She stopped. Thomas’ pallor did not diminish. He was not angry, or humiliated. But he could not meet his mother’s eyes. His mouth became somber and tired. Again, this surprised Ursula.
Thomas said: “It doesn’t matter. I mean that, Ma. It doesn’t matter. I—all I want to do now is to get out of Andersburg. Mr. Blake’s made me manager of his mines. I never want to see this town again.” He looked at Julia. For an instant, viciousness passed swiftly over his face, then faded into heavy weariness. “I don’t care about anything. I’m going out of here, and I’m going to forget.”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “You’ll go away. But you, Tom, and all of you, won’t ever be able to forget that you killed your father. You despised him because he loved you at the expense of his whole life; you plotted against him, you and Julie. Because he loved you—you thought he was a fool. And you were quite right. A man who loves his children as he loved you should be prepared for betrayal and cruelty and grief and contempt. But you have lost more than he has.”
Julia cried drearily. Her mother looked at her in a moment’s silence, untouched. “Cry, Julie,” she said, without passion. “It’s too late. You think you’ll forget, too. You won’t. You’ll remember even more, when you have children of your own.”
She turned to Thomas again. “Yes, your father understood everything, at the last. You can thank yourselves for that. Your wife is going to have a child, Tom. You love your wife; you’ll probably love your child. You’ll remember your father when your baby is born, and you’ll keep on remembering when you have other children, too, and you’ll remember when you are dying.”
Thomas said in a loud harsh voice: “I won’t enslave myself for the damned kids! I won’t be that much of a fool!” And then he caught his breath, stood up and walked to one of the windows. He remained there, his back to the room, his big hands thrust into his pockets, his massive shoulders drooping.
Ursula’s brows drew together as she watched her son. She clenched her hands on her knees. But she still spoke steadily: “The Prescott company is gone, for all of you, even though Gene remains as general manager. It’s gone for your father’s sons. I think he knew that, before he died. I only hope that it didn’t matter so much to him, at the last.”
Thomas said, his back still to his mother; “I don’t care. I hope—he—didn’t care, either. I’m not going to deny that we were rotten children. We were. I’m not going to defend ourselves by saying he made us that way, though he did.”
Ursula said: “You say you’re not going to ‘defend’ yourselves. You are trying to do just that. In spite of what you say, you are blaming your father. Perhaps when you were children, and so dreadfully and dangerously indulged, there was some excuse. But you aren’t children any longer; you haven’t been children for years. You aren’t imbeciles. When you had grown up, you might have had some pity. You have minds and understanding, and you might have had some pity.”
Julia said, brokenly: “I can’t bear this house. We can’t live here.” She spoke incoherently. “Papa always wanted us to have anything we wanted. He told us that parents owed that to their children. And so, when we took, when we demanded anything, we thought we had a—right.”
“You are a liar, Julie,” said Ursula. “You are a woman, and you’ve been a woman for years, and you know you didn’t have a ‘right.’”
Julia cried desperately: “You talk of cruelty, Mama! You are being cruel, yourself, now!”
At the window, Tom moved restlessly. “Shut up, Julie,” he said loudly and dully.
Ursula went on: “You knew, for a long time, that your father was dying. It meant nothing to you. Save your tears, Julie. Save them for your children, when they forget you, or leave you lonely, or pretend false love for you, or break your heart.”
She said: “There is an old German proverb: ‘Every man is every other man’s devil’. I can say, with reason, that children are their parents’ devils. They never let them forget that they, too, were once children of fathers and mothers.”
Barbara, the controlled and silent, spoke now: “Oh, Mama.”
Ursula looked at her. The bitterness was still in her eyes, but it softened slightly as they turned on Barbara. “You were a very cold girl, Barbie. You didn’t love your father. But at least you understood enough not to exploit him and betray him. And you were the only one he spoke of before he died. He must have known more about you than I knew.”
Barbara’s eyes filled.
Ursula continued: “Five hours after your father died, I received a cable from Matthew. He said that he ‘felt’ he could come home to see your father; he wasn’t ‘afraid’ any longer, he said. I cabled him back, and told him his father had died. Then he wrote me. He asked me to come to Italy and live with him.”
Julia wiped her eyes. She faltered: “Gene suggested to me that I ask you to come and live with us, Mama. I—I think we want you to do that.”
Thomas came back to his chair. He settled himself in it ponderously. “No,” he said, “she ought to come to Mary and me.”
Ursula smiled. When her children saw that smile, they looked aside. “No. I’m going to live with Barbie and Oliver. I’m going to live in my old house again. My house. But I don’t think I’d want to live there, except alone, if it weren’t for Oliver, and little Billy. I’m sorry, Barbie. I’m going to live in my house again because your husband is there, and your father’s grandson.”
Barbara’s tears came faster. Ursula said: “You, Tom, and you, Julie, detested Oliver. But Oliver was instrumental in saving Gene’s position, Julie, and if your father had any peace at all, Tom, it was because of Oliver. You’ll never like him—but that’s something else for you both to remember, too.”
She sighed, and her voice broke: “It’s very strange but, when it is suffering or desolated or ruined by its own evil, the world always says: ‘The younger generation will save the world for themselves and for their children. All our hope is in our children.’ But the children become men and women, and they don’t save the world, they don’t save themselves, they don’t save their children. The hope is a lie. Men have to lie to themselves; there’d be no living without lies.”
She lifted her hands, let them fall again. “There’s nothing more to say. I had to tell you all this, because, you see, I’m lying to myself, also. For I want to believe that you’ll teach your children that there is no hope for anybody, except in himself, and no hope for the world, except in each man’s responsibility towards his neighbor. All the evil that ever came to any man, to the whole world, comes when men say to themselves: ‘I, but not my brother.’ You won’t teach your children that. And so the terribleness of the world will only increase.”
She stood up, then, and left the room, tall and thin and straight, and she did not look back.
PROLOGUE
All that had to be done was done.
The Prescott house had been sold, and sold at a great loss. The neighbors could not afford to buy this house, and keep it from destruction. No one in Andersburg could afford to buy it.
The swart walls would be torn down. The marble would be carried off. The treasures and the rugs and the pictures and the furniture would disappear, be bought by strangers for the decoration of the houses of strangers. All that William Prescott had loved, had gathered together for his children, would be lost. Julia and Thomas and Barbara would buy nothing, for they wanted to forget. Because of what they wanted to forget, they wished nothing of this house to remain.
Ursula could now say to herself: “Let them forget. Please, God, let them forget. Let them forget everything but a hope for their children.”
Her bitterness was gone. She had her sorrow now, huge yet in some way comforting. She could remember that William had loved her, and that he had thought only of her before he died. It was enough for her. It was enough for all the rest of her life. In the end, she thought, there is only a man and his wife, even if one of them is dead, and the other is left, remembering.
She would take nothi
ng with her from this house but Matthew’s painting. In her first anguish, she had believed she would sell it. Then she knew that William would want her to keep it, even if she kept nothing else. It was strange that one so still and retreating as Matthew could have painted anything so strong and vibrant, so surging with life and so powerful. It was very odd but, finally, the painting reminded Ursula of William, and not of her son.
The weary work of months had been completed. It was winter, now. In a few days it would be Christmas, Christmas again, in her old home, with Oliver and William’s grandson. There would be a tree for the baby, and laughter, and love and festivity. One did not die, even if one wished to die.
In a few moments, Oliver and Barbara would arrive for her. She would go away with them, to her house, where the fire would be burning on the old hearth, and the smell of leather, and the lamps, and the panelled walls, would remind her of her father. Had August Wende had hopes for her, Ursula, too? Had he thought his hope of the world was in her? Poor Papa, thought Ursula, standing alone at the leaded window, and looking out at the dark night and the snow.
There was little Billy, waiting for his grandmother: little William Prescott. He was sturdy and young, dark-eyed and full of eagerness. What would the world do to him? What would he do for the world? Everyone spoke, now, of a century of comfort and progress, of peace and enlightenment, of the banishment of hunger and war and injustice. In less than two weeks it would be 1908. The Panic was passing. Perhaps, if one lied to oneself, one could believe that a “new era” was indeed coming, when all the old cruelties would be buried, all the old hatreds forgotten.
Perhaps it would indeed be possible to believe in that ancient salutation to the world: “On earth peace, good will toward men!”
Ursula began to weep, the first tears she had shed for her husband.
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, even
ts, 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 © 1949 by Taylor Caldwell
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5310-5
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
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Let Love Come Last Page 53