by Howard Pyle
“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.