The Entailed Hat Part 16

"I did. The s.e.xton is there now, lighting the fire."

"I thought you were loyal as ever, William, and depended upon you.

Thanks, dear friend! I am to marry Mr. Meshach Milburn at nine o'clock."

A cloud came over the young man's serene face, though his features retained their habitual sweetness.

"I can marry you, cousin, even to Meshach Milburn," he said, "if that is your wish. Why do you marry him?"

"It is not loyal in you to ask, William, but I will give you this answer: he has asked me. He is also devoted and rich. To avoid excitement, possibly some opposition, though it would be vain, we are to be married without further notice, and papa is to give me away."

Silent for a moment, the young rector exclaimed:

"Cousin Vesta, have I lived to see you a mercenary woman? Has this man's a.s.serted wealth found you cold enough to want it, when love has been so generously offered you by almost every young man of station in this region, and from abroad--even by me?" he said, after a pause. "The scar is on my heart yet, cousin. No, I will not believe such a thing of you.

There is a reason back of the fact."

"William, if you respected me as you once said you ever would, like your sister, you would not add this night the weight of your doubt to my other burdens, but take my hand with all the strength of yours, and lift me onward."

"I will," said the rector, swallowing a dry spot in his throat. "Though it was a bitter time I had when you refused me, cousin, the pain led me to my vows at the altar where I minister, and I have had the a.s.sistance of your beautiful music there, like the angel I seem to have seen reserved for me, in place of you, sitting at your side. And I know that this marriage is, on your part, pure as my sister's. No further will I inquire--what penalty you are paying for another, what mystery I cannot pierce."

He raised his hands above her head: "The peace of G.o.d that pa.s.seth understanding, abide with you, dear sister, forever!"

He went out with his eyes filled with tears, but hers were full of heavenly light, feeling his benediction to be righteous.

CHAPTER XII.

PRINCESS ANNE FOLKS.

The Was.h.i.+ngton Tavern, or, rather, the brick sidewalk which came up to its doors, and was the lounging-place for all the grown loiterers in Princess Anne, had been in the greatest activity all that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, since it was reported by Jack Wonnell, who set himself to be a spy on Meshach's errand, that the steeple-hat had disappeared in the broad mansion of Judge Daniel Custis.

Jack Wonnell had a worn bell-crown on his head, exposed to all kinds of weather, as he was in the habit of fis.h.i.+ng in these beaver-hats, and never owned an umbrella in his life. He lived near Meshach, in the old part of Princess Anne, near the bridge, and was the subject of the money-lender's scorn and contempt, as tending to make a mutual eccentricity ridiculous. Milburn had been willing to be hated for his hat, but Jack Wonnell made all unseasonable hats laughable, the more so that he was nearly as old a wearer of his bell-crowns as Milburn of the steeple-top. Although he had no such reasons of reverence and stern consistency as his rich neighbor, he seemed to have, in his own mind, and in plain people's, a better defence for violating the standard taste of dress.

The people said that Jack Wonnell, being a poor man, could not buy all the fas.h.i.+ons, and was merely wearing out a bargain; that he knew he was ridiculous, and set no such conceit on his absurdity as that grim Milburn; and they rather enjoyed his playing the Dromio to that Antipholus, and turning into farce the comedy of Meshach's error.

Jack Wonnell had partly embraced his bargain by the example of Meshach.

A frivolous, unambitious, childish fellow, amusing people, obliging people, running errands, driving stage, gardening, fis.h.i.+ng, playing with the lads, courting poor white bound girls, incontinent, inoffensive, he had been impelled to bid off his lot of old hats by Jimmy Phoebus saying:

"Jack, dirt cheap! Last you all your life! Better hats than old Meshach Milburn's. You'll drive his'n out of town."

To his infinite amus.e.m.e.nt and dignity, his appearance in the bell-crown hats attracted the severe regard of Milburn, and set the little town on a grin. The joke went on till Jimmy Phoebus, Judge Custis, and some others prompted Jack Wonnell, with the promise of a gallon of whiskey, to ask Meshach to trade the steeple-top for the bell-crown. The intense look of outrage and hate, with the accompanying menace his townsman returned, really frightened Jack, and he had prudently avoided Milburn ever since, while keeping as close a watch upon his movements and whereabouts as upon some incited bull-dog, liable to appear anywhere.

In this way Jack Wonnell had followed Meshach to the court-house corner, where stood Judge Custis's brick bank--which, of late, had done little discounting--and, from the open s.p.a.ce between it and the court-house in its rear, he peeped after Milburn up the main cross street, called Prince William Street, which stopped right at Judge Custis's gate.

There, in the quiet of early afternoon, he heard the knocker sound, saw the door open, and beheld the Entailed Hat disappear in the great doorway. Then, scarcely believing himself, Wonnell ran back to the tavern, and exclaimed:

"May I be struck stone dead ef ole Meshach ain't gwyn in to the Jedge's!"

"You're a liar!" said Jimmy Phoebus, promptly, catching Jack by the back of the neck, and pus.h.i.+ng his bell-crown down till it mashed over his nose and eyes, "What do you mean by tellin' a splurge like that?"

"I seen him, Jimmy," was the bell-crowned hero's smothered cry; "if I didn't, hope I may die!"

"What did he go there for?"

"I can't tell, Jimmy, to save my life!"

"Whoo-oo-p!" cried Phoebus, waving his old straw hat, itself nearly out of season. "If this is a lie, Jack Wonnell, I'll make you eat a raw fish. Levin"--to Levin Dennis--"you slip up by Custis's, and see if ole Meshach hain't pa.s.sed around the fence, or dropped along Church Street and hid in the graveyard, where he sometimes goes. I'll stay yer, and make Jack Wonnell account for sech lyin'!"

Levin Dennis, a boyish, curly-haired, graceful-going orphan, walked up the cross street, pa.s.sing Church lane and the Back alley, and slowly turned the long front of Teackle Hall, and went out the parallel street towards the lower bridge on the Deil's Island road, till he could turn and see the three great-chimneyed buildings of Teackle Hall lifting their gables and lightning-rods to his sight in their reverse, the partly stripped trees allowing that manorial pile to stand forth in much of its length and imposing proportions. Lest he might not be suspected of curiosity, Levin continued on to the bridge at Manokin landing, and counted the geese come out of a lawn on a willowy cape there, and take to water like a fleet of white schooners. He ascended the rise beyond the bridge, and looked over to see if Meshach might have taken a walk down the road. Then returning, he swept the back view of Princess Anne, from the low bluff of cedars on another inhabited cape on the right, which bordered the Manokin marshes, to the vale of the little river at the left, as it descended between Meshach's storehouse and the ancient Presbyterian church of the Head of Manokin, seated among its gravestones between its. .h.i.tching-stalls and its respectable parsonage manse. Nothing was visible of the owner of the distinguis.h.i.+ng hat.

So Levin Dennis returned more slowly around the north wing of Teackle Hall, looking at every window, as if Meshach might be there; but nothing did he see except the dog, which, to Levin's eye, appeared uneasy, and ran out of the gate to make friends with him.

"So, Turk!" Dennis muttered, patting the dog's head, "no wonder you're scared, boy, to see old Meshach Milburn come in."

Teackle Hall, according to rumor, was built at the close of the revolutionary war by an uncle, or grand-uncle, of Judge Custis, who came from Virginia, somewhere between Accomac and Northampton counties, and went into s.h.i.+pbuilding on the Manokin, adding some privateering and banking, too, and once, going abroad, he brought back from some ducal residence the plan of Teackle Hall, as Judge Custis found it on his coming into the property.

It was nearly two hundred feet in length, and would have made three respectable churches, standing in line, with their sharp gables to the front, the bold wings connected with the bolder centre by habitable curtains or colonnades, in which panels of slate or grained stone made an attic story above the lines of windows, and lintels and sills of the same stone, with high keystones, capped every window in the many-sided surface of the whole stately block, all built of brick brought over in vessels from the western sh.o.r.e, or possibly from the North, or Europe, and painted a gray stone color.

Its central gable had deep carved eaves, and a pediment-base to shed rain, and a large circular window in that pediment. The two mighty chimneys of that centre were parallel with the ridge of the roof, and rose nearly from the middle of the two opposite slopes, bespeaking four great fireplaces below, and a flat, low-galleried observatory upon the roof gave views of portions of the bay on clear days.

The wings of Teackle Hall had similar, but lower, chimneys, astraddle of their roofs, and forest trees--oak, gum, holly, and pine, with a great willow, and some tawny cedars, and bushes of rose and lilac--dotted the gra.s.sy lawn. The Virginia creeper and wild ivy climbed here and there to the upper windows, and a tall, broad, panelled doorway, opening on a low, open portico platform with steps, seemed to say to visitors: "Men of port and consideration come in this way, but inferiors enter by some of the smaller doors!"

Levin Dennis, who had never sounded that knocker, though he had often taken his terrapins to the kitchen, stared in concern at the door where it was reported Meshach Milburn had gone in, and would hardly have been surprised if that intruder had now appeared at one of the three deep windows over the door with a firebrand in his hand.

Levin muttered to himself: "Rich folks, I reckon, must make a trade.

Maybe it's hosses--maybe not. I know it ain't hats."

He then turned down to the Episcopal Church, only a square from Teackle Hall, and on a street between it and the main street, though in a retired situation, its front turned from the town, and looking over the fields and farms, like a good pastor who is warming at the fire with his hands behind him.

A single-storied, long, low edifice of British bricks, with its semicircular choir next the street, and, adjoining the choir, a spire of more modern brickwork built up to an open bell cupola, and open ribbed dome, also of brick, tipped with a gilded cross, the ivy was greenly matted all round the choir, and ran along the side of the church, where Levin Dennis walked under four tall, round-topped windows of stained and wired gla.s.s, till he came to the end gable or front of the church, standing in unworldly contemplation of the graveyard and the back fields.

There, since the Stamp Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose in form like the print of The Crucified, reaching out its stems and tendrils wide of the one glorified window in the gable, in whose red dyes glimmered the triumph of a b.l.o.o.d.y countenance. The mossy walls, often sc.r.a.ped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of picturesqueness and all the appearance of antiquity.

No sign of the unpopular townsman was to be seen anywhere, but, as Levin Dennis peeked around the foliage in the yard he beheld a man he had never observed before, and of a tall, bearded, suspicious, and ruffianly exterior, lying flat on the top of a memorial vault, with his head and feet half concealed in some cedar brambles.

"Hallo!" Dennis shouted.

"What do you hallo for?" spoke the man; "don't you never come to a churchyard to git yer sins forgive?"

"No," said the terrapin-finder, "not till I knows I has some sins."

"What air you prowlin' about the church then fur, anyhow?" demanded the stranger, standing up in his boots, into which his trousers were tucked; and he stood such a straight, long-limbed, lithe giant of a man that Levin saw he could never run away, even if the intruder meant to chew him up right there.

"I ain't a prowlin', friend," answered Levin Dennis. "I was jess a lookin'."

"Lookin' fur what, fur which, fur who?" said the man, taking a step towards Dennis, who felt himself to be no bigger than one of the other's long, ditch-leaping, good-for-wading legs.