The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
"Very well, then, we will read verse about, so that Mr. Milburn can hear
both our voices and his favorite minister's, too. You'll come, papa?"
"Yes, if I can. We have had a love-feast at Teackle Hall this morning,
and your sister from Talbot is down, but I think I can get off."
"Lord sakes!" Rhoda said, looking at Mr. Tilghman candidly; "you ain't a
minister now? Not a minister of the Gospil?"
"Unworthily so, Miss Rhoda."
"Well, I don't see how you was old enough to be convicted and learn it
all, unless you was a speretual merikle. Misc Somers see one of 'em at
Jinkotig. They called him the enfant phrenomeny. He exhorted at five
year old, and at seven give his experyins."
"Rare, Miss Rhoda," the rector said, hardly able to keep his reverence
in amusement at her impetuosity.
"Oh, he made a wild excitemins, Aunt Vesty. The women give each other
their babies to hold while they tuk turns a-shouting. 'Yer, Becky, hold
my baby while I shout!' says one. 'Now, Nancy, hold mine while I shout!'
To see that little boy up thar tellin' of his experyins was meriklus,
an' made an excitemins like the high tides on Jinkotig that drowns' em
out. But, Aunt Vesty, that little phrenomeny was a dwarf, twenty year
old, an' Misc Somers found it out and told about it."
"I'll be bound Mrs. Somers knows!" exclaimed the Judge.
"That she do," continued Rhoda, earnestly, with a slight sniffle of a
well-modelled nose and a dimpling that argued to Vesta something to
come. "Misc Somers says you held one of them babies, Jedge, to let its
mother shout, and pretended to be under a conviction; an' that you
backslid right thar and was a-whisperin' to the other mother. Lord
sakes! Misc Somers finds it all out."
"Well," said the Judge, finding the laugh against him, "I never did
better electioneering than that day. By holding that baby five minutes I
made a vote, and the mother will hold it twenty years before she will
make a vote."
"Misc Somers says, Jedge, you hold the women longer than thar babies;
but I told her you was in sech conviction you didn't know one from the
other. 'Oh,' she says, 'he's sly and safe when he gits over yer on the
Worcester side.' Misc Somers, she's dreadful plain."
William Tilghman, during the continuation of this colloquy, looked with
interest on the two young ladies: Vesta, the elder by two or three
years, and richly endowed with the lights of both beauty and
accomplishments; the maid from the ocean side, plainer, and with no
ornament within or without; but he could foresee, under Vesta's
fostering, a graceful woman, with coquetry and fascination not wholly
latent there; and, as his eyes met Rhoda's, he interpreted the look that
at a certain time of life almost every maiden casts on meeting a young
man--"Is he single?" She shot this look so archly, yet so strong, that
the arrow wounded him a very little as it glanced off. He smiled, but
the consciousness was restored a moment that he was a young man still,
as well as a priest. Love, which had closed a door like the portal of a
tomb against him, began to come forth like a glow-worm and wink its lamp
athwart the dark.
"She must come to Sunday-school," he thought, "if she stays in Princess
Anne. We will polish her."
The mocking-bird, not being satisfied with any lull in the conversation,
"pearted up," as he saw Vesta withdraw, and cried,
"'Sband! 'Sband! Meee--shack! Mee-ee-ee-shack! See me! see me! Gents!
gents! gents! genten! Sweet! sweetie! sweetie! Hoo! hoo! See! see!
Vesty, she! Ha! ha!"
He flew in the air over his stirring master, as if doubting that all was
well since the strange lady, who had been so quiet all the morning, was
gone.
"That bird almost speaks," said William Tilghman; "I have spent many an
hour teaching them, but never could make one talk like that."
"Maybe you had too much to teach to it," Rhoda Holland said; "it ain't
often they can speak, and they mustn't have much company to learn well.
Uncle Meshach haint had no company but that bird for years. I reckon
the bird got mad and lonesome, and jest hooted words at him."
"What is it saying now?" Tilghman asked. "See! it is almost convulsive
in its attempts to say something."
The gray bird, as impressive as a poor poet, seemed nearly in a state of
epilepsy to bring up some burden of oppressive sound, and, as they
watched it, almost tipsy with the intoxicant of speech, fluttering,
driving, and striking in the air, it suddenly brought out a note liquid
as gurgling snow from a bird-cote spout:
"L-l-lo-love! love! love! Ha! ha! L-l-love!"
"Well done, old bachelor!" Judge Custis remarked, in spite of his fagged
face, for good resolution and yesterday's unbracing had left him
somewhat limp and haggard still. "He brings out 'love' as if he had made
a vow against it, but the confession had to come. Many a monk would sing
the same if instinct could find a daring word in his chorals. These
mockers of Maryland were celebrated in the British magazines a hundred
years ago, and I recall some lines about them."
He then recited:
"'His breast whose plumes a cheerful white display,
His quivering wings are dressed in sober gray,
Sure all the Muses this their bird inspire,
And he alone is equal to a choir.
Oh, sweet musician! thou dost far excel
The soothing song of pleasing Philomel:
Sweet is her song, but in few notes confined,
But thine, thou mimic of the feathery kind!
Runs thro' all notes: thou only know'st them all,
At once the copy and th' original!'"
"That's magnificins!" Rhoda exclaimed, with quiet delight; "who is
'fellow Mil,' Jedge?"
"Oh, that's the British nightingale. These American mocking-birds
surpass them as one of our Eastern Shore clippers outsails all the naval
powers of Europe."
"I've hearn 'The British Nightingale,'" Rhoda said, with a flash of her
eyes; "he was a blind man with green specticklers that sang at Nu-ark,
''ome, sweet 'ome'--that's the way he plonounced it--an' it affected of
him so, he had to drink a whole tumbler of water, an' Misc Somers,
spying around to see if he was the rale nightingale, she found it was
gin in that glass, and told about it."
Rhoda made even the minister laugh, as she indented her cheeks and cast
a sheep's glance at him and the Judge. He marvelled that such forest
English could be resented so little by his mind, but he thought,
"Never mind, she may have had no more lessons than the bird, whose
difficulty is even beautiful. But see! Mr. Milburn is wide awake. My
friend, how do you feel?"
"Better, better!" murmured Milburn. "I cannot lie here any more. There
is money, _money_, gentlemen, dependent on my getting about."
He started up with the greatest resolution and confidence, and fell upon
his head before he had left the coverlets.
"No, no!" said the Judge, as he and Tilghman picked Milburn up and
arranged him as before. "Your will is matched this time, my brave
son-in-law! You are back in the hut you have consumed, among the fires
thereof, and the avenging blast of Nassawongo furnace burns in your
veins and cools you in the mill-pond alternately. Lie there and repent
for the injury you have done a spotless one!"
If Meshach heard this it was never known, but the unconscious or
impulsive utterance strengthened the impression with Tilghman and Rhoda
that Vesta's marriage was not altogether voluntary, and produced on both
a feeling of deeper sympathy and respect for her.
"Judge," the young minister said, "do good for evil, if evil there has
been! I have given him my hand sincerely; perhaps you can relieve his
mind of some business care."
"Mr. Milburn," the Judge said, when he saw the resinous eyes roll
towards him again out of that swarthy face, now pale with weakness, "I
am out of a job now, and can work cheap. Let me do any errand for you."
A look of petulance, followed by one of inquiry, came up from Milburn's
eyes, and he pressed his head between his wrists, as if to bring back
the blood that might propel his judgment. They heard him mutter,
"No business prudence--yet plausible, persuasive--might do it well."
The Judge spoke now, with some firmness:
"Milburn, there is no use of your rebelling. Here you are and here you
will lie till nature does her restoration, assisted by this medicine I
have brought you. You must undergo calomel, and this quinine must set on
its work of several weeks to break up the regularity of these chills. In
the meantime, as your interests are also Vesta's, and Vesta's are mine,
let me serve her, if not you."
The positive tone influenced the weakened system of the patient. He
looked at all three of the observers, and said to Tilghman, "William, I
might send you but for your calling; leave me with the Judge a little
while, both you and Rhoda."
Rhoda took the Conestoga bonnet from the top of the Entailed Hat box,
and arrayed herself in it, to the rector's exceeding wonder.
"Let's you and me go take a little walk," she said, putting her hand in
his arm with a quiet confidence in which was a spark of Meshach's will.
"I ain't afraid of Princess Anne people, if they are proud. Mise Somers
says King Solomons was no better than a lily outen the pond, and said so
himself."
The young man, sincere as his humility was, blushed a little at the idea
of walking through his native town with that bonnet at his side, he
being of one of the self-conscious, high-viewing families of the old
peninsula--his grand-uncle the staff-officer of Washington, and
messenger from Yorktown to Congress with the news, "Cornwallis has
fallen;" but it was his chivalric sense, and not his piety, which
immediately dispelled the last touch of coxcombry, when he felt that a
lady had requested him.
"With happiness, Miss Holland;" and he did not feel one shrinking
thought again as he ran the gantlet of the idle fellows of the town,
many of them his former vagrant playmates. Rhoda was perfectly happy. He
would have taken her to his grandmother's, with whom he kept house, but
that aristocratic old dowager might say something, he considered, to
destroy Rhoda's confidence in her elegant appearance and easy
vocabulary; and they walked past Teackle Hall, where Vesta saw them, and
opened the door and made them come in and eat a little. Rhoda at first
showed some uneasiness under this great pile of habitation, but Vesta
was so natural and gracious that the shyness wore off, and, at a fitting
moment, the bride said:
"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this
winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly
become."
Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta
praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in
spite of Mrs. Somers.
Tilghman, too, accused himself that he felt a little relieved when he
escorted Rhoda back to Meshach's in another bonnet, and Vesta followed,
with her great shaggy dog, Turk; she not unconscious--though serene and
thoughtfully polite to all she knew--of people peering at her in wonder
and excitement from every door and window of the town. The news was
working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the
aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed
daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer
in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a wife at last.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE DUSKY LEVELS.
The new son-in-law, left alone with Judge Custis, asked to be propped up
in bed, and nothing was visible that would support his pillow but the
aged leather hat-box that Custis, with a wry face, brought to do duty.
"My illness is unfortunate," he gasped; "not only to me, but to the new
ties I have formed; to the mutual interest my wife and I have in making