Edwin Brothertoft/Part II Chapter VI

Chapter VI.
No hag is a houri to herfille de chambre.

Mrs. Brothertoft, handsome hag, was thoroughly comprehended by the Voltaire family. That was no doubt part of their compensation for being black, and below stairs.

Sweet Lucy was also well understood in the kitchen.

Many a pitiful colloquy went on about her between those three faithful souls.

Sappho’s conundrum, “What is de most importantest ’gredient in soup?” was often propounded. Voltaire always protested against such vulgar remarks. Plato always guessed “Faith!” and pretended he’d never heard the riddle before.

“Faith is all very well,” Voltaire would say, in studied phrase, as a model to his son. “But where is the Works? Where is the Works to help Miss Lucy?”

“Jess you keep yer grip onto de Faith,” his wife would respond, “an’ de Works will jussumfy, when de day of jussumfication comes.”

So Lucy grew up a grave, sad, lonely young girl. Her heart was undeveloped, for she had no one but her mother to love. She loved there, with little response. Her mother received, and did not repel, her love. That was enough for this affectionate nature. As to sympathy, they were strangers.

“She seems to me bitterly cold, when I love her so dearly,” Lucy would say to herself; “but how can I wonder? My father’s wrong-doing has broken her heart. Her life must be mere endurance. Mine would be, if I were so disappointed in one I loved. It is now.”

And the poor child’s heart would sink, and her eyes fill, and thick darkness come over her future.

She lived a sadly lonely life. She could never be merry as other girls. There was a miserable sense of guilt oppressing her soul. The supposed crimes of her father — those unknown enormities — weighed upon her. These, she thought, were what made many good people a little shy of the Brothertoft household. She could not fail to perceive a vague something in which her mother’s house was different from other houses she was permitted slightly to know. Why were so many odious men familiar there? When the family were in town, she could avoid them, day and evening, and spend long hours unnoticed and forgotten in her own chamber. She could escape to books or needlework. But why did her mother tolerate these coarse men from the barracks, with their Tom, Dick, and Harry talk? To be sure these were days of war, and Mrs. Brothertoft was loyal in her sympathies, though non-committal, and “She may think it right,” thought Lucy, “to show her loyalty in the only way a woman can, by hospitality. But I am glad she does not expect me to help her entertain her guests. I am glad I am a child still. I hope I shall never be a woman.”

Her life took a sombre cast. She sank into a groove, and moved through the hours of her days a forlorn and neglected creature.

“Queer!” Julia Peartree Smith would say of her. “A little weak here,” and Julia touched her forehead, just below her chestnut front. “She is a Brothertoft, and they were always feeble-minded folk, you know. But perhaps it’s just as well,” — and Julia sank her voice to a mean whisper, — “just as well she shouldn’t be too sharp-sighted in that house. I really believe the silly chit loves her mother, and thinks her as good as anybody. I tried to give her a half-hint once, but the little fool fired up red-hot and said, I was a shameful old gossip, — ‘old,’ indeed!”

So Lucy lived, utterly innocent of any dream of the evil she was escaping. There is something sadly beautiful and touching in this spectacle. A moonlit cloud flitting over the streets of a great wicked city, pausing above foul courts where vice slinks and crime cowers, reflected in the eddies of the tainted river, — the same eddy that was cleft at solemn moonrise by a suicide, — this weft of gentle cloud is not more unconscious of all the sin and shame beneath it, than Lucy of any wrong. The cloud beholds the pure moon, and drifts along unsullied; Lucy saw only her own white and virginal faith. It was not a warming, cheering luminary; but it shed over her world the gray, resigned light of patience.

A touching sight! the more so, because we know that the character will develop, and, when it is ripe enough to bear maturer sorrows and to perceive a darker shame, that the eyes will open and the sorrow and shame will be revealed, standing where they have so long stood unseen.

After this little glimpse of Lucy’s life, monotonously patient for the want of love, Voltaire takes up his narration again.

Voltaire thought Mrs. Brothertoft had determined to marry off Miss Lucy to Major Kerr as long ago as last spring, before they left town. She did not, however, announce her plans until they were in the country. She probably knew that this was a case where the betrothed had better not see too much of each other.

“I remember the day,” says the negro, “when Miss Lucy began to mope. Roses was comin’ in strong. She used to fill the house with ’em. Sometimes she’d sing a little, while she was fixin’ ’em. But from that day out, she’s never teched a flower nor sung a word. She’s just moped.”

By and by Voltaire had discovered the reason.

It was the wreath of mock orange-flowers dangled over Lucy’s head by a false Cupid, Anteros himself, that had taught her to hate roses and every summer bloom. Her faint songs were still because her heart was sick. The bridegroom was coming, and her mother had notified the bride to put on her prettiest smile. This command was given in Mrs. Brothertoft’s short, despotic way. Neither side argued. Lucy prepared to obey, just as she would have thrust a thorn in her foot, or swallowed a coal, upon order. She was not so very happy. She could be a little more unhappy without an unbearable shock. Major Kerr did not disgust her so much as some of her mother’s intimates. Still the prospect was not charming. The summer roses lost color to her eyes. Color left the cheeks that once rivalled the roses. The bride did not try to smile. Smiles are smiles only when the heart pulls the wires. It takes practice to work the grimace out of a forced smile, so that it may pass for genuine.

When was the bridegroom coming? That information the bridegroom himself, though Sir Henry Clinton’s Adjutant, could not yet precisely give. “We are soon to make a blow at the Highlands, — then you will see me,” — so he wrote, and sent the message in a silver bullet. Silver bullets, walnuts split and glued together, and stuffed with pithy notes instead of kernels, and all manner of treacherous tokens, passed between Brothertoft Manor and the Red outposts. Whether facts leaked out from leaky old Put when glasses too many of the Brothertoft Yellowseal were under his belt; whatever true or false intelligence Scrammel paid for his post on Miss Lucy’s sofa, — every such fact was presently sneaking away southward in the pocket of young Bilsby, or some other Tory tenant on the Manor.

“I saw Miss Lucy mopin’ and mopin’ worse and worse,” says Voltaire, “but I couldn’t do nothin’, and there I sot in the pantry, like a dumb hoppertoad, watchin’ a child walkin’ up to a rattlesnake.”

Voltaire’s Faith without Works was almost dead.

Young Bilsby must have sneaked up to Brothertoft Manor with the news of Clinton’s expedition to the relief of Burgoyne, just at the time that Mr. Brothertoft’s announcement of his presence at Fishkill reached Voltaire.

“I did not dare tell Miss Lucy her father was so near,” says the major-domo, “until, all at once, on the fourth of this month, we saw King George’s ships lying off King’s Ferry; and by and by up the hill comes Major Kerr to the Manor-House, red as a beet.”

Upon this arrival, Lucy first fully comprehended what misery the maternal fiat was to bring upon her. Voltaire found her weeping and utterly desolate. At once his Faith worked out words. The dumb hoppertoad found voice to croak, “Ware rattlesnake!”

“You are going to be married, Miss Lucy?” he asked.

She wanted sympathy sadly, poor child! As soon as he spoke, she made a tableau and a scene, — both tragic. She laid her head on the old fellow’s shoulder, — Tableau. She burst into tears, — Scene.

Woolly wig and black phiz bent over fair hair and pale face. Delicate lips of a fine old Lincolnshire stock murmured a plaint. Thick lips of coarse old African stock muttered a vow of devotion. A little, high-bred hand, veined with sangre azul, yielded itself to the leathery pressure of a brown paw. Ah, poor child! she had need of a friend, and was not critical as to color.

“To be married?” Lucy responded, when sobs would let her speak. “Yes, Voltaire, in three or four days.”

“Time’s short as Sappho’s best pie-crust.”

“Mother says,” continued the young lady, “that I must have a protector. The Major is here now, and may be ordered up or down any day. Mother says it is providential, and we must take advantage of the opportunity, and be married at once.”

She looked very little like a bride, with her sad, shrinking face.

“Don’t you love Major Kerr?” asked Voltaire. “Lub” he always must pronounce this liquid verb.

“Do I love him, Voltaire? I hope to when we are married. Mother says I will. She says the ceremony and the ring will make another person of me. She says she has chosen me an excellent match, and I must be satisfied. O Voltaire! it seems a sin to say it, but my mother is cold and harsh with me. Perhaps I do not understand her. If I only had some other friend!”

“You have,” Voltaire announced.

“You — I know,” she said, kindly.

“Closer — miles closer ’n me!”

“Who? Do you mean any one of our loyalist neighbors?”

Lucy ran her thought over her short list of friends. All the valued names had been expunged by her mother’s strict censorship, or pushed back among mere acquaintance.

“Have you forgotten your father?” the butler asked.

“Forgotten! I go every day, when no one is by, and lift up the corner of the curtain over the Vandyck. Our ancestor is my father himself. I look at him, and pray God to forgive him for being so wicked, and breaking my mother’s heart.”

“Poh!”

Lucy drew back in astonishment, as if a Paixhan blow-gun had exploded at her side.

“Poh!” again burst out Voltaire’s double-corked indignation. “If there was a wicked one in that pair, it wasn’t him. If there’s a heart broke, it’s his.”

Lucy for a moment did not think of this as an assault upon her mother.

“What, Voltaire!” she cried. He is not dead! Not a bad man! Not a rebel!”

“Rebel!” says the French radical’s namesake. “Why shouldn’t he be a rebel for Freedom? Bad! he ain’t bad enough to marry off his daughter only to git shet of her. Dead! No, Miss Lucy; he’s up to Fishkill, and sends you his lub by me, if you want it.”

Love — even disguised as “Lub” — it was such a fair angel of light, that Lucy looked up and greeted it with a smile. But this was not a day for smiles. Storms were come after long gray weather. Only tears now, — bitter tears! They must flow, sweet sister! It is the old, old story.

“Does he really love me? Is this true? Was he true? Was I deceived? Why did he and my mother separate? Why did she drive him out? Whom can I trust? Is every one a liar? What does this mean? Answer me, Voltaire! Answer me, or I shall die.”

Voltaire looked, and did not answer. To answer was a terrible revelation to make to this innocent girl. Faith was putting the old fellow to very cruel Works.

“Speak!” said Lucy again, more passionately than before, and her voice expressed the birth of a new force within her. “Speak! What have you to say of my mother? I dread some new sorrow. Tell me what it is, or I shall die.”

Again these pages refuse to listen to the few deplorable words of his reply. He whispered the secret of her mother’s disloyal life.

“I will not believe it,” said the horror-stricken girl.

She did believe it.

She had touched the clew. From this moment she knew the past and the present, — vaguely, as a pure soul may know the mystery of sin.

For the moment she felt herself crushed to a deeper despair than before. She recognized the great overpowering urgency of Fate. She could not know that this recognition marks to the soul its first step into conscious immortality; and that the inevitable struggle to conquer Fate must now begin in her soul.

“What can I do?” she said; and she looked guiltily about the chamber, as if every object in that house were the accomplice of a sin.

“Run away with me to your father!” said Voltaire.

She shook her head weakly. She was a great, great way yet from any such exploit with her infant will.

“No,” she said; “I must obey my mother. That is my plain duty. She is pledged and I am pledged to this marriage. I must submit.” Tears again, poor child! The old habits are still too strong for her.

“But suppose your father should tell you to obey him, and not submit,” Voltaire propounded. “Suppose he should help to run you off.”

“How can he?”

“I will steal off to-night to Fishkill, and see him.”

“You risk your life.”

“Poh!”

“Poh!” is not a word to use to a young lady, Mr. Voltaire. Yet perhaps nothing could express so well as that explosive syllable how much and how little he valued life when the lady’s happiness was at stake.

“But I didn’t want Miss Lucy to be frightened, of course,” says he to Major Skerrett, “so I told her that I was safe enough in the Highlands, and when I got here I didn’t believe Major Scrammel would let me be shot for a spy.”

Here he gave a monstrous sly look.

Peter Skerrett again felt his cheeks burn, and his forehead tingle, and the stilled Muse of History reports that “he uttered a phrase indicative of reprehension and distrust.”

In short, he said to himself, “Scrammel! damn the fellow!”

Certainly! Why not? But it must not be forgotten, that it is Scrammel who suggested this expedition. Voltaire told Scrammel of the marriage. Scrammel, as our peep into friend Livingston’s brain informed us, would do one of his meanest tricks to be himself the bridegroom. And his scheme seems to be in a fair way to forbid the banns.

And so guileless Lucy Brothertoft had consented to her first plot. Her accomplice was to shift the burden of weakness from her shoulders, and throw it upon her father. Meantime she was to take her place at the great dinner-party, and be a hypocrite for the first time. How guilty felt that innocent heart! How she dreaded lest some chance word or look might betray her! What torture was the burning blush in her cheeks as she began to comprehend the woman she must name mother! How she trembled lest that woman’s cruel eyes should pierce her bosom, see the secret there, and consign her, without even the appointed delay, to the ardent bridegroom. She knew that she should yield and obey. Now that for the first time she was eager to have a will of her own, she saw how untrained and inefficient this will was. Horror of her mother, and loathing of her betrothed, each repelled her in turn. She seemed to see herself praying for mercy to the woman, and she coldly refusing to listen; then flying across the stage, and supplicating the man to spare her, and he, instead, triumphing with coarse fondness. Ah, unhappy lady! with no friend except that stout-hearted old squire, shinning by night through the Highlands, and dodging sentries at risk of a shot, — a shot, that startling trochee, sharp ictus, and faint whiz.

Except for the Majors, — Scrammel to plot, Skerrett to execute, — Voltaire’s evasion would have been in vain. Edwin Brothertoft was paralyzed by the news of his daughter’s danger.

“What can I do?” he said to the old servant, bitterly. “Nothing! Nothing! Is General Putnam, just defeated, likely to march down to rescue iny daughter? These are not the days of chivalry. Knights do not come at call, when damsels are in distress. No; I am impotent to help her. If she cannot help herself, her heart must break, as mine has broken. That base woman will crush her life, as she crushed mine. Why did you come to me? You have brought me news that I may love my daughter, only to make the new love a cause of deeper misery. Why did you tell me of this insult to her womanhood? I had enough to endure before. Go! What can I say to her? She will not care for a futile message, ‘that I love her, but can do nothing.’ Some stronger head than mine might devise a plan. Some stronger heart might dare. But I have given up. I am a defeated man, a broken-hearted man, living from day to day, and incompetent to vigor. I remember myself another person. I sometimes feel the old fire stir and go out. But I can do nothing. My fate and my daughter’s fate are one. Go, Voltaire, and leave me to my utter sorrow and despair!”

He had but just dismissed the negro, and turned a despondent back upon the world, — when lo! Peter Skerrett, as we saw him, comes forth. Here comes the Captor of Captives, the Hero of Ballads! Here come chivalry, youth, ardor, force, confidence, success, all in a body, — a regiment of victor traits in one man, and on that man’s lip, the best in the Continental army. Here comes a man whose timepiece has never learnt to mark “Too late.” Here he comes, and he has made it his business to eliminate Kerr from the problem of Brothertoft Manor; so that Kerr + Lucy = Bliss will be for a time an impossible equation.

Take courage, then, Edwin Brothertoft, tender of heart, sick at will, and thank Heaven that you married your gunstock to the brainpan of that British beggar with a baggonet at Bunker Hill, and so saved Skerrett to help you.

Voltaire’s story, with additions and improvements, now ends, and business proceeds.