Painted in the soft hues of personal experience, prescribed to her needs with a physician's art, doing all that funeral talk can do to raise the final tears from among the heartstrings and pour them in oblation upon the corpse, the pastor's consolation had the effect of some mesmeric hand that weakens our systems while it sublimates our feelings, and Vesta's female nature was almost broken down.

Where could she lean for the close sympathy befitting such grief? Her father was not here, and she had none but her husband--the husband of less than a week, but still the nearest to her need.

On him she allowed herself to rest that solemn evening after her mother's body had sought the ground. He was well again, for the time.

For the first time she was alone with him, and, as the shadows narrowed their chamber, and they sat with no other light than a little wood smouldering in the grate, he came to her and began to talk of childhood and his own mother, of the little sorrows his mother had shared with him, of domestic disagreements and happy love-making anew; how men feel when the partner of life is taken away, and children know not the meaning of Death, that has done so awful a thing upon the inoffensive one; but above all is shining, Meshach said, the star of motherhood, faintly lighting our way, mellowing our souls, and basking on the waters.

As he continued, and she could not see him, but only hear the plaintiveness of his voice, it became comfortable to hear him speak, and she grew more pa.s.sive, a sense of resignation fell upon her heart, and of grat.i.tude to him that could divine her loss so touchingly; and, like a child, she rested upon his side, upon his knee, and in his arms at last. Not fond nor yet infatuated, but subsiding and consenting, accepting her destiny like a myriad of women that are neither oppressed nor tender, but with reluctance, yield, she pa.s.sed out of grief to wifedom, like one tired and in a dream.

Visits of consolation were made by a few old friends for a day or two succeeding. The Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, late president of the college at Annapolis, came, bringing his handsome boy of twelve, Master Harry Winter Davis. The attorney-general of Maryland, Mr. Roger Taney, came with Mr. George Brown, the banker. Commodore Decatur's widow sent a mourning token, and the Honorable William Wirt brought Mr. Robert Smith, once the secretary of state at Washington.

These and others, looking at Meshach Milburn a little oddly, found him, on acquaintance, a man of sense; but the McLanes who called were either supercilious or studiously avoided the groom.

An invitation came from Arlington House to Vesta, to bring Mr. Milburn there; and, as they proceeded out the Washington road in a private carriage, they observed Mr. Ross Winans's friction-wheel car, with nearly forty people in it, making its trial trip behind a horse at a gallop. At the Relay House, where the horses on the railroad were changed, Milburn remarked, gazing up the Patapsco valley:

"My wife, we are here at the birth of this little iron highway. If our vision was great enough, we might see the mighty things that may happen upon it: servile insurrection, sectional war, great armies riding to great battles, thousands of emigrants drawn to the West. We shall die, but generations after us this road will grow and continue, like a vein of iron, whose length and uses no man can measure."

The road to Washington was in places good, and often turned in among the pines. At Riverdale they saw the deer of Mr. George Calvert, a descendant of one of the Lords Baltimore, browsing in his park, and his great four-in-hand carriage was going in the lodge-gates from a state visit to the Custises. Pa.s.sing direct to Georgetown from Bladensburg, they encountered General Jackson, taking his evening ride on horseback, and saw the chasm of the new ca.n.a.l being dug along the Potomac, and then, crossing Mason's ferry, they were set down at Arlington House an hour after dark.

The hospitable, harmless proprietor welcomed them into the huge edifice, half temple, half barn, among his elaborate daubs of pictures, and furniture and relics of Custis and Washingtonian times. He was nearly fifty years of age, of Indian features, but rather weak face, like one whose only substantiality was in his ancestors, and Vesta, placing him beside her husband, reflected that a similar inbreeding had produced a similarity in the two men, both of a sallow and bilious attenuation; but Milburn, beside her kinsman Custis, was like a bold wolf beside a vacant-visaged sheep.

Yet these men liked each other immediately, Milburn's intelligence and money, and real reverence for the great man who had adopted Mr. Custis, giving him admittance to the latter's fancy.

They strolled through those beautiful woods, one day to become a grove of sepulture for an army of dead, while Vesta, in the dwelling, talked with her cousins, and with the graceful Lieutenant Lee, who was courting Mary Custis.

It was a happy domestic life, and in the host's veins ran the blood of the Calverts, though not of the legitimate line.

It was suggested to go to the Capitol, and Mr. Milburn, growing daily better in the hill region, went also, and wore his steeple hat, greatly to the edification of Mr. Custis, who revelled in such antiquities.

Vesta heard the ladies whispering, when they returned, that a parcel of boys and negroes had followed the hat, laughing and jeering, and had finally driven the party to their carriage. This, and her husband's impatience to return to his business, hastened their departure from Arlington.

They took the steamer down the Potomac, and, as they came off the mouth of St. Mary's River, Milburn donned his Raleigh's hat again, and stood on deck, looking at the lights about the old Priest's House, where the capital of Lord Baltimore lay, a naked plain and a few starveling mementoes, within the bight of a sandy point that faced the archipelago of the Eastern Sh.o.r.e.

"My hat," said Milburn to himself, "is old as yonder town, and better preserved. The Calverts and Milburns have married into Mrs. Washington's kin. Does my wife love me?"

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

THE ORDEAL.

When Levin Dennis awoke in the bottom of the old wagon it was being rapidly driven, and Van Dorn's voice from the driver's seat was heard to say, without its usual lisp and Spanish interjection:

"Whitecar, is your brother at Dover sure of his game?"

"c.o.c.k sure, Cap'n. Got 'em tree'd! Best domestic stock in the town thar, an' the purtiest yaller gals: I know that suits _you_, Cap'n!"

"Have they arms?"

"Not a trigger. We trap 'em at one of their 'festibals.' No, sir, n.i.g.g.e.rs won't scrimmage."

"We a.s.semble at Devil Jim Clark's," said Van Dorn, and pa.s.sed by with a crack of his whip.

Levin, whom some friendly hand had wrapped in a bearskin coat--he had seen one like it upon Van Dorn--next heard the slaver speak to another party he had overtaken:

"Melson?"

"Ay yi!"

"Milman?"

"Ah! boy."

"You get your orders at Devil Jim Clark's!"

The stars were out, yet the night was rich in large, fleecy clouds, as if heaven were hurrying onward too. Levin lay on his back, jostled by the rough wagon, but, being perfectly sober now, he was more reasoning and courageous, and his new-found love impelled him to self-preservation. He might have rolled out of the vehicle and into the woods, and at least saved himself from committing further crime, but how would he see Hulda any more--Hulda, in danger, perhaps? Thus, even to ignorance, love brings understanding, and Levin began to ask himself the cause of his own misery. He knew it was liquor, yet what made him drink if not a disposition too easily led? Even now he was under almost voluntary subjection to the bandit in the wagon, whose voice he heard blandly command again to some pair he had caught up to:

"Tindel?"

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van! Tackle 'em!"

"You are not to be in peril to-night, so keep your spirits. I expect you to look out for the cords, gags, and fastenings generally!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin; oh, tackle 'em!"

"You and Buck Ransom there--"

"Politely, Captain; politely, sir!" exclaimed an insinuating voice from a negro rider.

"Are to meet us all at Devil Jim's!"

"Tackle 'em, Captin!"

"Politely, Captain!"

As Van Dorn urged his way to the head of the line, Levin looked out silently upon the flat country of forest and a few poor farms, drained imperfectly by some ditches of the Choptank. He supposed it might be almost midnight, from the position of those brilliant constellations which shone down equally upon his mother and himself--she in her innocence and he in his anxiety--and shone, also, perhaps, upon his poor father's grave in isle or ocean.

Within an hour blood was to be shed, no doubt, and rapine done, and he knew not the road to escape by nor the hole to hide in. Yet in that hour he had to make his choice,--to fight for liberty, or go to the jail, the whipping-post, or, perhaps, the gallows.

Levin considered ruefully his vagrant past, and how little could be said in extenuation of him in a court of justice, except by his mother's faith, which was no more evidence than a negro's oath.

Once it arose in his mind to surprise Van Dorn, overcome him, cast him out in a ditch, and drive to some one of the little farmhouses and rest, till day should give him his whereabouts and remedy.

Levin was not a coward, and his muscles were hard, and his feet could cling to a smooth plank like a bird's to a bough; but his heart relented to the fierce, soft man so unsuspectingly sitting with his back to him, when Levin reflected that he must, perhaps, put an end to Van Dorn's life with his sailor's knife, if they grappled at all, and this day expiring Van Dorn had paid a debt for him to the widow whose son was next overtaken, and who cried, forwardly, without being addressed:

"Van Dorn, what you goin' to give me if I git a n.i.g.g.e.r?"

"This!" said Van Dorn, without a pause, reaching the boy a measured blow with his whip-lash on the shoulder that made him literally fall from the mule and grovel with pain.