The Entailed Hat Part 37

"Oh, do so! I must see you a little day by day."

"May I take Rhoda with me?"

"Yes, if you will do it. She is a poor girl, but that is not her fault."

Vesta bent and touched his forehead with her lips, and, as she drew back, he raised his cold hand and put a piece of paper in hers.

"Present my love to your mother," he said, in a chill; "and return her the losses Judge Custis has named to me as her portion in Na.s.sawongo furnace. The amount is in this check, which I give you, although it is Sunday, because it represents no business among any of us, but an act of peace."

"You are an honorable man," Vesta said; "I have cost you dearly."

"It is the b.u.mping of a few years on the bar," Meshach answered, trying to smile; "be you my anchor out in calm water, and I will try to draw to you some day. It is not the price I pay that troubles me; it is the price you are paying."

"I am deeply interested in you," Vesta said; "if I should say more than that, it would not now be true."

"Thank you for that much," Milburn said; "even your pity is a treasure, and I thank G.o.d that I have made so much progress. Before you go, let my bird come in, and then shut the window, to keep the night-hawks and owls from finding him."

He managed, between his rising paroxysms of the chill, to whistle a note or two, and Tom flew in the window and fluttered viciously around his head, as if to be revenged for exile, and then, leaping on the old hat-box, set up a show performance, in which were all the menagerie of town and field, and, stopping a little while to hear the bird sing her name again, Vesta and her friends withdrew.

Mrs. Custis was found in her bedroom, much improved in spirits, but highly nervous.

"Oh, my poor, martyred, murdered idol!" she screamed, as Vesta came in; "are you alive? Is the beast dead? Don't tell me he dares to live."

"Yes, mamma, here are his teeth," Vesta said, when she had kissed her mother warmly. "He has sent you a check for all your lost money, and his love, and me to live here with you in Teackle Hall. Liberty, rest.i.tution, as you name it, and his affection to both of us: is he not a gentleman now?"

Mrs. Custis eagerly took the check.

"Do you believe it is good, precious? Maybe he sent it to deceive me while he could take advantage of your grat.i.tude. Oh, these foresters are devils! I wish I had the money for it."

"It is good for everything he has, mamma. Not to pay it would make him a bankrupt. He gave it to me almost with gallantry. Indeed, he is the most singular man I ever knew."

"That is the case with all pirates," said Mrs. Custis; "something in the female nature attracts us to lawless men, who take what they want--ourselves included. We were, I suppose, originally, just seized and appropriated, and are looking out for the appropriator to this day.

But you, Vesta, with the Baltimore blood in you, do not expect to play the Sabine bride tamely like that--to defend your spoiler and reconcile him to your brethren?"

"I was thinking it was the Baltimore blood that made me appreciate Mr.

Milburn, mamma. The Custises were not traders."

"Pshaw! the Custises were libertines, unless history belies them; they had else no popularity in the scamp court of Charley-over-the-water. He thought the daughter of any gentleman in his following was made for his mistress, and a large percentage of the said damsels thought he was right."

"Mr. Milburn is no Cavalier, I can see that," Vesta said; "I am attracted to him by elements of such strength and simplicity that I fancy he is a Puritan."

"Puritan fiddlestick!" Mrs. Custis said, putting Milburn's check in her bosom and pinning it in there, and looking vigilantly at the pin afterwards. "Now, my great comfort, my only McLane! do not idealize this forester as of any beginning whatsoever. It is all wrong. Thousands of convicts were exported to Chesapeake Bay from the slums of London, Bristol, Glasgow, and other places, and propagated here like the pokeweed. With instincts of larceny, and, possibly, a little rebellion in it, your man has robbed this house of your person; if he should also take your heart, the shame would be upon us."

"Oh, mother, you are unforgiving!"

"Of course I am; I am Scotch."

"You have not one son-in-law but this who would give you back the large amount your husband has misspent--not one who could do it but at a sacrifice you would not permit. For you and papa, to restore your faith in each other, I married our stranger creditor, forcing him to the altar rather than he me; and he has already proved himself of more delicacy than you, if I am to believe you are in your right mind. No, I am no McLane."

"You are not, if you do not use their Scotch-Irish perseverance to get the better of Meshach Milburn. You have obtained a marriage settlement with him, now have it confirmed, and sue out your divorce before the Legislature! Publicly as you have been profaned, ask the State of Maryland for reparation. The McLanes, the Custises, and all their connections, from the Christine River to the James, will storm Annapolis, make your cause, if necessary, a political issue, and the courts of this county will give you damages out of this beast's unpopular wealth."

Vesta looked at her mother with astonishment.

"What would become of my self-respect, my maiden name, if I made that show of my private griefs, mother?"

"Why, you would be a heroine. Every old lover, of whom there are so many eligible ones, would feel his zeal return. A romance would attend your name wherever the Baltimore newspapers are taken, and you would be as great a heroine as Betty Patterson."

"That disobedient girl?" Vesta, still in astonishment, exclaimed.

"I saw her when the bride of Jerome Bonaparte. She was not half as lovely as you! If Jerome had seen you--you were not born, then, and I was in society--he would never have looked at Betty. But, you see, she forced a settlement out of the Emperor, husbanded the income of it, and she is rich, and freer to-day than if she had become a French Bonaparte."

"Weak as they may be in many things, I am a Custis," Vesta spoke, with pale scorn. "I would not drag my name through the tobacco-stained lobbies of Annapolis to wear the crown of Josephine. The word I gave, in pity of my parents, to the man who is now my husband, to become his wife, I would not take back to my dying day, unless he first denied his word. I believe there is such a thing as honor yet. Mother, you fret my father by such principles."

"They are the principles of your uncle, Allan McLane."

"A man I shrink from," Vesta said, "although he is your brother. His unfeeling respectability, his unchangeableness, his want of every impulse but hate, his appropriation of our family honor, as if he was our lawgiver and high-sheriff, his secretiveness, formal religion, and mysterious prosperity, I do not appreciate, much as I have tried to be charitable to him. I do not like Baltimore as I do the Eastern Sh.o.r.e; it is fierce, hard, and suspicious."

"You shall not run down Baltimore before me," Mrs. Custis cried, hotly.

"It is a paradise to this region; and comparing Meshach Milburn to your uncle is blasphemy."

"I have on my finger, mother, his mother's ring."

"A pretty object it is," said Mrs. Custis, taking a peep at it and another at her check; "it requires a microscope to find it. The next thing you will be walking through Baltimore on your bridal tour, followed by a mob of small boys, to see Meshach's old steeple-top hat.

Then I shall feel for you, Vesta."

The cruel blow struck home. Vesta's reception, so unexpected, so acrimonious, affected her with a sense of gross ingrat.i.tude, and with a greater disappointment--she had failed to restore joy to her parents by her desperate sacrifice.

She began to feel that she might have done wrong. The broad sight of her act, looking back upon it from this momentary revulsion, seemed a frightful flood, like the mouth of one of the little Eastern Sh.o.r.e rivers that expands to a gulf in the progress of a brook. Last night she saw in an instant the misunderstandings and ruin she could prevent by her ready decision; now she saw the misunderstandings she never could correct, the prejudices stronger than parental sympathy, the wide separation her marriage had effected between two cla.s.ses of her duty--to think with her husband's affection and her mother's interests at the same time.

It also occurred to her that her father, the darling of her thought, had seemed slow to appreciate her marriage sacrifice, and was testy at her willingness to loosen her heart with her vestal zone towards her husband.

The whole day had pa.s.sed with such relief, such satisfaction, that she expected to end it in the tranquillity of Teackle Hall, like some young eagle returned to her nest with abundant prey for the old birds there, worn out with storm and time. In place of love and healing nature, Vesta had found worldliness, resentment, intrigue, and aspersion, concluding with a reference to the one object she feared and shrank from--the hat of dark entail, the shadow upon her future life. Her eyes filled up, she lisped aloud,

"I wish I had stayed with my husband!"

"Has he become so necessary to you already?" asked Mrs. Custis.

"He does appreciate my sacrifice," Vesta said, and her low sobs filled the room. In a moment Virgie entered, alert to her playmate's pains, and threw her arms around her mistress and kissed her like a child.

"Oh, missy," she spoke to Mrs. Custis, "to make her cry after what she has done for all of us--to save your home, to save me from being sold!"

No scruples of race made Vesta reject this sympathy, precious to her parched breast despite the quadroon taint as the golden sand in the brooks of Africa, giving at once wealth and cooling. The slave girl's long white arms, scarcely less pale than ivory--for she had slipped in at the sign of sorrow, while making her simple toilet--drew Vesta into her lap and laid her head upon the fair maiden shoulder, as if it was a babe's. On such a shoulder, only a shadow darker, Vesta had often lain in infancy, and sucked the milk that was sweet as Eve's--the common fount of white and black--at the breast of Virgie's mother. That faithful nurse was gone; the wild plum-tree grew upon her grave; but Virgie inherited the motherly instinct and added the sisterly sympathy, and her rich hair, half unbound, streamed down on Vesta's temples among the dark ringlets there, while she looked into her own spirit for a word to check those tears, and found it:

"People will say you have been crying, dear missy. The Lord knows you did right. Don't let anybody make you lose your faith till your master, your husband, does wrong to you; he wouldn't like to have you cry."

There was a nervous chord somewhere in the slave's throat that trembled on the key of the heroic, and her nostrils, slightly rounded, her head, free of carriage as the wild colt's, and a light from her soft eyes that seemed to be reflected on their long, silken lashes, bore out a spirit tamed by servitude, which still could kindle to everything that concerned woman in her birthright.

Vesta kissed Virgie, and ceased to sob; she rose and kissed her mother also.