 | XVII. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
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.
| XVII. Edwin Brothertoft | |