The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
"Milburn and Leisler were executed in New York during the lifetime of
the first Custis. They anticipated the expulsion of James II., and were
entrapped by their provincial enemies and made political martyrs."
"The inquirer," said Meshach, "who had obtained my address in the course
of business, related, that after Milburn's death his brethren and their
families had sailed to the Chesapeake, where the Protestants had
successfully revolutionized for King William, and, making choice of poor
lands, they had become obscure. He asked me if the court-house records
made any registry of their wills."
"Of course you found them?"
"Yes. It was a revelation to me, and gave me the honorable sense of some
origin and quality. I traced myself back to the earliest folios, at the
close of the seventeenth century."
"Any property, Milburn?" asked the Judge, voluptuous and reanimated
again.
"My great-grandfather had left his son nothing but a Hat."
"Not uncommon!" exclaimed Judge Custis. "Our early wills contain little
but legacies of wearing apparel, household articles, bedding, pots and
kettles, and the elements of civilization."
"The will on record said: '_I give to my eldest son, Meshach Milburn, my
best Hat, and no more of my estate._'"
"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the Judge, loudly. "Genteel to the last! A hat of
fashion, no doubt, made in London; quite too ceremonious and topgallant
for these colonies. He left it to his eldest son, en-_tiled_it, we may
say. Ho! ho!"
"When my indignation was over, I took the same view you do, Judge
Custis, that it was a bequest of dignity, not of burlesque; and I made
some inquiries for that best Hat. It was a legend among my forest kin,
had been seen by very old people, was celebrated in its day, and worn by
my grandfather thankfully. He left it to my father, still a hat of
reputation--"
"Still en-_tiled_ to the oldest son! Ha, ha! Milburn."
"My father sold the hat to Charles Wilson Peale, who was native to our
peninsula, and knew the ancient things existing here that would help him
to form Peale's Museum during the last century. I found the hat in that
museum, covering the mock-figure of Guy Fawkes!"
"Conspirator's hat; bravo!" exclaimed the Judge.
"It had been used for the heads of George Calvert and Shakespeare, but
in time of religious excitements was proclaimed to be the true hat of
Guy Fawkes. I reclaimed it, and brought it to Princess Anne, and in a
vain moment put it on my head and walked into the street. It was
assailed with halloos and ribaldry."
"It was another Shirt of Nessus, Milburn; it poisoned your life, eh?"
"Perhaps so," replied Milburn, with intensity. "They say what is one
man's drink is another man's poison. You will accept that hat on the
head of your son-in-law, or no more _drink_ out of the Custis property!"
CHAPTER V.
THE BOG-ORE TRACT.
Resolution of character and executive power had been trifled away by
Judge Custis. The trader had concluded their interview with a decision
and fierceness that left paralysis upon the gentleman's mind. He saw, in
sad fancy, the execution served upon his furniture, the amazement of his
wife, the pallor of his daughter, the indignation of his sons. He also
shrank before the impending failure of his furnace and abandonment of
the bog-ore tract, on which he had raised so much state and local fame;
people would say: "Custis was a fool, and deceived himself, while old
Steeple-top Milburn played upon the Custises' vanity, and turned them
into the street."
"No doubt," thought the Judge, "that fellow, Milburn, can get anything
when he gets my house. The poor folks' vote he may command, because he
is of their class. He is a lender to many of the rich. Who could have
suspected his intelligence? His address, too? He handled me as if I were
a forester and he a judge. A very, very remarkable man!" finished Judge
Custis, taking the last of the brandy.
He was interrupted by the entrance of Samson Hat.
"Where's your master, boy?" asked the Judge.
"He's gone up to de ole house, Judge, where his daddy and mammy died.
It's de place where I hides after my fights."
"May the ague strike him there! Let the bilious sweat from the mill-pond
be strong to-night, that, like Judas of old, his bowels may drop out!
But, no," continued the irresolute man, "I have no right to hate him."
"Judge," softly said the old negro, "my marster is a sick man. He ain't
happy like you an' me. He's 'bitious. He's lonely. Dat's enough to spile
angels. But a gooder man I never knowed, 'cept in de onpious sperrit.
He's proud as Lucifer. He's full of hate at Princess Anne and all de
people. Your darter may git a better man, not a pyorer one."
"Purity goes a very little way," exclaimed the Judge, "on the male side
of marriage contracts. It's always assumed, and never expected. You need
not remember, Samson, that I expressed any anger at your master!"
"My whole heart, judge, is to see him happy. Hard as he is, dat man has
power to make him loved. Your darter might go farder and fare wuss! I
wish her no harm, God knows!"
The negro said an humble good-night, and the Judge lay down upon his bed
to think of the dread alternatives of the coming week; but, voluptuous
even in despair, he slept before he had come to any conclusion.
Samson Hat walked up the side of the mill-pond on a sandy road, divided
from the water by a dense growth of pines. The bullfrogs and insects
serenaded the forest; the furnace chimney smoked lurid on the midnight.
At the distance of half a mile or more an old cabin, in decay, stood in
a sandy field near the road; it had no door in the hollow doorway, no
sash in the one gaping window; the step was broken leading to the sill,
and some of the weather-boarding had rotted from the skeleton. The old
end-chimney bore it toughly up, however, and the low brick props under
the corners stood plumb. Within lay a single room with open beams, a
sort of cupboard stairway projecting over the fireplace, and another
door and window were in the rear. Before this fireplace sat Meshach
Milburn on an old chair, fairly revealed by the light of some of the
burning weather-boarding he had thrown upon the hearth. On the hearth
was a little heap of the bog iron ore and a bottle.
"Come in, Samson!" he called. "Don't think me turned drunkard because I
am taking this whiskey. I drink it to keep out the malaria, and partly
as a communion cup; for to-night the barefooted ghosts who have drooped
and withered here are with me in spirit."
"Dey was all good Milburns who lived heah, marster," said the negro.
"Dey had hard times, but did no sin. Dey shook wid chills and fevers,
not wid conscience."
"I shall shake with neither," said the money-lender. "Go up into the
loft, and sleep till you are called. I want the horses early for
Princess Anne!"
The negro obeyed without remark, and disappeared behind the
cupboard-like door. Milburn sat before the fire, and looked into it
long, while a procession of thoughts and phantoms passed before it.
He saw a poor family of independent Puritans setting sail at different
dates from English seaports. Some were indentured servants, hoping for a
career; others were avoiding the civil wars; others were small political
malefactors, noisy against the oppressions of their hero, Cromwell, and
conspirators against his power; and, thrown by him in English jails,
were only delivered to be sold into slavery, driven through the streets
of market-towns, placed on troop ships between the decks, among the
horses, and set up at auction in Barbadoes, like the blacks; whence they
in time continued onward westward. One, the fortunate possessor of some
competence, sailed his own ship across the Atlantic, and delivered up to
Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being
suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic
colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him
down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would
not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods
upon the ploughshare, and fell back again into the furrow.
As Meshach Milburn thought of these things he took up a portion of the
bog ore from the hearth.
"Here is iron," he said, thoughtfully, "true iron, which makes the blood
red, moulds into infinite forms, nails houses together, binds wheels,
and casts into cannon and ball. But this iron ran into a bog, formed low
combinations, and had no other mould than twigs and leaves afforded. Its
volcanic origin was forgotten when it ran with sand and gravel away from
the mountain vein and upland ore along the low, alluvial bar, till, like
an oyster, the iron is dredged from the stagnant pool, impure,
inefficacious, corrupted. So is it with man, whose magnetic spirit
follows the dull declivity to the barren sandbars of the world, and
lodges there. I am of the bog ores; but that exists which will flux with
me, clean me of rust, and transmit my better quality to posterity. O,
youth, beauty, and station--lovely Vesta! for thee I will be iron!"
Milburn looked around the single room inquiringly. He placed his finger
upon the crevices in the weather-boarding; he opened the little closet
below the stairs, and a weasel dashed out and shot through the door; he
ascended the steep, short stairs, and with a torch examined the black
shingles, but nothing was there except a litter of young owls, whose
parents had gone poaching. Then, returning, he searched on every open
beam and rotting board, as if for writing.
"They could not write!" he thought. "Nothing is left to me, not even a
sign, down a century and a half, to tell that I had parents!"
As he spoke he felt an object move behind him, and, looking back, the
shadow of the Entailed Hat was dancing on the wall. As he threw his head
back, so did it; as he retired from it, the hat enlarged, until the
little room could hardly hold its shadow. Retiring again, he lifted it
from his head with bitter courtesy, and the shadow did the same. The man
and the shadow looked each at a peaked hat and stroked it.
"This is everything," exclaimed Milburn. "The hundred humble heads are
at rest in the sand; one grave-stone would mock them all. But once the
family brain expanded to a hat, and that survived the race. I am the
Quaker who respects his hat, the Cardinal who is crowned with it; yes,
and the dunce who must wear it in his corner!"
Then the picture of his parents arose upon his sight: a cheerful father,
with two or three old slaves, ploughing in the deep sand, to drop some
shrivelled grains of corn, or tinkering a disordered mill-wheel that
moved a blacksmith's saw. Ever full of confidence in nothing which could
increase, credulous and sanguine, tender and laborious, Milburn's sire
nursed his forest patches as if they were presently to be rich
plantations, and was ever "pricing" negroes, mules, tools, and
implements, in expectation of buying them. Nothing could diminish his
confidence but disease and old age. He heard of the great "improvement"
on the Furnace tract, and took his obedient wife and brood there. As the
laborers pulled out the tussocks and roots, encrusted with iron, from
the swamp and creek, fever and ague came forth and smote them both.
How wretched that scene when, almost too haggard to move, father and
mother, in this one bare room where Meshach sat, groaning amid their
many offspring, saw death with weakness creep upon each other--death
without priest or doctor, without residue or cleanliness--the death the
million die in lowly huts, yet, oh, how hard!
"Haste, sonny, _good_ boy," the frightened father had said, knowing not
how ill he was, in his dependence on his wife; "take the horse, and ride