The old Scotch and Irish
merchants there had made it the law that enterprise was only excusable
by success, and that success only branded an innovator. A good standard
of society, therefore, had barely permitted Judge Custis to take up the
bog-ore manufacture, and, failing in it, his wife thought he was no
better than a Jacobin.
On the Eastern Shore, where society was formed before Glasgow and
Belfast had colonized upon the Chesapeake with their precise formulas of
life, a gentler benevolence rose and descended upon the ground every
day, like the evaporations of those prolific seas which manure the thin
soil unfailingly. Religion and benevolence were depositions rather than
dogmas there; moderate poverty was the not unwelcome expectation, wealth
a subject of apprehensive scruples, kindness the law, pride the
exception, and grinding avarice, like Meshach Milburn's, was the mark of
the devil entering into the neighbor and the fellow-man.
Judge Custis was representative of his neighbors except in his Virginia
voluptuousness; his neighbors were neither prudes nor hypocrites, and he
respected them more than the arrogant race in the old land of Accomac
and in the Virginia peninsulas, whose traits he had almost lost.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the last of the cavalier stock was his
daughter, Vesta. From him it had nearly departed, and his sense of moral
shortcomings expanded his heart and made him tenderly pious to his kind,
if not to God.
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