The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it,
and is a fraud."
Here he kicked the negro underneath him, who hardly protested.
"Well, then," spoke Judge Custis, "as Clayton is a man of genius, and
you employ him--"
"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and
right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been
obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would
have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have
filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping
water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country could
go through, and the channel would be purged by every tide."
He stood up and put his foot on the negro, to the amusement of the boys
gathering around.
"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will;
it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my Beaver
Hat.'"
Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which had
entered his family.
The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon came
to a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, entered
upon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of which
the canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the low
ridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almost
mountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short of
imagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, only
fourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the only
achieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by the
national government, by three of the states it connected, and by private
subscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars of
expense--no light burden when the population was, by the previous
census, less than eight million whites in all the land.
Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up at
the deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands of
yellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of which
had fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again;
and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feet
overhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touched
Clayton and said:
"Never mind my failures! Thank God, I'm a Whig."
"Goy! there's nothing like it," said Clayton.
Not far from this point the canal passed an old church and graveyard at
a bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governor
of Delaware, was buried. Here Randel's plain conveyance took them in,
and in the moonlight they drove a few miles to Mr. Randel's estate, near
the banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay and
iron stain, on the farther shore.
"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall see
all the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vessel
that pays my tolls to the Canal Company."
"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distance
back, running north and south across the fields?"
"A railroad survey."
"Who is making it?"
"They say Meshach Milburn, of Princess Anne."
"Goy!" exclaimed Clayton, "I'll beat him."
* * * * *
For two or three days the three men, still studying the canal suit,
drove over a picturesque country, visiting the old manor of the
Labadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead of
the late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churches
among the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell's
warriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in the
neighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholy
interest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father more
than a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They also
went to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capture
Philadelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history of
Delaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from one
of these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points seared
Judge Custis's eyeballs:
"Your wife died at Cambridge." "Your daughter is very ill at
Wilmington."
"To Wilmington!" cried Judge Custis, staggering up. "Oh, my daughter! I
have killed her."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
SPIRITS OF THE PAST.
"What do they say, William, about Jack Wonnell's being found shot dead?"
"It is generally said that he was killed by the negroes for gallantries
to their color. Some talk of arresting little Roxy Custis."
"What do you say, William Tilghman?"
"I can say nothing. The night I drove Virgie to Snow Hill I drove over
poor Wonnell's body. A strange negro was seen here--an enemy of your
servant, Samson. The new cook at Teackle Hall thinks he fired the shot."
The young rector felt the searching look of those resinous forester's
eyes staring him through.
"That shot was meant for me, William Tilghman."
"Perhaps so."
"It was the shot of a hired murderer, who mistook Wonnell's unusual
hats for mine, that was not well described to him, or the description of
which his drunken and excited memory did not retain."
"Mr. Milburn, please save Vesta this suspicion."
"Oh! that pure soul could not know it," Milburn continued, with a
moment's gentleness; "but some of her proud kin, to whom I am less than
a dog, did send the assassin. I think I guess the man."
"Do not rush to a conclusion! Remember, Vesta has suffered so much for
others' errors."
"He was killed in this room, where Wonnell never came before. The wound
shows the shot to have come from a point below, where nothing but
Wonnell's hat, and not his features, could be seen. The mistake of
bell-crown for steeple-top shows that it was a stranger's job: the poor
fool died for me. Now where did the bungler who killed me by proxy come
from?"
"I will be frank with you, sir. Joe Johnson, the kidnapper, was also
here: Mary says so. To save Virgie from him, I helped her away."
"Now," said Milburn, "what enemy of mine delegated the kidnapper to
procure a murderer?"
He waited a moment without response, and answered, in a low tone of
voice, his own question:
"The man is at Johnson's Cross Roads: letters from Cambridge tell me so.
It was the deceased Mrs. Custis's brother, Allan McLane."
"Again I ask you to think of Vesta and her many sacrifices!"
"I do. I have promised her that she shall never receive a cruel word
from me. But I shall not spare my assassins. To them I shall be as one
they have killed, and whose blood smokes, for vengeance. I possess the
only warrant that can drive them from Maryland."
He laid a roll of bank-notes on the table suggestively.
"No wealth is accumulated in vain," said Meshach Milburn, his delicate
nostrils distended and his fine hand pointing to the bank-bills. "Now,
_war_ on Johnson's Cross Roads!"
He crossed the old room over the store, and, opening the green chest,
brought out the Entailed Hat, and took it in his hand with a grim smile.
"Here is something I thought to lay aside on my wife's account," he
spoke. "Her people compel me to wear it! I thought all malice to this
poor hat would be done with my social triumph here. But I am not a man
to be frightened. Let them kill me, but it shall be under my ancestral
brim."
"Oh! hear your mocking-bird sing again as it did:
'Vesta--Meshach--Love!' Where is the bird?"
Meshach Milburn shook his head and put the Entailed Hat upon it. "Tom
left me," he said, "when they began to fire bullets at my Hat."
* * * * *
Vesta's female instinct had already found the explanation of Wonnell's
death.
From the moment of knowing her husband, his fatal hat had been the
shadow across her life's path. His person had never been offensive to
her, and something attractive or modifying in him had led her, when a
child, to offer a flower to his hat, to give it consonance with himself,
that seemed to deserve less evil.
A fancied insult to his hat had made him quarrel with her father, a
quarrel which involved her conquest, not by wooing, but by the treaty of
war. The same hat had inspired the superstition which led her kitchen
servants to leave their comfortable home, and had been the insuperable
obstacle to her mother's consent to her marriage. It had caused the only
bitter words that ever passed between her and her father. At last it had
spilled blood, and her uncle, she well knew, from his implacable
nature, had set the ruffians on, and she knew as well that her husband
had found him out.
His intelligence, which would have been otherwise a matter of pride to
her, became a subject of fear, involved with his hat.
Then, the loss of Virgie was hardly less severe to Vesta than her own
mother's.
It was true that Roxy, pretty and loving, now poured all her devotion at
her mistress's feet, but there had been something in Virgie that Roxy
could never rise to--a dignity and self-reliance hardly less than a
white woman's. Vesta shed bitter tears at the news of that dear
comforter's flight, and on her knees, praying for the delicate young
wanderer, she felt God's conviction of the sins of slavery. Alas!
thousands felt the same who would not admit the conviction, and gave
excuses that welded into one nation, at last, the sensitive millions who
could not agree to a lesser sacrifice, but were willing to give war.
A little note from Snow Hill told Vesta that her maid had already
departed, and would only write again from free soil.
So the upbraided hat was worn more often than before, and Vesta had to
suffer much humiliation for it. Her husband now moved actively to
organize his railroad, and visited the Maryland towns of the peninsula,
taking her along, and wearing on the journey his King James tile, now
swathed in mourning crape.
At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he
applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county
press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's
rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters
on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to
see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his
side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel
that his _outre_ dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no
less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old
aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were
bestowed on the eccentric _parvenu_; and at Chestertown, where
originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys
burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown
loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's
host.
The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it
down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad
charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of
his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth
himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were
no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry
no deep malice, while silence is hate.
Loyal to her least of vows, and wishing to love and obey him in spirit
fully, Vesta felt that his own good-nature was being darkened again by
his obstinacy upon this single point of an obsolete hat.
He looked, in their evening circle at Teackle Hall, like a younger and
knightlier person, in a modern suit of clothes, and slippers of Vesta's