A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I know,” said Caroline. “You look like your father. I called him the Weasel.”

  “So I understand.” He was kindly amused. “I’m also Melinda’s brother.”

  He could see Caroline’s gray and sorrowful face and the fear-filled gleam of her eyes. “I came to see my sister,” he said. “She is very ill, I am afraid.”

  “I know,” said Caroline, breathing with loud difficulty against the wind. “I call her house every day. I promised Mary.”

  “She would like you to come sometime,” he said. “It’s very lonely for her, with Nathaniel at Plattsburg — that is the name of the place? — and Mimi in New York.”

  “How could she be lonely?” said Caroline. She stumbled as she went to a stone bench and sat down. “She had everyone to love her all her life. And Amanda and her children visit her often, and all her many friends in Boston. Melinda and I — what can we speak about together? Nothing.”

  She panted on the bench, and William came to her and sat down beside her.

  “But what are you doing here?” she demanded shortly.

  “I came to see Melinda. And to say good-by,” He paused. “My wife died a year ago. I suppose you didn’t know.”

  “Yes. My son John told me.” The dusk had taken on a peculiar steely transparency, and Caroline looked at the face so close to hers, the face Elizabeth had loved, and had died in the loving. Her whole body felt encased in pain.

  “But I’m not going back to England,” said William. He pointed to his garments. “I’m a simple parish priest now, as you can see.”

  “Your father is probably turning in his grave,” said Caroline sourly, trying to breathe against her torment.

  He laughed a little. “Probably.” He was silent for a few moments, then said, “I am going to the battlefields in France. My children are provided for and surrounded by all Rose’s large family, and so I can go, as I now am, with no regrets or worries.”

  Caroline’s eyes slowly roved over her private graveyard. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “To see Elizabeth’s grave. To think of her and pray for her soul.”

  Caroline bent her cheek on her folded hand. “I had nothing to give her and no way to help her, and so she is lying here now, and she’d be only twenty-six if she had lived. That is too young to be dead.”

  “There are younger, every day, dying,” said William. “Is life so glorious that we should regret to leave it?”

  He got to his feet and went to Elizabeth’s grave and looked at the white shaft that towered over it and then at the small flat white stone with her name upon it.

  He said from his little distance, “It is the living for whom we should feel pity. And the unborn, who shall be born, to face the world they must face. Elizabeth is safe.” His plain features expressed his pain and sadness. He came back to the bench.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that I loved Elizabeth more than anyone else, more than my parents and my sister, and far more than my poor young wife, who would not even be Elizabeth’s age if she had lived. I never forgot Elizabeth. And it wasn’t until only recently that I stopped hating the man who was responsible for so much of my misery and hers.” He hesitated. “Perhaps sometime I can even pray for his soul.”

  “No,” said Caroline. “Never for Timothy. It was not only Elizabeth; it was something else, besides. It was what he was.”

  “I know what he was,” said William soberly. “A thoroughly evil man, a dangerous man. You look surprised, Mrs. Sheldon. Don’t be. I knew, as you probably knew. But I pray sometimes that perhaps there was something else, too, which will serve as his first step to heaven.”

  “There never was,” said Caroline in a loud and breaking voice. “The world is full of such men now. No one knows or can guess how many. They will destroy all of us if they can, and it’s very likely that they can and will.”

  “Nothing can happen that God will not permit to happen,” said William, and he put his hand on her arm. “If these men do get their power it will be because of the sins of the rest of us, our apathy, our own faithlessness, our own greed and stupidity.” He folded his hands on his knee and looked at Elizabeth’s grave and then over all the graveyard. “Our own lack of manliness and resolution. Our godlessness. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon — they were all the scourges of God, the whips of God, punishing mankind for its sloth and its forgetfulness and complacency and sin. Its pride and selfishness. Its boasts and its own ugly lusts. Who knows what face the next scourge will wear, and what his name is, and where he lives at this very moment? We can only know that he does live and is watching and waiting.”

  The first drops of sleet stung their faces. William rose and offered his arm to Caroline, and they went together to Elizabeth’s grave. William blessed himself and murmured his prayers, and Caroline looked at the stone mutely. When they turned away she said, “I came today. I don’t know why today. It’s ridiculous, but it was as if I knew I’d never come again. Except for the last time.”

  She leaned on William’s arm as they crept down the forsaken path, and there were tears on her cheeks. William’s arm was like the arm of a son, and she turned her fingers and clung to the cloth that covered it.

  And again, thought Caroline, as she sat before her sparse fire and looked at the small red coals, I am waiting. Our life is nothing but a waiting, and I’m not sure, even now, that there is anything to wait for, except for a little quiet and a little peace.

  There was such silence about her now, as if she had been totally forgotten. But I’ve never been remembered, she said to herself. She thought of Amy and Ames, together again, and of the pleasant bulletins she received from Griffith at least once a week. “The young mistress,” he stated, “is managing very well, indeed. Sometimes the master is even subdued. Young Mrs. Sheldon is very determined, and I think, in a way, that he likes the new regime. There is no weeping, but only occasional sharp words, and the mistress’s are always the sharpest,” he reported happily. “Quite often the master will come into the kitchen for a drink with me and a few pungent remarks about women. All is well.”

  All was ‘well’ with John and Mimi too. John, wrote Mimi, was helping her to prepare for her show in early December, which would be about two weeks before her child was to be born. He had disliked some of the frames; he had ordered others, and Mimi laughingly confessed that John had been right. He talked of the coming baby with enthusiasm, she wrote. There was such a change in dear John. He no longer called her several times a day to be reassured that she was thinking of him. He knew, said Mimi.

  I have undone a little, thought Caroline. At the very last moment, I have undone a little. The rest lies with my sons and their wives. It isn’t much, but it is something, some recompense. My sons will never love me; that would be impossible. But in some way I have learned to love them, and that is more than enough. It is only this waiting, this endless waiting.

  She went up to her gallery and looked at the paintings of her grandfather. She saw more in them these days than ever before. Often she forgot to be in her study at the usual hours. She had a tremendous fortune to manage, which would belong to her grandchildren, and in another way it had become a trust again. But what would they do with it, these unborn? Would they be frightened, or would they love? Would they hoard, or would they live? She tried to imagine their faces, but they eluded her except for Christina’s; she saw their forms and their movements, but not their faces and their eyes. Sometimes she would pray awkwardly for these children. What would their world be like, this frightfully turbulent world on the eve of much more turbulence and terror? Would their world die, and them with it?

  “It is in the hands of God,” William had said to her when they had parted.

  But who knew what fearful designs were in the heart of God? He was a God of Justice and wrath, as well as tenderness and mercy. He did not consult men; He warned them, if they would listen, in their hearts. But who listened to Him? Occasionally astronomers saw a nova, ‘a new bright sta
r’, which disappeared shortly afterward, in days or weeks. Were they worlds which had brought God’s anger on them, and so their own destruction? The endless whirling nebulas were the hot vortexes, too, of new creation. But why, when it was all such a great weariness and an endless repetition? Or was God waiting for something too?

  Ames and Amy would come about twice a month to see her, and now John and Mimi came to see Melinda and always spent a few hours with Caroline. She would look at them with secret tenderness, but she would also feel an enormous fatigue, so that when the door closed upon them she would climb upstairs to her bed and be forced to lie down. It was as if she had mysteriously moved far from them and they were no longer even a small part of her life, and it exhausted her to shout over the tremendous distance to them. Their very voices, young and vibrant, took strength from her. They belonged to a world she had already left. But in leaving, she still had nowhere to go. She could only wait, her face turned to darkness. Did something move in that darkness? Was something developing there? She did not know. Day by day another tendril of her life attaching her to the world raveled and broke, another distant door closed.

  This is what it means to grow old, she thought. But her Aunt Cynthia, had lived to a much older age and had enjoyed every moment of it, and no doubt had regretted to leave. There were old, old dowagers in Boston, immediate and always aware, and engaged in life, and dominating it. Some were in their eighties and even their nineties. Their zest had not diminished. They would consider Caroline Ames young, compared with themselves. But I am old, thought Caroline. I was never young. Except for just a little while with Tom, who, at the end, had not wanted me and had wished to leave me forever.

  Sometimes she would lie down in Elizabeth’s room, but now Elizabeth’s face did not come to her, not even as a shadow. Elizabeth had not lived here; why should she return even for one instant? Sometimes Caroline would lie down in Tom’s room and sleep, but she never dreamed of him. She never felt his presence.

  It is this which is the worst, she would say to herself, the knowing that even the dead have left you, finally and for all time.

  She went to New York and remade her will. Higsby’s organization would not fail for lack of money, but only from lack of resolution. There was a larger perpetual fund for Sisters of Charity Hospital. There was a large sum for Griffith and Father Bellamy. There were trusts for medical research on cancer and heart disease. There was a fund for the everlasting care of the Sheldon graves. Then there were the new trusts for her sons and for her grandchildren whom she would never see.

  “Certainly you’ll see them, dear Caroline,” said another Mr. Tandy in a courageous voice. “Why, you are in the prime of life.”

  “Nonsense,” said Caroline. “I never was.”

  He looked at her dying face and agreed silently. Her body, always so stocky and wide, was dwindling rapidly; her face was old and sunken. Only her eyes, as if new life had been born in them, were young and clear.

  She shook hands with Mr. Tandy on leaving. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again,” she said. All that money, he thought with more than a stab of envy. All that miraculous money! Yet she had disposed of it indifferently, as if it no longer belonged to her, as if it meant nothing to her at all. One could only think of that money in connection with joy and luxury and comfort and security and power, but it was evident that Caroline did not think so.

  She said at the door, “I suppose you think I am quite mad.” Then she smiled, and he was astonished at the sudden shining of her eyes. “But I’m not, really. You remember the phrase: ‘In sound mind and in sound body’. You put it there yourself.”

  He thought about Caroline for a long time after she had gone. She had given all her life for her money; she had tripled the fortune her father had left her. She had devoted herself to it, as everyone knew. It had been her life. Now it was nothing to her. “Incredible, incredible,” said Mr. Tandy to himself.

  Then during one week in early December, Caroline stopped reading her business and financial magazines and journals. They gathered in her study, still in their wrappers. When her Boston office called, or her New York bank, she did not answer. She walked in the first early snows of December, along the black and shining shingle, looking at the gray and splashing ocean and at the gray and uneasy sky. She was taking stock of her life, for all at once that seemed to be the most important thing in the world. But when she attempted to sort it out so that it presented an orderly pattern or had some significance that she could discern she could see only confusion and lack of significance, and pain and misery. It was as if all her existence were a mass of many-colored ropes, slippery and twisting, tangled together, in which she was bound and beyond escape. Yet, escape she must, if she was to live, or even die in a measure of peace. As she struggled for order in her mind she was repeatedly overcome by an awful spiritual weariness, a repugnance, that was really despair. The soul’s night of darkness was on her.

  She had sent Maizie to the village for a Bible, though up in the attic, somewhere, forgotten by her, was Beth’s Bible, rotting away. “Yes,” said Maizie in the general store, “the old lady wants a Bible! Gettin’ scared in her old age.” The people in the store laughed heartily and with viciousness. Only thing in the world the old lady ever cared about was that cemetery plot up on the hill and her money. Never gave a cent to anybody; that was her. Now the growing village needed another school; kids were getting born much more than they used to. And the ‘new’ church needed lots of work, and there was old folks needin’ help, and their sons and daughters got too much to do with their own kids to care about the old folks any longer. If the old lady down there behind her walls wanted to do something with her money — and why shouldn’t she? — there was lots to do in the village and roundabout. People were smartenin’ up these days; they knew they had a right to be helped by folks who had the money, though they hadn’t earned it theirselves. Come to think of it, everybody in the world had a right to everything everybody else had, hadn’t they? They was born, weren’t they?

  Why was I born? thought Caroline. That priest had told her she had been born to know God, to serve Him in this life, and to join Him in eternity. But if God was omniscient, as He was, then He knew very well, when He created each soul, just what its destiny was and how few there were who would ever know Him or serve Him or join Him. Free will. Yet everywhere, it seemed, the cruel old doctrine of predestination challenged the doctrine of free will. There was some tremendous mystery here which perhaps only a few could interpret and understand. Why blame a man for his life, when it was determined and known from the instant of conception?

  The cheap Bible felt strange in Caroline’s hand as she opened it in the December darkness in Tom’s room. It fell open on the Psalms. ‘In my distress I cried unto the Lord and He heard me . . .’ ‘I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in Him will I trust . . . thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day . . .’

  The dusk became heavier and colder. The wind threw itself violently on the windows of the rotted house. Large handfuls of snow gushed down from the sky, spotted the windows in clumps, and clung. The house cowered like a ruin in the storm.

  “ ‘The arrow that flieth by day’,” said Caroline. Oh, the endless hail of arrows that assaulted every soul that came into the world, the barbs, the spears, the swords. Under all that nice and rosy cotton batting man desperately and eagerly strewed over his fearful world, crying out desperately and eagerly that all was well in this best of all possible worlds, lay the bottomless deeps of despair, the anguish, the loneliness, the terror and the ugliness, the horror and the hating, the perverted and the degraded, the blasphemous and the lost, the voices that cursed and the voices that never answered, the dark streets without an ending, the deformed and skulking shadows, the threat and the stinking and the death, the betrayals and the multitudes of murders and sins of the true world which man denied until dust stopped his mouth and he could lie no more
.

  ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh . . .’

  Caroline struggled to her feet, gasping. “Beth! Beth?” she cried, “is that you, Beth? I heard you. Beth!”

  She lumbered into the hall, which was black; only the small window at the end cast a little crepuscular gray below it. Caroline looked about wildly. “Beth! Is that you, Beth?” A door opened on the floor above, and Maizie’s stumbling footsteps descended the narrow steps. “Ma’am? You call me?” she whined.

  Caroline had to lean against the wall, for her heart was leaping with agony, and she could not breathe. A necklace of burning thorns tightened about her throat. Maizie, seeing only that shadow in the dimness, turned up the hall light, weak and bluish, and stared at Caroline. “I thought you called,” she said, and peered at the woman before her, whose panting was loud above the roar of the wind. She could see Caroline’s eyes, great and wild and golden in her pallid face, held still, listening, fixed.

  “Ma’am!” said Maizie, frightened, pushing back her pale and disheveled hair, for she had been sleeping in the cold and silent afternoon. “You sick or something?”