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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XIV

Chapter XIV.
Jierck Dewitt’s companions waited, at first silently, then anxiously, for his return.

Moments passed, and he was still gone.

“I hope he hain’t played us a trick,” whispered Van Wart.

“Not he!” says honest Sam Galsworthy.

“I’ll tell you what it is, boys,” whispers the root-doctor’s son. Jierck has got liquor aboard. Taint mutiny to say so, now he’s gone. I heard him walk tipsy when we came from the barn. When we got here, I saw he stood too ramrod for a sober man. You know how it is. Since his wife went bad, he’s lived on rum for stiddy victuals. He swore off to Major Skerrett. But he didn’t swear strong enough, or else somethin’ strange has drawed his cork.”

“If that is so,” said Lincoln-Brothertoft, “I must follow, and see that he does not risk himself or us. Watch, men, for your lives!”

“They may call that man Orderly Lincoln,” says Hendrecus Canady, as the other disappeared about the house, “but I believe he’s Tommy Jefferson or some other Congressman in disguise. He talks powerful dictionary. And how did he come to know this country like a hawk and like a hopper toad both?”

It seemed sad and sorry business to Edwin Brothertoft to go prowling like a burglar about the home of his forefathers.

He followed Jierck around the rear of the house. All the familiar objects wore an unkindly, alienated look. The walls were grim, the windows were dark, the whole building said to him, “You are an exile and an intruder.”

But he had no time for sentimental regrets. He turned the northern side of the house. A bright light burned in Lucy’s chamber in the tower. He could see a shadowy figure moving behind the curtain.

“My child! in a few moments we shall meet,” he thought.

Nothing to be seen of Jierck Dewitt! The sight of his daughter’s form revived his anxiety. Peering into the dark, he passed about the corner of the turret.

He stopped opposite the parlor windows on the front. A shutter stood open. A faint light, as from a nickering wood-fire within, gleamed out into the hazy night. The window-sill was breast high to a man.

“There we used to sit,” he murmured, “my wife and I. There by the fire, in the evenings of autumns long passed, I have watched her love dying, and all my hopeful vigor dying, — dying into ashes.”

The mighty despotism of an old love mastered him for a moment. There was little bitterness in his heart. These scenes, once so dear, became dear to him again. He pardoned them for their unconscious share in the tragedy of his life.

“I must have one glance into that room,” he thought. “My memory of it will be a troublesome ghost in my brain, until I have laid the ghost with a sight of the reality.”

He stole forward softly over the crisp, frosty grass, and looked cautiously in at the window.

Mrs. Brothertoft was seated alone before the fire. Guilt must sit alone and dwell alone. Loneliness is the necessity and the punishment of guilty hearts. No friends are faithful but the noble and the pure, and them guilt dreads and rejects. Mrs. Brothertoft was sitting alone in the fire-lit room. It was an instant before her husband’s eyes could distinguish objects within. He drew close to the window. He perceived her. A thrill of pity and pardon killed all his old rancors. He felt that, though he must war against her for his daughter’s sake, he fought, reserving an infinite tenderness for his foe.

And she within, — had she heard that stealthy step of his upon the stiffened grass and the dry leaves? Had his faint sigh penetrated to her, as she sat silent and moody? Did she feel the magnetism of human presence, — the spiritual touch of a spirit wounded by her wrong? Or was it merely that in these days of alarm and violence she kept her senses trained and alert?

He saw her cruel face turn suddenly, stare into the night, and mark an intruder.

For one breath he stood motionless.

Then, as she sprang forward to the window and shouted for help, he turned and ran around the rear of the house to the spot where he had left his comrades.

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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XV

Chapter XV.
Half past eight, and the two majors still sat vis-à-vis in the dining-room.

“I am tired of this,” thought Skerrett. “I have had enough of swallowing bumpers to this fellow’s ‘buppers.’ I have heard enough of his foulness, his boasts, and his drivel. I could never have been patient so long except for the lady’s sake. Every word and look of his is an imperative command to me to make sure of her safety. Yes, yes, Voltaire! You needn’t nod and wink that she is ready and anxious. Ten minutes more, to be positive that my men are come, — and then, Major, please the Goddess of Liberty, I’ll forbid your banns, and walk off with your person. I’m sorry for you, brute as you are. And you will not like your wineless quarters with Old Put.”

Monstrous long minutes, those final ten! At the rate of a thousand a minute, shades of doubt drifted across Peter’s mind.

Who has not known suspense and its miseries? — something hanging over him by a hair, or he hanging by a hair over nothing. Patience, Peter Skerrett! The pendulum ticks. It checks off the minutes, surely.

And while those minutes pass, tipsy Jierck Dewitt is at work in the cellar, trying to drown the misery that this guilty house has caused him.

The ten were almost ended, when Brothertoft started to search for the stray leader, that other victim of a woman’s disloyalty.

It was in the very last of the ten that Mrs. Brothertoft turned suddenly and saw an unknown face staring in at her, as she sat in the dusky parlor.

Time was up. Major Skerrett walked quietly to the window, threw up the sash, opened the shutters, and whistled in his men.

Three only came leaping in at the summons.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XV


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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XVI

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

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

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

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

Here came his mistress’s loud scream for help.

Plato was petrified.

Mrs. Brothertoft rushed into the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

But another did.

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

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

She instantly fired at the approaching figure.

He fell.

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

Her husband! She knew him at once.

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

“My husband!”

She said it with a strange, quiet satisfaction.

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

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

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

And she spurned him with her foot.

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

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

He caught the missile with his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He passed into the parlor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skerrett closed the door softly.

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

He listened. Not a sound!

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

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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the sharp crack of the pistol-shot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sappho was moaning over him.

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

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

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

Here Jierck Dewitt reappeared upon the scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XVIII

Chapter XVIII.
The other party of fugitives took a more circuitous route, to the east, through that scantily peopled region.

Volante stepped proudly along, pricking up her ears to recognize familiar bugbears, and to question strange stocks and stones, whether they were “miching malicho” to horse-flesh.

Brothertoft walked by his daughter’s side. Only now and then in their hurried march could he take her hand and speak and hear some word of tender love. But the consciousness in each of the other’s presence, and the knowledge of the new birth of the holiest of all the holy affections between them, was sufficient. A vague bliss involved them as they hurried through the dim night. And both evaded the thought of that Hate they had left behind, — that embodied Hate, helpless and alone, at Brothertoft Manor.

The negroes trotted along, babbling comically together.

Jierck Dewitt led the way in silence.

“I shall never dare to face Major Skerrett again, if I don’t bring these people straight through,” — so he thought. “I am just sober enough to walk my chalk if I pin my eyes to it. If I look at anything else, or think of anything else, this path’ll go to zigzagging, and splitting up into squirrel-tracks, and climbing up trees. Old Voltaire says he don’t know these back roads very well. If I lose the track, we shall be nowhere.”

The region a mile back from the river was mostly forest then, with scattered clearings. Often the course of our fugitives was merely a wood-road, or a cow-path, or an old trail. There were giant boles stopping the way, and prone trunks barricading it. There were bogs and thickets to avoid.

It is bewildering business to travel through a forest in the dark. Jierck Dewitt knew this well. He did not distract his attention with talk, or recalling the events of the evening. He held tight with all his eyes and all his wits to the track, commanding it not to divide or meander. This severe application steadied his brain. He slowly sobered. The fine fumes of his potations of Brothertoft Madeira, in the cellar, exhaled. The coarser gases of rum from the paternal jug split their exit through the sutures of his skull.

It seemed a moment, it seemed a millennium, it was an hour, when the party reached the foot of Cedar Ridge, almost three miles from the Manor-House.

Cedar Ridge is a famous look-out. “What you cannot see from there is not worth seeing,” say the neighbors. It rises some three hundred feet above the level of the river, and surveys highlands north, uplands and lowlands south, with Janus-like vision.

Long before Hendrecus Hudson baptized the North River, Cedar Ridge was a sacred mount — a hill of Sion — to the Redskins. Fire had disforested the summit, and laid bare two bosomy mounds, stereoscopic counterparts, with a little depression between. A single cedar, old as the eldest hills, grew in this hollow. Around it had generations of frowzy Indian braves held frantic powwows, and danced their bow-legged minuets. Many a captive had suffered the fate of Saint Sebastian against its trunk, and dabbled the roots with his copper-colored blood. Savory fragments of roast Iroquois had fattened the soil. Fed on this unwholesome diet, and topped every winter by Boreas, the tree made hard, red flesh, and bloated into a stunted, wicked-looking Dagon, as gnarled and knobby as that old yew-tree of Fountains Abbey, which — so goes the myth — was Joseph of Arimathea’s staff, — planted by him there when he was on his tour to convert the hairy Britons from Angli to Angeli.

A famous point of view was Cedar Ridge, named after this little giant, this squat sovereign among evergreens.

Such a landmark attained without error, Jierck Dewitt began to feel secure. He could relax his strict attention to his duties as guide, and let his thoughts confuse him again.

The moment he began to review the events of the evening with a sobered brain, he grew suddenly troubled.

He halted where the forest ceased on the ridge, and the two bare mounds with the low cedar appeared against the sky. He paused there, and let Voltaire overtake him.

This was the third night of that old brave’s travels. The present pace was telling on him. He was puffing loud and long, as he stopped at Jierck’s signal. The others passed on up the ridge. The white mare became a spot of light in the open.

“Voltaire,” whispered Jierck, “I didn’t see the Mistress around when we left the Manor. Do you know what was done with her?”

“Where was you, that you didn’t see?” asks Voltaire, taking and yielding air in great gasps between every word.

“Never mind that! What became of her?”

“Why you know (puff) that she fired (gasp) a pistol (explosion and sigh) at Master; and everybody thought (wheeze) that she’d shot him dead.” Here Voltaire took in a gallon or so of night air, and delivered it slowly back, by the pint, in the form of a chain of clouds, as white as if they came from the lungs of a pure Caucasian.

This speech explained half the mystery to Jierck. His curiosity seemed to become more troublesome. He continued anxiously: “Yes, yes, I know,” — which he did not until this moment. “But what was done with her afterwards. I was outside, doing my part there.”

“You was outside, was you?” says Voltaire, slowly recovering fluency. “Well, I guess they wanted you inside.”

“A man can’t be in two places at once. What did they want me for?”

“Them two boys — the root-doctor’s son and Samuel Galsworthy — is as spry as any two boys I ever see. Mighty spry and strong and handy boys they is; but they had a’most a orkud job with Mistress, she tearing and scratching so. They wanted another hand bad; but they got through, and fixed her up right at last.”

“Fixed her! How?”

“What you in such an orful hurry about? Let a man take breff, won’t you?”

“Yes; but speak quick! What did they do with her? Is she left there?”

“Leff thar!” says Voltaire, relapsing into full patois. “Whar would dey leave her? She’s done tied up in a big arm-cheer in de parlor. An’ dar she’ll stay all dis bressed night, jess like a turkey truss up fur to be roast.” And he gave a little, triumphant chuckle, that seemed to remember old cruelties he had suffered at her hands.

Jierck made no answer. He seemed to need breath as much as the negro. He gave a little gasp, and sprang up the hill-side.

Puzzled, Voltaire followed slowly after.

While they talked, the others had climbed to the top of the ridge, and halted to rest where the old cedar stood barring the way.

Jierck Dewitt came panting up to the summit.

He turned and glanced hastily over the hazy breadth of slumbering landscape below.

Belts of mist lay in the little valleys. Beyond was the river, a broad white pathway, like a void. And beyond again, the black heaps of the mountains westward. Here and there in the vague, a dot of light marked a farm-house. The lanterns of the British frigates were to be seen twinkling like reflections of stars in water.

It may have been fancy, but in the silence Lucy thought that she heard the far-away sound of the Tartar’s bell striking four bells, ten o’clock, and her consorts responding.

Jierck continued peering intently into the dark.

His seeming alarm communicated itself to the party.

“What is it?” said Brothertoft. “Do you fear pursuit?”

“No,” whispered Jierck.

His monosyllable sent a shiver to all their hearts. There was a veiled scream in this single word, — a revelation of some terrible panic awaiting them.

“I must see farther,” resumed Dewitt, in the same curdling tone; and he sprang up the mound on the right.

Edwin Brothertoft, impressed by this strange terror, followed.

He was within a dozen feet of the summit, and its wider reach of view, when Jierck leaped down and seized him tight by both shoulders. Jierck caught breath. Then, with his face close to the other’s, — “My God!” he hissed, “I’ve set the house on fire. We’ve left that woman there, tied, to burn to death.”


text:
Page:Elementary Chinese - San Tzu Ching (1900).djvu/197

 By the same Author:

 * A Chinese-English Dictionary, ryl 4to, pp. XLVI and 1415
 * Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 2 vols. cr. 8vo.
 * Gems of Chinese Literature
 * Historic China and other Sketches
 * Chuang Tzŭ, — Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer
 * Chinese Sketches
 * Chinese without a Teacher, 5th edition
 * Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms
 * Glossary of Reference on the Far East, 3rd edition
 * Remains of Lau Tzŭ
 * Synoptical Studies in Chinese Character
 * Handbook of the Swatow Dialect
 * From Swatow to Canton Overland
 * Dictionary of Colloquial Idioms
 * A Chinese Biographical Dictionary, pp. XII, 1022
 * Catalogue of the Wade Library, Cambridge
 * Chinese Poetry in English Verse


text: Page:Elementary Chinese - San Tzu Ching (1900).djvu/198


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XIX

Chapter XIX.
Edwin Brothertoft shook off the man’s clutch of horror, and stared southward.

A dull glow, like the light of moonrise through mist, was visible close to the dark line of the horizon.

Instantly, as he looked, the glow deepened. The black mass of the Manor-House appeared against the light. The fire must be in the rear and below. An alarm-gun from the frigate came booming through the silence.

While they stood paralyzed, Edwin Brothertoft sprang down from the mound, tore his daughter from the saddle, and was mounted himself quick as thought.

“I must save her!” he cried, — “your mother, my wife!”

He was gone.

A moment they could see the white horse, like a flash of light, as she flung down the break-neck hill-side.

Then she leaped into the mist, and a moment more they could hear her hoofs clattering.

They stood appalled and speechless.

Heart-beat by heart-beat it seemed that the fire grew intenser. All the world was blotted out for the gazers, except that one red spot, like a displaced moonrise, far to the southward.

Fire was not master yet. Who could say? Only three long miles. He might save her. Other succor might come.

Lucy gave one more look into that ocean of mist where she knew her father was struggling. Then, quick but quiet, she seized poor Jierck Dewitt’s arm.

“Come,” she said; “show me the way, — the shortest way. I will follow my father.”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XIX


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XX

Chapter XX.
Brothertoft galloped down the hill-side. He had no whip or spur, but the mare took in his passion, made it her own, and dashed forward madly. No winding by comfortable curves for them! They bore straight for the house.

Three miles from Cedar Ridge, — three miles to go! and broken country, all hill and gully! No sane man could gallop it by day. A night ride there might be the dream of a madman. There were belts of forest, dense and dark, with trees standing thick as palisades. There were ravines crowded with thorny thickets. There were stony brooks, and dry channels stonier. There were high walls slanting up the sharp slopes of the scattered clearings. Down was steep, and up was steep, and it was all up and down. But, though darkness trebled the danger, horse or rider never shrank. They bore straight on. Three miles to go!

And while they galloped, the rider’s thought galloped. Sometimes it burst out into a cry of encouragement for his horse; sometimes it was unspoken; but all the while it went on wildly, thus:—

“On, Volante! Straight for that light to the south! Fires move fast; we must go faster. Only three miles away, and there she sits bound, — and the flames coming, — she I once loved, God knows how faithfully! Gallop, gallop, Volante!

“Bravely! here we are down the ridge! Now, stretch out over this smooth bit of clearing! Yes; that black line is a stone wall. Measure it, Volante! Not four feet! Good practice for our first leap! Easy now, steady! Hurrah! Over and a foot to spare! Well done, horse! And I have been a plodding foot-soldier! But I can ride still, like a boy, side-saddle or no saddle. A Brothertoft cannot lose the cavalier. We shall win.

“What, Volante? Nothing to fear, — that white strip in the dell! Only a brook. Barely twelve feet to leap. Never mind the dark and the bad start! Remember my wife, — she burns, if we flinch. Now, together! Hurrah! Over, thank God! Splashed, but safe over and away!

“A clearing again. Shame, Volante! Are you a ploughman’s horse, that you labor so clumsily in these furrows? See that horrible glow upon the sky! This wood hides it again. Idle forest! why was it not burned clean from the ground a century ago? Everything baffles. No, Volante! No turning aside for this windrow! Over, over! Through, through, and now straight on! Yes; the hill is steep, but we must gallop down it. No stumbling. What! another wall, and higher? You shrink! No, — you must. She shall not burn! Now, God help us! Down? No; up and off! Hurrah!

“How we have rattled through those two miles! And here is the road. Easier travelling, if you can only take that worm fence! The top bars are sure to be rotten. A fair start, my good mare, and do your best! Bravely again! I knew we should crash over. Plain sailing now! What, limping, flagging, Volante? Shame! This is a road fit for a lady’s summer-evening canter. Shake out, Volante! Let me see your stride! Show your Lincolnshire blood! The winner in this race wins Life, —, do you hear? Wake up there, you farmers! Turn out and help! Fire at Brothertoft Manor. !

“Faster, faster! Are we too late? Never! I see the glow brighten against the sky; but the night is still as death; fire will move slow. We shall see at the turn of the road. Faster now! She must not burn, sitting there, where I saw her by the dear fireside of the years gone by, — sitting bound, and the flames snarling. Ah! I so loved her! I so trusted her! We were young. Life was so beautiful! God was so good! It was miserable that she should wound me, and more cruelly wound her own soul. But I have forgiven her. O, let me save her, if only to speak peace and pardon! She shall not burn. A dozen strides, and we can see the house. Perhaps this great light is the stables. No, — everything! Fire everywhere. Too late! too late! Never! I can burn. She shall not.”

And they galloped up the lawn.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XX


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXI

Chapter XXI.
“I am, a new-comer on the scene at Brothertoft Manor-House.

“I was a spark from Jierck Dewitt’s flint, a flash of his powder, a feeble smoulder, a pretty, graceful little flame, peering about for something nutritious. I was weak. I get force as I go. Let me once fairly touch fuel, and I will roar you, roar you, — ay, and roast you too!

“What a grand pile of rubbish I see, now that I can light up this dusky den of a cellar! Let me burrow here! Let me scamper here! Aha, I am warm and strong! A leap now! Hurrah! I am so large and vigorous that I can multiply myself. Go, little flames, rummage everywhere. Blaze, my children, flash in the corners, find what you like, eat and grow fierce. Grow fierce and agile! I mean to exhibit you by and by. You must presently run up stairs, make yourselves broad and slender, dance, exult, and devour everywhere.

“A drop of the famous Brothertoft Madeira, now, for Fire and family! Here goes at the wine-room. I cannot stop to draw corks. Down go the shelves! Crash go the bottles! Drink, flames, drink! What nectar! How this black hole of a cellar shines! Fine wine makes me hungry for finer fare! I could eat titbits now. Perhaps I shall find them up stairs. A cradle with a fat bambino, — that would be a sweet morsel! A maiden’s bed with a white-limbed maiden on it, — that I could take finely. Come flames, my children, up stairs, and let us see what we can find! Up, my strongest, my hungriest, my drunkest flames! up and follow!

“I am ! This house and all that be in it are mine!”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXI


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXII

Chapter XXII.
Mrs. Brothertoft sat in the parlor of the deserted mansion, bound, helpless, and alone.

She was exhausted and weak after her furious struggle with her captors. Mental frenzy had wearied her mind.

As Major Skerrett closed the door, and she was left solitary, a little brief sleep, like a faint, fell upon her.

It could have lasted but a moment, for when she suddenly awoke, the final footsteps of the retiring party were still sounding upon the gravel road.

She listened intently. The sound ceased. Human presence had departed. Silence about her, — except that the fire on the hearth hissed and muttered, as fire imprisoned is wont to do, in feeble protest against its powerlessness.

This moment of sleep seemed to draw a line sharp as death between two eras in Mrs. Brothertoft’s history. From the hither side of this emphatic interval of oblivion she could survey her past life apart from the present. Violence, Force, had at last intervened in her career, and made their mark sharp as the sudden cleft of an earthquake in a plain.

She had now the opportunity, as she sat bound, strictly but not harshly, before a comfortable fire, to review her conduct and approve or condemn. She could now ask herself why Force had come in to baffle her plans, — what laws she had broken to merit this inevitable penalty of failure and insulting punishment.

There was a pause in her life, such as is given to. all erring and guilty lives many times in life, and to all souls in death, to look at past ruin quietly, and plan, if they will, with larger wisdom for the time to come.

She rapidly put together her facts, and without much difficulty comprehended the plot of Kerr’s capture and Lucy’s evasion. It angered her to be defeated by a “silly child,” as she had named her. But she put this aside for the moment. A graver matter was to be considered.

She thought of her husband, lying in the dining-room, slain, as she supposed, by her hand.

Then, in her soul, began a great and terrible battle. “You are free!” her old companion Furies whispered her. “Free of that incubus, your husband. Such triumph well repays you for the insult of a few hours’ bondage.”

But then a low voice within her seemed to ask, “Triumph! Can you name it triumph that you have trampled on your womanhood, and done murder to a man who gave you only love and only pity when you wronged him?”

“Be proud of yourself, beautiful creature!” whispered the Furies. “You are an imperial woman, rich, masterly, and skilful, with a brilliant career before you.”

“Humble yourself before God and your own soul, miserable woman!” the inner voice replied. “Repent, or that murdered man will take his stand at your side forever.”

“He owed you this vengeance,” her evil spirits hinted, “for your great disappointment. If he had not been a nerveless dreamer, full of feeble scruples and sham ambitions, you would have had all your heart desired. He basely cheated you. He promised everything, and performed nothing. He was the pride of the Province; he let himself sink into insignificance. Poor-spirited nobody! It was a kindness to snuff out his mean and paltry life.”

“Did you see his gentle face as he fell?” the counter influence made answer. “How gray and old he was! Do you remember him? — it seems but yesterday — a fair youth, kindling with the hopes that to him were holy. You loved him sometimes, — do you not recognize those moments as your noblest? Have not yours been the false ambitions and the idle dreams? Is not all this misery and failure the result of your first trifling with sin, and then choosing it? Disloyal woman, — if you are a woman, and not a fiend, — your cruelty has brought defeat and shame upon you! Profit by this moment of quiet reflection! see how the broken law revenges itself!”

“Yes, madam,” the other voices here interrupted, “you cannot escape what your weakness calls shame. You will never live down scandal. The untempted people will never admit you to their ranks. Scorn them. Do not yield to feeble regrets. Be yourself, — your brave, defiant self!”

The Furies were getting the better. The virago was more and more overpowering the woman. Sometimes she sat patient. Sometimes she raged and struggled impotently with her bonds. It was terrible in the dim parlor to watch her face, and mark the tokens of that mad war within.

The fire in the chimney had been slowly heating the logs all this time. They were ripe to blaze. Suddenly they burst into a bright flame.

Mrs. Brothertoft looked up and saw herself in the mirror over the fireplace. There was hardly time for a thrill of self-admiration. The same flash that showed her her own face revealed also the reflection of the portrait behind her. She saw the heads of Colonel Brothertoft and his white horse looking through the torn curtain. She had not glanced that way since her scene of yesterday evening with the picture. She had evaded a sight that recalled her treason. Now it forced itself upon her. Here she was bound; and there, over her own head in the mirror, was a ghostly shadow of what?

What! was this the ghostlier image of her husband’s very ghost? Was he there in the canvas? Had he stolen away out of that dead thing once his body, lying only a few steps and two doors off? Was he there watching her? Why did he wear that triumphant smile? He was not used to smile much in the dreary old times; — never to sneer as this semblance was doing. Even that beast, the white horse, shared in his master’s exultation over her captivity, — his nostrils swelled, and he seemed to pant for breath enough to neigh over a victory.

She stared an instant, fascinated by that faint image. There was a certain vague sense of relief in its presence. This shadow of her husband murdered might be a terror; but he intervened a third party in the hostile parley and the thickening war between her two selves. This memento of remorse came to the succor of the almost beaten relics of her better nature, and commanded them to turn and make head again against that reckless, triumphant, bedlam creature, who was fast gaining the final mastery and absorbing her total being.

Was it thus? Had this image of a ghost come to say, “My wife, the old tie cannot break. I come to plead with you not to annihilate the woman, not to repel the medicine of remorse, and make yourself an incurable, irreclaimable fiend,” — was this his errand of mercy?

Or did he stand there to hound on the Frenzies, spiritual essences, to her, to him visible beings, whom she felt seducing her? Was he smiling with delight to see her spirit zigzagging across the line between madness and sanity, and staggering farther, every turn, away from self-control? Which was this shadow’s office?

While she trembled between these questions, still staring at those two reflections in the mirror, — herself and that image of the portrait, — suddenly the flash of flame in the chimney went out. A downward draught sent clouds of white smoke drifting about the room.

Mrs. Brothertoft peered a moment into the darkness. Her own reflection in the mirror was just visible, as she stirred her head. She missed the other. But there were strange sounds suddenly awakened, — a strange whispering through the house.

So long as her seeming, ghostly companion was visible, she had kept down her terror. Now, as she fancied it still present but unseen, a great dread fell upon her. She writhed in her bonds to turn and face that portrait on the wall. She could, with all her pains, only move enough to see a little corner of the curtain.

Did it move? Would something unearthly presently put aside those dusky folds, and come rustling to her side?

She listened a moment, and then screamed aloud.

The sound of her own voice a little reassured her. She laughed harshly, and her soliloquy went on, but wilder, and without the mild entreaties of her better self.

“What a fool I am to disturb myself with mere paint and canvas! But I will have that picture burnt, — yes, burnt, — to-morrow morning. The man is gone, and every relic of him and his name shall perish from the earth. How plainly I seem to see him lying there dead, with his face upturned! What? Do dead men stir? I think he stirred. Do you dare to lift your finger and point at me? I had a right to shoot housebreakers. Put down your finger, sir! You will not? Bah! Do what you please, you cannot terrify me. You shall be burnt, burnt, — do you hear? I smell fire strangely. The smoke from that chimney, — yes, nothing else. I am afraid I shall be cold before morning; but now I am feverish. The air seems hot and dry. I suppose I have grown excited, tied here. What is that low rustling all the while? Sometimes it seems to come from the cellar, then it is here. Any one in this room? Speak! Dewitt, Sarah, is that you come home? No answer; and this whispering grows louder. Some other chimney must be smoking. I can hardly breathe. I must try to sleep, or I shall go mad before morning with that dead man in the house. Put down your finger, sir! Don’t point at me like a school-boy! What! Is he coming? Is that his step I hear in the hall? Let me see, he has only two steps to make to the door, five across the hall, then two more and he could lean over and whisper what he thought of me.”

She listened awhile to the strange sounds below, and then went on: “If you come in here, Edwin Brothertoft, and speak to me, I shall go crazy. I cannot hear any of your meek talk. Lie where you are till morning, and then, if you wish, you shall be buried. Perhaps burning was a little too harsh. Morning is not many hours away. It must be nearly ten o’clock. But if this smoke grows any thicker, I shall certainly smother. These ghastly noises get louder and louder. What can that crash be? Is the dead man coming? Help, help! Keep him away! Mr. Brothertoft, Edwin, if you love me, pray stop fumbling at that latch. You know how indulgent you always were to my little fancies; do not come in, if you please. I am afraid, Edwin, afraid. I am so fevered, tied here by those cursed brigands, that I shall go mad. I am suffocating with this smoke. Will some one bring me a little water? But when you come, do not look into that room across the hall. There is a gray-headed man lying there. He may say I murdered him. Do not take notice of him, he was always weak-minded. He will say I insulted, wronged, dishonored him, and made his life a burden and a shame. Do not listen to scandal against a woman; but bring me a drop, one drop of water to cool my throat, for I am burning with a horrible fever. If these strange noises underneath and all around do not cease, I shall certainly go mad. What can it mean? I hear sounds like an army. I would rather not receive your friends at present, Mr. Brothertoft, if it is their feet and voices I hear. This smoke makes my eyes red, and you always were proud of my beauty, you know. What! have they lighted their torches, those ghosts in the hall? Or is this glow through the room the moon? No. My God! ! I shall burn. O Lucy, Lucy! O Edwin, help!”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXII


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIII.
Edwin Brothertoft came galloping up to the flames. Had he won this race, with a life for its prize?

The maddened mare tore forward, as if she would leap in among the loud riot there.

Fire everywhere! A mob of arrogant, roaring, frenzied flames possessed the cellar and the ground-floor. Each window, so long a peaceful entrance for sunbeams, now glowed with light within, or thrust out great cruel blades of fire, striking at darkness. Fire sheathed the base of the turret. Agile flames were climbing up its sides, and little playful flashes seized the creepers that overhung Lucy’s window, and, clinging to these, peered in through the panes, looking for such diet as they craved.

The husband turned the corner of the house, and galloped up to the window, — that window where an hour ago he had stood gazing at the proud, hateful face of the woman he loved so bitterly.

The white horse and its rider looked in at the window. And this is what the one quick, comprehensive glance of horror showed them, as a draught of air dragged the smoke away.

Opposite, on the wall, the two heads of the picture were just yielding to the flames around them. Little buds of flame were sprouting through the floor, little tendrils wreathing the doors, and drawing a closer circle about the figure at their centre. There she sat, as if this scene was prepared to illuminate her beauty. A gush of air lifted the smoke like a curtain, and there she was sitting, her black hair towering above her pale forehead, her white arms bound to the chair, and the red light of her diamond resting upon her white bosom.

The smoke had half suffocated her. But she was revived by the sudden flood of air, as a burned door gave way. She turned her head toward the window, — did her spirit tell her that the heart she had wounded was there? She lifted her feeble head as her husband dashed forward, and it seemed to him that, amid all the snarling and roaring of the flames, he could hear her moan, “Help, Edwin! Help!”

The bulbs of flame through the floor shot up and grew rank, the wreaths of flame reached out and spread fast as the beautiful tendrils of a magic vine, the smoke drifted together again, and hid the room and the figure sitting there. Over the carpet of flame, through the bower of flame, where long streamers redder than autumn hung and climbed, through the thick, blinding, suffocating, baffling smoke, Edwin Brothertoft sprang in to save his wife.

God help him, for his love is strong!

By this time, from the Tartar frigate and her consorts, boats’-crews were making for the burning house. They hoped to handle and furl the flames, as they would a flapping maintopsail in a gale. By this time the Manor people were also hurrying up, with neighborly intent to fling looking-glasses and crockery from the windows, and save them.

The Tartars were exhilarated by the splendid spectacle of fire in revolt. It was indeed a wild and passionate scene. From every window fingers of flame beckoned the world to behold it. And now on Lucy’s turret Fire had hoisted its banner, as in a castle the flag goes up when the master comes to hold holiday.

The sailors gained the foot of the lawn. This pageant burst upon them. They sprang forward with a hurrah. Suddenly the foremost, paused and huddled together. What is it?

A dark figure, bearing some heavy burden, appeared at the only window of the front where the flames were not overflowing in full streams and fountaining upward.

The figure came fighting forward. Fire shouted, and clutched at it. Smoke poured around, to bewilder it. The figure — a man’s form — staggered and fell. Inward or outward — inward into that fiery furnace, or outward toward the quiet, frosty air of night — the sailors could not see.

They rushed on more eagerly, but this time without the cheer.

Only the bravest, with Commodore Hotham himself at their head, dared face the flames, and touch the scorching heat to seek for that escaping figure they had seen.

They found him lying without, under the great window, — a man, and in his arms a burned and blackened thing. It might be, they thought, a woman.

They carried them away where the air was cool, and the crisp frost was unmelted on the grass. The man breathed, and moaned. No one knew his face, masked with black smoke.

With the neighbors, Mrs. Dewitt now came running up, and joined the group.

“See!” said she, with a shudder. “This was my mistress. She always wore this diamond on her neck in the evening. She is dead. No? she breathes!”

Yes; there was the gem, showing red reflections of the flames. An hour ago the woman had been a beauty, and the diamond a point of admiration, saying, “Mark this white neck and this fair bosom!” Now it made the utter ruin there more pitiful.

Some one led forward Volante, drooping and all in a foam. There was evidently some mystery in this disaster. “Take these burned creatures to the nearest house,” said Hotham. “And now, boys, some of you try to save the stables. Some come with me at the house. There were more people in it.”

The sailors fought fire. The others carried the two bodies to Bilsby’s farm-house. The flames showed them their path under the red-leaved trees of October.

The same ruddy light was guiding Lucy Brothertoft on her way to what a little while ago was home.

Long before she reached the spot, the roar and frenzy of the flames had subsided.

Nothing was left but the ragged walls and the red ruins of the Manor-House. It had been punished by fire for the misery and sin it had sheltered.

A guard of sailors, under a lieutenant, protected what little property had been saved. Lucy learned from them how an unknown man had rescued her mother to die away from the flames.

She left Voltaire to make some plausible story of the kidnapping, and to invent a release of hers from the captors’ hands, when the fire they had accidentally kindled was discovered.

She hastened to help the father she loved and the mother she pitied so deeply.

Jierck Dewitt followed her to Bilsby’s door.

“Go, Jierck!” she said. “It makes me shudder to see you, and think of this dreadful harm you have done. Go and tell the whole to Major Skerrett.”

“Will you speak to my wife, Miss Lucy, and show her how she is to blame, — how her wrong sent me wrong? Tell her how she and I are linked in with ruin here. Perhaps it will help you to forgive me if you can better her.”

Lucy promised.

She entered the farm-house to encounter her holy duties with her parents.

Jierck hurried off to meet Major Skerrett, give him the sorrowful history of the night, and warn him away from a region that would be alive by daylight, and bayonetting haystacks and hollow trees for kidnappers.

The penitent fellow could get no farther on his return than Cedar Ridge. There he saw the red embers of the Manor-House watching him from the edge of the horizon, like the eye of a Cyclops. He was fascinated, and sank down at the foot of the uncanny old cedar, sick with horror and fatigue.

Skerrett and Canady, pressing anxiously on, found Jierck there at sunrise, asleep and half dead with cold. They roused him, and heard his story.

A little wreath of smoke alone marked the site of the Manor-House. Here was the starting-point, there was the goal of Edwin Brothertoft’s night gallop. It thrilled the Major to hear of that wild ride, and to fancy he saw the white horse dashing through the darkness on that noble errand of mercy.

“Some men would have said, ‘Curse her! let her burn! She’s hurt me worse than fire’ll hurt her,’” says Hendrecus. “Some would have took the turns of the road, and got to the house when it was nothing but chimbleys. Some would have been afeard of being known, and shot for a rebel. I’ve heard say that the Patroon wasn’t one of the strong kind; but he’s done a splendid thing here, and I’m proud of myself that I was born on the same soil, and stand a chance to have some of the same natural grit into me.”

Nothing further could be done, and it was not safe to loiter. The three returned over the Highlands to Putnam’s army. And that day, and for many days, Peter Skerrett meditated on this terrible end of the sorrow and sin at Brothertoft Manor. He traced with ghastly interest the different paths by which vengeance converged upon the guilty woman, and saw with what careful method her crime had prepared its own punishment. “God grant,” said he, “that she may live to know what love and pity did to save her from the horror of her penalty!”


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXIV.
Would that marred and ruined being, once the beautiful Mrs. Brothertoft, ever revive enough to ask and receive forgiveness from her husband?

Lucy did not dare to hope it. She watched the breathing corpse, and looked to see it any moment escape from its bodily torture into death.

Edwin Brothertoft was but little harmed by the flames. A single leap had carried him through the fiery circle which was devouring his wife, as she sat bound. In an instant he had dragged her away over the falling floor, cut her free, and was at the window struggling through. He had been almost stifled by the smoke, but his hurts were slight. In a few days he was at his wife’s bedside.

He alone could interpret the sad, sad language of her suffering moans. Her soul, half dormant, in a body robbed of all its senses, seemed to perceive his presence and his absence by some spiritual touch. Would she ever hear his words of peace?

The red, ripe leaves grew over-ripe, and fell, and buried October. Then came the first days of November, with their clear, sharp sunshine, and bold, blue sky, and massive white clouds, sailing with the northwest wind a month before the snow-drifts. Sweet Indian summer followed. Its low southern breezes whispered the dying refrain of the times of roses and passionate sunshine.

Edwin Brothertoft sat by his wife’s window one twilight of that pensive season.

A new phase in his life had begun from the night of the rescue. By that one bold act of heroism he had leaped out of the old feebleness. He felt forgotten forces stir in him. His long sorrow became to him as a sickness from which a man rises fresh and purified.

In this mood, with the dim landscape, before him, a symbol of his own sombre history, and the glowing sky of evening beyond, symbolizing the clear and open regions of his mind’s career henceforth, — in this mood he grew tenderer for his wife than ever before.

It was no earthly love he felt for her. That had perished long ago. Deceit on her side wounded it. Disloyalty killed it. The element of passion was gone. There would have been a deep sense of shame in recalling his lover fondness once for a woman since unfaithful. But now he looked back upon her wrongs and his errors as irremediable facts, and he could pity both alike. The tendency of such a character as hers, so trained as hers, to some great rebellion against the eternal laws, some great trial of its strength with God, and to some great and final lesson of defeat, became plain to him. The law of truth in love and faith in marriage is the law a woman is likely to break if she is a law-breaker.

She had broken it, and he divined the spiritual warfare and the knowledge of defeat and degradation which had been her spiritual punishment, bitterer to bear than this final corporeal vengeance.

Entering into her heart and reading the thoughts there, he utterly forgave and pitied her.

And for himself, — what harm had she done him? None, — so he plainly saw. Except for the disenchanting office of this great sorrow, he would have lived and died a worldly man. When his poetic ardors passed with youth, he would have dwindled away a prosperous gentleman, lost his heroic and martyr spirit, and smiled or sneered or trembled at the shout for freedom through the land. Except for this great sorrow, his graceful gifts would have made him a courtier, his refinement would have become fastidiousness, he would have learned to idolize the status quo, and then, when the moment came for self-sacrifice, he would have been false to his nobler self. That meanness and misery he had escaped. That he had escaped it, and knew himself to be a man wholly true, was victory. The world might repeat its old refrain of disappointment in his career; it might say, “He promised to be our brilliant leader, — he is nobody.” But it could never say, “See, there is Brothertoft! He was an ardent patriot; but wealth spoiled him, the Court bought him, and he left us meanly.”

“My life,” he thought, “has been somewhat a negative. I have missed success. I have missed the joy of household peace. And yet I bear no grudge against my destiny. I have never for one moment been false to the highest truth, and that is a victory greater than success.”

These last words he had spoken aloud.

In reply, he heard a stir and a murmur from his wife.

He turned to her, and in the dusk he could see that her life was recoiling from death to gain strength to die. Voice and expression returned to her.

“Edwin!” she called to him, feebly.

“Jane?” he answered.

In the pleading tone of her cry, in the sweet affection of his one word of response, each read the other’s heart. There was no need of long interpretation. To her yearning for pardon and love, her name upon his lips gave full assurance that both were granted.

She reached blindly for his hand. He took hers tenderly. And there by the solemn twilight they parted for a time. Death parted them. She awoke in eternity. He stayed, to share a little longer in the dreamy work of life.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXIV


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXV

Chapter XXV.
A word of farewell to Major Kerr.

He had a horrid, horrid time at Fishkill.

Little but pork and beans to eat, little but apple-jack to drink, nothing but discomfiture to think of.

He experienced shame.

A letter was conveyed to him from Lucy Brothertoft. She wrote, as kindly as might be, what her real feelings had been toward him. She also described the sad tragedy of the night of his capture.

The conviction that he was a shabby fellow had by this time pierced Kerr’s pachyderm. He was grateful to Lucy that she felt no contempt for him. But her gentle dignity reproached his unmanliness to her, and he became a very dejected penitent.

General Burgoyne has been an important character behind the scenes of this drama. He was a clever amateur playwright, and while our personages have been doing and suffering, the General has been at work at a historical play, which he meant to name, “Saratoga, or the Last of the Rebels.” There was some able acting in it, and all the world watched for the catastrophe quite breathless and agape. A brilliant pageant of a surrender closed the play, in which, to the general surprise, it was Jack Burgoyne, and not Horatio Gates, who gave up the sword and yielded the palm.

This news came flying down to Fishkill within ten days after Major Kerr’s capture.

The unlucky fellow heard of the great take of British and Hessian officers. He began to fear prisoners were a drug in the market, and he must eat Continental fare till his stomach was quite gone.

“Write to Sir Henry Clinton,” said Old Put, good-naturedly, “that I’ll swap you for your value in the Yankees he took with the Highland forts.”

Kerr indited a doleful account of his diet and impending dyspepsia to his General.

“I must have him back,” said Sir Henry. “Anybody can be an Adjutant; but nobody in His Majesty’s army can carve a saddle of mutton, or take out a sidebone, with Kerr.”

The “swap” was arranged. The Major was put on board the Tartar, opposite Brothertoft Manor. He went off a sadder and a wiser man.

His capture had served its purpose of amusing Putnam’s desponding forces. The General had been able to write to Washington, “We have lost the Highland forts; but we have taken an Adjutant”; — and Humphreys had composed a doggerel, beginning, — “O Muse, inspire my feeble pen, To sing a deed of merit, Performed to daunt the enemy, By Major Peter Skerrett.”

Poor Kerr! when he reached New York, he was all the time haunted by regrets for his lost bride. “Up again, and take another!” is the only advice to be given under such circumstances. Some other flower of lower degree must be a substitute for the rose.

Cap’n Baylor, late of a whaler, now the chief oil man of New York, had a daughter Betty. She was a dumpy little maid. Flippers were her hands, fin-like were her feet. Nothing statuesque about her; but she tinkled with coin, and that tintinnabulation often opens the eyes of Pygmalion.

Her the Major wooed, and glibly won.

Cap’n Baylor oiled out his son-in-law’s debts. Kerr resigned his Adjutancy, and took his wife home.

Gout presently carried off the knobby old Earl of Bendigh. The Bucephalus colt made Brother Tom acephalous, by throwing him over a wall. Brother Dick succumbed to Bacchus. Harry Kerr, our Kerr, became the sixth Earl of Bendigh.

His dumpy Countess studied manners in England, and acquired the delicious languor of a lady’s-maid. She wore, morning, noon, and night, white gloves tight as thumbikins. She consumed perfume by the puncheon. But she was an honest, merry soul, who would stand no bullying. She kept Kerr in order, and made him quite a tolerably respectable fellow at last.

By and by, out of supreme gratitude to her for his wedded bliss, he had the Baylor arms looked up at the Herald’s office. They were found, and quartered with his own, and may still be seen on the coat of the Kerrs, Bendigh branch, as follows: “On a rolling sea vert, a Leviathan rampant, sifflant proper. Crest, a hand grasping a harpoon. Motto,, — .”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXV


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVI.
General Vaughan came down the river from Kingston, smelling of arson. Sir Henry Clinton destroyed the Highland forts and retired to New York. The Continental outposts forthwith reoccupied Peekskill.

With them came Peter Skerrett, and there were bristles on his upper lip a week or so old.

He hastened at once toward the Bilsby farm, where the Brothertofts had found shelter. He turned aside on the way to see the ruins of the Manor-House.

It was still brilliant October. If the trees that first put on crimsons and purples now were sere and bare, later comers kept up the pageant. Indeed, the great oaks had only just consented to the change of season. It took sharp frosts to scourge green summer out of them.

The woods seemed as splendid to Peter Skerrett as when he looked over them on the day of his adventure here. Nothing was altered, except in one forlorn spot.

There, instead of the fine old dignified Manor-House, appeared only a dew-sodden heap of cinders and ashes, — the tragic monument of a tragedy.

“It did well to perish,” thought Skerrett. “It had sheltered crime. Its moral atmosphere was tainted. The pure had fled from it. Happiness never could dwell there.”

Peter stood leaning against a great oak-tree, and studying the scene. The autumn leaves around him dallied and drifted, and fell into the lap of earth. He lingered, he hesitated, and let his looks dally with the vagrant leaves, as they circled and floated in the quiet air, choosing the spots where they would lay them down and die.

Just now he was in such eager haste; and now he hesitated, he lingered, he shrank from an interview he had ardently anticipated.

The fair girl he had aided to save from a miserable fate, — her face, seen for a moment dimly by starlight, ever haunted him. These heavy sorrows, coming upon her young life, filled him with infinite pity. As he thought of her, the undeveloped true lover in him began to develop.

And now, standing in this place where he had first seen her in a moment of peril, where he had felt the grateful pressure of her hand, he perceived how large and vigorous his passion had grown from these small beginnings.

He feared the meeting he had yearned for. It was to assure him whether this was really love he felt, or but another passing fancy like the others past.

And if it were the great, deep love he hoped, — if, when he saw her face, and touched her hand, and heard her voice again, his soul recognized hers as the one companion soul, — this filled him with another dread.

For if to know himself a lover, and half foresee that, after long and thorough proof of worthiness, he might be beloved, were the earliest thrill of an immortal joy; so this meeting, if it named him lover, and yet convinced him by sure tokens that his love would never be returned, was the first keen pang of a sorrow immeasurable.

No wonder that he waited, and traced the circuits of the falling leaves, and simulated to his mind a hundred motives for delay.

It was so still in the warm, sunshiny afternoon that he could hear the crumbling cinders fall in the ruins, and all about him the ceaseless rustle of the showering foliage.

But presently a noise more articulate sounded on the dry carpet of the path behind him. A light footstep was coming slowly toward this desolated spot. It seemed to Skerrett that he divined whose step would bring her hither to read again the lesson of the ruins.

He walked forward a little, that his sudden appearance against the oak might not startle the new-comer. He would not turn. It was new to the brave and ardent fellow to perceive timidity in his heart, and to evade an encounter with any danger.

The footstep quickened, — a woman’s surely. In a moment he heard a sweet voice call his name.

A shy and timorous call, a gentle, trembling tone, — it came through the sunshine and made all the air music.

Her voice! It was the voice he had longed and dreaded to hear. But now he feared no more. He believed that his immortal joy was begun, and these tremors of his soul, in answer to the trembles of her call, could never be the earliest warnings of an agony.

He saw her face again, fairer than he had dreamed, in the happy sunlight. He felt again the thankful pressure of her hand. He listened to her earnest words of gratitude.

They spoke a little — he gravely, she tearfully — of the tragedy of her mother’s life. This shadow deepened the tenderness of the lover. And she, perceiving this, drew closer to him, giving tokens, faint but sure, as he fancied, of the slow ripening happiness to grow henceforth.

Then she guided him to see his friend, her father.

The level sunbeams of evening went before them in the path. They disappeared amid the wood. Golden sunshine flowed after them. The trees showered all the air full of golden leaves of good omen.

It seems the fair beginning of a faithful love.

Will it end in doubt, sorrow, shame, and forgiveness; or in trust, joy, constancy, and peace?

THE END.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXVI


text: Talk:Edwin Brothertoft

title: Talk:Edwin Brothertoft


text:
Author:José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa

Works

 * José Sócrates on the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon (2007)


text:
Author:James Maury

Works

 * Maury, Reverend James vs Henry, Patrick -- "The Parson's Opinion Of The Parson's Cause" (1763)
 * Memoirs of a Huguenot Family (1893), edited by Ann Maury

title: Author:James Maury


text:
Lessee of Pollard's Heirs v. Kibbe/Concurrence McLean

Mr. Justice M'LEAN.

I agree to the judgment of reversal in this case; and as my opinion is mainly founded on the construction of the second section of the act of 1824, without reference to the exceptions it contains, I will state, in a very few words, my views in regard to that section.

It declares 'that all the right and claim of the United States to so many of the lots of ground east of Water street, and between Church street and North Boundary street, now known as water lots, as are situated between the channel of the river and the front of the lots known under the Spanish government as water lots, in the said city of Mobile, whereon improvements have been made, be, and the same are hereby vested in the several proprietors and occupants of each of the lots heretofore fronting on the river Mobile; except in cases where such proprietor or occupant has alienated his right to any such lot, now designated as a water lot, or the Spanish government has made a new grant,' &c.

The lots first named in this section are those to which the right of the United States is relinquished; and those lots are now denominated water lots, in contradistinction to those called water lots under the Spanish government.

'All the right and claim of the United States is relinquished to so many of the lots of ground'-then follows a description of the locality of these lots, lying 'east of Water street, and between Church street and North Boundary street, now known as water lots, as are situated between the channel of the river and the front of the lots known under the Spanish government as water lots, in the said city of Mobile:' and here the description of the locality of these lots ends, and the words 'whereon improvements have been made,' follow. Now I entertain no doubt the improvements must be made on the lots first named, and to which the United States relinquish their right; and not on those lots named merely to show the local situation of the present water lots. And this is the construction given to the section by the Supreme Court of Alabama.

The improvements then must be made on the water lot; and the lot in controversy, in this case, is a water lot.

The Court instructed the jury that 'if the lot claimed by the plaintiffs had been improved at and previous to the 26th May, 1824, and was east of Water street, and immediately in front of the lot so conveyed to John Forbes and Company, then the lot claimed, passed by the act of Congress, to those at that time owning and occupying the lot so as above conveyed to John Forbes and Company; and that it was immaterial who made the improvements on the disputed lot.'

The second section gives to the proprietor of the lot fronting the water lot, such water lot, provided it has been improved.

Now two things must concur to give a title under this act; and these are, proprietorship of the front lot, and improvements on the water lot. But, by whom must these improvements be made or owned, at the passage of the law?

The act does not specify; and the Court instructed the jury that if improvements were made, it was not material by whom they were made. Can this be the true construction of the act?

Congress did not intend to give to the proprietor of the front lot the water lot, unless it was improved; nor did they intend to give to the person who had improved the water lot, such lot, unless he was the proprietor of the front lot. The improvements of the water lot were as essential to the claim of title under this act, as the proprietorship of the front lot. And can it be supposed that Congress intended to give the water lot to the proprietor of the front lot, for the reason that the water lot had been improved by a stranger? In other words, that Congress, by a solemn act of legislation, would give a lot of ground to one man, because it had been improved by another? This is the principle asserted by this construction; and it is so unjust, and so directly opposed to the legislation of Congress, in regard to the pre-emptive rights, on the ground of improvements, that I am unwilling to sanction it. There is no instance in the entire history of legislation by Congress, where they have sanctioned such a principle. The policy has been to secure to the individual the benefits of his own labour and expenditure. And I am of the opinion that unless the proprietor of the front lot was, on the 26th May, 1824, also the proprietor of the improvements on the water lot, he can claim no title under the act.