The Entailed Hat Part 63

"_Chito! chito!_" lisped Van Dorn; "here is Punch Hall."

Levin raised his head, and saw nothing but an old house standing in the trees, with a little faint light streaming from the door, and heard the low hilarity of drinking men. The whole band poured out to receive Van Dorn's commands.

"One hour here to feed and rest!" Van Dorn exclaimed. "Let those sleep who can. Let any straggle or riot who dare!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

PEACH BLUSH.

Judge Custis, whom we left riding out of Princess Anne on Sunday afternoon, kept straight north, crossed the bottom of Delaware in the early evening, and went to bed at Laurel, on Broad Creek, a few miles south of Cannon's Ferry.

At daylight he was ahorse again, scarcely stiff from his exertion, and feeling the rising joys of a stomach and brain becoming clearer than for years, of all the forms of alcohol. His mind had been bathed in sleep and temperance, the two great physicians, and wiped dry, like the feet of the Prince of sufferers, with women's hairs. Exercise, natural to a Virginian, awakened his flowing spirits again, and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp--the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia--receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cl.u.s.ter of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation before, or about ten years after the independence of the country.

It was a level place of s.h.i.+ngle-boarded houses, a.s.sembled around a sandy square, in which were both elm and Italian poplar trees; and a double-storied wooden court-house was on the farther side, surrounded by little cabins for the county officers, pitched here and there, and in the rear was a jail of two stories, with family apartments below, and the dungeon window, the debtors' room, and a family bedroom above; and near the jail and court-house stood the whipping-post, like a dismantled pump, with a pillory floor some feet above the ground.

Young maples, mulberry and tulip trees, and ailanthuses grew bravely to make shade along the two streets which pierced the square, and the four streets which were parallel to its sides--pretty lanes being inserted between, to which the loamy gardens ran; and, as the Judge stopped at the tavern near the court, he was told it was "returning day," and the place would soon be filled with const.i.tuents a.s.sembling to hear how "she'd gone"--_she_, as the Judge knew well, meaning Suss.e.x County, and "gone" intimating her decision expressed at the polls.

"She's gone for Adams an' Clayton, ain't she, Jonathan Torbert?" asked the innkeeper.

"Yes," spoke a plain, religious-looking man, the teller of the bank; "Johnny Clayton's kept Suss.e.x and Kent in line for Adams; Jeems Bayard and the McLanes have captured Newcastle: Clayton goes to the senate, Louis McLane to the cabinet, the country to the alligators."

"Hurrah for Jackson!" answered the host; "he suits me ever since he whipped the British."

At breakfast Judge Custis recognized a gentleman opposite, wearing smallclothes, and with his hair in a queue, who spoke without other than a pa.s.sively kind expression:

"Judge."

"Ah! Chancellor!"

The Chancellor was nearly seventy years old, wearing an humble, meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were those of stewards.h.i.+p, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall need nothing but a shroud."

Judge Custis looked at the meek old gentleman closely, sitting at his plate like a lay brother in some monastery or infirmary, indifferent to talk or news or affairs; and the remembrance of what he had been--keen, acc.u.mulative, with youthful pa.s.sions long retained, and the man buoyant under the judge's guard--impressed the Virginian to say to himself:

"What, then, is man! At last old age a.s.serts itself, and bends the brazen temple of his countenance, like Samson, in almost pious remorse.

There sits twenty-five years of equity administration; behind it, thirty years of jocund and various life. No newspaper shall ever record it, because none are printed here; he is indifferent to that forgetfulness and to all others, because the springs of life are dry in his body, and he no more enjoys."

"Are you travelling north, Judge Custis?" the old man asked, for politeness' sake.

"Yes, to Dover."

"There is a seat in my carriage; you are welcome to it."

"I will take it a part of the way, at least, to feel the privilege of your society, Chancellor."

The old man gave a slow, sidewise shake of his head.

"Too late, too late," he said, "to flatter me. I was fond of it once. I have been a flatterer, too."

The Chancellor's black boy was put on the Judge's horse, and the two men, in a plain, country-made, light, square vehicle, turned the court-house corner for the north. As they pa.s.sed the door they heard the sheriff knock off two slaves to a purchaser, crying:

"Your property, sir, till they are twenty-five years of age."

"Ha, ha!" laughed, in a great horse laugh, a nearly chinless villager; "say till ole Patty Cannon can git 'em!"

The purchaser gave a cunning, self-convicted smile at the pa.s.sing chancellor, whose look of resignation only deepened and grew more humble. The Judge had some vague recollection which moved him to change the subject.

"We see each other but little, Chancellor, though we divide the same little heritage of land. I suppose your people are all proud of Delaware."

"Yes," said the old man; "being such a little adventurer, a mere foundling in the band of states, our people have the pride of their independence. The laws are administered, some more farms are opened in the forest every year, blossoms come, and old men die and are buried on their farms, and their bones respected a few years. Our history is so pastoral that we must show some temper when it is a.s.sailed, or we might let out our ignorance of it."

They rode in silence some hours through an older settled and more open country, with some large mill-ponds and a better cla.s.s of farm improvements, and the sense of some large water near at hand was mystically felt.

The Judge followed the old man's eyes at one place, seeing that they were raised with an expression of tranquil satisfaction, like aged piety, and a beautiful landscape of soft green marsh lay under their gaze from a slight elevation they had reached, showing cattle and sheep roving in it, tall groves where cows and horses found midday shade, and winding creeks, carrying sails of hidden boats, as if in a magical cruise upon the velvet verdure. Haystacks and farm settlements stood out in the long levels, and sailing birds speckled the air. In the far distance lay something like more marsh, yet also like the clouds.

"It is the Delaware Bay," the Chancellor said.

They soon entered a well-built little town on a navigable creek, with a large mill-pond, sawmills, several vessels building on the stocks, and an air of superior vitality to anything Judge Custis had seen in Delaware. Here the Chancellor pointed out the late home of Senator Clayton's father, and, after the horses had been fed, they continued still northward, pa.s.sing another small town on a creek near the marshes, and, a little beyond it, came to a venerable brick church, a little from the road, in a grove of oaks and forest trees.

"Here is Barrett's chapel," said the Chancellor; "celebrated for the plotting of the campaign between Wesley's native and English preachers for the conquest of America as soon as the crown had lost it."

They looked up over the broad-gabled, Quakerly edifice, with its broad, low door, high roof, double stories of windows, and a higher window in the gable, trim rows of arch-bricks over door and windows, and belt masonry; and heard the tall trees hush it to sleep like a baby left to them. Nearly fifty feet square, and probably fifty years old, it looked to be good for another hundred years.

"My family in Accomac was harsh with the Methodists through a mistaken conservatism," Judge Custis said. "They are a good people; they seem to suit this peninsula like the peachtree."

A small funeral procession was turning into Barrett's chapel, and the Chancellor interrogated one of the more indifferent followers as to the dead person. Having mentioned the name, the citizen said:

"His death was mysterious. He was a Methodist and a good man, but it seems that avarice was gnawing his principles away. A slave boy, soon to become free by law, disappeared from his possession, and he gave it out that the boy had run away. But suddenly our neighbor began to drink and to display money, and they say he had the boy kidnapped. He died like one with an attack of despair."

As they turned again northward, in the genial afternoon, Judge Custis said:

"What a stigma on both sides, Chancellor, is this kidnapping!"

The old man meekly looked down and did not reply. Judge Custis, feeling that there was some sensitiveness on this and kindred subjects, yet why he could not recollect, continued, under the impulse of his feelings:

"The night before I left Princess Anne, Joe Johnson, one of your worst kidnappers, boldly came to my house for lodging. Why I let him stay there is a subject of wonder and contempt to myself. But there he was, perhaps when I came away."

"Not a prudent thing to permit," the old man groaned.

"I knew his wife was the widow of a gallows' bird, one Brereton--the name is Yankee. He was hanged for highway robbery."

A m.u.f.fled sound escaped the sober old gentleman of Delaware.

"_You_ should remember the murder, Chancellor. It happened in this state. This Brereton killed a slave-buyer for what he brought here upon his person to buy the kidnapped free people and apprentice-slaves.

Brereton was the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, that infamous pander between Delaware and the South."