A Prologue To Love by Taylor Caldwell Page A

insisting that was Nature’s job, the cleared grass was coarse, heavy, and full of pigweed with thick branching leaves. He took care of the rig and the elderly horse and used it only when Beth went on shopping errands or he was to meet ‘the master’ at the station. Occasionally, with languor, he would wash windows grown dull with summer dust and rain or winter sleet, leaving, as Beth said irascibly, a worse smudge than before. But he was an old man; he helped Beth inside the house and complained constantly about the amount of wood she used in the ancient black iron stove and in the living-room fireplace. He liked the stable best, where he could talk to the horse and congratulate him that he was used so seldom and needed very little currying. Then he would swipe at the old rig with a dirty cloth, sit down in a rocking chair, and sleep. He disliked everyone except Caroline, whom he would entertain with hoary but fascinating stories. He was part Negro; his stories often had the richness of rain forests dripping in green dusk under a hot equatorial sun or the mystery of those who lived half of their conscious lives in a state of awed wonder. He had been a slave.
     
    Jim called the Ames house a mansion, which it was not and which it had never been. It was not in a good section of town; beyond the wooden fence, which was the only article Jim kept in perfect order and strength, stood shacks, working people’s little homes, full of children and noise and fury and drunken shouts on Saturday nights, and gloomy factories constantly increasing. But the house lay in a kind of somber enchantment of its own among its old and rotting trees, hidden from the sight and sound of neighbors. It had been built long ago, and no one knew who had been its original owner. Of dull red brick overgrown with glossy green ivy, it stood tall and thin, three stories high, with a widow’s walk on the top story, though the house was far from the sea. It had long windows as thin as splinters, and brown shutters and brown doors, all moldering. A path led from the locked gate and served as both walk and drive and was narrow and dusty and without gravel or stone, the earth hard-packed in summer and greasy with sliding brown mud in the winter. Once Jim had caught three little boys climbing the cronelike apple trees in the autumn and devouring the wormy fruit. They had evidently bolted over the high gate with its sharp points. He drove them off savagely and reinspected the gate and tested its bolts. Sometimes John Ames wondered acridly at this. A slave, of all people, should detest both fences and gates after he was free.
     
    Caroline pushed open the well-oiled iron gate, for it was always unlocked for her near the time of her return from school. Carefully she locked it behind her. She liked to walk alone to the house, especially on warm brown-and-golden autumn days like this. It was always damp under the arching trees, now yellow, ocher, and umbrous, with a flare now and again of some scarlet maple, like the beginning of a conflagration in this moldy and silent place. Caroline could smell the poignant and atavistic heaps of rotting leaves, the primeval earth sweating in its darkness, the sharp breath of an occasional spruce. Sometimes she would sit on a flat stone and watch squirrels and birds, or catch the flash of a skunk’s tail or the white fluff of a rabbit or the blur of a mouse rushing from one pile of leaves to another. It was so quiet here; the rumble of factories in the distance only increased the stillness, like thunder over a closed landscape.
     
    Sitting on the stone today, Caroline sighed and smiled a little. A soft wind, heavy with the pungent scent of decay and loneliness, brushed her face; her hands, lying on her knees, were dappled thinly by the leaves remaining on the trees which arched over her. Her solid feet rested on the dark and oily earth. She let herself luxuriate in the thought of the letter waiting for her in the house. Though