The doctor, mounted on an Indian pony, rode into the garden, dismounted, and saluted us. He seemed much more bent, and his hair more silvery than ever; but his demeanour was composed, serious, and not unkind.
“Madam,” said he, “I am come upon a weighty errand; and I would have you recognise it as an effect of kindness in the President, that he should send as his ambassador your only neighbour and your husband’s oldest friend in Utah.”
“Sir,” said my mother, “I have but one concern, one thought. You know well what it is. Speak: my husband?”
“Madam,” returned the doctor, taking a chair on the verandah, “if you were a silly child my position would now be painfully embarrassing. You are, on the other hand, a woman of great intelligence and fortitude: you have, by my forethought, been allowed three weeks to draw your own conclusions and to accept the inevitable. Further words from me are, I conceive, superfluous.”
My mother was as pale as death, and trembled like a reed; I gave her my hand, and she kept it in the folds of her dress and wrung it till I could have cried aloud. “Then, sir,” said she at last, “you speak to deaf ears. If this be indeed so, what have I to do with errands? what do I ask of Heaven but to die?”
“Come,” said the doctor, “command yourself. I bid you dismiss all thoughts of your late husband, and bring a clear mind to bear upon your own future and the fate of that young girl.”
“You bid me dismiss – ” began my mother. “Then you know!” she cried.
“I know,” replied the doctor.
“You know?” broke out the poor woman. “Then it was you who did the deed! I tear off the mask, and with dread and loathing see you as you are – you, whom the poor fugitive beholds in nightmares, and awakes raving – you, the Destroying Angel!”
“Well, madam, and what then?” returned the doctor. “Have not my fate and yours been similar? Are we not both immured in this strong prison of Utah? Have you not tried to flee, and did not the Open Eye confront you in the cañon? Who can escape the watch of that unsleeping eye of Utah? Not I, at least. Horrible tasks have, indeed, been laid upon me; and the most ungrateful was the last; but had I refused my offices, would that have spared your husband? You know well it would not. I, too, had perished along with him; nor would I have been able to alleviate his last moments, nor could I to-day have stood between his family and the hand of Brigham Young.”
“Ah!” cried I, “and could you purchase life by such concessions?”
“Young lady,” answered the doctor, “I both could and did; and you will live to thank me for that baseness. You have a spirit, Asenath, that it pleases me to recognise. But we waste time. Mr. Fonblanque’s estate reverts, as you doubtless imagine, to the church; but some part of it has been reserved for him who is to marry the family; and that person, I should perhaps tell you without more delay, is no other than myself.”
At this odious proposal my mother and I cried out aloud, and clung together like lost souls.
“It is as I supposed,” resumed the doctor, with the same measured utterance. “You recoil from this arrangement. Do you expect me to convince you? You know very well that I have never held the Mormon view of women. Absorbed in the most arduous studies, I have left the slatterns whom they call my wives to scratch and quarrel among themselves; of me, they have had nothing but my purse; such was not the union I desired, even if I had the leisure to pursue it. No, you need not, madam, and my old friend – ” and here the doctor rose and bowed with something of gallantry – “you need not apprehend my importunities. On the contrary, I am rejoiced to read in you a Roman spirit; and if I am obliged to bid you follow me at once, and that in the name, not of my wish, but of my orders, I hope it will be found that we are of a common mind.”
So, bidding us dress for the road, he took a lamp (for the night had now fallen) and set off to the stable to prepare our horses.
“What does it mean? – what will become of us?” I cried.
“Not that, at least,” replied my mother, shuddering. “So far we can trust him. I seem to read among his words a certain tragic promise. Asenath, if I leave you, if I die, you will not forget your miserable parents?”
Thereupon we fell to cross-purposes: I beseeching her to explain her words; she putting me by, and continuing to recommend the doctor for a friend. “The doctor!” I cried at last; “the man who killed my father?”
“Nay,” said she, “let us be just. I do believe, before Heaven, he played the friendliest part. And he alone, Asenath, can protect you in this land of death.”
At this the doctor returned, leading our two horses; and when we were all in the saddle, he bade me ride on before, as he had matter to discuss with Mrs. Fonblanque. They came at a foot’s-pace, eagerly conversing in a whisper; and presently after the moon rose and showed them looking eagerly into each other’s faces as they went, my mother laying her hand upon the doctor’s arm, and the doctor himself, against his usual custom, making vigorous gestures of protest or asseveration.
At the foot of the track which ascended the talus of the mountain to his door, the doctor overtook me at a trot.
“Here,” he said, “we shall dismount; and as your mother prefers to be alone, you and I shall walk together to my house.”
“Shall I see her again?” I asked.
“I give you my word,” he said, and helped me to alight. “We leave the horses here,” he added. “There are no thieves in this stone wilderness.”
The track mounted gradually, keeping the house in view. The windows were once more bright; the chimney once more vomited smoke; but the most absolute silence reigned, and, but for the figure of my mother very slowly following in our wake, I felt convinced there was no human soul within a range of miles. At the thought, I looked upon the doctor, gravely walking by my side, with his bowed shoulders and white hair, and then once more at his house, lit up and pouring smoke like some industrious factory. And then my curiosity broke forth. “In Heaven’s name,” I cried, “what do you make in this inhuman desert?”
He looked at me with a peculiar smile, and answered with an evasion:
“This is not the first time,” said he, “that you have seen my furnaces alight. One morning, in the small hours, I saw you driving past; a delicate experiment miscarried; and I cannot acquit myself of having startled either your driver or the horse that drew you.”
“What!” cried I, beholding again in fancy the antics of the figure, “could that be you?”
“It was I,” he replied; “but do not fancy that I was mad. I was in agony. I had been scalded cruelly.”
We were now near the house, which, unlike the ordinary houses of the country, was built of hewn stone and very solid. Stone, too, was its foundation, stone its background. Not a blade of grass sprouted among the broken mineral about the walls, not a flower adorned the windows. Over the door, by way of sole adornment, the Mormon Eye was rudely sculptured; I had been brought up to view that emblem from my childhood; but since the night of our escape, it had acquired a new significance, and set me shrinking. The smoke rolled voluminously from the chimney-top, its edges ruddy with the fire; and from the far corner of the building, near the ground, angry puffs of steam shone snow-white in the moon and vanished.
The doctor opened the door and paused upon the threshold. “You ask me what I make here,” he observed: “Two things: Life and Death.” And he motioned me to enter.
“I shall await my mother,” said I.
“Child,” he replied, “look at me: am I not old and broken? Of us two, which is the stronger, the young maiden or the withered man?”
I bowed