Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter IV

Chapter 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 the picture. She had used it as a pretext 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 long, and parted in the middle, like a Cavalier, 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 breastplate. 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 one has ever painted high-bred people as Vandyck,” 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 carnal element in their natures? Is it needful 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 personages 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 struggle, — the fine nature against the coarse, 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 modelled her perfect arms! The diamond 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 to their place of call. Mrs. Brothertoft 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 desolate 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 within or without the house. And so, closed 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.