Mackinac and Lake StoriesCatherwood, Mary Hartwell
General
Mackinac and Lake Stories
Catherwood, Mary Hartwell
Mackinac Island (Mich. : Island) -- Fiction; Michigan -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Success was the word most used by the King of Beaver. Though he
stood before his people as a prophet assuming to speak revelations,
executive power breathed from him. He was a tall, golden-tinted man
with a head like a dome, hair curling over his ears, and soft beard
and mustache which did not conceal a mouth cut thin and straight.
He had student hands, long and well kept. It was not his dress,
though that was careful as a girl's, which set him apart from farmers
listening on the benches around him, but the keen light of his blue
eyes, wherein shone the master.
Emeline thought she had never before seen such a man. He had an
attraction which she felt loathsome, and the more so because it drew
some part of her irresistibly to him. Her spirit was kin to his, and
she resented that kinship, trying to lose herself among farmers' wives
and daughters, who listened to their Prophet stolidly, and were in no
danger of being naturally selected by him. This moral terror Emeline
could not have expressed in words, and she hid it like a shame. She
also resented the subservience of her kinspeople to one no greater
than herself. Her stock had been masters of men.
As the King of Beaver slowly turned about the circle he encountered
this rebel defying his assumption, and paused in his speaking a full
minute, the drowsy farmers seeing merely that notes were being shifted
and rearranged on the table. Then he began again, the dictatorial key
transposed into melody. His covert message was to the new maid in the
congregation. She might struggle like a fly in a web. He wrapped her
around and around with beautiful sentences. As Speaker of the State
Legislature he had learned well how to handle men in the mass, but
nature had doubly endowed him for entrancing women. The spiritual part
of James Strang, King and Prophet of a peculiar sect, appealed to the
one best calculated to appreciate him during the remainder of his
exhortation.
The Tabernacle, to which Beaver Island Mormons gathered every Saturday
instead of every Sunday, was yet unfinished. Its circular shape and
vaulted ceiling, panelled in the hard woods of the island, had been
planned by the man who stood in the centre. Many openings under the
eaves gaped windowless; but the congregation, sheltered from a July
sun, enjoyed freely the lake air, bringing fragrance from their own
fields and gardens. They seemed a bovine, honest people, in homespun
and hickory; and youth, bright-eyed and fresh-cheeked, was not
lacking. They sat on benches arranged in circles around a central
platform which held the Prophet's chair and table. This was his
simple plan for making his world revolve around him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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