The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
respect, and that he shall behave himself; but no lovey and no honey for
me now. Life has passed the noon and the early afternoon for him and me,
and I live to be respectable, to appreciate my security, to keep
upstarts at arm's-length, to enjoy my life in its appointed circle,
taking care of my income, and never--no, never!--giving any human being
the opportunity to make me a beggar again."
"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, "think of Judge Custis! Have you not made home
cold to him by this formalism? We must study men, and please them
according to their tastes, and therein lies our joy; else we are false
to the companionship God gave us to man for. Yield to your husband's
boyish-heartedness; fly with him, like the mate by the bird! He has
repented; welcome him to your love again, and stay his feet from truant
going, or he may dash down the precipice this sorrow has arrested him
before, of everlasting dissipation and the death of his noble soul!"
Vesta stood above her mother, deeply moved, deeply earnest. Her mother
stole another look at the bank check.
"Well, daughter, I will be humbugged by him if you desire it," she said,
but with slight answering emotion. "If I had my life to go over again I
would marry a business man, and let the aristocracy go. There is the
second knock at the front-door. I believe I will dress myself and go
down-stairs too."
There were two ladies in the parlor when Vesta went there--Grandmother
Tilghman and the Widow Dennis.
"Good-evening, Vesta," said the old lady, who was stone-blind, but
easily knew Vesta's footstep. "William thought you would not go to
evening service on account of Mr. Milburn's illness, so I came around to
sit till church was over, when he will take me home. But what is that I
hear in this parlor, like somebody sniffling?"
"It's me, Aunt Vesty," said the voice of Rhoda Holland from the
background.
"This is Mr. Milburn's niece, who has come here to stay with me," Vesta
said.
"Ah! then it is no Custis. The last sniffle I heard was at the ball to
Lafayette in the spring of 1781. The marquis had marched from Head of
Elk to the Bald Friars' ferry up the Susquehanna and inland among the
hills to Baltimore, and we gave him a ball which, at his request, was
turned into a clothing-party. He snuffed so much that he kept up a
sniffle all the evening, like--"
Here Rhoda's sniffle was heard again.
"Yes, that's a good imitation," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I don't
like it."
"Did the gineral dance at the ball?" asked Rhoda. "What did he do with
his swurd? Did he dance with it outen his scibburd?"
"He danced like a gentleman," Mrs. Tilghman replied, as if she would
rather not, "and led me out in the first set. You danced with him,
Vesta, at the ball in '24, forty-three years afterwards. Does he sniffle
yet?"
"I don't recollect, grand-aunt. I was a little girl, and so much
flattered that I thought everything he did was perfect."
"Ah me!" exclaimed Mrs. Tilghman, pulling the feather of her turban up,
and looking as much like an old belle as possible at eighty years of
age; "you danced before Lafayette with my grandson Bill. Bill hardly
remembers Lafayette at all, thinking of you that night, so wonderful in
your girl's charms. I told him Vesta would never marry him, as he was
too plain and poor. But I never thought you would marry that--"
Here Rhoda sniffled warningly.
"Yes," exclaimed the old lady, catching the sniffle; "I never thought
you would marry _that_! But Bill is as dear a fool as ever. He says now
that Meshach Milburn is a good man, too. I never thought he was above
a--"
Rhoda sniffled earnestly.
"Precisely that," exclaimed the old lady; "that was my estimate of the
stock. Bill says he is a financial genius. I don't see what is to become
of girls in this generation. Here is Ellenora, too good to marry
Phoebus, the sailor man, too poor to marry anybody else; now, if
Milburn had married her and taken her son Levin into his business, it
would have been reasonable; but to take you and pervert your happiness,
almost makes me--"
Sniffle from Rhoda.
"Yes," said the old lady, snappishly; "almost! But I never did do it
yet."
"Did you ever see Gineral Washin'ton, mem?" Rhoda asked. "I thought,
maybe, you was old enough. Misc Somers, she see him up yer to Kint River
a-crossin' to 'Napolis. He was a-swarin' at the cappen of the piriauger
and a dammin' of the Eas'n Shu, and he said they wan't no good rudes in
Marylan' nohow; that the Wes'n Shu was all red mud, an' the Eas'n Shu
yaller mud, an' the bay was jus' pizen. Misc Somers say she don't think
it was Gineral Washin'ton, caze he cuss so. She goin' to find out when
she kin git a book an' somebody to read outen it to her, caze she
dreffle smart."
"Grand-aunt Tilghman," Vesta interposed to the blank silence of the
room, "knew General Washington intimately."
"Do tell us!" cried Rhoda. "You kin be a right interestin' ole woman, I
reckon, ef you air so quar."
In the midst of a smile, in which the blind old lady herself joined, and
Mrs. Custis at the same time entered the room, Mrs. Tilghman spoke as
follows:
"I went to visit Cousin Martha Washington several years before the
Revolution, at Mount Vernon. I had seen her while she was the widow of
Cousin Custis, and we occasionally corresponded. In those days we
visited by vessel, so a schooner of Robert Morris's father set me ashore
at Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington was then having his first portrait
painted by Wilson Peale, and he was forty years old. Peale and
Washington used to pitch the bar, play quoits, and fox-hunt, while
Cousin Martha, who was only three months younger than the colonel,
knitted and cut out sewing for her colored girls, and heard her
daughter, Martha Custis, play the harpsichord. Poor Martha had the
consumption; she was dark as an Indian; Washington often carried her
along the piazza and into the beautiful woodlands near the house; but
she died, leaving him all her money--nearly twenty thousand dollars. We
Custises rather looked down on Colonel Washington in those days; he was
not of the old gentry; his poor mother could barely read and write, and
once, when we went to Fredericksburg to see her, she was riding out in
the field among her few negroes as her own overseer, wearing an old
sun-bonnet, and sunburned like a forester."
"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "I should think she was a great
impediment to Washington."
"I reckon that's the way her son got big," exclaimed Rhoda; "if his mar
had laid down in bed all day, he couldn't have killed King George so
easy with his swurd."
"I often said to Cousin Martha, 'What did you see in this big horse of a
man?' 'Oh,' she replied, 'he's the best overseer in Virginia. He looks
after my property as no other man could.'"
"Then," said Mrs. Custis, emphatically, "he was one man out of a
thousand."
"That's the kind of man you married, Vesta," spoke up Mrs. Dennis.
"_Her_ husband," said Mrs. Custis, "looked after her father's property,
I am sure, for he got it all."
"And returned it all," exclaimed Vesta.
Mrs. Custis remarked that Washington certainly was a blue-blooded man.
"Is thar people with blue blood comin' outen of 'em?" asked Rhoda
Holland. "Lord sakes! I should think it would make 'em cold."
"I wonder if men are ever great?" asked Vesta; "or whether it is not
great occasion and trial that project them. A crisis comes in our lives,
and, finding what we can endure, we incur greater risks, and finally
delight in such adventure."
"That is the way with my poor boy, Levin," said Mrs. Dennis, quietly, to
Vesta. She was a pretty woman, somewhat past thirty, with rosy cheeks,
blue eyes, neat but rather poor attire, and a simple, artless manner,
and might have passed for the sister of her son.
"Is Levin coming for you to-night?" Vesta asked.
"No," blushed the widow; "James Phoebus will see me home. Levin has
gone off in his boat, and I have been worried about him all day. Some
time, I am afraid, he will go and never return. Oh, Cousin Vesta, this
waiting for a husband neither alive nor dead is very trying."
Overhearing the remark, Mrs. Custis remarked, "Norah, you ought to be
ashamed to keep that faithful fellow waiting on you, when you could give
yourself a good husband and reward him so easily."
"I think you had better look out for old age," Mrs. Tilghman also said,
"while you have youth and good looks to obtain the provision. Oden
Dennis is probably dead; if not dead, he does not mean to return, for I
can think of no circumstances in this age which would forcibly detain a
man from his wife fifteen years. Even if he was in a prison, he would be
allowed to write to you. He may not be dead, Norah, but he is not coming
back. Get a father for your son; you cannot manage Levin."
"Maybe he has been stoled by Injins," exclaimed Rhoda, with great
fervor; "thar was a Injin captive in a shew at Nu-ark, that had been
kept nineteen years. He forgot his language, and whooped dreffle. Misc
Somers say he was an imploster, an' worked on the Brekwater up to
Lewistown. She's always lookin' behind the shew to find out somethin'."
(Slight sniffle.)
"Do get that girl a pocket-handkerchief, and show her how to use it,"
exclaimed Mrs. Tilghman, breaking out. "Ah! girls, I have been a widow
thirty years. I never gave up the expectation of marrying again till I
lost my eyesight; and even after that, at sixty-five, I had an offer of
marriage; but I said to my gallant old beau, 'I will not take a man I
cannot compliment by seeing him and admiring him every day. I love you,
but my blindness would give you too much pain.' In our quiet towns, all
the life worth living is domestic joy. Do not lose it, Ellenora; do not
put it off too long!"
"I could love Mr. Phoebus, plain as he is," the widow spoke, "if I
could persuade myself that Oden is dead. But that I cannot do. A real
person--spirit or man--is watching over me closely. My very shoes I wear
to-night came from that mysterious agent. It is not my son; it is not
James Phoebus. No other stranger would so secretly assist me. I am
bound up in the fear and wonder that it is my husband."
"That does beat conjecture," said old Mrs. Tilghman. "Have you no friend
you might suspect?"
"None," the widow answered. "None who have not worn out their means of
giving long ago. Can I marry, with this ghostly visitation coming so
regularly? Should I not have faith in a husband's living if I receive a
wife's care from an unseen hand?"
"Oden Dennis," Mrs. Custis remarked, "was hardly a man to do charity and
not be seen. He was rather self-indulgent, demonstrative, and restless.
I cannot think of his nocturnal visits in the body. Besides, he would
not supply you in that way, Norah, if he meant to come back; and if he
cannot himself come to you, neither could he send."
Not altogether relishing Mrs. Tilghman's reproof, Rhoda was again heard
from, saying:
"Lord sakes! all the women has to talk about when they is gone is the
men. When the men comes, they talks as if they never missed of 'em. Misc
Somers, she never had no man, an' she talks mos' about the women that
has got one. I think Aunt Vesty has got the best man in Prencess Anne.
He's the richest. He's the freest. He never courted no other gal. He
ain't got no quar old women runnin' of him down--caze Misc Somers is
dreffle afraid of him!" This last remark seemed apologetic and an
afterthought.
"I am beginning to think my fortune is better than I deserve," Vesta
replied, to soften the application, as wine, tea, and cake were brought
in. "Now, dear friends, as I am Mr. Milburn's wife, let us all be
Christians this Sunday night, and drink his health and happy recovery,
and that he may never repent his marriage."