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?"