At the loud sound of this familiar word, the feverish man's ears were pierced as through some ever-open ventricle, like an old wound.
"Steeple-top! Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see I'm married. She hears it. Oh, spare and pity her!"
He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched, yet oppressed.
"How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that nickname. In public he never appeared to flinch before it; but you see it inflicted a never-healing wound. Who has not his vulture?"
"And how unjust to pursue this man with such frivolous inhospitality so many years," Vesta exclaimed, her splendid eyes flashing. "No account has been made of his private reasons, his family piety, or his stern taste, perhaps; for he must have a reason for his wardrobe, that being, it would seem, the only thing there can be no independence about. Did you hear, papa, his feeling for me but this moment? Strangely enough, my own mind was thinking of that hat. It seems to be bigger than the very steeples of the churches: it rises between the people and worship, yes, between us and Charity, and Faith,—I had almost said Hope, too."
"The colored people all say that hat he has to wear, because the devil makes him," the trim, fawn-footed Virgie said; "Aunt Hominy says the Bad Man wouldn't let him make no mo' money if he didn't go to church in that hat. Some of the white people says so, too."
"You don't believe such foolish tales as that, Virgie?" Vesta asked.
"'Deed, I don't believe anything you say is a story, Miss Vessy. Hominy believes it. She's 'most scared out of her life about Mr. Milburn coming to the house, an' she's got all the little ones a' most crazy with fear."
"Poor, dark, ignorant soul!" Vesta said; "she is, however, more excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition."
"If he is a good man to you, Miss Vessy," the slave girl said, "I'll think the Bad Man hasn't got anything to do with him. If he treats you bad, I'll think the Bad Man has."