A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Mad, mad,” he muttered to himself, but went with her. She dragged on his arm, trying to hurry him. He glanced fearfully into shadows, expecting a crouching form to leap out and strangle him. He thought of his unprotected home and his wife and children. The street echoed with the girl’s footsteps; his own feet wore only slippers, and he felt the cold air on his ankles and cursed her. Now the hotel seemed a place of refuge to him, and he hurried also.

  The clerk had been awakened by Caroline’s opening of the doors and the sound of her running. The owner, Herr Schloesser, had been summoned, and he was gravely regarding the unbolted doors when Caroline and the doctor burst through them. He stared and started. “Fräulein Ames!” he exclaimed. “What is wrong? Fräulein!” He recognized the doctor, who was an old friend. “Herr Doktor,” he said. “What is this?”

  The doctor flung off Caroline’s hand, and she immediately seized him again. “You know this — this — creature, Adolf?” he said.

  “But certainly! She is Fräulein Ames, one of our cherished and frequent guests,” said Herr Schloesser helplessly. “Fräulein, what is it?”

  The doctor relaxed. He turned benevolently to Caroline. “My dear child,” he said, “let us be calm.” He patted the stiff fingers on his sleeve and turned with an air of worried importance to his friend.

  “The lady says that her father is dying,” he said. “Will you lead me, Adolf, and obtain some assistance for this poor, frantic lady?”

  “Herr Ames? He is ill?” The hotelkeeper was alarmed. “Why did she not summon help here?”

  “That I do not know. She apparently lost her wits,” said the doctor with more and more benevolence toward Caroline. “Dear lady,” he said, “calm yourself. I will go to your father at once.”

  “The elevator,” said Herr Schloesser. “Good God, this is frightful. I will take you up myself.”

  Caroline was sobbing weakly now. She had released the doctor; she wrung her hands over and over as the ponderous elevator drew them up past sleeping floors. Once or twice she coughed chokingly; the doctor’s arm was now on her shoulders with solicitude. (But whoever would have thought!)

  “I have summoned my wife,” said the owner as he opened the lacy iron door of the elevator. He glanced with concern at the girl. “Poor Fräulein,” he murmured. He forgot the bad treatment in the matter of tips for his employees. This young lady was on the verge of collapse. His sentimental Teutonic heart made tears come to his eyes. But how strange this was! Why had she not called for help here in the hotel?

  Caroline ran to the open door of her suite, and the two men hurried after her, the gaunt bearded doctor and the tall fat Herr Schloesser. She ran into her father’s room. It sounded with his groans, which were fainter now. Herr Schloesser lit more lights. Caroline fell on her knees beside her father’s bed, then merely rested there, her eyes on John’s face, her white lips twisting in incoherent prayer. She did not feel the presence of Frau Schloesser, who knelt beside her, rosary in her fat fingers. She did not hear the woman’s mumbled prayers. The doctor examined his unconscious patient carefully. He began to frown as he listened to his heart. He was very important and in command of the situation now and very tender toward both father and daughter.

  He said, “We shall need nurses. This is very bad. The gentleman has had a serious heart attack. He must not be moved for an instant.” He reached into his bag for a hypodermic needle and fussily asked for water. Herr Schloesser brought it in a clean glass, and the doctor dropped three little gray pellets in it. When they were dissolved he injected the liquid into the thin limp arm of his patient. “That will relieve his pain,” he said, and studied the livid face, the blue lips, the sweat, the heaving chest.

  Herr Schloesser murmured, “He is — he is — ?”

  “Possibly,” said the doctor in rich tones of commiseration. “But one cannot tell. I have seen worse recover. It is a matter of extreme quiet. Please wake a servant and send to the hospital for nurses, in my name.”

  He sat down beside the bed. There was nothing to do but wait. He looked at Caroline and shook his head sympathetically and motioned to Frau Schloesser with his hand. Obediently she pulled Caroline to her feet, saying, “Dear little one, it is in the hands of God. Sit down here in this chair at the foot of the bed. Adolf, send for some brandy.”

  The hall outside was now quietly humming with servants, who brought in hot pans to be put at the sick man’s feet and against his icy hands, and heavier blankets. Caroline was now in a state of mute stupefaction. She crouched on the chair, and her eyes fixed themselves on her father’s face. She continued the dolorous wringing of her hands. She had no thoughts. She was only stunned. When the glass of brandy was put to her lips she was not aware of it; she only swallowed, then coughed briefly. Cold was all about her, cold in the room, cold immobilizing her body, cold in her heart, and the bitterest cold in her soul.

  Don’t die, Papa, she whispered in herself. Don’t leave me, Papa. I’ll do anything, if you won’t leave me. I’ll marry anyone you want. Don’t leave me. I am all alone. There is no one else in the world, only you, Papa.

  The lights in the room were, to her, only a yellow mist in which floated her father’s unconscious face. It looked like a face of gray granite on the white pillow. But he was breathing easier. The sweat had dried. He appeared to be sleeping. The doctor examined him again and nodded with a slight satisfaction. “I believe the heart is rallying,” he said. How large a fee should he charge these rich Americans? They had money to throw away in handfuls, these millionaires. He glanced furtively at Caroline. But why should a rich young lady dress in such ragged clothing? He shook his head. Everyone knew that Americans were quite mad and had peculiar ways.

  He cleared his throat as he felt his patient’s pulse. Caroline started, as if something had crashed against her ears. She looked at the doctor, who was bending over her father, this doctor with Fern’s eyes, this man who had asked that crushing question, who had believed she was very poor and so would not come to a dying man without assurance of his fee. He would have let Papa die if they could not have paid, if Herr Schloesser had not come to her rescue. She had had to drag him through the street; she had had to plead with him as a dog would plead. Because he had thought she had no money. No money, no money, no money, clanged the iron tongue in her mind. If we had no money Papa would have been left to die. No money, no money. “Oh, God,” she muttered aloud.

  Frau Schloesser was now holding a cup of hot fresh chocolate to her lips. But the sight of it nauseated her, and she gulped and shook her head. She put her hand to her mouth to control the retching. Then she felt the doctor’s solicitous fingers on her own wrist. His eyes were still Fern’s eyes, but they were also beaming as Fern’s eyes had beamed when Caroline had shown him her aunt’s ring. She snatched her wrist from him.

  The bells of Geneva proclaimed the hour of four. A ghostly glimmer quickened in the east, and the black mountains stood against it. The lake murmured restlessly. Two tall nuns in the white of nursing Sisters came into the room, accompanied by a priest. All rose but Caroline, who looked only at her father.

  She felt a gentle touch on her shoulder. A Sister was bending over her. She asked, “Mademoiselle, has your father been baptized? He is a Christian?”

  “What? What?” she muttered. The Sister was patient. She said slowly, “Your father — he has been baptized, he is a Christian?” She spoke in French, and then as Caroline looked at her uncomprehendingly she repeated the question again, in German. Caroline stared, her broad face a deathly color. “Christian,” she repeated. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  She put her frozen hands to her face. The words meant nothing to her at all. They were foolish. Her father was very ill, and this woman asked questions. “No,” she said again, for she had been educated to be polite even in the face of irrelevance. “I remember. He told me he hadn’t been baptized, and my aunt said he wouldn’t let me be baptized.” Then she became conscious of the white linen of the Sister and under
stood she was a nurse.

  “Will my father live?” she asked piteously, and caught the snowy robe.

  The Sister said gently, “It is in the hands of God. But the Father is here to baptize your father, to administer Extreme Unction, in behalf of his immortal soul, should he die. Are you willing, mademoiselle, that this take place?”

  “Die!” cried Caroline wildly, and clutched the robe tighter.

  “There are things worse than death,” said the Sister with compassion.

  “No,” said Caroline, and then was silent. After a moment she murmured, “It is much worse to be poor.” She paused, then said lifelessly, “Baptize him if you wish.”

  The priest sighed. Frau Schloesser had removed articles from the bedside table and had spread it with a clean white cloth and had brought water. One of the Sisters lit a candle in a ruby glass. Caroline watched, hardly seeing. The priest was putting on a strange strip of cloth, embroidered, over his thin old shoulders. He had opened a book. All fell on their knees, and the priest intoned in Latin. There was a little dish with oil in it and two or three little balls of white cotton. What is it? whispered Caroline in herself. A Sister was raising John’s head, a thick white napkin covering her hand and part of her arm. The priest lifted the water, murmuring, and let the water flow over John’s unconscious forehead. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” said the priest. He anointed the unconscious man with oil. The others, kneeling, lifted their voices in prayer, including the doctor. Caroline watched and listened dumbly. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, and all sound and sight receded from her.

  When she opened her eyes — and it seemed to her that a long time had passed — the priest had gone and the two Sisters were sitting beside her father. The doctor was leaving. Caroline could not move. A window had been opened; the sharp mountain air invaded the room. Somewhere swallows chattered, and a frail gray light came through the windows.

  Then John Ames said, “Caroline?”

  Caroline started to her feet, but she was so cold, so shattered, that she stumbled and fell against the bed. There was no one in the room now but her father and herself and the Sisters. She dropped on her knees beside John Ames. His eyes were open and sunken far back in his head, and there was an awful searching in them. “Papa,” said Caroline. “Oh, Papa.” A Sister compassionately put her hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  “Caroline,” he repeated, and his voice was dry and whistling. “Listen to me.” The searching brightened in his eyes.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Go home,” said the dying man. “Forget — Caroline. Go home. Don’t remember — I was wrong.” He paused and struggled for breath. He shut his eyes.

  “Papa,” pleaded Caroline. “Papa, I’ll marry Mr. Brookingham for you.”

  Again his eyes opened and became intense. “No,” he said. “No, no. Go home. Forget. I was wrong. Remember, I was wrong.”

  “Yes, Papa,” said Caroline, not understanding.

  Once more he seemed to sleep. Caroline took his hand; it was as cold as stone. She pressed it to her cheek. Then he said in a loving voice, “My darling, my little daughter, my Melinda. Melinda. My daughter.” He smiled. “My pretty child.”

  Caroline stiffened. Her mouth opened soundlessly.

  Then John Ames spoke for the last time in his life, and all his passion and longing were in his final cry. “Cynthia! Cynthia!”

  And then he died.

  Part 2

  Love is to the moral nature

  what the sun is to the earth.

  Balzac

  Chapter 1

  The small hotel on Beacon Street in Brookline was not old, but it had been designed deliberately to look old from the very moment it had been completed. Otherwise it would not have appeared respectable and so would have been avoided by those for whom it was intended: the elderly dowagers, the decrepit widowers, the spinsters and the aged bachelors of good family who were possessed of something which was now much more important in Boston — money. This is not to say that wealthy nobodies of no ‘connections’ would have been tolerated in the Beverley, but neither would ancients of excellent name but uncertain income have been welcome.

  So the Beverley gave solid and discreet service to those who were childless or without immediate relatives or who had found that an impertinent government had cut off, through immigration laws, a constant flow of cheap servants willing to live in a cold attic room for a few dollars a month and work at least fifteen hours a day in the kitchens and parlors and dining rooms of huge mansions and be always at call no matter the hour.

  Cynthia Winslow thought the Beverley equally as bad as the other small resident hotels now springing up in secluded Brookline and even in Boston itself. Why they had to be so ugly, if comfortable, she thought, was beyond her. Almost invariably they were constructed, as was the Beverley, of soft-looking muddy-brown stone, with tall, thin arched windows, gloomy little lobbies full of rubber plants and desiccated palm trees in tubs, dark corridors, and dining rooms calculated to chill the blood even in the summer. They all smelled of wood and wool and old bodies and peppermint and polish and varnish and lemony cologne and Pears soap and, in the vicinity of the gloomy dining rooms, of lamb stew and tea. Noting the dark crimson velvet draperies and lace curtains and the dull brown-patterned rugs in the lobby, she had no doubt that this depressing decor existed in the bedrooms and private little sitting rooms also.

  Normally she would be at Newport now, looking at the blue sea of July. But Caroline Ames had written her a stiff little note that she wished to see her aunt at four, precisely, in her sitting room, for tea ‘and certain matters which need discussing. Cynthia, thin and tall and very white and strained in her black silk mourning, sighed as she was assisted from her handsome victoria by the doorman, a comparatively young man of thirty-five whose brown livery and general demeanor tried to hint that he was at least fifty-five. He glanced respectfully and with approval at the bright hair under the small frilled black bonnet and noted the white chin above the black satin ribbons. “Mrs. Winslow,” he murmured, and led her preciously to the glass-and-wood double doors, making her feel at once like some tottering dowager of eighty. Good God, thought Cynthia as she always did when visiting the Beverley and similar hotels, why do people consider that only age is respectable, and the smells of age? You would never think, her thoughts would run, that America is a young country when you encounter Boston and the Beverley hotels. Cynthia was not only weary and sad, but heavily depressed. She had almost decided to move to New York, which was electric and passionate and gay and utterly disreputable and lively and young. My heart is only partly dead, she would tell herself; if I remain here, I will utterly die. I will eventually retire to a Beverley.

  But Melinda belonged in Boston — grave, sweet, and gentle Melinda.

  As she was conveyed up two floors in the elevator, which groaned heavily, as was proper, and whose ropes squeaked distressingly, Cynthia became more downhearted and her grief sharper. She had experienced grief many times in her life; one should become accustomed to it eventually, she thought. But sorrow was always fresh, always new, and always wore a new and unfamiliar face. If only John had listened to her three years ago and had consulted a physician; if only he had not driven himself so hard; if only he had refreshed himself with constant little joys and pleasures in a life like a desert; if only he had not been obsessed beyond the mere need of money; if only he had learned to laugh and to be flexible in a measure. If only . . . It was always the lament of the grieved. Even Melinda and I could not keep our darling alive, thought Cynthia, forgetting to be irritated because the liveried old man, old enough to be her father, carefully assisted her from the elevator.

  She even smiled drearily at him when he insisted on accompanying her down the narrow dark hall with its smells of old bombazine, asthma remedies, arnica lotions, and gas jets to the gleaming walnut door of Caroline’s suite. He knocked on the door importantly; Cynthia’s thin black silk r
ustled and exhaled a fresh odor of lilies of the valley. Beth opened the door, and a hot gush of sunlight poured into the hall, and the old man bowed and retreated. “Beth,” said Cynthia, unaware of the gratitude in her voice. She did not want to see her niece alone. “Mrs. Winslow,” said Beth in a muted voice. “Please come in.” She sighed, and Cynthia, passing her, touched her arm comfortingly, though why Beth needed comforting she did not know.

  The suite, as Cynthia feared, carried on the brown and dark crimson and navy blue of the lobby below. But it had a still and sterile smell and was hot. In the very center of the sitting room sat Caroline in very heavy black clothing with a silver and pearl pin at her throat. Cynthia saw her silent profile, forbidding and impassive, and her straight tall back and her coronet of coiled braids and her large folded hands. The older woman’s heart was filled with pity; she had not seen her niece since the funeral of John Ames some weeks ago, nor had she heard from her.

  “Caroline,” said Cynthia impulsively. She was not a woman of easy tears, but now her beautiful gray eyes filled with them. She went to her niece and put her gloved hand on the young woman’s shoulder. But Caroline did not move. She merely said in her strong voice, “Please sit down, Aunt Cynthia,” and indicated a stiff chair opposite her. “And, Beth, please leave us alone.” Beth sighed again, retreated to a bedroom, and shut the door. Cynthia sat down opposite her niece and looked at her earnestly. Then she was shocked. This girl was still stunned with grief; her features appeared wooden, her hazel eyes without life.