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, andmade 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 beginningof 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 byelms, 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 oftencoughed 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."
"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, buthesays that he's in a bad business. I hope he ain't dead."
"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I'veheard 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 calledthe 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 someof 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."
"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 mistookWonnell'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,waron 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 morepained for her husband than herself, to feel that hisoutrédress 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 eccentricparvenu; 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 lettersreceived 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 Phœbus 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 Phœbus 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 ofrecent 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 youcould be just to James Phœbus, 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 Phœbus 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 Phœbus; 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 specialeffort, "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 theIda, 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.