Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XVI

Chapter XVI.
Enter through the dining-room window, Ike Van Wart, old Sam Galsworthy, and Hendrecus Canady.

At the same moment Mrs. Brothertoft’s cry for help rang through the house. Jierck Dewitt in the cellar heard it. Lucy in her turret heard it. Plato in the hall could not but hear it, close at his ears.

Plato was still on guard, playing pantomime with the weapons. He stood, with pistol outstretched, pointing at an imaginary foe. It was a duello he was fancying. He had received the other party’s fire unscathed. Now his turn was come. He proudly covered his invisible antagonist with his pistol at full cock.

“Apologize, sir,” whispered Plato, “or —”

Here came his mistress’s loud scream for help.

Plato was petrified.

Mrs. Brothertoft rushed into the hall.

There was the negro, standing like a statue, holding forth a weapon to her hand. She seized it. Her sudden fright reacted into a sharp fury. She was fearless enough, this cruel virago. The touch of a deadly weapon made her long to be dealing death. She heard the scuffle in the dining-room.

“Come!” whispered her old comrades, the Furies, closing in, and becoming again body of her body, spirit of her spirit. “Come, take your chance! Here are marauders, — rebels! Shoot one of them! Practise here! Then you will get over any scruples against blood, and can kill the people you hate, if they ever come in your way. Now, madam!”

Such a command ran swiftly through her brain. She opened the dining-room door.

Her scream told the assaulting party they were discovered. They were pinioning Major Kerr in double-quick time. He sat in tipsy bewilderment, mumbling vain protests and vainer threats.

Not one of the group about the captive observed the mistress of the house, as she softly opened the door.

But another did.

Edwin Brothertoft, tardily following his party, was clambering through the window.

He saw his wife at the door. She must be kept from the danger of any chance shot or chance blow in the scuffle. This was his impulse. He sprang forward to put her away gently.

She instantly fired at the approaching figure.

He fell.

He staggered, and fell. His head struck the claw-foot of the table, and he lay there motionless, with face upturned and temple bleeding.

Her husband! She knew him at once.

His thin, gray hair drawn back from his mild, dreamy face, with the old pardoning look she remembered so well and hated so fiercely, — there lay the man she had wronged and ruined, dead; yes, as it seemed, dead at last by her own hand.

“My husband!”

She said it with a strange, quiet satisfaction.

Every one paused an instant, while she stood looking at her work, with a smile.

She had done well to wait. Those impalpable weapons she used to see in the air had become palpable at last. Yes; she had waited wisely. This was self-defence, not murder. She had the triumph without the name of crime.

“So you must come prowling about here, and be shot,” she said to him, as if they were alone together.

And she spurned him with her foot.

As by this indignity she touched and broke down the last limit of womanliness, she felt a great exulting thrill of liberty, a mad sense of power. Nothing could offer itself now that she was not willing to do. Any future cruelty was a trifle to this. Her joy in this homicide promoted it to a murder.

She looked up. The group about Kerr were all regarding her. She laughed triumphantly in a dreadful bedlam tone, and flung her pistol at Major Skerrett.

He caught the missile with his hand.

“Are you mad?” said he. “Do you know that you have killed your husband? Take her into the next room, men!”

“Come, madam,” said Galsworthy, gently. “You did not know it. We are sorry it was not one of us. We are Manor men, come to take this Britisher prisoner, not to harm anybody or anything here.”

“Curse you all!” she cried, and she made a clutch at Sam’s honest face. “I am not sorry, — not I! No; glad, glad, glad! And I’ll have you all served so, — no, hung, hung for spies!”

“Take her away, men!” repeated Skerrett. “We must confine her. But not here with this dead man. Gently now, as gently as you can; remember she’s a woman!”

“Woman!” says Canady, holding her fingers from his face. “No, by the Continental Congress! she’s a hell-cat.”

“No hope for him with such a wound as that,” said the Major, kneeling over Brothertoft and examining his bloody forehead. “He seems to be quite dead. See to him, Sappho! Stand by Major Kerr, Van Wart, while I dispose of the woman!”

“Sargn,” mumbled Kerr, “I’m sashfied ’t’s all a mshtake.”

The two men dragged Mrs. Brothertoft, struggling furiously, across into the parlor, and forced her into an arm-chair before the fire.

Skerrett followed. Plato was in the hall, terrified at the mischief he had caused.

“Run, Plato,” said the Major, “and have Miss Lucy’s mare out. And you, Voltaire, don’t look so frightened, man! We must make the best of it. Bring the young lady down some back way! She must not see her father or her mother. Horrible, horrible, all! A dreadful end of all this sorrow and sin!”

He passed into the parlor.

The flickering firelight gave a dim reality to the objects there. They stirred, they advanced and retreated. The rich old family furniture seemed eager to take part in the tragic acts now rehearsing.

Major Skerrett, in the dimness, marked the Vandyck on the wall. The torn curtain had not been repaired. It still fell away at the upper corner, revealing the heads of Colonel Brothertoft and his white charger. A startling resemblance the portrait bore to him now lying dead across the hall, It might almost seem as if the spirit of the departed, with a bitter interest in these scenes of old sorrow and joy, and in the personages who still moved in them, had identified itself with the picture, and was stationed there to watch events.

A single glance gave Major Skerrett these objects and impressions. He turned to the mistress of the house. She sat, baffled and glaring, held in the arm-chair by the two men.

“Madam,” said Skerrett gravely, “I regret that I must confine you. You have shown your power to do harm, and threatened more. I cannot take you with me for safety. If I left you free, you could start pursuit, and we should be caught and hung, as you desire. Boys, tie her in the chair. So as not to hurt her now; but carefully, so that she cannot stir hand or foot. I hate to seem to maltreat a woman.”

They belted her and corded her fast in the chair. She wrestled frantically, and cursed them with unwomanly words, such as no woman should know.

“There you are, ma’am, fast!” says Galsworthy, drawing back. “You’re tied so you won’t feel it, and so you can’t hurt yourself or anybody else.”

Skerrett heaped up the fire to burn steadily and slowly. Then, with great tenderness of manner, he laid a shawl over Mrs. Brothertoft’s shoulders.

“Madam,” said he again, “I am sincerely sorry that I must imprison you. I have tried to make you as comfortable as possible. The night is fine. This fire will burn till morning. I must take your people all away with me, for safety; but they shall be despatched back, as soon as we are out of danger, to release you, and” — here his voice grew graver — “to bury the husband whom you have killed, and in whose death you triumph.”

She made no answer. All the flickering of the fire could not shake the cold look of defiance now settled on her handsome face. The color had faded from her cheeks. Her countenance — rimmed with her black hair, disordered in the struggle — was like the marble mask of a Gorgon.

The Major paused a moment, listening if she would speak. “It seems brutal to leave her so,” he thought. “But what else can I do? She will grow calm by and by, and sleep. There are worse places to pass the night in than a comfortable arm-chair before a good fire.”

“Good night, madam,” he said, with no trace of a taunt in his tone.

The cold look gave place to an expression of utter malignancy and rage, at her impotence to do further harm.

“Move on, men,” said the Major, and followed them.

At the door he turned to survey the scene once more. Its tragedy terribly fascinated him.

There sat the lady, with the fire shining on her determined profile. She was quiet now; and, from the picture, the heads of the soldier and his white horse as quietly regarded her.

Skerrett closed the door softly.

He listened an instant without. Would she relent? Would he hear a sob, and then a great outburst of penitent agony, when, left to herself, she faced the thought of this ghastly accident, which she had adopted as a crime?

He listened. Not a sound!

There was no time to lose, and the Major hurried after his men.