The Lions of the Lord Part 31

His hope lasted hardly until the year ended. Before the time was over, there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not come; that the Lord's favour had been withdrawn from Israel. He knew the cause,--the shedding of innocent blood. They might have made war; indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between murder and that murder in which innocent blood should be shed; but the truth was plain. They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows.

Now the Lord's favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps another thousand years. The torture of the thing came back to him with all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of anguish. He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page. The cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him.

Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could not be far off, he went north to the April Conference. He took Prudence with him, not daring to leave her behind.

She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations. Another world lay outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the edge at its manifold fascinations. She had been there before as a child; now she was going as a woman. She remembered the city, bigger and grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile. She recalled even the strange advertis.e.m.e.nts and signs, from John and Enoch Reese, with "All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as flour, hard bread, b.u.t.ter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and whip-lashes," to the "Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool," who would "Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a supply of the Best Matches, made by himself." From William Hennefer, announcing that, "In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible Luxury the Valley Affords," to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash, flour, or wheat "at Jacob Hautz's house on the southeast corner of Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson Spencer's."

She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the plainsmen with revolvers in their belts, wearing the blue army cloak, the teamsters in leathern suits, and hors.e.m.e.n in fur coats and caps, buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and rolls of blankets behind their high Mexican saddles.

More fondly did she recall two wonderful evenings at the theatre. First had been the thrilling "Robert Macaire," then the romantic "Pizarro," in which Rolla had been a being of such overwhelming beauty that she had felt he could not be of earth.

This time her visit was an endless fever of discovery in a realm of magic and mystery, of joys she had supposed were held in reserve for those who went behind the veil. It was a new and greater city she came to now, where were buildings of undreamed splendour, many of them reaching dizzily three stories above the earth. And the shops were more fascinating than ever. She still shuddered at the wickedness of the Gentiles, but with a certain secret respect for their habits of luxury and their profusion of devices for adornment.

And there were strange new faces to be seen, people surely of a different world, of a different manner from those she had known, wearing, with apparent carelessness, garments even more strangely elegant than those in the shop windows, and speaking in strange, soft accents. She was told that these were Gentiles, tourists across the continent, who had ventured from Ogden to observe the wonders of the new Zion. The thought of the railroad was in itself thrilling. To be so near that wonderful highway to the land of the evil-doers and to a land, alas! of so many strange delights. She shuddered at her own wickedness, but fell again and again, and was held in bondage by the allurements about her. So thrilled to her soul's center was she that the pleasure of it hurt her, and the tears would come to her eyes until she felt she must be alone to cry for the awful joy of it.

The evening brought still more to endure, for they went to the play. It was a play that took her out of herself, so that the crowd was lost to her from the moment the curtain went up in obedience to a little bell that tinkled mysteriously,--either back on the stage or in her own heart, she was not sure which.

It was a love story; again that strangely moving love of one man for one woman, that seemed as sweet as it was novel to her. But there was war between the houses in the play, and the young lover had to make a way to see his beloved, climbing a high wall into her garden, climbing to her very balcony by a scarf she flung down to him. To the young woman from Amalon, these lovers' voices came with a strange compulsion, so that they played with her heart between them. She was in turn the youth, pleading in a voice that touched every heart string from low to high; then she was the woman, soft and timid, hesitating in moments of delicious doubt, yet almost fearful of her power to resist, --half-wishing to be persuaded, half-frightened lest she yield.

When the moment of surrender came, she became both of them; and, when they parted, it was as if her heart went in twain, a half with each, both to ache until they were reunited. Between the acts she awoke to reality, only to say to herself: "So much I shall have to think about--so much--I shall never be able to think about it enough."

Feverishly she followed the heart-breaking tragedy to its close, suffering poignantly the grief of each lover, suffering death for each, and feeling her life desolated when the end came.

But then the dull curtain shut her back into her own little world, where there was no love like that, and beside the little bent man she went out into the night.

The next morning had come a further delight, an invitation to a ball from Brigham. Most of the day was spent in one of the shops, choosing a gown of wondrous beauty, and having it fitted to her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FULL OF ZEST FOR THE MEASURE AS ANY YOUTH]

When she looked into the little cracked mirror that night, she saw a strange new face and figure; and, when she entered the ballroom, she felt that others noted the same strangeness, for many looked at her until she felt her cheeks burn. Then Brigham arose from a sofa, where he had been sitting with his first wife and his last. He came gallantly toward her; Brigham, whom she knew to be the most favoured of G.o.d on earth and the absolute ruler of all the realm about her--an affable, unpretentious yet dignified gentleman of seventy, who took her hand warmly in both his own, looked her over with his kindly blue eyes, and welcomed her to Zion in words of a fatherly gentleness. Later, when he had danced with some of his wives, Brigham came to dance with her, light of foot and full of zest for the measure as any youth.

Others danced with her, but during it all she kept finding herself back before the magic square that framed the land where a man loved but one woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love.

As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of wives between them.

Then she knew that what she had seen the night before had been the truth; that she could love no man who did not love her alone. She tried to imagine the lover in the play going from balcony to balcony, sighing the same impa.s.sioned love-tale to woman after woman; or to imagine him with many wives at home, to whom would be taken the news of his death in the tomb of his last. So she thought of the play and not of the ball, stepping the dances absently, and, when it was all over, she fell asleep, rejoicing that, before their death, the two dear lovers had been sealed for time and eternity, so that they could awaken together in the Kingdom.

They went home the next day, driving down the valley that rolled in billows of green between the broken ranges of the Wasatch and the Oquirrh. It was no longer of the Kingdom she thought, nor of Brigham and his wives; only of a clean-limbed youth in doublet and hose, a plumed cap, and a silken cloak, who, in a voice that brought the tears back of her eyes, told of his undying love for one woman--and of the soft, tender woman in the moonlight, who had trusted him and let herself go to him in life and in death.

The world had not ended. She thought that, in truth, it could not have ended yet; for had she not a life to live?

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

_The Lion of the Lord Sends an Order_

They reached home in very different states of mind. The girl was eager for the solitude of her favourite nook in the canon, where she could dream in peace of the wonderland she had glimpsed; but the little bent man was stirred by dread and chilled with forebodings. To him, as well as to the girl, the change in the first city of Zion had been a thing to wonder at. But what had thrilled her with amazed delight brought pain to him. Zion was no longer held inviolate.

And now the truth was much clearer to him. Not only had the Lord deferred His coming, but He had set His hand again to scatter Israel for its sin. Instead of letting them stay alone in their mountain retreat until the beginning of His reign on earth, He had brought the Gentiles upon them in overwhelming numbers. Where once a thousand miles of wilderness lay between them and Gentile wickedness, they were now hemmed about with it, and even it polluted the streets of the holy city itself.

Far on the east the adventurous Gentile had first pushed out of the timber to the richly gra.s.sed prairies; then, later, on to the plains, scorched brown with their spa.r.s.e gra.s.s, driving herds of cattle ahead, and stopping to make farms by the way. And now on the west, on the east, and on the north, the Lord had let them pitch their tents and build their cabins, where they would barter their lives for gold and flocks and furs and timber, for orchard fruits and the grains of the field.

Little by little they had ventured toward the outer ramparts of Israel, their numbers increasing year by year, and the daring of their onslaughts against the desert and mountain wastes. With the rifle and the axe they had made Zion but a station on the great highway between the seas; a place where curious and irreverent Gentiles stopped to gaze in wonder at and perhaps to mock the Lord's chosen; a place that would become but one link in a chain of Gentile cities, that would be forced to conform to the meretricious customs of Gentile benightedness.

It had been a fine vengeance upon them for their sin; one not unworthy of Him who wrought it. It had come so insidiously, with such apparent naturalness, little by little--a settler here, a settler there; here an acre of gray desert charmed to yellow wheat; there a pouch of shining gold washed from the burning sands; another wagon-train with hopeful men and faithful women; a cabin, two cabins, a settlement, a schoolhouse, a land of unwalled villages,--and democracy; a wicked government of men set up in the very face and front of G.o.d-governed Israel.

At first they had come with ox-teams, but this was slow, and the big Kentucky mules brought them faster; then had come the great rolling Concord stages with their six horses; then the folly of an electric telegraph, so that instant communication might be had with far-off Babylon; and now the capstone in the arch of the Lord's vengeance,--a railway,--flashing its crowded coaches over the Saints' old trail in sixty easy hours,--a trail they had covered with their oxen in ninety days of hardship. The rock of their faith would now be riven, the veil of their temple rent, and their leaders corrupted.

Even of Brigham, the daring already told tales that promised this last thing should come to pa.s.s; how he was become fat-souled, grasping, and tricky, using his sacred office to enlarge his wealth, seizing the canons with their precious growths of wood, the life-giving waterways, and the herding-grounds; taking even from the t.i.thing, of which he rendered no stewardship, and hiding away millions of the dollars for which the faithful had toiled themselves into desert graves. Truly, thought Joel Rae, that b.l.o.o.d.y day in the Meadows had been cunningly avenged.

One morning, a few weeks after he had reached home from the north, he received a call from Seth Wright.

"Here's a letter Brother Brigham wanted me to be sure and give you,"

said this good man. "He said he didn't know you was allowing to start back so soon, or he'd have seen you in person."

He took the letter and glanced at the superscription, written in Brigham's rather unformed but plain and very decided-looking hand.

"So you've been north, Brother Seth? What do you think of Israel there?"

The views of the Wild Ram of the Mountains partook in certain ways of his own discouragement.

"Zion has run to seed, Brother Rae; the rank weeds of Babylon is a-goin'

to choke it out, root and branch! We ain't got no chance to live a pure and G.o.dly life any longer, with railroads coming in, and Gentiles with their fancy contraptions. It weakens the spirit, and it plays the very hob with the women. Soon as they git up there now, and see them new styles from St. Looey or Chicago, they git downright daft. No more homespun for 'em, no more valley tan, no more parched corn for coffee, nor beet mola.s.ses nor unbolted flour. Oh, I know what I'm talkin'

about."

The tone of the good man became as of one who remembers hurts put upon his own soul. He continued:

"You no sooner let a woman git out of the wagon there now than she's crazy for a pink nubia, and a sh.e.l.l breastpin, and a dress-pattern, and a whole bolt of factory and a set of chiny cups and saucers and some of this here perfumery soap. And _that_ don't do 'em. Then they let out a yell for varnished rockin'-cheers with flowers painted all over 'em in different colours, and they tell you they got to have bristles carpet--bristles on it that long, prob'ly!" The injured man indicated a length of some eighteen or twenty inches.

"Of course all them grand things would please our feelings, but they take a woman's mind off of the Lord, and she neglects her work in the field, and then pretty soon the Lord gets mad and sics the Gentiles on to us again. But I made my women toe the mark mighty quick, I told 'em they could all have one day a week to work out, and make a little pin-money, hoein' potatoes or plantin' corn or some such business, and every cent they earned that way they could squander on this here pink-and-blue soap, if they was a mind to; but not a York shilling of my money could they have for such persuasions of Satan--not while we got plenty of soap-grease and wood-ashes to make lye of and a soap-kittle that cost four eighty-five, in the very Lord's stronghold. I dress my women comfortable and feed 'em well--not much variety but plenty _of_, and I've done right by 'em as a husband, and I tell 'em if they want to be led away now into the sinful path of worldliness, why, I ain't goin'

to have any ruthers about it at all! But you be careful, Brother Rae, about turning your women loose in one of them unG.o.dly stores up there.

That reminds me, you had Prudence up to Conference, and I guess you don't know what that letter's about."

"Why, no; do you?"

"Well, Brother Brigham only let a word or two drop, but plain enough; he don't have to use many. He was a little mite afraid some one down here would cut in ahead of him."

Joel Rae had torn open the big blue envelope in a sudden fear, and now he read in Brigham's well-known script:--

"DEAR BROT. JOEL:--

"I was ancus to see more of your daughter, and would of kept her hear at my house if you had not hurried off. I will let you seal her to me when I come to Pine valle next, late this summer or after Oct. conference. If anything happens and I am to bisy will have you bring her hear. Tell her of this and what it will mean to her in the Lord's kingdom and do not let her company with gentiles or with any of the young brethren around there that might put Notions into her head. Try to due right and never faint in well duing, keep the faith of the gospel and I pray the Lord to bless you. BRIGHAM YOUNG."

The shrewd old face of the Bishop had wrinkled into a smile of quiet observation as the other read the letter. In relating the incident to the Entablature of Truth subsequently, he said of Joel Rae at the moment he looked up from this letter: "He'll never be whiter when he's dead! I see in a minute that the old man had him on the bark."

"You know what's in this, Brother Seth--you know that Brigham wants Prudence?" Joel Rae had asked, looking up from the letter, upon which both his hands had closed tightly.

"Well, I told you he dropped a word or two, jest by way of keeping off the Princes of Israel down here."

"I must go to Salt Lake at once and talk to him."