Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  The door opened and Guy appeared, a little pale, but still amiable. The roars dwindled down the hall, descended the steps. Guy, coming toward the fire, held out his hand for inspection. “Look at those knuckles! The kid’s got a jaw like the jawbone of an ass. But it was worth it!”

  “Oh, Guy!” exclaimed Gertrude, distressed. “You know Joey’ll tell Papa, and then there’ll be such trouble for you. Why didn’t you ask me, if you need money?”

  “Well, how could I? I’ve got everybody’s presents but yours; I ran out of money. I only wanted five dollars from the little animal.”

  “But Guy, you know Papa has expressly warned us, dozens of times, that we were not to borrow from each other. You know he heard you borrowed from Reggie, and you didn’t get a penny for three months. Besides, I’m a married woman now, and I could have let you have all you wanted.”

  “You’re sweet, Trudie, but—”

  “My Christmas present to you, Guy, was a twenty-dollar gold piece. What would you say if I gave it to you now, instead of on Christmas?”

  “And mine,” said Reginald reluctantly, “was a five-dollar gold piece. That makes twenty-five dollars. I know I ought not to let you have it ahead of time, but I’m weak, like Trudie. Try to make it do until you get your allowance. And if you owe Joey anything, pay it back to him before Pa gets home tonight.”

  Guy, light-heartedness restored, was all the gayer for his brief and deadly rage. He related his interview with Joey, and exaggerated it delicately and with such wit that Gertrude, and even his brother, laughed to the point of tears. But Gertrude was still apprehensive about their father’s anger when Joey would have an opportunity to revenge himself on his brother by telling Ernest.

  “Don’t worry about the Old Man,” said Guy airily. “I’ve figured out a way to get around him. He’s always roaring that we don’t take any interest in business, and are just utterly worthless. Well, I’m going to tell him that I don’t care about going to New York to listen to Frey’s pretty little music. I’ll tell him I want to go with Paul to the coal mines and see how things are run. That ought to bring him around.”

  “Doesn’t that seem a little far-fetched, dear?” asked Gertrude, smiling. But Reginald, who had at first listened with indifference, sharpened to quick attention toward the last. He stared at his brother searchingly, his eyebrows knotted over his deep-set and lustreless eyes.

  “Far-fetched? I don’t think so. I’d like to see the mines. Strikes are going on down there. I’d like to see them, too. I’ve been reading the newspapers at school.” The youth nonchalantly inspected his fingernails, yawned. Reginald’s attention became stronger and more fixed.

  “Do strikes interest you?” he asked slowly.

  “Perhaps they do.” Nothing could have been more casual than Guy’s voice.

  “But how strange!” exclaimed Gertrude, diverted. “What for? Strikes! Don’t the men fight dreadfully? I’ve heard Papa talk. I think something ought to be done to show those miners their places.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Guy indifferently. He surveyed his sister with the blandest of expressions.

  But Reginald said nothing at all. But he thought: So Pa is to have only one of us after all. Joey. He watched his brother. But Guy is so elegant, almost like a girl. How strange that I never noticed before that he has a really hard jaw and straight mouth. But that is because he is always smiling; perhaps it is just to hide what he really is. However, Reginald could not convince himself of this. But he also was too young to reconcile Guy’s light-heartedness and gaiety, his impudence and grace and activity and frivolity, with any great depth or purpose. He finally gave it up, puzzled. Reticent himself, he never probed into the minds of others, and regretfully decided that perhaps he would never know the solution to the mystery.

  They talked until the winter dusk had become definite darkness, and until the crunching in the snow below warned them that their father and Paul were arriving. They had not bothered to light lamps, or to turn on the gas, and the warm dim-red glow of the dying fire made for intimacy in the heavy shadows of the room. One by one the coals were dropping onto the hearth, and now they could not see each other, and only occasionally caught the vague outline of a gesture or the movement of a shadowy face. Then loud and clear the dressing bell chimed through the pre-dinner hush of the house. Guy bounded away alertly, anticipating dinner, followed by Reginald, who had no desire to meet his father in the halls. Reginald did not close the door after him. Gertrude remained behind, reluctant to leave the quiet darkness of her brothers’ room. She knew she ought to go to her own apartments, partly to meet Paul when he came upstairs, and partly because it was time to change for dinner. But she could not move. A heaviness lay along all her body, and her legs felt like iron. She began to shiver a little.

  She heard Paul’s footsteps, muffled by the carpet, coming up the stairs. She shrank back against the fireplace and held her breath. Why, she did not know. Her mother came out of her own room and encountered Paul in the hall. He greeted her courteously and asked for Gertrude.

  “Why, she must be in her room,” replied May. “She was in the boys’ room all afternoon, but now I hear them splashing in the bathroom.”

  Paul was more cordial than usual with his aunt. He detained her in the hallway near the door of the room where Gertrude sat in shrinking silence.

  “Aunt May, I’ve just decided today to buy the house in Greenville. It ought to be ready for us by early summer.” His voice sounded exult ant and young, for all its native weight and inflexibility.

  “How nice,” said May warmly. “Trudie will be so pleased. Of course, it is quite a way out, but then, Windsor is bound to grow that way.”

  “I hope not,” said Paul decisively. “I like privacy. I have told Uncle Ernest a dozen times or more that the whole locality about here is rapidly going down, but he hardly believes it. Why, there is that wholesale butcher living practically next door! Within fifteen years this house will be the center of a slum.”

  “How very unpleasant.” May’s voice was still determinedly light. “I shouldn’t like to think that my old home was decaying. But things do change, don’t they?”

  She left him, went down the stairs. Gertrude could very plainly hear the rustling of her dress, the swift fall of her still agile feet on the carpet.

  There was the dimmest of light-glows in the long hallway. Paul evidently caught his foot on the frayed edge of the hall carpet, for he stopped directly in the doorway of the room where Gertrude was crouching, hidden. He muttered something; I should speak, thought Gertrude. Her mouth felt dry and thick and paralyzed. But this is absurd, her wild thoughts continued. But her body shrank farther into the darkness about the fireplace. She could see Paul’s dark, almost formless bulk in the pale rectangle of the doorway. She knew he was peering in, absently. She held her breath; her heart beat with a sickly sensation, and she felt herself gyrating mistily, with only that half-formed shadow a fixed spot in a place of flux. And all the time her thoughts intoned over and over: This is very, very stupid of me.

  Paul went on to their own apartments. She heard him call her name, then the door closed after him. She relaxed; her legs sagged, and her forehead felt wet. Her heart seemed to sink into a bottomless pit.

  She began to shiver again.

  CHAPTER LXXX

  Ernest was edified, and not a little secretly pleased that his frivolous and airy young son, Guy, apparently seemed to be beginning to feel an interest in his father’s vast enterprises. He was also, knowing his son, somewhat skeptical. But Ernest was not one to look too deeply into intrinsic motives: sometimes, he considered, the less probing one did the better. “Of course,” he said to the annoyed Paul, who had not much patience with his young brother-in-law, and was bitterly jealous of all Ernest’s sons as potential heirs to what he considered rightfully his, “of course, Paul, I realize it is probably just a fad on his part. Guy is always after something new and exciting. He’s under the impression the coal mines, now that the st
rikes are on, ought to be very romantic places. It won’t do him any harm to see things in the raw. Might sober him up a bit.”

  “I doubt it,” replied Paul dourly.

  So only Ernest, May, Gertrude and Elsa went to New York. May had no illusions that Ernest had softened toward his oldest son and was going to New York solely to hear him make his debut in the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. He had been contemptuously silent for years in the face of May’s reading of Godfrey’s letters and the enthusiastic comments of his masters. He had sent checks, paid bills, in that averted silence. It was as if he had given Godfrey up, and paid his bills as one paid up a hard debt. But May, in bitterness, saw that so far as Ernest was concerned, Godfrey, as a significant individual and a son, had ceased to exist. She did not have to hint overmuch, therefore, to discover Ernest’s real reason for going to New York. It was to see his friend, Jay Regan, Senior, the great financier, and also to discuss with him the possibility of selling to the newest American pirate, James Bellowes, his interest in the Pennsylvania oil wells in the vicinity of Titusville. May knew, from overhearing conversations between Ernest and Paul, that Bellowes was exerting pressure on Ernest either to sell him the wells or come in with him in the most infamous exploitation that had ever disgraced the history of American business. Ernest, as director of the railroad that did most of the oil carrying for the Bellowes combine, was in a peculiar position. He was in the anomalous and dangerous position of being a potential and deadly competitor of the biggest customer of the railroad, and the other directors were becoming restive and apprehensive. He had reached the point where he must decide to remain a competitor and enter into a war of titans for the control of oil, in which his chances were barely hopeful, but in which profits beyond any of his imaginations were the reward of victory, or sell, or combine his oil wells with Bellowes. The latter would enrich him, also; but it would be his first compromise, his first yielding. However, even his egotism was not sufficient to allow him the luxury of a battle for the battle’s sake and some adolescent idea of never-give-up-the-ship. He was perfectly willing to give up the ship if he were promised a share in the victor’s loot.

  Better to yield gracefully, with an enormous profit, and gain the friendship of this basilisk, this almost unhuman creature, that stood at the head of the oil industry. Ernest was not vainglorious nor really conceited: he saw nothing ignominious in becoming a vassal to such a formidable king, especially when an oath of fealty could be so pleasantly profitable. “Only the little man can afford glory,” he said to Paul. And so his journey to New York was for the sole purpose of yielding, after allowing himself to be persuaded, and bringing back with him, as reward, the friendship of the basilisk and an agreeable profit.

  He was too indifferent to May’s feelings, or at least pretended to be, to allow her to believe that the journey to New York was for the purpose of hearing Godfrey’s symphony performed. There was something brutal in his openness on the subject; he yawned ostentatiously when Godfrey was mentioned. It was probable that he took a sadist’s pleasure in May’s obvious pain and sadness; he was almost elated at the distress that stood starkly behind her serenity and poise. When he spoke of Godfrey it was with lightness and cruel indulgence. May thought: He has become my poor boy’s enemy. It would please him to see Godfrey ruined. A great part of her distress was due to the fact that in the face of all this, she could not hate Ernest. She was also extremely alarmed because he had been indifferent to Reginald’s fumbling request that he be excused from going to New York, and had not listened to his stammering explanation that he “wished to see someone, and it was very important.” A servant, explaining some petty future absence, would have gained more attention from Ernest than did Reginald. He had seemed to be attending, but his brutally indifferent manner, his apparent boredom and disinterest, had seriously upset May. Was another of his sons about to cease to exist for Ernest? she thought, terrified, mentally rushing in protection to the side of her second son. It was all because of Paul! her frantic thoughts ran on, and she glanced at Paul, reading his paper, with hatred. In a voice louder than usual, and edged with fear, she attempted to gain Ernest’s attention by arguing with Reginald about his decision not to go to New York. But Ernest’s attention could not be gained.

  Therefore, when Guy requested that he be permitted to go to the coal regions with Paul, May did not protest very much. It was such a relief to her to see Ernest warm into interest toward her third son, and smile upon him with real pleasure for the first time in years. Her complacence grew at the sight of Paul’s evident discomposure and annoyance. Joey, ill with a slight cold, was not to go to New York; he seemed quite resigned.

  It was a dark and snowy morning when Paul and Guy set out for the coal fields. Paul, more annoyed than ever, was heavily silent. Their accommodations on the train, though first class, were none too comfortable. The coaches stank of kerosene and wood smoke. The oil lamps had been lit, and flared into a yellow and uncertain gloom, swinging back and forth overhead with the motion of the train. The plush seats were gritty, the windows steamed and ran into little sooty puddles on the ledges, and each time the door was opened by the conductor a gale of bitter wind and snow roared through the coach.

  Paul, huddled in his fur-lined coat, had brought office books and papers with him. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and went to work. Guy, slender and clean and young, sat beside him. Paul had told himself that the boy would probably be an infernal nuisance, and this was no time to be dragging brats about with one into the wild violence and wretchedness of the coal regions. He could not understand Ernest; what the devil had come over him to dream of allowing a little numskull and idiot like Guy to accompany him, Paul, as if he were going on a holiday? He would not understand it! This was going to be grim business; he was Ernest’s deputy in one of the most serious disorders that had ever struck the coal centers. He was literally the messenger of life or death, and what his decisions were would have an immense effect on the attitude of capital toward labor for many years to come. Whatever he would do would have a detonating result. And all this was given a ludicrous quality by his being forced to take with him a brat barely out of short breeches. It was taking on the air of a hilarious outing, big brother taking little brother to the fair for a Christmas treat! It was intolerable. Intolerable and ridiculous. His gorge rising to an unendurable point, Paul glanced sidewise at his companion, the full enormity of his position occurring to him for the first time.

  He was a little disconcerted at the sight of Guy’s profile. It was a young and handsome profile, fine-drawn and sharp, almost dainty in its cleanness and smallness of feature. Guy had removed his hat; his fair curls and waves gleamed in the yellow lamplight. But his expression was what suddenly engrossed Paul’s attention: it was so tense, almost rigid, and yet composed, as though he were thinking thoughts no “brat” had the intelligence or the right to think. Especially not Guy, the spendthrift and the caperer, the laugher and the jokester, the player of practical jokes, the riotous jackanapes. The deep dimples made clefts in his cheeks, yet oddly did not detract from the rigidity of his expression. Paul felt quite a shock. He did not like the look on the boy’s face; the cool acidity of his jealousy began to stir without words, as though it instinctively felt the presence of a smiling enemy who had suddenly grown formidable.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, infusing into his voice a note of surly ridicule. “Got a belly-ache?”

  Guy smiled. But he looked straight ahead, and not at Paul. “No,” he said.

  Paul pulled his hat irritably. “I still can’t see why you took a notion to go with me?” he went on, shouting over the noise of the wheels. “What’s behind it all?”

  “You’ve asked me that before,” replied Guy.

  Paul colored at this cool impudence. He disliked Guy more than he disliked any of his other cousins, and it would have given him much pleasure to slap the youth. “That’s true. But you’ve not given a sensible answer. You said you’ve ‘read the pa
pers,’ and wanted to see what was going on. Couldn’t you have kept on reading the papers?” His heavy lip curled, and he tried to smile as one smiles at a precocious but secretly hated child.

  “No,” answered Guy, still staring straight ahead.

  Paul bit his lip. “This is a lot of damned nonsense,” he said, viciously infuriated at the futility of what he was saying. But Guy was silent. The dimples made him appear to be smiling faintly. But he was not smiling.

  “Perhaps you aren’t aware that we aren’t to stay at some luxurious hotel,” went on Paul. “Pittsville is only a wretched little mining town, with a drummers’ boarding house, a saloon, a few company stores and a dancehall and miners’ shacks. You won’t find things very pleasant, especially now. If you think you are going on a holiday, with lots of romance and excitement, you are going to be sadly mistaken.”

  “Did I say I expected things to be pleasant?” Guy turned to him, and now his face had the smooth blank quality of his father’s face when he felt particularly hostile and brutal. “I don’t mind where we stay. I’m not a girl.” He paused. “Why can’t you let me alone? You feel there’s some mystery in my wanting to go to Pittsville. Perhaps there is. Perhaps there isn’t. But I’m a human being, and I’ve a right to my thoughts and motives. You’re not paying my fare, you know. I think Pa took care of that.” He smiled slightly. “It’s no money out of your pocket, though I imagine you might feel it is.” His eyes were like a thrust into Paul’s face.

  Paul turned white with rage. His expression became quite ugly with it. For one teetering moment he was on the verge of striking the youth beside him. He saw that he had underestimated Guy, and his hatred became stronger as it was goaded with apprehension. Ernest needed only one son to show interest and wit and cogency, and his natural paternal vanity would do the rest. And what of him, Paul? He had been working for months on the supposition, the growing hope, that he would be the heir to what he was by nature qualified to inherit. He was giving all his time, his life, his ambitions, his sweat and his very flesh. Was all this to be jeopardized by a little dancing ninny? Especially one who guessed all he had been thinking and planning, and who, serene after all in the knowledge that he was Ernest Barbour’s son, was laughing at his brother-in-law? Real fright, real suffering, mingled themselves with Paul’s rage. It became imperative to him to discover the reason behind this “child’s” determination to visit the coal regions. He could not yet believe that intelligence and mature interest were behind it. So he controlled himself, clenched his teeth on his rage. He returned to his papers, waiting to find out what he knew he must know if he were to have any peace. He had a dogged mind, and the books he had brought with him were engrossing and familiar, so he was able to push his new apprehension away from him. But it lurked at a distance and his whole consciousness began to be pervaded with a singular malaise, as disturbing as it was new.