prospered exceedingly in his affairs, remained faithful to my mother;
and, though you may wonder to hear it, I believe there were few happier
homes in any country than that in which I saw the light and grew to
girlhood. We were, indeed, and in spite of all our wealth, avoided as
heretics and half-believers by the more precise and pious of the
faithful: Young himself, that formidable tyrant, was known to look
askance upon my father's riches; but of this I had no guess. I dwelt,
indeed, under the Mormon system, with perfect innocence and faith. Some
of our friends had many wives; but such was the custom; and why should
it surprise me more than marriage itself? From time to time one of our
rich acquaintances would disappear, his family be broken up, his wives
and houses shared among the elders of the church, and his memory only
recalled with bated breath and dreadful head-shakings. When I had been
very still, and my presence perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would
arise among my elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the
closer together and look behind them with scared eyes; and I might
gather from their whisperings how some one, rich, honoured, healthy, and
in the prime of his days, some one, perhaps, who had taken me on his
knees a week before, had in one hour been spirited from home and family,
and vanished like an image from a mirror, leaving not a print behind. It
was terrible, indeed; but so was death, the universal law. And even if
the talk should wax still bolder, full of ominous silences and nods, and
I should hear named in a whisper the Destroying Angels, how was a child
to understand these mysteries? I heard of a Destroying Angel as some
more happy child might hear in England of a bishop or a rural dean, with
vague respect and without the wish for further information. Life
anywhere, in society as in nature, rests upon dread foundations; I
beheld safe roads, a garden blooming in the desert, pious people
crowding to worship; I was aware of my parents' tenderness and all the
harmless luxuries of my existence; and why should I pry beneath this
honest seeming surface for the mysteries on which it stood?
We dwelt originally in the city; but at an early date we moved to a
beautiful house in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and
surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky
desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which
went no farther than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks
impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to
the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes,
after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the
ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was
something agreeable in the correct manner, the fine bearing, the thin
white hair and beard, and the piercing looks of the old doctor. Yet,
though he was almost our only visitor, I never wholly overcame a sense
of fear in his presence; and this disquietude was rather fed by the
awful solitude in which he lived and the obscurity that hung about his
occupations. His house was but a mile or two from ours, but very
differently placed. It stood overlooking the road on the summit of a
steep slope, and planted close against a range of overhanging bluffs.
Nature, you would say, had here desired to imitate the works of man; for
the slope was even, like the glacis of a fort, and the cliffs of a
constant height, like the ramparts of a city. Not even spring could
change one feature of that desolate scene; and the windows looked down
across a plain, snowy with alkali, to ranges of cold stone sierras on
the north. Twice or thrice I remember passing within view of this
forbidding residence; and seeing it always shuttered, smokeless, and
deserted, I remarked to my parents that some day it would certainly be
robbed.
"Ah, no," said my father, "never robbed"; and I observed a strange
conviction in his tone.
At last, and not long before the blow fell on my unhappy family, I
chanced to see the doctor's house in a new light. My father was ill; my
mother confined to his bedside; and I was suffered to go, under the
charge of our driver, to the lonely house some twenty miles away, where
our packages were left for us. The horse cast a shoe; night overtook us
half-way home; and it was well on for three in the morning when the
driver and I, alone in a light waggon, came to that part of the road
which ran below the doctor's house. The moon swam clear; the cliffs and
mountains in this strong light lay utterly deserted; but the house, from
its station on the top of the long slope and close under the bluff, not
only shone abroad from every window like a place of festival, but from
the great chimney at the west end poured forth a coil of smoke so thick
and so voluminous, that it hung for miles along the windless night-air,
and its shadow lay far abroad in the moonlight upon the glittering
alkali. As we continued to draw near, besides, a regular and panting
throb began to divide the silence. First it seemed to me like the
beating of a heart; and next it put into my mind the thought of some
giant, smothered under mountains, and still, with incalculable effort,
fetching breath. I had heard of the railway, though I had not seen it,
and I turned to ask the driver if this resembled it. But some look in
his eye, some pallor, whether of fear or moonlight on his face, caused
the words to die upon my lips. We continued, therefore, to advance in
silence, till we were close below the lighted house; when suddenly,
without premonitory rustle, there burst forth a report of such a bigness
that it shook the earth and set the echoes of the mountains thundering
from cliff to cliff. A pillar of amber flame leaped from the chimney-top
and fell in multitudes of sparks; and at the same time the lights in the
windows turned for one instant ruby red and then expired. The driver had
checked his horse instinctively, and the echoes were still rumbling
farther off among the mountains, when there broke from the now darkened
interior a series of yells--whether of man or woman it was impossible to
guess--the door flew open, and there ran forth into the moonlight, at
the top of the long slope, a figure clad in white, which began to dance
and leap and throw itself down, and roll as if in agony, before the
house. I could no more restrain my cries; the driver laid his lash about
the horse's flank, and we fled up the rough track at the peril of our
lives; and did not draw rein till, turning the corner of the mountain,
we beheld my father's ranch and deep, green groves and gardens, sleeping
in the tranquil light.
This was the one adventure of my life, until my father had climbed to
the very topmost point of material prosperity, and I myself had reached
the age of seventeen. I was still innocent and merry like a child;
tended my garden or ran upon the hills in glad simplicity; gave not a
thought to coquetry or to material cares; and if my eye rested on my own
image in a mirror or some sylvan spring, it was to seek and recognise
the features of my parents. But the fears which had long pressed on
others were now to be laid on my youth. I had thrown myself, one sultry,
cloudy afternoon, on a divan; the windows stood open on the verandah,
where my mother sat with her embroidery; and when my father joined her
from the garden, their conversation, clearly audible to me, was of so
startling a nature that it held me enthralled where I lay.
"The blow has come," my father said, after a long pause.
I could hear my mother start and turn, but in words she made no reply.
"Yes," continued my father, "I have received to-day a list of all that I
possess; of all, I say; of what I have lent privately to men whose lips
are sealed with terror; of what I have buried with my own hand on the
bare mountain, when there was not a bird in heaven. Does the air, then,
carry secrets? Are the hills of glass? Do the stones we tread upon
preserve the footprint to betray us? Oh, Lucy, Lucy, that we should have
come to such a country!"
"But this," returned my mother, "is no very new or very threatening
event. You are accused of some concealment. You will pay more taxes in
the future, and be mulcted in a fine. It is disquieting, indeed, to find
our acts so spied upon, and the most private known. But is this new?
Have we not long feared and suspected every blade of grass?"
"Ay, and our shadows!" cried my father. "But all this is nothing. Here
is the letter that accompanied the list."
I heard my mother turn the pages; and she was some time silent.
"I see," she said at last; and then, with the tone of one reading;
"'From a believer so largely blessed by Providence with this world's
goods,'" she continued, "'the Church awaits in confidence some signal
mark of piety.' There lies the sting. Am I not right? These are the
words you fear?"
"These are the words," replied my father. "Lucy, you remember Priestley?
Two days before he disappeared, he carried me to the summit of an
isolated butte; we could see around us for ten miles; sure, if in any
quarter of this land a man were safe from spies, it were in such a
station; but it was in the very ague-fit of terror that he told me, and
that I heard, his story. He had received a letter such as this; and he
submitted to my approval an answer in which he offered to resign a third
of his possessions. I conjured him, as he valued life, to raise his
offering; and, before we parted, he had doubled the amount. Well, two
days later he was gone--gone from the chief street of the city in the
hour of noon--and gone for ever. O God!" cried my father, "by what art
do they thus spirit out of life the solid body? What death do they
command that leaves no traces? that this material structure, these
strong arms, this skeleton that can resist the grave for centuries,
should be thus reft in a moment from the world of sense? A horror dwells
in that thought more awful than mere death."
"Is there no hope in Grierson?" asked my mother.
"Dismiss the thought," replied my father. "He now knows all that I can
teach, and will do naught to save me. His power, besides, is small, his
own danger not improbably more imminent than mine; for he, too, lives
apart; he leaves his wives neglected and unwatched; he is openly cited
for an unbeliever; and unless he buys security at a more awful
price--but no; I will not believe it: I have no love for him, but I will
not believe it."
"Believe what?" asked my mother; and then, with a change of note, "But
oh, what matters it?" she cried. "Abimelech, there is but one way open:
we must fly!"
"It is in vain," returned my father. "I should but involve you in my
fate. To leave this land is hopeless: we are closed in it as men are
closed in life; and there is no issue but the grave."
"We can but die then," replied my mother. "Let us at least die together.
Let not Asenath[2] and myself survive you. Think to what a fate we
should be doomed!"
My father was unable to resist her tender violence; and though I could
see he nourished not one spark of hope, he consented to desert his whole
estate, beyond some hundreds of dollars that he had by him at the
moment, and to flee that night, which promised to be dark and cloudy. As
soon as the servants were asleep, he was to load two mules with
provisions; two others were to carry my mother and myself; and, striking
through the mountains by an unfrequented trail, we were to make a fair
stroke for liberty and life. As soon as they had thus decided, I showed
myself at the window, and, owning that I had heard all, assured them
that they could rely on my prudence and devotion. I had no fear, indeed,
but to show myself unworthy of my birth; I held my life in my hand
without alarm; and when my father, weeping upon my neck, had blessed
Heaven for the courage of his child, it was with a sentiment of pride
and some of the joy that warriors take in war, that I began to look
forward to the perils of our flight.
Before midnight, under an obscure and starless heaven, we had left far
behind us the plantations of the valley, and were mounting a certain
canon in the hills, narrow, encumbered with great rocks, and echoing
with the roar of a tumultuous torrent. Cascade after cascade thundered
and hung up its flag of whiteness in the night, or fanned our faces with
the wet wind of its descent. The trail was break-neck, and led to
famine-guarded deserts; it had been long since deserted for more
practicable routes; and it was now a part of the world untrod from year
to year by human footing. Judge of our dismay when, turning suddenly an
angle of the cliffs, we found a bright bonfire blazing by itself under
an impending rock; and on the face of the rock, drawn very rudely with
charred wood, the great Open Eye which is the emblem of the Mormon
faith. We looked upon each other in the firelight; my mother broke into
a passion of tears; but not a word was said. The mules were turned
about; and leaving that great eye to guard the lonely canon, we
retraced our steps in silence. Day had not yet broken ere we were once
more at home, condemned beyond reprieve.
What answer my father sent I was not told; but two days later, a little
before sundown, I saw a plain, honest-looking man ride slowly up the
road in a great pother of dust. He was clad in homespun, with a broad
straw hat; wore a patriarchal beard; and had an air of a simple rustic
farmer, that was, in my eyes, very reassuring. He was, indeed, a very
honest man and pious Mormon; with no liking for his errand, though
neither he nor any one in Utah dared to disobey; and it was with every
mark of diffidence that he had had himself announced as Mr. Aspinwall,
and entered the room where our unhappy family was gathered. My mother
and me he awkwardly enough dismissed; and as soon as he was alone with
my father laid before him a blank signature of President Young's, and
offered him a choice of services: either to set out as a missionary to
the tribes about the White Sea, or to join the next day, with a party of
Destroying Angels, in the massacre of sixty German immigrants. The last,
of course, my father could not entertain, and the first he regarded as a
pretext: even if he could consent to leave his wife defenceless, and to
collect fresh victims for the tyranny under which he was himself
oppressed, he felt sure he would never be suffered to return. He refused
both; and Aspinwall, he said, betrayed sincere emotion, part religious,
as the spectacle of such disobedience, but part human, in pity for my
father and his family. He besought him to reconsider his decision; and
at length, finding he could not prevail, gave him till the moon rose to
settle his affairs, and say farewell to wife and daughter. "For," said
he, "then, at the latest, you must ride with me."
I dare not dwell upon the hours that followed: they fled all too fast;
and presently the moon out-topped the eastern range, and my father and
Mr. Aspinwall set forth, side by side, on their nocturnal journey. My
mother, though still bearing an heroic countenance, had hastened to
shut herself in her apartment, thenceforward solitary; and I, alone in
the dark house, and consumed by grief and apprehension, made haste to
saddle my Indian pony, to ride up to the corner of the mountain, and to
enjoy one farewell sight of my departing father. The two men had set
forth at a deliberate pace; nor was I long behind them, when I reached
the point of view. I was the more amazed to see no moving creature in
the landscape. The moon, as the saying is, shone bright as day; and
nowhere, under the whole arch of night, was there a growing tree, a
bush, a farm, a patch of tillage, or any evidence of man, but one. From
the corner where I stood, a rugged bastion of the line of bluffs
concealed the doctor's house; and across the top of that projection the
soft night wind carried and unwound about the hills a coil of sable
smoke. What fuel could produce a vapour so sluggish to dissipate in that
dry air, or what furnace pour it forth so copiously, I was unable to
conceive; but I knew well enough that it came from the doctor's chimney;
I saw well enough that my father had already disappeared; and in despite
of reason, I connected in my mind the loss of that dear protector with
the ribbon of foul smoke that trailed along the mountains.
Days passed, and still my mother and I waited in vain for news; a week
went by, a second followed, but we heard no word of the father and
husband. As smoke dissipates, as the image glides from the mirror, so in
the ten or twenty minutes that I had spent in getting my horse and
following upon his trail, had that strong and brave man vanished out of
life. Hope, if any hope we had, fled with every hour; the worst was now
certain for my father, the worst was to be dreaded for his defenceless
family. Without weakness, with a desperate calm at which I marvel when I
look back upon it, the widow and the orphan awaited the event. On the
last day of the third week we rose in the morning to find ourselves
alone in the house, alone, so far as we searched, on the estate; all our
attendants, with one accord, had fled, and as we knew them to be
gratefully devoted, we drew the darkest intimations from their flight.
The day passed, indeed, without event; but in the fall of the evening we
were called at last into the verandah by the approaching clink of
horse's hoofs.
The doctor, mounted on an Indian pony, rode into the garden, dismounted,
and saluted us. He seemed much more bent, and his hair more silvery than
ever; but his demeanour was composed, serious, and not unkind.
"Madam," said he, "I am come upon a weighty errand; and I would have you
recognise it as an effect of kindness in the President, that he should
send as his ambassador your only neighbour and your husband's oldest
friend in Utah."
"Sir," said my mother, "I have but one concern, one thought. You know
well what it is. Speak: my husband?"
"Madam," returned the doctor, taking a chair on the verandah, "if you
were a silly child my position would now be painfully embarrassing. You
are, on the other hand, a woman of great intelligence and fortitude: you
have, by my forethought, been allowed three weeks to draw your own
conclusions and to accept the inevitable. Further words from me are, I
conceive, superfluous."
My mother was as pale as death, and trembled like a reed; I gave her my
hand, and she kept it in the folds of her dress and wrung it till I
could have cried aloud. "Then, sir," said she at last, "you speak to
deaf ears. If this be indeed so, what have I to do with errands? what do
I ask of Heaven but to die?"
"Come," said the doctor, "command yourself. I bid you dismiss all
thoughts of your late husband, and bring a clear mind to bear upon your
own future and the fate of that young girl."
"You bid me dismiss----" began my mother. "Then you know!" she cried.
"I know," replied the doctor.
"You know?" broke out the poor woman. "Then it was you who did the deed!
I tear off the mask, and with dread and loathing see you as you
are--you, whom the poor fugitive beholds in nightmares, and awakes
raving--you, the Destroying Angel!"
"Well, madam, and what then?" returned the doctor. "Have not my fate and
yours been similar? Are we not both immured in this strong prison of
Utah? Have you not tried to flee, and did not the Open Eye confront you
in the canon? Who can escape the watch of that unsleeping eye of Utah?
Not I, at least. Horrible tasks have, indeed, been laid upon me; and the
most ungrateful was the last; but had I refused my offices, would that
have spared your husband? You know well it would not. I, too, had
perished along with him; nor would I have been able to alleviate his
last moments, nor could I to-day have stood between his family and the
hand of Brigham Young."
"Ah!" cried I, "and could you purchase life by such concessions?"
"Young lady," answered the doctor, "I both could and did; and you will
live to thank me for that baseness. You have a spirit, Asenath, that it
pleases me to recognise. But we waste time. Mr. Fonblanque's estate
reverts, as you doubtless imagine, to the church; but some part of it
has been reserved for him who is to marry the family; and that person, I
should perhaps tell you without more delay, is no other than myself."
At this odious proposal my mother and I cried out aloud, and clung
together like lost souls.
"It is as I supposed," resumed the doctor, with the same measured
utterance. "You recoil from this arrangement. Do you expect me to
convince you? You know very well that I have never held the Mormon view
of women. Absorbed in the most arduous studies, I have left the
slatterns whom they call my wives to scratch and quarrel among
themselves; of me, they have had nothing but my purse; such was not the
union I desired, even if I had the leisure to pursue it. No, you need
not, madam, and my old friend--" and here the doctor rose and bowed with
something of gallantry--"you need not apprehend my importunities. On the
contrary, I am rejoiced to read in you a Roman spirit; and if I am
obliged to bid you follow me at once, and that in the name, not of my
wish, but of my orders, I hope it will be found that we are of a common
mind."
So, bidding us dress for the road, he took a lamp (for the night had now
fallen) and set off to the stable to prepare our horses.
"What does it mean?--what will become of us?" I cried.
"Not that, at least," replied my mother, shuddering. "So far we can
trust him. I seem to read among his words a certain tragic promise.
Asenath, if I leave you, if I die, you will not forget your miserable
parents?"
Thereupon we fell to cross-purposes: I beseeching her to explain her
words; she putting me by, and continuing to recommend the doctor for a
friend. "The doctor!" I cried at last; "the man who killed my father?"
"Nay," said she, "let us be just. I do believe, before Heaven, he played
the friendliest part. And he alone, Asenath, can protect you in this
land of death."
At this the doctor returned, leading our two horses; and when we were
all in the saddle, he bade me ride on before, as he had matter to
discuss with Mrs. Fonblanque. They came at a foot's-pace, eagerly
conversing in a whisper; and presently after the moon rose and showed
them looking eagerly into each other's faces as they went, my mother
laying her hand upon the doctor's arm, and the doctor himself, against
his usual custom, making vigorous gestures of protest or asseveration.
At the foot of the track which ascended the talus of the mountain to his
door, the doctor overtook me at a trot.
"Here," he said, "we shall dismount; and as your mother prefers to be
alone, you and I shall walk together to my house."
"Shall I see her again?" I asked.
"I give you my word," he said, and helped me to alight. "We leave the
horses here," he added. "There are no thieves in this stone wilderness."
The track mounted gradually, keeping the house in view. The windows were
once more bright; the chimney once more vomited smoke; but the most
absolute silence reigned, and, but for the figure of my mother very
slowly following in our wake, I felt convinced there was no human soul
within a range of miles. At the thought, I looked upon the doctor,
gravely walking by my side, with his bowed shoulders and white hair, and
then once more at his house, lit up and pouring smoke like some
industrious factory. And then my curiosity broke forth. "In Heaven's
name," I cried, "what do you make in this inhuman desert?"
He looked at me with a peculiar smile, and answered with an evasion:
"This is not the first time," said he, "that you have seen my furnaces
alight. One morning, in the small hours, I saw you driving past; a
delicate experiment miscarried; and I cannot acquit myself of having
startled either your driver or the horse that drew you."
"What!" cried I, beholding again in fancy the antics of the figure,
"could that be you?"
"It was I," he replied; "but do not fancy that I was mad. I was in
agony. I had been scalded cruelly."
We were now near the house, which, unlike the ordinary houses of the
country, was built of hewn stone and very solid. Stone, too, was its
foundation, stone its background. Not a blade of grass sprouted among
the broken mineral about the walls, not a flower adorned the windows.
Over the door, by way of sole adornment, the Mormon Eye was rudely
sculptured; I had been brought up to view that emblem from my
childhood; but since the night of our escape, it had acquired a new
significance, and set me shrinking. The smoke rolled voluminously from
the chimney-top, its edges ruddy with the fire; and from the far corner
of the building, near the ground, angry puffs of steam shone snow-white
in the moon and vanished.
The doctor opened the door and paused upon the threshold. "You ask me
what I make here," he observed: "Two things: Life and Death." And he
motioned me to enter.
"I shall await my mother," said I.
"Child," he replied, "look at me: am I not old and broken? Of us two,
which is the stronger, the young maiden or the withered man?"