Captains and the Kings

by Taylor Caldwell

  He had almost forgotten that night in the conservatory, except that his aversion for Bernadette had increased. As he handled Elizabeth's extensive affairs in his offices in Philadelphia himself, for it was a private matter, he was approached one day with a fine offer for some property she owned in the city. He decided he would consult with her rather than conclude it himself, as usual, for it involved a respectable sum. He left for Green Hills the next evening, and Elizabeth met him at the door of her house herself, and not a servant. She looked at him mutely, and then her smooth cheeks flushed and she stood aside and let him into the hall. Then she said, "Would you like a glass of wine, Joseph? Have you dined?" It was late, and the servants were abed on the fourth floor, and the summer twilight still lingered in the west in a lake of pure serene jade. "To tell you the truth, Elizabeth," he said, with honest surprise, "I don't know if I have 'dined' or not. I didn't come in my own coach, but on a regular train, for my coach is being repaired. I am staying only overnight. I have business to conduct with you." She knew at once that he had not gone as yet to the Hennessey house, and she felt a curious and breathless excitement, an excitement she had forgotten had ever existed for her. She said, "Let us go into the morning room and I will see what there is in the pantry, for I dislike disturbing servants who have worked hard all the day." This consideration for servants or others was unique to Joseph. He followed her into the morning room which he had remembered had been furnished in Bernadette's flamboyant taste, all carved and gilt furniture and heavy silken draperies. Now it seemed larger for the scale of furniture was smaller and it was simple but gleaming, dove gray and blue with a touch of pink, and the French windows were open to the rose-filled gardens. There was a scent here not only of the roses but of lilies and fresh grass and wind and air. (Bernadette believed that the "night air" was dangerous and so very little entered the Hennessey mansion even during the summer, Elizabeth painted in water colors, and the gray silk walls bloomed with bright tints of wild flowers and ferns and water in narrow wood frames, something again unique to Joseph who was accustomed to enormous gilded frames for pictures. He studied them while he waited for his hostess, and he was impressed by her austere taste which was so like his own. He felt the usual tightness in his neck and shoulders loosening, and the compression in his chest easing. The house was silent, yet filled with breezes and he could hear the fluttering of new leaves on the trees. Elizabeth returned with a large silver platter on which there was a cold bird, wine, a salad, brown bread and butter, and a glass of yellow custard. She set out the small oval table with white linen and bright silver. She did not speak. This, in itself, was refreshing to Joseph who heard nothing but voices all day long, everywhere. He studied Elizabeth, in her white frock sprinkled with small violets and green leaves, her pale blond hair glimmering in the candlelight, her face composed as always, and as delicately reserved. Her waist, he noticed, was very slender, her breast daintily swelling, her hands capable and swift and very graceful. She had a profile which seemed to have been carved by a marble knife. He had not known hunger for a long time. Nor had his relish for food increased. Yet, all at once, he felt hungry, and he sat down at the table and Elizabeth sat near him, her hands in her lap, watching him. He did not know of the passion in her eyes, and that the supposedly resting hands were tightly held together. When he did glance up at her she gave him her cool smile and still said nothing. The house was full of the soft sighing of the wind and the scent of the gardens and the whisper of trees. There was nothing else. She poured two glasses of wine, one for herself and one for Joseph. He had never liked wine. He suddenly found this wine delicious, and as suddenly intoxicating. He leaned back in his chair and for the first time looked fully into Elizabeth's face. He started to speak, and then all at once he felt a desire for Elizabeth he had never felt for any other woman, a desire so hot and so intense and so tender that he did not recognize it for what it was. He could only think how womanly she was, how intelligent her face, how exquisite her white throat, how fine her chin and her nose, and how clearly green her eyes. It seemed incredible to him that such a woman, so patrician, could have loved the gross Tom Hennessey. As Elizabeth gazed at him calmly she knew, surely and completely, that he loved her if he did not know it yet himself, and that it was possible he had loved her for a considerable time. She knew all about Joseph. Tom Hennessey had told her, with ridicule and envy, and she had learned much since she had gone to live in the Hennessey house. Now she said to herself, But what I felt for Tom is nothing compared with what I feel for this man, and have felt for a long time. That was only girlish infatuation. This is love, the love of a mature woman for a man. This is the man I have always wanted. She looked at his hands, his face, his eyes, his graying russet hair, the spare strength of his body, and she felt the power in him, a different kind of power than that which Tom had possessed. It was a fine-honed power, and invulnerable. She remembered what Tom had said of him and something turned away in her, as at a spoken lewdness. Tom, like his daughter, had been a liar. She felt no betrayal of Bernadette, no shrinking, no considerations for any propriety or custom or social stringencies. Bernadette did not exist for her. They sipped wine together in the deep and eloquent silence, and listened to the night sounds outside, and the sudden hoot of an owl and the sleepy cry of a bird. The tension in the room increased, became sweetly unbearable, and all things in the room had an enormous imminence as flough they possessed a life of their own. The candlelight had a consciousness, and its golden shadows were alive. Then Elizabeth very simply stood up, and Joseph slowly rose also. Elizabeth gave him her hand, like a child. She blew out the candles, and a soft darkness filled the room. Hand in hand, like young lovers, they went up to her bedroom together. When Joseph awakened in the morning, just as the blue-gray dawn stood at the windows, and he saw Elizabeth beside him in her white bed, his first sensation was of a peace he had never known before, a fulfillment, an astonished contentment. He saw her pale hair on the pillows, her mysterious sleeping face, the girlish mounds of her breasts. He had never done this with any other woman before, but he gently took a long strand of her hair and kissed it. It was warm and fragrant against his mouth. He kissed her shoulder. She moved and went into his arms and she said, "I love you." But he could not answer that in turn because he had never told a woman he loved her. It was three months before he could say it without feeling absurd and without embarrassment, and then he knew it was true. For the first time in his life he knew joy without fear, joy to the uttermost, joy without skepticism or wariness or doubt. He knew what it was to love a woman, not only with sexual ecstasy but with his mind and his whole self. He had never believed it was possible. Three months later he said to her in the small but expensive hotel where they often met in New York, "I will divorce Bernadette, and we will be married." Elizabeth said, "You ha,/e three children, one only a toddler, and we are Catholics, and I have a son also, and we have duties." For the first time Joseph was angry with her. He said roughly, "You don't mind committing adultery with me, and I believe that is against the Church, too." Elizabeth looked at him seriously and said, "In some way, I don't think either of us is committing adultery. Our marriages were adulterous, and that is the worst kind." He said, still roughly, "What about Tom Hennessey? You wanted him, didn't you?" She smiled a smile he had never seen before, full of mischief and light. "I was young, and he seduced me. But I seduced you. In some fashion that is quite different!" "That may be logical," said Joseph, "but it is hardly theological." The months and the years that followed seemed to him incredible in their wonder and strange ease and lightness. He had always felt old, cramped, constricted, and now he knew what it was to feel young, released and almost free. It was an ambiguous feeling, touched with vulnerability and even with a little fear at times, as if he were no longer his own man, his own fortress, his own invincibility, sufficient unto himself. He had never known what it was to trust fully in all his life, but he trustcd Elizabeth and this often disturbed him. After all, she was a woman, he would think for
the first years; she was another human being and mankind was capricious, changeable, inclined to treachery. Then as time passed he felt less apprehensive in trusting Elizabeth, and came to trust her fully and without any reserve at all. She was that paradox to him: An intelligent woman. He found himself not only talking humorously to her and even with a little heavy banter--which surprised him as a new language--but confiding some of the aspects of his enterprises with her, though hardly all. He was also surprised by her subtlety, by her quickness of perception, her common sense, her sudden insights, her shrewd grasp of intricate matters, and her comments. She never pretended to be revolted by some of the things he told her, nor did she appear to believe that she should be revolted. She would listen with gravity, and if she had reservations she would voice them, and, to his delight, he sometimes found them practical. Once he said to her, "There are times when I can hardly believe you are a woman!" To which Elizabeth would reply wryly, "I never believed that intelligence was a matter of sex, though that is the delusion of many." On one occasion he said to her, "Elizabeth, you are a great gentleman," and she smiled. She thought to herself, My darling, you are the man I have been waiting for all my life. How fortunate it is that we both knew at last. Elizabeth was an endless and fascinating discovery to Joseph. She had, he would tell her, a thousand faces. She was a thousand different women. She shared his love for music. Her own knowledge of the art was necessarily more formal, for she had been taught at her schools, but she too discovered different men in Joseph. His perception, his engrossment with it when she accompanied him to the Academy of Music in New York, touched her almost to tears, and she marveled. His library, filled with the books he was constantly buying, and reading, commanded her respect and admiration. He had had little formal education, as he had often told her, but he was in all ways an extremely educated man and not the "money-grubbing brute" her father had called him. He had, she discovered, a sensitivity that he carefully kept within the core of him, as though it were a shameful secret and an entry for enemies. Bernadette had once jeeringly told her of Sean and Regina, and Elizabeth guessed that Joseph would never forgive nor forget nor recover from his sorrow. She gave him, once more, a motivation for living. He found himself enjoying life, reluctantly, and finding pleasure where he had never known it lived. His entry into her world of the mind and the spirit was cautious, half-retreating, dubious, sometimes sardonic, but he entered just the same and found it absorbing. Finally his impulses to suicide became fewer and fewer, and at last he felt the urge but once or twice a year, when he was away from Elizabeth for longer than he desired. He was still gloomy and distant with others, still suspicious and contemptuous and reserved, but he was less apt to be so as the years passed, and his first impression of strangers was less automatically condemning. It was probably Elizabeth--unknown to both of them--who had made him see his children for the first time, or rather her influence over him. She had often told him of her affection for them, particularly Ann Marie who was very like her, but he had dismissed this as womanish sentimentality. However unconscious it was, however, Elizabeth had succeeded in gentling him to some extent. He only knew that he loved her and that without her life would blacken for him again. Bernadette, who had long suspected her husband of infidelities--she had received many arch hints from her friends in Philadelphia and New York--did not discover Joseph's liaison with Elizabeth until five years after it began. She often went to New York with a woman friend or two to shop, and they remained overnight in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Joseph maintained a large suite. She loved the uproar of the city, and the stench and smoke from soft-coal fires and industry did not disturb her, and she had favorite shops and jewelers which she visited. She usually went to New York when Joseph was absent from Green Hills, for when he was "at home" she could not bear to be away. She was strolling happily with a friend, and gossiping, when they arrived at an intersection roaring and shrilling with traffic. They waited for a break in the crowds and wagons and carriages, and as they did so Bernadette desultorily glanced to her right and saw a closed carriage almost within touching distance of her gloved hand. Then she stood, stiff and motionless, staring, disbelieving, feeling a jolt in her breast like a deadly blow. There sat in the carriage, waiting, Joseph and Elizabeth. They were laughing, and, Bernadette thought dimly, I have never seen him laugh like that. Elizabeth's usually composed face was incandescent with laughter below the violet silk of her bonnet, and she looked impossibly beautiful and vivacious, her cheeks pink, her green eyes scintillating. Joseph was holding her hand and apparently teasing her. Suddenly he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, and she pretended to be shocked, and laughed again. Her face was the face of a woman rapturously in love, and Joseph's face, for all its sternness and lines, was the face of a lover. It was a face totally unfamiliar to Bernadette in its absorption. Never had he seemed so almost gay and insouciant. "Do let us move on," said Bernadette's friend beside her. "I declare, you seem rooted to the walk, dear." Numbly, moving as uncertainly as an old woman, and stumbling under her brown merino skirt, Bernadette obeyed. She felt feeble, drained as if bleeding to death, dazed, broken. Her vital parts seemed to be disintegrating, dropping away from her, and a sickness and anguish she had never known before lumbered in her breast. Her friend mercifully was chattering on, and Bernadette, her eyes swimming in a mist of agony, looked back over her shoulder. The carriage had crossed the intersection, and had halted at the doorway of the small and expensive hotel on the corner. Joseph and Elizabeth were alighting from the carriage. Bernadette saw Elizabeth's violet watered-silk suit with its lace ruffles and bustle, her velvet slippers, and the violets pinned on her breast. Joseph was gallantly, if a little stiffly, assisting her, and very briefly he held her in his arms as she stepped down. She looked up at him, her face tremulous with love and desire, and he looked down at her as he held her. Then they entered the hotel together. "Fie," said Bernadette's friend, very crossly. "What is wrong now, dear? You look like death. Here are my smelling salts, but let us move to the shop window. People are staring at us. Are you faint? Well, it is very warm for autumn, isn't it?" Through the haze of her enormous suffering Bernadette heard herself say, "I thought I saw--someone--I knew, going into that hotel. he looked like Joseph. Perhaps he is staying here, which is very unusual. Would you mind if I inquired?" "Not at all," said her friend, who had suddenly spied an intriguing hat in a window. I'll go in this shop and wait for you. But why should you think your husband is here? Aren't his offices in Philadelphia?" "He has interests in New York, too," said Bernadette. There was such a great and crushing pain in her throat. She left her friend and entered the hotel. It had a small rich lobby, which hinted of discreet money and even more discreet privacy. A manager and a clerk, in Prince Albert coats, were standing at the counter and Bernadette, conscious all at once both of her new infirmity and her plumpness, went to them. They courteously watched her approach, and with curiosity, for ladies did not enter hotels unaccompanied, and Bernadette was obviously a lady even if a little dowdy in spite of the Worth suit and the light sable boa on her shoulders, and her expensive black velvet millinery and her jewels. Her throat and mouth were as dry and parched as hot summer stone. She tried to wet lips that felt swollen and thick, and tried to smile. "Pardon me," she said, "but I thought I saw my--my brother--enter just now with his--wife. I--I didn't know they were in town." "The name, madam?" asked the manager, who had a beautiful set of whiskers. "Uh," said Bernadette. "Mr. Armagh." The manager consulted the book on the counter, and looked through his pince-nez. He shook his head regretfully. "The name seems familiar," he said. "But there are no Mr. and Mrs. Armagh registered. Are you certain you saw them enter, madam?" He looked at her with eyes at once glaucous and secret. "Yes. I am sure. Just a moment ago. Please," said Bernadette and gave him a heart-breaking smile. "Oh, please." The manager regarded her for a long moment, then closed the book. "I am sorry, madam. You must have been mistaken." "But--the lady and gentleman who just entered--" The manager said, "You must be m
istaken, madam. No one has entered here for the past half hour." Bernadette stared at him and he stared back, like a basilisk. Then Bernadette turned and left the lobby and went out into the street again and looked about her with glazed eyes and did not, for several minutes, know where she was or why she was here. People jostled her. One or two swore at her. She saw and heard nothing. Her arm was taken, and her friend said, "The hat wasn't in the least becoming. Bernadette! What is wrong with you? Are you ill?" "Yes," Bernadette whispered, and looked at her friend with such blind and tortured eyes that the other woman was appalled and frightened. "I want to go to the hotel. I--I must lie down. I may have had a seizure of some sort." She did not return to Green Hills for two days. She could not move from her bed. Her friend called a physician who feared that she had had a stroke. If Joseph had died she could not have suffered more torment, more consuming grief, more anguished incredulity. His other infidelities, though they had humiliated her, had not been too difficult to condone. Gentlemen were gentlemen, as her own father had taught her through his own conduct. But gentlemen, though they might frolic with other women cocasionally, and find them agreeable, still loved their wives, and did not love the other ladies. They were only passing pleasures, passing interests. So they were not very important, certainly not important enough to threaten a wife.