It might be made a very long and very painful story. Chapter after chapter might describe the gradual vanishing of illusions, the slight divergence, the widening of estrangement, the death of trust, the deceit on one side, the wearing misery of doubt on the other, the dragging march step by step, day by day, to the final wrong, the halt on the hither edge, and the careless, the desperate, the irremediable plunge at last.
But the statement of the result is sad enough. Let all these dreary chapters be condensed into one!
A fatality preceded the wrong. It was this:—
The woman was coarse, and the man was fine. No gentle influences had received her in the facile days of childhood, and trained her nobler nature to the masterhood. Her eyes had been familiar with vulgar people and their vulgar ways. Her ears had heard their coarse talk. Her mind had narrowed to their ignoble methods of judgment. Her heart’s desire had been taught to be for the cheap and mundane possessions, money, show, titles, place, notoriety; and not for the priceless and immortal wages of an earnest life, Peace, Joy, and Love. She could not comprehend a great soul unless its body were dubbed My Lord or Sir Edwin, and wore some gaud of a star at the breast, or a ribbon at the knee.
Poor child! She was young enough to be docile. But after the blind happiness of that honeymoon at Brothertoft Manor, the old feeling of her first interview with her lover revived and exasperated.
“I believe he wants to make me feel ignorant and vulgar,” she thought, “so that he can govern me. But he shall not. I intend to be mistress. I’m sick of his meek suggestions. No sir; my way is my way, and I mean to have it.”
And so, rebuked by contact with a delicacy she could not understand, she resolutely coarsened herself, sometimes for spite, sometimes for sorry consolation. Her unsensitive nature trampled roughly on his scruples.
“My dear Jane,” he said to her at Brothertoft, “could you not instruct Mr. Skaats to be a little more indulgent with the Manor tenants?”
“Mr. Skaats’s business is to get the rents, for us to spend.”
“But these people have been used to gentler treatment.”
“Yes; they have been allowed to delay and shirk as they pleased. My property must not be wasted as yours was.”
“It is a hard summer for them, with this drought.”
“It is an expensive summer for us, with these repairs.”
Again, when they were re-established in New York, other causes of dispute came up.
“I wish, my dear Jane,” he said, “that you would be a little more civil with my patriot friends from Boston.”
“I don’t like people who talk through their noses.”
“Forgive the twang for the sake of the good sense.”
“Good sense! It seems to me tiresome grumbling. I hate the word ‘Grievance.’ I despise the name Patriot.”
“Remember, my dear child, that I think with these gentlemen!”
“Yes; and you are injuring your reputation and your chances by it. A Brothertoft should be conservative, and stand by his order.”
“I try to be conservative of Right. I stand by the Order of Worth, Courage, and Loyalty to Freedom.”
“O, there you go again into your foggy metaphysics!”
Again, he came one day, and said, with much concern: “My dear, I was distressed to know from Skaats that your father’s estate owned a third of the ‘Red Rover.’ ”
“Why?” she asked, with no concern.
“I was sure you did not know, or you would be as much shocked as I am. She is in the slave-trade!”
“Well. And I have often heard my father call her a ‘tidy bit of property,’ and say she had paid for herself a dozen times.”
He could not make her comprehend his hatred of this vile business, and his contempt, as a gentleman, for all the base subterfuges by which base people tried to defend it.
The Red Rover fortunately did not remain a subject of discussion. On that very trip the Negroes rose and broiled the captain and crew—and served them right. Then, being used only to the navigation of dug-outs, they omitted to pump the vessel, whereupon she sunk, and the sharks had a festival.
With such divergences of opinion the first year of this propitious marriage passed miserably enough. Yet there was a time when it seemed to the disappointed husband and the defiant wife that their love might revive.
In 1758, Edwin Brothertoft, rich, aristocratic, and a liberal, the pride of the Colony as its foremost young man, was selected as the mouthpiece of a commission to present at home a petition and remonstrance. Such papers were flying freely across the water at that time. Reams of paper must be fired before the time comes for firing lead.
So to England went the envoy with his gorgeous wife. They were received with much distinction, as worthy young Americans from Benicia and elsewhere still are.
“Huzzay!” was the rapturous acclaim. “They do not talk through rebel noses!”
“Huzzay! It is English they speak, not Wigwamee!”
“Huzzay! The squaw is as beautiful as our Fairest, and painted red and white by cunning Nature, not daubed with ochres. Huzzay! the young sagamore is an Adonis. He beats Chesterfield at a bow and Selwyn at a mot.”
Mrs. Brothertoft grew proud of her husband, and grateful to him that he had chastened her Billop manners.
What a brilliant visit that was!
All the liberal statesmen—Pitt, Henry Fox, Conway, mellifluous Murray—were glad to do the young American honor.
Rugged Dr. Sam Johnson belabored him with sesquipedalian words, but in a friendly way and without bullying. He could be a good old boy, if he pleased, with good young ones.
Young Mr. Burke was gratified that his friend from a sublime and beautiful hemisphere appreciated the new treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful.
Young Mr. Joshua Reynolds was flattered that the distinguished stranger consented to sit to him, and in return tried to flatter the portrait.
Young Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, a poor Bohemian, smattered in music and medicine, came to inquire whether a clever man, out of place, could find his niche in America.
Mr. Garrick, playing Ranger, quite lost his self-possession when Mrs. Brothertoft first brought her flashing black eyes and glowing cheeks into the theatre, and only recovered when the audience perceived the emotion and cheered it and the lady together.
That great dilettante, Mr. Horace Walpole, made the pair a charming déjeuner at Strawberry Hill, upon which occasion he read aloud—with much cadence, as dilettante gentlemen continue to do in our own time—his friend Mr. Gray’s elaborate Elegy in a Country Churchyard, just printed. After this literary treat, Mr. Horace said: “Tell me something about that clever young aide-de-camp, Washington, who got Iroquois Braddock the privilege of dying in his scalp. A brave fellow that! an honor to your country, sir.” Mr. Gerge Selwyn, the wit, was also a guest. He looked maliciously out of his “demure eyes,” and said: “You forget, Horry, that you used to name Major Washington ‘a fanfaron,’ and laugh at him for calling the whiz of cannon-balls ‘a delightful sound.’ ” Whereupon the host, a little abashed, laughed, and said: “I wish such ‘fanfarons’ were more plenty in the army.” And the sparkling gossip did not relate how he had put this nickname in black and white in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, in whose correspondence it may still be read, with abundance of other second-hand jokes.
What a gay visit it was of the young pair in that brilliant moment of England!
While Brothertoft, in the intervals of urging his Petition and Remonstrance, discussed all the sublime and beautiful things that are dreamt of