FullReads

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,
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 pass 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:–