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.”
Chapter VII.
Such soliloquies as those of the last chapter presently led to dialogue of the same character.
The lady continued to scribble that brief romance, or rather that title of a romance.
“Lady Jane Brothertoft of Brothertoft Hall.”
The lover for his part was not a dunce. He soon perceived that it was his business to supply the situations and the talk under this title, and help the plot to grow.
It grew with alarming rapidity.
Tulips were thrusting their green thumbs through the ground in the Dutch gardens of the town when the young people first met. Tulips had flaunted their day and gone to green seed-vessels with a little ruffle at the top, and cabbage-roses were in young bud, when the first act of the drama ended.
The lady was hardly as coy as Galatea in the eclogue. The lover might have been repelled by the large share she took in the courtship. But he was a true, blind, eager young lover, utterly absorbed in a fanaticism of affection. Indeed, if in the tumult of his own bliss he had perceived that the lady was reaching beyond her line to beckon him, this would have seemed another proof that she and he were both obeying a Divine mandate. What young lover disputes his mistress’s right to share the passion?
“I knew it,” he said to her, by and by—“I knew from the first moment we met, that we must love one another. We are perfect counterparts—the halves of a perfect whole. But you the nobler. I felt from the moment that pleasant incident of the portrait had brought us together, that we were to be united. I hardly dared give my hope words. But I knew in my heart that the benign powers would not let me love so earnestly and yet desperately.”
These fine fervors seemed to her a little ridiculous, but very pretty. She looked in the glass, where the little Cupids in the onion-wreaths were listening, amused with Edwin’s rhapsodies, smiled to herself, then smiled to him, and said, “Matches are made in heaven.”
“I told you,” he said, “that I had erased the word Perhaps from my future. Now that I am in the way to prosperity and distinction for myself, and that you smile, success offers itself to me drolly. The Great Lawyer proposes to me a quadruple salary, and quarters the time in which I am to become a Hortensius. The Great Merchant offers me three hundred a year at once, a certain partnership, and promises to abandon codfish and go into more fragrant business.”
They laughed merrily over this. Small wit wakes lovers’ glee.
“I like you better in public life,” she said. “You must be a great man immediately.”
“Love me, and I will be what you love.”
“I am so glad I am rich. Such fine things can be done with money.”
“I should be terribly afraid of your wealth, if I was not sure of success on my side. As it is, we have the power of a larger usefulness.”
“Yes,” she said, carelessly.
He did not notice her indifferent manner, for he had dashed into a declamation of his high hopes for his country and his time. Those were the days when ardent youths were foreseeing Revolution and Independence.
She did not seem much interested in this rhapsody.
“I love to hear you talk of England and the great people you knew there,” said she. “Is not Brothertoft Manor-House very much like an English country-seat?”
“Yes; but if it were well kept up, there would be no place so beautiful in England—none so grand by nature, I mean.”
Here followed another rhapsody from this poetic youth on the Manor and its people, the river and the Highlands.