THE COST OF BEING RICH
Chapter Five
I came into the possession of the Heart of
the Ocean through a plea of desperation.
After the engagement, Rose realized that she
had me wrapped around her pinkie. When she wasn’t trying to persuade me to take
her on a trip here, Ruth wanted us to go out to dinner somewhere else. I felt
my authority crumbling. I tried to use my male strength, but she was too
powerful. When I said no to my fiancée, her eyes knew to immediately lose their
edge and look up at me innocently to peer into my own eyes through her lashes.
She knew just how to wipe the smile off her face in a heartbreaking manner and
look up at me, sadly.
This worked for a while, until we went to a
dinner with my father, Nathan Hockley. He saw how much authority she got in the
relationship, and afterwards, he took me aside and told me not to let things
get so out of hand.
"You should know better than this,
Caledon!" he said to me. "Women are sly creatures, and if they aren’t
put in their place early on, they can get very difficult. Trust me, if you
don’t break Rose down now, she’ll get the better of you."
I was torn. I had always secretly loathed the
way my father treated my mother. I knew secretly that women were equivalent to
men, maybe even better because of the beauty they could acquire both inside and
out. I hated the way my mother had been locked up when she disobeyed my father;
the way her opinions were nothing compared to his. I knew it was wrong. I
knew it. But it was against everything I had ever grown up with. It was the
exact opposite of what I was expected to be.
So I turned against Rose. The anger surged
inside her when I yelled or struck her. The first time it happened, she
screeched back. She put me down more than I had her and hit me twice for every
time I lay a finger on her.
"Rose, you will not get away with this.
I am your husband to be and you will treat me with dignity and respect."
"We’ll see about that." Then she
went running to her mother to beg for sympathy. Ruth, of course, was appalled
that her daughter had acted in such a way in front of me, their only ticket
from the streets. Rose grew even more furious at this, but there was nothing
she could do.
I controlled her like this for a while. It
worked to keep her in her place, as my father had said, but she despised me.
And I couldn’t stand it. I wanted her to love me as I did her. So, early in our
engagement I finally found us alone together on a starry night.
"Rose, I want to make you happy. I will
give you the world if you ask for it. Now tell me, what do you want?"
I expected her answer to be something along
the lines of, "A woman cannot be bought. You have to be kind and please
her. You will never bribe me into marrying you."
But that’s not what I got. Instead, she said,
"I want trips, and clothes, and diamonds. My mother believes I am
eternally indebted to you, but I know better than that. You aren’t going to
just let me go. And I might as well have some fun out of it."
So I arranged an endless array of shopping
trips in Paris followed by vacationing all around Europe. Rose had her hair
curled and her cheeks powdered. But this was not enough. We would walk along
the streets and every blond, blue-eyed boy would look at her and smile. This was
nothing because she was beautiful, but she always smiled back. She didn’t want
me.
In a fit of desperation, I went back to my
father for help. He laughed in my face for being such a failure. But he was
proud of me as a businessman and refused to see my reputation ruined. He
arranged for me to give Rose the Heart of the Ocean in late April, at the
engagement gala. Before that, however, we would sail back to America on the
greatest ship of all time--Titanic.