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

moved; but he remained just where he first stood, strong enough to have this colloquy over without restlessness.

"I am no saint," he said, "as you know very well, and there's a lot of things I've done, thinking that my revelations told me, which I don't know whether they told me or not, for in prison I saw that the things were bad things, like that mess of the bank, and running away as I did. I guess I could not have been living right, and the devil gulled me. But that hain't got nothing to do with the times I know that the Lord spoke. You don't believe it was the Lord at all. Well, then, who was it? For it's the same as has told me not to do the lots of wicked things I might have done and didn't. As to them plates, I told you before I didn't have them as much in my hands as I said I did. I got wrong a bit there too, maybe, but it isn't easy to keep quite straight between the thing you see and the words you say it in, when you are trying to talk to people about what they don't understand. It isn't easy to do just only what is perfectly right about anything at any time, at least, if it is to you, it isn't to me; but I often thought I was born worse than most people."

"The men who were your witnesses as to the reality of the plates are apostate," she said gently.

"They are apostate," he said gloomily, "and why? Because I would not let them live upon the Lord's tithes without labouring as we all laboured."

He spoke again after a moment. "The Gentiles have spread abroad a story about one Solomon Spalding, who they say wrote the Book of Mormon, which Rigdon stole, but you know--you who have been with us from the beginning--that neither I nor your husband nor any one of us saw Rigdon until we came to Kirtland, and if his word is to be believed he never saw this Spalding or his book."

She made an impatient movement of her head. "I know," she said, "that there is no truth in that story." She moved a little away from him; she was becoming oppressed by his still earnestness.

"Isn't it any proof to you that I hadn't the wits nor the education to make the book?" His words were wistful.

She sat down on the sill of the open window, the only seat in the room, and looked out on the moist earth.

"I guess you want to get rid of me," he said, "but I can't go till I know how it is with you, for I've been wrestling in prayer this night concerning you." Then after a minute he said, "Our brother gave you the money that he found on the person of your husband's murderer?"

"I paid it into the treasury."

"But if you don't believe, maybe you are thinking of going east?"

"Do you think I could use the price of my husband's blood for that? It is not for me to know whether the avengers of blood are right or wrong in a land where there is no law, but the money belonged to your Church."

He looked at her as one who has made a study of a certain class of objects looks at a fine specimen, as a jeweller looks at a gem of the first water. This man, with the genius for priesthood, was a connoisseur in souls. "Emmar wouldn't have thought it no harm to keep the money the Danites gave her," and he added more reflectively, "nor would I." There was admiration in his tones.

He came a step nearer now. "If you went east who have you to go to? Your uncle, he's dead."

Susannah started. "How do you know?"

His manner was pitying. "I saw it last night in the way I see things, in my visions, but Emmar she heard from some of the Saints that came from Palmyra that your uncle was sick unto death, and last night the Lord told me he was dead."

She rose up suddenly. She had known too many instances of this man's curious knowledge of distant events to think of doubting. Her first thought was that if Ephraim was in this trouble she must go to him at once.

"Your aunt will be awful jealous of your cousin now she's only got him."

Then under Smith's pitying glance Susannah shrank from the first impulse to go. She felt that there was something within her that merited his pity. She could not rush to Ephraim without invitation, because it was not for his sake but for her own she wanted to go. She believed that Smith knew it. She felt thankful, as he had dared to accuse her of not loving her husband, that he had the kindness not to accuse her of this. A certain awe of Smith came over her; he could be violent with those who were violent, coarse and jocular with his public who could be worked upon thus, but to her he spoke delicately, and he had shown her at times before this that he knew her better than she knew herself.

"Sister Susannah," said Smith humbly, "it's my fault that you've become the brainy woman that you are, for I encouraged you at book learning (knowing as how when you found your heart 'twould shine with the more lustre), but if you were to go and live along side of a man as is a bookworm you'd lose your chance of this life (let alone your soul's salvation by the apostasy which you think lightly of now). Anyhow I'd wait if I was you till his mother asks you, for she'd be in an awful taking if you and he were talk, talk, talking of what she didn't understand. And he is her only son, and she is a widow."

With this last phrase, which had a good and Scriptural sound, Smith had done.

Susannah gave him her hand in farewell, and listened gently while again he told her, as on the night of his flight from Kirtland, that his friendship and the friendship of his Church were always at her service.

The prophet walked down the street. A crowd of the Saints and a group of elders were waiting for him with impatience. Darling eyed his coming with looks gloomy and furtive, but the prophet was no longer, as on the previous night, wrathful and pompous. He spoke aside to Darling.

"I thought it right to tell our sister Susannah Halsey that her Gentile home had suffered bereavement. The uncle who has been as a father unto her is dead. I have been greatly exercised in grief for her," continued Smith, briefly and truly; and then he added, also with truth, but with subtle suggestion, "I cannot think that further dealing with that household could be of advantage to her, but having laid the matter before the Lord, I was made aware that we must seek the good of all our sisters not with regard to outward appearance or inclination of the eyes; therefore, Brother Darling, let your motive be lowly, not having respect unto persons," and he added with the simplicity of a child, "as mine is."

Susannah was left with the bad picture in her mind which Smith had sketched there. She saw herself cold to her husband, lacking in passionate motherliness to his child, eager for the society of another man not out of love but intellectual vanity, and cavilling also at all religion because faith had no good soil to rest in. She sat long on the window-sill of the empty room, looking at an uncultivated patch of ground that even in May had no beauty save for here and there the stirring of a weed in the damp scented earth. She was stunned to see her life limned in such lines, and the truth in the drawing made it at first seem wholly true.

But Fate had another messenger that morning more potent than the prophet. A girl came by on the road, stopped, looked at her window, and by some impulse such as moved the buds and birds, tripped nearer in the sunshine and offered a flower. It was a sprig of quince blossom, and the girl stood laughing on the threshold of life just as Susannah had stood when Ephraim first showed her the flower of the quince. The false lines in the picture drawn by Smith faded at the touch of the pink winged flowers. Her heart sprang into the truth.

The girl looked up to see the face of the schoolmistress flushed and shining with sudden tears.

"My dear," said Susannah gently, "when I was your age flowers were given to me, but I did not love them half enough."

The maiden tripped away, resolving at heart to heed the admonition, although she understood it very vaguely.

Susannah knelt down upon the floor behind the sill, pressing both hands upon her breast lest she should cry aloud.

"No! No! No!" she whispered, "I loved Ephraim, and it was because I left him that my heart closed up--because in insufferable pride and impatience I left him. Oh, my love, now I know that you loved me too." She rocked herself in a passionate desire for Ephraim's presence. The scene in the cold autumn wood at Fayette came back to her eyes and ears. She felt the very touch of his hand when he went. "Fool! fool!" she said, "foolish and wicked. If I Had not been proud, if I had not thought myself better than you and yours, I should have understood." For some unexplained reason her mind reverted now to Halsey and the child, and she wept for them as she had never wept before.

After these tears she stood up and stretched out her arms as if embracing a new life. Alas! around her were only the ugly walls of the poor unfurnished room. Susannah, rousing herself from the warm scenes of quickened memory, felt the contrast.

The hope of Ephraim's reply to her letter came to her smiling each morning, and, as the days passed, retired from her heart with a sigh each night.

When six weeks had gone and no reply came Susannah wrote again. This time she addressed the letter to the care of Mr. Horace Bushnell in Hartford, thinking that perhaps by some extraordinary chance Ephraim's whereabouts might not be known in Manchester. This letter was, unlike all those that had preceded it, more brief, more reserved, and more gentle. It expressed interest only in his affairs, telling little of her own except the fact that she desired to return. Autumn came, and Susannah's faith in man was tested to the utmost by the dreariness of daily disappointment.

If Ephraim were dead surely his mother or his friend would return her letters. If Ephraim were not dead what could be the explanation of this silence? Many vicissitudes of life occurred to her as possibly producing a change in him, and only one explanation of his silence was possible--that he was changed. That was a terrible belief to face. Her faith took the bit in its teeth and refused to be guided by intelligence. The whole strength of her volition abetted the revolt of faith. Anything, everything, might be true rather than that the essentials of character which went to make up Ephraim's personality should be blurred or decomposed.

Susannah wrote again to Ephraim, to his mother and to Mr. Bushnell--three separate letters. She worked with the more zeal at her