Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “There is only one thing that a Scotsman likes above money,” said Ernest, “and that’s public honor. I think he will trade.”

  “And you will proceed at once to manufacture repeating rifles, eh?”

  “Not at all. We would have to scrap our present machinery, and I haven’t gotten my money’s worth for it yet. I would just hold the patent for a couple of years, or so, and if I thought it justified, I would then have new machinery made. Besides, things have been very bad, lately, and I have thousands of rifles already made. I would dispose of them first.”

  Nicholas was doubtful. “The war outcome may depend on the repeating rifle,” he said. “I don’t know whether or not it would be treason to withhold it from the Government.”

  Ernest smiled, rose, put his hand on Nicholas’ shoulder. “Let me worry about the treason, Senator,” he said.

  “I should imagine, my dear Ernest, that you have had that worry more than once,” Nicholas grumbled. “Well, I’ll think it over. Perhaps in a month or two, I’ll send for young MacIlvain, and have a talk with him.”

  “That will be too late,” Ernest replied decisively. “It must be seen to at once. You forget that the British, especially the middle class, tend to sympathy with the South, and once war is declared, or definitely in the offing, nothing short of assassination will get that patent from old Angus. I have reliable information that he is about to withdraw it from the Patent Office as it is.”

  Nicholas detested being pushed, and he burst out irately: “All right, then, do it yourself! Use my name if you want to, but do your dirty work yourself! After all, you are an Englishman, and you ought to get down to business with MacIlvain better than I can.”

  Ernest laughed. “I am an Englishman, Senator. And Angus is Scotch. The Scotch like us little better than do the Irish. No, only you can handle this. Will you let me know within the next two weeks?”

  One month later Ernest filed the plans for the repeating rifle in his iron safe, locked the strong door, and dusted off his hands.

  On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was fired upon by Confederate troops, and the War Between the States burst like a blinding shell into the fields of peace.

  CHAPTER XLVI

  The War between the States came like a personal agony to Martin Barbour.

  “It is not necessary to kill men to save men!” he cried, over and over, to Amy, and to Gregory, who had forgotten his vow never to come to this house again.

  “I am not aware,” said Gregory cynically, “that this is a war to save any men, even black men. Of course, I read only seventy-five per cent of what Lincoln says, so I may have missed something. Perhaps you can tell me if he has declared this a holy war, for the express purpose of invading the South to free black savages and give them the status of civilized men.”

  “Of course, he hasn’t said anything of the kind!” Martin exclaimed excitedly. “But that is the real purpose of the war, to remove this blight from our civilization, this monstrous degradation of men by men.”

  “I thought,” said Gregory, “(but please correct me if I am wrong) that all this fighting was to preserve the Union. But you, perhaps, are privy to secret councils, and if so, I apologize for my ignorance.”

  Amy was mortified at this baiting of her husband, and somewhat sharply she said to him: “Nothing is ever so simple as you believe it is, Martin. You only see one clear issue, but there are many in this war, as there are in all things. It is deeper than slavery, deeper even than the right of the States to secede. It is compounded of all the ignorance and jealousy and hate and greed and stupidity in our country today; it is made up of sectional patriotism and provincial senselessness. Yes, and the idealists aren’t free from blame, either, for they have fomented ill feeling between the North and the South, and have frothed all over the place over problems they know nothing about. It’s easy to be virtuous about your neighbor’s failings, when you haven’t the slightest idea of his reasons for these so-called failings.”

  “Amy!” Martin was aghast, deeply hurt. Gregory laughed loudly. “Martin is a stylite,” he said. “And stylites don’t get around very much. Come down off your pillar, Martin, and travel about a bit.”

  But Martin was too busy in these days to be much troubled by gibes, though Amy’s defection depressed and bewildered him. His was the type of spirit that can endure anything from a stranger or enemy, but cannot stand the slightest opposition or sharpness from one it loves.

  He was rapidly becoming very poor. All his income and practically all of Amy’s was being swallowed into the hospital and the bank funds for the laborers. Moreover, he had extended his operations into a swarm of lesser charities. Missionaries, free schools, orphan asylums and prisons absorbed what small crumbs remained. The farm was poor, and though Hans and Carl brought to it the knowledge culled by generations of workers on poor land, and made every yard of earth yield beyond belief, the crops were barely sufficient to support the family, pay taxes and buy seed. But they stood behind Martin like monks behind an angelic abbot, and if old Mrs. Heckl grumbled, or Amy sighed audibly, they were outraged. They would have gone hungry to please Martin, to help him, and could not understand the selfish female nature that could find no pleasure in hardship and poverty for the sake of Martin. When Mrs. Heckl protested at the selling of the last two sides of bacon, pleading Amy and the children, they were horrified, refused to listen. But Mrs. Heckl ran and told Amy, and Amy, who would endure anything but depriving her children of food, came out across the fields to the smokehouse, confiscated the meat, and brought it back to the house herself. There was about her such still anger, such cold white fury, such bitter silence, that the two devotees could not say a single word, and tactfully refrained from telling Martin.

  Amy was no saint. She was approaching the point where even her steadfast affection for her husband, her desire for his happiness, would break. She looked at her children, in their patched clothes and rough shoes, and set her mouth. Paul and Elsa were seven years old, almost eight, and had not yet gone to school. There were no schools in this isolated section, and not even within four miles. Nor could she afford a governess for them. She taught them herself, but she was so crowded with work, so exhausted after this unusual and strenuous effort, so wearied from the prolonged nursing of the baby, that she could spare the twins only an hour or less a day, and then only when she had to sit down to sew or knit for them. It did not matter to her that she was aging before her time, that her shoes were breaking at the seams, that she had not a decent gown to her body, that her nails were black and broken, and that her bones ached constantly; but she was coming to the point where she would not have her children suffer any longer. Sometimes she dared not speak to Martin for fear of the rage that would burst from her mouth; sometimes she had to leave the room, trembling, pleading weariness. Sometimes, in fact, she almost hated him. She did not want to have May or her sisters-in-law see her condition, and so discouraged their visits. She found May’s shocked expression unbearable, and Florabelle’s uplifted eyebrows, smirk and dainty shrug almost impossible to stand in silence. Once she saw Florabelle frown delicately at the shabby rugs and fastidiously lift her skirts from contact with them, and something close to a homicidal impulse rose in the gentle Amy. Worst of all to endure was Dorcas, who observed everything, sympathized with nothing, but instead wore a certain smug expression of rectitude which testified to her opinion that Amy was doing nothing that was not her duty to do.

  For several long weeks after the war had commenced, Martin wandered about in a sick and absent daze, talking to no one, not even to Amy. Finally he wrote to Nicholas and offered his hospital to the wounded. To his amazed and almost incredulous delight, the President wrote him personally, thanking him for the offer and promising to take advantage of it. Not a month later the hospital was crowded with the wounded and dying soldiers, and Martin was again taken out of himself, and was happy. He took food from the larder for the soldiers, dainties such as home-made jams which Amy had put up herself. So, sh
e took to hiding delicacies, caching them away like contraband.

  She was never quite certain when the change of attitude about the war came to Martin, but she did notice, eventually, that he spoke less and less of its wickedness and futility, and more and more confidently of the great good that might come out of it. He began to speak of Sacrifice in rounded periods, and Amy, who was sick to death of the word, which seemed to her the ugliest in the whole language, was filled with apprehension. At last Martin suggested to her that she might fill her spare time rolling bandages and knitting socks for the soldiers. “Spare time!” Martin thought Amy had never looked so strange, so white, and her eyes had never blazed so upon him. But after that first exclamation, she said nothing, merely rose quietly and left the room. Nevertheless, she did not roll bandages. Mrs. Heckl, however, was prevailed upon to do so.

  One day Martin came home and told his wife that Carl had enlisted. He spoke quietly about it, but his handsome face was alight. Amy, suddenly weakened, sat down abruptly.

  “But, Martin! Old Hans cannot manage this farm alone! And this is all we have to live on!”

  “Amy.” He took her hand gravely, looked into her eyes. “My dear, you must try to do as other brave women are doing: the best you can. Other women’s husbands and sons have left their farms and gone to war, and the women have taken their places as best they could—”

  Amy rushed into a wind of hysteria. “In the fields? Do you want me to work in the fields, Martin? Do you want me to do the milking and the threshing and the weeding and the hoeing? Is that what you want?”

  “Amy! Did I say so? I shall get you a young boy, under military age, to help you, as soon as possible. But you must try to get along as best—”

  However, he found he was speaking to empty air, for Amy had fled. He remembered, troubled, that more and more she was fleeing like this from his presence, as though she were carrying a dangerous bomb outside before it exploded.

  A deep loneliness and heavy melancholy were settling upon him of late. Amy never reproached him, never complained, but he felt that a chasm had opened silently between them. He could not understand it; simply, he could not understand it. When he spoke of the hospital, she was silent, where she once smiled. When he elatedly told her of some injured man making an almost impossible recovery, she pressed pale lips together and continued sewing; once she had shared his elation, or at least appeared to share it. A sick suspicion came to him that perhaps Amy had never really felt about things as he felt about them. Why then, he asked himself, had she ever consented to do as he wished? It did not occur to him, in his simplicity and single-mindedness, that a person might do some things against all his desires, all his deepest impulses, merely for love. He could not have imagined himself going against his convictions even for love. That would have seemed to him hypocrisy and self-betrayal. He loved Amy with all his heart, had once felt that there was nothing devious or secret between them, and could not believe that she would be either hypocritical or self-betraying for anything or any one.

  She and Martin had reached a place, thought Amy in despair and cold pain, where they could no longer continue without an explosion that would be irreparable. In terror, she realized that she could remain silent very little longer, that passions and wraths and indignations, perhaps even brutalities and greedinesses she had never suspected in herself, must burst out from her like wild beasts escaping from behind bars. She could not hold them back much longer. I am not a saint, nor a heroine, she would think despairingly. I am a woman, with a right to comfort and happiness, and security for my children. He has no right to subject me to this! But I am much worse: I should never have consented in the first place. I thought I was doing it for his happiness, but it surely won’t make him happy to know that I have lied all along, that I have hated and loathed all this; it won’t make him happy when I scream into his face that I must go home to comfort and warmth and peace and dignity, or go mad. I have been very wrong, God forgive me!

  One night she reached the breaking point. “The young boy under military age” was a loafer, and useless. The woodbox was empty, and the weather was still chill and damp with early spring. The baby developed a cough and fever, and Amy remembered that there was a load of washing to be done, that Mrs. Heckl had not had time to do. She was feeling ill, herself, and all at once, she burst into cries and screams that brought Mrs. Heckl running, pale as a ghost.

  When Martin returned home, he found his wife in bed, quiet now, with resolutely closed eyes and bitten mouth. Mrs. Heckl was pottering about with the evening meal, and the children were subdued for once. Martin went directly to Amy, took her hand, murmured sympathetically, kissed her cheek, and wondered wretchedly why she did not look at him. He had so much to say to her, and finally he burst out with it impulsively:

  “Amy, darling, look at me.” He laughed a little, drearily. “You won’t have many more chances. Amy, please tell me it is all right, love. You see, I enlisted today. I’m a Captain, now, in the Quartermaster’s Corps, with the Third Division. I leave day after tomorrow. I’m not fighting; only helping with the supplies, and things, bringing up the rear, helping—”

  He stopped suddenly, for Amy was sitting bolt upright in bed, red blotches on her white face, her eyes staring at him wildly, her mouth open and gasping. He was frightened by her expression, tried to put his arm about her, but she recoiled.

  “Amy! Please, love! I won’t be in danger. You know I would never bear arms, that I would never kill. But this is different, being in charge of the food supplies, and so on. Such as blankets and medicines, tools and horses. I—I had to do it, darling. Everyone else was going. It was my duty—”

  But she had burst into laughter, loud and shrill, a little savage, quite terrible, and not to be controlled.

  CHAPTER XLVII

  Martin’s family was stupefied at his enlistment. They had no sooner heard of it than May and Florabelle, Dorcas and Hilda, called for their carriages and descended upon the frowsy little farm. They found Amy alone with the babies, working in the garden in the pale spring sunshine. She stood up as she heard the twittering of voices and the swish of silk coming up the broken walk, and her female relatives had a horrified glimpse of her, tall and thin and mud-stained, her skirt bedraggled, her hair in a loose swinging braid down her back, her hands black and moist with earth, her face with its fine pale skin drawn and weary in the disillusioning light.

  “Why, she has become a slattern!” thought Florabelle with smug disapproval, forgetting her lowly origin, and feeling exceedingly superior to this daughter of “gentry” and prideful aristocrats. Dorcas felt a sudden uneasy doubt of her adored brother’s wisdom, when she saw Amy, and for the first time a real pity for Amy and indignation against Martin made the color rise high in her smooth cool cheeks. May exclaimed out loud compassionately, and ran to her cousin with outstretched and perfumed arms, overcome with anger, her hoops tilting vehemently, her red curls spilling from the blue silk bonnet that matched her blue silk dress and dark blue shawl. As for Hilda, plump and gray and bellicosely florid, she stopped short, folded her black silk arms upon her bosom and said loudly: “Well, I must say! Charity begins at home. Seems to me that Martin has lost his good sense, if he ever had any!” And tugged her black shawl angrily over her shoulders.

  But the children, running to meet their grandmother, were sturdy and brown, with cheeks like wine-saps and eyes that blazed. Their clothing was shabby, even ragged, and the twins were barefooted in the warm spring earth. They leaped about her, tall Elsa and Paul, and fat little Lucy, like boisterous puppies, thrusting their muddy fingers greedily into her reticule for the sweetmeats she always brought them. She bent over them, grumbling and scolding, her bonnet rattling with jet, and kissed them roughly and soundly. “It’s a shame and a disgrace!” she shouted. “I’ll give Martin a piece of my tongue!”

  They had not seen Amy since Christmas. At that time the earth and the garden and the house roof had been covered with snow; fires had burned high on th
e hearths, the candles had glowed on table and mantel, and the sky had been low and gray over smoking chimneys. But the spring sunshine revealed all the shabbiness of house and grounds, the sagging fences and dusty windows, the oozing earth, and the ashes in the fireplaces, the grimy rugs and scarred old furniture. The four female visitors stood in the disordered parlor, looking at each other, aghast, making an island of themselves of hoops and shawls and ribboned bonnets and velvet reticules, perfume eddying from them, their bracelets jingling. Florabelle shrank from the children’s dirty hands, Hilda, with renewed scoldings, tried to brush them off with her kerchief, Dorcas kissed their soiled hard cheeks. But May held her cousin’s rough hand, and could not speak for the tears in her throat; however, her dark eyes burned and welled, and her lip trembled.

  All of the women had come to scold Amy roundly for her weak acquiescence in Martin’s latest folly. Only Hilda and Dorcas were alarmed for him personally. Florabelle thought he was making himself “ridiculous,” while May was outraged at his treatment of her cousin. But looking at the tight pale grimness of her once soft mouth, at the still bitterness in her once gentle eyes, none of them could speak of Martin yet, they could only look upon Amy with pity and concern. Even Dorcas thought Amy excessively foolish in allowing Martin to absorb the very sizable income from her dowry.

  Amy explained, simply, that she could offer them nothing but some indifferent tea, as Mrs. Heckl was ill with rheumatism and had not baked for several days. However, she said, she had some good wine which Gregory had brought her, and she produced it and four chipped glasses. The ladies sat gingerly on the dusty furniture and sipped the wine, which was beyond their expectations. Then May, unable to contain herself, burst out: “Amy, I can’t forgive Gregory for letting you come to this, and not telling me!”