Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Lass, do you stop your crying for a minute.” He regarded his wife with exhausted mournfulness. “I’ve got only a little time, and I’ve got to speak. I’ve got to speak, for your sake, and Martin’s, and the lassies.”

  He lifted a finger and pointed it at Ernest, still without looking at him, but commanding the eyes of the others. “Yes, look at him. My son. Who’s waited for this time. Waited to rob his brother and his mother and his sisters. When I wasn’t here to protect them. To take the bread from their mouths and throw them into the streets. To—”

  “That, Pa,” broke in Ernest, steadily and quietly, “is a lie. And deep down, you know it is a lie. Why you are saying all this, I don’t know. I don’t believe you know. But you do know that you are lying.”

  “Ernest!” exclaimed Martin sharply, outraged. He moved a little, but just then Ernest looked at him, and there was something in that look that paralyzed him.

  “So, I am a liar, eh?” whispered Joseph. He was staring at Ernest, row with malevolence, and was again smiling. “You can call your father on his deathbed a liar! But that will only show them all what you are. And you know I’m not lying. You know you’re a thief and a rascal, and have just waited for this!

  “I made a will, three years ago. You—and Martin—you were executors. Everything—in your hands.” His voice thickened, strangled. “I trusted you, then. But I know I was wrong. Martin is a simple lad. Sometimes I’ve thought he was calf-brained, for all he knew of—things.” (A dark gleam stood on Ernest’s face for a moment.) “Yes, I see you know what I mean. Martin is a simple lad. Any bright rascal could twist him around his little finger. Make him believe anything. And I knew it would only be a matter of time until my poor lass, here, and my little lassies, and this lad, would have nothing, be penniless, perhaps be shipped back to England, like poor Georgie, with a capful of pennies. And he, my fine Ernest, would have the field to himself, have all the money, everything I’ve worked for. That’s what he would connive to do—”

  “That,” broke in Ernest again, loudly and clearly, “is a lie.”

  “Ernest,” said Gregory, shocked and stern. “Remember—”

  “Ernest,” murmured Armand, shaking his head.

  “Ernest!” sobbed Hilda, heartbroken.

  Only Amy was silent. But she was gazing at Joseph steadfastly.

  Ernest turned to them all with an abrupt and furious gesture.

  “You know he is lying, all of you! And you’d let him die, lying! You’d let him go on repeating it, until he began to believe it himself! But I’m not dying; I’ve got my life to live. I’ve got a wife and a child, and all the years I’ve put into the shops, and the things I’ve done. I’ve got sacrifices behind me, and God knows what work! I’ve got to go on living, remembering that you all let my father die, lying. I’ve got to live, smudged by a filthy lie! Damn you all, do I care what you believe? But I’ve got a son, I’ll have more sons, and I’ll not have them dirtied by this lie!”

  He doesn’t care if we believe this “lie,” thought Gregory. It’s something else. And he regarded the young man in silence, curiously.

  Ernest turned to his father again, almost savagely. “You are too ill to know what you’re saying. You don’t believe it, anyway. For God’s sake, if you must die, die in peace, without that on your conscience. I’ve known for years that you didn’t trust me, suspected me. But I thought that all this was only on the top layer of your mind, and that underneath you didn’t believe it. How could you believe it? What evidence did you have? Your brother, George? You know, yourself, what he was. Other things you call my ‘conniving’? That’s business, Pa, business. That’s how fortunes are made. I’ve made fortunes for all of us. You’d not have one-tenth, one-hundredth, what you have today without me. My God!” he added, his voice breaking, tightening, “you know all this!”

  Joseph had listened; his whole ruined face seemed alight with mockery. He jerked his head feebly in Ernest’s direction, the while he gazed at the others.

  “You’ve heard him. But you, Martin, and you, Armand, and you, Mr. Gregory: you all know the truth. You know if I’m lying. He calls it ‘business.’ He’d call it business, robbing his mother and his sisters and his brother. I tell you,” and he struggled up from his pillows, a mad light glaring from his eyes, “it’s always been ‘business’ with him. The lad’s not human!”

  Hilda forced him back on his pillows, where he lay gasping, his eyes rolling. The doctor appeared at the bedside, forced some mixture between the panting lips. While this was going on Ernest faced the group at the foot of the bed as a man would face silent accusers. There was Gregory, inscrutable as ever, Armand, thoughtful and grave, Martin, with conviction written all over his handsome and sensitive face, and Amy. And she looked back at him steadfastly, gently. The fire crackled, the lights dimmed and flared, and Joseph struggled for the last time against the death that had him by the throat.

  Joseph won again, for a few minutes. He waved the doctor aside. He lifted the sheaf of papers in a clenched fist. “I’ve got it all here!” he continued in his hoarse whisper. “All here. Written down, word for word. I’ve left everything to Martin and his mother and his sisters. All I have. All my bank money and my stock, my interest in the shops, my patents. Everything. And for him—” and his eyes rolled on Ernest, “nothing. Fifty dollars, that’s all. I’ve done it, to protect all of them. Protect them from him!”

  As if a freezing wind had blown through the room, everyone stiffened. Everyone stared at the dying man, as if fascinated. Then Hilda cried out in haste and disbelief: “No, Joe, my love, you can’t do that! This is our lad, too, our Ernest! Our own bonnie lad! Joe, Joe! God would punish you for this!” She reached across the bed and seized Ernest’s hand, trying to pull him closer to his father. “Look, Joe, you know you are wrong. He would not rob his own flesh and blood. It is the sickness in you that puts such a thing in your mind. Martin! Tell your Pa it isn’t true, what he says about Ernest,” and she turned her twisted wet face to her younger son imploringly.

  But Martin said nothing. He looked down at his hands, which were clenched about one of the bedposts; his knuckles whitened swiftly in the lamplight. But he did not look up. Hilda’s mouth fell open, then she turned from him, visibly shaken, her mouth slack and an expression of dull horror and incredulity on her features. “Armand, tell Joe that it isn’t true about Ernest. And you, Mr. Gregory. Tell him, as God is your witness.”

  Armand looked over the footboard at his friend, very sadly. “No, my Joseph, it is not true, what you say. Ernest would not do this thing to his mother and his sisters.”

  Gregory spoke with quiet sternness: “You have let your imagination run away with you, man. But if you do this thing you will only hurt those you wish to protect. Ernest has given all of you what you have today. If you do this thing to him he may withdraw from everything, and I assure you that the interests of your family will suffer.”

  Then Ernest said, slowly and heavily, as though he spoke from a core of sickness: “Let him do what he wants to do. I don’t care. If it will ease his mind, don’t torment him: let him have his way.”

  Joseph twisted himself convulsively on his pillows to face his son. His face, wet with a deathly sweat, wrinkled and contorted itself grotesquely: “What do you mean, eh? by that? Do ye think I’ll be turned aside by that hypocrisy? What do you want, eh? What do you want by this?”

  Ernest looked down at him impassively; there was a livid flash in his pale eyes. “All I want, Pa, is for you to realize that what you have said is a lie. I want you to know it is a lie. But you know it already.”

  And he walked away from the bed, away from the firelight, and sat down in the shadows of a distant corner. He sat quietly, his legs crossed, his arms folded across his chest, his large face a white and expressionless mask in the semi-darkness.

  Joseph struggled valiantly against the mortal exhaustion that was dragging him down. “Pen!” he gasped. “You doctor, you, Armand, you, Amy! Get a lass
up here from the kitchen. Four witnesses. You, Mr. Gregory, you are the notary. You’ll sign. My new will. You—will destroy the old one. Pen! Pen! For God’s sake, hurry!”

  “Are you sure you want do this, Joe?” asked Gregory sternly. He began to sharpen a pen, but he did it so slowly that his fingers barely moved. The doctor went downstairs to call a maid.

  “I’m—sure,” Joseph panted. “God! The pen! It is sharp enough—”

  “Ink,” said Gregory, after a long slow stare at the dying man. Martin went to a chest of drawers, brought back the ink. He did not look at his brother, though he passed within three feet of him.

  “Sign!” shrilled the dying man. “All of you!”

  “We must wait until another witness is brought in,” answered Gregory gently. Under the smooth and elegant crest of his gray hair his high and sloping brow was shining with moisture. He continued to sharpen the pen. And now Armand looked at him, and what he saw made him stare intently, without blinking. He saw that someone else was having a race with death, and hoping death would win. Hilda was kneeling again by the bed, her head on the same pillow on which Joseph’s head lay. She was finished with crying, and her eyes; dark’ with anguish, glared blindly about her.

  The doctor and the housemaid came in. The girl was shrinking and whimpering. They all stood about the bed. Gregory dipped his pen into the ink; somehow, it appeared, his fingers shook and the inkpot fell from them upon the floor, emptying itself. “Damn!” exclaimed Gregory. “Will someone please bring me some more ink?”

  But the doctor raised a warning hand as he leaned over the bed. For Joseph, after a convulsive movement of ecstatic agony, had fallen back against his pillows. The black pits of his eyes had closed; he lay, hardly breathing, except for faint gasps. The doctor opened the slack lips wider, put a pellet upon it, gently held the jaws shut with his hand. The pen rolled upon the white counterpane, staining it, rolled down upon the floor. Martin picked it up, stood with it in his hand, helplessly.

  Ernest could not see his father from where he was. He could see only the group about the bed in the red and dying firelight. A flame darted up and revealed the shining spheres on the bedposts. And then he saw, through the crowding bodies, the lax and fallen hand of his father in the firelight, a white, shrivelled and waxen hand, suddenly slack. From the fingers slowly fell, like large leaves, the sheets of the will. One by one they fell, as if even in unconsciousness Joseph was reluctant to relinquish this will, and they lay on the carpet in a quiet heap.

  Then, seen by no one but Ernest, Amy detached herself from the group about the bed. She bent down behind her husband, and her hand, slim and swift, darted out and secured the sheaf of papers that Joseph had written. Ernest watched her expressionlessly. She crouched, backed silently away from the bed, clutching the papers. She continued to back away, her skirts tilting and swaying, her hair falling over her cheeks. She reached the fire, turned swiftly and noiselessly, rolled the papers into a thin tube and thrust them between two glowing logs. They caught fire, flared up a little, and showed her crouching there, as if cold and trying to warm herself.

  Then, after long moments had gone, she turned her head slowly and looked at Ernest over her shoulder, the firelight on the right plane of her face. Across the space of the room, across years and distances, across forever, their eyes met steadfastly, and held.

  Joseph lived for nearly a week longer in a state of mingled suffering and unconsciousness. During his periods of awareness he was so preoccupied with all the nuances of his dying that the small world he was about to leave was consumed and forgotten as his will was consumed and forgotten.

  When he finally died, there was no grief for him. His friends and his family looked at each other in pale and haggard joy that he had been released at last. Not the least part of their joy was the fact that no longer were they, themselves, to be tormented by the sight of his torment; but this no one, except Ernest, would acknowledge.

  Once or twice during Joseph’s last days alive Martin and his sisters had made weary search for the unsigned will. The girls finally gave up searching, but Martin, tenacious and grim-mouthed, continued to look until the very day of his father’s death.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  Joseph’s old will was found and probated.

  Four weeks later, at a stockholders’ meeting, Ernest was elected President of Barbour & Bouchard; Armand, Vice-President; Gregory Sessions, Chairman; and Martin, Secretary. Joseph’s death had left a starkness in the atmosphere, but no one spoke to Ernest of the last days of his life. He had become much older, and in spite of endless work, stouter. He assumed everything; nothing was too small for his consideration. He and Martin had inherited equally, but he acted as though he had inherited all. As the head of the family, he directed its activities down to the most insignificant details, until May complained, only half-humorously, that Hilda Barbour had regained a son and she had lost a husband. She had cause for complaint, for Ernest spent at least half his time with his mother and sisters, and visited Martin frequently at his new home. All through the affairs of his family, private and financial, ran the current of his decisions and his autocratic plans. Martin was helpless before him, becoming more haughty and timid and suspicious, yet dependent; Hilda, broken and hopeless, left everything to him, and the girls feared him more than they had feared their father. Dorcas was actually terrified of him. Only Florabelle, with her impudent, pretty ways, her roguishness and red-lipped poutings, her flippant and tinkling laughter, sometimes opposed him. He liked this fragile and feminine opposition, and indulged her sheepishly; she was quick to take advantage, proud that she could sometimes win him over, and once or twice flaunted her influence over him in public. She loathed study and application of any sort, and thought for a time that she could coax Ernest into allowing her to remain at home after her father’s death, on the plea that her mother needed her; but Ernest could not be moved, and she returned to school in tears. A few weeks later, Dorcas followed her sister to the same school. Ernest put up the Barbour house, which he had hated and which he hated still more now, for sale, and sent his mother to live with Martin and Amy.

  His energy poured itself out like a cataract. “He has a finger in every pie,” said Gregory to his associates at the bank. “One day Windsor will be famous because he lives here.”

  “Of course,” Martin said to his wife and mother one evening, “the last will of Pa’s was not valid, without signature, but I wish we had known what—other bequests he had had in it. We might have had the pleasure of doing some things as he had wished, if not all. It is very strange that nothing was ever found of it.”

  “Perhaps it is all for the best,” said Amy gently, meeting his troubled eyes with an expression of tenderness. “I am certain that many things in it would have made us all feel very badly. Things about Ernest. It was not signed, as you say, and being so, it is better it was never found.”

  He went to her and knelt beside her chair, and put his head upon her breast. He was desperately tired these strenuous and confused days in which the drive of his brother was like fist-blows on his mind and body; he was very frightened, also, and suffering mentally.

  “Amy, darling,” he said, “I cannot go on, like this, with our arms and our explosives killing men in the Crimea. I feel like a—murderer.”

  “What do you want to do, love?” she asked, putting her hands on his head and looking down into his face with her gentle smile.

  “I want to withdraw. I want to leave it all. We have enough. More than enough. I’ll take nothing from—from the shops. No profit from blood and death. We have this house, and what your uncle gave us. We can buy a small farm, and live simply by ourselves. Tell me that would satisfy you, Amy.”

  Amy was silent for a while. Upstairs, in their tall, narrow nursery, lay her twin children, Paul and Elsa, two months old, seven months younger than their cousin, Godfrey James Barbour. Amy was no fool, and had, since she had become a mother, developed her latent Yankee respect for money. If Martin
did as he wished, they would live very modestly indeed. It seemed to her with sudden clarity that this would be a heroic and silly thing for him to do. She could understand a woman’s shrinking from munitions making, for women were expected to be horrified at war and its bestialities. But she could not understand a man feeling so. It violated certain of her beliefs in the hardnesses and the power of men. So, though her expression was soft, she asked hesitantly:

  “But what of your mother’s share, Martin?”

  Martin glanced uneasily at his mother, who was dozing over her knitting.

  “Ma, I suppose, will want to keep it,” he answered doubtfully. He sighed, running his fingers through his fair thick hair, and stood up.

  “And the children, love? Must we not think of them, too?”

  Martin turned the sudden blue blaze of fanatical eyes upon her. She had seen this blaze only a few times during her life with him, and each time it was as though her husband had been transplanted to another dimension where she could not follow, which she could not understand, and which clove them apart. At those times they became strangers, looking at each other across abysses. Or through thick glass against which sound was annihilated, speech silenced, however they might make gestures or move their lips.

  “The children!” he cried. “Don’t you see that I would want to do this particularly for the children? I can’t have them taking profits as partners of death, either. I can’t have their whole lives made easy at the cost of others’ lives. Fine houses and fine clothes, servants and carriages, bought with blood! Amy, can’t you see this?” He looked at her imploringly, almost desperately.

  His emotion and his words seemed extravagant to her, and she was distressed at what she considered her treachery in not feeling as he did. She could understand that he could feel this way, could even understand the processes of his thoughts. She could even know that any arguments were impotent against his conviction of right. She was in the sad state that afflicts most tolerant people: comprehending emotions that were alien to her nature and feeling sympathy for them, while feeling in herself that they were quite wrong and more than a little absurd.