 | XI. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
11. XI.
Scene, the interior of Squire Dewitt's barn.
Hay at the sides, hay at the back, and great
mountains of hay rise into the dusky regions of
the loft.
In the centre stands Jierck Dewitt, just returned
from his noon interview with Major Skerrett.
At the left sits Ike Van Wart, asleep, with his
mouth open. Perhaps, like Voltaire, he hears
partially with his tonsils.
On the right, old Sam Galsworthy is killing
time with old sledge for a weapon. His right
hand has just beaten his left and won the
stakes, — viz.: twelve oats.
Hendrecus Canady stealthily approaches the
gaping sleeper on the left. He holds a head
of timothy-grass, — in these times of war we
perceive that it is a good model for a cannon
sponge. Hendrecus introduces timothy's head
into Van Wart's mouth, and begins to tickle the
tonsils and palate, so rosy.
To these enters pretty Katy Dewitt, blushing
well it may, for she bears dinner, — a deep yellow
dish of pork and beans and a pumpkin-pie
exquisitely varnished.
Tender-hearted Jierck Dewitt at once remembered
the wife who in happier days crisped his
pork and sweetened his pie.
Hendrecus dropped his tickler into Van Wart,
and sprang up to help his sweetheart. Her
pretty smiles stirred happy smiles on his face, —
a bright and good-humored one, though still
of pill-fed complexion. His lover-like attentions
brought out a blush on her cheeks. That fair
color seemed to make the old barn glow and all
the hay-mow bloom with fresh heads of pink
clover.
Poor Jierck Dewitt recalled how there were
once smiles as gay and blushes as tender between
him and a damsel as buxom.
Poor fellow! his dinner did him no good. He
grew moodier and moodier. The little scene between
his sister and Hendrecus had made him
miserable. He could not sleep like Van Wart,
nor play cards with Galsworthy, nor skylark with
Hendrecus. He sat brooding over his sorrow.
His powers of self-control were weakened. He
could not throw off this weight of an old bitterness.
A great vague misery oppressed him. He
began to fear his wits were going.
“If I could only get these ugly feelings into
shape,” he thought, “I could grapple with them
and choke them down. I must do something,
or I shall go mad. I believe I 'll steal round
through the woods to where I can see old Bilsby's
house and the chestnut-tree where Abby
first said she 'd have me. Looking at the places
may help me to drag this grief out of myself and
put it on them.”
Now that the British troops were withdrawn
for Vaughan's expedition, Jierck felt quite secure
in dodging about the woods of the Manor. He
left his companions in the barn, and stole off
toward his father-in-law's old red farm-house.
He felt as if he were his own ghost, compelled
to haunt a spot where he had been murdered.
It was quiet sunset. The golden light of
evening was among the golden woods. The
forest showered golden leaves upon the ground,
and melted away in golden motes across the
level sunbeams.
Jierck stole along until he came to a little
glade, crossed by a pathway. A great chestnut-tree
had made the glade its own. Lesser plants
were easily thrust back by its stout overshadowing
branches, and its brethren of the forest had
willingly given place to see what their brother
would do with its chance of greatness. It had
done nobly. It was an example to trees and the
expanding to one's sunshine, and letting one's
self grow like a fine old vegetable.
This had been Jierck's trysting-tree in the
times when the pastoral poem of his life was
writing itself, a canto a day. Under this chestnut,
one summer's eve, when the whole tree was
a great bouquet of flowery tassels, Jierck had
suddenly ventured to pop his shy question. Full-throated
robins up in those very branches had
shouted his sweetheart's “Yes,” for all the birds
and breezes to repeat.
Jierck, hidden in the thicket, looked kindly at
the old tree. He smiled to recall the meetings
there when he was a timid, clumsy lover. For
a moment recollections, half comic and all pleasant,
banished his agony of a man betrayed by
a disloyal woman.
But presently he heard sounds that were not
the light clash of falling leaf with fallen leaf.
Footsteps and voices were coming. Jierck withdrew
a little and watched. Two women appeared
up the pathway, following their long shadows.
They came out into the glade. It was his wife
and her sister, furloughed for the evening, and
on their way homeward.
Jierck beheld the woman's story written on
her face, — the tablet where all stories of lives
are written for decipherers to read. He saw
chapters. His wife was still an insolent, brazen
woman, the counterpart of her mistress on a
lower plane.
Poor Jierck! he had been drawn to this spot,
so he felt, to see his murderess and be stabbed
over again. The exceeding weight of his agony
came crushing down upon him. He shivered.
It seemed to him that snow must suddenly have
fallen with sunset. A moment ago it was not
spring, nor summer, but very tolerable autumn;
now winter had come, chilly and dreary. A
friendless place to him this traitor world! Jierck
felt smitten with degradation. He was utterly
miserable, and the old chestnut-tree insulted him
with memories of his dead hopes of happiness.
“I must have comfort,” thought Jierck.
When sorrow is too sharp to be borne, and
comfort must be had at once, men go to the
anodynes and stimulants. Kosmos provides
these in great variety. The four of most universal
application are,
Tobacco, Alcohol, Marriage, Death.
Poor Jierck Dewitt wanted comfort at once.
A whiff of smoke from his pipe was not concentrated
enough, and he could not wait to
try what virtue there was in bigamy.
“Rum or this!” he said wildly. The alternative
“this” seemed to attract him for an
felt along the cold edge. Was he about to taste
that mighty narcotic, Death?
Death! He touched his knife-blade. Gloom
alighted upon the landscape. The golden woods
grew lurid. Silence, deeper than he had ever
known, deepened and deepened, until he fancied
that Nature was hushed and listening for his
death-moan.
An imagined picture grew before his eyes: —
Time, morning. Scene, this glade of the big
chestnut. A man lies under the tree. The
first sunbeams melt the frost that dabbles his
hair. He must be a sound sleeper, for a chipmunk
has picked his pockets of their crumbs,
and now stands on his forehead, chuckling over
his breakfast. Mrs. Jierck Dewitt enters the
glade. She sees the sleeper. She starts, and
approaches cautiously. She stares, and then
looks up with a great, bold smile of relief and
scorn. For the sleeper is her husband. He
lies dead, with a knife in his breast.
“No!” hissed Jierck, dashing away this picture
from his eyes. “I 'll not kill myself to
please her.”
“Rum! I must have rum, or I shall go mad.
The old man's jug will be in the old place in the
kitchen cupboard,” he continued.
He skulked along rapidly through the woods,
in his heart paused a moment. He could keep
it down from maddening him, while he thought
of his sorry consolation to come.
It was growing dusk now, and he was reckless.
He stopped by the kitchen window of
his father's house and peered in.
The family were at supper. These were the
early years of the Revolution, and war had not
yet utterly desolated this region. Squire Dewitt's
was still a prosperous household, and he,
a fine old patriarch, presided at a liberal board.
Opposite him sat the mild mother of the house.
The harmony of a lifetime of love and companion
thinking on companion cares had made
her expression almost identical with her husband's.
Pretty Kate, a daughter of her parents'
old age, bustled the meal along, and hoped her
Hendrecus was not getting hungry. Jierck's
other sister, a widow, was making two smiles
grow in the place of one, on her boy Tommy's
round face, by cutting his gingerbread fatter
than usual. The cat, from a dresser, watched
every morsel and every sip, with a feline look,
which is a thief look.
This homely scene, instead of soothing poor
Jierck, was double bitterness to him.
“Curse the woman I made my wife!” he
thought. “She has spoilt my chance of home
love and reverence me. Curse her for making
me hate my life!”
He turned away, half mean, half fierce, and
stole in by the back-door to the cupboard.
Those were times, remember, before the demijohn
and the spinning-wheel had given way to
Webster's Unabridged and the melodeon. In
every farmer's pantry stood a Dutch-bellied
stone jug. It was corked with a corn cob, and
looked arrogantly through the window at the
old oaken bucket. Was there molasses in that
jug? Not so; but rum fitzmolasses. The well-sweep
grew stiff for want of exercise, moss
covered the dry-rotten bucket, green slime in
the stagnant well was only broken by the
plunges of lonely old “Rigdumbonnimiddikaimo”;
but the rum-jug was always alert and
jolly, and never had time to look vacuous before
it was a plenum again. It is hard to imagine
those ages; for we have changed our manners
now. Our brandy is dried up, our rum has
run away, and this is not a land flowing with
Monongahela.
Jierck stole, like a thief, into the pantry.
There sat the great jug, as of yore. It was of
gray stone-ware with blue splashes. Its spout
was fashioned into a face on the broad grin.
“Comfort here!” the grinning mask seemed to
bastard was the comfort it promised. Jierck
heaved up its clumsy heft, balanced it upon
his lips, and swigged.
Yes, — not to be squeamish in terms, — this
Patriot of the Revolution swigged. This was
not patriotic, nor under the circumstances honorable,
nor in any way wise or prudent. And
of course, as his provocation is unknown to our
time, we cannot appreciate his reckless despair.
If he had only stopped when he had enough!
At the present day we never take too much of
our anodynes and our stimulants. One weed,
one toddy, one wife, one million, one Presidential
term, — whenever wisdom whispers, Satis,
we pause and echo, “Satis 't is.” Wisdom was
younger in Jierck's time. If her childish voice
did at all admonish him, the gurgle in his
throat made him deaf to the warning at his
tympanum. He took too much, poor fellow!
Pardon him, and remember that an ill-omened
she-wolf had just crossed his path.
There is a sage and honorable law that limits
the robbing of orchards, — “Eat your fill; but
don't fill your pockets.” Jierck was rash enough
to violate this also. He pocketed a pint of
his sorry comforter. He found an empty bottle
labelled Hair-Oil. There were nameless unguents
before Macassar, and this bottle had held
made for the barn, just in time to evade pretty
Kate carrying supper to the others and her
Hendrecus.
Supper was done. Dusk was come. Jierck
set out with his party for the rendezvous. The
peril was considerable. Hanging was the penalty
for being caught. So they sharpened their
eyes, pricked up their ears, trod softly, and
tried to persuade the runt pony to do the same.
Jierck brought up the rear, in a state of sullen
contempt.
At the cross-roads Major Skerrett and his
companion met them. It was night now in
the woods. A red belt of day behind Dunderberg
stared watchfully at the party.
“I will go down to the house alone, as we arranged,”
whispered the Major. “The negro will
admit me to the dining-room. Do you be ready
on the lawn by the window at half past eight!
It will be dark enough for safety by that time.
When I open the window and whistle, jump in
and take our man. That is my plan. If anything
goes wrong, I will alter it. But nothing
will go wrong. Good-bye!”
He moved away through the darkness.
The party waited in the woods, listening to
the sounds of evening. It grew chilly. Jierck
Dewitt retired again and again, and sipped from
of himself for violating his pledge to the Major.
But he soliloquized, “I am only taking just
enough to keep my spirits up, — just enough to
make a man of me after my making a baby of
myself at sight of that woman.”
Just enough! It is not pleasant to betray the
errors of the past; but it is a truth grave in this
history that the unhappy fellow had much more
than enough when, at half past eight, he halted
his party under cover of the shrubbery on the
lawn at Brothertoft Manor-House.
| XI. Edwin Brothertoft | |