The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
floor, and Virgie had made a second errand to Teackle Hall, and brought
back the lady's rocking-chair that Milburn so much affected, and toilet
articles, and some dark cloth to hide the bare boards in places, and the
old loft soon wore a reasonable appearance of habitable life. Virgie
made up the fire, and the brass andirons took the cheerful flame upon
them, while Vesta sweetened the lemonade after her father had cut and
squeezed the lemons, and added some magnesia to make the drink foam.
"Really," said Judge Custis, "this miserable den takes the rudimentary
form of a home. I suppose there are now more comforts in his sight than
Meshach's whole race ever collected. What is your next move, Vesta?"
"To stay right here, darling papa, till it is safe and convenient to
carry Mr. Milburn home."
"Oh, folly! it will excite scandal, and be repulsive to my feelings.
This loft over a former groggery is no place for you: the news will
spread from Chincoteague to Arlington. Every Custis that lives will
censure me and outlaw you."
"I think you had best see Mr. Tilghman before the service, papa, and
have the marriage announced from the desk this morning: that will settle
the excitement before night. As for staying here, my home, you know, is
where he needs me. At his will I should have to stay here altogether.
But I wish to do this, dear father. It is of the greatest necessity to
my nature to improve my intercourse with my husband while he is sick,
that the hasty marriage we made may still have its period of
acquaintance and good understanding. I want to sound the possibilities
of my happiness. He will be less my master now than in his strength and
possession. Perhaps--" Vesta's voice fell, and she turned to gaze upon
the bridegroom, whose fever still consumed his wits--"perhaps I can
influence his dress,--his appearance."
"You mean the steeple top!" Judge Custis exclaimed, petulantly.
At the loud sound of this familiar word, the feverish man's ears were
pierced as through some ever-open ventricle, like an old wound.
"Steeple-top! Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see
I'm married. _She_ hears it. Oh, spare and pity her!"
He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched,
yet oppressed.
"How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge
Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that
nickname. In public he never appeared to flinch before it; but you see
it inflicted a never-healing wound. Who has not his vulture?"
"And how unjust to pursue this man with such frivolous inhospitality so
many years," Vesta exclaimed, her splendid eyes flashing. "No account
has been made of his private reasons, his family piety, or his stern
taste, perhaps; for he must have a reason for his wardrobe, that being,
it would seem, the only thing there can be no independence about. Did
you hear, papa, his feeling for me but this moment? Strangely enough, my
own mind was thinking of that hat. It seems to be bigger than the very
steeples of the churches: it rises between the people and worship, yes,
between us and Charity, and Faith,--I had almost said Hope, too."
"The colored people all say that hat he has to wear, because the devil
makes him," the trim, fawn-footed Virgie said; "Aunt Hominy says the Bad
Man wouldn't let him make no mo' money if he didn't go to church in that
hat. Some of the white people says so, too."
"You don't believe such foolish tales as that, Virgie?" Vesta asked.
"'Deed, I don't believe anything you say is a story, Miss Vessy. Hominy
believes it. She's 'most scared out of her life about Mr. Milburn coming
to the house, an' she's got all the little ones a' most crazy with
fear."
"Poor, dark, ignorant soul!" Vesta said; "she is, however, more
excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of
dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition."
"If he is a good man to you, Miss Vessy," the slave girl said, "I'll
think the Bad Man hasn't got anything to do with him. If he treats you
bad, I'll think the Bad Man has."
"Sometimes I feel as if men ought to have been left wild, like the
animals," the Judge said, rinsing out Milburn's mouth with a piece of
ice, "for the obstacles to liberty raised by fashion and civilization
are Asiatic in their despotism. Think of the taxes we pay to fashion
when we refused less to kings. Think of the aristocracy based upon
dress, after we have formally extirpated it by statute! Think of the
influence the boot-makers and mantua-makers of Europe, proceeding from
the courts we have renounced, exert upon our Presidents and Senators,
and, through the women of this country, upon all the men in the land! A
million women who do not know that there are two houses of Congress,
know just what bonnet the Duchess d'Angouleme is wearing, and how
Charles X. in Paris ties his cravat. So the devil always gets a worm in
every apple. The French Revolution abolished feudality, titles, great
landed property, and only omitted to abolish fashion, and that worm--a
silkworm it is--is devastating republican government everywhere, using
the women to infect us."
"Yet, in the nature of woman," said Vesta, "is the love of dress as
strongly as the love of woman is in man. Some righteous purpose is in
it, papa,--to ornament ourselves like the birds, and let art be born."
"God knows his own mysteries," Judge Custis said. "But Vesta, go home
with me to your own comfortable home, and let Virgie stay here to keep
watch."
"Master, I'm afraid to stay here," the girl exclaimed, sidling towards
her young mistress.
"Then I will stay, and be nurse," the Judge said. "Fear not! I will give
him only wholesome medicine, whatever poison he has given me and mine.
You stay in Teackle Hall, my precious child! Indeed, I must command it."
Vesta smiled sadly and pointed to her husband.
"He commands me now, papa. You were too indulgent a master, and spoiled
me. No, Virgie and I will both remain, and you conciliate mamma. All is
going well. Really, I am happy and grateful to my Heavenly Father that
he is smoothing the way so gently, that I thought would be so hard."
"Oh, the conditions of this disease are repulsive, my child. You are a
lady."
"No, I am a woman," said Vesta; "that man and I must see one or the
other die. You do not know how easy it is for a woman to nurse a man.
Though love might make the task more grateful, yet gratitude will do
much to sweeten it. He has loved me and taken the shadow from your old
age for me. Shall I leave him here to feel that I despise him? No."
She kissed her father, and gave him his cane.
"Come back this afternoon, my love," she said to him.
"Nothing on earth is like you!" exclaimed the old man. "I fear you are
not mine."
"Yes," Vesta said, "you are full of good, wherever you may have
strayed."
As the sound of his feet passed from the doorway below, the sick man,
with a sigh as from burning fire, opened his eyes and looked around.
They fell upon her picture.
"What is that?" he murmured; "I dreamed nothing like that, just now."
"It is my picture. I am here," Vesta said, bending over him. "Don't you
know me?"
"Who are you, dear lady?" he breathed, with fever-weakened eye-sockets,
and mind struggling up to his distended orbs, "do I know you?"
"Yes, I am Vesta--Vesta Custis, I was. I am your wife."
His eyes opened wide, as if hearing some wonderful news.
"Wife? what is that? My wife? No."
"Yes, I am Vesta Milburn, your wife."
He seemed to remember, and, with compassion for him, she stooped and
kissed him.
"God bless you!" he sighed, and passed away into the Upas shades again.
At that minute the mocking-bird flew in the open window and fluttered
above the lowly bed, and perched upon the headboard and began to sing:
"'Sband! 'sband! see! see! Vesty, sweet! Vesty, sweet! Ha, ha! hurrah!"
CHAPTER XV.
THE KIDNAPPER.
It seemed to Judge Daniel Custis as he walked abroad into the Sunday
sunshine, that he had never seen a more perfect day. The leaves were
turning on the great sycamore-trees, and the maples along the rise in
the road wore their most delicate garments of nankeen, while some young
hickories, loaded with nuts, and a high gum-tree, splendid in finery,
beckoned him out their way, across the Manokin bridge to the opposite
hill, where the Presbyterian church overlooked the town.
The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real
relief to his circumstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and
partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to
the man who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern
course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the
environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the
stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and
cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the
south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds
somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one
of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where
abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted
in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.
While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste
of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or
two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell
told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like
a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly
it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its
joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady,
and listened with something between courtesy and piety.
As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some passed
him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see
Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.
They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp
hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in
his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison
from it.
Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise
it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the
Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel,
when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:
"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my
child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"
His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of
being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life
beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty
pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer
than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of
the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw
onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and
selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of swine. His agony
increased.
"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate
and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes
hunting coons by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing
degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I
have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life
left me to do it in, but by God's help I will try! Yes, this golden
Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"