Edwin Brothertoft/Part III Chapter XXV

Chapter XXV.
A word of farewell to Major Kerr.

He had a horrid, horrid time at Fishkill.

Little but pork and beans to eat, little but apple-jack to drink, nothing but discomfiture to think of.

He experienced shame.

A letter was conveyed to him from Lucy Brothertoft. She wrote, as kindly as might be, what her real feelings had been toward him. She also described the sad tragedy of the night of his capture.

The conviction that he was a shabby fellow had by this time pierced Kerr’s pachyderm. He was grateful to Lucy that she felt no contempt for him. But her gentle dignity reproached his unmanliness to her, and he became a very dejected penitent.

General Burgoyne has been an important character behind the scenes of this drama. He was a clever amateur playwright, and while our personages have been doing and suffering, the General has been at work at a historical play, which he meant to name, “Saratoga, or the Last of the Rebels.” There was some able acting in it, and all the world watched for the catastrophe quite breathless and agape. A brilliant pageant of a surrender closed the play, in which, to the general surprise, it was Jack Burgoyne, and not Horatio Gates, who gave up the sword and yielded the palm.

This news came flying down to Fishkill within ten days after Major Kerr’s capture.

The unlucky fellow heard of the great take of British and Hessian officers. He began to fear prisoners were a drug in the market, and he must eat Continental fare till his stomach was quite gone.

“Write to Sir Henry Clinton,” said Old Put, good-naturedly, “that I’ll swap you for your value in the Yankees he took with the Highland forts.”

Kerr indited a doleful account of his diet and impending dyspepsia to his General.

“I must have him back,” said Sir Henry. “Anybody can be an Adjutant; but nobody in His Majesty’s army can carve a saddle of mutton, or take out a sidebone, with Kerr.”

The “swap” was arranged. The Major was put on board the Tartar, opposite Brothertoft Manor. He went off a sadder and a wiser man.

His capture had served its purpose of amusing Putnam’s desponding forces. The General had been able to write to Washington, “We have lost the Highland forts; but we have taken an Adjutant”; — and Humphreys had composed a doggerel, beginning, — “O Muse, inspire my feeble pen, To sing a deed of merit, Performed to daunt the enemy, By Major Peter Skerrett.”

Poor Kerr! when he reached New York, he was all the time haunted by regrets for his lost bride. “Up again, and take another!” is the only advice to be given under such circumstances. Some other flower of lower degree must be a substitute for the rose.

Cap’n Baylor, late of a whaler, now the chief oil man of New York, had a daughter Betty. She was a dumpy little maid. Flippers were her hands, fin-like were her feet. Nothing statuesque about her; but she tinkled with coin, and that tintinnabulation often opens the eyes of Pygmalion.

Her the Major wooed, and glibly won.

Cap’n Baylor oiled out his son-in-law’s debts. Kerr resigned his Adjutancy, and took his wife home.

Gout presently carried off the knobby old Earl of Bendigh. The Bucephalus colt made Brother Tom acephalous, by throwing him over a wall. Brother Dick succumbed to Bacchus. Harry Kerr, our Kerr, became the sixth Earl of Bendigh.

His dumpy Countess studied manners in England, and acquired the delicious languor of a lady’s-maid. She wore, morning, noon, and night, white gloves tight as thumbikins. She consumed perfume by the puncheon. But she was an honest, merry soul, who would stand no bullying. She kept Kerr in order, and made him quite a tolerably respectable fellow at last.

By and by, out of supreme gratitude to her for his wedded bliss, he had the Baylor arms looked up at the Herald’s office. They were found, and quartered with his own, and may still be seen on the coat of the Kerrs, Bendigh branch, as follows: “On a rolling sea vert, a Leviathan rampant, sifflant proper. Crest, a hand grasping a harpoon. Motto,, — .”