Читать книгу Edwin Brothertoft - Theodore Winthrop - Страница 8

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Handsome Jane Billop wanted a husband.

She looked into the glass, and saw Beauty. Into the schedules of her father’s will, and saw Heiress.

She determined to throw her handkerchief, as soon as she could discover the right person to pick it up.

“He must belong to a great family,” thought the young lady. “He must promise me to be a great man. He must love me to distraction. I hate the name of Billop! I should look lovely in a wedding-dress!”

She was very young, very premature, motherless, the daughter and companion of a coarse man who had basely made a great fortune. Rich rogues always fancy that their children will inherit only the wealth, and none of the sin. They are shocked when the paternal base metal crops out at some new vein in their progeny. Better not embezzle and oppress, papa, if you wish your daughters to be pure and your sons honest! Colonel Billop did not live to know what kind of an heiress he and his merciless avarice had fathered.

“I must see this young Brothertoft,” Jane’s revery continued. “Poor fellow, I have got all his property! Mr. Skaats says he is a very distinguished young gentleman, and will be one of the first men of the Province. Handsome too, and knows lords and ladies in England! Let me see! I cannot meet him anywhere so soon after the funeral. But he might call on me, about business. I feel so lonely and solemn! And I do not seem to have any friends. Everybody courts me for my money, and yet they look down upon me too, because my father made his own fortune.”

Colonel Billop had taken much pains to teach his daughter business habits, and instruct her in all the details of management of property.

She sat down at her desk, and in a bold round hand indited the following note:—

“Mr. Skaats, Miss Billop’s agent, begs that Mr. Brothertoft will do him the favor to call at the house in Wall Street to-morrow at eleven. Mr. Skaats is informed that there is a picture at the Manor-House which Mr. Brothertoft values, and he would be pleased to make an arrangement for the late owner’s retaining it.”

Skilful Jane! to whom a Vandyck was less worth than its length and breadth in brocade. She sealed this note with Colonel Billop’s frank motto, “Per omnia ad opes,” and despatched it.

Edwin was delighted at the prospect of recovering his ancestor. It is a mighty influence when the portrait of a noble forefather puts its eye on one who wears his name, and says, by the language of an unchanging look: “I was a Radical in my day; be thou the same in thine! I turned my back upon the old tyrannies and heresies, and struck for the new liberties and beliefs; my liberty and belief are doubtless already tyranny and heresy to thine age; strike thou for the new! I worshipped the purest God of my generation—it may be that a purer God is revealed to thine; worship him with thy whole heart.”

Such a monitor is priceless. Edwin was in a very grateful mood when he knocked at the door in Wall Street.

A bank now rests upon the site of the Billop mansion. Ponderous, grim, granite, stand the two columns of its propylon. A swinging door squeaks “Hail!” to the prosperous lender, and “Avaunt!” to the borrower unindorsed. Within, paying tellers, old and crusty, or young and jaunty, stand, up to their elbows in gold, and smile at the offended dignity of personages not identified presenting checks, and in vain requiring payment. Farther back depositors are feeding money, soft and hard, into the maw of the receiving teller. Behind him, book-keepers wield prodigious ledgers, and run up and down their columns, agile as the lizards of Pæstum. And in the innermost penetralia of that temple of Plutus, the High-Priests, old Dons of Directors worth billions, sit and fancy that they brew crisis or credit.

So stand things now where Edwin Brothertoft once stood contemplating a brass knocker.

The door opened, and he was presently introduced into a parlor, upholstered to the uppermost of its era.

But where is Mr. Skervey Skaats?

Instead of that mean and meagre agent, here is the principal, a singularly handsome, bold, resolute young woman, her exuberant beauty repressed and her carnations toned down by mourning.

Both the young people were embarrassed for a moment.

He was embarrassed at this unlooked-for substitution of a beautiful girl for an ugly reptile of a Skaats; and she to find how fair a spirit she had conjured up. He with a sudden compunction for the prejudice he had had against the unknown heir, his disinheritor; and she with her instant conviction that here was the person to pick up her handkerchief, if he would.

Shall the talk of these children be here repeated? It might fill a pleasant page; but this history cannot deal with the details of their immature lives. It only makes ready, in this First Act, for the rapid business of a riper period.

When Edwin Brothertoft left the heiress’s parlor, after sixty minutes of delight, she seated herself at the desk where she, under the alias Skaats, had indited his invitation, took a fresh sheet of paper and a virgin quill, and wrote:—

Jane Brothertoft.

Then the same in backhand, with flourishes and without. Then she printed, in big text:—

Lady Jane Brothertoft, of Brothertoft Hall.

Then, with a conscious, defiant look, she carried her prophetic autograph to the fire, and watched it burn.

Over the fireplace was a mirror, districted into three parts by gilded mullions. Above was perched a gilt eagle, a very rampant high-flier indeed. Two wreaths of onions, in the disguise of pomegranates, were festooned from his beak, and hung in alluring masses on either side of the frame. Quite a regiment of plump little cherubs, clad in gilding, tight as it could fit, clung in the wreaths, and sniffed at their fragrance. Jane looked up and saw herself in the mirror. A blush deepened her somewhat carnal carnations. Every cherub seemed to be laughing significantly. She made a face at the merry imps. As she did so, she caught sight of the reflection of her father’s portrait, also regarding her. He was such a father as a child would have been quite justified in disowning and utterly cutting, if a stranger had asked, “Who is that horrid person with the red face, the coarse jowl, the permanent leer, and cruel look?” An artist, cunning in red for the face and white for the ruffles, had made this personage more butcherly even than Nature intended.

Jane Billop marched up to the portrait, and turned it with its face toward the wall.

“He needn’t look at me, and tell me I am courting Mr. Edwin Brothertoft,” she said to herself. “I know I am, and I mean to have him. He is lovely; but I almost hate him. He makes me feel ignorant and coarse and mean. I don’t want to be the kind of woman he has been talking to with that deferential address. But I suppose this elegant manner is all put on, and he is really just like other people. He seems to be pretty confident of carrying the world before him. We shall be the great people of the Province. Here comes the distinguished Sir Edwin Brothertoft, and Lady Jane, his magnificent wife! People shall not pretend to look down upon me any more, because my father knew how to make money, when fools threw it away. I’ve got a Manor, too, Miss Mary Phillipse; and I’m handsomer than you, and not almost an old maid. That little chit of a Mayor Cruger’s daughter’s had better not try to patronize me again, nor Julia Peartree Smith turn up her poor pug nose. They’ll all want invitations to Mrs. Brothertoft’s ball on going out of mourning. How they will envy me my Edwin! What a beautiful bow he makes! What a beautiful voice he has! June is a lovely month for a wedding.”

There is never joy in Wall Street now such as filled the heart of Edwin Brothertoft on that morning of a bygone century. The Billops of our time live a league up town, and plot on Murray Hill for lovers of good family.

Edwin had found his Pearl—a glorious, flashing Ruby rather. Its gleam exhilarated him. His heart and his heels were so light, that he felt as if he could easily spring to the top of the spire of Old Trinity, which was at least a hundred feet lower than the crocketty structure now pointing the moral of Wall Street. He walked away from Miss Billop’s door in a maze of delight, too much bewildered by this sudden bliss to think of analyzing it.

So the young payee, whose papa’s liberal check for his quarter’s allowance has just been cashed, may climb from the bank on the site of the Billop bouse, as far as Broadway, content with the joy of having tin, without desiring to tinkle it.

But at the corner Edwin’s heart began to speak to him with sentiments and style quite different from the lady’s.

“How she startled me with her brilliant beauty! How kind it was to think of my valuing the portrait! How generously and how delicately she offered it! And I had done her the injustice of a prejudice! That wrong I will redress by thinking of her henceforth all the more highly and tenderly.

“Poor child! a lonely orphan like myself. She showed in all our interview how much she yearned for friendship. Mine she shall have. My love? yes, yes, my love! But that must stay within my secret heart, and never find a voice until I have fully assured my future.

“And this warm consciousness of a growing true love shall keep me strong and pure and brave. Thank God and her for this beautiful influence! With all the kindness I have met, I was still lonely, still desponding. Now I am jubilant; everything is my friend and my comrade. Yes; ring out, gay bells of Trinity! What is it you are ringing? A marriage? Ah, happy husband! happy bride! I too am of the brotherhood of Love. Ring, merry bells! Your songs shall be of blissful omen to my heart.”