THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT.
The religious excitement reached its culmination as the tenth and
eleventh of August came on. Some made ascension-robes. Work was
suspended everywhere. The more abandoned, unwilling to yield to the
panic, showed its effects on them by deeper potations, and by a
recklessness of wickedness meant to conceal their fears. With tin horns
they blasphemously affected to be angels blowing trumpets. They imitated
the Millerite meetings in their drunken sprees, and learned Mr.
Hankins's arguments by heart.
The sun of the eleventh of August rose gloriously. People pointed to it
with trembling, and said that it would rise no more. Soon after sunrise
there were crimson clouds stretching above and below it, and popular
terror seized upon this as a sign. But the sun mounted with a scorching
heat, which showed that at least his shining power was not impaired.
Then men said, "Behold the beginning of the fervent heat that is to melt
the elements!" Night drew on, and every "shooting-star" was a new sign
of the end. The meteors, as usual at this time of the year, were
plentiful, and the simple-hearted country-folk were convinced that the
stars were falling out of the sky.
A large bald hill overlooking the Ohio was to be the mount of ascension.
Here gathered Elder Hankins's flock with that comfortable assurance of
being the elect that only a narrow bigotry can give. And here came
others of all denominations, consoling themselves that they were just as
well off if they were Christians as if they had made all this fuss about
the millennium. Here was August, too, now almost well, joining with the
rest in singing those sweet and inspiring Adventist hymns. His German
heart could not keep still where there was singing, and now, in
gratefulness at new-found health, he was more inclined to music than
ever. So he joined heartily and sincerely in the song that begins:
"Shall Simon bear his cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No, there's a cross for every one,
And there's a cross for me.
I'll bear the consecrated cross
Till from the cross I'm free,
And then go home to wear the crown.
For there's a crown for me!
Yes, there's a crown in heaven above,
The purchase of a Saviour's love.
Oh I that's the crown for me!"
When the concourse reached the lines,
"The saints have heard the midnight cry,
Go meet him in the air!"
neither August nor any one else could well resist the infection of the
profound and awful belief in the immediate coming of the end which
pervaded the throng. Strong men and women wept and shouted with the
excitement.
Then Elder Hankins exhorted a little. He said that the time was short.
But men's hearts were hard. As in the days of the flood, they were
marrying and giving in marriage. Not half a mile away a wedding was at
that time taking place, and a man who called himself a minister could
not discern the signs of the times, but was solemnizing a marriage.
This allusion was to the marriage of Jonas, which was to take place that
very evening at the castle. Mrs. Anderson had refused to have "such
wicked nonsense" at her house, and as Cynthy had no home, Andrew had
appointed it at the castle, partly to oblige Jonas, partly from habitual
opposition to Abigail, but chiefly to express his contempt for
Adventism.
Mrs. Anderson herself was in a state of complete sublimation. She had
sent for Norman, that she might get him ready for the final judgment,
and Norman, without the slightest inclination to be genuinely religious,
was yet a coward, and made a provisional repentance, not meant to hold
good if Elder Hankins's figures should fail; just such a repentance as
many a man has made on what he supposed to be his death-bed. Do not I
remember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and myself,
who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think that he had been
"such a fool as to send for the preacher"?
Now, between Mrs. Anderson's joy at Norman's conversion, and her delight
that the world would soon be at an end and she on the winning side, and
her anticipation of the pleasure she would feel even in heaven in
saying, "I told you so!" to her unbelieving friends, she quite forgot
Julia. In fact she went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another,
falling into trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriously
called "the power." She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia, for
there were but three more hours of time, and she felt that the goal was
already gained, and she had carried her point to the very last. A
satisfaction for a saint!
The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge of the
surging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted together.
"Let us go and see Jonas married," said August. "It is no harm. God can
take us to heaven from one place as well as another, if we are His
children."
In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say disgusted, with
her mother's peculiar religious exercises, and she gladly escaped with
August to the castle and the wedding of her faithful friends.
Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle look as
flowery and festive as possible. The wedding took place in the lower
story, but the library was illuminated, and the Adventists who had
occasion to pass by Andrew's on their way to the rendezvous accepted
this as a new fulfillment of prophecy to the very letter. They nodded
one to another, and said, "See! marrying and giving in marriage, as in
the days of Noah!"
August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much on their way to
the castle. But in these last hours of a world grown old and ready for
its doom, they cleaved closer together. There could be neither heaven
nor millennium for one of them without the other! Loving one another
made them love God the more, and love cast out all fear. If this was the
Last, they would face it together, and if it proved the Beginning, they
would rejoice together. At sight of every shooting meteor, Julia clung
almost convulsively to August.
When they entered the castle, Jonas and Cynthy were already standing up
before the presiding elder, and he was about to begin. Cynthy's face
showed her sense of the awfulness of marrying at a moment of such
fearful expectation, or perhaps she was troubling herself for fear that
so much happiness out of heaven was to be had only in the commission of
a capital sin. But, like most people whose consciences are stronger than
their intellects, she found great consolation in taking refuge under the
wing of ecclesiastical authority. To be married by a presiding elder was
the best thing in the world next to being married by a bishop.
Whatever fear of the swift-coming judgment others might have felt, the
benignant old elder was at peace. Common-sense, a clean conscience, and
a child-like faith enlightened his countenance, and since he tried to be
always ready, and since his meditations made the things of the other
life ever present, his pulse would scarcely have quickened if he had
felt sure that the archangel's trump would sound in an hour. He neither
felt the subdued fear shown on the countenance of Cynthy Ann, nor the
strong skeptical opposition of Andrew, whose face of late had grown
almost into a sneer.
"Do you take this woman to be your lawful and wedded wife--"
And before the elder could finish it, Jonas blurted out, "You'd better
believe I do, my friend."
And then when the old man smiled and finished his question down to, "so
long as ye both shall live," Jonas responded eagerly, "Tell death er the
jedgment-day, long or short."
And Cynthy Ann answered demurely out of her frightened but too happy
heart, and the old man gave them his benediction in an apostolic fashion
that removed Cynthy Ann's scruples, and smoothed a little of the
primness out of her face, so that she almost smiled when Jonas said,
"Well! it's done now, and it can't be undone fer all the Goshorns in
Christendom er creation!"
And then the old gentleman--for he was a gentleman, though he had always
been a backwoodsman--spoke of the excitement, and said that it was best
always to be ready--to be ready to live, and then you would be ready for
death or the judgment. That very night the end might come, but it was
not best to trouble one's self about it. And he smiled, and said that it
was none of his business, God could manage the universe; it was for him
to be found doing his duty as a faithful servant. And then it would be
just like stepping out of one door into another, whenever death or the
judgment should come.
While the old man was getting ready to leave, Julia and August slipped
away, fearing lest their absence should be discovered. But the
peacefulness of the old elder's face had entered into their souls, and
they wished that they too were solemnly pronounced man and wife, with so
sweet a benediction upon their union.
"I do not feel much anxious about the day of judgment or the
millennium," said August, whose idiom was sometimes a little broken.
"When I was so near dying I felt satisfied to die after you had kissed
my lips. But now that it seems we have come upon the world's last days,
I wish I were married to you. I do not know how things will be in the
new heaven and the new earth. But I should like you to be my wife there,
or at least to have been my wife on earth, if only for one hour."
And then he proposed that they should be made man and wife now in the
world's last hour. It was not wrong. It could not give her mother
heart-disease, for she would not know of it till she should hear it in
the land where there are neither marriages nor sickness. Julia could not
see any sin in her disobedience under such circumstances. She did so
much want to go into the New Jerusalem as the wedded wife of August "the
grand," as she fondly called him.
And so in the stillness of that awful night they walked back to Andrew's
castle, and found the venerable preacher, with saddle-bags on his arm,
ready to mount his horse, for the presiding elder of that day had no
leisure time. Jonas and Cynthy stood bidding him good-by. And the old
man was saying again that if we were always ready it would be like
stepping from one door into another. But he thought it as wrong to waste
time gazing up into heaven to see Christ come, as it had been to gaze
after Him when He went away. Even Jonas's voice was a little softened by
the fearful thought ever present of the coming on of that awful midnight
of the eleventh of August. All were surprised to see the two young
people come back.
"Father Williams," said August, "we thought we should like to go into
the New Jerusalem man and wife. Will you marry us?"
"Sensible to the last!" cried Jonas.
"According to the laws of this State," said Mr. Williams, "you can not
be married without a license from the clerk of the county. Have you
a license?"
"No," said August, his heart sinking.
Just then Andrew came up and inquired what the conversation was about.
"Why, Uncle Andrew," said Julia eagerly, "August and I don't want the
end of the world to come without being man and wife. And we have no
license, and August could not go seven miles and back to get a license
before midnight. It is too bad, isn't it? If it wasn't that we think the
end of the world is so near, I should be ashamed to say how much I want
to be married. But I shall be proud to have been August's wife, when I
am among the angels."
"You are a noble woman," said Andrew. "Come in, let us see if anything
can be done." And he led the way, smiling.