A LOVER.
Two long hours I had kept Mr. Clitheroe in talk. For my friend’s sake
I would have prolonged the interview indefinitely. For my own, too. He
was a new character to me, this gentle soul, so sadly astray. My filial
feeling for him deepened momently. And as my pity grew more exquisitely
painful, I shrank still from quitting him, and so acknowledging that
the pity was hopeless.
We approached the fort. The fiddlers three were dragging their last
grumbling notes out of drowsy strings. The saints began to stream by
toward their wagons. We turned away to avoid recognition.
Miss Clitheroe and Brent joined us,--a sadder pair than we. The stars
showed me the glimmer of tears in her eyes. But her look was brave and
steady. She left my friend, and laid her hand on her father’s arm. A
marked likeness, and yet a contrast more marked, between these two.
He had given her his refinement, a quality so in him and of him that
he colored whatever came near him with an emanation from himself, and
so was blinded to its real crude tints. By this medium he made in his
description that black hole of a coal mine, where so many of his years
had been buried, a grotto of enchantment. He filled the world with
illusions. Whatever was future and whatever was past, seen through
his poetic imagination, seemed to him so beautiful, or so strange and
interesting, that he lost all care for the discomforts of the present.
And this same refinement of nature deluded him in judging character.
Bad and base motives seemed to him so ugly, that he refused to see
them, shrank from belief in them, and insisted upon trusting that men
were as honorable as himself. He was a man for prosperity. What did
fate mean by maltreating him with the manifold adversities of his life?
To what end was this sad error?
A strange contrast, with all the likeness, between his daughter and
him. A more vigorous being had mingled its life with hers. Or perhaps
the stern history of her early days had taught her to forge the armor
of self-protection. She seemed to have all her father’s refinement, but
she used it to surround and seclude herself, not to change and glorify
others. Godiva was not more delicately hidden from the vulgar world by
the mantle of her own golden hair, than this sweet lady by her veil of
gentle breeding.
As she took her father’s arm to lead him away to the camp, I could read
in her look that there were no illusions for her. But she clave to her
father,--the blinder and more hopelessly errant he might be, the closer
she clave. He might reject her guidance; she still stood by to protect
him, to sweeten his life, and when the darkness came, which she could
not but foresee, to be a light to him. However adversity had thus far
failed to teach him self-possession, it had made her a heroine and a
martyr,--a noble and unselfish soul, such as, one among the myriads,
God educates to shame the base and the trifling, and to hearten and
inspire the true.
“Now, dear father,” she said, “we must bid these kind friends good
night. We start early. We need rest.”
She held out her hand to me.
“Dear lady,” said I, taking her aside a moment while Brent spoke to
Mr. Clitheroe, “we are acquaintances of to-day; but campaigners must
despise ceremony. Your father has told me much of your history. I infer
your feelings. Consider me as a brother. Nothing can be done to aid
you?”
“Your kindness and your friend’s kindness touch me greatly. Nothing can
be done.”
She sobbed a little. I still held her hand.
“Nothing!” said I, “nothing! Will you go on with these people? you, a
lady! with your fate staring you in the face!”
She withdrew her hand and looked at me steadily with her large gray
eyes. What a woman to follow into the jaws of death!
“My fate,” she said, “can be no worse than the old common fate of
death. That I accept, any other I defy. God does not leave the worthy
to shame.”
“We say so, when we hope.”
“I say it and believe.”
“Come, Ellen dear,” called her father.
There was always between them, whenever they spoke, by finer gentleness
of tone and words of endearment, a recognition of how old and close
and exclusive was their union. Only when Sizzum was present at tea,
the tenderness, under that coarsening influence, passed away from the
father’s voice and manner, making the daughter’s more and more tender,
that she might win him back to her.
“Good bye!” she said. “We shall remember each other kindly.”
“Yes, gentlemen,” said Mr. Clitheroe. “This has been quite the
pleasantest episode of our journey. You must not forget us when you are
roaming through this region again.”
He said this with his light, cheerful manner. They turned away. It
seemed as if Death arose and parted us. We followed at a distance and
watched them safe to their wagon. The night wind had risen, and went
sighing over the desert reaches, bringing with it the distant howling
of wolves.
“Do not speak to me,” said Brent, “I will talk to you by and by.”
He left me and went toward our horses. It had been imprudent to leave
them so long at night, with bad spirits about.
I looked into the fort again. The dancers had gone. Bottery was
fumbling drunkenly over his fiddle. A score of men were within the
house carousing. Old Bridger’s whiskey had evidently flowed freely. In
one corner Larrap had unrolled a greasy faro-cloth and was dealing.
Murker backed him. They were winning largely. They bagged their
winnings out of sight, as fast as they fell in. Sizzum, rather to my
surprise, was a little excited with liquor, and playing recklessly,
losing sovereigns by the handful. As he lost, he became furious. He
struck Larrap in the face and called him a cheat. Larrap gave him an
ugly look, and then, assuming a boozy indifference, caught Sizzum by
the hand and vowed he was his best friend. Murker kept aloof from the
dispute. The game began again. Again Sizzum and the Mormons lost.
Again Sizzum slapped the dealer, and, catching the faro-cloth, tore
it in two. The two gamblers saw that they were in danger. They had
kept themselves sober and got the others drunk for such a crisis. They
hurried out of the way. Sizzum and his brother saints chased them; but
presently, losing sight of them in the dusk, they staggered off toward
camp, singing uproariously. Their leader on this festival had somewhat
forgotten the dignity of the apostle and captain.
This low rioting was doubly disgusting to me, after the sad evening
with our friends. I found Sizzum more offensive as a man of the world
than as a saint. I say man of the world, because the gambling scenes
of nominal gentlemen are often just as hateful, if more decorous, than
those of that night. I walked slowly off toward camp, sorrowful and
sick at heart. Baseness and vulgarity had never seemed to me so base
and vulgar till now.
I suddenly heard a voice in the bushes. It was Larrap. He was evidently
persuading his comrade to some villany. I caught a suspicious word or
two.
“Ah!” thought I, “you want our horses. We will see to that.”
I walked softly by. Brent was seated by the embers of a camp-fire,
cowered in a heap, like a cold Indian. He raised his face. All the
light had gone out of him. This trouble had suddenly worn into his
being, like the shirt of Nessus, and poisoned his life.
“John,” said I, “I never knew you despondent before.”
“This is not despondency.”
“What then?”
“Despair.”
“I cannot offer to cheer you.”
“It is bitter, Wade. I have yearned to be a lover for years. All at
once I find the woman I have seen and thought of, and known from my
first conscious moment. The circumstances crowded my love into sudden
intensity. I made the observations and did the work of months of
acquaintance in those few moments while we were at tea. My mind always
acts quick. I seem always to have been discussing my decisions with
myself, years before the subject of decision comes to me. Whatever
happens, falls on me with the force of a doom. I loved Miss Clitheroe’s
voice the instant I heard its brave tenderness answering her father.
I loved her unseen, and would have died for her that moment. When she
appeared, and I saw her face and read her heart, I knew that it was the
old dream,--the old dream that I never thought would be other than
a dream. The ancient hope and expectation, coeval with my life, was
fulfilled. She is the other self I have been waiting for and seeking
for.”
“Have you told her so?”
“Can a man stop the beating of his heart? Can a man not breathe? Not in
words, perhaps I did not use the lover words. But she understood me.
She did not seem surprised. She recognizes such a passion as her right
and desert.”
“A great-hearted woman can see how a man worthy of her can nullify time
and space, and meet her, soul to soul, in eternity from the first.”
“So I meet her; but circumstances here are stronger than love.”
“Can she do nothing with her father?”
“Nothing. She failed in England when this delusion first fell upon him.”
“Did she know what it meant for her and him?”
“Hardly. She even fancied that they would be happier in America than at
home, where she saw that his old grandeur was always reproaching him.”
“Did he conceal from her the goal and object of his emigration?”
“She knew he was, or supposed himself to be, a Mormon. But Mormonism
was little more than a name to her. She believed his perversion only
a transitory folly. It is but recently, only since they were away from
succor, off in the desert, that she has perceived her own risk. She
hoped that the voyage from England would disenchant her father, and
that she could keep him in the States. No; he was committed; he was
impracticable. You have seen yourself how far his faith is shaken. Just
so far that his crazy cheerfulness has given place to moping; but he
will hear nothing of reason.”
“What does she anticipate?”
“She says she only dares to endure. Day by day they both wear away. Day
by day her father’s bright hope dwindles away. Day by day she perceives
the moment of her own danger approaching. She could not speak to me of
it; but I could feel by her tone her disgust and disdain of Sizzum. O,
how steady and noble she is! All for her father! All to guide him with
the fewest pangs to that desolate death she knows must come! She gave
me a few touches of their past history, so that I could see how much
closer and tenderer than the common bond of parent and child theirs had
been.”
“That I saw, from the old gentleman’s story. Sorrow and poverty ennoble
love.”
“She thanked me and you so sweetly for our society, and the kind words
we had given them. She had not seen her father so cheerful, so like
himself, since they had left England.”
“What a weary pilgrimage they must have had, poor errant souls!”
“O Wade, Wade! how this tragedy of theirs cures me forever of any
rebellion against my own destiny. A helpless woman’s tragedy is so much
bitterer than anything that can befall a man.”
“Must we say helpless, John?”
“Are we two an army, that we can take them by force? She has definitely
closed any further communication on our part. She said that I could not
have failed to notice how Elder Sizzum disliked our presence. I must
promise her not to be seen with them in the morning. Sizzum would find
some means to punish her father, and that would be torture to her. It
seems that villain plays on the old man’s religious superstitions, and
can terrify him almost to madness.”
“The villain! And yet how far back of him lies the blame, that such
terrors can exist in any man’s mind, when God is Love.”
“I promised her not to see her again--for you and myself; to see her no
more. That good-bye was final. Now let me alone for a while, my dear
old boy; I am worn out and heart-broken.”
He mummied himself in his blankets, and lay on the grass, motionless
as a dead man. It was not his way to shirk camp duties. Indeed, his
volunteer services had left me in arrears.
I put our fire-arms in order in case of attack, and extinguished
our fire. Our horses, too, I drove in and tethered close by. My old
suspicion of Murker and Larrap had revived from their mutterings.
I thought that, after their great winnings of to-night, they would
feel that they could make nothing more of the mail party, and might
seize the chance to stampede or steal some of the Mormon horses or
ours. It was a capital chance in the sleepy hours after the revel.
Horse-stealing, since the bad example of Diomed, has never gone out of
fashion. Fulano and Pumps were great prizes. I knew that Larrap hated
Brent for his undisguised abhorrence and the ugly words and collision
of to-day. The pair bore good-will to neither of us. Their brutality
had jarred with us from the beginning. I knew they would take personal
pleasure in serving us a shabby trick out of their dixonary. On the
whole, I determined to watch all night.
Easy to purpose; hard to perform. I leaned against my saddle and
thought over the day. How I pitied poor Brent! Pitied him the more
thoroughly, since I was hardly less a lover than he. Long afterwards,
long after the misery of love dead in despair, comes the time when one
can say, “Ich habe gelebt und geliebet”; can know, “’Tis better to have
loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” But no such soothing
poetry could sing resignation to my friend in his unselfish misery. All
he could do--all I could do--was to bear the agony of this sudden cruel
wrong; to curse the chances of life that had so weakened the soul of
our new friend and so darkened his sight that he could not know truth
from falsehood. Doubly to curse the falsehood. Before, it had only
been something to scorn. Here tragedy entered. The mean, miserable,
ludicrous invention of Mormonism, the foolish fable of an idler, had
grown to be a great masterly tyranny. These two souls were clutched
by this foul ogre, and locked up in an impregnable prison. And we two
were baffled. Of what use was our loyalty to woman? What vain words
those unuttered words of our knightly vow to succor all distressed
damsels,--the vow that every gentleman takes upon himself, as earnestly
now, and wills to keep as faithfully, as any Artegall in the days gone
by, when wrong took cruder and more monstrous form! More monstrous
form! Could any wrong be more detestable! Did knight, who loved God and
honored his lady, ever encounter more paynim-like horde than this,--the
ignorant misled by the base?
In such dreary protest and pity I passed an hour. The evening breeze
had strengthened into a great gusty wind, blowing from the mountains to
the southward. I drowsed a little. A perturbed slumber overcame me. The
roaring night-wind aroused me at intervals with a blast more furious,
and I woke to perceive ominous and turbulent dreams flitting from my
brain,--dreams of violence, tyranny, and infamous outrage.
Suddenly another sensation went creeping along my nerves. I sat bolt
upright. There was a feeling of human presence, of stealthy approach
coming up against the night-wind and crushing its roar with a sound
more penetrating.
Brent, too, was on the alert.
“Some one at our horses,” he whispered.
We dashed forward. There was a rustle of flight through the bushes. We
each fired a shot. The noise ceased.
“Stop!” said my friend, as I was giving chase. “We must not leave the
horses. They will stampede them while we are off.”
“They? perhaps it was only a cayote or a wolf. Why, Fulano! old fellow!”
Fulano trotted up, neighing, and licked my hand. His lariat had been
cut,--a clean cut with a knife. We were only just in time.
“We must keep watch till morning,” said I. “I have been drowsing. I
will take the first hour.”
Brent, with a moan of weariness, threw himself down again on the grass.
I sat watchful.
The night-wind went roaring on. It loves those sweeps and surges of
untenanted plain, as it loves the lifts and levels of the barren sea.
The fitful gale rushed down as if it boiled over the edge of some great
hollow in the mountains, and then stayed to gather force for another
overflow. In its pauses I could hear the stir and murmur of the Mormon
cattle, a thousand and more. But once there came a larger pause; the
air grew silent, as if it had never known a breeze, or as if all life
and motion between earth and sky were utterly and forever quelled.
In that one instant of dead stillness, when the noise of the cattle was
hushed, and our horses ceased champing to listen, I seemed to hear the
clang of galloping hoofs, not far away to the southward.
Galloping hoofs, surely I heard them. Or was it only the charge of
a fresh blast down the mountain-side, uprooting ancient pines, and
flinging great rocks from crag to chasm?
And that strange, terrible, human, inhuman sound, outringing the noise
of the hoofs, and making the silence a ghastly horror,--was it a
woman’s scream?
No; it could only be my fevered imagination, that found familiar sounds
in the inarticulate voices of the wilderness. I listened long and
intently. The wind sighed, and raved, and threatened again. I heard the
dismal howling of wolves far away in the darkness.
I kept a double watch of two hours, and then, calling Brent to do his
share, threw myself on the grass and slept soundly.