The Entailed Hat Part 77

"The air and sky are warm and sparkling yet, and the roses are out. You work too hard between your ca.n.a.l case and your railroad. Let us fill the two carriages and drive to old Rehoboth, and eat our dinner there."

He consented, and they took with them Grandmother Tilghman and William, Rhoda Holland, Roxy, and Mrs. Dennis, and also the poor free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus had released from her chains.

The road pa.s.sed in sight of the birthplace of the lion of independence in Maryland, Samuel Chase, who forced that hesitating state, by threatenings and even riots, to declare for permanent separation from England, as Henry Winter Davis, by the same means, eighty-five years afterwards, forced her rebels against the Union to show their hands.

Near Chase's birthplace, on the glebe, rose the old Was.h.i.+ngton Academy, out in a field, raised in that early republican day when a generous fever for education, following the act of tolerance, made some n.o.ble school-houses that the growth of towns ultimately discouraged. With four great chimneys above its conical roof, and pediments and cupola, and two wide stories, and high bas.e.m.e.nt, all made in staid, dark brick, the academy yet had a mournful and neglected look, as if, like man, it was ruminating upon the more brutalized times and lessening enlightenment false systems ever require.

"Ah!" said Vesta's husband, "how many a poor boy thou hast sent from yonder mutilated for life, honey, like the lovers of the queen bee."

"How is that?" Vesta inquired.

"You never heard of the queen bee? Women, when they die, may turn to bees, and reverse their hard conditions in this life. The queen bee has no rival in the hive; all other females there are immature, and all the males are dying for the queen. She has five hundred lovers, so lovesick for her that they never work, and forty times as many maids, like Penelope's, all embroidering comb and wax."

"How was that proved?"

"By putting the bees in a gla.s.s house and watching them. To G.o.d all mankind may be in a gla.s.s hive, too, and every buzzer's secret biography be kept."

"And the queen bee's honeymoon?"

"From her that word is taken. She flies high into the air and meets a lover by chance; she has so many that one is sure to be met; she kisses him in that crystal eddy of suns.h.i.+ne, and, in the transport, he is wounded to the heart. How many young drones from the academy have seen thee once and swooned for life!"

"But the queen bee also has a fate some time, sir?"

"Yes. She leaves the ancient hive at last, and settles on an unsightly forest-tree somewhere, and all that love her follow: the long-neglected herb becomes busy with music and sweetness, and the flas.h.i.+ng of silver wings, till into some gum-tree cone the farmer gathers the swarm, and it is their home."

Vesta looked up at the poetical ill.u.s.tration, and saw her husband's conical hat, into which she had been hived, and her eyes fell to her mourning weeds.

"Oh, my father!" she thought; "has he kept his good resolutions! It is all I have left to hope for."

They travelled down the aisles of the level forest, sometimes the holly-trees, in their green leaf.a.ge and red fruit, sometimes the cleanly pine-tree's green, enriching the brown concavity of oaks; and at the scattered settlement of Kingston, the Jackson candidate for governor, Mr. Carroll, bowed from his door. Crossing Morumsco Creek, they bore to the east, and soon saw, on a plain, the still animate ecclesiastical hamlet of Rehoboth, extending its two ancient churches across the vision.

The road ran to the bank of the River Pocomoke, where a ferry was still maintained to the opposite sh.o.r.e and the Virginia land of Accomac, and the cold tide, without a sail, went winding to an oystery estuary of the bay, where the mud at the bottom was so soft that vessels aground in it could still continue sailing, as on the muggy globe that Noah came to sh.o.r.e in.

Close by were oyster-sh.e.l.ls high as a natural bluff, made by the Indian gourmands before John Smith's voyage of navigation.

Vesta was set out at the great, ruined Episcopal church that, like a castle of brick, made the gateway of Rehoboth; while William Tilghman and Rhoda strolled into the open door of the brick Presbyterian church farther on, and Milburn put up the horses at the tavern.

"William," Rhoda asked, "was this the first Presbyterian church ever made yer?"

"The first in America, Rhoda. This was Rev. Francis Makemie's church. He lived in Virginia, not far from here, where no other wors.h.i.+p was permitted but ours, so he came over the Pocomoke and reared a church of logs at this point, and this is the third or fourth church-building upon the spot. Rehoboth then came to be such a point for wors.h.i.+p that the Established Church put up yonder n.o.ble old edifice, as if to overawe this Calvinistic one, in 1735."

"It's a quare old house," said Rhoda. "The little doors that opens from the vestiblulete into the side galleries sent a draught right down the preacher's back at the fur end, and when he give out the hymn, 'Blow ye the trumpet, blow,' he always blowed his nose twice. So they boarded up the galleries and let the ceiling down flat, and if we go up thar we can see the other old round ceiling, William."

So they went up the narrow stairs from the door, and came into the tubes of galleries all closed from the congregation, and there, sitting down in the obscurity, the preacher pa.s.sed his arm around Rhoda's waist.

"Take keer," she said; "maybe you was predestined to be lost yer. I'm skeered to be up yer half in the dark, even with a good man."

Nevertheless, she came a little closer to him, and looked into his eyes with her arch, demure ones. The young rector suddenly kissed her.

"You've brought it on yourself, Rhoda, by looking so pretty in this stern old place of creeds and catechisms. Could you love me if I asked you?"

"You couldn't love me true, William. Your heart is in t'other old church among the bats and foxes, where Aunt Vesty sits this minute."

"No, my sorrow is there, Rhoda. I am trying to build a nest for my heart. We all must love."

"William, I don't think a young man in love can remember so much history when he's sittin' in the dark by his gal."

"Love among the ruins is always melancholy, Rhoda."

"Yes, William, and your love comes out of 'em: the ruins of your old first love. I couldn't make you happy."

"Try," said William; "my fancy wavers towards you. You are a beautiful girl."

"Yes," said Rhoda, practically, "it's time I was gittin' married. I think I'll take you on trial, and watch Aunt Vesty to see if she is jealous of me."

All differences of education pa.s.sed away, when, standing for a moment with this tall, willowy girl in his arms, her ardent nature in the blush of uncertainty, her very coquetry languis.h.i.+ng, like health taking religion captive, the rector of Princess Anne felt that there is no medicine for love but love.

They walked together around the square old edifice, among the graves of Tilghmans, Drydens, Revells, and Beauchamps, and saw the round-capped windows and double doors in arched brick, and, pa.s.sing back along the road, entered the enclosure of the grand old Episcopal church, which was nearly eighty feet long, and presented its broadside of blackish brick, and double tier of s.p.a.cious windows, to the absolute desertion of this forest place.

The churchyard was a copse of gum-tree and poplar suckers, and berry bushes, with apple-trees and cedars and wild cherry-trees next above, and higher still the damp sycamores and maples, growing out of myrtle nearly knee-deep upon the waves of old graves.

In beautiful carpentry, the thirteen windows on this ma.s.sive side upheld in their hand-worked sashes more than four hundred panes of dim gla.s.s, and two great windows in the gable had fifty panes each, and stood firm, though the wall between them, fifty feet in width, had fallen in, and been replaced with poorer workmans.h.i.+p. In the opposite gable was another door that had been forced open, and, as they stepped across the sill, a crack, like ice first stepped upon, went splitting the long and lofty vacancy with warning rumbles.

Now the whole interior, in fine perspective, stood exposed, at least seventy-five by fifty feet, like a majestic hall unbroken by any side-galleries, and with double stories of windows shedding a hazy light, and, at the distant end, a low pulpit, with s.p.a.cious altar. The walls of this neglected temple were two feet thick, and its high ceiling was kept from falling down by ten rude wooden props of recent rough carpentry; the pews were stately, high-fenced things, numbered in white letters on a black ground, and each four-sided, to contain ten persons; the rotting damask cus.h.i.+ons in many of them told of a former aristocracy, while now all the congregation could be a.s.sembled in a single pew, and wors.h.i.+p was unknown but once a year, when the bishop came to read his liturgy to dust and desolation.

So, on the opposite western cape of the Chesapeake, s.h.i.+vered the Roman priests of Calvert's foundation, in the waste of old St. Mary's; the folds had left the shepherds, and fifty people only came to wors.h.i.+p in the kirk of the earliest Presbyterians.

Two tall, once considered elegant, stoves were nearly midway up the cracking church-floor; and Mary, the free woman, had made a fire in one of them, and the pine wood was roaring, and the long height of pipe was smoking. Startled by the fire, a venerable opossum came out of one of the pews, and waggled down the aisle, like a gray devotee who had said his prayers, and feared no man.

Vesta was reading her prayer-book aloud near the stove to the pretty widow and Grandmother Tilghman. In a few moments the young rector emerged from a curious old gallery for black people, by the door, wearing his surplice; and he read the service at the desk, plaintive and simple, Milburn and his group responding in the room a thousand might have wors.h.i.+pped in.

"Cousin Vesta," the minister said, after the service, "Miss Holland is going to try to love me. Mr. Milburn, may I address her?"

"She is a wilful piece," Meshach said; "you must school her first. Let my wife give my consent."

Vesta went to both, and kissed them:

"I feel so much encouraged, dear Rhoda and William, to see love beginning all about me. Now, Norah, if you could be just to James Phoebus, who is proving his love to you, perhaps, with his life!"

"Yes, that is a match I approve of," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I don't want Bill to marry. Disappointed men make rash selections."

"Oh," said Rhoda, "don't conglatulate him too soon; I haven't tuk him yet. He's goin' teach me outen the books, and I'll teach him outen the forest."

They walked together to the river bank, and Mrs. Dennis had the poor woman, Mary, tell the adventures of Jimmy Phoebus to save her from slavery. All were deeply moved.

"Now, Norah," Grandmother Tilghman said, "the moment that man comes back you go to him and kiss him, and say, 'James, you have been the only father to my son. Do you want me to be your wife?' This world is made for marrying, Norah. Women have no other career. Nature does not value the brain of Shakespeare, but keeps the seed of every vagrant plant warm, and marries everything."

"Well," said Vesta, "Norah loves James Phoebus; don't you, Norah?"