The Lions of the Lord Part 27

"That I did not see Frances just now I am glad, For Winifred says she looked sullen and sad.

When I ask her the reason, I know very well That Frances will blush the true reason to tell.

"And I never again shall expect to hear said That she pouts at her milk with a toast of white bread, When both are as good as can possibly be-- Though Betsey, for breakfast, perhaps may have tea."

With no sort of propriety could be set down in printed words the occurrence that led to her reciting twenty times, somewhat defiantly in the beginning, but at last with the accents and expression of countenance proper to remorse, the following verses:--

"Who was it that I lately heard Repeating an improper word?

I do not like to tell her name Because she is so much to blame."

Indeed, she came to thunder the final verse with excellent gestures of condemnatory rage:--

"Go, naughty child! and hide your face, I grieve to see you in disgrace; Go! you have forfeited to-day All right at trap and ball to play."

Nor is it necessary to go back of the very significant lines themselves to explain the circ.u.mstance of her having the following for a half-day's burden:--

"Jack Parker was a cruel boy, For mischief was his sole employ; And much it grieved his friends to find His thoughts so wickedly inclined.

"But all such boys unless they mend May come to an unhappy end, Like Jack, who got a fractured skull Whilst bellowing at a furious bull."

Nor is there sufficient reason to say why she was often counselled to regard as her model:--

"Miss Lydia Banks, though very young, Will never do what's rude or wrong; When spoken to she always tries To give the most polite replies."

And painful, indeed, would it be to relate the events of one sad day which culminated in her declaiming at night, with far more than perfunctory warmth, and in a voice scarce dry of tears:--

"Miss Lucy Wright, though not so tall, Was just the age of Sophy Ball; But I have always understood Miss Sophy was not half so good; For as they both had faded teeth, Their teacher sent for Doctor Heath.

"But Sophy made a dreadful rout And would not have hers taken out; While Lucy Wright endured the pain, Nor did she ever once complain.

Her teeth returned quite sound and white, While Sophy's ached both day and night."

Yet her days were by no means all of reproof nor was her reproof ever harsher than the more or less pointed selections from the moral verses could inflict. Under the watchful care of Martha she flourished and was happy, her mother in little, a laughing whirlwind of tender flesh, tireless feet, dancing eyes, hair of sunlight that was darkening as she grew older, and a mind that seemed to him she called father a miracle of unfoldment. It was a mind not so quickly receptive as he could have wished to the learning he tried patiently to impart; he wondered, indeed, if she were not unduly frivolous even for a child of six; for she would refuse to study unless she could have the doll she called Bishop Wright with her and pretend that she taught the lesson to him, finding him always stupid and loth to learn. He hoped for better things from her mind as she aged, watching anxiously for the buddings of reason and religion, praying daily that she should be increased in wisdom as in stature. He had become so used to the look of her mother in her face that it now and then gave him an instant of unspeakable joy. But the sound of his own voice calling her "Prudence" would shock him from this as with an icy blast of truth.

When the children of Amalon came to play with her, the little Nephis, Moronis, Lehis, and Juabs, he saw she was a creature apart from them, of another fashion of mind and body. He saw, too, that with some native intuition she seemed to divine this, and to a.s.sume command even of those older than herself. Thus Wish Wright and his brother, Welcome, both her seniors by several years, were her awe-bound slaves; and the twin daughters of Zebedee Bloom obeyed her least whim without question, even when it involved them in situations more or less delicate. With her quick ear for rhythm she had been at once impressed by their names--impressed to a degree that savoured of fascination. She would seat the two before her, range the other children beside them, and then lead the chorus in a spirited chant of these names:--

"Isa Vinda Exene Bloom!

Ella Minda Almarine Bloom!"

repeating this a long time until they were all breathless, and the solemn twins themselves were looking embarra.s.sed and rather foolishly pleased.

As he observed her day by day in her joyous growth, it was inevitable that he came more and more to observe the woman who was caring for her, and it was thus on one night in late summer that he awoke to an awful truth,--a truth that brought back the words of the woman's former husband with a new meaning.

He had heard Prudence say to her, "You are a pretty mamma," and suddenly there came rushing upon him the sum of all the impressions his eyes had taken of her since that day when the Bishop had spoken. He trembled and became weak under the a.s.sault, feeling that in some insidious way his strength had been undermined. He went out into the early evening to be alone, but she, presently, having put the child to bed, came and stood near, silently in the doorway.

He looked and saw she was indeed made new, restored to the l.u.s.tre and fulness of her young womanhood. He remembered then that she had long been silent when he came near her, plainly conscious of his presence but with an apparent constraint, with something almost tentative in her manner. With her return to health and comeliness there had come back to her a thousand little graces of dress and manner and speech. She drew him, with his starved love of beauty and his need of companionship; drew him with a mighty power, and he knew it at last. He remembered how he had felt and faintly thrilled under a certain soft suppression in her tones when she had spoken to him of late; this had drawn him, and the new light in her eyes and her whole freshened womanhood, even before he knew it. Now that he did know it he felt himself shaken and all but lost; clutching weakly at some support that threatened every moment to give way.

And she was his wife, his who had starved year after year for the light touch of a woman's hand and the tones of her voice that should be for him alone. He knew now that he had ached and sickened in his yearning for this, and she stood there for him in the soft night. He knew she was waiting, and he knew he desired above all things else to go to her; that the comfort of her, his to take, would give him new life, new desires, new powers; that with her he would revive as she had done. He waited long, indulging freely in hesitation, bathing his wearied soul in her nearness--yielding in fancy.

Then he walked off into the night, down through the village, past the light of open doors, and through the voices that sounded from them, out on to the bare bench of the mountain--his old refuge in temptation--where he could be safe from submitting to what his soul had forbidden. He had meant to take up a cross, but before his very eyes it had changed to be a snare set for him by the Devil.

He stayed late on the ground in the darkness, winning the battle for himself over and over, decisively, he thought, at the last. But when he went home she was there in the doorway to meet him, still silent, but with eyes that told more than he dared to hear. He thought she had in some way divined his struggle, and was waiting to strengthen the odds against him, with her face in the light of a candle she held above her head.

He went by her without speaking, afraid of his weakness, and rushed to his little cell-like room to fight the battle over. As a last source of strength he took from its hiding-place the little Bible. And as it fell open naturally at the blood-washed page a new thing came, a new torture.

No sooner had his eyes fallen on the stain than it seemed to him to cry out of itself, so that he started back from it. He shut the book and the cries were stilled; he opened it and again he heard them--far, loud cries and low groans close to his ear; then long piercing screams stifled suddenly too low, horrible gurglings. And before him came the inscrutable face with the deep gray eyes and the shining lips, lifting, with love in the eyes, above a gashed throat.

He closed the book and fell weakly to his knees to pray brokenly, and almost despairingly: "Help me to keep down this self within me; let it ask for nothing; fan the fires until they consume it! _Bow me, bend me, break me, burn me out--burn me out_!"

In the morning, when he said, "Martha, the harvest is over now, and I want you to go north with me," she prepared to obey without question.

He talked freely to her on the way, though it is probable that he left in her mind little more than dark confusion, beyond the one clear fact of his wish. As to this, she knew she must have no desire but to comply.

Reaching Salt Lake City, they went at once to Brigham's office. When they came out they came possessed of a doc.u.ment in duplicate, reciting that they both did "covenant, promise, and agree to dissolve all the relations which have hitherto existed between us as husband and wife, and to keep ourselves separate and apart from each other from this time forth."

This was the simple divorce which Brigham was good enough to grant to such of the Saints as found themselves unhappily married, and wished it.

As Joel Rae handed the Prophet the fee of ten dollars, which it was his custom to charge for the service, Brigham made some timely remarks. He said he feared that Martha had been perverse and rebellious; that her first husband had found her so; and that it was doubtless for the good of all that her second had taken the resolution to divorce her. He was afraid that Brother Joel was an inferior judge of women; but he had surely shown himself to be generous in the provision he was making for the support of this contumacious wife.

They parted outside the door of the little office, and he kissed her for the first time since they had been married--on the forehead.

CHAPTER XXVII.

_A New Cross Taken up and an Old Enemy Forgiven_

Christina would now be left alone with the cares of the house, and he knew he ought to have some one to help her. The fever of sacrifice was also upon him. And so he found another derelict, to whom he was sealed forever.

At a time of more calmness he might have balked at this one. She was a cross, to be sure, and it was now his part in life to bear crosses. But there were plenty of these, and even one vowed to a life of sacrifice, he suspected, need not grossly abuse the powers of discrimination with which Heaven had seen fit to endow him. But he had lately been on the verge of a seething maelstrom, balancing there with unholy desire and wickedly looking far down, and the need to atone for this sin excited him to indiscretions.

It was not that this star in his crown was in her late thirties and less than lovely. He had learned, indeed, that in the game which, for the chastening of his soul, he now played with the Devil, it were best to choose stars whose charms could excite to little but conduct of a saintlike seemliness. The fat, dumpy figure of this woman, therefore, and her round, flat, moonlike face, her mouse-coloured wisps of hair cut squarely off at the back of her neck, were points of a merit that was in its whole effect nothing less than distinguished.

But she talked. Her tones played with the constancy of an ever-living fountain. Artlessly she lost herself in the sound of their music, until she also lost her sense of proportion, of light and shade, of simple, Christian charity. Her name was Lorena Sears, and she had come in with one of the late trains of converts, without friends, relatives, or means, with nothing but her natural gifts and an abiding faith in the saving powers of the new dispensation. And though she was so alive in her faith, rarely informed in the Scriptures, bubbling with enthusiasm for the new covenant, the new Zion, and the second coming of the Messiah, there had seemed to be no place for her. She had not been asked in marriage, nor had she found it easy to secure work to support herself.

"She's strong," said Brigham, to his inquiring Elder, "and a good worker, but even Brother Heber Kimball wouldn't marry her; and between you and me, Brother Joel, I never knew Heber to shy before at anything that would work. You can see that, yourself, by looking over his household."

But, after the needful preliminaries, and a very little coy hesitation on the part of the lady, Lorena Sears, spinster, native of Elyria, Ohio, was duly sealed to, for time and eternity, and became a star forever in the crown of, Joel Rae, Elder after the Order of Melchisedek in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and President of the Amalon Stake of Zion.

In the bustle of the start south there were, of necessity, moments in which the crown's new star could not talk; but these blessed respites were at an end when at last they came to the open road.

At first, as her speech flowed on, he looked sidelong at her, in a trouble of fear and wonder; then, at length, absently, trying to put his mind elsewhere and to leave her voice as the muted murmur of a distant torrent. He succeeded fairly well in this, for Lorena combined admirably in herself the parts of speaker and listener, and was not, he thankfully noted, watchful of his attention.

But in spite of all he could do, sentences would come to seize upon his ears: "... No chance at all back there for a good girl with any heart in her unless she's one of the doll-baby kind, and, thank fortune, I never was _that_! Now there was Wilbur Watkins--his father was president of the board of chosen freeholders--Wilbur had a way of saying, 'Lorena's all right--she weighs a hundred and seventy-eight pounds on the big scales down to the city meatmarket, and it's most of it heart--a hundred and seventy-eight pounds and most all heart--and she'd be a prize to anybody,' but then, that was his way,--Wilbur was a good deal of a take-on,--and there was never anything between him and me. And when the Elder come along and begun to preach about the new Zion and tell about the strange ways that the Lord had ordered people to act out here, something kind of went all through me, and I says, 'That's the place for _me_!' Of course, the saying is, 'There ain't any Gawd west of the Missouri,' but them that says it ain't of the house of Israel--lots of folks purtends to be great Bible readers, but pin 'em right down and what do you find?--you find they ain't really studied it--not what you could call _pored_ over it. They fuss through a chapter here and there, and rush lickety-brindle through another, and ain't got the blessed truth out of any of 'em--little fine points, like where the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart every time, for why?--because if He hadn't 'a'

done it Pharaoh would 'a' give in the very first time and spoiled the whole thing. And then the Lord would visit so plumb natural and commonlike with Moses--like tellin' him, 'I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of G.o.d Almighty, for by my name Jehovah was I not known unto them.' I thought that was awful cute and friendly, stoppin' to talk about His name that way. Oh, I've spent hours and hours over the blessed Book. I bet I know something you don't, now--what verse in the Bible has every letter in the alphabet in it except 'J'? Of course you wouldn't know. Plenty of preachers don't. It's the twenty-first verse of the seventh chapter of the book of Ezra. And the Book of Mormon--I do love to git set down in a rocker with my shoes off--I'm kind of a heavy-footed person to be on my feet all day--and that blessed Book in my hands--such beautiful language it uses--that verse I love so, 'He went forth among the people waving the rent of his garment in the air that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent,'--that's sure enough Bible language, ain't it? And yet some folks say the Book of Mormon ain't inspired. And that lovely verse in Second Niphi, first chapter, fourteenth verse: 'Hear the words of a trembling parent whose limbs you must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave from whence no traveller can return.' Back home the school-teacher got hold of that--he's an awful smarty--and he says, 'Oh, that's from Shakespeare,' or some such book, just like that--and I just give him one look, and I says, 'Mr. Lyman Hickenlooper, if you'll take notice,' I says, 'you'll see those words was composed by the angel Moroni over two thousand years ago and revealed to Joseph Smith in the sacred light of the Urim and Thummim,' I says, and the plague-oned smarty snickered right in my face--and say, now, what did you and your second git a separation for?"

He was called back by the stopping of her voice, but she had to repeat her question before he understood it. The Devil tempted him in that moment. He was on the point of answering, "Because she talked too much," but instead he climbed out of the wagon to walk. He walked most of the three hundred miles in the next ten days. Nights and mornings he falsely pretended to be deaf.

He found himself in this long walk full of a pained discouragement; not questioning or doubting, for he had been too well trained ever to do either. But he was disturbed by a feeling of bafflement, as might be a ground-mole whose burrow was continually destroyed by an enemy it could not see. This feeling had begun in Salt Lake City, for there he had seen that the house of Israel was no longer unspotted of the world. Since the army with its camp-followers had come there was drunkenness and vice, the streets resounded with strange oaths, and the midnight murder was common. Even Brigham seemed to have become a gainsayer in behalf of Mammon, and the people, quick to follow his lead, were indulging in unG.o.dly trade with Gentiles; even with the army that had come to invade them. And more and more the Gentiles were coming in. He heard strange tales of the new facilities afforded them. There was actually a system of wagon-trains regularly hauling freight from the Missouri to the Pacific; there was a stage-route bringing pa.s.sengers and mail from Babylon; even Horace Greeley had been publicly entertained in Zion,--accorded honour in the Lord's stronghold. There was talk, too, of a pony-express, to bring them mail from the Missouri in six days; and a few visionaries were prophesying that a railroad would one day come by them. The desert was being peopled all about them, and neighbours were forcing a way up to their mountain retreat.

It seemed they were never to weld into one vast chain the broken links of the fated house of Abraham; never to be free from Gentile contamination. He groaned in spirit as he went--walking well ahead of his wagon.