“What a weary pilgrimage they must have had, poor errant souls!”
“O Wade, Wade! how this tragedy of theirs cures me forever of any rebellion against my own destiny. A helpless woman’s tragedy is so much bitterer than anything that can befall a man.”
“Must we say helpless, John?”
“Are we two an army, that we can take them by force? She has definitely closed any further communication on our part. She said that I could not have failed to notice how Elder Sizzum disliked our presence. I must promise her not to be seen with them in the morning. Sizzum would find some means to punish her father, and that would be torture to her. It seems that villain plays on the old man’s religious superstitions, and can terrify him almost to madness.”
“The villain! And yet how far back of him lies the blame, that such terrors can exist in any man’s mind, when God is Love.”
“I promised her not to see her again—for you and myself; to see her no more. That good-bye was final. Now let me alone for a while, my dear old boy; I am worn out and heart-broken.”
He mummied himself in his blankets, and lay on the grass, motionless as a dead man. It was not his way to shirk camp duties. Indeed, his volunteer services had left me in arrears.
I put our fire-arms in order in case of attack, and extinguished our fire. Our horses, too, I drove in and tethered close by. My old suspicion of Murker and Larrap had revived from their mutterings. I thought that, after their great winnings of to-night, they would feel that they could make nothing more of the mail party, and might seize the chance to stampede or steal some of the Mormon horses or ours. It was a capital chance in the sleepy hours after the revel. Horse-stealing, since the bad example of Diomed, has never gone out of fashion. Fulano and Pumps were great prizes. I knew that Larrap hated Brent for his undisguised abhorrence and the ugly words and collision of to-day. The pair bore good-will to neither of us. Their brutality had jarred with us from the beginning. I knew they would take personal pleasure in serving us a shabby trick out of their dixonary. On the whole, I determined to watch all night.
Easy to purpose; hard to perform. I leaned against my saddle and thought over the day. How I pitied poor Brent! Pitied him the more thoroughly, since I was hardly less a lover than he. Long afterwards, long after the misery of love dead in despair, comes the time when one can say, “Ich habe gelebt und geliebet”; can know, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” But no such soothing poetry could sing resignation to my friend in his unselfish misery. All he could do—all I could do—was to bear the agony of this sudden cruel wrong; to curse the chances of life that had so weakened the soul of our new friend and so darkened his sight that he could not know truth from falsehood. Doubly to curse the falsehood. Before, it had only been something to scorn. Here tragedy entered. The mean, miserable, ludicrous invention of Mormonism, the foolish fable of an idler, had grown to be a great masterly tyranny. These two souls were clutched by this foul ogre, and locked up in an impregnable prison. And we two were baffled. Of what use was our loyalty to woman? What vain words those unuttered words of our knightly vow to succor all distressed damsels,—the vow that every gentleman takes upon himself, as earnestly now, and wills to keep as faithfully, as any Artegall in the days gone by, when wrong took cruder and more monstrous form! More monstrous form! Could any wrong be more detestable! Did knight, who loved God and honored his lady, ever encounter more paynim-like horde than this,—the ignorant misled by the base?
In such dreary protest and pity I passed an hour. The evening breeze had strengthened into a great gusty wind, blowing from the mountains to the southward. I drowsed a little. A perturbed slumber overcame me. The roaring night-wind aroused me at intervals with a blast more furious, and I woke to perceive ominous and turbulent dreams flitting from my brain,—dreams of violence, tyranny, and infamous outrage.