left the kitchen, "do you go up to my mother and stay with her all this night. Make your spread there beside her bed. Virgie, put on your hood and carry a letter for me—I will write it in the library."
She sat before her father, he too undecided to speak, and seeing by her fixed expression that it was no time for loquacity. She sealed the letter with wax, and, Virgie coming in, her father heard the direction she gave with curiosity greater than his embarrassment:
"Take this to Rev. William Tilghman. Give it to him only, and see that he reads it, Virgie, before you leave him. If he asks you any questions, tell him please to do precisely what this note says, and, as he is my friend, not to disappoint me."
The girl's steps were hardly out of hearing when Vesta opened the drawer of the library-table and took out a package of papers tied with a string. She unloosed it, and her father recognized from where he sat his notes of hand and mortgages.
"Gracious God, my darling!" exclaimed Judge Custis, "how came you by those papers?"
"They are to be mine to-night, father—in one hour. The moment they become mine they will be yours."
"Why, Vessy," said the Judge, "if they are yours even to keep a minute, the shortest way with them is up the chimney!"
He made a stride forward to take them from her hand. She laid them in her lap and looked at him so calmly that he stopped.
"You may burn the house, papa," she said, "it is still your own. But these papers you could only burn by a crime. It would be cheating an honorable man."
"Honorable! Who?" the Judge exclaimed.
"He who is to be my husband."
"You marry Meshach Milburn!" shouted the Judge, "O curse of God!—not him?"
"Yes, this night," answered Vesta; "I respect him. I hold these obligations by his trust in me. They are my engagement ring."
Judge Custis raised a loud howl like a man into whom a nail is driven, and fell at his daughter's feet and clasped her knees.
"This is to torture me," he cried; "he has not dared to ask you, Vesta?"
"Yes, and my word is passed, father. Shall that word, the word of a Custis, be less than a Milburn's faith. By the love he bore me, Mr. Milburn gave me these debts for my dower—a rare faith in one so prudent. If I do not marry him, they will be given back to him this night."
"Then give them back, my child, and save your soul and your purity, lest I live to be cursed with the sight of my noble daughter's shame? This marriage will be unholy, and the censure to follow it will be the bankruptcy of more than our estate—of our simple fame and old family respect. We have friends left who would help us. If you marry Milburn, they will all despise and repudiate us."
"I do not believe it," said Vesta. "The sense and courage of that gentleman—he is a gentleman, for I have seen him, and a gentleman of many gifts—will compel respect even where false pride and family pretension appear to put him down. Who that underrates him will make any considerable sacrifice to assist us? Your sons—will they do it? Then by what right do they decide my marriage choice? No, father, I only do my part to support our house in its extremity, as these gentlemen and others have done before."
She pointed to the old portraits of Custises on the wall. If any of them looked dissatisfied, he met a countenance haughty as his own.
"Vesta," her father called, "you know you do not love this man?"
Looking back a minute at the longing in his face, which now wore the solicitude of personal affection, she melted under it.
"No, father," she said, with a burst of tears. "I love you."
She threw her arms around him and kissed him long and fondly, both weeping together. He went into a fit of grief that admitted of no conversation till it was partly spent, and at last lay with his gray hairs folded to her heaving bosom, where the compensation of his love made her sacrifice more precious.
"I feel that I am doing right, father," she said tenderly "Till now I have had my doubts. No other young heart is wronged by my taking this step; I have never been engaged, and it now seems providential, as I could not then have gone to your assistance without injuring myself and another; and your debts are too great for any but this man to settle them. Your life has been one long sacrifice for me, and not a cloud has darkened above me till this day, giving me the first shower of sorrow, which I trust will refresh my soul, and make its humility grow. Oh, father, it would rejoice me so much if you could respond to my sacrifice with a better life!"
"God help me, I will!" he sobbed.
"That is very comforting to me. I will not enumerate your omissions, dear father, but if this important step in my life does not arrest some sad tendencies I see in you, the disappointment may break me down. Intemperance in you—a judge, a gentleman, a husband, and a father—is a deformity worse than Mr. Milburn's honest, unfashionable hat. Do you not feel happier that my husband is not to be a drunkard?"
"He has not that vice, thank God!" admitted the Judge.
"Be his better example, father, for I hope to see you influence him to be kind to me, and the sight of you walking downward in his view will degrade me more than bearing his name or sharing his eccentricities. Oh, if you love me, let not your dear soul slide out of the knowledge of God!"
"Pray for me, dear child! My feet are slippery and my knees are weak."
"Begin from this moment to lean on Heaven," said Vesta. "It is better than this world's consideration. Oh, what would strengthen me now but God's approval, though I go into a captivity I dreamed not of. Even there I can take my harp beneath the willows, like them in Babylon, and praise my Maker."
She sat at her piano and sang the hymn the young consumptive, Rev. Mr. Eastburn, composed in her grandmother's house, taking it from the Episcopal collection:
"O holy, holy, holy Lord!
Bright in Thy deeds and in Thy name,
Forever be Thy name adored,
Thy glories let the world proclaim!
"O Jesus, Lamb once crucified
To take our load of sins away,
Thine be the hymn that rolls its tide
Along the realms of upper day!
"O Holy Spirit from above,
In streams of light and glory given,
Thou source of ecstacy and love,
Thy praises ring through earth and heaven!"
As her voice in almost supernatural clearness and sweetness filled the two large rooms, and died away in melody, she rose and kissed her father again, and said, "Courage, love! we shall be happy still."
A knock at the door and there entered the young clergyman she had sent for, a sandy-haired, large-blue-eyed, boyish person, with a fair skin easily freckled, and a look of youthful chivalry under his sincere Christian humility.
"Good-evening, William," Vesta spoke; "I did not
