The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
consider everything. How could I make you happy? My own happiness I will
dismiss. Yours must then comprehend mine. Kindness might make me
grateful, but gratitude will not satisfy your love."
"Yes," exclaimed Milburn, chasing up his advantage with tremulous ardor;
"the long famine of my heart will be thankful for a dry crust and a cup
of ice. Here at the fireside let me sit and warm, and hear the rustle of
your dress, and grow in heavenly sensibility. You will redeem a savage,
you will save a soul!"
"It is not the price I must pay to do this, I would have you consider,
sir," Vesta replied, with her attention somewhat arrested by his
intensity; "it is the price you are paying--your self-respect,
perhaps--by the terms on which you obtain me. It may never be known out
of this family that I married you for the sake of my father and mother.
But how am I to prevent you from remembering it, especially when you say
that I am the sum of your purest wishes? If your interest would consume
after you obtained me, we might, at least, be indifferent; but if it
grew into real love, would you not often accuse yourself?"
Meshach Milburn sat down, cast his large brown eyes upon the floor, and
listened in painful reflection.
"You cannot conceive I have had any real love for you?" he exclaimed,
dubiously.
"You have seen me, and desired me for your wife; that is all," said
Vesta, "that I can imagine. Lawless power could do that anywhere. To be
an obedient wife is the lot of woman; but love, such as you have some
glimmering of, is a mystic instinct so mutual, so gladdening, yet so
free, that the captivity you set me in to make me sing to you will
divide us like the wires of a cage."
"There is no bird I ever caught," said Meshach Milburn, "that did not
learn to trust me. Your comparison does not, therefore, discourage me.
And you have already sung for me, the saddest day of your life!"
A slight touch of nature in this revelation of her strange suitor called
Vesta's attention to the study of him again. With her intelligence and
sense of higher worth coming to her rescue, she thought: "Let me see all
that is of this Tartar, for, perhaps, there may be another way to his
mercy."
As she recovered composure, however, she grew more beautiful in his
sight, her dark, peerless charms filling the room, her kindling eyes
conveying love, her skin like the wild plum's, and her raven brows and
crown of luxuriant hair rising upon a queenly presence worthy of an
empress's throne. Such beauty almost made Milburn afraid, but the
energies of his character were all concentrated to secure it.
"Who _are_ you?" she asked, with a calm, searching look, cast from her
highest self-respect and alert intelligence. "Have you any relations or
connections fit to bring here--to this house, to me?"
"Not one that I know," said the forester. "I am nothing but myself, and
what you will make of me."
"Where were you born and reared?"
"The house does not stand which witnessed that misery," spoke Milburn,
with a flush of obdurate pride; "it was burned last night, not far from
the furnace which swallowed your father's substance."
"Why, I would be afraid of you, Mr. Milburn, if your errand here was not
so practical. Omens and wonders surround you. Birds forget their natural
life for you. Iron ceases to be occult when you take it up. Your
birthplace in this world disappears by fire the night before you
foreclose a mortgage upon a gentleman's daughter. Is all this sorcery
inseparable from that necromancer's Hat you wear in Princess Anne?"
She had touched the sensitive topic by a skilful approach, yet he
changed color, as if the allusion piqued him.
"Nature never rebuked my hat, Miss Vesta, and you are so like nature, it
will not occupy your thoughts. I recollect the day you decorated my old
hat; said I: 'perhaps this vagrant head-covering, after all its injuries
and wanderings, may some day find a peg beneath my own roof, and the
kind welcome of a lady like that little miss.' That was several years
ago, and to-day, for the first time, my hat is on the rack of your hall.
The long wish of the heart is not often denied. We are not responsible
for it. The only conspiracy I have plotted here, was that I did not
oppose most natural occurrences, all drawing towards this scene. My
magic was hope and humility. I dared to wear my ancestor's hat in the
face of a contemptuous and impertinent provincial public, and it gave me
the pride to persevere till I should bring it home to honors and to
noble shelter. If you despise my hat, you will despise me."
"Oh, no; Mr. Milburn! I try never to despise anything. If you wore your
family hat from some filial respect, it was, in part, piety. But was
that, indeed, your motive in being so eccentric?"
Milburn felt uneasy again. He hesitated, and said:
"In perfect truth, I fear not. There may have been something of revenge
in my mind. I had been grossly insulted."
"Is it not something of that revenge which instigates you here--even in
this profession of love?" exclaimed Vesta, judicially.
Meshach looked up, and the shadows cleared from his face.
"I can answer that truthfully, lady. Towards you, not an indignant
thought has ever harbored in my brain. It has been the opposite:
protection, worship, tender sensibility."
"Has that exceptional charity extended to my father?"
"No."
Vesta would have been exasperated, but for his candor.
"My father never insulted you, sir?"
"No, he patronized me. He meant no harm, but that old hat has worn a
deep place in my brain through carrying it so long, and it is a subject
that galls me to mention it. Yet, I must be consistent with my only
eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my
identity, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men
shall respect my hat before I die."
"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can
understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were
Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our
family share it with us. You had a family, then?"
Milburn shook his head.
"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a
parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not
even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to
hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage
panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like
the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more
than the woodpeckers in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events
more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek,
in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm,
scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes
with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn
through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyond the great
Cypress Swamp. They are dying, but never dead. The few who live expect
no recognition from me, and, happy in their poverty, envy me nothing I
have accumulated. My name has grown hard to them, my hat is the subject
of their superstitions, my ambition and success have lost me their
sympathy without giving me any other social compensation. You behold a
desperate man, a merciless creditor, a tussock of ore from the bogs of
Nassawongo, yet one whose only crimes have been to adore you, and to
wear his forefathers' hat."
"Is this pride, then, wholly insulted sensibility, Mr. Milburn?"
"I cannot say, Miss Custis. You may smile, but I think it is
aristocracy."
"I think so, too," exclaimed Vesta reflectively; "you are a proud man.
My father, who has had reason to be proud, is less an aristocrat, sir,
than you."
Milburn's flush came and stayed a considerable while. He was not
displeased at Vesta's compliment, though it bore the nature of an
accusation.
"You are aristocratic," explained Vesta, "because you adopted the
obsolete hat of your people. Whatever vanity led you to do it, it was
the satisfaction of some origin, I think."
She checked herself, seeing that she was entering into his affairs with
too much freedom.
"I suppose that somewhere, some time," spoke the strange visitor, "some
person of my race has been influential and prosperous. Indeed, I have
been told so. He was elevated to both the magistracy and the scaffold,
but my hat had even an older origin."
"Tell me about that ancestor," said Vesta, the heartache from his
greater errand instigating her to defer it, while she was yet barely
conscious that the man was original, if not interesting.
He told a singular tale, tracing his hat to Raleigh's times and through
Sir Henry Vane to America, till it became the property of Jacob
Milborne, the popular martyr who was executed in New York, and his
brethren driven into Maryland, bringing with them the harmless hat as
their only patrimony.[1]
Before he began, Milburn drew up his compact little figure and opened
the door to the hall. The wind or air from some of the large, cold
apartments of the long house, coming in by some crack or open sash, gave
almost a shriek, and scattered the fire in the chimney.
Vesta felt her blood chill a moment as her visitor re-entered with the
antediluvian hat, and placed it upon the table beneath the lamp.
It had that look of gentility victorious over decay, which suggested the
mummy of some Pharaoh, brought into a drawing-room on a learned
society's night. Vesta repressed a smile, rising through her pain, at
the gravity of the forester guest, who was about to demonstrate his
aristocracy through this old hat. It seemed to her, also, that the
portraits of the Custises, on the wall, carried indignant noses in the
air at their apparently conscious knowledge of the presence of some
unburied pretender, as if, in Westminster Abbey, the effigies of the
Norman kings had slightly aroused to feel Oliver Cromwell lying among
them in state.
The hat, Vesta perceived, was Flemish, such as was popular in England
while the Netherlands was her ally against the house of Spain, and,
stripped of its ornaments, was lengthened into the hat of the Puritans.
Vesta attempted to exert her liberality and perceive some beauty in this
hat, but the utmost she could admit was the tyranny of fashion over the
mind--it seemed, over the soul itself, for this old hat, inoffensive as
it was, weighed down her spirits like a diving-bell.
The man, without his hat, had somewhat redeemed himself from low
conversation and ideas, but now, that he brought this hat in and
associated his person with it, she shrank from him as if he had been a
triple-hatted Jew, peddling around the premises.
The obnoxious hat also exercised some exciting influence over Meshach
Milburn, if his changed manner could be ascribed to that article, for he
resumed his strong, wild-man's stare, deepened and lowered his voice,
and without waiting for any query or expression of his listener, told
the tale.
CHAPTER IX.
HA! HA! THE WOOING ON'T.
It was twilight when Meshach Milburn closed his story, and silence and
pallid eve drew together in the Custis sitting-room, resembling the two
people there, thinking on matrimony, the one grave as conscious
serpenthood could make him, the other fluttering like the charmed bird.
Vesta spoke first:
"How intense must be your head to create so many objects around it
within the world of a hat! You have only brought the story down a little
way towards our times."
"I began the tale of Raleigh out of proportion," said Milburn, "and it
grew upon the same scale, like the passion I conceived for you so
intensely at the outset, that in the climax of this night I am scarcely
begun."