Follett waited with a new eagerness next day for their walk to the cañon. But Prudence, looking at him with eyes that sorrow was clouding, said that she could not go. He felt a sharp new resentment against the man who was letting her suffer rather than betray himself, and he again resolved that this man must be made to “toe the mark,” to “take his needings;” and that, meantime, the deceived girl must be effectually reassured. Something must be said to take away the hurt that was tugging at the corners of her smile to draw them down. To this end he pleaded with her not to deprive him of the day’s lesson, especially as the time was now at hand when he must leave. And so ably did he word his appeal to her sense of duty that at last she consented to go.
Once in the cañon, however, where the pines had stored away the cool gloom of the night against the day’s heat, she was glad she had come. For, better than being alone with that strange, new hurt, was it to have by her side this friendly young man, who somehow made her feel as if it were right and safe to lean upon him,—despite his unregenerate condition. And presently there, in the zeal of saving his soul, she was almost happy again.
Yet he seemed to-day to be impatient under the teaching, and more than once she felt that he was on the point of interrupting the lesson to some end of his own.
He seemed insufficiently impressed even with the knowledge of astronomy displayed by the prophets of the Book of Mormon, hearing, without a quiver of interest, that when at Joshua’s command the sun seemed to stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, the real facts were that the earth merely paused in its revolutions upon its own axis and about the sun. Without a question he thus heard Ptolemy refuted and the discoveries of Copernicus anticipated two thousand years before that investigator was born. He was indeed deplorably inattentive. She suspected, from the quick glances she gave him, that he had no understanding at all of what she read. Yet in this she did him injustice, for now she came to the passage, “They all did swear unto him that whoso should vary from the assistance which Akish desired should lose his head; and whoso should divulge whatsoever thing Akish should make known unto them should lose his life.” This time he sat up.
“There it is again—they don’t mind losing their heads. They were sure the fightingest men—don’t you think so now?”
As he went on talking she laid the book down and leaned back against the trunk of the big pine under which they sat. He seemed to be saying something that he had been revolving in his mind while she read.
“I’d hate to have you think you been wasting your time on me this summer, but I’m afraid I’m just too downright unsanctified.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” she cried.
“But I have to. I reckon I’m like the red-roan sorrel Ed Harris got for a pinto from old man Beasley. ‘They’s two bad things about him,’ says the old man. ‘I’ll tell you one now and the other after we swap.’ ‘All right,’ says Ed. ‘Well, first, he’s hard to catch,’ says Beasley. ‘That ain’t anything,’ says Ed,—‘just picket him or hobble him with a good side-line.’ So then they traded. ‘And the other thing,’ says the old man, dragging up his cinches on Ed’s pinto,—‘he ain’t any good after you get him caught.’ So that’s like me. I’ve been hard to teach all summer, and now I’m not any good after you get me taught.”
“Oh, you are! Don’t say you’re not.”
“I couldn’t ever join your Church—”
Her face became full of alarm.
“—only for just one thing;—I don’t care very much for this having so many wives.”
She was relieved at once. “If that’s all—I don’t approve of it myself. You wouldn’t have to.”
“Oh, that’s what you say now”—he spoke with an air of shrewdness and suspicion,—“but when I got in you’d throw up my duty to me constant about building up the Kingdom. Oh, I know how it’s done! I’ve heard your preachers talk enough.”
“But it isn’t necessary. I wouldn’t—I don’t think it would be at all nice of you.”
He looked at her with warm sympathy. “You poor ignorant girl! Not to know your own religion! I read in that book there about this marrying business only the other day. Just hand me that one.”
She handed him the “Book of Doctrine and Covenants,” from which she had occasionally taught him the Lord’s word as revealed to Joseph Smith. The revelation on celestial marriage had never been among her selections. He turned to it now.
“Here, right in the very first of it—” and she heard with a sinking heart,—“‘Therefore prepare thyself to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same; for behold! I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant then are ye damned, for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.’
“There now!”
“I never read it,” she faltered.
“And don’t you know they preach in the tabernacle that anybody who rejects polygamy will be damned?”
“My father never preached that.”
“Well, he knows it—ask him.”
It was proving to be a hard day for her.
“Of course,” he continued, “a new member coming into the Church might think at first he could get along without so many wives. He might say, ‘Well, now, I’ll draw a line in this marrying business. I’ll never take more than two or three wives or maybe four.’ He might even be so taken up with one young lady that he’d say, ‘I won’t even marry a second wife—not for some time yet, that is—not for two or three years, till she begins to get kind of houseworn,’ But then after he’s taken his second, the others would come easy. Say he marries, first time, a tall, slim, dark girl,”—he looked at her musingly while she gazed intently into the stream in front of them.
“—and then say he meets a little chit of a thing, kind of heavy-set like, with this light yellow hair and pretty light blue eyes, that he saw one Sunday at church—”
Her dark face was flushing now in pained wonder.
“—why then it’s so easy to keep on and marry others, with the preachers all preaching it from the pulpit.”
“But you wouldn’t have to.”
“No, you wouldn’t have to marry any one after the second—after this little blonde—but you’d have to marry her because it says here that you ‘shall abide the law or ye shall be damned, saith the Lord God.’”
He pulled himself along the ground closer to her, and went on again in what seemed to be an extremity of doubt.
“Now I don’t want to be lost, and yet I don’t want to have a whole lot of wives like Brigham or that old coot we see so often on the road. So what am I going to do? I might think I’d get along with three or four, but you never can tell what religion will do to a man when he really gets it.”
He reached for her small brown hand that still held the Book of Mormon open on her lap, and took it in both his own. He went on, appealingly:
“Now you try to tell me right—like as if I was your own brother—tell me as a sister. Try to put yourself in the place of the girl I’d marry first—no, don’t; it seems more like your sister if I hold it this way—and try to think how she’d feel when I brought home my second. Would that be doing square by her? Wouldn’t it sort of get her on the bark? But if I join your Church and don’t do that, I might as well be one of those low-down Freewill Baptists or Episcopals. Come now, tell me true, letting on that you’re my sister.”
She had not looked at him since he began, nor did she now.
“Oh, I don’t know—I don’t know—it’s all so mixed! I thought you could be saved without that.”
“There’s the word of God against me.”
“I wouldn’t want you to marry that way,—if I were your sister.”
“That’s right now, try to feel like a sister. You wouldn’t want me to have as many wives as those old codgers down there below, would you?”
“No—I’m sure you shouldn’t have but one. Oh, you couldn’t marry more than one, could you?” She turned her eyes for the first time upon him, and he saw that some inward warmth seemed to be melting them.
“Well, I’d hate to disappoint you if you were my sister, but there’s the word of the Lord—”
“Oh, but could you anyway, even if you didn’t have a sister, and there was no one but her to think of?”
He appeared to debate with himself cautiously.
“Well, now, I must say your teaching has taken a powerful hold on me this summer—” he reached under her arm and caught her other hand. “You’ve been like a sister to me and made me think about these things pretty deep and serious. I don’t know if I could get what you’ve taught me out of my mind or not.”
“But how could you ever marry another wife?”
“Well, a man don’t like to think he’s going to the bad place when he dies, all on account of not marrying a few more times. It sort of takes the ambition all out of him.”
“Oh, it couldn’t be right!”
“Well now, I’ll do as you say. Do I forget all these things you’ve been teaching me, and settle down with one wife,—or do I come into the Kingdom and lash the cinches of my glory good and plenty by marrying whenever I get time to build a new end on the house, like old man Wright does?”
She was silent.
“Like a sister would tell a brother,” he urged, with a tighter pressure of her two hands. But this seemed to recall another trouble to her mind.
“I—I’m not fit to be your sister—don’t talk of it—you don’t know—” Her voice broke, and he had to release her hand. Whereupon he put his own back up against the pine-tree, reached his arm about her, and had her head upon his shoulder.
“There, there now!”
“But you don’t know.”
“Well, I do know—so just you straighten out that face. I do know, I tell you. Now don’t cry and I’ll fix it all right, I promise you.”
“But you don’t even know what the trouble is.”
“I do—it’s about your father and mother—when they were married.”
“How did you know?”
“I can’t tell you now, but I will soon. Look here, you can believe what I tell you, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“Well, then, you listen. Your father and mother were married in the right way, and there wasn’t a single bit of crookedness about it. I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t know and couldn’t prove it to you in a little while. Say, there’s one of our wagon-trains coming along here toward Salt Lake next Monday. It’s coming out of its way on purpose to pick me up. I’ll promise to have it proved to you by that time. Now, is that fair? Can you believe me?”
She looked up at him, her face bright again.
“Oh, I do believe you! You don’t know how glad you make me. It was an awful thing—oh, you are a dear”—and full upon his lips she kissed the astounded young man, holding him fast with an arm about his neck. “You’ve made me all over new—I was feeling so wretched—and of course I can’t see how you know anything about it, but I know you are telling the truth.” Again she kissed him with the utmost cordiality. Then she stood up to arrange her hair, her face full of the joy of this assurance. The young man saw that she had forgotten both him and his religious perplexities, and he did not wish her to be entirely divested of concern for him at this moment.
“But how about me? Here I am, lost if I do and lost if I don’t. You better sit down here again and see if there isn’t some way I can get that crown of glory.”
She sat down by him, instantly sobered from her own joy, and calmly gave him a hand to hold.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, frankly. “You wait awhile. Don’t do anything right away. I’ll have to ask father.” And then as he reached over to pick up the Book of Mormon,—“No, let’s not read any more to-day. Let’s sit a little while and only think about things.” She was so free from embarrassment that he began to doubt if he had been so very deeply clever, after all, in suggesting the relationship between them. But after she had mused awhile, she seemed to perceive for the first time that he was very earnestly holding both of her hands. She blushed, and suddenly withdrew them. Whereat he was more pleased than when she had passively let them lie. He approached the matter of salvation for himself once more.
“Of course I can wait awhile for you to find out the rights of this thing, but I’m afraid I can’t be baptised even if you tell me to be—even if you want me to obey the Lord and marry some pretty little light-complected, yellow-haired thing afterwards—after I’d married my first wife. Fact is, I don’t believe I could. Probably I’d care so much for the first one that I’d have blinders on for all the other women in the world. She’d have me tied down with the red ribbon in her hair”—he touched the red ribbon in her own, by way of illustration—“just like I can tie the biggest steer you ever saw with that little silk rag of mine—hold him, two hind legs and one fore, so he can’t budge an inch. I’d just like to see some little, short, kind of plump, pretty yellow-haired thing come between us.”
For an instant, she looked such warm, almost indignant approval that he believed she was about to express an opinion of her own in the matter, but she stayed silent, looking away instead with a little movement of having swallowed something.
“And you, too, if you were my sister, do you think I’d want you married to a man who’d begin to look around for some one else as soon as he got you? No, sir—you deserve some decent young fellow who’d love you all to pieces day in and day out and never so much as look at this little yellow-haired girl—even if she was almost as pretty as you.”
But she was not to be led into rendering any hasty decision which might affect his eternal salvation. Moreover, she was embarrassed and disturbed.
“We must go,” she said, rising before he could help her. When they had picked their way down to the mouth of the cañon, he walking behind her, she turned back and said, “Of course you could marry that little yellow-haired girl with the blue eyes first, the one you’re thinking so much about—the little short, fat thing with a doll-baby face—”
But he only answered, “Oh, well, if you get me into your Church it wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether I took her first or second.”