Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter IX
Chapter IX.
Red.
That was the color now master in Mrs. Brothertoft’s houses, town and country.
Supercilious officers, in red coats, who were addressed as General or My Lord, insolent officers, in red coats, hight Colonel or Sir Harry, arranged their laced cravats at the mirror under the rampant eagle, or lounged on the sofas.
There were plenty of such personages now in New York, and Mrs. Brothertoft’s house made them all welcome. Regimental talk, the dullest and thinnest of all the shop talks talked among men, was the staple of conversation over her Madeira at her dinners, grand, or en famille, bien entendu.
Now and then a nasal patriot from Down East, or a patriot Thee-and-Thouer from Philadelphia, knocked at the door and inquired for Mr. Brothertoft.
“Out of town, Sir,” was the reply of the wiggy negro.
“When do you expect him back?”
“Don’t know, Sir,” the porter replied, rather sadly.
The patriot retired, and the negro closed the door with a sigh, — the pompous sigh of an old family servant.
“No,” muttered he, “I don’t know when he’ll be back. He never would come back if he knew about the goings on in this house. He never would anyhow, if it wasn’t to look after Miss Lucy. There she comes down stairs, I’ll ask her. Miss Lucy!”
A gentle, graceful little girl, of the Brothertoft type, turned at the foot of the stairs and answered, “What, Voltaire?”
“Do you know, Miss, where your father is, now?”
“No,” she replied, half sadly, half coldly.
“A gentleman was just asking when he would be back.”
“He does not inform us of his motions.”
She seemed to shrink from the subject, as if there were guilt in touching it.
Voltaire looked forlornly after her, as she passed into the parlor. Then he shook his fist indignantly at a great palmated pair of moosehorns, mounted as a hat-stand in the hall. On the right-brow antler hung a military cocked hat. On the left bezantler, a pert little fatigue cap was suspended.
“It’s too bad,” Voltaire began.
Black babble has become rather a bore in literature. Voltaire, therefore, will try not to talk Tombigbee.
“It’s too bad,” muttered the negro, in futile protest, “to see them fellows hanging up their hats here, and the real master — the real gentleman — shamed out of house and home.
“It’s too bad,” he continued despondingly, “to see Miss Lucy, as sweet a little lady as ever stepped, taught to think her father a good-for-nothing spendthrift and idler, if not worse. The madam will never let her see him alone. The poor child is one of the kind that believes what is told to ’em. No wonder she is solemn as Sunday all the time. I don’t see anything to be done. But I’ll go down and ask Sappho.”
Again he shook his fist at those enormous excrescences from the brow of a bold Cervus alces, — a moose that once walked the Highlands near Brothertoft Manor. Then he shambled down stairs to his wife Sappho’s boudoir, the kitchen.
Blacker than Sappho of Lesbos ever looked when Phaon cried, Avaunt! was this namesake of the female Sam Patch of Leucadia. But through her eyes and mouth good-humor shone, as the jolly fire shines through the chinks of the black furnace-doors under a boiler.
“Things goes wrong in this house, all but your cooking department, Sappho, and my butler department,” says Voltaire. “The master is shamed away, and is off properogating liberty. The mistress, — I suppose we’d better not say nothing about her.”
Sappho shook her head, and stirred her soup.
“But Miss Lucy is going to be a big girl pretty soon. Her mother is making her mistrust her father. She’s got no friends. What will come of her?”
Sappho tasted her soup. It was savory.
“Voltaire,” says she, striving to talk a dialect worthy of her name, and hitting half-way to English, “Voltaire, Faith is what you wants. You is not got the Faith of a free colored gentleman, member of one of de oldest families in all Westchester. You is got no more Faith than them Mumbo Jumbo Billop niggers what immigrated in the Red Rover. You jess let de Lord look after Miss Lucy. She is one after de Lord’s own heart.”
“But the Devil has put his huf into this house.”
“If you was a cook, you’d have more Faith. Jest you taste that soup now. How is it?”
“Prime,” says Voltaire, blowing and sipping.
“You taste it, Plato,” she repeated, dipping another ladle from the pot, and offering to her son, heir of his father’s philosophic dignity, and his mother’s Socratic visage. “How is it?”
“Prime!” says this second connoisseur.
“Now, what you guess is the most importantest thing in this soup?”
“Conundrums is vulgar, particular for ladies,” says Voltaire, loftily.
“That’s because you can’t guess.”
“Poh! it’s easy enough,” says he. “Beef!”
“No. You guess, Plato.”
“B’ilin’ water,” cries he, sure of his solution.
Sappho shook her head.
“Turkey carcasses,” propounded Voltaire, with excitement.
“Onions,” offered Plato, with eagerness.
“No,” says Sappho, “it’s Faith!”
“I was jest a goin’ to say Faith,” Plato unblushingly asserted.
“You see,” Sappho explained, “I takes beef, — bery well! and b’ilin’ water, — bery well! and turkey carcasses, and onions, and heaps of things, and puts ’em into a pot on the fire. Then I has Faith.”
“Poh!” cried Voltaire. “’T wasn’t a fair conundrum; you has the Faith into yourself.”
“Then I takes Faith,” repeated Sappho, without noticing this interruption, “Faith, that these ’gredients which is not soup is comin’ soup in de Lord’s time, an dey alluz comes soup.”
“And the primest kind!” Plato interjected, authoritatively.
“So,” continued Sappho, improving the lesson, “soup and roast geese, and pies and pancakes risin’ over night, has taught me disyer proverb, ‘Wait, and things comes out right at last.’ So it’s boun’ to be with Miss Lucy.”
This logic convinced the two namesakes of philosophers, and they carried up dinner, in a perplexed but patient mood.
My Lord and Sir Harry were both dining there that day.
“Do you know what has become of our hostess’s husband?” asked My Lord, as they lounged off after dinner.
“He’s going about the Provinces, stirring up rebellion after a feeble fashion,” said Sir Harry. “I believe that fellow Gaine pays him a few shillings a week for editing his ‘Mercury’ when he is in New York.”
“If I was Governor Tryon I’d have that dirty sheet stopped. He’s a new broom. He ought to make a clean sweep of all these Freedom Shriekers.”
Such then was the condition of things in the Brothertoft family at the beginning of Tryon’s administration.
Edwin Brothertoft had not become an absolute stranger to his old home, for two reasons. He pitied his guilty wife. He loved his innocent daughter. He could not quite give up the hope that his wife might need his pardon, by and by, when sin soured to her taste. He must never totally abandon his child to the debasing influences about her, though he had no power or influence to rescue her now, — that disheartened and broken-down man, contemned by the world as a purposeless idler.
Matters had not reached this pass in one year nor until many years, dreary to imagine, far too dreary to describe.
Who shall enumerate the daily miseries in that hapless house? Who shall count the cruel little scratches of the poniard, with which the wife practised for her final stab? What Recording Angel kept tally of the method she took to murder his peace, that he might know it was murdered, dead, dead, dead, and not exasperate her with his patient hope that it might recover?
Her fortune gave her one weapon, — a savage one in those vulgar hands. She used this power insolently, as baser spirits may. She would have been happy to believe, what she pretended, that her husband married her for money. Often she told him so. Often she reproached him with her own disappointment.
“Did I marry you,” she would say, “to be inefficient and obscure, — a mere nobody in the world? You were to be a great man, — that was your part of the bargain. You knew I was ambitious. I had a right to be. You have had everything to give you success, — everything!”
“Not quite everything,” he said sadly. “Not Love!”
Ah miserable woman! as she grew practised in deceit and wrong, she hated her husband more and more.
She maddened herself against him. She blamed him as the cause of her evil choices.
“It is his fault, not mine,” she said to herself. “He ought to have controlled me, and then I should not have done what makes me ashamed to face his puny face. He ought to have said, ‘You shall and you shall not,’ instead of his feeble, ‘Is this wise, Jane? Is this delicate? Is this according to your nobler nature?’ I don’t like to be pleaded with. A despot was what I needed. If he was half a man, he would take a whip to me, — yes, beat me, and kick all my friends out of doors and be master in the house. That I could understand.”
She maddened herself against him more and more. She so yielded to an insolent hate, that she was no better than a mad woman while he was by to enrage her with his patient, crushed, and yet always courteous demeanor, — a sorrowful shadow of the ardent, chivalric Edwin Brothertoft of yore.
“Why not kill the craven-spirited wretch?” she thought, “or have him killed? He would be better dead, than living and scorned? Once rid of him, and I could take my beauty and my wealth to England, and be a grand lady after all. Lady Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall! that was what I had a right to expect. He could have given it to me. The fool was capable enough. Everybody said he might be what he pleased. Why could he not love real things? a splendid house, plenty of slaves, a name, a title, instead of this ridiculous dream of Liberty. Liberty! if he and his weak-minded friends only dared strike a blow, — if they only would rebel, — he might be got rid of. Then I should be free. Ah, I will have my triumphs yet! Kings have loved women not half so handsome!”
And with red, unblushing cheeks she looked at herself in the mirror, and hated that obstruction, her husband, more and more.
A mad hate, which she would gladly have gratified with murder. The air often seemed to her full of Furies, scourging her on to do the deed. Furies flitted before her, proffering palpable weapons, — weapons always of strange and antique fashion, such as she had seen and handled in old museums in England. She remembered now with what pleasure she used to play with them, while she listened quietly to some sinister legend, and knew how the stain came on the blade.
“Kill him!” the Furies cried to her. It was a sound like the faint, distant cry one hears in a benighted forest, and wonders whether the creature be beast or man.
“Not yet,” she answered, aloud, to this hail in the far background of her purposes.
The postponement seemed to imply a promise, and she perceived the circle of shadowy Furies draw a little step nearer, and shout to each other in triumph, “‘Not yet’; she says, ‘Not yet.’”
So her hate grew more and more akin to a madness, as every cruel or base passion, even the silliest and most trifling, will, if fondled.
She found, by and by, that the cruellest stab she could give to the man she had wronged was through his daughter.
“Lucy is all Brothertoft, and no Billop,” Julia Peartree Smith often said.” It’s all wrong; she ought to take after her strong parent, not her weak one.”
There was a kind of strength incomprehensible to the old tabby. Nor did she know the law of the transmission of spiritual traits, — with what fine subtlety they get themselves propagated, and prevail over coarser and cruder forces.
Lucy was all Brothertoft. In her early days she did not show one atom of the maternal character. That made the mother’s influence more commanding. The child loved the mother with a modification of the same passion that the father had felt for a nature he deemed his nobler counterpart. The father was so much like his daughter that she could not comprehend him, until she was ripe enough to comprehend herself. Crude contrasts are earliest perceived, earliest appreciated, and earliest admired, in character as in art.
So without any resistance Mrs. Brothertoft wielded Lucy. She let the child love her and confide in her exclusively. But she hated her. She hated Edwin Brothertoft’s daughter. There was the girl growing more and more like him, day by day. There were the father’s smile, the father’s manner, the father’s voice, even the father’s very expressions of endearment, forever reproaching the mother with old memories revived.
Ah this miserable woman! She learnt to fear her daughter, — to dread the inevitable day when that pure nature would recoil from hers. She watched the gentle face covertly. When would that look of almost lover-like admiration depart? When would disgust be visible? When would the mild hazel eyes perceive that the bold black eyes could not meet them? When would the fair cheeks burn with an agonizing blush of shame?
“When will the girl dare to pity me, as that poor wretch her father does?” she thought.
This gentle, yielding, timid creature became her mother’s angel of vengeance. Mrs. Brothertoft never met her after an hour of separation without a wild emotion of terror.
“Has she discovered? Does she know what I am? Did some tattler whisper it to her in the street? The winds are always uttering a name to me. Has she heard it, too? Did she dream last night? Has her dream told her what her mother is? If she kisses me, I am safe.”
Yes. Sweet Lucy always had the same eager caress ready. She so overflowed with love to those she trusted, that she was content with her own emotion, and did not measure the temperature of the answering caress.
Ah this miserable mother! as false to maternal as to marital love. It became her task to poison the daughter against her father. If these two should ever understand each other, if there should ever be one little whisper of confidence between them, if she should ever have to face the thought of their contempt, — what then?
Agony would not let her think, “What then?” She must prevent the understanding, make the confidence impossible; it must be her business to educate and aim the contempt.
How perseveringly, craftily, ably she accomplished this! How slowly she instilled into her child’s mind the cumulative poison of distrust. Often the innocent lips shrank from the bitter potion. One day she might reject it. But the next, there was the skilful poisoner, — her mother.
“You cannot doubt me, Lucy,” the woman would say, looking aside as she commended her chalice. “If it distresses you to hear such things of your father, how much bitterer must it be for me to say them!”
These pages again refuse to tolerate the details of this second crime. Let that too pass behind the curtain.
Closed doors then! for the mother is at last saying that her husband has grown baser and baser, — so utterly lost to all sense of honor that she must exclude him from her house, and that her daughter must herself tell him that she will never see him again.
Closed doors, while the innocent girl flings herself into the guilty woman’s arms, and, weeping, promises to obey.
Closed doors, and only God to see and listen, while Lucy, alone in her chamber, prays forgiveness for her father, and pity for his desolate and heart-weary child.
Closed doors upon the picture of this fair girl, worn out with agony and asleep. And walking through her dreams that grisly spectre Sin, who haunts and harms the nights and days of those who repel, hardly less cruelly than he haunts and harms them who embrace him.
It was a tearful April morning of 1775, when this final interview took place.
“Let me understand this,” said Edwin Brothertoft, with the calmness of a practised sufferer. “My daughter has made up her mind never to see me again?”
“She has,” said Mrs. Brothertoft.
With what quiet, cruel exultation she spoke these words! Exultation mixed with terror for the thought, “I have schooled the girl. But she may still rebel. She may spring to him, and throw herself into his arms, and then the two will turn upon me, and point with their fingers, and triumph.”
“I cannot take my answer from you, madam,” he said.
“I have no other answer to give,” said Lucy.
“None?” he asked again.
“None,” she replied.
Her coldness was the result of utter bewilderment and exhaustion. It seemed to him irremediable hardness and coarseness of heart.
“She is her bad mother’s base daughter,” he thought. “I will think of her no more.”
Does this seem unnatural? Remember how easily a lesser faith is slain, when the first great faith has perished. The person trusted with the whole heart proves a Lie; then for a time all persons seem liars; then for a time the deceived, if they are selfish, go cynical; if they are generous, they give their faith to great causes, to great ideas, and to impersonal multitudes. Household treachery keeps the great army of Reform recruited.
“This girl,” thought Edwin Brothertoft, “cannot be so blind as not to know why her mother and I are separated. And yet she chooses her, and discards me. I knew that the woman once my wife could never be my wife again. I knew that our lips could never meet, our hands never touch. But I hoped — yes, I was weak enough to hope — that, when sin and sorrow had taught us their lessons, and the day for repentance and pardon came, we might approach each other in the person of our daughter, beloved by both alike. I was father and my wife mother in the honorable days gone by. Our child might teach the father and the mother a different love, not of the flesh, but of the spirit. This was my hope. I let it go. Why should I longer keep up this feeble struggle with these base people, who have ruined my life? I have no daughter. I never had a wife. I forget the past. God forgive me if I abandon a duty! God give me opportunity, if he wills that I ever resume it again!”
As he walked up Wall Street, moodily reflecting after this fashion, he heard a voice call him.
“Mr. Brothertoft!”
This hail came from the nose of a hurried person who had just turned the corner of Smith — now William — Street, and was making for the wife’s house, when he saw the husband.
“Mr. Brothertoft!” twanged sharp after the retreating figure. There was an odd mixture of alarm and triumph in these nasal notes.
“Call me by some other name!” said the one addressed, turning. “What you please, but never that again.”
“Waal!” says the other, speaking Bostonee, through a nose high Boston, “you mightn’t like my taste in baptism, so I’ll call you Cap’n, — that’s safe. Cap’n,” he continued in a thrilling whisper, through that hautboy he played on, “Cap’n, we’ve shed and drawed the fust blood fur Independence. Aperel 19 wuz the day. Lexington wuz wher we shed. Corncud wuz wher we drawed. Naow, if you’ll jest pint and poot fur Bosting, you’ll pint and poot fur a locality wher considdable phlebotomy is ter be expected baout these times, and wher Patriots is wanted jest as fast as they can pile in.”
Clang out your alarums, bells of Trinity! others may need awakening. Not he who was named Edwin Brothertoft. He is gone already to fight in the old, old battle — forever old, forever new — of freedom against tyranny, of the new thoughts against the old facts.
“So your husband’s on his way to get himself shot or hung. And a good riddance, I suppose, Madam B.,” said coarse Sir Harry.
“The beautiful widow will not cry her eyes out,” said My Lord with his usual sneer.
Mrs. Brothertoft writhed a little under this familiarity.
Like many another, who says, “Deteriora sequar” she wished to go to the bad with a stately step and queenly mien. That is not permitted by the eternal laws. Ah, miserable woman! she was taught to feel how much the gentleman she had betrayed was above the coarse associates she had chosen.
She missed him, now that he was gone irrevocably.
Had there been then in her heart any relics of the old love? Had she cherished some vague purpose of repentance, some thought of tears, some hope of pardon?
Had her torture of her husband been only a penance for herself? Was it the hate which is so akin to love? Could this be a self-hatred for a self that has wasted the power of loving, — a hate that is forever wreaking vengeance for this sad loss upon the object the heart most longs to love, — the only one that can remind that heart of its impotency? Had she been acting unconsciously by the laws of such a passion?
And this exasperating influence banished, would she have peace at last? Would the Furies let her alone? Would the hints of murder vanish and be still? Would she be a free woman, now, to follow out her purposes?
Edwin Brothertoft had disappeared. Deserters from the rebel army could give no news of such a person.
Julia Peartree Smith often suggested to her friend the welcome thought that he was dead.
Mrs. Brothertoft could not believe it. Something whispered her that there would be another act in the drama of her married life.