 | XXV. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
25. XXV.
A word of farewell to Major Kerr.
He had a horrid, horrid time at Fishkill.
Little but pork and beans to eat, little but
apple-jack to drink, nothing but discomfiture to
think of.
He experienced shame.
A letter was conveyed to him from Lucy
Brothertoft. She wrote, as kindly as might be,
what her real feelings had been toward him.
She also described the sad tragedy of the night
of his capture.
The conviction that he was a shabby fellow
had by this time pierced Kerr's pachyderm. He
was grateful to Lucy that she felt no contempt
for him. But her gentle dignity reproached his
unmanliness to her, and he became a very dejected
penitent.
General Burgoyne has been an important
character behind the scenes of this drama. He
was a clever amateur playwright, and while our
personages have been doing and suffering, the
General has been at work at a historical play,
of the Rebels.” There was some able acting in
it, and all the world watched for the catastrophe
quite breathless and agape. A brilliant pageant
of a surrender closed the play, in which, to the
general surprise, it was Jack Burgoyne, and not
Horatio Gates, who gave up the sword and
yielded the palm.
This news came flying down to Fishkill within
ten days after Major Kerr's capture.
The unlucky fellow heard of the great take of
British and Hessian officers. He began to fear
prisoners were a drug in the market, and he
must eat Continental fare till his stomach was
quite gone.
“Write to Sir Henry Clinton,” said Old Put,
good-naturedly, “that I 'll swap you for your
value in the Yankees he took with the Highland
forts.”
Kerr indited a doleful account of his diet and
impending dyspepsia to his General.
“I must have him back,” said Sir Henry.
“Anybody can be an Adjutant; but nobody in
His Majesty's army can carve a saddle of mutton,
or take out a sidebone, with Kerr.”
The “swap” was arranged. The Major was
put on board the Tartar, opposite Brothertoft
Manor. He went off a sadder and a wiser man.
His capture had served its purpose of amusing
been able to write to Washington, “We have lost
the Highland forts; but we have taken an Adjutant”;
— and Humphreys had composed a
doggerel, beginning, — “O Muse, inspire my
feeble pen, To sing a deed of merit, Performed
to daunt the enemy, By Major Peter Skerrett.”
Poor Kerr! when he reached New York, he
was all the time haunted by regrets for his lost
bride. “Up again, and take another!” is the
only advice to be given under such circumstances.
Some other flower of lower degree
must be a substitute for the rose.
Cap'n Baylor, late of a whaler, now the chief
oil man of New York, had a daughter Betty.
She was a dumpy little maid. Flippers were
her hands, fin-like were her feet. Nothing statuesque
about her; but she tinkled with coin,
and that tintinnabulation often opens the eyes
of Pygmalion.
Her the Major wooed, and glibly won.
Cap'n Baylor oiled out his son-in-law's debts.
Kerr resigned his Adjutancy, and took his wife
home.
Gout presently carried off the knobby old Earl
of Bendigh. The Bucephalus colt made Brother
Tom acephalous, by throwing him over a wall.
Brother Dick succumbed to Bacchus. Harry
Kerr, our Kerr, became the sixth Earl of
Bendigh.
His dumpy Countess studied manners in England,
and acquired the delicious languor of a
lady's-maid. She wore, morning, noon, and
night, white gloves tight as thumbikins. She
consumed perfume by the puncheon. But she
was an honest, merry soul, who would stand no
bullying. She kept Kerr in order, and made
him quite a tolerably respectable fellow at last.
By and by, out of supreme gratitude to her
for his wedded bliss, he had the Baylor arms
looked up at the Herald's office. They were
found, and quartered with his own, and may
still be seen on the coat of the Kerrs, Bendigh
branch, as follows: “On a rolling sea vert, a
Leviathan rampant, sifflant proper. Crest, a
hand grasping a harpoon. Motto, Illic spirat,
— There she blows.”
| XXV. Edwin Brothertoft | |