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

and down. At length she saw Smith returning, not with hasty steps, but as if against his will, walking again through the crowded place like a man in a dream. Men greeted him, but for once he gave no sign of seeing them. She heard his footstep on the stair. When he reached her door he almost fell against it in the opening, and staggered as he entered the room as if his self-control had just lasted so far. He knelt down by one of the fashionable marble-topped tables with which he had graced her room, and, like an ill-conditioned soul, burst into tears and broken complaints.

"But I cannot do it," he gasped. "I cannot."

In her hour of miserable waiting Susannah had thought of many things that might occur, and nerved herself to meet them, but this distemper of soul, this failure of will in the man who had been undaunted through years of persecuting torture, was so wholly unexpected that she stood aghast.

He clenched his hands as they lay helpless on the white table. "O Lord!" he cried, and she could not tell from the tone whether the words were oath or prayer. "O Lord, I cannot let her go." His thick tears muffled his voice, and still again and again during the paroxysm she caught the words as if reiterated in choking anger, "O Lord, I cannot."

His tears, however evil their source, laid hold of her woman's sensibility; she was no longer a critical observer. She no longer set aside his strange inward conflict as a delusion of madness. She participated in his consciousness so far as to think that she was actually witnessing the despair of a soul repulsing an opportunity of righteousness, and yet not so far dead as not to know its worth. She tried to speak, but found herself, as at other times, so affected by his overlapping emotion that she was trembling and had neither courage nor voice.

Smith lifted his head, looking with terror into vacant spaces of the dim room, as if following with his eyes some menacing form. He whined piteously. "I have purposed to be faithful"; he put up his hand as if to ward off a blow. "Thou knowest! thou knowest!" His voice was like a whispering shriek. The terror of his face and gestures was appalling to see.

Susannah was infected with fear of an apparition so evidently visible to him. Her mind swung, as it were, out of material limitations. She was overcome with the belief that a third person was with them, and her heart went out in gratitude to that mysterious other for taking her part.

But the gilt clock on the marble mantelshelf ticked on; Susannah felt herself aware that the person of Smith's vision was withdrawing, repulsed. She almost cried aloud to the invisible, but checked the prayer, holding on, as it were, to her own sanity with both hands. Smith writhed continually, moaning.

When at length she succeeded in telling him faintly that if he refused this opportunity he must fall lower and lower and lose even the desire for good, she found that her words had no longer any power to influence. He had passed beyond into some region of outer darkness, where the things of sense did not seem to penetrate, and where, if the actions of his body were the expression of his soul, there was literally "wailing and gnashing of teeth."

But Susannah hovered over him, not so much angry as pitiful, her own agony of mere physical sympathy increasing. Terrified to be near him, too compassionate to withdraw, she watched till at last the veins in his hands and his face became swollen and knotted. She was unwilling to lose the hope of her sole influence over him, and yet was about to call for help, when almost suddenly he seemed to become conscious of his surroundings again and shake himself free from the distress.

In a little while he was sitting on one of the chairs, wiping his purple face and swollen eyes with the large silken pocket-handkerchief that was one of the signs of his recent opulence. She saw the large ring on his swollen finger gradually loosen, and the hand return to its normal shape and colour. She felt convinced that his pulses had gone back to their common flow, because his whole volition had returned peacefully to its low ambitions and self-indulgence. She knew instinctively that it was not thus opulent and fierce that he would have looked had he come out on the other side of his temptation. She stood, outwardly patient, waiting helpless till he should speak.

"Sit down, sister," he panted condescendingly. He was fanning himself with the handkerchief now, as a man might who felt injured by undue heat in the atmosphere.

Her refusal was concise and severe.

He looked at her boldly, with no apprehension now in his eyes, not even the former conciliatory desire to receive her with fair words. She felt appalled. Could it be that his angel in deserting him had deserted her? Was there a devil strong enough to give her to him? It was perhaps only his belief which overshadowed hers, it was perhaps only, as she thought, a sickness of nerve but the impression that unseen personalities had been contending here was stronger upon her even than her anger and fear.

Smith got up and went to the window. His horses and buggy were still parading.

"I guess I've changed my mind," he said. He did not care, it seemed, to delude her, but he must still deceive himself. "I couldn't go against the voice of the church council to that extent; it wouldn't be safe for you or me; and besides, 'tisn't the Lord's will that you should go."

She recoiled, looking at him in steady reproach.

"Well, as I said before, I guess you can think it over for a few days." This was his easy answer to her look, and he went out, slamming the door.


CHAPTER V.

When that day began to wane Susannah was still sitting in the empty curtained room. No plan which offered even a fair hope of escape had occurred to her mind. Although in pictures of adventure her imagination had been fertile, throwing out suggestions unbidden, her judgment would have none of them. No one disturbed her. She was left in isolation, a prey to dismal thoughts.

She saw the happy crowds dispersing in the Square from evening recreation. There was nothing to hinder her from joining them. Sometimes her sense of imprisonment seemed only a morbid dream, for on all sides of the fair white city there was open ingress and egress for the faithful and the stranger. It was hard to believe that at wharfs and on the high roads fanatics watched for her, and yet after Smith's reluctant avowal she dare not doubt it.

She saw evening fade over the broad semi-circle of the river, over the multitude of cheerful homes that sloped to its edge. When darkness came she found herself more than ever pressed and tormented by the grim shapes of fear and remorse and despair. She had terrible reason to fear, and felt as never before that she had brought this horrid situation upon herself by joining and rejoining the prophet's following. She had no hope now that Smith would relent.

Beyond the city, eastward toward the sun-rising, lay the home of Ephraim's friendship, whither in the morning she had thought to bend her steps. She saw it through the glad glamour of her recent knowledge that he had not neglected her letters. All her desires fled to this thought of his friendship, like birds flying home. All her fancies clustered round it, like climbing flowers that caress and kiss the object they enfold when some rude wind disturbs. Whenever she withdrew her mind from its contemplation, the circumstances on which she looked were the more revolting.

Ever since Smith left she had been more or less under the impression that an unseen person there in that very room had contended with him. Again and again she had swept it aside as an infectious madness that she was catching from the fanatics about her, but it had recurred; and now as, not caring to light her lamps, she sat alone in the darkness by the very table against which Smith had writhed and wailed, she felt pressed upon by a spiritual life external to her own.

Within her soul from some unknown depth the word arose distinctly as if spoken, "Pray. You cannot save yourself. Pray."

"I am going mad." Susannah whispered the words audibly. It was a comfort to her even to hear her own voice. But when her whisper was past she again listened involuntarily.

The words within her rose again. "Even so. Pray. If you are going mad, you have the more need."

Susannah had come to class all search for definite and material answer to prayer as one of the superstitions of false religion. In this category stood also the hearing of voices and obedience to monitions from the unseen. Now she reproached herself because she could not immediately silence this fancy of disturbed nerves.

Long sad thoughts of all her reasons against prayer, strongest among them the futility of her husband's prayers, passed through her mind with their train of haunting memories, but in the cessation from argument which these pictures of the past produced, the words arose again dearly within her soul, like airdrops rising from the depths of a well and expanding into momentary iridescence on the surface, "Pray for help. If you have no faith in God's arm, you have the more need to seek it."

Stung by the fear that she was losing her mind, she rose as she would have faced a human antagonist.

"God's arm!" she said aloud, "my husband prayed such prayers, but I will ask nothing till I see his request fulfilled."

She spoke the quick words with an almost reckless sense of experiment. Her thought was that before she could honestly think of such prayer she must see some fruit of Angel's petitions for this man Smith and for her own safety.

"Save Smith from further degradation," she said, her breath coming sharply. "Save me now, if that sort of prayer is right. Do this in answer to my husband's prayers. Remember his prayers."

She had begun recklessly, supposing that she was contending only with her own sick fancy; she was astonished that a few swift moments had involved her in an increasing sense of personal contact, and she became awed by the strength of the encounter.

"My husband prayed for my safety," she repeated with softened attitude; then, as if seeking for the protection which had died with him, she repeated again and again, "Remember his prayers."

She left the challenge at last apparently to die where she had breathed it in the dark cold air of her lonely room. The tension of her mind relaxed.

She sat down again, not knowing whether anything had occurred, but a crisis in the morbid working of her strained nerves had in some way relieved her.

She was curiously unable to go back to her former agonised anxieties. Natural fatigue, even sleepiness, came over her, but not her fears, even though she wooed them.

"Ah, well," she said within herself, "it is quite true that it is useless to consider when I can give myself no help."

The habits of the Saints were early. When she heard silence fall upon the great house she went into her sleeping-room and lay down upon the bed. Sleep came quickly.

With the