The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories Part 9

The years that followed moved slowly, weighted as they were with hard work and monotony for Marg'et Ann, and by the time the voice of the corn had changed three times from the soft whispering of spring to the hoa.r.s.e rustling of autumn, she felt herself old and tired.

There had been letters and messages and rumors, more or less reliable, repeated at huskings and quiltings, to keep her informed of the fortunes of those who had crossed the plains, but her own letters from Lloyd had been few and unsatisfactory. She could not complain of this strict compliance with her wishes, but she had not counted upon the absence of her lover's mother, who had gone to Ohio shortly after his departure and decided to remain there with a married daughter. There was no one left in the neighborhood who could expect to hear directly from Lloyd, and the reports that came from other members of the party he had joined told little that poor Marg'et Ann wished to know, beyond the fact that he was well and had suffered the varying fortunes of other gold-hunters.

There were moments of bitterness in which she tried to picture to herself what her life might have been if she had braved her parents'

disapproval and married Lloyd before her mother's death; but there was never a moment bitter enough to tempt her into any neglect of present duty. The milking, the b.u.t.ter-making, the was.h.i.+ng, the spinning, all the relentless hard work of the women of her day, went on systematically from the beginning of the year to its end, and the younger children came to accept her patient ministrations as unquestioningly as they had accepted their mother's.

She wondered sometimes at her own anxiety to know that Lloyd was true to her, reproaching herself meanwhile with puritanic severity for such unholy selfishness; but she discussed the various plaids for the children's flannel dresses with Mrs. Skinner, who did the weaving, and cut and sewed and dyed the rags for a new best room carpet with the same conscientious regard for art in the distribution of the stripes which was displayed by all the women of her acquaintance; indeed, there was no one among them all whose taste in striping a carpet, or in "piecing and laying out a quilt," was more sought after than Marg'et Ann's.

"She always was the old-fas.h.i.+onedest little thing," said grandmother Elliott, who had been a member of Mr. Morrison's congregation back in Ohio. "I never did see her beat." The good old lady's remark, which was considered highly commendatory, and had nothing whatever to do with the frivolities of changing custom, was made at a quilting at Squire Wilson's, from which Marg'et Ann chanced to be absent.

"It's a pity she don't seem to get married," said Mrs. Barnes, who was marking circles in the white patches of the quilt by means of an inverted teacup of flowing blue; "she's the kind of a girl _I'd_ 'a'

thought young men would 'a' took up with."

"Marg'et Ann never was much for the boys," said grandmother Elliott, disposed to defend her favorite, "and dear knows she has her hands full; it's quite a ch.o.r.e to look after all them children."

The women maintained a charitable silence. The ethics of their day did not recognize any womanly duty inconsistent with matrimony. "A disappointment" was considered the only dignified reason for remaining single. Grandmother Elliott felt the weakness of her position.

"I'm sure I don't see how her father would get on," she protested feebly; "he ain't much of a hand to manage."

"If Marg'et Ann was to marry, her father would have to stir round and get himself a wife," said Mrs. Barnes, with cheerful lack of sentiment, confident that her audience was with her.

"I've always had a notion Marg'et Ann thought a good deal more of Lloyd Archer than she let on,--at least more than her folks knew anything about," a.s.serted Mrs. Skinner, stretching her plump arm under the quilt and feeling about carefully. "I shouldn't wonder if she'd had quite a disappointment."

"I would have hated to see her marry Lloyd Archer," protested grandmother Elliott; "she's a sight too good for him; he's always had queer notions."

"Well, I should 'a' thought myself she could 'a' done better," admitted Mrs. Barnes, "but somehow she hasn't. I tell 'Lisha it's more of a disgrace to the young man than it is to her."

Evidently this discussion of poor Marg'et Ann's dismal outlook matrimonially was not without precedent.

One person was totally oblivious to the facts and all surmises concerning them. Theoretically, no doubt, the good minister esteemed it a reproach that any woman should remain unmarried; but there are theories which refinement finds it easy to separate from daily life, and no thought of Marg'et Ann's future intruded upon her father's deep and daily increasing distress over the wrongs of human slavery. Marg'et Ann was conscious sometimes of a change in him; he went often and restlessly to see Squire Kirkendall, who kept an underground railroad station, and not infrequently a runaway negro was harbored at the Morrisons'. Strange to say, these frightened and stealthy visitors, dirty and repulsive though they were, excited no fear in the minds of the children, to whom the slave had become almost an object of reverence.

Marg'et Ann read her first novel that year,--a story called "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which appeared in the "National Era,"--read it and wept over it, adding all the intensity of her antislavery training to the enjoyment of a hitherto forbidden pleasure. She did not fail to note her father's eagerness for the arrival of the paper; and recalled the fact that he had once objected to her reading "Pilgrim's Progress" on the Sabbath.

"It's useful, perhaps," he had said, "useful in its way and in its place, but it is fiction nevertheless."

There were many vexing questions of church discipline that winter, and the Rev. Samuel McClanahan rode over from Cedar Towns.h.i.+p often and held long theological discussions with her father in the privacy of the best room. Once Squire Wilson came with him, and as the two visitors left the house Marg'et Ann heard the Rev. Samuel urging upon the elder the necessity of "holding up Brother Morrison's hands."

It was generally known among the congregation that Abner Kirkendall had been before the session for attending the Methodist Church and singing an uninspired hymn in the public wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d, and it was whispered that the minister was not properly impressed with the heinousness of Abner's sin. Then, too, Jonathan Loomis, the precentor, who had at first insisted upon lining out two lines of the psalm instead of one, and had carried his point, now pushed his dangerous liberality to the extreme of not lining out at all. The first time he was guilty of this startling innovation, "Rus.h.i.+n' through the sawm," as Uncle John Turnbull afterwards said, "without deegnity, as if it were a mere human cawmposeetion," two or three of the older members arose and left the church; and the presbytery was shaken to its foundations of Scotch granite when Mr. Morrison humbly acknowledged that he had not noticed the precentor's bold sally until Brother Turnbull's departure attracted his attention.

It is true that the minister had preached most acceptably that day from the ninth and twelfth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of Job: "By reason of the mult.i.tude of oppressions they make the oppressed to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty.... There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men." And it is possible that the zeal for freedom that burned in his soul was rather gratified than otherwise by Jonathan's bold singing of the prophetic psalm:--

"He out of darkness did them bring And from Death's shade them take, Those bands wherewith they had been bound Asunder quite he brake.

"O that men to the Lord would give Praise for His goodness then, And for His works of wonder done Unto the sons of men."

But such absorbing enthusiasm, even in a good cause, argued a doctrinal laxity which could not pa.s.s unnoticed.

"A deegnifyin' of the creature above the Creator, the sign above the thing seegnified," Uncle Johnnie Turnbull urged upon the session, smarting from the deep theological wound he had suffered at Jonathan's hands.

A perceptible chill crept into the ecclesiastical atmosphere which Marg'et Ann felt without thoroughly comprehending.

Nancy Helen was sixteen now, and Marg'et Ann had taught the summer school at Yankee Neck, riding home every evening to superintend the younger sister's housekeeping.

Laban had emerged from the period of unshaven awkwardness, and was going to see Emeline Barnes with ominous regularity.

There was nothing in the affairs of the household to trouble Marg'et Ann but her father's ever increasing restlessness and preoccupation. She wondered if it would have been different if her mother had lived. There was no great intimacy between the father and daughter, but the girl knew that the wrongs of the black man had risen like a dense cloud between her father and what had once been his highest duty and pleasure.

She was not, therefore, greatly surprised when he said to her one day, more humbly than he was wont to speak to his children:--

"I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few."

"What will you do, father?"

Marg'et Ann asked the question hesitatingly, dreading the reply. The minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolution into words.

"If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg'et Ann,--they are our iniquities, indirectly, child."

He got up and walked across the rag-carpeted floor. Marg'et Ann sat still in her mother's chair, looking down at the stripes of the carpet,--dark blue and red and "hit or miss;" her mother had made them so patiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little.

The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke.

"Isn't it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us,--for Abolitionists, I mean; I have heard that it was."

"Dangerous!" The preacher's face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy of martyrdom; poor Marg'et Ann had touched the wrong chord. "It cannot be worse for me than it is for them,--I must go," he broke out impatiently; "do not say anything against it, child!"

And so Marg'et Ann said nothing.

Really there was not much time for words. There were many st.i.tches to be taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as ignorant and indifferent as a child, before she packed it all in the old carpet sack and nerved herself to see him start.

He went away willingly, almost cheerfully. Just at the last, when he came to bid the younger children good-by, the father seemed for an instant to rise above the reformer. No doubt their childish unconcern moved him.

"We must think of the families that have been rudely torn apart. Surely it ought to sustain us,--it ought to sustain us," he said to Laban as they drove away.

Two days later they carried him home, crippled for life by the overturning of the stage near Cedar Creek.

He made no complaint of the drunken driver whose carelessness had caused the accident and frustrated his plans; but once, when his eldest daughter was alone with him, he looked into her face and said, absently, rather than to her,--

"Patience, patience; I doubt not the Lord's hand is in it."

And Marg'et Ann felt that his purpose was not quenched.

In the spring Lloyd Archer came home. Marg'et Ann had heard of his coming, and tried to think of him with all the intervening years of care and trial added; but when she saw him walking up the path between the flowering almonds and s...o...b..ll bushes, all the intervening years faded away, and left only the past that he had shared, and the present.

She met him there at her father's bedside and shook hands with him and said, "How do you do, Lloyd? Have you kept your health?" as quietly as she would have greeted any neighbor. After he had spoken to her father and the children she sat before him with her knitting, a very gentle, self-contained Desdemona, and listened while he told the minister stories of California, mentioning the trees and fruits of the Bible with a freedom and familiarity that savored just enough of heresy to make him seem entirely unchanged.

When Nancy Helen came into the room he glanced from her to Marg'et Ann; the two sisters had the same tints in hair and cheek, but the straight, placid lines of the elder broke into waves and dimples in the younger.

Nancy Helen shook hands in a limp, half-grown way, blus.h.i.+ngly conscious that her sleeves were rolled up, and that her elders were maturely indifferent to her sufferings; and Lloyd jokingly refused to tell her his name, insisting that she had kissed him good-by and promised to be his little sweetheart when he came back.

Marg'et Ann was knitting a great blue and white sock for Laban, and after she had turned the mammoth heel she smoothed it out on her lap, painstakingly, conscious all the time of a tumultuous, unreasonable joy in Lloyd's presence, in the sound of his voice, in his glance, which a.s.sured her so unmistakably that she had a right to rejoice in his coming.