A Prologue to Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Prologue To Love

  Publishing Information

  Author Page

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part 5

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  A Prologue To Love

  by

  Taylor Caldwell

  Publishing Information

  A Prologue To Love

  by Taylor Caldwell

  Copyright © 1961

  Copyright renewed

  mobi digital edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by eNet Press Inc.

  16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034

  Digitized in the United States of America in 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  www.enetpress.com

  Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com

  ISBN 978-1-61886-421-5

  Author Page

  Taylor Caldwell, christened Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell, was born in Manchester, England on September 7, 1900, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve! (although it remained unpublished until 1975). She continued to write prolifically, however, despite ill health.

  Taylor Caldwell was also known by the pen names of Marcus Holland and Max Reiner as well as her married name of J. Miriam Reback. Her works include Dear and Glorious Physician, a novel detailing the exploits of Saint Luke, The Listener, written about a mysterious altruistic individual who lends an ear where it is needed, and Dynasty of Death, a saga about a family of munitions makers.

  In 1918-1919, she served in the United States Navy Reserve. In 1919 she married William F. Combs. In 1920, they had a daughter, Mary (known as ‘Peggy’). From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York. In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo. In 1931 she graduated from the University of Buffalo, and also was divorced from William Combs.

  Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, a fellow Justice employee. She had a second child with Reback, a daughter Judith, in 1932. They were married for 40 years, until his death in 1971.

  In 1934, she began to work on the novel Dynasty of Death, which she and Reback completed in collaboration. It was published in 1938 and became a best-seller. ‘Taylor Caldwell’ was presumed to be a man, and there was some public stir when the author was revealed to be a woman. Over the next 43 years, she published 42 more novels, many of them best-sellers. For instance, This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Her works sold an estimated 30 million copies. She became wealthy, traveling to Europe and elsewhere, though she still lived near Buffalo.

  Her books were big sellers right up to the end of her career. In 1979, she signed a two-novel deal for $3.9 million. During her career as a writer, she received several awards: The National League of American Pen Women gold medal (1948); The Buffalo Evening News Award (1949); The Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).

  She was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society’s monthly journal American Opinion. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion.

  Around 1970, she became interested in reincarnation. She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives. Supposedly, she agreed to be hypnotized and undergo ‘past-life regression’ to disprove reincarnation. According to Stearn’s book, The Search of a Soul - Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives (1973), Caldwell instead began to recall her own past lives - eleven in all, including one on the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria.

  In 1972, she married William Everett Stancell, a retired real estate developer, but divorced him in 1973. In 1978, she married William Robert Prestie, an eccentric Canadian 17 years her junior. This led to difficulties with her children. She had a long dispute with her daughter Judith over the estate of Judith’s father Marcus; in 1979, Judith committed suicide. Also in 1979, Caldwell suffered a stroke, which left her unable to speak, though she could still write. (She had been deaf since about 1965.) Her daughter Peggy accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell, and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.

  She died of heart failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985.

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  1938 DYNASTY OF DEATH

  1940 THE EAGLES GATHER

  1941 THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan

  1941 TIME NO LONGER

  1942 THE STRONG CITY

  1943 THE ARM AND THE DARKNESS

  1943 THE TURNBULLS

  1944 THE FINAL HOUR

  1945 THE WIDE HOUSE

  1946 THIS SIDE OF INNOCENCE

  1947 THERE WAS A TIME

  1948 MELISSA

  1949 LET LOVE COME LAST

  1951 THE BALANCE WHEEL

  1952 THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

  1953 MAGGIE - HER MARRIAGE

  1954 NEVER VICTORIOUS, NEVER DEFEATED

  1955 YOUR SINS AND MINE

  1956 TENDER VICTORY

  1957 THE SOUND OF THUNDER

  1959 DEAR AND GLORIOUS PHYSICIAN

  1960 THE LISTENER

  1961 A PROLOGUE TO LOVE

  1963 GRANDMOTHER AND THE PRIESTS

  1963 THE LATE CLARA BEAME

  1965 A PILLAR OF IRON

  1965 WICKED ANGEL

  1966 NO ONE HEARS BUT HIM

  1967 DIALOGUES WITH THE DEVIL

  1968 TESTIMONY OF TWO MEN

  1970 GREAT LION OF GOD

  1971 ON GROWING UP TOUGH

  1972 CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS

  1973 TO LOOK AND PASS

  1974 GLORY AND
THE LIGHTNING

  1975 ROMANCE OF ATLANTIS (with Jess Stearn)

  1976 CEREMONY OF THE INNOCENT

  1977 I, JUDAS (with Jess Stearn)

  1978 BRIGHT FLOWS THE RIVER

  1980 ANSWER AS A MAN

  Dedication

  For Bernard and Ida Welt

  *****

  It is not possible for us to know each other except as we

  manifest ourselves in distorted shadows to the eyes of others.

  We do not even know ourselves; therefore, why should we judge a neighbor?

  Who knows what pain is behind virtue and what fear behind vice?

  No one, in short, knows what makes a man, and only

  God knows his thoughts, his joys, his bitternesses, his agony,

  the injustices committed against him and the injustices he commits.

  . . . God is too inscrutable for our little understanding.

  After sad meditation it comes to me that all that lives,

  whether good or in error, mournful or joyous, obscure or of gilded reputation,

  painful or happy, is only a prologue to love beyond the grave,

  where all is understood and almost all forgiven.

  Seneca

  Part 1

  Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth . . .

  Ecclesiastes

  Chapter 1

  The child sat on a large black boulder and looked at the sea, and she was all alone under a sky the color of smoke and beside waters as angry as an intemperate man and grayer than death.

  Gulls cried piercingly as they swirled in the harsh wind and dived to the leaden crests of the waves and threw themselves upward again as if despairing. Though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon of a late September day, the bitter air threatened winter, and there was no sun, only a pale silver blur in the gaseous heavens. There was no sound but the furious thunder of the ocean hurling itself on the dark and gleaming sand, the gulls, and the wind which assaulted the tall and dying clumps of sea grass on the dunes behind the child. Water and sky appeared to mingle together without a horizon; the gusts of wind lifted the child’s braids and blew wisps over her poor coat. But the child did not move; she huddled on her stone. It was as if she were waiting mournfully yet eagerly, as a woman waits for the return of her lover who has been long gone from her sight. She was unaware of her cold hands, which were reddened and without gloves, and of her cold feet in shabby buttoned boots, and her icy knees covered meagerly with darned black stockings. Occasionally she absently pulled the shawl about her neck and huddled deeper in her coat, which was too small for her. Nothing lived in that wild scene but the child and the gulls, and only the gulls moved. A long time had passed. The lonely girl, ten years old, waited with a vast patience beyond the patience of children, and her eyes never left the sea and her ears heard nothing but the savage voice of the tumultuous waters.

  A considerable distance behind the child stood a very old and wind-scarred wooden house, tall and battered, its fretted woodwork sagging, its narrow windows unlighted except for a feeble lamp in the main room downstairs, its broken steps rough with blown sand, its chimneys without smoke but for one at the east end. The shingles on the roof curled. There were no gardens, no trees about the house, and only the sea grass in sandy clumps. The house stood alone, without neighbors, on a slight rise surrounded by outbuildings as dilapidated as itself, and with a tiny shanty behind it. An atmosphere of desolation and extreme poverty hung over the house like a mist, and an air of abandonment. Each surge of the wind beating on the gray and pock-marked walls threatened to blow the wretched building down, to scatter it on the sandy earth, there to be buried by the veils of sand streaming in the gale.

  Two women, one very old, one middle-aged, sat by the only fire in the house, in the parlor. But the fire was of driftwood, thriftily gathered each day, and it smoked and burned fitfully. One single lamp, burning kerosene of a particularly bad odor, lighted the long and narrow room, which was furnished with miserable sticks of furniture as poor as the house itself, and as old. The floor was covered with a straw rug which had long lost its color; the few tables and chairs were splintered and unpolished, for they had been made of rough wood never stained or varnished. The wind entered here through cracks never mended, and the flame in the plain oil lamp flickered. The wood smoldered in the fireplace, which was built of stones gathered from the shore.

  The women shivered. The old woman’s cheap black dress was covered with a number of afghans, and her thin shoulders by shawls which sent out an odor of peppermint and age and mold. She sat very close to the fire, holding out her hands to the vague heat and muttering under her breath discontentedly. Her face, in the uncertain light, had a kindly yet predatory expression, wise and disillusioned, with a touch of hard humor in the lines of her wrinkled and sunken mouth. The eyes, black and small, had an unusually sharp and youthful glance, which never overlooked anything. Her untidy white hair was heaped over her forehead; her big-knuckled hands were blue from chill. While she warmed them she rocked in the only rocker in the room, and the creaking sound was like a complaint. She chewed red-striped peppermint candies which she kept in a bag on her knees.

  The younger woman was dressed more neatly; her gray woolen dress with its tight bodice and full draped skirt was old and carefully mended, but it fitted her fine and buxom figure as if made of the best satin. Her curled hair was ruddy, her manner vivacious as she set a table for a meager supper — the dining room, dark and somber, was too cold to be used today. Her face, round and pink, was both intelligent and good-tempered, and her blue eyes, alert and friendly, occasionally glanced at the old woman. Then her pink mouth would quirk, and one of her reddish eyebrows would raise. She often seemed about to speak; then, as if vexed, she would rattle a cracked plate made of the cheapest ironware, white and without a pattern. A kettle sluggishly began to hiss on the fire.

  “I don’t care!” said the younger woman with a defiant lift of her plump shoulders. “I’m going to make myself some tea to warm up a little! You can have one cup with me, Kate, and don’t grumble about the waste again. I’m tired of all this.”

  “Well, if you’re that tired, why don’t you leave, Beth?” asked the older woman, splintering a peppermint deftly with her false teeth.

  Beth went to the sand-dusty window and looked at the child at a distance, sitting there motionless on the boulder. The woman grumbled, shaking her head as if exasperated by her own weakness. She said angrily, “Because of Carrie, and you know it.”

  “That little monster is nothing to you,” said old Kate, and rocked as if laughing internally. “If I was in your place I wouldn’t stay because of her. No sir. Not that I don’t like the kid; maybe I don’t. But I promised her mother I’d stay, and it’s all arranged; was arranged a long time ago.” She sighed. “You’d never believe it, looking at Carrie, but her mother was a beauty, pretty as a painting, with yellow hair and big gray eyes and a lovely figure.” Kate’s voice held a hint of her early girlhood in the Midlands of England. “Best of all, she had a beautiful soul.” She cackled. “And better than all else, she had a lot of money. He got it, of course. There were some said he married her for her money. Maybe. But I think he cared for her too. Now, now, don’t go romantic on me again, Beth!”

  Beth came back to the fire, her blue eyes bright with curiosity. “He’s still got the money, hasn’t he? He isn’t the kind to spend anything, God knows. Some say he’s rich — ”

  Kate cackled again and rubbed her hands. “Never listen to strangers and the foolish gab they talk. As for me, I keep my own counsel.” She looked at Beth shrewdly. “Living here like this every summer, and then in that house in Lyndon, would you say he was rich? It’s bad enough here in Lyme; it’s worse in Lyndon in the winter. Colder than death, with hardly any fires, and the snow about like mountains. Would you say a rich gent would live like that, eh, Beth?”

  “Not in my book, he wouldn’t,” said Beth vigorously. She paused, her big plump finger o
n her plump lips. “Yet he’s always in Europe, sailing or steaming away months in the year. Must have business in those foreign places. Poor men don’t have business anywhere.”

  “Hum,” said Kate. “Well, I’ll have a cup of tea with you; always did like a nice cup of tea, though most times we have to buy it out of our own pockets when the can runs low — which it always does. You buy the tea this time, Beth?”