"Take her along; likely he"ll marry her right off."
"But I can"t--I couldn"t--Brother Seth, I wish her not to marry him."
The Bishop stared blankly at him, his amazement freezing upon his lips, almost, the words he uttered.
"Not--want--her--to marry--Brother Brigham Young, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all the world!"
"I must go up and talk to him at once."
"You won"t talk him out of it. Brother Brigham has the habit of prevailing. Of course, he"s closer than d.i.c.k"s hat-band, but she"ll have the best there is until he takes another."
"He may listen to reason--"
"Reason?--why, man, what more reason could he want,--with that splendid young critter before him, throwing back her head, and flashing her big, shiny eyes, and lifting her red lips over them little white teeth--reason enough for Brother Brigham--or for other people I could name!"
"But he wouldn"t be so hard--taking her away from me--"
Something in the tones of this appeal seemed to touch even the heart of the Wild Ram of the Mountains, though it told of a suffering he could not understand.
"Brigham is very sot in his ways," he said, after a little, with a curious soft kindness in his voice,--"in fact, a _sotter_ man I never knew!"
He drove off, leaving the other staring at the letter now crumpled in his hand. He also said, in his subsequent narrative to the Entablature of Truth: "You know I"ve always took Brother Rae for jest a natural born _not_, a shy little cuss that could be whiffed around by anything and everything, but when I drove off he had a plumb ornery fighting look in them deep-set eyes of his, and blame me if I didn"t someway feel sorry for him,--he"s that warped up, like an old water-soaked sycamore plank that gits laid out in the sun."
But this look of belligerence had quickly pa.s.sed from the face of Joel Rae when the first heat of his resentment had cooled.
After that he merely suffered, torn by his reverence for Brigham, who represented on earth no less a power than the first person of the Trinity, and by the love for this child who held him to a past made beautiful by his love for her mother,--by a thousand youthful dreams and fancies and wayward hopes that he had kept fresh through all the years; torn between Brigham, whose word was as the word of G.o.d, and Prudence who was the living flower of her dead mother and all his dead hopes.
Could he persuade Brigham to leave her? The idea of refusing him, if he should persist, was not seriously to be thought of. For twenty-five years he, in common with the other Saints, had held Brigham"s lightest command to be above all earthly law; to be indeed the revealed will of G.o.d. His kingship in things material no less than in things spiritual had been absolute, undisputed, undoubted--indeed, gloried in by the people as much as Brigham himself gloried when he declared it in and out of the tabernacle. Their blind obedience had been his by divine right, by virtue of his iron will, his matchless courage, his tireless spirit, and his understanding of their hearts and their needs, born of his common suffering with them. Nothing could be done without his sanction.
No man could enter a business, or change his home from north to south, without first securing his approval; even the merchants who went east or west for goods must first report to him their wishes, to see if he had contrary orders for them! From the invitation list of a ball to the financing of a corporation, his word was law; in matters of marriage as well--no man daring even to seek a wife until the Prophet had approved his choice. The whole valley for five hundred miles was filled with his power as with another air that the Saints must breathe. In his oft-repeated own phrase, it was his G.o.d-given right to dictate all matters, "even to the ribbons a woman should wear, or the setting up of a stocking." And his people had not only submitted blindly to his rule, but had reverenced and even loved him for it.
Twenty-five years of such allegiance, preceded by a youth in which the same gospel of obedience was bred into his marrow--this was not to be thrown off by a mere heartache; not to be more than striven against, half-heartedly, in the first moment of anguish.
He thought of Brigham"s home in the Lion House, the score or so of plain, elderly women, hard-working, simple-minded; the few favourites of his later years, women of sightlier exteriors; and he pictured the long dining-room, where, at three o"clock each afternoon, to the sound of a bell, these wives and half a hundred children marched in, while the Prophet sat benignantly at the head of the table and blessed the meal.
He tried to fix Prudence in this picture, but at every effort he saw, not her, the shy, sweet woman, full of surprised tenderness, but a creature hardened, debased, devoid of charm, dehumanised, a brood-beast of the field.
And yet this was not rebellion. His mind was clear as to that. He could not refuse, even had refusal not been to incur the severest penalties both in this world and in the world to come. The habit of obedience was all-powerful.
Presently he saw Prudence coming across the fields in the late afternoon from the road that led to the canon. He watched her jealously until she drew near, then called her to him. In a few words he told her very gravely the honour that was to be done her.
When she fully understood, he noted that her mind seemed to attain an unusual clearness, her speech a new conciseness; that she was displaying a force of will he had never before suspected.
Her reply, in effect, was that she would not marry Brigham Young if all the angels in heaven came to entreat her; that the thought was not a pretty one; and that the matter might be considered settled at that very moment. "It"s too silly to talk about," she concluded.
Almost fearfully he looked at her, yielding a little to her spirit of rebellion, yet trying not to yield; trying not to rejoice in the amused flash of her dark eyes and the decision of her tones. But then, as he looked, and as she still faced him, radiant in her confidence, he felt himself going with her--plunging into the tempting wave of apostasy.
CHAPTER x.x.xII.
_A New Face in the Dream_
In a settled despair the little bent man waited for the end. Already he felt himself an outcast from Israel. In spirit he had disobeyed the voice of Brigham, which was the voice of G.o.d; exulting sinfully in spite of himself in this rebellion. Praying to be bowed and bent and broken, to have all trace of the evil self within him burned out, he had now let that self rise up again to cry out a want. Praying that crosses might daily be added to his burden, he had now refused to take up one the bearing of which might have proved to Heaven the extinction of his last selfish desire. He had been put to the test, as he prayed to be, and he had failed miserably to meet it. And now he knew that even his life was waning with his faith.
During the year when he waited for the end of the world, he had been nerved to an unwonted vigour. Now he was weak and fit for no further combat. He waited, with an indifference that amazed him, for the day when he should openly defy Brigham, and have penalties heaped upon him.
First he would be ordered on a mission to some far corner of the world.
It would mean that he must go alone, "without purse or scrip," leaving Prudence. He would refuse to go. Thereupon he would be sternly disfellowshiped. Then, having become an apostate, he would be a fair mark for many things, perhaps for simple persecution--perhaps for blood atonement. He had heard Brigham himself say in the tabernacle that he was ready to "unsheathe his bowie knife" and send apostates "to h.e.l.l across lots."
He was ready to welcome that. It were easier to die now than to live; and, as for being cut off from his glory in the after-time, he had already forfeited that; would miss it even if he died in fellowship with Brigham and full of churchly honours; would miss it even if the power on high should forgive him,--for he himself, he knew, could not forgive his own sin. So it was little matter about his apostasy, and Prudence should be saved from a wifehood that, ever since he had pictured her in it, had seemed to him for the first time unspeakably bad.
They talked but little about it that day, after her first abrupt refusal. There was too much for each of them to think of. He was obliged to dwell upon the amazing fact that he must lie in h.e.l.l until he could win his own forgiveness, regardless of what gentle pardoning might be his from G.o.d. This, to him, simple and obvious truth, was now his daily torture.
As for Prudence, she had to be alone to dream her dreams of a love that should be always single. Brigham"s letter, far from disturbing these, had brought them a zest hitherto lacking. Neither the sacrilege of refusing him, its worldly unwisdom, nor its possible harm to the little bent man of sorrows, had as yet become apparent to her. Each day, when such duties as were hers in the house had been performed, she walked out to be alone,--always to Box Canon, that green-sided cleft in the mountain, with the brook lashing itself to a white fury over the boulders at the bottom. She would go up out of the hot valley into its cool freshness and its pleasant wood smells, and there, in the softened blue light of a pine-hung glade, she would rest, and let her fancy build what heaven-reaching towers it would. On some brown bed of pine-needles, or on a friendly gray boulder close by the water-side, where she could give her eyes to its flow and foam, and her ears to its music,--music like the m.u.f.fled tinkling of little silver bells in the distance,--she would let herself go out to her dream with the joyous, reckless abandon of falling water.
It was commonly a dream of a youth in doublet and hose, a plumed cap, and a cloak of purple satin, who came in the moonlight to the balcony of his love, and sighed his pa.s.sion in tones so moving that she thought an angel must have yielded--as did the girl in the balcony who had let down the scarf to him. She already knew how that girl"s heart must have fluttered at the moment,--how she must have felt that the hands were mad, wicked, uncontrollable hands, no longer her own.
There was one place in the dream that she managed not without some ingenuity. It had to be made plain that the lover under the window did not come from a long, six-doored house, with a wife behind each door; that this girl, pale in the moonlight, with quickening heart and rebellious hands on the scarf, and arms that should open to him, was to be not only his first wife but his last; that he was never even to consider so much as the possibility of another, but was to cleave unto her, and to love her with a single heart for all the days of her life and his own.
There were various ways of bringing this circ.u.mstance forward. Usually she had Brigham march on at the head of his great family and counsel the youth to take more wives, in order that he should be exalted in the Kingdom. Whereupon the young man would fold his love in his arms and speak words of scorn, in the same thrilling manner that he spoke his other words, for any exaltation which they two could not share alone.
Brigham, at the head of his wives, would then slink off, much abashed.
She had come naturally to see her own face as the face of this happily loved girl in the dream. She knew no face for the youth. There was none in Amalon; not Jarom Tanner, six feet three, who became a helpless, grinning child in her presence; nor Moroni Peterson, who became a solemn and ghastly imbecile; nor Ammaron Wright, son of the Bishop, who had opened the dance of the Young People"s Auxiliary with prayer, and later tried to kiss her in a dark corner of the room. So the face of the other person in her dream remained of an unknown heavenly beauty.
And then one afternoon in early May a strange youth came singing down the canon; came while she mused by the brook-side in her best-loved dream. Long before she saw him, she heard his music, a young, clear, care-free voice ringing down from the trail that went over the mountains to Kanab and into Kimball Valley; one of the ways that led out to the world that she wondered about so much. It was a voice new to her, and the words of his ballad were also new. At first she heard them from afar:--
"There was a young lady came a-tripping along, And at each side a servant-O, And in each hand a gla.s.s of wine To drink with the Gypsy Davy-O.
"And will you fancy me, my dear, And will you be my Honey-O?
I swear by the sword that hangs by my side You shall never want for money-O.
"Oh, yes, I will fancy you, kind sir, And I will be your Honey-O, If you swear by the sword that hangs by your side I shall never want for money-O."
The singer seemed to be making his way slowly. Far up the trail, she had one fleeting glimpse of a man on a horse, and then he was hid again in the twilight of the pines. But the music came nearer:--
"Then she put on her high-heeled shoes, All made of Spanish leather-O, And she put on her bonnie, bonnie brown, And they rode off together-O.
"Soon after that, her lord came home Inquiring for his lady-O, When some of the servants made this reply, She"s a-gone with the Gypsy Davy-O.
"Then saddle me my milk-white steed, For the black is not so speedy-O, And I"ll ride all night and I"ll ride all day Till I overtake my lady-O."
She stood transfixed, something within her responding to the hidden singer, as she had once heard a closed piano sound to a voice that sang near it. Soon she could get broken glimpses of him as he wound down the trail, now turning around the end of a fallen tree, then pa.s.sing behind a giant spruce, now leaning far back while the horse felt a way cautiously down some sharp little declivity. The impression was confused,--a glint of red, of blue, of the brown of the horse, a figure swaying loosely to the horse"s movements, and then he was out of sight again around the big rock that had once fallen from high up on the side of the canon; but now, when he came from behind that, he would be squarely in front of her. This recalled and alarmed her. She began to pick a way over the boulders and across the trail that lay between her and the edge of the pines, hearing another verse of the song, almost at her ear:--
"He rode all night and he rode all day, Till he came to the far deep water-O, Then he stopped and a tear came a-trickling down his cheek, For there he saw his lady-O."
Before she could reach a shelter in the pines, while she was poised for the last step that would take her out of the trail, he was out from behind the rock, before her, almost upon her, reining his horse back upon its haunches,--then in another instant lifting off his broad-brimmed hat to her in a gracious sweep. It was the first time she had seen this simple office performed outside of the theatre.