The Entailed Hat Part 24

"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 a.s.sailant 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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 flas.h.i.+ng. "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 wors.h.i.+p, 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 superst.i.tion."

"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 fas.h.i.+on and civilization are Asiatic in their despotism. Think of the taxes we pay to fas.h.i.+on 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 d.u.c.h.ess d'Angouleme 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, t.i.tles, great landed property, and only omitted to abolish fas.h.i.+on, 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."

"G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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."