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The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes
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.
