Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  François’ face changed, colored, became for an instant almost radiant. Then it relapsed into heavy sullenness. He snatched at his discarded pen, thrust it viciously into the wood of his polished rosewood desk, then tossed it at the wall. “Married! My God! On one hundred dollars a month? Hah! What girl, what sweet little creature, even if she were an angel, and able to appreciate an artist, would marry a man with one hundred dollars a month? It would be a crime to ask her, and even if she consented, what man of honor—”

  “True,” cut in Jules deftly. “François, I must talk to you as man to man. Yesterday afternoon,” he continued, lying smoothly and swiftly, “Paul Barbour came into my office when I was having a private conference with Honore and Leon, and began to shout at me like an enraged bull. It seems he suspected you and little Alice were plotting to get married. And he told me fully what he intended to do: he is going to send the child to New York and marry her off to her cousin, Thomas Van Eyck. Tomorrow, I believe.”

  While he had been speaking, François’ face had turned a livid white, and blue lines had sprung out about his lips. All his pretentiousness disappeared; he sat there like a man stricken and anguished, as indeed he was.

  “New York! Tomorrow! Alice!” His hands wrung together. “But he can’t do that to my Alice! We love each other. She—she told me she didn’t care what I had, she would marry me just the same. The—the years between us didn’t matter, she said. All she wished to do was to serve me and my art—the darling! I can’t believe this, Jules.” He stood up, shaken with his distress. He looked down at his brother, pleadingly, desperately.

  Jules shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid it is true. You know, François, I guessed some time ago that you cared for Alice. But it was Alice who inadvertently, poor child, betrayed the whole thing to me. This business will break her heart. If you care anything for her, you will contrive to take her away and marry her before she is sent to New York.”

  François flung out his arms in his desperation. “But how? I have only twenty dollars to my name at this minute! It is two weeks to the first, when Mother gives me my check for one hundred dollars. And how can I support my darling? Her father will cut her off, will give her nothing, if she marries me.”

  “You forget,” said Jules gently, “Alice is her grandfather’s heiress. Listen to me closely: Uncle Ernest won’t cut her off. He’ll admire her, and you, for going and getting what you both want. Paul isn’t Crown Prince any longer. I’m not speaking idly: I know. The old devil isn’t going to live forever, and when you marry Alice, and he dies, you’ll be the richest man in Windsor. Sit down, François, and try to listen carefully.”

  François sat down, trembling, but his face, turned to Jules, was full of excitement and hope and increasing joy. He leaned forward, eagerly, and put his quivering hand on his brother’s knee. Jules laid his smooth cool brown hand on François’ tremulous fingers, and pressed them affectionately.

  “But you, as a man of honor, naturally, remember that before Uncle Ernest’s death you will have a wife to support, and that, of course, you can’t bring her here. Paul won’t give her a cent, I agree with you. He’ll probably have a stroke into the bargain, which wouldn’t be bad at all. Now then: for years we’ve all tried to interest you in the company, but possibly you were correct when you said repeatedly that you were not fit for that work, that an artist would stifle in the atmosphere of business. A ‘nefarious business’ you called it. I believe?” he added with a smile François blushed. “Well, never mind. It doesn’t matter. You know your own feelings best. I am most certainly against any man entering a business for which he is constitutionally unfitted, and which will at once do violence to his conscience and his nature.” (François looked a trifle foolish, and stammered incoherently: “Oh, dammit, I don’t care whether it’s nefarious or not! Money is money!”)

  “Quite true, François!” Jules’ smile was genial and indulgent. “Even if you are an artist, you can see things straight. That is the difference between a fool and a wise man. Now then after Paul went away yesterday, Honore and Loon and I talked it all over. We were very indignant. We looked around for a solution, for we are all fond of little Alice, and naturally of you. So eventually we arrived at a brilliant idea: Honore suggested that you be appointed a director of the Kinsolving Arms Company, at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year!”

  Dazzled and excited thought he was, François face blanched with despair. “But I don’t know anything about the Kinsolving Arms, Jules! What the hell could I do there? How could I earn fifteen thousand dollars a year? By sitting year after year in a stuffy drab office, where I’d smother, surrounded by machinery and tramping men crushed under noise and smells—! My God, Jules! How could you be so cruel, offering me hope, then demanding my life in return for it?”

  Jules listened to this hysterical outburst with an immovable expression, but his eyes, narrowed and hidden, glinted between their lids. A muscle twitched in his cheek, and his exquisitely kept hands clenched and moved as though they were strangling something loathesome and repulsive. But his voice was still gentle and indulgent, when François had finished.

  “Of course, we understand all that, François. We’re not offering you stones, or demanding anything. We are sincerely desirous of finding a solution for you and Alice. We want to help you. Now this directorship: all that will be required of you is to appear on the board of directors twice a year. For perhaps an hour or two. A mere honorary title. Do you understand? Nothing else will be required of you. Believe me, we are trying to help you.”

  François was almost beside himself with joy. He stood up, bent over Jules suddenly, and flung his arms about his brother’s neck. “My God! My God!” he sobbed, standing upright after a convulsive moment. “What can I say? What can I do? What can I do! I can’t believe it. It—it’s like an answer to prayer, this deliverance. Like an awakening after hell. I’ve been sitting here, dying by inches, I tell you, Jules, planning suicide, weeping, tearing my hair, and you come like an archangel, like a deliverer—What can I do or say?”

  “Well, sit down, and I’ll tell you.” Nothing could have been kinder than Jules’ expression, nothing more affectionate. “We must be practical. Tomorrow, when Paul is at his office, you must go direct to Alice’s home, and let nothing prevent you from seeing her. Not a dozen flunkeys, or that fat elephant, Elsa. Then, you must take the child away, just as she stands. Immediately. Before Elsa can telephone Paul. You will have a carriage waiting, and you will both immediately drive to some justice, or a minister, and marry. Secure the license before you go for the girl. Then, return here, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Jules, help me! Come with me tomorrow! You’ll be able to get by Elsa, and reach Alice! Or just come with me, and sit in the carriage.”

  “I can’t do that, François.” Jules seemed pained. “It would never do for Paul to suspect that any of us, except you, had anything to do with this. Remember, we have business relationships to keep up, and so on. No, you must get up your courage and do it yourself. It won’t be very hard.” He stood up, drew out his wallet. “Here. Two fifty dollar bills. That ought to smooth your way nicely, tomorrow. And, just another thing: we’ll all be interested. Telephone me when the deed is done, won’t you?” He put his hand on François’ bony and trembling shoulder. “Now, brace up. And, by the way, don’t mention a word of this to our mother. You know Mama?”

  “Don’t I, though!” ejaculated François, laughing and sobbing together. He wrung Jules’ hand. “God! You’re an angel, Jules!”

  CHAPTER CIX

  Ernest Barbour, approaching seventy-two, did not like the last decade of the nineteenth century. It seemed to him that the decades of his youth had been gracious and graceful, more coordinated and stable, slower yet stronger and more significant. Now, everything was heat and flux and raucous voices and noise and ugliness.

  It was a simple age, but also hideous, trying to relieve its own lack of beauty with flounces and ruffles. Even its
corruption was naïve, its ugliness disarming. Life was a matter of whitewashed fences and rose gardens and box hedges and sleek horses, and big houses adorned by machine-made wooden fretwork and turrets, large feathered hats, plump beds, roast beef, watering places, twinkling victorias.

  The age of advertising had begun: Hood’s Sarsaparilla, Paine’s Celery Compound, Lydia E. Pinkham’s female wonder tonic, and Pearline, were beginning to make the nation conscious of its physical self. White’s Yucatan Gum was setting the jaws of the younger generation to a bovine rhythm. Sailor hats, stuck on masses of pompadour with great sharp pins, adorned the heads of gay young women in heavy long-braided skirts and starched shirtwaists. (Ernest thought of the ribboned bell-like and dainty gowns of the women of his youth, from which slender waists, white bosoms and gleaming shoulders rose as from the calyx of a flower.) But today mutton-legged sleeves were outraging the masculine sense of beauty, and plumes obscured irate male views at the theatres. “Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay,” was tickling the feet of the young people, and everything was joyous; America had just emerged from the depression and panic of 1893 and was in an elated condition. Everyone was learnedly discussing the merits of Socialism and listening intently to a gentleman called Eugene Debs; from him, they turned with equal gravity to another and less intelligent prophet, one William Jennings Bryan, who was more picturesquely arrayed by nature and design than Debs and therefore more worthy of serious attention.

  Never before had there appeared such heavy mustaches on the faces of elegant gentlemen, and never had beer been so carefully brewed and so copious. Saloons were rich in the luxury of mahogany bars and gleaming mirrors and mighty brass spittoons; the theatre resounded with sentimental dramas dripping with high motives and heroism. The new safety bicycles were everywhere and people were talking excitedly about the rumors of “flying machines,” and the new gay slang expressions “You’re off your trolley,” “It’s a good thing, push it along,” “It’s naughty but it’s nice,” were enlivening the language. Eleonora Duse stirred women with her stately gestures and passionate histrionics, and the ideal of female beauty was still Lillian Russell, the ideal of success, Diamond Jim Brady. Frontiers were disappearing farther and farther west. Gentlemen appeared at lawn parties in flannels and gaily striped blazers and caps with long visors, accompanying ladies with wasp waists, deep lace berthas, hats like aviaries or floral exhibits, and skirts that fell in cascades from prominent posteriors.

  It was a raw, exuberant and vital age, full of stupidities and fatnesses and leannesses, but also excitements. America was feeling her power; through the smother of European foam she was lifting her strong young head, shouting coarsely but effectively. Suddenly conscious of herself, she blared her red-cheeked defiance across the seas. She drank her beer gustily, believed firmly, and at times, tearfully, in God and Country and Motherhood and the President and the Flag, called herself the refuge of the oppressed and invited the world to her table of thanksgiving. The world came, to laugh and stare and ridicule and envy.

  Civil War veterans still marched in well-filled ranks. Speakers at reunions spoke of eternal peace. A certain German ruler spoke solemnly of German Kultur and wider understanding between nations, and science. France draped her statues of Alsace and Lorraine with black, and listened uneasily to the whispers of a man called Sazaroff, and other agents. English statesmen listened to the hosannas that were universally sung to peace, civilization, brotherhood, justice and faith, and cheered their ageing Queen, and in the meantime bought secret blocks of stock issued by one Robsons-Strong Company.

  The America of Ernest Barbour’s youth had been much like a more lavish and easier England, England expanded, become prosperous and rich. Castes had flourished, speech had been similar, mannerisms had been faithfully imported, morals had been borrowed. But this new America was something he did not know or care about, except that it bored him and exhausted him with feverish inanity and constant puerile laughter. He and his colleagues, for reasons of their own, had fomented contempt, distrust and ridicule for England, and having succeeded, he found what he had helped create distasteful.

  He knew well enough that he was old, and dying. To be irritated as well, seemed to him insupportable. He realized, also, that there was no greater hell to be conceived than that of having a mind still unimpaired, an energy still avid, banked up in a body that trembled at exertion and grew exhausted, and memories that seemed to become more lurid and more intense as the present grew less significant. His mind, finding no satisfaction and value in the reality of the days, turned its back on time and began to thumb old pages. His sleep was a constant procession of vivid pictures which seemed utterly real and only then occurring; he never thought, when experiencing them: This is only a dream of what has gone and is dead.

  Often he would dream of the dining room at the Sessions house, where he sat at the table and carved the joint or the roast. Dimly, he knew that May was there, and Godfrey and Reginald; they were faint if present shadows. But colorful, alive, shining with vitality, he saw the faces of Guy and Gertrude and Joey, young faces. He saw Gertrude with her sweet wild gestures, her cloud of dark hair, her swift, uncertain smile. Guy spoke, showing his glittering white teeth, the lamplight on his yellow hair. There was Joey, frowning heavily at his plate, but lifting his head alertly when his father spoke, watching his father’s moving mouth. No one had seemed to care particularly about Joey, that heavy youth with the sullen voice and disagreeable features and rude mannerisms; but Ernest had cared, and had understood.

  His three dead children, young again, alive again, sat at his table, and looked at him, smiling. Often he would wake up with a terrible start, thinking he had heard Gertrude’s voice—Gertrude, who had been his darling. Sometimes he thought he could hear Guy’s running light step, or Joey’s rumbling tones. Then he would dream of Amy, sitting opposite him in candlelight, home again at the very table she had sat at when a child and a young girl, before her marriage to Martin. He could see the movement of her slim white hands, and the glitter of his own diamonds upon them, and her mouth, smiling and a little wry with experience. In his sleep, he would reach out to her, and hold May in his arms. This never failed to shock him into consciousness; for a few thundering singing moments in the dark, holding May, he would believe he held Amy. May, too, would wake up, and would know at once what had happened. She would press his face against her shoulder, or breast, and murmur to him, and soon he would fall asleep again. But May would not fall asleep, as she held him.

  He was fonder than ever of May, and unspeakably grateful to her. Often he would say to her: “May, I don’t know what I’d do without you, by God, I don’t!” Then she would answer, smiling comfortably: “I don’t, either.”

  Neither of them ever mentioned Gertrude or Guy or Joey, but only once or twice, in anguish, May had looked at Ernest and had cried silently: You have killed my children!

  Finally, even Ernest knew that he was an old man and had very little longer to live. He had allowed May to take him on a long cruise, which lasted over four months. This so improved him that when he heard rumors of contention between America and Spain he abruptly transferred to a ship going to Europe and spent two months there, in spite of May’s angry protests. Then he returned home.

  He was very exhausted when he reached New York. May, hoping to get him to Windsor quietly, did not announce their arrival one stormy March morning. They drove to the Sessions house, and Ernest went to bed. The servants were busy downstairs; up here everything was warm red firelight against a background of a furious white blizzard. Ernest, who often, now, could not lie down and breathe with comfort, sat bolstered up in bed by a series of fat pillows. May sat beside him, holding his hand, smiling, talking with her old humor and laughter.

  She looked at him, breathing on his pillows with difficulty. He had shrunken greatly the last year; even the broadness of his shoulders had thinned, become brittle. His throat was withered and corded, his face lined, gray and shrunken, the pale implacable eyes seeming
much larger, almost protruding, in their sockets. His white hair was neatly combed, but still rose crestlike over his broad pale forehead, which was singularly free from wrinkles, except between the eyes, where the flesh was a deep irascible furrow. His ears were pallid lobes, his jawbone jutting and rigid. The hand May held was clammy and cool, and was a trifle tremulous.

  He liked to hear May talk to him. Not even Amy, he thought, had had such a voice, rich and deep and humorous and quick. He hardly paid attention to what she was saying; he merely listened to the sound of her voice. He thought: May is an old woman. He studied her thick hair, which was like white silk, her lined, soft and withered cheeks, still delicately colored, her mouth, gleaming with the perfect porcelain of manufactured teeth, her plump collapsed bosom and heavy upper arms, the broad thighs that shimmered under black silk. But her eyes, sparkling and quick with intelligence, were the same, for all the discolored pockets under them and the fine wrinkles that webbed them. At seventy, May was a comely old woman, heavy with life and understanding.

  He said: “May, I’m going to die soon.”

  Her smile slackened, but she answered vigorously: “Nonsense. You’ll see ninety, at least.”

  His hand moved restlessly in hers. “Don’t lie, May, either to yourself, or to me. I’m going to peg out. It’s funny, though, to think that I’ve married you twice, and each time because I needed you.” He smiled at her, not without irony. She waited, and her expression saddened. “The first time, I needed your money, and what you had. The second time, I needed you. Sometimes I think it was you I needed both times.”

  May swallowed, as though a ball had risen into her throat. She held his hand tightly, and her lashes became moist. “Ernest, dear, we’ve been married nearly fifty years, yet you’ve never said anything to me so wonderful as that before.” She laughed shakily: “Yes, I said ‘nearly fifty years,’ for I don’t consider that I wasn’t still married to you—even when I wasn’t!”