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  THE ENTAILED HAT

  OR

  _PATTY CANNON'S TIMES_

  A Romance

  BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND

  "GATH"

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
  1884

  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by

  HARPER & BROTHERS,

  In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.


  _All rights reserved._


  TO

  JUDGE GEORGE P. FISHER

  OF DELAWARE

  AND

  HON. JOHN A. J. CRESWELL

  OF MARYLAND

  LOVERS OF OLD TIMES

  WELCOMERS OF THE NEW ERA


"Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom Old Clothes are not
venerable."--CARLYLE: _Sartor Resartus_




INTRODUCTION.


Once the author awoke to a painful reflection that he knew no place
well, though his occupation had taken him to many, and that, after
twenty-five years of describing localities and society, he would be
identified with none.

"Where shall I begin to rove within confines?" he asked, feeling the
vacant spaces in his nature: the want of all those birds, forest trees,
household habits, weeds, instincts of the brooks, and tints and tones of
the local species which lie in some neighborhood's compass, and complete
the pastoral mind.

Numerous districts rose up and contended together, each attractive from
some striking scene, or bold contrast, or lovely face; and wiser policy
might have led his inclinations to one of these, redundant, perhaps, in
wealth or literary appreciation; yet the heart began to turn, as in
first love, or vagrancy almost as sweet, to the little, lowly region
where his short childhood was lived, and where the unknown generations
of his people darkened the sand--the peninsula between the Chesapeake
and the Delaware.

Far down this peninsula lies the old town of Snow Hill, on the border of
Virginia; there the pilgrim entered the court-house, and asked to see an
early book of wills, and in it he turned to the name of a maternal
ancestor, of whom grand tales had been told him by an aged relative. His
breath was almost taken by finding the following provisions, dated
February 12, 1800:

"I give and bequeath to my son, Ralph Milbourn, MY BEST HAT, TO HIM AND
HIS ASSIGNEES FOREVER, and no more of my estate.

"I give to Thomas Milbourn my small iron kettle, my brandy still, all my
hand-irons, my pot-rack, and fifteen pounds bond that he gave to my
daughter, Grace Milbourn."

The next day a doctor took the author on his rounds through "the
Forest," as a neighboring tract was almost too invidiously called, and
through a deserted iron-furnace; village almost of the date of these
wills.

Everywhere he went the Entailed Hat seemed, to the stranger in the land
of his forefathers, to appear in the vistas, as if some odd, reverend,
avoided being was wearing it down the defiles of time. Now like Hester
Prynne wearing her Scarlet Letter, and now like Gaston in his Iron Mask,
this being took both sexes and different characters, as the author
weighed the probabilities of its existence. At last he began to know it,
and started to portray it in a little tale.

The story broke from its confines as his own family generation had
broken from that forest, and sought a larger hemisphere; yet, wherever
the mystic Hat proceeded, his truant fancy had also been led by his
mother's hand.

Often had she told him of old Patty Cannon and her kidnapper's den, and
her death in the jail of his native town. He found the legend of that
dreaded woman had strengthened instead of having faded with time, and
her haunts preserved, and eye-witnesses of her deeds to be still living.

Hence, this romance has much local truth in it, and is not only the
narration of an episode, but the story of a large region comprehending
three state jurisdictions, and also of that period when modern life
arose upon the ruins of old colonial caste.




          CONTENTS.


          CHAPTER                                                    PAGE

       I. TWO HAT WEARERS                                              1
      II. JUDGE AND DAUGHTER                                           6
     III. THE FORESTERS                                               15
      IV. DISCOVERY OF THE HEIRLOOM                                   19
       V. THE BOG-ORE TRACT                                           25
      VI. THE CUSTISES RUINED                                         32
     VII. JACK-O'-LANTERN IRON                                        40
    VIII. THE HAT FINDS A RACK                                        45
      IX. HA! HA! THE WOOING ON'T                                     69
       X. MASTER IN THE KITCHEN                                       83
      XI. DYING PRIDE                                                 89
     XII. PRINCESS ANNE FOLKS                                        100
    XIII. SHADOW OF THE TILE                                         121
     XIV. MESHACH'S HOME                                             129
      XV. THE KIDNAPPER                                              154
     XVI. BELL-CROWN MAN                                             164
    XVII. SABBATH AND CANOE                                          179
   XVIII. UNDER AN OLD BONNET                                        192
     XIX. THE DUSKY LEVELS                                           210
      XX. CASTE WITHOUT TONE                                         218
     XXI. LONG SEPARATIONS                                           239
    XXII. NANTICOKE PEOPLE                                           261
   XXIII. TWIFORD'S ISLAND                                           269
    XXIV. OLD CHIMNEYS                                               285
     XXV. PATTY CANNON'S                                             298
    XXVI. VAN DORN                                                   318
   XXVII. CANNON'S FERRY                                             335
  XXVIII. PACIFICATION                                               357
    XXIX. BEGINNING OF THE RAID                                      360
     XXX. AFRICA                                                     365
    XXXI. PEACH BLUSH                                                373
   XXXII. GARTER-SNAKES                                              391
  XXXIII. HONEYMOON                                                  405
   XXXIV. THE ORDEAL                                                 411
    XXXV. COWGILL HOUSE                                              424
   XXXVI. TWO WHIGS                                                  433
  XXXVII. SPIRIT OF THE PAST                                         441
 XXXVIII. VIRGIE'S FLIGHT                                            456
   XXXIX. VIRGIE'S FLIGHT--CONTINUED                                 468
      XL. HULDA BELEAGUERED                                          486
     XLI. AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK                                    496
    XLII. BEAKS                                                      510
   XLIII. PLEASURE DRAINED                                           515
    XLIV. THE DEATH OF PATTY CANNON                                  524
     XLV. THE JUDGE REMARRIED                                        542
    XLVI. THE CURSE OF THE HAT                                       554
   XLVII. FAILURE AND RESTITUTION                                    558

       *       *       *       *       *

     A picture of Joe Johnson's Kidnapper's Tavern, as it stood in the
     year 1883, is given on the title-page.




THE ENTAILED HAT.




CHAPTER I.

TWO HAT WEARERS.


Princess Anne, as its royal name implies, is an old seat of justice, and
gentle-minded town on the Eastern Shore. The ancient county of Somerset
having been divided many years before the revolutionary war, and its
courts separated, the original court-house faded from the world, and the
forest pines have concealed its site. Two new towns arose, and flourish
yet, around the original records gathered into their plain brick
offices, and he would be a forgetful visitor in Princess Anne who would
not say it had the better society. He would get assurances of this from
"the best people" living there; and yet more solemn assurances from the
two venerable churches, Presbyterian and Episcopalian, whose
grave-stones, upright or recumbent, or in family rows, say, in epitaphs
Latinized, poetical, or pious, "_We_ belonged to the society of Princess
Anne." That, at least, is the impression left on the visitor as he
wanders amid their myrtle and creeper, or receives, on the wide, loamy
streets, the bows of the lawyers and their clients.

There were but two eccentric men living in Princess Anne in the early
half of our century, and both of them were identified by their hats.

The first was Jack Wonnell, a poor fellow of some remote origin who had
once attended an auction, and bought a quarter gross of beaver hats.
Although that happened years before our story opens, and the fashions
had changed, Jack produced a new hat from the stock no oftener than when
he had well worn its predecessor, and, at the rate of two hats a year,
was very slowly extinguishing the store. Like most people who frequent
auctions, he was not provident, except in hats, and presented a
startling appearance in his patched and shrunken raiment when he mounted
a bright, new tile, and took to the sidewalk. His name had become, in
all grades of society, "Bell-crown."

The other eccentric citizen was the subject of a real mystery, and even
more burlesque. He wore a hat, apparently more than a century old, of a
tall, steeple crown, and stiff, wavy brim, and nearly twice as high as
the cylinders or high hats of these days. It had been rubbed and
recovered and cleaned and straightened, until its grotesque appearance
was infinitely increased. If the wearer had walked out of the court of
King James I. directly into our times and presence, he could not have
produced a more singular effect. He did not wear this hat on every
occasion, nor every day, but always on Sabbaths and holidays, on funeral
or corporate celebrations, on certain English church days, and whenever
he wore the remainder of his extra suit, which was likewise of the
genteel-shabby kind, and terminated by greenish gaiters, nearly the
counterpart, in color, of the hat. To daily business he wore a cheap,
common broadbrim, but sometimes, for several days, on freak or unknown
method, he wore this steeple hat, and strangers in the place generally
got an opportunity to see it.

Meshach Milburn, or "Steeple-top," was a penurious, grasping, hardly
social man of neighborhood origin, but of a family generally
unsuccessful and undistinguished, which had been said to be dying out
for so many years that it seemed to be always a remnant, yet never
quite gone. He alone of the Milburns had lifted himself out of the
forest region of Somerset, and settled in the town, and, by silence,
frugality, hard bargaining, and, finally, by money-lending, had become a
person of unknown means--himself almost unknown. He was, ostensibly, a
merchant or storekeeper, and did deal in various kinds of things,
keeping no clerk or attendant but a negro named Samson, who knew as
little about his mind and affections as the rest of the town. Samson's
business was to clean and produce the mysterious hat, which he knew to
be required every time he saw his master shave.

As soon as the lather-cup and hone were agitated, Samson, without
inquiry, went into a big green chest in the bedroom over the old wooden
store, and drew out of a leather hat-box the steeple-crown, where
Meshach Milburn himself always sacredly replaced it. Then "Samson Hat,"
as the boys called him, exercised his brush vigorously, and put the
queer old head-gear in as formal shape as possible, and he silently
attended to its rehabilitation through the medium of the village hatter,
never leaving the shop until the tile had been repaired, and suffering
none whatever to handle it except the mechanic. In addition to this,
Samson cooked his master's food, and performed rough work around the
store, but had no other known qualification for a confidential servant
except his bodily power.

He was now old, probably sixty, but still a most formidable pugilist;
and he had caught, running afoot, the last wild deer in the county.
Though not a drinking man Samson Hat never let a year pass without
having a personal battle with some young, willing, and powerful negro.
His physical and mental system seemed to require some such periodical
indulgence, and he measured every negro who came to town solely in the
light of his prowess. At the appearance of some Herculean or
clean-chested athlete, Samson's eye would kindle, his smile start up,
and his friendly salutation would be: "You're a _good_ man! 'Most as
good as me!" He was never whipped, rumor said, but by an inoffensive
black class-leader whom he challenged and compelled to fight.

"Befo' God, man, I never see you befo'! I'se jined de church! I kint
fight! I never didn't do it!"

"Can't help it, brother!" answered Samson. "You're too _good_ a man to
go froo Somerset County. Square off or you'll ketch it!"

"Den if I must I must! de Lord forgive me!" and after a tremendous
battle the class-leader came off nearly conqueror.

Whenever Samson indulged his gladiatorial propensities he disappeared
into the forest whence he came, and being a free man of mental
independence equal to his nerve, he merely waited in his lonely cabin
until Meshach Milburn sent him word to return. Then silently the old
negro resumed his place, looked contrition, took the few bitter,
overbearing words of his master silently, and brushed the ancient hat.

Meshach kept him respectably dressed, but paid him no wages; the negro
had what he wanted, but wanted little; on more than one occasion the
court had imposed penalties on Samson's breaches of the peace, and he
lay in jail, unsolicitous and proud, until Meshach Milburn paid the
fine, which he did grudgingly; for money was Meshach's sole pursuit, and
he spent nothing upon himself.

Without a vice, it appeared that Meshach Milburn had not an emotion,
hardly a virtue. He had neither pity nor curiosity, visitors nor
friends, professions nor apologies. Two or three times he had been
summoned on a jury, when he put on his best suit and his steeple-crown,
and formally went through his task. He attended the Episcopal worship
every Sunday and great holiday, wearing inevitably the ancient tile,
which often of itself drew audience more than the sermon. He gave a very
small sum of money and took a cheap pew, and read from his prayer-book
many admonitions he did not follow.

He was not litigious, but there was no evading the perfectness of his
contracts. His searching and large hazel eyes, almost proud and quite
unkindly, and his Indian-like hair, were the leading elements of a face
not large, but appearing so, as if the buried will of some long
frivolous family had been restored and concentrated in this man and had
given a bilious power to his brows and jaws and glances.

His eccentricity had no apparent harmony with anything else nor any
especial sensibility about it. The boys hooted his hat, and the little
girls often joined in, crying "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's
loose!" But he paid no attention to anybody, until once, at court time,
some carousing fellows hired Jack Wonnell to walk up to Meshach Milburn
and ask to swap a new bell-crown for the old decrepit steeple-top.
Looking at Wonnell sternly in the face, Meshach hissed, "You miserable
vagrant! Nature meant you to go bareheaded. Beware when you speak to me
again!"

"I was afraid of him," said Jack Wonnell, afterwards. "He seemed to have
a loaded pistol in each eye."

No other incident, beyond indiscriminate ridicule, was recorded of this
hat, except once, when a group of little children in front of Judge
Custis's house began to whisper and titter, and one, bolder than the
rest, the Judge's daughter, gravely walked up to the unsocial man; it
was the first of May, and he was in his best suit:

"Sir," she said, "may I put a rose in your old hat?"

The harsh man looked down at the little queenly child, standing straight
and slender, with an expression on her face of composure and courtesy.
Then he looked up and over the Judge's residence to see if any
mischievous or presuming person had prompted this act. No one was in
sight, and the other children had run away.

"Why do you offer me a flower?" he said, but with no tenderness.

"Because I thought such a very old hat might improve with a rose."

He hesitated a minute. The little girl, as if well-born, received his
strong stare steadily. He took off the venerable old head-gear, and put
it in the pretty maid's hand. She fixed a white rose to it, and then he
placed the hat and rose again on his head and took a small piece of gold
from his pocket.

"Will you take this?"

"My father will not let me, sir!"

Meshach Milburn replaced the coin and said nothing else, but walked down
the streets, amid more than the usual simpering, and the weather-beaten
door of the little rickety storehouse closed behind him.




CHAPTER II.

JUDGE AND DAUGHTER.


Judge Custis was the most important man in the county. He belonged to
the oldest colonial family of distinction, the Custises of Northampton,
whose fortune, beginning with King Charles II. and his tavern credits in
Rotterdam, ended in endowing Colonel George Washington with a widow's
mite. The Judge at Princess Anne was the most handsome man, the father
of the finest family of sons and daughters, the best in estate, most
various in knowledge, and the most convivial of Custises.

In that region of the Eastern Shore there is so little diversity of
productions, the ocean and the loam alone contributing to man, that
Judge Custis had an exaggerated reputation as a mineralogist.

He had begun to manufacture iron out of the bog ores found in the
swamps and hummocks of a neighboring district, and, with the tastes of a
landholding and slaveholding family, had erected around his furnace a
considerable town, his own residence as proprietor conspicuous in the
midst. There he spent a large part of the time, and not always in the
company of his family, entertaining friends from the distant cities,
enjoying the luxuries of terrapin, duck, and wines, and, as rumor said
in the forest, all the pleasures of a Russian or German nobleman on a
secluded estate.

He could lie down on the ground with the barefooted foresters, equal and
familiar with them, and carry off their suffrages for the State Senate
or the Assembly. In Princess Anne he was more discriminating, rising in
that society to his family stature, and surrounded by alliances which
demanded what is called "bearing." In short, he was the head of the
community, and his wealth, originally considerable, had been augmented
by marriage, while his credit extended to Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Not long after the occurrence of his young daughter, Vesta, placing the
rose in Meshach Milburn's mysterious hat, Judge Custis said to his lady
at the breakfast-table:

"That man has been allowed to shut himself in, like a dog, too long. He
owes something to this community. I'll go down to his kennel, under
pretence of wanting a loan--and I do need some money for the furnace!"

He took his cane after breakfast and passed out of his large mansion,
and down the sidewalk of the level street. There were, as usually, some
negroes around Milburn's small, weather-stained store, and Samson Hat,
among them, shook hands with the Judge, not a particle disturbed at the
latter's condescension.

"Judge," said Samson, looking that large, portly gentleman over, "you'se
a _good_ man yet. But de flesh is a little soft in yo' muscle, Judge."

"Ah! Samson," answered Custis, "there's one old fellow that is wrastling
you."

"Time?" said the negro; "we can't fight him, sho! Dat's a fack! But I'm
good as any man in Somerset now."

"Except my daughter's boy, the class-leader from Talbot."

"Is dat boy in yo' family," exclaimed Samson, kindling up. "I'll walk
dar if he'll give me another throw."

The Judge passed into the wide-open door of Meshach Milburn's store. A
few negroes and poor whites were at the counter, and Meshach was
measuring whiskey out to them by the cheap dram in exchange for
coonskins and eggs. He looked up, just a trifle surprised at the
principal man's advent, and merely said, without nodding:

"'Morning!"

Judge Custis never flinched from anybody, but his intelligence
recognized in Meshach's eyes a kind of nature he had not yet met, though
he was of universal acquaintance. It was not hostility, nor welcome, nor
indifference. It was not exactly spirit. As nearly as the Judge could
formulate it, the expression was habitual self-reliance, and if not
habitual suspicion, the feeling most near it, which comes from conscious
unpopularity.

"Mr. Milburn," said Judge Custis, "when you are at leisure let me have a
few words with you."

The storekeeper turned to the poor folks in his little area and remarked
to them bluntly:

"You can come back in ten minutes."

They all went out without further command. Milburn closed the door. The
Judge moved a chair and sat down.

"Milburn," he said, dropping the formal "mister," "they tell me you lend
money, and that you charge well for it. I am a borrower sometimes, and I
believe in keeping interest at home in our own community. Will you
discount my note at legal interest?"

"Never," replied Meshach.

"Then," said the Judge, smiling, "you'll put me to some inconvenience."

"That's more than legal interest," answered Milburn, sturdily. "You'll
pay the legal interest where you go, and the inconvenience of going will
cost something too. If you add your expenses as liberally as you incur
them when you go to Baltimore, to legal interest, you are always paying
a good shave."

"Where you have risks," suggested the Judge, "there is some reason for a
heavy discount, but my property will enrich this county and all the land
you hold mortgages on."

"Bog ore!" muttered the money-lender. "I never lent money on that kind
of risk. I must read upon it! They say manufacturing requires mechanical
talent. How much do you want?"

"Three thousand."

"Secured upon the furnace?"

"Yes."

Meshach computed on a piece of paper, and the Judge, with easy
curiosity, studied his singular face and figure.

He was rather short and chunky, not weighing more than one hundred and
thirty pounds, with long, fine fingers of such tracery and separate
action that every finger seemed to have a mind and function of its own.
Looking at his hands only, one would have said: "There is here a
pianist, a penman, a woman of definite skill, or a man of peculiar
delicacy." All the fingers were well produced, as if the hand instead of
the face was meant to be the mind's exponent and reveal its portrait
there.

Yet the face of Meshach Milburn, if more repellent, was uncommon.

The effects of one long diet and one climate, invariable, from
generation to generation, and both low and uninvigorating, had brought
to nearly aboriginal form and lines his cheek-bones, hair, and resinous
brown eyes. From the cheek-bones up he looked like an Indian, and
expressed a stolid power and swarthiness. Below, there dropped a large
face, in proportion, with nothing noticeable about it except the nose,
which was so straight, prominent, and complete, and its nostrils so
sensitive, that only the nose upon his face seemed to be good company
for his hands. When he confronted one, with his head thrown back a
little, his brown eyes staring inquiry, and his nose almost sentient,
the effect was that of a hostile savage just burst from the woods.

That was his condition indeed.

"Look at him in the eyes," said the town-bred, "he's all forester!"

"But look at his hand," added some few observant ones.

Ah! who had ever shaken that hand?

It was now extended to the Judge and he took from its womanly fingers
the terms of the loan. Judge Custis was surprised at the moderation of
Meshach, and he looked up cheerfully into that ever sentinel face on
which might have been printed "_qui vive?_"

"It's not the goodness of the security," said Meshach, "I make it low to
you, socially!"

The Custis pride started with a flush to the Judge's eyes, to have this
ostracised and hooted Shylock intimate that their relations could be
more than a prince's to a pawnbroker. But the Judge was a politician,
with an adaptable mind and address.

"Speaking of social things, Milburn," he said, carelessly, "our town is
not so large that we don't all see each other sometimes. Why do you wear
that forlorn, unsightly hat?"

"Why do you wear the name _Custis?_"

"Oh, I inherited that!"

"And I inherited my hat."

There was a pause for a minute, but before the Judge could tell whether
it was an angry or an awkward pause, the storekeeper said:

"Judge Custis, I concede that you are the best bred man in Princess
Anne. Where did you get authority to question another person about any
decent article of his attire?"

"I stand corrected, Milburn," said the Judge. "Good feeling for you more
than curiosity made me suggest it. And I may also remark to you, sir,
that when you lend me money you will always do it commercially and not
_socially_."

"Very well," remarked Meshach Milburn, "and if I ever enter your door, I
will then take off my hat."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning Meshach Milburn surprised Samson Hat by saying: "Boy,
when you have another fight and make yourself a barbarian again,
remember to bring back, from Nassawongo furnace, about a peck of the bog
ores!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The years moved on without much change in Princess Anne. The little
Manokin river brought up oysters from the bay, and carried off the corn
and produce. The great brick academy at neighboring "Lower Trappe"
boarded and educated the brightest youths of the best families on the
Peninsula; and these perceived, as the annual summers brought their
fulness, what portion of their beauty remained with Vesta Custis. She
was like Helen of Troy, a subject of homage and dispute in childhood,
and became a woman, in men's consideration, almost imperceptibly. Sent
to Baltimore to be educated, her return was followed by suitors--not
youthful admirers only, but mature ones--and the young men of the
Peninsula remarked with chagrin: "None of us have a chance! Some great
city nabob will get her."

But the academy boys and visitors, and the townspeople, had one common
opportunity to see her and to hear her--when she sang, every Sabbath and
church day, in the Episcopal church.

Her voice was the natural expression of her beauty--sweet, powerful,
free, and easily trained. A divine bird seemed hidden in the old church
when this noble yet tender voice broke forth; but they who turned to see
the singer who had made such Paradise, looked almost on Eve herself.

She was rather slight, tall, and growing fuller slowly every year, like
one in whom growth was early, yet long, and who would wholly mature not
until near middle life. Her head, however, was perfection, even in
girlhood, not less by its proportions than its carriage: her graceful
figure bore it like the slender setting, holding up the first splendor
of the peach; a head of vital and spiritual beauty, where purity and
luxuriance, woman and mind, dwelt in harmony and joy. As she seemed ever
to be ripening, so she seemed never to have been a child, but, with
faculties and sense clear and unintimidated, she was never wanting in
modesty, nor accused of want of self-possession. Judge Custis made her
his reliance and pride; she never reproved his errors, nor treated them
familiarly, but settled the household by a consent which all paid to her
character alone. More than once she had appeared at the furnace mansion
when the Judge's long absence had awakened some jealousy or distrust:

"Father, please go home with me! I want you to drive me back."

The easy, self-indulgent Judge would look a slight protest, but at the
soft, spirited command; "Come, sir! you can't stay here any more,"
dismissed his companions, and took his place at the head of Princess
Anne society.

Vesta was almost a brunette, with the rich colors of her type--eyebrows
like the raven's wing, ripe, red lips, and hair whose darkness and
length, released from the crown into which she wound it, might have spun
her garments. Her eyes were of a steel-blue, in which the lights had the
effect of black. She was dark with sky breaking through, like the rich
dusk and twilights over the Chesapeake.

People wondered that, with such beauty, ease, and accomplishments she
was not proud; but her pride was too ethereal to be seen. It was not the
vain consciousness of gifts and endowments, but the serene sense of
worthiness, of unimpaired health, honor, and descent, which made her
kind and thoughtful to a degree only less than piety. Grateful for her
social rank and parentage, she adorned but did not forget them. The
suitors who came for her were weighed in this scale of perfect
desert--to be sons of such parents and associates of her married sisters
and sisters-in-law. Not one had survived the test, yet none knew where
he failed.

"Vesta is too good for any of them," exclaimed the Judge, on more than
one occasion. "When I get the furnace in such shape that it will run
itself I will take my daughter to Europe and give her a musical
education."

In truth, the Judge had expectations of his daughter; for the reputation
he had attained as a manufacturer was not without its drawbacks. He
maintained two establishments; he supported a large body of laborers and
dependents, some of whom he had brought from distant places under
contract; the experiment in which he had embarked was still an
experiment, and he was subject to the knowledge and judgment of his
manager, being himself rather the patron than the manufacturer at the
works. Many days, when he was supposed to be testing the percentage and
mixture of his ores, he was gunning off on the ocean bars, crabbing on
Whollop's Beach, or hunting up questionable company among the forest
girls, or around the oystermen's or wrecker's cabins. He had plenty of
property and family endorsers, however, and seldom failed to have a
satisfactory interview with Meshach Milburn, who was now assisting him,
at least once a quarter, to keep both principal and interest at home.

The Judge had grown thicker with Meshach, but the storekeeper merely
listened and assented, and took no pains to incur another criticism on
his motives. Meshach wore his great hat, as ever, to church and on
festive days, and it was still derided, and held to be the town wonder.
Vesta Custis often saw the odd little man come into church while she was
singing, and she fancied that his large, coarse ears were turned to
receive the music she was making, and she faintly remembered that once
she had held in her hands that wonderful hat with its copper buckle in
the band, and stiff, wide brim, flowing in a wave. More than that she
knew nothing, except that the wearer was an humble-born, grasping
creature--a forester without social propensities, or, indeed, any human
attachments. The negro who abode under his roof was beloved, compared to
the sordid master, and all testimony concurred that Meshach Milburn
deserved neither commiseration, friendship, nor recognition. Her father,
however, indulgent in all things, said the money-lender had a good mind,
and was no serf.

Milburn had ceased to deal with negroes or dispense drams. His wealth
was now known to be more than considerable. He had ceased, also, to lend
money on the surrounding farms, and rumors came across the bay that he
was a holder of stocks and mortgages on the Western Shore, and in
Baltimore and Pennsylvania. The little town of Princess Anne was full of
speculations about him, and even his age was uncertain; Jack Wonnell had
measured it by hats. Said Jack:

"I bought my bell-crowns the year ole Milburn's daddy and mammy died.
They died of the bilious out yer in Nassawongo, within a few days of
each other. Now, I wear two bell-crowns a year. I come out every Fourth
of July and Christmas. 'Tother day I counted what was left, and I
reckoned that Meshach couldn't be forty-five at the wust."

Vesta Custis was only twenty years old when the townsfolk thought she
must be twenty-five, so long had she been the beauty of Somerset. Her
mother had always looked with apprehension on the possible time when her
daughter would marry and leave her; for Judge Custis had long ceased to
have the full confidence of his lady, whose fortune he had embarked
without return on ventures still in doubt, and he always waived the
subject when it was broached, or remarked that no loss was possible in
his hands while Mrs. Custis lived.




CHAPTER III.

THE FORESTERS.


One Saturday afternoon in October Meshach Milburn drew out his razor,
cup, and hone, and prepared to shave, albeit his beard was never more
than harmless down. By a sort of capillary attraction Samson Hat divined
his purpose, and, opening the big green chest, brought out the
mysterious hat.

"Put it down!" commanded the money-lender. "Go out and hire me a
carriage with two horses--_two_ horses, do you mind!"

Samson dropped the hat in wonderment.

"Make yourself decent," added Meshach; "I want you to drive. Go with me,
and keep with me: do you understand?"

"Yes, marster."

When the negro departed, Meshach himself took up the tall, green,
buckled hat, with the stiff, broad, piratical brim. He looked it over
long and hard.

"Vanity, vanity!" he murmured, "vanity and habit! I dare not disown thee
now, because they give thee ridicule, and without thee they would give
me nothing but hate!"

The people around the tavern and court-house saw, with surprise too
great for jeering, the note-shaver go past in a carriage, driven by his
negro, and with two horses! Jack Wonnell took off his shining beaver to
cheer. As the phenomenal team receded, the old cry ran, however, down
the stilly street: "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's loose!"

The carriage proceeded out the forest road, and soon entered upon the
sandy, pine-slashed region called Hard-scrabble, or Hardship.

Here the roads were sandy as the hummocks and hills in the rear of a sea
beach, and the low, lean pines covered the swells and ridges, while in
occasional level basins, where the stiff clay was exposed, some
forester's unpainted hut sat black and smoking on the slope, without a
window-pane, an ornament, or anything to relieve life from its monotony
and isolation.

But where the rills ran off to the continuous swamps the leafage started
up in splendrous versatility. The maple stood revealed in all its fair,
light harmonies. The magnolia drooped its ivory tassels, and scented the
forest with perfume. The kalmia and the alder gave undergrowth and
brilliancy to the foliage. Hoary and green with precipitate old age, the
cypress-trees stood in moisture, and drooped their venerable beards from
angular branches, the bald cypress overhanging its evergreen kinsman,
and looking down upon the swamp-woods in autumn, like some hermit artist
on the rich pigments on his palette.

But nothing looked so noble as the sweet gum, which rose like a giant
plume of yellow and orange, a chief in joyous finery, where the cypress
was only a faded philosopher.

Beside such a tall gum-tree Samson Hat reined in, where a well-spring
shone at the bottom of a hollow cypress. He borrowed a bucket from the
hut across the road, and watered the horses.

"Marster," ventured the negro, "dey say your gran'daddy sot dis spring."

"Yes," said Milburn, "and built the cabin. Yonder he lies, on the knoll
by that stump, up in the field: he and more of our wasted race."

"And yon woman is a Milburn," added the negro, socially. "I know her by
de hands."

The barefoot woman living in the cabin--one room and a loft, and the
floor but a few inches above the ground--cried out, impudently:

"If I could have two horses I'd buy a better hat!"

Milburn did not answer, but marked the poor, small corn ears ungathered
on the fodderless stalks, the shrubs of peach-trees, of which the
largest grew on his ancestors' graves, the little cart for one horse or
ox, which was at once family carriage and farm wagon, and the few pigs
and chickens of stunted breeds around the woman's feet.

"Drive on, boy," he exclaimed; "the worst of all is that these people
are happy!"

"Dat's a fack, marster," laughed Samson Hat. "Dey wouldn't speak to you
in Princess Anne. Dey think everybody's proud and rich dar."

"Here the sea once dashed its billows on a bar," said Meshach Milburn,
reflectively. "That geology book relates it! From the North the hummocks
recede in waves, where successive beaches were formed as the sea slowly
retreated. Hardly deeper than a human grave they strike water, below the
sand and gravel. Below the water they drink is nothing but black mud,
made of coarse, decayed grass. No lime is in the soil. Not a mineral
exists in all this low, wave-made peninsula, where my people were
shipwrecked--except the wonderful bog ores."

The negro's genial, wondering nature broke out with comfortable
assurance.

"Dat must be in de Bible," he said. "Marster, de Milburns been heah so
long, dey must hab got shipwrecked wid ole Noah!"

"All families are shipwrecked," absently replied Meshach, "who cast
their lot upon an unrewarding land, and growing poorer, darker, down,
from generation to generation, can never leave it, and, at last, can
never desire to go."

"Marster, dar is one got to go some ob dese days. It's me--pore ole
Samson!"

"Ha! has some one set you on to demand your wages?"

"No, marster, I am old. It's you dat I'm troubled about! Dar's none to
mend for you, cook for you, cure yo' sickness, or lay you in de grave."

No more was said until they passed the settled part of the forest and
entered one of the many straight aisles of sky and sand among the pines,
which had been opened on the great furnace tract of Judge Custis. He had
here several thousand acres, and for miles the roadways were cleft
towards the horizon. The moon rose behind them as they entered the
furnace village, and they saw the lights twinkle through the open doors
of many cottages and the furnace flames dart over the forbidding
mill-pond, where in the depths grew the iron ore, like a vegetable
creation, and above the surface, on splayed and conical mud-washed
roots, the hundreds of strong cypresses towered from the water. Between
the steep banks of dark-colored pines, taller than the forest growth,
this furnace lake lay black and white and burning red as the shadows, or
moonrise, or flames struck upon it, and the stained water foamed through
the breast or dam where the ancient road crossed between pines,
cypresses and gum-trees of commanding stature.

Tawny, slimy, chilly, and solemn, the pond repeated the forms of the
groves it submerged; the shaggy shadows added depth and dread to the
effect; some strange birds hooted as they dipped their wings in the
surface, and, flying upward, seemed also sinking down. As Meshach felt
the chill of that pond he drew down his hat and buttoned up his coat.

"The earliest fools who turned up the bog ores for wealth," he said,
"released the miasmas which slew all the people roundabout. They killed
all my family, but set me free."




CHAPTER IV.

DISCOVERY OF THE HEIRLOOM.


Judge Custis was in his bedroom, in the second story of the large,
inn-like mansion at the middle of the village, and he was just
recovering from the effects of a long wassail. In his peculiar nervous
condition he started at the sound of wheels, and, drawing his curtains,
looked out upon the long shadow of an advancing figure crowned with a
steeple hat.

This human shadow strengthened and faded in the alternating light, until
it was defined against his storehouse, his warehouse, his cabins, and
the plain, and it seemed also against the wall of dense forest pines.
Then footsteps ascended the stairs. His door opened and Meshach Milburn,
with his holiday hat on his head, stood on the threshold; his eyes
vigilant and bold as ever, and all his Indian nature to the front.

"My God, Milburn!" exclaimed the Judge, "odd as it is to see you here, I
am relieved. Old Nick, I thought, was coming."

"Shall I come in?" asked Milburn.

"Yes; I'm sleeping off a little care and business. Let your man stay
outside on the porch. Draw up a chair. It's money, I suppose, that
brings you here?"

The money-lender carefully put his formidable hat upon a table, took a
distant chair, pushed his gaitered feet out in front, and laid a large
wallet or pocket-book on his lap. Then, addressing his whole attention
to the host, he appeared never to wink while he remained.

"Judge Custis," he said, straightforwardly, "the first time you came to
borrow money from me, you said that Nassawongo furnace would enrich this
county and raise the value of my land."

"Yes, Milburn. It was a slow enterprise, but it's coming all right. I
shipped a thousand tons last year."

"Judge Custis," continued the money-lender, "I told you, when you made
the first loan, that I would investigate this ore. I did so years ago.
Specimens were sent by me to Baltimore and tested there. Not content
with that, I have studied the manufacture of iron for myself--the
society of Princess Anne not grudging me plenty of solitude!--and I know
that every ton of iron you make costs more than you get for it. The bog
ore is easy to smelt; but it is corrupted by phosphate of iron and is
barely marketable."

The Judge was sitting with eyes wide open, and paler than before.

"You have found that out?" he whispered. "I did not know it myself until
within this year--so help me God!"

"I knew it before I made you the second loan."

"Why did you not tell me?"

"Because you forbade our relations to be anything but commercial. I was
not bound to betray my knowledge."

"Why did you, then, from a commercial view, lend me large sums of money
again and again?"

"Because," said the money-lender, coolly, "you had other security. You
have a daughter!"

Judge Custis broke from the bed-covers and rushed upon Meshach Milburn.

"Heathen and devil!" he shouted, taking the money-lender by the throat,
"do you dare to mention her as part of your mortgage?"

They struggled together until a powerful pair of hands pinioned the
Judge, and bore him back to his bed. Samson Hat was the man.

"Judge!" he exclaimed, gentle, but firm, "you is a _good_ man, but
not as good as me. Cool off, Judge!"

"I expected this scene," said Meshach Milburn. "It could not have been
avoided. I was bound in conscience and in common-sense to make you the
only proposition which could save you from ruin. For, Judge Custis, you
are a ruined man!"

Overcome with excitement and suspended stimulation, the old Judge fell
back on his pillow and began to sob.

"Give him brandy," said Meshach Milburn, "here is the bottle! He needs
it now."

The wretched gentleman eagerly drank the proffered draught from the
negro's hands. His fury did not revive, and he covered his face with his
palms and moaned piteously.

"Judge Custis," remarked Meshach Milburn, "if the apparent social
distance between us could be lessened by any argument, I might make one.
For the difference is in appearance only. The healthy flesh which gives
you and yours stature and beauty is a matter of food alone. My stock has
survived five generations of such diet as has bent the spines of the
forest pigs and stunted the oxen. Money and family joy will give me
children comely again. My life has been hard but pure."

The old Judge felt the last unconscious reflection.

"Yes," he uttered, solemnly, "no doubt Heaven marked me for some such
degradation as this, when I yielded to low propensities, and sought my
pleasure and companions in the huts of the forest!"

"You claim descent from the Stuart Restoration: I know the tale. A
creditor of the two exiled royal brothers for sundry tavern loans and
tipples drew for his obligation an office in far-off Virginia. Seizures,
confiscations, the slave-trade, marriages--in short, the long game of
advantage--built up the fortunes of the Custises, until they expired in
a certain Judge, whose notes of hand a hard man, forest-born, held over
the Judge's head on what seemed hard conditions, but conditions in which
was every quality of mercy, except consideration for your pride."

The Judge made a laugh like a howl.

"_Mercy?_" he exclaimed, "you do not know what it is! To ensnare my
innocent daughter in the damned meshes of your principal and interest!
Call it malignity--the visitation of your unsocial wrath on man and an
angel; but not mercy!"

"Then we will call it compensation," continued Meshach Milburn: "for
twenty years I have denied myself everything; you denied yourself
nothing. Your substance is wasted; renew it from the abundance of my
thrift. It was not with an evil design that I made myself your creditor,
although, as the years have rolled onward and solitude chilled my heart,
that has always pined for human friendship, I could not but see the
kindling glory of your daughter's beauty. Like the schoolboys, the
married husbands--yes, like the slaves--I had to admire her. Then,
unknowing how deeply you were involved, I found offered to me for sale
the paper you had negotiated in Baltimore--paper, Judge Custis,
dishonorably negotiated!"

The money-lender rose and walked to the sad man's bed, and held the
hand, full of these notes, boldly over him.

"It was despair, Milburn!" moaned the Judge.

"And so was my resolution. Said I: 'This lofty gentleman would cheat me,
his neighbor, who have suffered all the contumely of this _good
society_, and on starveling opportunity have slowly recovered
independence. Now he shall take my place in the forest, or I will wear
my hat at the head of his family table.'"

"A dreadful revenge!" whispered Custis, with a shudder. "Such a hat is
worse than a cloven foot. In God's name! whence came that ominous hat?"

Milburn took up the hat and held it before the lamplight, so that its
shadow stood gigantic against the wall.

"Who would think," he said, sarcastically, "that a mere head-covering,
elegant in its day, could make more hostility than an idle head? I will
tell you the silly secret of it. When I came from the obscurity of the
forest, sensitive, and anxious to make my way, and slowly gathered
capital and knowledge, a person in New York directed a letter of inquiry
to me. It told how a certain Milburn, a Puritan or English Commonwealth
man, had risen to great distinction in that province, and had
revolutionized its government and suffered the penalty of high-treason."

"True enough," said Judge Custis, pouring a second glass of brandy;
"Milburn and Leisler were executed in New York during the lifetime of
the first Custis. They anticipated the expulsion of James II., and were
entrapped by their provincial enemies and made political martyrs."

"The inquirer," said Meshach, "who had obtained my address in the course
of business, related, that after Milburn's death his brethren and their
families had sailed to the Chesapeake, where the Protestants had
successfully revolutionized for King William, and, making choice of poor
lands, they had become obscure. He asked me if the court-house records
made any registry of their wills."

"Of course you found them?"

"Yes. It was a revelation to me, and gave me the honorable sense of some
origin and quality. I traced myself back to the earliest folios, at the
close of the seventeenth century."

"Any property, Milburn?" asked the Judge, voluptuous and reanimated
again.

"My great-grandfather had left his son nothing but a Hat."

"Not uncommon!" exclaimed Judge Custis. "Our early wills contain little
but legacies of wearing apparel, household articles, bedding, pots and
kettles, and the elements of civilization."

"The will on record said: '_I give to my eldest son, Meshach Milburn, my
best Hat, and no more of my estate._'"

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the Judge, loudly. "Genteel to the last! A hat of
fashion, no doubt, made in London; quite too ceremonious and topgallant
for these colonies. He left it to his eldest son, en-_tiled_it, we may
say. Ho! ho!"

"When my indignation was over, I took the same view you do, Judge
Custis, that it was a bequest of dignity, not of burlesque; and I made
some inquiries for that best Hat. It was a legend among my forest kin,
had been seen by very old people, was celebrated in its day, and worn by
my grandfather thankfully. He left it to my father, still a hat of
reputation--"

"Still en-_tiled_ to the oldest son! Ha, ha! Milburn."

"My father sold the hat to Charles Wilson Peale, who was native to our
peninsula, and knew the ancient things existing here that would help him
to form Peale's Museum during the last century. I found the hat in that
museum, covering the mock-figure of Guy Fawkes!"

"Conspirator's hat; bravo!" exclaimed the Judge.

"It had been used for the heads of George Calvert and Shakespeare, but
in time of religious excitements was proclaimed to be the true hat of
Guy Fawkes. I reclaimed it, and brought it to Princess Anne, and in a
vain moment put it on my head and walked into the street. It was
assailed with halloos and ribaldry."

"It was another Shirt of Nessus, Milburn; it poisoned your life, eh?"

"Perhaps so," replied Milburn, with intensity. "They say what is one
man's drink is another man's poison. You will accept that hat on the
head of your son-in-law, or no more _drink_ out of the Custis property!"




CHAPTER V.

THE BOG-ORE TRACT.


Resolution of character and executive power had been trifled away by
Judge Custis. The trader had concluded their interview with a decision
and fierceness that left paralysis upon the gentleman's mind. He saw, in
sad fancy, the execution served upon his furniture, the amazement of his
wife, the pallor of his daughter, the indignation of his sons. He also
shrank before the impending failure of his furnace and abandonment of
the bog-ore tract, on which he had raised so much state and local fame;
people would say: "Custis was a fool, and deceived himself, while old
Steeple-top Milburn played upon the Custises' vanity, and turned them
into the street."

"No doubt," thought the Judge, "that fellow, Milburn, can get anything
when he gets my house. The poor folks' vote he may command, because he
is of their class. He is a lender to many of the rich. Who could have
suspected his intelligence? His address, too? He handled me as if I were
a forester and he a judge. A very, very remarkable man!" finished Judge
Custis, taking the last of the brandy.

He was interrupted by the entrance of Samson Hat.

"Where's your master, boy?" asked the Judge.

"He's gone up to de ole house, Judge, where his daddy and mammy died.
It's de place where I hides after my fights."

"May the ague strike him there! Let the bilious sweat from the mill-pond
be strong to-night, that, like Judas of old, his bowels may drop out!
But, no," continued the irresolute man, "I have no right to hate him."

"Judge," softly said the old negro, "my marster is a sick man. He ain't
happy like you an' me. He's 'bitious. He's lonely. Dat's enough to spile
angels. But a gooder man I never knowed, 'cept in de onpious sperrit.
He's proud as Lucifer. He's full of hate at Princess Anne and all de
people. Your darter may git a better man, not a pyorer one."

"Purity goes a very little way," exclaimed the Judge, "on the male side
of marriage contracts. It's always assumed, and never expected. You need
not remember, Samson, that I expressed any anger at your master!"

"My whole heart, judge, is to see him happy. Hard as he is, dat man has
power to make him loved. Your darter might go farder and fare wuss! I
wish her no harm, God knows!"

The negro said an humble good-night, and the Judge lay down upon his bed
to think of the dread alternatives of the coming week; but, voluptuous
even in despair, he slept before he had come to any conclusion.

Samson Hat walked up the side of the mill-pond on a sandy road, divided
from the water by a dense growth of pines. The bullfrogs and insects
serenaded the forest; the furnace chimney smoked lurid on the midnight.
At the distance of half a mile or more an old cabin, in decay, stood in
a sandy field near the road; it had no door in the hollow doorway, no
sash in the one gaping window; the step was broken leading to the sill,
and some of the weather-boarding had rotted from the skeleton. The old
end-chimney bore it toughly up, however, and the low brick props under
the corners stood plumb. Within lay a single room with open beams, a
sort of cupboard stairway projecting over the fireplace, and another
door and window were in the rear. Before this fireplace sat Meshach
Milburn on an old chair, fairly revealed by the light of some of the
burning weather-boarding he had thrown upon the hearth. On the hearth
was a little heap of the bog iron ore and a bottle.

"Come in, Samson!" he called. "Don't think me turned drunkard because I
am taking this whiskey. I drink it to keep out the malaria, and partly
as a communion cup; for to-night the barefooted ghosts who have drooped
and withered here are with me in spirit."

"Dey was all good Milburns who lived heah, marster," said the negro.
"Dey had hard times, but did no sin. Dey shook wid chills and fevers,
not wid conscience."

"I shall shake with neither," said the money-lender. "Go up into the
loft, and sleep till you are called. I want the horses early for
Princess Anne!"

The negro obeyed without remark, and disappeared behind the
cupboard-like door. Milburn sat before the fire, and looked into it
long, while a procession of thoughts and phantoms passed before it.

He saw a poor family of independent Puritans setting sail at different
dates from English seaports. Some were indentured servants, hoping for a
career; others were avoiding the civil wars; others were small political
malefactors, noisy against the oppressions of their hero, Cromwell, and
conspirators against his power; and, thrown by him in English jails,
were only delivered to be sold into slavery, driven through the streets
of market-towns, placed on troop ships between the decks, among the
horses, and set up at auction in Barbadoes, like the blacks; whence they
in time continued onward westward. One, the fortunate possessor of some
competence, sailed his own ship across the Atlantic, and delivered up to
Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being
suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic
colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him
down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would
not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods
upon the ploughshare, and fell back again into the furrow.

As Meshach Milburn thought of these things he took up a portion of the
bog ore from the hearth.

"Here is iron," he said, thoughtfully, "true iron, which makes the blood
red, moulds into infinite forms, nails houses together, binds wheels,
and casts into cannon and ball. But this iron ran into a bog, formed low
combinations, and had no other mould than twigs and leaves afforded. Its
volcanic origin was forgotten when it ran with sand and gravel away from
the mountain vein and upland ore along the low, alluvial bar, till, like
an oyster, the iron is dredged from the stagnant pool, impure,
inefficacious, corrupted. So is it with man, whose magnetic spirit
follows the dull declivity to the barren sandbars of the world, and
lodges there. I am of the bog ores; but that exists which will flux with
me, clean me of rust, and transmit my better quality to posterity. O,
youth, beauty, and station--lovely Vesta! for thee I will be iron!"

Milburn looked around the single room inquiringly. He placed his finger
upon the crevices in the weather-boarding; he opened the little closet
below the stairs, and a weasel dashed out and shot through the door; he
ascended the steep, short stairs, and with a torch examined the black
shingles, but nothing was there except a litter of young owls, whose
parents had gone poaching. Then, returning, he searched on every open
beam and rotting board, as if for writing.

"They could not write!" he thought. "Nothing is left to me, not even a
sign, down a century and a half, to tell that I had parents!"

As he spoke he felt an object move behind him, and, looking back, the
shadow of the Entailed Hat was dancing on the wall. As he threw his head
back, so did it; as he retired from it, the hat enlarged, until the
little room could hardly hold its shadow. Retiring again, he lifted it
from his head with bitter courtesy, and the shadow did the same. The man
and the shadow looked each at a peaked hat and stroked it.

"This is everything," exclaimed Milburn. "The hundred humble heads are
at rest in the sand; one grave-stone would mock them all. But once the
family brain expanded to a hat, and that survived the race. I am the
Quaker who respects his hat, the Cardinal who is crowned with it; yes,
and the dunce who must wear it in his corner!"

Then the picture of his parents arose upon his sight: a cheerful father,
with two or three old slaves, ploughing in the deep sand, to drop some
shrivelled grains of corn, or tinkering a disordered mill-wheel that
moved a blacksmith's saw. Ever full of confidence in nothing which could
increase, credulous and sanguine, tender and laborious, Milburn's sire
nursed his forest patches as if they were presently to be rich
plantations, and was ever "pricing" negroes, mules, tools, and
implements, in expectation of buying them. Nothing could diminish his
confidence but disease and old age. He heard of the great "improvement"
on the Furnace tract, and took his obedient wife and brood there. As the
laborers pulled out the tussocks and roots, encrusted with iron, from
the swamp and creek, fever and ague came forth and smote them both.

How wretched that scene when, almost too haggard to move, father and
mother, in this one bare room where Meshach sat, groaning amid their
many offspring, saw death with weakness creep upon each other--death
without priest or doctor, without residue or cleanliness--the death the
million die in lowly huts, yet, oh, how hard!

"Haste, sonny, _good_ boy," the frightened father had said, knowing not
how ill he was, in his dependence on his wife; "take the horse, and ride
into Snow Hill for the doctor. Poor mother is dreadful sick!"

Then, leaping upon the lean old horse, bare-backed and with a rope
bridle, Meshach had pushed through the deep sand, bareheaded and
barefooted, and almost crazy with excitement, until he entered the
shining streets of the sandhilled town, and sensitively rushed into the
doctor's office, crying, "Daddy and mammy is sick, at the Furnace!" and
told his name, and wheeled, and fled.

But, as the boy rode home, more slowly, past the river full of
splutter-docks, the yellow masts of vessels rising above the woods, the
flat fields of corn everywhere bounded by forest, and the small white
houses of the better farmers, and at last entered the murmurous,
complaining woods, he saw but one thing--his mother.

Was she to disappear from the lonely clearing, and leave only the hut
and its orphans? she, who kept heaven here below, and was the saints,
the arts, the all-sufficient for her child? With her there could be no
poverty; without her riches would be only more sand. With a little
molasses she made Christmas kingly with a cake. She could name a little
chicken "Meshach," and every egg it laid was a new toy. A mocking-bird
caught in the swamp became one of the family by her kindness; would it
ever sing again? The religion they knew was all of her. The poor slaves
saw no difference in mistresses while she was theirs. In sickness she
was in her sphere--health itself had come. And once, the tenderest
thing in life, when his father and she had quarrelled, and the light of
love being out made the darkness of poverty for the only time visible,
Meshach saw her weeping, and he could not comfort her.

Then, blinded by tears, he lashed his nag along, and entered the low
door. She was dead!

"Sonny, mammy's gone!" the wretched father groaned; the little children,
huddling about the form, lifted their wail; the mocking-bird could find
no note for this, and was hushed.

Milburn arose; the fire was low. He walked to the door, and there was a
sign of day; the all-surrounding woods of pine were still dark, but on
the sandy road and hummock-field some light was shining, like
hopefulness against hope; the farm was ploughed no more; the ungrateful
centuries were left behind and abandoned, like old wilderness
battle-fields, so sterile that their great events remain ever unvisited.

"Ho! Samson, boy! It is time!"

"Yes, marster!" answered the negro in the loft.

As the negro gathered himself up and passed down the stairs, he saw
Meshach Milburn before the fire, stirring the coals. Passing out, Samson
stood a moment at the gate, and lounged up the road, not to lose his
master. As he stood there, flames burst out of the old hut and glistened
on the evergreen forest, lighting the tops of the mossy cypresses in the
mill-pond, and revealing the forms of the sandy fields. Before he could
start back Samson saw his master's figure go round and round the house,
lighting the weather-boarding from place to place with a torch; and then
the low figure, capped with the long hat, came up the road as if at
mighty strides, so lengthened by the fire.

"No need of alarm, boy!" exclaimed the filial incendiary. "Henceforth my
only ancestral hall is _here_!"

He held the ancient tile up in the light of the blaze.

"Ah, marster!" said the negro, "yo' hat will never give comfort like a
home, fine as de hat may be, mean as de roof! De hat will never hold two
heads, and dat makes happiness."

"The hat, at least," answered Milburn, bitterly, "will cover me where I
go. Such rotted roofs as that was make captives of bright souls."

They looked on the fire in silence a few minutes.

"You have burnt me out, boss," said old Samson, finally. "I ain't got no
place to go an' hide when I fights, now. It makes me feel solemn."

"Peace!" replied Meshach Milburn. "Now for the horses and Princess
Anne!"




CHAPTER VI.

THE CUSTISES RUINED.


Vesta Custis, dressing in her chamber, heard early wheels upon the
morning air, and looking through the blinds saw a double team coming up
the road from Hardship.

"Mother," she said, "is that father coming, yonder? No, it is not his
driver."

"Why, Vesta!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis, "that is old Milburn's man."

"Samson Hat? so it is. What is he doing with two horses?"

Here Vesta laughed aloud, and began to skip about in her long, slender,
worked slippers, whose insteps would spare a mouse darting under.

"Mamma, it is Milburn himself, in a hack and span. See there; the
steeple-top hat, copper buckle and all! Isn't he too funny for anything!
But, dear me! he is staring right up at this window. Let us duck!"

Vesta's long, ivory-grained arms, divided from her beautiful shoulders
only by a spray of lace, pulled her mother down.

"Don't be afraid, dear! he can see nothing but the blinds. Perhaps he is
looking for the Judge."

Vesta rose again in her white morning-gown, like a stag rising from a
snow-drift. A long, trembling movement, the result of tittering, passed
down the graceful column of her back.

"He sits there like an Indian riding past in a show, mamma! Did you ever
see such a hat?"

"I think it must be buggy by this time," said the mother; and both of
them shook with laughter again. "Unless," added Mrs. Custis, "the bugs
are starved out."

"Poor, lonely creature," said Vesta, "he can only wear such a hat from
want of understanding."

"His _understanding_ is good enough, dear. He has the green gaiters on."

They laughed again, and Vesta's hair, shaken down by her merriment, fell
nearly to her slipper, like the skin of some coal-black beast, that had
sprung down a poplar's trunk.

"Ah! well," exclaimed Vesta, as her maid entered and proceeded to wind
up this satin cordage on her crown, "what men are in their minds, can
woman know? Old ladies, not unfrequently, wear their old coal-scuttle
bonnets long past the fashion, but it is from want. This man is his own
master and not poor. His companion is a negro, and his taste a mouldy
hat, old as America. How happy are we that it is not necessary to pry
into such minds! A little refinement is the next blessing to religion."

"Your father's mind is a puzzle, too, Vesta. He has everything which
these foresters lack,--education, society, standing, and comforts. But
he returns to the forest, like an opossum, the moment your eye is off
him. He can't be traced up like this man, by his hat. I think it's a
shame on you, particularly. If he don't come home this day, I shall send
for my brother and force an account of my property from Judge Custis!"

The wife sat down and began to cry.

"I'll take the carriage after breakfast, mamma, and seek him at the
Furnace or wherever he may be. Those bog ores have given him a great
deal of trouble."

"I wish I had never heard of bog ore," exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "When the
money was in bank, there was no ore about it. He goes to the forest
looking like a magistrate and a gentleman; he always comes back looking
like a bog-trotter and a drunkard. There must be _women_ in it!"

Here, in an impulse of weak rage, the poor lady got up and walked to her
mirror and looked at her face. Apparently satisfied that such charms
were trampled on, she dried her tears altogether, and resumed:

"Ginny, go out of the room! (to the neat mulatto lass). Vesta, my dear
daughter, I would not cast a stain upon you for the world; but flesh and
blood _will_ cry out. If your father don't do better I will separate
from him, and leave Princess Anne!"

"Why, _mother_!"

The daughter's bright eyes were large and startled now, and their
steel-blue tint grew plainer under her rich black eyebrows.

"I will do it, if I die, unless he reforms!"

"Why, mother!"

Vesta stood with her lips parted, and her beautiful teeth just lacing
the coral of the lip. She could say no more for a long moment. Rising as
she spoke, with her head thrown back, and her mould the fuller and a
pallor in her cheeks, she looked the Eve first hearing the Creator's
rebuke.

"A separation in this family?" whispered Vesta. "It would scandalize all
Maryland. It would break my heart."

"Darling daughter, my heart must be considered sometimes. I was
something before I was a Custis. I am a woman, too."

Vesta, still pale, crossed to her mother's side and kissed her.

"Don't, don't, mamma, ever harbor a thought like that again. You, who
have been so brave and patient longer than I have lived!"

"Ah, Vesta, it is the length of injury that wears us out! What if
something should happen to us? None are so unfit to bear poverty as we."

"We cannot be poor," said the daughter, soothingly. "Don't you remember,
mother, where it says: 'As thy day, so shall thy strength be'?".

"My child," Mrs. Custis replied, "your day is young. Life looks hopeful
to you. I am growing old, and where is the arm on which I should be
leaning? What are we but two women left? There is another passage on
which I often think when we sit so often alone: 'Two women shall be
grinding at the mill: the one shall be taken and the other left!' Is
that you, or is it I? Listen, my child! it is time that you should feel
the melancholy truth! Your father's habits have mastered him. He is
beyond reclamation!"

Vesta was kneeling, and she slowly raised her head and looked at her
mother, with her nostrils dilated. Mrs. Custis felt uneasy before the
aroused mind of her child.

"Don't look at me so, Vesta," the poor lady pleaded. "I thought you
ought to know it."

"How dare you say that of my father? Of Judge Custis?"

As they were in this suspense of feeling, wheels were heard. The
daughter went to the window and looked down, and then returned to her
mother's ear.

"Hush, mother, it is papa. Now, wash your eyes at the toilet. Let us
meet him cheerfully. Never say again that he is beyond reclamation,
while we can try!"

A kiss smoothed Mrs. Custis's countenance. Vesta was dressed for
breakfast in a few moments, and descended to the library and was
received in her father's arms. He held her there a long while, and held
her close, and by little fits renewed his embrace, but she felt that his
breath was feverish and his arms trembled. Looking up at him she saw,
indeed, that he was flushed, yet haggard and careworn.

"Vessy," he spoke with a feeble attempt to smile, "I want a glass of
brandy. Mine gave out at the Furnace, and the morning ride has weakened
me. Where is the key?"

She looked at him with a half-glance, so that he might not suspect, as
if to measure his need of stimulant. Then, without a word, she led the
way to the dining-room and unlocked the liquor closet, and turned her
back lest he might not drink his need from sensitiveness.

"Naughty man," said Vesta, standing off and looking at him when he was
done. "I was going down for you to the Furnace after breakfast. We will
have no more of this truantry. Mamma and I have set our feet down! You
must come back from the Furnace every night, and go again in the
morning, like other business men. Be very kind to mamma this morning,
sir! She feels your neglect."

Vesta had already rung for the Judge's valet, who now appeared, drew off
his boots, supplied his slippers and dressing-gown, and led the way to
his bath. In a quarter of an hour he reappeared, looking better, and he
irresolutely turned again towards the dining-room, smiling suggestively
at Vesta.

"Not that way," spoke she. "Here is mamma, and we are ready for prayers.
Here is the place in the Bible."

They all went to the family room, where the dressing-maids of Vesta and
her mother were waiting for the usual morning prayers. Vesta placed the
open Bible on her father's knee, and he began absently and stumblingly
to read. It was in the book of Samuel, and seemed to be some old Jewish
mythology. He suddenly came to a verse which arrested his sensibilities
by its pathos:

"'And David sent messengers to Ish-bosheth, Saul's son, saying, Deliver
me my wife Michal.... And Ish-bosheth sent, and took her from her
husband, even from Phaltiel, the son of Laish. And her husband went with
her along weeping behind her.... Then said Abner unto him: Go, return.
And he returned.'"

Judge Custis saw at once the picture this compact history aroused. The
inexorable David, perhaps, had married another's love. Occasion had
arisen to embitter her kin, and they took her back and gave her in
happiness to her pining lover. But, again, the man of correct habits
triumphed over the sons of the king, and despatched Abner to tear his
wife from her true husband's arms. Poor Phaltiel followed her weeping,
until ordered to go back--and back he went, forever desolate.

The scene recalled the brutal demand of his creditor upon his child. The
Judge's eyes silently o'erflowed, and he could not see.

Vesta had watched him closely, as her silent magistracy detected a great
anxiety or illness in her father. Lest her mother might also notice it,
she interposed in the lesson, as was her habit, by reading the Episcopal
form of prayer, in which they all bent their heads. Once or twice, as
she went on, she detected a suppressed sob, especially at the paragraph:
"Thou who knowest the weakness and corruption of our nature, and the
manifold temptations which we daily meet with, we humbly beseech thee to
have compassion on our infirmities and to give us the constant
assistance of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be effectually restrained
from sin and excited to our duty!"

They went to the breakfast-table, and the Judge's countenance was down.
He bit off some toast and filled his mouth with tea, but could not
swallow. A hand softly touched his elbow, and, looking there, he saw a
wine-glass full of brandy softly glide to the spot. As he looked up and
saw the rich, yearning face of his dark-eyed daughter tenderly
consulting his weakness, his heart burst forth; he leaned his head upon
the table and cried, between drink and grief:

"Darling, we are ruined!"

Mrs. Custis at once arose, and looked frightenedly at the Judge. Vesta
as quickly turned to the servants and motioned them to go.

"No, let them hear it!" raved Judge Custis, perceiving the motion. "They
are interested, like us. They must be sold, too. Faithful servants!
Perhaps it may warn them to escape in time!"

The servants, bred like ladies, quietly left the room.

Mrs. Custis, growing paler, exclaimed:

"Daniel Custis, have you lost everything in that furnace?"

"Everything!"

"And my money, too?"

"Yes."

"Merciful God!"

Before the weak lady could fall Vesta's arm was around her, and her
finger on the table-bell. Servants entered and Mrs. Custis was carried
out, her daughter following.

When Vesta returned her father was walking up and down the floor with
his long silk handkerchief in both hands, weeping bitterly, and speaking
broken syllables. She looked at him a moment with all the might of a
daughter, first called on to act alone in a great crisis. The feeling
she was wont to hold towards him, of perfect pride, had received a blow
in her mother's expression: "Your father's habits have mastered him
beyond reclamation."

Could this be true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was
beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not
pierce, nor Hope overtake? _Her_ father, the first gentleman in
Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray
of heaven to beam upon his grave!

She saw his danger now: it was written on his face, where the image of
God shone dim that had once been crowned there. Hair thinner, and very
gray; the rich, dark eyes intimidated, as if manly confidence was gone;
the skin no more the pure scroll of regular life written in the healthy
fluid of the heart, but faded, yet spotted with alcohol; on the nose and
lips signs of coarser sensuality; the large skeleton bent and the
nervous temperament shattered. This father had been until this moment
Vesta's angel. Now, there might not be an angel in the universe to fly
to his rescue. Deep, dreadful humility descended into the daughter's
spirit.

"God forgive me!" she thought, "how blind and how proud and sinful I
have been!"

She walked over to her father tenderly and kissed him, and then, drawing
his weaker inclination by hers, brought him to a sofa, placed a pillow
for him, and made him stretch his once proud form there. Procuring a
bowl of water, she washed his face free of tears with a napkin, and
bathed it in cologne. The voluptuous nature of the Judge yielded to the
perfume and the easy position, and he sobbed himself to sleep like an
exhausted child.

Sitting by the sleeping bankrupt, watching his breast rise and fall, and
hearing his coarse snoring, as if fiends within were snarling in rivalry
for the possession of him, Vesta felt that the life which was
unconscious there was the fountain of her own, and, loving no man else,
she felt her heart like a goldfish of that fountain, go around and
around it throbbingly.

Then first arose the wish, often in woman's life repeated, to have been
born a man and know how to help her father. That suggested that she had
brothers who ought to be summoned, and confer with their father; but now
it occurred to her that every one of them had leaned upon him; and,
though conscious that it was wicked, Vesta felt her pride rise against
the thought that any being outside of that house, even a brother, should
know of its disgrace.

What could she do? She thought of all her jewels, her riding mare, her
watch, her father's own gifts, and then the thought perished that these
could help him.

Could she not earn something by her voice, which had sung to such
praises? Alas! that voice had lost the ingredient of hope, and she
feared to unclose her lips lest it might come forth in agony, crying,
"God, have mercy!"

"I have nothing," said Vesta to herself; "except love for these two
martyrs, my father and mother. No, nothing can be done until he awakens
and tells me the worst. Meantime it would be wicked for me to increase
the agitation already here, and where I must be the comforter."




CHAPTER VII.

JACK-O'-LANTERN IRON.


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.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE HAT FINDS A RACK.


Meshach Milburn had locked the store after writing some letters, and had
taken the broad street for Judge Custis's gate. The news of his
disappearance towards the Furnace, with an extravagant livery team, had
spread among all the circle around the principal tavern, and they were
discussing the motive and probabilities of the act, with that deep inner
ignorance so characteristic of an instinctive society. Old Jimmy
Phoebus, a huge man, with a broad face and small forehead, was called
upon for his view.

"It's nothin' but a splurge," said Jimmy; "sooner or later everybody
splurges--shows off! Meshach's jest spilin' with money and he must have
a splurge--two hosses and a nigger. If it ain't a splurge I can't tell
what ails him to save my life."

A general chorus went up of "Dogged if I kin tell to save my life!"

Levin Dennis, the terrapin-buyer, made a wild guess, as follows:

"Meshach, I reckon, is a goin' into the hoss business. He's a ben in
everything else, and has tuk to hosses. If it tain't hosses, I can't
tell to save my life!"

All the lesser intellects of the party executed a low chuckle, spun
around half-way on their boot-heels and back again, and muttered: "Not
to save my life!"

Jack Wonnell, wearing one of the new bell-crowns, and barefooted, and
looking like a vagrant who had tried on a militia grenadier's imposing
bearskin hat, let off this irrelevant _addendum_:

"Ole Milbun's gwyn to see a gal. Fust time a man changes his regler
course wilently, it's a gal. I went into my bell-crowns to git a gal.
Milbun's gwyn get a gal out yonda in forest. If that ain't it, can't
tell to save m' life!"

The smaller fry, not being trained to suggestion, grinned, held their
mouths agape, executed the revolution upon; one heel, and echoed:
"Dogged ef a kin tell t' _save_ m' life!".

"He's a comin', boys, whooep!" exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus. "Now we'll
all take off our hats an' do it polite, for, by smoke! thar's goin' to
be hokey-pokey of some kind or nuther in Prencess Anne!"

The smallish man in the Guy Fawkes hat and the old, ultra-genteel,
greenish gaiters, walked towards them with his resinous bold eyes to the
front, his nose informing him of what was in the air like any silken
terrier's, and yet with a pallor of the skin as of a sick person's, and
less than his daily expression of hostility to Princess Anne.

"He's got the ager," remarked Levin Dennis, "them's the shakes, comin'
on him by to-morrey, ef I know tarrapin bubbles!"

The latter end only of the nearest approach to profanity current in that
land was again heard, fluttering around: "to _save_ my life!"

Jimmy Phoebus had the name of being descended from a Greek pirate, or
patriot, who had settled on the Eastern Shore, and Phoebus looked it
yet, with his rich brown complexion, broad head, and Mediterranean eyes.
"Good-afternoon, Mr. Milburn!" spoke Jimmy, loud and careless.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Phoebus. Gentlemen, good-afternoon!"

As he responded, with a voice hardly genial but placating, Milburn
lifted his ancient and formidable hat, and in an instant seemed to come
a century nearer to his neighbors. His stature was reduced, his
unsociableness seemed modified; he now looked to be a smallish,
friendless person, as if some ownerless dog had darted through the
street, and heard a kind chirp at the tavern door, where his reception
had been stones. His voice, with a little tremor in it, emboldened Levin
Dennis also to speak:

"Look out for fevernager this month, Mr. Milburn!"

Meshach bowed his head, gliding along as if bashfully anxious to pass.

"Nice weather for drivin'!" added Jack Wonnell, having also taken off
his own tile of frivolity, to feel the effect; but this remark was
regarded by the group as too forward, and a low chorus ran round of
"Jack Wonnell can't help bein' a fool to save his life!"

Milburn said to himself, passing on: "Are those voices kinder than
usually, or am I more timid? What is it in the air that makes everything
so acute, and my cheeks to tingle? Am I sick, or is it Love?"

The word frightened him, and the sand under his feet seemed to crack; a
woodpecker in an old tree tapped as if it was the tree's old heart
quickened by something; the houses all around looked like live objects,
with their windows fixed upon his walk, like married folks' eyes. As he
came in sight of Judge Custis's residence, so expressive of old respect
and long intentions, the money-lender almost stopped, so mild and
peacefully it looked at him--so undisturbed, while he was palpitating.

"Why this pain?" thought Milburn. "Am I afraid? That house is mine. Do I
fear to enter my own? And yet it does not fear me. It has been there so
long that it has no fears, and every window in it faces benignant to my
coming. The three gables survey yonder forest landscape like three old
magistrates on the bench, administering justice to a county where never
till now was there a ravisher!"

The thought produced a moment's intellectual pride in him, like lawless
power's uneasy paroxysm. "It is the Forest these gentles have to fear
to-day!" he thought, resentfully, then stopped, with another image his
word aroused:

"What has that forest ever felt of injury or hate, with every cabin-door
unlatched, no robber feared by any there, the blossoms on the negro's
peachtree, the ripe persimmons on the roadside, plenteous to every
forester's child, and humility and affection making all richer, without
a dollar in the world, than I, the richest upstart of the forest,
compelled to buy affection, like an indifferent slave!"

A large dog at Custis's home, seeing him walk so slowly, came down the
path to the gate, also walking slow, and showed neither animosity nor
interest, except mechanically to walk behind him towards the door.

"The dog knows me," thought the quickened heart of Meshach, "from
life-long seeing of me, but never wagged his tail at me in all that
time. Could I acquire the heart even of this dog, though I might buy
him? My debtor's step would still be most welcome to him, and he would
eat my food in strangeness and fear."

Milburn walked up the steps, and sounded the substantial brass knocker.
It struck four times, loud and deep, and the stillness that followed was
louder yet, like the unknown thing, after sentence has been passed. He
seemed to be there a very long time with his heart quite vacant, as if
the debtor's knocker had scared every chatterer out of it, and yet his
temples and ears were ringing. He was thinking of sounding the knocker
again, when a lady's servant, partly white, rolled back the bolt, and
bowed to his question whether the Judge was in.

He entered the broad hall of that distinguished residence, and taking
the Entailed Hat from his head, hung it up at last, where better
head-coverings had been wont to keep equal society, on a carved mahogany
rack of colonial times. The venerable object, once there, gave a common
look to everything, as Meshach thought, and deepened his personal sense
of unworthiness. He tried to feel angry, but apprehension was too strong
for passion even to be simulated.

"O, discriminating God!" he felt, within, "is it not enough to create us
so unequal that we must also cringe in spirit, and acknowledge it! I
expected to feel triumphant when I lodged my despised hat in this man's
house, but I feel meaner than before."

The room, whose door was opened by the lady's maid, was the library,
containing three cumbrous cases of books, and several portraits in oil,
with deep, gilded frames, a map of Virginia and its northeastern
environs, including all the peninsula south of the Choptank river and
Cape Henlopen; and near the door was a tall clock, that a giant might
stand in, solemnly cogging and waving time, and giving the monotony of
everlasting evening to the place, which was increased by the flickering
fire of wood on the tall brass fire-irons, before which some
high-backed, wide, comfortable leather chairs were drawn, all worn to
luxurious attitudes, as if each had been the skin of Judge Custis and
his companions, recently evacuated.

A woman's rocking-chair was disposed among them, as though every other
chair deferred to it. This was the first article to arrest Milburn's
attention, so different, so suggestive, almost a thing of superstition,
poised, like a woman's instinct and will, upon nothing firm, yet, like
the sphere it moved upon, traversing a greater arc than a giant's seat
would fill. Purity and conquest, power and welcome, seemed to abide
within it, like the empty throne in Parliament.

Milburn, being left alone, touched the fairy rocker with his foot. It
started so easily and so gracefully, that, when it died away, he pressed
his lips to the top of it, nearest where her neck would be, and
whispered aloud, with feeling, "God knows that kiss, at least, was
pure!"

He looked at the portraits, and, though they were not inscribed, he
guessed at them all, right or wrong, from the insight of local lore or
envious interpretation.

"Yon saucy, greedy, superserviceable rogue," thought Meshach, "with wine
and beef in his cheeks, and silver and harlotry in his eye, was the
Irish tavern-keeper of Rotterdam, who kept a heavy score against the
banished princes whom Cromwell's name ever made to swear and shiver, and
they paid him in a distant office in Accomac, where they might never
see him and his bills again, and there they let him steal most of the
revenue, and, of course, his loyalty was in proportion to his booty.
Many a time, no doubt, he was procurer for both royal brothers, Charles
and James, making his tavern their stew, with Betty Killigrew, or Lucy
Walters, or Katy Peg, or even Anne Hyde, the mother of a queen--of her
who was the Princess Anne, godmother of our worshipful town here. I have
not read in vain," concluded Meshach, "because my noble townsmen drove
me to my cell!"

The next portrait was clothed in military uniform, with a higher type of
manhood, shrewd and vigilant, but magisterial. "That should be
Major-general John Custis," thought Milburn, looking at it, "son of John
the tapster, and a marrying, shifty fellow, who first began greatness as
a salt-boiler on these ocean islands, till his father's friend, Charles
II., in a merry mood, made Henry Bennet, the king's bastard son's
father-in-law, Earl of Arlington and lessee of Virginia. All the
province for forty shillings a year rent! Those were pure, economical
times, indeed, around the court. So salt-boiler John flunkeyed to
Arlington's overseers, named his farm 'Arlington,' hunted and informed
upon the followers of the Puritan rebel Bacon, then turned and fawned
upon King William, too. His grandchildren, all well provided for, spread
around this bay. So much for politics in a merchant's hands!"

The tone of Meshach's comment had somewhat raised his courage, and a
sense of pleasurable interest in the warm room and genial surroundings
led him to pass the time, which was of considerable length, quite
contentedly, till Judge Custis was ready.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, the steeple-top hat was giving some silent astonishment to
the house-servants, assembled to gaze upon it from the foot of the hall.
The neat chamber-servant, Virgie, had carried the wondrous information
to the colonnade that the dreadful creditor had come, and Roxy, the
table waiter, had carried it from the colonnade to the kitchen, where
the common calamity immediately produced a revolution against good
manners.

"Hab he got dat debbil hat on he head, chile?" inquired Aunt Hominy,
laying down the club with which she was beating biscuit-dough on the
block.

"Yes, aunty, he's left it on the hat-rack. I'm afraid to go past it to
the do'."

Aunt Hominy threw the club on the blistered bulk of dough, and retreated
towards the big black fireplace, with a face expressive of so much
fright and cunning humor together that it seemed about to turn white,
but only got as far as a pucker and twitches.

"De Lord a massy!" exclaimed Aunt Hominy, "chillen, le's burn dat hat in
de fire! Maybe it'll liff de trouble off o' dis yer house. We got de hat
jess wha' we want it, chillen. Roxy, gal, you go fotch it to Aunt
Hominy!"

The girl started as if she had been asked to take up a snake: "'Deed,
Aunt Hominy, I wouldn't touch it to save my life. Nobody but ole Samson
ever did that!"

"Go' long, gal!" cried Aunt Hominy, "didn't Miss Vessy hole dat ar' hat
one time, an' pin a white rose in it? Didn't he, dat drefful Meshach
Milbun, offer Miss Vessy a gole dollar, an' she wouldn' have none of his
gole? Dat she did! Virgie, you go git dat hat, chile! Poke it off de
rack wid my pot-hook heah. 'Twon't hurt you, gal! I'll sprinkle ye fust
wid camomile an' witch-hazel dat I keep up on de chimney-jamb."

Aunt Hominy turned towards the broadly notched chimney sides, where
fifty articles of negro pharmacy were kept--bunches of herbs, dried
peppers, bladders of seeds, and bottles of every mystic potency.

"Aunty," answered Virgie, "if I wasn't afraid of that Bad Man, I would
be afraid to move that hat, because Miss Vessy would be mortified.
Think of her seeing me treating a visitor's things like that. Why, I'd
rather be sold!"

"Dat hat," persisted Aunt Hominy, "is de ruin ob dis family. Dat hat,
gals, de debbil giv' ole Meshach, an' made him wear it fo' de gift ob
gittin' all de gole in Somerset County. Don't I know when he wore it
fust? Dat was when he begun to git all de gole. Fo' dat he had been po'
as a lizzer, sellin' to niggers, cookin' fo' heseff, an' no' count,
nohow. He sot up in de loft of his ole sto' readin' de Bible upside down
to git de debbil's frenship. De debbil come in one night, and says to
ole Meshach: 'Yer's my hat! Go, take it, honey, and measure land wid it,
and all de land you measure is yo's, honey!' An' Meshach's measured mos'
all dis county in. Jedge Custis's land is de last."

The relation affected both girls considerably, and the group of little
colored boys and girls still more, who came up almost chilled with
terror, to listen; but it produced the greatest effect on Aunt Hominy
herself, whose imagination, widened in the effort, excited all her own
fears, and gave irresistible vividness to her legend.

"How can his hat measure people's lands in, Aunty?" asked Virgie,
drawing Roxy to her by the waist for their mutual protection.

"Why, chile, he measures land in by de great long shadows dat debbil's
hat throws. Meshach, he sots his eyes on a good farm. Says he, 'I'll
measure dat in!' So he gits out dar some sun-up or sundown, when de sun
jest sots a'mos' on de groun, an' ebery tree an' fence-pos' and standin'
thing goes away over de land, frowin' long crooked shadows. Dat's de
time Meshach stans up, wid dat hat de debbil gib him to make him longer,
jest a layin' on de fields like de shadow of a big church-steeple. He
walks along de road befo' de farm, and wherever dat hat makes a mark on
de ground all between it an' where he walks is ole Meshach's land.
Dat's what he calls his mortgage!"

The children had their mouths wide open; the maids heard with faith only
less than fear.

"But, Aunt Hominy," spoke Roxy, "he never measured in Judge Custis's
house, and all of us in it, that is to be sold."

"Didn't I see him a doin' of it?" whispered Aunt Hominy, stooping as if
to creep, in the contraction of her own fears, and looking up into their
faces with her fists clinched. "He's a ben comin' along de fence on de
darkest, cloudiest nights dis long a time, like a man dat was goin' to
rob something, and peepin' up at Miss Vessy's window. He took de dark
nights, when de streets of Prencess Anne was clar ob folks, an' de dogs
was in deir cribs, an' nuffin' goin' aroun' but him an' wind an' cold
an' rain. One night, while he was watchin' Miss Vessy's window like a
black crow, from de shadow of de tree, I was a-watchin' of him from de
kitchen window. De moon, dat had been all hid, come right from behin' de
rain-clouds all at once, gals, an' scared him like. De moon was low on
de woods, chillen, an' as ole Meshach turned an' walked away, his
debbil's shadow swept dis house in. He measured it in dat night. It's
ben his ever since."

"Well," exclaimed Roxy, after a pause, "I know I wouldn't take hold of
that hat now."

"I am almost afraid to look at it," said Virgie, "but if Miss Vessy told
me to go bring it to her, I would do it."

"Le's us all go together," ventured Aunt Hominy, "and take a peep at it.
Maybe it won't hurt us, if we all go."

Aware that Judge Custis and his wife were not near, the little circle of
servants--Aunt Hominy, Virgie, Roxy, and the four children, from five to
fourteen years of age--filed softly from the kitchen through the covered
colonnade, and thence along the back passage to the end of the hall,
where they made a group, gazing with believing wonder at the King James
tile.

* * * Vesta Custis, having changed her morning robe for a walking-suit,
and slightly rearranged her toilet, and knelt speechless awhile to
receive the unknown will of Heaven, came down the stairs at last, in
time to catch a glimpse of half-a-dozen servants staring at a strange
old hat on the hall rack. They hastily fled at her appearance, but the
idea of the hat was also conveyed to her own fancy by their unwonted
behavior. She looked up an instant at the queer, faded article hanging
among its betters, and with a reminiscence of childhood, and of having
held it in her hand, there descended along the intervening years upon
the association, the odor of a rose and the impression of a pair of
bold, startled eyes gazing into hers. She opened the library door, and
the same eyes were looking up from her father's easy-chair.

"Mr. Milburn, I believe?" said Vesta, walking to the visitor, and
extending her hand with native sweetness.

He arose and bowed, and hardly saw the hand in the earnest look he gave
her, as if she had surprised him, and he did not know how to express his
bashfulness. She did not withdraw the hand till he took it, and then he
did not let it go. His strong, rather than bold, look, continuing, she
dropped her eyes to the hand that mildly held her own, and then she
observed, all calm as she was, that his hand was a gentleman's, its
fingers long and almost delicate, the texture white, the palm warm, and,
as it seemed to her, of something like a brotherly pressure, respectful
and gentle too.

As he did not speak immediately, Vesta returned to his face, far less
inviting, but peculiar--the black hair straight, the cheek-bones high,
no real beard upon him anywhere, the shape of the face broad and
powerful, and the chops long, while the yellowish-brown eyes, wide open
and intense, answered to the open, almost observant nostrils at the end
of his straight, fine nose. His complexion was dark and forester-like,
seeming to show a poor, unnutritious diet. He was hardly taller than
Vesta. His teeth were good, and the mouth rather small. She thought he
was uncertain what to say, or confused in his mind, though no sign of
fear was visible. Vesta came to his rescue, withdrawing her hand
naturally.

"I have seen you many times, Mr. Milburn, but never here, I think."

"No, miss, I have never been here." He hesitated. "Nor anywhere in
Princess Anne. You are the first lady here to speak to me."

His words, but not his tone, intimated an inferiority or a slight. The
voice was a little stiff, appearing to be at want for some corresponding
inflection, like a man who had learned a language without having had the
use of it.

"Will you sit, Mr. Milburn? You owe this visit so long that you will not
be in haste to-day. I hope you have not felt that we were inhospitable.
But little towns often encourage narrow circles, and make people more
selfish than they intend."

"You could never be selfish, miss," said Milburn, without any of the
suavity of a compliment, still carrying that wild, regarding gaze, like
the eyes of a startled ox.

Vesta faintly colored at the liberty he took. It was slightly
embarrassing to her, too, to meet that uninterpretable look of inquiry
and homage; but she felt her necessity as well as her good-breeding, and
made allowance for her visitor's want of sophistication. He was like an
Indian before a mirror, in a stolid excitement of apprehension and
delight. The most beautiful thing he ever saw was within the compass of
his full sight at last, and whether to detain it by force or persuasion
he did not know.

Her dark hair, silky as the cleanest tassels of the corn, fell as
naturally upon her perfect head as her teeth, white as the milky
corn-rows, moved in the May cherries of her lips. The delicate arches
of her brows, shaded by blackbirds' wings, enriched the clear sky of her
harmonious eyes, where mercy and nobility kept company, as in heaven.

"How could you know I was unselfish, Mr. Milburn?"

"Because I have heard you sing."

"Oh, yes! You hear me in our church, I remember."

"I have heard you every Sunday that you sung there for years," said
Meshach, with hardly a change of expression.

"Are you fond of music, Mr. Milburn?"

"Yes, I like all I have ever heard--birds and you."

"I will sing for you, then," said Vesta, taking the relief the talk
directed her to. A piano was in another room, but, to avoid changing the
scene, as well as to use a simpler accompaniment for an ignorant man's
ears, she brought her guitar, and, placing it in her lap, struck the
strings and the key, without waiting, to these tender words:

  "Oh, for some sadly dying note,
  Upon this silent hour to float,
  Where, from the bustling world remote,
    The lyre might wake its melody!
  One feeble strain is all can swell.
  From mine almost deserted shell,
  In mournful accents yet to tell
    That slumbers not its minstrelsy.

  "There is an hour of deep repose,
  That yet upon my heart shall close,
  When all that nature dreads and knows
    Shall burst upon me wondrously;
  Oh, may I then awake, forever,
  My harp to rapture's high endeavor;
  And, as from earth's vain scene I sever,
    Be lost in Immortality."

Vesta ceased a few minutes, and, her visitor saying nothing, she
remarked, with emotion.

"Those lines were written at my grandfather's house, in Accomac County,
by a young clergyman from New York, who was grandfather's rector, Rev.
James Eastburn. He was only twenty-two years old when he died, at sea,
of consumption. His is the only poetry I have ever heard of, Mr.
Milburn, written in our beautiful old country here."

"I wondered if I should ever hear you sing for me," spoke Milburn, after
hesitation. "Now it is realized, I feel sceptical about it. You are
there, Miss Custis, are you not?"

Vesta was puzzled. Under other circumstances she would have been amused,
since her humor could flow freely as her music. It faintly seemed to her
that the little odd man might be cracked in the head.

"Yes, indeed, Mr. Milburn. If it were a dream, I should have no
expression all this day but song. I think I never felt so sad to sing as
just now. Father is ill. Mamma is ill. I have become the business agent
of the family, and have heard within this hour that papa is deeply
involved. You are his creditor, are you not?"

Meshach Milburn bowed.

"What is the sum of papa's notes and mortgages? Is it more than he can
pay by the sacrifice of everything?"

"Yes. He has nothing to sell at forced sale which will bring anything,
but the household servants here; these maids in the family are
marketable immediately. You would not like to sell them?"

"Sell Virgie! She was brought up with me; what right have I to sell her
any more than she has to sell me?"

"None," said Milburn, bluntly, "but there is law for it."

"To sell Roxy, too, and old Aunt Hominy, and the young children! how
could I ever pray again if they were sold? Oh! Mr. Milburn, where was
your heart, to let papa waste his plentiful substance in such a
hopeless experiment? If my singing in the church has given you
happiness, why could it not move you to mercy? Think of the despair of
this family, my father's helpless generosity, my mother's marriage
settlement gone, too, and every other son and daughter parted from
them!"

"I never encouraged one moment Judge Custis's expenditure," said
Meshach, "though I lent him money. The first time he came to me to
borrow, my mind was in a liberal disposition, for you had just entered
it with your innocent attentions. I supposed he wanted a temporary
accommodation, and I gave it to him at the lowest rate one Christian
would charge another."

"You say that I influenced you to lend my father money? Why, sir, I was
a child. He has been borrowing from you since my earliest
recollections."

The creditor took from his breast-pocket a large leather wallet, and,
arising, laid its contents on the table. He opened a piece of folded
paper, and drew from it two objects; one a lock of blue-black hair like
his own, and the other a pressed and faded rose.

"This flower," said Milburn, with reverence, "Judge Custis's daughter
fastened in my derided hat. I kept it till it was dead, and laid it away
with my mother's hair, the two religious objects of my life. That faded
rose made me your father's creditor, Miss Custis."

Vesta took the rose, and looked at him with surprise and inquiry.

"Oh, why did not this flower speak for us?" she said; "to open your lips
after that, to save my father? Then you informed yourself, and knew that
he was hurrying to destruction, but still you gave him money at higher
interest."

Milburn looked at her with diminished courage, but sincerity, and
answered: "Your voice sang between us, Miss Custis, every time he came.
I did not admit to myself what it was, but the feeling that I was being
drawn near you still opened my purse to your father, till he has drained
me of the profits of years, which I gave him with a lavish fatality,
though grasping every cent from every source but that. I did know, then,
he could not probably repay me, but every Sabbath at the church you
sang, and that seemed some compensation. I was bewitched; indistinct
visions of gratitude and recognition from you filled the preaching with
concourses of angels, all bearing your image, and hovering above me. The
price I paid for that unuttered and ever-repelled hope has been
princely, but never grudged, and it has been pure, I believe, or Heaven
would have punished me. The more I ruined myself for your father, the
more successful my ventures were in all other places; if you were my
temptation, it had the favor or forgiveness of the God in whose temple
it was born."

Vesta arose also, with a frightened spirit.

"Do I understand you?" she said, with her rich gray eyes wide open under
their startled lashes. "My father has spoken of a degrading condition?
Is it to love you?"

For the first time Meshach Milburn dropped his eyes.

"I never supposed it possible for you to love me," he said, bitterly. "I
thought God might permit me some day to love you."

"Do you know what love is?" asked Vesta, with astonishment.

"No."

"How came you, then, to be interpreting my good acts so basely, carrying
even my childhood about in your evil imagination, and cursing my
father's sorrow with the threat of his daughter's slavery?"

Milburn heard with perfect humility these hard imputations.

"You have not loved, I think, Miss Custis?" he said, with a slight
flush. "I have believed you never did."

He raised his eyes again to her face.

"I loved my father above everything," faltered Vesta. "I saw no man,
besides, admiring my father."

"Then I displaced no man's right, coveting your image. Sometimes it
seemed you were being kept free so long to reward my silent worship. I
do not know what love is, but I know the gifts of God, as they bloom in
nature, repel no man's devotion. The flowers, the birds, and the forest,
delighted my childhood; my youth was spent in the study of myself and
man; at last a beautiful child appeared to me, spoke her way to my soul,
and it could never expel her glorious presence. All things became
subordinate to her, even avarice and success. She kept me a Christian,
or I should have become utterly selfish; she kept me humble, for what
was my wealth when I could not enter her father's house! I am here by a
destiny now; the power that called you to this room, so unexpectedly to
me, has borne us onward to the secret I dreaded to speak to you. Dare I
go further?"

She was trying to keep down her insulted feelings, and not say something
that should forever exasperate her father's creditor, but the
possibility of marrying him was too tremendous to reply.

"This moment is a great one," continued Milburn, firmly, "for I feel
that it is to terminate my visions of happiness, and of kindness as
well. You have expressed yourself so indignantly, that I see no thought
of me has ever lodged in your mind. Why should it have ever done so?
Though I almost dreamed it had, because you filled my life so many years
with your rich image, I thought you might have felt me, like an
apparition, stealing around this dwelling often in the dark and rain,
content with the ray of light your window threw upon the deserted
street. Now I see that I was a weak dunce, whose passion nature lent no
nerve of hers to convey even to your notice. Better for me that I had
hugged the debasing reality of my gold, and lost my eyes to everything
but its comfort!"

He looked towards the door. Vesta sat down in the fairy rocker, and
detained him.

"You have told me the feeling you think you had, Mr. Milburn. Poor as we
Custises are now, it will not do to be proud. How did you ever think
that feeling could be returned by me? My youth, my connections,
everything, would forbid me, without haughtiness, to see a suitor in
you. Then, you took no means to turn my attention towards you. You could
have been neighborly, had you desired. You did not even wear the
commonest emblems of a lover--"

She paused. Milburn said to himself:

"Ah! that accursed Hat."

The interruption ruffled his temper:

"I have had reasons, also proud, Miss Custis, to be consistent with my
perpetual self here. I will put the substantial merits of my case to
you, since I see that I am not likely to make myself otherwise
attractive. This house is already mine. The law will, in a few weeks,
put me in possession of your father's entire property. I shall change
outward circumstances with him in Princess Anne. He is too old to adopt
my sacrifices, and recover his situation; he may find some shifting
refuge with his sons and daughters, but, even if his spirit could brook
that dependence, it would be very unnecessary, when, by marrying his
creditor, you can retain everything he now has to make his family
respectable. I offer you his estate as your marriage portion!"

He took up from the table the notes her father had negotiated, and laid
them in her lap.

Vesta sat rocking slowly, and deeply agitated. She had in her mouth the
comfort and honor of her parents, which she could confer in a single
word. It was a responsibility so mighty that it made her tremble.

"Oh! what shall I say?" she thought. "It will be a sin to say 'Yes.' To
say 'No' would be a crime."

"You shall retain every feature of your home--your servants, your
mother, and her undiminished portion; your liberty in the fullest sense.
I will contribute to send your father to the legislature or to congress,
to sustain his pride, and keep him well occupied. The Furnace he may
appear to have sold to me, and I will accept the unpopularity of closing
it. I ask only to serve you, and inhabit your daily life, like one of
these negroes you are kind to, and if I am ever harsh to you, Miss
Vesta, I swear to surrender you to your family, and depart forever."

Vesta shook her head.

"There is no separation but one," she said, "when Heaven has been called
down to the marriage solemnity. It is before that act that we must
consider everything. How could I make you happy? My own happiness I will
dismiss. Yours must then comprehend mine. Kindness might make me
grateful, but gratitude will not satisfy your love."

"Yes," exclaimed Milburn, chasing up his advantage with tremulous ardor;
"the long famine of my heart will be thankful for a dry crust and a cup
of ice. Here at the fireside let me sit and warm, and hear the rustle of
your dress, and grow in heavenly sensibility. You will redeem a savage,
you will save a soul!"

"It is not the price I must pay to do this, I would have you consider,
sir," Vesta replied, with her attention somewhat arrested by his
intensity; "it is the price you are paying--your self-respect,
perhaps--by the terms on which you obtain me. It may never be known out
of this family that I married you for the sake of my father and mother.
But how am I to prevent you from remembering it, especially when you say
that I am the sum of your purest wishes? If your interest would consume
after you obtained me, we might, at least, be indifferent; but if it
grew into real love, would you not often accuse yourself?"

Meshach Milburn sat down, cast his large brown eyes upon the floor, and
listened in painful reflection.

"You cannot conceive I have had any real love for you?" he exclaimed,
dubiously.

"You have seen me, and desired me for your wife; that is all," said
Vesta, "that I can imagine. Lawless power could do that anywhere. To be
an obedient wife is the lot of woman; but love, such as you have some
glimmering of, is a mystic instinct so mutual, so gladdening, yet so
free, that the captivity you set me in to make me sing to you will
divide us like the wires of a cage."

"There is no bird I ever caught," said Meshach Milburn, "that did not
learn to trust me. Your comparison does not, therefore, discourage me.
And you have already sung for me, the saddest day of your life!"

A slight touch of nature in this revelation of her strange suitor called
Vesta's attention to the study of him again. With her intelligence and
sense of higher worth coming to her rescue, she thought: "Let me see all
that is of this Tartar, for, perhaps, there may be another way to his
mercy."

As she recovered composure, however, she grew more beautiful in his
sight, her dark, peerless charms filling the room, her kindling eyes
conveying love, her skin like the wild plum's, and her raven brows and
crown of luxuriant hair rising upon a queenly presence worthy of an
empress's throne. Such beauty almost made Milburn afraid, but the
energies of his character were all concentrated to secure it.

"Who _are_ you?" she asked, with a calm, searching look, cast from her
highest self-respect and alert intelligence. "Have you any relations or
connections fit to bring here--to this house, to me?"

"Not one that I know," said the forester. "I am nothing but myself, and
what you will make of me."

"Where were you born and reared?"

"The house does not stand which witnessed that misery," spoke Milburn,
with a flush of obdurate pride; "it was burned last night, not far from
the furnace which swallowed your father's substance."

"Why, I would be afraid of you, Mr. Milburn, if your errand here was not
so practical. Omens and wonders surround you. Birds forget their natural
life for you. Iron ceases to be occult when you take it up. Your
birthplace in this world disappears by fire the night before you
foreclose a mortgage upon a gentleman's daughter. Is all this sorcery
inseparable from that necromancer's Hat you wear in Princess Anne?"

She had touched the sensitive topic by a skilful approach, yet he
changed color, as if the allusion piqued him.

"Nature never rebuked my hat, Miss Vesta, and you are so like nature, it
will not occupy your thoughts. I recollect the day you decorated my old
hat; said I: 'perhaps this vagrant head-covering, after all its injuries
and wanderings, may some day find a peg beneath my own roof, and the
kind welcome of a lady like that little miss.' That was several years
ago, and to-day, for the first time, my hat is on the rack of your hall.
The long wish of the heart is not often denied. We are not responsible
for it. The only conspiracy I have plotted here, was that I did not
oppose most natural occurrences, all drawing towards this scene. My
magic was hope and humility. I dared to wear my ancestor's hat in the
face of a contemptuous and impertinent provincial public, and it gave me
the pride to persevere till I should bring it home to honors and to
noble shelter. If you despise my hat, you will despise me."

"Oh, no; Mr. Milburn! I try never to despise anything. If you wore your
family hat from some filial respect, it was, in part, piety. But was
that, indeed, your motive in being so eccentric?"

Milburn felt uneasy again. He hesitated, and said:

"In perfect truth, I fear not. There may have been something of revenge
in my mind. I had been grossly insulted."

"Is it not something of that revenge which instigates you here--even in
this profession of love?" exclaimed Vesta, judicially.

Meshach looked up, and the shadows cleared from his face.

"I can answer that truthfully, lady. Towards you, not an indignant
thought has ever harbored in my brain. It has been the opposite:
protection, worship, tender sensibility."

"Has that exceptional charity extended to my father?"

"No."

Vesta would have been exasperated, but for his candor.

"My father never insulted you, sir?"

"No, he patronized me. He meant no harm, but that old hat has worn a
deep place in my brain through carrying it so long, and it is a subject
that galls me to mention it. Yet, I must be consistent with my only
eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my
identity, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men
shall respect my hat before I die."

"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can
understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were
Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our
family share it with us. You had a family, then?"

Milburn shook his head.

"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a
parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not
even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to
hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage
panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like
the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more
than the woodpeckers in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events
more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek,
in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm,
scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes
with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn
through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyond the great
Cypress Swamp. They are dying, but never dead. The few who live expect
no recognition from me, and, happy in their poverty, envy me nothing I
have accumulated. My name has grown hard to them, my hat is the subject
of their superstitions, my ambition and success have lost me their
sympathy without giving me any other social compensation. You behold a
desperate man, a merciless creditor, a tussock of ore from the bogs of
Nassawongo, yet one whose only crimes have been to adore you, and to
wear his forefathers' hat."

"Is this pride, then, wholly insulted sensibility, Mr. Milburn?"

"I cannot say, Miss Custis. You may smile, but I think it is
aristocracy."

"I think so, too," exclaimed Vesta reflectively; "you are a proud man.
My father, who has had reason to be proud, is less an aristocrat, sir,
than you."

Milburn's flush came and stayed a considerable while. He was not
displeased at Vesta's compliment, though it bore the nature of an
accusation.

"You are aristocratic," explained Vesta, "because you adopted the
obsolete hat of your people. Whatever vanity led you to do it, it was
the satisfaction of some origin, I think."

She checked herself, seeing that she was entering into his affairs with
too much freedom.

"I suppose that somewhere, some time," spoke the strange visitor, "some
person of my race has been influential and prosperous. Indeed, I have
been told so. He was elevated to both the magistracy and the scaffold,
but my hat had even an older origin."

"Tell me about that ancestor," said Vesta, the heartache from his
greater errand instigating her to defer it, while she was yet barely
conscious that the man was original, if not interesting.

He told a singular tale, tracing his hat to Raleigh's times and through
Sir Henry Vane to America, till it became the property of Jacob
Milborne, the popular martyr who was executed in New York, and his
brethren driven into Maryland, bringing with them the harmless hat as
their only patrimony.[1]

Before he began, Milburn drew up his compact little figure and opened
the door to the hall. The wind or air from some of the large, cold
apartments of the long house, coming in by some crack or open sash, gave
almost a shriek, and scattered the fire in the chimney.

Vesta felt her blood chill a moment as her visitor re-entered with the
antediluvian hat, and placed it upon the table beneath the lamp.

It had that look of gentility victorious over decay, which suggested the
mummy of some Pharaoh, brought into a drawing-room on a learned
society's night. Vesta repressed a smile, rising through her pain, at
the gravity of the forester guest, who was about to demonstrate his
aristocracy through this old hat. It seemed to her, also, that the
portraits of the Custises, on the wall, carried indignant noses in the
air at their apparently conscious knowledge of the presence of some
unburied pretender, as if, in Westminster Abbey, the effigies of the
Norman kings had slightly aroused to feel Oliver Cromwell lying among
them in state.

The hat, Vesta perceived, was Flemish, such as was popular in England
while the Netherlands was her ally against the house of Spain, and,
stripped of its ornaments, was lengthened into the hat of the Puritans.

Vesta attempted to exert her liberality and perceive some beauty in this
hat, but the utmost she could admit was the tyranny of fashion over the
mind--it seemed, over the soul itself, for this old hat, inoffensive as
it was, weighed down her spirits like a diving-bell.

The man, without his hat, had somewhat redeemed himself from low
conversation and ideas, but now, that he brought this hat in and
associated his person with it, she shrank from him as if he had been a
triple-hatted Jew, peddling around the premises.

The obnoxious hat also exercised some exciting influence over Meshach
Milburn, if his changed manner could be ascribed to that article, for he
resumed his strong, wild-man's stare, deepened and lowered his voice,
and without waiting for any query or expression of his listener, told
the tale.




CHAPTER IX.

HA! HA! THE WOOING ON'T.


It was twilight when Meshach Milburn closed his story, and silence and
pallid eve drew together in the Custis sitting-room, resembling the two
people there, thinking on matrimony, the one grave as conscious
serpenthood could make him, the other fluttering like the charmed bird.
Vesta spoke first:

"How intense must be your head to create so many objects around it
within the world of a hat! You have only brought the story down a little
way towards our times."

"I began the tale of Raleigh out of proportion," said Milburn, "and it
grew upon the same scale, like the passion I conceived for you so
intensely at the outset, that in the climax of this night I am scarcely
begun."

"Yet, like Raleigh, I see the scaffold," said Vesta, with an attempt at
humor that for the first time broke her down, and she raised her hands
to her face to hush the burst of anguish. It would not be repressed, and
one low cry, deep with the sense of desertion and captivity, sounded
through the deepening room and smote Milburn's innermost heart. He
obeyed an impulse he had not felt since his mother died, starting
towards Vesta and throwing his arms around her, and drawing her to his
breast.

"Honey, honey," he whispered, kissing her like a child, "don't cry now,
honey. It will break my heart."

The act of nature seldom is misinterpreted; Vesta, having labored so
long alone with this obdurate man, her young faculties of the head
strained by the first encounter beyond her strength, accepted the
friendship of his sympathy and contrition, as if he had been her father.
In a few moments the paroxysm of grief was past, and she disengaged his
arms.

"You are not merciless," said Vesta. "Tell me what I must do! You have
broken my father down and he cannot come to my help. Take pity on my
inequality and advise me!"

"Alas! child," said Milburn, "my advice must be in my own interest,
though I wish I could find your confidence. I am a poor creature, and do
not know how. It is you who must encourage the faith I feel starting
somewhere in this room, like a chimney swallow that would fain fly out.
Chirrup, chirrup to it, and it may come!"

Standing a moment, trying to collect her thoughts and wholly failing,
Vesta accepted the confidence he held out to her with open arms.
Blushing as she had never blushed in her life, though he could not know
it in the evening dark, she walked to him and kissed him once.

"Will that encourage you to advise me like a friend?" she said.

"Alas! no," sighed Milburn fervently, "it makes me the more your unjust
lover. I cannot advise you away from me. Oh, let me plead for myself. I
love you!"

"Then what shall I do," exclaimed Vesta, in low tones, "if you are
unable to rise to the height of my friend, and my father is your slave?
Do you think God can bless your prosperity, when you are so hard with
your debtor? On me the full sacrifice falls, though I never was in your
debt consciously, and I have never to my remembrance wished injury to
any one."

"Would you accept your father's independence at the expense of the most
despised man in Princess Anne?" Milburn spoke without changing his kind
tone. "Would you let me give him the fruit of many years of hard toil
and careful saving, in order that I shall be disappointed in the only
motive of assisting him--the honorable wooing of his daughter?"

She felt her pride rising.

"Your father's debts to me are tens of thousands of dollars," continued
Milburn. "Do you ask me to present that sum to you, and retire to my
loneliness out of this bright light of home and family, warmth and
music, that you have made? That is the test you put my love to:
banishment from you. Will you ask it?"

"I have not asked for your money, sir," said Vesta. "Yet I have heard of
Love doing as much as that, relieving the anguish of its object, and
finding sufficient joy in the self-denying deed."

"I do not think you personally know of any such case, though you may
have read it in a novel or tract. Men have died, and left a fortune they
could no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a
considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and noble woman; but where did
you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every
endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his
sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What
would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl
new epithets after my hat?"

Vesta searched her mind, thinking she must alight upon some such example
there, but none suited the case. Meshach took advantage of her silence:

"The gifts of a lover are everywhere steps to love, as I have
understood. He makes his impression with them; they are expected.
Nothing creates happiness like a gift, and it is an old saying that
blessings await him who gives, and also her who takes, and that to seek
and ask and knock are praiseworthy."

"Oh," said Vesta, "but to be _bought_, Mr. Milburn? To be weighed
against a father's debts--is it not degrading?"

"Not where such respect and cherishing as mine will be. Rather exalt
yourself as more valuable to a miser than his whole lendings, and
greater than all your father's losses as an equivalent, and even then
putting your husband in debt, being so much richer than his account."

"Where will be my share of love in this world, married so?" asked Vesta.
"To love is the globe itself to a woman, her youth the mere atmosphere
thereof, her widowhood the perfume of that extinguished star; and all my
mind has been alert to discover the image I shall serve, the bright
youth ready for me, looking on one after another to see if it might be
he, and suddenly you hold between me and my faith a paper with my
father's obligations, and say: 'Here is your fate; this is your whole
romance; you are foreclosed upon!' How are you to take a withered heart
like that and find glad companionship in it? No, you will be
disappointed. It will recoil upon me that I sold myself."

"The image you waited for may have come," said Milburn undauntedly,
"even in me; for love often springs from an ambush, nor can you prepare
the heart for it like a field. I recollect a fable I read of a god
loving a woman, and he burst upon her in a shower of gold; and what was
that but a rich man's wooing? We get gold to equalize nobility in women;
beauty is luxurious, and demands adornment and a rich setting; the
richest man in Princess Anne is not good enough for you, and the mere
boys your mind has been filled with are more unworthy of being your
husband than the humble creditor of your father. Such a creation as Miss
Vesta required a special sacrifice and success in the character of her
husband. The annual life of this peninsula could not match you, and a
monster had to be raised to carry you away."

"You are not exactly a monster," Vesta remarked, with natural
compassion, "and you compliment me so warmly that it relieves the strain
of this encounter a little. Do not draw a woman's attention to your
defects, as she might otherwise be charmed by your voice."

"That also is a part of my sacrifice," said Meshach, "like the money
which I have accumulated. Without a teacher, but love and hope, I have
educated myself to be fit to talk to you. It is all crude now, like a
crow that I have taught to speak, but encouragement will make me
confident and saucy, and you will forget my sable raiment--even my hat."

A chilliness seemed to attend this conclusion, and Vesta touched her
bell. Virgie, entering, took her mistress's instructions: "Bring a tray
and tea, and lights, and place Mr. Milburn's hat upon the rack!"

The girl glanced at the antique hat with a timid light in her eye, but
her mistress's head was turned as if to intimate that she must take it,
though it might be red-hot. Virgie obeyed, and soon brought in the tea.

"It is good tea," spoke Milburn, drinking not from the cup, but the
saucer, while Vesta observed him oddly, "and it is chill this evening.
Let me start your fire!"

He shivered a little as he stood up and walked across the room, and
poking the charred logs into a flame; and, setting on more wood, he made
the walls spring into yellow flashes, between which Vesta saw her
forefathers dart cold glances at her, in their gilt frames--yet how
helpless they were, with all their respectability, to take her body or
her father's honor out of pawn!--and she felt for the first time the
hollowness of family power, except in the ever-preserved mail of a
solvent posterity. She also made a long, careful survey of her suitor,
to see if there was any apology for him as a husband.

His figure was short, but with strength and elasticity in it; better
clothes might fit him daintily, and Vesta re-dressed him in fancy with
lavender kids upon his small hands, a ring upon his long little finger,
a carnelian seal and a ribbon at his fob-pocket, and ruffles in his
shirt-bosom. In place of his dull cloth suit, she would give him a buff
vest and pearl buttons with eyelet rings, and white gaiters instead of
those shabby green things over his feet, and put upon his head a neat
silk hat with narrow brim to raise his height slenderly, and let a coat
of olive or dark-blue, and trousers of the same color, relieve his
ornaments. Thus transformed, Vesta could conceive a peculiar yet a
passable man, whom a lady might grow considerate towards by much praying
and striving, and she wondered, now, how this man had managed to soothe
her already to that degree that she had voluntarily kissed him. She
would be afraid to do it again, but it was as clearly on record as that
she had once put a flower in his hat; and Vesta said to herself:

"He has power of some kind! That story, little as I heard of it, was
told with an opinionated confidence I wish my poor father had something
of. Could I ever be happy with this man, by study and piety? God might
open the way, but it seems closed to me now."

"The night wears on, Miss Custis," spoke Meshach. "Its rewards are
already great to me. When may I return?"

"I think we must determine what to do this night, Mr. Milburn," Vesta
said, with rising determination. "Not one point nearer have we come to
any solution of this obligation of my father. We have considered it up
to this time as my obligation, and that may have unduly encouraged you.
Sir, I can work for my living."

"You _work_?" repeated Milburn.

"Why not? I love my father. As other women who are left poor work for
their children or a sick husband, why should not I for him! Poverty has
no terrors but--but the loss of pride."

"You hazard that, whatever happens," said her suitor, "but you will not
lose it by evading the lesser evil for the greater. I have heard of
women who fled to poverty from dissatisfaction with a husband, but pride
survived and made poverty dreadful. Pride in either case increased the
discontent. You should take the step which will let pride be absorbed in
duty, if not in love."

"Duty?" thought Vesta. "That is a reposeful word, better than Love. Mr.
Milburn," she said aloud, "how is it my duty to do what you ask?"

"I think I perceive that you have a loyal heart, a conscientiousness
that deceit cannot even approach. Something has already made you slow to
marriage, else, with your wonders, I would not have had the chance to
be now rejected by you. Marriage has become too formidable, perhaps, to
you, by the purity of your heart, the more so because you looked upon it
to be your destiny. It _is_ your fate, but you contend against it. Look
upon it, then, as a duty, such as you expect in others--in your slave
maid, for instance."

"Alas!" Vesta said, "she may marry freely. I am the slave."

"No, Miss Vesta, she has been free, but, sold among strangers with your
father's effects, will feel so perishing for sympathy and protection
that love, in whatever ugly form it comes, will be God's blessing to her
poor heart. What you repel in the revulsion of fortune--the yoke of a
husband--millions of women have bent to as if it was the very rainbow of
promise set in heaven."

"How do you know so much of women's trials, Mr. Milburn? Have you had
sisters, or other ladies to woo?"

"I have seen human nature in my little shop, not, like your rare nature,
refined by happy fortune and descent, but of moderate kind, and
struggling downward like a wounded eagle. They have come to me at first
for cheaper articles of necessity or smaller portions than other stores
would sell, looking on me with contempt. At last they have sacrificed
their last slave, their last pair of shoes, and, when it was too late,
their false pride has surrendered to shelter under a negro's hut, or
dance barefooted in my store for a cup of whiskey."

"Sir," exclaimed Vesta indignantly, rising from her rocker, "do you set
this warning for me?"

As she rose Meshach Milburn thought his wealth was merely pebbles and
shells to her perfection, now animated with a queen's spirit.

"Miss Vesta," he said, "pardon me, but I have just issued from many
generations of forest poverty, and knowing how hard it is to break that
thraldom, I would stop you from taking the first step towards it. The
bloom upon your cheek, the mould you are the product of without flaw,
the chaste lady's tastes and thoughts, and inborn strength and joy, are
the work of God's favor to your family for generations. That favor he
continues in laying those family burdens on another's shoulders, to
spare you the toil and care, anxiety and slow decay, that this violent
change of circumstances means. It would be a sin to relapse from this
perfection to that penury."

"I cannot see that honorable poverty would make me less a woman,"
exclaimed Vesta.

"You do not dread poverty because you do not know it," Milburn
continued. "It grows in this region like the old field-pines and little
oaks over a neglected farm. Once there was a court-house settlement on
Dividing Creek, where justice, eloquence, talent, wit, and heroism made
the social centre of two counties, but they moved the court-house and
the forest speedily choked the spot. Now not an echo lingers of that
former glory. You can save your house from being swallowed up in the
forest."

"By marrying the forest hero?" Vesta said, though she immediately
regretted it.

"Yes," Milburn uttered stubbornly, after a pause. "I have met the house
of Custis half-way. I am coming out of the woods as they are going in,
unless the sacrifice be mutual."

"Let us not be personal," Vesta pleaded, with her grace of sorrow; "I
feel that you are a kind man, at least to me, but a poor girl must make
a struggle for herself."

She saw the tears stand instantly in his eyes, and pressed her
advantage:

"Your tears are like the springs we find here, so close under the flinty
sand that nobody would suspect them, but I have seen them trickle out.
Tell me, now, if I would not be happier to take up the burden of my
father and mother, and let us diminish and be frugal, instead of
cowardly flying into the protection of our creditor, by a union which
the world, at least, would pronounce mercenary. My father might come up
again, in some way."

"No, Miss Vesta. Your father can hold no property while any portion of
his debts remains unpaid. The easier way is to show the world that our
union is not mercenary, by trying to love each other. Throughout the
earth marriage is the reparation of ruined families--the short path, and
the most natural one, too. Ruth was poor kin, but she turned from the
harvest stubble that made her beautiful feet bleed, to crawl to the feet
of old Boaz and find wifely rest, and her wisdom of choice we sing in
the psalms of King David, and hear in the proverbs of King Solomon, sons
of her sons."

"I am not thinking of myself, God knows!" said Vesta. "Gladly could I
teach a little school, or be a governess somewhere, or, like our
connection, the mother of Washington, ride afield in my sun-bonnet and
straw hat and oversee the laborers."

"That never made General Washington, Miss Vesta. It was marriage that
lent him to the world; first, his half-brother's marriage with the
Fairfaxes; next, his own with Custis's rich widow. Had they been looking
for natural parts only, some Daniel Morgan or Ethan Allen would have
been Washington's commander."

"Why do you draw me to you by awakening the motive of my self-love?"
asked Vesta. "That is not the way to preserve my heart as you would have
it."

"In every way I can draw you to me," spoke Milburn, again trembling with
earnestness, "I feel desperate to try. If it is wrong, it arises from my
sense of self-preservation. Without you I am a dismal failure, and my
labor in life is thrown away."

"Do you really believe you love me? Is it not ambition of some kind;
perhaps a social ambition?"

"To marry a Custis?" Milburn exclaimed. "No, it is to marry _you_. I
would rather you were not a Custis."

"Ah! I see, sir;" Vesta's face flushed with some admiration for the man;
"you think your family name is quite as good. So you ought to do. Then
you love me from a passion?"

"Partly that," answered Milburn. "I love you from my whole temperament,
whatever it is; from the glow of youth and the reflection of manhood,
from appreciation of you, and from worship, also; from the eye and the
mind. I love you in the vision of domestic settlement, in the
companionship of thought, in the partition of my ambition, in my
instinct for cultivation. I love you, too, with the ardor of a lover,
stronger than all, because I must possess you to possess myself; because
you kindle flame in me, and my humanity of pity is trampled down by my
humanity of desire; I cannot hear your appeal to escape! I am deaf to
sentiments of honor and courtesy, if they let you slip me! Give yourself
to me, and these better angels may prevail, being perhaps accessory to
the mighty instinct I obey at the command of the Creator!"

As he proceeded, Vesta saw shine in Meshach Milburn's face the very
ecstacy of love. His dark, resinous eyes were like forest ponds flashing
at night under the torches of negro 'coon-hunters. His long lady's hands
trembled as he stretched them towards her to clasp her, and she saw upon
his brow and in his open nostril and firm mouth the presence of a will
that seldom fails, when exerted mightily, to reduce a woman's, and make
her recognize her lord.

Yet, with this strong excitement of mental and animal love, which
generally animates man to eloquence, if not to beauty, a weary
something, nearly like pain, marked the bold intruder, and a quiver, not
like will and courage, went through his frame. It was this which touched
Vesta with the sense that perhaps she was not the only sufferer there,
and pity, which saves many a lover when his merits could not win,
brought the Judge's daughter to an impulsive determination.

"Mr. Milburn," she said at last, pressing her hands to her head, "this
day's trials have been too much for my brain. Never, in all my life
together, have I had realities like these to contend with. I am worn
out. Nay, sir, do not touch me now!" He had tried to repeat his
sympathetic overture, and pet her in his arms. "Let us end this conflict
at once. You say you will marry me; when?"

"It is yours to say when, Miss Custis. I am ready any day."

"And you will give me every note and obligation of my father, so that my
mother's portion shall be returned to her in full, and this house,
servants, and demesnes be mine in my own right?"

"Yes," said Milburn; "I have such confidence in your truth and virtue
that you shall keep these papers from this moment until the
marriage-day."

"It will not be long, then," Vesta said, looking at Milburn with a will
and authority fully equal to his own. "Will you take me to-night?"

"To-night?" he repeated. "Not to-night, surely?"

"To-night, or probably never."

He drew nearer, so as to look into her countenance by the strong
firelight. Calm courage, that would die, like Joan of Arc in the flames,
met his inquiry.

"Yes," said Milburn, "at your command I will take you to-night, though
it is a surprise to me."

He flinched a little, nevertheless, his conscience being uneasy, and the
same trembling Vesta had already observed went through his frame again.

"What will the world say to your marriage after a single day's
acquaintance with me?"

"Nothing," Vesta answered, "except that I am your wife. That will, at
least, silence advice and prevent intrusion. If I delay, these
forebodings may prevail, if not with me, with my family, some of whom
are to be feared."

He seemed to have no curiosity on that subject, only saying:

"It is you, dear child, I am thinking of--whether this haste will not be
repented, or become a subject of reproach to yourself. To me it cannot
be, having no world, no tribe--only myself and you!"

Vesta came forward and lifted his hand, which was cold.

"I believe that you love me," she said. "I believe this hand has the
lines of a gentleman. Now, I will trust to you a family confidence. The
troubles of this house are like a fire which there is no other way of
treating than to put it out at once. My father will not be disturbed,
beyond his secret pain, at the step I am to take, for he appreciates
your talents and success. It is for him I shall take this step, if I
take it at all, and I have yet an hour to reflect. But my mother will be
resentful, and her brothers and kindred in Baltimore will express a
savage rage, in the first place, at my father's losing her portion; next
to that, and I hope less bitterly, they will resent my marriage to you.
Exposed to their interference, I might be restrained from going to my
father's assistance; they might even force me away, and break our family
up, leaving father alone to encounter his miseries."

"I see," said Milburn; "you would give me the legal right to meet your
mother's excited people."

"Not that merely," Vesta said; "I would put it out of her power and
theirs to prevent the sacrifice I meditate making. My father's immediate
dread is my mother's upbraiding--that he has risked and lost her money.
It has sent her to bed already, sick and almost violent. I might as well
save the poor gentleman his whole distress, if I am to save him a
part."

"Brave girl!" exclaimed Meshach Milburn, in admiration. "It is true,
then, that blood will tell. You intend to give your mother the money
which has been lost, and silence her complaint before she makes it?"

"Just that, Mr. Milburn, and to say, 'It is my husband's gift, and a
peace-offering from us all.'"

"Is it not your intention, honey," asked the creditor, "to take Mrs.
Custis into your confidence before this marriage?"

She looked at him with the entreaty of one in doubt, who would be
resolved. "Advise me," she said. "I want to do the best for all, and
spare all bitter words, which rankle so long. Is it necessary to tell my
mother?"

"No. You are a free woman. I know your age--though I shall forget it by
and by." This first gleam of humor rather became his strange face. "If
you tell your father, it is enough."

"I hope I am doing right," Vesta said, "and now I shall take my hour to
my soul and my Saviour. Sir, do you ever pray?"

Milburn recoiled a little.

"I do not pray like you," he replied; "my prayers are dry things. I do
say a little rhyme over that my mother taught me in the forest."

"Try to pray for me to do right," said Vesta, "that I may not make this
sacrifice, and leave a wounded conscience. And now, sir, farewell. At
nine o'clock go to our church and wait. If I resolve to come, there you
will find the rector, and all the arrangements made. If I do not come, I
think you will see me no more."

"Oh, beautiful spirit," exclaimed her lover, "oppress me not with that
fear!"

"If another way is made plain to me," Vesta said, "I shall go that way.
If my duty leads me to you again, you will be my master. Sir, though
your errand here was a severe one, I thank you for your sincerity and
the kind consideration you seem to have had for me so long. Farewell."

"Angel! Vesta! Honey!" Milburn cried, "may I kiss you?"

"Not now," she answered, cold as superiority, and interposing her hand.

The door stood wide open, and the slave-girl, Virgie, in it, holding the
Entailed Hat. Milburn, with a shudder, took it, and covered himself, and
departed.




CHAPTER X.

MASTER IN THE KITCHEN.


The kitchen had been a scene of anything but culinary peace and savor
during the long visit of the owner of the hat.

Aunt Hominy and the little darkeys had made three stolen visits to the
hall to peep at the dreadful thing hanging there, as if it were a trap
of some kind, liable to drop a spring and catch somebody, or to explode
like a mortar or torpedo. As hour after hour wore on, and Miss Vesta did
not reappear, and finally rang her bell for tea, Aunt Hominy was beside
herself with superstition.

"Honey," she exclaimed to Virgie, "jess you take in dis yer dried lizzer
an' dis cammermile, an' drap de lizzer in dat ole hat, an' sprinkle de
flo' whar ole Meshach sots wi' de cammermile, an' say 'Shoo!' Maybe
it'll spile his measurin' of Miss Vessy in."

"No, aunty, if old Meshach measured _me_ in, I wouldn't make the family
ashamed before him. Miss Vessy is powerful wise, and maybe she'll get
the better of that wicked hat."

"Yes," said Roxy, "she's good, Aunt Hominy, an' says her prayers every
night and mornin'. I've heard tell that witches can't hear the Lord's
name, and stay, nohow. Maybe Miss Vessy'll say in Meshach's old hat:
'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on.' That'll
make the old devil jess fly up an' away."

"No, gals," insisted Aunt Hominy, "cammermile is all dat'll keep him
from a-measurin' of us in. Don't ole Meshach go to church, too, and hab
a prayer-book an'--listen dar, honey! ef she ain't a singin' to him!"

As Virgie answered the bell, Aunt Hominy took down her cherished
camomile and sprinkled the little children, and gave them each a glass
of sassafras beer to bless their insides.

"Lord a bless 'em!" exclaimed the old lady, "ef de slave-buyer comes,
Aunt Hominy'll take 'em to de woods an' jess git los', an' live on
teaberries, slippery-ellum, haws, an' chincapins. We don't gwyn stay an'
let ole Meshach starve us like a lizzer."

"Aunt Hominy," said Roxy, "maybe, old lady, ef you bake a nice loaf of
Federal bread, or a game-pie, or a persimmon custard, an' send it to ole
Meshach, he won't sell us to the slave-buyers. He never gets nothing
good to eat, an' don't know what it is. A little taste of it'll make him
want mo'."

"Roxy, gal," said Aunt Hominy, "I'd jess like to make a dumplin'-bag out
o' dat steeple-hat he got. When I skinned de dumplin' de hat would be
bad spiled, chillen, an' den de Judge would git his lan' back dat
Meshach's measured in. For de Judge would say, 'Meshach, ye hain't
measured me fair. Wha's yer yard-stick, ole debbil?' Den Meshach he say,
'De hat I tuk it in wid, done gone burnt by dat ole Hominy, makin' of
her puddin's.' 'Den,' says de Judge, 'ye ain't measured me squar. I
won't play. Take it all back!' Chillen, we must git dat ar ole hat, or
de slave-buyers done take us all."

They started to take another peep of cupidity and awe at the storied
hat, when Virgie emerged from the parlor door with the dreaded article
in her hand, and, hanging it on the peg, came with superstitious fear
and relief into the colonnade. Aunt Hominy hurried her to the kitchen,
strewed her with herb-dust, waved a rattle of snake's teeth in a pig's
weazen over her head, and ended by pushing a sweet piece of preserved
watermelon-rind down her throat.

"Did it hurt ye, honey?" inquired Aunt Hominy, with her eyes full of
excitement, referring to the hat.

"'Deed I don't know, aunty," Virgie answered; "all I saw was Miss Vessy,
looking away from me, as if she might be going to be ashamed of me, an'
I picked the thing up an' took it to the rack; an' all I know is, it
smelled old, like some of the old-clothes chests up in the garret, when
we lift the lid and peep in, an' it seems as if they were dead people's
clothes."

The little negroes, Ned, Vince, and Phillis, heard this with shining
eyes, and dived their heads under Aunt Hominy's skirts and apron, while
the old woman exclaimed:

"De Lord a massy!" and began to blow what she called "pow-pow" on the
girl's profaned fingers.

"I don't believe it's anything, aunty, but an ugly, old, nasty, dead
folks' hat," exclaimed Virgie. "He just wears it to plague people. He
was drinking tea just like Miss Vessy, but I thought his teeth chattered
a little, as if he had smelt of the old hat, and it give him a chill."

"Where did he get the hat, Aunt Hominy?" Roxy asked. "Did he dig it up
somewhere?"

The question seemed to spur the cook's easy invention, and, after a
cunning yet credulous look up and down the large kitchen, where the pale
light at the windows was invisible in the stronger fire beneath the
great stack chimney, Aunt Hominy whispered:

"He dug dat hat up in ole Rehoboff ruined churchyard. He foun' it in de
grave."

"But you said this afternoon, aunty, that the Bad Man gave it to him."

"De debbil met him right dar," insisted Aunt Hominy, "in dat ole
obergrown churchyard, whar de hymns ob God used to be raised befo' de
debbil got it. He says to Meshach: 'I make you de sexton hyar. Go git de
spade out yonder, whar de dead-house used to be, an' dig among de graves
under de myrtle-vines, an' fin' my hat. As long as ye keep de Lord an'
de singin' away from dis yer big forsaken church, you may keep dat hat
to measure in eberybody's lan'.' So nobody kin sing or pray in dat
church. Nobody but Meshach Milburn ever prays dar. He goes dar sometimes
wid his Chrismas-giff on he head, an' prays to de debbil."

Thus does an unwonted fashion arouse unwonted visions, as if it brought
to the present day the phantoms which were laid at rest with itself, and
they walked into simple minds, and produced superstition there.

Aunt Hominy never was stimulated to inventions of this kind, but she
immediately absorbed them, and they became religious beliefs with her.
Her manner, highly animated by her terror and belief, produced more and
more superstition in the minds of the girls and children, and the
conversation fell off,--the little negroes wandering hither and thither,
unable to sleep, yet unable to attract sufficient attention from any
one, till Judge Custis, who had been waiting for hours for his creditor
to go, slipped down the back stairs in his old slippers, and came to the
kitchen among the colored people for company's sake.

His fine presence, and familiar, if superior, address, put a new
complexion at once on the African end of the house.

He picked up all the children by twos or threes, woolled them, chased
them, tossed them, and drove the lurid images of Aunt Hominy's mind out
of their spirits, and then caught the two young girls, and set Roxy on
his shoulder, and caught Virgie by the waist, and finally piled them on
Aunt Hominy, who ran behind her biscuit-block, and he bunched all the
children upon the party.

"De Lord a massy, Judge!" exclaimed Aunt Hominy, delighted, and showing
her white teeth, whichever side she revealed. "Go 'long, Judge, Missy
Custis ketch you! Miss Vessy's a-comin', befor' de Lawd!"

The children were screaming, getting into the riot more, while
pretending to try to get out, invading the Judge's back, and rubbing
their clean wool into his whiskers, and the two neat servants, brought
up like white children in his family, were not unaccustomed to either
jovial handling or petting from their master, which he commonly
concluded by a present of some kind.

"Old woman," said the Judge to Aunt Hominy, "can you give me a bit of
broiled something for my stomach? I want to eat it right here."

"Ha! yah! Don't got nothin' but a young chicken, marster! Mebbe I kin
git ye a squab outen de pigeon-house in de gable-yend."

"That's it, Hominy!" exclaimed Judge Custis; "a tender squab, a little
toast in cream, a glass of morning milk, and a bunch of fresh celery,
will just raise my pulse, and put courage into me. Get it, my faithful
old girl; it's the last I may ask of you, for old Samson Hat is going to
own you next."

"Me? No, sah! I'll run away from Prencess Anne fust. De man dat cleans
ole Meshach Milburn's debbil hat sha'n't nebber hab me."

"Well, it'll be one of you. If you don't take Samson, Roxy must, or
Virgie. The old fellow will be very influential with our new master,
and, Hominy, we're all depending on you to make him so comfortable that
he will just keep the family together."

Sobriety came in on this attempted witticism, and the old cook saw a
film grow into the Judge's smiling eyes.

"Old marster!" she exclaimed, raising her hands, "you's jess a-sottin'
dar, an' breakin' your poor heart. Don't I know when you is a-makin'
believe? Mebbe dis night is de las' we'll ever see you in your own warm,
nice kitchen, an' never mo', dear ole marster, kin Hominy brile you a
bird or season de soup you like. Bless God, dis time we'll git de squab
an' de celery an' de toast, befo' ole Meshach Milburn measures all we
got in!"

While the children crawled around the Judge's knees, setting up a dismal
wail to see him sob, the two neat house girls, forgetting every
contingency to themselves, sobbed also, like his own daughters, to see
him unmanned; but Aunt Hominy only felt desperately energetic at the
chance to cook the last supper of the Custis household.

She lighted a brand of pine in the fire, and started one of the stable
boys up a ladder by its light to ransack the pigeon-cote, and in a very
little while both a chicken and a bird were broiled and set upon the
kitchen-table upon a spotless cloth, and the plume of lily-white celery,
and the smoking toast in velvet cream, warmed the Judge's nostrils, and
dried his tears.

Roxy stood behind him to wait upon his wishes; Virgie subdued every
expression of grief, and comforted the children, and poor Aunt Hominy,
with silent tears streaming down her cheeks to see him eat and suffer,
kept up a clatter of epicurean talk, lest he might turn and see her
miserable. As he finished his meal, and took out his gold tooth-pick,
and felt a comfortable joy of such misery and sympathy, Vesta opened the
door, and said:

"Papa!"

"My child?"

"Let me speak with you."

Judge Custis rose, and raised his hands to Aunt Hominy in speechless
recognition of her service; but not till the door closed behind him did
the old cook's cry burst through her quivering lips:

"Oh! chillen, chillen, he'll never eat no mo' like dat again. Ole
Meshach's measured him in!"




CHAPTER XI.

DYING PRIDE.


At the termination of Milburn's long visit, Vesta had gone to her own
room, and read her passage in the Bible, and said her prayer, and tried
to think, but the day's application had been too great to leave her mind
its morning energy, when health, which is so much of decision, was
elastic in her veins and brain.

She began to see her duty loom up like a prodigious thing on one side,
crowding every other consideration out of the way but one--her modesty;
and threatening that, which, like a little mouse, ran around and around
her mind, timorous, but helpless, and without a hole of escape.

She would cease to be a maid within the circuit of the clock, or forsake
her family, and drive that great bloodhound of duty over the threshold
of her ruined home.

In the one case lay outward devastation--the red eyes of parents and
servants who had not slept all night, and looked at her as their
obdurate hostage, and the prying constables lodged upon the premises to
see that nothing was smuggled out, the ring of the auctioneer's bell,
and the fingering of boors and old gossips over the cherished things of
the family, even to her heirlooms, jewelry, and hosiery; the vast old
house a hollow barn when these were done, and she and her mother
visitors at the jail where her poor father looked through the bars, and
bent his head in shame!

Then the servants, one after another, mounted upon the court-house
block, the old gray servitors mocked, the little children parted, like
calves by the butcher, and the young girls feeling the desperate
apprehensions of abuse and violation, that were the other alternative to
herself, with whom purity was like the whiteness of the lily, prized
more than its beauty of form or its perfume.

She glanced in her mirror by the light that flamed in her brazen grate,
and saw the blushes climb like flying virgins at the sack of towns, up
the white ramparts of her neck and temples.

The form which had altered so little from childhood, supple and
straight, and moulded to perfection, was to fall like the young
hickory-tree in the August hurricane, twisted from its native grove. The
breath of the man she was to yield her life to, irresistible and hot as
that storm, she had felt already, when he held her for a moment in his
arms in the transport of passion, and heard his fearless avowal of
desire.

To marry any man now seemed hard; to marry this one was inexpressible
shame, and at the thought of it she could not shed a tear, such
paralysis came over her. She had read of the recent Greek revolution,
where elegant ladies of Scio, and other isles of the Ægean Sea, educated
in the best seminaries of Europe, had been sold by thousands as common
slaves in the markets of Constantinople, and carried to their estates by
brutal Turks, with all the gloating anticipation of lust and tyranny.

On this vivid episode started a procession of all the ages of women who
had been the sport of conquest since their common mother, Eve, lost
Paradise by her simplicity: the Jewish maidens carried to Babylon, the
Gothic virgins dragged at the horse-tails of the Moors, the daughters of
Palestine and Byzantium consigned to Arab sensualists, and made to
follow their nomadic tents, and the almond-eyed damsels of China
surrendered by their parents to the wild Kalmucks, to be beaten and
starved on every cold plain of Asia, till life was laid down with
neither hope nor fear.

"I am happier than millions of my sex," Vesta said; "my captor does not
despise me, at least. Perhaps he will treat me kinder than I think, and
give me time to draw towards him without this deadly pain and shame."

Then she almost repented of her hasty decision to marry this night,
instead of after longer acquaintance, which Mr. Milburn, no doubt, would
have granted, and his words were remembered with accusation: "What will
the world say to your marriage after a single day's acquaintance with
me?" "Will this haste not be repented, or become a subject of reproach
to you?" Was it too late to recall her words, and ask for delay?

"No," thought Vesta, "I am to keep, at least, my mind maiden and chaste,
instead of playing the unstable coquette with that. I will not let him
begin to think me weak and changeful already."

To see if there was the least glimmer of relief from this marriage Vesta
crossed to her mother's room, and found Mrs. Custis with her head
wrapped in handkerchiefs steeped in cologne, and a vial of laudanum in
her hand, and in a condition bordering on hysteria.

"Mamma," said poor Vesta, "are you in pain?"

"Oh!" screamed Mrs. Custis, "I am just dying here of cruelty and
brutality. Your father is a villain. I'll have that rascal, Milburn,
killed. Go get me ink and paper, daughter, and sit here and write me a
letter to my brother, Allan McLane, in Baltimore. He shall settle with
Judge Custis for this robbery, and take you and me back to Baltimore,
leaving your father to go to the almshouse or the jail, I don't care
which."

"Mother," exclaimed Vesta, "what a sin! to abuse poor father now in all
his trouble!"

"Trouble!" echoed Mrs. Custis, mockingly, "what trouble has he had, I
would like to know? Living in the woods like a Turk among his barefooted
forest concubines! Spending my money, raked and scraped by my poor
father in the sugar importation, to make puddle iron out of the swamp,
and be considered a smart man! The family is broken up. We are paupers,
and now 'it is save yourself.' I'll take care of you if I can, but your
father may starve for any aid I will give him."

"Then he shall have the only aid in my power, mother," said Vesta,
decisively.

"Your aid!" Mrs. Custis exclaimed. "What have you got? Your jewels, I
suppose? How long will they keep him? You had better keep your jewels,
girl, for your wedding, and have it come quickly, for marriage is now
your only salvation."

"My last jewel shall go, then," Vesta said, with a pale resolution that
darted through her veins like ice.

"Save your jewels," Mrs. Custis continued, "and choose a husband before
this thing is noised abroad! You have a good large list to select from.
There is your cousin, Chase McLane, crazy for you, and with an estate in
Kent. There is that young fool Carroll, with thousands of acres on the
western shore, and the widower Hynson of King George, Virginia, with
eighty slaves and his stables full of race-horses. You can marry any of
these Dennis boys, or take Captain Ringgold of Frederick, who lives in
elegance at West Point, or be mistress of Tench Purvience's mansion on
Monument Square in Baltimore. All you have to do is to write a letter,
saying: 'I expect you,' or, what is better, take to-morrow's steamer for
Baltimore and use your Uncle Allan's house and become engaged and
married there."

"Mamma," Vesta spoke without rebuke, only with a sad, confirmed feeling
of her destiny, "I could be capable of deceiving any of those gentlemen
if I could so heartlessly leave my father."

"Deceiving!" Mrs. Custis remarked, filling her palm and brow with the
cologne. "What is man's whole work with a woman but deceit? To court her
for her money, to kiss her into taking her money out of good mortgages
and putting it into bog iron ore? To tell her when past middle life that
she has nothing to live upon, except the charity of the public, or her
reluctant friends. All this for an experiment! The Custis family are all
knaves or fools. Your father is a monster."

Vesta went to her mother's side and bathed her forehead.

"Dear mamma," she said, "let you and I do something for ourselves, while
papa looks around and finds something to do. We can rent a house in
Princess Anne and open a seminary. I can teach French and music, you can
be the matron and do the correspondence and business, and if papa is at
a loss for larger occupation he can lecture on history and science. Our
friends will send their children to us, and we shall never be separated.
I will give up the thought of marriage and live for you two."

Mrs. Custis made a gesture of impatience.

"And be an old maid!" she blurted. "That is insufferable. What are all
these accomplishments and charms for but a husband, and what is he for
but to provide bread and clothes. Don't be as crazy as your unprincipled
father! Try no experiments! Drop philanthropy! Money is the foundation
of all respectability."

Vesta thought to herself: "Can that be so? Does it not, then, justify
the man who solicits me in his means of getting money? Mother"--Vesta
spoke--"you would have me marry, then?"

"There is no would about it," answered Mrs. Custis. "You _must_ marry!"

"Marry immediately?"

"Yes, the sooner the better, to a rich man. Have you picked out one?"

"Give me your blessing, and I will try," Vesta said; "I think I know
such a one."

Mrs. Custis kissed her daughter, and moaned about her poor head and lost
marriage portion, and Vesta set out to look for her father.

She found him as described, in the luxury of tears and squab, as
comfortable among his negro servants as in the state legislature or at
the head of society, and they wrapped up in his condescension and
misfortunes.

As Vesta saw the curious scene of such patriarchal democracy in the old
kitchen, she wondered if that voluptuous endowment of her father was not
the happy provision to make marriage unions tolerable, and social
revulsions philosophical. Something of regret that she had not more of
the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that
wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt
at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother.

"Roxy," said Vesta, as she left the kitchen, "do you go up to my mother
and stay with her all this night. Make your spread there beside her bed.
Virgie, put on your hood and carry a letter for me,--I will write it in
the library."

She sat before her father, he too undecided to speak, and seeing by her
fixed expression that it was no time for loquacity. She sealed the
letter with wax, and, Virgie coming in, her father heard the direction
she gave with curiosity greater than his embarrassment:

"Take this to Rev. William Tilghman. Give it to him only, and see that
he reads it, Virgie, before you leave him. If he asks you any questions,
tell him please to do precisely what this note says, and, as he is my
friend, not to disappoint me."

The girl's steps were hardly out of hearing when Vesta opened the drawer
of the library-table and took out a package of papers tied with a
string. She unloosed it, and her father recognized from where he sat his
notes of hand and mortgages.

"Gracious God, my darling!" exclaimed Judge Custis, "how came you by
those papers?"

"They are to be mine to-night, father--in one hour. The moment they
become mine they will be yours."

"Why, Vessy," said the Judge, "if they are yours even to keep a minute,
the shortest way with them is up the chimney!"

He made a stride forward to take them from her hand. She laid them in
her lap and looked at him so calmly that he stopped.

"You may burn the house, papa," she said, "it is still your own. But
these papers you could only burn by a crime. It would be cheating an
honorable man."

"Honorable! Who?" the Judge exclaimed.

"He who is to be my husband."

"You marry Meshach Milburn!" shouted the Judge, "O curse of God!--not
him?"

"Yes, this night," answered Vesta; "I respect him. I hold these
obligations by his trust in me. They are my engagement ring."

Judge Custis raised a loud howl like a man into whom a nail is driven,
and fell at his daughter's feet and clasped her knees.

"This is to torture me," he cried; "he has not dared to ask you, Vesta?"

"Yes, and my word is passed, father. Shall that word, the word of a
Custis, be less than a Milburn's faith. By the love he bore me, Mr.
Milburn gave me these debts for my dower--a rare faith in one so
prudent. If I do not marry him, they will be given back to him this
night."

"Then give them back, my child, and save your soul and your purity, lest
I live to be cursed with the sight of my noble daughter's shame? This
marriage will be unholy, and the censure to follow it will be the
bankruptcy of more than our estate--of our simple fame and old family
respect. We have friends left who would help us. If you marry Milburn,
they will all despise and repudiate us."

"I do not believe it," said Vesta. "The sense and courage of that
gentleman--he is a gentleman, for I have seen him, and a gentleman of
many gifts--will compel respect even where false pride and family
pretension appear to put him down. Who that underrates him will make any
considerable sacrifice to assist us? Your sons,--will they do it? Then
by what right do they decide my marriage choice? No, father, I only do
my part to support our house in its extremity, as these gentlemen and
others have done before."

She pointed to the old portraits of Custises on the wall. If any of them
looked dissatisfied, he met a countenance haughty as his own.

"Vesta," her father called, "you know you do not love this man?"

Looking back a minute at the longing in his face, which now wore the
solicitude of personal affection, she melted under it.

"No, father," she said, with a burst of tears. "I love you."

She threw her arms around him and kissed him long and fondly, both
weeping together. He went into a fit of grief that admitted of no
conversation till it was partly spent, and at last lay with his gray
hairs folded to her heaving bosom, where the compensation of his love
made her sacrifice more precious.

"I feel that I am doing right, father," she said tenderly "Till now I
have had my doubts. No other young heart is wronged by my taking this
step; I have never been engaged, and it now seems providential, as I
could not then have gone to your assistance without injuring myself and
another; and your debts are too great for any but this man to settle
them. Your life has been one long sacrifice for me, and not a cloud has
darkened above me till this day, giving me the first shower of sorrow,
which I trust will refresh my soul, and make its humility grow. Oh,
father, it would rejoice me so much if you could respond to my sacrifice
with a better life!"

"God help me, I will!" he sobbed.

"That is very comforting to me. I will not enumerate your omissions,
dear father, but if this important step in my life does not arrest some
sad tendencies I see in you, the disappointment may break me down.
Intemperance in you--a judge, a gentleman, a husband, and a father--is a
deformity worse than Mr. Milburn's honest, unfashionable hat. Do you not
feel happier that my husband is not to be a drunkard?"

"He has not that vice, thank God!" admitted the Judge.

"Be his better example, father, for I hope to see you influence him to
be kind to me, and the sight of you walking downward in his view will
degrade me more than bearing his name or sharing his eccentricities. Oh,
if you love me, let not your dear soul slide out of the knowledge of
God!"

"Pray for me, dear child! My feet are slippery and my knees are weak."

"Begin from this moment to lean on Heaven," said Vesta. "It is better
than this world's consideration. Oh, what would strengthen me now but
God's approval, though I go into a captivity I dreamed not of. Even
there I can take my harp beneath the willows, like them in Babylon, and
praise my Maker."

She sat at her piano and sang the hymn the young consumptive, Rev. Mr.
Eastburn, composed in her grandmother's house, taking it from the
Episcopal collection:

  "O holy, holy, holy Lord!
    Bright in Thy deeds and in Thy name,
  Forever be Thy name adored,
    Thy glories let the world proclaim!

  "O Jesus, Lamb once crucified
    To take our load of sins away,
  Thine be the hymn that rolls its tide
    Along the realms of upper day!

  "O Holy Spirit from above,
    In streams of light and glory given,
  Thou source of ecstacy and love,
    Thy praises ring through earth and heaven!"

As her voice in almost supernatural clearness and sweetness filled the
two large rooms, and died away in melody, she rose and kissed her father
again, and said, "Courage, love! we shall be happy still."

A knock at the door and there entered the young clergyman she had sent
for, a sandy-haired, large-blue-eyed, boyish person, with a fair skin
easily freckled, and a look of youthful chivalry under his sincere
Christian humility.

"Good-evening, William," Vesta spoke; "I did not expect to see you till
we reached the church. But sit, and I will answer your questions.
Father, you are to go with me to the church--you and Virgie. Mr.
Tilghman is to marry us."

"Now, Vesta," spoke the young man, as her father left the room, "whom
are you going to marry, cousin, in such haste as this?"

"Did you have the church made ready, William, as I requested?"

"I did. The sexton is there now, lighting the fire."

"I thought you were loyal as ever, William, and depended upon you.
Thanks, dear friend! I am to marry Mr. Meshach Milburn at nine o'clock."

A cloud came over the young man's serene face, though his features
retained their habitual sweetness.

"I can marry you, cousin, even to Meshach Milburn," he said, "if that is
your wish. Why do you marry him?"

"It is not loyal in you to ask, William, but I will give you this
answer: he has asked me. He is also devoted and rich. To avoid
excitement, possibly some opposition, though it would be vain, we are to
be married without further notice, and papa is to give me away."

Silent for a moment, the young rector exclaimed:

"Cousin Vesta, have I lived to see you a mercenary woman? Has this man's
asserted wealth found you cold enough to want it, when love has been so
generously offered you by almost every young man of station in this
region, and from abroad--even by me?" he said, after a pause. "The scar
is on my heart yet, cousin. No, I will not believe such a thing of you.
There is a reason back of the fact."

"William, if you respected me as you once said you ever would, like your
sister, you would not add this night the weight of your doubt to my
other burdens, but take my hand with all the strength of yours, and lift
me onward."

"I will," said the rector, swallowing a dry spot in his throat. "Though
it was a bitter time I had when you refused me, cousin, the pain led me
to my vows at the altar where I minister, and I have had the assistance
of your beautiful music there, like the angel I seem to have seen
reserved for me, in place of you, sitting at your side. And I know that
this marriage is, on your part, pure as my sister's. No further will I
inquire--what penalty you are paying for another, what mystery I cannot
pierce."

He raised his hands above her head: "The peace of God that passeth
understanding, abide with you, dear sister, forever!"

He went out with his eyes filled with tears, but hers were full of
heavenly light, feeling his benediction to be righteous.




CHAPTER XII.

PRINCESS ANNE FOLKS.


The Washington Tavern, or, rather, the brick sidewalk which came up to
its doors, and was the lounging-place for all the grown loiterers in
Princess Anne, had been in the greatest activity all that Saturday
afternoon, since it was reported by Jack Wonnell, who set himself to be
a spy on Meshach's errand, that the steeple-hat had disappeared in the
broad mansion of Judge Daniel Custis.

Jack Wonnell had a worn bell-crown on his head, exposed to all kinds of
weather, as he was in the habit of fishing in these beaver-hats, and
never owned an umbrella in his life. He lived near Meshach, in the old
part of Princess Anne, near the bridge, and was the subject of the
money-lender's scorn and contempt, as tending to make a mutual
eccentricity ridiculous. Milburn had been willing to be hated for his
hat, but Jack Wonnell made all unseasonable hats laughable, the more so
that he was nearly as old a wearer of his bell-crowns as Milburn of the
steeple-top. Although he had no such reasons of reverence and stern
consistency as his rich neighbor, he seemed to have, in his own mind,
and in plain people's, a better defence for violating the standard taste
of dress.

The people said that Jack Wonnell, being a poor man, could not buy all
the fashions, and was merely wearing out a bargain; that he knew he was
ridiculous, and set no such conceit on his absurdity as that grim
Milburn; and they rather enjoyed his playing the Dromio to that
Antipholus, and turning into farce the comedy of Meshach's error.

Jack Wonnell had partly embraced his bargain by the example of Meshach.
A frivolous, unambitious, childish fellow, amusing people, obliging
people, running errands, driving stage, gardening, fishing, playing with
the lads, courting poor white bound girls, incontinent, inoffensive, he
had been impelled to bid off his lot of old hats by Jimmy Phoebus
saying:

"Jack, dirt cheap! Last you all your life! Better hats than old Meshach
Milburn's. You'll drive his'n out of town."

To his infinite amusement and dignity, his appearance in the bell-crown
hats attracted the severe regard of Milburn, and set the little town on
a grin. The joke went on till Jimmy Phoebus, Judge Custis, and some
others prompted Jack Wonnell, with the promise of a gallon of whiskey,
to ask Meshach to trade the steeple-top for the bell-crown. The intense
look of outrage and hate, with the accompanying menace his townsman
returned, really frightened Jack, and he had prudently avoided Milburn
ever since, while keeping as close a watch upon his movements and
whereabouts as upon some incited bull-dog, liable to appear anywhere.

In this way Jack Wonnell had followed Meshach to the court-house corner,
where stood Judge Custis's brick bank--which, of late, had done little
discounting--and, from the open space between it and the court-house in
its rear, he peeped after Milburn up the main cross street, called
Prince William Street, which stopped right at Judge Custis's gate.
There, in the quiet of early afternoon, he heard the knocker sound, saw
the door open, and beheld the Entailed Hat disappear in the great
doorway. Then, scarcely believing himself, Wonnell ran back to the
tavern, and exclaimed:

"May I be struck stone dead ef ole Meshach ain't gwyn in to the
Jedge's!"

"You're a liar!" said Jimmy Phoebus, promptly, catching Jack by the
back of the neck, and pushing his bell-crown down till it mashed over
his nose and eyes, "What do you mean by tellin' a splurge like that?"

"I seen him, Jimmy," was the bell-crowned hero's smothered cry; "if I
didn't, hope I may die!"

"What did he go there for?"

"I can't tell, Jimmy, to save my life!"

"Whoo-oo-p!" cried Phoebus, waving his old straw hat, itself nearly
out of season. "If this is a lie, Jack Wonnell, I'll make you eat a raw
fish. Levin"--to Levin Dennis--"you slip up by Custis's, and see if ole
Meshach hain't passed around the fence, or dropped along Church Street
and hid in the graveyard, where he sometimes goes. I'll stay yer, and
make Jack Wonnell account for sech lyin'!"

Levin Dennis, a boyish, curly-haired, graceful-going orphan, walked up
the cross street, passing Church lane and the Back alley, and slowly
turned the long front of Teackle Hall, and went out the parallel street
towards the lower bridge on the Deil's Island road, till he could turn
and see the three great-chimneyed buildings of Teackle Hall lifting
their gables and lightning-rods to his sight in their reverse, the
partly stripped trees allowing that manorial pile to stand forth in much
of its length and imposing proportions. Lest he might not be suspected
of curiosity, Levin continued on to the bridge at Manokin landing, and
counted the geese come out of a lawn on a willowy cape there, and take
to water like a fleet of white schooners. He ascended the rise beyond
the bridge, and looked over to see if Meshach might have taken a walk
down the road. Then returning, he swept the back view of Princess Anne,
from the low bluff of cedars on another inhabited cape on the right,
which bordered the Manokin marshes, to the vale of the little river at
the left, as it descended between Meshach's storehouse and the ancient
Presbyterian church of the Head of Manokin, seated among its gravestones
between its hitching-stalls and its respectable parsonage manse. Nothing
was visible of the owner of the distinguishing hat.

So Levin Dennis returned more slowly around the north wing of Teackle
Hall, looking at every window, as if Meshach might be there; but nothing
did he see except the dog, which, to Levin's eye, appeared uneasy, and
ran out of the gate to make friends with him.

"So, Turk!" Dennis muttered, patting the dog's head, "no wonder you're
scared, boy, to see old Meshach Milburn come in."

Teackle Hall, according to rumor, was built at the close of the
revolutionary war by an uncle, or grand-uncle, of Judge Custis, who came
from Virginia, somewhere between Accomac and Northampton counties, and
went into shipbuilding on the Manokin, adding some privateering and
banking, too, and once, going abroad, he brought back from some ducal
residence the plan of Teackle Hall, as Judge Custis found it on his
coming into the property.

It was nearly two hundred feet in length, and would have made three
respectable churches, standing in line, with their sharp gables to the
front, the bold wings connected with the bolder centre by habitable
curtains or colonnades, in which panels of slate or grained stone made
an attic story above the lines of windows, and lintels and sills of the
same stone, with high keystones, capped every window in the many-sided
surface of the whole stately block, all built of brick brought over in
vessels from the western shore, or possibly from the North, or Europe,
and painted a gray stone color.

Its central gable had deep carved eaves, and a pediment-base to shed
rain, and a large circular window in that pediment. The two mighty
chimneys of that centre were parallel with the ridge of the roof, and
rose nearly from the middle of the two opposite slopes, bespeaking four
great fireplaces below, and a flat, low-galleried observatory upon the
roof gave views of portions of the bay on clear days.

The wings of Teackle Hall had similar, but lower, chimneys, astraddle of
their roofs, and forest trees--oak, gum, holly, and pine, with a great
willow, and some tawny cedars, and bushes of rose and lilac--dotted the
grassy lawn. The Virginia creeper and wild ivy climbed here and there to
the upper windows, and a tall, broad, panelled doorway, opening on a
low, open portico platform with steps, seemed to say to visitors: "Men
of port and consideration come in this way, but inferiors enter by some
of the smaller doors!"

Levin Dennis, who had never sounded that knocker, though he had often
taken his terrapins to the kitchen, stared in concern at the door where
it was reported Meshach Milburn had gone in, and would hardly have been
surprised if that intruder had now appeared at one of the three deep
windows over the door with a firebrand in his hand.

Levin muttered to himself: "Rich folks, I reckon, must make a trade.
Maybe it's hosses--maybe not. I know it ain't hats."

He then turned down to the Episcopal Church, only a square from Teackle
Hall, and on a street between it and the main street, though in a
retired situation, its front turned from the town, and looking over the
fields and farms, like a good pastor who is warming at the fire with his
hands behind him.

A single-storied, long, low edifice of British bricks, with its
semicircular choir next the street, and, adjoining the choir, a spire of
more modern brickwork built up to an open bell cupola, and open ribbed
dome, also of brick, tipped with a gilded cross, the ivy was greenly
matted all round the choir, and ran along the side of the church, where
Levin Dennis walked under four tall, round-topped windows of stained and
wired glass, till he came to the end gable or front of the church,
standing in unworldly contemplation of the graveyard and the back
fields.

There, since the Stamp Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half
a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the
town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little
window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose
in form like the print of The Crucified, reaching out its stems and
tendrils wide of the one glorified window in the gable, in whose red
dyes glimmered the triumph of a bloody countenance. The mossy walls,
often scraped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble
under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and
humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was
already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of
picturesqueness and all the appearance of antiquity.

No sign of the unpopular townsman was to be seen anywhere, but, as Levin
Dennis peeked around the foliage in the yard he beheld a man he had
never observed before, and of a tall, bearded, suspicious, and ruffianly
exterior, lying flat on the top of a memorial vault, with his head and
feet half concealed in some cedar brambles.

"Hallo!" Dennis shouted.

"What do you hallo for?" spoke the man; "don't you never come to a
churchyard to git yer sins forgive?"

"No," said the terrapin-finder, "not till I knows I has some sins."

"What air you prowlin' about the church then fur, anyhow?" demanded the
stranger, standing up in his boots, into which his trousers were tucked;
and he stood such a straight, long-limbed, lithe giant of a man that
Levin saw he could never run away, even if the intruder meant to chew
him up right there.

"I ain't a prowlin', friend," answered Levin Dennis. "I was jess a
lookin'."

"Lookin' fur what, fur which, fur who?" said the man, taking a step
towards Dennis, who felt himself to be no bigger than one of the other's
long, ditch-leaping, good-for-wading legs.

"Why, I was jess a follerin' a man--that is, friend, not 'zackly a man,
but a hat."

"A hat?" The man walked up to Dennis this time, and stood over him like
a pine-tree over a sucker. "Yer's yer hat," pulling an old straw
article, over-worn, from Dennis's head. "No wind's a blowin' to blow
hats into graveyards. Or did you set yer hat under a hen in yere, by a
stiffy?"

Dennis looked up, laughing, though not all at ease, but his amiable want
of either intelligence or fear, which belong near together, made his
most natural reply to the pertinacious intruder a disarming grin.

"No, man," Dennis said, "it was a hat on a man's head--ole Meshach
Milburn's steeple-top. I was a follerin' of him."

"Stow your wid!" the man clapped the hat back on Levin's head. "You're a
poor hobb, anyhow. Is thair any niggers to sell hereby?"

"Oh, that's your trade, nigger buyin'? Well, there's mighty few niggers
to sell in Prencess Anne. Unless"--here a flash of intelligence shone in
Levin's eyes--"unless that's what's took ole Meshach Milburn to Jedge
Custis's. He goes nowhar unless there's trouble or money for _him_."

"And where is Judge Custis's, you rum chub?"

"Yander!" pointing to Teackle Hall.

"Ha! that is a Judge's? And niggers? Broke, too! Well, it's no hank for
a napper bloke. So bingavast! Git! Whar's the tavern?"

"I'm a-goin' right thair," answered Levin, much relieved. "You must be a
Yankee, or some other furriner, sir."

"No, hobb! I'm workin' my lay back to Delaware from Norfolk, by pungy to
Somers's cove. Show me to the tavern and I'll sluice your gob. I'll
treat you to swig."

At the prospect of a drink, of which he was too fond, Levin led the way
to the Washington Tavern, where there was a material addition to the
attendance since Jimmy Phoebus had called to every passer-by that
Meshach Milburn, on the testimony of Jack Wonnell, had actually been and
gone and disappeared in Judge Custis's doorway, and nearly a dozen
townsfolks were now discussing the why and wherefore, when, suddenly,
Levin Dennis came out of Church Street with a man over six feet high, of
a prodigious pair of legs, and arms nearly as long, with a cold,
challenging, yet restless pair of blue eyes, and with reddish-brown
beard and hair, coarse and stringy. The free negro, Samson Hat, being a
little way off, was observed to cast a beaming glance of admiration at
the athletic proportions of the stranger, who looked as if he might
shoulder an ox, or outrun a horse.

"Hallo!" exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus, looking the stranger over boldly,
yet with indifference, at last. "You're cuttin' a splurge, Levin, too.
Where's Meshach?"

"Can't see no sign of him, Jimmy. Guess Jack Wonnell hit it, an' he's
gone in the Jedge's. Mebbe he's buyin' of Jedge Custis's niggers. That's
this gentleman's business."

Jimmy Phoebus, himself no slight specimen of a man, gave another
glance at the stranger from the black cherries of his eyes, and,
apparently no better satisfied with the inspection, made no sign of
acquaintance.

"Whoever ain't too nice to drink with a nigger buyer," said the man,
independently, "can come in and set up his drink, with my redge, for I'm
rhino-fat and just rotten with flush."

There was a pause for somebody to take the initiative, but Jimmy
Phoebus, turning his big, broad Greekish face and small forehead on
the stranger, remarked:

"I never tuk a drink with a nigger buyer yit, and, by smoke! I reckon
I'm too old to begin."

The man stopped and measured Jimmy up in his eye.

"Humph!" he said with a sneer, "you look to be a little more than half
nigger yourself. If I was dead broke I'd run you to market an' git my
price for you."

"No doubt of it whatever, as fur as you're concerned," said Jimmy,
unexcited, while the man pushed Levin Dennis in towards the bar.

Either the new movement of Meshach Milburn, or the example of the
strange man, set Princess Anne in a tipsy condition that day. The
stranger was full of money, and treating indiscriminately, and the
pavement before the hotel was continually beset with the loiterers, and
the bar took money and spread mischief. So when, an hour after dark, the
unpopular townsman, avoiding the crowd, passed by on the opposite side
of the street, nearest his own lodging, one of the loudest and most
unanimous yells he had ever heard in his experience, rang out from the
Washington Tavern.

"Steeple-top! Steeple-top! Old Meshach's loose. Whoo-o-op!"

"Laugh on!" thought Meshach, "till now I never knew the meaning of 'let
them laugh who win.'"

He felt confirmed in his idea to be married in the Raleigh tile, and
when he saw Samson Hat, Milburn said: "Boy, brush all my clothing well.
Then go back to the livery stable, and order a buggy to be ready for you
at ten o'clock. At that hour set out for Berlin; and bring back Rhody
Holland with you in the morning."

"It's more dan thirty mile, marster, an' a sandy road."

"No matter. Take it slow. I will write you a letter to carry. Samson, I
am going to be married to-night to the rose of Princess Anne."

"Dar's on'y one," said Samson. "Not Miss Vesty Custis?"

"Yes, Samson. Princess Anne may now have something to howl at. The poor
girl may be lonesome, as, no doubt, she will be dropped everywhere on my
account, and not a soul can I think of, to be my young lady's maid,
unless it is Rhody."

"Yes, Marster, wid all your money you're pore in friends; in
women-friends you is starved."

"You may go with me to the church," said Meshach, "I suppose you want to
see me married."

"Yes, sir. Dat I do! Wouldn't miss dat fo' my Christmas gift. I 'spect
dat gal Virgie will come wid Miss Vesty to de cer'mony, marster."

"Perhaps so. You are not thinking of love, too, Samson?"

"Well, don't know, marster. Virgie's a fine gal, sho' I am a little old,
Marster Milburn, but I'll have to look out for myseff, I 'spec, now you
done burnt down my spreein' place. Dar's a wife comin' in yar now. So if
you don't speak a good word fur me wid some o' Miss Vesty's gals, I'm
aboot done."

"Well, boy," Meshach said, "you have got the same chance I had: the
upper hand. I owe you a nice little sum in wages, and you may be able to
buy one of the Custis housemaids, and set her free, and marry her, or,
be her owner. You are a free man."

Samson shook his head gravely.

"Dat won't do among niggers," he said. "Niggers never kin play de upper
hand in love, like white people. Dey has to do it by love itseff: by
kindness, marster."

Before nine o'clock Milburn and his negro left the old store by the town
bridge, and passing by the river lane called Front Street, into Church
Street, walked back of the hotel, avoiding its triflers, and reached the
church in a few minutes unobserved. The long windows shed some light,
however, but as it was Saturday night, this was attributed, by the few
who noticed it, to preparations for the next Sabbath morning. Before
setting out, Samson Hat, observing his employer to shake a trifle, asked
him if a dram of whiskey would not be proper.

"No, boy; this is a wedding without wine. I shall need all my wits to
find my manners."

He entered the church, and found it warmed, and the minister already
present in his surplice, kneeling alone at the altar. Mr. Tilghman
arose, with his youthful face very pale, and tears upon his cheeks, and
seeing his neglected parishioner and the serving-man, came down the
aisle.

"Mr. Milburn," he said, extending his hand, "I hope to congratulate,
after this ceremony, a Christian-hearted bridegroom, and one who will
take the rare charge which has fallen to him, in tender keeping. My
endeavor shall be to love you, sir, if you will let me! Miss Vesta is
the priestess of Princess Anne, and if you take her from our sight and
hearing, even God's ministrations in this church will seem hollow, I
fear."

"To me they would," said Milburn, "though from no disrespect to our
pastor."

"You have been a faithful parishioner," resumed Tilghman, "during my
brief labor here, as in my boyhood, when I little dreamed I should fill
that desk. You know, perhaps, that it was from the hopeless love of my
cousin Custis, I fled to God for consolation, and he made me his humble
minister."

"I have heard so," said Milburn; "or, rather, I have seen so."

"Pardon my mentioning a subject so irrelevant to you, sir, but, though I
have surrendered every vain emotion for my cousin, her happiness is a
part of my religion, and this sudden conclusion of her marriage, about
which I have asked only one question, has urged me to throw myself upon
your sympathy."

"What do you ask, William Tilghman? No matter--your request is granted."

"How have I won your favor?" the young rector asked, somewhat surprised.

Milburn mechanically picked his hat from a pew, and held it a little way
up.

"You were the only boy in this village who never cried after this hat."

"Then it was probably overlooked by me. I was like the other boys,
mischievous, before my spirits had been depressed by unhappy love, and I
did not know I was any exception to their habits."

"It was grateful to see that exception," said Milburn; "hooted people
make fine distinctions."

"Oh, Mr. Milburn, forgive the boys! They are made for laughter, and
little causes excite it, like dogs to bark, from health and
exercise--scarcely more than that. The request I make is to let me be
your friend, because I have been your wife's! Frankness becomes my
calling, and I think you need friendly, cordial surroundings to bring
out your usefulness, and give you the freedom that will take constraint
out of your family life, and, without diminishing your good
sensibilities, dispel any morbid ones. This will open a way for Vesta to
see her domestic career, which, otherwise, might become so rapidly
contracted as to disappoint you both. You have seen her the idol of her
wide circle, free as a bird, indulged by her kind, and by Providence
also, till joy and grace, beauty and health, faith and hope live
abundant in her, and you are the beneficiary of it all. Her society
hereafter you must control. May I become your friend, and let my love
for your wife recommend me to your confidence, as you to mine and to my
prayers?"

"Have I another friend already?" exclaimed Milburn, his voice quivering.
"What wealth she brings me never known before! William, you will be ever
welcome to me."

They clasped hands upon it, and old Samson Hat, sitting back, was heard
to chuckle aloud such a warming laugh, that Meshach's response to it, in
a sudden pallid shivering, seemed slightly out of keeping. He was
recalled, however, by the entrance of Judge Custis with his daughter,
and her maid, Virgie.

Vesta was very pale, but neither shrinking nor negative. On the
contrary, she supported her father rather than received his support, and
Milburn saw the Judge's worn, helpless face, with the pride faded from
it, and pity for his daughter absorbing every other feeling of
depression.

He wore his best cloth suit, with the coat tails falling to his knees
behind, the body cut square to the hips, and the collar raised high upon
his stock of white enamelled English leather. His low-buttoned vest
exposed his shirt-buttons of crystal and gilt, and a ruffle, ironed by
Roxy's slender hands with nimble touches, parted down the middle like
sea foam on shell, and similar ruffles at the wrists were clasped by
chain buttons of pearl and silver. His vest was of figured Marseilles
stuff, and gaiters of the same material partly covered his shoes; and
his heavy seal, with his coat of arms upon it, fell from a pale ribbon
at his fob. Debtor though he was, and answering at the bar of the church
to a heavy personal and family judgment, his large and flowing lines of
body, deeply cut chin, full eyes, and natural height and grace of
stature made him a marked and noble presence anywhere.

Vesta Custis, dropping off a mantle of blue velvet at a touch of her
maid, stood in a party dress of white silk, the neck, shoulders, and
arms bare; and, as she halted a minute in the aisle, Virgie struck the
cloth sandals from her mistress's white slippers of silk, and, removing
her hood of home-embroidered cloth, a veil of white fell to her train.
The dingy light from the lamps of whale-oil gathered, like poor folks'
children's marvelling eyes, around the pair of diamonds in her
delicately moulded, but alert and generous ears. Her fine gold
watch-chain, twice dependent from her neck, disappeared in the snowy
mould of her bosom, on whose heaving drift swam a magnolia-bud and
blossom, each with a leaf. Her father's picture, in a careful miniature
set in pearls, lay higher on her breast, fastened by a pearl necklace.
Her hands were covered with white gloves, and her arms were without
ornament. Her hair, dropping in dark ringlets around her forehead and
temples, was combed upward farther back, and then gathered around a
pearl comb in high braids, and the plentiful loops drooped to her
shoulder.

Milburn glanced at the treasures of her peerless bodily charms, never
till now revealed to his sight, and their splendor almost made him
afraid.

Never had he been at a theatre, a ball, or anywhere from which he could
have foreseen a swan-like neck and bosom sculptured like these, and arms
as white as the limbs of the silver-maple, and warmed with bridal-life
and modesty.

Her lips, parted and red, her great rich eyes a goddess might have
commanded through, with their eyebrows of raven-black, like entrances to
the caves of the Cumæan sibyl, her small head borne as easily upon her
neck as a dove upon a sprig--all flashed upon Milburn's thrilled yet
flinching soul, as the revelation of a divinity.

As she stepped forward he spoke to her with that bold instinct or
ecstasy she had observed when she first addressed him in her father's
house, ten hours before.

"You have dressed yourself for me?" he said.

"Sir, such as I could command upon this necessity I thought to do you
honor with."

"For _me_, to look so beautiful! what can I say? You are very lovely!"

"It is gracious of you to praise me. Shall we wait, or are you ready?"

He gave her his hand, unable to speak again, and she was calm enough to
notice that his hand was now hot, as if he had fever. Her father, at her
side, reached out also, and took the bridegroom's other hand:

"Milburn," he said, huskily, "this is no work of mine. My daughter has
my consent only because it is her will."

"The nobler to me for that," Milburn spoke, with his countenance
strangely flushed. "What shall we do, my lady?"

"Give me your arm; not that one. This is right. Have you brought a ring,
sir?"

"Yes." He drew from his vest pocket a little, lean gold ring, worth
hardly half a dollar.

"It was my poor mother's," he said.

Without another word she walked forward, her arm drawing him on, Virgie
following, and her father bringing up the rear. Samson Hat, feeling
uneasy at being awarded no part in the ceremony, slipped up the aisle as
far as the big, stiff-aproned stove in the middle of the church, behind
which he ducked his body, but kept his head and faculties in the centre
of the events.

Mr. Tilghman had preceded them in his surplice, and taking his place at
the altar, with his countenance pale as death, he read the exordium in
an altered voice: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here, and in
the face of this company, to join together this man and this woman in
holy matrimony."

"What 'company' is here?" thought Vesta. "Not alone these poor negroes
and my father; no, I feel behind me, looking on, the generations of our
pride and helpless ease, the worthy younger suitors I have been too
exacting and particular to see the consideration and merits of, the
golden hours I might have improved my mind in, with brilliant
opportunities I was not jealous of, and which will be mine no more,
because I had not trimmed my virgin lamp; and so I slept away my
girlhood, till now I awaken at the cry, 'The bridegroom cometh,' and I
behold! Yes, I have been a foolish virgin, and am surprised when my fate
is here! Perhaps my guardian angel also stands behind me, the cross
advanced that I must take, my crown concealed; but somewhere, midway of
this journey of life, she may give it to me, and say, 'Well done!'"

"This 'company,'" thought Milburn, with swimming head, "gathered to see
me marry! what company? I seem to feel, besides these negroes, my sole
spectators, the populous forest peering on, the barefoot generations,
the illiterate broods, the instinctive parents, the sandy graves. They
give forth my lost tribe, and all cry at me, 'Go, leave us, proud one!
despiser, go!' Yet there is one I see, pure as my bride, white as my
captive's bosom, her soul all in her believing eyes, and saying, 'Oh, my
son, it is a woman like me that has come into your life, and her heart
is very tender, and, by your mother's dying love! be kind to the poor
stranger you have bought.'"

He answered, "I will!" aloud, and it seemed almost a miraculous
coincidence that it was a response to the minister's question, till he
heard the corresponding inquiry put to his bride in the clergyman's low,
but gentlest, tones:

"Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him, in
sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto
him, so long as ye both shall live?"

"I will!" spoke the Judge's daughter, clear as music, and the Judge drew
a long, deep sigh, saturated with tears, as if from the deepest wells of
grief.

He could not distinctly answer, as he joined her hand to the minister's.
The minister lost his office and speech for a moment, joining her hand
to the bridegroom's. The slave-girl burst into a wail she could not
control, and only Vesta stood calm as her bridegroom, putting her cool,
moist hand in his palm of fire, and waited to repeat the Church's
deliberate language.

When both had made this solemn promise, she reached for the little ring,
and gave it to her old lover, the minister, and Virgie loosed her glove.
Mr. Tilghman, his tears silently falling upon his book, passed the ring
to Meshach, and saw its tiny circle hoop her white finger round, no
bigger than a straw, yet formidable as the martyr's chain. His prayers
were said with deep feeling, and he pronounced them man and wife. Then,
shaking Meshach's hand, he said, with his boyish countenance bright as
faith could make it:

"My friend, may I take my kiss?"

Meshach nodded his head, but his face was like a ball of fire, and he
hardly knew what was asked. Mr. Tilghman kissed Vesta, saying,

"Cousin, your husband is my friend, and love and friendship both
surround you now. May your happiness be, like your goodness, securest
when you surmount difficulties, like those birds that cannot float at
perfect grace till they have struggled above the clouds."

"May I kiss you now?" Milburn said, gazing with a wild look upon her
rich eyes.

As she obediently raised her lips, a strange, warm, husky breath, not
natural nor even passionate, came from his nostrils. The Judge, looking
at this--no pleasing scene to him, the fairest Custis in two hundred
years being devoured before his sight--exclaimed within his soul,

"Is Meshach drinking? His eyes look fiery."

So, after kissing his daughter also, and saying, "May God reward you
with triumphs and compensation beyond our fears!" the Judge said:

"Milburn, I suppose, in the sudden conclusion of this union, you have
made no arrangements as to where you will go; so come, of course, to
Teackle Hall, and make it your home."

"Is that your wish, my dear one?"

Vesta replied, "Yes. But it is yours to choose, sir."

"You have some business with your father for an hour," Milburn said;
"meantime, I require something at my warehouse, and, as it is yet early
in the night, may I leave you a little while?"

She bowed her head again, and, while they proceeded towards the
church-door, lingering there, Samson took the opportunity to seize both
of Virgie's hands.

"Virgie," he exclaimed, "is all dat kissin a gwyin on an' we black folks
git none of it? Come hyeah, purty gal, an' kiss yer ole gran'fadder!"

Virgie consented without resistance, till Samson continued, "Oh, what
peach an' honey, Virgie! Gi me anoder one! I say, Virgie, sence my
marster an' your mistis have done gone an' leff us two orphans, sposen
we git Mr. Tilghman to pernounce us man an' wife, too?" Then Virgie drew
away.

"Samson Hat," she said, "what's that you are talking about? You ought to
be ashamed of yourself. You are old enough to be my father!"

"'Deed I ain't, my love. I'm good as four o' dese new kine o' Somoset
County beaux. I'm a free man. Maybe I'll sot you free too, Virgie--me
an' my marster yonder. He says we better git married. 'Deed he does."

"You are just an impertinent old negro," the girl replied. "Do you
suppose any well-raised girl would have a man who got rich by cleaning
the Bad Man's hat? You're nothing but the devil's serving-man, sir."

"Look out dat debbil don't ketch you, den," said Samson. "You pore,
foolish, believin' chile! Look out dem purty black eyes don't cry for
ole Samson yit. He's done bound to marry some spring chicken, ole Samson
is, an' I reckon you'll brile de tenderest, Virgie."

Virgie, indignant, but fluttered at her first real proposal, and from
one of the richest men of her color in Princess Anne, hastened to tie on
her young mistress's walking-shoes, and, as they all stepped from the
happy old church, where Vesta's voice had so often pierced, in her
flights of harmony, to a bliss that seemed to carry her soul, like a
lark, to heaven's gate, that

  "singing, still dost soar, and, soaring, ever singest,"

she saw fall upon the pavement of the churchyard the long, preposterous,
moon-thrown hat of the bridegroom.

"Oh, what will he do with that hat, now that he has married me?" Vesta
thought. "Will he continue to afflict me with it?"

Her heart sank down, so that she felt relieved when he kissed her again
at the church-gate, and saying, "I will come soon, darling," went, with
his man, into Princess Anne.

"Is your buggy ready harnessed, Samson?" his master asked, when they
turned the court-house corner.

"Yes, marster."

At this moment a large crowd of men, comprising all the idle population
in town, as well as many Saturday-night bacchanalians from the country
and coasts, some standing before the tavern, others on the opposite
sidewalks or gathered on the court-house corner, seeing the hatted
figure of Meshach rise against the moonlight, raised the scattering
cry, finally deepening into a yell, of:

"Man with the hat loose! Steeple-top! Three cheers for old Meshach's
hat!"

With a minute's irresolution, as if hesitating to go through the crowd,
Milburn turned into the main street, crossed it, and continued down the
opposite sidewalk, on the same side with his domicile, the jeers and
jests still continuing.

"Dar's rum a workin' in dis town all arternoon, marster," his faithful
negro said, "eber sence dat long man come in from de churchyard wid
Levin Dennis. Look out, marster!"

He had scarcely spoken, when three men were seen to bar the way, two of
them drunk, the third ugly with drink, emerging from a groggery that
stood across the street from the tavern, where further beverage had been
denied them. The first was Jack Wonnell. He hiccoughed, cried
"Steeple-top!" and slunk behind a mulberry-tree. The second man was
Levin Dennis, hardly able to stand, and he sat down on the groggery
step, smiling up idiotically.

The third man, rising like a giant out of his boots, with his arms
swaying like loose grapevines, and his bearded face streaked with
tobacco drippings, looking insolence and contempt, brought the flat of
one hand fairly down on the crown of Milburn's surprising tile, with the
words:

"Halloo! Yer's Goosecap! Hocus that cady, Old Gripefist!"

The hat, age being against it, wilted down on Meshach's eyes, and the
heedless stroke, unconsciously powerful, staggered him.

Samson, who had drunk in the giant's qualifications with an instant's
admiration, immediately drew off, seeing his master insulted, and struck
the tall stranger a blow with his fist. The man reeled, rallied, and
sought to grapple with Samson. That skilful pugilist bent his knees,
slided his shoulders back, and, avoiding the clutch, raised, and threw
his trunk forward, with the blow studied well, and planted his knuckles
in the white man's eyes. The tall ruffian went down as from a bolt of
lightning.

Milburn saw all this happen in a minute of time, and his eye, looking
for something to defend himself, dropped on the brick pier under the
groggery steps, where Levin Dennis sat, stupefied by the scene. A brick
in the pier was loose, and Milburn stepped towards it. In this small
interval the hardy stranger had recovered himself and staggered to his
feet, and had drawn a dirk-knife.

"The ruffian oly you!" he bellowed. "Knocked down! by a nigger, too!
Hell have you, then!"

As he darted forward, he described a rapid circle backward and downward
with the knife, aiming to turn it through Samson's bowels, which he
would have done--that valorous servant being without defence, and not so
much as a pebble of stone lying on the bare plain of the soil to give
him aid--had not Meshach, wresting the loose brick from the pier, aimed
it at the corresponding exposed portion of the assassin's body, and
struck him full in the pit of the stomach. The man's eyes rolled, and he
fell, like one stone-dead, his dirk sticking in the sidewalk.

"Let him lie there," said Meshach, contemptuously. "No danger of such a
dog dying! If there is time he shall mend in the jail. Take to your
buggy, boy, and keep out of the way."

The negro needed no warning, as the impiety of striking a white man was
forbidden in a larger book than the Bible--the book of ignorance. He
disappeared through the houses and was a mile out of Princess Anne,
driving fast, before the new man had raised his head from the ground.

"Where is the nigger?" he gasped, his paleface painted by his bloodshot
eyes. "What kind of coves are you to let a black bloke fight a white
man? I'll cut his heart out before I tip the town."

He looked around on the crew which had crossed over from the tavern;
Meshach had vanished in his store at the descent of the road. Jimmy
Phoebus was the only one to speak.

"Nigger buyer," he said, "if you are around this town from now till
midnight, or after midnight to-morrer, Sunday night, ole Meshach Milburn
will have you in that air jail till Spring. By smoke! he'll find out yer
aunty's cedents, whair you goin, whair you been, what's yer splurge, an
all yer hokey pokey. You've struck the Ark of the Lord this time--ole
Milburn's Entailed Hat! Take my advice an' travel!"

The man washed his face at the tavern pump, turned the bank corner, and
disappeared in the night towards Teackle Hall.




CHAPTER XIII.

SHADOW OF THE TILE.


As Vesta and her father stepped over the sill of Teackle Hall, it seemed
very dear, yet somewhat dread to them, being reclaimed again, but at the
penalty of a new member of the family and he an intruder. To the library
Vesta and her father went, and he threw some wood upon the low fire, and
lighted the lamp and candles; then turning, he took his daughter in his
arms and sobbed bitterly, repeating over the words: "What shall I do! O
what shall I do!" She also yielded to the luxury of grief, but was
speechless till he said:

"My darling, I have dreamed of your wedding-day many a time, but it was
not like this. Music and joy, free-heartedness, a handsome, youthful
bridegroom, our whole connection gathered here from the army and navy,
from South, West, and North, and all happy except poor Daniel Custis,
about to lose his child!"

"Your child is not to go," Vesta whispered; "is not that a comfort?"

"I do not know. Is it my pure, poor child? Had I seen you waste with
consumption, day by day, like a dying lilac-tree, with its clusters
fewer every year till it deadened to the root, I could have wept in
heavenly sympathy, and learned from you the way I have not walked. But,
in your flower to be a forester's plucking, stripped from my stem and
trodden in the sand, your pride reduced, your tastes unheeded, your
heart dragged into the wigwam of a savage and made to consult his
maudlin will---- Oh, what shall I do!"

"I do not fear my husband like that," Vesta said, opening his arms. "My
mind, I think, he will rather raise to serious things, for which I have
some desire, though, I fear, no talent. Papa, something tells me that
this old life we have led, easy and happy, comfortable and independent,
is passing away. Our family race must learn the new lessons of the age
if we would not see it retired and obscure. Is that not so?"

"I fear it is God's truth, my darling. The life we have led is only a
remnant of colonial, or, rather, of provincial dignity, to which the
nature of this republican government is hostile. Tobacco, which was once
our money, is disappearing from this shore, and wheat and corn we cannot
grow like the rich young West, which is pouring them out through the
canal the late Governor Clinton lived to open. Money is becoming a thing
and not merely a name, and it captures every other thing--land,
distinction, talent, family, even beauty and purity. The man you married
understands the art of money and we do not."

"Then are we not impostors, papa, if we assume to be so much better than
our real superiors? Surely we must persevere in those things the age
demands, and excel in them, to sustain our pride."

"Yes, if the breed is gamecock it will accept any challenge, not only
war and politics, but mechanics, shop-keeping, cattle-herding,
anything!"

"Papa, if you can see these things that are to be, so clearly, why can
you not take the wise steps to plant your family on the safe side?"

"Ah! we Virginians were always the best statesmen, but we died poor.
Having no manual craft, slight bookkeeping, and unlimited capacity for
office, we foresaw everything but the humiliation of ourselves, and that
we hardly admitted when it had come, so much were we flattered by our
philosophic intellects. Our newest amusement is to expound the
constitution to them who are doing too well under it, although our
fathers, who made it, like Jefferson and Madison, died only yesterday,
overwhelmed with debts, and poor Mr. Monroe is run away to New York,
they say, to dodge the Virginia bailiffs."

"Well, papa, I have saved you from that fear. Here are your notes to Mr.
Milburn and others. Sit down and look them over carefully and see if
they are all here!"

He took them up, with volatile relief laughing on his yet tear-marked
face, and said:

"We'll burn them, Vessy."

"Nay, sir, not till you have seen them all. A single note missing would
give you the same perplexity, and there is no daughter left to settle
it."

He looked at her with a smile, yet annoyance.

"You are not going to make a Meshach Milburn of me?"

"Stop, sir!" Vesta said. "You might do worse than learn from my
husband."

Something strange in her expression baffled the Judge.

"Ha!" he interjected, "have I a rival already, daughter? Is his conquest
as complete as that?"

"I promised to honor him a few moments ago, and I believe I can, papa.
All that you tell me adds to my respect for a man who seems to be only
what he is."

"Perhaps you can love him, too?" the Judge said, watching her with an
apprehension a little like wonder, a little like jealousy.

"Oh, I wish I could, papa! That also I promised to do, and I will try.
But my work will all be a failure if you do not become reconciled to Mr.
Milburn. It was for you I married him, and to save your name, your
peace, your independence, and the upbraiding we expected from mamma at
the loss of her dower. He is now your son-in-law, still in the prime of
life, with the business training you lament that you do not possess.
Begin this moment, papa, and learn his habits. Count and identify those
notes!"

Judge Custis looked them over separately, ran the number of notes he had
given over in his mind, and said:

"Yes, he has made fair restitution. There are none missing."

"Restitution implies that he has robbed you, papa. A just man did not
speak there! Every penny in those debts is stamped with Mr. Milburn's
injuries and coined by his sacrifices. Have you spent his money
remembering that?"

"No, my child, I suppose not."

"Give me the notes, papa."

She took them and sat thinking a few moments silently.

"If I were a man, papa," she said at length, "I would try to learn
business sense. It must be so respectable to live with one's mind able
to help one's security and one's friends, and prepare for age or
sickness while strong and healthy. Now, I think I will not let you burn
these notes till you have paid the price of them! Please write a
transfer of this house, servants, and your manor to me, Vesta----yes,
Vesta Milburn!"

She blushed as she spoke for the first time her new-worn name.

"Alas!" sighed her father, "Vesta Custis no more. I begin to feel it.
Well, Mrs. Milburn--I will give you the title--for what must I make over
these old properties to you?"

"In consideration of my repayment of the sum of my mother's estate to
you for her, for which you have given her no security whatever. It is
not provided for by these notes. I have only Mr. Meshach Milburn's
promise that he will pay her this money, risked and lost by you, father,
I fear very heedlessly. Is it restitution, also, for Mr. Milburn to
strip himself to pay your debts to mother?"

"No," said the Judge, guiltily, "that he pays on account of his passion
for you. He may cheat you there."

"I do not believe it, because he has been faithful to me so many years
before I knew he loved me. A man who keeps himself pure for a woman he
has no vows to, will pay her father's debts of honor when he has
promised."

Judge Custis found the issue quite too warm for his convenience, and
blushing as much as Vesta, he sat down and drew up a conveyance of his
property to Vesta Milburn, in her own right, and in consideration of
twenty-five thousand dollars, paid to Mrs. Lucy Custis on account of
judgment confessed to her by Daniel Custis.

"There, my dear," he said, passing it over, "what do you want with it?
Are you not sure of a home here as long as you live, even with me as the
proprietor?"

"No. The tragedy nearly finished here may be repeated, papa, and all of
us be homeless if you can go in debt again. I shall not do that--not
even for my husband, and here will stand Teackle Hall to protect you
all from the cold if bad times ever come again."

"You have paid a greater price for it, my child, than it is worth, and
you are entitled to it."

"Besides, dear father, if Mr. Milburn needs any reminder of his promise
to repay mamma's dowry, this will give it. He intended his gift to be my
marriage dower, and were I to convey it to you I should first ask his
consent; not in law, perhaps, but in delicacy."

"Oh, yes," the Judge said carelessly, "I am glad you have such good
reasons. Yet, my beautiful, my last child,--pride of my race! I hate to
see you so ready for this business--this calculation and foresight. It
is not like the Custises. I fear this man, Milburn, in a single day has
thrown his net around your nature, and annexed you to his sordid
existence. At this moment the redeeming thing about you is that you
cannot love him."

"Dear father, thoughts like that beset me, too--the pride of
aristocracy, the remembrance of what has been; but I want to be honest
and not to cheat my heart or any person. We have fallen from our height;
he has raised himself from his condition; and there is no deception in
my conduct. He knows I do not love him. Instead of standing upon an
obdurate heart, I pray God to melt my nature and mould it to his
affection!"

Regarding her a moment with increasing interest, Judge Custis came
forward and kissed her forehead.

"Amen, then!" he said. "May you love your husband! I will do all I can
to love him, too."

"That is spoken like a true man," Vesta said. "And now, father,
good-night! Be ready here for Mr. Milburn's arrival. Ring for a decanter
and some cake. It will not hurt you, after your fast, to drink a glass
of sherry with the bridegroom."

He kissed her and felt her trembling in his arms. As she started to go,
she returned and clung to him again. Her face was pale with fear.

"Oh, dreadful God!" he muttered, "to visit my many sins upon this
spotless angel! Where shall I fly?"

A step was upon the porch, and Vesta flashed up the stairway.

Judge Custis went to his door apprehensive and in tears. A strange man
stood there, with his eye bruised and blood dripping down to his coarse,
rope-like beard. He was in liquor, but so pale that it was apparent by
the starlight.

"Good-evening," said the man; "you don't know me, Judge Custis? No
matter, I'm Joe Johnson."

The Judge, whose tears had taken him far from things of trivial memory,
looked at the man and repeated "_Joe_ Johnson. Not Joe Johnson of
Dorchester?"

"Yes, Judge, Joe Johnson, the slave-dealer. I've bought many a nigger
from a Custis when it was impolite to sell 'em, Judge, so they let me
run' em off, and cussed me for it to the public. An' that's made me
onpopular, Judge Custis, and that's my fix to-night."

"You have been fighting, Johnson, I think," said the Judge, with
suppressed dislike.

"I've been knocked down by a nigger," said the man, with a glare of
ferocity, removing his hand from the wounded eye, as if it inflamed his
recollection of the blow to see the drops of blood drip from his beard
to the porch. "This town is too nice to abide a dealer in the
constitutional article, and so they set on me, when I was a little
jingle-brained with lush, an' while the nigger klemmed me in the peep, a
little white villain with a steeple bonnet hit me in the bread-bag with
a stone. I've come yer, Judge, to lie up in the kitchen, an' sleep warm
over Sunday, for the cops threaten to take me, if they catch me before
midnight."

"I suppose you know, Johnson, that I am a magistrate, and the proper
harborage I give to breakers of the peace is the jail."

"I'm not afraid of that limbo, Judge Custis, when I come to you. Old
Patty Cannon has done you many a good turn with Joe Johnson's gang about
election times in the upper destreeks of Somerset. Patty always said
Judge Custis was a game gentleman that returned a favor."

The Judge's countenance, an instant blank, lighted up with all a
vote-getter's smile, and he said:

"Joe, you're a terrible fellow, but dear old Aunt Patty did always take
my part! I suspect, Joe, that you have run afoul of Samson, the hired
man of Meshach Milburn, who is a boxer, though I wonder that he could
get away with your youth and size. Of course, I won't let you come to
harm. You haven't been playing your tricks on anybody's negroes, Joe?"

"No, upon my word, Judge! You see, I took a load of Egypt down the
Nanticoke to Norfolk, and shipped 'em to Orleens. Says I: 'I'll go back
Eastern Shore way, and see if there's any niggers to git.' So I tramped
it from Somers's Cove to Princess Anne, an' sluiced my gob at Kingston
and the Trappe till I felt noddy with the booze, and lay down in the
churchyard to snooze it off. Bein' awaked before my nod was out, I felt
evil an' chiveyish, and the tavern blokes, an' the nigger, an' the
feller with the steeple shap, all clecked me at once."

"Well, Joe, for Aunt Patty's sake, I'll take care of you. Go to the
kitchen door, and I'll step through the house and tell our Aunt Hominy
to give you supper and breakfast, and a place to get some sleep. But you
must keep out of the way, and slip off quietly on Sunday, for we have
had a wedding in the family to-day, Joe, and though I cannot understand
your peculiar slang, I suspect the bridegroom to be the man who knocked
the breath out of you with the stone."

The stranger lifted his hand from his bloody eye again, and counted the
red drops splashing down from his beard. Judge Custis marked his scowl.

"Tut, tut!" said the Judge, "you will never get your revenge out of that
man. He is too strong. I don't wonder that he disabled you, and don't
you ever get into his clutches, Joe; for if he knows you are here, I
shall be forced to send you to jail this very night. Keep out of the
hands of Meshach Milburn! He has knocked the breath out of you, Mr.
Johnson, but there are some whose hearts he has twisted out of their
bodies."

"I'll meet him somewhere," Joe Johnson muttered, "but not in Princess
Anne;" and he pulled down his slouched hat to cover his eyes, and
stalked away to find the kitchen.

"Oh, what a day can bring forth," Judge Custis thought, raising his
hands to the October stars: "Meshach of the ominous hat the host in my
parlor: Joe Johnson, the son-in-law of Patty Cannon, the guest of my
kitchen!"




CHAPTER XIV.

MESHACH'S HOME.


Vesta had slept she hardly knew how long, but it was day, and slowly her
eyes turned towards the remainder of her bed to see if it was occupied.

The bridegroom was not there.

She reached her foot into her slipper at the bedside, and at one swift
step passed before her mirror, whispering:

"I have dreamed it all!"

The fresh, flushing skin, and radiant contrasts of hair and eyes seemed
so welcome to her in their perfect assurance of health, that she
whispered again:

"Have I dreamed it? He is not here. Oh, am I free?"

Then a feeling of reproval came to her as the minutest memory of that
wonderful yesterday rose to her mind, and the vow she had made to honor
and obey seemed to have been too easily repented. She looked upon her
hand, and the little, thin, pathetic thread of gold reaffirmed her
memory of the wedding-ring, and at the next suggestion a blush coursed
through her being like a redbird in the apple-blossoms: perhaps he had
stolen from her chamber stealthily as he came, while she, drowned in
deep slumber, wotted not.

A glance into the mirror again revealed those blushes repeating each
other, like the Aurora in the northern dawn, till, with a searching
consciousness, and her voice raised above the whisper, she said,

"Be still, silly _girl_!"

Opening the door, she found Virgie lying on the rug without, warmly
wrapped in her mistress's blanket-shawl, but wide awake.

"Virgie, no one has passed?" asked Vesta.

"No, Miss Vessy. Nobody could have stepped over me, for my mind has been
too awake, if I did sleep a little. Maybe _he_ ain't a-coming, Miss
Vessy. Maybe he's ashamed!"

"Hush, Virgie," Vesta said, "you are speaking of your master."

Throwing her morning-robe around her shoulders, the maiden bride tripped
noiselessly to her mother's apartment; the door was open, the night
taper floating in its vase, and Mrs. Custis lay asleep with her
bank-book under her pillow.

"Shall I awake her?" Vesta thought. "Yes, if I do not need her
experience, I do want her confidence, and not to give her mine would
seem deceit now."

Vesta kissed her mother softly, and placed her cheek beside that lady's
thin, respectable profile as she awoke, and said:

"Daughter, mercy! why, what has become of you? It seems to me I have
seen nobody for days, and I wanted to express my indignation even in my
dreams. Where have you been?"

"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, taking Mrs. Custis's head in her arms, "I have
been finding your lost fortune, which troubled us all so much. It is to
be given back to you, dearest--my husband has promised to do so."

"Your husband? Whom have you selected, that he is so free with his
money? How could you hear from Baltimore so soon? Now, don't tell me a
parcel of stuff, thinking to comfort me. Your father is a villain, and
my connections shall know it."

Mrs. Custis drew her bank-book from under her head, and began to cry, as
she took a single look at its former total.

"Darling mamma," Vesta said, "seeing you so miserable yesterday on
account of papa's failure, and your portion gone with it, I accepted an
offer of marriage, and have a rich man's promise that, first of all,
your part shall be paid to you. This house, and our manor, and
everything as it is--the servants, the stable, and the movables--belong
to me, in my own name, paid for in papa's notes, and by him transferred
to me to be our home forever, so that a revulsion like yesterday may not
again cross the sill of our door. Does not that deserve a kiss, mamma?"

"I don't believe a word of it," said Mrs. Custis. "This is another trick
to deceive me. I don't accuse you of it, Vesta, but you are the victim
of somebody and your father. Now, who can this man be, so free with his
ready money? It's not the style in Baltimore to promise so liberally as
all that. Have you accepted young Carroll?"

"No, nor thought of him, mamma."

"Then it must be that widower fool, Hynson, ready to sell his negroes
for a second wife like you."

"He has neither been here in body or mind," Vesta said; "never in my
mind."

"That would be a marriage to make a talk: it wouldn't be like you to
bestow so much beauty on a widower. I think there is a certain vulgarity
about an elegant girl marrying a widower. She is so refined, and he is
generally so sleek and sensual. Did you hear from Charles McLane?"

"Nothing, mamma; let me ease your mind by telling you that my husband
lives here in Princess Anne. He was father's creditor, Mr. Meshach
Milburn. He has loved me unknown for years. I saw a way to stop all
scandal and recrimination by marrying him at once, that the society we
know would have but one, and not two, subjects of curiosity. Papa saw me
married last night to Mr. Milburn, and I bear his name this Sabbath
day."

"His wife? Meshach Milburn? The vulgarian in the play-actor's hat? That
man! Daughter, you play with my poor head. It is going again. Oh-h-h!"

"Mother, it is true. I am Mrs. Milburn. My husband is your benefactor."

It was unnecessary to say more, for Mrs. Custis had really fainted.

"Poor mother!" thought Vesta, "I am confirmed in my fear that, if she
had been told of my purpose, she would have opposed it bitterly."

Roxy was summoned to assist Vesta, and after Mrs. Custis had become
conscious, and sighed and cried hysterically, her daughter, sitting in
her lady's rocker, spoke out plainly:

"Mother, I appreciate your disappointment in my marriage, though I
should be the one to make complaint and receive sympathy, instead of
discouragement; but I do not desire it; indeed, I will not permit any
person to disparage my husband, or draw odious comparisons between my
poverty and his exertions. If there are in my body, or my society, any
merits to please a man, they have fallen to him under the law of
Providence, that he that hath shall receive. I pity your illness, dear
mamma, but I fear Mr. Milburn is ill, too, for he has not been here all
night, though he left me at the church-gate."

"I hope the viper is dead!" Mrs. Custis said, with great clearness, and
energized it by sitting up in bed. Roxy left the room.

"I hope he has been murdered," said Mrs. Custis, "and that the murderer
will never be discovered. If there is any spirit of the McLanes left in
my brothers and nephews, they will wipe out, in blood, the insult of
this marriage between my daughter and the man who set a trap upon the
honor of a respectable family."

Vesta arose with a pale, troubled face, yet with some of her mother's
prejudice flashing back.

"He can defend himself, mamma. I shall go to seek him now, since he is
so much hated for me."

She returned to her room, and put on a walking-suit, and made her
toilet. In the library Vesta found her father dozing in a large chair,
with his feet upon a leather sofa, and a silk handkerchief drawn across
his crown, under which were the dry beds of tears that had coursed down
his cheeks. She saw, with a touch of joy, that the sherry in the
decanter was untouched, and the two glasses were still clean: he had not
relapsed into his habits, even while making an all-night vigil to wait
for the unwelcome son-in-law. He started as she entered, and then stared
at her between his dazed wits and a mute inquiry that she could
understand.

"He has not come, papa. And mamma--oh! she is severe."

Vesta, trembling at the throat a moment, rushed into her father's
wide-open arms, and buried the sob in his breast.

"Poor soul! Poor lamb! Poor thing!" he said, over and over, while his
temper slowly rose, that seldom rose of recent years, since pleasure and
carelessness had taken its masculine sting away, but Vesta felt his
tones change while he petted her, and at last heard him say, hoarsely:

"By God!"

"Sh--h!" she whispered, raising her hand to his mouth.

"I will kill somebody," he went on, finishing his sentence, and as she
drew away he strode across the room and back again, a noble exhibition
of passion that had a noble origin, in fatherly pity.

"Don't lose your true pride, papa, after you have persevered so long,"
Vesta said. "It is Sunday. Do you think he will come? What can have
happened?"

"He will either come or fight me," Judge Custis remarked. "I have tried
to be a peaceable man and Christian magistrate, albeit a poor hypocrite
in some, things, but I am pushed too far. My wife's smallness is worse
than insanity and wickedness put together. Between her and this
money-broking fiend, and my neglected child entrapped into such a
marriage, by God! I will clean my old duelling arms, and appeal to
injustice itself to set me even."

If he had been fine-looking in his sincere grief, he was thrice more
attractive in his sincere high spirit. Vesta, admiring him in spite of
her cares, did not like to see him in this unnatural recklessness.

"Dear father," she said, soothingly, "you have no cause of quarrel."

"I have every cause," he cried; "the proposal to marry you was an
insult, for which I should have challenged him, and shot him if he
declined. Now he has married you and absconded, using you and the Custis
honor with contempt. In my day I was the best shot in Eastern Virginia.
I can kill a man in this cause as easily as I have broken either of a
man's arms, at choice, in my courting days. Public opinion will clear me
under this provocation, and I can acquit my own conscience, abhorrent
as duelling is to me. My sons-in-law would leap to take the quarrel up,
and rid the world of Meshach Milburn."

"That is mamma's idea, to kill the debtor who has been specially kind to
her. She says she will send for Uncle Allan McLane, and is more
unreasonable than ever. Papa, your feelings are unjust. Something we do
not know of has happened to Mr. Milburn. He was not himself all the
while at the church. Now that I recollect, he was not ardent for the
marriage to be so soon. It was I who hastened the hour. Let us be right
in everything, having progressed so far with the recovery of our
fortunes, and let us await the fulfilment of events hopefully."

"Milburn was drunk at the ceremony, I saw that," Judge Custis said, "but
it was no excuse. In fact, what good can come of this violent alliance?
It seems to me that we have leaped from the frying-pan into the fire. I
feel ugly, my daughter, and there is no concealing it."

"Then you are in the mood to talk to mother this morning," Vesta said,
"while you have some unusual will and spirit. This resentful sullenness
she is showing I fear more than your passing emotion, papa. Be firm, yet
kind, with her, and I will go to find my husband. Yes, that is my place.
He may be more justly complaining of my absence now, than we of his
neglect."

"You don't mean that you are going to visit him at his den?"

"I shall go there first. It would have been my home last night if he had
required it. To tell the truth," Vesta said, blushing, "the poor man was
so kind to me yesterday, in spite of his object, and so quaint, and, as
it seemed, dependent on me, that my charity is enlisted for him, and I
could almost have married him from pity."

The Judge's temper fell a little in the study of his daughter's
blushing.

"Wonderful! wonderful!" he thought to himself; "that poor corn-bred
fellow has already made more impression on this girl's pride than a
hundred cavalier gallants. Truly, we are a republic, Vesta," he
continued aloud, "and you lay down the Custis character as easily as our
old connection, Lord Fairfax, accepted the democracy of his hired
surveyor, Mr. Washington, before he died."

"I laid down the Custis name yesterday," Vesta said, "though not their
better character, I hope. Papa, there is only one law of marriage; it is
where the wife follows the husband."

She looked a little archly at him, wiping her eyes of recent tears, and
though she may not have meant it, he was reminded of his own fear of his
wife.

Aunt Hominy now came in, having been told by Virgie to prepare coffee,
and she followed Roxy, who brought it into the library. The old cook had
a strange look, as of one who had been up all night at a fire, or a
"protracted meeting," and she poked her head in as if afraid to come
farther, till Vesta went out and kissed her kindly.

"Poor Aunty Hominy! did you think I was sold, or abused, because I had
been married? Dear old aunty, I shall never leave you!"

Aunt Hominy had a countenance of profound, almost vacant, melancholy,
mixed with a fear that, the Judge remarked, "he had seen on the faces of
niggers that had stolen something."

"Miss Vessy," she stammered, at last, "is you measured in by ole
Meshach? Is he got you, honey? Dat he has, chile! He's gwyn to bury you
under dat pizen hat. Po' little girl! Po' Miss Vessy!"

"Oh, Aunt Hominy," Vesta said, "he will be a kind master in spite of his
queer hat, and take good care of you and all the children; for he is my
husband, and will love you all for me."

A dumb, terrified look adhered to the old black woman's face.

"No, he won't be kind to nobody," she gasped. "You has gwyn been lost,
Miss Vessy. You is measured in. De good Lord try an' bress you! Hominy
ain't measured in yit. Hominy's kivered herseff wid cammermile, an'
drunk biled lizzer tea. Hominy's gone an' got Quaker."

"What's _Quaker_, Aunt Hominy?"

"Quaker," the old woman repeated, backing out and looking down,
"Quaker's what keeps him from a measurin' of me in!"

Then, as Vesta drew on her bonnet and shawl, having taken her coffee and
toast, the old servant, gliding back in the depths of Teackle Hall,
raised a wild African croon, as over the dead, giving her voice a
musical inflection like the jingle of Juba rhyme:

"Good-bye, Miss Vessy! Good-bye, Aunt Hominy's baby! Good-bye, dear
young missis! Good-bye, my darlin' chile, furever, furever, an' O
furever, little Vessy Custis, O chile, farewell!"

The tears raining upon her cheeks, her wild, wringing hands and upflung
arms and shape convulsed, Vesta remembered long, and thought, as she
left Teackle Hall with Virgie, that some African superstition had, by
the aid of dreams, drawn into a passing excitement the faithful
servant's brain.

At the corner of old Front Street, and extending almost out upon the
little Manokin bridge, stood Meshach Milburn's two-story house and
store, with a door upon both streets. Though planted low, in a hollow,
it stood forward like Milburn's challenging countenance, unsupported by
any neighbors.

"Don't it look like a witch's, Missy?" Virgie said, as Vesta took in its
not unpicturesque outlines and crude plank carpentry, the weather-rotted
roof, the decrepit chimney at the far end, the one garret window in the
sharp gable, the scant little windows above stairs, and the doors low to
the sand.

"It may have been the pride of the town fifty years ago, Virgie. I have
passed it many a day, looking with mischievous curiosity for the
steeple-hat, to show that to some city friend, little thinking I must
ever enter the house. But hear that wilful bird singing so loud! Where
is it?"

"I can't tell to save my life. It ain't in the tree yonder. It's the
first bird up this mornin', Miss Vessy, sho'!"

"Is not that larger door standing ajar, the one with the four panels in
it?" Vesta asked. "Yes, it is unfastened and partly open."

The blood left Vesta's heart a moment, as the thought ran through her
mind: "He has been watched, followed home, and murdered!"

The idea seemed to explain his absence on his marriage night, and, like
a sudden flame first seen upon a burning ship, lighting up the wide
ocean with its bright terrors, Vesta saw the infinite relations of such
a crime: her almost secret marriage, her custody of her father's notes,
the record of them upon her husband's books, his last word at the church
gate: "I will come soon, darling," and now, this silent abode, with its
door ajar on Sunday dawn, before the town was up--they might bear the
suspicion of a dreadful crime by the ruined debtor house of Custis
against their friendless creditor.

This thought, personal to her father, was immediately dismissed in the
feeling for a possibly murdered husband. If the idea barely touched her
sense of self, that her tremendous sacrifice had been arrested by
Heaven, and her purity saved between the altar and the nuptials by the
bloodshed of her purchaser at the hands of some meaner avenger, though
not until she had redeemed her father from Milburn's clutch, this idea
never passed beyond the portal of her mind; she repulsed it, entering,
and began to think of the easy prey her husband might have been, hated
by so many, defended by none, known to be very rich, no loss to the
community, as it might think, in its financial ignorance, and his only
guard a stalwart negro notorious for fighting.

Believing Milburn to deserve better than his present fame, Vesta
advanced towards the door of the old wooden store with a spirit of
commiseration and awe, and still the wild bird from somewhere poured out
a shriek, a chuckle, a hurrah, enough to turn her blood to ice.

As Vesta pushed open the old, seasoned door it dragged along the floor,
and the loose iron bar and padlock, dropping down, made a ring that
brought an echo like a tomb's out of the hollow interior.

"'Deed, Miss Vessy, I'm 'fraid to go in there," Virgie said.

"You are not to come in till I call you. But hear that bird rioting in
song! Does Mr. Milburn keep birds?"

"I can't tell, Miss Vessy. That bird's a Mocker. It must be in there
somewhere. Oh, don't go in, Miss Vessy; something will catch you, dear
Missy, sho'."

But Vesta was already gone, following the piercing sound of the native
bird, that seemed to be in the loft.

She saw a little counter of pine, and a pine desk built into it, and
bundles of skins, some cord-wood, a pile of lumber and boxes, a few
barrels of oil or spirits, and dust and cobwebs thick on everything; and
a little way in from the door the light and darkness made weird effects
upon each other, increasing the apparent distances, and changing the
forms; and the sun, now risen, made turning cylinders of gold-dust at
certain knot-holes in the eastern gable, across whose film she saw two
lean mice stand upon the floor unalarmed, and tamely watch her come.

The screaming of the bird was conveyed through the thin floor from above
with loud distinctness, and every note of singing things seemed to be
imitated by it, from the hawk's gloating cry to the swallow's twittering
alarm, with the most rapid versatility, and even hurry, as if the
creature was trying over every bird language, with the hope of finding
one mankind could understand. It was idle to expect to be heard amid
such clamor, and Vesta, having pounded on the floor a few times, made
her way to a sort of cupboard, that might turn out to be a stairway,
and, sure enough, a door opened on its dark side, and light from above
flickered down.

At this moment the bird's notes abruptly ceased, and a voice, unlike
anything she had ever heard in her life, yet human, spoke in response to
a more natural human voice, both issuing from above.

The second voice seemed to be Milburn's; the first voice was something
like it, yet not like anything from the throat of man, and the
superstition she had been rebuking in her servant came with a thrilling
influence upon her entire nature. She was about to fly, but called out
one word as she arrested herself:

"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!"

The loud, unclassifiable voice above immediately answered:

"Gent! Gent-gent-gent-en! t-chee, t-chee! Gents, tss-tss-tss! Ha! ha!
Gentlemen!"

"May I come up?" Vesta cried.

"Come, p-chee! Come chee! come tsee! See me! see me! see me! Come
p-chee! come see! come see me!"

The last accentuation, in spite of the bird's interference, was
sufficiently distinct to amount to an invitation, and with a raising of
her eyelids once dependently to heaven, Vesta went up the stairs.

She put her head into a large, long room, which took up the whole
contents of the second story, and was lighted on three sides by the
small windows she had seen without. It had no carpet or floor-covering
of any kind; the fire was gone out upon the chimney-hearth in the end,
and the atmosphere, a little chill, was melting before the sunshine
which now streamed in at both sides of the fireplace and clearly
revealed every object in the apartment,--some clothes-pegs, a wooden
table with a blue plate, a blue cup and saucer and a saucepan upon it,
and a coarse knife and fork; a large green chest, and a leather hat-box;
an old hair trunk fifty years old, and nearly falling to pieces; black
silhouettes, in little round ebony frames, of a woman and a man hung
over the mantel, and between them a silhouette of a face she had no
difficulty in recognizing to be intended for her own.

Stretched upon a low child's bed, of the sort called trundle-bed in
those days, which could be wheeled under the high-legged bed of the
parents, lay the bridegroom, in his wedding-dress and gaitered shoes,
with his steeple-crowned hat upon the faded calico quilt beside him, and
his face as red as burning fever could make it.

Vesta only verified the particulars of the inventory of Milburn's lodge
afterwards, her instant attention being drawn to the motionless form of
her husband, whose flushed face seemed to indicate a death by
strangulation or apoplexy. She went forward and put her hand upon him.

"Mr. Milburn!" she spoke.

"Milburn!" echoed a voice of piercing strength, though ill articulated.
She looked around in astonishment, and saw nobody.

"Husband!" Vesta spoke, louder, stooping over him.

"S'band! s'band! See! see!" shouted the wanton voice, almost at her
elbow.

Vesta, with one hand on the helpless man's brow, turned again, almost
indignantly, for the tone seemed to address some sense of neglect or
shame in her, which she had not been guilty of. Still, nothing was to be
seen.

At the far corner of the room was a step-ladder leading to a hole in the
loft above; but this was not the place of the interruption, for she
heard the voice now come as from the chimney at the opposite end of the
room, nearer the bed, and accompanied with a fluttering and scratching,
as if some spirit of evil, with the talons of a rat or a bat, was trying
to break in where the prostrate man lay on the bed of oblivion.

"Meshach! Meshach!" rang the half-human cry, "Hoo! hoo! Vesty! Vesty!
Sweet! sweet! sweet! Ha, ha! See me! See me! Meshach, he! Vesty, she!
She! she! she! Hoot! hoot! ha!"

Rapidly changing her view, with her ears no less than her heart tingling
at the use of her own name, Vesta saw on the dusty wooden mantel a
common bird of a gray color, with dashes of brown and black upon his
wings, and a whitish breast, and he was greatly agitated, as if he meant
to fly upon her or upon some other intruder she could not see.

His eyes, of black pupils upon yellowish eyeballs, sparkled with nervous
activity. He flung himself into the air above her head, uttering sounds
of such mellow richness and such infinite fecundity of modulation, that
the old hovel almost burst with intoxicated song, combining gladness,
welcome, fear, defiance, superstition, horror, and epithalamium all
together, like Orpheus gone mad, and losing the continuity of his golden
notes.

The bird's upper bill was beaked like a hawk's, his lower was sharp as a
lance, and between them issued that infuriated melody and cadence and
epithet that old Patrick Henry's spirit might have migrated into from
his grave in the Virginia woods. He suddenly flung himself from his
vortex of song upon the bed of the sick man, with a twitching hop and
rapid opening and shutting of the tail, like the fan of a disturbed
beauty, and thence perched upon Milburn's peaked hat, and with a
convulsive struggle of his throat and body, as if he were in superhuman
labor, brought out, distinct as man could speak, the words,

"'Sband! 'sband! Vesty! Vesty! Sweet! sweet! Come see! come see!"

Vesta, by a quick, expert movement, grasped the bird, and smoothed it
against her bosom, and soothed its excitement.

She had heard verified what Audubon avowed, and had but recently
published in the beautiful edition of his works her father was a
subscriber to, that some said the American mocking-bird could imitate
the human voice, though the naturalist remarked that he himself had
never heard the bird do it.

The present verification, Vesta thought, of the mocking-bird's supremest
power, might have issued from its excitement at the silent and helpless
condition of its master--that master who had told Vesta that no bird in
the woods ever resisted his seductions and mystic influence.

"If that be true," Vesta said to herself, "there is no danger of this
vociferous pet making his escape if I put him out of the window till I
can see if his master speaks or lives."

So she raised the window, and flung the mocking-bird up into the air,
and it came down and dropped into the old willow-tree beneath, and there
set up a concert the Sabbath morning might have been proud of, when, in
the corn-fields, the free-footed Saviour went plucking the milky ears.
Vesta could but stop a minute and listen.

The liquid notes chased each other around in circles of dizzy harmony,
as if angels were at hide-and-seek on the blue branches of the air,
eluding each other in pure-heartedness, chasing each other with eager
love, sighing praise and happiness as their supernal hearts emitted
music in the glow of ecstasy, and carrying upward the loveliest emotions
of the earth in yearning sympathy for nature. No language, now, that
Vesta could identify, was woven into that maze of morning song, which
challenged, with its fulness and golden weight, the floods of sunshine,
matching light with sound, spontaneous both, and rivals for the favors
of the soft atmosphere. Singing with all its heart, outdoing all it
knew, forgetting imitation in wild improvisation, watching her window as
it danced upon the twigs and fluttered into the air, conscious of her
listening as it purled and warbled towards her, and sounded every pipe
and trumpet, virginal and clarion, hautboy and castanet, in the
orchestra of its rustic bosom, the mocking-bird's ode seemed almost
supernatural this morn to Vesta, and she thought to herself:

"Oh, what wedding music in the cathedral at Baltimore could equal that?
and this poor man receives it for his epithalamium, without cost, as
truly as if nature were greeting my coming to him in the old poet's
spirit:

  "'Now all is done; bring home the bride againe;
    Bring home the triumph of our victory;
  Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,
    With joyance bring her and with jollity:
  Sing, ye sweet angels, Alleluia sing,
  That all the woods may answer, and your echo ring.'"

Relieved from the agitation of the mocking-bird, Vesta now gave her
whole attention to her husband; and the high heat of his brain and
circulation, and his muttering, like delirium, seemed to indicate that
he had an intense attack of intermittent fever. She heard the words
several times repeated by him: "I will come soon, darling!" and the
simplicity of his devotion to her, unloved as he was, had such flavor of
pathos in it that the tears started to Vesta's eyes.

"Poor soul!" she said, "it will be long before I can love him. _There_,
his hunger must be enduring. But my duty is not the less clear to stay
by his side and nurse him, as his wife."

At this conclusion she looked Milburn over carefully, to see if any
wound or sign of violence, whether by accident or an enemy, appeared
upon him, and finding none, and he all the time wandering in his sleep,
she climbed the ladder and peeped into the garret, to see if his servant
might be there. Samson's bed, as she supposed it was, had not been
disturbed, and so, descending, she raised the window over the larger
door she had entered by, and beckoned Virgie to come up.

"Take this tin cup," she said to the quadroon, "and go to the spring,
near here, and bring it to me full of water."

Then, as the girl tripped away, Vesta found a piece of paper, and wrote
her father a note, telling him to come to her; and to the girl, when she
returned, her mistress said:

"I want you to get a roll of new rag-carpet at Teackle Hall, and have it
brought here, to spread upon this floor. Send me, too, a pair of our
brass andirons, and pack in a basket some glass, table-ware, and linen.
Tell papa to bring one of his own night-shirts, and to take down my
picture in the sewing-room, and wrap it up, and have it sent. I must
have mamma's medicine-box and a wheelbarrow of ice; and let Hominy make
some strong tea and hot-water toast. Virgie, do not forget that this
sick gentleman is my husband, and a part of our own family!"

"The girl's face preserved its respect with difficulty as she heard the
last part of the sentence, but she replied to What she understood to be
a warning by saying:

"Miss Vessy, I never tell anybody tales."

"No, dear, you do not. I only feared you might forget the very different
view we must take of Mr. Milburn from his former life here."

Being again left alone, Vesta took the tin cup of spring-water, and,
raising the disturbed man's head, she gave him a drink, and, as he
opened his eyes to see whom it was, she heard him say, with an
articulate sigh:

"Heaven."

With the remainder of the water and her handkerchief she washed his hot
skin and kept it moist, and fitful murmurs, as "Darling!" "Angel!"
"Beautiful lady!" came from his roving brain as perception and poison
contended for his mind. The inborn sense in woman of happiness after
doing good offices and being appreciated was attended with a certain
intellectual elation, and even amusement, at having witnessed what was
altogether new to her,--the life of the meaner class of white people.
She looked at the dexterous silhouette of herself, cut, probably, from
memory, long ago, by the man, no doubt, who never knew her until
yesterday, and, guessing the companion profiles to be his mother and
father, she exclaimed, mentally:

"I cannot see anything insincere about this man's statement to me. Here
are all the proofs of his deep attachment to me long before he forced my
name upon papa with such apparent insolence. If papa could see these
proofs with a woman's interest, he would have a full apology in them.
Here, too, is the bird that sings my name. What strength of
prepossession the master must have had to make the feathered pupil
repeat the sound of 'Vesta,' and call me 'sweet!' What resources, too,
without the use of money or social aids! He knows the story of our
English beginning, while we make it an idle boast; but to him Cromwell
and Milton, Raleigh and Vane, are men of to-day. Ah!" Vesta thought, "I
think I see now one of those Puritans in my husband, of whom I have
heard as sprinkled through Virginia. We are the Cavaliers. There is the
Roundhead, even to the King James hat."

As she was led onward in these probabilities, Vesta took up the demure
old Hat and looked it over without any superstition, and reflected:

"Do we not exaggerate trifles? Why should this man be so derided because
he covers his head with an old hat? What of it? Suppose it shows some
vanity or eccentricity, why is there more merit in covering that up than
in expressing it in the dress? The styles we wear to-day are the
derision even of the current journals, and what will be thought of them
fifty years hence, when the fashion magazines show me as I look,--the
envy of my moment, the fright of my grandchildren?"

With rising color, she put the hat in the leather hat-box, and shut it
up.

Judge Custis made his way up the dark stairs in a little while, and, as
soon as he looked at Milburn, exclaimed,

"Curses come home to roost! It was only night before last that I said,
in the presence of Meshach's negro, 'May the ague strike him and the
bilious sweat from Nassawongo mill-pond!' He slept by it that night,
while I was tossing in misery. The next night it was his turn. Daughter,
he has the bilious intermittent fever, the legacy of all his fathers. He
exposed himself, I suppose, extraordinarily that night, and I hear that
he burned the old cabin in the morning. Now he will burn, in memory of
it, for the next ten weeks; for he has, I suspect, from the time of day
the burning and delirium came, what is called the double quotidian type
of the fever, with two attacks in the twenty-four hours."

"Poor man!" exclaimed Vesta.

"Now I can account for his appearance at the marriage ceremony last
night. The fever was on him, but he went through it by hard grit, and,
probably, returning here to get some relief, he just fell over on that
bed, and his head left him for some hours. The paroxysm goes away during
sleep, and returns in the morning; so, before he could get abroad
to-day, even if he could walk, to report himself at Teackle Hall,
another fever came, and a furious one, too, and he will have good luck
to survive forty days of fever, with probably eighty sweats in that
time."

"He must be doctored at once, papa."

"Well, I am good enough doctor for the bilious fever. He wants plenty of
cold lemonade, cold sponging, and ice to suck when the fever is on him.
When the chills intervene he wants blanketing, hot bottles at his feet,
and hot tea, or something stronger. In the rest between the attacks of
fever and chill, he wants calomel and Peruvian bark, and if these
delirious spells go on, he may want both bleeding and opium."

"Here are some of the things he immediately needs, then," Vesta said, as
a tall white man she had never seen before came up the stairs with
Virgie, bringing some Susquehanna ice in a blanket, and a roll of
carpet, and other articles she had sent for. The man's face wore a large
bruise that heightened his savage appearance.

"Judge," exclaimed the stranger, "I'm doin' a little work to pay fur my
board. Who's your whiffler? He'll know me when he sees me next time."

Following the stranger's eyes, Vesta and her father saw Meshach Milburn,
half raised up from the low trundle-bed, staring at Joe Johnson as if
trying to get at him. His lips moved, he partly articulated:

"Catch the--scoundre--_him_!"

"Joe," said the Judge, "slip away! He recognizes you as the assailant
yesterday. Don't hesitate: see how he glares at you!"

"Oh, it's the billy-noodle with the steeple nab-cheat, him that settled
me with the brick," said the stranger, in a low voice. "So I have piped
him. Ah! that's plumby!"

As the tall man started to go Milburn's countenance relaxed, he wandered
again in his head, and fell back upon the bed.

"I told you he was a hard hater, Mr. Johnson," the Judge remarked.

"Them shakes is the equivvy for the bruise he give me,--that is, till we
both heal up. He's painted the ensigns of all nations on my stummick,
Judge. But a blow is cured by a blow!"

With a look of admiring computation upon the girl Virgie, Joe Johnson
drew his long figure down the stairs, like a pole.

"What a brutal giant," Vesta said; "and how came he to be doing our
errands?"

"Why, Aunt Hominy hadn't nobody to bring the wheelbarrow load, and this
man said he'd come, and he would come, Miss Vesty, so I couldn't say
anything."

"He's a man of a good deal of influence," said the Judge, uneasily, "in
the upper part of our county, and in Delaware. Last night, after the
wedding, he slapped Meshach's hat, and old Samson knocked him down for
it, and he would have killed Samson, I hear, but for your bridegroom,
who felled him with a timely brick. It's a hard team to pass on a narrow
road,--Meshach and Samson; hey, Virgie?"

"I'm glad old Samson beat him, anyway," the pretty quadroon said,
showing her white teeth.

"Oh, what troubles will not that hat bring upon us!" Vesta thought; and
then spoke: "If Mr. Milburn was strong, I think he would hardly let that
man get out of the county before night."

"Well, daughter, what are you going to do with these articles he has
brought?"

"They are to make this room comfortable. See, he has my picture here,
cut by his own hands: I want to put a better one before him: help me
hang it, papa!"

In a few minutes the bright oil portrait, but recently painted by Mr.
Rembrandt Peale, was taking the sunlight upon its warm brunette cheeks,
in full sight of the bridegroom, and the thick rag carpet warmed the
floor, and Virgie had made a second errand to Teackle Hall, and brought
back the lady's rocking-chair that Milburn so much affected, and toilet
articles, and some dark cloth to hide the bare boards in places, and the
old loft soon wore a reasonable appearance of habitable life. Virgie
made up the fire, and the brass andirons took the cheerful flame upon
them, while Vesta sweetened the lemonade after her father had cut and
squeezed the lemons, and added some magnesia to make the drink foam.

"Really," said Judge Custis, "this miserable den takes the rudimentary
form of a home. I suppose there are now more comforts in his sight than
Meshach's whole race ever collected. What is your next move, Vesta?"

"To stay right here, darling papa, till it is safe and convenient to
carry Mr. Milburn home."

"Oh, folly! it will excite scandal, and be repulsive to my feelings.
This loft over a former groggery is no place for you: the news will
spread from Chincoteague to Arlington. Every Custis that lives will
censure me and outlaw you."

"I think you had best see Mr. Tilghman before the service, papa, and
have the marriage announced from the desk this morning: that will settle
the excitement before night. As for staying here, my home, you know, is
where he needs me. At his will I should have to stay here altogether.
But I wish to do this, dear father. It is of the greatest necessity to
my nature to improve my intercourse with my husband while he is sick,
that the hasty marriage we made may still have its period of
acquaintance and good understanding. I want to sound the possibilities
of my happiness. He will be less my master now than in his strength and
possession. Perhaps--" Vesta's voice fell, and she turned to gaze upon
the bridegroom, whose fever still consumed his wits--"perhaps I can
influence his dress,--his appearance."

"You mean the steeple top!" Judge Custis exclaimed, petulantly.

At the loud sound of this familiar word, the feverish man's ears were
pierced as through some ever-open ventricle, like an old wound.

"Steeple-top! Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see
I'm married. _She_ hears it. Oh, spare and pity her!"

He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched,
yet oppressed.

"How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge
Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that
nickname. In public he never appeared to flinch before it; but you see
it inflicted a never-healing wound. Who has not his vulture?"

"And how unjust to pursue this man with such frivolous inhospitality so
many years," Vesta exclaimed, her splendid eyes flashing. "No account
has been made of his private reasons, his family piety, or his stern
taste, perhaps; for he must have a reason for his wardrobe, that being,
it would seem, the only thing there can be no independence about. Did
you hear, papa, his feeling for me but this moment? Strangely enough, my
own mind was thinking of that hat. It seems to be bigger than the very
steeples of the churches: it rises between the people and worship, yes,
between us and Charity, and Faith,--I had almost said Hope, too."

"The colored people all say that hat he has to wear, because the devil
makes him," the trim, fawn-footed Virgie said; "Aunt Hominy says the Bad
Man wouldn't let him make no mo' money if he didn't go to church in that
hat. Some of the white people says so, too."

"You don't believe such foolish tales as that, Virgie?" Vesta asked.

"'Deed, I don't believe anything you say is a story, Miss Vessy. Hominy
believes it. She's 'most scared out of her life about Mr. Milburn coming
to the house, an' she's got all the little ones a' most crazy with
fear."

"Poor, dark, ignorant soul!" Vesta said; "she is, however, more
excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of
dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition."

"If he is a good man to you, Miss Vessy," the slave girl said, "I'll
think the Bad Man hasn't got anything to do with him. If he treats you
bad, I'll think the Bad Man has."

"Sometimes I feel as if men ought to have been left wild, like the
animals," the Judge said, rinsing out Milburn's mouth with a piece of
ice, "for the obstacles to liberty raised by fashion and civilization
are Asiatic in their despotism. Think of the taxes we pay to fashion
when we refused less to kings. Think of the aristocracy based upon
dress, after we have formally extirpated it by statute! Think of the
influence the boot-makers and mantua-makers of Europe, proceeding from
the courts we have renounced, exert upon our Presidents and Senators,
and, through the women of this country, upon all the men in the land! A
million women who do not know that there are two houses of Congress,
know just what bonnet the Duchess d'Angoulême is wearing, and how
Charles X. in Paris ties his cravat. So the devil always gets a worm in
every apple. The French Revolution abolished feudality, titles, great
landed property, and only omitted to abolish fashion, and that worm--a
silkworm it is--is devastating republican government everywhere, using
the women to infect us."

"Yet, in the nature of woman," said Vesta, "is the love of dress as
strongly as the love of woman is in man. Some righteous purpose is in
it, papa,--to ornament ourselves like the birds, and let art be born."

"God knows his own mysteries," Judge Custis said. "But Vesta, go home
with me to your own comfortable home, and let Virgie stay here to keep
watch."

"Master, I'm afraid to stay here," the girl exclaimed, sidling towards
her young mistress.

"Then I will stay, and be nurse," the Judge said. "Fear not! I will give
him only wholesome medicine, whatever poison he has given me and mine.
You stay in Teackle Hall, my precious child! Indeed, I must command it."

Vesta smiled sadly and pointed to her husband.

"He commands me now, papa. You were too indulgent a master, and spoiled
me. No, Virgie and I will both remain, and you conciliate mamma. All is
going well. Really, I am happy and grateful to my Heavenly Father that
he is smoothing the way so gently, that I thought would be so hard."

"Oh, the conditions of this disease are repulsive, my child. You are a
lady."

"No, I am a woman," said Vesta; "that man and I must see one or the
other die. You do not know how easy it is for a woman to nurse a man.
Though love might make the task more grateful, yet gratitude will do
much to sweeten it. He has loved me and taken the shadow from your old
age for me. Shall I leave him here to feel that I despise him? No."

She kissed her father, and gave him his cane.

"Come back this afternoon, my love," she said to him.

"Nothing on earth is like you!" exclaimed the old man. "I fear you are
not mine."

"Yes," Vesta said, "you are full of good, wherever you may have
strayed."

As the sound of his feet passed from the doorway below, the sick man,
with a sigh as from burning fire, opened his eyes and looked around.
They fell upon her picture.

"What is that?" he murmured; "I dreamed nothing like that, just now."

"It is my picture. I am here," Vesta said, bending over him. "Don't you
know me?"

"Who are you, dear lady?" he breathed, with fever-weakened eye-sockets,
and mind struggling up to his distended orbs, "do I know you?"

"Yes, I am Vesta--Vesta Custis, I was. I am your wife."

His eyes opened wide, as if hearing some wonderful news.

"Wife? what is that? My wife? No."

"Yes, I am Vesta Milburn, your wife."

He seemed to remember, and, with compassion for him, she stooped and
kissed him.

"God bless you!" he sighed, and passed away into the Upas shades again.

At that minute the mocking-bird flew in the open window and fluttered
above the lowly bed, and perched upon the headboard and began to sing:

"'Sband! 'sband! see! see! Vesty, sweet! Vesty, sweet! Ha, ha! hurrah!"




CHAPTER XV.

THE KIDNAPPER.


It seemed to Judge Daniel Custis as he walked abroad into the Sunday
sunshine, that he had never seen a more perfect day. The leaves were
turning on the great sycamore-trees, and the maples along the rise in
the road wore their most delicate garments of nankeen, while some young
hickories, loaded with nuts, and a high gum-tree, splendid in finery,
beckoned him out their way, across the Manokin bridge to the opposite
hill, where the Presbyterian church overlooked the town.

The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real
relief to his circumstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and
partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to
the man who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern
course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the
environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the
stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and
cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the
south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds
somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one
of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where
abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted
in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.

While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste
of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or
two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell
told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like
a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly
it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its
joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady,
and listened with something between courtesy and piety.

As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some passed
him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see
Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.

They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp
hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in
his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison
from it.

Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise
it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the
Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel,
when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:

"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my
child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"

His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of
being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life
beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty
pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer
than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of
the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw
onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and
selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of swine. His agony
increased.

"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate
and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes
hunting coons by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing
degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I
have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life
left me to do it in, but by God's help I will try! Yes, this golden
Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"

He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist
meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense
of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may
grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is
the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church,
and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship
to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is
there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"

He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that
might be owned and settled this day.

Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his
wife--the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he
loved her at all with the ardor of old times.

She had fretted his passion away in little sticklings for little
proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate
social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her
unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all
catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and
believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and
social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his
knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.

Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in
Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his
waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the
distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance,
her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and
air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.

"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not
grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set
her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and
wonder that she is not wordly-wise."

He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife
again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the
right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this
morning.

"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta
taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the
marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this
day."

The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and
widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and
cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to
wander along its sluices as this morn.

"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said,
restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other!
But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us
years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic
gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits. But I have been a
truant husband, and my tongue is parched by dusty rovings in prodigal
ways. Let me woo her again with all my might!"

He walked through Princess Anne, worship now having commenced in all the
churches, and saw nobody upon the street except a divided group before
the tavern. There he heard Jimmy Phoebus speak to Levin Dennis
sharply:

"Levin, what you doin' with that nigger buyer? Ain't you got no Dennis
pride left in you?"

The Judge saw that Joe Johnson, safe from civil process on Sunday, even
if his enemy had not been helpless in bed, was washing Levin Dennis's
brandy-sickened head under the street pump, plying the pump-handle and
shampooing him with alternate hands.

"Jimmy," answered Levin, when he was free from the spout, "this
gentleman's give me a job. I'm goin' to take him out for tarrapin on the
Sound. He's goin' to pay me for it."

"Tarrapin-catchin' on a Sunday ain't no respectable job for a Dennis,
nohow," cried Jimmy Phoebus, bluntly; "an' doin' it with a nigger
buyer is a fine splurge fur you, by smoke! I can't see where your pride
is, Levin, to save my life."

Jack Wonnell, wearing a bell-crown, looked on with timid enjoyment of
this plain talk, opening his mouth to grin, shutting it to shudder.

The big stranger, dropping Levin Dennis, strode in his long jack-boots,
in which his coarse trousers were stuffed, right to the front of Jimmy
Phoebus, and glared at him through his inflamed and unsightly eye.
Jimmy met his scowl with a mildness almost amounting to contempt.

"Hark ye!" spoke the stranger, "you have been a picking a quarrel with
me all yisterday, an' to-day air a beginnin' of it agin. Do you want to
fight?"

"No," said Jimmy, whittling a stick; "I ain't fond of fighting, and I
never do it of a Sunday. I wouldn't be guilty of fightin' you, by
smoke!"

"I have tuk a bigger nug than you and nicked his kicks into the bottom
of his gizzard till his liver-lights fell into my mauleys. So it's nish
or knife betwixt us, my bene cove!"

He put his hand upon his hip, where he carried a sheath-knife.

"Raise that hand," said Jimmy Phoebus, with a quick pass of his
whittling knife to the giant's throat. "Raise it or, by smoke! yer goes
yer jugler."

As Phoebus spoke he lifted one foot, of a prodigious size, as deftly
as an elephant hoisting his trunk, and kicked the man's hand from the
hip pocket without moving either his own body or countenance. It was
done so automatically that the other turned fiercely to see who kicked
him, and his sheath-knife, partly raised, was flung by the force of the
kick several yards away.

"Pick up his knife, Levin," Jimmy said, "or he'll hurt hisself with it."

At this moment Judge Custis came up and pushed the two powerful men
apart.

"Fighting on Sunday in our public street," he exclaimed; "Phoebus, I
wouldn't have thought it of you!"

"This yer bully, Judge," Jimmy said coolly, "started to take Prencess
Anne the fust day, an' ole Meshach's Samson knocked him a sprawlin', an'
Meshach hisself finished him. To-day he starts in to lead off yon poor
imbecile, Levin Dennis, and, as I expresses my opinion of it, he draws
his knife on me; so I takes my foot, Judge, that you have seen me untie
a knot with, and I spiles his wrist with it. Take care of his knife,
Levin,--he's a pore creetur without it."

"We'll have this out, nope for nope, or may I take the morning-drop!"
growled the strange man.

"That kind of language ain't understood in honest company," Jimmy
Phoebus said; "I s'pose it's thieves' lingo, used among your friends,
or, maybe, big words you bully strangers with, when you want to cut a
splurge. Now, as you've been licked by a nigger and kicked by a white
man, maybe you can understand my language! Hark you, too, nigger buyer!
Do you know where I saw you first?"

For the first time a flash of fire came from the pungy captain's black
cherries of eyes, and his huge broad face of swarthy color expressed its
full Oriental character:

"The last time I saw you, Joe Johnson, was not a-lurking in Judge
Custis's kitchen fur no good, nor a-insultin' of the Judge's t'other
visitor, Milburn of the steeple-top: it was a-huggin' the whippin'-post
on the public green of Georgetown, State of Delaware, an' the sheriff
a-layin' of it over your back; an' after he sot you up in the pillory I
took the rottenest egg I could git, an' I bust it right on the eye where
that nigger bruised you yisterday!"

The oppressive silence, as Joe Johnson slunk back, desperate with rage,
yet unable to deny, was broken by Jack Wonnell's unthinking
interjection:

"Whoop, Jimmy! Hooraw for Prencess Anne!"

"An' why did I git that egg an' make you smell it, Joe Johnson? Because,
by smoke! you was a stinkin' kidnapper, robbing of the pore free
niggers of their liberty, knowin' that they didn't carry no arms and
couldn't make no good defense! That's your trade, an' it's the meanest
an' most cowardly in the world. It's doin' what the Algerynes does in
fair fighting. You're a fine American citizen, ain't you? I know your
gang, and a bloody one it is, but you can't look a white man in the eye,
because you're a thief and a coward!"

The Hellenic nature of the bay captain had never displayed itself to the
Judge with this fulness, and he felt some natural admiration as he took
Phoebus by the arm.

"Well, well!" said the Judge, "let him go now, Phoebus! Mr. Johnson,
don't let me see you in Princess Anne again to-day. Continue your
journey and disturb us no more, or I shall put criminal process upon
you, and you see we have stout constables in Somerset."

As he led Phoebus around the corner of the bank, the Judge said:

"James, my wife is so sick that I must keep house with her this morning,
and I want a little note left at the church for Mr. Tilghman. Will you
take it?"

"Why, with pleasure, Judge," the nonchalant villager replied. "I don't
look very handsome in the 'piscopal church, but I'll do a' arrand."

As the Judge wrote the note with his gold pencil on a leaf of his
memorandum book, he said:

"James, did you identify that man yesterday?"

"Yes, I knowed him as soon as he come to the tavern. This mornin',
seein' of him around town, I was afear'd Samson Hat would stumble on
him, and the nigger buyer would kill him for yisterday's blow. Thinks I:
'Samson is too white a nigger to be killed that way, by smoke!' but the
prejudice agin a nigger hittin' a white man is sich in this state that
Joe Johnson, bloody as he is, would never have stretched hemp for Samson
Hat; so I picked a quarrel with the nigger buyer to take the fight out
of him before Samson should come. He won't fight nobody now in this
town. _His_ hokey-pokey is done _yer_."

"You took a great risk, Phoebus. He is such an evil fellow in his
resentments, that I let him hide and eat in my quarters for fear of some
ill requital if I refused. That gang of Patty Cannon's is the curse of
the Eastern Shore."

"And if you'll pardon a younger and a porer man, Judge, it's jest sich
gentlemen as you that lets it go on. You politicians give them people
'munity, an' let 'em alone because they fight fur you in 'lection times
an' air popular with foresters an' pore trash, because they persecutes
niggers an' treats to liquor. You know the laws is agin their actions on
both sides of the Delaware line, but in Maryland they're a dead letter."

"You speak plain truth, James Phoebus, brave as your conduct. But the
poor men must make a sentiment against these kidnappers, because among
the ignorant poor they find their defenders and equals."

"Judge," the pungy captain said, "they'se a-makin' a pangymonum of all
the destreak about Patty Cannon's. By smoke! it's a shame to liberty. In
open day they lead free niggers, men, wimmin, an' little children, too,
to be sold, who's free as my mommy and your daughter."

Judge Custis thought painfully of the scant freedom his daughter now
enjoyed. Jimmy Phoebus continued:

"Now yer, we're raising hokey-pokey about the Algerynes and the
Trypollytins capturin' of a few Christian people an' sellin' of 'em to
Turkey, an' about the Turkey people makin' slaves of the Christian Greek
folks. Henry Clay is cuttin' a big splurge about it. Money is bein'
raised all over the country to send it to 'em. Commodo' Decatur was a
big man for a-breakin' of it up. By smoke! they're sellin' more free
people to death and hell along Mason and Dixon's line, than up the whole
buzzum of the Mediterranean Sea."

The brown-skinned speaker was more excited now than he had been during
all the collision with Joe Johnson.

"Indeed, Phoebus, they have kidnapped several thousand people, the
Philadelphia abolitionists say, but the reports must be exaggerated. The
demand for negroes is so great, since the cotton-gin and the foreign
markets have made cotton a great staple, and the direct importation of
slaves from Africa has been stopped, that there is a great run for
border-state negroes, and free colored people seldom are righted when
they have been pulled across the line."

"They never are righted, Judge Custis! I'm ashamed of my native state.
Only a few years ago, when I was a boy, people around yer was a-freein'
of their niggers, and it was understood that slavery would a-die out,
an' everybody said, 'Let the evil thing go.' But niggers began to go up
high; they got to be wuth eight hunderd dollars whair they wasn't wuth
two hunderd; and all the politicians begun to say: 'Niggers is not fit
to be free. Niggers is the bulrush, or the bulwork, or bull-something of
our nation.' And then kidnapping of free niggers started, and the next
thing they'll kidnap free American citizens!"

"Tut! tut! James! it will never go that far."

"Won't it? What did Joe Johnson say to me last night before the
Washington Tavern? He said: 'I've sold whiter niggers than you, myself.
I kin run you to market an' git my price for you!'"

The bay sailor took off his hat.

"Look at me!" he continued; "by smoke! look on my brown skin and black
eyes an' coal black hair. Whair did they come from? They come from
Greece, whair Leonidas an' Marky Bozarris and all them fellers came
from: that's what my daddy said. He know'd better than me. I'm nothin'
but a pore Eastern Shore man sailing my little vessel, but I'm a
free-born man, and I tell you, Judge, it's a dangerous time when nothing
but his shade of color protects a free man."

"James Phoebus," the Judge said, gravely, "I hope you believe me when
I say that I think all these things outrages, and they grow out of the
greater outrage of slavery itself. We are being governed by new states,
hatched in the Southwest from the alligator eggs of old slavery, that
had grown into political and moral disrepute with us in Maryland and
Virginia."

"There's no nigger in me," Phoebus said, putting on his hat, "but I
have taken these hints about my looking like a nigger to heart, and I'll
take a nigger's part when he is imposed on, as if he was some of the
body and blood of my Lord Jesus. Now you hear it!"

"And brave enough you are to mean it, my honest fellow. So do my errand,
and good-morning, James."




CHAPTER XVI.

BELL-CROWN MAN.


As the Judge and Phoebus had turned the corner of the bank Samson Hat
appeared, driving down Princess Anne's broad main street a young white
girl.

"There's the nigger that set my peep in limbo," muttered the negro
dealer, "but even he shall go past to-day. This accursed town is packed
agin me."

He took a long look at Samson, however, who mildly returned it in the
most respectful manner, as if he had never seen the strange gentleman
before. "And now, my pals," Joe Johnson said, turning to Levin Dennis
and Jack Wonnell, "we will all three go down to the bay and I'll pervide
the lush, and pay the soap while you ketch the tarrapin, an' let me
sleep my nazy off."

"I'll go an' no mistake!" cried Jack Wonnell, who had been taking a
drink of pump-water out of his bell-crown. "So will you, Levin."

Levin Dennis hesitated; "I want to tell my mother first," he said,
"maybe she won't like me fur to go of a Sunday. She'll send Jimmy
Phoebus after me."

Joe Johnson took a bag of gold from inside his waist-band, hanging by a
loop there, and held up a piece of five before the boy's bright eyes:

"Yer, kid! That's yourn if you don't have no mother about it. Pike away
with me, pig widgeon, an' find your boat, and I pay you this pash at
sundown."

Levin's credulous eyes shone, and with one reluctant look towards his
mother's cottage he led the way into the country.

Little was said as they walked an hour or more towards the west, the
stranger apparently brooding upon his indignities, and twice passing
around the jug of brandy which Jack Wonnell was made to carry, and
before noon they came to a considerable creek, out in which was anchored
a small vessel bearing on her stern in illiterate, often inverted,
letters the name: _Ellenora Dennis_.

"What's that glibe on yonder?" asked Johnson, pointing to the letters.

"That's his mother's name, boss," Jack Wonnell said, hitching at the
stranger's breeches, "she's a widder, an' purty as a peach."

"Ain't you got no daddy, pore pap-lap?" Johnson asked coarsely.

"He's gone sence I was a baby," Levin answered; "he went on Judge
Custis's uncle's privateer that never was heard of no mo'. We don't know
if the British tuk him an' hanged him, or if the _Idy_ sunk somewhair
an' drowned him, or if she's a-sailin' away off. I has to take care of
mother."

"Humph!" growled Joe Johnson; "son of a gander and a gilflirt: purty
kid, too--got the ole families into him. No better loll for me!"

Drawing a punt concealed under some marsh brush, young Levin pushed off
to his vessel, made her tidy by a few changes, pulled up the jib, and
brought her in to the bank.

"Mr. Johnson, I never ketched tarrapin of a Sunday befo', but I reckon
tain't no harm."

"Harm? what's that?" Joe Johnson sneered. "Hark ye, boy, no funking with
me now! When I begin with a kinchin cove I starts squar. If ye think
it's wicked to ketch tarrapin, why, I want 'em caught. If you _don't_
keer, you kin jest stick up yer sail an' pint for Deil's Island, an'
we'll make it a woyige!"

Not quite clear as to his instructions, Levin took the tiller, and Jack
Wonnell superserviceably got the terrapin tongs, and stood in the bow
while the cat-boat skimmed down Monie Creek before a good breeze and a
lee tide. The chain dredge for terrapin was thrown over the side, but
the boat made too much sail for Wonnell to take more than one or two
tardy animals with his tongs, as they hovered around the transparent
bottoms making ready for their winter descent into the mud.

"Take up your dredge," Johnson commanded in a few minutes. "It makes us
go slow."

Jack Wonnell obediently made a few turns on the windlass, and as the bag
came up, two terrapin of the then common diamond-back variety rolled on
the deck, and a skilpot.

"That's enough tarrapins," Johnson said, "unless you're afraid it's
doin' wrong, Levin. Say, spooney! is it wicked now?"

The boy laughed, a little pale of face, and Johnson closed his remark
with:

"Nawthin' ain't wicked! Sunday is dustman's day to be broke by heroes.
D'ye s'pose yer daddy on the privateer wouldn't lick the British of a
Sunday? The way to git rich, sonny, is to break all the commandments at
the post, an' pick 'em up agin at the score!"

"That's the way, sho' as you're born. Whoop! Johnson, you got it right!"
chuckled Jack Wonnell, not clear as to what was said.

Levin Dennis felt a little shudder pass through him, but he gave the
stranger the helm, and by Wonnell's aid raised the main-sheet, and the
light boat went winging across Monie Bay, starting the water-fowl as it
tacked through them.

"Here's another swig all round," Joe Johnson exclaimed, "and then I'll
go below to lollop an hour, for I'm bloody lush."

Levin drank again, and it took the shuddering instinct out of him, and
Joe Johnson cried, as he disappeared into the little cabin:

"Ree-collect! You pint her for Deil's Island thoroughfare, and wake me,
pals, at the old camp-ground, fur to dine."

The two Princess Anne neighbors felt relieved of the long man's company,
and Jack Wonnell lay on his back astern and grinned at Levin as if there
was a great unknown joke or coincidence between them, finally
whispering:

"Where does he git all his gold?"

Levin shook his head:

"Can't tell, Jack, to save my life. Nigger tradin', I reckon. It must be
payin' business, Jack."

"Best business in the world. Wish I had a little of his money, Levin.
Hu-ue-oo!" giving a low shout, "then wouldn't I git my gal!"

"Who's yo' gal, Jack, for this winter?"

"You won't tell nobody, Levin?"

"No, hope I may die!"

Jack put his bell-crown up to the side of his mouth, executed another
grin, winked one eye knowingly, and whispered:

"Purty yaller Roxy, Jedge Custis's gal."

"She won't have nothin' to do with you, Jack; she's too well raised."

"She ain't had yit, Levin, but I'm follerin' of her aroun'. There ain't
no white gal in Princess Anne purty as them two house gals of Jedge
Custis's."

"Well, what kin you do with a nigger, Jack? You never kin marry her."

"Maybe I kin buy her, Levin."

"She ain't fur sale, Jack. Jedge Custis never sells no niggers. You
can't buy a nigger to save your life. When some of Jedge Custis's
niggers in Accomac run away he wouldn't let people hunt for 'em."

Jack Wonnell put his bell-crown to the side of his mouth again, grinned
hideously, and whispered:

"Kin you keep a secret?"

Levin nodded, yes.

"Hope a may die?"

"Hope I may die, Jack."'

"Jedge Custis is gwyn to be sold out by Meshach Milburn."

"What a lie, Jack!"

Levin let the tiller half go, and the _Ellenora Dennis_ swung round and
flapped her sails as if such news had driven all the wind out of them.

"Jack," Levin exclaimed, "Jimmy Phoebus says you've turned out a
reg'lar liar. Now I believe it, too."

"Hope I may die!" Jack Wonnell protested, "I never does lie: it's too
hard to find lies for things when people comes an' tells you, or you kin
see fur yourseff. Jimmy called me a liar fur sayin' Meshach Milburn was
gone into the Jedge's front do', but we saw him come out of it, didn't
we?"

"Yes, that was so; but this yer one is an awful lie."

"Well, Levin, purty yaller Roxy, she told me, an' she's too purty to
tell lies. I loves that gal like peach-an'-honey, Levin, an' I don't
keer whether she's white or no. She's mos' as white as me, an' a good
deal better."

"So you do talk to Roxy some?"

"Levin, I'll tell you all about it, an' you won't tell nobody. Well, I
picks magnoleys an' wild roses an' sich purty things fur Roxy to give
her missis, an' Roxy gives me cake, an' chicken, an' coffee at the back
door, knowin' I ain't got much to buy 'em with. Lord bless her! she
don't half know I don't think as much of them cakes an' snacks an' warm
rich coffee, as I do of her purty eyes. She's a white angel with a
little coffee in her blood, but it's ole Goverment Javey an' more than
half cream!"

Here Levin laughed loudly, and said that Jack must have learned that out
of a book.

"Oh," said Jack, shutting one eye hard and joining in the grin, "sence I
ben in love I kin say lots o' smart things like that. I have seen purty
little Roxy grow up from a chile, an' as she begin to round up and git
tall, says I: 'Nigger or no nigger, she's angel!' The white gals they
all throwed off on me, caze I wasn't earnin' nothin', an' I sot my eyes
on Roxy Custis an' I says: 'What kin I do fur to make her shine to me?'
So I kept a-follerin' of her everywhere, an' I see her one day comin'
along the road a-pickin' of the wild blossoms an' with her han' full of
'em, an' I says: 'Roxy, what you doin' of with them flowers?' 'They're
fur my missis, Miss Vesty,' says she; 'she lives on wild flowers, an'
they're all I has to give her, an' I want her to love me as much as
Virgie.' You see Levin, the t'other gal, Virgie, waits on Miss Custis,
an' Roxy she was a little jealous. Then I says: 'Roxy, I kin git you
flowers for your missis. I know whair the magnoleys is bloomin' the
whitest an' a-scentin' the whole day long.' 'Do you?' says she, 'Oh,
Mr. Wonnell, I would like to have a bunch of magnoleys to put on Miss
Vesty's toilet every day.' 'I'll git 'em fur you, Roxy,' says I, 'becaze
I allus thought you was a little beauty.' Says she: 'I'd give most
anything to surprise Miss Vesty with flowers every day,--rale wild
ones!' 'Then,' says I, 'Roxy, I'll git' em fur you for a kiss!' An' she
most a-blushed blood-red an' ran away."

"That's what I told you, Jack, she's raised too well to be talkin' to
white fellers."

"Nobody's raised too well," rejoined Jack Wonnell, "to be deef to love
and kindness. Says I to myself: 'Jack, you skeert that gal. Now say
nothin' mo' about the kiss, an' go git her the flowers every day, an'
she'll think mo' of you!' So away I went to King's Creek an' pulled the
magnoleys, an' I come to the do' an' asked ole Hominy to bring down Roxy
for a minute. Roxy she come, an' was gwyn to run away till she saw my
flowers, an' she stopped a minute an' says I: 'I jest got 'em for you,
Roxy, becaze I see you when you was a little chile.' She tuk 'em an'
says: 'It was very kind of you, sir,' an' kercheyed an' melted away.
Next day I was thar agin, Levin, an' I says, to make it seem like a
trade: 'Roxy, kin ye give me a cup of coffee?' 'Law, yes!' she says,
forgittin' her blushin' right away. So I kept shady on love an' put it
on the groun's of coffee, an', Levin, I everlastin'ly fotched the wild
flowers till that gal got to be a-lookin' fur me at the do' every day,
an' I'd hide an' see her come to the window an' peep fur me. One day she
says, as I was drinkin' of the coffee: 'Mr. Wonnell, what do you put
yourself at sech pains fur to 'blige a pore slave girl that ain't but
half white?' I thought a minute, so as to say something that wouldn't
skeer her off, an' I says: 'Roxy, it's becaze I'm sech a pore, worthless
feller that the white gals won't look at me!' The tears come right to
her eyes, an' she says: 'Mr. Wonnell, if I was white I would look at
you.' 'I believe you would,' says I, 'becaze you've got a white heart,
Roxy.'"

"Jack, you're a dog-gone smart lover," said Levin. "I didn't think you
had no kind of sense."

"Love-makin' is the best sense of all," said Jack, "it's that sense that
keeps the woods a-full of music, where the birds an' bees is twitterin'
and hummin' an' a-matin'. Love is the last sense to come, after you can
see, an' hear, an' feel, an' they're give to people to find out
something purty to love. Love was the whole day's work in the garding of
Eden befo' man got too industrious, an' it's all the work I do, an' I
hope I do it well."

"Now what did Roxy tell you about Meshach Milburn and Judge Custis?"

"You see, Levin, as I kept up the flower-givin', I could see a little
love start up in purty Roxy, but she didn't understand it, an' I was as
keerful not to skeer it as if it had been a snow-bird hoppin' to a crumb
of bread. She would talk to me about her little troubles, an' I listened
keerful as her mammy, becaze little things is what wimmin lives on, an'
a lady's man is only a feller patient with their little talk. The more I
listened the more she liked to tell me, an' I saw that Roxy was
a-thinkin' a great deal of me, Levin, without she or me lettin' of it
on.

"This mornin' she came to the door with her eyes jest wiped from
a-cryin'. Says I, 'Roxy, little dear, what ails you?' 'Oh, nothin','
says she, 'I can't tell you if thair is.' 'Here's your wild flowers for
Miss Vesty,' says I, 'beautiful to see!' 'Oh,' says Roxy, 'Miss Vesty
won't need 'em now.' Says I: 'Roxy, air you goin' to have all that
trouble on your mind an' not let me carry some of it?' 'Oh, my friend,'
she says, 'I must tell you, fur you have been so kind to me: don't
whisper it! But my master is in debt to Meshach Milburn, an' _he's_
married Miss Vesty, an' we think we're all gwyn to be sold or made to
live with that man that wears the bad man's hat.' Says I: 'Roxy,
darling, maybe I kin buy you.' 'Oh, I wish you was my master,' Roxy
said. An' jest at that minute, love bein' oncommon strong over me this
mornin', I took the first kiss from Roxy's mouth, an' she didn't say
nothin' agin it."

Here Jack Wonnell kissed the atmosphere several times with deep unction,
and ended by a low whoop and whistle, and looked at Levin Dennis with
one eye shut, as if to get Levin's opinion of all this.

"Well," Levin said, "I never ain't been in love yet. I 'spect I ought to
be. But mother is all I kin take keer of, and, pore soul! she's in so
much trouble over me that she can't love nobody else. I git drunk, an'
go off sailin' so long, an' spend my money so keerless, that if the Lord
didn't look out for her maybe she'd starve."

"Yes, Levin, you likes brandy as much as I likes the gals. You go off
for tarrapin, an' taters, an' oysters, an' peddles 'em aroun' Prencess
Anne, an' then somebody pulls you in the grog-shops an' away goes your
money, an' your mother ain't got no tea and coffee."

"Jack," said Levin, abruptly, "do you believe in ghosts?"

"I don't know, Levin. If I saw one maybe I would, but I'm too trashy for
ghosts to see me."

"Well, now," Levin said, "there's a ghost, or something, that looks out
for mother when I'm drunk or gone, an' it leaves tea and coffee in the
window for her."

"Sho'! why, Levin, that's Jimmy Phoebus! He's ben in love with your
mother for years an' she won't have him, but he keep's a hangin' on.
He's your mother's ghost."

"No, Jack. I thought it was till Jimmy come to me an' asked me who I
guessed it was. He was a little jealous, I reckon. I said: 'It's you,
of course, Jimmy!' 'No,' says he, 'by smoke! I don't do any hokey-pokey
like that. What I give, I go and give with no sneakin' about it or
prying into Ellanory's poverty.' He was right down mad, but he couldn't
find nothing out. So I think it may be the ghost of father, drowned at
sea, bringing tea and coffee, and sometimes a dress, and a pair of
shoes, too, to keep mother warm."

Levin Dennis, standing against the tiller, seemed to Jack Wonnell to be
fair and spiritual as a woman, as his comely brow and large eyes grew
serious with this relation of his father's mysterious fate. His dark
auburn hair, in short ringlets parted in the middle, gave his sunburnt
countenance a likeness to some of the old gentle families with which he
was allied, his father having been a son of younger sons, in a date when
primogeniture prevailed in all this bay region; and therefore,
possessing nothing, he went into the war against England as a sailor,
and his family influence obtained for him command of the new privateer
launched on the Manokin, the _Ida_, which set sail with a good crew and
superior armament, amid the acclaims of all Somerset, and, sailing past
the Capes into the ocean with all her bunting flying, slid down the
farther world to everlasting silence and the vapors of mystery.

His widow waited long and patiently with this only boy, Levin, a
scarcely lisping child, and stories of every kind were current; that the
captain had been captured and hanged by the enemy, and the ship burned
or condemned; that he had hoisted the black flag and become a pirate and
quit the western world for the East India waters; and finally, that the
_Ida_ foundered off Guiana and every soul was drowned.

The widow, a beautiful woman, neglected by her husband's connection, who
were sullen at the loss of their investment and their expected profits
from the vessel, lived in the little house she had owned before her
marriage, and sank into the plainer class of people, almost losing her
identity with the ruling families to which her son was kin, but in her
humbler class highly respected and solicited in marriage.

She was still young and fair, and Jimmy Phoebus, a hale bachelor, and
captain of a trading schooner, had endeavored to marry her for years,
and held on to his hope patiently, exercising many kind offices for her,
though his means were limited, and he had poor kin looking to him for
help. She feared the absent lover might be alive and return to find her
another's wife.

So her son, growing up without a father's discipline, and being too
respectable, it was supposed, to put to a trade or be indentured, lived
by fugitive pursuits on land and water, hauling and peddling vegetables
and provisions at times; and now, by the gift of Jimmy Phoebus, he
sailed his little sloop or cat-boat chiefly to carry terrapin to
Baltimore. Rough sailor acquaintances, exposure, a credulous, easily led
nature, and almost total neglect of school at a time when education was
a high privilege, had made him wayward and often intemperate, but
without developing any selfish or cruel characteristics, and being of an
agreeable exterior and affable disposition, he fell a prey to any
strangers who might be in town--gunners, negro buyers, idle planters,
and spreeing overseers, many of whom hired his company and vessel to
take their excursions; and, while loving his mother, and being her only
reliance, she saw him slipping further and further into manhood without
steadiness or education or fixed principles, or any female influence to
draw him to domestic constraints.

His slender, supple figure, and marks of gentility in his limbs, and
shapely brow and large, gentle eyes, poorly consorted with ragged
clothes, bare feet, and absolute dependence on chance employment, the
latter becoming more precarious as his age and stature made more
demands for money through his false appetites.

"Jack," said Levin Dennis, "what do you mean by gittin' money to buy
Roxy Custis? You never git no money."

"Won't he give it to me? Him?" Jack Wonnell indicated the hatchway down
which Joe Johnson had gone. "He's got bags of it."

"Him? Why, Jack, how much money do you s'pose a beautiful servant like
Roxy will fetch?"

"Won't that piece _he's_ gwyn to give you buy her?"

"Five dollars? Why, you poor fool, she will bring five hundred
dollars--maybe thousands. This nigger trader, with all his gold, would
be hard pushed, I 'spect, to buy Roxy."

Jack looked downcast, and failed to wink or whistle.

"Gals like her," said Levin, "goes for mistresses to rich men, an'
sometimes they eddicates 'em, I've hearn tell, to know music, an'
writin', an' grammar, an' them things."

"And a pore man who wouldn't abuse a gal most white like that, but would
respect her an' marry her, too, Levin, they makes laws agin him! Maybe I
kin steal Roxy?"

Here Jack whistled low, shut one eye with deep knowingness, and grinned
behind his bell-crown.

"Oh, you simpleton!" Levin said. "Where could you take her to?"

"Pennsylvany, Cannydy, Turkey, or some of them Abolition states up
thar"--Jack Wonnell indicated the North with his finger. "Ain't there no
place where a white man kin treat a bright-skinned slave like that as if
they both was a Christian?"

"No," answered Levin, "not in this world."

The hero of the bell-crowns was much affected, and Levin thought he
really was whimpering, though his vacant grin was a poor frame for
grief.

"Jack," said Levin, "if what Roxy Custis told is true, the gal is the
slave of your pertickler enemy, Meshach Milburn."

The wearer of the rival species of hat was "badly sobered," as Levin
mentally expressed it, at this dismal solution of his gentle dreams of
love. He arose and walked to the bow of the boat, and looked down into
the flying waves over which the cat-boat skipped, as if he might seek
the solution of his own disconnected yet harmless life in the bottom of
the sound, among the oyster rocks.

The water was now speckled with canoes and periaugers (pirogues), and
little sail-boats coming from Deil's Island preaching, and before them
rose out of the bay the low woody islands and capes which, with white
straits between, enclose from the long blue nave of the Chesapeake the
scalloped aisle called Tangier Sound. Like pigeons and wrens around some
cathedral, the wild-fowl flew in these involuted, almost fantastic,
architectures of archipelago and peninsula, which, lying flat to the
water, yet took ragged perspective there, as if some Gothic builder had
laid his foundations, but had not bent the tall pines together, that
grew above in palm-like groves, to make the groined roofs and arches of
his design.

Here could be seen the ospreys, sailing in graceful pairs above the
herrings' or the old wives' shoals, taking with elegance and
conscientiousness the daily animal food that even man demands, with all
his sentiments and gospels. There the canvas-back duck, in a little
flock, broke the Sabbath to dive for the wild celery that grows beneath
the sound. In yonder tree the bald eagle was starting out upon his
Algerine work of vehemence and piety, to intercept the hawk and steal
his cargo. The wild swan might be those faint, far birds flying so high
over Kedge's Straits, in the south, and the black loon, spreading his
wings like a demon, disappears close to the cat-boat, and rises no more
till memory has forgotten him.

Levin Dennis steered close to a point where he had been wont to scatter
food for the black ducks, and draw them to the gunner's ambush.
Sheldrakes and goosanders, coots and gulls, whifflers and dippers, made
the best of Sunday, and bathed and wrote their winged penmanship on the
white sheet of water.

Poor Jack Wonnell returning, with something on his face between a grin
and a tear, said:

"Levin, didn't I never harm nobody?"

"Not as I ever heard about, Jack. They say you ain't got no sense, but
you never fight nobody. Everybody kin git along with you, Jack!"

"No they can't, Levin. Meshach Milburn hates the ground I tread on. If
he know'd I was in love with little Roxy he'd marry her to a nigger."

"What makes him hate you so, Jack?"

"Becaze I wears my bell-crowns, and he wears the steeple-top hat. He
thinks I'm a-mockin' of him. Levin, I ain't got no other kind of hat to
wear. Meshach Milburn needn't wear that air hat, but if I don't wear a
bell-crown I must go bareheaded. I bought that lot of hats with the only
dollar or two I ever had, as they say a fool an' his money is soon
parted. The boys said they was dirt cheap. Now there wouldn't be nothin'
to see wrong in my bell-crowns, ef all the people wasn't pintin' at ole
Milburn's Entail Hat, as they call it. Why can't he, rich as a Jew, go
buy a new hat, or buy me one? I don't want to mock him. I'm afeard of
him! He looks at me with them loaded pistols of eyes an' it mos' makes
me cry, becaze I ain't done nothin'. I'm as pore as them trash ducks,"
pointing to a brace of dippers, which were of no value in the market,
"but I ain't got no malice."

"No, Jack. That trader could give you that bag of gold to keep and it
would be safe, becaze it wasn't your own."

"I 'spect I will have to go to the pore-house some day, Levin; my ole
aunt, who takes keer of me, can't live long, an' I ain't good fur
nothin'. I can't git no jobs and I run arrands for everybody fur
nothin', but the first money I git I'm gwyn to buy a new hat with. Ever
sence I wore these bell-crowns Meshach hates me, an' I hope he's the
only man that does hate me, Levin. I don't think Meshach kin be a bad
man."

"How kin he be good, Jack?"

"Why, I have seen him in the woods when he didn't see me, calling up the
birds. Danged if they didn't come and git on him! Now birds ain't gwyn
to hop on a man that's a devil, Levin. Do you believe he deals with the
devil?"

"I do," said Levin; "I see sich quare things I believe in most anything
quare. These yer tarrapins has got sense, and they're no more like it
than a stone. One night when we hadn't nothin' to eat at home, mother
and me, an' she was a sittin' there with tears in her eyes wonderin'
what we'd do next day, I ree-collected, Levin, that there was four
tarrapins down in the cellar,--black tarrapin, that had been put there
six months before. I said to mother: 'I 'spect them ole tarrapins is
dead an' starved, but I'll go see.'

"I found 'em under the wood-pile, an' they didn't smell nor nothin', so
I took 'em all four up to mother an' put 'em on the kitchen table befo'
the fire, an' I devilled 'em every way to wake up, an' crawl, and show
some signs of life. No, they was stone dead!

"'Well, mother,' says I, 'put on your bilin' water an' we'll see if dead
tarrapin is fit fur to eat!' She smiled through her cryin', and put the
water on, an' when it began to bubble in the pot, I lifted up one of
them tarrapins an' dropped him in the bilin' water, an' Jack, I'll be
dog-goned if them other three tarrapins didn't run right off the table
an' drop on to the flo' an' skeet for that cellar door!

"I caught 'em an' biled 'em, an' as we sat there eatin' stewed tarrapin
without no salt, or sherry wine, or coffee, or even corn-bread, we heard
somethin' like paper scratchin' on the window, an' mother fell back and
clasped her hands, an' said, 'There, do you hear the ghost?'

"I rushed to the door an' hopped into the yard, an' not a livin'
creature did I see; but there on the window-shelf was packages of salt,
coffee, tea, and flour, and a half a dollar in silver! I run back in the
house, white as a ghost myself, an' I cried out, 'Mother, it's father's
sperrit come again!'

"She made me git on my knees an' pray with her to give poor father's
spirit comfort in his home or in heaven!"




CHAPTER XVII.

SABBATH AND CANOE.


They now approached an island with low bluffs, on which appeared a
considerable village, shining whitely amid the straight brown trunks of
a grove of pine-trees; but no people seemed moving about it, and they
saw but a single vessel at anchor in the thoroughfare or strait they
steered into--a canoe, which revealed on her bow, as they rounded to
beside her, a word neither Levin nor Jack could read, except by hearsay:
_The Methodist_.

"Jack," said Levin, "that was a big pine-tree the parson hewed his canoe
outen. She fell like cannon, going off inter the swamp. She's a'most
five fathom long, an' a man can lie down acrost her. She's to carry the
Methodis' preachers out to the islands."

"Hadn't we better wake _him_ up now?" said Jack Wonnell; "I 'spect you
want a drink, Levin?"

"Yes; I got a thirst on me like fire," Levin exclaimed. "I could do
somethin' wicked now, I 'spect, for a drink of that brandy."

Mooring against the shore, Levin went to his passenger, who was still in
deep sleep stretched upon the bare floor of the hold or cabin--a brawny,
wiry man, with strong chin and long jaws, and his reddish, dark beard
matted with the blood that had spilled from his disfigured eye, and now
disguised nearly one half his face, and gave him a wild, bandit look.

"Cap'n! mister! boss! wake up! We have come to Deil's Island."

The long man, lying on his back, seemed unable to turn over upon his
side, though he muttered in his stirred sleep such words as Levin could
not understand:

"The darbies, Patty! Make haste with them darbies! Put the nippers on
her wrists an' twist 'em. Ha! the mort is dying. Well, to the garden
with her!"

At this he awoke, and turned his cold, light eyes on Levin, and leaped
to his feet.

"Did you hear me?" he cried. "It was only nums, kid, and jabber of a
nazy man. Some day this sleep-talk will grow my neck-weed. Don't mind
me, Levin! Come, lush and cock an organ with me, my bene cove!"

"If you mean brandy," Levin said, "I must have some or I'll jump out of
my skin. I feel like the man with the poker was a-comin'."

Joe Johnson gave him the jug and held it up, and the boy drank like one
desperate.

"How the young jagger lushes his jockey," the tall man muttered. "He's
in Job's dock to-day. I'll take no more. A bloody fool I was all
yesterday, an' oaring with my picture-frame. What place is this?"

"Deil's Island, sir."

"Ha! so it is. 'Twas Devil's Island once, till the Methodies changed it
fur politeness. This is the camp-meetin', then? Yer, Wonnell, take this
piece of money, an' go to some house an' fetch us a bite of dinner.
We'll wait fur you."

The tall man led the way to the heart of the grove of pines, where the
seeming town was found--a deserted religious encampment of durable
wooden shells, or huts, in concentric circles of horseshoe shape, and at
the open end of the circle was the preaching-stand, a shed elevated
above the empty benches and pegs of removed benches, and which had a
wide shelf running across the whole front for the preacher's Bible, and
to receive his thwacks as he walked up and down his platform.

It looked a little mysterious now, with the many evidences of a large
human occupation in the recent summer, to see this naked town and hollow
pulpit lying so suggestively under the long moan of the pine-trees,
conferring together like dread angels in council, and expressing at
every rising breeze their impatience with the sins of men.

At times the great branches paused awhile, scarcely murmuring, as if
they were brooding on some question propounded in their council, or
listening to human witnesses below; and then they would gravely
converse, as the regular zephyrs moved in and out among them, and pause
again, as if their decision was almost dreaded by themselves. At
intervals, a stern spirit in the pines would rise and thunder and shake
the shafts of the trees, and others would answer him, and patience would
have a season again. And so, with scarcely ever a silence that remained
more than a moment, this council went on all day, continued all night,
was resumed as the sun arose to comfort the world again, ceased not when
the rainbow hung out its perennial assurance upon the storm, and
typified to trembling worshippers the great synod of the Creator, in
everlasting session, ready to smite the world with fire, but suspending
sentence in the evergreen pity of God.

In one of the deserted shells, or "tents," of pine, with neatly shingled
roof, facing the preaching-booth, Joe Johnson and Levin Dennis found
benches, and, at the tall man's example, Levin also lighted a pipe, and
looked out between the escapes of smoke at Tangier Sound, deserted as
this camp-ground on the Sabbath, since the worshippers had reached home
from church in their canoes. He thought of his lonely mother in the town
of Princess Anne, wondering where he was, and of the Sundays fast
speeding by and bringing him to manhood, with no change in their
condition for the better, but penury and disappointment, a vague
expectation of the dead to return, and deeper intemperance of the dead
man's son and widow's only hope. He would have cried out with a sense of
misery contagious from the music of those pines above him, perhaps, if
the brandy had not begun to creep along his veins and shine bold in his
large, girlish eyes.

"Levin," said Joe Johnson, "don't you like me?"

"Yes, Mr. Johnson, I think I does, 'cept when you use them quare words I
can't understan'."

"I'm dead struck with you, Levin," Joe Johnson said. "I want to fix you
an' your mother comfortable. You're blood stock, an' ought to be stabled
on gold oats."

He drew the canvas bag of eagles and half-eagles out of his trousers,
and held its mouth open for Levin to feast his eyes.

"Thar," said he, "I told you, Levin, I was a-goin' to give you one of
them purties. I've changed my mind; I'm a-goin' to give you five of
'em!"

"My Lord!" exclaimed Levin; "that's twenty-five dollars, ain't it, sir?"

"Oll korrect, Levin. Five of them finniffs makes a quarter of a hundred
dollars--more posh, Levin, I 'spect, than ever you see."

"I never had but ten, sir, at a time, an' that I put in this boat, and
Jimmy Phoebus put ten to it, an' that paid for her."

"What a stingy pam he was to give you only ten!" Joe Johnson exclaimed,
with disgust. "Ain't I a better friend to ye? Yer, take the money
_now_!"

He pressed the gold pieces ostentatiously upon the boy, who looked at
them with fear, yet fascination.

"What am I to do to earn all this, Mr. Johnson?"

"You comes with me fur a week,--you an' yer boat. I charters you at that
figger!"

"But--mother?"

"Well, when we discharge pigwidgeon, your friend with the bell
shape--Jack Sheep yer--all you got to do, Levin, is to send the hard
cole to your mother by him, sayin', 'Bless you, marm; my wages will
excoos my face!'"

"Oh, yes, that will do. Mother will know by the money that I have got a
long job, and not be a 'spectin' of me. When do we sail, cap'n?"

"How fur is it to Prencess Anne? What time to-night kin you make it?"

Levin stepped out of the shanty and looked at the wind and water, his
pulses all a-flutter between the strong brandy and the wonderful gold in
his pocket; and as he watched the veering of the pine-boughs to see
which way they moved, their moaning seemed to be the voice of his
widowed mother by her kitchen fire that day, saying, "He is in trouble.
Where is my son? Why stays he, O my Levin?"

"The tide is on the stand, cap'n, an' will turn in half an hour. It will
take us up the Manokin with this wind by dark, ef we can get water
enough in the thoroughfare without going around by Little Deil's."

Johnson came out and made the same observations on wind and flood.

"I reckon it's eighteen miles to the head of deep water on Manokin,
Levin?"

"Not quite, sir, through the thoroughfare; it's nigh eighteen. We've got
four hours and a half of daylight yet."

"Then stand for the head of Manokin an' obey all my orders like a
'listed man, an' I'll git ye and yer mother a plantation, an' stock it
with niggers for you. Come, brace up again!"

He offered the brandy-jug, and encouraged the boy to drink heartily, and
affected to do the same himself, though it was but a feint.

While they stood in the shelter of the camp cottage going through this
pastime, a voice from near at hand resounded through the woods, and made
their blood stop to circulate for an instant on the arrested heart.

It was a voice making a prayer at a high pitch, as if intended to cover
all the camp-ground and be heard to the outermost bounds. The sincerity
of the sound made Levin Dennis feel that the camp might still be
inhabited by some spiritual congregation which the eyes of profane
visitors could not see--the remainder of the saints, the souls of the
converted, or an ethereal host from above the solemn organ of the pines.

The idea had scarcely seized upon him when a fluttering of wings was
heard, and on the old camp-ground alighted a flock of white wild-geese.

They balanced their large deacon and elder-like bodies upon the empty
seats, and there set up as grave a squawking as if they were singing a
hymn, with that indifferent knowledge of harmony possessed by
camp-meeting choristers.

The accident of their coming--no unusual thing on these exposed
islands--might have made untroubled people only laugh, but it produced
the contrary effect on both our visitors. Levin felt a superstitious
fear seize upon him, and, turning to Joe Johnson, he saw that person
with a face so pale that it showed his blood-gathered eye yet darker and
more hideous, like a brand upon his countenance, gazing upon the late
empty preaching-booth.

There Levin, turning his eyes, observed a solitary man kneeling, of a
plain appearance and dress, and with locks of womanly hair falling
carelessly upon a large and almost noble forehead, his arms raised to
heaven and his voice flowing out in a mellow stream of supplication, in
the intervals of which the geese could be heard quacking aloud and
paddling their wings as they balanced and hopped over the camp-meeting
arena.

"Who's he a prayin' to?" Levin asked of Joe Johnson.

"Quemar!" muttered Johnson, as if he were terrified at something; "his
potato-trap is swallerin' ghosts! Curse on the swaddler? The kid will
whindle directly. Come, boy, come!"

At this, seizing Levin's hand, partly in persuasion, partly as if he
wanted the lad's protection, Johnson, fairly trembling, ran for the
boat.

Levin was frightened too; the more that he saw the stronger man's fear.
As they dashed across the camp-ground the wild-geese took alarm, and,
some running, some flying, scudded towards the Sound. A voice from the
pulpit cried after the retreating men, but only to increase their fears,
and when they leaped on board the _Ellenora_, Joe Johnson was livid with
terror. He ran partly down the companion-way and stopped to look back:
the wild-geese were now spreading their wings like a fleet of fleecy
sails, and fluttering down the sound in gallant convoy.

"What did you run for?" Levin said; "the jug of brandy is left. It was
only Parson Thomas!"

"You run first," the man replied, gasping for breath, and a little
ashamed. "What did he preach at me fur?"

"That's the parson of the islands," Levin said; "he started Deil's
Island camp-meetin' last year, an' his favo-rite preacher dyin' jess as
he got it done, ole Pap Thomas, who lives yer, comes out to the
preachin'-stand sometimes alone, an' has a cry and a prayer. The geese
scared _me_, cap'n."

"Push off!" ordered Joe Johnson; "my teeth are most a-chatterin' with
the chill that mace cove give me."

He pulled up the anchor, hoisted the jib, and showed such nervous
apprehension that Levin subsided to managing the helm, and steered down
the thoroughfare, or strait, which, for some distance, wound around the
camp-meeting grove.

"Yer's Jack Wonnell comin' with the jug and the dinner. Sha'n't we wait
fur him?"

"He's got the kingdom-come cove with him! No; stop for nothing."

But the boat had to stop, as her keel scraped the mud in the almost dry
thoroughfare, and a plain island man of benevolent, nearly credulous,
face, hailed them, saying, stutteringly:

"Ne-ne-neighbors, do-don't be sc-scared that a-way. We ain't
he-eee-thens yer. Br-br-brother Wonnell's bringin' your taters and
pone."

"Come on, an' be damned to you?" Johnson cried to Wonnell. "What do we
want with this tolabon sauce?"

"Sw-w-wear not a-a-at all!" cried the parson of the islands. "'Twon't
l-l-lift ye over l-l-low tide, brother. Stay an' eat, an' t-t-talk a
little with us. Why, I have seen that f-f-face before!"

"Never in a gospel-ken before," the slave-dealer muttered, with an oath.

"B-but it can't be him," spoke the island parson, with solemnity. "Ole
Ebenezer Johnson died s-s-several year ago."

"Who was he?" cried the slave-dealer, with a little respectful interest.

"Ebenez-z-zer Johnson," Parson Thomas replied, with a mild and credulous
countenance, "was the wickedest man on the Eastern Sho' for twenty year.
P-pardon me, brother, fur a likin' ye to him, but somethin' in ye
y-y-yur," passing his hand upon his skull, "p-puts me in mind of him. It
was hyur he was shot"--still keeping his hand upon the skull--"through
an' through, an' died the death of the sinner. I have p-p-put my
f-finger through the two holes where the b-bullet come an' went, an' rid
this w-world of a d-d-demon!"

The story appeared to have a fascination for the slave-buyer, Levin
Dennis thought, and Johnson exclaimed:

"Well, hod, did he ever run afoul of _you_?"

"O y-y-yes," answered the genial island exhorter, with obliging
loquacity; "it was tw-w-enty-s-seven year ago that I see ole Eben-nezer
Johnson come on the camp-ground of P-p-pungoteague with a mob of
p-p-pirates to break up the f-f-fust Methodies camp-meetin' ever held
about these sounds. He was en-c-couraged by ole King Custis, f-f-father
of our Daniel Custis, of Prencess Anne, who was a b-b-big man fur the
Establish Church an' d-dispised the Methodies. It was a cowardly thing
to do, but while King C-C-Custis laughed and talked a' durin' of the
p-p-preachin', Eb-b-b-benezer Johnson started a fight. The preacher
c-c-cut his eye and saw who was a w-w-winkin' at the interference. He
was a l-l-lion of the L-l-lord, and bore the c-c-commission of Immanuel.
He knowed he was outen the s-s-state of Maryland and over in the
V-v-vergeenia county of Ac-c-comack, an' that if the l-l-aws was a
little more t-t-tolerant sence the Revolutionary war the ar-r-ristocracy
there was b-bitter as ever towards the people of the Lord. He t-t-urned
from his preachin' at last, right on King Custis, an' he pinted his
f-finger at him straight. The p-preacher was L-l-lorenzo Dow."

"Wheoo!" Jack Wonnell exclaimed, with a coinciding grin; "I've hearn of
him: a Yankee-faced feller, like a woman, with long braids an' curls of
hair fallin' around of his breast an' back, and a ole straw hat, rain or
shine."

"That was L-l-lorenzo Dow," the parson of the islands said. "He turned
on K-k-king Custis and screamed, 'W-who art thou? The L-lord shall smite
thee, w-whited sepulchre, and m-mock thee in thy ch-h-hildren's
children, thou A-a-a-hab and thy J-j-jezebel!' It was King Custis's wife
he pinted at, too, the greatest lady and heiress in V-v-virgeenia.
Sh-h-e f-f-ainted in f-fear or r-rage to hear the prophecy and insult of
her. Then, turning on Eb-b-benezer Johnson, Lorenzo Dow cried out, 'The
dogs shall lie buried safer than his bones. Lay hold of him, brethren!'
And s-something in Lorenzo Dow's t-trumpet-blast made every M-methodis'
a giant. They s-swept on Ebenezer Johnson, the bully of thr-ree states,
an' beat him to the ground, an' raced his band to their boats, an' then
they th-hrew him into a little j-j-jail they had on the camp-ground,
f-for safe keeping."

"What did King Custis do then, Pappy Thomas?" asked Levin.

"Why, brethren, what did he do but use his f-f-family influence to g-git
out a warrant for the preacher and his m-managers, on the ground of
f-false imprisonment and s-slander! Lorenzo Dow got over into Maryland
s-safe from the warrant, but our p-presiding elder was p-put in jail
till he could p-pay two thousand dollars fine. It almost beggared the
poor Methodies of that day to raise so much money, but g-glory be to
G-god! we can raise it now any day in the year, and in the next
g-generation we can buy our p-persecutors."

"So Ebenezer Johnson, accordin' to the autum bawler's patter, got
popped in the mazzard, my brother of the surplice? But he didn't climb
no ladder, did he?"

The stuttering host seemed not to comprehend this sneering exclamation,
and Levin Dennis said:

"King Custis wasn't killed, was he, Pappy Thomas?"

"It was his children's children his p-p-punishment was promised to," the
island parson said, "and to the Lord a thousand y-years are but as
d-days."

"The tide is fuller, Levin," Joe Johnson cried, "your keel is clear. Now
pint her for Manokin. So bingavast, my benen cove, and may you chant all
by yourself when I am gone!"

"God bless the boys!" the islander cried, "an' k-keep them from the
f-fire everlasting that is burning in your jug. And s-s-stranger,
remember the end of Eb-b-benezer Johnson, an' repent!"

The old man, barefooted, stoop-shouldered, stuttering, yet with a chord
of natural rhetoric in his high fiddle-string of a windpipe, stood
looking after them till they passed down the thoroughfare under the
jib-sail, and Joe Johnson did not say a word till some marsh brush
intervened between them, he being apparently under a remnant of that
panic which had seized him on the camp-ground.

"That's a good man," Levin Dennis said, giving the tiller to Jack
Wonnell and raising the sail; "he preached to the Britishers when they
sailed from Tangiers Islands to take Baltimore, and told 'em they would
be beat an' their gineral killed. He's made the oystermen all round yer
jine the island churches an' keep Sunday. That stutterin' leaves him
when he preaches, and when he leads the shout in meetin' it's piercin'
as a horn."

"He's a bloody Romany rogue," Joe Johnson muttered, "to tell me such a
tale! But, kirjalis! he cursed not me!"

"What language is that, Mr. Johnson? Is it Dutch or Porteygee?"

"It's what we call the gypsy; some calls it the Quaker. It's convenient,
Levin, when you go to Philadelfey, or Washinton, or New York, or some o'
them big cities, an' wants to talk to men of enterprise without the
quails a-pipin' of you. Some day I'll larn it to you if you're a good
boy."

They now sailed out of the thoroughfare into the broad mouth of the
Manokin, where a calm fell upon air and water for a little while, and
they could hear smothered music, as of drum-fish beneath the water,
beating, "thum! thum!" and crabs and alewives rose to the surface around
them, chased by the tailor-fish. The cat-boat drifted into the mouth of
a creek where rock and perch were running on the top of the water, and
with the tongs Jack Wonnell raised half a bushel of oysters in a few
dips, and opened them for the party. Along the shores wild haws and wild
plums still adhered to the bushes, and the stiff-branched
persimmon-trees bore thousands of their tomato-like fruit. The
partridges were chirping in the corn, the crow blackbirds held a funeral
feast around the fodder, some old-time bayside mansions stretched their
long sides and speckled negro quarters along the inlets, half hidden by
the nut-trees, and in the air soared the turkey-buzzard, like a
voluptuary politician, taking beauty from nothing but his lofty station.

"The ole Eastern Sho'," Jack Wonnell said, with his animated vacancy,
"is jess stuffed with good things, Cap'n Johnsin. You kin fall ovaboard
most anywhair an' git a full meal. You kin catch a bucket of crabs with
a piece of a candle befo' breakfast, an' shoot a wild-duck mos' with
your eyes shet."

"This country's good for nothin'," Joe Johnson said. "Floredey is the
land! Wot kin a nigger earn for yer? Corn, taters, melons: faugh!
Tobacco is a givin' out, cotton won't live yer. But Floredey is the
hell-dorader of the yearth."

"What's the hell-dorader?" asked Levin.

"That's Spanish or Porteygee for cheap niggers an' cotton," cried the
trader. "Cotton's the bird!"

"I thought cotton was a wool," Levin said.

"No, boy, cotton is a plant, growin' like a raspberry on a bush, havin'
pushed the blossoms off an' burst the pods below 'em, an' thar it is fur
niggers to pick it. Thar's a Yankee in Georgey made a cotton-gin to gin
it clean, an' now all the world wants some of it."

"Some of the gin?" asked the irrelevant Wonnell.

"No, some of the cotton, Doctor Green! They can't git enough of it.
Eurip is crazy about it, but there ain't niggers enough to pick it all.
So I'm in the nigger trade an' tryin' to be useful to my country, an'
wot does I git fur it? I git looked down on, an' a nigger's pertected
fur a-topperin' of me! But never mind, I'll be a big skull yet, an' keep
my kerrige--in Floredey."

"What's Floredey good fur?" Levin asked.

"It's full of nigger Injins, Simminoles, every one of 'em goin' to be
caught an' branded, an' put at cotton an' tobakker plantin', an' hog an'
cow herdin'. More niggers will be run in from Cubey, an' all the free
niggers in Delaware and up North will be sold, an' you an' me, Levin, is
gwyn to own a drove of 'em an' have a orchard of oranges an' a thousand
acres of cotton in bloom. We'll hold our heads up. Your mother shall be
switched to a nabob. My wife will be a shakester in diamonds. We'll
dispise Cambridge an' Princess Anne, an' there sha'n't be a free nigger
left on the face of the earth. We'll swig to it!"

The sick-headed yet fancy-ridden Levin drank again, and listened to the
dealer's marvellous tales of golden fruit on coasts of indigo, and palms
that sheltered parrots calling to the wild deer. Jack Wonnell took the
helm when Levin lay down to sleep in the little cabin, still lulled by
tales of wealth and lawless daring, and there he slept the deep sleep
of the castaway, when the vessel grounded at dusk, in the sound of
evening church-bells, at Princess Anne.

"Let him sleep," Joe Johnson spoke; "yer, Wonnell, I give you tray of
his strangers to take to his mommy," handing out three gold pieces.
"Don't you forgit it! Yer's a syebuck fur you," giving Jack a sixpence.
"You an' me will part company at Prencess Anne."




CHAPTER XVIII.

UNDER AN OLD BONNET.


Vesta had been sitting half an hour beside her unconscious husband,
listening to his broken speech, and thinking upon the rapidity of events
once started on their course, like eaglets scarcely taught to fly before
they attack and kill, when the sound of carriage-wheels, arrested at the
door, called her to the window, and Tom, the mocking-bird, which had
been comparatively quiet since he found his master snugly cared for, now
began to hop about, fly in the air, and sing again:

"Sweet--sweet--sweetie! come see! come see!"

Vesta saw Meshach's wiry, deliberate colored man step down and turn the
horses' heads, and there dropped from the carriage, without using the
carriage-step, at a leap and a skip, a young female object whose head
was invisible in an enormous coal-scuttle bonnet of figured blue chintz.
However quick she executed the leap, Vesta observed that the arrival had
forgotten to put on her stockings.

Before Vesta could turn from the window this singular object had darted
up the dark stairs of the old storehouse and thrown herself on the
delirious man's bed:

"Uncle, Uncle Meshach! air you dead, uncle? Wake up and kiss your
Rhudy!"

She had kissed her uncle plentifully while awaiting the same of him, and
the attack a little excited him, without recalling his mind to any
sustained remembrance, though Vesta heard the words "dear child," before
he turned his head and chased the wild poppies again. Then the young
female, ejaculating,

"Lord sakes! Uncle don't know his Rhudy!" pulled her black apron over
her head and had a silent cry--a little convulsion of the neck and not
an audible sigh besides.

"She weeps with some refinement," Vesta thought; and also observed that
the visitor was a tall, long-fingered, rather sightly girl of, probably,
seventeen, with clothing the mantuamaker was guiltless of, and a hoop
bonnet, such as old people continued to make in remembrance of the
high-decked vessels which had brought the last styles to them when their
ancestors emigrated with their all, and forever, from a land of _modes_.
The bonnet was a remarkable object to Vesta, though she had seen some
such at a distance, coining in upon the heads of the forest people to
the Methodist church. It resembled the high-pooped ship of Columbus,
which he had built so high on purpose, the girls at the seminary said,
so as to have the advantage of spying the New World first; but it also
resembled the long, hollow, bow-shaped Conestoga wagons of which Vesta
had seen so many going past her boarding-school at Ellicott's Mills
before the late new railroad had quite reached there. As she had often
peered into those vast, blue-bodied wagons to see what creatures might
be passengers in their depths, so she took the first opportunity of the
blue scuttle being jolted up by the mourner to discern the face within.

It was a pretty face, with a pair of feeling and also mischievous brown
eyes, set in the attitude of wonder the moment they observed another
woman in the room. The skin was pale, the mouth generous, the nose long,
like Milburn's, but not so emphatic, and the neck, brow, and form of the
face longish, and with something fine amid the wild, cow-like stare she
fixed on Vesta, exclaiming, in a whisper,

"Lord sakes! a lady's yer!"

Then she threw her apron over the Conestoga bonnet again, and held it up
there with her long fingers, and long, plump, weather-stained wrists.

Vesta looked on with the first symptoms of amusement she had felt since
the morning she and her mother laughed at the steeple-crown hat, as they
looked down from the windows of Teackle Hall upon the man already her
husband. That morning seemed a year ago; it was but yesterday.

"Old hats and bonnets," Vesta thought, "will be no novelties to me by
and by. This family of the Milburns is full of them."

Then, addressing the new arrival, Vesta said,

"This is your uncle, then? Where do you live?"

"I live at Nu _Ark_," answered the miss, taking down the black apron and
looking from the depths of the bonnet, like a guinea-pig from his hole.

"If she had said 'the Ark' without the 'New,'" Vesta thought, "it would
have seemed natural."

"Your uncle has a high fever," Vesta said, kindly; "he is not in danger,
we think. It was right of you to come, however. Now take off your
bonnet. What is your name?"

"Rhudy--I'm Rhudy Hullin, ma'am."

"Rhoda--Rhoda Holland, I think you say."

"Yes'm, Rhudy Hullin. I live crost the Pookamuke, on the Oushin side,
out thar by Sinepuxin. I don't live in a great big town like Princess
Anne; I live in Nu Ark."

At this the girl carefully extricated her head from the Conestoga
scuttle, looked all over the bonnet with pride and anxiety, and then
carefully laid it on the top of her uncle's hat-box.

"Uncle Meshach give it to me," she said, with a sly inclination towards
the sick bed. "Misc Somers made it. Uncle, he bought all the stuff; Misc
Somers draw'd it. Did you ever see anything like it?"

"Never," said Vesta.

"Well, some folks out Sinepuxin said it was a sin and a shame--sech
extravagins; but Misc Somers she said Uncle Meshach was rich an' hadn't
but one Rhudy. It ain't quite as big as Misc Somers's bonnet, but it's
draw'd mour."

Here Rhoda gave a repetition of what Vesta had twice before observed--an
inaudible sniffle, and, being caught in it, wiped her nose on her apron.

"Take my handkerchief," Vesta said, "you are cold," and passed over her
cambric with a lace border.

"What's it fur?" Rhoda asked, looking at it superstitiously. "You don't
wipe your nuse on it, do you? Lord sakes! ain't it a piece of your neck
fixin'?"

Vesta felt in a good humor to see this weed of nature turn the
handkerchief over and hold it by the thumb and finger, as if she might
become accountable for anything that might happen to it.

"I got two of these yer," she said; "Misc Somers made 'em outen a frock.
They ain't got this starch on 'em; they're great big things. I always
forgit 'em. My nuse wipes itself."

"Now come near the fire and warm your feet," said Vesta; "for your ride
from the oceanside, this cold morning, through the forests of the
Pocomoke, must have chilled you through. Lay off your blanket shawl."

Rhoda laid the huge black and green shawl, that reached to her feet, on
the green chest, and smoothed it with evident pride.

"Uncle Meshach bought that in Wilminton," she said; "ain't it beautiful!
I never wear it but when I come over yer or go to Snow Hill. Snow Hill's
sech a proud place!"

She had a way of laughing, by merely indenting her cheeks, without a
sound, just as she expressed the sense of pain; the only difference
being in the beaming of her eyes; and Vesta thought it had something
contagious in it. She would laugh broadly and in silence, as if she had
been put on behavior in church, and there had adopted a grimace to make
the other girls laugh and save herself the suspicion.

As she pulled her skirts down to her feet, Vesta's observation was
confirmed that Rhoda had no stockings on, and she could not help
exclaiming,

"My dear child, what possessed you to ride this October morning only
half dressed? You might catch your death."

Rhoda caught her nose on the half sniffle, raised and dimpled her cheeks
in a sly laugh, and cried,

"Lord sakes! you mean my legs? Why, I ain't got but two pairs of
stockings, an' Misc Somers is a wearin' one of' em, and the ould pair's
in the wash. It's so tejus to knit stockings, and sech fun to go
barefoot, that I don't wear' em unless Misc Somers finds it out. Why,
the boys can't see me!"

She grimaced again so naturally and engagingly that Vesta had to laugh
quite aloud, and saw meantime that the young woman's oft-cobbled shoes
covered a slender foot a lady might have envied.

"Now, Rhoda," Vesta said, almost indignantly, "why did you not ask your
wealthy uncle for some good yarn stockings?"

"Him? Why, ma'am, he's got so many pore kin, if he begin to give' em all
stockings, he'd go barefoot himself."

"Has he other nieces like you?"

"No." The girl quietly grimaced, with her brown eyes full of laughter.
"There's plenty of others, but none like Rhudy; the woods is full of
them others."

"So you are the favorite? Now, what was your uncle going to do with all
his money?"

"Lord sakes!" Rhoda said; "he was going to marry Miss Vesty with it.
That's what Misc Somers said."

The mocking-bird had been striking up once or twice in the conversation,
and now pealed his note loud:

"Vesta, she! she! she! she-ee-ee!"

A tingle of that superstition she had felt more than once already, in
her brief knowledge of this forest family, went through Vesta's veins
and nerves, and she silently remarked,

"How little a young girl knows of men around her--what satyrs are taking
her image to their arms! These people knew he loved me, when I knew not
that he ever saw me."

She addressed the niece again:

"Rhoda, did your uncle say he loved Miss Vesta?"

"No'm. He never said he luved nothing; but I heard Tom, the
mocking-bird, shout 'Vesty,' and saw a lady's picture yonder between
grandpar and grandmem, and told Misc Somers, and she says, 'Your Uncle
Meshach's in luve!' Oh, I was right glad of it, because he was so sad
and lonesome!"

The fountain of sympathy burst up again in Vesta's heart, and she felt
that there were compensations riches and station knew not of in humble
alliances like hers.

"Rhoda," she said, going to the young girl and putting her hand upon her
soft brown hair, "you have not noticed the new picture of a lady hanging
up here, have you?"

"No'm, not yet. Everything is so quare in this room sence I saw it last,
I hain't seen nothin' in it but you. Now I see the carpet, an' the
brass andirons, an' the chiney, an'--Lord sakes! is that a picture? Why,
I thought it was you."

"It is, Rhoda. I am Vesta; I am your new aunt."

The girl made one of her engaging, dimpled, silent laughs, as if by
stealth again, changed it into a silent cry by a revulsion as natural,
and rose to her feet and took Vesta in her arms.

"I'm so glad, I will cry a little," Rhoda simpered, her eyes all dewy;
"oh, how Misc Somers will say, 'I found it out first!'"

Tom kept up a whistling, self-gratulating little cry, as if he had his
own thoughts:

"Sweety! sweety! sweet! Vesty, see! see! see!"

Vesta felt a chain of happy thoughts arise in her mind, which she
expressed as frankly as the girl of forest product had spoken, that she
might not retard the welcome of these homely friendships:

"Yes, Rhoda, I am thankful to find a social life open to me where there
seemed no way, and brooks and playmates where everything looked dry. You
come here like a sunbeam, God bless you! I can hear you talk, and teach
you what little I know, and we will relieve each other, watching him."

She felt a slight modification of her joy at this reminder, but the bird
seemed to teach her patience, as he suggested, hopping and flying in the
air,

"Come see! come see! come see!"

"Yes," thought Vesta, "_come and see!_ It is good counsel. I begin to
feel the breaking of a new sense,--curiosity about the poor and lowly.
My education seems to have closed my observation on people of my own
race, who daily trode almost upon my skirts, and whom I never saw--whom
it was considered respectable not to see--while even my colored servants
enjoyed my whole confidence because they were my slaves. Yet, in
misfortune, to these plain white people I must have dropped; and then
Roxy and Virgie, sold to some temporary rich man, would have been above
me, slaves as they would continue! How false, how fatal, both slavery
and proud riches to the republicans we pretend to be! Compelled 'to see'
at last, I shall not close my eyes nor harden my heart."

The maid from Newark had meantime quietly inspected the rag carpet, the
cloth hangings, the fairy rocker, and all the acquisitions of her
uncle's abode, and Vesta again observed that she was of slender and
willowy shape and motion, unaffected in anything, not forward nor
excited, and with the shrewd look so near ready wit that she could make
Vesta laugh almost at will. Vesta showed her how to administer cool
drink and the sponging to the sufferer, and he saw them together with a
look of inquiry which the febrile action soon drove away.

"Are your parents living, Rhoda?"

"No'm; they're both dead. My mother was Uncle Meshach's sister, and she
married a rich man, who biled salt and had vessels an' kept tavern.
Father Hullin died of the pilmonary; mar died next. Misc Somers brought
me up whar the tavern used to be. It ain't a stand no more. Uncle
Meshach owns it."

"Is it a nice place?"

"Now it ain't as nice as it use to be, Aunt Vesty"--the girl glided
easily over what Vesta thought might be a hard word--"sence the shews
don't stop thar no mour."

"The shoes? What is that?"

"The wax figgers and glass-blowers, and the strongis' man in the world.
Did you ever see him?"

Vesta said, "No, dear."

"I saw him," Rhoda said, with a compression of her mouth and a gleam of
her eyes. "He bruke a stone with his fist and Misc Somers kep the
stone, and what do you think it was?"

"Marble?"

"No'm; chork! He jest washed the chork over with a little shell or
varnish or something, and, of course, it bruke right easy; so he wasn't
the strongest man in the world at all, and if Misc Somers ever see him,
she'll tell him so."

"Is it a little or a large house, Rhoda?"

"Oh, it's a magnificins house, twice as big as this, with the roof bent
like an elefin's back, an' three windows in it--rale dormant windows,
that looks like three eyes outen a crab, and a gabil end three rows of
windows high, and four high chimneys. The rope-walker said it was fit to
be a rueyal palace. Then thar's the kitchen an' colonnade built on to
it. It's the biggest house, I reckon, about Sinepuxin. That
rope-walker's a mountin-bank."

"A mountain bank? You mean a mountebank--an impostor?"

"Yes'm,"--the mouth shut and the eyes flashed again. "He allowed he'd
break the rupe after he'd walked on it, and he said it wasn't stretched
tight enough, and went along a feeling of it; and Misc Somers found out
every time he teched of it he put on some bluestone water or somethin'
else to rot it, so, of course, he bruke it easy. But Misc Somers's going
to tell him, if he comes agin, he's a mountin-bank. Lord sakes! she
ain't afraid."

"So, since it has ceased to be a tavern, dear, you see no more
jugglers?"

"The last shew there," Rhoda said, "was the canninbils and the
missionary. The missionary had converted of 'em, and they didn't eat no
more; but he tuld how they used to eat people; and they stouled a pony
outen the stables an' run to the Cypress swamp, and thar they turned out
to be some shingle sawyers he'd just a stained up. Misc Somers is
a-waitin' for him. Lord sakes! she don't keer."

"And so you were an orphan, brought up at the old roadside stage-house
at Newark? And who is Mrs. Somers?"

"Misc Somers, she's a ole aunt of Par Hullin. She an' me live together
sence par and mar died of the pilmonary. Oh, I have a passel of beaus
that takes me over to the Oushin on Sinepuxin beach, outen the way of
the skeeters, an' thar we wades and sails, and biles salt and roasts
mammynoes. Aunt Vesty, I can cut out most any girl from her beau; but,
Lord sakes! I ain't found no man I love yet."

"I'm glad of that," said Vesta, "because you will then be satisfied with
Princess Anne. They say your uncle will be sick here several weeks, and
we can help each other to make him well. Now he is waking."

Milburn opened his eyes and sighed, and saw them together, and Rhoda
held back considerately while the young wife approached the bed. He
looked at her with a bewildered doubt.

"I thought they said you had gone forever," he murmured.

"No, I am come forever, or until you wish me gone."

"I told them so," he sighed; "I said, 'She has high principle, though
she can't love me.'"

"Uncle Meshach, give Auntie time!" cried Rhoda, with a quick divination
of something unsettled or misunderstood. "Don't you know your Rhudy?
Even I was afraid of you till I was tuke sick and you thought it was the
pilmonary and nursed me."

"You have a good niece," Vesta said, as her husband kissed the stranger;
"and we shall love each other, I hope, and improve each other."

"Yes, that will be noble," he replied. "Teach her something; I have
never had the time. Oh, I am very ill; at a time like this, too!"

"Be composed, Mr. Milburn," the bride said; "it is only Nature taking
the time you would not give her, and which she means for us to improve
our almost violent acquaintance. I shall be very happy sitting here, and
wish you would let your niece be with me; I desire it."

He tried to smile, though the strong sweat succeeding the fever broke
upon him from his hands to his face.

"She is yours," he said; "the best of my poor kin. Do not despise us!"

Vesta drew her arm around Rhoda and kissed her, that he might see it.

"What goodness!" he sighed, and the opening of his pores, as it let the
fever escape, gave him a feeling of drowsy relief which Vesta
understood.

"Now let us turn the covers under the edges, Rhoda," she said, "and put
your blanket-shawl over him, and he will get some natural sleep."

He turned once, as if to see if she was there, and closed his eyes
peacefully as a child.

"Now, Rhoda," said Vesta, in a few minutes, "I hear papa's carriage at
the door, and, while he comes up, I shall ride back to see my mother and
get a few things at home."

"Who is your poppy, Aunt Vesty?"

"Don't you know him?--Judge Custis, who lives in Princess Anne."

"Jedge Custis! Why, Lord sakes! he ain't your par, is he? Aunt Vesty,
he's one of my old beaus."

The Judge brought with him Reverend William Tilghman, and Vesta, as she
was retiring, introduced Rhoda to both of them:

"This is Miss Rhoda--Mr. Milburn's niece."

Judge Custis, a trifle blushing, took both of Rhoda's hands:

"Ha, my pretty partner and dancing pupil! How are our friends at St.
Martin's Bay and Sinepuxent? Many a sail and clam-bake we have had,
Rhoda."

"You're a deceiver," Rhoda cried, with a dimpling somewhere between glee
and accusation. "I'm goin' to plosecute you, Jedge, fur not tellin' of
me you was a married man. My heart's bruke."

"Who could remember what he was, Rhoda, sitting all that evening beside
you at--where was it?"

"The Blohemian glass-blowers," Rhoda cried; "the only ones that ever
visited the Western Himisfure. Jedge," with sudden impetuosity, "that
little one, with the copper rings in his years, wasn't a Blohemian at
all. He lived up at Cape Hinlupen, an' Misc Somers see him thar when she
was a buyin' of herring thar. She's goin' to tell him, when she catches
him at Nu-ark."

The young rector observed the flash of those bright eyes following the
pleasing dimples, and the slips of orthography seemed to him never less
culpable coming from such lips and teeth.

"William," said Vesta, "come around this afternoon, and let us have our
usual Sunday reading-circle. Mr. Milburn will be awake and appreciate
it, as he is one of your most regular parishioners. Rhoda, you can
read?"

"Oh, yes'm. Misc Somers, she's a good reader. She reads the Old
Testamins. The names thar is mos' too long for me, but I reads the
Psalms an' the Ploverbs right well."

"Very well, then, we will read verse about, so that Mr. Milburn can hear
both our voices and his favorite minister's, too. You'll come, papa?"

"Yes, if I can. We have had a love-feast at Teackle Hall this morning,
and your sister from Talbot is down, but I think I can get off."

"Lord sakes!" Rhoda said, looking at Mr. Tilghman candidly; "you ain't a
minister now? Not a minister of the Gospil?"

"Unworthily so, Miss Rhoda."

"Well, I don't see how you was old enough to be convicted and learn it
all, unless you was a speretual merikle. Misc Somers see one of 'em at
Jinkotig. They called him the enfant phrenomeny. He exhorted at five
year old, and at seven give his experyins."

"Rare, Miss Rhoda," the rector said, hardly able to keep his reverence
in amusement at her impetuosity.

"Oh, he made a wild excitemins, Aunt Vesty. The women give each other
their babies to hold while they tuk turns a-shouting. 'Yer, Becky, hold
my baby while I shout!' says one. 'Now, Nancy, hold mine while I shout!'
To see that little boy up thar tellin' of his experyins was meriklus,
an' made an excitemins like the high tides on Jinkotig that drowns' em
out. But, Aunt Vesty, that little phrenomeny was a dwarf, twenty year
old, an' Misc Somers found it out and told about it."

"I'll be bound Mrs. Somers knows!" exclaimed the Judge.

"That she do," continued Rhoda, earnestly, with a slight sniffle of a
well-modelled nose and a dimpling that argued to Vesta something to
come. "Misc Somers says you held one of them babies, Jedge, to let its
mother shout, and pretended to be under a conviction; an' that you
backslid right thar and was a-whisperin' to the other mother. Lord
sakes! Misc Somers finds it all out."

"Well," said the Judge, finding the laugh against him, "I never did
better electioneering than that day. By holding that baby five minutes I
made a vote, and the mother will hold it twenty years before she will
make a vote."

"Misc Somers says, Jedge, you hold the women longer than thar babies;
but I told her you was in sech conviction you didn't know one from the
other. 'Oh,' she says, 'he's sly and safe when he gits over yer on the
Worcester side.' Misc Somers, she's dreadful plain."

William Tilghman, during the continuation of this colloquy, looked with
interest on the two young ladies: Vesta, the elder by two or three
years, and richly endowed with the lights of both beauty and
accomplishments; the maid from the ocean side, plainer, and with no
ornament within or without; but he could foresee, under Vesta's
fostering, a graceful woman, with coquetry and fascination not wholly
latent there; and, as his eyes met Rhoda's, he interpreted the look that
at a certain time of life almost every maiden casts on meeting a young
man--"Is he single?" She shot this look so archly, yet so strong, that
the arrow wounded him a very little as it glanced off. He smiled, but
the consciousness was restored a moment that he was a young man still,
as well as a priest. Love, which had closed a door like the portal of a
tomb against him, began to come forth like a glow-worm and wink its lamp
athwart the dark.

"She must come to Sunday-school," he thought, "if she stays in Princess
Anne. We will polish her."

The mocking-bird, not being satisfied with any lull in the conversation,
"pearted up," as he saw Vesta withdraw, and cried,

"'Sband! 'Sband! Meee--shack! Mee-ee-ee-shack! See me! see me! Gents!
gents! gents! genten! Sweet! sweetie! sweetie! Hoo! hoo! See! see!
Vesty, she! Ha! ha!"

He flew in the air over his stirring master, as if doubting that all was
well since the strange lady, who had been so quiet all the morning, was
gone.

"That bird almost speaks," said William Tilghman; "I have spent many an
hour teaching them, but never could make one talk like that."

"Maybe you had too much to teach to it," Rhoda Holland said; "it ain't
often they can speak, and they mustn't have much company to learn well.
Uncle Meshach haint had no company but that bird for years. I reckon
the bird got mad and lonesome, and jest hooted words at him."

"What is it saying now?" Tilghman asked. "See! it is almost convulsive
in its attempts to say something."

The gray bird, as impressive as a poor poet, seemed nearly in a state of
epilepsy to bring up some burden of oppressive sound, and, as they
watched it, almost tipsy with the intoxicant of speech, fluttering,
driving, and striking in the air, it suddenly brought out a note liquid
as gurgling snow from a bird-cote spout:

"L-l-lo-love! love! love! Ha! ha! L-l-love!"

"Well done, old bachelor!" Judge Custis remarked, in spite of his fagged
face, for good resolution and yesterday's unbracing had left him
somewhat limp and haggard still. "He brings out 'love' as if he had made
a vow against it, but the confession had to come. Many a monk would sing
the same if instinct could find a daring word in his chorals. These
mockers of Maryland were celebrated in the British magazines a hundred
years ago, and I recall some lines about them."

He then recited:

  "'His breast whose plumes a cheerful white display,
  His quivering wings are dressed in sober gray,
  Sure all the Muses this their bird inspire,
  And he alone is equal to a choir.
  Oh, sweet musician! thou dost far excel
  The soothing song of pleasing Philomel:
  Sweet is her song, but in few notes confined,
  But thine, thou mimic of the feathery kind!
  Runs thro' all notes: thou only know'st them all,
  At once the copy and th' original!'"

"That's magnificins!" Rhoda exclaimed, with quiet delight; "who is
'fellow Mil,' Jedge?"

"Oh, that's the British nightingale. These American mocking-birds
surpass them as one of our Eastern Shore clippers outsails all the naval
powers of Europe."

"I've hearn 'The British Nightingale,'" Rhoda said, with a flash of her
eyes; "he was a blind man with green specticklers that sang at Nu-ark,
''ome, sweet 'ome'--that's the way he plonounced it--an' it affected of
him so, he had to drink a whole tumbler of water, an' Misc Somers,
spying around to see if he was the rale nightingale, she found it was
gin in that glass, and told about it."

Rhoda made even the minister laugh, as she indented her cheeks and cast
a sheep's glance at him and the Judge. He marvelled that such forest
English could be resented so little by his mind, but he thought,

"Never mind, she may have had no more lessons than the bird, whose
difficulty is even beautiful. But see! Mr. Milburn is wide awake. My
friend, how do you feel?"

"Better, better!" murmured Milburn. "I cannot lie here any more. There
is money, _money_, gentlemen, dependent on my getting about."

He started up with the greatest resolution and confidence, and fell upon
his head before he had left the coverlets.

"No, no!" said the Judge, as he and Tilghman picked Milburn up and
arranged him as before. "Your will is matched this time, my brave
son-in-law! You are back in the hut you have consumed, among the fires
thereof, and the avenging blast of Nassawongo furnace burns in your
veins and cools you in the mill-pond alternately. Lie there and repent
for the injury you have done a spotless one!"

If Meshach heard this it was never known, but the unconscious or
impulsive utterance strengthened the impression with Tilghman and Rhoda
that Vesta's marriage was not altogether voluntary, and produced on both
a feeling of deeper sympathy and respect for her.

"Judge," the young minister said, "do good for evil, if evil there has
been! I have given him my hand sincerely; perhaps you can relieve his
mind of some business care."

"Mr. Milburn," the Judge said, when he saw the resinous eyes roll
towards him again out of that swarthy face, now pale with weakness, "I
am out of a job now, and can work cheap. Let me do any errand for you."

A look of petulance, followed by one of inquiry, came up from Milburn's
eyes, and he pressed his head between his wrists, as if to bring back
the blood that might propel his judgment. They heard him mutter,

"No business prudence--yet plausible, persuasive--might do it well."

The Judge spoke now, with some firmness:

"Milburn, there is no use of your rebelling. Here you are and here you
will lie till nature does her restoration, assisted by this medicine I
have brought you. You must undergo calomel, and this quinine must set on
its work of several weeks to break up the regularity of these chills. In
the meantime, as your interests are also Vesta's, and Vesta's are mine,
let me serve her, if not you."

The positive tone influenced the weakened system of the patient. He
looked at all three of the observers, and said to Tilghman, "William, I
might send you but for your calling; leave me with the Judge a little
while, both you and Rhoda."

Rhoda took the Conestoga bonnet from the top of the Entailed Hat box,
and arrayed herself in it, to the rector's exceeding wonder.

"Let's you and me go take a little walk," she said, putting her hand in
his arm with a quiet confidence in which was a spark of Meshach's will.
"I ain't afraid of Princess Anne people, if they are proud. Mise Somers
says King Solomons was no better than a lily outen the pond, and said so
himself."

The young man, sincere as his humility was, blushed a little at the idea
of walking through his native town with that bonnet at his side, he
being of one of the self-conscious, high-viewing families of the old
peninsula--his grand-uncle the staff-officer of Washington, and
messenger from Yorktown to Congress with the news, "Cornwallis has
fallen;" but it was his chivalric sense, and not his piety, which
immediately dispelled the last touch of coxcombry, when he felt that a
lady had requested him.

"With happiness, Miss Holland;" and he did not feel one shrinking
thought again as he ran the gantlet of the idle fellows of the town,
many of them his former vagrant playmates. Rhoda was perfectly happy. He
would have taken her to his grandmother's, with whom he kept house, but
that aristocratic old dowager might say something, he considered, to
destroy Rhoda's confidence in her elegant appearance and easy
vocabulary; and they walked past Teackle Hall, where Vesta saw them, and
opened the door and made them come in and eat a little. Rhoda at first
showed some uneasiness under this great pile of habitation, but Vesta
was so natural and gracious that the shyness wore off, and, at a fitting
moment, the bride said:

"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this
winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly
become."

Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta
praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in
spite of Mrs. Somers.

Tilghman, too, accused himself that he felt a little relieved when he
escorted Rhoda back to Meshach's in another bonnet, and Vesta followed,
with her great shaggy dog, Turk; she not unconscious--though serene and
thoughtfully polite to all she knew--of people peering at her in wonder
and excitement from every door and window of the town. The news was
working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the
aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed
daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer
in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a wife at last.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE DUSKY LEVELS.


The new son-in-law, left alone with Judge Custis, asked to be propped up
in bed, and nothing was visible that would support his pillow but the
aged leather hat-box that Custis, with a wry face, brought to do duty.

"My illness is unfortunate," he gasped; "not only to me, but to the new
ties I have formed; to the mutual interest my wife and I have in making
up your losses on Nassawongo furnace, which we are all the poorer by to
that amount; and to a suitor whose cause I have taken up. I have bought
an interest in a great lawsuit."

"Then the day of reckoning of your enemies has come, Milburn."

"Not yet," said the sick man, with a proud flash of his eyes, "unless I
am no merchant and you are no lawyer, and the first I will not concede."

"Nor I the second," exclaimed the Judge, with some pride and temper.

"You were once a good lawyer, if visionary," resumed the money-lender,
with scant ceremony. "Had we been able to respect each other we might
have been confederated in things valuable to ourselves and to our time
and place. But that is past, and you do not possess my confidence as my
legal agent, my attorney. I wish you to get another advocate for me."

"I am willing to be useful, even without your compliments," the Judge
said, remembering his Christian resolution. "We will not quarrel, if I
can serve you."

"I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but my strength is not great
enough for unmeaning flattery. This marriage was so dear to my heart
that I have put it before a very large interest about which I have no
time to lose, and still am helpless upon this bed. I will trust you to
do my errand. Go to that chest, Judge Custis, and you will find a
package of papers in the cedar till at the end. Bring them here."

As the Judge opened the old chest a musty smell, as of mummies wrapped
in herbs, ascended into his nose, and he saw some faded clothes, as
those of poor people deceased, male and female, lying within. The
mocking-bird piped a noisy warning as he raised the lid of the till and
saw the desired papers among a parcel of spotted and striped bird-eggs:

"Come see! come see! Meshach! he! he! sweet!"

"Now open the window yonder," said Meshach, taking the papers, "and let
Tom fly out. He starts my nerves. Wh-oo-t, whi-it, Tom!"

The mocking-bird, spreading its wings and tail, and striking obstinately
towards its master a minute, as he whistled, flew out of the window and
settled in the old willow below, and had a Sunday-afternoon concert,
calling the passing dogs by name, whistling to them, and deceiving cats
and chickens with invitations they familiarly heard, to eat, to shoo, to
scat, and to roost.

"If he regulates his wife like that bird," the Judge spoke to himself,
"she will fly to heaven soon."

Milburn opened the papers, counted them, and handed them to his
father-in-law.

"The papers will be plain to you, Judge Custis, after I have made a few
words of explanation. You well know that the canal between the Delaware
and Chesapeake is finished, and vessels are now passing through it from
bay to bay. It is taking one hundred dollars a day tolls, and twenty
vessels already go past between sun and sun, though the size of the
shipping of the cities it connects has not yet been adapted to its
proportions. It has been a cheap and quick work, costing something above
two millions of dollars, taking only five years of time; and yet it has
begun its mercantile life by a cheat upon a man to whom it is indebted
as a promoter and contractor, and to whom I have advanced the means to
compel justice and damages."

"Well, well, Milburn; I must pay tribute to your enterprise. The era of
these great carrying corporations has barely begun, and you stake your
little fortune against one of them that is backed by the great city of
Philadelphia!"

"The canal passes through the state of Delaware, in which is three
quarters of its little length of only fourteen miles, and there a suit
will be free, to some extent, from the corruptions they might exercise
in Pennsylvania; and, if successful there, we can more easily attach the
tolls of the canal. I have no more faith in the Legislature of Delaware
than of any other state; kidnappers sit in its responsible seats, and it
licenses lotteries to make prizes of its own honor. But we shall try our
case before a simple jury, which will be flax in the hands of one lawyer
in that state, if we can secure him; but hitherto he has refused my
contractor, and will not take the case."

"Why," said the Judge, "you must mean Clayton, the new senator."

"That is the man," Milburn continued, stopping for strength and breath.
"He is finely educated, I hear, at the colleges and law schools, and
possesses a remarkable power over the agricultural and mixed races of
that small state, whom he thoroughly understands by sympathy and
acquaintance. I heard him once in court, at Georgetown, wither and
confound the confederated kidnapping influences of the whole peninsula,
and, against the will and intention of the jury, prevail upon their
fears and sensibilities to find a bold rogue guilty of stealing free
men; of color--a rogue who was in this room, unless it is a delusion of
my fever, this very day, and with whom I fancied I had been in collision
somewhere."

"You only knocked him down with a brick, after Samson had done it with
his fist, and then the fellow came to me for shelter, afraid you would
pursue him at law, and I suppose he did an errand for my servants to
this abode."

The Judge looked around upon the abode as if he had used the most
respectable word he could possibly apply to it.

"I will compromise with such scoundrels as that one," Milburn spoke,
"only when I am afraid of them. But, to conclude my statement; for
reasons of timidity, or doubts of success, or political
ambition--something I cannot fathom--Mr. Clayton will not hearken to my
debtor, and I have not disclosed my own interest in the suit. He is at
home from Washington, and an appointment has been made with him at his
office in Dover to-morrow. You see I am unable to keep it, and I have no
one else to send, and information reaches me that the canal company,
discovering my money in the contractor's bank account, intends to retain
Clayton forthwith. If you set out this afternoon, you can reach
Laureltown for bedtime. It is at least forty miles thence to Dover, and
you might ride it to-morrow by noon, with push, and in that case you
have a chance to beat the Philadelphia emissary several hours. I have
five thousand dollars at stake already; I believe I shall get damages of
forty times five if I can retain that man."

"I am ready to start at once," said the Judge, rising up; "I can read
these papers on the way. The saddle was my cradle, and I have a good
horse. My valise can follow me on the stage to-morrow."

"Unless you see the best reasons for it, my name is not to be mentioned
to any one as a party to this suit; I am not popular with juries."

"Then good-bye, Milburn," said the Judge, but did not extend his hand.
"As you treat my daughter, may God treat you!"

"Amen," exclaimed the money-lender, as the Judge's feet passed over the
door-sill below, and he sank back to the bed, exhausted again.

       *       *       *       *       *

While the proceedings described occupied the white people, the servants,
Roxy and Virgie, in their clean Sunday suits, loitered around the bridge
behind the store, or strayed a little way up the Manokin brook, hearing
the mocking-bird rend his breast in all the ventriloquy of genius.

"Virgie," said Samson Hat, meeting them under the willow-tree, "when I
carries you off and marries you, I s'pect you'll be climbin' up in my
loft, too, makin' it comf'able fo' me."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you old, black, impertinent
servant of darkness!" Virgie said. "Indeed, when I look at a man, he
must be almost white--not all white, though, like Roxy's beau."

"Who's he, Roxy?" Samson asked.

Roxie blushed, and said she had no beau, and never wanted one.

"Roxy's beau," says Virgie, "is that poor, helpless Mr. Jack Wonnell. He
comes to see her every day. He's devotion itself. Indeed, Samson, if you
are going to marry me, and Roxy marry all those bell-crown hats, we
shall cure the town of its two greatest afflictions."

"Bad ole hats?" asks Samson.

"Roxy'll burn all the bell-crowns for her beau, and I'll bury the
steeple-hat and you that cleans it, and the people will be so glad
they'll set me free and I can go North."

"Look out, Virgie; I'll put dat high-crown hat on you like Marster
Milburn put de bell on de buzzard. He went up to dat buzzard one day
wid a little tea-bell in his hand an' says, 'Buzzard, how do ye like
music?' Says de buzzard, tickled wid de compliment, 'I'm so larnid in
dat music, I disdains to sing; I criticises de birds dat does.' 'Den,'
says Mars Milburn, 'I needn't say to ye, P'ofessor Buzzard, dat dis
little bell will be very pleasin' to yo' refine taste.' Wid dat he takes
a little piece o' wire an' fastens de tea-bell to de bird's foot an'
says, 'Buzzard, let me hear ye play!' De buzzard flew and de bell
tinkled, an' all de other buzzards hear some'in' like de cowbell on de
dead cow dey picked yisterday, an' dey says, 'Who's dat a flyin' heah?
Maybe it's a cow's ghose!' So dey up, all scart, an' cross'd de bay; an'
de buzzard wid a bell haint had no company sence, becoz he stole a
talent he didn't have, and it made everybody oncomfitable."

"I've heard about Meshach belling a buzzard," said Roxy, "but they say
he's got something on his foot, too, like a hoof--a clove foot. Did you
ever see it, Samson?"

"He never tuk his foot off," said the negro, warily, "to let me see it.
Dat bell on de buzzard, gals, is like white beauty in a colored skin; it
draws white men and black men, like quare music in de air, but it makes
de pale gal lonesome. She can't marry ary white man; she despises black
ones."

The shrewd lover had touched a chord of young pain in the hearts of both
those delicate quadroons. Both were so nearly white that the slight
corruption increased their beauty, rounded their graceful limbs,
plumpened their willowy figures, gave a softness like mild night to
their expressive eyes, and blackened the silken tassels of their elegant
long hair. No tutor had taught them how to walk,--they who moved on
health like skylarks on the air. Faithful, pure-minded, modest, natural,
they were still slaves, and their place in matrimony, which nature
would have set among the worthiest--superior in love, superior in
maternity, superior in length of days and enjoyment--was, by the freak
of man's _caste_, as doubtful as the mermaid's.

Roxy was a little the shorter and fuller of shape, the milder and more
pathetic; in Virgie the white race had left its leaner lines and greater
unrelenting. She said to Samson, with the pique her reflections
inspired,

"I never thought the first man to make love to me would be as black as
you."

"De white corn years," says Samson, "de rale sugar-corn, de blackbird
gits. None of dem white gulls and pigeons gits dat corn. A white feller
wouldn't suit you, Virgie."

"Why?" says Roxy, "Virgie was raised among white children; so was I. We
didn't know any difference till we grew up."

"Dat was what spiled ye," Samson said; "de colored man is de best
husban'. He ain't thinkin' 'bout business while he makin' love, like
Marster Milburn. The black man thinks his sweetheart is business enough,
long as she likes him. He works fur her, to love her, not to be makin' a
fool of her, and put his own head full of hambition, as dey calls it.
You couldn't git along wid one o' dem pale, mutterin' white men, Virgie.
Now, Roxy's white man, he's most as keerless as a nigger; he kin't do
nothin' but make love, nohow. Dat's what she likes him fur."

"He's as kind a hearted man as there is in Princess Anne," Roxy spoke
up. "I never thought about him except as a friend. I know I sha'n't look
down on him because he likes a yellow girl, for then I would be looking
down on myself."

"Virgie," said Samson, "I reckon I'm a little ole, but you kin't fine
out whar it is. Ye ought to seen me fetch dat white hickory of a feller
in de eye yisterday, and he jest outen his teens. I know it's a kine of
impedent to be a courtin' of you, Virgie, dat's purtier dan Miss Vesty
herself--"

"Nobody can be as pretty as Miss Vesta," Virgie cried, delighted with
the compliment; "she's perfection."

"As I was gwyn to say," dryly added Samson, "I never just knowed what I
was a lettin' Marster Milburn keep my wages fur, till he married Miss
Vesty, and then I sot my eyes on Miss Vesty's friend an' maid, and I
says, 'Gracious goodness! dat's de loveliest gal in de world. I'll git
my money and buy her and set her free, and maybe she'll hab me, ole as I
am.'"

"She will, too, Samson, if you do that, I believe," Roxy cried; "see how
she's a-smiling and coloring about it."

Virgie's throat was sending up its tremors to her long-lashed eyes, and
a wild, speculative something throbbed in her slender wrists and beat in
the little jacket that was moulded to her swelling form: the first sight
of freedom in the wild doe--freedom, and a mate.

"My soul!" Roxy added, "if poor Mr. Wonnell could set me free, I think I
might pity him enough to be his wife."

Samson used his opportunity to stretch out his hand and take Virgie's,
while she indulged the wild dream.

"Dis han' is too purty," he said, "to be worn by a slave. Let me make it
free."

She turned away, but the negro had been a wise lover, and his plea
pierced home, and it struck the Caucasian fatherhood of the bright
quadroon.

"Freedom is mos' all I got," the negro continued; "it's wuth everything
but love, Virgie. Dat you got. Maybe we can swap' em and let me be yo'
slave."

"Don't, don't!" pleaded Virgie, pulling her hand very gently. "I'm
afeard of you; you clean the Bad Man's hat."




CHAPTER XX.

CASTE WITHOUT TONE.


Judge Custis was well out of town, riding to the north, when the little
reading-circle assembled, without his patronage, over the old store, and
the young minister directed it. In the warm afternoon the windows were
raised till Milburn's chill began to set in again, and they could hear
the mocking-bird, in his tree, tantalizing the great shaggy dog Turk by
whistling to him,

"Wsht! wsht! Come, sir! come, sir! Sic 'em! sic 'em! wh-i-it! sic 'em,
Turk! wsht! wh-i-i-t! Sirrah! Ha! ha!"

Turk would run a little way, run back, see nobody, watch all the windows
of the store, and finally he seemed to think the spot was haunted, or
unreliable in some way; for he would next run to the open store door,
and bark, run back, and, from a distance, watch the hollow dark within,
as if a vague enemy lived there, mocking his obedient nature and keeping
his mistress captive. Turk was a setter with mastiff mixing, worth a
little for the hunt and more for the watch, but as an ornament and
friend worth more than all; he was so impartial in his favors as to like
Aunt Hominy and Vesta about equally, and often slept in the kitchen
before the great chimney fire.

"Do we worry you, Mr. Milburn, by reading here?" Vesta asked.

"No, my darling. It is so kind of you to bring music to my poor loft."

William Tilghman opened his Bible at a place marked by a little
ribbon-backed bristol card, inscribed in Vesta's childhood by her
learning fingers, "Watch with me." He thought of his cousin, now
fluttering between her betrayal to this Pilate and her crucifixion, and
caught her eyes looking at the Bible-marker, as if saying to him and to
the forest maiden, "Watch with me."

Tilghman started the reading, Vesta followed, and Rhoda had to do her
part, also; but she required to labor hard to keep up, as the chapter
was in the Acts, descriptive of Paul's voyage towards Rome, and had
plenty of hard words and geography in it. At one verse, Rhoda's reading
was like this:

"And--when--we--had--sailed--slowl--li--many-days--and--scare--scare--skar
--skurse--I declar', Aunt Vesty, this print is blombinable!--scace--Oh,
yes, scacely--scarce--were--come--over--against--Ceni--Snide--Snid--Mr.
Tilghman, what is this crab-kine of word? Cnidus? Well, I declar'! a dog
couldn't spell that; it looks like Snyder spelled by his hired
man--against Cnidus--the--wind--not--snuffers--no, snuffering (here
Rhoda executed the double sniffle)--yes, didn't I say snuffering? I mean
suffering--suffering--us--we--sailed--under--I can't spell that nohow;
nobody kin!"

"'Sailed under Crete,' dear," assisted Vesta.

"Sailed under--Crety--over--against--Sal--Sal--Salm--oh, yes, psalms!
No: Sal Money."

"Salmone," explained the rector, not daring to look up; "we sailed under
Crete over against Salmone; and, hardly passing it, came unto a place
which is called the Fair Havens, nigh whereunto was the city of Lasea.'"

"Lord sakes!" exclaimed Rhoda, putting out her crescent foot, on which
was Vesta's worked stocking, "did they have Fair Havens in them days?
Was it this one over yer on the Wes'n Shu?"

"No," answered Tilghman; "Fair Havens was always a ready name for
sailors finding a good port in trouble."

"Thar ain't no good port out thar on the Oushin side now but Monroe's
Inlet, outen Jinkotig. The rest of 'em gits filled up, an' kadgin's the
on'y way to kadge through of 'em, Misc Somers says."

"She means warping, or pulling over a shoal inlet by a rope to an
anchor, as the water lifts the vessel."

"Yes, you know, Mr. Tilghman," Rhoda cried, delighted; "that's
kadgin'--pullin' over the bar by the anchor line. You're all agroun',
can't git nowhar, air a-bumpin' on the bar, an' the breakers is comin'
dreadful in your side: you'll break all up if you stay thar. So you git
the little anchor--the little one is better than ary too big a one--an'
put it in the yawl an' paddle acrost the bar an' sot her, an' them
aboard pulls as the billers lifts ye, and so they keep her headed in,
and, kadging, kadging, bumpety-bump, at las' you go clar of the bar an'
come home to smooth haven in Sinepuxin."

"Yes, my sisters," appended the young minister, "we need often to kedge
home, to warp over the bars of life, and Hope, in ever so little an
anchor, helps a little, if we do not lose the line. Little hopes are
often better than great ones, for o'er-great hopes swamp little vessels.
Even hope must be artfully shaped and skilfully dropped to take hold of
the unseen bottoms of opportunity. All of us have entertained burdensome
hopes, heavy anchors, and they would not hold us against the breakers;
but there may be little hopes, carried in advance of us, that will draw
us into pleasant sounds and bays."

"We owe to you, Rhoda, this comforting hope," said Vesta, "and, while
you are with us, we shall teach you to read more confidently."

Vesta then sang Charles Wesley's hymn:

  "'Jesus, in us thyself reveal!
  The winds are hushed, the sea is still,
    If in the ship Thou art.
  Oh, manifest Thy power divine;
  Enter this sinking church of Thine,
    And dwell in every heart.'"

The sounds of her singing reached the people, rambling curiously around
on Sunday afternoon to see the principals in the surprising marriage
they had but lately heard of, and, as she ended, Mr. Milburn called her,
saying,

"It is time for you to leave me till to-morrow."

"Is that your desire?"

"It is, kind lady. I have a servant-man, Samson, used to all my work,
and you can hear of my condition through your slave girls, going and
coming. I want you to feel free as ever, though my wife at last. I did
not seek you to cloud your morning, but to share your sunshine. Go to
Teackle Hall, and there I will come when I am stronger. At no time do I
ever wish you to sleep in this old stable."

"May I come and sit with you to-morrow, sir?"

"Oh, do so! I must see you a little day by day."

"May I take Rhoda with me?"

"Yes, if you will do it. She is a poor girl, but that is not her fault."

Vesta bent and touched his forehead with her lips, and, as she drew
back, he raised his cold hand and put a piece of paper in hers.

"Present my love to your mother," he said, in a chill; "and return her
the losses Judge Custis has named to me as her portion in Nassawongo
furnace. The amount is in this check, which I give you, although it is
Sunday, because it represents no business among any of us, but an act of
peace."

"You are an honorable man," Vesta said; "I have cost you dearly."

"It is the bumping of a few years on the bar," Meshach answered, trying
to smile; "be you my anchor out in calm water, and I will try to draw to
you some day. It is not the price I pay that troubles me; it is the
price you are paying."

"I am deeply interested in you," Vesta said; "if I should say more than
that, it would not now be true."

"Thank you for that much," Milburn said; "even your pity is a treasure,
and I thank God that I have made so much progress. Before you go, let my
bird come in, and then shut the window, to keep the night-hawks and owls
from finding him."

He managed, between his rising paroxysms of the chill, to whistle a note
or two, and Tom flew in the window and fluttered viciously around his
head, as if to be revenged for exile, and then, leaping on the old
hat-box, set up a show performance, in which were all the menagerie of
town and field, and, stopping a little while to hear the bird sing her
name again, Vesta and her friends withdrew.

Mrs. Custis was found in her bedroom, much improved in spirits, but
highly nervous.

"Oh, my poor, martyred, murdered idol!" she screamed, as Vesta came in;
"are you alive? Is the beast dead? Don't tell me he dares to live."

"Yes, mamma, here are his teeth," Vesta said, when she had kissed her
mother warmly. "He has sent you a check for all your lost money, and his
love, and me to live here with you in Teackle Hall. Liberty,
restitution, as you name it, and his affection to both of us: is he not
a gentleman now?"

Mrs. Custis eagerly took the check.

"Do you believe it is good, precious? Maybe he sent it to deceive me
while he could take advantage of your gratitude. Oh, these foresters are
devils! I wish I had the money for it."

"It is good for everything he has, mamma. Not to pay it would make him a
bankrupt. He gave it to me almost with gallantry. Indeed, he is the most
singular man I ever knew."

"That is the case with all pirates," said Mrs. Custis; "something in
the female nature attracts us to lawless men, who take what they
want--ourselves included. We were, I suppose, originally, just seized
and appropriated, and are looking out for the appropriator to this day.
But you, Vesta, with the Baltimore blood in you, do not expect to play
the Sabine bride tamely like that--to defend your spoiler and reconcile
him to your brethren?"

"I was thinking it was the Baltimore blood that made me appreciate Mr.
Milburn, mamma. The Custises were not traders."

"Pshaw! the Custises were libertines, unless history belies them; they
had else no popularity in the scamp court of Charley-over-the-water. He
thought the daughter of any gentleman in his following was made for his
mistress, and a large percentage of the said damsels thought he was
right."

"Mr. Milburn is no Cavalier, I can see that," Vesta said; "I am
attracted to him by elements of such strength and simplicity that I
fancy he is a Puritan."

"Puritan fiddlestick!" Mrs. Custis said, putting Milburn's check in her
bosom and pinning it in there, and looking vigilantly at the pin
afterwards. "Now, my great comfort, my only McLane! do not idealize this
forester as of any beginning whatsoever. It is all wrong. Thousands of
convicts were exported to Chesapeake Bay from the slums of London,
Bristol, Glasgow, and other places, and propagated here like the
pokeweed. With instincts of larceny, and, possibly, a little rebellion
in it, your man has robbed this house of your person; if he should also
take your heart, the shame would be upon us."

"Oh, mother, you are unforgiving!"

"Of course I am; I am Scotch."

"You have not one son-in-law but this who would give you back the large
amount your husband has misspent--not one who could do it but at a
sacrifice you would not permit. For you and papa, to restore your faith
in each other, I married our stranger creditor, forcing him to the altar
rather than he me; and he has already proved himself of more delicacy
than you, if I am to believe you are in your right mind. No, I am no
McLane."

"You are not, if you do not use their Scotch-Irish perseverance to get
the better of Meshach Milburn. You have obtained a marriage settlement
with him, now have it confirmed, and sue out your divorce before the
Legislature! Publicly as you have been profaned, ask the State of
Maryland for reparation. The McLanes, the Custises, and all their
connections, from the Christine River to the James, will storm
Annapolis, make your cause, if necessary, a political issue, and the
courts of this county will give you damages out of this beast's
unpopular wealth."

Vesta looked at her mother with astonishment.

"What would become of my self-respect, my maiden name, if I made that
show of my private griefs, mother?"

"Why, you would be a heroine. Every old lover, of whom there are so many
eligible ones, would feel his zeal return. A romance would attend your
name wherever the Baltimore newspapers are taken, and you would be as
great a heroine as Betty Patterson."

"That disobedient girl?" Vesta, still in astonishment, exclaimed.

"I saw her when the bride of Jerome Bonaparte. She was not half as
lovely as you! If Jerome had seen you--you were not born, then, and I
was in society--he would never have looked at Betty. But, you see, she
forced a settlement out of the Emperor, husbanded the income of it, and
she is rich, and freer to-day than if she had become a French
Bonaparte."

"Weak as they may be in many things, I am a Custis," Vesta spoke, with
pale scorn. "I would not drag my name through the tobacco-stained
lobbies of Annapolis to wear the crown of Josephine. The word I gave,
in pity of my parents, to the man who is now my husband, to become his
wife, I would not take back to my dying day, unless he first denied his
word. I believe there is such a thing as honor yet. Mother, you fret my
father by such principles."

"They are the principles of your uncle, Allan McLane."

"A man I shrink from," Vesta said, "although he is your brother. His
unfeeling respectability, his unchangeableness, his want of every
impulse but hate, his appropriation of our family honor, as if he was
our lawgiver and high-sheriff, his secretiveness, formal religion, and
mysterious prosperity, I do not appreciate, much as I have tried to be
charitable to him. I do not like Baltimore as I do the Eastern Shore; it
is fierce, hard, and suspicious."

"You shall not run down Baltimore before me," Mrs. Custis cried, hotly.
"It is a paradise to this region; and comparing Meshach Milburn to your
uncle is blasphemy."

"I have on my finger, mother, his mother's ring."

"A pretty object it is," said Mrs. Custis, taking a peep at it and
another at her check; "it requires a microscope to find it. The next
thing you will be walking through Baltimore on your bridal tour,
followed by a mob of small boys, to see Meshach's old steeple-top hat.
Then I shall feel for you, Vesta."

The cruel blow struck home. Vesta's reception, so unexpected, so
acrimonious, affected her with a sense of gross ingratitude, and with a
greater disappointment--she had failed to restore joy to her parents by
her desperate sacrifice.

She began to feel that she might have done wrong. The broad sight of her
act, looking back upon it from this momentary revulsion, seemed a
frightful flood, like the mouth of one of the little Eastern Shore
rivers that expands to a gulf in the progress of a brook. Last night she
saw in an instant the misunderstandings and ruin she could prevent by
her ready decision; now she saw the misunderstandings she never could
correct, the prejudices stronger than parental sympathy, the wide
separation her marriage had effected between two classes of her duty--to
think with her husband's affection and her mother's interests at the
same time.

It also occurred to her that her father, the darling of her thought, had
seemed slow to appreciate her marriage sacrifice, and was testy at her
willingness to loosen her heart with her vestal zone towards her
husband.

The whole day had passed with such relief, such satisfaction, that she
expected to end it in the tranquillity of Teackle Hall, like some young
eagle returned to her nest with abundant prey for the old birds there,
worn out with storm and time. In place of love and healing nature, Vesta
had found worldliness, resentment, intrigue, and aspersion, concluding
with a reference to the one object she feared and shrank from--the hat
of dark entail, the shadow upon her future life. Her eyes filled up, she
lisped aloud,

"I wish I had stayed with my husband!"

"Has he become so necessary to you already?" asked Mrs. Custis.

"He does appreciate my sacrifice," Vesta said, and her low sobs filled
the room. In a moment Virgie entered, alert to her playmate's pains, and
threw her arms around her mistress and kissed her like a child.

"Oh, missy," she spoke to Mrs. Custis, "to make her cry after what she
has done for all of us--to save your home, to save me from being sold!"

No scruples of race made Vesta reject this sympathy, precious to her
parched breast despite the quadroon taint as the golden sand in the
brooks of Africa, giving at once wealth and cooling. The slave girl's
long white arms, scarcely less pale than ivory--for she had slipped in
at the sign of sorrow, while making her simple toilet--drew Vesta into
her lap and laid her head upon the fair maiden shoulder, as if it was a
babe's. On such a shoulder, only a shadow darker, Vesta had often lain
in infancy, and sucked the milk that was sweet as Eve's--the common
fount of white and black--at the breast of Virgie's mother. That
faithful nurse was gone; the wild plum-tree grew upon her grave; but
Virgie inherited the motherly instinct and added the sisterly sympathy,
and her rich hair, half unbound, streamed down on Vesta's temples among
the dark ringlets there, while she looked into her own spirit for a word
to check those tears, and found it:

"People will say you have been crying, dear missy. The Lord knows you
did right. Don't let anybody make you lose your faith till your master,
your husband, does wrong to you; he wouldn't like to have you cry."

There was a nervous chord somewhere in the slave's throat that trembled
on the key of the heroic, and her nostrils, slightly rounded, her head,
free of carriage as the wild colt's, and a light from her soft eyes that
seemed to be reflected on their long, silken lashes, bore out a spirit
tamed by servitude, which still could kindle to everything that
concerned woman in her birthright.

Vesta kissed Virgie, and ceased to sob; she rose and kissed her mother
also.

"It was very wrong in me to say what I did not wish to say, about Uncle
Allan, mamma. I hope papa was kind to you to-day."

"Dear me!" Mrs. Custis cried; "everything is turned upside down by that
bog iron ore. A new element has come into the family to disturb it.
Nobody believes anything respectable any more. Your father is an
infidel, or a radical, or something perverse; you are defending those
wild foresters! What will become of the Christian religion and society
and good principles?"

"What did papa say before he left home?"

"He acted in the strangest manner, Vesta. He came right in and kissed
me, like a great booby, and sat down and wanted to talk about our
courting days. I thought at first he was drunk again, or that the
Methodists had got hold of him and fed him on camp-meeting straw. How do
you account for it?"

Virgie had slipped out as soon as the talk became confidential.

"He wants to do better, dear mamma. Do respond to his contrition and
affection! If we could all humble our hearts, it would be so easy to
start life better, and turn this accident to joy and comfort. I have
found new engagements and reliefs already. There is a young girl, Mr.
Milburn's niece, whom I shall bring home this evening and occupy myself
teaching her. She is an orphan, without a mother's knowledge, barely
able to read, but pretty and quaint."

"Bring a forester in here?" Mrs. Custis exclaimed, fairly shivering.
"What will Allan McLane's daughters say? Your sister from Talbot has
been here all this day, and you have scarcely given her an hour. Between
this fatal marriage and your neglect, she left, with her husband,
positively pale with horror. I do not know what is to follow this
marriage. I have posted a letter already to my brother Allan, telling
him of your betrayal by your father and this bridegroom. All our
connection will be up in arms."

Vesta's heart sank again, but she felt no fears of her husband's ability
to meet mere family opposition, secured by law and form in his rights.
She only feared hostility might rouse in him severity and defiance which
would neutralize her present influence upon him, and change his
accommodating, almost gentle, disposition as a husband.

For, blacker than any object in her future path, she saw a little,
trivial thing, like a wild boar closing her hitherto adventurous
excursion into the forest where her husband grew--the hat that had
covered his head!

Her mother's thoughtless mention of that object made it formidable to
her fears as some iron mask locked round her husband's countenance,
making day hideous and the world a dungeon to all who must walk with
him.

She discerned that his combative spirit would start to the defence of
his hat if it should become the subject of family rancor, because no man
forgives an insult to his personal appearance; and this article of wear
had ringed his brain with gangrene, and war made upon it would be met by
war, while Vesta had expected to induce forgetfulness of the rusty old
tile, to charm away the remembrance of it, and to have it laid forever
aside.

"I am not the daughter of Uncle McLane," Vesta protested. "I am,
besides, a woman, free of my minority. Mr. Milburn is hardly the man to
submit to any trespass. I warn you, mamma, to put my uncle at no
disadvantage; for my husband has already beaten papa, and he will smile
at your brother when he knows that I do not support any of his
pretensions."

"The first thing," answered Mrs. Custis, stubbornly, "is to see that he
pays this check. Oh, my dear money!"--she pressed it to her heart--"how
delightful it is to see you again. Science, love, glory, ideas: how
vulgar they are without money. With this check paid, I think I shall
never read a book again; and as for the bog ores, why, I shall scream if
there is an iron article in the house. Vesta, this house, I believe, is
yours now? I had forgotten. Well, no wonder you defend the man who took
your father's roof from over his head and gave it to you!"

"That is unkind, mamma. I value it only as a sure home for you and papa.
If I gave it to him it might be in risk again."

"But suppose you continue to defend this monster of a Milburn, he and
you may require the whole house. I am too well-bred to be converted to
any of his impious ideas. I am a Baltimorean, and stand by my colors."

"Let us speak of that no more," Vesta said, almost in despair, "but talk
of dear papa. I know he loves you."

"It is too late," Mrs. Custis remarked, solemnly, with another fondling
of her check; "he has neglected me too long. I expect his attention and
respect, and that he shall behave himself; but no lovey and no honey for
me now. Life has passed the noon and the early afternoon for him and me,
and I live to be respectable, to appreciate my security, to keep
upstarts at arm's-length, to enjoy my life in its appointed circle,
taking care of my income, and never--no, never!--giving any human being
the opportunity to make me a beggar again."

"Oh, mamma," Vesta said, "think of Judge Custis! Have you not made home
cold to him by this formalism? We must study men, and please them
according to their tastes, and therein lies our joy; else we are false
to the companionship God gave us to man for. Yield to your husband's
boyish-heartedness; fly with him, like the mate by the bird! He has
repented; welcome him to your love again, and stay his feet from truant
going, or he may dash down the precipice this sorrow has arrested him
before, of everlasting dissipation and the death of his noble soul!"

Vesta stood above her mother, deeply moved, deeply earnest. Her mother
stole another look at the bank check.

"Well, daughter, I will be humbugged by him if you desire it," she said,
but with slight answering emotion. "If I had my life to go over again I
would marry a business man, and let the aristocracy go. There is the
second knock at the front-door. I believe I will dress myself and go
down-stairs too."

There were two ladies in the parlor when Vesta went there--Grandmother
Tilghman and the Widow Dennis.

"Good-evening, Vesta," said the old lady, who was stone-blind, but
easily knew Vesta's footstep. "William thought you would not go to
evening service on account of Mr. Milburn's illness, so I came around to
sit till church was over, when he will take me home. But what is that I
hear in this parlor, like somebody sniffling?"

"It's me, Aunt Vesty," said the voice of Rhoda Holland from the
background.

"This is Mr. Milburn's niece, who has come here to stay with me," Vesta
said.

"Ah! then it is no Custis. The last sniffle I heard was at the ball to
Lafayette in the spring of 1781. The marquis had marched from Head of
Elk to the Bald Friars' ferry up the Susquehanna and inland among the
hills to Baltimore, and we gave him a ball which, at his request, was
turned into a clothing-party. He snuffed so much that he kept up a
sniffle all the evening, like--"

Here Rhoda's sniffle was heard again.

"Yes, that's a good imitation," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I don't
like it."

"Did the gineral dance at the ball?" asked Rhoda. "What did he do with
his swurd? Did he dance with it outen his scibburd?"

"He danced like a gentleman," Mrs. Tilghman replied, as if she would
rather not, "and led me out in the first set. You danced with him,
Vesta, at the ball in '24, forty-three years afterwards. Does he sniffle
yet?"

"I don't recollect, grand-aunt. I was a little girl, and so much
flattered that I thought everything he did was perfect."

"Ah me!" exclaimed Mrs. Tilghman, pulling the feather of her turban up,
and looking as much like an old belle as possible at eighty years of
age; "you danced before Lafayette with my grandson Bill. Bill hardly
remembers Lafayette at all, thinking of you that night, so wonderful in
your girl's charms. I told him Vesta would never marry him, as he was
too plain and poor. But I never thought you would marry that--"

Here Rhoda sniffled warningly.

"Yes," exclaimed the old lady, catching the sniffle; "I never thought
you would marry _that_! But Bill is as dear a fool as ever. He says now
that Meshach Milburn is a good man, too. I never thought he was above
a--"

Rhoda sniffled earnestly.

"Precisely that," exclaimed the old lady; "that was my estimate of the
stock. Bill says he is a financial genius. I don't see what is to become
of girls in this generation. Here is Ellenora, too good to marry
Phoebus, the sailor man, too poor to marry anybody else; now, if
Milburn had married her and taken her son Levin into his business, it
would have been reasonable; but to take you and pervert your happiness,
almost makes me--"

Sniffle from Rhoda.

"Yes," said the old lady, snappishly; "almost! But I never did do it
yet."

"Did you ever see Gineral Washin'ton, mem?" Rhoda asked. "I thought,
maybe, you was old enough. Misc Somers, she see him up yer to Kint River
a-crossin' to 'Napolis. He was a-swarin' at the cappen of the piriauger
and a dammin' of the Eas'n Shu, and he said they wan't no good rudes in
Marylan' nohow; that the Wes'n Shu was all red mud, an' the Eas'n Shu
yaller mud, an' the bay was jus' pizen. Misc Somers say she don't think
it was Gineral Washin'ton, caze he cuss so. She goin' to find out when
she kin git a book an' somebody to read outen it to her, caze she
dreffle smart."

"Grand-aunt Tilghman," Vesta interposed to the blank silence of the
room, "knew General Washington intimately."

"Do tell us!" cried Rhoda. "You kin be a right interestin' ole woman, I
reckon, ef you air so quar."

In the midst of a smile, in which the blind old lady herself joined, and
Mrs. Custis at the same time entered the room, Mrs. Tilghman spoke as
follows:

"I went to visit Cousin Martha Washington several years before the
Revolution, at Mount Vernon. I had seen her while she was the widow of
Cousin Custis, and we occasionally corresponded. In those days we
visited by vessel, so a schooner of Robert Morris's father set me ashore
at Mount Vernon. Colonel Washington was then having his first portrait
painted by Wilson Peale, and he was forty years old. Peale and
Washington used to pitch the bar, play quoits, and fox-hunt, while
Cousin Martha, who was only three months younger than the colonel,
knitted and cut out sewing for her colored girls, and heard her
daughter, Martha Custis, play the harpsichord. Poor Martha had the
consumption; she was dark as an Indian; Washington often carried her
along the piazza and into the beautiful woodlands near the house; but
she died, leaving him all her money--nearly twenty thousand dollars. We
Custises rather looked down on Colonel Washington in those days; he was
not of the old gentry; his poor mother could barely read and write, and
once, when we went to Fredericksburg to see her, she was riding out in
the field among her few negroes as her own overseer, wearing an old
sun-bonnet, and sunburned like a forester."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Custis. "I should think she was a great
impediment to Washington."

"I reckon that's the way her son got big," exclaimed Rhoda; "if his mar
had laid down in bed all day, he couldn't have killed King George so
easy with his swurd."

"I often said to Cousin Martha, 'What did you see in this big horse of a
man?' 'Oh,' she replied, 'he's the best overseer in Virginia. He looks
after my property as no other man could.'"

"Then," said Mrs. Custis, emphatically, "he was one man out of a
thousand."

"That's the kind of man you married, Vesta," spoke up Mrs. Dennis.

"_Her_ husband," said Mrs. Custis, "looked after her father's property,
I am sure, for he got it all."

"And returned it all," exclaimed Vesta.

Mrs. Custis remarked that Washington certainly was a blue-blooded man.

"Is thar people with blue blood comin' outen of 'em?" asked Rhoda
Holland. "Lord sakes! I should think it would make 'em cold."

"I wonder if men are ever great?" asked Vesta; "or whether it is not
great occasion and trial that project them. A crisis comes in our lives,
and, finding what we can endure, we incur greater risks, and finally
delight in such adventure."

"That is the way with my poor boy, Levin," said Mrs. Dennis, quietly, to
Vesta. She was a pretty woman, somewhat past thirty, with rosy cheeks,
blue eyes, neat but rather poor attire, and a simple, artless manner,
and might have passed for the sister of her son.

"Is Levin coming for you to-night?" Vesta asked.

"No," blushed the widow; "James Phoebus will see me home. Levin has
gone off in his boat, and I have been worried about him all day. Some
time, I am afraid, he will go and never return. Oh, Cousin Vesta, this
waiting for a husband neither alive nor dead is very trying."

Overhearing the remark, Mrs. Custis remarked, "Norah, you ought to be
ashamed to keep that faithful fellow waiting on you, when you could give
yourself a good husband and reward him so easily."

"I think you had better look out for old age," Mrs. Tilghman also said,
"while you have youth and good looks to obtain the provision. Oden
Dennis is probably dead; if not dead, he does not mean to return, for I
can think of no circumstances in this age which would forcibly detain a
man from his wife fifteen years. Even if he was in a prison, he would be
allowed to write to you. He may not be dead, Norah, but he is not coming
back. Get a father for your son; you cannot manage Levin."

"Maybe he has been stoled by Injins," exclaimed Rhoda, with great
fervor; "thar was a Injin captive in a shew at Nu-ark, that had been
kept nineteen years. He forgot his language, and whooped dreffle. Misc
Somers say he was an imploster, an' worked on the Brekwater up to
Lewistown. She's always lookin' behind the shew to find out somethin'."
(Slight sniffle.)

"Do get that girl a pocket-handkerchief, and show her how to use it,"
exclaimed Mrs. Tilghman, breaking out. "Ah! girls, I have been a widow
thirty years. I never gave up the expectation of marrying again till I
lost my eyesight; and even after that, at sixty-five, I had an offer of
marriage; but I said to my gallant old beau, 'I will not take a man I
cannot compliment by seeing him and admiring him every day. I love you,
but my blindness would give you too much pain.' In our quiet towns, all
the life worth living is domestic joy. Do not lose it, Ellenora; do not
put it off too long!"

"I could love Mr. Phoebus, plain as he is," the widow spoke, "if I
could persuade myself that Oden is dead. But that I cannot do. A real
person--spirit or man--is watching over me closely. My very shoes I wear
to-night came from that mysterious agent. It is not my son; it is not
James Phoebus. No other stranger would so secretly assist me. I am
bound up in the fear and wonder that it is my husband."

"That does beat conjecture," said old Mrs. Tilghman. "Have you no friend
you might suspect?"

"None," the widow answered. "None who have not worn out their means of
giving long ago. Can I marry, with this ghostly visitation coming so
regularly? Should I not have faith in a husband's living if I receive a
wife's care from an unseen hand?"

"Oden Dennis," Mrs. Custis remarked, "was hardly a man to do charity and
not be seen. He was rather self-indulgent, demonstrative, and restless.
I cannot think of his nocturnal visits in the body. Besides, he would
not supply you in that way, Norah, if he meant to come back; and if he
cannot himself come to you, neither could he send."

Not altogether relishing Mrs. Tilghman's reproof, Rhoda was again heard
from, saying:

"Lord sakes! all the women has to talk about when they is gone is the
men. When the men comes, they talks as if they never missed of 'em. Misc
Somers, she never had no man, an' she talks mos' about the women that
has got one. I think Aunt Vesty has got the best man in Prencess Anne.
He's the richest. He's the freest. He never courted no other gal. He
ain't got no quar old women runnin' of him down--caze Misc Somers is
dreffle afraid of him!" This last remark seemed apologetic and an
afterthought.

"I am beginning to think my fortune is better than I deserve," Vesta
replied, to soften the application, as wine, tea, and cake were brought
in. "Now, dear friends, as I am Mr. Milburn's wife, let us all be
Christians this Sunday night, and drink his health and happy recovery,
and that he may never repent his marriage."

They drank with some hesitation, except the bride, Rhoda, and Mrs.
Dennis. Mrs. Tilghman needed the wine too much to wait long, and Mrs.
Custis, finding she was observed, took a sip from her glass also,
excusing herself on the ground of a recent headache from drinking
heartily.

As the conversation proceeded, now by general participation, again by
couples apart, and Vesta found herself more and more a subject of
sympathy, with no little curiosity interwoven in it, she also imagined
that an undertone of belief was abroad that she had made a mercenary
marriage.

Old Mrs. Tilghman--in her prime a most caustic belle, and worldly as
three marriages, all shrewdly contracted, could make her--seemed
determined to hold that Vesta had rejected her grandson for the
money-lender on the consideration of wealth. Vesta's own mother, too,
who should have known her well, had twice hinted the same. Even the
inoffensive Ellenora had accepted that idea, or another kin to it, and
Rhoda Holland had remembered that her uncle was the richest of
bridegrooms in Princess Anne. Vesta felt the injustice, but said to
herself:

"I must make the sacrifice complete, and incur any harsh judgment it may
bear. I see that I shall be driven for sympathy to the last place in the
world I anticipated: to my husband's heart. Yes, there is something
besides love in marriage: if I cannot love him, he can understand me."

Vesta had come to a place all come to who volunteer an act of great
sacrifice--to have it put upon a low motive from the lower plane of
sacrifice in many otherwise kind people. We give our money to an
institution of charity, and it is said that it was for notoriety, or
self-seeking, or at the expense of our kin. We lead a forlorn hope in
politics, or some other arena, to establish a cause or assist a
principle, with the certain result of defeat, and we are said to be
jealous or malignant. Perhaps we make a book to illustrate some old
region off the highways of observation, drawn to it by kindred strings
or early patterings, and the politician there regards it as an attack,
the old family fossil as an intrusion, the very youth as if it were a
queer and gratuitous thing from such an outer source. So we wince a
little, but feel that it was necessary to be misunderstood to complete
the sacrifice.

The feeling of despondency increased after the little company separated,
and Vesta went to her room and laid herself upon her still maiden bed.
She had said her prayer and asked the approval of God, but her nervous
system, under the tension of almost two days' excitement and events such
as she had never known, was alert and could not fall to slumber. Old
passages of Testament lore haunted her soul, such as: "Thy desire shall
be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee;" "A man shall leave his
father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife." She began to see
that marriage was not merely the solution of a family trouble, and the
giving of her body as a hostage for a pecuniary debt, but that it was a
rendition of all her liberty, even the liberty of sympathy and of
sorrow, to the man to whom she must cleave.

In marrying him she had left friendship, father and mother, everything,
at a greater distance than she ever dreamed; and they resented the
desertion to the degree that they now confounded her with her new
interest, let go their claim upon her, and could scarce conceive of her
except in the dual relation of a woman subject to her husband, and
selfish as himself.

"I wonder if he will grow weary of me, too," she thought, with anguish,
"after his possession is established and I shall have no other source of
confidence? What did I know of this world only yesterday? Then every way
seemed clear and open for me, my friends abundant, and love profuse;
to-day I am in awful doubts, and yet I must not lose my will and drift
with every passing fear and confusion into the fickleness which makes
woman contemptible after she has given her hand. I will never give up
two persons--my father, and my husband!"

As she turned down the lamp, it being nearly midnight, a short, fierce
cry, quickly stifled, as if some wild animal had howled once in
nightmare and fallen asleep in his kennel again, seized on her ears and
chilled her blood.

Vesta started up in bed and listened. It seemed to her that there were
footsteps, but they passed away, and she listened in vain for any other
sounds, till sleep fell deep and dreamless upon her, like black Lethe
winding through a desert wedding-day.




CHAPTER XXI.

LONG SEPARATIONS.


Vesta was awakened by Roxy, Virgie, and her mother all standing around
her bed at once, exclaiming something unintelligible together. It was
late morning, the whole family having slept long, after the several
experiences of two such days, and the sun was shining through the great
trees before Teackle Hall and burnishing the windows, so that Vesta
could hardly see.

"The kitchen servants have run away," Mrs. Custis shrieked, on Vesta's
request that her mother only should talk. "Old Hominy is gone, and has
taken all her herbs and witcheries with her; and all the young children
bred in the kitchen, Ned and Vince, the boys, and little Phillis, the
baby, they, too, are gone."

"I heard a strange cry or howl last night, as I dropped to sleep," Vesta
exclaimed, rubbing her eyes.

"Dear missy," cried Virgie, falling upon the pillow, "it was your poor
dog Turk; his throat has been cut upon the lawn."

"Yes, missy," Roxy blubbered, "poor Turk lies in his blood. There is
nobody to get breakfast but Virgie and me. Indeed, we did not know about
it."

"That is not very likely," said the suspicious Mrs. Custis.

"I know you did not, girls," Vesta said, "you have too much intelligence
and principle, I am sure; nor could Hominy have been so inhuman to my
poor dog."

Vesta at once rose up and threw on her morning-gown.

"The first thing to be done is to have breakfast. Roxy, do you go at
once to Mr. Milburn's and bring his man Samson here, and awake Miss
Holland to take Samson's place by her uncle. Tell Samson to make the
fire, and you and he get the breakfast. No person is to speak of this
incident of the kitchen servants leaving us on any pretence."

"Won't you give the alarm the first thing?" cried Mrs. Custis, not very
well pleased to see Vesta keep her temper. "They may be overtaken before
they get far away, daughter. Those four negroes are worth twelve hundred
dollars!"

"They are not worth one dollar, mamma, if they have run away from us;
because I should never either sell them or keep them again if they had
behaved so treacherously."

"I say, sell them and get the money," Mrs. Custis cried; "are they not
ours?"

"No, mamma, they are mine. Mr. Milburn and papa are to be consulted
before any steps are taken. Papa deeded them to me only last Saturday;
why should they have deserted at the moment I had redeemed them? Virgie,
can you guess?"

Virgie hesitated, only a moment.

"Miss Vesty, I think I can see what made Hominy go. She was afraid of
Meshach Milburn and his queer hat. She believed the devil give it to
him. She thought he had bought her by marrying you, and was going to
christen her to the Bad Man, or do something dreadful with her and the
little children."

"That's it, Miss Vessy," plump little Roxy added. "Hominy loved the
little children dearly; she thought they was to become Meshach's, and
she must save them."

"Poor, superstitious creature!" Vesta exclaimed.

"More misery brought about by that fool's hat!" cried Mrs. Custis. "If I
ever lay hands on it, it shall end in the fire."

"No wonder," Vesta said, "that this poor, ignorant woman should do
herself such an injury on account of an article of dress that disturbs
liberal and enlightened minds! Now I recollect that Hominy said
something about having 'got Quaker.' What did it mean?"

The two slave girls looked at each other significantly, and Virgie
answered,

"Don't the Quakers help slaves to get off to a free state? Maybe she
meant that."

"Do you suppose the abolitionists would tamper with a poor old woman
like that, whose liberty would neither be a credit to them nor a comfort
to her? I cannot think so meanly of them," Vesta reflected. "Besides,
could she have killed my dog?"

"A gross, ignorant, fetich-worshipping negro would kill a dog, or a
child, or anything, when she is possessed with a devil," Mrs. Custis
insisted.

"I don't believe she killed Turk," Roxy remarked, as she left the room.
"There was a white man in the kitchen last Saturday night: I think he
slept there; master gave him leave."

"Yes, missy," Virgie continued, after Roxy had gone to obey her orders;
"he was a dreadful man, and looked at me so coarse and familiar that I
have dreamed of him since. It was the man Mr. Milburn knocked down for
mashing his hat; he was afraid Mr. Milburn would throw him into jail, so
he asked master to hide in the kitchen. But Hominy was almost crazy with
fear of Mr. Milburn before that."

Vesta held up her beautiful arms with a look of despair.

"What has not that poor old hat brought upon every body?" she cried.
"Oh, who dares contest the sunshine with the tailor and hatter? They are
the despots that never will abdicate or die."

"The idea of your father letting a tramp like that sleep in the kitchen
among the slaves!" cried Mrs. Custis. "What obligation had he incurred
there, too, I should like to know? Teackle Hall is become a cave of owls
and foxes; it is time for me to leave it. Here is my husband gone,
riding fifty miles for his worst enemy, leaving us without a cook and
without a man's assistance to discover where ours is gone. I know what I
shall do: I will start this day for Cambridge, to meet my brother, and
visit the Goldsboroughs there till some order is brought out of this
attempt to plant wheat and tares together."

Vesta stopped a moment and kissed her mother: "That is just the thing,
dear mother," she said. "Let me straighten out the difficulties here;
go, and come back when all is done, and you can be yourself again."

"I shall do it, Vesta. Brother Allan gets to Cambridge to-morrow
afternoon; I will go as far as Salisbury this day, and either meet him
on the road to-morrow or find him at Cambridge. Oh, what a house is
Teackle Hall--full of male and female foresters, abolitionists,
runaways, and radicals! All made crazy by the bog ores and the fool's
hat!"

Descending to the yard, Vesta found Turk lying in his blood, his mastiff
jaws and shaggy sides clotted red, and, as it seemed, the howl in which
he died still lingering in the air. The Virginia spirit rose in Vesta's
eyes:

"Whoever killed this dog only wanted the courage to kill men!" she
exclaimed. "James Phoebus, look here!"

The pungy captain had been abroad for hours, and the masts of his
vessel were just visible across the marshy neck in the rear of Teackle
Hall. He touched his hat and came in.

"Early mornin', Miss Vesty! Hallo! Turk dead? By smoke, yer's
pangymonum!"

"He's stabbed, Jimmy!" Samson Hat remarked, coming out of the kitchen;
"see whar de dagger struck him right over de heart! Dat made him howl
and fall dead. His froat was not cut dat sudden; it's gashed as if wid
somethin' blunt."

"Right you are, nigger! The throat-cuttin' was a make believe; the stab
will tell the tale. But who's this yer, lurkin' aroun' the kitchen do';
if it ain't Jack Wonnell, I hope I may die! Sic!"

With this, active as the dog had been but yesterday, Jimmy rushed on
Jack Wonnell, chased him to the fence, and brought him back by the neck.
Wonnell wore a bell-crown, and his hand was full of fall blossoms. As
Wonnell observed the dead dog, pretty little Roxy came out of the
kitchen, and stood blushing, yet frightened, to see him.

"What yo' doin' with them rosy-posies?" Jimmy demanded. "Who're they
fur? What air you sneakin' aroun' Teackle Hall fur so bright of a
mornin', lazy as I know you is, Jack Wonnell?"

"They are flowers he brings every morning for me," Roxy spoke up, coming
forward with a pretty simper.

"For you?" exclaimed Vesta. "You are not receiving the attentions of
white men, Roxy?"

"He offered, himself, to get flowers for me, so I might give you as
pretty ones as Virgie, missy. I let him bring them. He's a poor, kind
man."

"I jess got 'em, Jimmy," interjected Jack Wonnell, with his peculiar
wink and leer, "caze Roxy's the belle of Prencess Anne, and I'm the
bell-crown. She's my little queen, and I ain't ashamed of her."

"Courtin' niggers, air you!" Jimmy exclaimed, collaring Jack again. "Now
whar did you go all day Sunday with Levin Dennis and the nigger buyer?
What hokey-pokey wair you up to?"

"Mr. Wonnell," Roxy had the presence of mind to say, "take care you tell
the truth, for my sake! Aunt Hominy is gone, with all the kitchen
children, and Mr. Phoebus suspects you!"

"Great lightnin' bugs!" Jimmy Phoebus cried. "The niggers stole, an'
the dog dead, too?"

"I 'spect Jedge Custis sold 'em, Jimmy," Jack Wonnell pleaded, twisting
out of the bay captain's hands. "He's gwyn to be sold out by Meshach
Milburn. Maybe he jess sold 'em and skipped."

"Where is Judge Custis, Miss Vesty?" Phoebus asked.

"He has gone to Delaware, to be absent several days."

"Is what this bell-crowned fool says, true, Miss Vesty?"

"No. There was some fear among the kitchen servants of being sold; there
was no such necessity when they ran away, as it had been settled."

"It is unfortunate that your father is gone. He has been seen with a
negro trader. That trader and he disappear the same evening. The trader
lives about Delaware, too, Miss Vesty."

Vesta's countenance fell, as she thought of the suspicion that might
attach to her father. The great old trees around Teackle Hall seemed
moaning together in the air, as if to say, "Ancestors, this is strange
to hear!"

"Who told you, Jack Wonnell," spoke the bay sailor, "that Judge Custis
was to be sold out?"

"I won't tell you, Jimmy."

"I told him," Roxy cried, after an instant's hesitation, while Jimmy
Phoebus was grinding the stiff bell-crown hat down on Wonnell's
suffocating muzzle. "I did think we was all going to be sold, and had
nobody to pity me but that poor white man, and I told him as a friend."

"And I never told anybody in the world but Levin Dennis yisterday," Jack
cried out, when he was able to get his breath.

"Whar did you go, Jack, wid the long man and Levin all day yisterday?"
Samson asked.

"Yes, whar was you?" Jimmy Phoebus shouted, with one of his Greek
paroxysms of temper on, as his dark skin and black-cherry eyes flamed
volcanic. "Whar did you leave Ellenora's boy and that infernal
soul-buyer? Speak, or I'll throttle you like this dog!"

"You let him alone, sir!" little Roxy cried, hotly, "he won't deceive
anybody; he's going to tell all he knows."

"Let go, Jimmy," Samson said; "don't you see Miss Vesty heah?"

"Don't scare the man, Mr. Phoebus," Vesta added; "but I command him to
tell all that he knows, or papa shall commit him to jail."

Jack Wonnell, taking his place some steps away from Phoebus, and
wiping his eyes on his sleeve, whimpering a few minutes, to Roxy's great
agitation, finally told his tale.

"I'm sorry, Jimmy, you accused me before this beautiful lady an' my
purty leetle Roxy--bless her soul!--of stealing Jedge Custis's niggers.
Thair's on'y one I ever looked sheep's eyes at, an' she's a-standin'
here, listenin' to every true word I says. I'm pore trash, an' I reckon
the jail's as good as the pore-house for me, ef they want to send me
thair, fur it's in town, and Roxy kin come an' look through the bars at
me every day."

Roxy was so much affected that she threw her apron up to her face, and
Vesta and Phoebus had to smile, while Samson Hat, looking indulgently
on, exclaimed,

"Dar's love all froo de woods. Doves an' crows can't help it. It's
deeper down dan fedders an' claws."

"That nigger trader," continued Jack Wonnell, bell-crown in hand, "hired
me an' Levin to take him a tarrapinin'. He had a bag of gold that
big"--measuring with his hand in the crown of the hat--"an' he give
Levin some of it, an' I took it to Levin's mother las' night, an' told
her Levin wouldn't be back fur a week, maybe. I thought Mr. Johnson was
gwyn to give me some gold too, so I could buy Roxy, but yer's all he
give me. Everybody disappints me, Jimmy!"

Jack Wonnell showed an old silver fi'penny bit, and his countenance was
so lugubrious that the sailor exclaimed,

"Jack, he paid you too well for all the sense you got. Now, whar has
Levin gone with the _Ellenora Dennis?_"

"I don't know, Jimmy. He made Levin sail her up to the landin' down yer
below town, whair Levin's father, Cap'n Dennis, launched the _Idy_
fifteen year ago. I left Levin thar, and he said, 'Jack, I'm goin' off
with the nigger trader to git some of his money fur mother!'"

"Poor miserable boy!" Phoebus exclaimed; "he's led off easy as his
pore daddy. The man he's gone with, Miss Vesty, is black as hell. Joe
Johnson is known to every thief on the bay, every gypsy on the shore. He
steals free niggers when he can't buy slave ones, outen Delaware state.
He sometimes runs away Maryland slaves to oblige their hypocritical
masters that can't sell 'em publicly, an' Johnson and the bereaved owner
divides the price. Go in the house, yaller gal!" Jimmy Phoebus turned
to Roxy, who obeyed instantly. "Jack Wonnell, you go too; I'm done with
you!" (Jack slipped around the house and made his peace with Roxy before
he started.) "You needn't to go, Samson; I know you're true as steel!"

"I must go an' git de breakfast, Jimmy," the negro said, going in.

"Now, Miss Vesty"--Phoebus turned to the mistress of Teackle
Hall--"Joe Johnson has got old Hominy and the little niggers, by smoke!
That part of this hokey pokey is purty sure! Did he steal them an'
decoy them, or wair they sold to him by Judge Custis or by Meshach
Milburn?"

"By neither, I will risk my life. Mr. Milburn was taken to his bed
Saturday evening, and on Sunday father went to Delaware on legal
business for my husband."

"That is Meshach Milburn, I hear," the bay sailor remarked, with a
penetrating look. "Shall I go and see him on this nigger business?"

"No," Vesta replied; "he is too sick, and it is a delicate subject to
name to him. My girls, Virgie and Roxy, think old Hominy ran away from a
superstitious fear she had of Mr. Milburn, who had become the master of
Teackle Hall by marriage."

"Yes, by smoke! every nigger in town, big and little, is afraid of
Milburn's hat."

"He has no ownership in those servants, nor has my father now. I will
tell you, James--relying on your prudence--that Hominy belonged to me,
and so did those three children, having passed from my father to my
husband and thence to me and back to my father, and from him to me again
in the very hour of my marriage. I fear they have been persuaded away,
to be abused and sold out of Maryland."

Jimmy Phoebus looked up at the sighing trees and over the wide façade
of Teackle Hall, and exclaimed "by smoke!" several times before he made
his conclusions.

"Miss Vesty," he said, finally, "send for your father to come home
immediately. People will not understand how Joe Johnson, outlaw as he
is, dared to rob a Maryland judge of his house servants, Johnson himself
bein' a Marylander, unless they had some understanding. Your sudden
marriage, an' your pappy's embarrassments, will be put together, by
smoke! an' thar is some blunt enough to say that when Jedge Custis is
hard up, he'll git money anyhow!"

The charge, made with an honest man's want of skill, battered down all
explanations.

"I confess it," said Vesta. "Papa's going away on a Sunday, and these
people disappearing on Sunday night, might excite idle comment. It might
be said that he endeavored to sell some of his property before his
creditor could seize it."

"I have seen you about yer since you was a baby, Vesty, an' Ellenora
says you're better game an' heart than these 'ristocrats, fur who I
never keered! That's why I take the liberty of calling you Vesty. Now,
let me tell you about your niggers. If they was a-gwyn to freedom in a
white man's keer, I wouldn't stop 'em to be cap'n of a man-of-war. But
Joe Johnson, supposin' that he's got of 'em, is a demon. Do you see the
stab on that dog? well, it's done with one of the bagnet pistols them
kidnappers carries--hoss pistols, with a spring dagger on the muzzle;
and, when they come to close quarters, they stab with 'em. Johnson
killed your dog; I know his marks. He sails this whole bay, and maybe
he's run them niggers to Washin'ton, or to Norfolk, an' sold 'em south.
It ain' no use to foller him to either of them places, if he has, with
the wind an' start he's got, and your pappy's influence lost to us by
his absence. But thar is one chance to overhaul the thief."

"What is that, James?" said Vesta, earnestly. "I do want to save those
poor people from the abuse of a man who could kill my poor, fond dog."

"Joe Johnson keeps a hell-trap--a reg'lar Pangymonum, up near the head
of Nanticoke River. It's the headquarters of his band, and a black band
they air. He has had good wind"--the pungy captain looked up and noted
the breeze--"to get him out of Manokin last night, and into the Sound;
but he must beat up the Nanticoke all day, and we kin head him off by
land, if that's his destination, before he gits to Vienna, an' make him
show his cargo. Then, with a messenger to follow Jedge Custis an' turn
him back, we can swear these niggers on Johnson--and, you see, we can't
make no such oath till we git the evidence--an' then, by smoke! we'll
bring ole Hominy an' the pore chillen back to Teackle Hall."

"Here is one you love to serve, James," said Vesta, as the Widow Dennis
came in the gate.

"I came to meet you at the landing, James," said the blue-eyed,
sweet-voiced widow, with the timid step and ready blush. "Levin is gone
for a week with a negro trader; he sends me so much money, I fear he is
under an unusual temptation, and Wonnell says the trader is giving him
liquor. What shall I do?"

"Make me his father, Ellenory, and that'll give me an interest over him,
and you will command me. You want a first mate in your crew. Levin kin
make a fool of me if I go chase him now, and I can't measure money with
a nigger trader, by smoke!"

"Oh! James," the widow spoke, "you know my heart would be yours if I
could control it. When my way is clear you will have but to ask. Do go
and find Levin!"

"Norah, we suspect the same trader of having taken off Hominy, our cook,
and the kitchen children, in Levin's boat."

The widow listened to Vesta, and burst into tears. "He will be accessory
to the crime," she sobbed. "Oh, this is what I have ever feared. James
Phoebus, you have always had the best influence over Levin. If you
love me, arrest him before the law takes cognizance of this wild deed.
Where has he gone?"

Virgie appeared upon the lawn to say that Mrs. Custis wanted to know who
should drive her as far as Salisbury, where she could get a slave of her
son-in-law to continue on with her to Cambridge.

"I have been thinking all the morning where I can find a reliable man to
go and bring back papa," Vesta answered; "there are a few slaves at the
Furnace, but time is precious."

"Here is Samson," Virgie said, "and he has got a mule he rides all over
the county. Let him go."

"Go whar, my love?" asked Samson.

"To Dover, in Delaware," Vesta answered. "You can ride to Laurel by
dark, Samson, and get to Dover to-morrow afternoon."

"And I can ride with him as far as Salisbury," Jimmy Phoebus said,
"and get out to the Nanticoke some way; fur I see Ellenora will cry till
I go."

"You can do better than that, James," Vesta said, rapidly thinking.
"Samson can take you to Spring Hill Church or Barren Creek Springs, by a
little deviation, and at the Springs you will be only three miles from
the Nanticoke. Even mamma might go on with the carriage to-night as far
as the Springs, or to Vienna."

"If two of them are going," Virgie exclaimed, "one can drive Missy
Custis and the other ride the mule."

Samson shook his head.

"Dey say a free nigger man gits cotched up in dat ar Delawaw state.
Merrylin's good enough fur me. I likes de Merrylin light gals de best,"
looking at Virgie.

"Go now, Samson, to oblige Miss Vesty," Virgie said, "and I'll try to
love you a little, black and bad as you are."

"I'se afraid of Delawaw state," Samson repeated, laughing slowly. "Joe
Johnson, dat I put dat head on, will git me whar he lives if I go dar,
mebbe."

"No," Phoebus put in, "I'll be a lookin' after him on the banks of the
Nanticoke, Samson, while you keep right in the high-road from Laurel to
Georgetown, and on to Dover. Joe Johnson's been whipped at the post, and
banished from Delaware for life, and dussn't go thar no more."

"If you go, Samson," little Roxy put in, having reappeared, "Virgie'll
feel complimented. Anything that obliges Miss Vesty counts with Virgie."

"If you are a free man," Virgie herself exclaimed, her slight, nervous,
willowy figure expanding, "are you afraid to go into a freer state than
Maryland? If I was free I would want to go to the freest state of all.
Behave like a free man, Samson Hat, or what is freedom worth to you?"

"It's wuth so much, pretty gal, dat I don't want to be a-losin' of it,
mind, I tell you, 'sept to my wife when she'll hab me."

Samson watched the quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin
almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's
after a hard winter--the more active that a little meagre--her head
small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the
loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong passion, for her
mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when they listened to
him.

"A slave, Miss Vesty says"--Virgie spoke with almost fierceness--"is not
one that's owned, half as much as one that sells himself--to hard drink,
or to selfishness, or to fear. You're not a free man, Samson, if you're
afraid, and are like these low slave negroes who dare nothing if they
can only get a little low pleasure. All that can make a black man white,
in my eyes, is a white man's enterprise."

Vesta felt, as she often had done, the capable soul of her servant, and
did not resent her spirit as unbecoming a slave, but rather felt
responsive chords in her own nature, as if, indeed, Virgie was the more
imperious of the two. Coming now into full womanhood, her race elements
finding their composition, her character unrestrained by any one in
Teackle Hall, Virgie was her young mistress's shield-bearer, like David
to the princely Jonathan.

"Why, Virgie," Samson answered, with humility, "I never meant not to go,
lady gal, after marster's wife asked me, I only wanted you to beg me
hard, an' mebbe I'd git a kiss befo' I started."

"Wait till you come back, and see if you do your errand well," Virgie
spoke again. "I shall not kiss you now."

"I will," cried little Roxy, to the amusement of them all, giving Samson
a hearty smack from her little pouting mouth; "and now you've got it,
think it's Virgie's kiss, and get your breakfast and start!"

As they went to their abodes to make ready, Jimmy Phoebus found Jack
Wonnell playing marbles with the boys at the court-house corner.

"Jack," he said, "I'm a-going to find Levin an' that nigger trader. I
may git in a peck of trouble up yonder on the Nanticoke. Tell all the
pungy men whair I'm a-goin', an' what fur."

"Can't I do somethin' fur you, Jimmy? Can't I give you one o' my
bell-crowns; thair's a-plenty of 'em left."

"Take my advice, Jack, an' tie a stone to all them hats and sink' em in
the Manokin. Ole Meshach's hat has made more hokey-pokey than the Bank
of Somerset. Pore an' foolish as you air, maybe your ole bell-crowns
will ruin you."

The road to Salisbury--laid out in 1667, when "Cecil, Lord of Maryland
and Avalon," erected a county "in honor of our dear sister, the Lady
Mary Somerset"--followed the beaver-dams across the little river-heads,
and pierced the flat pine-woods and open farms, and passed through two
little hamlets, before our travellers saw the broad mill-ponds and
poplar and mulberry lined streets of the most active town--albeit
without a court-house--in the lower peninsula. Jimmy Phoebus, driving
the two horses and the family carriage, and Samson, following on his
mule, descended into the hollow of Salisbury at the dinner-hour, and
stopped at the hotel. The snore of grist-mills, the rasp of mill-saws,
the flow of pine-colored breast-water into the gorge of the village, the
forest cypress-trees impudently intruding into the obliquely-radiating
streets, and humidity of ivy and creeper over many of the old,
gable-chimneyed houses, the long lumber-yards reflected in the swampy
harbor among the canoes, pungies, and sharpies moored there, the small
houses sidewise to the sandy streets, the larger ones rising up the
sandy hills, the old box-bush in the silvery gardens, the bridges close
together, and the smell of tar and sawdust pleasantly inhaled upon the
lungs, made a combination like a caravan around some pool in the Desert
of the Nile.

"If there is any chance to catch my negroes," Mrs. Custis said, "I will
go right on after dinner. Samson, send Dave, my daughter's boy, to me
immediately; he is working in this hotel."

Samson found Dave to be none other than the black class-leader he had
failed to overcome at the beginning of our narrative, but changes were
visible in that individual Samson had not expected. From having a clean,
godly, modest countenance, becoming his professions, Dave now wore a
sour, evil look; his eyes were blood-shotten, and his straight, manly
shoulders and chest, which had once exacted Samson's admiration and
envy, were stooped to conform with a cough he ever and anon made from
deep in his frame.

"Dave," said Samson, "your missis's modder wants you, boy, to drive her
to Vienny. What ails you, Dave, sence I larned you to box?"

"Is you de man?" Dave exclaimed, hoarsely; "den may de Lord forgive you,
fur _I_ never kin. Dat lickin' I mos' give you, made me a po', wicked,
backslidin' fool."

"Why, Dave, I jess saw you was a _good_ man; I didn't mean you no harm,
boy."

"You ruined me, free nigger," repeated the huge slave, with a scowl,
partly of revenge and partly remorse. "You set up my conceit dat I could
box. I had never struck a chile till dat day; after dat I went aroun'
pickin' quarrels wid bigger niggers, an' low white men backed me to
fight. I was turned out o' my church; I turned my back on de Lord;
whiskey tuk hold o' me, Samson. De debbil has entered into Class-leader
Dave."

"Oh, brudder, wake up an' do better. Yer, I give you a dollar, an' want
to be your friend, Davy, boy."

"I'll git drink wid it," Dave muttered, going; and, as he passed out of
the stable-door he looked back at Samson fiercely, and exclaimed, "May
Satan burn your body as he will burn my soul. I hate you, man, long as
you live!"

Jimmy Phoebus remarked, a few moments afterwards, that Dave, dividing
a pint of spirits with a lean little mulatto boy, put a piece of money
in the boy's hands, who then rode rapidly out of the tavern-yard upon a
fleet Chincoteague pony.

At two o'clock they again set forward, the man Dave driving the carriage
and Jimmy Phoebus sitting beside him, while Samson easily kept
alongside upon his old roan mule, the road becoming more sandy as they
ascended the plateau between the Wicomico and Nanticoke, and the
carriage drawing hard.

"If it is too late to keep on beyond Vienna to-night," said Mrs. Custis,
"I will stop there with my friends, the Turpins, and start again, after
coffee, in the morning, and reach Cambridge for breakfast."

"I will turn off at Spring Hill," Samson spoke, "and I kin feed my mule
at sundown in Laurel an' go to sleep."

In an hour they came in sight of old Spring Hill church, a venerable
relic of the colonial Established Church, at the sources of a creek
called Rewastico; and before they crossed the creek the driver, Dave,
called "Ho, ho!" in such an unnecessarily loud voice that Mrs. Custis
reproved him sharply. Dave jumped down from the seat and appeared to be
examining some part of the breeching, though Samson assured him that it
was all right. As Dave finished his examination, he raised both hands
above his head twice, and stretched to the height of his figure as he
stood on the brow of a little hill.

"Missy Custis," he apologized, as he turned back, "I is tired mighty bad
dis a'ternoon. Dat stable keeps me up half de night."

"Liquor tires you more, David," Mrs. Custis spoke, sharply; "and that
tavern is no place to hire you to with your appetite for drink, as I
shall tell your master."

At this moment Jimmy Phoebus observed the lean little mulatto boy who
had left the hotel come up out of the swampy place in the road and
exchange a look of intelligence with Dave as he rode past on the pony.

"Boy," cried Samson, "is dat de road to Laurel?"

The boy made no answer, but, looking back once, timidly, ground his
heels into the pony's flank and darted into the brush towards Salisbury.

"Samson," spoke Dave, "you see dat ole woman in de cart yonder?"--he
pointed to a figure ascending the rise in the ground beyond the
brook--"I know her, an' she's gwyn right to Laurel. She lives dar. It's
ten miles from dis yer turn-off, an' she knows all dese yer
woods-roads."

"Good-bye, den, an' may you find Aunt Hominy an' de little chillen,
Jimmy, an' bring dem all home to Prencess Anne from dat ar Joe Johnson!"
cried Samson, and trotted his mule through the swamp and away. Jimmy
Phoebus saw him overtake the old woman in the cart and begin to speak
with her as the scrubby woods swallowed them in.

"What's dat he said about Joe Johnson?" observed Dave, after a bad
spell of coughing, as they cleared the old church and entered the sandy
pine-woods.

Mrs. Custis spoke up more promptly than Jimmy Phoebus desired, and
told the negro about the escape of Hominy and the children, and the hope
of Mr. Phoebus to head the party off as they ascended the Nanticoke
towards the Delaware state-line.

"You don't want to git among Joe Johnson's men, boss?" said the red-eyed
negro; "dey bosses all dis country heah, on boff sides o' de state-line.
All dat ain't in wid dem is afraid o' dem."

"How fur is it from this road to Delaware, Dave?" asked Phoebus.

"We're right off de corner-stone o' Delawaw state dis very minute. It's
hardly a mile from whar we air. De corner's squar as de stone dat sots
on it, an' is cut wid a pictur o' de king's crown."

"Mason and Dixon's line they call it," interpreted Mrs. Custis.

"Do you know Joe Johnson, Dave?"

"Yes, Marster Phoebus, you bet I does. He's at Salisbury, he's at
Vienna, he's up yer to Crotcher's Ferry, he's all ober de country, but
he don't go to Delawaw any more in de daylight. He was whipped dar, an'
banished from de state on pain o' de gallows. But he lives jess on dis
side o' de Delawaw line, so dey can't git him in Delawaw. He calls his
place Johnson's Cross-roads: ole Patty Cannon lives dar, too. She's
afraid to stay in Delawaw now."

"Why, what is the occupation of those terrible people at present?" asked
Mrs. Custis.

No answer was made for a minute, and then Dave said, in a low,
frightened voice, as he stole a glance at both of his companions out of
his fiery, scarred eyes:

"Kidnappin', I 'spect."

"It's everything that makes Pangymonum," Jimmy Phoebus explained;
"that old woman, Patty Cannon, has spent the whole of a wicked life, by
smoke!--or ever sence she came to Delaware from Cannady, as the bride of
pore Alonzo Cannon--a-makin' robbers an' bloodhounds out of the young
men she could git hold of. Some of' em she sets to robbin' the mails,
some to makin' an' passin' of counterfeit money, but most of 'em she
sets at stealin' free niggers outen the State of Delaware; and, when
it's safe, they steal slaves too. She fust made a tool of Ebenezer
Johnson, the pirate of Broad Creek, an' he died in his tracks a-fightin
fur her. Then she took hold of his sons, Joe Johnson an' young Ebenezer,
an' made 'em both outlaws an' kidnappers, an' Joe she married to her
daughter, when Bruington, her first son-in-law, had been hanged. When
Samson Hat, who is the whitest nigger I ever found, knocked Joe Johnson
down in Princess Anne, the night before last, he struck the worst man in
our peninsula."

Dave listened to this recital with such a deep interest that his breath,
strong with apple whiskey, came short and hot, and his hands trembled as
he guided the horses. At the last words, he exclaimed:

"Samson knocked Joe Johnson down? Den de debbil has got him, and means
to pay him back!"

"What's that?" cried Jimmy Phoebus.

The sweat stood on the big slave's forehead, as if his imagination was
terribly possessed, but before he could explain Mrs. Custis interrupted:

"I think it was said that old Patty Cannon corrupted Jake Purnell, who
cut his throat at Snow Hill five years ago. He was a free negro who
engaged slaves to steal other slaves and bring them to him, and he
delivered them up to the white kidnappers for money; and nobody could
account for his prosperity till a negro who had been beaten to death was
found in the Pocomoke River, and three slaves who had been seen in his
company were arrested for the murder. They confessed that they had
stolen the dead negro and he had escaped from them, and was so beaten
with clubs, to make him tractable, that when they gave him to Purnell
his life was all gone. Then he was thrown in the river, but his body
came up after sinking, and the confession of the wretched tools
explained to the slave-owners where all their missing negroes had gone.
They marched and surrounded Purnell's hut, and he was discovered
burrowed beneath it. They brought the dogs, and fire to drive him out,
and as he came out he cut his throat with desperate slashes from ear to
ear."

During this narrative the man Dave had listened with rising nervous
excitement, rolling his eyes as if in strong inward torment, till the
concluding words inspired such terror in him that he dropped the reins,
threw back his head, and shouted, with large beads of sweat all round
his brow:

"Mercy! mercy! Have mercy! Save me, oh, my Lord!"

"He's got a fit, I reckon," cried Jimmy Phoebus, promptly grasping the
reins as the horses started at the cry, and with his leg pinning Dave to
the carriage-seat. At that moment the road descended into the hollow of
Barren Creek, and, leaping down at the old Mineral Springs Hotel, a
health resort of those days, Phoebus humanely procured water and
freshened up the gasping negro's face.

"I declare, I am almost afraid to trust myself to this man," Mrs. Custis
observed, with more distaste than trepidation.

"Every nigger in this region," exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus, "thinks
Pangymonum's comin' down at the dreaded name of Patty Cannon; an' this
nigger's gone most to ruin, any way."

"Oh, marster," exclaimed the slave, recovering his speech and glaring
wildly around, "I hain't been always the pore sinner rum an' fightin'
has made of me. I served the Lord all my youth; I praised his name an'
kept the road to heaven; an' thinkin' of the shipwreck I'se made of a
good conscience, an' hearin' missis tell of the end of Jake Purnell, it
made me yell to de good Lord for mercy, mercy, oh, my soul!"

His frightful agitation increased, and Jimmy Phoebus soothed him,
good-naturedly saying:

"Mrs. Custis, I reckon you'd better let him come in the tavern and take
a little sperits; it'll strengthen his nerves an' make him drive
better."

As they drank at the old summer-resort bar, at that time in the height
of its celebrity, and the only _spa_ on the peninsula, south of the
Brandywine Springs, Phoebus spoke low to the negro:

"Dave, somethin' not squar and fair is a-workin' yer, by smoke! I've got
my eye on you, nigger, an' sure as hokey-pokey thair it'll stay. You
know my arrand yer, Dave: to save a pore, ignorant, deluded black woman
from Joe Johnson's band. Now, you've been a-cryin 'Mercy!' I want you to
show mercy by a-tellin' of me whar I'm to overtake an' sarch Levin
Dennis's cat-boat if it comes up the Nanticoke to-night with them people
and Joe Johnson aboard!"

Having swallowed his liquor greedily, the colored man replied, with his
former lowering countenance and evasive eyes:

"You can't do nothin' as low down de river as Vienny, 'case de Nanticoke
is too wide dar, and if you cross it at Vienny ferry, den you got de
Norfwest Fork between you and Johnson's Cross-roads, wid one ferry over
dat, at Crotcher's, an' Joe Johnson owns all dat place. But you kin keep
up dis side o' de Nanticoke, Marster Phoebus, de same distance as from
yer to Vienny, to de pint whar de Norfwest Fork come in. Sometimes Joe
Johnson sails up dat big fork to get to his cross-roads. In gineral he
keeps straight up de oder fork to Betty Twiford's wharf, right on de
boundary line."

"How far is that?"

"It's five miles from yer to Vienny, and five miles from yer to a
landin' opposite de Norfwest Fork. Four miles furder on you're at
Sharptown, an' dar you can see Betty Twiford's house on de bank two
miles acrost de Nanticoke."

"Nine miles, then, to Sharptown! He's had the tide agin him since he
entered the Nanticoke, and it's not turned yit. By smoke! I'll look for
a conveyance!"

"You can ride with me to the first landing," spoke up a noble-looking
man, whip in hand; "and after delaying a little there, I shall go on the
Sharptown ferry and cross the river."

Phoebus accepted the invitation immediately, and cautioning Mrs.
Custis to speak with less freedom in that part of the country, he bade
her adieu, and took the vacant seat in the stranger's buggy.

When Mrs. Custis came to Vienna ferry, and the horses and carriage went
on board the scow to be rowed to the little, old, shipping settlement of
that name, the negro Dave, standing at the horses' heads, exchanged a
few sentences with the ferry-keeper.

"Dave," called Mrs. Custis, a little later on, "you have no love, I see,
for old Samson."

"He made a boxer outen me an' a bad man, missis."

"Do you know the man he works for--Meshach Milburn?"

"No, missis. I never see him."

"He wears a peculiar hat--nothing like gentlemen's hats nowadays: it is
a hat out of a thousand."

"I never did see it, missis."

"You cannot mistake it for any other hat in the world. Now, Samson is
the only servant and watchman at Mr. Milburn's store, and he attends to
that disgraceful hat. If you can ever get it from him, Dave, and destroy
it, you will be doing a useful act, and I will reward you well."

The moody negro looked up from his remorseful, brutalized orbs, and
said:

"Steal it?"

"Oh, no, I do not advise a theft, David--though such a wretched hat can
have no legal value. It is an affliction to my daughter and Judge Custis
and all of us, and you might find some way to destroy it--that is all."

"I'll git it some day," the negro muttered; and drove into the old
tobacco-port of Vienna.




CHAPTER XXII.

NANTICOKE PEOPLE.


A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some who
perceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take any
atlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, they
will see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into a
square niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary,
standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about forty
miles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making a
perfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.
Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of the
Atlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.

The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of a
state is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the same
blow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidal
ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore of
Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the
one to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to the
south--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.

Nature, therefore, as if anticipating some foolish political boundaries
on the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at the
southwestern corner of Delaware to the splendid bay of Virginia.

Around that corner of the little Delaware commonwealth, in a flat, poor,
sandy, pine-grown soil, Jimmy Phoebus rode by the stranger in the
afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining
upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds
whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.

The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and
insects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast
washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,
where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back
are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is
something of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in
the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence
has abandoned, and uttering, as he feeds, the loud sounds of challenge,
as if to cry, "Abandoned by man; pre-empted by me!"

Jimmy Phoebus also heard the bold, bantering woodpecker, with his red
head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a
tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics
the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other
voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs
always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with
his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the
woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top
lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of
a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems
everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run
his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain
itself.

In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the
flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and
mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of
cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running
downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over
the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young
ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking
any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish
as the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.

The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees
that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in
the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,
probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the
quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led
his mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air darted
voices of birds forsaken or on doctor's errands, crying "Phoebe?
Phoebe?" or "Killed he! killed he!"

"Are you a dealer?" asked the gentleman of Jimmy Phoebus.

"Just a little that way," said Jimmy, warily, "when I kin git somethin'
cheap."

The stranger had a pair of keen, dancing eyes, and a long, eloquent,
silver-gray face that might have suited a great general, so fine was
its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a
well, disturbing the mirror there.

"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did that
sound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that's
what brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"

"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.

"Johnson's a great factor hereabout," continued the military-looking
man, bending his handsome eyes on the bay captain, as if there was a
business secret between them, and peering at once mischievously and
nobly; "he makes the quotient to suit. He leaves the suttle large and
never stints the cloff."

"He don't narry a feller down to the cloth he's got, sir?" assented
Jimmy, dubiously.

"Why should he? His equation is simple: I suppose you know what it is."

"Not ezackly," answered Phoebus, pricking up his ears to learn.

"Well, it is force and class sympathy against a dead quantity: laws
which have no consignees, cattle which have no lawyer and no tongue,
rights which have lapsed by their assertion being suspended, till demand
and supply, like a pair of bulldogs, tear what is left to pieces. Armed
with his _ca. sa._, my neighbor Johnson offsets everybody's _fi. fa._,
serves his writ the first, and makes to gentlemen like you a
satisfactory quotient. But he cuts no capers with Isaac and Jacob
Cannon!"

"I expect now that you are Jacob Cannon?" remarked the tawny sailor, not
having understood a word of what preceded. "If that's the case, I'm glad
to know your name, and thank you for givin' me this lift."

By a bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guess
would do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand way,
continued:

"We let neighbor Johnson and his somewhat peculiar mother-in-law make
such commerce as suits him, provided he studies to give us no
inconvenience. That is his equation; with his quotient we have no
concern other than our slight interest in his wastage, as when Madame
Cannon rides down to change a bill and leaves an order for
supplies--rum, chiefly, I believe. Gentlemen like you come into this
country to deal, replevin, or what not, and we say to you all, 'Don't
tread on us--that is all.' We shall not look into your parcels, nor lie
awake of nights to hear alarms; but harm Isaac and Jacob Cannon one
ha'pence and _levari facias, fi. fa.!_"

"And fee-fo-fum," ejaculated Jimmy, cheerfully; "I've hearn it before."

Looking again with some curiosity at his companion, Phoebus saw that
he was not beyond fifty years of age, of a spare, lofty figure--at least
six feet four high--sitting straight and graceful as an Indian, his
clothes well-tailored, his countenance and features both stern and
refined; every feature perfected, and all keen without being hard or
angular--and yet Jimmy did not like him. There seemed to have been made
a commodore or a general--some one designed for deeds of chivalry and
great philanthropy; and yet around and between the dancing eyes spider
lines were drawn, as if the fine high brain of Jacob Cannon had put
aside matters that matched it and meddled with nothing that ascended
higher above the world than the long white bridge of his nose. His
sentiments apparently fell no further towards his heart than that; his
brain belonged to the bridge of his nose.

"Another Meshach Milburn, by smoke!" concluded Jimmy.

After a little pause Phoebus inquired into the character of the people
in this apparently new region of country.

"The quotient of much misplanting and lawyering is the lands on the
Nanticoke," spoke the gray-nosed Apollo; "the piece of country directly
before us, in the rear of my neighbor Johnson's cross-roads, was an old
Indian reservation for seventy years, and so were three thousand acres
to our right, on Broad Creek. The Indian is a bad factor to civilize his
white neighbors; he does not know the luxury of the law, that grand
contrivance to make the equation between the business man and the herd.
Ha, ha!"

Mr. Cannon chuckled as if he, at least, appreciated the law, and turned
the fine horsy bridge of his nose, all gray with dancing eyelight,
enjoyingly upon Mr. Phoebus.

"The Indians were long imposed upon, and when they went away, at the
brink of the Revolutionary War, they left a demoralized white race; and
others who moved in upon the deserted lands of the Nanticokes were, if
possible, more Indian than the Indians. This peninsula never produced a
great Indian, but when Ebenezer Johnson settled on Broad Creek it
possessed a greater savage than Tecumseh. He took what he wanted and
appealed to nature, like the Indian. He stole nothing; he merely took
it. He served, with anything convenient, from his fists to a
blunderbuss, his _fi. fa._ and his _ca. sa._ upon wondering but
submissive mankind. Need I say that this was before the perfect day of
Isaac and Jacob Cannon?"

"They would have socked it to him, I reckon," Jimmy exclaimed,
consonantly.

Mr. Jacob Cannon gave a tender smile, such as the gray horse emits at
the prospect of oats, and continued:

"Such was the multiplicand to make the future race. Here, too, raged the
boundary-line debate between Penns and Calverts, with occasional raids
and broken heads, and a noble suit in chancery of fifty years, till no
man's title was known, and, instead of improving their lands, our
voluptuous predecessors improved chiefly their opportunities. You cut
sundry cords of wood and hauled it to the landing, and Ebenezer Johnson
coolly scowed it over to his paradise at the mouth of Broad Creek. You
had a little parcel of negroes, but the British war-ships, in two
successive wars, lay in the river mouth and beckoned them off. Having no
interest in any certain property, the foresters of the Nanticoke would
rather trade with the enemy than fight for foolish ideas; and so this
region was more than half Tory, and is still half passive, the other
half predatory. To neither half of such a quotient belongs the house of
Isaac and Jacob Cannon!"

His nostrils swelled a trifle with military spirit, and he raised the
bridge of his nose delicately, turning to observe his instinctive
companion.

"If it's any harm I won't ask it," the easy-going mariner spoke, "but
air you two Cannons ary kin to ole Patty Cannon?"

Mr. Cannon smiled.

"In Adam all sinned--there we may have been connected," he said. "The
question you ask may one day be actionable, sir. The Cannons are a
numerous people in our region, of fair substance, such as we have, but
they showed nothing to vary the equation of subsistence here till there
arose the mother of Isaac and Jacob Cannon. She was a remarkable woman;
unassisted, she procured the charter for Cannon's Ferry, and made the
port settlement of that name by the importance her ferry acquired; and
when she died there were found in her house nine hundred dollars in
silver--for she never would take any paper money--the earnings of that
sequestered ferry, to start her sons on their career. She knew the
peculiar character of some of her neighbors--how lightly _meum_ and
_tuum_ sat upon their fears or consciences--but she kept no guard except
her own good gray eyes and dauntless heart over that accumulating pile
of little sixpences, for there was but one spirit as bold as she in all
this region of the world--"

"And that, I reckon," observed Jimmy Phoebus, "was ole Patty Cannon
herself."

Mr. Jacob Cannon slightly bowed his head, and spoke aloud from an inner
communion:

"Forgive me, mother, that I make the comparison! Thy frugal oil, that
burned with pure and lonely widow's flame at Cannon's Ferry window, the
traveller hailed with comfort in his heart, and blessed the enterprise.
But to compound the equation another unknown quantity of female force
arose beside my mother's lamp. A certain young Cannon, distantly of our
stock, must needs go see the world, and he returned with a fair demon of
a bride, and settled, too, at Cannon's Ferry. He lived to see the
wondrous serpent he had warmed in his arms, and died, they say, of the
sting. But she lived on, and, shrinking back into the woods to a little
farm my mother's sons rented to her, she lighted there a
Jack-o'-the-lantern many a traveller has pursued who never returned to
tell. With Ebenezer Johnson's progeny and her own siren sisters, who
followed Madame Cannon to the Nanticoke, the nucleus of a settlement
began, and has existed for twenty years, that only the Almighty's
_venire facias_ can explore."[2]

"That's my arrand, Jacob Cannon," quietly remarked Jimmy Phoebus. "I'm
a pore man from Prencess Anne. If you took me for a nigger-dealer you
did me as pore a compliment as when I asked if you was Patty Cannon's
kin. But I have got just one gal to love and just one life to lose, an'
if God takes me thar, I'm a-goin' to Johnson's Cross-roads."

Mr. Jacob Cannon turned and examined his companion with some twinkling
care, but showed no personal concern.

"Every man must be his own security, my dark-skinned friend, till he can
find a bailsman. That place I never take--neither the debtor's nor the
security. The firm of Isaac and Jacob Cannon allows no trespass, and
further concern themselves not. But we are at the Nanticoke."

"I'm obliged to you for the lift, Mr. Jacob Cannon," said Jimmy,
springing down, "and hope you may never find it inconvenient to have let
such a pack of wolves use your neighborhood to trespass on human natur."




CHAPTER XXIII.

TWIFORD'S ISLAND.


Some piles of wood and an old wharf were at the river-side, and a little
scow, half filled with water, and with only a broken piece of paddle in
it, was the only boat the pungy captain could find. The merchant's buggy
was soon out of sight, and the wide, gray Nanticoke, several hundred
yards wide, and made wider by a broad river that flowed into it through
low bluffs and levels immediately opposite, was receiving the strong
shadows of approaching night, and the tide was running up it violent and
deep.

Long lines of melancholy woods shut both these rivers in; an osprey
suddenly struck the surface of the water, like a drowning man, and rose
as if it had escaped from some demon in the flood; the silence
following his plunge was deeper than ever, till a goatsucker,
noiselessly making his zigzag chase, cried, as if out of eternal gloom,
his solemn command to "_Whip_ poor Will." Those notes repeated--as by
some slave ordering his brother to be lashed or one sympathetic soul in
perdition made the time-caller to another's misery--floated on the
evening light as if the oars of Charon echoed on the Styx, and broken
hearts were crossing over.

Alone, unintimidated, but not altogether comfortable, Jimmy Phoebus
proceeded to bail out the old scow, and wished he had accepted one of
Jack Wonnell's hats to do the task, and, when he had finished it, the
stars and clouds were manoeuvring around each other in the sky, with
the clouds the more aggressive, and finally some drops of rain punctured
the long, bare muscles of the inflowing tide, making a reticule of
little pittings, like a net of beads on drifting women's tresses. As
night advanced, a puffing something ascended the broad, black aisle of
this forest river, and slowly the Norfolk steamboat rumbled past, with
passengers for the Philadelphia stage. Then silence drew a sheet of fog
around herself and passed into a cold torpor of repose, affected only by
the waves that licked the shores with intermittent thirst.

The waterman, regretting a little that he had not taken his stand at
Vienna, where human assistance might have been procured, and thinking
that the poison airs might also afflict him with Meshach Milburn's
complaints, fought sleep away till midnight, straining his eyes and ears
ever and anon for signs of some sail; but nothing drew near, and he had
insensibly closed his lids and might have soon been in deep sleep, but
that he suddenly heard, between his dreams and this world, something
like a little baby moaning in the night.

He sat up in the damp scow, where he had been lying, and listened with
all his senses wide open, and once again the cry was wafted upon the
river zephyrs, and before it died away the sailor's paddle was in the
water, and his frail, awkward vessel was darting across the tide.

He saw, in the black night, what none but a sailor's eyes would have
seen, a thing not visible, but divined, coming along on the bosom of the
river; and his ears saw it the clearer as that little cry continued--now
stopped, now stifled, now rising, now nearly piercing; and then there
was a growl, momentary and loud, and a rattle as of feet over wood, and
a stroke or thud, or heavy concussion, and then a white thing rose up
against the universal ink and rushed on the little scow, sucking water
as it came--the cat-boat under full sail.

Phoebus had paddled for the opposite shore of the river to prevent the
object of his quest escaping up the Northwest Fork, yet to be in its
path if it beat up the main fork, and, by a piece of instinctive
calculation, he had run nearly under the cat-boat bows.

"Ahoy, there!" cried Jimmy, standing up in his tipsy little skiff; "ahoy
the _Ellenory Dennis!_ I'm a-comin' aboard."

And with this, the paddle still in his hand, and his knees and feet
nearly sentient in their providence of uses, the sailor threw himself
upon the low gunwale, and let it glide through his palms till he could
see the man at the helm.

There was no light to be called so, but the helmsman was yet perceived
by the sailor's experienced eyes, and he grappled the gunwale firmer,
and, preparing to swing himself on board, shouted hoarsely,

"You Levin Dennis, I see you, by smoke! You know Jimmy Phoebus is your
friend, an' come out of this Pangymonum an' stop a-breakin' of your
mother's heart! Oh, I see you, my son!"

If he did see Levin Dennis, Levin did not see Jimmy Phoebus, nor
apparently hear him, but stood motionless at the helm as a frozen man,
looking straight on in the night. The rigging made a little flapping,
the rudder creaked on its hooks, but every human sound was still as the
grave now, and the boy at the helm seemed petrified and deaf and blind.

The pungy captain's temper rose, his superstition not being equal to
that of most people, and he cried again,

"You're a disgrace to the woman that bore you. Hell's a-waitin' for your
pore tender body an' soul. Heave ahoy an' let drop that gaff, an' take
me aboard, Levin!"

Still silent and passive as a stone, the youthful figure at the helm did
not seem to breathe, and the cat-boat cut the water like a fish-hawk.

A flash of bright fire lighted up the vessel's side, a loud pistol-shot
rang out, and the sailor's hands loosened from the gunwale and clutched
at the air, and he felt the black night fall on him as if he had pulled
down its ebony columns upon his head.

He knew no more for hours, till he felt himself lying in cold water and
saw the gray morning coming through tree-boughs over his head. He had a
thirsty feeling and pain somewhere, and for a few minutes did not move,
but lay there on his shoulder, holding to something and guessing what it
might be, and where he might be making his bed in this chilly autumn
dawn.

His hand was clutching the a-stern plank of the old scow, and was so
stiff he could not for some time open it. The scow was aground upon a
marshy shore, in which some large trees grew, and were the fringes of a
woods that deepened farther back.

"By smoke!" muttered Jimmy, "if yer ain't hokey-pokey. But I reckon I
ain't dead, nohow."

With this he lifted the other hand, that had been stretched beneath his
head, and was also numb with cramp and cold, and it was full of blood.

"Well," said Jimmy, "that feller did hit me; but, if he'll lend me his
pistol, I'll fire a straighter slug than his'n. I wonder where it is."

Feeling around his head, the captain came to a raw spot, the touch of
which gave him acute pain, and made the blood flow freshly as he
withdrew his hand, and he could just speak the words, "Water, or I'll--"
when he swooned away.

The sun was up and shining cheerily in the tree-tops as Phoebus, who
was its name-bearer, recovered his senses again, and he bathed his face,
still lying down, and tore a piece of his raiment off for a bandage,
and, by the mirror of a still, green pool of water, examined his wound,
which was in the fleshy part of his cheek--a little groove or gutter,
now choked with almost dried blood, where the ball had ploughed a line.
It had probably struck a bone, but had not broken it, and this had
stunned him.

"I was so ugly before that Ellenory wouldn't more than half look at me,"
Jimmy mused, "an' now, I 'spect, she'll never kiss that air cheek."

He then bandaged his cheek roughly, sitting up, and took a survey of the
scenery.

The river was here a full quarter of a mile wide, on the opposite shore
bluffy, and in places bold, but, on the side where Phoebus had drifted
with the tide, clutching his old scow with mortal grip, there extended a
point of level woods and marsh or "cripple," as if by the action of some
back-water, and this low ground appeared to have a considerable area,
and was nowhere tilled or fenced, or gave any signs of being visited.

But the opposite or northern shore was quite otherwise; there the river
had a wide bend or hollow to receive two considerable creeks, and
changed its course almost abruptly from west to southwest, giving a
grand view of its wide bosom for the distance of more than two miles
into Maryland; and the prospect was closed in that direction by a
whitish-looking something, like lime or shell piles, standing against
the background of pale blue woods and bluffs.

Right opposite the spot where Phoebus had been stranded, a cleared
farm came out to the Nanticoke, affording a front of only a single
field, on the crest of a considerable sand-bluff--elevations looking
magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field,
which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks,
an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form;
and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a
respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three
queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, and two
chimneys, not built outside of the house, as was the general fashion,
but naturally rising out of the old English-brick gables. All between
the gables was built of wood; a porch of one story occupied nearly half
the centre of that side of the house facing the river; and to the right,
against the house and behind it, were kitchen, smoke-house, corn-cribs,
and other low tenements, in picturesque medley; while to the left
crouched an old, low building on the water's edge, looking like a
brandy-still or a small warehouse. The road from the wharf and lane
passed along a beach, and partly through the river water, to enter a
gate between this shed and the dwelling; and from the garden or lawn, on
the bluff before the latter, arose two tall and elegant trees, a
honey-locust and a stalwart mulberry.

"Now, I never been by this place before," Jimmy Phoebus muttered,
"but, by smoke! yon house looks to me like Betty Twiford's wharf, an',
to save my life, I can't help thinkin' yon white spots down this side of
the river air Sharptown. If that's the case, which state am I in?"

He rose to his feet, bailed the scow, which was nearly full of water,
and began to paddle along the shore, and, seeing something white, he
landed and parted the bushes, and found it to be a stone of a bluish
marble, bearing on one side the letter M, and on the other the letter P,
and a royal crown was also carved upon it.

"Yer's one o' Lord Baltimore's boundary stones," Phoebus exclaimed.
"Now see the rascality o' them kidnappers! Yon house, I know, is
Twiford's, because it's a'most on the state-line, but, I'm ashamed to
say, it's a leetle in Maryland. And that lane, coming down to the wharf,
is my way to Joe Johnson's Pangymonum at his cross-roads."

A sound, as of some one singing, seemed to come from the woods near by,
and Phoebus, listening, concluded that it was farther along the water,
so he paddled softly forward till a small cove or pool led up into the
swamp, and its shores nowhere offered a dry landing; yet there were
recent foot-marks deeply trodden in the bog, and disclosed up the slope
into the woods, and from their direction seemed to come the mysterious
chanting.

"My head's bloody and I'm wet as a musk-rat, so I reckon I ain't afraid
of gittin' a little muddy," and with this the navigator stepped from the
scow in swamp nearly to his middle, and pulled himself up the slope by
main strength.

"I believe my soul this yer is a island," Jimmy remarked; "a island
surrounded with mud, that's wuss to git to than a water island."

The tall trees increased in size as he went on and entered a noble grove
of pines, through whose roar, like an organ accompanied by a human
voice, the singing was heard nearer and nearer, and, following the track
of previous feet, which had almost made a path, Phoebus came to a
space where an axe had laid the smaller bushes low around a large
loblolly pine that spread its branches like a roof only a few feet from
the ground; and there, fastened by a chain to the trunk, which allowed
her to go around and around the tree, and tread a nearly bare place in
the pine droppings or "shats," sat a black woman, singing in a long,
weary, throat-sore wail. Jimmy listened to a few lines:

  "Deep-en de woun' dy han's have made
    In dis weak, helpless soul,
  Till mercy wid its mighty aid
    De-scen to make me whole;
            Yes, Lord!
    De-scen to make me whole."

A little negro child, perhaps three years old, was lying asleep on the
ground at the woman's feet, in an old tattered gray blanket that might
have been discarded from a stable. Near the child was a wooden box, in
which were a coarse loaf of corn-bread and some strips of bacon, and a
wooden trough, hollowed out of a log, contained water. The woman's face
was scratched and bruised, and, as she came to some dental sounds in her
chant, her teeth were revealed, with several freshly missing in front,
and her lips were swollen and the gums blistered and raw.

She glanced up as Phoebus came in sight, looked at him a minute in
blank curiosity, as if she did not know what kind of animal he was, and
then continued her song, wearily, as if she had been singing it for
days, and her mind had gone into it and was out of her control. As she
moved her feet from time to time, the chain rattled upon her ankles.

"Well," said Jimmy, "if this ain't Pangymonum, I reckon I'll find it at
Johnson's Cross-roads! Git up thar, gal, an' let me see what ails you."

The woman rose mechanically, still singing in the shrill, cracked, weary
drone, and, as she rose, the baby awoke and began to cry, and she
stooped and took it up, and, patting it with her hands, sang on, as if
she would fall asleep singing, but could not.

The chain, strong and rusty, had been very recently welded to her feet
by a blacksmith; the fresh rivet attested that, and there were also
pieces of charcoal in the pine strewings, as if fire had been brought
there for smith's uses. Jimmy Phoebus took hold of the chain and
examined it link by link till it depended from a powerful staple driven
to the heart of the pine-tree; though rusty, it was perfect in every
part, and the condition of the staple showed that it was permanently
retained in its position, as if to secure various and successive
persons, while the staple itself had been driven above the reach of the
hands, as by a man standing on some platform or on another's shoulders.

Phoebus took the chain in his short, powerful arms, and, giving a
little run from the root of the tree, threw all the strength of his
compact, heavy body into a jerk, and let his weight fall upon it, but
did not produce the slightest impression.

"There's jess two people can unfasten this chain," exclaimed Jimmy,
blowing hard and kneading his palms, after two such exertions, "one of
em's a blacksmith and t'other's a woodchopper. Gal, how did you git
yer?"

The woman, a young and once comely person of about twenty-eight years of
age, sang on a moment as if she did not understand the question, till
Phoebus repeated it with a kinder tone:

"Pore, abused creatur, tell me as your friend! I ain't none of these
kidnappers. Git your pore, scattered wits together an tell a friend of
all women an' little childern how he kin help you, fur time's worth a
dollar a second, an' bloody vultures are nigh by. Speak, Mary!"

The universal name seemed timely to this woman; she stopped her chanting
and burst into tears.

"My husband brought me here," she said, between her long sobs. "He sold
me. I give him everything I had and loved him, too, and he sold me--me
and my baby."

"I reckon you don't belong fur down this way, Mary? You don't talk like
it."

"No, sir; I belong to Philadelphia. I was a free woman and a widow; my
husband left me a little money and a little house and this child;
another man come and courted me, a han'some mulatto man, almost as white
as you. He told me he had a farm in Delaware, and wanted me to be his
wife; he promised me so much and was so anxious about it, that I
listened to him. Oh, he was a beautiful talker, and I was lonesome and
wanted love. I let him sell my house and give him the money, and started
a week ago to come to my new home. Oh, he did deceive me so; he said he
loved me dearly."

She began to cry again, and her mind seemed to wander, for the next
sentence was disconnected. Jimmy took the baby in his arms and kissed it
without any scruples, and the child's large, black eyes looked into his
as if he might be its own father, while he dandled it tenderly.

"The foxes has come an' barked at me two nights," said the woman; "they
wanted the bacon, I 'spect. The water-snakes has crawled around here in
the daytime, and the buzzards flew right down before me and looked up,
as if they thought I ought to be dead. But I wasn't afraid: that man I
give my love to was so much worse than them, that I just sung and let
them look at me."

"You say he sold you, Mary?"

The woman rubbed her weary eyes and slowly recollected where she had
left off.

"We moved our things on a vessel to Delaware, and come up a creek to a
little town in the marshes, and there we started for my husband's farm.
He said we had come to it in the night. I couldn't tell, but I saw a
house in the woods, and was so tired I went to sleep with my baby there,
and in the night I found men in the room, and one of them, a white man,
was tying my feet."

A crow cawed with a sound of awe in the pine tops, and squirrels were
running tamely all round about as she hesitated.

"I thought then of the kidnappers of Delaware, for I had heard about
them, and I jumped out of bed and fought for my life. They knocked me
down and the rope around my feet tripped me up; but I fought with my
teeth after my hands was tied, too, and I bit that white man's knees,
and then he picked up a fire-shovel, or something of iron, and knocked
my teeth out. My last hope was almost gone when I saw my husband coming
in, and I cried to him, 'Save me! save me, darling!' He had a rope in
his hand, and, before I could understand it, he had slipped it over my
neck and choked me."

"Your own husband? I can't believe it, to save my life!"

"I didn't believe it, neither, till I heard him say, when they loosened
the slipknot that had strangled me--the voice was his I had trusted so
much; I never could forget it!--'Eben,' he said, 'I've took down every
mole and spot on her body and can swear to' em, for I've learned 'em by
heart, and you won't have no trouble a-sellin' her, as she can't
testify."

"The imp of Pangymonum!" Jimmy cried. "He had married you to note down
your marks, and by' em swear you to be a slave!"

"The white man tried to sell me to a farmer, and then I told what I had
heard them say. He believed me, and told them the mayor of Philadelphia
had a reward out for them, for kidnappin' free people, already. Then
they talked together--a little scared they was--and tied me again, and
brought me on a cart through the woods to the river and fetched me here,
and chained me, and told me if I ever said I was free, to another man,
they meant to sell my baby and to drown me in the river."

She finished with a chilly tremor and a low wail like an infant, but the
sailor passed her baby into her arms to engage her, and said:

"The Lord is still a-countin' of his sparrows, or I wouldn't have been
on this arrand, by smoke! To drift yer, hangin' senseless to that ole
scow, must have been to save you, Mary. This is a island where they
chains up property, I reckon, that is bein' follered up too close.
Time's very precious, Mary, but I've got a sailor's knife yer, an' I'll
stay to cut the staple out o' this ole pine if they come an' kill me.
You take an' wash my face off outen that water-trough while I bite a bit
of the bacon."

He took the child again and amused it while the woman carefully cleaned
his wound and rebandaged it so that he could breathe and see and eat,
though the cotton folds wrapped in much of his face like a mask. He then
examined the chain again, especially where it was rivetted at the feet,
and lifted a large iron ball weighing several pounds, which was also
affixed to her ankle, so that she could not climb the tree. Her ankle he
found blistered by the red-hot rivet being smithed so barbarously close
to the flesh.

"Don't leave me, oh! don't leave me here to die," the woman pleaded, as
he started into the woods.

"I'll stay by you an' we'll die together, if we must; but it's not my
idee to die at all, Mary. I'm goin' to bring that air scow ashore while
I cut a hickory, if I can find one, to break this yer chain."

Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the
scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw
come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the
_Ellenora Dennis_, and stand towards the island in the cripple.

"The tide's agin' em, an' they must make a tack to get yer," Jimmy
muttered; "but I'm afraid this knife will have to go to the heart of
some son of Pangymonum in ten minutes, or Ellenory Dennis never agin be
pestered by her ugly lover."

He was seized with a certain frenzy of strength and discernment at the
danger he was in, and, as he carried the scow onward and across the
woodland island, heavy as it was, he also noted a single small hickory
tree on that farther margin, and threw himself against it and bent it
down, and plunged his knife into the straining fibres so that it
crackled and splintered in his hand. He leaped to the tree and scaled it
as he had often climbed a mast, and he thrust the sapling under the
staple, trimming the point down with the knife as he clutched the tree
by his knees, and then, catching the young hickory like a lever, he
dropped down the pine trunk and got his shoulder under the sapling and
brought the weight of his body desperately against it. The staple bent
upward in the tree, but did not loosen.

At that instant the scraping of a boat upon the mud was heard, and the
black woman fell upon her knees.

"Pray, but do it soft," Jimmy whispered; "an' not a cry from the child,
or there'll be a murder!"

He had rapidly trimmed the hickory stem of its branches while he spoke,
so that it could penetrate the arborage of the tree from above, and
climbing higher, like a cat, he worked the point of the lever downwards
into the now crooked staple, and threw himself out of the tree against
the sapling, which bent like a bow nearly double, but would not break,
and, as the staple yielded and flew out, the chain and the deliverer
fell together on the soft pine litter.

"Hark!" exclaimed a voice through the woods.

"What was it?" asked another voice.

"Come!" Phoebus murmured, and gathered together the woman, the child,
and the chain and ball, and stepped, long and silent as a rabbit's
leaps, through the awe-hushed pines, carrying the whole burden on his
shoulders.

He sat them in the scow, which sank to the edges, and, covered by a
protruding point of woods, pushed off into the deep river, yet guiding
the frail vessel in to the sides of the stream, away from the influence
of the out-running tide. As the scow turned the first crease or elbow in
the river, it began to sink.

"If you make a sound you are a slave fur life," whispered the waterman,
as he slipped overboard and began to swim, with his hand upon the stern.
As he did this, straining every muscle of his countenance to keep
afloat, the wound in his cheek began to bleed again, and he felt his
strength going. Down, down he began to settle, till the water reached
his nostrils, and the woman heard him sigh as he was sinking:

"I'd do it--an' die--agin--fur--Ellenory. God bless her!"

The scow, now full of water, turned upside down, and threw mother and
child into the stream, and the child was gone beneath the surface before
the woman could catch herself upon a sunken branch of an imbedded tree;
and, as she gasped there, the body of the pungy captain swept past her
and she caught him by the hair, and he clutched her with the drowning
instinct, and down they went together, like husband and wife, in
nature's contempt of distinctions between living worms.

They went down to the very bottom, but not to drown; for the old tree,
having fallen where it grew in other years, was sustained upon its
limbs, and made an invisible yet sure pathway to the shore. The long
chain and the iron ball fettered to the colored woman's foot, however,
deprived her for a few moments of all power to step along the slippery,
submerged trunk, and, with her soul full of agony for her child, which
she no longer saw, she was about to let go of her deliverer's body and
throw herself also into the river, to die with them, when the old scow,
having emptied itself of the water, reappeared at the surface and struck
the woman a buoyant blow that altered the course of her thought.

"Pore, brave man," the woman gasped. "He's got a wife, maybe. He said,
'God bless her,' an' he give his life for a poor creature like me. God
has took my baby. I can't do nothing for it now, but maybe I can save
this man's life before I die."

Indifferent to her personal fate, she drew intelligence from her spirit
of sacrifice, which is the only thing better than learning. She pushed
the scow down and under Phoebus with her remaining hand, till it
relieved her of a portion of the weight of his body, and rose up,
half-bearing the bronze-faced sailor's form, and animating her generous
purpose with the honest and happy smile he wore upon his face, even in
the vestibule of the eternal palace. Then, gathering the long meshes of
the iron chain up from its termination at her feet, she threw the longer
portion of it into the scow, so that it no longer became entangled in
the cross-branches and knots below, and she could lift also the iron
ball sufficiently to glide her feet along the tree.

With pain and difficulty, lessened by self-forgetfulness, she pushed the
scow and the body to the foot of the tree, and, feeling around its old
roots for further support, the red-eyed terrapins arose and swam around
her, disturbed in their possessions; but she feared no reptiles any
more, since Death, the mighty crocodile, had eaten the babe that she had
nursed but this morning.

She had intelligent remembrance enough to think of all the precautions
her deliverer had taken, and, when she had dragged his body on the shore
into the dense, scrubby woods, she also drew out the little scow and
heaped some dead brush upon it, and had scarcely concealed herself when
she heard voices from the river, and the report of a sail swung around
upon its boom, and of feet upon a deck. The voices said:

"If she's got off to Delaware, Joe Johnson won't have long to stay on
his visit; for all the beaks will gather fur him an' be started by John
M. Clayton."

"I'm sorry fur Joe," answered another voice; "he hoped to make one more
big scoop this trip, an' quit the Corners fur good."

"Let us sail by ole Ebenezer Johnson's roost at Broad Creek mouth, an'
peep up both forks of the river," said the other voice, receding; "it's
only a mile and a half. If we discover nothin', we'll run down the river
and inquire at the landings as fur as Vienny."

The colored woman now worked with all her strength to revive the
insensible sailor, rolling him, rubbing his body till her elbows seemed
almost to be dropping off, and then rubbing his great, broad breast with
her head and face and neck. She breathed into his mouth the breath
heaven vouchsafed to Hagar as bountifully as to Sarah, and, wringing out
portions of her garments and hanging them at sunny exposures to dry, she
substituted them, in her exhausted intervals, for the wet clothing of
the man; and as she worked, with a hollow, desolate heart, she sobbed:

"Lord, gi' me this man's life! O Lord, that took my chile, I will have
this life back!"

Crying and weeping, fainting and laboring, the moments, it seemed the
very hours, ran by and still he did not waken; and still, with all that
noble strength that makes the fields of white men grow and blossom under
the negro's unthanked toil, the widow and childless one fought on for
this cold lump of brother nature.

He warmed, he breathed, he groaned, he spoke!

His voice was like a happy sigh, as of one disturbed near the end of a
comforting morning nap in summer:

"You thar, Mary?"

He stared around with difficulty, his wounded face now clotted and
stained with blood, and his eyes next looked an inquiry so kind and
apprehensive that she answered it, to save him breath:

"Baby's drowned. God does best!"

He reached his hand to hers--she was almost naked to the waist, having
sacrificed all she had, the greatest of which was modesty, to bring back
that life in him which came naked and unashamed into the world--and he
put his little strength into the grasp.

"Mary," he exhaled, "why didn't you ketch the baby and leave me go?"

"Oh, dearly as I loved it," the woman answered, "I'm glad you come up
under my hands instead. You can do good: you're a white man. Baby would
have only been a poor slave, or a free negro nobody would care for."

"I mean to do good, if the Lord lets me," sighed the sailor; "I mean to
go and die agin for human natur at Johnson's Cross-roads."




CHAPTER XXIV.

OLD CHIMNEYS.


The day was far advanced when Jimmy Phoebus was strong enough to rise
and walk, and leave the refuge in the woods. He advised the colored
woman to crawl through the pine-trees along the margin, while he paddled
in the old scow in the shadow of the forest, which now lay strong upon
the river's breast.

At the distance of about a mile, Broad Creek, like a tributary river,
flowed into the Nanticoke from the east, fully a quarter of a mile wide,
and half a mile up this stream an old, low, extended, weather-blackened
house faced the river, and seemed to grin out of its broken ribs and
hollow window-sockets like a traitor's skull discolored upon a gibbet.
It was falling to pieces, and along its roof-ridge a line of crows
balanced and croaked, as if they had fine stories to tell and weird
opinions to pass upon the former inhabitants of the tenement.

"There, I have hearn tell," said Jimmy, as he drew in to the bank, and
took the woman into the scow and began to tow her along the beach,
wading in the water, "_there_, I have hearn tell, lived the pirate of
Broad Creek, ole Ebenezer Johnson, who was shot soon after the war of
'12 at Twiford's house down yonder."

"For kidnapping free people?" asked the woman, without interest, the
question coming from her desolate heart.

"In them days they didn't kidnap much; it was jest a-beginnin'. The war
of '12 busted everything on the bay, burned half a dozen towns, kept the
white men layin' out an' watchin', and made loafers of half of 'em, an'
brought bad volunteers an' militia yer to trifle with the porer gals,
an' some of them strangers stuck yer after the war was done. I don't
know whar ole Ebenezer come from; some says this, an' some that. All we
know is, that he an' the Hanlen gals, one of 'em Patty Cannon, was the
head devils in an' after the war."

"It's a bad-lookin' ole house, sir. See, yonder's a coon runnin' out of
the door. Oh! I hear my child cryin' everywhere I look."

"The British begun to run the black people off in the war. The black
people wanted to go to 'em. The British filled the islands in Tangier
yer with nigger camps; they was a goin' to take this whole peninsuly,
an' collect an' drill a nigger army on it to put down Amerikey. When the
war was done, the British sailed away from Chesapeake Bay with thousands
of them colored folks, an' then the people yer begun to hate the free
niggers."

"For lovin' liberty?" the woman sighed, looking at the ball, which had
galled her ankle bloody.

"They hated free niggers as if they was all Tories an' didn't love
Amerikey. So, seein' the free niggers hadn't no friends, these Johnsons
an' Patty Cannon begun to steal 'em, by smoke! There was only a million
niggers in the whole country; Louisiana was a-roarin' for 'em; every
nigger was wuth twenty horses or thirty yokes of oxen, or two good farms
around yer, an' these kidnappers made money like smoke, bought the
lawyers, went into polytics, an' got sech a high hand that they tried a
murderin' of the nigger traders from Georgey an' down thar, comin' yer
full of gold to buy free people. That give 'em a back-set, an' they hung
some of Patty's band--some at Georgetown, some at Cambridge."

"If my baby's made white in heaven, I'm afraid I won't know him," the
woman said, nodding, and wandering in her mind.

"At last the Delawareans marched on Johnson's Cross-roads an' cleaned
his Pangymonum thar out, an' guarded him, and sixteen pore niggers in
chains he'd kidnapped, to Georgetown jail. Young John M. Clayton was
paid by the Phildelfy Quakers to git him convicted. Johnson was strong
in the county--we're in it now, Sussex--an' if Clayton hadn't skeered
the jury almost to death, it would have disagreed. He held 'em over
bilin' hell, an' dipped 'em thar till the court-room was like a
Methodis' revival meetin', with half that jury cryin' 'Save me, save me,
Lord!' while some of 'em had Joe Johnson's money in their pockets. Joe
was licked at the post, banished from the state, an' so skeered that he
laid low awhile, goin' off somewhar--to Missoury, or Floridey, or
Allybamy. But Patty Cannon never flinched; she trained the young boys
around yer to be her sleuth-hounds an' go stealin' for her; an', till
she dies, it's safer to be a chicken than a free nigger. They stole you,
pore creatur' from Phildelfy, an' they steal 'em in Jersey and away into
North Carliney; fur Joe Johnson's a smart feller fur enterprise, and
Patty Cannon's deep as death an' the grave."

Phoebus looked at the woman sitting in the scow, and he saw that she
was fast asleep; his tale having no power to startle her senses, now
worn-out by every infliction.

"I must git that ball an' chain off," the sailor said; "but iron, in
these ole sandy parts, is scarce as gold."

He lifted her out of the scow and laid her in the shade, and began to
explore the old house. To his joy, he found the iron crane still hanging
in the chimney, and signs of recent fire.

"These yer ole cranes was valleyble once," Jimmy said, "an' in the wills
they left 'em to their children like farms, an' lawsuits was had over
the bilin' pots an' the biggest kittles. It broke a woman's heart to git
a little kittle left her, an' the big-kittled gal was jest pestered with
beaux. But, by smoke! we're a-makin' iron now in Amerikey! Kittles is
cheap, and that's why this crane is left by robbers an' gypsies after
they used it."

He twisted the crane out of the bricks on which it was hinged, and some
of the mantel jamb fell down.

"Hallo!" cried Jimmy, "what's this a rollin' yer? A shillin', by George!
I say, by George, this time caze ole George the Third's picter's on it.
Maybe thar's more of 'em."

He pulled a few bricks out of the jamb, and raked the hollow space
inside with his hand, and brought forth a steel purse of English
manufacture, filled with shillings at one end, and fifteen golden
guineas at the other; they rolled out through the decayed filigree,
rusted, probably, by the rain percolating through the chimney, and the
purse crumbled to iron-mould in his hand.

"'The Lord is my shepherd,'" said the sailor, reverently; "'I shall not
want. He leadeth me by the still waters.' How beautiful Ellenory says
it. Look thar at the waters of the Nanticoke, beautiful as silver. Lord,
make 'em pure waters an' free, to every pore creatur!"

"To who! to who!" screamed a voice out of the hollow chimney.

"Well," answered Jimmy, hardly excited, "I ain't partickler. Ha! I
thought I knew you, Barney," he continued, as an owl fluttered out and
hopped up a ruined stairway.

"Now, British money ain't coined by Uncle Sam; what is the date? I can
make figgers out easy: Eighteen hundred and fifteen!' I was about to do
Ebenezer Johnson the onjustice of saying that he'd sold his country out
to ole Admiral Cockburn, but the war was done when this money was
coined. Whose was it?"

He removed more carefully some of the bricks, to put his hand in the
hollow depository left there, and, feeling around and higher up, brought
out the bronze hilt of a sword, on which was a name.

"Who would have thought this was a house of learnin'?" Jimmy said,
dubiously. "I can't read it. By smoke! maybe they've murdered somebody
yer. I reckon he was British. Ellenory kin read it, if I live to see her
agin."

There was nothing more, and, as he left the rotting old house, a crash
and a cloud of smoke rose up behind him, and the chimney fell into the
middle of the floor.

With the crane's sharp wrought-iron point and long leverage the pungy
captain succeeded, after tedious efforts, in breaking the links of the
chain and also in removing the linked cannon-ball from the woman's foot,
but he could not remove the iron band and link around her ankle.

"God bless you!" exclaimed the woman. "It's a sin to say so, but I feel
as if I could fly since that dreadful weight is off. Oh, I want to fly,
for I dreamed of my baby, an' he smiled at me from heaven as if he said,
'I'm happy, mamma!'"

"You don't owe me nothin', Mary. I love a widder, as you air, an' she
begged me to come yer. When you git to Prencess Anne, whar I want you to
go, find Ellenory Dennis, an' tell her I've seen her boy, an' I'll bring
him back if I kin."

"Princess Anne? where is it?"

"It's maybe, forty mile from yer, Mary; half-way between sunrise and
sunset."

"Right south, sir?"

"That's it. Now I'll tell you how to git thar. Take this old woods road
along Broad Creek and walk to Laurel, five miles; it's a little town on
the creek. Keep in under the woods, but don't lose the road, fur every
foot of it's dangerous to niggers. You kin git thar, maybe, by dark. I
don't know nobody thar, Mary, an' I can't write, fur I never learned
how. But you go right to the house of some preacher of the Gospel, and
tell him a lie."

Mary opened her eyes.

"I wouldn't have you tell a lie to anybody but a good man," continued
Phoebus, "fur then it's so close to the Lord it won't git fur an'
pizen many, as lies always does. You must tell that preacher that you're
the runaway slave of Judge Custis of Prencess Anne, an' you're sorry you
run away, an' want to go home."

"Oh, sir, you are not like my wicked husband, trying to sell me too?"

"No, Mary, bad as you've been used, faith's your only sure friend. If
you was to tell the preacher you had been kidnapped, he'd, maybe, be
afraid to help you. They're a timid set down yer on any subject
concernin' niggers; these preachers will help save black folks' souls,
but never rescue their pore broken bodies. When you tell him you are the
slave of a rich man like Judge Custis, he'll jump at the chance to do
the Judge a favor, an' tell you that you do right to go back to your
master. That's whair he's a liar, Mary--so he'll scratch _your_ lie
off."

"They'll turn me back at Princess Anne, and wont know me, maybe."

"Not if you do this, Mary. Make them take you to Judge Custis's
daughter--the one that's just been married. Tell her you want to speak
to her privately. Then tell her the nigger-skinned man--I'm him--that
she sent away with her mother, found you whar you was chained in the
woods. Take this link of the chain to show her. Tell her you want to be
her cook till the one that run away is found."

"I'll do it, sir. I've got no home to go to, now."

"Tell her all you remember. Tell her not to tell Ellenory any of my
troubles. Tell her I'm a-startin' for Pangymonum, an', if I die, it's
nothin' but a bachelor keepin' his own solitary company. Yer's a gold
piece an' three silver pieces I found, Mary, to pay your way. Good-bye."

"Won't you give me your knife?" asked the woman.

"What fur, Mary?"

"To kill myself if they kidnap me again."

"I have nothin' else to fight for my life with," said Phoebus. "No,
you must not do that. Keep in the woods to Laurel."

She fell on the ground and kissed his knees, and bathed them with her
tears.

"I do have faith, master," she said, "faith enough to be your slave."

"I'd cry a little, too," said Jimmy, twitching his eyes, as the woman
disappeared in the forest, "if I knowed how to do it; but, by smoke! the
wind on the bay's dried up my tear ponds. I'll bury these curiosities
right yer, with this chain and ball, and put some old bricks around' em
outen the chimney they come from."

He dug a hole with his knife, carefully cutting out a piece of the sod,
and restoring it over the buried articles; and, after notching some
trees to mark the place, he pushed in the scow again into Broad Creek,
and descended the Nanticoke on the falling tide to Twiford's wharf.

Dragging the scow up the bed of a creek to conceal it, he discovered
another boundary stone. A beach led under the cover of a sandy bluff to
the river gate of Twiford's comfortable house, and he boldly entered the
lane and lawn, saying to himself:

"I reckon a feller can ask to buy one squar meal a day in a free
country, fur I'm hungry."

Even in that day the house was probably seventy years old, roofed by an
artistic shingler in lines like old lace-work, the short roofs over the
three pretty dormers like laced bib-aprons, the window-casements in
small checkers of dark glass, the roof capacious as an armadillo's back
or land-turtle's; but half of it was almost as straight as the walls,
and the small, foreign bricks in the gables, glazed black and dark-red
alternately, were laid by conscientious workmen, and bade fair to stand
another hundred years, as they smoked their tidy chimney pipes from
hearty stomachs of fireplaces below.

Standing beneath the honey-locust tree at the lawn-gate, the sailor
beheld an extensive prospect of the river Nanticoke, bending in a
beautiful curve, like the rim of a silver salver, towards the south, the
blue perspective of the surrounding woods fading into the azure bluffs
on the farther shore, where, as he now identified it, the hamlet of
Sharptown assumed the mystery and similitude of a city by the
enchantment of distance. A large brig was riding up the river under the
afternoon breeze, carrying the English flag at her spanker. The
wild-fowl, flying in V-formed lines, like Hyads astray, flickered on the
salver of the river like house-flies. Some fishermen distantly appeared,
human, yet nearly stationary, as if to enliven a dream, and the bees in
a row of hives kept murmuring near by, increasing the restful sense in
the heart and the ears.

"Why cannot human natur be happy yer, pertickler with its gal--some one
like Ellenory?" Phoebus thought; "why must it git cruel an' desperate
for money, lookin' out on this dancin' water, an' want to turn this
trance into a Pangymonum?"

He crossed the lane to a squatty old structure of brick by the
water-side, and peeped in.

"A still, by smoke!" he said. "If it ain't apple brandy may I forgit my
compass! No, it's peach brandy. Well, anyway, it's hot enough; an' this,
I 'spect, is what started the Pangymonum."

He took a stout drink, and it revived his weakened system, and he bathed
his head in its strong alcohol. He then returned to the lawn and walked
around the house, peeping into the lower rooms--of which there were two
in the main building, the kitchen being an appendage--but saw nobody.
The porch in the rear extended the full width of the house, unlike the
smaller shed in front, which only covered two doors, standing curiously
side by side.

Completely sheltered by the longer porch, Phoebus, looking into a
window, there saw a table already set with a clean cloth, and bread and
cold chicken, and a pitcher of creamy milk, with a piece of ice floating
in it. On either side of a large fireplace at the table-side was a door,
one open, and leading by a small winding stair to the floor above. A bed
was also in the room, which looked out by one window upon the lawn and
the river, and by the other at the farm, the corn-cribs, and the small
barns and pound-yard.

With a sailor's quiet, sliding feet, Jimmy walked into the low hall, and
a cat-bird, in a cage there, immediately started such a shrill series of
cries that his steps were unheard by himself.

"Nobody bein' yer," thought Jimmy, "an' the flies gittin 'at the
victuals, I reckon I'll do as I would be done by."

So he began to eat, and soon he heard a female voice, very close by,
sound down the stairs, as if reciting to another person.

"Aunt Patty says Aunt Betty's first husband, Captain Twiford, was a
sea-captain and a widower, and she was one of the beautiful Hanley
girls, brought up by old Ebenezer Johnson at his house across on Broad
Creek; and there Captain Twiford courted her, and brought her here to
live. He died early--all my aunties' husbands died early--and is buried
in the vault out here behind the pound, where you can go in and see him
in his shroud, lying by Aunt Betty. Her next husband, John Gillis, left
her, and then she lived with William Russell, a negro-trader. Aunt Patty
governed all her sisters and the Johnson boys, too. Oh, how I fear her
when she looks at me sometimes with her bold, black eyes: I can't help
it."

Another voice, not a woman's, yet almost as gentle, now seemed to ask a
question; but the cat-bird, behaving like a detective and a tale-bearer,
made such a furious screaming at seeing a stranger drinking the milk,
that Phoebus could not hear it well. The pleasant female voice spoke
again:

"Yes, he was killed in the room under this, before I was born, Aunt
Patty says; and sometimes she likes to tell such dark and bloody tales,
and laughs with joy to see me frightened at them. Aunt Betty got in
debt, and this house and farm were sold under executions and bought by a
Maryland man, who stole an opportunity when the men were away, and set
his goods in the house and set Aunt Betty's goods outside upon the lawn.
It's only a mile, or a little more, from here to Ebenezer Johnson's, and
the news of the seizure was sent there."

Jimmy tore off a piece of chicken with his teeth, listening voraciously.

"Did you hear anything?" continued the voice; "I thought I did. The dogs
are chained up in the smoke-house, and bad people are often coming here;
I will go turn the dogs loose."

"Be dogged if you do!" Jimmy reflected. "That's the meanest cat-bird
ever I see, fur now it's shut up a-purpose."

There sounded something familiar to the uninvited guest in the voice
which seemed to delay this intention; but the cat-bird, with his
unaccommodating mood, broke right in again. Then the female continued:

"While the men--who had come armed, expecting trouble--were removing
Aunt Betty's goods out of the room, throwing many of them out of the
windows, so as to be themselves in sole possession, a sound was heard in
the room below, where your meal is now ready, like a panther skipping
and lashing his tail; and, before the men could breathe, old Ebenezer
Johnson was up the stairs and laying about him. His eyes were full of
murder. One man jumped right through that window and rolled off the
porch; another he pitched down the stairs; the third was a boy, Joe
King, barely grown--he lives not far from this house now--and Ebenezer
Johnson dashed him down the stairs, too, and started after him. All his
life the boy had been taught to dread that terrible man, and now he was
in his hands, or flying before him; and, as he reeled through the room
below, out of the door that opens on the back porch, the boy's eyes, in
the agony of the fear of death, beheld a rifle leaning there."

"Mighty good thing if it was thar now!" Jimmy inwardly remarked,
finishing the chicken, and still hungry.

"Oh, there _is_ a noise somewhere in this house," the voice exclaimed;
"I never tell this story but it makes me startled at every sound. The
boy, as he whirled past, grasped the long rifle, drew it to his
shoulder, and, with a young volunteer's skill--for he had been drilling
to fight the British--he put the two balls in that old man's brain. Both
balls entered over the left eyebrow, and one passed through the head and
was found in the wall; the other never was found.[3] The lawless giant
gave a trembling motion through his frame, his eyes glazed, and he sank
dead upon the floor without a sound--the wicked had ceased from
troubling! Aunt Betty, Aunt Patty, and Aunt Jane, three sisters shaped
by him in soul, fell on his body and wept and almost prayed, but it was
too late. They buried him near Aunt Betty, in the field behind the
pound."

Undertaking to rise from his chair, Jimmy Phoebus made a loud scraping
on the floor, and the table-knife fell with a ringing sound.

"Who's there?" cried a voice, and added, "I knew the dogs ought to be
loose."

"Who's there?" also asked the other voice, with something very familiar
to Phoebus in its sounds.

"E-b-e-n-e-z-e-r John-son!" answered Jimmy, in his deepest bass tones,
mentally considering that a ghost might carry more terror than a robber,
after that tale.

A little scream followed, and a whispered consultation, and then a
girl's bare feet, beautifully moulded, slowly descended the steep
stairway, and next a slender, graceful body came into view, and finally
a face, delicious as a ripe peach, looked once at the intruder below,
and all the pink and bright color faded from it to see, standing there,
where Ebenezer Johnson had given up the ghost, a stalwart effigy,
bandaged in white all round the head, and over the left eye and cheek,
where the dead river-pirate had received his double bullet, the blood
was hideously matted and not wholly stanched even yet. She sank slowly
down upon the steps and saw no more.

"Now, if I don't git out, the dogs will be set loose," muttered Jimmy,
as he disappeared up the farm-house lane and put the barn and pound
between him and the house; and scarcely had he done so when Levin Dennis
appeared coming down the stairs, all unconscious of the apparition, and,
finding the beautiful girl insensible, he raised her in his arms and
stole a kiss.

Paying for his one act of deceit by losing the principal object of his
quest, Jimmy Phoebus stopped a minute by Ebenezer Johnson's grave.

In a level field of deep sand--the soil here being the poorest in the
region--and between the cattle-pound and the pines, which were
everywhere jealous of their other indigenous brother, the Indian corn,
an old family burial-lot lay under some low cedar-trees, with wild berry
bushes growing all around. There were several little stones over
Twifords that had died early, and a large heap of sand, planted with
some flowers, that might have covered a favorite horse, but which
Phoebus believed was the resting-place of the river buccaneer; and
there was also a vault of brick and plaster, with the little door ajar,
where prurient visitors, themselves with Saul's own selfish curiosity to
raise the dead, had poked and peeped about until the coffin lids had
been drawn back and the dead pair exposed to the dry peninsular air.

The bay captain looked in and beheld his predecessor, Captain Twiford,
who also sailed the bay, lying in his shroud--not in full clothing, as
men are buried now, for clothing was too valuable in the scanty-peopled
country to feed it to the worms. Twiford lay shrivelled up, shroud and
flesh making but one skin, the face of a walnut color, the hair
complete, the teeth sound, and severe dignity unrelaxed by the exposure
he was condemned to for his evil alliance with Betty Hanley.

She also lay exposed, who had lived so shamelessly, respecting not the
mould of beauty God had given her, till now men leered to look upon her
nearly kiln-dried bosom glued into its winding-sheet, and the glory of
her hair, that had been handled by bantering outlaws, and in a rippling
wave of unbleached coal covered the grinning coquetry of her skull.

"Them that mocks God shall be mocked of him," said Jimmy Phoebus,
closing the door and putting some of the scattered bricks of the vault
against it. "Now, I reckon, I kin git to the cross-roads by a leetle
after dark."




CHAPTER XXV.

PATTY CANNON'S.


Phoebus passed along the side of a large, black, cypress-shaded
mill-pond, and found the boundary stone again, and took the angle from
its northern face as a compass-point, and, proceeding in that direction,
soon fell in with a sort of blind path hardly feasible for wheels, which
ran almost on the line between the states of Maryland and Delaware,
passing in sight of several of these old boundary stones. Not a dwelling
was visible as he proceeded, not even a clearing, not a stream except
one mere gutter in the sand, not a man, hardly an animal or a bird; the
monotonous sand-pines, too low to moan, too thick to expand, too dry to
give shade, yet grew and grew, like poor folks' sandy-headed children,
and kept company only with some scrubby oaks that had strayed that way,
till pine-cone and acorn seemed to have bred upon each other, and the
wild hogs disdained the progeny.

"Maybe I'll git killed up yer in this Pangymonum," Jimmy reflected; "an'
though I 'spose it don't make no difference whair you plant your bones,
I don't want to grow up into ole pines. Good, big, preachin' kind of
pines, that's a little above the world, an' says 'Holy, rolley,
melancho-ly, mind your soul-y'--I could go into their sap and shats
fust-rate. But to die yer an' never be found in these desert wastes is
pore salvage for a man that's lived among the white sails of the bay,
an' loved a woman elegant as Ellenory."

It was dark, and he could hardly see his way in half an hour. Sometimes
a crow would caw, to hear strange sounds go past, like an old
watchman's rattle moved one cog. The stars became bright, however, and
the moon was new, and when Phoebus came to a large cleared opening in
the pines, the lambent heavens broke forth and bathed the sandy fields
with silver, and showed a large, high house at the middle of the
clearing, with outside chimneys, one thicker than the other, and a porch
of two stories facing the east.

Though not a large dwelling, it was large for those days and for that
unfrequented region, and its roof seemed to Phoebus remarkably steep
and long, and yet, while enclosing so much space, had not a single
dormer window in it. The southern gable was turned towards the intruder,
and in it were two small windows at the top, crowded between the thick
chimney and the roof slope. The two main stories were well lighted,
however, and the porch was enclosed at the farther end, making a double
outside room there. No sheds, kitchens, or stables were attached to the
premises, but an old pole-well, like some catapult, reared its long pole
at half an angle between the crotch of another tree. Roads, marked by
tall worm fences, crossed at the level vista where this tall house
presided, and a quarter of a mile beyond the cross-roads, to the
northeast, was another house, much smaller, and hip-gabled, like
Twiford's, standing up a lane and surrounded by small stables, cribs,
orchard, and garden.

"I never 'spected to come yer," Jimmy Phoebus observed, "but I've
hearn tell of this place considabul. The big barn-roofed house is Joe
Johnston's tavern for the entertainment of Georgey nigger-traders that
comes to git his stolen goods. It's at the cross-roads, three miles from
Cannon's Ferry, whar the passengers from below crosses the Nanticoke fur
Easton and the north, an' the stages from Cambridge by the King's road
meets 'em yonder at the tavern. The tavern stands in Dorchester County,
with a tongue of Caroline reaching down in front of it, an' Delaware
state hardly twenty yards from the porch. Thar ain't a court-house
within twenty miles, nor a town in ten, except Crotcher's Ferry, whar
every Sunday mornin' the people goin' to church kin pick up a basketful
of ears, eyes, noses, fingers, an' hair bit off a-fightin' on Saturday
afternoon. They call the country around Crotcher's, Wire Neck, caze no
neck is left thar that kin be twisted off; the country in lower Car'line
they calls 'Puckem,' caze the crops is so puckered up. They say Joe's a
great man among his neighbors, an' kin go to the Legislater. The t'other
house out in the fields is Patty Cannon's own, whar she did all her
dev'lishness fur twenty years, till Joe got rich enough to build his
palace."

With the rapid execution of a man who only plans with his feet and
hands, the bay sailor observed that there was a grove of good high
timber--oaks and pines--only a few rods from the cross-roads and to the
right, under cover of which he could draw near the tavern. As he
proceeded to gain its shade, he heard extraordinary sounds of turbulence
from the front of the tavern, the yelling of men, the baying of hounds,
oaths and laughter, and, listening as he crossed the intervening space,
he fell into a ditch inadvertently, almost at the edge of the timber.

"Hallo!" cried Jimmy, lying quite still to draw his breath, since the
ditch was now perfectly dry, "this ditch seems to me to pint right for
that tavern."

He therefore crawled along its dry bed till it crossed under a road by a
wooden culvert or little bridge of a few planks.

The noise at the tavern was now like a fight, and, as Phoebus
continued to crawl forward, he heard twenty voices, crying,

"Gouge him, Owen Daw!" "Hit him agin, Cyrus James!" "Chaw him right up!"
"Give' em room, boys!"

Having crawled to what he judged the nearest point of concealed
approach, Phoebus lost the moment to take a single glance only, and,
drawing his old slouched hat down on his face to hide the bandaging, he
muttered, "Now's jess my time," and crept up to the back of the crowd,
which was all facing inwards in a circle, and did not perceive him.

A fully grown man, as it seemed, was having a fight with a boy hardly
fifteen years old; but the boy was the more reckless and courageous of
the two, while the man, with three times the boy's strength, lacked the
stomach or confidence to avail himself of it; and, having had the boy
down, was now being turned by the latter, amid shouts of "Three to two
on Owen Daw!" "Bite his nose off, Owen Daw!" "Five to two that Cyrus
James gits gouged by Owen Daw!"

The boy with a Celtic face and supple body was full of zeal to merit
favor and inflict injury, and, as the circle of vagrants and outlaws of
all ages reeled and swayed to and fro, Phoebus, unobserved by anybody,
put his head down among the rest and searched the faces for those of
Levin Dennis or Joe Johnson.

Neither was there, and the only face which arrested his attention was a
woman's, standing in the door of the enclosed space at the end of the
porch, at right angles to the central door of the tavern, and just
beside it. The whole building was without paint, and weather-stained,
but the room on the porch was manifestly newer, as if it had been an
afterthought, and its two windows revealed some of the crude appendages
of a liquor bar, as a fire somewhere within flashed up and lighted it.

By this fire the woman's face was also revealed, and she was so much
interested in the fight that she turned all parts of her countenance
into the firelight, slapping her hands together, laughing like a man,
dropping her oaths at the right places, and crying:

"I bet my money on little Owen Daw! Cy James ain't no good, by God!
Yer's whiskey a-plenty for Owen Daw if he gouges him. Give it to him,
Owen Daw! Shame on ye, Cy James!"

There was occasional servility and deference to this woman from members
of the crowd, however they were absorbed in the fight. She was what is
called a "chunky" woman, short and thick, with a rosy skin, low but
pleasing forehead, coal-black hair, a rolling way of swaying and moving
herself, a pair of large black eyes, at once daring, furtive, and
familiar, and a large neck and large breast, uniting the bull-dog and
the dam, cruelty and full womanhood.

Behind this woman, whom Phoebus thought to be Patty Cannon herself,
the moonlight from the rear came through the door in the older and main
building, shining quite through the house, and Phoebus saw that the
rear door was also open and was unguarded.

He took the first chance, therefore, of dodging around the corner of the
bar, intending to pass around the north gable of the house and dart up
the stairs by the unwatched door; but he had barely got out of sight
when a loud hurrah burst from the crowd as a feeble voice was heard
crying "Enough, enough!" followed by jeers rapidly approaching.

The large outside chimney, where Phoebus now was, had an arched cavity
in it large enough to contain a man, being the chimney of two different
rooms within, whose smoke, uniting higher up, ascended through one stem.
Into this cavity Phoebus dodged, in time to avoid the beaten party to
the fight, the grown man, who staggered blindly by towards a well, his
face dripping blood, and he was sobbing babyishly; but the concealed
sailor heard him say, in a whining tone:

"She set him on me; I'll make her pay for it."

Several of the partisans or tormentors of this craven followed after
him, and Jimmy himself fell in at the rear, and, instead of going with
the rest towards the well, where the loser was bathing his face,
Phoebus softly stepped over the low sill of the back door, the woman's
back being turned to him, and, as he had anticipated, a stairway
ascended there out of a large room, which answered the purposes of
parlor and hall, dining and gambling room, as Jimmy drank in at one
glance, from seeing tables, dishes and cards, bottles and whips, arms
and saddles. This stairway had no baluster, and was not safe in the dark
for strangers to the house.

Satisfying himself by an interior observation, as he had suspected
exteriorly, that there was no cellar under Johnson's tavern, the sailor
slipped up the stairs, intent to find where Judge Custis's property and
Ellenora's wayward son had been concealed. The second story had a hall,
which opened only at the front of the house and upon the upper piazza,
and four doors upon this hall indicated four bedrooms. One of them was
ajar, and, peeping through, Phoebus saw, extended on a bed, oblivious
to all the righting and din outside, Joe Johnson the negro-trader, his
form revealed by a lamp and the open fire.

An impulse, immediately repressed, came on the sailor to draw his knife
and stab Johnson to the heart, as probably the villain who had shot him
from the cat-boat. The negro-trader wearily turned his long length in
the bed, and Phoebus slipped back along the hall to the only door
besides that was not closed fast, leading into the room at the rear
southern corner of the house.

This door creaked loudly as it was opened, and a man of a bandit form
and dress, who was lying on a pallet within, revealed by the bright
moonlight streaming in at two windows, half roused himself as Jimmy
crouched at the door, where a partition, as of a very large
clothes-press, taking up fully half the room, rose between the intruder
and the occupant.

"Who's there?" exclaimed a voice, with a slight lisp in it.

Jimmy discovered that there was a low trap or door near the floor,
opening into this remarkable closet, and he slipped inside and drew his
knife again. The man was heard moving about the narrow room, and he
finally seemed to walk out into the hall and down the stairs.

Feeling around his closet, which was pitch dark, Phoebus found a deep
indentation in it, as of a smaller closet, and the sound of crooning
voices came from above.

"By smoke!" Jimmy mentally exclaimed, "this big closet is nothin' but a
blind fur a stairway in the little closet to climb up to the dungeon
under the big roof."

He stole out again and found the moonlight now streaming upon an empty
pallet and the burly watchman gone, and streaming, too, upon a larger
door in the closet opposite the indentation he had felt, this door
secured by a padlock through a staple fastening an iron bar. The key was
in the padlock, and Jimmy turned it back, drew off the lock and dropped
the bar.

The moment he opened the door an almost insupportable smell came down a
shallow hatchway within, up which leaned a rough step-ladder, movable,
and of stout construction.

"That smell," said Phoebus, entering, and pulling the door close
behind him, "might be wool, or camel, or a moral menagerie from the
royal gardings of Europe, but I guess it's Nigger."

He went up the steep steps with some difficulty, as they were made to
pass only one person, and at the top he entered a large garret, divided
into two by a heavy partition of yellow pine, with a door at the middle
of it, and from beyond this partition came the sounds of crooning and
babbling he had heard.

The bright night, shining through a small gable window, revealed this
outer half of the garret empty, and not furniture or other appurtenance
than the hole in the floor up which he had come, and the door into the
place of wailing beyond, which was fastened by a long iron spike
dropping into a staple that overshot a heavy wooden bar. As he slipped
up the spike and took the bar off, Phoebus heard some person in the
room below mutter, and lock the great padlock upon the other door,
effectually barring his escape by that egress.

"We must take things as they come," thought Jimmy, grimly, "partickler
in Pangymonum, whar I am now."

He also reflected that the arrangements of this kidnappers' pen, simple
as they seemed, were quite sufficient. If authority should demand to
search the house, the double clothes-press below, with the ladder pulled
up into the loft, became a harmless closet hung with wardrobe matters,
and the inner closet a storeroom for articles of bulk; and no human
being could either go up or come down without passing two inhabited
floors and three different doors, besides the door to the slave-pen.

This last door Phoebus now threw open and walked into the pen itself,
stooping his head to avoid the low entrance.

For some minutes he could not see the contents at all in the total
darkness that prevailed, as there was no window whatever in this pen or
den, but he heard various voices, and inhaled the strong, close air of
many African breaths exhausting the supply of oxygen, and knew that
chains and irons were being moved against the boards of the floor.

"Thair ain't nothin' to do yer," Jimmy remarked, softly, "but jess squat
down an' git a-climated, as they say about strangers to our bilious
shore, an' git your eyeballs tuned to the dark. But I should say that
this was both hokey-pokey an' Pangymonum, by smoke!"

A man in some part of the den was praying in a highly nervous, excited
way, slobbering out his agonizing sentences, and dwelling hard upon his
more open vowels, and keeping several other inmates in sympathy or equal
misery, as they piped in answer to his apostrophes:

"Lawd, de-_scen'! De_-scen', O my Lawd. I will not let dee go; no, oh my
Lawd! Come, save me! Yes, my Lawd! Come walkin' on de waters! Come outen
Lazarus's tomb! Come on de chario'f fire! Come in de power! De-scen'
now, O my Lawd!"

Phoebus's entrance made no excitement, and he crouched down to await
the strengthening of his eyes to see around him. The place appeared to
be nearly twenty-five feet square, and was cross-boarded both the gable
way and under the sloping roof, whose eaves were planked up a foot or
two above the floor; in the middle any man could stand upright and
scarcely touch the ridge beam with his hands, but along the sloping
sides could barely sit upright.

The man still continuing to express his absolute subjection of spirit in
a frenzy of words, and several little children crying and shouting
responsively, Phoebus ordered the man to cease, after asking him
kindly to do so several times; and the command being disobeyed, he
slapped the praying one with his open hand, and the poor wretch rolled
over in a kind of feeble fit.

A little child somewhere continuing to cry, Phoebus took it in his
arms and held between it and the starlight, at the half-open door, one
of the shillings he had obtained from the old cabin on Broad Creek a few
hours before. The child, seeing something shine, seized it and held
fast, and Phoebus next passed his hand over the face of a sleeping
man, who was snoring calmly and strenuously on the floor beside him. He
made room for the faint light to shine upon the sleeper's black face,
and exclaimed, in a moment:

"If it ain't Samson Hat I hope I may be swallered by a whale!"

Calling his name, "Samson! Samson!" Phoebus observed a most dejected
mulatto person, who had been lying back in the shadows, crawl forward,
rattling his manacles. This man, when spoken to, replied with such
refinement and accuracy, however his face betokened great inward misery,
that the sailor took as careful a survey of him as the moonlight
permitted, coming in by that one lean attic window. He was a man who had
shaved himself only recently, and his dark, curling side-whiskers and
clean lips, and the tuft of goatee in the hollow of his chin, and
intelligent, high forehead, seemed altogether out of place in this
darksome eyrie of the sad and friendless.

"Is he your friend, sir?" asked this man, turning towards Samson. "He
must have a good conscience if he is, for he slept soon after he was
brought here, and has never uttered a single complaint."

"And you have, I reckon?" said the waterman.

"Oh, yes, sir; I have been treated with such ingratitude. It would break
any gentleman's heart to hear my tale. Who is your friend, sir?"

"Samson, wake up, old bruiser!" cried Phoebus, shaking the sleeper
soundly; "you didn't give in to one or two, by smoke!"

"Is it you, Jimmy?" the old negro finally said, with a sheepish
expression; "why, neighbor, I'm glad to see you, but I'm sorry, too. A
black man dey don't want to kill yer, caze dey kin sell him, but a white
man like you dey don't want to keep, and dey dassn't let him go."

"A _white_ man here?" exclaimed the superior-looking person; "what can
they mean?"

"I'm ironed so heavy, Jimmy," continued Samson, "dat I can't set up
much. My han's is tied togedder wid cord, my feet's in an iron clevis,
and a ball's chained to de clevis."

"Give me your hands," exclaimed Jimmy; "I'll settle them cords, by
smoke!"

In a minute he had severed the cords at the wrist, and the intelligent
yellow man pleaded that a similar favor be done for him, to which the
sailor acceded ungrudgingly.

"Jimmy," said Samson, "if it's ever known in Prencess Anne--as I 'spect
it never will be, fur we're in bad hands, neighbor--dar'll be a laugh
instid of a cry, fur ole boxin' Samson, dat was kidnapped an' fetched to
jail by a woman!"

"You licked by a woman, Samson?"

"Yes, Jimmy, a woman all by herseff frowed me down, tied my hands an'
feet, an' brought me to dis garret. I hain't seen nobody but her an'
dese yer people, sence I was tuk."

"Ha!" exclaimed the dejected mulatto, "that's a favorite feat of Patty
Cannon. She is the only woman ever seen at a threshing-floor who can
stand in a half-bushel measure and lift five bushels of grain at once
upon her shoulders, weighing three hundred pounds."

"I ain't half dat," Samson smiled, quietly, "an' she handled me, shore
enough. You remember, Jimmy, when I leff you by ole Spring Hill church,
to go an' git a woman on a little wagon to show me de way to Laurel?"

"Why, it was only yisterday, Samson!"

"Dat was de woman, Jimmy. She was a chunky, heavy-sot woman, right purty
to look at, an' maybe fifty year ole. She was de nicest woman mos' ever
I see. She made me git off my mule an' ride in de wagon by her, an' take
a drink of her own applejack--she said she 'stilled it on her farm. She
said she knowed Judge Custis, an' asked me questions about Prencess
Anne, an' wanted me to work fur her some way. We was goin froo a pore,
pine country, a heap wuss dan Hardship, whar Marster Milburn come outen,
an' hadn't seen nobody on de road till we come to a run she said was
named de Tussocky branch, whar she got out of de wagon to water her
hoss. At dat place she come up to me an' says, 'Samson, I'll wrastle
you!' 'Go long,' says I, 'I kin't wrastle no woman like you.' 'You got
to,' she says, swearin' like a man, an' takin' holt of me jess like a
man wrastles. I felt ashamed, an' didn't know what to do, and, befo' I
could wink, Jimmy, dat woman had give me de trip an' shoved me wid a
blow like de kick of an ox, and was a-top of my back wid a knee like
iron pinnin' of me down."

"The awful huzzy of Pangymonum!"

"De fust idee I had was dat she was a man dressed up like a woman. I
started like lightnin' to jump up, an' my legs caught each oder; she had
carried de cord to tie me under her gown, an' clued it aroun' me in a
minute. As I run at her an' fell hard, she drew de runnin' knot tight
an' danced aroun' me like a fat witch, windin' me all up in de rope. De
sweat started from my head, I yelled an' fought an' fell agin, an', as I
laid with my tongue out like a calf in de butcher's cart, she whispered
to me, 'Maybe you're de las' nigger ole Patty Cannon'll ever tie!'

"At dat name I jess prayed to de Lord, but it was too late. She put me
in de cart an' gagged me so I couldn't say a word, and blood came outen
my mouth. I heard her talkin' to people as we passed by a town an' over
a bridge. Nobody looked in de cart whar I laid kivered over, till we
come to a ferry in de night, an' dar we passed over, and I heard her
talkin' to a man on dis side of de ferry. He come to de side of de wagon
an' peeped at me, layin' helpless dar, my eyes jess a-prayin' to
him--and he had an elegant eye in his head, Jimmy. He says softly to
hisself, 'Dis is no consignment, manifes'ly, to Isaac an' Jacob Cannon,'
an' he kivered me up again, an' the woman fetched me yer, put on de
irons, and shoved me into dis hole in de garret."

"I reckon that was Isaac Cannon, t'other Levite that never sees anything
that ain't in his quoshint."

"How's the purty gals, Jimmy? I shall see' em in my dreams, I' spect, if
I _am_ sold Souf. I ain't got long to stay, nohow, Jimmy, fur I'm mos'
sixty. If you ever git out, tell my marster to buy dat gal Virgie, an'
make her free. She ain't fit to be a slave."

"Gals has their place," said Phoebus, "but not whair men has to fight
for liberty. How many fighting men are we here?"

"I 'spect you's de only one, Jimmy; we's all chained up; dese
nigger-dealers is all blacksmifs an' keeps balls, hobbles, gripes, an'
clevises, an' loads us wid iron."

"Who is that woman back yonder so quare an' still?"

"Why, Jimmy, don't you know Aunt Hominy, Jedge Custis's ole cook? Dey
brought her in dis mornin' wi' two little children outen Teackle Hall
kitchen; one of dem you give dat silver to--little Ned. Hominy ain't
said a word sence she come."

Jimmy Phoebus went back to the corner of the den where the old woman
cowered, and called her name in many different accents and with kind
assurances:

"Hominy, ole woman, don't you know Ellenory's Jimmy? Jedge Custis is
comin' for you, aunty. I'm yer to take you home."

She did not speak at all, and Phoebus lifted her without resistance
nearer to the moonlight. Her lips mumbled unintelligibly, her eyes were
dull, she did not seem to know them.

Samson crawled forward, and also called her name kindly:

"Aunt Hominy, Miss Vesty's sent fur you. Dis yer is Jimmy Phoebus."

The little boy Ned now spoke up:

"Aunt Hominy ain't spoke sence dat Quaker man killed little Phillis."

"Jimmy," solemnly whispered Samson, "Aunt Hominy's lost her mind."

"Yes," spoke up the dejected and elegant mulatto prisoner, "she's become
an idiot. They sometimes take it that way."

Phoebus bent his face close down to the poor old creature's, sitting
there in her checkered turban and silver earrings, clean and tidy as
servants of the olden time, and he studied her vacant countenance, her
tenantless eyes, her lips moving without connection or relevance, and
felt that cruelty had inflicted its last miraculous injury--whipped out
her mind from its venerable residence, and left her body yet to suffer
the pains of life without the understanding of them.

"Oh, shame! shame!" cried the sailor, tears finally falling from his
eyes, "to deceive and steal this pore, believin' intelleck! To rob the
cook of the little tin cup full o' brains she uses to git food fur bad
an' fur good folks! Why, the devils in Pangymonum wouldn't treat that a
way the kind heart that briled fur 'em."

"De long man said he was Quaker man," exclaimed Vince, the larger boy,
"an' he come to take Hominy to de free country. Hominy was sold, she
said, an' must go. De long man had a boat--Mars Dennis's boat--an' in de
night little Phillis woke up an' cried. Nobody couldn't stop her. De
long man picked little Phillis up by de leg an' mashed her skull in agin
de flo'. Aunt Hominy ain't never spoke no mo'."

"Did you hear the long man speak after that, Vince?"

"Yes, mars'r. I heerd de long man tell Mars Dennis dat if he didn't
steer de boat an' shet his mouf, he'd shoot him. I heerd de pistol go
off, but Mars Dennis wasn't killed, fur I saw him steerin' afterwards."

"Thank God!" spoke the sailor, kissing the child. "Ellenory's boy was
innocent, by smoke! That nigger-trader shot me an' threatened Levin's
life if he listened to me hailing of him. The noise I heard was the
murder of the baby, whose cries betrayed the coming of the vessel.
Samson, thar's been treachery ever sence we left Salisbury, an' that
nigger Dave's a part of it."

"He said he hated me caze I larned him to box. Maybe my fightin's been
my punishment, Jimmy, but I never struck a man a foul blow."

"And what was _your_ hokey-pokey?" the pungy captain cried to the man
who had been making so much religious din. "Did they sell you fur never
knowin' whar to stop a good thing?"

The man hoarsely explained, himself interested by the disclosures and
fraternity around him:

"I was slave to a local preacher in Delaware, an' de sexton of de
church. It was ole Barrett's chapel, up yer between Dover an'
Murderkill--de church whar Bishop Coke an' Francis Asbury fust met on de
pulpit stairs. My marster an' me was boff members of it, but he loved
money bad, an' I was to be free when I got to be twenty-five years ole,
accordin' to de will of his Quaker fader, dat left me to him. Las'
Sunday night dey had a long class-meetin' dar, an' when nobody was leff
in de church but my marster an' me, he says to me, 'Rodney, le's you an'
me have one more prayer togedder befo' you put out dat las' lamp. You
pray, Rodney!' I knelt an' prayed for marster after I must leave him to
be free next year, an', while I was prayin' loud, people crept in de
church an' tied me, and marster was gone."

"He sold you fur life to them kidnappers, boy, becaze you was goin' to
be free next year. Don't your Bible tell you to watch _an'_ pray?"

"Yes, marster."

"Well, then, boys, it's all watch to-night and no more praying," cried
Jimmy Phoebus, cheerily. "Here are four men, loving liberty, bound to
have it or die. Thar's one of' em with a knife, an' the first kidnapper
that crosses that sill, man or woman--fur we'll trust no more women,
Samson--gits the knife to the hilt! The blessed light that shone onto
Calvary an' Bunker Hill is a gleamin' on the blade. Work off your irons,
if you kin; I'll git you rafters outen this roof to jab with if you
can't do no better. Are you all with me?"

"I am, Jimmy," answered Samson, quietly.

"I'll die with ye, too," exclaimed the praying man, with rekindled
spirit.

"We will all be murdered, gentlemen," protested the dejected mulatto. "I
know these desperate people."

"Then you crawl over in the corner," Phoebus commanded, "and see three
men fight fur you. We don't want any fine buck nigger to spile his
beauty for us."

The man crawled back into the blackness of the den again, and Phoebus
began to search the open half of the garret for implements of war. He
found two long pieces of chain, with which determined men might beat out
an adversary's brains.

"Now, boys," Jimmy delivered himself, "I hain't lost my head yisterday
nor to-day neither, by smoke! I'm goin' to kill the first person that
comes yer, an' git the keys of this den from him, an' lock all of you in
fast, an' the dead kidnapper, too. Then they won't git at you to ship
you off till I kin git to Seaford, over yer in Delaware--it's not more
than six mile--whar I know three captains of pungies, and all of' em's
in port thar now--all friends of Jimmy Phoebus, all well armed, and
their crews enough to handle Pangymonum!"

A noise was heard at the lock of the lower door, and Phoebus slipped
into the enclosed den and took his station just within the door.

"Remember," he whispered, "I open the fight."

The lock snapped at the door below the step-ladder, the bolt fell, and
the light of a lamp flashed up the hatchway and upon the naked roof, and
through the cracks of the boarded garret pen.

The sailor's knife was in his belt-pouch, where he carried it over the
hip. As he leaned down to look through a crack in the low door, he felt
a hand from the gloom behind touch him.

Instinctively he felt for his knife, and it was gone.

"Captain," cried the voice of the dejected mulatto, as the door of the
pen flew open and the bandit-looking stranger appeared with the lamp,
"there's a white man here going to kill you. I've taken his knife from
him and saved your life. It's a rebellion, captain!"

"Help! Patty! Joe!" cried the man, with a loud voice, as Jimmy Phoebus
threw himself upon him and extinguished the lamp, and the two powerful
men rolled on the floor together in a grip of mortal combat.

Phoebus was a man of great power, but his antagonist was strong and
slippery, too, and a spirited rough-and-tumble fighter.

The pungy captain was on top, the bandit man locked him fast in his arms
and legs, and tried to stab him in the side, as Phoebus felt the
handle of a clasp-knife, which seemed slow to obey its spring, strike
him repeatedly all round the groin, in strokes that would have killed,
inflicted by the blade.

Phoebus attempted to drag the man to the hatchway and force him down
it, while the two negro assistants of Phoebus beat down the negro
traitor with their chains, and searched him vainly for the knife he had
filched.

At last Phoebus prevailed, and his antagonist rolled down the open
hatchway, seven feet or more, still keeping his desperate hold on
Phoebus, and dragging him along; and both might have cracked their
skulls but for a woman just in the act of hurrying up the ladder,
against whom their two bodies pitched and were cushioned upon her.

The shock, however, stunned both of them, and when Phoebus recollected
himself he was tied hand and foot and lying on the garret floor again,
and over him stood Joe Johnson, flourishing a cowhide.

The bandages had again been torn from Phoebus's face, and he was
bleeding at the flesh-wound in his cheek, and breathless from his
conflict. A woman had dashed a vessel of water into his face, and this
had revived him.

The other man, called "captain," had, meantime, by the aid of this
woman--the same Phoebus had seen down-stairs--subdued and tied the
black insurgents, and both of them were flourishing their whips over the
backs and heads of the prisoners, big and little, so that the garret was
no slight reflection of the place of eternal torment, as the shadows of
the monsters, under the weak light, whipped and danced against the beams
and shingles, and shrieks and shouts of "Mercy!" blended in hideous
dissonance.

The woman now turned her lamp on the sailor's rough, swarthy, injured
countenance, and looked him over out of her dark, bold eyes:

"Joe, this is a nigger, by God!"

Johnson and the captain also examined him carefully, and, uttering an
oath, the former kicked the prostrate man with his heavy boot.

"I popped this bloke last night," he said, "and thought the scold's cure
had him. He's a sea-crab playin' the setter fur niggers. He sang beef to
me in Princess Anne. I told him thar he'd pass for a nigger, Patty, and
we'll sell him fur one to Georgey!"

"All's fish that comes to our net, Joe," the woman chuckled; "he'll sell
high, too."

"That white man," spoke the voice of Samson, within the pen, his chains
rattling, "has hunderds of friends a-lookin' fur him, an' you'll ketch
it if you don't let him off."

"What latitat chants there?" Joe Johnson demanded of Patty Cannon.

"That's my nigger, Joe," the woman answered.

"Fetch him to the light."

The captain propped Samson up, and Joe Johnson glared into his face, and
then struck him down with the handle of his heavy whip.

"Patty," he growled, "that nigger's scienced; he's the champion scrapper
of Somerset. He knocked me down, and I marked him fur it; and now, by
God! I'm a-goin' to burn him alive on Twiford's island."

He swore an oath, half blasphemous, half blackguard, and the captain
murmured, with a lisp:

"The white man is the only _witness_. Make sure of him!"

Irons were produced, and the captain speedily fastened Phoebus's hands
in a clevis, and hobbled his feet, and placed him, without brutality, in
the pen, and, further, chained him there to a ring in the joist below.
As the door was closed and bolted, a voice from the darkness of the pen
cried out:

"Aunt Patty, let me out: I saved the captain's life; I took the white
man's knife. I'll serve you faithfully if you only let me go."

"He blowed the gab," said Joe Johnson, "but it won't serve him."

"Zeke," cried the woman, "it's no use. You go to Georgey with the next
gang--you an' the white nigger thar."

The man threw himself upon the floor and moaned and prayed, as the
lamplight disappeared and the hatchway slid echoingly over the stairs,
and the lower bolts were drawn. As he lay there in horror and amid
contempt, a voice arrested his ears near by, singing, with musical and
easy spirit, so low that it seemed a hymn, from the roads and fields far
down beneath:

  "Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
    In dis weak, helpless soul."

The man listened with awe and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune,
and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a
treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy
Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor
most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and
Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's
island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon
his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was
none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise
of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for
her.

"Poor Mary!" Phoebus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn
cadence.

The wretched man listened and trembled.

"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his
inflection.

The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeballs
turned in torment.

"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly,
in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of
the quiet hymn again:

  "Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
    In dis weak, helpless soul,
  Till mercy, wid its mighty aid
    De-scen to make me whole;
          Yes, Lord!
    De-scen to make me whole."

The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into
a place between two of the cypress shingles in the roof, where he had
hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and
only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting
scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as
superstitious passions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and
hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.

When the low drone of the hymn he had heard his victim sing to her baby,
when her faith in him was pure and childlike, crossed his maddened ears
again, he raised one shriek of "Mercy!" to which no answer fell, and
drew the blade across his throat and fell dead in the kidnappers' den.




CHAPTER XXVI.

VAN DORN.


A thin fur of frost was on the level farm-lands, and the saffron and
orange leaves were falling almost audibly from the trees, as Levin
Dennis awoke on Wednesday, in the long, low house standing back in the
fields from Johnson's cross-roads, and drank in the cool, stimulating
morn, the sun already having made his first relay, and his postilion
horn was blowing from the old tavern that reared its form so broadly and
yet so steeply in plain sight.

Levin had been brought up from Twiford's wharf the night before by the
pretty maid whom Jimmy Phoebus had so much frightened, and this was
his first day of restful feeling, having slept off the liquor fumes of
Sunday, the exciting watches of Monday, and the mingled pleasure and
pain, illness and interest, love and remorse, of Tuesday.

He had felt already the earliest twinges of youthful fondness for the
young girl he had spent the day with at Twiford's, while lying sick
there from a disordered stomach and nervous system, and her amiability
and charms, more than the temptation of unhallowed money, had changed
his purpose to escape at Twiford's and give information of the injury
inflicted upon Judge Custis's property.

It hardly seemed real that he had been an accessory to a felony and a
witness to a murder--the stealing of a gentleman's domestic slaves and
the braining of the smallest and most helpless of them, nearly in his
sight; yet so it had happened, and he felt the danger he was in, but
hesitated how to act. He had accepted the money of the trader, and
passed his mother's noblest friend on the river without recognition,
while a dastardly ball had probably ended poor Phoebus's career. To
all these deeds he was the only white witness, the only one on whose
testimony redress could be meted out.

He felt, therefore, that he was a prisoner, and his life dependent on
his cordial relations with the bloody negro-dealer and his band; and
Johnson had reiterated his promise that if Levin joined them in equal
fraternity he should make money fast and become a plantation proprietor.

This night coming, a raid on free negroes in Delaware was to be made by
the band in force, and Levin had been told that he must be one of the
kidnappers, and his frank co-operation that night would forever relieve
him of any suspicions of defection and bad faith.

"Steal one nigger, Levin," Joe Johnson had said, "and then if ever
caught in the hock you never can snickle!"

Levin interpreted this thieves' language to mean that he must do a crime
to get the kidnappers' confidence.

The power of this band he had divined a little of when, at points along
the river, especially about Vienna, there had been mysterious
intercourse between Joe Johnson and people on the shore, carried on in
imitations of animal sounds; and the negro ferryman at that old
Dorchester village had spoken with Johnson only half an hour before the
trader's encounter with Jimmy Phoebus in mid-stream, whereupon the
grim passenger had produced his pistol and notified Levin:

"Now, my feller prig, honor's what I expect from you, and, to remind you
of it, Levin, I'm a-goin' to pint this barking-iron at your mummer, so
that if you patter a cackle, a blue plum will go right down your
throat."

He had then tried to evade some one expected on the river, and, in a fit
of rage at the awakening and wailing of the child, had hushed it
forever, and then had shot Phoebus down.

Poor Hominy had sincerely believed that Johnson's peculiar slang was the
language of the good Quakers, followers of Elias Hicks, who sheltered
runaway slaves and spoke a "thee" and "thou" and "verily," and that
strange misapprehension in her ignorant mind the keen dealer had made
use of to decoy her into Levin's vessel and waft her into a distant
country.

"We didn't steal her, Levin," Johnson said; "she wanted to mizzle from a
good master, an' we jess sells the crooked moke an' makes it squar."

When Aunt Hominy, having under her protecting care the little children,
came on board the _Ellenora Dennis_ at Manokin Landing, Levin had been
asleep, and knew nothing of the theft till it was too late to protest,
and Johnson himself had sailed the cat-boat into broad water. Then,
bearing through Kedge's Strait, he had cruised up the open bay, out of
sight of the Somerset shore, and entered the Nanticoke towards night by
way of Harper's Strait, and run up on the night flood; but the instinct
of Jimmy Phoebus had cut him off at the forks of the Nanticoke, and
propelled another crime to Johnson's old suspected record. He had never
been indicted yet for murder, though murder was thought to be none too
formidable a crime for him.

There was a zest of adventure in this guilty errand, which, but for its
crime, would have pleased Levin moderately well, the roving drop in his
blood expanding to this wild association; and he knew but little
comparatively of the Delaware kidnappers, reading nothing, and in those
days little was printed about Patty Cannon's band except in the distant
journals like _Niles's Register_ or _Lundy's Genius of Emancipation_.
Levin had never sailed up the Nanticoke region before, and its scenery
was agreeable to his sight, while his heart was just fluttering in the
first flight of sentiment towards the interesting creature he had so
unexpectedly and, as he thought, so strangely discovered there.

Arriving at Twiford's in the night, Johnson had sent him to bed there,
and pushed on himself with the negro property to Johnson's Cross-roads;
and, when he awakened late the next day, Levin had found a beautiful
wildflower of a young woman sitting by his pallet, looking into his
large soft eyes with her own long-lashed orbs of humid gray, and
brushing his dark auburn ringlets with her hand. As he had looked up
wonderingly, she had said to him:

"I have never seen a man before with his hair parted in the middle, but
I think I have dreamed of one."

"Who air you?" Levin asked.

"Me! Oh, I'm Hulda. I'm Patty Cannon's granddaughter."

"That wicked woman!" Levin exclaimed. "Oh, I can't believe that!"

"Nor can I sometimes, till the sinful truth comes to me from her own
bold lips. Oh, sir, I am not as wicked as she!"

"How kin you be wicked at all," Levin asked, "when you look so good? I
would trust your face in jail."

"Would you? How happy that makes me, to be trusted by some one! Nobody
seems to trust me here. My mother was never kind to me. Captain Van Dorn
is kind, but too kind; I shrink from him."

"Where is your mother now?"

"She has gone south with her husband, to live in Florida for all the
rest of her life, and we are all going there after father gets one more
drove of slaves. You are one of father's men, I suppose?"

"Who is your father?"

"Joe Johnson."

"That man," murmured Levin. "Oh, no, it is too horrible."

"Do not hate me. Be a little kind, if you do, for I have watched you
here hours, almost hoping you never might wake up, so beautiful and pure
you looked asleep."

"And you--that's the way you look, Huldy. How kin you look so an' be his
daughter."

"I am not his child, thank God! He is my stepfather."

"What is your name, then, besides Huldy?"

The girl blushed deeply and hesitated. Her fine gray eyes were turned
upon her beautiful bare feet, white as the river that flashed beneath
the window.

"Hulda Bruinton," she said, swallowing a sigh.

"Bruinton--where did I hear that name?" Levin asked; "some tale has been
told me, I reckon, about him?"

"Yes, everybody knows it," Hulda said, in a voice of pain; "he was
hanged for murder at Georgetown when I was a little child."

Levin could not speak for astonishment.

"I might as well tell you," she said, "for others will, if I conceal it.
I can hardly remember my father. My mother soon married Joe and
neglected me, and Aunt Patty, my grandmother, brought me up. She was
kind to me, but, oh, how cruel she can be to others!"

"You talk as if you kin read, Huldy," said Levin, wishing to change so
harsh a topic; "kin you?"

"Yes, I can read and write as well as if I had been to school. Some one
taught me the letters around the tavern--some of the negro-dealers: I
think it was Colonel McLane; and I had a gift for it, I think, because I
began to read very soon, and then Aunt Patty made me read books to
her--oh, such dreadful books!"

"What wair they, Huldy?"

"The lives of pirates and the trials of murderers--about Murrell's band
and the poisonings of Lucretia Chapman, the execution of Thistlewood,
and Captain Kidd's voyages; the last I read her was the story of Burke
and Hare, who smothered people to death in the Canongate of Edinburgh
last year to sell their bodies to the doctors."

"Must you read such things to her?"

"I think that is the only influence I have over her. Sometimes she looks
so horribly at me, and mutters such threats, that I fear she is going to
kill me, and so I hasten to get her favorite books and read to her the
dark crimes of desperate men and women, and she laughs and listens like
one hearing pleasant tales. My soul grows sick, but I see she is
fascinated, and I read on, trying to close my mind to the cruel
narrative."

"Huldy, air you a purty devil drawin' me outen my heart to ruin me?"

"No, no; oh, do not believe that! I suppose all men are cruel, and all I
ever knew were negro-traders, or I should believe you too gentle to live
by that brutal work. I looked at you lying in this bed, and pity and
love came over me to see you, so young and fair, entering upon this life
of treachery and sin."

Levin gazed at her intently, and then raised up and looked around him,
and peered down through the old dormers into the green yard, and the
floody river hastening by with such nobility.

"Air we watched?" he inquired.

"By none in this house. All the men are away, making ready for the hunt
to-morrow night. The river is watched, and you would not be let escape
very far, but in this house I am your jailer. Joe told me he would sell
me if I let you get away."

Levin listened and looked once more ardently and wonderingly at her, and
fell upon his knees at her uncovered feet.

"Then, Huldy, hear me, lady with such purty eyes,--I must believe in
'em, wicked as all you look at has been! I never stole anything in my
life, nor trampled on a worm if I could git out of his path,--so help me
my poor mother's prayers! Huldy, how shall I save myself from these
wicked men and the laws I never broke till Sunday? Oh, tell me what to
do!"

"Do anything but commit their crimes," she answered. "Promise me you
will never do that! Let us begin, and be the friends I wished we might
be, before I ever heard you speak. What is your name?"

"Levin--Levin Dennis. My father's lost to me, and mother, too."

"Then Heaven has answered my many prayers, Levin, to give me something
to cherish and protect. I am almost a woman: oh, what is my dreadful
doom?--to become a woman here among these wolves of men, who meet around
my stepfather's tavern to buy the blood and souls of people born free.
Joe Johnson sells everything; he has often threatened to sell me to some
trader whose bold and wicked eyes stared at me so coarsely, and I have
heard them talk of a price, as if I was the merchandise to be
transferred--I, in whose veins every drop of blood is a white woman's."?

"I want you to watch over me, Huldy: I'm a poor drunken boy, my boat
chartered to Joe Johnson fur a week an' paid fur. Tell me what to do,
an' I'll do it."

"First," she said, "you must eat something and drink milk--nothing
stronger. Their brandy, which they 'still themselves, sets people on
fire. I will set the table for you."

It was after the table had been set that Jimmy Phoebus slipped in and
devoured the milk and meat, overhearing the continuance of the
conversation just given; and when his awkward motions had disturbed
these new young friends, Hulda fainted on the stairs before the
apparition Levin did not see, and he snatched the kiss that was like
plucking a pale-red blossom from some dragon's garden.

That night two horses without saddles came to bring them both to
Johnson's Cross-roads, and Levin awoke at Patty Cannon's old residence
on the neighboring farm.

He looked out of the small window in the low roof Upon a little garden,
where a short, stout, powerfully made woman, barefooted, was taking up
some flowers from their beds to put them into boxes of earth.

"Yer, Huldy," exclaimed this woman, "sot 'em all under the glass kivers,
honey, so grandmother will have some flowers for her hat next winter.
They wouldn't know ole Patty down at Cannon's Ferry ef she didn't come
with flowers in her hat."

A mischievous blue-jay was in a large cherry-tree, apparently
domesticated there, and he occupied himself mimicking over the woman's
head the alternate cries of a little bird in terror and a hawk's scream
of victory.

"Shet up, you thief!" spoke the woman, looking up. "Them blue-jays, gal,
the niggers is afeard of, and kills 'em, as Ole Nick's eavesdroppers and
tale-carriers. That's why I keeps 'em round me. They's better than a
watch-dog to bark at strangers, and, caze they steals all their life, I
love' em. Blue-jay, by Ged! is ole Pat Cannon's bird."

"Grandma," Hulda said, "I wish you had a large, elegant garden. You love
flowers."

"Purty things I always _would_ have," exclaimed the bulldog-bodied
woman, with an oath; "bright things I loved when I was a gal, and traded
what I had away fur 'em. Direckly I got big, I traded ugly things fur
'em, like niggers. I'd give a shipload of niggers fur an apern full of
roses."

"Florida, they say, is beautiful, grandma, and flowers are everywhere
there."

"Yes, gal, they says so; but I don't never expect to go thar.
Margaretty, your mommy, likes it thar. Delaware's my home; some of 'em
hates me yer, and the darned lawyers tries to indict me, but I'll live
on the line till they shoves me over it, whar I've been cock of the walk
sence I was a gal."

As Hulda, also barefooted, but moulded like the flowers, so that her
feet seemed natural as the naked roots, carried the boxes around to the
glass beds encircling a chimney--dahlias, autumnal crocuses or saffrons,
tri-colored chrysanthemums or gold-flowers, and the orange-colored
marigolds--the elder woman, resting on her hoe, smelled the turpentine
of a row of tall sunflowers and twisted one off and put it in her
wide-brimmed Leghorn hat.

"When I hornpipe it on the tight rope," Levin heard her chuckle, "one of
these yer big flowers must die with me."

She disappeared into the peach orchard, which tinted the garden with its
pinkish boughs, and Levin improved the chance to look over the cottage
and the landscape.

It was a mere farm, level as a floor, part of a larger clearing in the
primeval woods, where only fire or age had preyed since man was come;
and, although there seemed more land than belonged to this property, no
other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and
tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long porch forward at
the base of that tall, blank, inexpressive roof which seemed suspended
like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers;
the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the
southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the King's
road.

The house where Levin Dennis now looked out was a three-roomed, frame,
double cabin, with beds in every room but the kitchen, and the hip-roof
gave considerable bed accommodation in the attic besides, the rooms
being all small, as was general in that day. Around the house extended a
pretty garden, with some cherry and plum trees and wild peach along its
boundaries, and the fields around contained many stumps, showing that
the clearing had been made not many years before, while here and there
some heaps of brush had been allowed to accumulate instead of being
burned.

As Levin looked at one of those brush-heaps in a low place, a pair of
buzzards slowly and clumsily circled up from it, and, flying low, went
round and round as if they might be rearing their young there and hated
to go far; and, for long afterwards, Levin saw them hovering high above
the spot in parental mindfulness.

He drew his head in the dormer casement, and was making ready to go down
to the breakfast he smelled cooking below, when his own name was
pronounced in the garden, and he stopped and listened.

"You lie!" exclaimed the old woman's voice. "I'll mash you to the
ground!"

"He said so, grandma, indeed he did."

Levin had a peep from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs.
Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's
head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her not unpleasing
features.

Levin walked at once to the window and whistled, as if to the bird in
the tree. The older woman immediately dropped her hoe, and cried out to
Levin:

"Heigh, son! ain't you most a-starved fur yer breakfast? It's all ready
fur ye, an' Huldy's waitin' fur ye to come down."

Levin at once went down the short, winding stairs to a table spread in
the kitchen end, and the old woman blew a tin horn towards Johnson's
Cross-roads, as if summoning other boarders, and then she said to Levin,
with a very pleasing countenance:

"Son, these yer no-count people will be askin' you questions to bother
you, and I don't want no harm to come to you, Levin; so you tell
everybody you see yer that Levin Cannon is your name, and they'll think
you's juss one o' my people, and won't ask you no more."

Hulda slightly raised her eyes, which Levin took to mean assent, and he
said:

"Cannon's good enough for a body pore as me."

"You're a-goin' with Joe to-night, ain't you?"

"Yes'm, I b'leeves so."

"That's right, cousin. You'll git rich an' keep your chariot, yit.
Captain Van Dorn's gwyn to head the party. As Levin Cannon, ole Patty's
pore cousin, he'll look out fur you, son. Now have some o' my slappers,
an' jowl with eggs, an' the best coffee from Cannon's Ferry. Huldy, gal,
help yer Cousin Levin! He won't be your sweetheart ef you don't feed him
good."

The breakfast was brought in by a white man with a face scratched and
bitten, and one eye full of congested blood.

"Cy," Patty Cannon cried, "them slappers, I 'spect, you had hard work to
turn with that red eye Owen Daw give you."

"I'll brown both sides of him yit, when I git the griddle ready for
him," the man exclaimed, half snivelling.

"Before you raise gizzard enough for that, little Owen'll peck outen yer
eyes, Cy, like a crow; he's game enough to tackle the gallows. You may
git even with him thar, Cy."

The man turned his cowardly, serving countenance on Levin inquisitively,
and looked sullen and ashamed at Hulda, who observed:

"Cyrus, you are not fit for the rude boys around father's tavern, who
always impose on you. Please don't go there again."

"Where else kin he go?" inquired Patty Cannon, severely; "thar ain't no
church left nigh yer, sence Chapel Branch went to rot for want of
parsons' pay. Let him go to the tavern and learn to fight like a man,
an' if the boys licks him, let him kill some of 'em. Then Joe and the
Captain kin make somethin' of Cy James, an' people around yer'll respect
him. Why, Captain, honey, ain't ye hungry?"

This was addressed to a man with several bruises on his forehead, and an
enormous flaxen mustache, as soft in texture as a child's hair--a man
wearing delicate boots with high Flemish leggings, that curled over and
showed full women's hose of red, over which were buckled trousers of
buff corduroy, covering his thighs only, and fastened above his hips by
a belt of hide. His shirt was of blue figured stuff, and his loose,
unbuttoned coat was a kind of sailor's jacket of tarnished black velvet.
He hung a broad slouched hat of a yellowish-drab color, soft, like all
his clothing, upon a peg in the wall, and bowed to Hulda first with a
smile of welcome, to Madame Cannon cavalierly, and to Levin with a
graceful reserve that attracted the boy's attention from the notorious
woman at he head of the table, and held him interested during all the
meal.

"Pretty Hulda, I salute you! Patty, _buenos dias!_ I hope I see you
well, friend!"--the last to Levin.

As he took up his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure
white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed
man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he
would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he
seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he
gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but
little again.

To Levin this man had the greatest fascination, partly from his
extraordinary dress--like costumes Levin had seen at the theatre in
Baltimore, where the pirates on the stage wore a jacket and open shirt
and belt similar in cut though not in material--and partly from his
countenance, in which was something very familiar to the boy, though he
racked his memory in vain for the time and place. The stranger was
hardly more than forty to forty-five years of age, but the mistress of
the house treated him with all the blandishments of a husband.

"Dear Captain! pore honey!" she said; "to have his beautiful yaller hair
tored out by the nigger hawk! Honey, he fell onto me, and I thought a
bull had butted me in the stummick."

"He broke no limbs, Patty," the captain lisped, feeding himself in a
dainty way--and Levin observed that his fork was silver, and his knife
was a clasp-knife with a silver handle, that he had taken from his
pocket--"_Chis! chis!_ if he had snapped my arm, the caravan must have
gone without me to-night. I am sore, though, for Señor was a valiant
wrestler."

"He'll git his pay, honey, when they sot him to work in Georgey an' flog
him right smart, an' we spend the price of him fur punch. He, he! lovey
lad!"

"I took this from him to-day when I searched him carefully," the captain
said, handing Patty Cannon a piece of silver coin.

The woman, though she looked to be little more than fifty years of age,
drew out spectacles of silver from an old leather case, and putting them
on, spelled out the coin:

"George--three--eighteen--eighteen hunderd-and-fifteen!"

She threw up her head so quickly that the spectacles dropped from her
nose, and Hulda caught them, and then Mrs. Cannon turned on Hulda with a
ferocious expression and snatched the spectacles from her hand.

"Whar did the devil git it?" Patty Cannon asked.

"Ah! who knows?" the Captain lisped with pale nonchalance, giving one of
those strong, piercing looks he sometimes afforded, right into the
hostess's eyes. "It might be a coincidence: _chis! chito!_ A shilling of
a certain year is no rare thing. But, Madame Cannon, it becomes slightly
curious when six such shillings, all numbered with that significant
year, came out of the same pocket!"

With this he passed five shillings of the same appearance over to the
hostess, and she put on her spectacles again and looked at them all, and
dropped them in her lap with a weary yet frightened expression, and
muttered:

"Van Dorn, who kin he be?"

"That is of less consequence, my dear, than whether we can afford to
sell him."

The Captain was now looking at Hulda with the same strong intentness,
but her eyes were in her plate; and, though Madame Cannon looked at her,
too, with both interest and dislike, Hulda quietly ate on, unconscious
of their regard.

"Shoo!" the woman said; "people kin scare theirselves every day if they
mind to. We've got him, and, if he knows anything, it's all in that
nigger noddle. So eat and be derned!"

"My guardian angel," the Captain remarked, with a blush and a stronger
lisp, "you may not have observed that I have never ceased to eat, while
you immediately lost your appetite. What will you do with the
shillings?"

Mrs. Cannon took them from her lap, and rose as if she meant to throw
them out of the window, her angry face bearing that interpretation.

"Stop, remarkable woman," the Captain said, pulling his soft, flaxen
mustache with the diamond-flashing hand, "let your fecund resources stop
and counsel, for I am only looking to your happiness, that has so
abundantly blessed my life and banished every superstition from my heart
till I believe in neither ghosts, nor God, nor devil, while you believe
in all of them, and give yourself many such unnecessary friends and
intruders. _Chito! chito!_ as the Cubans say, and hear my suggestion
before you throw away those shillings!"

"Take care how you mock me!" cried Patty Cannon, with her dark, bold
eyes furtive, like one both angered and troubled, and her ruddy cheeks
full of cloudy blood.

"Sit down! Give the shillings to pretty Hulda there."

"To her?"

"_Ya, ya!_ to pleasing Hulda; for what will trouble us then, her sinless
bosom being their safe depository, and her long-lashed eyes melting our
ghosts to gray air?"

With a look of strong dislike, the woman gave Hulda the shillings,
saying:

"If you ever show one of 'em to me, gal, I'll make you swaller it."

Hulda took the silver pieces and looked at them a moment with girlish
delight:

"Oh, grandma, how kind you are! Why do you speak so mad at me when you
give me these pretty things? They seem almost warm in my bosom as I put
them there, like things with life. Let me kiss you for them!"

She rose from the chair and approached the mistress of the house, who
sat in a strange terror, not forbidding the embrace, yet almost
shuddering as Hulda stooped and pressed her pure young lips to the
blanched and dissipated face of Patty Cannon.

The Captain looked at the kiss with his peculiar strong, cold look, and
smiled at Hulda graciously and said:

"There, ladies, repose in each other's confidence! A few shillings for
such a kiss is shameful pay, Aunt Patty. Do you remember as well as I
do, Madame Cannon, that once you missed some money, and thought your
mother had stolen it, and hunted everywhere for it, and it never came to
light?"

"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath.

"Has the Señor been in that direction, do you think? I think he has, for
Melson and Milman are up from Twiford's with the news that Zeke's last
hide has burst her chain and fled, and all the lower Nanticoke gives no
trace of her, and Zeke has passed the heavenly gates."

The Captain drew the back of his silver clasp-knife across his throat,
smilingly, and placed on the table a sailor's sheath-knife.

"Zeke only was untied; it was a too generous omission," he said. "The
Philadelphia woman the Señor says he set free, and that she has gone to
start an alarm against us. The Señor is a cool man: he told me that, and
laughed and roared, and says he will live to see us all in a
picture-frame. _Ayme, ayme_, Patty!"

With her face growing longer and longer, the woman heard these scarcely
intelligible sentences--wholly unintelligible to the younger people--and
to Levin it seemed that she grew suddenly old and yet older, till her
cheeks, but lately blooming, seemed dead and wrinkled, and, from
maintaining the appearance of hardly fifty, and fair at that, she now
looked to be more than sixty years of age, and sad and helpless.

"Van Dorn, I'm dying," she muttered, as her eyes glazed, and she settled
down in her chair like a lump of dough.

"_Ha! O hala hala_! hands off, fair Hulda," the Captain cried,
joyfully, as Hulda had been moved to relieve the poor old woman; "no one
shall assist at these ceremonies of expiation but Van Dorn himself,
whose rights in Mistress Cannon are of priority. She's dropsical, and
hastening to perdition too soon, which I must arrest and let her comfort
me still more. Sweet comforter! Young gentleman, you shall help me."

Levin took hold of Patty Cannon's feet and found that she seemed made of
bone, so tough were her sinews, and Van Dorn easily lifted her broad
shoulders, and so she was laid on a bed in the next room, where the
elegant Captain was seen rubbing her limbs, and even handling a bottle
of leeches, one of which he allowed to crawl over the hand that wore the
diamond, making it look like a ruby melting or in living motion. As this
voracious blood-lover took his fill around the straight ankles of the
hostess, the dainty Captain held her in his arms like an ardent lover.

"Honey," sighed the woman, "my rent is due, and Jake Cannon never waits.
Take Huldy and this yer new recruit, my cousin Levin Cannon, an' drive
'em to the ferry,--an' watch that boy, Van Dorn: I want him broke in!
Give him a pistol and a knife, an' have him cut somebody. Put the
blood-mark on him and he's ours."

"Great woman!" the Captain lisped, prolific of his kisses, "Maria
Theresa! Semiramis! Agrippina! Cleopatra! ever fecund in great ideas and
growing youthful by nightshade, _alto! quedo!_ but I love thee!"

"Am I young a little yit, honey?" asked Patty Cannon. "Oh, don't deceive
me, Van Dorn! Can my eyes look love an' hate, like old times?"

"_Si! quizá!_ More and more, dark angel, entering into black age like
torches in a cave, I see your deep eyes flame; but never do they please
me, Patty, as when they flash on some new wicked idea, like this of
marking the boy for life. Who is he?"

"He's a Cannon, one of the stock that my Delaware man belonged to. His
mother looked down on me fur coming in their family: I have remembered
her."

"You want your young cousin made a felon, then?"

"Yes, honey, I want him scorched, so the devil will know him fur his
own."

The Captain reached down to the lady's feet and pulled off the leech and
held it up against his hollow palm, gorged with the blood of the fair
patient.

"See, Patty! The boy shall drink blood like this, till, drunk with it,
he can hold on no more, and drops into our fate as in this vial."

As he spoke he let the leech fall in the bottle, where its reflection in
the glass seemed to splash blood.

"Ha, ha! Van Dorn, I love you!" the woman cried, and smothered him with
caresses.




CHAPTER XXVII.

CANNON'S FERRY.


When it was announced to Levin and Hulda, who had meantime been talking
in the garden, dangerously near the subject of love, that they were to
be given a ride to Cannon's Ferry with Captain Van Dorn, at the especial
desire of Aunt Patty Cannon--who also sent them a handful of half-cents
to spend--they were both delighted, though Hulda said:

"Dear Levin, if it was only ourselves going for good, how happy we might
be! I could live with your beautiful mother and work for her, and,
knowing me to be always there, you would bring your money home instead
of wasting it."

"Can't we do so some way?" asked Levin. "Oh, I wish I had some sense! I
wish Jimmy Phoebus was yer, Huldy, to take me out thair in the garden
an' whip me like my father. But, if I hadn't come yer, how could I have
seen you, Huldy?"

"How could I have spent such a heavenly night of peace and hope if you
had not come, dear? The Good Being must have led you to me."

"Huldy," said Levin, after thinking to the range of his knowledge,
"maybe thar's a post-office at Cannon's Ferry, an' you kin write a
letter to Jack Wonnell fur me."

"Why not to your mother, Levin?"

"Oh, I am ashamed to tell her; it would kill her."

"If we should be found out, Levin, Aunt Patty would kill me. There is no
paper here, no ink that I can get, the postage on a letter is almost
nineteen cents, and, look! these half-cents are short of the sum by just
two."

"I have gold," cried Levin, thinking of the residue of Joe Johnson's
bounty.

He put his hand into his pocket, but the money was no longer there.

"Hush!" cried Hulda, "you have been robbed. Everybody is robbed who
sleeps here. Grandma can smell gold like the rat that finds yellow
cheese."

The individual who had served the breakfast was seen coming towards
them, a man in size, with a low forehead, no chin to speak of, a long,
crane neck, and a badly scratched and festered face.

"Mister," he said to Levin, "come help me hitch the horses; I'm beat so
I can't see how."

Levin started at once, suggesting to Hulda to make search for his
missing money, and, when they were in the little stable, the man
observed, in a whisper, to Levin:

"By smoke!"

Levin went on putting the bridles and breeching on the horses, when the
man said again, with an insinuating grin:

"By smoke!"

"Heigh?" exclaimed Levin.

"By smoke!" the man remarked again, with a very ardent emphasis.

"You must have been in Prencess Anne," Levin said, "to swar 'by smoke.'"

The ill-raised man, with such an inferior head and cranish neck, now
slipped around to the front of Levin and looked down on him, and
whispered:

"Hokey-pokey!"

The idea crossed Levin's mind that the scullion of Patty Cannon must
have gone crazy.

"Whair did you pick up them words, Cy?" Levin asked.

"Hokey-pokey!" answered Cy James, with a more mysterious and impressive
sufflation; "Hokey-pokey! By smoke! and Pangymonum, too!"

"Why, Cy! what do you mean? Jimmy Phoebus never swars but in them air
words. Do you know Jimmy Phoebus?"

"Pangymonum, too!" hissed Cy James, with every animation. "Hokey-pokey,
three! an' By smoke, one!"

He put his long arms on his knees, and bent down like a great goose, and
stared into Levin's eyes.

"I never had sense enough," Levin said, "to guess a riddle, Cy Jeems.
Them words I have hearn a good man--my mother's friend--use so often
that they scare me. My mind's been a-thinkin' on him night an' day. Oh,
is he dead?"

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!" the long, lean, excited
fellow whispered, with the greatest solemnity.

"They're Jimmy Phoebus's daily words, dear Cyrus. He was killed on the
river night before last; I saw him fall; it is my sin and misery."

"He ain't dead," Cy James whispered, very low and carefully. "I won't
tell you whar he is till you make Huldy _like_ me."

"How kin I do that, Cy?"

"She thinks I'm a coward and gits whipped by Owen Daw. Tell her I ain't
no coward. Tell her I'm goin' to fry all these people on my griddle--all
but Huldy. Tell her I'm only playin' coward till I gets 'em all in
batter an' the griddle greased, an' then I'll be the bully of the
Cross-roads!"

"Do you hate _me_, Cy Jeems? I ain't done nothin' to you. I'm a
prisoner here till I kin git my boat back from Joe an' go to Prencess
Anne."

"I won't hate you if you kin make Huldy love me," Cy James replied.
"Tell her I ain't no coward; that I'm goin' to be free, an' rich too."
He dropped his palms to his knees again, and whispered, "fur I know whar
ole Patty buries her gole an' silver!"

"Come with those horses, you idle lads," the lisping voice of the
Captain was heard to call. "_Ya, ya!_ there, _luego!_ the morning passes
on."

"All ready," Cy James replied, and as they left the stable door he
whispered once again, and looked significantly towards Johnson's
Cross-roads:

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!"

The Captain, looking like a gentleman of the knightly ages misplaced in
this forest lair, held the reins standing on the ground, and handed
Hulda in to the seat beside his own with a grace and a blush and a
lisping laugh that, Levin thought, were very fascinating.

"Now, Master Cannon, take your place in the tail of the vehicle," the
Captain said, bowing to Levin, and darting one of those cold, coarse
looks at him that he vouchsafed but for a moment, like a soft cat that
has all the nature of the rabbit except the tiger's glare.

The vehicle was an old wagon without springs, and Levin's seat was a
piece of board, while Hulda's had a back to it, and the Captain had
padded it with a bear's-skin robe. He looked with the most delicate
attention at Hulda, blushed when she looked at him, and, scarcely
noticing the horses, yet having them under nearly automatic control, he
drove out of Patty Cannon's lane and turned into the woods.

Levin cast one long, prying look at Johnson's tavern, wishing he might
have the gift to see through its weather-stained planking and tall blank
roof, and then he watched the road, of hard sand or piney litter, with
here and there a mud-hole or long, puddly rut in it, unravel like a
ribbon behind the wheels among the thick pines.

He also observed the skill with which the Captain threw his long cowhide
whip, a mere strip of rawhide fastened to a stick, awkward in other
hands; but Van Dorn could brush a fly from either of the short, shaggy
Delaware horses with it, and hardly look where he struck or disturb the
horse, and he could deliver a blow with it by mere sleight that made the
animal stagger and tremble with the abrupt pain.

At a little sandy rill, the only one they crossed, a long water-snake
endeavored to escape before the rapid wagon could strike it, but the
Captain rose to his feet quick and cat-like, and projected the long lash
into the roadside, and the snake writhed and bounded in the air almost
cut in two. Then, sitting again and bending so close to Hulda that his
long, downy mustache of gold touched her cheek, Van Dorn said, softly:

"_Qué hermoso!_ Young wild-flower, let me take a snake out of your path
also?"

"Which one, Captain?"

"It does not matter. Name any one."

"Alas!" said Hulda, "I am of them; how can I wish harm to my stepfather
and my grand-dame? They are not what I wish, but I am commanded to honor
them."

"By whom, fair Hulda?"

"By God. I read it in the Book after I heard it from a slave."

"_Dónde está!_ What slave that we know was so God-read?"

"Poor drunken Dave. He was a good man before he knew us. He told me all
the Commandments for a drink of brandy, and I wrote them down and
afterwards I found them in a book."

"_Chis! chito!_ how graceful is your mind, Hulda! It comes out of the
absolute blank of your condition and discovers things, as the young
osprey, untaught before, knows where to dive for fish. Who that ever
comes to Johnson's Cross-roads brings the Bible?"

"Colonel McLane."

"He? the self-righteous crocodile! he gave you the Book?"

"Yes. He told me Joe and grandma were good people--'conservative good
people,' I think he called it; but he said you believed nothing, and
there was no basis, I think he called it, for 'conservative good' in
you."

"_O hala hala!_ But this is good," the Captain softly remarked, stroking
his golden mustache with the hand that carried the lustrous ring. "Patty
Cannon may be saved; I must be damned; and Allan McLane will sit in
judgment. No, I believe nothing, because such as they believe!"

"That is why nobody likes you," Hulda frankly observed, "agreeable as
you are."

"And can you believe in anything after the surroundings of your
childhood, touching crime like the pond-lily that grows among the
water-snakes?"

"The lily cannot help it, and is just as white as if it grew under
glass, because--"

"Because the lily has none of the blood of the snake?" the captain
lisped. "Do you enter that claim?"

"No," said Hulda; "I know I am born from wicked parents, a daughter of
crime, my father hanged, my mother of dreadful origin, but never have I
felt that God held me accountable for their works if I kept my heart
humble and my hands from sin; and never have I been tempted yet from
within my own nature to enjoy a single moment of such hideous
selfishness. And I thank my kind Maker that something to love and
believe in, though unhappy as myself, has come down the sad pathway I
looked along so many years, and found me waiting for him."

Without reply, the Captain kept his own thoughts for several minutes,
and finally sighed:

"I know one thing in which I might believe, pretty child."

"Oh, then embrace it," Hulda said, "and give your faith a single straw
to cling to."

Van Dorn's hand slipped around her waist, and his florid cheeks and blue
eyes bent beneath her Leghorn hat:

"I find it here, perhaps, Hulda. Shall I embrace your youth with my
strong passion? I fear I love you."

"Yes," she answered, looking up with her long-lashed eyes of such
entrancing gray; "kiss me if it will give you hope!"

The blush and high color went out of his face as he stared into those
passive, large gray orbs, wide open beneath his pouting, rich,
effeminate lips, and, as he hesitated, Hulda repeated:

"Kiss me, if it will make you hope!"

"No, no," he answered; "of all places I am most hopeless _there_."

"I knew you would not kiss me," Hulda said, with a tone above him, "if I
gave you the right for any pure object. The kiss _you_ would give me
does not see its mate in my soul."

"You hate me, then?" said Van Dorn.

"No, I pity you; I pray for you, too."

"For me? What interest have you in me?"

"I do not know," said Hulda. "I have often wondered what made me think
of you so often and, yet, never with admiration. You are the only person
here who appears to have lost something by being here; some portion of
you seems to have disappeared; I have felt that you might have been a
gentleman, though you can never be again. I shrink from you, and still I
pity you. But, with all your handsome ways, I would never love you,
while the poor boy who is riding with us I loved as soon as he came."

"_Chis! chito!_ You can shrink from me and not from a Cannon, too? Why,
girl, you have put him in my power."

"I have been in your power for a long time, Captain Van Dorn, and you
have looked at me with bold and evil eyes many a time, but never came
nearer. When I gaze at you as I did just now, you fly from me. That boy
I love is as safe as I am, in your hands."

"Why, dear presumer? Tell me."

"Because I love him, and you require my pity. As long as you protect
that poor orphan boy I shall carry your name to God for pardon; if you
ever do him harm, my prayers for you will be dumb forever."

"_Oh! aymé! aymé!_" softly laughed Van Dorn, his blush not coming now;
"you forget, Hulda, that I believe in nothing."

They had hardly gone four miles when a little, low-pitched town of small
square houses, strewn about like toy-blocks between pairs of red outside
chimneys, sat, in the soft, humid October morning, along the rim of a
marshy creek that, skirting the hamlet, flowed into the Nanticoke River
a few miles, by its course, above Twiford's wharf. Two streets, formed
by two roads, ended in a third street along the sandy, flattish river
shore, and there stood four or five larger dwellings, like their
humbler neighbors, built of wood, but with bolder, greater chimneys,
rising into the air as if in rivalry of four large ships and brigs that
lay at anchor or beside the two wharves, and threw their masts and spars
into the sailing clouds, making the low forest that closed river and
village in, stoop to its humility. But the beautiful river, with
frequent bluffs of sand and woods, flowing two hundred yards wide in
stately tide, and bearing up to Cannon's Ferry fish-boats and pungies,
Yankee schooners and woodscows, and the signs of life, however lowly,
that floated in blue smoke from many hearths, or sounded in oars,
rigging, and lading, seemed to Hulda human joy and power, and she cried
to Levin:

"Levin, oh, look! Did you ever see as big a place as this? Yonder is the
road to Seaford, just as far as we have come! The big ships are taking
corn for West Indies, and bringing sugar and molasses. That is the ferry
scow, and on the other side it is only five miles to Laurel."

"Do you like to travel that road?" asked the Captain, with his pleasing
lisp and blush returned again.

"It makes me sad," replied Hulda; "but I do not mutter when I go past
the spot, like grandma."

"What spot?" asked Levin.

"Where father killed the traveller," Hulda said. "He died shamefully for
it. You could almost see the place but for yonder woods, where the road
to Laurel climbs the sandy hill."

"What's this?" said Van Dorn, seeing a little crowd around one of the
single-story cabins, and turning his team into the parallel street.

A very tall, grand-looking man towered above the rest, and seemed unable
to stand upright in the low cottage, with his proportions, so that he
took his place on the grassy sand without and gave his directions to
some one within:

"Levy on the spinning-wheel! Simplify the equation! Stand by your _fi.
fa.!_ Don't be chicken-hearted, constable--she's had the equivalent; now
she sees the quotient, too."

Van Dorn looked on and saw a spinning-wheel come out of the door, and a
little wool in a bag after it. Jacob Cannon put his foot on the wheel
and poked his head in the door.

"I see an axe and a coffee-mill there, constable: levy onto 'em with
your _distringas. Experientia docet stultos!_ Pass out that pair of
shoes!"

A voice of a woman crying was heard, and Van Dorn and Levin both leaped
out to look.

Hulda also stepped down and disappeared.

A woman, barely able to stand up, and white as illness and anguish could
make her, had staggered to the door to beg that her shoes be given back,
and pointed to her naked feet.

"Now she's off the bed, levy on that!" cried the military figure with
the long, eloquent face and twinkling eyes; "shove it out the window.
Mind your _fi. fa._ and I'll take care of the quotient."

"Have mercy!" cried the woman; "my child was only born last week."

"Fling out that good chair there, constable. Levy on the green chest!
Don't you see a whole quilt or blanket anywhere! Allow neither tret nor
suttle when you serve a writ for Isaac and Jacob Cannon!"

"Where shall I lie with my babe?" cried the poor woman, looking around
on the naked cabin, where neither bed, nor blanket, nor chair, nor
chest, nor spinning-wheel remained.

"_Li-vari facias!_ and _fi-eri facias!_ If there's a mistake a replevin
lies, but no mistakes are made by Isaac and Jacob Cannon. Constable, I
think I see an iron pot on that crane!"

"It's got meat in it, sir--meat a-bilin'," answered the constable.

"Turn out the meat! Levy on the pot! Make the quotient accurate!
Eliminate the pot from the equation!"

Out came the pot, as the material boiling in it put out the October
fire, and it was thrown in the miscellaneous heap at Jacob Cannon's
feet.

"Now take the cradle, hard-hearted man," the woman cried, "and turn the
baby into the fire, too, since I can cook nothing to make its milk in my
breasts."

"Is the cradle worth anything, constable?" asked the magnificent-looking
man with the gray silvery lights around his horsy nose; "if it's worth
taking, I want it. People who can't pay their debts must live single
like Jacob Cannon, and not be distrained."

A boy, with his face scratched, and dissipation settled in it, bounded
suddenly into the aghast group of spectators, and made a vicious dive to
recover the effects around Jacob Cannon's feet, but that mighty worthy
took him by the collar and, holding him up, dropped him over a fence
like a bug:

"Owen Daw, here be witnesses to an assault _insultus_, actionable as a
trespass _vi_, the quotient whereof is damages or the equivalent in
Georgetown jail. Take heed, good citizens, and especially I note you,
Captain Van Dorn."

"I'll kill him," shouted the young bully of Johnson's Cross-roads, and
late distrainer on the profile of Cyrus James, Esquire, seizing an ugly
stick.

"Justifiable as _son assault demesne_," remarked the creditor,
carelessly, as he wrenched the bobbin from the spinning-wheel and
knocked the boy down with it.

His commanding manner and the ready hand operated to abash the latter,
and, deeply pained with the scene, Levin Dennis fervently and
impulsively cried to Van Dorn:

"Oh, Captain! can't you pay her debts! I'll give all Joe's going to give
me, to pay you back. See how she lays on the bare floor! Hear her child
crying for her! Oh! I think I hear my mother's voice a-callin' of me
home as I listen to it."

Van Dorn, feeling Levin's hands grasp his own with simple confidence,
heard and did not turn his head, while blushes like roses bloomed
successively upon his fresh, effeminate cheeks. He did not repel the
boy's hands, however, but looked at the scene with worldly and unpitying
curiosity.

"To pay the distraints of Isaac and Jacob Cannon," he murmured, softly,
"would keep a poor slaver poor. You must grow accustomed to such cries:
I had to do so. Learn to love money like that merchant and me, and you
will think them music."

"Oh, when we cry to God for mercy, captain, maybe our cries will sound
like that! I can't bear to hear it."

"You told mother, Jake Cannon, when she rented this ole house," the boy,
Owen Daw, exclaimed, "that she needn't pay the rent, if she didn't want
to, till the day of judgment."

"I've got the judgment," Jacob Cannon answered, his whitish eyes seeming
to chuckle to the bridge of his nose, "and this is the day it's due. All
legal days are 'judgment days' to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

"My son, my son," the woman's voice wailed out to Owen Daw, "I see the
end of your going to Patty Cannon's: my baby to the grave, myself to the
almshouse, and you to the gallows."

"Captain, Captain," Levin cried, "oh, pay the debt for me! Mother's
never been poor as this. Pay it, and I will work fur you anywhair, dear
captain."

"How much is the debt," asked Van Dorn, lispingly.

"Ten dollars," spoke the constable, also moved to shame.

"Cannon, will you take me for it?"

"I'll take your judgment-bond or the cash, Captain Van Dorn, nothing
less."

"Put back her stuff," the captain said, slightly pressing Levin's hand,
as if to say, "This is for you"--"put back her stuff and I'll settle it
with Isaac Cannon."

"God bless you!" cried the woman, taking her babe from the cradle and
hushing its hunger at her breast; "they call you a wicked man, but
blessings on you for all the good you do!"

"_Chito! chito!_" smiled Van Dorn. "I did it for this foolish boy; I pity
none."

Hulda had resorted to the strand, or river street of Cannon's Ferry,
where there were two storehouses, and she had borrowed quill and ink,
and written a letter addressed to "Mrs. Ellenora Dennis, Princess Anne,
Somerset County, Maryland," saying:

"_Madam, Levin, your son, is near this place against his will, among
dangerous men and in great temptation, but he has found a friend. In one
week this friend will try to write again, and, if not heard from, seek
Levin Dennis at Johnson's Cross-roads_."

This letter, written with all her unproficient speed, had just been
folded, wafered, and endorsed, and she had put down one of the shillings
of 1815 to pay the postage, when a shadow fell upon the store counter,
and the letter was withdrawn from her hand; Van Dorn stood by her side.

"_Chis! chito! Es posible?_ A spy, perhaps. Now you will love Van Dorn,
or Grandma Cannon shall hear your letter read!"

"Give it to me, Captain," Hulda pleaded; "she will kill me if she reads
it."

"If it were sent, _pomarosa_, we all might die. No, you are too
dangerous."

He looked, without his blush, at the shilling she was putting back in
her bosom, and his eye was cold and fierce. Hulda's heart sank down.

"Brother Isaac," cried Jacob Cannon, to a man of fine, lean height, who
was at the desk--a man a little shorter than Jacob, and not so much of a
king in appearance but with the same whitish eyes dancing around the
bridge of his nose, and a more covert and thoughtful brow--"Brother
Isaac, Captain Van Dorn is chicken-hearted, and wants to settle the debt
of the Widow O'Day, otherwise Daw."

"By cash or judgment-note, captain?"

"Cash," answered Van Dorn, modestly; "take it out of this double-eagle,
with Madam Cannon's rent for your farm."

"There's a tree--a bee-tree, Brother Jacob, I think you said--cut down
from Mrs. Cannon's field?"

"Yes, actionable under statute made and provided, wilfully to spoil or
destroy any timber or other trees, roots, shrubs, or plants; value of
said bee-tree three dollars; _levari facias!_ The quotient is
unsatisfactory to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

The eyes of the elder and smaller brother endeavored to have an
introduction to each other through the bridge of his nose.

"Oh, Brother Jacob," he chuckled, "what an executive help you air!
Captain, isn't he a perfect Marius?"

"Madam Cannon," observed the captain, "throws up the farm with this
payment, gentlemen. She has already moved her effects across the line to
son-in-law Johnson's. The bee-tree I know nothing about."

"Brother Jacob," spoke Isaac Cannon, "Moore takes the farm! Let him be
notified that his rent commences without day."

"Execution made, Brother Isaac," answered the Marius of the family.
"This morning, perceiving Patty Cannon about to move her effects, my
bailiff seized on her plough as security for the aforesaid bee-tree
spoiled, maimed, and destroyed, and Moore is ploughing to put in his
wheat with it already. Time is money to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

"Ha, ha! what an executive comfort! Brother Jacob never adds an item to
profit and loss."

"Gentlemen," said Van Dorn, "I recommend you not to be charging
bee-trees to tenants in the vicinity of Johnson's Cross-roads. It's an
unusual item, and we are raising young men there who may not understand
it."

"Captain," said the elder Cannon, chuckling as if still in admiration of
Marius's subtlety, "I recollect now that our ferryman brought over a man
from Laurel this morning with some news. A woman with a broken shackle
reported there last night, and said she was the slave of Daniel Custis
of Princess Anne: she came from Broad Creek."

"Where did she go?"

"A Methodist preacher put her in his buggy and started to her master's
with her."

"Then she'll beat the wind," said Van Dorn; "these preachers are all
horse-jockeys, and can outswap the devil. _Hola! ya, ya!_ I must see to
this."

He strode out, with a cold eye glanced at Hulda.

"Come, young people," spoke the grand head of Jacob Cannon to Levin and
Hulda; "I will show you my museum."

He led the way to a warehouse overhanging the river and unlocked a door,
and told them to walk carefully till they could see in the dark of the
interior.

Levin kept Hulda's hand in his as they slowly saw emerge from the
shadows a great variety of dissimilar things heaped together, till the
house could hardly hold the vast aggregate of pots and kettles,
spinning-wheels and cradles, bedsteads and beds, harrows and ploughs,
chairs and gridirons, rakes and hoes, silhouettes and picture-frames,
hand-made quilts of calico and pillows of home-plucked geese feathers,
fishermen's nets and oars--whatever made the substance of living in an
old country without minerals and manufactures, in the early part of the
nineteenth century.

"Whare did you git' em, sir?" Levin asked.

"Executed of 'em," said the warrior head and stature of Jacob Cannon;
"pounced on 'em; satisfied judgments upon 'em. _Fi. fa.!_ We call
this Peale's Museum Number Two, or the Variegated Quotient."

"All these things taken from the poor?" asked Hulda. "How many miseries
they tell!"

"Mr. Cannon," said Levin, "what kin you do with 'em? People won't buy
'em. They're just a-rottin' to pieces."

"We keep' em to show all them who trespass on Isaac and Jacob Cannon,"
answered Marius, with easy grandeur, "that there is a judgment-day!"

Hulda's long-lashed gray eyes, with a look of more than childish
contempt, accompanied her words:

"I should think you would fear that day, Mr. Cannon, when you say the
prayer, 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us.'"

The wind from the river seemed to bend the old warehouse, and the noise
it made through the chinks and around the corners, slightly stirring the
loosely disposed pile of cottage and hut comforts, seemed to arouse low
wails among these as when they were torn from the chimney side and the
family.

"Where is my baby?" the cradle seemed to say, "that I received and
rocked warm from the womb of pain? Oh, I am hungry for his little
smile!"

"Why do I rest my busy wheel?" the spinner seemed to creak, "when I know
my children are without stockings? Who keeps me here idle while Mother
asks for me?"

"Where is the old gray head," sighed the feathers, sifting in the breeze
from a broken pillow-case, "that every night and in the afternoons dozed
on our bag of down, and picked us over once a year, and said her prayers
in us? Oh, is she sleeping on the cold, bare floor, and we so useless!"

The pot seethed to the kettle, "It is dinner-time, and the little boys
are crying for food, and still there is no one to lift me on the crane
and start the fire beneath me! What will they think of me, they gathered
around so many years and watched me boil, and poked their little fingers
in to taste the stewing meat? I want to go! I want to go!"

The kettle answered to the pot: "I never sung since the constable forced
me from grandmother's hand, and robbed her of the cup of tea."

The old quilt of many squares fluttered in the draught: "Take me to the
young wife who sewed me together and showed me so proudly, for I fear
she is a-cold since her young husband died!"

These household sounds the thrilled young lovers, standing so poor and
on the brink of what they knew not, seemed to hear in awe, and drew
closer to each other, like young Eve and Adam in the great wreck of
Paradise and at the voice of God.

Hand in hand they stepped forth into the bright light of day, and walked
along the sandy street beneath the tall locust, maple, and ailanthus
trees that grew in line along the front yards of the Cannon brothers.
Four large houses stood sidewise, end to end, here: first, Cannon's
business house; next, Isaac Cannon's comfortable home, where he dwelt, a
married man; and, third, the elegant frame mansion, with tall, airy
chimneys, of Jacob Cannon the bachelor, whose house, built for a bride,
had never yet been warmed by a fire; finally, the old, bow-roofed, low
dwelling of the mother of the Cannons, opposite which was the ferry
wharf, and Van Dorn talking to the negro ferryman.

"Levin," said pretty Hulda, not sad, but very grave, "this noble house
is like that noble-looking Mr. Cannon, hollow and cold. He lives with
his brother Isaac, and keeps his own dwelling empty and locked up,
because he loved money too much to find a wife."

"Let us love each other, Huldy," Levin said; "it is all we've got."

"It is all there is to get, my love," Hulda answered. "Yes, I do love
you, Levin. I will try to save you, if I can, because I love you, though
suffering may come to me."

"No," cried Levin, "I cannot leave you, dear. If I could now cross in
the ferry-boat, I wouldn't do it; I must go back with you."

As Captain Van Dorn came up from the wharf, blushing like a school-boy,
and tapping his white teeth together under the long flax of his
mustache, his attention was arrested by a proclamation pasted on a post:


      "_Five Hundred Dollars Reward, for_

      JOSEPH MOORE JOHNSON, KIDNAPPER.

  "_The above reward will be paid by me to any person or
  persons--and they will be exempted from detention--who
  will deliver to me the body of the above-named miscreant, that
  he may be brought to trial in Pennsylvania_.

      "JOSEPH WATSON, _Mayor of Philadelphia_."


"_Chis! he!_" Van Dorn sighed; "the end must soon be near. Now, young
people, come!"

As they passed Cannon's place, going out of town, the familiar voice of
Jacob was heard to cry:

"Owen Daw's escaped, Brother Isaac; but we'll clap it to him on a _de
bonis non_. I'll never take my eye off him till I die."

"Brother Jacob, what an executive help you air!"

As Van Dorn drove the horses up the slight ascent in the rear of the
ferry, past an ancient double puncheon house there, with an arch in the
centre, young Hulda--who now wore shoes and stockings, and a presentable
dress of English goods, and looked quite the woman out of her sincere
and sometimes proud and eloquent eyes--said to him, as she pointed back:

"Captain, it was there my father killed the traveller, where we see the
road beyond the ferry enter the pines."

"Yes," said Van Dorn, giving her a cold look; "we might see the place
but for the woods. It is at a hill, a short mile from the Nanticoke."

"Tell Levin about it, captain."

"_Quedo, quedo!_ It would not be pleasant."

"Yes," said Hulda; "if it was true, I can hear it: I want Levin to hear
it, too, so that no deceit shall be between us."

Her smooth, moist hair, gray, humid eyes, complexion born between the
rose and dew, and straight, lithe figure, and air of dignity and truth,
impressed Van Dorn curiously:

"How bold you grow, wild-flower! Cannot you stoop to re-create me? I,
too, would live without deceit. But I will not tell you that story."

"You are afraid," spoke Hulda, feeling that nothing but this man and
three miles of level road separated her from the vengeance of Patty
Cannon, and that she must assert herself strongly over him.

"_Ya, ya!_ Are you not harsh? Remember, you may be whipped by your
grandma."

"No, you will whip me, or kill me, if it is to be done. You dare not
give me to her to punish."

"Dare not, again? Why?"

"Because you are my guardian. Between us is an instinct different from
love, but strong; I feel it. I lean towards you, but not on you. What is
it?"

"_O Dios!_" lisped Van Dorn, his blush suspended and his warm blue eyes
fascinated by her. "Is this a child or Echo?"

"Tell me of my father's crime. I want Levin to know the wretched thing
he has affection for."

"_Ayme! ah!_ Well, listen, young lovers; and see what grisly things walk
in these pines! There was a man named Brereton; they call him Bruington
here, where their noses are twisted and their chins weak. He came from
old Lewes, off to the east by Cape Henlopen, and of a stout family, in
which was a grain of evil ever smoking through the blood. Do you
sometimes feel it, Hulda?"

"No, not evil like that."

"He was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and held the iron while the master
struck. One day a man came in the shop, whose horse had thrown a shoe,
to have a shoeing, and, when he paid for it, he took a handful of money
from his pocket, and one piece--a dollar--fell in the soft soot of the
shop, unperceived but by the boy: _chis!_ he covered it with his foot."

Van Dorn's whip-lash firmly covered a huge fly on the horse's ear, and
laid it dead.

"When the man departed, the boy raised his foot and uncovered the
dollar; his master said, 'Smart boy!' They divided the stolen dollar."

"Jimmy Phoebus says the fust step is half of a journey," Levin noted.

"The blacksmith's boy looked avariciously on travellers ever after, who
might possess a dollar. He took the empty shop of Patty Cannon's first
husband, years after that saint died, and worked on hobbles, clevises,
and chains to hold the kidnapped articles of commerce. Naturally he
kidnapped, too, and, while she was yet a child, Patty's daughter became
Brereton's wife, bestowed by the fond, appreciative mother. Master
Levin, if you fall into his path, Brereton's daughter may be bestowed on
you. _Hola!_ behold her in Hulda."

"I can't see any of that sin in Hulda, Captain; she ain't even ashamed."

"No," affirmed Hulda, looking sincerely at Van Dorn; "it is too true to
make me ashamed. I feel as if God's hand covered me like the silver
dollar under my father's foot, because he let me survive such parents."

As she spoke she took one of the silver shillings of 1815 and covered it
with her hand in Van Dorn's sight. Van Dorn spoke on rapidly:

"There were two brothers named Griffin from about Cambridge, in
Maryland; spoiled boys who had taken to the flesh trade, and they stole
men and gambled the proceeds away, and Brereton was their leader. One
day a traveller came by from Carolina, hunting contraband slaves, and he
was of your boastful sort, and dropped the hint that he had fifteen
thousand dollars on his body to be invested. No later had he spoken than
he felt his folly, from the burning eyes around him and watering mouths
telling him to sleep there and slaves would be fetched; so he started in
a fright for Laurel, by way of Cannon's Ferry, intending to deposit his
money or make them deal with him there. The word was passed to Brereton
by his wife or mother-in-law, and by Brereton to the Griffins, to mount
and intercept the gold. Some say," lisped Van Dorn, "that Mistress
Cannon, dressed in man's clothes, commanded the band."

A deep, chuckling interest, like the sound of a hidden brook, attended
Van Dorn's recital, and he was blushing like a girl.

"At Slabtown, a nondescript spot a mile above Cannon's, the
light-marching band crossed in a row-boat; they piled brush and bent
down saplings in the traveller's road, where he should almost reach the
brow of the hill in his buggy, and when the fleshmonger halted at the
obstacle, _chis, hola!_ they let him have it on both sides, and sent
icicles to his heart. He drew a pistol, but in a dying hand. 'Away!'
cried the assassins; 'he is not dead.' His horse, in fright at bursting
firearms in the evening shades, leaped the brushy barriers and galloped
to Laurel, and delivered there an ashy-visaged effigy, down whose beard
the red dye of his life dripped audibly, as he sat stiff in death in the
buggy. His name was only guessed; how happy he in that!"

"And what was the fate of the murderers?" Hulda asked, with less horror
than Levin showed.

"Three of them were arrested; one of the Griffins exposed his brother
and Captain Brereton; these two died on the gallows at Georgetown, young
Brereton exerting himself under the noose to prevent his injudicious
comrade saying too much on peerless Patty Cannon and her fair sisters,
and thinking on their interests more than on this living child. Ha!
Hulda _Brereton?_"

"The other Griffin also suffered death?" suggested Hulda, with a pale,
unevasive countenance.

"Yes, your fond grandma, then in her blazing charms, drew him to her
band again with the lure of Widow Brereton's hand; he killed a constable
to recommend himself the better, and died on the gallows at his native
Cambridge. _Hala hala!_ she gave your mother, wild-flower Hulda, to Joe
Johnson next to wife."

"It is an awful story," Levin said, "but Hulda never saw it."

"I can remember my father," said Hulda; "a large, strong man, with a
slow, heavy face, but he never smiled on me."

"Well, here is the cross-roads," said Van Dorn. "What shall I do with
this letter, bad wild-flower?"

"Read it, if you will, or take this English shilling and post it."

Van Dorn shrank back, rejecting the money.

"Will you not buy it back, Hulda," he whispered, "with love?"

"Never."

"You may pay for this letter this night with your life or modesty!"

"You dare not kill me," Hulda said.

"You will see," said Van Dorn.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

PACIFICATION.


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 naïvely 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."[4]




CHAPTER XXIX.

BEGINNING OF THE RAID.


The raid into Delaware was all organized when Levin and Hulda were
driven to Johnson's tavern, and the arrival of Van Dorn called forth
cheers and yells, as that blushing worthy threw his trim, athletic
figure out of the wagon and bowed to Joe Johnson, on the tavern porch:

"_O hala hala!_ do you go, son-in-law?"

"I'll ride with ye, Captain, a split of the Maryland way, but sprat for
that Delaware! I'll go in it no more. I'll stand whack with you,
however, fur the madges I give you and fur my stalling ken."

"_Quedito!_" lisped Van Dorn; "we never leave your interests out,
son-in-law. How is Aunt Patty?"

"She's made a punch fur the population, an' calls fur young Levin thar
to lush with her."

"I'll take mine along," Levin cried, "an' drink it in the chill o' the
night."

"No," commanded the voice of Patty Cannon; "it's a-waitin' fur you, son:
a good stiff bowl of apple and sugar. Him as misses his drinks yer we
sets no account on."

As Van Dorn and Levin pushed through the motley crowd on the little
porch into the bar, where Mrs. Cannon administered, she set before them
two fiery bowls, and cried:

"Come in yer, Colonel McLane, an' jine my nug an' my young cousin
Levin."

"No, Patty," answered a voice from the next room within; "I've drunk my
share. There's nothing like a conservative course."

As Patty put her head into this inner room, Levin Dennis, seeing a
window open at his elbow, threw the whole of his liquor over his
shoulder into the yard and smacked his lips heartily, saying,

"Good!"

"Ha!" exclaimed Van Dorn, evidently noticing Levin's deceit; "smart
people are around us, Patty. Beware!"

He took from his pocket the fateful letter and glanced at its
endorsement, and, as he did so, Levin heard an exclamation in the yard
from a man who had received the whole of the apple brandy and sugar in
his face, and was furious; but as soon as he seemed to recognize the
thrower he muttered, apologetically:

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! and Pangymonum, too!"

When Levin looked at Van Dorn again, the blush was on his face, but the
letter had disappeared.

"Beware of the conservative course, Colonel," lisped Van Dorn, "except
when generous Patty makes the punch; for she holds such measure of it
that she does not see our infirmities."

"Honey," cried Patty Cannon to Levin, giving him an affectionate hug,
"have ye swallered yer liquor so smart as that? Why, I love to see a
nice boy drink."

"But no more for him now, _cajela_," the Captain protested; "two such
will make him fall off his horse. _Bebamos_, Patty! _Esta
excelente!_"--drinking.

"How purty the Captain says them things," the madam cried to the
gentleman within. "Maybe he's a mockin' his ole sweetheart. Oh, Van
Dorn, if I thought you could forget me I would kill you!"

Levin noticed the rapid temper and demoniac face of this not unengaging
lady as she spoke, her whole nature turning its course like a wheeling
bat, and from plausibility to an instant's jealousy, and then to a dark
tide of awful rage, took but a thought.

"_Qué disparate! hala o he!_" Van Dorn lisped, sweetly, chucking the
hostess under the chin; "but I do love to see thee so, thou charmer of
my life. Never will I desert thee, Patty, whilst thou can suffer."

Her dark clouds slowly passed away as Levin turned from the place, but
her small head and abundant raven hair showed the blood troubled to the
roots, and the eyes, once rich with midnight depths, now glazing in the
course of time, like old window panes, by age, searched the bandit's
face with a strange fear:

"Van Dorn, time and pleasure cannot kill you: how well you look to-day.
I think you are a boy, to be ruined again every time you love me, you
blush so modestly. Where is that pot of color you paint your cheeks with
even before _me_, whose blushes none can recollect? Why do you love me?"

"_O dios!_" said Van Dorn; "I love thee for these spells of splendor,
dark night and noonday passion, the alternations of earth and hell that
eclipse heaven altogether. I love to see thee fear, though fearing
nothing here, because I see nothing that you fear beyond the grave. You
hate this boy?"

"I hate him worse than wrinkles. Let him not come to me a child
to-morrow; let him see ghosts long as he lives."

"How are the prisoners, Patty?"

"Why, the white nigger, dovey, is sick to-day; blood-loss and blisters
have give him fever. My nigger, that I tied--ha! ha! a good job for
Patty Cannon, at her age!--says t'other's a pore coaster named Jimmy
Phoebus."

"Joe must be ready for a quick departure," the Captain exclaimed, "when
we come back from Dover: it is a bold undertaking, and the whole of the
little state will be aroused like a black snake uncoiling in one's
pocket."

The woman pointed from her shoulder towards the inner room, and spoke
even lower than before:

"Van Dorn, I have a customer."

"For negroes?"

"No, for Huldy. He shall have her."

       *       *       *       *       *

As Levin Dennis stood at the cross-roads without, he saw a strange man
ploughing in the farm so recently deserted by his hostess for the gayer
cross-roads. The afternoon light fell on the sandy fields and struck a
polish from the ploughshare, and, as the ploughman passed the brambly
spot again, the buzzards slowly circled up, as if to protest that he
came too near their young.

The long, lean servant, who had waited on the breakfast-table, came out
to Levin and watched his eyes.

"Ploughin', ploughin'," he said. "Levin, I kin show you how to plough: I
can't do it, but you're the man."

"Cyrus, Huldy don't hate you. She says you're the nighest to a friend
she's got."

"Oh, I love her like sugar-cane," the lean, cymlin-headed servant said.
"Tell her I'm goin' to be a great man. I'm goin' to spile the game. They
lick me, but Cy Jeems has courage, Levin."

"Cyrus, tell Huldy all that's goin' on agin her. We don't know nothin'.
You kin go and come an' nobody watches you. Huldy will be grateful fur
it."

Putting his long arms on his knees and bending down, the scullion stared
close to Levin's eyes and whispered, looking towards the field:

"Ploughin'! ploughin'!"

Then, turning partly, and gazing over the old tavern with a look of
wisdom, Cy James whispered again:

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! an' Pangymonum, too!"

"I reckon he's crazy," Levin thought, as the queer fellow turned and
fled.

It was about three o'clock when the cavalcade was reviewed by Captain
Van Dorn from the porch of the hotel, and it consisted of about twenty
persons, white and black; some riding mules, some horses, and there was
one wagon in the line--the same that had been driven to Cannon's
Ferry--intended for Levin, Joe Johnson, and the Captain. Van Dorn stood
blushing, pulling his long mustache of flax, and resting on his cowhide
whip.

"Dave," he called to a powerful negro, "get down from that mule; you're
too drunk to go. Jump up in his place, Owen Daw!"

The widow's son gladly vaulted on the animal.

"Sorden," continued Van Dorn, "you know all the roads: lead the way!
Whitecar, go with him! We rendezvous at Punch Hall at eight o'clock. The
order of march is in pairs, a quarter to half a mile apart. If any man
acts in anything without orders, or halloos upon the road, he may get
this lash or he may get my knife."

"Captain, where do we feed?" asked a small, wiry mulatto.

"Water at Federalsburg," answered Van Dorn; "feed at the Punch Hall."

They rode off in pairs at intervals of ten minutes; Van Dorn's vehicle
went last. A moment before he departed, Cy James touched the Captain's
sleeve and whispered, "Huldy." Turning to see if he was unobserved, Van
Dorn followed to the deep-arched chimney at the northern gable, and
dismissed his guide with a look.

"Captain Van Dorn," Hulda said, her large gray eyes strained in
tenderness and nervous courage, "do that boy Levin no harm: I love him!
God forgive all your sins, many as they are, if you disobey
grandmother's wicked commands about my darling!"

"Ha! wild-flower, you have been listening?"

"No, I have only looked: I know Aunt Patty's petting ways when she means
to ruin, and watch her black flashes of cunning between: she is no
cousin of Levin; he is Joe's gentle prisoner; his very name she made him
hide when she saw you coming this morning."

"_Creo que si_: Hulda, let me kiss you!"

"Yes, if you dare."

She gave him that pure, soul-driven, child's strong look again, exerting
all the influence she had ever felt she exercised over him.

Nevertheless he kissed her for the first time:

"To-day, _bonito_, I dare to kiss thee. Believe me, my kiss is a tender
one."

"Yes, sir. There is something like a father in it. Oh, my father, art
thou in heaven?"

"If there be such a place, wild-flower, I think he is."

"Oh, thank you, Captain Van Dorn. There may you also be and find the
faith I feel in my one day's love on earth. I pray for you every day."

"_Ayme_, poor weakling! Pray now for thyself: if thou canst save thyself
sinless a brief day or two, it may be well for thee and Levin. Thy
grandmother is dreadful in her joys this night."

"I can die," said Hulda, "if Levin be saved."

He kissed her again, and something wet dropped down his blushes.

"Eternal love!" he sighed; "I've lost it."




CHAPTER XXX.

AFRICA.


The Captain took his place at the reins, his picturesque velvet jacket,
wide hat, bright hair, and gay shirt, thighings, belt, and boots,
deserving all Patty Cannon's encomiums as he made a polite adieu and
threw his whip like a thunderbolt, and a cheer rose from the discarded
volunteers loitering about the tavern as he drove Joe Johnson and Levin
away.

The road was nearly dead level for five miles, but, being the old
travelled road from Laurel and the south to Easton, and pointing towards
Baltimore, numerous farms and clearings were seen, and tobacco-fields
alternated with the dry corn and new-ploughed wheat patches. Here and
there, like a measure of gold poured upon the ground, the yellow ears
lay in the gaunt corn-rows, to become the ground meal of the slave and
the cattle's winter substance. Joe Johnson's popularity was everywhere
apparent, and many a shout was given of, "Good luck to ye, Joe!" "Tote
us a nigger back from Delaway, Joe!" "Don't be too hard on them ar black
Blue Hen's chickens, Joe!"

Van Dorn was too far above the comprehension of his neighbors, or,
indeed, of anybody, to be familiarly addressed, but "Patty Cannon's man"
was the term of injured inferiority towards him after he had passed.

At Federalsburg they crossed the branch of the Nanticoke piercing to the
centre of Delaware state, and saw one large brick house of colonial
appearance dominating the little wooden hamlet, and here, as generally
within the Maryland line, hunting negroes was the "lark" or the serious
occupation of many an idle or enterprising fellow, who trained his negro
scouts like a setter, or more often like a spaniel, and crossed the line
on appointed nights as ardently and warily as the white trader in Africa
takes to the trails of the interior for human prey.

"Joe," said Van Dorn, "what is to be your disposition of the prisoners
we have?"

"All goes with me to Norfolk but one,--the nigger boxer; I burn him
alive on Twiford's island. If the white chap is too pickle to sell, I'll
throw him overboard; he ain't safe."

"_Ea! sus!_ it is boyish to burn the old lad. I have had many a blow
from a black, and stab, too. A dog will bite you if you lasso him."

"No nigger can knock me down and git off with selling."

"Then you are a bad trader. The negro's price is all the negro is; why
make him your equal by hating him?"

"I am a Delaware boy," Joe Johnson said, "and it's the pride with me to
give no nigger a chance. In Maryland you pets 'em, like ole Colonel Ned
Lloyd over yer on the Wye; he's give his nigger coachman a gole watch
an' chain because he's his son! What a nimenog! Some day he'll raise a
nigger that'll be makin' politikle speeches, an' then I don't want to
live no more."[5]

"_Chito!_ Since the Delaware lawyer sent you to the post, son-in-law,
you're morose. I have had to eat with negro princes, dance with their
queens, and be ceremonious as if they had been angels."

"It would be the reign of Queen Dick for me! I couldn't do it, nohow."

"And, by the way, Joseph, I may see your friend, the lawyer Clayton, at
Dover, to-night: he may send me to the post, too; and I fear no Delaware
governor will take off the cropping of my ears, as was done for you in
state patriotism."

"Beware of that imp of Tolobon!" Joe Johnson muttered. "How I wish you
could kill him, Van Dorn. He's got to be a senator; some day he'll be
chief-justice of Delaware: then, what'll niggers be wuth thar?"

"I fancy, Joseph, you might be a legislator in Delaware if your
inclinations ran that way?"

"Easy enough, but I makes legislators. My wife, Margaretta--her first
husband's sister is the wife of the chancellor."

"Hola! oh! How came that great alliance?"

"She was housekeeper; he was a close old bachelor and must break a leg.
'Well,' she says, 'you're a daddy; justice is your trade, and I must
have it.' So, from bein' his peculiar, she becomes the madam; but she
inwented the kid."

"I have never been in Dover; how shall I tell where Lawyer Clayton
dwells?"

"It's on the green a-middle of the town, a-standin' by the
state-house--a long, roughcast house in the corner, three stories high,
with two doors; the door next the state-house is his office. Go past the
state-house, which has a cupelo onto it, an' you see the jug an'
whippin'-post. He's got 'em handy fur you."

Levin listened with all his ears. The liquor was now well out of his
system, and he thanked God he had refused Patty Cannon's burning dram,
else he might be this night--he thought it with remorse--the reckless
mate for Owen Daw, whose own mother had predicted the gallows for him.

"And now, Van Dorn, I turn back," Joe Johnson said; "I have a job to do
down the Peninsuly. McLane has become the owner of a gal thar, an' wants
her sneaked. I takes black Dave with me, an' when I'm back, my boat will
be ready an' my cargo packed. Then hey fur Floridey!"

He unhaltered his horse at the tail of the wagon, mounted him, and rode
back across the stream. Van Dorn touched his horses and entered the
dense woods in a byway to the north.

"Get up here, Master Levin, and ride by me," the Captain said, very
soon, and he lifted Levin's old hat from his head and looked at his
bright hair parted in the middle, his fine, large eyes, needing the
light of knowledge, and his soft complexion and marks of good
extraction.

"Where is thy father, Levin, to let thee go so ragged, with such
graceful limbs and feet as these?"

"Shipwrecked," said Levin; "gone down, I 'spect, on the privateer."

"A sailor, was he? Well, he should be home to clothe thee and see that
thou dost not cheat. I marked how Madam Cannon's punch was tossed out of
the window."

"I thought you would not want me drunk beside you all night, sir, and
then I might enjoy your company. I don't want to drink no more liquor."

"You like my company?"

"Yes, sir."

The Captain blushed, and asked,

"Why do you like me?"

"Not fur nothin' you do, sir. I like you fur somethin' in your ways; I
reckon you're a smart man."

"_Si, señor_, that I am. I have gained the whole world and lost two."

"Two worlds, sir?"

"Yes, two immortal worlds; that is to say, two unaccountable worlds. I
am no Christian."

"Maybe you're Chinee or Mahometan, then, sir; I 'spect everybody's got a
religion."

"I was a Mahometan for business ends," Van Dorn said. "Having become a
slaver, it was nothing to be a renegade. Stealing a man's soul every
day, I put no value on mine. Yes, Mahomet is the prophet of God: so are
you."

"You have been in Afrikey, I 'spect," suggested Levin.

"A few years only, but long enough to be rich and to be ruined. I know
the negro coast from the Gambia to Cape Palmas, and inland to Timbo. I
have had an African queen and the African fever: I went to conquer
Africa and became a slave."

"In Africa, I 'spect, Captain," Levin remarked, without inference, "a
nigger-trader is respectable."

Van Dorn shook his head.

"I doubt if that trade is respectable anywhere on this globe, unless it
be _here_. No, I will say for these people, too, that while they do it
low lip homage, they look down on it. I was once the greatest guest in
Timbo, housed with its absolute prince, attended by my suite, looking
like an ambassador, and he called me 'his son' and drew me to his
breast. Proclamations were made that I should be respected as such, yet
every human object fled before me. As I rode out alone to see the
gardens and cassava fields, the roaming goats and oxen, and the rich
mountain prospects, and saw the sloe-eyed girls bathing in the brooks,
the cry went round, 'Flesh-buyer is coming,' and huts were deserted,
fields forsaken, the gray patriarchs and the little children ran, and I
was left alone with the dumb animals, despised, abhorred."

"Don't they have slavery thair, sir?"

"Yes, slavery immemorial, yet the slave-buyer is no more respectable
than the procurer. The coin of Africa, its only medium, was the slave.
He paid the debt of war, of luxury, and of business. Yet the soul of
man, in the familiar study of such universal slavery, grovels with it,
and points to bright destiny no more with the head erect: I died in
Africa."

"Ain't you in the business now, sir?"

"Now I am a mere forest thief and bushman, Levin. He who begins a base
trade rises early to its fulness, and in subsequent life must be a poor
wolf rejected from the pack, stealing where he can sneak in. Such is the
kidnapper eking out the decayed days of the slaver; such is the ruined
voluptuary, living at last on the earnings of some shameless woman; such
am I: behold me!"

Van Dorn's eyes turned on Levin in their cold, heartless light, and yet
he blushed, as usual.

"You ought to be a gentleman, Captain. What made you break the laws so
and be a bad man?"

"_Aymè! aymè_!" mused Van Dorn, "shall I tell you? It was Africa. I was
a high-minded youth, cool and bold, and with a thread of pleasure in me.
I went to sea in a manly trade, and, fortune being slow, they whispered
to me, in the West Indies, that my clipper was just the thing for the
slave-trade, and I made the first venture out of virtue, which is all
the voyage. In Africa I fell a prey to the voluptuous life a white man
leads there, to which the very missionaries are not always exceptions.
Young, pale, gentle, graceful, brave, my blushes instant as my passions,
the ceaseless intrigue of that hot climate circled around me like a
dance in the harem around the young intruder: I forgot my native land
and every obligation in it; I was enslaved by Africa to its swooning
joys; I went there like the serpent and was stung by the woman."

"Ain't they all right black and ugly in Africa, Captain?"

"The world has not the equals of Senegambia for beauty," said Van Dorn.
"The Fullah beauties are often almost white, and the black admixture is
no more than varnish on the maple-tree. And even here, my lad, where
civilization builds a wall of social fire around the slave, you often
mark the idolatry of the white head to captive Africa."

"Did you make money?"

"For some years I did, plenty of it; but degradation in the midst of
pleasure weighed down my spirits. The thing called honor had flown from
over me like the heavenly dove, and in its place a hundred painted birds
flocked joyfully, the dazzling creatures of that thoughtless world. Oh,
that I could have been born there or never have seen it! At last I
started home, but the world had adopted a new commandment, 'Thou shalt
not trade in man.' They took my ship and all its black cargo, and I came
home naked. Then my heart was broke, and I turned kidnapper."

"Home is the best place," said Levin; "I 'spect it is, even if folks is
pore. When Jimmy Phoebus give me a boat I thought I was rich as a
Jew."

"What is that name?" asked Van Dorn.

"James Phoebus: he's mother's sweetheart."

"_Ce ce ce!_" the Captain mused; "your mother lives, then?"

"Yes, sir. She's pore, but Jimmy loves her, and the ghost of father
feeds her."

"_Quedo!_ a ghost? what kind of thing is that? Aunt Patty sees them: I
never do."

"It comes an' puts sugar an' coffee in the window, an' sometimes a pair
of shoes an' a dress. Mother says it's father: I guess it is."

"_O Dios!_" lisped Van Dorn. "This Phoebus, is he a good man?"

"Brave as a lion, sir; pore as any pungy captain; the best friend I ever
had. I hoped mother would marry him, he's been a-waitin' fur her so
long. She's afraid father ain't dead."

"_O hala, hala!_ women are such waiters; but this man can wait too. Is
he strong?"

"He come mighty nigh givin' Joe Johnson a lickin' last Sunday, sir, in
Princess Anne. He hates a nigger-trader. Him an' Samson Hat, a black
feller, thinks as much of each other as two brothers."

"And he gave you a boat?"

"Yes, sir: Joe Johnson hired it of me, but I didn't know he was goin' to
run away niggers. He's got my boat an' ruined my credit, I 'spect, in
Princess Anne, an' what will mother do when I go to jail?"

"Why, this other man, Phoebus, is there to marry her or look after
her."

"Oh, Captain," sobbed Levin, putting his hands on Van Dorn's knees, and
laying his orphan head there too, "pore Jimmy's dead: Joe Johnson shot
him."

The Captain did not move or speak.

"I've been a drunkard, Captain," Levin sobbed again, in the confidence
of a child; "that's whair all our misery comes from. I've got nothin'
but my boat, an' people hires it to go gunnin' an' fishin' and
spreein', and they takes liquor with 'em, an' I drinks. God help me; I
never will agin, but die first!"

"Are you not afraid to lean on me?" lisped Van Dorn.

"No, sir."

"I have killed people, too."

"The Lord forgive you, sir; I know you won't kill _me_."

A sigh broke from the bandit's lips, in place of his usual soft lisp,
and was followed by a warm drop of water, as from the forest leaves now
bathed in night, that plashed on Levin's neck.

"O God," a soft voice said, "may I not die?"

Then Levin felt the same warm drops fall many times upon him, and his
nature opened like the plants to rain.

"I have found a friend, Captain," the boy spoke, after several minutes,
but not looking up; "I feel you cry."

"_Chito! chito!_" lisped Van Dorn; "here is Punch Hall."

Levin raised his head, and saw nothing but an old house standing in the
trees, with a little faint light streaming from the door, and heard the
low hilarity of drinking men. The whole band poured out to receive Van
Dorn's commands.

"One hour here to feed and rest!" Van Dorn exclaimed. "Let those sleep
who can. Let any straggle or riot who dare!"




CHAPTER XXXI.

PEACH BLUSH.


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 _tar_rapin, 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."




CHAPTER XXXII.

GARTER-SNAKES.


At Princess Anne Vesta had moved her husband to Teackle Hall, and he
occupied her father's room and seemed to be growing better, though the
doctor said that he had best be sent to the hills somewhere.

The free woman, Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus sent to Vesta, had arrived
very opportunely, and took Aunt Hominy's place in the kitchen, where all
the children's echoes were gone, the poor woman's own bereavement
thrilling the ears of Virgie, Roxy, and Vesta herself; but, alas! her
tale was not legal testimony, because she was a little black.

Jack Wonnell had found unexpected favor in Meshach Milburn's eyes, and
was appointed to sleep in the store and watch it; and there Roxy came
down in the twilights, and, with pity more than affection, heard him
weave the illusion of his love for her, willing to be amused by it,
because it was so sincere with him; for Jack was all lover, and meek and
artful, bold and domestic, soft and outlawed, as the houseless Thomas
cat that makes highways of the fences, and wooes the demurest kitten
forth by the magic of his purring.

"Roxy," said Jack, "I'm a-goin' to git you free, gal, fur I 'spect
Meshach Milburn will give me a pile o' money fur a-watchin' of the sto'.
Then we'll go to Canaday, whar, I hearn tell, color ain't no pizen, an'
we'll love like the white doves an' the brown, that both makes the same
coo, so happy they is."

"Jack," said the soft-eyed, pitying maid, "you're a pore foolish fellow,
but I like to hear you talk. I reckon there is no harm in you. Virgie is
in love, too, with a white man, but you mustn't breathe it."

"Never," said Jack, making solemn motions with his eyes, and cuddling
closer in dead earnest of sympathy. "Hope I may die! Can't tell, to save
my life! Who-oop! Tell me, Roxy!"

"Pore sister Virgie, she was made to love, and, though it's hopeless, I
think she loves Mr. Tilghman, our minister, because he loved Miss Vesty
once, and Virgie worships Miss Vesty like her sister."

       *       *       *       *       *

Vesta told the story of Mary, the free woman, to her husband, who
listened closely and said:

"I know of but one thing, my darling, that will make such ignorance and
cruelty fade out in the forests of this peninsula: an iron road. A new
thing, called the railroad-engine, has just been made by an Englishman,
one George Stephenson, and a specimen of it has been sent to New York,
where I have had it examined. The errand your father went to do for me,
he has done well. I shall send him to Annapolis next, to get a charter
for a railroad up this peninsula that will pass inside the line of
Maryland, and penetrate every kidnapping settlement hidden there, and
light, intercourse, and law shall exterminate such barracoons as
Johnson's."

Vesta was glad to hear her father praised by her husband, and hopes
rekindled of some happier family reunion, when she should feel the
heartache die within her that now raged intermittently during her vestal
honeymoon. A letter came on the fourth day which dashed these hopes to
the ground, and it was as follows:


                           "DORCHESTER COUNTY, MD., _October--, 1829_.

     "_Darling Niece_,--Idol of my heart, let me begin by entreating you
     to take a conservative course when I break the sad intelligence to
     you of the death of my dear sister, Lucy, at Cambridge, yesterday,
     of the heart disease. She was the star of the house of McLane. She
     is gone. 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, and I shall take a
     conservative though _consistent_ course on the parties who have
     inflicted this injury upon you, my dear niece, and upon your calm
     and collected, if stricken, uncle.

     "'The Lord moves in a _mysterious_ way, his wonders to perform,'
     and his humble instruments require only to be _inflexible and
     conservative_ to do all things well. Be assured that
     _righteousness_ shall be done upon the adversaries of our family,
     and _that_ right speedily. My own grief is composed in the
     satisfaction I shall take, and the assurance that your sainted
     mother is where the wicked cease from troubling.

     "The financial arrangements of my dear sister were of the most
     conservative and high-toned character, as was to have been expected
     of her.

     "You may be desirous, my outraged, but, I hope, still _spirited_,
     idol, to hear the particulars of Lucy's death. She did not reach
     Cambridge till near midnight, having made the long journey from
     Princess Anne without fitting companions, and, in the excited state
     of her feelings, after she left Vienna in the evening, a depression
     of the spirits, accompanied by a fluttering of the heart, came on,
     and rapidly increased, and, by the time she arrived at our
     relatives', she was nearly dead with nervous apprehension and
     weakness. On seeing me, she revived sufficiently to make her will
     in the most _sisterly_ and conservative manner.

     "A physician was procured, but he pronounced her system so
     debilitated and detoned as hardly probable to outride the shock,
     the nervous centres being depressed and atrophy setting in.

     "She talked incessantly about the _Entailed Hat_, and said it was a
     permanent shadow and weight upon your heart, and made me promise to
     _mash_ it, if it could conservatively be done.

     "I read to my dear sister from _the Book of Books_, and tried to
     compose her feelings, but she broke out ever and anon, 'Oh, Brother
     Allan! to think I have raised children to be bought and sold, and
     married to foresters and trash.' She was deeply sensitive as to
     what would be said about it in Baltimore.

     "Just before she died, she said, 'Do not bury me at Princess Anne,
     where that fiend can come near me with his frightful Hat! Take me
     to Baltimore, where there are no bog-ores, nor old family chattels,
     to disturb the respectability of death. Apologize for my daughter,
     _and do her justice_.'

     "And so this grand woman died, in the confidence of a blessed
     immortality, leaving us to vindicate her motives and continue her
     conservative course, and to meet at her funeral next Friday, at our
     church in Baltimore, where Rev. John Breckenridge will preach the
     funeral sermon over this murdered saint.

                     "With conservative, yet proud, grief,
                                 "Affectionately, your uncle,
                                                 "ALLAN McLANE."


"Oh, sir!" Vesta exclaimed, turning blindly towards her husband; "mother
is dead. Where can I turn?"

"Where but to me, poor soul!" Milburn replied, knowing nothing of Mrs.
Custis's late feelings against him. "Your father shall be notified, and
I am able to attend the funeral with you."

"It is in Baltimore," Vesta sobbed.

"Well, honey, there I am ordered by the doctor to go, and get above the
line of malaria, in the hills. I can make the effort now."

Her grief and loneliness deprived her of the will to refuse him. Roxy
was selected to be her mistress's maid upon the journey, and William
Tilghman and Rhoda Holland were to take them in the family carriage down
to Whitehaven landing for the evening steamer.

Jack Wonnell, in officious zeal to be useful, gathered flowers, and hung
around Teackle Hall to run errands; and, in order not to exasperate
Vesta's husband, appeared bareheaded as the party set off, Milburn's
hat-box being one of the articles of travel, and Milburn vouchsafing
these words to Jack:

"There is a dollar for you, Mr. Wonnell. I rely upon you to watch my old
store and conduct yourself like a man."

"I'll do it," answered Jack, grinning and blushing; "hope I may die!
Good-bye, Miss Vesty. Purty Roxy, don't you forgit me 'way off thair in
Balt'mer. I'll teach Tom to sing your name befo' you ever see me agin."

He waved his arms, with real tears dimming his vision, and Roxy affected
to shed some tears also, as she waved good-bye to Virgie, whose eyes
were turned with wistful pain upon the beautiful face of her mistress
receding down the vista. Vesta threw her a kiss and reclined her head
upon her husband's shoulder.

That evening, an hour before the carriage was to return, Virgie and the
free woman, Mary, walked together down to Milburn's store, to see if
Jack Wonnell was on the watch. As they trode in the soft grass and sand
under the old storehouse they saw the bell-crowned hat--a new one,
brought from the ancient stock that very day--shining glossily on
Wonnell's high, eccentric head, as he sat in the hollow window of the
old storehouse and talked to the mocking-bird, which he was feeding with
a clam-shell full of boiled potato and egg, and some blue haws.

"Tom, say 'Roxy,' an' I'll give ye some, Tommy! Now, boy! 'Roxy, Roxy,
purty Roxy! _purty_ Roxy! Poor ole Jack! poor ole Jack!'"

The bird flew around Wonnell's head, biting at the hat which stood in
such elegant irrelevance to the remainder of his dress, and cried,
"Meshach, he! he! he! Vesty, she! Vesty, Meshach! Vesty, Meshach!" but
said nothing the village vagrant would teach it. He showed the patience
idleness can well afford, and, feeding it a little, or withholding the
food awhile, continued to plead and teach:

"'Roxy, Roxy, purty Roxy! Poor, pore Jack! pore Jack!' Now, Tom, say
'Roxy, Roxy, pore Jack!'"

The bird flew and struck, and sang a little, very niggardly, and so, as
the lights in the west sank and faded, the shiftless lover continued in
vain to seek to give the bird one note more than the magician, his
master, had taught.

The stars modestly appeared in the soft heavens, and Princess Anne
gathered its roofs together like a camp of camels in the desert, and,
with an occasional bleat or bark or human sound, seemed dozing out the
soft fall night, absorbed, perhaps, in the spreading news of Mrs.
Custis's death and Vesta's wedding-journey, that had to be taken at
last.

"Miss Virgie," said the woman Mary--ten years her senior, but comely
still--"have you ever loved like me? Oh, I had a kind husband, and,
helpless as I was, I tried to love once more. Maybe it was a sin."

"I love my mistress as if she was myself," Virgie said; "I feel as if,
in heaven, before we came here, I was with her, Mary! I love her father,
too, as if he was not my master, but my friend. Oh, how I love them all!
But what can I do to show my love--poor naked slave that I am? They say
they will soon set me free. Mary, how do people feel when they are
free?"

"They don't appreciate it," sighed Mary. "They go and put themselves in
captivity again, like selfish things: they falls in love."

"But to love and be free!" Virgie said, her bosom glowing in the thought
till her rich eyes seemed to shed warmth and starlight on her
companion's face; "to give your own free love to some one and feel him
grateful for it: what a gift and what a joy is that! He might be
thankful for it, and, seeing how pure it was, he might respect me."

"Who is it, Virgie?" Mary said.

"Whoever would love me like a white girl!" the ardent slave softly
exclaimed. "It must be some one who does not despise me. I hear Miss
Vesta's beau, Master William, read the beautiful service, with his
sweet, submissive face, and I think to myself, 'How freely he might have
my heart to comfort his if he would take it like a gentleman!' I would
be his slave to make him happy, if he could love me purely, like my
mother! Oh, my mother, whose name I do not know! where is the tie that
fastens me to heaven? Did my father love me?"

"Pore Jack! pore Jack! Sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy,' Tom!" coaxed Wonnell
above to the sleepy bird.

"Whoever was your father, Virgie, your mother's love for you was pure.
God makes the wickedest love their children, because he is the Father to
all the fatherless."

"Oh! could my own father have brought me into the world and hated me?"
Virgie said. "They say I am almost beautiful. Will he who gave me life
never call me his, and say, 'My daughter, come to my respect, rest on my
heart, and take my name'?"

"Poor Virgie!" sighed Mary; "remember we are black! We hardly ever have
fathers: they is for white people."

"Dog my hide!" mumbled Wonnell, above, "ef a bird ain't a perwerse
critter. Purty Roxy won't think I'm smart a bit ef I can't make Tom say
'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack!'"

"I am almost white," Virgie continued; "I want to be all white. Why
can't I be so? The Lord knows my heart is white, and full of holy,
unselfish love."

"Pore chile!" Mary said; "we shall all be washed and made white in the
Lamb's blood, Virgie. That's where your soul pints you to, dear young
lady. I know it ain't pride and rebellion in you: it's like I'm looking
at my baby, white as snow to me and God now."

"Hush!" said Virgie, trembling, "what voice is that?"

There was an old willow-tree in a recessed spot at the end of the store,
and by it were two sheds or small buildings, now disused, into one of
which, with a door low to the ground, Mary drew Virgie, and they
listened to a low voice saying,

"Dave, air your pops well slugged?"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"Allan McLane pays fur the job?"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"You can't mistake him, Dave. No shap is worn like that nowadays. Look
only fur his headpiece, and aim well!"

"Yes, Mars Joe."

"Fur me," continued the other voice, "I'll go right to the tavern an'
prove an _alibi_. My lay is to take the house gal that old Gripefist's
young wife thinks so much of. I'll snake her out to-night. She's the
property of Allan McLane, left him in his sister's will. They found on
her body the paper giving the gal to the dead woman only two days
before. She's Allan's to-morrow, but to-night she's mine!"

A sensual, sucking, chuckling sound, like a kiss made upon the back of
his own hand, followed this significant threat; and Mary, placing her
hand over the sinking slave girl's mouth, held her motionless.

"Tommy, Tommy! sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack! Pore Jack!' Sing,
Tommy, sing!"

"_There_," whispered the white man, softly, and was gone.

Mary breathed only the words to Virgie, "_Kidnappers_--come!" and they
glided from the old tenement unobserved, and entered the copse along the
stream.

"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! His leetle Roxy's gone away. Pore Jack! Roxy!
Roxy! Roxy!" the mourner at the window above chattered sleepily to the
nodding bird.

The negro at the corner of the old warehouse, half covered by the
willow's shade, peered up with blood-shotten eyes to distinguish the
covering on the bird-tamer's head.

He saw Jack Wonnell sitting backward on the window-frame, swaying in and
out, as he lazily tempted the mocking-bird to sing, and once the
bell-crown hat, so singular to view, came in full relief against the
gray sky.

"It's ole Meshach," said the negro, silently, with desperate eyes. "I
hoped it wasn't. Dar is de hat, sho!"

He cocked his huge horse-pistol, and took aim directly from below.

"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! I reckon Roxy won't have pore Jack, caze Tommy
won't sing. Sing, Tommy, little Roxy's pet: 'Pore Jack! Pore--'"

The great horse-pistol boomed on the night, and in the smoke the negro
rushed into the bush and sought the fields.

Down from his seat in the window-sill the witless villager came
backward, all bestrewn, measuring his body in the sand, where he lay,
silent as the other shadows, with his arms extended in the frenzy of
death, and his mouth wide open and flowing blood.

Jack Wonnell had paid the penalty of being out of fashion.

The mocking-bird, aroused by the loud report, leaped into the empty
window-sill to seek his tutor, and set up the lesson he had learned too
late:

"Poor Jack! Poor Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" came screaming on the night,
and all was still.

       *       *       *       *       *

William Tilghman was driving back from Whitehaven in the melancholy
thoughts inspired by the departure of his cousin, whom he had at last
seen go into the great wilderness of the world the passive companion of
her husband, like the wife of Cain, driven forth with him, when the
carriage was arrested at the ancient Presbyterian church--which
overlooked Princess Anne from the opposite bank of the little river--by
a woman almost throwing herself under the wheels.

"Why, Lord sakes! it's our Virgie!" cried Rhoda Holland.

The girl, with all the energy of dread, sprang into the carriage by
William Tilghman's side and threw her arms around him:

"Save me! Save me!"

"What ails you, Virgie?" cried the young man, assuringly. "You are in no
danger, child!"

"I am sold," the girl gasped, with terror on her tongue and in her wild
eyeballs. "Miss Vesty's sold me to her Uncle Allan. He's sent the
kidnappers after me. They're yonder, in Princess Anne. Oh, drive me to
the North, to the swamps, anywhere but there!"

"I know your mistress made you over to her mother, Virgie, for a
precaution, fearing you might not be safe in her own hands. She told me
so, and asked if the death of her mother could possibly affect you."

"Oh, it has!" the girl whispered. "Mary knows the kidnapper that's come
for me. He is the same that stole Hominy and the children. He kept her
chained on an island. He says he'll have me to-night, to do as he
pleases. Master McLane lets him have me!"

The girl, in her terror, as the carriage had descended the hill already
and crossed the Manokin, seized the reins in Tilghman's hands and drew
them with such frenzy that the horses, as they came to Meshach Milburn's
store, were pulled into the open area before it, where something in
their surprise or lying on the ground gave them immediate fright, and
they dashed at a gallop into Front Street, the wheels passing over an
object by the old storehouse that nearly upset the carriage.

The street they took for their run crossed a small arm of the Manokin,
and led up to a gentleman's gate; but before this brook was crossed
Tilghman, an experienced horseman and driver, had reined the flying
animals into a nearly unoccupied street, called Back Alley, parallel
with the main street of Princess Anne, but hidden from it by houses and
gardens, and almost in a moment of time the whole town had been cleared,
with hardly a person in it aware of such a vehicle going past.

It was a real runaway, but Tilghman, in a cool, gentle voice, like a
brook's music, told the girls to sit perfectly still, as they had a
clear, level road; and, seeing that he could not stop the animals by any
mere exercise of strength, without danger to his harness, he waited for
their power to wear out, or their fears to subside.

Rhoda Holland was ashamed to scream, if her pride was not too well
aroused already in the presence of the muscular young minister, sitting
there like an artillery teamster driving into battle, and his nostrils
and jaws delineated in the gray air, expressed almost the joy he had
long put by of following the hounds in the autumn fox-hunts, where Judge
Custis said he had been the perfect pattern of a rider.

As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving
behind the bloody hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was
herself alone, dashing at that frightful pace to destruction, until the
young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to
inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as
a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions
and kissed the slave girl pityingly.

Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and
man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or
dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands
several miles east of Princess Anne.

"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle
Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is nobody knows whar, now. This yer Allan
McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a
conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take
keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."

"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to
Virgie.

"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick.
He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary
knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will
never go there again."

"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably _is_ true. Vesta has
no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade,
with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs.
Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent
Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson
would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to
him."

"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss
Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"

"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not
anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought
you safest, you were most in peril."

They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and
halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the
gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the
Furnace village.

"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't
keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."

"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and
we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a
nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a
husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground
Road to the free states."

"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"

"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free,
and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving
her a wild beast's chance to run."

"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"

"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor."
The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth
and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of
God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will
do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."

As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked
feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in
the night.

In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out,
its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond,
lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained
with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like
the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's
foreclosure.

A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the
white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a
lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be
cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the
ponds and night-damps?

The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave
better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at
Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story
house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a
single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the
river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts
of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.

Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who
opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed
door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon
afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.

"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have
brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave
me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart
is bursting: what can I say?"

"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night,"
the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You
can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."

"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear
old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my
freedom, or die on the road to it."

"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we
can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."

He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and
hastened to his horses and the hotel.

As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne,
the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.

"Thar!" she said, "I think you just looked magnificens last night,
sittin' behine them critters, like Death on the plale horse, an' lovin'
Aunt Vesty, though she's gone away an' quit you, enough to fight for her
pore, bright-skinned gal. I wish somebody would love _me_ like that!"

"So you could quit him, too, Rhoda?"

"Well, William, I likes beaus that's couragelis! You're splendid
a-preachin', but I like you better drivin' and showin' your excitemins."

"You are a beautiful girl," the clergyman said; "suppose you try to like
me better."

The great question, being thus opened, was not disposed of when they
reached Princess Anne, and quietly stabled the horses.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

HONEYMOON.


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?"




CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE ORDEAL.


When Levin Dennis awoke in the bottom of the old wagon it was being
rapidly driven, and Van Dorn's voice from the driver's seat was heard to
say, without its usual lisp and Spanish interjection:

"Whitecar, is your brother at Dover sure of his game?"

"Cock sure, Cap'n. Got 'em tree'd! Best domestic stock in the town thar,
an' the purtiest yaller gals: I know that suits _you_, Cap'n!"

"Have they arms?"

"Not a trigger. We trap 'em at one of their 'festibals.' No, sir,
niggers won't scrimmage."

"We assemble at Devil Jim Clark's," said Van Dorn, and passed by with a
crack of his whip.

Levin, whom some friendly hand had wrapped in a bearskin coat--he had
seen one like it upon Van Dorn--next heard the slaver speak to another
party he had overtaken:

"Melson?"

"Ay yi!"

"Milman?"

"Ah! boy."

"You get your orders at Devil Jim Clark's!"

The stars were out, yet the night was rich in large, fleecy clouds,
as if heaven were hurrying onward too. Levin lay on his back, jostled
by the rough wagon, but, being perfectly sober now, he was more
reasoning and courageous, and his new-found love impelled him to
self-preservation. He might have rolled out of the vehicle and into the
woods, and at least saved himself from committing further crime, but how
would he see Hulda any more--Hulda, in danger, perhaps? Thus, even to
ignorance, love brings understanding, and Levin began to ask himself the
cause of his own misery. He knew it was liquor, yet what made him drink
if not a disposition too easily led? Even now he was under almost
voluntary subjection to the bandit in the wagon, whose voice he heard
blandly command again to some pair he had caught up to:

"Tindel?"

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van! Tackle 'em!"

"You are not to be in peril to-night, so keep your spirits. I expect you
to look out for the cords, gags, and fastenings generally!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin; oh, tackle 'em!"

"You and Buck Ransom there--"

"Politely, Captain; politely, sir!" exclaimed an insinuating voice from
a negro rider.

"Are to meet us all at Devil Jim's!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin!"

"Politely, Captain!"

As Van Dorn urged his way to the head of the line, Levin looked out
silently upon the flat country of forest and a few poor farms, drained
imperfectly by some ditches of the Choptank. He supposed it might be
almost midnight, from the position of those brilliant constellations
which shone down equally upon his mother and himself--she in her
innocence and he in his anxiety--and shone, also, perhaps, upon his poor
father's grave in isle or ocean.

Within an hour blood was to be shed, no doubt, and rapine done, and he
knew not the road to escape by nor the hole to hide in. Yet in that hour
he had to make his choice,--to fight for liberty, or go to the jail,
the whipping-post, or, perhaps, the gallows.

Levin considered ruefully his vagrant past, and how little could be said
in extenuation of him in a court of justice, except by his mother's
faith, which was no more evidence than a negro's oath.

Once it arose in his mind to surprise Van Dorn, overcome him, cast him
out in a ditch, and drive to some one of the little farmhouses and rest,
till day should give him his whereabouts and remedy.

Levin was not a coward, and his muscles were hard, and his feet could
cling to a smooth plank like a bird's to a bough; but his heart relented
to the fierce, soft man so unsuspectingly sitting with his back to him,
when Levin reflected that he must, perhaps, put an end to Van Dorn's
life with his sailor's knife, if they grappled at all, and this day
expiring Van Dorn had paid a debt for him to the widow whose son was
next overtaken, and who cried, forwardly, without being addressed:

"Van Dorn, what you goin' to give me if I git a nigger?"

"This!" said Van Dorn, without a pause, reaching the boy a measured blow
with his whip-lash on the shoulder that made him literally fall from the
mule and grovel with pain.

"Discipline is what your mother failed to give you, _repróbo_. Manners I
shall teach you. Fall in the rear!"

Owen Daw crawled desperately on his mule and obeyed without parley, but
his audacity soon recovered enough to force his animal up to the wagon
tail and open whispered communications with Levin there.

Nothing had passed them for hours that Levin had seen, when suddenly a
horseman at a rapid lope stopped the wagon, and a hoarse negro voice
muttered:

"How de do, now? See me! see me!"

"Derrick Molleston?" spoke Van Dorn.

"See me! see me!"

"Get down and ride with me. Levin, are you awake?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Take this man's horse and ride him. John Sorden is ahead. It will
stretch your chilled limbs."

"May I go with him?" asked Owen Daw, in his Celtic accent, quite
cringing now.

"Not unless he wants you."

"Come, then," Levin obligingly said.

While the two youths were still lingering by the wagon they heard these
words:

"Have you arranged everything with Whitecar and Devil Jim?"

"See me! see me!"--apparently meaning, "Rely upon me."

"Is Greenley ready to make the diversion if any attack be made upon us?"

"See me! see me! His gallus is up and he'd burn de world."

"This Lawyer Clayton?"

"See me! see me! He gives a big party, Aunt Braner tole me. A judge is
dar from Prencess Anne, an' liquor a-plenty. See me! see me!"

"The white people absolutely gone from Cowgill House?"

"See me! It's nigh half a mile outen de town. Dar's forty tousand
dollars, if dar's a cent, at dat festibal: gals more'n half white, men
dat can read an' preach: de cream of Kent County. See me! see me!"

"And not a suspicion of our coming?"

"See me! O see me!" hoarsely said the negro; "innercent as de unborn.
To-night's deir las' night!"

Levin trembled as these merciless words reached his ears, but Owen Daw
seemed to forget his affront at the tidings, and chuckled to Levin as
they trotted away:

"Bet you I git a better nigger nor you!"

"Oh, shame, Owen Daw! Your mother was saved to-day from bein' turned out
of doors by my pity. Think of robbin' these niggers of their freedom!
What have they done?"

"Been niggers!" exclaimed Owen Daw. "That's enough!"

"What will you do, Owen, to help your poor mother?"

"Wait till I git big enough, bedad, an' kill ole Jake Cannon for this
day's work."

As they rode on they came to the man called Sorden, riding as the guide
to the invading column, a person of more genteel address than any
beneath Van Dorn, and young, pliable, and frolicking.

"My skin!" he said. "Now, boys, Van Dorn oughtn't had to brung you.
You're too sniptious for this rough work. I love the Captain better than
I ever loved A male, but he oughtn't to spile boys."

"Van Dorn told me to come," Owen Daw cried. "I'm big enough to buck a
nigger."

"I love him better than I ever loved A male," said Sorden,
apologetically. "Who is t'other young offender?"

"I'm a stranger to your parts," Levin replied. "Mrs. Cannon made me
come. I didn't want to."

"Are you afear'd?"

"Yes," Levin said.

"Well, I love the Captain better than I ever loved A male. But boys is
boys, and I hate to see 'em spiled. If you was nigger boys I wouldn't
keer a cent; but white's my color, and I don't want to trade in it."

They halted at a small, sharp-gabled brick house, of one story and a
kitchen and garret, at the left of the road, to which the corner of a
piece of oak and hickory woods came up shelteringly, while in the rear
several small barns and cribs enclosed the triangle of a field. A door
in the middle, towards Maryland, seemed very high-silled, and low
grated windows were at the cellar on each side of the steps.

The place had a suspicious appearance, and a pack of hounds in full cry
rushed from the kitchen, and, while in the act of leaping the stile and
palings, were arrested almost in mid air by a chuffy voice crying from
within:

"Hya! Down! Spitch!"

The whole pack meekly sneaked back to the house, whining low, and a few
blows of a switch and short howls within completed the excitement.

"What place is this?" asked Owen Daw.

"Devil Jim Clark's," said Sorden.

The dwelling stood about forty yards back from the road, drawing nearly
into the cover of the woods, and its little yard was made cavernous by
thick-planted paper-mulberry and maple trees, while a line of
cherry-trees and an old pole-well rose along the road and hedge. As they
rode to the rear of the house a little dormer window, like a snail,
crawled low along the roof, and a light was shining from it.

"Devil Jim's business-office," nodded Sorden.

"What's his business?" asked Levin, freshly.

"Niggers. He keeps 'em up thar between the garret and the
roof--sometimes in the cellar."

"Does he want a business-office for that?"

"He's a contractor on the canawl, too, Jim is--raises race-horses, farms
it, gambles a little, but nigger-runnin' is his best game. My skin! Yer
comes Captain Van Dorn. I love him as I never loved A male."

"Van Dorn," spoke a voice from the house, "remember my family is
particular. Your men must go to the barn. Come in!"

"Spiced brandy at the barn!"--a quiet remark from somewhere--was
sufficient to lead the herd away, and, giving the order to "water and
fodder," Van Dorn passed into the kitchen, thence through a bedroom to
the chief room of the house, and up a small winding-stair to a scrap of
hallway or corridor hardly two feet wide.

The man who led pointed to a trap above one end of this hall, and
exclaimed, "Niggers there! family yonder!"--the last reference to a door
closing the little passage.

He then opened a wicket at the side of the hall, admitting Van Dorn to
an exceedingly small closet or garret room, barely large enough for the
men to sit, and lighted by a lamp in the little dormer window seen from
below.

"Drink!" said the man, uncorking a bottle of champagne; "I had it ready
for you."

He poured the foaming wine and set the bottle on a sort of secretary or
desk, and then looked anxiety and avarice together out of his liquid
black eyes and broad, heavy face.

"_Buéna suérte, señor!_" Van Dorn lisped, as they drank together.

"Hya! spitch!" nervously muttered Clark, cutting his own top-boots with
a dog-whip. "I wish I was out of the business: the risk is too great. My
wife is religious--praying, mebbe, now, in there. My daughters is at the
seminaries, spendin' money like the Canawl Company on the lawyers.
Nothin' pays like nigger-stealin', but it's beneath you and me, Van
Dorn."

"_A la verdad!_ This is my last incursion, Don Clark. Pleasure has kept
me poor for life. To-day I did a little sacrifice, and it grows upon
me."

"If they should ketch me and set me in the pillory, Van Dorn, for what
you do to-night, hya! spitch!"--he slashed his knees--"it would break
Mrs. Clark's heart."

"I want this money to-night," said Van Dorn, "to make two young people
happy. They shall take my portion, and take me with them out of the
plains of Puckem."

"Oh, it is nervous business"--Clark's eyes of rich jelly made the pallor
on his large face like a winding-sheet--"hya! spitch! The Quakers are
a-watchin' me. Ole Zekiel Jinkins over yer, ole Warner Mifflin down to
the mill, these durned Hunns at the Wildcat--they look me through every
time they ketch me on the road. But the canawl contract don't pay like
niggers; my folks must hold their heads up in the world; Sam Ogg won't
let me keep out of temptation."

"Do you fear me, Devil Jim?"

"Hya! spitch! No. If all in the trade was like you, I could sleep in
trust. If you go out of it, so will I."

"Then to-night, _peniténte!_ we make our few thousand and quit. Give up
your cards and I my _doncellitas_, and we can at least live."

They shook hands and drank another glass, and then Van Dorn said:

"Send up to me, _hermano!_ the lad who will reply to the name of Levin.
With him I would speak while you give the directions! Poor coward!" Van
Dorn said, after his host had descended the stairs, "he can never be
less than a thief with that irksomeness under such fair competence."

At that moment a beautiful maid or woman, in her white night-robe, stood
in the little doorway, with eyes so like the richness of his just gone
that it must have been his daughter. She fled as she recognized a
stranger, and Van Dorn pursued till a door was closed in his face.

"Poor fool!" he said, sinking into his chair again; "I will never be
more honest than any woman can make me!"

As Levin entered the little hallway Van Dorn smiled:

"Here is a glass of real wine to inspire you, _junco_."

"No, Captain. I would rather die than drink it."

"Do you repent coming with me?"

"Oh, bitterly, Captain. I don't want to steal poor, helpless people if
they is black."

"Now, listen, lad!"--Van Dorn's face ceased to blush and the coarse
look came into his blue eyes--"this night's excursion is for your
profit. I like your gentle inclination for me, and the good acts you
have solicited from me, and the confidence you have shown me as to your
love for pretty Hulda. Join me in this work willingly, and I will give
her, for your marriage settlement, all my share."

"Never," Levin exclaimed.

Van Dorn drew his knife and rose to his feet.

"Levin," he lisped, "I promised Patty Cannon that I would bring you back
spotted with crime or dead. Now choose which it shall be."

"To die, then," cried Levin, with one hand drawing the long, silken hair
from his eyes and with the other drawing his own knife; "but I will
fight for my life."

Van Dorn seized Levin's wrist in a vise-like grip, but, as he did so,
threw his own knife upon the floor.

"Oh! _huérfano_, waif," Van Dorn murmured, while his blush returned,
"take heed thou ever sayest 'No' with courage like that, when cowardice
or weak acquiescence would extort thy 'Yes.' This moment, if thou hadst
consented, thy heart would be on my knife, young Levin!"

He drew the knife from Levin's hand and put it in his ragged coat again,
and set the boy on his knee as if he had been a little child.

"Oh, God be thanked I did not kill you, sir," sobbed Levin, his tears
quickly following his courage; "twice I have thought of doin' it
to-day."

"I never would have put you to that test, my poor lad, but that I saw
your conscience at work all this day under the stimulation of virtuous
love. Think nothing of me. Build your own character upon some good
example, and, sweet as life is, fight for it on the very frontiers of
your character. _Die_ young, but surrender only when you are old."

"Captain," Levin said, "how kin I git character? My father is dead.
Everybody twists me around his fingers."

"Then think of some plain, strong, faithful man you may know and refer
every act of your character to him. Ask yourself what he would do in
your predicament, then go and do the same."

"I do know such a man," Levin said, in another moment; "It is Jimmy
Phoebus, my poor, beautiful mother's beau."

"_El rayo ha caido!_" Van Dorn spoke, low and calm; "yes, Levin, any man
worthy of your mother will do."

"Captain, turn back with me! Is it too late?"

"Too late these many years, young _señor_. I shall lead the war on
Africa to-night again at Cowgill House."

He rose and finished the wine.

"Clark shall give you a horse, Levin. I present it to you. Ride on with
Sorden at the lead, and a mile from here, at Camden town, take your own
way. Good-night!"

Taking a single look at the miserable band of whites and blacks
collected in the barn, and revealed by a lantern's light in the
excitement of drink and avarice, or the familiarity of fear and
vice--some inspecting gags of corn-cob and bucks of hickory, others
trimming clubs of blackjack with the roots attached; others loading
their horse-pistols and greasing the dagger-slides thereon; some
whetting their hog-killing knives upon harness, others cutting rope and
cord into the lengths to bind men's feet--Levin was set on the loping
horse he had been already riding, by Clark, the host, and soon met
Sorden on the road.

"Where is Van Dorn?" Sorden asked; "I love him as I never loved A male."

"He sends me to Camden of an errand," Levin answered; "is it far?"

"About a mile. Three miles, then, to Dover. My skin! how fresh your
critter is; ain't it Dirck Molleston's? I thought so. Then he'll be
wantin' to turn in at Cooper's Corners."

"Does Derrick live there?"

"Yes. That's whar he holds the Forks of both roads from below, and
watches the law in Dover. I hope Van Dorn will git away with the loot
and not git ketched, fur I love him as I never loved A male."

Levin's horse, at his easy gait, soon left Sorden far behind, and the
strange events of the night, and his wonder what to do next, kept
Levin's brain whirling till he saw the form of a few houses rise among
the trees, and a line of arborage indicate a main road from north to
south. The scent as of cold, wide waters and marshes filled the night.

"Here is Camden," Levin thought; "where shall I go? If I turn south I
shall get no bed nor food all night, and be picked up in the mornin' fur
a kidnapper. I can't go back. The big river or the ocean, I reckon, is
before me. What would Jimmy Phoebus do?"

He held the animal in as he asked this question, and paused at the
crossing of the great State road.

The idea slowly spread upon his whole existence that James Phoebus
would, in Levin's place, ride instantly to Dover and give the alarm.

Levin tried to construct Phoebus in a mood to give some other advice,
but, as the resolute pungy captain's form seemed to bestride the young
man's mind, it rose more and more stalwart, and appeared to lead towards
Dover, where so many poor souls, in the joys of intercourse and freedom,
were like little birds unconscious of the hawks above them, and no man
in the world but Levin Dennis could save them from death or bondage.

Would James Phoebus, with his lion nature, ever hesitate in the duty
of a citizen and a Christian under such circumstances, or forgive
another man for withholding information that might be life and liberty
and mercy?

Yet there was Van Dorn to be betrayed. What would Van Dorn do in Levin's
place?

The words of Van Dorn, not a quarter of an hour old, spoke aloud in
Levin's echoing consciousness: "Think nothing of me. Refer every act to
some faithful man and go and do the same!"

Levin looked up, and the very clouds, now swollen dark in spite of
starshine, seemed hurrying on Dover. The night-birds were crying "Mercy!
mercy!" the lizards and tree-frogs seemed to cross each other's voices,
piping "Time! time! time!"

"_Huldy!_" Levin whispered, and let the reins fall loose, and his animal
darted through Camden town to the north.

He had gone by the small frame houses, the Quaker meeting, the stores,
the outskirt residences, when suddenly his horse turned out to pass a
large, dark object in the road ahead, and a horseman rode right across
Levin's course, forcing his animal back on its haunches.

"High doings, friend!" a man's voice raspingly spoke; "I'm concerned for
thee!"

"Git out of my way or I'll stab you!" Levin cried, between his new ardor
to do his duty and the idea that he had already been intercepted by
Patty Cannon's band.

"Ha, friend! I'm less concerned for myself than thee. Thou wilt not stab
a citizen of Camden town at his own door?"

"For Heaven's sake, let me go, then!" Levin pleaded. "The kidnappers is
coming to Dover in a few minutes. I want to tell Lawyer Clayton!"

Immediately the other person, a tall, lean man, wheeled and dashed after
the dark object ahead, which Levin, following also hard, found to be a
large covered wagon--something between the dearborn or farmer's and the
family carriage.

"Bill," the Quaker called to the driver, "spare not thy whip till Dover
be well past. Here is one who says kidnappers are raiding even the
capital of Delaware. I'm concerned for thee!"

The driver began to whip his horses into a gallop, and cries, as of
several persons, came out of the close-curtained vehicle.

"What's in there?" Levin asked the Quaker, who had rejoined him;
"niggers?"

"No, friend," the Quaker crisply answered, "only Christians."

They crossed a mill-stream, and soon afterwards a smaller run, without
speaking, and came to a little log-and-frame cabin in a fork of the
road, where Levin's horse tried to run in.

"Ha, friend! Is it not Derrick Molleston's loper thee has--the same that
he gets from Devil Jim Clark? What art thou, then? I feel concerned for
thee."

"A Christian, too, I hope," answered Levin, forcing his nag up the road.

"Then thee is better than a youth in this dwelling we next pass," the
Quaker said, pointing to a brick house on the left; "for there lived a
judge whose son bucked a poor negro fiddler in his father's cellar, and
delivered him to Derrick Molleston to be sold in slavery. I hear the
poor man tells it in his distant house of bondage."

"What's this?" Levin inquired, seeing a strange structure of beams on a
cape or swell to the right, in sight of the dark forms of a town on the
next crest beyond.

"A gallows," said the Quaker, "on which a horse-thief will be hanged
to-morrow. To steal a horse is death; to steal a fellow-man is nothing."

As he spoke, the mysterious carriage turned down a cross street of Dover
and stole into the obscurity of the town.

"Ha! ha!" exclaimed the Quaker; "if Joe Johnson had not stopped to feed
at Devil Jim's, he might have overtaken my brother's wagon full of
escaping slaves. I tell thee, friend, because I'm scarce concerned for
thee now."




CHAPTER XXXV.

COWGILL HOUSE.


Long after midnight, Dover was in bed, except at one large house on the
Capitol green, where light shone through the chinks and cracks of
curtains and shutters, and some watch-dog, perhaps, ran along curiously
to see why.

The stars and clouds in the somewhat troubled sky looked down through
the leafless trees upon the pretty town and St. Jones's Creek circling
past it, and hardly noticed a long band of creeping men and animals
steal up from the Meeting House branch, past the tannery and the
academy, and plunge into the back streets of the place, avoiding the
public square.

One file turned down to the creek and crossed it, to return farther
above, cutting off all escape by the northern road, while a second file
slipped silently through and around the compact little hamlet and waited
for the other to arrive, when both encompassed an old brick dwelling
standing back from the roadside in a green and venerable yard, nearly
half a mile from the settled parts of Dover.

This house was brilliantly lighted, and the rose-bushes and shade trees
were all defined as they stood above the swells of green verdure and the
ornamental paths and flower-beds.

One majestic tulip-tree extended its long branches nearly to the portal
of the quaint dwelling, and a luxuriant growth of ivy, starting between
the cellar windows, clambered to the corniced carpentry of the eaves,
and made almost solid panels of vine of the spaces between the four
large, keystoned windows in two stories, which stood to the right of the
broad, dumpy door.

This door, at the top of a flight of steps, was placed so near the gable
angle of the house that it gave the impression of but one wing of a
mansion originally designed to be twice its length and size.

Between this gable--which faced the road, and had four lines of windows
in it, besides a basement row--and the back or town door, as described,
was one squarish, roomy window, out of relation to all the rest, and
perhaps twelve feet above the ground. This, as might be guessed, was on
the landing of the stairs within; for the great door and front of the
residence being at the opposite side, the whole of the space at the
townward gable, to the width of seventeen feet, was a noble hall about
forty feet long, lofty, and with pilasters in architectural style, and
lighted by two great windows in the gable and the square window on the
stairway.

The stairway itself was a beautiful piece of work and proportion, rising
from the floor in ten railed steps to the landing at the square window,
where a space several feet square commanded both the great front door
and the windows in the gable, and also the yard behind; thence, at right
angles, the flight of steps rose along the back wall to a second landing
over the dumpy back-door, and, by a third leap, returned at right
angles, to the floor above, making what is called the well of the
stairway to be exceedingly spacious, and it opened to the garret floor.

No doubt this cool, great hall was designed to be the centre of a large
mansion, yet it had lost nothing in agreeableness by becoming, instead,
the largest room in the house, receiving abundant daylight, and it was
large enough for either a feast or public worship, and such was its
frequent use.

Built by a tyrannical, eccentric man at the beginning of the century,
it had passed through several families until a Quaker named Cowgill, who
afterwards became a Methodist, and who held no slaves and was kind to
black people, made it his property, and superintended a tannery and mill
within sight of it.

He was frequently absent for weeks, especially in the bilious autumn
season, and allowed his domestics to assemble their friends and the
general race, at odd times, in the great hallway, for such rational
enjoyments as they might select.

In truth, the owner of the house desired it to get a more cheerful
reputation; for the negroes, in particular, considered it haunted.

The first owner, it was said, had amused himself in the great hall-room
by making his own children stand on their toes, switching their feet
with a whip when they dropped upon their soles from pain or fatigue; and
his own son finally shot at him through the great northern door with a
rifle or pistol, leaving the mark to this day, to be seen by a small
panel set in the original pine. The third owner, a lawyer, often
entertained travelling clergymen here; and, on one occasion, the
eccentric Reverend Lorenzo Dow met on the stairs a stranger and bowed to
him, and afterwards frightened the host's family by telling it, since
they were not aware of any stranger in the house. The room over the
great door had always been considered the haunt of peculiar people, who
molested nobody living, but appeared there in some quiet avocation, and
vanished when pressed upon.

This main door itself had a church-like character, and was battened or
built in half, so that the upper part could be thrown open like a
window, and yet the lock on this upper part was a foot and a half long,
and the key weighed a pound.

This ponderous door, in elaborate carpentry, opened upon a flight of
steps and on a flower-yard surrounded by elms, firs, and Paulownia
trees, the latter of a beany odor and nature. A lower servants' part of
the dwelling, in two stories, stretched to the fields, and had a
veranda-covered rear.

Van Dorn called to a negro:

"Buck Ransom!"

"Politely, Captain," the negro's insinuating voice answered.

"Go to the front door and knock. As you enter, see that it is clear to
fly open. Then, as you pass along the hall, throw the windows up."

"Politely, Captain;" the negro bowed and departed.

"Owen Daw!"

"Yer honor!"

"Climb into the big tulip-tree softly and take this musket I shall reach
you. Train it on the staircase window, and fire only if you see
resistance there."

The boy went up the tree with all his vicious instincts full of fight.

"Melson!"

"Ay yi!"

"Milman!"

"Ah! boy."

"Get yourselves beneath the two large windows on the hall and serve as
mounting-blocks to Sorden's party. I shall storm the main door. As we
enter there, Sorden, order your men right over Melson and Milman into
the windows Ransom has lifted."

"I love him," muttered Sorden, admiringly, "as I never loved A male,"
and collected his party.

"Whitecar, you and your brother hold the back door with your staves. If
it is forced, Miles Tindel--"

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

"Will throw his red-pepper dust into the eyes of any that come out."

"Oh, tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

"Derrick Molleston!"

"See me, O see me!" the powerful negro muttered.

"Take Herron and Vincent, and two more, and guard the kitchen and the
front of the main dwelling. Knock any creature stiff, except--_ayme!
ay!_--the young damsels, whose fears will soon trip them to the ground."

"See me, see me!" the negro hoarsely said.

"As we enter the door, I shall cry, 'Patty Cannon has come!' Then spring
in the windows and beat opposition down. _Relampaguéa!_ Ransom is slow."

The knocker on the great door sounded, and it sprang open and quickly
slammed again, and a stifled, strange sound followed, as of a scuffle.

Van Dorn, agile as a panther, sprang on Milman's back and looked into a
window in the gable, drawing his face away, so as to be unseen in the
night.

The bright interior was full of people, sitting back against the
wainscoting, as if listening to a sermon, while down the middle of the
stately hall stretched a table lighted by whale-oil lamps and many
little candles, and filled with the remnants of a feast. The stairway in
the corner Van Dorn could not see, and there the dusky audience was all
facing, as if towards the preacher. There seemed a something out of the
common in the kind of attention the inmates were paying, but Van Dorn's
eyes were absorbed in the sight of several drooping and yet almost
startled dove-eyed quadroon maids, and he only noticed that the spy,
Ransom, could not be seen.

"Sorden," Van Dorn said, slipping down, "can Ransom have betrayed us?
_Chis!_ they all look as if a death-warrant was being read."

"My skin! No, Captain. Air they all there?"

"All," said Van Dorn; "I see thirty thousand dollars of flesh in sight."

"And niggers won't scrimmage nohow," spoke Whitecar. "Let's beat 'em
mos' to death."

"Come on then," said Van Dorn, softly; "if the windows are not lifted,
break them in."

He twisted, by main strength, a panel out of the palings near the house,
and led the way to the great front door. A dozen desperate hands seized
the heavy panel and ran with it. The door flew open, but at that moment
every light in Cowgill House went out.

"Dar's ghosts in dar," the hoarse voice of Derrick Molleston was heard
to say, and the negro element stopped and shrank.

"Tindel, your torch!" Van Dorn exclaimed, and, after a moment's
delay--the old house and shady yard meantime illumined by lightning, and
sounds of thunder rolling in the sky--a blazing pine-knot, all prepared,
was procured, and Van Dorn, holding it in his left hand, and with
nothing but his rude whip in his right, bounded in the door, shouting:

"Patty Cannon has come!"

At that dreaded name there were a few suppressed shrieks, and the great
windows at the gable side fell inwards with a crash as the kidnappers
came pouring over.

Van Dorn's quick eye took in the situation as he waved his torch, and it
lighted ceiling and pilaster, the close-fastened doors on the left and
the great stairway-well beyond, filled with black forms in the attitude
of defence.

"Patty Cannon has come!" he shouted again; "follow me!"

An instant only brought him to the base of the staircase, and the
lightning flashing in the gaping windows and fallen door revealed him to
his followers, with his yellow hair waving, and his long, silken
mustache like golden flame.

A mighty yell rose from the emboldened gang as they formed behind him,
with bludgeons and iron knuckles, billies and slings, and whatever would
disable but fail to kill.

Van Dorn, far ahead, made three murderous slashes of his whip across the
human objects above, and, with a toss of that formidable weapon, clubbed
it and darted on.

At the moment loud explosions and smoke and cries filled the echoing
place, as a volley of firearms burst from the landing, sweeping the line
of the windows and raking the hall. The band on the floor below stopped,
and some were down, groaning and cursing.

"They're armed; it's treachery," a voice, in panic, cried, and the
cowardly assailants ran to places of refuge, some crawling out at the
portal, some dropping from the windows, and others getting behind the
stairway, out of fire, and seeking desperately to draw the bolts of the
smaller door there.

"Patty Cannon has come!" Van Dorn repeated, throwing himself into the
body of the defenders, who, terrified at his bravery, began to retreat
upward around the angles of the stairs.

One man, however, did not retreat, neither did he strike, but wrapped
Van Dorn around the body in a pair of long and powerful arms, and lifted
him from the landing by main strength, saying:

"High doings, friend! I'm concerned for thee."

Van Dorn felt at the grip that he was overcome. He tried to reach for
his knife, but his arms were enclosed in the unknown stranger's, who,
having seized him from behind, sought to push him through the square
window on the landing into the grass yard below, where the rain was
falling and the lightning making brilliant play among the herbs and
ferns.

As the kidnapper prepared himself to fall, with all his joints and
muscles relaxed, the boy, Owen Daw, lying bloodthirstily along the limb
of the old tulip-tree, aimed his musket, according to Van Dorn's
instructions, at the forms contending there, and greedily pulled the
trigger.

The Quaker's arms, as they enclosed Van Dorn, presented, upon the cuff
of his coat, a large steel or metal button, and the ball from the tree,
striking this, glanced, and entered Van Dorn's throat.

"_Aymé Guay!_" Van Dorn muttered, and was thrown out of the window to
the earth, all limp and huddled together, till John Sorden bore him off,
muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The desperate party beneath the stairs at last broke open the back door
there and rushed forth, only to receive handfuls of red pepper dust
thrown by Miles Tindel, as he cried,

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

They screamed with anguish, and rolled in the wet grass, and yet, with
fears stronger than pain, sought the road in blindness, and some way to
leave the town.

Young Owen O'Day, or Daw, crept down the tree, and, seeing Van Dorn in
Sorden's arms at the wagon, contemptuously said, as he mounted his mule
and vanished:

"I reckon he'll never discipline me no mo'."

Derrick Molleston, regretting the loss of his loping horse, bore out to
the wagon an object he had found striving to escape from the veranda at
the kitchen side, though with a gag in his mouth, and a skewer between
his elbows and his back.

"See me, see me!" the negro kidnapper spoke, hoarsely. "He's mine an'
Devil Jim Clark's. I tuk him."

"Why, it's Buck Ransom," Sorden said.

"An' I'm gwyn to sell him, too," the negro muttered, seizing the reins.
"You see me now! Maybe he cheated us. Any way, he's tuk."

The old wagon started at a run through the driving rain, the black
victim lying helpless on his back, and Van Dorn bleeding in Sorden's
arms, who continued to moan,

"I loved him as I never loved A male!"

Van Dorn made several efforts to talk, and often coughed painfully, and
finally, as they reached a lane gate, he articulated:'

"The Chancellor's?"

"Yes, dis is it," Derrick Molleston said. "See me, Cap'n Van. I's all
heah."

As they advanced up a shady lane, fire from somewhere began to make a
certain illumination in spite of the loud storm.

"It's Bill Greenley. He's set de jail afire," the negro exclaimed. "See
me, O see me!"

The conflagration gave a vapory red light to a secluded dwelling they
now approached, upon a bowery lawn, and Sorden saw a woman of a severe
aspect looking out of a window at the fire.

"What is the meaning of this trespass so late at night?" she called.
"Are you robbers? My aged husband is asleep."

"Madam," answered Sorden, "here is the husband of Mrs. Patty Cannon. She
was your brother's mother-in-law. I love this man as I never loved A
male. He is wounded, and we want him taken in till he can have a
doctor."

"Take him to the jail, then, if that is not it burning yonder," the
woman exclaimed, scornfully. "Shall I make the home of the Chancellor of
Delaware a hospital for Patty Cannon's men as a reward for her sending
my brother to the gallows?"

She closed the window and the blind, and left them alone in the storm.

"Drive, Derrick, to your den at Cooper's Corners, quick, then," Sorden
said.

As they left the lane a flash of lightning, so near, so white, that they
seemed to be within the volume and crater of it, enveloped the wagon.
One horse sank down on his haunches, and the other reared back and tore
from his harness, while the wagon was overset.

The negro picked up his helpless fellow-African and lifted him on his
back, starting off in mingled avarice and terror, and saying,

"Derrick's gwyn home, sho'. See me, see me!"

Van Dorn put his finger at his throat, where blood was all the while
trickling, and, with a gentle cough, extorted the sounds:

"Leave me--under a bush--to--die."

"No," cried Sorden, raising Van Dorn also upon his back; "I love him as
I never loved A male."

The fire of the burning jail lighted their return into the outskirts of
Dover and to the gallows' hill, where stood the scaffold, split with the
lightning from cross-beam to the death-trap. As they halted opposite it
to rest, a horse and rider came stumbling past, and Molleston, dropping
his burden, shouted:

"Bill Greenley, dat's our hoss. We want it."

"His is the hoss that's on him," cried the escaped horse-thief, looking
scornfully up at his own gallows as he lashed his blinded animal along
in the rain.

"Cheer up, Captain Van," John Sorden said, soaked through with the rain;
"'t'ain't fur now to Cooper's Corners."




CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO WHIGS.


"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standing
before his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops in
the public square of Dover.

Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elms
and locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-driven
floods of rain.

"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightning
appalling, and I thought I heard firearms, too."

Judge Custis heard Clayton say, as he entered the room:

"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did
he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black
people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"

"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.

Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean
suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:

"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"

The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:

"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt
Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last
night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off,
and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin'
last night to Mr. Clayton yer."

Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,

"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and
fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"

"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man
surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were
marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the
road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord
rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John
Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little
brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House--where I
am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes
the name among them of 'Kind Parke'--I found several of our free
Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William
Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell,
as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile
enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"

"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on,
won't they? Goy!"

"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill
House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise
war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns,
and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical
defensive position--is that the vain term?--to send a volley out the
main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of
Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the
staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a
festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's
permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was
designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend
Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the
feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the
stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro
spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of
the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order,
all the lights were put out."

"Oh, Jedge," Levin Dennis broke in, "it was short and dreadful! Captain
Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-way
up fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yer
then pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the high
window. I pity Van Dorn, but _he_ says that he's in a bad business. I
hope he ain't dead."

"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such a
dare-devil, but he has never pestered Princess Anne."

"I ran and hid in the deep eaves of the garret story," Levin continued,
"which is built in like closets, and the wasps there, coming in to suck
the blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves from
outside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin'
and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' about
them kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come to
Dover no more."

"Two things surprise me," Clayton said; "that Joe Johnson would venture
to raid Dover itself after the licking I got him; and that free darkeys
could make such a defence."

"Ah! John Clayton," spoke Jonathan Hunn, "there was a white witness
there, to affirm that they only defended their lives."

"It was Captain Van Dorn that raided Dover," Levin spoke; "Joe Johnson
is a coward."

"Judge Custis," said Mr. Clayton, "you and I can save this peninsula, at
least, from the sectional excitements that are coming. You must
surrender to Delaware old Patty Cannon and her household. She now lives
on your side of the line. Come over to the Governor's office with me,
and I will get a requisition for her on the business of last night.
Young Dennis here knows the band; friend Hunn saw the attack."

Judge Custis's face grew suddenly troubled.

"Clayton," he said, "I would rather not appear in this matter. Indeed,
you must excuse me."

"What!" said Clayton; "hesitate to do a little thing like this, after
the free opinions you have expressed?"

There was a long, awkward pause. The Quaker arose, and, looking well at
Judge Custis, said:

"None but Almighty God knows the secrets of a slave-holder's mind. No
son of Adam is fit to be absolute over any human creature."

"Amen!" Judge Custis said, meekly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The news from Princess Anne confirmed the loss of Vesta Custis's slaves.
Judge Custis was told to come home and take steps for their recovery,
but he was strangely apathetic. The day after the raid Levin Dennis
disappeared, Clayton only saying:

"Who would have thought that soft-eyed boy was already fascinated by
these kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to Patty
Cannon's."

The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, as
law-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contract
against corporations were not many; this form of legal life being
comparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, or
before megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in the
canals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together,
comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of John
Randel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to be
rid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied with
money by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which was
distant about thirty miles.

The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a soft
yet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkle
and mildness like the Florida climate. They passed several tidal creeks,
as the Duck and the Little Duck, the Blackbird and the Apoquinimink,
and, as they advanced, the barns became larger, the hedges more tasteful
and trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peach
orchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three little
towns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smaller
farms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turned
across the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at the
end of a long lane, and near a great stagnant pond, where John Randel,
Junior, as he fully named himself on every occasion, had a fine dinner
spread.

After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to
Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,
and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through
a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.

The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed
them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a
willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the
marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.
Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive
countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce
gestures.

"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "I
ought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoretical
engineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue the
villains who employ me."

Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it as
stolidly as a bottle of medicine shaken by the doctor.

"Yes, you sued Judge Ben Wright and he nonsuited you."

"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting
the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius
has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He
deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it,
and is a fraud."

Here he kicked the negro underneath him, who hardly protested.

"Well, then," spoke Judge Custis, "as Clayton is a man of genius, and
you employ him--"

"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and
right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been
obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would
have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have
filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping
water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country could
go through, and the channel would be purged by every tide."

He stood up and put his foot on the negro, to the amusement of the boys
gathering around.

"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will;
it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my Beaver
Hat.'"

Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which had
entered his family.

The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon came
to a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, entered
upon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of which
the canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the low
ridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almost
mountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short of
imagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, only
fourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the only
achieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by the
national government, by three of the states it connected, and by private
subscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars of
expense--no light burden when the population was, by the previous
census, less than eight million whites in all the land.

Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up at
the deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands of
yellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of which
had fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again;
and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feet
overhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touched
Clayton and said:

"Never mind my failures! Thank God, I'm a Whig."

"Goy! there's nothing like it," said Clayton.

Not far from this point the canal passed an old church and graveyard at
a bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governor
of Delaware, was buried. Here Randel's plain conveyance took them in,
and in the moonlight they drove a few miles to Mr. Randel's estate, near
the banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay and
iron stain, on the farther shore.

"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall see
all the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vessel
that pays my tolls to the Canal Company."

"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distance
back, running north and south across the fields?"

"A railroad survey."

"Who is making it?"

"They say Meshach Milburn, of Princess Anne."

"Goy!" exclaimed Clayton, "I'll beat him."

       *       *       *       *       *

For two or three days the three men, still studying the canal suit,
drove over a picturesque country, visiting the old manor of the
Labadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead of
the late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churches
among the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell's
warriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in the
neighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholy
interest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father more
than a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They also
went to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capture
Philadelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history of
Delaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from one
of these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points seared
Judge Custis's eyeballs:

"Your wife died at Cambridge." "Your daughter is very ill at
Wilmington."

"To Wilmington!" cried Judge Custis, staggering up. "Oh, my daughter! I
have killed her."




CHAPTER XXXVII.

SPIRITS OF THE PAST.


"What do they say, William, about Jack Wonnell's being found shot dead?"

"It is generally said that he was killed by the negroes for gallantries
to their color. Some talk of arresting little Roxy Custis."

"What do you say, William Tilghman?"

"I can say nothing. The night I drove Virgie to Snow Hill I drove over
poor Wonnell's body. A strange negro was seen here--an enemy of your
servant, Samson. The new cook at Teackle Hall thinks he fired the shot."

The young rector felt the searching look of those resinous forester's
eyes staring him through.

"That shot was meant for me, William Tilghman."

"Perhaps so."

"It was the shot of a hired murderer, who mistook Wonnell's unusual
hats for mine, that was not well described to him, or the description of
which his drunken and excited memory did not retain."

"Mr. Milburn, please save Vesta this suspicion."

"Oh! that pure soul could not know it," Milburn continued, with a
moment's gentleness; "but some of her proud kin, to whom I am less than
a dog, did send the assassin. I think I guess the man."

"Do not rush to a conclusion! Remember, Vesta has suffered so much for
others' errors."

"He was killed in this room, where Wonnell never came before. The wound
shows the shot to have come from a point below, where nothing but
Wonnell's hat, and not his features, could be seen. The mistake of
bell-crown for steeple-top shows that it was a stranger's job: the poor
fool died for me. Now where did the bungler who killed me by proxy come
from?"

"I will be frank with you, sir. Joe Johnson, the kidnapper, was also
here: Mary says so. To save Virgie from him, I helped her away."

"Now," said Milburn, "what enemy of mine delegated the kidnapper to
procure a murderer?"

He waited a moment without response, and answered, in a low tone of
voice, his own question:

"The man is at Johnson's Cross Roads: letters from Cambridge tell me so.
It was the deceased Mrs. Custis's brother, Allan McLane."

"Again I ask you to think of Vesta and her many sacrifices!"

"I do. I have promised her that she shall never receive a cruel word
from me. But I shall not spare my assassins. To them I shall be as one
they have killed, and whose blood smokes, for vengeance. I possess the
only warrant that can drive them from Maryland."

He laid a roll of bank-notes on the table suggestively.

"No wealth is accumulated in vain," said Meshach Milburn, his delicate
nostrils distended and his fine hand pointing to the bank-bills. "Now,
_war_ on Johnson's Cross Roads!"

He crossed the old room over the store, and, opening the green chest,
brought out the Entailed Hat, and took it in his hand with a grim smile.

"Here is something I thought to lay aside on my wife's account," he
spoke. "Her people compel me to wear it! I thought all malice to this
poor hat would be done with my social triumph here. But I am not a man
to be frightened. Let them kill me, but it shall be under my ancestral
brim."

"Oh! hear your mocking-bird sing again as it did:
'Vesta--Meshach--Love!' Where is the bird?"

Meshach Milburn shook his head and put the Entailed Hat upon it. "Tom
left me," he said, "when they began to fire bullets at my Hat."

       *       *       *       *       *

Vesta's female instinct had already found the explanation of Wonnell's
death.

From the moment of knowing her husband, his fatal hat had been the
shadow across her life's path. His person had never been offensive to
her, and something attractive or modifying in him had led her, when a
child, to offer a flower to his hat, to give it consonance with himself,
that seemed to deserve less evil.

A fancied insult to his hat had made him quarrel with her father, a
quarrel which involved her conquest, not by wooing, but by the treaty of
war. The same hat had inspired the superstition which led her kitchen
servants to leave their comfortable home, and had been the insuperable
obstacle to her mother's consent to her marriage. It had caused the only
bitter words that ever passed between her and her father. At last it had
spilled blood, and her uncle, she well knew, from his implacable
nature, had set the ruffians on, and she knew as well that her husband
had found him out.

His intelligence, which would have been otherwise a matter of pride to
her, became a subject of fear, involved with his hat.

Then, the loss of Virgie was hardly less severe to Vesta than her own
mother's.

It was true that Roxy, pretty and loving, now poured all her devotion at
her mistress's feet, but there had been something in Virgie that Roxy
could never rise to--a dignity and self-reliance hardly less than a
white woman's. Vesta shed bitter tears at the news of that dear
comforter's flight, and on her knees, praying for the delicate young
wanderer, she felt God's conviction of the sins of slavery. Alas!
thousands felt the same who would not admit the conviction, and gave
excuses that welded into one nation, at last, the sensitive millions who
could not agree to a lesser sacrifice, but were willing to give war.

A little note from Snow Hill told Vesta that her maid had already
departed, and would only write again from free soil.

So the upbraided hat was worn more often than before, and Vesta had to
suffer much humiliation for it. Her husband now moved actively to
organize his railroad, and visited the Maryland towns of the peninsula,
taking her along, and wearing on the journey his King James tile, now
swathed in mourning crape.

At Cambridge, which basked upon the waters like an English Venice, he
applied the sinews of war to a listless public sentiment, and the county
press began to call for Joe Johnson's expulsion, and Patty Cannon's
rendition to the State of Delaware. At Easton, lying between the waters
on her treasures of marl, like a pearl oyster, the people turned out to
see the little man in the peaked hat, with the beautiful lady at his
side; and Vesta was more pained for her husband than herself, to feel
that his _outré_ dress was prejudicing his railroad, as business, no
less than beauty, revolts from any outward affectation. At the old
aristocratic homes on the Wye River, more scowls than smiles were
bestowed on the eccentric _parvenu_; and at Chestertown, where
originated the Peales who drew this hat into their museum, the boys
burned tar-barrels on the market space, and marched, in hats of brown
loaf-sugar wrappers, like Meshach's, before the dwelling of Vesta's
host.

The greater the opposition, the more indomitable Milburn grew to live it
down. He wrote to her father to go to Annapolis and work for a railroad
charter and state aid, and began grading for his line in the vicinity of
his old store at Princess Anne, throwing the first shovelful of earth
himself, with the immemorial hat upon his sconce. This time there were
no shouts, and he almost regretted it, seeming to feel that jeers carry
no deep malice, while silence is hate.

Loyal to her least of vows, and wishing to love and obey him in spirit
fully, Vesta felt that his own good-nature was being darkened again by
his obstinacy upon this single point of an obsolete hat.

He looked, in their evening circle at Teackle Hall, like a younger and
knightlier person, in a modern suit of clothes, and slippers of Vesta's
gift. His delicate hand well became the ring she put upon it, and, when
he talked high enthusiasm and sense, and stood ready to back them with
courage and money, Vesta thought her husband lacked but one thing to
make him the equal of his supposititious kinsman, the democratic martyr
in the seventeenth century, and that was another head-dress. She almost
feared to broach the subject, knowing that an old sore is ever the most
sensitive, and being too direct and frank to insinuate or practise any
arts upon him.

She was embroidering an evening-cap of velvet for him one day when Mrs.
Tilghman sent a hat-box, and in it was a fine new hat of the current
style. He answered her letter politely, and put the new hat upon the
rack of Teackle Hall, and never touched it again.

Next, Rhoda Holland, his niece, procuring, from some country beau, a
beaver-skin--and beavers were growing scarce and dear in that
peninsula--had him an elegant cap made of it for the cold weather now
coming; but he only kissed her and put it on the rack, and there it
tempted the moth.

His chills and fever continued at broken times, but more regular became
the dislike and opposition of the old class of society as he undertook
to become the promoter of his region. They regarded it as audacity worse
than crime: he had outstripped them in wealth, and now was undermining
their importance. Many avowed that they would never ride on a railroad
built by such a man; others hoped it would break him; some took open
ground against his work, and wrote letters to Annapolis to prejudice him
with the Legislature, where the Baltimore interest was already crying
loudly that an Eastern Shore railroad meant to take Maryland trade and
money to Philadelphia. Meshach fiercely responded that, unless the
railway took the line of the Maryland counties, Delaware state would
build it and carry it off to Newcastle instead of to Elkton, where
Meshach meant to unite with a projected Baltimore system. Prudently
estimating the sparseness of his fortune to execute a hundred miles of
embankment and railroad, Milburn yet kept up a display of surveyors and
graders in several counties, and his local patriotism had at least the
appreciation of Vesta's little circle.

In the meantime the continued absence of Samson surprised him, and Judge
Custis's letters were irregular and long coming as he went farther
north, while two letters received by the Widow Dennis were as mystical
as they were assuring: one, in a female hand, told her that her son
Levin was being tenderly watched, and another, in man's writing,
enclosed some money, and said her son would soon be home. Mrs. Dennis
was far from happy in this indefinite state of mind, and her heart told
her, also, that the absence of James Phoebus was a different strain.
She loved that absentee already too well to forgive his silence.

One day, before November, Vesta said to her husband:

"The air and sky are warm and sparkling yet, and the roses are out. You
work too hard between your canal case and your railroad. Let us fill the
two carriages and drive to old Rehoboth, and eat our dinner there."

He consented, and they took with them Grandmother Tilghman and William,
Rhoda Holland, Roxy, and Mrs. Dennis, and also the poor free woman,
Mary, whom Jimmy Phoebus had released from her chains.

The road passed in sight of the birthplace of the lion of independence
in Maryland, Samuel Chase, who forced that hesitating state, by
threatenings and even riots, to declare for permanent separation from
England, as Henry Winter Davis, by the same means, eighty-five years
afterwards, forced her rebels against the Union to show their hands.

Near Chase's birthplace, on the glebe, rose the old Washington Academy,
out in a field, raised in that early republican day when a generous
fever for education, following the act of tolerance, made some noble
school-houses that the growth of towns ultimately discouraged. With four
great chimneys above its conical roof, and pediments and cupola, and two
wide stories, and high basement, all made in staid, dark brick, the
academy yet had a mournful and neglected look, as if, like man, it was
ruminating upon the more brutalized times and lessening enlightenment
false systems ever require.

"Ah!" said Vesta's husband, "how many a poor boy thou hast sent from
yonder mutilated for life, honey, like the lovers of the queen bee."

"How is that?" Vesta inquired.

"You never heard of the queen bee? Women, when they die, may turn to
bees, and reverse their hard conditions in this life. The queen bee has
no rival in the hive; all other females there are immature, and all the
males are dying for the queen. She has five hundred lovers, so lovesick
for her that they never work, and forty times as many maids, like
Penelope's, all embroidering comb and wax."

"How was that proved?"

"By putting the bees in a glass house and watching them. To God all
mankind may be in a glass hive, too, and every buzzer's secret biography
be kept."

"And the queen bee's honeymoon?"

"From her that word is taken. She flies high into the air and meets a
lover by chance; she has so many that one is sure to be met; she kisses
him in that crystal eddy of sunshine, and, in the transport, he is
wounded to the heart. How many young drones from the academy have seen
thee once and swooned for life!"

"But the queen bee also has a fate some time, sir?"

"Yes. She leaves the ancient hive at last, and settles on an unsightly
forest-tree somewhere, and all that love her follow: the long-neglected
herb becomes busy with music and sweetness, and the flashing of silver
wings, till into some gum-tree cone the farmer gathers the swarm, and it
is their home."

Vesta looked up at the poetical illustration, and saw her husband's
conical hat, into which she had been hived, and her eyes fell to her
mourning weeds.

"Oh, my father!" she thought; "has he kept his good resolutions! It is
all I have left to hope for."

They travelled down the aisles of the level forest, sometimes the
holly-trees, in their green leafage and red fruit, sometimes the cleanly
pine-tree's green, enriching the brown concavity of oaks; and at the
scattered settlement of Kingston, the Jackson candidate for governor,
Mr. Carroll, bowed from his door. Crossing Morumsco Creek, they bore to
the east, and soon saw, on a plain, the still animate ecclesiastical
hamlet of Rehoboth, extending its two ancient churches across the
vision.

The road ran to the bank of the River Pocomoke, where a ferry was still
maintained to the opposite shore and the Virginia land of Accomac, and
the cold tide, without a sail, went winding to an oystery estuary of the
bay, where the mud at the bottom was so soft that vessels aground in it
could still continue sailing, as on the muggy globe that Noah came to
shore in.

Close by were oyster-shells high as a natural bluff, made by the Indian
gourmands before John Smith's voyage of navigation.

Vesta was set out at the great, ruined Episcopal church that, like a
castle of brick, made the gateway of Rehoboth; while William Tilghman
and Rhoda strolled into the open door of the brick Presbyterian church
farther on, and Milburn put up the horses at the tavern.

"William," Rhoda asked, "was this the first Presbyterian church ever
made yer?"

"The first in America, Rhoda. This was Rev. Francis Makemie's church. He
lived in Virginia, not far from here, where no other worship was
permitted but ours, so he came over the Pocomoke and reared a church of
logs at this point, and this is the third or fourth church-building upon
the spot. Rehoboth then came to be such a point for worship that the
Established Church put up yonder noble old edifice, as if to overawe
this Calvinistic one, in 1735."

"It's a quare old house," said Rhoda. "The little doors that opens from
the vestiblulete into the side galleries sent a draught right down the
preacher's back at the fur end, and when he give out the hymn, 'Blow ye
the trumpet, blow,' he always blowed his nose twice. So they boarded up
the galleries and let the ceiling down flat, and if we go up thar we can
see the other old round ceiling, William."

So they went up the narrow stairs from the door, and came into the tubes
of galleries all closed from the congregation, and there, sitting down
in the obscurity, the preacher passed his arm around Rhoda's waist.

"Take keer," she said; "maybe you was predestined to be lost yer. I'm
skeered to be up yer half in the dark, even with a good man."

Nevertheless, she came a little closer to him, and looked into his eyes
with her arch, demure ones. The young rector suddenly kissed her.

"You've brought it on yourself, Rhoda, by looking so pretty in this
stern old place of creeds and catechisms. Could you love me if I asked
you?"

"You couldn't love me true, William. Your heart is in t'other old church
among the bats and foxes, where Aunt Vesty sits this minute."

"No, my sorrow is there, Rhoda. I am trying to build a nest for my
heart. We all must love."

"William, I don't think a young man in love can remember so much history
when he's sittin' in the dark by his gal."

"Love among the ruins is always melancholy, Rhoda."

"Yes, William, and your love comes out of 'em: the ruins of your old
first love. I couldn't make you happy."

"Try," said William; "my fancy wavers towards you. You are a beautiful
girl."

"Yes," said Rhoda, practically, "it's time I was gittin' married. I
think I'll take you on trial, and watch Aunt Vesty to see if she is
jealous of me."

All differences of education passed away, when, standing for a moment
with this tall, willowy girl in his arms, her ardent nature in the blush
of uncertainty, her very coquetry languishing, like health taking
religion captive, the rector of Princess Anne felt that there is no
medicine for love but love.

They walked together around the square old edifice, among the graves of
Tilghmans, Drydens, Revells, and Beauchamps, and saw the round-capped
windows and double doors in arched brick, and, passing back along the
road, entered the enclosure of the grand old Episcopal church, which was
nearly eighty feet long, and presented its broadside of blackish brick,
and double tier of spacious windows, to the absolute desertion of this
forest place.

The churchyard was a copse of gum-tree and poplar suckers, and berry
bushes, with apple-trees and cedars and wild cherry-trees next above,
and higher still the damp sycamores and maples, growing out of myrtle
nearly knee-deep upon the waves of old graves.

In beautiful carpentry, the thirteen windows on this massive side upheld
in their hand-worked sashes more than four hundred panes of dim glass,
and two great windows in the gable had fifty panes each, and stood firm,
though the wall between them, fifty feet in width, had fallen in, and
been replaced with poorer workmanship. In the opposite gable was another
door that had been forced open, and, as they stepped across the sill, a
crack, like ice first stepped upon, went splitting the long and lofty
vacancy with warning rumbles.

Now the whole interior, in fine perspective, stood exposed, at least
seventy-five by fifty feet, like a majestic hall unbroken by any
side-galleries, and with double stories of windows shedding a hazy
light, and, at the distant end, a low pulpit, with spacious altar. The
walls of this neglected temple were two feet thick, and its high ceiling
was kept from falling down by ten rude wooden props of recent rough
carpentry; the pews were stately, high-fenced things, numbered in white
letters on a black ground, and each four-sided, to contain ten persons;
the rotting damask cushions in many of them told of a former
aristocracy, while now all the congregation could be assembled in a
single pew, and worship was unknown but once a year, when the bishop
came to read his liturgy to dust and desolation.

So, on the opposite western cape of the Chesapeake, shivered the Roman
priests of Calvert's foundation, in the waste of old St. Mary's; the
folds had left the shepherds, and fifty people only came to worship in
the kirk of the earliest Presbyterians.

Two tall, once considered elegant, stoves were nearly midway up the
cracking church-floor; and Mary, the free woman, had made a fire in one
of them, and the pine wood was roaring, and the long height of pipe was
smoking. Startled by the fire, a venerable opossum came out of one of
the pews, and waggled down the aisle, like a gray devotee who had said
his prayers, and feared no man.

Vesta was reading her prayer-book aloud near the stove to the pretty
widow and Grandmother Tilghman. In a few moments the young rector
emerged from a curious old gallery for black people, by the door,
wearing his surplice; and he read the service at the desk, plaintive and
simple, Milburn and his group responding in the room a thousand might
have worshipped in.

"Cousin Vesta," the minister said, after the service, "Miss Holland is
going to try to love me. Mr. Milburn, may I address her?"

"She is a wilful piece," Meshach said; "you must school her first. Let
my wife give my consent."

Vesta went to both, and kissed them:

"I feel so much encouraged, dear Rhoda and William, to see love
beginning all about me. Now, Norah, if you could be just to James
Phoebus, who is proving his love to you, perhaps, with his life!"

"Yes, that is a match I approve of," said Grandmother Tilghman, "but I
don't want Bill to marry. Disappointed men make rash selections."

"Oh," said Rhoda, "don't conglatulate him too soon; I haven't tuk him
yet. He's goin' teach me outen the books, and I'll teach him outen the
forest."

They walked together to the river bank, and Mrs. Dennis had the poor
woman, Mary, tell the adventures of Jimmy Phoebus to save her from
slavery. All were deeply moved.

"Now, Norah," Grandmother Tilghman said, "the moment that man comes back
you go to him and kiss him, and say, 'James, you have been the only
father to my son. Do you want me to be your wife?' This world is made
for marrying, Norah. Women have no other career. Nature does not value
the brain of Shakespeare, but keeps the seed of every vagrant plant
warm, and marries everything."

"Well," said Vesta, "Norah loves James Phoebus; don't you, Norah?"

The widow blushed.

"Take him, my pretty neighbor," said Milburn.

As they all looked at her, she suddenly cried:

"I want to, indeed. I would have done so before, but I am superstitious.
Who is it that feeds me so mysteriously?"

"Has he been coming of late?" asked Mrs. Tilghman.

"No, not since you were married, Vesta."

"Then I think it will come no more," Milburn said. "You have waited
longer than I did."

His eyes sought his wife's. He added:

"Will I ever be more than your husband?"

"Yes," said Grandmother Tilghman, with a special effort, "when you wear
a hat a young wife is not ashamed of."

All felt a cold thrill at these words from the blind woman. Milburn
said, gravely,

"How can you know about hats, when you cannot see them?"

"Oh," said Grandmother, herself a little frightened, "that hat I think I
can smell."

       *       *       *       *       *

That same night, in Princess Anne, Mrs. Dennis, in her little cottage,
undressed herself by a fragment of hearth-fire that now and then flashed
upon the picture of her husband, as he had left her sixteen years
before, when Levin was a baby--a rich blonde, youthful man, dressed in
naval uniform, like Decatur, whose birthplace was so near his own.

His golden hair curled upon his forehead, his blue eyes were full of
handsome daring, and his red, pouting mouth was like a woman's; upon his
arm a corded chapeau was held, epaulettes tasselled his shoulders, his
rich blue coat was slashed with gold along the wide lappels, and stood
stiffly around his neck and fleecy stock and fan-shaped shirt-ruffles.
He seemed to be a mere boy, but of the mettle which made American
officers and privateersmen of his days the only guerdons of the
republicanism of the seas against the else universal dominion of
England.

This portrait, the last of her family possessions, was the young
sailor's parting gift to her when he sailed in the _Ida_, leaving her a
mere girl, with his son upon her breast. The picture hung above the
lowly door, the bolt whereof was never fastened in that serene society,
and seldom is to this day.

Mrs. Dennis knelt upon the bare floor, and raised her branching arms,
white as her spirit, to the lover of her youth:

"Oh, thou I have adored since God gave me to feel the beauty and
strength of man in my childhood, if I have ever looked on man but thee
with love or wavering, rebuke me now for the offence I am to do, if such
it be, in choosing another father for thy boy!"

A low wail seemed to be breathed upon the midnight from somewhere near,
and a sick man's cough seemed to break the perfect silence. The widow's
hand instinctively covered her bosom as she listened, and, deep in the
spirit of her prayer, she continued:

"Oh, Bowie, if thou livest, let me know! May I not live to see thee come
and find me in another's arms; thy look would kill me. If thou art
detained by enemies, by savage people, or by foreign love, no matter
what thy errors, I will still be true! Give me some token by the God
that has thee in his keeping, whether thou liest on the ocean's floor or
lookest from the stars. If thou art dead, love of my youth, assure me,
oh, I pray thee!"

The wail and hacking cough seemed to be repeated very near. A footstep
seemed to come.

The door flew open, and in the moonlight stood a man, pale as a ghost,
of bandit look, with Spanish-looking garments, and head and neck tied up
with cerements, like wounded people in the cockpits of ships of war.

He bent upon her the eyes of the portrait above the door. How changed!
how like! There seemed upon his throat the stain of blood.

The widow, fascinated, frozen still, let fall her arms of ivory, and, as
she gazed, her beautiful neck, strained in horror and astonishment,
received upon its snow the rapture of Diana's shine.

The effigy, so like her husband, yet so altered, reached towards her his
hand, on which a diamond caught the moon, and seemed to drink it. A
wail, like the others she had heard, broke from his lips, and said the
words:

"To lose those charms! To lose that heart! O God!"

As thus he stood, ghastly and supplicating, as if he would fall and die
upon her threshold, another hand came forward in the moonlight, and drew
the door between them. A voice she had not heard tenderly exclaimed:

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"It is my husband's spirit," the widow breathed. "I cannot marry."

She swooned upon her floor, before the dying fire.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

VIRGIE'S FLIGHT.


Snow Hill, when Virgie looked forth upon it, almost seemed built on
snow, a white sand composing the streets, gardens, and fields, though
the humid air brought vegetation even from this, and vines clambered,
willows drooped, flowers blossomed, on winter's brink, and great
speckled sycamores, like freckled giants, and noble oaks, rose to
heights betokening rich nutrition at their roots.

Heat and moisture and salt had made the land habitable, and the wind
from a receded sea had piled up the sand long ago into mounds now
covered with verdure, which the freak or fondness of the manor owner had
called a hill, and put his own name thereto, perhaps with memories of
old Snow Hill in London.

Upon this apparent bank or hill two venerable churches stood, both of
English brick, the Episcopalian, covered with ivy, and the Presbyterian,
which had given its name to the first synod of the Kirk in the new
world, and now stood, surrounded with gravestones, where the visitor
might read Scottish names left to orphans at Worcester, as yonder at the
Episcopate graveyard, names left to English orphans in the same rolling
tide of blood; and Worcester was the name of the county, as the court
and jail might tell.

Hidden in the sand, like Benjamin's cup in the bag of flinty corn, a
golden lustre yet seemed to betray Snow Hill, as the sun rose into its
old trees, and woke the liquid-throated birds, and finally made the old
brick and older whitewashed houses gleam, and exhale a soft, blue smoke.
Virgie heard a sound as of hoofs upon a bridge, and saw, across the
lily-bordered river, the Custis carriage winding up a golden road.

"Alone!" said Virgie; "love has gone. Now I must live for freedom."

"Breakfast, Miss," spoke a neat, kind-faced, yet ready woman, of
Virgie's own size and color; "my husband is going to drive you out of
town before any of the white people are up to see you."

At the table was a mulatto man, whom the woman introduced as her
husband.

"Mrs. Hudson," Virgie said, "you are doing so much for me! may the good
Lord pay you back!"

"Oh, no," replied the woman, "I am always up at this hour. I work hard,
because I am trying to buy my mother, who is still a slave."

"How came you free?" Virgie asked, wistfully.

"I saved a sick gentleman's life, and he bought me for it, and gave me
my freedom. See, I have a pass that tells the color of my eyes and skin,
my weight, and everything. With this I can go into Delaware and the free
states. I wish you had one, Miss Virgie."

"Oh, Mrs. Hudson, I dearly wish I had. Let me read it. Why, I could
almost pass for you, from this description."

"Indeed you could," the housewife said; "we are not of the same age, but
white people don't read a pass very careful."

"How I would love anybody that could get me such a pass!"

"I have given my word of honor that I will never lend it. Much as I like
to help my color to freedom, I cannot break my word. To-morrow I have to
go into Delaware with my pass to nurse a lady."

"You attend the sick, Mrs. Hudson?"

"Yes, I have a kind of call that way, Miss Virgie. Ever since I was a
girl I pulled herbs and tried them on myself, and studied 'tendin' on
people, watchin' their minds, that is so much of sickness, and how to
wrap and rub them. My husband oysters down in the inlets. Here is his
wagon."

"The Lord remember you in need, dear Mrs. Hudson."

The old wagon, an open thing, to peddle oysters and fish, was driven
across the town to the south, and soon was in the open country, going
towards Virginia. A smell of salt bay seemed in the air; the hawks'
nests in dead trees indicated the element that subsisted everything, and
the trees in the fields were often lordly in size, though sand and small
oak and pine woods were seldom out of sight. As they turned into a lane
near a little roadside place of worship, a young white man rode by on
horseback, and, seeing Virgie, reined in and shouted,

"Purty, purty, purty as peaches and cream! Ole Virginny blood is in them
eyes, by the Ensign!"

The colored man muttered, "Go 'long, Mr. Wise!"

"By the Ensign now," continued the man, who was young, but of a
cadaverous countenance, "if 'tis a Maryland huzzy, she is marvellous.
What's the name, angel gal?"

"She's a Miss Spence. I'm a takin' her home yer," the mulatto man
interposed, hastily, and went in the gate, while the horseman, with a
shout like one intoxicated, gallopped towards the north.

"I'm sorry he seen you, sho'!" the conductor said; "that's Henry A.
Wise, the big lawyer from Accomac. Maybe he'll inquire at Snow Hill,
where he's goin' to court."

"What house is this, Mr. Hudson?" Virgie asked, seeing at the end of the
short lane a thick-set house and porch, with small farm-buildings around
it.

"That's ole Spring Hill, built by the first of the Milburns; by the one
that made the will leavin' his hat and nothin' else to be son. It's got
brick ends. I 'spect they had money when they come here, Virgie."

The quickened mettle of the girl noticed that he had ceased to call her
"Miss."

"Now," said Hudson, "I'm goin' to leave you here with my sister till I
see about gittin' a boat. If you is tracked to Snow Hill, it'll be found
you come out this way, now. The inlets run up along the coast yer past
the Delaware line. I'm a goin' to sail you past Snow Hill agin an'
double on 'em. Yes, Miss Virgie, I'll git you away if it costs all I
have got together."

An excited light seemed to be in his eyes.

Virgie was put in a loft over the kitchen of the house, and left to her
contemplations. The place was nearly dark, and she was jaded for want of
sleep, the past night's excitement having shaken her nervous system, and
soon she began to doze fitfully, and dream almost awake.

She saw Meshach Milburn, who seemed to have become a little, old-faced
child, reaching up to an older person, very like himself in features,
and taking a steeple hat from his hand. This older child reached back,
and took a similar hat from another, still older; and then the first two
vanished, and two old men were giving and receiving the hat.

Then nothing was left but the hat alone, which was a huge object with
fire belching from it, and by the flame a circle of wizards went round
and round in dizzy glee, all wearing hats of similar form, but higher,
higher, till they reached the sky and stars, and each was spouting
flames.

Among these riotous wizards she recognized the features of the tall
kidnapper and of Judge Custis; and Vesta, too, was there, and old Aunt
Hominy, all giving a hasty look of shame or sorrow or severity at her,
till she, fearing, yet fascinated, leaped into the circle, and danced
around and around with the rest, till her feet made a fiery path and her
head was burning hot, and finally she lost her balance, and fell into
the great hat, whose high walls, like mountains, surrounded her, and
nothing could she see in the bottom of the old felt tile but a little
grave, and peeping from it was the face of the murdered child the
kidnapper had taken away.

"Come," said a voice, and Virgie awoke, with fever in her temples and
hot hands, to see the head of her conductor looking into the loft as if
with red-hot eyeballs.

She only knew that she was going again in the old wagon, and a boy was
in it, and that after a certain time, she could not tell how long, she
was helped to the ground at an old landing, where the road stopped, and
was placed on board a sort of scow, which the breeze, laden with
mosquitoes, was carrying into a broad, islet-sprinkled water.

The man Hudson was sounding, and was watching the sail, while the boy
steered, and Virgie was lying, sick and cold, in the middle of the
skiff, covered with the man's large coat.

It seemed to her to be afternoon, and the ocean somewhere near, as she
heard low thunder, like breaking waves; and once, when she rose, in a
stupefied way, to look, there were familiar objects on both shores, and
she thought it was the Old Town beach near Snow Hill inlet.

A little later the man brought her oysters and some cold pork-rib, with
corn-bread, to eat, and the shores grew closer, and finally seemed
almost to meet, as the skiff, scraping the bottom, darted through a
narrow strait.

Then the stars were shining over her, and the waters grew wide again,
and, lying in a trance of flying lights and images, she thought she felt
her lips kissed, and a voice say "Darling!"

Finally, she felt lifted up and carried, and, when she could realize the
situation, she found herself lying on a pile of shingles at an old
wharf, and the man, beside her, was weeping, as he watched the boat
receding down a moonlit aisle of wave.

"My boy, my poor ole woman," she heard her conductor mutter, "I never
can come back to you no mo'!"

"Why?" spoke Virgie, hardly realizing what she said.

"Because--because--_you_ did it!" the man exclaimed, with ardent eyes,
seen through his streaming tears.

"Oh, tell me where I am!" Virgie said. "Is it far to freedom now?"

She looked at the sky, all agitated with clouds and stars moving across
each other, and it seemed the nearest world of all.

"Is my father there?" thought Virgie, "my dear white father? Can he see
me here, sick and lonely, and hate me?"

"We're at de Shingle landing; yonder is St. Martin's," said the negro,
cautiously; "there's two roads nigh whar we air, goin' to the North,
dear Virgie; one is the stage-road, and t'other is the shingle-trail
through the Cypress Swamp.

"Take the road that's the safest to Freedom," Virgie sighed.

In a few moments, walking over the ground, they came to a place where
the cart-trail crossed a sandy road, and went beyond it, along the edge
of a small stream. The man walked a few steps up the better road
undecidedly, and suddenly drew Virgie back into the bushes, but not
quick enough to be unobserved by two men coming on in an old, rattling
wagon.

"My skin!" cried the man driving, a youngish man, of sharp, but not
unkindly eyes, "thar's a sniptious gal. Come out yer and show yourself!"

Virgie felt the man's eyes resting on her, but not with the coarse ardor
of his companion, who wore a wide slouched hat and red shirt, and was
bandaged around the head and throat, yet from his ghastly pale face,
like death, on which some blood seemed to be smeared, and to stain the
bandage at his neck, lay a coarse leer, and he kissed his mouth at her,
and uttered:

"_O flexuosa! esquisita!_ It is dainty, Sorden!"

"Now ef we was a going t'other way, Van Dorn," the driver said, "we
could give them a lift. Boy, what are you out fur? Where's your passes?"

"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."

"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy
Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same
woman! where did you get this pass?"

"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."

His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The
driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon
started south.

"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy
Hudson for assisting a runaway!"

"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only
road!"

He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the
swampy branch.

"What have you done?" cried Virgie.

"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."

With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her
impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in
frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and
scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of
pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the
reptile.

Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up
their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high
tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and
stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their
beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal
dream.

The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon
were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to
industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden
every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums
of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their
contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each
insist upon the last word to say:

"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you
didn't!" "You did, you did!"

Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born,
had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night,
till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan
disputing for her soul.

As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these
warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels
cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of
spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!"
groaned back.

"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"

She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"

The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing
sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere
ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the
man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and
puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or
again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the
light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if
from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man
often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some
treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in
the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.

He stared at her in wonder, but too wistfully. The cat-briers hung
across the opening, and grapevines, like cables of sunken ships, fell
many a fathom through the crystal waves of night; but the North Star
seemed to find a way to peep through everything, and Virgie heard the
words from Hudson, once, of--

"Jess over this branch a bit we is in Delaware!"

Then the crickets and tree-frogs, the bullfrogs and the whippoorwills,
the owls and everything, seemed to drown his voice and halloo for hours,
"We is in Delaware! we is, we is! we is in Del-a-a-ware!"

A little warming, kindly light at length began to blaze their trail
along, as if some gentle predecessor, with a golden adze, had chipped
the funereal trees and made them smile a welcome. Small fires were
burning in the vegetable mould or surface brush, and the opacity of the
forest yielded to the pretty flame which danced and almost sang in a
household crackle, like a young girl in love humming tunes as she
kindles a fire.

The mighty swamp now grew distinct, yet more inaccessible, as its inner
edges seemed transparent in the line of fires, like curtains of lace
against the midnight window-panes. The Virginia creeper, light as the
flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen
giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared
beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some
kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers
in bed.

Suddenly the man took Virgie up and carried her through a stream of
running water, brown with the tannin matter of the swamp.

"We is in Delaware," he said, soon after, as they reached a camp of
shingle sawyers, all deserted, and lighted by the fire, the golden chips
strewn around, and the sawdust, like Indian meal, that suggested good,
warm pone at Teackle Hall to Virgie.

She put her feet, soaked with swamp water, at a burning log to warm, and
hardly saw a mocasson snake glide round the fire and stop, as if to dart
at her, and glide away; for Virgie's mind was attributing this kindly
fire to the presence of Freedom.

"Oh, I should like to lie here and go to sleep," she said, languidly; "I
am so tired."

The man Hudson, wringing wet with the journey's difficulties, threw his
arms around her and drew her to his damp yet fiery breast.

"We will sleep here, then," he breathed into her lips; "I love you!"

The incoherence of everything yielded to these sudden words, and on the
young maid's startled nature came a reality she had not understood: her
guide was drunken with passion.

She struggled in his arms with all her might, but was as a switch in a
maniac's hands.

"I stole my ole woman's pass fur you," the infatuated ruffian sighed;
"you said you would love the man who got you one, Virgie. You is mine!"

A suffocating sense and heat, more than animal nature, seemed to enclose
them. The girl struggled free, her lithe figure exerted with all her
dying strength to preserve her modesty.

"Hudson," she cried, "I will tell your wife! God forgive you for
insulting a poor, sick, helpless girl in this wild swamp!"

"My wife is dead to me, Virgie. You is the only wife I has now. Here we
shall sleep and forgit my children and my little home that was enough
fur me, gal, till your beauty come and tuk me from it."

"Stop!" the girl called, with her face blanched even in her fever,
though not with fear, as her white blood rose proudly. "If you do not
keep away, I will throw myself in that deep pool and drown. I would
rather die than cheat your good wife as you have done."

"Nothing is yer," the negro said, "but you, an' me, an' Love. I would
not let you drown. You are too beautiful. We will get to the free states
together and live for each other. Kiss me!"

He darted upon her again and bent her fair head back by the fallen
braids of her silky hair.

The tall woods filled with majestic light; something roared as if the
winds had gone astray and were rushing towards them.

"Hark!" cried Virgie. "God is coming to punish you."

As she spoke the ground beside them burst into flames and black smoke.
The man's arms relaxed; he looked around him and exclaimed,

"It's the underground fire. Run fur your life!"

He led the way, running to the north, as they had been going. In a
moment fire, like a golden wall, rose across their path.

They turned whence they had come, and the fire there was like a lake of
lava, and over it the enormous trees seemed to warm their hands, and up
the dry vines, like monkeys of flame, the forked spirits of the burning
earth dodged and chased each other.

"Gal, I can't leave you to perish," the desperate man shouted; "you must
love me or we'll die together."

He threw his wet great-coat around her head, so that she could not
breathe the smoke nor spoil her beauty, and dashed into the fire ahead
of them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Virgie awoke, lying upon the ground, the stars still standing in the
sky, but some streaks of light in the east betokening dawn.

Her hands were full of soot, her skirts were burned, some smarting pains
were in her legs and feet, but she could walk.

"Where is that poor, deluded man?" she thought.

A groan came from the ground, and there lay something nearly naked,
burrowing his face in a pool of swamp water.

"Thank the Lord you are not dead," the girl said, "but have lived to
repent and be a better man."

He rose up and looked at her with a face all blackened and raw and
hideous to see.

"Merciful Lord!" exclaimed Virgie; "what ails you, pore man?"

"The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you
must lead me now; I am gone blind."




CHAPTER XXXIX.

VIRGIE'S FLIGHT (_continued_).


"Can you walk, Hudson?" asked Virgie, when her horror would permit.

"Yes, child, I can walk, I reckon; but both my eyes is burned out. Oh,
my pore old wife: she could nurse me so well. I have lost her."

The girl comforted the sightless man, and led him on, indifferent to
danger. He waded the deep places, where the water soothed his wounds and
filled his blistered sockets with cool mud.

"Blessed is the pure in heart," he murmured, as they reached some sandy
ground and sank down. "You, Virgie, can see God; I never can."

The great Cypress Swamp of Delaware--counterpart of the Dismal Swamp in
Virginia--the northern border of which they had now reached, had
probably been once a great inlet or shallow bay in the encroaching
sand-bar of the peninsula, and was filled with oysters and fish, which
in time were imprisoned and became the manure of a cypress forest that
soon started up when springs of water flowed under the sand and
moistened the seed; and for ages these forests had been growing, and had
been prostrated, and had dropped their leaves and branches in the great
inlet's bed, until a deep ligneous mass of combustible stuff raised
higher and higher the level of the swamp, and, dried with ages more of
time than dried the mummies of the Pharaohs, it often opened tunnels to
burrowing fire, which at some point of its course belched forth and
lighted the hollow trees, and raged for weeks. Such a fire they had come
through.

Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a
little cart and ox.

"Are you a colored boy?" Virgie asked.

"No," answered the boy, proudly. "I'm Indian-river Indian; reckon I'm a
_little_ nigger."

"Take this poor man in and I will pay you. Where are you going?"

"To Dagsborough landing, for salt."

"Leave me at Dagsborough, at the old Clayton house," spoke up the blind
man; "it's empty. I can die thar or git a doctor."

Before the people were up they entered a little hamlet, on that stage
road from which they had made the night's detour, and saw a few small
houses and a little shingle-boarded church near by among the woods, and
one large house of a deserted appearance was at the town's extremity.
The man said, "This is John M. Clayton's birthplace: my wife used to
work yer."

"Virgie!" exclaimed a familiar voice.

The girl turned, her ears still ringing with the echoes of the swamp,
and saw a face she knew, and ran to the breast beneath it, crying,

"Samson Hat! Oh, friend, love me like my mother. I am very ill."

"Pore, darlin' child," Samson said; "no love will I ever bodder you wid
agin but a father's. Why air you so fur from home?"

"I'm sold, Samson: I'm trying to get free. The kidnappers is after me.
Oh, save me!"

"I've jist got away from 'em, Virgie. The ole woman, Patty Cannon, set
me free. I promised her I would kidnap somebody younger dan ole Samson.
Bless de Lord! I come dis way!"

He led her into the oak-trees of the old church grove, where English
worship had been celebrated just a hundred years; and she gave him money
to buy medicine and get a doctor for the blind man, and to purchase her
a shawl at the store. Then Virgie sank into a fevered sleep under the
old oak-trees, and, when she knew more, was gliding in a boat that
Samson was sailing down a broad piece of water, and her head was in his
lap.

"You air pure as an angel yit, my little creatur," Samson said; "and now
I'm a-takin' you down the Indian River into Rehoboth Bay; and arter dark
I'll git you up the beach to Cape Hinlopen, and maybe I kin buy you a
passage on some of dem stone boats dat's buildin' de new breakwater dar,
and dat goes back to de Norf."

"Oh, Samson, if I could love any man it would be you," Virgie said; "but
I cannot love any now except my dear white father. Who is he?"

"De Lord, I reckon, has got yo' pedigree, Virgie."

"Am I dying, Samson?" asked the girl, wistfully, with her brilliant eyes
full of fever. "Oh, friend, let me die so good that Miss Vesty and my
father can come and kiss me!"

"Tell me about Princess Anne an' my dear old Marster Meshach Milburn,
dat I'se leff so long, Virgie!" the old pugilist said, wiping his eyes
of tears.

She began to try to remember, but faces and events ran into each other,
and she felt aware that her mind was wandering, but could not bring it
back; and so the boat, sailing in sight of the ocean and the stately
ships there, grounded after noon almost within sound of the surf.

Sheltered in a piece of woods for some hours, Virgie found herself, at
dark, carried in old Samson's arms up a beach of the sea where the sand
was yielding and seldom firm, except at the very edge of the surf, which
rolled ominously and at times became a roar, and often swept to the low,
sedgy bank. Lightning played across the black sea, lifting it up, as it
seemed, and showing vessels making either out or in, and finally thunder
burst upon the gathering confusion, and Samson said:

"Dar's a gun in dat thunder!"

The next flash of lightning showed a vessel close to the shore, coming
rapidly in on the southeaster, and her gun was fired again, and feeble
hailing was heard; but the storm now broke all at once, and a wave threw
Samson to the ground and nearly carried Virgie back with it to the
boiling sea; but the faithful old man fought for her, and she ran at his
side, uttering no complaint, till once, as they stopped to get breath,
and the heavenly fire drew into sight every foot, as it seemed, of that
vast ocean, cannonading it also with majestic artillery, the girl
sighed,

"Freedom is beautiful!"

"Oh, Virgie," Samson answered, covering her with his own coat, "if I
could buy you free, pore chile, I'd a-mos' go into slavery to save you
from dis night."

"I can die in there," Virgie said, pointing to the waves; "they must not
catch me."

A wail came out of the storm, so close before that it hushed them both,
and the lightning lifted upon their eyes a stranding vessel, so close,
it seemed, that they could touch it, and she was full of people,
hallooing, but not in any intelligible tongue.

As the black night fell upon this magic-lantern sketch they heard a
crash of wave and wood, and falling spars and awful shrieks, and, when
the next vivid flash of lightning came, nothing was visible but floating
substance, and spluttering cries came out of the bosom of the sea, and a
black man, flung, as if out of a cannon, upon a wave that drenched these
wanderers, struck the ground at their feet, and looked into Samson's
eyes as the convulsion of death seized his chest and feet.

Before they could speak to each other, the beach was full of similar
corpses, a moment before alive as themselves, and every one was naked
and black.

"It's a slave-ship, foundered yer," cried Samson.

He caught at a yawl-boat driving past him, in the many things that
drifted around their feet, and Virgie saw painted upon its bow the word
"_Ida_."

"Samson," she said, feeling all the influences of Princess Anne again,
and forgetting her own misery, "it's Mrs. Dennis's husband come home and
shipwrecked."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Virgie next remembered, she was on a vast hill of sand, near a
lighthouse that was built upon it, and flashed its lenses sleepily upon
a sullen break of day, the mutual lights showing the tops of trees
rising out of the sand, where a forest had been buried alive, like
little twigs in amber.

Almost naked with fighting the storm, Samson Hat slept at her side,
peaceful as hale age and virtue could enjoy the balm of oblivion in
life.

"Happy are the black," thought the sick girl, "that take no thought on
things this white blood in me makes so big: on freedom and my father.
Father, do love me before I die!"

She knelt on the great sand hillock by Cape Henlopen and prayed till
she, too, lost her knowledge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's
side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet
their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these
seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old
man at her side to say,

"Samson, why cannot these angels sing?"

The old man looked up and faintly smiled:

"Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and
swans. Dey can't sing like angels."

"Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"

"Jesus, maybe," the negro answered, looking at her, his eyes full of
tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

The great Breakwater, which required forty years and nearly a million
tons of stone to build it, was then just commencing, and where it was to
be, within the shallow bight of Henlopen, they saw the wrecks of many
vessels, some sunken, some shattered in collision, some stranded in the
marsh, proving the needs of commerce for such a work, and also the fury
of the storm that had so innocently vanished, like a sleeping tiger
after his bloody meal.

In the gentle sunshine floated the American flag upon several vessels
there--the flag that first kissed the breeze upon that spot in the year
1776, when Esek Hopkins raised over the _Alfred_ the dyes of the peach
and cream in the centre of his little squadron. And there, along the low
bluff of the Kill, still lay the shingle-boarded town of Lewes, in the
torpor of nearly two hundred years, or since the Dutch De Vries had
settled it in 1631. Lord Delaware, Argall, and the Swede, Penn,
Blackbeard, Paul Jones, Lord Rodney, a thousand heroes, had known it
well; the pilots, like sea-gulls, had their nests there; the Marylanders
had invaded it, the Tories had seized it, pirates had been suckled
there; and now the courts and lawyers had forsaken it, to go inland to
Georgetown.

"Virgie," said Samson, "I'll try to buy some of de stone-boat captains
to carry you to Phildelfy."

He waded the Kill, carrying her, and left her in an old Presbyterian
church at the skirt of Lewes, and procured medicine for her, and then
labored in vain nearly all day to get her passage to a free state. The
reply was invariable: "Can't take the risk of the whippin'-post and
pillory for no nigger. Can't lose a long job like bringin' stone to the
Breakwater to save one nigger."

At the hotel a colored man beckoned Samson aside--a fine-looking man, of
a gingerbread color--and they went into the little old disused
court-house, in the middle of a street, where there was a fire.

"Brother," said the stranger, "I see by your actions that you're trying
to git a passage North. Is it fur yourself?"

"No," Samson said, taking an inventory of the other's fine chest and
strength, and mentally wishing to have a chance at him; "I'm a free man,
and kin go anywhere; but I have a friend."

"Why, old man," spoke the other, frankly, "I'm the agent of our society
at this pint."

"What is it?" asked Samson, warily.

"The Protection Society. They educated me right yer. I went to school
with white boys. Now, where is your friend?"

"What kin you do fur her?" asked Samson.

"It's a gal, is it? Why, I can just put her in my buggy, made and
provided for the purpose, and drive her to the Quaker settlement."

"Where's that?"

"Camden--only thirty miles off. I've got free passes all made out. Give
yourself, brother, no more concern."

Samson looked at the handsome person long and well. The man stood the
gaze modestly.

"Oh, if I had some knowledge!" spoke Samson; "I might as well be a slave
if I know nothin'. I can't read. I wish I could read your heart!"

"I wish you could," said the man; "then you would trust me."

"What is your name?"

"Samuel Ogg."

"I want you to hold up your hand and swear, Sam Ogg, that you will never
harm the pore chile I bring you. Say, 'Lord, let my body rot alive, an'
no man pity me, if I don't act right by her.'"

"It's a severe oath," said the stranger, "but I see your kind interest
in the lady. Indeed, I'm only doing my duty."

He repeated the words, however, and Samson added, "God deal with you,
Sam Ogg, as you keep dat oath. Now come with me!"

The girl was found asleep, but delirious, her large eyes, in which the
blue and brown tints met in a kind of lake color, being wide open, and
almost lost in their long lashes, while flood and fire, sun and frost,
had beaten upon the slender encasement of her gentle life, that still
kept time like some Parian clock saved from a conflagration, in whose
crystal pane the golden pendulum still moves, though the hands point
astray in the mutilated face.

Her teeth were shown through the loving lips she parted in her stormy
dreams, like waves tossing the alabaster sails of the nautilus, or like
some ear of Indian corn exposed in the gale that blows across the
tasselled field.

Her raiment, partly torn from her, showed her supple figure and neck,
and, beneath her mass of silky hair, her white arm, like an ivory
serpent, sustained her head, her handsome feet being fine and high-bred,
like the soul that bounded in her maiden ambition.

There had been days when such as she called Antony away from his wife,
and Cæsar from his classical selfishness; when on many an Eastern throne
such beauty as this stirred to murmurous glory armies beyond compute,
and clashed the cymbals of prodigious conquests. She lay upon the
altar-cushions of the church, like young Isaac upon his father's altar,
and where the mourners knelt to pray for God's reconcilement, the
cruelty of their law flashed over her like Abraham's superstitious
knife.

Priceless was this young creature, in noble hands, as wife or daughter,
human food or fair divinity, and all the precious mysteries of woman
awake in her to love and conjugality, like song and seed in the spring
bird; yet a hard, steely prejudice had shut her out from every
institution and equality, let every crime be perpetrated upon her, made
the scent of freedom in her nostrils worse than the incentive of the
thief, and has outlasted her half a century, and is self-righteous and
inflexible yet.

In that old churchyard that enclosed her slept revolutionary officers,
who helped to gain freedom: they might be willing to rise with her, not
to be buried in the same enclosure.

How small is religion, how false democracy, how far off are the
judgments of heaven! There stood over the pulpit an inscription, itself
presumptuous with aristocracy, saying, "The dead in Christ shall rise
first;" as if those truly dead in the humility of Christ would not
prefer to rise last!

Samson watched his new friend narrowly, whose countenance was profoundly
piteous, and his teeth and lip made a "Tut-tut!" Satisfied with the man,
Samson knelt by Virgie and kissed her once.

"Pore rose of slavery," said Samson, "forgive me dat I courted you like
a gal, instead of like an angel. I am old, and ashamed of myself. Dear,
draggled flower, we may never meet agin. May the Lord, if dis is his
holy temple, save you pure and find you a home, Virgie. Good-bye!"

"Come," said the man, as Samson sat bowed and weeping, "the buggy is
ready; I'll wrap you warm, Miss."

"Freedom!" spoke the girl, awakening; "oh, I must find it."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next that Virgie knew, she was in a cabin loft, and voices were
heard speaking in a room below.

"See me!" said one; "we sell you, dat's sho'! See me now! You make de
best of it. Sam Ogg yer, we sold twenty-two times. Sam will be sold wid
you and teach yo' de Murrell game."

"Politely, gentlemen," said a feminine voice; "I don't know that I have
the nerve for it. My occupation has been marrying them. It is true that
the hue-and-cry has made that branch dull, but I had great talent for
it."

"Kidnapping," said a third voice, "is running low. It surrounds the
whole slave belt from Illinois to Delaware. The laws of Illinois were
made in our interests till Governor Harrison, whose free man was
kidnapped, raised an excitement out there six years ago. Newt Wright,
Joe O'Neal, and Abe Thomas were the smartest kidnappers along the
Kentucky line. But Joe Johnson, who is getting ready to go south, will
be the last man of enterprise in the business. John A. Murrell's idea is
to divide fair with black men, sell and steal them back, and I think it
is sagacious. It's safer, any way, than Patty Cannon's other plan."

"What is that, Mr. Ogg?" said the feminine-voiced negro.

"Making away with the negro-traders, they say."

"See me! see me!" exclaimed the first voice. "Dey'll hang her some day
fur dat."

"Now," resumed Mr. Ogg, "a man of intelligence like you and me, Mr.
Ransom--pardon, sir, does your shackle incommode you? I'll stuff it with
some wool--"

"Politely, Mr. Ogg; I'm ironed rather too tight."

"I say, Mr. Ransom, you and I can always play the average slaveholder
for a fool. Why, I hardly get into any family before I make love to some
member of it, and if I don't vamose with a black wench, it's with her
mistress."

"Ah, Mr. Ogg, they are perfectly fiendish in resenting _that!_"

"Of course, but there's a grand tit-for-tat going through all nature.
Why, sir, the pleasures of the far South, to a man of art and enterprise
like you, far exceed this poor, plain region. Take the roof off slavery
and the blacks have rather the best of it; the whites would think so if
they could see what is going on."

"Politely, Mr. Ogg; will not the entire institution some day blow itself
out, like one of their Western steamboats?"

"No doubt of it, Mr. Ransom. When we have disposed of you, and you can
see the country for yourself, observe how sensitive slaveholding is! A
thousand anxieties lie in it. They believe in insurrections, rapes, and
incendiaries. A perfect sleep they hardly know, but go prowling around
night and day, driven by their suspicions. It makes them warlike, yet
unhappy, and the slaves eat the ground poor. Besides, they have terrible
enemies in the negro-traders, whom they look down on socially, and
really drive them into sympathy with the negroes. Mr. Murrell, for
instance, has a grand plan for a slave insurrection. He says white
society is all against him, and he'll get even with it."

"See me, see me!" hoarsely chimed in another voice. "Slavery is bad
scared, sho'! Joe Leonard Smith, Catholic, over on de western sho', has
jess set twelve niggers free. Governor Charley Ridgely has set two
hundred and fifty free. John Randolph, dey say, is gwyn to set more dan
three hundred free. Dar's fifty abolition societies in Nawf Carolina,
eleven in Maryland, eight in ole Virginny, two in Delaware. Ho, ho! dey
set' em free and we'll steal' em back! Ole Derrick Molleston will never
be out of pork an' money!"

"Politely, gentlemen," said the individual with the shackle. "Have you
heard of the incendiary proclamation issued in Boston by David Walker,
telling all slaves that it is their religious duty to rise?"

"Yes, and rise they will, but to what end? It will be a big scare, but
no war. The next thing they will stop reading among all slaves, prevent
emancipation by law, and watch the colored meeting-houses. The fire will
be buried under the amount of the fuel, yet all be there."[6]

"Mr. Ogg, your experience is remarkable. And you have been sold and run
away in nearly every slave state? Politely, sir, are they not kidnapping
white men, too? Who is this Morgan that was stolen last year in the
State of New York?"

"Oh, that's a renegade Free Mason, Mr. Ransom. As much fuss is made over
him as if we did not steal a hundred free people every day. It only
shows that kidnapping of all sorts is getting to be unpopular. If a new
political party can be made on stealing one white Morgan, don't you
think another party will some day rise on stealing several millions of
black Morgans?"

"See me! see me!" exclaimed the hoarse voice, suddenly.

"Escaping, are you?" cried the second voice.

"Politely, gentlemen, politely!" was heard from the third voice, some
distance off in the dark, and then chasing footsteps followed, and
Virgie arose and peeped below.

A fire was burning in a clay chimney beside a table, on which were meat
and liquor. The girl swung herself out of the loft to the ground-floor,
and, seizing the meat and bread, rushed noiselessly into the night.

She hardly knew what she was doing until she had crossed a bridge and
come to the edge of a small town, around which she took a road to the
right that led into another country road, and this she followed a mile
or more, till she saw a small brick house, by a stile and pole-well, in
the edge of woods.

The light from a little dormer-window in the garret beamed so brightly
that it charmed Virgie's soul with the fascination of warmth and home,
and, without thinking, she crossed the stile, bathed her hot temples at
the well, and walked into the kitchen before the fire.

"Freedom!" said Virgie, wanderingly; "have I come to it?" She fell upon
the rag carpet before the fire, saying, "Father, dear father," and did
not move.

"Well," spoke a man of large paunch and black snake's eyes, sitting
there, "it's not often people in search of freedom walk into Devil Jim
Clark's!"

"She is white," exclaimed a woman, looking compassionately upon the
stranger, "and she is dying."

"No," retorted the man, "she is too pretty to be white. This is the
bright wench Sam Ogg was seen with. She belongs to Allan McLane, and
there's a reward of five hundred dollars for her, but she'll bring two
thousand in New Orleans for a mistress."

"Hush!" said the woman; "you may bring a judgment upon your daughters."

"Joe Johnson is about to sail," remarked Devil Jim Clark; "he shall take
her with him."

The girl had heard _that_ name through the thick chambers of oblivion.
She rose and shrieked, and rushed into the woman's arms:

"Save me, mother, save me from that man!"

The woman's heart was pierced by the cry, and she folded Virgie to her
breast and kissed her, saying:

"She shall sleep in our daughter's bed and rest her poor feet this
night--our daughter, James, that we buried."

The man's mouth puckered a little; he looked uneasy, and drew his
handkerchief to his eyes.

"You're all agin me! you're all agin me!" he bellowed, and rushed from
the room.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wife of Devil Jim Clark was a pious Methodist, and, with her
rich-eyed daughter, spent the next day at Virgie's bedside, hearing her
broken mutterings for fatherly love and Vesta's cherished remembrance.

"Your father is out for mischief," Mrs. Clark said. "Jump on your
saddle-horse, my daughter, and ride to the Widow Brinkley's, just over
the Camden line. Tell her to send for this girl."

"Mamma, they say she's an abolitionist."

"That's what I send you for. It's a race between you and your father. Be
with me or with him!"

The girl tied on her hood, took her riding-whip, and departed.

In an hour she returned with a tidy black woman, whom Mrs. Clark took
into Virgie's chamber.

"My heart bleeds for this poor girl," the hostess said. "They say your
son spirits negroes North. Mr. Clark says so. I do not ask you if it is
true, but, as one mother to another, I give you this girl. She is too
white to be sold. She looks like a dead child of mine."

"Bill is not due home till sunset. If she is alive by that time, he has
just time to drive her to Mr. Zeke Hunn's vessel at the mouth of the
creek, which lies there every trip one hour--"

"To let runaways come aboard?"

"I have never been accused of helping them, Mrs. Clark."

The trader's wife slipped a bank-bill into the colored woman's hand.

"Lend to the Lord!" she said. "I depend upon you to save us the sin of
selling this girl."

       *       *       *       *       *

There came to the little black house that lurked by the woods two
riding-horses, and stopped at the stile.

"Wait here!" said the voice of Devil Jim Clark. "Will you take her if
she is still delirious?"

"Bingavast! Why not? I'm delirious myself, Jim, fur it's my
wedding-night. I'll rest her at Punch Hall."

The herculean ruffian coolly proceeded to prepare some saddle-ropes to
tie his victim before him on his horse. He was interrupted by a woman:

"Come and see your work, Joe Johnson!"

Following up the short cupboard stairs, the kidnapper was pointed to an
object on the bed, with peaked face and sharpened feet, as it lay white
as lime, with eyelashes folded and the arms drawn to its sides.

"Take her to Patty Cannon now," said Mrs. Clark, "who is only fit for
dead company."

"The dell dead and undocked?" the ruffian exclaimed, slightly shrinking
from the body; "maybe she's counterfeited the cranke. I'll search her
cly. But, hark!"

A wagon and hoofs were heard.

"Joe," whispered the woman's husband, "you're only four mile from Dover.
Maybe it's warrants for both of us?"

"Hike, then!" hissed the pallid murderer; "the world's agin me," and he
slipped away with his companion.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Now, Bill Brinkley," the wife of Devil Jim whispered, as a tall,
ingenuous-looking colored boy came in the room, "you are just in time.
She has had laudanum enough to keep her still; my daughter powdered her;
let me kiss her once before she goes."

As the woman departed, the black boy, looking around him, muttered:

"Whar is dat loft? I've hearn about it."

Some movements overhead in the low dwelling directed his attention to a
small trap-door, and, standing on a stool, he unbolted it and pushed it
upwards, whispering,

"Any passengers for Philadelfy? De gangplank's bein' pulled in!"

First a woolly head, then another, and next two pairs of legs appeared
above.

"Take hold yer and carry de sick woman to de dearborn," the boy said,
not a particle disturbed, as two frightened blacks dropped from the
loft, with handcuffs upon them.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the clear evening a wagon sped along towards the east, through the
saffron marshes, tramping down the stickweed and ironweed and the
golden rod, and, while the people in it cowered close, the negro driver
sang, as carelessly as if he was the lord of the country:

  "De people of Tuckyhoe
    Dey is so lazy an' loose,
  Dey sows no buttons upon deir clothes,
    And goes widout deir use;
  So nature she gib dem buttons,
    To grow right outen deir hides,
  Dat dey may take life easy,
    And buy no buttons besides.

  "But de people of Tuckyhoe
    Refuse to button deir warts,
  Unless dey's paid a salary
    For practisin' of sech arts;
  Like de militia sogers,
    Dat runs to buttons an' pay,
  De folks is truly shifless,
    On Tuckyhoe side of de bay."

A sail was seen in the starlight, rising out of the marshes at an old
landing in the last elbow of Jones's Creek, and hardly had the fugitives
been put on board when the anchor was weighed and the packet stood out
for the broad Delaware, her captain a negro, her owner a Quaker.

The girl was awakened by the cold air of the bay striking her face.

"Freedom!" she murmured; "it must be this. Oh, I am faint for father's
arms to take me."

       *       *       *       *       *

Was this Teackle Hall that Virgie looked upon--a square, bright room,
and her bed beside a window, and below her stretching streets of
cobblestone and brick, and roofs of houses, to green marshes filled with
cows, and a river that seemed blue as heaven, which sipped it from above
like a boy drinking head downward in a spring? How beautiful! It must be
freedom, Virgie thought, but why was she so cold? Her eyes, looking
around the room, fell upon a lady in a cap, reading a tract to a large,
shaven, square-jawed man, and this woman was of a silver kind of beauty,
as if her mind had overflowed into her heart, and, not affecting it, had
made her face of argent and lily, milk and sheen.

"What sayeth Brother Elias, Lucretia?"

"He sayeth, Thomas: 'This noble testimony, of refusing to partake of the
spoils of oppression, lies with the dearly beloved young people of this
day. We can look for but little from the aged, who have been accustomed
to these things, like second nature. Without justice there can be no
virtue. Oh, justice, justice, how art thou abused everywhere! Men make
justice, like a nose of wax, to satisfy their desires. If the soul is
possessed of love, there is quietness.'"

"Yes," said the girl, from the bed, thinking aloud; "love is quietness.
Will father come!"

She dreamed and heard and looked forth again upon the hill descending to
the river, the stately sails, the farther shore, so like her native
region, and asked with her eyes what land they might be in.

"Wilmington," said the beautiful woman. "This is the house of Thomas
Garrett, the friend of slaves. When you can be moved, it shall be to the
green hills of the Brandywine, where all are free."

"Hills? What are they?" mused Virgie, looking at her wasted hand. "Must
I climb any more? Must I wade the swamps again? I know I have a father
somewhere."

She dreamed and wept unconsciously, and told of many things at Teackle
Hall, being, indeed, a little child again, playing with her little
mistress, Vesta. The stars stood in the sky right over her pillow, and
she talked to them, and some she seemed to know, as little Vince, or
little Roxy, or Master Willy Tilghman, all playmates of her childhood;
but ever and anon these vanished, and the young Quaker woman was reading
again from the sermons of Elias Hicks, and the words were: "Love is
quietness;" "Light only can qualify the soul;" "If I go not away, the
Comforter will not come unto you."

"What Comforter?" sighed Virgie, and there seemed a great blank, and
then she heard a scream--was it she that screamed so?--and she was
trying with all her might to get somewhere, and was fainting in the
labor, but trying again and again, and then a calmness that was like
gentle awe, strange because so painless, spread into her nature, and she
only listened.

"My daughter," said a voice, "my own child! Call me 'father,' and say I
am forgiven."

"Father! forgiven!" she murmured, and felt a warm face, that yet could
not warm her own, shedding tears and kissing her, and close to it her
arms were thrown tight, as if she never could let go, and everything was
music, but wonderful.

She feared she must fall if she did not hold to him. Who was it that
called her "daughter"? Why came those cold stars so close, as if to spy
upon him?

Oh, holy purity, that held so fast and did not know, but trusted
nature's quivering embrace! She wrestled with something, like a rock of
ice, to move her eyes and see, or ere she was dashed down forever, the
eyes that gushed for her. They were her master's.

"Master," she said, "whose am I?"

"Mine before God. Pure to my heart as your white sister, Vesta! White as
young love, in fondness and trust forever!"

"And mother?" gurgled the girl's low notes; "where is she?"

"Yonder," said the Judge, "in Heaven, that will judge me, whither she
winged in bearing thee to me!"

A happy light came over Virgie's face. She kissed her father twice, as
if the second kiss was meant for her happier sister, and, raising her
arms towards the sky he pointed to, whispered, "Freedom!" and died upon
his breast.




CHAPTER XL.

HULDA BELEAGUERED.


Owen Daw brought the news of the repulse from Cowgill House and the
wounding of Captain Van Dorn.

"Where is the little tacker, Levin?" asked Patty Cannon, furiously.

"Arrested, I 'spect," cried O'Day, boldly; "Van Dorn's hit in the
throat."

"He'll not talk much, then," muttered the woman; "his time had to come.
Where will I find another lover at my age? Why, honey," she chuckled to
herself, in a looking-glass, "that son of his'n may come back. He's took
a shine to Huldy: why not to me?"

At the idea another hideous thought came to her mind: to settle Hulda's
fate in her young lover's absence, and monopolize the corrupting power
over Levin Dennis, if he ever lived to see Johnson's Cross-roads again.

As individual fugitives returned, confirming the decisive repulse of the
band, Patty Cannon's face grew dark, and her oaths low and deep; Cyrus
James heard her say:

"If I could only hang some one for this! Joe Johnson's the white-livered
sneak that would not go. I've hanged a better son-in-law."

"Aunt Patty, I love your grandchild, Huldy," Cy James ventured to say.
"The Captain's wounded and Joe's going away to Floridy. Maybe I kin git
you up another band."

Without an instant's consideration of this ambitious proposition, Mrs.
Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar,
into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief
muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry her
yet."

With this reflection Mr. James hid himself for the remainder of the
afternoon in some secluded part of the Hotel Johnson.

Mrs. Cannon, however, had instantly resumed her monologue on business.

"They all think to give the old woman the go-by: a sick man's no good,
and there's that wife of Van Dorn's hopin' to git him yit. By God! she
sha'n't have him in his shroud. No; I'll recruit from young material.
Ruin 'em when they's boys, and, while you kin pet 'em, they'll do your
work! I have one nigger in the garret Joe wants to burn: he's my nigger,
and I'll let him loose to bring me more niggers. Money is what I need to
put on a bold front: Huldy must fetch it!"

With this resolution Patty Cannon mounted the stairs to a room on the
second floor, and, without knocking, pushed her way in.

A man of a voluptuous form and face, like one overfed, yet on the best,
and with stiff, military shoulders, and of colors warm in tint, yet cold
in expression, blue eyes, and rich, wine-lined cheeks and lips, that
still seemed hard and self-indulged, spoke up at once:

"Always knock, Patty! it's more conservative. My way in life is to reach
my point, but respect all the forms. What do you want?"

"When do you leave for Baltimore, Cunnil McLane?"

"As soon as Joe returns with my dear sister's property: to-morrow, I
hope."

"You can take Huldy Bruington if you pay my price for her: two thousand
dollars down. If you won't give it, she shall be married to some young
kidnapper, who will fetch twice that pile for her in niggers. They'll
all fight their weight in black wildcats to git her."

"Very, very abrupt proposition, Patty; not conservative at all. What's
the matter with you, dame, to-day. Van Dorn not lucky, heigh?"

He gave her a vitreous smile and watched her over his round paunch, on
which a crystal watch-seal hung, like a more human eye than his own. Her
color began to rise.

"I'm mad," said Patty Cannon; "don't worry me; don't Jew me! Do you
mind? Yes, Van Dorn has been whipped--by niggers, too. Will you pay my
price or not?"

"Tut, tut, good woman! What can I want with a white girl. It wouldn't
look conservative at all in Baltimore."

Patty Cannon stamped her foot.

"Don't rouse me with any of your hypocritical cant, Cunnil McLane! What
have you been teachin' that child to read an' write fur--out of your
Bible, too? What do you bring her presents fur, and hang around us when
we know you despise us all, except fur the black folks we can sell you
cheap? Haven't I been sold to men like you time and again before I was a
woman, and don't I know the sneaking pains that old men take to look
benevolent when youth an' beauty is fur sale; and how they pet it to
keep it pure fur their own selfish enjoyment? God knows I do!"

"Patty, you shock me!" the rubicund gentleman observed. "I have always
found you conservative before. Now, go and send sweet Hulda here, and,
for Heaven's sake, Patty, don't reveal this bargain to her."

"Is it a bargain, Cunnil?"

"It is, if she can be made willing to it."

"That she shall, or make her bed in the forest, where good looks are not
safe around yer."

Hulda was found at a window, looking out upon her former home, and at a
ploughman who had nearly completed the furrows in a large field, sparing
only some low places piled with brush, over one of which some buzzards
circled, lofty, yet intent as anglers watching their tackle. Hard as
that home had been to Hulda, she regretted leaving it for this men's
tavern, where her grandmother's saucy temperament found so many
incentives to bravado, and her caution, that had to be exercised in
Delaware, was quite unnecessary on the Maryland side of the line.

At the little hip-roofed white cottage Hulda had felt a sense of privacy
pleasing to her growing life, and her ability to read often charmed
Patty Cannon to a stillness that was like the hyena's sleep, and even
made her acquiescent and cordial.

But where she met men alone, unmodified by modest women's example, the
bold tendency of Patty was to out-do men, and lead them on to audacities
they would have feared to follow in but for her courage and policy; for
she could coax either young or coarse natures, as well as she could
drive.

These feats of strength and cunning, statecraft and desperation,
reminded Hulda of a book she had read about the Norman knights in
England kidnapping and robbing the poor Saxons; and one description of
King William the Conqueror suggested to Hulda that he was perhaps a
Patty Cannon in his times, as his body and legs were short and powerful,
like hers, and he could bend a bow riding on horseback that no other
knight could bend on foot with the legs planted firmly. He could not
read nor write, and was superstitious, yet cruel as the grave. All this
was true of Patty Cannon, whose feat of standing in a bushel measure and
putting three hundred pounds of grain on her shoulder has been related.

She often wrestled and bound, without assistance, strong black men
fighting for their liberties. She could ride horseback, sitting like
men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel.

Hulda was dressed in her best clothes, her hair was tied in wide braids,
her fine features and large, tender, yet seeking, gray eyes, never had
been turned on Patty Cannon so directly.

Her grandmother abandoned in a moment an attempt to be complaisant, and
sternly ordered her to attend to Colonel McLane's chamber.

"I can support you no longer, huzzy," said the dark-eyed woman, her
cheeks full of blood. "Make haste to find some easy life or Joe shall
get you a husband. We are ruined. You must make money, do you hear!"

"Here is money, grandma!" said Hulda, producing some of the shillings of
1815.

At the first glance of these Patty Cannon turned pale, but, in an
instant, the hot blood rushed to her face again, and she swore a
dreadful oath and chased Hulda, with uplifted hands, into the chamber of
Allan McLane.

"Ah, Hulda, inflaming your poor grandmother again!" said that carefully
clad and game-fed gentleman. "Now, now, lovely girl, it's not
conservative. Honor thy father and mother, and grandmother, of course;
didn't I teach you that?"

"What is it to be conservative?" Hulda asked, sitting before the fire,
while the Colonel ran over her straight feet and tall, willowy figure,
and stopped, a little chilled by her clear, dewy eyes.

"Conservative? why, it's never to rush on anything; to oppose rushing;
to--to be a bulwark against innovations. To prefer something you have
tried, and know."

"Like you?" asked Hulda.

"Yes, your benefactor, instead of having some impulsive passion. Of
course, you never loved in this place?"

"It is the only place I know. To be conservative, as you call it, I
must take my life and opportunity as I find them, like something I have
tried and know."

"Ah, Hulda! I see you have a radical, perverse something in you, to
twist my meaning so close. You do not belong to this vile spot, except
by consanguinity. It would be perfectly conservative for you to look to
a better settlement."

"You have hinted that before," Hulda said, serene in his presence as a
young woman used to proposals. "I do want to change this life, but I
cannot do it and be conservative. I must fasten upon a free impulse, a
natural chance of some kind. God has kept my heart pure in this dreadful
place, where I was born. Why are you here, if you are conservative? It
is not a gentleman's resort."

He grew a little angry at this thrust, but she continued to look at him
quietly, unaware that she was impertinent.

"I often have business, Hulda, with Joe and Patty; negroes are very
high, and we must buy them where they are to be had. But a deepening
religious interest in you often attracts me here."

"Why religious as well as conservative, sir?"

"I have been afraid that the sights you see here, after the good
instructions I have given you, might make you an infidel."

"What is an infidel?"

"One who, being unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to
believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man.
Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much
as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is,
holds a conservative position on a Great First Cause."

Here McLane drew out his gold spectacles, and turned the leaves of his
Bible over, and pointed Hulda a place to read, beginning, "The fool hath
said in his heart, There is no God." At his command she read it, with
faith, yet observation, her mind being fully alert to the warning Van
Dorn had left her, that in his absence her great trial was to be.

McLane was wearing a gray English suit, with full round paunch, sleek
all over the body, his hair a little gray, his gold glasses dangling in
his hand, patent varnished slippers and silk stockings, and a silk scarf
and cameo pin in it, and a cameo of his deceased sister upon his
finger-ring, marking his attire; his eyes, of a pop kind, much too far
forward, and blue as old china, and yet an animal, not a spiritual
blue--the tint of washing-blue, not of distance; a hare-lip somewhere in
his talk, though the fulness of his very red lips hardly allowed place
for it; and his nose and brows stern and military, as if he had been a
pudding stamped with the die of a Roman emperor or General Jackson.

He watched her reading with censorship, yet desire, patronage, and
oiliness together.

Glancing up when she had read far enough, Hulda thought he was looking
at her as if she was some rarer kind of negress.

"Beautifully read, Hulda! I never go to such places as theatres, but you
might be, I should say, an actress. Don't think of it, however! Very
unconservative profession! I take great pride in you, my lovely girl;
suppose I take you home with me!"

He walked to her stool, and laid his warm hand on her neck, standing
behind her; she did not move nor change color.

"Something has happened to me, Colonel McLane," Hulda spoke, clear as a
bell out of a prison, "to make even Johnson's Cross Roads good and
happy. Can you guess what it is?"

She bent her head back, and looked up fearlessly at him, as if he were
the negro now.

"Not religious ecstasy?" he said. "Not camp-meeting or revival
conversion, I hope. That's vile."

"No, Colonel. It is knowing a pure young man, whose love for me is
natural and unselfish."

"Great God!" spoke McLane, removing his hand. "Not some kidnapper?"

"No," Hulda said, "no slave-dealer of any kind. They cannot make him so.
He is perfectly conservative, Colonel, as to that vileness. I believe he
is a gentleman, too."

"You must have great experience in that article," he sneered, looking
angry at her.

"I have seen you and my lover; you have the best clothes, and profess
more. He has a nature that your opportunities would bring real
refinement from. He respects me, wretched as I am; I read it in his
eyes. You are looking for a way to degrade me in my own feelings, yet to
deceive me. Can you be a gentleman?"

She was serene as if she had said nothing, though she rose up, and stood
at one side of the fireplace, opposite him; between them was a print of
General Jackson riding over the British.

In that moment Allan McLane felt that the girl was cheap at her
grandmother's figure.

He had always conceived her a flexible, peculiar child; in a few minutes
she had grown years, and become a rare and nearly stately woman, not now
to be moulded, but to be tempted with large, worldly propositions.

"May I ask who this lover is that I am so much beneath, Hulda--I, who
have taught you the accomplishments you chastise me with? I found you
sand; I made you crystal."

He drew out a large pongee handkerchief, and really dropped some tears
into it. She continued, cool and unmoved:

"My love is Levin Dennis, from Princess Anne. I am not afraid to tell
it."

"Why?"

"Because I want his danger and mine to be fully known to him, and make
him a man."

The Colonel folded his pongee, and came again to Hulda's side.

"That dissipated boy! Oh, Hulda, where is your real pride? He has
abandoned his mother. He is a poor gypsy. No, I must save you from such
a mistake. It is my duty to do it."

"I thank you for teaching me, whatever made you do it. If I could awaken
in you some unselfishness towards me and my new love, sir, it would be
the greatest gratitude I could show you. You conceal so many hard, bad
things under your word 'conservative,' that the gentle feelings, like
forgiveness, have forsaken you, I fear."

"No," the Colonel said, stiffly, his shoulders becoming more military,
"insults to my honor I never forgive. People who do not resent, have no
conservative principle."

"I forgive, as I hope to be forgiven, Joe, Aunt Patty, Van Dorn, and
you. I hope pity and mercy and sweet, unselfish love, such as I think
mine is, may grow in all of you! Oh, Colonel,"--she turned to him
earnestly, and, raising her hands to impress him, he merely noted the
elegance of her wrists and brown arms--"the buying and selling of these
human beings makes everybody unfeeling. It is stealing their souls and
bodies, whether they be bought at the court-house or kidnapped on the
roads. My dream of joy is to have a husband who will work with his own
free hands, and till his little farm, and sail his vessel, without a
slave. Above that I expect and ask nothing from the dear God who has so
long been my protector in this den of crime."

"Warm or cold, hectoring or tender, you are splendid, Hulda," McLane
said, his face fairly refulgent. "Now let me show you a conservative
picture of your real deserts. I am a bachelor. I keep an elegant house
in Baltimore. My table is supplied with the best in the market; my
servants are my slaves, and never disobey me; my paintings are
celebrated; books I never run to--they are radical things--but I can buy
them; my carriage is the best Rahway turn-out, and my horses are
Diomeds. In Frederick County I have an estate, in sight of the
mountains. As a Christian act, I will take you away from this spot, to
which you seem but half kindred, and make you my wife."

"You ask me to marry you?"

"Conservatively; that is, continue to be my pupil, and obey me. I will
bring your mind out of its ignorance, your body out of rags, your
associations out of crime. I will provide for you, as you are obedient,
while I live and after I am dead. You shall travel with me, and see
bright cities--New Orleans, Charleston, Havana. If you remain here, you
will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it
conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to
become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every
kind."

"How are you to be repaid for this?"

"By your love."

"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."

"Pooh! that's beneath you."

"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."

"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the
refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"

The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he
bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his
hands.

"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro
dealer."

He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic
composure.

"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"

"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."

She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame.
He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult
to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have
been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty
Cannon shall see my gold."




CHAPTER XLI.

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.


Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret,
a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited,
though she had not revealed them--her modesty having received a stab
that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by
the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter--Vesta
fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party
in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of
cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of
mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something
inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take
refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn
was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my
father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from
the slave-pen.

"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"

She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she
peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she
pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the
jail.

"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."

"Three men, one old woman, and some little things, makes the present
contents of Pangymonum," spoke up a rough, cheery voice, "an', by smoke!
it's jess enough."

"Is it the white man that talks?"

"He says he's white, but they think it's goin' to be easy hokey-pokey to
pass him off for a nigger."

Her eyes soon recognized the speaker as he said, "By smoke! miss, you're
not much like a Johnson. I reckon you're Huldy."

"Yes, and you, sir?"

"I was Jimmy Phoebus before I was a nigger."

The girl went rapidly up to him, and put her arms around him.

"Thank God!" she said, "you are not dead. Levin Dennis, my dear friend,
wept to think you were at the river bottom. But, quick, sir; I may be
caught here. Are you all true to each other?"

"Yes, the traitor's cut his wizzen. Speak out, Huldy!"

"I heard Patty Cannon mutter that she was going to set her black man
free to kidnap for her. Hark! I must fly."

Hulda descended the ladder in time to surprise Cy James coming up. He
bent his goose neck down as he leaned his hands upon his knees, and,
looking up into her face, ejaculated,

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! And Pangymonum, too."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Samson," said Jimmy Phoebus, as soon as Hulda disappeared, "git
ready to be a first-class liar; I want you to take up Patty Cannon's
offer."

"An' leave you yer alone, Jimmy? I can't do it."

"Don't be a fool, Samson. Ironed here, we can't help nobody. Make your
way to Seaford and Georgetown, and go round the Cypress Swamp to
Prencess Anne. Alarm the pungy captains; fur Johnson'll try to run us by
sail, I reckon, down the bay to Norfolk. I've got a file that
cymlin-headed feller give me, an' I reckon I'll git out of my irons
about the time you git to Judge Custis's. There! ole Patty's coming."

"Go, Samson," spoke the Delaware colored man. "I'm younger than you, and
I'll fight as heartily under Mr. Phoebus's orders."

Aunt Hominy's voice came in blank monologue out of the background:

"He tuk dat debbil's hat, chillen, an' measured us in wid little Vessy."

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening there was a long, free conference between Samson and Patty
Cannon, in her kitchen, next to the bar, where Hulda heard laughing and
invitations to drink, and all the sounds of perfect equality, the
negro's piquant sayings and _bonhommie_ seeming to disarm and please the
designing woman, whose familiarity was at once her influence and her
weakness, and she lavished her sociable nature on blacks and whites.
Samson was so fearless and observing that he betrayed no interest in
escaping, and came slowly into the range of her temperament; but, as
Hulda peeped, towards midnight, into the kitchen, she saw old Samson
kindly patting juba, while Patty was executing a drunken dance.

As the latter dropped upon a pallet bed she had there, and fell into a
doze, the colored man quietly raised the latch and walked off the tavern
porch.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the morning dawn horses and voices were heard by Hulda, and she
recognized Joe Johnson's steps in the house. He shook Patty Cannon, but
could not awaken her; then looked into Van Dorn's room, and found Hulda,
apparently sound asleep, and heard his name called by Allan McLane
across the hall:

"Joe! not so loud. Be conservative. Come in; I'm waiting for you. Is all
done and fetched?"

"The bloke with the steeple felt will never snickle," spoke the ruffian.

"Good, good, Joe! Vengeance is mine, and it's a conservative saying. My
dear sister is at peace."

"The two yaller pullets have slipped you; the abigail mizzled to the
funeral with your niece, and t'other dell must have smelt us, and hopped
the twig."

"Not tasteful language at all, Joe. I don't understand you. Where are
the two bright wenches, Virgie and Roxy?"

"Roxie's in Baltimore; Virgie's run away."

"Run? Where? Don't trifle with me, Joe Johnson! Conservative as I am, I
don't like it, sir. Where could she have run?"

"There's no way for her to slip us but by water or through the Cypress
Swamp, Colonel. She ain't safe this side of Cantwell's bridge. Word has
gone out, and every road is watched."

"But Van Dorn is beaten back; he hasn't made a single capture; the
niggers drove him out of Dover with firearms, and he is wounded
somewhere."

The tall kidnapper turned pale, and then consigned Van Dorn's shade to
eternal torment.

"Don't swear before me, sir!" McLane, also irritated, exclaimed. "It's
not conservative, and I won't permit it. How do I know Meshach Milburn
is dead? who did it?"

"Black Dave fired the barker, and saw him settled."

"Send him here!"

The negro came in, red-eyed, and hoarse with diseased lungs, and stood,
the wreck of a once gigantic and regular man.

"Gi' me a drink," he muttered; "I'm mos' dead wi' misery an cold."

"Tell this man what you did," Joe Johnson spoke; "you waited till you
saw the hat at the window, and fired, and fetched hat an' man to the
ground?"

Swallowing a thimbleful of McLane's brandy, the negro grunted "Blood!"
and looked tremblingly at his hands.

"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely;
"was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.

Black Dave looked, and shook his head.

"Not like that? Damnation!"

"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson;
"what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."

"Like dis, I reckon." He modelled the crown into a bell form with his
finger.

Joe Johnson and McLane looked at each other a minute with mutual
accusation and confusion, and the former unceremoniously knocked the
negro down with his great fist.

"No gold of mine for this job, Joe Johnson," said Allan McLane; "in your
conservatism to save your own skin, you have let your tool kill an
innocent man."

He waved his hand, with all his strong will, towards the door, and shut
it in the kidnapper's face. Then, in haughty emotion, not like fear, but
disappointed pride and revenge, McLane sat down, glanced around him as
if to determine the next movement, and instinctively reached his hand
towards his Bible, which he opened at a marked page, and softly read,
till tears of baffled vindictiveness and counterfeited humility stopped
his voice, as follows:

"'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time
to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a
time to break down, and a time to build up ... God requireth that which
is past ... man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is
vanity.... a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his
portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?'"

When tears of pious vindictiveness had closed the reading, Colonel
McLane spread his pongee handkerchief on the bare floor, and knelt in
silent and comfortably assured prayer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Black Dave had crawled into the room where Hulda partly heard these
revelations, and he entered the large closet under the concealed shaft
to the prison pen, where his groans and mental agony touched Hulda's
commiseration. She opened the trap, and crawled there too.

"Hush, Dave!" she whispered. "What makes you so miserable?"

"Missy, I'se killed a man. Dey made me do it. I'll burn in torment. Lord
save me!"

"Dave," said Hulda, "my poor father died for his offences. You can do no
more; but, like him, you can repent."

"Oh, missy, I's black. Rum an' fightin' has ruined me. Dar's no way to
do better. De law won't let me bear witness agin de people dat set me
on. How kin I repent unless I confess my sin? De law won't let me
confess."

"Confess your poor, wracked soul to me, Dave. The Lord will hear you,
though you dare not turn your face to him."

"Missy, once I was in de Lord's walk. My han's was clean, my face clar,
my stummick unburnt by liquor. I stood in no man's way; at de church
dey put me fo'ward. My soul was happy. One day I licked a man bigger dan
me. It made me proud an' sassy. I backslid, an' wan't no good to be
hired out to steady people; so de taverns got me, an' den de kidnappers
used me, an' now de blood of Cain an' Abel is on my forehead forever."

Hulda knelt by the murderer, and prayed with all her heart; not the
self-conscious, special pleading of the prayer across the hall, but the
humble prayer of the penitent on Calvary: "Lord, we, of this felon den,
ask to be with thee in Paradise."

       *       *       *       *       *

The whole of the next day was spent in preparations for flight by Patty
and her son-in-law.

A boat of sufficient size, and crew to man it, had to be procured down
the river, and this necessitated two journeys, one of Patty, to Cannon's
Ferry, another by Joe, to Vienna and Twiford's wharf.

During their absence Cy James was equally intent on something, and Hulda
saw him in the ploughed field near the old Delaware cottage, under the
swooping buzzards, directing the farmer where to guide his plough, and
it seemed, in a little while, that one of the horses had fallen into a
pit there.

Later on Hulda observed Cy James, with a spade, digging at various
places near Patty Cannon's former cottage.

"All are at work for themselves," Hulda thought, "except Levin and me.
How often have I seen Aunt Patty slip to secret places in the night, or
by early dawn, when she looked every window over to see if she was
watched. Her beehives were her greatest care."

A sudden thought made Hulda stand still, and cast the color from her
cheeks.

"They are all going away. I shall be taken, too, or kept for worse evil
here. My mother, in Florida, hates me; she has told me so. I know the
marriage Allan McLane means for me--to be his white slave! Levin is
poor, and his mother is poor, too; they say Patty Cannon has buried
gold. Perhaps God will point it out to me."

She slipped down the Seaford road, and walked up the lane in the fields
she knew so well. No person was in the hip-roofed cottage. Hulda went
among the outbuildings, and began to inspect the beehives, made of
sections of round trees, and the big wooden flower-pots Patty Cannon had
left behind her.

She was only interrupted by a gun being fired in the ploughed field, and
saw the pertinacious buzzards there fall dead from the air as they
exasperated the ploughman.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I shall have one piece of fun in Maryland before I go," Hulda heard her
stepfather say, as he went past her bed to ascend the hatchway at morn,
"and that is to burn the nigger who mugged me. This is his day."

Almost immediately he came, cursing, down the ladder, followed by a
jeering laugh from above, and the cry, "We'll all see you hanged yit, by
smoke! an' mash another egg on your countenance, nigger-buyer!"

In a moment or two a tremendous quarrel was going on below stairs
between the kidnapper and his wife's mother, and Hulda believed they
were murdering each other; and, peeping once to see, beheld Johnson
holding Patty to the floor, and stuffing her elegant hair, which had
been torn out in the scuffle, into her mouth.

"I'll be the death of you, old fence, before I go," he shouted; "the
verdict would be, 'I did the county a service.'"

"Come away there!" cried Allan McLane, pushing past Hulda and between
the combatants. "Shame on you, Joe! To whip your grandmother is hardly
conservative. Here is an errand that will pay you well: my wench Virgie
has been caught."

The kidnapper released the woman and turned to his guest.

"Good news!" he said; "ef it puts my neck in the string, I'll fetch her
fur you."

His countenance had begun to assume a sensual expression, when Patty
Cannon, to whom his back was turned, rushed upon him like a tornado,
lifted him from his feet, and threw him through the back door into the
yard and bolted him out. McLane retreated by the other door.

"Thank heaven!" reflected Hulda, looking down in terror, "no one is
murdered yet, and I have another day of grace to wait for Levin."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Cunnil McLane," said Patty Cannon, in his room that night, "what
interest have you in the quadroon gal an' Huldy, too? You don't want' em
both, Cunnil?"

"No, Aunt Patty. All my views are conservative. Quite so! Hulda I want
to reform and model to my needs. She'll ornament me. By taking the girl
Virgie from my niece Vesta, I desire to punish the latter for consenting
to the degradation of our family, and marrying the forester, Milburn.
She loves this quadroon; therefore, I want to deprive her of the girl:
Joe is to bring her to me, do you see?"

His face expressed the indifference he felt to Virgie's safety on the
way, and the coarse suggestion gave Patty Cannon her opportunity:

"Cunnil, there's but three in the house to-night; I am one."

"I am two, Patty."

"And three is purty Huldy, Cunnil!"

They looked at each other a few minutes in silence.

"There is two to one," said Patty Cannon, with a giggle. "We have no
neighbors that air not used to noises yer."

The silence was restored while the two products of men-dealing read each
other's countenances.

"I made a very conservative and liberal proposition to her, Patty, and
she insulted me, yet beautifully. But I owe her a grudge for it."

"Insulted you, Cunnil? The ongrateful huzzy! Can't you insult her back?
She never dared to disobey _me_. Her pride once broke down, she'll be
like other gals, I reckon."

"That's true, no doubt. But, Patty, haven't you a little remorse about
it, considering she's your grandchild?"

"My mother had none fur me, honey," the old woman chuckled, familiarly.

"What is that story I have heard something of, about your origin,
Patty?"

"I don't know no more about it, Cunnil, than a pore, ignorant gal would,
you know. I've hearn my grandfather was a lord. A gypsy woman enticed
his son and he married her. His father drove him from his door, an' his
wife fetched him on her money to Canady, where she went into the
smugglin' business at St. John's, half-way between Montreal and the
United States."

"And he was hanged there for assassinating a friend who detected him?"

"They says so, honey. Anyhow, he was hanged. We gals was beautiful. Says
mother: 'It's a hard world, but don't let it beat you, gals! Marry ef
you kin. Anyway, you must live, and you can't live off of women.' I
married a Delaware man, and so I quit bein' Martha Hanley and became
Patty Cannon."[7]

"And what a career you have led, Aunt Patty! Lived anywhere but in this
old pocket between the bays, you would have had the reputation of
Captain Kidd. Tell me now, conservatively, was not your own helpless
childhood the cause of your mistakes, and does it never make you feel
for other sparrow-birds like Hulda?"

The black-haired woman, with a certain evil-thinking, like one reflected
upon harshly, finally clapped her bold black eyes on McLane's, and
replied, chuckling:

"I don't know as it do, Cunnil. Before my mother pinted the way, I loved
the men. I loved 'em to be bad. Mommy tuk us as we drifted. An' as fur
Huldy yer, her mother throws her onto me; she's not like the Cannons an'
Johnsons; she's full of pride, and," with an oath, "let it be tuk out of
her! Will you pay my price?"

He hesitated.

"It's not the price, Patty; it's the way. Isn't it cowardly?"

"Yes," said Patty, saucily, "it's kidnappin'. That's the trade yer. Pay
down the money, Cunnil, an' this bare room will brighten to be your
wedding chamber. Pah! are you a man!"

Her words aroused the visions self-love can reluctantly repulse, and
which, entertained but an instant, grow irresistible.

The limber, maturing, rounding form of Hulda stepped on the footstool of
his mind, touched his knee, and exhaled the aroma of her youth like a
subtile musk, till he leaned back languidly, as if he smoked a pipe and
on its bowl her bust was painted, and all her modesties dissolved into
the intoxication. Brutality itself grew natural to this vision, as a
fiercer joy and substitute for the deceit he could no longer practice.
The child had flown from her in the instant of his grasping it, like a
pale butterfly, but there remained where it had floated, a silken and
nubile essence, fairy and humanity in one, clad in pure thoughts and
sweet respect, the profanation of which would be as rare a game as
Satan's struggle with the soul of Eve.

Her innocence and spirit, self-respect and awakened womanly
consciousness, weakness and sensibility, mettle and beauty, presented
themselves by turns; and the cold, woodeny room, the neglected tavern,
the autumn night wind coming down the chimney and starting the fire, all
seemed instinctive, like him, with mischief, as if Patty Cannon's soul
flew astraddle of a broom and led a hundred witches.

McLane was fifty; his family was a stiff commercial one, that had
generally kept demure, yet grasping, and practised the conservatism he
also boasted of, but had departed from: he was the outlaw of the house,
yet elevating its tenets into an aggressive shibboleth, the more so that
he prospered by anti-progress.

He was a backer of domestic slave-dealers, and put his money into forms
of gain men hesitated at; not only at the curbstone, for usury, but
behind pawnbrokers and sporting men, in lottery companies and
liquor-houses, and, it was said, in the open slave-trade, too, clippers
for which occasionally stole out of the Chesapeake on affected trading
errands to the East Indies, and came home with nothing but West India
fruits.

He strove to maintain his credit by ostentatious abhorrence of novelties
and heterodoxies, and of all liberal agitations, and had the sublime
hardihood to carry his Bible into every sink of shame, as if it was the
natural baggage of a gentleman, and expected with him; and he would
rebuke "blasphemy" while bidding at the slave auction or sitting in a
bar-room full of kidnappers, among many of whom he passed for a
religious standard.

No portion of that Bible gave him any delight or occupation, however,
except the Old Testament, with its thoroughgoing codes of servitude,
concubinage, and an-eye-for-an-eye. He knew the Jewish laws better than
the Scribes and Pharisees in the time of Herod and John, and had
persuaded himself that the mental endorsement and, wherever possible,
the practice of these, constituted a firm believer. Revenge,
intolerance, formality, and self-sleekness had become so much his theory
that he did not know himself whether he was capable of doing evil
provided he wanted anything.

Not particularly courageous, he was so destitute of sensibility that he
felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white
inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather
preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted
no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and
so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious
social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.

"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice,
like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you
may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"

"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide from me yer by your
fire, and my voice outside the door will keep her in yer till day."

McLane went to his portmanteau and unlocked it, and took out rolls of
notes and a buckskin bag of gold.

The yellow lustre seemed to flash in Patty Cannon's rich black eyes,
like the moon overhead upon a well.

"How beautiful it do shine, Cunnil!" she said. "Nothing is like it fur a
friend. Youth an' beauty has to go together to be strong, but, by God!
gold kin go it alone."

He counted out two piles, one of notes and one of gold, using his gold
spectacles upon his hawk nose to do so, and said:

"Patty, I've bought many a grandchild _with_ the old woman, but this is
the first child I have bought _from_ the grandmother. Now fulfil your
contract and earn your money!"

He put his spectacles in his pocket, stretched his gaitered slippers
before the fire, looked at his watch and let the crystal seal drop on
his sleek abdomen, and his vitreous, blue-green eyes filled with color
like twin vases in a druggist's window. He was ready and anxious to
substitute the ruffian for the tempter.

Patty Cannon, glancing at the money on the table, and bearing a lamp,
started at once through the house, calling "Huldy! Huldy!"

Nothing responded to the name.

She searched from room to room, peering everywhere, and made the circuit
twice, and, taking a lantern, went into the windy night and round the
bounds of the old tavern.

The house was easily explored, having no cellar nor outbuildings, and
the trap to the slave-pen was locked fast. The girl's shawl and hat were
also gone.

"She's heard us, I reckon," the old woman muttered; "she's run away an'
ruined me. Joe's cruel to me; Van Dorn is gone; without gold I go to the
poor-house. McLane is pitiless--"

She dwelt upon the sentence, and, with only an instant's hesitation,
turned into the tavern again and buttoned the outer door.

Beneath her feather bed she reached her hand and drew out a large
object, took a horn from the mantel and sprinkled it with something
contained there, and then, in a bold, masculine walk, stamping hard went
in the dark up the open stairs again, talking, as she advanced, loudly,
complaisantly, or sternly, as if to some truant she was coaxing or
forcing. Finally, at McLane's chamber, she knocked hard, crying:

"Open, Cunnil! Here's the bashful creatur! She daren't disobey no mo'.
Step out and kiss her, Cunnil!"

"Ha!" said McLane, throwing open his door, out of which the full light
of fire and candles gleamed, "conservative, is she? Well, let her
enter!"

As he made one step to penetrate the darkness with his dazzled eyes,
Patty Cannon silently thrust against his heart a huge horse-pistol and
pulled the trigger: a flash of fire from the sharp flint against the
fresh powder in the pan lit up the hall an instant, and the heavy body
of the guest fell backward before his chair, and over him leaned the
woman a moment, still as death, with the heavy pistol clubbed, ready to
strike if he should stir.

He did not move, but only bled at the large lips, ghastly and
unprotesting, and the cold blue eyes looked as natural as life.

Patty Cannon took the chair and counted the money.




CHAPTER XLII.

BEAKS.


The wind was blowing in spells, like crowds moved during an argument, at
one time mute as awe, again murmurous, and sometimes mutinous and
fierce, when Hulda, having heard a few words only of her grandmother's
overture, glided from the old tavern and passed on into the night,
terrified but not unthinking, till she reached some large pines that
seemed to say over her head, high up towards heaven: "Where now, oh
where, oh-h-h wh-h-here, in the co-o-o-old, co-o-o-old w-h-h-h-ilderness
of the wh-h-h-orld?"

"Anywhere!" answered Hulda, not afraid of cold or nature, so intense had
become her fear of men and women. "Still, where? I might go to Cannon's
Ferry and tell my tale to those hard-hearted merchants, or to Seaford
and beg a shelter somewhere there; but first I will try our old cottage
home again."

She went so quietly up the field lane that dogs could not have heard
her, and, as she approached the little house, saw lights in it, and soon
heard voices and saw moving figures within.

Knowing every knot-hole and crack of the little dwelling, Hulda soon had
a perfect view of the contents of the house by standing in the dark, a
little distance from one of the low, small windows.

A table stood in the middle of the main room, on which was an old
mouldered chest with the earth clinging to it, and beside the chest were
bones and shreds of clothing on the riven lid of the chest.

"You swear that the evidence you give shall be the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God!" exclaimed a small,
chunky, Irish-looking person, presenting a book to be kissed by a
scrawny, chinless, goose-necked lad, whom Hulda immediately recognized
as Cyrus James.

"Shall I take him, Doctor Gibbons?" asked a fine-looking, easy-mannered
man, of the magistrate.

"Yes, Mr. Clayton."

"Do you know the nature of an oath? What is it?"

"I'll be fried like a slapper on the devil's griddle ef I don't tell
right," whined Cy James, zealously.

"No you won't; at least, not _first_. If you don't tell me the truth
I'll have your two ears cut off on the pillory, and no slapper shall
enter that hungry stomach of yours for a month. Goy!"

He looked at Cy James as if he had a mind to bite his nose off as a mere
beginning.

"Now, Hollyday Hicks, you and Billy Hooper and the other constables take
away this box, which smells too loud here, as soon as the witness has
sworn to it. When did you last see this box, James?"

"About ten year ago, sir, when I had been bound to Patty Cannon four
year, I reckon, I see Patty an' Joe Johnson an' Ebenezer, his brother,
all toting this chist to the field an' a-buryin' of it."[8]

"What did you see them put in that chest?"

"A dead man--a nigger-trader. I can't tell whether his name was Bell or
Miller; she killed two men nigh that time, an' I was so little that I've
got 'em mixed."

"Did you see her kill this man?"

"No, sir, I wasn't home. I got home in time to see 'em packin' him in
the box. I hearn Patty tell the boys how she killed him. Oh! she was
proud of it, sir, becaze she didn't have no help in it."

Half a dozen heads of constables, some of whom Hulda knew, leaned
forward together to hear the witness, while others removed the unsavory
remains. Mr. Clayton continued:

"How did she say she killed him?"

"She said he come to Joe's tavern with a borreyed hoss from East New
Market, where he told the people he was buyin' niggers, and would take
fifteen thousand dollars wuth if he could git 'em. He was follered out,
an' Ebenezer Johnson got in ahead of him. They told him the tavern was
full, an' he would be better tuk care of at a good woman's little farm
close by. They made him think, she said, that a gentleman with much
money wasn't allus safe at the tavern. Aunt Patty got him supper. He sit
at the table after it a-pickin' of his teeth. She got her pistol an'
went out in her garden a-hoein' of her flowers. Once she come up on him
at the window to shoot, but he turned quick, an' she says to him: 'Oh,
sir, I only want to see if you didn't need somethin' more.' 'No, no,'
says he; 'I've made a rale good supper.' 'I loves my flowers,' Aunt
Patty says, 'an' likes to hoe 'em at sundown, so they can sleep nice an'
soft.' 'Do you?' says he; 'I reckon you're a kind woman.' He turned
around agin an' begin to look over his pocket-book. She hoed an' hoed,
an' hummed a little tune. All at once she slipped up, an' I heerd her
say, 'Boys, I give it to him good, right in the back of the head, an' he
fell on to the table, an' the water he had been drinkin' was red as
currant wine.'"

"James Moore, I'll swear you next," the magistrate said to the new
tenant of the farm; and this man proceeded to testify concerning the
finding of the chest as he was ploughing in a wet spot where he had
removed some brush.

Cy James, being recalled, gave testimony as to other buried bodies,
chiefly of children slaughtered in wantonness or jealousy, or to avoid
pursuit.

"Take this boy, Joe Neal," said Constable Hicks,[9] "and hold him fast."

"Goy!" said Clayton, with a terrible frown at Cy James, "we may have to
hang him yet! Guilty knowledge of these crimes for so many years, and
exposure at last only for a private resentment, constitute an accessory.
Well for you, depraved young man, if you had possessed the principle of
_this_ young gentleman!"

The Senator placed his hand upon a sitting figure, and there arose in
Hulda's sight the image of her lover, Levin Dennis.

"Constables," said Dr. Gibbons, the magistrate, "I shall give you your
warrants now. The Maryland authorities propose, without waiting for
extradition proceedings, to deliver your prisoners at the state line."

"Goy!" said Clayton, "they may have friends in the executive chambers at
Annapolis. No, boys, act together, like patriots, as the Maryland and
Delaware lads served in the same revolutionary brigade. Joe Johnson is
due here at noon to-morrow: be careful not to disturb old Patty nor
awaken her suspicions till he arrives. She is almost past doing evil,
but he has a lifetime left to do it in."

"Constable Neal, I'll shove them over the line to you!" spoke the
Maryland officer.

"Constable Wilson, look out when you lay on to old Patty: she may be
loaded and go off," exclaimed the Delaware officer.

"Doctor John Gibbons," spoke Clayton, "waste no time with them at the
hearing in Seaford, but get horses and send them right to Georgetown
jail; they are slippery as eels. Goy!"

As Cy James was being taken to a secure place in the garret he turned to
Levin Dennis, much wilted and crestfallen.

"Oh, Levin," he said, "Huldy won't have me now, I know. Won't you stand
by me, Levin? She's goin' to marry you, and I'll give ye all I've
found."

"Huldy!" Levin exclaimed; "oh, must I leave her yonder at the tavern
another night?"

"No," answered Hulda, coming forward; "we are both preserved, my friend.
But I must have made my bed in the forest this night if God had not
directed me to you."

As they clasped each other fondly, Senator Clayton exclaimed,

"What? Doves among the rattlesnakes. Goy!"




CHAPTER XLIII.

PLEASURE DRAINED.


The dawn had not broken when that fleet traveller, Joseph Johnson,
anticipating his enemies by hours, noiselessly tied his horses at the
tavern he had erected, and nearly fell into the arms of Owen Daw.

"Joe," said that scapegrace, "thar's queer people hanging around yer.
They say a blue chist has been dug outen the field yonder, an' bones in
it. I 'spect they're a-lookin' fur you, Joe."

"I'll give you a job, Owen," said Johnson, quick on his feet as the boy.
"Run these horses into my wagon thar while I git some duds together
before I hop the twig."

Slipping to the rear of the house, he entered, and looked in Patty's
room--she was not there; a slight smell of gunpowder seemed to be in the
hall. Passing rapidly up the stairs, Johnson saw a light shine in
McLane's room, and he kicked the door wide open, exclaiming,

"Bad luck everywhere; the gal's stone dead; the beaks are round us. Wake
up, McLane!"

"Joe!" said a voice, and Patty Cannon threw her arms around him.

"To burning fire with you!" bellowed the filial son. "Take your arms
away!"

"Let us make up, Joe! Everybody has run away from us. Huldy is gone,
too. McLane is dead."

"Dead? Dead where?"

"There"--she pointed to a feather-bed lying upon the floor, the outlines
of which seemed unusually pointed and stiff for feathers, though it was
sown up in its own blankets and quilts. Joe Johnson touched it with his
foot and bounded back.

"Hell-cat!" he cried, "is this one of your tricks?"

"I did it fur you, Josie. He brought it on hisself. There's his
portmanteau full of money to pay our travelling expenses. He's sewed up
beautiful, and in the bay you can drop him to the bottom."

Joe Johnson's face became almost livid pale, and, rushing upon Patty
Cannon with both hands raised, he struck her to the floor and put his
boot upon her.

"If I had time, I'd have your life," he hissed. "But it would lose the
uptucker a job. To-night I leave you forever. Margaretta, your daughter,
wishes never to see you again. Take this crib and the blood you still
must shed to keep your old heart warm, and take my curse to choke you on
the gallows!"

He rushed away and gave a low whistle at the window; Daw and Joe's
brother, Ebenezer, a lower set and more sinister being, bounded up the
stairs and loosened and drove before them the little band of captives.

"One word from you, white nigger, in all this journey to-day, scatters
your brains in the woods!"

Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phoebus saw his
nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.

"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed,
and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau
thrown in beside it.

"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take
the poor old woman that's raised you along."

"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you
would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe
Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it
to you."

He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little
bar and moaned,

"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"

How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar
sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she
shouted,

"Van Dorn! God bless you, Van Dorn! Is you alive again?"

The Captain was supported in the arms of another person, who took him,
ghastly pale, into the little bar and laid him upon her pallet,
muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

       *       *       *       *       *

The morning was well advanced, and the sun made the gaunt and steep old
tavern rise like a mammoth from the level lands, and filled its upper
front rooms with golden wine of light, as Patty Cannon sat in one of
them by a window near the piazza, and talked to Van Dorn, whom she had
tenderly washed and re-dressed, and placed him in her own comfortable
rocking-chair of rushes, with his feet raised, as all unaffected
Americans like, and blanketed, upon a second chair.

Her woes and his relief made Patty social, yet tender, and the instincts
of her sex had returned, to be petted and beloved.

"Oh, Captain," she said, fondly, "how clean and sweet you look, like my
good man again. Don't be cross to me, Van Dorn! My heart is sad."

"_Chito_, Patty! _chito_! Fie! _you_ sad? I like to see you saucy and
defiant. Let us not repent! So Joe has left you?"

"With cruel curses. My daughter hates me, he says, and means to be a
lady where I can't disgrace her. Oh, honey! to raise a child and have it
hate an' despise you goes hard, even if I have been bad. There's nothing
left me now but you, Van Dorn; oh, do not die!"

He coughed carefully, as if coughing was a luxury to be very mildly
exerted, and wiped a little blood from his tongue and lip.

"I'll try not to die till I comfort you some, _Márta delicióso_! The
ball is at my windpipe, and, when the blood trickles in, it makes me
cough, and I must beware of emotions, the surgeon says, lest it drop
into my lung and break a blood-vessel by some very spasmodic cough. So
do not be too beautiful or I might perish."

He stroked his long yellow mustache with the diamond-fingered hand, and
drew his velvet smoking-cap tight upon his silken curls, but he was too
pale to blush as formerly, though he lisped as much, like a modest boy.

"Captain," the woman said, pleased to crimson, "you are so much smarter
than me I'm afeard of you. Am I beautiful a little yet? Do I please you?
I know you mock me."

"_O hala hala!_" sighed Van Dorn. "You are the star of my life. All that
I am, you have made me. Patty, I worship you. When you are gone, human
nature will breathe and wonder. Do you remember when first we met?"

"A little, Captain. Tell it to me again. Praise me if you kin. I'm
almost desolate."

Her lip trembled, and she glanced at the fields across the way, she had
so long inhabited, where, as it seemed to her, more life than ever was
visible to-day, though she did not look carefully.

"How many years it has been, Patty, we will not tell. I was coming home
from Africa with an emigrant, a Briton, my capturer, indeed--that
officer in the blockading squadron on that coast who seized my
privateer, the _Ida_, with all her complement of Guinea slaves. His name
was all I took from him--you got the rest--_Van Dorn_!"

She stole a startled look at him out of her listening eyes, as if this
might be unpleasant talk, but he parried it with a compliment.

"_Chis! Dios!_ What a family of beauties you were! Betty, with her
hoyden air, and Jane, with her wealth of charms, and Patty, with her
bold, rich eyes and conquering will. We sailed into the Nanticoke by
mistake for the Manokin. My friend had pitied my misfortunes and liked
my company, and, when he broke me up as a slaver--having already been
broken as a privateer--had said: 'Dennis, that country you praise so
well has infatuated me; I'll resign my commission and buy a little
vessel, and settle in America with you for the sake of my dear little
daughter, Hulda Van Dorn.' _Ayme!_ that poor little wild-flower:
where did she spend the chill night yesterday, Patty, can you tell?"

He coughed again, very carefully, and his eye, the brighter for his
fretted lungs, never left his hostess, as though he feared she might
overlook some pleasing feature of his story. She trotted her foot and
muttered:

"You made me jealous of her: I got to hate an' fear her, lovey."

"Voluptuous as two young widowers were after a long cruise, we tarried
among you sirens, myself almost at the threshold of my home, where my
wife believed me dead, yet waited longingly and waits this morn, dear
Patty. _Dios da fe!_ My friend, entasselled with bright Betty, sooner
felt remorse at the spectacle of his little child so ill-caressed, and
beckoned me away; but he had shown his gold, and could better be spared
than reckless I. You know the cool, deep game, dear Pat. _Hala ha!_ I
was made to buy the poison you sisters gave Van Dorn, and seem the
accomplice in his death: never till this week has that murder given up a
testimony--the portion of the dead man's coin your mother stole and hid,
which Hulda inherited at last. _Verdad es verde!_ I became afraid to
leave you: I am here at the death with you, my old enchantress."

A crack ran through the empty wooden house, which made her rise; Van
Dorn, as he was called, enjoyed her uneasiness, like a pallid mask
painted with a smile.

"Captain," she said, "how many people I see out yonder in the fields!
Maybe thar's to be a fox-chase."

"Sit, Patty! Let me drink, in my last days of life, the wine lees of
your memory. You are so dear to me! Turn in the golden sun, that I may
linger on that face which autumn's ashes fall upon, though through the
dead leaves I see the russet colors smoulder yet! How daring was your
girlhood: the poor blacksmith farmer, whose name you will transmit
forever, fretted you with his sickness and his scruples, and, _he aqui!_
you stilled him with the same cup you mixed for Betty's husband. His
daughter you gave to wife to his apprentice, a strong, stolid man,
capable of heroism, Patty, for he died for you, his dear misleader, on
the shameful scaffold, though all the crowd knew who his instigator was;
but, like a man, he died and never told."

"Van Dorn, you hurt me," Patty broke out; "I cannot laugh to-day, and
these tales depress me, honey. Where shall we go when you are well?"

"_La gente pone, y Dios dispone!_ Stay yet, and chat awhile. I would
not, for the world, see you discouraged,--you, unfathomable angel! who,
in this mangy corner of the globe, looked abroad over the land like
Catherine, from her sterile throne, over the mighty steppes, and levied
war upon the hopes of man. How you did trouble Uncle Sam, great Patty,
robbing his mails for years between Baltimore and the Brandywine! Young
Nichols still serves his term for that shrewd trick you taught him, of
cutting the mail-bags open as he sat, with the corrupted drivers, on the
crowded stage, stealthily throwing the valuable letters in the road, to
be gathered by a following horseman.[10] _Es admirable!_ Young Perry
Hutton, reared by you to kidnap, then to drive the mail and filch its
letters--a Delaware boy, too--perished on the gallows for killing a
mail-driver more scrupulous than himself, who detected him under his
mask.[11] Young Moore--was he your connection, darling?--stopping the
mail-stage at the Gunpowder Forge, fell under the driver's buckshot.[12]
And Hare--"

"Captain," called Patty, "I see men and boys all over the fields yonder,
running and digging and dragging away the bresh. Is them ole buryins of
mine suspected?"

"Pshaw! darling, 'tis your warm imagination, and Joe's unkindness. I
would make you happy with the memory of your daring acts. _Que
maravilla!_ In your little pets you stamped a life out, when another
woman would only stamp her foot. There was that morning when your fire
would not burn, and a little black child bawled with the cold and
angered you; if its body is ever dug up where it was laid, the skull
cracked with the billet of wood will tell the tale. You once suspected
me of truantry from your charms--_Quedo, quedo!_ exacting dame--and the
pale offspring of poor Hagar you threw upon the blazing backlog, and
grimly watched it burn. The pursued children whose cries you could not
still, that yet are stilled till hell shall have a voice, not even you
can number. Evangelists, O Patty, dipping their pens in blood of saints
to write your crimes, would make the next age infidel, where you will
seem impossible, and all of us mythology!"

"Be still!" the woman cried, rising and walking, in her rolling gait, to
watch things without that stirred her mind more than her lover's
recitation; "what good kin these tales do you, Captain? My God! the
roads is full of people, and they are all looking yer. Is it at me, Van
Dorn?"

He coughed painfully, still watching her, however, and answered:

"Only a quarter-race, I guess, dear Pat! What! are you _fearing_, at
your time of life?"

"No," cried Patty Cannon, defiantly, taking something from her bosom;
"here is the same dose I gave my husband, if the worst comes."

"Bravo, Patty! you only tarnish into age, like an old bronze, that is
harder by time and oxidizing. I was a gentleman, and yet you mastered
me. How strange to see us together beleaguered here, myself by death,
and you by the law! Why, we have defied them both! Let them come on! Do
you believe in everlasting fire?--that every injury is a live coal to
roast the soul? I know you do; and, if you do, how beautiful your rosy
grate will be, tough charmer, with boys spoiled in the bud, and husbands
in the blossom, with families of freemen torn apart, and children, born
free as the flag of their country, sent to perpetual bondage and the
whip. _Poca barba, poca vergüenza!_[13] Who but a woman could have put
it into William Bouser's head, when she had kidnapped him and thirty
negroes more, and sold them all to Austin Woolfolk, in Baltimore, to
rise at sea on Woolfolk's vessel, and massacre the officers, only to be
hanged at last, and all to make Woolfolk a better customer!"[14]

"There are people all round the house, Van Dorn. I hear them on the
stairs and in the rooms. Have mercy!"

"Devils, or men, Patty? Both are your courtiers, remember, and perhaps
they crowd each other. What do we care? _Que contento estoy!_ Perhaps I
am indifferent because no blood is on my hands, vile slaver though I am!
Joe Johnson and his low-browed brother you could teach to kill; me,
nothing worse than to steal and fondle you. Patty, you believe in hell.
I am a believer, too; for I believe in heaven."

"O Van Dorn; how you do talk!"

"Since you entrapped my son, young Levin Dennis--_chito! quedito!_ do
not start, fair fiend--to have his father make another Johnson of him, I
have discovered, through the little girl, the beauteous damsel now,
Hulda Van Dorn, the sin you meant to spot me with; and, listen, Patty!
it was my son, rich with his mother's loyalty and love--dear guardian
wife, that never shall learn of my ruin here, nor see me more!--it was
my Levin, set free by me, who gave the news at Dover and beat us back."

He had partly risen as he spoke, and the exertion seemed to choke him.
The woman sat in dreadful silence, watching his veins rise upon his pale
and wilful face. He caught at his throat with his fingers, and for a
time could speak no more.

"Patty," said he, at last, between his coughing spells, "I believe
again, for I have seen my wife, true as an angel, beauteous as a child,
in prayer for me. An honest man waits my death to love her better, and
be the father of my son. _Hala o hala!_ I have had the daughter of my
murdered friend to kiss and bless me, and to love my son. My son has
given me his confidence, unknowing whom I was, and shown to me a brave,
pure heart. _Yo soy amado!_ Their prayers may knock for me at the
eternal door. But thou, the murderer of my youth, no heart will pray
for. Believe in hell, and die; _ha! hala! ho!_"

He pointed his white finger at her in an ecstasy, with a mocking smile
in his blue eyes, like fading stars at dawn, and then the rosy morning
flowed all round his mouth, as the bullet, detached in his emotion, fell
towards the lung, and wakened hemorrhage, and to the last of his
strength he pointed at her, and then fell back, in crimson linen,
smiling yet in death.

Terrified at the unwonted scene of a natural decease in that abode of
violence, the mistress only sat, the image of paralysis, till her door
slowly opened, and there entered, hand in hand, young Levin Dennis and
Hulda Van Dorn.

"Levin," the young girl said, composed as one to whom reputable life and
obsequies were familiar, "I have heard the dying sentences of this
misled, strong, disappointed man. Let us kneel down, dear friend, and
say a prayer. He was our father, Levin; not Van Dorn--_that_ is my name,
the daughter of his friend--but Captain Oden Dennis, of the _Ida_
privateer."

As they knelt, with closed eyes, the room slowly filled, and Patty
Cannon's arms were seized by two constables, and the warrant read to
her. She heard it with humility, making no answer but this:

"Once I had money an' friends a plenty; my money is gone, and so is my
friends; there's no fight now in pore ole Patty Cannon."




CHAPTER XLIV.

THE DEATH OF PATTY CANNON.


As Patty Cannon came out of the tavern the cross-roads were full of
people, taking their last look at the spot where she had triumphed for
nearly twenty years.

None thought to look at Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and
his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods,
where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three
mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears:

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The Maryland constable marched Patty Cannon down to the little bridge of
planks where ran the ditch nearly on the State line, and tradition still
believes the figment that Joe Johnson at that moment was hiding beneath
it.

There, driven across the boundary like some borderer's cow, the queen of
the kidnappers was seized by the Delaware constable, and placed in a
small country gig-wagon, and, followed by a large mounted posse, the
road was taken to the little hamlet of Seaford, five miles distant.

She watched the small funereal cedars and monumental poplar-trees rise
strangled from the underbrush, the dark-brown streams flowing into inky
mill-ponds, the close, small pines, scarcely large enough to moan, but
trying to do so in a baby tone, and her eyes turned to the sand, where
she was soon to be. Not agony nor repentance nor any hope of escape
fluttered her cold heart, but only a feeling of being ungratefully
deserted by her friends, and ill-treated by her equals and neighbors,
who had so seldom warned or avoided her; no preacher had come to tell
her the naked gospel, and some had bowed to her respectfully, and even
begged her oats, and made subscriptions from her ill-gotten silver.

Seaford was a sandy place upon a bluff of the Nanticoke, and, as the
procession came in, a party of surveyors, working for Meshach Milburn's
railroad, paused to jeer the old kidnapper. She had grown suddenly old,
and never raised her voice, that had always been so forward, to make a
reply.

The magistrate, Dr. John Gibbons, had been an educated young Irishman
who landed from a ship at Lewes, and, marrying a lady in Maryland, near
Patty Cannon's, became the legal spirit of the little town. His office,
a mere cabin, on a corner by his house, being too small for the purpose,
the examination was adjourned to the tavern, at the foot of the hill,
near where a mill-pond brook dug its way to the Nanticoke. Around the
tavern some box-bush walks were made in the sand, and willow-trees
bordered the cold river-side, and, at pauses in the hearing, wild-fowl
were heard to play and pipe in the falling tide.

The evidence of Cy James and other cowardly companions in her sins was
quickly given, and the procession started through the woods and sands to
Georgetown, twelve miles to the eastward, where Patty Cannon was
received by all the town, waiting up for her, and the jail immediately
closed her in.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I didn't ezackly make out what that cymlin-headed feller did it fur,"
Jimmy Phoebus remarked, in the hold of an old oyster pungy, where he
found himself with his mulatto friend and Aunt Hominy and the children,
"but the file he fetched me has done its work at last. Yer, Whatcoat,"
addressing his male fellow-prisoner, "take this knife the same feller
slipped me, an' cut these cords." Standing up free again, Mr. Phoebus
further remarked,

"Whatcoat, thar's two of us yer. By smoke! thar's three."

The docile colored man opened his eyes.

"Him!" exclaimed the sailor, indicating the feather-bed in the hold,
with its stiff, invisible contents; "Joe'll chuck him overboard down yer
about deep water somewhere. Now, for a little hokey-pokey; I think I'll
git in thar myself, an' let Joe sell t'other feller fur a nigger."

Phoebus's power over his fellow-prisoners--little children and idiotic
Hominy included--was now perfect, and he began to explore the rotten old
hold, which contained oyster-rakes, fish-lines, and the usual utensils
of a dredging-vessel, and soon discovered that there could be made a
clear passage to crawl through her from forecastle to-cabin by removing
a few boards.

"Yer, Hominy," he said, "get to work with your needle, old gal; I'm
goin' to take you home."

       *       *       *       *       *

With a good start, and a fair wind and slack tide, Johnson was off
Vienna at eight o'clock.

"Ten mile to go, an' they can't catch me with a racehorse," he said,
"after I pass Chicacomico wharf, an' git abaft the marshes. I'm boozy
fur sleep. Thar's two in this crew I don't know, and I must be helmsman.
Bingavast! I'll make my nigger work his passage."

He walked to the hatchway over the hold, and, sliding it back, dropped
in, and, with a few expert blows of the professional smithy, set
Whatcoat free, merely glancing where Phoebus lay upon his face,
snoring hard.

"Cool cucumber of a bloke," Johnson said, "he'll be too much fur me in a
trade; I'll have to stifle him!" Then, ordering the mulatto man astern,
Johnson gave him the tiller, and sat near, nodding, till the second
wharf on the starboard was passed.

"Now Gabriel can't overhaul me," Johnson exclaimed; "thar's no more road
on the Dorchester side, an' the Somerset roads is all gashed by creeks
an' barred by farm-gates. I'll sink that dab an' stiffy."

He called two deck hands, and lifted the body out of the hold. Phoebus
still placidly slept upon his face, and Johnson looked at him with
peculiar envy after a hurried glance at the dead. Some ropes being put
around the bed, and drag-irons attached to them, the whole weight was
unceremoniously thrown overboard at the point of Hungry Neck, and the
dealer remarked, apologetically:

"There goes a great hypocrite, gentlemen; he wasn't above piracy, ef he
could git another man to fly the black flag for him. I reckon he'll be
'conservative' enough after this. And now I'll snooze. Steer her for
Ragged Point, yonder, Whatcoat, an' when you git thar wake me. It's
clear broad inlet all the way; an' remember, nigger, I sleep and shoot,
on hair triggers!"

With his pistols in his hand, Johnson lay down in the cabin a few feet
from the helmsman, and tried to see and sleep at once. He had been
without rest for many nights, and sleep soon bound him in its own clevis
and manacles.

When he awoke, so deep had been his slumber that he could not recall for
a moment where he was. The tiller was unmanned, the stars shone in the
cabin hatchway, a cold bilge-water draft blew through the old hulk, and,
as he dragged himself up the steps, he saw tall woods near by, and heard
the voice of solemn pines.

The vessel was aground; wild geese were making jubilant shrieks as they
cut the water with their fleecy wings, like cameo engraving; the outlaw
gazed and gazed, and finally muttered:

"Deil's Island, or I'm a billy noodle! I run from it the last time I was
yer, an' my blood runs cold to be yer agin; my daddy got his curse from
this camp-meetin'."

Taking speed from his apprehensions, Johnson slid back the hatchway and
leaped into the hold, starlight and moonlight following him, and nothing
did they reveal there except one man, peacefully sleeping upon his face,
as Phoebus had last been seen.

The kidnapper shook his captive, but he did not awaken. He turned the
man over, and there met his eyes the cold blue stare and Roman nose and
bleeding lips of Allan McLane, apparently returned from the bottom of
the river.

With a shriek, the outlaw bounded upon the deck and ran to the bow of
the pungy.

"Help me!" came a faint cry from the forecastle, and, peeping in, Joe
Johnson recognized one of his own familiars he had shipped at Cannon's
Ferry, gagged, like his companion, and tied fast. The man had just been
able to articulate.

"Now, spiflicate me!" spoke the skipper, relieving the man, "the ruffian
cly you! who did this?"

"The white nigger did it all, Joe. He crawled through the stays to the
cabin, and got your pistols, first; leastways, we found him an' the
yaller feller at the helm on top of us, coming up the fo'castle, and
next t'other two men jined 'em. They said ole Samson had give 'em the
wink. We two was tied and throwed in yer, an' ef you had awaked, thar
was a man to stab you to the heart, sot over you."

"The portmanteau?" cried Johnson.

"That's gone, I reckon. They sowed you up a feather an' oyster-shell man
on a plank to heave overboard; that's what they said. They steered for
Deil's Island, an' sot the Island Parson yer to watch that you don't git
the pungy off, an' I reckon they're half-way to Princess Anne."

Joe Johnson heard no more. He released his creatures from their bonds,
took the dead body in the pungy's canoe, and gave the command:

"Row fur the open bay! We'll strike St. Mary's County or Virginny.
Bingavast! Hike! Never agin will I put foot on this Eastern Shore."

       *       *       *       *       *

At Georgetown Jimmy Phoebus, Samson, and Levin Dennis met again, and
Levin told the mystery of his father's disappearance.

"Never tell your mother, Levin, that Captain Dennis died in that
Pangymonum; it would break her heart, and she never would trust man
agin."

"Jimmy," spoke up Samson, "let her understand that he got wrecked on the
_Ida_. It looks a little bad, but the slave-trade sounds better than
kidnappin'."

"They say that Allan McLane owned that slave vessel," Phoebus put in;
"but he didn't live to know his loss. He'll meet his heathens at the
Judgment Seat."

"Who has fed mother?" Levin asked. "Hulda can't explain that."

"I kin, Levin," Samson Hat said, bashfully. "It was me. Good ole Meshach
Milburn, that everybody's down on, pitied that pore woman, an' made me
set things she needed in her window. He said if I ever told it he'd
discharge me."

"Dog my skin!" Jimmy Phoebus observed, "the next man that calls
'steeple top' after ole Meshach I'll mash flat! But, come, my son, I've
buried at Broad Creek your wife's family relics. We'll hire a wagon, and
drive to ole Broad Creek 'piscopal church on the way, and there I'll
have you married to Huldy."

The sword-hilt and coins were disinterred, and in that ancient edifice
of hard pine, where the worship of her English race had long been
celebrated, the naval officer's daughter became the wife of the son of
his voluptuous and perverted friend. As Jimmy Phoebus kissed them he
said:

"Levin, when your mother says 'Yes,' all four of us will settle in the
West. Illinois has become a free state, after a hard fight, and I reckon
that'll suit us."

       *       *       *       *       *

For a while Patty Cannon, by her affability and sorrow, had easy times
in jail, and was allowed to eat with the jailer's family; but, as the
examination proceeded before the grand jury, and her menials hastened to
throw their responsibility in so many crimes upon her alone, an outer
opinion demanded that she be treated more harshly, and some of the irons
she had manacled upon her captives were riveted upon her own ankles.
Very soon dropsy began to appear in her legs and feet, and, after it
became evident to her that neither money nor friends were forthcoming in
her defence, she fell into a passive despair.

The frequent conferences between Jimmy Phoebus and Cy James led to the
belief that not only had Hulda recovered portions of her father's money
and valuables, hidden in the beehives and flower-pots old Patty had so
assiduously attended, but that Phoebus had seized upon property
indicated by the informer, and was to have whatever remained of it after
procuring the latter's release.

This result was hastened by Patty Cannon's death, which happened, to the
great relief of many respectably considered people in that region, who
had feared from the first that she would make a minute confession,
implicating everybody who had dealt with her band.

Among these was Judge Custis, who opened his skeleton-in-the-closet to
John M. Clayton one spring-like day. Clayton had quietly prodded on the
conviction of Patty Cannon, but the jealousy of the slaveholding
interest made him wary of any open appearance against her.

They were sitting in the little parlor of the Methodist parsonage, a
small frame house with a conical-roofed portico and big end-chimney, a
little off from the public square, whither they had gone to send the
pastor to wait on the aged Chancellor, who had been taken ill in the
court-room, and lay in the hotel.

"Clayton," said Judge Custis, in a low tone of voice, "what this woman
may do or tell, you would not think concerned me, but I will show you
how deep her influence has reached, as well as explain to you why I
would not pursue my own servants to her den. In this I humiliate myself
before you, as I must do, if I am to become your client."

"You had been trading with Patty Cannon; I guessed that much."

"Such was the case. When I was a collegian at Yale, returning home one
holiday, I fell in love with a beautiful quadroon, the property of my
uncle, in Northampton County. She was an elegant woman, with a good
education, and had been my playmate. I was ardent and good-looking, and
easily found lodgment in her heart; but the conquest of her charms was
long, and agonizing with sincere esteem. You must believe me when I
declare that I fell dangerously ill because I was refused by her, and,
making a confidant of my doctor, he told the girl that she must choose
between my death and her surrender. Pity, then, prevailed, even over
religion. I was happy in every point but one--the injury concealment
worked upon her self-respect; for, Clayton, my mistress was my own
cousin."

"Goy!"

"I never desired to marry, although no children had been born in my
patriarchal relation; but, in the course of years, my uncle became
pressed for debts, and he appealed to me to save my beautiful handmaiden
from sale, he being in full sympathy with my relation to her, because
she was his daughter."

"I goy!"

"The case was urgent. I possessed some negroes, the legacy of my mother.
To sell them publicly would be a stigma both upon my humanity and my
credit. I adopted the cowardly device of letting a kidnapper slip them
away, and take a large commission for his trouble. I saved my lady, but
at the expense of a secret."

"And that secret Joe Johnson depended on, Custis, when he was suddenly
driven into your house, and found your old servant already demoralized
by the announcement of your son-in-law?"

"The scoundrel pressed his advantage; and he saw, besides, my
daughter--not Vesta, but her half-sister, Virgie--and, between his
persecution of her and my brother-in-law's vindictiveness, poor Virgie
was literally run to the ground and into it; she is in her grave."

Judge Custis broke into a long fit of sobbing, and Clayton, who had
noticed his dejected mien since their separation, passed an arm around
him, saying:

"Never mind, now! Never mind, old friend! Johnson is fled; McLane, they
whisper, has never been seen since he entered Johnson's tavern. His will
was found there, and your daughter gets her mother's property and
servants back."

"I must finish my story," Judge Custis said, stanching his tears. "By
the decline of every family with natural feelings and refinement, under
what Mr. Pinkney termed 'the contaminating curse of reluctant bondsmen,'
we, also, became poor. To save others, it was necessary that I must
marry, and get money by my own prostitution. My God, how we are repaid!
A bride was found for me in Baltimore, the sister of Allan McLane, and a
beauty.

"I began my married life with the best intentions; my poor mistress
herself advised me to turn to my wife, and become a true man. She told
me so with her heart breaking. In heaven, where she dwells with my poor
child, she hears me now, and knows I speak the truth!"

Judge Custis broke down again, and leaned his convulsed head on
Clayton's tender breast, whose own widower's grief gushed forth
responsively.

"Children were born in Teackle Hall; my servitude was becoming adjusted
to me, when Allan McLane, in his love of vindictiveness and of low,
formal respectability, conceived that my poor quadroon required some
chastisement for having been his sister's rival, and he set a trap to
buy her. I was forced to have her bought, to protect her, and to bring
her to my care again, and thus our passion was revived, and, giving
birth to Virgie, she died. Reared together, and unconscious of their
kindred, those daughters loved each other as dearly as when, in heaven,
they shall hide in the radiance of each other, and cover my sins with
their angelic wings."

"Rise up, old friend!" cried Clayton; "your transgressions are, at
least, washed out in sincere tears. Hear the birds all around us loving
and condoning, and filling the air with praise. Come out!"

As they stepped upon Georgetown Square they saw John Randel, Jr.,
leading a party of surveyors to locate the opposition railroad to
Meshach Milburn's. These and many others were pressing towards the
whipping-post and pillory, in the rear of the court-house, where stood,
exposed by the sheriff, the cleanly mulatto woman who had entertained
Virgie in Snow Hill the first night of her flight.

"This free woman, Priscilla Hudson," cried the sheriff, "is to stand one
hour in the pillory for the crime of lending her pass to a slave. Thirty
lashes she was sentenced to, the Governor has graciously taken off. She
is to be sold, out of the state, at the end of one hour, for the term of
her natural life, to the highest bidder."

The poor woman stood there, bare armed and bare almost to the bosom,
delicate and lovely to see, and the mother of free children, her
clothing having been partly removed before the pardon of the stripes was
announced to her.

Her head and arms were thrust through the holes in one leaf of the
pillory, and thus, thrown forward, her modesty was exposed to the wanton
gaze of the crowd, while, on the other side of the same elevated
platform, pilloried in like manner, was a female chicken-thief,
impudent, indifferent, and chewing tobacco, and spitting it out upon the
pillory floor.

As Clayton and Custis saw this scene on their way to the tavern, an egg,
thrown from a window of the debtor's jail, whether meant for Mrs. Hudson
or not, struck her in the face, and its corrupt contents streamed down
her white and shivering breast.

"Shame! shame!" cried the people, as they saw the woman cry, and, gazing
up to the jail window, another female face appearing there, turned
their cries to curses:

"Hang her! hang her!"

For the last time in life Patty Cannon's bold and comely face swelled
again with passionate blood to the roots of the glossy black hair, and
the few who saw her rich, dark eyes, inflamed with anger, say their
pupils were dilated like the wild-cat's. She was gone in a moment, and
the sheriff had wiped Mrs. Hudson's face and breast with a handkerchief
passed up by a colored woman.

Two men were now actively going around the crowd, hat in hand,
soliciting contributions to buy the woman, the first a blind man, whose
eyes were bandaged, and a white man led him, calling loudly:

"The abolitionists have raised three hundred dollars to buy this woman's
freedom. We want a hundred more, as some mean people may bid her up
high. This man, her husband, stole her pass, to slip a friend away. We
couldn't git the evidence in, but it's God's truth, gentlemen! The
woman's nursed my wife, an' done a heap of good; and she come here, of
her own free will, out of Maryland, to nurse the Chancellor."

Little money was raised in that crowd, since there was little to give,
and, addressing the two distinguished strangers, Sorden, the crier,
exclaimed:

"What, gentlemen, will you let the Hunn brothers and Tommy Garrett and
the Motts give three hundred dollars for a woman they never saw, and we,
who see her always doing good, give nothing?"

"Pity! pity!" sobbed the blind man. "I'm burned so bad nobody will buy
_me_, but I stole her pass to help a slave off that I fell in love
with."

Judge Custis left Clayton's side, and waited till the hour in the
pillory was done, and, after a fierce contest, saw Sorden come off
victorious at the sale, though it took every dollar the Judge could
raise in Georgetown on his private credit.

"What is the name of the girl you gave her pass to?" asked the Judge of
the blind mulatto.

"Virgie, marster."

"My heart told me so," exclaimed the Judge. "Your crime has been
punished enough. I will send you to your wife."[15]

       *       *       *       *       *

John Randel, Jr., observed, that evening:

"Devil Jim Clark has taken example from Patty Cannon, and squared the
circle."

"Not dead?" asked Clayton.

"Yes, dead and buried. He was cleaning up his contract on the canal, and
mistook the white Irish laborers there for kidnapped niggers. They set
on him, and beat him and scared him together, so that he never
recovered. They say he was 'converted' on his death-bed; or, as the
saying is, 'he died triumphantly;' but the darkeys report that the devil
came straight down with a chariot and drove him off."

"That fellow, Whitecar, I'm reserving," said Clayton, "to punish when I
can use him to sustain an argument in favor of admitting negro testimony
in kidnapping cases.[16] Without that admission, these kidnappers cannot
be convicted: even Patty Cannon here may escape us, though she has
killed white men."

Sorden spoke up, he being of the party:

"A disease called leprosy has broke out in ole Derrick Molleston's
cabin; Sam Ogg has got it, too, and they say he fetched it up from the
breakwater. Nobody will go near them. Black Dave is dead; he said he
killed a man at Prencess Anne: the young wife of Levin Dennis, who
turns out to be a lady, stayed and prayed with him to the last, and he
went off humble and happy. But, my skin! another kidnapper has rented
Johnson's tavern a'ready."

"The railroad will clear all these evils out," exclaimed Randel. "I've
put it into poetry," and he began to recite:

  "To dark Naswaddox forest fled
     The murderer from the main,
  And with the otter laid his head
     Amid the swamp and cane:
  'Here nothing can pursue my ear,
     From travelled paths astray;
  I shall forget, from year to year,
     The world beyond the bay!'

  "The hunted man one morning heard
     A whistle near and strong,
  And in the night a fiery light
     The thickets flashed among:
  The demon of the engine rushed
     Along on blazing beams--
  The hound the murderer had flushed,
     The outlaw's path was Steam's!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The cry of hate from the crowd around the whipping-post, as it awoke
Patty Cannon's last anger, also determined her last crime.

Fear was relative in her: she had neither the fear of men nor of shame,
and only of death as it involved a hereafter. Whether that hereafter was
a latent conviction in her mind, or the vivid admonition of guilt and
dead men's eyes peering over her dreams and into the silent, lonely
watches of haunted midnights, who shall tell? There is no analysis of a
native and ancient depravity: it was sown in the marrow, it strengthens
in the bone, and, with a cunning, daring self-assertion, gambles upon
the faith of living and of dying not. Its very fears push it onward in
crime, and make it cruelly tantalize its own fate, as cowards lean over
graveyard walls, and shout, with an inner trembling, "Come forth--I dare
you!"

So had this woman, conscious of her deserts, bullied eternal justice
through its long postponements, never doubting, while ever vexing, the
Spirit of God, until the number of her crimes crowded the tablet of her
memory, and out of the hideous gulf of her past life gazed faces without
names and deeds without memoranda; a procession the longer that
strangers were in it, and, shrinking from her, yet pressing on,
exclaimed her name or only shrieked "'Tis she!" as if her name was
nothing to her curse.

Sleeping in her chains, there were children's eyes watching her from
far-off corners, as if to say, "Give us the whole life we would have
lived but for you!"

As her swollen limbs festered to the irons, there were babies' cries
floating in the air, that seemed to draw near her breasts, as if for
food, and suddenly convulse there in screams of pain, and move away with
the sounds of suffocation she had heard as they expired.

All night there were callers on her, and whom they were no one could
tell; but the jailer's family saw her lips moving and her eyes consult
the air, as if she was faintly trying bravado upon certain
business-speaking ghosts who had come with bills long overdue and
demanded payment, and went out only to come again and again.

Some of these mystic visitors she would jeer at and defy, and stamp her
feet, as if they had no rights in equity against her soul, having been
on vicious errands when they met their ends, and bankrupts in the court
of pity; but suddenly a helpless something would appear, and paralyze
her with its little wail, like a babeless mother or a motherless babe,
and, with her forehead wet with sweat of agony, she would affect to
chuckle, and would whisper, "Nothin' but niggers! nothin' more!"

Day brought her some relief, but also other cares, and of these the
chief was the care of money. She had been a spendthrift all her life,
and robbed mankind of life and liberty to enjoy the selfish dissipation
of spending their blood-money; and what had she bought with it? Nothing,
nothing. To spend it, only, she had wrecked her sex and her soul; to
spend it for such trifles as children want--candy and common ornaments,
a dance and a treat, a gift for some boor or forester or even negro she
was misleading, or to establish a silly reputation for generosity:
generous at the expense of human happiness, and of robbing people of
liberty and life, merely for spending-money!

Now she had none to appease the all-devouring greeds of habit
intensified by real necessity: no money to buy dainties or even liquor;
no money to spend upon the jailer's family and keep the reputation of
kindness alive; no money for decent apparel to appear in court; none to
corrupt the law or to hire witnesses and attorneys.

The two demons she had created alternately seized the day and the night:
the demon of money plagued her all day, the demon of murder pursued her
all night.

Every morning she had insatiate wants; all night she had remorseless
visitors; and, close before, the gallows filled the view, with the Devil
tying the noose.

That Devil she plainly saw, so busy on the gallows, fitting his ropes
and shrouds and long death-caps, and he evaded her, as if he had no
commerce with her now.

He was a cool and wistful man, perfectly happy in the prospect of
getting her, and not anxious about it, so sure was he of her soon and
complete possession.

He was always out in the jail-yard when she looked there, fixing his
ropes, sliding the nooses, examining the gallows, like a conscientious
carpenter; and in his complacent smile was an awful terror that froze
her dumb: he seemed so impersonal, so joyous, so industrious, as if he
had waited for her like a long creditor, and compounded the interest on
her sins till the infernal sum made him a millionaire in torments.

A Devil it was, real as a man--a slavemaster to whose quiet love of
cruelty eternal death was not enough; a man whose unscarred age, old as
the rising sun, still came and went in immortal youthfulness and
satisfaction, but for the nonce forgetting other debtors in the grip he
had on her, as his majestic expiation for his own shortcomings.

He looked like a storekeeper, a man of accounts, a cosmopolitan
kidnapper, who knew a good article and had it now. She was so terrified
that she wanted to cry to him, and see if he would not remit that
business method and become more human, and sauce her back.

But no; the longer she watched, the less he looked towards her, though
she knew his smile meant no one else. To hang upon his cord was very
little; to go with him after it was stretched, down the burning grates
of hell, and see him all so cool and busy in her misery, was the gnawing
vulture at her heart.

In vain she tried to throw responsibility for her sins upon a vague,
false parentage and fatherhood, and say that she was bred to robbery and
vice; a something in her heart responded: "No, you had beauty and health
and chaste lovers whom you rejected or tempted, and a mind that was ever
clear and knew right from wrong. Conscience never gave you up, though
drenched in innocent blood. The often-murdered monitor revived and cried
aloud like the striking of a clock, but never was obeyed!"

Thus haunted, deserted, peeped in upon from the hereafter, racked with
vain needs, her outlets closed to every escape or subterfuge, revenge
itself dead, and disease assisting conscience to banish sleep, the
wretched woman crawled to her window one day and saw the helpless
effigy of her sex exposed there for doing an act of humanity; and
instantly an instinct she immediately obeyed exacted from her one last
familiar, heartless deed, to show the crowd that even she, Patty Cannon
the murderess, had "no respect for a nigger."

That doctrine long survived her, though she found it old when she came
among them.

She aimed an egg at the breast of her sex, and, with a barefaced grin,
she saw it strike and burst. The next moment the crowd had recognized
and defied her.

In the exasperation of their shout, and of being no longer praised even
for insulting a negro, a convulsion of desperate rage overcame the
murderess.

Too helpless to retort in any other way, yet in uncontrollable
recklessness, she exclaimed, "They never shall see me hang, then!" and
swallowed the arsenic she had concealed in her bosom.

That night she died in awful torments.

       *       *       *       *       *

The venerable Chancellor, lying in the hotel near the whipping-post
corner, watched by the released Mrs. Hudson, who must to-morrow depart
from the state forever, heard that night voices on the square, saying:

"Patty Cannon's dead. They say she's took poison."

A mighty pain seized the Chancellor's heart, and the loud groans he made
called a stranger into the room.

"Is that dreadful woman dead?" sighed the Chancellor.

"Yes; she will never plague Delaware again, marster."

"God be thanked!" the old man groaned. "Justice and murder are kin no
more."

They said he died that instant of heart disease.




CHAPTER XLV.

THE JUDGE REMARRIED.


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, _Anna_polis, 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.[17]

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.




CHAPTER XLVI.

THE CURSE OF THE HAT.


As the spring burst upon Princess Anne in cherry blossoms and dogwood
flowers, in herring and shad weighting the river seines, and broods of
young chickens and peach-trees pullulating, and as the time of fruit and
corn and early cantaloupe followed, the life in human veins also
unfolded in infant fruit, and Vesta became a mother.

The forest and the court had harmonized in the offspring, and the young
boy took the name of Custis Milburn.

Healthy and comely, as if Society had made the match for Nature, the
infant flourished without a day's ailing, and grew upon its parents'
eyes like a miracle, having the symmetry and loveliness of the mother,
and the bold, challenging countenance of the father; and to Meshach it
brought the satisfaction of an improved posterity, and an heir to his
success; to Vesta, compensation for the loss of worldly society.

She found more joy in Teackle Hall, with this wondrous product of her
sacrifice and pain, than with the admiration of all the good families in
Maryland; and a sense of warmth and gratitude sprang to her conscience
towards the father of this matchless gift.

"I have not given him my whole loyalty," she reflected, with exacting
piety; "I have let trifles stand before my vows."

Accordingly, when Milburn, conscience-stricken, and accusing himself of
hard conditions in exacting a marriage without love, came one day, with
all the magnanimity of a new parent, before his wife to make some
restitution, she surprised him by arising and kissing him.

"Sir, I have been very proud and stubborn. Do forgive me!"

He pressed her to his breast, while his tears ran over her face.

"Honey," he said at length, "what a mockery my crime to you has been--to
think that you could ever love me! No, I will give you freedom. Dear as
your captivity is to me, your cage shall open and you shall fly."

Vesta stepped back at these strange words and waited for him to explain.
He continued:

"I will send you to Italy with our child. Your father shall go, too, if
you desire. Go from me and these unloved conditions, this hateful
bondage and constraint"--his tears flowed fast again, but he let them
fall ungrudged,--"find in your music and your noble mind forgetfulness
of this unworthy marriage. I can live in the recollection of the
blessing you have been to me."

"What!" said Vesta; "do you command me to leave you?"

"Yes. Let it be that. I know how conscientious you are, my darling, but
it is your duty to go. A hard struggle is before me: I am deeply
embarked in an untried business. Now I can spare the money. Go and find
happiness in a happier land."

She went to him again and put her arms around him.

"Leave you?" she said. "What have I done to be driven away? How could I
reconcile myself to let you live alone? 'For better or for worse,' I
said. God has made it better and better every day."

He held her head between his palms and looked into her eyes, to see if
she spoke from the heart.

"Husband," she whispered, "I love you."

       *       *       *       *       *

The minds of both husband and wife, after this reconcilement, turned to
the disturbing hat as the subject of their estrangement hitherto.

Said Milburn to himself: "What a sinner I have been to distress that
poor child with my miserable hat! At the first opportunity she gives me,
I will lay it aside forever."

Said Vesta to her father and his bride: "What a wicked heart I have
kept, to oppose my husband in such a little thing as his good old
hat--the badge of his reverence to his family and of his bravery to an
impertinent age. I have let it discolor my married life and all the
sunshine. But my baby has melted my obdurate heart. Come, unite with me,
and let us show him that everything he wears we will adopt proudly."

Therefore, when Milburn next went out, his wife came with a beaming face
and elastic step and put on his head his steeple hat. He looked at her
grimly, but she stopped his protest with a kiss.

He thought to introduce the subject to Judge Custis, but that fond
bridegroom broke in with:

"Milburn, you're a game fellow. It was impudent in me to say one word
about your hat. I'll get one like it myself if I can find one. Tut, tut,
man! It becomes you. Say no more about it."

Milburn undertook to make the explanation to his niece, but before he
could well begin she cried:

"Uncle Meshach, Aunt Vesta is just in love with your hat! She won't hear
of your wearing any other. We're all going to stand by it, uncle."

A man chooses his own verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in
the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment,
is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the
trap of his own temperament.

So Meshach Milburn never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself
from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor
who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear,
the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his
tile--his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had
pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man
with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of his
vulgarity whenever he takes a human hand.

To have put on any other hat would have subjected him to new hoots and
comments, and made himself publicly smile at his own folly; he must have
climbed as high as the pillory to explain the change and make apology;
the society he had faced in defiance seemed all at once united to refuse
him a _status_ without his Entailed Hat, and it would have taken the
courage of throwing off a life-long _alias_ and living under a forgotten
name, to appear in Princess Anne in a new, contemporary head-dress.

Milburn saw that he must wear his old hat for life; he bent under the
servitude, and was alone the victim of it now.




CHAPTER XLVII.

FAILURE AND RESTITUTION.


The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.

The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an
embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway
company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of
notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the
railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper's Ferry,
as Vesta's boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The
venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of
memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended
over Patty Cannon's old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner
rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of
abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore,
where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for
President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob
Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later,
chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue the
murderer.

By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had
become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or
Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled,
and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,--now a man in
growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,--loaded his gun and started for
Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off
the ferry scow.

"Are you going to give me back that ten dollars, you old scoundrel?"
shouted O'Day.

"Stand back! stand back!" answered long Jacob; "the quotient was
correct; the _lex loci_ and the _lex terræ_ were argued. The _lex
talionis_--"

"Take it!" cried the villain, adroitly firing his shot-gun into the
merchant's breast, so as not to injure his humaner beast.

Jacob Cannon staggered to the fence at the head of the wharf, and caught
there a moment, and fell dead.

"You scoundrel," screamed Isaac Cannon from the window, "to kill my
brother, my executive comfort."

"Yes," answered O'Day, "and I'll give the other barrel to you!"

As Isaac Cannon barricaded himself in, Owen O'Day collected his effects
without hurry, and betook himself to the wilds of Missouri.

Cannon's Ferry fell into decay when the railroad at Seaford carried off
its trading importance, but there are yet to be seen the never tenanted
mansion of the disappointed bridegroom, and the gravestones which show
how Jacob's fate frightened Isaac Cannon to a speedy tomb.

In the meantime, John M. Clayton had made use of the fears of Calhoun
and his nullifiers, who were menaced with the penalties of treason by
the president, to pass a great protective tariff bill by their aid, thus
establishing the manufactures in the same period with the railways.

This triumph in the senate left him free to conduct the suit of Randel
against the Canal Company, which occupied as many years as the railroad
enterprise of Meshach Milburn.

The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon
to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a
trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters
and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's
pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his
adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous
of him, had yet to decide in his favor.

Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old
Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages
claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a
great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the
newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French
spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems--something that would
be going on at the final end of the world.

"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy!
he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the
New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits
with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green
battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern
passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.

John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man
all his life.

He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was
nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature
for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages;
yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the
outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle
of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned
its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his
projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon
engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born
for the law.

In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted
Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to
that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named
Sorden (_not_ the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for
kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown
after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the
obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock
in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending
Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it
had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance
year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home
and hustled in front by overwhelming opposition.

Judge Custis took the field for Congress on the railroad issue, and was
elected, through the Forest vote, and his wife went through a Washington
season with as much dignity as enjoyment, few suspecting that she was
not the Judge's social equal.

The ancestral hat defied all worldly hostility, but became the iron
helmet to bend its wearer's back. He prayed in secret for some pitying
angel to break the spell that bound him to it, but none conceived that
he would let it go.

His boy grew strong, and took his father's dress to be a matter of
course; his wife pressed upon him the nauseous ornament he had so long
affected; a wide conspiracy seemed to have been formed to drive his head
into that hereditary wigwam, and he could not escape it.

Even Grandmother Tilghman, who now was an inmate of Teackle Hall, in
William's absence of years, forgot all about the queer hat, and rejoiced
to herself that "Bill" had not married "that political girl."

Milburn had maintained his financial solvency by turns and sorties that
even his enemies admired, but a railroad built along one man's spine and
terminated by a steeple depot on his head must wear out the unrelieved
individual at last.

The banks in Baltimore began to break; fierce riots ensued; the state
debt had mounted up, through aid to public works, to fifteen million
dollars; the Eastern Shore Railroad obtained, too late, the vote of the
subsidy expected, and the state treasurer could not find funds to pay
it.

The gazettes announced the failure of Meshach Milburn, Esq., of the
Eastern Shore.

Without an instant's hesitation, Vesta surrendered her own property, and
she and Rhoda Custis opened a select school in a part of Teackle Hall,
and let the remainder for residences.

"Why do you make this sacrifice?" asked her husband; "nobody expected
it."

"They may say we were married to protect my parents," Vesta answered,
"but not that it was to secure myself. My boy shall have a clear name."

His failure ended the active life of Meshach Milburn; too considerate of
his family to renew his former low endeavors, he became a clerk in the
county offices, through Judge Custis's influence, and wore his hat to
stipendiary labor with the regularity, but not the rebellious instincts,
of old days, becoming, instead, the victim of a certain religious trance
or apathy, which deepened with time.

Vesta saw that Milburn's misfortune extinguished the last remnant of
animosity in her father's mind, and the two men went about together,
like two old boys who had both been prisoners of war, and were cured of
ambition.

Milburn resumed his forest walks and bird-tamings, all traces of
ambition left his countenance, and he was as dead to business things as
if he had never risen above his forest origin.

He often talked of William Tilghman, and seemed to wish to see him,
though for no apparent purpose.

The Asiatic cholera, having begun to make annual visits to the United
States, singled out, one day, the wearer of the obsolete hat, and put to
the sternest test of affection and humanity the household at Teackle
Hall.

Whether from the respect his steady purposes had given them, or the
natural devotion in a sequestered society, no soul left his side.

But it brought the final visitation of poverty upon Vesta. Her school
was broken up in a day. She dismissed it herself, and calmly sat by her
husband's bed, to soothe his dying weakness, and await the providence of
God.

He rapidly passed through the stages of cramp and collapse, a nearly
perished pulse, and the cadaverous look of one already dead, yet his
intellect by the law of the disease, lived unimpaired.

"The stream cannot rise above the fountain," he spoke, huskily; "all we
can get from life is love. My darling, you have showered it on me, and
been thirsty all your days."

"I have been happy in my duty," Vesta said; "you have been kind to me
always. We have nothing to regret."

He wandered a little, though he looked at her, and seemed thinking of
his mother.

"Where can we go?" he muttered, pitifully; "I burned the dear old hut
down. It would have been a roof for my boy."

His chin trembled, as if he were about to cry, and sighed:

"Fader an' mammy's quarrelled; the mocking-bird won't sing. Ride for the
doctor! ride hard! Oh! oh! too late, little chillen! They'se both
dead!"

He returned to perfect knowledge in a moment, and fixed his eyes on
Vesta, saying,

"I leave you poor. I tried hard. Perhaps--"

His eye was here arrested by some conflict at the door, where Aunt
Hominy, notwithstanding her imperfect wits, was striving to keep guard.

"De debbil's measurin' him in! Measurin' him in at las'!" the old woman
said; "Miss Vessy's 'mos' free!"

"Admit me!" spoke a clear, familiar voice, "I must see him. Mr. Clayton
has won the lawsuit, and two hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars
damages! Cousin Meshach is rich again."

"That friendly voice," spoke Meshach, with a happy light in his eyes;
"oh, I wanted to hear it again!"

Yet he put his hand up with all his little strength to push away the
intruder, who would have kissed him, and whispered,

"No. The cholera!"

"It's the bishop, uncle!" cried Mrs. Custis; "Bishop Tilghman, from the
West."

"Don't I know him," Milburn whispered, with sinking voice and powers.
"Honest man! Bishop of our church! Bishop in the free West! God bless
him!"

He was lost again, as if he had fainted, for some time, and, all
kneeling, the young bishop made a prayer.

When they arose Milburn seemed speechless, yet he tried to raise his
hand, and, Vesta coming to his aid, his long, lean fingers closed around
hers, and he signalled to William Tilghman with his eyes.

The bishop came near, and, by a painful effort, Milburn put his wife's
hand in her cousin's. His lips framed a word without a sound:

"_Restitution._"

"Glory to God!" suddenly exclaimed Grandmother Tilghman, who seemed to
see without sight all that was going on.

"I knew it would be so, if both would wait," sighed Rhoda to her
husband, through her tears.

There was still something on Milburn's mind, though he was unable to
explain it. Every attempt was made to interpret his want, but in vain,
till Aunt Hominy broke the silence by mumbling:

"He want dat debbil's hat!"

Vesta saw her husband's eyes twinkle as if he had heard the word, and it
gave her a thought. She left the room, and returned with her boy, a fine
young fellow, obedient to her wish. In his hand was his father's hat.

"What will you do if papa leaves us, Custis?" Vesta spoke, loudly, so
that the dying man could hear.

"I will wear my forefather's hat, papa!" said the child.

The dying man drooped his eyes, as if to say "No," and looked fervently
at his son and wearily at the old headpiece.

Vesta placed it on his pillow, and waited to know his next wish.

He made a sign, which they interpreted to mean,

"Lift me!"

He was lifted up, livid as the dead, and raised his eyes towards his
forehead.

His wife set the Entailed Hat upon his temples.

"Bury it!" he said, in a distinct whisper, and passed away.


THE END.


      *       *       *       *       *


FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the original manuscript a circumstantial story, as taken from
Milburn's lips, was preserved. The "Tales of a Hat" may be separately
published.

[2] "Slavery, in the State of Delaware, never had any _constitutional_
recognition. It existed in the colonial period by custom, as over the
whole country, but subject to be regulated or abolished by simple
legislative enactment. Very early the State of Delaware undertook its
regulation, with the view of securing the personal and individual rights
of the persons so held in bondage, and to prevent the increase by
importation. In 1787 the export of Delaware slaves was forbidden to the
Carolinas, Georgia, and the West Indies, and two years later the
prohibition was extended to Maryland and Virginia, and it never was
repealed, and in 1793 the first penalties were enacted against
kidnappers."--_Letter of Hon. N. B. Smithers to the Author._

[3] The skull of Ebenezer Johnson can be seen at Fowler & Wells' Museum,
New York, with the bullet-hole through it. There, also, are the skulls
of Patty and Betty Cannon.

[4] At this point the second episode, telling the descent of the
Entailed Hat from Raleigh to Anne Hutchinson, is omitted, to shorten the
book.

[5] Frederick Douglass, afterwards Marshal of the District of Columbia,
was at this time a slave boy twelve years old, living about twenty miles
from the scene of this conversation.

[6] The Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia occurred a year or
thereabout later than this time.

[7] The origin of Patty Cannon is in doubt; a pamphlet published near
her time gives it as above, with strong circumstantial embellishments,
yet there are neighbors who say she was of Delaware and Maryland
stock--a Baker and a Moore. The weight of tradition is the other way.

[8] This incident is fully related in "Niles's Register" of April 25,
1829 (No. 919 of the full series), page 144, where also is a
contemporary account of Patty Cannon's arrest. The date of the exposure
in this story is transposed from April to October. She was to have been
tried in October, but died in May, about six weeks after her arrest.

[9] Thomas Hollyday Hicks, the Union Governor of Maryland in 1861, was
at the date of these events member elect to the Legislature from the
neighborhood of Patty Cannon's operations, and was thirty-one years old.
Lanman's "Dictionary of Congress" says: "He worked on his father's farm
when a boy, and served as constable and sheriff of his county."

[10] See "Niles's Register," 1826.

[11] See "Niles's Register," 1820, for two long accounts of this crime,
saying, "One of them, Perry Hutton, a native of Delaware, formerly a
well-known stage-driver, who lately broke jail at Richmond, where he had
been committed for kidnapping." See, also, "Scharf's Baltimore
Chronicles," pp. 398, 399.

[12] "Niles's Register," 1823.

[13] Spanish proverb: "Little beard, little shame."

[14] This case is related in the "Life of Benjamin Lundy."

[15] A case actually like this, happening twenty-five years later, was
related to me by Judge George P. Fisher, of Dover.

[16] See the case of Whitecar in the Delaware reports.

[17] I take the following note from the _New York Tribune_ of December,
1882: "The town of Richmond, Ind., is said to be the centre of Quakerdom
in this country, and has five meetings in the two creeds of Fox and
Hicks, and the Earlham Quaker College. There I saw the large,
fur-covered white hats, a few of which are still left, which were
imported into Indiana by the North Carolina Quakers from 'Beard's Hatter
Shop,' an extinct locality in the North State, where the Quakers were
prolific, and they all ordered these marvellous hats, which are said to
be literally _entailed_, being incapable of wearing out, and as good for
the grandson as for the pioneer. They are made of beaver-skin or its
imitation in some other fur."


       *       *       *       *       *


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End of Project Gutenberg's The Entailed Hat, by George Alfred Townsend