“Your husband probably had his own reasons to suspect something,” said Tony, alerted. “After all, he is a member of the House of Lords.”
But Dolores had withdrawn into cool indifference again. “Really, I don’t know. I’m not concerned with those things.”
Tony said with involuntary passion, “Dolores, are you concerned about anything at all?” He stood up and approached her. “What is wrong with you? Why have you gone away like this? You are living a kind of death in life. …”
She was affronted. She drew her gown closely about her, rejecting him.
“Don’t be dramatic, Tony. It seems to me that I’ve been very docile and obliging—to everybody. What more do any of you want?”
He was so distressed that in spite of her attitude he put his hand on her shoulder tightly. “Dolores, you’ll deny anything I accuse you of. So, I can only ask you a question: do you love your husband?”
She did not move under his hand, but all her flesh repudiated him. She looked up at him, and he thought that not even a dead face could be so aloof as this. “Of course not,” she said. “I never did. I like him considerably, but I don’t love him. However, what does that matter to anyone? I think your question is insolent.”
But something was stirring in her eyes, and Tony knew it for bottomless pain. “Did you ever love anyone else, Dolores?”
She replied in a very matter-of-fact voice, “Yes, I did. Miles Peale.”
He drew his hand away from her rapidly. “Miles Peale! Miles Peale!” He shook his head dazedly. “I can’t believe it. I thought you detested him.” He felt sick and weak.
Dolores smiled bitterly. “I thought so, too. But all the time I loved him. I planned on marrying him. Then Grandpa died, and Dad was in a mess and couldn’t be talked to, Mama said. He had burdens enough of his own. She remarked that if I should tell Dad about Miles and me, it would be the last thing he could bear. She convinced me that Dad wanted me to many Dick. I didn’t need much convincing, for only a few weeks after Grandpa died Dad complained that it was evident I would be an old maid. I admit he seemed confused. I”—she halted for an instant, and Tony could see her swallowing painfully—“loved Dad very much. I couldn’t add more to his worries. I married Dick so that I could get away from Miles, whom Dad disliked; he would never have given his consent And he really wanted me to marry Dick. There was a night when he had been drinking, and I went to him in the library, to help him, and he shouted out to me that I could marry Dick if I wanted to, and be damned to me. That is what he said, Tony.”
Tony sat down again, for his knees were trembling. He looked at his sister, who would be gone tomorrow. He could not help himself, and he said, “Dolores, you can’t go away believing a lie. But the truth might be too terrible for you. Shall I tell you, I wonder?”
Curisoity changed the hard outline of her face. “Tell me what, Tony?”
He prayed that he was doing what was right. “You can’t go away believing cruel things about our father. Dolores, Dad never wanted you to marry Dick. Remember the months after Grandpa died. Dad was almost beside himself with worry. You see, he never really had much confidence in his own power; he was always afraid, all his life. He hardly knew what was going on in his home.” He paused, completely shaken. “I’m afraid our mother used those months to her advantage. Dolores, what did she tell you about Miles Peale?”
Dolores was very white. “I told her I loved him and wanted to marry him. And she said, ‘Well, if it’ll give you any pleasure, your father will drop dead if you ever mention that boy’s name to him. He hates him as much as he hates his father.’”
Tony got up and began to wander about the room. “It is true that Dad disliked Miles. But he did not hate him. That was proved when he gave him a position on the road, and by the responsibilities he has turned over to him. Dad loves you, Dolores. If you had wanted to marry a savage he would have given his consent, if you had been convinced it would have made you happy. How could you doubt him, knowing him as you did, knowing that you were his favorite child?”
Dolores could only whisper, as she stared at her brother distractedly, “I thought he wanted me to marry Dick. I thought, from what Mama said, that it would make him happy when he was so miserable and distraught over everything. I did it for Dad.”
She suddenly put her hand over her mouth and sobbed drily. “Now I know what he meant, two years ago, when he asked me why I did it! I didn’t understand. I was offended.” Tears rushed into her eyes. She started to her feet and caught her brother’s arm. “I must go to him immediately and tell him about Mama, about everything.”
“No,” said Tony inflexibly. “That is one thing, now, that you dare not do. For his sake. I honestly think it would kill him. You can’t even tell Mama about it. You must keep it to yourself, and it will help you bear your own wretchedness.”
But Dolores was weeping uncontrollably and wringing her hands. “No, I can’t tell him. You are right. I stayed away from the party today—I couldn’t bear to see Miles. We love each other. I don’t know what to do!”
“You can go to Dad tonight and tell him that you love him, and you can remain here until the war is over.”
She went up and down the room as her brother had done, shaking her head until her hair fell over her face in a cascade of agony and despair. Tony watched her until he could endure the sight no longer. He went to his sister and put his arms about her and drew her head to his shoulder. “Dolores, Dolores,” he murmured. “Dear sister, dear child.”
She clung to him, crying mournfully, her hair streaming about her in a tangled mass. “Oh, God,” she stammered. “What can I do, what can I do!”
“You told me just now that you like poor Dick. He is a good fellow, Dolores, and the best of husbands and fathers. You can remember that. You can do your duty. I know, I feel, that you would have been wretched in the end with Miles. Perhaps you have been granted a great mercy.”
But she rolled her head on his shoulder. “No. We’d have been happy. And I could have stopped—anything he has in mind.”
Tony lifted her face. “What do you mean?”
Her cheeks ran with tears. “Don’t you know, Tony? It isn’t something for which I have proof. But Miles—he wants what DeWitt has. Dad, the road, are in danger. I know it with all my heart.”
Danger. Tony put aside his sister and turned his back to her. But there is nothing we can do, he thought. There is, though, always my mother, and DeWitt, and the fifty-one per cent of the stock in the family’s hands. He returned to Dolores and tried to console her with these facts. However, she shook her head silently.
“When someone wants something, as Miles does, he always gets it, Tony,” she said after a moment or two.
She pushed her hair back from her face resolutely. “I’ll take your advice, of course, and assure Dad that I’ve always loved him. But, Tony, I must go back to England. Nothing can persuade me to the contrary. Watch out for little Alex. You can do so much for him, and he needs you—in this family. Mama mustn’t be allowed to—to corrupt him.”
On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania, mysteriously not convoyed this time, was struck by a German torpedo off the green and smiling coast of Ireland, and went down with the loss of over a thousand lives, including one hundred twenty-four American citizens.
Among those who perished was Lady Dolores Gibson-Hamilton. A letter from the British War Office was awaiting her at home, informing her, with regret, that her husband, Richard Gibson-Hamilton, had died of wounds “somewhere in France,” several days before. She went down into the waters remembering only that she had been reconciled to her father, and thinking of her son.
46
Patrick Peale returned from the Johns Hopkins Hospital on a very hot day in June. He had told his wife one of the very few lies he had ever uttered, not to spare her any anxiety, but because he did not want to express to anyone his own fears for himself. He came back to Portersville, ghastly and wizened, and though the day was extremely warm he had frequent rigors during w
hich he pressed his arms convulsively to his sides.
He was only sixty-one, but he had become an old man during the past two months. Laura had seen it, and had urged a medical examination upon him, which he had refused petulantly, and with the usual contempt he now invariably expressed for her. But fear had come to him eight months previously. He had had a bad cold late in October, which he had seemed unable to shake off; a heavy cough remained with him, which did not slacken even when warm weather had come. When, one day in late March, he coughed up a slight portion of blood, he had been seized with extreme terror. Tuberculosis? He was afraid of consulting any physicians. Now he became obsessed with his private fear. Heretofore his one unremitting obsession had been Allan Marshall. He added this other to the original one, and in his characteristically confused and narrow thinking, he blamed Allan for this mysterious invader of his life.
He had done much reading about a new science: psychosomatic medicine. Always meticulously careful of his health, with the concentrated absorption of one in love with himself and who believed himself to be of the utmost value and importance, he had followed every medical advance submitted to the public. He was convinced that the desperate resentment and chronic rage in which he lived—all provoked by Allan Marshall—had “psychosomatically” brought on the unnamed illness which afflicted him. But still, in March, he was afraid to have an examination. He bought tomes on the subject of phthisis. He looked for sputum, for night sweats, for loss of weight, for early evening fever. He took his temperature. He was relieved to find that though he was losing weight he had none of the other symptoms. Just a cough, he told himself with prayerful thanksgiving. Coughs had a way of remaining, especially in a man of his age. His chest was very painful. Neuritis, probably.
There was no more blood until the latter part of May, and then there was a considerable amount of it. He was terribly frightened. He waited a few more days, his cough becoming alarmingly more harsh and hacking. It was then that he called Johns Hopkins, told his wife gloomily that he had some business in New York, and went to Baltimore.
The verdict was swift and sure: cancer of the lungs, a very extensive cancer for which nothing could be done. His doctors gave him a box of tiny gray pills, and they looked at him with pity. They also gave him an unlimited prescription for morphine and informed him that he must not be hesitant about using it. Patrick, stunned, would not believe at first. It was impossible. He neither drank nor smoked; he had always lived a blameless life. He had given up his pipe many years ago. “Impossible,” he said to his doctors, looking at them with terror. “I have always been a good man, according to my lights.” They thought him piteous, but a little stupid. One said, “If disease attacked only the unrighteous, then we’d have such a religious revival that there wouldn’t be churches enough to accommodate the people.” But Patrick thought only of Allan Marshall. He said to his doctors, “I have been killed, murdered, as surely as if I had had a bullet shot into me.”
He arrived home in great pain and weakness, and went at once to bed. He called for Laura, who came to him immediately. There he lay on his pillows, shrunken and still, his large brown eyes, once so serious in his youth, bulging with the agony and dread of those mortally stricken. When Laura entered the room, he glared at her with accusation mingled with hatred and fury and fear. He said, before she could speak in her anxiety for him, “I am going to die. I’ll live, with luck, about two months.” The accusation flamed in his eyes, as she sank into a chair near him. She was unable to speak, for her throat had tightened and she was trembling violently, uncontrollably.
“Allan Marshall killed me,” added Patrick, and closed his eyes against her. The tall lean house was very chill, for even the June heat could not penetrate those gaunt walls or invade this narrow bedroom with the somber furniture. Patrick was seized with a spasm of coughing. Now blood foamed to his lips, but he was too distraught and too numbed to wipe it away. He knew it was there; he derived some satisfaction, some malicious contentment, that Laura could see the signs of his coming dissolution.
She cried out, so he knew that she had seen. He felt her standing over him. She was using a handkerchief on his mouth. He turned aside his head and groaned, “Let me alone.” Sharp pain knifed through his chest and he put one withered hand to it.
“Patrick, Patrick!” she was weeping. “What is wrong? What do you mean? Oh, God, why are you bleeding? I must call the doctor. …” A scent of lilacs floated from her, and he sickened at the perfume and drew in his nostrils.
“I said,” he repeated feebly, “that Allan Marshall has finally succeeded in killing me.”
He’s ill, and mad, thought Laura distractedly. “I must call the doctor,” she said again. But he held up his hand.
“Too late,” he answered. “Too late for anything. I have cancer of the lungs. They told me yesterday, at Johns Hopkins. That is where I went, and not to New York, as I told you.” He pointed to the table at his side. “Morphine. For my pain.”
There was no dignity in him, no compassion for his wife, no desire to spare anyone pain. There was only terror, outrage, hatred, that this thing had come to him. The Pharisee—confronted with reality, stripped of precise theories and dogmas and pride, face to face with majestic Death, who could not be placated with self-righteous cries and the spurious importance of men like Patrick Peale—could only whimper to himself and long for vengeance.
Laura, undone by pity, suffering her own terror, fell into her chair again. “Oh, Patrick,” she murmured frantically. “I know you haven’t looked well for some time—I wanted you to have an examination. Oh, Patrick. Oh, my dear. Are—are they certain?”
As if he were determinedly and deliberately throwing stones at her, he gave her the facts. His voice was stronger. He watched her shocked face and tear-filled eyes, pleased. Let her suffer, too. She had made his life wretched enough. A dimwitted, colorless, silly woman, hysterical and mindless! How often she had opposed him in the past; how often she had begged him, long ago, not to “poison” their children’s minds against that foul wretch, Marshall. How she had pleaded with him to persuade Miles not to marry Ruth Purcell, and Mary not to marry DeWitt Marshall. She had stood in his way wherever he had turned. She had refused to entertain Norman deWitt, and when Patrick had insisted, she had treated the visitor coldly and with evident distaste. He, Patrick, could remember nothing of her now but womanish petulance and foolishness. She had resisted, for years, turning over to him her sixteen per cent of the Interstate stock.
“They are absolutely certain,” he said to her now. “There is nothing that can be done, except temporary easing of pain. I believe they said I might live two months.”
Laura put her hands over her face and wept aloud. Patrick, poor Patrick; cold, silent, hating, gloomy Patrick. Her sobs were deep and broken. Patrick moved restlessly. “Now, Laura,” he said in his old tone of disdain and repudiation, “let’s not be hysterical, as usual. Hysterical people never feel strongly, I’ve heard. Spare me superficiality, at least.”
She dropped her hands from her wet face and looked at him speechlessly. Her pity was a fire in her. She could not go to him and console him; she dared not take him in her arms. His bitter eyes were mocking her, enjoying her grief, taking satisfaction in her pain. She closed her eyes, for she could not endure that light in his.
“My children will remember,” he was saying. “My sons will avenge me.”
He’s mad; he’s boundlessly vindictive, she thought, in spite of her compassion. But she could not let him die with that evil obsession in his soul. She could not let him use his sons, as he had long plotted, to strike at Allan Marshall, Allan away in the sanitarium where he had been sent after his collapse over the death of his daughter.
“Have pity,” she stammered imploringly. “Have pity on yourself, Patrick. Allan may have hurt you, once; we all hurt each other. Some out of cruelty, some out of necessity, some out of greed or expediency. Think of Allan now. It is feared he is dying; he is out of his mind with sorrow.
Dolores, poor Dolores. The little boy—without parents. Patrick, you can’t—you can’t—go on, hating like that, carrying it with you. … You can’t do that to yourself, you can’t continue to hate yourself like this.”
He regarded her with somber outrage and disgust. “Are you insane?” he asked. “But then, you never had any intelligence. ‘Hate’ myself! That comes of your having very limited comprehension, and a sheltered existence, and poor heredity. I was told your mother was a fool. It is a good thing she didn’t live to have other children, to burden the world with more feeble-mindedness.”
Her gray eyes became enormous as she looked at him, and her slender body stiffened. For a moment she forgot to pity him, and she felt the hot thrust of loathing in herself. How could he, even in this extremity, be so cruel, so contemptible, so self-righteous? The dying were supposed to gain some comprehension, some mercy for others, some tenderness, some. wisdom. But there her husband lay, and he was as he had always been, and all his twisted egotism was burning more vividly than ever.
But then, Laura thought with a resurgence of pity, he is so frightfully afraid. He always speaks of God; he attends church with fanatical regularity. But he never believed in God, never once in his life. He is the complete atheist.
He was dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “Send for Miles and Fielding,” he said in the voice of one scornfully speaking to the meanest of servants. “And leave me alone for a little while. I think I want to sleep.”
But he did not sleep. Left alone, while Laura telephoned his sons and quietly called the family physician, who promised to arrange for nurses and to visit Patrick the next day, the slowly dying man suddenly thrust his knuckles against his teeth and a sick whining sound began to rise in his throat. He choked it down; it rose again and again. His nightshirt became damp and clammy against his quivering flesh. The curtains had been drawn far back from the slits of windows, and he could see the scarlet sunset flaring over the dark mountains. He began to stare at it, and he thought: I am all alone. I was always alone. No one ever cared for me at any time in my life. He muttered prayers like an incantation, a plea not for mercy but for explanation. Why should this awful terror have come to him instead of to his enemies? He contemplated himself on his pillows, a good and virtuous man, completely abandoned to silence and death and lovelessness, and he was moved to overwhelming commiseration for himself.