Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter II

Chapter 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. The chances are nearly ten to one in favor of 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 didn’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 Adjutaut to Sir Henry. Bah! the shop-keeping, play-acting, 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 needn’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, overbearing, heavy, that he was. She wished to be 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?