The Entailed Hat Part 68

As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving behind the b.l.o.o.d.y hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was herself alone, das.h.i.+ng at that frightful pace to destruction, until the young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions and kissed the slave girl pityingly.

Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands several miles east of Princess Anne.

"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is n.o.body knows whar, now. This yer Allan McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."

"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to Virgie.

"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick.

He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will never go there again."

"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably _is_ true. Vesta has no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade, with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs.

Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to him."

"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"

"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not antic.i.p.ate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought you safest, you were most in peril."

They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the Furnace village.

"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."

"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground Road to the free states."

"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"

"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free, and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving her a wild beast's chance to run."

"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"

"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor."

The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of G.o.d all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."

As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in the night.

In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out, its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond, lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's foreclosure.

A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the ponds and night-damps?

The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.

Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.

"Oh, may G.o.d let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "G.o.d bless you for the kiss you gave me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart is bursting: what can I say?"

"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night,"

the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."

"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my freedom, or die on the road to it."

"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."

He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and hastened to his horses and the hotel.

As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne, the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.

"Thar!" she said, "I think you just looked magnificens last night, sittin' behine them critters, like Death on the plale horse, an' lovin'

Aunt Vesty, though she's gone away an' quit you, enough to fight for her pore, bright-skinned gal. I wish somebody would love _me_ like that!"

"So you could quit him, too, Rhoda?"

"Well, William, I likes beaus that's couragelis! You're splendid a-preachin', but I like you better drivin' and showin' your excitemins."

"You are a beautiful girl," the clergyman said; "suppose you try to like me better."

The great question, being thus opened, was not disposed of when they reached Princess Anne, and quietly stabled the horses.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

HONEYMOON.

Meanwhile the steamer was taking Vesta and her husband across the Chesapeake Bay in the night--that greatest, gentlest indentation in the coast of the United States; at once river and sound, fiord and sea, smooth as the mill-pond, and full of life as the nutritious milk of the mother, and on whose breast a brood of rivers lay and suckled without rivalry--the long Susquehanna, James, and Potomac; the short, thick Choptank, Chester, and Patapsco; and, to the flying wild-swan, its arborage looked like a vast pine-tree, with boughs of snow, climbing two hundred miles from its roots in the land of corn and cotton into the golden cloud of Northern grain and hay.

Upon one broken horn of this fruitful bay hung Baltimore, like an eagle's nest upon the pine, seizing the point of indentation that brought it nearest to the fertile upland and the valley outlets of the North and West, where the toil-loving Germans burnished their farms with women's hands, and sent their long bowed teams to market on as many turnpikes as the Chesapeake had rivers.

At morning Vesta looked upon the fleet of little sail lying in the basin of the city, among larger s.h.i.+ps and arks and barges, and saw Federal Hill's red clay rising a hundred feet above the piers, and the spotless monument to Was.h.i.+ngton resting its base as high above the tide, on a nearly naked bluff. The rich sunrise fell on the streaked flag of the republic at the mast on Fort McHenry, and the garrison band was playing the very anthem that lawyer Key had written in the elation of victory, though a prisoner in the enemy's hands. Alas! how many a prisoner in the enemy's hands was doing tribute to that flag from cotton-field and rice-swamp, tobacco land and corn-row, pouring the poetry of his loyalty and toil to the very emblem of his degradation!

Vesta heard, with both satisfaction and sorrow, at Barnum's Hotel that her husband was too ill to attend the funeral, and must keep his room and fire; she needed his comfort and devotion in her sorrow, but upon her dead mother's bier seemed to stand the injunction against that fateful hat he had brought with him; and yet she pitied him that he must stay alone, unknown, unrelated, chattering with the chill or burning without complaint.

"G.o.d send you sympathy from the angels like you, my darling!" Milburn said. "I know what it is to lose a mother."

Escorts in plenty waited on Vesta, but she wished she could find some kinsman of her husband, if ever so poor, to take his arm to the church and burial-ground; and at the news that her uncle Allan McLane had not arrived, and would not, probably, now be present, she felt another blending of relief and apprehension, because her husband might not to-day be exasperated by him, yet his relations to her mother's property would still remain unknown,--and Vesta feared for Virgie.

In the same impulse which had made her retain Teackle Hall, to secure it against her father's careless business methods, she had made Virgie over to her mother, to place her, apparently, farther from danger, never supposing that in those prudent hands the enemy might insinuate; but Death, the deathless enemy, was filching everywhere, and though she could not see why Virgie could be persecuted, Vesta now wished she had set her free.

The girl belonged to her mother's estate: suppose Allan McLane was the administrator of it? Suppose, indeed, he was the heir? Vesta's heart fell, as she considered that a woman had best let business alone.

The young bride-mourner was an object of mingled admiration and sympathy as she leaned on the arm of a kinsman and entered the Presbyterian kirk.

She was considered one of the great beauties of Maryland, and the young Robert Breckenridge, fresh from Kentucky, on a visit to his brother, the pastor, thought he had never seen Vesta's equal even in Kentucky; and, as he gazed through her mourning veil, the pastor's Delaware wife heard him whisper, "Divinity itself!"

The clear olive skin, eyes of gray twilight, eyebrows like midnight's own arches, and luxuriant hair, were touched by grief as if a G.o.ddess suffered; and, in her deep mourning robes, Vesta seemed a monarch's daughter about to pa.s.s through some convent to her sainthood.

She had the height to give dignity to this beauty, and the grace to lift pathos above weakness.

The minister's musical tones were wrought to consonance with this n.o.ble human model, and he spoke of that ideal motherhood which, to every child at the bier, seems real as the dripping bucket at the fairy's well--of mother's love, trials, weakness, and immortality; of the absence of her sympathy making the first great bereavement in life's progress; of her nature abiding in us and her spirit hovering over, while we live.