"Let's you and me go take a little walk," she said, putting her hand in his arm with a quiet confidence in which was a spark of Meshach's will. "I ain't afraid of Princess Anne people, if they are proud. Mise Somers says King Solomons was no better than a lily outen the pond, and said so himself."
The young man, sincere as his humility was, blushed a little at the idea of walking through his native town with that bonnet at his side, he being of one of the self-conscious, high-viewing families of the old peninsula—his grand-uncle the staff-officer of Washington, and messenger from Yorktown to Congress with the news, "Cornwallis has fallen;" but it was his chivalric sense, and not his piety, which immediately dispelled the last touch of coxcombry, when he felt that a lady had requested him.
"With happiness, Miss Holland;" and he did not feel one shrinking thought again as he ran the gantlet of the idle fellows of the town, many of them his former vagrant playmates. Rhoda was perfectly happy. He would have taken her to his grandmother's, with whom he kept house, but that aristocratic old dowager might say something, he considered, to destroy Rhoda's confidence in her elegant appearance and easy vocabulary; and they walked past Teackle Hall, where Vesta saw them, and opened the door and made them come in and eat a little. Rhoda at first showed some uneasiness under this great pile of habitation, but Vesta was so natural and gracious that the shyness wore off, and, at a fitting moment, the bride said:
"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly become."
Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in spite of Mrs. Somers.
Tilghman, too, accused himself that he felt a little relieved when he escorted Rhoda back to Meshach's in another bonnet, and Vesta followed, with her great shaggy dog, Turk; she not unconscious—though serene and thoughtfully polite to all she knew—of people peering at her in wonder and excitement from every door and window of the town. The news was working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a wife at last.
Chapter XIX.
THE DUSKY LEVELS.
The new son-in-law, left alone with Judge Custis, asked to be propped up in bed, and nothing was visible that would support his pillow but the aged leather hat-box that Custis, with a wry face, brought to do duty.