The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
They drank with some hesitation, except the bride, Rhoda, and Mrs.
Dennis. Mrs. Tilghman needed the wine too much to wait long, and Mrs.
Custis, finding she was observed, took a sip from her glass also,
excusing herself on the ground of a recent headache from drinking
heartily.
As the conversation proceeded, now by general participation, again by
couples apart, and Vesta found herself more and more a subject of
sympathy, with no little curiosity interwoven in it, she also imagined
that an undertone of belief was abroad that she had made a mercenary
marriage.
Old Mrs. Tilghman--in her prime a most caustic belle, and worldly as
three marriages, all shrewdly contracted, could make her--seemed
determined to hold that Vesta had rejected her grandson for the
money-lender on the consideration of wealth. Vesta's own mother, too,
who should have known her well, had twice hinted the same. Even the
inoffensive Ellenora had accepted that idea, or another kin to it, and
Rhoda Holland had remembered that her uncle was the richest of
bridegrooms in Princess Anne. Vesta felt the injustice, but said to
herself:
"I must make the sacrifice complete, and incur any harsh judgment it may
bear. I see that I shall be driven for sympathy to the last place in the
world I anticipated: to my husband's heart. Yes, there is something
besides love in marriage: if I cannot love him, he can understand me."
Vesta had come to a place all come to who volunteer an act of great
sacrifice--to have it put upon a low motive from the lower plane of
sacrifice in many otherwise kind people. We give our money to an
institution of charity, and it is said that it was for notoriety, or
self-seeking, or at the expense of our kin. We lead a forlorn hope in
politics, or some other arena, to establish a cause or assist a
principle, with the certain result of defeat, and we are said to be
jealous or malignant. Perhaps we make a book to illustrate some old
region off the highways of observation, drawn to it by kindred strings
or early patterings, and the politician there regards it as an attack,
the old family fossil as an intrusion, the very youth as if it were a
queer and gratuitous thing from such an outer source. So we wince a
little, but feel that it was necessary to be misunderstood to complete
the sacrifice.
The feeling of despondency increased after the little company separated,
and Vesta went to her room and laid herself upon her still maiden bed.
She had said her prayer and asked the approval of God, but her nervous
system, under the tension of almost two days' excitement and events such
as she had never known, was alert and could not fall to slumber. Old
passages of Testament lore haunted her soul, such as: "Thy desire shall
be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee;" "A man shall leave his
father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife." She began to see
that marriage was not merely the solution of a family trouble, and the
giving of her body as a hostage for a pecuniary debt, but that it was a
rendition of all her liberty, even the liberty of sympathy and of
sorrow, to the man to whom she must cleave.
In marrying him she had left friendship, father and mother, everything,
at a greater distance than she ever dreamed; and they resented the
desertion to the degree that they now confounded her with her new
interest, let go their claim upon her, and could scarce conceive of her
except in the dual relation of a woman subject to her husband, and
selfish as himself.
"I wonder if he will grow weary of me, too," she thought, with anguish,
"after his possession is established and I shall have no other source of
confidence? What did I know of this world only yesterday? Then every way
seemed clear and open for me, my friends abundant, and love profuse;
to-day I am in awful doubts, and yet I must not lose my will and drift
with every passing fear and confusion into the fickleness which makes
woman contemptible after she has given her hand. I will never give up
two persons--my father, and my husband!"
As she turned down the lamp, it being nearly midnight, a short, fierce
cry, quickly stifled, as if some wild animal had howled once in
nightmare and fallen asleep in his kennel again, seized on her ears and
chilled her blood.
Vesta started up in bed and listened. It seemed to her that there were
footsteps, but they passed away, and she listened in vain for any other
sounds, till sleep fell deep and dreamless upon her, like black Lethe
winding through a desert wedding-day.
CHAPTER XXI.
LONG SEPARATIONS.
Vesta was awakened by Roxy, Virgie, and her mother all standing around
her bed at once, exclaiming something unintelligible together. It was
late morning, the whole family having slept long, after the several
experiences of two such days, and the sun was shining through the great
trees before Teackle Hall and burnishing the windows, so that Vesta
could hardly see.
"The kitchen servants have run away," Mrs. Custis shrieked, on Vesta's
request that her mother only should talk. "Old Hominy is gone, and has
taken all her herbs and witcheries with her; and all the young children
bred in the kitchen, Ned and Vince, the boys, and little Phillis, the
baby, they, too, are gone."
"I heard a strange cry or howl last night, as I dropped to sleep," Vesta
exclaimed, rubbing her eyes.
"Dear missy," cried Virgie, falling upon the pillow, "it was your poor
dog Turk; his throat has been cut upon the lawn."
"Yes, missy," Roxy blubbered, "poor Turk lies in his blood. There is
nobody to get breakfast but Virgie and me. Indeed, we did not know about
it."
"That is not very likely," said the suspicious Mrs. Custis.
"I know you did not, girls," Vesta said, "you have too much intelligence
and principle, I am sure; nor could Hominy have been so inhuman to my
poor dog."
Vesta at once rose up and threw on her morning-gown.
"The first thing to be done is to have breakfast. Roxy, do you go at
once to Mr. Milburn's and bring his man Samson here, and awake Miss
Holland to take Samson's place by her uncle. Tell Samson to make the
fire, and you and he get the breakfast. No person is to speak of this
incident of the kitchen servants leaving us on any pretence."
"Won't you give the alarm the first thing?" cried Mrs. Custis, not very
well pleased to see Vesta keep her temper. "They may be overtaken before
they get far away, daughter. Those four negroes are worth twelve hundred
dollars!"
"They are not worth one dollar, mamma, if they have run away from us;
because I should never either sell them or keep them again if they had
behaved so treacherously."
"I say, sell them and get the money," Mrs. Custis cried; "are they not
ours?"
"No, mamma, they are mine. Mr. Milburn and papa are to be consulted
before any steps are taken. Papa deeded them to me only last Saturday;
why should they have deserted at the moment I had redeemed them? Virgie,
can you guess?"
Virgie hesitated, only a moment.
"Miss Vesty, I think I can see what made Hominy go. She was afraid of
Meshach Milburn and his queer hat. She believed the devil give it to
him. She thought he had bought her by marrying you, and was going to
christen her to the Bad Man, or do something dreadful with her and the
little children."
"That's it, Miss Vessy," plump little Roxy added. "Hominy loved the
little children dearly; she thought they was to become Meshach's, and
she must save them."
"Poor, superstitious creature!" Vesta exclaimed.
"More misery brought about by that fool's hat!" cried Mrs. Custis. "If I
ever lay hands on it, it shall end in the fire."
"No wonder," Vesta said, "that this poor, ignorant woman should do
herself such an injury on account of an article of dress that disturbs
liberal and enlightened minds! Now I recollect that Hominy said
something about having 'got Quaker.' What did it mean?"
The two slave girls looked at each other significantly, and Virgie
answered,
"Don't the Quakers help slaves to get off to a free state? Maybe she
meant that."
"Do you suppose the abolitionists would tamper with a poor old woman
like that, whose liberty would neither be a credit to them nor a comfort
to her? I cannot think so meanly of them," Vesta reflected. "Besides,
could she have killed my dog?"
"A gross, ignorant, fetich-worshipping negro would kill a dog, or a
child, or anything, when she is possessed with a devil," Mrs. Custis
insisted.
"I don't believe she killed Turk," Roxy remarked, as she left the room.
"There was a white man in the kitchen last Saturday night: I think he
slept there; master gave him leave."
"Yes, missy," Virgie continued, after Roxy had gone to obey her orders;
"he was a dreadful man, and looked at me so coarse and familiar that I
have dreamed of him since. It was the man Mr. Milburn knocked down for
mashing his hat; he was afraid Mr. Milburn would throw him into jail, so
he asked master to hide in the kitchen. But Hominy was almost crazy with
fear of Mr. Milburn before that."
Vesta held up her beautiful arms with a look of despair.
"What has not that poor old hat brought upon every body?" she cried.
"Oh, who dares contest the sunshine with the tailor and hatter? They are
the despots that never will abdicate or die."
"The idea of your father letting a tramp like that sleep in the kitchen
among the slaves!" cried Mrs. Custis. "What obligation had he incurred
there, too, I should like to know? Teackle Hall is become a cave of owls
and foxes; it is time for me to leave it. Here is my husband gone,
riding fifty miles for his worst enemy, leaving us without a cook and
without a man's assistance to discover where ours is gone. I know what I
shall do: I will start this day for Cambridge, to meet my brother, and
visit the Goldsboroughs there till some order is brought out of this
attempt to plant wheat and tares together."
Vesta stopped a moment and kissed her mother: "That is just the thing,
dear mother," she said. "Let me straighten out the difficulties here;
go, and come back when all is done, and you can be yourself again."
"I shall do it, Vesta. Brother Allan gets to Cambridge to-morrow
afternoon; I will go as far as Salisbury this day, and either meet him
on the road to-morrow or find him at Cambridge. Oh, what a house is
Teackle Hall--full of male and female foresters, abolitionists,
runaways, and radicals! All made crazy by the bog ores and the fool's
hat!"
Descending to the yard, Vesta found Turk lying in his blood, his mastiff
jaws and shaggy sides clotted red, and, as it seemed, the howl in which
he died still lingering in the air. The Virginia spirit rose in Vesta's
eyes:
"Whoever killed this dog only wanted the courage to kill men!" she
exclaimed. "James Phoebus, look here!"
The pungy captain had been abroad for hours, and the masts of his
vessel were just visible across the marshy neck in the rear of Teackle
Hall. He touched his hat and came in.
"Early mornin', Miss Vesty! Hallo! Turk dead? By smoke, yer's
pangymonum!"
"He's stabbed, Jimmy!" Samson Hat remarked, coming out of the kitchen;
"see whar de dagger struck him right over de heart! Dat made him howl
and fall dead. His froat was not cut dat sudden; it's gashed as if wid
somethin' blunt."
"Right you are, nigger! The throat-cuttin' was a make believe; the stab
will tell the tale. But who's this yer, lurkin' aroun' the kitchen do';
if it ain't Jack Wonnell, I hope I may die! Sic!"
With this, active as the dog had been but yesterday, Jimmy rushed on
Jack Wonnell, chased him to the fence, and brought him back by the neck.
Wonnell wore a bell-crown, and his hand was full of fall blossoms. As
Wonnell observed the dead dog, pretty little Roxy came out of the
kitchen, and stood blushing, yet frightened, to see him.