A Prologue To Love (49 page)

In the pursuit of what was now the most precious thing to her but which was not yet attainable because she was still too young and had no fortune of her own, Elizabeth could doggedly put William Lord Halnes out of her mind when necessary in the pursuit of first things. As she listened to her mother’s weeping behind the locked door of the gallery she did not think of William consciously at all. She started when she heard Caroline unlock the door. Usually she was warned by approaching footsteps and could then flash into her own room or appear artlessly at the head of the stairs. She was not warned now. Her quick wits rescued her. She coughed loudly and repeatedly. The door opened and Caroline confronted her, majestic, frowning.

“What is it?” asked Caroline roughly. “What are you doing, Elizabeth?”

“I was just going into my room, Mother, and then I thought I heard you talking, or something, and I thought you might be sick.” She stared pointedly at her mother’s reddened eyes, and it was Caroline now, and not she, who was on the defensive.

“Nonsense,” said Caroline. She frowned again. “Didn’t I hear you cough? Are you catching cold?”

“No. It’s only the dust,” said Elizabeth with a slight and meaning smile.

“What dust?” asked Caroline irritably. She looked down the long hall. “These servants. They never do their work properly.” She was closing the door behind her.

Then Elizabeth said, “Mother, I know you have some wonderful paintings in the gallery. I’d like to see them. Truly I would.” She was curious to know what had made her mother cry in ‘Bluebeard’s Cabinet’. The information might be valuable someday. She looked at Caroline with large and innocent eyes. Caroline smiled tightly.

“Would you? I doubt it, Elizabeth.” She hesitated, then pushed back the door. She paused. “A moment.” She partly closed the door, moved quickly into the room. Elizabeth tried to peer through the crack but could see nothing but her mother’s rusty black skirt. Caroline came to the door and said, “Come in, then.”

Elizabeth entered and looked curiously about the long, well-lighted room. Here, at least, all was immaculate, the floor polished, the walls painted blue, the wide windows well washed and uncurtained. But it was very cold and very still. There were no seats except for a single straight-backed wooden chair. The walls held several paintings of good size; one of them faced the wall.

Elizabeth moved slowly from picture to picture, examining in silence, and she thought: What hideous daubs! What impossible colors! What distortions! You’d never see anything like this in the Boston Museum or at Miss Stockington’s. I suppose this is what they call modern painting. No wonder our house is so dreadful and unkempt; Mother has no taste at all for anything, otherwise she would never have bought these horrors. But she said she paid twenty thousand dollars for one! Why? All that money! She has no right to waste our inheritance so!

Caroline was standing near one of the windows, watching her daughter. She waited in silence for the girl’s verdict; she saw the serious, considering profile. Then Elizabeth turned her face to her mother, and the cold wintry light shone unshadowed upon it and Caroline saw her father’s face, with every plane and color and expression reproduced in the younger, softer lines of femininity. A strong shock ran through her. She put her hands beside her, against the wall, as if to support herself.

Elizabeth looked at her mother and saw only a woman of nearly forty-five, broad, tall, impressive, with a crown of graying braids and an impassive wide face with large and brooding hazel eyes. She saw only a woman she thought excessively ugly, a little grimy, unfashionable in her old black bombazine with the raveled hem that swept the floor, too big of breast, too wide of shoulder. The dark skin was not lightened by any color on cheek or on sullen, heavy lip. Elizabeth stood again before the painting of the tower and pretended to be absorbed in it, for this was one her mother had mentioned in her monologue.

“Well?” said Caroline at last. Elizabeth turned to her mother again and saw a peculiar change on her mother’s face, a searching look.

“Strange,” murmured Elizabeth. She searched her mind for phrases she had overheard in the Boston Museum. “Authentic drawing. Brilliant color. Disturbing realism. Passionate realization.” These phrases had meant nothing to Elizabeth, but her mind had stored them up for use in the future, and she could use them now.

“Oh. Yes,” said Caroline. “I didn’t know you would understand, Elizabeth.” The girl’s acute ear heard gratitude and surprise. She smiled in herself with satisfaction.

“I’ve seen something like this before,” said Elizabeth, and then she remembered; three years ago, when she had been in the Bothwell house, old Harper had commented about a painting he had over his Adam mantelpiece. “New dimension. Not lithographic or reproduction of obviousness. Emotion, power, intensity.”

Caroline said quickly, “You saw something like this before? By the same artist? Where, Elizabeth!”

She left the window and approached Elizabeth rapidly, and then she did a thing she had never done before. She put her hand on the girl’s thin shoulder and pressed it, and bent a little to look into that suddenly beloved face, so like her own father’s. Elizabeth’s first fastidious impulse — for she hated to be touched by anyone — was to recoil, but her calculating mind kept her still and even made her shoulder less stiff.

“Why, in old Mr. Harper Bothwell’s house. A marvelous painting of a mountain and a blind man staggering among a lot of boulders. The artist was a David Ames. I asked Mr. Bothwell about it; he said he was no relation to us, just the same name. I was fascinated by the painting, Mother. Mr. Bothwell said there were only about thirty in the world now.” She smiled at her mother with John Ames’ own smile, and an expression of pain appeared about Caroline’s eyes.

Caroline said in a low voice, “I thought I knew them all. Your cousin Timothy owns the Bothwell house now. It’s strange he never spoke of that painting.” She looked away. “I must have it. Is it still there?”

“No. Cousin Timothy didn’t like it for some unknown reason. He took it down; I don’t know where it is now. It wasn’t there the last time I visited them.” What had Cousin Timothy said? “Repulsive. Disgusting. My father-in-law certainly had a low taste, for a well-bred Bostonian.” Elizabeth said, shrugging delicately, “I do love Cousin Timothy. But he has no feeling for art, I am afraid.”

The paintings on the wall glowed and glimmered like jewels, like windows opening into strange and exotic worlds of passion and color, of delight and splendor, of terror. Caroline looked at them, and her lips trembled. She would offer Timothy anything he wanted for the picture Amanda had inherited and which he had despised. Had he sold it? No matter. She, Caroline, would trace it to the ends of the world. She had a disturbing thought. Timothy always knew the value of everything. It was not possible that he did not know that a David Ames canvas was invaluable. He must have sold it.

Elizabeth said in an awed voice, “I love them all, these paintings. But the one I love most is this picture of the tower, Mother.”

“Why?” asked Caroline, and leaned toward her daughter.

Elizabeth’s mind clicked with mechanical precision as it sorted out what she had heard her mother say of this particular painting. She said, “I think it has a quality of awfulness, Mother. Perhaps even a little frightful. Ominous, in a way, perhaps even threatening. Like a warning.” She added the last through a prompting of her immense intuition. “And yet, when you look at it, it is as though the artist closed a door in your face — to protect himself too.”

“Oh yes!” cried Caroline. She swirled swiftly to her daughter and now put both hands on those young shoulders and could not know the satisfied contempt in Elizabeth’s heart. “Oh, Elizabeth! You are sixteen, and I never knew what you really are! I’m so sorry.” The stress of her emotion, her joy, her craving for understanding, made her pull the girl to her breast and hug her desperately.

Elizabeth, standing still in her mother’s embrace, contracted her nostrils so as not to breathe in too much of the odor of old bombazine, of the odor of her mother’s disturbed flesh. It was a real agony for the young girl to be held so tightly by anyone, but she controlled herself. She even put her slender arms about her mother and made her voice murmur consolingly, as she had heard Melinda murmur to her children. Caroline’s tears ran down the smooth light brown head and the fragile temple.

“Oh, Elizabeth,” said Caroline, and her wretched heart expanded and she was full of love and craven gratitude.

If one picture was worth twenty thousand dollars, thought Elizabeth, enduring an embrace that sickened her, how much more were the others worth? She said, “I couldn’t bear it, Mother, if you left these wonderful paintings to anyone but me. Who would care for them but me?”

But Caroline, timidly kissing her daughter’s cheek, was thinking: If I was so mistaken about Elizabeth, perhaps I’ve been mistaken, too, about my sons. I have thought of them only as my heirs, to protect Papa’s money. Perhaps I was wrong.

If Caroline, in her simplicity, was doing some innocent thinking, her daughter, standing in the center of her chill and ascetic room, was also doing some very uninnocent thinking. Like her grandfather, she had marvelous powers of induction and deduction when it was a matter concerning her own profit. She had moved and reached her mother for the first time, and it had been her deliberate doing; she had seen the final indecision and wonderment on Caroline’s face and had come to a very intelligent conclusion. There was no time to waste. Elizabeth, moving in her fleet and silent fashion, went to John’s room and knocked on the door. No one knocked on his door except his father, and so he thought it was Tom and did not answer. So Elizabeth said, “It is I, John. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Oh, you would,” he grunted. “Well, come in. You know the way. You never knocked before.” So Elizabeth turned the knob and came into the large warm room. She looked at the fire distastefully. “What a furnace,” she remarked. The room was very untidy; open books sprawled on every chair and even on the floor and bed. John was a fairly good student at Harvard and very popular with faculty and fellow classmates, for not only was he very athletic, but he had a burly good nature which deceived many. It was only at home that he permitted himself to be himself. He said to Elizabeth, “If you don’t like the heat, just go away. Well, Miss Snoop, what are you looking for now?”

It was no secret to Elizabeth’s brothers that she listened to everything. This amused Ames; it did not amuse John. She looked at John now with her gelid blue eyes and said icily, “I’m not looking for anything.” She sniffed the dust in the room, saw the tangled and crumpled draperies which had once been soft and colorful.

“You never do anything without a reason,” said John. “Well? What is it?”

Elizabeth sat down stiffly on the edge of one chair, pushing aside the books. She considered her brother meditatively, his broad strength, his highly colored good looks. Caroline’s features in her son were attractive. John narrowed his hazel eyes at his sister. “Thinking of lending me the ten dollars I asked you about this morning?”

“Did you ask Father?”

He grunted in disgust. “Of course I did. And he said my allowance was more than enough, with what he slipped me over and above Ma’s pittance. What’s the matter with the old man? Is he becoming a miser too?”

“Mother’s not a miser,” said Elizabeth. “I know everybody thinks so, but she isn’t.”

“What is she, then?” asked John with more disgust.

Elizabeth knew, but she did not intend to tell her brother. She made her voice soft. “She just doesn’t know how to live. We’ve been no help to her at all.”

“See who wants to be helpful to anybody!” jeered John. But he leaned back in his chair, and he was so big and heavy that the substantial piece of furniture creaked. “Well. If she won’t spend a cent unless she has to, practically at the point of a gun, and lives like a dog and would like us all to live like dogs and thinks of nothing but getting money, what else is she but a miser? Tell me that.”

“I told you. She doesn’t know how to live. I’ve learned a few things from ‘snooping’, as you meanly call it. Her father made her live in poverty; she went to Miss Stockington’s, and she’s quite a legend there. All the girls had three uniforms for the winter; Mother had only one, and she was usually out of elbows by the end of the second term. She took horse cars; there was rarely any carriage for her. She had the smallest of allowances. She never had any luxury or pleasure or the pretty things that most other girls have. She never made her debut, never had a ball given for her, never knew anyone worth knowing. Why, the poorest girl at Miss Stockington’s lived like a princess compared with Mother.”

“Um,” said John. “She didn’t have much spirit, did she? I’ve heard some things too.” He smiled slyly. “I had a bad time the first year at Harvard; fellows kept throwing it up to me how Ma practically murdered those people who died in the North Shore wreck four years ago. Their families and the Bothwells were all good friends, and there was no good will for Ma after that, and even the big suits Ma had to settle out of court didn’t satisfy them. But I finally convinced the fellows that though Caroline Ames is my mother I wasn’t formed in the same image.”

Elizabeth smiled in herself. She said seriously, “John, Mother needs our help. She needs to be shown why you, at Harvard, have to have more money. What does she know about how much a young man needs over and above his actual expenses? She wouldn’t want people to despise you. You don’t have the clothes the other men at Harvard have; you have to travel on streetcars; you have no money with which to entertain. Did you ever try to explain it to her?”

John grunted. He twisted a pencil in his hand, his big black head bent. He did not trust his sleek and beautiful sister, but he reminded himself that Elizabeth had a lot of sense and acuteness. But why should such a selfish piece care about his needs and his craving for luxury and splendid living and spending?

He said, “Why are you interested in my personal affairs all at once, Lizzie?”

“Don’t call me that,” she said sharply. Then she made herself smile again. “Why am I interested? Isn’t it obvious? I’m sixteen; I’ll be a member of the Assemblies; I’ll make my debut. I have Father’s promise on all that, you can be sure. But Mother’s reputation for closeness is well known. Now, if she can be shown how to live and what we actually need, she’ll loosen up the purse strings. Even more important, you are at Harvard and you meet eligible young men, young men I want to meet in the future. Under circumstances as they are now, I may never meet the right men. I’ll have to take anything at all.”

“Like Ma did,” said John, grinning nastily.

“Certainly,” said Elizabeth at once. “Do you think anyone with any self-respect, even a thrifty Bostonian, would have married Mother as she was in those days? Of course not. I don’t intend to make a poor marriage. I need your help. You can’t give it to me unless you have the money to entertain, as other young men at Harvard do. You won’t be able to interest your friends in me, as your only sister, unless they can be sure I’ll have some money of my own.

“Mother doesn’t know anything about our needs. After all, she is our mother, and she does care for us in her way. I’m not her favorite; if anyone is, you are. She would listen to you. She’s in her study now. Why don’t you go in and have a frank talk with her?”

“And after all these generalities of yours, what shall I actually tell her?”

“That you want to live. That you want money to spend as easily as other young men spend it. That it is perfectly fine to save, but it is much better to spend. She doesn’t know about it. Tell her.”