suit my son?” asked the elder, with a gentleman’s scorn.
“Meanness and avarice are new to me,” the junior rejoined, with a gentleman’s indignation. “Can a fortune so made profit a man?”
“Billop will not enjoy it. He is dying, too. His heirs will take possession, as mine retire.”
Edwin could not think thus coolly of his father’s death. To check tears, he went on with his queries.
“He has heirs, then, our unenviable successor?”
“One child, heir or heiress; I do not remember which.”
“Heir or heiress, I hope the new tenant will keep the old place in order, until I can win it back for you, father.”
“It cheers me greatly, my dear son,” said the father, with a smile on his worn, desponding face, “to find that you are not crushed by my avowal of poverty.”
“The thought of work exhilarates me,” the younger proudly returned.
“We Brothertofts have always needed the goad of necessity,” said the senior, in apology for himself and his race.
“Now, then, necessity shall make us acquainted with success. I will win it. You shall share it.”
“In the spirit, not in the body. But we will not speak of that. Where will you seek your success, here or there?”
He pointed to Vandyck’s group of the Parliamentary Colonel and his family. The forefather looked kindly down upon his descendants. Each of them closely resembled that mild, heroic gentleman.
“Here or in the land of our ancestors?” the father continued. “Your generation has the choice. No other will. These dull, deboshed Hanoverians on the throne of England will crowd us to revolution, as the Stuarts did the mother country.”
“Then Westchester may need a Brothertoft, as Lincolnshire did,” cries Edwin, ardently. His face flushed, his eye kindled, it seemed as if the Colonel, in the vigor of youth, had stepped down from the canvas.
His father was thrilled. A life could not name itself wasted which had passed to such a son.
“But let us not be visionary, my boy,” he went on more quietly, and with weak doubts of the wisdom of enthusiasm. “England offers a brilliant career to one of your figure, your manners, and your talents. Our friends there do not forget us, as you know, for all our century of rustication here. When I am gone, and the Manor is gone, you will have not one single tie of property or person in America.”
“I love England,” said Edwin, “I love Oxford; the history, the romance, and the hope of England are all packed into that grand old casket of learning; but”—and he turned towards the portrait—“the Colonel embarked us on the continent. He would frown if we gave up the great ship and took to the little pinnace again.”
Clearly the young gentlemen was not Anglicized. He went on gayly to say, “that he knew the big ship was freighted with pine lumber, and manned by Indians, while the pinnace was crammed with jewels, and had a king to steer and peers to pull the halyards; but still he was of a continent, Continental in all his ideas and fancies, and could not condescend to be an Islander.”
Then the gentlemen continued to discuss his decision in a lively tone, and to scheme pleasantly for the future. They knew that gravity would bring them straightway to sadness.
Sadness must come. Both perceived that this meeting was the first in a series of farewells.
Daily interviews of farewell slowly led the father and the son to their hour of final parting.
How tenderly this dear paternal and filial love deepened in those flying weeks of winter. The dying man felt his earthly being sweetly completed by his son’s affection. His had been a somewhat lonely life. The robust manners of his compeers among the Patroons had repelled him. The early death of his wife had depressed and isolated him. No great crisis had happened to arouse and nerve the decaying gentleman.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I should not have accepted a merely negative life, if your mother had been with me to ripen my brave purposes into stout acts. Love is the impelling force of life. Love wisely, my son! lest your career be worse than failure, a hapless ruin and defeat.”
These boding words seemed spoken with the clairvoyance of a dying man. They were the father’s last warnings.
The first mild winds of March melted the snow from the old graveyard of Brothertoft Manor on a mount overlooking the river. There was but a little drift to scrape away from the vault door when they came to lay Edwin Brothertoft, fourth of that name, by the side of his ancestors.
Chapter IV.
Four great Patroons came to honor their peer’s funeral.
These were Van Cortlandt, Phillipse with his son-in-law Beverley Robinson, from the neighborhood, and Livingston from above the Highlands.
They saw their old friend’s coffin to its damp shelf, and then walked up to the manor-house for a slice of the funeral baked meats and a libation to the memory of the defunct.
A black servant carved and uncorked for them. He had the grand air, and wielded knife and corkscrew with dignity. Voltaire the gentlemen called him. He seemed proud to bear the name of that eminent destructive.
The guests eat their fat and lean with good appetite. Then they touched glasses, and sighed over another of their order gone.
“The property is all eaten up with mortgages, I hear,” says Phillipse, with an appropriate doleful tone.
“Billop swallows the whole, the infernal usurer!” Van Cortlandt rejoined, looking lugubriously at his fellows, and then cheerfully at his glass.
“He’s too far gone to swallow anything. The Devil has probably got him by this time. He was dying three days ago,” said Beverley Robinson.
“Handsome Jane Billop will be our great heiress,” Livingston in turn remarked. “Let your daughters look to their laurels, Phillipse!”
“My daughters, sir, do not enter the lists with such people.”
“Come, gentlemen,” jolly Van Cortlandt interjected, “another glass, and good luck to our young friend here! I wish he would join us; but I suppose the poor boy must have out his cry alone. What can we do for him? We must stand by our order.”
“I begin to have some faith in the order,” says Livingston, “when it produces such ‘preux chevaliers’ as he. What can we do for him? Take him for your second son-in-law, Phillipse! The lovely Mary is still heart-whole, I believe. Our strapping young friend from Virginia, Master George Washington, has caracoled off, with a tear in his eye and a flea in his ear. Slice off twenty or thirty thousand acres from your manor, marry these young people, and set them up. You are too rich for our latitude and our era.”
Mr. Adolphus Phillipse was a slow coach. The other’s banter teased him.
“Mr. Livingston,” he began, swelling and growing red.
