Читать книгу The Lions of the Lord (Western Novel) - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 8

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By eight o’clock the next morning, out under a cloudy sky, the Raes were ready and eager for their start to the new Jerusalem. Even the sick woman’s face wore a kind of soft and faded radiance in the excitement of going. On her mattress, she had been tenderly installed in one of the two covered wagons that carried their household goods. The wagon in which she lay was to be taken across the river by Seth Wright,—for the moment no Wild Ram of the Mountains, but a soft-cooing dove of peace. Permission had been granted him by Brockman to recross the river on some needful errands; and, having once proved the extreme sensitiveness, not to say irritability, of those in temporary command, he was now resolved to give as little éclat as possible to certain superior aspects of his own sanctity. He spoke low and deferentially, and his mien was that of a modest, retiring man who secretly thought ill of himself.

He mounted the wagon in which the sick woman lay, sat well back under the bowed cover, clucked low to the horses, and drove off toward the ferry. If discreet behaviour on his part could ensure it there would be no conflict provoked with superior numbers; with numbers, moreover, composed of violent-tempered and unprincipled persecutors who were already acting with but the merest shadow of legal authority.

On the seat of the second wagon, whip in hand, was perched Giles Rae, his coat buttoned warmly to the chin. He was slight and feeble to the eye, yet he had been fired to new life by the certainty that now they were to leave the territory of the persecuting Gentiles for a land to be the Saints’ very own. His son stood at the wheel, giving him final directions. At the gate was Prudence Corson, gowned for travel, reticule in hand, her prettiness shadowed, under the scoop of her bonnet, the toe of one trim little boot meditatively rolling a pebble over the ground.

“Drive slowly, Daddy. Likely I shall overtake you before you reach the ferry. I want but a word yet with Prudence; though”—he glanced over at the bowed head of the girl—“no matter if I linger a little, since Brother Seth will cross first and we must wait until the boat comes back. Some of our people will be at the ferry to look after you,—and be careful to have no words with any of the mob—no matter what insult they may offer. You’re feeling strong, aren’t you?”

“Ay, laddie, that I am! Strong as an ox! The very thought of being free out of this Babylon has exalted me in spirit and body. Think of it, boy! Soon we shall be even beyond the limits of the United States—in a foreign land out there to the west, where these bloodthirsty ones can no longer reach us. Thank God they’re like all snakes—they can’t jump beyond their own length!”

He leaned out of the wagon to shake a bloodless, trembling fist toward the temple where the soldiers had made their barracks.

“Now let great and grievous judgments, desolations, by famine, sword, and pestilence come upon you, generation of vipers!”

He cracked the whip, the horses took their load at his cheery call, and as the wagon rolled away they heard him singing:—

“Lo, the Gentile chain is broken!

Freedom’s banner waves on high!”

They watched him until the wagon swung around into the street that fell away to the ferry. Then they faced each other, and he stepped to her side as she leaned lightly on the gate.

“Prue, dear,” he said, softly, “it’s going hard with me. God must indeed have a great work reserved for me to try me with such a sacrifice—so much pain where I could least endure it. I prayed all the night to be kept firm, for there are two ways open—one right and one wrong; but I cannot sell my soul so early. That’s why I wanted to say the last good-bye out here. I was afraid to say it in there—I am so weak for you, Prue—I ache so for you in all this trouble—why, if I could feel your hands in my hair, I’d laugh at it all—I’m so weak for you, dearest.”

She tossed her yellow head ever so slightly, and turned the scoop of her bonnet a little away from his pain-lighted face.

“I am not complimented, though—you care more for your religion than for me.”

He looked at her hungrily.

“No, you are wrong there—I don’t separate you at all—I couldn’t—you and my religion are one—but, if I must, I can love you in spirit as I worship my God in spirit—”

“If it will satisfy you, very well!”

“My reward will come—I shall do a great work, I shall have a Witness from the sky. Who am I that I should have thought to win a crown without taking up a cross?”

“I am sorry for you.”

“Oh, Prue, there must be a way to save the souls of such as you, even in their blindness. Would God make a flower like you, only to let it be lost? There must be a way. I shall pray until I force it from the secret heavens.”

“My soul will be very well, sir!” she retorted, with a distinct trace of asperity. “I am not a heathen, I’d thank you to remember—and when I’m a wife I shall be my husband’s only wife—”

He winced in acutest pain.

“You have no right to taunt me so. Else you can’t know what you have meant to me. Oh, you were all the world, child—you, of your own dear self—you would have been all the wives in the world to me—there are many, many of you, and all in a heavenly one—”

“Oh, forgive me, dearest,” she cried, and put out a little gloved hand to comfort him. “I know, I know—all the sweetness and goodness of your love, believe me. See, I have kept always by me the little Bible you gave me on my birthday—I have treasured it, and I know it has made me a better girl, because it makes me always think of your goodness—but I couldn’t have gone there, Joel—and it does seem as if you need not have gone—and that marrying is so odious—”

“You shall see how little you had to fear of that doctrine which God has seen fit to reveal to these good men. I tell you now, Prue, I shall wed no woman but you. Nor am I giving you up. Don’t think it. I am doing my duty and trusting God to bring you to me. I know He will do it—I tell you there is the spirit of some strange, awful strength in me, which tells me to ask what I will and it shall be given—to seek to do anything, how great or hard soever, and a giant’s, a god’s strength will rest in me. And so I know you will come. You will always think of me so,—waiting for you—somehow, somewhere. Every day you must think it, at any idle moment when I come to your mind; every night when you waken in the dark and silence, you must think, ‘Wherever he is, he is waiting for me, perhaps awake as I am now, praying, with a power that will surely draw me.’ You will come somehow. Perhaps, when I reach winter quarters, you will have changed your mind. One never knows how God may fashion these little providences. But He will bring you safe to me out of that Gentile perdition. Remember, child, God has set his hand in these last days to save the human family from the ruins of the fall, and some way, He alone knows how, you will come to me and find me waiting.”

“As if you needed to wait for me when I am here now ready for you, willing to be taken!”

“Don’t, don’t, dear! There are two of me now, and one can’t stand the pain. There is a man in me, sworn to do a man’s work like a man, and duty to God and the priesthood has big chains around his heart dragging it across the river. But, low, now—there is a little, forlorn boy in me, too—a poor, crying, whimpering, babyish little boy, who dreamed of you and longed for you and was promised you, and who will never get well of losing you. Oh, I know it well enough—his tears will never dry, his heart will always have a big hurt in it—and your face will always be so fresh and clear in it!”

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into the face under the bonnet.

“Let me make sure I shall lose no look of you, from little tilted chin, and lips of scarlet thread, and little teeth like grains of rice, and eyes into which I used to wander and wonder so far—”

She looked past him and stepped back.

“Captain Girnway is coming for me—yonder, away down the street. He takes me to Carthage.”

His face hardened as he looked over his shoulder.

“I shall never wed any woman but you. Can you feel as deeply as that? Will you wed no man but me?”

She fluttered the cherry ribbons on the bonnet and fixed a stray curl in front of one ear.

“Have you a right to ask that? I might wait a time for you to come back—to your senses and to me, but—”

“Good-bye, darling!”.

“What, will you go that way—not kiss me? He is still two blocks away.”

“I am so weak for you, sweet—the little boy in me is crying for you, but he must not have what he wants. What he wants would leave his heart rebellious and not perfect with the Lord. It’s best not,” he continued, with an effort at a smile and in a steadier tone. “It would mean so much to me—oh, so very much to me—and so very little to you—and that’s no real kiss. I’d rather remember none of that kind—and don’t think I was churlish—it’s only because the little boy—I will go after my father now, and God bless you!”

He turned away. A few paces on he met Captain Girnway, jaunty, debonair, smiling, handsome in his brass-buttoned uniform of the Carthage Grays.

“I have just left the ferry, Mr. Rae. The wagon with your mother has gone over. The other had not yet come down. Some of the men appear to be a little rough this morning. Your people are apt to provoke them by being too outspoken, but I left special orders for the good treatment of yourself and outfit.”

With a half-smothered “thank you,” he passed on, not trusting himself to say more to one who was not only the enemy of his people, but bent, seemingly, on deluding a young woman to the loss of her soul. He heard their voices in cheerful greeting, but did not turn back. With eyes to the front and shoulders squared he kept stiffly on his way through the silent, deserted streets to the ferry.

Fifteen minutes’ walk brought him to the now busy waterside. The ferry, a flat boat propelled by long oars, was landing when he came into view, and he saw his father’s wagon driven on. He sped down the hill, pushed through the crowd of soldiers standing about, and hurried forward on the boat to let the old man know he had come. But on the seat was another than his father. He recognised the man, and called to him.

“What are you doing there, Brother Keaton? Where’s my father?”

The man had shrunk back under the wagon-cover, having seemingly been frightened by the soldiers.

“I’ve taken your father’s place, Brother Rae.”

“Did he cross with Brother Wright?”

“Yes—he—” The man hesitated. Then came an interruption from the shore.

“Come, clear the gangway there so we can load! Here are some more of the damned rats we’ve hunted out of their holes!”

The speaker made a half-playful lunge with his bayonet at a gaunt, yellow-faced spectre of a man who staggered on to the boat with a child in his arms wrapped in a tattered blue quilt. A gust of the chilly wind picked his shapeless, loose-fitting hat off as he leaped to avoid the bayonet-point, and his head was seen to be shaven. The crowd on the bank laughed loud at his clumsiness and at his grotesque head. Joel Rae ran to help him forward on the boat.

“Thank you, Brother—I’m just up from the fever-bed—they shaved my head for it—and so I lost my hat—thank you—here we shall be warm if only the sun comes out.”

Joel went back to help on others who came, a feeble, bedraggled dozen or so that had clung despairingly to their only shelter until they were driven out.

“You can stay here in safety, you know, if you renounce Joseph Smith and his works—they will give you food and shelter.” He repeated it to each little group of the dispirited wretches as they staggered past him, but they replied staunchly by word or look, and one man, in the throes of a chill, swung his cap and uttered a feeble “Hurrah for the new Zion!”

When they were all on with their meagre belongings, he called again to the man in the wagon.

“Brother Keaton, my father went across, did he?”

Several of the men on shore answered him.

“Yes”—“Old white-whiskered death’s-head went over the river”—“Over here”—“A sassy old codger he was”—“He got his needings, too”—“Got his needings—”

They cast off the line and the oars began to dip.

“And you’ll get your needings, too, if you come back, remember that! That’s the last of you, and we’ll have no more vermin like you. Now see what old Joe Smith, the white-hat prophet, can do for you in the Indian territory!”

He stood at the stern of the boat, shivering as he looked at the current, swift, cold, and gray under the sunless sky. He feared some indignity had been offered to his father. They had looked at one another queerly when they answered his questions. He went forward to the wagon again.

“Brother Keaton, you’re sure my father is all right?”

“I am sure he’s all right, Brother Rae.”

Content with this, at last, he watched the farther flat shore of the Mississippi, with its low fringe of green along the edge, where they were to land and be at last out of the mob’s reach. He repeated his father’s words: “Thank God, they’re like all snakes; they can’t jump beyond their own length.”

The confusion of landing and the preparations for an immediate start drove for the time all other thoughts from his mind. It had been determined to get the little band at once out of the marshy spot where the camp had been made. The teams were soon hitched, the wagons loaded, and the train ready to move. He surveyed it, a hundred poor wagons, many of them without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground. These bade fair not to outlast some of the lumbering carts that threatened at every rough spot to jolt apart.

Yet the line bravely formed to the order of Seth Wright as captain, and the march began. Looking back, he saw peaceful Nauvoo, its houses and gardens, softened by the cloudy sky and the autumn haze, clustering under the shelter of their temple spire,—their temple and their houses, of which they were now despoiled by a mob’s fury. Ahead he saw the road to the West, a hard road, as he knew,—one he could not hope they should cross without leaving more graves by the way; but Zion was at the end.

The wagons and carts creaked and strained and rattled under their swaying loads, and the line gradually defined itself along the road from the confused jumble at the camp. He remembered his father again now, and hurried forward to assure himself that all was right. As he overtook along the way the stumbling ones obliged to walk, he tried to cheer them.

“Only a short march to-day, brothers. Our camp is at Sugar Creek, nine miles—so take your time this first day.”

Near the head of the train were his own two wagons, and beside the first walked Seth Wright and Keaton, in low, earnest converse. As he came up to them the Bishop spoke.

“I got Wes’ and Alec Gregg to drive awhile so we could stretch our legs.” But then came a quick change of tone, as they halted by the road.

“Joel, there’s no use beatin’ about the bush—them devils at the ferry jest now drowned your pa.”

He went cold all over. Keaton, looking sympathetic but frightened, spoke next.

“You ought to thank me, Brother Rae, for not telling you on the other side, when you asked me. I knew better. Because, why? Because I knew you’d fly off the handle and get yourself killed, and then your ma’d be left all alone, that’s why, now—and prob’ly they’d ’a’ wound up by dumping the whole passle of us bag and baggage into the stream. And it wa’n’t any use, your father bein’ dead and gone.”

The Bishop took up the burden, slapping him cordially on the back.

“Come, come,—hearten up, now! Your pa’s been made a martyr—he’s beautified his inheritance in Zion—whinin’ won’t do no good.”

He drew himself up with a shrug, as if to throw off an invisible burden, and answered, calmly:

“I’m not whining, Bishop. Perhaps you were right not to tell me over there, Keaton. I’d have made trouble for you all.” He smiled painfully in his effort to control himself. “Were you there, Bishop?”

“No, I’d already gone acrost. Keaton here saw it.”

Keaton took up the tale.

“I was there when the old gentleman drove down singing, ‘Lo, the Gentile chain is broken.’ He was awful chipper. Then one of ’em called him old Father Time, and he answered back. I disremember what, but, any way, one word fired another until they was cussin’ Giles Rae up hill and down dale, and instead of keepin’ his head shet like he had ought to have done, he was prophesyin’ curses, desolations, famines, and pestilences on ’em all, and callin’ ’em enemies of Christ. He was sassy—I can’t deny that—and that’s where he wa’n’t wise. Some of the mobocrats was drunk and some was mad; they was all in their high-heeled boots one way or another, and he enraged ’em more. So he says, finally, ‘The Jews fell,’ he says, ‘because they wouldn’t receive their Messiah, the Shiloh, the Saviour. They wet their hands,’ he says, ‘in the best blood that had flowed through the lineage of Judah, and they had to pay the cost. And so will you cowards of Illinois,’ he says, ‘have to pay the penalty for sheddin’ the blood of Joseph Smith, the best blood that has flowed since the Lord’s Christ,’ he says. ‘The wrath of God,’ he says, ‘will abide upon you.’ The old gentleman was a powerful denouncer when he was in the spirit of it—”

“Come, come, Keaton, hurry, for God’s sake—get on!”

“And he made ’em so mad, a-settin’ up there so peart and brave before ’em, givin’ ’em as good as they sent—givin’ ’em hell right to their faces, you might say, that at last they made for him, some of them that you could see had been puttin’ a new faucet into the cider barrel. I saw they meant to do him a mischief—but Lord! what could I do against fifty, being then in the midst of a chill? Well, they drug him off the seat, and said, ‘Now, you old rat, own up that Holy Joe was a danged fraud;’ or something like that. But he was that sanctified and stubborn—‘Better to suffer stripes for the testimony of Christ,’ he says, ‘than to fall by the sin of denial!’ Then they drug him to the bank, one on each side, and says, ‘We baptise you in the holy name of Brockman,’ and in they dumped him—backwards, mind you! I saw then they was in a slippery place where it was deep and the current awful strong. But they hauled him out, and says again, ‘Do you renounce Holy Joe Smith and all his works?’ The poor old fellow couldn’t talk a word for the chill, but he shook his head like sixty—as stubborn as you’d wish. So they said, ‘Damn you! here’s another, then. We baptise you in the name of James K. Polk, President of the United States!’ and in they threw him again. Whether they done it on purpose or not, I wouldn’t like to say, but that time his coat collar slipped out of their hands and down he went. He came up ten feet down-stream and quite a ways out, and they hooted at him. I seen him come up once after that, and then they see he couldn’t swim a stroke, but little they cared. And I never saw him again. I jest took hold of the team and drove it on the boat, scared to death for what you’d do when you come,—so I kept still and they kept still. But remember, it’s only another debt the blood of the Gentiles will have to pay—”

“Either here on earth or in hell,” said the Bishop.

“And the soul of your poor pa is now warm and dry and happy in the presence of his Lord God.”