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 _outre_ 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.