The Wizard's Daughter, and Other Stories

"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 remove
We 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."

"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 chore 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," asserted 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 Township 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 worship of God, 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, "Rushin' 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 multitude 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,