Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  They entered the drawing room, and now the energetic Rufus was crying out buoyantly, “Lydia is quite well! She awoke, and now she is sleeping again! Mrs. Brunt is very capable, and the baby is asleep, too. What a night this has been! And listen to that wind. Like a tiger at the windows.”

  His parents were sitting near the fire, and he went to them in his exuberant way and kissed them heartily. His mother smiled at him with deep devotion, but his father, curiously, and for the first time in Rufus’s memory, looked beyond himat Stephen.

  Stephen was hesitating on the threshold as he always did, as if he were an intruder in the house where he had spent the greater portion of his life. The room was of majestic proportions, and had been exquisitely furnished, not by Aaron deWitt, but by a famous artist who had died on the very day he had entered the completed house. The walls of the room were paneled in white, with occasional panels of deep blue silk on which hung a few of the artist’s smaller but finer paintings of mountain and river and forests. A dim heliotrope rug covered the floor, and upon this were scattered Aubusson carpets like oblongs of faded flowers. An enormous white fireplace, beautifully carved and fluted, dominated almost one entire wall, and the fire on its white hearth fluttered and flamed in gold. Silver, bronze, and gilt lamps lighted up the room, and a curved sofa covered with a delicate rose and blue tapestry stood on one side of the fireplace. A large blue satin chair was drawn up opposite. Gilt cabinets occupied two distant corners, and on their crystal shelves were arranged wonderful statuettes of ivory and Dresden, little gold snuffboxes, tiny dolls’ mirrors, and other objets d’art at which no one except Lydia and Alice and Stephen so much as glanced.

  Aaron deWitt sat, slight and stiff, and in his red velvet dressing gown, on the soft-hued sofa, and his wife, Sophia, sat opposite him in the blue satin chair. He had a short, pointed white beard, as stiff as his body, and a sunken, sallow face in which his small black eyes looked at the world with cold derision and ruthlessness. His bony nose jutted far out from his face like a sharp-edged stone, and. under his thick white hair his forehead was rutted like old granite. He was much slighter than his sons, and his little feet, encased in warm carpet slippers, barely touched the floor. He gave the impression of complete and indomitable hardness, and there was an inexorable quality about him which intimidated everyone except his wife.

  Sophia, his wife, was his own age, sixty-five. They had been married a long time before Sophia had borne her two sons. Unlike Aaron, she was tall. Where he was inflexible, she was arrogant, and this revealed itself in the haughty way she held her head, and the manner in which she preened. Her father had been the proprietor of an ill-paying general store in the village in the valley, and since her husband had become wealthy she had felt the necessity to assume a grandeur and pretentiousness not hers by birth. Her figure was still good, in spite of her age, and she wore, tonight, a rather old-fashioned if very rich black gown with immense hoops.

  It was from Sophia that Rufus had inherited his flaming red hair, and though Sophia’s hair, dressed very severely, was now almost entirely gray, threads of fire still ran through it. He had also inherited her eyes, her formerly ruddy complexion. She had once been a high-spirited woman, as he was now high-spirited, but as her earlier heartiness and joviality, her exuberance and gregariousness, her gaiety and boldness, had later taken on an aspect of “vulgarity” in her mind, she had repressed them.

  “Well, come in, come in!” she shouted at Stephen and Alice as they still wavered on the threshold, uneasily. Then she lowered her voice and said, “Alice, sit by Papa, and Stephen. …” She did not care where Stephen sat, so long as it was not near her; so Stephen wandered vaguely to a chair at some distance, sat down, and fumbled for his pipe. His chair was not near a lamp; he began to blend with the shadows, as he always did.

  Rufus stood behind the sofa on which sat Alice and his father. He was too restless and too vital for much sitting. He put one hand on his father’s shoulder, and his other hand was spread wide near Alice’s young back. He beamed at his mother and said, “Everything is splendid now. Dear Liddie is resting. Isn’t the baby beautiful? She looks like us, Ma.”

  Sophia smiled at him, and when she smiled the former spectacular color which she had possessed seemed to envelop her in spite of her gray hair and lost complexion. Her small hazel eyes glowed with pride. She had kept her big white teeth, and they shone between her pale lips. She said, “Well, but it’s a pity she isn’t a boy.”

  Aaron deWitt spoke for the first time, and he had a singularly neutral and uninterested voice: “I’m glad it’s a girl. No danger to Rufus, then.”

  Rufus laughed boisterously and patted his father on the shoulder. “Now, what do you mean by that, Pa?”

  Aaron shrugged, coughed, and drew the folds of his dressing gown closer over his sunken chest.

  “Your Pa doesn’t mean anything, dear,” said Sophia, frowning briefly at her husband. “He’s teasing you. But we’ll have a boy next time, eh?”

  Rufus began to smile and nod, then stopped. He thought of Lydia’s outburst against him, and his red brows drew together in a puzzled frown. “Liddie was a little hysterical,” he commented. He straightened up, began to walk up and down behind the sofa.

  “Was she?” asked Aaron, with the first interest he had shown. “Now I wonder why? What did she say?”

  “Lydia is never hysterical, under normal circumstances,” reproved Sophia. “Ladies after childbirth are often unstrung. One doesn’t give any weight to what they say.”

  “What did she say?” repeated Aaron. He smiled coldly, and his yellow teeth glimmered in the firelight. “And stop walking up and down behind me, Rufe.”

  Rufus obeyed at once. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t quite remember. She seemed overwrought. But then, she’s had so much pain today, and it was difficult. …”

  His mother regarded him shrewdly. She did not like Lydia, but she remembered that it was Lydia’s and Alice’s money which had extricated her husband from a particularly perilous situation. She could command almost everybody, but she could not command Lydia, with her cool smile, her hidden amusements, her lack of illusion. She would have liked to question Rufus also, but she knew, as he knew, that it was much more convenient, and safer, never to discuss or notice anything which might threaten one’s personal comfort. If Lydia had been elliptical, and inscrutable, in her tiresome way, then it was best to ignore it. So Sophia said, with a twitch of her hoops, “It can’t be important. Having a child makes a woman very nervous.” She turned her head and looked at Stephen, and said with offended irritation, “Stephen! Are you smoking that abominable pipe? You know I don’t like smoking in the house, and it is very bad for your father’s lungs. Please stop it immediately.”

  Starting apologetically, Stephen began to knock the ashes from his pipe. It was then that Aaron said, “Let him smoke. Smoke, Steve, if you want to. Who cares?”

  This was so extraordinary, and so without precedent, that both Rufus and Sophia stared blankly at Aaron, who was grinning wryly. They knew that Aaron had as low an opinion of Stephen as they had, and that it delighted him to discomfit his son, and to ridicule his diffidence, and to harass him.

  “But Pa, your lungs,” said Rufus.

  “The devil with my lungs,” replied Aaron. His wizened face sharpened, and he shrugged again. Stephen, as much surprised as his mother and brother, held his pipe in his hand as if he did not know what to do with it. Then, as he caught his father’s derisive eye, he put the pipe back in his mouth. “This is an unusual occasion, isn’t it?” added Aaron. Something seemed to be pleasing him, for he gave a low and bitter chuckle. “I think we should celebrate. Are the servants still up?” He tugged at a brocaded bellpull near him. “Whisky, Steve? Rufe? And what will you have, my dears?” he demanded of Sophia and Alice.

  “A little hot milk,” replied Sophia. Her withered cheeks were flushed; she tossed her head with suppressed anger and gave Stephen a glance of intense dislike.

  �
�A little hot milk,” said Aaron contemptuously. “For you, then, Sophie, if you will. But what of you, Alice?”

  Alice had been sitting silently beside him all this time, shrinking, and looking only at the fire. She jumped nervously at this direct address, and blinked, and tried to smile. “Why, a little hot milk—” she almost whispered.

  “Nonsense!” said Aaron. “You won’t have whisky, of course, but sherry or port. Aren’t you going to drink to your niece?” He watched her keenly. He thought her a pretty young thing, but without importance, and not very bright.

  Alice was so afraid of him that she stammered incoherently, “I’m thinking of Lydia. She was so strange. It—it isn’t like Lydia to be strange, or to cry.”

  “You’ll discover it quite natural to be ‘strange’ when your own time arrives,” interrupted Sophia, annoyed. This little mewling thing, this little white kitten! Only her money had made her tolerable to the strong Sophia. She dismissed Alice, and said righteously, “A cup of hot milk, Aaron, if you please.”

  “Whisky, of course, for me,” said Rufus. He was leaning on the back of the sofa directly behind his father. He radiated pleasure and affection at everybody, including Stephen.

  “Well,” said Aaron impatiently to his older son. “Can’t you speak up, Steve?”

  As Stephen never “spoke up,” this highly amused Rufus and Sophia, who laughed heartily. Alice looked slowly at them both, and something began to kindle in her sweet and gentle face, something like the shine of steel. She said clearly, “I think Stephen distinctly said ‘whisky,’ Papa deWitt!”

  Sophia and Rufus gaped at her with unaffected astonishment. Alice, who was so quiet, so shrinking, so like a small and timid mouse, had actually “spoken up,” herself, for the first time to anyone’s knowledge. There was a valiant look about her, and a breathlessness.

  “Why, so Steve did,” said Aaron, and chuckled again. Something had happened to make this child courageous, to reveal emotions no one had known she possessed.

  A sleepy butler answered the summons, and Aaron gave his orders. There was a prolonged silence in the room. A plane had shifted; there was a different aspect to everything, queer and out of focus. Everyone was aware of it, especially the observant Aaron.

  “Well!” exploded the confounded Sophia at last.

  “Well, what?” asked her husband, as if interested.

  Rufus and Sophia exchanged a glance. Rufus smiled easily, and Sophia stretched her neck high. “It seems we’re all a little—high-strung tonight,” she said. “It’s so very late.” She added, to Stephen, without turning to him, “The south bedroom is ready for you both, and I’m sure we’ll all be glad to be in bed very soon.”

  Alice spoke again quickly. “I hope there’ll be a fire for us. There wasn’t the last time, and I took a chill, and so did Stephen.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” began Stephen, smiling tenderly at his wife. She turned rapidly on the sofa and exclaimed, “Indeed it does, Stephen! You have weak lungs, too, you know, and you shall not, you shall not enter a room where there is no fire!”

  So, the whimpering kitten had claws, had she? thought Sophia. This thought did not give her more respect for Alice; rather, it increased her contempt. These weak and vapid creatures sometimes flared up incontinently, and in desperation, but it was easy to subdue them. Sophia stared at Alice haughtily, and said in most repressive voice, “It was an oversight. Besides, you don’t intend to sit up all night in your room, do you, Alice? Or do you like a warm and uncomfortable room?”

  But Alice was not subdued. “I like a warm room,” she said, and her voice, though light and childish, had become inflexible. “I want a fire.”

  Aaron laughed his thin and acidulous laugh. He was more and more delighted. “A fire it will be, then,” he said.

  The butler returned to the drawing room with the whisky, the hot milk, and the sherry. He was a short, stout man of forty, with hard and bulbous blue eyes, a milk-white bald head with a thin tuft of yellow hair curling over each extended ear. He placed the tray on the table before Aaron and smothered a sulky yawn. He looked up, and Rufus, still standing behind his father, winked at him. Immediately, he smirked.

  “Seth,” said Aaron abruptly, “is there a fire in the south bedroom?”

  “No, sir,” answered the man, his smirk disappearing. “It wasn’t ordered.”

  “No?” Aaron raised his thick white brows. “Well, it is now. Make one immediately, for Mr. and Mrs. Stephen.”

  “At this hour, sir?” asked the butler incredulously. “It’s almost one in the morning!”

  Aaron played with the tassels of his robe and contemplated his servant. “Did I ask you the time, Seth?” He fixed his cold and implacable eyes on the other, and Seth stepped back. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, and left the room hastily, his fat buttocks rocking under his long coat.

  “You ought not to have bothered, Pa,” Stephen began in his halting voice.

  “Why not? Isn’t this my house? Isn’t he my servant?” Aaron began to pour the whisky from the crystal bottle. “Aren’t you my guest, as well as my son?”

  No one answered him. The queer silence returned to the room, and Rufus lifted himself from the protective pose he had assumed over his father and this time, when his eyes met his mother’s, there was consternation in them. Aaron extended a glass in Stephen’s direction, and Stephen rose in long sections and went to take it. He stood there, like a stranger, between his father and mother, and could only look down at the whisky. He could not remember when his father had ever shown him any consideration; he could not remember when he had last said, “my son.” But Alice’s eyes gleamed at him with gallant love, and her chin tilted. Sophia sat upright in affront, and with an expression that resembled fear about her mouth. “Have you forgotten me, Aaron?” she demanded loudly. “I was under the impression that ladies were to be served first.” Her voice shook with her anger and bafflement.

  “The hot milk is as near to you, my dear Sophia, as it is to me,” Aaron remarked indifferently. And then he lifted the glass of sherry and put it into Alice’s hand. Again Rufus and his mother exchanged glances, and Sophia’s face turned grim.

  Rufus began to laugh easily, came from behind the sofa, and took his own glass of whisky. He said, “I can’t last recall when we were all up to such an hour. Strange to say, I am not in the least tired.”

  Alice rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone but Stephen and Lydia without being addressed first, but now she turned impetuously to Rufus and cried, “It was not you who had the baby! It was not you who suffered! Why should you be tired?” The sherry splashed over her agitated fingers. Her eyes were too brilliant, as though she were feverish. She went on: “I must know what has hurt Lydia. I must know!”

  Stephen looked down at her compassionately, tried to smile his usual painful smile, then said nothing. Sophia clattered her teaspoon on her saucer and said, “Good heavens! What is wrong with you, Alice? You’re quite a spitfire tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Shall we drink to the baby?” asked Aaron in a very mild voice. His evil smile made his eyes dance.

  Stephen abstractedly put the glass to his lips, and the three men drank. Rufus’s ruddy complexion became even ruddier. But Alice put down her sherry and sat again in rigid silence, looking beyond Aaron at the fire.

  “Our heiress,” said Aaron contemplatively, as he licked the last drops of whisky from the glass. He held up the glass and examined it with regret. Sophia had begun to smile and to nod her head with satisfaction. Rufus laughed aloud with pleasure, seated himself on the arm of the sofa, and flung his arm about his father’s bony shoulders. Now the swift glance between mother and son was triumphant. It was always understood that though Stephen was vice-president of the State Railroad Company, and Rufus only superintendent, Rufus, the younger son, would inherit the presidency after his father’s death. It was only right, Rufus and his mother had told each other. It was he, Rufus, who was the farsighted member of the company, the intelligent one,
the daring and the ambitious one. “Gray Stephen” was only the plodder, the conservative moderator, the dusty handler of papers, the silent guardian of files and books. Was it not Stephen who had said it would be almost impossible to secure that 999-year lease, and was it not Rufus, assisting his father, who had actually secured it? Had not Aaron, himself, declared that without Rufus this could not have been done?

  Rufus and his mother had forgotten, though the event was very recent, that for months before, Stephen had prosaically, quietly, and with that colorless obstinacy of his, presented all the facts and the solid dull figures and the duller but insistent arguments to the men of power who had the authority to grant such a lease. Each time Stephen would go to Philadelphia, with his old-fashioned carpetbag, Rufus and his mother would laugh happily at “our bookkeeper,” and amused themselves endlessly with speculations as to how Stephen would conduct himself in grand houses and great offices among sophisticated men. It never occurred to Sophia to question Aaron why he had sent Stephen to Philadelphia; she had assumed that there was not much importance in dry papers, and Stephen, “the paper man,” was good only to marshal the routine facts before the real force of the family, Rufus, descended on Philadelphia with imaginative intelligence and eloquent persuasion.

  No one ever knew what Aaron was thinking, but Rufus and his mother did not care, and Sophia did not even frown when Aaron, after his toast, poured himself another glass of whisky and tossed it down his shriveled throat. It was only Stephen who said in his toneless voice, “Pa, do you think, after your illness, that you ought to be drinking whisky? Your stomach, you know …” and the voice trailed off, as it always did, into uncertainty.

  “It isn’t every night we have an heiress born to us,” said Aaron. He gave Alice a long and speculative glance. Then he yawned, suddenly and abruptly, and announced, “I’m going to bed. Sophie, are my pills on my dresser?”