Chapter 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 talked of, — I fear,” thought Skerrett. “I must 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 timepiece 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-inChief 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 he to himself. “The name of Kerr struck 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 over the record, while it whirled by like 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, and not what men would say it might have been? 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! ’Tis 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 Crow, an impossible buffoon. La Beecher Stowe 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 didn’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 how he had shammed sick yesterday, dodged away at evening, and tramped all night by bypaths 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.