The connection of a man of last century's hat with such a progressive thing as a railroad, seemed to excite everybody's risibilities. His railroad was called the Hat Line, even in the debates, and coarse people and negroes were hired by wits in the lobby to attend the Legislature with petitions for the Eastern Shore railroad, the whole delegation wearing antique and preposterous hats, gathered up from all the old counties and from the slop-shops of Baltimore; and in that day queer hats were very common, as animal skins of great endurance were still used to manufacture them.[17]
From Somerset word was sent that Milburn retained his hat from no amiable weakness or eccentricity, but because he had entered a vow never to abandon it till he had put every superior he had under his feet; and that he was a victim of gross forest superstition, and had made a bargain with the devil, who allowed him to prosper as long as he braved society with this tile.
The hotel servants chuckled as he went in and out; the oystermen and wood-cutters called jocosely to each other as he passed by; respectable people said he could have no consideration for his wife to degrade her by raising the derision of the town. Judge Custis finally remarked:
"Milburn, I resolved, many years ago, never to address you again on the subject of your dress. My duty makes me break the resolve: your hat is the worst enemy of your railroad."
Vesta, however, was the Entailed Hat's greatest victim. It lay upon her spirits like a shroud. Nervous and apprehensive as she had become, the perpetual admonition and friction of this article drove her into silence and gloom, poisoned the air and blocked up the sunlight, made going forth a constant running of the gantlet, and hospitality a comedy, and human observation a wondering stare.
The hat was the silent, unindicated thing that stood between her and her husband and the rest of the world. She never mentioned it, for she saw that it was forbidden ground. Kind and liberal as her husband was in every other thing, she dared not allude to a matter which had become the centre of his nervous organization, like an indurated sore; and yet she saw, from other than selfish considerations, that this hat was his own worst foe.
Some positive vice—and he had none—some calculating conspiracy—and he was direct as the day—some base amusement or hidden habit or acrid disease would hold him in captivity and pervert his heart less than this simple aberration of behavior. Had he been a hunchback men would have overlooked it; a hideous goitre or wen they would not have resented; but extreme gentility or high-bred courtesy could not refrain from turning to look a second time at a man with a beautiful lady on his arm and a steeple hat upon his head.
The existence of any subject man and wife must not talk together upon, which is yet a daily ingredient of comfort and display, itself disarranges their economy and finally becomes the chronic intruder of their household; and, when it is a trifle, it seems the more an obstacle, because there is no reasoning about it.
This Hat had long ceased to be external: it was worn on Milburn's heart and stifled the healthy throbbing there. It made two men of him,—the outer and the household man,—and, like the Corsican brothers, they were ever conscious of each other, and a word to one aroused the other's clairvoyant sensibility.
"If people would only not observe him," Vesta said, "I think he would lay his hat aside; but that is impossible, and all his pride is in the unending conflict with a law of everlasting society. Who sets a fashion, we do not know; who dares to set one that is obsolete must be a martyr; independence no one can practise but a lunatic. Oh, what tyranny exists that no laws can reach, and how much of society is mere formality!"