Mrs. Custis was in no situation to give annoyance for that day, as a sick-headache seized her and she kept her room. Infirm of will, purely social in her marriage relations, and never aiming higher than respectability, she missed the coarse mark of her husband who, with all his moral defections, probably was her moral equal, his vital standard higher, his tone a genial hypocrisy, and at bottom he was a democrat.
Mrs. Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, bounded by the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world, particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the old Venetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly with the Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South. Amiable, social, afraid of new ideas, frugal of money; if hospitable at the table, with a certain spiritedness that is seldom intellectual, but a beauty that powerfully attracts, till, by the limited sympathies beneath it, the husband from the outer world discerns how hopelessly slavery and caste sink into an old shipping society, the Baltimore that ruled the Chesapeake had no more perfected product than Mrs. Custis.
Her modesty and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believed that marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying her children was the only innovation to be permitted. Certain accomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must become masculine in prosecution; a professional woman she shrank from as from an infidel or an abolitionist; reading was meritorious up to an orthodox point, but a passion for new books was dangerous, probably irreligious. To lose one's money was a crime; to lose another's money the unforgiven sin, because that was Baltimore public opinion, which she thought was the only opinion entitled to consideration. The old Scotch and Irish merchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusable by success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standard of society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up the bog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was no better than a Jacobin.
On the Eastern Shore, where society was formed before Glasgow and Belfast had colonized upon the Chesapeake with their precise formulas of life, a gentler benevolence rose and descended upon the ground every day, like the evaporations of those prolific seas which manure the thin soil unfailingly. Religion and benevolence were depositions rather than dogmas there; moderate poverty was the not unwelcome expectation, wealth a subject of apprehensive scruples, kindness the law, pride the exception, and grinding avarice, like Meshach Milburn's, was the mark of the devil entering into the neighbor and the fellow-man.
Judge Custis was representative of his neighbors except in his Virginia voluptuousness; his neighbors were neither prudes nor hypocrites, and he respected them more than the arrogant race in the old land of Accomac and in the Virginia peninsulas, whose traits he had almost lost. Sometimes it seemed to him that the last of the cavalier stock was his daughter, Vesta. From him it had nearly departed, and his sense of moral shortcomings expanded his heart and made him tenderly pious to his kind, if not to God. He admired new-comers, new business modes, and Northern intruders and ideas, feeling that perhaps the last evidence of his aristocracy from nature was a chivalric resignation. The pine-trees were saying to him: "Ye shall go like the Indians, but be not inhospitable to your successors, and leave them your benediction, that the great bay and its rivers may be splendid with ships and men, though ye are perished forever." A perception of the energy of his countrymen, and a pride in it, without any mean reservation, though it might involve his personal humiliation, was Judge Custis's only remaining claim to heaven's magnanimity. Still, rich in human nature, he was beloved by his daughter with all her soul.
He awoke long after noon, in body refreshed, and a glass of milk and a plover broiled on toast were ready for him to eat, with some sprigs of new celery from the garden to feed his nerves. He made this small meal silently, and Vesta said, as the tray was removed:
"Now, papa, before we leave this room, you are to tell me the whole injury you have suffered, and what all of us can do to assist you; for if you had succeeded the reward would have been ours, and we must divide the pains of your misfortune with you without any regret. Courage, papa! and let me understand it."
The Judge feebly looked at Vesta, then searched his mind with his eyes downcast, and finally spoke:
"My child, I am the victim of good intentions and self-enjoyment. I am less than a scoundrel and worse than a fool. I am a fraud, and you must be made to see it, for I fear you have been proud of me."
"Oh, father, I have!" said Vesta, with an instant's convulsion. "You were my God."
"Let us throw away idolatry, my darling. It is the first of all the sins. How loud speaks the first commandment to us this moment: 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me'?"
"I have broken it," sobbed Vesta, "I loved you more than my Creator."
"Vesta," spoke the Judge, "you are the only thing of value in all my house. The work of nature in you is all that survives the long edifice of our pride. The treasure of your beauty and love still makes me rich to thieves, who lie in ambush all around us. We are in danger, we are pursued. O God! pity, pity the pure in heart!"
As the Judge, under his strong earnestness, so rare in him of late, threw wide his arms, and raised his brow in agony, Vesta felt her idolatry come back. He was so grand, standing there in his unaffected pain and helplessness, that he seemed to her some manly Prometheus, who had worked with fire and iron, to the exasperation of the jealous gods. Admiration dried her tears, and she forgot her father's references to herself.
"What is iron?" she asked. "Tell me why you wanted to make iron! If I can enter into your mind and sympathize with the hopes you have had, it will lift my soul from the ground. Papa, I should have asked for this lesson long ago."
The Judge strode up and down till she repeated the question, and had brought him to his seat. He collected his thoughts, and resumed his worldly tone as he proceeded, with his old cavalier volatility, to tell the tale of iron.
"I have duplicated loans," he said at last, "on the same properties, incurring, I fear, a stigma upon my family and character; as well as the ruin of our fortune."
Vesta arose with pale lips and a sinking heart.
"Oh, father," she whispered, in a frightened tone, "who knows this terrible secret!"
"Only one man," said the Judge, cowering down to the carpet, with his courage and volatility immediately gone, "old Meshach Milburn knows it all! He has purchased the duplicate notes of protest, and holds them with his own. He has me in his power, and hates me. He will expose me, unless I submit to an awful condition."
"What is it, father?"
The Judge looked up in terror, and, meeting Vesta's pale but steady gaze, hid his face and groaned:
"Oh! it is too disgraceful to tell. It will break your mother's heart."
"Tell me at once!" exclaimed Vesta, in a low and hollow tone. "What further disgrace can this monster inflict upon us than to expose our dishonor? Can he kill us more than that?"
"I know not how to tell you, Vessy. Spare me, my darling! My face I hide for shame."
There was a pause, while Vesta, with her mind expanded to touch every point of suggestion, stood looking down at her father, yet hardly seeing him. He did not move.
Vesta stooped and raised her father's face to find some solution of his mysterious evasion. He shut his eyes as if she burned him with her wondering look.
"Papa, look at me this instant! You shall not be a coward to me."
He broke from her hands and retreated to a window, looking at her, but with a timorous countenance.
"I wish you to go this moment and find your creditor, Mr. Milburn, and bring him to me. You must obey me, sir!"
The father raised his hands as if to protest, but before he could speak a shadow fell upon the window, and the figure of a small, swarthy man covered with a steeple-crowned hat advanced up the front steps.
"Saviour, have mercy!" murmured Judge Custis, "the wolf is at the door."
Vesta took her father in her arms, and kissed him once assuringly.
"Papa, go send a servant to open the door. Have Mr. Milburn shown into this room to await me. Do you go and engage my mother affectionately, and both of you remain in your chamber till I am ready to call you."
The proximity of the dreadful creditor had almost paralyzed Judge Custis, and he glided out like a ghost.
