The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
bent his head in shame!
Then the servants, one after another, mounted upon the court-house
block, the old gray servitors mocked, the little children parted, like
calves by the butcher, and the young girls feeling the desperate
apprehensions of abuse and violation, that were the other alternative to
herself, with whom purity was like the whiteness of the lily, prized
more than its beauty of form or its perfume.
She glanced in her mirror by the light that flamed in her brazen grate,
and saw the blushes climb like flying virgins at the sack of towns, up
the white ramparts of her neck and temples.
The form which had altered so little from childhood, supple and
straight, and moulded to perfection, was to fall like the young
hickory-tree in the August hurricane, twisted from its native grove. The
breath of the man she was to yield her life to, irresistible and hot as
that storm, she had felt already, when he held her for a moment in his
arms in the transport of passion, and heard his fearless avowal of
desire.
To marry any man now seemed hard; to marry this one was inexpressible
shame, and at the thought of it she could not shed a tear, such
paralysis came over her. She had read of the recent Greek revolution,
where elegant ladies of Scio, and other isles of the AEgean Sea, educated
in the best seminaries of Europe, had been sold by thousands as common
slaves in the markets of Constantinople, and carried to their estates by
brutal Turks, with all the gloating anticipation of lust and tyranny.
On this vivid episode started a procession of all the ages of women who
had been the sport of conquest since their common mother, Eve, lost
Paradise by her simplicity: the Jewish maidens carried to Babylon, the
Gothic virgins dragged at the horse-tails of the Moors, the daughters of
Palestine and Byzantium consigned to Arab sensualists, and made to
follow their nomadic tents, and the almond-eyed damsels of China
surrendered by their parents to the wild Kalmucks, to be beaten and
starved on every cold plain of Asia, till life was laid down with
neither hope nor fear.
"I am happier than millions of my sex," Vesta said; "my captor does not
despise me, at least. Perhaps he will treat me kinder than I think, and
give me time to draw towards him without this deadly pain and shame."
Then she almost repented of her hasty decision to marry this night,
instead of after longer acquaintance, which Mr. Milburn, no doubt, would
have granted, and his words were remembered with accusation: "What will
the world say to your marriage after a single day's acquaintance with
me?" "Will this haste not be repented, or become a subject of reproach
to you?" Was it too late to recall her words, and ask for delay?
"No," thought Vesta, "I am to keep, at least, my mind maiden and chaste,
instead of playing the unstable coquette with that. I will not let him
begin to think me weak and changeful already."
To see if there was the least glimmer of relief from this marriage Vesta
crossed to her mother's room, and found Mrs. Custis with her head
wrapped in handkerchiefs steeped in cologne, and a vial of laudanum in
her hand, and in a condition bordering on hysteria.
"Mamma," said poor Vesta, "are you in pain?"
"Oh!" screamed Mrs. Custis, "I am just dying here of cruelty and
brutality. Your father is a villain. I'll have that rascal, Milburn,
killed. Go get me ink and paper, daughter, and sit here and write me a
letter to my brother, Allan McLane, in Baltimore. He shall settle with
Judge Custis for this robbery, and take you and me back to Baltimore,
leaving your father to go to the almshouse or the jail, I don't care
which."
"Mother," exclaimed Vesta, "what a sin! to abuse poor father now in all
his trouble!"
"Trouble!" echoed Mrs. Custis, mockingly, "what trouble has he had, I
would like to know? Living in the woods like a Turk among his barefooted
forest concubines! Spending my money, raked and scraped by my poor
father in the sugar importation, to make puddle iron out of the swamp,
and be considered a smart man! The family is broken up. We are paupers,
and now 'it is save yourself.' I'll take care of you if I can, but your
father may starve for any aid I will give him."
"Then he shall have the only aid in my power, mother," said Vesta,
decisively.
"Your aid!" Mrs. Custis exclaimed. "What have you got? Your jewels, I
suppose? How long will they keep him? You had better keep your jewels,
girl, for your wedding, and have it come quickly, for marriage is now
your only salvation."
"My last jewel shall go, then," Vesta said, with a pale resolution that
darted through her veins like ice.
"Save your jewels," Mrs. Custis continued, "and choose a husband before
this thing is noised abroad! You have a good large list to select from.
There is your cousin, Chase McLane, crazy for you, and with an estate in
Kent. There is that young fool Carroll, with thousands of acres on the
western shore, and the widower Hynson of King George, Virginia, with
eighty slaves and his stables full of race-horses. You can marry any of
these Dennis boys, or take Captain Ringgold of Frederick, who lives in
elegance at West Point, or be mistress of Tench Purvience's mansion on
Monument Square in Baltimore. All you have to do is to write a letter,
saying: 'I expect you,' or, what is better, take to-morrow's steamer for
Baltimore and use your Uncle Allan's house and become engaged and
married there."
"Mamma," Vesta spoke without rebuke, only with a sad, confirmed feeling
of her destiny, "I could be capable of deceiving any of those gentlemen
if I could so heartlessly leave my father."
"Deceiving!" Mrs. Custis remarked, filling her palm and brow with the
cologne. "What is man's whole work with a woman but deceit? To court her
for her money, to kiss her into taking her money out of good mortgages
and putting it into bog iron ore? To tell her when past middle life that
she has nothing to live upon, except the charity of the public, or her
reluctant friends. All this for an experiment! The Custis family are all
knaves or fools. Your father is a monster."
Vesta went to her mother's side and bathed her forehead.
"Dear mamma," she said, "let you and I do something for ourselves, while
papa looks around and finds something to do. We can rent a house in
Princess Anne and open a seminary. I can teach French and music, you can
be the matron and do the correspondence and business, and if papa is at
a loss for larger occupation he can lecture on history and science. Our
friends will send their children to us, and we shall never be separated.
I will give up the thought of marriage and live for you two."
Mrs. Custis made a gesture of impatience.
"And be an old maid!" she blurted. "That is insufferable. What are all
these accomplishments and charms for but a husband, and what is he for
but to provide bread and clothes. Don't be as crazy as your unprincipled
father! Try no experiments! Drop philanthropy! Money is the foundation
of all respectability."
Vesta thought to herself: "Can that be so? Does it not, then, justify
the man who solicits me in his means of getting money? Mother"--Vesta
spoke--"you would have me marry, then?"
"There is no would about it," answered Mrs. Custis. "You _must_ marry!"
"Marry immediately?"
"Yes, the sooner the better, to a rich man. Have you picked out one?"
"Give me your blessing, and I will try," Vesta said; "I think I know
such a one."
Mrs. Custis kissed her daughter, and moaned about her poor head and lost
marriage portion, and Vesta set out to look for her father.
She found him as described, in the luxury of tears and squab, as
comfortable among his negro servants as in the state legislature or at
the head of society, and they wrapped up in his condescension and
misfortunes.
As Vesta saw the curious scene of such patriarchal democracy in the old
kitchen, she wondered if that voluptuous endowment of her father was not
the happy provision to make marriage unions tolerable, and social
revulsions philosophical. Something of regret that she had not more of
the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that
wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt
at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother.
"Roxy," said Vesta, as she left the kitchen, "do you go up to my mother
and stay with her all this night. Make your spread there beside her bed.
Virgie, put on your hood and carry a letter for me,--I will write it in
the library."
She sat before her father, he too undecided to speak, and seeing by her
fixed expression that it was no time for loquacity. She sealed the
letter with wax, and, Virgie coming in, her father heard the direction
she gave with curiosity greater than his embarrassment:
"Take this to Rev. William Tilghman. Give it to him only, and see that
he reads it, Virgie, before you leave him. If he asks you any questions,
tell him please to do precisely what this note says, and, as he is my
friend, not to disappoint me."
The girl's steps were hardly out of hearing when Vesta opened the drawer
of the library-table and took out a package of papers tied with a
string. She unloosed it, and her father recognized from where he sat his
notes of hand and mortgages.
"Gracious God, my darling!" exclaimed Judge Custis, "how came you by
those papers?"
"They are to be mine to-night, father--in one hour. The moment they
become mine they will be yours."
"Why, Vessy," said the Judge, "if they are yours even to keep a minute,
the shortest way with them is up the chimney!"
He made a stride forward to take them from her hand. She laid them in
her lap and looked at him so calmly that he stopped.
"You may burn the house, papa," she said, "it is still your own. But
these papers you could only burn by a crime. It would be cheating an
honorable man."
"Honorable! Who?" the Judge exclaimed.
"He who is to be my husband."
"You marry Meshach Milburn!" shouted the Judge, "O curse of God!--not
him?"
"Yes, this night," answered Vesta; "I respect him. I hold these
obligations by his trust in me. They are my engagement ring."
Judge Custis raised a loud howl like a man into whom a nail is driven,
and fell at his daughter's feet and clasped her knees.
"This is to torture me," he cried; "he has not dared to ask you, Vesta?"
"Yes, and my word is passed, father. Shall that word, the word of a
Custis, be less than a Milburn's faith. By the love he bore me, Mr.
Milburn gave me these debts for my dower--a rare faith in one so
prudent. If I do not marry him, they will be given back to him this
night."
"Then give them back, my child, and save your soul and your purity, lest
I live to be cursed with the sight of my noble daughter's shame? This
marriage will be unholy, and the censure to follow it will be the
bankruptcy of more than our estate--of our simple fame and old family
respect. We have friends left who would help us. If you marry Milburn,
they will all despise and repudiate us."
"I do not believe it," said Vesta. "The sense and courage of that
gentleman--he is a gentleman, for I have seen him, and a gentleman of
many gifts--will compel respect even where false pride and family
pretension appear to put him down. Who that underrates him will make any
considerable sacrifice to assist us? Your sons,--will they do it? Then
by what right do they decide my marriage choice? No, father, I only do
my part to support our house in its extremity, as these gentlemen and
others have done before."
She pointed to the old portraits of Custises on the wall. If any of them
looked dissatisfied, he met a countenance haughty as his own.
"Vesta," her father called, "you know you do not love this man?"