Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter VI
Chapter VI.
When Pyramus and Thisbe, when Cœur de Lion and Blondel, want speech of each other, Wall will ever have “a cranny right and sinister” for their whispers, will “show a chink to blink through with their eyne.”
Breakfast was over. Voltaire was in the pantry, clashing dish and pan for a signal. Lucy waited her moment to dart in and get her hopes of escape made into certainties.
“I am going up stairs, Lucy,” said her mother, “to give Dewitt her last hints about your wedding-dress. Come up presently and try it on.”
She went out, leaving lover and lady together.
Kerr stood before the fire in his favorite posture. His face was red, his jacket was red. He produced the effect of a great unmeaning daub of scarlet in a genre — mauvais genre — picture.
The big booby grew embarrassed with himself. The quiet presence of this young girl abashed him. He knew that his suit was an insult to her. He saw that she did not appreciate his feet and inches. Neither his cheeks nor his shoulders nor his calves touched her heart. His vanity had been hurt, and he felt a spiteful triumph that she was in his power.
This morning he was ashamed of himself. It is a grievous thing that men cannot go to bed tipsy and wake up without headaches and with self-respect. Perhaps it will be different when Chaos comes again.
Kerr felt disgusted with himself, and embarrassed. He wanted to talk to cover his awkwardness. He did not know what to say. The complaint is not uncommon.
“I suppose she knows it’s a fine day, and wont thank me for telling her,” he thought. “Vaughan’s trip up the river, — that’s talked out. I made the pun about Esopus and Esop’s fables, that Rawdon got off last night, and she didn’t laugh. I wish I had Jack André’s tongue. I have half a mind to cut it out of him — the dashed whipper-snapper — for trying to get her to flirt with him yesterday. I suppose I ought to be making love now. But she has never let me come near enough to make what I call love. Well, I must say something. Here goes! Ahem! Lucy — Miss Lucy.”
“Sir.”
“It’s a very fine day.”
“Very.”
“A most uncommonly fine day for this doosed climate.”
No reply.
“I’d box the dumb thing’s ears if she was Mrs. K.,” thought the Major. “But she sha’n’t silence me. I’ll give her another chance. Ahem! Miss Lucy! Wouldn’t you like to stroll out and take the air?”
“No, I thank you. Do not let me detain you.”
“I say, you know, we’re to be married tomorrow. You needn’t be so infernally distant.”
“My mother wishes me to join her with the dressmakers.”
“Well, if you wont come, you wont,” says Kerr, taking himself off in dudgeon.
He walked out upon the lawn. The air was nine-oxygen azote of the purest proof. He swallowed it boozily, as if it were six-water grog.
Lucy hied to the trysting-place, where the arch-plotter was waiting amid pans and dishes.
“Voltaire, tell me!” she cried. And here tears interrupted her, and gushed as if she intended to use the biggest pan for a lacrymatory.
“Don’t cry, Miss Lucy,” the old fellow says. “It’s good news!”
At which she only wept the more.
Without much knowledge of the chemistry of tears, Voltaire saw that spending them relieved and calmed the young lady. Meanwhile, to be talking on indifferent subjects until her first burst was over, he said, “I saw Major Scrammel at Fishkill, Miss Lucy. He asked after your health.”
“I am. obliged to him.” The name seemed to act like a dash of cold water. These Majors fatigued her. Scrammel Yankee, Emerick Hessian, Kerr British, — she liked none of them. She began to feel a disgust for the grade.
“My father!” she said, with her whole heart in the word, “tell me of him. He has not forgotten me. He loves me. He will save me from this — this —” A sob drowned the epithet.
“He loves you dearly,” Voltaire responded.
“Lub,” he still pronounced the precious word. He brought his two thick lips together to sound the final “b,” instead of lightly touching his upper teeth against his lower lip and breathing out “ve” final.
This great fact of love established, with all its sequel, by a single word, Lucy, womanlike, desired to know that this dear new lover no longer misunderstood her. She must be satisfied that she stood right in his esteem before she could take thought of her own dangers.
“You told him,” she said, eagerly, “that I was not an unnatural daughter, — only deceived and deluded by this cruel woman?”
Tears had started again, as she thought of the misery he must have suffered for her disloyalty. But indignation at her mother burned them up, and she closed her sentence sternly.
“He sees through it all,” the old ambassador replied.
“How did he look? Not very sad, I hope?” she said.
Womanlike again, she must have the person before her eyes. She must see him, a visible being, — that she could take to her heart with infinite love and pity and hope, — before she could listen to his message of comfort to her.
“He looked pretty old, Miss Lucy. His hair’s grown gray. It oughtn’t to. He’s a boy still, — only a little better than forty. He could make his life all over again yet. But he looked old and settled down sad. He’s got a sargeant’s coat on, instead of a general’s; but he looks, into his face, as if he know’d all generals know, and a heap more.”
“My dear father!” interjected Lucy in the middle of Voltaire’s description. And she thought what a beloved task it would be for her to renew and restore that ruined life.
“And now, Voltaire,” she said, “can he protect me?”
“We talked it all over. He didn’t see anything he could do. He said he was too broken-hearted to plan for anybody.”
Poor Lucy! all her hopes thus dashed down! She could almost hear her own heart break.
But Voltaire continued: “He had guv” — (no Tombigbee, old boy!) — “given it all up, and I was goin’ off feelin’ mighty low, mighty low, I tell you, Miss Lucy. I started off for the woods and sot down, lookin’ for a squerril-hole to git into, and die like a four-legs. Jess then, jess before I’d found my dyin’ bed, I heerd somebody screech, ‘Voltaire, Voltaire!’ like mad. Fust I thought ’t was the Holy Angels. Then I thought praps ’t was the Black Debbls, prowlin’. I looked round the woods, pretty skeered, and heerd chestnuts drap. Then come the yell again, and your father lighted right down on me and dragged me back like a go-cart. I didn’t know what was comin’; but he yanked me up the bank to the old well, afront of Squire Van Wyck’s farm-house, and there I saw —”
At this point of his eager recital Voltaire’s ancient bellow had to pause and draw breath.
“Saw!” cried Lucy equally eager, peopling this pause with a great legion of upstart hopes, all in buff and blue, fine old Continentals complete from boots to queues; but strangers to her, and therefore without faces.
“Saw Major Skerrett,” gasped Voltaire.
All that legion of hopes in Lucy’s brain suddenly condensed into a single heroic Continental vision, with the name Skerrett for a face. She was sure this new-comer meant Help. She could feel her just now breaking heart tie itself together with a chain, each link a letter of the name Skerrett.
“Another Major!” she said, half impatiently.
There was almost a shade of coquetry in her little protest against this stranger personage. The woman was not dead in her yet.
“Anudder Major ob anudder stuff. De good God, not de Debbl, — he make dis one.”
“Voltaire, don’t talk so!”
Did she object to his fact in physiology, or to his pronunciation?
Voltaire, with bellows rested, now began to describe the new hero with enthusiasm. His touches were crude, but picturesque, — a charcoal sketch.
“Major Skerrett, Miss Lucy. O my! what a beautiful moustache he had! jess the color of ripe chestnut-leaves, and curling down on each side, so.”
The black forefinger described an ogee on either black lip.
Lucy did not interrupt. She must have her correct image of the new actor before she inquired his rôle. She perceived already that he was not to be a sicklied Hamlet.
Her first picture of the hero had been a figure in a Continental uniform, with the name Skerrett instead of a face.
Second picture: Lucy sees the mere name vanish. Two chestnut-leaves, fine gold as October can paint them, broad in the middle, blunt at the but, taper toward the point, serrated along the edges, dispose themselves to her mind’s eye in the air, and form a moustache. She looks at her vision of this isolated feature, and thinks, “It is much prettier than Major Emerick’s.”
“A go-ahead nose,” continues Voltaire, without pause.
Lucy inserts a go-ahead nose into the blank, over and a little ahead of the moustache. Third picture.
“No mumps round his cheeks and chin,” the describer went on.
Not a mump had ever disfigured the cheeks Lucy hereupon balanced on either side of the nose and the chin which she had located under the two chestnut-leaves. Picture fourth.
“Eyes blue as that saucer,” — Voltaire pointed to a piece of delicate china, — “and they look like the Holy Angels.”
Into their sockets Lucy inserted a pair of orbs, saucer in color not in shape, and gave them a holy, angelic expression. She inspected the growing portrait with her own sweet eyes, — they were hazel, “an excellent thing in woman,” — and began to think the illumined face very charming.
“Lots of tan on his bark,” resumed the painter in words.
Lucy dipped her pencil in umber and gave the bark of cheeks, chin, and nose a nut-brown tint, that bravely backed the gold of the moustache.
“Yaller hair under his cocked hat.”
“Yellow! if you please, Voltaire,” she protested, and with skilful thought she adjusted the coiffure.
“No queue.”
An imaginary queue, tied with a tumbled black ribbon, had been bobbing in the air near the hero’s cerebellum. Lucy docked it, and, with a scornful gesture, sent it whirling off into the Unseen.
“Now,” says Voltaire, “you jess stick in Troot (Truth), Wercher (Virtue), Kerridge (Courage), and all the other good things into that are face: you jess clap on a smile that’ll make a dough heart in a bosom turn into light gingerbread; and give him a look that can make stubbed toes want to wheel about and turn about and dance breakdowns, and is stickin’ plaster to every scratch on an old free colored gentleman’s shins: you jess think you see a Major what Liberty and all the Holy Angels is pullin’ caps for, and all the Debbls is shakin’ huf away from where he stands: you jess git all that in your eye, Miss Lucy, and you’ve got Major Skerrett.”
The picture was complete. Truth, Virtue, Courage, and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly’s name, into a brother tar’s arm with India ink. She had given the hero’s face a smile, yeasty, sugary, and pungent enough to convert the dullest dough heart into light gingerbread. She had bestowed upon her ideal a look that would be surgery to scarred shins and light fantasy to the weariest toes. Now she passed her finger over the chestnut-leaf moustache to smooth down its serrated edges. The portrait was done. Lucy surveyed it an instant, and blushed to think it was indeed a Major that women and angels might pull caps for.
She blushed to herself — the simple maid — and felt a slight shame at her longing to see if the real man was identical with her ideal.
This child — remember she was but eighteen, and had been kept by herself and her mother, a complete child until just now — this child had hitherto had no ideal of a hero except that he must be Kerr’s opposite. We know already her verdict upon the British officers. Of Putnam’s family, Scrammel she distrusts; Radière she would like as a friend, if he were not so Gallic, dyspeptic, and testy; Humphreys is ridiculous, with his grand airs and his prosy poetasms; Livingston amuses her; — voila tout!
“And can this gentleman help?” she asked earnestly, as soon as she had his person before her eyes.
“Help!” says Voltaire; “he can’t help helping. That’s his business under this canopy.”
The negro stated briefly the scheme for Kerr’s capture and her abduction.
Lucy comprehended the whole in a moment.
“Major Skerrett sent you a message, Miss Lucy,” says the successful envoy, closing his report.
“Me!” she said. She massacred a little scruple, that Major Kerr’s betrothed ought not to be receiving messages from strange majors. “What is it? He is very kind to think of me.”
“He said, ‘Tell Miss Brothertoft to be brave, to be prudent, and to keep her room with a headache, until we are ready to start.’”
“It makes me brave and prudent, now that I have a strong friend to trust. But the headache I had is all gone. I never felt so well and happy in my life.”
“Look at him!” Voltaire rejoined, pointing to Kerr, through the pantry window. “That will make you ache from your head to your heels.”
She did look, and ached at once with fresh resentment and disgust.
Kerr was leaning limp against a tree, breathing tipsily his nine-oxygen azote. The golden hills, the blue river, and the mountains, blue and gold, had no charms for him. He was thinking, “Almost time to make it seven bells. I can’t touch anything stronger than six-water grog this morning. O my head!”
“Pretty fellow fur a lubber to my young lady!” says Voltaire. His mispronunciation revealed a truth.
This faithful blackamoor now proceeded to act Othello relating his adventures. He had a tragicomic episode to impart of his “hair-breadth ’scapes,” “of being taken by the insolent foe,” of all “his portance in his travel’s history”; and what he suffered, shin and sole, in the “rough quarries, rocks, and hills” back of Anthony’s Nose, while he dodged by night along the by-paths.
Lucy “gave him for his pains a world of sighs,” and “loved him for the dangers he had passed” in her service.
“Now,” said the loyal squire, in conclusion, “I must set you something to do, Miss Lucy.”
“What?” she asked, trembling a little at responsibility.
“Send Dewitt and Sally Bilsby off home! They’ll want a frolic after working so hard on your wedding-dress. We must have the house to ourselves to-night.”
“To-night! Lucy’s heart bounded and sunk. Yes, she must be free to-night, or to-morrow would make her a slave.
“Miss Lucy,” whispered Voltaire, “two of ’em was here already before sunrise.”
“Not the ——” She hesitated.
“Not the Major! No; old Sam Galsworthy and Hendrecus Canady. You know ’em. They come to see how the land lay.”
“Mother calls; I must go,” said Lucy, in a tremor.
She gave one look through the window at Kerr, leaning limp against a chestnut-tree. The Skerrett-moustache-colored leaves in myriad pairs shook over him. She seemed to see a myriad of faces, with go-ahead noses, no mumps, angelic blue eyes, bronzed skins, and truth and courage in every line, looking out of the tree, and signalizing her, “Be brave! be prudent!”