The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times

gift. His delicate hand well became the ring she put upon it, and, when he talked high enthusiasm and sense, and stood ready to back them with courage and money, Vesta thought her husband lacked but one thing to make him the equal of his supposititious kinsman, the democratic martyr in the seventeenth century, and that was another head-dress. She almost feared to broach the subject, knowing that an old sore is ever the most sensitive, and being too direct and frank to insinuate or practise any arts upon him. She was embroidering an evening-cap of velvet for him one day when Mrs. Tilghman sent a hat-box, and in it was a fine new hat of the current style. He answered her letter politely, and put the new hat upon the rack of Teackle Hall, and never touched it again. Next, Rhoda Holland, his niece, procuring, from some country beau, a beaver-skin--and beavers were growing scarce and dear in that peninsula--had him an elegant cap made of it for the cold weather now coming; but he only kissed her and put it on the rack, and there it tempted the moth. His chills and fever continued at broken times, but more regular became the dislike and opposition of the old class of society as he undertook to become the promoter of his region. They regarded it as audacity worse than crime: he had outstripped them in wealth, and now was undermining their importance. Many avowed that they would never ride on a railroad built by such a man; others hoped it would break him; some took open ground against his work, and wrote letters to Annapolis to prejudice him with the Legislature, where the Baltimore interest was already crying loudly that an Eastern Shore railroad meant to take Maryland trade and money to Philadelphia. Meshach fiercely responded that, unless the railway took the line of the Maryland counties, Delaware state would build it and carry it off to Newcastle instead of to Elkton, where Meshach meant to unite with a projected Baltimore system. Prudently estimating the sparseness of his fortune to execute a hundred miles of embankment and railroad, Milburn yet kept up a display of surveyors and graders in several counties, and his local patriotism had at least the appreciation of Vesta's little circle. In the meantime the continued absence of Samson surprised him, and Judge Custis's letters were irregular and long coming as he went farther north, while two letters received by the Widow Dennis were as mystical as they were assuring: one, in a female hand, told her that her son Levin was being tenderly watched, and another, in man's writing, enclosed some money, and said her son would soon be home. Mrs. Dennis was far from happy in this indefinite state of mind, and her heart told her, also, that the absence of James Phoebus was a different strain. She loved that absentee already too well to forgive his silence. One day, before November, Vesta said to her husband: "The air and sky are warm and sparkling yet, and the roses are out. You work too hard between your canal case and your railroad. Let us fill the two carriages and drive to old Rehoboth, and eat our dinner there." He consented, and they took with them Grandmother Tilghman and William, Rhoda Holland, Roxy, and Mrs. Dennis, and also the poor free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus had released from her chains. The road passed in sight of the birthplace of the lion of independence in Maryland, Samuel Chase, who forced that hesitating state, by threatenings and even riots, to declare for permanent separation from England, as Henry Winter Davis, by the same means, eighty-five years afterwards, forced her rebels against the Union to show their hands. Near Chase's birthplace, on the glebe, rose the old Washington Academy, out in a field, raised in that early republican day when a generous fever for education, following the act of tolerance, made some noble school-houses that the growth of towns ultimately discouraged. With four great chimneys above its conical roof, and pediments and cupola, and two wide stories, and high basement, all made in staid, dark brick, the academy yet had a mournful and neglected look, as if, like man, it was ruminating upon the more brutalized times and lessening enlightenment false systems ever require. "Ah!" said Vesta's husband, "how many a poor boy thou hast sent from yonder mutilated for life, honey, like the lovers of the queen bee." "How is that?" Vesta inquired. "You never heard of the queen bee? Women, when they die, may turn to bees, and reverse their hard conditions in this life. The queen bee has no rival in the hive; all other females there are immature, and all the males are dying for the queen. She has five hundred lovers, so lovesick for her that they never work, and forty times as many maids, like Penelope's, all embroidering comb and wax." "How was that proved?" "By putting the bees in a glass house and watching them. To God all mankind may be in a glass hive, too, and every buzzer's secret biography be kept." "And the queen bee's honeymoon?" "From her that word is taken. She flies high into the air and meets a lover by chance; she has so many that one is sure to be met; she kisses him in that crystal eddy of sunshine, and, in the transport, he is wounded to the heart. How many young drones from the academy have seen thee once and swooned for life!" "But the queen bee also has a fate some time, sir?" "Yes. She leaves the ancient hive at last, and settles on an unsightly forest-tree somewhere, and all that love her follow: the long-neglected herb becomes busy with music and sweetness, and the flashing of silver wings, till into some gum-tree cone the farmer gathers the swarm, and it is their home." Vesta looked up at the poetical illustration, and saw her husband's conical hat, into which she had been hived, and her eyes fell to her mourning weeds. "Oh, my father!" she thought; "has he kept his good resolutions! It is all I have left to hope for." They travelled down the aisles of the level forest, sometimes the holly-trees, in their green leafage and red fruit, sometimes the cleanly pine-tree's green, enriching the brown concavity of oaks; and at the scattered settlement of Kingston, the Jackson candidate for governor, Mr. Carroll, bowed from his door. Crossing Morumsco Creek, they bore to the east, and soon saw, on a plain, the still animate ecclesiastical hamlet of Rehoboth, extending its two ancient churches across the vision. The road ran to the bank of the River Pocomoke, where a ferry was still maintained to the opposite shore and the Virginia land of Accomac, and the cold tide, without a sail, went winding to an oystery estuary of the bay, where the mud at the bottom was so soft that vessels aground in it could still continue sailing, as on the muggy globe that Noah came to shore in. Close by were oyster-shells high as a natural bluff, made by the Indian gourmands before John Smith's voyage of navigation. Vesta was set out at the great, ruined Episcopal church that, like a castle of brick, made the gateway of Rehoboth; while William Tilghman and Rhoda strolled into the open door of the brick Presbyterian church farther on, and Milburn put up the horses at the tavern. "William," Rhoda asked, "was this the first Presbyterian church ever made yer?" "The first in America, Rhoda. This was Rev. Francis Makemie's church. He lived in Virginia, not far from here, where no other worship was permitted but ours, so he came over the Pocomoke and reared a church of logs at this point, and this is the third or fourth church-building upon the spot. Rehoboth then came to be such a point for worship that the Established Church put up yonder noble old edifice, as if to overawe this Calvinistic one, in 1735." "It's a quare old house," said Rhoda. "The little doors that opens from the vestiblulete into the side galleries sent a draught right down the preacher's back at the fur end, and when he give out the hymn, 'Blow ye the trumpet, blow,' he always blowed his nose twice. So they boarded up the galleries and let the ceiling down flat, and if we go up thar we can see the other old round ceiling, William." So they went up the narrow stairs from the door, and came into the tubes of galleries all closed from the congregation, and there, sitting down in the obscurity, the preacher passed his arm around Rhoda's waist. "Take keer," she said; "maybe you was predestined to be lost yer. I'm skeered to be up yer half in the dark, even with a good man." Nevertheless, she came a little closer to him, and looked into his eyes with her arch, demure ones. The young rector suddenly kissed her. "You've brought it on yourself, Rhoda, by looking so pretty in this stern old place of creeds and catechisms. Could you love me if I asked you?" "You couldn't love me true, William. Your heart is in t'other old church among the bats and foxes, where Aunt Vesty sits this minute." "No, my sorrow is there, Rhoda. I am trying to build a nest for my heart. We all must love." "William, I don't think a young man in love can remember so much history when he's sittin' in the dark by his gal." "Love among the ruins is always melancholy, Rhoda." "Yes, William, and your love comes out of 'em: the ruins of your old first love. I couldn't make you happy." "Try," said William; "my fancy wavers towards you. You are a beautiful girl." "Yes," said Rhoda, practically, "it's time I was gittin' married. I think I'll take you on trial, and watch Aunt Vesty to see if she is jealous of me." All differences of education passed away, when, standing for a moment with this tall, willowy girl in his arms, her ardent nature in the blush of uncertainty, her very coquetry languishing, like health taking religion captive, the rector of Princess Anne felt that there is no medicine for love but love. They walked together around the square old edifice, among the graves of Tilghmans, Drydens, Revells, and Beauchamps, and saw the round-capped windows and double doors in arched brick, and, passing back along the road, entered the enclosure of the grand old Episcopal church, which was nearly eighty feet long, and presented its broadside of blackish brick, and double tier of spacious windows, to the absolute desertion of this forest place. The churchyard was a copse of gum-tree and poplar suckers, and berry bushes, with apple-trees and cedars and wild cherry-trees next above, and higher still the damp sycamores and maples, growing out of myrtle nearly knee-deep upon the waves of old graves. In beautiful carpentry, the thirteen windows on this massive side upheld in their hand-worked sashes more than four hundred panes of dim glass, and two great windows in the gable had fifty panes each, and stood firm, though the wall between them, fifty feet in width, had fallen in, and been replaced with poorer workmanship. In the opposite gable was another door that had been forced open, and, as they stepped across the sill, a crack, like ice first stepped upon, went splitting the long and lofty vacancy with warning rumbles. Now the whole interior, in fine perspective, stood exposed, at least seventy-five by fifty feet, like a majestic hall unbroken by any side-galleries, and with double stories of windows shedding a hazy light, and, at the distant end, a low pulpit, with spacious altar. The walls of this neglected temple were two feet thick, and its high ceiling was kept from falling down by ten rude wooden props of recent rough carpentry; the pews were stately, high-fenced things, numbered in white letters on a black ground, and each four-sided, to contain ten persons; the rotting damask cushions in many of them told of a former aristocracy, while now all the congregation could be assembled in a