At the termination of Milburn's long visit, Vesta had gone to her own room, and read her passage in the Bible, and said her prayer, and tried to think, but the day's application had been too great to leave her mind its morning energy, when health, which is so much of decision, was elastic in her veins and brain.
She began to see her duty loom up like a prodigious thing on one side, crowding every other consideration out of the way but one--her modesty; and threatening that, which, like a little mouse, ran around and around her mind, timorous, but helpless, and without a hole of escape.
She would cease to be a maid within the circuit of the clock, or forsake her family, and drive that great bloodhound of duty over the threshold of her ruined home.
In the one case lay outward devastation--the red eyes of parents and servants who had not slept all night, and looked at her as their obdurate hostage, and the prying constables lodged upon the premises to see that nothing was smuggled out, the ring of the auctioneer's bell, and the fingering of boors and old gossips over the cherished things of the family, even to her heirlooms, jewelry, and hosiery; the vast old house a hollow barn when these were done, and she and her mother visitors at the jail where her poor father looked through the bars, and bent his head in shame!
Then the servants, one after another, mounted upon the court-house block, the old gray servitors mocked, the little children parted, like calves by the butcher, and the young girls feeling the desperate apprehensions of abuse and violation, that were the other alternative to herself, with whom purity was like the whiteness of the lily, prized more than its beauty of form or its perfume.
She glanced in her mirror by the light that flamed in her brazen grate, and saw the blushes climb like flying virgins at the sack of towns, up the white ramparts of her neck and temples.
The form which had altered so little from childhood, supple and straight, and moulded to perfection, was to fall like the young hickory-tree in the August hurricane, twisted from its native grove. The breath of the man she was to yield her life to, irresistible and hot as that storm, she had felt already, when he held her for a moment in his arms in the transport of passion, and heard his fearless avowal of desire.
To marry any man now seemed hard; to marry this one was inexpressible shame, and at the thought of it she could not shed a tear, such paralysis came over her. She had read of the recent Greek revolution, where elegant ladies of Scio, and other isles of the AEgean Sea, educated in the best seminaries of Europe, had been sold by thousands as common slaves in the markets of Constantinople, and carried to their estates by brutal Turks, with all the gloating anticipation of lust and tyranny.
On this vivid episode started a procession of all the ages of women who had been the sport of conquest since their common mother, Eve, lost Paradise by her simplicity: the Jewish maidens carried to Babylon, the Gothic virgins dragged at the horse-tails of the Moors, the daughters of Palestine and Byzantium consigned to Arab sensualists, and made to follow their nomadic tents, and the almond-eyed damsels of China surrendered by their parents to the wild Kalmucks, to be beaten and starved on every cold plain of Asia, till life was laid down with neither hope nor fear.
"I am happier than millions of my sex," Vesta said; "my captor does not despise me, at least. Perhaps he will treat me kinder than I think, and give me time to draw towards him without this deadly pain and shame."
Then she almost repented of her hasty decision to marry this night, instead of after longer acquaintance, which Mr. Milburn, no doubt, would have granted, and his words were remembered with accusation: "What will the world say to your marriage after a single day's acquaintance with me?" "Will this haste not be repented, or become a subject of reproach to you?" Was it too late to recall her words, and ask for delay?
"No," thought Vesta, "I am to keep, at least, my mind maiden and chaste, instead of playing the unstable coquette with that. I will not let him begin to think me weak and changeful already."
To see if there was the least glimmer of relief from this marriage Vesta crossed to her mother's room, and found Mrs. Custis with her head wrapped in handkerchiefs steeped in cologne, and a vial of laudanum in her hand, and in a condition bordering on hysteria.
"Mamma," said poor Vesta, "are you in pain?"
"Oh!" screamed Mrs. Custis, "I am just dying here of cruelty and brutality. Your father is a villain. I'll have that rascal, Milburn, killed. Go get me ink and paper, daughter, and sit here and write me a letter to my brother, Allan McLane, in Baltimore. He shall settle with Judge Custis for this robbery, and take you and me back to Baltimore, leaving your father to go to the almshouse or the jail, I don't care which."
"Mother," exclaimed Vesta, "what a sin! to abuse poor father now in all his trouble!"
"Trouble!" echoed Mrs. Custis, mockingly, "what trouble has he had, I would like to know? Living in the woods like a Turk among his barefooted forest concubines! Spending my money, raked and scraped by my poor father in the sugar importation, to make puddle iron out of the swamp, and be considered a smart man! The family is broken up. We are paupers, and now 'it is save yourself.' I'll take care of you if I can, but your father may starve for any aid I will give him."
"Then he shall have the only aid in my power, mother," said Vesta, decisively.
"Your aid!" Mrs. Custis exclaimed. "What have you got? Your jewels, I suppose? How long will they keep him? You had better keep your jewels, girl, for your wedding, and have it come quickly, for marriage is now your only salvation."
"My last jewel shall go, then," Vesta said, with a pale resolution that darted through her veins like ice.
"Save your jewels," Mrs. Custis continued, "and choose a husband before this thing is noised abroad! You have a good large list to select from. There is your cousin, Chase McLane, crazy for you, and with an estate in Kent. There is that young fool Carroll, with thousands of acres on the western shore, and the widower Hynson of King George, Virginia, with eighty slaves and his stables full of race-horses. You can marry any of these Dennis boys, or take Captain Ringgold of Frederick, who lives in elegance at West Point, or be mistress of Tench Purvience's mansion on Monument Square in Baltimore. All you have to do is to write a letter, saying: 'I expect you,' or, what is better, take to-morrow's steamer for Baltimore and use your Uncle Allan's house and become engaged and married there."
"Mamma," Vesta spoke without rebuke, only with a sad, confirmed feeling of her destiny, "I could be capable of deceiving any of those gentlemen if I could so heartlessly leave my father."
"Deceiving!" Mrs. Custis remarked, filling her palm and brow with the cologne. "What is man's whole work with a woman but deceit? To court her for her money, to kiss her into taking her money out of good mortgages and putting it into bog iron ore? To tell her when past middle life that she has nothing to live upon, except the charity of the public, or her reluctant friends. All this for an experiment! The Custis family are all knaves or fools. Your father is a monster."
Vesta went to her mother's side and bathed her forehead.
"Dear mamma," she said, "let you and I do something for ourselves, while papa looks around and finds something to do. We can rent a house in Princess Anne and open a seminary. I can teach French and music, you can be the matron and do the correspondence and business, and if papa is at a loss for larger occupation he can lecture on history and science. Our friends will send their children to us, and we shall never be separated. I will give up the thought of marriage and live for you two."
Mrs. Custis made a gesture of impatience.
"And be an old maid!" she blurted. "That is insufferable. What are all these accomplishments and charms for but a husband, and what is he for but to provide bread and clothes. Don't be as crazy as your unprincipled father! Try no experiments! Drop philanthropy! Money is the foundation of all respectability."
Vesta thought to herself: "Can that be so? Does it not, then, justify the man who solicits me in his means of getting money? Mother"--Vesta spoke--"you would have me marry, then?"
"There is no would about it," answered Mrs. Custis. "You must marry!"
"Marry immediately?"
"Yes, the sooner the better, to a rich man. Have you picked out one?"
"Give me your blessing, and I will try," Vesta said; "I think I know such a one."
Mrs. Custis kissed her daughter, and moaned about her poor head and lost marriage portion, and Vesta set out to look for her father.
She found him as described, in the luxury of tears and squab, as comfortable among his negro servants as in the state legislature or at the head of society, and they wrapped up in his condescension and misfortunes.
As Vesta saw the curious scene of such patriarchal democracy in the old kitchen, she wondered if that voluptuous endowment of her father was not the happy provision to make marriage unions tolerable, and social revulsions philosophical. Something of regret that she had not more of the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother.
"Roxy," said Vesta, as she left the kitchen, "do you go up to my mother and stay with her all this night. Make your spread there beside her bed. Virgie, put on your hood and carry a letter for me,--I will write it in the library."
She sat before her father, he too undecided to speak, and seeing by her fixed expression that it was no time for loquacity. She sealed the letter with wax, and, Virgie coming in, her father heard the direction she gave with curiosity greater than his embarrassment:
"Take this to Rev. William Tilghman. Give it to him only, and see that he reads it, Virgie, before you leave him. If he asks you any questions, tell him please to do precisely what this note says, and, as he is my friend, not to disappoint me."
The girl's steps were hardly out of hearing when Vesta opened the drawer of the library-table and took out a package of papers tied with a string. She unloosed it, and her father recognized from where he sat his notes of hand and mortgages.
"Gracious God, my darling!" exclaimed Judge Custis, "how came you by those papers?"
"They are to be mine to-night, father--in one hour. The moment they become mine they will be yours."
"Why, Vessy," said the Judge, "if they are yours even to keep a minute, the shortest way with them is up the chimney!"
He made a stride forward to take them from her hand. She laid them in her lap and looked at him so calmly that he stopped.
"You may burn the house, papa," she said, "it is still your own. But these papers you could only burn by a crime. It would be cheating an honorable man."
"Honorable! Who?" the Judge exclaimed.
"He who is to be my husband."
"You marry Meshach Milburn!" shouted the Judge, "O curse of God!--not him?"
"Yes, this night," answered Vesta; "I respect him. I hold these obligations by his trust in me. They are my engagement ring."
Judge Custis raised a loud howl like a man into whom a nail is driven, and fell at his daughter's feet and clasped her knees.
"This is to torture me," he cried; "he has not dared to ask you, Vesta?"
"Yes, and my word is passed, father. Shall that word, the word of a Custis, be less than a Milburn's faith. By the love he bore me, Mr. Milburn gave me these debts for my dower--a rare faith in one so prudent. If I do not marry him, they will be given back to him this night."
"Then give them back, my child, and save your soul and your purity, lest I live to be cursed with the sight of my noble daughter's shame? This marriage will be unholy, and the censure to follow it will be the bankruptcy of more than our estate--of our simple fame and old family respect. We have friends left who would help us. If you marry Milburn, they will all despise and repudiate us."
"I do not believe it," said Vesta. "The sense and courage of that gentleman--he is a gentleman, for I have seen him, and a gentleman of many gifts--will compel respect even where false pride and family pretension appear to put him down. Who that underrates him will make any considerable sacrifice to assist us? Your sons,--will they do it? Then by what right do they decide my marriage choice? No, father, I only do my part to support our house in its extremity, as these gentlemen and others have done before."
She pointed to the old portraits of Custises on the wall. If any of them looked dissatisfied, he met a countenance haughty as his own.
"Vesta," her father called, "you know you do not love this man?"
Looking back a minute at the longing in his face, which now wore the solicitude of personal affection, she melted under it.
"No, father," she said, with a burst of tears. "I love you."
She threw her arms around him and kissed him long and fondly, both weeping together. He went into a fit of grief that admitted of no conversation till it was partly spent, and at last lay with his gray hairs folded to her heaving bosom, where the compensation of his love made her sacrifice more precious.
"I feel that I am doing right, father," she said tenderly "Till now I have had my doubts. No other young heart is wronged by my taking this step; I have never been engaged, and it now seems providential, as I could not then have gone to your assistance without injuring myself and another; and your debts are too great for any but this man to settle them. Your life has been one long sacrifice for me, and not a cloud has darkened above me till this day, giving me the first shower of sorrow, which I trust will refresh my soul, and make its humility grow. Oh, father, it would rejoice me so much if you could respond to my sacrifice with a better life!"
"God help me, I will!" he sobbed.
"That is very comforting to me. I will not enumerate your omissions, dear father, but if this important step in my life does not arrest some sad tendencies I see in you, the disappointment may break me down. Intemperance in you--a judge, a gentleman, a husband, and a father--is a deformity worse than Mr. Milburn's honest, unfashionable hat. Do you not feel happier that my husband is not to be a drunkard?"
"He has not that vice, thank God!" admitted the Judge.
"Be his better example, father, for I hope to see you influence him to be kind to me, and the sight of you walking downward in his view will degrade me more than bearing his name or sharing his eccentricities. Oh, if you love me, let not your dear soul slide out of the knowledge of God!"
"Pray for me, dear child! My feet are slippery and my knees are weak."
"Begin from this moment to lean on Heaven," said Vesta. "It is better than this world's consideration. Oh, what would strengthen me now but God's approval, though I go into a captivity I dreamed not of. Even there I can take my harp beneath the willows, like them in Babylon, and praise my Maker."
She sat at her piano and sang the hymn the young consumptive, Rev. Mr. Eastburn, composed in her grandmother's house, taking it from the Episcopal collection:
"O holy, holy, holy Lord!
Bright in Thy deeds and in Thy name,
Forever be Thy name adored,
Thy glories let the world proclaim!
"O Jesus, Lamb once crucified
To take our load of sins away,
Thine be the hymn that rolls its tide
Along the realms of upper day!
"O Holy Spirit from above,
In streams of light and glory given,
Thou source of ecstacy and love,
Thy praises ring through earth and heaven!"
As her voice in almost supernatural clearness and sweetness filled the two large rooms, and died away in melody, she rose and kissed her father again, and said, "Courage, love! we shall be happy still."
A knock at the door and there entered the young clergyman she had sent for, a sandy-haired, large-blue-eyed, boyish person, with a fair skin easily freckled, and a look of youthful chivalry under his sincere Christian humility.
"Good-evening, William," Vesta spoke; "I did not expect to see you till we reached the church. But sit, and I will answer your questions. Father, you are to go with me to the church--you and Virgie. Mr. Tilghman is to marry us."
"Now, Vesta," spoke the young man, as her father left the room, "whom are you going to marry, cousin, in such haste as this?"
"Did you have the church made ready, William, as I requested?"
"I did. The sexton is there now, lighting the fire."
"I thought you were loyal as ever, William, and depended upon you. Thanks, dear friend! I am to marry Mr. Meshach Milburn at nine o'clock."
A cloud came over the young man's serene face, though his features retained their habitual sweetness.
"I can marry you, cousin, even to Meshach Milburn," he said, "if that is your wish. Why do you marry him?"
"It is not loyal in you to ask, William, but I will give you this answer: he has asked me. He is also devoted and rich. To avoid excitement, possibly some opposition, though it would be vain, we are to be married without further notice, and papa is to give me away."
Silent for a moment, the young rector exclaimed:
"Cousin Vesta, have I lived to see you a mercenary woman? Has this man's asserted wealth found you cold enough to want it, when love has been so generously offered you by almost every young man of station in this region, and from abroad--even by me?" he said, after a pause. "The scar is on my heart yet, cousin. No, I will not believe such a thing of you. There is a reason back of the fact."
"William, if you respected me as you once said you ever would, like your sister, you would not add this night the weight of your doubt to my other burdens, but take my hand with all the strength of yours, and lift me onward."
"I will," said the rector, swallowing a dry spot in his throat. "Though it was a bitter time I had when you refused me, cousin, the pain led me to my vows at the altar where I minister, and I have had the assistance of your beautiful music there, like the angel I seem to have seen reserved for me, in place of you, sitting at your side. And I know that this marriage is, on your part, pure as my sister's. No further will I inquire--what penalty you are paying for another, what mystery I cannot pierce."
He raised his hands above her head: "The peace of God that passeth understanding, abide with you, dear sister, forever!"
He went out with his eyes filled with tears, but hers were full of heavenly light, feeling his benediction to be righteous.
