The Entailed Hat Part 95

Vesta found her circle reunited, though with many absentees, at Princess Anne.

Aunt Hominy took her place in the kitchen, and cooked with all her former art, but her voice and understanding were gone, and she never would go past the Entailed Hat, and still regarded it, as nearly as could be made out, as the cause of all her errors and dangers, though she seemed to admit its unevadable dominion.

The poor woman, Mary, finding Samson Hat, in time, wishing to have a partner in the old storehouse, where he had become the only resident, had faith enough left to make her third marriage with him; and his means not only made good the property she had lost, but the hale old man presented her with a babe boy, which took the name of Meshach Phoebus, and on which Judge Custis sagely remarked that it "ought to have been a red-headed n.i.g.g.e.r, having both the fiery furnace and the blazing sun in its name."

On Samson Hat's death, which resulted from rheumatism reaching his heart, his widow joined her deliverer from slavery, James Phoebus, in the West, where he lived happily with his bride and stepson, and often wrote home of a friend he had there named Abe Lincoln, who made flat-boat voyages with him down the Mississippi. Both Ellenora Phoebus and Hulda Dennis reared Western families which played effective parts in the drama of civilization.

Vesta lost no time in setting free every slave about Teackle Hall and on the farms, with the approval of her father and husband also, and Roxy became the wife of Whatcoat, the rescued freedman, and the replacer, at her mistress's side, of poor Virgie, whose body was brought home and interred by the church where she had been her white sister's bridesmaid.

The grief of Vesta for Virgie was quiet, but long, and as that of an equal, not a mistress, though she may have never known how equal.

In the fatalities thronging about her marriage Vesta observed one signal blessing--the complete reform of her father's habits.

He drank nothing whatever, supplying with fruit the pleasures of wine, and with exercise and business, on her husband's behests, the vagrant tours he once made in the forest for politics and amours.

Aware of his sociable and voluptuous nature, Vesta desired to see him married again, to complete and secure his reformation; and, while she was yet puzzling her brain to think of a wife to suit him, he solved the problem himself by cleanly cutting out Rhoda Holland from under the attentions of William Tilghman.

Rhoda had rapidly learned, and had corrected her grammar without losing her humor and her taste for dress, and her free, warm spirits soon made her an elegant woman, in whom, fortunately or unfortunately, a very decided worldly ambition germinated,--at once the proof and the vindication of _parvenues_.

She may have patterned it upon her uncle, or it may have emanated from his ambitious family stock, which, in and around him, had wakened to the vigor of a previous century; but it was so different from Vesta's nature that, while it but made n.o.bler her soul of tranquil piety and ease of ladyhood, Vesta was interested in Rhoda's self-will and business coquetry.

A higher vitality than Vesta's, Rhoda Holland soon showed, in the superficial senses, more acuteness of sight and insight, quicker intuitions, more self-love, though not selfishness, less scrupulousness, perhaps, in dealing with her lovers, and, with fidelity and virtue, a pushing spirit that Vesta only mildly reproved, since she made the allowance that it was in part inspired by herself.

"Take care, dear," Vesta said one day, "that you grow not away from your heart. With all improving, there is a growth that begets the heart disease. Do you love cousin William Tilghman? He is too true a man to be hurt in his feelings. Nothing in this world, Rhoda, is a subst.i.tute for principle in woman."

"I don't want to lose principle, auntie," Rhoda said; "but I am afraid I love life too much to be a pastor's wife. I never saw the world for so long that I'm wild in it. I want to go, to look, and to see, everywhere.

I feel my heart is in my wings, and must I go sit on a nest? Miss Somers--"

"The question is, dear, do you love?"

"Auntie, I reckon I love William as much as he does me."

"But he is devoted, Rhoda."

"If I thought I had the whole, full heart of William, Aunt Vesta, and it would give him real pain to disappoint him, I would marry him. But I have watched him like a cat watches a mouse. He wants to marry me to make other people than himself happy; to reconcile you and uncle more; to take uncle more into your family by marrying his niece. William is trying to love Uncle Meshach like a good Christian, but, Aunt Vesta, he thinks more of your little toe than of my whole body."

The crimson color came to Vesta's cheeks so unwillingly, so mountingly, that she felt ashamed of it, and, in place of anger, that many wives so exposed would have shown, she shed some quiet tears.

"Rhoda, don't you know I am your uncle's wife."

Rhoda threw her arms around her.

"Forgive me, dear! When you tell me, Aunt Vesta, that William loves me dearly, I'll gladly marry him. I only want, auntie, not to make happiness impossible, when to wait would be better."

Vesta wondered what Rhoda meant, but, kissing her friend tenderly again, Rhoda whispered:

"Auntie, it's not selfishness that makes me behave so. Indeed, I love William; it's a sacrifice to let him go."

Vesta looked up and found Rhoda's eyes this time full of tears.

"Strange, tender girl!" cried Vesta. "What makes you cry?"

Yet, for some unspoken, perhaps unknown, reasons, they both shed together the tears of a deeper respect for each other.

Soon afterwards Judge Custis, being sent to Annapolis by Milburn, was requested to take Rhoda along, as a part of her education, and Vesta went, also, at her husband's desire.

She feared that her father, devoted as he had become to her husband's business interests, still disliked him and bore him resentment; and Vesta wished to see not only outward but inward reconcilement of those two men, from one of whom she drew her being, and towards the other began to feel sacred yet awful ties that took hold on life and death.

They were taken to the landing by Mr. Milburn and the young rector, and there, as the steamboat approached, Tilghman said:

"Rhoda, your uncle has consented. He wishes us to marry. I ask you, before all of them, to consider my proposal while you are gone, and come home with your reply."

The impetuous girl threw her arms around him and kissed him in silence, and, covering her face with her veil, awaited in uncontrollable tears the steamboat that was to carry her to the mightier world she had never seen, beyond the bay.

After she reached the steamer her stillness and grief continued, and going to bed that night she turned up her face, discolored by tears, for Vesta to kiss her, like a child, and faltered:

"Aunty, don't think I have no principle. Indeed, I have some."

Annapolis, half a century the senior of Baltimore, and the first town to take root in all the Chesapeake land, was now almost one hundred and fifty years old, and the stern monument of Cromwell's protectorate. Its handful of expelled Puritans from Virginia, compelled to organize their county under the name of the Romanist, Anne Arundel, unfurled the standard of the Commonwealth, reddened with a tyrant king's blood, against the invading army of Lord Baltimore, and, shouting "G.o.d is our strength: fall on, men!" annihilated feudal Maryland, never to revive; and, after King William's similar revolution in England, "Providence town" took his queen sister's name, _Anna_polis, like Princess Anne across the bay.

Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races, stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland, and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the slaveholders' insurrection.

It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had a.s.sembled in the name of ca.n.a.ls and railroads to compete for the bonded aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of the Eastern Sh.o.r.e for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the cormorant, Baltimore.

Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred and thirty miles of railroad.

The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state capital.

Vesta, whose carriage had been brought over, looked with a gentle patriotism--being herself of divided Maryland and Virginia sympathies--upon the little peninsulated capital, with its old roomy houses of colonial brick, its circles and triangles in the public ways, and the unchanged names of such streets as King George, Prince George, and the Duke of Gloucester; but Rhoda was excited to the height of state pride in everything she saw, and, with strong faculty, seized on the historical and political relations of Annapolis, till Judge Custis said:

"Vesta, that girl is of the old rebel Milburn stock, I know. She takes it all in like a wild duck diving for the bay celery."

With two such beautiful women to speak for it, the Eastern Sh.o.r.e railroad seemed at first to have many friends, but it was not in the nature of the enterprising elements about Baltimore to yield a point, however complaisant they might appear.

Vesta did not go into general company, but her influence was mildly exercised in her rooms at the large old hotel, and in her carriage as she made excursions in pleasant weather to the South and West rivers, to "the Forest" of Prince George and to the thrifty Quakers of Montgomery.

She wrote and received a daily letter, her husband being attentive and tender, despite his growing cares, as he had promised to be on that severe day he made his suit to her.

But the story of her sacrifice, shamefully exaggerated, with all that intensity of expression habitual in a pro-slavery society whenever money is the stake and denunciation the game, was used to injure her husband's interests.

Mr. Milburn was described as a vile Yankee type of miser and overreacher, who had plotted against the fortune of a gentleman and the virtue of his daughter for a long series of remorseless years.

Local opposition affirmed that he would use the railroad to ruin other gentry and oppress his native region, and that he was a Philadelphia emissary and an abolitionist, scheming to create a new state of the three jurisdictions across the bay.

Judge Custis, with his great popularity, did not escape censure; he was said to have winked at the surrender of his child for money and ambition, and to have broken the heart of his estimable wife after he had lost her fortune in an iron furnace.

Senator Clayton, whose mother had originated near Annapolis, made a visit there from Washington, and was entrapped into saying that Delaware would furnish all needful railway facilities for the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, and that two railways there would never pay.