The End of the World: A Love Story
CHAPTER XLI.
THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT.
The religious excitement reached its culmination as the tenth andeleventh of August came on. Some made ascension-robes. Work wassuspended everywhere. The more abandoned, unwilling to yield to thepanic, showed its effects on them by deeper potations, and by arecklessness of wickedness meant to conceal their fears. With tin hornsthey blasphemously affected to be angels blowing trumpets. They imitatedthe Millerite meetings in their drunken sprees, and learned Mr.Hankins's arguments by heart.
The sun of the eleventh of August rose gloriously. People pointed to itwith trembling, and said that it would rise no more. Soon after sunrisethere were crimson clouds stretching above and below it, and popularterror seized upon this as a sign. But the sun mounted with a scorchingheat, which showed that at least his shining power was not impaired.Then men said, "Behold the beginning of the fervent heat that is to meltthe elements!" Night drew on, and every "shooting-star" was a new signof the end. The meteors, as usual at this time of the year, wereplentiful, and the simple-hearted country-folk were convinced that thestars were falling out of the sky.
A large bald hill overlooking the Ohio was to be the mount of ascension.Here gathered Elder Hankins's flock with that comfortable assurance ofbeing the elect that only a narrow bigotry can give. And here cameothers of all denominations, consoling themselves that they were just aswell off if they were Christians as if they had made all this fuss aboutthe millennium. Here was August, too, now almost well, joining with therest in singing those sweet and inspiring Adventist hymns. His Germanheart could not keep still where there was singing, and now, ingratefulness at new-found health, he was more inclined to music thanever. So he joined heartily and sincerely in the song that begins:
"Shall Simon bear his cross alone, And all the world go free? No, there's a cross for every one, And there's a cross for me. I'll bear the consecrated cross Till from the cross I'm free, And then go home to wear the crown. For there's a crown for me! Yes, there's a crown in heaven above, The purchase of a Saviour's love. Oh I that's the crown for me!"
When the concourse reached the lines,
"The saints have heard the midnight cry, Go meet him in the air!"
neither August nor any one else could well resist the infection of theprofound and awful belief in the immediate coming of the end whichpervaded the throng. Strong men and women wept and shouted with theexcitement.
Then Elder Hankins exhorted a little. He said that the time was short.But men's hearts were hard. As in the days of the flood, they weremarrying and giving in marriage. Not half a mile away a wedding was atthat time taking place, and a man who called himself a minister couldnot discern the signs of the times, but was solemnizing a marriage.
This allusion was to the marriage of Jonas, which was to take place thatvery evening at the castle. Mrs. Anderson had refused to have "suchwicked nonsense" at her house, and as Cynthy had no home, Andrew hadappointed it at the castle, partly to oblige Jonas, partly from habitualopposition to Abigail, but chiefly to express his contempt forAdventism.
Mrs. Anderson herself was in a state of complete sublimation. She hadsent for Norman, that she might get him ready for the final judgment,and Norman, without the slightest inclination to be genuinely religious,was yet a coward, and made a provisional repentance, not meant to holdgood if Elder Hankins's figures should fail; just such a repentance asmany a man has made on what he supposed to be his death-bed. Do not Iremember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and myself,who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think that he had been"such a fool as to send for the preacher"?
Now, between Mrs. Anderson's joy at Norman's conversion, and her delightthat the world would soon be at an end and she on the winning side, andher anticipation of the pleasure she would feel even in heaven insaying, "I told you so!" to her unbelieving friends, she quite forgotJulia. In fact she went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another,falling into trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriouslycalled "the power." She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia, forthere were but three more hours of time, and she felt that the goal wasalready gained, and she had carried her point to the very last. Asatisfaction for a saint!
The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge of thesurging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted together.
"Let us go and see Jonas married," said August. "It is no harm. God cantake us to heaven from one place as well as another, if we are Hischildren."
In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say disgusted, withher mother's peculiar religious exercises, and she gladly escaped withAugust to the castle and the wedding of her faithful friends.
Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle look asflowery and festive as possible. The wedding took place in the lowerstory, but the library was illuminated, and the Adventists who hadoccasion to pass by Andrew's on their way to the rendezvous acceptedthis as a new fulfillment of prophecy to the very letter. They noddedone to another, and said, "See! marrying and giving in marriage, as inthe days of Noah!"
August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much on their way tothe castle. But in these last hours of a world grown old and ready forits doom, they cleaved closer together. There could be neither heavennor millennium for one of them without the other! Loving one anothermade them love God the more, and love cast out all fear. If this was theLast, they would face it together, and if it proved the Beginning, theywould rejoice together. At sight of every shooting meteor, Julia clungalmost convulsively to August.
When they entered the castle, Jonas and Cynthy were already standing upbefore the presiding elder, and he was about to begin. Cynthy's faceshowed her sense of the awfulness of marrying at a moment of suchfearful expectation, or perhaps she was troubling herself for fear thatso much happiness out of heaven was to be had only in the commission ofa capital sin. But, like most people whose consciences are stronger thantheir intellects, she found great consolation in taking refuge under thewing of ecclesiastical authority. To be married by a presiding elder wasthe best thing in the world next to being married by a bishop.
Whatever fear of the swift-coming judgment others might have felt, thebenignant old elder was at peace. Common-sense, a clean conscience, anda child-like faith enlightened his countenance, and since he tried to bealways ready, and since his meditations made the things of the otherlife ever present, his pulse would scarcely have quickened if he hadfelt sure that the archangel's trump would sound in an hour. He neitherfelt the subdued fear shown on the countenance of Cynthy Ann, nor thestrong skeptical opposition of Andrew, whose face of late had grownalmost into a sneer.
"Do you take this woman to be your lawful and wedded wife--"
And before the elder could finish it, Jonas blurted out, "You'd betterbelieve I do, my friend."
And then when the old man smiled and finished his question down to, "solong as ye both shall live," Jonas responded eagerly, "Tell death er thejedgment-day, long or short."
And Cynthy Ann answered demurely out of her frightened but too happyheart, and the old man gave them his benediction in an apostolic fashionthat removed Cynthy Ann's scruples, and smoothed a little of theprimness out of her face, so that she almost smiled when Jonas said,"Well! it's done now, and it can't be undone fer all the Goshorns inChristendom er creation!"
And then the old gentleman--for he was a gentleman, though he had alwaysbeen a backwoodsman--spoke of the excitement, and said that it was bestalways to be ready--to be ready to live, and then you would be ready fordeath or the judgment. That very night the end might come, but it wasnot best to trouble one's self about it. And he smiled, and said that itwas none of his business, God could manage the universe; it was for himto be found doing his duty as a faithful servant. And then it would bejust like stepping out of one door into another, whenever death or thejudgment should come.
While the old
man was getting ready to leave, Julia and August slippedaway, fearing lest their absence should be discovered. But thepeacefulness of the old elder's face had entered into their souls, andthey wished that they too were solemnly pronounced man and wife, with sosweet a benediction upon their union.
"I do not feel much anxious about the day of judgment or themillennium," said August, whose idiom was sometimes a little broken."When I was so near dying I felt satisfied to die after you had kissedmy lips. But now that it seems we have come upon the world's last days,I wish I were married to you. I do not know how things will be in thenew heaven and the new earth. But I should like you to be my wife there,or at least to have been my wife on earth, if only for one hour."
And then he proposed that they should be made man and wife now in theworld's last hour. It was not wrong. It could not give her motherheart-disease, for she would not know of it till she should hear it inthe land where there are neither marriages nor sickness. Julia could notsee any sin in her disobedience under such circumstances. She did somuch want to go into the New Jerusalem as the wedded wife of August "thegrand," as she fondly called him.
And so in the stillness of that awful night they walked back to Andrew'scastle, and found the venerable preacher, with saddle-bags on his arm,ready to mount his horse, for the presiding elder of that day had noleisure time. Jonas and Cynthy stood bidding him good-by. And the oldman was saying again that if we were always ready it would be likestepping from one door into another. But he thought it as wrong to wastetime gazing up into heaven to see Christ come, as it had been to gazeafter Him when He went away. Even Jonas's voice was a little softened bythe fearful thought ever present of the coming on of that awful midnightof the eleventh of August. All were surprised to see the two youngpeople come back.
"Father Williams," said August, "we thought we should like to go intothe New Jerusalem man and wife. Will you marry us?"
"Sensible to the last!" cried Jonas.
"According to the laws of this State," said Mr. Williams, "you can notbe married without a license from the clerk of the county. Have youa license?"
"No," said August, his heart sinking.
Just then Andrew came up and inquired what the conversation was about.
"Why, Uncle Andrew," said Julia eagerly, "August and I don't want theend of the world to come without being man and wife. And we have nolicense, and August could not go seven miles and back to get a licensebefore midnight. It is too bad, isn't it? If it wasn't that we think theend of the world is so near, I should be ashamed to say how much I wantto be married. But I shall be proud to have been August's wife, when Iam among the angels."
"You are a noble woman," said Andrew. "Come in, let us see if anythingcan be done." And he led the way, smiling.