The Mormon Prophet, Lily Dougall [young adult books to read TXT] 📗

to another and much larger house. The Danite advanced here with more confidence and spoke with some men who gathered at their approach. Afterwards three men, a father and sons, came and one after the other shook hands respectfully with Susannah. Within the house she found a motherly woman, the wife of the elder son. When Susannah's misfortunes were related to her in undertones she cast her apron over her head and groaned as with pain.

Susannah thought that the concern of this household must arise from fear on their own account. "Are you Latter-Day Saints?" she asked mechanically.

The eldest man, with the air of a patriarch, replied, "No, madam, we are not Saints; the fact is we don't hold by religion of one sort or another; we just believe in being kind to our neighbours and living, good lives; so whatsoever your belief may be it is no affair of ours, and you shall rest here for the sake of our common humanity. We'll look after you, madam." He made a bow that was a queer mixture of uncouthness in keeping with his surroundings and a recollection of some more formal society.

The woman of the house, taking her apron from her head, suddenly bethought her of the best things that she had to offer. Gently forcing Susannah into an elbow chair, she ran, and lifting an infant a few weeks old from its cradle, put it in Susannah's arms.

The next night the young Danite went away.


CHAPTER XIII.

Only the outline of passing events was reported to Susannah in her haven of peace. The elder man took her into his courtly care, and made a point of explaining to her what he thought she needed to know. The newspapers were sedulously kept from her, and so reticent were the other members of the household on the subject of their contents that her heart constantly sickened at the thought of what she was not allowed to hear.

"You see, madam," the old man explained, "it was Major-General Atchison that called out the militia in first defence of your people against Gilliam's mob. Gilliam had about three hundred men, and they started in the north of the State. Well, Parks and Doniphan, commanding the militia called out by Atchison, seem to have set about fighting the mob sincerely enough." The old man pushed back his spectacles and rubbed his hair. "Then you see, madam, that didn't please Governor Boggs. Here was the militia of his State shooting down his own good, honest Christian voters who keep him in office, that's Gilliam's men, and all the mob; so Boggs gets a lot of his men in all parts of the country to write him letters saying what dreadful crimes the Mormons are committing. These letters will no doubt pass into history as a genuine account of your people's doings. Well! well! I wouldn't shock your prejudices, but I'd like just to point out by the way that it's all done in the name of religion. There's Boggs has got an old mother who spends a lot of her time praying that the purity of the American religion may not be corrupted by the awful doctrines of Joe Smith."

The old man shook his head and rubbed his thin gray curly hair again with a smile of constrained patience. "You see, although I do not wish to grieve you by saying it, if we could only get rid of religion there would be a lot of brotherly kindness in the world that so far has never had a chance to say 'peep' and peck its shell. Well, but here's Boggs reading his letters, and he turns pale with horror at the thought of the corruption that has come among his good and pious people, so he writes off to the commanders of the militia that they are to stop fighting the mob, to fight against the Mormons, and only against the Mormons. So then Atchison resigns. He points out, fairly enough, that there hasn't been a single conviction in any lawful court against the Mormons for the crimes they are accused of. But what of that if Boggs is Governor? So they have taken away the arms from the Mormon company of militia, and the other day they went up to Far West with three or four thousand men, and they got Smith and his brother Hyrum and three of the elders to come out to them, and they court-martialled them and ordered them all to be shot the next day.

"But it wasn't done, madam," he added hastily. "General Doniphan had the pluck to stand out against it and say he would withdraw his troops, so they put them in irons and sent them to the gaol in Richmond, and then at the point of the bayonet they have forced the other leaders to bind themselves to pay all the expenses of the war and to get every Mormon, man, woman, and child, out of the State, or else they are all to be shot. That is how the matter stands at present."

"Do you incur any risk by the hospitality you give to me?" asked Susannah. She had not as yet had energy, even if she had had inclination, to explain that the Book of Mormon was not sacred in her eyes, nor Smith a prophet. "Do you think," she asked the old man wistfully, "that the Mormons have ever been the aggressors, that they have committed any of the atrocities they are accused of?"

"In some cases they have pillaged, and burned, and murdered; they wouldn't be human if some of them hadn't got fierce under the treatment they have been receiving; but when a man like Atchison, who has been scouring the country and knows pretty well what has happened, prefers to resign his honourable office rather than fight against them, you may be sure they are not very far in the wrong. Injuries, you know, will always set a few men mad. There is your elder, Rigdon, for instance; when he got here and heard of some of the things your folks had suffered, he up and made a wild oration on the 4th of July, and said that if any more outrages were committed on the Mormons, the Mormons would up and exterminate all the Gentiles in the State. But it has been well enough seen by any one who had eyes to see that no such language was ever countenanced by the real rulers of your sect."

When Susannah thanked the old man for his candour he drove his moral once more. "You see, madam, I can look at things as they are because I am not bound by any religion to look at them in any particular way."

Susannah rose up when the old man's story was ended, and stood for some minutes looking wistfully out through the window panes upon the leafless and storm-swept fields. They two were together in the long, scantily furnished living-room at the end of the long table. Her figure was stronger, more true in its proportions, than when she had been a girl. Her hair, trained into smooth obedience, was fastened within the muslin cap she had fashioned for herself, tied Quaker fashion under her chin. Her face was very white, as if, having blanched with terror in the tragedy of Haun's Mill, the life-blood had not as yet returned to it.

At last she said simply, "I thank you, sir."

The old man looked most approvingly at her form and at the subtle witchery which the eagerness of imprisoned thought gave to reticent features, at the depth of her blue eye. "I wish, my dear, that you could see your way to give up your religion and remain with us."

"I thank you, sir," she said again, and went back to the household tasks she had fallen into the habit of performing.

She was not eating the bread of dependence. In such a place, where woman's work is at a premium, it was easy for her to do what was reckoned of more value than what she received. The old man had two sons. The elder and his wife were in the prime of life, having a large family; the younger son was unmarried. The farm was large and prosperous. The one woman, even had she been less amiable, would have naturally desired to keep Susannah as a helper; being the kindly soul she was, she reserved the more attractive tasks for her, and bade the children call her endearing names. In her blindness, in her slow recovery from utter exhaustion of mind and nerve, Susannah never thought of connecting this long-continued kindness with the fact that the old man's younger son had as yet no wife.

At first Susannah had fixed her thoughts upon an immediate return to the east, but weeks went by and she had not written to Ephraim Croom for the money that she needed. The whole civilised world contained for her but one friend to whom she would write.

The Canadian farm, the remote country village of Manchester, and the Mormon sect--these formed her whole experience. Her father, who had scolded and played with her; Ephraim, who had understood her and had been the authority to her heart that his parents could not be; her husband, who had wrapped about her such close protection that she had tottered when she thought to walk alone--these were her real world, and of them only Ephraim was left.

It was not in her nature at any time, above all not in these stricken months, to desire to go out into the world alone to make for herself a sphere of usefulness and a circle of companions. Hence she thought only of returning to Ephraim, and by his help obtaining some occupation by which she could live simply and within his reach. But when she thought more closely of throwing herself, as it were, penniless and desolate at the feet of this one prized friendship, doubts arose about her path.

One thing which she had lost in the broken camp by her husband's grave, one that if she had had greater power of recollection she would not have left behind in that complete breaking with the past, was a packet of the few letters which Ephraim had from time to time written to her. She did not know whether she had thrown them into the grave with her treasure, or whether they were left a prey to fire and theft, but in her heart she had carried them beyond the loss of their material existence.

The first had answered her insistent question concerning the vexed condition of the devotees of prayer. It contained no word of criticism of the Mormon creed, nothing that if read aloud could have disturbed Halsey's peace. "Perchance," he had said, "as a medical man applies a poultice or blister to a diseased body to draw out the evil, so to those who pray and are too ignorant, _i.e._ opinionated, to follow perfectly the greatest teacher of prayer, God may apply circumstances to bring all the evil of heart to the surface, that in this life and the future it may the more quickly work itself away." Susannah had so conned this passage that she could now close her eyes and read it as written upon the red dusk of their lids.

The next letter had been written a year later. He described a great change in his life. He had gone to spend the winter in Hartford, on the Connecticut River, to be under a new physician, and had there met with a preacher called Mr. Horace Bushnell. This acquaintance was evidently much to Ephraim. Susannah had made some complaint of the harshness of the