Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XVII

Chapter XVII.
All this while Lucy had been waiting anxiously in her chamber in the turret.

As twilight faded, she took her farewell of river, slopes, groves, and mountains. With dying day, all that beloved scene sank deeper into her memory.

At last Voltaire came and whispered: “They are come. Be ready when I call!”

She was ready; and now, in these few moments, before she blew out her light and departed, she studied the familar objects about her with new affection.

It seemed to her as if all the observation of her past life had been half-conscious and dreamy.

The sudden ripening of her character, by this struggle with evil, gave all her faculties force.

Commonplace objects were no longer commonplace. Everything in her room became invested with a spiritual significance.

“Good bye, my dear old mirror!” she thought. “You have given me much dumb sympathy when I smiled or wept. You could not answer my tearful questions, why my innocent life must be so dreary. I begin to comprehend at last the Myself you have helped me to study. Good bye, my bedside! I had no mother’s lap to rest my head on when I prayed. But your cool, white cushion never repelled me, whether I knelt in doubt or in agony. Good bye, my pillow! thanks for many a night of oblivion! thanks for many an awakening with hope renewed! Good bye, kind, sheltering walls of my refuge! The child you have known so long is a woman. Girlhood ends sharply here. The woman says, Good bye.”

As she stood waiting for the signal of flight, suddenly her mother’s cry of alarm broke the silence.

At that ill-omened voice, Lucy trembled, and for one moment despaired.

Then came the sharp crack of the pistol-shot.

The shock startled her into courage. This note of battle joined awaked all the combatant in her. “I cannot hide here,” she thought, “while they are in danger for my sake. I cannot fight, but I may help, if any one is hurt.”

One more glance about her chamber, and then she closed the door, and shut herself out into the wide world.

At the top of the staircase, the sound of a struggle below met her. She paused, and shuddered. Not for fear. Timidity seemed to be expunged from the list of her possible emotions. She shuddered for horror.

She recognized her mother’s voice. She heard those bedlam cries and curses. These were the tones of a woman who had ejected the woman, and was a wild beast. Feminine reserve had dropped at last, and the creature appeared what her bad life had slowly made her.

“What final horror has done this?” thought Lucy.

She leaned cautiously over the banisters, and beheld the scene in the hall. A sickening sight for a daughter to see! A strange scene in that proud and orderly house! Outward decorum, at least, had always reigned there. Evil had now, at last, undergone its natural development into violence.

Pale and shivering with excitement, but conscious of a new-born sense of justice and an inexorable hardness of heart against guilt, Lucy leaned forward, and saw her mother struggling with the two men. She saw the alarmed negroes. She saw the gentleman, whom she identified at a glance as the expected hero, and heard his grave voice as he ordered Plato to make her horse ready and Voltaire to seek herself.

“A dreadful end of all this sorrow and sin!” she heard him say.

Lucy repeated these words to herself in a whisper. “A dreadful end! What does he mean? I do not see my father. Can it be? Did she fire the shot? Has she murdered the body, as she has done her best to kill the soul?”

Lucy sprang down the stairs, by Voltaire, and into the dining-room.

There sat Major Kerr, drivelling entreaties to his impassive sentry.

And on the floor, with a stream of blood flowing over his temple and clotting his gray hair, lay a man, — her father!

Sappho was moaning over him.

Lucy flung her aside, almost fiercely. She crushed her own great cry of anguish. She knelt by him and lifted the reverend head with her arms.

And so it happened that when Edwin Brothertoft, stunned by a sharp blow from a glanced bullet and by his heavy fall, in a moment came to himself and unclosed his eyes, he saw his daughter’s face hanging over him, and felt her arms about his neck. Her tender arms embracing him, — her lips at his.

Ah, moment of dear delight! when life renewed perceived that love was there to welcome it and to baptize its birth with happy tears!

Here Jierck Dewitt reappeared upon the scene.

Alarm had fallen upon him, like water on a tipsy pate under a pump. He was sober enough to perceive that he must justify his outsidership and make his desertion forgotten. He looked through the window, took his cue, and then bustled forward officiously. He spoke, to be sure, with a burr, and trod as if the floor were undulating gayly beneath him; but why may not haste and eagerness make tongue and feet trip?

“Hooray, Ike!” cries he; “I’ve made all right outside. Plato’s just bringing out your horse, Miss. Thank you for looking after the Sergeant, Miss,” continued Jierck, blundering down on his knees beside Mr. Brothertoft. “How do you find yourself, Sergeant? O, you’ll do. Only a little love-tap the ball gave you. A drop of rum, — capital thing rum, always, — a drop on a bit of brown paper, stuck on the scratch, and you’re all right. Feel a little sick with the jar, don’t you? Yes. Well, we must get you outside into the air. Now, then, make a lift. Thank you, Miss. Now, again. Why, Sergeant, you’re almost as steady on your pins as I am. Now, Miss, you hold him on that side, and here I am on this, stiff as the Lord Chancellor. Think you can step over the window-sill, Sargeant? Well done! And here we are, out in the fresh air! And here’s the boy with the horse. All right! All right, Major; here we are, waiting for you!”

The last was said to Major Skerrett, who came hurrying out after them.

“You are not badly hurt, thank God!” he said, grasping his friend’s hand.

“No,” replied the other, still feeble with the shock, “Heaven does not permit such horror. What have you done with her?”

“I have left her confined in the parlor. We bound her there, as tenderly as might be. She cannot suffer in person at all.”

“I suppose I had better take your word for it.”

“You must. We must not dally a moment. Some straggler may have heard the pistol-shot and be on our track. Now, boys, mount the Major on his pony.”

“My daughter, Skerrett; you will give her your hand for goodwill,” said the father.

In the hazy night she could but faintly see her paladin, and he her. There was no time for thanks and compliments. No time for Lucy to search for the one look with all the woman in it, and the one word with all the spirit in it, that might express her vast passion of gratitude. She gave him her hand, containing at least one lobe of her heart. He pressed it hastily, and as certainly a portion of his heart also was in his palm, there may have been an exchange of lobes in the hurry.

“Hoist away, Sam!” said Hendrecus Canady, buckling to one of Major Kerr’s limp legs.

“Ay, ay!” rejoined Galsworthy, on his side boosting bravely at the lubberly carcass of the prisoner, while Ike Van Wart held the runt pony’s head. “Seems to me these Britishers get drunker when they’re drunk than we do.”

“We’re so full of the spirit of ’76,” rejoined the root-doctor’s son, “that no other kind of spirit can please us.”

“Cooducher take summuddy elsh, now, boysh?” boosily entreated poor Kerr; “Shrenry Clidn wantsh me.”

Ah, Major! Sir Henry must continue to want you. Nobody listens to your deteriorated King’s English and no more of it shall be here repeated.

“We have not a moment to lose,” said Major Skerrett. “We must not let our success grow cold. I have my prisoner, Mr. Brothertoft, and your daughter is with you. Each of us will take care of his own. For the first ten miles we had better separate. I, with our friend the Major, will make a dash along the straight road, and you will take to the by-paths and the back country, as we agreed. If there is any chase, it will be after us, and we can all fight. I will give you charge of all the non-combatants. Voltaire, you and your family will travel with your master.”

“Yes, sir,” says Voltaire, “we never want to see this house again, so long as she’s there. The women will come in the morning, and they can cut her loose.”

“Well, your master will settle that. Until Miss Lucy is out of danger you must all stay by her. Where’s Jierck Dewitt?”

“Here, sir,” says Jierck, from behind Volante.

“You’ve deceived me, and been drinking, Jierck.”

“I have, Major,” the repentant man replied. “I saw my wife going by, and everything grew so black that I had to fire up a little, or I should have stuck a knife into me. But I’m all right now. Trust me once more!”

“I must! Go with the lady! Bring her safe through, and I will forget that you have forgotten yourself.”

The two parties separated with “Good bye! God speed!”

Major Kerr made an attempt at “Au revoir, Miss Lucy.” But his vinous consonants could not find their places among his vinous vowels, and his civility was inarticulate.

Skerrett halted, and watched Volante among the yellow trees, until there was not even a whisk of her tail to be seen across the luminous haze of the cool starlit night of October.

“Noble horse! lovely lady!” he thought. “It is a sacrifice not to accompany and protect her; but she will be safe, and my duty is with my prisoner. Now, ought I not to go back and tell the wife that she did not kill her husband? Time is precious. She would only curse and say she was sorry she missed. No; I cannot bear again to see a woman so dewomanized. I cannot bear to think of that cruel virago as the mother of this delicate girl. No; let her stay there alone, and think of herself as a murderess! Perhaps remorse may visit her in the dead of night, — perhaps repentance in the holy stillness of dawn.”

Peter took his last look at the mansion. It stood dim and unsubstantial in the mist, and silent as a cenotaph.

He overtook his men, and pushed rapidly and safely along. But still a vague uneasiness beset him, lest, in these days of violence, some disaster might befall that deserted house and its helpless tenant. Long after he was involved in the dusky defiles of the Highlands, he found himself pausing and looking southward. Every sound in the silent night seemed a cry for help from that beautiful Fury he had left before the glimmering fire, with the portrait watching her, like a ghost.

Poor Kerr! plaintive at first, then sullen, then surly, then doleful. The runt pony set its legs hard down on terra firma, and bumped the bumptiousness all out of him.

All the good nature of his captors could not better his case. He was sadly dejected in mind and flaccid in person when the party issued from the Highlands, a little after late moonrise.

Major Skerrett only waited till he saw the pumpkins of the Fishkill plain, lying solitary or social, and turning up their cheeks to the cool salute of wan and waning Luna. Then he gave his prisoner to Van Wart and Galsworthy, to be put to bed at Putnam’s quarters, and himself, with Hendrecus, turned back to meet the fugitives.

Let us now trace them on their flight from Brothertoft Manor.