 | Edwin Brothertoft |  |
2. PART II.
1. I.
Buff and Blue.
Dear, faithful old colors! They never appeared
more brave and trusty than in Major Skerrett's
coat, — a coat of 1777.
“White at the seams of the blue, soiled at the
edges of the buff,” said the Major, inspecting
himself in a triangular bit of looking-glass. “I
must have a new one, if I can find a tailor who
will take an order on the Goddess of Liberty in
pay. Good morning, Mrs. Birdsell.”
This salutation he gave as he passed out of the
little house in Fishkill where he had been quartered
last night.
“Good mornin', Sir,” returned Mrs. Birdsell,
rushing out of her kitchen, with a rolling-pin in
hand, and leaving her pie-crust flat on its back,
all dotted with dabs of butter, as an ermine cape
is with little black tails.
She looked after him, as he stepped out into the
village street. Her first emotion was feminine
admiration, — her second, feminine curiosity.
“What a beautiful young man!” she said to
her respectable self. “Sech legs! Sech hair,
— jest the color of ripe chesnut burrs, — only I
don't like that streak of it on his upper lip.
I 've olluz understood from Deacons that the
baird of a man cum in with Adam's fall and waz
to be shaved off. Naow I 'd give a hul pie to
know what Gineral Washington 's sent him on
here for. It 's the greatest kind of a pity he
did n't come a few days before. That old granny,
Gineral Putnam, would n't hev let Sirr Henery
Clinton grab them forts down to the Highlands,
if he 'd hed sech a young man as this to look
arter him and spry him up.”
Before he continued his walk, Major Skerrett
paused a moment for a long hearty draught of
new October, — new American, a finer tipple than
old English October.
Finer and cheaper! In fact it was on free tap.
No cask to bore. No spigot to turn. No
pewter pot to fill. Major Skerrett had but to
open his mouth and breathe. He inhaled, and
he had swallowed Science knows how many
quarts of that mellow golden nectar, the air of
an American October morning. It was the perfection
of potables, — as much so then in 1777,
as it is now in 1860.
“I have seen the lands of many men, and
drained their taps,” soliloquized the Major, parodying
or out of the bottle, tasted I such divine stuff
as this. O lilies and roses, what a bouquet! O
peaches and pippins, what a flavor! O hickory-nuts
and chinkapins, what an aroma! More,
Hebe, more! Let me swig! — forgive the word!
But one drinks pints; and I want gallons, puncheons.”
While he is indulging in this harmless debauch,
let Mrs. Birdsell's question, “What did
General Washington send him on for?” be
answered.
“Peter,” said Washington familiarly to Major
Skerrett, his aide-de-camp, “I have written peremptorily
several times to General Putnam to
send me reinforcements. They do not come.”
The chief was evidently somewhat in the dumps
there at his camp, near Pennibecker's Mill, on
the Perkiomy Creek, twenty miles from Philadelphia,
at the end of September, 1777.
“I suppose,” the Major suggested, “that Putnam
cannot get out of his head his idle scheme
for the recapture of New York, — that `suicidal
parade,' as Aleck Hamilton calls it.”
“I must have the men. Our miserable business
of the Brandywine must be done over.”
“Yes; Sir William Howe is bored enough
in Philadelphia by this time. Everybody always
is there. It would be only the courtesy of war
to jollier quarters.”
“I do not like to challenge him unless I have
a couple of thousand more men. You must
take a little ride, Major, up to Old Put at Peeks-kill,
and see that they start.”
“The soldier obeys. But he sighs that he
may miss a battle or an adventure.”
“Adventures sprout under the heels of knights-errant
like you, Peter. Peekskill is not many
miles away from the spot of one of my young
romances.”
The noble old boy paused an instant, sentimental
with the recollection of handsome Mary
Phillipse and nineteen years ago.
“The men will come like drawing teeth,”
he resumed. “Old Put is — what was that Latin
phrase you used about him to Lafayette the other
day?”
“Tenax propositi,” Skerrett replied.
“Anglice, obstinate as a mule. Ah, Skerrett!
we poor land-surveyors, that had to lug levels
and compasses through the woods, know little
Latin and less Greek. But there was more of
your quotation, to express the valuable side of
Putnam's character.”
“Nec vultus instantis tyranni, Mente quatit
solida,” quoted the Major; and then translated
impromptu, “Never a scowl, o'er tyrant's jowl,
His stiff old heart can shake.”
Washington laughed. Skerrett laughed louder.
He was at that ebullient age when life is
letting off its overcharge of laughter. Young
fellows at that period are a bore or an exhilaration;
— a bore, to say the least, if their animal
spirits are brutal spirits, — no bore, even if not
quite the ripest company, provided their glee
does not degenerate into uproar.
“I don't know what I should do, Peter, in these
dark times, without your irrepressible good spirits,”
said the chief. “My boys — you and Hamilton
and Lafayette and Harry Lee — keep me up.
I get tired to death of the despondencies and
prejudices and jealousies of some of these old women
in breeches who wear swords or cast votes.”
“Perhaps you cannot spare me then to go to
Peekskill,” the Major said, slyly.
His Country's Father smiled. “Be off, my
boy; but don't stay too long. Your head will
be worth more to Old Put than a regiment.
He 's growing old. He shows the effects of
tough campaigning in his youth. Besides, keeping
a tavern was not the best business for a man
of his convivial habits.”
“We youngsters found that out at the siege
of Boston, when you, General, were keeping your
head cool on baked apples and milk.”
“I ate 'em because I liked 'em, my boy. My
head keeps itself cool. By the way, you will be
La Radière. The old gentleman never
can forget how the Frenchmen and their Indians
mangled him in Canada in '58.”
“He never can let anybody else forget it. I
would give odds that he 'll offer to tell that story
before I 've been with him fifteen minutes.”
“Well, good bye! Hurry on the regulars!
Let him call in the militia in their places! Tell
him he must hold the Highlands! If he cannot
keep Sir Henry Clinton back until Gates takes
Jack Burgoyne, you and I, Peter, will have to
paint ourselves vermilion and join the Tuscaroras.”
After such a talk with our chief, — who was
not the stilted prig that modern muffs have made
him, — Major Skerrett departed on his mission.
He left head-quarters a few days before that hit-and-miss
battle of Germantown.
Skerrett was young and a hard rider. He
lamed his horse the first day. He lost time in
getting another. It was the evening of October
eighth, when, as he approached the North River
to cross to Peekskill, the country people warned
him back with the news that on the sixth Sir
Henry Clinton had taken the Highland forts,
and Putnam had run away to Fishkill.
“Black news!” thought Skerrett. “General
Washington will turn Tuscarora now, if ever.”
Skerrett made a circuit northward, crossed the
Hudson at Newburgh, and reported to General
Putnam, October 9, sunset, at the Van Wyck
farm-house, on the plain, half a mile north of the
Fishkill Mountains. The heights rose in front, a
rampart a thousand feet high.
Old Put limped out to meet Washington's
aide-de-camp. He was a battered veteran, lame
with a fractured thigh, stiff with coming paralysis
and now despondent after recent blunders.
“Dusky times, Skerrett,” says he, forlornly.
“I suppose the Chief sent you for men. He 's
a cannibal after human flesh. But don't worry
me to-night. To-morrow we 're to have a Council
of War, and I 'll see what can be done. I
suppose you know what 's happened.”
“Yes, — generally.”
“Well; it 's all clear for Clinton to go up and
join that mountebank, Jack Burgoyne. I might
just as well go home, and set up tahvern again to
Pomfret for anything I can do here. God save
the King is going to make Yankee Doodle sing
small from yesterday on. It was all the fault of
that cursed fog, — we had a fog, thick as mush,
all day on the sixth. I believe them British
ships brought it with 'em in bags, from the Channel.
They chocked up the river with their fog,
and while I was waitin' for 'em over to Peekskill,
they crep across and took the forts. Darn it
all!”
Putnam paused to take an indignant breath.
Skerrett smiled at the old hero's manner. When
he was excited, the Yankeeisms of his youth
came back to him. His lisp also grew more
decided. Nobody knows whether the lisp was
natural, or artificial, and caused by a jaw-breaker
with the butt of a musket he got from an uncivil
Gaul at Fort Ti in '58. His Yankeeisms, his
lisp, his drollery, his muddy schemes, made the
jolly old boy the chief comic character of our
early Revolutionary days.
“How Jack Burgoyne will stick out that great
under-lip of his, — the ugly pelican!” continued
old Put, “when he hears of this. He 'll stop
fightin', while he goes at his proper trade, and
writes a farce with a Yankee in it, who 'll never
say anything but, `I veouw! By dollars, we 're
chawed up!'”
“Don't you remember, General,” says Skerrett,
“how Bunker Hill interrupted the acting
of a farce of his? Perhaps Gates will make him
pout his lip, as he did when he saw you pointing
the old mortar Congress at him and Boston from
Prospect Hill. Don't you recollect? We saw
him with a spy-glass, and you said he looked like
a pelican with a mullet in his pouch. By the
way, where did you ever see pelicans?”
“When I was down to take Cuba in '62, and
we did n't take it. I 'll tell you the story when
a thing but pelicans to eat for two days, — and
fishy grub they are!”
“Well, we must not despair,” says Skerrett,
cheerily, seeing that the old brave began to
brighten.
“Dethpair?” lisped Putnam, “who 's a goin'
to despair? I tell you, my boy, you 'll eat a
Connecticut punkin-pie with me, yet, in peace
and Pomfret. I wish we had one now, for
supper.”
“There 's raw material enough about,” Skerrett
said, glancing at the piles of that pomaceous
berry which wallowed among the corn shocks
and smiled at the sugary sunset.
“Yes; but this is York State, and punkinpies
off their native Connecticut soil are always
a mushy mess, or else tough as buckskin. Never
mind, my boy, we 'll sit every man under his own
corn-stalk, on his own squash, and whistle Yankee
Doodle and call it macaroni, yet. It don't
look half so dark to me now as it did in the Ticonderogy
times. Did I ever tell you the story
how the Frenchmen and their cussed Indians
mauled me there?”
“It 's coming. I knew it would,” thought
Peter, at the beginning of this sentence, “and I
did not bring any cotton to plug my ears!”
“Well,” continued Put, without waiting for
tale another time, for here comes my orderly,
with papers to sign. You remember Sergeant
Lincoln, don't you, Skerrett?”
“I should not remember much in this world,
if he had not saved my life and my memory for
me. Shall I tell you my story, short? Scene I.
Bunker Hill. A British beggar with a baggonet
makes a point at Peter Skerrett's rebel buttons
on his left breast. Rebel Sergeant Lincoln twigs,
describes a circle with a musket's butt. Scene
II. Bunker Hill. A British beggar on his back
sees stars and points upward with his baggonet
at those brass buttons on the blue sky. In the
distance two pairs of heels are seen, — these,”
says Peter, lifting his own, “and yours, Sergeant
Lincoln. And that 's what I call a model story.”
“Ne quid nimis, certainly. Not a word to
spare, Sir,” says the Sergeant, taking Peter's
proffered hand.
He was a slender, quiet, elderly man. Perhaps
prematurely aged by care or campaigning
or a wound, rather than old. He handed his
papers to the General, and withdrew.
“I guess I 've got the only orderly in the Continental
Army that can talk Latin,” says Put,
proud as if this possession made a Julius Cæsar
of himself. “Lincoln must have been a school-master
before he 'listed.”
“There 's no flavor of birch about him,” Skerrett
rejoined. “Perhaps he stepped out of a
pulpit to take the sword.”
“He don't handle the sword very kindly.
He 's brave enough.”
“But not bloody,” interjected Peter.
“No. There 's men enough that can squint
along a barrel, and drop a redcoat, and sing out,
`Hooray! another bully gone!' — but not many,
like my orderly, that can tell you why a redcoat
has got to be a bully, and why we 're doing our
duty to God and man by a droppin' on 'em. I
tell you, he in the ranks to keep up the men's
sperits is wuth more than generals I could name
with big appleettes on their backs.”
“Is that the reason why he stays in the ranks,
and does not ask for epaulettes?”
“He might have had them long ago; but he 's
shy of standing up for himself. I guess he 's
some time or other ben wownded in his mind, and
all the impudence has run out a the wownd.”
“Liberty, preserve me from such phlebotomy!”
devoutly ejaculated Peter. “But has the
Sergeant been with you all this time?”
“With my division. But I did not have him
with me in Westchester. I stationed him here
to look after the stores, and put recruits through
the motions. Now, Major, I must look at these
papers. Come to the Council of War to-morrow,
can get. The news gets worse and worse. This
very morning General Tryon — spiteful dog —
has been marauding this side of Peekskill, and
burning up a poor devil of a village at the lower
edge of the Highlands.”
“Arson is shabby warfare,” said Peter, taking
leave.
2. II.
It was in the Skerrett blood to come out red
at a pinch.
“Things do look a little dusky for the good
cause,” thought Skerrett, as, wearing his buff
and blue coat, — far too dull a coat for so bright
a fellow, — he stood drinking October next morning,
as we have seen him, before Mrs. Birdsell's
cottage.
“The Liberty-tree is a little nipped,” he continued.
“I suppose all the worm-eaten people
will drop off now. Let 'em go! and be food for
pigs! We sound chestnuts will stick to the
boughs, and wear our burrs till Thanksgiving.
“Fine figure that! quite poetic! Who would
n't be a poet in such a poem of a morning? O
Lucullus, you base old glutton, with your feasts
and your emetics! see here, how I breathe and
blow, breathe and blow, — that 's a dodge you
were not up to!
“Hooray! now I 'm full of gold air and go-ahead
spirits.”
He marched off, — the gallant, buoyant young
Continental soil unhung. On his nut-brown
face his blonde moustache lay lovingly curling.
The Marquis de Chastellux, the chief, if not
the only, authority on the Revolutionary moustache,
does not specify Skerrett's in his “Travels
in America.” The distinction might have
been invidious. But it was understood that,
take it “by and large,” color and curl, Skerrett's
was the Moustache (with a big M) of its
era. Many brother officers shaved in despair
when they beheld it. Hence, perhaps, the number
of shorn lips in the portraits of our heroes
of that time.
“Something is going to happen to-day,”
thought the Major. “I bubble. I shall boil
over, and make a fool of myself before night.
I am in that ridiculous mood when a man loves
his neighbor as himself, believes in success, wants
to tilt at windmills. O October! you have intoxicated
me! I challenge the world. Hold
me, somebody, or I shall jump over the Highlands
and take Sir Henry Clinton by the hair,
then up to Saratoga and pick up Jack Burgoyne,
knock their pates together, and fling them
over the Atlantic.”
A man's legs gallop when his blood and spirits
are boiling after such a fashion. It did not take
the Major any considerable portion of eternity
between Fishkill village and Putnam's head-quarters.
In fact, he had need to despatch. He had
slept late after his journey. The Council would
be assembled, and already muddling their brains
over the situation.
The Van Wyck farm-house stood, and still
stands, with its flank to the road and its front to
the Highlands.
“Not much clank and pomp and pageantry
in this army of Israel Putnam,” thought Skerrett.
“No tents! Men are barracked in barns,
I suppose, or sleep under corn-stalks, with pumpkins
for pillows. No sentinels! But probably
every man keeps his eyes peeled and his ears
pricked up for the tramp of British brogans or
Hessian boots on the soil.”
There was, however, a sentry standing at the
unhinged gate in the decimated paling of the
farm-yard.
He turned his back, and paced to the end of
his beat, as Major Skerrett approached.
“Aha!” thought the latter, “Jierck Dewitt
is as quick-sighted as ever. He wants to dodge
me. Poor fellow! Bottle has got him again, I
fear. Why can't man be satisfied with atmosphere,
and cut alcohol?”
Skerrett entered the gate, and hailed, “Jierck!”
The sentinel turned and saluted.
A clear case of Bottle! The Colony of Jamaica
was a more important ally to Great
Britain in the Revolution than is generally
known. Ah! if people would only take their
rum latent in its molasses, and pour out their
undistilled toddies on their buckwheat cakes!
“Jierck,” said the Major kindly, “you promised
me you would not touch it.”
“So I did,” says the man, inflicting on himself
the capital punishment of hanging his head;
“and I kep stiff as the Lord Chancellor, till I
got back home to Peekskill below here. There
I found my wife had gone wrong.”
The poor fellow choked. A bad wife is a
black dose.
“We grew up together, sir, on the Brothertoft
Manor lands. She was a Bilsby, one of the old
families, — as brisk and bright a gal as ever
stepped. We were married, and travelled just
right, she alongside of me, and I alongside of
her, pullin' well and keepin' everything drawin'.
Well, when I shouldered arms, Lady Brothertoft
— that's the Patroon's widow — got my wife
to go down to York and be her maid. It was
lettin' down for Squire Dewitt's son's wife to
eat in anybody's kitchen. But that 's nothing.
The harm is that Lady Brothertoft's house
is unlucky. Women don't go into it and stay
straight. There 's too much red in the parlors, —
the Patroon cleared out, and got himself killed,
if he is killed. That 's what spoilt my wife.”
Skerrett's supernatural spirits sank a little at
this. There was an undeveloped true lover in
the young man, — developed enough to show him
what misery may come from such a wrong as
Jierck's.
“That 's why I took to rum,” continued the
man, dismally. “When my company was ordered
to join Old Put at Peekskill, and I saw all
the old places where my wife and I used to do
our courtin', and saw my sister Kate smilin' at
her sweetheart and makin' comforters for him, I
could n't stand it. They all told me to keep
away from the woman. But I did n't quite believe
it, you know. So I went down to the
Manor-House and saw her. She did n't dare to
look me in the face. That had to be drownded
somehow. I drownded it in rum. I can't get
drunk like a beast, — that is n't into me, — but I
have n't been sober one hour since until we
came up here to Fishkill.”
“Stop it now, Jierck, and try to forget.”
“What 's the use?”
“The use is this. We were all proud of you,
as a crack man. We cannot spare you. You
know as well as I do what we are fighting for.
The Cause cannot spare you. Stand to your
Old Jamaica.”
The sentinel was manned by these hearty
words and tones.
“I 'll try,” said he, “to please you, Major
Skerrett.”
Up went his head and his courage.
“That 's right,” says the Major; “and we 'll
have a fling at the enemy together before I go,
and spike a gun for him.”
“I must take another sip of October, after
that,” thought Skerrett, as he walked on toward
the farm-house.
He halted on the steps, and inspected the
scene.
October was quite as gorgeous to see, as it was
glorious to tipple. It was in the Skerrett blood
to love color.
“Color! O blazes, what a conflagration of a
landscape!” thought the Major; “O rainbows,
what delicious blending! V. I. B. G. Y. O. R.
Violet hills far away, indigo zenith, blue sky on
the hill-tops, green pastures, yellow elms, chest-nuts,
and ashes, orange pumpkins, red maples!
Flames! Rainbows! Splendors! Take my blood,
O my dear country! and cheap, too, for such a
pageant!”
There were two parts to the scene he was regarding
with this exhilaration, — a flat part and
of fertile plain, gerrymandered into farms. Half
a mile away in front, the sudden mountains set
up their backs to show their many-colored gaberdines,
crimson, purple, and gold at the bottom
flounce, belted with different shades of the same
in regular gradation above, and sprigged all over
with pines and cedars, green as May.
The morning sun winked at the Major over
the summits, saying, as plain as a wink can speak,
“Beat this, my Skerrett, in any clime, on any
continent, if you can!”
The Major, with both his eyes, blinked back
ecstatically, “It can't be beat! O Sol! It can't
be beat!”
When he opened his dazzled eyes, and glanced
again about him, he seemed to see thousands of
little suns rollicking over the fields, and congeries
of suns piling themselves like golden bombs here
and there. They were not suns, but pumpkins,
rollicking in the furrows, and every congeries was
a heap of the same, putting their plump cheeks
together and playing “sugar my neighbor.”
“We must keep war out of this,” thought the
Major. “Nerve my good right arm, O Liberty,
to protect this pie-patch!”
His earnest prayer was disturbed by the sound
of voices close at hand.
Immediately Sergeant Lincoln appeared at the
accompanied him.
“Make way for the Lord Chancellor!” says
Skerrett to himself, as this gray-headed, dusky
dignitary loomed up. “If I am ever elected
Judge, I shall take that old fellow's scalp for a
wig. And his manners, too! He seems to be
laying down the law to the Sergeant, so flat that
it will never stir again. Mysterious fellow, this
orderly who quotes Latin! I 'd like to solve him,
and offer him sympathy, if he has had the `wownd'
old Put talks of. I owe him a cure for saving
me from a kill.”
The two passed by, in eager conversation.
Skerrett turned, and entered the farm-house,
where the officers of Putnam's army were sighing
over blunders past, and elaborating schemes
for the future.
Peter's seedy coat was freshness and elegance
compared to the scarecrow uniforms it now
encountered. Our Revolutionary officers were
braves at heart, but mostly Guys in costume.
3. III.
“Ah mon camarade! ma belle Moustache!
My Petare!” cried Colonel La Radière, as Skerrett
entered. “Soyez le bienvenu!”
The ardent Parisian officer of engineers rushed
forward, and embraced his young friend with effusion.
“Glad to see you, Peter!” says Captain Livingston,
a dry fellow, son of the Patroon. “Now,
Radière, there 's a second man who talks French,
to fire back your sacrebleus. Moi et Anthony's
Nose sommes fatigués à vous faire echo.”
“Come, boys,” says old Put, “talk Continental!”
The other officers in turn made Skerrett
welcome, and the business of brewing blunders
went on.
Does any one want a historic account of that
Council of War, and what it did not do?
The want is easily supplied. Rap for the spirit
of Colonel Humphreys, then late of Derby, Connecticut,
late of Yale College, late tutor at Phillipse-Manor.
He was Putnam's aide, and wrote
He was afterwards pompous gold-stick to Mr.
President Washington. He went as Plenipo to
Madrid, returned, became a model of deportment,
and was known to his countrymen as the Ambassador
from Derby.
(Raps are heard. Enter the Ghost of Humphreys.
“Now then, Ghost, talk short and sharp, not,
as you used to, — to borrow two favorite words
of yours, — sesquipedalian and stentorophonic!
Tell us what was done at that council, and be
spry about it!”
“Young Sir, I shall report your impertinence
to George Washington and Christopher Columbus
in Elysium. Christopher will say, `Founder the
continent!' George will say, `Perish the country!'
if its youth have drawn in and absorbed
their bump of reverence.”
“O, belay that, old boy! Tell us what you
did at the Council!”
“Nothing, your nineteenth-centuryship!” responds
Ghost, quelled and humble. “We pondered,
and propounded, and finally concluded to
do nothing, and let the enemy make the next
move.”
“Which he proceeded to do by sending up
General Vaughan to burn Kingston. That 's
enough! Avaunt, Ghost!”
Exit Humphreys to tell Chris and George
that America is going to the dogs.)
“Well,” said Putnam at last, “we 've discussed
and discussed, and I don't see that there 's any
way of getting a crack at the enemy, unless one
of you boys wants to swim down the river, with
a torch in his teeth, and set one of those frigates
below the Highlands on fire. Who speaks?”
“Cold weather for swimming!” says Livingston.
“Well, boys, you must contrive something to
keep our spirits up,” Putnam resumed. “When
I was up to Fort Ti in '58, and fighting was dull,
we used to go out alone and bushwhack for a
private particular Indian.”
“Perhaps I can offer a suggestion,” said Major
Scrammel, Putnam's other aide, re-entering the
room after a brief absence.
Scrammel was a handsomish man with a bad-dish
face. A man with his cut of jib and shape
of beak hardly ever weathers the lee shore of
perdition. For want of a moustache to twirl, he
had a trick of pulling his nose. Perhaps he was
training that feature for tweaks to come.
“Blaze away, Scrammel!” said his General;
“you always have some ambush or other in your
head.”
“Lady Brothertoft's nigger, the butler, is up
here with the latest news from below. I have
just been out to speak to him.”
“What, Scrammel!” says Livingston, sotto
voce. “A billet-doux from the fair Lucy?”
“La plus belle personne en Amerique!” Radière
sighs.
“You don't except the mother?” Livingston
inquired; “that mature, magnificent Amazon!”
“No,” replied the Frenchman, laboriously
building, brick by brick, a Gallo-American sentence.
“The mother of the daughtare is too
much in the Ladie Macquebeth. I figure to myself
a poniard, enormous sharpe, in her fine
ouhite hand, and at my heart. I seem to see
her poot ze-pardon! the poison in the basin —
the bowl — the gobbelit. I say, `Radière, care
thyself! It is a dame who knows to stab.' Mais,
Mees Lucie! Ah, c'est autre chose!”
“Come, Scrammel!” Putnam said, impatiently;
“we are waiting for your news.”
“The nigger stole away on some business of
his own, which he is mysterious about; but he
tells me that his mistress consoled herself at
once for our retirement from Peekskill after we
lost the forts. She had some of her friends
from the British ships and Clinton's army at her
house as soon as we were gone.”
“I believe she is as dangerous a Tory as lives
in all Westchester,” said the General. “She
ought to be put in security.”
“What! after all those dinners of hers we
have eaten, General?” says Livingston.
“I wish the dinners were out of me, and had
never been in me,” Old Put rejoined, sheepishly.
“I 'm afraid we used to talk too much after her
Madeira.”
The Council was evidently of that opinion, as
a look whisking about the circle testified.
A very significant look, with a great basis of
facts behind it. Suppose we dig into the brain of
one of these officers, — say that keen Livingston's,
— and unearth a few facts about Mrs.
Brothertoft, as she is at the beginning of Part
II. of this history.
Now, then, off with Livingston's scalp, and the
top of his skull! and here we go rummaging
among the convolutions of his brain for impressions
branded, “Brothertoft, Mrs.” We strike
a lead. We find a pocket. How compact this
brain stows its thoughts! It must, for it has
the millions on millions of a lifetime to contain.
We have read of a thousand leagues of lace
packed into a nut-shell. We have seen the Declaration
of Independence photographed within
the periphery of a picayune. Here 's closer
stowage, — a packet of thoughts of actual material
dimensions, but so infinitesimal that we shall
have to bring a microscope to bear before we
can apply the micrometer. Come, Sirius, nearest
thy beams through our lens and magnify this
record! Thanks, Sirius! Quite plain now!
That little black point has taken length and
breadth, and here 's the whole damnation in
large pica, — Heaven save us from the like!
Livingston Junior on Mrs. Brothertoft. Abstract
of Record: —
“By scalps and tomahawks, what a splendid
virago! She must be, this summer of 1777,
some thirty-five or thirty-six, and in her primest
prime. Heart's as black as her hair, some say.
Crushed her husband's spirit, and he took himself
off to kingdom come. Ambitious? I should
think so. Tory, and peaches to the enemy? Of
course. She uses her womanhood as a blind,
and her beauty as a snare. Very well for her to
say, `My business is to protect my property, and
establish my daughter. Women don't understand
politics, and hate bloodshed.' Bah! she
understands her kind of politics, like a Catherine
de' Medici. Bloodshed! She could stab a man
and see him writhe. But she gives capital dinners,
— more like England than any others in
America. Poor old Put, honest, frank, simple-hearted
fellow! look at him on the sofa there
with her, and a pint too much of her Madeira
under his belt! She knows just how near to let
his blue sleeve and buff cuff come to that shoulder
'll whisper 'em to a little bird, and pounce! one
of these fine days the redcoats will be upon us.
Upon us and on her sofa! Yes, and a good
many inches nearer than Old Put is allowed
to sit. For they do whisper scandal about Madam.
When she dropped Julia Peartree Smith,
the old tabby talked as old cats always talk about
their ex-friends. Scandal! Yes, by the acre;
but it 's splendid to see how she walks right over
it. And several of us fine fellows will not hear
or speak scandal of a house where that lovely
Lucy lives, — the sweet, pure, innocent angel.
They say the mother means to trade her off to
a redcoat as soon as she can find one to suit.
Mamma wants a son-in-law who will give her,
scandal and all, a footing among stars and garters
in England, when she has seen her estates
safe through the war. It 's too bad. I 'd go
down and kidnap that guileless, trustful victim
myself, if I was n't so desperately lazy. There 's
Scrammel too, — he would play one of his meanest
tricks to get her. Scrammel was almost the
only one of us boys in buff and blue that was
not taboo from Miss Lucy's side. Mamma was
not over cordial to our color unless it was buttoned
over breasts that held secrets. Her black
eyes very likely saw scoundrel in Scrammel's
face, and used him. Poor Lucy! It looks dark
what her mother is.”
Enough, Livingston! Thanks for this bit of
character! Here 's your dot of a record, labelled
“Brothertoft, Mrs.”! Now trepan your self with
your own skull, clap your scalp back again on
your sinciput, and listen to what Scrammel is
saying!
“The old nigger tells me,” he was saying,
“that Sir Henry Clinton and his Adjutant spent
the night after Forts Clinton and Montgomery
were taken quietly at Brothertoft Manor-House.”
“Well,” said the General, “then they had a
better night than we had, running away through
the Highlands. We can't protect our friends.
If the enemy have only made themselves welcome
at the Manor-House, instead of burning it
for its hospitality to us, Madam is lucky.”
“She seems to have made her new guests
welcome. The nigger thinks she knew they
were coming.”
“By George! — by Congress! I mean,” says
Put, wincing, “if I ever get back to Peekskill —”
“She seems to think, according to her butler's
story, that you are never to come back,” Scrammel
struck in.
“If that is all the news you have to tell, by
way of keeping our spirits up, you might as well
have been silent, sir!” growls Putnam.
“It 's not all,” Scrammel resumed. “The
nigger thinks they are getting up some new
expedition. But whether they do or not, the
adjutant don't go. He is to stay some days at
the Manor.”
“Lord Rawdon, is n't it?” Put asked. “Well,
he is a gentleman and a fine fellow, — not one of
those arrogant, insolent dogs that rile us so.”
“Not Rawdon. He was to be. But Major
Kerr got the appointment by family influence.”
“Kurr! c'est chien, n'est ce pas?” whispered
Radière to Livingston.
“Yes,” returned the Captain; “and this Kerr
is a sad dog. He bit Scrammel once badly at
cards in New York, before the war. Scrammel
don't forgive. He hates Kerr, and means to bite
back. Hear him snarl now!”
“The Honorable Major Kerr,” Scrammel continued,
“third son of the Earl of Bendigh, Adjutant-General
to Clinton's forces, a fellow who
hates us and abuses us and maltreats our prisoners,
but an officer of importance, is staying and
to stay several days, the only guest, at Brothertoft
Manor-House. Let me see; it can't be
more than twenty miles away.”
He marked his words, and glanced about the
circle. His eyes rested upon Livingston last.
“Oho!” says that gentleman. “I begin to
comprehend. You mean to use the Brothertoft
Prince at Newport. Woolly-head's skull is to
butt through Kerr's bedroom door, at dead of
night. Then, enter Scrammel, puts a pistol to
his captive's temple and marches him off to Fish-kill.
Bravo! Belle ideé, n'est ce pas, mon
Colonel?”
“Magnifique!” rejoined Radière. “I felicit
thee of it, my Scaramelle.”
“Now, boys!” says Put, “this begins to
sound like business. We need some important
fellow, like Kerr, taken prisoner and brought
here, to keep our spirits up. The thing 's easy
enough and safe enough. If I was twenty years
younger, general or no general, I 'd make a dash
to cut him out. Who volunteers to capture the
Adjutant?”
“I remember myself,” said Radière, gravely,
“of a billet, very short, very sharp, which our
Chief wrote to Sir Clinton, lately. It was of
one Edmund Palmer, taken — so this billet said —
as one espy, condemned as one espy, and hang-ged
as espy. Sir Clinton waits to answer that
little billet. But I do not wish to read in his
response the name of one of my young friends,
taken as espy and hang-ged.”
“Why does not Scrammel execute Scrammel's
plan?” asked Livingston.
“I cannot be spared,” the aide-de-camp responded.
“O yes! never mind me!” cried the General.
“Skerrett, here, can fill your place. Or Humphreys
can stop writing doggerel and do double
duty.”
Scrammel evidently was not eager to leave a
vacancy, or to gag his brother aide-de-camp's
muse.
“Why don't you volunteer yourself, Livingston?”
he said. “You know the country and
the house, and seemed to be well up in the
method of Prescott's capture at Newport.”
“I have not my reputation to make,” said the
other, haughtily. Indeed, his reckless pluck was
well known. “But I 'm desperately lazy,” which
was equally a notorious fact.
No other spoke, and presently all eyes were
making focus upon that blonde Moustache, which
the Marquis de Chastellux does not, and these
pages do, endow with a big M, and make historic.
It was only the other day that the wearer of
that decoration had become the hero of a famous
ballad, beginning, —
In number twelve or more,
As they sat tippling apple-jack,
Heard some one at the door.
“`Arise,' he cried, — 't was Skerrett spoke, —
`And trudge, or will or nill,
Twelve miles to General Washington,
At Pennibecker's Mill.”
Then the ballad went on to state, in stanzas
many and melodious, how it happened that the
“blades” of his Majesty's great knife, the Army,
were sheathed in a carouse, at an outpost near
Philadelphia, without sentries. Apple-jack, too,
— why they condescended to apple-jack, — that
required explanation: “And apple-jack, that tipple
base, Why did these heroes drain? O, where
were nobler taps that night, — Port, sherry, and
champagne?” Then the forced march of the unlucky
captives was depicted: “It rained. The
red coats on their backs Their skins did purple,
blue; The powder on their heads grew paste;
Each toe its boot wore through.” The poem
closed with Washington's verdict on the exploit:
“Skerrett, my lad, thou art a Trump, The ace of
all the pack; Come into Pennibecker's Mill, And
share my apple-jack!”
Hero once, hero always! When a man has
fairly compromised himself to heroism, there is
no let-up for him. The world looks to him at
once, when it wants its “deus ex machina.”
In the present quandary, all eyes turned to
Peter Skerrett, Captor of Captives and Washington's
Ace of Trumps.
“General,” said he, “I seem to be the only
unattached officer present. Nothing can be done
now about my mission. I do not love to be idle.
Allow me to volunteer in this service, if you
think it important.”
Old Put began to look grave. “You risk your
life. If they catch you in their lines, it is hanging
business.”
“I knew this morning,” thought the Major,
“that I should make a fool of myself before
night. I have!”
“No danger, General!” he said aloud. “I 've
got the knack of this work. I like it better than
the decapitation part of my trade.”
“Ah, Skerrett!” Livingston says, “that ballad
will be the death of you. You will be adding
Fitte after Fitte, until you get yourself discomfitted
at last. Pun!”
Mark this! It was the Continental Pun at its
point of development reached one year after the
Declaration of Independence. O let us be joyful!
Let us cry aloud with joy at our progress
since. Puns like the above are now deemed
senile, and tolerated only in the weekly newspapers.
No doggerel had been written about Scrammel.
No lyric named him hero. “Your friend
seems to have a taste for the office of kidnapper,”
he caitiffly sneered to Livingston, under cover of
his own hand, which tweaked the Scrammel nose
as he spoke.
“He has a taste for doing what no one else
dares,” rejoined the other. “Your nose is safe
from him, even if he overhears you. I say,
me with you. I know this country by leagues
and by inches.”
“No, Harry; General Putnam cannot spare
his Punster. One officer is enough. I shall
take Jierck Dewitt for my aide-de-camp. He
knows the Brothertoft-Manor country.”
“Empty Jierck of rum, cork him and green-seal
him, mouth and nose, and there cannot be
a better man.”
“Since you will go, you must,” says Put. “By
the way, if you want a stanch, steady man, take
Sergeant Lincoln. He somehow knows this
country as if he had crept over it from the
cradle. Where is that negro of Lady Brothertoft's,
Scrammel?”
“I left him talking to Lincoln. Major Skerrett
will easily find him.”
“He was my wiggy friend,” thought Skerrett.
“Don't fail to bag Kerr,” says Livingston.
“He wants a Yankee education, — so does all
England.”
“Yes,” says Radière, “we must have these
Kurr at school. We must teach to them civility
through our noses of rebels. We must flogge
them with roddes from the Liberté-Tree. They
shall partake our pork and bean. Yankee
Doodle shall play itself to them on our two
whistles and a tambour. Go, my Skerrett!
boy!”
All the officers gave him Good speed! and
Humphreys, Poetaster-General, began to bang
the two lobes of his brain together, like a pair
of cymbals, to strike out rhymes in advance
for a pæan on the conquering hero's return.
“You won't stay to dinner,” cries Put.
“There 's corned beef and apple-sauce, and a
York State buckskin pumpkin-pie, — I wish it
was a Connecticut one!”
“Yes,” says Livingston, “and I watched the
cook this morning coursing that dumb rooster
of yours, General, until he breathed his last.”
“Ah, my Skerrett!” sighed Radière. “Will
posterity appreciate our sacrifices? Will they remember
themselves — these oblivious posterity
— of the Frenchmen who abandoned the cuisines
of Paris to feed upon the swine and the
bean à discretion, to swallow the mush sans
melasse, to drink the Appel Jacque? Will they
build the marble mausoleum, inscribed, `Ci-Git
La Radière, Colonel. He was a Good
Heart and a Bad Stomach, and He shed his
Digestion for Liberty?'”
Skerrett laughed. “I will mention it to posterity,
Colonel,” he said, — and this page redeems
his promise.
Then, lest weeds might sprout under his feet,
moment announced, — and launched himself
upon the current of his new adventure.
“Down!” he soliloquized; “down, my longings
for buckskin pie, and for rooster dead of
congestion of the lungs from over coursing!
Tempt me not, ye banquets of Sybaris, until
my train is laid and waiting for the fusee.”
4. IV.
Major Skerrett paused on the farm-house
steps.
“Jierck Dewitt, I want,” he thought. “And
there he is on guard, looking every inch a soldier
again. My good word has quite set him up.
Mem. — A word of cheer costs little, and may
help much. Now for Sergeant Lincoln and the
negro!”
Just at the edge of the bank, in front of
the farm-house, Skerrett perceived the Sergeant
sitting.
His head was resting on his hands. The physiognomy
of his back revealed despondency. An
old well-sweep bent over him, and seemed to
long to comfort him with a douse of balm from
its bucket.
The landscape glowed, as before. The jolly
pumpkins grinned, as before. The Major's spirits
were still at bubble and boil. “Every prospect
was pleasing, and only man” — that is only
Sergeant — seemed woe-begone.
“He is feeling his wound, — the `wownd' Put
cheer him. Unhappy people are not allowed in
the Skerrett precinct.”
“Why, Orderly!” says the Major, approaching,
and laying his hand on the other's shoulder;
“you must not be down-hearted, man! What
has happened? What can I do for you?”
The Sergeant raised his head, and shook it
despairingly.
“Thank you,” said he. “Nothing! It is too
late!”
“Too late! That is a point of time my time-piece
has not learnt how to mark.”
Indeed, the Skerrett movement was too elastic
in springs, and too regular with its balance-wheel,
to strike any hour but “Just in time!”
The Sergeant thanked him, with a smile and
manner of singular grace, and repeated, sorrowfully,
“It is too late.”
“Too late is suicide,” says Peter. “We will
not cut our throats till after Indian summer.
Presently you shall tell me what is and is not
too late. First, I have a question or two to
ask. The General tells me you know this country
thoroughly.”
“I do by heart, — by sad heart.”
“I have undertaken to cut in, and cut out,
where the enemy is, twenty miles below on the
river.”
The Orderly at once seemed greatly interested.
“Twenty miles below? No one can know that
region better than I.”
“Was it there his heart was wounded?”
thought the Major.
“Ah, then! you 're just my man,” Skerrett
continued, ignoring the other's depression. “I
have volunteered on a wild-goose chase. I may
need to know every fox-track through all the
Highlands to get away safe with my goose, if
I catch him.”
Major Skerrett, surprised at a sudden air of
eager attention and almost excitement in the
older man, paused a moment.
“Go on!” said the other authoritatively, with
a voice and manner more of Commander-in-Chief
than Sergeant.
Skerrett felt, as he had done before, the peculiar
magnetism of this mysterious Orderly, who
quoted Latin and bowed like a courtier.
“I have taken upon myself,” said he, “to cut
out a British officer of distinction, now staying
at a country house twenty miles below. I may
want you of my party. General Putnam recommends
you.”
The Orderly sprang up and grasped Major
Skerrett's arm with both his hands.
“Who is the man? Name! Name!” he
gasped.
“Major Kerr,” replied Skerrett, coolly.
“Wait! wait a moment!” cried the other,
in wild excitement.
He rushed to the edge of the bank, where a
path plunged off, leading to the Highland road,
and was lost among the glowing recesses of a
wood skirting the base of the heights. He
halted there, and screamed, in a frantic voice,
“Voltaire! Voltaire!”
And neither the original destructive thinker
thus entitled, nor any American namesake of his
answering the call, the Orderly raced down the
slope, with hat gone and gray cue bobbing
against his coat-collar.
He disappeared in the grove, and the Major
could hear his feet upon the dry leaves, and his
voice still crying loudly, “Voltaire! Voltaire!”
“Has the old man gone mad?” thought Skerrett.
“Voltaire the Great is getting too ancient
to travel. It is hardly fair to disturb him. He
is a soldier `emeritus' of our Good Cause. He
waked France up. We have to thank him
largely that France has an appetite for freedom,
and sends her sons over to help us fight
for it. But he cannot hear this hullaballoo at
Ferney; Lafayette, Radière, and the others, represent
their master, with such heart and stomach
as they can.
“I must not lose sight of my runaway,” continued
him like a shot. He may have a grudge there.
Some private vendetta in the case. And yet this
mild old man always seemed to me to have entirely
merged his personality in patriotism. I
fancied that he had forgotten all his likes, dislikes,
loves, and hates, and given up all ties except
his allegiance to an idea.”
Major Skerrett walked rapidly to the edge of
the bank, where Sergeant Lincoln had first given
tongue for an absent philosopher.
As he was about to follow the path, he heard
steps again in the wood. In a moment the Orderly
reappeared, and ran up the slope, panting.
He was followed by a person who moved slower,
and blew harder, the same old wiggy negro
whom Major Skerrett had observed laying down
the law to his companion.
“So that is Voltaire!” thought the Major.
“Well, it is the first time I have ever found the
devil blacker than he is painted.”
The Orderly sank, agitated and out of breath,
on the ground.
Voltaire came up the hill, and, being hatless,
pulled hard at his gray wig, by way of salute.
The wig was rooted to the scalp. Voltaire left
it in situ, and bowed as grandly as a black
dignitary may when he is blown by a good
run.
“I was in despair just now,” said Sergeant
Lincoln. “In despair when I said it was too
late to help me. Perhaps it is not so. I trust
God sends you, Major Skerrett, to show us the
way out of our troubles.”
“This is sound Gospel,” thought Skerrett.
“This black Voltaire may be the Evangelist;
but the Gospel is unimpeachable.”
“Come, Sergeant,” continued he aloud, “tell
me what all this means, my friend. We must
despatch. My bird down the river may take
wing, if I waste time.”
“I am pained, my dear young friend,” said
the senior, rising, “to acknowledge to you an
unwilling deceit of mine. But I must do so.
You have known me always under a false name.
I am not Lincoln, but Brothertoft, — Edwin
Brothertoft.”
“My father's friend!” said Skerrett, taking
the other's hand. “Mr. Brothertoft, so missed,
so desired by the Good Cause. Why —”
Here Major Skerrett interrupted himself, and
went to rummaging in his brain for the disconnected
strips of record stamped, “Brothertofts,
The family.” The strips pasted themselves together,
and he ran his mind's eye rapidly along,
as one might read a mile or so of telegram in
cipher.
As he read with one eye introverted and galloping
a belt on a drum making a million revolutions in
a breath, he kept the other eye fixed upon Mr.
Brothertoft, alias Lincoln, before him.
This sad, worn, patient, gentle face supplied a
vivid flash of interpretation. It shed light upon
all the dusky places in Major Skerrett's knowledge
of the family. The eye looking outward
helped the eye looking inward. Instantly, by
this new method of utilizing strabismus, he saw
what he remembered faintly become distinct. He
could now understand why this quiet gentleman
had dropped his tools, — forceful mallet and keen
chisel, — and let the syllables of his unfinished
mark on the world wear out.
“I have heard and read of these blighting
hurts,” thought Peter, “and I trifled with their
existence, and was merry as before, — God forgive
me! Now I touch the wounded man, and it
chills me. I lose heart and hope. But strangely,
too, this man who first teaches me to feel the pain,
teaches me also that the sufferer needs my love.
Seems to me I am more in earnest than I was
two minutes ago. I feel older and gentler. I
wish I was his son!”
“Why?” said Edwin Brothertoft, answering
slowly and sadly, while the other's brain read
records and forged thoughts at this furious speed.
“Would you ask me why my life is what it is,
Ah, my friend, the story is long and dreary, — too
dreary to darken the heart of youth.”
Sadly as he spoke, there was no complaint in
his tone. He seemed to regard his facts a little
dreamily, as if he were mentioning some other
man's experience.
“But the past is dead,” he continued, “and
here are present troubles alive and upon me.”
“Troubles alive!” says the Major, feeling
brave, buoyant Peter Skerrett still stirring under
the buff and blue. “Those I can help floor,
perhaps. Name them!”
He looked so victorious, and the Moustache,
albeit unknown to the pages of De Chastellux,
so underscored his meaning nose, and so drew
the cartouche of a hero about his firm mouth,
that Brothertoft thrilled with admiration through
his sadness.
Everybody has seen the phantasmagoric shop-sign.
“Vinegar,” you read upon it, as you approach
down the street. You don't want Vinegar,
and you gaze reproachfully at the sign. But
what is this? As you advance, a blur crosses
your eyes. 'T was Vinegar surely! 'T is Sugar
now. And that you do want; and proceed to
purchase a barrel of crushed, a keg of powdered,
and a box of loaves wearing foolscaps of Tyrian
purple on their conical bald pates.
Edwin Brothertoft had seen only Despair
written up before him. He advanced a step, at
Skerrett's words, lifted up his eyes, and Despair
shifted to Hope.
“When you named Major Kerr,” he said,
“you named one who is devising evil to me and
mine. Capture him and the harm is stayed.
My faithful old friend Voltaire and I will try to
tell you the story between us.”
Voltaire considered this his introduction, and
bowed pompously.
“You are too juicy, Voltaire, and too shiny, and
not sardonic enough, to bear the name of the
weazened Headpiece of France,” the Major said.
“When I made my pilgrimage to Ferney, I found
that Atropos of Bigotry in a night-cap and dressing-gown,
looking as wrinkled, leathery, and
Great as one of Michael Angelo's Sibyls. I hope
you are as true to Freedom as he was, and a
more wholesome man.”
Skerrett made this talk to give the old fellow
time to blow, as well as to stir up a smile to the
surface of Brothertoft's sad face.
“Yes sir,” said the negro, bowing again.
“Voltaire, sir, omnorum gotherum of Brothertoft
Manor-House. Hannibal was my name;
but I heard Mr. Ben Franklin say that Mr. Voltaire
was the greatest man he knowed, so I married
to that name, and tuk it.”
Here he paused and grinned. His white teeth
gleamed athwart his face, as the white stocking
flashes through, when one slits a varnished boot,
too tight across the instep.
“I have been here at Fishkill some months,”
said Brothertoft. “At first I did not allow myself
to think of my family. Then neighborhood
had its effect. I communicated my whereabouts
to this trusty friend. He got my message, and
comes to give me the first news I have had
since I left home at the news of Lexington.”
“More than two years ago,” Skerrett said.
“And in those two years,” continued the
other, “my daughter has passed from child to
woman.”
“Oho!” thought Peter. “His daughter —
Radière's la plus belle — is in this business.
My years in Europe had made me almost forget
there was such a person. Is she like father,
or mother, I wonder?”
“From child to woman, sir,” says Voltaire,
“and there 's not such another young lady in
the Province, — State, I mean.”
Bravo, Voltaire! You refuse to talk “nigger.”
You still remember that Tombigbee is a
dialect taboo to you. Continue to recollect that
on these pages you are a type of a race on whose
qualities the world is asking information. Christy's
Minstrels dance out their type negro, Jim
presents hers, Uncle Tom, an exceptional saint.
Mr. Frederick Douglass introduces himself with
a courtier's bow and an orator's tongue. The
ghost of John C. Calhoun rushes forward, and
points to a stuffed Gorilla. Then souviens toi
Voltaire of thy representative position, and don't
lapse into lingo!
“When I abandoned home,” Brothertoft resumed,
“I believed that I could be of no further
use to a daughter who had disowned me. But I
have found that a man cannot cease to love his
own flesh and blood.”
“Nor his flesh and blood him,” says the negro.
“Other people may do the hating. Miss
Lucy only knows how to love.”
Fort bien Voltaire! except the pronunciation
“lub.”
“It was only a day or two before the capture
of the forts that my tardy message of good-will
reached my friend here,” said the ex-Patroon.
“And just in time,” that friend rejoined.
“I hope so,” sighed Putnam's Orderly.
“Yes sir,” the negro said, turning to Skerrett.
“It was now or never. So I left my great dinner-party.
Sir Henry Clinton and his suite were
to dine with us to-day!”
“Grand company!” the Major said, seeing
that a tribute of respect was wanted.
“Sirr Henery Clinton!” repeated the butler
with pride. “I did n't like to leave. My wife
Sappho can cook prime. My boy Plato can pass
a plate prime. But where 's the style to come
from when I 'm away? Who 's to give the signals?
`Ground dishes! Handle covers! Draw
covers! Forrud march with covers to the pantry!'
Who 's to pull the corks and pour the
Madeira so it won't blob itself dreggy?”
He paused and sighed.
Edwin Brothertoft was silent. The thought
of Red dinner-parties at the Manor was evidently
not agreeable to him.
“We are not getting on at a gallop,” thought
Skerrett. “But we are on the trail. My guides
must take their own time. They know the way
and the dangers, and I do not. The facts will
all come out within five minutes.”
“Well, Voltaire,” he said, “a bad appetite
to 'em all! Go on with your story. You make
me hungry with your dinner-parties.”
“Ha, ha!” chuckled the butler, — his vision
of himself as Ganymede, serving Sir Clinton
Tonans with hypernectareous tipple, vanishing.
“Ha, ha!” and with his triumph he lapsed for
a moment into Tombigbee: “Dey tinks, down
ter de Manor, dat I 'se lyin' sick abed wid de
colored mobbus.”
And then the old fellow proceeded to relate
away at evening, and tramped all night by by-paths
through the Highlands; how British scouts
had challenged his steps and fired at his rustle;
how stumbling-blocks had affronted his shins,
and many a stub had met his toes; and how
at last, after manifold perils, he had found his
old master under the guise of an Orderly, and
announced to him a new wrong in the house
of Brothertoft, — a new wrong, the climax of an
old tyranny.
No wonder Mr. Brothertoft had been despondent
so that even his back showed it, — so despondent,
that the well-sweep longed to douse
him with a bucket of balm. No wonder that
he sadly said, “Too late!” and could see no
better hour than that, marked by the Skerrett
timepiece.
Now then for this new wrong! It shall be
told condensed, so that indignation can have it,
a tough nut to crack with its teeth.
5. V.
“In short,” says Voltaire, winding up his
story, “Madame Brothertoft is going to marry
off Miss Lucy to Major Kerr, day after to-morrow
evening.”
“To marry off! Then it is nilly the lady!”
Skerrett said.
“Nilly, sir! Yes, the nilliest kind!”
There, Sir Peter, is a tough nut for your Indignation
to bite on!
Peter was an undeveloped True Lover. The
“vital spark of heavenly flame” was in him;
but it lay latent under his uniform, as fire
lurks in a quartz pebble, until the destined little
boy strikes another quartz pebble against it.
Now there is a little boy of Destiny whose trade
it is to go about knocking hearts together and
striking Love, — that pretty pink flash, that rosy
flash, which makes cheeks blush sweeter and
eyes gleam brighter than they knew how to
blush and gleam before, — that potent flash
which takes hold of proper hearts and carbonizes
with myriad facets and a smile on every
one, — that keen flash which commands bad
hearts to burn away into ugly little heaps of
gray ashes. There is such an urchin, and Cupid,
alias Eros, is his name. He had tapped Peter
Skerrett's heart several times with hearts labelled,
“Anna's heart,” “Belinda's heart,” “Clara's
heart,” “Delia's heart,” and so on down the
alphabet. No perceptible love had answered
these taps. Perhaps the urchin made the female
heart impinge upon the male, instead of clashing
them together in mutual impact. Or perhaps
he did not do his tapping in a dark place,
— for shadow is needful to show light, — love
wants sorrow for a background.
However this might be, Peter Skerrett was still
an undeveloped true lover. He had made no
mistakes in love, he had had no disappointments.
His illusions were not gone. He still believed
love was the one condition of marriage. Marriage
without it this innocent youth deemed an
outrage.
The latent love in his heart cried, “Shame!”
when he heard Voltaire's story. Indignant blood
rushed to his cheeks, to his eyes indignant fire,
and curl indignant to his moustache. He discharged
a drop of ire by skimming a flat stone
at a chattering chipmunk, enthroned on a pumpkin
queries.
“You are sure, Mr. Brothertoft, that your
daughter does not love Kerr.”
“Sure. I have her word for it.”
“Does he love her?”
“He wants her.”
“Why?”
“She is a beauty and an heiress, — those are
the patent charms.”
“Ah! But does she know that Kerr is a fanfaron
and a rake, — selfish, certainly, probably
base, and very likely cruel?”
“She knows only what her mother tells her.
Friends are taboo in that house.”
“But does she divine nothing? Nothing to
base a refusal on? Pardon me if my tone seems
to express a doubt of this young lady, but —”
“But you have seen so many captivated by
rank and a red coat. My friend, I have done her
greater injustice than any you can imagine. I
believed my own child spoiled by bad influences.
We could not understand each other. An evil-omened
figure held a black curtain between us.
I was too sick at heart to see the truth. I had
lost my faith. I thought that my daughter
had taken in poison with her mother's milk. I
fancied that she was a willing pupil when her
mother taught her to hate and despise me. I
And punished now! punished most cruelly! My
spleen, my haste, my intemperate despair, are
bitterly punished by my daughter's danger. How
fatally I misjudged her in my sore-wounded
heart! I know her better at last. Better now,
when I fear it is too late to save her. I know
her at last through this faithful servant and
friend. He stood by her when I forsook her.
God forgive me! God forgive me!”
He poured out this confession with passion
growing as he spoke. Then he turned and
grasped Major Skerrett by the shoulder.
“What is to be done?” he cried.
“Much!” said Skerrett, quietly, commanding
his own eagerness roused by the other's
agony. “Remember that this wedding is not
to be before day after to-morrow. I have volunteered
to present the intended bridegroom to
General Putnam here, by that time. Do you suppose
I intend to break my engagement, whether
it forbids his banns or not?”
He assumed more confidence than he felt.
The enterprise was growing complicated. While
there was merely question of taking or not taking
a prisoner, Skerrett could look at the matter
coolly. Success was only another laurel in his
corona triumphalis! Failure was but a bay the
less. If he bagged his man, another canto of
would keep Put and his paladins amused until
their general decadence of tail was corrected, and
their bosoms swelled with valor again, and that
was enough.
But here was a new character behind the
scenes. The hero's pulse began to gallop and
his heart to prance. A woman's happiness at
stake!
“Ah!” reflected the Major, “I was cool
enough so long as I thought I was merely entertaining
a circle of downcast braves, bushwhacking
to steal an exchangeable Adjutant, and giving
the enemy an unexpected dig in the ribs.
But the new portion of the adventure makes me
shaky. If I fail, I lose my laurel, all the same,
and a lady has to be bonneted with a wreath of
orange-flowers against her will. If I don't bag,
Beauty goes to the Kerrs; I miss my canto and
the poem of her life becomes a dirge. I must
not think of it, or I shall lose my spirits.”
“Prying into a maiden's heart is new business
to me,” he resumed to the father, who stood
watching him anxiously. “I cannot quite comprehend
this matter. She does not love this
man. Her dislike has brought about a reconciliation
between you. Where is her No? I have
heard that women carry such a weapon, — brandish
it, too, and strike on much less provocation
than she has.”
“She is not a free agent,” replied Brothertoft.
“Her mother dominates her. She forced her to
disown me. She will force her to this marriage.
Lucy has been quelled all her life. I hope and
believe that if she were released, or even supported
for one moment in rebellion, her character
might find it had vigor. But she is still willow
in her mother's hands. If the mother, for
whatever reasons, has made up her mind to this
marriage, she will crowd her daughter into it.”
“What reasons are sufficient for such tyranny?”
“I divine metaphysical reasons, that I cannot
speak of. It pains me greatly, my dear young
friend, to talk harshly of my daughter's mother.
Perhaps after all she may mean kindly now.
She may be mistaken in Kerr.”
“No,” said Peter. “No woman of the world
can mistake such a fellow.”
“Still, he is a strong friend to have on the
other side.”
“Yes; and this is a moment when the other
side is up and we are down. I can see how,
with these great estates, a Patrooness may be
willing to save herself a confiscation. She can
pretend to be neutral, with a leaning to Liberty,
and leave her son-in-law to rescue the acres if
Liberty goes to the gallows.”
“Such considerations have brought matters to
victor. So the poor child is hurried off without
giving her time to consider.”
“We must make time for her. I will go at
my plans presently. But I should like to hear a
little more of Voltaire's story.”
“You are very kind to take this interest in
the welfare of a desolate and disheartened man,
and those who are dear to him.”
Peter's cheeks were too brown to show blushes,
and his cocked hat covered his white forehead;
but he noticed that his heart was brewing a crimson
blush, whether it burst through the valves
and came to the surface or not. In fact he began
to feel a lively sympathy for this weak girl,
into whose orbit he was presently to fling himself,
like a yellow-haired comet, with spoil-sport
intent. The more he tried to cork in his blush,
the more it would n't be corked. And presently
bang it came to the surface. His white forehead
tingled at every pore, as the surface of a glass of
Clicquot may tingle with its own bursting bubbles.
No such rosy flash had ever showed on his
countenance, when Anna's or Belinda's or Clara's
or Delia's cheeks challenged him to kindle up.
But the mere thought of a name much lower
down in the alphabet now made his heart eager
to do its share in striking fire and lighting this
sorrowful scene about the Lucy in question.
The sad father was not in the way to observe
blushes; nor was Voltaire, who now proceeded
to finish his story.
For fear the worthy fellow might lapse into
brogue, — whereupon the ghost of John C. Calhoun
would hurroo with triumph, and ventriloquize
derisive niggerisms through the larynx of
his type negro, the stuffed Gorilla, — Voltaire's
tale shall be transposed into the third person.
Then the hiatuses can be filled up, and we shall
be able to peer a little into Lucy Brothertoft's
heart, and see whether the Heavenly Powers
have guarded her, as Sappho the cook long ago
prophesied they would.
6. VI.
No hag is a houri to her fille de chambre.
Mrs. Brothertoft, handsome hag, was thoroughly
comprehended by the Voltaire family.
That was no doubt part of their compensation
for being black, and below stairs.
Sweet Lucy was also well understood in the
kitchen.
Many a pitiful colloquy went on about her
between those three faithful souls.
Sappho's conundrum, “What is de most importantest
'gredient in soup?” was often propounded.
Voltaire always protested against
such vulgar remarks. Plato always guessed
“Faith!” and pretended he 'd never heard the
riddle before.
“Faith is all very well,” Voltaire would say,
in studied phrase, as a model to his son. “But
where is the Works? Where is the Works to
help Miss Lucy?”
“Jess you keep yer grip onto de Faith,” his
wife would respond, “an' de Works will jussumfy,
when de day of jussumfication comes.”
So Lucy grew up a grave, sad, lonely young
girl. Her heart was undeveloped, for she had
no one but her mother to love. She loved there,
with little response. Her mother received, and
did not repel, her love. That was enough for
this affectionate nature. As to sympathy, they
were strangers.
“She seems to me bitterly cold, when I love
her so dearly,” Lucy would say to herself; “but
how can I wonder? My father's wrong-doing
has broken her heart. Her life must be mere
endurance. Mine would be, if I were so disappointed
in one I loved. It is now.”
And the poor child's heart would sink, and
her eyes fill, and thick darkness come over her
future.
She lived a sadly lonely life. She could
never be merry as other girls. There was a
miserable sense of guilt oppressing her soul.
The supposed crimes of her father — those unknown
enormities — weighed upon her. These,
she thought, were what made many good people
a little shy of the Brothertoft household. She
could not fail to perceive a vague something in
which her mother's house was different from
other houses she was permitted slightly to know.
Why were so many odious men familiar there?
When the family were in town, she could avoid
them, day and evening, and spend long hours
She could escape to books or needlework. But
why did her mother tolerate these coarse men
from the barracks, with their Tom, Dick, and
Harry talk? To be sure these were days of war,
and Mrs. Brothertoft was loyal in her sympathies,
though non-committal, and “She may think it
right,” thought Lucy, “to show her loyalty in
the only way a woman can, by hospitality. But
I am glad she does not expect me to help her
entertain her guests. I am glad I am a child
still. I hope I shall never be a woman.”
Her life took a sombre cast. She sank into a
groove, and moved through the hours of her
days a forlorn and neglected creature.
“Queer!” Julia Peartree Smith would say
of her. “A little weak here,” and Julia touched
her forehead, just below her chestnut front.
“She is a Brothertoft, and they were always
feeble-minded folk, you know. But perhaps
it 's just as well,” — and Julia sank her voice
to a mean whisper, — “just as well she should n't
be too sharp-sighted in that house. I really believe
the silly chit loves her mother, and thinks
her as good as anybody. I tried to give her a
half-hint once, but the little fool fired up red-hot
and said, I was a shameful old gossip, —
`old,' indeed!”
So Lucy lived, utterly innocent of any dream
sadly beautiful and touching in this spectacle.
A moonlit cloud flitting over the streets of a
great wicked city, pausing above foul courts
where vice slinks and crime cowers, reflected
in the eddies of the tainted river, — the same
eddy that was cleft at solemn moonrise by a suicide,
— this weft of gentle cloud is not more unconscious
of all the sin and shame beneath it,
than Lucy of any wrong. The cloud beholds the
pure moon, and drifts along unsullied; Lucy
saw only her own white and virginal faith. It
was not a warming, cheering luminary; but it
shed over her world the gray, resigned light of
patience.
A touching sight! the more so, because we
know that the character will develop, and, when
it is ripe enough to bear maturer sorrows and to
perceive a darker shame, that the eyes will open
and the sorrow and shame will be revealed,
standing where they have so long stood unseen.
After this little glimpse of Lucy's life, monotonously
patient for the want of love, Voltaire
takes up his narration again.
Voltaire thought Mrs. Brothertoft had determined
to marry off Miss Lucy to Major Kerr as
long ago as last spring, before they left town.
She did not, however, announce her plans until
they were in the country. She probably knew
better not see too much of each other.
“I remember the day,” says the negro, “when
Miss Lucy began to mope. Roses was comin' in
strong. She used to fill the house with 'em.
Sometimes she 'd sing a little, while she was
fixin' 'em. But from that day out, she 's never
teched a flower nor sung a word. She 's just
moped.”
By and by Voltaire had discovered the reason.
It was the wreath of mock orange-flowers
dangled over Lucy's head by a false Cupid,
Anteros himself, that had taught her to hate
roses and every summer bloom. Her faint songs
were still because her heart was sick. The bridegroom
was coming, and her mother had notified
the bride to put on her prettiest smile. This
command was given in Mrs. Brothertoft's short,
despotic way. Neither side argued. Lucy prepared
to obey, just as she would have thrust a
thorn in her foot, or swallowed a coal, upon
order. She was not so very happy. She could
be a little more unhappy without an unbearable
shock. Major Kerr did not disgust her so much
as some of her mother's intimates. Still the
prospect was not charming. The summer roses
lost color to her eyes. Color left the cheeks that
once rivalled the roses. The bride did not try to
smile. Smiles are smiles only when the heart
grimace out of a forced smile, so that it may pass
for genuine.
When was the bridegroom coming? That information
the bridegroom himself, though Sir
Henry Clinton's Adjutant, could not yet precisely
give. “We are soon to make a blow at the
Highlands, — then you will see me,” — so he
wrote, and sent the message in a silver bullet.
Silver bullets, walnuts split and glued together,
and stuffed with pithy notes instead of kernels,
and all manner of treacherous tokens, passed between
Brothertoft Manor and the Red outposts.
Whether facts leaked out from leaky old Put
when glasses too many of the Brothertoft Yellow-seal
were under his belt; whatever true or false
intelligence Scrammel paid for his post on Miss
Lucy's sofa, — every such fact was presently
sneaking away southward in the pocket of young
Bilsby, or some other Tory tenant on the Manor.
“I saw Miss Lucy mopin' and mopin' worse
and worse,” says Voltaire, “but I could n't do
nothin', and there I sot in the pantry, like a
dumb hoppertoad, watchin' a child walkin' up to
a rattlesnake.”
Voltaire's Faith without Works was almost
dead.
Young Bilsby must have sneaked up to Brothertoft
Manor with the news of Clinton's expedition
that Mr. Brothertoft's announcement of his presence
at Fishkill reached Voltaire.
“I did not dare tell Miss Lucy her father was
so near,” says the major-domo, “until, all at
once, on the fourth of this month, we saw King
George's ships lying off King's Ferry; and by
and by up the hill comes Major Kerr to the
Manor-House, red as a beet.”
Upon this arrival, Lucy first fully comprehended
what misery the maternal fiat was to
bring upon her. Voltaire found her weeping
and utterly desolate. At once his Faith worked
out words. The dumb hoppertoad found voice
to croak, “Ware rattlesnake!”
“You are going to be married, Miss Lucy?”
he asked.
She wanted sympathy sadly, poor child! As
soon as he spoke, she made a tableau and a scene,
— both tragic. She laid her head on the old
fellow's shoulder, — Tableau. She burst into
tears, — Scene.
Woolly wig and black phiz bent over fair hair
and pale face. Delicate lips of a fine old Lincolnshire
stock murmured a plaint. Thick lips
of coarse old African stock muttered a vow of
devotion. A little, high-bred hand, veined with
sangre azul, yielded itself to the leathery pressure
of a brown paw. Ah, poor child! she had
color.
“To be married?” Lucy responded, when
sobs would let her speak. “Yes, Voltaire, in
three or four days.”
“Time 's short as Sappho's best pie-crust.”
“Mother says,” continued the young lady,
“that I must have a protector. The Major is
here now, and may be ordered up or down any
day. Mother says it is providential, and we
must take advantage of the opportunity, and be
married at once.”
She looked very little like a bride, with her
sad, shrinking face.
“Don't you love Major Kerr?” asked Voltaire.
“Lub” he always must pronounce this
liquid verb.
“Do I love him, Voltaire? I hope to when
we are married. Mother says I will. She says
the ceremony and the ring will make another
person of me. She says she has chosen me an
excellent match, and I must be satisfied. O
Voltaire! it seems a sin to say it, but my mother
is cold and harsh with me. Perhaps I do not
understand her. If I only had some other
friend!”
“You have,” Voltaire announced.
“You — I know,” she said, kindly.
“Closer — miles closer 'n me!”
“Who? Do you mean any one of our loyalist
neighbors?”
Lucy ran her thought over her short list of
friends. All the valued names had been expunged
by her mother's strict censorship, or
pushed back among mere acquaintance.
“Have you forgotten your father?” the butler
asked.
“Forgotten! I go every day, when no one
is by, and lift up the corner of the curtain over
the Vandyck. Our ancestor is my father himself.
I look at him, and pray God to forgive
him for being so wicked, and breaking my mother's
heart.”
“Poh!”
Lucy drew back in astonishment, as if a Paixhan
blow-gun had exploded at her side.
“Poh!” again burst out Voltaire's double-corked
indignation. “If there was a wicked
one in that pair, it was n't him. If there 's a
heart broke, it 's his.”
Lucy for a moment did not think of this as
an assault upon her mother.
“What, Voltaire!” she cried. “He is not
dead! Not a bad man! Not a rebel!”
“Rebel!” says the French radical's namesake.
“Why should n't he be a rebel for Freedom?
Bad! he ain't bad enough to marry off
his daughter only to git shet of her. Dead!
you his lub by me, if you want it.”
Love — even disguised as “Lub” — it was
such a fair angel of light, that Lucy looked up
and greeted it with a smile. But this was not
a day for smiles. Storms were come after long
gray weather. Only tears now, — bitter tears!
They must flow, sweet sister! It is the old,
old story.
“Does he really love me? Is this true? Was
he true? Was I deceived? Why did he and
my mother separate? Why did she drive him
out? Whom can I trust? Is every one a
liar? What does this mean? Answer me, Voltaire!
Answer me, or I shall die.”
Voltaire looked, and did not answer. To answer
was a terrible revelation to make to this
innocent girl. Faith was putting the old fellow
to very cruel Works.
“Speak!” said Lucy again, more passionately
than before, and her voice expressed the birth of
a new force within her. “Speak! What have
you to say of my mother? I dread some new
sorrow. Tell me what it is, or I shall die.”
Again these pages refuse to listen to the few
deplorable words of his reply. He whispered
the secret of her mother's disloyal life.
“I will not believe it,” said the horror-stricken
girl.
She did believe it.
She had touched the clew. From this moment
she knew the past and the present, — vaguely, as
a pure soul may know the mystery of sin.
For the moment she felt herself crushed to a
deeper despair than before. She recognized the
great overpowering urgency of Fate. She could
not know that this recognition marks to the soul
its first step into conscious immortality; and that
the inevitable struggle to conquer Fate must now
begin in her soul.
“What can I do?” she said; and she looked
guiltily about the chamber, as if every object in
that house were the accomplice of a sin.
“Run away with me to your father!” said
Voltaire.
She shook her head weakly. She was a great,
great way yet from any such exploit with her infant
will.
“No,” she said; “I must obey my mother.
That is my plain duty. She is pledged and I
am pledged to this marriage. I must submit.”
Tears again, poor child! The old habits are still
too strong for her.
“But suppose your father should tell you to
obey him, and not submit,” Voltaire propounded.
“Suppose he should help to run you off.”
“How can he?”
“I will steal off to-night to Fishkill, and see
him.”
“You risk your life.”
“Poh!”
“Poh!” is not a word to use to a young lady,
Mr. Voltaire. Yet perhaps nothing could express
so well as that explosive syllable how
much and how little he valued life when the
lady's happiness was at stake.
“But I did n't want Miss Lucy to be frightened,
of course,” says he to Major Skerrett, “so
I told her that I was safe enough in the Highlands,
and when I got here I did n't believe Major
Scrammel would let me be shot for a spy.”
Here he gave a monstrous sly look.
Peter Skerrett again felt his cheeks burn, and
his forehead tingle, and the stilled Muse of History
reports that “he uttered a phrase indicative
of reprehension and distrust.”
In short, he said to himself, “Scrammel! damn
the fellow!”
Certainly! Why not? But it must not be
forgotten, that it is Scrammel who suggested this
expedition. Voltaire told Scrammel of the marriage.
Scrammel, as our peep into friend Livingston's
brain informed us, would do one of his
meanest tricks to be himself the bridegroom.
And his scheme seems to be in a fair way to forbid
the banns.
And so guileless Lucy Brothertoft had consented
to her first plot. Her accomplice was to
and throw it upon her father. Meantime she
was to take her place at the great dinner-party,
and be a hypocrite for the first time. How
guilty felt that innocent heart! How she dreaded
lest some chance word or look might betray
her! What torture was the burning blush in
her cheeks as she began to comprehend the woman
she must name mother! How she trembled
lest that woman's cruel eyes should pierce
her bosom, see the secret there, and consign her,
without even the appointed delay, to the ardent
bridegroom. She knew that she should yield
and obey. Now that for the first time she was
eager to have a will of her own, she saw how
untrained and inefficient this will was. Horror
of her mother, and loathing of her betrothed,
each repelled her in turn. She seemed to see
herself praying for mercy to the woman, and she
coldly refusing to listen; then flying across the
stage, and supplicating the man to spare her,
and he, instead, triumphing with coarse fondness.
Ah, unhappy lady! with no friend except
that stout-hearted old squire, shinning by night
through the Highlands, and dodging sentries at
risk of a shot, — a shot, that startling trochee,
sharp ictus, and faint whiz.
Except for the Majors, — Scrammel to plot,
Skerrett to execute, — Voltaire's evasion would
by the news of his daughter's danger.
“What can I do?” he said to the old servant,
bitterly. “Nothing! Nothing! Is General Putnam,
just defeated, likely to march down to rescue
my daughter? These are not the days of chivalry.
Knights do not come at call, when damsels
are in distress. No; I am impotent to help
her. If she cannot help herself, her heart must
break, as mine has broken. That base woman
will crush her life, as she crushed mine. Why
did you come to me? You have brought me
news that I may love my daughter, only to make
the new love a cause of deeper misery. Why
did you tell me of this insult to her womanhood?
I had enough to endure before. Go!
What can I say to her? She will not care for a
futile message, `that I love her, but can do
nothing.' Some stronger head than mine might
devise a plan. Some stronger heart might dare.
But I have given up. I am a defeated man, — a
broken-hearted man, living from day to day,
and incompetent to vigor. I remember myself
another person. I sometimes feel the old
fire stir and go out. But I can do nothing.
My fate and my daughter's fate are one. Go,
Voltaire, and leave me to my utter sorrow and
despair!”
He had but just dismissed the negro, and
when lo! Peter Skerrett, as we saw him, comes
forth. Here comes the Captor of Captives, the
Hero of Ballads! Here come chivalry, youth,
ardor, force, confidence, success, all in a body,
— a regiment of victor traits in one man, and
on that man's lip The Moustache, the best
in the Continental army. Here comes a man
whose timepiece has never learnt to mark “Too
late.” Here he comes, and he has made it his
business to eliminate Kerr from the problem of
Brothertoft Manor; so that Kerr + Lucy = Bliss
will be for a time an impossible equation.
Take courage, then, Edwin Brothertoft, tender
of heart, sick at will, and thank Heaven that
you married your gunstock to the brainpan of
that British beggar with a baggonet at Bunker
Hill, and so saved Skerrett to help you.
Voltaire's story, with additions and improvements,
now ends, and business proceeds.
7. VII.
“After this history, I want a little topography,”
said Skerrett. “Can you sketch me
a ground plan of the house?”
That skeleton, Brothertoft could draw without
much feeling. The house, as it stood, complete
in the background of memory, he would
not allow himself to recall. Its walls and furniture
were to him the unshifted scenes and
properties of a tragedy. If he painted them
before his mind's eye, an evil-omened figure of
a woman would step from behind the curtain,
threatening some final horror, to close the drama
of their lives.
“This wing to the right,” Skerrett said, “seems
an addition.”
“It was built on by the present proprietress,”
coldly rejoined the former heir.
“Stables here!” continued the Major, tracing
the plan. “Dining-room windows open toward
them. Shrubbery here, not too far off for an
ambush. Now, Voltaire, if we could get Major
Kerr alone in that dining-room in the dusk
easily.”
“Ho!” exclaims the butler. “That 's all
settled beforehand.”
“Kerr sometimes makes late sittings there,
then? I fancied I knew his habits.”
“He 's a poor hand at courtin',” says Voltaire,
with contempt. “Ladies likes dewotion, —
that 's my 'sperience. He 's only dewoted to
fillin' hisself full of wine.”
“A two-bottle man?”
“Every day, when the ladies leave table, he rubs
his hands,” — Voltaire imitates, — “and says,
`Now then, old boy, fresh bottle! Yellow-seal!
Don't shake him!' He drinks that pretty slow,
and gives me a glass and says, `Woolly-head,
we 'll drink my pretty Lucy. Lucky Kerr's
pretty bride!'”
Peter Skerrett here looked ferocious.
“Then,” continued the old fellow, “he drops
off asleep at the table till four o'clock. Then
he wakes up, sour, and sings out,” — Voltaire imitates,
— “`Hullo, you dam nigger! Look sharp!
Another bottle! If you shake him, I 'll cut your
black heart out.' He drinks him, and then
byme-by he says, `Ole fel! Shmore wide, ole
fel. Tuther boddle dow! I ashkitspussonle
favor, ole fel!' Then he sings a little, and gets
generally accelerated.”
“I would rather have him slowed, than accelerated,”
says Peter.
“Oho!” grinned the butler, and whispered
to himself, “If the Major thinks he ought to
be stupid-tipsy for the good of the cause and
Miss Lucy, I can deteriorate him, into his Madeira,
with a little drop of our French Gutter de
Rosy brandy. That will take the starch out of
his legs, and make him easy to handle. But that
is my business. I won't tell nobody my secrets.
The pantry and I must keep dark.”
“I cannot help a grain of compunction in
this matter,” Skerrett said. “A gentleman
does not like to interfere in another man's
courtship.”
“Do you call this plot of a coarse man with
an unmotherly woman by the fair name of courtship?”
Brothertoft said.
“No. And fortunately the lady has no illusions.
I should not like to be the one to tell
Beauty she had loved Beast. But this Beauty,
it seems, has kept her heart too pure to have
lost her fine maidenly instinct of aversion to a
blackguard. Well, no more metaphysics! Scruples
be hanged. Kerr don't deserve to be treated
like a gentleman. England should have kept
such fellows at home, if she wanted us to believe
good manners were possible under a monarchy.
Now, then, Mr. Brothertoft, suppose I do not
prisoner, — does his capture protect your daughter
enough?”
“I could wish, if it were possible, to have her
with me henceforth.”
“We must make it possible, though it complicates
matters. I could rush in, snatch Kerr,
and be off. The blow would be struck, the
enemy annoyed, our people amused; but in a
fortnight Clinton would offer some Yankee major
and a brace of captains to boot for his Adjutant,
the Honorable, &c. Then he would go down and
play Beast to Beauty again.”
“Save my daughter, once for all; if it can be
done.”
“I 'll try. Now, Voltaire, listen!”
Which he opened his mouth to do.
“What people, besides the two ladies and
Major Kerr, will be at your house to-morrow
evening, — the servants, I mean?”
“Oh! we live small at the Manor, now, —
ridiculous small. It 's war times now. Rents
is n't paid. When we want a proper lot of servants,
we takes clodhoppers.”
“Lucky for my plans you do live small,”
Skerrett said. “Never mind your family pride!
Name the household!”
“Me and Sappho and Plato, all patriots;
Jierck Dewitt's wife and her sister, Sally Bilsby,
more than is good for 'em.”
“Could you manage to have the girls out of
the way to-morrow evening?”
“Easy enough. They 'll be glad to get away
for a frolic.”
“Any horses in your stable, Voltaire?”
“Six, — all out of that Harriet Heriot mare
stock. You remember, Master Edwin.”
Edwin Brothertoft did sadly remember the late
old Sam Galsworthy's generous offer. He remembered
sadly that ride, so many years ago,
and how the sweet south winds, laden with the
rustle of tropic palms, met him with fair omen,
— ah! long ago, when Faith was blind and Hope
was young!
“Six white horses,” Voltaire continued; “the
four carriage-horses, Madam's horse, and Miss
Lucy's mare, — you ought to see Miss Lucy on
her!”
“Perhaps I shall. Tell Plato to give the mare
another oat to-morrow! Her mistress may want
a canter in the evening, — eh, Voltaire?”
Grin in response.
“Tell Miss Brothertoft, with her father's best
love,” Skerrett resumed, “that he will be on
the lawn by the dining-room window to-morrow
evening at nine o'clock, waiting for her to ride
with him to Fishkill. Tell her to be brave, prudent,
until she is called to start. And you, Voltaire,
as you love her, be cautious, be secret and be
wide awake!”
At “be cautious,” the old fellow winked elaborately.
At “be secret,” he locked all four
eyelids tight. At “be wide awake,” — snap!
eyelids flung open, and white of eye enough
appeared to dazzle a sharpshooter.
“Now, listen, Voltaire!”
Mouth agape, again, as if he had a tympanum
at each tonsil.
“Look at me, carefully!” continues Peter.
Pan shut and eyes à la saucer.
“Do you think you would know me disguised
in a red coat?”
Pan opened to explode, “Certain sure, sir!”
“And without my moustache?” the major
asked.
He gave that feature a tender twirl. His
fingers wrapped the fair tendrils lovingly around
them.
“Must it go?” he sighed. “O Chivalry!
O Liberty! O my Country! what sacrifices you
demand!”
Voltaire was sure that he would know the
Hero, even with an emasculated lip.
“Well; about eight to-morrow evening, when
Major Kerr is `accelerated' with his second
off, and red coat on — and ask a night's
lodging for a benighted British sergeant.”
“You shall have it,” says the major-domo,
with a grand-seigneur manner.
“Nothing but apple-jack or Jersey champagne
has passed these lips, since we lost the
Brandywine. You will naturally give me my
bottle of Yellow-seal, and my bite of supper,
in the dining-room with the Major.”
“Oh!” cried Voltaire with sudden panic.
“Don't risk it! Major Kerr 's got a sword awful
long and awful sharp, and two pistols with gold
handles, plum full of bullets. Every day, when
he drinks, he puts 'em on the sideboard, an' he
say, `Lookerheeyar, ole darkey! spose dam rebble
cum, I stick him, so; an' I shoot him, so.'
Don't resk it, Mas'r Skerrett!”
(Ancient servitor, suppress thy terror and thy
Tombigbee together!)
“Slip off with the weapons, and hide 'em in
your bed,” says the Major.
“In my bed?” says Voltaire, in good Continental
again. “In our feather bed? Suppose
Sappho goes to lie down, and touches cold iron,
wont she take on scollops, high?”
“The poetess must not be taught to strike
a jangling lyre. Give the tools to Plato. Set
him on guard at the dining-room door when
— such as his ancient namesake never
dreamed.”
Brothertoft smiled at these classical allusions.
Lively talk was encouraging him, as his junior
meant it should.
Neither foresaw what a ghastly mischief was
to follow this arming of Plato.
8. VIII.
“Now, Voltaire, the sooner you are on your
way back, to warn and comfort your young
lady, the better,” said Skerrett. “I 'm sorry
for your shins among the Highlands by night.”
“Never mind my shins,” Voltaire replied
with a martyr air. “They belong to my country
and Miss Lucy.”
He passed his hand tenderly along their curvilinear
edges, as if he were feeling a scymitar,
before a blow. They were sadly nicked, poor
things! They would be lacerated anew, as he
brandished them at the briers, and smote with
them the stumps along his twenty-mile anabasis.
“Farewell, my trump of trumps,” said the
Major. “Remember; be cautious, be secret, be
wide awake!”
Same pantomime as before in reply.
“If Mrs. Brothertoft suspects anything, there
will be tragedy,” Peter continued.
So all three knew, and shuddered to think.
“I will walk a little way with my friend,”
now to send to my dear child.”
Peter watched the two contrasted figures until
they disappeared in the glow of the many-colored
forest.
“Lovely old gentleman!” he thought. “Yes;
`lovely' is the word. My first encounter with
a broken heart. It has stopped my glee for a
long time to come. I have felt tears in my
eyes, all the while, and only kept them down
by talking low comedy with the serio-comic
black personage. Can a broken heart be mended?
That is always woman's work, I suppose. In
this case, too, woman broke, woman must repair.
The daughter must make over what the
wife spoilt. She shall be saved for his sake and
her own, even if I come out of the business
an amputated torso. I don't quite comprehend
people that cannot help themselves. But here
I see the fact, — there are such. And I suppose
exuberant chaps, like myself, are put in
the world to help them. I wonder whether
any woman will break my heart! I wonder
whether Miss Lucy liked any of our fellows,
and had a hero in her eye to make Kerr look
more caitiff than he is. Could not be Scrammel,
— he is a sneak. Could not be Radière, —
he is too dyspeptic. Nor Humphreys, — too pompous.
Nor Livingston, — he is not sentimental
seen and will see with his moustache off. Ah!
the Chief was right when he told me I should
put my foot into some adventure up here. And
now the thing is started, I must set it moving.”
He walked toward Jierck Dewitt, still on
guard at the gate. His relief was just coming
up, and the sentry was at liberty.
“Did you know those two men I was talking
with, by the well, Jierck?” Peter asked.
“Yes, sir; Sergeant Lincoln and Lady Brothertoft's
factotum. I 'd like to know what old
Voltaire wanted here.”
“He does not recognize the ex-Patroon,” Skerrett
thought. “Then no one will. Jierck's eyes
always saw a little lighter in the dark, and a
little steadier in a glare, than the next man's.
Sorrow must have clapped a thick mask on my
friend's face.”
“I suppose you know the Brothertoft Manor
country and the Manor-House thoroughly,
Jierck,” the Major said.
“Know the Manor, sir! I should think so.
I began with chasing tumble-bugs and crickets
over it, and studied it inch by inch. Then I
trailed black-snakes and ran rabbits, and got to
know it rod by rod. I 've fished in every brook,
and clumb every nut-tree, and poked into every
woodcock swamp or patridge brush from end
side-hill and swale, fields that grow stun and
fields that grow corn. I 've run horses over it,
where horses is to be run, — and that 's not
much, for its awful humpy country, and boulders
won't stay put anywheres. Deer, too, —
there ain't many pieces of woods on it where I
have n't routed out deers, and when they legged
for the Highlands, I legged too, and come to
know the Highlands just as well. I used to love,
when I was a boy, to go along on the heights
above the river, and pick out places where I was
going to live; but I sha'n't live in any of 'em
now. What does a man care about home, or
living at all, when his woman is n't true?”
Major Skerrett did not interrupt this burst of
remembrances. “Jierck suffers as much in his
way,” he thought, “as the ex-Patroon.” “And
the house,” he said, “you know that as thoroughly?”
“Ay, from garret to cellar. My father,
Squire Dewitt, has been in England, and he
says it 's more like an English house than any
he knows, in small. From garret to cellar, says
I. The cellar I ought to know pretty well. I
dodged in there once, when I was a boy, hangin'
round the house; and got into the wine-room,
and drank stuff that came near spoilin' my taste
for rum forever, — I wish it had. They caught
blood come. Mr. Brothertoft tried to beg off for
me. She 'd got not to make much of him by
that time, and the more he begged, the harder
she had 'em lay it on me. But I 'm talkin' off,
stiddy as the North River, and you 've got something
to say to me, Major, I know, by the way
you look. What 's up about Brothertoft Manor?”
“There 's a British officer staying there, who
has never tasted pork and beans. I 've promised
General Putnam to bring him up here to
dinner.”
“Hooray! that 's right. Give these militia
something to think about, or they get to believe
war 's like general trainin'-day, and they can cut
for home when they 're tired. You want volunteers.
I 'm one.”
“I counted on you for my lieutenant. Sergeant
Lincoln also goes. Now I want three men
more, and you shall choose them. Each man
must have the grit of a hundred; and they must
know the country as well as they know the way
to breakfast. Name three, Jierck!”
“That I 'll do, bang. There 's Ike Van Wart,
for one. His junto, him and Jack Paulding and
Dave Williams, would just make the three. But
Jack 's nabbed, and down to York in a prisonship.
And Dave 's off on furlough, sowing his
next summer.”
Only Isaac Van Wart, therefore, of that famous
trio, whom the Muse of Tradition shall
fondly nickname
Major André's Bootjack,
joined Skerrett on his perilous service.
“Ike for one,” continued Dewitt. “Well,
Galsworthy, old Sam Galsworthy, for two. And
for three, I don't believe a better man lives
than Hendrecus Canady, the root-doctor's son.
They 're all Brothertoft-Manor boys, built of
the best cast-steel, and strung with the wiriest
kind of wire. Shoot bullets into 'em, stick baggonets
into 'em; they don't mind the bullets any
more than spit-balls at school, nor the baggonets
more than witches do pins.”
“Well, Jierck, have them here in an hour. I
will join you, and talk the trip over, and we will
be ready to start at sunset.”
Skerrett found himself a horse, trotted back
to Fishkill, wrote a farewell to his step-brother
and his mother, and scratched a few irrepressible
lines to Washington, such as the hero loved
to get from his boys, and valued much more than
lumbering despatches marked Official. The despatches
only announced facts, good or bad. The
brisk, gallant notes revealed spirits which black
“So long as I have lads like Peter Skerrett,”
thought Our George, by the grace of God Pater
Patriæ, when he received this note, a fortnight
after that cup-lip-and-slip battle of Germantown,
“while I have such lads with me, I can leave my
red paint in my saddle-bags with my Tuscarora
grammar.”
“Now,” thought Peter, “I have made my will
and written my despatch, I must proceed to
change myself into a redcoat.”
He unpacked a British sergeant's uniform,
which he had carried, if disguise should be
needed in his late solitary journey.
“There is a garment,” said he, holding up the
coat with an air of respect, “whose pockets have
felt the King's shilling. But thy pockets, old
buff and blue!” — he stripped off his own coat,
— “never knew bullion, though often stuffed
with Continental paper at a pistareen the pound
avoirdupois.”
His weather-beaten scarlets were much too
small for the tall champion. By spasm and
pause, and spasm again, however, he managed
to squeeze into them at last.
Then he took Mrs. Birdsell's little equilateral
triangle of mirror, three inches to a side, and,
holding it off at arm's length, surveyed himself
by sections.
“The color don't suit my complexion,” he
said, viewing his head and neck. “The coat
will not button over my manly chest, and I shall
have to make it fast with a lanyard,” — here he
took a view of the rib-region. “The tails are
simply ridiculous,” — he twisted about to bring
the glass to bear upon them. “In short,” — and
he ran the bit of mirror up and down, — “I am
a scarecrow, cap à pie. Liberty herself would
not know me. Pretty costume to go and see a
lady in! Confound women! Why will wives
break husband's hearts? Why will girls grow
up beauties and heiresses, and become baits for
brutes? Ah, Miss Lucy Brothertoft! You do
not know what an inglorious rig Peter Skerrett
is submitting to for your sake. And the worst
is to come. Alas! the worst must come!”
He hoisted the looking-glass and gazed for a
moment irresolutely at his face.
There, in its accustomed place, sat The Moustache,
blonde in color, heroic in curl, underscoring
his firm nose, pointing and adorning the
handsome visage.
Skerrett gazed, sighed, and was silent.
Nerve him, Liberty! Steel him, Chivalry!
A hard look crept over his countenance.
He clutched a short blade, pointless; but with
an edge trenchant as wit.
It was a razor.
Slash! And one wing of The Moustache was
swept from the field.
Behold him, trophy in hand and miserable
that he has won it!
Will resolution carry him through a second
assault? Or will he go one-sided; under one
nostril a golden wreath, under the other, bristles,
for a six-month?
Slash! The assassination is complete.
His lip is scalped. All is bald between his
nose and mouth. The emphasis is subtracted
from his countenance. His upper lip, no longer
kept in place by its appropriate back-load, now
flies up and becomes seamed with wrinkles.
And there on the table lay The Moustache!
There they lay, — the right flank and the left
flank, side by side in their old posture, — the
mere exuviæ of a diminished hero.
Peter turned away weakly as a Samson
shorn.
“Ah, Liberty! Ah, Chivalry!” he moaned.
“Will the good time to come make a sacred
relic of these yellow tufts?”
Tradition reports that his hostess found them,
and buried them, in an old tinder-box, in the
Fishkill village graveyard, where they sleep
among other exuviæ, arms, legs, torsos, and
bodies of the heroes of that time.
And now it may be divined why De Chastellux
Perhaps Peter kept his lip in mourning
until after the surrender of Cornwallis. Perhaps,
alas! they never grew again.
“It will take gallons on gallons of this October
to put me in good spirits again,” says the
Major, as he rode away.
The mellow air, all sweetness, all sparkle, and
all perfume, flowed up to his lips, generously.
He breathed, and breathed, and breathed again
of that free tap, and by the time he reached the
rendezvous was buoyant as ever.
The Orderly, Brothertoft, was awaiting him,
and sat patient, but no longer despondent, looking
through the bulky Highlands, as if they
were the mountains of a dream.
Jierck Dewitt and his Three were skylarking
in a pumpkin patch. Twenty years ago we
saw the same three, straddling and spurring
tombstones in the Brothertoft Manor graveyard,
the day of the last Patroon's funeral, — the day
when Old Van Courtlandt made a Delphic
Apollo of him, and foretold, amid general clink
of glasses, that marriage of white promise and
black performance.
“The child is father of the man”; and the
four boys have grown up as their fathers' children
should.
Jierck Dewitt has already shown himself, and
manliness.
When he caught sight of Major Skerrett, he
dropped a yellow bomb, charged with possible
pumpkin-pies, which he was about to toss at
the head of one of his men, and marched the
file up to be reviewed by its leader.
“Number one is Ike Van Wart, Major,” says
Jierck. “His eyes are peeled, if there 's any
eyes got their bark off in the whole Thirteen.”
Ike touched his cocked hat — it was his only
bit of uniform — and squared shoulders to be
looked at.
He was a lank personage, of shrewd, but rather
sanctimonious visage. War made him a scout.
Fate appointed him one prong of Major André's
Bootjack. But Elder and Chorister were written
on his face; and he died Elder and Chorister
of the First Presbyterian Church of Greenburgh,
in Westchester.
“Right about face, Ike!” says Jierck. “Forrud
march, Old Sam Galsworthy! He 's grit, if
grit grows. His only fault is he 's too good-natured
to live.”
Old Sam stood forward, and laughed. As he
laughed, the last button flew off his uniform
coat. It was much too lean a coat for one of
his increasing diameter, and the exit of that
final button had long been merely a question
by pointing to his descendants, who in
our day are the identical Sam, repeated. Under
thirty, they drive high-stepping bays in the wagons
of the great Express Companies. They wear
ruddy cheeks, chinny beards, natty clothes,
blue caps with a gilt button; and rattle their
drags through from Flatten Barrack, up Broadway
and back, at 2 P. M., without hitting a
hub or cursing a carter. Everybody says Old
Sam is too good-natured to live! But he does
live and thrive, and puts flesh on his flesh, and
dollars on his pile. Over thirty, he marries,
as becomes a Galsworthy, buys acres up the
river, raises red-cheeked apples and children,
breeds high-stepping bays, and when he takes
his annual nag to the Bull's Head for sale,
the knowing men there make bets, and win
them, that Old Squire Sam weighs at least two
hundred and forty pounds with his coat off.
“Right about face, Sam!” says the fugleman.
“Forrud march, Hendrecus Canady! He looks
peakèd, Major. His father 's a root and Injun
doctor, and he never had much but pills to eat,
until he ran off and joined the army. But I
stump the whole Thirteen to show me a wirier
boy, or a longer head. He 'll be in Congress before
he says `Die' through that nose of his'n.”
Hendrecus Canady in turn toed the mark for
meagre yellow down on his cheeks grew to a
point at his chin. But he is neatly dressed in
half-uniform. He has a keen look, which will
say, “Stand and deliver your fact!” to every
phenomenon. He will, indeed, talk through his
nose, until his spirit passes by that exit to climes
where there are no noses to twang by. But wiry
men must be had when states need bracing.
And the root-doctor's runaway son was M. C.
long before his beak intoned his Nunc dimittis.
“Now, boys,” said Skerrett, “I like your looks,
and I like what Captain Jierck says of you. You
know what we 've got to do, and know it must
be done. You 'll travel, scattering, according to
Jierck's orders, and rendezvous before moon-rise
at his father's barn on the Manor. Sergeant
Lincoln goes with me. Jierck will name a place
where he 'll meet me at sunrise. We shall have
all day to-morrow to see how the land lies, and
the night to do our job in. Now, then, shake
hands round, and go ahead!”
| Edwin Brothertoft | |