A Daughter of Witches: A Romance

by Joanna E. Wood

She knew that Lanty did not love her passionately, but to this strange woman there was an added charm in the thought that she must do battle for the love she craved. Her whole soul rose to the combat, which she might have gained had she not made a fatal error in overlooking the real issue, which was not to make Lanty love her, but to make him cease loving Mabella.

Mabella’s face, in the soft dusk, wore an exalted expression of purity and tremulous happiness. There were soft shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands trembled as she plucked a flower to fragments. Her hidden happiness had so winged her spirit that her slight body was sorely tired by its eagerness. She started at each sound, and smiled at nothing. Sweet Mabella Lansing did not dream that these eyes of hers had already betrayed her precious secret, but they had been read by a kindly heart. Sidney Martin thought he never in his life had seen anything so sweet as this girl’s face, lit by the first illumination of love’s torch. An epicure in the senses, he realized keenly the delicacy of this phase of young life—like the velvet sheen upon a flower freshly unfolded, like the bloom upon the grape, like the down upon a butterfly’s wing, lovely, but destroyed by a touch. Beneath this evanescent charm he knew there was deep, true feeling, but he sighed to think that the world might mar its unconsciousness.

Sidney Martin had no place in his musings for God, yet in the face of Mabella Lansing he saw a purity, a love, a look of young delight so holy, that almost he was persuaded to think of a Divinity beyond that of human nature. But he said to himself, “After all how sweet a thing human nature is; how cruel to seek to believe in that ancient smirch, called original sin. Has sin part or place in this girl, or in Vashti, Queen Vashti, with the marvellous eyes and the splendid calm presence? Vashti, who looks at life so calmly, so benignly——” and so on, for begin where he would, his thoughts reverted to Vashti. She was first and last with him for ever. The Alpha and Omega of his life.

But these things were all inarticulate, and in the old scented garden the three talked of other things. The girls were telling Sidney the story of the Lansing Legacy.

Long, long before, when the Lansings were by far the most numerous family in the country side, when a Lansing preached in the church, when a Lansing taught in the little school, where Lansing children outnumbered all the others put together, the doyen of the family was a quaint old man—Abel Lansing. He was very old, a living link between the generations, and spoke, as one having authority, of the days of old. Although a bachelor, he was yet patriarchal in his rule over the wide family connection, and they brought him their disputes to be adjusted, and came to him to be consoled in their griefs. When they were prosperous, he preserved their humility by reminding them of the case of Jeshurun, “who waxed fat and kicked,” and the dire results of that conduct; when they complained of poverty or hardship, he told them they should be thankful for the mercies vouchsafed to them, contrasting their lot with that of their fathers, who threshed their scanty crops with a flail upon the ice, in lieu of a threshing floor, carried guns as well as bibles in church, and ate their hearts out yearning for the far-off hedges of England when they had not yet grown to love their sombre hills of refuge.

He was very eloquent, evidently both with God and man. It was his prayer, so tradition said, which brought the great black frost to an end, and it was a prayer of his, addressed to human ears, which stayed the hand of vengeance, when uplifted against captive Indians. How excusable vengeance would have been in this case, and how well mercy was repaid, is known to all who have read of the troublous times of old.

In fullness of years, old Abel Lansing died, and dying, left all he had to the poor of the parish, save and excepting a hoard of broad Spanish pieces. How he had come by these dollars no one knew. The commonly accepted idea was that they had been brought from England by the first Lansing, and kept sacredly in case of some great need. Be that as it may, there they were, stored in the drawer of the old oak coffer which had been made in England by hands long dead.

And Abel Lansing’s will directed that to each Lansing there should be given one piece, and in the quaint phraseology of the times, Abel had set down the conditions of his gift. The recipients were bidden to guard the coin zealously and never to part with it save in extremis—to buy bread, save life or defend the Faith.

And strangely enough, when the money was portioned out, it was found that for each broad silver piece there was a Lansing, and for each Lansing a broad silver piece. No more and no less. And the country folk, hardly yet divorced from belief in the black art, with the unholy smoke of the burned witches still stinging their eyes, looked at each other curiously when they spoke of the circumstances.

Oh, what an eloquent human history might be written out, if the tale of each of these coins was known! What an encyclopædia of human joys and sorrows! For no Lansing lightly parted with his Spanish dollar, upon the possession of which the luck of the Lansings depended. They were exchanged as gages of love between Lansing lovers. They were given Lansing babies to “bite on,” when they began cutting their teeth. They had been laid upon dead eyes. They had been saved from burning houses at the peril of life. And dead hands had been unclosed to show one held clasped even in the death pang.