 | IX. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
9. IX.
Red.
That was the color now master in Mrs. Brothertoft's
houses, town and country.
Supercilious officers, in red coats, who were
addressed as General or My Lord, insolent officers,
in red coats, hight Colonel or Sir Harry,
arranged their laced cravats at the mirror
under the rampant eagle, or lounged on the
sofas.
There were plenty of such personages now in
New York, and Mrs. Brothertoft's house made
them all welcome. Regimental talk, the dullest
and thinnest of all the shop talks talked among
men, was the staple of conversation over her
Madeira at her dinners, grand, or en famille, bien
entendu.
Now and then a nasal patriot from Down East,
or a patriot Thee-and-Thouer from Philadelphia,
knocked at the door and inquired for Mr. Brothertoft.
“Out of town, Sir,” was the reply of the wiggy
negro.
“When do you expect him back?”
“Don't know, Sir,” the porter replied, rather
sadly.
The patriot retired, and the negro closed the
door with a sigh, — the pompous sigh of an old
family servant.
“No,” muttered he, “I don't know when he'll
be back. He never would come back if he knew
about the goings on in this house. He never
would anyhow, if it was n't to look after Miss
Lucy. There she comes down stairs, I 'll ask
her. Miss Lucy!”
A gentle, graceful little girl, of the Brothertoft
type, turned at the foot of the stairs and
answered, “What, Voltaire?”
“Do you know, Miss, where your father is,
now?”
“No,” she replied, half sadly, half coldly.
“A gentleman was just asking when he would
be back.”
“He does not inform us of his motions.”
She seemed to shrink from the subject, as if
there were guilt in touching it.
Voltaire looked forlornly after her, as she
passed into the parlor. Then he shook his fist
indignantly at a great palmated pair of moose-horns,
mounted as a hat-stand in the hall. On
the right-brow antler hung a military cocked
cap was suspended.
“It 's too bad,” Voltaire began.
Black babble has become rather a bore in literature.
Voltaire, therefore, will try not to talk
Tombigbee.
“It 's too bad,” muttered the negro, in futile
protest, “to see them fellows hanging up their
hats here, and the real master — the real gentleman
— shamed out of house and home.
“It 's too bad,” he continued despondingly,
“to see Miss Lucy, as sweet a little lady as ever
stepped, taught to think her father a good-for-nothing
spendthrift and idler, if not worse. The
madam will never let her see him alone. The
poor child is one of the kind that believes what is
told to 'em. No wonder she is solemn as Sunday
all the time. I don't see anything to be done.
But I 'll go down and ask Sappho.”
Again he shook his fist at those enormous
excrescences from the brow of a bold Cervus
alces, — a moose that once walked the Highlands
near Brothertoft Manor. Then he shambled
down stairs to his wife Sappho's boudoir,
the kitchen.
Blacker than Sappho of Lesbos ever looked
when Phaon cried, Avaunt! was this namesake
of the female Sam Patch of Leucadia. But
through her eyes and mouth good-humor shone,
black furnace-doors under a boiler.
“Things goes wrong in this house, all but
your cooking department, Sappho, and my butler
department,” says Voltaire. “The master is
shamed away, and is off properogating liberty.
The mistress, — I suppose we 'd better not say
nothing about her.”
Sappho shook her head, and stirred her soup.
“But Miss Lucy is going to be a big girl pretty
soon. Her mother is making her mistrust her
father. She 's got no friends. What will come
of her?”
Sappho tasted her soup. It was savory.
“Voltaire,” says she, striving to talk a dialect
worthy of her name, and hitting half-way to
English, “Voltaire, Faith is what you wants.
You is not got the Faith of a free colored gentleman,
member of one of de oldest families in
all Westchester. You is got no more Faith than
them Mumbo Jumbo Billop niggers what immigrated
in the Red Rover. You jess let de Lord
look after Miss Lucy. She is one after de Lord's
own heart.”
“But the Devil has put his huf into this
house.”
“If you was a cook, you 'd have more Faith.
Jest you taste that soup now. How is it?”
“Prime,” says Voltaire, blowing and sipping.
“You taste it, Plato,” she repeated, dipping
another ladle from the pot, and offering to her
son, heir of his father's philosophic dignity, and
his mother's Socratic visage. “How is it?”
“Prime!” says this second connoisseur.
“Now, what you guess is the most importantest
thing in this soup?”
“Conundrums is vulgar, particular for ladies,”
says Voltaire, loftily.
“That 's because you can't guess.”
“Poh! it 's easy enough,” says he. “Beef!”
“No. You guess, Plato.”
“B'ilin' water,” cries he, sure of his solution.
Sappho shook her head.
“Turkey carcasses,” propounded Voltaire, with
excitement.
“Onions,” offered Plato, with eagerness.
“No,” says Sappho, “it 's Faith!”
“I was jest a goin' to say Faith,” Plato unblushingly
asserted.
“You see,” Sappho explained, “I takes beef,
— bery well! and b'ilin' water, — bery well! and
turkey carcasses, and onions, and heaps of things,
and puts 'em into a pot on the fire. Then I has
Faith.”
“Poh!” cried Voltaire. “'T was n't a fair
conundrum; you has the Faith into yourself.”
“Then I takes Faith,” repeated Sappho, without
noticing this interruption, “Faith, that these
de Lord's time, an dey alluz comes soup.”
“And the primest kind!” Plato interjected,
authoritatively.
“So,” continued Sappho, improving the lesson,
“soup and roast geese, and pies and pancakes
risin' over night, has taught me disyer
proverb, `Wait, and things comes out right at
last.' So it 's boun' to be with Miss Lucy.”
This logic convinced the two namesakes of
philosophers, and they carried up dinner, in a
perplexed but patient mood.
My Lord and Sir Harry were both dining there
that day.
“Do you know what has become of our hostess's
husband?” asked My Lord, as they lounged
off after dinner.
“He 's going about the Provinces, stirring up
rebellion after a feeble fashion,” said Sir Harry.
“I believe that fellow Gaine pays him a few
shillings a week for editing his `Mercury,' when
he is in New York.”
“If I was Governor Tryon I'd have that dirty
sheet stopped. He 's a new broom. He ought
to make a clean sweep of all these Freedom
Shriekers.”
Such then was the condition of things in the
Brothertoft family at the beginning of Tryon's
administration.
Edwin Brothertoft had not become an absolute
stranger to his old home, for two reasons. He
pitied his guilty wife. He loved his innocent
daughter. He could not quite give up the hope
that his wife might need his pardon, by and by,
when sin soured to her taste. He must never
totally abandon his child to the debasing influences
about her, though he had no power or influence
to rescue her now, — that disheartened
and broken-down man, contemned by the world
as a purposeless idler.
Matters had not reached this pass in one year
nor until many years, — dreary to imagine, far
too dreary to describe.
Who shall enumerate the daily miseries in that
hapless house? Who shall count the cruel little
scratches of the poniard, with which the wife
practised for her final stab? What Recording
Angel kept tally of the method she took to murder
his peace, that he might know it was murdered,
dead, dead, dead, and not exasperate her
with his patient hope that it might recover?
Her fortune gave her one weapon, — a savage
one in those vulgar hands. She used this power
insolently, as baser spirits may. She would have
been happy to believe, what she pretended, that
her husband married her for money. Often she
told him so. Often she reproached him with her
own disappointment.
“Did I marry you,” she would say, “to be inefficient
and obscure, — a mere nobody in the
world? You were to be a great man, — that
was your part of the bargain. You knew I was
ambitious. I had a right to be. You have had
everything to give you success, — everything!”
“Not quite everything,” he said sadly. “Not
Love!”
Ah miserable woman! as she grew practised
in deceit and wrong, she hated her husband more
and more.
She maddened herself against him. She
blamed him as the cause of her evil choices.
“It is his fault, not mine,” she said to herself.
“He ought to have controlled me, and then I
should not have done what makes me ashamed
to face his puny face. He ought to have said,
`You shall and you shall not,' instead of his
feeble, `Is this wise, Jane? Is this delicate? Is
this according to your nobler nature?' I don't
like to be pleaded with. A despot was what I
needed. If he was half a man, he would take a
whip to me, — yes, beat me, and kick all my
friends out of doors and be master in the house.
That I could understand.”
She maddened herself against him more and
more. She so yielded to an insolent hate, that
she was no better than a mad woman while he
was by to enrage her with his patient, crushed,
shadow of the ardent, chivalric Edwin Brothertoft
of yore.
“Why not kill the craven-spirited wretch?”
she thought, “or have him killed? He would
be better dead, than living and scorned? Once
rid of him, and I could take my beauty and my
wealth to England, and be a grand lady after all.
Lady Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall! that was
what I had a right to expect. He could have
given it to me. The fool was capable enough.
Everybody said he might be what he pleased.
Why could he not love real things? a splendid
house, plenty of slaves, a name, a title, instead
of this ridiculous dream of Liberty. Liberty! if
he and his weak-minded friends only dared strike
a blow, — if they only would rebel, — he might be
got rid of. Then I should be free. Ah, I will
have my triumphs yet! Kings have loved women
not half so handsome!”
And with red, unblushing cheeks she looked
at herself in the mirror, and hated that obstruction,
her husband, more and more.
A mad hate, which she would gladly have
gratified with murder. The air often seemed to
her full of Furies, scourging her on to do the
deed. Furies flitted before her, proffering palpable
weapons, — weapons always of strange and
antique fashion, such as she had seen and handled
now with what pleasure she used to
play with them, while she listened quietly to
some sinister legend, and knew how the stain
came on the blade.
“Kill him!” the Furies cried to her. It was
a sound like the faint, distant cry one hears in
a benighted forest, and wonders whether the
creature be beast or man.
“Not yet,” she answered, aloud, to this hail
in the far background of her purposes.
The postponement seemed to imply a promise,
and she perceived the circle of shadowy Furies
draw a little step nearer, and shout to each
other in triumph, “`Not yet'; she says, `Not
yet.'”
So her hate grew more and more akin to a
madness, as every cruel or base passion, even
the silliest and most trifling, will, if fondled.
She found, by and by, that the cruellest stab
she could give to the man she had wronged was
through his daughter.
“Lucy is all Brothertoft, and no Billop,” Julia
Peartree Smith often said. “It 's all wrong; she
ought to take after her strong parent, not her
weak one.”
There was a kind of strength incomprehensible
to the old tabby. Nor did she know the law of
the transmission of spiritual traits, — with what
prevail over coarser and cruder forces.
Lucy was all Brothertoft. In her early days
she did not show one atom of the maternal character.
That made the mother's influence more
commanding. The child loved the mother with
a modification of the same passion that the father
had felt for a nature he deemed his nobler counterpart.
The father was so much like his daughter
that she could not comprehend him, until
she was ripe enough to comprehend herself.
Crude contrasts are earliest perceived, earliest
appreciated, and earliest admired, in character
as in art.
So without any resistance Mrs. Brothertoft
wielded Lucy. She let the child love her and
confide in her exclusively. But she hated her.
She hated Edwin Brothertoft's daughter. There
was the girl growing more and more like him,
day by day. There were the father's smile, the
father's manner, the father's voice, even the
father's very expressions of endearment, forever
reproaching the mother with old memories revived.
Ah this miserable woman! She learnt to fear
her daughter, — to dread the inevitable day when
that pure nature would recoil from hers. She
watched the gentle face covertly. When would
that look of almost lover-like admiration depart?
the mild hazel eyes perceive that the bold black
eyes could not meet them? When would the
fair cheeks burn with an agonizing blush of
shame?
“When will the girl dare to pity me, as that
poor wretch her father does?” she thought.
This gentle, yielding, timid creature became
her mother's angel of vengeance. Mrs. Brothertoft
never met her after an hour of separation
without a wild emotion of terror.
“Has she discovered? Does she know what
I am? Did some tattler whisper it to her in
the street? The winds are always uttering a
name to me. Has she heard it, too? Did she
dream last night? Has her dream told her what
her mother is? If she kisses me, I am safe.”
Yes. Sweet Lucy always had the same eager
caress ready. She so overflowed with love to
those she trusted, that she was content with her
own emotion, and did not measure the temperature
of the answering caress.
Ah this miserable mother! as false to maternal
as to marital love. It became her task to
poison the daughter against her father. If these
two should ever understand each other, if there
should ever be one little whisper of confidence
between them, if she should ever have to face
the thought of their contempt, — what then?
Agony would not let her think, “What then?”
She must prevent the understanding, make the
confidence impossible; it must be her business
to educate and aim the contempt.
How perseveringly, craftily, ably she accomplished
this! How slowly she instilled into her
child's mind the cumulative poison of distrust.
Often the innocent lips shrank from the bitter
potion. One day she might reject it. But the
next, there was the skilful poisoner, — her
mother.
“You cannot doubt me, Lucy,” the woman
would say, looking aside as she commended her
chalice. “If it distresses you to hear such
things of your father, how much bitterer must
it be for me to say them!”
These pages again refuse to tolerate the details
of this second crime. Let that too pass
behind the curtain.
Closed doors then! for the mother is at last
saying that her husband has grown baser and
baser, — so utterly lost to all sense of honor that
she must exclude him from her house, and that
her daughter must herself tell him that she will
never see him again.
Closed doors, while the innocent girl flings
herself into the guilty woman's arms, and, weeping,
promises to obey.
Closed doors, and only God to see and listen,
for her father, and pity for his desolate
and heart-weary child.
Closed doors upon the picture of this fair girl,
worn out with agony and asleep. And walking
through her dreams that grisly spectre Sin, who
haunts and harms the nights and days of those
who repel, hardly less cruelly than he haunts
and harms them who embrace him.
It was a tearful April morning of 1775, when
this final interview took place.
“Let me understand this,” said Edwin Brothertoft,
with the calmness of a practised sufferer.
“My daughter has made up her mind never to
see me again?”
“She has,” said Mrs. Brothertoft.
With what quiet, cruel exultation she spoke
these words! Exultation mixed with terror for
the thought, “I have schooled the girl. But she
may still rebel. She may spring to him, and
throw herself into his arms, and then the two
will turn upon me, and point with their fingers,
and triumph.”
“I cannot take my answer from you, madam,”
he said.
“I have no other answer to give,” said Lucy.
“None?” he asked again.
“None,” she replied.
Her coldness was the result of utter bewilderment
and exhaustion. It seemed to him irremediable
hardness and coarseness of heart.
“She is her bad mother's base daughter,” he
thought. “I will think of her no more.”
Does this seem unnatural? Remember how
easily a lesser faith is slain, when the first great
faith has perished. The person trusted with the
whole heart proves a Lie; then for a time all
persons seem liars; then for a time the deceived,
if they are selfish, go cynical; if they are generous,
they give their faith to great causes,
to great ideas, and to impersonal multitudes.
Household treachery keeps the great army of
Reform recruited.
“This girl,” thought Edwin Brothertoft, “cannot
be so blind as not to know why her mother
and I are separated. And yet she chooses her,
and discards me. I knew that the woman once
my wife could never be my wife again. I knew
that our lips could never meet, our hands never
touch. But I hoped — yes, I was weak enough
to hope — that, when sin and sorrow had taught
us their lessons, and the day for repentance and
pardon came, we might approach each other in
the person of our daughter, beloved by both
alike. I was father and my wife mother in the
honorable days gone by. Our child might teach
the father and the mother a different love, not of
I let it go. Why should I longer keep up this
feeble struggle with these base people, who have
ruined my life? I have no daughter. I never
had a wife. I forget the past. God forgive me
if I abandon a duty! God give me opportunity,
if he wills that I ever resume it again!”
As he walked up Wall Street, moodily reflecting
after this fashion, he heard a voice call
him.
“Mr. Brothertoft!”
This hail came from the nose of a hurried
person who had just turned the corner of Smith
— now William — Street, and was making for
the wife's house, when he saw the husband.
“Mr. Brothertoft!” twanged sharp after the
retreating figure. There was an odd mixture
of alarm and triumph in these nasal notes.
“Call me by some other name!” said the one
addressed, turning. “What you please, but
never that again.”
“Waal!” says the other, speaking Bostonee,
through a nose high Boston, “you might n't like
my taste in baptism, so I 'll call you Cap'n, —
that 's safe. Cap'n,” he continued in a thrilling
whisper, through that hautboy he played on,
“Cap'n, we've shed and drawed the fust blood
fur Independence. Aperel 19 wuz the day.
Lexington wuz wher we shed. Corncud wuz
poot fur Bosting, you 'll pint and poot fur a locality
wher considdable phlebotomy is ter be
expected baout these times, and wher Patriots
is wanted jest as fast as they can pile in.”
Clang out your alarums, bells of Trinity!
others may need awakening. Not he who was
named Edwin Brothertoft. He is gone already to
fight in the old, old battle — forever old, forever
new — of freedom against tyranny, of the new
thoughts against the old facts.
“So your husband 's on his way to get himself
shot or hung. And a good riddance, I suppose,
Madam B.,” said coarse Sir Harry.
“The beautiful widow will not cry her eyes
out,” said My Lord with his usual sneer.
Mrs. Brothertoft writhed a little under this
familiarity.
Like many another, who says, “Deteriora sequar,
she wished to go to the bad with a stately
step and queenly mien. That is not permitted
by the eternal laws. Ah, miserable woman! she
was taught to feel how much the gentleman
she had betrayed was above the coarse associates
she had chosen.
She missed him, now that he was gone irrevocably.
Had there been then in her heart any relics of
the old love? Had she cherished some vague
some hope of pardon?
Had her torture of her husband been only a
penance for herself? Was it the hate which is
so akin to love? Could this be a self-hatred for
a self that has wasted the power of loving, — a
hate that is forever wreaking vengeance for this
sad loss upon the object the heart most longs to
love, — the only one that can remind that heart
of its impotency? Had she been acting unconsciously
by the laws of such a passion?
And this exasperating influence banished,
would she have peace at last? Would the
Furies let her alone? Would the hints of murder
vanish and be still? Would she be a free
woman, now, to follow out her purposes?
Edwin Brothertoft had disappeared. Deserters
from the rebel army could give no news of such
a person.
Julia Peartree Smith often suggested to her
friend the welcome thought that he was dead.
Mrs. Brothertoft could not believe it. Something
whispered her that there would be another
act in the drama of her married life.
| IX. Edwin Brothertoft | |