Omnes inquire.
“He must marry Jane Billop.”
“Ay, he must marry Jane Billop,” Omnes rejoin.
“A glass to it!” cried the proposer.
“Glasses round!” the seconders echo, with subdued enthusiasm.
“A beauty!” says Van Cortlandt, clinking with Phillipse.
“An heiress!” says Phillipse, clinking on.
“An orphan and only child!” says Robinson, touching glasses with his neighbor.
“Sweet sixteen!” says Livingston, blowing a kiss, and completing the circle of clink.
These jolly boys, old and young, were of a tribe on its way to extinction, with the painted sagamores of tribes before them. First came the red nomad, striding over the continent. In time followed the great Patroon, sprawling over all the acres of a county. Finally arrives the unembarrassed gentleman of our time, nomad in youth, settler at maturity, but bound to no spot, and cribbed in no habitation; and always packed to move, with a brain full of wits and a pocket full of coupons.
The four proprietors finished their libations and sent for Edwin to say good-bye. His deep grief made any suggestion of their marriage scheme an impertinence.
Jolly Van Cortlandt longed to lay his hand kindly on the young man’s shoulder and say, “Don’t grieve, my boy! ‘Omnes moriar,’ as we used to say at school. Come, let me tell you about a happy marriage we’ve planned for you!”
Indeed, he did arrange this little speech in his mind, and consulted Livingston on its delivery.
“Let him alone!” said that ‘magister morum.’ “You know as much of love as of Latin. The match is clearly made in heaven. It will take care of itself. He shall have my good word with the lady, and wherever else he wants it. I love a gentleman.”
“So do I, naturally,” Van says, and he gave the youth honored with this fair title a cordial invitation to his Manor.
The others also offered their houses, hearths, and hearts, sincerely; and then mounted and rode off on their several prosperous and cheerful ways.
Meanwhile, a group of the tenants of the Manor, standing on the sunny side of the vault, had been discussing the late lord and the prospects of his successor. As the elders talked, their sons and heirs played leap-frog over the tombstones, puffed out their cheeks to rival the cherubs over the compliments in doggerel on the slabs, and spelled through the names of extinct Lincolnshire families, people of slow lungs, who had not kept up with the fast climate.
“I feel as if I’d lost a brother,” said Squire Jierck Dewitt, the chief personage among the tenantry.
“A fine mahn, he was!” pronounced Isaac Van Wart, through a warty nose. “But not spry enough—not spry enough!”
“Anybody could cheat him,” says lean Hendrecus Canady, the root and Indian doctor, who knew his fact by frequent personal experiments.
“Who’d want to cheat a man that was everybody’s friend?” asked old Sam Galsworthy’s hearty voice.
“The boy’s a thorough Brothertoft, mild as a lamb and brave as a lion,” Dewitt continued. “But I don’t like to think of his being flung on the world so young.”
“He can go down to York and set up a newspaper,” Van Wart suggested.
“If I was him, I’d put in for Squire Billop’s gal, and have easy times.” This was the root doctor’s plan.
“Well, if he ever wants a hundred pounds,” says Galsworthy—“ay, or five hundred, for that matter—he’s only got to put his hand into my pocket.”
“You can’t put your own hand in, without wrastlin’ a good deal,” Van Wart says.
Sam laughed, and tried. But he was too paunchy.
“I’m a big un,” he said; “but I was a little un when I got back from that scalpin’ trip to Canada, when Horse-Beef Billop was Commissary. I didn’t weigh more ’n the Injun doctor here; and he, and that boy he feeds on yaller pills, won’t balance eight stone together. It’s bad stock, is the Billop. I hope our young man and the Colonel’s gal won’t spark up to each other.”
It was growing dusk. The dead man’s R. I. P. had been pronounced, and the youth’s “Perge puer!“ The tenants, members of a class presently to become extinguished with the Patroons, marched off toward the smokes that signalled their suppers. The sons dismounted from the tombstones and followed. Each of them is his father, in boy form. They prance off, exercising their muscles to pull their pound, by and by, at the progress of this history. Old Sam Galsworthy junior has hard work to keep up with the others, on account of his back load. He carries on his shoulders little Hendrecus Canady, a bolus-fed fellow, his father’s corpus vile to try nostrums upon.
And Edwin Brothertoft sat alone in his lonely home—his home no more.
Lonely, lonely!
A blank by the fireside, where his father used to sit. A blank in the chamber, where he lay so many days, drifting slowly out of life. Silence now—silence, which those feeble words of affection, those mild warnings, those earnest prayers, those trailing whispers low from dying lips, would never faintly break again. No dear hand to press. No beloved face to watch sleeping, until it woke into a smile. No face, no touch, no voice; only a want and an absence in that lonely home.
And if, in some dreamy moment, the son seemed to see the dear form steal back to its accustomed place and the dear face appear, the features wore an eager, yet a disappointed look. So much to say, that now could never be said! How the father seemed to long to recover human accents, and urge fresh warnings against the passions that harm the life and gnaw the soul, or to reveal some unknown error sadder than a sin.
And sometimes, too, that vision of the father’s countenance, faint against a background of twilight, was tinged with another sorrow, and the son thought, “He died, and never knew how thoroughly I loved him. Did I ever neglect him? Was I ever cold or careless? That sad face seems to mildly reproach me with some cruel slight.”
The lonely house grew drearier and drearier.
“Colonel Billop,” wrote Mr. Skaats, his agent and executor, “has been removed by an all-wise Providence. Under the present circumstances, Mr. Brothertoft, I do not wish to disturb you. But I should be glad to take possession at the Manor at your earliest convenience.”
Respectfully, &c.,“Skervey Skaats.”
Everything, even the priceless portrait of the Puritan Colonel, was covered by the mortgages. Avarice had licked them all over with its slime, and gaped to bolt the whole at a meal.
Edwin did not wish to see a Skervey Skaats at work swallowing the family heirlooms. He invited Squire Dewitt to act for him with the new proprietor’s representative.
New York, by that time, had become a thriving little town. The silt of the stream of corn that flowed down the Hudson was enriching it. Edwin had brave hopes of making at least his daily bread there with his brains or his hands.
While
