A Prologue To Love (47 page)

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 under 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.

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.

Cynthia had arrived at the Bothwell house three days before Christmas with her young son. Her bright hair was so expertly dyed that it was not obvious; she still had her fine figure and her eyes were still lovely and brightly gray. She was a little over sixty, but in a good light and in her wonderful clothes she could have passed for a woman in her late forties.

But since the tragedy she had suddenly aged. Lines webbed her face; her mouth sagged; her nose was pinched. Her whole body became limp and bent. The dyed hair was a travesty now above fallen cheeks, wrinkled brow, and livid color.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “I still can’t believe it. What are we going to do about poor Melinda? She seems sightless and deaf and hardly alive. She doesn’t notice her children. She didn’t seem to be present, really, at the funeral services. When I touch her or try to comfort her, she only shivers and draws away. Of course she’s in a state of shock, but I can see that the doctor is worried. I do wish she would go to the Bothwell house in Boston for a while. I suggested she go to England with me, but I don’t think she even heard. What shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Timothy. “But after all, she’s still young. She’ll get over it in time.”

Cynthia sipped her brandy, cried a little, then wiped her eyes. While she was doing this, Timothy was doing some hard and disagreeable thinking. Old Harper Bothwell had been a lawyer; he had constantly urged his clients to review their wills frequently in the light of new circumstances. But lawyers were notorious about neglecting their own affairs. Harper had not made a new will in spite of the marriages of his son and daughter. It had been a short will: he had no one but Alfred and Amanda, and he had made provisions in behalf of a few proper charities. So he had left his enormous fortune to be divided equally between Alfred, his adopted son, and Amanda, provided both survived him. There had been no mention of grandchildren or surviving spouses of his own children. If Alfred died before Amanda or if she died before Alfred, prior to the death of Harper Bothwell, the entire fortune was to be given to the survivor. His whole will had been based on the assumption that his heirs would be alive on his death.

If, therefore, in that wreck it could have been assumed that Alfred had died before his father, his inheritance would have passed to Amanda. But there were many witnesses to the fact that Harper was dead when the rescuers reached him and that his son was still alive and had survived almost one hour longer. Therefore, he had inherited fifty percent of Harper’s fortune, unconscious and dying though he had been, and Alfred had made his own will two years before, leaving all he had in trust to his widow for life, his children to inherit after her death. Timothy knew that Tom Sheldon’s insistence, courage, and desperation had inspired the exhausted rescuers to tear apart the small last portion of the coach. They had wanted to wait for morning; there were no cries or any evidence of life in the remaining section. But Tom had insisted.

“If someone’s badly hurt and unconscious in there he could die before morning. We have to go on.” They did, burned and bloodstained though they were, and they had found Alfred still breathing, still alive. It was too late to save his life, if there had been any hope at all. But he had, by that short space of time, inherited his share of his father’s money.

Tom Sheldon and others had made their affidavits only yesterday. If it had not been for Tom, Timothy knew, all would have gone to Amanda, for Alfred would not have been found alive. Timothy had hated Tom before; he hated him now with an insane hatred. It was not as though Melinda would have been penniless if Alfred had not remained alive long enough to inherit. Timothy had taken care of her investments; the money left to her by her father had doubled; Alfred himself had had considerable money of his own, bequeathed to him by his dead parents, which was now Melinda’s. Moreover, Timothy more than suspected that the greater part of his mother’s money would be left to her daughter. Melinda, without the money which Amanda, Timothy’s wife, would have inherited in full, would have been a very rich woman.

The years of his marriage and his fatherhood had not reduced Timothy’s love for his sister. In fact, he did not often think of his blood connection with her. She was still his love; he could never see her without longing and pain. Nevertheless, he had wanted his wife to receive the full Bothwell fortune, which he would have managed and controlled. While his mother cried tonight he wondered whom he hated more, Caroline or Tom. He did not want them dead; he wanted them ruined and beggared, by himself. The Gargoyle would then know who had done this to her. There was no gratitude in Timothy; he had used Caroline, and she had benefited him, but he considered that he had served her well while he had served himself.