“So that is he!” was the cry. “How handsome! how graceful! how chivalrous! how brilliant! what a bow he makes! his manners disarm every antagonist! He will not take advantages, they say. He is generous, and has visionary notions about fair play. He thinks a beaten foe should not be trampled on or scalped. He thinks enemies ought to be forgiven, and friends to be sustained, through thick and thin. Well, well! such fancies are venial errors in a young aristocrat.”
The city received him as kindly as it does the same manner of youth now, when its population has increased one hundred-fold.
The chief lawyer said, “Come into my office and copy papers, at a pound a week, and in a year you will be a Hortensius.”
The chief merchant said, “If you like the smell of rum, codfish, and beaver-skins, take a place in my counting-house, at a hundred pounds a year, and correct the spelling of my letters. I promise nothing; but I may want a partner by and by.”
The Governor of the Province and Mayor of the town, dullards, as officials are wont to be, each took the young gentleman aside, and said, “Here is a proclamation of mine! Now punctuate it, and put in some fine writing—about Greece and Rome, you know, and Magna Charta, with a Latin quotation or two—and I will find, you a fat job and plenty of pickings!”
The Livingston party proposed to him to go to the Assembly on their votes and fight the De Lanceys. The De Lanceys, in turn, said, “Represent us, and talk those radical Livingstons down.”
Lord London, Commander-in-Chief, swore that Brothertoft was the only gentleman he had seen among the dashed Provincials. “And,” says he, “you speak Iroquois and French, and all that sort of thing. Be my secretary, and I’ll get you a commission in the army—dashed if I don’t!”
King’s College, just established, to increase the baker’s dozen of educated men in the Colony, offered the young Oxonian a professorship, Metaphysics, Mathematics, Languages, Belles-Lettres—in fact whatever he pleased; none of the Trustees knew them apart.
Indeed, the Provincial world prostrated itself before this fortunate youth and prayed him—
“Be the representative Young American! Convince our unappreciative Mother England:
“That we do not talk through our noses;“That our language is not lingo;“That we are not slaves of the Almighty Wampum;“That we can produce the Finest Gentlemen, as well as the Biggest Lakes, the Longest Rivers, the Vastest Antres, and the Widest Wildernesses in the World.”
What an oyster-bed, indeed, surrounded our hero!
Alas for him! He presently found a Pearl.
Chapter VI.
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