Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Well!” exclaimed Gregory heartily, as though he and Ernest had parted only yesterday, and the best of friends, “here you two are at last! Nicholas, this is Mr. Ernest Barbour, and this, Mr. Martin Barbour. Gentlemen, my brother, the Senator!”

  “Each wish of my heart,

  Shall sti-ll-l verdantly cling!”

  sang the duet. There came an enthusiastic clapping, the rattle of fans. A hubbub of voices. And near the doorway, Ernest solemnly shaking hands with his host and the Senator. Martin, bright of color with nervousness, also shook hands, murmured something chokingly, fell miserably silent.

  So this, thought Ernest, oblivious at the moment of the girl at the piano, is Senator Sessions! This tall and florid man, with Gregory’s long and slender legs and vigorous mane of hair. But the slenderness ended at his torso, which was slightly swollen under the satin waistcoat. His posture, his manner, his voice and his words, were all elegant, but compared to Gregory’s elegance they seemed vulgar and affected, as though Nicholas were merely copying his brother. In Nicholas, Gregory’s fine-drawn geniality and courtesy became bluffness, a too-frank camaraderie, a democratic expansiveness and patronage, that were in themselves the very essence of vulgarity. His voice boomed with rich pleasure and urbanity; his handclasp was firm and warm and affectionate, his manner full of open friendliness. All these things deceived most people, subjugated, charmed and entranced them, made them adoring and compliant slaves. But Ernest pierced beyond them ruthlessly; he pierced beyond the high complexion, the beaming smile, the handsome and glowing features. He saw that though the small bright blue eyes glittered jovially, they had a certain coldness and porcine wariness. They were sunken under the drooping cowl-eyelids of the brutal and suspicious man. Though Nicholas was evidently a man who loved opulent and luxurious living, was probably the best of dinner companions, he had no true friendliness nor kindness in him. There was avarice behind the smile, voracity in the heavy folds about his mouth, selfishness showing its dull clay through the glaze of his manner. Gregory Sessions was one who recognized his own occasional rascality, because he was intelligent. His brother, being less intelligent, lacked this insight into himself. At times, he actually believed that he meant his florid sentimentalities. He was the perfect politician.

  “I have heard much of you, Mr. Barbour!” exclaimed the Senator. (He appeared to speak exclusively in exclamation points.) “Frankly, one of my reasons for returning home was to know you! I have heard so much, indeed, yes!” Knowing the value of a direct and open eye, he stared down with evident pleasure at the young men. Already he was under no misapprehension as to the relative positions of Ernest and Martin; after a few slightly fixed and glazed glances at Martin, he concentrated upon the other brother.

  “You are very kind, Senator,” said Ernest, with an air of gratification.

  “I have so little time! But I have heard so much of your—your genius, your acumen, your—ideals, that we must get together, we two, just we two! and have a little conversation alone—eh?”

  “Nothing,” said Ernest ceremoniously, with a short, stiff bow, “is nearer to my desires.”

  Senator Sessions beamed; his smile took on itself the faintest hint of a grin. He placed his hand familiarly on Ernest’s shoulder. Gregory watched, slightly smiling. Martin, as usual, had tried to efface himself against the wall.

  “Tomorrow,” continued the Senator, “I must go to Philadelphia. Politics, my dear Mr. Barbour, politics! The elections this fall, you know. A bad feature of democracy is that even a politician, after several years of faithful service, must periodically convince his constituents of his worth. Dashed short memories they have, eh?”

  “Or perhaps long ones,” interposed Gregory, with a quirk of his eyebow. The Senator boomed out into his rich laughter at this acid sally, then turned off his laugh abruptly as Amy and May came toward them. “Ah, my dears,” said Nicholas, “what lovely music you two birds have been making! May, my love, I have never heard you sing better.”

  “How excessively civil of you, Nicholas,” said May, mockingly, dropping him an elaborate curtsey. Her dimples frolicked in the bright color of her cheeks and her eyes sparkled with vitality and spirits. She tapped Ernest on the arm with her fan, very archly: “Mr. Barbour! Is it possible that you forgot me? If so, you are the first man who ever did so!” Ernest, surprised and flushing, found himself laughing involuntarily. No one could help laughing when May desired him to; there was about her such an air of gaiety and slyness. Ernest was grateful for her ability today, for it made the awkward moment of meeting Amy again slide smoothly on a wave of laughter. He could actually turn to her, smiling, actually take her hand. It is true that the smile became a little fixed, and a sick pain stabbed at his throat, but his expression remained mirthful, quite automatically.

  “It is so pleasant to see you again, Mr. Barbour,” Amy was saying. Her sweet face was tranquil; her eyes met his with a puzzling pity, but their gaze was direct and kind. Her hand lay in his, cool and faintly throbbing, and when he glanced at it an instant, he saw the beating of the delicate blue veins in the lace-veiled wrist. Her billowing yellow muslin gown brought out golden lights in those steady brown eyes and in her glossy light-brown hair.

  Ernest murmured something to her, what, he never knew. He only felt, with terror, the rising of a sense of acute illness and faintness. He could not let her hand go; he clung to it, pressed it, felt a fierce ache behind his eyes. This was far more dreadful than he had expected; he was appalled by the strength and relentless power of his own emotions. He had not known that he had loved the girl so. He stared at her soft pink lips, and was seized by such a passion to kiss them that his desire subtly communicated itself to her, and she drew back, gently disengaging her hand from his. Thin red welts rose on its whiteness from pressure of his fingers. But she still looked at him with sweet kindness and compassionate dignity.

  “I must help him to forget me,” she thought. There was a certain integrity and rigidity in her nature that could obliterate emotions she did not desire, and now there were only pity and kindness in her for the unfortunate young man. She said: “We were hoping you were not ill, Mr. Barbour.”

  For a moment Ernest could not reply. He had turned very white, and veins had risen in his neck and on his forehead. He stood perfectly still, but the fiercest battle of his life was trampling all over his secret defenses; if he could have spoken, if Amy had not turned from him slightly just then, he might have thrown everything over, have taken what he desperately wanted. But he could not speak; she had turned away. He looked up to see May Sessions regarding him with an odd mixture of mockery and compassion.

  Gregory, vaguely remembering that Martin was present, looked for him. That young man had pressed so closely against the wall that he was a full four feet from the others. His misery was so evident that Gregory wanted to burst out laughing. May, being the closer to him, he said: “May, my love, this is Mr. Martin Barbour, Mr. Ernest’s brother. Mr. Barbour, this is my cousin, Miss May Sessions.”

  May made her slightly malicious and ceremonious curtsey, bouncing up from it like a pretty toy on springs. She glanced up at Martin coquettishly, and exclaimed, with a fine disregard of taste: “Gracious! What handsome gentlemen Windsor does produce, to be sure!” Martin rewarded her with the reddest blush she had ever seen, bowed stiffly over her hand, glanced over her head in the most abject panic. His expression was the precise one of an animal looking for an escape. And his eyes, slightly wild, fell on Amy, who was regarding him with her usual gentleness and understanding.

  And at that very instant, the thing that Jacques Bouchard had feared and dreaded, the thing he had agonizingly prayed might never happen, did happen. Martin fell in love with Amy Drumhill. His panic disappeared, his color receded, his heart amazingly steadied itself as if he had laid a strong hand on it. He dropped May’s fingers, turned from her to Amy. Gregory introduced him. Martin took her hand, held it strongly, as if he knew her very well. They both recognized their own ge
ntleness and timidity in each other, their own simplicity of mind and straightness of uncluttered thought. There would only be trust and honesty and faith. Amy’s thought was that in turning from Ernest she had turned from violence and obscurity and bitter selfishness to kindness and clarity and truth. It was as if Martin was a mirror in which all the only faintly suspected qualities of his brother were ruthlessly shown. A feeling of rest and peace passed over her. Quite to their amazement, they found themselves walking out of the room, walking down the long hall, going through the back door, going down to the garden. Ernest and May, Gregory and Nicholas, had, in the meantime, become submerged in a frothy sea of gay skirts and ringlets and fans, bounded in a circle by fawn coats and elaborate cravats. Only Ernest and May were aware of Martin’s and Amy’s escape. It had been so easy, so natural, after an incoherent murmuring which no one noticed particularly. But Ernest, smiling, laughing at May, was struggling with a sick rage and confusion.

  The gardens were very quiet, for most of the guests were already assembling at the tables, the first warning chimes having rung. They were laid out in a rustic and charming manner, with flagged and uneven paths overgrown with green fungus, trees heavy with golden summer, peonies in pinkly riotous beds, roses bursting over white-painted trellises, marigold, pansies, bachelor buttons, dahlias, sweet williams and phlox all mingling in a joyous bewilderment, disregarding the formalities of better-behaved gardens. Amy laughed with happy inconsequence under the lankiness of tall hollihocks, looked at Martin with gentle courtesy as he made some remarks near a giant clump of ragged golden-glows. The grass was long and thick, the wind bending the flowers all one way, so that they were like an uneven and colorful army in deep genuflection, tossed Amy’s ringlets, swept under the multitudinous fluffiness of her petticoats so that they billowed and spread, made the trees momentarily roar and turn their lighter undersides up. Alternate shadow and blazing sun rushed over the gardens, so that their color assaulted the eye one moment with unbearable brilliance, and the next dimmed them until their hues became almost drained and cold. Gray-white pigeons fluttered against the wind, filled the air with their cooing. The two collies tore around the side of the house and leapt upon Amy and Martin with extravagant affection and noise. Amy, with much laughter, defended herself helplessly against the assaults of the wind and the dogs. She pleaded for help from Martin, turning her tinted face and dancing brown eyes upon him, pushing her blowing ringlets aside with one hand.

  Martin, struggling with the wildly delighted collies, thought he had never seen anything so lovely and so tender as this girl. He was not confused, nor made inarticulate by his feelings for her. They seemed to strengthen him, on the contrary, making him sure and strong, easy and quiet. There was such simplicity and directness in her, such lack of affectation, such gentleness. And as they went on together, an old faint misery in Amy suddenly disappeared. When she lifted her head and glanced up at Martin, meeting the steady shine of his almost beautiful blue eyes, she felt utterly at peace, strangely comforted. There was a childlike confidence in the unconsciousness with which she rested her hand on his arm. His voice seemed to her infinitely reassuring and familiar. By the time they turned back toward the house, she was not in love with him, but she loved him, though she did not know it as yet. She had been in love with Ernest, and that condition had brought with it uncertainty and pain, excitement and breathless confusion, exquisite joy and bitter longing. These she would never experience with Martin, but she had something infinitely better and surely calm.

  When they went back to the emptying drawing room, Amy heard Ernest laughing loudly, but with enjoyment, and she thought contentedly: “I could never have made him laugh like that, as he does at May.”

  Amy was the first young woman to whom Martin had spoken in familiarity and with pleasure. Heretofore he had run from women, utterly disconcerted and terrified, though a strong but unrecognized instinct in him had tugged at his vitals, urged him to return. He had had curious, and, to him, shameful thoughts about them. He had tried to deify them in his mind, identifying them with the pallid and sexless female saints of his newly adopted religion. But in spite of this, there were times when a powerful longing and appetite rose in him, a sweet yearning that made his flesh weak. The blood of sturdy Englishmen would not be repressed; under the lash of his secret and contemptuous cry of “lust!” this blood seethed and became full of fever. He might drive his hungry thoughts from the scene of this sweet shame, but they returned like starving dogs at the scent of a doe. At other times he looked at women with loathing, hating them for the madness they stirred in his body. So he had avoided them, encouraged his terror of them. In this, the sad and impotent Jacques had abetted him, his arguments eager and fervid and full of latent terror.

  But now that he had met Amy he was full of contentment and joy. He said to himself: “I love her,” and was amazed that no feeling of shame or degradation followed. He seemed suspended in golden enchantment, in which everything was right and simple and beautiful. Not for one instant did he remember Jacques Bouchard, and the fact that he had been planning to enter a monastery.

  When he and Amy rejoined the others, he was no longer afraid of them. He looked victorious and self-possessed, so much, indeed, that Ernest could not stop staring blankly at him.

  They went out onto the lawns, found their table. It was a large round one centered with pink roses and trailing green vines. In an arbor to the side of the house several musicians were playing, gentle, sentimentally soft music. The wind rushed in a golden current through the trees; a hubbub of voices and laughter, of callings to and fro, made a bright confusion.

  May, Amy decided fondly, was at her best. It was as if that young woman had brought out from some place of reserve all her wit and her cleverness, her charm and laughter, her gaiety and impudence, and sitting in the midst of them picked them up one by one, holding them high for admiration. If she seemed too lavish with them, displaying them too quickly and eagerly, it was because she realized that she had little time, and that a pause, a flagging of interest, would turn a bored eye from her upon Amy again. She was like a circus showman who must rivet interest, keep up a constant ululation, entrance, absorb, enchant and fascinate, so that prospective customers would not leave her in ennui for a rival showman. One with an observing eye would have detected a slight desperation in her arts and tricks; she seemed to dance wildly before Ernest, trying to hide out the sight of Amy with the lifting and fluttering of fan-spread skirts. And she succeeded so well that she kept him laughing, so much so that he could scarcely eat. Laughter was new and strange to him: he was surprised that he enjoyed it enormously. He came back again and again to May Sessions, as a very thirsty man comes back again and again to a well of good water. His pale face was full of color; he even amazed himself by saying witty things that had no irony in them. May’s wit sharpened the wits of everyone about her. When they all laughed at her remarks, an expression of mingled tiredness and gratification crept about her eyes and smiling mouth.

  Even Martin laughed. But his was the reserved and suspicious nature of the recluse, the nature that despises easy laughter and suspects a too lavish gaiety of being “light-minded.” He laughed at May Sessions, but secretly despised her, felt a very agreeable sensation of superiority. The others laughed with her, and looked at her with pleased gratitude. So as the circle knitted itself more closely, more eagerly, about this pretty dispenser of gaiety, Martin withdrew, smiling serenely still, but withdrawing. He turned to Amy. She was smiling at May, but when Martin spoke to her she blushed a little, looked at him with gentle attention. They talked together in low voices, as they sat side by side. Neither was very talkative, and what they said to each other was inconsequential and widely spaced by understanding silence. Martin blessedly lost, for a time, his passionate self-preoccupation, his aching awareness of his own body and face and hands. When he spoke, he spoke with eagerness and anxiety, as though to reassure himself that Amy was all he had thought her, that she liked him, that sh
e understood what he was trying to say. He found everything delicious: the air, the wind, the flash of silver in the sunlight, the gay colors of the women, the laughter, the rich food, the glance of friendly eyes. They all intoxicated him; he looked about him, thinking: I am happy. And smiled like an amazed child.

  Gregory, happening to glance at Martin and Amy, thought to himself in astonishment: How alike these two are! The same innocence of expression, of unworldiness and gentleness and timidity and kind simplicity! And they would both impress others as having weakness of character and no will. This is probably true, but they could both be strong and resolute and unshaking enough if they were doing what they thought was “right.” Nothing could move them, then. Not even God in His heaven, and all the seraphim, or all the devils in hell. What inconvenience they could cause others! I’m not sure I like these soft characters that turn to stone at unexpected times.