A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  Tom had seen John Ames a few times in Lyme village. It was strange that he did not recognize John Ames in his granddaughter. Yet in appearance, in light brown hair, in fineness and rigidity of feature, in the color of frigid blue eyes, in height and stiffness, in manner and in way of short and repelling speech, Elizabeth was the young John Ames who had looked at the world closely and had not found it good. She was nearly twelve years old now, and as she had only just achieved puberty her body was as featureless as a boy’s. Her long hair was tied back from her excellent bony cheeks and pale forehead and face with a blue ribbon; she wore a blue serge dress over which she had tied a plain white pinafore; her stockings were white and her little slippers glistened. She gave an impression of asceticism, of self-control and restraint, and she regarded her father now with a faint and reproving frown.

  “Aren’t you cold in here, Elizabeth?” asked Tom with concern, looking at the low fire.

  “No. I like it cool,” said Elizabeth in her precise light voice. She did not stand up. “Is there something you wanted, Father?” She did not call him ‘Dad’ as did John and Ames.

  “Yes. It’s a nice sharp day, with a little sun.” Tom glanced at the white ruffled curtains over the windows. “You rarely go out, dear. John and I and Harry are going to push off some of those boulders on the sea walk, and I thought you’d like to watch us.”

  “Why?” said Elizabeth. She was seated at her desk, on which stood a neat pile of books and some lesson papers.

  “To get some fresh air,” said Tom with irritation.

  “I walk every afternoon, alone, along the beach. I just came in, Father. And now I have all my studies to do.”

  “You study too much,” said Tom lamely. “It isn’t too good for a child.”

  “I’m not a child,” said Elizabeth with such dignity that Tom could not smile. She waited for him to leave. But he stayed, uneasily. He loved Elizabeth more than he loved his other children; she was his daughter; she would be a pretty woman, and probably charming, for her eyes were so large and so bright even if cold. He had tried to reach her from babyhood, to soften her natural constraint. He had never succeeded, not once. Tom blamed this on Caroline’s lack of maternal coddling and affection.

  “You’ll be leaving for Miss Stockington’s in September,” said Tom, and he meant, “I’m lonely, and I’m your father and I love you, and I’ll be more lonely when you’re gone.” He did not say this, but Elizabeth guessed it and she smiled faintly and looked at her books. She said, “I must do a lot of work before I’ll be ready for that school.”

  “Then you don’t want to join John and me?”

  “No, Father.”

  He could only retreat. Elizabeth had already forgotten him. I’ve failed someway, Tom accused himself miserably. But how? I’ve loved them with all my heart and always tried to spend a lot of time with them. But they never wanted me.

  He went to Ames’ room. Ames was suffering from a cold and was in bed. One of the maids, under protest, was reading to him. He liked to be read to; he was ten years old and could read very well himself, but he preferred to inconvenience people. The maid was reading Dickens’ Bleak House to him, and Tom listened on the threshold for a few moments. What a book to be reading to a child! But Ames was absorbed in it, and occasionally, with icy patience, he would correct the maid’s stumbling pronunciation. The bedroom was pleasant; Ames collected agreeable objects and spent his allowance on them in Boston. He liked Dresden; a few precious figurines stood on a table near a window. His brushes were of polished silver; he had spent four months’ allowance on the excellent antique little chair near his bed. Tom did not know what an ‘exquisite’ was, and so he did not know that his son was such a one.

  Ames had evolved from a fat pale baby into a thin pale boy with fair hair and hard-slate colored eyes. His features were not as delicate as Elizabeth’s, but they were much more finely drawn than John’s. He resembled his cousin Timothy Winslow in many ways. Tom loved Ames less than he did his two other children, and for that guilty reason had been even more gentle with him than with John and Elizabeth. He always felt a little fear when with him.

  “How are you this afternoon, dear?” asked Tom. “Less feverish?”

  Ames took time to blow his nose nicely. Then he said, “I feel terrible. Stir up the fire, will you, Dad?”

  The maid slumped in her chair and stared at the window gloomily. Damned kid! She’d just love to lay hands on him and beat some respect for his father into him! Tom stirred up the fire to a hot glow.

  “Mr. Ames,” said the maid, “I got to go to the kitchen to get the vegetables ready. Cook’s grumbling right now.”

  “All right,” said Ames. “You read to me, Dad.” He gave Tom a small and secret smile.

  “Well, go down and help, Elsie,” said Tom. He looked regretfully at his son. “I’d like nothing better than to read to you, Ames, but I’m going to move some boulders with John and Harry.”

  “With John?” Ames sat up on his pillows and laughed in nasty glee. “You mean John’s going to help?”

  “Why, certainly. Why not?”

  Ames chuckled. “I’d like to see old Johnnie doing something he doesn’t have to do! I’ll bet you had to drag him by the scruff of the neck.”

  Tom refused to believe that his children did not like each other. It was unnatural for children not to like their brothers and sisters, and Tom believed that in some way the very isolation in which the children lived had made them ‘close’.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Tom. “He’s a big, active boy, and it’ll be good for him and he’ll like it.”

  Ames chuckled again. Then he said, “Turn the gas up a little, will you, Dad?”

  “Why not daylight? Why do all of you like to skulk behind curtains and not let in the sun sometimes?” But Tom turned up the gas over Ames’ beautifully modeled head.

  “I hate the sight of the snow and the water,” said Ames. He picked up the book Elsie had left on her chair and turned a page.

  “I’ll ask Mr. Burton to come in and read to you,” said Tom, lingering.

  “Oh no. Please don’t, Dad. He has a voice like an old woman’s. I hate old people.”

  Tom thought of Beth, and unwillingly he remembered that his children had never liked her and had tormented her. My God, we’re a guilty family, he thought. Ames was regarding him secretively over the edge of the book. Old Johnnie was right, he was thinking. Dad’s a fool. No wonder Mama despises him.

  Tom left the room slowly and walked down the stairs as if he were an old man himself, sick with years, sick with experience. Then his natural optimism returned, not quite as readily as once it did, but eventually, as he reached the outside door. The children were in the process of growing; it was a difficult age; it would be all right — sometime.

  The air, the sky, and the sea seemed formed of bright silver. But there would be another storm tonight, thought Tom with the countryman’s intelligence of nose and eye. John, who seemed almost a man in height and bulk, was huddled silently near the handy man who was listlessly prodding at one big boulder with a crowbar. “Well, well,” said Tom heartily, “that’s a big fellow, isn’t it? It’ll take all three of us to push it off the walk. Where do they come from, anyway?”

  Harry whined, “No use trying to get rid of ‘em. They just come back. Fool thing, anyway, this walk. I told you that, Mr. Sheldon.”

  “I like it,” said Tom, without being offended.

  “But every time there’s a storm they’re out here bigger’n ever. Water rolls ‘em in.”

  “We’ll roll them out. All right, Johnnie, give a hand.”

  “I’ll hurt my back; that must weigh a ton,” said John.

  “Nonsense. Less than three hundred pounds, I’d say. As for hurting your back, I’ll bet you could push it off onto the beach yourself, John. You’re a very strong boy.”

  John was not flattered. He put his gloved hands on the boulder beside his father’s; Harry, muttering, inserted the crowbar un
der the bottom. Tom pushed. John hated work of all kinds, though he was a considerable athlete. Tom panted a little with the effort, and John made a sneering face. Tennis was fine; he intended to make the football team at Groton and engage in all the sports. But work, and especially stupid work like this, was for peasants. Tom did not know that Caroline was watching him from her study window and that she was frightened. What did it matter if boulders came on the walk? What did it matter where or how you lived? But Tom was very foolish about his house. He was even more foolish about his children. He would hurt himself. The silvery air made Tom look very pale even at this distance. Caroline’s hand clenched on the dull dark blue draperies of her study. “Stop it!” she said with anger and fear.

  Chapter 7

  It did indeed storm that night. The snow came down in formidable quantities, burying Lyme and Boston, burying the countryside, heaping itself over New York also, so that the people recalled the famous blizzard of 1888. Everything stood still in a white silence. Then two days before Christmas it thawed, and there was a flood everywhere of running deep water.

  “I don’t like the feel of the roadbed,” said old Harper Bothwell to his adopted son Alfred. “The North Shore Railroad was always a shaky line, but it’s worse now, much worse over the past four years. Why don’t you tell your friend Tom Sheldon to get Caroline Ames to do something about it? She’s the chief shareholder, isn’t she? But trust the daughter of Johnny Ames not to allow a cent to be spent even when necessary! One of these days there’ll be an accident and she’ll discover that lawsuits are more expensive than repairs to a local roadbed. Damn it! That was a bad lurch there!”

  He looked about the coach with disfavor, wrinkling his nose and sniffing. The coach smelled; he remarked that he suspected the coaches were rarely cleaned, with which Alfred genially agreed. “But after all, it’s only about a twenty-minute or less run. Did you expect a red plush private coach, Pa? You’ve been on this line scores of times. Never bothered you before.”

  “Perhaps I’m getting old; I like my comforts. Look at this seat; the stuffing is coming out. You can scarcely see through the windows.” He peered at the glass, saw the dull sheets of water not only reaching the tracks but washing over them, and saw the inundated countryside and the trees seemingly growing from small lakes and drowned fields. Beyond them, the sullen sea rolled under clouds of gulls. “Don’t know why you live out here,” grumbled Harper.

  “Never mind, Pa. We’ll be home in ten minutes. It gives me an odd feeling that this will be the last Christmas of the nineteenth century, or is it the last? Doesn’t matter. But as we were saying in your office, I feel uneasy — ”

  Harper sighed. “When you’ve lived as long as I’ve done, my boy, you get over feeling uneasy about anything. But everything’s new to you young fellows; everything’s portentous; everything has significance; everything is about to change. I’ve seen many changes in my life. What do the French say? The more a thing changes, the more it is the same. Nations go through growing pains; they get over it in time.”

  “But I’m living in this time, Pa. I don’t believe in laissez faire. That’s an attitude that helps countries go down the drain. I don’t want that to happen to America. My children have to live here.”

  Harper clutched the arm of his seat as the train swayed around a bad curve. “Damn that engineer. Can’t he understand this is dangerous, the way the roadbed is? He could slow down.” He smiled sourly. “Alfred, do you think that by taking thought you can do anything about the ‘situation’, as you call it, in America? In many ways things are better than they used to be. Why, I remember that old Vanderbilt and the other old railroad boys used to have to pay out fortunes in blackmail to United States senators for every mile they laid! But they finally linked the country together, in spite of the government and its greedy, itching palm. I agree with one thing you said today: there never was a government that wasn’t as corrupt as hell and just waiting for a chance to jump in and establish despotism. This is true of America, too, but we’re a big country, and by and large we’re a sensible country. We have the Constitution.”

  “So did republican Rome,” said Alfred. “And look what happened to Rome’s constitution when the boys really got up a head of steam.”

  “Well, you won’t see the end of the American Constitution in your time, Alfred. Nor will I. Can’t tell about the future, though. It always comes back to the people. A virtuous electorate keeps its government within bounds; a stupid and vicious people lets its government expand until the government takes over everything. Then the knouts come out of hiding, and the secret police and the ropes and all the rest of it. A people deserves its government. So far, the American people have done well; no use worrying about the future.”

  Alfred indeed had no cause to worry about himself and his children and the future of his country. He would never know of wars and rumors of wars; he would never see the advance of socialism in America. He would never know that his beloved little son Nathaniel would die in the Argonne Forest in 1918. He would never learn of the rise of the Communist Russian Empire, nor of Hitler and Mussolini.

  For within five miles of the station at Lyme the train ran over flooded ground from which the rails had been swept only four minutes before. His final memories of his world included only a leaping and crashing and rending and sliding and tearing, of screams and cries, of the shriek of torn metal, of the upheaval of a derailed train. It was like him, in those last awful moments, when he understood what had happened, to throw himself across his father and try to shield that father with his young body and his arms. But that did not matter. Old Harper Bothwell was killed within seconds, and Alfred lived, in unconsciousness, forty-five minutes longer.

  It was after three in the morning when Tom Sheldon, staggering with exhaustion, his clothing torn and bloodstained, his face gray and lined and haggard, his whole body trembling, returned to his house. He could hardly walk; his boots squeaked with water; his hands were wounded. Caroline had waited up for him, and when she saw him she screamed faintly, then shouted, “You didn’t have to go! There were hundreds to help in the wreck! You might have been killed, yourself! You shouldn’t have gone!”

  But Tom, panting, could not speak for a while. Then he said quietly, “You own the major part of the stock in the North Shore Railroad, don’t you, Carrie? The roadbed needed to be repaired for years; I heard you tell your cousin that you wouldn’t approve of any expenditures. And didn’t I hear you telling him on the telephone only yesterday that it was nonsense to stop service until the water went down and the rails could be examined and repaired? Yes, Carrie.

  “Eight people are dead, Carrie, and forty badly injured. But you don’t have to worry. You didn’t spend a cent.” His panting became a long, slow groan. “Alfred Bothwell and his father are dead; they were coming home for Christmas. Alfred — I got to him finally — died in my arms. He never knew. That should be a little comfort to you, Carrie, but it won’t be a comfort to his sister and his wife and his children.”

  “Alfred, dead?” she muttered, putting her hand to her cheek and standing before Tom in her rough flannel nightgown and her slippers and with braids on her shoulders. But it was Tom who was dead, who had died in the wreck. It was Tom she would never see again. She burst into agonized tears and forgot everything, her isolation, her loneliness, her quarrel with her husband, her mistrust and desolate gloom. She held out her hands to Tom. And he would not see them.

  “Yes. He is dead.” He paused. “Why are you crying, Carrie? He never meant anything to you. Nobody ever meant anything to you; there was only your money. But God won’t let you go unpunished for this, Carrie.” And he shook his head over and over. Holding onto furniture, touching walls and doors, he left the room.

  Christmas came and went, and the new century arrived, but no one in the Bothwell house knew of either of them. The gray snow came and the mourning village and mourning Boston friends cared nothing or thought of nothing but the wreck. It made headlines in the
national newspapers, and it was frequently mentioned that the wreck was due to neglect and that the controlling shares were owned by Mrs. Tom Sheldon, the former Caroline Ames, daughter of John Ames, who had left her such a vast fortune. There were investigations. There were talks of suits and the preparation of suits. An old photograph of Caroline was frequently published, showing her closed and impassive face, her reluctant eyes. Many anonymous and threatening letters arrived at the Sheldon house, and Caroline silently threw them into the fire.

  On January 4, Cynthia, Lady Halnes, and her son Timothy Winslow sat alone in the beautiful drawing room of the Bothwell house near Lyme. They sipped brandy before the fire; they sat listlessly with their own thoughts. Timothy said to himself: The old baggage is getting aged at last. This has done her in. He thought of his cousin Caroline with hatred. He had never liked the kind and exuberant Alfred, but he was thinking of Melinda, mute and stricken since the death of her husband and lying sleeplessly in her lonely bed. She had not said more than half a dozen words since that terrible day.