The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
"Yet, like Raleigh, I see the scaffold," said Vesta, with an attempt at
humor that for the first time broke her down, and she raised her hands
to her face to hush the burst of anguish. It would not be repressed, and
one low cry, deep with the sense of desertion and captivity, sounded
through the deepening room and smote Milburn's innermost heart. He
obeyed an impulse he had not felt since his mother died, starting
towards Vesta and throwing his arms around her, and drawing her to his
breast.
"Honey, honey," he whispered, kissing her like a child, "don't cry now,
honey. It will break my heart."
The act of nature seldom is misinterpreted; Vesta, having labored so
long alone with this obdurate man, her young faculties of the head
strained by the first encounter beyond her strength, accepted the
friendship of his sympathy and contrition, as if he had been her father.
In a few moments the paroxysm of grief was past, and she disengaged his
arms.
"You are not merciless," said Vesta. "Tell me what I must do! You have
broken my father down and he cannot come to my help. Take pity on my
inequality and advise me!"
"Alas! child," said Milburn, "my advice must be in my own interest,
though I wish I could find your confidence. I am a poor creature, and do
not know how. It is you who must encourage the faith I feel starting
somewhere in this room, like a chimney swallow that would fain fly out.
Chirrup, chirrup to it, and it may come!"
Standing a moment, trying to collect her thoughts and wholly failing,
Vesta accepted the confidence he held out to her with open arms.
Blushing as she had never blushed in her life, though he could not know
it in the evening dark, she walked to him and kissed him once.
"Will that encourage you to advise me like a friend?" she said.
"Alas! no," sighed Milburn fervently, "it makes me the more your unjust
lover. I cannot advise you away from me. Oh, let me plead for myself. I
love you!"
"Then what shall I do," exclaimed Vesta, in low tones, "if you are
unable to rise to the height of my friend, and my father is your slave?
Do you think God can bless your prosperity, when you are so hard with
your debtor? On me the full sacrifice falls, though I never was in your
debt consciously, and I have never to my remembrance wished injury to
any one."
"Would you accept your father's independence at the expense of the most
despised man in Princess Anne?" Milburn spoke without changing his kind
tone. "Would you let me give him the fruit of many years of hard toil
and careful saving, in order that I shall be disappointed in the only
motive of assisting him--the honorable wooing of his daughter?"
She felt her pride rising.
"Your father's debts to me are tens of thousands of dollars," continued
Milburn. "Do you ask me to present that sum to you, and retire to my
loneliness out of this bright light of home and family, warmth and
music, that you have made? That is the test you put my love to:
banishment from you. Will you ask it?"
"I have not asked for your money, sir," said Vesta. "Yet I have heard of
Love doing as much as that, relieving the anguish of its object, and
finding sufficient joy in the self-denying deed."
"I do not think you personally know of any such case, though you may
have read it in a novel or tract. Men have died, and left a fortune they
could no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a
considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and noble woman; but where did
you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every
endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his
sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What
would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl
new epithets after my hat?"
Vesta searched her mind, thinking she must alight upon some such example
there, but none suited the case. Meshach took advantage of her silence:
"The gifts of a lover are everywhere steps to love, as I have
understood. He makes his impression with them; they are expected.
Nothing creates happiness like a gift, and it is an old saying that
blessings await him who gives, and also her who takes, and that to seek
and ask and knock are praiseworthy."
"Oh," said Vesta, "but to be _bought_, Mr. Milburn? To be weighed
against a father's debts--is it not degrading?"
"Not where such respect and cherishing as mine will be. Rather exalt
yourself as more valuable to a miser than his whole lendings, and
greater than all your father's losses as an equivalent, and even then
putting your husband in debt, being so much richer than his account."
"Where will be my share of love in this world, married so?" asked Vesta.
"To love is the globe itself to a woman, her youth the mere atmosphere
thereof, her widowhood the perfume of that extinguished star; and all my
mind has been alert to discover the image I shall serve, the bright
youth ready for me, looking on one after another to see if it might be
he, and suddenly you hold between me and my faith a paper with my
father's obligations, and say: 'Here is your fate; this is your whole
romance; you are foreclosed upon!' How are you to take a withered heart
like that and find glad companionship in it? No, you will be
disappointed. It will recoil upon me that I sold myself."
"The image you waited for may have come," said Milburn undauntedly,
"even in me; for love often springs from an ambush, nor can you prepare
the heart for it like a field. I recollect a fable I read of a god
loving a woman, and he burst upon her in a shower of gold; and what was
that but a rich man's wooing? We get gold to equalize nobility in women;
beauty is luxurious, and demands adornment and a rich setting; the
richest man in Princess Anne is not good enough for you, and the mere
boys your mind has been filled with are more unworthy of being your
husband than the humble creditor of your father. Such a creation as Miss
Vesta required a special sacrifice and success in the character of her
husband. The annual life of this peninsula could not match you, and a
monster had to be raised to carry you away."
"You are not exactly a monster," Vesta remarked, with natural
compassion, "and you compliment me so warmly that it relieves the strain
of this encounter a little. Do not draw a woman's attention to your
defects, as she might otherwise be charmed by your voice."
"That also is a part of my sacrifice," said Meshach, "like the money
which I have accumulated. Without a teacher, but love and hope, I have
educated myself to be fit to talk to you. It is all crude now, like a
crow that I have taught to speak, but encouragement will make me
confident and saucy, and you will forget my sable raiment--even my hat."
A chilliness seemed to attend this conclusion, and Vesta touched her
bell. Virgie, entering, took her mistress's instructions: "Bring a tray
and tea, and lights, and place Mr. Milburn's hat upon the rack!"
The girl glanced at the antique hat with a timid light in her eye, but
her mistress's head was turned as if to intimate that she must take it,
though it might be red-hot. Virgie obeyed, and soon brought in the tea.
"It is good tea," spoke Milburn, drinking not from the cup, but the
saucer, while Vesta observed him oddly, "and it is chill this evening.
Let me start your fire!"
He shivered a little as he stood up and walked across the room, and
poking the charred logs into a flame; and, setting on more wood, he made
the walls spring into yellow flashes, between which Vesta saw her
forefathers dart cold glances at her, in their gilt frames--yet how
helpless they were, with all their respectability, to take her body or
her father's honor out of pawn!--and she felt for the first time the
hollowness of family power, except in the ever-preserved mail of a
solvent posterity. She also made a long, careful survey of her suitor,
to see if there was any apology for him as a husband.
His figure was short, but with strength and elasticity in it; better
clothes might fit him daintily, and Vesta re-dressed him in fancy with
lavender kids upon his small hands, a ring upon his long little finger,
a carnelian seal and a ribbon at his fob-pocket, and ruffles in his
shirt-bosom. In place of his dull cloth suit, she would give him a buff
vest and pearl buttons with eyelet rings, and white gaiters instead of
those shabby green things over his feet, and put upon his head a neat
silk hat with narrow brim to raise his height slenderly, and let a coat
of olive or dark-blue, and trousers of the same color, relieve his
ornaments. Thus transformed, Vesta could conceive a peculiar yet a
passable man, whom a lady might grow considerate towards by much praying
and striving, and she wondered, now, how this man had managed to soothe
her already to that degree that she had voluntarily kissed him. She
would be afraid to do it again, but it was as clearly on record as that
she had once put a flower in his hat; and Vesta said to herself:
"He has power of some kind! That story, little as I heard of it, was
told with an opinionated confidence I wish my poor father had something
of. Could I ever be happy with this man, by study and piety? God might
open the way, but it seems closed to me now."
"The night wears on, Miss Custis," spoke Meshach. "Its rewards are
already great to me. When may I return?"
"I think we must determine what to do this night, Mr. Milburn," Vesta
said, with rising determination. "Not one point nearer have we come to
any solution of this obligation of my father. We have considered it up
to this time as my obligation, and that may have unduly encouraged you.
Sir, I can work for my living."
"You _work_?" repeated Milburn.
"Why not? I love my father. As other women who are left poor work for
their children or a sick husband, why should not I for him! Poverty has
no terrors but--but the loss of pride."
"You hazard that, whatever happens," said her suitor, "but you will not
lose it by evading the lesser evil for the greater. I have heard of
women who fled to poverty from dissatisfaction with a husband, but pride
survived and made poverty dreadful. Pride in either case increased the
discontent. You should take the step which will let pride be absorbed in
duty, if not in love."
"Duty?" thought Vesta. "That is a reposeful word, better than Love. Mr.
Milburn," she said aloud, "how is it my duty to do what you ask?"
"I think I perceive that you have a loyal heart, a conscientiousness
that deceit cannot even approach. Something has already made you slow to
marriage, else, with your wonders, I would not have had the chance to
be now rejected by you. Marriage has become too formidable, perhaps, to
you, by the purity of your heart, the more so because you looked upon it
to be your destiny. It _is_ your fate, but you contend against it. Look
upon it, then, as a duty, such as you expect in others--in your slave
maid, for instance."
"Alas!" Vesta said, "she may marry freely. I am the slave."
"No, Miss Vesta, she has been free, but, sold among strangers with your
father's effects, will feel so perishing for sympathy and protection
that love, in whatever ugly form it comes, will be God's blessing to her
poor heart. What you repel in the revulsion of fortune--the yoke of a
husband--millions of women have bent to as if it was the very rainbow of
promise set in heaven."
"How do you know so much of women's trials, Mr. Milburn? Have you had
sisters, or other ladies to woo?"
"I have seen human nature in my little shop, not, like your rare nature,
refined by happy fortune and descent, but of moderate kind, and
struggling downward like a wounded eagle. They have come to me at first
for cheaper articles of necessity or smaller portions than other stores