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 chair 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.