A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Of course,” said Caroline.

  Ames was more surprised. “I wish you really knew Amy,” he said cautiously.

  “I think I do,” said Caroline. “I’m not blind. The girl would make you an excellent wife. She has a sweet, good face. She might improve your character.”

  Ames could hardly believe what he was hearing. He sat up in his chair, and color came into his thin cheeks.

  “Whether you’ll improve hers is a moot question,” said Caroline.

  She spoke dispassionately. This was a damned strange conversation to have just after the funeral of Elizabeth, to whom Caroline was devoted, thought Ames. He was more than a trifle bewildered. But then, she was granite.

  Caroline said, “What is Timothy’s objection?”

  Ames shrugged elegantly. “Since I was a very young child I knew there was no love lost between you and old Timothy. Then, as I’ve said, he’s probably caught a rumor of your will. He was still in your law firm, you’ll remember, when you made it, and lawyers have a way of finding out. However, I think it is a more personal objection. He’s very cordial, of course, and is quite an actor. But I’ve caught him off guard a few times. Why he should hate me, I don’t know; I’m a rich man. Amy could do worse.” Ames regarded his mother blandly.

  “What is Amy’s attitude toward you?”

  “The same as mine toward her. We want to be married.”

  “And so?”

  “She happens to be devoted to her father. She wants more rime to make him change his mind. He won’t. He hardly spoke to me today. And Amanda shows her antagonism very clearly. So Amy and I are just wandering about at the present time, and it isn’t making her very happy.”

  “You’ve been dilly-dallying,” said Caroline. She looked again at the rosebud. “Haven’t young men any enterprise these days? If you want the girl, tell her to make up her mind immediately. In fact, you can mention that you won’t see her again unless she consents.”

  Ames had to control his sudden and powerful excitement. “And you wouldn’t mind? I thought you hated her grandmother.”

  “I did. I still do. But that doesn’t matter. I like the girl.”

  Ames lit a cigarette. He was, like his dead sister, a person of immense self-control. There was something he could not understand here, but he was not going to explore it.

  “I suppose if Timothy heard I was changing my will a little, he would not object then?”

  Ames’ greed urged him to say “Yes!” But he was too involved with Amy for games. He shook his head. “No. It’s more than that. I just recently had another talk with Amy. We meet now in the Boston Museum. She practically promised me that if her father was not reconciled to the marriage she would marry me when she is twenty-one.”

  “You think it is the lack of love between Timothy and me? I put him on his way, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” Ames paused. Then he said with unusual bluntness, “He told Amy something. He said he’d rather see her dead than married to me, your son.”

  Caroline smiled grimly. “That is what I suspected.”

  “But why, for God’s sake?”

  “He hated your grandfather too.” Caroline smoothed the leaves of the rosebud with a slow hand.

  “But my grandfather has been dead for ages. What does he have to do with it?”

  “Timothy thought him ill bred. Besides,” said Caroline calmly, “there was a personal hatred. His mother was my father’s mistress for many years.”

  “Oh. The devil!” exclaimed Ames. “Honor of the family, eh?”

  “Not in the way you mean. Besides, he hates me much more. It is envy. He is a very greedy and voracious man, in spite of his fine airs. But again, it is much more than that. He thinks we have bad blood, yet he is one of the most corrupt men I’ve ever known. But such men are very careful of their daughters. No doubt he believes you are quite corrupt, yourself.”

  Ames smiled. “It is possible I am. I feel quite respectable these days, however. I haven’t turned out as frightful as even you thought I would.”

  “Quite right,” said Caroline.

  She held the rosebud with both hands now, almost clutching it. “Let me tell you this. On the day you marry Amy Winslow, I will give you three million dollars. As my wedding present to you. If that does not make you press the girl at once, nothing else will.”

  Ames was so stunned that he took the cigarette from his mouth, stared at it as if wondering what it was, then threw it into the littered, cold fireplace.

  “You will put that in writing?”

  “Yes. Before you leave. On one condition: that when you marry Amy you will show it to her parents.”

  “I see,” said Ames. He narrowed his eyes at his mother.

  “If it will convince you more, I will, within a few days, set that money aside for you, in your name, to be drawn only when you marry Amy.”

  “I see,” repeated Ames.

  But he did not really ‘see’. He would let himself wonder and conjecture later. He was swept up in excitement.

  “I am tired now,” said Caroline. “I think I will go to my room and rest. But you must keep me informed. Moreover, you must not let your brother know.”

  She began to walk away, then stopped. “There must always be a time limit to everything. I suggest you marry Amy Winslow within one week after the elections this fall.”

  Ames considered this. “After Timothy is elected senator?” He smiled. “That will soften the blow.”

  “I said, after the elections,” answered Caroline. She looked at the rose she held. “After the elections. Is that understood?”

  Ames repeated, “Yes. I see.” The dreary room was heavily weighted with the scent of roses.

  Mr. Higsby Chalmers alighted stiffly and chubbily from the train at Lyme on August 16, 1914, the day the Germans captured Liege. It was very hot in Boston, and he was pleased to find the air so cool in Lyme. He had been reading his morning paper on the train with great concern, for he was one of the few men in America — except for those who had planned this war a long time ago and were now bustling like evil wasps behind their shut doors in New York and Washington — who realized what was about to happen to the world. His knowledge was not precise, for he was a good, sound, and conservative Bostonian, and he was extremely intelligent and state chairman of his political party. His awareness was more than a little intuitive, sharpened only to a degree by his favorite pastime of ‘reading between the lines’ and political acumen.

  What had alarmed him particularly this morning was a statement issued by President Wilson to the effect that ‘America is in no danger of being involved’ in the holocaust in Europe. Americans were not as yet interested in a war they regarded with less concern than baseball; there were few, if any, editorials about the war in this country. In fact, many newspapers put the war on the back pages or second pages, to give headlines to the more engrossing news about the ‘White Slave Traffic’, fulminations against the modern dance and ragtime, Mr. Elbert Hubbard’s sparkling little publication called The Philistine, the belligerence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the latest philanthropies of Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Henry Ford’s ‘tin lizzie’ and accompanying jokes, prospects for the coming football season, the new Freudian theories of sex, and, as always, Fundamentalist religion and ‘the crime against youth’ contained in naïve motion pictures and popular magazines. The picture pages of the newspapers were filled with photographs of the building of Grand Central Station in New York, actresses, happy dogs, airplanes, fashion portraits, and ballroom dancers in the contortions of the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear.

  So, thought Mr. Chalmers with increasing alarm, why did President Wilson ‘reassure’ the country that it would not be involved in Europe’s wars when the country was not asking ‘reassurance’ about anything except the lifting of a mild depression and more and more popular entertainment and vulgar excitement? Was Mr. Wilson warning men who were as yet faceless to the people, or of whose existence the people did no
t even dream? Was he telling them, in effect, that so long as he was alive and President, America would not abandon George Washington’s emphatic admonition to beware of foreign entanglements?

  ‘An unknown source close to the Vatican,’ however, was more pointed than Mr. Wilson. That source was warning the world in a strong and steadfast voice that it must beware of the seeming in Europe and halt hostilities before it was too late, for the men behind an apparently simple war were men who were enemies of Germany and England alike. “Thunder from the Left,” said the source urgently. But only those who already knew listened to Rome, and then with a derisive smile and with hateful words of contempt. Did Rome actually think, they asked each other, laughing, that the stupid and simple masses would stop their rush to suicide behind the Judas-goat the plotters had provided?

  Mr. Wilson’s reassurance appeared on page 5 of the newspaper, and the ‘source close to the Vatican’ appeared over the obituaries. And that, thought Mr. Chalmers, was a terrible and ironic, if unconscious, bit of humor. He felt restless and vaguely frightened, and he thought of his young grandsons. Like all dignified Bostonians, he made few concessions to weather and wore his usual fine black broadcloth suit, with high stiff collar and tight knotted tie. He was a short man, and very stout, and wore gold cuff links, a gold watch chain, and a gold and diamond stickpin, and he had trouble mounting the high step of one of the station hacks. He said, “The Sheldon residence,” and sat on the ragged leather seat, reread Mr. Wilson’s statement and the warning of the ‘source close to the Vatican’, and fanned himself agitatedly with his hat.

  “What?” he said with some irritation when the driver asked him his destination. “I thought I told you the Sheldon residence, Mrs. Caroline Ames Sheldon’s residence.”

  “Ayeah,” grumbled the driver, applying his whip to his horse. “That’s what I thought you said, mister, but there ain’t hardly anyone ever going out there and I wanted to be sure.” He looked over his shoulder at the very red stout face of Mr. Chalmers and stopped a snigger at Mr. Chalmers’ old-fashioned gray-and-auburn little beard.

  “Well, you are sure now,” said Mr. Chalmers, rustling his paper pointedly. He sniffed. He preferred horses to automobiles, for he was sixty years old and very dignified, but this poor nag not only was covered with flies but had a very bad smell indeed. Still, it wasn’t worse than gasoline fumes.

  Then he was curious. As the hack rattled away from the dusty depot and took the rough public road lying a little distant from the ocean, he said, “I’m sorry to hear Mrs. Sheldon has so few visitors. She must be lonely.”

  The driver snorted. “Not her! With all that money! What more she need, anyways? Nobody ever sees her, except folks who go up to the old graveyard once in a while — right there over that first hill — and she never speaks to nobody. Keeps her girl’s grave covered with white roses; they come twice a week from Boston, in big boxes. Nobody ever gets buried up there any more, but you should see that there Sheldon plot. Acshully pays a man to keep the grass nice and green, and urns planted! Crazy!”

  Nobody, my man, thought Mr. Chalmers with a slight smile, is ‘crazy’ who has been able to increase one hundred million dollars to nearly three hundred millions since 1884. When Caroline’s curt note asking him to call upon her had arrived three days ago, his wife Clara had said, “No one has seen Caroline Ames for centuries, just centuries. I wonder what on earth she wants with you, Higsby?” Mr. Chalmers wondered too.

  He had expected to find a rather neglected house, for rumors ran avidly in Boston, but he had not expected to find the large mansion in such incredible decay. The house had been built — 1885? — not even thirty years ago. Yet it had the appearance of an old crumbling ruin in the sad countryside of poor Ireland or in some forgotten section of Wales. The great lean pines were almost strangled by vines and scrub; there was no garden; there were no lawns, but only stretches of sea grass, nettles, weeds, and boulders. Good God, thought Mr. Chalmers, paying off the hack driver, surely even Caroline should be aware of this jungle, this dreadful forlornness, this indecent neglect. Every window, he saw as he carefully picked his way over small rocks and gravel and fallen ancient leaves and small dropped branches, was covered with blown sand and dirt. The pines sighed in the sea wind, and Mr. Chalmers sighed also. He pulled the bell and heard it echo in the house, and he half expected no one to answer. But eventually the door was opened by a homely and slatternly maid who peered at him suspiciously. He gave her his card, and she examined it, turning it over and over in her dirty hands.

  “You wait there,” she said in a hoarse voice, “and I’ll see if Miz Sheldon wants to see you.” She closed the splintered door loudly in his face.

  The whole house looks as though no one had ever lived here, thought Mr. Chalmers, suppressing his irritation. The door opened and the girl said, “Wal, come in. What you waitin’ for?” And Mr. Chalmers entered a beautifully proportioned but filthy and littered hall and immediately sneezed in the dust. The maid led him to the drawing room, the most wretched room Mr. Chalmers had ever seen in his life, and abandoned him on the threshold. He saw the once-lovely furniture, now broken and smeared with old oil, the threadbare rug, the tattered draperies. It was cold and dark in here after the hot bright sun outside, and Mr. Chalmers, still sneezing, blew his nose.

  “Come in, Higsby,” said a well-bred but rusty voice from the interior of a room which he thought resembled a dirty and abandoned warehouse.

  “Thank you, Caroline,” he said, and walked into the room and found his hostess sitting massively and stiffly on a chair. She indicated an opposite chair and said curtly, “Tea?”

  “No, thank you, Caroline,” he said hurriedly, thinking of the maid’s dirty hands and sore eyes.

  “I have nothing else,” said Caroline.

  “It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Mr. Chalmers, sitting down carefully, and politely repressing his impulse to dust off his chair first.

  He looked at Caroline, whom he had remembered as a tall, shy, but somewhat imposing girl in plain clothing. His mother had said, “If only someone would take that girl in hand — what on earth is Cynthia Winslow doing, anyway? — she could be quite handsome and very impressive.” He understood that people changed with the years; he had once, himself, been a short but slender and graceful youth, and a fine dancer and sportsman, and beardless. Now he was sixty, solidly fat, with high blood pressure, bifocals, and a beard. But surely he had not changed so drastically as Caroline had changed. He would not have recognized this bulky great woman with her scanty white crown of braids, her dark yet pallid skin, her leaden mouth, hard and sullen, as the Caroline he had known as a girl. Poor soul, poor girl, he remarked to himself, and blew his nose again.

  “How are you, Caroline?” he asked, feeling quite shocked.

  “Well enough,” she said shortly. “And you, Higsby?”

  “Well enough,” he repeated, and smiled. “Clara sends you her regards.”

  “Um,” said Caroline. Her large hands were folded in her lap. She wore an old black dress which was of a fashion of many, many years ago, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a tight bodice with a row of buttons down the front, and a full long skirt. The color was tinged here and there with a hint of green age. Then she stirred just a little. She did not actually smile, but Mr. Chalmers believed she did.

  “Clara was in my form at Miss Stockington’s,” she said. “She always complained that her family name, Higsby, was so ugly that she would marry the first man who asked her — so she could change it. Yet she married you, a distant cousin with the very same name, only Christian — Higsby.”

  This was a long speech for Caroline, and Mr. Chalmers’ fine acute ear caught it, and he understood. Caroline was trying to be pleasant, and it was a fearful effort for her. He said, “And one of my sons and one of my grandsons are named Higsby too.” He laughed gently. His trained eye was studying Caroline without appearing to do so. He was remembering that she had lost her only daughter, a poor, beautiful, ma
d thing, only a short time ago after years at Hillcrest.

  “I suppose,” said Caroline, “that you are wondering why I sent for you.”

  “Frankly, I am,” said Mr. Chalmers.

  “It is a political matter,” said Caroline.

  Mr. Chalmers was startled. He was a lawyer, and a very successful one. He had believed that Caroline had sent for him because of a problem she preferred not to discuss with Tandy, Harkness and Swift.

  “Political?” he echoed.

  “You are state chairman of your party, are you not?”

  “Yes, of course.” He paused. Women could not vote, and he could not conceive of Caroline, the immured recluse, being a suffragette or interested in politics.

  “And the candidate for senator of your party is Gideon Lowe, isn’t he?”