Norfolk is never more at peace than on the day succeeding the ball.
There is no challenge, no duel. Planter Paul Jones waits to hear from
Lieutenant Parker; at first hopefully; in the end, when nothing comes,
with doubtful brow of grief. Is it that Lieutenant Parker will not
fight? Planter Paul Jones hears the suggestion from his friend Mr. Hurst
with polite scorn. Such heresy is beyond reach.
“He _must_ fight,” urges Planter Paul Jones, desperately keeping alive
the fires of his hope. “He will fight, if for no other reason, then
because it is his trade. Lieutenant Parker is pugnacious by profession;
that of itself will make him toe the peg.”
Planter Paul Jones is wrong. Lieutenant Parker never shows his beaten
face on American soil again. Nor does any bellicose gentleman appear for
Lieutenant Parker, or propose to take his place.
This last omission gives Planter Paul Jones as sharp a pang as though
he has been slighted by some dearest friend. Having on his own part a
native lust for battle, it bewilders him when so excellent a foundation
for a duel falls into neglect, and no architect of combat steps forward
to build thereon.
“It is not to be understood!” observes Planter Paul Jones dejectedly,
after the sloop of war, with Lieutenant Parker and those others of that
gold-lace coterie, has sailed away, “it’s not to be understood! Surely,
there must have been one gentleman among them who, free to do so, would
have called me to account.” Then, with solemn sadness: “I am convinced
that their admiral interfered.”
Who shall say? The admiral is the paternal uncle of Lieutenant Parker of
the crushed and broken nose.
The story will go later to England to the explanatory effect that no
fellow-officer would act for Lieutenant Parker. However, in doubt of
this, that last named imprudent person--wearing the marks of Planter
Paul Jones’ rebuke for many a day--is not dismissed the king’s service.
He will be in the fight off Fort Moultrie, where--unlike Sergeant Jasper
of the Americans--he in no wise is to distinguish himself.
Planter Paul Jones, when every final chance of the trouble for which
he longs has departed with the departure of the war sloop, sorrowfully
steers the peace sloop back to his plantation by the Rappahannock; and
thereafter he does his best to forget an incident that--because of the
mysterious tameness of the English, under conditions which should have
brought them ferociously to the field--gives him an aching sense of
pain. He says to Mr. Hurst, when about to spread his small canvas and
sail away for home, “It is one of those experiences, sir, that shake a
man’s faith in his kind.”
The colonial dames get hold of the tale, and
Planter Paul Jones becomes all the more the petted darling of the
drawing-rooms. This of itself is a destiny most friendly to his taste;
for our Virginia Bayard lives not without his tender vanities. Bright
eyes are more beautiful than stars; and he can sigh, or whisper a
sonnet, or softly press a little hand. Also, having in his composition
an ardent dash of the peacock, he is capable, with fair ladies looking
on, of a decorous, albeit a resplendent strut.
Four months, dating from the disaster to Lieutenant Parker’s nose, have
squeezed through the gates of a narrow present, and merged with those
other countless months which together make the past. It is a muggy April
morning, and New York City, panting with its metropolitan population
of forty thousand, is soaked to the bone. Little squalls of rain follow
each other in gusty procession. Between the squalls the sun shines
forth, and sets the world a-steam. After each of these intermittent
bursts of glory, the sun is again blotted ont by a black flurry of
clouds, and another shower sets in.
It is in William Street that the reader comes across the lithe figure of
Planter Paul Jones. That restless tobacco grower, with his two aquatic
slaves, Scipio and Cato, in the little sloop, has been knocking about
the eastern shore for ducks. A sudden change of plan now brings him to
New York, with a final purpose of extending his voyage as far as Boston.
Planter Paul Jones is in a mood to know the Yankees better, and come
by some guess of his own as to how soon our Puritan bulldogs may be
expected to fly at the English throat.
As he goes briskly northward along William Street, even through his
landsman’s garb there shows much that is marine. Also, he evinces a
sailor’s contempt for the dripping weather, plowing ahead through shine
and through shower as though in the catalogue of the disagreeable there
is no such word as a wetting.
At the corner of John Street, Planter Paul Jones comes upon a lean,
prim personage. By his severe air the latter gentleman is evidently an
individual of consequence. The severe gentleman, with a prudent care for
his coat in direct contrast to the weather-carelessness of the other,
has taken refuge in the safe harborage of a doorway. From the dry
vantage thereof he cranes his neck in a tentative way, the better to
survey the heavens. Plainly he desires a guarantee, in favor of some
partial space of sunshine, before he again ventures abroad.
As Planter Paul Jones comes up, both he and the severe gentleman gaze
at each other for one moment. Then their hands are caught in a warm
exchange of greetings:
“Mr. Livingston, by my word!” cries Planter Paul Jones, shaking the
severe gentleman’s hand.
“Paul Jones!” exclaims the severe gentleman, returning the handshake,
but with due regard to the pompous.
“Now this is what I term fortunate!” says Planter Paul Jones, releasing
the other’s fingers. “I was on my way to your house to ask for letters
of introduction to Mr. Hancock and others in Boston.”
“Boston! Surely you have heard the news?”
“News? I’ve heard nothing. For six weeks I’ve been anywhere between
Barnegat and the inner Chesapeake in my sloop. I tied up at the foot of
Whitehall Street within the hour, and you’re the first I’ve spoken with
since I stepped ashore. What is this news that makes you stare at the
name of Boston?”
“And you’ve not heard!” repeats Mr. Livingston. Then, with a look at
once somber and solemn: “Black news! Black news, indeed! I’m on my way
to Hanover Square to have it set in types, and scattered up and down the
town. Come; you shall go with me. I’ll talk as we walk along.”
Mr. Livingston takes Planter Paul Jones by the arm.
“Black news!” he resumes. “The Massachusetts men have attacked the
British at Lexington and Concord; my despatches, while necessarily
meager, declare that the British were disgracefully beaten, and lost,
killed and wounded, several hundred soldiers.”
“And you call that black news?” interjects Planter Paul Jones, his eye
finely aflame. “To my mind now it is as good news as ever I hope to
hear.”
“How can you say so! It fills me with measureless gloom. I cannot but
look ahead and wonder where it will end. And yet we should hope for the
best.” The speaker heaves a weary sigh. “Possibly the mother country may
learn from this experience how bitterly in earnest Americans are, and be
thereby led to mitigate the harshness of her attitude toward us.”
Planter Paul Jones looks his emphatic disbelief.
“There will be no softening of England’s attitude. Believe me, sir,
I’m not so long out of London, but what I’m clear as to the plans and
purposes of King George and his ministers. The Tories have deliberately
forced the present situation.”
“Forced the situation! You amaze me!”
“Sir, my name is not Paul Jones, if it be not the deliberate design of
King George and his advisers to bring about a clash between England and
these colonies.”
“And to what end, pray?”
“To give them an excuse for imposing martial law upon us. They will pour
a cataract of redcoats upon our shores. Musket in fist, cannon to back
them, they will disperse our legislatures, take away our charters of
self-government. That blood at Concord and Lexington gives them the
pretext for which they schemed. They can now call us ‘rebels;’ and,
calling us ‘rebels,’ they will try to reduce us--for all our white skins
and freeborn blood--to the slavish status of Hindostan.”
Mr. Livingston stares, while this long speech is reeled off.
“Do you mean to say,” he asks at last, “that we are the victims of a
Tory plot? Am I to understand that Concord and Lexington were aimed at
by the king?”
“Precisely so; and for one I’m glad the issue’s made. We have now but
the one alternative. We may choose between abject slavery and war to the
hilts.”
Mr. Livingston’s severely pompons face, as the iron truth begins to
overcome him, assumes an expression at once noble and high.
“Why, then!” says he, “if such be the Tory design, war we shall have.”
Then, following a pause: “And what is to be your course in case of war?”
“I shall take my part in it, never fear! This very day I shall write
to friends who will have seats in the Congress that meets next month in
Philadelphia, and ask them to wear my name in their minds. I am theirs
so soon as ever they have a plank afloat to put me on.”
The pair, earnestly talking, reach Hanover Square, and pause in front of
“The Bible and Crown.”
“Here we are,” says Mr. Livingston. “Now if you’ll but wait until I give
orders to Master Rivington, as to how he shall print and circulate my
despatches, I’ll have you up to the house, where we can further consider
this business over a bottle of wine.”
“I beg that you will excuse me,” returns Planter Paul Jones. He has been
making plans of his own while they talked. “I trust you will pardon me;
but I shall have no more than time to write and post my letters, and get
away on the ebb tide. Three days from now I must be at my plantation by
the Rappahannock, putting all in order for the storm.”
“Remember!” cries Mr. Livingston, as he and Planter Paul Jones shake
bands at parting, “my brother Philip will be in the coming Congress.
You have but to go to him, he is as much your friend as is either Mr.
Washington or Mr. Jefferson. I shall speak to Philip of you before the
day is out.”
“Say to your brother,” returns Planter Paul Jones, “that I shall come to
him among the first.”
The winds generously flatter the little sloop on her return voyage.
She came north slowly, reluctantly; now, with the wind aft and all but
blowing a gale, she flies southward like a bird. As Planter Paul Jones
boasted, within the three days after seeing the last of Sandy Hook, he
steps ashore on his own domain by the Rappahannock.
Cato and Scipio grin in exultation. In a pardonable anxiety to open the
eyes of plodding fellow-slaves of the tobacco fields, they mendaciously
shorten the sailing time out of New York by forty-eight hours, and
declare that Planter Paul Jones brought the sloop home in a single day.
“Potch um home, Marse Paul does, faster than a wil’ duck could
trabble!” is their story. Thereupon, the innocent tobacco blacks
marvel, openmouthed, at the far-travelled Cato, and Scipio of the many
experiences.
Planter Paul Jones, on whom a war-fever is growing, plunges into
immediate conference with Duncan Macbean.
“How much free money can we make?” he asks.
The old Highlander scratches his grizzled locks.
Then he thoughtfully considers the inside of his Glengarry bonnet, which
he takes from his head for that purpose. One would think, from his long
study of it, that he keeps his accounts in its linings. The inspection
being over, he puts it back on his head.
“Now there s’uld be the matter of three thousand guineas in gold in
Williamsburg,” returns old Duncan Macbean; “besides a hunner or so
siller in the house. I can gi’ ye three thousand guineas, and never miss
the feel o’ them, gin that’ll be enou’.”
“Three thousand guineas! What time I shall be in Philadelphia it should
keep a king! Have it set to my credit, Duncan, in Mr. Ross’ bank in
Chestnut Street in that town. I shall go there as soon as Congress
convenes.”
“And will ye no be back home agen?” asks Duncan, his bronzed cheek a
trifle white.
“If there’s war--and, take it from me, there will be--I shall not
return. I hope to sail in the first warship that flies the colors of the
Colonies.”
Then, grasping old Duncan’s hand in a grip of steel: “You stay here and
run the plantation, old friend! Wherever I am, I shall know that all is
right ashore while you are here. For I can trust you.”
“Ay! ye can trust me; no fear o’ that!” and the water stands in the old
eyes.