Norfolk is never more at peace than on the day succeeding the ball. There is no challenge, no duel. Planter Paul Jones waits to hear from Lieutenant Parker; at first hopefully; in the end, when nothing comes, with doubtful brow of grief. Is it that Lieutenant Parker will not fight? Planter Paul Jones hears the suggestion from his friend Mr. Hurst with polite scorn. Such heresy is beyond reach.
“He must fight,” urges Planter Paul Jones, desperately keeping alive the fires of his hope. “He will fight, if for no other reason, then because it is his trade. Lieutenant Parker is pugnacious by profession; that of itself will make him toe the peg.”
Planter Paul Jones is wrong. Lieutenant Parker never shows his beaten face on American soil again. Nor does any bellicose gentleman appear for Lieutenant Parker, or propose to take his place.
This last omission gives Planter Paul Jones as sharp a pang as though he has been slighted by some dearest friend. Having on his own part a native lust for battle, it bewilders him when so excellent a foundation for a duel falls into neglect, and no architect of combat steps forward to build thereon.
“It is not to be understood!” observes Planter Paul Jones dejectedly, after the sloop of war, with Lieutenant Parker and those others of that gold-lace coterie, has sailed away, “it’s not to be understood! Surely, there must have been one gentleman among them who, free to do so, would have called me to account.” Then, with solemn sadness: “I am convinced that their admiral interfered.”
Who shall say? The admiral is the paternal uncle of Lieutenant Parker of the crushed and broken nose.
The story will go later to England to the explanatory effect that no fellow-officer would act for Lieutenant Parker. However, in doubt of this, that last named imprudent person—wearing the marks of Planter Paul Jones’ rebuke for many a day—is not dismissed the king’s service. He will be in the fight off Fort Moultrie, where—unlike Sergeant Jasper of the Americans—he in no wise is to distinguish himself.
Planter Paul Jones, when every final chance of the trouble for which he longs has departed with the departure of the war sloop, sorrowfully steers the peace sloop back to his plantation by the Rappahannock; and thereafter he does his best to forget an incident that—because of the mysterious tameness of the English, under conditions which should have brought them ferociously to the field—gives him an aching sense of pain. He says to Mr. Hurst, when about to spread his small canvas and sail away for home, “It is one of those experiences, sir, that shake a man’s faith in his kind.”
The colonial dames get hold of the tale, and
Planter Paul Jones becomes all the more the petted darling of the drawing-rooms. This of itself is a destiny most friendly to his taste; for our Virginia Bayard lives not without his tender vanities. Bright eyes are more beautiful than stars; and he can sigh, or whisper a sonnet, or softly press a little hand. Also, having in his composition an ardent dash of the peacock, he is capable, with fair ladies looking on, of a decorous, albeit a resplendent strut.