The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
revolutionary war by an uncle, or grand-uncle, of Judge Custis, who came
from Virginia, somewhere between Accomac and Northampton counties, and
went into shipbuilding on the Manokin, adding some privateering and
banking, too, and once, going abroad, he brought back from some ducal
residence the plan of Teackle Hall, as Judge Custis found it on his
coming into the property.
It was nearly two hundred feet in length, and would have made three
respectable churches, standing in line, with their sharp gables to the
front, the bold wings connected with the bolder centre by habitable
curtains or colonnades, in which panels of slate or grained stone made
an attic story above the lines of windows, and lintels and sills of the
same stone, with high keystones, capped every window in the many-sided
surface of the whole stately block, all built of brick brought over in
vessels from the western shore, or possibly from the North, or Europe,
and painted a gray stone color.
Its central gable had deep carved eaves, and a pediment-base to shed
rain, and a large circular window in that pediment. The two mighty
chimneys of that centre were parallel with the ridge of the roof, and
rose nearly from the middle of the two opposite slopes, bespeaking four
great fireplaces below, and a flat, low-galleried observatory upon the
roof gave views of portions of the bay on clear days.
The wings of Teackle Hall had similar, but lower, chimneys, astraddle of
their roofs, and forest trees--oak, gum, holly, and pine, with a great
willow, and some tawny cedars, and bushes of rose and lilac--dotted the
grassy lawn. The Virginia creeper and wild ivy climbed here and there to
the upper windows, and a tall, broad, panelled doorway, opening on a
low, open portico platform with steps, seemed to say to visitors: "Men
of port and consideration come in this way, but inferiors enter by some
of the smaller doors!"
Levin Dennis, who had never sounded that knocker, though he had often
taken his terrapins to the kitchen, stared in concern at the door where
it was reported Meshach Milburn had gone in, and would hardly have been
surprised if that intruder had now appeared at one of the three deep
windows over the door with a firebrand in his hand.
Levin muttered to himself: "Rich folks, I reckon, must make a trade.
Maybe it's hosses--maybe not. I know it ain't hats."
He then turned down to the Episcopal Church, only a square from Teackle
Hall, and on a street between it and the main street, though in a
retired situation, its front turned from the town, and looking over the
fields and farms, like a good pastor who is warming at the fire with his
hands behind him.
A single-storied, long, low edifice of British bricks, with its
semicircular choir next the street, and, adjoining the choir, a spire of
more modern brickwork built up to an open bell cupola, and open ribbed
dome, also of brick, tipped with a gilded cross, the ivy was greenly
matted all round the choir, and ran along the side of the church, where
Levin Dennis walked under four tall, round-topped windows of stained and
wired glass, till he came to the end gable or front of the church,
standing in unworldly contemplation of the graveyard and the back
fields.
There, since the Stamp Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half
a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the
town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little
window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose
in form like the print of The Crucified, reaching out its stems and
tendrils wide of the one glorified window in the gable, in whose red
dyes glimmered the triumph of a bloody countenance. The mossy walls,
often scraped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble
under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and
humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was
already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of
picturesqueness and all the appearance of antiquity.
No sign of the unpopular townsman was to be seen anywhere, but, as Levin
Dennis peeked around the foliage in the yard he beheld a man he had
never observed before, and of a tall, bearded, suspicious, and ruffianly
exterior, lying flat on the top of a memorial vault, with his head and
feet half concealed in some cedar brambles.
"Hallo!" Dennis shouted.
"What do you hallo for?" spoke the man; "don't you never come to a
churchyard to git yer sins forgive?"
"No," said the terrapin-finder, "not till I knows I has some sins."
"What air you prowlin' about the church then fur, anyhow?" demanded the
stranger, standing up in his boots, into which his trousers were tucked;
and he stood such a straight, long-limbed, lithe giant of a man that
Levin saw he could never run away, even if the intruder meant to chew
him up right there.
"I ain't a prowlin', friend," answered Levin Dennis. "I was jess a
lookin'."
"Lookin' fur what, fur which, fur who?" said the man, taking a step
towards Dennis, who felt himself to be no bigger than one of the other's
long, ditch-leaping, good-for-wading legs.
"Why, I was jess a follerin' a man--that is, friend, not 'zackly a man,
but a hat."
"A hat?" The man walked up to Dennis this time, and stood over him like
a pine-tree over a sucker. "Yer's yer hat," pulling an old straw
article, over-worn, from Dennis's head. "No wind's a blowin' to blow
hats into graveyards. Or did you set yer hat under a hen in yere, by a
stiffy?"
Dennis looked up, laughing, though not all at ease, but his amiable want
of either intelligence or fear, which belong near together, made his
most natural reply to the pertinacious intruder a disarming grin.
"No, man," Dennis said, "it was a hat on a man's head--ole Meshach
Milburn's steeple-top. I was a follerin' of him."
"Stow your wid!" the man clapped the hat back on Levin's head. "You're a
poor hobb, anyhow. Is thair any niggers to sell hereby?"
"Oh, that's your trade, nigger buyin'? Well, there's mighty few niggers
to sell in Prencess Anne. Unless"--here a flash of intelligence shone in
Levin's eyes--"unless that's what's took ole Meshach Milburn to Jedge
Custis's. He goes nowhar unless there's trouble or money for _him_."
"And where is Judge Custis's, you rum chub?"
"Yander!" pointing to Teackle Hall.
"Ha! that is a Judge's? And niggers? Broke, too! Well, it's no hank for
a napper bloke. So bingavast! Git! Whar's the tavern?"
"I'm a-goin' right thair," answered Levin, much relieved. "You must be a
Yankee, or some other furriner, sir."
"No, hobb! I'm workin' my lay back to Delaware from Norfolk, by pungy to
Somers's cove. Show me to the tavern and I'll sluice your gob. I'll
treat you to swig."
At the prospect of a drink, of which he was too fond, Levin led the way
to the Washington Tavern, where there was a material addition to the
attendance since Jimmy Phoebus had called to every passer-by that
Meshach Milburn, on the testimony of Jack Wonnell, had actually been and
gone and disappeared in Judge Custis's doorway, and nearly a dozen
townsfolks were now discussing the why and wherefore, when, suddenly,
Levin Dennis came out of Church Street with a man over six feet high, of
a prodigious pair of legs, and arms nearly as long, with a cold,
challenging, yet restless pair of blue eyes, and with reddish-brown
beard and hair, coarse and stringy. The free negro, Samson Hat, being a
little way off, was observed to cast a beaming glance of admiration at
the athletic proportions of the stranger, who looked as if he might
shoulder an ox, or outrun a horse.
"Hallo!" exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus, looking the stranger over boldly,
yet with indifference, at last. "You're cuttin' a splurge, Levin, too.
Where's Meshach?"
"Can't see no sign of him, Jimmy. Guess Jack Wonnell hit it, an' he's
gone in the Jedge's. Mebbe he's buyin' of Jedge Custis's niggers. That's
this gentleman's business."
Jimmy Phoebus, himself no slight specimen of a man, gave another
glance at the stranger from the black cherries of his eyes, and,
apparently no better satisfied with the inspection, made no sign of
acquaintance.
"Whoever ain't too nice to drink with a nigger buyer," said the man,
independently, "can come in and set up his drink, with my redge, for I'm
rhino-fat and just rotten with flush."
There was a pause for somebody to take the initiative, but Jimmy
Phoebus, turning his big, broad Greekish face and small forehead on
the stranger, remarked:
"I never tuk a drink with a nigger buyer yit, and, by smoke! I reckon
I'm too old to begin."
The man stopped and measured Jimmy up in his eye.
"Humph!" he said with a sneer, "you look to be a little more than half
nigger yourself. If I was dead broke I'd run you to market an' git my
price for you."
"No doubt of it whatever, as fur as you're concerned," said Jimmy,
unexcited, while the man pushed Levin Dennis in towards the bar.
Either the new movement of Meshach Milburn, or the example of the
strange man, set Princess Anne in a tipsy condition that day. The
stranger was full of money, and treating indiscriminately, and the
pavement before the hotel was continually beset with the loiterers, and
the bar took money and spread mischief. So when, an hour after dark, the
unpopular townsman, avoiding the crowd, passed by on the opposite side
of the street, nearest his own lodging, one of the loudest and most
unanimous yells he had ever heard in his experience, rang out from the
Washington Tavern.
"Steeple-top! Steeple-top! Old Meshach's loose. Whoo-o-op!"
"Laugh on!" thought Meshach, "till now I never knew the meaning of 'let
them laugh who win.'"
He felt confirmed in his idea to be married in the Raleigh tile, and
when he saw Samson Hat, Milburn said: "Boy, brush all my clothing well.
Then go back to the livery stable, and order a buggy to be ready for you
at ten o'clock. At that hour set out for Berlin; and bring back Rhody
Holland with you in the morning."
"It's more dan thirty mile, marster, an' a sandy road."
"No matter. Take it slow. I will write you a letter to carry. Samson, I
am going to be married to-night to the rose of Princess Anne."
"Dar's on'y one," said Samson. "Not Miss Vesty Custis?"
"Yes, Samson. Princess Anne may now have something to howl at. The poor
girl may be lonesome, as, no doubt, she will be dropped everywhere on my
account, and not a soul can I think of, to be my young lady's maid,
unless it is Rhody."
"Yes, Marster, wid all your money you're pore in friends; in
women-friends you is starved."
"You may go with me to the church," said Meshach, "I suppose you want to
see me married."
"Yes, sir. Dat I do! Wouldn't miss dat fo' my Christmas gift. I 'spect
dat gal Virgie will come wid Miss Vesty to de cer'mony, marster."
"Perhaps so. You are not thinking of love, too, Samson?"
"Well, don't know, marster. Virgie's a fine gal, sho' I am a little old,
Marster Milburn, but I'll have to look out for myseff, I 'spec, now you
done burnt down my spreein' place. Dar's a wife comin' in yar now. So if
you don't speak a good word fur me wid some o' Miss Vesty's gals, I'm
aboot done."
"Well, boy," Meshach said, "you have got the same chance I had: the
upper hand. I owe you a nice little sum in wages, and you may be able to
buy one of the Custis housemaids, and set her free, and marry her, or,
be her owner. You are a free man."
Samson shook his head gravely.
"Dat won't do among niggers," he said. "Niggers never kin play de upper
hand in love, like white people. Dey has to do it by love itseff: by
kindness, marster."
Before nine o'clock Milburn and his negro left the old store by the town
bridge, and passing by the river lane called Front Street, into Church