A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  “What?” he asked gently.

  She made a wide, vague motion in the air. “Why, the glass. In front of me.”

  The nun at the door lifted her beads and held them in her hand, and the doctor stared down at his desk. He said, “I’d like a colleague to question and examine you.”

  It was like a fairy tale. He no sooner had said this than another man stood beside him, conjured out of the thin air. Elizabeth laughed like a child.

  The two doctors sat side by side. Elizabeth was not afraid of them, for the glass was gleaming before her. The new doctor was an older man, and he looked at Elizabeth compassionately.

  “Now, Miss Jones, you must answer some questions. Have you had a nervous breakdown recently or a shock?”

  “Oh no, indeed.” It was very necessary to be precise. “In fact, we have no family doctor at all. I’ve never been sick. I am very healthy.”

  “I see. I must ask you some questions.”

  The questions, thought Elizabeth indignantly, were very personal and embarrassing. In the midst of them she beckoned to the nun, who came to stand by her side. “Really,” she would murmur to the nun before answering the questions, and would look for feminine reassurance. The Sister smiled and sighed and nodded.

  “And there have been no — nervous — disorders in your family at all?”

  “Certainly not! We are a very vigorous family.”

  The doctors exchanged glances. Then they looked at Elizabeth and studied her strained and haggard face, her staring eyes, her trembling mouth. “It is just my eyes,” she said, and said it over and over.

  They asked her repeatedly where she lived, and she always gave an address in Boston. She did not know it was Miss Stockington’s school; she had forgotten. No, she said, she was an orphan. She had no father, no mother, no sisters, no brothers. She was all alone in the world and had to work hard for a living. The doctors looked at her smooth and elegant hands and listened to her well-bred voice.

  Then the nun gave her a white pill and a glass of water. Elizabeth eyed them suspiciously. She swung to the doctors. “Am I in a hospital?” she demanded.

  “Yes, the Sisters of Charity.” They watched the girl whose mother was anonymously responsible for this fine new wing and the new facilities. Elizabeth swallowed the pill, drank the water, and thanked the Sister politely. As the Sister began to move away Elizabeth took a section of her habit and smiled. “I always knew it was only mist,” she said, and smiled again, knowingly.

  “And there have been no recent deaths in your family?” asked the new doctor in so kind a tone that tears came into Elizabeth’s eyes. Then she was sobbing. She put her hands over her face and cried wildly. The tears ran through her fingers, down the front of her shirtwaist, her suit, and then onto her knees. Her cries filled the large warm room. The doctors did not try to restrain her. She finally fumbled in her purse and wiped her eyes, but her sobs continued.

  “Who died?” asked the new doctor in a tone of pity and understanding.

  “Who?” Elizabeth stared at him. “Why, you should know. Elizabeth Josephine Sheldon.” The doctors looked up alertly. Elizabeth said, “She died a long time ago.”

  Timothy Winslow wrote to his brother William: “It will come as a shock to you, and a surprise, though it did not to me, to hear that Elizabeth lost her mind two weeks ago and is now confined in a private mental hospital near Boston for the insane. I had always suspected that there was some latent madness in that branch of the family. I have talked with Caroline about the unfortunate girl, and she admitted to me that Elizabeth had been ‘strange’ for at least a year before the climax, when she ran into a hospital in Boston complaining of her eyesight. I also visited Hillcrest Sanitarium, where Elizabeth is hospitalized, and they would not let me see her, merely telling me that she had gone into a mute state which is symptomatic of her disorder. The diagnosis is pessimistic; she will probably never recover. It is a blessing that Elizabeth’s mental disturbance came on before marriage, for some man is spared the misery of this situation, at least.”

  William read this letter, and then he went into his young wife’s sitting room. She was asleep before the fire, her rosy face contented, a little stupid, yet gentle. He had a quiet affection for her. He thought of Elizabeth. He was sick with grief and despair. He went to find his mother and gave her Timothy’s letter. Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked at him without comment.

  He spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “I am an ordained priest, but before God I say this: I hate Timothy with all my heart and soul, and I curse him with all the strength I have. I shall never write to him again, and you must never speak his name to me in this house.”

  He asked his bankers to write to Elizabeth’s hospital, through their New York associates, and order white roses to be placed in the girl’s room three times a week. But Elizabeth never saw them, never was conscious of their presence.

  Chapter 8

  In the summer of 1913 Elizabeth spoke for the first time since her confinement. She spoke in a slow and halting voice, a few rational words. She wanted to know where she was. This so heartened her doctors that they decided she could go home over one weekend in the company of a nurse, and if she improved, the treatment would be extended. They had no illusions of a cure; they had seen this sad condition too often. But she was still young; perhaps familiar surroundings might bring back the world of reality to her, and eventually she might come into some contact with it.

  Eventually she was allowed to go to Lyme every month for two days, and always with a nurse. She expressed neither pleasure at nor revulsion for the idea; she merely accepted it. On her return the doctors would always question her, but her answers, though rational, expressed no emotion. She lived in the half-world of the living dead. The doctors were well aware that this world was not sluggish or dreamlike or stagnant, but filled with nightmares of sufferings and terrors, and that her symptoms were not ‘objective’ but were the faint echoes of the horror in which she lived. She was under drugs most of the time. She did not speak of her mother and appeared more relieved than anything else when she returned to the hospital.

  The monthly visits went on for a year; now they had become two a month. Elizabeth’s soft brown hair, so smooth, with the light deep wave over her forehead, had turned to the color and texture of flax, though she was only twenty-six. Her pale face was rigid and without expression; her eyes, fixed and without emotion, had faded. She was almost fleshless; her fine bones lay closely to her pallid skin. She walked and moved like an old woman. She was docile and obedient to the nurse and spoke hardly at all to her mother. It was as if she had difficulty each time in recognizing her. The nurses never knew what Caroline felt. They believed her to be very old because of her white hair, the stoop in her broad shoulders, the clefts in her big face, the awkward and fumbling motions of her hands, her slowness. They thought that Elizabeth must be the child of her middle age, and they conjectured whether such children were not often calamities to their parents.

  A new young nurse, very intelligent, small but strong, dark and lively of face, brought Elizabeth home for her visit on Saturday June 27, 1914. She had been told of the wretched house to which she would bring her charge. The other nurses had said, “Take your own sheets and other linens! Everything is so grimy there, so dirty, so old and fallen apart. You’d wonder, with all her money, why Mrs. Sheldon lives like that, but you know all the stories about her in Boston. They call her a recluse. She could buy the White House, if it was for sale, and never even know it. Only one maid, too, who does everything in that big old filthy barn of a place. The grounds are just like a jungle; nothing’s been done there for years and years. You’ll hate it. But you just have to stand it a couple of days. Take some books with you, too, or you’ll end up biting your own fingernails.”

  The nurse, Sally Crimmens, had indulgently thought her friends were exaggerating. But she found conditions to be much worse than the nurses had told her. She was a cheerful young soul, but she became desponde
nt in three hours. She took Elizabeth for a walk along the beach and drew in great breaths of clean ocean air. The house stank, and it was a mercy that it was so close to the water. The June light lay wide and brilliant on the sea, and all the world was at peace.

  As Miss Crimmens was more intelligent than the other nurses, she thought: If only that house had the feeling of God in it, and love, and sympathy, and kindness, and family! It would help poor Elizabeth so much, and it would give her some consolation and perhaps it would cure her eventually. But Miss Crimmens did not know that those blessed things had never been in that house and that it was because of this that Elizabeth had never acquired fortitude, had never known any consolations, had never been able to armor her soul with faith and resignation, had never been taught at all how to deal with life, and had never, at any time, had a confidante to whom she could express her agony and desolation. When faced with loss and tragedy she had had no resources to sustain her. Her spirit had died for lack of a voice or the help of a hand, or even the knowledge that somewhere there might be someone who would listen and help.

  Miss Crimmens was sure, after a very sharp inspection, that Mrs. Sheldon loved her daughter and that she was stricken to the heart. This was evident in the very first glance she had given Elizabeth, the timid touch of her hand to the girl’s shoulder, her first uncertain words. But more than anything else, by the look in her large hazel eyes, at once childlike, hoping, despairing. She had said, “Elizabeth? You are home, Elizabeth. Don’t you know? Don’t you remember?” But Elizabeth had not answered her, and Caroline’s big shoulders drooped and she had turned away.

  Later, when the three sat in an intolerable silence in the living room, after a dinner which had revolted Miss Crimmens because of the bad cooking and worse serving, the nurse saw Caroline watching her daughter grimly; her nostrils kept expanding and contracting, as if she were holding back some terrible expression of her thoughts, and it was as if she hated. This place is getting on my nerves, thought the young woman. I’m beginning to imagine things.

  It had not been until five o’clock that night some years ago that the Sisters of Charity had called Caroline to tell her of Elizabeth’s breakdown and to add that the girl was under restraint and drugs in the mental ward. The four o’clock train had come and gone, and the call from the hospital had arrived just when Caroline was beginning to feel acute anxiety. She listened to the gentle words of the Reverend Mother, and she could feel nothing and hardly understood anything. The Reverend Mother had had to repeat her message several times. The maid had entered Caroline’s study with an emptied wastebasket, and Caroline, shaking her head over and over, gave the girl the telephone and muttered, “I can’t understand that woman. Let her give you the message.” But she finally understood. It was only that her mind refused to accept it.

  The doctors had searched Elizabeth’s purse for identity and had found it. They had exclaimed in astonishment, for this was the daughter of the immensely rich Caroline Ames. “Why, my sister went to school with Caroline!” said the first doctor. And then, thoughtfully, “She was always more than a little queer. I wonder . . .”

  The maid avidly reported to Caroline that the hospital requested that Mrs. Sheldon not visit her daughter for a few days, ‘until she is more rested’. The winter twilight came into the room, and the sound of the winter gale, and the little fire in the study could not warm the air. Caroline clumsily and heavily knelt down before it, trying to warm hands as cold as stone, and the maid watched her. Then Caroline said, “Bring me some hot coffee.” When the coffee arrived Caroline was behind her desk again, and her eyes were great and glittering. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  She did not know how to begin. She moistened her lips over and over. Then she could speak. “I didn’t see Miss Sheldon before she left for town today. Tell me everything yon can remember about this morning. Every thing.”

  The maid was an uneducated country girl with a small vocabulary. Caroline’s aspect frightened her. “Why, there wasn’t nothing,” she said.

  “Think,” said Caroline. “Was Miss Sheldon any different this morning than at any other time?”

  The girl shook her head vigorously. “No, ma’am. Just ate a piece of toast and drank some coffee. I fixed her some eggs, but she didn’t eat ‘em. Then she got up and went out into the hall and put on her coat and hat and gloves, and the hack come up and she went.”

  “She said nothing, did nothing, but that?”

  The girl, unused to thinking and interrogation, began to shake her head. Then she paused. “Why, it wasn’t nothing,” she said. “There was just the paper on the hall table. I’d just brung it in when the boy left it. Miss Sheldon picked it up and turned the pages and looked up and down ‘em. And then she said, ‘Really!’ And made a big fuss about putting the paper together again. And shook out the pages.” She paused, screwing up her eyes. “She said somethin’ else, about people bein’ so careless these days, or some-thin’. And then I heard her laughin’ outside, and she kind of ran to the hack, and she never runs. Least, I’ve never seen her do it before.”

  Caroline sipped her coffee. The power of her disciplined mind began to work. It scrutinized every word the girl had said. And it was remembering, also, the day eighteen months ago when Elizabeth had returned from England. Caroline was recalling Elizabeth’s shrill remark that she hated Timothy, that Timothy was dangerous, and that her mother must ‘ruin’ him. Elizabeth’s face, as on that day, rose before Caroline, and she remembered the girl’s collapse and then her almost terrified insistence that Timothy had ‘done nothing’ to her. From that day on Elizabeth had not been quite the same. She had immense powers of self-discipline; she behaved normally, worked harder than ever, appeared to be more acute than usual. But something had been wrong.

  Yes, Elizabeth had been sick when she returned from England. She had not improved after all. And she had seen something or heard something in the house this morning which had finally crashed down all her control, had sent her reeling into madness. Caroline’s daughter, her child, her loved child who resembled John Ames — driven to madness. This morning. But there must have been some long-silent suffering before it; Elizabeth’s mind had broken finally. Why?

  “Bring me the morning’s newspaper,” said Caroline. “It’s the top one in the kitchen.” She sipped her coffee. She kept pain from her by an enormous effort of will. There was time enough for pain later. Now she must know.

  The girl brought the newspaper, and Caroline dismissed her. Then inch by inch she searched the first page. Nothing. Then the second, the third, and on. Nothing. Only scandal and reports of murders and thefts and the mayor’s demand for more money for the police. Next came the Society news. Very thoroughly, though without much hope now, Caroline examined it. “Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Andrew Winslow of Boston and New York announce the marriage of their brother, William Lord Halnes — ”

  Caroline folded her hands on the paper and thought. Cynthia’s son, whom she had never seen. How old would he be now? As old as John. She examined every item Timothy had ever carelessly let drop about his brother, his resemblance to old Montague, his wealth, his title, his coming marriage to Lady Rose Haven. When had he first mentioned that engagement? Nearly two years ago. He had taken his time in marrying, the son of the Weasel! Nearly two years. What had delayed it? Caroline studied even the minutest thing with inexorable thoroughness.

  Timothy had mentioned that he and Amanda and their children had gone to Devon to see his mother and brother. Again he had mentioned the coming marriage. But it had not taken place then, eighteen months ago.

  And then, vividly — had Elizabeth gone to Devon with the family? No one had said a word of it to Caroline. Why? Elizabeth would have known her mother would be angry. Caroline looked at her telephone, then lifted the receiver and called Timothy, who was at present in Boston. When he answered, her throat was so dry that she could not speak for several moments. Moreover, she was not accustomed to dissimulations, for she had no training in
being a liar, no training in the way of speaking lightly when one’s whole life depended on the answer. It was only by a deliberate act of her will that she could finally say, “Timothy, you should have told me that Elizabeth went with you to Devon to see your mother.”

  There was a long pause. Her hand tightened on the receiver pressed to her ear. Then Timothy laughed quietly. “Oh? Did Elizabeth finally tell you? Don’t be angry, Caroline. We didn’t want her to go, but she insisted. We had even arranged for a chaperone for her in London, but she refused and continued to insist. You know what a strong-willed girl Elizabeth is.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline, thinking of the strong will which had broken so tragically today. “I know.”

  “It was embarrassing for Amanda,” said Timothy. “She was annoyed at Elizabeth’s insistence; it seemed strange to her. Elizabeth had seen Mother and my brother William a few times when she was younger. Now, Caroline, you aren’t going to be hard on the girl, are you?”

  Caroline knew all about her cousin; he had never been able to deceive her, though he believed he had. She heard the change in his voice; she could hear uneasiness in it, for all its quiet geniality and pretended amusement.