‘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 {43} 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
canyon 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 breakneck, 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 canyon, 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,
at 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. Farther 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 canyon? 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 in 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?’