Edwin Brothertoft/Part II Chapter VIII
Chapter 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,” said Brothertoft, “I have a more hopeful message 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 enough. Nor Skerrett, — him she has never 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 to end of it. I know it, woodland and clearing, 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 haven’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 isn’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 me, and the Madam had me whipped till the 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’e 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 prison-ship. And Dave’s off on furlough, sowing his father’s winter wheat for the Cowboys to tromp 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 facts could not darken, nor heavy facts depress. “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 German town, “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 does not immortalize the Skerrett Moustache. 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 related why he is not fully up to his mark of 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 of time. Hearty Old Sam may be best described 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 peaked, 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 inspection. He had a sallow, potticary face. A 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!”