CHAPTER VII.
JACK-O'-LANTERN IRON.
Mrs. Custis was in no situation to give annoyance for that day, as asick-headache seized her and she kept her room. Infirm of will, purelysocial in her marriage relations, and never aiming higher thanrespectability, she missed the coarse mark of her husband who, with allhis moral defections, probably was her moral equal, his vital standardhigher, his tone a genial hypocrisy, and at bottom he was a democrat.
Mrs. Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, boundedby the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world,particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the oldVenetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly withthe Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South. Amiable,social, afraid of new ideas, frugal of money; if hospitable at thetable, with a certain spiritedness that is seldom intellectual, but abeauty that powerfully attracts, till, by the limited sympathies beneathit, the husband from the outer world discerns how hopelessly slavery andcaste sink into an old shipping society, the Baltimore that ruled theChesapeake had no more perfected product than Mrs. Custis.
Her modesty and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believedthat marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying herchildren was the only innovation to be permitted. Certainaccomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must becomemasculine in prosecution; a professional woman she shrank from as froman infidel or an abolitionist; reading was meritorious up to an orthodoxpoint, but a passion for new books was dangerous, probably irreligious.To lose one's money was a crime; to lose another's money the unforgivensin, because that was Baltimore public opinion, which she thought wasthe only opinion entitled to consideration. The old Scotch and Irishmerchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusableby success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standardof society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up thebog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was nobetter than a Jacobin.
On the Eastern Shore, where society was formed before Glasgow andBelfast had colonized upon the Chesapeake with their precise formulas oflife, a gentler benevolence rose and descended upon the ground everyday, like the evaporations of those prolific seas which manure the thinsoil unfailingly. Religion and benevolence were depositions rather thandogmas there; moderate poverty was the not unwelcome expectation, wealtha subject of apprehensive scruples, kindness the law, pride theexception, and grinding avarice, like Meshach Milburn's, was the mark ofthe devil entering into the neighbor and the fellow-man.
Judge Custis was representative of his neighbors except in his Virginiavoluptuousness; his neighbors were neither prudes nor hypocrites, and herespected them more than the arrogant race in the old land of Accomacand in the Virginia peninsulas, whose traits he had almost lost.Sometimes it seemed to him that the last of the cavalier stock was hisdaughter, Vesta. From him it had nearly departed, and his sense of moralshortcomings expanded his heart and made him tenderly pious to his kind,if not to God. He admired new-comers, new business modes, and Northernintruders and ideas, feeling that perhaps the last evidence of hisaristocracy from nature was a chivalric resignation. The pine-trees weresaying to him: "Ye shall go like the Indians, but be not inhospitable toyour successors, and leave them your benediction, that the great bay andits rivers may be splendid with ships and men, though ye are perishedforever." A perception of the energy of his countrymen, and a pride init, without any mean reservation, though it might involve his personalhumiliation, was Judge Custis's only remaining claim to heaven'smagnanimity. Still, rich in human nature, he was beloved by his daughterwith all her soul.
He awoke long after noon, in body refreshed, and a glass of milk and aplover broiled on toast were ready for him to eat, with some sprigs ofnew celery from the garden to feed his nerves. He made this small mealsilently, and Vesta said, as the tray was removed:
"Now, papa, before we leave this room, you are to tell me the wholeinjury you have suffered, and what all of us can do to assist you; forif you had succeeded the reward would have been ours, and we must dividethe pains of your misfortune with you without any regret. Courage, papa!and let me understand it."
The Judge feebly looked at Vesta, then searched his mind with his eyesdowncast, and finally spoke:
"My child, I am the victim of good intentions and self-enjoyment. I amless than a scoundrel and worse than a fool. I am a fraud, and you mustbe made to see it, for I fear you have been proud of me."
"Oh, father, I have!" said Vesta, with an instant's convulsion. "Youwere my God."
"Let us throw away idolatry, my darling. It is the first of all thesins. How loud speaks the first commandment to us this moment: 'Thoushalt have no other gods before me'?"
"I have broken it," sobbed Vesta, "I loved you more than my Creator."
"Vesta," spoke the Judge, "you are the only thing of value in all myhouse. The work of nature in you is all that survives the long edificeof our pride. The treasure of your beauty and love still makes me richto thieves, who lie in ambush all around us. We are in danger, we arepursued. O God! pity, pity the pure in heart!"
As the Judge, under his strong earnestness, so rare in him of late,threw wide his arms, and raised his brow in agony, Vesta felt heridolatry come back. He was so grand, standing there in his unaffectedpain and helplessness, that he seemed to her some manly Prometheus, whohad worked with fire and iron, to the exasperation of the jealous gods.Admiration dried her tears, and she forgot her father's references toherself.
"What is iron?" she asked. "Tell me why you wanted to make iron! If Ican enter into your mind and sympathize with the hopes you have had, itwill lift my soul from the ground. Papa, I should have asked for thislesson long ago."
The Judge strode up and down till she repeated the question, and hadbrought him to his seat. He collected his thoughts, and resumed hisworldly tone as he proceeded, with his old cavalier volatility, to tellthe tale of iron.
"I have duplicated loans," he said at last, "on the same properties,incurring, I fear, a stigma upon my family and character; as well as theruin of our fortune."
Vesta arose with pale lips and a sinking heart.
"Oh, father," she whispered, in a frightened tone, "who knows thisterrible secret!"
"Only one man," said the Judge, cowering down to the carpet, with hiscourage and volatility immediately gone, "old Meshach Milburn knows itall! He has purchased the duplicate notes of protest, and holds themwith his own. He has me in his power, and hates me. He will expose me,unless I submit to an awful condition."
"What is it, father?"
The Judge looked up in terror, and, meeting Vesta's pale but steadygaze, hid his face and groaned:
"Oh! it is too disgraceful to tell. It will break your mother's heart."
"Tell me at once!" exclaimed Vesta, in a low and hollow tone. "Whatfurther disgrace can this monster inflict upon us than to expose ourdishonor? Can he kill us more than that?"
"I know not how to tell you, Vessy. Spare me, my darling! My face I hidefor shame."
There was a pause, while Vesta, with her mind expanded to touch everypoint of suggestion, stood looking down at her father, yet hardly seeinghim. He did not move.
Vesta stooped and raised her father's face to find some solution of hismysterious evasion. He shut his eyes as if she burned him with herwondering look.
"Papa, look at me this instant! You shall not be a coward to me."
He broke from her hands and retreated to a window, looking at her, butwith a timorous countenance.
"I wish you to go this moment and find your creditor, Mr. Milburn, andbring him to me. You must obey me, sir!"
The father raised his hands as if to protest, but before he could speaka shadow fell upon the window, and the figure of a small, swarthy mancovered with a steeple-crowned hat advanced up the front steps.
"Saviour, have mercy!" murmured Judge Custis, "the wolf is at the door."
Vesta
took her father in her arms, and kissed him once assuringly.
"Papa, go send a servant to open the door. Have Mr. Milburn shown intothis room to await me. Do you go and engage my mother affectionately,and both of you remain in your chamber till I am ready to call you."
The proximity of the dreadful creditor had almost paralyzed JudgeCustis, and he glided out like a ghost.