extra feet of Mr. Rouse's doubtful version with skill, and gliding
nimbly over the gaps in prosody by the aid of his dextrously elongated
syllables.
Some of the older men seemed to dwell upon these peculiarities of
versification as being distinctively ecclesiastical and therefore
spiritually edifying, and brought up the musical rear of such couplets
with long-drawn and profoundly impressive "shy-un's" and "i-tee's;" but
these irregularities found little favor in the eyes of the younger
people, who had attended singing-school and learned to read buckwheat
notes under the direction of Jonathan Loomis, the precentor.
Marg'et Ann listened to the Rev. Mr. McClanahan's elaborately divided
discourse, wondering what piece of the logical puzzle Lloyd would
declare to be missing; and she glanced rather wistfully once or twice
toward the Amen corner where the young man sat, with his head thrown
back and his eager eyes fixed upon the minister's face.
When the intermission came, she ate her sweet cake and her triangle of
dried apple pie with the others, and then walked toward the graveyard
behind the church. She knew that Lloyd would follow her, and she prayed
for grace to speak a word in season.
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 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.