The Entailed Hat Part 11

She checked herself, seeing that she was entering into his affairs with too much freedom.

"I suppose that somewhere, some time," spoke the strange visitor, "some person of my race has been influential and prosperous. Indeed, I have been told so. He was elevated to both the magistracy and the scaffold, but my hat had even an older origin."

"Tell me about that ancestor," said Vesta, the heartache from his greater errand instigating her to defer it, while she was yet barely conscious that the man was original, if not interesting.

He told a singular tale, tracing his hat to Raleigh's times and through Sir Henry Vane to America, till it became the property of Jacob Milborne, the popular martyr who was executed in New York, and his brethren driven into Maryland, bringing with them the harmless hat as their only patrimony.[1]

Before he began, Milburn drew up his compact little figure and opened the door to the hall. The wind or air from some of the large, cold apartments of the long house, coming in by some crack or open sash, gave almost a shriek, and scattered the fire in the chimney.

Vesta felt her blood chill a moment as her visitor re-entered with the antediluvian hat, and placed it upon the table beneath the lamp.

It had that look of gentility victorious over decay, which suggested the mummy of some Pharaoh, brought into a drawing-room on a learned society's night. Vesta repressed a smile, rising through her pain, at the gravity of the forester guest, who was about to demonstrate his aristocracy through this old hat. It seemed to her, also, that the portraits of the Custises, on the wall, carried indignant noses in the air at their apparently conscious knowledge of the presence of some unburied pretender, as if, in Westminster Abbey, the effigies of the Norman kings had slightly aroused to feel Oliver Cromwell lying among them in state.

The hat, Vesta perceived, was Flemish, such as was popular in England while the Netherlands was her ally against the house of Spain, and, stripped of its ornaments, was lengthened into the hat of the Puritans.

Vesta attempted to exert her liberality and perceive some beauty in this hat, but the utmost she could admit was the tyranny of fas.h.i.+on over the mind--it seemed, over the soul itself, for this old hat, inoffensive as it was, weighed down her spirits like a diving-bell.

The man, without his hat, had somewhat redeemed himself from low conversation and ideas, but now, that he brought this hat in and a.s.sociated his person with it, she shrank from him as if he had been a triple-hatted Jew, peddling around the premises.

The obnoxious hat also exercised some exciting influence over Meshach Milburn, if his changed manner could be ascribed to that article, for he resumed his strong, wild-man's stare, deepened and lowered his voice, and without waiting for any query or expression of his listener, told the tale.

CHAPTER IX.

HA! HA! THE WOOING ON'T.

It was twilight when Meshach Milburn closed his story, and silence and pallid eve drew together in the Custis sitting-room, resembling the two people there, thinking on matrimony, the one grave as conscious serpenthood could make him, the other fluttering like the charmed bird.

Vesta spoke first:

"How intense must be your head to create so many objects around it within the world of a hat! You have only brought the story down a little way towards our times."

"I began the tale of Raleigh out of proportion," said Milburn, "and it grew upon the same scale, like the pa.s.sion I conceived for you so intensely at the outset, that in the climax of this night I am scarcely begun."

"Yet, like Raleigh, I see the scaffold," said Vesta, with an attempt at humor that for the first time broke her down, and she raised her hands to her face to hush the burst of anguish. It would not be repressed, and one low cry, deep with the sense of desertion and captivity, sounded through the deepening room and smote Milburn's innermost heart. He obeyed an impulse he had not felt since his mother died, starting towards Vesta and throwing his arms around her, and drawing her to his breast.

"Honey, honey," he whispered, kissing her like a child, "don't cry now, honey. It will break my heart."

The act of nature seldom is misinterpreted; Vesta, having labored so long alone with this obdurate man, her young faculties of the head strained by the first encounter beyond her strength, accepted the friends.h.i.+p of his sympathy and contrition, as if he had been her father.

In a few moments the paroxysm of grief was past, and she disengaged his arms.

"You are not merciless," said Vesta. "Tell me what I must do! You have broken my father down and he cannot come to my help. Take pity on my inequality and advise me!"

"Alas! child," said Milburn, "my advice must be in my own interest, though I wish I could find your confidence. I am a poor creature, and do not know how. It is you who must encourage the faith I feel starting somewhere in this room, like a chimney swallow that would fain fly out.

Chirrup, chirrup to it, and it may come!"

Standing a moment, trying to collect her thoughts and wholly failing, Vesta accepted the confidence he held out to her with open arms.

Blus.h.i.+ng as she had never blushed in her life, though he could not know it in the evening dark, she walked to him and kissed him once.

"Will that encourage you to advise me like a friend?" she said.

"Alas! no," sighed Milburn fervently, "it makes me the more your unjust lover. I cannot advise you away from me. Oh, let me plead for myself. I love you!"

"Then what shall I do," exclaimed Vesta, in low tones, "if you are unable to rise to the height of my friend, and my father is your slave?

Do you think G.o.d can bless your prosperity, when you are so hard with your debtor? On me the full sacrifice falls, though I never was in your debt consciously, and I have never to my remembrance wished injury to any one."

"Would you accept your father's independence at the expense of the most despised man in Princess Anne?" Milburn spoke without changing his kind tone. "Would you let me give him the fruit of many years of hard toil and careful saving, in order that I shall be disappointed in the only motive of a.s.sisting him--the honorable wooing of his daughter?"

She felt her pride rising.

"Your father's debts to me are tens of thousands of dollars," continued Milburn. "Do you ask me to present that sum to you, and retire to my loneliness out of this bright light of home and family, warmth and music, that you have made? That is the test you put my love to: banishment from you. Will you ask it?"

"I have not asked for your money, sir," said Vesta. "Yet I have heard of Love doing as much as that, relieving the anguish of its object, and finding sufficient joy in the self-denying deed."

"I do not think you personally know of any such case, though you may have read it in a novel or tract. Men have died, and left a fortune they could no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and n.o.ble woman; but where did you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl new epithets after my hat?"

Vesta searched her mind, thinking she must alight upon some such example there, but none suited the case. Meshach took advantage of her silence:

"The gifts of a lover are everywhere steps to love, as I have understood. He makes his impression with them; they are expected.

Nothing creates happiness like a gift, and it is an old saying that blessings await him who gives, and also her who takes, and that to seek and ask and knock are praiseworthy."

"Oh," said Vesta, "but to be _bought_, Mr. Milburn? To be weighed against a father's debts--is it not degrading?"

"Not where such respect and cheris.h.i.+ng as mine will be. Rather exalt yourself as more valuable to a miser than his whole lendings, and greater than all your father's losses as an equivalent, and even then putting your husband in debt, being so much richer than his account."

"Where will be my share of love in this world, married so?" asked Vesta.

"To love is the globe itself to a woman, her youth the mere atmosphere thereof, her widowhood the perfume of that extinguished star; and all my mind has been alert to discover the image I shall serve, the bright youth ready for me, looking on one after another to see if it might be he, and suddenly you hold between me and my faith a paper with my father's obligations, and say: 'Here is your fate; this is your whole romance; you are foreclosed upon!' How are you to take a withered heart like that and find glad companions.h.i.+p in it? No, you will be disappointed. It will recoil upon me that I sold myself."

"The image you waited for may have come," said Milburn undauntedly, "even in me; for love often springs from an ambush, nor can you prepare the heart for it like a field. I recollect a fable I read of a G.o.d loving a woman, and he burst upon her in a shower of gold; and what was that but a rich man's wooing? We get gold to equalize n.o.bility in women; beauty is luxurious, and demands adornment and a rich setting; the richest man in Princess Anne is not good enough for you, and the mere boys your mind has been filled with are more unworthy of being your husband than the humble creditor of your father. Such a creation as Miss Vesta required a special sacrifice and success in the character of her husband. The annual life of this peninsula could not match you, and a monster had to be raised to carry you away."

"You are not exactly a monster," Vesta remarked, with natural compa.s.sion, "and you compliment me so warmly that it relieves the strain of this encounter a little. Do not draw a woman's attention to your defects, as she might otherwise be charmed by your voice."

"That also is a part of my sacrifice," said Meshach, "like the money which I have acc.u.mulated. Without a teacher, but love and hope, I have educated myself to be fit to talk to you. It is all crude now, like a crow that I have taught to speak, but encouragement will make me confident and saucy, and you will forget my sable raiment--even my hat."

A chilliness seemed to attend this conclusion, and Vesta touched her bell. Virgie, entering, took her mistress's instructions: "Bring a tray and tea, and lights, and place Mr. Milburn's hat upon the rack!"

The girl glanced at the antique hat with a timid light in her eye, but her mistress's head was turned as if to intimate that she must take it, though it might be red-hot. Virgie obeyed, and soon brought in the tea.

"It is good tea," spoke Milburn, drinking not from the cup, but the saucer, while Vesta observed him oddly, "and it is chill this evening.

Let me start your fire!"

He s.h.i.+vered a little as he stood up and walked across the room, and poking the charred logs into a flame; and, setting on more wood, he made the walls spring into yellow flashes, between which Vesta saw her forefathers dart cold glances at her, in their gilt frames--yet how helpless they were, with all their respectability, to take her body or her father's honor out of p.a.w.n!--and she felt for the first time the hollowness of family power, except in the ever-preserved mail of a solvent posterity. She also made a long, careful survey of her suitor, to see if there was any apology for him as a husband.

His figure was short, but with strength and elasticity in it; better clothes might fit him daintily, and Vesta re-dressed him in fancy with lavender kids upon his small hands, a ring upon his long little finger, a carnelian seal and a ribbon at his fob-pocket, and ruffles in his s.h.i.+rt-bosom. In place of his dull cloth suit, she would give him a buff vest and pearl b.u.t.tons with eyelet rings, and white gaiters instead of those shabby green things over his feet, and put upon his head a neat silk hat with narrow brim to raise his height slenderly, and let a coat of olive or dark-blue, and trousers of the same color, relieve his ornaments. Thus transformed, Vesta could conceive a peculiar yet a pa.s.sable man, whom a lady might grow considerate towards by much praying and striving, and she wondered, now, how this man had managed to soothe her already to that degree that she had voluntarily kissed him. She would be afraid to do it again, but it was as clearly on record as that she had once put a flower in his hat; and Vesta said to herself:

"He has power of some kind! That story, little as I heard of it, was told with an opinionated confidence I wish my poor father had something of. Could I ever be happy with this man, by study and piety? G.o.d might open the way, but it seems closed to me now."