Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  She was too intelligent and reasonable a woman to be silly and jealous. She had been too fond of Amy to cultivate hatred for her. Perhaps, she thought wryly, this was because she had never lost hope that Ernest might love her some day as she wanted him to love her. Now, she was losing hope, and as her hope waned the red star of hatred began to rise in the darkness it was leaving behind. She told herself a thousand times that Amy had done nothing wrong, had not lifted an eye or hand to attract Ernest, had not shown by any sign that she cared for him. She tried to believe that Amy’s sense of obligation and affection would prevent any flirtation, however mild, with the man who loved her. She would surely have honor—! Honor, thought May ruefully. In her place, if I loved him, would I have honor?

  Amy had never been a woman to visit constantly, and since Gregory’s death her excursions abroad were fewer than ever. May rarely saw her, except when she herself visited the house in Quaker Terrace. And now that her own hope was dimming, becoming colder and sadder, she visited Amy less than ever, rarely sent the carriage for her children. On the occasion of her latest visit she had thought that Amy looked exceptionally well, suddenly blooming in her middle thirties as some women do, but that her manner was a little distrait and preoccupied. She had seemed relieved when May had prepared to go, and May imagined that she had winced a little under her warm cousinly kiss. She had stood beside the carriage while May had settled herself, prattling humorously as always, and when May had looked down at her for a last smiling good-by she had been startled to see that Amy’s eyes were full of tears. On the way home, May was suddenly amazed at her own surge of bitter instinctive hatred for her cousin, an emotion of which she was at once ashamed.

  May knew that Ernest’s affair with the buxom Army widow was over and done with. She thought that if he had begun another affair she would know of that also. But what she did, not know was that when Ernest wished a matter to be secret, it was a secret indeed. So, May began to feel some contentment and some hope that her husband was done with all his straying.

  Two months after Florabelle Bouchard married her gallant Major, Nicholas Sessions succumbed to cerebral hemorrhage, and the balance of the vast Sessions fortune passed into May’s hands, and through hers, into Ernest’s.

  CHAPTER LVIII

  Godfrey James Barbour, though fourteen years old, was still known as “little Godfrey,” or “Frey.”

  It was not that his stature was so small; he was only an inch less in height than his robust cousin, Paul Barbour, one year younger. But he was exceedingly slender, not gaunt, but so delicately made, so almost exquisitely made, that he appeared shorter than he was, and frailer. He carried himself well, however, and gracefully. His hair was very fair and curling, his eyes a soft bright brown; he had the Barbour nose, short and rather square, but he had not inherited his father’s belligerently distended nostrils. His mouth, flexible and well colored, was his most beautiful feature. In fact, as Ernest sometimes said with disdain, he was a beautiful boy. His beauty lay not so much in the contours and coloring of his face, but in a certain lofty nobility of expression, a certain width and height of brown eyes, a certain attitude of his long and slender head. Sometimes his father, disgruntled, told his mother that the lad was getting to look uncommonly like Martin, and he hoped to God that the family wasn’t going to be afflicted by another martyr and idealist. But the truth was that it was only in his external coloring that he resembled his dead uncle, and then he did not have Martin’s blue eyes.

  Godfrey, or Frey, as she called him, was May’s darling, her Benjamin. When he was at home, he was never far from her. She often laughed at him, poked him, rallied him, amused herself with his seriousness and only slight humor, and understood him only a little. Sometimes she scolded him, like a “Billingsgate fishwife,” Ernest said. But more than all these, she loved him, and if her face was frequently humorous when she talked to him, her hand was gentle and had in it something fiercely protective. She was rarely impatient with him, though she was not instinctively fond of children (in fact, rather disliked even her own). But her patience with Godfrey was remarkable. She was never too hurried, too tired, too irritated, to listen to him, to sit down and draw him to her, to touch his cheek and hold his hand while he stammered out what had been troubling him. While she listened, her face would soften, glow, bend toward him attentively. Sometimes he puzzled and annoyed and worried her, for he was silent and secretive, dignified and inexplicable, given to wild little rages that had in them something of despair. He never played as other children played; he was apparently afraid of his contemporaries, and actually seemed to suffer when forced to be with them. But though she understood him only a little, she knew when he was distressed, though not why, guessed his lostness, though not the reason, sympathized with his obscure pains without knowing their source. If sometimes, even with her, he felt helplessly alone, her smile and voice, her touch and love, comforted him.

  May knew that the boy disliked and feared his father. When he had been a very little child, he had frequently run from Ernest, even to the extent of hiding under beds. When Ernest, in impatient affection, had lifted him upon his knee, had tried to engage him in talk, the child had sat in petrified silence, like a caught bird shivering under a hand that tried to be kind. Like that bird, he had been unable to move in his terror, had merely fixed his bright distended eyes upon his father’s face in a sort of deadly fascination. It would have astonished Ernest had he known that to his little son’s vision he appeared almost monstrous, like a strange and dangerous animal, that his eyes had seemed to shine with ferocity, that his breath had seemed hot, his teeth gleaming savagely, his voice rough for all its attempt to be gentle. It would have astounded and disconcerted him to know that the very young Godfrey dreamt about him at night, enlarged and frightful, like something out of the dreams of the pagan Teutons: gigantic, emerging from thunders and mists, riding on winds, a Wotan that bestrode mountains and carried lightning in his hand.

  His first conscious memories in childhood were not connected with sight or taste or touch, nor even with hunger or pleasure or greed. They were connected with sound. Sounds to him had personalities, even if they were merely the creaking of a shutter in the wind, the rush of trees at midnight, the snapping of wood in intense cold, the iron ring of winter nights, or the metallic falling of summer rain in the pool at the foot of the garden. The song of the robin at evening seemed more real to him than the bird; notes struck on the piano keys were more alive than the hands that evoked them. He early discovered that all things had a rhythm peculiar to them and to them alone, and sometimes lying awake at night he tapped out on the wall near his bed the rhythms of low wind, cricket, or rattle of casement. When a sound with a steady rhythm, or an odd cadence, came to his attention, he was elated; his tapping out of it gave him a sensuous satisfaction, almost voluptuous. He came to love certain rhythms, hate others, be irritated by some, made restless by many. Sometimes May, lying awake also at her husband’s side, heard that low steady tapping on the wall, for she slept in the room adjoining, and for years she was puzzled as to what made it. When Godfrey told her, she did not quite understand, but she thought it very touching. She bought the boy a drum, something which Ernest assured her he would not care for. But Godfrey seized on it with cries of joy, much to Ernest’s pleasure and surprise. Thereafter the rhythms pulsed through the house and the gardens, strange running rhythms, slow dolorous rhythms, rhythms that danced and hopped like little old-fashioned figures, rhythms that seemed to fold hands in prayer, to rise in triumphant ecstasy and victory.

  One day May and Godfrey were sitting alone in a little arbor in the garden, she embroidering, he tapping on his drum. Neither had spoken a word for some time. May dropped her needle, and looked down at the young boy at her feet. His head was bent, and a shaft of sunlight, coming through the lozenge-shaped slats of the summer house, gilded his fair head until it seemed to blaze with light. She studied his delicate profile, the long fair lashes, the faintly flushed cheek, the beau
tiful dreaming mouth. All at once she was afraid; he seemed to have been removed far from her, where she could not go. He was only a little boy of seven at the time, but she felt that he had gone from her, and that if she did not speak and break the enchantment, he would not come back. It was quite absurd, she knew, but she put her hand tenderly on his head and said: “My darling, why do you sit there dreaming so, just tapping on your drum? What are you thinking about?”

  He had a nervous, self-conscious color that had a habit of rising and falling in his face when he was spoken to. He looked at his mother in embarrassment; young though he was he knew her sympathy for him was connected only with her love, and not her understanding.

  “Why, I’m just making sounds,” he answered. “The sounds I hear. I’m trying to make the same sound.” He regarded her seriously. “Everything has a sound, Mama. Even you have.”

  May was quite edified. “Have I, now! Show me how I sound.”

  He regarded her with increasing seriousness, while she struggled not to smile. Then, still looking at her, he began to beat out a rhythm on his drum. She was like a score that he was following. He beat out a rhythm that was quick and light, somewhat erratic at moments, sometimes dancing and fast, sometimes slower and softer, followed by swift tapping sounds like rapid and laughing speech. But under all this he struck a steady and sober rhythm, unchanging and steadfast, if a little monotonous.

  May had often confessed that she had no ear whatsoever for music. She could use a piano passably, ballads and light sonatinas and simple melodies, but she performed them almost playfully, with an air of apology. She had attended scores of concerts in Boston and New York, as a necessary polish to her education. But she never really liked music, and could rarely tell one symphony from another. So Godfrey’s rhythmic beating appeared only a jumble of mechanical hollow sounds to her, without individual meaning. She wrinkled her white brow as he finished and waited for her comment, and tried to look intellectual. “Very, very sweet, my lovie,” she said at last, bending to kiss him. “You are really quite clever.”

  But the next day she called him into the drawing room, sat down at the piano with him beside her on the bench, and began to teach him what she knew of music. He had been strumming for most of his short life on that instrument, and she was astonished to find that he could play quite well, already, if utterly without technique or clarity. He played, of course, by ear, and it was exceedingly difficult for her at first to make him relate the notes on the written page to the sounds his hands evoked. “Dear me,” she thought irritably, “I’m pretty much of a fool. I should have paid some attention to this long ago. Now I’ve got to unravel all the bad things he has picked up, himself.”

  But she enjoyed the teaching. It was not until the boy had acquired everything she knew that she thought of professional teachers.

  And at first, she had taught him only because she wished to give him pleasure, and not with any dream or thought of the future. But one day, as she watched his beautifully shaped small hands evoking from the piano keys an exquisite impromptu melody, watched the ecstatic absorption on his lifted face, she thought humbly, with a sudden clarity of vision: He shall have his music. He shall have his life.

  Godfrey had never heard an orchestra; in fact, it is doubtful if he knew such a thing, dedicated wholly to music, existed. Two or three times a year he heard the band concert playing in Sessions Park, on Fourth of July, Thanksgiving Day, and a time or two besides in the summer. The musicians were not very skilled, and leaned heavily on the brasses and the drums, which was all very well on the side of noise, but not very subtle. However, to music-starved Godfrey James Barbour, the blared marches, the sentimental melancholies, the dolorous nocturnes, were exquisite. He would wiggle his way as closely as possible to the bandstand, and would stand there, gripping the criss-cross slats of its platform, staring up at the leader or closing his eyes in ecstasy. Sometimes, when a particularly poignant passage stole out through the noisy jumbled confusion of the drums and the horns, tears would roll down the boy’s cheeks, and he would press his meagre chest against the hands that gripped the slats, heavily, as though the self-induced pain relieved the transports in him.

  But this was before May had taught him all she knew of music. Introduced to Bach and Beethoven, to Mozart and Gounod, listening to May’s description of them as played by an orchestra, conjuring them up with remarkable fidelity by the aid of his intense imagination, Godfrey soon found his beloved brass band intolerable. May remembered all her half-forgotten hours in music halls; she would play, for Godfrey’s benefit, a few bars of an overture, then explain, with quite commendable color and accuracy, how the horns came in here, or the flute there, how the melody whispered here, rose triumphantly there. Here would be the hushed murmur of drums, like meditative voices heard at a distance, here a harp would sing thinly, like rippling moonlight, here a ’cello would add depth and poignancy that would be almost unbearable, here the violins would emerge, like supple dancers with strong sweet voices, or a theme would burn softly and clearly, like tapers ringed with light. She would play sections of symphonies, and before the boy’s startled and radiant eyes abysses would open, spanned by rainbows, or chaos would tumble before him, blinding him with darkness or light.

  May found a sudden, tremendous and exciting happiness in this teaching of her young son. She found that her life had become regulated and staid, placid when not anxious about her husband, somewhat petty and circumscribed. In teaching Godfrey, in watching the white light upon his face, the trembling of his lips, she became aware of old dreams and joys, old glories and majesties, old feelings that beyond the rim of a narrow earth splendors stood veiled and imminent, which she thought she had forgotten in the welter of a fat trough. For some time she felt the old delicious restlessness, the old mysterious urge of the spirit, the old sensation of ecstatic waiting for a vision. She told herself a little drearily that these were all lies, the vagaries of an awakening adolescence; nevertheless, she felt that nothing else in the world was so beautiful, so satisfying, so close to God. All the things she had come to accept as truth, as validities proved beyond a doubt, seemed flat and stupid to her, like empty prairies without hills or valleys. “What does it matter if you know at last that two and two are four?” she thought. “Does it make living more endurable or more beautiful; does it make miseries easier to bear if you know a relentless formula? Two and two make four. But that’s not an axiom that stands in the presence of God.”

  One day, on an impulse, as she sat with Godfrey at the piano, she held up four fingers and looked at him quizzically. “How many fingers have I up, Frey? Four. Don’t you believe it! There’s no end to my fingers, there’s no end to what I can do with them! I can save with them, kill with them, be kind with them, steal or play with them, destroy or love with them. Those are the real fingers, all the thousands of things they can do; and you can’t count them, love. So, you see, when you say these are four fingers, you lie. Some day the world will try to teach you that they are only four fingers after all, but if you believe that, you will lose your soul.”

  Godfrey had listened gravely. At the end he had nodded his head. “Did you understand?” cried May irritably, wondering, herself, at this irritation.

  “Yes, Mama.” And she wondered for a long time if he did. But one day he said to her, quite unexpectedly, several months after that episode: “Mama, Papa believes that you only held up four fingers, doesn’t he?”

  May was quite startled. She regarded Godfrey in silence for a few moments, then, she pulled him to her, kissed him passionately, tears in her eyes. “Yes, love, Papa always believed that there were just four fingers.”

  “Then, he lost his soul, didn’t he, Mama?”

  May put him from her a little and looked into his face blankly. “Perhaps he did, my pet, perhaps he did.” Then she pushed him away and smiled. “You mustn’t carry metaphors to a bitter end, sweet.” She paused. “In fact, never carry anything to a bitter end.”

  May boug
ht him a thick volume of the lives of famous composers written in a simple and clarified style; it was also copiously illustrated with fine engravings both of the composers and scenes from various operas. It was, to Godfrey, as though he had entered a dark, uncertain room and had thrown open vast windows upon the heavens and the earth and the mountains and the seas. He sat at the piano, playing sections of themes, selected arias, fugues and concertos, and it seemed to him that he sat in the midst of heroic and terrible figures, among confusions and majesties in a world peopled with angels and Odins, monsters and demons, fairies and giants; he heard winds of terror and rage, cries of agony, voices lifted in the lofty measures of faith and prayer.

  CHAPTER LIX

  May wondered how professional teachers could be introduced in conversation with Ernest without causing too much of an uproar. But Ernest himself gave her an opportunity very soon.

  Godfrey had been attending Windsor’s newest and most exclusive boys’ school (“A few Pupils will be Instructed by an English Gentleman, Formerly Schoolmaster at Gloucester Boys’ School, London, under the Patronage of H.R.H. the Duke of York”). The English Gentleman, incidentally, had been en route to Chicago, but he had sadly miscalculated the vast distances in this new country, and found himself in a distressing state of embarrassment in Pittsburgh. He found friends in that city, and at their home met a lady from Windsor, who prophesied a fine future for him if he would condescend to consider Windsor, and promised all sorts of assistance. He had no other choice; his new friends were very generous, and he had soon rented a tall narrow red brick house, gloomy and sombre, with vault-like parlors, high narrow windows and black marble fireplaces, furnished accordingly, and there he opened his school for a few “selected pupils, the sons of gentlemen.”