by Howard Pyle
There was a loud splash of men jumping overboard, and then, almost instantly, the cry of “Quarter! quarter!” The lieutenant ran to the edge of the vessel. It was as he had thought: the grappling-irons of the pirate sloop had parted, and it had drifted away. The few pirates who had been left aboard of the schooner had jumped overboard and were now holding up their hands. “Quarter!” they cried. “Don’t shoot! — quarter!” And the fight was over.
The lieutenant looked down at his hand, and then he saw, for the first time, that there was a great cutlass gash across the back of it, and that his arm and shirt-sleeve were wet with blood. He went aft, holding the wrist of his wounded hand. The boatswain was still at the wheel. “By zounds!” said the lieutenant, with a nervous, quavering laugh, “I didn’t know there was such fight in the villains.”
His wounded and shattered sloop was again coming up toward him under sail, but the pirates had surrendered, and the fight was over.
“THE COMBATANTS CUT AND SLASHED WITH SAVAGE FURY.”
CHAPTER XLVII
IN THE NEW LIFE
IT IS WONDERFUL how adolescent youth accepts the changes of its life, and with what fluency it adapts itself to them.
During the month that the Attorney Burton lingered at Marlborough before his return to England, it came to be more like home to Jack than any place in which he had ever lived. In a wonderfully little while there grew to be a singularly ripe feeling of familiarity about the roomy halls and passageways, the books, the pictures, the fine, stiff, solid furniture, the atmosphere of wide and affluent ease; a like familiarity in all the outside surroundings of unkempt grassy lawn, of garden and of stable. No doubt the steady, uniform kindness of those dear people tended more than anything else to endear everything to him, with that peculiar home-feeling that always afterward embalmed the memories of Marlborough in his mind. No one, not even his uncle, Sir Henry, in the few years that followed, seemed to fill the singular place in his heart occupied by Colonel Parker with his somewhat grandiose benignity; no one the place of Madam Parker with her fussy, sometimes tiresome, attentions.
It was a long time before Nelly Parker recovered her perfect strength. Some days she would appear almost perfectly herself; then would ensue times of petulant lassitude that were sometimes very hard to bear. The little doctor came every day to see her, sometimes staying to supper, and riding home alone through the starlit night. He and Jack struck up a great friendship, and there were many little meaningless fragments of that pleasant time remaining in Jack’s memory, in which the little pot-bellied man was the dominant figure.
One such recollection was of finding him waiting for Miss Nelly Parker when she and Jack returned from a ride to Bolingwood — Mr. Bamfield Oliver’s place. She had gone to call on the young ladies, and Jack, at her bidding, had reluctantly accompanied her. He always felt his awkwardness and young clumsiness at such times — the constraint of talking about himself and of answering those reiterated questions about his adventures. At the sound of their horses’ hoofs the doctor and Madam Parker had appeared at the door, and as Jack dismounted and helped Nelly Parker down from her horse at the horse-block, the doctor had called out, “Well, my young pirate, and so you are back again, then? Zooks! We were just debating whether you hadn’t run away with our young lady again, and for good and all this time.”
Another such recollection of his presence was of his coming unexpectedly one time while there was company out on the lawn, and of feeling her pulse as she sat in the midst of them all.
Such foolish little memory fragments are very apt to have some indefinable filaments of association that cause them to cling with peculiar tenacity to the memory.
For some such subtle reason all the little circumstances of a certain uneventful Sunday morning became very intimately a part of Jack’s life. That day he rode to the parish church with the family, in the great coach. It had been raining the day before, but then the air was full of warm, mellow autumn sunlight, that fell widely in through the coach windows and across Colonel Parker’s knees and his own lap, feeling warm and pleasant to his legs. The road was heavy with sticky mud, and the four horses strained and labored as they pulled the huge, yawing coach through the deeper ruts. Nelly Parker and her mother sat opposite, the young girl, all unconscious of his steady look, playing with and smoothing out the ribbons that hung from her prayer-book — trivial little things, but for some reason knit so closely into his consciousness, that his memory always recurred to them with a singular precision of detail. The church was paved with brick, and he even remembered how very chill and damp it was that morning, and how, by and by, when he moved his toes in his shoes, he found them grown numb and as cold as ice.
When the sermon was over the ladies and gentlemen gathered for a while, standing in groups here and there in the churchyard, flooded with the yellow sunlight that felt very bland and warm after the chill, damp interior of the building. The greater part of the ladies were gathered in a single group, chatting together about this or that of gossip. Three or four gentlemen stood with them, now and then putting in a word, now and then laughing. Colonel Parker and Mr. Bamfield Oliver and Mr. Cartwright were standing together, discussing tobacco; and from where he stood he could hear Mr. Oliver’s monologue running somewhat thus:— “I cannot understand it,” — here he offered the other gentlemen snuff from a fine silver-gilt snuff-box,— “I cannot understand it; ’twas as good tobacco as any I ever shipped, and if there was anything the matter with it, as Sweet complains, why, the hogsheads must have been broached in the carrying. I’m sure it could not have been Jarkins’s fault; for he is the best packer I have.” And so on and so on.
All this while Jack was lingering near Nelly Parker, holding her prayer-book in his hand. He saw that Harry Oliver and two of his sisters were talking to Mrs. Cartwright a little distance away. He knew one of the young ladies; the other, who had been away from home for some time, was, as yet, a stranger to him. He felt that she was looking intently at him, and presently saw her whispering to her brother. He tried to appear unconscious, but with certain prescience he knew very well she was speaking to her brother about him and his adventures. Suddenly Harry Oliver burst out laughing. “Why, Master Jack,” he called, “here’s another young lady hath lost her heart to you, and thinks you’re a hero. The fame of your pirate adventures has reached all the way to the Bermuda Hundreds, ’twould seem.”
The young lady’s velvety cheek, dark like her brother’s, colored to a soft crimson, and she turned sharply away. Jack felt himself blushing in sympathy, and Nelly Parker, looking at him, burst out with a peal of laughing.
The afternoon of another Sunday, when the news of the fight at Ocracock and the death of Blackbeard was first received at Marlborough, had perhaps more reason for its insistence upon the plane of his consciousness than this meaningless fragment.
Nelly Parker had gone to her room after dinner, and the house seemed singularly empty without her presence in it. Jack was sitting in the library, reading. Now and then the words formed themselves into ideas, but for long lapses he would read without knowing what he was reading, his mind full of and brimming over with the thought of her. The sunlight came in through the wide, open windows, and lay in great squares across the floor, and the brass of the nails in the chair and sofa and of the andirons, catching the light, gleamed like stars, and the room was full of the clear brightness. The blazing fire snapped and crackled in the great fireplace, and there was a dish of apples on the table.
While he so sat there he heard the door suddenly opened, and the rustle of a dress. He knew instantly and vividly who it was had come in — he felt it in every fiber, but he would not look up. Then he heard her moving about the room.
“What are you reading?” she said, at last.
Jack looked at the top of the page. “’Tis The Masque of Comus,” he said.
“The Masque of Comus!” she repeated. “I was reading that to papa yesterday.”
She came over and stood behind his c
hair as she spoke, leaning over him and looking down at the book in his hand, reading it as he read it. He felt her nearness, and every filament of nerve tingled at it. Her breath fanned his cheek, and a part of her dress touched his shoulder. His heart thrilled poignantly, and his breath came thickly and suffocatingly, but still he did not look up. She stood there close behind him for a long while. He could almost hear the beat of her young heart, and it seemed to him that she must be feeling some soft echo of his own passion. Suddenly she gave his elbow a push that knocked the book out of his hand, and then she burst out laughing. As Jack stooped to pick up the book there was the voice of some one in the hall without. It was Harry Oliver, and she sprang away from where she stood, and flew like a flash to a chair at some distance, where she seated herself, instantly demure.
Then Harry Oliver came into the room; and presently he and she were talking and laughing together, and all that agonizing delight of the little while before melted out of Jack’s heart and dissolved away and was gone.
That passionate, innocent joy of early love! How does it fill all these little nameless, foolish things full to overflowing with its tremulous golden happiness — its ardent pangs of deep delight!
It was a little while after this that Colonel Parker called Jack into his own cabinet and put a packet of papers in his hand, saying that they had just been sent up from Jamestown, and that they were from Lieutenant Maynard; that there had been a fight with the pirates at Ocracock, and that Blackbeard was killed.
“What!” exclaimed Jack. “Blackbeard dead?” And then again, after a moment— “Blackbeard dead!” It seemed incredible to him that such a thing could be; he could not realize it.
There was a list of killed and wounded accompanying the letter, and Jack read it over, name by name — he knew nearly all. “Why,” he cried, “Morton’s dead, too — and Miller, the quartermaster — and Roberts, and Gibbons. Why, that is all of Blackbeard’s officers, except Hands, who is lame at Bath Town.”
“Maynard says there was a lame man they arrested down at Bath Town and brought up with them.”
“That, then, must be Hands,” said Jack. “He was the fellow whom Blackbeard shot in sport while I was down there.” And then, suddenly thinking of Nelly Parker, his heart thrilled agonizingly again.
CHAPTER XLVIII
JACK MEETS SOME OLD FRIENDS
IT WAS LATE in November when Mr. Burton returned to England. Jack accompanied him as far as Jamestown; and Mr. Simms, who had business at the factory at Yorktown, also went down in the schooner as far as that place.
The day was keen and clear, with a soft, cool wind blowing, before which the schooner sloped swiftly away, dropping the great brick front of Marlborough rapidly behind. The wide rush of air and water seemed very full of life and vigor, and Jack lay up under the weather-rail in the warm sunlight, wrapped in his overcoat and given up utterly to the building of day-dreams.
He had just parted from Nelly Parker, and his mind was very full of thoughts of her. She had been more than usually teasing that morning. “I believe you wouldn’t mind if I were going away from you forever,” Jack had burst out as they stood lingering in the wide sunlight in front of the great house. “I sometimes think that you have no heart in you at all.”
Then she looked at him with sudden seriousness. “Do you, then, really think that of me?” she said. “Well, then, I may tell you that I have a heart, and that it would, indeed, grieve me to the heart if you were going away forever.”
“Would it?” Jack had said.
“Yes. And see — if I have teased you too much, here is my hand.”
Jack took her soft, white hand in his; it was very warm. Then with a sudden impulse he lifted it to his lips and pressed a long, long kiss upon it. She did not withdraw it, and when he looked up he saw that she was still gazing very steadily at him. His heart was beating with exceeding quickness, but he looked as steadily back at her, though with swimming sight. Then she had burst out into a peal of laughter, had snatched her hand away, and had run away back into the house, leaving him standing where he was. Then he had hurried down toward the wharf, hardly sensing whither he was walking, and not answering Mr. Simms when the factor asked him what had kept him so long.
Long after they had dropped Marlborough away behind, he still lay in the sunlight under the rail, wrapped closely in his overcoat, his heart full of the thought of her. He was giving himself over luxuriously to that foolish day-dreaming to which adolescent youth loves to yield itself, and upon the funny inconsequence of which the matured man looks back and laughs from the firmer stand of later years. For one often remembers such dear, foolish day-dreams in after times.
He imagined to himself how he would have to go away to live in England. He would not come back again, he thought, until he had made himself famous; then he would return to her once more. Yes; while he was away from her he would become very famous. Maybe he would enter the navy. There would be a great war, and his ship would be in battle. He pictured to himself a terrible battle in which the senior officers would all be killed, so that it would depend upon him, the youngest of all, to save the ship. He would call upon the men to follow him, and then, in a last desperate, almost hopeless attack, he would rush aboard the enemy’s ship, his men close behind him. They would conquer, but he would have been shot through the arm, and his arm would have to be cut off, and he would go with an empty sleeve — it seemed very pathetic as he thought of it. All the world would talk of the young hero who had saved the ship, and Nelly Parker would hear of it and would think, “He will now never come back to Virginia again. He is too great and too famous to remember me now.” Then one day he would suddenly appear before her. She would say: “What! have you, then, come back to us? Have you, then, not forgotten us?” He would smile and would say: “No, I can never forget you.” He would stand before her with one empty sleeve pinned to his breast. There would be an order upon his breast, and he would say: “I love you and have always loved you, and none but you.”
“If we make it in time,” said Mr. Simms, suddenly, speaking to the Attorney Burton where they stood together looking out toward the shore, “we’ll stop at the Roost this afternoon. There was a letter for Mr. Parker sent up to Marlborough by mistake yesterday, and I may as well leave it on the way down.”
His words broke sharply upon Jack’s thoughts and shattered the dream to fragments. He lay silent for a moment or two. “Do you think,” he said, suddenly, “that Mr. Parker is there now?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Simms, turning toward him, “but I hope he is, so that I can leave this letter for him. Why do you ask?”
“I’d like to go ashore,” said Jack, “but I don’t care to meet him.”
“Why not?” said Mr. Simms. “He can’t do you any harm.”
“I know that very well,” said Jack, “but, all the same, I don’t want to see him, if I can help it.”
It wanted still an hour of sunset when they reached the Roost. Mr. Parker was not at home, and Jack accompanied Mr. Simms up to the house. How familiar and yet how strange everything appeared! How full of countless associations! There was a bed-coverlet hanging from a window, and he seemed to recognize its garish colors. A face passed by the open window — it was Peggy Pitcher. Two or three negroes came out from behind the end of the house and stood looking toward him; among them was Little Coffee. The negro boy stood staring; then, when Mr. Simms had gone into the house, he came forward, and Jack burst out laughing at his staring face. He asked the negro boy where Dennis was; Little Coffee said that the overseer was at the stable, and Jack went directly over to the outbuildings, Little Coffee following him. That feeling of renewed familiarity still surrounded everything. Everywhere the negroes grinned recognition at him, and he spoke to them all, laughing and nodding his head.
He found Dennis sitting in the shed by the stables mending an old saddle. He looked up when Jack came in, as though for a moment puzzled. Then instantly his face cleared. “Why, lad,” he said, “is that
you?” He slipped the wax-end betwixt his lips and held out his hand. Then he looked Jack over. “And how you have climbed up in the world, to be sure!” he said.
“Have I?” said Jack, laughing.
They talked together for a little while about indifferent things, and it did not seem to Jack that Dennis was as keenly alert as he should have been to the fact of his visit. There was something very disappointing in it. As they talked, Little Coffee stood by, looking him all over. “How’s Mrs. Pitcher, Dennis?” Jack asked, presently.
“Oh, she’s very well,” said Dennis. “She was talking about you only this morning. I tell you what ’tis, lad, she and his honor had it like shovel and tongs after you ran away.”
“Did they?” said Jack. “Well, I think I’ll go over to the house to see her. I’ve only got a little while to stay. We’re going on down the river to Jamestown. Good-by.”
Dennis took the hand that Jack gave him and shook it warmly.
“I can’t get up,” he said, “for this teasing saddle.”
Jack went away over to the house, still accompanied by Little Coffee. Some one had told Peggy Pitcher that he was about the place, and she was expecting him. Whatever lack of warmth Jack had felt in Dennis’s greeting was fully made up by Mrs. Pitcher. “Why, Jack,” she said, looking all over him, “what a fine, grand gentleman you’ve grown all of a sudden! Well, to be sure! To think that I should have seen you that last time sitting down yonder in the cellar so down in the spirits that ’twas enough to break a body’s heart to see you, and now you to be grown so fine a young lord of a man, to be sure. I did hear say that you joined the pirates after you got away.”
“No, I didn’t join the pirates,” said Jack. “I went down to North Carolina with them, but I didn’t have any business with them. But never mind that, Mrs. Pitcher. What I wanted to say is that I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me as long as ever I live.”