Princess Anne had missed for several days some conspicuous citizens, such as Daniel Custis and wife, Captain Phoebus, Levin Dennis, and the free negro Samson--large components of a small town; but it had also gained what everybody admitted to be the most beautiful woman in the place except Mrs. Vesta Milburn--the brown-eyed, tall, roguish niece of Meshach Milburn, whom Vesta had made a lady of in externals, corrected some of her faults, such as the sniffle, and was daily teaching her the mysteries of grammar and address, aided by the rector of the parish, whose heart was roused to partial animation again by the young visitor.
Loyally William Tilghman had pressed his friendship on Vesta's semi-social husband, determined to like him, and finding small resistance there, and, happily, no suspicion; and this was so grateful to Vesta that she indulged the hope that her cousin and late lover would find compensation for her loss in Rhoda Holland.
Love came easily on as a topic of talk where Rhoda, with her unconventional preference for that subject, introduced it.
"Mr. William"--she had got that far towards the inevitable "William"--said Rhoda, one evening at Teackle Hall, as they sat in the library, "do preachers love jus' like other folks? Misc Somers say they is drea'fle sly-boots. She say thar was a preacher down yer to Girdle Tree Hill that preached the Meal-an-the-Yum was a-goin' to happen right off."
"Millennium," suggested Tilghman.
"Maybe so. Misc Somers call it 'the Meal-an-the-Yum,' I thought. Anyway, they was all goin' to rise, right off, an' he with 'em. Lord sakes! they had frills put on thar night-gowns to rise in. An' the night before they was a-goin' up, that ar scamp run away with a widder an' her darter, jilted the widder an' married the darter; an' they couldn't rise at Girdle Tree Hill caze the preacher wa'n't thar, an' they didn't know when."
"And I suppose Mrs. Somers tells it on him?" William Tilghman added.
"That she do. Now, was you ever in love, Mr. William?"
"I have been thinking, Rhoda, that when you are a good scholar, and grandmother and you grow to like each other, as I believe you will, I might fall in love with you."
"Lord sakes! Me loved by a preacher? Couldn't I never stay home from the preachin'? But then, to hear your own ole man a-barkin' away at the other gals, I think it would be right good!"
The subject had now gone to that length that in a few days, to Grandmother Tilghman's slight indignation, Rhoda called the rector "William," and he answered her, "Dear Rhoda."
The triple widow, however, had one lane to her consideration, up which the artful Rhoda strayed as soon as she saw the gate ajar.
"Misc Tilghman," she said one day, "I been a-lookin' at you. I 'spect you was a real beauty. If you wasn't a little quar, nobody would see you was a ole woman now."
"I was a belle," spoke the blind old lady, emphatically. "General John Eager Howard said he would rather talk with me than hear an oration from Fisher Ames. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, proposed to me when I was old enough to be your grandmother, and after Susan Decatur, the commodore's widow, had tried in vain to get an offer from him. Said I, 'Carroll, is this another Declaration of Independence? No,' said I, 'Carroll, I won't reduce the last signer, it may be, to obedience on a wife going blind. That would be worse slavery than George the Third's!' He said I was a Spartan widow."
"Every widow I ever see was a sparkin' widow," Rhoda naively concluded, at which Mrs. Tilghman had to join in the laughter, and there was no evil feeling.
Jack Wonnell now held the temporary post of cook and woodchopper at Teackle Hall, and Roxy saw him every day, sewed his tattered clothing up, put the germs of self-respect in him, and caused Vesta to say to her husband, as they were sitting in his storehouse parlor one afternoon, in the intermission of his chill and sweat:
"Such rapid changes have taken place here, Mr. Milburn, that they have disturbed my judgment, and now I hardly know whether my oldest prejudice is assured, as I see that white man the happy domestic servant of my pure slave girl. She seems to have no greater affection than pity and interest for him, while he is made more of a man by his undisguised devotion to her. No man could work better than he does now."
"Love is so great, so occult," the husband said, his brown eyes searching his wife's face over, "that its combinations have centuries left to run before they shall beat every prejudice down, and prove, in spite of sin and dispersion, that of one blood are all the nations made."
