text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VI

Chapter VI.
Handsome Jane Billop wanted a husband.

She looked into the glass, and saw Beauty. Into the schedules of her father’s will, and saw Heiress.

She determined to throw her handkerchief, as soon as she could discover the right person to pick it up.

“He must belong to a great family,” thought the young lady. “He must promise me to be a great man. He must love me to distraction. I hate the name of Billop! I should look lovely in a wedding-dress!”

She was very young, very premature, motherless, the daughter and companion of a coarse man who had basely made a great fortune. Rich rogues always fancy that their children will inherit only the wealth, and none of the sin. They are shocked when the paternal base metal crops out at some new vein in their progeny. Better not embezzle and oppress, papa, if you wish your daughters to be pure and your sons honest! Colonel Billop did not live to know what kind of an heiress he and his merciless avarice had fathered.

“I must see this young Brothertoft,” Jane’s revery continued. “Poor fellow, I have got all his property! Mr. Skaats says he is a very distinguished young gentleman, and will be one of the first men of the Province. Handsome too, and knows lords and ladies in England! Let me see! I cannot meet him anywhere so soon after the funeral. But he might call on me, about business. I feel so lonely and solemn! And I do not seem to have any friends. Everybody courts me for my money, and yet they look down upon me too, because my father made his own fortune.”

Colonel Billop had taken much pains to teach his daughter business habits, and instruct her in all the details of management of property.

She sat down at her desk, and in a bold round hand indited the following note: —

“Mr. Skaats, Miss Billop’s agent, begs that Mr. Brothertoft will do him the favor to call at the house in Wall Street to-morrow at eleven. Mr. Skaats is informed that there is a picture at the Manor-House which Mr. Brothertoft values, and he would be pleased to make an arrangement for the late owner’s retaining it.”

Skilful Jane! to whom a Vandyck was less worth than its length and breadth in brocade. She sealed this note with Colonel Billop’s frank motto, “Per omnia ad opes,” and despatched it.

Edwin was delighted at the prospect of recovering his ancestor. It is a mighty influence when the portrait of a noble forefather puts its eye on one who wears his name, and says, by the language of an unchanging look: “I was a Radical in my day; be thou the same in thine! I turned my back upon the old tyrannies and heresies, and struck for the new liberties and beliefs; my liberty and belief are doubtless already tyranny and heresy to thine age; strike thou for the new! I worshipped the purest God of my generation, — it may be that a purer God is revealed to thine; worship him with thy whole heart.”

Such a monitor is priceless. Edwin was in a very grateful mood when he knocked at the door in Wall Street.

A bank now rests upon the site of the Billop mansion. Ponderous, grim, granite, stand the two columns of its propylon. A swinging door squeaks “Hail!” to the prosperous lender, and “Avaunt!” to the borrower unindorsed. Within, paying tellers, old and crusty, or young and jaunty, stand, up to their elbows in gold, and smile at the offended dignity of personages not identified presenting checks, and in vain requiring payment. Farther back depositors are feeding money, soft and hard, into the maw of the receiving teller. Behind him, book-keepers wield prodigious ledgers, and run up and down their columns, agile as the lizards of Pæstum. And in the innermost penetralia of that temple of Plutus, the High-Priests, old Dons of Directors worth billions, sit and fancy that they brew crisis or credit.

So stand things now where Edwin Brothertoft once stood contemplating a brass knocker.

The door opened, and he was presently introduced into a parlor, upholstered to the uppermost of its era.

But where is Mr. Skervey Skaats?

Instead of that mean and meagre agent, here is the principal, a singularly handsome, bold, resolute young woman, her exuberant beauty repressed and her carnations toned down by mourning.

Both the young people were embarrassed for a moment.

He was embarrassed at this unlooked-for substitution of a beautiful girl for an ugly reptile of a Skaats; and she to find how fair a spirit she had conjured up. He with a sudden compunction for the prejudice he had had against the unknown heir, his disinheritor; and she with her instant conviction that here was the person to pick up her handkerchief, if he would.

Shall the talk of these children be here repeated? It might fill a pleasant page; but this history cannot deal with the details of their immature lives. It only makes ready, in this First Act, for the rapid business of a riper period.

When Edwin Brothertoft left the heiress’s parlor, after sixty minutes of delight, she seated herself at the desk where she, under the alias Skaats, had indited his invitation, took a fresh sheet of paper and a virgin quill, and wrote: —

 * Jane Brothertoft.

Then the same in backhand, with flourishes and without. Then she printed, in big text: —

Then, with a conscious, defiant look, she carried her prophetic autograph to the fire, and watched it burn.

Over the fireplace was a mirror, districted into three parts by gilded mullions. Above was perched a gilt eagle, a very rampant high-flier indeed. Two wreaths of onions, in the disguise of pomegranates, were festooned from his beak, and hung in alluring masses on either side of the frame. Quite a regiment of plump little cherubs, clad in gilding, tight as it could fit, clung in the wreaths, and sniffed at their fragrance. Jane looked up and saw herself in the mirror. A blush deepened her somewhat carnal carnations. Every cherub seemed to be laughing significantly. She made a face at the merry imps. As she did so, she caught sight of the reflection of her father’s portrait, also regarding her. He was such a father as a child would have been quite justified in disowning and utterly cutting, if a stranger had asked, “Who is that horrid person with the red face, the coarse jowl, the permanent leer, and cruel look?” An artist, cunning in red for the face and white for the ruffles, had made this personage more butcherly even than Nature intended.

Jane Billop marched up to the portrait, and turned it with its face toward the wall.

“He needn’t look at me, and tell me I am courting Mr. Edwin Brothertoft,” she said to herself. “I know I am, and I mean to have him. He is lovely; but I almost hate him. He makes me feel ignorant and coarse and mean. I don’t want to be the kind of woman he has been talking to with that deferential address. But I suppose this elegant manner is all put on, and he is really just like other people. He seems to be pretty confident of carrying the world before him. We shall be the great people of the Province. Here comes the distinguished Sir Edwin Brothertoft, and Lady Jane, his magnificent wife! People shall not pretend to look down upon me any more, because my father knew how to make money, when fools threw it away. I’ve got a Manor, too, Miss Mary Phillipse; and I’m handsomer than you, and not almost an old maid. That little chit of a Mayor Cruger’s daughter’s had better not try to patronize me again, nor Julia Peartree Smith turn up her poor pug nose. They’ll all want invitations to Mrs. Brothertoft’s ball on going out of mourning. How they will envy me my Edwin! What a beautiful bow he makes! What a beautiful voice he has! June is a lovely month for a wedding.”

There is never joy in Wall Street now such as filled the heart of Edwin Brothertoft on that morning of a bygone century. The Billops of our time live a league up town, and plot on Murray Hill for lovers of good family.

Edwin had found his Pearl, — a glorious, flashing Ruby rather. Its gleam exhilarated him. His heart and his heels were so light, that he felt as if he could easily spring to the top of the spire of Old Trinity, which was at least a hundred feet lower than the crocketty structure now pointing the moral of Wall Street. He walked away from Miss Billop’s door in a maze of delight, too much bewildered by this sudden bliss to think of analyzing it.

So the young payee, whose papa’s liberal check for his quarter’s allowance has just been cashed, may climb from the bank on the site of the Billop bouse, as far as Broadway, content with the joy of having tin, without desiring to tinkle it.

But at the corner Edwin’s heart began to speak to him with sentiments and style quite different from the lady’s.

“How she startled me with her brilliant beauty! How kind it was to think of my valuing the portrait! How generously and how delicately she offered it! And I had done her the injustice of a prejudice! That wrong I will redress by thinking of her henceforth all the more highly and tenderly.

“Poor child! a lonely orphan like myself. She showed in all our interview how much she yearned for friendship. Mine she shall have. My love? yes, yes, my love! But that must stay within my secret heart, and never find a voice until I have fully assured my future.

“And this warm consciousness of a growing true love shall keep me strong and pure and brave. Thank God and her for this beautiful influence! With all the kindness I have met, I was still lonely, still desponding. Now I am jubilant; everything is my friend and my comrade. Yes; ring out, gay bells of Trinity! What is it you are ringing? A marriage? Ah, happy husband! happy bride! I too am of the brotherhood of Love. Ring, merry bells! Your songs shall be of blissful omen to my heart.”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VI


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VII

Chapter VII.
Such soliloquies as those of the last chapter presently led to dialogue of the same character.

The lady continued to scribble that brief romance, or rather that title of a romance.

“Lady Jane Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall.”

The lover for his part was not a dunce. He soon perceived that it was his business to supply the situations and the talk under this title, and help the plot to grow.

It grew with alarming rapidity.

Tulips were thrusting their green thumbs through the ground in the Dutch gardens of the town when the young people first met. Tulips had flaunted their day and gone to green seed-vessels with a little ruffle at the top, and cabbage-roses were in young bud, when the first act of the drama ended.

The lady was hardly as coy as Galatea in the eclogue. The lover might have been repelled by the large share she took in the courtship. But he was a true, blind, eager young lover, utterly absorbed in a fanaticism of affection. Indeed, if in the tumult of his own bliss he had perceived that the lady was reaching beyond her line to beckon him, this would have seemed another proof that she and he were both obeying a Divine mandate. What young lover disputes his mistress’s right to share the passion?

“I knew it,” he said to her, by and by, — “I knew from the first moment we met, that we must love one another. We are perfect counterparts, — the halves of a perfect whole. But you the nobler. I felt from the moment that pleasant incident of the portrait had brought us together, that we were to be united. I hardly dared give my hope words. But I knew in my heart that the benign powers would not let me love so earnestly and yet desperately.”

These fine fervors seemed to her a little ridiculous, but very pretty. She looked in the glass, where the little Cupids in the onion-wreaths were listening, amused with Edwin’s rhapsodies, smiled to herself, then smiled to him, and said, “Matches are made in heaven.”

“I told you,” he said, “that I had erased the word Perhaps from my future. Now that I am in the way to prosperity and distinction for myself, and that you smile, success offers itself to me drolly. The Great Lawyer proposes to me a quadruple salary, and quarters the time in which I am to become a Hortensius. The Great Merchant offers me three hundred a year at once, a certain partnership, and promises to abandon codfish and go into more fragrant business.”

They laughed merrily over this. Small wit wakes lovers’ glee.

“I like you better in public life,” she said. “You must be a great man immediately.”

“Love me, and I will be what you love.”

“I am so glad I am rich. Such fine things can be done with money.”

“I should be terribly afraid of your wealth, if I was not sure of success on my side. As it is, we have the power of a larger usefulness.”

“Yes,” she said, carelessly.

He did not notice her indifferent manner, for he had dashed into a declamation of his high hopes for his country and his time. Those were the days when ardent youths were foreseeing Revolution and Independence.

She did not seem much interested in this rhapsody.

“I love to hear you talk of England and the great people you knew there,” said she. “Is not Brothertoft Manor-House very much like an English country-seat?”

“Yes; but if it were well kept up, there would be no place so beautiful in England, — none so grand by nature, I mean.”

Here followed another rhapsody from this poetic youth on the Manor and its people, the river and the Highlands.

She was proud of her lover’s eloquence, although she did not sympathize much in his enthusiasms. She had heard rivers talked of as water-power or roads for water-carriage. Mountains had been generally abused in the Billop establishment as ungainly squatters on good soil. Forests were so many feet of timber. Tenants were serfs, who could be squeezed to pay higher rents, and ought to be the slaves of their landlords.

But she listened, and felt complimented while Edwin painted the scenery of her new piece of property with glowing fancy, and while he made each of the tenants the hero of a pastoral idyl. A manor that could be so commended must be worth more money than she had supposed.

“I begin to long to see it,” she said, with real interest. “And that dear old fat Sam Galsworthy, who lent you the horse, I must thank him.”

“Why not go up, as soon as June is fairly begun?”

“Mr. Skaats would not know all the pretty places.”

They looked at each other an instant, — she bold and imperious, he still timidly tender.

“If I only dared!” he said.

“Men always dare, do they not?” she rejoined, without flinching.

“Are you lonely here?” he asked.

“Bitterly, except when you come. Are you?”

“Sadly, except when I am with you.”

Another exchange of looks, — she a little softened, and oppressed with the remembrance of the sudden, voiceless, unconscious death of her father, — he softened too, measuring her loss by his, tenderer for her than before, but not quite so timid.

“Both very lonely,” he continued, with a smile. “Two negatives make an affirmative. Do you love me?”

“I am afraid I am already committed on that subject.”

“Why should we not put our two solitudes together, and make society?”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Skaats would be a poor guide to Brothertoft Manor.”

“Mr. Skaats!” she said impatiently, as if she were dismissing a feline intruder. “We were not talking of him.”

“No. I was merely thinking I could recommend you a better cicerone.”

“Who can you possibly mean?”

“Myself.”

“Ah!”

“Brothertoft Manor would be a lovely place to spend a honeymoon in.”

“I long to see it, after your description.”

“June there is perfection.”

“June! and this is May!”

“Will you go there with me in June, my dearest love?”

“Yes, Edwin.”

It was agreed among all the gossips of the Province — and the gossips were right — that this was not a mercenary match. Youth and beauty on both sides, what could be more natural than love and marriage? And then the gossips went on to weigh the Brothertoft name against the Billop fortune, and to pronounce — for New York in those days loved blood more than wampum — that the pounds hardly balanced the pedigree. Both parties were in deep mourning. Of course there could be no great wedding. But all the female quality of the Province crowded to Trinity Church to see the ceremony. The little boys cheered lustily when the Billop coach, one of the three or four in town, brought its broadside to bear against the church porch, and, opening its door, inscribed with the Billop motto, “Per omnia ad opes,” discharged the blushing bridegroom and his bride.

The beadle — for beadles have strutted on our soil — quelled the boys, and ushered the happy pair to the chancel-rail. It is pleasant to know that the furniture of the altar, reading-desk, and pulpit, which met their eyes, was crimson damask of the “richest and costliest kind,” and cost in England forty-two pounds eleven shillings and threepence.

Venerable Rector Barclay read the service, with a slight Mohawk accent. He had been for some years missionary among that respectable tribe, — not, be it observed, the unworthy offshoot known as Mohocks and colonized in London, — and had generally persuaded his disciples to cut themselves down from polygamy to bigamy. Reverend Samuel Auchmuty assisted the Rector with occasional interjections of Amen.

The great officials of the Province could not quit business at this hour; but the Patroons who happened to be in town mustered strong in honor of their order. Of pretty girls there came galore. Pages would fail to name them and their charms. There was the espiègle Miss Jay, of that fine old Huguenot Protestant stock, which still protests pertinaciously against iniquity in Church and State. There was the sensible Miss Schuyler, the buxom Miss Beekman, high-bred Miss Van Rensselaer, Miss Winthrop, faultless in toilette and temper, Miss Morris, wearing the imperious nose of her family, popular Miss Stuyvesant, that Amazonian filly Miss Livingston, handsome Mary Phillipse with her determined chin, Julia Peartree Smith, nez en l’air as usual, and a score of others, equally fair, and equally worthy of a place in a fashionable chronicle.

“Poor Edwin Brothertoft!” said the Peartree Smith, as the young ladies filed out after the ceremony. “Did you hear that bold creature make her responses, ‘I Jane take thee Edwin,’ as if she were hailing the organ loft. These vulgar girls understand the policy of short engagements. They don’t wish to be found out. But company manners, will not last forever. Poor Mr. Brothertoft! why could he not find a mature woman?” (Julia had this virtue, perhaps, to an exaggerated degree, and had been suspected of designs upon the bridegroom.) “Girls as young as she is have had no chance to correct their ideal. She will correct it at his expense. She will presently find out he is not perfect, and then will fancy some other man would have suited her better. Women should have a few years of flirtation before they settle in life. These pantalette marriages never turn out well. An engagement of a few weeks to that purse-proud baby, her father’s daughter! Poor Edwin Brothertoft! He will come to disappointment and grief.”

With this, Miss Julia, striving to look Cassandra, marches off the stage.

But Edwin Brothertoft had no misgivings. If he had fancied any fault of temper in his betrothed, or perceived any divergence in principle, he had said to himself, “My faithful love shall gently name the fault, or point the error, and her love shall faithfully correct them.”

The Billop coach rumbled away on its little journey down Wall Street. Parson Barclay bagged his neat fee and glowed with good wishes. The world buzzed admiration. The little boys huzzaed. The bell-ringer tugged heartily at the bell-rope. And at every tug of his, down on the noisy earth, the musical bells, up in the serene air, responded, “Go, happy pair! All bliss, no bale! All bliss, no bale!”

The rumble of the “leathern conveniency,” the applause of Young New York, and the jubilation of the bells were so loud, that Edwin was forced to lean very close to his wife’s cheek while he whispered: —

“We were alone, and God has given us each a beloved companion. We are orphans; we shall be all in all to one another. Long, long, and always brightening years of thorough trust and love, dearer than ever was dreamed, lie before us. How happy we shall be in our glowing hopes! how happy in our generous ambitions! how happy in our earnest life! Ah, my love! how can I love you enough for the gift of this beautiful moment, for the promise of the fairer time to come!”

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title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VII


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VIII

Chapter VIII.
Cassandra was right. The marriage went wrong.

It was the old, old, young, young story.

But which of those old young stories?

Ah, yes! there are so many of them. And yet all human tragedies belong to one Trilogy. There are but three kinds of wrongs in our lives.

The wrongs a man does to his own soul or body, or suffers in either.

The wrongs of man against his brother man.

The wrongs between man and woman.

This is one of the old young stories of the wrong between man and woman.

It might be made a very long and very painful story. Chapter after chapter might describe the gradual vanishing of illusions, the slight divergence, the widening of estrangement, the death of trust, the deceit on one side, the wearing misery of doubt on the other, the dragging march step by step, day by day, to the final wrong, the halt on the hither edge, and the careless, the desperate, the irremediable plunge at last.

But the statement of the result is sad enough. Let all these dreary chapters be condensed into one!

A fatality preceded the wrong. It was this: —

The woman was coarse, and the man was fine. No gentle influences had received her in the facile days of childhood, and trained her nobler nature to the masterhood. Her eyes had been familiar with vulgar people and their vulgar ways. Her ears had heard their coarse talk. Her mind had narrowed to their ignoble methods of judgment. Her heart’s desire had been taught to be for the cheap and mundane possessions, money, show, titles, place, notoriety; and not for the priceless and immortal wages of an earnest life, Peace, Joy, and Love. She could not comprehend a great soul unless its body were dubbed My Lord or Sir Edwin, and wore some gaud of a star at the breast, or a ribbon at the knee.

Poor child! She was young enough to be docile. But after the blind happiness of that honeymoon at Brothertoft Manor, the old feeling of her first interview with her lover revived and exasperated.

“I believe he wants to make me feel ignorant and vulgar,” she thought, “so that he can govern me. But he shall not. I intend to be mistress. I’m sick of his meek suggestions. No sir; my way is my way, and I mean to have it.”

And so, rebuked by contact with a delicacy she could not understand, she resolutely coarsened herself, sometimes for spite, sometimes for sorry consolation. Her unsensitive nature trampled roughly on his scruples.

“My dear Jane,” he said to her at Brothertoft, “could you not instruct Mr. Skaats to be a little more indulgent with the Manor tenants?”

“Mr. Skaats’s business is to get the rents, for us to spend.”

“But these people have been used to gentler treatment.”

“Yes; they have been allowed to delay and shirk as they pleased. My property must not be wasted as yours was.”

“It is a hard summer for them, with this drought.”

“It is an expensive summer for us, with these repairs.”

Again, when they were re-established in New York, other causes of dispute came up.

“I wish, my dear Jane,” he said, “that you would be a little more civil with my patriot friends from Boston.”

“I don’t like people who talk through their noses.”

“Forgive the twang for the sake of the good sense.”

“Good sense! It seems to me tiresome grumbling. I hate the word ‘Grievance.’ I despise the name Patriot.”

“Remember, my dear child, that I think with these gentlemen!”

“Yes; and you are injuring your reputation and your chances by it. A Brothertoft should be conservative, and stand by his order.”

“I try to be conservative of Right. I stand by the Order of Worth, Courage, and Loyalty to Freedom.”

“O, there you go again into your foggy metaphysics!”

Again, he came one day, and said, with much concern: “My dear, I was distressed to know from Skaats that your father’s estate owned a third of the ‘Red Rover.’”

“Why?” she asked, with no concern.

“I was sure you did not know, or you would be as much shocked as I am. She is in the slave-trade!”

“Well. And I have often heard my father call her a ‘tidy bit of property,’ and say she had paid for herself a dozen times.”

He could not make her comprehend his hatred of this vile business, and his contempt, as a gentleman, for all the base subterfuges by which base people tried to defend it.

The Red Rover fortunately did not remain a subject of discussion. On that very trip the Negroes rose and broiled the captain and crew, — and served them right. Then, being used only to the navigation of dug-outs, they omitted to pump the vessel, whereupon she sunk, and the sharks had a festival.

With such divergences of opinion the first year of this propitious marriage passed miserably enough. Yet there was a time when it seemed to the disappointed husband and the defiant wife that their love might revive.

In 1758, Edwin Brothertoft, rich, aristocratic, and a liberal, the pride of the Colony as its foremost young man, was selected as the mouthpiece of a commission to present at home a petition and remonstrance. Such papers were flying freely across the water at that time. Reams of paper must be fired before the time comes for firing lead.

So to England went the envoy with his gorgeous wife. They were received with much distinction, as worthy young Americans from Benicia and elsewhere still are.

“Huzzay!” was the rapturous acclaim. “They do not talk through rebel noses!”

“Huzzay! It is English they speak, not Wigwamee!”

“Huzzay! The squaw is as beautiful as our Fairest, and painted red and white by cunning Nature, not daubed with ochres. Huzzay! the young sagamore is an Adonis. He beats Chesterfield at a bow and Selwyn at a mot.”

Mrs. Brothertoft grew proud of her husband, and grateful to him that he had chastened her Billop manners.

What a brilliant visit that was!

All the liberal statesmen — Pitt, Henry Fox, Conway, mellifluous Murray — were glad to do the young American honor.

Rugged Dr. Sam Johnson belabored him with sesquipedalian words, but in a friendly way and without bullying. He could be a good old boy, if he pleased, with good young ones.

Young Mr. Burke was gratified that his friend from a sublime and beautiful hemisphere appreciated the new treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful.

Young Mr. Joshua Reynolds was flattered that the distinguished stranger consented to sit to him, and in return tried to flatter the portrait.

Young Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, a poor Bohemian, smattered in music and medicine, came to inquire whether a clever man, out of place, could find his niche in America.

Mr. Garrick, playing Ranger, quite lost his self-possession when Mrs. Brothertoft first brought her flashing black eyes and glowing cheeks into the theatre, and only recovered when the audience perceived the emotion and cheered it and the lady together.

That great dilettante, Mr. Horace Walpole, made the pair a charming déjeuner at Strawberry Hill, upon which occasion he read aloud, — with much cadence, as dilettante gentlemen continue to do in our own time, — his friend Mr. Gray’s elaborate Elegy in a Country Churchyard, just printed. After this literary treat, Mr. Horace said: “Tell me something about that clever young aide-de-camp, Washington, who got Iroquois Braddock the privilege of dying in his scalp. A brave fellow that! an honor to your country, sir.” Mr. Gerge Selwyn, the wit, was also a guest. He looked maliciously out of his “demure eyes,” and said: “You forget, Horry, that you used to name Major Washington ‘a fanfaron,’ and laugh at him for calling the whiz of cannon-balls ‘a delightful sound.’” Whereupon the host, a little abashed, laughed, and said: “I wish such ‘fanfarons’ were more plenty in the army.” And the sparkling gossip did not relate how he had put this nickname in black and white in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, in whose correspondence it may still be read, with abundance of other second-hand jokes.

What a gay visit it was of the young pair in that brilliant moment of England!

While Brothertoft, in the intervals of urging his Petition and Remonstrance, discussed all the sublime and beautiful things that are dreamt of in philosophy with Mr. Burke, — while he talked Art with Mr. Reynolds, poetry with Dr. Goldsmith, and de omnibus rebus with Dr. Johnson, — his wife was holding a little court of her own.

She was a new sensation, with her bold, wilful beauty and her imperious Americanism. A new sensation, and quite annihilated all the traditions of Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish dress, when she appeared at a masquerade as Pocahontas, in a fringed and quilled buckskin robe, moccasons, and otter coronet with an eagle’s plume.

“I suppose that’s a scalping-knife she’s playing with,” said the Duke of Gurgoyle, inspecting her in this attire. “And, by George, she looks as if she could use it.”

Then the ugly old monster, and the other blasé men, surrounded the Colonial beauty, and fooled her with flattery.

Was she spoilt by this adulation?

“Dear Edwin,” she schemed, in a little visit they made to Lincolnshire and the ruins of old Brothertoft Manor, “let us buy back this estate and never return to that raw America. You can go into Parliament, make one or two of your beautiful speeches, and presently be a Peer, with stars and garters.”

“Does a garter straighten a leg? does a star ennoble a heart? Listen, my love, do you not hear Great Tom of Lincoln warning me, as he long ago warned my ancestor, ‘Go home again, Brothertoft, Liberty is in danger’?”

“No,” she rejoined, petulantly; “a loyal bell would not utter such treasonable notes. This is what I hear: ‘Come again, Brothertoft, Lord of the old Manor!’ Liberty! Liberty! You tire me with your idle fancies. Why will you throw away name and fame?”

“I will try to gain them, since they are precious to you; but they must come in the way of duty.”

There was peril in these ambitions of hers; but the visionary husband thought, “How can I wonder that her head is a little turned with adulation? She merits it all, my beautiful wife! But she will presently get the court glare out of her eyes. When our child is born, a pledge of our restored affection, she will recognize deeper and tenderer duties.”

The Brothertoft embassy was a social success, but a political failure.

The lewd old dolt of a King sulkily pooh-poohed Remonstrance and Petition.

“You ought to have redress,” says Pitt, “but I am hardly warm in my seat of Prime Minister. I can only be a tacit friend at present.”

“Go home and wait,” says Ben Franklin, a shrewd old Boston-boy, — fond of tricks with kites, keys, and kerchiefs, — who was at that time resident in London. “Wait awhile! I have not been fingering thunderbolts so long, without learning that people may pooh-pooh at the clouds, and say the flashes are only heat-lightning; but by and by they’ll be calling upon the cellars to take ’em in, and the feather-beds to cover ’em.”

The Brothertofts went home. England forgot them, and relapsed into its belief, —

That on the new continent the English colonists could not remain even half-civilized Yengeese, but sank to absolute Yankees, —

Whose bows were contortions, and smiles grimaces;

Whose language was a nasal whoop of Anglo-Iroquois;

And who needed to be bolused with Stamp Acts and drenched with Tea Duties, while Tom Gage and Jack Burgoyne pried open their teeth with the sword.

There was one visible, tangible, ponderable result of the Brothertofts’ visit to England.

Lucy Brothertoft, an only child, was born, — a token of love revived, — alas! a monument of love revived to die and be dismissed among memories.

If the wife had been a true wife, how sweetly her affection for her husband would have redoubled for him in his new relation of father. Here was a cradle for rendezvous. Why not clasp hands and renew vows across it? This smiling, sinless child, — why could it not recall to either parent’s face a smile of trust and love?

But this bliss was not to be.

Ring sadly, bells of Trinity! It is the christening day. Alas! the chimes that welcome the daughter to the bosom of the church are tolling the knell of love in the household where she will grow to womanhood.

The harmonious interlude ended. The old, old story went on. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the wife grew to hate her husband. Sadly, sadly, sadly, he learned to only pity her.

The visit to England had only more completely enamored her of worldliness. She missed the adulation of My Lord and Sir Harry. Her husband’s love and approval ceased to be sufficient for her. And when this is said, all is said.

It was a refinement of cruelty in the torture days to bind a living man to a corpse. Dead lips on living lips. Lumpish heart at throbbing heart. Glazed eyes so close that their stare could be felt, not seen, by eyes set in horror. Death grappling, and Life wrestling itself to Death. Have we never seen this, now that the days of bodily torture are over? Have we seen no delicate spirit of a woman quelled by the embraces of a brute? Have we seen no high and gentle-hearted man bound to a coarse, base wife, and slain by that body of death?

The world, the oyster, sulked when the young man it had so generously gaped for quite lost his appetite for fat things.

“Shame!” said the indignant Province. “We had unanimously voted Edwin Brothertoft our representative gentleman. He was ardent and visionary, and we forgave him. He was mellifluous, grammatical, ornamental, and we petted him. We were a little plebeian, and needed an utterly brave young aristocrat to carry our oriflamme, and we thrust the staff into his hand. Shame, Brothertoft! you have gulled us. It is the old story, — premature blossom, premature decay. The hare sleeps. The tortoise swallows the prize! To the front, ye plodders, slow, but sure! And you, broken-down Brothertoft, retire to the back streets! wear the old clothes! and thank your stars, if we consent to pay you even a starvation salary!”

“Poor Jane Billop!” said Julia Peartree Smith, who was now very intimate with that lady. “I always said it would be so. I knew she would come to disappointment and grief. The Brothertofts were always weak as water. And this mercenary fellow hurried her into a marriage, a mere child, after an engagement of a few weeks. No wonder she despises him. I do, heartily. What lovely lace this is. I wonder if she couldn’t give me another yard! Heigh ho! Nobody smuggles for me!”

Brother patriots, too, had their opinion on the subject of Brothertoft’s withdrawal into obscurity.

“These delicate, poetical natures,” said our old friend, Patroon Livingston, “feel very keenly the blight of political enslavement. Well may a leader droop, when his comrades skulk! I tell you, gentlemen, that it is our non-committal policy which has disheartened our friend. When we dare to stand by him, and say, ‘Liberty or death!’ the man will be a man again, — yes, a better man than the best of us. I long to see his eye kindle, and hear his voice ring again. I love a gentleman, when he is man enough to be free.”

But whoever could have looked into this weary heart would have read there a sadder story than premature decay, a deadlier blight than political enslavement, a crueller and closer wrong than the desertion of comrades.

Wrong! it had come to that, — the final wrong between man and woman, — the catastrophe of the first act of the old, old tragedy.

These pages do not tolerate the details of this bitter wrong.

The mere facts of guilt are of little value except to the gossip and the tipstaff; but how the wounded and the wounding soul bear themselves after the crime, that is one of the needful lessons of life.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter VIII


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Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/56

 innocent person might cease to be married without knowing it, and that if an adulterous partner be forgiven there should properly be a fresh marriage; but these objections are not very serious. Marriage is a legal contract as well as a natural union; the latter may be destroyed while the former remains unaffected. Only the law can undo the work of the law. Divorce is a legal act dissolving marriage; but marriage is far more than a legal act; it is a natural union, and the religious validity of the legal act depends on its relation to the natural union.

It is true that the natural union may be dissolved without the knowledge of the innocent partner; but that is precisely the reason why the prophets and the Christian Church emphasise the religious aspect of marriage. The All-Seeing is a witness of all marriages, and He watches over the fidelity of those whose union He has ordained. Human law must follow, so far as it can, the lines of moral fact. The State ought not to uphold a covenant which

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 has lost validity, where alone it could be valid, in foro conscientiœ. It seems to follow that no Christian can rightly condone adultery, for that would be to acquiesce in a monstrous association of the nature of polygamy.

In the case of adultery, discovered, repented of and forgiven, it must be assumed that a new marriage has really taken place, though of course no fresh legal ceremony is requisite, since the original contract has not been cancelled by divorce. The essence of marriage is free consent of the parties: that consent is abrogated when an adulterous union is formed: but the act of renouncing the sinful connection on the one side, and of forgiving the injury on the other, amounts on both sides to a fresh act of consent, that is, to a fresh marriage.

The reason why an adulterer should be refused the permission legally to marry, which is rightly allowed to the innocent party, lies, presumably, not in the region of Christian morality so much as in that of legal principle.

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Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter IX

Chapter IX.
Red.

That was the color now master in Mrs. Brothertoft’s houses, town and country.

Supercilious officers, in red coats, who were addressed as General or My Lord, insolent officers, in red coats, hight Colonel or Sir Harry, arranged their laced cravats at the mirror under the rampant eagle, or lounged on the sofas.

There were plenty of such personages now in New York, and Mrs. Brothertoft’s house made them all welcome. Regimental talk, the dullest and thinnest of all the shop talks talked among men, was the staple of conversation over her Madeira at her dinners, grand, or en famille, bien entendu.

Now and then a nasal patriot from Down East, or a patriot Thee-and-Thouer from Philadelphia, knocked at the door and inquired for Mr. Brothertoft.

“Out of town, Sir,” was the reply of the wiggy negro.

“When do you expect him back?”

“Don’t know, Sir,” the porter replied, rather sadly.

The patriot retired, and the negro closed the door with a sigh, — the pompous sigh of an old family servant.

“No,” muttered he, “I don’t know when he’ll be back. He never would come back if he knew about the goings on in this house. He never would anyhow, if it wasn’t to look after Miss Lucy. There she comes down stairs, I’ll ask her. Miss Lucy!”

A gentle, graceful little girl, of the Brothertoft type, turned at the foot of the stairs and answered, “What, Voltaire?”

“Do you know, Miss, where your father is, now?”

“No,” she replied, half sadly, half coldly.

“A gentleman was just asking when he would be back.”

“He does not inform us of his motions.”

She seemed to shrink from the subject, as if there were guilt in touching it.

Voltaire looked forlornly after her, as she passed into the parlor. Then he shook his fist indignantly at a great palmated pair of moosehorns, mounted as a hat-stand in the hall. On the right-brow antler hung a military cocked hat. On the left bezantler, a pert little fatigue cap was suspended.

“It’s too bad,” Voltaire began.

Black babble has become rather a bore in literature. Voltaire, therefore, will try not to talk Tombigbee.

“It’s too bad,” muttered the negro, in futile protest, “to see them fellows hanging up their hats here, and the real master — the real gentleman — shamed out of house and home.

“It’s too bad,” he continued despondingly, “to see Miss Lucy, as sweet a little lady as ever stepped, taught to think her father a good-for-nothing spendthrift and idler, if not worse. The madam will never let her see him alone. The poor child is one of the kind that believes what is told to ’em. No wonder she is solemn as Sunday all the time. I don’t see anything to be done. But I’ll go down and ask Sappho.”

Again he shook his fist at those enormous excrescences from the brow of a bold Cervus alces, — a moose that once walked the Highlands near Brothertoft Manor. Then he shambled down stairs to his wife Sappho’s boudoir, the kitchen.

Blacker than Sappho of Lesbos ever looked when Phaon cried, Avaunt! was this namesake of the female Sam Patch of Leucadia. But through her eyes and mouth good-humor shone, as the jolly fire shines through the chinks of the black furnace-doors under a boiler.

“Things goes wrong in this house, all but your cooking department, Sappho, and my butler department,” says Voltaire. “The master is shamed away, and is off properogating liberty. The mistress, — I suppose we’d better not say nothing about her.”

Sappho shook her head, and stirred her soup.

“But Miss Lucy is going to be a big girl pretty soon. Her mother is making her mistrust her father. She’s got no friends. What will come of her?”

Sappho tasted her soup. It was savory.

“Voltaire,” says she, striving to talk a dialect worthy of her name, and hitting half-way to English, “Voltaire, Faith is what you wants. You is not got the Faith of a free colored gentleman, member of one of de oldest families in all Westchester. You is got no more Faith than them Mumbo Jumbo Billop niggers what immigrated in the Red Rover. You jess let de Lord look after Miss Lucy. She is one after de Lord’s own heart.”

“But the Devil has put his huf into this house.”

“If you was a cook, you’d have more Faith. Jest you taste that soup now. How is it?”

“Prime,” says Voltaire, blowing and sipping.

“You taste it, Plato,” she repeated, dipping another ladle from the pot, and offering to her son, heir of his father’s philosophic dignity, and his mother’s Socratic visage. “How is it?”

“Prime!” says this second connoisseur.

“Now, what you guess is the most importantest thing in this soup?”

“Conundrums is vulgar, particular for ladies,” says Voltaire, loftily.

“That’s because you can’t guess.”

“Poh! it’s easy enough,” says he. “Beef!”

“No. You guess, Plato.”

“B’ilin’ water,” cries he, sure of his solution.

Sappho shook her head.

“Turkey carcasses,” propounded Voltaire, with excitement.

“Onions,” offered Plato, with eagerness.

“No,” says Sappho, “it’s Faith!”

“I was jest a goin’ to say Faith,” Plato unblushingly asserted.

“You see,” Sappho explained, “I takes beef, — bery well! and b’ilin’ water, — bery well! and turkey carcasses, and onions, and heaps of things, and puts ’em into a pot on the fire. Then I has Faith.”

“Poh!” cried Voltaire. “’T wasn’t a fair conundrum; you has the Faith into yourself.”

“Then I takes Faith,” repeated Sappho, without noticing this interruption, “Faith, that these ’gredients which is not soup is comin’ soup in de Lord’s time, an dey alluz comes soup.”

“And the primest kind!” Plato interjected, authoritatively.

“So,” continued Sappho, improving the lesson, “soup and roast geese, and pies and pancakes risin’ over night, has taught me disyer proverb, ‘Wait, and things comes out right at last.’ So it’s boun’ to be with Miss Lucy.”

This logic convinced the two namesakes of philosophers, and they carried up dinner, in a perplexed but patient mood.

My Lord and Sir Harry were both dining there that day.

“Do you know what has become of our hostess’s husband?” asked My Lord, as they lounged off after dinner.

“He’s going about the Provinces, stirring up rebellion after a feeble fashion,” said Sir Harry. “I believe that fellow Gaine pays him a few shillings a week for editing his ‘Mercury’ when he is in New York.”

“If I was Governor Tryon I’d have that dirty sheet stopped. He’s a new broom. He ought to make a clean sweep of all these Freedom Shriekers.”

Such then was the condition of things in the Brothertoft family at the beginning of Tryon’s administration.

Edwin Brothertoft had not become an absolute stranger to his old home, for two reasons. He pitied his guilty wife. He loved his innocent daughter. He could not quite give up the hope that his wife might need his pardon, by and by, when sin soured to her taste. He must never totally abandon his child to the debasing influences about her, though he had no power or influence to rescue her now, — that disheartened and broken-down man, contemned by the world as a purposeless idler.

Matters had not reached this pass in one year nor until many years, dreary to imagine, far too dreary to describe.

Who shall enumerate the daily miseries in that hapless house? Who shall count the cruel little scratches of the poniard, with which the wife practised for her final stab? What Recording Angel kept tally of the method she took to murder his peace, that he might know it was murdered, dead, dead, dead, and not exasperate her with his patient hope that it might recover?

Her fortune gave her one weapon, — a savage one in those vulgar hands. She used this power insolently, as baser spirits may. She would have been happy to believe, what she pretended, that her husband married her for money. Often she told him so. Often she reproached him with her own disappointment.

“Did I marry you,” she would say, “to be inefficient and obscure, — a mere nobody in the world? You were to be a great man, — that was your part of the bargain. You knew I was ambitious. I had a right to be. You have had everything to give you success, — everything!”

“Not quite everything,” he said sadly. “Not Love!”

Ah miserable woman! as she grew practised in deceit and wrong, she hated her husband more and more.

She maddened herself against him. She blamed him as the cause of her evil choices.

“It is his fault, not mine,” she said to herself. “He ought to have controlled me, and then I should not have done what makes me ashamed to face his puny face. He ought to have said, ‘You shall and you shall not,’ instead of his feeble, ‘Is this wise, Jane? Is this delicate? Is this according to your nobler nature?’ I don’t like to be pleaded with. A despot was what I needed. If he was half a man, he would take a whip to me, — yes, beat me, and kick all my friends out of doors and be master in the house. That I could understand.”

She maddened herself against him more and more. She so yielded to an insolent hate, that she was no better than a mad woman while he was by to enrage her with his patient, crushed, and yet always courteous demeanor, — a sorrowful shadow of the ardent, chivalric Edwin Brothertoft of yore.

“Why not kill the craven-spirited wretch?” she thought, “or have him killed? He would be better dead, than living and scorned? Once rid of him, and I could take my beauty and my wealth to England, and be a grand lady after all. Lady Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall! that was what I had a right to expect. He could have given it to me. The fool was capable enough. Everybody said he might be what he pleased. Why could he not love real things? a splendid house, plenty of slaves, a name, a title, instead of this ridiculous dream of Liberty. Liberty! if he and his weak-minded friends only dared strike a blow, — if they only would rebel, — he might be got rid of. Then I should be free. Ah, I will have my triumphs yet! Kings have loved women not half so handsome!”

And with red, unblushing cheeks she looked at herself in the mirror, and hated that obstruction, her husband, more and more.

A mad hate, which she would gladly have gratified with murder. The air often seemed to her full of Furies, scourging her on to do the deed. Furies flitted before her, proffering palpable weapons, — weapons always of strange and antique fashion, such as she had seen and handled in old museums in England. She remembered now with what pleasure she used to play with them, while she listened quietly to some sinister legend, and knew how the stain came on the blade.

“Kill him!” the Furies cried to her. It was a sound like the faint, distant cry one hears in a benighted forest, and wonders whether the creature be beast or man.

“Not yet,” she answered, aloud, to this hail in the far background of her purposes.

The postponement seemed to imply a promise, and she perceived the circle of shadowy Furies draw a little step nearer, and shout to each other in triumph, “‘Not yet’; she says, ‘Not yet.’”

So her hate grew more and more akin to a madness, as every cruel or base passion, even the silliest and most trifling, will, if fondled.

She found, by and by, that the cruellest stab she could give to the man she had wronged was through his daughter.

“Lucy is all Brothertoft, and no Billop,” Julia Peartree Smith often said.” It’s all wrong; she ought to take after her strong parent, not her weak one.”

There was a kind of strength incomprehensible to the old tabby. Nor did she know the law of the transmission of spiritual traits, — with what fine subtlety they get themselves propagated, and prevail over coarser and cruder forces.

Lucy was all Brothertoft. In her early days she did not show one atom of the maternal character. That made the mother’s influence more commanding. The child loved the mother with a modification of the same passion that the father had felt for a nature he deemed his nobler counterpart. The father was so much like his daughter that she could not comprehend him, until she was ripe enough to comprehend herself. Crude contrasts are earliest perceived, earliest appreciated, and earliest admired, in character as in art.

So without any resistance Mrs. Brothertoft wielded Lucy. She let the child love her and confide in her exclusively. But she hated her. She hated Edwin Brothertoft’s daughter. There was the girl growing more and more like him, day by day. There were the father’s smile, the father’s manner, the father’s voice, even the father’s very expressions of endearment, forever reproaching the mother with old memories revived.

Ah this miserable woman! She learnt to fear her daughter, — to dread the inevitable day when that pure nature would recoil from hers. She watched the gentle face covertly. When would that look of almost lover-like admiration depart? When would disgust be visible? When would the mild hazel eyes perceive that the bold black eyes could not meet them? When would the fair cheeks burn with an agonizing blush of shame?

“When will the girl dare to pity me, as that poor wretch her father does?” she thought.

This gentle, yielding, timid creature became her mother’s angel of vengeance. Mrs. Brothertoft never met her after an hour of separation without a wild emotion of terror.

“Has she discovered? Does she know what I am? Did some tattler whisper it to her in the street? The winds are always uttering a name to me. Has she heard it, too? Did she dream last night? Has her dream told her what her mother is? If she kisses me, I am safe.”

Yes. Sweet Lucy always had the same eager caress ready. She so overflowed with love to those she trusted, that she was content with her own emotion, and did not measure the temperature of the answering caress.

Ah this miserable mother! as false to maternal as to marital love. It became her task to poison the daughter against her father. If these two should ever understand each other, if there should ever be one little whisper of confidence between them, if she should ever have to face the thought of their contempt, — what then?

Agony would not let her think, “What then?” She must prevent the understanding, make the confidence impossible; it must be her business to educate and aim the contempt.

How perseveringly, craftily, ably she accomplished this! How slowly she instilled into her child’s mind the cumulative poison of distrust. Often the innocent lips shrank from the bitter potion. One day she might reject it. But the next, there was the skilful poisoner, — her mother.

“You cannot doubt me, Lucy,” the woman would say, looking aside as she commended her chalice. “If it distresses you to hear such things of your father, how much bitterer must it be for me to say them!”

These pages again refuse to tolerate the details of this second crime. Let that too pass behind the curtain.

Closed doors then! for the mother is at last saying that her husband has grown baser and baser, — so utterly lost to all sense of honor that she must exclude him from her house, and that her daughter must herself tell him that she will never see him again.

Closed doors, while the innocent girl flings herself into the guilty woman’s arms, and, weeping, promises to obey.

Closed doors, and only God to see and listen, while Lucy, alone in her chamber, prays forgiveness for her father, and pity for his desolate and heart-weary child.

Closed doors upon the picture of this fair girl, worn out with agony and asleep. And walking through her dreams that grisly spectre Sin, who haunts and harms the nights and days of those who repel, hardly less cruelly than he haunts and harms them who embrace him.

It was a tearful April morning of 1775, when this final interview took place.

“Let me understand this,” said Edwin Brothertoft, with the calmness of a practised sufferer. “My daughter has made up her mind never to see me again?”

“She has,” said Mrs. Brothertoft.

With what quiet, cruel exultation she spoke these words! Exultation mixed with terror for the thought, “I have schooled the girl. But she may still rebel. She may spring to him, and throw herself into his arms, and then the two will turn upon me, and point with their fingers, and triumph.”

“I cannot take my answer from you, madam,” he said.

“I have no other answer to give,” said Lucy.

“None?” he asked again.

“None,” she replied.

Her coldness was the result of utter bewilderment and exhaustion. It seemed to him irremediable hardness and coarseness of heart.

“She is her bad mother’s base daughter,” he thought. “I will think of her no more.”

Does this seem unnatural? Remember how easily a lesser faith is slain, when the first great faith has perished. The person trusted with the whole heart proves a Lie; then for a time all persons seem liars; then for a time the deceived, if they are selfish, go cynical; if they are generous, they give their faith to great causes, to great ideas, and to impersonal multitudes. Household treachery keeps the great army of Reform recruited.

“This girl,” thought Edwin Brothertoft, “cannot be so blind as not to know why her mother and I are separated. And yet she chooses her, and discards me. I knew that the woman once my wife could never be my wife again. I knew that our lips could never meet, our hands never touch. But I hoped — yes, I was weak enough to hope — that, when sin and sorrow had taught us their lessons, and the day for repentance and pardon came, we might approach each other in the person of our daughter, beloved by both alike. I was father and my wife mother in the honorable days gone by. Our child might teach the father and the mother a different love, not of the flesh, but of the spirit. This was my hope. I let it go. Why should I longer keep up this feeble struggle with these base people, who have ruined my life? I have no daughter. I never had a wife. I forget the past. God forgive me if I abandon a duty! God give me opportunity, if he wills that I ever resume it again!”

As he walked up Wall Street, moodily reflecting after this fashion, he heard a voice call him.

“Mr. Brothertoft!”

This hail came from the nose of a hurried person who had just turned the corner of Smith — now William — Street, and was making for the wife’s house, when he saw the husband.

“Mr. Brothertoft!” twanged sharp after the retreating figure. There was an odd mixture of alarm and triumph in these nasal notes.

“Call me by some other name!” said the one addressed, turning. “What you please, but never that again.”

“Waal!” says the other, speaking Bostonee, through a nose high Boston, “you mightn’t like my taste in baptism, so I’ll call you Cap’n, — that’s safe. Cap’n,” he continued in a thrilling whisper, through that hautboy he played on, “Cap’n, we’ve shed and drawed the fust blood fur Independence. Aperel 19 wuz the day. Lexington wuz wher we shed. Corncud wuz wher we drawed. Naow, if you’ll jest pint and poot fur Bosting, you’ll pint and poot fur a locality wher considdable phlebotomy is ter be expected baout these times, and wher Patriots is wanted jest as fast as they can pile in.”

Clang out your alarums, bells of Trinity! others may need awakening. Not he who was named Edwin Brothertoft. He is gone already to fight in the old, old battle — forever old, forever new — of freedom against tyranny, of the new thoughts against the old facts.

“So your husband’s on his way to get himself shot or hung. And a good riddance, I suppose, Madam B.,” said coarse Sir Harry.

“The beautiful widow will not cry her eyes out,” said My Lord with his usual sneer.

Mrs. Brothertoft writhed a little under this familiarity.

Like many another, who says, “Deteriora sequar” she wished to go to the bad with a stately step and queenly mien. That is not permitted by the eternal laws. Ah, miserable woman! she was taught to feel how much the gentleman she had betrayed was above the coarse associates she had chosen.

She missed him, now that he was gone irrevocably.

Had there been then in her heart any relics of the old love? Had she cherished some vague purpose of repentance, some thought of tears, some hope of pardon?

Had her torture of her husband been only a penance for herself? Was it the hate which is so akin to love? Could this be a self-hatred for a self that has wasted the power of loving, — a hate that is forever wreaking vengeance for this sad loss upon the object the heart most longs to love, — the only one that can remind that heart of its impotency? Had she been acting unconsciously by the laws of such a passion?

And this exasperating influence banished, would she have peace at last? Would the Furies let her alone? Would the hints of murder vanish and be still? Would she be a free woman, now, to follow out her purposes?

Edwin Brothertoft had disappeared. Deserters from the rebel army could give no news of such a person.

Julia Peartree Smith often suggested to her friend the welcome thought that he was dead.

Mrs. Brothertoft could not believe it. Something whispered her that there would be another act in the drama of her married life.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part I Chapter IX


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Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/58

 It is a sound rule of law that no man shall profit by his own crime, and that rule appears to be violated when the adulterer is enabled to gain by his offence the very freedom which he desires. The French law of divorce in this respect appears sounder than our own. "There is this limitation on the power of re-marriage of divorced persons, that the party to the marriage against whom the decree has been pronounced is not allowed to marry the person with whom his or her guilt has been established."

The direct teaching of Christ, then, as preserved in the Gospels, does not carry us beyond this point; and so far, save of course for the supreme authority which He, and He alone, could add to moral teaching, Christ does not seem to carry the doctrine of marriage beyond the point reached by the prophet Malachi. The inference seems to be equally clear and important.

Just as in the case of the other human relationships the mind of Christ was to be

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 slowly revealed to the conscience and reason of the Church, as the Holy Spirit interpreted experience in the light of the principles of the Gospel, so it was to be in the case of this primary and sacred relationship of the sexes. Indeed, to the reflective student of the history of Christendom it will necessarily occur that the indirect consequences of Christ's Gospel have been far more powerful influences for good on human society than His precise directions. Let anyone consider the effect on the doctrine and practice of Christian marriage which has come from four circumstances of the revelation of God in Christ.

I.—The general character of the life of Christ as plainly and confessedly normal. Ascetic contempt of marriage very early stained Christian thought and cast deep shadows over Christian life, but that baleful temper could find no support in the teaching or example of the divine Lord. His contemporaries were perplexed, and even scandalised by the ordinary aspect of His life. It cannot

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 be a mere accident that the "beginning of His signs" was made at a marriage in Cana of Galilee. The Prayer Book justly infers the dignity and pureness of marriage from the fact that "Christ adorned and beautified with His presence" that "holy estate."

Jews in the first century, like Christians in later times, and perhaps like the "natural man" at all times, expected an ascetic ordering of life to mark a great religious teacher; but Christ disappointed this expectation. "The Son of Man came eating and drinking" was His own description of His life. In view of the fact that the sub-Apostolic Church was invaded by a powerful wave of ascetic sentiment, which has left clear tokens of its action on the sacred writings, and colours all the literature of the early centuries, it must be allowed, to indicate the overmastering impression made by the Lord's life and teaching on His contemporaries, that the Gospels preserve a record of both, which is so wonderfully free from ascetic tendencies.

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 Historically, asceticism is one of the two grand enemies of the female sex; the other is sensuality, and these two, if so familiar a phrase may be allowed, play into one another's hands. Asceticism belittles what sensuality degrades. When, at a somewhat later stage of Christian history, the theologians of the Church elaborated the doctrine of the Incarnation, this consequence was seen to follow—that all truly human relationships receive a divine authentication and an eternal significance. Marriage as the human relationship par excellence was more than any other exalted by this fact.

II.—For, and this must be counted a distinct cause, the historic Incarnation was effected by the means of a natural birth. "When the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman". The Church was early called to emphasise the moral importance of this fact, and the presence in the Apostles Creed of an explicit declaration of belief in the birth of Christ from a human mother must be regarded

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 as a definite repudiation of every version of Christianity, which, as was the case with that of the followers of Marcion in the second century, against whom perhaps that clause in the Creed was specifically directed, cuts the direct connection between the Incarnate and the human race by postulating for Him some non-human mode of terrestrial existence. Always the tradition of the Christian Church holds together the mother and the divine Child; and whosoever worships the one cannot but reverence the other.

III.—It is in accordance with this exaltation of woman in her most sublime function of motherhood that the Gospel gives a large and honourable place to women and children. Significantly in the sacred narrative there stand together Christ's declaration about the essential indissolubleness of marriage and His blessing of the children, for these are the normal effect and the fairest grace of the sexual relationship as guarded and crowned in the Christian home. Christ's fondness for

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 children was hardly less perplexing to His religious contemporaries than His respectful treatment of women. His disciples, we read, "marvelled that He was speaking with a woman" when they found Him in converse with the woman of Samaria by the side of Jacob's well; and they moved Him to "indignation" by "rebuking" the Jewish mothers who, with a true insight into His mind, "brought unto Him little children that He should touch them."

IV.—Christ's doctrine of purity as something not to be narrowed down to specific acts, but rather to be conceived of as a chaste and reverent spirit inhabiting the mind, and holding under control the very thoughts and intents of the heart, necessarily tended, wherever it was in any measure sincerely accepted, to purify and exalt the relationship of the sexes. Far more powerful than specific regulations was that lofty declaration of the Sermon on the Mount:

"Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, that every one that

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Translation talk:Catullus 27

"Here is pure Bacchus (wine)"

If one is going to turn 'Thyonianus' into 'Bacchus' -- presumably for easier comprehension -- then one shouldn't further gloss it with 'wine'. Either go all the way through to 'wine' or leave it! The current version preserves neither literality nor poetry. Dioskolos (talk) 06:41, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

title: Translation talk:Catullus 27


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it be important in studying the Gospels to remember that they are neither codes of law nor casuistic treatises, it is hardly less important in reading the Epistles to remember that they are always occasional documents called forth by special circumstances, and only rightly understood when those circumstances are clearly kept in mind. In some sense we may say of the Apostolic writings that they were designed to serve the purposes of legal codes and casuistic manuals in the churches to which they were addressed; but, even so, legislation and casuistry are, in the nature of things, contingent and provisional. Neither, therefore, can rightly be clothed with the attributes of unalterableness and perpetual obligation. It is mere matter of fact that

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 much of the Apostolic legislation on practical matters has become obsolete, and accordingly we cannot evade the question, whenever appeal is made to Apostolic authority in discussions of practical problems, whether the rulings advanced are really relevant to the cases in debate.

In all questions relating to the intercourse of the sexes there is prima facie a large probability that Apostolic rulings will be irrelevant to modern difficulties, and this for two reasons, which lie on the surface of the New Testament. The apostles were Jews of the first century, and they assumed the prevailing Jewish notions with respect to the relative position of the sexes: the natural inequality of men and women coloured their thought, even when they had risen to the Christian doctrine, that such natural inequality had properly disappeared in the Church. This was one reason; the strength of which will be at once apparent to every reader of the curious passage in which St. Paul legislates for

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Rh the conduct of women in the assemblies for worship.

The other reason lies in the special circumstances of the Apostolic converts. Pagan presuppositions in their minds, pagan tradition governing their action, determined necessarily the specific form of the admonitions by which the apostles endeavoured to correct both, and to bring their spiritual children into worthy habits of thought and life. Of St. Paul it has been said with substantial truth that he "did not in any way go beyond the conception of woman's position which at bottom belonged to the whole ancient world," and of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, which is our chief authority for learning what the apostle's teaching with respect to marriage actually was, it has been justly observed that "in its main portions it is chiefly a history of the difficulties which the Gospel had to contend with on heathen soil."

It is indeed the case that within the life of

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 Israel the general doctrine of the natural inferiority of women had been mitigated, and in great part corrected, by the teaching, moral and theological, of the prophets, and we have seen that our Saviour emphatically endorsed the prophetic view of marriage; still, it cannot be denied that St. Paul reveals in many places a mental attitude on the subject of sexual relationship, which can only be explained by the Rabbinic training which he had received at the feet of Gamaliel.

There is, however, clear indication that his views on this, as on other subjects, were developing under the influence of the Holy Spirit, interpreting to him his richly-varied experiences, and leading him to realise more thoroughly, as time passed, the practical consequences of his Christian principles. The noble passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians carries the theory of marriage far beyond the point at which it stands in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and we shall be justified, by all we know of the great apostle's mental history,

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Rh in attaching far greater importance to those declarations which are definitely, from the point of view of his time, novel than to those which do but echo the current notions of the schools.

If we are disposed to hesitate as to the legitimacy of thus distinguishing between apostolic pronouncements, and attaching superior importance to those which succeed in commending themselves to our own perceptions of spiritual fitness, we may remember that St. Paul himself bids us thus distinguish, and, specifically with reference to his discussion of sexual questions, makes his appeal to the Christian conscience.

In these words there is disclosed another determining factor of Apostolic morality. "The present distress" is an allusion to the

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 end of the age, which was generally believed by Christians in that time to be impending, and was supposed to bring with it a period of great calamity. This expectation tended to strengthen the wave of asceticism, which had already begun to make its appearance among Christians, and has left very distinct impressions on the Apostolic writings. If celibacy is exalted, and marriage discouraged, we must bear in mind the obvious practical considerations which justified both counsels, on the supposition that the whole system of human life was on the brink of the final catastrophe.

Before we can accept the rulings of the Apostolic age as obligatory on our own, we must be sure that they do not reflect the distinctive and long-discarded beliefs of that age as to the end of the world. It will be apparent that a mere quoting of texts will not serve the turn of any serious inquirer into the permanent teaching of St. Paul; there is a process of careful examination to be carried

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Rh through before the exact value of any specific declaration is fixed. As with the Lord Himself, so with His apostles; nothing is in such wise delivered to the Church as to settle the problems of practical life in advance of their actual emergence in Christian experience. Bearing these considerations in mind we may conveniently gather the teaching of St. Paul under five heads:

I.—Every reader of the Pauline Epistles knows that the apostle everywhere manifests a horror and dread of sexual sin. As a devout and spiritually-minded Pharisee he had been taught to regard with deep aversion the moral licentiousness of the Gentile world; and this hereditary zeal for purity had been stimulated

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 and exalted by his discipleship. His conception of the Gospel as the revelation of the righteousness of God in judgment on sin, and in victory over sin, led him to emphasise the gravity of the prevailing licentiousness. A sufficient indication of his mind is found in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where he draws a fearful picture of Gentile society as sunken in sexual vices, and with prophetic fervour proclaims the severe retribution of God's vengeance which would surely follow.

As he founded churches in the cities of the Empire he added the character of a pastor to that of an evangelist, and his pastoral activity stands on record in the Epistles. It is clear that at every point he was compelled to do battle with the tradition of sexual licence which prevailed among his converts. In the earliest of his extant epistles he lays down the grand principle that discipleship implied purity. "For God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification."

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Rh To the Corinthians he insists upon the fatal character of the sins of the flesh as excluding men from entrance into the kingdom of God, as desecrating the "temple of the Holy Ghost," as bringing judgments on the Church, and as being so infectious that nothing but prompt expulsion of the guilty could preserve the moral soundness of the Church. He even applies to irregular sexual unions the words which were designed to describe the union in marriage, and suggests that such impure connections inflict injury on the enduring self, which survives the decay of the physical nature. The emotion with which he writes indicates the strength of his conviction that the very life of Christianity was imperilled by the moral laxity of the Corinthians:

"The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body: and God both raised the Lord, and will raise up us through his power. Know ye not that your bodies are members of Christ? shall I then take away the members of Christ, and make them members of an harlot? God forbid. Or know ye not that he that is joined to an harlot is one body? for, The twain, saith he, shall become one flesh. But he

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 that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have from God? and ye are not your own; for ye were bought with a price: glorify God therefore in your body."

It needs not to accumulate quotations, for the salient fact is not in dispute. The insistence of St. Paul on chastity of thought and act as indispensable in the Christian must necessarily determine our general estimate of his teaching about marriage, the relationship which is more than any other affected by the standard of purity which is recognised by the general conscience. Any society which regarded the apostle's writings as inspired Scripture, and made them the authoritative source of moral teaching, could not but rise out of the depravity of ancient paganism and reach a level of domestic purity higher than any imaginable by the men of the time.

II.—To the same effect was St. Paul's consistent opposition to asceticism. It is

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Rh indeed not to be denied that the apostle, when he discusses the questions of the Corinthians on marriage and divorce, starts from the assumption that celibacy is to be ranked higher than married life; but he separates his teaching decisively from that of his ascetic contemporaries by giving reasons of a purely practical character for this exaltation of the single life, and by insisting on the lawfulness and the purity of marriage. He seems to regard celibacy and marriage as two specific states of the Christian life, equally requiring a vocation, equally pure, but under all the circumstances of the time, with persecution always threatening, the Lord's work always demanding a complete concentration of thought and energy from those who were charged with it, and the Lord's return in judgment and victory always at hand, not equally expedient and befitting. He quotes a passage from the Apocryphal Second Book of Esdras, and applies it to the existing situation:

"But this I say, brethren, the time is shortened, that

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 henceforth both those that have wives may be as though they had none; and those that weep, as though they wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and those that buy, as though they possessed not; and those that use the world as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away. But I would have you to be free from cares. He that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married is careful for the things of the world, how he may please his wife. And there is a difference also between the wife and the virgin. She that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but she that is married is careful for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I say for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is seemly, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction."

We must remember that St. Paul could hardly have realised the possibility of a wife being competent to strengthen and not enfeeble her husband in difficulty and affliction. Himself unmarried, he formed his notion of married life from observation solely, and the testimony thus rendered would not encourage a very exalted opinion of the wife as the comrade and friend of her husband.

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Rh

When we add that the arguments based on the probability of persecution, and on the certainty of the speedy coming of Christ, have been disallowed by experience, it would seem that little or nothing can be concluded for the guidance of the modern Church from the apostle's evident preference for the single life. Moreover, his language in the later Epistle to the Ephesians places marriage on so exalted a plane that it is not possible to imagine any higher, and we may conclude, if we will, that experience tended to correct whatever there was of error in the earlier opinions.

Asceticism was one aspect of a form of thought which was widely spread in the world

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 at the time when Christianity came into existence, and within Christianity speedily came to exercise a potent and most unhappy influence. In spite of the fact that asceticism ran directly counter to the whole genius and habit of Judaism, it appears certain that among the Jews there were those who indulged in the speculations out of which ascetic practices were developed. In the Epistle to the Colossians the apostle is evidently concerned with controverting teachings which stood in connection with ascetic doctrines of conduct.

Bishop Lightfoot traces the origin of these doctrines to a Jewish source, and regards the Essenes as the original representatives of the asceticism which has worked such havoc in the Church. He gives the following account of the Essene attitude towards marriage:

"To the legalism of the Pharisee, the Essene added an asceticism, which was peculiarly his own, and which in many respects contradicted the tenets of the other sect. The honourable, and even exaggerated, estimate of marriage, which was characteristic of the Jew, and of the Pharisee as the typical Jew, found no favour with the

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Rh

Essene. Marriage was to him an abomination. Those Essenes who lived together as members of an order, and in whom the principles of the sect were carried to their logical consequences, eschewed it altogether. To secure the continuance of their brotherhood they adopted children, whom they brought up in the doctrines and practices of the community. There were others however who took a different view. They accepted marriage, as necessary for the preservation of the race. Yet even with them it seems to have been regarded only as an inevitable evil. They fenced it off by stringent rules, demanding a three years probation and enjoining various purificatory rites. The conception of marriage, as quickening and educating the affections and thus exalting and refining human life, was wholly foreign to their minds. Woman was a mere instrument of temptation in their eyes, deceitful, faithless, selfish, jealous, misled and misleading by her passions."

The theological speculations of the Essenes appear to have conformed to the general type which, at a somewhat later period, became known as Gnostic, and their opinions tended to find practical expression in ascetic severity.

"If," concludes the Bishop, "the notices relating to these points do not always explain themselves, yet read in the light of the heresies of the Apostolic age, and in that of subsequent Judæo-Christianity, their bearing seems to be distinct enough; so that we should not be

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 far wrong, if we were to designate Essenism as Gnostic Judaism."

At Colossae the Gnostic tendency revealed itself in the insistence on minute prohibitions, limiting the liberty of the Christian at every turn in his use of things in themselves lawful, and the object of these disciplinary rules was "to check the indulgence of the flesh," but this object was not attained.

In the pastoral Epistles "forbidding to marry" is expressly included among the "seducing spirits and doctrines of devils" which will mark the apostates "in later times," and when we reflect on the long train of degrading consequences which have flowed from Christian asceticism, and notably

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Rh from that exaltation of celibacy, as intrinsically purer than marriage, which still disturbs the practice, and confuses the thought, of Christendom, it is impossible to question the truth of the melancholy forecast.

It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of the fact that, at the start of its history, the Catholic Church was committed to the championship of marriage. The full significance of that championship is only realised when it is set in connection with the passion for purity which, as we have shown, marked the teaching of the apostles. In both respects the healthy tradition of the prophets, confirmed by the supreme and deliberate sanction of the Lord, came into conflict with powerful tendencies of the age, and rescued the new religion from the most perilous and the most plausible of perversions.

III.—St. Paul's teaching with respect to women was clearly determined by influences of widely differing kinds. First of all,

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 unquestionably, we must place the training he had received in the Rabbinic schools of Jerusalem. Next, we must take account of the modification, to which that training necessarily was subjected, from the mere circumstance that he had become a Christian, and as such had to correlate his old beliefs with his new discipleship. Then we have to give a great place to his personal experience of Christian women, such as were, if with St. Chrysostom we so read the name, Junia, who was accounted "of note among the apostles," and Phoebe, the trusted deaconess of Cenchreæ, and the ladies, Euodia and Syntyche, who were evidently the leading members of the Philippian Church, and Priscilla, who had been the teacher in the faith of his eloquent friend, Apollos.

Finally, we have to allow for his pastoral experience, which brought home to him the special risks which attached to feminine action in the churches, and the necessity of taking effectual measures to protect modesty against

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Rh enthusiasm. These different influences combined in the apostle's teaching, but they operated with varying degrees of power at different times in his career; and, accordingly, it is easy to fail in doing justice to his real views.

Perhaps the most characteristic and, for our present purpose, the most luminous utterance is that which deals with the practical question of female conduct in the public assemblies. The Rabbinist, the Christian, the pastor, the statesman are all represented in this curious passage:

"Now I praise you that ye remember me in all things, and hold fast the traditions, even as I delivered them to you. But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Everyman praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman praying or prophesying with her head unveiled dishonoureth her head: for it is one and the same thing as if she were shaven. For if a woman is not veiled, let her also be shorn: but if it is a shame to a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be veiled. For a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

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 For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man: for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man: for this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels. Howbeit neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also by the woman; but all things are of God. Judge ye in yourselves: is it seemly that a woman pray unto God unveiled? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair it is a dishonour to him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seemeth to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God."

It is characteristic of St. Paul to base even the seemingly most trivial of his practical counsels on the largest principles, so here, when he finds it necessary to regulate the procedure of Christian women in the congregation, he brings in the first principles of religion.

The natural order in which woman is subject to man is connected with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, that he may hold together the fundamental equality of spiritual status,

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Rh which the Gospel declared, and the subordination of the female sex, which the circumstances of the time rendered imperative, in the most evident interest of the Christian character. He appeals to the historic fact, as he supposed, that woman was created out of man, and to the divine purpose so disclosed, viz., that woman should be a help meet for man. He declares the natural and the religious interdependence of the sexes. He appeals to the general sense of decency, and insists on recognising it as the expression of a divine law. All the while he keeps steadily in view the actual situation of the Church in Corinth.

The Jews were wont to pray covered, as well men as women; the Greeks prayed with bare heads. Corinth was a notorious centre of sexual vice, and of all places there was none in which any relaxation of traditional discipline could be permitted with greater risk to female chastity. The apostle makes a new rule to meet the situation. Men shall follow the Greek practice, women the Jewish; and the

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 rule shall stand on a basis of fundamental doctrine. Subordination of rank and variety of function shall be shown to be consistent with, nay inseparable from, the Christian doctrine of spiritual equality.

St. Paul connects the subordination of wife to husband in the union of marriage with the subordination of Christ to God in the mystery of the Incarnation. The connection carried the assurance that whatever Rabbinic prejudices clouded his understanding as to the full practical significance of the equality in Christ, which the Gospel taught, were passing away.

Just as the prophetic association of monogamy with monotheism compelled a lofty doctrine of marriage, so the association of Christian marriage with the mystic union betwixt Christ and the Church inspired a sublime version of the relationship of husband and wife. Obedience implied protection; power was linked with sacrifice. Subordination was exalted by love.

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Rh Authority was conditioned and interpreted by service.

No current of ascetic sentiment would ever be able to sweep the Christian Church from the sublime doctrine of marriage thus included in the canon of Scripture. Every other

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 passage in the Pauline writings must be harmonised with this crowning exposition.

IV.—The seventh chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians contains the apostle's rulings on certain practical matters of difficulty which had been referred to his decision. Of these the most urgent and permanently important was the question of divorce. There are two distinct cases. First, when both husband and wife are Christians: next, when one or other of the parties is an unbeliever. In the former case St. Paul adduces the commandment of Christ prohibiting divorce. In the latter case he makes the validity of the marriage turn on the willingness of the heathen partner to maintain it.

In the event of desertion in consequence of Christianity, he allows divorce and, since no other kind of divorce was known to the ancient, re-marriage. We must suppose the apostle to have in mind the facile and frequent divorces of Greek and Roman life, and the extreme repugnance which in some cases the fact of

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Rh Christianity provoked. His ruling is thus expressed:

It is important to appreciate the broad principles on which the apostle rests his decision. The essence of the natural union is the free mutual consent of the parties; if that condition be not abolished by the conversion of one of them to Christianity, then he

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 insists on the validity of the marriage; but so great an event is conversion, nothing less than the new birth of the individual, that a fresh act of consent on the part of the unconverted partner is necessary if the marriage is to be sustained. This act is implied in willingness to dwell with the Christian.

St. Paul does not allow the Corinthian suggestion that the contact with an unbeliever in marriage was itself polluting; rather he advances the profound doctrine that the Christian partner carried a consecration to the husband or the wife, and brought them, not less than the children of a Christian parent, within the sphere of holiness. Nor will he allow the Christian to break up the marriage which the unbeliever is willing to maintain, because to do this would be to run counter to the cardinal truth that natural relationships are confirmed, hallowed and immortalised in Christ. In the case, however, of a refusal to dwell with the Christian, St. Paul regards the marriage as null and void, and grants liberty

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Rh of re-marriage to the Christian, on the principle that no natural franchise is forfeited by discipleship.

V.—The same principles governed the apostle's ruling on the subject of fresh mixed marriages. He forbids the widow to re-marry except "in the Lord," which can hardly mean less than a prohibition of marriage with a non-Christian. In the second epistle we have the prohibition stated at length, and with much solemnity:

This language is general, and both in ancient and in modern times it has been questioned whether it is intended to refer to mixed marriages: St. Augustine says he does not remember a passage in the New Testament forbidding in unambiguous terms Christians

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Translation talk:Catullus 26

Thoughts on translation -
 * Wind names. I've rendered them all into English here, partially because Apheliota is profoundly obscure, and thus kind of useless in a translation; it certainly is not the standard name for the East-wind (Eurus would be more common) -- it seems to exist scarcely anywhere else. (Yes, it's a clear Latinization of Greek Apheliotes, but that in itself is hardly a household name.)
 * "Fifteen thousand and two hundred". Presumably some denomination of money is implied, as when we in English say "a million" for "a million dollars". Dioskolos (talk) 08:51, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

title: Translation talk:Catullus 26


text:
Translation talk:Catullus 30

"now does it pity you nothing ... of your sweet little friend". Yes, miserere can mean 'pity', but 'pity' cannot be used thus in English. One can pity someone, but not pity someone nothing of someone. Dioskolos (talk) 08:58, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

title: Translation talk:Catullus 30


text:
Translation:Catullus 104

Le poesie di Catullo/104 Carmina (Catullus)/104

title: Translation:Catullus 104


text:
Talk:Catullus 104

"nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem" -- the imperfect nature of amarem is hard naturally to convey in English here, the subjunctive "would" rather outweighing it. 'Perdite' could even be 'wastefully', 'profligately'. Dioskolos (talk) 09:31, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

title: Talk:Catullus 104