University of Virginia Library

4. IV.

Four great Patroons came to honor their peer's
funeral.

These were Van Cortlandt, Phillipse with his
son-in-law Beverley Robinson, from the neighborhood,
and Livingston from above the Highlands.

They saw their old friend's coffin to its damp
shelf, and then walked up to the manor-house
for a slice of the funeral baked meats and a libation
to the memory of the defunct.

A black servant carved and uncorked for
them. He had the grand air, and wielded knife
and corkscrew with dignity. Voltaire the gentlemen
called him. He seemed proud to bear
the name of that eminent destructive.

The guests eat their fat and lean with good
appetite. Then they touched glasses, and sighed
over another of their order gone.

“The property is all eaten up with mortgages,
I hear,” says Phillipse, with an appropriate doleful
tone.

“Billop swallows the whole, the infernal

usurer!” Van Cortlandt rejoined, looking lugubriously
at his fellows, and then cheerfully at his
glass.

“He 's too far gone to swallow anything. The
Devil has probably got him by this time. He
was dying three days ago,” said Beverley Robinson.

“Handsome Jane Billop will be our great
heiress,” Livingston in turn remarked. “Let
your daughters look to their laurels, Phillipse!”

“My daughters, sir, do not enter the lists with
such people.”

“Come, gentlemen,” jolly Van Cortlandt interjected,
“another glass, and good luck to our
young friend here! I wish he would join us;
but I suppose the poor boy must have out his
cry alone. What can we do for him? We
must stand by our order.”

“I begin to have some faith in the order,”
says Livingston, “when it produces such `preux
chevaliers' as he. What can we do for him?
Take him for your second son-in-law, Phillipse!
The lovely Mary is still heart-whole, I believe.
Our strapping young friend from Virginia, Master
George Washington, has caracoled off, with
a tear in his eye and a flea in his ear. Slice off
twenty or thirty thousand acres from your
manor, marry these young people, and set them
up. You are too rich for our latitude and our
era.”

Mr. Adolphus Phillipse was a slow coach.
The other's banter teased him.

“Mr. Livingston,” he began, swelling and
growing red.

“Come, gentlemen,” cries Van Cortlandt, pacificator,
“I have a capital plan for young Brothertoft.”

“What?” Omnes inquire.

“He must marry Jane Billop.”

“Ay, he must marry Jane Billop,” Omnes
rejoin.

“A glass to it!” cried the proposer.

“Glasses round!” the seconders echo, with
subdued enthusiasm.

“A beauty!” says Van Cortlandt, clinking
with Phillipse.

“An heiress!” says Phillipse, clinking on.

“An orphan and only child!” says Robinson,
touching glasses with his neighbor.

“Sweet sixteen!” says Livingston, blowing a
kiss, and completing the circle of clink.

These jolly boys, old and young, were of a
tribe on its way to extinction, with the painted
sagamores of tribes before them. First came
the red nomad, striding over the continent. In
time followed the great Patroon, sprawling over
all the acres of a county. Finally arrives the
unembarrassed gentleman of our time, nomad in
youth, settler at maturity, but bound to no spot,

and cribbed in no habitation; and always packed
to move, with a brain full of wits and a pocket
full of coupons.

The four proprietors finished their libations
and sent for Edwin to say good-bye. His deep
grief made any suggestion of their marriage
scheme an impertinence.

Jolly Van Cortlandt longed to lay his hand
kindly on the young man's shoulder and say,
“Don't grieve, my boy! `Omnes moriar,' as we
used to say at school. Come, let me tell you
about a happy marriage we 've planned for
you!”

Indeed, he did arrange this little speech in
his mind, and consulted Livingston on its delivery.

“Let him alone!” said that `magister morum.'
“You know as much of love as of Latin.
The match is clearly made in heaven. It
will take care of itself. He shall have my good
word with the lady, and wherever else he wants
it. I love a gentleman.”

“So do I, naturally,” Van says, and he gave
the youth honored with this fair title a cordial
invitation to his Manor.

The others also offered their houses, hearths,
and hearts, sincerely; and then mounted and
rode off on their several prosperous and cheerful
ways.

Meanwhile, a group of the tenants of the Manor,
standing on the sunny side of the vault, had
been discussing the late lord and the prospects
of his successor. As the elders talked, their
sons and heirs played leap-frog over the tombstones,
puffed out their cheeks to rival the cherubs
over the compliments in doggerel on the
slabs, and spelled through the names of extinct
Lincolnshire families, people of slow lungs, who
had not kept up with the fast climate.

“I feel as if I 'd lost a brother,” said Squire
Jierck Dewitt, the chief personage among the
tenantry.

“A fine mahn, he was!” pronounced Isaac
Van Wart, through a warty nose. “But not
spry enough, — not spry enough!”

“Anybody could cheat him,” says lean Hendrecus
Canady, the root and Indian doctor, who
knew his fact by frequent personal experiments.

“Who 'd want to cheat a man that was everybody's
friend?” asked old Sam Galsworthy's
hearty voice.

“The boy 's a thorough Brothertoft, mild as a
lamb and brave as a lion,” Dewitt continued.
“But I don't like to think of his being flung on
the world so young.”

“He can go down to York and set up a newspaper,”
Van Wart suggested.

“If I was him, I 'd put in for Squire Billop's

gal, and have easy times.” This was the root
doctor's plan.

“Well, if he ever wants a hundred pounds,”
says Galsworthy, — “ay, or five hundred, for
that matter, — he 's only got to put his hand
into my pocket.”

“You can't put your own hand in, without
wrastlin' a good deal,” Van Wart says.

Sam laughed, and tried. But he was too
paunchy.

“I 'm a big un,” he said; “but I was a little
un when I got back from that scalpin' trip to
Canada, when Horse-Beef Billop was Commissary.
I did n't weigh more 'n the Injun doctor
here; and he, and that boy he feeds on yaller
pills, won't balance eight stone together. It 's
bad stock, is the Billop. I hope our young man
and the Colonel's gal won't spark up to each
other.”

It was growing dusk. The dead man's R. I.
P. had been pronounced, and the youth's `Perge
puer!” The tenants, members of a class presently
to become extinguished with the Patroons,
marched off toward the smokes that signalled
their suppers. The sons dismounted from the
tombstones and followed. Each of them is his
father, in boy form. They prance off, exercising
their muscles to pull their pound, by and by, at
the progress of this history. Old Sam Galsworthy

junior has hard work to keep up with the
others, on account of his back load. He carries
on his shoulders little Hendrecus Canady, a
bolus-fed fellow, his father's corpus vile to try
nostrums upon.

And Edwin Brothertoft sat alone in his lonely
home, — his home no more.

Lonely, lonely!

A blank by the fireside, where his father used
to sit. A blank in the chamber, where he lay so
many days, drifting slowly out of life. Silence
now, — silence, which those feeble words of affection,
those mild warnings, those earnest prayers,
those trailing whispers low from dying lips, would
never faintly break again. No dear hand to
press. No beloved face to watch sleeping, until
it woke into a smile. No face, no touch, no
voice; only a want and an absence in that lonely
home.

And if, in some dreamy moment, the son
seemed to see the dear form steal back to its
accustomed place and the dear face appear, the
features wore an eager, yet a disappointed look.
So much to say, that now could never be said!
How the father seemed to long to recover human
accents, and urge fresh warnings against the
passions that harm the life and gnaw the soul,
or to reveal some unknown error sadder than
a sin.

And sometimes, too, that vision of the father's
countenance, faint against a background of twilight,
was tinged with another sorrow, and the
son thought, “He died, and never knew how
thoroughly I loved him. Did I ever neglect
him? Was I ever cold or careless? That sad
face seems to mildly reproach me with some
cruel slight.”

The lonely house grew drearier and drearier.

Everything, even the priceless portrait of the
Puritan Colonel, was covered by the mortgages.
Avarice had licked them all over with its slime,
and gaped to bolt the whole at a meal.

Edwin did not wish to see a Skervey Skaats
at work swallowing the family heirlooms. He
invited Squire Dewitt to act for him with the
new proprietor's representative.

New York, by that time, had become a thriving
little town. The silt of the stream of corn that
flowed down the Hudson was enriching it. Edwin

had brave hopes of making at least his daily
bread there with his brains or his hands.

While he was preparing to go, Old Sam Galsworthy
appeared with a bag of guineas and a fine
white mare of the famous Lincolnshire stock, —
such a mare as Colonel Brothertoft used to ride,
and Prince Rupert's men to run from.

“Squire Dewitt told me you were going to
trudge to York,” said Sam.

“I was,” replied the orphan; “my legs will
take me there finely.”

“It was in my lease,” said Sam, “to pay a
mare-colt every year over and above my rent,
besides a six-year-old mare for a harriet, whenever
the new heir came in.”

“Heriot, I suppose you mean, Sam.”

“We call 'em heroits when they 're horses,
and harriets when they 're mares. Well, your
father would n't take the colts since twelve year.
He said he was agin tribute, and struck the colts
and the harriets all out of my lease. So I put
the price of a colt aside for him every year, in
case hard times come. There 's twelve colts in
this buckskin bag, and this mare is the token
that I count you the rightful owner of my farm
and the whole Manor. I 've changed her name
to Harriet, bein' one. She 's a stepper, as any
man can see with half a blinker. The dollars
and the beast is yourn, Mister Edwin.”

Edwin shook his head. “You are very kind,
Sam; but I am my father's son, and against
tribute in any form.”

“I have n't loved your father forty year to
see his son go afoot. Ride the mare down, anyhow.
She don't get motion enough, now that
I 'm too heavy for her, bein' seventeen stone
three pound and a quarter with my coat off.”

Edwin's pride melted under this loyalty.

“I will ride her then, Sam, and thank you.
And give me a luck-penny out of the bag.”

“You 'll not take the whole?” pleaded Galsworthy.

No. And when the root-doctor heard this, he
stood Hendrecus Canady junior in a receptive
position, and dosed him with a bolus of wisdom,
as follows: —

“Men is divided into three factions. Them
that grabs their chances. Them that chucks
away their chances. And them that lets their
chances slide. The Brothertofts have alluz ben
of the lettin'-slide faction. This one has jined
the Chuckin'-Aways. He 'll never come to
nothin'. You just swaller that remark, my son,
and keep a digestin' of it, if you want to come
to anything yourself.”

Next morning Edwin took leave of home, and
sorrowfully rode away.

A harsh, loud March wind chased him, blowing

Harriet Heriot's tail between her legs. The
omens were bad.

But when, early the second morning, the orphan
crossed King's Bridge, and trod the island
of his new career, a Gulf Stream wind, smelling
of bananas and sounding of palm-leaves, met
him, breathing welcome and success.