Vesta had slept she hardly knew how long, but it was day, and slowly her eyes turned towards the remainder of her bed to see if it was occupied.
The bridegroom was not there.
She reached her foot into her slipper at the bedside, and at one swift step passed before her mirror, whispering:
"I have dreamed it all!"
The fresh, flushing skin, and radiant contrasts of hair and eyes seemed so welcome to her in their perfect assurance of health, that she whispered again:
"Have I dreamed it? He is not here. Oh, am I free?"
Then a feeling of reproval came to her as the minutest memory of that wonderful yesterday rose to her mind, and the vow she had made to honor and obey seemed to have been too easily repented. She looked upon her hand, and the little, thin, pathetic thread of gold reaffirmed her memory of the wedding-ring, and at the next suggestion a blush coursed through her being like a redbird in the apple-blossoms: perhaps he had stolen from her chamber stealthily as he came, while she, drowned in deep slumber, wotted not.
A glance into the mirror again revealed those blushes repeating each other, like the Aurora in the northern dawn, till, with a searching consciousness, and her voice raised above the whisper, she said,
"Be still, silly girl!"
Opening the door, she found Virgie lying on the rug without, warmly wrapped in her mistress's blanket-shawl, but wide awake.
"Virgie, no one has passed?" asked Vesta.
"No, Miss Vessy. Nobody could have stepped over me, for my mind has been too awake, if I did sleep a little. Maybe he ain't a-coming, Miss Vessy. Maybe he's ashamed!"
"Hush, Virgie," Vesta said, "you are speaking of your master."
Throwing her morning-robe around her shoulders, the maiden bride tripped noiselessly to her mother's apartment; the door was open, the night taper floating in its vase, and Mrs. Custis lay asleep with her bank-book under her pillow.
"Shall I awake her?" Vesta thought. "Yes, if I do not need her experience, I do want her confidence, and not to give her mine would seem deceit now."
Vesta kissed her mother softly, and placed her cheek beside that lady's thin, respectable profile as she awoke, and said:
"Daughter, mercy! why, what has become of you? It seems to me I have seen nobody for days, and I wanted to express my indignation even in my dreams. Where have you been?"
"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, taking Mrs. Custis's head in her arms, "I have been finding your lost fortune, which troubled us all so much. It is to be given back to you, dearest--my husband has promised to do so."
"Your husband? Whom have you selected, that he is so free with his money? How could you hear from Baltimore so soon? Now, don't tell me a parcel of stuff, thinking to comfort me. Your father is a villain, and my connections shall know it."
Mrs. Custis drew her bank-book from under her head, and began to cry, as she took a single look at its former total.
"Darling mamma," Vesta said, "seeing you so miserable yesterday on account of papa's failure, and your portion gone with it, I accepted an offer of marriage, and have a rich man's promise that, first of all, your part shall be paid to you. This house, and our manor, and everything as it is--the servants, the stable, and the movables--belong to me, in my own name, paid for in papa's notes, and by him transferred to me to be our home forever, so that a revulsion like yesterday may not again cross the sill of our door. Does not that deserve a kiss, mamma?"
"I don't believe a word of it," said Mrs. Custis. "This is another trick to deceive me. I don't accuse you of it, Vesta, but you are the victim of somebody and your father. Now, who can this man be, so free with his ready money? It's not the style in Baltimore to promise so liberally as all that. Have you accepted young Carroll?"
"No, nor thought of him, mamma."
"Then it must be that widower fool, Hynson, ready to sell his negroes for a second wife like you."
"He has neither been here in body or mind," Vesta said; "never in my mind."
"That would be a marriage to make a talk: it wouldn't be like you to bestow so much beauty on a widower. I think there is a certain vulgarity about an elegant girl marrying a widower. She is so refined, and he is generally so sleek and sensual. Did you hear from Charles McLane?"
"Nothing, mamma; let me ease your mind by telling you that my husband lives here in Princess Anne. He was father's creditor, Mr. Meshach Milburn. He has loved me unknown for years. I saw a way to stop all scandal and recrimination by marrying him at once, that the society we know would have but one, and not two, subjects of curiosity. Papa saw me married last night to Mr. Milburn, and I bear his name this Sabbath day."
"His wife? Meshach Milburn? The vulgarian in the play-actor's hat? That man! Daughter, you play with my poor head. It is going again. Oh-h-h!"
"Mother, it is true. I am Mrs. Milburn. My husband is your benefactor."
It was unnecessary to say more, for Mrs. Custis had really fainted.
"Poor mother!" thought Vesta, "I am confirmed in my fear that, if she had been told of my purpose, she would have opposed it bitterly."
Roxy was summoned to assist Vesta, and after Mrs. Custis had become conscious, and sighed and cried hysterically, her daughter, sitting in her lady's rocker, spoke out plainly:
"Mother, I appreciate your disappointment in my marriage, though I should be the one to make complaint and receive sympathy, instead of discouragement; but I do not desire it; indeed, I will not permit any person to disparage my husband, or draw odious comparisons between my poverty and his exertions. If there are in my body, or my society, any merits to please a man, they have fallen to him under the law of Providence, that he that hath shall receive. I pity your illness, dear mamma, but I fear Mr. Milburn is ill, too, for he has not been here all night, though he left me at the church-gate."
"I hope the viper is dead!" Mrs. Custis said, with great clearness, and energized it by sitting up in bed. Roxy left the room.
"I hope he has been murdered," said Mrs. Custis, "and that the murderer will never be discovered. If there is any spirit of the McLanes left in my brothers and nephews, they will wipe out, in blood, the insult of this marriage between my daughter and the man who set a trap upon the honor of a respectable family."
Vesta arose with a pale, troubled face, yet with some of her mother's prejudice flashing back.
"He can defend himself, mamma. I shall go to seek him now, since he is so much hated for me."
She returned to her room, and put on a walking-suit, and made her toilet. In the library Vesta found her father dozing in a large chair, with his feet upon a leather sofa, and a silk handkerchief drawn across his crown, under which were the dry beds of tears that had coursed down his cheeks. She saw, with a touch of joy, that the sherry in the decanter was untouched, and the two glasses were still clean: he had not relapsed into his habits, even while making an all-night vigil to wait for the unwelcome son-in-law. He started as she entered, and then stared at her between his dazed wits and a mute inquiry that she could understand.
"He has not come, papa. And mamma--oh! she is severe."
Vesta, trembling at the throat a moment, rushed into her father's wide-open arms, and buried the sob in his breast.
"Poor soul! Poor lamb! Poor thing!" he said, over and over, while his temper slowly rose, that seldom rose of recent years, since pleasure and carelessness had taken its masculine sting away, but Vesta felt his tones change while he petted her, and at last heard him say, hoarsely:
"By God!"
"Sh--h!" she whispered, raising her hand to his mouth.
"I will kill somebody," he went on, finishing his sentence, and as she drew away he strode across the room and back again, a noble exhibition of passion that had a noble origin, in fatherly pity.
"Don't lose your true pride, papa, after you have persevered so long," Vesta said. "It is Sunday. Do you think he will come? What can have happened?"
"He will either come or fight me," Judge Custis remarked. "I have tried to be a peaceable man and Christian magistrate, albeit a poor hypocrite in some, things, but I am pushed too far. My wife's smallness is worse than insanity and wickedness put together. Between her and this money-broking fiend, and my neglected child entrapped into such a marriage, by God! I will clean my old duelling arms, and appeal to injustice itself to set me even."
If he had been fine-looking in his sincere grief, he was thrice more attractive in his sincere high spirit. Vesta, admiring him in spite of her cares, did not like to see him in this unnatural recklessness.
"Dear father," she said, soothingly, "you have no cause of quarrel."
"I have every cause," he cried; "the proposal to marry you was an insult, for which I should have challenged him, and shot him if he declined. Now he has married you and absconded, using you and the Custis honor with contempt. In my day I was the best shot in Eastern Virginia. I can kill a man in this cause as easily as I have broken either of a man's arms, at choice, in my courting days. Public opinion will clear me under this provocation, and I can acquit my own conscience, abhorrent as duelling is to me. My sons-in-law would leap to take the quarrel up, and rid the world of Meshach Milburn."
"That is mamma's idea, to kill the debtor who has been specially kind to her. She says she will send for Uncle Allan McLane, and is more unreasonable than ever. Papa, your feelings are unjust. Something we do not know of has happened to Mr. Milburn. He was not himself all the while at the church. Now that I recollect, he was not ardent for the marriage to be so soon. It was I who hastened the hour. Let us be right in everything, having progressed so far with the recovery of our fortunes, and let us await the fulfilment of events hopefully."
"Milburn was drunk at the ceremony, I saw that," Judge Custis said, "but it was no excuse. In fact, what good can come of this violent alliance? It seems to me that we have leaped from the frying-pan into the fire. I feel ugly, my daughter, and there is no concealing it."
"Then you are in the mood to talk to mother this morning," Vesta said, "while you have some unusual will and spirit. This resentful sullenness she is showing I fear more than your passing emotion, papa. Be firm, yet kind, with her, and I will go to find my husband. Yes, that is my place. He may be more justly complaining of my absence now, than we of his neglect."
"You don't mean that you are going to visit him at his den?"
"I shall go there first. It would have been my home last night if he had required it. To tell the truth," Vesta said, blushing, "the poor man was so kind to me yesterday, in spite of his object, and so quaint, and, as it seemed, dependent on me, that my charity is enlisted for him, and I could almost have married him from pity."
The Judge's temper fell a little in the study of his daughter's blushing.
"Wonderful! wonderful!" he thought to himself; "that poor corn-bred fellow has already made more impression on this girl's pride than a hundred cavalier gallants. Truly, we are a republic, Vesta," he continued aloud, "and you lay down the Custis character as easily as our old connection, Lord Fairfax, accepted the democracy of his hired surveyor, Mr. Washington, before he died."
"I laid down the Custis name yesterday," Vesta said, "though not their better character, I hope. Papa, there is only one law of marriage; it is where the wife follows the husband."
She looked a little archly at him, wiping her eyes of recent tears, and though she may not have meant it, he was reminded of his own fear of his wife.
Aunt Hominy now came in, having been told by Virgie to prepare coffee, and she followed Roxy, who brought it into the library. The old cook had a strange look, as of one who had been up all night at a fire, or a "protracted meeting," and she poked her head in as if afraid to come farther, till Vesta went out and kissed her kindly.
"Poor Aunty Hominy! did you think I was sold, or abused, because I had been married? Dear old aunty, I shall never leave you!"
Aunt Hominy had a countenance of profound, almost vacant, melancholy, mixed with a fear that, the Judge remarked, "he had seen on the faces of niggers that had stolen something."
"Miss Vessy," she stammered, at last, "is you measured in by ole Meshach? Is he got you, honey? Dat he has, chile! He's gwyn to bury you under dat pizen hat. Po' little girl! Po' Miss Vessy!"
"Oh, Aunt Hominy," Vesta said, "he will be a kind master in spite of his queer hat, and take good care of you and all the children; for he is my husband, and will love you all for me."
A dumb, terrified look adhered to the old black woman's face.
"No, he won't be kind to nobody," she gasped. "You has gwyn been lost, Miss Vessy. You is measured in. De good Lord try an' bress you! Hominy ain't measured in yit. Hominy's kivered herseff wid cammermile, an' drunk biled lizzer tea. Hominy's gone an' got Quaker."
"What's Quaker, Aunt Hominy?"
"Quaker," the old woman repeated, backing out and looking down, "Quaker's what keeps him from a measurin' of me in!"
Then, as Vesta drew on her bonnet and shawl, having taken her coffee and toast, the old servant, gliding back in the depths of Teackle Hall, raised a wild African croon, as over the dead, giving her voice a musical inflection like the jingle of Juba rhyme:
"Good-bye, Miss Vessy! Good-bye, Aunt Hominy's baby! Good-bye, dear young missis! Good-bye, my darlin' chile, furever, furever, an' O furever, little Vessy Custis, O chile, farewell!"
The tears raining upon her cheeks, her wild, wringing hands and upflung arms and shape convulsed, Vesta remembered long, and thought, as she left Teackle Hall with Virgie, that some African superstition had, by the aid of dreams, drawn into a passing excitement the faithful servant's brain.
At the corner of old Front Street, and extending almost out upon the little Manokin bridge, stood Meshach Milburn's two-story house and store, with a door upon both streets. Though planted low, in a hollow, it stood forward like Milburn's challenging countenance, unsupported by any neighbors.
"Don't it look like a witch's, Missy?" Virgie said, as Vesta took in its not unpicturesque outlines and crude plank carpentry, the weather-rotted roof, the decrepit chimney at the far end, the one garret window in the sharp gable, the scant little windows above stairs, and the doors low to the sand.
"It may have been the pride of the town fifty years ago, Virgie. I have passed it many a day, looking with mischievous curiosity for the steeple-hat, to show that to some city friend, little thinking I must ever enter the house. But hear that wilful bird singing so loud! Where is it?"
"I can't tell to save my life. It ain't in the tree yonder. It's the first bird up this mornin', Miss Vessy, sho'!"
"Is not that larger door standing ajar, the one with the four panels in it?" Vesta asked. "Yes, it is unfastened and partly open."
The blood left Vesta's heart a moment, as the thought ran through her mind: "He has been watched, followed home, and murdered!"
The idea seemed to explain his absence on his marriage night, and, like a sudden flame first seen upon a burning ship, lighting up the wide ocean with its bright terrors, Vesta saw the infinite relations of such a crime: her almost secret marriage, her custody of her father's notes, the record of them upon her husband's books, his last word at the church gate: "I will come soon, darling," and now, this silent abode, with its door ajar on Sunday dawn, before the town was up--they might bear the suspicion of a dreadful crime by the ruined debtor house of Custis against their friendless creditor.
This thought, personal to her father, was immediately dismissed in the feeling for a possibly murdered husband. If the idea barely touched her sense of self, that her tremendous sacrifice had been arrested by Heaven, and her purity saved between the altar and the nuptials by the bloodshed of her purchaser at the hands of some meaner avenger, though not until she had redeemed her father from Milburn's clutch, this idea never passed beyond the portal of her mind; she repulsed it, entering, and began to think of the easy prey her husband might have been, hated by so many, defended by none, known to be very rich, no loss to the community, as it might think, in its financial ignorance, and his only guard a stalwart negro notorious for fighting.
Believing Milburn to deserve better than his present fame, Vesta advanced towards the door of the old wooden store with a spirit of commiseration and awe, and still the wild bird from somewhere poured out a shriek, a chuckle, a hurrah, enough to turn her blood to ice.
As Vesta pushed open the old, seasoned door it dragged along the floor, and the loose iron bar and padlock, dropping down, made a ring that brought an echo like a tomb's out of the hollow interior.
"'Deed, Miss Vessy, I'm 'fraid to go in there," Virgie said.
"You are not to come in till I call you. But hear that bird rioting in song! Does Mr. Milburn keep birds?"
"I can't tell, Miss Vessy. That bird's a Mocker. It must be in there somewhere. Oh, don't go in, Miss Vessy; something will catch you, dear Missy, sho'."
But Vesta was already gone, following the piercing sound of the native bird, that seemed to be in the loft.
She saw a little counter of pine, and a pine desk built into it, and bundles of skins, some cord-wood, a pile of lumber and boxes, a few barrels of oil or spirits, and dust and cobwebs thick on everything; and a little way in from the door the light and darkness made weird effects upon each other, increasing the apparent distances, and changing the forms; and the sun, now risen, made turning cylinders of gold-dust at certain knot-holes in the eastern gable, across whose film she saw two lean mice stand upon the floor unalarmed, and tamely watch her come.
The screaming of the bird was conveyed through the thin floor from above with loud distinctness, and every note of singing things seemed to be imitated by it, from the hawk's gloating cry to the swallow's twittering alarm, with the most rapid versatility, and even hurry, as if the creature was trying over every bird language, with the hope of finding one mankind could understand. It was idle to expect to be heard amid such clamor, and Vesta, having pounded on the floor a few times, made her way to a sort of cupboard, that might turn out to be a stairway, and, sure enough, a door opened on its dark side, and light from above flickered down.
At this moment the bird's notes abruptly ceased, and a voice, unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, yet human, spoke in response to a more natural human voice, both issuing from above.
The second voice seemed to be Milburn's; the first voice was something like it, yet not like anything from the throat of man, and the superstition she had been rebuking in her servant came with a thrilling influence upon her entire nature. She was about to fly, but called out one word as she arrested herself:
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!"
The loud, unclassifiable voice above immediately answered:
"Come, p-chee! Come chee! come tsee! See me! see me! see me! Come p-chee! come see! come see me!"
The last accentuation, in spite of the bird's interference, was sufficiently distinct to amount to an invitation, and with a raising of her eyelids once dependently to heaven, Vesta went up the stairs.
She put her head into a large, long room, which took up the whole contents of the second story, and was lighted on three sides by the small windows she had seen without. It had no carpet or floor-covering of any kind; the fire was gone out upon the chimney-hearth in the end, and the atmosphere, a little chill, was melting before the sunshine which now streamed in at both sides of the fireplace and clearly revealed every object in the apartment,--some clothes-pegs, a wooden table with a blue plate, a blue cup and saucer and a saucepan upon it, and a coarse knife and fork; a large green chest, and a leather hat-box; an old hair trunk fifty years old, and nearly falling to pieces; black silhouettes, in little round ebony frames, of a woman and a man hung over the mantel, and between them a silhouette of a face she had no difficulty in recognizing to be intended for her own.
Stretched upon a low child's bed, of the sort called trundle-bed in those days, which could be wheeled under the high-legged bed of the parents, lay the bridegroom, in his wedding-dress and gaitered shoes, with his steeple-crowned hat upon the faded calico quilt beside him, and his face as red as burning fever could make it.
Vesta only verified the particulars of the inventory of Milburn's lodge afterwards, her instant attention being drawn to the motionless form of her husband, whose flushed face seemed to indicate a death by strangulation or apoplexy. She went forward and put her hand upon him.
"Mr. Milburn!" she spoke.
"Milburn!" echoed a voice of piercing strength, though ill articulated. She looked around in astonishment, and saw nobody.
"Husband!" Vesta spoke, louder, stooping over him.
"S'band! s'band! See! see!" shouted the wanton voice, almost at her elbow.
Vesta, with one hand on the helpless man's brow, turned again, almost indignantly, for the tone seemed to address some sense of neglect or shame in her, which she had not been guilty of. Still, nothing was to be seen.
At the far corner of the room was a step-ladder leading to a hole in the loft above; but this was not the place of the interruption, for she heard the voice now come as from the chimney at the opposite end of the room, nearer the bed, and accompanied with a fluttering and scratching, as if some spirit of evil, with the talons of a rat or a bat, was trying to break in where the prostrate man lay on the bed of oblivion.
"Meshach! Meshach!" rang the half-human cry, "Hoo! hoo! Vesty! Vesty! Sweet! sweet! sweet! Ha, ha! See me! See me! Meshach, he! Vesty, she! She! she! she! Hoot! hoot! ha!"
Rapidly changing her view, with her ears no less than her heart tingling at the use of her own name, Vesta saw on the dusty wooden mantel a common bird of a gray color, with dashes of brown and black upon his wings, and a whitish breast, and he was greatly agitated, as if he meant to fly upon her or upon some other intruder she could not see.
His eyes, of black pupils upon yellowish eyeballs, sparkled with nervous activity. He flung himself into the air above her head, uttering sounds of such mellow richness and such infinite fecundity of modulation, that the old hovel almost burst with intoxicated song, combining gladness, welcome, fear, defiance, superstition, horror, and epithalamium all together, like Orpheus gone mad, and losing the continuity of his golden notes.
The bird's upper bill was beaked like a hawk's, his lower was sharp as a lance, and between them issued that infuriated melody and cadence and epithet that old Patrick Henry's spirit might have migrated into from his grave in the Virginia woods. He suddenly flung himself from his vortex of song upon the bed of the sick man, with a twitching hop and rapid opening and shutting of the tail, like the fan of a disturbed beauty, and thence perched upon Milburn's peaked hat, and with a convulsive struggle of his throat and body, as if he were in superhuman labor, brought out, distinct as man could speak, the words,
"'Sband! 'sband! Vesty! Vesty! Sweet! sweet! Come see! come see!"
Vesta, by a quick, expert movement, grasped the bird, and smoothed it against her bosom, and soothed its excitement.
She had heard verified what Audubon avowed, and had but recently published in the beautiful edition of his works her father was a subscriber to, that some said the American mocking-bird could imitate the human voice, though the naturalist remarked that he himself had never heard the bird do it.
The present verification, Vesta thought, of the mocking-bird's supremest power, might have issued from its excitement at the silent and helpless condition of its master--that master who had told Vesta that no bird in the woods ever resisted his seductions and mystic influence.
"If that be true," Vesta said to herself, "there is no danger of this vociferous pet making his escape if I put him out of the window till I can see if his master speaks or lives."
So she raised the window, and flung the mocking-bird up into the air, and it came down and dropped into the old willow-tree beneath, and there set up a concert the Sabbath morning might have been proud of, when, in the corn-fields, the free-footed Saviour went plucking the milky ears. Vesta could but stop a minute and listen.
The liquid notes chased each other around in circles of dizzy harmony, as if angels were at hide-and-seek on the blue branches of the air, eluding each other in pure-heartedness, chasing each other with eager love, sighing praise and happiness as their supernal hearts emitted music in the glow of ecstasy, and carrying upward the loveliest emotions of the earth in yearning sympathy for nature. No language, now, that Vesta could identify, was woven into that maze of morning song, which challenged, with its fulness and golden weight, the floods of sunshine, matching light with sound, spontaneous both, and rivals for the favors of the soft atmosphere. Singing with all its heart, outdoing all it knew, forgetting imitation in wild improvisation, watching her window as it danced upon the twigs and fluttered into the air, conscious of her listening as it purled and warbled towards her, and sounded every pipe and trumpet, virginal and clarion, hautboy and castanet, in the orchestra of its rustic bosom, the mocking-bird's ode seemed almost supernatural this morn to Vesta, and she thought to herself:
"Oh, what wedding music in the cathedral at Baltimore could equal that? and this poor man receives it for his epithalamium, without cost, as truly as if nature were greeting my coming to him in the old poet's spirit:
"'Now all is done; bring home the bride againe;
Bring home the triumph of our victory;
Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,
With joyance bring her and with jollity:
Sing, ye sweet angels, Alleluia sing,
That all the woods may answer, and your echo ring.'"
Relieved from the agitation of the mocking-bird, Vesta now gave her whole attention to her husband; and the high heat of his brain and circulation, and his muttering, like delirium, seemed to indicate that he had an intense attack of intermittent fever. She heard the words several times repeated by him: "I will come soon, darling!" and the simplicity of his devotion to her, unloved as he was, had such flavor of pathos in it that the tears started to Vesta's eyes.
"Poor soul!" she said, "it will be long before I can love him. There, his hunger must be enduring. But my duty is not the less clear to stay by his side and nurse him, as his wife."
At this conclusion she looked Milburn over carefully, to see if any wound or sign of violence, whether by accident or an enemy, appeared upon him, and finding none, and he all the time wandering in his sleep, she climbed the ladder and peeped into the garret, to see if his servant might be there. Samson's bed, as she supposed it was, had not been disturbed, and so, descending, she raised the window over the larger door she had entered by, and beckoned Virgie to come up.
"Take this tin cup," she said to the quadroon, "and go to the spring, near here, and bring it to me full of water."
Then, as the girl tripped away, Vesta found a piece of paper, and wrote her father a note, telling him to come to her; and to the girl, when she returned, her mistress said:
"I want you to get a roll of new rag-carpet at Teackle Hall, and have it brought here, to spread upon this floor. Send me, too, a pair of our brass andirons, and pack in a basket some glass, table-ware, and linen. Tell papa to bring one of his own night-shirts, and to take down my picture in the sewing-room, and wrap it up, and have it sent. I must have mamma's medicine-box and a wheelbarrow of ice; and let Hominy make some strong tea and hot-water toast. Virgie, do not forget that this sick gentleman is my husband, and a part of our own family!"
"The girl's face preserved its respect with difficulty as she heard the last part of the sentence, but she replied to What she understood to be a warning by saying:
"Miss Vessy, I never tell anybody tales."
"No, dear, you do not. I only feared you might forget the very different view we must take of Mr. Milburn from his former life here."
Being again left alone, Vesta took the tin cup of spring-water, and, raising the disturbed man's head, she gave him a drink, and, as he opened his eyes to see whom it was, she heard him say, with an articulate sigh:
"Heaven."
With the remainder of the water and her handkerchief she washed his hot skin and kept it moist, and fitful murmurs, as "Darling!" "Angel!" "Beautiful lady!" came from his roving brain as perception and poison contended for his mind. The inborn sense in woman of happiness after doing good offices and being appreciated was attended with a certain intellectual elation, and even amusement, at having witnessed what was altogether new to her,--the life of the meaner class of white people. She looked at the dexterous silhouette of herself, cut, probably, from memory, long ago, by the man, no doubt, who never knew her until yesterday, and, guessing the companion profiles to be his mother and father, she exclaimed, mentally:
"I cannot see anything insincere about this man's statement to me. Here are all the proofs of his deep attachment to me long before he forced my name upon papa with such apparent insolence. If papa could see these proofs with a woman's interest, he would have a full apology in them. Here, too, is the bird that sings my name. What strength of prepossession the master must have had to make the feathered pupil repeat the sound of 'Vesta,' and call me 'sweet!' What resources, too, without the use of money or social aids! He knows the story of our English beginning, while we make it an idle boast; but to him Cromwell and Milton, Raleigh and Vane, are men of to-day. Ah!" Vesta thought, "I think I see now one of those Puritans in my husband, of whom I have heard as sprinkled through Virginia. We are the Cavaliers. There is the Roundhead, even to the King James hat."
As she was led onward in these probabilities, Vesta took up the demure old Hat and looked it over without any superstition, and reflected:
"Do we not exaggerate trifles? Why should this man be so derided because he covers his head with an old hat? What of it? Suppose it shows some vanity or eccentricity, why is there more merit in covering that up than in expressing it in the dress? The styles we wear to-day are the derision even of the current journals, and what will be thought of them fifty years hence, when the fashion magazines show me as I look,--the envy of my moment, the fright of my grandchildren?"
With rising color, she put the hat in the leather hat-box, and shut it up.
Judge Custis made his way up the dark stairs in a little while, and, as soon as he looked at Milburn, exclaimed,
"Curses come home to roost! It was only night before last that I said, in the presence of Meshach's negro, 'May the ague strike him and the bilious sweat from Nassawongo mill-pond!' He slept by it that night, while I was tossing in misery. The next night it was his turn. Daughter, he has the bilious intermittent fever, the legacy of all his fathers. He exposed himself, I suppose, extraordinarily that night, and I hear that he burned the old cabin in the morning. Now he will burn, in memory of it, for the next ten weeks; for he has, I suspect, from the time of day the burning and delirium came, what is called the double quotidian type of the fever, with two attacks in the twenty-four hours."
"Poor man!" exclaimed Vesta.
"Now I can account for his appearance at the marriage ceremony last night. The fever was on him, but he went through it by hard grit, and, probably, returning here to get some relief, he just fell over on that bed, and his head left him for some hours. The paroxysm goes away during sleep, and returns in the morning; so, before he could get abroad to-day, even if he could walk, to report himself at Teackle Hall, another fever came, and a furious one, too, and he will have good luck to survive forty days of fever, with probably eighty sweats in that time."
"He must be doctored at once, papa."
"Well, I am good enough doctor for the bilious fever. He wants plenty of cold lemonade, cold sponging, and ice to suck when the fever is on him. When the chills intervene he wants blanketing, hot bottles at his feet, and hot tea, or something stronger. In the rest between the attacks of fever and chill, he wants calomel and Peruvian bark, and if these delirious spells go on, he may want both bleeding and opium."
"Here are some of the things he immediately needs, then," Vesta said, as a tall white man she had never seen before came up the stairs with Virgie, bringing some Susquehanna ice in a blanket, and a roll of carpet, and other articles she had sent for. The man's face wore a large bruise that heightened his savage appearance.
"Judge," exclaimed the stranger, "I'm doin' a little work to pay fur my board. Who's your whiffler? He'll know me when he sees me next time."
Following the stranger's eyes, Vesta and her father saw Meshach Milburn, half raised up from the low trundle-bed, staring at Joe Johnson as if trying to get at him. His lips moved, he partly articulated:
"Catch the--scoundre--him!"
"Joe," said the Judge, "slip away! He recognizes you as the assailant yesterday. Don't hesitate: see how he glares at you!"
"Oh, it's the billy-noodle with the steeple nab-cheat, him that settled me with the brick," said the stranger, in a low voice. "So I have piped him. Ah! that's plumby!"
As the tall man started to go Milburn's countenance relaxed, he wandered again in his head, and fell back upon the bed.
"I told you he was a hard hater, Mr. Johnson," the Judge remarked.
"Them shakes is the equivvy for the bruise he give me,--that is, till we both heal up. He's painted the ensigns of all nations on my stummick, Judge. But a blow is cured by a blow!"
With a look of admiring computation upon the girl Virgie, Joe Johnson drew his long figure down the stairs, like a pole.
"What a brutal giant," Vesta said; "and how came he to be doing our errands?"
"Why, Aunt Hominy hadn't nobody to bring the wheelbarrow load, and this man said he'd come, and he would come, Miss Vesty, so I couldn't say anything."
"He's a man of a good deal of influence," said the Judge, uneasily, "in the upper part of our county, and in Delaware. Last night, after the wedding, he slapped Meshach's hat, and old Samson knocked him down for it, and he would have killed Samson, I hear, but for your bridegroom, who felled him with a timely brick. It's a hard team to pass on a narrow road,--Meshach and Samson; hey, Virgie?"
"I'm glad old Samson beat him, anyway," the pretty quadroon said, showing her white teeth.
"Oh, what troubles will not that hat bring upon us!" Vesta thought; and then spoke: "If Mr. Milburn was strong, I think he would hardly let that man get out of the county before night."
"Well, daughter, what are you going to do with these articles he has brought?"
"They are to make this room comfortable. See, he has my picture here, cut by his own hands: I want to put a better one before him: help me hang it, papa!"
In a few minutes the bright oil portrait, but recently painted by Mr. Rembrandt Peale, was taking the sunlight upon its warm brunette cheeks, in full sight of the bridegroom, and the thick rag carpet warmed the floor, and Virgie had made a second errand to Teackle Hall, and brought back the lady's rocking-chair that Milburn so much affected, and toilet articles, and some dark cloth to hide the bare boards in places, and the old loft soon wore a reasonable appearance of habitable life. Virgie made up the fire, and the brass andirons took the cheerful flame upon them, while Vesta sweetened the lemonade after her father had cut and squeezed the lemons, and added some magnesia to make the drink foam.
"Really," said Judge Custis, "this miserable den takes the rudimentary form of a home. I suppose there are now more comforts in his sight than Meshach's whole race ever collected. What is your next move, Vesta?"
"To stay right here, darling papa, till it is safe and convenient to carry Mr. Milburn home."
"Oh, folly! it will excite scandal, and be repulsive to my feelings. This loft over a former groggery is no place for you: the news will spread from Chincoteague to Arlington. Every Custis that lives will censure me and outlaw you."
"I think you had best see Mr. Tilghman before the service, papa, and have the marriage announced from the desk this morning: that will settle the excitement before night. As for staying here, my home, you know, is where he needs me. At his will I should have to stay here altogether. But I wish to do this, dear father. It is of the greatest necessity to my nature to improve my intercourse with my husband while he is sick, that the hasty marriage we made may still have its period of acquaintance and good understanding. I want to sound the possibilities of my happiness. He will be less my master now than in his strength and possession. Perhaps--" Vesta's voice fell, and she turned to gaze upon the bridegroom, whose fever still consumed his wits--"perhaps I can influence his dress,--his appearance."
"You mean the steeple top!" Judge Custis exclaimed, petulantly.
At the loud sound of this familiar word, the feverish man's ears were pierced as through some ever-open ventricle, like an old wound.
"Steeple-top! Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see I'm married. She hears it. Oh, spare and pity her!"
He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched, yet oppressed.
"How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that nickname. In public he never appeared to flinch before it; but you see it inflicted a never-healing wound. Who has not his vulture?"
"And how unjust to pursue this man with such frivolous inhospitality so many years," Vesta exclaimed, her splendid eyes flashing. "No account has been made of his private reasons, his family piety, or his stern taste, perhaps; for he must have a reason for his wardrobe, that being, it would seem, the only thing there can be no independence about. Did you hear, papa, his feeling for me but this moment? Strangely enough, my own mind was thinking of that hat. It seems to be bigger than the very steeples of the churches: it rises between the people and worship, yes, between us and Charity, and Faith,--I had almost said Hope, too."
"The colored people all say that hat he has to wear, because the devil makes him," the trim, fawn-footed Virgie said; "Aunt Hominy says the Bad Man wouldn't let him make no mo' money if he didn't go to church in that hat. Some of the white people says so, too."
"You don't believe such foolish tales as that, Virgie?" Vesta asked.
"'Deed, I don't believe anything you say is a story, Miss Vessy. Hominy believes it. She's 'most scared out of her life about Mr. Milburn coming to the house, an' she's got all the little ones a' most crazy with fear."
"Poor, dark, ignorant soul!" Vesta said; "she is, however, more excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition."
"If he is a good man to you, Miss Vessy," the slave girl said, "I'll think the Bad Man hasn't got anything to do with him. If he treats you bad, I'll think the Bad Man has."
"Sometimes I feel as if men ought to have been left wild, like the animals," the Judge said, rinsing out Milburn's mouth with a piece of ice, "for the obstacles to liberty raised by fashion and civilization are Asiatic in their despotism. Think of the taxes we pay to fashion when we refused less to kings. Think of the aristocracy based upon dress, after we have formally extirpated it by statute! Think of the influence the boot-makers and mantua-makers of Europe, proceeding from the courts we have renounced, exert upon our Presidents and Senators, and, through the women of this country, upon all the men in the land! A million women who do not know that there are two houses of Congress, know just what bonnet the Duchess d'Angouleme is wearing, and how Charles X. in Paris ties his cravat. So the devil always gets a worm in every apple. The French Revolution abolished feudality, titles, great landed property, and only omitted to abolish fashion, and that worm--a silkworm it is--is devastating republican government everywhere, using the women to infect us."
"Yet, in the nature of woman," said Vesta, "is the love of dress as strongly as the love of woman is in man. Some righteous purpose is in it, papa,--to ornament ourselves like the birds, and let art be born."
"God knows his own mysteries," Judge Custis said. "But Vesta, go home with me to your own comfortable home, and let Virgie stay here to keep watch."
"Master, I'm afraid to stay here," the girl exclaimed, sidling towards her young mistress.
"Then I will stay, and be nurse," the Judge said. "Fear not! I will give him only wholesome medicine, whatever poison he has given me and mine. You stay in Teackle Hall, my precious child! Indeed, I must command it."
Vesta smiled sadly and pointed to her husband.
"He commands me now, papa. You were too indulgent a master, and spoiled me. No, Virgie and I will both remain, and you conciliate mamma. All is going well. Really, I am happy and grateful to my Heavenly Father that he is smoothing the way so gently, that I thought would be so hard."
"Oh, the conditions of this disease are repulsive, my child. You are a lady."
"No, I am a woman," said Vesta; "that man and I must see one or the other die. You do not know how easy it is for a woman to nurse a man. Though love might make the task more grateful, yet gratitude will do much to sweeten it. He has loved me and taken the shadow from your old age for me. Shall I leave him here to feel that I despise him? No."
She kissed her father, and gave him his cane.
"Come back this afternoon, my love," she said to him.
"Nothing on earth is like you!" exclaimed the old man. "I fear you are not mine."
"Yes," Vesta said, "you are full of good, wherever you may have strayed."
As the sound of his feet passed from the doorway below, the sick man, with a sigh as from burning fire, opened his eyes and looked around. They fell upon her picture.
"What is that?" he murmured; "I dreamed nothing like that, just now."
"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 compassion for him, she stooped and kissed him.
"God bless you!" he sighed, and passed 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:
