The Entailed Hat Part 25

"It is my picture. I am here," Vesta said, bending over him. "Don't you know me?"

"Who are you, dear lady?" he breathed, with fever-weakened eye-sockets, and mind struggling up to his distended orbs, "do I know you?"

"Yes, I am Vesta--Vesta Custis, I was. I am your wife."

His eyes opened wide, as if hearing some wonderful news.

"Wife? what is that? My wife? No."

"Yes, I am Vesta Milburn, your wife."

He seemed to remember, and, with compa.s.sion for him, she stooped and kissed him.

"G.o.d bless you!" he sighed, and pa.s.sed away into the Upas shades again.

At that minute the mocking-bird flew in the open window and fluttered above the lowly bed, and perched upon the headboard and began to sing:

"'Sband! 'sband! see! see! Vesty, sweet! Vesty, sweet! Ha, ha! hurrah!"

CHAPTER XV.

THE KIDNAPPER.

It seemed to Judge Daniel Custis as he walked abroad into the Sunday sunshine, that he had never seen a more perfect day. The leaves were turning on the great sycamore-trees, and the maples along the rise in the road wore their most delicate garments of nankeen, while some young hickories, loaded with nuts, and a high gum-tree, splendid in finery, beckoned him out their way, across the Manokin bridge to the opposite hill, where the Presbyterian church overlooked the town.

The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real relief to his circ.u.mstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to the man who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.

While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity tw.a.n.g, like a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady, and listened with something between courtesy and piety.

As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some pa.s.sed him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.

They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison from it.

Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel, when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:

"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"

His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of swine. His agony increased.

"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes hunting c.o.o.ns by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life left me to do it in, but by G.o.d's help I will try! Yes, this golden Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"

He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church, and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"

He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that might be owned and settled this day.

Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his wife--the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he loved her at all with the ardor of old times.

She had fretted his pa.s.sion away in little sticklings for little proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.

Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance, her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.

"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and wonder that she is not wordly-wise."

He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this morning.

"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this day."

The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to wander along its sluices as this morn.

"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said, restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other!

But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits. But I have been a truant husband, and my tongue is parched by dusty rovings in prodigal ways. Let me woo her again with all my might!"

He walked through Princess Anne, worship now having commenced in all the churches, and saw n.o.body upon the street except a divided group before the tavern. There he heard Jimmy Phoebus speak to Levin Dennis sharply:

"Levin, what you doin' with that n.i.g.g.e.r buyer? Ain't you got no Dennis pride left in you?"

The Judge saw that Joe Johnson, safe from civil process on Sunday, even if his enemy had not been helpless in bed, was washing Levin Dennis's brandy-sickened head under the street pump, plying the pump-handle and shampooing him with alternate hands.

"Jimmy," answered Levin, when he was free from the spout, "this gentleman's give me a job. I'm goin' to take him out for tarrapin on the Sound. He's goin' to pay me for it."

"Tarrapin-catchin' on a Sunday ain't no respectable job for a Dennis, nohow," cried Jimmy Phoebus, bluntly; "an' doin' it with a n.i.g.g.e.r buyer is a fine splurge fur you, by smoke! I can't see where your pride is, Levin, to save my life."

Jack Wonnell, wearing a bell-crown, looked on with timid enjoyment of this plain talk, opening his mouth to grin, shutting it to shudder.

The big stranger, dropping Levin Dennis, strode in his long jack-boots, in which his coa.r.s.e trousers were stuffed, right to the front of Jimmy Phoebus, and glared at him through his inflamed and unsightly eye.

Jimmy met his scowl with a mildness almost amounting to contempt.

"Hark ye!" spoke the stranger, "you have been a picking a quarrel with me all yisterday, an' to-day air a beginnin' of it agin. Do you want to fight?"

"No," said Jimmy, whittling a stick; "I ain't fond of fighting, and I never do it of a Sunday. I wouldn't be guilty of fightin' you, by smoke!"

"I have tuk a bigger nug than you and nicked his kicks into the bottom of his gizzard till his liver-lights fell into my mauleys. So it's nish or knife betwixt us, my bene cove!"

He put his hand upon his hip, where he carried a sheath-knife.

"Raise that hand," said Jimmy Phoebus, with a quick pa.s.s of his whittling knife to the giant's throat. "Raise it or, by smoke! yer goes yer jugler."

As Phoebus spoke he lifted one foot, of a prodigious size, as deftly as an elephant hoisting his trunk, and kicked the man's hand from the hip pocket without moving either his own body or countenance. It was done so automatically that the other turned fiercely to see who kicked him, and his sheath-knife, partly raised, was flung by the force of the kick several yards away.

"Pick up his knife, Levin," Jimmy said, "or he'll hurt hisself with it."

At this moment Judge Custis came up and pushed the two powerful men apart.

"Fighting on Sunday in our public street," he exclaimed; "Phoebus, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"