Chapter VIII.
Cassandra was right. The marriage went wrong.
It was the old, old, young, young story.
But which of those old young stories?
Ah, yes! there are so many of them. And yet all human tragedies belong to one Trilogy. There are but three kinds of wrongs in our lives.
The wrongs a man does to his own soul or body, or suffers in either.
The wrongs of man against his brother man.
The wrongs between man and woman.
This is one of the old young stories of the wrong between man and woman.
It might be made a very long and very painful story. Chapter after chapter might describe the gradual vanishing of illusions, the slight divergence, the widening of estrangement, the death of trust, the deceit on one side, the wearing misery of doubt on the other, the dragging march step by step, day by day, to the final wrong, the halt on the hither edge, and the careless, the desperate, the irremediable plunge at last.
But the statement of the result is sad enough. Let all these dreary chapters be condensed into one!
A fatality preceded the wrong. It was this: —
The woman was coarse, and the man was fine. No gentle influences had received her in the facile days of childhood, and trained her nobler nature to the masterhood. Her eyes had been familiar with vulgar people and their vulgar ways. Her ears had heard their coarse talk. Her mind had narrowed to their ignoble methods of judgment. Her heart’s desire had been taught to be for the cheap and mundane possessions, money, show, titles, place, notoriety; and not for the priceless and immortal wages of an earnest life, Peace, Joy, and Love. She could not comprehend a great soul unless its body were dubbed My Lord or Sir Edwin, and wore some gaud of a star at the breast, or a ribbon at the knee.
Poor child! She was young enough to be docile. But after the blind happiness of that honeymoon at Brothertoft Manor, the old feeling of her first interview with her lover revived and exasperated.
“I believe he wants to make me feel ignorant and vulgar,” she thought, “so that he can govern me. But he shall not. I intend to be mistress. I’m sick of his meek suggestions. No sir; my way is my way, and I mean to have it.”
And so, rebuked by contact with a delicacy she could not understand, she resolutely coarsened herself, sometimes for spite, sometimes for sorry consolation. Her unsensitive nature trampled roughly on his scruples.
“My dear Jane,” he said to her at Brothertoft, “could you not instruct Mr. Skaats to be a little more indulgent with the Manor tenants?”
“Mr. Skaats’s business is to get the rents, for us to spend.”
“But these people have been used to gentler treatment.”
“Yes; they have been allowed to delay and shirk as they pleased. My property must not be wasted as yours was.”
“It is a hard summer for them, with this drought.”
“It is an expensive summer for us, with these repairs.”
Again, when they were re-established in New York, other causes of dispute came up.
“I wish, my dear Jane,” he said, “that you would be a little more civil with my patriot friends from Boston.”
“I don’t like people who talk through their noses.”
“Forgive the twang for the sake of the good sense.”
“Good sense! It seems to me tiresome grumbling. I hate the word ‘Grievance.’ I despise the name Patriot.”
“Remember, my dear child, that I think with these gentlemen!”
“Yes; and you are injuring your reputation and your chances by it. A Brothertoft should be conservative, and stand by his order.”
“I try to be conservative of Right. I stand by the Order of Worth, Courage, and Loyalty to Freedom.”
“O, there you go again into your foggy metaphysics!”
Again, he came one day, and said, with much concern: “My dear, I was distressed to know from Skaats that your father’s estate owned a third of the ‘Red Rover.’”
“Why?” she asked, with no concern.
“I was sure you did not know, or you would be as much shocked as I am. She is in the slave-trade!”
“Well. And I have often heard my father call her a ‘tidy bit of property,’ and say she had paid for herself a dozen times.”
He could not make her comprehend his hatred of this vile business, and his contempt, as a gentleman, for all the base subterfuges by which base people tried to defend it.
The Red Rover fortunately did not remain a subject of discussion. On that very trip the Negroes rose and broiled the captain and crew, — and served them right. Then, being used only to the navigation of dug-outs, they omitted to pump the vessel, whereupon she sunk, and the sharks had a festival.
With such divergences of opinion the first year of this propitious marriage passed miserably enough. Yet there was a time when it seemed to the disappointed husband and the defiant wife that their love might revive.
In 1758, Edwin Brothertoft, rich, aristocratic, and a liberal, the pride of the Colony as its foremost young man, was selected as the mouthpiece of a commission to present at home a petition and remonstrance. Such papers were flying freely across the water at that time. Reams of paper must be fired before the time comes for firing lead.
So to England went the envoy with his gorgeous wife. They were received with much distinction, as worthy young Americans from Benicia and elsewhere still are.
“Huzzay!” was the rapturous acclaim. “They do not talk through rebel noses!”
“Huzzay! It is English they speak, not Wigwamee!”
“Huzzay! The squaw is as beautiful as our Fairest, and painted red and white by cunning Nature, not daubed with ochres. Huzzay! the young sagamore is an Adonis. He beats Chesterfield at a bow and Selwyn at a mot.”
Mrs. Brothertoft grew proud of her husband, and grateful to him that he had chastened her Billop manners.
What a brilliant visit that was!
All the liberal statesmen — Pitt, Henry Fox, Conway, mellifluous Murray — were glad to do the young American honor.
Rugged Dr. Sam Johnson belabored him with sesquipedalian words, but in a friendly way and without bullying. He could be a good old boy, if he pleased, with good young ones.
Young Mr. Burke was gratified that his friend from a sublime and beautiful hemisphere appreciated the new treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful.
Young Mr. Joshua Reynolds was flattered that the distinguished stranger consented to sit to him, and in return tried to flatter the portrait.
Young Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, a poor Bohemian, smattered in music and medicine, came to inquire whether a clever man, out of place, could find his niche in America.
Mr. Garrick, playing Ranger, quite lost his self-possession when Mrs. Brothertoft first brought her flashing black eyes and glowing cheeks into the theatre, and only recovered when the audience perceived the emotion and cheered it and the lady together.
That great dilettante, Mr. Horace Walpole, made the pair a charming déjeuner at Strawberry Hill, upon which occasion he read aloud, — with much cadence, as dilettante gentlemen continue to do in our own time, — his friend Mr. Gray’s elaborate Elegy in a Country Churchyard, just printed. After this literary treat, Mr. Horace said: “Tell me something about that clever young aide-de-camp, Washington, who got Iroquois Braddock the privilege of dying in his scalp. A brave fellow that! an honor to your country, sir.” Mr. Gerge Selwyn, the wit, was also a guest. He looked maliciously out of his “demure eyes,” and said: “You forget, Horry, that you used to name Major Washington ‘a fanfaron,’ and laugh at him for calling the whiz of cannon-balls ‘a delightful sound.’” Whereupon the host, a little abashed, laughed, and said: “I wish such ‘fanfarons’ were more plenty in the army.” And the sparkling gossip did not relate how he had put this nickname in black and white in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, in whose correspondence it may still be read, with abundance of other second-hand jokes.
What a gay visit it was of the young pair in that brilliant moment of England!
While Brothertoft, in the intervals of urging his Petition and Remonstrance, discussed all the sublime and beautiful things that are dreamt of in philosophy with Mr. Burke, — while he talked Art with Mr. Reynolds, poetry with Dr. Goldsmith, and de omnibus rebus with Dr. Johnson, — his wife was holding a little court of her own.
She was a new sensation, with her bold, wilful beauty and her imperious Americanism. A new sensation, and quite annihilated all the traditions of Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish dress, when she appeared at a masquerade as Pocahontas, in a fringed and quilled buckskin robe, moccasons, and otter coronet with an eagle’s plume.
“I suppose that’s a scalping-knife she’s playing with,” said the Duke of Gurgoyle, inspecting her in this attire. “And, by George, she looks as if she could use it.”
Then 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.