And always when the dusk came she would try to cheer him to new hope for the next night, counting the months that remained in the year, the little time within which the great white day must be. Then they would go back through the soft light of the afterglow, he with his bent shoulders and fallen face, shrunk and burned out, except for the eyes, and she in the first buoyant flush of her womanhood, free and strong and vital, a thing of warmth and colour and luring curve, restraining her quick young step to his, as she suppressed now a world of strange new fancies to his soberer way of thought. When they reached home again, her words always were: “Never mind, Daddy—it must come soon—there’s only a little time left in the year.”
It was on these occasions that he knew she was now the stronger, that he was leaning on her, had, in fact, long made her his support—fearfully, lest she be snatched away. And he knew at last that another change had come with her years; that she no longer confided in him unreservedly, as the little child had. He knew there were things now she could not give him. She communed with herself, and her silences had come between them. She looked past him at unseen forms, and listened as if for echoes that she alone could hear, waiting and wanting, knowing not her wants—yet driven to aloofness by them from the little bent man of sorrows, whose whole life she had now become.
His hope lasted hardly until the year ended. Before the time was over, there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not come; that the Lord’s favour had been withdrawn from Israel. He knew the cause,—the shedding of innocent blood. They might have made war; indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between murder and that murder in which innocent blood should be shed; but the truth was plain. They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows. Now the Lord’s favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps another thousand years. The torture of the thing came back to him with all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of anguish. He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page. The cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him. Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could not be far off, he went north to the April Conference. He took Prudence with him, not daring to leave her behind.
She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations. Another world lay outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the edge at its manifold fascinations. She had been there before as a child; now she was going as a woman. She remembered the city, bigger and grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile. She recalled even the strange advertisements and signs, from John and Enoch Reese, with “All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as flour, hard bread, butter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and whip-lashes,” to the “Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool,” who would “Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a supply of the Best Matches, made by himself.” From William Hennefer, announcing that, “In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible Luxury the Valley Affords,” to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash, flour, or wheat “at Jacob Hautz’s house on the southeast corner of Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson Spencer’s.”
She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the plainsmen with revolvers in their belts, wearing the blue army cloak, the teamsters in leathern suits, and horsemen in fur coats and caps, buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and rolls of blankets behind their high Mexican saddles.
More fondly did she recall two wonderful evenings at the theatre. First had been the thrilling “Robert Macaire,” then the romantic “Pizarro,” in which Rolla had been a being of such overwhelming beauty that she had felt he could not be of earth.
This time her visit was an endless fever of discovery in a realm of magic and mystery, of joys she had supposed were held in reserve for those who went behind the veil. It was a new and greater city she came to now, where were buildings of undreamed splendour, many of them reaching dizzily three stories above the earth. And the shops were more fascinating than ever. She still shuddered at the wickedness of the Gentiles, but with a certain secret respect for their habits of luxury and their profusion of devices for adornment.
And there were strange new faces to be seen, people surely of a different world, of a different manner from those she had known, wearing, with apparent carelessness, garments even more strangely elegant than those in the shop windows, and speaking in strange, soft accents. She was told that these were Gentiles, tourists across the continent, who had ventured from Ogden to observe the wonders of the new Zion. The thought of the railroad was in itself thrilling. To be so near that wonderful highway to the land of the evil-doers and to a land, alas! of so many strange delights. She shuddered at her own wickedness, but fell again and again, and was held in bondage by the allurements about her. So thrilled to her soul’s center was she that the pleasure of it hurt her, and the tears would come to her eyes until she felt she must be alone to cry for the awful joy of it.
The evening brought still more to endure, for they went to the play. It was a play that took her out of herself, so that the crowd was lost to her from the moment the curtain went up in obedience to a little bell that tinkled mysteriously,—either back on the stage or in her own heart, she was not sure which.
It was a love story; again that strangely moving love of one man for one woman, that seemed as sweet as it was novel to her. But there was war between the houses in the play, and the young lover had to make a way to see his beloved, climbing a high wall into her garden, climbing to her very balcony by a scarf she flung down to him. To the young woman from Amalon, these lovers’ voices came with a strange compulsion, so that they played with her heart between them. She was in turn the youth, pleading in a voice that touched every heart string from low to high; then she was the woman, soft and timid, hesitating in moments of delicious doubt, yet almost fearful of her power to resist,—half-wishing to be persuaded, half-frightened lest she yield.