Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter IV

by Theodore Winthrop

Chapter IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Billop swallows the whole, the infernal usurer!” Van Cortlandt rejoined, looking lugubriously at his fellows, and then cheerfully at his glass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Omnes inquire.

“He must marry Jane Billop.”

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

“A glass to it!” cried the proposer.

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

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

“An heiress!” says Phillipse, clinking on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If I was him, I’d put in for Squire Billop’s gal, and have easy times.” This was the root doctor’s plan.

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

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

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

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

It was growing dusk. The dead man’s R. I. P. had been pronounced, and the youth’s “Perge puer!“ The tenants, members of a class presently to become extinguished with the Patroons, marched off toward the smokes that signalled their suppers. The sons dismounted from the tombstones and followed. Each of them is his father, in boy form. They prance off, exercising their muscles to pull their pound, by and by, at the progress of this history. Old Sam Galsworthy junior has hard work to keep up with the others, on account of his back load. He carries on his shoulders little Hendrecus Canady, a bolus-fed fellow, his father’s corpus vile to try nostrums upon.

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

Lonely, lonely!

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

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

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

The lonely house grew drearier and drearier.

“Colonel Billop,” wrote Mr. Skaats, his agent and executor, “has been removed by an all-wise Providence. Under the present circumstances, Mr. Brothertoft, I do not wish to disturb you. But I should be glad to take possession at the Manor at your earliest convenience.”

Respectfully, &c.,

“Skervey Skaats.”

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

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

New York, by that time, had become a thriving little town. The silt of the stream of corn that flowed down the Hudson was enriching it. Edwin had brave hopes of making at least his daily bread there with his brains or his hands.

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

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

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

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

“Heriot, I suppose you mean, Sam.”

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

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

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

Edwin’s pride melted under this loyalty.

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

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

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

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

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

A harsh, loud March wind chased him, blowing Harriet Heriot’s tail between her legs. The omens were bad.

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