Читать книгу The Lions of the Lord (Western Novel) - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 6

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In his cautious approach to the Daggin house, he came upon her unawares—a slight, slender, shapely thing of pink and golden flame, as she poised where the sun came full upon her. One hand clutched her flowing blue skirts snugly about her ankles; the other opened coaxingly to a kitten crouched to spring on the limb of an apple-tree above her. The head was thrown back, the vivid lips were parted, and he heard her laugh low to herself. Near by was a towering rose-bush, from which she had broken the last red rose, large, full, and lush, its petals already loosened. Now she wrenched away a handful of these, and flung them upward at the watchful kitten. The scarlet flecks drifted back around her and upon her. Like little red butterflies hovering in golden sunlight, they lodged in her many-braided yellow hair, or fluttered down the long curls that hung in front of her ears. She laughed again under the caressing shower. Then she tore away the remaining petals and tossed them up with an elf-like daintiness, not at the crouched and expectant kitten this time, but so that the whole red rain floated tenderly down upon her upturned face and into the folds of the white kerchief crossed upon her breast. She waited for the last feathery petal. Her hidden lover saw it lodge in the little hollow at the base of her bare, curved throat. He could hold no longer.

Stepping from the covert that had shielded him, he called softly to her.

“Prudence—Prue!”

She had reached again for the kitten, but at the sound of his low, vigorous note, she turned quickly toward him, colouring with a glow that spread from the corner of the crossed kerchief up to the yellow hair above her brow. She answered with quick breaths.

“Joel—Joel—Joel!”

She laughed aloud, clapping her small hands, and he ran to her—over beds of marigolds, heartsease, and lady’s-slippers, through a row of drowsy-looking, heavy-headed dahlias, and past other withering flowers, all but choked out by the rank garden growths of late summer. Then his arms opened and seemed to swallow the leaping little figure, though his kisses fell with hardly more weight upon the yielded face than had the rose-petals a moment since, so tenderly mindful was his ardour. She submitted, a little as the pampered kitten had before submitted to her own pettings.

“You dear old sobersides, you—how gaunt and careworn you look, and how hungry, and what wild eyes you have to frighten one with! At first I thought you were a crazy man.”

He held her face up to his eager eyes, having no words to say, overcome by the joy that surged through him like a mighty rush of waters. In the moment’s glorious certainty he rested until she stirred nervously under his devouring look, and spoke.

“Come, kiss me now and let me go.”

He kissed her eyes so that she shut them; then he kissed her lips—long—letting her go at last, grudgingly, fearfully, unsatisfied.

“You scare me when you look that way. You mustn’t be so fierce.”

“I told him he didn’t know you.”

“Who didn’t know me, sir?”

“A man who said I wasn’t sure of you.”

“So you are sure of me, are you, Mr. Preacherman? Is it because we’ve been sweethearts since so long? But remember you’ve been much away. I’ve seen you—let me count—but one little time of two weeks in three years. You would go on that horrid mission.”

“Is not religion made up of obedience, let life or death come?”

“Is there no room for loving one’s sweetheart in it?”

“One must obey, and I am a better man for having denied myself and gone. I can love you better. I have been taught to think of others. I was sent to open up the gospel in the Eastern States because I had been endowed with almost the open vision. It was my call to help in the setting up of the Messiah’s latter-day kingdom. Besides, we may never question the commands of the holy priesthood, even if our wicked hearts rebel in secret.”

“If you had questioned the right person sharply enough, you might have had an answer as to why you were sent.”

“What do you mean? How could I have questioned? How could I have rebelled against the stepping-stone of my exaltation?”

His face relaxed a little, and he concluded almost quizzically:

“Was not Satan hurled from high heaven for resisting authority?”

She pouted, caught him by the lapels of his coat and prettily tried to shake him.

“There—horrid!—you’re preaching again. Please remember you’re not on mission now. Indeed, sir, you were called back for being too—too—why, do you know, even old Elder Munsel, ‘Fire-brand Munsel,’ they call him, said you were too fanatical.”

His face grew serious.

“I’m glad to be called back to you, at any rate,—and yet, think of all those poor benighted infidels who believe there are no longer revelations nor prophecies nor gifts nor healings nor speaking with tongues,—this miserable generation so blind in these last days when the time of God’s wrath is at hand. Oh, I burn in my heart for them, night after night, suffering for the tortures that must come upon them—thrice direful because they have rejected the message of Moroni and trampled upon the priesthood of high heaven, butchering the Saints of the Most High, and hunting the prophets of God like Ahab of old.”

“Oh, dear, please stop it! You sound like swearing!” Her two hands were closing her ears in a pretty pretense.

He seemed hardly to hear her, but went on excitedly:

“Yet I have done what man could do. I am never done doing. I would gladly give my body to be burned a thousand times if it would avail to save them into the Kingdom. I have preached the word tirelessly—fanatically, they say—but only as it burned in my bones. I have told them of visions, dreams, revelations, miracles, and all the mercies of this last dispensation. And I have prayed and fasted. Just now coming from winter quarters, when I could not preach, I held twelve fasts and twelve vigils. You will say it has weakened me, but it has weakened only the bonds that the flesh puts upon the spirit. Even so, I fell short of my vision—my tabernacle of flesh must have been too much profaned, though how I cannot dream—believe me, I have kept myself as high and clean as I knew. Yet there was promise. For only last night at the river bank, the spirit came partially upon me. I was taken with a faintness, and I heard above my head a sound like the rustling of silken robes, and the spirit of God hovered over me, so that I could feel its radiance. All in good time, then, it shall dwell within me, so that I may know a way to save the worthy.”

He grasped her wrist and bent eagerly forward, with the same wild look in his eyes that had before disquieted her.

“Mark what I say now—I shall do great works for this generation; I am strangely favoured of God; I have felt the spirit quicken wondrously within me, and I know the Lord works not in vain; what great wonder of grace I shall do, what miracle of salvation, I know not, but remember, it shall be transcendent; tell it to no one, but I know in my inner secret heart it shall be a greater work than man hath yet done.”

He stopped and drew himself up, shaking his head, as if to shrug off the spell of his own feeling.

“Now, now! stop it at once, and come to the house. I’ve been tending your father and mother, and I’m going to tend you. What you need directly is food. Your look may be holy, but I prefer full cheeks. Not another word until you have eaten every crumb I put before you.”

With an air of captor, daintily fierce, she led him toward the house and up to the door, which she pushed open before him.

“Come softly, your mother may be still asleep—no, your father is talking—listen!”

A querulous voice, rough with strong feeling, came from the inner room.

“Here, I tell you, is the prophecy of Joseph to prove it, away back in 1832: ‘Verily thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will terminate in the death and misery of many souls. The days will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at that place; for behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called.’ Now will you doubt again, mother? For persecuting the Saints of the most high God, this republic shall be dashed to pieces like a potter’s vessel. But we shall be safe. The Lord will gather Israel home to the chambers of the mountains against the day of wrath that is coming on the Gentile world. For all flesh hath corrupted itself on the face of the earth, but the Saints shall possess a purified land, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh. Then shall the heavens open—”

He broke off, for the girl came leading in the son, who, as soon as he saw the white-haired old man with his open book, sitting beside the wasted woman on the bed, flew to them with a glad cry.

They embraced him and smoothed and patted him, tremulously, feebly, with broken thanks for his safe return. The mother at last fell back upon her pillow, her eyes shining with the joy of a great relief, while the father was seized with a fit of coughing that cruelly racked his gaunt frame and left him weak but smiling.

The girl had been placing food upon the table.

“Come, Joel,” she urged, “you must eat—we have all breakfasted, so you must sit alone, but we shall watch you.”

She pushed him into the chair and filled his plate, in spite of his protests.

“Not another word until you have eaten it all.”

“The very sight of it is enough. I am not hungry.”

But she coaxed and commanded, with her hands upon his shoulders, and he let himself be persuaded to taste the bread and meat. After a few mouthfuls, taken with obvious disrelish, she detected the awakening fervour of a famished man, and knew she would have to urge no more.

As the son ate, the girl busied herself at the mother’s pillow, while the father talked and ruminated by intervals,—a text, a word of cheer to the wasted mother, incidents of old days, memories of early revivals. In 1828, he had hailed Dylkes, the “Leatherwood God,” as the real Messiah. Then he had been successively a Freewill Baptist, a Winebrennerian, a Universalist, a Disciple, and finally an eloquent and moving preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now he was a wild-eyed old dreamer with a high, narrow forehead depressed at the temples, enfeebled, living much in the past. Once his voice would be low, as if he spoke only to himself; again it would rise in warning to an evil generation.

“The end of the world is at hand, laddie,” he began, after looking fondly at his son for a time. “Joseph said there are those now living who shall not taste of death till Jesus comes. And then, oh, then—the great white day! There is strong delusion among the wicked in the day in which we live, but the seed of Abraham, the royal seed, the blessed seed of the Lord, shall be told off to its separate glory. The Lord will spread the curtains of Zion and gather it out to the fat valleys of Ephraim, and there, with resurrected bodies it shall possess the purified earth. I shall be away for a time before then, laddie—and the dear mother here. Our crowns have been earned and will not long be withheld. But you will be there for the glory of it, and who more deserves it?”

“I pray to be made worthy of the exaltation, Father.”

“You are, laddie. The word and the light came to me when I preached another faith—for the spirit of Thomas Campbell had aforetime moved me—but you, laddie, you have been bred in the word and the truth. The Lord, as a mark of his favour, has kept you from the contamination of doubters, infidels, heretics, and apostates. You have been educated under the care of the priesthood, close here in Nauvoo the Beautiful, and who could more deserve the fulness of thrones, dominions, and of power—who of all those whose number the after-time shall unfold?”

He turned appealingly to the mother, whose fevered eyes rested fondly upon her boy as she nodded confirmation of the words.

“Did he not march all the way from Kirtland to Missouri with us in ’34—the youngest soldier in the whole army of Zion? How old, laddie?—twelve, was it?—so he marched a hundred miles for every one of his little years—and so valiant—none more so—begging us to hasten and give battle so he could fight upon the Lord’s side. Twelve hundred miles he walked to put back in their homes the persecuted Saints of Jackson County. But, ah! There he saw liberty strangled in her sanctuary. Do you mind, laddie, how in ’38 we were driven by the mob from Jackson across the river into Clay County? how they ran off our cattle, stole our grain? how your poor old mother’s mother died from exposure that night in the rain and sleet? how we lived on mast and corn, the winter, in tents and a few dugouts and rickety huts—we who had the keys of St. Peter and the gifts of the apostolic age? Do you mind the sackings and burnings at Adam-Ondi-Ahman? Do you mind the wife of Joseph’s brother, Don Carlos, she that was made by the soldiers to wade Grand River with two helpless babes in her arms? They would not even let her warm herself, before she started, at the flames of her own hut they had fired. And, laddie, you mind Haun’s mill. Ah, the bloody day!—you were there, and one other, the sister, happy, beautiful as her in the Song of Songs, when the brutes came—”

“Don’t, father—stop there—you are making my throat shut against the food.”

“Then you came to Far West in time to see Joseph and his brethren sold to the mobocrats by that devil’s traitor, Hinkle,—you saw the fleeing Saints forced to leave their all, hunted out of Missouri into Illinois—their houses burned, the cattle stolen, their wives and daughters—”

“Don’t, father! Be quiet again. You and mother must be fit for our journey, as fit as we younger folk.”

He glanced fondly across the table, where the girl had leaned her chin in her hands to watch him, speculatively. She avoided his eyes.

“Yes, yes,” assented the old man, “and you know of our persecutions here—how we had to finish the temple with our arms by our sides, even as the faithful finished the walls of Jerusalem—and how we were driven out by night—”

“Quiet, father!”

“Yes, yes. Ah, this gathering out! How far shall we go, laddie?”

“Four hundred miles to winter quarters. From there no one yet knows,—a thousand, maybe two thousand.”

“Aye, to the Rockies or beyond, even to the Pacific. Joseph prophesied it—where we shall be left in peace until the great day.”

The young man glanced quickly up.

“Or have time to grow mighty, if we should not be let alone. Surely this is the last time the Lord would have us meek under the mob.”

“Ho, ho! As you were twelve years ago, trudging by my side, valiant to fight if the Lord but wills it! But have no fear, boy. This time we go far beyond all that may tempt the spoiler. We go into the desert, where no humans are but the wretched red Lamanites; no beasts but the wild ones of four feet to hunger for our flesh; no verdure, no nourishment to sustain us save the manna from on high,—a region of unknown perils and unnamed deserts. Truly we make the supreme test. I do not overcolour it. Prudence, hand me yonder scrap-book, there on the secretary. Here I shall read you the words of no less a one than Senator Daniel Webster on the floor of the Senate but a few months agone. He spoke on the proposal to fix a mail-route from Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia River in that far-off land. Hear this great man who knows whereof he speaks. He is very bitter. ‘What do we want with this vast, worthless area—this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie-dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snows? What can we ever hope to do with that Western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, uninviting, and not a harbour on it. Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it now is!’”

The girl had been making little impatient flights about the room, as if awaiting an opportunity to interrupt the old man’s harangue, but even as she paused to speak, he began again:

“There, laddie, do you hear him?—arid deserts, shifting sand, snow and ice, wild beasts and wilder men—that is where Israel of the last days shall be hidden to wait for the second coming of God’s Christ. There, having received our washings and anointings in the temple of God on earth, we shall wait unmolested, and spread the curtains of Zion in due circumspection. And what a migration to be recorded in another sacred history ages hence! Surely the blood of our martyred Prophet hath not smoked to heaven in vain. Where is there a parallel to this hegira? They from Egypt went from a heathen land, a land of idolatry, to a fertile home chosen for them by the Lord. But we go from a fair, smiling land of plenty and pretended Christianity into the burning desert. They have driven us to the edge; now they drive us in. But God works his way among the peoples of earth, and we are strong. Who knows but that we shall in our march throw up a highway of holiness to the rising generation? So let us round up our backs to the burden!”

“Amen!” replied the young man fervently, as he rose from the table.

“And now we must be about our preparations for the journey. The time is short—who is that?”

He sprang to the door. Outside, quick steps were heard approaching. The girl, who had risen in some confusion, stood blushing and embarrassed before him. The mother rose feebly on her elbow to reassure him.

“’Tis Captain Girnway, laddie. Have no alarm—he has befriended us. But for him we should have been put out two days ago, without shelter and without care. He let us be housed here until you should come.”

There was a knock at the door, but Joel stood with his back to it. The words of Seth Wright were running roughshod through his mind. He looked sharply at Prudence.

“A mobocrat—our enemy—and you have taken favours from him—a minion of the devil?—shame!”

The girl looked up.

“He was kind; you don’t realise that he has probably saved their lives. Indeed, you must let him in and thank him.”

“Not I!”

The mother interposed hurriedly.

“Yes, yes, laddie! You know not how high-handed they have been. They expelled all but us, and some they have maltreated shamefully. This one has been kind to us. Open the door.”

“I dare not face him—I may not contain myself!”

The knock was repeated more loudly. The girl went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders to draw him away.

“Be reasonable,” she pleaded, in low tones, “and above all, be polite to him.”

She put him gently aside and drew back the door. On the threshold smiled the young captain he had watched from the window that morning, marching at the head of his company. His cap was doffed, and his left hand rested easily on the hilt of his sword. He stepped inside as one sure of his welcome.

“Good morning, Miss Prudence, good morning, Mr. Rae, good morning, madam—good morning—”

He looked questioningly at the stranger. Prudence stepped forward.

“This is Joel Rae, Captain Girnway.”

They bowed, somewhat stiffly. Each was dark. Each had a face to attract women. But the captain was at peace with the world, neatly uniformed, well-fed, clean-shaven, smiling, pleasant to look upon, while the other was unshaven, hollow-cheeked, gaunt, roughly dressed, a thing that had been hunted and was now under ban. Each was at once sensible of the contrast between them, and each was at once affected by it: the captain to a greater jauntiness, a more effusive affability; the other to a stonier sternness.

“I am glad to know you have come, Mr. Rae. Your people have worried a little, owing to the unfortunate circumstances in which they have been placed.”

“I—I am obliged to you, sir, in their behalf, for your kindness to my father and mother and to Miss Corson here.”

“You are a thousand times welcome, sir. Can you tell me when you will wish to cross the river?”

“At the very earliest moment that God and the mob will let us. To-morrow morning, I hope.”

“This has not been agreeable to me, believe me—”

“Far less so to us, you may be sure; but we shall be content again when we can get away from all your whiggery, democratism, devilism, mobism!”

He spoke with rising tones, and the other flushed noticeably about the temples.

“Have your wagons ready to-morrow morning, then, Mr. Rae—at eight? Very well, I shall see that you are protected to the ferry. There has been so much of that tone of talk, sir, that some of our men have resented it.”

He turned pleasantly to Prudence.

“And you, Miss Prudence, you will be leaving Nauvoo for Springfield, I suppose. As you go by Carthage, I shall wish to escort you that far myself, to make sure of your safety.”

The lover turned fiercely, seizing the girl’s wrist and drawing her toward him before she could answer.

“Her goal is Zion, not Babylon, sir—remember that!”

She stepped hastily between them.

“We will talk of that to-morrow, Captain,” she said, quickly, and added, “You may leave us now for we have much to do here in making ready for the start.”

“Until to-morrow morning, then, at eight.”

He bowed low over the hand she gave him, gracefully saluted the others, and was gone.