Meanwhile the steamer was taking Vesta and her husband across the Chesapeake Bay in the night--that greatest, gentlest indentation in the coast of the United States; at once river and sound, fiord and sea, smooth as the mill-pond, and full of life as the nutritious milk of the mother, and on whose breast a brood of rivers lay and suckled without rivalry--the long Susquehanna, James, and Potomac; the short, thick Choptank, Chester, and Patapsco; and, to the flying wild-swan, its arborage looked like a vast pine-tree, with boughs of snow, climbing two hundred miles from its roots in the land of corn and cotton into the golden cloud of Northern grain and hay.
Upon one broken horn of this fruitful bay hung Baltimore, like an eagle's nest upon the pine, seizing the point of indentation that brought it nearest to the fertile upland and the valley outlets of the North and West, where the toil-loving Germans burnished their farms with women's hands, and sent their long bowed teams to market on as many turnpikes as the Chesapeake had rivers.
At morning Vesta looked upon the fleet of little sail lying in the basin of the city, among larger ships and arks and barges, and saw Federal Hill's red clay rising a hundred feet above the piers, and the spotless monument to Washington resting its base as high above the tide, on a nearly naked bluff. The rich sunrise fell on the streaked flag of the republic at the mast on Fort McHenry, and the garrison band was playing the very anthem that lawyer Key had written in the elation of victory, though a prisoner in the enemy's hands. Alas! how many a prisoner in the enemy's hands was doing tribute to that flag from cotton-field and rice-swamp, tobacco land and corn-row, pouring the poetry of his loyalty and toil to the very emblem of his degradation!
Vesta heard, with both satisfaction and sorrow, at Barnum's Hotel that her husband was too ill to attend the funeral, and must keep his room and fire; she needed his comfort and devotion in her sorrow, but upon her dead mother's bier seemed to stand the injunction against that fateful hat he had brought with him; and yet she pitied him that he must stay alone, unknown, unrelated, chattering with the chill or burning without complaint.
"God send you sympathy from the angels like you, my darling!" Milburn said. "I know what it is to lose a mother."
Escorts in plenty waited on Vesta, but she wished she could find some kinsman of her husband, if ever so poor, to take his arm to the church and burial-ground; and at the news that her uncle Allan McLane had not arrived, and would not, probably, now be present, she felt another blending of relief and apprehension, because her husband might not to-day be exasperated by him, yet his relations to her mother's property would still remain unknown,--and Vesta feared for Virgie.
In the same impulse which had made her retain Teackle Hall, to secure it against her father's careless business methods, she had made Virgie over to her mother, to place her, apparently, farther from danger, never supposing that in those prudent hands the enemy might insinuate; but Death, the deathless enemy, was filching everywhere, and though she could not see why Virgie could be persecuted, Vesta now wished she had set her free.
The girl belonged to her mother's estate: suppose Allan McLane was the administrator of it? Suppose, indeed, he was the heir? Vesta's heart fell, as she considered that a woman had best let business alone.
The young bride-mourner was an object of mingled admiration and sympathy as she leaned on the arm of a kinsman and entered the Presbyterian kirk. She was considered one of the great beauties of Maryland, and the young Robert Breckenridge, fresh from Kentucky, on a visit to his brother, the pastor, thought he had never seen Vesta's equal even in Kentucky; and, as he gazed through her mourning veil, the pastor's Delaware wife heard him whisper, "Divinity itself!"
The clear olive skin, eyes of gray twilight, eyebrows like midnight's own arches, and luxuriant hair, were touched by grief as if a goddess suffered; and, in her deep mourning robes, Vesta seemed a monarch's daughter about to pass through some convent to her sainthood.
She had the height to give dignity to this beauty, and the grace to lift pathos above weakness.
The minister's musical tones were wrought to consonance with this noble human model, and he spoke of that ideal motherhood which, to every child at the bier, seems real as the dripping bucket at the fairy's well--of mother's love, trials, weakness, and immortality; of the absence of her sympathy making the first great bereavement in life's progress; of her nature abiding in us and her spirit hovering over, while we live.
Painted in the soft hues of personal experience, prescribed to her needs with a physician's art, doing all that funeral talk can do to raise the final tears from among the heartstrings and pour them in oblation upon the corpse, the pastor's consolation had the effect of some mesmeric hand that weakens our systems while it sublimates our feelings, and Vesta's female nature was almost broken down.
Where could she lean for the close sympathy befitting such grief? Her father was not here, and she had none but her husband--the husband of less than a week, but still the nearest to her need.
On him she allowed herself to rest that solemn evening after her mother's body had sought the ground. He was well again, for the time.
For the first time she was alone with him, and, as the shadows narrowed their chamber, and they sat with no other light than a little wood smouldering in the grate, he came to her and began to talk of childhood and his own mother, of the little sorrows his mother had shared with him, of domestic disagreements and happy love-making anew; how men feel when the partner of life is taken away, and children know not the meaning of Death, that has done so awful a thing upon the inoffensive one; but above all is shining, Meshach said, the star of motherhood, faintly lighting our way, mellowing our souls, and basking on the waters.
As he continued, and she could not see him, but only hear the plaintiveness of his voice, it became comfortable to hear him speak, and she grew more passive, a sense of resignation fell upon her heart, and of gratitude to him that could divine her loss so touchingly; and, like a child, she rested upon his side, upon his knee, and in his arms at last. Not fond nor yet infatuated, but subsiding and consenting, accepting her destiny like a myriad of women that are neither oppressed nor tender, but with reluctance, yield, she passed out of grief to wifedom, like one tired and in a dream.
Visits of consolation were made by a few old friends for a day or two succeeding. The Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, late president of the college at Annapolis, came, bringing his handsome boy of twelve, Master Harry Winter Davis. The attorney-general of Maryland, Mr. Roger Taney, came with Mr. George Brown, the banker. Commodore Decatur's widow sent a mourning token, and the Honorable William Wirt brought Mr. Robert Smith, once the secretary of state at Washington.
These and others, looking at Meshach Milburn a little oddly, found him, on acquaintance, a man of sense; but the McLanes who called were either supercilious or studiously avoided the groom.
An invitation came from Arlington House to Vesta, to bring Mr. Milburn there; and, as they proceeded out the Washington road in a private carriage, they observed Mr. Ross Winans's friction-wheel car, with nearly forty people in it, making its trial trip behind a horse at a gallop. At the Relay House, where the horses on the railroad were changed, Milburn remarked, gazing up the Patapsco valley:
"My wife, we are here at the birth of this little iron highway. If our vision was great enough, we might see the mighty things that may happen upon it: servile insurrection, sectional war, great armies riding to great battles, thousands of emigrants drawn to the West. We shall die, but generations after us this road will grow and continue, like a vein of iron, whose length and uses no man can measure."
The road to Washington was in places good, and often turned in among the pines. At Riverdale they saw the deer of Mr. George Calvert, a descendant of one of the Lords Baltimore, browsing in his park, and his great four-in-hand carriage was going in the lodge-gates from a state visit to the Custises. Passing direct to Georgetown from Bladensburg, they encountered General Jackson, taking his evening ride on horseback, and saw the chasm of the new canal being dug along the Potomac, and then, crossing Mason's ferry, they were set down at Arlington House an hour after dark.
The hospitable, harmless proprietor welcomed them into the huge edifice, half temple, half barn, among his elaborate daubs of pictures, and furniture and relics of Custis and Washingtonian times. He was nearly fifty years of age, of Indian features, but rather weak face, like one whose only substantiality was in his ancestors, and Vesta, placing him beside her husband, reflected that a similar inbreeding had produced a similarity in the two men, both of a sallow and bilious attenuation; but Milburn, beside her kinsman Custis, was like a bold wolf beside a vacant-visaged sheep.
Yet these men liked each other immediately, Milburn's intelligence and money, and real reverence for the great man who had adopted Mr. Custis, giving him admittance to the latter's fancy.
They strolled through those beautiful woods, one day to become a grove of sepulture for an army of dead, while Vesta, in the dwelling, talked with her cousins, and with the graceful Lieutenant Lee, who was courting Mary Custis.
It was a happy domestic life, and in the host's veins ran the blood of the Calverts, though not of the legitimate line.
It was suggested to go to the Capitol, and Mr. Milburn, growing daily better in the hill region, went also, and wore his steeple hat, greatly to the edification of Mr. Custis, who revelled in such antiquities. Vesta heard the ladies whispering, when they returned, that a parcel of boys and negroes had followed the hat, laughing and jeering, and had finally driven the party to their carriage. This, and her husband's impatience to return to his business, hastened their departure from Arlington.
They took the steamer down the Potomac, and, as they came off the mouth of St. Mary's River, Milburn donned his Raleigh's hat again, and stood on deck, looking at the lights about the old Priest's House, where the capital of Lord Baltimore lay, a naked plain and a few starveling mementoes, within the bight of a sandy point that faced the archipelago of the Eastern Shore.
"My hat," said Milburn to himself, "is old as yonder town, and better preserved. The Calverts and Milburns have married into Mrs. Washington's kin. Does my wife love me?"
