Vesta found her circle reunited, though with many absentees, at Princess Anne.
Aunt Hominy took her place in the kitchen, and cooked with all her former art, but her voice and understanding were gone, and she never would go past the Entailed Hat, and still regarded it, as nearly as could be made out, as the cause of all her errors and dangers, though she seemed to admit its unevadable dominion.
The poor woman, Mary, finding Samson Hat, in time, wishing to have a partner in the old storehouse, where he had become the only resident, had faith enough left to make her third marriage with him; and his means not only made good the property she had lost, but the hale old man presented her with a babe boy, which took the name of Meshach Phoebus, and on which Judge Custis sagely remarked that it "ought to have been a red-headed nigger, having both the fiery furnace and the blazing sun in its name."
On Samson Hat's death, which resulted from rheumatism reaching his heart, his widow joined her deliverer from slavery, James Phoebus, in the West, where he lived happily with his bride and stepson, and often wrote home of a friend he had there named Abe Lincoln, who made flat-boat voyages with him down the Mississippi. Both Ellenora Phoebus and Hulda Dennis reared Western families which played effective parts in the drama of civilization.
Vesta lost no time in setting free every slave about Teackle Hall and on the farms, with the approval of her father and husband also, and Roxy became the wife of Whatcoat, the rescued freedman, and the replacer, at her mistress's side, of poor Virgie, whose body was brought home and interred by the church where she had been her white sister's bridesmaid. The grief of Vesta for Virgie was quiet, but long, and as that of an equal, not a mistress, though she may have never known how equal.
In the fatalities thronging about her marriage Vesta observed one signal blessing--the complete reform of her father's habits.
He drank nothing whatever, supplying with fruit the pleasures of wine, and with exercise and business, on her husband's behests, the vagrant tours he once made in the forest for politics and amours.
Aware of his sociable and voluptuous nature, Vesta desired to see him married again, to complete and secure his reformation; and, while she was yet puzzling her brain to think of a wife to suit him, he solved the problem himself by cleanly cutting out Rhoda Holland from under the attentions of William Tilghman.
Rhoda had rapidly learned, and had corrected her grammar without losing her humor and her taste for dress, and her free, warm spirits soon made her an elegant woman, in whom, fortunately or unfortunately, a very decided worldly ambition germinated,--at once the proof and the vindication of parvenues.
She may have patterned it upon her uncle, or it may have emanated from his ambitious family stock, which, in and around him, had wakened to the vigor of a previous century; but it was so different from Vesta's nature that, while it but made nobler her soul of tranquil piety and ease of ladyhood, Vesta was interested in Rhoda's self-will and business coquetry.
A higher vitality than Vesta's, Rhoda Holland soon showed, in the superficial senses, more acuteness of sight and insight, quicker intuitions, more self-love, though not selfishness, less scrupulousness, perhaps, in dealing with her lovers, and, with fidelity and virtue, a pushing spirit that Vesta only mildly reproved, since she made the allowance that it was in part inspired by herself.
"Take care, dear," Vesta said one day, "that you grow not away from your heart. With all improving, there is a growth that begets the heart disease. Do you love cousin William Tilghman? He is too true a man to be hurt in his feelings. Nothing in this world, Rhoda, is a substitute for principle in woman."
"I don't want to lose principle, auntie," Rhoda said; "but I am afraid I love life too much to be a pastor's wife. I never saw the world for so long that I'm wild in it. I want to go, to look, and to see, everywhere. I feel my heart is in my wings, and must I go sit on a nest? Miss Somers--"
"The question is, dear, do you love?"
"Auntie, I reckon I love William as much as he does me."
"But he is devoted, Rhoda."
"If I thought I had the whole, full heart of William, Aunt Vesta, and it would give him real pain to disappoint him, I would marry him. But I have watched him like a cat watches a mouse. He wants to marry me to make other people than himself happy; to reconcile you and uncle more; to take uncle more into your family by marrying his niece. William is trying to love Uncle Meshach like a good Christian, but, Aunt Vesta, he thinks more of your little toe than of my whole body."
The crimson color came to Vesta's cheeks so unwillingly, so mountingly, that she felt ashamed of it, and, in place of anger, that many wives so exposed would have shown, she shed some quiet tears.
"Rhoda, don't you know I am your uncle's wife."
Rhoda threw her arms around her.
"Forgive me, dear! When you tell me, Aunt Vesta, that William loves me dearly, I'll gladly marry him. I only want, auntie, not to make happiness impossible, when to wait would be better."
Vesta wondered what Rhoda meant, but, kissing her friend tenderly again, Rhoda whispered:
"Auntie, it's not selfishness that makes me behave so. Indeed, I love William; it's a sacrifice to let him go."
Vesta looked up and found Rhoda's eyes this time full of tears.
"Strange, tender girl!" cried Vesta. "What makes you cry?"
Yet, for some unspoken, perhaps unknown, reasons, they both shed together the tears of a deeper respect for each other.
Soon afterwards Judge Custis, being sent to Annapolis by Milburn, was requested to take Rhoda along, as a part of her education, and Vesta went, also, at her husband's desire.
She feared that her father, devoted as he had become to her husband's business interests, still disliked him and bore him resentment; and Vesta wished to see not only outward but inward reconcilement of those two men, from one of whom she drew her being, and towards the other began to feel sacred yet awful ties that took hold on life and death.
They were taken to the landing by Mr. Milburn and the young rector, and there, as the steamboat approached, Tilghman said:
"Rhoda, your uncle has consented. He wishes us to marry. I ask you, before all of them, to consider my proposal while you are gone, and come home with your reply."
The impetuous girl threw her arms around him and kissed him in silence, and, covering her face with her veil, awaited in uncontrollable tears the steamboat that was to carry her to the mightier world she had never seen, beyond the bay.
After she reached the steamer her stillness and grief continued, and going to bed that night she turned up her face, discolored by tears, for Vesta to kiss her, like a child, and faltered:
"Aunty, don't think I have no principle. Indeed, I have some."
Annapolis, half a century the senior of Baltimore, and the first town to take root in all the Chesapeake land, was now almost one hundred and fifty years old, and the stern monument of Cromwell's protectorate. Its handful of expelled Puritans from Virginia, compelled to organize their county under the name of the Romanist, Anne Arundel, unfurled the standard of the Commonwealth, reddened with a tyrant king's blood, against the invading army of Lord Baltimore, and, shouting "God is our strength: fall on, men!" annihilated feudal Maryland, never to revive; and, after King William's similar revolution in England, "Providence town" took his queen sister's name, Annapolis, like Princess Anne across the bay.
Annapolis became a place of fashion and of court, with horse-races, stage-playing, a press, a club, fox-hunting clergymen, a grand state-house, the town residences of planters, the belles of Maryland, and the seat of war against the French, the British crown, and the slaveholders' insurrection.
It was now in a state of comfortable decline, having yielded to Baltimore and to Washington its once superior influence and society; but a lobby, the first in magnitude ever seen in this province, had assembled in the name of canals and railroads to compete for the bonded aid of the Legislature, and Judge Custis was leading the forlorn hope of the Eastern Shore for some of the subsidy so liberally showered upon the cormorant, Baltimore.
Judge Custis was instructed to lobby at Annapolis for one million dollars, or only one-eighth part of the grants made by the state, and he was to draw on Meshach Milburn for funds, who, meantime, continued out of his private resources to grade and buy right of way for one hundred and thirty miles of railroad.
The adventure was gigantic for the private capital of that day, and the unpopularity of the adventurer at home was soon testified at the state capital.
Vesta, whose carriage had been brought over, looked with a gentle patriotism--being herself of divided Maryland and Virginia sympathies--upon the little peninsulated capital, with its old roomy houses of colonial brick, its circles and triangles in the public ways, and the unchanged names of such streets as King George, Prince George, and the Duke of Gloucester; but Rhoda was excited to the height of state pride in everything she saw, and, with strong faculty, seized on the historical and political relations of Annapolis, till Judge Custis said:
"Vesta, that girl is of the old rebel Milburn stock, I know. She takes it all in like a wild duck diving for the bay celery."
With two such beautiful women to speak for it, the Eastern Shore railroad seemed at first to have many friends, but it was not in the nature of the enterprising elements about Baltimore to yield a point, however complaisant they might appear.
Vesta did not go into general company, but her influence was mildly exercised in her rooms at the large old hotel, and in her carriage as she made excursions in pleasant weather to the South and West rivers, to "the Forest" of Prince George and to the thrifty Quakers of Montgomery. She wrote and received a daily letter, her husband being attentive and tender, despite his growing cares, as he had promised to be on that severe day he made his suit to her.
But the story of her sacrifice, shamefully exaggerated, with all that intensity of expression habitual in a pro-slavery society whenever money is the stake and denunciation the game, was used to injure her husband's interests.
Mr. Milburn was described as a vile Yankee type of miser and overreacher, who had plotted against the fortune of a gentleman and the virtue of his daughter for a long series of remorseless years.
Local opposition affirmed that he would use the railroad to ruin other gentry and oppress his native region, and that he was a Philadelphia emissary and an abolitionist, scheming to create a new state of the three jurisdictions across the bay.
Judge Custis, with his great popularity, did not escape censure; he was said to have winked at the surrender of his child for money and ambition, and to have broken the heart of his estimable wife after he had lost her fortune in an iron furnace.
Senator Clayton, whose mother had originated near Annapolis, made a visit there from Washington, and was entrapped into saying that Delaware would furnish all needful railway facilities for the Eastern Shore, and that two railways there would never pay.
Finally, Judge Custis wrote to his son-in-law to come to Annapolis and meet these misstatements in person.
Milburn came, and his pride being irritated by the nature of the opposition, he wore to the scene of the combat his ancestral hat.
He became at once the most marked figure in Maryland.
In one end of the state he was caricatured in drawings and verses as the generic Eastern-Shore man, wearing such a hat because he had not heard of any later styles.
The connection of a man of last century's hat with such a progressive thing as a railroad, seemed to excite everybody's risibilities. His railroad was called the Hat Line, even in the debates, and coarse people and negroes were hired by wits in the lobby to attend the Legislature with petitions for the Eastern Shore railroad, the whole delegation wearing antique and preposterous hats, gathered up from all the old counties and from the slop-shops of Baltimore; and in that day queer hats were very common, as animal skins of great endurance were still used to manufacture them.
From Somerset word was sent that Milburn retained his hat from no amiable weakness or eccentricity, but because he had entered a vow never to abandon it till he had put every superior he had under his feet; and that he was a victim of gross forest superstition, and had made a bargain with the devil, who allowed him to prosper as long as he braved society with this tile.
The hotel servants chuckled as he went in and out; the oystermen and wood-cutters called jocosely to each other as he passed by; respectable people said he could have no consideration for his wife to degrade her by raising the derision of the town. Judge Custis finally remarked:
"Milburn, I resolved, many years ago, never to address you again on the subject of your dress. My duty makes me break the resolve: your hat is the worst enemy of your railroad."
Vesta, however, was the Entailed Hat's greatest victim. It lay upon her spirits like a shroud. Nervous and apprehensive as she had become, the perpetual admonition and friction of this article drove her into silence and gloom, poisoned the air and blocked up the sunlight, made going forth a constant running of the gantlet, and hospitality a comedy, and human observation a wondering stare.
The hat was the silent, unindicated thing that stood between her and her husband and the rest of the world. She never mentioned it, for she saw that it was forbidden ground. Kind and liberal as her husband was in every other thing, she dared not allude to a matter which had become the centre of his nervous organization, like an indurated sore; and yet she saw, from other than selfish considerations, that this hat was his own worst foe.
Some positive vice--and he had none--some calculating conspiracy--and he was direct as the day--some base amusement or hidden habit or acrid disease would hold him in captivity and pervert his heart less than this simple aberration of behavior. Had he been a hunchback men would have overlooked it; a hideous goitre or wen they would not have resented; but extreme gentility or high-bred courtesy could not refrain from turning to look a second time at a man with a beautiful lady on his arm and a steeple hat upon his head.
The existence of any subject man and wife must not talk together upon, which is yet a daily ingredient of comfort and display, itself disarranges their economy and finally becomes the chronic intruder of their household; and, when it is a trifle, it seems the more an obstacle, because there is no reasoning about it.
This Hat had long ceased to be external: it was worn on Milburn's heart and stifled the healthy throbbing there. It made two men of him,--the outer and the household man,--and, like the Corsican brothers, they were ever conscious of each other, and a word to one aroused the other's clairvoyant sensibility.
"If people would only not observe him," Vesta said, "I think he would lay his hat aside; but that is impossible, and all his pride is in the unending conflict with a law of everlasting society. Who sets a fashion, we do not know; who dares to set one that is obsolete must be a martyr; independence no one can practise but a lunatic. Oh, what tyranny exists that no laws can reach, and how much of society is mere formality!"
Vesta pitied her husband, but the disease was beyond her cure. She had anticipated some compensation for her marriage, in a larger life and society, and in the exercise of her mind, especially in art and music; yet these were purely social things with woman, and the baneful hat was ever darkening her threshold and closing the vista of every other one. She meditated escaping from it by a visit to Europe, which her father had promised her before his embarrassments, and which had been spoken of by Mr. Milburn as due her in the way of musical perfection.
"Uncle," Rhoda Holland said one day, "do put off that old hat. Aunt Vesta could love you so much better! People think it is cruel, uncle. Oh, listen to your wife's heart and not to your pride."
"Stop!" said Milburn. "One more reference to my honest hat and you shall be sent back to Sinepuxent and Mrs. Somers."
It may have been this dreadful threat, or rising ambition, or the fascinations of Judge Custis's position and attentions and remarkable gallantry, that disposed Rhoda to turn her worldly sagacity upon the father of her friend.
The visit to Annapolis occupied the whole winter; as it proceeded, Judge Custis, suppressing the temptations of the table, and feeling his later responsibilities thoughtfully, and desirous of a fixed settlement in a home again, felt a powerful passion to possess Rhoda Holland.
He contended against it in vain. Her beauty and coquetry, and ambition, too, seized his fancy, and worked strongly upon his imagination. He had seen her grow from a forest rose to be the noblest flower of the garden, superb in health, rich in colors, tall and bright and warm, and easily aware of her conquests, and with a magical touch and encouragement. She began to lead him on from mere mischief. He was wise, and observant of women, and he threw himself in the place of her instructor and courtier. She became his pupil, and an exacting one, driving his energies onward, demanding his full attention, stimulating his mind; and Vesta soon saw that her father was a blind captive in the cool yet self-fluttered meshes of her connection.
"Is there any law, husband," Vesta asked, "to prevent Rhoda marrying Judge Custis?"
"I think not. There is no consanguinity. In a society where every degree of cousins marry together, it would be as gratuitous to interfere in such a marriage as to forbid my hat by law."
"He is so enamoured of her," said Vesta, "that I fear the results of her refusing him upon his habits. Father is a better man than he ever was: a wife that can retain his interest will now keep him steady all his life."
The adjournment of the Legislature was at hand; another year, and perhaps years unforeseen in number, were to be occupied in the same slow, illusive quest.
Judge Custis found himself one morning early above the dome of the old state-house, where he frequently went at that hour with Rhoda Holland, to look out upon the bay and the town and "Severn's silver wave reflected."
He turned to her with a sparkle of humor, yet a flush of the cheek, and said:
"My girl, what is to be your answer to Pastor Tilghman's marriage offer?"
"It cannot be."
"Then I am free to ask for another. Rhoda, you have seen that I am foolish for you. I was your admirer when you were a poor forest girl--"
"And when you were a married man," Rhoda interrupted. "How splendid and sly you were! But, even then, I was delighted that a great man like you could even flirt with me. Perhaps you will cut up the same way again?"
"No, Rhoda. This is my last opportunity. I will devote to you my remaining life. I am fifty-five, but it is the best fifty-five in Maryland. You shall have the devotion of twenty-five."
"I want to be taken to Washington," Rhoda said. "I think I could marry an old man if he took me there."
"I will run for Congress, then. You will make a great woman in public life. I do not ask you to love me, but to let me love you. Oh, my child, marriage has been a tragedy with me. I will be a repentant and a fond husband. Hear my selfishness speak and make the sacrifice."
"If I say 'Yes,'" said Rhoda, "it is not to settle down and nurse you. You are to be what you have been this winter: a beau, and an ever fond and gallant gentleman."
"Yes, as long as time will let me."
"Then say no more about it," Rhoda answered, with a little pallor; "if the rest are willing, a poor girl like me will not refuse you, but say, like Ruth, 'Spread thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.' I love your daughter."
Meshach Milburn, not more than half pleased with the turn affairs had taken, hastened to Princess Anne in advance and sought William Tilghman.
"Dear friend," he said, "I hope your heart was not committed to my wayward niece?"
"Has she engaged herself to another, Cousin Meshach?"
"Yes, to Judge Custis. You know what a taking way he has with girls. It was not my match, William."
Milburn looked at the young man and beheld no disappointment on his face--rather a flush of spirit.
"Cousin Meshach," he said, cheerfully, "I thought I could make Rhoda happy; I thought I interpreted her right. Since I was mistaken, it is better that she has been sincere. No, my heart is still a bachelor's and a priest's. See, cousin! The bishop has sent for me to take a larger field."
He united Rhoda and the Judge, as he had married his first love--to another; she was pale and in tears; he kissed her at the altar, and gave his hand to the Judge warmly:
"I know you will be a better Christian, Cousin Daniel. God has given you much love on the earth. Our prayers for you have been answered."
Vesta was disappointed, expecting to see William made happy in a marriage with Rhoda.
