people remarkable for solid common sense and shrewdness, and with a respect for learning which August had found “pitiful.” Pitiful or not, their square and sturdy homes had been filled with books and musical instruments, much talk of Schiller and Goethe, much disgusted argument about Bismarck, and much delicate mysticism.

  Much of the family fortune had been lost during the war
, and when August died, in June 1878, he left his daughter a small fieldstone house in Andersburg, a large plot of uncultivated land just beyond the suburbs to the west, eight thousand dollars in cash, many objets d’art, and multitudinous books. There was nothing else, unless one also added a fine capacity for self-understanding, a clarified serenity of mind, pride, reasonableness, and a balanced ability to observe the world and its doings without overmuch heat.

  “I suppose, my love, that you’ll have to become a teacher yourself now,” he had remarked on his deathbed, with regret. “You will need to remember one thing, and remember it always: Nothing very singular ever turns up anywhere. Consequently, one should never become excited, either over a strange student or a strange event. For there is nothing strange, and, really, nothing very interesting, in all the world.”

  Even in the moment of her deepest grief, as Ursula had looked down upon her father slowly dying, she had thought: “He is really dying of ennui.” For some weeks after his death, she felt that his ennui had had in it elements of tragedy, and so, a certain splendor.

  Eight thousand dollars, even when augmented to ten thousand dollars after the sale of some of the objets d’art, would not last her a lifetime. She was twenty-seven years old, a “confirmed” spinster. Fortunately, she had no relatives to support. Her mother had died when she, herself, had been a child of ten. She was comparatively healthy. She did not particularly dislike her fellowmen, so that she contemplated teaching with no aversion. Though August Wende had made fun of his parents’ thriftiness, he had been exceedingly thrifty himself, and Ursula was a competent and frugal housewife, a bargainer in the food shops and the clothing establishments. As she had always made her own clothing, she was a clever dressmaker and milliner. She had, therefore, three choices of a way of making a comfortable living. She did not consider teaching better than either of the others, for she was without false pride. She decided to take some months or even years to consider. Teaching had “prestige,” to which she was indifferent, but dressmaking and millinery might bring in more money.

  She went alone, scandalously, to New York, enjoyed a few operas and plays, walked endlessly, studied the bonnets in the fine shops, and the rich gowns, garnered many ideas and much refreshment, and returned home in calm and rejuvenated spirits. She worked in her pretty garden all summer, preserved jams and jellies in the autumn, made handsome frocks of the materials she had purchased in New York, through the winter, set her garden in the spring. Then she began to think of what she must do for a living. Her capital was sacred. That must never be touched. She knew her ideas were middle-class, and was proud of them.

  Once, in her early twenties, she had considered marriage. But though she had attracted a number of young men, she had never been overly attracted to them in turn. She had had a happy and tranquil life with her father, and, as she was a keen observer, she had not believed the marriage state, as exemplified among her friends, to be particularly ecstatic, or even satisfying. At twenty-seven, she had only one suitor.

  She finally decided that she would accept a teaching post. She had been offered a teaching position in a small, girls’ school, with a salary large enough to take care of her very modest requirements. This, then, was the best way open to her.

  The small fieldstone house, set on a quiet tree-lined street, had an old loveliness. She would not sell it, though good offers had been made to her. It was her refuge, with its little library full of books, with its excellent old furniture, its three bedrooms with sloping ceilings, its ancient elms and perfect small garden, its leaded windows and strong plank doors, its flagged walks and hedges, its good paintings of plump ancestors on the panelled walls. Both she and her father had had exquisite taste. There was not an ugly or a cheap note either in the house or in its grounds. Her front windows looked on the narrow cobbled street, but the rear windows, from the bedrooms, had a view of the distant lavender foothills, and of the gardens.

  Here Ursula could entertain her very few friends, but not too frequently. She was happiest when alone. There was nothing morbid in this. She had the contemplative mind, poised and still and lucid. She did not pretend to dislike people, as August had sometimes pretended. There were moments when she felt quite warm towards her friends.

  Now it was March, pale, white, sterile March, with its wan cold twilights and its silences. She would often stand in the wet brown garden, her shawl over her shoulders, and listen for the first sound of life, drawing the chill pure air into her lungs. Nothing, she thought, will ever change. She was not sorry.

  Yet on the twenty-eighth of March, with spring definitely established, things changed for her forever. The change came with William Prescott.

  The jonquils massed themselves in cold golden pools near the rear wall of the house, strong, watery, and vigorous, shining even in the pale twilight. The wind from the hills ranged over the garden, and it raised a burst of fecund scent, as lustful as a mating animal. The ground had darkened; in the west, over the hills, lay a dull brazen lake, filled with the black rags of approaching clouds. Above the lake stood the slender silver of the moon, a curve of ice glimmering and sharp.

  Ursula had not as yet lit a lamp in the house; it waited for her, dark and silent, with a low red fire in the parlor. She was cutting an armful of the jonquils, and thinking, with a tranquil sadness, of her father, who had preferred these flowers above all others. Perhaps it was because, like himself, they had so little perfume. There was nothing heady about them, like the roses, nothing passionate, like the tiger lily, nothing sweet and intense, like the lilac. They pleased the eye; they did not disturb the spirit. They had a simple perfection of petal—and they were soon gone. Ursula sighed. Regretfully, she concluded that her father, after all, had not been even a philosopher.

  She would put the jonquils into water tonight, enjoying the mass of them against her walnut walls; tomorrow, she would carry them to his grave. Of course, he was not really in his grave. He was not anywhere. But she would allow herself the brief sentimentality of pretending to believe that he was aware of the jonquils, and of herself. There were times when it was almost soothing to pay lip-service to conventional belief. One or two of her neighbors would see her in the cemetery, and remark on the jonquils, and would think more highly of her for it. Ursula smiled faintly. She did not, truly, particularly care about the opinions of others. But if she were to be commented upon, she preferred that the comments be kind, rather than malicious.

  My life is closing in upon me, she reflected. It does not matter. I am an old maid. Even that does not matter. I have a peaceful fire waiting for me, and books, and I have eight thousand dollars in the bank, and no one can disturb me. If I choose to indulge myself in hypocrisy, then I can do so without reproachful eyes fixed upon me.

  The curve of the moon brightened, and now the wind became colder. Even the jonquils faded in the darkening twilight. But a white and spectral light hovered in the branches of trees, still bare and waiting.

  It was then that she heard the brass knocker sounding loudly on her front door. Echoes bounded back to her. The whole street would hear that peremptory summons. She could not recall that any of her friends were rude enough to sound her knocker so noisily. One did not do that. In this sedate city, still brooding under Quaker traditions, one did not do that.

  Annoyed, Ursula thought of heads appearing at windows along the street, staring down at the gray cobblestones and at her door. She entered the house through the rear door, laid the jonquils on the bare scrubbed table in the kitchen, which was lined with knotty pine, thrust a spill into the still glowing coals in the stove, carried the wavering light into the parlor, and there lit a lamp. Whoever stood outside must have seen the warm flare against her undrawn curtains, for he again struck the knocker a resounding blow, impatient and imperious.

  Her cat, black and sleek, rose purring from the hearth and rubbed himself against her skirts. She felt the annoyed hardness of her lips, and forced them to part. She laid down her shawl, passed her hands over her
hair, went composedly to the door, and opened it to the rush of the dark night air.

  The gas-lamps along the street were already flaring in the dusk, yellow and glowing. They outlined the tall broad figure of a man. She could not see his face, only his head, with the hard round hat still upon it. He did not remove his hat for several moments; she could feel his eyes staring down upon her. Then, as if reluctant, he took off his hat, and said, in a cold, quick voice: “Mrs. Wende?”

  “Miss,” corrected Ursula, as coldly.

  There was a ruthless urgency about this stranger, and Ursula had a swift thought that she was glad that she had no relatives who might be ill, no friends whose calamities could really stir and strike her, no fear of any summons to death or suffering. Otherwise, facing this stranger, she might have been alarmed. Now she could observe him on her own invulnerable threshold, and feel only irritation at his brusqueness.

  “What is it you wish?” she asked. She had a clear, chill voice, the voice of a born spinster, as she had often wryly commented to herself.

  “Miss Wende,” said the stranger. He paused. He was trying to be polite, she saw. Then he went on: “You have a plot of land, fifteen acres, to the west of the town. I want to buy it. What is your price? I understand it is for sale. Someone told me an hour ago.”

  Ursula wanted to laugh. But she was still exasperated. Her first impulse was to say: “The land is not for sale,” and then shut the door with finality. Yet that was absurd. She wished to sell the land; she had a price already fixed. Mere pique must not do her out of a sale, no matter how she disliked boors.

  She said, closing the door a trifle: “You must see my lawyer. He manages all my affairs. Mr. Albert Jenkins, in the Imperial Bank Building, on Landmeer Street.”

  She saw that discreet heads were already bobbing at the windows of the nearest houses. Her door closed even more. “Mr. Albert Jenkins,” she repeated, firmly.