 | Edwin Brothertoft |  |
3. PART III.
1. I.
For the first time in her life Lucy Brothertoft
failed to kiss her mother on the morning of the
dinner to Sir Henry Clinton.
A great pang went to the guilty woman's
heart.
She perceived that her daughter knew her at
last.
Ah, miserable woman! She did not dare turn
her great black eyes reproachfully upon Lucy,
and demand the omitted caress.
She did not dare say tenderly, “What, my
daughter, are you forgetting me?”
She did not dare go forward and press her
own unworthy lips to those virgin lips.
For one instant a great tumult of love and
remorse stirred within her. She longed to fling
herself on her knees before her daughter, to
bury her face in Lucy's lap, and there, with
tears and agony, cry out: —
“O my child! pity me, do not hate me, for
the lie I have been. Ah! you do not know the
misery of wearing an undetected falsehood in
hypocrisy. You do not know how miserably
base it is to be loved for what you are not, —
to be trusted as a true and loyal heart, when
every moment of such false pretence is another
film of falsehood over the deep-seated lie. You
cannot know how we tacit liars long for betrayal,
while we shrink and shudder when it
approaches!
“And you, my gentle daughter, have been my
vengeance. Listen to me now! The old pride
breaks. The old horror passes. I confess. Before
you, the very image of my husband in his
young and hopeful days, I confess my shameful
sin. I have been a foul wife and a false mother.
Do not scorn me, Lucy. I have suffered, and
shall suffer till I die.
“Ah! thank Heaven, my child, that you do
not feel and cannot divine half my degradation.
My agony you see, — let it be the lesson of your
life! Here I hide my face, and dare to recall
that brave and noble lover, your father. So
gentle he was, so tender, so utterly trustful!
And I was mean enough to think he triumphed
over me because his soul was fine, and mine was
coarse. So I took my coarse revenge.
“O fool, fool! that I could not comprehend
that pure and lofty nature. O base! that I
must grovel and rank myself with the base. O
for the unwomanly sneers, for the studied
insults, by which I bore him down, and broke
at last that high, chivalric heart. It seems to
me that I was not sane, but mad all those miserable
years.
“But now, my daughter, see me weep! I
repent. My soul repents and loathes this guilty
woman here. I have spoken, I have told you
fully what I am. I look up. I see your father's
patient, pitying glance upon your face. Speak,
with his voice, and say I may be slowly pardoned,
if my penitence endures. And kiss me, Lucy!
not my tainted lips; but kiss my forehead with
a kiss of peace!”
Such a wild agony of love and remorse stirred
within this wretched woman's heart.
But she battled it down, down, down.
The virago in her struck the woman to the
earth, and throttled her. No yielding. No
tears. No repentance. She scorned the medicine
of shame.
Lucy's presence cowed her. She did not
dare look at that gentle, earnest face, except
covertly, and as an assassin looks.
The Furies, her old companions, thickened
about her, like a mist pregnant with forms.
There was a whispering in the air. Did others
see those shadowy images? Did others hear
emphatic. “Stab the meek-faced girl! Be rid
of this spy! Shall she sit there and shame
you?” — so the Furies whispered and shouted.
And the woman replied within herself: “Am
I not stabbing her? See, here is my hired
bravo, my future son-in-law, the very Honorable
Major Kerr, — le bel homme! He will give
the puny thing troubles of her own to mind.
We will see whether she is always to stay so
meek and patient. We will see whether these
Brothertofts are so much better than other
people. She has learnt to suspect me at last.
I knew the time would come, and I have made
ready for it. Day after to-morrow they are to
be married, and then I shall be rid of Miss
Monitress.”
With such passions at work, breakfast at
Brothertoft, on the morning of Putnam's Council,
and the dinner to Clinton, was not a very
cheerful meal. Mother and daughter were silent.
Kerr took his cue, and played knife and fork.
2. II.
Lucy left the room immediately after breakfast.
“My pretty Lucy seems to have the megrims,”
said Major Kerr. “Is that on the cards for a
blushing bride?”
“She sighs for the hour when Adonis shall
name her his,” replied the mother, with a half-sneer.
“Confound it, Madam! I believe you are
laughing at me,” the blowsy Adonis grumbled.
He lifted himself from the table, and swaggered
off to the fire, with a gorged movement. He
probably had never seen a turkey-buzzard lounging
away from carrion; but he unconsciously
imitated that unattractive fowl.
The débris of his meal, the husks of what he
did eat, remained in an unpleasant huddle on
the table, proving that a great, gross feeder had
been there.
He stood before the fire, a big red object, the
type of many Englishmen who were sent over in
the Revolution to disenchant us with monarchy.
an Englishman's being a gentleman. Our mother
country seemed to have carefully decimated
her civil and military service of its brutes, to do
the dirty work of flogging the Continentals.
Kerr stood before the fire, making a picture of
himself.
A handsomish animal! Other women might
call him le bel homme without Mrs. Brothertoft's
tone of contempt. He had evidently given
the artists of the alcoholic school — Brandy
and that brotherhood — frequent sittings. They
paint rubicund, and had not been chary of carnations
in his case. His red uniform-jacket
gave him the air of an overgrown boy. But not
a frank, merry one; nor even an oafish, well-meaning
dolt of a chap. This great boy is a
bully. Smaller urchins would suffer under his
thumb. He would crush a butterfly, or, indeed,
anything gentle and tender, without much ceremony.
So Mrs. Brothertoft seemed to think, as she
surveyed him, posed there for inspection.
She smiled to herself, and thought, “This
sensual tyrant will presently give Miss Lucy
something else to do than insult me with her
prudish airs.”
“Dash it, Ma'am!” Kerr repeated, — his caste,
in his time, dashed freely, — “do you mean to
hint the girl is not fond of me?”
“Fond! she adores you. See how jealous she
is! She cannot leave you one moment.”
“I 'd have you to know, Madam, with your
sneers, that better blood than your daughter
have been fond of me.”
“Why did n't Adonis stay in the home market,
then, instead of putting himself in the Provincial?”
“You know why! I don't make any secret
of my debts and my peccadillos. You know as
much about me as I do about you, my mother-in-law.”
She winced a little at this coarse familiarity.
It was part of her inevitable punishment to be so
treated. Ah! how bitterly she remembered, at
such words, the reverent courtesy of her husband!
how bitterly, his pitying tenderness, even
when she had dishonored him, so far as his honor
was in her power! But she hardened herself
against these memories, and her vindictiveness
against that daughter of his grew more cruel.
“You must allow,” continued Kerr, “that
you get me dem cheap.”
“Cheap!” she rejoined. “Cheap with the
debts and the peccadillos! Cheap, white feather
and all!”
“Who says I ever showed the white feather?”
roared Kerr. “That 's one of that muscadin,
Jack André's lies. He wants my place as Adjutant
rhyme-writing milksop! he 'd better keep
his Swiss jaws shut, and not slander a British
nobleman!”
“Nobleman!” says his hostess, evidently taking
pleasure in galling her conspirator; “I
thought you were only a peer's third son.”
“There are but three lives between me and
the earldom, — an old gouty life, Tom's jockey
life, and Dick's drunken one. Your daughter
will be Countess of Bendigh one of these days,
and you 'd both better be careful how you treat
me.”
“How could I treat you better?” I give you
the prettiest girl in the Province, with the prettiest
portion.”
“Have I got to tell you again, that not every
man would take your daughter? You need n't
look so fierce about it.”
She did look fierce. She looked — la belle
sauvage — as if she could handle a scalping-knife.
And no wonder! This was not very pretty
talk on either side.
It was not very pretty work they had plotted.
Hate must have become very bitter in the mother's
heart before she chose this brute and booby
for her daughter's husband. She did not even
perceive the dull spark of a better nature, not
utterly quenched in him, — gross, dissolute, over-bearing,
rid of Lucy Brothertoft, — this was the first
thing. If, besides, she got an ally on the royalist
side, and a son-in-law who could help her to a
place in society in England, it was clear gain.
But enough of this conspiracy!
Will the father and that young rebel sans
moustache be bold and speedy enough to defeat
it?
3. III.
Place aux héros!
To-day the lady of Brothertoft Manor dines
Sir Henry Clinton and suite.
If General Putnam should ever march back,
and blame her that she gave aid and comfort
to the enemy, she will say that she was forced
to protect herself by a little sham hospitality.
It may be sham, but it is liberal. Sappho
contributes her most faithful soup. The river
gives a noble sturgeon, — and “Albany beef,”
treated as turbot, with sauce blanche, is fish
for anybody's fork. The brooks supply trouts
by the bushel. The Highlands have provided
special venison for this festival. The Manor kills
its fatted calf, its sweetest mutton, its spright-liest
young turkey, fed on honeydew grasshoppers.
There is a plum-pudding big as a pumpkin.
Alas that no patriot palate will vibrate to the
passing love-taps of these substantial good things!
All is ready, and Lady Brothertoft — so she
loves to be called — awaits her distinguished
guests, in her grandest attire.
But, calm and stately as she sits, there is now
miserable panic and now cruel hate in her heart;
for all the time she is whispering to herself.
“Lucy did not kiss me. It is the first time
in all her life. Edwin Brothertoft's daughter
has discovered at last what I am. Did he come
in a dream and tell her?”
Then she would raise her eyes as far as those
fair hands lying in her daughter's lap, — no
higher, no higher, or the daughter would face
her, — and think of the wedding-ring that her
plot is presently to force upon one of those
locked fingers. She could hardly keep back a
scream of wild triumph at the thought.
So the mother sits, and holds her peace, such
as it is. The daughter waits, in a strange dream
of patience. Major Kerr swaggers about, admires
his legs, feels embarrassed before his mute betrothed,
looks at his watch and grumbles, “It 's
half past two. Dinner 's three, sharp. The
soup will be spoiled if they don't show presently.”
They begin to show now upon the quarter-decks
of the three frigates in the river. The
guests, in full bloom of scarlet and gold, come
up from cabin and ward-room of the Tartar, the
Preston, and the Mercury. Jack on the forecastle
has his joke, as each new figure struts
forth, dodging whatever would stain or flavor
“Bear a hand there, you lubber, with
the flour for my hair-powder! How the devil
did that spot come on my coat-sleeve! Why the
devil did n't you have these ruffles starched?”
The last man now struggles into his tightest
Hessians. The last man draws on his silk stockings.
The last mans his pumps. Sir Henry
Clinton comes out with Commodore Hotham.
The captain's gig has been swinging half an
hour in the shade of the frigate's hull. Present
arms, sentry at the gangway! Here they
come, down the black side of the ship. Fire
and feathers, how splendid! Take care of your
sword, Sir Henry, or you 'll trip and get a
ducking instead of a dinner! They scuttle into
the stern-sheets. The oarsmen, in their neatest
holiday rig, scoff in their hearts, and name
these great personages “lobsters” and “land-lubbers.”
The captain's coxswain, the prettiest
man of the whole ship's company, gives the
word, “Shove off!” Boat-hook shoves, Jack on
deck peers through the port-holes. A topman,
aloft, accidentally drops a tarry bit of spunyarn
and hits Sir Henry on his biggish nose. “Back
starboard,” the pretty coxswain orders. “Pull
port!” “Give way all!” And so we go to
dinner! And so from men-of-war in our time
heroes go to dinners ashore.
And now the gay party enters the dining-room
at Brothertoft Manor.
How bright the sunbeams of the October afternoon,
ricochetting from the smooth Hudson into
the windows, gleam on the epaulets and buttons
of a dozen gorgeous officers! One special
ray is clearly detailed to signalize that star on
Sir Henry Clinton's left breast. The room is
aflame with scarlet. Certainly these flamboyant
heroes will presently consume away every vestige
of a rebel army. Surely, after a parry or
two against these dress swords, the champions
of freedom will drop their points and yield their
necks to the halter. Each elaborate fine gentleman,
too, of all this bandboxy company, is
crowned with victor bays. They plucked them
only t' other day across the river on the ramparts
of Forts Clinton and Montgomery. When
Jack Burgoyne sends down his bunch of laurel
from Saratoga, the whole are to be tied up in
one big bouquet, and despatched to tickle the
nose and the heart of Farmer George at Windsor
Castle.
Sir Henry Clinton — no less — Cœsar ipse —
hands in the grand hostess, and takes his seat
at her right. How jolly he looks, the fat little
man! How his round face shines, and his protuberant
nose begins to glow with inhaling the
steam of the feast!
“I must have you on my left, Admiral,” says
the hostess, to a hearty gentleman in naval uniform.
“Thank you for my promotion, Madam,” rejoins
Commodore Hotham, dropping into his
place.
At the head of her table, then, sits Lady
Brothertoft, proud and handsome, flanked by
the two chiefs. And down on either side the
guests dispose themselves in belaurelled vista.
Major Kerr takes the foot of the table. He
carves well for everybody, and best for himself.
Two spoonsful of sauce blanche float his choice
portion of the Albany beef. The liver of the
turkey he accepts as carver's perquisites. And
when he comes to cut the saddle of venison,
plenty of delicate little scraps, quite too small to
offer to others, find their way to his plate.
Lucy is at his right. What? in high spirits?
in gay colors? Has she so soon become a hypocrite
and conspiratress? Why, the little dissembler
laughs merrily, and flirts audaciously!
Laughs merrily! Ah! there are bitter tears
just beneath that laugh! If you call tolerating
compliments from that young Captain at
her right flirting, then she is flirting, and so conceals
her disgust of her betrothed.
And who is that young Captain? He stole
into the chair at Lucy's right, and began to talk
this fine gentleman of twenty-six, with the oval
face, the regular features, the slightly supercilious
mouth, the dimpled chin, the hair so carefully
powdered and queued? Who is this elegant
petit maître? With what studied gesture
he airs his ruffles! How fluently he rattles!
How easily he improvises jingle! He quotes
French, as if it were his mother-tongue. He
smiles and sighs like an accomplished lady-killer.
Who is he?
Major Emerick, of the Hessian Chasseurs,
looks across the table at this gay rattle, and then
whispers to his own neighbor, Lord Rawdon,
“Zee dat dab maggaroni, Chack Antré; how
he bake lubb to de breddy Lucie! Bajor Gurr
will bide off his 'ead breddy sood.”
“Kerr may glower and look like a cannibal,”
Rawdon returned, in a whisper, “but he will
not eat Jack André's head so long as there 's
any of that venison left.”
“I dinkèd Chack was id Bedsylvadia or Cherzey,”
says Emerick, wiping that enormous moustache
of his, — a coarse Hessian article, planted
like a bushy abattis before his mouth.
“He was,” replied Rawdon, “and I don't see
how he has been able to get here so soon, unless
that is his eidolon, his wraith, and moves like the
ghost in Hamlet. I suppose he heard that Kerr
be an Adjutancy looking for an Adjutant, and has
posted up to offer himself. He did n't know I
was to have it. Jack is in too much hurry to
be a great man. His vanity will get him into a
scrape some of these days.”
So this sentimental Captain is Jack André.
A pretty face; but there is gallows in it. A
pretty laced cravat; but the tie has slipped
ominously round under the left ear. Ah! Jack,
Rawdon is right; thy vanity will be the death of
thee. Suppose thou hast been jilted by the
pretty Mrs. R. L. Edgeworth, née Sneyd, do not
be over hasty to gain name and fame, that she
may be sorry she loved the respectable Richard,
and not thee, flippant Jack. Sink thy shop-keeping
days; nobody remembers them against
thee. Do not try by unsoldierly tricks of bribery
and treachery, and a correspondence after
the bagman model, to get for thyself the rank of
Brigadier and the title Sir John. And, Jack,
take warning that the latitude of Brothertoft
Manor is unhealthy for thee in the autumn.
Never come here again, or thy bootjack will
draw thy boots and find death in them! Swinging
by the neck is a sorry exit for a petit maître,
and it must be annoying to know that, in punishment
for a single shabby act, one's fame is standing
forever in the pillory in Westminster Abbey.
Captain André whispered soft nothings to Lucy.
And though Kerr glowered truculently, she listened,
much to the amusement of Emerick and
Rawdon. Lucky, perhaps, for the daughter, that
mamma, at the head of the table, did not detect
this by-play! She might have scented revolt,
and hastened the marriage. An hour would
have brought the Tartar's chaplain; five minutes
would have clothed him in his limp surplice, and
in five more, Lucy, still quelled by the old tyranny,
would have stammered, “love, honor, and
obey,” — and “die.”
She was not always very attentive to her butterfly
companion.
Sometimes she bent forward, and looked at her
mother, sitting in all her glory between Army
and Navy, and the daughter's cheeks burned
with shame. She longed to fly away from all
this splendor, somewhither where she could dwell
innocently and weep away the infinite sorrow in
her gentle heart. If she had not been too bewildered
by her throng of battling hopes and
fears within, by the clatter of the feast, and Jack
André's mischianza of gossip and compliment,
her notions of right and wrong, of crime and
punishment, would have become sadly confused.
Questions did indeed drift across her mind, —
“How can she sit there so proud and handsome?
How can she be so calm and hard?
and lead the talk so vigorously? She wields
and manages every one about her. They applaud
her wit. They listen to her suggestions.
She seems to comprehend these political matters
better than any of them. Hear Sir Henry
Clinton, `Madam, if you were Queen of England,
these rebel Colonies would soon be taught
subjection.' It is half compliment of guest to
hostess; but more than half truth. For she is
an imperious, potent woman. And has evil in her
soul given her this power and this knowledge?
Must women sin to be strong? How can she
sit there, knowing what she knows of herself,
knowing what is known of her? She seems to
triumph. Triumph! alas! why is she not away
in silence and solitude, with a veil over her
bad beauty, praying to God to forgive her for
the harm she has done, and for the sin she is?
Is such hypocrisy possible? Or am I deceived?
May not she perhaps, perhaps, be worthy? May
she not be wise and good? Is it not I who
am the hypocrite? May she not mean kindly
in providing me a man of rank and power as a
protector in these rude times? Are not my suspicions
the ignorance of a child, — my plots the
wicked struggles of a rebellious heart against
duty? O God, pity and guide me!”
Lucy felt tears starting to her eyes at these
to listen to Jack André's small-talk.
Jack was telling a clever story of a raid he
and some brother officers had made from New
York on the poultry-yards of Staten Island.
An old lady with a broomstick had endeavored
to defend the Clove Road against these turkey-snatchers,
and he gave her drawl to the life.
“Then,” says Jack, “out came Captain Rambullet,
with the rusty matchlock of Rambouillet
his Huguenot ancestor, and interposed a smell of
cornstalk whiskey between us and his hen-roost.”
This scene, too, Jack gave with twang and
drawl to the life, amid roars of laughter, and
cries of “Coot! coot!” from Major Emerick.
Lucy did not laugh. She had all at once
discovered that her sympathies were with these
rebels, nasal twang and all. “My father is one
of them,” she thought. “If I am to be saved
from marrying this coarse glutton, it must be
by a rebel. Putnam and his officers were not
so showy as these men; but they seemed more
in earnest.”
I do not succeed in entertaining you, fair
lady,” says André, sotto voce. “Your thoughts
are all for that happy fellow beside you,” — and
he looked with a little sneer towards Kerr, who
was applying to Bottle for the boon of wit.
A feeling of utter despair came over poor
glanced at the animal. Then she drew away
indignantly from the man who had put this
little stab into her heart.
“Are there no gentlemen in the world?” she
thought. “Do men dare to speak so and look
so at other young ladies?”
“Loog ad de breddy Meess,” says Emerick,
holding a wine-glass before his bushy abattis,
as a cover. “Zhe is nod habbie wid Chack,
nor wid Gurr!”
“A dozen fellows,” Rawdon rejoined, behind
his glass, “of better blood than Jack, and better
hearts than Kerr, would have cut in there long
ago. The daughter is as sweet and pure as
a lily. But who dares marry such a mother-in-law?”
— and he shrugged his shoulders expressively
toward the hostess.
Do we talk so at dinner-tables in 1860? eh,
nous autres?
The hostess now rose, and beckoned her daughter.
“I leave you, gentlemen, to your toasts,” she
said. “Major Kerr will be my representative.”
She moved to the door. Army and Navy,
Albion and Hesse, all sprang to open for her.
A murmur of admiration for her beauty and
bearing applauded the exit. Lady Brothertoft
seemed to be at her climax.
Kerr of course did not let the toasts lag.
“The King, gentlemen!”
Cheers! Drank cyathis plenis.
Sir Henry Clinton rises, gleaming star, red
nose, and all, and proposes, “Our hostess!”
Bumpers and uproar!
Then they load and fire, fast and furious.
Bottle can hardly gallop fast enough to supply
ammunition.
“The Army!” “Hooray, hooray! Speech
from Lord Rawdon!”
“The Navy!” “Three cheers for Commodore
Hotham!”
“The captured forts!” Drank in silence to
the memory of Colonel Campbell and Count
Grabowski, killed there.
“Luck to Jack Burgoyne!” “Pouting Jack,”
André suggests. “May he be a spiler to
Schuyler, and fling Gates over the hedge into
the ditch!” Laughter and cheers, and immense
rattling of glasses on the table.
“Here 's to General Vaughan and his trip
up the river to-morrow! May he add a moral
to the Esopus fables!”
“The Brandywine! and here 's hoping Mr.
Washington may have another taste of the
same cup!”
Are modern toasts and dinner-table wit of this
same calibre?
Kerr rose and endeavored to offer the famous
sentiment known as The Four Rules of Arithmetic.
He was muddled by this time, and the
toast got itself transposed. He gravely proposed,
in a thick voice, and in words with no
syllables, — “Addition to the Whigs! Subtraction
to the Tories! Multiplication to the King's
foes! Division to his friends!” And added
Kerr, out of his own head, — “Cuffush'n t'
ev'ryborry!”
Ironical cheers from Jack André. Whereupon
good-natured Emerick, to cover the general
serio-comic dismay, rose and said, — “Shettlemen,
I kiv Bajor Gurr and his breddy bride.”
Double bumpers. Hoorayryrayryray! Rattle
everybody, with glasses, forks, and nut-crackers.
One enthusiast flung his glass over his head, and
then blundered out a call for Captain André's
song, “The Lover's Lament.” Lord Rawdon
was the only one to perceive the bad omen.
So Jack, without more solicitation, began, in a
pretty voice, —
When Delia's heart was mine,” —
— a most moving ditty, the words and music
his own.
Everybody felt a little maudlin when this Jack
of all airs and graces closed his lay with a dulcet
revel.
In such pauses young gentlemen who love
flirtation more than potation dodge off and join
the ladies.
Let us follow this good example. A revel,
with Major Kerr for its master, may easily grow
to an orgie; and meanwhile the mother and
daughter are sitting in the parlor alone.
4. IV.
The sun of October had gone down below the
golden forests on the golden hills. It was dusk,
and the two ladies sat in the parlor, dimly lit by
a glimmering fire.
They were alone; unless the spirit of the first
Edwin Brothertoft was looking at them from
Vandyck's portrait on the wall.
That wonderful picture hung in its old place.
More than a century, now, it had been silently
watching the fortunes of the family.
No Provincial daubs had ventured within sight
of this masterpiece. Each successive Brothertoft
was always proud to know that his face, at its
best, was his ancestor's repeated. Each descendant
said, “Vandyck painted us, once for
all, in the person of our forefather. When there
is another Colonel Brothertoft, or a second Vandyck,
it will be time to give the picture a companion.”
So one perfect work had vetoed a whole gallery
of wooden visages.
The present Mrs. Brothertoft had always disliked
for first summoning her husband to her
side. When she brought shame into the house,
she began to dread its tacit reproach. The eyes
of the Colonel, sad and stern, seemed forever to
follow her. His wife's gentle face grew merciless.
Even the innocent child on the canvas
read her secret heart.
By and by, to escape this inspection, she had
the portrait covered with a crimson silk curtain.
“A Vandyck,” she said, “is too rare and too
precious to be given up to flies.”
For many years the ancestors had been left to
blush behind a screen of crimson silk.
To-day, before dinner, her guests had asked to
see this famous work of the famous master.
No one could detect the tremor in her heart at
this request. No one could see how white her
face grew as she fumbled with the cords, nor
how suddenly scarlet as she drew aside the curtain.
Every one exclaimed in genuine or conventional
admiration.
The picture represented that meeting at Old
Brothertoft Manor, after the battle of Horncastle,
in the time of the Great Rebellion. The
Colonel was in his corslet, buff and jackboots of
a trooper. His plumed hat, caught by a cord,
had fallen upon his shoulder. He wore his hair
not like a crop-eared Roundhead. On one arm
rested the bridle of the grand white charger beside
him. With the other he held his fair boy,
now pacified from his Astyanax fright, and smiling
at his father's nodding crest and glinting breast-plate.
The wife, the first Lucy Brothertoft,
stood by, regarding the two she loved best with
tender solicitude. It was, indeed, a sweet domestic
group, and the gentleman's armor, his
impatient war-horse, and that hint in the background
of the Manor-House, smoking and in
ruins, gave it a dramatic element of doubt and
danger, — a picture full of grace, heroism, and
affection, — one to dignify a house, to ennoble
and refine a household.
Lucy looked at her mother as the curtain
parted and revealed the three figures. To the
guests they were Art; to the ladies they were
mute personages in a tragedy. Lucy saw her
mother's glance, quick and covert, at these faces
she had so long evaded. The daughter could
understand now why, as Mrs. Brothertoft looked,
her countenance seemed resolutely to harden,
and grow more beautifully Gorgon than ever.
“Quite a chef-d'œuvre!” says Sir Henry
Clinton, looking through his hand, with a knowing
air. — “What color! what chiar' oscuro!
what drapery!” Jack André exclaimed. — “No
said Lord Rawdon.—“Breddy bicksher!”
was Major Emerick's verdict. — “You must be
proud, Madam,” said honest Commodore Hotham,
ignorant of scandal, “to bear this honored
and historic name.”
While these murmurs of approval were going
on, Plato announced dinner. The guests filed
out, leaving the picture uncovered. It still remained
so, now that the mother and daughter
sat in the dusky room, after dinner. The flashing
and fading fire gave its figures movement
and unreal life.
Lucy glanced at her mother's face, now dim
and far away, and now, as the fire blazed up,
leaping forth from its lair of darkness.
“Certainly,” she thought, “my mother was
never so terribly handsome.”
It was true. She was an imperial woman,
face, form, and bearing. How majestic her
strong, straight nose, her full chin, her vigorous
color, her daring eyes, her brow of command,
and her black hair dressed, after a mode of the
day, in a tower, and falling in masses on the
neck! More flesh and more color would have
made her coarse. Is it possible that the excitement
of a bad conscience has refined her beauty?
Must the coarse take the poison of sin, as the
fine take the medicine of sorrow, to kill the
for some to wear, through life, a harsh dishonor
next the skin?
“How can this be?” thought Lucy. “Should
not the heart have peace, that the face may wear
beauty, the emblem of peace? Can there be
peace in her heart?”
Peace! As if in answer, at a flash of firelight,
the mother's face glared out fierce and cruel.
Sternness, but no peace there!
Lucy turned, and took refuge with the person-ages
of the picture.
“You,” she addressed them in mute appeal,
“are a world nearer my heart than this unmotherly
woman beside me. O chivalric gentleman!
O benign lady! encourage and sustain me! My
heart will break with these doubts and plots and
perils.”
The two ladies sat silent by the firelight.
The guests were noisy, two doors off. They
were laughing and applauding Kerr's tipsy
toasts, André's song, Emerick's Hessian butchery
of the King's English.
At a louder burst of revelry Lucy started,
shrank, and glanced at her mother's impassive
face, — a loyal mask to its mistress.
Mrs. Brothertoft also looked up, and caught
Lucy's eye. For an instant the two gazed at
one another. There was an instant's spiritual
the tainted being against the pure. Their two
souls stood at their eyes, and battled for a breath,
while the fire flashed like a waving of torches.
The flash sunk, the room was dark again.
But before the light was gone the guilty eyes
wavered, the guilty spirit cowered. Mrs. Brothertoft
looked away, seeking refuge from her
daughter, against whose innocent heart she was
devising an infamy.
As she turned, she caught sight of the picture.
It was steadily regarding her, — a judge, remote,
unsympathetic, Rhadamanthine.
At this sight, the perpetual inner battle in her
evil heart stormed to the surface. Her countenance
was no longer an impassive mask.
Lucy suddenly saw a bedlam look leap out
upon those beautiful features.
It seemed to Mrs. Brothertoft that the Furies,
whose companionship and hints she had so long
encouraged, now closed in upon her, and became
body of her body, soul of her soul.
She rose, and strode up to the uncovered portrait.
She stood a moment, surveying it in silence, —
herself a picture in the fire-lit obscure.
How beautiful her white shoulders, her white
bosom above the dark silk, cut low and square in
front, after a fashion of the time! How wondrously
at her throat trembled like the unwinking
eye of a serpent.
She raised her white right arm, and pointed at
the figure of the Parliamentary Colonel.
By the firelight, it seemed as if he, thus summoned,
still holding his eager white horse by the
bridle, stepped out before the canvas, ready for
this colloquy.
Lucy was terrified by her mother's wild expression
and gesture. The gentleman in the
portrait had taken more than ever the semblance
of her father's very self. But he wore a sterner
look than she remembered on that desolate face.
The daughter shuddered at this strange meeting
of her parents, — one in the flesh, one in the
spirit.
“Sir!” said Mrs. Brothertoft, still pointing at
the picture. There was scorn, veiling dread, in
her voice.
Lucy could not control herself. She burst into
tears.
At the sound of her first sob, the mother came
to herself. Bedlam tore itself out of her face
with a spasm. She let fall her round, white
arm. A tremor and a chill shook her. With
these, the Furies seemed to glide forth from her
being. They stood for an instant, dim and rustling
forms in the glimmer. Then they vanished
dashed the curtain over the picture and moved
away.
She did not perceive — for she looked thither
no more — that by her violent movement she
had broken the cord, and let down one fall of
the curtain, at the top, so that there was space
for the heads of the soldier and his white horse
to appear.
There those heads wait, as if at a window.
There they seem, horse and man, to watch for
their moment to spring into that dusky room, lit
by the flashes of a dying fire.
Mrs. Brothertoft turned, and laid her hand on
her sobbing daughter's shoulder.
“You seem agitated and hysterical, my dear,”
she said, almost gently. “Perhaps you had better
hide your tears in your pillow. We shall not
see our noisy friends for some time.”
Again their eyes met for an instant. But the
mother mistook Lucy's pleading expression.
She had lost her power of deciphering an innocent
face. She fancied she read contempt
and triumph, where there was only pity and
love longing to revive. She turned away, and,
yielding to a brutal emotion, resumed, — “Yes,
go, Lucy, and keep out of sight for the evening!
We must not have red eyes and swollen cheeks
when Adonis comes from dinner with pretty
speeches for his fair bride.”
Lucy rose, disappointed and indignant, and left
the parlor without “Good night.”
Given two weeks instead of two days before
marriage, and this gentle spirit might emancipate
itself. But obedience is still a piety with Lucy.
Mute mental protests against injustice do not
train the will. It must win strength by struggles.
Her will has sunk into chronic inertia.
She suffers now for her weakness, as if it were a
crime.
She fled by the noisy dining-room and up to
her chamber in the tower at the northwest corner
of the house. In the mild, clear, star-lit
night she could see yellow autumn among the
woods around the mansion. Beyond, the white
river belted the world. The lights of the British
frigates sparkled like jewels in this silver
cincture. Dunderberg, large and vague, hid the
spaces westward, where night was overflowing
twilight. Northward, the Highlands closed the
view, dim as Lucy's hope.
Ah! why was there no clairvoyante Sister
Anne to cry that she saw “somebody coming,” —
to tell the desclate girl, staring from her window
into the unfriendly night, that succor was afoot,
and hastening in three detachments southward,
as fast as the boulder, the bog, and the forest
would permit.
But there was no Sister Anne, no friend
doors! Weep, sob, pray, poor child. Suffer, suffer,
young heart! Suffer and be strong!
Closed doors at last, and quiet at the Manor.
Songs silent. Revelry over. The guests have
gone, walking as men walk after too many
bumpers. Sentinels here and there have received
the inarticulate countersign. The boats'
crews, chilly and sulky with long waiting, have
pulled the “lobsters” off to the frigates, and
boosted them up the sides. They have tumbled
into their berths in ward-room or cabin, — one,
alas! with his Hessians on! They must quickly
sleep off wassail, and be ready to stir with dawn,
for at sunrise General Vaughan starts with his
flotilla up the river. And most of the diners-out,
whether their morning headaches like it or
not, must go with the General to commit arson
upon Esopus, alias Kingston, a most pestilent
nest of rebels.
Quiet then aboard the Tartar, the Preston, and
the Mercury, swinging to their anchors in the
calm river! Quiet at the Manor-House! but not
peaceful repose, — for in their dreams the spirits
of the mother and the daughter battle, and both
are worn and weary with that miserable war.
5. V.
There were three headaches next morning at
the breakfast-table at Brothertoft Manor.
Major Kerr carried an enormous ache in his
thick skull. His was the crapulous headache.
He knew it well. Every manner of cure, except
prevention, he had experimented upon. The
soda-water-cure did not reach his malady. The
water-cure, whether applied in the form of pump
or a wet turban, was equally futile.
“It could n't have been t' other bottle that
has made me feel so queer,” Kerr soliloquized.
“Must have been Jack André's mawkish songs.
I never could stand poetry.”
So he marched down to breakfast, more Rubens
in complexion than ever, and twice as surly.
Spending tears had given Lucy her headache.
She had wept enough to fill a brace of lacrymatories.
The pangs sharpened when she saw
Adonis appear, very red and very gruff. He
seemed fairly loathsome to her now.
“Must such a beast — yes, I will say beast —
as that come near me?” thought she.
Strong language for a young lady; but appropriate.
It is well to have a few ugly epithets
in one's vocabulary. Hard words have their
virtue and their place, as well as soft ones.
Mrs. Brothertoft also had a headache.
She looked pale and ill this morning. This
will never do, Madam. Consider your beauty!
It will consume away, if you allow so much
fever in your brain.
Breakfast was more silent even than yesterday's.
No headache cared to ask sympathy of
either of the others.
Lucy said not a word. She compelled herself
to be at table. She dreaded her mother's presence;
but she dreaded her absence still more.
Lucy suffered under the uneasiness of a young
plotter. She knew that her plot was visible in
her face. She trembled at every look. And yet
she felt safer while she was facing her foes.
Poor child! if she could have wept, as she
wished, freely and alone, a dozen of lacrymatories
— magnums — would not have held her
tears.
Moody Mrs. Brothertoft is also silent.
She does not think it good policy to draw out
her son-in-law this morning. Only a wretchedly
low card, and no trump, will respond to the
attempt. T' other bottle rather drowns the power
of repartee. Major Kerr was too inarticulate
A courtly bow and a fine manner are hardly
to be expected at levée from a hero lugged to
his couchée by Plato and two clodhoppers, —
themselves a little out of line and step with
too many heeltaps. The hostess does not choose
by solicitous questions to get growls from the
future bridegroom, such as, —
Kerr loquitur. “Yes, thank you; my tea is
mere milksop; my egg an addle; my toast a
chip; my butter lard; my buckwheat cakes
dem'd flabby. Everything has a tipsy taste and
smells of corked Madeira. O, my head!”
Such talk would not make the lover more
captivating. He had better be left to himself,
to take his breakfast with what stomach he
may.
Nor does Mrs. Brothertoft think it wise to
remark upon yesterday's dinner and its distinguished
guests to her daughter. Remark brings
rejoinder. This morning, again, Lucy had no
kiss for her mother. Instead of the warm, tender
caress of other days, with warmth and tenderness
for two, Lucy's manner was grave and
distant.
Mrs. Brothertoft divines incipient rebellion in
her daughter. She does not wish to let it cultivate
itself with contradictions. If she should
propound, “It is a fine morning,” Lucy might
she suggested, “My dear, have the horses saddled,
and take Major Kerr to see the view from
Cedar Ridge,” Lucy would probably respond,
“Major Kerr is not fond of nature, and I am
afraid of marauders.” If she remarked, “What
a grand, soldierly creature Major Emerick is!
What an amusing accent! and his moustache
how terribly charming!” Lucy might curl her
pretty lip, and reply, “Grand! soldierly! the
hirsute ogre! As to his accent, — I do not
understand Hessian; and it does not amuse me
to hear good pronounced `coot,' and to have
pictures, flowers, soup, and the North River,
all classed together and complimented as `breddy.'
And as to his moustache, — no moustache
is tolerable; and if any, certainly not that great
black thing.” Nor would it do for the mother
to say, “I am sure you found Captain André an
Admirable Crichton,” and to hear from her
daughter in reply, “Don't speak of him! I am
still sick with his sentimentality of a Strephon.
He is a flippant coxcomb. I do not wonder
Miss Honora Sneyd got tired of him, with his
little smile and his little sneer.”
Such responses Lucy would probably have
made to her mother's attempts at breakfast-table
talk. Do these answers seem inconsistent with
the great sorrow and the great terror in the girl's
always en grande tenue. It is a sign that the
heart is not quite broken, when its owner has
life enough to be pettish. The popgun is the
father of the great gun. Silly skirmish and
bandying of defiance precede the great battle
for life and death.
So Mrs. Brothertoft knew, and she was not
willing to give Lucy the chance to hear herself
say, `No.' If she were once publicly compromised
as of the negative faction, she might, even
at this late hour, foster her little germ of independence.
She might wake up to-morrow with
a Will of Her Own, grown in a single night as
big as Jack's bean-stalk. She might expand her
solitary, forlorn hope of a first No into a conquering
army. No, N o, — only a letter and a
cipher, — she might add ciphers, multiply it by
successive tens and make it No,ooo,ooo,ooo, —
and so on, until she was impregnable to the
appointed spouse.
This of course must not be.
The mother did not know that Lucy had hoisted
a signal of distress, and that she was almost
ready to haul her flag up from half-mast, and fly
it at the masthead of defiance. This Mrs. Brothertoft
did not suspect of her submissive and meek
child. She knew nothing of Voltaire's errand.
But she had grown suddenly apprehensive and
self this morning. She began to quail a little
more and more before her daughter's innocence.
For all reasons, she did not desire to provoke
discussion.
A grim, mute breakfast, therefore, at Brothertoft
Manor.
Each headache looked into its tea-cup in
silence. Major Kerr crunched a bit of dry
toast, instead of feeding omnivorously.
There is no conversation of this party to report,
gay or glum.
But tableau is sometimes more dramatic than
talk.
A new-comer at the door glanced at this
unsociable trio, and deciphered the picture
pretty accurately.
It was old Voltaire, limping forward from
the kitchen.
Lucy sat with her face toward the pantry
door, and first saw him.
Flash! Lucy lightened and almost showered
tears at the rising of this black cloud, charged
with fresh electricity.
Flash back! from the whites of Voltaire's
eyes and from his teeth.
It was a brief flash, but abiding enough to
show Lucy, through her gloom, one figure
stealing to her succor. Him she was sure of,
of a black could not reveal the other recruits
to her rebel army. So they must remain latent,
with their names and faces latent, until
she can have an interview with her complotter.
But what a hot agony of hope blazed up
within her at Voltaire's look and cunning nod!
“I must not scream with joy,” she thought.
“I must not shriek out this great, wicked, triumphant
laugh I feel stirring in me. I must
not jump up and hug the dear old soul.
Thank Heaven, my tea is hot, and I can choke
myself and cry.”
Which she proceeded to do; and under cover
of her napkin got her face into mask condition
again.
She was taking lessons — this fair novice — in
what a woman's face is made for; — namely, to
look cool when the heart is fiery; to look dull,
when the wits have just suffered the whetstone;
to look blank, when the soul's hieroglyphs will
stare out if a blush is only turned on; to look
tame, when the spirit is tiger; to look peace,
when there is no peace; to look mild as new
milk, when the blood boils and explosion butts
against the wired cork of self-control. A guileful
world, guileless lady! and you must fight
your fight to-day with silence and secrecy, lest
mamma detect a flutter in your bosom, and your
pulled, if not its neck wrung.
Voltaire limped forward with a plate of buck-wheat
cakes. They were meal of the crop
which had whitened the slopes of Westchester
this summer, and purpled them this autumn.
They were round as a doubloon, or the moon at
its fullest. Their edges were sharp, and not
ragged and taggy. Their complexion was most
delicate mulatto. Their texture was bubbly as
the wake of a steamboat. Eyes never lighted on
higher art than the top cake, and even the one
next the plate utterly refused to be soggy. Indeed,
each pancake was a poem, — a madrigal
of Sappho's most simply delicate confectioning,
round as a sonnet, and subtle in flavor as an
epigram.
These pearls Voltaire cast before the party.
Nobody partook. Nobody appreciated. Nobody
noticed. The three appetites of the three headaches
were too dead to stir.
The old fellow was retiring, when Mrs. Brothertoft
addressed him roughly.
“I shall promote Plato and break you, Voltaire,
if you are taken sick at the wrong time
again.”
“Sorry, missus. Colored mobbas, missus.
No stoppin' him. Bery bad indeed!”
His appearance disarmed suspicion. He was
No one, to look at him, would have divined that
his pangs were of the motive powers, and not
the digestive, — that he suffered with the nicked
shin, the stubbed toe, and the strained calf, and
was utterly unconscious of a stomach, except as
a locality for colonizing a white lie in.
6. VI.
When Pyramus and Thisbe, when Cœur de
Lion and Blondel, want speech of each other,
Wall will ever have “a cranny right and sinister”
for their whispers, will “show a chink to blink
through with their eyne.”
Breakfast was over. Voltaire was in the pantry,
clashing dish and pan for a signal. Lucy
waited her moment to dart in and get her hopes
of escape made into certainties.
“I am going up stairs, Lucy,” said her mother,
“to give Dewitt her last hints about your wedding-dress.
Come up presently and try it on.”
She went out, leaving lover and lady together.
Kerr stood before the fire in his favorite posture.
His face was red, his jacket was red. He
produced the effect of a great unmeaning daub
of scarlet in a genre — mauvais genre — picture.
The big booby grew embarrassed with himself.
The quiet presence of this young girl abashed
him. He knew that his suit was an insult to her.
He saw that she did not appreciate his feet and
inches. Neither his cheeks nor his shoulders
had been hurt, and he felt a spiteful triumph
that she was in his power.
This morning he was ashamed of himself. It
is a grievous thing that men cannot go to bed
tipsy and wake up without headaches and with
self-respect. Perhaps it will be different when
Chaos comes again.
Kerr felt disgusted with himself, and embarrassed.
He wanted to talk to cover his awkwardness.
He did not know what to say. The
complaint is not uncommon.
“I suppose she knows it 's a fine day, and
wont thank me for telling her,” he thought.
“Vaughan's trip up the river, — that 's talked
out. I made the pun about Esopus and Esop's
fables, that Rawdon got off last night, and she
did n't laugh. I wish I had Jack André's tongue.
I have half a mind to cut it out of him — the
dashed whipper-snapper — for trying to get her
to flirt with him yesterday. I suppose I ought
to be making love now. But she has never let
me come near enough to make what I call love.
Well, I must say something. Here goes! Ahem!
Lucy — Miss Lucy.”
“Sir.”
“It 's a very fine day.”
“Very.”
“A most uncommonly fine day for this doosed
climate.”
No reply.
“I 'd box the dumb thing's ears if she was
Mrs. K.,” thought the Major. “But she sha'n't
silence me. I 'll give her another chance. Ahem!
Miss Lucy! Would n't you like to stroll out and
take the air?”
“No, I thank you. Do not let me detain you.”
“I say, you know, we 're to be married to-morrow.
You need n't be so infernally distant.”
“My mother wishes me to join her with the
dressmakers.”
“Well, if you wont come, you wont,” says
Kerr, taking himself off in dudgeon.
He walked out upon the lawn. The air was
nine-oxygen azote of the purest proof. He swallowed
it boozily, as if it were six-water grog.
Lucy hied to the trysting-place, where the
arch-plotter was waiting amid pans and dishes.
“O Voltaire, tell me!” she cried. And here
tears interrupted her, and gushed as if she intended
to use the biggest pan for a lacrymatory.
“Don't cry, Miss Lucy,” the old fellow says.
“It 's good news!”
At which she only wept the more.
Without much knowledge of the chemistry of
tears, Voltaire saw that spending them relieved
and calmed the young lady. Meanwhile, to be
talking on indifferent subjects until her first
burst was over, he said, “I saw Major Scrammel
health.”
“I am obliged to him.” The name seemed
to act like a dash of cold water. These Majors
fatigued her. Scrammel Yankee, Emerick Hessian,
Kerr British, — she liked none of them.
She began to feel a disgust for the grade.
“My father!” she said, with her whole heart
in the word, “tell me of him. He has not forgotten
me. He loves me. He will save me from
this — this —” A sob drowned the epithet.
“He loves you dearly,” Voltaire responded.
“Lub,” he still pronounced the precious word.
He brought his two thick lips together to sound
the final “b,” instead of lightly touching his
upper teeth against his lower lip and breathing
out “ve” final.
This great fact of love established, with all its
sequel, by a single word, Lucy, womanlike, desired
to know that this dear new lover no longer
misunderstood her. She must be satisfied that
she stood right in his esteem before she could
take thought of her own dangers.
“You told him,” she said, eagerly, “that I
was not an unnatural daughter, — only deceived
and deluded by this cruel woman?”
Tears had started again, as she thought of the
misery he must have suffered for her disloyalty.
But indignation at her mother burned them up,
and she closed her sentence sternly.
“He sees through it all,” the old ambassador
replied.
“How did he look? Not very sad, I hope?”
she said.
Womanlike again, she must have the person
before her eyes. She must see him, a visible
being, — that she could take to her heart with
infinite love and pity and hope, — before she
could listen to his message of comfort to her.
“He looked pretty old, Miss Lucy. His hair 's
grown gray. It ought n't to. He 's a boy still, —
only a little better than forty. He could make
his life all over again yet. But he looked old
and settled down sad. He 's got a sargeant's
coat on, instead of a general's; but he looks,
into his face, as if he know'd all generals know,
and a heap more.”
“My dear father!” interjected Lucy in the
middle of Voltaire's description. And she
thought what a beloved task it would be for
her to renew and restore that ruined life.
“And now, Voltaire,” she said, “can he protect
me?”
“We talked it all over. He did n't see anything
he could do. He said he was too broken-hearted
to plan for anybody.”
Poor Lucy! all her hopes thus dashed down!
She could almost hear her own heart break.
But Voltaire continued: “He had guv” —
and I was goin' off feelin' mighty low, — mighty
low, I tell you, Miss Lucy. I started off for
the woods and sot down, lookin' for a squerril-hole
to git into, and die like a fourlegs.
Jess then, jess before I 'd found my dyin' bed,
I heerd somebody screech, `Voltaire, Voltaire!'
like mad. Fust I thought 't was the Holy
Angels. Then I thought praps 't was the Black
Debbls, prowlin'. I looked round the woods,
pretty skeered, and heerd chestnuts drap. Then
come the yell again, and your father lighted
right down on me and dragged me back like
a go-cart. I did n't know what was comin'; but
he yanked me up the bank to the old well,
afront of Squire Van Wyck's farm-house, and
there I saw —”
At this point of his eager recital Voltaire's
ancient bellow had to pause and draw breath.
“Saw!” cried Lucy equally eager, peopling
this pause with a great legion of upstart hopes,
all in buff and blue, fine old Continentals complete
from boots to queues; but strangers to
her, and therefore without faces.
“Saw Major Skerrett,” gasped Voltaire.
All that legion of hopes in Lucy's brain suddenly
condensed into a single heroic Continental
vision, with the name Skerrett for a face. She
was sure this new-comer meant Help. She
together with a chain, each link a letter of the
name Skerrett.
“Another Major!” she said, half impatiently.
There was almost a shade of coquetry in her
little protest against this stranger personage.
The woman was not dead in her yet.
“Anudder Major ob anudder stuff. De good
God, not de Debbl, — he make dis one.”
“O Voltaire, don't talk so!”
Did she object to his fact in physiology, or
to his pronunciation?
Voltaire, with bellows rested, now began to
describe the new hero with enthusiasm. His
touches were crude, but picturesque, — a charcoal
sketch.
“Major Skerrett, Miss Lucy. O my! what a
beautiful moustache he had! jess the color of
ripe chestnut-leaves, and curling down on each
side, so.”
The black forefinger described an ogee on
either black lip.
Lucy did not interrupt. She must have her
correct image of the new actor before she inquired
his rôle. She perceived already that he
was not to be a sicklied Hamlet.
Her first picture of the hero had been a figure
in a Continental uniform, with the name Skerrett
instead of a face.
Second picture: Lucy sees the mere name
vanish. Two chestnut-leaves, fine gold as October
can paint them, broad in the middle, blunt
at the but, taper toward the point, serrated
along the edges, dispose themselves to her mind's
eye in the air, and form a moustache. She
looks at her vision of this isolated feature, and
thinks, “It is much prettier than Major Emerick's.”
“A go-ahead nose,” continues Voltaire, without
pause.
Lucy inserts a go-ahead nose into the blank,
over and a little ahead of the moustache. Third
picture.
“No mumps round his cheeks and chin,” the
describer went on.
Not a mump had ever disfigured the cheeks
Lucy hereupon balanced on either side of the
nose and the chin which she had located under
the two chestnut-leaves. Picture fourth.
“Eyes blue as that saucer,” — Voltaire pointed
to a piece of delicate china, — “and they look
like the Holy Angels.”
Into their sockets Lucy inserted a pair of
orbs, saucer in color not in shape, and gave
them a holy, angelic expression. She inspected
the growing portrait with her own sweet eyes, —
they were hazel, “an excellent thing in woman,”
— and began to think the illumined face very
charming.
“Lots of tan on his bark,” resumed the
painter in words.
Lucy dipped her pencil in umber and gave
the bark of cheeks, chin, and nose a nut-brown
tint, that bravely backed the gold of the moustache.
“Yaller hair under his cocked hat.”
“Yellow! if you please, Voltaire,” she protested,
and with skilful thought she adjusted
the coiffure.
“No queue.”
An imaginary queue, tied with a tumbled
black ribbon, had been bobbing in the air near
the hero's cerebellum. Lucy docked it, and, with
a scornful gesture, sent it whirling off into the
Unseen.
“Now,” says Voltaire, “you jess stick in Troot
(Truth), Wercher (Virtue), Kerridge (Courage),
and all the other good things into that are
face: you jess clap on a smile that 'll make
a dough heart in a bosom turn into light gingerbread;
and give him a look that can make
stubbed toes want to wheel about and turn about
and dance breakdowns, and is stickin' plaster
to every scratch on an old free colored gentleman's
shins: you jess think you see a Major
what Liberty and all the Holy Angels is pullin'
caps for, and all the Debbls is shakin' huf away
from where he stands: you jess git all that
Skerrett.”
The picture was complete. Truth, Virtue,
Courage, and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled
into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks
an anchor, or Polly's name, into a brother tar's
arm with India ink. She had given the hero's
face a smile, yeasty, sugary, and pungent enough
to convert the dullest dough heart into light gingerbread.
She had bestowed upon her ideal a
look that would be surgery to scarred shins and
light fantasy to the weariest toes. Now she
passed her finger over the chestnut-leaf moustache
to smooth down its serrated edges. The
portrait was done. Lucy surveyed it an instant,
and blushed to think it was indeed a Major that
women and angels might pull caps for.
She blushed to herself — the simple maid —
and felt a slight shame at her longing to see if
the real man was identical with her ideal.
This child — remember she was but eighteen,
and had been kept by herself and her mother, a
complete child until just now — this child had
hitherto had no ideal of a hero except that he
must be Kerr's opposite. We know already her
verdict upon the British officers. Of Putnam's
family, Scrammel she distrusts; Radière she
would like as a friend, if he were not so Gallic,
dyspeptic, and testy; Humphreys is ridiculous,
amuses her; — voila tout!
“And can this gentleman help?” she asked
earnestly, as soon as she had his person before
her eyes.
“Help!” says Voltaire; “he can't help helping.
That 's his business under this canopy.”
The negro stated briefly the scheme for Kerr's
capture and her abduction.
Lucy comprehended the whole in a moment.
“Major Skerrett sent you a message, Miss
Lucy,” says the successful envoy, closing his
report.
“Me!” she said. She massacred a little
scruple, that Major Kerr's betrothed ought not
to be receiving messages from strange majors.
“What is it? He is very kind to think of me.”
“He said, `Tell Miss Brothertoft to be brave,
to be prudent, and to keep her room with a
headache, until we are ready to start.'”
“It makes me brave and prudent, now that I
have a strong friend to trust. But the headache
I had is all gone. I never felt so well and happy
in my life.”
“Look at him!” Voltaire rejoined, pointing
to Kerr, through the pantry window. “That
will make you ache from your head to your heels.”
She did look, and ached at once with fresh
resentment and disgust.
Kerr was leaning limp against a tree, breathing
tipsily his nine-oxygen azote. The golden
hills, the blue river, and the mountains, blue and
gold, had no charms for him. He was thinking,
“Almost time to make it seven bells. I can't
touch anything stronger than six-water grog this
morning. O my head!”
“Pretty fellow fur a lubber to my young
lady!” says Voltaire. His mispronunciation
revealed a truth.
This faithful blackamoor now proceeded to act
Othello relating his adventures. He had a tragicomic
episode to impart of his “hair-breadth
'scapes,” “of being taken by the insolent foe,”
of all “his portance in his travel's history”; and
what he suffered, shin and sole, in the “rough
quarries, rocks, and hills” back of Anthony's
Nose, while he dodged by night along the by-paths.
Lucy “gave him for his pains a world of
sighs,” and “loved him for the dangers he had
passed” in her service.
“Now,” said the loyal squire, in conclusion,
“I must set you something to do, Miss Lucy.”
“What?” she asked, trembling a little at responsibility.
“Send Dewitt and Sally Bilsby off home!
They 'll want a frolic after working so hard on
your wedding-dress. We must have the house
to ourselves to-night.”
“To-night! Lucy's heart bounded and sunk.
Yes, she must be free to-night, or to-morrow
would make her a slave.
“Miss Lucy,” whispered Voltaire, “two of
'em was here already before sunrise.”
“Not the —” She hesitated.
“Not the Major! No; old Sam Galsworthy
and Hendrecus Canady. You know 'em. They
come to see how the land lay.”
“Mother calls; I must go,” said Lucy, in a
tremor.
She gave one look through the window at
Kerr, leaning limp against a chestnut-tree.
The Skerrett-moustache-colored leaves in myriad
pairs shook over him. She seemed to see a
myriad of faces, with go-ahead noses, no mumps,
angelic blue eyes, bronzed skins, and truth and
courage in every line, looking out of the tree,
and signalizing her, “Be brave! be prudent!”
7. VII.
Portentous all the morning was Voltaire to
Sappho.
Now cookery, like chemistry, must have peace
to perform its experiments in.
Poor Sappho, with her husband darting into the
kitchen, looking mysterious, exploding “Hush!”
and darting off again, was as much flustered
as a nervous chemical professor when his pupils
jeer his juggles with cabbage-liquor, and turn
up rebellious noses at his olefiant gas.
Sappho's great experiment of dinner suffered.
She put sugar in her soup and salt in her pudding.
She sowed allspice for peppercorns, and
vice versa. She overdid the meat that should
have been underdone. She roasted her goose
until its skin was plate armor. She baked her
piecrust hard as Westchester shale. Yesterday's
dinner was sublime; to-day's would be
ridiculous. Conspiracy upsets domestic economy,
as it does political.
When Voltaire had deranged his wife with
dark hints, he proceeded to perplex his son.
Plato was lord of the stables. These were
times of war. Westchester was beginning to
suffer for being neutral ground for rebel and
tory to plunder. Rents came slow at Brothertoft
Manor, and when they came were short. Economy
must be consulted. That crafty counsellor
suggested that Plato's helpers in the stable
should be discharged, and he do three men's
work. He was allowed, however, Bilsby juvenissimus
and another urchin from the Manor to
“chore” for him. They were unpaid attachés.
They did free service as stable-boys, for the
honor and education of the thing, for the privilege
of chewing straws among the horses, and
for the luxury of a daily bellyful of pork and
pudding, and a nightly bed in the loft.
Voltaire went out to the stable. The six white
horses of famous Lincolnshire stock stood, three
on this side, three on that. Their long tails occasionally
switched to knock off the languid last
flies of summer.
Voltaire stopped at the coach-house door to
drive out a noisy regiment of chickens. A lumbering
old coach, of the leathern conveniency
order, was shoved away in a corner. There is
always such a vehicle in every old family stable,—
a stranded ark, that no horse-power will ever stir
again.
“Nineteen year ago,” thought the ancient
June, I drew Mister Edwin and that Billop gal,
in that conveniency, less than two hundred yards
from her house in Wall Street to Trinity Church,
to be married. I heerd the Trinity bells say,
`Edwin Brothertoft, don't marry a Billop!'
I felt it in my bones that she 'd turn out mean.
Her money brought worse luck than we 'd ever
had before. And the good luck has n't got holt
yet.”
“Plato,” says he, stepping into the great picturesque
stable, half full of sunshine, half of
shade, and half of hay, fragrant as the Fourth
of July.
“Sir!” says Plato, drawing himself up, and
giving a military salute. He had seen much
soldiering going on of late, and liked to play at
it, — a relic, perhaps, of Gorilla imitativeness.
“Them boys don't look to me in good health.”
Voltaire pointed to Bilsby and mate. They
were both chewing straws, — a pair of dull sharps,
like most young clodhoppers. They could tell a
calf from a colt with supernatural keenness; but
were of the class which gets itself well Peter-Funked
before its manhood learns the time of
day.
“Dey 's fat, ragged, and sassy as ary boys dis
chile ever seed,” rejoined Plato.
“Bery weakly dey looks,” continued the conspirator.
sich sickly boys 'n all my born days. Chestnuts
is what dey wants. Worms is de trouble. Boys
always gits worms onless dey eats suthin on to
a bushel of chestnuts in de fall.”
The two ragamuffins dropped their straws,
turned pale, and began to feel snakes wake and
crawl within them.
“Now, boys,” says Voltaire impressively, “if
you want ter perwent dem varmint, jess you
put fur de woods an' fill yourselves plum full
ob chestnuts.”
“But chestnuts has worms, too,” objected
Bilsby.
“So much de better; dey 'll eat yourn. Go
'long now. Stay hum to-night, and don't come
roun' here fore to-morrow noon. Be keerfle
now! Eat all to-day; and pick to-morrow to
keep. You don't look to me like boys who is
prepared to die.”
The pair obeyed, and departed solemnly. Nothing
but chestnuts could save them from the worm
that never dieth. There were two very grave
and earnest lads that day cracking burrs in the
groves of Brothertoft Manor.
Plato stared in consternation as he saw his
regiment disbanded.
Voltaire winked with both eyes, and chuckled
enormously.
“Don't you ask me no questions, Plato,” says
he, “an' you wont have no lies to complex yer
mind. I meant to clare de kitchen, ole fokes,
young fokes, an so I scared off dem boys, ho, ho!
Now I 's gwine to gib you a conundrum, Plato.”
Plato let go Volante's tail, which he was combing,
and pricked up his ears.
“What does a young lady do when she don't
want to marry her fust husband?”
“Marries her second,” guessed Plato, cheerfully.
“Plato! I 'se ashamed of you. Dat would
be bigamy.”
The crestfallen groom gave it up.
“You gib it up,” says the propounder.
“Well; she says to her coachman, — it 's bery
mysterious dat de coachman's name is Plato.
She says to him, Plato!”
“What?” interjected the other.
“Neber interrump de speaker!” chided Voltaire.
“She says, `Plato, you know my mare.'
Says he, `Your mare Volanty, Miss?' Says she,—
it's mysterious, but Volanty is her name, — `Now,
Plato, you jess poot anudder oat in her manger,
an groom her slick as a het griddle, and see
de girts and de bridle is right.' And says she,
`Plato, don't you complex yer mind wedder de
answer to dat conundrum ain't suthin' about
runnin' away. But jess you wait till de sebben
seal is opened.”
Here the namesake of him of Ferney gave
a wise binocular wink.
The other philosopher's namesake also eclipsed
his whites with a binocular wink. He divined
where his sire had been travelling in the past
thirty-six hours. He had nodded through the
watches of last night to let the senior in undiscovered.
He knew of the interview with Old
Sam Galsworthy and Hendrecus Canady, an hour
before sunrise. He comprehended enough of
the plot to enjoy it as a magnificent conundrum,
which he could guess at all day, sure
that the seven seals of mystery would be opened,
by and by.
Voltaire limped back to the house and his
pantry. His butler countenance fell, as he contemplated
the empty bottles of yesterday's banquet.
He could almost have wept them full,
if he had known any chemistry to change salt
tears to wine.
“How those redcoats drink!” he muttered.
“Our cellar wont last many more such campaigns.
I must get up some fresh wine for
to-day, and a little brandy to deteriorate Major
Kerr.”
Burns wrote poetry as he pleased, in Scotch,
in English, or in a United-Kingdom brogue.
Voltaire takes the same liberty, and talks now
rank Tombigbee, now severe Continental, and
inconsistent, and use one slang in the saloon
and another in the salon.
Voltaire lighted a candle, and descended into
the cellar.
“It 's resky,” thought he, “to bring a light,
without a lantern, among all this straw and
rubbish. Fire would n't let go, if it once cotched
here. But nobody ever comes except me.”
A flaring dip, very free with sparks, was certainly
dangerous in this den. Who has not
seen such a tinder-box of a place under a careless
old country-house? Capital but awesome
regions they offer for juvenile hide and seek!
How densely their black corners are populated
with Bugaboo! The hider and the seeker shudder
alike in those gloomy caverns, and are glad
enough to find each other, touch hands and
bolt for daylight.
Habit, or possibly his complexion in harmony
with dusky hues, made Voltaire independent
of the terrors of the place. He marched along,
carefully sheltering his candle with a big paw,
brown on the back and red on the palm.
Combustibles were faintly visible in the glimmer.
There were empty wine-boxes overflowing
with the straw that once swaddled their
bottles. There was a barrel of curly shavings,
a barrel of rags quite limp and out of curl, a
barrel of apples very fragrant, one of onions
very odorous, a barrel of turnips white and
shapely, and a bin of potatoes, of the earth,
earthy, and amorphous as clods. There were
the staves and hoops of a rotten old beer-cask,
leaning together, and trying to hold each other
up, like the decayed members of a dead faction.
There was a ciderless cider-cask, beginning
to gape at the seams, like a barge out
of water. Rubbish had certainly called a congress
in this cellar, and the entire rubbish interest
in all its departments had sent deputies.
Old furniture had a corner to itself, and it was
melancholy to see there the bottomless chairs
that people long dead had sat through, the
posts of old bedsteads sleeping higgledy-piggledy,
and old tables that had seen too many revels in
their day, and were tipsily trying to tumble
under themselves. Then there was a heap of
old clothes and ole clo', ghostly in their forlornness,
lifting up arms and holding forth skirts in
vain signal for the ragman. It was a gloomy,
musty, cavernous place, and Voltaire's faint
candle only shed a little shady light around.
The butler unlocked the wine-room door.
Batteries of dusty bottles in their casemates
aimed at him, with flashes of yellow-seal at
their muzzles.
“Three bottles for Major Kerr, — his last,”
he said. “One, very particular, for Major Skerrett
when he comes. One of our French Gutter
de Rosy brandy to qualify with. Ranks looks
broken here since Major Kerr come. I must
close 'em up to-morrow. Bottles likes to lie
touchin', so the wine can ripen all alike.”
The old fellow's hands were so full that he
could not lock his door conveniently. He left it
open for his next visit of reorganization.
He limped off, running the gauntlet of the
combustibles. No spark flew, no cinder fell.
That masterful plaything, fire, could not be
allowed to sport with the old rubbish.
How Voltaire proceeded to carry on his private
share of the plot by deteriorating Kerr's
allowance of Madeira with Cognac, is a secret of
the butler's pantry. It shall not be here revealed.
Why deteriorate the morals of 1860 by
recalling forgotten methods of cheating? Adulteration
is a lost art, thank Bacchus! We drink
only pure juices now. Only honest wines for
our honest dollars in this honest age.
Now from the cellar we will mount to the
room above stairs, where Penelope and her
maids — no, not Penelope, for she was loyal and
disconsolate — where Mrs. Brothertoft and her
maids are at work at the san-benito for to-morrow's
auto-da-fé.
8. VIII.
If there was a Dieden in 1777, she has gone
with the braves who lived before Agamemnon,
and like them is forgotten.
If there had been a Dieden in little New York
of those days, she would not have been called in
to make Miss Brothertoft's san-benito, her wedding-dress.
The resources of the Manor were sufficient.
Mrs. Brothertoft could plan the robe. Mrs. Dewitt
could execute it. Sally Bilsby also lent a
'prentice hand. The silk, white, stiff, and with a
distinct bridal rustle, had been bought to order
by Bilsby junior, on one of his traitorous trips
to New York.
Lucy, leaving Voltaire in the pantry, as was
described, ran up stairs and faced her wedding-dress
without flinching. It is not generally a
sight to blanch the cheeks of a young lady.
Indeed, one may fancy that a rose finer than
roses might bud in the heart, and bloom from
neck to forehead, when a bride first beheld the
lily-white drapery of her hour of immolation.
Lucy neither blanched nor blushed.
“Be brave! be prudent!” the warning of her
unseen protector was ringing in her ears. She
saw it, inscribed on a label, and hanging from
the lips of her vision of his face. The brave do
not blanch. The prudent do not blush. So she
quietly joined the busy circle, took a needle and
stabbed the wedding-dress without mercy.
It was a monstrous relief thus to kill time.
She did herself, for the hour, “her quietus make
with a bare bodkin,” and the other weapons of
a modiste.
“Stitch, stitch, stitch! Seam, and gusset, and band!”
“Ah!” she thought, “what a blessing is this
distraction of labor! I have shed my tears. If
I were to sit inactive, I might brood myself
into despair. If I were to think over my
wrong, I might flame out too soon. If I look
at my mother, I begin to dread her again. I
know she could master me still. O my God!
sustain me through these last hours of my peril!
I never knew how great it was until now. I
foresaw a misery; but the degradation of giving
myself up to this man, I never even dreamed
of. I am ashamed, ashamed to recall that there
have been instants when I tolerated him, — when
I thought that he was not so very gross and
coarse. I pray God that the sacredness of my
soul is not spoilt.”
A great agony stirred in her maidenly bosom
at this thought. She bent closer to her work.
She knew that her mother's eyes were upon her.
She heard, without marking, the tattle of the
maids.
“Fly, little needle!” she said to herself.
“Measure off this pause in my life! Every
stitch is a second. Sixty are a minute. Minutes
make hours, and hours wear out the weary
day. Evening must come. If I can but be
brave and prudent, I shall see my father and his
noble friend, and be safe.”
Her needle galloped at the excitement of the
thought.
Mrs. Brothertoft looked at her, and said to her
heart, with a sneer, — “Pretty creature! she consoles
herself, it seems. Our boozy, rubicund
bridegroom begins to look quite pale and interesting,
seen through a bridal veil. The touch of
white silk cures her scruples easily. Ah! the
blushing bride will be resigned to her bliss.
Bah! that I — I should dread such a pretty,
silly trifler! What a fool I was to think her
different from other simpering girls! So, this is
the meaning of all her coy little wiles and her
headaches. Headaches! she may have as many
as she pleases now, in her pensive bower. Ah!
I comprehend thee now, fair hypocrite. The
slender fingers are impatient for the ring. Fly,
he will not quite crush thy poor, silly heart.
And I have been afraid of her! She is so tickled
with her wedding favors, that she will presently
be kissing me again for gratitude with more
fervor than ever. But I am sick of her simplicity.
I am tired of her `Dearest mammas!'
I should strangle her, I dare say, if she were
not taken off. She grows more like that Edwin
Brothertoft lately.”
“Your dress is ready to try on, Miss Lucy,”
said Mrs. Jierck Dewitt.
So there was a mighty rustle, and a headless,
armless torso of stiff white silk rose up and stood
on its skirt. It did Dewitt great credit. Ah!
if her character had only been equal to her skill!
But she was a brazen hussy, and Sally, her sister,
no better. Tel maître, tel valet. One positively
bad woman spoils many negatively bad ones. It
would not seem at all unfair if Destiny took advantage
of the harm done Jierck Dewitt's wife
in punishing the lady of the Manor through her
means.
Lucy still faced her wedding-dress without
flinching. She may even have thought that, if
the worst came, it was better to go to the guillotine
in becoming array. It is perhaps woman
to say, “My heart is broken; but my bodice fits
without a fold.”
It is woman, no doubt, but there are women
and Women. Lucy could safely admire the robe,
and tranquilly criticise it, because she knew that
she and it were not to see marriage together.
“Now shall I unlace you, Miss Lucy?” says
the abigail.
Yes, abigail; as soon as these masculine eyes,
whose business is with the young lady's soul,
not with her toilette, can take themselves decorously
out of the room.
9. IX.
Nombre de Dieden! what a fit!
Unlacing and relacing concluded, these masculine
eyes, again admitted to the maiden's bower,
are dazzled with unexpected loveliness.
There stands the lady, within the perfect
dress!!! beautiful to three points of admiration.
Sweet eighteen can bear low neck by broad day-light.
The struggle in her heart with all her wild
emotions of terror and hope was as great a
beautifier as the presence of critical wedding-guests,
the rustle of a surplice, the electric touch
of a gay gold ring, and the first clasp of the hand
of a husband.
And you, O Peter Skerrett! you have shaved
off your moustache and donned a coat much too
small, — you have made a guy of yourself for
your first interview with this angel!
Shall the personal impression she may already
have made be here revised and corrected? No;
for this is not real sunshine upon her. If she is
ever photographed, it shall be in her bright, not
for description! It is easy to see the
Brothertoft in her. She blends the tender grace
of the lady in Vandyck's picture with the quiet
dignity of the gentleman. But is there not kindling
in her face the vigor of another race, her
mother's? Perhaps a portrait now would belie
her final look.
“You are like an angel, Miss Lucy,” said Mrs.
Dewitt.
She was. She stood there in bridal robe, veil,
and wreath. Her hands were clasped firm to
control her insurgent heart. Her lips were
parted, and she was whispering to herself, “Be
brave! Be prudent!” Her eyes overlooked the
present, and saw hope in the blue sky above the
golden Highlands through her window.
Yes; like an angel.
There was a hush for a moment. The three
bad women — the pert hoyden, the false wife, and
the proud mistress of the Manor — were silenced
and abashed.
Again the old pang stirred in the mother's bosom.
Again she longed to throw herself at her daughter's
feet and pray forgiveness. But again she
gained that defeat of a victory over her womanliness.
She trampled down the weakness of repentance.
The bedlam look flickered over her
features, and she hardly restrained her furious
face and the maiden bosom that so shamed her.
“You do look just like an angel, Miss Lucy,”
Abby Dewitt asseverated, with the air of a connaisseuse
in the article. “Don't she, Sally?”
The two thereupon gave tongue to voluble
flatteries.
“Your work does you great credit, Dewitt,”
Lucy said. “Mamma, cannot we spare Abby
and Sally to go home to the farm to-night?
They deserve a holiday after this long confinement.
And to-morrow will be a busy day again.”
“Of course, my dear, if they wish it.” Mrs.
Brothertoft was glad to put her daughter under
obligation.
The women again gave tongue with thanks.
They were always, as Voltaire had said, ready to
get away for a frolic. Lucy smiled to herself at
the easy success of her stratagem. She had
packed off baggage and baggage, without suspicion.
“What a conspirator I am becoming!” she
thought. “Ah! silly Lucy, the child, the thing
to be flung away! She too can help baffle the
evil schemes against herself. When these coarse
women are gone, there will be not a soul but
friends within a mile of the house.”
Dinner was tardy to-day, after the late breakfast
following the revel.
Nine-oxygen azote by the lung-full had given
tone to Major Kerr's system. His appetite for
meat and drink were in full force again, all the
stouter for this morning's respite.
“What a lucky dog I am,” he said, “to dodge
that expedition of Vaughan's! I 'm `the soldier
tired of war's alarms,' Miss Lucy.”
“You do not care about laurels any more,”
Mrs. Brothertoft said, with her half-sneer.
“Not when I can get roses.”
His look with this brought fire into Lucy's
cheeks.
“No,” resumed he; “I should be glad enough
to help burn the dashed rebels' houses over their
heads, and them, too, in their beds. Here 's confusion
to 'em, and luck to Jack Burgoyne! I
hate the vulgar `varmint.' But I don't want to
leave a good dinner to see bonfires. I know
where I 'm well off, and going to be better.
Eh, Miss Lucy?”
Her heart began to throb and her head to
ache at once.
“This goose has got a bark on thick as an
oak-tree,” continued the valiant trencherman,
making an incision. “Give me another cut of
beef, — the red, with plenty of fat and plenty of
gravy, if you please, my mamma that shall be.
I need support when the parson opens his batteries
to-morrow. Eh, Miss Lucy? `With this
Hain't got any goods. I 'll endow you with all
my worldly debts, and tell the Jews to shift
the security. Haw, haw!”
He laughed boisterously.
This coarse pæan stirred up echoes of repulsion
in Lucy's heart.
How she longed to fling defiance at him!
Patience, — she almost bit the word in two, with
her teeth set hard upon it. One rash expression
would be ruin; but great red-hot shot of
scorn burned within her. She discovered that
there was strong language in her vocabularly.
It grew significant to her now. She was beginning
to half understand herself at last. When
the boiler grows hot, the water feels its latent
steam.
“Am I the same being?” she thought. “Am
I the meek Consent I have pitied and wept with
so long? No, I have ceased to be a spiritless nobody.
I am almost sorry that help from without
is coming to me. I should like to stand up now
and say, `Madam, of you as a woman I will not
speak, — as a mother, you are a tyrant, and I
defy you. I defy you and this brute, not half so
base as you, whom you have dared to name by
the sacred name of lover, whom you have called
in to aid you in dishonoring your child.' Yes;
I could almost say that to her now. Is it possible?
woman? I never felt what the sanctity of my
womanhood was until now, — now that I perceive
this miserable plot against it.”
This defiant mood was strong within her.
But presently, as she looked at Kerr, growing
redder with too much dinner and too much
wine, laughing at his own coarse jokes and
throwing at her with great vulgar compliments;
and when all at once, in contrast, rose the figure
of the other Major as she had painted him, —
disgust so mastered her that she sprang up,
pleaded a headache, and fled to her chamber, to
wait and hope and doubt and pray alone.
“Megrims again,” said the lover, sulkily, as
she disappeared. “I don't like it. She did n't
run away from Jack André yesterday.”
“O, let her amuse herself with headaches, if
she pleases,” said the Lady of the Manor. “I
understand the child. I saw her this morning
over her wedding-dress. She is as eager for
the happy moment as any lover could wish.”
“So you think she shams coy?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Brothertoft; and she was
willing to believe it.
“Well, good night, pretty creature! Let it
go up stairs and think how sweet it will look
to-morrow in its silks and laces! What, are you
going too, my mamma?”
“Yes. Take your glass of wine quietly. We
will have supper late. I am going to doze a
little in the parlor. I dreamed troublesome
dreams last night.”
“By George!” said Kerr, as she closed the
door. “Splendid woman! Twice as handsome
as the Duchess of Gurgoyle! I suppose she
thinks the Kerrs will take her up when she
goes to England. No, ma'am! We can 't quite
stand that. You 've got all you can expect out
of me when you 've married off your daughter
on me. Now, then, it 's going to be solemn business,
drinking alone.”
10. X.
Plot and counterplot at Brothertoft Manor.
And meantime, what has counterplot without the
house been doing?
If Edwin Brothertoft and Peter Skerrett could
have travelled by daylight through the Highlands,
then this narrative, marching with them,
might have seen what fine things they saw, and
told of them. But they went cautiously by
night. They saw little but the stars overhead
and the faint traces of their shy path. They
were not distracted by grand views. Nature is a
mere impertinence to men who are filled with a
purpose. Fortunately, these intense purposes do
not last a lifetime. Minds become disengaged,
and then they go back, and make apologies to
Nature for not admiring her. And she, minding
her own business, cares as little for the compliment
as for the slight.
It is a bit of the world worth seeing, that
bossy belt of latitude between Fishkill and
Brothertoft Manor. There is a very splendid
pageant to behold there in the halcyon days of
every tree is a flame, or a blush, or a dash of
blood or deep winy crimson on the gray rocks of
the mountains. The Hudson Highlands do not
wrangle about height with the Alps; but they
content themselves with wearing a more gorgeous
autumn on their backs than any mountains
on the globe. Go and see! Frost paints as
bravely now as it did in 1777, and it is safer to
travel. Bellona has decamped from the land,
and half-way from Fishkill down the pass, Minerva,
fair-haired, contralto-voiced, and courteous,
keeps school and presides over the sixty-third
milestone from New York. Go and see
the Highlands for yourself! The business of
these pages is mainly with what hearts suffer and
become under pressure, little with what eyes
survey.
Danger is safety to the prudent. Major Skerrett
and his guide made their perilous journey
without mishap. At the chilly dawn of day, we
find them at the rendezvous in the hills behind
Peekskill, trying to believe that there was warmth
in the warm colors of the woods, and waiting for
Jierck Dewitt.
Presently he appeared, in high spirits.
“We 've come in the nick of time,” said he.
“The redcoats have done all the harm they could
about here. They 've drawed in every man, and
allow, if they set a few towns afire, that General
Gates will turn his back to Burgoyne and take
to passin' buckets.”
“Bang!” here spoke the sunrise gun at Fort
Montgomery.
“Bang! bang! bang!” the three frigates responded.
Dunderberg grumbled with loud echoes. He
was pleased to be awaked by the song of birds;
but the victorious noise of British cannon he
protested against, like a good American.
“The coast is clear for us,” resumed Jierck.
“Clear almost as if these were peace times.
Now if you 'll come along, I 'll take you to a
safe den in the woods, a mile from the Manor-House,
where you can stay all day, snug as a
chipmunk in a chestnut stump, and see how the
land lies. I 'll tell you my other news as we
go.”
They took up their guns and knapsacks and
followed. The light of morning was fair and
tender. The autumn colors were exhilarating.
White frost shone upon the slopes and glimmered
upon every leaf in the groves.
These were the Manor lands. Each spot Edwin
Brothertoft remembered as a scene of his
childhood's discoveries of facts and mysteries
in Nature. They walked on for an hour, and
his youth.
“Do you see that white shining through the
trees?” said Jierck, halting. “It 's the river.
Ten steps and you 'll see the house. Now, Major,
I 'll go and look after my boys, and come at noon
for your orders.”
Jierck turned back into the wood. Major
Skerrett stepped forward eagerly. He had an
eye for a landscape. He had also a soldier's
eye for every new bit of possible battle-field.
Ten steps brought him to the edge of the
slope. A transcendent prospect suddenly flung
out its colors before him. First was a stripe of
undulating upland thoroughly Octobered. Then
a stripe of river, bending like a belt in a flag,
that a breeze is twisting between its fingers.
Then beyond, Highlands, not so glowing as the
foreground, nor so sparkling blue as the blue
water, nor so simple as the sky, softly combined
and repeated all the elements of beauty before
him.
He turned to give and take sympathy from his
companion. Mr. Brothertoft was not beside him.
He had seated himself within cover of the wood.
“Come out, sir!” called Skerrett with enthusiasm.
“I am so bewildered with this beautiful
prospect that I need to hear another man's superlatives
to satisfy me I am not in a dream.
Come out, sir! We are quite safe.”
“My friend,” said Brothertoft. “I was hesitating
a moment before I risked the quenching
of my strange good spirits. You are looking
upon a scene that has been very dear and very
sad to me. I cannot see it, as you do, with a
stranger's eye. It is to me the scenery of tragedy.
I cannot tell yet whether I have outgrown
the wound enough to tolerate the place where
I first felt it.”
He moved forward, and took his place by the
Major's side. The two stood silent a moment.
Thus far the younger, in his robust appetite for
the beauty of Nature, had felt “no need of the
remoter charm by thought supplied.” Color and
form he took as a hungry child takes meat and
drink. Now for the first time there was history
in his picture, sorrow upon his scene. He made
his friend's sadness his own, and looked through
this melancholy mist at the gold, the sheen, and
the bloom. His mere physical elation at this intoxicating
revelry of color passed away. Beauty
left his head and went to his heart.
He turned to see how his companion was
affected.
“I find,” said Brothertoft, “that I do not hate
these dear old scenes. Indeed, the flush and the
fervor of this resplendent season enter into me.
I am cheered enough to pardon myself all my
faults, and all who have wronged me for their
again.”
For a moment there was bold light in his eyes
and vigor in his bearing. The light faded presently
and the vigor drooped. He was again the
stricken man, aged prematurely by sorrow.
“But, my son,” continued the elder, “I cannot
quite sustain myself in this cheerful mood. I
look at my forefathers' house, and think of my
daughter, and I doubt.”
Skerrett followed the direction of his eyes and
studied the Manor-House.
It stood on a small plateau, half a mile from
the river, in the midst of its broad principality.
There was not such another house then in America.
There are few enough now, town or country,
cottage or palace, over whose doors may be
seen the unmistakable cartouche of a gentleman.
The first Edwin Brothertoft built his house
after the model of the dear old dilapidated seat
in Lincolnshire. It was only one fourth the size;
but it had kept the grand features of its prototype.
Skerrett could see and admire the four
quaint gables, two front and two rear, the sturdy
stack of warm chimneys, and the corner tower
with its peaked hat, — such as towers built in
James the First's time wore. It bristled well in
the landscape.
It was a century old. That must be a very
unsociable kind of house which will not make
itself at home in the space of a century. In a
hundred years the Manor-House and buildings
and their scenery had learnt perfect harmony
with each other. Wherever trees were wanted
for shade or show, they had had time to choose
their post and grow stately. Those stalks which
know nothing but to run up lank, for plank, had
long been felled and uprooted. There were no
awkward squads of bushes, stuck about where
they could not stand at ease; but orderly little
companies of shrubbery and evergreens had nestled
wherever a shelter invited them, or wherever
a shoulder of lawn wanted an epaulet. Creepers
had chosen those panels of wall which needed
sheltering from heat or cold, and had measured
precisely how much peering into windows and
drooping over doors could be permitted. The
little Dutch bricks of the sides and the freestone
of the quoins and trimmings, their coloring revised
by the pencils of a hundred quartettes of
seasons, now were as much in tone with the
scene as the indigenous rocks of the soil. Absolute
good taste had reigned at Brothertoft
Manor for a century. Its results justified the
government thoroughly. The present proprietress
had been educated out of her gaudy fancies
by this fine example of the success of a better
repairs and additions chime with the ancient
harmony.
At this moment, too, of Peter Skerrett's inspection,
the landscape about the house wore
its wealthiest garniture. Each maple in the
grounds had crimsoned its ruddiest, or purpled
its winiest, or gilded its leaves, every one with
a film of burnished gold. The elms were all at
their gayest yellow or their warmest brown, and
stiff masculine chestnuts beside them rivalled
their tints, if they could not their grace. Here
and there was a great oak, resolute not to
adopt these new-fangled splendors of gaudy day,
and wearing still the well-kept coat of green
which had served him all summer. Younger
gentlemen of the same family, however, would
not be behind the times, and stood about their
ancestor in handsome new doublets of murrey
color. Every slash and epaulet of shrubbery
was gold on the green of the lawn, and creepers
blazed on the walls and dropped their scarlet
trailers, like flames, before the windows.
“It is a dear old dignified place,” said Peter
Skerrett, “and I wish I could go down and
make a quiet call there by daylight. I will,
by and by, after the war, unless the rebels
punish it with fire for having dined Sir Henry
Clinton.”
“It is a dear old place,” said Brothertoft,
“and I love it most dearly as the school-house
of my education in sorrow. No man is convinced
of his own immortality until his soul
has borne as murderous blows as can be struck,
and still is not murdered. I come to the place
where the hardest hitting at my peace has been
done, and I feel a new sense of power because
I find that there is something in me that is
not quite devastated. On the old battle-field,
I perceive that I am not wholly beaten, and
can never be.”
He said this in a tone of soliloquy. Peter
Skerrett was too young to thoroughly understand
his friend. Besides, he was conscious of
a frantic hunger, — an excellent thing in a hero.
“Come, sir,” said he, “shall we breakfast? I
have remarked that swallowing dawn is an appetizer.
Here goes at my knapsack, to see what
General Putnam's cook has done for us.”
The cook had done as well as a rebel larder
allowed. They did well by the viands, and
then, under cover of the wood, they wore away
the morning watchfully.
They saw boats from the frigates land men to
be drilled ashore or to forage in the village of
Peekskill. Here and there a farmer, braver
or stupider than his neighbors, was to be discerned,
ploughing and sowing for next summer
appeared creeping timidly along the country
roads. The cattle seemed to feed cautiously
and sniff about, lest Cowboys should catch them.
The whole scene wore a depressed and apprehensive
air. Brothertoft Manor was willing to
be well with both sides, and was equally uncomfortable
with both. The tenants of the
Manor were generally trying to persuade themselves
that British frigates in the river were
merely marts for their eggs and chickens. Men
that have not made up their minds are but
skulking creatures on God's earth.
“Seems to me,” said Skerrett, “that I can
tell a Tory or a Neutral as far as I can see
him.”
The day wore on, and in this pause of action
the two gentlemen opened their hearts to each
other.
It was the intercourse of father and son.
Each wanted what the other gave him.
The fatherless junior felt his mind grow deeper
with a man who had touched bottom in thought.
He was sobered and softened by the spectacle
of one so faithful to the truth that was in him,
so gentle, so indulgent, weakened perhaps by
sorrow, but never soured.
The sonless senior said. “Ah, Skerrett! you
are the young oak. If I had had you to lean upon,
Such a merry heart as yours makes the whole
world laugh, — not empty laughter, but hearty.”
At noon Jierck Dewitt came to report. He
and the boys were safely hid in his father's
barn.
“Ike mostly sleeps,” says Jierck, “Sam plays
old sledge with dummy, and Hendrecus is writin'
something in short lines all beginnin' with big
letters, poetry perhaps. He 's an awful great
scholar.”
Their plans were again discussed, and orders
issued.
“Well,” said Jierck, “at dusk I 'll have my
men, and father's runt pony for the prisoner to
straddle, down at the forks of the road waitin'
for you. Nothing can stop us now but one
thing.”
“And that?” asked the Major.
“Is Lady Brothertoft. If she suspicions anything
before we 're ready to run, it will be all
up with us, — halter round our necks and all
up among the acorns.”
So Jierck, still “stiff as the Lord Chancellor,”
and yet limber as a snake in the grass, took
his departure.
Afternoon hours went slower than the morning
hours.
“The sun always seems to me to hold back
he would tumble to bed faster. I am impatient
to make our success sure.”
“Your sturdy confidence reassures me,” returned
Brothertoft. “I am happy there is one
of us whose heart-beats will not unsteady him.
I lose hope when I think what failure means to
my daughter.”
“I must keep myself the cool outsider, with
only a knight-errant's share in this adventure,”
Peter said.
A hard task he found this! The father so
charmed him that he felt himself, for his sake,
taking a very tender fraternal interest in the
young lady. It was so easy to picture her in
her chamber, not a mile away, looking tearfully
for help toward the hills. It was so easy to
fancy her face, — her father's, with the bloom
of youth instead of the shades of sorrow; and
her character, — her father's, with all this gentleness
that perhaps weakened him, in her but
sweet womanliness. Peter Skerrett perceived to
the full the romance of the adventure. He
frequently felt the undeveloped true lover in
him grow restive. He thought that he was all
the time putting down that turbulent personage.
Perhaps he was. But it must be avowed that
he often regretted his moustache, despised his
ill-fitting coat, and only consoled himself by recalling,
see me.” As evening approached, Peter Skerrett
perceived that his desire to redeem this fair
victim from among the bad and the base was
become a passion. He also noticed that its fervor
kept him cool and steady.
Silent sunset came. The crisis drew near.
Doubts began to curdle in Edwin Brothertoft's
mind. He looked over the broad landscape, and
along the solemn horizon, and all his own past
spread before him, sad-colored and dreary.
“Ah my beautiful childhood!” he thought.
“Ah my ardent youth, my aspiring manhood,
my defeated prime! My life utterly defeated,
as the world measures defeat, — and all through
her! All through her, the woman I loved with
my whole heart! Please God we may not meet
to-night! Please Heaven we may never meet
until her dark hour comes! Please Heaven that
when the loneliness of sin comes upon her, and
the misery of a worse defeat than any I have felt
is hers, — that then at last I may be ready with
such words of pardon as she needs!”
“See!” said Skerrett, softly. “It is dark.
There is a light in your daughter's window. We
will go to her.”
“In the name of God!” said the father.
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.
12. XII.
Eight o'clock, and Major Kerr sat sipping Madeira
in the dining-room at Brothertoft Manor.
“What 's the use of eight candles?” he said
to Voltaire.
“Only four, sir,” says the butler, depositing
two branches on the table.
“I see eight, — no, sixteen. Well, let 'em
burn! Economy be hanged! I say, nigger!”
“What, sir?” Voltaire perceived that his
deteriorating process had been effectual. Kerr
saw double and spoke thick.
“I 'm tired of sitting here alone. Can't you
sing me a song?”
“I used to sing like a boblink, sir; but since
I lost my front tooth the music all leaks out in
dribbles. There 's a redcoat sargeant just come
into the kitchen. He looks like a most a mighty
powerful singer. Shall I bring him in?”
“Yes. I ain't proud. A Kerr can associate
with anybody.”
As Voltaire left the room, he picked up the
Major's sword and pistols from the sideboard.
door of the parlor where the lady of the Manor
was sitting solitary. His father handed him the
arms. The seven seals of mystery had been
opened, and Plato was deep in the plot.
“Take 'em, boy,” says Voltaire, “and be
ready!”
Ready for what? Neither divined. But Plato
took the weapons with dignity, and became a
generalissimo in his own estimation. He brandished
the sword, and made a lunge at some
imaginary antagonist. Then he lifted a cocked
pistol, and took aim. It was comic in the dim
hall to see him going through his silent pantomime.
He thrust, he parried, he dropped his
point, he bowed like an accomplished master of
fence. He raised a pistol, bowed graciously, as
if to say, “Après vous, Monsieur,” touched trigger,
assumed a look half triumph, half concern,
then laid his hand upon his heart and
smiled the smile of one whose wounded honor
is avenged. All this was done without so much
as a chuckle.
While Plato was at his noiseless gymnastics,
Voltaire, through the pantry, had conducted the
Sergeant into Major Kerr's presence.
Skerrett, with his moustache off, and in a disguise
a world too shrunk for his shanks and
shoulders, looked much less the hero than when
at this moment he did not feel very heroic.
He was sailing under false colors. He was
acting a lie. He did not like the business,
whatever the motive was. He took his seat
vis-à-vis the rival Major, and thought, “If fair
play is a jewel, I must give the effect of paste
set in pinchbeck at this moment.”
“Glad to see you, Sargeant,” says Kerr, speaking
thick. “That 's right,” — to Voltaire. “Give
him some wine! Fine stuff they have in this
house. Better than regulation grog, Sargeant.”
The new-comer nodded, and went at his supper
vigorously.
“Goshshave th' King, Sargn! Buppers!” says
Kerr, holding up his glass aslant and spilling a
little.
“Bumpers!” responded the other.
“Frustrate their politics. Confound their
knavish tricks,” chanted Kerr. “Rebblstricksh,
I mean, Sargn. Cuffoud 'em. Buppers!”
“Bumpers!” Skerrett rejoined, still feeling
great compunction at the part he was playing.
“Sargeant,” says Kerr, “I 'm going to tell you
something.”
Skerrett looked attention.
“I 'm going to be married to-morrow,” —
spoken confidentially.
“Ah!”
“Don't say, `Ah!' Sargeant. Ah expreshes
doubtsh. Say, Oh! Sargeant. I askitshpussonlefaver,
Sargn. Say, Oh!”
“Oh!”
“That 's right. Oh is congratulation.” He
made muddy work with the last word. “Yes,
Sargeant, doocid pretty girl, doocid pretty property.
Want to see her, Sargeant?”
“No, I thank you.”
“Yes, you do, Sargeant. Don't tell me!
I 'm a lucky fellow, Sargeant. Always was
with women. I 'll have her down in the parlor,
by and by, and you can look through the crack
of the door and see her. She loves me so much,
Sargeant, that she 's gone up stairs to look at
her wedding-dress and wish for to-morrow.”
This discourse, spoken thick, and the leer that
emphasized it, quite dissipated all Major Skerrett's
scruples.
“Faugh!” thought he. “Everything is fair
play against such a beast. I never comprehended
before what a horror to a delicate woman
must be marriage with such a creature. Life
would drag on one long indignity, and every
day fresh misery and fresh disgust. Faugh!
sitting here and hearing him talk gives me
qualms, — me, a man of the world, who have
certainly had time to outgrow my squeamishness.
I could not tolerate the thought of giving
to the degradation of this fellow's society. He
shall not have Mr. Brothertoft's gentle daughter.
No, not if I have to shoot him where he sits.
No, not if I have to stab the lady.”
Peter looked at his watch. Time was not up.
He was compelled to bottle his indignation and
listen civilly.
Kerr grew more and more confidential in his
cups. Faugh! the jokes he made! the staves
he trolled! the winks he winked! the imbecile
laughs he roared! the conquests he recounted
in love and war! Faugh, that such brutes have
sometimes dragged the pure and the gentle down
to their level! Faugh, that they still grovel on
our earth, so that the artist, compelled by the
conditions of his work to paint such a Silenus,
finds his unpleasant models thick about him,
and paints under the sharp spur of personal
disgust and personal harm!
The two Majors in the dining-room, the Lady
of the Manor in a drowsy revery over the parlor
fire, Lucy eager and trembling in her chamber,
— for Voltaire has whispered that the hero
has come, — Volante saddled, Plato gesticulating
with sword and pistols; — now let us see
what the plotters without the Manor-House are
doing.
13. XIII.
What are the plotters without the Manor-House
doing?
All, except Jierck Dewitt, are standing at
ease, and waiting for their commander's signal.
Old Sam Galsworthy has his hand on the muzzle
of the runt pony, and at the faintest symptom
of a whinny in reply to Volante's whinnies in
the stable, Sam plugs the pony's nostrils with
his thumbs and holds his jaws together with
iron hand. Ike Van Wart leans on his gun,
and looks dull. Hendrecus Canady stands to
his gun, and looks sharp. Sergeant Lincoln-Brothertoft
keeps himself in a maze, — for to
think would be to doubt of success, and to
doubt is to fail.
This of course is the moment when Jierck
Dewitt should be “stiff as the Lord Chancellor,”
limber as the Lord Chief Acrobate, steady
as a steeple, and silent as a sexton.
But Jierck is at present a tipsy man, in happy-go-lucky
mood. He begins to grow impatient
waiting in the cold and shamming sober. A
more amusing than stand and handle a chilly
trigger.
“I 'm going to take a turn about the house
to see all 's safe, Orderly,” whispered he to
Lincoln-Brothertoft. “I leave you in charge of
the party. Keep a sharp look-out. I will be
back in half a jiff.”
Jierck stole off into the darkness.
Recollections of former exploits hereabouts
had revived in his muddled brain.
“Hair-oil 's all gone,” he thought. “Now
if I could only get into the cellar of the old
house, I should have my choice of liquors, just
as I did ten years ago, when Lady Brothertoft
had me caught and licked for breaking in.
By Congress, it 's worth a try! The cellar
window-bars used to be loose enough. It
won't do any harm to give 'em a pull all round.
If one gives, I can tumble in, get a drink to
keep my spirits up, and be back long before
the Major calls.”
His fancy was hardly so coherent as this, but
he obeyed it. He crept about the house and
fumbled at the bars of the nearest window.
The windows opened on a level with the ground.
“No go,” said he; “try another!” He did,
and another.
At the third window the solder was loose
with his knife and worked the bar about. It
still resisted, and he admonished it in a drunken
whisper, “I 'm ashamed of you, you dum bit
of rusty iron, keepin' a patriot away from Tory
property. Give in now, like a good feller, before
I git mad and do something rash.”
At this the bar joined the patriots, and gave
in. It came away in Jierck's hand. He laid
the cold iron on the frosty grass. He could
now take out the stone into which the bar had
been set. He did so. That released the foot
of the next bar. He bent this aside. There
was room for him to squeeze through.
He carefully backed into the cellar.
It was drunkard's luck. A sober man would
not have tried it. Moral: do not be too sober
in your head or your heart, if you would pluck
success among the nettles.
Jierck took a step forward in the Cimmerian
darkness of the cellar. He fell plump into
a heap of that rubbish which Voltaire's flaring
dip revealed to us in the morning.
“This noise won't do,” he thought. “One
tumble will pass for rats. Another may bring
Lady B. down stairs. I should n't like to see
her standing here with a candle in one hand
and a knife in the other. She 'd stick me,
like pork. No; I must strike a light. A flash
will do, to show me the way.”
He unplugged his powder-horn with his teeth
and poured a charge on the stone floor.
“Old Brindle did n't know how many redcoats
that horn of his was to be the means of
boring through,” thought Jierck. “Powder 's
an istooshn.”
In the dark his flint and steel tinkled together.
A spark flew. Fizz. Fiat lux! The powder
flashed.
Cimmerian corners, barrels of curly shavings
and rags out of curl, casks gone to hoops and
staves, shattered furniture, all the rubbishy
properties of a cellar scene, “started into light
and made the lighter start.” Light gave them
a knowing look and was out again. The scenery
scuffled back into darkness.
Jierck afterward found that he had marked
every object in that black hole, as they flung
forward at the flash. He had marked the scene,
and it was to haunt him always. At present,
he was thinking of nothing but the wine-room.
His fireworks had shown him the way clear
to it. He saw also that the door was ajar, as
Voltaire had left it in the morning.
He moved forward now without stumble or
tumble. He felt his way into the wine-room.
He touched the rough dusty backs of a battery
of recumbent bottles. He grasped one by the
he knocked off the yellow-sealed muzzle.
“Fire away!” said he, presenting the weapon
at his lips.
Gurgle.
He stopped to take breath. He felt like a
boy again. The wine tasted as it did ten years
ago, when he first stole into the cellar, and
was punished for it.
“She can't have me whaled this time,” he
muttered. “Here goes again! What stuff it
is!”
Gurgle a second time, and the cellar seems
to listen.
But while that amber stream was flowing
between the white stalactites in Jierck's upper
jaw, and the white stalagmites in his lower, and
rippling against that pink stalactite his palate,
before it leaped farther down the grotto, —
suddenly: —
A scream above, a rush, a shot, a scuffle.
For an instant Jierck was paralyzed. He
stood listening. The bottle, for which he had
deserted his post, slipped through his alarmed
fingers and crashed on the floor. The sound
half recalled him to himself.
He turned and sprang for that dim parallelogram
of lighter darkness, — the window where
he had entered.
Awkwardly, drunkenly, trembling with haste
and shame, he clambered up upon the sill and
began to back out between the bars. His coat
caught against the bent iron.
As he stopped to disengage it, he peered
suspiciously back into the cellar.
A little spot of red glow in the midst of
the blackness caught his eye.
“Aha!” he thought, “my powder lighted
something tindery in that heap of rubbish. It
will soon eat what it 's got, and go out on the
stone floor. And if it don't go out, let it burn!
Blast the old house! it 's a nest of Tories. Blast
it! the mistress had me thrashed like a dog.
Blast the house! my wife was spoilt here, and
that spoilt me. Blast it! let it burn, and show
us the way out of the country!”
Jierck tore his coat from the bar, backed
out, picked up his gun and skulked tipsily off
to join his party.
14. XIV.
Jierck Dewitt's companions waited, at first
silently, then anxiously, for his return.
Moments passed, and he was still gone.
“I hope he hain't played us a trick,” whispered
Van Wart.
“Not he!” says honest Sam Galsworthy.
“I 'll tell you what it is, boys,” whispers the
root-doctor's son. Jierck has got liquor aboard.
Taint mutiny to say so, now he 's gone. I heard
him walk tipsy when we came from the barn.
When we got here, I saw he stood too ramrod
for a sober man. You know how it is. Since
his wife went bad, he 's lived on rum for stiddy
victuals. He swore off to Major Skerrett. But
he did n't swear strong enough, or else somethin'
strange has drawed his cork.”
“If that is so,” said Lincoln-Brothertoft, “I
must follow, and see that he does not risk himself
or us. Watch, men, for your lives!”
“They may call that man Orderly Lincoln,”
says Hendrecus Canady, as the other disappeared
about the house, “but I believe he 's Tommy
He talks powerful dictionary. And how
did he come to know this country like a hawk
and like a hoppertoad both?”
It seemed sad and sorry business to Edwin
Brothertoft to go prowling like a burglar about
the home of his forefathers.
He followed Jierck around the rear of the
house. All the familiar objects wore an unkindly,
alienated look. The walls were grim,
the windows were dark, the whole building said
to him, “You are an exile and an intruder.”
But he had no time for sentimental regrets.
He turned the northern side of the house. A
bright light burned in Lucy's chamber in the
tower. He could see a shadowy figure moving
behind the curtain.
“My child! in a few moments we shall meet,”
he thought.
Nothing to be seen of Jierck Dewitt! The
sight of his daughter's form revived his anxiety.
Peering into the dark, he passed about the
corner of the turret.
He stopped opposite the parlor windows on
the front. A shutter stood open. A faint light,
as from a flickering wood-fire within, gleamed
out into the hazy night. The window-sill was
breast high to a man.
“There we used to sit,” he murmured, “my
wife and I. There by the fire, in the evenings
of autumns long passed, I have watched her
love dying, and all my hopeful vigor dying, —
dying into ashes.”
The mighty despotism of an old love mastered
him for a moment. There was little bitterness
in his heart. These scenes, once so dear, became
dear to him again. He pardoned them for
their unconscious share in the tragedy of his life.
“I must have one glance into that room,” he
thought. “My memory of it will be a troublesome
ghost in my brain, until I have laid the
ghost with a sight of the reality.”
He stole forward softly over the crisp, frosty
grass, and looked cautiously in at the window.
Mrs. Brothertoft was seated alone before the
fire. Guilt must sit alone and dwell alone.
Loneliness is the necessity and the punishment
of guilty hearts. No friends are faithful but the
noble and the pure, and them guilt dreads and
rejects. Mrs. Brothertoft was sitting alone in
the fire-lit room. It was an instant before her
husband's eyes could distinguish objects within.
He drew close to the window. He perceived
her. A thrill of pity and pardon killed all his
old rancors. He felt that, though he must war
against her for his daughter's sake, he fought,
reserving an infinite tenderness for his foe.
And she within, — had she heard that stealthy
step of his upon the stiffened grass and the dry
leaves? Had his faint sigh penetrated to her, as
she sat silent and moody? Did she feel the
magnetism of human presence, — the spiritual
touch of a spirit wounded by her wrong? Or
was it merely that in these days of alarm and
violence she kept her senses trained and alert?
He saw her cruel face turn suddenly, stare
into the night, and mark an intruder.
For one breath he stood motionless.
Then, as she sprang forward to the window and
shouted for help, he turned and ran around the
rear of the house to the spot where he had left
his comrades.
15. XV.
Half past eight, and the two majors still sat
vis-à-vis in the dining-room.
“I am tired of this,” thought Skerrett. “I
have had enough of swallowing bumpers to this
fellow's `buppers.' I have heard enough of his
foulness, his boasts, and his drivel. I could
never have been patient so long except for the
lady's sake. Every word and look of his is an
imperative command to me to make sure of her
safety. Yes, yes, Voltaire! You need n't nod
and wink that she is ready and anxious. Ten
minutes more, to be positive that my men are
come, — and then, Major, please the Goddess of
Liberty, I 'll forbid your banns, and walk off
with your person. I 'm sorry for you, brute as
you are. And you will not like your wineless
quarters with Old Put.”
Monstrous long minutes, those final ten! At
the rate of a thousand a minute, shades of doubt
drifted across Peter's mind.
Who has not known suspense and its miseries?
— something hanging over him by a hair,
Peter Skerrett! The pendulum ticks. It checks
off the minutes, surely.
And while those minutes pass, tipsy Jierck
Dewitt is at work in the cellar, trying to drown
the misery that this guilty house has caused him.
The ten were almost ended, when Brothertoft
started to search for the stray leader, that other
victim of a woman's disloyalty.
It was in the very last of the ten that Mrs.
Brothertoft turned suddenly and saw an unknown
face staring in at her, as she sat in the
dusky parlor.
Time was up. Major Skerrett walked quietly
to the window, threw up the sash, opened the
shutters, and whistled in his men.
Three only came leaping in at the summons.
16. XVI.
Enter through the dining-room window, Ike
Van Wart, old Sam Galsworthy, and Hendrecus
Canady.
At the same moment Mrs. Brothertoft's cry
for help rang through the house. Jierck Dewitt
in the cellar heard it. Lucy in her turret
heard it. Plato in the hall could not but hear
it, close at his ears.
Plato was still on guard, playing pantomime
with the weapons. He stood, with pistol out-stretched,
pointing at an imaginary foe. It was
a duello he was fancying. He had received the
other party's fire unscathed. Now his turn was
come. He proudly covered his invisible antagonist
with his pistol at full cock.
“Apologize, sir,” whispered Plato, “or —”
Here came his mistress's loud scream for help.
Plato was petrified.
Mrs. Brothertoft rushed into the hall.
There was the negro, standing like a statue,
holding forth a weapon to her hand. She seized
She was fearless enough, this cruel virago.
The touch of a deadly weapon made her long to
be dealing death. She heard the scuffle in the
dining-room.
“Come!” whispered her old comrades, the
Furies, closing in, and becoming again body of
her body, spirit of her spirit. “Come, take your
chance! Here are marauders, — rebels! Shoot
one of them! Practise here! Then you will
get over any scruples against blood, and can kill
the people you hate, if they ever come in your
way. Now, madam!”
Such a command ran swiftly through her
brain. She opened the dining-room door.
Her scream told the assaulting party they
were discovered. They were pinioning Major
Kerr in double-quick time. He sat in tipsy bewilderment,
mumbling vain protests and vainer
threats.
Not one of the group about the captive observed
the mistress of the house, as she softly
opened the door.
But another did.
Edwin Brothertoft, tardily following his party,
was clambering through the window.
He saw his wife at the door. She must be
kept from the danger of any chance shot or
chance blow in the scuffle. This was his impulse.
gently.
She instantly fired at the approaching figure.
He fell.
He staggered, and fell. His head struck the
claw-foot of the table, and he lay there motionless,
with face upturned and temple bleeding.
Her husband! She knew him at once.
His thin, gray hair drawn back from his mild,
dreamy face, with the old pardoning look she
remembered so well and hated so fiercely, —
there lay the man she had wronged and ruined,
dead; yes, as it seemed, dead at last by her
own hand.
“My husband!”
She said it with a strange, quiet satisfaction.
Every one paused an instant, while she stood
looking at her work, with a smile.
She had done well to wait. Those impalpable
weapons she used to see in the air had become
palpable at last. Yes; she had waited wisely.
This was self-defence, not murder. She had the
triumph without the name of crime.
“So you must come prowling about here, and
be shot,” she said to him, as if they were alone
together.
And she spurned him with her foot.
As by this indignity she touched and broke
down the last limit of womanliness, she felt a
power. Nothing could offer itself now that she
was not willing to do. Any future cruelty was a
trifle to this. Her joy in this homicide promoted
it to a murder.
She looked up. The group about Kerr were
all regarding her. She laughed triumphantly in
a dreadful bedlam tone, and flung her pistol at
Major Skerrett.
He caught the missile with his hand.
“Are you mad?” said he. “Do you know
that you have killed your husband? Take her
into the next room, men!”
“Come, madam,” said Galsworthy, gently.
“You did not know it. We are sorry it was
not one of us. We are Manor men, come to
take this Britisher prisoner, not to harm anybody
or anything here.”
“Curse you all!” she cried, and she made a
clutch at Sam's honest face. “I am not sorry, —
not I! No; glad, glad, glad! And I 'll have
you all served so, — no, hung, hung for spies!”
“Take her away, men!” repeated Skerrett.
“We must confine her. But not here with this
dead man. Gently now, as gently as you can;
remember she 's a woman!”
“Woman!” says Canady, holding her fingers
from his face. “No, by the Continental Congress!
she 's a hell-cat.”
“No hope for him with such a wound as
that,” said the Major, kneeling over Brothertoft
and examining his bloody forehead. “He seems
to be quite dead. See to him, Sappho! Stand
by Major Kerr, Van Wart, while I dispose of the
woman!”
“Sargn,” mumbled Kerr, “I 'm sashfied 't 's
all a mshtake.”
The two men dragged Mrs. Brothertoft, struggling
furiously, across into the parlor, and forced
her into an arm-chair before the fire.
Skerrett followed. Plato was in the hall, terrified
at the mischief he had caused.
“Run, Plato,” said the Major, “and have Miss
Lucy's mare out. And you, Voltaire, don't look
so frightened, man! We must make the best of
it. Bring the young lady down some back way!
She must not see her father or her mother.
Horrible, horrible, all! A dreadful end of all
this sorrow and sin!”
He passed into the parlor.
The flickering firelight gave a dim reality to
the objects there. They stirred, they advanced
and retreated. The rich old family furniture
seemed eager to take part in the tragic acts
now rehearsing.
Major Skerrett, in the dimness, marked the
Vandyck on the wall. The torn curtain had not
been repaired. It still fell away at the upper
and his white charger. A startling resemblance
the portrait bore to him now lying dead
across the hall. It might almost seem as if the
spirit of the departed, with a bitter interest in
these scenes of old sorrow and joy, and in the
personages who still moved in them, had identified
itself with the picture, and was stationed
there to watch events.
A single glance gave Major Skerrett these objects
and impressions. He turned to the mistress
of the house. She sat, baffled and glaring,
held in the arm-chair by the two men.
“Madam,” said Skerrett gravely, “I regret
that I must confine you. You have shown your
power to do harm, and threatened more. I cannot
take you with me for safety. If I left you
free, you could start pursuit, and we should be
caught and hung, as you desire. Boys, tie her
in the chair. So as not to hurt her now; but
carefully, so that she cannot stir hand or foot.
I hate to seem to maltreat a woman.”
They belted her and corded her fast in the
chair. She wrestled frantically, and cursed
them with unwomanly words, such as no woman
should know.
“There you are, ma'am, fast!” says Galsworthy,
drawing back. “You 're tied so you
won't feel it, and so you can't hurt yourself or
anybody else.”
Skerrett heaped up the fire to burn steadily
and slowly. Then, with great tenderness of
manner, he laid a shawl over Mrs. Brothertoft's
shoulders.
“Madam,” said he again, “I am sincerely
sorry that I must imprison you. I have tried
to make you as comfortable as possible. The
night is fine. This fire will burn till morning.
I must take your people all away with me, for
safety; but they shall be despatched back, as
soon as we are out of danger, to release you,
and” — here his voice grew graver — “to bury
the husband whom you have killed, and in
whose death you triumph.”
She made no answer. All the flickering of
the fire could not shake the cold look of defiance
now settled on her handsome face. The color
had faded from her cheeks. Her countenance
— rimmed with her black hair, disordered in
the struggle — was like the marble mask of a
Gorgon.
The Major paused a moment, listening if she
would speak. “It seems brutal to leave her
so,” he thought. “But what else can I do?
She will grow calm by and by, and sleep. There
are worse places to pass the night in than a
comfortable arm-chair before a good fire.”
“Good night, madam,” he said, with no trace
of a taunt in his tone.
The cold look gave place to an expression
of utter malignancy and rage, at her impotence
to do further harm.
“Move on, men,” said the Major, and followed
them.
At the door he turned to survey the scene
once more. Its tragedy terribly fascinated him.
There sat the lady, with the fire shining on
her determined profile. She was quiet now;
and, from the picture, the heads of the soldier
and his white horse as quietly regarded her.
Skerrett closed the door softly.
He listened an instant without. Would she
relent? Would he hear a sob, and then a great
outburst of penitent agony, when, left to herself,
she faced the thought of this ghastly accident,
which she had adopted as a crime?
He listened. Not a sound!
There was no time to lose, and the Major
hurried after his men.
17. XVII.
All this while Lucy had been waiting anxiously
in her chamber in the turret.
As twilight faded, she took her farewell of
river, slopes, groves, and mountains. With dying
day, all that beloved scene sank deeper into
her memory.
At last Voltaire came and whispered: “They
are come. Be ready when I call!”
She was ready; and now, in these few moments,
before she blew out her light and departed,
she studied the familar objects about her
with new affection.
It seemed to her as if all the observation of
her past life had been half-conscious and dreamy.
The sudden ripening of her character, by this
struggle with evil, gave all her faculties force.
Commonplace objects were no longer commonplace.
Everything in her room became invested
with a spiritual significance.
“Good bye, my dear old mirror!” she thought.
“You have given me much dumb sympathy
when I smiled or wept. You could not answer
be so dreary. I begin to comprehend at last the
Myself you have helped me to study. Good bye,
my bedside! I had no mother's lap to rest my
head on when I prayed. But your cool, white
cushion never repelled me, whether I knelt in
doubt or in agony. Good bye, my pillow!
thanks for many a night of oblivion! thanks
for many an awakening with hope renewed!
Good bye, kind, sheltering walls of my refuge!
The child you have known so long is a woman.
Girlhood ends sharply here. The woman says,
Good bye.”
As she stood waiting for the signal of flight,
suddenly her mother's cry of alarm broke the
silence.
At that ill-omened voice, Lucy trembled, and
for one moment despaired.
Then came the sharp crack of the pistol-shot.
The shock startled her into courage. This
note of battle joined awaked all the combatant in
her. “I cannot hide here,” she thought, “while
they are in danger for my sake. I cannot fight,
but I may help, if any one is hurt.”
One more glance about her chamber, and then
she closed the door, and shut herself out into the
wide world.
At the top of the staircase, the sound of a
struggle below met her. She paused, and shuddered.
expunged from the list of her possible emotions.
She shuddered for horror.
She recognized her mother's voice. She
heard those bedlam cries and curses. These
were the tones of a woman who had ejected the
woman, and was a wild beast. Feminine reserve
had dropped at last, and the creature
appeared what her bad life had slowly made her.
“What final horror has done this?” thought
Lucy.
She leaned cautiously over the banisters, and
beheld the scene in the hall. A sickening sight
for a daughter to see! A strange scene in that
proud and orderly house! Outward decorum, at
least, had always reigned there. Evil had now,
at last, undergone its natural development into
violence.
Pale and shivering with excitement, but conscious
of a new-born sense of justice and an inexorable
hardness of heart against guilt, Lucy
leaned forward, and saw her mother struggling
with the two men. She saw the alarmed negroes.
She saw the gentleman, whom she identified
at a glance as the expected hero, and heard
his grave voice as he ordered Plato to make her
horse ready and Voltaire to seek herself.
“A dreadful end of all this sorrow and sin!”
she heard him say.
Lucy repeated these words to herself in a
whisper. “A dreadful end! What does he
mean? I do not see my father. Can it be?
Did she fire the shot? Has she murdered the
body, as she has done her best to kill the soul?”
Lucy sprang down the stairs, by Voltaire, and
into the dining-room.
There sat Major Kerr, drivelling entreaties to
his impassive sentry.
And on the floor, with a stream of blood flowing
over his temple and clotting his gray hair,
lay a man, — her father!
Sappho was moaning over him.
Lucy flung her aside, almost fiercely. She
crushed her own great cry of anguish. She
knelt by him and lifted the reverend head with
her arms.
And so it happened that when Edwin Brothertoft,
stunned by a sharp blow from a glanced
bullet and by his heavy fall, in a moment came
to himself and unclosed his eyes, he saw his
daughter's face hanging over him, and felt her
arms about his neck. Her tender arms embracing
him, — her lips at his.
Ah, moment of dear delight! when life renewed
perceived that love was there to welcome
it and to baptize its birth with happy tears!
Here Jierck Dewitt reappeared upon the scene.
Alarm had fallen upon him, like water on a
to perceive that he must justify his outsidership
and make his desertion forgotten. He looked
through the window, took his cue, and then bustled
forward officiously. He spoke, to be sure,
with a burr, and trod as if the floor were undulating
gayly beneath him; but why may not
haste and eagerness make tongue and feet trip?
“Hooray, Ike!” cries he; “I 've made all
right outside. Plato 's just bringing out your
horse, Miss. Thank you for looking after the
Sergeant, Miss,” continued Jierck, blundering
down on his knees beside Mr. Brothertoft.
“How do you find yourself, Sergeant? O,
you 'll do. Only a little love-tap the ball gave
you. A drop of rum, — capital thing rum, always,
— a drop on a bit of brown paper, stuck on
the scratch, and you 're all right. Feel a little
sick with the jar, don't you? Yes. Well, we
must get you outside into the air. Now, then,
make a lift. Thank you, Miss. Now, again.
Why, Sergeant, you 're almost as steady on your
pins as I am. Now, Miss, you hold him on that
side, and here I am on this, stiff as the Lord
Chancellor. Think you can step over the window-sill,
Sargeant? Well done! And here we
are, out in the fresh air! And here 's the boy
with the horse. All right! All right, Major;
here we are, waiting for you!”
The last was said to Major Skerrett, who came
hurrying out after them.
“You are not badly hurt, thank God!” he
said, grasping his friend's hand.
“No,” replied the other, still feeble with the
shock, “Heaven does not permit such horror.
What have you done with her?”
“I have left her confined in the parlor. We
bound her there, as tenderly as might be. She
cannot suffer in person at all.”
“I suppose I had better take your word for
it.”
“You must. We must not dally a moment.
Some straggler may have heard the pistol-shot
and be on our track. Now, boys, mount the
Major on his pony.”
“My daughter, Skerrett; you will give her
your hand for good-will,” said the father.
In the hazy night she could but faintly see
her paladin, and he her. There was no time
for thanks and compliments. No time for Lucy
to search for the one look with all the woman
in it, and the one word with all the spirit in it,
that might express her vast passion of gratitude.
She gave him her hand, containing at least one
lobe of her heart. He pressed it hastily, and as
certainly a portion of his heart also was in his
palm, there may have been an exchange of lobes
in the hurry.
“Hoist away, Sam!” said Hendrecus Canady,
buckling to one of Major Kerr's limp legs.
“Ay, ay!” rejoined Galsworthy, on his side
boosting bravely at the lubberly carcass of the
prisoner, while Ike Van Wart held the runt
pony's head. “Seems to me these Britishers
get drunker when they 're drunk than we do.”
“We 're so full of the spirit of '76,” rejoined
the root-doctor's son, “that no other kind of
spirit can please us.”
“Cooducher take summuddy elsh, now,
boysh?” boosily entreated poor Kerr; “Shrenry
Clidn wantsh me.”
Ah, Major! Sir Henry must continue to want
you. Nobody listens to your deteriorated King's
English and no more of it shall be here repeated.
“We have not a moment to lose,” said Major
Skerrett. “We must not let our success grow
cold. I have my prisoner, Mr. Brothertoft, and
your daughter is with you. Each of us will take
care of his own. For the first ten miles we had
better separate. I, with our friend the Major,
will make a dash along the straight road, and
you will take to the by-paths and the back
country, as we agreed. If there is any chase,
it will be after us, and we can all fight. I will
give you charge of all the non-combatants. Voltaire,
you and your family will travel with your
master.”
“Yes, sir,” says Voltaire, “we never want to
see this house again, so long as she 's there.
The women will come in the morning, and they
can cut her loose.”
“Well, your master will settle that. Until
Miss Lucy is out of danger you must all stay
by her. Where 's Jierck Dewitt?”
“Here, sir,” says Jierck, from behind Volante.
“You 've deceived me, and been drinking,
Jierck.”
“I have, Major,” the repentant man replied.
“I saw my wife going by, and everything grew
so black that I had to fire up a little, or I should
have stuck a knife into me. But I 'm all right
now. Trust me once more!”
“I must! Go with the lady! Bring her safe
through, and I will forget that you have forgotten
yourself.”
The two parties separated with “Good bye!
God speed!”
Major Kerr made an attempt at “Au revoir,
Miss Lucy.” But his vinous consonants could
not find their places among his vinous vowels,
and his civility was inarticulate.
Skerrett halted, and watched Volante among
the yellow trees, until there was not even a
whisk of her tail to be seen across the luminous
haze of the cool starlit night of October.
“Noble horse! lovely lady!” he thought.
her; but she will be safe, and my duty is with
my prisoner. Now, ought I not to go back and
tell the wife that she did not kill her husband?
Time is precious. She would only curse and say
she was sorry she missed. No; I cannot bear
again to see a woman so dewomanized. I cannot
bear to think of that cruel virago as the mother
of this delicate girl. No; let her stay there
alone, and think of herself as a murderess!
Perhaps remorse may visit her in the dead of
night, — perhaps repentance in the holy stillness
of dawn.”
Peter took his last look at the mansion. It
stood dim and unsubstantial in the mist, and
silent as a cenotaph.
He overtook his men, and pushed rapidly and
safely along. But still a vague uneasiness beset
him, lest, in these days of violence, some disaster
might befall that deserted house and its helpless
tenant. Long after he was involved in the dusky
defiles of the Highlands, he found himself pausing
and looking southward. Every sound in the
silent night seemed a cry for help from that
beautiful Fury he had left before the glimmering
fire, with the portrait watching her, like a
ghost.
Poor Kerr! plaintive at first, then sullen, then
surly, then doleful. The runt pony set its legs
bumptiousness all out of him.
All the good nature of his captors could not
better his case. He was sadly dejected in mind
and flaccid in person when the party issued
from the Highlands, a little after late moon-rise.
Major Skerrett only waited till he saw the
pumpkins of the Fishkill plain, lying solitary or
social, and turning up their cheeks to the cool
salute of wan and waning Luna. Then he gave
his prisoner to Van Wart and Galsworthy, to be
put to bed at Putnam's quarters, and himself,
with Hendrecus, turned back to meet the fugitives.
Let us now trace them on their flight from
Brothertoft Manor.
18. XVIII.
The other party of fugitives took a more circuitous
route, to the east, through that scantily
peopled region.
Volante stepped proudly along, pricking up
her ears to recognize familiar bugbears, and to
question strange stocks and stones, whether they
were “miching malicho” to horse-flesh.
Brothertoft walked by his daughter's side.
Only now and then in their hurried march
could he take her hand and speak and hear
some word of tender love. But the consciousness
in each of the other's presence, and the
knowledge of the new birth of the holiest of all
the holy affections between them, was sufficient.
A vague bliss involved them as they hurried
through the dim night. And both evaded the
thought of that Hate they had left behind, —
that embodied Hate, helpless and alone, at
Brothertoft Manor.
The negroes trotted along, babbling comically
together.
Jierck Dewitt led the way in silence.
“I shall never dare to face Major Skerrett
again, if I don't bring these people straight
through,” — so he thought. “I am just sober
enough to walk my chalk if I pin my eyes to it.
If I look at anything else, or think of anything
else, this path 'll go to zigzagging, and splitting
up into squirrel-tracks, and climbing up trees.
Old Voltaire says he don't know these back
roads very well. If I lose the track, we shall
be nowhere.”
The region a mile back from the river was
mostly forest then, with scattered clearings. Often
the course of our fugitives was merely a
wood-road, or a cow-path, or an old trail. There
were giant boles stopping the way, and prone
trunks barricading it. There were bogs and
thickets to avoid.
It is bewildering business to travel through a
forest in the dark. Jierck Dewitt knew this well.
He did not distract his attention with talk, or
recalling the events of the evening. He held
tight with all his eyes and all his wits to the
track, commanding it not to divide or meander.
This severe application steadied his brain. He
slowly sobered. The fine fumes of his potations
of Brothertoft Madeira, in the cellar, exhaled.
The coarser gases of rum from the paternal
jug split their exit through the sutures of his
skull.
It seemed a moment, it seemed a millennium,
it was an hour, when the party reached the foot
of Cedar Ridge, almost three miles from the
Manor-House.
Cedar Ridge is a famous look-out. “What
you cannot see from there is not worth seeing,”
say the neighbors. It rises some three
hundred feet above the level of the river, and
surveys highlands north, uplands and lowlands
south, with Janus-like vision.
Long before Hendrecus Hudson baptized the
North River, Cedar Ridge was a sacred mount
— a hill of Sion — to the Redskins. Fire had
disforested the summit, and laid bare two bosomy
mounds, stereoscopic counterparts, with a little
depression between. A single cedar, old as the
eldest hills, grew in this hollow. Around it
had generations of frowzy Indian braves held
frantic powwows, and danced their bow-legged
minuets. Many a captive had suffered the fate
of Saint Sebastian against its trunk, and dabbled
the roots with his copper-colored blood.
Savory fragments of roast Iroquois had fattened
the soil. Fed on this unwholesome diet, and
topped every winter by Boreas, the tree made
hard, red flesh, and bloated into a stunted,
wicked-looking Dagon, as gnarled and knobby
as that old yew-tree of Fountains Abbey, which
— so goes the myth — was Joseph of Arimathea's
on his tour to convert the hairy Britons from
Angli to Angeli.
A famous point of view was Cedar Ridge,
named after this little giant, this squat sovereign
among evergreens.
Such a landmark attained without error, Jierck
Dewitt began to feel secure. He could relax
his strict attention to his duties as guide, and
let his thoughts confuse him again.
The moment he began to review the events
of the evening with a sobered brain, he grew
suddenly troubled.
He halted where the forest ceased on the
ridge, and the two bare mounds with the low
cedar appeared against the sky. He paused
there, and let Voltaire overtake him.
This was the third night of that old brave's
travels. The present pace was telling on him.
He was puffing loud and long, as he stopped at
Jierck's signal. The others passed on up the
ridge. The white mare became a spot of light
in the open.
“Voltaire,” whispered Jierck, “I did n't see
the Mistress around when we left the Manor.
Do you know what was done with her?”
“Where was you, that you did n't see?” asks
Voltaire, taking and yielding air in great gasps
between every word.
“Never mind that! What became of her?”
“Why you know (puff) that she fired (gasp)
a pistol (explosion and sigh) at Master; and
everybody thought (wheeze) that she 'd shot him
dead.” Here Voltaire took in a gallon or so
of night air, and delivered it slowly back, by the
pint, in the form of a chain of clouds, as white
as if they came from the lungs of a pure Caucasian.
This speech explained half the mystery to
Jierck. His curiosity seemed to become more
troublesome. He continued anxiously: “Yes,
yes, I know,” — which he did not until this
moment. “But what was done with her afterwards.
I was outside, doing my part there.”
“You was outside, was you?” says Voltaire,
slowly recovering fluency. “Well, I guess they
wanted you inside.”
“A man can't be in two places at once. What
did they want me for?”
“Them two boys — the root-doctor's son and
Samuel Galsworthy — is as spry as any two boys
I ever see. Mighty spry and strong and handy
boys they is; but they had a'most a orkud job
with Mistress, she tearing and scratching so.
They wanted another hand bad; but they got
through, and fixed her up right at last.”
“Fixed her! How?”
“What you in such an orful hurry about?
Let a man take breff, won't you?”
“Yes; but speak quick! What did they do
with her? Is she left there?”
“Leff thar!” says Voltaire, relapsing into full
patois. “Whar would dey leave her? She 's
done tied up in a big arm-cheer in de parlor.
An' dar she 'll stay all dis bressed night, jess
like a turkey truss up fur to be roast.” And
he gave a little, triumphant chuckle, that seemed
to remember old cruelties he had suffered at her
hands.
Jierck made no answer. He seemed to need
breath as much as the negro. He gave a little
gasp, and sprang up the hill-side.
Puzzled, Voltaire followed slowly after.
While they talked, the others had climbed to
the top of the ridge, and halted to rest where
the old cedar stood barring the way.
Jierck Dewitt came panting up to the summit.
He turned and glanced hastily over the hazy
breadth of slumbering landscape below.
Belts of mist lay in the little valleys. Beyond
was the river, a broad white pathway, like a
void. And beyond again, the black heaps of
the mountains westward. Here and there in
the vague, a dot of light marked a farm-house.
The lanterns of the British frigates were to be
seen twinkling like reflections of stars in water.
It may have been fancy, but in the silence
Lucy thought that she heard the far-away sound
and her consorts responding.
Jierck continued peering intently into the
dark.
His seeming alarm communicated itself to the
party.
“What is it?” said Brothertoft. “Do you
fear pursuit?”
“No,” whispered Jierck.
His monosyllable sent a shiver to all their
hearts. There was a veiled scream in this single
word, — a revelation of some terrible panic awaiting
them.
“I must see farther,” resumed Dewitt, in the
same curdling tone; and he sprang up the
mound on the right.
Edwin Brothertoft, impressed by this strange
terror, followed.
He was within a dozen feet of the summit,
and its wider reach of view, when Jierck leaped
down and seized him tight by both shoulders.
Jierck caught breath. Then, with his face close
to the other's, — “My God!” he hissed, “I 've
set the house on fire. We 've left that woman
there, tied, to burn to death.”
19. XIX.
Edwin Brothertoft shook off the man's clutch
of horror, and stared southward.
A dull glow, like the light of moonrise through
mist, was visible close to the dark line of the
horizon.
Instantly, as he looked, the glow deepened.
The black mass of the Manor-House appeared
against the light. The fire must be in the rear
and below. An alarm-gun from the frigate came
booming through the silence.
While they stood paralyzed, Edwin Brothertoft
sprang down from the mound, tore his daughter
from the saddle, and was mounted himself
quick as thought.
“I must save her!” he cried, — “your mother,
my wife!”
He was gone.
A moment they could see the white horse,
like a flash of light, as she flung down the
break-neck hill-side.
Then she leaped into the mist, and a moment
more they could hear her hoofs clattering.
They stood appalled and speechless.
Heart-beat by heart-beat it seemed that the
fire grew intenser. All the world was blotted
out for the gazers, except that one red spot,
like a displaced moonrise, far to the southward.
Fire was not master yet. Who could say?
Only three long miles. He might save her.
Other succor might come.
Lucy gave one more look into that ocean
of mist where she knew her father was struggling.
Then, quick but quiet, she seized poor
Jierck Dewitt's arm.
“Come,” she said; “show me the way, —
the shortest way. I will follow my father.”
20. XX.
Brothertoft galloped down the hill-side. He
had no whip or spur, but the mare took in his
passion, made it her own, and dashed forward
madly. No winding by comfortable curves for
them! They bore straight for the house.
Three miles from Cedar Ridge, — three miles
to go! and broken country, all hill and gully!
No sane man could gallop it by day. A night
ride there might be the dream of a madman.
There were belts of forest, dense and dark, with
trees standing thick as palisades. There were
ravines crowded with thorny thickets. There
were stony brooks, and dry channels stonier.
There were high walls slanting up the sharp
slopes of the scattered clearings. Down was
steep, and up was steep, and it was all up and
down. But, though darkness trebled the danger,
horse or rider never shrank. They bore
straight on. Three miles to go!
And while they galloped, the rider's thought
galloped. Sometimes it burst out into a cry of
encouragement for his horse; sometimes it was
thus: —
“On, Volante! Straight for that light to the
south! Fires move fast; we must go faster. Only
three miles away, and there she sits bound, — and
the flames coming, — she I once loved, God knows
how faithfully! Gallop, gallop, Volante!
“Bravely! here we are down the ridge!
Now, stretch out over this smooth bit of clearing!
Yes; that black line is a stone wall.
Measure it, Volante! Not four feet! Good
practice for our first leap! Easy now, steady!
Hurrah! Over and a foot to spare! Well done,
horse! And I have been a plodding foot-soldier!
But I can ride still, like a boy, side-saddle or no
saddle. A Brothertoft cannot lose the cavalier.
We shall win.
“What, Volante? Nothing to fear, — that
white strip in the dell! Only a brook. Barely
twelve feet to leap. Never mind the dark and
the bad start! Remember my wife, — she burns,
if we flinch. Now, together! Hurrah! Over,
thank God! Splashed, but safe over and away!
“A clearing again. Shame, Volante! Are
you a ploughman's horse, that you labor so
clumsily in these furrows? See that horrible
glow upon the sky! This wood hides it again.
Idle forest! why was it not burned clean from
the ground a century ago? Everything baffles.
Over, over! Through, through, and now
straight on! Yes; the hill is steep, but we
must gallop down it. No stumbling. What!
another wall, and higher? You shrink! No, —
you must. She shall not burn! Now, God
help us! Down? No; up and off! Hurrah!
“How we have rattled through those two
miles! And here is the road. Easier travelling,
if you can only take that worm fence!
The top bars are sure to be rotten. A fair start,
my good mare, and do your best! Bravely
again! I knew we should crash over. Plain
sailing now! What, limping, flagging, Volante?
Shame! This is a road fit for a lady's summer-evening
canter. Shake out, Volante! Let me
see your stride! Show your Lincolnshire blood!
The winner in this race win's Life, — Life, do you
hear? Wake up there, you farmers! Turn out
and help! Fire at Brothertoft Manor. Fire!
“Faster, faster! Are we too late? Never!
I see the glow brighten against the sky; but the
night is still as death; fire will move slow.
We shall see at the turn of the road. Faster
now! She must not burn, sitting there, where I
saw her by the dear fireside of the years gone
by, — sitting bound, and the flames snarling.
Ah! I so loved her! I so trusted her! We
were young. Life was so beautiful! God was
wound me, and more cruelly wound her own
soul. But I have forgiven her. O, let me save
her, if only to speak peace and pardon! She
shall not burn. A dozen strides, and we can see
the house. Perhaps this great light is the stables.
No, — everything! Fire everywhere. Too
late! too late! Never! I can burn. She shall
not.”
And they galloped up the lawn.
21. XXI.
“I am Fire, a new-comer on the scene at Brothertoft
Manor-House.
“I was a spark from Jierck Dewitt's flint, a
flash of his powder, a feeble smoulder, a pretty,
graceful little flame, peering about for something
nutritious. I was weak. I get force as I go.
Let me once fairly touch fuel, and I will roar
you, roar you, — ay, and roast you too!
“What a grand pile of rubbish I see, now that
I can light up this dusky den of a cellar! Let
me burrow here! Let me scamper here! Aha,
I am warm and strong! A leap now! Hurrah!
I am so large and vigorous that I can multiply
myself. Go, little flames, rummage everywhere.
Blaze, my children, flash in the corners, find
what you like, eat and grow fierce. Grow fierce
and agile! I mean to exhibit you by and by.
You must presently run up stairs, make yourselves
broad and slender, dance, exult, and devour
everywhere.
“A drop of the famous Brothertoft Madeira,
now, for Fire and family! Here goes at the
go the shelves! Crash go the bottles! Drink,
flames, drink! What nectar! How this black
hole of a cellar shines! Fine wine makes me
hungry for finer fare! I could eat titbits now.
Perhaps I shall find them up stairs. A cradle
with a fat bambino, — that would be a sweet
morsel! A maiden's bed with a white-limbed
maiden on it, — that I could take finely. Come
flames, my children, up stairs, and let us see
what we can find! Up, my strongest, my hungriest,
my drunkest flames! up and follow!
“I am Fire! This house and all that be in it
are mine.”
22. XXII.
Mrs. Brothertoft sat in the parlor of the deserted
mansion, bound, helpless, and alone.
She was exhausted and weak after her furious
struggle with her captors. Mental frenzy had
wearied her mind.
As Major Skerrett closed the door, and she was
left solitary, a little brief sleep, like a faint, fell
upon her.
It could have lasted but a moment, for when
she suddenly awoke, the final footsteps of the retiring
party were still sounding upon the gravel
road.
She listened intently. The sound ceased.
Human presence had departed. Silence about
her, — except that the fire on the hearth hissed
and muttered, as fire imprisoned is wont to do,
in feeble protest against its powerlessness.
This moment of sleep seemed to draw a line
sharp as death between two eras in Mrs. Brothertoft's
history. From the hither side of this emphatic
interval of oblivion she could survey her
past life apart from the present. Violence, Force,
their mark sharp as the sudden cleft of an earthquake
in a plain.
She had now the opportunity, as she sat bound,
strictly but not harshly, before a comfortable fire,
to review her conduct and approve or condemn.
She could now ask herself why Force had come
in to baffle her plans, — what laws she had broken
to merit this inevitable penalty of failure and
insulting punishment.
There was a pause in her life, such as is given
to all erring and guilty lives many times in life,
and to all souls in death, to look at past ruin
quietly, and plan, if they will, with larger wisdom
for the time to come.
She rapidly put together her facts, and without
much difficulty comprehended the plot of Kerr's
capture and Lucy's evasion. It angered her to
be defeated by a “silly child,” as she had named
her. But she put this aside for the moment.
A graver matter was to be considered.
She thought of her husband, lying in the
dining-room, slain, as she supposed, by her hand.
Then, in her soul, began a great and terrible
battle. “You are free!” her old companion
Furies whispered her. “Free of that incubus,
your husband. Such triumph well repays you
for the insult of a few hours' bondage.”
But then a low voice within her seemed to ask,
have trampled on your womanhood, and done
murder to a man who gave you only love and
only pity when you wronged him?”
“Be proud of yourself, beautiful creature!”
whispered the Furies. “You are an imperial
woman, rich, masterly, and skilful, with a brilliant
career before you.”
“Humble yourself before God and your own
soul, miserable woman!” the inner voice replied.
“Repent, or that murdered man will
take his stand at your side forever.”
“He owed you this vengeance,” her evil spirits
hinted, “for your great disappointment. If
he had not been a nerveless dreamer, full of
feeble scruples and sham ambitions, you would
have had all your heart desired. He basely
cheated you. He promised everything, and performed
nothing. He was the pride of the Province;
he let himself sink into insignificance.
Poor-spirited nobody! It was a kindness to
snuff out his mean and paltry life.”
“Did you see his gentle face as he fell?” the
counter influence made answer. “How gray
and old he was! Do you remember him? — it
seems but yesterday — a fair youth, kindling
with the hopes that to him were holy. You
loved him sometimes, — do you not recognize
those moments as your noblest? Have not
dreams? Is not all this misery and failure the
result of your first trifling with sin, and then
choosing it? Disloyal woman, — if you are a
woman, and not a fiend, — your cruelty has
brought defeat and shame upon you! Profit by
this moment of quiet reflection! see how the
broken law revenges itself!”
“Yes, madam,” the other voices here interrupted,
“you cannot escape what your weakness
calls shame. You will never live down scandal.
The untempted people will never admit you to
their ranks. Scorn them. Do not yield to
feeble regrets. Be yourself, — your brave, defiant
self!”
The Furies were getting the better. The
virago was more and more overpowering the
woman. Sometimes she sat patient. Sometimes
she raged and struggled impotently with
her bonds. It was terrible in the dim parlor to
watch her face, and mark the tokens of that mad
war within.
The fire in the chimney had been slowly heating
the logs all this time. They were ripe to
blaze. Suddenly they burst into a bright flame.
Mrs. Brothertoft looked up and saw herself in
the mirror over the fireplace. There was hardly
time for a thrill of self-admiration. The same
flash that showed her her own face revealed also
saw the heads of Colonel Brothertoft and his
white horse looking through the torn curtain.
She had not glanced that way since her scene of
yesterday evening with the picture. She had
evaded a sight that recalled her treason. Now it
forced itself upon her. Here she was bound;
and there, over her own head in the mirror, was
a ghostly shadow of what?
What! was this the ghostlier image of her
husband's very ghost? Was he there in the canvas?
Had he stolen away out of that dead
thing once his body, lying only a few steps and
two doors off? Was he there watching her?
Why did he wear that triumphant smile? He
was not used to smile much in the dreary old
times; — never to sneer as this semblance was
doing. Even that beast, the white horse, shared
in his master's exultation over her captivity, —
his nostrils swelled, and he seemed to pant for
breath enough to neigh over a victory.
She stared an instant, fascinated by that faint
image. There was a certain vague sense of
relief in its presence. This shadow of her husband
murdered might be a terror; but he intervened
a third party in the hostile parley
and the thickening war between her two selves.
This memento of remorse came to the succor
of the almost beaten relics of her better nature,
again against that reckless, triumphant, bedlam
creature, who was fast gaining the final mastery
and absorbing her total being.
Was it thus? Had this image of a ghost
come to say, “My wife, the old tie cannot break.
I come to plead with you not to annihilate the
woman, not to repel the medicine of remorse,
and make yourself an incurable, irreclaimable
fiend,” — was this his errand of mercy?
Or did he stand there to hound on the Frenzies,
spiritual essences, to her, to him visible
beings, whom she felt seducing her? Was he
smiling with delight to see her spirit zigzagging
across the line between madness and sanity, and
staggering farther, every turn, away from self-control?
Which was this shadow's office?
While she trembled between these questions,
still staring at those two reflections in the mirror,
— herself and that image of the portrait, — suddenly
the flash of flame in the chimney went
out. A downward draught sent clouds of white
smoke drifting about the room.
Mrs. Brothertoft peered a moment into the
darkness. Her own reflection in the mirror was
just visible, as she stirred her head. She missed
the other. But there were strange sounds suddenly
awakened, — a strange whispering through
the house.
So long as her seeming, ghostly companion
was visible, she had kept down her terror. Now,
as she fancied it still present but unseen, a great
dread fell upon her. She writhed in her bonds
to turn and face that portrait on the wall. She
could, with all her pains, only move enough
to see a little corner of the curtain.
Did it move? Would something unearthly
presently put aside those dusky folds, and come
rustling to her side?
She listened a moment, and then screamed
aloud.
The sound of her own voice a little reassured
her. She laughed harshly, and her soliloquy
went on, but wilder, and without the mild entreaties
of her better self.
“What a fool I am to disturb myself with
mere paint and canvas! But I will have that
picture burnt, — yes, burnt, to-morrow morning.
The man is gone, and every relic of him and
his name shall perish from the earth. How
plainly I seem to see him lying there dead,
with his face upturned! What? Do dead men
stir? I think he stirred. Do you dare to lift
your finger and point at me? I had a right to
shoot housebreakers. Put down your finger,
sir! You will not? Bah! Do what you please,
you cannot terrify me. You shall be burnt,
burnt, — do you hear? I smell fire strangely.
else. I am afraid I shall be cold before morning;
but now I am feverish. The air seems hot
and dry. I suppose I have grown excited, tied
here. What is that low rustling all the while?
Sometimes it seems to come from the cellar,
then it is here. Any one in this room? Speak!
Dewitt, Sarah, is that you come home? No answer;
and this whispering grows louder. Some
other chimney must be smoking. I can hardly
breathe. I must try to sleep, or I shall go mad
before morning with that dead man in the house.
Put down your finger, sir! Don't point at me
like a school-boy! What! Is he coming? Is
that his step I hear in the hall? Let me see,
he has only two steps to make to the door, five
across the hall, then two more and he could lean
over and whisper what he thought of me.”
She listened awhile to the strange sounds
below, and then went on: “If you come in here,
Edwin Brothertoft, and speak to me, I shall go
crazy. I cannot hear any of your meek talk.
Lie where you are till morning, and then, if
you wish, you shall be buried. Perhaps burning
was a little too harsh. Morning is not many
hours away. It must be nearly ten o'clock.
But if this smoke grows any thicker, I shall certainly
smother. These ghastly noises get louder
and louder. What can that crash be? Is the
away! Mr. Brothertoft, Edwin, if you love me,
pray stop fumbling at that latch. You know
how indulgent you always were to my little
fancies; do not come in, if you please. I am
afraid, Edwin, afraid. I am so fevered, tied
here by those cursed brigands, that I shall go
mad. I am suffocating with this smoke. Will
some one bring me a little water? But when
you come, do not look into that room across
the hall. There is a gray-headed man lying
there. He may say I murdered him. Do not
take notice of him, he was always weak-minded.
He will say I insulted, wronged, dishonored him,
and made his life a burden and a shame. Do
not listen to scandal against a woman; but bring
me a drop, one drop of water to cool my throat,
for I am burning with a horrible fever. If these
strange noises underneath and all around do not
cease, I shall certainly go mad. What can it
mean? I hear sounds like an army. I would
rather not receive your friends at present, Mr.
Brothertoft, if it is their feet and voices I hear.
This smoke makes my eyes red, and you always
were proud of my beauty, you know. What!
have they lighted their torches, those ghosts in
the hall? Or is this glow through the room the
moon? No. My God! Fire! I shall burn.
O Lucy, Lucy! O Edwin, help!”
23. XXIII.
Edwin Brothertoft came galloping up to the
flames. Had he won this race, with a life for
its prize?
The maddened mare tore forward, as if she
would leap in among the loud riot there.
Fire everywhere! A mob of arrogant, roaring,
frenzied flames possessed the cellar and the
ground-floor. Each window, so long a peaceful
entrance for sunbeams, now glowed with light
within, or thrust out great cruel blades of fire,
striking at darkness. Fire sheathed the base of
the turret. Agile flames were climbing up its
sides, and little playful flashes seized the creepers
that overhung Lucy's window, and, clinging
to these, peered in through the panes, looking
for such diet as they craved.
The husband turned the corner of the house,
and galloped up to the window, — that window
where an hour ago he had stood gazing at the
proud, hateful face of the woman he loved so
bitterly.
The white horse and its rider looked in at the
glance of horror showed them, as a
draught of air dragged the smoke away.
Opposite, on the wall, the two heads of the
picture were just yielding to the flames around
them. Little buds of flame were sprouting
through the floor, little tendrils wreathing the
doors, and drawing a closer circle about the figure
at their centre. There she sat, as if this
scene was prepared to illuminate her beauty.
A gush of air lifted the smoke like a curtain,
and there she was sitting, her black hair towering
above her pale forehead, her white arms
bound to the chair, and the red light of her
diamond resting upon her white bosom.
The smoke had half suffocated her. But she
was revived by the sudden flood of air, as a
burned door gave way. She turned her head
toward the window, — did her spirit tell her that
the heart she had wounded was there? She
lifted her feeble head as her husband dashed
forward, and it seemed to him that, amid all
the snarling and roaring of the flames, he could
hear her moan, “Help, Edwin! Help!”
The bulbs of flame through the floor shot up
and grew rank, the wreaths of flame reached
out and spread fast as the beautiful tendrils of
a magic vine, the smoke drifted together again,
and hid the room and the figure sitting there.
flame, where long streamers redder than autumn
hung and climbed, through the thick, blinding,
suffocating, baffling smoke, Edwin Brothertoft
sprang in to save his wife.
God help him, for his love is strong!
By this time, from the Tartar frigate and her
consorts, boats'-crews were making for the burning
house. They hoped to handle and furl the
flames, as they would a flapping maintopsail in a
gale. By this time the Manor people were also
hurrying up, with neighborly intent to fling
looking-glasses and crockery from the windows,
and save them.
The Tartars were exhilarated by the splendid
spectacle of fire in revolt. It was indeed a wild
and passionate scene. From every window fingers
of flame beckoned the world to behold it.
And now on Lucy's turret Fire had hoisted its
banner, as in a castle the flag goes up when the
master comes to hold holiday.
The sailors gained the foot of the lawn. This
pageant burst upon them. They sprang forward
with a hurrah. Suddenly the foremost
paused and huddled together. What is it?
A dark figure, bearing some heavy burden,
appeared at the only window of the front where
the flames were not overflowing in full streams
and fountaining upward.
The figure came fighting forward. Fire
shouted, and clutched at it. Smoke poured
around, to bewilder it. The figure — a man's
form — staggered and fell. Inward or outward
— inward into that fiery furnace, or outward
toward the quiet, frosty air of night — the sailors
could not see.
They rushed on more eagerly, but this time
without the cheer.
Only the bravest, with Commodore Hotham
himself at their head, dared face the flames, and
touch the scorching heat to seek for that escaping
figure they had seen.
They found him lying without, under the
great window, — a man, and in his arms a
burned and blackened thing. It might be, they
thought, a woman.
They carried them away where the air was
cool, and the crisp frost was unmelted on the
grass. The man breathed, and moaned. No
one knew his face, masked with black smoke.
With the neighbors, Mrs. Dewitt now came
running up, and joined the group.
“See!” said she, with a shudder. “This was
my mistress. She always wore this diamond on
her neck in the evening. She is dead. No; she
breathes!”
Yes; there was the gem, showing red reflections
of the flames. An hour ago the woman
admiration, saying, “Mark this white neck and
this fair bosom!” Now it made the utter ruin
there more pitiful.
Some one led forward Volante, drooping and
all in a foam. There was evidently some mystery
in this disaster. “Take these burned creatures
to the nearest house,” said Hotham.
“And now, boys, some of you try to save the
stables. Some come with me at the house.
There were more people in it.”
The sailors fought fire. The others carried
the two bodies to Bilsby's farm-house. The
flames showed them their path under the red-leaved
trees of October.
The same ruddy light was guiding Lucy
Brothertoft on her way to what a little while ago
was home.
Long before she reached the spot, the roar and
frenzy of the flames had subsided.
Nothing was left but the ragged walls and
the red ruins of the Manor-House. It had been
punished by fire for the misery and sin it had
sheltered.
A guard of sailors, under a lieutenant, protected
what little property had been saved.
Lucy learned from them how an unknown man
had rescued her mother to die away from the
flames.
She left Voltaire to make some plausible story
of the kidnapping, and to invent a release of
hers from the captors' hands, when the fire they
had accidentally kindled was discovered.
She hastened to help the father she loved and
the mother she pitied so deeply.
Jierck Dewitt followed her to Bilsby's door.
“Go, Jierck!” she said. “It makes me
shudder to see you, and think of this dreadful
harm you have done. Go and tell the whole
to Major Skerrett.”
“Will you speak to my wife, Miss Lucy, and
show her how she is to blame, — how her wrong
sent me wrong? Tell her how she and I are
linked in with ruin here. Perhaps it will help
you to forgive me if you can better her.”
Lucy promised.
She entered the farm-house to encounter her
holy duties with her parents.
Jierck hurried off to meet Major Skerrett, give
him the sorrowful history of the night, and warn
him away from a region that would be alive by
daylight, and bayonetting haystacks and hollow
trees for kidnappers.
The penitent fellow could get no farther on his
return than Cedar Ridge. There he saw the red
embers of the Manor-House watching him from
the edge of the horizon, like the eye of a Cyclops.
He was fascinated, and sank down at the
and fatigue.
Skerrett and Canady, pressing anxiously on,
found Jierck there at sunrise, asleep and half
dead with cold. They roused him, and heard
his story.
A little wreath of smoke alone marked the site
of the Manor-House. Here was the starting-point,
there was the goal of Edwin Brothertoft's
night gallop. It thrilled the Major to hear of
that wild ride, and to fancy he saw the white
horse dashing through the darkness on that
noble errand of mercy.
“Some men would have said, `Curse her! let
her burn! She 's hurt me worse than fire 'll
hurt her,'” says Hendrecus. “Some would have
took the turns of the road, and got to the house
when it was nothing but chimbleys. Some
would have been afeard of being known, and shot
for a rebel. I 've heard say that the Patroon
was n't one of the strong kind; but he 's done a
splendid thing here, and I 'm proud of myself
that I was born on the same soil, and stand a
chance to have some of the same natural grit
into me.”
Nothing further could be done, and it was not
safe to loiter. The three returned over the
Highlands to Putnam's army. And that day,
and for many days, Peter Skerrett meditated on
Manor. He traced with ghastly interest
the different paths by which vengeance converged
upon the guilty woman, and saw with
what careful method her crime had prepared its
own punishment. “God grant,” said he, “that
she may live to know what love and pity did to
save her from the horror of her penalty!”
24. XXIV.
Would that marred and ruined being, once the
beautiful Mrs. Brothertoft, ever revive enough
to ask and receive forgiveness from her husband?
Lucy did not dare to hope it. She watched the
breathing corpse, and looked to see it any moment
escape from its bodily torture into death.
Edwin Brothertoft was but little harmed by
the flames. A single leap had carried him
through the fiery circle which was devouring his
wife, as she sat bound. In an instant he had
dragged her away over the falling floor, cut her
free, and was at the window struggling through.
He had been almost stifled by the smoke, but his
hurts were slight. In a few days he was at his
wife's bedside.
He alone could interpret the sad, sad language
of her suffering moans. Her soul, half dormant,
in a body robbed of all its senses, seemed to perceive
his presence and his absence by some spiritual
touch. Would she ever hear his words of
peace?
The red, ripe leaves grew over-ripe, and fell,
and buried October. Then came the first days
of November, with their clear, sharp sunshine,
and bold, blue sky, and massive white clouds,
sailing with the northwest wind a month before
the snow-drifts. Sweet Indian summer followed.
Its low southern breezes whispered the
dying refrain of the times of roses and passionate
sunshine.
Edwin Brothertoft sat by his wife's window
one twilight of that pensive season.
A new phase in his life had begun from the
night of the rescue. By that one bold act of
heroism he had leaped out of the old feebleness.
He felt forgotten forces stir in him. His long
sorrow became to him as a sickness from which a
man rises fresh and purified.
In this mood, with the dim landscape before
him, a symbol of his own sombre history, and
the glowing sky of evening beyond, symbolizing
the clear and open regions of his mind's career
henceforth, — in this mood he grew tenderer for
his wife than ever before.
It was no earthly love he felt for her. That
had perished long ago. Deceit on her side
wounded it. Disloyalty killed it. The element
of passion was gone. There would have been a
deep sense of shame in recalling his lover fondness
once for a woman since unfaithful. But
errors as irremediable facts, and he could pity
both alike. The tendency of such a character as
hers, so trained as hers, to some great rebellion
against the eternal laws, some great trial of its
strength with God, and to some great and final
lesson of defeat, became plain to him. The law
of truth in love and faith in marriage is the
law a woman is likely to break if she is a law-breaker.
She had broken it, and he divined the spiritual
warfare and the knowledge of defeat and degradation
which had been her spiritual punishment,
bitterer to bear than this final corporeal vengeance.
Entering into her heart and reading the
thoughts there, he utterly forgave and pitied
her.
And for himself, — what harm had she done
him? None, — so he plainly saw. Except for
the disenchanting office of this great sorrow,
he would have lived and died a worldly man.
When his poetic ardors passed with youth, he
would have dwindled away a prosperous gentleman,
lost his heroic and martyr spirit, and
smiled or sneered or trembled at the shout for
freedom through the land. Except for this great
sorrow, his graceful gifts would have made him a
courtier, his refinement would have become fastidiousness,
status quo, and then, when the moment came for
self-sacrifice, he would have been false to his
nobler self. That meanness and misery he had
escaped. That he had escaped it, and knew
himself to be a man wholly true, was victory.
The world might repeat its old refrain of disappointment
in his career; it might say, “He
promised to be our brilliant leader, — he is nobody.”
But it could never say, “See, there is
Brothertoft! He was an ardent patriot; but
wealth spoiled him, the Court bought him, and
he left us meanly.”
“My life,” he thought, “has been somewhat a
negative. I have missed success. I have missed
the joy of household peace. And yet I bear no
grudge against my destiny. I have never for
one moment been false to the highest truth, and
that is a victory greater than success.”
These last words he had spoken aloud.
In reply, he heard a stir and a murmur from
his wife.
He turned to her, and in the dusk he could
see that her life was recoiling from death to gain
strength to die. Voice and expression returned
to her.
“Edwin!” she called to him, feebly.
“Jane?” he answered.
In the pleading tone of her cry, in the sweet
the other's heart. There was no need of long
interpretation. To her yearning for pardon and
love, her name upon his lips gave full assurance
that both were granted.
She reached blindly for his hand. He took
hers tenderly. And there by the solemn twilight
they parted for a time. Death parted them.
She awoke in eternity. He stayed, to share a
little longer in the dreamy work of life.
25. XXV.
A word of farewell to Major Kerr.
He had a horrid, horrid time at Fishkill.
Little but pork and beans to eat, little but
apple-jack to drink, nothing but discomfiture to
think of.
He experienced shame.
A letter was conveyed to him from Lucy
Brothertoft. She wrote, as kindly as might be,
what her real feelings had been toward him.
She also described the sad tragedy of the night
of his capture.
The conviction that he was a shabby fellow
had by this time pierced Kerr's pachyderm. He
was grateful to Lucy that she felt no contempt
for him. But her gentle dignity reproached his
unmanliness to her, and he became a very dejected
penitent.
General Burgoyne has been an important
character behind the scenes of this drama. He
was a clever amateur playwright, and while our
personages have been doing and suffering, the
General has been at work at a historical play,
of the Rebels.” There was some able acting in
it, and all the world watched for the catastrophe
quite breathless and agape. A brilliant pageant
of a surrender closed the play, in which, to the
general surprise, it was Jack Burgoyne, and not
Horatio Gates, who gave up the sword and
yielded the palm.
This news came flying down to Fishkill within
ten days after Major Kerr's capture.
The unlucky fellow heard of the great take of
British and Hessian officers. He began to fear
prisoners were a drug in the market, and he
must eat Continental fare till his stomach was
quite gone.
“Write to Sir Henry Clinton,” said Old Put,
good-naturedly, “that I 'll swap you for your
value in the Yankees he took with the Highland
forts.”
Kerr indited a doleful account of his diet and
impending dyspepsia to his General.
“I must have him back,” said Sir Henry.
“Anybody can be an Adjutant; but nobody in
His Majesty's army can carve a saddle of mutton,
or take out a sidebone, with Kerr.”
The “swap” was arranged. The Major was
put on board the Tartar, opposite Brothertoft
Manor. He went off a sadder and a wiser man.
His capture had served its purpose of amusing
been able to write to Washington, “We have lost
the Highland forts; but we have taken an Adjutant”;
— and Humphreys had composed a
doggerel, beginning, — “O Muse, inspire my
feeble pen, To sing a deed of merit, Performed
to daunt the enemy, By Major Peter Skerrett.”
Poor Kerr! when he reached New York, he
was all the time haunted by regrets for his lost
bride. “Up again, and take another!” is the
only advice to be given under such circumstances.
Some other flower of lower degree
must be a substitute for the rose.
Cap'n Baylor, late of a whaler, now the chief
oil man of New York, had a daughter Betty.
She was a dumpy little maid. Flippers were
her hands, fin-like were her feet. Nothing statuesque
about her; but she tinkled with coin,
and that tintinnabulation often opens the eyes
of Pygmalion.
Her the Major wooed, and glibly won.
Cap'n Baylor oiled out his son-in-law's debts.
Kerr resigned his Adjutancy, and took his wife
home.
Gout presently carried off the knobby old Earl
of Bendigh. The Bucephalus colt made Brother
Tom acephalous, by throwing him over a wall.
Brother Dick succumbed to Bacchus. Harry
Kerr, our Kerr, became the sixth Earl of
Bendigh.
His dumpy Countess studied manners in England,
and acquired the delicious languor of a
lady's-maid. She wore, morning, noon, and
night, white gloves tight as thumbikins. She
consumed perfume by the puncheon. But she
was an honest, merry soul, who would stand no
bullying. She kept Kerr in order, and made
him quite a tolerably respectable fellow at last.
By and by, out of supreme gratitude to her
for his wedded bliss, he had the Baylor arms
looked up at the Herald's office. They were
found, and quartered with his own, and may
still be seen on the coat of the Kerrs, Bendigh
branch, as follows: “On a rolling sea vert, a
Leviathan rampant, sifflant proper. Crest, a
hand grasping a harpoon. Motto, Illic spirat,
— There she blows.”
26. XXVI.
General Vaughan came down the river from
Kingston, smelling of arson. Sir Henry Clinton
destroyed the Highland forts and retired to New
York. The Continental outposts forthwith reoccupied
Peekskill.
With them came Peter Skerrett, and there
were bristles on his upper lip a week or so old.
He hastened at once toward the Bilsby farm,
where the Brothertofts had found shelter. He
turned aside on the way to see the ruins of the
Manor-House.
It was still brilliant October. If the trees that
first put on crimsons and purples now were sere
and bare, later comers kept up the pageant.
Indeed, the great oaks had only just consented
to the change of season. It took sharp frosts to
scourge green summer out of them.
The woods seemed as splendid to Peter Skerrett
as when he looked over them on the day
of his adventure here. Nothing was altered,
except in one forlorn spot.
There, instead of the fine old dignified Manor-House,
and ashes, — the tragic monument of a
tragedy.
“It did well to perish,” thought Skerrett.
“It had sheltered crime. Its moral atmosphere
was tainted. The pure had fled from it. Happiness
never could dwell there.”
Peter stood leaning against a great oak-tree,
and studying the scene. The autumn leaves
around him dallied and drifted, and fell into the
lap of earth. He lingered, he hesitated, and let
his looks dally with the vagrant leaves, as they
circled and floated in the quiet air, choosing the
spots where they would lay them down and die.
Just now he was in such eager haste; and
now he hesitated, he lingered, he shrank from an
interview he had ardently anticipated.
The fair girl he had aided to save from a miserable
fate, — her face, seen for a moment dimly
by starlight, ever haunted him. These heavy
sorrows, coming upon her young life, filled him
with infinite pity. As he thought of her, the
undeveloped true lover in him began to develop.
And now, standing in this place where he had
first seen her in a moment of peril, where he
had felt the grateful pressure of her hand, he
perceived how large and vigorous his passion had
grown from these small beginnings.
He feared the meeting he had yearned for.
It was to assure him whether this was really love
he felt, or but another passing fancy like the
others past.
And if it were the great, deep love he hoped, —
if, when he saw her face, and touched her hand,
and heard her voice again, his soul recognized
hers as the one companion soul, — this filled him
with another dread.
For if to know himself a lover, and half foresee
that, after long and thorough proof of worthiness,
he might be beloved, were the earliest thrill of
an immortal joy; so this meeting, if it named
him lover, and yet convinced him by sure tokens
that his love would never be returned, was the
first keen pang of a sorrow immeasurable.
No wonder that he waited, and traced the circuits
of the falling leaves, and simulated to his
mind a hundred motives for delay.
It was so still in the warm, sunshiny afternoon
that he could hear the crumbling cinders fall in
the ruins, and all about him the ceaseless rustle
of the showering foliage.
But presently a noise more articulate sounded
on the dry carpet of the path behind him. A
light footstep was coming slowly toward this
desolated spot. It seemed to Skerrett that he
divined whose step would bring her hither to
read again the lesson of the ruins.
He walked forward a little, that his sudden
appearance against the oak might not startle
the new-comer. He would not turn. It was
new to the brave and ardent fellow to perceive
timidity in his heart, and to evade an encounter
with any danger.
The footstep quickened, — a woman's surely.
In a moment he heard a sweet voice call his
name.
A shy and timorous call, a gentle, trembling
tone, — it came through the sunshine and made
all the air music.
Her voice! It was the voice he had longed
and dreaded to hear. But now he feared no
more. He believed that his immortal joy was
begun, and these tremors of his soul, in answer
to the trembles of her call, could never be the
earliest warnings of an agony.
He saw her face again, fairer than he had
dreamed, in the happy sunlight. He felt again
the thankful pressure of her hand. He listened
to her earnest words of gratitude.
They spoke a little — he gravely, she tearfully
— of the tragedy of her mother's life. This
shadow deepened the tenderness of the lover.
And she, perceiving this, drew closer to him,
giving tokens, faint but sure, as he fancied, of
the slow ripening happiness to grow henceforth.
Then she guided him to see his friend, her
father.
The level sunbeams of evening went before
them in the path. They disappeared amid the
wood. Golden sunshine flowed after them. The
trees showered all the air full of golden leaves
of good omen.
It seems the fair beginning of a faithful love.
Will it end in doubt, sorrow, shame, and forgiveness;
or in trust, joy, constancy, and peace?
| Edwin Brothertoft | |