A Prologue To Love by Taylor Caldwell Page B

she could not as yet see the house, she could smell the burning of wood.
     
    Poor Beth; it was warm today, but Beth, who was so fearful of the coming winter, had defiantly started fires. “You never know when the weather will change,” she would say with a challenge in her blue eyes. She was approaching fifty; her crisp and curling hair was almost gray, and, though plump, she shivered in a cool wind. Old Kate was dead, and Beth knew that only she would stay in this lonely and sifting house with all the dull and inexplicable echoes in the narrow halls, the tall and half-empty rooms and bedrooms, the brick-walled and brick-floored kitchen, the black iron fireplaces, the cracked and warped doors, the primitive facilities, the ceilings broken and yellowed, the walls papered with paper so old that the original patterns had gone, leaving only spidery tracings and no color except what age had given it, the floors carpeted with rugs that no amount of sweeping would clean, and all of the carpeting of a dim brownish tint as rough to a bare foot as gravel. So Beth had her fires sulkily, even when John Ames was at home, which was increasingly at longer intervals. She had even moved some of the furniture from several of the eight uninhabited bedrooms (Jim, by choice, slept in the loft in the barn) into the rooms used by Caroline and herself, and had shaken her head over chairs slippery with age and worn of fabric, and beds with towering carved headboards that reached to the ceilings. With Jim’s grumbling help she had tugged at marble-topped tables to move them into the two bedrooms and had looked with discouragement at stone cracked and filled with ancient dirt. But there were no ornaments anywhere. Eventually, out of her own money, Beth had bought two cheap green vases ‘in town’, one for herself and one for Caroline’s room, and she kept them filled with cattails, which she gilded or painted, or wild spring or autumn flowers she found on the land. When all but the cattails, which Caroline loathed, failed, Beth would make artificial flowers of coarse colored paper and dip them in paraffin to last through the dark winter. She thought it made matters cozy; Caroline would look at them and shudder, but she never told Beth, who had gone to such trouble for her.
     
    Beth had bullied John Ames into permitting her to buy clean cheap muslin for her bedroom windows and Caroline’s. These she had tinted pink, which Caroline also loathed. But all of the other windows were hung with decaying brown velveteen draperies, dejected and dusty and tattered. Finally Beth stopped her desperate work of mending them; let them rot, she would say grimly, then he’ll notice. But John Ames apparently did not notice, and no guests ever came to make invidious remarks. The house stood in its ugh’ decay, its breathless isolation, its silence, its utter abandonment. It was in this horrible place, Beth would reflect, that the young Ann Ames had died, far from family and friends, far from the beautiful house in which she had been born and in which she had lived for twenty years. How could she have endured it? Beth would ask herself.
     
    Beth could not understand Caroline’s love for the house and its snarled acres, and Caroline, who could never express herself well, could not tell her only confidante what this silent isolation meant to her and what relief and surcease there were among the desolate trees. For here, where no one came but her dreams and the remembrances of Jim’s eerie stories, she could be free, no longer stiff with awkwardness as she was in school, no longer frightened as she was on the streets of Lyndon. Here she could think of herself as beautiful and beloved, surrounded by creatures as shy as herself.
     
    “It’s bad for a young girl to have no friends,” Beth would say crossly. Caroline would not reply but would touch Beth’s plump arm quickly. She could not tell Beth that she had multitudes of companions in the small woods and