A Prologue To Love (28 page)

If Caroline had not found the self-portrait of her grandfather she would not have done what she did now. The emotion she had been experiencing quickened to a storm. She put the portrait of David Ames on the pile of curtains, caught up her dragging black skirts, and ran out of the attic. Beth heard the rapid tumult of her running feet on the stairs, the desperate clatter, the smothered crying. She came hurriedly out of the kitchen in time to see Caroline, her skirts flying, her arms outstretched, racing toward the door. She had a glimpse of Caroline’s face, laughing, weeping, distracted, and of her disheveled hair. “What is it?” screamed Beth, terrified. But Caroline fled across the sagging boards of the living room and through the door, and she was calling, “Tom! Tom! Wait for me!”

Beth stumbled to the door, watching that turbulent young figure rushing down the wet shingle. And there was Tom, turning, startled. Then he was holding out his arms and he was laughing and the gulls wheeled about him. A moment later Caroline was in his arms, and she was clutching him, and Beth could hear her incoherent cries. Then she was still, and Tom was smoothing her hair and holding her to him as a father might hold a child.

“Oh, thank You, Father,” Beth said. “Thank You.” She threw her apron over her eyes and burst into tears.

Tom held Caroline a long time in his arms until he had quieted her. When she lifted her head from his shoulder and looked up into his face shyly, he thought that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her olive cheeks were wet and flushed with apricot; her hazel eyes shimmered; her smile was charming beyond description and childishly innocent and joyous. The soft sea wind brushed wisps of her black hair over her low forehead. “Oh, Tom,” she said.

Arm in arm they went to their large boulder on the gleaming shingle and sat down side by side. The evening sky reddened, and the sea was the color of ripe grapes. The water hissed and murmured against the black rocks; a freighter fussed busily along the horizon, and sandpipers scampered about scallops of foam, and gulls circled with light on their wings. Caroline’s hand began to tighten on Tom’s with rising hysteria, and he only waited. He was her first confidant; she did not know how to begin or what to say; her life was like a huge rock on her shoulders, pressing her down; she did not know how to shift it, but shift it she must. Awkward and taciturn, with no apt words but only her need to explain, to cry for help, she began to speak hoarsely and with sudden incoherent blurts, and Tom listened. He kept his face still and gentle, knowing that she was looking at him intensely and imploringly, begging him to understand. She began with the finding of her grandfather’s portrait a little while ago, then she moved back in time, her words stammering against the background of wind and water. Always, vehemently, she absolved her father.

A less perceptive and loving man than Tom would have found the jerky and breathless story incomprehensible, for it was delivered in bursts, with no connecting links. Always, she insisted piteously, her father had been the victim of villains and exploiters; he had done only what he had to do. The others had no excuse for their rapacity and their evil. An unknown and appalling world emerged before Tom’s disgusted and outraged inner eye. Occasionally Caroline paused out of exhaustion, searching for fresh words, and she looked emptily at the slow darkness rolling over the sea. She told of that night in Switzerland, and her voice quickened with terror and grief and rage, and she pulled her hand from Tom’s and clenched them into fists on her knee and beat her knee with them. Her face became charged with suffering and hatred. Tom listened until she was done.

Tom saw very clearly that John Ames had been no victim — instead, he had been his own mortal enemy — and that in his distortion of spirit he had martyred and victimized his own daughter. He had also hated her, it was evident, because she resembled his father. He thought of David Ames and the discovery of his identity by Caroline, and he was full of pity for the dead artist and a deeper pity and love for the girl who had been proxy for her grandfather. He hated John Ames dead more than he had hated him living. Once his father had told him, “It’s this way, Tom: even though some of the bully boys in the pulpit say we make the events, all of them, in our life, that just isn’t so. I can’t make folks like me if they’re dead set against me for one reason or another. And if somebody wants what I have, even if he’s unjust, he can cause me a heap of trouble without my having anything to do with it.

“There’s only one good thing we can control, though, and that’s the way we take the miseries of life, and all the injustice and malice and cruelty, and the sickness and death and failure. It’s what we do in our souls that counts.”

John Ames had answered his own challenge, from boyhood, with vengefulness and hate. His choice had been his own. It was piteous to hear his daughter declare that he had done only what he had to do. Tom waited and knew that Caroline was watching him eagerly in the warm salt darkness, with the sea growing louder in their ears.

Then he spoke slowly and gently, the fire in his pipe a low ember. “That’s an awful experience you had in Switzerland, Carrie. No one can doubt it or excuse it. But let’s look at it this way, without excusing the doctor who wanted to know if he’d get paid. You run out to his house in the middle of the night, in your night clothes, out of the hotel, when there’re servants there. You woke him from a sound sleep; he had a house and a family behind him, and you scream at him to come to your father, when he knew very well that you just had to pull a bell or something and get all the help you needed.

“Let’s say, though, that he was all bad and wrong and greedy and cruel. You aren’t the only one who comes up against such people all their lives, Carrie. We all do. Why, I deal with them every day, sweetheart. The banker down there in the village; he practically wanted our eyeteeth on the first loan and insulted us. He didn’t have a right to insult us.

“When I was on the canalboats I ran into many rotten people who did rotten things to me, sometimes as bad as what was done to you. What should I have done? Hurt them back? That would have been a waste of time; it would have crippled me too. Why should I let such people break my spiritual legs and put out my eyes? I didn’t let them do it to me. I kept thinking, too, of the good people I’d met who’d helped me, often when they couldn’t have afforded to. The world’s a hard place and a dangerous one, and nobody’s going to be able to change it. There’s no security or peace in it.

“I never had much schooling, but I’ve read all I could and I never stop reading. I wanted to be — right — for you, Carrie. There’s nothing in the Bible, Carrie, that promises us much more than pain and struggle. We’re supposed to have the courage to forget, and even to forgive, and go on, on our own straight way. You were hurt, sure. But suppose all of us, including me, answered back the way you’ve been doing, poor girl? We’d — ” But Carrie pulled her hand away from his. He did not attempt to take it again.

How can I explain to him, thought Carrie despairingly, that it’s all tied up with money, and that if you don’t have money, a lot of money, the world will tear your throat out and destroy you? She said, “Perhaps I haven’t explained it properly, Tom. It was because that doctor thought I had no money, and that’s what frightened me.”

Tom nodded understandingly. He knew what it was not to have money. But he could not know how money affected Caroline, for he had not lived her life and had not had her father as his own.

He said, “I won’t let anything ever hurt you again, Carrie, or at least I’ll try. You’ve had to stand too much. But now there are only you and me. Let’s go on from there, shall we?”

Caroline wanted to believe that Tom understood and that she had come to a safe place. She put her head again on his shoulder and cried, huddled in the warmth of his arms.

She said, “Tom, I must go to New York the day after tomorrow to see my father’s lawyers again — Tandy, Harkness and Swift. My father owned fifty-one percent of Broome and Company stock. Did you ever hear of it? No? It doesn’t matter. There’s a frightful old woman — Mrs. Broome — she will be there; there is going to be a discussion. Tom! I don’t want anything more to do with her kind of people, here or in Europe or anywhere!”

“Good,” said Tom warmly. He had only a faint idea that Caroline was about to withdraw from her father’s associates and friends. The ramifications and enormous enterprises behind Caroline’s fortune were unknown to him. He had been reading of trusts and monopolies in the newspapers. He did not connect Caroline at all with trusts and monopolies and cartels, which were the preoccupations of unhuman and faceless giants in top hats, Prince Albert coats, and striped trousers (as shown by cartoonists). Caroline had a lot of money; he was aware of that. But the source of that money was nebulous to him. His farthest journeys had been to Boston and the small towns along the coast, and his direct small contacts were with little lumber mills, brick manufacturers, and slate dealers.

“I am also going to conduct my father’s fleet of ships and clippers in a legal fashion,” said Caroline. “It’s what he’d want me to do.”

“Legal?” murmured Tom abstractedly, kissing her cheek. Then he laughed. “Keep a little boat for us! Mine is about done.” He paused and said again with more alertness, “Legal? What do you mean?”

Caroline, without feeling in the slightest that she was betraying her father, told him. Tom blinked, incredulous. He knew the world of small evil; the monster world was still beyond his understanding or acceptance. He felt the sea wind on his throat and bare arms and he was suddenly cold. Was it possible that in free and honorable America there were actually such men as John Ames who could buy governmental officials, who could bribe higher and presumably better than ordinary human beings in portions of lofty office? But Caroline was naming men with whose names Tom was familiar through the newspapers, and she spoke of them casually. She spoke of the White House, the State Department, in the tones of one who knew them well. This stunned Tom. For the first time he was afraid.

“Or I’ll sell the shipping business,” said Caroline.

My God, thought Tom simply.

He said, “Carrie, did you really meet President Hayes?”

She was surprised. “Why, certainly, Tom, many times.” Her voice was weary. “I’ve told you. We had dinner with him on several occasions in the White House.” She waited, then said timidly, “Is something the matter, Tom?”

He squeezed her hand. After a moment he asked, “I wonder if the President knew what and who your father carried on his ships, and what countries he dealt with.”

“I don’t know,” said Caroline. “But nothing mattered to the people in Washington. It was just money. Papa supported Mr. Hayes before and after he was elected.”

Tom lit his pipe with uncertain and fumbling fingers. The world was not simply composed of a few undeniably evil men and many undeniably good men. It was not composed almost entirely of men who loved and honored their country, as he, Tom, had believed. He thought of himself bitterly as a provincial numskull, a fool, an ignoramus. He had actually believed, in his stupid simplicity, that in spite of a few incompetent rascals the men who controlled his government were of the race of the Founding Fathers. America’s integrity, honor, and courage were beyond question. Now something more terrible than the account Caroline had given him of the people she had met abroad struck Tom’s dazed mind.

“Is something the matter?” Caroline repeated with more timidity.

“My God,” said Tom aloud. Then he put his arms tightly about the girl. “I’ll take you away from all that,” he said. “You can’t have anything more to do with it, Carrie,” he said.

“No, never again,” said Caroline, and kissed his cheek like a child. “Tom, you’ll go with me to New York? You’ll help me?”

Tom could not help it, but he cringed. He saw himself in his coarse country clothing lumbering beside Caroline in an elegant office, face to face with the pale countenance of evil, face to face with smooth enemies. What would they think of him?

“You’ll help me!” cried Caroline.

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Tom.

It was very dark. A lighthouse blinked, faded, blinked again. A gull cried in the night. It was very dark.

Tom’s father died that night in his sleep. He had not made a sound. Tom was sitting in the little parlor of the house; his father’s bedroom door was slightly open, but Tom heard nothing. He had sat there until dawn, thinking with growing fear of what Caroline had told him, thinking of Caroline herself, and wondering in despair how it would be to be her husband. He smoked, let his pipe grow cold, then relit it. He went into the dark kitchen for a drink of water. He stood there looking out into the rustling night, thinking, thinking. I never even thought! he told himself with disgust. It was just Carrie, the little girl I’d known since I was twelve. Then he thought of Caroline clinging to him on the boulder, and her mournful kisses and her trust and her tears. He shook his head and groaned softly and went back to sit and smoke and think.

Would love be enough for Caroline? Would she actually be content to live in the small house he had designed for her? He must ask her to consider everything. He must try to show her exactly what he was and what she could expect. For the very first time he saw the power of her fortune. It was stupid, he said to himself, to chatter that it meant nothing at all. He considered his own little and uncertain income. Would Caroline expect more from him than that? She was the mistress of one of the mightiest fortunes in the world. He looked down at his worn trousers, his worn workman’s boots, his calloused hands. Why should Caroline love him? It seemed impossible that a Caroline Ames could love a Tom Sheldon. A sick premonition grew in him as the first shadowy light of dawn and the first blue shadow touched the parlor windows.

He would talk to his father. He trusted old Thomas. I should have talked with him years ago, thought Tom, rising wearily to go into the kitchen to grind the breakfast coffee and cut the breakfast bacon. How was he to explain to old Thomas? His father would stare at him with his faded eyes and then he would say — What would he say? “That I am a shambling country fool,” said Tom, working the handle of the kitchen pump. “I must have known that all the time, and that’s why I never told him about Carrie.”

He built a fire in the stove and put the blue granite coffeepot on it, and then the iron skillet. Long shafts of rose and green lifted in the east. Tom went to call his father just when the bacon began to splutter. But his father was serenely dead.