Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I don’t know about that!” said Hilda sourly. “Seems to me it’s Amy’s fault as much as Martin’s. Of all the silly things, and all that money, too!”

  “Suppose we don’t talk about that,” Amy interrupted, smiling. But her expression warned them off. “I know you have come to shout at me for letting Martin enlist. I am sure, if you will think about it for a moment, that you will remember that nobody ‘lets’ Martin do anything. He does what he thinks is right.” The faint twist of her lips as she said this was indescribably wry.

  “Raoul thinks it is absurd!” said Florabelle.

  “Eugene,” said Dorcas hesitantly, “thinks you might have done something, Amy, but I suppose you understand Martin best. I only hope that nothing happens to him,” and her voice broke.

  “I don’t care what happens to him!” cried May, the muscles rising in her white throat, and her hands twisting her handkerchief violently. “But I think it outrageous for him to reduce my cousin to this! Perhaps it is best that he is going away; maybe Amy might have some decency in her life, and some comfort.” She swung upon the others passionately. “He is your son and your brother, and—”

  “And he is my husband, May,” broke in Amy’s voice, cold and incisive.

  After awhile they went away, dissatisfied and discontented. When they had gone, and the children were outside again, quarrelling over the candies their grandmother had brought them, Amy sighed. She had not told any of them that Martin had already gone; he had left that duty to her. “I couldn’t stand seeing my mother cry, and Dorcas, too,” he said simply. “Eugene and Raoul and Armand aren’t my friends any more; you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and they can’t be Ernest’s friends, and mine, too. So, I won’t need to say good-by to them.” But Amy, today, had not had the strength to tell them.

  Sitting there, her tired hands slack on her mud-stained knees, she remembered the last morning she and Martin had been together. She had not slept much the night before, and the baby, John Charles, had been restless, too. She had watched the windows become gray, and finally blue with the early morning sky. She had gotten up to help Mrs. Heckl with the fires and the breakfast.

  A terrible constraint had grown between Martin and Amy since the night he had told her of his enlistment. Neither could leap over the abyss whose bridge Amy had destroyed with that wild and uncontrolled laughter. Amy felt internally frozen, and beneath that icy crust raged things she dared not let come to the surface. Martin had been frightened by that outbreak from the controlled and usually soft-voiced Amy; he had seen something in her face and her eyes in the space of a few seconds that was strange to him, and savage and fierce, like something primitive fighting for survival, something terror-stricken. The Amy he knew had gone, and it was a hating stranger who had looked at him. He was still bewildered over it; he was almost afraid to speak to this shadow of Amy, for fear it might turn its face upon him and show him again that stranger’s face. In Catholic mythology he had once read of a demon driving out a woman’s soul and taking its place in her body, and though he smiled a little sadly to himself at the memory, he thought it somewhat appropriate.

  Then the morning of his going came, and the abyss lay between them, bottomless. During the past few days they had talked very little, and then only quietly, as if afraid of disturbing something that had best not be disturbed. Martin had talked only of business matters. He had left the affairs of his hospital, the bank funds, his charities, in the joint care of Amy and Father Dominick. He did not add that he had left his will also, in the priest’s care.

  On his last morning at home, Martin was heavy with grief. He watched Amy timidly as she moved about the table, but she did not glance at him. He was afraid of her white grim face, and he could see the bony line of her tight jaw. Moreover, the fact of his fatherhood had come home to him very closely, and he could not get enough of his children. He held the fat baby, John Charles, on one knee, and Lucy on the other. The twins stood at his side, jabbering, demanding to know just what exactly he was going to do in the war: Was he going to kill lots of wicked Rebels? Would he bring them a Rebel gun when he came back? If the war lasted long enough, would he let Paul go with him as a drummer boy? And could Elsa nurse in a hospital? The twins, who had always been a little reserved with him, instinctively guessing that he lacked their brand of robust vitality, stared at him with blue and shining adoration. He had justified himself in their eyes. Lucy tugged at the brass buttons on his new dark blue uniform, and the baby pressed his round face against Martin’s chest in order to bite one of the shiny things. He kissed them repeatedly, holding them closely to him, and Mrs. Heckl, coming back and forth with the breakfast, thought the sight a beautiful one. She thought Martin looked like a fair angel in uniform, with his children about him.

  Then had come the moment of parting. Amy and he stared at each other for a long minute, then, with a cry, Amy was in his arms, clinging to him, sobbing incoherently yet dryly, holding him, clutching his arms. Finally, he had to push her away. He ran out of the house, and got onto his horse. Amy rushed from the house, came flying down the path, clutched his reins, looking up at him with a distorted face. “Don’t go, Martin, don’t go!” she cried, over and over.

  He carried that memory of her as a sort of comfort and renewed joy, into the Army, into danger, and finally into death. She loved him still, and that, at the end, was all that mattered.

  Thinking of all this, as she sat by her cold and ashen hearth this spring day, Amy began to cry silently, wiping her eyes on the edge of her apron. Something crackled in her bosom, and she withdrew a letter she had received that morning from Martin, sent from Washington. She re-read it, her tears staining it.

  “I’m not trying to be a hero or a reformer, Amy, dear,” he had written, “but I do believe it is the duty of everyone to save and not to destroy, to conserve and not to devour, to speak gently, and not brutally, to be merciful instead of cruel. To set himself against viciousness and treachery, wherever he may find them, to fight injustice and hatred, because they are enemies of mankind. You would not think I was making a gesture if I jumped into the river to save a life, or ran into a burning building to drag out a victim. Yet a man who speaks out against injustice and cruelty, greed and hatred, is ridiculed, even though he is really trying to rescue men and women and children from dangers more deadly than water and fiercer than fire. Ernest always called me ‘feckless,’ but I assure you it requires more than ordinary courage to take that epithet in silence and continue doing the very thing which has called it out. It takes courage to be yourself, though Ernest would say it requires only money. So, in doing what I am doing now, I feel that I have done the thing I must do, not even sure it is right, but certain that it is not cruel and not for self-gain.”

  CHAPTER XLVIII

  More poignantly than suffering, even than death, the scarred land affected Martin. Men died, and were buried, and their suffering was over, but the land stood there mutely under the hot autumn sun, blasted and desolate. To Martin, there was something infinitely pathetic and terrible in this mute immolation of earth to the hatred of man. It was an accusation against him, silent and frightful; it was the evidence that betrayed his eternal ferocity, his inability to live at peace either with his fellows or with the earth from which he had come. It proved again that he was Nature’s outcast, Nature’s pariah, a white, forked animal that left a scorched trail of destruction wherever he trod, a creature from whom all other creatures fled, gentle or wild, bloodthirsty or ravenous. He was the abomination of Nature, the cannibal, to whom all things, including his brother, were prey. He was the monster who killed for pleasure as well as for hunger, destroyed wantonly because of his innate perversity, a mad beast against whom the innocently savage and the humble and the timid had no defense whatsoever.

  Bringing up the rear with his supplies, Martin rode for days in the autumn sunshine, his horse sweating under him, the water running down his face from under his broad-brimmed hat. He looked about him a
t the burned fields which spread on each side of the dusty, rutted road. The crops had been destroyed by a marauding section of the division to which he belonged; he passed houses gutted and black from fire, the chimneys standing alone and sooty in the midst of the broken ruins. Where crops had been inadvertently spared, they were rotting in the hot sun, or were trampled down. Orchards stood silently on low hillsides, their red leaves hanging, their fruits, overripe, hot and decaying, dropping slowly, one by one, into the white dust beneath them. The doors of blackened barns hung open, showing the empty interiors; here and there a dried hog-wallow showed the imprints of vanished animals. Not a horse or a cow stood in the brown meadows. Once they passed a small farmhouse newly abandoned; the gardens behind it were ragged and boisterous with color, and a child’s swing swayed a little under a big old tree. A bucket still stood on the lip of a mossy well, and birds fluttered thirstily on the brim. Faint blue hills fumed in the distance; overhead spread the wide blue heat of the skies. But on the earth were desolation and destruction, silence sweltering and empty. The cavalry made the only sound, as it escorted the Quartermaster’s Corps and the supplies; the jingling of harness and spurs, the hoarse singing of the men, the ribald shouts, the velvety clop-clop of the horses in the clouds of golden dust, the roll of wheels, were the only things that broke the oppressive and abandoned stillness. Once a noisy string of cawing crows rose blackly against the hollow flame of the heavens; once buzzards sailed low and silently, as if they knew that death rode below. On and on, over the withered and ravished earth, yellow-brown as though seared by a conflagration; on and on, over land that had revolted passively and speechlessly, in drought and heat, in blackened trees and blasted meadow, in shrunken muddy streams and burned hills, in sandy erosions and dusty gullies.

  A few times they passed ancient log cabins squatting low in an area of littered ground. The haggard faces of the sun-bonneted women and children struck at Martin. He was Captain of his detachment and in spite of his men’s scowls and half-audible mutters, he stopped the train and gave bread and meat and flour to the poor creatures. They accepted only after prolonged coaxing, and then without thanks. They looked after the train with expressions of stupid wonderment and perplexity. Conquerors who were kind and merciful, who smiled gently, were quite new. A few of the older children essayed to shout “damned Yankees” after the train, but the shout was without true conviction or spirit.

  Martin was not popular with his men. They had a vile name for men who hated bloodshed and killing, who disliked ribaldry and dirtiness of all kinds. They would have applied it to Martin, had it not been for the edge that could come through the mildness of him, his obvious strength and height, the quiet steadiness and command he could infuse into his voice. But because he was also kind and considerate, forbearing and gentle, they felt a contempt for him, and he had a hard time to maintain discipline. Not being their kind, he gave orders that were received with only slightly concealed resentment. This puzzled him, for he heard other officers issuing harsh commands that were instantly carried out, with automatic cheerfulness and acceptance; he knew his own orders were mild, and issued only when necessary. So he could not understand the obvious ill-will and sullenness of his own men. The whole thing depressed him, made him withdraw more and more from friendly communication with those under his command. He had not yet learned that the whip and the boot and the sword are the only languages the majority of men understand, and that justice and compassion are incomprehensible.

  Following up the devastating Army that went before, his sadness increased, and also his anger. Surely, he thought, it was not necessary to lay waste and induce misery among women and children, in order to free slaves and preserve the Union. It was robbing Peter to pay Paul. One day a company passed them, going in the opposite direction, with a detachment of prisoners. The ill-will his men nourished for him was not decreased when he forbade them to harry the prisoners or taunt them.

  Long hot days, brown and sweltering, over the blasted earth. Friendless and avoided even by his brother officers, Martin drew more and more within himself, and his shyness made him appear haughty and secretive. Finally he was left entirely alone, and the only words that passed his lips were orders. He would look sadly ahead at the rising and falling blue backs, listen to the good-natured and ribald talk of the men, and feel himself utterly outcast.

  They were in enemy territory now, and must keep a sharp lookout. The laughter began to leave the men’s voices, and their faces drew tighter and grimmer. What they did not as yet know was that their rear was being cut off, that a circle was closing in about them. But one morning, just before dawn, they were bloodily apprized of these facts.

  Martin, sleeping uneasily on the warm dark earth, under a tree, was aroused by a volley of shots, by screams, shouts, uproar, mad runnings to and fro, the thin shriek of wounded horses, and blasts of red fire in the dimness. He stood up, staggering and dazed, tried to call out through parched lips. He was one of the first to be struck down. He felt a searing blow in his chest, another in his arm, and was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  He was awakened by his own torture after what seemed eons upon eons of singing black emptiness in which he crawled, dying of thirst. Something brilliant was burning against his eyelids, and as he painfully lifted them, he saw it was the sun pouring down from a brazen void. All about him was the most profound silence he had ever known. Through the heat-mist of agony, he saw that he was lying half under a gutted wagon, his head exposed to the sun and innumerable insects. Not a human sound was to be heard; not a moving thing to be seen, except the ominous sailing of lowering buzzards. All about him were trees drenched in light, their leaves vividly clear and green; his sharpened eyes saw every blade of trampled and stained grass.

  He knew he had been left for dead. He knew there was no hope for him. He knew he was about to die. And he thought of nothing except his thirst and the agony in his chest. He listened to the hot and dazzling silence about him. Once he called feebly.

  And then, after a dark period, he awoke again, and thought of Amy. And the thought of her was like a cool hand touching him, a cup of cool water. She had been angry with him for something, but she had forgiven him, and she loved him. Contentedly, he thought: That is all that matters.

  He was about to die, but he did not think of God. He thought how blessed it was that the twilight was coming, and how good it was to be cool and without pain. He closed his eyes, and sighed.

  It amazed him all of a sudden to find himself in a dim and heliotrope world, smelling of rain and trees and earth. He found himself standing before a low white gate in a low white fence. Suddenly he was enormously excited and filled with joy. He opened the gate, began to walk up a winding path of flagstones, covered with green moss. On each side were drooping trees, heavy with moisture and evening; between them he saw flower-beds small-globed with dew, and he could smell their piercing fragrance. Everything was twilit and still and at peace. He passed the familiar old sun-dial, and he told himself that tomorrow he would stand by it again and read it by the sun. And now, at a little distance, he saw the old, low white house with its chimney and latticed windows thrown open to the evening. He saw the trees clasped above it, saw the little black kitten rolling on its step. He saw the skies, mauve and misty, with here and there a star beginning to sparkle faintly in them. And then, all at once, with a sensation that was both pain and ecstasy, he could smell the lilacs, dripping with crystal water.

  “There has been a storm, and now it is evening, and the storm has gone,” he thought. He hurried toward the house. The door opened, as though he were expected, and his old great-great-aunt stood on the step, wrapped in her white shawl, nodding and smiling at him.

  “You are late, Martin,” she called to him in her thin and piping voice. “But never mind, my love. Better late than never.”

  CHAPTER XLIX

  “If the war lasts two or three years more, I shall be worth three million dollars,” thought Ernest. He looked through his
office window with complacency. “What shall I do with it? Travel. Hum. I don’t know. I’m not much interested in seeing strange places, for the people never change except in dress. Their stupidity never varies; their incompetence never becomes competence. The same dull eyes and heavy mouths, the same flat voices and silly words. Build a bigger and showier house? I’m not interested in that; I’ve got the finest house in all the world! I’m not afraid of poverty any more; I’ve got a golden wall that nothing can ever blow up. But I don’t care about the things that other men care about: assorted women and fine wines and horses and queer ways of making a fool out of yourself. Nor do I care about collecting paintings or bric-a-brac or jewelry or statuary; I don’t know anything about them and don’t particularly want to know. I’ve got more than enough money for my children, even for Gertrude. What then, do I want with more money?”

  He smiled a little sheepishly to himself, for he knew the answer. Over that sheepish smile his eyes pointed brilliantly with something oddly like hate and triumph. Power. There was nothing like power. A man could never have too much, if he understood what he was getting. Power to set your heel on the neck of a world you loathed because of its stupidity and vicious brutality and animal-like treachery, its weasel-soul, its tiny vices and tiny virtues. But best of all, Ernest said to himself, power gave a man the inestimable right to be himself, to be what he was, without apology or hypocrisy.

  Strange that it should take power, money, to be simply yourself! As if your own personality was like a prisoner that could be freed only upon an enormous bond, that the mere right to do as you pleased, say what you pleased, eat, laugh, sleep, think when you pleased, must be purchased with a ransom. There were some people, ruminated Ernest, who declared that a man was free only when he had a gigantic fortune or absolutely no money at all. In either case, he could be free. But if a man were not either penniless or immensely rich, he was in bondage to his fellows; he must live, or pretend to live (which was worse) in accordance with the rules their stupidity dictated; he must learn to mouth their words. (Like eating their vomit, thought Ernest disgustedly.) He must trim down his soul to fit their measurements, which was almost as bad as expecting one to cut off one’s flesh in order to please one’s tailor. He must pretend to accept their god, or be in danger of worse than the hell fire they promised: their hatred and fear, their suspicion, and their ability to inflict a thousand little septic wounds. Not to be rich, or penniless, was to be chained in a vast monkey-cage, helpless against ferreting fingers, squeaking tongues, indignities and dishonoring.