Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter V

Chapter V.
There were three headaches next morning at the breakfast-table at Brothertoft Manor.

Major Kerr carried an enormous ache in his thick skull. His was the crapulous headache. He knew it well. Every manner of cure, except prevention, he had experimented upon. The soda-water-cure did not reach his malady. The water-cure, whether applied in the form of pump or a wet turban, was equally futile.

“It couldn’t have been t’ other bottle that has made me feel so queer,” Kerr soliloquized. “Must have been Jack André’s mawkish songs. I never could stand poetry.”

So he marched down to breakfast, more Rubens in complexion than ever, and twice as surly.

Spending tears had given Lucy her headache. She had wept enough to fill a brace of lacrymatories. The pangs sharpened when she saw Adonis appear, very red and very gruff. He seemed fairly loathsome to her now.

“Must such a beast — yes, I will say beast — as that come near me?” thought she.

Strong language for a young lady; but appropriate. It is well to have a few ugly epithets in one’s vocabulary. Hard words have their virtue and their place, as well as soft ones.

Mrs. Brothertoft also had a headache.

She looked pale and ill this morning. This will never do, Madam. Consider your beauty! It will consume away, if you allow so much fever in your brain.

Breakfast was more silent even than yesterday’s. No headache cared to ask sympathy of either of the others.

Lucy said not a word. She compelled herself to be at table. She dreaded her mother’s presence; but she dreaded her absence still more. Lucy suffered under the uneasiness of a young plotter. She knew that her plot was visible in her face. She trembled at every look. And yet she felt safer while she was facing her foes. Poor child! if she could have wept, as she wished, freely and alone, a dozen of lacrymatories — magnums — would not have held her tears.

Moody Mrs. Brothertoft is also silent.

She does not think it good policy to draw out her son-in-law this morning. Only a wretchedly low card, and no trump, will respond to the attempt. T’ other bottle rather drowns the power of repartee. Major Kerr was too inarticulate last night to be very coherent this morning. A courtly bow and a fine manner are hardly to be expected at levée from a hero lugged to his couchée by Plato and two clodhoppers, — themselves a little out of line and step with too many heeltaps. The hostess does not choose by solicitous questions to get growls from the future bridegroom, such as, —

Kerr loquitur. “Yes, thank you; my tea is mere milksop; my egg an addle; my toast a chip; my butter lard; my buckwheat cakes dem’d flabby. Everything has a tipsy taste and smells of corked Madeira. O, my head!”

Such talk would not make the lover more captivating. He had better be left to himself, to take his breakfast with what stomach he may.

Nor does Mrs. Brothertoft think it wise to remark upon yesterday’s dinner and its distinguished guests to her daughter. Remark brings rejoinder. This morning, again, Lucy had no kiss for her mother. Instead of the warm, tender caress of other days, with warmth and tenderness for two, Lucy’s manner was grave and distant.

Mrs. Brothertoft divines incipient rebellion in her daughter. She does not wish to let it cultivate itself with contradictions. If she should propound, “It is a fine morning,” Lucy might say, “It seems to me cold as Greenland.” If she suggested, “My dear, have the horses saddled, and take Major Kerr to see the view from Cedar Ridge,” Lucy would probably respond, “Major Kerr is not fond of nature, and I am afraid of marauders.” If she remarked, “What a grand, soldierly creature Major Emerick is! What an amusing accent! and his moustache how terribly charming!” Lucy might curl her pretty lip, and reply, “Grand! soldierly! the hirsute ogre! As to his accent, — I do not understand Hessian; and it does not amuse me to hear good pronounced ‘coot,’ and to have pictures, flowers, soup, and the North River, all classed together and complimented as ‘breddy.’ And as to his moustache, — no moustache is tolerable; and if any, certainly not that great black thing.” Nor would it do for the mother to say, “I am sure you found Captain André an Admirable Crichton,” and to hear from her daughter in reply, “Don’t speak of him! I am still sick with his sentimentality of a Strephon. He is a flippant coxcomb. I do not wonder Miss Honora Sneyd got tired of him, with his little smile and his little sneer.”

Such responses Lucy would probably have made to her mother’s attempts at breakfast-table talk. Do these answers seem inconsistent with the great sorrow and the great terror in the girl’s heart? Our passions, like our persons, are not always en grande tenue. It is a sign that the heart is not quite broken, when its owner has life enough to be pettish. The popgun is the father of the great gun. Silly skirmish and bandying of defiance precede the great battle for life and death.

So Mrs. Brothertoft knew, and she was not willing to give Lucy the chance to hear herself say, ‘No.’ If she were once publicly compromised as of the negative faction, she might, even at this late hour, foster her little germ of independence. She might wake up to-morrow with a Will of Her Own, grown in a single night as big as Jack’s bean-stalk. She might expand her solitary, forlorn hope of a first No into a conquering army. No, No, — only a letter and a cipher, — she might add ciphers, multiply it by successive tens and make it No,ooo,ooo,ooo, — and so on, until she was impregnable to the appointed spouse.

This of course must not be.

The mother did not know that Lucy had hoisted a signal of distress, and that she was almost ready to haul her flag up from half-mast, and fly it at the masthead of defiance. This Mrs. Brothertoft did not suspect of her submissive and meek child. She knew nothing of Voltaire’s errand. But she had grown suddenly apprehensive and timorous, and hardly recognized her old intrepid self this morning. She began to quail a little more and more before her daughter’s innocence. For all reasons, she did not desire to provoke discussion.

A grim, mute breakfast, therefore, at Brothertoft Manor.

Each headache looked into its tea-cup in silence. Major Kerr crunched a bit of dry toast, instead of feeding omnivorously.

There is no conversation of this party to report, gay or glum.

But tableau is sometimes more dramatic than talk.

A new-comer at the door glanced at this unsociable trio, and deciphered the picture pretty accurately.

It was old Voltaire, limping forward from the kitchen.

Lucy sat with her face toward the pantry door, and first saw him.

Flash! Lucy lightened and almost showered tears at the rising of this black cloud, charged with fresh electricity.

Flash back! from the whites of Voltaire’s eyes and from his teeth.

It was a brief flash, but abiding enough to show Lucy, through her gloom, one figure stealing to her succor. Him she was sure of, — her father. But one gleam from the whites of a black could not reveal the other recruits to her rebel army. So they must remain latent, with their names and faces latent, until she can have an interview with her complotter.

But what a hot agony of hope blazed up within her at Voltaire’s look and cunning nod!

“I must not scream with joy,” she thought. “I must not shriek out this great, wicked, triumphant laugh I feel stirring in me. I must not jump up and hug the dear old soul. Thank Heaven, my tea is hot, and I can choke myself and cry.”

Which she proceeded to do; and under cover of her napkin got her face into mask condition again.

She was taking lessons — this fair novice — in what a woman’s face is made for; — namely, to look cool when the heart is fiery; to look dull, when the wits have just suffered the whetstone; to look blank, when the soul’s hieroglyphs will stare out if a blush is only turned on; to look tame, when the spirit is tiger; to look peace, when there is no peace; to look mild as new milk, when the blood boils and explosion butts against the wired cork of self-control. A guileful world, guileless lady! and you must fight your fight to-day with silence and secrecy, lest mamma detect a flutter in your bosom, and your fledgling purpose of flight get its pin-feathers pulled, if not its neck wrung.

Voltaire limped forward with a plate of buckwheat cakes. They were meal of the crop which had whitened the slopes of Westchester this summer, and purpled them this autumn. They were round as a doubloon, or the moon at its fullest. Their edges were sharp, and not ragged and taggy. Their complexion was most delicate mulatto. Their texture was bubbly as the wake of a steamboat. Eyes never lighted on higher art than the top cake, and even the one next the plate utterly refused to be soggy. Indeed, each pancake was a poem, — a madrigal of Sappho’s most simply delicate confectioning, round as a sonnet, and subtle in flavor as an epigram.

These pearls Voltaire cast before the party. Nobody partook. Nobody appreciated. Nobody noticed. The three appetites of the three headaches were too dead to stir.

The old fellow was retiring, when Mrs. Brothertoft addressed him roughly.

“I shall promote Plato and break you, Voltaire, if you are taken sick at the wrong time again.”

“Sorry, missus. Colored mobbas, missus. No stoppin’ him. Bery bad indeed!”

His appearance disarmed suspicion. He was a weary and dismal object after his journey. No one, to look at him, would have divined that his pangs were of the motive powers, and not the digestive, — that he suffered with the nicked shin, the stubbed toe, and the strained calf, and was utterly unconscious of a stomach, except as a locality for colonizing a white lie in.