“You could marry any distinguished man in the world,” he went on, clearing his tight throat. “You could marry a prince if you wished. Yet you now tell me — ” He paused. He could not speak Tom’s name or talk of his background; his white eyelids dropped over his eyes, and he squeezed them together so that they were parched wrinkles in his face. He shook his head over and over.
“Have you thought, Caroline, what your father would think of this madness?”
Caroline’s large mouth wavered. She said, “Yes, Timothy. I’ve thought. The night Papa died — there was a meeting in our suite in Geneva and all the gentlemen were what you would call distinguished, and their wives were of excellent family, or at least they had fortunes. They wanted to embroil Papa in something infamous — I must tell you of it sometime — and Papa rejected them and their plans. He despised them.” She stopped and then pressed the damp palms of her hands together in an urgent gesture, almost passionate. “One of the men was a Mr. Montague Brookingham. You may have heard of him. His father died recently and he is now Lord Halnes. He wanted to marry me, Timothy; he had spoken to Papa about it. He was abhorrent to me. And just before Papa died he indicated that he didn’t want me to marry that man; he wanted me to go home and forget all of them, all those you speak of as distinguished. So Papa would have understood about Tom.” She looked at him pleadingly.
“Your father knew about him; he knew this feller?”
“Timothy, please. Don’t call Tom — that. No, Papa never knew anything about him. I was going to tell him that very night. And then he died.” Tears came into her eyes, and she swallowed.
He did not speak; the arched fingers curled on the tablecloth as he struggled for control. Caroline continued: “But I had already made up my mind earlier in the evening that even if Papa objected I’d go home, back to Tom. Tom is clean and good. I love him, Timothy.”
The simplicity of her final words would have moved a less relentless and rapacious man than Timothy Winslow. But they only infuriated him.
“Your father would have disinherited you, Caroline. I knew him very well; I have studied his whole career almost all my life, and especially since I have been in that law office.”
Caroline shook her head. “No, Timothy, you are wrong. I know it now.”
He wanted to say to her, “You can’t do this disgusting thing. Do you know to whom your money rightfully belongs? To the Esmonds, who have had to endure your contemptible nobody of a father for too long! It was the money of an Esmond lady which he confiscated, a full two hundred thousand dollars.”
He was hardly able to control himself, and it was a curious emotion for Timothy Winslow, who had never before permitted any human being to outrage him like this. But even in his sickening anger he knew that a wrong word now would wreck all his future, would send Caroline from him forever. So he said, “Caroline, you are really so inexperienced. This — this man — he knows who you are and all about your fortune.”
She interrupted him eagerly. “Yes, Timothy, he has always known. It isn’t of any consequence to him.”
He gaped at her. He put both smoothing hands over his head now.
“Tom isn’t interested in my money,” Caroline went on. “He wants to build a little house for us in Lyme. We’ll live very quietly. That is why I am putting so much of my money into investment trusts which my bankers and your partners will take care of for me. I never intend to touch the principal of Papa’s money; we’ll live simply on what Tom earns as a builder of little houses and some of the interest on my fortune. And I do plan to increase that fortune, as Papa would want me to do.”
Oh, God, thought Timothy. He studied Caroline with sharp intensity. Nothing would change that bovine mind; nothing could convulse that lump of stolid flesh. She would have her peasant, and all that money would be his and a brood of animals’. The money would never be Timothy’s and Melinda’s, Melinda who had grace and beauty and intelligence and who deserved this fortune and whose children would deserve it. Melinda deserved mansions and castles, homes in New York, Boston, Paris, London, on the Mediterranean. But this creature would keep it locked in her milkmaid’s hands, then give it to her faceless cubs.
He had to conceal his face; he knew that; he shadowed it with one long hand. Caroline was touched. “Dear Timothy, it will all be well,” she said. “Please don’t be disturbed. I want you to meet Tom very soon. I want you to be at our wedding.” When he did not answer, she added timidly, “You may have thought I was impulsive today, Timothy. But I wasn’t. You see, for many years Papa talked of you; he admired you so much. You are my cousin, and I only wish I had known you better before.”
Timothy dropped his hand to the table with the exhaustion only great emotion can bring. But he could not bear to look at her. He forgot what he now owed Caroline; he felt as one feels who has been irretrievably robbed. He accepted this fact; nobody could persuade Caroline from this disaster, which was his own. He knew her stubbornness, her rocklike immovability.
He thought of his mother. What would she think of this? If only she had some influence over her niece! Damn her, why had she inspired such hatred in Caroline?
He said, “Caroline, take some time to think about this — matter. Don’t be hasty. It’s all your life, you know. If later you find you’ve made a mistake, it will be a calamity for you.”
Caroline smiled with gratitude. “I’m not making a mistake, Timothy. I know Tom too well. I want you two to be friends.”
When Timothy returned to his hot but austere room that night he found a letter from his mother. He did not want to read it immediately; he knew her annoying vivacity, the way she had of making something trivial into an enthusiastic adventure, though her letters, since that dog had died, had been somewhat subdued.
Listlessly he dropped the letter on his bedside table and walked up and down his room in the fervid twilight. He told himself repeatedly that there was nothing he could do. A wrong move, and he would only destroy himself. If he went to that bumpkin rascal, Sheldon, who was licking his lips in anticipation over the Ames fortune, Caroline would be hopelessly offended. A gentleman would listen to a gentleman, but what could a gentleman say to a cowherd? There was nothing he, Timothy Winslow, could do about it.
Then he picked up his mother’s letter absently. He lit the oil lamp near his narrow bed and tore open the envelope. He recognized from Cynthia’s handwriting that the old girl was vivacious again; there were all those loops and twirls. He made a contemptuous sound and began to read. It was a short letter for Cynthia, and, as he feared, it scintillated.
“Darling, you must come home immediately! I have the most marvelous news for you! I have so much to tell you!”
“And I, madam,” said Timothy grimly, and aloud, “have so much to tell you too.”
Chapter 6
A few days before the meeting between Caroline and her cousin, Timothy Winslow, something very remarkable indeed happened to Cynthia.
She had been very restless and suffering from what was fashionably called ‘the vapors’. She sat in her warm and silent little garden one day, dressed loosely in a white silk-and-lace robe; she had rolled up the sleeves, and her ivory arms were translucent in the green light that fell through the trees. She was considering her life with unusual sadness. She thought of John Ames with pain and loneliness and a sick longing. She had never loved any man but John in this particular way. Now it was as if her life, pleasant, full of flowers, music, laughter, beauty, and grace, had been convulsed, shattered, darkened, abandoned. She had not been John’s wife; she endured the secret anguish and torment of a widow. Her friends were sympathetic, but after all, they would say to her consolingly, he was only her brother-in-law and not her husband. It is quite different, the widows would tell her with sighing significance. For the first time Cynthia wished she had married John Ames. She could then be honestly and openly grieved.
Cynthia, who held many moral laws lightly, knew bitterly now that a woman in an ambiguous situation must hide her emotio
ns and must permit those emotions to fester in her silently. She controlled herself as much as possible, not for her own sake, but for the sake of Melinda, whose young life must not be ruined and despised. But it was almost too arduous for the sorrowing woman. Three months had passed since John had died. Cynthia longed to weep openly, to let her grief be known so it would not poison her in the dark nights.
She was a woman to whom the intimate presence of a man was absolutely necessary. Her nature was ardent and graceful, and in many ways dependent. Her bed was not a new widow’s bed; it was nonetheless empty. She might be middle-aged, but her passions were young and had been aroused only by John Ames. Her beautiful body was as urgent as a girl’s. Care and coddling of her flesh, her naturally vivacious and interested personality, good health, and eager awareness of living had kept her unusually young for her forty-five years. Moreover, there had been little stress in her life, and much love and affection. These had prolonged her youthfulness. In all but actual years she was like a woman of thirty.
So, in spite of herself, she thought of marrying, in her hunger. But the desirable men were already married; the widowers were cautious and were looking for younger women; the bachelors were beyond desire and unhealthy. She was also a woman who, though the beneficiary of a life trust, would have nothing substantial to leave a prudent man. She was beautiful and desirable, but in the eyes of Boston men these were not enough. She was condemned to be an observer of life from this time onward and no longer a participant. There would be no nights of excitement, no confidences in the dark, no smothered laughter and kisses, no warm turning in arms, no sense of being of the first importance to any man. She had no desire for another liaison, though the opportunities were there among disgruntled husbands and a few wary bachelors. It must be marriage or nothing, and the nothing was terrible to Cynthia Winslow.
She had not kept Melinda in town this hot and steaming summer. The young girl was sorrowful enough for ‘Uncle John’. So Cynthia had been persuaded by a close friend to let Melinda accompany the family to Newport. The friend was Mrs. Bothwell, who was fond of the girl and who frequently thought of the fortune left her by John Ames. After all, there was her son Alfred. Cynthia was alone in her house; the idea of going to Newport was distasteful to her. Had there been any opportunity of meeting a strange man of substance and charm she would have gone. But she knew there was no such opportunity. She could see the dreary years ahead, years of discretion, emptiness, loneliness, and deprivation. Melinda would marry and have her own affairs. She, Cynthia, would live virtuously and in desolation in this house, bored and silent. She highly regarded those who were engrossed in good works, but good works as the sole aim of life repelled her. The world was made for joy, also, and pleasure and intimacy. I should really go to New York, she thought restlessly in her garden on this hot, still day. But she knew she could not. A lone woman in New York was in a most anomalous position.
Locusts sang in the crab-apple trees; a wet, hot wind blew over the flower beds. Large yellow bumblebees hummed stridently in the silence. A bird drank from a distant stone bath. A rabbit timidly poked its head from the end of the garden, a leaf in its working mouth. “Go away,” said Cynthia listlessly. “I don’t plant petunias for your supper.” She lifted the weight of her lovely hair from her neck and threw it over the back of her low chair. She fanned herself and fluttered a perfumed handkerchief over her moist forehead and cheeks. Nothing, she thought, could be more oppressive than Boston in August. Yet when she instinctively caught the shadow of autumn in the hollows under the trees, in the frantic exuberance of the flowers, in the light of the vivid sky, in the color of the little crab apples, in the faint browning of the grass, she was unbearably depressed. She hated winter; she now even hated the topaz deepening of autumnal Boston. Melinda, it was arranged, was to go to school in England in late September. Not Switzerland! Cynthia thought of those five months she had spent in Switzerland, immured in a luxurious villa near Lucerne, awaiting the birth of Melinda, when she was ostensibly supposed to be traveling all over the Continent as a gay widow.
“Darling John,” she murmured now, “I should have married you. It might have been awful, but then again I might have been able to do something with you. I am no poor little Ann. Besides,” she added with a faint and mournful smile, “as your widow I should have had a great deal more money and so should have been much more desirable.”
A perspiring maid came from the house, gliding over the grass as if she had no legs at all. She has forgotten the brandy, thought Cynthia irritably, aware that she had been drinking too much since John died. The maid carried a card on a silver tray, and Cynthia, yawning, picked it up. There was really no one in town, except some very elderly and tiresome widows who lived on back streets. Had one of them really emerged in her rusty black and decided to pay Cynthia Winslow a visit? Cynthia read the card: ‘Montague Lord Halnes’.
“Who on earth?” Cynthia murmured, frowning, then remembering not to frown. She could not afford wrinkles. She knew no Mr. Montague Lord Halnes. She said so, very shortly, to the maid. But the maid was an Englishwoman, and she was awed; she curtsied, to Cynthia’s astonishment, not to Cynthia, but to the card. “It is Lord Halnes, Mrs. Winslow,” she said with a touch of superiority in her voice. “A very famous family in England. The old lord died nearly two months ago, and the present lord came into his title and the estates. I read about it in the papers from home.”
“Oh?” said Cynthia, sitting up and vaguely excited. “But why should he come to see me?” She shook out her hair, and the long bright curls fell down her back.
The maid smirked importantly. “Indeed, Mrs. Winslow, I do not know. But Lord Halnes was a Mr. Montague Brookingham, and I do remember overhearing that he was a friend of Mr. Ames.”
Cynthia sat up even straighter and was more excited. Of course, Montague Brookingham. John had spoken of him often and admiringly.
“His lordship is awaiting Mrs. Winslow,” said the maid with some reproof. Americans did not keep nobility waiting; but then, Americans were very ill bred and ignorant.
Cynthia felt the first prickling of animation she had felt for months. She examined the smooth white card and its fine engraving. “Oh dear,” she said. “I am not dressed. I do wish he had written first. Why, I might have been out of town!” The very thought was calamitous. Then she paused. “Lady — Halnes — she is not with him?”
“I believe his lordship is not married,” said the maid coldly. Cynthia smiled at her. “Do you study the Almanach de Gotha in your spare time, Jordan?” she asked mischievously.
“Certainly, madam,” said Jordan, whose accent was becoming more and more British each time she spoke. Cynthia thought she was covertly sneering at her, but a sharp glance reassured her that the woman was entirely serious. “There is a whole page devoted to the family in the Almanach,” added Jordan. “They go back to King John.”
“I must dress,” said Cynthia. And then she saw herself as a man would see her, in thin white silk and lace, with loosened and warmly disheveled hair, with bare and pretty arms, and with a face flushed delicately in the heat. The maid stood apart to let her mistress stand, but Cynthia leaned back indolently in her chair and smiled.
“On second thought, bring Lord Halnes out to me in the garden,” she said.
Jordan was horrified. She looked closely at Cynthia; the white silk and lace only half obscured the handsome high breast, and it was obvious that the lady wore no stays and that there was little under the loose gown, if anything. It was indecent! Nobodies — and Jordan was convinced all Americans, including the President, were nobodies — did not receive nobility like this, half nude in little city gardens. It was shameful. Had Mrs. Winslow no sense of the proprieties at all, no self-respect, no pride? She was dressed for the boudoir, like one of those creatures one spoke about only in whispers and behind one’s hand.
“Don’t stand there gaping,” said Cynthia impatiently. “Didn’t you hear me? Bring Lord Halnes out to me here. And f
etch brandy. You might consult with Cook; it is possible that his lordship will have dinner with me.”
“You don’t wish tea, madam?” asked Jordan desperately. “It is teatime.”
“Brandy,” said Cynthia with emphasis, waving the woman away with her lace handkerchief. “Do I ever have tea when I am alone?”
Crushed and appalled, Jordan sailed leglessly over the grass to the back door of the house. How does she manage it? thought Cynthia, shaking out her soft and luminous laces and observing with pleasure how her long thighs and calves were lovingly implied under the thin silk. She became excited again. A rich and unmarried nobleman! Englishmen were tall and slender and handsome and very ruddy, especially the nobility. They were charming. Cynthia’s heart began to beat rapidly. Why was he visiting her? For what purpose? Had he a secret message from poor John? She moved her chair a trifle and let two long curls flow over one shoulder.
A Prologue to Love Page 34
