Judge Custis, whom we left riding out of Princess Anne on Sunday afternoon, kept straight north, crossed the bottom of Delaware in the early evening, and went to bed at Laurel, on Broad Creek, a few miles south of Cannon's Ferry.
At daylight he was ahorse again, scarcely stiff from his exertion, and feeling the rising joys of a stomach and brain becoming clearer than for years, of all the forms of alcohol. His mind had been bathed in sleep and temperance, the two great physicians, and wiped dry, like the feet of the Prince of sufferers, with women's hairs. Exercise, natural to a Virginian, awakened his flowing spirits again, and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp--the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia--receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation before, or about ten years after the independence of the country.
It was a level place of shingle-boarded houses, assembled around a sandy square, in which were both elm and Italian poplar trees; and a double-storied wooden court-house was on the farther side, surrounded by little cabins for the county officers, pitched here and there, and in the rear was a jail of two stories, with family apartments below, and the dungeon window, the debtors' room, and a family bedroom above; and near the jail and court-house stood the whipping-post, like a dismantled pump, with a pillory floor some feet above the ground.
Young maples, mulberry and tulip trees, and ailanthuses grew bravely to make shade along the two streets which pierced the square, and the four streets which were parallel to its sides--pretty lanes being inserted between, to which the loamy gardens ran; and, as the Judge stopped at the tavern near the court, he was told it was "returning day," and the place would soon be filled with constituents assembling to hear how "she'd gone"--she, as the Judge knew well, meaning Sussex County, and "gone" intimating her decision expressed at the polls.
"She's gone for Adams an' Clayton, ain't she, Jonathan Torbert?" asked the innkeeper.
"Yes," spoke a plain, religious-looking man, the teller of the bank; "Johnny Clayton's kept Sussex and Kent in line for Adams; Jeems Bayard and the McLanes have captured Newcastle: Clayton goes to the senate, Louis McLane to the cabinet, the country to the alligators."
"Hurrah for Jackson!" answered the host; "he suits me ever since he whipped the British."
At breakfast Judge Custis recognized a gentleman opposite, wearing smallclothes, and with his hair in a queue, who spoke without other than a passively kind expression:
"Judge."
"Ah! Chancellor!"
The Chancellor was nearly seventy years old, wearing an humble, meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were those of stewardship, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall need nothing but a shroud."
Judge Custis looked at the meek old gentleman closely, sitting at his plate like a lay brother in some monastery or infirmary, indifferent to talk or news or affairs; and the remembrance of what he had been--keen, accumulative, with youthful passions long retained, and the man buoyant under the judge's guard--impressed the Virginian to say to himself:
"What, then, is man! At last old age asserts itself, and bends the brazen temple of his countenance, like Samson, in almost pious remorse. There sits twenty-five years of equity administration; behind it, thirty years of jocund and various life. No newspaper shall ever record it, because none are printed here; he is indifferent to that forgetfulness and to all others, because the springs of life are dry in his body, and he no more enjoys."
"Are you travelling north, Judge Custis?" the old man asked, for politeness' sake.
"Yes, to Dover."
"There is a seat in my carriage; you are welcome to it."
"I will take it a part of the way, at least, to feel the privilege of your society, Chancellor."
The old man gave a slow, sidewise shake of his head.
"Too late, too late," he said, "to flatter me. I was fond of it once. I have been a flatterer, too."
The Chancellor's black boy was put on the Judge's horse, and the two men, in a plain, country-made, light, square vehicle, turned the court-house corner for the north. As they passed the door they heard the sheriff knock off two slaves to a purchaser, crying:
"Your property, sir, till they are twenty-five years of age."
"Ha, ha!" laughed, in a great horse laugh, a nearly chinless villager; "say till ole Patty Cannon can git 'em!"
The purchaser gave a cunning, self-convicted smile at the passing chancellor, whose look of resignation only deepened and grew more humble. The Judge had some vague recollection which moved him to change the subject.
"We see each other but little, Chancellor, though we divide the same little heritage of land. I suppose your people are all proud of Delaware."
"Yes," said the old man; "being such a little adventurer, a mere foundling in the band of states, our people have the pride of their independence. The laws are administered, some more farms are opened in the forest every year, blossoms come, and old men die and are buried on their farms, and their bones respected a few years. Our history is so pastoral that we must show some temper when it is assailed, or we might let out our ignorance of it."
They rode in silence some hours through an older settled and more open country, with some large mill-ponds and a better class of farm improvements, and the sense of some large water near at hand was mystically felt.
The Judge followed the old man's eyes at one place, seeing that they were raised with an expression of tranquil satisfaction, like aged piety, and a beautiful landscape of soft green marsh lay under their gaze from a slight elevation they had reached, showing cattle and sheep roving in it, tall groves where cows and horses found midday shade, and winding creeks, carrying sails of hidden boats, as if in a magical cruise upon the velvet verdure. Haystacks and farm settlements stood out in the long levels, and sailing birds speckled the air. In the far distance lay something like more marsh, yet also like the clouds.
"It is the Delaware Bay," the Chancellor said.
They soon entered a well-built little town on a navigable creek, with a large mill-pond, sawmills, several vessels building on the stocks, and an air of superior vitality to anything Judge Custis had seen in Delaware. Here the Chancellor pointed out the late home of Senator Clayton's father, and, after the horses had been fed, they continued still northward, passing another small town on a creek near the marshes, and, a little beyond it, came to a venerable brick church, a little from the road, in a grove of oaks and forest trees.
"Here is Barrett's chapel," said the Chancellor; "celebrated for the plotting of the campaign between Wesley's native and English preachers for the conquest of America as soon as the crown had lost it."
They looked up over the broad-gabled, Quakerly edifice, with its broad, low door, high roof, double stories of windows, and a higher window in the gable, trim rows of arch-bricks over door and windows, and belt masonry; and heard the tall trees hush it to sleep like a baby left to them. Nearly fifty feet square, and probably fifty years old, it looked to be good for another hundred years.
"My family in Accomac was harsh with the Methodists through a mistaken conservatism," Judge Custis said. "They are a good people; they seem to suit this peninsula like the peachtree."
A small funeral procession was turning into Barrett's chapel, and the Chancellor interrogated one of the more indifferent followers as to the dead person. Having mentioned the name, the citizen said:
"His death was mysterious. He was a Methodist and a good man, but it seems that avarice was gnawing his principles away. A slave boy, soon to become free by law, disappeared from his possession, and he gave it out that the boy had run away. But suddenly our neighbor began to drink and to display money, and they say he had the boy kidnapped. He died like one with an attack of despair."
As they turned again northward, in the genial afternoon, Judge Custis said:
"What a stigma on both sides, Chancellor, is this kidnapping!"
The old man meekly looked down and did not reply. Judge Custis, feeling that there was some sensitiveness on this and kindred subjects, yet why he could not recollect, continued, under the impulse of his feelings:
"The night before I left Princess Anne, Joe Johnson, one of your worst kidnappers, boldly came to my house for lodging. Why I let him stay there is a subject of wonder and contempt to myself. But there he was, perhaps when I came away."
"Not a prudent thing to permit," the old man groaned.
"I knew his wife was the widow of a gallows' bird, one Brereton--the name is Yankee. He was hanged for highway robbery."
A muffled sound escaped the sober old gentleman of Delaware.
"You should remember the murder, Chancellor. It happened in this state. This Brereton killed a slave-buyer for what he brought here upon his person to buy the kidnapped free people and apprentice-slaves. Brereton was the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, that infamous pander between Delaware and the South."
The old Chancellor looked up.
"I wish to anticipate you," he said, "in what you might further say with truth, but perhaps do not fully know. The murderer, Brereton, was the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, it is true; but he was also the brother-in-law of myself."
"Impossible!" Judge Custis said.
"Yes, sir; I married his sister."
The old Chancellor again turned his eyes to the ground.
"Great heavens!" exclaimed the Judge; "how many curious things can be in such a little state!"
It was in the middle of the afternoon that Judge Daniel Custis rode into a small town on an undulating plain, around two sides of which, at hardly half a mile distance, ran a creek through a pretty wooded valley, and a third side was bounded by a branch of the same creek, all winding through copse, splutter-dock, lotus-flower, and marsh to the Delaware Bay.
At the centre of the town, on the swell or crest of alluvial soil, of a light sandy loam foundation, an oblong public square, divided by a north and south street, contained the principal dwellings of the place, one of which was the Delaware State Capitol, a red-brick building, a little older than the American Constitution, with a bell-crowned cupola above its centre, and thence could be seen the Delaware Bay.
Near the state-house stood the whipping-post in the corner, humble as a hitching-post, and the brick jail hid out of the way there also, like an unpresentable servant ever cringing near his master's company. Various buildings, generally antique, surrounded this prim, Quakerly square, some brick, and with low portals, others smart, and remodelled to suit the times; some were mere wooden offices or huts, with long dormers falling from the roof-ridge nearly to the eaves, like a dingy feather from a hat-crown, with a jewel in the end; and one was an old steep-roofed hotel, painted yellow, with a long, lounging side.
At diagonal corners of this square, as far apart as its space would permit, two venerable doctors' homes still stood, which had given more repute to Delaware's little capital than its jurists or statesmen,--the former residence of Sykes the surgeon and Miller the pathologist and writer.
It was at the former of these houses, a many-windowed, tall, side-fronting house of plastered brick, with side office and centre door, that Judge Custis stopped and hitched his horse to a rack near the state-house adjoining. The sound of twittering birds fell from the large elms, willows, and maples on the square, and Custis could see the robins running in the grass.
From the door of the two-storied side office the sound of a violin came tenderly, and the Judge waited until the tune was done, when loud exclamations of pleasure, the clapping of hands, and the stamping of feet, showed that the fiddler was not alone.
Presenting himself at the door, Judge Custis was immediately confronted by a large, tall man, fully six feet high, with a strong countenance and sandy hair, who carried the fiddle and bow in his hand, and with the other hand seized Judge Custis almost affectionately, and drew him in, crying:
"Why, how is my old friend? Goy! how does he do? Who could have expected you on this simple occasion? Sit down there and take my own chair! Not that little one--no, the big easy-chair for my old friend! Goy!"
As Judge Custis cast his eye around, to note the company, the demonstrative host, with a flash of his gray-blue eyes, whispered,
"Who is he? who is he?"
"A Custis," whispered a person hardly the better off for his drams; "I reckon he is, by the lips and skin."
"Goy!" rapidly spoke the fiddler. "Friend Custis--I know my heart does not deceive me!--let me introduce you to the very essence of grand old little Delaware: here is Bob Frame, the ardent spirit of our bar; this is James Bayard, our misguided Democratic favorite; here is Charley Marim and Secretary Harrington, and my esteemed friend Senator Ridgely, and my cousin, Chief-justice Clayton. We are all here, and all honored by such a rare guest. Goy!"
As the Judge went through the hand-shaking process, the tall, well-fed host stooped to the convivial person again, and, with his hand to the side of his mouth, and an air of solemn cunning, whispered:
"Where from?"
"Accomac, or Somerset, I reckon," muttered the other.
"Now," exclaimed the host, taking both of Judge Custis's hands, "how do our dear friends all get along in Somerset and Accomac? Where do you call home now, Friend Custis? How are our old friends Spence and Upshur, and Polk and Franklin and Harry Wise? Goy! how I love our neighbors below."
There was a strength of articulation and physical emphasis in the speaker that the Judge noted at once, and it was attended with a beaming of the eyes and a fine fortitude of the large jaws that made him nearly magnetic.
"And this is John M. Clayton?" said the Judge. "We are not so far off that we have not fully heard of you. And now, since I belong to a numerous family, let me identify myself, Clayton, as Daniel Custis, late Judge on the Eastern Shore."
"Judge Custis! Daniel Custis! Friends," looking around, "what an honor! Think of it! The eminent American manufacturer! The creator of our industries! The friend of Mr. Clay and the home policy! Bayard, you need not shake your head! Ridgely, pardon my patriotic enthusiasm! Look at a man, my friends, at last! Goy!"
As the Judge listened to various affirmations of welcome, Mr. Clayton, with one eye winked and the other resting on Lawyer Frame, the ardent spirit of the bar, made the motion with his lips:
"Cambridge?"
"No; Princess Anne."
"And dear old Princess Anne, how does she fare?"--he had again turned to the Judge--"how is the little river Wicomico--no, I mean Manokin--how does it flow? Does it flow benevolently? Does it abound in the best oysters I ever tasted? in tarrapin, too? How is she now? Goy!"
"Are you on your way north, Brother Custis, or going home?" the keen, black-eyed Chief-justice asked.
"No, my journey is ended. I came to Dover to be acquainted with Mr. Clayton."
"Aunt Braner. Hyo! Come yer, Aunt Braner!" the host cried loudly, and an old colored woman came in, closely followed by some of her grandchildren, who stood, gazing, at the door. "Take this gentleman and give him the best room in my house. The best ain't good enough for him! Take him right up and give him water and make your son bresh him, and we'll send him the best julep in Kent County. Goy!"
"De bes' room was Miss Sally's, Mr. Clayton," the old woman answered.
A sudden change came over the highly prompt and sanguine face of the host; he hesitated, wandered in the eyes, and caught himself on the words:
"No, give him the Speaker Chew room: that'll suit him best."
As the Judge followed the servant out, the young Senator emptied his mouth of a large piece of tobacco into a monster spittoon that a blind man could hardly miss, and, with a face still long and silent, and much at variance with his previous spontaneity, he absently inquired:
"What can he want? what can he want?"
One of the small negro children had meantime toddled in at the door, and, with large, liquid eyes in its solemn, desirous face, laid hands on the fiddle and looked up at Mr. Clayton.
"Bless the little child!" he suddenly said. "Wants a tune? Well!"
Placing himself in a large chair, the young Senator tilted it back till his hard, squarish head rested against the mantel, and he felt along the strings almost purposelessly, till the plaintive air came forth:
"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon!
How can ye bloom so fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I so full of care?
Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings beside thy mate;
For so I sat, and so I sang,
And wist not of my fate."
He closed his eyes on the strains, and a thickening at his throat, and movement of his broad, athletic chest, as he continued the air, showed that he was inwardly laboring with some strong emotion.
His cousin, the Chief-justice, made a signal with his hat, and one by one the sitters stole out into the square noiselessly, and went their ways, leaving the young man playing on, with the negro child at his knee, leaning there as if to spy out the living voice in his violin.
Other children came to the door--white children from the square, black children from the garden--and some ventured a little way in to hear the tender wooing of the sympathetic strings. He moved his bow mechanically, but the music sprang forth as if it knew its sister, Grief, was waiting on the chords. At last a bolder child than the rest came and pushed his elbow and said,
"Papa!"
"My boy, my dear boy!" the fiddler cried, as tears streamed down his cheeks, and he lifted the lad to his heart and kissed him.
Judge Custis, though no word passed upon the subject, saw the solitary canker at the Senator's heart--his wife's dead form in the old Presbyterian kirk-yard.
It was soon apparent to Judge Custis, from this and other silent things, that a light-hearted, affectionate, strong, yet womanly, engine of energy constituted the young Delaware lawyer-politician. Keen, cunning, impulsive, hopeful, his feet provincial, his head among the birds, he combined facility and earnestness in almost mercurial relations to each other, and the Judge saw that these must constitute a remarkable jury lawyer.
His face was shaven smooth; his throat and chin showed an early tendency to flesh; the poise of his head and thoughtful darting of his eyes and slight aqualinity of his nose indicated one who loved mental action and competition, yet drew that love from a great, healthy body that had to be watched lest it relapse into indolence. The loss of his wife so soon after marriage had been followed by nearly complete indifference to women, and he had made politics his only consolation and mistress, harnessing her like a young mare with his old roadster of the law, and driving them together in the slender confines of his principality, and then locking the law up among his office students to drive politics into the national arena at Washington.
"You require to be very neighborly, Clayton, in a small bailiwick like this?" the Judge inquired, as they strolled along the square in the soft evening.
"We have the best people in the world in Delaware, friend Custis: few traders, little law, scarcely any violence, and they are easy to please; but it is a high offence in this state not to be what is called 'a clever man.' You must stop, whatever be your errand, and smile and inquire of every man at his gate for every individual member of his household. The time lost in such kind, trifling intercourse is in the aggregate immense. But, Goy! I do love these people."
"It seems to me that you encourage that exaction."
"Well, I do. As an electioneerer, I can get away with any of 'em. Goy! Why, Jim Whitecar, Lord bless your dear soul!"--this addressed to a thick-set, sandy, uncertain-looking man who was about retreating into the Capitol Tavern--"what brings you to town, Jim?"
"It's a free country, I reckon," exclaimed the suspicious-looking man.
"Goy! that's so, Jimmy. We're all glad to see you in Dover behaving of yourself, Jim. Now don't give me any trouble this year, friend Jimmy. Behave yourself, and be an honor to your good parents that I think so much of. Oblige me, now!"
As they turned to cross the middle of the square, Clayton said:
"I'll have him at that whipping-post, hugging of it, one of these days."
"What is he?"
"A kidnapper down here in Sockum, and a bad one: a dangerous fellow, too. I hear he says if I ever push him to the extremity of his co-laborer, Joe Johnson--whom I sent to the post and then saved from cropping--that he'll kill me. Goy!"--Mr. Clayton looked around a trifle apprehensively--"I'm ready for him."
"Delaware kidnapping is a great institution," Custis said.
"It has an antiquity and extent you would hardly believe, friend Custis. Long before our independence, in the year 1760, the statutes of Delaware had to provide against it. Our laws have never permitted the domestic slave-trade with other states."
The little place seemed to have a good society, and the beauty of the young girls sitting at the doors or walking in the evening showed something of the florid North Europe skins, Batavian eyes, and rotund Dutch or Quaker figures.
As they returned to the public square, a room in the tavern, almost brilliantly lighted for that day of candles, displayed its windows to the gaze of Clayton, who exclaimed:
"Goy! that is surely John Randel, Junior."
"That distinguished engineer?" observed his visitor, who had been waiting all the evening to broach the subject of his errand. "I have the greatest admiration of him. Shall we call on him?"
"Why, yes, yes," answered Clayton, dubiously; "I'm not afraid of him. I--goy! I owe him nothing. He is such a litigious fellow, though; so persistent with it; barratry, champetry, mad incorrigibility: he's the wildest man of genius alive. But come on!"
Knocking at a door on the second floor, a sharp, prompt reply came out:
"Come!"
A middle-sized man, with a large head and broad shoulders, and cloth leggings, buttoned to above his knee, sat in a nearly naked, carpetless room, writing, his table surrounded by burning wax candles, and his countenance was proud and intense. Mr. Clayton rushed upon him and seized his hand:
"How is my friend Randel? The indefatigable litigant, the brilliant engineer, to whom ideas, goy! are like persimmons on the tree, abundant, but seldom ripe, and only good when frosted. How is he now and what is he at?"
"Stand there," spoke the engineer, "and look at me while I read the sentence I was finishing upon John Middleton Clayton of Delaware."
"Go it, Randel! Now, Custis, he'll put a wick in me and just set me afire. Goy!"
"'It is the curse of lawyers,'" the unrelaxing stranger read, "'to let their judgment for hire, from early manhood, to easy clients, or to suppress it in the cringing necessities of popular politics: hence that residue and fruit of all talents, the honest conviction of a man's bravest sagacity, perishes in lawyers' souls ere half their powers are fledged: they become the registers of other men, they think no more than wax.'"
Here Mr. Randel blew out one of the candles. The illustration was cogent. Mr. Clayton lighted it again with another candle.
"There's method in his madness, Custis," he said, with a wink. "Let me introduce my great friend to you, Randel?"
"Stop there," the engineer repeated, sternly, "till I have read my sentence. 'Seldom it is that a lawyer of useful parts, in a community as detached and pastoral as the State of Delaware, has a cause appealing to his manliness, his genius, and his avarice, like this of John Randel, Junior, civil engineer! No equal public work will probably be built in the State of Delaware during the lifetime of the said Clayton. No fee he can earn in his native state will ever have been the reward of a lawyer there like his who shall be successful with the suit of John Randel, Junior, against the Canal Company. No principle is better worth a great lawyer's vindication than that these corporations, in their infancy, shall not trample upon the private rights of a gentleman, and treat his scholarship and services like the labor of a slave.'"
"Well said and highly thought," interposed Judge Custis.
"'The said Clayton,'" continued John Randel, still reading, "'refuses the aid of his abilities to a stranger and a gentleman inhospitably treated in the State of Delaware.'"
"No, no," cried Clayton; "that is a charge against me I will not permit."
"'The said Clayton,'" read Randel, inflexibly, "'with the possibilities of light, riches, and honor for himself, and justice for a fellow-man, chooses cowardice, mediocrity--and darkness. He extinguishes my hopes and his.'"
With this, Mr. Randel, by a singular fanning of his hands and waft of his breath, put out all the candles at once and left the whole room in darkness.
Judge Custis was the first to speak after this extraordinary illustration:
"Clayton, I believe he has a good case."
"That is not the point now," Mr. Clayton said, with rising spirit and emphasis. "The point now is, 'Am I guilty of inhospitality?' Goy! that touches me as a Delawarean, and is a high offence in this little state. It is true that this suitor is a stranger. He comes to me with an introduction from my brilliant young friend, Mr. Seward, of New York, who vouches for him. But the corporation he menaces is also entitled to hospitality: it is, in the main, Philadelphia capital. Girard himself, that frugal yet useful citizen, is one of its promoters. My own state, and Maryland, too, have interests in this work. Is it the part of hospitality to be taking advantage of our small interposing geography, and laying by the heels, through our local courts, a young, struggling, and, indeed, national undertaking?"
"Let the courts of your state, which are pure, decide between us," said John Randel, Junior, relighting the candles with his tinder-box.
"No lawyer ought to refuse the trial of such a public cause because of any state scruples," Judge Custis put in, in his grandest way. "That is not national; it is not Whig, Brother Clayton." The Judge here gave his entire family power to his facial energy, and expressed the Virginian and patrician in his treatment of the Delaware bourgeois and plebeian. "Granted that this corporation is young and untried: let it be disciplined in time, that it may avoid more expensive mistakes in the future. No cause, to a true lawyer, is like a human cause; the time may come when the talent of the American bar will be the parasite of corporations and monopolists, but it is too early for that degradation for you and me, Senator Clayton. The rights of a man involve all progress; progress, indeed, is for man, not man for progress. As a son of Maryland, if he came helpless and penniless to me, I would not let this gentleman be sacrificed."
"If I were a rich man, Clayton would take my case," the engineer said; "my poverty is my disqualification in his eyes."
He again essayed, in a dramatic way, to fan out the candles, but his breath failed him; his hands became limp, and then hastily covered his eyes, and he sank to the table with a groan, and put his head upon it convulsively.
"Gentlemen," he uttered, in a voice touching by its distress, "oh! gentlemen, professional life--my art--is, indeed, a tragedy."
The easy sensibilities of Judge Custis were at once moved. Senator Clayton, looking from one to the other in nervous indecision, seeing Custis's dewy eyes, and Randel's proud breaking down, was himself carried away, and shouted:
"I goy! This is a conspiracy. But, Randel, I'll take your case; I can't see a man cry. Goy!"
As they all arose sympathetically and shook hands, a knock came on the door, and there was a call for Mr. Clayton. He returned in a few minutes, with a rather grim countenance, and said:
"Randel, I have just declined a big round retaining-fee to defend the very suit your tears and Brother Custis's have persuaded me to prosecute. But, goy! a tear always robbed me of a dollar."
"This sympathy to-day will make you an independent man for life," exclaimed the engineer.
"I have done Milburn's first errand right," Judge Custis thought; "five minutes' delay would have been fatal."
