the ugly old monster, and the other blasé men, surrounded the Colonial beauty, and fooled her with flattery.
Was she spoilt by this adulation?
“Dear Edwin,” she schemed, in a little visit they made to Lincolnshire and the ruins of old Brothertoft Manor, “let us buy back this estate and never return to that raw America. You can go into Parliament, make one or two of your beautiful speeches, and presently be a Peer, with stars and garters.”
“Does a garter straighten a leg? does a star ennoble a heart? Listen, my love, do you not hear Great Tom of Lincoln warning me, as he long ago warned my ancestor, ‘Go home again, Brothertoft, Liberty is in danger’?”
“No,” she rejoined, petulantly; “a loyal bell would not utter such treasonable notes. This is what I hear: ‘Come again, Brothertoft, Lord of the old Manor!’ Liberty! Liberty! You tire me with your idle fancies. Why will you throw away name and fame?”
“I will try to gain them, since they are precious to you; but they must come in the way of duty.”
There was peril in these ambitions of hers; but the visionary husband thought, “How can I wonder that her head is a little turned with adulation? She merits it all, my beautiful wife! But she will presently get the court glare out of her eyes. When our child is born, a pledge of our restored affection, she will recognize deeper and tenderer duties.”
The Brothertoft embassy was a social success, but a political failure.
The lewd old dolt of a King sulkily pooh-poohed Remonstrance and Petition.
“You ought to have redress,” says Pitt, “but I am hardly warm in my seat of Prime Minister. I can only be a tacit friend at present.”
“Go home and wait,” says Ben Franklin, a shrewd old Boston-boy—fond of tricks with kites, keys, and kerchiefs—who was at that time resident in London. “Wait awhile! I have not been fingering thunderbolts so long, without learning that people may pooh-pooh at the clouds, and say the flashes are only heat-lightning; but by and by they’ll be calling upon the cellars to take ’em in, and the feather-beds to cover ’em.”
The Brothertofts went home. England forgot them, and relapsed into its belief—
That on the new continent the English colonists could not remain even half-civilized Yengeese, but sank to absolute Yankees—
Whose bows were contortions, and smiles grimaces;
Whose language was a nasal whoop of Anglo-Iroquois;
And who needed to be bolused with Stamp Acts and drenched with Tea Duties, while Tom Gage and Jack Burgoyne pried open their teeth with the sword.
There was one visible, tangible, ponderable result of the Brothertofts’ visit to England.
Lucy Brothertoft, an only child, was born—a token of love revived—alas! a monument of love revived to die and be dismissed among memories.
If the wife had been a true wife, how sweetly her affection for her husband would have redoubled for him in his new relation of father. Here was a cradle for rendezvous. Why not clasp hands and renew vows across it? This smiling, sinless child—why could it not recall to either parent’s face a smile of trust and love?
But this bliss was not to be.
Ring sadly, bells of Trinity! It is the christening day. Alas! the chimes that welcome the daughter to the bosom of the church are tolling the knell of love in the household where she will grow to womanhood.
The harmonious interlude ended. The old, old story went on. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the wife grew to hate her husband. Sadly, sadly, sadly, he learned to only pity her.
The visit to England had only more completely enamored her of worldliness. She missed the adulation of My Lord and Sir Harry. Her husband’s love and approval ceased to be sufficient for her. And when this is said, all is said.
It was a refinement of cruelty in the torture days to bind a living man to a corpse. Dead lips on living lips. Lumpish heart at throbbing heart. Glazed eyes so close that their stare could be felt, not seen, by eyes set in horror. Death grappling, and Life wrestling itself to Death. Have we never seen this, now that the days of bodily torture are over? Have we seen no delicate spirit of a woman quelled by the embraces of a brute? Have we seen no high and gentle-hearted man bound to a coarse, base wife, and slain by that body of death?
The world, the oyster, sulked when the young man it had so generously gaped for quite lost his appetite for fat things.
“Shame!” said the indignant Province. “We had unanimously voted Edwin Brothertoft our representative gentleman. He was ardent and visionary, and we forgave him. He was mellifluous, grammatical, ornamental, and we petted him. We were a little plebeian, and needed an utterly brave young aristocrat to carry our oriflamme, and we thrust the staff into his hand. Shame, Brothertoft! you have gulled us. It is the old story—premature blossom, premature decay. The hare sleeps. The tortoise swallows the prize! To the front, ye plodders, slow, but sure! And you, broken-down Brothertoft, retire to the back streets! wear the old clothes! and thank your stars, if we consent to pay you even a starvation salary!”
“Poor Jane Billop!” said Julia Peartree Smith, who was now very intimate with that lady. “I always said it would be so. I knew she would come to disappointment and grief. The Brothertofts were always weak as water. And this mercenary fellow hurried her into a marriage, a mere child, after an engagement of a few weeks. No wonder she despises him. I do, heartily. What lovely lace this is. I wonder if she couldn’t give me another yard! Heigh ho! Nobody smuggles for me!”
Brother patriots, too, had their opinion on the subject of Brothertoft’s withdrawal into obscurity.
“These delicate, poetical natures,” said our old friend, Patroon Livingston, “feel very keenly the blight of political enslavement. Well may a leader droop, when his comrades skulk! I tell you, gentlemen, that it is our non-committal policy which has disheartened our friend. When we dare to stand by him, and say, ‘Liberty or death!’ the man will be a man again—yes, a better man than the best of us. I long to see his eye kindle, and hear his voice ring again. I love a gentleman, when he is man enough to be free.”
But whoever could have looked into this weary heart would have read there a sadder story than premature decay, a deadlier blight than political enslavement, a crueller and closer wrong than the desertion of comrades.
Wrong! it had come to that—the final wrong between man and woman—the catastrophe of the first act of the old, old tragedy.
These pages do not tolerate the details of this bitter wrong.
The mere facts of guilt are of little value except to the gossip and the tipstaff; but how the wounded and the wounding soul bear themselves after the crime, that is one of the needful lessons of life.
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