The Entailed Hat Part 38

"It was very wrong in me to say what I did not wish to say, about Uncle Allan, mamma. I hope papa was kind to you to-day."

"Dear me!" Mrs. Custis cried; "everything is turned upside down by that bog iron ore. A new element has come into the family to disturb it.

n.o.body believes anything respectable any more. Your father is an infidel, or a radical, or something perverse; you are defending those wild foresters! What will become of the Christian religion and society and good principles?"

"What did papa say before he left home?"

"He acted in the strangest manner, Vesta. He came right in and kissed me, like a great b.o.o.by, and sat down and wanted to talk about our courting days. I thought at first he was drunk again, or that the Methodists had got hold of him and fed him on camp-meeting straw. How do you account for it?"

Virgie had slipped out as soon as the talk became confidential.

"He wants to do better, dear mamma. Do respond to his contrition and affection! If we could all humble our hearts, it would be so easy to start life better, and turn this accident to joy and comfort. I have found new engagements and reliefs already. There is a young girl, Mr.

Milburn's niece, whom I shall bring home this evening and occupy myself teaching her. She is an orphan, without a mother's knowledge, barely able to read, but pretty and quaint."

"Bring a forester in here?" Mrs. Custis exclaimed, fairly shivering.

"What will Allan McLane's daughters say? Your sister from Talbot has been here all this day, and you have scarcely given her an hour. Between this fatal marriage and your neglect, she left, with her husband, positively pale with horror. I do not know what is to follow this marriage. I have posted a letter already to my brother Allan, telling him of your betrayal by your father and this bridegroom. All our connection will be up in arms."

Vesta's heart sank again, but she felt no fears of her husband's ability to meet mere family opposition, secured by law and form in his rights.

She only feared hostility might rouse in him severity and defiance which would neutralize her present influence upon him, and change his accommodating, almost gentle, disposition as a husband.

For, blacker than any object in her future path, she saw a little, trivial thing, like a wild boar closing her hitherto adventurous excursion into the forest where her husband grew--the hat that had covered his head!

Her mother's thoughtless mention of that object made it formidable to her fears as some iron mask locked round her husband's countenance, making day hideous and the world a dungeon to all who must walk with him.

She discerned that his combative spirit would start to the defence of his hat if it should become the subject of family rancor, because no man forgives an insult to his personal appearance; and this article of wear had ringed his brain with gangrene, and war made upon it would be met by war, while Vesta had expected to induce forgetfulness of the rusty old tile, to charm away the remembrance of it, and to have it laid forever aside.

"I am not the daughter of Uncle McLane," Vesta protested. "I am, besides, a woman, free of my minority. Mr. Milburn is hardly the man to submit to any trespa.s.s. I warn you, mamma, to put my uncle at no disadvantage; for my husband has already beaten papa, and he will smile at your brother when he knows that I do not support any of his pretensions."

"The first thing," answered Mrs. Custis, stubbornly, "is to see that he pays this check. Oh, my dear money!"--she pressed it to her heart--"how delightful it is to see you again. Science, love, glory, ideas: how vulgar they are without money. With this check paid, I think I shall never read a book again; and as for the bog ores, why, I shall scream if there is an iron article in the house. Vesta, this house, I believe, is yours now? I had forgotten. Well, no wonder you defend the man who took your father's roof from over his head and gave it to you!"

"That is unkind, mamma. I value it only as a sure home for you and papa.

If I gave it to him it might be in risk again."

"But suppose you continue to defend this monster of a Milburn, he and you may require the whole house. I am too well-bred to be converted to any of his impious ideas. I am a Baltimorean, and stand by my colors."

"Let us speak of that no more," Vesta said, almost in despair, "but talk of dear papa. I know he loves you."

"It is too late," Mrs. Custis remarked, solemnly, with another fondling of her check; "he has neglected me too long. I expect his attention and respect, and that he shall behave himself; but no lovey and no honey for me now. Life has pa.s.sed the noon and the early afternoon for him and me, and I live to be respectable, to appreciate my security, to keep upstarts at arm's-length, to enjoy my life in its appointed circle, taking care of my income, and never--no, never!--giving any human being the opportunity to make me a beggar again."

"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, "think of Judge Custis! Have you not made home cold to him by this formalism? We must study men, and please them according to their tastes, and therein lies our joy; else we are false to the companionship G.o.d gave us to man for. Yield to your husband's boyish-heartedness; fly with him, like the mate by the bird! He has repented; welcome him to your love again, and stay his feet from truant going, or he may dash down the precipice this sorrow has arrested him before, of everlasting dissipation and the death of his n.o.ble soul!"

Vesta stood above her mother, deeply moved, deeply earnest. Her mother stole another look at the bank check.

"Well, daughter, I will be humbugged by him if you desire it," she said, but with slight answering emotion. "If I had my life to go over again I would marry a business man, and let the aristocracy go. There is the second knock at the front-door. I believe I will dress myself and go down-stairs too."

There were two ladies in the parlor when Vesta went there--Grandmother Tilghman and the Widow Dennis.

"Good-evening, Vesta," said the old lady, who was stone-blind, but easily knew Vesta's footstep. "William thought you would not go to evening service on account of Mr. Milburn's illness, so I came around to sit till church was over, when he will take me home. But what is that I hear in this parlor, like somebody sniffling?"

"It's me, Aunt Vesty," said the voice of Rhoda Holland from the background.

"This is Mr. Milburn's niece, who has come here to stay with me," Vesta said.

"Ah! then it is no Custis. The last sniffle I heard was at the ball to Lafayette in the spring of 1781. The marquis had marched from Head of Elk to the Bald Friars' ferry up the Susquehanna and inland among the hills to Baltimore, and we gave him a ball which, at his request, was turned into a clothing-party. He snuffed so much that he kept up a sniffle all the evening, like--"

Here Rhoda's sniffle was heard again.

"Yes, that's a good imitation," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I don't like it."

"Did the gineral dance at the ball?" asked Rhoda. "What did he do with his swurd? Did he dance with it outen his scibburd?"

"He danced like a gentleman," Mrs. Tilghman replied, as if she would rather not, "and led me out in the first set. You danced with him, Vesta, at the ball in '24, forty-three years afterwards. Does he sniffle yet?"

"I don't recollect, grand-aunt. I was a little girl, and so much flattered that I thought everything he did was perfect."

"Ah me!" exclaimed Mrs. Tilghman, pulling the feather of her turban up, and looking as much like an old belle as possible at eighty years of age; "you danced before Lafayette with my grandson Bill. Bill hardly remembers Lafayette at all, thinking of you that night, so wonderful in your girl's charms. I told him Vesta would never marry him, as he was too plain and poor. But I never thought you would marry that--"

Here Rhoda sniffled warningly.

"Yes," exclaimed the old lady, catching the sniffle; "I never thought you would marry _that_! But Bill is as dear a fool as ever. He says now that Meshach Milburn is a good man, too. I never thought he was above a--"

Rhoda sniffled earnestly.

"Precisely that," exclaimed the old lady; "that was my estimate of the stock. Bill says he is a financial genius. I don't see what is to become of girls in this generation. Here is Ellenora, too good to marry Phoebus, the sailor man, too poor to marry anybody else; now, if Milburn had married her and taken her son Levin into his business, it would have been reasonable; but to take you and pervert your happiness, almost makes me--"

Sniffle from Rhoda.

"Yes," said the old lady, snappishly; "almost! But I never did do it yet."

"Did you ever see Gineral Washin'ton, mem?" Rhoda asked. "I thought, maybe, you was old enough. Misc Somers, she see him up yer to Kint River a-crossin' to 'Napolis. He was a-swarin' at the cappen of the piriauger and a dammin' of the Eas'n Shu, and he said they wan't no good rudes in Marylan' nohow; that the Wes'n Shu was all red mud, an' the Eas'n Shu yaller mud, an' the bay was jus' pizen. Misc Somers say she don't think it was Gineral Washin'ton, caze he cuss so. She goin' to find out when she kin git a book an' somebody to read outen it to her, caze she dreffle smart."

"Grand-aunt Tilghman," Vesta interposed to the blank silence of the room, "knew General Washington intimately."

"Do tell us!" cried Rhoda. "You kin be a right interestin' ole woman, I reckon, ef you air so quar."

In the midst of a smile, in which the blind old lady herself joined, and Mrs. Custis at the same time entered the room, Mrs. Tilghman spoke as follows:

"I went to visit Cousin Martha Washington several years before the Revolution, at Mount Vernon. I had seen her while she was the widow of Cousin Custis, and we occasionally corresponded. In those days we visited by vessel, so a schooner of Robert Morris's father set me ash.o.r.e at Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington was then having his first portrait painted by Wilson Peale, and he was forty years old. Peale and Washington used to pitch the bar, play quoits, and fox-hunt, while Cousin Martha, who was only three months younger than the colonel, knitted and cut out sewing for her colored girls, and heard her daughter, Martha Custis, play the harpsichord. Poor Martha had the consumption; she was dark as an Indian; Washington often carried her along the piazza and into the beautiful woodlands near the house; but she died, leaving him all her money--nearly twenty thousand dollars. We Custises rather looked down on Colonel Washington in those days; he was not of the old gentry; his poor mother could barely read and write, and once, when we went to Fredericksburg to see her, she was riding out in the field among her few negroes as her own overseer, wearing an old sun-bonnet, and sunburned like a forester."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "I should think she was a great impediment to Washington."

"I reckon that's the way her son got big," exclaimed Rhoda; "if his mar had laid down in bed all day, he couldn't have killed King George so easy with his swurd."

"I often said to Cousin Martha, 'What did you see in this big horse of a man?' 'Oh,' she replied, 'he's the best overseer in Virginia. He looks after my property as no other man could.'"

"Then," said Mrs. Custis, emphatically, "he was one man out of a thousand."

"That's the kind of man you married, Vesta," spoke up Mrs. Dennis.

"_Her_ husband," said Mrs. Custis, "looked after her father's property, I am sure, for he got it all."