The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
piety; "I have let trifles stand before my vows."
Accordingly, when Milburn, conscience-stricken, and accusing himself of
hard conditions in exacting a marriage without love, came one day, with
all the magnanimity of a new parent, before his wife to make some
restitution, she surprised him by arising and kissing him.
"Sir, I have been very proud and stubborn. Do forgive me!"
He pressed her to his breast, while his tears ran over her face.
"Honey," he said at length, "what a mockery my crime to you has been--to
think that you could ever love me! No, I will give you freedom. Dear as
your captivity is to me, your cage shall open and you shall fly."
Vesta stepped back at these strange words and waited for him to explain.
He continued:
"I will send you to Italy with our child. Your father shall go, too, if
you desire. Go from me and these unloved conditions, this hateful
bondage and constraint"--his tears flowed fast again, but he let them
fall ungrudged,--"find in your music and your noble mind forgetfulness
of this unworthy marriage. I can live in the recollection of the
blessing you have been to me."
"What!" said Vesta; "do you command me to leave you?"
"Yes. Let it be that. I know how conscientious you are, my darling, but
it is your duty to go. A hard struggle is before me: I am deeply
embarked in an untried business. Now I can spare the money. Go and find
happiness in a happier land."
She went to him again and put her arms around him.
"Leave you?" she said. "What have I done to be driven away? How could I
reconcile myself to let you live alone? 'For better or for worse,' I
said. God has made it better and better every day."
He held her head between his palms and looked into her eyes, to see if
she spoke from the heart.
"Husband," she whispered, "I love you."
* * * * *
The minds of both husband and wife, after this reconcilement, turned to
the disturbing hat as the subject of their estrangement hitherto.
Said Milburn to himself: "What a sinner I have been to distress that
poor child with my miserable hat! At the first opportunity she gives me,
I will lay it aside forever."
Said Vesta to her father and his bride: "What a wicked heart I have
kept, to oppose my husband in such a little thing as his good old
hat--the badge of his reverence to his family and of his bravery to an
impertinent age. I have let it discolor my married life and all the
sunshine. But my baby has melted my obdurate heart. Come, unite with me,
and let us show him that everything he wears we will adopt proudly."
Therefore, when Milburn next went out, his wife came with a beaming face
and elastic step and put on his head his steeple hat. He looked at her
grimly, but she stopped his protest with a kiss.
He thought to introduce the subject to Judge Custis, but that fond
bridegroom broke in with:
"Milburn, you're a game fellow. It was impudent in me to say one word
about your hat. I'll get one like it myself if I can find one. Tut, tut,
man! It becomes you. Say no more about it."
Milburn undertook to make the explanation to his niece, but before he
could well begin she cried:
"Uncle Meshach, Aunt Vesta is just in love with your hat! She won't hear
of your wearing any other. We're all going to stand by it, uncle."
A man chooses his own verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in
the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment,
is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the
trap of his own temperament.
So Meshach Milburn never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself
from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor
who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear,
the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his
tile--his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had
pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man
with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of his
vulgarity whenever he takes a human hand.
To have put on any other hat would have subjected him to new hoots and
comments, and made himself publicly smile at his own folly; he must have
climbed as high as the pillory to explain the change and make apology;
the society he had faced in defiance seemed all at once united to refuse
him a _status_ without his Entailed Hat, and it would have taken the
courage of throwing off a life-long _alias_ and living under a forgotten
name, to appear in Princess Anne in a new, contemporary head-dress.
Milburn saw that he must wear his old hat for life; he bent under the
servitude, and was alone the victim of it now.
CHAPTER XLVII.
FAILURE AND RESTITUTION.
The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.
The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an
embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway
company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of
notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the
railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper's Ferry,
as Vesta's boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The
venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of
memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended
over Patty Cannon's old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner
rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of
abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore,
where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for
President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob
Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later,
chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue the
murderer.
By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had
become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or
Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled,
and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,--now a man in
growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,--loaded his gun and started for
Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off
the ferry scow.
"Are you going to give me back that ten dollars, you old scoundrel?"
shouted O'Day.
"Stand back! stand back!" answered long Jacob; "the quotient was
correct; the _lex loci_ and the _lex terrae_ were argued. The _lex
talionis_--"
"Take it!" cried the villain, adroitly firing his shot-gun into the
merchant's breast, so as not to injure his humaner beast.
Jacob Cannon staggered to the fence at the head of the wharf, and caught
there a moment, and fell dead.
"You scoundrel," screamed Isaac Cannon from the window, "to kill my
brother, my executive comfort."
"Yes," answered O'Day, "and I'll give the other barrel to you!"
As Isaac Cannon barricaded himself in, Owen O'Day collected his effects
without hurry, and betook himself to the wilds of Missouri.
Cannon's Ferry fell into decay when the railroad at Seaford carried off
its trading importance, but there are yet to be seen the never tenanted
mansion of the disappointed bridegroom, and the gravestones which show
how Jacob's fate frightened Isaac Cannon to a speedy tomb.
In the meantime, John M. Clayton had made use of the fears of Calhoun
and his nullifiers, who were menaced with the penalties of treason by
the president, to pass a great protective tariff bill by their aid, thus
establishing the manufactures in the same period with the railways.
This triumph in the senate left him free to conduct the suit of Randel
against the Canal Company, which occupied as many years as the railroad
enterprise of Meshach Milburn.
The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon
to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a
trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters
and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's
pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his
adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous
of him, had yet to decide in his favor.
Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old
Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages
claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a
great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the
newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French
spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems--something that would
be going on at the final end of the world.
"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy!
he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the
New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits
with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green
battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern
passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.
John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man
all his life.
He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was
nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature
for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages;
yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the
outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle
of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned
its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his
projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon
engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born
for the law.
In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted
Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to
that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named
Sorden (_not_ the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for
kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown
after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the
obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock
in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending
Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.
* * * * *
The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it
had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance
year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home
and hustled in front by overwhelming opposition.
Judge Custis took the field for Congress on the railroad issue, and was
elected, through the Forest vote, and his wife went through a Washington
season with as much dignity as enjoyment, few suspecting that she was
not the Judge's social equal.
The ancestral hat defied all worldly hostility, but became the iron
helmet to bend its wearer's back. He prayed in secret for some pitying
angel to break the spell that bound him to it, but none conceived that
he would let it go.
His boy grew strong, and took his father's dress to be a matter of
course; his wife pressed upon him the nauseous ornament he had so long
affected; a wide conspiracy seemed to have been formed to drive his head
into that hereditary wigwam, and he could not escape it.
Even Grandmother Tilghman, who now was an inmate of Teackle Hall, in
William's absence of years, forgot all about the queer hat, and rejoiced
to herself that "Bill" had not married "that political girl."
Milburn had maintained his financial solvency by turns and sorties that