and thence to his mouth. By the movement of his jaws he must be
eating; in that camp of famine he had reserved a store of
nourishment; and while his companions lay in the stupor of
approaching death, secretly restored his powers.
My father was so incensed at what he saw that he raised his rifle;
and but for an accident, he has often declared, he would have shot
the fellow dead upon the spot. How different would then have been
my history! But it was not to be: even as he raised the barrel,
his eye lighted on the bear, as it crawled along a ledge some way
below him; and ceding to the hunters instinct, it was at the brute,
not at the man, that he discharged his piece. The bear leaped and
fell into a pool of the river; the canyon re-echoed the report; and
in a moment the camp was afoot. With cries that were scarce human,
stumbling, falling and throwing each other down, these starving
people rushed upon the quarry; and before my father, climbing down
by the ledge, had time to reach the level of the stream, many were
already satisfying their hunger on the raw flesh, and a fire was
being built by the more dainty.
His arrival was for some time unremarked. He stood in the midst of
these tottering and clay-faced marionettes; he was surrounded by
their cries; but their whole soul was fixed on the dead carcass;
even those who were too weak to move, lay, half-turned over, with
their eyes riveted upon the bear; and my father, seeing himself
stand as though invisible in the thick of this dreary hubbub, was
seized with a desire to weep. A touch upon the arm restrained him.
Turning about, he found himself face to face with the old man he
had so nearly killed; and yet, at the second glance, recognised him
for no old man at all, but one in the full strength of his years,
and of a strong, speaking, and intellectual countenance stigmatised
by weariness and famine. He beckoned my father near the cliff, and
there, in the most private whisper, begged for brandy. My father
looked at him with scorn: 'You remind me,' he said, 'of a
neglected duty. Here is my flask; it contains enough, I trust, to
revive the women of your party; and I will begin with her whom I
saw you robbing of her blankets.' And with that, not heeding his
appeals, my father turned his back upon the egoist.
The girl still lay reclined against the rock; she lay too far sunk
in the first stage of death to have observed the bustle round her
couch; but when my father had raised her head, put the flask to her
lips, and forced or aided her to swallow some drops of the
restorative, she opened her languid eyes and smiled upon him
faintly. Never was there a smile of a more touching sweetness;
never were eyes more deeply violet, more honestly eloquent of the
soul! I speak with knowledge, for these were the same eyes that
smiled upon me in the cradle. From her who was to be his wife, my
father, still jealously watched and followed by the man with the
grey beard, carried his attentions to all the women of the party,
and gave the last drainings of his flask to those among the men who
seemed in the most need.
'Is there none left? not a drop for me?' said the man with the
beard.
'Not one drop,' replied my father; 'and if you find yourself in
want, let me counsel you to put your hand into the pocket of your
coat.'
'Ah!' cried the other, 'you misjudge me. You think me one who
clings to life for selfish and commonplace considerations. But let
me tell you, that were all this caravan to perish, the world would
but be lightened of a weight. These are but human insects,
pullulating, thick as May-flies, in the slums of European cities,
whom I myself have plucked from degradation and misery, from the
dung-heap and gin-palace door. And you compare their lives with
mine!'
'You are then a Mormon missionary?' asked my father.
'Oh!' cried the man, with a strange smile, 'a Mormon missionary if
you will! I value not the title. Were I no more than that, I
could have died without a murmur. But with my life as a physician
is bound up the knowledge of great secrets and the future of man.
This it was, when we missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and
wandered to this desolate ravine, that ate into my soul, and, in
five days, has changed my beard from ebony to silver.'
'And you are a physician,' mused my father, looking on his face,
'bound by oath to succour man in his distresses.'
'Sir,' returned the Mormon, 'my name is Grierson: you will hear
that name again; and you will then understand that my duty was not
to this caravan of paupers, but to mankind at large.'
My father turned to the remainder of the party, who were now
sufficiently revived to hear; told them that he would set off at
once to bring help from his own party; 'and,' he added, 'if you be
again reduced to such extremities, look round you, and you will see
the earth strewn with assistance. Here, for instance, growing on
the under side of fissures in this cliff, you will perceive a
yellow moss. Trust me, it is both edible and excellent.'
'Ha!' said Doctor Grierson, 'you know botany!'
'Not I alone,' returned my father, lowering his voice; 'for see
where these have been scraped away. Am I right? Was that your
secret store?'
My father's comrades, he found, when he returned to the signal-
fire, had made a good day's hunting. They were thus the more
easily persuaded to extend assistance to the Mormon caravan; and
the next day beheld both parties on the march for the frontiers of
Utah. The distance to be traversed was not great; but the nature
of the country, and the difficulty of procuring food, extended the
time to nearly three weeks; and my father had thus ample leisure to
know and appreciate the girl whom he had succoured. I will call my
mother Lucy. Her family name I am not at liberty to mention; it is
one you would know well. By what series of undeserved calamities
this innocent flower of maidenhood, lovely, refined by education,
ennobled by the finest taste, was thus cast among the horrors of a
Mormon caravan, I must not stay to tell you. Let it suffice, that
even in these untoward circumstances, she found a heart worthy of
her own. The ardour of attachment which united my father and
mother was perhaps partly due to the strange manner of their
meeting; it knew, at least, no bounds either divine or human; my
father, for her sake, determined to renounce his ambitions and
abjure his faith; and a week had not yet passed upon the march
before he had resigned from his party, accepted the Mormon
doctrine, and received the promise of my mother's hand on the
arrival of the party at Salt Lake.
The marriage took place, and I was its only offspring. My father
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 headshakings. 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 further 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 halfway 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 one
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 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?'
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?'
I bowed, and passing by him, entered a vestibule or kitchen, lit by
a good fire and a shaded reading-lamp. It was furnished only with
a dresser, a rude table, and some wooden benches; and on one of
these the doctor motioned me to take a seat; and passing by another
door into the interior of the house, he left me to myself.
Presently I heard the jar of iron from the far end of the building;
and this was followed by the same throbbing noise that had startled
me in the valley, but now so near at hand as to be menacing by
loudness, and even to shake the house with every recurrence of the
stroke. I had scarce time to master my alarm when the doctor
returned, and almost in the same moment my mother appeared upon the
threshold. But how am I to describe to you the peace and
ravishment of that face? Years seemed to have passed over her head
during that brief ride, and left her younger and fairer; her eyes
shone, her smile went to my heart; she seemed no more a woman but
the angel of ecstatic tenderness. I ran to her in a kind of
terror; but she shrank a little back and laid her finger on her
lips, with something arch and yet unearthly. To the doctor, on the
contrary, she reached out her hand as to a friend and helper; and
so strange was the scene that I forgot to be offended.
'Lucy,' said the doctor, 'all is prepared. Will you go alone, or
shall your daughter follow us?'
'Let Asenath come,' she answered, 'dear Asenath! At this hour,
when I am purified of fear and sorrow, and already survive myself
and my affections, it is for your sake, and not for mine, that I
desire her presence. Were she shut out, dear friend, it is to be
feared she might misjudge your kindness.'
'Mother,' I cried wildly, 'mother, what is this?'
But my mother, with her radiant smile, said only 'Hush!' as though
I were a child again, and tossing in some fever-fit; and the doctor
bade me be silent and trouble her no more. 'You have made a
choice,' he continued, addressing my mother, 'that has often
strangely tempted me. The two extremes: all, or else nothing;
never, or this very hour upon the clock - these have been my
incongruous desires. But to accept the middle term, to be content
with a half-gift, to flicker awhile and to burn out - never for an
hour, never since I was born, has satisfied the appetite of my
ambition.' He looked upon my mother fixedly, much of admiration
and some touch of envy in his eyes; then, with a profound sigh, he
led the way into the inner room.
It was very long. From end to end it was lit up by many lamps,
which by the changeful colour of their light, and by the incessant
snapping sounds with which they burned, I have since divined to be
electric. At the extreme end an open door gave us a glimpse into
what must have been a lean-to shed beside the chimney; and this, in
strong contrast to the room, was painted with a red reverberation
as from furnace-doors. The walls were lined with books and glazed
cases, the tables crowded with the implements of chemical research;
great glass accumulators glittered in the light; and through a hole
in the gable near the shed door, a heavy driving-belt entered the
apartment and ran overhead upon steel pulleys, with clumsy activity
and many ghostly and fluttering sounds. In one corner I perceived
a chair resting upon crystal feet, and curiously wreathed with
wire. To this my mother advanced with a decisive swiftness.
'Is this it?' she asked.
The doctor bowed in silence.
'Asenath,' said my mother, 'in this sad end of my life I have found
one helper. Look upon him: it is Doctor Grierson. Be not, oh my
daughter, be not ungrateful to that friend!'
She sate upon the chair, and took in her hands the globes that
terminated the arms.
'Am I right?' she asked, and looked upon the doctor with such a
radiancy of face that I trembled for her reason. Once more the
doctor bowed, but this time leaning hard against the wall. He must
have touched a spring. The least shock agitated my mother where
she sat; the least passing jar appeared to cross her features; and
she sank back in the chair like one resigned to weariness. I was
at her knees that moment; but her hands fell loosely in my grasp;
her face, still beatified with the same touching smile, sank
forward on her bosom: her spirit had for ever fled.
I do not know how long may have elapsed before, raising for a
moment my tearful face, I met the doctor's eyes. They rested upon
mine with such a depth of scrutiny, pity, and interest, that even
from the freshness of my sorrow, I was startled into attention.
'Enough,' he said, 'to lamentation. Your mother went to death as
to a bridal, dying where her husband died. It is time, Asenath, to
think of the survivors. Follow me to the next room.'
I followed him, like a person in a dream; he made me sit by the
fire, he gave me wine to drink; and then, pacing the stone floor,
he thus began to address me -
'You are now, my child, alone in the world, and under the immediate
watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary
circumstances, to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder,
or by particular fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to
find favour in the eyes of the President himself. Such a fate for
a girl like you were worse than death; better to die as your mother
died than to sink daily deeper in the mire of this pit of woman's
degradation. But is escape conceivable? Your father tried; and
you beheld yourself with what security his jailers acted, and how a
dumb drawing on a rock was counted a sufficient sentry over the
avenues of freedom. Where your father failed, will you be wiser or
more fortunate? or are you, too, helpless in the toils?'
I had followed his words with changing emotion, but now I believed
I understood.
'I see,' I cried; 'you judge me rightly. I must follow where my
parents led; and oh! I am not only willing, I am eager!'
'No,' replied the doctor, 'not death for you. The flawed vessel we
may break, but not the perfect. No, your mother cherished a
different hope, and so do I. I see,' he cried, 'the girl develop
to the completed woman, the plan reach fulfilment, the promise - ay,
outdone! I could not bear to arrest so lively, so comely a
process. It was your mother's thought,' he added, with a change of
tone, 'that I should marry you myself.' I fear I must have shown a
perfect horror of aversion from this fate, for he made haste to
quiet me. 'Reassure yourself, Asenath,' he resumed. 'Old as I am,
I have not forgotten the tumultuous fancies of youth. I have
passed my days, indeed, in laboratories; but in all my vigils I
have not forgotten the tune of a young pulse. Age asks with
timidity to be spared intolerable pain; youth, taking fortune by
the beard, demands joy like a right. These things I have not
forgotten; none, rather, has more keenly felt, none more jealously
considered them; I have but postponed them to their day. See,
then: you stand without support; the only friend left to you, this
old investigator, old in cunning, young in sympathy. Answer me but
one question: Are you free from the entanglement of what the world
calls love? Do you still command your heart and purposes? or are
you fallen in some bond-slavery of the eye and ear?'