CHAPTER XLIX
THE DEPARTURE
THE Attorney Burton wrote to Colonel Parker almost immediately upon his return to England. He said that he had been to see Master Hezekiah Tipton, “and if I had dropped from the stars instead of walking into his office,” he wrote, “he could not have been more amazed to see me.”
After that he wrote frequently, keeping Colonel Parker apprised of all his movements. By January, he had Jack’s affairs so far settled that there was talk of his returning to England. It was finally arranged with Hezekiah Tipton that Jack should go to live at Grampton with Sir Henry Ballister, and a sufficient sum for his maintenance was extorted from the old man. It was also arranged that he should be given such an education as befitted his rank in the world.
Finally, March was settled upon as the date of Jack’s departure. During that month the “Richmond Castle,” a fine, large ship, was to sail for England. Captain Northam was one in whom Colonel Parker felt every confidence, and so it was decided that Jack should take passage in that vessel from Yorktown.
As the time for departure drew nearer and nearer, there was that ever increasing bustle and confusion of preparation that always culminates with such a leave-taking. Even on the very last day the two sea-chests did not seem nearly filled, and there was a mountainous heap of clothes and personal belongings yet waiting to be packed away in them. The negro women-servants were hurrying continually up and down stairs upon this errand and upon that, and there was a ceaseless calling and countermanding of orders. Madam Parker, leaning over the banister, and calling:—“Jack! Jack! Where is Jack? Did you see Master Jack, Chloe?”—“Iss, missy. Him in de office with hes honor.”—“Well, run and ask him where he put those two lace cravats and the lawn sleeves, for we can’t find them anywhere.” “Mamma, mamma!” this from Nelly Parker from the room within, “if that is what you ‘re looking for, I know where they are; they were put into the little chest. I saw Dinah pack them there this morning.”
A dozen times Madam Parker would sink down, suddenly relaxed, into a chair, to say that she was that tired with all this hurry that her feet ached to the bone, and each time Nelly Parker would say, “Why do you vex yourself so much, then, mamma? Surely Dinah and Rose and Chloe are enough to do the packing without your wearing yourself out at it.”
“But, my dear,” Madam Parker would say, with her nervous fussiness, “if I don’t see to it myself, they will never get it done.”
Then Chloe, Madam Parker’s own maid, came to say that Robin and the negro man, Cæsar, were waiting to cord the boxes.
“Well, they’ll have to wait,” said Madam Parker, crossly, “for they’re not ready yet.”
“They might cord the small box, mamma,” said Nelly Parker; “we can pack everything else in the other.”
Meantime, Jack was sitting with Colonel Parker, who was giving him his last instructions. “I have them marked down here,” he said, “on this paper. Keep it carefully by you. Nay; don’t trust it in your pocket that way. Where’s the pocket-book I gave you yesterday to keep such things in?”
“I left it up-stairs on the table, sir,” said Jack.
“You should always carry it with you,” said Colonel Parker, “and not leave it about in that way. Well, put the memoranda into your pocket, now, but be sure you put it in your pocket-book when you get up-stairs.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack.
“Here’s a letter to Captain Northam,” said Colonel Parker. “Give it to him as soon as you go aboard the “Richmond Castle,” and he will extend very particular care to you. It gives him full instruction as to all he is to do for you. When you get to Gravesend he will send you up as far as Broadstairs in a wherry, and there you shall get a hackney coach to take you to my agent at Snow Hill. Here is a letter to him and a packet—Ebenezer Bilton, Esquire. This packet of letters you shall use while you are in London as you need them. You will see by the addresses who they are for. Here is this large packet to give to your uncle. You had better put these larger packets into your chests, but carry the captain’s letter in your pocket-book, so you may give it to him as soon as you get aboard.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack.
How singularly dull and blank is the interval of waiting that follows all rude bustle of preparation—when the boxes have been corded and carried away down to the landing, and the house has again relapsed into its former quietude, and yet the time has not quite come to say farewell. There is something singularly trying in that period of passive waiting.
It was late that last afternoon at Marlborough, and Jack and Nelly Parker stood at the window, in the slant of the winter’s day, looking out down toward the landing. The day before the treacherous March weather had turned suddenly back to winter again, and it had snowed nearly all day; now the slush was melting rapidly in the sun. Everywhere the water was running, trickling, the drops sparkling in the bright slanting light of the sinking sun. The snow still lingered in wide white patches here and there in sheltered places of the grass; but on the pathway and on the steps of the house it had dissolved into a wet, thin sheet of half-frozen slush. She was very silent as she stood there looking out toward the river beyond the screen of winter trees.
“I wonder how much you will miss me?” Jack said.
She turned and looked directly at him, but she did not reply in words.
“I shall miss you,” he said. “I can’t tell how much I shall miss you. I shall be thinking about you all the time.”
“Will you, Jack!”
“Yes, I shall. Will you often think about me?”
“Indeed I shall.” Then she suddenly reached out her hand toward him, and he took it and held it in his, and she let it remain there. It seemed to him that he could hardly breathe, and as she stood there, perfectly still, with her hand in his, he could see her innocent bosom rising and falling with her own labored heavy breathing.
“Will you miss me?” he said, at last, almost whispering. “Will you, then, miss me? I’ll miss you—oh, how I shall miss you!”
“Yes, I’ll miss you,” she whispered.
She stood close to him. Her dress and her arm touched him, and he thrilled and thrilled again and again. It was upon him to say somewhat of that which so swelled his bosom, but the words hung like lead on his lips, and his heart beat so strenuously that he could hardly breathe. She did not withdraw her hand from his as she stood there.
Then suddenly there was the sound of some one coming, and she snatched her hand away from him. It was Madam Parker. “Why, Jack,” she said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. What are you doing here?” and she looked from one to the other.
“Doing?” said Jack, stupidly. “I’m not doing anything.” And Nelly Parker moved away from the window.
“Colonel Parker wants to see you in his room for a minute,” said Madam Parker. “You’d better go right away.” And if she thought of anything that had passed, she said nothing concerning it.
Jack did not find a chance to speak to Nelly Parker again that night until the very last minute before she went away to bed. She seemed to him to avoid even looking at him. She sat very silently beside her father, listening to what he said, but saying nothing herself. She went to bed before the others, the negro waiting-woman standing at the door holding the candle. Then she gave Jack her hand. Her father and mother were looking on. “Good-night,” she said; “and ‘twill be good-by.” And then she raised her eyes, and looked slowly and steadily at him.
Jack held her hand, remembering strongly what had passed that afternoon.
“And will you not wake to see me off in the morning?” he said. He was still holding her hand.
“Maybe I will.”
“You will—I know you will.”
“Why, Jack, you’ll be off before we’re awake,” said Colonel Parker. “You’ll have started before seven o’clock.” And then she went away.
Jack was awakened by the rattle of the latch and the echoing footsteps of some one coming into his room, and the sliding light of a candle shining across the walls and then down into his face. It was Colonel Parker’s serving-man, Robin, who had come, bringing a lighted candle and a jug of hot water. “You must get up, Master Jack,” he said, “’tis six o’clock.”
“‘THEN I WILL COME,’ SAID HE.”
Even in the moment of first awakening from sleep into which he had brokenly drifted the night before, he was conscious of something portentous looming in the background of the coming day; but he could not in the first instant seize upon the coming events of his life. Then it came to him with a flash, and he sprang out of bed upon the cold floor and into the chill of the dark and wintry room. The time had come for him to depart.
Robin helped him as he dressed with chattering teeth and numb, cold fingers. “The boat’s all ready and waiting, Master Jack,” the man said, “and they’ll start as soon as you’ve eaten your breakfast and go aboard.”
“’Tis mightily cold this morning, Robin,” Jack said.
“Ay; ’tis a freezing morning, sir,” said the man.
Presently Jack asked, “Is Miss Nelly up yet?”
“Miss Nelly!” said Robin, in very evident surprise. “Why, Master Jack, she won’t be up for three hours yet.”
“I thought maybe she’d be up to see me off,” Jack said, in a sort of foolish explanation.
He found a solitary breakfast spread out for him down-stairs by the light of a cluster of candles, and he sat down and began immediately to eat, waited on by Robin and a negro man. All the great spaces were chill and raw with frost of the winter morning. Jack’s fingers were still stiff with cold, and his breath blew out like a cloud in the light of the candles. He ate his meal with an ever heavier and heavier certainty that Nelly Parker would not be awake to see him off. As the certainty grew upon him there seemed to be something singularly heartless in such neglect. He would never have so treated her, and at the thought a sudden anger arose within him against her. Then it occurred to him with a fading hope that maybe she might be in the library or drawing-room waiting for him. He finished his scant breakfast and went thither, out across the hall; but there was no one there but the negro man making a fire of logs, the smoke rising in great volumes from the kindled lightwood, part of it coming out into the room, and filling it with a pungent cloud. The wide, cold spaces seemed singularly empty and deserted of their accustomed life. As he stood, lingering, some one came across the hall; it was Robin, and he was carrying the overcoats. “They’re waiting for you at the landing, Master Jack,” he said.
Then Jack, with a crumbling away of the heart, knew for a certainty that he was not to see her again.
Robin held the overcoat for him, and he slipped his arms into it, and then he went out of the house and down toward the landing. The sun had not yet risen, and the air of the morning was keen with the cold and frozen newness of the day. Here and there, where the sodden snow of yesterday had not all melted away, it had frozen again into slippery sheets that crunched beneath his tread. He turned and looked back toward the house. He could see her room; it was closed and dark. Then he turned again and walked on once more toward the landing, his breath coming thick and hot in his throat. To think that she would not come to bid him good-by before he went away!
The boat was waiting for him, and the sailing-master stood upon the wharf, swinging and slapping his arms. Jack climbed down into it, and the other followed him. The men shoved it off with a push of their oars, and then began rowing away toward the schooner, where a light still hung in the stays, burning pallidly in the increasing daylight. Then they were aboard.
Jack went down into the cabin, still gray with the early light. Both his chests were there and his two bundles, and he sat down among them, overwhelmed. By and by he came up on deck again. They were out and away in the river now. The sun had just risen, and the red light lit up the front of the great house, now standing out clear through the leafless trees. Jack stood holding to the stays, looking out at it, and his eyes blurred, and for a moment everything was lost to his sight. She had not come to bid him good-by; that was the bitterest pang of all.
CHAPTER L
THE RETURN
JACK wrote back to Marlborough from Jamestown, and again from Yorktown just before he sailed—letters full of homesickness and of longing. Perhaps the most unhappy hours of his life were those one or two when, from the poop-deck of the great ship, he saw the bluffs of Yorktown fall further and further astern while, one after another, the great square sails high overhead burst out to the swift cold wind that hummed away to the eastward, driving the water in white-capped ridges before it. He sensed nothing of the windy glory of that morning; he was so full of the heavy weight of his melancholy that he could not stand still for a minute, but walked up and down, up and down the deck continually, his soul full to overflowing with that deep, yearning passion of homesickness. A number of passengers—two ladies—one young and one old—and half a dozen gentlemen also stood gazing out at the shore as it fell away behind; yet it seemed to Jack that, in spite of such companionship, he was more alone than ever he had been in all of his life before.
How different were those other feelings when, six weeks later, he stood with his fellow passengers (now grown into so many intimate friends) and watched the distant cliff-walls of England rising up, ever higher and higher, out of the ocean! Even six weeks of time may cure those pangs of homesickness and of love-longings in a young and wholesome heart.
The week that followed was one of such continued bustle and change that no part of it had time to really come close enough to him to be firmly united to his life. The Thames; the journey from Gravesend; London, its different people and different scenes; the long northward journey in the coach—all these were mere broken fragments of events without any coherency of ordinary sequence. Then at last he was at Grampton.
It was a fine and stately old place, with an air of quality such as he had never known before—a great brick house, of old King James’s day, with long wings and ivy-covered gables; with halls and passageways, with wide terraced lawn, with gardens and deeply-wooded park.
That first moment of his arrival, he felt singularly lonely as he stood in the great wainscoted hall, looking about him at the pictures on the walls, the bits of armor, the stag’s antlers, the tall, stiff, carved furniture. It was all ever so much greater and grander than he had anticipated, and he felt himself altogether out of place and a stranger in it. Then his uncle came hurrying to meet him and gave him a very kind and hearty welcome to Grampton.
He had been settled in England for over a month before he heard from Virginia. Then there came a great packet of letters all together; a fat, bulky letter from Colonel Parker, one from Madam Parker, one from Lieutenant Maynard, and a very long letter from Nelly Parker.
He held this last for a long time in his hands before he opened it, recognizing, as he sat there, how greatly the keenness of that old sweet passion had become dulled and blunted even in this short time. He felt a sort of shame that it should be so, not knowing that it always is thus.
It is a long time before one can get used to that strange time-wearing that so rubs the keen, sharp outline of passion into the dim and indistinct formlessness of mere memories; sometimes we grow gray before we recognize that it must be so, and even then we wonder why it should be.
Then he opened her letter and read it.
“We have had a great deal of company for the last two weeks,” said a fragment of the letter. “There was an aunt Polly from the eastern shore of the bay who brought my three cosins with her. And then my uncle James came afterward with my other cosin, a boy of thirteen and mightily spoiled, who will talk at table and give his opinion to my father, who, as you know, can bare no man’s opinion but his own, much less a boy’s of thirteen. But my cosins are dear, sweet girls whom I have not seen for nigh four years,” and so on and so on. “The ‘Lyme,’ hath come back from Jamaca, too, and so Mr. Maynard was here and brought two young gentlemen who are cadits along with him. You know them very well, for they are Master Delliplace and Master Monk. And so everything very gay. Well, I am gay, too, and do enjoy myself, but indeed think oftener than I choose to tell you of some one a great ways off in England.” And here Jack felt a strong yearning toward the writer of the innocent, inconsequent words. There seemed to be a tender pathos even in the misspelling here and there. Continuing, the letter said: “Indeed and indeed I was truly sorry that I did not wake to see you go away, for so I did entend to do, and so I ment to tell you I would do. And indeed I could have boxed Cloe’s ears that she did not wake me, for so she promised to do. But she did not wake herself, so how could she wake me? I did not wake for a good long time after the boat had gone, and when I waked the boat was way down the river at the bend. Alack! I could have cried my eyes out. Do you beleve that? Well, I did cry, and that not a little, for I was so sorry to have you gone that I could have cried my eyes out for a week.” Toward the end of the letter she said: “I had nigh forgot to tell you that my poor uncle Richard is reported dead. He was in Jamaca, and Mr. Maynard says he was shott, but how, he could not tell. So now the Roost is to be sold, and ’tis likely that papa will buy it. Yesterday he said to mama, ‘What a fine thing it would be if Jack could buy the Roost and come back to us again,’ for indeed it is a fine plantation. And oh, I wish you could buy the Roost.”
After Jack had finished reading the letter he sat thinking a long time. Would he ever go back to Virginia again? As he sat there, he felt a sudden longing for it—its warm wildness, its pine woods, its wide stretches of inland waters—and while the feeling was strong within him, he sat down and wrote to her. “It is all very fine here”—he said, “a great, grand house, with a wide park of trees, and a lawn with terraces and stone steps, and a great garden all laid out in patterns and scrolls, with box bushes and hedges trimmed into shapes of peacocks and round balls and what not.” And so on in a page or so of description. “My uncle is as kind as ever he can be, only—I will tell you this in secret—he will drink too much wine at dinner, and then sometimes is cross. Well, he is a dear, good, kind man, and almost like a father to me. My Aunt Diana is kind to me, too, and my cousins—dear, good, sweet girls—do all they can to make me happy. Yet I always think of Virginia, and more than all else, when I am thinking of it, do I think of one who stood with me at the window the last day I was there, and wish I were there to see her again. Ay, sometimes I would give all I have in the world if I could only be back again.” It was a great pleasure for him to write this, and as he wrote it his heart warmed and thrilled again. “Indeed, I did look for you that morning I went away,” he wrote, “for I hoped to say good-by to you again when there was no one by to hear me say it. But you did not come, and I went away so sad and broken-hearted that I could almost have cried. I was so sad that I would have given all the world to be back again.
“My uncle,” he wrote, “intends that I shall go to Cambridge College, and so I study all day long with a tutor. But methinks I am slow and dull at learning, excepting Latin and Greek, which my poor father taught me when I was a boy, and which I know nigh as well as my tutor himself. That I know perhaps in some places better than he. But yet, if I could help it, I would not go to Cambridge College, but would go back to Virginia again. Yet what can I do? It is four years, now, till I come of age and enter into mine own, and then I can come and go as I please. Do you not believe that it will please me to go straight back to Virginia?”
He sat for a little while thinking, and then he wrote, “Whom, think you, I saw a short while ago?—whom but Israel Hands, who hath come back to England again. He found me out where I was living, and came here begging. I did not know him at first, for he hath grown a great, long beard. He limps with the knee, which he says is all stiff like solid bone, and that he can only bend it—as indeed he showed me—a tiny bit. He hath grown mightily poor and is in want. My uncle was prodigiously interested in him, and would have him up in his cabinet to talk with him, after he had something to eat and some beer in the buttery. I gave him some money, and he went away happy. My uncle’s man said that he was drinking down in the village that night, and so, I suppose, spent all the money I gave him,—poor wretch.”
Then, thinking of another matter, he wrote: “I do not think I told you aught of my cousin Edward. He is my uncle’s son, and is in the Guards—a great, tall, handsome gentleman, who was here a while since and was very kind to me; only he would forever tease me by calling me his cousin the pirate, and would ask me to show him my pardon before he would own me. But of course you must understand all this in jest.”
Jack was twenty years of age when his uncle Hezekiah died. The old man left a great fortune of over thirty thousand pounds, a part of which was invested in a large tract of land in Virginia. The next year Jack left college, and the year after, in the following summer, took passage to America to look after his property and to have it properly surveyed. Colonel Parker, who had been the active agent in the purchase of the land, invited him to come directly to Marlborough, and Jack gladly accepted the invitation.
It seemed very wonderful to behold with the living eyes those old familiar places once more. It was almost like stepping back from the living present into a dim and far-away fragment of the beautiful past. The very schooner that met him at Jamestown—how familiar it was! It seemed to him that he remembered every turn of the scrollwork in the little cabin.
They passed by the old Roost early in the morning. It stood out clear and clean in the bright light, and Jack stood upon deck gazing, gazing at it.
How full of associations it all was! and yet the place was very much changed. The roof had been newly repaired, the house painted, and the old stables were replaced with new outbuildings. The sharp outlines of the old house and the two tall chimneys were, however, exactly as he remembered them.
Turning, he could just see the houses at Bullock’s Landing on the other side of the river; and, looking at the far-distant cluster of wooden hovels, he almost lived over again the circumstances of that night of his escape from his master.
It was after midday when the brick chimneys of Marlborough showed in the distance across the wide, bright river above the trees, and it was maybe two or three o’clock when he stepped ashore at the well-known landing-wharf.
He saw that there was quite a company gathered on the lawn in front of the house as he walked up from the landing along the familiar path. And how familiar it all was—just exactly as he remembered it, only now, to his riper knowledge, the great house appeared to have shrunk in size, and to have become more bare and angular than he remembered it to have been. The company upon the lawn had turned their faces toward him as he came. They evidently had not seen the approach of the schooner. He saw Colonel Parker at once and Madam Parker, but he did not see Nelly Parker until she arose from among the others as he drew near. She had changed very little, except that her slender, girlish figure had rounded out into the greater fullness of womanhood. Jack was looking straight at her, but he had seen that Harry Oliver was there also.
“Papa!—mamma!” she cried out, “t’is Jack!” And then she ran to meet him, reaching out her hands and grasping both of his. Then, in an instant, all was a general disturbance of voices and of coming forward. Colonel Parker wrung Jack’s hand again and again, and Madam Parker almost cried, giving him, not her hand, but her cheek to kiss.
“I hope Mr. Ballister will remember me,” said Harry Oliver.
“Indeed, yes,” said Jack, “I’m not likely to forget you,” and he took the hand that was offered.
He saw in the brief moment of hand-shaking that Oliver had not improved in his appearance. His face had begun to show a white, puffy look, as though of dissipation, and there was a certain looseness about his dress that Jack had not remembered. In his memory he had an image of Harry Oliver as of a perfectly fine gentleman, and he wondered passively whether the change that he now beheld was in the other or in himself.
That night was full of a singular redundancy of happiness—one of those periods of pellucid contentment which lies in after times so sweet a center in the memory of other things. The room he occupied was the very one that had been his before he went away to England; and as he lay there in the warm, mellow darkness, wide awake, listening to the myriad sounds of night that came in through the open window, and as he thought of Eleanor Parker, and that he was now again with her, to see her and to be near her for a month, he seemed to be wrapped all about with a balm of the perfect joy of peacefulness.
That month was the happiest of all his life, for in it Nelly Parker promised to be his wife. It had merged into lovely early autumn weather, and the katydids were in full song, and in the happy after-memories of those four blissful weeks, the note of the little green singing things was always present in recollections of mellow evenings when he and she would sit out in front of the house, listening to the rasping notes answering one another from the black clumps of foliage; of other times when he would lie awake in his room, not sleeping for thinking of her, his heart full to overflowing with happiness, and that same rasping iteration sounding ceaselessly here—there—louder—more distant, in through the open window. Never afterward did he hear the katydids singing at night without a recurrent echoing vibration of happiness flowing into his heart. For so, year by year, as the seasons come, do such little things of the heavenly Father’s beautiful world of nature bring back to the soul an echo of some part of that divine hymn that has been sung,—of joy, of tender sorrow, of bliss fulfilled, of grief that is past,—a sound, a touch from out the past, setting the finely-drawn heart-cords to quivering and ringing with an answering pang of passion that age does not always dull—that time does not always cause to become stilled.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The pirate captain had really only twenty-five men aboard of his sloop at the time of the battle.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious errors were corrected.