"This moment is a great one," continued Milburn, firmly, "for I feel that it is to terminate my visions of happiness, and of kindness as well. You have expressed yourself so indignantly, that I see no thought of me has ever lodged in your mind. Why should it have ever done so?

Though I almost dreamed it had, because you filled my life so many years with your rich image, I thought you might have felt me, like an apparition, stealing around this dwelling often in the dark and rain, content with the ray of light your window threw upon the deserted street. Now I see that I was a weak dunce, whose pa.s.sion nature lent no nerve of hers to convey even to your notice. Better for me that I had hugged the debasing reality of my gold, and lost my eyes to everything but its comfort!"

He looked towards the door. Vesta sat down in the fairy rocker, and detained him.

"You have told me the feeling you think you had, Mr. Milburn. Poor as we Custises are now, it will not do to be proud. How did you ever think that feeling could be returned by me? My youth, my connections, everything, would forbid me, without haughtiness, to see a suitor in you. Then, you took no means to turn my attention towards you. You could have been neighborly, had you desired. You did not even wear the commonest emblems of a lover--"

She paused. Milburn said to himself:

"Ah! that accursed Hat."

The interruption ruffled his temper:

"I have had reasons, also proud, Miss Custis, to be consistent with my perpetual self here. I will put the substantial merits of my case to you, since I see that I am not likely to make myself otherwise attractive. This house is already mine. The law will, in a few weeks, put me in possession of your father's entire property. I shall change outward circ.u.mstances with him in Princess Anne. He is too old to adopt my sacrifices, and recover his situation; he may find some shifting refuge with his sons and daughters, but, even if his spirit could brook that dependence, it would be very unnecessary, when, by marrying his creditor, you can retain everything he now has to make his family respectable. I offer you his estate as your marriage portion!"

He took up from the table the notes her father had negotiated, and laid them in her lap.

Vesta sat rocking slowly, and deeply agitated. She had in her mouth the comfort and honor of her parents, which she could confer in a single word. It was a responsibility so mighty that it made her tremble.

"Oh! what shall I say?" she thought. "It will be a sin to say 'Yes.' To say 'No' would be a crime."

"You shall retain every feature of your home--your servants, your mother, and her undiminished portion; your liberty in the fullest sense.

I will contribute to send your father to the legislature or to congress, to sustain his pride, and keep him well occupied. The Furnace he may appear to have sold to me, and I will accept the unpopularity of closing it. I ask only to serve you, and inhabit your daily life, like one of these negroes you are kind to, and if I am ever harsh to you, Miss Vesta, I swear to surrender you to your family, and depart forever."

Vesta shook her head.

"There is no separation but one," she said, "when Heaven has been called down to the marriage solemnity. It is before that act that we must consider everything. How could I make you happy? My own happiness I will dismiss. Yours must then comprehend mine. Kindness might make me grateful, but grat.i.tude will not satisfy your love."

"Yes," exclaimed Milburn, chasing up his advantage with tremulous ardor; "the long famine of my heart will be thankful for a dry crust and a cup of ice. Here at the fireside let me sit and warm, and hear the rustle of your dress, and grow in heavenly sensibility. You will redeem a savage, you will save a soul!"

"It is not the price I must pay to do this, I would have you consider, sir," Vesta replied, with her attention somewhat arrested by his intensity; "it is the price you are paying--your self-respect, perhaps--by the terms on which you obtain me. It may never be known out of this family that I married you for the sake of my father and mother.

But how am I to prevent you from remembering it, especially when you say that I am the sum of your purest wishes? If your interest would consume after you obtained me, we might, at least, be indifferent; but if it grew into real love, would you not often accuse yourself?"

Meshach Milburn sat down, cast his large brown eyes upon the floor, and listened in painful reflection.

"You cannot conceive I have had any real love for you?" he exclaimed, dubiously.

"You have seen me, and desired me for your wife; that is all," said Vesta, "that I can imagine. Lawless power could do that anywhere. To be an obedient wife is the lot of woman; but love, such as you have some glimmering of, is a mystic instinct so mutual, so gladdening, yet so free, that the captivity you set me in to make me sing to you will divide us like the wires of a cage."

"There is no bird I ever caught," said Meshach Milburn, "that did not learn to trust me. Your comparison does not, therefore, discourage me.

And you have already sung for me, the saddest day of your life!"

A slight touch of nature in this revelation of her strange suitor called Vesta's attention to the study of him again. With her intelligence and sense of higher worth coming to her rescue, she thought: "Let me see all that is of this Tartar, for, perhaps, there may be another way to his mercy."

As she recovered composure, however, she grew more beautiful in his sight, her dark, peerless charms filling the room, her kindling eyes conveying love, her skin like the wild plum's, and her raven brows and crown of luxuriant hair rising upon a queenly presence worthy of an empress's throne. Such beauty almost made Milburn afraid, but the energies of his character were all concentrated to secure it.

"Who _are_ you?" she asked, with a calm, searching look, cast from her highest self-respect and alert intelligence. "Have you any relations or connections fit to bring here--to this house, to me?"

"Not one that I know," said the forester. "I am nothing but myself, and what you will make of me."

"Where were you born and reared?"

"The house does not stand which witnessed that misery," spoke Milburn, with a flush of obdurate pride; "it was burned last night, not far from the furnace which swallowed your father's substance."

"Why, I would be afraid of you, Mr. Milburn, if your errand here was not so practical. Omens and wonders surround you. Birds forget their natural life for you. Iron ceases to be occult when you take it up. Your birthplace in this world disappears by fire the night before you foreclose a mortgage upon a gentleman's daughter. Is all this sorcery inseparable from that necromancer's Hat you wear in Princess Anne?"

She had touched the sensitive topic by a skilful approach, yet he changed color, as if the allusion piqued him.

"Nature never rebuked my hat, Miss Vesta, and you are so like nature, it will not occupy your thoughts. I recollect the day you decorated my old hat; said I: 'perhaps this vagrant head-covering, after all its injuries and wanderings, may some day find a peg beneath my own roof, and the kind welcome of a lady like that little miss.' That was several years ago, and to-day, for the first time, my hat is on the rack of your hall.

The long wish of the heart is not often denied. We are not responsible for it. The only conspiracy I have plotted here, was that I did not oppose most natural occurrences, all drawing towards this scene. My magic was hope and humility. I dared to wear my ancestor's hat in the face of a contemptuous and impertinent provincial public, and it gave me the pride to persevere till I should bring it home to honors and to n.o.ble shelter. If you despise my hat, you will despise me."

"Oh, no; Mr. Milburn! I try never to despise anything. If you wore your family hat from some filial respect, it was, in part, piety. But was that, indeed, your motive in being so eccentric?"

Milburn felt uneasy again. He hesitated, and said:

"In perfect truth, I fear not. There may have been something of revenge in my mind. I had been grossly insulted."

"Is it not something of that revenge which instigates you here--even in this profession of love?" exclaimed Vesta, judicially.

Meshach looked up, and the shadows cleared from his face.

"I can answer that truthfully, lady. Towards you, not an indignant thought has ever harbored in my brain. It has been the opposite: protection, worship, tender sensibility."

"Has that exceptional charity extended to my father?"

"No."

Vesta would have been exasperated, but for his candor.

"My father never insulted you, sir?"

"No, he patronized me. He meant no harm, but that old hat has worn a deep place in my brain through carrying it so long, and it is a subject that galls me to mention it. Yet, I must be consistent with my only eccentricity. Wherever I may go, there goes my hat; it makes my ident.i.ty, my inflexibility; it achieves my promise to myself, that men shall respect my hat before I die."

"Pardon me," said Vesta, not uninterested in his character, "I can understand an eccentricity founded on family respect. We were Virginians, and that is next to religion there. The negroes of our family share it with us. You had a family, then?"

Milburn shook his head.

"No; not a family in the sense you mean. Generations of obscurity, a parentage only virtuous; no tombstone anywhere, no crest nor motto, not even a self-deluding lie of some former gentility, shaped from hand to hand till it commits a larceny on history, and is brazen on a carriage panel! We were foresters. We came forth and existed and perished, like the families of ants upon the ant-hills of sand. We migrated no more than the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs in your sycamore trees, and made no sound in events more than their insectivorous tapping. Out yonder beyond Dividing Creek, in the thickets of small oak and low pines, many a little farm, scratched from the devouring forest, speckling the plains and wastes with huts and with little barns of logs, once bore the name of Milburn through all the localities of the Pocomoke to and beyond the great Cypress Swamp. They are dying, but never dead. The few who live expect no recognition from me, and, happy in their poverty, envy me nothing I have acc.u.mulated. My name has grown hard to them, my hat is the subject of their superst.i.tions, my ambition and success have lost me their sympathy without giving me any other social compensation. You behold a desperate man, a merciless creditor, a tussock of ore from the bogs of Na.s.sawongo, yet one whose only crimes have been to adore you, and to wear his forefathers' hat."

"Is this pride, then, wholly insulted sensibility, Mr. Milburn?"

"I cannot say, Miss Custis. You may smile, but I think it is aristocracy."

"I think so, too," exclaimed Vesta reflectively; "you are a proud man.

My father, who has had reason to be proud, is less an aristocrat, sir, than you."

Milburn's flush came and stayed a considerable while. He was not displeased at Vesta's compliment, though it bore the nature of an accusation.

"You are aristocratic," explained Vesta, "because you adopted the obsolete hat of your people. Whatever vanity led you to do it, it was the satisfaction of some origin, I think."