After that there is music from a melodeon, and the children sing the Mormon song,
"I want to be a Mormon,
And with the Mormons stand,"
and give it with as much fervor, Erma cannot help noticing, as the Sunday-schools in the East sing the beautiful hymn, "I want to be an angel," on which this is an awful parody.
Then stillness falls upon the audience, for the big gun of the evening is coming—the man who stands upon the right hand of the prophet and obtains his inspiration from him; the man who has expounded to them during a number of years the doctrines of their creed, revealed by the Almighty to Joseph Smith, their founder.
A moment after Kruger announces, a peculiar thrill in his voice, "Bishop Tranyon!"
As he says this, Erma, bending forward to get a better view, clenches her little hands together and thinks to herself, "This is the wretch who is Lawrence's enemy, and would destroy his happiness and mine!"
Then onto the platform comes a figure, wearing his clothes with a grace strange in a Mormon community, and whose broadcloth is finer than the sect is wont to wear, and whose gray eyes are familiar, and whose soft gestures are those she has been longing for—and whose grizzled moustache, now joined to a mighty beard, has caressed her lips. Gazing at him with all her might, something suddenly snaps in the girl's head, for he is speaking, and the incisive, smooth, cynical voice now crying the glory of the Mormon Church, the sanctity of plural, polygamous marriage—the voice now crying out the glory of what she thinks unutterable indignity and degradation to her sex, is that of—God help her!—no, she will not believe it, but still does—her father!
In one awful flash comes to her the thought, "If he is what he is, then what am I?" and merciful insensibility comes with it.
As for Mr. Livingston, he has listened to the preliminary proceedings in a perfunctory, philosophical kind of way, sometimes scoffing inwardly. Then his mind, as the children sing their hymn, running upon other churches, finally comes to his own; he has got to carelessly looking over the choristers, and trying to select from them youths who he thinks would make good altar-boys in his Episcopal Church.
He is hardly awakened from this when Bishop Tranyon is announced, and looking carelessly at him, thinks, "There's something curiously familiar in the old Mormon—he has a little of the New York club style about him. Good gracious! that gesture—where have I seen it?" and rubs his glasses and inspects him more closely. And then, remembering Travenion, the old New York swell, having known him as a boy, and seen him on his visits to New York, Ollie gets excited, for the eyes seem familiar to him, and the voice is the same that he has heard several times in the smoking-rooms of the Unity and Stuyvesant Clubs, though for a moment he cannot reconcile himself to believe what his memory tells him.