The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes
by Howard Pyle · English · Gutenberg #49985 · 715,355 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes
Author: Howard Pyle
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JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
[Illustration: “‘SPEAK UP, BOY, SPEAK UP,’ SAID THE GENTLEMAN.” (SEE
PAGE 90.)]
THE STORY OF JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
by
HOWARD PYLE
[Illustration: DECORATION]
Being the Narrative of the Adventures
of a Young Gentleman of Good Family,
Who Was Kidnapped in the Year 1719
and Carried to the Plantations of the
Continent of Virginia, Where He Fell
in With That Famous Pirate Captain
Edward Teach, or Blackbeard: of His
Escape from the Pirates and the Rescue
of a Young Lady from Out Their Hands
[Illustration: LOGO]
New York
The Century Co.
1895
Copyright, 1894, 1895, by
The Century Co.
The De Vinne Press.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE AMERICA MERCHANT 5
II JACK BALLISTER 9
III JACK AND HIS UNCLE 26
IV CAPTAIN BUTTS 31
V KIDNAPPED 38
VI ABOARD THE ARUNDEL 43
VII ACROSS THE OCEAN 47
VIII TO THE END OF THE VOYAGE 57
IX IN VIRGINIA 65
X INTO BONDAGE 77
XI MARLBOROUGH 85
XII DOWN THE RIVER 92
XIII THE ROOST 97
XIV IN ENGLAND 102
XV LIFE AT THE ROOST 109
XVI JACK’S MASTER IN THE TOILS 116
XVII JACK RIDES ON A MISSION 124
XVIII MISS ELEANOR PARKER 130
XIX THE VISITOR AGAIN 135
XX THE WILD TURKEY 146
XXI THE STRUGGLE 154
XXII THE ESCAPE 161
XXIII A MEETING 168
XXIV AT MARLBOROUGH 179
XXV IN CAPTIVITY 190
XXVI THE PIRATE’S LAIR 198
XXVII AT BATH TOWN 203
XXVIII IN NORTH CAROLINA—IN VIRGINIA 211
XXIX AN EXPEDITION 221
XXX THE ATTEMPT 229
XXXI THE RETURN 237
XXXII A SCENE 243
XXXIII HOW JACK RESOLVED 253
XXXIV THE ESCAPE 265
XXXV THE BEGINNING OF THE VOYAGE 272
XXXVI A STOP OVER NIGHT 280
XXXVII THE SECOND DAY 287
XXXVIII THE THIRD DAY 296
XXXIX THE FOURTH DAY 305
XL FIAT JUSTITIA 319
XLI THE BOAT ADRIFT 327
XLII THE NEXT DAY 336
XLIII THE RETURN 346
XLIV RISING FORTUNES 353
XLV PREPARATION 362
XLVI THE FIGHT 373
XLVII IN THE NEW LIFE 385
XLVIII JACK MEETS SOME OLD FRIENDS 391
XLIX THE DEPARTURE 404
L THE RETURN 412
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“‘SPEAK UP, BOY, SPEAK UP,’ SAID THE GENTLEMAN” Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
“‘HE’LL COME TO BY AND BY; HE’S ONLY STUNNED A TRIFLE,’
SAID THE CAPTAIN” 42
“‘NOW, THEN, GENTLEMEN, HOW MUCH DO YOU BID FOR THIS
BOY?’ SAID THE AUCTIONEER” 82
“MR. PARKER STOOD LOOKING STEADILY AT HIS VISITOR” 122
“‘I DON’T WANT TO BE ANYBODY’S SERVANT, LADY, AND
WOULDN’T IF I COULD HELP IT’” 132
“HE PICKED UP THE BIRD AND HELD IT OUT AT ARM’S LENGTH” 152
“HE LED JACK UP TO THE MAN WHO SAT UPON A BARREL” 174
“JACK FOLLOWED THE CAPTAIN AND THE YOUNG LADY UP
THE CROOKED PATH TO THE HOUSE” 200
“THEY FOUND HER STILL SITTING IN THE SAME PLACE” 234
JACK AND DRED RESCUE ELEANOR—THE START 272
THE PIRATES FIRE UPON THE FUGITIVES 316
“COLONEL PARKER REACHED AND LAID HIS HAND UPON JACK’S
SHOULDER. ‘AY,’ SAID HE, ‘’TIS A GOOD, HONEST FACE’” 348
“THE COMBATANTS CUT AND SLASHED WITH SAVAGE FURY” 384
“‘THEN I WILL COME,’ SAID HE” 408
JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
INTRODUCTION
ONE of the most important problems that confronted the Virginia
plantations in the earlier colonial days was the question as to how to
obtain sufficient labor to till the soil and to raise tobacco for the
English market.
Some of the colonial planters of Virginia owned thousands of acres of
the richest tobacco land in the world—whole tracts of virgin earth
where the priceless loam lay open to the rain, the air, and the warm
sky; bountifully fruitful loam, only waiting for tillage to be coined
into vast tobacco fortunes for the princely owners. All that was needed
was human labor to dig the earth, to plant, to hoe, to cultivate, and
to prepare the tobacco for market, for there was not a hundredth part
enough labor to turn the waiting soil, that lay ready to yield at any
time its thousands of hogsheads of tobacco, and the question was, where
and how labor was to be obtained.
The easiest and quickest solution of the question appeared to be the
importation of negro slave labor from Africa.
The introduction of such slave labor began almost in the earliest days
of the provinces. Hundreds of shiploads of African negroes were brought
across the ocean and set to work digging and hoeing in the tobacco
fields, and slave trade became a regular traffic between the west coast
of Africa and the Americas.
But the African slaves, when imported, were found only fit to do the
very rudest and simplest sort of labor. They were poor, ignorant
savages, who, until they were set to work on the plantations, knew
almost nothing at all about such labor as was practised by civilized
mankind. When they were told to dig the earth, they dug, but they
labored without knowing either why they worked or wherefore. They did
just as their masters or their overseers bade them, and nothing more.
Beyond this they could be taught little or nothing, for not only were
those earlier savages like children, incapable of learning much of
anything; but, in most instances, they could not even speak a single
word of the language of their masters, and so could not understand what
their owners wanted of them. They were of use only to work as a dumb
animal might work, and not as white men could work.
So the Virginia plantations were still without that intelligent labor
which white men alone could bring to the tilling of the soil; labor
that knew what it was about when it dug the earth, and which, when told
to do so, could turn its hand to other things that might be required of
it. And so it was that every means was used to bring English men and
women to the Virginia plantations.
Even in the last part of the seventeenth century those immigrants
who afterward developed our great country into what it now is, were
beginning to pour into the colonies. But, of this immigrant labor,
the best and the most intelligent did not come to Virginia or other
of the southern provinces. It drifted to the New England or the
Pennsylvania provinces rather than to those in the South. There, in
the North, any man could obtain a farm for himself by hewing it out
of the wilderness. In Virginia the land was nearly all owned by the
great tobacco planters. Hence it was that only the poorest and least
ambitious of these white men and women could in the earlier provincial
days be induced to go thither, and hence white labor was so much more
in demand in the South than in the North.
A certain class of the immigrants of that time were called
“redemptioners” or “redemption servants.” They were so called because
they had to redeem by their labor the cost of their passage across the
ocean from England to America. Upon their arrival in the New World they
were sold for a term of years—seven, eight, nine, ten, as the case
might be—and the money received from such sale was paid to the ship
captain or the merchant who transported them from the Old World to the
New. Thus their debt was redeemed, and hence their name.
Those who came thus as redemption servants from England were generally
the poorest and most wretched of its people—paupers, outcasts,
criminals—unfortunates who were willing to do almost anything to
get away from their surroundings into a new life, where they hoped
something better might be in store for them than that wretchedness
which they had had to endure at home.
Thousands of such people were sent across the ocean to the Virginia and
other plantations, where, poor and miserable as they often were, the
demand for them grew ever greater and greater as the wilderness became
more and more open to cultivation.
Every year higher and higher prices were paid for such servants, until,
at last, a ship-load of redemptioners (provided the voyage across the
ocean had been speedy and no contagious disease had developed aboard
the vessel) became almost the most profitable cargo exported from
England.
When the transportation of servants became thus so remunerative,
the crimps who supplied them to merchants or to ship captains were
oftentimes tempted, when other means failed, to resort to kidnapping,
or man-stealing, to supply the demand.
During the earlier fifty years of the last century, thousands of men,
women, and even children were stolen from England and sent away to the
Americas, perhaps never to return, perhaps never even to be heard of
again. In those days—“The kidnapper will catch you!” were words of
terror to frighten children and gadding girls on all the coastways of
England.
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICA MERCHANT
HEZEKIAH TIPTON had been a merchant in the America trade for upwards of
forty years. He had shipped hundreds of servants to the Americas; they
were as much a part of his cargo as tea or broad-cloth or books or silk
stuffs.
Maybe he was not always scrupulously careful to know whence came some
of the servants he thus transported. He was reasonably honest in his
dealings, as the times went, and he would not often buy a servant from
a crimp if he knew positively that the crimp had kidnapped the man.
But if he was not positively sure, he would not go out of his way to
inquire into things that did not concern him. He would either take the
servant offered for sale, or else he would not take him; but he would
not trouble himself to ask how the crimp obtained the man, or whether
the man himself was or was not really willing to emigrate to the
colonies.
There was, for instance, a good deal of talk at one time about three
men whom Hezekiah had sent to South Carolina. A Dutchman had brought
them into the harbor in his lugger. He said that the men desired to
emigrate, and Hezekiah, who at that time had a ship just clearing for
Charleston, expressed his willingness to pay the captain something for
them, if he did not demand too much. Two of the men were stupefied
with drink, and the third had a bloody clout wrapped around his head,
and was cut and bruised as though he had been beaten with a club or a
belaying-pin. It was an evident case of kidnapping, but nevertheless
Hezekiah paid the Dutch captain for the men, and had them sent directly
aboard the ship. One of the three men was sober the next morning.
Hezekiah had come aboard the ship, and as he was rowed away toward the
shore the man leaned over the rail above, shouting out curses after the
old merchant, swearing that he would certainly come back to England
some time and murder him. “You think you’re safe,” bawled the man after
the departing boat,—“you think you’re safe! Wait till you feel my
knife in your back this day twelve-month—d’ye hear?—then you won’t
feel so safe.” The men rowing the boat to the shore grinned and winked
at one another. Old Hezekiah sat immovably in the stern, paying no
attention to the man’s threats and imprecations, which continued until
the captain of the ship knocked him down, and so silenced his outcries.
This affair created, as was said, a good deal of talk at the time.
* * * * *
In the year 1719, beginning in February and ending in November,
Hezekiah Tipton sent away to the American colonies or plantations in
all over five score servants.
One day early in March, a company of nineteen men who had volunteered
to emigrate to the Virginias was brought up from London to meet the
brig _Arundel_ at Southampton. They were quartered at the Golden Fish
Inn, and during the morning the old America merchant went to look them
over. The men were ranged in a row along by the wall of the inn yard,
and the old man walked up and down in front of the line, peering at
each man with half-shut eyes and wrinkled face, while a few people from
the inn stood looking on with a sort of inert interest. He did not seem
very well pleased with the appearance of the servants. There were
only nineteen, and there should have been one and twenty. The agent
explained that there had been twenty-one of them when he wrote from
London, but that one of them had run away during the night, and that
another would not sign the papers. “‘Twas,” said he, “as fine, good
a young lad of sixteen or eighteen as ever you see. But his mother,
methinks it was, comes in crying at the last minute and takes him away
from under our werry noses, so to speak.” Hezekiah grunted a reply as
he walked up and down along the row of grinning, shuffling men, looking
them over. The big knotted joints of the old man’s fingers gripped the
cracked and yellow ivory head of his walking-stick, which he every now
and then tapped, tapped on the stones of the court-yard. “That man,”
said he, in his cracked, querulous voice, poking his walking-stick as
he spoke at a lean little man standing in the line—“that man—why did
ye bring him? How much d’ye think he’ll fetch in the Virginias? I’s
warrant me not fifteen guineas.”
“Why, Master Tipton,” said the agent, referring to a slip of paper
which he held in his hand, “there you are mightily mistook. Maybe,
like enough, that man is worth more than any of ‘em. He’s a skilled
barber and leecher, and a good man he is, and knows his trade, to be
sure, and that werry well. Just you think, Master Tipton, how much he
might be worth as a vally or body-servant to one of them there Virginia
planters.”
“Humph!” grunted the old man, and he shook his lean head slowly
from side to side. “I’ll tell you what it is, Master Dockray,” he
said again, after a while, “they be not nigh so good as those I had
last—and only nineteen where there should have been one and twenty.”
The agent made no answer and the old man continued his inspection for
a while. He did not say anything further, and by and by he turned away
and, with the agent at his heels, entered the inn to receipt the
papers, and with his going the inspection came to an end.
Finally, in making you acquainted with old Hezekiah Tipton, it may be
said that he was a notable miser of his time. To see him hobbling along
the street in his snuff-colored coat, threadbare at the seams, and here
and there neatly patched and darned, one might take him, perhaps, for
a poor decent school-teacher of narrow means, but certainly not for
one of the richest men in the county, as he was reputed to be. There
were a great many stories concerning him in Southampton, many of them
doubtless apocryphal, some of them based upon a foundation of truth.
One such story was that every Sunday afternoon the old man used to
enter into his own room, bolt the door, and spread gold money out on
the floor; that he would then strip himself and roll in the yellow
wealth as though taking a bath. Another story was that he had three
iron chests in the garret of his home, each chest bolted to the floor
with iron bolts. That the one chest was full of Spanish doubloons, the
second full of French louis d’ors, the third full of English guineas.
The Southampton tradesmen used to say that it was more difficult to
collect their bills from Hezekiah Tipton than from almost any one in
the town.
CHAPTER II
JACK BALLISTER
JACK BALLISTER at this time was a little over sixteen years old, and
had now been living with his uncle Tipton something over two years.
Jack’s father at the time of his death had been vicar of Stalbridge for
nearly nineteen years, so that Jack, until he had come to Southampton,
had never known anything but that part of Wiltshire which immediately
surrounded Stalbridge and Stalbridge vicarage. The only other inmates
of the vicarage were old Janet, the housekeeper, and a farmer’s
daughter who helped about the house, and old Giles Cobb, who came up
now and then to work in the garden.
There was, by the way, always a singular charm to Jack in the memories
of this garden. Some of his earliest recollections were of playing
out in the tangled sunny reaches while old Giles bent, with stooping
shoulders and rounded back, over his work, digging and planting and
picking about at the weeds in the brown, loamy beds. There was a yew
hedge, and two bee hives that stood under a cherry tree, and a row of
two or three cucumber frames that lay bright and shining, reflecting
in their glassy surface the clouds and the warm sky above. There was
always an association of flowers, of birds, and of warm yellow sunlight
about the tangled, flowery space, and in the years afterwards, when
Jack visited the old vicarage, one of the first places he went to was
the garden. It looked strangely familiar yet strangely unfamiliar. It
seemed more unkempt and uncared for. The birds were singing in the
trees over beyond the hedge, but the two straw-thatched bee hives
were gone. Nevertheless he could almost fancy that old Giles with his
hunched shoulders and his smock frock might at any moment come in
through the gate, trundling his squealing wheel-barrow before him.
Jack was not quite four years old when his mother had died. It seemed
to him that he could remember her, yet the image he held in his mind
might not have been an actual memory, but only some strong association
connected with things that Janet had told him about her. Yet it
seemed to him that he really did hold a mental impression of her in
his memory of early things, an impression of a large, tender, shadowy
figure, dressed in black, and with a white kerchief or shawl around
her shoulders. He could almost fancy that he could remember a peculiar
fragrance that lingered about the folds of her dress—a fragrance like
that of the old lavender chest where Janet kept the house linen. This
recollection of his mother might have been only an image conjured
up out of what had been told him concerning her, but, as was said,
it always seemed as though it were a real and living memory. It is
sometimes difficult to tell where fancy ends and memory begins in those
broken fragments of recollections of early childhood.
It seemed to him that the same figure was present in the memory of a
certain time when he, as a little, little boy, had fallen down the
steps and cut his chin. It seemed to him that it was she who had
comforted him, singing to him while she scraped a crisp half-apple and
fed him with the pulp from the point of a knife. Janet had said that
that fall had not happened until the year after his mother’s death,
but it seemed to Jack that it was his mother’s presence that had filled
the memory of the accident, and he always felt that maybe it was Janet
who was mistaken, and not his own recollections of the trivial event.
He often thought of his mother, as a motherless boy is apt to think of
that missing presence, and it seemed to him that if she had only lived
he would have loved her very much, and that his life would have been
much sweeter to him.
Janet often talked to him about her. His grandmother, Janet told him,
had adopted her as a little girl, and had brought her up with her own
daughter, who was now Lady Arabella Sutton. She had been, Janet said,
more of a companion than a waiting-maid. Of these stories of by-gone
times, that children so delight to have told to them, Jack would
make Janet tell him most often of the great family quarrel that had
happened when his father had told the others that he and Anne Tipton
were going to be married. Janet always made the most out of the story,
embellishing it more and more as the years passed by, and as her
imagination suggested new details. “Indeed,” she would maybe say, “you
should ha’ seen him stand up before your grandmother, as grand as you
please, with his arms folded so. ‘A Ballister, madam,’ says he, ‘can
marry where he chooses.’”
Jack could not imagine his father as the hero of any such scene, still
less could he image him as riding post-haste to Southampton when his
mother had been sent away home from Grampton Hall.
He often heard people say that his father was a great scholar. The
vicar was always silent and preoccupied, sometimes deep in his books,
sometimes scribbling away with a busy pen, a litter of papers scattered
all over the floor about him, and his wig pushed back awry from his
smooth, round forehead; sometimes walking up and down the garden paths
with his hands clasped behind his back, his head bent forward, and his
eyes fixed on the ground. He used especially to walk thus while he was
formulating in his mind the outlines of one of the pamphlets he used to
write. Jack could not imagine that any one so absorbed in his books and
his studies could ever have been the hero of such romance. And then he
always seemed so very, very old to Jack. It was hard to imagine that
such a dry and sapless life could ever have had the ichor of romance
flowing through it.
Before Janet had come to Stalbridge she had been one of the dependents
of the other Ballisters. “They be grand, grand folks,” she would
sometimes say, “and hold their heads as high as ever the Duke of
Newcastle himself.” She sometimes told Jack that if his father had not
set his family all against him, he might have been a bishop as like as
not. “I’d never come to Stalbridge only for your mother, poor soul,”
said she. “But she was fond of me, and I was fond of her, and so I
came.”
It seemed to Jack that he could hardly remember the time when
his father did not teach him Latin and Greek. One of his first
recollections as a little, little boy was of his father teaching him
the Greek alphabet. He learned little or nothing else than the two
languages, and it is not likely that his father thought anything else
was worth learning. Jack once overheard the vicar say to old Sir Thomas
Harding, “Sir, I will make the boy the best scholar in England.” The
words remained fixed in Jack’s memory as such fragmentary speeches
do sometimes fix themselves, for no especial reason, in the mind of
boyhood. The promise of great scholarship was, however, never to be
fulfilled, for Jack was only fourteen years old when the vicar died,
and in the neglected two years at Southampton he never went to school
a day, or studied six words of a lesson, or read a page of Greek or
Latin, except one or two times when Mr. Stetson made him read a passage
or two of Greek as a matter of curiosity.
Jack’s father never said anything to him about his mother or his
relations. His uncle Tipton had come up from Southampton just before
his father’s death, but that was the only time that Jack had ever
really seen one of his own kindred.
During the fall of the year in which Jack’s father had died, a
messenger on horseback, with great jackboots and a suit of green livery
turned up with scarlet, rode up to the vicarage and delivered a packet
to Janet, who presently brought it in to the vicar, where he sat in
the sagging wainscoted study, writing in the midst of a litter of
papers scattered on the floor. The vicar set his pen in his mouth and
took the letter, and Jack watched him as he broke the great red seal
and began reading the packet, now and then frowning, either in the
effort of reading the written words or else at the purport of the words
themselves. When he had finished the letter he laid it to one side and
resumed his writing where it had been interrupted. The messenger who
had brought the letter did not immediately go away. Jack could hear
now and then the jingle of his bridle or spurs, and now and then the
sound of his whistling, as he lounged in the warm sunlight outside.
Then there was the noise of voices talking together—the voices of
Janet and the messenger—and presently the housekeeper came into the
study to say that the man wanted to know when he could have his answer.
The vicar looked up with the bewildered air he always wore when he was
interrupted. “Eh!” he said, “eh! what d’ye say? Answer? Who wants an
answer?” Then remembering, “oh, aye, there’s no answer to send. You may
tell him, there’s no answer.” And then presently the messenger rode
clattering away whence he had come.
The letter lay where the vicar had left it until the next afternoon,
and Jack, impelled by curiosity, managed to read a part of it. It was
from his grand-aunt Lady Dinah Welbeck. She said that she was very ill,
and she asked the vicar to come and see her before her end, and that
all should be forgiven. The vicar did not go, either because he did
not think of the message again, or else because he did not choose to
resume his correspondence with his family. The letter lay about until
the vicar tore a great strip off from it with which to light a candle
in the next room, and the next day the written sheet was gone.
Some time after Lady Dinah Welbeck’s death another communication, long
and bulky, was brought to the vicarage. The vicar read it but paid no
attention to it. Then another letter came and another. The last letter
the vicar did not even open for several days. He was very busy at work
upon a pamphlet, and the letter lay neglected upon the writing table
until one morning Janet brought it and thrust it into his hand. “Eh!”
said he, as though suddenly awakening to things about him, “what is
this! what is this?” He took the letter and looked at it. “Why, this
letter should have been given me three days ago,” he said.
“So ’twas, master,” said Janet, “but you did not read it.”
“Did I not so?” said Jack’s father, and then he broke the seal and read
it. But still he paid no attention to it.
No doubt the vicar’s family would long since have received him back
among them if he had cared to have them do so. He and they had drifted
far apart in the nineteen years that had passed. During that time all
ill feeling—at least on the part of the family—had faded away and
died. There was no intimacy, hardly any acquaintance, between the
vicar and his brother, Sir Henry, neither was there any longer rancor
between them.
Some of the letters written at this time had been written by Sir Henry,
and after a number had been sent without eliciting any reply, the
baronet sent the Grampton lawyer down to Stalbridge. The attorney and
the vicar were closeted together for a long time, and when they at last
came out of the study the vicar was very angry. It was the only time
that Jack had ever seen him so. “They may keep it all!” he was saying
in a great loud voice. “They may keep it all! I want none of it, I say.
All that I want of them is to let me alone as I let them alone. I want,
I say, none of their money or nothing that belongs to them. They may
keep all for themselves.”
Jack was leaning out of an upper window in the sunlight, looking down
upon their heads, as they stood just below. Their voices came up to him
through the warm air very distinctly.
“But, sir,” said the lawyer, “do you not then consider the welfare of
your own son?”
“Sir,” said the vicar in the same loud voice, “that, I believe, is not
your affair. I will look after my son’s welfare mine own self. I tell
you, sirrah, that those who sent you may e’en keep all of the money for
themselves. I want nothing of them, and neither shall my son take aught
from them.”
“But, sir,” said the lawyer, “you forget that the money hath been left
to you individually. In taking it you do not take anything from them.
It was not left to your brother, it is not a gift from him or, indeed,
from any one, and it does not belong to any one but you. Your family
cannot even receive it from you without process of law, and you cannot
help taking it.”
“Aye, but I can help taking it,” cried out the vicar.
“Sir, sir!” said the lawyer, “pray be calm, sir. Pray look at this
matter reasonably. Here is this money—”
“I will not hear anything more,” cried out the vicar, “only I tell you
I shall not touch a farthing of it.”
Then the lawyer lost his temper. “Sir,” said he, “I must needs tell you
that you are the most unreasonable man that ever I met in all of my
life.”
The vicar drew himself up to his full height. “Sir,” said he, “sure you
forget yourself and to whom you speak. You forget who I am, sir. You
are welcome to think as you choose about me, but you are not welcome
to tell me your opinion of me. Who are you, sirrah, to speak so to
James Ballister?” And then he turned upon his heel back into the house,
shutting the door behind him.
Jack, as he still leaned out into the sunlight, looking down from
above, saw the stranger stand irresolutely for a while, then turn and
go slowly out of the gate and mount his horse and ride away.
That winter the vicar died, and Jack went to Southampton to live.
* * * * *
Perhaps one of the bitterest days in Jack Ballister’s boyhood life
was the first evening after his arrival at his new home. His uncle
had had the parlor opened, as though to do some honor to his coming.
Jack sat for nearly an hour on the stiff uncomfortable chair, saying
almost nothing, but just sitting there by the dim light of a candle.
Old Hezekiah had tried to talk, but the conversation had lapsed and
dwindled away into silence. Now he sat winking and blinking in the
light of the candle, looking as though he were trying to think of
something more to say, but yet saying nothing, and Jack, too miserable
and depressed to talk, ventured nothing upon his own part. He was very
glad when at last he was permitted to creep away miserably to bed
and to yield himself fully to the luxury of hot tears and of utter
loneliness and homesickness.
It seemed to him that night as though he never would be happy again,
but even by the next morning he found himself awakened to a new and
fresh hold upon his life. Things appeared bright and cheerful again in
the fresh sunlight of a new day, and after he had finished his frugal
breakfast he went out into the streets and down to the harbor, full
of interest in the new surroundings in which he found himself placed.
The harbor and the ships at anchor there seemed very wonderful to
the boy fresh from the inland country. There was a great high-pooped
battle-ship lying at anchor in the harbor that morning, and its sloping
decks, whence came the distant rattle of a drum, seemed to teem with
bustling life, lit every now and then by a spark of sunlight glinting
on the slant of a musket-barrel. As Jack stood and gazed, he forgot how
lonely he had been the night before.
In a little while—in a few weeks—his life had drifted into all these
new circumstances, and had become one with them, and he presently found
himself looking back to that old life at Stalbridge as a thing gone by
and done with forever. All that remained was the memory of those things
as episodes ended and done.
It is wonderful with what ductility life fits itself into new
circumstances, becoming so accustomed to them, even in a few days, that
they no longer seem to be new.
After that first formal reception in the musty, stuffy parlor, old
Hezekiah seemed to consider his duty to his nephew as ended. Thereafter
Jack was allowed to go where he pleased and to do as he chose. The old
man hardly ever spoke to the lad excepting now and then in some dry and
constrained fashion. Old Deborah, the housekeeper, used to send him on
errands occasionally, but excepting for such little demands upon him,
he had no ties to bind him to his new home except as it was a place
wherein to eat his meals and to sleep at night.
He spent nearly all his time lounging about the harbor front, for there
was a never-ending delight to him in the presence of the great ships
and the rough sailors, who would talk of strange foreign countries—of
having been to Calcutta, or to Shanghai, or to Jamaica, or to the
Americas or the Brazils, as Jack might have talked of having been to
the Isle of Wight. They spoke of the Caribbean Sea, or of the Indian
Ocean, as he might speak of the Solent.
He often used to strike up an acquaintance with these sailors an
acquaintance that would become, maybe, almost intimate for the two or
three days that they were in the harbor.
It was an idle, aimless, useless life that he lived at this time.
Sometimes—maybe when he was running on some petty, trivial errand
for old Deborah—a sudden feeling of almost nauseating shame for his
useless existence would come upon him and weigh him down with a leaden
weight. It seemed almost as though an inner voice, as of conscience,
would say: “Fie upon you! A great, big, hulking fellow like you to
go carrying a little crock of yeast through the streets like this!”
Generally when such an inner voice as of conscience would speak, he
would satisfy himself by replying as with an inner voice of his own:
“Oh, well, ’tis Uncle Hezekiah’s fault. If he’d only set me work to do,
why, I’d do the work, and be glad enough of the chance.”
Mr. Stetson, the rector, used sometimes to talk to him almost like an
echo of that inner accusing voice. “’Tis a vast pity, Jack,” he would
sometimes say, “that such a great, stout fellow as thou art should
live so in useless idleness. If nothing else better, why do you not
study your books?” And Jack would be very uncomfortable with the heavy
feeling that he had left some part of duty undone.
He used often to go to supper at the rectory. He felt more at ease
there—less big-jointed and clumsy than almost anywhere else. And
besides, he very heartily enjoyed the good things he had to eat at such
times, for Deborah set a very poor and skimpy table at his uncle’s
house. They generally had preserved ginger and thin sweet cakes at
these suppers at the rectory, and Jack used sometimes to contrive to
slip a couple of cakes into his pocket to nibble after he got home.
Sometimes, especially if there were visitors present, the good old
rector would insist upon talking to Jack about his uncle the baronet,
or about Lady Dinah Welbeck, or about his aunt Lady Arabella Sutton.
“Indeed,” he would maybe say, “Jack’s poor father was a very learned
man, a _very_ learned man. His pamphlet on the apostolic succession was
the best that was writ at the time of the controversy. ’Tis, methinks,
impossible for a man to be so perfectly ripe a scholar unless he hath
good blood in his veins such as that of the Ballisters or haply of mine
own. Why should it not be so? To be sure, you cannot make as good wine
out of gooseberries as you can out of currants. Mine own father used
often to say to me: ‘Andrew, never forget that you have the blood of
Roger Stetson in your veins.’”
Jack always felt a certain awkward constraint when the rector would
talk in this way. It made him somehow feel ashamed, and he did not know
just where to look or what to answer.
Sometimes Mr. Stetson would make him read aloud in Greek. “You should
hear him read ‘The Frogs,’” he would maybe say, and he would almost
thrust a copy of Aristophanes into Jack’s not very willing hand. Jack
would read a page or two in a perfunctory sort of a way, while the
rector would sit smiling and tapping his finger-tips on the table
beside which he sat. “Thou hast the making of a fine scholar in thee,
Jack,” he would perhaps say, “and ’tis a vast pity thy uncle Tipton
does not send thee to school. I will have a talk with him about it when
the time comes.”
Several times the rector spoke to old Hezekiah about his nephew. Once
he walked all the way back from church with the old merchant, and
almost into the parlor. But nothing ever came of such talks. “Hey!”
said the old man; “go to school? What does he want to go to school for?
Well, well! I’ll see to it, and think it over by and by,” and there the
matter would rest.
Another friend whom Jack made was the attorney Burton. One day, as Jack
was walking whistling along the street, the little lawyer came running
out of his office and called after him to stop. “Master Jack! Master
Jack! stop a little bit,” he cried out. “Master Jack Ballister!—I have
a word or two to say to you.” He had run out bareheaded, and he was
half breathless with his haste and his calling. He held an open letter
in his hand. “Who d’ye think, young gentleman,” said he, still panting
a little, “I have heard from? Why, from your uncle Sir Henry Ballister,
to be sure. He hath writ to me asking about you—how you are, what you
are doing, and how Master Tipton is treating you. What shall I tell
him?”
“Why, you may tell him,” said Jack, “that I do very well.”
This was the beginning of Jack’s acquaintance with the attorney Burton.
Several times afterward the little lawyer told him that Sir Henry had
written about him. “He hath a mind, methinks,” said the attorney, “to
be more particular as to what your uncle Tipton is doing for you.
Indeed, he hath asked me very especially about what he does for you. I
know what I shall tell him, for I have talked to Master Stetson about
you, and he tells me what a famous scholard you are. But harkee, Master
Jack, if ever you have need of advice, you come to me, for so Sir Henry
advised me to say to you.”
Jack stood listening to the little man with a feeling of pleased and
fatuous gratification. It was very pleasant to be so remembered by his
grand relation. “Why, then, I take it very kind of Sir Henry, Master
Burton, and of you, too, for the matter of that,” said he. “And if ever
I do have need of your advice, why, I will come to you just as freely
as you give me leave to do.”
As he walked away down the street, thinking over what the attorney had
said, he almost wished that he had some definite cause of complaint
against his uncle Hezekiah, so that he might call upon the aid of Sir
Henry and the attorney. How fine it would be to have Sir Henry take
his part! He fancied to himself a talk with his uncle Hezekiah, in
which he made himself perhaps say, “Sir, you shall not treat me so,
for I tell you plain that there are those now to take my part against
you, and that it is not just a poor orphaned boy with whom you have to
deal.” Boys love to build up in their imagination such foolish scenes
and fortunate conversations that never happen. Sometimes such fancyings
seem so like the real thing that, like Jack, one almost forgets that
they are not really likely to happen. But by and by the time came when
Jack really did appeal to the lawyer and when he really did come to an
understanding with his uncle.
That spring a young cooper named Dan Williamson had a boat that he
wanted to sell. It had belonged partly to his brother, who had died
during the fall before, and Dan, who was one of that sort who always
had need of money, was very anxious to sell it. Jack’s great desire was
to possess a boat of his own. It seemed to him that Dan’s boat was
exactly the one that would best suit him. He used to think with a keen
and vivid delight of how glorious it would be to own Dan’s boat. And
then she was so very cheap. If the boat were his he would give her a
fresh coat of paint, and name her the _Sea-gull_. If he could only get
twenty pounds from his uncle Hezekiah, he could not only buy the boat,
but add a new suit of sails.
He talked so often to Dan about the boat that at last the cooper
began to believe that he might be able to sell it to Jack. “She’s
the cheapest boat,” said Dan, “that was ever offered for sale in
Southampton.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Jack; “but I do believe that she’s a
good boat.”
“Good!” said Dan. “She’s the best boat in Southampton to-day, and, what
is more, she’s as cheap as the dirt under your feet. You’d better buy
her, for you’ll never get such another chance as long as you live.”
Jack shook his head. “I do believe she is a good boat, Dan,” he said;
“but how shall I buy a boat without money to buy it with? I have no
money in hand, and am not like to have any.”
“Well, well,” said Dan, “to be sure, that’s too bad”; and then, after
a little space, he continued: “But I’ll tell you what,—you come down
with me, and I’ll take you out in her; then you may see for yourself
what a fine boat she is.”
“I’ll go out with you,” said Jack; “but I can’t buy her, though. I wish
I could.”
Then they went off together down to the cooper-shops where Dan kept the
boat.
Jack helped Dan step the mast. Then they pushed the boat off beyond the
end of the shed. As the sail filled, Dan put down the helm, and brought
the boat out under the stern of a bark lying at anchor a little
distance from the shore. The watch on deck, a tipsy-looking sailor with
his throat wrapped around with a woolen stocking, stood looking over
the stern of the bark and down at them as they sailed by. Jack looked
up at the towering hulk above him. The name of the bark—the _Prophet
Elijah_—was painted in great, fat letters across the stern. At one
side there was a picture of the prophet’s head, with his long beard.
There was a rushing sound of water under the stern of the vessel. Then
they were out in the wide, shining harbor, the warm air blowing mildly
and softly about them.
“Look, how she lies up to the wind,” said Dan Williamson; “why, I do
believe I could sail her straight into the wind’s eye if I chose to. I
tell ‘ee what ’tis, Jack, you’ll never find such another chance as this
to get what you want.”
“Maybe I won’t and maybe I will,” said Jack; “all the same, I sha’n’t
buy her, for why, I have no money to buy her with.”
“No money!” said Dan Williamson; “why, if I had as much money as
belongs to you, I’d give up coopering and live a gentleman all my life,
I would. Why don’t ye go and ask your uncle Tipton for eighteen pound
straight and fair? Sure, the money’s your own, and not his. Why don’t
ye ask him for it?”
“Ask him for it?” said Jack. “And what good would that do? Asking won’t
do any good. The money’s mine, sure enough, yet I can’t touch a penny
of it till I am of age.”
“‘T won’t do any harm to ask him, anyway,” said Dan Williamson. “Here,
you come and take the tiller, and see for yourself how close up she
sails.”
Jack took the tiller, and then they sailed along for a while in
silence. By and by Dan spoke again. “I’ll tell you what ’tis, Jack, if
I was you I’d go straight to Master Burton, I would, and I’d ask him
about it. What did you say t’ other evening down at the Golden Fish?
Didn’t you say that he told you to come to him if ever you wanted
anything that your uncle Tipton wouldn’t give you, and that he said
your t’ other uncle that’s a lord would get it for you? Well, then, why
don’t you go to him and ask for eighteen or twenty pound? What you said
was true, wasn’t it?”
“Why, yes, ’twas true enough, as far as that goes,” said Jack.
“Well, then,” said Dan Williamson, “there you are.”
Jack sat for a little while in silence, then he spoke.
“I tell you what it is, Dan, maybe you don’t believe what I told you,
but it is true enough. I tell you what—I’m going to go to Master
Burton this very day, and ask him about what you say.” He did not
really entertain any hope, however, that he could get twenty pounds
from his uncle Hezekiah.
As soon as he came ashore again, he went straight up to the little
lawyer’s house.
The little man was in his office—a musty, stuffy little den of a
place, smelling of stale tobacco smoke, and set around with dusty cases
of worn and yellow-backed books and tin boxes.
The attorney sat in the midst of the litter surrounding him like a
little gray mouse. He had black, beady eyes, a long nose, and a thin,
leathery face.
He sat looking with his little twinkling black eyes at Jack as he
stated his case. “Why, as for your fortune, Master Jack, I must needs
tell you plain that it might as well be locked up in the church belfry
for all the good it may do you now. For so it is locked up in your
father’s will, tight and fast as if it were in a box, and your uncle
hath the keeping of it for you.”
“And can I get none of my money of him, then?” said Jack.
“Why, as for that, I don’t say that, neither,” said the little lawyer.
“It may be a hard matter to get it, and yet, after all, I may be able
to get it for you. I’ll tell you what to do, Master Jack. Go you to
your uncle and ask him plain and straight for what money you need. How
much was it you wanted?”
“Well, say twenty pounds,” said Jack.
“Well, then, you ask him for twenty pounds, plain and straight, and if
he says you nay, then come back to me, and I’ll see what I can do for
you. Sir Henry hath asked me to look after you a trifle, and so I will
do.”
CHAPTER III
JACK AND HIS UNCLE
JACK, following the attorney’s advice, had made up his mind to ask his
uncle for the money that very night, but when he came face to face with
doing it, it was very hard. They were sitting together over their poor
frugal supper, and the old miser’s utter unconsciousness of what Jack
had it on his mind to say made the saying of it very hard. At last he
suddenly spoke. “Uncle Hezekiah,” said he.
The old man looked up sharply, almost as though startled at the sound
of Jack’s voice. He did not say anything, but he sat looking at Jack as
though inviting him to continue.
“Uncle Hezekiah,” said Jack again. He did not know in just what words
to frame what he had to say. Then he continued: “I want to—to talk to
you about a matter of business.”
“Hey!” said the old man, “business! business! What d’ ye mean—what
d’ye mean by business?”
“Why,” said Jack, “I want some money to buy something. I went to see
Master Burton to-day, and he told me I had best come to you and ask you
for it.” Gradually Jack was becoming bolder as he became accustomed to
the sound of his own voice. “Dan Williamson hath a boat for sale,” he
continued. “He wants eighteen pound for it, and if I had twenty pound
it would be just enough to fit her up as I would like to have her. I
went and talked to Master Burton, and he told me I had best come to you
and ask you for the money.”
The old man stared blankly at Jack, his lean jaw hanging gaping with
speechless surprise. “Why! why! what’s all this?” he said, finding his
voice at last. “Twenty pound! Why, I do believe you’re gone clean clear
crazy. Twenty pound! What’s Roger Burton got to do with my giving you
twenty pound, I’d like to know? You’ll not get a farden, and that’s the
long and the short of it. Master Burton, indeed! What business is it of
his, I’d like to know?” He sat looking at Jack for a little while, and
then he slowly resumed his interrupted supper again.
Jack sat leaning back in his chair, with his hands in his breeches’
pockets, looking across the table at his uncle. His heart was swelling
with a feeling of very choking and bitter disappointment and anger. It
seemed to him that he had not expected much, but now that his uncle had
denied him, his disappointment was very bitter. He watched his uncle as
the old man continued eating in silence. “Very well,” said he at last,
“then I know what I’ll do. I’ll go back to Master Burton again. He told
me what to do, and that if you said me nay I was to go back to him
again. He says that Sir Henry Ballister has been writing to him about
me, asking how you treated me and what you did for me, and he told me
if you would not give me what I asked for, I was to go back to him, and
he’d write to Sir Henry and tell him all about it, and that he’d see if
something couldn’t be done on my account.”
Old Hezekiah looked up again. “Sir Henry Ballister?” said he. “What’s
he been writing to Roger Burton about, I should like to know! What’s he
got to do with it? He’s not your guardeen, is he? I’m your guardeen,
and the guardeen of your money as well. As for Sir Henry Ballister,
why, he’s got no more to do with you than the man in the moon.” Then he
went on eating again, and again Jack sat watching him in silence. In
a little while Hezekiah finished his supper, chasing the fatty gravy
around and around his plate with the point of his knife. Then he laid
down his knife and fork, pushed away his plate, and arose from the
table.
“Very well,” said Jack, breaking the silence, “we’ll see about all
this business. I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to write to
Sir Henry Ballister myself, and tell him about the way I’m treated by
you. You never give me a farthing to spend, and as for being your own
flesh and blood—why, I might as well be a dog in this house as to be
your own kin. You keep all my money and use it as your own, and yet
you don’t speak six words to me in a month.” Jack was dimly surprised
at his own boldness in speaking. Now that he had made a beginning, it
seemed very easy to say his say and to speak out all that lay on his
mind. “I’m not going to be treated like a dog by you or by anybody,” he
said.
“Yes, I do speak to you, too,” said Hezekiah, stopping at the door.
“What d’ ye want me to say to you, anyhow?” he added. “Don’t I give you
all you want to eat and drink, and never charge you a farden for it?
What more d’ye want than that? You’re the most ungratefulest nevy that
ever lived, so you are, to talk to me that way.”
Then he went out of the door, and along the dark passageway, and Jack
heard him enter the office, and shut the door behind him. Then he began
eating his supper again. He felt very bitter and very angry against the
old man.
So he sat eating for a long time in lonely silence, broken only by
the sound of Deborah clattering now and then among the pots and pans
in the kitchen beyond. Suddenly he heard the office door open again,
and the sound of his uncle’s steps coming back along the passage. He
reached the door, and Jack heard his fingers fumbling for the latch in
the darkness, and then the sharp click as it was raised. Then the door
opened, and the old man came in. He stood for a moment, and then came
straight across to the table where Jack sat. He stood leaning with both
hands upon the table. Jack did not know exactly what to expect. He drew
himself back, for the first thought that came into his mind was that
the old man was going to attack him personally. “Lookee, Jacky,” said
old Hezekiah, at last, “I’ve been thinking of that there twenty pound
you was speaking of. Well, Jacky, you shall have that twenty pound, you
shall.”
“What d’ye mean, Uncle Hezekiah?” said Jack.
“Why,” said Hezekiah, “I mean what I said. You shall have that twenty
pound, Jacky. I’ve been thinking about it, and what you said, and I’m
going to give you what you want. I can’t give it to you just now, for
twenty pound is a deal of money, and I haven’t that much to give you
straight away. But I’ll give it to you after a while, I will, Jacky.
I’ll give it to you—let me see—I’ll give it to you on Monday next.
Will that be time enough?”
“Why, yes, it will,” said Jack, “if you really mean what you say.”
“Aye,” said the old man, “I mean it sure enough; but don’t you say
anything more to Roger Burton, will ye? Just you come to me when you
want anything, and don’t you go to him. I mean to be a good, kind uncle
to you, Jacky, I do,” and he reached out a lean, tremulous hand, and
pawed at Jack, who drew instinctively away from his approach. “I do,
Jacky, I do,” said the old man, almost whining in his effort to be
affectionate. “But don’t you be writing to Sir Henry Ballister about
me, will you, Jacky?”
“I won’t write to him if you’ll treat me decently,” said Jack.
“Aye, aye,” said the old man, “I mean to do that, Jacky, I do. Only
don’t you be talking any more to Lawyer Burton. I’ll give you that
twenty pound. I’ll give it to you on—on Monday next, I will.”
Then he turned and went away again. Jack sat looking after him. He felt
very uncomfortable. He could not understand why the old man had yielded
so suddenly. He did not believe at all that he had yielded, or that he
would give him what he asked for. He felt sure, in spite of his uncle’s
words, that he had been put off with a barren promise that would never
bear fruit.
CHAPTER IV
CAPTAIN BUTTS
ON the evening of the next day a number of boys were gathered at the
end of the wharf in front of Hezekiah Tipton’s warehouses. They were
throwing stones into the water. Jack went out along the wharf to where
they were. They were all of them boys younger than himself.
“Well, if that’s all the better you can throw,” said Jack, “to be sure
you can’t throw well. Just you watch me hit yon anchor-buoy out there
with this pebble.”
A brig had come into the harbor during the day, and now lay at anchor
some distance off from the shore. The sails were half reefed and hung
limp from the yards. The men were washing down the decks, and from the
shore you could see them busy about the decks, and every now and then
a gush of dirty water as it ran through the scupper-holes. A boat was
just about putting off from the brig. Presently some one climbed down
over the side of the vessel and into the boat, and then it was pushed
off. Jack stopped throwing stones and stood looking. The boat came
rowing straight toward the wharf where he and the other boys stood.
It pulled in around the back of a sloop that lay fast to the end of
the wharf, and was hidden from sight. Jack jumped down from the wharf
to the deck of the sloop, and went across to see who was in the boat.
It had come in under the side of the sloop, and two of the men were
holding it to its place, grasping the chains. They looked up at Jack
and the other boys as they came to the rail of the sloop and looked
down at them. There were two men in the stern of the boat. One was just
about to climb aboard the sloop, the other sat still. He who still sat
in his place had a knit cap pulled down half over his ears. He held a
pipe in his mouth and he had gold ear-rings in his ears. The other, who
was about to climb aboard the sloop, was plainly the captain of the
brig. He was short and thick-set. He wore a rough sea coat with great
flapped pockets and brass buttons. One of the pockets bulged out with a
short pistol, the brass butt of which stuck out from under the flap. He
wore canvas petticoat-breeches strapped to his waist by a broad leather
belt with a big flat brass buckle. His face and as much of the short
bull-neck as Jack could see were tanned red-brown like russet leather,
and his cheeks and chin were covered with an unshaven beard of two or
three days’ growth. He stood up in the boat, with his hand resting on
the rail of the sloop.
“Do you know where Master Hezekiah Tipton lives?” he asked in a hoarse,
rattling voice.
“Why, yes, I do,” said Jack. “This is his wharf, and I’m his nephew.”
“Well, then,” said the man, “I wish you’d show me to him.”
As Jack accompanied the other up the stony street to his uncle’s house,
he turned to look at his companion every now and then.
“Where do you hail from, captain?” said he.
“I hail from the land where every man minds his own business,” said the
other in his rattling voice. “Where do you hail from, my hearty?”
Jack did not know just what to reply at first. “Oh, well,” he said, “if
you don’t choose to give me a civil answer, why, then you needn’t.”
After that they walked in silence till they reached the house. Jack
looked into the office, but Hezekiah was not there. “If you’ll come
into the parlor,” said he, “I’ll go and tell him you’re here, only I
don’t know who you are, to be sure.” He opened the door of the room as
he spoke, and showed the captain into the darkened parlor. It always
smelled damp and musty and unused, and the fireplace had a cold, dark
look as though no comforting fire had ever burned there.
“Tell Master Tipton ’tis Captain Butts of the _Arundel_ wants to see
him,” said the stranger, laying aside his hat with its tarnished
gilt lace and wiping his partly bald head with the corner of his red
neckerchief. All the time he was looking strangely about him at his
unfamiliar surroundings.
There was the sound of a knife and fork rattling against a plate in the
distance, and Jack, following the sound, went along the passage to the
room beyond, where he knew Hezekiah was sitting at supper.
“There’s a man in the parlor,” said Jack, “would like to see you. He
says his name’s Captain Butts of the _Arundel_.”
Hezekiah was looking at Jack as he spoke. He laid down his knife and
fork immediately, and pushed back his chair and arose. Jack followed
him back to the parlor. He stood outside of the door, looking in. The
stranger arose as Master Tipton came in, holding out to the old America
merchant a big, brown, hairy hand with a hard, horny-looking palm.
“How d’ye do, Master Tipton?” said he in his rattling voice. “I be
mightily glad to see you.”
“Well, then, Master Captain Butts,” said Hezekiah, giving him a limp,
reluctant hand, “I be mightily glad to see you, too,—more glad than
you are to see me, like enough, for I’ve been looking for you these
three days past, and wondering where was the _Arundel_. There be them
nineteen servants down at the ‘Duck and Doe’ that should have been took
away yesterday morning. Their lodging at the inn is a matter of ten
pence a day each. Now, who do you think’s to pay for that there?”
“Well, well, Master,” said the other, “‘tweren’t no fault of mine that
I weren’t here yesterday. Wind and tide be to blame, so whatever ye
lose ye may just charge up ag’in’ them. We can’t sail without wind, can
we? and we can’t sail ag’in’ the tide, can we? As for the men, why, the
sooner I get my clearance papers and the men aboard the better ’twill
suit me. The tide turns at eight o’clock, and if the wind comes up,
as ’tis like to do, why, I’ll drop out and away with the turn o’ the
water.”
Master Hezekiah looked around. Jack was still standing in the doorway.
“You go in and get your supper, Jacky,” said he, and then he got up and
closed the door, and Jack went back into the supper-room.
All the time that Jack sat at his meal old Deborah scolded him
ceaselessly for being so late.
“’Tis always so,” said she, her voice growing shriller and shriller.
“You be always late, and think of nobody but your own self.”
“No, I’m not always late, neither,” said Jack; “I wasn’t late to
breakfast, or to supper either, yesterday.”
“But you didn’t come home to dinner at all,” said old Deborah, “and I
kept it for you, and I kept it for you, and the ’taties all like wax in
the oven, and not fit to eat.”
“I didn’t want any dinner,” said Jack. “I had something to eat down at
the wharf.”
“Well,” said old Deborah, “you might just as well have been late as not
to come at all, for I kept a-waiting and a-waiting for you till it was
all dried up and wasted—aye, all wasted, and it what many a pore body
’u’d’a’ been glad enough to ’a’ had, too.”
In the interval of her scolding Jack could occasionally hear the
distant rumbling of Captain Butts’s voice in the office.
It grew darker and darker in the twilight gloom of the kitchen, until
Jack could hardly see the food upon his plate.
“I wish you’d bring a candle, Deborah,” said he, “I can’t see to find
the way to my own mouth.”
“A candle!” said Deborah; “if you’d come to your supper in time you’d
not need a candle to see. Now you may just go without.”
“Very well,” said Jack, “I don’t care, for I’m done.”
“Then, if you’re done, you may go down to the pump and fetch back some
water.”
Jack took the pail and went off with it. He was gone a long time, and
the night was fairly settled when he came stumbling back into the
kitchen, slopping the water upon the steps and the floor.
“Why,” said Deborah, “I thought you was never coming. Your uncle’s
asking for you. He’s over in the office now, and he wants to see you
there.”
“Very well,” said Jack, “if I’d known that, may be I’d hurried and may
be I wouldn’t.”
In the office he found Captain Butts seated at the tall desk, with a
bottle of Hezekiah’s old Jamaica rum before him. They had been looking
over some papers, and the Captain had evidently been helping himself
very freely to the rum. He smelt strong of the liquor. He was leaning
over the desk, his chin resting upon his fists. He looked up at Jack
with his keen gray eyes from under his bushy eyebrows. “Is this the
boy?” said he. Hezekiah, who sat opposite to his visitor, nodded
without speaking.
“Come hither, my hearty,” said Captain Butts, beckoning to Jack. Jack
came forward slowly. “And so ye’re a hard one to manage, be ye? By
blood! if I had ye aboard the _Arundel_ for a few days, I’d manage ye.”
“Who says I’m hard to manage?” demanded Jack, indignantly.
“That does your good uncle,” said the Captain. As he spoke he reached
out suddenly, and catching Jack by the arm held him tight, feeling up
and down the length of his arm. “Ye be well put together, my hearty,”
said he; “ye’d make a valuable servant in the tobacco-fields,” and he
winked tipsily as he spoke. “Now, being as ye’re so hard to manage,
how’d you like it if you was to take a cruise to the Americas with old
Benny Butts?”
Jack could smell the rum heavy upon the captain’s breath, and he saw
that he was a little tipsy. He jerked his arm away from the other’s
grasp.
“I am well enough off here as I am, thank you, Master Captain,” said
he, “and I don’t choose to go to the Americas at all.”
The Captain burst out laughing. He fetched a thump upon the desk before
him that made the bottle of rum and the tumbler hop and jingle. “Harkee
to that, now!” said he, “he don’t choose to go to the Americas,” and he
gave another roar of laughter.
Master Hezekiah sat looking on at the two, resting his forehead upon
his lean fingers, his hand shading his eyes from the light of the
candle. Suddenly he cut into the talk. “Come, come, Captain Butts!”
said he tartly, “let there be an end to this! Sure you forget what
you’re saying. Come hither,” said he to Jack. Jack came around to him,
and the old man lifted the lid of the desk and brought out a bundle of
papers and a little bag of money. He counted out a few coins, which
he made into a little pile. Then he untied the tape and chose a paper
from among the others. Jack stood watching him. “Here be a list of
the America servants down at the Golden Fish,” said Hezekiah, “and
this”—here he chinked the money between his fingers as he gave it to
Jack—“is fifteen shillings ten-pence. I want you to do something for
me, Jacky. I want you to go down to the Golden Fish and pay Landlord
Evans his account, and then give this release to Dockray, who hath the
America men in charge. After that I want you to take them down to the
wharf and deliver them over to Captain Butts, and get his receipt. D’ye
understand?”
“Why, yes, I do,” said Jack; “but why do you want me to do this when
the crimp can serve you so much better than I?” He could not understand
why his uncle, who had never before made any demands upon him should
suddenly prefer such a request as this.
“Why,” said Hezekiah, “you ask me for money t’other day, didn’t ye?
Well, then, if you want money you must begin to do something for to
earn it. What I want you to do now is to take these servants down and
deliver them over to Captain Butts.”
“Oh, well,” said Jack, “I’m willing enough, but I don’t see why you
should choose me to do it. What am I to do with them? Tell me again.”
“You’re to take them down to the wharf, d’ye understand? Then Captain
Butts will give you a receipt for ‘em. Then you’ll have nothing more to
do with the business.”
“Very well,” said Jack; “methinks I understand. And now if the Captain
is ready to go, why, I am, too.”
As he and Captain Butts walked together down the street in the
darkness, Jack said again: “I don’t see why he wants me to take his
servants down to the wharf. He never asked such a thing of me before.”
Captain Butts, for reply, burst out laughing, and fetched him a clap on
the shoulder that jarred him through and through. “Well, I do suppose
you’ll find out some day why he sends you on his errands,” he said.
CHAPTER V
KIDNAPPED
AT THE END of the court the two parted, the Captain going on down to
the wharf and Jack up to the Golden Fish. He found the crimp and gave
him Hezekiah’s release, and then the redemptioners immediately began to
make themselves ready. There was something pitiful in the meagerness
of their preparation. One or two of them had nondescript bundles tied
up in handkerchiefs, and one had a pair of stockings wrapped up in a
piece of dirty paper. Beyond this they had nothing at all to take with
them to the new world to which they were bound. But they seemed to
borrow very little trouble on that score. They were very restless and
turbulent at the near prospect of sailing. They had somehow contrived
to obtain some liquor, and two or three of them were more than half
drunk.
The crimp brought them out into the court of the inn and arranged them
in some sort of order, two by two, by the dim light of the lantern.
They jostled and pushed one another, and leered in the lantern light
at Jack as he stood looking at them helplessly. “I’ll never be able to
take them down to the wharf by myself,” said he.
“Oh, you’ll be able to take us,” said a big, bull-necked fellow; “a
baby’d lead us wherever he chose for to go,” and then they all laughed.
“Well, I don’t know,” said the crimp, shaking his head as he looked
them over; “like enough I’d better go with you as far as the wharf. I
don’t know why he should have sent you to take ‘em, anyhow. Lookee!”
said he to the huddled line of servants, in a suddenly-changed voice;
“I won’t have none of your tricks, d’ye understand? D’ye see this?” and
he fetched a bludgeon out of his pocket and showed it to them. “The
first man as tries any of his tricks, I knocks him on the head, d’ye
understand?”
“Why, master,” said one of the men, “you wouldn’t hurt us, would you?
We be your lambs.”
“Never you mind,” said the crimp, shaking his head. “Don’t you go
trying any of your tricks on me. Come along now, march!”
“Hurrah for the Golden Fish and Johnny Waddels!” cried out one of the
men.
The others gave a broken and confused cheer as they marched away out
of the court, the crimp walking beside the first couple, and Jack
coming after to keep a lookout upon them. They marched along for a
while, first down one street and then another until they had come to
the water-front. The wind was blowing chilly. The bull-necked fellow
had begun to sing. They walked along for some little distance and then
crossed the street. Here the storehouses stood dark and deserted as
they passed by them. At last they came to the wharf, across which the
night wind swept without shelter.
“Well,” said the crimp, “I’ll leave you here. ’Tis no use my going any
further.”
“Yes,” said Jack, “I can manage them very well now by myself, I
suppose.”
“I’ll just wait under the lee of the shed here,” said the crimp, “till
I see you’re all right.”
“Very well,” said Jack. “Come along,” said he to the men as they stood
shivering in their thin, ragged clothes. The bull-necked fellow had
ceased his discordant singing. At Jack’s bidding they now marched out
along the wharf. There were lights out in the darkness at the end of
the wharf, where the sloop lay black and shapeless in the night. When
Jack came to where the light was he found two dark figures standing
waiting for him on the wharf. One of them was Captain Butts, the other
was the man in the knit cap, who now carried a lantern hanging over
his arm. There were two or three men, two of them also with lanterns,
standing on the deck of the sloop. Jack knew that the boat that had
brought the Captain off from the brig was lying in the darkness beyond,
for he could hear the sound of voices, and then the sound of the rattle
of an oar.
Captain Butts had twisted his handkerchief well up about his throat.
“Well,” said he, “I thought you was never coming.”
“I came as soon as I could,” said Jack.
“Just bring the men out to the boat, across the sloop here,” said the
Captain; and at Jack’s bidding the men, one after another, jumped down
from the wharf to the deck of the sloop below. Jack followed them, and
the Captain and the man with the lantern followed him. “Where’s your
list?” said the Captain, and then, as Jack gave it to him: “Hold the
lantern here, Dyce. That’s it.” He held the list to the dull light,
referring to it as he counted the shivering transports who stood in
line. “Sixteen—seventeen—eighteen—nineteen—nineteen all told.
That’s right. Now, then, look alive, my hearties, and get aboard as
quick as you can!”
Jack stood with his hands in his pockets and his back to the chill
night breeze. The wharf and the sloop, deserted in the night, seemed a
singularly dark and lonely background to the dimly moving figures. The
water, driven by the wind, splashed and dashed noisily around the end
of the wharf. One by one the redemptioners clambered clumsily over the
rail of the sloop and down into the boat alongside, stumbling over the
thwarts in the darkness and settling themselves amid the growling and
swearing of the sailors. “Are you all right?” asked the Captain.
“All right, sir,” said Dyce.
Suddenly the Captain turned sharply toward Jack. “Now, then,” said he,
“you get aboard too!” Jack gaped at him. “You get aboard too!” said
Captain Butts again.
“What do you mean?” said Jack.
“I mean that you’re going aboard too,” said the Captain, and as he
spoke he reached out and caught Jack by the collar. “That’s why you
were sent here,” said he, “and that’s what I’m bound to do. I’m bound
to take you to the Americas with me.”
Then Jack saw it all in a flash. He stood for one stunned instant, and
then he began struggling fiercely to loosen himself from the Captain’s
grasp upon his collar. The next instant he felt himself jerked
violently backward and he heard the Captain’s voice saying: “You get
into the boat down there! You’ll do as I tell you, if you know what’s
good for you!”
Jack twisted and struggled desperately and frantically, but still the
Captain held him in a grip like a vise. “Let me go!” gasped Jack. “Let
me go!”
“Into the boat, I tell ye!” he heard the Captain’s voice growling in
his ear, and at the same time he found himself flung forward violently
toward the rail of the sloop. The boats and the dark waters were just
below. He saw dimly, his sight blurred with the fury of his struggles,
the dark figures of the men in the boat below. He flung out his feet
against the rail, bracing himself against the Captain’s hold; at the
same time he clutched hold of the stays. “Here, Dyce, loose his hand
there,” said the Captain’s voice, panting with his struggles. “The
young villain! What d’ye mean, anyhow?”
The man with the knit cap sprang forward at the Captain’s bidding, and,
still holding the lantern, began to pluck Jack’s fingers loose from the
stays. Then suddenly Jack screamed out, “Help!—Help!—Help!” three
times, and at the same time he kicked backward violently against the
Captain’s shins.
“You will, will you!” wheezed the Captain. As he spoke he jerked Jack
violently backward. Jack had just time to see a whirling flash in the
light of the lantern. Then there came a deafening, blinding crash. Ten
thousand sparkling stars flew whirling around and around him. He felt a
hot stream shoot down across his face, and he knew that it was blood.
There was another crash, this time duller and more distant, then a
humming that droned away into stillness—then nothing.
* * * * *
“By blood! Captain,” said Dyce, “I believe you’ve killed the boy.”
The Captain thrust the pistol with which he had struck Jack back again
into his pocket. “The young villain!” he said, panting with his late
efforts. “He’ll kick me, will he? And he’d’a’ had the town down on
us if I hadn’t shut his noise.” He lowered down upon Jack’s figure
lying deathly still and in a dark heap on the deck. Dyce bent over
the senseless form, holding the lantern to the face. Jack’s eyes were
upturned. His legs and body twitched; his head was streaming with blood
and his face was bloody. Captain Butts stooped over him. “Oh! he’s all
right,” said he roughly; “he’ll come to by and by; he’s only stunned a
trifle. Get him aboard and be quick about it! There’s somebody coming
along the wharf now. Here; here’s his hat. Catch it there.”
[Illustration: “‘HE’LL COME TO BY AND BY; HE’S ONLY STUNNED A TRIFLE,’
SAID THE CAPTAIN.”]
CHAPTER VI
ABOARD THE ARUNDEL
FOR a long while Jack was very light-headed and sick. He did not seem
to have any strength. It seemed to him that several days passed while
he lay in his berth, now partly waking, now partly sleeping. When he
was partly awake his mind seemed to wander, and he could not separate
the things he now saw from the things he had seen before. Both seemed
grotesque and distorted. It seemed to him that his father was nearly
always with him. He had a line of Greek to construe, but he could never
get the words correctly. He kept trying and trying to get the words
in their proper order, but always, when he would get the line nearly
correct, it would fall to pieces, and he would have to begin all over
again. He felt that his father was very angry with him, and that he
was driving him on to complete the line, and he felt that if he could
only finish the task he would have rest and be well again. But there
were three words that never would fit rightly into the line, and he
never could make them fit into it. With these several fancyings there
commingled the actual things about him. His father seemed to him to be
waiting and waiting for him to complete his task; but at the same time
he saw the sloping deck of the vessel and the berths upon the other
side, and could feel the brig rising and falling and rolling upon the
sea. There was ever present in his ears the sound of creaking and
groaning and rattling and sliding, and there were men talking together
and smoking their pipes, the pungent smell of the tobacco helping to
make him feel very sick. If he could only fit these words together into
the line, then his father would go away, and he would be well and could
go up on deck. Oh, how his head ached! He wished he could get away from
these words that would not fit into the sentence.
Then the night would come, and he would be partly asleep. Sometimes he
would lie half dreaming for an hour or more, and in the darkness the
things of his fancy were very real.
Very soon after he had been brought aboard he had a dim, distorted
vision of Dyce, the mate, coming with a lantern to where he lay,
bringing somebody along with him. It seemed to him that the two men
had leaned over him talking about him while a number of other people
had stood near. The man who had come with the mate must have been
Sim Tucker, a thin, little man, with a long, lean chin, who was a
barber-leech. Jack had felt some one trim his hair, and then do
something that had hurt him very much. It seemed to be a grotesque
nightmare that the barber-leech had sewed up his head. Afterward a
bandage was tied around his head, and then he felt more comfortable.
Jack knew very well that it had all been a dream, and he was always
surprised to wake up and find the bandage around his head.
Now and then Sim Tucker would come and speak to him. “How d’ye feel
now?” he would maybe say.
“Why,” said Jack, “I would be all well if my father would only go away.
But I can’t construe that sentence.”
“You can’t what!”
“I can’t get those Greek words right, and my father won’t go away.”
“Why, your father says they’re all right.”
“Does he?”
“Aye.”
“But there are those four words. They won’t fit.”
“Why, yes, they fit all right. Don’t you see?” Then it seemed to Jack
that they did fit into the sentence, and for a little while he was more
easy in his mind.
After a while he began to get better, and his head got clearer. Then
one day he was so well that he was able to crawl up to the deck. He
had not eaten anything at all and was very weak. He climbed up the
companion-way and stood with his head just above the scuttle. He looked
aft almost along the level of the deck. In the distance was the rise of
the poop-deck, with a man at the wheel just under the over-hang. The
first mate, Dyce, still wearing his knit cap pulled down half over his
ears, was walking up and down the poop-deck, smoking. With the rise and
fall of the vessel, Jack could catch every now and then a glimpse of
the wide, troubled ocean, moving and heaving with ceaselessly restless,
crawling waves, cut keenly and blackly at the sharp rim of the horizon
against the gray sky. Every now and then there was a great rush of air
from the vast hollow sails overhead, that swept back and forth, back
and forth across the wide, windy sky. The sailors looked at him as he
stood there with the bandage wrapped around his head. He began to feel
very sick and dizzy with the motion of the vessel, and presently he
crept down below, back to his berth again.
“Be you feeling better?” said one of the men, coming to him.
“Yes, I think I am,” said Jack, “only it makes me sick and faint-like
to stand up.”
“Well, you’ve been pretty sick,” said the man, “and that’s the sacred
truth. I thought the Captain had killed you for sure when I saw him hit
you that second crack with the pistol. I thought he’d smashed your
head in.”
Several of the other men had gathered about his berth and stood looking
down at him. Jack wished they would go away. He lay quite still, with
his eyes shut, and by and by they did leave him.
He felt very lonely and deserted. A great lump rose in his throat when
he thought of all that had happened to him. “I have not a friend in the
world,” he said to himself, and then the hot tears forced themselves
out from under his eyelids.
When next he opened his eyes he saw that Sim Tucker was standing over
him. “How d’ye feel now?” said the barber-leech.
“Oh, I feel better,” said Jack irritably. “I wish you’d go away and let
me alone.”
“Let me look at your head,” said the leecher. He unwound the bandage
deftly with his long, lean fingers. “Aye,” said he, “ye’re getting
along well now. To-morrow I’ll take out them stitches. He must have hit
ye with the cock of the pistol to make a great, big, nasty cut like
that.”
CHAPTER VII
ACROSS THE OCEAN
THE next morning Jack was up on deck again for a while, feeling very
much better and stronger than the day before. In the afternoon Mr. Dyce
came down into the steerage and told him that the Captain wanted to see
him.
Jack, although he was now out of his bunk, was still very weak, and
not yet accustomed to the rolling heave and pitch of the vessel at
sea. He followed the mate along the deck in the direction of the
round-house, balancing himself upon the slanting, unsteady plane, now
and then catching at the rail or at the shrouds or stays to steady
himself. Everything was still very fresh and new to him, so that,
even though his mind was heavy with leaden apprehension concerning
the coming interview with Captain Butts—the thought which weighed
down his spirit with dull imaginings—even though his mind was full of
this, the freshness and newness of everything was yet strong in his
consciousness—the tumultuous noise of the sea, the sun shining bright
and clear, the salt wind blowing strong and cold. Every now and then a
cresting wave would flash out a vivid whitecap in the sunlight against
the profound green of the limitless ocean; the sky was full of clouds,
and purpling shadows dappled the wide stretch of ever-moving waters.
The brig, plowing its way aslant to leeward, plunged every now and then
with a thunderous clap of white foam into the oncoming wave, and the
broad shadows of sail and rigging swept back across the sunlit deck
with the backward and forward sweep of the masts against the sky high
overhead. Of all these things Jack was strongly conscious as he walked
along the deck, wondering, with that dull and heavy apprehension, what
Captain Butts was going to say to him.
Two men on the poop-deck were heaving the log, one of them keeping
tally with a slate; a third, with a red bandana handkerchief knotted
about his head, stood gripping the wheel, holding the yawing vessel
steadily to its course. The man with the slate looked at Jack as he
came along the deck, clinging to the rail for support.
Captain Butts was waiting in the round-house, leaning with elbows
upon the table. A bottle of rum and a half-emptied tumbler stood on
the table at his elbow, and the cabin was full of the strong, pungent
odor of the liquor. A chart, blackened and dirty as with long use,
lay spread out on the table. Part way across it stretched a black
line which the Captain had drawn—probably the supposed course of
the vessel—for Captain Butts sailed by dead reckoning. He looked up
from under his brows as Jack entered, frowning until his partly bald
forehead swelled with knotted veins, but he did not immediately say
anything. Jack had come forward and stood at the end of the table. The
mate, who lingered close to the door, had taken out his pipe and was
filling it with tobacco. Jack did not know how pale and thin he was,
how sick he looked; he was conscious only of the weakness that seemed
not only to make him unsteady upon his legs, but to unnerve him of all
strength of spirit. As he stood there now, facing the Captain, he felt
an hysterical choking in his throat, and he swallowed and swallowed
upon the hard, dry lump that seemed to be there.
“Well, my hearty,” said the Captain, breaking the silence at last
with his hoarse, rattling voice, “well, my hearty, you got your dose
that time, or else I’m mistook. By Blood!” he continued with sudden
savageness, “I’ll teach you to play with Benny Butts, I will, and to
kick at his shins. By Blood! When you’re dealing with me, you’re not
dealing with your poor old uncle as ye can bully and blatherskite as
you please. By Blood! I’ll break your back if you go trying any of your
airs with me, I will.” And as his anger rose with his own words, he
opened his eyes wide and glared upon his victim. Jack did not dare to
reply. He stood looking down, holding tight to the edge of the table
and striving to balance himself to the lurching of the ship.
“Your uncle told me all about you, he did,” said Captain Butts,
beginning again; “how you threatened him with the law and tried to make
mischief atwixt him and your t’other folks. He told me how you stole
his money away from him for to—”
“I never stole a farthing in my life,” said Jack hoarsely.
“D’ye give me back talk?” roared the Captain, smiting his palm upon
the table. “By Blood! if ye answer me any of your back talk, I’ll clap
ye in irons as quick as look at ye. I say ye did steal money from your
uncle.” Again he glared at Jack as though defying him to reply, and
Jack, conscious of his utter powerlessness, did not venture to answer.
“I say ye did steal money from your uncle,” repeated the Captain, “and
that again and again. He might have sent ye to jail had he been so
minded, and maybe he would ha’ done so only for the shame o’ the thing.
Now I tell ye what you’re going to do. You ‘re going to the Americas to
be put to work under a master who’ll keep you out o’ mischief for five
years. That’s what you’re going to do. After you’ve served out your
five years in the Americas under a master, why, then, maybe, you’ll
know how to behave yourself arter you get back home again.”
The brig gave a sudden heaving lurch that sent the bottle and glass
sliding across the table. The Captain caught them with a quick sweep
of his hand, while Jack, losing his balance, partly fell, partly
sat abruptly down upon the seat beside him. He was up again almost
instantly and stood once more holding by the side of the table.
“Now, you listen to what I say. You behave yourself decent while
you’re aboard this here brig, and you’ll be treated decent, but you go
a makin’ any trouble for me, and by Blood! I’ll clap you in irons, I
will, and I’ll lay ye down in the hold, and there ye’ll stay till we
drop anchor in Yorktown. D’ye hear that?”
Jack nodded his head.
“Well, then, if ye hear me, why don’t ye answer me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack.
“Very well, then, you go and remember what I’ve said.”
Jack, so dismissed, went out of the round-house and into the wide,
bright sunlight again. Nor was it until he had returned half way back
across the slanting deck that anything like a full realization of his
fate came upon him. Then suddenly it did seize upon him, gripping
him almost like a physical pang. He stopped short and caught at the
foremast stays under that sudden grip of despair, and bent leaning
over the rail of the ship. Then, in an instant the sky and the ocean
blurred together and were lost in the blinding flood, and hot tears
went raining down his face in streams. He stood there for a long time
facing the ocean and crying. No one knew what he was doing, and he was
as much alone as though he stood all by himself in the midst of the
empty universe, instead of aboard a brig with footsteps passing around
him and the grumbling growl of men’s voices as they talked together
sounding in his ears.
* * * * *
It had seemed to Jack at that time, when he stood there crying out
into the face of the sea and the sky, as though life had no hope and
no joy, and as though he never could be happy again. It was not so,
however, and it never is so. We grow used to every sorrow and trouble
that comes to us. Even by the next day he had begun to grow accustomed
to the thought of his fate. He awoke to an immediate consciousness
of it, and all day it stood there, a big, looming background to the
passing events of his life, while he helped the other redemptioners
wash down the decks, pattering about in the wet with his bare feet in
the slushing slop of water; all the while he stood leaning over the
rail, dumbly joying in the consciousness of the sweep and rush of wind
and water—looking out astern of the vessel at the wake that spread
away behind, over which hovered and dipped and skimmed the little black
Mother Carey’s chickens. In all the things of his life it was thus
present with him, but he did not again suffer a despair so poignant and
so bitter as had struck him down that time he had stood there crying
out toward the sky and the ocean with his back to the ship’s company.
So it is that time so quickly wears away the sharp edges of trouble,
until it grows so dull and blunted that it no longer hurts.
The crew had come somehow to know something of Jack’s history. The
first day he was out on deck after a spell of stormy weather into
which the _Arundel_ sailed, Tom Roberts, the carpenter, asked him if
he had not an uncle as was a lord. “He’s a baronet,” said Jack, and
Roberts said he knowed he was summat of the kind. The same day, as
Jack was standing in line with the others waiting for his dinner to
be served out to him, the carpenter passed close to him with a wink.
“You come over along o’ we,” he said, “and you shall have a taste o’
grog with your victuals,” and Jack, after a hesitating moment, had,
with a feeling of gratification and pleasure, followed him over to the
forecastle scuttle, where a part of the crew sat eating in the sunshine
that shone aslant under the foresail. After that he nearly always
messed with the crew, and by the end of the voyage it had become a
regularly established thing for him to do so.
Some of the crew had either lived in the Colonies, or had sailed from
one to the other in coasting vessels, and Jack learned much about his
future home from them. Roberts himself had lived for two years as
ship-carpenter in Boston, in the province of Massachusetts, and one of
the men, named Dred—Christian Dred—had lived for a while in North
Carolina with Blackbeard, the famous pirate. He had been one of the
pirate’s men, and had sailed with the renowned freebooter in his famous
ship, the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_.
During the voyage Jack became better acquainted with Dred than with any
one aboard the _Arundel_, and before they had reached Virginia the two
had become very intimate. Dred was a silent, taciturn man, speaking
but rarely to any one and saying what he had to say in as few words as
possible. But he seemed pleased with Jack’s friendship. He questioned
Jack much as to his former life, and in return told a good deal about
himself. He said he had left Blackbeard the year before and had
surrendered upon the King’s Proclamation of Pardon. He always carried
his pardon about with him rolled up in oil-skin and hung about his neck
by a bit of string, and he showed it to Jack one day, unrolling the
oil-skin very carefully and gingerly, and then rolling it up again with
just as particular care as he had opened it. He told Jack that after he
had surrendered to the Pardon, Blackbeard and others of the pirates
had also surrendered. He said that Blackbeard was now living on a farm
down at Bath Town, in North Carolina, and had married a fine young
“gell” of sixteen or thereabouts. He once told Jack that he had begun
his “h—cruising,” as he called it, when he had sailed from New York
in a “Red Sea Trader” in ‘95, and that ever since then he had “smelled
brimstone.”
(The Red Sea Traders, it may be explained, were those who carried
supplies of stores, chiefly of rum and gunpowder, to the pirates who
then so infested the west coast of Africa, exchanging their commodities
for plunder captured by those freebooters.)
Dred told Jack that he was only eighteen years old when he had sailed
in the Red Sea trade. “Not much older than you be now,” he added.
Once, when Dred was overhauling his gunny-bag, he brought out a string
of a dozen or so jingling coins hung on a bit of silver wire. He held
the trinket out at arm’s length. “D’ye see this here string o’ money?”
said he; “I gave that to a Spanish gell once down in Port Royal,
Jamaicy, and what’s more, I took it off of her neck again arter she had
died of yellow fever, and no one else’ld go nigh her.”
Jack grew to like Dred very heartily. He did not think of him as being
a red-handed and wicked pirate. It did not seem to him that his new
friend was, after all, very different from other men—excepting that he
had had very wonderful adventures happen to him.
And yet Dred was indeed a red-handed pirate.
It was toward the latter part of the voyage that he told Jack the story
of the taking of the English ship that Blackbeard afterward used as
the flag-ship of his pirate fleet, and which became so famous under
the name of the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_. Dred’s was almost the most
important part in that tragedy. He told the story almost naïvely, and
did not at all seem to appreciate the significance of what he had done.
They—the pirates—had, he said, been cruising in the West Indies. Then
they sailed northward until they came to Charleston. (Here he told
incidentally how they had blockaded the town for over a week, stopping
and searching all incoming and outgoing vessels, and how they had
even gone up boldly into the town in search of a chest of medicine.)
After they had left Charleston, they had, he said, cruised away off
shore with two sloops and a bark which they had taken. They “made no
purchase,” as he phrased it, until one morning they sighted a sail,
which proved to be an armed ship of some six or seven hundred tons
burden, bound apparently for the Chesapeake Capes.
When they had come to within hailing distance of the vessel they
ordered her to heave to. But she would not, and there was some exchange
of shots before she would finally surrender. The ship had only one
passenger aboard, a young Virginia gentleman, Mr. Edward Parker,
who had been to college in England and who was now returning home,
having finished his education. Dred said that the supercargo, on being
threatened by Blackbeard, told the pirates that the young gentleman had
in his charge a valuable chest of money and of goldsmiths’ bills of
exchange. On hearing this Blackbeard and two or three of the pirates
ran aft to the cabin, only to find that the young gentleman had locked
himself in and refused to come out.
After some parleying the pirates tried to break in the door, but it was
braced from within, and the young gentleman at once began firing at
them through the panels. Two of the pirates were shot. “One on ‘em,”
said Dred, “was Abraham Dolling, and he was shot that bad through the
neck that we had to hale him off by the legs, and he died a little bit
after just at the bottom of the poop ladder.”
His own part in the tragedy that followed Dred told somewhat thus:
“Seein’ as how we was makin’ nothing of it at all by the way we was
doing, I climbs up on the poop-deck, thinking maybe to get a sight of
my young gentleman through the sky-light. But no; he had blocked up
the sky-light with mattresses from the captain’s berth. So then I went
across the poop-deck to the stern falls. The boat had been shot away
from the lee davit by our fire, and the lines hung loose from the falls
over the stern. I lashed two on ‘em together and let myself down from
the davits with one hand, holding my pistol with t’ other. I eased
myself to one side until I was low enough, and then I peeped in at the
stern window. There I could see my young gentleman off beyond in the
captain’s cabin standing close by the door, and I can see him now as
plain as I can see this here hand o’ mine. He had pulled a couple of
sea chists to the door, and he had a plank from the captain’s berth
set agin ‘em and propped agin the braces of the table. He was in his
shirt sleeves, and he had a pistol in each hand. The captain o’ the
ship was a’ talkin’ to him from t’ other side of the door, telling him
he’d better gin up and surrender the money, and I could hear my young
gentleman swearing by all that was holy that he would never gin up the
money. He had his head turned to one side, and he didn’t see me, so I
crawled in through the window. But I’d no more ‘n set foot on deck than
all on a sudden he wheels around like a flash, and afore I knowed what
he was at—Bang!—he fires his pistol fair for my head. I felt the wind
of the ball and it smashed into a chiny closet just behind me. Then,
seeing he had missed me, he ups with t’ other pistol and arter that
’twas either him or me. So I let fly, and down he went all of a heap
acrost the chist afore the door.”
“Was he dead?” asked Jack.
“I think he were,” said Dred. “Leastways he was dead afore we could get
him out of the cabin.”
Dred told this story to Jack one afternoon as they were sitting
together up under the lee-forecastle rail, and then he showed him the
pardon in the oiskin bag hung around his neck.
In the intimacy between the two Jack talked much to Dred about his own
prospects, and his new friend advised him to submit to his fate with
patience. “Arter all,” he said, “five year be n’t so werry long—not
nigh as long as death. And then you’ll see a deal o’ the world, and
arter that you goes back home agin, an’ there ye be,” and the illogical
words brought a good deal of comfort to Jack.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE END OF THE VOYAGE
ON a long sea voyage you come to lose all sense of time. One day melts
and blends into the other so that you can hardly tell them apart. They
stretch along into weeks, and the weeks, perhaps, into months which can
neither be called long nor short, but only just a monotonous reach of
time.
The only thing that brings its change to the ceaseless monotony are the
changes that happen in the weather. Twice they had a spell of heavy
weather during the voyage; the first time, a few days after Jack had
become well enough to be about on deck, Jack was very seasick, and so
were nearly all of the transports.
It was quite a heavy storm, lasting for three or four days, and at
one time Jack thought that the brig must really be in danger. As he
lay prone in his bunk his heart quaked with every tumultuous lift of
the vessel. Some of the crew were in the forecastle beyond, and the
deep sound of their talk and now and then a burst of laughter came to
him where he lay. He did not see how they could be so indifferent to
the loud and incessant creaking and groaning of the ship’s timbers,
alternated now and then with the noise of distant thumping and bumping,
and always the gurgling rush of water, as though it were bursting
through the straining timbers and streaming into the hold. It seemed to
him sometimes as though the vessel must capsize, so tremendous was the
mountainous lift and fall of the fabric, and so strenuous the straining
of its timbers. Sometimes he would clutch tight hold of the box-like
side of his bunk to save himself from being pitched out bodily upon the
deck. The steerage became a horrible pit, where the transports rolled
about stupefied with sickness, and when, by and by, he himself began to
recover, it became impossible for him to bear it.
So the afternoon of the second day of the storm he crawled up to the
decks above. The level stretch lay shining with sheets of drifting wet.
Jack stood clinging dizzily to the shrouds looking about him. A number
of the crew were strung out along the yard-arm high aloft, reefing the
fore-topsail, clinging with feet and hands to the lines and apparently
indifferent to the vast rush of the wet wind and the gigantic sweep
of the uncertain foothold to which they clung. The hubbub of roaring
wind and thundering waters almost stunned Jack as he stood clinging
there. The voice of Dyce shouting his orders through a trumpet from
the quarter-deck seemed to be upborne like a straw on that vast and
tremendous sweep of uproar. One of the crew came running along the wet
and slippery deck in his bare feet, cursing and swearing at Jack and
waving to him to go below. The next moment, and before Jack could move
to obey, the vessel plunged down into a wave, with a thunder-clap of
sound and a cataract of salt water that nearly swept him off his feet
and wet him to the skin.
Perhaps of all the actual events of the voyage, this episode and the
two or three minutes’ spectacle of the storm lingered most vividly of
all in Jack’s memory.
It was at this time that he first began to get better acquainted with
the crew. When, at the bidding of the sailor, he went down below, wet
and dripping, he could not bear to go back into the steerage, and the
crew let him lie out in the forecastle. They laughed at him and his
plight, but they did not drive him back into the steerage.
Then there were many other days of bright sunlight and of smooth
breezy sailing; and still other times of windy, starry nights, when
the watch would sit smoking up under the lee sail, and Jack would sit
or maybe lie stretched at length listening to them as they spun their
yarns—yarns, which, if the truth must be told, were not always fit for
the ears of a boy like Jack.
So the days came and went without any distinct definition of time, as
they always do in a long voyage such as this, and then, one soft warm
afternoon, Jack saw that there were sea-gulls hovering and circling
around the wake of the brig. One of the crew told him that they had
come within soundings again, and when he looked over the side of the
vessel he saw that the clear, tranquil green of the profounder depths
of the ocean had changed to the cloudy, opalescent gray of shoaler
waters.
Then it was the next morning and Jack felt some one shaking him awake.
“What is it?” said he, opening his eyes heavily and looking up into the
lean face of Sim Tucker that was bent over him.
The little man was all in a quiver of excitement. “’Tis land!” he cried
in a shrill, exultant voice—“’tis land! We’re in sight of land! Don’t
you want to get up and see it? You can see it from the deck.” His voice
piped shriller and shriller with the straining of his excitement.
Jack was out of his berth in an instant; and, almost before he knew it,
up on deck, barefoot, in the cool brightness of the early day.
The deck was wet and chill with the dew of the early morning. The sun
had not yet risen, but the day was bright, and as clear as crystal.
The land lay stretched out sharp and clear-cut in the early morning
light—a pure white, thread-like strip of sandy beach, a level strip of
green marsh, and, in the far distance, a dark, ragged line of woodland
standing against the horizon.
Jack had seen nothing but the water for so long, and his eyes had
become so used to the measureless stretch of ocean all around him,
that the land looked very near, although it must have been quite a
league away. He stood gazing and gazing at it. The New World! The
wonderful new world of which he had heard so much! And now he was
really looking at it with his very living eyes. Virginia! That, then,
was the New World. He stood gazing and gazing. In the long line of the
horizon there was an open space free of trees. He wondered whether
that was a tobacco-plantation. There was a single tree standing by
itself—a straight, thin trunk, and a spread of foliage at the top. He
wondered if it was a palm-tree. He did not then know that there were no
palm-trees in Virginia, and that single, solitary tree seemed to him to
be very wonderful in its suggestion of a strange and foreign country.
Then, as he stood gazing, a sudden recollection of the fate that now,
in a little while, awaited him in this new world—of his five years of
coming servitude. The recollection of this came upon him, gripping him
with an almost poignant pang; and he bent suddenly over, clutching the
rail tightly with both hands. How would it be with him then? What was
in store for him in this new world upon which he was looking? Was it
hope or despair, happiness or misery?
Captain Butts and Mr. Dyce were standing on the poop-deck, the Captain
with a glass held to his eye looking out at the land. By and by he
lowered the glass, and said something to the mate. Then he handed the
glass to the other, who also took a long, steady look at the distant
thread of shore.
Some of the crew were standing in a little group forward. Among the
others was Dred, the red bandana handkerchief around his head blazing
like a flame in the crystal brightness of the morning. As Jack, still
possessed by that poignant remembrance of his coming fate, went up to
where they stood, Dred turned and looked at him, almost smiling. The
light of the rising sun glinted in his narrow black eyes, and cut in a
sharp seam the crooked, jagged scar that ran down his cheek. He nodded
at Jack ever so slightly; but he did not say anything, and then he
turned and looked out again toward the land. Just then the mate shouted
an order, and then the group of sailors broke asunder, some of them
running across the deck in their bare feet, throwing loose the ropes
from the belaying-pins, others scrambling up the ratlines higher and
higher, until they looked like little blots in the mazy rigging against
the blue, shining sky overhead.
* * * * *
It was after sunset when the brig, half sailing, half drifting, floated
with the insweep of the tide up into the York River. Jack stood with
the other redemption servants gazing silently and intently at the high
bluff shores. Above the crest of the bluff they could see the roofs
and brick chimneys of the little town. A half-dozen vessels of various
sorts were riding at anchor in the harbor, looming darkly against the
bright face of the water, just ruffled by the light breeze. The line of
a long, straggling wharf reached some distance out across the water to
a frame shed at the end. Along the shore toward the bluff were two or
three small frame-houses and a couple of big brick buildings. Somebody
had told Jack that they were the tobacco warehouses, and they appeared
very wonderful to him. A boat was pulling off from the wharf—it
was the custom officer’s boat. Other boats were following it, and a
sail-boat came fluttering out from the shore into the bright stretch
of water. Suddenly there was a thunderous splash. It was the anchor
dropped. There was a quick rattling of the cable and a creaking as it
drew taut. Then the _Arundel_ swung slowly around with the sweep of the
tide, and the voyage was ended.
* * * * *
A minute later the boat with the custom officer came alongside. Captain
Butts met him at the gangway and took him into the cabin. In a little
while boats, canoes, and dug-outs came clustering about the _Arundel_.
They all seemed strange and foreign to Jack. Nearly everybody wanted
to come aboard, but the mate, who stood at the gangway, allowed only a
few to come up on deck. These he directed to the cabin, whither Captain
Butts had taken the custom officer. The others remained in their boats
below, looking up at the redemption servants who stood crowded at the
rail, staring down at them. A ceaseless volley of questions and answers
was called back and forth from those below to those above. “Where d’ye
come from?” “Gravesend and Southampton.” “What craft is this?” “The
_Arundel_ of Bristol.” “Comes from Gravesend, d’ye say?” “Be there any
man aboard that comes from Southwark?” “Hey, Johnnie Stivins, here be
a man asks of Southwark.” “Hi, there! what are ye doin’, d’ye want to
stave us in?”—a babel of a dozen voices at a time.
Jack stood looking down through the now falling twilight to the figures
below, dim and shadowless in the pallid light. Just beneath where he
stood was a dug-out that had come off from the shore among the first.
It was rowed by a negro naked to the waist. A white man sat in the
stern. He appeared to have a kind of hat of woven grasses upon his
head. He wore loose cotton trousers and was smoking a leaf of tobacco
rolled into a cigarro, the lighted tip of which alternately glowed and
faded in the dimming light. How strange and wonderful it all was!
Just then Captain Butts came out of the cabin with the custom officer.
He did not then pay any attention to the group of redemptioners
gathered at the rail. He stood looking at the custom officer as he
climbed down into the boat. Then he turned sharply around. “Here,
Dyce!” he roared to the mate, “send those men down into the steerage.
We’ll have half on ‘em running away in the dark next we knows on.”
The transports grumbled and growled among themselves as they were
driven below. One or two of them were disposed to joke, but the others
swore as they climbed stumblingly down the forecastle ladder.
The day had been warm, and the steerage was close and hot; a lantern
hung from the deck above, and in the dim, dusky light the men stood
crowded together. Presently one of them began singing a snatch of a
scurrilous song. Other voices joined in the refrain, and gradually the
muttering and grumbling began to change into a noisy and rebellious
turbulence. The singing grew louder and louder, breaking now and then
into a shout or yell.
Jack had crept into his berth. It was close and stuffy and it smelt
heavy and musty after the fresh air above. He felt very dull and numb,
and the noises and tumult in the close confines of the steerage stunned
and deafened him.
Suddenly Captain Butts’s voice sounded from the open scuttle of the
forecastle companion way. “What d’ ye mean below there?” he roared;
“are ye all gone drunk or crazy? Stop that there noise or I’ll put a
stopper on ye that’ll be little enough to your liking! D’ ye hear?”
A moment’s lull followed his voice; then one of the men gave a shrill
cat-call. It was, as a signal, instantly followed by a burst of yells
and whistles and jeers. Jack expected to see Captain Butts down among
them bodily, but he did not come, and for a while the transports
whistled and yelled and shouted unchecked. Presently there was the
noise of some one coming down into the forecastle beyond. It was Joe
Barkley—one of the sailors. He came into the steerage, and at his
coming an expectant lull fell upon the tumult. He carried a cocked and
loaded pistol in his hand. His face was stolid and expressionless, and
he looked neither to the right nor to the left. “What be ye going to
do, Joe,” called out one of the redemptioners. He did not answer; he
went straight up to the lantern, opened it, blew out the light, closed
it again, and then turned away without saying a word. He went into the
forecastle and blew out the lantern there, and then everything was
instantly engulfed in an impenetrable and pitchy darkness. A burst of
derisive yells followed Joe as he climbed clattering up the forecastle
ladder again, but he paid no attention to the jibes and jeers, and the
next moment Jack heard the rattling of the slide of the scuttle as it
was closed, and then the snapping of the lock. For a while after the
lights were put out the uproar was louder than ever. The men thumped
and banged and kicked. But in time the pitchy darkness quelled their
spirits in spite of themselves, and little by little the turmoil
ceased. It broke out intermittently, it quieted again, and then at last
it subsided into a muffled grumbling.
Jack lay in his berth staring into the darkness; his ears seemed to
hum and tingle with the black stillness that surrounded him. He felt
intensely wide awake as though he could never sleep again. Teeming
thoughts passed vividly through his brain. Visions of all he had seen
during the day—the sandy shore, the distant strip of pine woods, the
restless, crawling waters between—he could almost see the water. But
gradually thoughts and visions intermingled, and almost before he knew
it he had drifted off into the ocean of sleep.
CHAPTER IX
IN VIRGINIA
SINCE the capital of Virginia had been removed from Jamestown to
Williamsburg, and since the Governor’s palace and the Government House
had been established there, it had become the center of fashion in the
colony. Just now the Court was in session, and the Council sitting, and
Governor Spottiswood was holding court every Thursday.
The day was rather close and warm, but there was an unusually large
representation of the provincial aristocracy present. It was still
not late in the afternoon, but there had already been a good many
arrivals, and the gabbling sound of talking filled the assembly room.
The Governor, where he stood at the end of the room, was the center of
a group of gentlemen who were clustered about him and in his immediate
vicinity. It was almost difficult for one to get past them to pay
respect to his Excellency. A group, perhaps, would move a little
aside to make way for newly arriving ladies and gentlemen, but such
as were now coming in could only get to the Governor with a sense of
discomfort and of being crowded. In parts of the room more distant from
the Governor the talk was, perhaps, more of social matters, but near
his Excellency the knots of men discussed things relating to colonial
affairs.
Just then the talk was about a renewed trouble with pirates, who had
begun again to infest the mouth of the bay and the North Carolina
sounds.
It was just about this time that Blackbeard had broken his pardon and
was again stopping vessels sailing between Virginia and the Carolinas.
The _Pearl_ and the _Lyme_, ships of war, were then lying at Jamestown,
and some of the officers had come over to pay their respects at the
palace. Some of them were standing near listening to Councillor Page,
who was just then speaking of the latest depredations of Blackbeard.
“He was lying down at Ocracock,” said Mr. Page. “I had a sloop coming
from the Tar River with some shingle thatch for my new warehouse. Well,
the villains stopped her and came aboard of her. They overhauled her
cargo, and I do believe if they’d known ‘t was for me they would have
thrown it all overboard. But Williams said naught about that, and so
they did not know whose ‘t was. There was nothing on board to serve
the villains’ turn, and they might just as well have let the sloop
go; but no, there that wretch, Blackbeard, held her for nearly two
days, so that she might not give the alarm of his being there to any
incoming vessels. Williams—he was the captain of my sloop—Williams
said that while he was lying there under the pirates’ guns, he himself
saw Blackbeard stop and levy upon some nine vessels of different sorts,
rummaging all over their cargoes. He said it was chiefly rum and cloth
the villain was after. Williams said that ‘t was reported the villains
held every boat that came through the inlet, and would neither let them
go in nor come out, but made ‘em all lie at anchor under his guns. He
hath two armed sloops now and a crew altogether of some forty or sixty
men, and twice or thrice as many more to call upon if he chooses.”
Lieutenant Maynard, of the _Lyme_, was standing by, listening to the
talk.
“Why, zounds!” said he, “Why then do you people here in the
provinces put up with such a rascal as this Teach or Blackbeard
or what-ye-call-him? I’d blow him out of the water, were I in his
Excellency’s place. Aye, I would fit out an expedition and send it down
there and blow the villain clean out of the water and have done with
him.”
“What was that?” said the Governor, turning around smiling toward the
speaker. “Tut, tut! Lieutenant, that shows how little you men of war
know about civil affairs. How could I, as Governor of Virginia, fit out
an expedition and send it down into North Carolina. Ocracock is under
Governor Eden’s jurisdiction, not under mine, and ’tis his place to
move against pirates in the waters of his own province. They’re inland
waters, and under the jurisdiction of North Carolina.”
“Well, your Excellency,” said Lieutenant Maynard, “to be sure I know
naught about the law, and only about fighting. But if a villain stood
at my neighbor’s door and stopped my own people from coming out and
going in upon my business, and robbed them, By Zounds! your Excellency,
I would have it out with him, even if I had to chase him into my
neighbor’s house to do it.” The Governor laughed, and the little group
around him joined in the laughter. Then his Excellency turned again to
meet some new-comers who made their way toward him through the circle
surrounding him.
“I do declare,” said Mr. Dillworth, “methinks Governor Eden of North
Carolina is as bad as ever was Fletcher of New York at his worst times.
‘Twas through this Blackbeard that poor Ned Parker was murdered—the
first young gentleman of Virginia. ’Tis currently known everywhere—and
yet Eden grants the villain the King’s pardon as soon as he asks for
it. ’Tis said his Excellency—Eden, I mean—has more than once had his
share of the booty that the pirates have taken. Why, would you believe
it, the villain pirate was only last year up here at Norfolk, coming
and going as he pleased, carrying his Majesty’s pardon in his pocket
and flaunting it in the eyes of everybody. Well, if ever we catch him,
now he hath broken his pardon, ‘t will be a short enough shrift he’ll
get of it, I’ll promise him.”
“How is Colonel Parker now?” asked Mr. Page.
“He’s about well now,” said Mr. Cartwright, a cousin of Colonel
Parker’s. “I was at Marlborough last week, and his gout seems to have
fairly left him.”
“Methinks he hath never been the same man since poor Master Ned was
murdered,” said Mr. Dillworth. “I never saw anybody so broken by
trouble as he was at that time.”
“His daughter, Miss Nelly, is a great beauty, I hear,” said Lieutenant
Maynard.
“The girl is well enough,” said Mr. Cartwright briefly.
A group of some half dozen ladies and two gentlemen were gathered at
one of the open windows, into which the warm air blew widely. One
of the gentlemen was Mr. Harry Oliver, a young man about eighteen
years old. He wore his own hair curled and hanging to his shoulders,
and he put it back with his hand every now and then as he talked. He
showed his white teeth when he smiled, and his large, dark eyes moved
restlessly hither and thither.
“Yonder comes Dick Parker,” said he suddenly.
“Why, so it is,” said Miss Peggy Oliver. They all looked toward the new
comer. “Upon my word,” she continued, “he is a man I can’t abide for
the life of me. As proud, haughty a man as ever I saw. He turns me to a
block of ice whenever I am near him, and I can’t find a word to say for
myself.”
“Why, Peggy,” said Oliver, “that, then, must be why you can’t abide
him,” and thereupon the group broke into a laugh.
Mr. Richard Parker, who had just come into the room, was standing
quietly waiting to speak to the Governor. He did not try to push
his way through the circle that surrounded his Excellency, and for
a while nobody saw him. His handsome, florid face, surrounded by a
fine powdered wig, looked calmly and steadily in the direction of
the Governor. He stood quite impassive, waiting an opportunity to go
forward when he would not have to push his way through the crowd.
Presently some one saw him and spoke to the others, and they made way
for him almost as with deference. He went forward calmly and paid his
respects in a few brief words. He spoke with the Governor for a little
while, or rather the Governor spoke to him, and he replied. All the
time the Governor was speaking, Mr. Parker was looking steadily and
composedly around the room, glancing back toward his interlocutor every
now and then to reply. Presently there was a pause, and then at last
Mr. Richard Parker bowed and withdrew to a little distance.
“Why, only look at him now,” said Peggy Oliver, “even his Excellency is
not good enough for him.”
“Well, to be sure, Peggy,” said one of the elder ladies, “if Mr. Parker
is proud, he hath enough to make him proud when you think what a great
man of fashion he hath been in his day. ‘T is not every man who hath
had the luck to be a friend of the Duke of Marlborough. ‘T is a wonder
to me that he should ever have come here to the provinces, seeing what
a great man of fashion he was at home in England.”
The two gentlemen burst out laughing. “Why,” said Will Costigan, “for
that matter, ‘t was Hobson’s choice betwixt Virginia or the debtor’s
prison, madam.”
“They say old Dunmore Parker when he was alive used to send a fortune
every year to England for him to spend,” said one of the ladies.
“Tom told me t’ other day that he one time played a game of piquet
for four days on end. ‘T was with a Frenchman; a nobleman—I forget
his name—who was a prisoner at Malplaquet. Indeed it must have been
mightily hard upon him after his father died to find that all the
estate, except the Dunmore Plantation, was left to his brother.”
Just then Mr. Parker approached the group and the talk ceased. He
nodded to Oliver and then passed by and stood at a little distance
looking about him. Presently Harry Oliver edged over toward him. “How
d’ ye do, Parker,” said he.
Mr. Parker turned his eyes toward the young man with an answering “How
d’ ye do, Oliver.”
There was a moment’s pause. “That’s a prodigious handsome piece of lace
you’ve got there, Parker,” said the young man, looking at Mr. Parker’s
cravat.
“‘T is good enough,” said Mr. Parker briefly.
“Is it Flemish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t come across any such lace as that here in Virginia,” said the
young man.
“Don’t you?”
Oliver stood for a while in silence. Almost unconsciously he assumed
somewhat of the older man’s manner, standing with his hands behind him
and looking indifferently around the room. “Tell me, Parker,” said he,
“do you go down to Parrot’s to-morrow?”
Again Mr. Parker looked slowly toward him. “To Parrot’s?” said he.
“What d’ ye mean?”
“Why, have you not heard?” exclaimed the young man eagerly, glad
to have found something that promised to interest the other. “Why,
to-morrow there’s to be fought seven as fine mains as ever were pitted
in Virginia. There are to be six mains fought between the Gentlemen of
Surry and the Gentlemen of Prince George’s. Will Costigan yonder hath
brought his red cock over from t’ other side of the Bay. The bird hath
been all the talk for six months past. He offers to pit it against the
winner of all the mains. I heard say, too, that Ned Williamson purposes
to bring down a three-year horse that he hath broke, and will run it in
the afternoon, perhaps, against Tom Lawson’s Duke of Norfolk.”
Mr. Parker listened impassively. “I had not heard anything about it,”
said he; “I only came down yesterday. What time do you go down to
Parrot’s?” he asked presently.
“To-morrow morning. I’m going to stay at my uncle Tom’s over night.
Will you go along?”
“Why,” said Mr. Parker, “I hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe I will
go.”
“I start in the morning,” said Oliver, eagerly; “I’ll come over for you
if you’ll go.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Parker, “you can come over, and if I find I can,
I’ll go with you. Is not that Mistress Denham and her daughter coming
into the room?”
Then Mr. Parker moved away across the room to speak to the two Maryland
ladies.
* * * * *
It was early twilight of the next evening when Mr. Richard Parker
and Harry Oliver rode up to Parrot’s house. The house itself was the
largest of a cluster of unpainted frame buildings that stood just
beyond a clearing, overlooking the bay from a low, sandy bluff. A
number of outbuildings and sheds surrounded it to the rear. Three pine
trees stood not far from the low porch that sheltered the doorway,
and a dozen or more horses stood clustered around the shaggy resinous
trunks. Near by them lounged a group of men, black and white, talking
together with now and then the break of a laugh. They fell silent, and
some of them took off their hats as Mr. Parker and Mr. Oliver rode up
to the door and alighted. Mr. Oliver nodded in reply, but Mr. Parker
paid no attention to any one. “Where is Parrot?” asked the younger man.
“He’s inside, Mr. Oliver,” answered one of the group. “They were at
cards awhile ago, sir, and I reckon they be at it yet.”
The two gentlemen went directly into the house. Tom Parrot’s wife met
them in the hallway, where was a scattered heap of hats and riding
coats. From the room to one side came the deep sound of men talking,
and then a sudden outburst of voices. “I be mortal proud to see ye,
gentlemen,” said Mrs. Parrot, dropping them a courtesy. “Indeed, Mr.
Parker, you do honor us in coming. You’ll find Tom and the gentlemen in
yonder.”
“You go ahead, Oliver,” said Mr. Parker.
Another loud burst of voices greeted the two as they entered the room,
so dense with tobacco smoke that at first they could see nothing at
all. The room was full of the smell of rum. A great bowl of punch stood
on the side-table, and there was a continual tinkle and jingle of
glasses. Tom Parrot pushed back his chair noisily and rose to meet the
new comers. He was a little stout man with a red face. It was redder
than ever now, and bedewed with drops of sweat. He had laid aside his
wig, and his bald head glistened with moisture. He wore no coat, his
waistcoat was opened, and his breeches loosened at the waistband. He
wiped his face and head with his shirt sleeve as he spoke. “Why, Mr.
Parker,” said he, “who’d a-thought to see you! You be mighty welcome,
Mr. Parker. Won’t you take a hand at the game, sir? Tim (to the negro),
push up that there chair for Mr. Parker. Fetch a clean glass and fill
it with punch. You know all the gentlemen here, don’t you, Mr. Parker?”
And then he stopped abruptly as though struck by a sudden thought.
Mr. Richard Parker looked briefly around the table. He did know, at
least by sight, all who were there but one. That one was a stranger
to him; a tall man with a long, thick, perfectly black beard tied
into a knot with a piece of string. His thick, black hair was parted
in the middle and brushed smoothly down upon either side of his head,
and was trimmed squarely all around his neck. The locks at his temple
were plaited into long strings, that hung down in front of his ears,
in which twinkled a pair of gold ear-rings. His face was tanned by
exposure to a leathery russet, but deepened to a bricky red in his
cheeks. At the name of Parker the stranger had looked up sharply for an
instant, and then had looked down again at the cards he was in the act
of shuffling. A sudden hush as of expectancy had fallen upon the room.
Everybody was looking attentively at Mr. Parker and at the stranger.
“Who is your friend yonder, Parrot?” asked Mr. Parker, “I don’t know
him.”
“Him?” said Parrot, “why, he’s no more a friend of mine than he is a
friend of all the rest of us, Mr. Parker.”
Seeing the other’s hesitation, the stranger spoke up boldly and loudly.
“My name is Teach,” said he, “Captain Teach, and I hail from North
Carolina. It’s like enough you’ve heard of me before, as I’ve heard
of you, sir. Well, then, I’m glad to make your acquaintance, Mr.
Parker.” He reached a brown, hairy hand across the table toward Mr.
Richard Parker, looking up at him as he did so with the most impudent
coolness and steadiness. Mr. Richard Parker made no sign of having
recognized the stranger’s name. He and the pirate seemed to be the only
self-possessed men in the room. He calmly ignored the proffered hand,
but said in a perfectly equal voice: “Why, then, I am obliged to you
for telling me who you are,” and then coolly and composedly took his
seat. “What game do you play, Parrot?” said he.
“Why, Mr. Parker,” said Parrot eagerly, “’tis lanterloo, and Captain
Teach is holding the bank just now. Will you take a hand, sir?”
* * * * *
By midnight the bowl of punch had been emptied and filled, and emptied
again, and at times the uproar was stunning. Mr. Richard Parker had
laid aside his coat and unbuttoned his waistcoat. His shirt was opened
at his handsome, round throat, and the sweat trickled down his smooth
red neck. “Harkee now, Captain Teach,” he called across the table in a
loud, rather hoarse, voice, “I know very well who you are, you bloody
villain! You’re a bloody pirate, d’ ye hear?”
The other glowered with tipsy truculence back at him for a moment or
two in silence. “You can’t prove me pirate, Mr. Dick Parker,” said he
at last, “and no man can prove me pirate now. Maybe I am a pirate and
maybe I’m none, but how can you prove I’m a pirate?”
Mr. Parker’s flaming face did not change a shade in the heavy
haughtiness of its expression. “A pirate you are,” said he, “and what’s
more, you’re at your tricks again. I’ve heard all about you, and I
know all about you, d’ ye see? Well, you’ve been losing at your cards
all night, Mr. Pirate. You may do well enough in your villainy afloat,
stabbing poor coasting captains and murdering young gentlemen of blood
like my nephew Ned, but what a poor figure do you make ashore when you
try your luck with the gentlemen at play. See what I’ve won of you!
Look ‘ee now, sirrah, I’ll play you a game of hazard man to man, and
clear you out o’ all you have left if you dare to play me.”
“Dare! Why should I not dare to play you, Dick Parker! D’ye think I’m
afeard of you? I’ll play you as long as ye can see. Why not?”
Harry Oliver pushed back his chair and rose. He came rather unsteadily
to where Mr. Parker sat. “Don’t do it, Dick,” said he, thickly. “Don’t
you play that man. He’s a bloody villain, Dick, and ’tisn’t fit you
should play him. D’ye forget what everybody knows, and that he had a
hand in Ned’s death?”
“Sit down, Oliver!” the other replied, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“Here, Parrot, clear the table of these cards and hand the dice over
here. There’s your cup, you villain!” and he tossed the box across the
table. “And now set your stakes and throw your cast.”
Everybody gathered around the two to watch the game, and for a while
nothing was heard but the rattle and fall of the dice. At first the
luck ran all in Mr. Parker’s favor, and Teach’s face grew blacker and
blacker. Then suddenly fortune changed, and in a little while the
winner had lost everything he had gained. Again and again he threw, and
again and again he lost. He played more and more desperately, and his
opponent grinned at every cast.
“Don’t play any more, Parker!” cried Harry Oliver. “Your luck’s against
you, and you’ve lost too much already.” But the other only pushed him
aside with his elbow, and gathered up the dice with trembling fingers.
At last he dashed down the dice and box furiously, and thereupon
Captain Teach burst out laughing. “And have ye had enough?” he exulted
hoarsely.
Mr. Parker stared haughtily at him without deigning any reply. “Did
you order out the horses, Oliver?” he said, pushing back his chair and
rising.
“Yes, I did. They’re waiting outside now, and have been this hour.”
“Then, come along, let us go; ’tis nearly morning now.”
The moon, nearing its last quarter, hung in the east like a flattened
globe of white light. The air was chill and smelt rank of marsh and
woodland. The mocking birds were singing in ceaseless medley from the
inky-black thickets beyond. Blackbeard followed the two gentlemen as
they came out of the house. “And when may I look for you to settle your
losses, Mr. Parker?” said he.
“I’ll talk with you to-morrow,” said Mr. Parker, as he set his foot in
the stirrup.
“But you’ll give me some written obligation of some sort, won’t you?”
“I tell you, sirrah, I’ll talk with you to-morrow. Do you hear me?
To-morrow.” And then the two gentlemen rode away into the night,
leaving the other standing looking after them.
CHAPTER X
INTO BONDAGE
IT was the morning after the arrival at Yorktown. Jack was awake and
up on deck bright and early. The sun had just risen upon a clear
and cloudless day, and the brisk, fresh wind drove the crisp waves
splashing against the brig as she rode at anchor. The foliage of the
trees on shore whitened to the breeze, and the smoke blew sharply
away here and there from some tall brick chimney. The town looked
fresh and strangely new in the brightness of the morning. Three of
the vessels that had lain in the harbor over night were getting under
way. The yo-hoeing of the sailors, and the creaking and rattling of
block and tackle, as the sails rose higher and higher apeak, sounded
sharp and clear across the water. One large schooner, heeling over
before the wind, slid swiftly and silently past the _Arundel_. Three or
four sailors, clustered along the rail, were looking over toward the
_Arundel_ as they passed the brig, but the man at the helm—he wore a
red woolen monteray cap—gazed out steadily ahead, stooping a little so
as to see under the boom of the mainsail.
Several of the redemptioners had come up on deck; one or two of them,
doubtless remembering the tumult and disorder of the night before, wore
a hang-dog doubtful look. Suddenly Jack saw the mate coming toward them
from aft. “What are ye doing up here on deck!” he called out. “Weren’t
you ordered below last night? Very well then, you go down below now,
and don’t ye come up till you’re sent for; d’ye hear?” The men, though
sullen and lowering, had no thought of disobeying the mate’s orders,
and Jack, with the others, climbed down the ladder into the forecastle
again.
It was well toward the middle of the day, and Jack was lounging in his
berth, when Dred suddenly appeared in the steerage. He stood looking
silently around for a moment or two, and then, seeing Jack, beckoned
to him. Dred did not speak until they were out in the forecastle. “The
agent’s come from shore to take you all off, lad,” said he; “he’s with
Captain Butts in the cabin now, and in a minute or two you’ll be sent
for.”
“To take us ashore?” said Jack. A sudden, keen pang gripped his heart,
followed instantly by an utter falling away of the spirits, that left
him almost physically weak. “To take us ashore?” Had the time then come
at last?
“Aye,” said Dred, “ye’ve got to go ashore now, lad. But sit you down
there a bit,” and he pointed to a sea-chest. “I’ve a notion to try
and tidy ye up a bit. I don’t choose to have ye looking like they
riff-raff,” and he jerked his head toward the steerage. “D’ye see, we
two ha’ been mates, ha’n’t we?” He had taken out his gunny-bag, and he
now brought out of it his needle and thread. He looked up at Jack from
under his brows and then looked away again. Jack did not return the
look but sat with dry and choking throat, his breath coming hot and
heavy from him. “Well, then,” said Dred, “seeing as we’re messmates, I
won’t have ye going ashore looking like nothing but trash. Give me your
coat and waistcoat.” He had threaded his needle and waxed the thread
deftly. Jack stripped off his coat and waistcoat, and without a word
Dred began mending the frayed and tattered edges of the waistcoat. Jack
sat silently in his shirt-sleeves watching him. He knew that Dred was
talking for the sake of talking. He felt almost stifled with his hot
and labored breathing as he sat watching the other’s busy fingers.
“There, that looks betterish,” said Dred, holding the waistcoat off
and looking at it, still carefully avoiding Jack’s eyes as he did so.
“Here, take it,” and he tossed it to Jack. “And now for the coat. I be
a wonderful man at mending clothes, ben’t I? Lord! what a hole is here,
to be sure.” There was a long time of silence, Dred busily sewing away
at the coat. “There,” said he at last, “what d’ ye think of that for a
bit of mending? Well, well, lad, the time comes to all on us to part
some time, so what matters it soon or late? Harkee, Jack; don’t you go
making trouble for yourself. You be a good boy, and you’ll be treated
well enough, I dare say. You’re mightily young yet, and five or six
year won’t matter so much to you, and then think o’ what a deal you’ll
see in that time.” He was talking very briskly, meantime putting away
the needle and thread neatly.
Five years! Jack stood watching Dred fumbling in his gunny-bag.
Presently he fetched out a pair of yarn stockings. “Here, put these
on,” said he, “the ones you got be all full of holes. Give ‘em to me.”
Jack did not dare to trust himself to speak. He began dumbly changing
his stockings, Dred standing over him.
Suddenly the boatswain appeared at the companion-way of the forecastle,
and piped all hands up on deck. Jack and Dred went up together. Captain
Butts and the agent were standing waiting for the men, the agent
holding a little packet of papers in his hand. Jack, in a glance, saw
that the agent was a tall, lean man dressed in rusty black, wearing a
long, black coat, and with the flaps of his hat tied up with leather
thongs. His lips moved as he counted the redemptioners, one by one, as
they came up out of the companion-way and were formed in a line before
him by the boatswain. A great, flat boat, rowed by four negroes and
with a white man in the stern, had been made fast to the side of the
brig. “Nineteen, twenty—that’s all of ‘em, Captain,”—the agent had
counted Jack in with the others,—“and very lucky you’ve been with ‘em.
Now, Bo’s’n, get ‘em down as soon as you can.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the boatswain; and then to the men, “Now then,
look alive, my hearties, and don’t take all day about it!”
Then, suddenly, Jack went straight up to where the agent stood. “Sir,”
said he, hoarsely, “I have been ill-used. I was knocked down and
kidnapped, and brought away from home against my will. Will you not
listen to me and hear what I have to say?”
“Hold your noise!” roared the captain.
“No, I won’t, neither,” said Jack. He did not expect much, indeed he
felt that he had no hope of escape, but still the effort was worth
making. He stood chokingly looking at the agent, and he felt that his
heart was beating very heavily within him.
“I don’t know anything about what you say,” said the agent. “The bill
calls for twenty men shipped from Southampton, and your name must be
among them. What’s your name?”
“Jack Ballister.”
“Yes, here ’tis—John Ballister—shipped for five years. If there is
something wrong, you’ll have to hold Captain Butts and Mr. Hezekiah
Tipton to answer. I’m only an agent, and ’tis none of my business.”
“I wish I had ye for a couple of days longer,” said Captain Butts, “I’d
answer ye, I would. I’d put my answer upon your back, I would, afore I
let ye go.”
“But Master Hezekiah Tipton is my own uncle,” said Jack.
“I don’t know anything about that,” said the agent, “’Tis none of my
business.”
Jack did not say another word. He crossed the deck, hardly knowing
what he was doing, and climbed down into the boat, where the other
transports were already seating themselves. A moment or two, and the
agent followed, and then immediately the boat was cast loose. As it
pulled away toward the shore, Jack gave one look back across the
widening stretch of water. It was almost like a dream; it seemed to
him as though that which was passing was not really happening to him.
Dred’s red handkerchief gleamed like a flame against the blue sky as he
stood on the rail looking after the departing boat. Then Jack turned
his face quickly away. He could not trust himself to look again, lest
he should break down before all the boat-full of men.
A little scattered cluster of men stood upon the wharf waiting for the
flat boat as it drew nearer and nearer, and when it struck the piling
with a bump half a dozen willing hands caught the line that was thrown
them and made it fast. Jack scrambled with the others to the wharf
under the curious gaze of those who stood looking on. They were formed
into a line, two by two, and then marched down the wharf toward the
shore. The loungers followed them scatteringly. Beyond the wharf they
crossed a narrow strip of beach, and climbed a sloping, sandy road
cut through the high bluff. At the crest they came out upon a broad,
grassy street, upon which fronted the straggling houses, one or two
built of brick, but most of them unpainted frame-structures, with tall,
sharp-pointed roofs and outside chimneys of brick. A curious smoky
smell pervaded the air. People stood at their doors looking at Jack and
his companions as they marched two by two down the center of the dusty
street.
So at last they reached and were halted in front of a large brick
warehouse. Then the agent opened the door, and they entered. Within it
was perfectly empty, and smelt damp and earthy from disuse. The board
floor was sunken unevenly, and the plaster was broken from the walls
here and there in great patches. The two windows, which looked upon the
rear of the adjoining houses, were barred across with iron. Jack heard
his companions talking together. “Well, Jack,” said Sim Tucker, “here
we be at last.”
Jack sometimes wondered whether the two days that followed passed
very quickly or very slowly. Food was sent over three times a day to
the warehouse by the agent, and twice a day all hands were allowed to
walk about for a few minutes in a little yard back of the building. It
seemed to him that he slept nearly all the rest of the time, except
now and then when he stood on an empty box looking out of one of the
windows. The windows overlooked a yard and a shed, beyond the roof of
which was a cluster of trees, and beyond that again two tall chimneys.
Nearly always there were pigeons on the roof of the shed. Now and then
there was the noise of their clapping flight, but the gurgling coo
of the strutting males sounded almost continuously through the warm
silence.
* * * * *
About eleven o’clock of the third day, they were brought out of the
storehouse, formed into line in front of the building, and then
marched away in the hot sun down the street about a hundred yards to
the custom-house. Jack saw a lounging, scattered crowd of men there
gathered in a little group, and he guessed that that was where they
were to be sold.
The agent and the auctioneer stood by a horse-block talking together
in low tones as the man who had marched Jack and the others down from
the warehouse formed them in line against the wall of the building. The
agent held a slip of paper in his hand, which he referred to every now
and then. At last the auctioneer mounted upon the horse-block.
[Illustration: “‘NOW THEN, GENTLEMEN, HOW MUCH DO YOU BID FOR THIS
BOY?’ SAID THE AUCTIONEER.”]
“Gentlemen,” Jack heard him say, “I have now to offer as fine a lot of
servants as hath ever been brought to Virginia. There be only twenty,
gentlemen, but every one choice and desirable. Which is the first one
you have upon your list, Mr. Quillen?” said he, turning to the agent.
The agent referred to a slip of paper he held in his hand. “Sam
Dawson,” he called out in a loud voice. “Step out, Sam Dawson!” and in
answer to the summons a big, lumbering man, with a heavy brow and dull
face, stepped out from the line and stood beside the horse-block.
“This is Sam Dawson, gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, addressing the
crowd. “He hath no trade, but he is a first-rate, healthy fellow and
well fitted for the tobacco fields. He is to be sold for five years.”
“They’re all to be sold for five years,” said the agent.
“You have heard, gentlemen,” said the auctioneer—“they’re all to be
sold for five years. This is a fine big fellow. How much have I bid
for him? How much? Ten pounds is bid for his time—ten pounds is bid,
gentlemen! I have ten pounds. Now I have twelve pounds! Now I have
fifteen pounds!”
In a minute the price had run up to twenty pounds, and then a voice
said quietly: “I will give you twenty-five pounds for the man.”
“Mr. Simms bids twenty-five pounds for the man’s time in behalf of
Colonel Birchall Parker,” said the salesman. “Have I any more bids for
him?” But Mr. Simms’s bid seemed to close the sale, for no one appeared
to care to bid against him.
Jack had been so dazed and bewildered by coming out from the dark and
chill warehouse into the sunlight and life, that he had scarcely
noticed anything very particularly. Now he looked up at the man who
had bought Sam Dawson’s time, and saw that he was a stout, red-faced,
plain-looking man, dressed very handsomely in snuff-colored clothes. As
Jack wondered who he was, another man was called out from the line of
servants. Again the bids had run up to ten or twelve pounds, and then
again Mr. Simms made a bid of twenty-five pounds, and once more no one
bid against him. Another man and another man were sold, and then Jack
heard his own name.
“Jack Ballister!” called the agent. “Stand out, boy, and be quick about
it!” and Jack mechanically advanced from the others and took his place
beside the block, looking around him, as he did so, at the circle of
faces fronting him and all staring at him. His mouth felt very dry,
and his heart was beating and pounding heavily. “Here is a fine, good
boy, gentlemen,” said the salesman. “He is only sixteen years old, but
he will do well as a serving or waiting-man in some gentleman’s house
who hath need of such. He hath education, and reads and writes freely.
Also, as you may see for yourselves, gentlemen, he is strong and well
built. A lively boy, gentlemen—a good, lively boy! Come, boy, run to
yonder post and back, and show the gentlemen how brisk ye be.”
Jack, although he heard the words, looked dumbly at the speaker. “D’ye
hear me!” said the agent. “Do as I bid ye; run to yonder post and back!”
Then Jack did so. It seemed to him as though he were running in a
nightmare. As he returned to his place he heard the agent saying: “The
boy is strong, but doth not show himself off as well as he might. But
he is a good boy, as you may see for yourselves.” The next thing he
knew was that Mr. Simms had bought him for twenty pounds.
CHAPTER XI
MARLBOROUGH
MARLBOROUGH was the house of Colonel Birchall Parker. It was in its
day, perhaps, the finest house in Virginia, not even excepting the
Governor’s palace at Williamsburgh. It stood upon the summit of a slope
of the shore rising up from the banks of the James River. The trees
in front nearly hid the house from the river as you passed, but the
chimneys and the roof stood up above the foliage, and you caught a
glimpse of the brick façade, and of the elaborate doorway, through an
opening in the trees, where the path led up from the landing-place to
the hall door. The main house was a large two-storied building capped
by a tall, steep roof. From the center building long wings reached out
to either side, terminating at each end in a smaller building or office
standing at right angles to its wing, and, together with the main
house, inclosing on three sides a rather shaggy, grassy lawn. From the
front you saw nothing of the servants’ quarters or outbuildings (which
were around to the rear of the house), but only the imposing façade
with its wings and offices.
Now it was early morning; Colonel Birchall Parker had arisen, and
his servant was shaving him. He sat by the open window in his
dressing-gown, and with slippers on his feet. His wig, a voluminous
mass of finely curled black hair, hung from the block ready for him
to put on. The sunlight came in at the open window, the warm mellow
breeze just stirring the linen curtains drawn back to either side and
bringing with it the multitudinous sounds of singing birds from the
thickets beyond the garden. The bed-clothes were thrown off from a
mountainously high bed, and the wooden steps, down which Colonel Parker
had a little while before descended from his couch to the bare floor,
were still standing beside the curtained bedstead. The room had all the
confused look of having just been slept in.
Colonel Parker held the basin under his chin while the man shaved
him. He had a large, benevolent face, the smooth double chin just now
covered with a white mass of soap-suds. As he moved his face a little
to one side to receive the razor he glanced out of the open window. “I
see the schooner is come back again, Robin,” said he.
“Yes, your honor,” said the man, “it came back last night.”
“Were there any letters?”
“I don’t know, your honor; the schooner came in about midnight, and Mr.
Simms is not about yet.” The man wiped the razor as he spoke and began
whetting it to a keener edge. “Mr. Richard came up with the schooner,
your honor,” said he.
“Did he?”
“Yes, your honor, and Mr. Simms fetched up a lot of new servants with
him. They’re quartered over in the empty store-house now. Will your
honor turn your face a little this way?”
The noises of newly awakened life were sounding clear and distinct
through the uncarpeted wainscoted spaces of the house—the opening and
shutting of doors, the sound of voices, and now and then a break of
laughter.
The great hall and the side rooms opening upon it, when Colonel Parker
came down-stairs, were full of that singularly wide, cool, new look
that the beginning of the morning always brings to accustomed scenes.
Mr. Richard Parker, who had been down from his room some time, was
standing outside upon the steps in the fresh, open air. He turned as
Colonel Parker came out of the doorway. “Well, brother Richard,” said
Colonel Parker, “I am glad to see you; I hope you are well?”
“Thank you, sir,” said the other, bowing, but without any change in his
expression. “I hope you are in good health, sir?”
“Why, yes,” said Colonel Parker, “I believe I have naught to complain
of now.” He came out further upon the steps, and stood at a little
distance, with his hands clasped behind him, looking now up into the
sky, now down the vista between the trees and across the river.
There was a sound of fresh young voices echoing through the upper hall,
then the noise of laughter, and presently the sound of rapid feet
running down the uncarpeted stairway. Then Eleanor Parker burst out of
the house in a gale, caught her father by the coat, and standing on her
tip-toes, kissed both of his cheeks in rapid succession.
Two young girl visitors and a young man of sixteen or seventeen
followed her out of the house, the girls demurely, the young man with
somewhat of diffidence in the presence of Mr. Richard Parker.
“My dear,” said Colonel Parker, “do you not then see your uncle?”
“Why, to be sure I do,” said she, “but how could you expect me to see
anybody until I had first kissed you. How do you do, Uncle Richard?”
and she offered him her cheek to kiss.
Mr. Richard Parker smiled, but, as he always did, as though with an
effort. “Why, zounds, Nell!” said he, “sure you grow prettier every
day; how long do you suppose ’twill be before you set all the gentlemen
in the colony by the ears? If I were only as young as Rodney, yonder,
I’d be almost sorry to be your uncle, except I would then not have the
right to kiss your cheek as I have just done.”
The young girl blushed and laughed, with a flash of her eyes and a
sparkle of white teeth between her red lips. “Why, Uncle Richard,” said
she, “and in that case, if you were as handsome a man as you are now, I
too would be sorry to have you for nothing better than an uncle.”
Just then a negro appeared at the door and announced that breakfast was
ready, and they all went into the house.
Mistress Parker, or Madam Parker, as she was generally called, followed
by her negro maid carrying a cushion, met them as they entered the
hall. The three younger gentlemen bowed profoundly, and Madam Parker
sank almost to the floor in a courtesy equally elaborate.
She was a thin little woman, very nervous and quick in her movements.
She had a fine, sensitive face, and, like her daughter, very dark eyes,
only they were quick and brilliant, and not soft and rich like those of
the young girl.
The morning was very warm, and so, after breakfast was over, the
negroes carried chairs out upon the lawn under the shade of the trees
at some little distance from the house. The wide red-brick front
of the building looked down upon them where they sat, the elder
gentlemen smoking each a long clay pipe of tobacco, while Madam
Parker sat with them talking intermittently. The young people chatted
together in subdued voices at a little distance, with now and then a
half-suppressed break of laughter.
“I hear, brother Richard,” said Colonel Parker, “that Simms brought up
a lot of servants from Yorktown.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Parker, “there were about twenty altogether, I believe.
And that brings a matter into my mind. There was one young fellow I
would like very much to have if you can spare him to me—a boy of about
sixteen or seventeen. I have no house-servant since Tim died, and so,
if you have a mind to part with this lad, sir, I’d like mightily well
to have him.”
“Why, brother Richard,” said Colonel Parker, “if Simms hath no use for
the boy I see no reason why you should not have him. What hath Simms
done with him?”
“He is with the other servants over at the old store-house, I believe,
sir; Simms had them sent there last night. May I send for the lad, that
you may see him?”
“I should be glad to see him,” said Colonel Parker.
* * * * *
Jack had come up from Yorktown packed with the other servants in the
hold of the schooner. The hatch was tilted to admit some light and
air, but he could see nothing of whither he was being taken, and his
only sense of motion was in the slant of the vessel, the wind, and the
rippling gurgle of the water alongside.
He had been wakened from a deep sleep to be marched past a clustering
group of darkly black trees, across a grassy stretch of lawn, in the
silent and profoundly starry night, to a brick building into which he
and his companions were locked, as they had been locked in the old
warehouse at Yorktown.
Now, as he followed the negro through the warm, bright sunlight, he
gazed about him, half bewildered with the newness of everything,
yet with an intense and vivid interest. He had seen really nothing
of Marlborough as he had been marched up from the landing place at
midnight with his companions the night before. As the negro led him
around the end of the building, he gazed up curiously at the wide brick
front. Then he saw that there was a party of ladies and gentlemen
sitting in the shade across the lawn. He followed the negro as the
other led him straight toward the group, and then he halted at a little
distance, not knowing just what was expected of him.
Mr. Richard Parker beckoned to him. “Come hither, boy,” said he, “this
gentleman wants to see you.” Jack obeyed, trying not to appear ungainly
or uncouth in his movements, and feeling that he did not know just how
to succeed.
“Look up, boy; hold up your head,” said a gentleman whom he at once
knew to be the great Colonel Parker of whom he had heard—a large,
stout, noble-looking gentleman, with a broad, smooth chin and a diamond
solitaire pinned in the cravat at his throat. As Jack obeyed he felt
rather than saw that a pretty young lady was standing behind the
gentleman’s chair, looking at him with large, dark eyes. “Where did you
come from?” asked the gentleman.
Jack, with the gaze of everybody upon him, felt shy of the sound of his
own voice. “I came from Southampton,” said he.
“Speak up, boy, speak up,” said the gentleman.
“I came from Southampton,” said Jack again, and this time it seemed to
him that his voice was very loud indeed.
“From Southampton, hey?” said the gentleman. He looked at Jack very
critically for a while in silence. “Well, brother Richard,” said he at
last, “’tis indeed a well-looking lad, and if Simms hath no special use
for him I will let you have him. How long is he bound for?”
“Five years,” said Mr. Parker. “They were all bound for five years. I
spoke to Simms about him yesterday, and he said he could spare him.
Simms gave twenty pounds for him, and I will be willing and glad enough
to pay you that for him.”
“Tut, tut, brother Richard,” said Colonel Parker, “don’t speak to me of
paying for him; indeed, I give him to you very willingly.”
“Then, indeed, sir, I am very much obliged to you. You may go
now, boy.” Jack hesitated for a moment, not knowing clearly if he
understood. “You may go, I said,” said Mr. Richard Parker again. And
then Jack went away, still accompanied by the negro.
The gloomy interior of the store-house struck chill upon him as he
reëntered it from the brightness and heat outside, and once more he
was conscious of the dampness and all-pervading earthy smell. The
transports, huddled together, were dull and silent. One or two of them
were smoking, others lay sleeping heavily, others sat crouching or
leaning against the wall doing nothing—perfectly inert. They hardly
looked up as Jack entered.
CHAPTER XII
DOWN THE RIVER
IT was the next morning that the door of the store-house in which
Jack and his companions were confined was suddenly opened by a white
man. He was a roughly-dressed fellow, with a shaggy beard and with
silver ear-rings in his ears. “Where’s that there boy of Mr. Richard
Parker’s?” said he.
“D’ ye mean me?” said Jack, “I am the only boy here.”
“Why, then, if you are the only boy here, you must be the one,” said
the man with a grin. “Come along with me,” he added, “and be quick
about it.”
“Am I going for good and all?” asked Jack.
“I reckon ye be.”
The other redemptioners had roused themselves somewhat at the coming of
the man and were listening. “Good-by, Jack,” said one of them, as he
was about to go, and the others took up the words: “Good-by—good-by,
Jack.” “Good-by,” said Jack. He shook hands with them all, and then he
and the man went out into the bright sunlight.
His conductor led the way down back of the great house, and past a
clustered group of cabins, in front of which a number of negro children
played like monkeys, half naked and bareheaded, who stopped their
antics and stood in the sun, and watched Jack as he passed, while some
negro women came to the doors and stood also watching him.
“Won’t you tell me where I’m going to be taken?” said Jack, quickening
his steps so as to come up alongside of his conductor.
“You’re going with Mr. Richard Parker,” said the man. “I reckon he’ll
be taking you down to the Roost with him.”
“The Roost?” said Jack, “and where is the Roost?”
“Why, the Roost is Mr. Parker’s house. It’s some thirty or forty mile
down the river.”
As they were speaking they had come out past a group of trees at the
end of the great house, and upon the edge of the slope. From where
they were they looked down to the shore of the river, and upon a large
flat-boat with a great square sail that lay at the landing place, a rod
or so away. There was a pile of bags, and a lot of boxes and bundles of
various sorts lying upon the wharf in the sun. Three or four negro men
were slowly and indolently carrying the bags aboard the flat-boat.
“Are we going down the river in that boat?” asked Jack, as he descended
the slope at the heels of the other.
“Yes,” said the man briefly.
On the bank at the end of the wharf was a square brick building, in the
shade of which stood Mr. Simms and Mr. Parker, the latter smoking a
cigarro. Mr. Simms held in his hand a slip of paper, upon which he kept
the tally of the bags as they were carried aboard. Jack went out along
the wharf, watching the negro men at work, until Mr. Simms called out:
“Get aboard the boat, young man.” Thereupon he stepped into the boat,
climbing over the seats to the bow, where he settled himself easily
upon some bags of meal, and whence he watched the slow loading of the
boat.
At last everything was taken aboard. “We’re all ready now, Mr. Simms,”
called out the man who had brought Jack down from the storehouse.
Mr. Parker and Mr. Simms came down the wharf together. Mr. Parker
stepped aboard the scow, and immediately it was cast loose and pushed
off from the landing.
“Good-by, Mr. Parker, sir,” called Mr. Simms across the widening
stretch of water, and he lifted his hat as he spoke. Mr. Parker nodded
a brief reply. The boat drifted farther and farther away with the
sweeping stream as the negro rowers settled themselves in their places,
and Mr. Simms still stood on the wharf looking after them. Then the
oars creaked in the rowlocks and the head of the boat came slowly
around in the direction intended. Jack, lying upon and amid the meal
bags, looked out astern. Before him were the naked, sinewy backs of
the eight negro oarsmen, and away in the stern sat the white man—he
was the overseer of the North Plantation—and Mr. Parker, who was just
lighting a fresh cigarro. Presently the oars sounded with a ceaseless
chug, chug, in the rowlocks, and then the overseer left the tiller for
a moment and came forward and trimmed the square, brown sail, that now
swelled out smooth and round with the sweep of the wind. The rugged,
wooded shores crept slowly past them, and the now distant wharf and
brick buildings, and the long front of the great house perched upon the
slope, dropped further and further astern. Then the flat-boat crept
around the bend of the river, and house and wharf were shut off by an
intervening point of land.
Jack could not but feel the keen novelty of it all. The sky was warm
and clear. The bright surface of the water, driven by the breeze,
danced and sparkled in the drifting sunlight. It was impossible that
he should not feel a thrill of interest that was like delight in the
newness of everything.
About noon the overseer brought out a hamper-like basket, which he
opened, and from which he took a plentiful supply of food. A couple of
cold roast potatoes, a great lump of Indian-corn bread, and a thick
slice of ham were passed forward to Jack. It seemed to him that he had
never tasted anything so good.
After he had finished his meal he felt very sleepy. He curled himself
down upon the bags in the sunlight, and presently dozed off.
The afternoon sun was slanting when he was aroused by a thumping
and bumping and a stir on board. He opened his eyes, and sat up to
see that the boat had again stopped at a landing-place. It was a
straggling, uneven wharf, at the end of which, upon the shore, was an
open shed. Thence a rough and rugged road ran up the steep bluff bank,
and then turned away into the woody wilderness beyond. A wagon with a
nondescript team of oxen and mules, and half a dozen men, black and
white, were waiting beside the shed at the end of the wharf for the
coming of the flat-boat.
Then followed the unloading of the boat.
Mr. Parker had gone ashore, and Jack could see him and the overseer
talking together and inspecting a small boat that lay pulled up from
the water upon a little strip of sandy beach. Jack himself climbed out
from the boat upon the wharf, where he walked up and down, stretching
himself and watching those at work. Presently he heard some one
calling, “Where’s that young fellow? Hi, you, come here!”
Then Jack saw that they had made ready the smaller boat at which they
had been looking, and had got the sail hoisted upon it; it flapped and
beat in the wind. A little group stood about it, and Jack saw that they
were waiting for him. He ran along the wharf, and jumped down from it
to the little strip of sandy beach. They were in the act of pushing
off the boat when he climbed aboard. As it slid off into the water Mr.
Parker stepped into it. Two men ran splashing through the water and
pushed it off, and as it reached the deeper water, one of them jumped
in over the stern with a dripping splash of his bare feet, catching the
tiller and trimming the sail as he did so, and bringing the bow of the
boat around before the wind. Then there was a gurgling ripple of water
under the bows as the wind filled the sail more strongly, and presently
the wharf and the flat-boat dropped rapidly astern, and once more Jack
was sailing down the river, while wooded shores and high bluff banks,
alternating one another, drifted by, and were dropped away behind.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ROOST
THE sun had set, and the dusk was falling rapidly. The boat was running
toward a precipitous bluff shore, above the crest of which, and some
forty or fifty yards inland, loomed the indistinct form of a house,
the two tall chimneys standing out sharply against the fading sky.
There was a dark mass of trees on the one side, and what appeared to
be a cluster of huts on the other. The barking of two or three dogs
sounded distantly across the water, and a dim light shone from one of
the windows. The boat drew nearer and nearer to the dark shore; then at
last, with a grinding jar of the keel upon the beach, the journey was
ended.
A flight of high, ladder-like steps reached from the sandy beach to the
summit of the bluff. Jack followed Mr. Parker up this stairway, leaving
the man who had brought them to furl and tie the sail. Excepting the
barking of dogs and the light in the window, there was at first no sign
of life about the place as they approached. Then suddenly there was a
pause in the dogs’ barking; then a renewed clamorous burst from half a
dozen throats at once. Suddenly the light in the room began to flicker
and move, and Jack could see a number of dim forms come around the end
of the house. The next minute a wide door was opened, and the figure
of a woman appeared, holding a candle above her head. Instantly half a
dozen hounds burst out of the house from behind her and came rushing
down toward Jack and Mr. Parker, barking and baying.
Mr. Parker paid no attention to the dogs, but led the way directly up
the flight of tall, steep steps and into the hallway. He nodded to the
woman as he passed, speaking briefly to her, and calling her Peggy.
She was rather a handsome woman, with a broad face and black hair and
eyes. She stood aside and the master passed her into the house, Jack
following close at his heels. “Here are two letters for you,” said
the woman, and she gave them to him from the table; and Mr. Parker,
without laying aside his hat, took them, tore one of them open and
began reading it by the light of the candle which she held for him. As
he read, his eyebrows drew together into a knot of a frown, and his
handsome florid face lowered.
Meantime Jack stood gazing about him at the large, barren hallway
barely lit by the light of the candle. At the further end he could just
distinguish the dim form of a broad bare, stairway leading up to the
floor above. It seemed to be very cheerless, and he felt strange and
lonely in the dark, gloomy space. Several negroes were standing just
outside of the door, looking in; he could see their forms dimly in the
darkness. They appeared weird and unreal, with their black faces and
shining teeth.
Suddenly Mr. Parker looked up from the letter he was reading and bade
the woman, Peggy, to take Jack out to the kitchen and to give him
something to eat.
When Jack entered the kitchen he found the man who had brought him and
Mr. Parker down the river in the boat, sitting at the table eating,
while a barefoot negro woman, with necklace and bracelets of blue glass
beads, waited upon him. The man looked up and welcomed Jack as he
came in, and then almost immediately began asking him questions about
England. The feeling of loneliness and depression was settling more
and more heavily upon Jack’s spirits, and he replied vaguely hardly
knowing what were the questions asked him, or what he said in answer.
After he had ended his supper, he went and stood in the doorway,
looking out into the starlit night. He thought he saw the dim forms
of human figures moving about in the gloom, and the black outlines of
rude buildings. The warm darkness was full of the ceaseless whispering
noises of night, broken now and then by the sudden sound of loud
gabbling negro voices. The mockingbirds were singing with intermittent
melody from the dark stillness of the distant woods. His feeling of
depression seemed to weigh upon Jack’s soul like a leaden weight. He
could almost have cried in his loneliness and homesickness.
* * * * *
When Jack woke at the dawning of the next day, in the little bare
room at the end of the upper hall where he slept within easy call
of Mr. Parker’s voice, he did not at first know where he was. Then
instantly came recollection, and with it a keen longing to see his new
surroundings. He arose, dressed hastily, and went down-stairs and out
of doors. Everything looked very different in the wide clear light of
early morning. The buildings he had seen in the blackness of the night
before resolved into a clustered jumble of negro huts,—some of frame,
some of wattled sticks,—about which moved the wild figures of the
half-savage black men, women, and children.
Jack walked out into the open yard, and turned and looked back at the
house.
It was a great rambling frame structure, weather-beaten and gray.
Several of the windows were open, and out of one of them hung a
patchwork bed-coverlet, moving lazily now and then in the wind. A thin
wreath of smoke curled away from one of the chimneys into the blue
air. Everything looked very fresh and keen in the bright light of the
morning.
A lot of negro children had been playing about the huts, some of them
entirely naked. They ceased their play and stood staring at Jack as
he came out into the open yard, and a negro lad of about his own age,
who was standing in the door of a wattled hut at a little distance,
came over and spoke to him. The black boy was lean and lanky, with
over-grown, spider-like legs and arms. He had a little round, nut-like
head covered with a close felt of wool. “Hi, boy!” he said, when he had
come up close to Jack, “what your name?”
“My name’s Jack Ballister,” said Jack; “what’s your name?”
“My name Little Coffee,” and the negro boy grinned with a flash of his
white teeth.
“Little Coffee! Why, to be sure, that’s a very queer name for any
Christian soul to have,” said Jack.
The negro boy’s grin disappeared into quick darkness. “My name no
queer,” he said, with a sudden childish sullenness. “My name Little
Coffee all right. My fader Big Coffee—I Little Coffee.”
“Well,” said Jack, “I never heard of anybody named Coffee in all my
life before.”
“Where you come from?” asked the negro boy.
“I came from England,” said Jack; “we drink coffee there; we don’t give
Coffee as a name to Christian souls. Where do you come from, Coffee?”
“Me come nowhere,” said Coffee, with a returning grin. “Me born here in
yan house.”
Beyond the row of negro huts was a small wooden cabin of a better
appearance than the others. Suddenly a white man came out of the door
of this hut, stood looking for a moment, and then walked forward
toward Jack. It was Dennis, the overseer. He—unless Peggy Pitcher
be excepted—became almost the most intimate friend Jack had for the
two months or so that he lived at the Roost; and in this curiously
strange fragment of his life, perhaps the most vivid recollections that
remained with him in his after memory were of intervals of time spent
in Dennis’s hut; of the great black, sooty fireplace; of the shelf-like
floor at the further end of the cabin, where was the dim form of the
bed with the bright coverlet; of Dennis’s negro wife, pattering about
the earthen floor in her bare feet, her scant red petticoat glowing
like a flame of fire in the shadowy interior; of Dennis himself,
crouching over the smoldering ashes, smoking his Indian clay pipe of
tobacco. As Dennis now approached, Jack thought that he had hardly ever
seen a stranger-looking figure, for a pair of gold ear-rings twinkled
in his ears, a broad hat of woven grass shaded his face, he wore a pair
of loose white cotton drawers, and a red beard covered his cheeks and
chin and throat. “I do suppose,” said Dennis, when he had come close
enough to Jack—“I do suppose that you are the new boy that came last
night.”
“Yes,” said Jack, “I am.”
CHAPTER XIV
IN ENGLAND
IT is not to be supposed that Jack could have disappeared so suddenly
and entirely as he had done without leaving behind him much talk and
wonder as to what had become of him.
One day, for instance, Mr. Stetson stopped old Hezekiah in the street
and began asking after Jack. “I know nought of him, Master Stetson,”
said the old man. “He always was a main discontented, uneasy lad as
ever I see. Time and time again have he talked to me about running away
to sea—and that, whenever I would tell him ’twas time for him to be
earning his own living by honest, decent work.”
“But, Mr. Tipton,” said the rector, “I do hear talk that he hath been
kidnapped.”
“Mayhap he have been,” said Hezekiah; “but I know naught of him.”
“And are you not, then, going to do anything to try to find him?” cried
out the good old rector. “Sure, you would leave no stone unturned to
discover what hath become of your nephew.”
“What can I do, master?” said Hezekiah, almost whining. “I’m main sorry
Jacky be gone, and am willing to do whatever I can for to find him
again, but what can I do?”
“Why, Master Tipton,” said the rector, “that, me-seems, is your affair
and not mine. I can hardly tell you how to set about doing your own
duty in this thing. But sure am I you should do whatever you can to
find what hath become of your poor nephew.”
It was the very general opinion that Jack Ballister had been kidnapped,
and nearly every one surmised that old Hezekiah himself had had a hand
in it. If any of this talk reached Hezekiah’s own ears he paid no
attention to it, but went his way either unconscious of or indifferent
to all that his neighbors said about him.
Then, one morning, the old America merchant received a communication
from the little attorney, Burton, telling him that if he would stop at
his (the attorney’s) office, betwixt the hours of three and five in the
afternoon, he should receive certain news _in re_ John Ballister that
might be of interest to him.
The old man came promptly at three o’clock, and found the little lawyer
rustling among a litter of papers like a little gray mouse. He had a
great pair of barnacle glasses perched astride his nose, and he pushed
them up on his sharp bony forehead, where they gleamed like two disks
of brightness as he turned around to face the old man. There was a
moment or two of silence, broken at last by the old America merchant.
“Well, master,” said he, lifting his wig and wiping the bald pate
beneath with a red handkerchief—“Well, master, here I be; and what is
it you have to say to me about my nephew—about Jacky? I be in a vast
hurry this art’noon, master, and wait here with great business upon my
hands.”
“Perhaps so, but I dare say you have time to listen to me, though,”
said the attorney. “For what I have to say concerns you very nearly,
Master Tipton.”
Then he opened the lid of the desk and brought out from a pigeonhole a
bundle of papers tied up with a piece of tape. “Some time ago, Master
Tipton,” he said, “Sir Henry Ballister, who is an honored client of
mine, gave me instructions to look after his nephew, John Ballister,
who was left by his father in your ward. When the young man disappeared
I wrote to Sir Henry to that effect, and received from him further
instructions to inquire into the affair.”
The little lawyer had been untying the packet while speaking. He now
spread the papers out in front of him, touching them one by one as
he continued: “First of all, Master Tipton,” he said, “I heard it
reported that, when last seen, Master John Ballister was in company
with one of your own crimps and a party of redemption servants you were
shipping to the Americas. I found, further, that the crimp’s name was
Weems—Israel Weems. Here is a letter from Weems in answer to one from
me, in which letter he acknowledges that Master John Ballister was
with him the night that the servants were shipped, and that he did not
again see the young man after leaving him at the wharf. Here is another
communication from John Barkley, merchant, of London, relating to the
cargo of the Arundel, in which it is supposed the young man was carried
away. He specified that there were but nineteen servants to be shipped
from this port to the Virginia plantations. These are my notes taken
during a cursory examination of Jonah Doe, landlord of the Golden Fish
Inn.” And so the little man continued, recapitulating his evidence, and
touching, as he spoke of them, the different papers spread out on the
desk before him. “The result of all this, Master Hezekiah Tipton,” he
concluded, “is that it is perfectly conclusive to my mind that Master
John Ballister hath been kidnapped and carried away to the Virginias. I
don’t say that you had a hand in the business, Master Tipton—I would
be loath to suppose so, and to so accuse a fellow-townsman and an old
acquaintance; but ’tis my belief your nephew hath been stole, and I
would like to hear what you yourself have to say about it.”
Old Hezekiah did not reply immediately. He sat for a while staring
absently at the other as though not seeing him. Then suddenly he
aroused himself almost as with a start. “Hey?” he said, “How? Oh, ay!
what you say appeareth all very true, Master Burton. But—will you let
me see them papers?”
“To be sure I will,” said the other; “and if you can explain the
business satisfactorily, Master Tipton, and if you can satisfy Sir
Henry Ballister that his nephew is safe and sound, and shall be duly
fetched back again with no ill having befallen him, why, I, for one,
will be as glad as glad can be.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” said the old man, almost briskly. He
adjusted his spectacles as he spoke, and then opened the first paper of
the packet and began slowly and deliberately reading it. Then he took
up the second and gave it a like close and deliberate scrutiny, and so
on through the packet.
“Well, Master Hezekiah,” said the attorney, when the other had finished
the perusal of the packet, “now you’ve read these papers, what do you
think of ‘em, and what do you intend to do about this business? I will
report to Sir Henry Ballister just what you choose for me to say.”
The old man did not reply immediately. He had taken up his spectacles
again, and was rubbing them and rubbing them with his red bandana
handkerchief. “Those papers, Master Burton,” said he, at last, “bear
mightily hard upon me. They make it appear like I kidnapped Jacky
myself. Here be you spending all your time a-hunting up evidence to
make it look like as though I had dealt foul with my own flesh and
blood—and you a neighbor of mine, and I one who hath put many and
many a good guinea’s worth of work into your way.”
“That last is true enough, Master Tipton,” said the little lawyer;
“and, as I said before, I, for one, have no wish to do aught to harm
you. Just you think, Master Tipton,—that was why I sent for you to
come and see me; else I would have sent these papers straight to Sir
Henry Ballister instead of showing them, first of all, to you.”
“I be much beholden to you, neighbor,” said the old man. “But these
papers look mightily ill for me. Suppose anything should happen to you,
and those papers should fall into strange hands; how would it be with
me then? Ha’ ye thought of that?”
“Ay, ay,” said the little lawyer, “I have thought of it, and it is all
arranged for, Master Tipton. If aught should happen to me, I have so
arranged it that only a part of these papers go to Sir Henry Ballister.
All that concerns you is cared for, so that no harm shall happen you.”
“I be much beholden to you, neighbor,” said the old man again.
“And now,” said the attorney, after another little pause of silence,
“what have you to say, Master Tipton? What am I to write to Sir Henry
Ballister?”
Then the old America merchant arose: “Well, master,” said he, “all this
be so sudden that, to be sure, I don’t know what to say. Give me time
to think over it, and then I will talk to you in full some other day.
Let me see; this be Wednesday. On Friday next I’ll meet you here, and
tell you all that I have to say. Can you give me so long as that?”
“To be sure I can,” said the lawyer. “Take your own time, and ’twill
suit me.”
“Very well, then, on Friday next,” said the old man.
It was the next day that the little lawyer returned home by night from
the King’s Arms Coffee-House, where he used to spend an occasional
bachelor’s evening gossiping with his cronies over his toddy, or
talking politics.
It was maybe ten o’clock when he left the coffee-house. There was a
chill drizzling rain falling, and the little lawyer shuddered as he
stepped out into the darkness, gathering his wrap-rascal more closely
about him and turning up the collar about his ears. The night, coming
as he did into it from the lights of the warm coffee-house, appeared
as dark as pitch. The little lawyer took the middle of the street just
lit by the occasional dim light of a corner lamp. There were few folks
stirring, and only now and then the sound of a voice or a distant
footstep. The far-away baying of a dog sounded from out the more
distant hollow of the wet night. The little attorney was recapitulating
in his mind the points of an argument he had had with the writer
Willowood during the evening. He had had the better of the question,
and he felt a warm glow of pleasure as he went stumbling through the
night, as he thought, point by point, of the advantage he had had in
the discussion. There was some one walking behind him, and it came into
his mind to think how easy it would be for some one to knock him upon
the head without his neighbors being any the wiser. Then he began again
thinking of how he had answered Master Willowood.
The thought of a possible attack upon himself came into his mind again
as he reached the mouth of the dark court upon which fronted his own
house, and he paused for a moment before he turned into the black and
silent street. In the stillness he could hear the rain pattering and
dripping everywhere, and there was a light shining dimly from an upper
window of a house further down the court.
The attorney thought he heard soft footsteps near him, and he was in
the act of turning to satisfy himself that he was mistaken, when in the
instant there came a crash as though the heavens had burst asunder.
There was a flashing flame of livid fire and a myriad sparkling points
of light. The thought had time to shoot through his brain, “What
has happened to me?”—the thought and a hundred possibilities of
answer,—before the sparks had vanished, and the roaring in his ears
had hummed away into the silence of unconsciousness.
It all passed in a moment; there was no struggle and no outcry.
Excepting for a quivering twitch, the attorney Burton was lying as
though dead, a dark and indistinguishably motionless heap upon the
ground, and two men were bending over him, looking down at him.
CHAPTER XV
LIFE AT THE ROOST
JACK’S after recollections of this earlier part of his life in America
while he lived at the Roost always remained with him as singularly
fragmentary memories of things passed. The various events that then
happened to him never, in those recollections, had a feeling of
keen and vivid reality as a part of his own life. It was almost as
though they might have somehow happened outside of the real things
of his life. Nearly every one who has reached manhood and who looks
back thence to the earlier periods of his adolescence, feels such
strangeness of unfamiliarity in certain fragmentary parts of his
younger life.
Maybe Jack felt this lack of reality in the events of that time because
that just then he was passing from boyhood into manhood; perhaps the
memory of those times seemed strange to him and lacking of vitality
because of the many changes of scene and circumstance that then
happened to him, and because he did not have time to become intimately
acquainted with any especial arrangement of his surroundings before it
was changed for some other surroundings of a different sort.
For Jack’s master was very often away from home, and generally he would
take Jack with him, and so it was that during this period there were
successive memories of queer rambling Virginia towns—level streets of
earth fronted by gray wooden buildings with narrow windows and wide
brick chimneys, in the midst of which lesser buildings there towered
here and there maybe a more pretentious mansion of brick, set back in a
tangled garden, approached by a steep flight of stone steps. The towns
were nearly all of this nature:—Yorktown, Jamestown, Williamsburg and
the lesser courthouse towns, more or less inland, up the river; and
they always remained in Jack’s memory as so many pictured scenes rather
than as various settings of his actual life.
At other times Mr. Parker would maybe take Jack with him on his
periodical visits to the plantation houses of his friends; nearly all
wide, rambling, barn-like structures, where wild company sometimes
gathered, and where, during the time of his master’s visits, Jack would
live in the company of the white servants and negroes who lounged
about, ready to run at any moment at the owner’s call. Jack made many
acquaintances among these people, but no friends.
This life was so varied and so entirely different from anything that he
had known before that he never got to feel as though it were perfectly
a part of himself. Even the Roost, with its bare, rambling rooms and
hallways, never entirely lost this feeling of unfamiliarity.
Nearly always there was more or less company at the old house—the same
sort of wild, roistering company that gathered at the other plantation
houses; men who came riding fine high-bred horses, who fought cocks,
who gambled, drinking deeply and swearing with loud voices, and with an
accent that was not at all like the English speech that Jack had known
at home.
One of his earlier experiences of this new life of his in the strange
new world into which he had come was of such a company that one day
came riding up to the gray old wooden mansion with a vast clattering of
horses’ hoofs, a shouting of voices and laughter, and a cloud of dust.
The party was accompanied by a following group of negro servants, one
of whom carried a fighting-cock on a saddle before him. Jack and Little
Coffee and another negro boy ran out to hold the horses, and Dennis
and two negroes came over from the stable to help. Mr. Parker came out
and stood on the upper step in the doorway, looking on as the visitors
dismounted. The scene was always very vivid in Jack’s memory.
The most prominent of the visiting party was young Mr. Harry Oliver. He
had been drinking, and his smooth cheeks were dyed a soft, deep red.
He dismounted with some difficulty, and then with uncertain steps went
over to his negro servant, who still sat on his horse, holding the cock
before him on the horn of the saddle. “Give the bird to me, Sambo,”
said the young man in a loud, unsteady voice.
“He strike you, mea-asta, you no take care,” said the negro warningly.
“Better let me take him, Mr. Oliver,” cried out Dennis.
The young man paid no heed to either warning, but took the bird from
the negro. It struggled, and one of the spurs caught in the lace of Mr.
Oliver’s cuff, tearing a great rent in it. Everybody laughed but Mr.
Parker, who stood looking calmly on at the scene. “Ouch! Look what he’s
done to me,” cried out Mr. Oliver. “Here, Dennis, you take him.” And
again the others laughed loudly at the young man’s mishap.
Dennis took the bird, seizing its narrow cruel head deftly, and holding
it so that it might not strike him.
“Hath Mr. Castleman been here yet?” asked one of the visitors of Dennis.
“No, your honor,” said Dennis.
“Aha!” shouted Harry Oliver, “what do you think of that, Tom? I tell
you he’ll not come. His black cock’s no match for Red Harry. I’ll bet
you five pounds he doesn’t come at all. I knew he was only talking
for talk’s sake last night when he said that he would match his bird
against Harry.”
The others, ready to be amused at anything the tipsy young fellow said,
again laughed loudly.
“If you want to bet your money, I’ll cover your five pounds that the
gentleman is here in the hour,” said one of the party, who was a
stranger to Jack.
“Let him alone, Phillips,” said Mr. Parker, coming down the steps.
“The boy is not cool enough to bet his money now. Won’t you come in,
gentlemen?”
“Yes, I am cool enough, too,” cried out Oliver. “I’ll bet my money as
I choose; and you shall mind your own business, Parker, and I’ll mind
mine.”
Then they all went into the house and to the dining-room, where the rum
and the sugar stood always ready on the sideboard.
Jack, as was said, was still new to all this life. “What are they going
to do?” he asked of Dennis as he led the horse he held over toward the
stable.
“Do?” said Dennis; “what d’ye think they’d do but fight a cock main?”
About an hour after the arrival of the first party of guests, Mr.
Castleman and four of his friends came in a body. Mr. Castleman’s negro
also brought a cock, and almost immediately the birds were pitted
against one another in the bare and carpetless hallway.
Jack did not see the beginning of the fight. He was up-stairs helping
Mrs. Pitcher make up some beds for the night. When he heard that they
were fighting the cocks down in the hall, he hurried down-stairs,
boy-like, to see what was going on. A burst of loud voices greeted his
ears as he descended the stairway. A number of the negroes and some
white servants were clustered on the steps, looking over the banister
and down below. There was another loud burst of voices dominated by
Mr. Oliver’s shrill boyish tones crying out, “Why, then! Why, then!
That’s my hero! Give it to him again! Why, then! ’Tis Red Harry against
them all! Where’s your fifty pounds now, Castleman?”
Jack at the head of the stairs could look down upon the tragedy being
enacted on the floor below. He stood for a second—two seconds—gazing
fascinated. The black cock—a dreadful bloody, blinded thing—was
swaying and toppling to death. The red cock towered above him, cruel,
remorseless, striking, and striking again; then poising, then striking
its helpless dying enemy again. Harry Oliver was squatted behind
his bird, hoarse with exultation. The end was very near. Mr. Parker
sat calm and serene, looking down at the fight. The others stood or
squatted around in a circle, tense and breathless with excitement. All
this Jack saw in the few dreadful seconds that he stood there, and the
scene was forever fixed upon his memory. He awoke to find that his
mouth was clammy with a dreadful excitement. Peggy Pitcher had followed
him out on the landing. Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Look at
Jack!” she cried. “‘T hath made him sick.”
Jack saw many cock-fights after that one, but the circumstances of this
time always remained the most keenly stamped upon his memory as one of
the most vivid of those unreal realities of that transition period.
Another memory of an altogether different sort was of one time when
Mr. Parker was away from home, and when he himself went with Dennis,
and Little Coffee, and two other negroes, down the river to the Roads,
fishing. Mrs. Pitcher had advised him not to go. “His honor may come
back,” said she; “and if he does and finds you away he’ll be as like as
not to give you a flaying with his riding-whip.”
“A fig for his honor!” said Jack. “I’m not afraid of his honor. And as
for being away when he comes back, why, that I shall not. He’ll be
sure not to be back from Annapolis for a week to come.”
The memory that followed was of a long sail in the open boat of some
forty miles or so in the hot sun and the swift, brisk wind; a memory of
sitting perched on the up-tilted weather-rail listening to Dennis and
the negroes chattering together in the strange jabbering English that
was becoming so familiar to him now.
It was pretty late in the afternoon when they approached the
fishing-ground. Dennis leaned over the rail every now and then, and
peered down into the water, as the hoy drifted along close-hauled to
the wind. One of the negroes stood ready to drop the sail, and the
other stood in the bow to throw over the stone that served as an anchor
when Dennis should give the order. “Let go!” shouted Dennis suddenly,
and the sail fell with a rattle of the block and tackle, and in a
heap of canvas. At the same time the negro in the bow threw the stone
overboard with a great loud splash.
Jack and Little Coffee were the first to drop their lines into the
water. Jack sat watching the negro boy; he hoped with all his might
that he might catch the first fish, but it did not seem possible that
he could catch a fish in that little open spot of the wide, wide
stretch of water. Then all of a sudden there came a sharp, quivering
pull at the hook, and he instantly began hauling in the wet and
dripping line wildly, hand over hand. He thought for a moment that
he had lost the fish; then there came a renewed tugging at his line,
and in another second he had jerked the shining thing into the boat,
where it lay flashing and splashing and flapping upon the boards of the
bottom. “I caught the first fish, Little Coffee!” he shouted.
“Look dar, now,” said Little Coffee, testily. “Fish just bite my hook,
and you talk and scare ‘um away.”
Jack jeered derisively, and Dennis burst out laughing, while Little
Coffee glowered at Jack in glum sullenness.
They fished all that afternoon, and it was toward evening when they
hoisted up the anchor stone. Two of the negroes poled the hoy to
the shore. Jack was the first to jump from the bow of the boat to
the white, sandy beach, littered with a tangle of water-grasses
and driftwood, washed up by the waves. A steep bluff bank of sand
overlooked the water, and Jack ran scrambling up the sliding, sandy
steep, and stood looking around him. For some little distance the
ground was open, and there was a low wooden shed, maybe fifty or sixty
paces away; beyond it stood the outskirts of the virgin forest. He
stood and gazed about him, realizing very keenly that this was the new
world, and sensing a singular thrilling delight at the wildness and
strangeness of everything.
This, too, was a very vivid memory fragment of that strange and
distantly impersonal period of his life.
CHAPTER XVI
JACK’S MASTER IN THE TOILS
JACK had been living nearly a month at the Roost before he saw anything
of those money troubles that so beset and harassed his master. He was
afterward to learn how fierce and truculent Mr. Parker could become at
those times when he was more than usually tormented by his creditors.
It was about noon, and Jack was busy getting ready the clothes that his
master was to wear for the morning. There had been company at the Roost
the night before, and Mr. Parker, who had sat up till past midnight,
and who had only just risen, sat at the open window in his nightcap and
dressing-gown, with his half-eaten breakfast beside him, smoking a long
pipe of tobacco out into the warm, soft air.
Suddenly there came the sound of horses’ hoofs approaching from the
distance, and then the opening of the gate. Mr. Parker craned his neck
and peeped out of the window cautiously. Immediately he laid down his
pipe of tobacco, and turning to Jack,—“Harkee,” said he, in a voice
instinctively lowered, “yonder is a man coming whom I don’t choose to
see, so you just go down and tell him I’m not at home, and that I won’t
be back till next Thursday; d’ ye understand?” Jack nodded his head.
“Well, then, do as I tell you, and don’t you let him guess I’m at home.”
Even as the master spoke there came a loud knocking at the door. Jack
ran down-stairs and through the hall, and opened it before any of the
slower negroes could reach it. There were two men outside, one of them
held a pair of horses, and the other had just knocked. The man with the
horses had the look of a servant. The other was a lean, wizened fellow
with smoothly brushed hair tied behind with a bit of string, a flapped
hat, and a long-skirted gray coat—he looked like an attorney or a
money-lender. “Well, master,” said Jack, “and what’ll you have?”
“I want to see your master,” said the man shortly.
“Who?” said Jack.
“Your master.”
“My master?”
“Yes; what’s the matter with the oaf? Where’s your master? Why don’t ye
answer me and tell me whether Mr. Parker is at home.”
“Oh, Mr. Parker! So ’tis him you wish to see, to be sure.”
But, after all, Jack did not have to tell the lie Mr. Parker had bidden
him to tell. A voice suddenly sounded from overhead—a keen, shrill
voice. “What d’ye want, Master Binderly? Who d’ye come to see?”
The man at the door stepped back a pace or two and looked up, and Jack
craned forward and looked up also. Mrs. Pitcher was leaning out of
the window just above their heads. She wore a morning wrapper, and a
cap very much the worse for wear, which gave her a singularly frowsy,
tousled appearance.
“Why, you know what I want, Mistress Pitcher, just as well as I do,”
said the man. “I want to see Mr. Richard Parker, and by zounds! I will
see him, too! Here have I been running after him and looking for him up
and down the Province these two weeks past. Here are obligations of his
which have come into my hands for over a thousand pounds, and he won’t
pay any attention to me, and he won’t renew his notes, and he won’t do
anything.”
Jack stood in the doorway listening with very great interest, and two
or three grinning negroes had gathered at the end of the house, looking
on with a vague and childish curiosity. “Well, Master Money-Shark,”
said the woman, “I don’t know what you are talking about; all I know is
that you won’t find Mr. Richard Parker here, and so you may as well go
about your business.”
“Why, what are you talking about?” bawled the money-lender. “If this is
not my business, what is my business?” and Jack could not help laughing
at his loud voice.
“Well, that I don’t know anything about, or don’t care anything about,”
Mrs. Pitcher answered shrilly. “All I know is this here—Mr. Parker
ain’t about, and won’t be about till next Thursday.”
“I don’t believe what you tell me,” answered the man roughly; “anyhow,
I’ll come in and wait—and I’ll wait till next Thursday, if I have to.
Either I’m going to have my money, or I’m going to have satisfaction
for it.”
“No, you won’t come into the house, neither,” cried Mrs. Pitcher; and
then, as the money-lender made as though to enter, she called, “Shut
the door, there, Jack!” and Jack at her bidding banged the door in the
man’s face, shooting the bolt and locking it.
The man kicked and pounded upon the door, and Jack could hear the
housekeeper pouring vituperation down upon him from above. He himself,
now having nothing more to do, went up stairs and leaned out of another
window to see what the outcome of it all would be.
The housekeeper was just saying: “If you don’t go away from there, now,
I’ll pour a kittle of hot water on ye.” Whereupon Mr. Binderly seemed
to think it best to quit his knocking. He went out into the roadway in
front, and stood there for a while talking in low tones to his servant.
“Very well, then, Mistress Pitcher,” said he at last. “You’ve got the
power on me here; but you tell your master this for me, that he may
hide himself from me as he pleases, but for all that there is law to
be had in the Province of Virginia. And that ain’t all, neither, Mrs.
Pitcher; you tell your master that I ain’t going to law till I try
other things first. I’m going to his brother, Colonel Birchall Parker,
first, and see what he’ll have to say to this here. He’s the richest
man in Virginia, and he ain’t got the right to let his brother ruin a
poor man like me.”
Peggy Pitcher made no answer to the money-lender, but snapped her
fingers at him. Then she leaned on the window-sill watching him as he
clambered on his horse and rode away again as he had come, with his
serving-man at his heels.
There were several other occasions when creditors came pressing Mr.
Parker for money, but never any that had such a smack of comedy about
it.
It was somewhat more than a month later when another sort of visitor
than poor Mr. Binderly appeared at the Roost. Again the master was at
home, and alone, but upon this occasion it was after nightfall when the
visitor arrived. Jack was reading aloud the jokes from an old almanac
to Mrs. Pitcher, who sat idly listening to him. Mr. Pa
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