The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
stolen from her chamber stealthily as he came, while she, drowned in
deep slumber, wotted not.
A glance into the mirror again revealed those blushes repeating each
other, like the Aurora in the northern dawn, till, with a searching
consciousness, and her voice raised above the whisper, she said,
"Be still, silly _girl_!"
Opening the door, she found Virgie lying on the rug without, warmly
wrapped in her mistress's blanket-shawl, but wide awake.
"Virgie, no one has passed?" asked Vesta.
"No, Miss Vessy. Nobody could have stepped over me, for my mind has been
too awake, if I did sleep a little. Maybe _he_ ain't a-coming, Miss
Vessy. Maybe he's ashamed!"
"Hush, Virgie," Vesta said, "you are speaking of your master."
Throwing her morning-robe around her shoulders, the maiden bride tripped
noiselessly to her mother's apartment; the door was open, the night
taper floating in its vase, and Mrs. Custis lay asleep with her
bank-book under her pillow.
"Shall I awake her?" Vesta thought. "Yes, if I do not need her
experience, I do want her confidence, and not to give her mine would
seem deceit now."
Vesta kissed her mother softly, and placed her cheek beside that lady's
thin, respectable profile as she awoke, and said:
"Daughter, mercy! why, what has become of you? It seems to me I have
seen nobody for days, and I wanted to express my indignation even in my
dreams. Where have you been?"
"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, taking Mrs. Custis's head in her arms, "I have
been finding your lost fortune, which troubled us all so much. It is to
be given back to you, dearest--my husband has promised to do so."
"Your husband? Whom have you selected, that he is so free with his
money? How could you hear from Baltimore so soon? Now, don't tell me a
parcel of stuff, thinking to comfort me. Your father is a villain, and
my connections shall know it."
Mrs. Custis drew her bank-book from under her head, and began to cry, as
she took a single look at its former total.
"Darling mamma," Vesta said, "seeing you so miserable yesterday on
account of papa's failure, and your portion gone with it, I accepted an
offer of marriage, and have a rich man's promise that, first of all,
your part shall be paid to you. This house, and our manor, and
everything as it is--the servants, the stable, and the movables--belong
to me, in my own name, paid for in papa's notes, and by him transferred
to me to be our home forever, so that a revulsion like yesterday may not
again cross the sill of our door. Does not that deserve a kiss, mamma?"
"I don't believe a word of it," said Mrs. Custis. "This is another trick
to deceive me. I don't accuse you of it, Vesta, but you are the victim
of somebody and your father. Now, who can this man be, so free with his
ready money? It's not the style in Baltimore to promise so liberally as
all that. Have you accepted young Carroll?"
"No, nor thought of him, mamma."
"Then it must be that widower fool, Hynson, ready to sell his negroes
for a second wife like you."
"He has neither been here in body or mind," Vesta said; "never in my
mind."
"That would be a marriage to make a talk: it wouldn't be like you to
bestow so much beauty on a widower. I think there is a certain vulgarity
about an elegant girl marrying a widower. She is so refined, and he is
generally so sleek and sensual. Did you hear from Charles McLane?"
"Nothing, mamma; let me ease your mind by telling you that my husband
lives here in Princess Anne. He was father's creditor, Mr. Meshach
Milburn. He has loved me unknown for years. I saw a way to stop all
scandal and recrimination by marrying him at once, that the society we
know would have but one, and not two, subjects of curiosity. Papa saw me
married last night to Mr. Milburn, and I bear his name this Sabbath
day."
"His wife? Meshach Milburn? The vulgarian in the play-actor's hat? That
man! Daughter, you play with my poor head. It is going again. Oh-h-h!"
"Mother, it is true. I am Mrs. Milburn. My husband is your benefactor."
It was unnecessary to say more, for Mrs. Custis had really fainted.
"Poor mother!" thought Vesta, "I am confirmed in my fear that, if she
had been told of my purpose, she would have opposed it bitterly."
Roxy was summoned to assist Vesta, and after Mrs. Custis had become
conscious, and sighed and cried hysterically, her daughter, sitting in
her lady's rocker, spoke out plainly:
"Mother, I appreciate your disappointment in my marriage, though I
should be the one to make complaint and receive sympathy, instead of
discouragement; but I do not desire it; indeed, I will not permit any
person to disparage my husband, or draw odious comparisons between my
poverty and his exertions. If there are in my body, or my society, any
merits to please a man, they have fallen to him under the law of
Providence, that he that hath shall receive. I pity your illness, dear
mamma, but I fear Mr. Milburn is ill, too, for he has not been here all
night, though he left me at the church-gate."
"I hope the viper is dead!" Mrs. Custis said, with great clearness, and
energized it by sitting up in bed. Roxy left the room.
"I hope he has been murdered," said Mrs. Custis, "and that the murderer
will never be discovered. If there is any spirit of the McLanes left in
my brothers and nephews, they will wipe out, in blood, the insult of
this marriage between my daughter and the man who set a trap upon the
honor of a respectable family."
Vesta arose with a pale, troubled face, yet with some of her mother's
prejudice flashing back.
"He can defend himself, mamma. I shall go to seek him now, since he is
so much hated for me."
She returned to her room, and put on a walking-suit, and made her
toilet. In the library Vesta found her father dozing in a large chair,
with his feet upon a leather sofa, and a silk handkerchief drawn across
his crown, under which were the dry beds of tears that had coursed down
his cheeks. She saw, with a touch of joy, that the sherry in the
decanter was untouched, and the two glasses were still clean: he had not
relapsed into his habits, even while making an all-night vigil to wait
for the unwelcome son-in-law. He started as she entered, and then stared
at her between his dazed wits and a mute inquiry that she could
understand.
"He has not come, papa. And mamma--oh! she is severe."
Vesta, trembling at the throat a moment, rushed into her father's
wide-open arms, and buried the sob in his breast.
"Poor soul! Poor lamb! Poor thing!" he said, over and over, while his
temper slowly rose, that seldom rose of recent years, since pleasure and
carelessness had taken its masculine sting away, but Vesta felt his
tones change while he petted her, and at last heard him say, hoarsely:
"By God!"
"Sh--h!" she whispered, raising her hand to his mouth.
"I will kill somebody," he went on, finishing his sentence, and as she
drew away he strode across the room and back again, a noble exhibition
of passion that had a noble origin, in fatherly pity.
"Don't lose your true pride, papa, after you have persevered so long,"
Vesta said. "It is Sunday. Do you think he will come? What can have
happened?"
"He will either come or fight me," Judge Custis remarked. "I have tried
to be a peaceable man and Christian magistrate, albeit a poor hypocrite
in some, things, but I am pushed too far. My wife's smallness is worse
than insanity and wickedness put together. Between her and this
money-broking fiend, and my neglected child entrapped into such a
marriage, by God! I will clean my old duelling arms, and appeal to
injustice itself to set me even."
If he had been fine-looking in his sincere grief, he was thrice more
attractive in his sincere high spirit. Vesta, admiring him in spite of
her cares, did not like to see him in this unnatural recklessness.
"Dear father," she said, soothingly, "you have no cause of quarrel."
"I have every cause," he cried; "the proposal to marry you was an
insult, for which I should have challenged him, and shot him if he
declined. Now he has married you and absconded, using you and the Custis
honor with contempt. In my day I was the best shot in Eastern Virginia.
I can kill a man in this cause as easily as I have broken either of a
man's arms, at choice, in my courting days. Public opinion will clear me
under this provocation, and I can acquit my own conscience, abhorrent
as duelling is to me. My sons-in-law would leap to take the quarrel up,
and rid the world of Meshach Milburn."
"That is mamma's idea, to kill the debtor who has been specially kind to
her. She says she will send for Uncle Allan McLane, and is more
unreasonable than ever. Papa, your feelings are unjust. Something we do
not know of has happened to Mr. Milburn. He was not himself all the
while at the church. Now that I recollect, he was not ardent for the
marriage to be so soon. It was I who hastened the hour. Let us be right
in everything, having progressed so far with the recovery of our
fortunes, and let us await the fulfilment of events hopefully."
"Milburn was drunk at the ceremony, I saw that," Judge Custis said, "but
it was no excuse. In fact, what good can come of this violent alliance?
It seems to me that we have leaped from the frying-pan into the fire. I
feel ugly, my daughter, and there is no concealing it."
"Then you are in the mood to talk to mother this morning," Vesta said,
"while you have some unusual will and spirit. This resentful sullenness
she is showing I fear more than your passing emotion, papa. Be firm, yet
kind, with her, and I will go to find my husband. Yes, that is my place.
He may be more justly complaining of my absence now, than we of his
neglect."
"You don't mean that you are going to visit him at his den?"
"I shall go there first. It would have been my home last night if he had
required it. To tell the truth," Vesta said, blushing, "the poor man was
so kind to me yesterday, in spite of his object, and so quaint, and, as
it seemed, dependent on me, that my charity is enlisted for him, and I
could almost have married him from pity."
The Judge's temper fell a little in the study of his daughter's
blushing.
"Wonderful! wonderful!" he thought to himself; "that poor corn-bred
fellow has already made more impression on this girl's pride than a
hundred cavalier gallants. Truly, we are a republic, Vesta," he
continued aloud, "and you lay down the Custis character as easily as our
old connection, Lord Fairfax, accepted the democracy of his hired
surveyor, Mr. Washington, before he died."
"I laid down the Custis name yesterday," Vesta said, "though not their
better character, I hope. Papa, there is only one law of marriage; it is
where the wife follows the husband."
She looked a little archly at him, wiping her eyes of recent tears, and
though she may not have meant it, he was reminded of his own fear of his
wife.
Aunt Hominy now came in, having been told by Virgie to prepare coffee,
and she followed Roxy, who brought it into the library. The old cook had
a strange look, as of one who had been up all night at a fire, or a
"protracted meeting," and she poked her head in as if afraid to come
farther, till Vesta went out and kissed her kindly.
"Poor Aunty Hominy! did you think I was sold, or abused, because I had
been married? Dear old aunty, I shall never leave you!"
Aunt Hominy had a countenance of profound, almost vacant, melancholy,
mixed with a fear that, the Judge remarked, "he had seen on the faces of
niggers that had stolen something."
"Miss Vessy," she stammered, at last, "is you measured in by ole
Meshach? Is he got you, honey? Dat he has, chile! He's gwyn to bury you
under dat pizen hat. Po' little girl! Po' Miss Vessy!"
"Oh, Aunt Hominy," Vesta said, "he will be a kind master in spite of his