The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
mythology. He suddenly came to a verse which arrested his sensibilities
by its pathos:
"'And David sent messengers to Ish-bosheth, Saul's son, saying, Deliver
me my wife Michal.... And Ish-bosheth sent, and took her from her
husband, even from Phaltiel, the son of Laish. And her husband went with
her along weeping behind her.... Then said Abner unto him: Go, return.
And he returned.'"
Judge Custis saw at once the picture this compact history aroused. The
inexorable David, perhaps, had married another's love. Occasion had
arisen to embitter her kin, and they took her back and gave her in
happiness to her pining lover. But, again, the man of correct habits
triumphed over the sons of the king, and despatched Abner to tear his
wife from her true husband's arms. Poor Phaltiel followed her weeping,
until ordered to go back--and back he went, forever desolate.
The scene recalled the brutal demand of his creditor upon his child. The
Judge's eyes silently o'erflowed, and he could not see.
Vesta had watched him closely, as her silent magistracy detected a great
anxiety or illness in her father. Lest her mother might also notice it,
she interposed in the lesson, as was her habit, by reading the Episcopal
form of prayer, in which they all bent their heads. Once or twice, as
she went on, she detected a suppressed sob, especially at the paragraph:
"Thou who knowest the weakness and corruption of our nature, and the
manifold temptations which we daily meet with, we humbly beseech thee to
have compassion on our infirmities and to give us the constant
assistance of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be effectually restrained
from sin and excited to our duty!"
They went to the breakfast-table, and the Judge's countenance was down.
He bit off some toast and filled his mouth with tea, but could not
swallow. A hand softly touched his elbow, and, looking there, he saw a
wine-glass full of brandy softly glide to the spot. As he looked up and
saw the rich, yearning face of his dark-eyed daughter tenderly
consulting his weakness, his heart burst forth; he leaned his head upon
the table and cried, between drink and grief:
"Darling, we are ruined!"
Mrs. Custis at once arose, and looked frightenedly at the Judge. Vesta
as quickly turned to the servants and motioned them to go.
"No, let them hear it!" raved Judge Custis, perceiving the motion. "They
are interested, like us. They must be sold, too. Faithful servants!
Perhaps it may warn them to escape in time!"
The servants, bred like ladies, quietly left the room.
Mrs. Custis, growing paler, exclaimed:
"Daniel Custis, have you lost everything in that furnace?"
"Everything!"
"And my money, too?"
"Yes."
"Merciful God!"
Before the weak lady could fall Vesta's arm was around her, and her
finger on the table-bell. Servants entered and Mrs. Custis was carried
out, her daughter following.
When Vesta returned her father was walking up and down the floor with
his long silk handkerchief in both hands, weeping bitterly, and speaking
broken syllables. She looked at him a moment with all the might of a
daughter, first called on to act alone in a great crisis. The feeling
she was wont to hold towards him, of perfect pride, had received a blow
in her mother's expression: "Your father's habits have mastered him
beyond reclamation."
Could this be true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was
beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not
pierce, nor Hope overtake? _Her_ father, the first gentleman in
Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray
of heaven to beam upon his grave!
She saw his danger now: it was written on his face, where the image of
God shone dim that had once been crowned there. Hair thinner, and very
gray; the rich, dark eyes intimidated, as if manly confidence was gone;
the skin no more the pure scroll of regular life written in the healthy
fluid of the heart, but faded, yet spotted with alcohol; on the nose and
lips signs of coarser sensuality; the large skeleton bent and the
nervous temperament shattered. This father had been until this moment
Vesta's angel. Now, there might not be an angel in the universe to fly
to his rescue. Deep, dreadful humility descended into the daughter's
spirit.
"God forgive me!" she thought, "how blind and how proud and sinful I
have been!"
She walked over to her father tenderly and kissed him, and then, drawing
his weaker inclination by hers, brought him to a sofa, placed a pillow
for him, and made him stretch his once proud form there. Procuring a
bowl of water, she washed his face free of tears with a napkin, and
bathed it in cologne. The voluptuous nature of the Judge yielded to the
perfume and the easy position, and he sobbed himself to sleep like an
exhausted child.
Sitting by the sleeping bankrupt, watching his breast rise and fall, and
hearing his coarse snoring, as if fiends within were snarling in rivalry
for the possession of him, Vesta felt that the life which was
unconscious there was the fountain of her own, and, loving no man else,
she felt her heart like a goldfish of that fountain, go around and
around it throbbingly.
Then first arose the wish, often in woman's life repeated, to have been
born a man and know how to help her father. That suggested that she had
brothers who ought to be summoned, and confer with their father; but now
it occurred to her that every one of them had leaned upon him; and,
though conscious that it was wicked, Vesta felt her pride rise against
the thought that any being outside of that house, even a brother, should
know of its disgrace.
What could she do? She thought of all her jewels, her riding mare, her
watch, her father's own gifts, and then the thought perished that these
could help him.
Could she not earn something by her voice, which had sung to such
praises? Alas! that voice had lost the ingredient of hope, and she
feared to unclose her lips lest it might come forth in agony, crying,
"God, have mercy!"
"I have nothing," said Vesta to herself; "except love for these two
martyrs, my father and mother. No, nothing can be done until he awakens
and tells me the worst. Meantime it would be wicked for me to increase
the agitation already here, and where I must be the comforter."
CHAPTER VII.
JACK-O'-LANTERN IRON.
Mrs. Custis was in no situation to give annoyance for that day, as a
sick-headache seized her and she kept her room. Infirm of will, purely
social in her marriage relations, and never aiming higher than
respectability, she missed the coarse mark of her husband who, with all
his moral defections, probably was her moral equal, his vital standard
higher, his tone a genial hypocrisy, and at bottom he was a democrat.
Mrs. Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, bounded
by the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world,
particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the old
Venetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly with
the Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South. Amiable,
social, afraid of new ideas, frugal of money; if hospitable at the
table, with a certain spiritedness that is seldom intellectual, but a
beauty that powerfully attracts, till, by the limited sympathies beneath
it, the husband from the outer world discerns how hopelessly slavery and
caste sink into an old shipping society, the Baltimore that ruled the
Chesapeake had no more perfected product than Mrs. Custis.
Her modesty and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believed
that marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying her
children was the only innovation to be permitted. Certain
accomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must become
masculine in prosecution; a professional woman she shrank from as from
an infidel or an abolitionist; reading was meritorious up to an orthodox
point, but a passion for new books was dangerous, probably irreligious.
To lose one's money was a crime; to lose another's money the unforgiven
sin, because that was Baltimore public opinion, which she thought was
the only opinion entitled to consideration. The old Scotch and Irish
merchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusable
by success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standard
of society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up the
bog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was no
better than a Jacobin.
On the Eastern Shore, where society was formed before Glasgow and
Belfast had colonized upon the Chesapeake with their precise formulas of
life, a gentler benevolence rose and descended upon the ground every
day, like the evaporations of those prolific seas which manure the thin
soil unfailingly. Religion and benevolence were depositions rather than
dogmas there; moderate poverty was the not unwelcome expectation, wealth
a subject of apprehensive scruples, kindness the law, pride the
exception, and grinding avarice, like Meshach Milburn's, was the mark of
the devil entering into the neighbor and the fellow-man.
Judge Custis was representative of his neighbors except in his Virginia
voluptuousness; his neighbors were neither prudes nor hypocrites, and he
respected them more than the arrogant race in the old land of Accomac
and in the Virginia peninsulas, whose traits he had almost lost.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the last of the cavalier stock was his
daughter, Vesta. From him it had nearly departed, and his sense of moral
shortcomings expanded his heart and made him tenderly pious to his kind,
if not to God. He admired new-comers, new business modes, and Northern
intruders and ideas, feeling that perhaps the last evidence of his
aristocracy from nature was a chivalric resignation. The pine-trees were
saying to him: "Ye shall go like the Indians, but be not inhospitable to
your successors, and leave them your benediction, that the great bay and
its rivers may be splendid with ships and men, though ye are perished
forever." A perception of the energy of his countrymen, and a pride in
it, without any mean reservation, though it might involve his personal
humiliation, was Judge Custis's only remaining claim to heaven's
magnanimity. Still, rich in human nature, he was beloved by his daughter
with all her soul.
He awoke long after noon, in body refreshed, and a glass of milk and a
plover broiled on toast were ready for him to eat, with some sprigs of
new celery from the garden to feed his nerves. He made this small meal
silently, and Vesta said, as the tray was removed:
"Now, papa, before we leave this room, you are to tell me the whole
injury you have suffered, and what all of us can do to assist you; for
if you had succeeded the reward would have been ours, and we must divide
the pains of your misfortune with you without any regret. Courage, papa!
and let me understand it."
The Judge feebly looked at Vesta, then searched his mind with his eyes
downcast, and finally spoke:
"My child, I am the victim of good intentions and self-enjoyment. I am
less than a scoundrel and worse than a fool. I am a fraud, and you must
be made to see it, for I fear you have been proud of me."
"Oh, father, I have!" said Vesta, with an instant's convulsion. "You
were my God."
"Let us throw away idolatry, my darling. It is the first of all the
sins. How loud speaks the first commandment to us this moment: 'Thou
shalt have no other gods before me'?"
"I have broken it," sobbed Vesta, "I loved you more than my Creator."
"Vesta," spoke the Judge, "you are the only thing of value in all my
house. The work of nature in you is all that survives the long edifice
of our pride. The treasure of your beauty and love still makes me rich