Chapter XLVII
Failure and Restitution
The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.
The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper’s Ferry, as Vesta’s boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended over Patty Cannon’s old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore, where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later, chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue the murderer.
By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had become detested in their own community, and when they sued O’Day, or Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled, and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,—now a man in growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,—loaded his gun and started for Cannon’s Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off the ferry scow.
“Are you going to give me back that ten dollars, you old scoundrel?” shouted O’Day.
“Stand back! stand back!” answered long Jacob; “the quotient was correct; the lex loci and the lex terrae were argued. The lex talionis—“
“Take it!” cried the villain, adroitly firing his shot-gun into the merchant’s breast, so as not to injure his humaner beast.
Jacob Cannon staggered to the fence at the head of the wharf, and caught there a moment, and fell dead.
“You scoundrel,” screamed Isaac Cannon from the window, “to kill my brother, my executive comfort.”
“Yes,” answered O’Day, “and I’ll give the other barrel to you!”
As Isaac Cannon barricaded himself in, Owen O’Day collected his effects without hurry, and betook himself to the wilds of Missouri.
Cannon’s Ferry fell into decay when the railroad at Seaford carried off its trading importance, but there are yet to be seen the never tenanted mansion of the disappointed bridegroom, and the gravestones which show how Jacob’s fate frightened Isaac Cannon to a speedy tomb.
In the meantime, John M. Clayton had made use of the fears of Calhoun and his nullifiers, who were menaced with the penalties of treason by the president, to pass a great protective tariff bill by their aid, thus establishing the manufactures in the same period with the railways.
This triumph in the senate left him free to conduct the suit of Randel against the Canal Company, which occupied as many years as the railroad enterprise of Meshach Milburn.
The barbarous system of “pleadings” was then in full vogue, though soon to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton’s pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous of him, had yet to decide in his favor.
Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems—something that would be going on at the final end of the world.
“Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy! he don’t know a Delaware jury. I’ll get my country-seat, up here on the New Castle hills, out of this case,” Clayton said, as he pitched quoits with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.
John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man all his life.
He sued his successor and fellow New-Yorker, Engineer Wright, and was nonsuited. He garnisheed the canal officers, and beset the Legislature for remedial legislation, and threatened Clayton himself with damages; yet had such a fund of experience and such vitality that he kept the outer public beaten up, like the driving of wild beasts into the circle of the hunters. He had surveyed the great city of New York and planned its streets above the new City Hall. Elevated railroads were his projection half a century before they came about. He now looked upon engineering with indifference, and considered himself to have been born for the law.
In the midst of many other duties, Clayton, in course of time, convicted Whitecar of kidnapping, on negro testimony, having obtained a ruling to that end from his cousin, the chief-justice; and a constituent named Sorden (not the personage of our tale), being prosecuted for kidnapping, in order to spite Clayton, was cleared by him at Georgetown after a marvellous exhibition of jury eloquence, and repaid the obligation, years after our story closes, by breaking a party dead-lock in the Legislature of Delaware, where he became a member, and sending Mr. Clayton for the fourth time to the American senate.
The Entailed Hat became more common in the streets of Annapolis than it had been in Princess Anne, as Milburn pressed his bill for assistance year after year, and was shot through the back with slanders from home and hustled in front by overwhelming opposition.
Judge Custis took the field for Congress on the railroad issue, and was elected, through the Forest vote, and his wife went through a Washington season with as much dignity as enjoyment, few suspecting that she was not the Judge’s social equal.
The ancestral hat defied all worldly hostility, but became the iron helmet to bend its wearer’s back. He prayed in secret for some pitying angel to break the spell that bound him to it, but none conceived that he would let it go.
His boy grew strong, and took his father’s dress to be a matter of course; his wife pressed upon him the nauseous ornament he had so long affected; a wide conspiracy seemed to have been formed to drive his head into that hereditary wigwam, and he could not escape it.
Even Grandmother Tilghman, who now was an inmate of Teackle Hall, in William’s absence of years, forgot all about the queer hat, and rejoiced to herself that “Bill” had not married “that political girl.”
Milburn had maintained his financial solvency by turns and sorties that even his enemies admired, but a railroad built along one man’s spine and terminated by a steeple depot on his head must wear out the unrelieved individual at last.
The banks in Baltimore began to break; fierce riots ensued; the state debt had mounted up, through aid to public works, to fifteen million dollars; the Eastern Shore Railroad obtained, too late, the vote of the subsidy expected, and the state treasurer could not find funds to pay it.
The gazettes announced the failure of Meshach Milburn, Esq., of the Eastern Shore.
Without an instant’s hesitation, Vesta surrendered her own property, and she and Rhoda Custis opened a select school in a part of Teackle Hall, and let the remainder for residences.
“Why do you make this sacrifice?” asked her husband; “nobody expected it.”
“They may say we were married to protect my parents,” Vesta answered, “but not that it was to secure myself. My boy shall have a clear name.”
His failure ended the active life of Meshach Milburn; too considerate of his family to renew his former low endeavors, he became a clerk in the county offices, through Judge Custis’s influence, and wore his hat to stipendiary labor with the regularity, but not the rebellious instincts, of old days, becoming, instead, the victim of a certain religious trance or apathy, which deepened with time.
Vesta saw that Milburn’s misfortune extinguished the last remnant of animosity in her father’s mind, and the two men went about together, like two old boys who had both been prisoners of war, and were cured of ambition.
Milburn resumed his forest walks and bird-tamings, all traces of ambition left his countenance, and he was as dead to business things as if he had never risen above his forest origin.
He often talked of William Tilghman, and seemed to wish to see him, though for no apparent purpose.
The Asiatic cholera, having begun to make annual visits to the United States, singled out, one day, the wearer of the obsolete hat, and put to the sternest test of affection and humanity the household at Teackle Hall.
Whether from the respect his steady purposes had given them, or the natural devotion in a sequestered society, no soul left his side.
But it brought the final visitation of poverty upon Vesta. Her school was broken up in a day. She dismissed it herself, and calmly sat by her husband’s bed, to soothe his dying weakness, and await the providence of God.
He rapidly passed through the stages of cramp and collapse, a nearly perished pulse, and the cadaverous look of one already dead, yet his intellect by the law of the disease, lived unimpaired.
“The stream cannot rise above the fountain,” he spoke, huskily; “all we can get from life is love. My darling, you have showered it on me, and been thirsty all your days.”
“I have been happy in my duty,” Vesta said; “you have been kind to me always. We have nothing to regret.”
He wandered a little, though he looked at her, and seemed thinking of his mother.
“Where can we go?” he muttered, pitifully; “I burned the dear old hut down. It would have been a roof for my boy.”
His chin trembled, as if he were about to cry, and sighed:
“Fader an’ mammy’s quarrelled; the mocking-bird won’t sing. Ride for the doctor! ride hard! Oh! oh! too late, little chillen! They’se both dead!”
He returned to perfect knowledge in a moment, and fixed his eyes on Vesta, saying,
“I leave you poor. I tried hard. Perhaps—“
His eye was here arrested by some conflict at the door, where Aunt Hominy, notwithstanding her imperfect wits, was striving to keep guard.
“De debbil’s measurin’ him in! Measurin’ him in at las’!” the old woman said; “Miss Vessy’s ‘mos’ free!”
“Admit me!” spoke a clear, familiar voice, “I must see him. Mr. Clayton has won the lawsuit, and two hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars damages! Cousin Meshach is rich again.”
“That friendly voice,” spoke Meshach, with a happy light in his eyes; “oh, I wanted to hear it again!”
Yet he put his hand up with all his little strength to push away the intruder, who would have kissed him, and whispered,
“No. The cholera!”
“It’s the bishop, uncle!” cried Mrs. Custis; “Bishop Tilghman, from the West.”
“Don’t I know him,” Milburn whispered, with sinking voice and powers. “Honest man! Bishop of our church! Bishop in the free West! God bless him!”
He was lost again, as if he had fainted, for some time, and, all kneeling, the young bishop made a prayer.
When they arose Milburn seemed speechless, yet he tried to raise his hand, and, Vesta coming to his aid, his long, lean fingers closed around hers, and he signalled to William Tilghman with his eyes.
The bishop came near, and, by a painful effort, Milburn put his wife’s hand in her cousin’s. His lips framed a word without a sound:
“Restitution.”
“Glory to God!” suddenly exclaimed Grandmother Tilghman, who seemed to see without sight all that was going on.
“I knew it would be so, if both would wait,” sighed Rhoda to her husband, through her tears.
There was still something on Milburn’s mind, though he was unable to explain it. Every attempt was made to interpret his want, but in vain, till Aunt Hominy broke the silence by mumbling:
“He want dat debbil’s hat!”
Vesta saw her husband’s eyes twinkle as if he had heard the word, and it gave her a thought. She left the room, and returned with her boy, a fine young fellow, obedient to her wish. In his hand was his father’s hat.
“What will you do if papa leaves us, Custis?” Vesta spoke, loudly, so that the dying man could hear.
“I will wear my forefather’s hat, papa!” said the child.
The dying man drooped his eyes, as if to say “No,” and looked fervently at his son and wearily at the old headpiece.
Vesta placed it on his pillow, and waited to know his next wish.
He made a sign, which they interpreted to mean,
“Lift me!”
He was lifted up, livid as the dead, and raised his eyes towards his forehead.
His wife set the Entailed Hat upon his temples.
“Bury it!” he said, in a distinct whisper, and passed away.