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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VI

Chapter VI.
When Pyramus and Thisbe, when Cœur de Lion and Blondel, want speech of each other, Wall will ever have “a cranny right and sinister” for their whispers, will “show a chink to blink through with their eyne.”

Breakfast was over. Voltaire was in the pantry, clashing dish and pan for a signal. Lucy waited her moment to dart in and get her hopes of escape made into certainties.

“I am going up stairs, Lucy,” said her mother, “to give Dewitt her last hints about your wedding-dress. Come up presently and try it on.”

She went out, leaving lover and lady together.

Kerr stood before the fire in his favorite posture. His face was red, his jacket was red. He produced the effect of a great unmeaning daub of scarlet in a genre — mauvais genre — picture.

The big booby grew embarrassed with himself. The quiet presence of this young girl abashed him. He knew that his suit was an insult to her. He saw that she did not appreciate his feet and inches. Neither his cheeks nor his shoulders nor his calves touched her heart. His vanity had been hurt, and he felt a spiteful triumph that she was in his power.

This morning he was ashamed of himself. It is a grievous thing that men cannot go to bed tipsy and wake up without headaches and with self-respect. Perhaps it will be different when Chaos comes again.

Kerr felt disgusted with himself, and embarrassed. He wanted to talk to cover his awkwardness. He did not know what to say. The complaint is not uncommon.

“I suppose she knows it’s a fine day, and wont thank me for telling her,” he thought. “Vaughan’s trip up the river, — that’s talked out. I made the pun about Esopus and Esop’s fables, that Rawdon got off last night, and she didn’t laugh. I wish I had Jack André’s tongue. I have half a mind to cut it out of him — the dashed whipper-snapper — for trying to get her to flirt with him yesterday. I suppose I ought to be making love now. But she has never let me come near enough to make what I call love. Well, I must say something. Here goes! Ahem! Lucy — Miss Lucy.”

“Sir.”

“It’s a very fine day.”

“Very.”

“A most uncommonly fine day for this doosed climate.”

No reply.

“I’d box the dumb thing’s ears if she was Mrs. K.,” thought the Major. “But she sha’n’t silence me. I’ll give her another chance. Ahem! Miss Lucy! Wouldn’t you like to stroll out and take the air?”

“No, I thank you. Do not let me detain you.”

“I say, you know, we’re to be married tomorrow. You needn’t be so infernally distant.”

“My mother wishes me to join her with the dressmakers.”

“Well, if you wont come, you wont,” says Kerr, taking himself off in dudgeon.

He walked out upon the lawn. The air was nine-oxygen azote of the purest proof. He swallowed it boozily, as if it were six-water grog.

Lucy hied to the trysting-place, where the arch-plotter was waiting amid pans and dishes.

“Voltaire, tell me!” she cried. And here tears interrupted her, and gushed as if she intended to use the biggest pan for a lacrymatory.

“Don’t cry, Miss Lucy,” the old fellow says. “It’s good news!”

At which she only wept the more.

Without much knowledge of the chemistry of tears, Voltaire saw that spending them relieved and calmed the young lady. Meanwhile, to be talking on indifferent subjects until her first burst was over, he said, “I saw Major Scrammel at Fishkill, Miss Lucy. He asked after your health.”

“I am. obliged to him.” The name seemed to act like a dash of cold water. These Majors fatigued her. Scrammel Yankee, Emerick Hessian, Kerr British, — she liked none of them. She began to feel a disgust for the grade.

“My father!” she said, with her whole heart in the word, “tell me of him. He has not forgotten me. He loves me. He will save me from this — this —” A sob drowned the epithet.

“He loves you dearly,” Voltaire responded.

“Lub,” he still pronounced the precious word. He brought his two thick lips together to sound the final “b,” instead of lightly touching his upper teeth against his lower lip and breathing out “ve” final.

This great fact of love established, with all its sequel, by a single word, Lucy, womanlike, desired to know that this dear new lover no longer misunderstood her. She must be satisfied that she stood right in his esteem before she could take thought of her own dangers.

“You told him,” she said, eagerly, “that I was not an unnatural daughter, — only deceived and deluded by this cruel woman?”

Tears had started again, as she thought of the misery he must have suffered for her disloyalty. But indignation at her mother burned them up, and she closed her sentence sternly.

“He sees through it all,” the old ambassador replied.

“How did he look? Not very sad, I hope?” she said.

Womanlike again, she must have the person before her eyes. She must see him, a visible being, — that she could take to her heart with infinite love and pity and hope, — before she could listen to his message of comfort to her.

“He looked pretty old, Miss Lucy. His hair’s grown gray. It oughtn’t to. He’s a boy still, — only a little better than forty. He could make his life all over again yet. But he looked old and settled down sad. He’s got a sargeant’s coat on, instead of a general’s; but he looks, into his face, as if he know’d all generals know, and a heap more.”

“My dear father!” interjected Lucy in the middle of Voltaire’s description. And she thought what a beloved task it would be for her to renew and restore that ruined life.

“And now, Voltaire,” she said, “can he protect me?”

“We talked it all over. He didn’t see anything he could do. He said he was too broken-hearted to plan for anybody.”

Poor Lucy! all her hopes thus dashed down! She could almost hear her own heart break.

But Voltaire continued: “He had guv” — (no Tombigbee, old boy!) — “given it all up, and I was goin’ off feelin’ mighty low, mighty low, I tell you, Miss Lucy. I started off for the woods and sot down, lookin’ for a squerril-hole to git into, and die like a four-legs. Jess then, jess before I’d found my dyin’ bed, I heerd somebody screech, ‘Voltaire, Voltaire!’ like mad. Fust I thought ’t was the Holy Angels. Then I thought praps ’t was the Black Debbls, prowlin’. I looked round the woods, pretty skeered, and heerd chestnuts drap. Then come the yell again, and your father lighted right down on me and dragged me back like a go-cart. I didn’t know what was comin’; but he yanked me up the bank to the old well, afront of Squire Van Wyck’s farm-house, and there I saw —”

At this point of his eager recital Voltaire’s ancient bellow had to pause and draw breath.

“Saw!” cried Lucy equally eager, peopling this pause with a great legion of upstart hopes, all in buff and blue, fine old Continentals complete from boots to queues; but strangers to her, and therefore without faces.

“Saw Major Skerrett,” gasped Voltaire.

All that legion of hopes in Lucy’s brain suddenly condensed into a single heroic Continental vision, with the name Skerrett for a face. She was sure this new-comer meant. She could feel her just now breaking heart tie itself together with a chain, each link a letter of the name Skerrett.

“Another Major!” she said, half impatiently.

There was almost a shade of coquetry in her little protest against this stranger personage. The woman was not dead in her yet.

“Anudder Major ob anudder stuff. De good God, not de Debbl, — he make dis one.”

“Voltaire, don’t talk so!”

Did she object to his fact in physiology, or to his pronunciation?

Voltaire, with bellows rested, now began to describe the new hero with enthusiasm. His touches were crude, but picturesque, — a charcoal sketch.

“Major Skerrett, Miss Lucy. O my! what a beautiful moustache he had! jess the color of ripe chestnut-leaves, and curling down on each side, so.”

The black forefinger described an ogee on either black lip.

Lucy did not interrupt. She must have her correct image of the new actor before she inquired his rôle. She perceived already that he was not to be a sicklied Hamlet.

Her first picture of the hero had been a figure in a Continental uniform, with the name Skerrett instead of a face.

Second picture: Lucy sees the mere name vanish. Two chestnut-leaves, fine gold as October can paint them, broad in the middle, blunt at the but, taper toward the point, serrated along the edges, dispose themselves to her mind’s eye in the air, and form a moustache. She looks at her vision of this isolated feature, and thinks, “It is much prettier than Major Emerick’s.”

“A go-ahead nose,” continues Voltaire, without pause.

Lucy inserts a go-ahead nose into the blank, over and a little ahead of the moustache. Third picture.

“No mumps round his cheeks and chin,” the describer went on.

Not a mump had ever disfigured the cheeks Lucy hereupon balanced on either side of the nose and the chin which she had located under the two chestnut-leaves. Picture fourth.

“Eyes blue as that saucer,” — Voltaire pointed to a piece of delicate china, — “and they look like the Holy Angels.”

Into their sockets Lucy inserted a pair of orbs, saucer in color not in shape, and gave them a holy, angelic expression. She inspected the growing portrait with her own sweet eyes, — they were hazel, “an excellent thing in woman,” — and began to think the illumined face very charming.

“Lots of tan on his bark,” resumed the painter in words.

Lucy dipped her pencil in umber and gave the bark of cheeks, chin, and nose a nut-brown tint, that bravely backed the gold of the moustache.

“Yaller hair under his cocked hat.”

“Yellow! if you please, Voltaire,” she protested, and with skilful thought she adjusted the coiffure.

“No queue.”

An imaginary queue, tied with a tumbled black ribbon, had been bobbing in the air near the hero’s cerebellum. Lucy docked it, and, with a scornful gesture, sent it whirling off into the Unseen.

“Now,” says Voltaire, “you jess stick in Troot (Truth), Wercher (Virtue), Kerridge (Courage), and all the other good things into that are face: you jess clap on a smile that’ll make a dough heart in a bosom turn into light gingerbread; and give him a look that can make stubbed toes want to wheel about and turn about and dance breakdowns, and is stickin’ plaster to every scratch on an old free colored gentleman’s shins: you jess think you see a Major what Liberty and all the Holy Angels is pullin’ caps for, and all the Debbls is shakin’ huf away from where he stands: you jess git all that in your eye, Miss Lucy, and you’ve got Major Skerrett.”

The picture was complete. Truth, Virtue, Courage, and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly’s name, into a brother tar’s arm with India ink. She had given the hero’s face a smile, yeasty, sugary, and pungent enough to convert the dullest dough heart into light gingerbread. She had bestowed upon her ideal a look that would be surgery to scarred shins and light fantasy to the weariest toes. Now she passed her finger over the chestnut-leaf moustache to smooth down its serrated edges. The portrait was done. Lucy surveyed it an instant, and blushed to think it was indeed a Major that women and angels might pull caps for.

She blushed to herself — the simple maid — and felt a slight shame at her longing to see if the real man was identical with her ideal.

This child — remember she was but eighteen, and had been kept by herself and her mother, a complete child until just now — this child had hitherto had no ideal of a hero except that he must be Kerr’s opposite. We know already her verdict upon the British officers. Of Putnam’s family, Scrammel she distrusts; Radière she would like as a friend, if he were not so Gallic, dyspeptic, and testy; Humphreys is ridiculous, with his grand airs and his prosy poetasms; Livingston amuses her; — voila tout!

“And can this gentleman help?” she asked earnestly, as soon as she had his person before her eyes.

“Help!” says Voltaire; “he can’t help helping. That’s his business under this canopy.”

The negro stated briefly the scheme for Kerr’s capture and her abduction.

Lucy comprehended the whole in a moment.

“Major Skerrett sent you a message, Miss Lucy,” says the successful envoy, closing his report.

“Me!” she said. She massacred a little scruple, that Major Kerr’s betrothed ought not to be receiving messages from strange majors. “What is it? He is very kind to think of me.”

“He said, ‘Tell Miss Brothertoft to be brave, to be prudent, and to keep her room with a headache, until we are ready to start.’”

“It makes me brave and prudent, now that I have a strong friend to trust. But the headache I had is all gone. I never felt so well and happy in my life.”

“Look at him!” Voltaire rejoined, pointing to Kerr, through the pantry window. “That will make you ache from your head to your heels.”

She did look, and ached at once with fresh resentment and disgust.

Kerr was leaning limp against a tree, breathing tipsily his nine-oxygen azote. The golden hills, the blue river, and the mountains, blue and gold, had no charms for him. He was thinking, “Almost time to make it seven bells. I can’t touch anything stronger than six-water grog this morning. O my head!”

“Pretty fellow fur a lubber to my young lady!” says Voltaire. His mispronunciation revealed a truth.

This faithful blackamoor now proceeded to act Othello relating his adventures. He had a tragicomic episode to impart of his “hair-breadth ’scapes,” “of being taken by the insolent foe,” of all “his portance in his travel’s history”; and what he suffered, shin and sole, in the “rough quarries, rocks, and hills” back of Anthony’s Nose, while he dodged by night along the by-paths.

Lucy “gave him for his pains a world of sighs,” and “loved him for the dangers he had passed” in her service.

“Now,” said the loyal squire, in conclusion, “I must set you something to do, Miss Lucy.”

“What?” she asked, trembling a little at responsibility.

“Send Dewitt and Sally Bilsby off home! They’ll want a frolic after working so hard on your wedding-dress. We must have the house to ourselves to-night.”

“To-night! Lucy’s heart bounded and sunk. Yes, she must be free to-night, or to-morrow would make her a slave.

“Miss Lucy,” whispered Voltaire, “two of ’em was here already before sunrise.”

“Not the ——” She hesitated.

“Not the Major! No; old Sam Galsworthy and Hendrecus Canady. You know ’em. They come to see how the land lay.”

“Mother calls; I must go,” said Lucy, in a tremor.

She gave one look through the window at Kerr, leaning limp against a chestnut-tree. The Skerrett-moustache-colored leaves in myriad pairs shook over him. She seemed to see a myriad of faces, with go-ahead noses, no mumps, angelic blue eyes, bronzed skins, and truth and courage in every line, looking out of the tree, and signalizing her, “Be brave! be prudent!”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VI


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 most certain truth, not to be doubted of. I shall only say, that there was as much ground, in the hour of it, to countenance the said Groton woman, and to apprehend and imprison, on her accusations, as there is now to countenance these afflicted persons, and to apprehend and imprison on their accusations. But furthermore, it is worthy of our deepest consideration, that in the conclusion, (after multitudes have been imprisoned, and many have been put to death), these afflicted persons should own that all was a mere fancy and delusion of the devil's, as the Groton woman did own and acknowledge with respect to herself; if, I say, in after times, this be acknowledged by them, how can the justices, judges, or any else concerned in these matters, look back upon these things without the greatest of sorrow and grief imaginable? I confess to you, it makes me tremble when I seriously consider of this thing. I have heard that the chief judge has expressed himself very hardly of the accused woman at Groton, as though he believed her to be a witch to this day: but by such as knew the said woman, this is judged a very uncharitable opinion of the said judge, and I do not understand that any are proselyted thereto. (Pages 73, 74.)

Thomas Hutchinson, in the "History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay" (Boston, 1767), refers to this case and says: -

In 1671, Elizabeth Knapp, another ventriloqua, alarmed the people of Groton in much the same manner as Ann Cole had done those of Hartford; but her daemon was not so cunning, for instead of confining himself to old women, he rail'd at the good minister of the town and other persons of good character, and the people could not then be prevailed on to believe him, but believed the girl, when she confessed she had been deluded, and that the devil had tormented her in the shape of good persons; and so she escaped the punishment due to her fraud and imposture. (ii. 17.)

Samuel G. Drake, in his "Annals of Witchcraft in New England" (Boston, 1869), also mentions the case of Elizabeth Knapp, and says: - William Stoughton, Lieutenant-Governor

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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 This Story has been given to show how, in those Times, a tolerably severe Case of Hysterics could be magnified by those who had an exceedingly large Maggot of Credulity in their Brains. Groton is only thirty-three Miles from Boston, but the Story, in travelling even that short Distance, had no Doubt swollen into such Proportions, as to have but a faint Likeness to the Original.

The Condition of Elizabeth Knap was probably very similar to that of Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), who, for her Pretensions to Inspiration, "Convulsions and strange Motions of Body," was put to Death in the Time of Henry the Eighth, 1584. (Pages 132, 133.)

John Willard, who was hung as a witch at Salem on August 19, 1692, had previously lived in Groton. The papers relating to his arrest and trial are still on file in the office of the clerk of the courts for Essex County at Salem, and give many particulars of the unfortunate affair. They are found in the first volume of "Witchcraft Papers," and numbered from 91 to 107 inclusive. The trial was held before a special term of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, of which the records are now lost.

A warrant for Willard's arrest was issued on May 10, 1692, addressed "To the Constable of Salem" and put in the hands of John Putnam, Jr., who made a return dated May 12, that he "went to the house of the Vsuall abode of John Willards and made search for him, and in seuerall other houses and places butt could not find him; and his relatione and friends then gaue mee accompt that to theire best knowledge he was ffleed."

Seven indictments were found against him, and the original copies of four of them are still in existence. These all charge him with practising his sorceries on various spinsters.

According to Robert Calef, in his "More Wonders of the Invisible World " (London, 1700): -

John Willard, had been imployed to fetch in several that were accused; but taking dissatisfaction from his being sent, to fetch up


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 some that he had better thoughts of, he declined the Service, and presently after he himself was accused of the same Crime, and that with such vehemency, that they sent after him to apprehend him; he had made his Escape as far as Nashawag, about 40 Miles from Salem; yet 'tis said those Accusers did then presently tell the exact time, saying, now Willard is taken. (Page 104.)

It will be noticed that Calef leaves it to be inferred that Willard was arrested at Nashawag, which is another form of Nashua, and an old name of Lancaster. The Nashua River is sometimes called the Nashawag, in the early records of Groton. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft" (Boston, 1867), says definitely that Willard "was seized in Groton" (ii. 173); but I do not find his authority for the statement. Lancaster may have been the place of his arrest. Willard had previously lived at Groton, which was then a frontier town; and after his flight from Salem he would naturally have gone thither.

The following are copies of some of the original papers: -

''Anno Regni Regis et Reginae et Mariae nunc Angliae, &c. Quarto.''

Essex ss

The Jurors for our Sovereigne Lord and Lady the King & Queen presents that John Willard of Salem Village in the County of Essex husband the Eighteenth day of May in the ffourth year of the Reigne of our Sovereigne Lord and Lady William & Mary by the Grace of God of England Scottland ffrance & Ireland King & Queen Defenders of the ffaith &c: Divers other Dayes & times as well before as after, certaine detestable arts called Witchcrafts & Sorceries wickedly & feloniously hath vsed, Practised & Exercised at & within the Towne of Salem in the County of Essex aforesaid in. vpon. and agt one Mercy Lewis of Salem Village aforesaid in the County aforesaid single woman by which said wicked arts the said Mercy Lewis the said Eighteenth Day of May in the ffourth year abovesaid and divers other Dayes & times as well before as after was & is hurt, tortured afflicted consumed Pined wasted & tormented, against the Peace of our Sovereigne Lord &


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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VII

Chapter VII.
Portentous all the morning was Voltaire to Sappho.

Now cookery, like chemistry, must have peace to perform its experiments in.

Poor Sappho, with her husband darting into the kitchen, looking mysterious, exploding “Hush!” and darting off again, was as much flustered as a nervous chemical professor when his pupils jeer his juggles with cabbage-liquor, and turn up rebellious noses at his olefiant gas.

Sappho’s great experiment of dinner suffered. She put sugar in her soup and salt in her pudding. She sowed allspice for peppercorns, and vice versa. She overdid the meat that should have been underdone. She roasted her goose until its skin was plate armor. She baked her piecrust hard as Westchester shale. Yesterday’s dinner was sublime; to-day’s would be ridiculous. Conspiracy upsets domestic economy, as it does political.

When Voltaire had deranged his wife with dark hints, he proceeded to perplex his son.

Plato was lord of the stables. These were times of war. Westchester was beginning to suffer for being neutral ground for rebel and tory to plunder. Rents came slow at Brothertoft Manor, and when they came were short. Economy must be consulted. That crafty counsellor suggested that Plato’s helpers in the stable should be discharged, and he do three men’s work. He was allowed, however, Bilsby juvenissimus and another urchin from the Manor to “chore” for him. They were unpaid attachés. They did free service as stable-boys, for the honor and education of the thing, for the privilege of chewing straws among the horses, and for the luxury of a daily bellyful of pork and pudding, and a nightly bed in the loft.

Voltaire went out to the stable. The six white horses of famous Lincolnshire stock stood, three on this side, three on that. Their long tails occasionally switched to knock off the languid last flies of summer.

Voltaire stopped at the coach-house door to drive out a noisy regiment of chickens. A lumbering old coach, of the leathern conveniency order, was shoved away in a corner. There is always such a vehicle in every old family stable, — a stranded ark, that no horse-power will ever stir again.

“Nineteen year ago,” thought the ancient Brothertoft retainer, “nineteen year ago last June, I drew Mister Edwin and that Billop gal, in that conveniency, less than two hundred yards from her house in Wall Street to Trinity Church, to be married. I heerd the Trinity bells say, ‘Edwin Brothertoft, don’t marry a Billop!’ I felt it in my bones that she’d turn out mean. Her money brought worse luck than we’d ever had before. And the good luck hasn’t got holt yet.”

“Plato,” says he, stepping into the great picturesque stable, half full of sunshine, half of shade, and half of hay, fragrant as the Fourth of July.

“Sir!” says Plato, drawing himself up, and giving a military salute. He had seen much soldiering going on of late, and liked to play at it, — a relic, perhaps, of Gorilla imitativeness.

“Them boys don’t look to me in good health.”

Voltaire pointed to Bilsby and mate. They were both chewing straws, — a pair of dull sharps, like most young clodhoppers. They could tell a calf from a colt with supernatural keenness; but were of the class which gets itself well Peter-Funked before its manhood learns the time of day.

“Dey’s fat, ragged, and sassy as ary boys dis chile ever seed,” rejoined Plato.

“Bery weakly dey looks,” continued the conspirator. “Fallin’ away horrible! Neber see sich sickly boys ’n all my born days. Chestnuts is what dey wants. Worms is de trouble. Boys always gits worms onless dey eats suthin on to a bushel of chestnuts in de fall.”

The two ragamuffins dropped their straws, turned pale, and began to feel snakes wake and crawl within them.

“Now, boys,” says Voltaire impressively, “if you want ter perwent dem varmint, jess you put fur de woods an’ fill yourselves plum full ob chestnuts.”

“But chestnuts has worms, too,” objected Bilsby.

“So much de better; dey’ll eat yourn. Go ’long now. Stay hum to-night, and don’t come roun’ here fore to-morrow noon. Be keerfle now! Eat all to-day; and pick to-morrow to keep. You don’t look to me like boys who is prepared to die.”

The pair obeyed, and departed solemnly, Nothing but chestnuts could save them from the worm that never dieth. There were two very grave and earnest lads that day cracking burrs in the groves of Brothertoft Manor.

Plato stared in consternation as he saw his regiment disbanded.

Voltaire winked with both eyes, and chuckled enormously.

“Don’t you ask me no questions, Plato,” says he, “an’ you wont have no lies to complex yer mind. I meant to clare de kitchen, ole fokes, young fokes, an so I scared off dem boys, ho, ho! Now I’s gwine to gib you a conundrum, Plato.”

Plato let go Volante’s tail, which he was combing, and pricked up his ears.

“What does a young lady do when she don’t want to marry her fust husband?”

“Marries her second,” guessed Plato, cheerfully.

“Plato! I’se ashamed of you. Dat would be bigamy.”

The crestfallen groom gave it up.

“You gib it up,” says the propounder. “Well; she says to her coachman, — it’s bery mysterous dat de coachman’s name is Plato. She says to him, Plato!”

“What?” interjected the other.

“Neber interrump de speaker!” chided Voltaire. “She says, ‘Plato, you know my mare.’ Says he, ‘Your mare Volanty, Miss?’ Says she, — it’s mysterous, but Volanty is her name, — ‘Now, Plato, you jess poot anudder oat in her manger, an groom her slick as a het griddle, and see de girts and de bridle is right.’ And says she, ‘Plato, don’t you complex yer mind wedder de answer to dat conundrum ain’t suthin’ about runnin’ away. But jess you wait till de sebben seal is opened.”

Here the namesake of him of Ferney gave a wise binocular wink.

The other philosopher’s namesake also eclipsed his whites with a binocular wink. He divined where his sire had been travelling in the past thirty-six hours. He had nodded through the watches of last night to let the senior in undiscovered. He knew of the interview with Old Sam Galsworthy and Hendrecus Canady, an hour before sunrise. He comprehended enough of the plot to enjoy it as a magnificent conundrum, which he could guess at all day, sure that the seven seals of mystery would be opened, by and by.

Voltaire limped back to the house and his pantry. His butler countenance fell, as he contemplated the empty bottles of yesterday’s banquet. He could almost have wept them full, if he had known any chemistry to change salt tears to wine.

“How those redcoats drink!” he muttered. “Our cellar wont last many more such campaigns. I must get up some fresh wine for to-day, and a little brandy to deteriorate Major Kerr.”

Burns wrote poetry as he pleased, in Scotch, in English, or in a United-Kingdom brogue. Voltaire takes the same liberty, and talks now rank Tombigbee, now severe Continental, and now a lingo of his own. Most men are equally inconsistent, and use one slang in the saloon and another in the salon.

Voltaire lighted a candle, and descended into the cellar.

“It’s resky,” thought he, “to bring a light, without a lantern, among all this straw and rubbish. Fire wouldn’t let go, if it once cotched here. Bat nobody ever comes except me.”

A flaring dip, very free with sparks, was certainly dangerous in this den. Who has not seen such a tinder-box of a place under a careless old country-house? Capital but awesome regions they offer for juvenile hide and seek! How densely their black corners are populated with Bugaboo! The hider and the seeker shudder alike in those gloomy caverns, and are glad enough to find each other, touch hands and bolt for daylight.

Habit, or possibly his complexion in harmony with dusky hues, made Voltaire independent of the terrors of the place. He marched along, carefully sheltering his candle with a big paw, brown on the back and red on the palm.

Combustibles were faintly visible in the glimmer. There were empty wine-boxes overflowing with the straw that once swaddled their bottles. There was a barrel of curly shavings, a barrel of rags quite limp and out of curl, a barrel of fine flour from the Phillipse Mills, a barrel of apples very fragrant, one of onions very odorous, a barrel of turnips white and shapely, and a bin of potatoes, of the earth, earthy, and amorphous as clods. There were the staves and hoops of a rotten old beer-cask, leaning together, and trying to hold each other up, like the decayed members of a dead faction. There was a ciderless cider-cask, beginning to gape at the seams, like a barge out of water. Rubbish had certainly called a congress in this cellar, and the entire rubbish interest in all its departments had sent deputies. Old furniture had a corner to itself, and it was melancholy to see there the bottomless chairs that people long dead had sat through, the posts of old bedsteads sleeping higgledy-piggledy, and old tables that had seen too many revels in their day, and were tipsily trying to tumble under themselves. Then there was a heap of old clothes and ole clo’, ghostly in their forlornness, lifting up arms and holding forth skirts in vain signal for the ragman. It was a gloomy, musty, cavernous place, and Voltaire’s faint candle only shed a little shady light around.

The butler unlocked the wine-room door. Batteries of dusty bottles in their casemates aimed at him, with flashes of yellow-seal at their muzzles.

“Three bottles for Major Kerr, — his last,” he said. “One, very particular, for Major Skerrett when he comes. One of our French Gutter de Rosy brandy to qualify with. Ranks looks broken here since Major Kerr come. I must close ’em up to-morrow. Bottles likes to lie touchin’, so the wine can ripen all alike.”

The old fallow’s hands were so full that he could not lock his door conveniently. He left it open for his next visit of reorganization.

He limped off, running the gauntlet of the combustibles. No spark flew, no cinder fell. That masterful plaything, fire, could not be allowed to sport with the old rubbish.

How Voltaire proceeded to carry on his private share of the plot by deteriorating Kerr’s allowance of Madeira with Cognac, is a secret of the butler’s pantry. It shall not be here revealed. Why deteriorate the morals of 1860 by recalling forgotten methods of cheating? Adulteration is a lost art, thank Bacchus! We drink only pure juices now. Only honest wines for our honest dollars in this honest age.

Now from the cellar we will mount to the room above stairs, where Penelope and her maids — no, not Penelope, for she was loyal and disconsolate — where Mrs. Brothertoft and her maids are at work at the san-benito for tomorrow’s auto-da-fé.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VII


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 Lady the King & Queen. and against the forme of the Statute in that case made & Provided

 * Witnesses
 * Mercy Lewis
 * Abigail Williams
 * Mary Walcott
 * Susanna Sheldon
 * Ann Puttnam Senior
 * Ann Puttnam Junior
 * Elizabeth Hubbard

Another warrant was issued on May 15, 1692: "To The Marshall of the County of Essex or to the Constables in Salem or any other Marshal or Marshalls Constable or Constables within this their Majes Colony or Terretory of the Massachusetts in New England."

This warrant was "To be prosecuted according to the direction of Constable John putnam of Salem Village who goes with the same."

The following endorsement is made on the paper: -

I haue apprehended John Wilard of Salam Veleg acorden to the tener of this warant and brought him before your worsheps Date 18 May 1692

by me. John Putnam Constoble of Salam

The Deposition of Samuel Parris aged about 39 years, & Nathanell Ingersoll aged about fifty & eight yeares & also Thomas Putman aged about fourty yeares all of Salem -

testifyeth & saith that Eliz: Hubbard, Mary Warren & Ann Putman & John Indian were exceedingly tortured at the examination of John Willard of Salem Husbandman, before the honoured Magistrates the 18 May 1692 & also that upon his looking upon Eliz: Hubbard she was knockt down, & also that some of the afflicted & particularly Susannah Sheldon then & there testifyed that they saw a black man whispering him in the ear, & that said Sheldon could not come near to said Willard but was knockt down, and also that Mary


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26 Warren in a fit being carried to him the said Willard she said Warren was presently well upon his grasping her arm, & farther that severall of the afflicted also then testified, that divers of those he had murthered then rose up against him, & farther that he could by no means rightly repeat the Lords Prayer thô he made manifold assayes.

Mr. Samuel Parris and Nathanael Ingersoll and: thomas putnam did uppon the oath which they had taken did before us the Juris of inquest owne this thar testimony: this 3. day of June: 92:

Sworn in Court by Mr Parris & Tho: Putman

june the .3. 1692:

Sarah Vibber aged 36 yeares or thear abouts testifie and saith the be for Jno Welard was exammend at the uilleg I being in Left Engorsols Chambor I saw ye aporition of john willard com to mary wolcot & marcy luis & hurt them griuosly & almost choked Them Then I tould of it & emediatly ye said wiliard fel upon me & tormented me greuesly & pinched me. & threw me down

Sarah uibber: ownid this har testimony before us the Jurriars for Inqwest: this. 3 . of June: 1692

Jurat in Curia

The deposition of Lydia Necols aged. 46 yeares and of Margaret Knight. aged. 20 . yeares who testefy and say.

That the wife of John Willard being at her fathers house when the said Willard liued at Groten she made a lamentable complaynt how cruelty her husband had beaten her. she thought her selfe that she should neuer recouer of the blows he had giuen her: the next morninge he was got into a litle hole vnder the stayres. and then she thought some thinge extra ordinary had befallen him then he ran out at the doore: and ran up. a steep hill. almost impossible for any man to run vp: as she sayd: then she tooke her mare and rid away. fearing some euil had ben intended agaynst her. and when she came to the house of Henery or Beniamin Willard she told how it was with her and the sayd Henery Willard or both went to looke after him and met him comeinge in a strange distracted frame

The deposition of Thomas Baly aged 36 yeares who testefieth and sayth.


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Rh to English books, persons and things which are scattered up and down his recently published Pensées. But we know that he attended some exciting debates in Parliament, and we know also how profoundly his study of English institutions influenced the Spirit of Laws.

On the preparation for that great work Montesquieu was engaged for the next seventeen years of his life. In 1734 appeared the Considerations on the Greatness and Decay of the Romans, which might be treated as a first instalment of its contents. Machiavelli had treated Roman history from the point of view of a practical statesman, and had used it as a storehouse of warnings and examples for the guidance of an Italian prince. 'Chance,' he said, 'leaves great room for prudence in shaping the course of events.' Bossuet wrote as a theologian, and sought for evidence of 'the secret judgements of God on the Roman empire.' Montesquieu wrote as a political philosopher, and tried to find in the history of a particular state the application of certain broad general principles. 'It is not fortune that rules the world. There are general causes, moral or physical, on which the rise, the stability, the fall of governments depend. If a state is ruined by the chance of a single battle, that is to say by a particular event, the possibility of its being so ruined arises from some general cause, and it is for these causes that the historian should seek.' In this short treatise Montesquieu's style perhaps reaches its highest level. He is not distracted by a multiplicity of topics; the greatness, dignity and unity of his subject give force, character, and continuity to his style. His sentences march like a Roman legion.

'The work of twenty years.' So Montesquieu describes the Spirit of Laws, counting in his three years

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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VIII

Chapter VIII.
If there was a Dieden in 1777, she has gone with the braves who lived before Agamemnon, and like them is forgotten.

If there had been a Dieden in little New York of those days, she would not have been called in to make Miss Brothertoft’s san-benito, her wedding-dress.

The resources of the Manor were sufficient. Mrs. Brothertoft could plan the robe. Mrs. Dewitt could execute it. Sally Bilsby also lent a ’prentice hand. The silk, white, stiff, and with a distinct bridal rustle, had been bought to order by Bilsby junior, on one of his traitorous trips to New York.

Lucy, leaving Voltaire in the pantry, as was described, ran up stairs and faced her wedding-dress without flinching. It is not generally a sight to blanch the cheeks of a young lady. Indeed, one may fancy that a rose finer than roses might bud in the heart, and bloom from neck to forehead, when a bride first beheld the lily-white drapery of her hour of immolation.

Lucy neither blanched nor blushed.

“Be brave! be prudent!” the warning of her unseen protector was ringing in her ears. She saw it, inscribed on a label, and hanging from the lips of her vision of his face. The brave do not blanch. The prudent do not blush. So she quietly joined the busy circle, took a needle and stabbed the wedding-dress without mercy.

It was a monstrous relief thus to kill time. She did herself, for the hour, “her quietus make with a bare bodkin,” and the other weapons of a modiste.

 * “Stitch, stitch, stitch! Seam, and gusset, and band!”

“Ah!” she thought, “what a blessing is this distraction of labor! I have shed my tears. If I were to sit inactive, I might brood myself into despair. If I were to think over my wrong, I might flame out too soon. If I look at my mother, I begin to dread her again. I know she could master me still. O my God! sustain me through these last hours of my peril! I never knew how great it was until now. I foresaw a misery; but the degradation of giving myself up to this man, I never even dreamed of. I am ashamed, ashamed to recall that there have been instants when I tolerated him, — when I thought that he was not so very gross and coarse. I pray God that the sacredness of my soul is not spoilt.”

A great agony stirred in her maidenly bosom at this thought. She bent closer to her work. She knew that her mother’s eyes were upon her. She heard, without marking, the tattle of the maids.

“Fly, little needle!” she said to herself. “Measure off this pause in my life! Every stitch is a second. Sixty are a minute. Minutes make hours, and hours wear out the weary day. Evening must come. If I can but be brave and prudent, I shall see my father and his noble friend, and be safe.”

Her needle galloped at the excitement of the thought.

Mrs. Brothertoft looked at her, and said to her heart, with a sneer, — “Pretty creature! she consoles herself, it seems. Our boozy, rubicund bridegroom begins to look quite pale and interesting, seen through a bridal veil. The touch of white silk cures her scruples easily. Ah! the blushing bride will be resigned to her bliss. Bah! that I — I should dread such a pretty, silly trifler! What a fool I was to think her different from other simpering girls! So, this is the meaning of all her coy little wiles and her headaches. Headaches! she may have as many as she pleases now, in her pensive bower. Ah! I comprehend thee now, fair hypocrite. The slender fingers are impatient for the ring. Fly, little bird, to the bosom of thy spouse. Perhaps he will not quite crush thy poor, silly heart. And I have been afraid of her! She is so tickled with her wedding favors, that she will presently be kissing me again for gratitude with more fervor than ever. But I am sick of her simplicity. I am tired of her ‘Dearest mammas!’ I should strangle her, I dare say, if she were not taken off. She grows more like that Edwin Brothertoft lately.”

“Your dress is ready to try on, Miss Lucy,” said Mrs. Jierck Dewitt.

So there was a mighty rustle, and a headless, armless torso of stiff white silk rose up and stood on its skirt. It did Dewitt great credit. Ah! if her character had only been equal to her skill! But she was a brazen hussy, and Sally, her sister, no better. Tel maître, tel valet. One positively bad woman spoils many negatively bad ones. It would not seem at all unfair if Destiny took advantage of the harm done Jierck Dewitt’s wife in punishing the lady of the Manor through her means.

Lucy still faced her wedding-dress without flinching. She may even have thought that, if the worst came, it was better to go to the guillotine in becoming array. It is perhaps woman to say, “My heart is broken; but my bodice fits without a fold.”

It is woman, no doubt, but there are women and Women. Lucy could safely admire the robe, and tranquilly criticise it, because she knew that she and it were not to see marriage together.

“Now shall I unlace you, Miss Lucy?” says the abigail.

Yes, abigail; as soon as these masculine eyes, whose business is with the young lady’s soul, not with her toilette, can take themselves decorously out of the room.

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 That I being at Groaton some short tyme after John Willard. as the report went, had beaten his wife I went to cal him home and comeinge home with him in the night I heard such a hideous noyse of strang creatures I was much affrighted for I never had heard the like noyse I fearinge they might be some euil spirits I enquired of the said Willard what might it be that made such a hideous noyse the sayd Willard sayd they ware Locust: the next day as I suppose the sayd Willards wife with a younge child and her mother being vpon my mare. ridinge between Groaton Mil and Chensford. they being willing to goe on foote a litle desired me to ride: then I taking my mare being willing to let her feed a litle: there as I remember I aprehend I heard the same noyse agayne where at my mare started and got from me

Jurat in Curia

The testomony of Rebeckah Wilkins aged ninteen years Doe testifie that 29th July at night shee se John Wilard seting in the Conner and hee said that hee wold afflick me that night and forthwith hee ded afflick me: and the nax day I ded se him afflick me soer by Choaking & Polling one ear into Peases the nex day being the Lords day I being Going to meting I se John Wilard and hee afflickted me uery soer

Jurat in Curia

The deposition of Henery Wilknes sen aged 41 yeares who testifieth and sayth that vpon the third of May last John Willard came to my house: and uery earnestly entreated me to go with him to Boston which I at lenght consented to go with him, my Son Daniel comeinge and vnderstandinge I was goinge with him to Boston and seemed to be much troubled that I would go with the sayd Willard: and he sayd he thought it were wel. If the sayd Willard were hanged: which made me admire for I neuer heard such an expression come from him to any one beinge since he came to yeares of discretion, but after I was gone in a few days he was taken sicke: and grew euery day worse & worse where vpon we made aplication to a physitian who affirmed his sicknes was by some preter natural cause & would make no aplication of any phisicke. Some tymes after this our neighbours comeing to visit my son Mercy Lewis came with them and


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 affirmed that she saw the apperition of John Willard aflicting him: quickly after came An Putnam. and she saw the same apperition and then my eldest daughter was taken in a sad manner & the sayd An: saw the sayd Willard aflicting her. at Another tyme mercy lewes and mary Walcott came to visit him, and they saw the same apparition of Willard aflicting him, and this not but a little tyme before his death.

Sworne in Court

John Willard was tried on the 5th of August and hung on the 19th. Three other men and one woman were executed at the same time for witchcraft; one of whom was the Reverend George Burroughs. They all were convicted on the same kind of absurd and flimsy testimony as that given in the depositions against Willard. They were allowed no counsel for defence, and their execution was nothing short of judicial murder. Under the gallows Mr. Burroughs made a speech, declaring his innocence, and also a prayer which he ended by repeating correctly the Lord's Prayer. This produced a great effect on the multitude, as it was then the common belief that a witch or wizard could not say it without blundering. The sympathy of the crowd was so much excited that the leaders of the wicked movement began to fear lest the executions would be prevented; and Cotton Mather, mounted on horseback, addressed the assemblage and told them that the punishment was a righteous one.

Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft," says: -

John Willard appears to have been an honest and amiable person, an industrious farmer, having a comfortable estate, with a wife and three young children. He was a grandson of Old Bray Wilkins; whether by blood or marriage, I have not been able to ascertain. The indications are that he married a daughter of Thomas or Henry Wilkins, most probably the former, with both of whom he was a joint possessor of lands. He came from Groton; and it is for local antiquaries to discover whether he was a relative of the Rev. Samuel Willard of Boston. If so, the fact would shed much light upon our story. (ii. 321.)


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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter IX

Chapter IX.
Nombre de Dieden! what a fit!

Unlacing and relacing concluded, these masculine eyes, again admitted to the maiden’s bower, are dazzled with unexpected loveliness.

There stands the lady, within the perfect dress!!! beautiful to three points of admiration. Sweet eighteen can bear low neck by broad daylight.

The struggle in her heart with all her wild emotions of terror and hope was as great a beautifier as the presence of critical wedding-guests, the rustle of a surplice, the electric touch of a gay gold ring, and the first clasp of the hand of a husband.

And you, O Peter Skerrett! you have shaved off your moustache and donned a coat much too small, — you have made a guy of yourself for your first interview with this angel!

Shall the personal impression she may already have made be here revised and corrected? No; for this is not real sunshine upon her. If she is ever photographed, it shall be in her bright, not in her dark day. Let her wait till fuller maturity for description! It is easy to see the Brothertoft in her. She blends the tender grace of the lady in Vandyck’s picture with the quiet dignity of the gentleman. But is there not kindling in her face the vigor of another race, her mother’s? Perhaps a portrait now would belie her final look.

“You are like an angel, Miss Lucy,” said Mrs. Dewitt.

She was. She stood there in bridal robe, veil, and wreath. Her hands were clasped firm to control her insurgent heart. Her lips were parted, and she was whispering to herself, “Be brave! Be prudent!” Her eyes overlooked the present, and saw hope in the blue sky above the golden Highlands through her window.

Yes; like an angel.

There was a hush for a moment. The three bad women — the pert hoyden, the false wife, and the proud mistress of the Manor — were silenced and abashed.

Again the old pang stirred in the mother’s bosom. Again she longed to throw herself at her daughter’s feet and pray forgiveness. But again she gained that defeat of a victory over her womanliness. She trampled down the weakness of repentance. The bedlam look flickered over her features, and she hardly restrained her furious impulse to leap forward and rend the innocent face and the maiden bosom that so shamed her.

“You do look just like an angel, Miss Lucy,” Abby Dewitt asseverated, with the air of a connaisseuse in the article. “Don’t she, Sally?”

The two thereupon gave tongue to voluble flatteries.

“Your work does you great credit, Dewitt,” Lucy said. “Mamma, cannot we spare Abby and Sally to go home to the farm to-night? They deserve a holiday after this long confinement. And to-morrow will be a busy day again.”

“Of course, my dear, if they wish it.” Mrs. Brothertoft was glad to put her daughter under obligation.

The women again gave tongue with thanks. They were always, as Voltaire had said, ready to get away for a frolic. Lucy smiled to herself at the easy success of her stratagem. She had packed off baggage and baggage, without suspicion.

“What a conspirator I am becoming!” she thought. “Ah! silly Lucy, the child, the thing to be flung away! She too can help baffle the evil schemes against herself. When these coarse women are gone, there will be not a soul but friends within a mile of the house.”

Dinner was tardy to-day, after the late breakfast following the revel.

Nine-oxygen azote by the lung-full had given tone to Major Kerr’s system. His appetite for meat and drink were in full force again, all the stouter for this morning’s respite.

“What a lucky dog I am,” he said, “to dodge that expedition of Vaughan’s! I’m ‘the soldier tired of war’s alarms,’ Miss Lucy.”

“You do not care about laurels any more,” Mrs. Brothertoft said, with her half-sneer.

“Not when I can get roses.”

His look with this brought fire into Lucy’s cheeks.

“No,” resumed he; “I should be glad enough to help burn the dashed rebels’ houses over their heads, and them, too, in their beds. Here’s confusion to ’em, and luck to Jack Burgoyne! I hate the vulgar ‘varmint.’ But I don’t want to leave a good dinner to see bonfires. I know where I’m well off, and going to be better. Eh, Miss Lucy?”

Her heart began to throb and her head to ache at once.

“This goose has got a bark on thick as an oak-tree,” continued the valiant trencherman, making an incision. “Give me another cut of beef, — the red, with plenty of fat and plenty of gravy, if you please, my mamma that shall be. I need support when the parson opens his batteries to-morrow. Eh, Miss Lucy? ‘With this ring thee I wed, and with all my worldly —’ Hain’t got any goods. I’ll endow you with all my worldly debts, and tell the Jews to shift the security. Haw, haw!”

He laughed boisterously.

This coarse pæan stirred up echoes of repulsion in Lucy’s heart.

How she longed to fling defiance at him! Patience, — she almost bit the word in two, with her teeth set hard upon it. One rash expression would be ruin; but great red-hot shot of scorn burned within her. She discovered that there was strong language in her vocabulary. It grew significant to her now. She was beginning to half understand herself at last. When the boiler grows hot, the water feels its latent steam.

“Am I the same being?” she thought. “Am I the meek Consent I have pitied and wept with so long? No, I have ceased to be a spiritless nobody. I am almost sorry that help from without is coming to me. I should like to stand up now and say, ‘Madam, of you as a woman I will not speak, — as a mother, you are a tyrant, and I defy you. I defy you and this brute, not half so base as you, whom you have dared to name by the sacred name of lover, whom you have called in to aid you in dishonoring your child.’ Yes; I could almost say that to her now. Is it possible? Is it possible that a woman can so hate a woman? I never felt what the sanctity of my womanhood was until now, — now that I perceive this miserable plot against it.”

This defiant mood was strong within her. But presently, as she looked at Kerr, growing redder with too much dinner and too much wine, laughing at his own coarse jokes and throwing at her with great vulgar compliments; and when all at once, in contrast, rose the figure of the other Major as she had painted him, — disgust so mastered her that she sprang up, pleaded a headache, and fled to her chamber, to wait and hope and doubt and pray alone.

“Megrims again,” said the lover, sulkily, as she disappeared. “I don’t like it. She didn’t run away from Jack André yesterday.”

“O, let her amuse herself with headaches, if she pleases,” said the Lady of the Manor. “I understand the child. I saw her this morning over her wedding-dress. She is as eager for the happy moment as any lover could wish.”

“So you think she shams coy?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brothertoft; and she was willing to believe it.

“Well, good night, pretty creature! Let it go up stairs and think how sweet it will look to-morrow in its silks and laces! What, are you going too, my mamma?”

“Yes. Take your glass of wine quietly. We will have supper late. I am going to doze a little in the parlor. I dreamed troublesome dreams last night.”

“By George!” said Kerr, as she closed the door. “Splendid woman! Twice as handsome as the Duchess of Gurgoyle! I suppose she thinks the Kerrs will take her up when she goes to England. No, ma’am! We can’t quite stand that. You’ve got all you can expect out of me when you’ve married off your daughter on me. Now, then, it’s going to be solemn business, drinking alone.”

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter IX


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Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter X

Chapter X.
Plot and counterplot at Brothertoft Manor. And meantime, what has counterplot without the house been doing?

If Edwin Brothertoft and Peter Skerrett could have travelled by daylight through the Highlands, then this narrative, marching with them, might have seen what fine things they saw, and told of them. But they went cautiously by night. They saw little but the stars overhead and the faint traces of their shy path. They were not distracted by grand views. Nature is a mere impertinence to men who are filled with a purpose. Fortunately, these intense purposes do not last a lifetime. Minds become disengaged, and then they go back, and make apologies to Nature for not admiring her. And she, minding her own business, cares as little for the compliment as for the slight.

It is a bit of the world worth seeing, that bossy belt of latitude between Fishkill and Brothertoft Manor. There is a very splendid pageant to behold there in the halcyon days of October, the ruddy, the purple, the golden, when every tree is a flame, or a blush, or a dash of blood or deep winy crimson on the gray rocks of the mountains. The Hudson Highlands do not wrangle about height with the Alps; but they content themselves with wearing a more gorgeous autumn on their backs than any mountains on the globe. Go and see! Frost paints as bravely now as it did in 1777, and it is safer to travel. Bellona has decamped from the land, and half-way from Fishkill down the pass, Minerva, fair-haired, contralto-voiced, and courteous, keeps school and presides over the sixty-third milestone from New York. Go and see the Highlands for yourself! The business of these pages is mainly with what hearts suffer and become under pressure, little with what eyes survey.

Danger is safety to the prudent. Major Skerrett and his guide made their perilous journey without mishap. At the chilly dawn of day, we find them at the rendezvous in the hills behind Peekskill, trying to believe that there was warmth in the warm colors of the woods, and waiting for Jierck Dewitt.

Presently he appeared, in high spirits.

“We’ve come in the nick of time,” said he. “The redcoats have done all the harm they could about here. They’ve drawed in every man, and are off at sunrise up river for Kingston, They allow, if they set a few towns afire, that General Gates will turn his back to Burgoyne and take to passin’ buckets.”

“Bang!” here spoke the sunrise gun at Fort Montgomery.

“Bang! bang! bang!” the three frigates responded.

Dunderberg grumbled with loud echoes. He was pleased to be awaked by the song of birds; but the victorious noise of British cannon he protested against, like a good American.

“The coast is clear for us,” resumed Jierck. “Clear almost as if these were peace times. Now if you’ll come along, I’ll take you to a safe den in the woods, a mile from the Manor-House, where you can stay all day, snug as a chipmunk in a chestnut stump, and see how the land lies. I’ll tell you my other news as we go.”

They took up their guns and knapsacks and followed. The light of morning was fair and tender. The autumn colors were exhilarating. White frost shone upon the slopes and glimmered upon every leaf in the groves.

These were the Manor lands. Each spot Edwin Brothertoft remembered as a scene of his childhood’s discoveries of facts and mysteries in Nature. They walked on for an hour, and Brothertoft grew almost gay with memories of his youth.

“Do you see that white shining through the trees?” said Jierck, halting. “It’s the river. Ten steps and you’ll see the house. Now, Major, I’ll go and look after my boys, and come at noon for your orders.”

Jierck turned back into the wood. Major Skerrett stepped forward eagerly. He had an eye for a landscape. He had also a soldier’s eye for every new bit of possible battle-field.

Ten steps brought him to the edge of the slope. A transcendent prospect suddenly flung out its colors before him. First was a stripe of undulating upland thoroughly Octobered. Then a stripe of river, bending like a belt in a flag, that a breeze is twisting between its fingers. Then beyond, Highlands, not so glowing as the foreground, nor so sparkling blue as the blue water, nor so simple as the sky, softly combined and repeated all the elements of beauty before him.

He turned to give and take sympathy from his companion. Mr. Brothertoft was not beside him. He had seated himself within cover of the wood.

“Come out, sir!” called Skerrett with enthusiasm. “I am so bewildered with this beautiful prospect that I need to hear another man’s superlatives to satisfy me I am not in a dream. Come out, sir! We are quite safe.”

“My friend,” said Brothertoft. “I was hesitating a moment before I risked the quenching of my strange good spirits. You are looking upon a scene that has been very dear and very sad to me. I cannot see it, as you do, with a stranger’s eye. It is to me the scenery of tragedy. I cannot tell yet whether I have outgrown the wound enough to tolerate the place where I first felt it.”

He moved forward, and took his place by the Major’s side. The two stood silent a moment.

Thus far the younger, in his robust appetite for the beauty of Nature, had felt “no need of the remoter charm by thought supplied.” Color and form he took as a hungry child takes meat and drink. Now for the first time there was history in his picture, sorrow upon his scene. He made his friend’s sadness his own, and looked through this melancholy mist at the gold, the sheen, and the bloom. His mere physical elation at this intoxicating revelry of color passed away. Beauty left his head and went to his heart.

He turned to see how his companion was affected.

“I find,” said Brothertoft, “that I do not hate these dear old scenes. Indeed, the flush and the fervor of this resplendent season enter into me. I am cheered enough to pardon myself all my faults, and all who have wronged me for their wrongs. It is grand to feel so young and brave again.”

For a moment there was bold light in his eyes and vigor in his bearing. The light faded presently and the vigor drooped. He was again the stricken man, aged prematurely by sorrow.

“But, my son,” continued the elder, “I cannot quite sustain myself in this cheerful mood. I look at my forefathers’ house, and think of my daughter, and I doubt.”

Skerrett followed the direction of his eyes and studied the Manor-House.

It stood on a small plateau, half a mile from the river, in the midst of its broad principality. There was not such another house then in America. There are few enough now, town or country, cottage or palace, over whose doors may be seen the unmistakable cartouche of a gentleman.

The first Edwin Brothertoft built his house after the model of .the dear old dilapidated seat in Lincolnshire. It was only one fourth the size; but it had kept the grand features of its prototype. Skerrett could see and admire the four quaint gables, two front and two rear, the sturdy stack of warm chimneys, and the corner tower with its peaked hat, — such as towers built in James the First’s time wore. It bristled well in the landscape.

It was a century old. That must be a very unsociable kind of house which will not make itself at home in the space of a century. In a hundred years the Manor-House and buildings and their scenery had learnt perfect harmony with each other. Wherever trees were wanted for shade or show, they had had time to choose their post and grow stately. Those stalks which know nothing but to run up lank, for plank, had long been felled and uprooted. There were no awkward squads of bushes, stuck about where they could not stand at ease; but orderly little companies of shrubbery and evergreens had nestled wherever a shelter invited them, or wherever a shoulder of lawn wanted an epaulet. Creepers had chosen those panels of wall which needed sheltering from heat or cold, and had measured precisely how much peering into windows and drooping over doors could be permitted. The little Dutch bricks of the sides and the freestone of the quoins and trimmings, their coloring revised by the pencils of a hundred quartettes of seasons, now were as much in tone with the scene as the indigenous rocks of the soil. Absolute good taste had reigned at Brothertoft Manor for a century. Its results justified the government thoroughly. The present proprietress had been educated out of her gaudy fancies by this fine example of the success of a better method. She had altered nothing, and made her repairs and additions chime with the ancient harmony.

At this moment, too, of Peter Skerrett’s inspection, the landscape about the house wore its wealthiest garniture. Each maple in the grounds had crimsoned its ruddiest, or purpled its winiest, or gilded its leaves, every one with a film of burnished gold. The elms were all at their gayest yellow or their warmest brown, and stiff masculine chestnuts beside them rivalled their tints, if they could not their grace. Here and there was a great oak, resolute not to adopt these new-fangled splendors of gaudy day, and wearing still the well-kept coat of green which had served him all summer. Younger gentlemen of the same family, however, would not be behind the times, and stood about their ancestor in handsome new doublets of murrey color. Every slash and epaulet of shrubbery was gold on the green of the lawn, and creepers blazed on the walls and dropped their scarlet trailers, like flames, before the windows.

“It is a dear old dignified place,” said Peter Skerrett, “and I wish I could go down and make a quiet call there by daylight. I will, by and by, after the war, unless the rebels punish it with fire for having dined Sir Henry Clinton.”

“It is a dear old place,” said Brothertoft, “and I love it most dearly as the school-house of my education in sorrow. No man is convinced of his own immortality until his soul has borne as murderous blows as can be struck, and still is not murdered. I come to the place where the hardest hitting at my peace has been done, and I feel a new sense of power because I find that there is something in me that is not quite devastated. On the old battle-field, I perceive that I am not wholly beaten, and can never be.”

He said this in a tone of soliloquy. Peter Skerrett was too young to thoroughly understand his friend. Besides, he was conscious of a frantic hunger, — an excellent thing in a hero.

“Come, sir,” said he, “shall we breakfast? I have remarked that swallowing dawn is an appetizer. Here goes at my knapsack, to see what General Putnam’s cook has done for us.”

The cook had done as well as a rebel larder allowed. They did well by the viands, and then, under cover of the wood, they wore away the morning watchfully.

They saw boats from the frigates land men to be drilled ashore or to forage in the village of Peekskill. Here and there a farmer, braver or stupider than his neighbors, was to be discerned, ploughing and sowing for next summer as if war were a hundred miles away. Carts appeared creeping timidly along the country roads. The cattle seemed to feed cautiously and sniff about, lest Cowboys should catch them. The whole scene wore a depressed and apprehensive air. Brothertoft Manor was willing to be well with both sides, and was equally uncomfortable with both. The tenants of the Manor were generally trying to persuade themselves that British frigates in the river were merely marts for their eggs and chickens. Men that have not made up their minds are but skulking creatures on God’s earth.

“Seems to me,” said Skerrett, “that I can tell a Tory or a Neutral as far as I can see him.”

The day wore on, and in this pause of action the two gentlemen opened their hearts to each other.

It was the intercourse of father and son. Each wanted what the other gave him.

The fatherless junior felt his mind grow deeper with a man who had touched bottom in thought. He was sobered and softened by the spectacle of one so faithful to the truth that was in him, so gentle, so indulgent, weakened perhaps by sorrow, but never soured.

The soilless senior said. “Ah, Skerrett! you are the young oak. If I had had you to lean upon, I should not have lost force to climb and bloom. Such a merry heart as yours makes the whole world laugh, — not empty laughter, but hearty.”

At noon Jierck Dewitt came to report. He and the boys were safely hid in his father’s barn.

“Ike mostly sleeps,” says Jierck, “Sam plays old sledge with dummy, and Hendrecus is writin’ something in short lines all beginnin’ with big letters, poetry perhaps. He’s an awful great scholar.”

Their plans were again discussed, and orders issued.

“Well,” said Jierck, “at dusk I’ll have my men, and father’s runt pony for the prisoner to straddle, down at the forks of the road waitin’ for you. Nothing can stop us now but one thing.”

“And that?” asked the Major.

“Is Lady Brothertoft. If she suspicions anything before we’re ready to run, it will be all up with us, — halter round our necks and all up among the acorns.”

So Jierck, still “stiff as the Lord Chancellor,” and yet limber as a snake in the grass, took his departure.

Afternoon hours went slower than the morning hours.

“The sun always seems to me to hold back in going down hill,” Skerrett said. “I wish he would tumble to bed faster. I am impatient to make our success sure.”

“Your sturdy confidence reassures me,” returned Brothertoft. “I am happy there is one of us whose heart-beats will not unsteady him. I lose hope when I think what failure means to my daughter.”

“I must keep myself the cool outsider, with only a knight-errant’s share in this adventure,” Peter said.

A hard task he found this! The father so charmed him that he felt himself, for his sake, taking a very tender fraternal interest in the young lady. It was so easy to picture her in her chamber, not a mile away, looking tearfully for help toward the hills. It was so easy to fancy her face, — her father’s, with the bloom of youth instead of the shades of sorrow; and her character, — her father’s, with all this gentleness that perhaps weakened him, in her but sweet womanliness. Peter Skerrett perceived to the full the romance of the adventure. He frequently felt the undeveloped true lover in him grow restive. He thought that he was all the time putting down that turbulent personage. Perhaps he was. But it must be avowed that he often regretted his moustache, despised his ill-fitting coat, and only consoled himself by recalling, “It will be night, and she will only half see me.” As evening approached, Peter Skerrett perceived that his desire to redeem this fair victim from among the bad and the base was become a passion. He also noticed that its fervor kept him cool and steady.

Silent sunset came. The crisis drew near. Doubts began to curdle in Edwin Brothertoft’s mind. He looked over the broad landscape, and along the solemn horizon, and all his own past spread before him, sad-colored and dreary.

“Ah my beautiful childhood!” he thought. “Ah my ardent youth, my aspiring manhood, my defeated prime! My life utterly defeated, as the world measures defeat, — and all through her! All through her, the woman I loved with my whole heart! Please God we may not meet to-night! Please Heaven we may never meet until her dark hour comes! Please Heaven that when the loneliness of sin comes upon her, and the misery of a worse defeat than any I have felt is hers, — that then at last I may be ready with such words of pardon as she needs!”

“See!” said Skerrett, softly. “It is dark. There is a light in your daughter’s window. We will go to her.”

“In the name of God!” said the father.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter X


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XI

Chapter XI.
Scene, the interior of Squire Dewitt’s barn.

Hay at the sides, hay at the back, and great mountains of hay rise into the dusky regions of the loft.

In the centre stands Jierck Dewitt, just returned from his noon interview with Major Skerrett.

At the left sits Ike Van Wart, asleep, with his mouth open. Perhaps, like Voltaire, he hears partially with his tonsils.

On the right, old Sam Galsworthy is killing time with old sledge for a weapon. His right hand has just beaten his left and won the stakes, — viz.: twelve oats.

Hendrecus Canady stealthily approaches the gaping sleeper on the left. He holds a head of timothy-grass, — in these times of war we perceive that it is a good model for a cannon sponge. Hendrecus introduces timothy’s head into Van Wart’s mouth, and begins to tickle the tonsils and palate, so rosy.

To these enters pretty Katy Dewitt, blushing and smiling. Fragrance comes with her; and well it may, for she bears dinner, — a deep yellow dish of pork and beans and a pumpkin-pie exquisitely varnished.

Tender-hearted Jierck Dewitt at once remembered the wife who in happier days crisped his pork and sweetened his pie.

Hendrecus dropped his tickler into Van Wart, and sprang up to help his sweetheart. Her pretty smiles stirred happy smiles on his face, — a bright and good-humored one, though still of pill-fed complexion. His lover-like attentions brought out a blush on her cheeks. That fair color seemed to make the old barn glow and all the hay-mow bloom with fresh heads of pink clover.

Poor Jierck Dewitt recalled how there were once smiles as gay and blushes as tender between him and a damsel as buxom.

Poor fellow! his dinner did him no good. He grew moodier and moodier. The little scene between his sister and Hendrecus had made him miserable. He could not sleep like Van Wart, nor play cards with Galsworthy, nor skylark with Hendrecus. He sat brooding over his sorrow. His powers of self-control were weakened. He could not throw off this weight of an old bitterness. A great vague misery oppressed him. He began to fear his wits were going.

“If I could only get these ugly feelings into shape,” he thought, “I could grapple with them and choke them down. I must do something, or I shall go mad. I believe I’ll steal round through the woods to where I can see old Bilsby’s house and the chestnut-tree where Abby first said she’d have me. Looking at the places may help me to drag this grief out of myself and put it on them.”

Now that the British troops were withdrawn for Vaughan’s expedition, Jierck felt quite secure in dodging about the woods of the Manor. He left his companions in the barn, and stole off toward his father-in-law’s old red farm-house. He felt as if he were his own ghost, compelled to haunt a spot where he had been murdered.

It was quiet sunset. The golden light of evening was among the golden woods. The forest showered golden leaves upon the ground, and melted away in golden motes across the level sunbeams.

Jierck stole along until he came to a little glade, crossed by a pathway. A great chestnut-tree had made the glade its own. Lesser plants were easily thrust back by its stout overshadowing branches, and its brethren of the forest had willingly given place to see what their brother would do with its chance of greatness. It had done nobly. It was an example to trees and the world, of the wisdom of standing by one’s roots, expanding to one’s sunshine, and letting one’s self grow like a fine old vegetable.

This had been Jierck’s trysting-tree in the times when the pastoral poem of his life was writing itself, a canto a day. Under this chestnut, one summer’s eve, when the whole tree was a great bouquet of flowery tassels, Jierck had suddenly ventured to pop his shy question. Full-throated robins up in those very branches had shouted his sweetheart’s “Yes,” for all the birds and breezes to repeat.

Jierck, hidden in the thicket, looked kindly at the old tree. He smiled to recall the meetings there when he was a timid, clumsy lover. For a moment recollections, half comic and all pleasant, banished his agony of a man betrayed by a disloyal woman.

But presently he heard sounds that were not the light clash of falling leaf with fallen leaf. Footsteps and voices were coming. Jierck withdrew a little and watched. Two women appeared up the pathway, following their long shadows. They came out into the glade. It was his wife and her sister, furloughed for the evening, and on their way homeward.

Jierck beheld the woman’s story written on her face, — the tablet where all stories of lives are written for decipherers to read. He saw no wish there to expunge or revise the later chapters. His wife was still an insolent, brazen woman, the counterpart of her mistress on a lower plane.

Poor Jierck! he had been drawn to this spot, so he felt, to see his murderess and be stabbed over again. The exceeding weight of his agony came crushing down upon him. He shivered. It seemed to him that snow must suddenly have fallen with sunset. A moment ago it was not spring, nor summer, but very tolerable autumn; now winter had come, chilly and dreary. A friendless place to him this traitor world! Jierck felt smitten with degradation. He was utterly miserable, and the old chestnut-tree insulted him with memories of his dead hopes of happiness.

“I must have comfort,” thought Jierck.

When sorrow is too sharp to be borne, and comfort must be had at once, men go to the anodynes and stimulants. Kosmos provides these in great variety. The four of most universal application are,

Tobacco, Alcohol, Marriage, Death.

Poor Jierck Dewitt wanted comfort at once. A whiff of smoke from his pipe was not concentrated enough, and he could not wait to try what virtue there was in bigamy.

“Rum or this!” he said wildly. The alternative “this” seemed to attract him for an instant. He drew his knife from his belt, and felt along the cold edge. Was he about to taste that mighty narcotic, Death?

Death! He touched his knife-blade. Gloom alighted upon the landscape. The golden woods grew lurid. Silence, deeper than he had ever known, deepened and deepened, until he fancied that Nature was hushed and listening for his death-moan.

An imagined picture grew before his eyes: — Time, morning. Scene, this glade of the big chestnut. A man lies under the tree. The first sunbeams melt the frost that dabbles his hair. He must be a sound sleeper, for a chipmunk has picked his pockets of their crumbs, and now stands on his forehead, chuckling over his breakfast. Mrs. Jierck Dewitt enters the glade. She sees the sleeper. She starts, and approaches cautiously. She stares, and then looks up with a great, bold smile of relief and scorn. For the sleeper is her husband. He lies dead, with a knife in his breast.

“No!” hissed Jierck, dashing away this picture from his eyes. ” I’ll not kill myself to please her.”

“Rum! I must have rum, or I shall go mad. The old man’s jug will be in the old place in the kitchen cupboard,” he continued.

He skulked along rapidly through the woods, like a beast of prey. The great dull agony in his heart paused a moment. He could keep it down from maddening him, while he thought of his sorry consolation to come.

It was growing dusk now, and he was reckless. He stopped by the kitchen window of his father’s house and peered in.

The family were at supper. These were the early years of the Revolution, and war had not yet utterly desolated this region. Squire Dewitt’s was still a prosperous household, and he, a fine old patriarch, presided at a liberal board. Opposite him sat the mild mother of the house. The harmony of a lifetime of love and companion thinking on companion cares had made her expression almost identical with her husband’s. Pretty Kate, a daughter of her parents’ old age, bustled the meal along, and hoped her Hendrecus was not getting hungry. Jierck’s other sister, a widow, was making two smiles grow in the place of one, on her boy Tommy’s round face, by cutting his gingerbread fatter than usual. The cat, from a dresser, watched every morsel and every sip, with a feline look, which is a thief look.

This homely scene, instead of soothing poor Jierck, was double bitterness to him.

“Curse the woman I made my wife!” he thought. “She has spoilt my chance of home and fireside, of a happy age and children to love and reverence me. Curse her for making me hate my life!”

He turned away, half mean, half fierce, and stole in by the back-door to the cupboard.

Those were times, remember, before the demijohn and the spinning-wheel had given way to Webster’s Unabridged and the melodeon. In every farmer’s pantry stood a Dutch-bellied stone jug. It was corked with a corn cob, and looked arrogantly through the window at the old oaken bucket. Was there molasses in that jug? Not so; but rum fitzmolasses. The well-sweep grew stiff for want of exercise, moss covered the dry-rotten bucket, green slime in the stagnant well was only broken by the plunges of lonely old “Rigdumbonnimiddikaimo”; but the rum-jug was always alert and jolly, and never had time to look vacuous before it was a plenum again. It is hard to imagine those ages; for we have changed our manners now. Our brandy is dried up, our rum has run away, and this is not a land flowing with Monongahela.

Jierck stole, like a thief, into the pantry. There sat the great jug, as of yore. It was of gray stone-ware with blue splashes. Its spout was fashioned into a face on the broad grin. “Comfort here!” the grinning mask seemed to wink, and did not reveal how short-lived and bastard was the comfort it promised. Jierck heaved up its clumsy heft, balanced it upon his lips, and swigged.

Yes, — not to be squeamish in terms, — this Patriot of the Revolution swigged. This was not patriotic, nor under the circumstances honorable, nor in any way wise or prudent. And of course, as his provocation is unknown to our time, we cannot appreciate his reckless despair.

If he had only stopped when he had enough! At the present day we never take too much of our anodynes and our stimulants. One weed, one toddy, one wife, one million, one Presidential term, — whenever wisdom whispers, Satis, we pause and echo, “Satis ’t is.” Wisdom was younger in Jierck’s time. If her childish voice did at all admonish him, the gurgle in his throat made him deaf to the warning at his tympanum. He took too much, poor fellow! Pardon him, and remember that an ill-omened she-wolf had just crossed his path.

There is a sage and honorable law that limits the robbing of orchards, — “Eat your fill; but don’t fill your pockets.” Jierck was rash enough to violate this also. He pocketed a pint of his sorry comforter. He found an empty bottle labelled Hair-Oil. There were nameless unguents before Macassar, and this bottle had held one of them. Jierck filled it from the jug, and made for the barn, just in time to evade pretty Kate carrying supper to the others and her Hendrecus.

Supper was done. Dusk was come. Jierck set out with his party for the rendezvous. The peril was considerable. Hanging was the penalty for being caught. So they sharpened their eyes, pricked up their ears, trod softly, and tried to persuade the runt pony to do the same. Jierck brought up the rear, in a state of sullen contempt.

At the cross-roads Major Skerrett and his companion met them. It was night now in the woods. A red belt of day behind Dunderberg stared watchfully at the party.

“I will go down to the house alone, as we arranged,” whispered the Major. “The negro will admit me to the dining-room. Do you be ready on the lawn by the window at half past eight! It will be dark enough for safety by that time. When I open the window and whistle, jump in and take our man. That is my plan. If anything goes wrong, I will alter it. But nothing will go wrong. Good-bye!”

He moved away through the darkness.

The party waited in the woods, listening to the sounds of evening. It grew chilly. Jierck Dewitt retired again and again, and sipped from his bottle, labelled Hair-Oil. He was ashamed of himself for violating his pledge to the Major. But he soliloquized, “I am only taking just enough to keep my spirits up, — just enough to make a man of me after my making a baby of myself at sight of that woman.”

Just enough! It is not pleasant to betray the errors of the past; but it is a truth grave in this history that the unhappy fellow had much more than enough when, at half past eight, he halted his party under cover of the shrubbery on the lawn at Brothertoft Manor-House.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XI


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Page:Groton In The Witchcraft Times.djvu/34

 After a careful investigation I cannot discover any kinship between the Reverend Samuel Willard and John, though there may have been a remote one. Lydia Nichols and Margaret Knight, according to their depositions, were acquainted with Henry and Benjamin Willard, of Groton, both sons of the minister, and these men knew John Willard. The Reverend Mr. Willard, who had carefully studied Elizabeth Knapp's case twenty years before the Salem tragedy, evidently believed in the demoniacal origin of witchcraft, though he held moderate views on the subject. In a pamphlet written by him, entitled "Some Miscellany Observations on our present Debates respecting Witchcrafts," and printed in the year 1692, he takes the ground that there are witches in New England, and they ought to be punished.

In passing judgment on the authors of this monstrous delusion, let us not forget the fact that witchcraft was recognized as a crime in the colonial and provincial laws of Massachusetts, following those of England; and let us remember, too, that many of the wisest and best men at that period looked upon it as a sin against God, which should be punished in accordance with the Mosaic law.

Sir William Blackstone, in his "Commentaries on the Laws of England" (Boston, 1818), says:-

To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God, in various passages both of the old and new testament: and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws; which at least suppose the possibility of a commerce with evil spirits. (iv. 60.)


text: Page:Groton In The Witchcraft Times.djvu/35


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XII

Chapter XII.
Eight o’clock, and Major Kerr sat sipping Madeira in the dining-room at Brothertoft Manor.

“What’s the use of eight candles?” he said to Voltaire.

“Only four, sir,” says the butler, depositing two branches on the table.

“I see eight, — no, sixteen. Well, let ’em burn! Economy be hanged! I say, nigger!”

“What, sir?” Voltaire perceived that his deteriorating process had been effectual. Kerr saw double and spoke thick.

“I’m tired of sitting here alone. Can’t you sing me a song?”

“I used to sing like a boblink, sir; but since I lost my front tooth the music all leaks out in dribbles. There’s a redcoat sargeant just come into the kitchen. He looks like a most a mighty powerful singer. Shall I bring him in?”

“Yes. I ain’t proud. A Kerr can associate with anybody.”

As Voltaire left the room, he picked up the Major’s sword and pistols from the sideboard. Plato was in the hall, stationed to watch the door of the parlor where the lady of the Manor was sitting solitary. His father handed him the arms. The seven seals of mystery had been opened, and Plato was deep in the plot.

“Take ’em, boy,” says Voltaire, “and be ready!”

Ready for what? Neither divined. But Plato took the weapons with dignity, and became a generalissimo in his own estimation. He brandished the sword, and made a lunge at some imaginary antagonist. Then he lifted a cocked pistol, and took aim. It was comic in the dim hall to see him going through his silent pantomime. He thrust, he parried, he dropped his point, he bowed like an accomplished master of fence. He raised a pistol, bowed graciously, as if to say, “Apres vous, Monsieur” touched trigger, assumed a look half triumph, half concern, then laid his hand upon his heart and smiled the smile of one whose wounded honor is avenged. All this was done without so much as a chuckle.

While Plato was at his noiseless gymnastics, Voltaire, through the pantry, had conducted the Sergeant into Major Kerr’s presence.

Skerrett, with his moustache off, and in a disguise a world too shrunk for his shanks and shoulders, looked much less the hero than when he first stepped forth upon these pages. Indeed, at this moment he did not feel very heroic.

He was sailing under false colors. He was acting a lie. He did not like the business, whatever the motive was. He took his seat vis-à-vis the rival Major, and thought, “If fair play is a jewel, I must give the effect of paste set in pinchbeck at this moment.”

“Glad to see you, Sargeant,” says Kerr, speaking thick. “That’s right,” — to Voltaire. “Give him some wine! Fine stuff they have in this house. Better than regulation grog, Sargeant.”

The new-comer nodded, and went at his supper vigorously.

“Goshshave th’ King, Sargn! Buppers!” says Kerr, holding up his glass aslant and spilling a little.

“Bumpers!” responded the other.

“Frustrate their politics. Confound their knavish tricks,” chanted Kerr. “Rebblstricksh, I mean, Sargn. Cuffoud ’em. Buppers!”

“Bumpers!” Skerrett rejoined, still feeling great compunction at the part he was playing.

“Sargeant,” says Kerr, “I’m going to tell you something.”

Skerrett looked attention.

“I’m going to be married to-morrow,” — spoken confidentially.

“Ah!”

“Don’t say, ‘Ah!’ Sargeant. Ah expreshes doubtsh. Say, Oh! Sargeant. I askitshpussonlefaver, Sargn. Say, Oh!”

“Oh!”

“That’s right. Oh is congratulation.” He made muddy work with the last word. “Yes, Sargeant, doocid pretty girl, doocid pretty property. Want to see her, Sargeant?”

“No, I thank you.”

“Yes, you do, Sargeant. Don’t tell me! I’m a lucky fellow, Sargeant. Always was with women. I’ll have her down in the parlor, by and by, and you can look through the crack of the door and see her. She loves me so much, Sargeant, that she’s gone up stairs to look at her wedding-dress and wish for to-morrow.”

This discourse, spoken thick, and the leer that emphasized it, quite dissipated all Major Skerrett’s scruples.

“Faugh!” thought he. “Everything is fair play against such a beast. I never comprehended before what a horror to a delicate woman must be marriage with such a creature. Life would drag on one long indignity, and every day fresh misery and fresh disgust. Faugh! sitting here and hearing him talk gives me qualms, — me, a man of the world, who have certainly had time to outgrow my squeamishness. I could not tolerate the thought of giving up any woman, even one with heart deflowered, to the degradation of this fellow’s society. He shall not have Mr. Brothertoft’s gentle daughter. No, not if I have to shoot him where he sits. No, not if I have to stab the lady.”

Peter looked at his watch. Time was not up. He was compelled to bottle his indignation and listen civilly.

Kerr grew more and more confidential in his cups. Faugh! the jokes he made! the staves he trolled! the winks he winked! the imbecile laughs he roared! the conquests he recounted in love and war! Faugh, that such brutes have sometimes dragged the pure and the gentle down to their level! Faugh, that they still grovel on our earth, so that the artist, compelled by the conditions of his work to paint such a Silenus, finds his unpleasant models thick about him, and paints under the sharp spur of personal disgust and personal harm!

The two Majors in the dining-room, the Lady of the Manor in a drowsy revery over the parlor fire, Lucy eager and trembling in her chamber, — for Voltaire has whispered that the hero has come, — Volante saddled, Plato gesticulating with sword and pistols; — now let us see what the plotters without the Manor-House are doing.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XII


text:
Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XIII

Chapter XIII.
What are the plotters without the Manor-House doing?

All, except Jierck Dewitt, are standing at ease, and waiting for their commander’s signal. Old Sam Galsworthy has his hand on the muzzle of the runt pony, and at the faintest symptom of a whinny in reply to Volante’s whinnies in the stable, Sam plugs the pony’s nostrils with his thumbs and holds his jaws together with iron hand. Ike Van Wart leans on his gun, and looks dull. Hendrecus Canady stands to his gun, and looks sharp. Sergeant Lincoln-Brothertoft keeps himself in a maze, — for to think would be to doubt of success, and to doubt is to fail.

This of course is the moment when Jierck Dewitt should be “stiff as the Lord Chancellor,” limber as the Lord Chief Acrobate, steady as a steeple, and silent as a sexton.

But Jierck is at present a tipsy man, in happy-go-lucky mood. He begins to grow impatient waiting in the cold and shamming sober. A thought strikes him. He can do something more amusing than stand and handle a chilly trigger.

“I’m going to take a turn about the house to see all’s safe, Orderly,” whispered he to Lincoln-Brothertoft. “I leave you in charge of the party. Keep a sharp look-out. I will be back in half a jiff.”

Jierck stole off into the darkness.

Recollections of former exploits hereabouts had revived in his muddled brain.

“Hair-oil’s all gone,” he thought. “Now if I could only get into the cellar of the old house, I should have my choice of liquors, just as I did ten years ago, when Lady Brothertoft had me caught and licked for breaking in. By Congress, it’s worth a try! The cellar window-bars used to be loose enough. It won’t do any harm to give ’em a pull all round. If one gives, I can tumble in, get a drink to keep my spirits up, and be back long before the Major calls.”

His fancy was hardly so coherent as this, but he obeyed it. He crept about the house and fumbled at the bars of the nearest window. The windows opened on a level with the ground.

“No go,” said he; “try another!” He did, and another.

At the third window the solder was loose and a bar shaky. Jierck dug at the solder with his knife and worked the bar about. It still resisted, and he admonished it in a drunken whisper, “I’m ashamed of you, you dum bit of rusty iron, keepin’ a patriot away from Tory property. Give in now, like a good feller, before I git mad and do something rash.”

At this the bar joined the patriots, and gave in. It came away in Jierck’s hand. He laid the cold iron on the frosty grass. He could now take out the stone into which the bar had been set. He did so. That released the foot of the next bar. He bent this aside. There was room for him to squeeze through.

He carefully backed into the cellar.

It was drunkard’s luck. A sober man would not have tried it. Moral: do not be too sober in your head or your heart, if you would pluck success among the nettles.

Jierck took a step forward in the Cimmerian darkness of the cellar. He fell plump into a heap of that rubbish which Voltaire’s flaring dip revealed to us in the morning.

“This noise won’t do,” he thought. “One tumble will pass for rats. Another may bring Lady B. down stairs. I shouldn’t like to see her standing here with a candle in one hand and a knife in the other. She’d stick me, like pork. No; I must strike a light. A flash will do, to show me the way.”

He unplugged his powder-horn with his teeth and poured a charge on the stone floor.

“Old Brindle didn’t know how many redcoats that horn of his was to be the means of boring through,” thought Jierck. “Powder’s an istooshn.”

In the dark his flint and steel tinkled together.

A spark flew. Fizz. Fiat lux! The powder flashed.

Cimmerian corners, barrels of curly shavings and rags out of curl, casks gone to hoops and staves, shattered furniture, all the rubbishy properties of a cellar scene, “started into light and made the lighter start.” Light gave them a knowing look and was out again. The scenery scuffled back into darkness.

Jierck afterward found that he had marked every object in that black hole, as they flung forward at the flash. He had marked the scene, and it was to haunt him always. At present, he was thinking of nothing but the wine-room. His fireworks had shown him the way clear to it. He saw also that the door was ajar, as Voltaire had left it in the morning.

He moved forward now without stumble or tumble. He felt his way into the wine-room. He touched the rough dusty backs of a battery of recumbent bottles. He grasped one by the neck. With a skilful blow against the shelf, he knocked off the yellow-sealed muzzle.

“Fire away!” said he, presenting the weapon at his lips.

Gurgle.

He stopped to take breath. He felt like a boy again. The wine tasted as it did ten years ago, when he first stole into the cellar, and was punished for it.

“She can’t have me whaled this time,” he muttered. “Here goes again! What stuff it is!”

Gurgle a second time, and the cellar seems to listen.

But while that amber stream was flowing between the white stalactites in Jierck’s upper jaw, and the white stalagmites in his lower, and rippling against that pink stalactite his palate, before it leaped farther down the grotto, — suddenly: —

A scream above, a rush, a shot, a scuffle.

For an instant Jierck was paralyzed. He stood listening. The bottle, for which he had deserted his post, slipped through his alarmed fingers and crashed on the floor. The sound half recalled him to himself.

He turned and sprang for that dim parallelogram of lighter darkness, — the window where he had entered.

Awkwardly, drunkenly, trembling with haste and shame, he clambered up upon the sill and began to back out between the bars. His coat caught against the bent iron.

As he stopped to disengage it, he peered suspiciously back into the cellar.

A little spot of red glow in the midst of the blackness caught his eye.

“Aha!” he thought, “my powder lighted something tindery in that heap of rubbish. It will soon eat what it’s got, and go out on the stone floor. And if it don’t go out, let it burn! Blast the old house! it’s a nest of Tories. Blast it! the mistress had me thrashed like a dog. Blast the house! my wife was spoilt here, and that spoilt me. Blast it! let it burn, and show us the way out of the country!”

Jierck tore his coat from the bar, backed out, picked up his gun and skulked tipsily off to join his party.

title: Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XIII