The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories

The young man stalked through the tall grass that choked the path of the little inclosure until he overtook her under a blossoming crab-apple tree.

He had been "going with" Marg'et Ann more than a year, and there was generally supposed to be an understanding between them.

She turned when he came up, and put out her hand without embarrassment, but she blushed as pink as the crab-apple bloom in his grasp.

They talked a little of commonplace things, and Marg'et Ann looked down and swallowed once or twice before she said gravely, —

"I hoped you'd come forward this sacrament, Lloyd."

The young man's brow clouded.

"I've told you I can't join the church without telling a lie, Marg'et Ann. You wouldn't want me to tell a lie," he said, flushing hotly.

She shook her head, looking down, and twisting her handkerchief into a ball in her hands.

"I know you have doubts about some things; but I thought they might be removed by prayer. Have you prayed earnestly to have them removed?" She looked up at him anxiously.

"I've asked to be made to see things right," he replied, choking a little over this unveiling of his holy of holies; "but I don't seem to be able to see some things as you do."

She pondered an instant, looking absently at the headstone of "Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy's two beloved wives, then she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish ancestry were not given to glib talking of sacred things:

"I suppose doubts are sent to try our faith; but we have the promise that they will be removed if we ask in the right spirit. Are you sure you have asked in the right spirit, Lloyd?"

"I have prayed for light, but I haven't asked to have my doubts removed, Marg'et Ann; I don't know that I want to believe what doesn't appear reasonable to me."

The girl lifted a troubled, tremulous face to his.

"That isn't the right spirit, Lloyd, – you know it isn't. How can God remove your doubts if you don't want him to?"

The young man reached up and broke off a twig of the round, pink crab-apple buds and rolled the stem between his work-hardened hands.

"I've asked for light," he repeated, "and if when it comes I see things different, I'll say so; but I can't want to believe what I don't believe, and I can't pray for what I don't want."

The triangle of Marg'et Ann's brow between her burnished satin puffs of hair took on two upright, troubled lines. She unfolded her handkerchief nervously, and her token fell with a ringing sound against tired Hephzibah's gravestone and rolled down above her patiently folded hands.

Lloyd stooped and searched for it in the grass. When he found it he gave it to her silently, and their hands met. Poor Marg'et Ann! No hunted Covenanter amid Scottish heather was more a martyr to his faith than this rose-cheeked girl amid Iowa cornfields. She took the bit of flattened lead and pressed it between her burning palms.

"I hope you won't get hardened in unbelief, Lloyd," she said soberly.

The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve.

"You ain't a-going to let this make any difference between you and me, are you, Marg'et Ann?" he pleaded.

"I don't know," wavered the girl. "I hope you'll be brought to a sense of your true condition, Lloyd." She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of her skirt. "It would be an awful cross to father and mother."

The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the church door in unhappy silence.

Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion wine in the room.

The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed heads, in deep spiritual isolation.

The solemn stillness of self-examination pervaded the room, and Marg'et Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resentment in her heart toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of "Dundee."

Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting opposite her, and then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine himself, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink damnation to himself.

It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance.

Marg'et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready for the milking, and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about supper.

Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison's touch-me-nots and four-o'clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from the patch under the Bowerly apple-tree.

She shared Marg'et Ann's room that night, and after she had taken off her lace headdress and put a frilled nightcap over her lonesome little knot of gray hair and said her prayers, she composed herself on her pillow with a patient sigh, and lay watching Marg'et Ann crowd her burnished braids into her close-fitting cap without speaking; but after the light was out, and her companion had lain down beside her, the old maid placed her knotted hand on the girl's more shapely one, and said: —

"There's worse things than living single, Marg'et Ann, and then again I suppose there's better. Of course every girl has her chances, and the people we make sacrifices for don't always seem quite as grateful as we calculated they'd be. I'm not repinin', but I sometimes think if I had my life to live over again I'd do different."

Marg'et Ann pressed the knotted fingers, that felt like a handful of hickory nuts, and touched the little circle with its two worn-out hearts, but she said nothing.

She had heard that the Rev. Samuel McClanahan was going to marry the youngest Groesbeck girl, now that his children were "getting well up out of the way," and she knew that her mother had been telling Miss Nancy something about her own love affair with Lloyd Archer.

Whatever Mrs. Morrison may have confided to Miss Nancy McClanahan concerning Marg'et Ann and her lover must have been entirely suppositional and therefore liable to error; for the confidence between parent and child did not extend into the mysteries of love and marriage, nor would the older woman have dreamed of intruding upon the sacred precinct of her daughter's feelings toward a young man. She had remarked once or twice to her husband that she was afraid sometimes that there was something between Lloyd Archer and Marg'et Ann; but whether this something was a barrier or a bond she left the worthy minister to divine.

That he had decided upon the latter was evidenced, perhaps, by his reply that he hoped not, and his fear, which he had expressed before, that Lloyd was getting more and more settled in habits of unbelief; and Mrs. Morrison took occasion to remark the next day in her daughter's hearing that she would hate to have a child of hers marry an unbeliever.

Marg'et Ann did not, however, need any of these helps to an understanding of her parents' position. She knew too well the danger that was supposed to threaten him who indulged in vain and unprofitable questionings, and she had too often heard the vanity of human reason proclaimed to feel any pride in the readiness with which Lloyd had answered Squire Wilson in the argument they had on foreordination at Hiram Graham's infare. Indeed, she had felt it a personal rebuke when her father had said on the way home that he hoped no child of his would ever set up his feeble intellect against the eternal purposes of God, as Lloyd Archer was doing. Marg'et Ann knew perfectly well that if she married Lloyd in his present unregenerate state she would, in the estimation of her father and mother, be endangering the safety of her own soul, which, though presumably of the elect, could never be conclusively so proved until the gates of Paradise should close behind it.

She pondered on these things, and talked of them sometimes with Lloyd, rather unsatisfactorily, it is true; for that rising theologian bristled with questions which threw her troubled soul into a tumult of fear and uncertainty.

It was this latter feeling, perhaps, which distressed her most in her calmer moments; for it was gradually forcing itself upon poor Marg'et Ann that she must either snatch her lover as a brand from the burning or be herself drawn into the flames.

She had taken the summer school down on Cedar Creek, and Lloyd used to ride down for her on Friday evenings when the creek was high.

Rebecca and Archie Skinner were to be married in the fall, and her mother, who had been ailing a little all summer, would need her at home when Rebecca was gone. Still, this would not have stood in the way of her marriage had everything else been satisfactory; and Lloyd suspected as much when she urged it as a reason for delay.

"If anybody has to stay at home on your mother's account, why not let Archie Skinner and Becky put off their wedding a while? They're younger, and they haven't been going together near as long as we have," said Lloyd, in answer to her excuses.

They were riding home on horseback one Friday night, and Lloyd had just told her that Martin Prather was going back to Ohio to take care of the old folks, and would rent his farm very reasonably.

Marg'et Ann had on a slat sunbonnet which made her profile about as attractive as an "elbow" of stovepipe, but it had the advantage of hiding the concern that Lloyd's questioning brought into her face. It could not, however, keep it out of her voice.

"I don't know, Lloyd," she began hesitatingly; then she turned toward him suddenly, and let him see all the pain and trouble and regret that her friendly headgear had been sheltering. "Oh, I do wish you could come to see things different!" she broke out tremulously.

The young man was quiet for an instant, and then said huskily, "I just thought you had something like that in your mind, Marg'et Ann. If you've concluded to wait till I join the church we might as well give it up. I don't believe in close communion, and I can't see any harm in occasional hearing, and I haven't heard any minister yet that can reconcile free will and election; the more I think about it the less I believe; I think there is about as much hope of your changing as there is of me. I don't see what all this fuss is about, anyway. Arch Skinner isn't a church member!"

It was hard for Marg'et Ann to say why Archie Skinner's case was considered more hopeful than Lloyd's. She knew perfectly well, and so did her lover, for that matter, but it was not easy to formulate.

"Ain't you afraid you'll get to believing less and less if you go on arguing, Lloyd?" she asked, ignoring Archie Skinner altogether.

"I don't know," said Lloyd somewhat sullenly.

They were riding up the lane in the scant shadow of the white locust trees. The corn was in tassel now, and rustled softly in the fields on either side. There was no other sound for a while. Then Marg'et Ann spoke.

"I'll see what father thinks" —

"No, you won't, Marg'et Ann," broke in Lloyd obstinately. "I think a good deal of your father, but I don't want to marry him; and I don't ask you to promise to marry the fellow I ought to be, or that you think I ought to be; I've asked you to marry me. I don't care what you believe and I don't care what your father thinks; I want to know what you think."

Poor Lloyd made all this energetic avowal without the encouragement of a blush or a smile, or the discouragement of a frown or a tear. All this that a lover watches for anxiously was hidden by a wall of slats and green-checked gingham.

She turned her tubular head covering toward him presently, however, showing him all the troubled pink prettiness it held, and said very genuinely through her tears, —

"Oh, Lloyd, you know well enough what I think!"

They had reached the gate, and it was a very much mollified face which the young man raised to hers as he helped her to dismount.

"Your father and mother wouldn't stand in the way of our getting married, would they?" he asked, as she stood beside him.

"Oh, no, they wouldn't stand in the way," faltered poor Marg'et Ann.

How could she explain to this muscular fellow, whose pale-faced mother had no creed but what Lloyd thought or wanted or liked, that it was their unspoken grief that made it hard for her? How shall any woman explain her family ties to any man?

Marg'et Ann did not need to consult her father. He looked up from his writing when she entered the door.

"Was that Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann?" he asked kindly.

"Yes, sir."

"I'd a little rather you wouldn't go with him. He seems to be falling into a state of mind that is likely to end in infidelity. It troubles your mother and me a good deal."

Marg'et Ann went into the bedroom to take off her riding skirt, and she did not come out until she was sure no one could see that she had been crying.

Mrs. Morrison continued to complain all through the fall; at least so her neighbors said, although the good woman had never been known to murmur; and Marg'et Ann said nothing whatever about her engagement to Lloyd Archer.

Late in October Archie Skinner and Rebecca were married and moved to the Martin Prather farm, and Lloyd, restless and chafing under all this silence and delay, had no longer anything to suggest when Marg'et Ann urged her mother's failing health as a reason for postponing their marriage.

Before the crab-apples bloomed again Mrs. Morrison's life went out as quietly as it had been lived. There was a short, sharp illness at the last, and in one of the pauses of the pain the sick woman lay watching her daughter, who was alone with her.

"I'm real glad there was nothing between you and Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann," she said feebly; "that would have troubled me a good deal. You'll have your father and the children to look after. Nancy Helen will be coming up pretty soon, and be some help; she grows fast. You'll have to manage along as best you can."

The girl's sorely troubled heart failed her. Her eyes burned and her throat ached with the effort of self-control. She buried her face in the patchwork quilt beside her mother's hand. The woman stroked her hair tenderly.

"Don't cry, Marg'et Ann," she said, "don't cry. You'll get on. It's the Lord's will."

The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg'et Ann walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so pathetically neat, – taking up the dead woman's task where she had left it, and doing everything with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of neglected duty might disturb her rest.

The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the thicket was faintly pink.

Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg'et Ann could not trust her voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening before they turned to go back. Marg'et Ann had thrown a little homespun shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of grief in the dim light.

"It don't seem right, Marg'et Ann," he began in a voice strained almost to coldness by intensity of feeling.

"But it is right, – we know that, Lloyd," interrupted the girl; then she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. "Oh, Lloyd, I can't bear it – I can't bear it alone – you must help me to be – to be – reconciled!"

The young man laid his cheek upon her soft hair. There was nothing but hot, unspoken rebellion in his heart. They stood still an instant, and then Marg'et Ann raised her head and drew the little shawl up and caught it under her quivering chin.

"We must go in," she said staidly, choking back her sobs.

Lloyd laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him again.

"Is there no help, Marg'et Ann?" he said piteously, looking into her tear-stained face. In his heart he knew there was none. He had gone over the ground a thousand times since he had seen her standing beside her mother's open grave with the group of frightened children clinging to her.

"God is our refuge and our strength,In straits a present aid;Therefore, although the earth removeWe will not be afraid,"

repeated the girl, her sweet voice breaking into a whispered sob at the end. They walked to the step and stood there for a moment in silence.

The minister opened the door.

"Is that you, Marg'et Ann," he asked. "I think we'd better have worship now; the children are getting sleepy."

Almost a year before patient, tireless Esther Morrison's eternal holiday had come, a man, walking leisurely along an empty mill-race, had picked up a few shining yellow particles, holding in his hand for an instant the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its moorings was swept westward on the wave of excitement that followed. Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and in harvest fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the plains.

Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discontented, caught the fever among the first. Marg'et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless. She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her part that she had forfeited her right to influence his life in any way. As for him, unconsciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt injured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the byways, his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the "way of a man with a maid."

Lloyd had indulged a hope which he could not mention to any one, least of all to Marg'et Ann, that the minister would marry again in due season. But nothing pointed to a fulfillment of this wish. The good man seemed far more interested in the abolition of slavery in the South than in the release of his daughter from bondage to her own flesh and blood, Lloyd said to himself, with the bitterness of youth. Indeed, the household had moved on with so little change in the comfort of its worthy head that a knowledge of Lloyd's wishes would have been quite as startling to the object of them as the young man's reasons for their indulgence.

The gold fever had seemed to the minister a moral disorder, calling for spiritual remedies, which he had not failed to administer in such quantity and of such strength as corresponded with the religious therapeutics of the day.

Marg'et Ann hinted of this when her lover came to her with his plans.

She was making soap, and although they stood on the windward side of the kettle, her eyes were red from the smoke of the hickory logs.

"Do you think it is just right, Lloyd?" she asked, stirring the unsavory concoction slowly with a wooden paddle. "Isn't it just a greed for gold, like gambling?"

Lloyd put both elbows on the top of the ash hopper and looked at her laughingly. He had on a straw hat lined with green calico, and his trousers were of blue jeans, held up by "galluses" of the same; but he was a handsome fellow, with sound white teeth and thick curling locks.

"I don't know as a greed for gold is any worse than a greed for corn," he said, trying to curb his voice into seriousness.

"But corn is useful – it is food – and, besides, you work for it." Marg'et Ann pushed her sunbonnet back and looked at him anxiously.

"Well, I've planted a good deal more corn than I expect to eat this year, and I was calculating to sell some of it for gold, – you wouldn't think that was wrong, would you, Marg'et Ann?"

"No, of course not; but some one will eat it, – it's useful," maintained the girl earnestly.

"I haven't found anything more useful than money yet," persisted the young man good-naturedly; "but if I come home from California with two or three bags full of gold, I'll buy up a township and raise corn by the wholesale, – that'll make it all right, won't it?"

Marg'et Ann laughed in spite of herself.

"You're such a case, Lloyd," she said, not without a note of admiration in her reproof.

When it came to the parting there was little said. Marg'et Ann hushed her lover's assurances with her own, given amid blinding tears.

"I'll be just the same, Lloyd, no matter what happens, but I can't let you make any promises; it wouldn't be right. I can't expect you to wait for me. You must do whatever seems right to you; but there won't be any harm in my loving you, – at least as long as you don't care for anybody else."

The young man said what a young man usually says when he is looking into trustful brown eyes, filled with tears he has caused and cannot prevent, and at the moment, in the sharp pain of parting, the words of one were not more or less sincere than those of the other.

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 hoarse 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 butter-making, the washing, 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-fashionedest 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."