“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.
“Come, gentlemen,” cries Van Cortlandt, pacificator, “I have a capital plan for young Brothertoft.”
“What?” 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