 | VIII. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
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!”
| VIII. Edwin Brothertoft | |