The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 5. Robert Louis Stevenson

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СКАЧАТЬ child, alone in the world, and under the immediate watch of Brigham Young. It would be your lot, in ordinary circumstances, to become the fiftieth bride of some ignoble elder, or by particular fortune, as fortune is counted in this land, to find favour in the eyes of the President himself. Such a fate for a girl like you were worse than death; better to die as your mother died than to sink daily deeper in the mire of this pit of woman’s degradation. But is escape conceivable? Your father tried; and you beheld yourself with what security his jailers acted, and how a dumb drawing on a rock was counted a sufficient sentry over the avenues of freedom. Where your father failed, will you be wiser or more fortunate? or are you, too, helpless in the toils?”

      I had followed his words with changing emotion, but now I believed I understood.

      “I see,” I cried; “you judge me rightly. I must follow where my parents led; and oh! I am not only willing, I am eager!”

      “No,” replied the doctor, “not death for you. The flawed vessel we may break, but not the perfect. No, your mother cherished a different hope, and so do I. I see,” he cried, “the girl develop to the completed woman, the plan reach fulfilment, the promise – ay, outdone! I could not bear to arrest so lively, so comely a process. It was your mother’s thought,” he added, with a change of tone, “that I should marry you myself.” I fear I must have shown a perfect horror of aversion from this fate, for he made haste to quiet me. “Reassure yourself, Asenath,” he resumed. “Old as I am, I have not forgotten the tumultuous fancies of youth. I have passed my days, indeed, in laboratories; but in all my vigils I have not forgotten the tune of a young pulse. Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain; youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a right. These things I have not forgotten; none, rather, has more keenly felt, none more jealously considered them; I have but postponed them to their day. See, then: you stand without support; the only friend left to you, this old investigator, old in cunning, young in sympathy. Answer me but one question: Are you free from the entanglement of what the world calls love? Do you still command your heart and purposes? or are you fallen in some bond-slavery of the eye and ear?”

      I answered him in broken words; my heart, I think I must have told him, lay with my dead parents.

      “It is enough,” he said. “It has been my fate to be called on often, too often, for those services of which we spoke to-night; none in Utah could carry them so well to a conclusion; hence there has fallen into my hands a certain share of influence which I now lay at your service, partly for the sake of my dead friends, your parents; partly for the interest I bear you in your own right. I shall send you to England, to the great city of London, there to await the bridegroom I have selected. He shall be a son of mine, a young man suitable in age, and not grossly deficient in that quality of beauty that your years demand. Since your heart is free, you may well pledge me the sole promise that I ask in return for much expense and still more danger: to await the arrival of that bridegroom with the delicacy of a wife.”

      I sat awhile stunned. The doctor’s marriages, I remembered to have heard, had been unfruitful; and this added perplexity to my distress. But I was alone, as he had said, alone in that dark land; the thought of escape, of any equal marriage, was already enough to revive in me some dawn of hope; and, in what words I know not, I accepted the proposal.

      He seemed more moved by my consent than I could reasonably have looked for. “You shall see,” he cried; “you shall judge for yourself.” And hurrying to the next room he returned with a small portrait somewhat coarsely done in oils. It showed a man in the dress of nearly forty years before, young indeed, but still recognisable to be the doctor. “Do you like it?” he asked. “That is myself when I was young. My – my boy will be like that, like, but nobler; with such health as angels might condescend to envy; and a man of mind, Asenath, of commanding mind. That should be a man, I think; that should be one among ten thousand. A man like that – one to combine the passions of youth with the restraint, the force, the dignity of age – one to fill all the parts and faculties, one to be man’s epitome – say, will that not satisfy the needs of an ambitious girl? Say, is not that enough?” And as he held the picture close before my eyes, his hand shook.

      I told him briefly I would ask no better, for I was transpierced with this display of fatherly emotion; but even as I said the words, the most insolent revolt surged through my arteries. I held him in horror, him, his portrait, and his son; and had there been any choice but death or a Mormon marriage, I declare before Heaven I had embraced it.

      “It is well,” he replied, “and I had rightly counted on your spirit. Eat, then, for you have far to go.” So saying, he set meat before me; and while I was endeavouring to obey, he left the room and returned with an armful of coarse raiment. “There,” said he, “is your disguise. I leave you to your toilet.”

      The clothes had probably belonged to a somewhat lubberly boy of fifteen; and they hung about me like a sack, and cruelly hampered my movements. But what filled me with uncontrollable shudderings was the problem of their origin and the fate of the lad to whom they had belonged. I had scarcely effected the exchange when the doctor returned, opened a back window, helped me out into the narrow space between the house and the overhanging bluffs, and showed me a ladder of iron foot-holds mortised in the rock. “Mount,” he said, “swiftly. When you are at the summit, walk, so far as you are able, in the shadow of the smoke. The smoke will bring you, sooner or later, to a cañon; follow that down, and you will find a man with two horses. Him you will implicitly obey. And remember, silence! That machinery which I now put in motion for your service may by one word be turned against you. Go; Heaven prosper you!”

      The ascent was easy. Arrived at the top of the cliff, I saw before me on the other side a vast and gradual declivity of stone, lying bare to the moon and the surrounding mountains. Nowhere was any vantage or concealment; and knowing how these deserts were beset with spies, I made haste to veil my movements under the blowing trail of smoke. Sometimes it swam high, rising on the night wind, and I had no more substantial curtain than its moon-thrown shadow; sometimes again it crawled upon the earth, and I would walk in it, no higher than to my shoulders, like some mountain fog. But, one way or another, the smoke of that ill-omened furnace protected the first steps of my escape, and led me unobserved to the cañon.

      There, sure enough, I found a taciturn and sombre man beside a pair of saddle-horses; and thenceforward, all night long, we wandered in silence by the most occult and dangerous paths among the mountains. A little before the dayspring we took refuge in a wet and gusty cavern at the bottom of a gorge; lay there all day concealed; and the next night, before the glow had faded out of the west, resumed our wanderings. About noon we stopped again, in a lawn upon a little river, where was a screen of bushes; and here my guide, handing me a bundle from his pack, bade me change my dress once more. The bundle contained clothing of my own, taken from our house, with such necessaries as a comb and soap. I made my toilet by the mirror of a quiet pool; and as I was so doing and smiling with some complacency to see myself restored to my own image, the mountains rang with a scream of far more than human piercingness; and where I still stood astonished, there sprang up and swiftly increased a storm of the most awful and earth-rending sounds. Shall I own to you that I fell upon my face and shrieked? And yet this was but the overland train winding among the near mountains: the very means of my salvation: the strong wings that were to carry me from Utah!

      When I was dressed the guide gave me a bag, which contained, he said, both money and papers; and, telling me that I was already over the borders in the territory of Wyoming, bade me follow the stream until I reached the railway station, half a mile below. “Here,” he added, “is your ticket as far as Council Bluffs. The East express will pass in a few hours.” With that, he took both horses and, without further words or any salutation, rode off by the way that we had come.

      Three hours afterwards, I was seated on the end platform of the train as it swept eastward through the gorges and thundered in tunnels of the mountains. The change of scene, the sense of escape, the still throbbing terror of pursuit – above all the astounding magic of my new conveyance, kept СКАЧАТЬ