 | IV. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
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.
| IV. Edwin Brothertoft | |