The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories

"Now hurry!"

A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him; but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things – not altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something else which he did not dare to say even to himself – something which made him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued, arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or, what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation – as if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice. He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive conscience.

And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision – half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the "queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely, since it is to make you strong and well."

Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.

"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain by saving Dysart, except" – he smiled grimly – "her rascally father's good name."

The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a night.

The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul beyond endurance.

"Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now I believe he's a Christian."

Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.

"Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for that," – she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply, – "it's soundin' brass; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not."

"Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick."

Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained curiosity.

"I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can manage now, without tacklin' another."

"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know." There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth.

"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple.

Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the cañon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do – this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the cañon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the cañon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things.

The girl paused and peered down into the cañon inquiringly.

"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.

She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we have no more."

Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.

She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.

"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy thinking."

As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in the path.

Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.

"I – I – love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a voice when he thinks himself alone.

The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.

"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"

Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain why I have told you," he answered.

"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at him steadily.

Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the naked truth:

"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return – because I have promised to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."

He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death where he might easily have chosen dishonor.

His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of the cañon at the snow of San Antonio.

"You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl, who loves you, and live a lie?" she asked without looking at him.

"My God! but you make it hard!" groaned Palmerston.

She faced about haughtily.

"I make it hard!" she exclaimed. "I have been afraid of you – not for myself, but for – for others, about something in which one might be mistaken. And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman out of her life, a girl who loves you – who promised to marry you because you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of your love for her. And this is what men call honor! Do you know what I intend to do? I intend to write to this girl and tell her what you have told me. Then she may marry you if she wishes. But she shall know. You shall not feed her on husks all her life, if I can help it. And because I intend to do this, even if – even if I loved you, I could never see you again!"

Palmerston knew that he stood aside to let her pass and walk rapidly out of the cañon.

The call of insects and the twitter of linnets seemed to deepen into a roar. A faint "halloo" came from far up the mountain-side, and in the distance men's voices rang across the cañon.

A workman came running down the path, almost stumbling over Palmerston in his haste.

"Where's the old man – where's Dysart?" he panted, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. "We've struck a flow that's washing us into the middle of next week. The old professor made a blamed good guess this time, sure."

Marg'et Ann

It was sacrament Sabbath in the little Seceder congregation at Blue Mound. Vehicles denoting various degrees of prosperity were beginning to arrive before the white meeting-house that stood in a patch of dog-fennel by the roadside.

The elders were gathered in a solemn, bareheaded group on the shady side of the building, arranging matters of deep spiritual portent connected with the serving of the tables. The women entered the church as they arrived, carrying or leading their fat, sunburned, awe-stricken children, and sat in subdued and reverent silence in the unpainted pews. There was a smell of pine and peppermint and last week's gingerbread in the room, and a faint rustle of bonnet strings and silk mantillas as each newcomer moved down the aisle; but there was no turning of heads or vain, indecorous curiosity concerning arrivals on the part of those already in the pews.

Outside, the younger men moved about slowly in their creased black clothes, or stood in groups talking covertly of the corn planting which had begun; there was an evident desire to compensate by lowered voices and lack of animated speech for the manifest irreverence of the topic.

Marg'et Ann and her mother came in the farm wagon, that the assisting minister, the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who was to preach the "action sermon," might ride in the buggy with the pastor. There were four wooden chairs in the box of the wagon, and the floor was strewn with sweet-scented timothy and clover. Mrs. Morrison and Miss Nancy McClanahan, who had come with her brother from Cedar Township to communion, sat in two of the chairs, and Marg'et Ann and her younger sister occupied the others. One of the boys sat on the high spring seat with his brother Laban, who drove the team, and the other children were distributed on the hay between their elders.

Marg'et Ann wore her mother's changeable silk made over and a cottage bonnet with pink silk strings and skirt and a white ruche with a wreath of pink flowers in the face trimming. Her brown hair was combed over her ears like a sheet of burnished bronze and held out by puff combs, and she had a wide embroidered collar, shaped like a halo, fastened by a cairngorm in a square setting of gold.

Miss Nancy McClanahan and her mother talked in a subdued way of the Fast Day services, and of the death of Squire Davidson, who lived the other side of the creek, and the probable result of Esther Jane Skinner's trouble with her chest. There was a tacit avoidance of all subjects pertaining to the flesh except its ailments, but there was no long-faced hypocrisy in the tones or manner of the two women. Marg'et Ann listened to them and watched the receding perspective of the corn rows in the brown fields. She had her token tied securely in the corner of her handkerchief, and every time she felt it she thought regretfully of Lloyd Archer. She had hoped he would make a confession of faith this communion, but he had not come before the session at all. She knew he had doubts concerning close communion, and she had heard him say that certain complications of predestination and free will did not appear reasonable to him. Marg'et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have thought of criticising the Creator for making the sky blue instead of green as for any of His immutable decrees as set forth in the Confession of Faith. It did not prevent her liking Lloyd Archer that her father and several of the elders whom he had ventured to engage in religious discussion pronounced him a dangerous young man, but it made it impossible for her to marry him. So she had been quite anxious that he should see his way clear to join the church.

They had talked about it during intermission last Sabbath; but Marg'et Ann, having arrived at her own position by a process of complete self-abnegation, found it hard to know how to proceed with this stalwart sinner who insisted upon understanding things. It is true he spoke humbly enough of himself, as one who had not her light, but Marg'et Ann was quite aware that she did not believe the Catechism because she understood it. She had no doubt it could be understood, and she thought regretfully that Lloyd Archer would be just the man to understand it if he would study it in the right spirit. Just what the right spirit was she could not perhaps have formulated, except that it was the spirit that led to belief in the Catechism. She had hoped that he would come to a knowledge of the truth through the ministrations of the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who was said to be very powerful in argument; but he had found fault with Mr. McClanahan's logic on Fast Day in a way that was quite disheartening, and he evidently did not intend to come forward this communion at all. Her father had spoken several times in a very hopeless manner of Lloyd's continued resistance of the Holy Spirit, and Marg'et Ann thought with a shiver of Squire Atwater, who was an infidel, and was supposed by some to have committed the unpardonable sin. She remembered once when she and one of the younger boys had gone into his meadow for wild strawberries he had come out and talked to them in a jovial way, and when they were leaving, had patted her little brother's head, and told him, with a great, corpulent laugh, to "ask his father how the devil could be chained to the bottomless pit." She did not believe Lloyd could become like that, but still it was dangerous to resist the Spirit.

Miss Nancy McClanahan had a bit of mint between the leaves of her psalm-book, and she smelled it now and then in a niggardly way, as if the senses should be but moderately indulged on the Sabbath. She had on black netted mitts which left the enlarged knuckles of her hands exposed, and there was a little band of Guinea gold on one of her fingers, with two almost obliterated hearts in loving juxtaposition. Marg'et Ann knew that she had been a hardworking mother to the Rev. Samuel's family ever since the death of his wife, and she wondered vaguely how it would seem to take care of Laban's children in case Lloyd should fail to make his peace with God.