A Prologue to Love Page 6

  The golden-red sunshine of the October day brought out flecks of dull crimson on the backs of the heavy lawbooks lined against the mahogany paneling of the office. A scarlet fire whispered and rustled on a black marble hearth; the black and green leather chairs looked very comfortable. A large window looked out upon the street, which clattered with traffic. A lamplighter was already beginning his scuttling rounds outside, though the sun still stood like an enormous bloated red moon high in the west. Mr. Bothwell carried the papers to his steel safe in a corner, which was concealed by a pierced Chinese screen of black teakwood inlaid with ivory.

  Mr. Bothwell, a short wide man, had never been able to overcome the rolling waddle of his sturdy Irish father. He sat down behind his desk and peered beamingly over his glasses at John Ames, who sat stiffly and coldly, and at Cynthia, so luscious in her sable jacket, her sable hat and her sable muff, and her dark blue woolen frock. Her gleaming curls lay on the rich fur about her throat. But it was at John Ames that Mr. Bothwell looked the closest. Damned if the man didn’t look like one of those English aristocrats! Yet everyone knew he was an enormously rich nobody. Mr. Bothwell chuckled.

  “This is a very fine thing, John, a very fine thing!” he said in a ripe voice. “There aren’t many brothers-in-law who would do so much for a dead wife’s sister.” He fingered the big black pearl in his cravat; his fat thighs swelled against the broadcloth that covered them as he lay back in his chair unctuously.

  “One does one’s best,” said John coldly.

  One could always recognize the plebeian by his addiction to meaningless platitudes, thought Mr. Bothwell.

  “John,” said Cynthia demurely, though her eye sparkled, “is very punctilious about duty. Isn’t he a love?”

  “Heh, heh,” said Mr. Bothwell amiably. If there was anyone who looked less like a ‘love’ it was John Ames. John’s face was paler than usual, and there were grim corners about his mouth. He even gave Cynthia a formidable look. Mr. Bothwell began to wonder why he had voluntarily made this gift to Cynthia. “Shall we have a drop of sherry?” he asked with a fond glance at the young woman.

  “No,” said Cynthia. “You know very well, Uncle Carlton, that I hate sherry. Now, if you have some of that fine Scotch whiskey — ”

  “It just happens that I received a new shipment from Pierce’s today,” said Mr. Bothwell. He had been quite a beau in Boston and New York and appreciated a refined lustiness in women. There were too many sticks among the proper ladies in Boston. He opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a crystal decanter and three shining glasses.

  “None for me, thank you,” said John with another icily sullen look at Cynthia.

  “Sherry, then?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then it seems that Cynthia and I will have to toast each other alone,” said Mr. Bothwell. He smiled to himself. If that rigid Croesus thought that by his disapproval he would be able to quell Cynthia’s spirits, he was mistaken.

  The whiskey was delightful. Mr. Bothwell’s ruddy Irish color deepened. He relaxed even more in his chair. Cynthia drank expertly, not like a scrubwoman in one gulp, not like a squeamish lady who made a wry face, but with knowing approval. “I must order some of this,” she said. “Dear Uncle Carlton. You’re looking so well.”

  “The sea, you know,” said the lawyer with a wink. “I’m not the kind who takes his wife, in full dress, out on Bailey’s Beach at noon. I prefer a session with my friends in some quiet clubroom at the hotel. I do ride, you know, Cynthia, and I’m fond of a brisk walk all alone at night before retiring. What did you say, John? Excellent! Let me pour you a glass at once. Taste in whiskey, as in wines, is cultivated.”

  John Ames’ mouth tightened. Did the old rascal mean that as an insult?

  “I’m sorry you and Aunt Matilda can’t come tonight to my birthday party,” said Cynthia. “I’m making it quite a gala affair. Harper is coming too; I’ve always been so fond of Harper. And it’s so sad that he lives alone in that huge house, though it’s very beautiful, and with such a marvelous view of the river.”

  Mr. Bothwell smiled blandly at her. “Harper’s loneliness can be cured at any time,” he suggested. “He is waiting.”

  John Ames was thinking with dismay: A gala affair! He knew Cynthia’s extravagance. She was discreetly gazing at her muff.

  “I trust,” he said ironically, “that I am also invited, though I expected to leave for Lyndon very early tomorrow. And I know your parties, Cynthia. They usually last to dawn.”

  He was angry. He had expected, now that the matter of the trust fund had been concluded, that he would spend the night in Cynthia’s bed. He had been thinking of little else. He had wondered why he should feel so much emotion, so much terrible desire, so passionate and overwhelming an urge. Nevertheless, he considered her a woman without the proper decencies of women, a light-minded creature without solid values. He did not believe in the least now that wealthy men in Boston wanted to marry her and give her all she wished. That, he believed, was the tormenting goad she had applied to him, and it still stung. She was ungrateful and unscrupulous; she had brought him here under an aura of duty, for which he had nothing but loathing, and after robbing him she was dismissing him. He gripped the arms of his chair.

  Cynthia turned to him. Her beautiful eyes were very soft and tender; he did not see that. She said, “But, John dear, you simply can’t leave tomorrow! I have so much I want to say to you. Remember, I am alone, and you are all I have left in the world. Except Timothy,” she added with haste, thinking of her son.

  He stared at her with sudden penetration. He had totally forgotten, in these last few days while painful negotiations had been going on, that she had refused to marry him and that she had said she loved him.

  In her turn Cynthia was studying him also, and she could almost hear his thoughts. She smiled sadly to herself. Dear John. She would try to bring some joy to his stony life; in spite of himself, he enjoyed parts of her existence, though he objectively disapproved of them. When he had said to her, “I can’t live without you,” he had spoken more truth than he knew.

  He saw the warm promise in her eyes. He would not be cheated, then. Cynthia might have no morals or honor, but she had a gay way of fulfilling the minor obligations. Why had he been such a fool as to take her word for it that wealthy and distinguished men in Boston wanted her, she a penniless woman with a child? Wealthy men married wealth; they did not marry women with whom they had slept for nothing.

  Again he remembered that she had said she loved him. Cynthia was not a liar. He detested himself; she would have come to him without that money, wife or not a wife.

  They arrived at Cynthia’s house in the amber dusk of the autumn evening. A little sunlight remained; it fell redly on the burdens of crab apples weighting down the trees in the garden; the fiery fruit stood against the deep and polished blue of the October sky. A woman of responsibility would have had her servants garner all that incredibly lush fruit. But not Cynthia! She had said quite seriously that she preferred to leave it for the birds who did not migrate; she could get along very well without glasses upon glasses of crab-apple jelly in her cellars. “Can you imagine me eating such jelly on my hot muffins in the winter while the birds who do not desert us in the autumn are starving?” she had asked of him.

  John did not believe that any human being was of any value at all, except in so far as money was concerned. But he hated waste. As Cynthia tripped away to change he looked gloomily at the endless profusion of pink and scarlet fruit on the trees. She had not even picked the apples and pears along the gray stone wall at the rear! Sometimes she would eat a warm fruit in laughing apology to the damned birds. She had birdhouses on every tree and what she called ‘feeding shelves’ for the winter. As he watched the birds eating the fruit he thought of the night — after that damned gala affair. Her birthday! She was Ann’s twin; her birthday was really in April.

  This was only an excuse for the party. But there would be the night, o
r rather the dawn, after the party, and he began to feel very hot and his face flushed and became moist, and he wiped it carefully with his fine linen handkerchief. He had loved Ann. But this was something entirely different. It was baffling, infuriating, crushing, and, in its way, intolerable.

  He heard a stealthy footstep on the thick rug of the drawing room, almost a sliding footstep. He turned. Cynthia’s son Timothy stood on the other side of the fireplace, looking at him silently. Timothy was Caroline’s age, and up to the time of the trust fund John had thought of Timothy as a husband for his daughter. But the boy was now penniless, unless his mother saved some of the new money, which was very improbable indeed.

  Timothy was tall, and fair like his mother, and had her gray eyes. Considering that Timothy resembled Cynthia, it was surprising to John Ames that he did not like his nephew. He had many traits of which John approved. He was careful, neat, circumspect, quiet; he did not speak easily and laughed very seldom. There was a seriousness about him beyond his age, not the far solemnity of Carrie which infuriated her father, but a concentrated, adult seriousness. John knew that Timothy saved every penny he received as gifts. He had shown John, even at six, his big porcelain pig-bank. Once he had told John that he wanted to be just like his uncle. There had been respect and admiration in his gray eyes as he looked at John.

  John remembered that day last spring, as he stood looking at Timothy now. He remembered very acutely his sudden diffused revulsion, and then his sudden shocked awareness of his revulsion. Of course it had vanished almost instantly and had been replaced with approval. The boy had sensible values; he was no fool like his mother. Still, John disliked him.

  “How do you do, Timothy?” he asked in a formal voice. He felt restive.

  His thoughts did not fit the presence of a child whose mother he had just bought.

  Timothy had been well brought up in Boston. But then, his mother had been an Esmond, his father a Winslow. He said with the utmost balanced courtesy, “How do you do, Uncle John? And how is Caroline?” he asked, the question phrased in exquisite politeness; as if he cared a damn about Caroline, John commented to himself.

  “She is very well,” said John, still formal. Damn the boy. He made even men feel gauche and cumbersome. “How is school?”

  “Splendid,” said Timothy. His fair cheeks were faintly colored. He was very handsome and moved with grace. He bent and poked the fire, and his blond hair caught the light. There were no smudges on him, no griminess. When he looked up at John with deference, the eyes were almost his mother’s.

  “I have decided to be a lawyer,” said Timothy after he had fastidiously brushed up the hearth. “You remember, Uncle John, that you told me that even a boy should consider his future.”

  “But I thought you wanted to be a financier, Timothy.”

  Timothy smiled, a reserved and secret smile. “I think that I’ll be a lawyer for financiers,” he said.

  John thrust his hands into his pockets, a gesture he usually abhorred. But now it gave him a sense of lightness, of combativeness, of ease. He felt free.

  “Good,” he said, and did not mean it. He wished the boy would go. His presence was like something noxious in the room. His was not a clean ruthlessness. It reminded John of a place where quiet serpents lurked, of a place where discreet men talked in low voices, smoked expensive cigars, tried to outwit men like John Ames, and drank sherry and looked at each other with well-bred and evil glances, and had cuff links they had inherited from great-grandfathers. Oh yes, the Bourse, and the Reichsbank, and London. And of course St. Petersburg. But men like John Ames were not fooled by them and had weapons superior to theirs, forged of brutal iron.

  Timothy stood before John Ames, not stiffly or awkwardly as most young boys stand, but with an adult restraint and poise. John, all at once, was uneasily impressed by a kind of potency the boy had, a stillness. Timothy said, “I’ve been reading some of Uncle Carlton’s and Uncle Harper’s lawbooks. They brought them to me. Fundamentals of Law and Basic Law. I am also taking Latin in school.”

  His young voice had a dry precision in it, and John was reminded of the London, Boston, and New York lawyers he knew who spoke exactly with those intonations. There was a quick itch between John’s shoulders. The boy was definitely pernicious.

  “Good,” said John again. “But don’t boys in your school play cricket — and things?” He had not the slightest idea what well-to-do boys did in their exclusive private schools.

  “Yes. I am very good at those. Too,” said Timothy with a slight smile. “After all, the other boys will be my clients. They like me.”

  John said, “Well, grow up fast, Timothy. I may need you myself.”

  Why couldn’t the horrible boy smile as a boy smiled? Timothy did smile, but it was chill and accepting. He inclined his head. At that moment Cynthia rustled into the room, smiling. A faint frown wrinkled the smooth skin between her brows at the sight of her son, who bowed to her.

  “Dear me, Timothy,” she said. “I thought you were having your tea upstairs.”

  “I was going, Mother,” he replied. He looked at Cynthia, and it was as though something like glass moved invisibly over his young and handsome face. Cynthia hesitated, then she kissed him quickly and gave a slight push. This was intended to impress him with the fact that he was still a child; it was also an attempt on the part of Cynthia to hide her aversion and to assert her authority. Timothy ignored the push; he bowed to John, then again to his mother, and walked with a stately grace out of the room.

  “Dear me,” sighed Cynthia. “Everyone tells me he is a most extraordinary boy, so good, so intelligent. His teachers just worship him. Now George was not in the least like him, nor am I. I just don’t know where he came from!”

  “He will be a great lawyer,” said John gloomily. “The kind men like myself need; we give them retainers.”

  “They keep you out of trouble,” Cynthia laughed. “Never mind. How distinguished you always look, John! If you were a lumberjack you’d still look distinguished.”

  If Timothy had been cut with dry steel-point, his mother had been cut with a flashing diamond. She literally sparkled from head to foot, from her formally dressed blond hair heaped in puffs and curls upon her small head to her pretty feet. There was a diamond bow in her hair, and her slippers twinkled with brilliants. A diamond chain hung about her neck and a large pear-shaped diamond dangled from it just where her full white breast began. She wore a gown of rose brocade, which twinkled when she moved; the hem, fluted, reminded John of the stola of Grecian women. The rear was gathered into a great and shimmering bustle. She had never appeared so beautiful to him, with her delicately flushed cheeks, her exquisite cheekbones, and her great gray eyes.

  I’ve bought something admirable, thought John, appeased, and his desire came upon him again. He kissed her roughly. “Careful,” said Cynthia, satisfied with the kiss. She lay back in the circle of his arms and looked at him with deep and passionate love.

  “You know very well it isn’t your birthday, Cynthia,” John said as Cynthia sat down with a silken rustle.

  “Of course I know,” she said gaily. “But anything is an excuse for a party, isn’t it? I am also having a birthday cake, with candles, for my fictitious birthday. After all, it is a day to celebrate.”

  His pleasure in her dropped. “In what way?” he asked. “Because I’ve just signed twenty-five thousand dollars a year over to you?”

  She did not answer him for a moment. Her smile went away; she looked at him with intense gravity. Then she said in a low voice, “If that is the way it appears to you, what can I say?”

  She made an effort to be lively again. She held out her arm to him, smiled once more, and said in a vivacious tone, “And look what you gave me for my birthday, dear John! Thank you so much. It’s delightful.”

  She was showing him a bracelet he had not seen before, a wide bracelet crowded with diamonds so large and so bright that it was almost blinding. “And think of it,” said Cynthia
, “it cost only twelve thousand dollars! Isn’t it a bargain?” She looked at him with a strange expression and repeated more slowly, “Isn’t it a bargain — all of it?”

  But he saw nothing but the bracelet and was aghast. He drew back from her; it was twilight now and the only brilliance in the room was Cynthia.

  “My God!” exclaimed John. “That is about half of what you still have in the bank and in your investments! Cynthia, you are a fool! You must take it back at once; you can’t afford it.”

  She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them. Now he could not see her face in the dimness. She said, “My bank account and my investments are still intact, what there is of them. I had the bill for this bracelet sent to your office, John, in Boston.”

  He was enraged. “And when I deduct the cost from the amount ‘due’ you this year, what will you have left? Twelve thousand dollars for twelve months — ”

  “Oh no,” she said gently. “Don’t you remember? You gave me this as my birthday present.”