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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Mormon Prophet
+
+Author: Lily Dougall
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2005 [EBook #17279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MORMON PROPHET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by the Canadian Institute for Historical
+Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org))
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Mormon Prophet
+
+BY
+
+LILY DOUGALL
+
+Author of The Mermaid, The Zeitgeist, The Madonna of a Day, Beggars All,
+Etc.
+
+
+TORONTO
+
+THE W.J. GAGE COMPANY (LIMITED)
+1899
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1899,
+BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In studying the rise of this curious sect I have discovered that certain
+misconceptions concerning it are deeply rooted in the minds of many of
+the more earnest of the well-wishers to society. Some otherwise
+well-informed people hold Mormonism to be synonymous with polygamy,
+believe that Brigham Young was its chief prophet, and are convinced that
+the miseries of oppressed women and tyrannies exercised over helpless
+subjects of both sexes are the only themes that the religion of more
+than two hundred thousand people can afford. When I have ventured in
+conversation to deny these somewhat fabulous notions, it has been
+earnestly suggested to me that to write on so false a religion in other
+than a polemic spirit would tend to the undermining of civilised life.
+
+In spite of these warnings, and although I know it to be a most
+dangerous commodity, I have ventured to offer the simple truth, as far
+as I have been able to discern it, consoling my advisers with the
+assurance that its insidious influence will be unlikely to do harm,
+because, however potent may be the direful latitude of other religious
+novels, this particular book can only interest those wiser folk who are
+best able to deal with it.
+
+As, however, to many who have preconceived the case, this narrative
+might, in the absence of explanation, seem purely fanciful, let me
+briefly refer to the historical facts on which it is based. The Mormons
+revere but one prophet. As to his identity there can be no mistake,
+since many of the "revelations" were addressed to him by name--"To
+Joseph Smith, Junior." He never saw Utah, and his public teachings were
+for the most part unexceptionable. Taking necessary liberty with
+incidents, I have endeavoured to present Smith's character as I found it
+in his own writings, in the narratives of contemporary writers, and in
+the memories of the older inhabitants of Kirtland.
+
+In reviewing the evidence I am unable to believe that, had Smith's
+doctrine been conscious invention, it would have lent sufficient power
+to carry him through persecutions in which his life hung in the
+balance, and his cause appeared to be lost, or that the class of earnest
+men who constituted the rank and file of his early following would have
+been so long deceived by a deliberate hypocrite. It appears to me more
+likely that Smith was genuinely deluded by the automatic freaks of a
+vigorous but undisciplined brain, and that, yielding to these, he became
+confirmed in the hysterical temperament which always adds to delusion
+self-deception, and to self-deception half-conscious fraud. In his day
+it was necessary to reject a marvel or admit its spiritual significance;
+granting an honest delusion as to his visions and his book, his only
+choice lay between counting himself the sport of devils or the agent of
+Heaven; an optimistic temperament cast the die.
+
+In describing the persecutions of his early followers I have modified
+rather than enlarged upon the facts. It would, indeed, be difficult to
+exaggerate the sufferings of this unhappy and extraordinarily successful
+sect.
+
+A large division of the Mormons of to-day, who claim to be Smith's
+orthodox following, and who have never settled in Utah, are strictly
+monogamous. These have never owned Brigham Young as a leader, never
+murdered their neighbours or defied the law in any way, and so vigorous
+their growth still appears that they claim to have increased their
+number by fifty thousand since the last census in 1890. Of all their
+characteristics, the sincerity of their belief is the most striking. In
+Ohio, when one of the preachers of these "Smithite" Mormons was
+conducting me through the many-storied temple, still standing huge and
+gray on Kirtland Bluff, he laid his hand on a pile of copies of the Book
+of Mormon, saying solemnly, "Sister, here is the solidest thing in
+religion that you'll find anywhere." I bought the "solidest" thing for
+fifty cents, and do not advise the same outlay to others. The prophet's
+life is more marvellous and more instructive than the book whose
+production was its chief triumph. That it was an original production
+seems probable, as the recent discovery of the celebrated Spalding
+manuscript, and a critical examination of the evidence of Mrs. Spalding,
+go far to discredit the popular accusation of plagiarism.
+
+Near Kirtland I visited a sweet-faced old lady--not, however, of the
+Mormon persuasion--who as a child had climbed on the prophet's knee. "My
+mother always said," she told us, "that if she had to die and leave
+young children, she would rather have left them to Joseph Smith than to
+any one else in the world: he was always kind." This testimony as to
+Smith's kindheartedness I found to be often repeated in the annals of
+Mormon families.
+
+In criticising my former stories several reviewers, some of them
+distinguished in letters, have done me the honour to remark that there
+was latent laughter in many of my scenes and conversations, but that I
+was unconscious of it. Be that as it may, those who enjoy unconscious
+absurdity will certainly find it in the utterances of the self-styled
+prophet of the Mormons. Probably one gleam of the sacred fire of humour
+would have saved him and his apostles the very unnecessary trouble of
+being Mormons at all.
+
+In looking over the problems involved in such a career as Smith's, we
+must be struck by the necessity for able and unprejudiced research into
+the laws which govern apparent marvels. Notwithstanding the very natural
+and sometimes justifiable aspersions which have been cast upon the work
+of the Society for Psychical Research, it does appear that the
+disinterested service rendered by its more distinguished members is the
+only attempt hitherto made to aid people of the so-called "mediumistic"
+temperament to understand rather than be swayed by their delusions.
+Whether such a result is as yet possible or not, Mormonism affords a
+gigantic proof of the crying need of an effort in this direction; for
+men are obviously more ignorant of their own elusive mental conditions
+than of any other branch of knowledge.
+
+L.D.
+
+MONTREAL, December, 1898.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORMON PROPHET.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK I._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In the United States of America there was, in the early decades of this
+century, a very widely spread excitement of a religious sort. Except in
+the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were
+scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from
+a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the
+settlers. In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had
+been persecuted for their faith: Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of
+diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of
+fiery zeal, their cravings for "the light that never was on sea or
+land," but not that education by contact with law and order which, in
+older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.
+
+With the religious revivals came signs and wonders. A wave of peculiar
+psychical phenomena swept over the country, in explanation of which the
+belief most widely received was that of the direct interposition of God
+or the devil. The difficulty of discerning between the working of the
+good and the bad spirit in abnormal manifestations was to most minds
+obviated by the fact that they looked out upon the confusing scene
+through the glasses of rigidly defined opinion, and according as the
+affected person did or did not conform to the spectator's view of truth,
+so he was judged to be a saint or a demoniac. Few sought to learn rather
+than to judge; one of these very few was a young man by name Ephraim
+Croom. He was by nature a student, and, being of a feeble constitution,
+he enjoyed what, in that country and time, was the very rare privilege
+of indulging his literary tastes under the shelter of the parental roof.
+
+In one of the last years of the eighteenth century Croom the elder had
+come with a young wife from his father's home in Massachusetts to settle
+in a township called New Manchester, in the State of New York. He was a
+Baptist by creed; a man of strong will, strong affections, and strong
+self-respect. Taking the portion of goods which was his by right, he
+sallied forth into the new country, thrift and intelligence written upon
+his forehead, thinking there the more largely to establish the
+prosperity of the green bay tree, and to serve his God and generation
+the better by planting his race in the newer land.
+
+The thirtieth year after his emigration found him a notable person in
+the place that he had chosen, with almost the same physical strength as
+in youth, stern, upright, thrifty, the owner of large mills, of a
+substantial wooden residence, and of many acres of land. He was as rich
+as he had intended to be; his ideal of righteousness, being of the
+obtainable sort, had been realised and strictly adhered to. The one
+disappointment of his life was the lack of those sturdy sons and
+daughters who, to his mind, should have surrounded the virtuous man in
+his old age. They had not come into the world. His wife, a good woman
+and energetic helpmeet, had brought him but the one studious son.
+
+Ephraim was thirty-two years of age when a young girl, strong,
+beautiful, impetuous, entered under the sloping eaves of his father's
+huge gray shingle roof. The girl was a niece on the maternal side. Her
+New England mother had, by freak of love, married a reckless young
+Englishman of gentle blood who was settled on a Canadian farm. Pining
+for her puritan home, she died early. The father made a toy of his
+daughter till he too died in the fortified town of Kingston, on the
+northern shore of Lake Ontario. No other relatives coming forward to
+assume his debts or to claim his child, their duty in the matter was
+clear to the minds of the Croom household, and the girl was sent for.
+Her name was Susannah, but she herself gave it the softer form that she
+had been accustomed to hear; when she first entered the sitting-room of
+the grave Croom family trio, like a sunbeam striking suddenly through
+the clouds on a dark day, she held out her hand and her lips to each in
+turn, saying, "I am Susianne."
+
+That first time Ephraim kissed her. It was done in surprise and
+embarrassed formality. He knew, when the moment was past that his
+parents had perceived that Susannah needed more decorous training. He
+concurred in believing this to be desirable, for the manners that had
+surrounded him were very stiff. Yet the memory of the greeting remained
+with him, a thing to be wondered at while he turned the whispering
+leaves of his great books.
+
+Susannah had travelled from the Canadian fort in the care of the
+preacher Finney. He was a revivalist of great renown, possessing a
+lawyer-like keenness of intellect, much rhetorical power, and Pauline
+singleness of purpose. That night he ate and slept in the house.
+
+The original Calvinism of the Croom household had already been modified
+by the waves of Methodist revival from the Eastern States. Finney was an
+Independent, but Martha Croom had an abounding respect for him; his
+occasional visits were epochs in her life. She had prepared many baked
+meats for his entertainment before the evening of his arrival with
+Susannah, but while he was present she devoted herself wholly to his
+conversation.
+
+The feast was spread in the inner kitchen. In the square brick fireplace
+burning pine sticks crackled, bidding the chill of the April evening
+retire to its own place beyond the dark window pane. The paint upon the
+walls and floor glistened but faintly to the fire and the small flames
+of two candles that stood among the viands upon the table.
+
+The elder Croom sat in his place. He was burly and ruddy, a wholesome
+man, very silent, very strong, a person to be feared and relied on.
+Ephraim believed that force went forth from his father's presence like
+perfume from a flower. There were many kinds of flowers whose perfume
+was too strong for Ephraim, but he felt that to be a proof of his own
+weakness.
+
+Martha Croom, also of New England stock, was of a different type. At
+fifty years she was still as slender as a girl--tall and too slender,
+but the small shapely head was set gracefully on the neck as a flower
+upon its stalk. Her hair, which was wholly silvered, was still abundant
+and glossily brushed. Her mind was not judicial. She was more quick to
+decide than to comprehend, full of intense activities and emotions.
+
+"I have heard," said the preacher slowly, "certain distressing rumours
+concerning--"
+
+Mrs. Croom gave an upward bridling motion of her head, and a red spot
+of indignant fire came in each of her cheeks. "Joe Smith?", she cried.
+"A blasphemous wretch! And there is nothing, Mr. Finney, that so well
+indicates the luke-warmishness into which so many have fallen as that
+his blasphemy is made a jest of."
+
+Ephraim moved uneasily in his chair.
+
+Mr. Croom made a remark brief and judicial. "The Smiths are a _low_
+family."
+
+Mrs. Croom answered the tone. "If the dirt beneath our feet were to
+begin using profane language, I don't suppose it would be beneath our
+dignity to put a stop to it."
+
+"It is the Inquisition that my mother wishes to reinstate," said
+Ephraim.
+
+The master of the house again spoke with the _naïveté_ of unquestioning
+bias. "No, Ephraim; for your mother would be the last to interfere with
+any for doing righteousness or believing the truth."
+
+Mrs. Croom's slender head trembled and her eyes showed signs of tears at
+her son's opposition. "If God-fearing people cannot prevent the most
+horrible iniquities from being practised in their own town, the laws are
+in a poor condition."
+
+"You have made no candid inquiry concerning Smith, mother; your judgment
+of him, whether true or false, is based on angry sentiment and wilful
+ignorance."
+
+The preacher sighed. "This Smith is deceiving the people."
+
+"His book," said Ephraim, "is a history of the North American Indians
+from the time of the flood until some epoch prior to Columbus. It would
+be as difficult to prove that it was not true as to prove that Smith is
+not honest in his delusion. We can only fall back upon what Butler would
+call 'a strong presumption.'"
+
+Mrs. Croom, consciously or not, made a little sharp rap on the table,
+and there was a movement of suppressed misery like a quiver in her
+slender upright form. Her voice was low and tremulous. "If you'd got
+religion, Ephraim, you wouldn't speak in that light manner of one who
+has the awful wickedness of adding to the words of the Book."
+
+Ephraim continued to enlighten the preacher in a stronger tone. "Whether
+the man is mad or false, almost all the immoralities that you will hear
+reported about him are, as far as I can make out, not true. He doesn't
+teach that it's unnecessary to obey the ten commandments, or beat his
+wife, nor is he drunken. He's got the sense to see that all that sort of
+thing wouldn't make a big man of him. It's merely a revised form of
+Christianity, with a few silly additions, that he claims to be the
+prophet of."
+
+Mrs. Croom began to weep bitterly.
+
+The elder Croom asked a pertinent question. "Why do you wilfully
+distress your mother, Ephraim?"
+
+"Because, sir, I love my mother too well to sit silent and let her
+think that injustice can glorify God."
+
+It was a family jar.
+
+Finney was a man of about forty years of age; his eyes under
+over-reaching brows were bright and penetrating; his face was shaven,
+but his mouth had an expression of peculiar strength and gentleness. He
+looked keenly at the son of the house, who was held to be irreligious.
+And then he looked upon Susannah, whose beauty and frivolity had not
+escaped his keen observation. He lived always in the consciousness of an
+invisible presence; when he felt the arms of Heaven around him, wooing
+him to prayer, he dared not disobey.
+
+He arose now, setting his chair back against the wall with preoccupied
+precision. "The spirit of prayer is upon me," he said; and in a moment
+he added, "Let us pray."
+
+Susannah was eating, and with relish. She laid down her bit of pumpkin
+pie and stared astonished. Then, being a girl of good sense and good
+feeling, she relinquished the remainder of her supper, and, following
+her aunt's example, knelt beside her chair.
+
+The two candles and the firelight left shadowy spaces in parts of the
+room, and cast grotesque outlines against the walls. Nothing was
+familiar to Susannah's eye; she could not help looking about her.
+Ephraim was nearest to her. He was a bearded man, and seemed to her very
+old. She saw that his face looked pale and distressed; his eyes were
+closed, his lips tight set, like one bearing transient pain. At the end
+of the table her uncle knelt upright, with hands clasped and face
+uplifted, no feature or muscle moving--a strong figure rapt in devotion.
+On her other side, as a slight tree waves in the wind, her aunt's slim
+figure was swaying and bending with feeling that was now convulsive and
+now restrained. Sometimes she moaned audibly or whispered "Amen." Across
+the richly-spread table Susannah saw the preacher kneeling in a full
+flickering glare of the pine fire, one hand upon the brick jamb, the
+other covering his eyes, as if to hide from himself all things that were
+seen and temporal in order that he might speak face to face with the
+Eternal.
+
+It was some time before she listened to the words of the prayer. When
+she heard Ephraim Croom spoken of by name, there was no room in her mind
+for anything but curiosity. After a while she heard her own name, and
+curiosity began to subside into awe. After this the preacher brought
+forward the case of Joseph Smith.
+
+Before the prayer ended Susannah was troubled by so strong a sense of
+emotion that she desired nothing so much as relief. It seemed to her
+that the emotion was not so much in herself as in the others, or like an
+influence in the room pressing upon them all. At length a kitten that
+had been lying by the hearth got up as if disturbed by the same
+influence, and, walking round the room, rubbed its fur against Ephraim's
+knee. She saw the start run through his whole nervous frame. Opening his
+eyes, he put down his hand and stroked it. Susannah liked Ephraim the
+better for this. The kitten was not to be comforted; it looked up in his
+face and gave a piteous mew. Susannah tittered; then she felt sorry and
+ashamed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Two quiet years passed, and Susannah had attained her eighteenth
+birthday.
+
+On a certain day in the week there befell what the aunt called a
+"season" of baking. It was the only occasion in the week when Mrs. Croom
+was sure to stay for some length of time in the same place with Susannah
+beside her. Ephraim brought down his books to the hospitable kitchen,
+and sat aloof at a corner table. He said the sun was too strong upon his
+upper windows, or that the rain was blowing in. The first time that
+Ephraim sought refuge in the kitchen Mrs. Croom was quite flustered with
+delight. She always coveted more of her son's society. But when he came
+a third time she began to suspect trouble.
+
+Mrs. Croom stood by the baking-board, her slender hands immersed in a
+heap of pearly flour; baskets of scarlet currants lay at her feet. All
+things in the kitchen shone by reason of her diligence, and the windows
+were open to the summer sunshine. Susannah sat with a large pan of red
+gooseberries beside her; she was picking them over one by one.
+Somewhere in the outer kitchen the hired boy had been plucking a goose,
+and some tiny fragments of the down were floating in the air. One of
+them rode upon a movement of the summer air and danced before Susannah's
+eyes. She put her pretty red lips beneath it and blew it upwards.
+
+Mrs. Croom's suspicions concerning Ephraim had produced in her a desire
+to reprove some one, but she refrained as yet.
+
+Susannah having wafted the summer snowflake aloft, still sat, her young
+face tilted upward like the faces of saints in the holy pictures, her
+bright eyes fixed upon the feather now descending. Ephraim looked with
+obvious pleasure. Her head was framed for him by the window; a dark
+stiff evergreen and the summer sky gave a Raphaelite setting.
+
+The feather dropped till it all but touched the tip of the girl's nose.
+Then from the lips, puckered and rosy, came a small gust; the fragment
+of down ascended, but this time aslant.
+
+"You didn't blow straight enough up," said Ephraim.
+
+Susannah smiled to know that her pastime was observed. The smile was a
+flash of pleasure that went through her being. She ducked her laughing
+face farther forward to be under the feather.
+
+Mrs. Croom shot one glance at Ephraim, eager and happy in his watching.
+She did what nothing but the lovelight in her son's face could have
+caused her to do. She struck the girl lightly but testily on the side of
+the face.
+
+Ephraim was as foolish as are most men in sight of a damsel in distress.
+He made no impartial inquiry into the real cause of trouble; he did not
+seek Justice in her place of hiding. He stepped to his mother's side,
+stern and determined, remembering only that she was often unwise, and
+that he could control her.
+
+"You ought not to have done that. You must never do it again."
+
+With the print of floury fingers on her glowing cheeks the girl sat more
+astonished than angry, full of ruth when her aunt began to sob aloud.
+
+The mother knew that she was no longer the first woman in her son's
+love.
+
+It was without doubt, Mrs. Croom's first bitter pang of jealousy that
+lay at the beginning of those causes which drove Susannah out upon a
+strange pilgrimage. But above and beyond her personal jealousy was a
+consideration certainly dearer to a woman into whose inmost religious
+life was woven the fibre of the partisan. As she expressed it to
+herself, she agonised before the Lord in a new fear lest her unconverted
+son should be established in his unbelief by love for a woman who had
+never sought for heavenly grace; but, in truth, that which she sought
+was that both should swear allegiance to her own interpretation of
+grace. In this prayer some good came to her, the willingness to
+sacrifice her jealousy if need be; but, after the prayer another thought
+entered into her mind, which she held to be divine direction; she must
+focus all her efforts upon the girl's conversion. In her heart all the
+time a still small voice told her that love was the fulfilling of the
+law, but so still, so small, so habitual was it that she lost it as we
+lose the ticking of a clock, and it was not with increased love for
+Susannah that she began a course of redoubled zeal.
+
+The girl became frightened, not so much of her aunt as of God. The
+simple child's prayer for the keeping of her soul which she had been in
+the habit of repeating morning and evening became a terror to her,
+because she did not understand her aunt's phraseology. The "soul" it
+dealt with was not herself, her thoughts, feelings, and powers, but a
+mysterious something apart from these, for whose welfare these must all
+be sacrificed.
+
+Susannah had heard of fairies and ghosts; she inclined to shove this
+sort of soul into the same unreal region. The dreary artificial heaven,
+which seemed to follow logically if she accepted the basal fact of a
+soul separated from all her natural powers, could be dispensed with
+also. This was her hope, but she was not sure. How could she be sure
+when she was so young and dependent? It was almost her only solace to
+interpret Ephraim's silence by her own unbelief, and she rested her
+weary mind against her vague notions of Ephraim's support.
+
+One August day Mrs. Croom drove with her husband to a distant funeral.
+
+In the afternoon when the sunshine was falling upon the fields of maize,
+when the wind was busy setting their ribbon-like leaves flapping, and
+rocking the tree-tops, Ephraim Croom was disturbed in his private room
+by the blustering entrance of Susannah.
+
+The room was an attic; the windows of the gable looked west; slanting
+windows in the shingle roof looked north and south. The room was large
+and square, spare of furniture, lined with books. At a square table in
+the centre sat Ephraim.
+
+When Susannah entered a gust of wind came with her. The handkerchief
+folded across her bosom was blown awry. Her sun-bonnet had slipped back
+upon her neck; her ringlets were tossed.
+
+"Cousin Ephraim, my aunt has gone; come out and play with me." Then she
+added more disconsolately, "I am lonely; I want you to talk to me,
+cousin."
+
+The gust had lifted Ephraim's papers and shed them upon the floor. He
+looked down at them without moving. Life in a world of thoughts in which
+his fellows took no interest, had produced in him a singularly
+undemonstrative manner.
+
+Susannah's red lips were pouting. "Come, cousin, I am so tired of
+myself."
+
+But Ephraim had been privately accused of amative emotions. Offended
+with his mother, mortified he knew not why, uncertain of his own
+feeling, as scholars are apt to be, he had no wish then but to retire.
+
+"I am too busy, Susianne."
+
+"Then I will go alone; I will go for a long, long walk by myself." She
+gave her foot a defiant stamp upon the floor.
+
+He looked out of his windows north and south; safer district could not
+be. "I do not think it will rain," he said.
+
+A suspicion of laughter was lurking in his clear quiet eyes, which were
+framed in heavy brown eyebrows and thick lashes. Nature, who had stinted
+this man in physical strength, had fitted him out fairly well as to
+figure and feature.
+
+Susannah, vexed at his indifference, but fearing that he would retract
+his unexpected permission, was again in the draught of the open door.
+
+"Perhaps I will walk away, away into the woods and never come back; what
+then?"
+
+"Indians," suggested he, "or starvation, or perhaps wolves, Susianne."
+
+"But I love you for not forbidding me to go, cousin Ephraim."
+
+The smile that repaid him for his indulgence comforted him for an hour;
+then a storm arose.
+
+In the meantime Susannah had walked far. A squatter's old log-house
+stood by the green roadside; the wood of the roof and walls was
+weathered and silver-gray. Before it a clothes-line was stretched,
+heaved tent-like by a cleft pole, and a few garments were flapping in
+the wind, chiefly white, but one was vivid pink and one tawny yellow.
+
+The nearer aspect of the log-house was squalid. An early apple-tree at
+the side had shed part of its fruit, which was left to rot in the grass
+and collect flies, and close to the road, under a juniper bush, the rind
+of melons and potato peelings had been thrown. There was no fence; the
+grass was uncut. Upon the door-step sat a tall woman, unkempt-looking,
+almost ragged. She had short gray hair that curled about her temples;
+her face was handsome, clever-looking too, but, above all, eager. This
+eagerness amounted to hunger. She was looking toward the sky, nodding
+and smiling to herself.
+
+Susannah stopped upon the road a few feet from the juniper bush. It
+occurred to her that this was Joseph Smith's mother, who had the
+reputation of being a speywife. The sky-gazer did not look at her.
+
+"Are you Lucy Smith?"
+
+The woman clapped her hands suddenly together and laughed aloud. Then
+she rose, but, only glancing a moment at the visitor, she turned her
+smiling face again toward the sky.
+
+Into Susannah's still defiant mood darted the thought of a new
+adventure. "Will you tell my fortune?"
+
+"Who am I to tell fortunes when my son Joseph has come home?" Again came
+the excited laugh. "It's the grace of God that's fallen on this house,
+and Lucy Smith, like Elizabeth, the wife of Zacharias, is the mother of
+a prophet."
+
+"He isn't a prophet," said Susannah, taking a step backward.
+
+"Seven years ago was his first vision, and all the people trampling upon
+him since to make him gainsay it, but he stood steadfast. I dreamed
+it--when he was a little child I dreamed it, and it has come true."
+Then, seeming to return into herself, her gaze wandered again to the
+sky, and she murmured, "The mother of a prophet, the mother of a
+prophet!"
+
+On the other side of the road a few acres of ground were lying under
+disorderly cultivation. In one patch the stalks of sweet maize had been
+fastened together in high stooks, disclosing the pumpkin vines, which
+beneath them had plentifully borne their huge fruit, green as yet. At
+the back of this cultivated portion an old man, the elder Joseph Smith,
+was digging potatoes; his torn shirt fluttered like the dress of a
+scarecrow. Behind him and all around was the green wood, close-growing
+bushes hedging in the short trees of a second growth which covered a
+long low hill. Above the hill ominous clouds like smoking censers were
+being rolled up from the east; the waving beards of the corn stooks
+rustled and streamed in wind which was growing colder. Susannah's dress
+and bonnet were roughly blown, and the clothes on the line flapped again
+around the tall figure of the witch in the doorway.
+
+Susannah contradicted again with the scornful superiority of youth. "I
+don't believe that your son is a prophet."
+
+Lucy Smith, having the sensitive receptive power of an hysteric, was
+sobered now by the determination of Susannah's aspect. She looked almost
+repentant for a moment, and then said humbly, "If you'll come in and see
+Emmar--Joseph and Emmar have come home--Emmar will tell you the same."
+
+A gray vaporous tint was being spread over the heavens, folding this
+portion of earth in its shadow and darkening the interior of the cabin
+which Susannah entered.
+
+Upon a decent bedstead reclined a young woman. Everything near her was
+orderly and clean. She belonged, it would seem, to a better class of the
+social order than the other, certainly to a higher type of womanhood.
+
+"What have you got? Is it a kitten?" asked Susannah. Advancing across
+the dark uneven floor, she perceived that the reclining woman was
+caressing some small creature beneath her shawl.
+
+"Emmar, Emmar," said Lucy Smith, "tell Miss from the mill about the
+angel that appeared to Joseph."
+
+Emma Smith was a nobly made, dignified young creature. She looked at
+Susannah's beautiful and open countenance, and straightway drew forth
+the young thing she was nursing for her inspection. It was an infant but
+a few days old. Surprised, reverent, and delighted, Susannah bent over
+it. The child made them all akin--the squalid old hysteric, the
+respectable young mother, the beautiful girl in her silken shawl.
+
+Some minutes elapsed.
+
+"Emmar, Miss here doesn't know nothing about Joseph. She says it ain't
+true."
+
+The young mother smiled frankly. "I suppose it seems very hard for you
+to believe," she said, "but it's quite true, and the Lord told Joseph
+where to find the new part of the Bible that he's going now to make
+known to the world. Shall I tell you about it?"
+
+Susannah looked at her dazed; she had heretofore heard of the Smiths'
+doctrines as of the ravings of the mad. It had not occurred to her that
+a sane mind could regard them seriously.
+
+"It was seven years ago," said Emma, "at the time the big revival was
+here and Joseph was converted; but he heard all the Methodists and
+Baptists and Presbyterians disputing together as to which of them was
+right, and he felt so burdened to know which was right, and he felt a
+sort of longing in him to be a great man, bigger than the revival
+preacher that had been here that all the people ran after, and Joseph
+felt that he could be bigger than that, and preach and tell all the
+people what was right, if they would all come to hear him. And he was so
+burdened that one day he went out into the woods, and he began crying
+and confessing his sins and calling out to God to show him what was
+right and make him a great preacher. Well, when he had been crying and
+going on like that for a long time, he just fell right down as if he was
+asleep, and it was all dark till a light fell from heaven and an angel
+came in the light." Emma went on to tell of Smith's vision and first
+call, of his backsliding and final commission.
+
+Susannah stared. The young mother was a reality; the baby was a reality.
+Could the statements in this wild story bear any relation to reality?
+The old woman stood by, nodding and smiling. The young girl's mind
+became perplexed.
+
+"It was just before he began to translate the gold book that he came to
+board at my father's in Susquehannah County, and he told me all about
+it, and I believed him; but my father wouldn't, so I had to go away with
+Joseph to get married; but since then father's forgiven us; and we've
+been back home this last summer, and we've been to Fayette too, living
+with a gentleman called Mr. Whitmer, who believes in Joseph, and all the
+time Joseph's been translating the book that was written on the gold
+plates that he found in the hill. It's been very hard work, and we've
+had to live very poor, because Joseph couldn't earn anything while he
+was doing it, but it's done now, so we feel cheered. And now that it's
+going to be printed, and Joseph can begin to gather in the elect very
+soon, and now that baby's come--"
+
+Emma stopped again; the last domestic detail seemed to involve her mind
+in such meshes of bliss that she lost sight of the end of her sentence.
+All her words had been calm, and the baby that lay upon the bed beside
+her stretching its crumpled rose-leaf fists into the air and making
+strange grotesque smiles with its little red chin and cheeks was
+undoubtedly a true baby, a good and delightful thing in Susannah's
+estimation. Had the Bible in the hill been a true Bible? Susannah
+intuitively knew that Emma Smith, bending with grave rapture over her
+firstborn, was not trying to deceive her.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that it is terribly wicked of you to
+believe about this Bible." Her utterance became thick with her rising
+indignation. "How can you sit and hold that child and say such terribly
+wicked things?" She could not have told why she referred to the child;
+the moment before it was spoken she had not formulated the thought. She
+was not old enough to reason about the sacredness of babies; she only
+felt.
+
+The tears started to Emma's eyes. She clasped her child to her breast.
+"Yes, I know how you feel. I felt that way too myself, and sometimes
+even yet it frightens me; but, you see, I know it is true, so it must be
+right. But I've given up expecting other people to believe it just yet,
+until Joseph is allowed to preach, and then it's been revealed to him
+that the nations shall be gathered in. Only you looked so--so
+beautiful--you see, I thought perhaps God might have sent you to be a
+friend to me. I have no friends because of the way they persecute
+Joseph."
+
+Susannah turned in incredulous wrath and tramped, young and haughty, to
+the outer door. The first drops of a heavy shower were falling; she
+hesitated.
+
+"But tell her about the witnesses, Emmar." Old Lucy stood half-way
+between the bed and the door, making nods and becks in her excited
+desire that Susannah should be impressed. "For when the dear Lord saw
+that folks wouldn't b'lieve Joseph, He didn't leave him without
+witnesses."
+
+Susannah, stopped by the weather, felt more willing to conciliate. She
+returned gloomily within the sound of Emma's gentle voice.
+
+"It was Mr. Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer and Mr. Harris," Emma said. "Mr.
+Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer saw the gold plates held in the air, as it were
+by hands they couldn't see, but Martin Harris he had to withdraw himself
+because he couldn't see the vision, and he went away by himself and
+sobbed and cried. But Joseph went and put his arm around him and prayed
+that his faith might be strengthened, and then he saw it. So they three
+have written their testimony in the front of the book that's being
+printed."
+
+A storm had now broken upon the house in torrents. The door was shut.
+Emma wrapped her child closer in her shawl. Susannah sat sulky and
+disconsolate. She had a vague idea that the vengeance of heaven was
+overtaking her for merely listening to such heresy. Over against this
+was a shadowy doubt whether it might not be true, roused by Emma's
+continued persistency.
+
+"Is it any easier to believe that those things happened to folks when
+the Bible was written? Don't you believe that God appeared to Moses and
+Samuel and told them the very words to write down, and showed them
+visions; and isn't He the same God yesterday, to-day, and for ever? It's
+just what it says in the Bible shall come about in the latter days. It's
+because of the great apostasy of the Church, no one really believing in
+Jesus Christ, that a new prophet had to appear--that's Joseph."
+
+"They do believe," Susannah spoke sullenly.
+
+"Well, there's your aunt, Mis' Croom. Now she's as good as there is in
+the modern Church, isn't she? She's doing all she can to save her soul.
+She can't do it, for she don't believe. Why the Lord, He said that signs
+and wonders should follow them that believe. Have they any signs and
+wonders up at your place? And He said that believers must forsake all,
+houses and lands and all; what have your people forsook? And as to its
+being hard to believe about Joseph--you just take the things in the
+Bible, Elisha and the bears, for instance, and Paul bringing back Dorcas
+to life, and just think how hard they'd be to believe if you heard they
+happened yesterday, next door to you. And with God all times and places
+is the same. Souls is only saved by believing; the Lord says so, and
+accepting the things of faith to come to pass, and being baptized and
+giving up all and following; and it's an awful thing to lose one's
+soul."
+
+At this reiteration of the doctrine of the soul as a thing apart from
+the development of reason and character, Susannah rose, ready to cry
+with anger. Her aunt's agitation on the subject had left a sore to which
+the gentlest touch was pain.
+
+"I don't believe it," she cried. "I don't believe God wants us to do
+anything except just good. That's what _my_ father told me. I'm going
+home. I don't care how it rains."
+
+Emma did not hear her. Over her pale young face had come the peculiar
+expression of alert and loving listening. She had detected the sound of
+a footstep which Susannah now heard coming heavily near.
+
+A large man of about twenty-five years of age entered from the bluster
+of the storm. As Susannah was trying to push out past him into its fury,
+he paused, staring in rough astonishment.
+
+Lucy hung on to her arm. "Stay a bit! Joseph must hold the umbrella over
+Miss. Emmar, tell her she can't no wise go alone."
+
+Susannah fled into the driving sheets of rain, but Joseph Smith,
+umbrella in hand, followed her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The umbrella was a very heavy one. Susannah certainly could not have
+held it against the wind. Joseph Smith held the shelter between Susannah
+and the blast, looking at her occasionally with a kindly expression in
+his blue eyes, but merely to see how far it sheltered her.
+
+They walked in silence for about a quarter of a mile. The rain swept
+upon her skirt and feet; she saw it falling thick on either side; she
+saw it beating upon Smith's shoulder, upon one side of his hat, and
+dripping from his light hair. The wind was so strong that the very drops
+that trickled from his hair were blown backward. His blue coat was
+old--not much protection, she thought, against the storm.
+
+The false prophet had hitherto appeared quite as terrible to her
+imagination and as far removed from real life as the wild beast of story
+books; now he appeared very much like any other man--rather more kind in
+his actions, perhaps, and distrait in his thought. Susannah began to
+think herself a discoverer.
+
+"You are not keeping the rain off yourself."
+
+"It don't matter about me. I don't mind getting wet."
+
+His tone carried conviction. After a while gratitude again stirred her
+into speech.
+
+"I'm afraid you find it awfully hard holding up the umbrella."
+
+He gave a glance downward at her as she toiled by his side. "Why you're
+most blown away as it is. You couldn't get along without the umbrellar."
+Regarding her attentively for a minute, he added, "Emmar will be vexed
+when she hears that your dress got so splashed."
+
+They were both bending somewhat forward against the wind; the road
+beneath them was glistening with standing water. When they passed by the
+woods the trees were creaking and cracking, and over the meadows hung
+shifting veils of clouds and rain.
+
+"I guess I'd better not take you farther than Sharon Peck's. Your folks
+would be pretty mad if you walked through the village with Joe Smith."
+
+The lines round Susannah's mouth strengthened themselves; she felt
+herself superior to those whose attitude of mind he had thus described.
+
+"You have been very kind to come with me. I'd like better to go home
+than stop, if it isn't too far."
+
+"I guess not. If you'd lived here longer you'd know that there was all
+manner of evil said about me, and the worst of it is that some of it's
+true. I've been a pretty low sort of fellow, and I hain't got any
+education to speak of."
+
+She looked up at him in astonishment; the expression of his face was
+peaceful and kindly. "Then why do you go about preaching and saying--"
+
+"I hain't got nothing to do with that at all. If an angel comes from
+heaven and gives me a partic'lar revelation, calling me by name, namely,
+'Joseph Smith, Junior,' tain't for me to say he's made a mistake and
+come to the wrong man, though goodness knows I hev said it to the Lord
+often enough; but now I've come to see that it's my business just to do
+what I'm told. But as to the low ways I hed--why, I've repented and give
+them up, and as to the education, I'm trying to get that, but it won't
+come in a minute."
+
+Her conscience was not at rest; to be silent was like telling a lie, and
+from motives of fear, too! At length she burst out, "I don't believe you
+ever saw an angel, Mr. Smith. I think it's very wicked of you to have
+made it up, and about the gold Bible too."
+
+They were still half a mile from the nearest house. Susannah gasped.
+When she had spoken her defiance she realised that if she had nothing
+worse to fear, she at least deserved to be left alone among the raging
+elements. She staggered somewhat, expecting a rebuff.
+
+"I guess you'd better take my arm," he said. "It ain't no sort of a day
+for a woman to be out."
+
+When she hesitated, flushed and frightened, a smile came for the first
+time across his face. "You're almost beat back by the wind. It won't
+hurt you to grip hold of my sleeve, you know, even if I am a thundering
+big liar. I don't know as I can expect you to believe anything else.
+Emmar didn't for a long time, but then, after a spell, she gave up all
+the comforts of her father's house just to stand by me, and no one's
+ever had a word to say against Emmar."
+
+They stopped at a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village.
+
+Smith had said to Susannah, "There's a gentleman I know stopping at
+Sharon Peck's. I'll pass the umbrellar on to him, and he'll take you
+home. He's been a Quaker, but I guess you'll find him a pretty nice
+young gentleman. Mrs. Peck, she isn't to home."
+
+He left Susannah standing upon the lee side of a wooden house amid
+treeless fields. The eaves sheltered her. She stooped down and with both
+hands wrung the water from her skirts. She was busy over this when the
+promised escort joined her.
+
+The remnants of his forsaken Quakerism hung around him; his coat was
+buff, his hat straight in the brim, his manner prim, and when he spoke
+it was in the speech of his people. His complexion was very light, hair,
+eyebrows and lashes, and the down on his chin--almost flaxen; his face
+was browned by exposure to the weather, but so well formed that Susannah
+found him very good to look upon, the features pointed and delicate, but
+not without strength.
+
+"Thou wilt walk as far as thy home with me?" he asked.
+
+He held Smith's huge umbrella, but he did not hold it with the same
+strength, nor did he show the same skill in keeping it against the wind.
+
+He spoke as they walked. "Thou hast walked a long way. Art weary?"
+
+"Yes--no--I don't know." What did it matter whether she was tired or
+not? Baffled curiosity was exciting her. "You are a stranger here. Are
+you a friend of the Smiths?"
+
+"I have experienced the great benefit of being acquainted with the
+prophet for the last fourteen days."
+
+"But he's not a prophet," said Susannah resentfully.
+
+"Did'st thou never find thyself to be mistaken when thou wast most sure?
+Hast thou not perceived that thy Bible tells thee in many different ways
+that God chooses not as men choose?"
+
+Then with great ardour he preached to her the doctrine of this new
+Christian sect. He was a convert; his preaching was rather the eager
+recital of his own experience, which would out, like some dynamic force
+within him, than pressure brought wilfully to bear upon her.
+
+He said, "I do not ask thee, friend, if thou art Methodist or Baptist or
+Presbyterian, but I do ask thee, canst thou read the promises of thy
+Lord to his church and be content with its present low estate?"
+
+Susannah was habituated to some recognition of her beauty; she missed it
+here, not knowing what she missed. Smith had known that it was important
+for her to be sheltered from the wind; he was sorry that her skirts were
+splashed; his manner, casual as it had been, had at least had in it that
+element of "because you are you," the first essential of any human
+relationship. But Susannah liked the young Quaker much better than
+Smith; he was of finer fibre, and her heart was agape for young
+companionship; so, unconsciously, she resented his indifference, not
+only as to her sect but as to her sex.
+
+"My father was an Englishman," she replied with dignity, not knowing why
+this seemed sufficient answer.
+
+The Quaker proceeded eagerly with his own story. He had searched the
+Scriptures diligently, and found in them no warrant for believing that
+the age of miracles and direct revelations would ever pass from the
+church. Then upon the gloom of his deep despondency a star had arisen.
+He had heard of a young man, poor, obscure, illiterate, who had dared to
+come forth saying again, as St. Peter had once said, "This is that which
+was spoken by the prophet Joel." He had come far to hear the word, and,
+upon hearing it, he had found rest for himself and a hope for the world.
+
+His ardour was beginning to tell upon Susannah's mind. The desire awoke
+within her for some fellowship with his enthusiasm. Stronger was the
+desire to receive personal recognition from the fair-faced youth.
+
+"I am English," she repeated, "and of course I think it very wicked to
+add anything to the Bible; it says so in the Revelation."
+
+"That to me also was a stumbling-block for a short time; but if thou
+wilt consider, friend, that the Book of Mormon is the history of God's
+dealing with the wild races of our own continent from the time of Noah
+until the time of Maroni, which would be about three hundred years after
+the first coming of the Lord, and that this sacred history, so necessary
+for the instruction of us who must now dwell in the same land, could not
+be given until this continent was known to the world, thou wilt cease to
+cavil, and wilt in all humility believe that that which is done of the
+hand of the Lord cannot be wrong."
+
+Faith begging the question is a sight to which the eye of experience
+becomes accustomed, but Susannah, standing upon the threshold of life,
+blinked and failed to focus her vision, feeling vaguely that during the
+last phrase some one had turned a somersault, and that too quickly to be
+watched.
+
+"Thou wilt think upon these things?" The young Quaker stood in the storm
+and looked earnestly upon Susannah, who was upon her uncle's doorstep,
+within shelter of the brown pent house.
+
+Susannah smiled. It was a perfectly instinctive smile, not one
+self-conscious thought went behind or before. She smiled because the
+young man was comely, and because she was young and wanted
+companionship.
+
+"I don't know," she said with perfect frankness; "my aunt will be so
+vexed with me when she hears that I've been to the Smiths that I don't
+believe I'll be allowed to think of anything this good while."
+
+Her smile, her girlishness, seemed at last to pierce beneath the armour
+of his devout abstraction. Fortune at work chooses her a fine-edged
+instrument, and Joseph Smith, with unerring but probably half conscious
+instinct, had sent the right messenger. The cloud of serious intent on
+the youth's face broke now into a sudden admiring glance, half playful
+yet fully earnest. His gray eyes held for a moment gracious parley with
+hers. "Wilt thou," he asked, still smiling, "give it as excuse in the
+day of judgment that they would not let thee think?"
+
+"N-n-no." She was more struck with the inadequacy of the excuse than
+with the fact that she had a better one if she had chosen to give it.
+
+He was again grave, but he was not now unappreciative. "Thou art very
+fair, and beauty to a young woman is, no doubt, a great snare. I will
+wrestle in prayer for thee."
+
+He was going down the brick walk between the masses of drenched flowers.
+"Don't," cried Susannah faintly, "don't do that." But he did not hear
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The wind that in the hurly-burly out of doors had been a cheerful if
+boisterous enemy, seemed suddenly transformed into a wailing spirit when
+Susannah was making her way up the stairs of the darkening wooden house.
+Its master and mistress had not yet returned from burying the dead. The
+girl made her way up to Ephraim's room. The books were left open upon
+the table; no one was there.
+
+It was a new thing that Ephraim should breast a storm.
+
+Susannah trudged downstairs again and dried her bedraggled skirts at the
+fire--an empty house, a dreary wailing wind, and gathering twilight for
+her sole companions.
+
+At length a step was heard. Ephraim came in bearing Susannah's rain
+cloak and goloshes. He was wet, pale, and breathless, but he would not
+betray his weakness and excitement by a word.
+
+"You were looking for me, Ephraim, and some one told you that I had come
+home. Did you hear who brought me? O Ephraim! I have been out walking
+with the false prophet, and then with one of his disciples." Susannah,
+sitting by the fire, looked at him trying to smile through his gloom.
+
+She began again, then stopped; how to impart the full flavour of that
+which had befallen her she did not know. It seemed to her that the
+difficulty lay in Ephraim's silence. She was not aware that she had not
+even a distinct thought for a certain interest in her late companion
+which she most wanted to put into words. "Ephraim, it's all very well
+for you to stand there drying your feet, but--but--they were just like
+other people, as you told Mr. Finney, you know."
+
+"Did you expect them to have horns and tails?"
+
+"I don't think they are very wicked," said Susannah. She looked down as
+she said it, speaking with a certain undefined tenderness of tone
+begotten of a new experience.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That's all."
+
+"How could you know whether they are wicked or not?" he burst out
+angrily. "Do you suppose that they would show _you_ the iniquity of
+their hearts?"
+
+"Why, Ephraim, you've always stood up for them before!"
+
+He gave a sort of snort. "I never stood up for them by making eyes at my
+hands and cooing out my words."
+
+She looked up in entire bewilderment.
+
+"It doesn't matter what I mean," he added. "What did they say? What did
+they do? Tell me. If I'd known these fellows had come back, do you
+suppose I'd have let you go?"
+
+"You are so strange," she said. "They did nothing but just bring me home
+and hold the umbrella, and Joseph Smith said he knew he'd been a bad man
+and didn't know anything. I thought you'd be interested to hear about
+them, Ephraim."
+
+"I should have thought you'd had too much self-respect to allow him to
+talk to you like that. Of course he was trying to work on your
+feelings."
+
+"No, he wasn't, Ephraim. You are quite as unjust as my aunt to-day. He
+wasn't trying to work on my feelings. He was just--well, he was sorry
+that my frock got so wet, and he just happened to say the other thing. I
+am sure--"
+
+Her conviction concerning the naturalness of Smith's conduct and the
+Quaker's sincerity had arisen in the presence of each, and was not now
+to be ascribed to any particular word or action which she could remember
+and repeat.
+
+"Oh, he was sorry your frock was splashed, was he? And the other fellow
+they call Halsey, was he concerned about that too?"
+
+"Who told you that his name was Halsey?" The interest of her tone was
+unmistakable.
+
+"That is his name, and he must be a degraded fellow to take up with
+Smith."
+
+She saw that Ephraim's clothes were very wet; he must have walked far.
+She attributed his exhausted look entirely to fatigue, and his
+ill-temper to the same cause. "Mr. Halsey seemed quite good and in
+earnest, like the people that come to see Mr. Finney when he stays here,
+asking about saving their souls, as if their souls were something quite
+different from the other part of them; and, Ephraim, I have often wanted
+to ask you, but I didn't like to. You don't believe what aunt and uncle
+do, do you? Aunt talks as if you didn't believe. Do you think"--her
+voice trembled--"do you think that I ought to think about my soul--that
+way?"
+
+Ephraim never perceived the nature of her difficulty. He thought she
+questioned the earnestness of life. He leaned back against the jamb of
+the chimney, vainly trying to dispel his anger and bring his mind under
+the command of reason. He looked at Susannah steadily; she was somewhat
+pale with weariness and excitement; she could never be other than
+beautiful. How perfect was the moulding of the strong firm chin, of the
+curving nostrils! The breadth of the cheek bone, the height and breadth
+of the brow, beautiful as they were in their pink and white tinting,
+conveyed to him almost more strongly the sense of mental completeness
+than of outward beauty. He did not dare to look at her questioning
+eyes; his glance travelled over the amber ringlets, damp and tossed
+just now, drooping as if to say "Susannah is lonely and perplexed, and
+she needs your help." Ephraim, proud, and mortified to think how ill he
+compared with her, laughed fiercely within himself. This was a young
+woman of distinction, and just now she knew it so little that she sat
+looking up with respect at his ill-conditioned self. How long would that
+last? How long would she remember any word that he chanced to say to
+her?
+
+"Susannah, I think you are very ignorant. Were you never taught anything
+when you were a little girl?"
+
+"My father and his friends were always polite to me." She spoke with
+grave, rather than offended, dignity.
+
+"She is entirely sweet," he said to himself; "she will never answer me
+in anger." Then he went on aloud, "And I am not polite; I am ill-trained
+and ill-bred. Well, listen, Susannah. Whatever my mother may or may not
+tell you about my peculiar opinions, whatever _I_ choose to believe or
+to do, remember this, that I tell you that _you have_ a soul to be
+eternally lost or saved, and it behoves you to walk carefully and
+concern yourself about your salvation." There was a vibration of intense
+warning in his voice. He was thinking of the life that might be so noble
+if will and reason sided with God, and of the snares that the world lays
+for beauty, and the light way in which beauty might walk into them;
+and, as with all dreamy minds, he was too absorbed in his thought to
+know how little it shone through the veil in which he wrapped it.
+
+Susannah grew a shade paler. She had struggled in a blind child-fashion
+to maintain a religion that would embrace her manifold life, but now it
+appeared that, after all, Ephraim endorsed the general view; his refusal
+to comply openly with it came of wilfulness, not unbelief. The
+stronghold of her peace was gone. "My papa never spoke to me about
+religion in that way, but I don't think he believed that."
+
+Ephraim thought of the weak and reckless young father, of the careless
+life broken suddenly by death.
+
+"He has learned the truth now," he said shortly.
+
+After a pause, in which she did not speak, he betook himself to his own
+rooms, leaving Susannah to the companionship of the lonely house, the
+howling wind, the gathering night, and a new fear of a state eternal and
+infernal, into which she might so easily slip. Ephraim said so, and he
+would never have proclaimed what he would not comply with unless its
+truth were very sure.
+
+As for him, his self-despite was pain that rendered him oblivious of her
+real danger. Where was his boasted justice? Gone before a breath of
+jealousy. The neighbours had told him that she had smiled on Halsey,
+and the abuse of the Smithites, in which his mother indulged in the
+blindness of religious party-spirit, had fallen from his lips as soon as
+his own passion had been touched. Had his former candour, then, been the
+thing his mother called it, _indifference_ to, rather than reverence for
+truth?
+
+This was the travail of soul that Susannah could have as little thought
+of as he had of hers. It held Ephraim in its fangs for many days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The return of Smith and his few followers, and the speedy publication of
+the first edition of the Book of Mormon, stirred anew the flames of
+religious excitement. All other sects were at one in decrying "the
+Mormons," as they now began to be called by their enemies. There was
+perhaps good reason for intelligent disapprobation, but Understanding
+was left far behind the flying feet of Zeal, who, torch in hand, rushed
+from house to house. It was related that Joseph Smith was in the habit
+of wounding inoffensive sheep and leading them bleeding over the
+neighbouring hills under the pretext that treasure would be found
+beneath the spot where they would at last drop exhausted; and there were
+dark hints concerning benighted travellers who, staying all night at the
+Smiths' cabin, had seen awful apparitions and been glad to fly from the
+place, leaving their property behind. There was a story of diabolical
+influence which Smith had exercised in order to gain the young wife whom
+he had stolen from her father's roof, and, worse than all, there were
+descriptions of occult rites carried on in secret places, where the
+most bloody mysteries of the Mosaic priesthood were horribly travestied
+by Smith and his friends, Cowdery and Rigdon, in order to dupe the
+simple into belief in the new revelation.
+
+Ephraim Croom had again withdrawn himself out of hearing of the
+controversy. Judging that Susannah was sufficiently guarded by his
+parents to be safe, he became almost oblivious of conversation which he
+despised. He did not reflect that Susannah knew nothing of his hidden
+conflict, that she could only perceive that, after uttering an ominous
+warning, he had left her to work out its application alone.
+
+It was at first not at all her liking for the Smiths, but only her
+unbiassed common sense, which convinced her that the wild stories told
+concerning them were untrue. When she became enraged at their untruth
+she became more kindly disposed toward the young mother, whose baby had
+made a strong appeal to her girlish heart, and the big kindly lout of a
+man who had sheltered her from the rain. This benevolent disposition
+might have slumbered unfruitful but for the memory of the fine and
+resolute face of the young disciple who had promised to wrestle in
+prayer for her. There was novelty in the thought. The gay witch Novelty
+often apes the form of Love. Susannah did not know Love, so she did not
+recognise even the vestments falsely worn, but they attracted her all
+the same. Her young blood boiled when her aunt, dimly discerning some
+unlooked-for obstinacy in her niece's mind, repeated each new report in
+disfavour of the Mormons. It was the old story about the blood of the
+martyrs, for ridicule and slander spill the pregnant blood of the soul;
+but they who believe themselves to be of the Church can seldom believe
+that any blood but their own will bear fruit. Every stab given to the
+reputation of the Smiths was an appeal to Susannah's sympathy for them.
+Mrs. Croom, with a sense of solemn responsibility, was at great cost
+bringing all her influence to bear upon the young girl whom her son
+loved. She drearily said to herself, after many days, that her influence
+was weak, that it accomplished nothing. The strength of it pushed
+Susannah, who stood faltering at the parting of the ways, and the
+impetus of that push was felt in her rapid and unsteady step for many
+and many a year.
+
+One day, when the men were out cutting the maize, Susannah rode with her
+uncle to the most distant of his fields, and found herself on the hill
+called in Smith's revelation Cumorah.
+
+The sound of the men at work and the horses shaking their harness was
+close in her ears while she strayed over this bit of hilly woodland. It
+is one of the low ridges that intersect the meadows on the banks of the
+Canandaigua, and here Smith professed to have found the golden book. It
+was because of this that Susannah had the curiosity to climb it now.
+
+The beech wood grew thick upon it; the afternoon sun struck its slant
+sunbeams across their boles. Once, where the beeches parted, she came
+upon a fairy glade where two or three maples, fading early, had carpeted
+the ground with a mosaic of gold and red, and were holding up the
+remainder of their foliage, pink and yellow, in the light. The beauty
+wrought in her a dreamy receptive mood. Climbing higher, she came upon a
+very curious dip or hollow in the ground. In its narrowest part a man
+was lying prostrate; his face was buried in his hat, which was lying
+upon the ground between his hands; the whole expression of his body was
+that of attention concentrated upon something within the hat. When she
+came close he moved with a convulsive start, and she saw that it was
+Joseph Smith.
+
+His look changed into one of deference and satisfaction. He rose up,
+lifting his hat carefully; in it lay a curious stone composed of bright
+crystals, in shape not unlike a child's foot.
+
+"It's my peepstone," he said. "It's the stone I look into when I pray
+that I may be shown what to do." Exactly as one child might show to
+another some worthless object he deemed choice, he showed the stone to
+her.
+
+"I don't know what you mean. How could a stone help you?"
+
+"All I know is that when I've been lying for a long time, feeling that
+I'm a poor fellow and haven't got no sense anyway, and the tears come to
+my eyes and gush out, feeling I'm so poor and mean, then when I lie and
+look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of
+things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening
+alongside of me that I didn't know any other way. I can't say how it may
+be; I only know when I see it that I am 'accounted worthy.'"
+
+"You couldn't see anything in the stone."
+
+"No more I couldn't. The stone's nothing, an' I'm nothing, and that's
+why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the
+devil that sends them; and it's not the devil, for I always work myself
+up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come
+after that if it was the devil?"
+
+"What do you see?"
+
+"I'll tell you one thing I have seen. Mebbe you'll know what it means;
+mebbe you won't. I don't know myself rightly yet. I've often to study on
+those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I've
+seen you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside
+the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables
+and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light
+hair."
+
+"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.
+
+"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own
+heart seemed to say--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it.
+Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your
+folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began
+again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.
+"The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and
+shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul;
+and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her
+to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and
+grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and
+honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"
+
+As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the
+sunlight, before her eyes.
+
+Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing
+remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself,
+and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start
+from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was
+going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the
+prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her
+mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in
+childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision
+within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never
+heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then
+been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that
+she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic
+suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety
+and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of
+policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her
+gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this
+man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again
+to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound,
+suggested piety. "She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the
+salvation of her soul," "She is chosen to go through suffering and grief
+for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these
+words had come to her--to her--direct from the mind of the Almighty!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family
+room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.
+
+Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges,
+their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun
+and gray. Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken
+distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines. That far
+outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds,
+but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the
+moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane--steel blue, so
+full of light as to be luminous in itself. From this the nearer contour
+of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of
+russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in
+the sunlight, the fields were yellow. From the top of a low hill which
+met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it
+passed the door. Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent,
+of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the
+hill?
+
+Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with
+his mother, and her uncle was at the mill. On the white road she saw a
+man approaching whose dress showed him to be Smith's Quaker convert,
+Angel Halsey, a name she had conned till it had become familiar. He did
+not pass, but opened the gate of the small garden path and came up
+between the two borders of sweet-smelling box. In the garden China
+asters, zenias, and prince's feather, dahlias, marigolds, and
+love-lies-bleeding were falling over one another in luxuriant waste. The
+young man neither looked to night nor to left. He scanned the house
+eagerly, and his eyes found the window at which Susannah sat. He stepped
+across the flowers and stood, his blonde face upturned, below the open
+sash. Under his light eyebrows his hazel eyes shone with a singularly
+bright and exalted expression.
+
+"Come, friend Susannah," said he, "I have been sent to bring you to
+witness my baptism," and with that he turned and walked slowly down the
+path, as if waiting for her to follow.
+
+Susannah, filled with surprise, watched him as he made slowly for the
+gate, as if assured that she would come. When he got to it he set it
+open, and, holding it, looked back.
+
+She dropped the long folds of muslin, and they fell upon the floor
+knee-deep about her; she stepped out of them and walked across the old
+familiar living-room, with its long strips of worn rag-carpet, its old
+polished chairs, and smoky walls. The face of the eight-day clock stared
+hard at her with impassive yet kindly glance, but its voice only
+steadily recorded that the moments were passing one by one, like to all
+other moments.
+
+Susannah went out of the door. The sun drew forth aromatic scent from
+the borders of box, and her light skirt brushed the blossoms that leaned
+too far over. Outside the wicket gate at which the young man stood was a
+young quince tree laden with pale-green fruit. Susannah let her eyes
+rest upon it as she spoke: she even let her mind wander for a second to
+think how soon the fruit would be gathered.
+
+"Why should I come to see your baptism?" she asked, with her voice on
+the upward cadence.
+
+The young man blushed deeply. "I am come to thee with a message from
+heaven." He glanced upward to the great sky that was the colour of
+turquoise, cloudless, serene.
+
+"It is a strange errand." There was a touch of reproof in her voice, and
+yet also the vibration of awe-struck inquiry. Her mind rushed at once to
+the memory of Joseph Smith's prophecy.
+
+"Come, friend," said the young Quaker very gently.
+
+"I can't possibly go."
+
+His strange reply was, "With God all things are possible."
+
+The text fell upon her mind with force.
+
+"Come," he said gently, and he motioned that he would shut the gate
+behind her.
+
+"Not now; my shoes are not stout; I have no bonnet or shawl."
+
+"Put thy kerchief over thy head and come, friend Susannah, for 'no man,
+putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom
+of heaven.'"
+
+At this he walked on, and she was forced to follow for a few steps to
+ask an explanation. She tied her kerchief over her head and the thick
+white dust covered her slender shoes.
+
+"What do you want me to come for?" she asked.
+
+He looked upon her, colouring again with the effort to express what was
+to him sacred. "It has been given to me to pray for thy soul. To-day, as
+I prayed, it was borne in upon me that thou shouldst be with me in the
+waters of baptism."
+
+Susannah paused on the road, planting the heels of her shoes deeply in
+the dust. "I will not," she cried. "I will never believe in Joseph
+Smith."
+
+"And yet it has been revealed, friend, that thou art one of the elect.
+The time will come very soon when thou wilt believe to the salvation of
+thy soul."
+
+He walked slowly onward, and after a minute Susannah, with quickened
+steps, followed him, in high anger now. "I do not believe in the
+revelations of Joseph Smith," she cried. And because he did not appear
+offended she spoke more rudely, catching at phrases to which she had
+become accustomed. "If the salvation of my soul should depend upon it, I
+would rather lose it than believe."
+
+But when she had said these last words a little gasp came in her breath,
+and her heart quailed in realising the possibility of which she had
+spoken. Her own angry words had diverted her attention from questioning
+the reasonableness of the new faith to the fearful contemplation of what
+might be the result of rejection.
+
+If she quailed at her own speech, the grief of the young Quaker was more
+obvious. He put up his hands as if in fear that she should add to her
+sin by repeating her words. Quiet as was his demeanour, the emotional
+side of his nature had evidently been deeply wrought upon to-day, for
+when he tried to speak to reprove her, grief choked his utterance. It
+was not at that time a strange thing for men under the influence of
+religious convictions to weep easily. On the contrary, it was accounted
+by evangelists a sign of great grace; but Susannah, accustomed only to
+the reserve of English gentlemen and her uncle's stern Puritan
+self-repression, seeing this young Quaker weep for her sake, was greatly
+touched. She became possessed by an excited desire to console him.
+
+The young man turned, weeping as he went, into a little wood that here
+bordered the road. Susannah followed, full of ruth, thinking that he
+merely sought temporary shade.
+
+They had proceeded under the trees a few paces when Emma Smith came up
+from the bank of the river to meet them. Halsey controlled himself and
+spoke to Emma.
+
+"She has refused. For this time she has rejected the truth."
+
+Now to Susannah the matter for amazement was that she had come so far
+from home (although, it was not very far), that she had actually
+arrived, as it seemed, at an appointed place. The sting that this gave
+to her pride was greatly eased by perceiving that she had not by this
+fulfilled his hopes.
+
+Emma Smith had a pale, patient face, which was at this time made
+peculiarly dignified by a look of solemn excitement. Young as she was,
+she turned to Susannah with a protecting motherly air.
+
+"Perhaps next time the opportunity is offered the young lady will
+embrace it and save her soul." She spoke consolingly to Halsey, but
+looked at Susannah with encouraging and respectful eyes. "You will see
+this young man baptized?" she asked.
+
+Under the protection of Emma Smith, Susannah stooped under the willow
+boughs and found herself upon the bank of the river in the presence of
+Joseph Smith, his mother, and some half-dozen men.
+
+Lucy Smith was muttering somewhat concerning a vision of angels, and the
+suppressed excitement of them all was manifest. Susannah was infected by
+it; she was now tremulous and eager to see what was to be seen.
+
+Joseph Smith advanced into the flowing river and stood in a pool where
+the water was well up to his thighs. Standing thus, he began to speak in
+the same formal tone and with the same solemn expression that Susannah
+had marked when he spoke the revelation concerning herself, but more
+loudly. "Behold! we have gathered together according to the revelation
+which has been given to me--"
+
+Here a dark young man called Oliver Cowdery groaned and said "Amen." A
+tremble of excitement went through the group upon the shore.
+
+Loudly the prophet went on--"Knowing well that there is nothing in me,
+who was wicked and graceless to a very high degree, and wanting in
+knowledge, but was yet chosen, upon this sinful earth and in these last
+days, when wickedness and hypocrisy is abounding, to open to all who
+would be saved a new church which is such as that which the angel hath
+revealed to me a church should be, and all them which shall receive my
+word and shall be baptized of me or of Mr. Oliver Cowdery, whom the
+angel Maroni, descending in a cloud of light, has ordained with me to
+the priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of
+angels and of the gospel of repentance and of baptism by immersion for
+the remission of sins. And this shall never again be taken from the
+earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in
+the new Jerusalem."
+
+The loud voice carried with it an impression of strong personal feeling;
+the effect on the bystanders was such as the words alone were wholly
+inadequate to produce. Cowdery, who during the speech had frequently
+groaned and responded, after the Methodist fashion, now shouted and
+clapped his hands towards the heavens, whereupon Lucy Smith fell into a
+convulsive state between laughter and tears, and the men standing beside
+her dropped upon their knees. Emma Smith remained standing; upon her
+face was a rapt triumphant expression. She put her arm round Susannah
+protectingly, and Susannah did not repulse the familiar action.
+
+Joseph Smith now in the same voice called upon his father to be
+baptized. He addressed him formally as "Joseph Smith senior." The old
+man had, as it seemed, a great fear of the water. It took both priests
+of the new sect together to lift and immerse him. There was more
+splashing than was seemly. The baptism of a farmer named Martin Harris,
+which followed, was more decorous.
+
+The sunlight lay bright on the other side of the flowing river, and the
+shadow of the willow tops above them was outlined on the stream. On the
+sunny bank opposite there was a thicket of sumac trees reddening to the
+autumn heat; the wild vine was climbing upon them, making their foliage
+the more dense, and at their roots, by the edge of the stream, the
+golden rod was massed. On the bank on which they stood the colouring was
+more quiet. A few ragged spikes of the purple aster were all that grew
+under the gray green willows, which with every breath turned the silver
+underside of their soft foliage to the wind. The place for the baptism
+had no doubt been chosen because of the depth of the water, and because
+the bank here was comparatively bare.
+
+It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. The steady sound of the
+mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common
+bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of the hour.
+
+It was time that Angel Halsey should be baptized. In his Quaker clothes
+he waded into the water. His manner now was entirely serene, his face
+full of joy.
+
+A thought was struck wedge-like into Susannah's understanding. If
+Halsey, who was so manifestly on a higher plane of education and
+refinement than these others, could so triumphantly embrace the new
+faith, it must surely contain more of virtue and reason than she could
+see. The influence of what he was, being so much greater than the
+influence of what he had said, caused her mind to work with solemn
+earnestness as she followed him in sympathy through the symbol of death
+and resurrection.
+
+When the prophet came back to the shore he appeared for the first time
+to recognise Susannah, and stopped before her, but at first with a
+distraught manner, as if he were trying to recollect some dream that
+eluded him. He still had his hand familiarly on Halsey's arm, for he had
+been conducting him out of the water.
+
+"This is the elect sister?" Smith asked in a hesitating tone, as if
+still striving with memory. "Does she desire baptism?"
+
+"Not yet," answered Halsey, "but I have asked the Lord for her soul, and
+I believe that it has been given."
+
+In Halsey's mind up to this moment there was, no doubt, only the
+solicitude of the missionary spirit; but Smith was a man whose mind was
+cast in a different mould; he had already marked the solicitude and
+given it his own interpretation, and he had already opened his own eyes
+upon her beauty. How far this had conscious connection with the
+condition of actual trance into which he now fell cannot be known. It is
+probable that what the Psalmist calls the "secret parts" are not in
+such minds as Smith's open to the man's own eye.
+
+Smith became wrapped in a sudden ecstasy. Oblivious of all around him,
+he looked up into the heavens, and it was apparent that his eyes were
+not beholding the material objects around. Those about him gazed
+awe-struck, waiting and listening, for he began to speak in a low
+unknown tongue, as if holding converse with some one above.
+
+Susannah shrank back, but was held by Emma's encouraging arm. Halsey
+stayed perforce, for the prophet's grasp had tightened convulsively upon
+him.
+
+In a few moments the vision was over, and Joseph Smith opened his eyes
+and smiled in his own slow kindly way upon the frightened girl and upon
+Angel Halsey, who stood with steadfast mien.
+
+"It has been revealed to me in heaven that the soul of the elect sister
+is indeed given to be united to the soul of this young disciple, that
+thereby she may obtain salvation."
+
+He took Susannah's hand, and she felt no power to resist him; he clasped
+Halsey's almost more timid and reluctant hand over it.
+
+"Wherefore in the sight of God and in the sight of these elect saints
+now present I declare that these two are joined together in the mystical
+union of a most holy marriage which God himself has revealed from
+heaven."
+
+For some moments Susannah gazed fascinated; then she snatched away her
+hand; dignity sought to maintain itself; pride rose up in anger. Her
+growing awe of the prophet numbed to a certain extent both these
+sentiments, but stronger than pride and self-respect and awe was some
+tender shame within her heart which was hurt beyond enduring, so that
+she put her hands before her face and wept, and walked away from them
+weeping, followed by Emma, who began, as they walked, to weep in
+sympathy.
+
+Tears bring relief to the brain, a relief it is hard to distinguish from
+comfort of soul. When Susannah could check her unaccustomed sobs, when
+she found herself walking quietly homeward with only the weeping Emma by
+her side, the spirit of long suffering and patience stole upon her
+unawares.
+
+"Why do you cry?" she asked gently.
+
+"I think it must be so hard for you," said Emma; "it's been very hard
+for me, although I love Joseph with all my heart; but you are so
+childish and so good-looking, it seems someways as if it came harder on
+you; and then that Mr. Halsey hasn't got the warmth of heart that Joseph
+has."
+
+To this astonishing reply Susannah found no answer. Emma was too
+respectable, too honest in her sympathy, to be derided, but Susannah's
+understanding could ill endure the thought that the incident of the hour
+was important. As the outcome of honest delusion, she might forgive it;
+something in the pathos of Halsey's strained face as she remembered his
+look when she turned away weeping, urged her to forgiveness.
+
+"Mr. Halsey is nothing to me," said Susannah at last; she spoke with a
+falter in her voice, for Emma's unfeigned grief touched her.
+
+"Oh! don't say that. Some judgment might come on you that would be worse
+than any suffering that would come from obedience to the word of the
+Lord; and besides, it's the will of God, you see; and of course He'll
+see that it's done, so you'd be punished for rebellion, and you'd have
+to obey all the same."
+
+Susannah was beginning to be infected by this steady assumption that God
+had indeed spoken. Could it be possible?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+How much better humanity might have been had we been at the world's
+making we cannot tell, but as it is, the Creator knows that a woman
+whose veins are pulsing with youth does not know, as she stands between
+her lovers, how far influences not born of reason are affecting her
+understanding. Ephraim remained neglectful, and Susannah remembered with
+more and more distinct compassion Halsey's wistful face and the touch of
+his trembling hand. But the emotion which is deeper than human love was
+also in ferment. The shock which she had received, aided by the pressure
+at home, had effectually worked religious unrest. She was certain now
+that she must do some new thing to obtain peace with God. Long
+monotonous days ripened within her this altered mind.
+
+On one of the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when
+such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were
+loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in
+the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads
+on the old highroad to Palmyra, where a small wooden bridge carries
+over a creek that runs through the meadow to the Canandaigua. Here in
+the leisure time of the afternoon Smith lifted up his voice and preached
+to an ever-increasing crowd, composed first of men, and added to by
+whole families from most of those houses within touch of the village.
+
+The elder Croom, his wife, and Susannah were returning from the weekly
+shopping at Palmyra's store; they came upon the crowd, and stopped
+perforce. Wrath was upon the faces of the elder couple, and nothing less
+than terror upon Susannah's white cheeks.
+
+Susannah would have run far to have been saved the awful interrogation
+of opportunity. Perhaps all that she knew just then, in her childlike
+bewilderment, was that the slanders of the persecution were wrong, and
+her untrained mind jumped to the conclusion that the God of truth must
+therefore be with Smith. Beyond this there was unnamed wonder at the
+unexplained influence that Smith held over her, and more curious
+thoughts, stretching out like the delicate tendrils of an unsupported
+vine, concerning Halsey, his prayers and warnings, and the strength of
+selfless devotion that she had read in his innocent eyes.
+
+Old Croom, deacon and magistrate, was not one to tarry at such a
+gathering longer than need be. When he perceived that some of the planks
+of the bridge had been taken to support the dam he alighted and broke
+down a log fence in order to drive his horses through meadow and stream
+to join the road nearer home. His women must needs walk over the scanty
+beams. Mrs. Croom, stately and well attired, could make her way through
+the crowd; no one there was so rapt but that he let her pass when, with
+eyes flashing in righteous indignation, she tapped him on the shoulder
+and bid him stand aside. Susannah followed in her aunt's wake, the crowd
+of neighbours and strange labourers closing behind them again as they
+worked their way, of necessity slowly, nearer and nearer the preacher
+and the little band of adherents that stood steadfast around him.
+
+Susannah heard the words of the sermon in which open confession of his
+own past sin, bold persuasions to Christianity and righteousness, were
+strangely mingled with the claim of the new prophet. She could not
+remember one moment what he had said the last. Low hisses and muttered
+threats of the angry men about her fell on her ears in the same way,
+making their own impression, but not on reason or memory. A sickening
+dread of a call that would come before she got away was all that she
+fully realised. It came when, in her white gala dress, she stood still
+at last near to, and under the eye of, the preacher.
+
+The sermon was finished. There was a silence at its end so unexpected
+that none in the crowd broke it. It seemed for those moments to reach
+not only into the hearts of the crowd, but into the wide, empty vault of
+sunny blue above them, and over the open fields and golden woods. Then,
+before the wrath of the crowd had gathered strength to break into
+violence, Smith went down into the water and called loudly to all such
+as felt the need of saving their souls to enter upon the heavenly
+pilgrimage by the gate of his baptism. His adherents had cast themselves
+upon their knees in prayer. Susannah saw the strong, dark face of Oliver
+Cowdery looking up to the sky as though he saw the heavens opened, and
+she saw Angel Halsey look at herself, and then, clasping his hands over
+his fair young face, bow himself in supplication.
+
+A man, ragged in dress, and bearing the look of ill deeds in his face,
+made his way out of the crowd into the water. He was a stranger to the
+place, and the spectators looked on in silent surprise. Before Smith had
+dipped him in the stream and blessed him another man came forward, pale
+and thin, with a hectic flush upon his cheeks. He was a well-known
+resident of Manchester; all knew that his days on earth must be few. A
+low howl began to rise, loudest on the outskirts of the crowd, but the
+fact that the man was dying kept many silent, feeling that the doomed
+may surely have their own will.
+
+Before Joseph Smith had spoken his benediction over this trembling,
+gasping creature, when Halsey had left his kneeling to spring forward
+and lead him to the shore, Susannah began to move forward to the water.
+No one who saw her move at first dreamed of what she sought. Her aunt
+had pushed on some distance farther and stood waiting, almost too
+astonished at this last baptism to notice that she was separated from
+her charge. Now, when she saw Susannah pushing forward, she only
+wondered with others what she would be at, and spoke to her
+ineffectually, without the shriek and struggle which she made when the
+girl was beyond her reach.
+
+So Susannah, moving like one in an agonised dream, came to the edge of
+the pool. Among the praying band there was no doubt as to her intention,
+no astonishment; the kneeling men gave instant thanks to God for her
+decision, and Halsey, having helped the feeble man to land, led Susannah
+down into the water, his face illuminated by the victory of faith.
+
+Susannah heard now her aunt's wild shrieks; she heard too the surging of
+the crowd, but the meaning of neither sound came to her. She waded on to
+where Smith stood, with only the dazed sense of a goal to be reached.
+She was perfectly passive in his hands as he dipped her beneath the
+surface and raised her up, but she listened to the blessing he
+pronounced with a sudden leap of the heart, feeling that now at last the
+misery of fear was past and the demand of God satisfied--it must be so
+because it had cost so much.
+
+When she came to herself she saw that the crowd, like a wild beast, had
+sprung downward upon the disciples. Even in her first terrified glance
+she was impressed by the strange and awful difference between the
+distorted and hideous faces of the mob and the exalted calm of the few
+men who had at this time fixed their minds on the unseen rather than the
+seen. She looked up to Smith in the swift appeal of terror, and felt
+once for all the huge courage by which his life was marked. His hand,
+helping her to the shore, never trembled. He calmly directed her steps
+into the quiet meadow before he gave himself to the battle.
+
+When her person was no longer there to be protected, the Mormons gave
+way at once before the gathering strength of the mob. She saw them
+beaten down mercilessly; she saw Smith himself beaten and thrown
+prostrate in the water. The still, warm air that a few minutes before
+had seemed instinct with prayer was now vibrating to the howls and
+taunts and curses of the mob. Susannah had no doubt that these, who were
+now her friends, were being killed; their sufferings justified her to
+herself and produced a fierce exaltation in the step which she had
+taken. In her experience of life she thought that the mob would turn
+upon her next, and stood waiting, every muscle tense, her hands
+clenched, feeling excitedly that she would rather die than live to see
+such intolerable wrong.
+
+This tension of nerve relaxed somewhat when her uncle lifted her
+forcibly into the waggon. With eyes wide open with horror and lips
+trembling, she asked, "Did they kill them, uncle?"
+
+"No, child, they only gave them a good trouncing in their own pond." He
+choked here, out of pity for her, keeping back the torrent of his anger.
+
+Even at this early date it was bruited that Joseph Smith exercised some
+unseemly force of will by which he distorted the reason of his converts.
+This report explained the fact that for the first day after the shock of
+Susannah's baptism her aunt and uncle did not lay the blame of it at her
+door, did not argue or persuade, only watched her as one recovering from
+a strange disease. But in the afternoon of that first day the pent-up
+fever of the aunt's wrath against those whom she thought to blame broke
+forth, and almost in delirium.
+
+The last hot weather of the autumn still held; in the same still hour of
+the afternoon, the hour in which Susannah's baptism had taken place the
+day before, Angel Halsey, pallid with his yesterday's beating and
+ill-usage, but steadfast and even joyful of face, walked up to the front
+door of the magistrate's house.
+
+This door opened upon an unfrequented entrance-hall. Susannah heard the
+knock, heard her aunt move with the dignity befitting an expected
+visitor. Then she heard Ephraim's step on the stair for the first time
+that day, and reflected dully that he must have seen the advent of some
+important person from his window to be thus answering the call of the
+door.
+
+After that she heard words that had the sound of suppressed screams in
+them. She realised that the house mistress was ordering some enemy from
+her door. These commands were not obeyed, and Susannah, hearing that the
+intruder remained, began in fear to suspect the meaning of the
+intrusion. As she rose the report of a fire-arm startled her from all
+the remnants of her selfish dulness, causing her feet to fly.
+
+From within the sitting-room she saw the entrance-hall. Its door was
+open to the wide sweep of land that lay in floods of sunshine. In the
+light, half turning now to go as he had come, stood Angel Halsey. Her
+eager eyes drank in the sight of him, because last night she had thought
+to see him die. She saw his quietness even while, it seemed to her, the
+gun still echoed, and it was Ephraim who held the gun! Beside Ephraim
+her aunt stood, like one in a frenzy, her very garments twitching and
+her gray hair fallen loose. None of them looked to see the girl within
+the shaded room.
+
+"Friends," said Halsey, "I came to say 'Peace be with this house,' and
+to speak with her to whom God has given the spirit of obedience to his
+truth, but it is written that when any house refuses to receive us we
+must depart."
+
+His voice was for some cause growing fainter, but Susannah was certain
+that the cause was not fear.
+
+He took a letter from his breast. "I wrote it," he said, "in case I
+might not enter to speak with her."
+
+He gave the letter to Ephraim, who took it reluctantly, as one impelled
+by some strong sense of right.
+
+Halsey went out. He tottered upon the path, but he opened the gate and
+walked on. Ephraim, still holding the gun and the letter, turned and saw
+Susannah.
+
+Ephraim's face was gaunt and haggard as she had never seen it before;
+his eyes were large, and she thought she read unutterable distress in
+them, but could not understand. She held out her hand for the letter,
+but as he gave it both she and he perceived for the first time that it
+was stained with blood; they felt mutually the thrill that the sight
+gave.
+
+He put his hand out suddenly and pushed her within the room. "Go," he
+entreated, "for God's sake, Susy, go to your own room; take his letter
+with you if you will, but go."
+
+Susannah went amazed, but she began to think that Ephraim's distress had
+not been a gracious sorrow, but remorse for his own crime. He must have
+shot Halsey as he would have shot at some evil beast. When she had time
+to remember that Halsey had tottered when he walked, she fled back,
+straining the blood-stained letter to her breast, and tore open the
+closed door. Her aunt was sitting in a low chair sobbing. Ephraim,
+bareheaded in the sunshine, was standing on the path shading his eyes to
+scan the road. Susannah ran out, not to him (her shame and grief for him
+were too deep for any word), but with intent to run after the wounded
+man and nurse his wound.
+
+"It can be but a slight flesh wound," said Ephraim mechanically.
+
+She looked first where he was gazing, and saw that some distance down
+the road Halsey was stepping into a chaise. Another man took the seat
+beside him and they drove away.
+
+Then she looked at Ephraim. He did not appear as though he felt his
+guilt; he had the mien rather of one who was striving bravely to endure
+hardship. Then indeed she felt that the gulf of thought must yawn wide
+between them; she could even yet have pitied Ephraim's contrition, but
+he was not contrite. In indignation she retired, sitting in the privacy
+of her little bedroom.
+
+It was a strange letter, not alone because the ink was blurred by blood
+that, still warm, soaked it through in parts, but because, coming from
+a young man to a maid, in the first flush of her strength and beauty, it
+offered love and marriage, giving only as his reason, urging only as her
+motive, the service of God.
+
+"If," the letter read, "thou canst see thy way, dear friend, to hold
+fast that thou hast in the house of thy friends, if thou canst see thy
+way, by steadfast confession and by the grace of thy demeanour, to
+strive among them for their conversion, it would be well while thou art
+still so young to remain with them for a time--at least so I think. But
+our prophet thinks, and I also greatly desire to think, that the strain
+upon thy faith would be too great, that thou mightst fail; and
+remembering that it has been revealed to him that our union has been
+sealed in heaven, he thinks that thou wouldst do well to commit thy
+tender life now to my keeping."
+
+The phrase "and I greatly desire to think" was almost as strong as any
+in a long letter to tell which way his delight would lie, and Susannah's
+was not a mind upon which this indication of reserve force was thrown
+away. She trusted, vaguely in thought but implicitly in heart, to that
+which lay behind--something which did not alarm her, which in her inner
+vision wore no warm nor obtrusive colouring, but which she knew to be
+intense and of enduring quality. And she saw herself alone, beaten by
+adverse winds and without other shelter.
+
+Halsey touched upon the fact that Smith and his disciples (he did not
+say himself) had suffered greatly from yesterday's ill-usage, and said
+that, having given their message to the people, they were that day
+leaving for a place called Fayette, in Seneca county, where it had
+previously been determined that the new church should be organised. He
+himself would wait either until Susannah saw her way to come with him,
+or until he knew that she was at peace, having chosen of her own accord
+to remain. He would bring a chaise, in which she could travel if she
+would, near her uncle's house at dawn upon the next morning. He would
+take her, he said, to the house where the Smiths were in Fayette, but it
+was implied through all the letter that the mystic marriage which Smith
+had solemnised was considered by Halsey as valid, and that if she joined
+her material fortunes now to those of the persecuted sect, it would be
+as his wife.
+
+In speaking of the future he did not gloss over the persecution; he did
+not even promise, as Smith had done, a sure and material reward. The
+mind of the young Quaker convert was fixed upon the things that are
+unseen. This was not hidden from the girl. The thought of being with him
+in his faith and resignation gave her peace. Poverty and persecution
+seemed as nothing compared with the torture of being surrounded by
+people whose thought and actions aroused in her young heart whirlwinds
+of passionate opposition. Even Ephraim, instead of rising in his
+strength to condemn the outrage of yesterday, had attempted to-day to
+wound or kill. Her amazement and dismay at this drove her out as it were
+with a scourge.
+
+Halsey had told her to pray, and she had tried to pray. Halsey had told
+her to search the Scriptures for guidance, and she read. Text after text
+came home to her heart, bidding her leave her kindred to share the
+fortunes of the persecuted children of faith.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+At break of day Halsey was waiting upon the road with a fairly good
+horse and a comfortable chaise. Susannah never forgot the light that
+came to his eyes when he saw her approach; it was like dawn in paradise.
+
+Angel Halsey was not without shrewd worldly wisdom. He turned into a
+cross corduroy road that led through the woods, passing only some small
+clearings to the west of Palmyra, and thus by a detour avoiding that
+village, he returned again to the highroad between Canandaigua and
+Geneva. The pursuers, upon failing to hear that the chaise had passed
+through Palmyra, might turn back, or if they had gone on they might have
+outstripped them on the road, and be in front rather than behind. This
+danger peopled the long lonely road with possible enemies both before
+and behind. The strain upon the imagination was very great. The road was
+heavy and rough.
+
+Susannah perceived that Halsey's apprehension of being overtaken was
+almost solely on her account. He was so upborne by his religious
+enthusiasm as to be oblivious to the pain which his wound of yesterday
+gave him, and was perfectly willing to encounter the violence of her
+kindred again if need be, yet, seeing her terror with a quickness of
+sympathy which roused her gratitude, he took every possible precaution
+that could allay her fears. All through the weary, weary day she hardly
+spoke to him, never addressed him by name.
+
+They reached the new town of Geneva at sundown. When they had set forth
+again, it was a great comfort to Susannah that grayness had succeeded to
+sunshine. She was weary of the yellow light, of the dull glare from the
+stubble fields, of the obtrusive colours of the autumn foliage, of the
+blueness of the sky, of everything, indeed, that she had seen and heard
+during the wretched hours of the day. They now travelled through a very
+flat tract; little of the land was cleared; the road was straight. It is
+hard to explain the mental weariness produced by a straight level road.
+The hope and interest inspired by undulations or curves are lost. The
+distance ever gives a farther reach of the weary way to the view, as if
+by a parable it would impress on the traveller the knowledge that the
+future was to be barren of delight.
+
+About two miles from Geneva, before the daylight was quite gone, they
+were both startled by hearing a rushing, crashing sound coming toward
+them in the woods. Were their pursuers upon them after all? Had they
+chosen this, the most lonely part of their road, to fall upon them?
+
+They did not speak their thoughts to one another. Angel struck the
+horse, and it galloped forward perhaps about a hundred yards, and then,
+of its own accord, stopped suddenly.
+
+Upon the side of the road, pushing itself backward among the bushes, the
+better to gain space for its run, was a bull. Its eyes were bloodshot,
+its head lowered for a long moment to measure its distance ere it made
+the attack. The horse seemed palsied with terror. It moved backward with
+tottering steps, trembling all over, heedless of whip or rein.
+
+The backward movement prolonged the hesitation of the bull, which turned
+itself to take another aim. The horse uttered an almost human cry. In
+the moment of hearing that cry Susannah felt that she had already gone
+through some shocking form of death. Halsey brought down his whip,
+striking the horse with all his might; it leaped forward, lifting the
+chaise almost into the air; then it was rushing madly on, dragging the
+wheels behind it with terrible velocity.
+
+They had caught sight of the rush of the bull. They felt the animal's
+heavy side just graze the back of the chaise, and they heard behind them
+a bellow of rage that seemed to fill all the solitary place with
+diabolical echoes.
+
+The body of the chaise was bounding upon its leather bands, jolting
+cruelly against the axle. Susannah cried out that she should be thrown
+from her seat. The swift-falling darkness encompassed their path. Their
+hope lay in the straightness of the road, and their chief fear was that
+by some greater roughness of the way the chaise, which was now swaying
+fearfully, might be overturned.
+
+Gradually the sound of the bull's galloping became less distinct. The
+chaise was still upright. The horse, beginning to falter in his pace,
+took more kindly to the accustomed control of the rein. It was then
+Susannah found that she had been clinging to Halsey for support, and
+that he, by bracing himself with one arm to the side of the chaise and
+holding her with the other, had prevented her from being thrown out.
+
+In gathering her shawl about her she wrapped herself again in a certain
+amount of her former reserve, but the excitement that she had been
+through made her former silence impossible.
+
+Halsey at first received her remarks in silence, then as he essayed to
+answer, his voice grew low and faint, and a sudden suspicion of the
+cause pierced through her mind.
+
+In another moment he sank, leaning against her. Putting her hand beneath
+his coat, she found to her dismay that the strain of holding her had
+opened his wound; his clothes were again wet with blood.
+
+The reins slipped from his hands. Susannah tied them loose to the front
+of the chaise and, putting her arms round the fainting man, drew the
+bandages tightly but with unskilful hands; she lessened the bleeding and
+caused him such acute pain that he lifted his head and spoke.
+
+"What shall I do?" she asked piteously. The blood, diverted from the
+brain, had left it without healthy circulation, but she did not know yet
+that this was affecting his mind.
+
+"Friend," he whispered, "that was in truth no bull; it was the devil
+himself."
+
+"The devil?" she asked faintly.
+
+"He almost succeeded in his cruel attempt to cause us to be discouraged
+from the way."
+
+"It seems to me he only succeeded in causing us to take the way with
+greater vehemence," she replied in some scorn.
+
+In the next minute she heard him whisper eagerly, "Look up; look between
+the branches; quick! Do you not see the face looking at us?"
+
+The branches of the overhanging tree were black with night. She looked
+up in the direction that his feeble hand indicated, and with
+indescribable terror scanned the blank spaces in which no human face
+could possibly be.
+
+"Look!" he whispered again impatiently. "Don't you see it? It is the
+face of a man. A white face! It is the face of thy cousin as I saw it
+yesterday when I was counted worthy to suffer. Look! look! does thou
+not see him?"
+
+His words had the effect of producing in her that maddening fear of the
+dark which ghostly tales induce, and now he fainted again. She was
+afraid to cry for help, afraid even of the rustle of her own garments.
+She did not know how far she was from any house. And it seemed to her
+that this lover, who was almost a stranger, was dying in her arms. The
+misery of this hour governed her action in the next.
+
+Halsey in the bottom of the chaise lay with his head against her knee,
+and soon, holding the bandages of his wound close upon it with one hand,
+she took the reins with the other and urged the horse forward. She had
+had no thought all that day but to go, as Halsey had said, to Emma
+Smith's protection. She hoped now that there was but one road; that when
+she came to the first settlement she would be with the Smiths. This was
+not the case. She travelled an hour, obliged to pass more than one
+cross-road because she dared not turn down it. At length she found
+herself in front of a large house with lighted windows, which was
+evidently an inn.
+
+The door opened, letting out a stream of candlelight. A man stood in the
+doorway. "What place is this?" cried Susannah's voice from the darkness.
+
+"It's John Biery's hotel."
+
+"Will you have the kindness to tell me if you know of any one called
+Mr. Joseph Smith?"
+
+There was some talking within. "No, we never heard of Mr. Joseph Smith."
+
+"Or Mr. Oliver Cowdery?" Again there was talking.
+
+"No, it don't seem that we've any of us heard o' those names before. Be
+you alone?" The deep bass voice of John Biery was becoming more
+insistent in its rising inflection.
+
+For some half-minute Susannah did not answer, and then fear of being
+compelled to retake the road made irresolution impossible.
+
+"Indeed, sir, I am not alone. I have in the chaise with me a sick man,
+and I fear that he may be dying. I thought to find friends, but it seems
+in the darkness I have missed my way. I must beg of you to assist me to
+lift him into the house and give us shelter for the night."
+
+The men had remained perfectly still, drinking in her every syllable
+with that fierce thirst for news which is a first passion of dwellers in
+such desolate places; then, aroused by what they heard, they came
+forward across a rough bit of ground to the road. The burly form of John
+Biery came first, and he called for a lantern, which was instantly
+produced by one of those who followed. They held it up over Angel's
+crouching form and death-like face. Then they held it higher and stared
+at Susannah. Her shawl had fallen from off her shoulders. The
+handkerchief upon her neck was loose, and underneath the pink border of
+her bonnet the ringlets had begun to stray. Her resolute face, so young
+and beautiful, startled them almost as an apparition might have done.
+
+"I'm dead beat," said the hotel-keeper under his breath, "if I ever seed
+anything like that!" But with the ready suspicion of a prudent
+householder he questioned her. Where had the man come by the wound? For
+they saw the blood-stained bandages she clasped.
+
+Yesterday, she explained, he had received a slight bullet-wound by
+accident, and to-day, in their long travel, the loss of blood had
+disabled him.
+
+"Does he belong to you, young lady?"
+
+Susannah busied herself with the bandages for a moment, but terror had
+carried her far. She replied with gentle decision, "He is my husband."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+"It is our fault."
+
+That evening Ephraim Croom stood in his father's sitting-room, near the
+door of the dark stair that led up to his own rooms. His shoulders were
+drooping. His face was gray and haggard. Even his hair and beard, damp,
+unkempt, seemed to express remorse in their outline. He stood doggedly
+facing his father and mother, repeating the thing that he saw to be
+true, but with no further words to interpret his insight.
+
+To his parents his opinions, his attitude, appeared as an outrage upon
+reason. His father looked at him with greater severity than he had ever
+before exercised upon his only child. "I reckon, Ephraim, that you speak
+without using the sense that the Almighty has been mercifully pleased to
+give you. You know, Ephraim, the girl has been as a daughter in this
+house. When has it been said to her that her father, dying in his
+worldly follies, left her destitute, the pittance she gets needing to go
+for his debts? She's had about as good a home as any girl should want,
+and your mother and the ministers have dealt faithfully with her
+concerning her soul."
+
+Ephraim made a movement of the head as if for a moment he could have
+stood upright, feeling in one respect innocent; then again there was
+nothing but the droop of shame visible.
+
+His mother looked at him with eyes that were red with weeping. She had
+been wiping them with fierce furtive rubs of her handkerchief; now she
+was rubbing the handkerchief, a hard ball, in the palm of one hand.
+Perhaps grief at Susannah's loss had been dominant until Ephraim's
+accusation had fanned her anger. "She'd better have gone with him openly
+from the baptising. I never thought then that it was love-making she was
+after." Deep scorn was here expressed. "Religion! 'Twasn't much religion
+she had in her mind. And we treated her real kindly, Ephraim, thinking
+'twas the hold of delusion they had upon her. 'Twould be very small use
+to bring her back even if you or your father could have found out which
+way they'd gone. 'Tisn't likely she'd stay long if you fetched her,
+seeing she's that sort of a girl, with a hankering for the man. There
+isn't a place in this house to lock her into unless it is the cellar."
+
+It was perhaps the thought of the unspeakable degradation it would be to
+the worthy house to hold a girl as prisoner in the cellar, perhaps the
+dismal knowledge that that which had already befallen them and her was
+not much better than this, that caused his mother here to lose her
+self-control entirely and weep bitterly. Ephraim shrank under her words
+as if they had been the strokes of a whip striking him. When she had
+ended he went on heavily up the dark stair.
+
+Both the men were in riding-dress. The elder man, when he had comforted
+his wife as best he might, laid aside his boots and whip determinedly,
+believing that the use for them, as far as concerned the search for his
+niece, was at an end. Upstairs, sitting between the three windows that
+looked east and north and south, Ephraim sat as long as exhaustion made
+rest necessary. He was still equipped for the road, thinking only which
+way it behoved him to travel, and when.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+The next day, toward afternoon, Joseph Smith stood by the bedside of
+Angel Halsey. Susannah, wan and weary with a long night's nursing, was
+sitting beside the pillow. Smith looked upon them both benevolently. It
+was some minutes before he spoke. Susannah was too much in awe of him to
+say much, but his presence was welcome. Since Halsey's rational self had
+been lost in his delirium, loneliness like darkness that could be felt
+had pressed upon her.
+
+"Our brother will be healed," said Smith at length. "It is given to me
+to know that he will be healed." He then spread his hands over the sick
+man and made a short prayer. There was much fervour in his words and his
+voice was loud.
+
+"Give him to drink," said Smith.
+
+"Biery's wife told me as long as he was in fever not to give him water."
+
+Smith looked down upon her kindly, but he spoke in a tone of absolute
+authority. "My sister, I say unto thee give him water. It is given to me
+to know that he must have water and that he will do well."
+
+"It is never done in such cases," said Susannah. "I remember when my
+father--" She had not the faith that Smith required of her.
+
+Without a frown, with perfect gentleness, Smith fetched the water and,
+lifting the sick man's head, allowed him to drink eagerly. Halsey was
+obviously comforted.
+
+Smith had something else to say. If he had not been who he was Susannah
+might have perceived that he was somewhat perplexed, even embarrassed.
+Just as a child does not easily attribute to the adult such hindering
+emotions, so she supposed him to be upon a plane above them.
+
+He lingered by the bedside, apparently watching the sufferer. At length
+he said, "You set out with this young man--yesterday morning?"
+
+"Yes, very early."
+
+There was another pause, then he said, "Did you go before a justice of
+the peace?"
+
+"A justice of the peace?" Then she added inconsequently, "My uncle is a
+justice of the peace." She had never heard of a civil marriage; she did
+not know in the least what he meant.
+
+"Or--or a minister?"
+
+She began to understand now.
+
+"I married you myself, sister, and it was sealed in heaven, but I
+haven't got a license to marry, so that the Gentiles would say--that the
+knot wasn't tied, ye know." The last words were a lapse into common
+parlance. She had grown accustomed to the hybrid nature of his
+mannerism.
+
+He had expected and feared to see her white face flame into excitement,
+but to Susannah it seemed a small thing now what the Gentiles might say.
+If the marriage was indeed sealed in heaven, then all was well. And if
+it was not, worse could not be. She was too weary now to respond to the
+prophet's worldly solicitude for her. Looking at the still unconscious
+Halsey, she felt that there was time enough for further action.
+
+Smith said, "Emma would have come, but the child has spasms."
+
+"We meant to go to you," said Susannah. "We lost our way. I only heard
+to-day where you were."
+
+After a while he said, "I might stop here with our sick brother and send
+you to Emma, but there is a congregation called for to-night. Mr.
+Cowdery would have come, but he was at the baptising."
+
+"Did you leave the baptising just to come and see us?" It occurred to
+her that from his point of view two stray disciples such as herself and
+Halsey could be of little importance compared with his appearance at the
+solemn function.
+
+Smith busied himself giving Halsey more water. That done, he went away
+without further words. Susannah heard his horse gallop from the door.
+She knew that he had travelled some five miles to pay this visit, and
+she supposed that he desired to return if possible before the converts
+had come up from the water. His visit had undoubtedly brought her
+comfort. His response to her message had been prompt and kind. She knew
+now that his thoughts and Emma's were busy concerning her. And then,
+too, the sick man was better. He had gone quietly to sleep.
+
+The woman of the house brought her for food an unusual delicacy. Smith
+had ordered this. Mrs. Biery made some remarks concerning him. She said
+that his coat seemed very old, but that he had given her money and bid
+her attend diligently upon the sick man and his wife. Susannah, who knew
+how little money the Smiths had hitherto possessed, how many things they
+must want for themselves, was touched.
+
+As her spirits revived, her faith and hope in the new sect revived also.
+She looked among the few possessions Halsey had brought with him for the
+precious copy of the Book of Mormon, and sat reading it by Angel's
+bedside while the autumn sun was sinking.
+
+Sometimes she heard a traveller stop at the inn door and pass on again.
+At dusk there was a sounds of horses coming with speed. To her surprise
+Joseph Smith came into the room again. He looked as if he had been
+riding hard, but he spoke as quietly as though he had gone only from
+that room to the next.
+
+"I have brought a gentleman who can marry you according to the law of
+the State." Susannah had gone forward to greet him, but now she looked
+suddenly back toward the unconscious man, whose form was almost
+indistinguishable in the dusk.
+
+Smith brought candles and set them at the foot of the bed. He took
+Halsey by the hand and lifted him to a sitting posture, telling him in
+clear strong tones what was required of him. Halsey understood. He
+became completely conscious under Smith's influence, and for the hour
+almost strong. He would know where he was and how he came there, who the
+minister was that had come. He even required that this stranger should
+show his license to marry.
+
+The minister was a common-looking man, small, shaggy as to the beard,
+business-like. He knew nothing of Joseph Smith's prophetical claims, and
+cared only to know that Susannah was over eighteen years of age.
+Marriage was a thing easily accomplished in that day and region. A few
+minutes more and Susannah was a wife.
+
+In after years, when she used to think of Angel Halsey as having gone
+before her into the unseen, Susannah held the belief that the part of
+him which she would meet there would be that which shone out in the rare
+half-playful smiles he gave, in the glance which, at the moment of
+smiling, he bent on her. He was a very grave man, shrewd, in many ways,
+in others as simple as a child, but above all greatly religious. His
+religion, however deep might be its root, was also always upon the
+surface. Only now and then, when, as at their first meeting, he
+recognised in his serious way that something else was required if he
+would truly hold communion with Susannah, the smile would come as from
+some inward part of his spirit, like a dawning light slowly breaking
+through the surface, soon withdrawn again by the power of custom. When
+he thus smiled, Susannah in those days trusted him absolutely, avowed
+herself entirely to his service, and felt within her heart a large
+measure of affection.
+
+Halsey's was the first case of illness in the newly-formed sect that
+called itself already "_The_ Church of Christ." Joseph Smith and Cowdery
+and a man named Whitmer, with whom the Smiths were now housed, having
+consulted upon it, decided that they must begin at once to carry out the
+commands of Scripture. They came together, therefore, and anointed
+Halsey with oil, laying their hands upon him and praying fervently.
+Halsey, believing himself to be healed, got up from his sick-bed, and
+his recovery progressed rapidly.
+
+Full of excitement, fervour, superstition, and faith, the apostles of
+the new doctrine were fully persuaded that they might expect a literal
+fulfilment of the promise that signs and wonders should follow them that
+believe. The fierce opposition and hatred which were roused by the
+reports of their doings are easily accounted for when we consider that
+their opinions had to encounter that curious distortion of reason which
+has caused religious warfare in all times and places to become the worst
+sort of warfare, and the fact which Smith himself had acknowledged when
+he first saw Susannah, that many evil reports about him had formerly
+been true; then also the new sect produced vehement psychical
+disturbance wherever it touched the surrounding population, and many
+things occurred which might, or might not, be termed miracles, according
+to the interpretation of the observer. It was no longer possible for
+Joseph Smith to ride, as he had done on the day of Susannah's marriage,
+with a minister of one of the older sects. He became very notorious, and
+to every one except those who were interested enough in his doctrine to
+give him a fair hearing, his name became a synonym for all evil.
+
+Halsey remained with Susannah at John Biery's hotel. Halsey was one of
+the few converts who could afford to live in comparative comfort and to
+pay something for the entertainment of destitute disciples. For that
+reason the landlord, John Biery, held himself from the religious quarrel
+that was shaking the region.
+
+Even before Halsey had regained his strength he drove Susannah to swell
+the congregation at the preachings which were daily taking place in
+different places within the township, for such converts as had already
+professed themselves were gathered now in the neighbourhood of Fayette.
+
+Experiences came to Susannah in such quick succession that this was not
+a time of reflection. Such part of her husband's religion as she could
+appropriate she endeavoured very sincerely to embrace. After the manner
+of the thought, of the time she supposed that the sect was either right
+or wrong--if right, all right; if wrong, all wrong. Sometimes the
+ghastly fear that her growing belief was false would arise with hideous
+menace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+All the doings of the infant sect were directed by those utterances of
+Joseph Smith which he held to be revelations. These were confided
+sometimes to the elders, sometimes to the converts at large. Susannah
+frequently heard of them first through Emma Smith, whose pious heart was
+constantly filled with wonder and thankfulness at the thought of the
+great honour vouchsafed to her husband. These revelations, sometimes
+illimitable in their sweep, and sometimes having reference only to the
+most minute practical details, were at this time all in accordance
+either with the dictates of common sense or with the severely literal
+meaning of some Scripture text. They were therefore easily justified
+either to reason or to the eye of faith, but the results of their
+application were often startling, and it was facts, not theories, that
+chiefly caused Susannah to stagger.
+
+At length the growing excitement among the congregation seemed to gather
+toward some climax. It was then that Joseph Smith was said for the first
+time to cast out devils.
+
+Near to John Biery's hotel lived a family of the name of Knight. The
+worthy farmer became a convert, and so also, in appearance, did his son.
+Susannah first saw them at their baptism, which took place one cold
+bleak day in the margin of Seneca Lake. The horses which had brought the
+little company to the edge of the water, having been tied among the
+trees, made a constant rustling and trampling among the fallen leaves.
+The sharp rustle, the thud of the hoofs upon the ground, were sounds
+long connected in her mind with the crisis of her doubt, which then
+began. The maples stood above them, tall and leafless; the waters of the
+lake were leaden in hue and cold. Looking southward on either side of
+its long flood, the snores with their many points and headlands lay
+cold, almost hueless, near by, and in the distance blue as tarnished
+steel.
+
+It was a bitter day for baptist and for the immersed. Joseph Smith went
+out alone into the water, commanding the other elders to remain upon the
+shore. Whatever else the man had or had not, he had splendid courage in
+facing physical ills. There were but few candidates. Susannah, standing
+apart near the shore, chanced to be in the path by which the younger
+Knight descended to the water. He was a young man with strong features
+and a thick, unhealthy skin. He was dressed in the wet garments which
+another candidate had taken off. Cold he might have been, but as he
+passed she heard his teeth chatter so loudly that it almost seemed to
+her that his very bones rattled. She drew back with the impression that
+some horrible thing had passed by. Before she had time to wonder that
+the chill should have had such an effect upon the hardy fellow, his feet
+were in the water, and he turned and caught her eye. The look he gave
+her became suddenly one of terrified entreaty.
+
+Susannah did not move; she was spell-bound. He began to wade toward
+Smith, who stood in the deeper water. She wondered why he allowed
+himself to be immersed. She was certain that he did not desire it, was
+certain also that no motives of interest, no physical force, could have
+operated to compel, when suddenly she asked herself sharply, what force
+had taken her into the waters of this extraordinary baptism?
+
+To her astonishment, when Newell Knight came up from the water he was
+shouting aloud. She thought that his accents were a horrible simulation
+of merriment, but by the others they were accepted as an evidence of
+holy joy.
+
+Two days after, when Susannah and her husband were returning from
+Smith's preaching through the autumn night, they were met as they were
+approaching Biery's hotel by a messenger from Knight's house. The
+messenger had been sent to fetch Halsey. He reported that Newell Knight
+was in "an awful way." Susannah alighted at once and walked to the
+tavern, in order that her husband might drive with all speed to the
+afflicted man.
+
+The lights as they shone from John Biery's windows reminded her vividly
+of the first time, a month since, when she had driven to that house at
+night. She had grown much older since then, stronger in many ways,
+weaker in some, but she was not conscious of this; it was not her way to
+give even so much as a passing glance at herself as one of the actors in
+life's drama. The road on which she trod was heavy with mud. The
+night-winds cried around and through the empty branches of two or three
+neglected trees in the clearing. The square wooden tavern stood at the
+cross-roads. The light from the door made a pathway through the
+darkness, up which Susannah walked.
+
+When she entered, the heat and fumes from fire, candles, tobacco-pipes,
+and steaming mugs met her. She was accustomed to walking through John
+Biery's main room to gain the stair that led to her own; on the whole it
+was not disorderly, or Susannah had but to appear on the threshold to
+reduce it to order. To-night the men did not let her pass with their
+usual civil "Good evening"; they assumed that she had an interest in
+their talk.
+
+"Is Mr. Halsey stopping over to Farmer Knight's?" asked Biery. "My! and
+they'll be real glad to get him, ye know. Twiced they've been here fur
+him. They say that Newell Knight he's possessed with a devil."
+
+Susannah wrapped her shawl tightly across her breast, a nervous movement
+caused not by cold but by the desire to withdraw her real self from the
+surrounding circumstance.
+
+A tall thin man sitting by the table set down his mug with a clatter
+upon it. "Wall now, tain't my idea thet thet's exectly what's taken
+Newell. I saw a case of a man thet was taken under the preacher Finney.
+'Twas over to Ithica. The hull town knew about it. A lot of folks went
+in. I jest looked in when I was passing, and seen the man meself. He was
+lyin' on the floor. His wife was aholdin' his head, but he didn't know
+her. He hedn't no knowledge of any of the folks. He jest lay there
+rollin', and his eyes was rollin'. And when Finney was fetched, Finney
+he said 'twas 'conviction.' I don't know what the man was convicted of,
+but 'twas 'conviction' Finney called it. He didn't say nothing about
+being possessed with devils."
+
+The third speaker was a small fat man. His face was smooth and had the
+peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the
+middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he glanced at
+Susannah critically.
+
+"When they're taken that way under Finney," he said, as if meditating,
+"'conviction' commonly means conviction of sins--their own sins, ye
+know, not other folk's; and when they git up, if they've taken anything
+wrongfully they hev to restore it fourfold afore the conviction will
+leave off a-worrittin' them. I don't know how 'tis among the Mormons."
+The last words were said in an undertone and he had dropped his eyes. It
+would have required a brave man to treat Susannah to open sarcasm.
+
+She stood looking from one to the other. She still wore her girlish
+cottage bonnet, and as its fashion was, it had slipped backwards upon
+the amber ringlets that hung upon her neck; but the girlish look was
+fast passing from the face, the hair parting fell on either side of pale
+cheeks.
+
+"Oh, as to thet, 's fur as I know, one religion's as good as another,"
+said the politic Biery.
+
+Susannah looked at the fat, bright-eyed man who was no longer looking at
+her. "I know" (her voice fell with a strange gentleness through the
+thickened atmosphere of the room) "that there are many malicious stories
+abroad about the dishonesty of our people which are not true."
+
+But as she went up the stair she remembered that she had heard of no
+case where reformation of character had been followed by the returning
+of the fourfold. Most of these saints of the new sect had before their
+conversion been, like her husband, already God-fearing and righteous,
+but in cases where, like their leader, they had been reclaimed from
+evil courses, had they not been satisfied with offering the present and
+future to God, leaving the past? She had heard of no case of restitution
+such as Finney insisted upon.
+
+Susannah entered the low, wide room in which she lived. The chimney from
+the lower room passed up and was always warm. She went and laid her cold
+hands against the rough plaster that covered its bricks, and, being
+tired, she leaned, laying her cheek too against its warm surface. The
+one candle cast but a faint light upon the chairs, the bed, the table.
+The small panes of the window-glass were bare to the darkness without
+and the empty tree-branches. The heavy latch of the closed door was
+fastened crookedly for lack of good workmanship.
+
+Her unsatisfied mind ached for counsel, and her thought, roving over the
+world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know
+him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to
+lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then
+the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked
+back her tears.
+
+She waited an hour, two hours; then, becoming anxious on Halsey's
+account, she borrowed a lantern and went across the fields to Knight's
+farmhouse.
+
+Quite a number of people had gathered. Susannah met some of them coming
+from the house, but others were still there, standing about the fire in
+the kitchen. She heard that the later arrivals had all been disappointed
+of the sight of Newell Knight in his fit. Halsey had assumed authority,
+stating that it was indeed a case of possession, and that none but those
+who were strong in faith and in the power of prayer must come near the
+possessed. The craving of the visitors for excitement was only fed by
+the sound of the young man's voice, heard at short intervals.
+
+He cried aloud, sometimes shrieking that he was being taken into "the
+pit" and that Joseph Smith could alone deliver him, sometimes exclaiming
+in a strange voice that he was no longer Newell Knight but a demon, and
+sometimes only moaning and gibbering words that no one could understand.
+
+Halsey came out to Susannah. "Wouldst thou see him?" he asked tenderly.
+"The sight will distress thee, for it is truly terrible to see with the
+eye of flesh the power of hell, and yet I cannot forbid thee if thou
+wouldst come, for perchance the Lord may mean it for our edification."
+
+Susannah went with him into the inner room, hardly knowing why she went,
+but probably impelled by the instinctive desire to relieve suffering
+which was part of her womanhood. The young man's father and mother,
+together with two or three Mormon converts, were kneeling upon the
+floor, saying prayers for the sufferer in more or less audible, more or
+less agonised tones.
+
+The young man lay upon a pallet-bed, in what would have been called by
+the medical science of the time "convulsions." His eyeballs were rolled
+upwards in a manner most disfiguring to his face. His hands were
+clenched. Halsey no sooner entered the room than he, too, fell upon his
+knees, lifting his face upward as if in silent and fervent prayer.
+
+For a moment Susannah felt impelled to follow his example. "But
+perhaps," she thought to herself, "cold water upon the patient's head,
+or a warm foot-bath--" Such suggestions caused her to resist the impulse
+to join the praying band, and, having resisted it, she suddenly
+experienced, as one feels a fresh breeze entering a close room, a
+strong, clear sense of knowledge that in this matter, at least, her
+husband was deluded, that the friends had better rise from their knees
+and betake themselves to ruder remedies.
+
+Susannah had never learned to command; she had never even learned to
+advise. She had too much reverence to speak aloud, disturbing those who
+were at prayer. She stood hesitating, and then, in very low tones,
+whispered her belief in her husband's ear.
+
+No doubt Halsey was shocked at his wife's unbelief; perhaps by the law
+of telepathy, for whose existence some psychical experts vouch, his
+thought penetrated the mind of the sensitive upon the bed. Whatever the
+cause, Newell Knight sat up and pointed at Susannah, crying aloud that
+he saw the devil about to seize upon her. So excited was the mental
+atmosphere, so vivid were the sufferer's words and the effect of his
+pointing finger, or, perhaps, so substantial was his vision, that more
+than one of the saints afterwards averred that they had seen the Evil
+One about to embrace Susannah. But they did not agree in the description
+of his form.
+
+Halsey wrapped his arms about his wife, and led her like a child from
+the room and from the house. She hardly had time to speak before she saw
+the night again about her. He set her down upon an old log that chanced
+to lie against Knight's barn, kneeling beside her. There, when they were
+alone in the darkness, he invoked that name to which throughout all
+Christendom the devils are believed to be subject.
+
+"Angel," she said gently, "stop praying and listen to me. If you can
+command the devil in the name of our Lord, why don't you do that to poor
+Newell Knight?" She felt strong sympathy for the young man; she was
+moved almost to tears to think they were taking the wrong way with him.
+
+"I have tried and failed. We have sent for Joseph Smith. My faith is not
+strong enough," he added humbly. "This cometh not forth but by prayer
+and by fasting. Look! I am even now unfaithful to my charge because I
+love thee, friend, more, I fear, than the work of the Lord."
+
+They were left alone because Halsey in passing out had left the door of
+the sick room open to the eager neighbours. Now reluctantly he went back
+to his task of guarding the patient, and Susannah, after assuring his
+anxious soul that she felt no ill effects whatever from the dire
+proximity, went home again across the dark frozen fields with her
+lantern. She sat half the night watching and waiting.
+
+It was in the darkest hour before the dawn that she heard Halsey's step
+and crept down through the black house to unlock the door for him. When
+they had come again into the room she saw that he was greatly excited,
+filled with apparent calm of an exalted mood.
+
+"We have beheld a most glorious victory, friend; and truly we have been
+shown signs and wonders, and a very great miracle has been wrought. I
+wish thou couldst have seen with thine own eyes, and yet--"
+
+She thought that he had been going to say that her lack of faith had
+made it more expedient for her to be away, but that he had checked in
+himself even the thought that he was more worthy of privilege than she.
+
+It seemed that Joseph Smith, having been preaching the evening before at
+a place some twenty miles away, had not been able to reach Knight's
+house until nearly two in the morning.
+
+"He rode all night," said Halsey, "and lost not a moment in coming to
+the inner room; it was like him."
+
+"Yes," said Susannah, "it was like him; he is very kind."
+
+Halsey went on. "He spread his hands over Newell and commanded the
+devils to come out of him."
+
+"And did they come?"
+
+"They left him. Joseph said that it was given to him to see that there
+were three of them; but they departed, going out into the darkness."
+
+The wind moaned against the window near which Susannah sat.
+
+"They left Newell very weak, but at peace like an infant sleeping. But
+at first I feared that he was as one dead, for I could not see him
+breathe; but Joseph's faith was strong, for he lifted up his voice and
+began to give praise, and he took Newell by the hand and bade him rise,
+but his hand fell back as if there was no life in it. Then Joseph Smith
+knelt with us upon the floor, and Newell lay smiling, but his eyes were
+closed, and he seemed dead to this world, although the body was warm.
+Afterwards he told us that at the time he was seeing a vision of
+unspeakable light and glory. And then, as we watched him, I fearing
+because my faith was weak, a marvel happened as a sign and seal to our
+faith that Joseph is indeed called to be a great prophet. I wish that
+thou couldst have seen it, Susannah, for the miracle has given me a
+great uplifting in spirit, but I am come to bear witness to it, that
+thou, too, mayest rejoice in the marvel."
+
+There was a few moments' pause. "What was it?" she asked.
+
+"Newell began to rise from the bed. He did not sit up or move himself,
+but he was raised slowly into the air, still reclining as though upon
+his pillow. The invisible hands of angels bore him upwards."
+
+Susannah knit her brows. "Did you see the angels? I don't understand."
+And then more vehemently she asked, "What was it that you did see?"
+
+"Nay, friend, it was not vouchsafed to us to see the blessed spirits,
+but surely they must have lifted him, for he rose, soaring upwards, as
+thou hast seen the thistledown ascend gently, almost as high as the roof
+of the room. As we gazed in great astonishment, and the women fainted
+for fear, he sank again as slowly till he rested upon his bed, and he
+opened his eyes and spoke to us of the wonderful vision of light which
+he had seen, and then he arose in perfect health and walked."
+
+Susannah sat silent for a minute or two. Her husband was also silent,
+wrapped in contemplation. Then Susannah said, "You are very tired,
+Angel. You were overwrought last night, even before you were called to
+the Knights'; you had better go to sleep now."
+
+She darkened the window against the coming of the dawn that her husband
+might sleep in the day instead of the night. She herself went downstairs
+with the earliest stir of footsteps. Because of a whim that seized her,
+she helped to prepare the breakfast that was to be served to the
+household at sunrise, and then she partook of it heartily, looking out
+of a southern window as she ate, watching the red sun ascend behind the
+naked boles of the elms. She was glad that the new day had come. Her
+heart ached not so much with pure grief now as with mocking laughter.
+Her husband was mad, quite mad, or else--and this was the more bitter
+belief--he had seen that she was in danger of disaffection, and had told
+this lie to dupe her, thinking that because she was a woman she would be
+impressed by it. As the sincerity of Angel's look came before her she
+said to herself that if that were the case no doubt Joseph Smith had
+invented the story, and laid it upon Angel's conscience to tell it. That
+or madness was the only explanation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+It was long after the day of her departure before Ephraim again set out
+to find Susannah. An illness to which he was subject first came upon
+him, and then, when days were past and he was able to leave his bed,
+conflicting reports concerning Susannah had been brought to the house,
+and Ephraim's courage failed. Why should he go if by seeing her he could
+neither give her pleasure nor do her good? It was natural that report,
+dwelling on what it could understand rather than on what was
+incomprehensible, should magnify Susannah's love for Halsey. No man in
+New Manchester who in the past month had chanced to catch sight of any
+maid holding secret parlance with any lover but now swore stoutly that
+that maid had been Susannah.
+
+It often happens that schemes least calculated to succeed attain
+success. Susannah and Halsey had not gone far, nor had they gone with
+great secrecy, yet it had happened that no one had observed them as they
+travelled, and as there was at that time of the year little
+communication between the towns to the east and west of Geneva Market,
+it was long before real news concerning them transpired.
+
+At length, when many days had passed, it was told in Manchester where
+Susannah really was; and as if the mischief Rumour was ashamed of being
+caught telling the truth, she hastily added a lie, and one that had a
+fair show of evidence in its favour. She declared that Susannah had not
+been married except by some mystical Mormon ceremony which was void in
+law.
+
+When Ephraim heard this circumstantial story, and with it many new tales
+concerning wicked mysteries practised by the Mormons in Fayette, he
+threw down his books, as long ago the fabled fruit that had turned to
+ashes was thrown down, and prepared for the road.
+
+In the first day's journey he reached Geneva, and setting out again
+before it was light, he came to John Biery's hotel when the sun was
+rising red beyond the gray elm boughs on the morning on which Susannah
+breakfasted alone.
+
+Susannah looked up from her breakfast and saw Ephraim standing beside
+her. It was his way to look calm outwardly, but she could see that he
+was struggling with the nervous untoward beating of his heart, so that
+he could not speak. Susannah did not understand why she could not
+immediately rise and speak. She was conscious of a red flush that rose
+and mantled her face, but she did not understand the emotion from which
+it arose. She only knew that she was glad to see Ephraim, more glad than
+she could have thought to be of anything upon a day when her heart had
+been set mocking.
+
+"You have come at last," she whispered, and only knew when the words
+were said that she had hoped to see him before. Her whisper was broken
+by rising tears, which she checked in very shame.
+
+"I want to speak to you," said Ephraim briefly.
+
+So she rose and went out with him. She put her shawl over her head and
+walked upon the roadside. The day was mild, the first of the Indian
+summer. Ephraim had not put up his horse; he led it by the bridle as he
+walked.
+
+"Sure as I'm alive, it's her uncle as has come after her at last," said
+the wife of John Biery, gazing through the small panes of the kitchen
+window. And, in truth, Ephraim did look many years older than Susannah,
+for his figure was bowed somewhat for lack of strength.
+
+Susannah did not now think of Ephraim as old, neither did she think of
+him as young. To her he was just Ephraim, bearing no more relation of
+comparison to any other mortal than if his had been the only soul in the
+world beside her own. She was not aware of this; she was only thinking
+that if he had not shot Halsey she would have been able to speak freely
+to him now. It was so wicked of Ephraim, above all others, to do such a
+thing. It was, in fact, unforgivable because of the stain upon Ephraim's
+own character more than because of Halsey's blood. But that again she
+did not analyse. She only knew that her feeling kept her silent.
+
+"I am here, Susannah"--in his battle to speak Ephraim economised
+words--"to ask you to come back with me."
+
+Susannah considered. It would be perhaps the best thing that she could
+do after she had spoken her mind to Angel. He would not ask her to
+remain to join in a service she loathed. But when she thought of her
+aunt, and of the voice of an outraged Puritan neighbourhood, her heart
+naturally failed her.
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"Is this man more to you--I do not say than the ties of kindred, for
+that is natural--but more to you than the obligation to live a life of
+reason and duty?"
+
+"No." Susannah spoke the answer aloud because it arose so simply and
+strongly within her. Had she not just come to a crisis in which her
+desire to abide by reason proved far stronger than the feeling which
+bound her to Halsey? And yet, as she thought of his love and his
+tenderness for her, she felt only pity for him, even if he had told a
+lie.
+
+Ephraim had grown calmer, but at the clear denial his heart again beat
+against the breath he was trying to draw. She did not love Halsey then!
+she was not married to him! He could conceive of nothing that could have
+brought that word and tone to Susannah's lips if she were bound.
+
+"Does not duty and reason, does not even mere sanity, call upon you to
+come back with me, Susannah, and spend your life where you can exercise
+the gifts God has given you among those who abide by law and order?"
+
+"Perhaps, Ephraim, it is so; but I am too great a coward. Think of the
+shame that I should have to endure from my aunt, and all the world would
+taunt me with my folly and madness. I think it would kill what little
+good there is in me. For although I should be willing to suffer if I
+have done wrong, yet there would be no use in going where my punishment
+would be greater than I could bear."
+
+He was shocked to think of the days that had elapsed before he had come
+to her. She had suffered much before she could speak in this way, and
+when he saw how mild and sad she was, and, above all, rational, he
+longed to comfort her as he would comfort a child with caresses and the
+promise of future joys. He could give her neither, because he believed
+that she cared for neither caress nor joy from his hand. There was
+something he could offer--all that he had to give that she could take,
+but the offer was so hard to make that he prefaced it.
+
+"A way might be found by which you could return to our house, Susannah,
+and be troubled by no spoken reproach, and you could live down that
+which was unspoken." He paused a minute, and then said, "But I would
+know first that you leave all that pertains to your life here freely.
+You have found it true, what is so much reported, that the Mormons
+follow wicked practices?"
+
+"No, oh no, Ephraim; that is not true--mad, deluded perhaps, but not
+wicked. The stories of wickedness told are malicious even where there is
+a colour of truth, and for the most part there is none. In the matter of
+daily life they abide by the laws of God and man, and nothing else is
+taught."
+
+It was the thought of the sacerdotal deception that she felt had been so
+lately practised upon herself that caused her to put in the reserving
+words "in the matter of daily life"; but when she remembered the malice
+that had instigated report, the unlovely lives of the malicious
+fault-finders, the evil stains that lie even upon the best lives, she
+burst out, "There is not one in our community, Ephraim, who would stoop
+to a cruel act either in word or deed. There is not one of us, even
+among those who have recently repented from very wicked lives, who would
+try to take the life of a defenceless man when he was, at a great cost
+to himself, pursuing what he thought to be the path of duty--as you did,
+Ephraim."
+
+Before this he had kept his eyes upon the ground; standing still now, he
+looked straight into hers. So for a minute they stood, the horse's head
+drooping beside his shoulder, the woman upon the roadside erect,
+passionate; around them the leafless wood through which the long
+straight road was cut. The long level red beams of the sun struck
+through between the gray trunks, burnishing the wet carpet of the fallen
+leaf.
+
+"Did you think it was I who fired?" he asked.
+
+Then he went on with the horse, and she at the side.
+
+She was utterly astonished. "Who, Ephraim--who fired?"
+
+He looked straight in front of him again. "It was my mother. She
+brandished the gun in his face. She couldn't have intended to shoot."
+
+From Susannah's heart a great cloud was lifted. She felt no confused
+need to readjust her thoughts; rather it was that in a moment her
+apprehension of Ephraim's character slipped easily from some abnormal
+strain into normal pleasure.
+
+She pressed her hands to her breast as if fondling some delight.
+"Forgive me," she said, "but I am so glad, oh, so very glad." She drew a
+long breath as if inhaling not the autumn but the new sweetness of
+spring.
+
+So they went on a little way, he somewhat shy because of her emotion,
+she meditating again, and this question pressed.
+
+"And you think," she asked, "that your mother would receive me if I went
+back with you? that I could live at peace with her?"
+
+"Do you think that whatever I might do she would ever try to shoot
+_me_?" he asked with half a smile. "Do you think that she would ever, by
+word or deed, do anything that would hurt _me_?"
+
+"Never." Susannah said the word as a matter of course.
+
+"Or that my father would ever deny me anything that I seriously asked
+for, or that he knew my happiness depended upon?"
+
+"No, surely not; but, Ephraim--"
+
+"Oh," he continued, growing distress in his voice, "Susannah, is there
+any place else in the whole world that you can go for shelter and
+comfort but to our house? You have spoken of this madness and delusion;
+you are satisfied that you must leave--" He had meant to say "this man,"
+but he was too shy, and he faltered--"that you must leave these people?"
+
+She cast her eyes far in among the trunks of the close-growing trees,
+upon one side and then upon another, as if looking for a way of escape.
+Yes, surely her faith in Angel's creed had been hurt beyond recovery,
+and she must free herself, but how? She dallied with Ephraim's offer of
+asylum because she could think of no other.
+
+"Yes," she said mechanically; "yes, but how can I?"
+
+"Oh, my dear cousin, don't you see that it is wrong for you to stay one
+day longer here? If you believed at first that the bond that united you
+to this man was binding, you do not believe it now. You were so young
+when you went, yet the thing cannot be undone on that account. You were
+so beautiful that I had hoped a great and prosperous life lay before
+you. Now, of course, that cannot be, but--but--at least you can live a
+life of peace, live truly and nobly, using your faculties to glorify
+God."
+
+She began to see that he was trying to work up to something else that he
+had to say. She followed him heedfully, knowing that with Ephraim the
+steps in an argument were important. He saw some way out which she did
+not see, and her whole mind paused in eager listening.
+
+He turned and faced her again, lifting his eyes, holding out his hand;
+his voice, usually weak, was strong. She knew that it was a strong man
+who spoke to her.
+
+"Susannah, will you take my name and protection?"
+
+She gazed at him incredulous, and then, beginning to understand what it
+was that he thought, and all that he meant, she leaned against one of
+the cold gray tree trunks, weeping weakly like a child.
+
+"But I am married," the words came with a long sobbing sigh.
+
+"Not legally?" and then he added, "nor in God's sight."
+
+"Yes, yes, oh! you are making a great mistake, Ephraim. Joseph Smith and
+my husband are not like that. A minister came and did it. He had his
+license, and we have the paper he signed."
+
+Ephraim set his teeth hard together and kept silence. He said to himself
+that he might have known that the rascals would be clever enough to make
+the tie secure.
+
+Susannah wept on, not loudly, but with long convulsive sighs that broke
+into the tears she was endeavouring to check.
+
+"And, Ephraim, my husband is good--oh, very good, and very kind to me,
+and up to last night I thought that what he believed might be true. I
+was not sure, but I thought that Joseph Smith might be a prophet. I knew
+they were far, far better than the other people who despise them, and so
+I was glad to be with them; and up till last night" (she repeated the
+words, controlling herself to give them emphasis)--"up till last night I
+thought that they at least believed everything they said to be true."
+
+Then, after an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he
+had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right
+moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was
+broken; she had detected some fraud. His hope, dazed by one blow, now
+began to look through the circumstance more clearly. If he could lead
+her to renounce the religion in which she had apparently ceased to
+believe, and persuade her to return to his father's roof, the Mormon
+husband himself might seek the dissolution of the marriage. Therefore
+Ephraim made no comment on what had passed, but asked gently, "What of
+last night, Susy?"
+
+With a great effort she stood up, brushing away her tears, brushing back
+with both hands the hair that had fallen about her face. In the shock
+which Ephraim's proposal had given, in the brief interval of her tears,
+she had realised as never before that she could not shake off her duty
+to Angel as she had thought to shake off his creed. She spoke
+tremblingly.
+
+"Ephraim, you are so good that you are above us all. You live in some
+higher place. You would have made this great sacrifice to help me." (She
+never doubted that Ephraim's proposal had been born in self-abnegation.)
+"Surely you can tell me what to do, for I am in great distress; but I
+want you first to remember that my husband is good, and that he loves me
+more than all the world, more than everything except God, and if he has
+told me a lie now, it must have been because he thought to save my soul
+by it, but I think--I think that the lie could not have been his. I
+think it must have been Joseph Smith's." She spoke very wistfully.
+
+"What was it?" he asked again, tender of the shock she had received, yet
+still confident that it would be his part to widen this breach.
+
+Looking down with burning cheeks, she told him what Halsey's story about
+Newell Knight's levitation had been. She remembered it quite clearly and
+told it baldly.
+
+Before she finished it she heard him mutter below his breath that it was
+very strange. She was surprised at his tone of perplexity.
+
+"It is very strange to me," she cried, "because I know my husband, and
+up till now he has been so upright and, except that he believed in
+Joseph Smith, so sensible and wise."
+
+"And is this all?" asked Ephraim. "If it were not for this, would you be
+content to go on as before?"
+
+He had begun to walk slowly on with the horse, and she too walked. After
+she had answered him the long silence became oppressive, and she knew
+that Ephraim was suffering to a degree that she could not understand. At
+length when he did speak his words were most unexpected.
+
+He was looking toward the rising sun, which was still dim and flushed
+with the autumn haze. "The Christ whom we all worship," he began
+abruptly, "each in our different way, called himself by the sacred name
+of Truth. Does he desire, do you think, that we must worship him by
+adhering to what we know to be fact, no matter what would seem to be
+gained by slighting facts? It is a great temptation to me to conceal
+from you, Susannah, a part of my book knowledge which I cannot help
+thinking has some bearing upon this case--how much or how little I do
+not know."
+
+He walked on for a little way, and at length, with a great sigh, he
+began to speak again, answering her first appeal for advice.
+
+"I think that your prophet is mad or false, that his Mormonism is utter
+folly, but you knew that I thought that long ago. As to this story your
+husband has told you, I am bound to say that it has happened before in
+the world's history many times that men have seen, or thought they saw,
+a man rise into the air. In my opinion it is not the indication of a
+sound mind when men see such things, and I feel sure that such a
+phenomenon, fact or delusion, whatever it may be, cannot bear any
+relation to the religious life. My advice to you is--ah, Susannah, I can
+say it truly in the sight of God and of my own conscience--my advice to
+you is to be quit of such men and such scenes, but I dare not keep back
+from you the truth that this one story, so far from lessening my
+confidence in your husband's probity or in Smith's, has rather increased
+it; for, being very ignorant men, they could not have heard of these
+stories that I have told you, for I have read them only in rare books;
+that they have reproduced the same incident seems rather to prove that
+they have by accident stumbled upon the same fact--whether a dizziness
+of the eyes, or an affection of the brain, or an actual counteraction of
+gravity, I cannot tell."
+
+She listened, drinking in each slow word. After all, then, to-day was
+just like yesterday, and that which she had to decide was as to the
+reasonableness of the whole new doctrine, as to her willingness to live
+among such scenes and such men.
+
+There had been no sudden madness or deceit to give her reason for sudden
+revolt (perhaps her heart said excuse instead of reason).
+
+Ephraim had grown very pale. After he had watched her for a while, he
+said with a sad smile, "You will not come home with me to-day,
+Susannah?"
+
+"I must think over all this again, Ephraim. I don't know how these
+things can be, but what you admit is very strange."
+
+He knew from her tone that the die was cast; he had no heart to discuss
+the laws that govern marvels.
+
+"If at any time, any hour of the day or night, you should wish to come
+to us, Susannah, the door is open."
+
+"You have been very kind, Ephraim. There is not much use in my trying to
+say anything about how good you are, but--" She stopped, thinking of her
+recovered confidence in his character and her husband's; in this
+thought she experienced an elevation of the spirits, a new hopefulness,
+which, after the dreary blank of the morning's outlook, was like
+sunshine after rain. With this elevation the religious habit of thought
+which she had learned from Halsey intermingled. "O Ephraim," she cried,
+"I believe that God sent you to give me back my faith."
+
+He had nothing more to say after that. He rode away leaving her standing
+upon the tawny carpet of the fallen leaf, standing in the pink sunshine
+under naked trees, and looking after him with tears of gratitude in her
+eyes. Ephraim looked back once, but not again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+When Susannah was returning from her parting with Ephraim Croom, she
+found Joseph Smith was walking slowly upon the road not far from John
+Biery's hotel. He was holding a small book open before his eyes, conning
+a lesson, repeating the words aloud again and again as a schoolboy
+might.
+
+"It has been given to me to see that the Lord hath need of the learning
+of this world, Mrs. Halsey. When I have got the Latin and the Greek, I
+shall try to find some man who can teach me the Egyptian language, that
+I may know how far the ancient Egyptian from which I translated the Book
+differs therefrom."
+
+Susannah had expected to find him excited after the events of the past
+night, but instead he was intent only upon committing a portion of the
+Latin grammar to memory, learning by rote as children did in those days.
+
+"My husband told me," she began. She stood in awe of Smith, hardly
+knowing how to express herself to him; then she went on, almost roughly,
+"I don't see how Newell Knight could have gone up in the air and come
+down again; it does not seem to me sensible."
+
+He clasped his hands behind his back, his large thumb holding his place
+open in the lesson-book, and walked beside her, his head bent somewhat
+forward in reverie.
+
+"I am often much taken aback at what happens to me now, Mrs. Halsey, but
+I do declare to ye that that was the greatest wonder I ever saw before
+my eyes; and it's given to me to see that ye've got the same sort of
+difficulty about him as it's natural for me to have." He began to lapse
+in his own dialect. "Ye want to see the reason why of things. Well, I
+tell ye, I've just got down to this point, that I've give up tryin' to
+see why. If ye come to that, why was I chosen to lead this people? I
+tell ye when the words of the interpretation of the Book began to pour
+through my mind, and I'd no power to stop them, and I just felt as if I
+could cry like a baby when I couldn't get any one to write 'em down--I
+tell ye, I used often to ask why. But it ain't no use. What I've got to
+do is jest to get hold of the guiding that comes to me as clear as I
+can, and jest walk straight along those lines."
+
+She was returning with a heart bruised with the pain of the recent
+colloquy at parting, but full too of purpose, feeling that she owed it
+to Ephraim to reconsider the evidence for Smith's prophetical claim. She
+glanced shrewdly at him as he walked and spoke--young, blue-eyed,
+large, and mild. The man seemed to her harder to comprehend if his word
+was disbelieved than if it was believed. On either supposition her
+understanding faltered.
+
+"It is very hard for me to believe these things, Mr. Smith. It is very
+hard for me to believe, for instance, about the gold plates. How could
+they appear only to you and vanish again? It doesn't seem to me
+reasonable."
+
+"No more is it reasonable, but lots of things in the Bible is as lacking
+in reason, like the sheet that appeared to Peter with beasts. But about
+the plates, I'll tell you just how it was, even though it's not just the
+way other folks has got hold of it. This is the truth, and you can think
+how hard it was to put it much straighter to folks who didn't believe in
+me then as they do now. The night that the angel came down three times
+and stood at the foot of my bed, and told me to go and get the plates
+and where they were to be found, my brain just seemed to go on fire. I
+could see things I never saw any other time. Why, that night I saw
+through the wooden wall and into the next room, just as if there hadn't
+been any boards there, and I saw all the air about me full of motes,
+just as they are in that sunbeam, and it was dark to other people. I
+could hear, too, the cocks crowing and dogs barking for miles round; and
+when morning came I got up and looked out, and it was as if I had my
+eyes to a telescope. I could see the houses for miles and miles. I ran
+up the hill and worked into the hole, and there I saw the plates, just
+as the angel had said. I'll never forget to my dying day just what they
+looked like, and the sort of writing they had. I took them up and
+covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid
+them, and told my folks. That night I was an awful sick man, and the
+sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates
+they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were
+really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were
+changed lest any one should see them and die. And I was to keep them
+hidden. I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs;
+firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words
+of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry
+out if I couldn't get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it
+and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he
+believed, and likewise the Whitmers. And the second proof is that after
+I had buried the bricks by command, and we was far away from the place
+where they lay, Martin Harris and Cowdery and David Whitmer saw the
+plates, the very same as I had told them; they were floating in the air
+at the time of prayer."
+
+"But, Mr. Smith, St. Peter saw the sheet in a dream; there isn't
+anything in the Bible about things or people floating in the air when
+people are awake."
+
+"Well, I don't know, sister, about that. There was Philip when he
+finished baptisin' the African. Ye see, in going to Azotus he must have
+gone up before he went along, or he'd have struck agen the trees; and
+our brother Newell, not being as good as Philip, and not having as much
+faith, ye see, he jest began to go and had to come back again. Mebbe
+when he's engaged in the work for a year or two he'll become an apostle
+too. Did ye never think, Sister Halsey, that Providence might take us
+up, intending to do great things with us, and jest have to set us down
+because we hadn't learned to have faith enough?"
+
+This spiritual significance of the episode of Newell Knight had not
+occurred to Susannah before. It touched her own case.
+
+He went on. "When I think of the future that is opening before us,
+Sister Halsey--why, when I think of how all the nations are to be
+gathered in--there's persecutions in store, and we must be tried by
+fire, but there's riches and honour and blessing for those as shall be
+steadfast; and it's borne in upon me that the Kingdom shall be set up in
+the west of this land." He turned and looked at her, becoming elevated
+in mind and rising again into finer language. "And the men that are like
+unto thy husband, and have the single eye to believe and obey the word
+of the Lord, shall become as princes, dispensing bread to the hungry,
+and the water of life to them that are athirst; and the beautiful women
+who fail not but continue faithful, shall be as princesses driving
+behind white horses and wearing silken robes, and comforting the sick in
+their sickness, and welcoming the women of the nations as they come from
+distant lands, teaching them that which is good--" He drew his breath,
+as if about to say more and yet larger words, but remained silent,
+looking upon the open space of the fields. Then his mien, which had
+become enlarged, contracted somewhat, as if the vision were past.
+
+"Why, Mrs. Halsey, when I do think of it, it seems as if one day at a
+time were'nt enough, and as if I couldn't just set myself to get the
+Latin and the Greek, and preach just to a few folks and help a person
+that's needing a bit of help; but it's borne right in here upon me that
+what we need is the learning of the world, otherwise called the wisdom
+of the serpent. I never was a great hand to learn, and father he didn't
+make me, so it comes harder now; but I'll see to it that the young ones
+of our folks shall take to learning mighty early; and what we want is to
+be faithful in small things, and not stumble in our faith if now and
+then a man do rise into the air."
+
+She felt his blue eyes, mild but shrewd, meeting hers as he came to this
+last item.
+
+"Sister, 'twas given to me to know the first time as I saw you that
+there was a great work for you to do in comforting and establishing the
+elect, and it comes to me now that you'd better be getting some more
+education, for although I suffer not a woman to teach, yet she may
+establish that which is already taught."
+
+Inclined to put some question that would bring out more definite
+instruction as to her own special function in the Church, she did not
+notice two men who were approaching from the other side in a gig until
+they were close upon them.
+
+One of these was a well-to-do farmer, the brother of a woman who had
+recently been converted at one of Smith's meetings. Now he was breathing
+out revenge. He sprang to the ground, striking at Smith with a heavy
+whip. Susannah saw the mildness of the prophet's eye turn into a sharp
+glitter. She realised that he was not afraid, although when the other
+man also sprang upon him there was not the least doubt but that he must
+be worsted in such an assault.
+
+In the minute that Smith was wrestling with the farmer for the
+possession of the whip, Susannah wrung her hands in an agony and ran
+forward toward the hotel, screaming aloud for help; then, afraid of what
+might befall in her absence, she ran back. By this time the two men had
+thrown Smith down. Even then he showed his strength, for they struggled
+hard to get the whip, which he had seized from them.
+
+In her storm of feeling Susannah for the first time came out from the
+habits of girlish timidity. Hardly knowing what she said, what she was
+about to say, she heard the words of her own fierce indignation ring out
+on the air of the mild autumn morning. The scene--the bare road, the
+sere weeds and grasses, the prostrate prophet, the flushed faces of the
+two burly countrymen upturned to hers as they stooped, crushing him
+down--all was photographed on her mind by excitement.
+
+By the intensity of her upbraiding she arrested the attention of Smith's
+enemies for a minute till, as if he revolted against his own weakness,
+one of them gave vent to a loud jest, at which the other laughed.
+
+The words meant nothing to Susannah, nothing more than the Latin words
+of the lesson-book that lay torn and muddy at her feet, but Smith no
+sooner heard them than he hurled himself from the ground with almost
+superhuman strength.
+
+Both men were forced in self-defence to close upon him. Smith shouted
+aloud, although a hand on his throat almost choked him, "Go to the
+hotel, Mrs. Halsey; go in to your husband." Susannah knew now that he
+was fighting for her, not for himself; the allegiance of his glance gave
+her a thrill of loyalty to him which was wholly new.
+
+Two men ran out from the hotel, and behind them John Biery. When they
+neared the place the farmer and his accomplice got into their gig and
+called back fierce threats against Smith as they went. John Biery was a
+constable, yet, although he saw that Smith had been brutally assaulted,
+he made no attempt to pursue and capture the offenders. The other men
+contented themselves with picking up his hat and book and remarking that
+the men that had run away hadn't had no sort of right, and that Smith
+ought to have the law on them. Susannah was the more enraged by this
+refusal to interfere.
+
+Smith wiped his face from dust and blood. It pleased Susannah's love of
+dignity to observe that when he spoke it was not in impotent wrath.
+
+"Go in to your husband, Mrs. Halsey, and tell him to rejoice that we are
+accounted worthy to suffer."
+
+That was not exactly the news that Susannah did bring when she went back
+to her husband's room. Her feelings were so upwrought that it was some
+time before, in pouring out to Halsey her indignation, she could find
+relief. Whatever might or might not be the truth of Smith's heart, it
+remained true that in this persecution the many were ranged against the
+few, and were lashing each other on by false reports to lawless
+brutality. Like the Psalmist, Halsey led her as it were into the house
+of the Lord, and pointed out the end of the wicked and the award of the
+righteous. He added to the then popular notion of external reward
+thoughts which had been working in his own mind under the influence of
+that time-spirit which leads such minds as his in the foremost paths. He
+spoke to her of the strength of character gained and lost by all that
+was done and suffered in the right way or in the wrong.
+
+Susannah was soothed. She knew that the truth was being spoken to her,
+and her heart leaped forth to do reverence, not only to it, but to the
+man who could find it in the midst of such insults. Ephraim was good. If
+he could only know how good Angel was, he would not have asked her to
+return. All thought of deserting the new cause now was gone; the blood
+that had trickled from Smith's bruised head, the danger that menaced
+Halsey, sustained her. She wrote to Ephraim to that effect.
+
+Some days after, when driving past Biery's hotel from a meeting he had
+been holding in the town of Geneva, Joseph Smith entered and laid before
+Susannah books for the cultivation of her mind--a Latin grammar and
+exercise book like his own, a Universal History, and a primer of Natural
+Philosophy. He told her that in two weeks, when she had mastered their
+contents, he would bring her others. He left hastily, the business of
+the Church pressing.
+
+In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no
+longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a
+popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men
+know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that
+writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart.
+There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism,
+and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from
+brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits
+down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson.
+Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his
+grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far
+behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her.
+
+There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for
+the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of
+lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity.
+
+Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave
+the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle
+flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a
+large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked
+counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with
+whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising
+that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her
+understanding, not her heart, developed. "Why believe in Moses and the
+prophets if not in Smith--in the miracles of yesterday if not in those
+of to-day?" was the question with which Halsey prefaced the sermons he
+began to preach. The answer that his logic deduced carried conviction to
+many of his hearers, but in Susannah's mind the question alone made
+way.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK II._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In the next year, 1831, the new church was formally organised, and this
+was the "revelation" given for her direction by the mouth of Joseph
+Smith--"And now, behold, I speak unto the Church; thou shalt not kill;
+thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt love thy wife,
+cleaving unto her and to none else; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou
+shalt not speak evil of thy neighbour, nor do him any harm. Let him that
+goeth to the East tell them that shall be converted to flee to the
+West."
+
+The reports of the first missionaries, who had travelled westward,
+preaching both to the Indians (called by the "Saints," Lamanites) and to
+white men, were received in the beginning of this year, and the point
+designated for the first station of the Church on its way westward was a
+place called Kirtland, on the banks of the Chagrin River, in northern
+Ohio. Thither Halsey was sent, having commands to preach by the way.
+
+At Halsey's wayside meetings the old hymns and the old tunes were sung.
+The new doctrine embraced all that was supposed to be alive in the old;
+it repudiated only what was supposed to be dead. It offered that
+enlargement of human powers which the belief in wonders implies, a new
+form of church government, a new land to live in, a new hope of a
+visible and glorious church, and, above all, a living prophet. If the
+personality of the prophet seemed more attractive to those who believed,
+not having seen him, to Susannah, who knew the baseness of his origin so
+well, the sudden increase of his influence over hundreds of people
+seemed the greatest of marvels; and it was impossible but that even his
+person should gain some added grace from the reflected light of success.
+Halsey was only one of a dozen successful Mormon preachers who were
+converging with their train of followers upon the first station of the
+new church.
+
+There is no spot in northern Ohio more lovely than the five hills or
+bluffs that rise from the banks of the Chagrin River and its tributary
+brooks twelve miles to the south-east of what is now the city of
+Cleveland. On the shores of the river and its streams lie green levels;
+from these the bluffs rise steeply for some one or two hundred feet to
+tablelands of great fertility.
+
+The site for the first Mormon temple was on the highest of these hills
+overlooking the three valleys. Its foundations were quickly laid.
+Around it upon the slope and tableland, up and down the valleys, and
+upon the opposite hills, the wooden houses of the converts began to
+spring up, not unlike in colour to a crop of mushrooms, and very like in
+the suddenness of their growth.
+
+Not long after Susannah and Halsey had reached Kirtland, Joseph Smith,
+with a convert named Rigdon, went on, with missionaries who were
+travelling farther west, in order to find in the wilderness the place
+that was appointed for the building of Zion or the New Jerusalem. At the
+same time all those men among the converts who were deemed fit were sent
+out in couples to preach the new Gospel, some back to the eastern States
+whence they had come, some to Canada, some to the south. To Joseph Smith
+it was given to know who was to go and who to stay. Halsey was directed
+to remain, to receive and establish the new converts who came, to tithe
+their property for the building of the temple, and to found, according
+to Smith's direction, a school of the prophets.
+
+"And to thy wife, Susannah, it shall be given to teach the children such
+worldly learning as she has herself acquired, until it may be possible
+for us to appoint for them a more learned male instructor."
+
+Joseph Smith spoke these words in the room which served him as business
+office and chapel. He was drawing on his gloves, ready to go forth upon
+the journey to Missouri.
+
+Several of the elders and their wives were present, some busy on one
+errand and some on another. Susannah, being with Halsey, received the
+command in person, although it was not directly addressed to her. She
+had observed that since her arrival at Kirtland the prophet never
+addressed himself to her directly when in public. In many ways his
+manners were becoming gradually more formal, and his relapses into his
+native speech less frequent.
+
+Susannah could not criticise keenly, so much she marvelled at the man.
+His activities before starting on this journey were almost incredible.
+Every hour he had made decisions, for the most part successful,
+concerning the adaptability of men whom he had only seen, for labours of
+which he knew as little. He had preached continually. He had baptised
+newcomers in the icy floods of the April stream. He had advised as to
+the choice of lands and their manner of cultivation, as to the size and
+form of houses. He had visited the sick and planned merry-makings for
+the young. In addition to all this, even while preparing for the long
+journey into an unknown region, he was busy learning three languages,
+and was laying plans, not only for missionary campaigns that were to
+spread over the whole earth, but for a new translation of the Old
+Testament. If the better clothes that he had begun to wear sat somewhat
+pompously upon him, if his manners now sometimes indicated an attempt
+not only to be, but to appear, a prophet, such small affectations sank
+out of sight in the light of such extraordinary ability.
+
+After Smith and Sydney Rigdon had started westward, Susannah went over
+to console Emma. The prophet's wife was at that time living in a
+building of which the front part was the general store whence the
+material needs of the growing church were as far as possible provided.
+Susannah passed through between bales of cloths, boxes, and barrels of
+provisions. It was dusk; a young man who served in the store carried a
+candle before her, and the odd-shaped piles of merchandise threw strange
+moving shadows upon the low beams of the roof and walls. The young man
+held the candle to light the way up a straight staircase. "Mis' Smith,"
+he shouted, "here's Mis' Halsey come to see you."
+
+At the top of the staircase Susannah was met by a cooing, creeping baby,
+who beat with its little fist upon a wicket gate fencing off the stair.
+
+"It was the last thing he did before setting out, to nail that gate
+together and fasten it up with his own hands, so as I wouldn't need
+always to be running after the young one, lest he should fall down the
+stair." It was Emma Smith who spoke; she emerged dishevelled and tearful
+from an upper room. "When he has so much to think about and all, and
+Elder Rigdon waiting for him at the office till he'd finished. Mr.
+Smith, he's always so kind, and he knew as that would be the thing as
+would give me the most help of anything."
+
+Emma subsided again into tears--tears that were the more touching to
+Susannah because Emma was not like most women; she seldom wept.
+
+"I don't mean to give way," Emma continued, "but if it was your husband
+as had gone, you'd know how it was, and it's the first time I've ever
+been separate from him so long."
+
+Susannah sat down with the child in her arms. When the question was
+brought home to her she did not believe that temporary separation from
+Halsey would cause her tears.
+
+Emma began again with an effort at self-control. "It's a long way to
+Jackson County, quite across Missouri. It's all Elder Rigdon's doing,
+his going just now."
+
+Susannah found something that she could say here in agreement. "It may
+be wrong, but I--I don't like Elder Rigdon."
+
+"Well, of course the way he believed, and all his congregation, when the
+word was first preached to them makes Joseph think that he must be full
+of grace. Ye know, to see Joseph when he's quite by himself, ye'd be
+surprised to see how desponding he is by nature. He's that desponding he
+was real surprised, real right down taken by surprise, when he heard
+that Mr. Rigdon, so clever a minister as he was, and of the Campbellites
+too, had been baptized and a hundred and twenty-seven of his
+congregation with him. (That was first off, and ye know how many he's
+brought in since.) He could hardly believe it; he says, 'It seems as if
+I hadn't any faith at all.' And that night he couldn't sleep, but just
+walked up and down, and two revelations came to him before morning, and
+one of them addressed to Rigdon, so Joseph knows of course he's got the
+right thing in him. Then his education, too; he's got a sight more
+education than Cowdery. Joseph thinks a deal of education."
+
+"I don't like him." Susannah sat upright; her hands were busy with the
+baby upon her knee.
+
+"Well, I dunno." Emma spoke meditatively. "It said in one of Joseph's
+revelations that we should dwell together in love."
+
+Susannah laughed; it was a bright, trilling laugh, and filled the large,
+low room with its sudden music. It almost seemed like a light in the
+growing darkness.
+
+"I guess I'll light up," said Emma, "it'll be more cheerful."
+
+Susannah was still playing with the baby, and Emma looked at her
+critically. "Joseph thinks a great deal of you, Mrs. Halsey; he's told
+ye to teach school?"
+
+"I have got more time than most of the women, and my husband can afford
+to hire a school-room."
+
+"'Tain't that," said Emma decidedly, "it's the same thing as makes ye
+say that you don't talk to any of the other folks except in a civil way.
+Ye're a bit above all the rest of us ladies in the way ye hold yerself
+and the way ye speak. I guess it comes of yer father's folks having been
+somebody, and then being so clever at books--ye see, Joseph sees all
+that; there ain't anything that he doesn't see."
+
+Susannah perceived that there was something behind this. "You're not
+vexed, are you?"
+
+Emma continued with more hesitation in her tones. "No, I'm not vexed.
+Why should I be? And besides I like you and Mr. Halsey better than any
+of the folks, although I couldn't let it be known."
+
+"There's something that you are thinking about."
+
+Emma sighed deeply; her mien faltered; she subsided again into her seat
+by the wall and into tears. "It's only that I feel that Joseph's getting
+to be such a great man. Why, there's more than a thousand folks now
+looking to him all the time to be told what to do, and thousands more
+drawing in, and Joseph beginning to wear the kid gloves whenever he goes
+on the street."
+
+There was an interval of sighs and suppressed sobs.
+
+"Aren't you glad? I thought you were glad about it."
+
+"I declare papa and mamma were just wild when I ran away and married
+Joseph, because they said that he was a low fellow, and poor, and not
+good enough for me, and now--and now--I begin to feel that I'm not good
+enough for him."
+
+Susannah went over and sat beside her, chiding indignantly. "You know
+very well that nobody could be the same help to him that you are, and
+you know very well that there's nobody in the world that he thinks so
+much of as you." She did not say all she thought. She considered Emma to
+be Smith's superior, but that opinion would have given acute pain.
+
+The young church worked upon Smith's principles of thrift, temperance,
+and co-operation, and Kirtland rapidly assumed the proportions of a
+town. Susannah became the mistress of the children's school. Smith was a
+good economist; although he helped the needy, nothing that his converts
+could pay for was given to them for nothing. Hence it was that
+Susannah's private purse was well filled with tuition fees.
+
+She had already in mind what she would do with this money; she would
+write to the booksellers in Boston who fulfilled Ephraim's orders, and
+obtain from them some of the books whose names she remembered to have
+seen on his shelves. She knew nothing of their contents, she hardly
+knew whether she wanted them more for the sake of their contents or for
+their familiar appearance, but she thought that if she did not
+understand them when reading, she could write to Ephraim and ask for an
+explanation. She could not think of any other excuse for writing to him
+again. It had taken her a good many months to think of this one.
+
+Halsey, who had learned to drop the Quaker forms of speech when speaking
+to others, still, moved by the remembrances of his early home, used them
+in speech to Susannah. He inquired somewhat anxiously concerning the
+proposed purchase.
+
+"Dost think that they will contain what the prophet has called 'sound
+learning,' and that there will be nothing in them to distract thy soul?"
+
+"How can I tell when I do not know what is in them?" She did not speak
+with impatience.
+
+"Art wise, dear heart, in this longing?" he asked wistfully.
+
+Then he carried away her order and despatched it.
+
+In the meantime Smith had returned from Missouri, his mind filled and,
+as it were, enlarged by the new land which he said was appointed by
+revelation as the site of the New Jerusalem. Jackson County, on the
+south bank of the Missouri River, was the place. He had already gathered
+four or five hundred new converts there, and he was now possessed with
+the desire for money to build the new city, and for a million proselytes
+to dwell in it. In spite of this, after sending out new relays of
+missionaries in all directions, he settled down to the most sober
+routine of study. Hebrew was the new language he wished to acquire, and
+he felt the call to revise the Old Testament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Only one unusual incident occurred in Susannah's presently peaceful
+life. One day in the golden October she set out to walk some distance up
+the valley of the Chagrin River. The object of the walk was a visit to
+one of the outlying farmhouses occupied by a family of the Saints; but
+Susannah, as was her wont, found more joy in the walk than in the visit.
+When she had passed beyond the meeting of the waters, the valley lay
+long before her, about a mile in width and quite flat. The stream was
+scarcely seen; the ground was covered with flowery weeds, white asters
+with their myriad tiny stars, the pale seed feathers of the golden rod,
+high grasses, and wild things innumerable which had been turned brown
+and gray by the autumn sun, pink clumps of the rice weed, and small
+groves of the scarlet stalks of the wild buckwheat. This level sea of
+weeds stood so high that when she threaded the narrow path they reached
+above her waist. The bees in the white asters were humming as they hum
+in apple bloom. The blue jays were calling and flying in low horizontal
+flights. The valley stretched to the south-east, then curved; a little
+mountain barred the view, upon whose pine-trees the distant air began to
+tinge with blue. On the curving bluffs on either side the trees stood in
+stately crowds; hardly a leaf had fallen, except from the golden
+walnut-trees; the colour of the foliage was for the most part like the
+plumage of some green southern bird, iridescence of gold and red shot
+through. To her right, where a part of the long hill had been cleared of
+trees, the sun shone upon bare gullies in the soap-stone cliffs, making
+the colour of that particular brown bit of earth very vivid. Everywhere
+a soft autumn haze was lying, and above white clouds were swinging
+across the pale blue sky.
+
+After threading the valley path for a mile Susannah was ascending the
+bluff to get to the level of the upper farms, when, much to her
+surprise, she came, as once before upon the hill Cumorah, upon Joseph
+Smith. He was lying under a group of giant walnut-trees, whose boles
+were sheltered from the road by a natural hedge of red dogwood and
+brambles. He had apparently been occupied at his devotions, but she only
+saw him arising hastily. This time there was no peep-stone; it had long
+since been discarded. The prophet had a Bible in his hand, and it was
+evident that he had been weeping. It was in those lands the habit of
+religious men of all sects to make oratories of the woods. Susannah's
+only desire was to pass and leave him undisturbed, but he spoke.
+
+He began severely, "Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that a woman
+should stray so far from home and without companions."
+
+For a moment Susannah stood abashed. Unaccustomed to censure, she
+supposed that she must have done wrong. "I have walked this way before,"
+she began meekly, "but if--" She stopped here, her own judgment in the
+matter beginning to assert itself.
+
+The prophet had forgotten his reproof. At all times his conversation was
+apt to reveal that sudden changes of mental phase took place within him
+apparently without conscious volition. He now exclaimed with more modest
+mien, "It is, no doubt, by the will of the Lord that you are come, for I
+stood in sore need of comfort, for the revelation of the truth is a
+trial hard to endure, and at times very bitter."
+
+"Is it?" asked Susannah intently. It was impossible but that her long
+curiosity should find some vent, and yet she shrank inwardly from her
+own prying.
+
+The prophet leaned against a huge bole. The ground at his feet was
+covered with yellow walnut leaves and the olive-coloured nuts. The
+sunlight fell upon him in patches of yellow light. He opened the Bible,
+turning over the leaves of the Old Testament as if making a rapid survey
+of its history in his mind.
+
+"Sister Halsey," he began, "when the favour of the Lord rested chiefly
+upon the Jewish nation, at the times of the patriarchs and David, and
+when Solomon, arrayed in all his glory and in the greatness of his
+wisdom, reigned from Dan to Beersheba, mustn't those have been the times
+when the people walked most closely with the Lord?"
+
+"I suppose so, Mr. Smith."
+
+"It is not enough to suppose, Sister Halsey, for it is clearly written
+that when the Jews went contrary to the will of the Lord they were given
+over into the hands of their enemies."
+
+Susannah endeavoured to give a more unqualified assent.
+
+"Sister Halsey, there has come to my soul in reading this book in these
+last days a word, and I know not if it be the word of the Lord or no."
+
+She saw with astonishment that his whole frame was trembling now. She
+began to realise that he was truly in trouble, whether because of the
+greatness of the revelation or because of private distress she could not
+tell. She became more pitiful.
+
+"I hope you are well, Mr. Smith, and that Emma is well. There is nothing
+to really distress you, is there?"
+
+In hearing the increased gentleness of her tone he seemed to find a more
+easy expression for his pent-up feeling. "It's come upon me in a very
+cutting way, truly as the prophets said like a two-edged sword, and at
+the time too when I was inquiring of the Lord concerning--" He stopped
+here, and she felt that his manner grew more confidential, but he did
+not look at her, his eyes sought the ground--"concerning a matter which
+has given me no little heart searching." He stopped again, she listening
+with a good deal of interest.
+
+"It's come to me to observe that among the chosen people--there ain't no
+gainsayin' it, Sister Halsey, though I trust you to be discreet and not
+mention the matter, but in the days when the divine favour rested on
+Israel each man had more than one wife; and the Lord Himself says He
+give them to Solomon, the only objection being to heathen partners."
+
+"Do you mean, Mr. Smith, that I'm not to mention what everybody knows
+already, that in the Old Testament times polygamy was practised?"
+
+The now entire lack of sympathy in her tone affected him as an
+intentional act of rudeness would affect an ordinary man. The tissue of
+his mind, which had relaxed into confidence, grew visibly firmer. He
+assumed the teaching tone.
+
+"No, Mrs. Halsey, the only thing that I asked you not to mention was
+that I had any light of revelation on a point on which most of our minds
+is already made up."
+
+"Mr. Smith, you can't possibly be in the slightest doubt but that it
+would be very wicked for any man now to have more than one wife."
+
+"I've heard a great many of the ministers who in times past, in the time
+of our bondage we heard and believed, say as it would be very wicked for
+any one nowadays to take God at His word and expect Him to do a miracle
+or heal the sick; but I've come to the conclusion, Mrs. Halsey, that it
+isn't a question of what we in our ignorance and prejudice might think
+wicked, but it's a question of what's taught in this book, looked at
+without the eye of prejudice and tradition. What we call civilisation is
+too often devilisation--_devilisation_, Mrs. Halsey."
+
+He tapped the book. He was becoming oratorical. "The idea of one wife
+came in with the Romans. 'Twas no institution of Jehovah, Mrs. Halsey."
+
+Susannah, more accustomed to his oratorical vein than to private
+conference, became now more frank and at ease.
+
+"You said you didn't know that the idea was from the Lord, Mr. Smith,
+and I don't think it is. I don't think you'll entertain it very long,
+and I don't think, if you did, many of the Saints would stay in your
+church."
+
+She bade him good-day, and went on up the slope. When she was walking
+along the brink of the bluff in the open beyond the nut-trees she heard
+him call. He came after her with hastened gait, Bible still in hand. She
+was surprised to find that what he had to say was very simple, but not
+the less dignified for that.
+
+"I sometimes think, Sister Halsey, that you look down on us all as if we
+weren't good enough for you, although you're too kindly to let it be
+seen. According to the ways of the world, of course, it's so. If I'm as
+rough and uneducated as most of our folks, at least I can think in my
+mind what it would be not to be rough, and I can think sometimes how it
+all seems to you."
+
+His words appealed directly to strong private feeling which had no
+outlet. While she stood seeking a reply the natural power that he had of
+working upon the feelings of others, vulgarly called magnetism, so far
+worked in connection with his words that tears came to her eyes.
+
+"I don't often think about my old life," she said with brief pathos.
+
+Smith was looking at the ground, as a huge, shy boy might stand when
+anxious to express sympathy of which he was somewhat ashamed. "I know it
+must be a sort of abiding trial to you." After a moment he added, "I
+wouldn't like to make it worse by having you think that I was goin' to
+preach any strange doctrine. I'd sometimes give a good deal if the Lord
+would raise me up a friend that I could speak to concerning the lights
+that come to me that I know that it wouldn't do to speak of in the
+public congregations, because of their upsetting nature, and likewise
+because I doubt concerning their meaning. And of this matter there was
+no thought in my mind to speak in public, for it is for the future to
+declare whether it be of the darkness or of the light; but to you I
+spoke, almost unwittingly, and perhaps in disobedience to the dictates
+of wisdom."
+
+He looked at her wistfully.
+
+Susannah leaned her arm upon the topmost log of the snake fence and
+looked down the slope. His insight into her own trials caused her to
+sympathise with him in spite of his absurdity. She made an honest effort
+to assist him to self-analysis. She said, "A great many things come into
+our minds at times, Mr. Smith, that seem important, but, as you say, if
+we do not speak about them, afterwards we see that they are silly. Of
+course with you, if you think some of your thoughts are revelations, it
+must make you often fancy that the others may be very important too, but
+it does not follow that they are, and, as you say, time will weed them
+out if you are trying to do right." She wondered if he would resent her
+_ifs_. She stood looking down the bank in the short silence that
+followed, feeling somewhat timorous. The steep ground was covered with
+the feathery sprays of asters, seen through a velvety host of gray
+teasles which grew to greater height. Through the teasles the white and
+purple flowers showed as colours reflected in rippled water--rich, soft,
+vague in outline. At one side, by an old stump, there was a splendid
+feather, yellow and green, of fading golden rod; yellow butterflies,
+that looked as if they had dyed their wings in the light reflected from
+this flower, repeated its gold in glint and gleam over all the gray
+hillside, shot with the white and the blue. At the foot of the bank lay
+the flat valley, and from this vantage ground the river could be seen.
+The soft musical chat of its waters ascended to her ears, and among the
+huge bronze-leafed nut-trees, whose shelter she had just left, the
+woodpeckers were tapping and whistling to one another.
+
+At length Smith sighed deeply, but without affectation. "Yes, I reckon
+that's a good deal how it is. It ain't easy, Mrs. Halsey--I hope in your
+thoughts when judgin' of me you'll always remember that it ain't easy to
+be a prophet."
+
+When he had gone, Susannah found herself laughing, but for Halsey's sake
+the laughter was akin to tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Ohio was being quickly settled. Within a few miles of Kirtland,
+Cleveland and Paynesville were rising on the lake shore, and to the
+south there were numerous villages; but the society of the Saints at
+Kirtland was especially prosperous, and so sudden had been the increase
+of its numbers and its wealth that the wonder of the neighbouring
+settlers gave birth to envy, and envy intensified their religious
+hatred. Twice before Smith had left Fayette he had been arrested and
+brought before a magistrate, accused of committing crimes of which the
+courts were unable to convict him. Now the same spirit gave rise to the
+same accusations against his followers. About this time webs of cloth
+were taken from a woollen mill near Paynesville, and several horses were
+also stolen. The Mormons, whether guilty or not, were accused by common
+consent of the orthodox and irreligious part of the community. Hatred of
+the adherents of the new sect began to rise in all the neighbouring
+country, as a ripple rises on the sea when the wind begins to blow; the
+growing wave broke here and there in little ebullitions of wrath, and
+still gained strength until it bid fair to surge high.
+
+About Christmas time there were a number of cases of illness in
+Kirtland. Joseph Smith healed one woman, who appeared to be dying, by
+merely taking her by the hand, after praying, and commanding her to get
+up. After that he went about with great confidence to others who were
+stricken, and in many cases health seemed to return with remarkable
+celerity. It is hard to understand why the report of this, going abroad
+with such addition as gossip gives, should have greatly added to the
+rage of the members of other religious sects. Perhaps they supposed that
+the prophet arrogated to himself powers that were even more than
+apostolic. They threatened violence to Kirtland on the prophet's
+account, so that before the new year he took Emma and the child and
+established himself with them in an obscure place called Hiram, some
+twenty miles to the south. Sydney Rigdon, who by this time was, under
+the prophet, the chief leader of the Saints, went also to Hiram to be
+beside him. Smith was toiling night and day to produce a new version of
+the Hebrew Scriptures, believing that he was taught by inspiration to
+correct errors in them. Rigdon was scribe and reviser. These two being
+absent from Kirtland, responsibility and work without limit rested again
+with Angel Halsey.
+
+With unsatisfied affections and thoughts wholly perplexed, Susannah
+beheld the days of the new year lengthening. Then she fell into the
+weakness, to which humanity is prone, of hoping eagerly for some
+external circumstance that should lighten the inner darkness. A bit of
+stray news one day came to her with the shock of an apparent fulfilment
+of her vague expectation. Finney was passing through that part of the
+country preaching. Of all human beings she had ever met, this remarkable
+evangelist most impressed her as a man who had intimate dealing, awful,
+yet friendly, with an unseen power. She had no sooner heard that he was
+within reach than her mind leaped to the determination to hear him
+preach and speak with him again. She would lay her difficulties before
+him; she would hear from him more intelligence concerning the home which
+she had left than a thousand letters could convey.
+
+It was March now. The winter's snow was gone. Finney, as it chanced, was
+to come as near to Kirtland as the village of Hiram. Susannah spoke to
+her husband.
+
+"Did you hear that Mr. Finney was going to preach at Hiram?"
+
+She stood turning from the white spread table in the centre of the room.
+The morning light was shining on the satin surface of the planed maple
+wood with which walls and ceiling were lined. Halsey was putting on his
+boots to go out to his day's round of business and pastoral work. He
+knew just as well as if she had explained it to him that a great deal
+lay behind what she said. He fell to wondering at once what she could
+want. Was it to send a message to the old home by the man whose very
+name must recall all its memories?
+
+"I want to go and hear him preach," Susannah went on.
+
+Halsey was disturbed. "Thou canst not really have such a desire," he
+said severely.
+
+"Why not? A great deal that he preaches is just the same as what you
+preach, Angel."
+
+He saw that she was in a turbulent mood, and that grieved him; but as
+for her request, he could not believe it to be serious.
+
+"Thou art speaking idle words," he said with a sigh, and he rose to go
+out.
+
+"You have not answered me. Why shouldn't I hear him when you agree that
+much that he says is true?"
+
+"He is in the camp of those whom Satan has stirred up to do us injury.
+That which thou callest truth in his mouth is but the form of godliness,
+for it is clear that if God be with those who fight against us he cannot
+be with us."
+
+Something in the expression of her face brought him now a more distinct
+feeling of alarm. His nature was singularly direct. He had scarcely
+finished his meditative argument ere he sought to clinch its purport,
+and, stepping near, he laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.
+
+"Dost thou doubt, Susannah, that God is with us?"
+
+The crimson colour mounted from her cheeks and spread over her white
+brow. It was as if Angel had asked what he never had asked, whether she
+loved him or not, whether all her thoughts and feelings were loyal. She
+knew that for him there was no line of separation between life and love,
+and love and religion. She was careful for him always, as a mother is
+for a delicate child, as a sick nurse is for a patient. She could not
+have endured to give him the pain of hearing her denial, even if such
+denial would have expressed her attitude truly.
+
+"Indeed, Angel, I--I know that you--" she faltered.
+
+The trouble in his face was growing. "Has not _God_ made the signs of
+his presence clear to us, and even visible before our eyes? If thou
+shouldst deny the outward signs, is it not by his grace that we live?
+Susannah, dost thou think that it is in me by nature to bear with the
+infirmities and murmurings of our people as I bear with them
+daily--babes as they are, learning, but not yet having learned, to live
+at peace with one another? Or dost thou think that it is in me to
+forgive daily the outrageous acts and words of our enemies, trying as
+they do to injure our innocent brothers, or even our prophet himself?
+Yet, Susannah" (his voice was stirred with emotion), "I would bear
+witness to thee that every day, as I pray, the anger is taken out of my
+heart, and I can deal with these very men in the spirit of love."
+
+Standing erect before him, confused and distressed, she made another
+effort to soothe, even taking his hand from her shoulder and trying to
+caress it between her own, but so tense was the question in his mind
+that his fingers were limp and unresponsive to her touch.
+
+"I know all that you would say, Angel; I know that you are good; I know
+that our people, although they have many faults, are trying to do right,
+and I believe that the people in other sects around us are far more
+wicked, but--Mr. Finney is not like that."
+
+"Dear heart, thou knowest well that there is no goodness but that which
+comes from above, and although this Mr. Finney may have a show of
+goodness, as thou or I might have in his place, yet what avail can his
+preaching be if God be not with him? So what show of goodness he has
+only aideth the devil; for how can it be possible, when two armies are
+encamped one against another, that God can fight upon both sides? Is
+Christ divided?"
+
+A loud knock came to the outer door; Elder Halsey was late in getting to
+his work; men were waiting for him. He let the sound of the raps die
+away before he answered them; his searching look was upon her face,
+hungering for some assurance that his words had met and slain her
+doubts. Then he was forced to leave her.
+
+It was easy for Susannah to obtain a horse to go to the village of
+Hiram. When the day of Finney's preaching came, after her husband had
+gone to his afternoon work, she rode out of Kirtland.
+
+Since she had made up her mind to disobey she had said nothing further
+to Angel. Why inflict upon him the painful attempt to hinder her which
+his conscience would demand?
+
+The last snow-wreath had faded, but there was not as yet a bud or blade
+of perfect green. The valley of the Chagrin lay almost hueless in the
+cold sunshine. A light wind was blowing over its levels of standing
+weeds, and whispering in the bare arms of the huge nut-trees upon its
+bluffs.
+
+When the sun began to sink, Susannah had reached the low rolling ground
+that surrounds Hiram. The landscape here had a less distinctive
+character, and there was no vapour in the sky to make the sunset
+beautiful. She was weary of her horse's rough trot, and still more so of
+its slow plodding, but she felt excitement. She had conquered those
+forces, part of her womanhood, which urged compliance with her husband's
+desire and her own desire to abide by the homely routine whatever it
+might be. The thing that she had done seemed so large that her
+imagination told her that the event must justify it.
+
+She had no thought of concealment. She knew only the two families in the
+village of Hiram. Her plan was to go first to the Rigdons and ask for
+refreshment, thence to the meeting, and after that to ask for the
+night's lodging which she knew that Emma Smith would not refuse.
+
+In the village she saw that people were moving about and talking with an
+air of excitement. When she turned to a quiet corner and asked an
+elderly man for Mrs. Rigdon's house, he stared at her as if at an
+apparition.
+
+"Is it Sydney Rigdon's wife that you're wanting?"
+
+Susannah had raised her veil, and he looked at her face with the
+greatest curiosity. Flushed with exercise, braced by the sharp air, her
+colour was brilliant and her eyes sparkling. Her plain dress and heavy
+veil appeared to the man to be a disguise, so surprising to him was the
+brilliancy of her face and the modulation of her voice.
+
+"Do you not know where the Rigdons live?" she asked.
+
+He was chewing tobacco, and now he spat upon the ground, not rudely, but
+as performing an habitual action in a moment of abstracted thought. "Oh,
+I know well enough, but if ye won't mind my saying a word to ye, young
+lady, I'd advise ye to put up somewhere else. I've got darters of my
+own--in course I don't know who ye may be or what ye may be doing
+here." This last was added in an apparent attempt to attain to some
+suspicion that he felt to be reasonable.
+
+"You think ill of them because you despise their sect," she said gently,
+"but I am the wife of one of the elders."
+
+"Have ye got hold of some news that ye're carrying to them?" He evinced
+a sudden interest that appeared to her extraordinary.
+
+"What news?"
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't know. I jest thought 'twas queer, if you'd got hold of
+anybody's secrets, that you should be asking where they lived, straight
+out and open in the street like this."
+
+His words suggested to her only the idle fancies of prejudice. Some
+other people drew near, and, dropping her veil, she was starting in the
+direction in which he pointed when he spoke again in a more determined
+voice. "You jest tell me one thing, will you?" He even laid his hand
+upon her bridle with authority, "Are ye going to stop at Rigdons' all
+night?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Sartin?"
+
+When he received her reply he let go the bridle, saying in warning
+tones, "Well, see that ye don't do it, that's all."
+
+The incident left a disagreeable impression on Susannah's, mind, but she
+did not attach any distinct meaning to it.
+
+Rigdon and his wife were both within. Rigdon locked the door when
+Susannah had entered. Then with crossed arms, standing where he could
+watch against intruders from the window, he began to tell her news of
+import. His mother, who was an old woman, his wife, and some younger
+members of the family, gathered round.
+
+The light fell sideways upon his thickset form and large hairy face. His
+manner was the result of struggle between effort for heroic pose and an
+almost overmastering alarm. His matter was the evil conduct of the
+surrounding Gentiles toward the Saints. It seemed that in this and
+neighbouring places, evangelistic meetings had been held in which
+Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists had joined, and Rigdon averred
+that the preachers had used threatening and abusive language with regard
+to the Saints. A series of such meetings had begun in Hiram, small as it
+was; and Joseph Smith, like a war-horse scenting the battle, had set
+aside his arduous task of correcting the Old Testament and gone forth to
+preach in the open air. At first he had been greeted only with derision
+or pelted with mud, but in the last few days he had made and baptized
+converts, and now the fury of the other sects was at white heat.
+
+Susannah's mind swiftly sifted out the improbabilities from Rigdon's
+wrathful tale.
+
+"But the people that gather to such meetings as Mr. Finney holds are for
+the most part awaked, for the time at least, to a higher Christian
+life. It cannot be they who have used the vile language that you
+repeat."
+
+She almost felt the disagreeable heat of Rigdon's breath as he threw out
+in answer stories of coarse and brutal insult which had been heaped upon
+himself and Smith. The large animal nature of this man always annoyed
+her. There was much of breath in his words, much of physical sensation
+always clinging to his thoughts. At present, however, she was not
+inclined to judge him too hardly; although visibly unstrung, unwise in
+his sweeping condemnation, coarse in his anger, and somewhat
+grandiloquent in his pose, there was still much of real heroism in his
+mental attitude. Braced by the fiercest party spirit, he stood staunch
+in his loyalty to Smith and the cause, with no thought of yielding an
+inch of ground to the oppressors.
+
+"I do not believe," repeated Susannah sturdily, "that it is the more
+religious of the Gentiles who have said and done these things. I have
+come here to-night to hear and to speak with Mr. Finney, whom I know to
+be a very godly and patient man."
+
+"Why has he come here?" demanded Rigdon. "He who by his preaching can
+gather thousands in populous places, why should he ride across this
+thinly settled parcel of land, preaching to mere handfuls, if it is not
+to denounce us? And he has not the courage to go nearer to the place
+where the Saints are gathered in numbers. He will teach his hearers
+first to ravage the few sheep that are scattered in the wilderness, that
+by that they may gain courage even to attack the fold."
+
+Susannah drew upon herself their anger, and so strong was Rigdon's
+physical nature that even his transient anger seemed to embody itself in
+some sensible influence that went out from him and preyed upon her
+nervous force.
+
+The night had fallen. A bell, the rare possession of the largest
+meeting-house, had already begun to ring for Finney's preaching.
+Susannah went out on foot. The Rigdons, as also the Smiths, were living
+some way from the village. She had now a mile of dark road to traverse.
+
+Closely veiled, Susannah stepped onward eagerly. She felt like a child
+going home. The scene which she had left showed up vividly the elements
+of Mormon life that were most repulsive to her, the broad assumptions of
+ignorance, the fierce beliefs born of isolation, and the growth by
+indulgence of such animal characteristics as were not kept under by a
+literal morality or enforced by privations. She was going to see a man
+who could speak with the voice of the sober past, whose tones would
+bring back to her the intellectual delicacies of Ephraim's conversation,
+the broad, pure vision of life which he beheld, and the dignified
+religion of his people.
+
+The meeting-house was of moderate size. It was already filled when
+Susannah entered, but she was able to press down one of the passage-ways
+between the pews and seat herself near the front, where temporary
+benches were being rapidly set up.
+
+Many of the congregation had doubtless come as far as she. Men and women
+of all ages, and even children, were there. Some, who it seemed had
+followed Finney from his last place of preaching, were talking excitedly
+concerning the work of God which he had wrought there. On every face
+solemnity was written, and stories were being told of one and another
+who in his recent meetings had "fallen under the power of God."
+
+When Finney ascended the pulpit Susannah forgot all else. The chapel was
+not well lighted, but the pulpit lamps shone upon him. He had a smooth,
+strong face; his complexion was healthy and weather-beaten; his dark
+eyes flashed brightly under bushy brows. His manner was calm; his style,
+even in prayer, was that of keen, terse argument; he spoke and behaved
+like a man who, having spent the emotional side of his nature in some
+private gust of passionate prayer, had come forth nerved to cool and
+determined action.
+
+With her whole soul Susannah hung upon his every word, unreasonably
+expecting to find some new and unforeseen solution to the problems of
+her life. He had pointed out a straight path to multitudes; she hoped
+that he could now show it to her.
+
+The power of Finney's preaching lay in its close logical reasoning, by
+which, accepting certain premises, he built up the conclusion that if a
+man would escape eternal punishment he must forsake his sin and accept
+salvation by faith in the doctrine of the substitution. He began always
+by speaking to the indifferent and the unconvinced; he led them step by
+step, until it appeared that there was but one step between them and
+destruction, and that faith must make one quick, long leap to gain the
+safety of the higher plane, whose joys he depicted in glowing terms.
+
+For the most part there was intense silence in the congregation,
+although sometimes an audible whisper of prayer or a groan of suppressed
+emotion was heard. The infection of mental excitement was strong.
+
+Susannah was experiencing disappointment. Accustomed as she was to
+excitement in the meetings of the Saints, her mind easily resisted the
+infectious influence. Finney's teaching had not differed in any respect
+from the doctrine which she heard from her husband daily, a doctrine
+which she knew by experience did not save men from delusion and rancour.
+She still listened eagerly to hear of some provision made in the scheme
+of salvation against injustice and folly. Surely Finney would say
+something more.
+
+As it happened he did say something more. When for more than an hour he
+had explained the great plan of salvation he touched upon the
+responsibility that the hearing of such conclusive reasoning imposed.
+The sower had sown broadcast; it remained for him to speak with awful
+impressiveness of those forces which would be arrayed against the
+convicted soul. Under this head he referred at once and with deep
+emotion to the devil, who, in the guise of false teachers lying in wait,
+caught up the seed.
+
+There could be no doubt that the Mormon leaders were in his mind, as
+they were in the mind of his congregation. It became swiftly evident to
+Susannah that Finney was stirred by what he believed to be righteous
+indignation, and that he was as content to be ignorant concerning the
+doctrines and morals of the people against whom he spoke as were the
+rudest members of the outside rabble who now pressed with excitement to
+the open doors and windows.
+
+The righteous Finney had no thought of unrestrained violence. He spoke
+out of that deep well of hatred for evil that is, and ought to be, in
+every good man's heart, but he had not humbled himself to gain any real
+insight into the mingling of good and evil.
+
+"They are liars, and they know that they are liars," said Finney,
+striking the pulpit cushion. "The hypocrisy of their religion is proved
+by the lawless habits of their daily lives. Having sold themselves to
+the great enemy of souls, they lie in wait for you and for your
+children, seeking to beguile the most tender and innocent, that they
+may rejoice in their destruction."
+
+He used only such phrases as the thought of the time warranted with
+regard to those who had been proved to be workers of iniquity, but to
+Susannah it was clear, in one brief moment, what effect his words would
+have when heard by, or reported to, more brutal men. She knew now that
+Rigdon's words were true. The so-called Christian ministers, even the
+noblest of them, stirred up the low spirit of party persecution.
+
+She rose suddenly, sweeping back her veil from her face. "I will go
+out." She said the words in a clear voice.
+
+A way was made to a back door by the side of the pulpit. Every one
+looked at her. Finney, going on with his preaching, recognised her as
+she began to push forward, and he faltered, as if seeing the face of one
+who had arisen from the dead. The excited audience felt the tremor that
+passed over its leader; it was the first signal for such obvious nervous
+affections as frequently befell people under his preaching; before
+Susannah had reached the door a stalwart man fell as if dead in her
+path.
+
+There was a groan and a whisper of awe all round. This was the "falling"
+which was taken by many as an indubitable sign of the divine power.
+Susannah had seen it often under Smith's preaching. She waited with
+indifference until he was lifted up.
+
+Then the sea of faces around her, the powerful voice of the preacher
+resounding above, passed away like a dream, and were exchanged for a
+small room and a dim light, where two or three people were gathered
+round the form of the insensible man. She escaped unnoticed through a
+private door into the fields, where the March wind eddied in the black
+night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The house in which the Smiths lived was small. Susannah crossed a
+field-path, led by a light in their window. In the living room a truckle
+bed had already been made up. By the fire Joseph and Emma were both
+occupied with two sick children. These children, twins of about a year,
+had been taken out of pity at their mother's death, and Susannah was
+told as she entered that they had been attacked by measles.
+
+Susannah found that the fact that she had been to the meeting had not
+irritated the Smiths, although Mrs. Rigdon had called to make the most
+of the story. Emma, absorbed in manifold cares for the children, was
+only solicitous on Susannah's account lest a night's rest in that house
+should be impossible. Smith, pacing with a child in his arms, seemed to
+be head and shoulders above the level whose surface could be ruffled by
+life's minor affairs. With the eye of his inner mind he was gazing
+either at some lofty scheme of his own imagining, or at heaven or at
+vacancy. All of him that was looking at the smaller beings about him was
+composed and kind.
+
+One of the twins, less ill than the other, had fallen asleep in Emma's
+arms. The other was wailing pitifully upon the prophet's breast.
+
+"Do you and Mrs. Halsey go in and lie down with that young un, Emmar,
+and rest now for a bit while ye can."
+
+"I can't leave ye, Joseph, with the child setting out to cry all night
+like that."
+
+But he had his way. Long after they had lain down in the inner room
+Susannah heard him rocking the wailing babe, or trying to feed it, or
+pacing the floor. Emma, worn out, slept beside her. Upstairs the owners
+of the house, an old couple named Johnson, and Emma's own child, were at
+rest.
+
+Susannah lay rigidly still in the small portion of the bed which fell to
+her share. Her mind was up, wandering through waste places, seeking rest
+in vain. The wail of the child in the next room at last had ceased. The
+prophet had lain down with it on the truckle bed. Long after midnight
+Susannah began to hear a low sound as of creeping footsteps in the
+field. Some people were passing very near, surely they would go past in
+a moment? She heard them brushing against the outer wall, and gleams of
+a light carried fell upon the window.
+
+In a minute more the outer door of the house was broken open. Emma woke
+with a cry; instinct, even in sleep, made her spring toward the door
+that separated her from her husband.
+
+The two women stood in the inner doorway, but the coarse arm of a masked
+man was already stretched across it, an impassable barrier. The prophet
+lay on the child's bed, so heavy with sleep tardily sought that he did
+not awake until four men had laid hold of him. All the light upon the
+scene came from a smoking torch which one of the housebreakers held.
+Some twenty men might have been there inside the room and out. The women
+could barely see that Smith was borne out in the midst of the band. He
+struggled fiercely when aroused, but was overpowered by numbers.
+
+The owners of the house came down from above, huddling together and
+holding Emma, who would have thrown herself in the midst of the mob.
+
+Susannah had not undressed. She threw her cloak over her head and ran
+out, determined to go to the village and demand help in the name of law
+and a common humanity. She was in a mood to be reckless in aiding the
+cause she had espoused.
+
+By the glow of the torch which the felons held she saw the group close
+about the one struggling man as they carried him away. She fled in a
+different direction.
+
+She had gone perhaps sixty rods in the darkness out of sight of Smith
+and his tormentors when she was stopped by three men and her name and
+purpose demanded. When she declared it in breathless voice they laughed
+aloud. In the darkness she was deprived of that weapon, her beauty, by
+which she habitually, although unconsciously, held men in awe.
+
+"Now, see here, sister, you jest sit quietly on the fence here, and see
+which of them's going to get the best of it. Your man's a prophet, you
+know; let him call out his miracles now, and give us a good show of them
+for once. He's jest got a few ordinary men to deal with; if he and his
+miracles can't git the best of them he ain't no prophet. Here's a
+flattish log now on top. Git up and sit on the fence, sister."
+
+While she struggled in custody another group of dark figures came
+suddenly at a swinging trot round the dark outline of one of the nearer
+houses. They brought with them the same kind of lurid torch and a
+smoking kettle or cauldron carried between two. The foremost among them
+were also carrying the body of a man, whether dead or alive she could
+not see. When he was thrown upon the ground he moved and spoke. It was
+Rigdon's voice. She perceived that he was helpless with terror. The
+prophet had certainly struggled more lustily.
+
+"Now you jest keep still, sister," said the loudest of her three
+companions. "Kill him? not if ye don't make a mess of it by interferin'.
+It's only boilin' tar they've got in the pot."
+
+Susannah covered her face with her hands; then, too frightened to
+abstract her mind, she gazed again, as if her watchfulness might hinder
+some outrage. The group was not near enough, the light was too
+uncertain, for her to see clearly. The shadows of the men were cast
+about upon field and wall as if horrible goblins surrounded and
+overshadowed the more material goblins who were at work. They were
+taking Rigdon's clothes from him. Their language did not come to her
+clearly, but it was of the vilest sort, and she heard enough to make her
+heart shiver and sicken. They held over him the constant threat that if
+he resisted they would kill him outright. If Smith, too, were exposed to
+such treatment she did not believe that he would submit, and perhaps he
+was now being done to death not far off.
+
+When they began to beat Rigdon with rods and his screams rang out,
+Susannah could endure no longer. She broke madly away from her keepers,
+running back along the road towards Emma's house. They essayed to
+follow; then with a laugh and a shrug let her go, calling to her to run
+quick and see if the prophet had fetched down angels to protect him.
+
+Susannah ran a long way, then, breathless and exhausted, found that she
+had missed a turning and gone much too far. Afraid lest she should lose
+herself by mistaking even the main direction in which she wanted to go,
+and that while out of reach of any respectable house she might again be
+assailed by members of the mob, she came back, walking with more
+caution. She had no hope now of being the means of bringing help. She
+had come farther from the village instead of nearing it, and what few
+neighbours there were, having failed to interfere, were evidently
+inimical.
+
+When she found the right turning she again heard the shouts of some
+assaulting party, and, creeping within the shadow of trees, she waited.
+
+At length they passed her, straggling along the road, shouting and
+singing, carrying with them some garments which, in rough horse-play,
+they were tearing into fragments. When the last had turned his back to
+where she stood she crept out, running again like a hunted thing,
+fearing what she might find as the result of their work. To increase her
+distress the thought came that it was more than possible that like work
+had been going on at Kirtland that night. Tears of unutterable
+indignation and pitiful love came to her eyes at the thought that Angel,
+too, might be suffering this shameful treatment. Across some acres of
+open ground she saw the Smiths' house, doors and windows lit by candles.
+Thither she was hastening when, in the black space of the nearer field,
+she almost fell upon a whitish form, grotesque and horrible, which was
+rising from the ground.
+
+"Who is it?" asked Joseph Smith.
+
+He stood up now, but not steadily; his voice was weak, as if he had
+been stunned, and his utterance indistinct because his mouth had
+apparently received some injury. She thought of nothing now but that he
+was Angel's master, and that Angel might be in like plight.
+
+"What have they done? What is the matter?" she whispered tenderly, tears
+in her voice.
+
+"Is it you?" he asked curiously. He said nothing for a minute and then,
+"They've covered me with the tar and emptied a feather-bed on me. If
+ye'd have the goodness to tell Brother Johnson to come out to me, Mrs.
+Halsey--"
+
+"They have hurt you other ways," she said tremulously, "you are
+bruised."
+
+"A man don't like to own up to having been flogged, ye see; but Peter
+and Paul and all of _them_ had to stand it in their time, so I don't
+know why a fellow like me need be shamefaced over it. But if you'd be
+good enough, Mrs. Halsey, to go and tell Emmar that I ain't much hurt,
+and send Brother Johnson out with some clothes or a blanket--"
+
+He stopped without adding that he would feel obliged. As she went she
+heard him say with another sort of unsteadiness in his tone, "It's real
+kind of you to care for me that much."
+
+In her excitement she did not know that she was weeping bitterly until
+she found herself surrounded by other shuddering and weeping women in
+Emma's room; for other of the converts in Hiram, hearing of the violence
+abroad, had crept to this house for mutual safety and aid.
+
+It is the low, small details of physical discomfort that make the
+bitterest part of the bread of sorrow. Now and afterwards, through all
+the persecutions in which she shared, Susannah often felt this. If she
+could have stood off and looked at the main issues of the battle she
+might have felt, even on the mere earthly plane, exaltation. Yet one
+truth her experience confirmed--that no human being who in his time and
+way has been hunted as the offscouring of the world--no, not the
+noblest--has ever had his martyrdom presented in a form that seemed to
+him majestic. It is only those who bear persecution, not in its reality
+but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.
+
+All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with
+the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the
+painful operation of taking the tar from Smith's lacerated skin. The
+prophet bore himself well. Now and then, through the thin partition the
+watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his
+determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had
+appointed the next day.
+
+At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon's house. The animal was
+safe. When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those
+within the house. Rigdon was raving in delirium. He had, it seemed, been
+dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony
+ground. They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers. He lay
+upon a small bed in horrible condition. His wife, with swollen eyes and
+pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out
+with vain efforts to soothe him. His mother, a thin and dark old woman,
+vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out
+of the room silently, as though to say, "This is the work of those whose
+virtue you extolled."
+
+The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of
+dawn. The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as
+innocence may sleep. The famous preacher, and all those souls that he
+had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in
+silence. Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the
+roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to
+renewed wrath. Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past
+night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey's safety. She gave her
+horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had
+reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was
+being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight,
+with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths
+of the leafless nut woods. It was high day, and the people were
+gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through
+the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.
+
+As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to
+preach. His face was very white and sad. Susannah's glad relief,
+fatigue, and excitement found vent in tears.
+
+"You are safe!" she cried. "Oh, my dear, I will never leave you again
+while danger is near--never, never again!"
+
+In the evening of that day further news came from Hiram. The prophet had
+preached long and gloriously in the open air. New converts had been
+made, and he himself, scarified and bruised as he was, had gone down
+into the icy river and baptized them in sight of all. The mob had
+shrieked and jeered, but had been withheld by God, as the messenger
+said, from further violence.
+
+Susannah made no further effort to find new life in the old doctrines.
+All her sentiments of justice and mercy combined to make her espouse her
+husband's cause with renewed ardour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+In the summer of that same year, while the wheat in the Manchester
+fields was still green, and the maize had attained but half its growth,
+while the ox-eyed daisies still stood a happy crowd in the unmown
+meadows, and pink and yellow orchids blazed in unfrequented dells, the
+preacher Finney, after long absence, chanced to be again travelling on
+the Palmyra road. As was his habit, he sought entertainment at the house
+of Deacon Croom in New Manchester.
+
+The preacher remembered always that his citizenship was in heaven. From
+the thought he drew great nourishment of peace and hope, but as far as
+his earthly affairs were concerned the outlook was at present grievous.
+
+He was returning from a long and dreary religious convention held in an
+eastern town, where one, Mr. Lyman Beecher, had stirred up against him
+the foremost divines of New York and Boston. They had asserted that
+Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of God could suddenly turn men from
+following evil to pursuing good, was false and pernicious; that his
+method stirred up the people to unholy excitements which were productive
+of great evil. Now the accusations of these divines (who, thinking that
+a man's change of mind must needs be so slow a thing, some of them,
+gray-haired, had not as yet produced this change in a single sinner)
+were in many points wholly false, in many exaggerated, and where the
+article of truth remained in the accusation there was much to be said in
+defence of work that had resulted, if in some evil, certainly in much
+palpable good. To such groups of priests and soldiers and publicans as
+came forth to John's baptism of repentance, the godly Finney, travelling
+now east and now west, had appealed, and that the wide land was the
+better for the crying of his voice no candid person who knew the result
+of his labours could deny. He that had two coats had imparted to him
+that had none; the extortioner had returned his unfair gains, and some
+rough men had become gentle. But in the assembly from which Finney had
+just come the larger numbers and the greater power of rhetoric had been
+on that side which appeared to show least faith in God and least zeal
+for men, and Finney had come out from the combat bruised in spirit.
+
+Some natural comfort the weary man experienced from the sweet charm of
+the summer afternoon, from anticipation of the welcome and sympathy
+which would soon be his. He heard, but could not see, the Canandaigua
+water as it ran under its canopy of willows, over whose foliage the
+light wind passed in silver waves. On the height of the hill above the
+mill-dam he turned his horse into the yard of the Croom homestead. The
+stalwart deacon in overalls, his excitable, slender wife, her
+cap-strings flying, came forth, the one from the barn, the other from
+her bake-house.
+
+It was not to either of these worthy souls that Finney intended first to
+confide the story of his glimpse of Susannah. It said much for the
+sterling truth of this man's soul that, accustomed as he was to demand
+from himself and others public confession of those experiences most
+private to the individual soul, he had not lost delicacy of feeling or
+reverence for individual privacy in human relationships. He had not been
+at this house since the month after Susannah's departure, when
+excitement and wrath still raged concerning her. He judged that in the
+hearts of the older members the wound had healed, leaving only the
+healthy scar that such sorrows leave in busy lives. He knew, too, that
+in Ephraim's heart the blade of this grief had cut deeper.
+
+The supper over, the full moon already gilding the last hour of the
+summer daylight, Ephraim donned his hat to take the solitary evening
+stroll to which he had become accustomed. He thought to leave the trio
+who were in complete accord of sentiment to talk longer over the
+persecution which Finney endured, but on the little brick path between
+the flower-beds the evangelist came up with him.
+
+Ephraim was but half pleased. It was in this brief evening hour that he
+set his thoughts free, like children at playtime. Like other students
+forced to live in invalidish habits, he had established a rule of
+thought more strict than men of active callings need. At certain hours
+he would study his country's social, political needs; at others he would
+help in his father's farm management; at others he would study some
+exact science. But when the measured hours of his day were over, and
+before he lit his student's lamp, for a while he turned his fancies
+loose, and they ran all too surely to play about Susannah's charms,
+about the circumstances of her life. This was not his happiest hour. The
+eternal advantage of love was lost for the time in its present distress.
+Hateful thoughts were the results of this self-indulgence, yet he hated
+more anything that came as interruption. During these years the lover in
+him had not grown what the world calls wise.
+
+For some minutes Finney, controlling the briskness of his ordinary pace,
+walked by Ephraim's side and contented himself with the gracious scene,
+passing remarks upon weather and crops. Soon, for the value of time
+always pressed upon him, his business-like voice took a softened tone,
+and he began preaching a heart-felt sermon to his one listener.
+
+The subject of the sermon was "the fire God gave for other ends," and he
+ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was
+wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.
+
+Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile. "Did it ever
+occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been
+the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made? What
+time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing
+the iridescence on a beetle's wing, in adjusting man's soul till it
+responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the
+surface of the ocean to weather?"
+
+Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim's _bonhomie_ and his
+strange ideas. "But what have you to advance against what I have already
+said, Ephraim?"
+
+"Advance? I advance nothing. I even withdraw my painted insects and the
+storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best
+teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use
+without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us
+the most dangerous things. I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in
+order to thank you for having spoken her name. No one else has spoken it
+in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I--I am
+fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps
+would name her."
+
+The voice of the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland
+in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air. Beside this and
+the throb of insect voices there was no sound. "I came out this
+evening," said Finney, "to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw
+_her_." His voice fell at the pronoun in sympathetic sorrow.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go
+northward to the Erie Canal, in order that I might pass through that
+part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that
+hypocrite's teaching."
+
+There was no need in the district of Manchester for Finney to explain
+what hypocrite he meant. In his own country Smith was commonly held to
+be the arch-hypocrite.
+
+"The devil has surely espoused that cause in earnest, for the number of
+deluded souls in that part of Ohio and in southern Missouri, and
+scattered as missionaries up and down the country, is, I hear, between
+three and four thousand."
+
+"And always among those who worship the letter of the Scripture,"
+remarked Ephraim, "for their missionaries give chapter and verse for all
+they teach."
+
+"I was told that their customs were peculiarly evil. Even among
+themselves they lie and steal and are violent and licentious; and they
+teach openly that it is a merit to steal from the Gentiles, as they call
+those not of themselves; and, furthermore, they aim at nothing less
+than setting up a government of their own in the west."
+
+"Who told you all this?"
+
+"I am sorry to say that I had it on good authority. Some of the western
+brethren had it from a poor fellow who had been deluded into entering
+the Mormon community, and had barely escaped with his life when he
+desired to withdraw."
+
+"Would you consider a pervert from your own sect the best witness of its
+tenets? But you say that you saw my cousin?"
+
+Finney told what had led him to the village of Hiram, and said, "When I
+spoke of the sins of the Mormons, a young woman seated near the front of
+the congregation rose up. It was your cousin. I saw at once by the
+pallor of her face that the Lord was having direct dealing with her
+soul. The 'power' was indeed very great; a strong man fell as dead near
+her, who before the night was over gave testimony of sound conversion.
+After he and your cousin had been led out, many others in different
+parts of the building cried to God for mercy. When the sermon was over I
+sought for your cousin, but when I told who she was, the people of the
+place said that no doubt Mormon messengers had come while she was
+waiting, and forced her to depart. That night there was a disturbance in
+the place; some of the more hot-headed men had the leaders out, and
+tarred and feathered them--a dastardly deed! I have been threatened
+myself with being rid on a rail and tarred when the devil stirred up the
+people against my preaching, but the Lord mercifully preserved me. 'Tis
+a shameful practice, but I hear it was done to these men to intimidate
+them from the more violent crimes which they had conspired to commit. In
+the morning I was forced to go, as I was advertised to preach at many
+stations farther on, or I would have denounced the violence from the
+pulpit. I could not find out anything more concerning your cousin, but
+the Lord has never allowed me to doubt that the many prayers which we
+have offered on her behalf were answered that night, for I could see by
+the expression of her face that she, like those upon the day of
+Pentecost, was cut to the heart."
+
+At the garden gate, under the boughs of the quince-tree, which had
+increased its branches since the day in which Susannah had last passed
+under them, Ephraim now stood in the moonlight, barring the entrance. At
+length with a sigh he said, "Alas! Finney, I believe that there are few
+souls under heaven more true and more worthy than your own; but as for
+the power of God, 'His way is in the sea and his path in the great
+waters, but his footsteps are not known.'"
+
+Out of his breast Ephraim took a thin leather book, and from out of the
+book gave Finney a letter much worn with reading.
+
+Finney took the letter reverently, and read it by the light of his
+bedroom candle. In those days letters were more formally written; this
+one from Susannah to Ephraim began with wishes concerning her aunt and
+uncle and the prosperity of the household. The fine flowing writing
+filled the large sheet.
+
+"I write to you, my dear cousin, rather than to my aunt, to whom I fear
+my letter would not be acceptable, for although I can say that I regret
+my wilfulness and the manner of my disobedience, still I can never
+regret that, having been forced to choose, I threw in my lot with those
+who can suffer wrong rather than with those who have it in their hearts
+to inflict wrong, for if there be a God--ah, Ephraim, this is another
+reason why I address you, for I am in sore doubt concerning the
+knowledge of God, as to whether any knowledge is possible. My husband,
+who denies me nothing, has allowed me to send for some of your books
+whose names I remembered. I thought at first to write to you about them,
+but I distrust now my own understanding too much to venture. I would
+like you to know that they have helped me somewhat, for I do not now say
+to myself in hard, tearless fashion that I know there is no God, to
+which thought I was driven by the reflection that most of those who seek
+him most diligently sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
+
+"But the more immediate occasion of this letter is to tell you that a
+month since Mr. Finney held a meeting not far from us. I went, thinking
+to gain some help from him, and to hear news of you, but I was greatly
+disappointed, and made very angry. He preached as my husband and many of
+our elders preach, and there were among the crowd the same signs of
+excitement and peculiar manifestations that we have constantly among us.
+But toward the end of his sermon Mr. Finney spoke of my husband's
+Church, and he lent the weight of his influence to very evil slanders
+that are constantly repeated about us by those who have not sought to
+know the truth. He did us great injury by stirring up the roughest of
+the people to violence. Mr. Finney will, I suppose, visit you and repeat
+those lies, which no doubt he believes, but is most culpable in
+believing, because he has not investigated the scandal against us as he
+would have investigated scandal against any who are orthodox. I write
+now to tell you that that which he says is not true. For although there
+are a few criminals amongst us, as in every community, evil is not
+taught or condoned."
+
+As Finney read this letter by his lonely candle he was so far stirred by
+what he deemed the merely human side of the incident as to say to
+himself, "Poor Ephraim! She has never even known that he loved her." But
+next day, in speaking to Ephraim, he pointed out that in the worst
+communities there were always pure-minded women who knew little or
+nothing of the evil around them, and said he believed that his message
+would still be the means of bringing home the truth to Susannah's heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+In the meantime an interval of comparative peace had come to Kirtland.
+The Gentiles, because they discovered that the town was a good market
+for the produce of more fields than the Saints could till, allowed their
+religious zeal to slumber.
+
+A female relative of Halsey, having lost her friends by death, came from
+the east to Kirtland upon his invitation.
+
+Susannah went down the hill one summer day to meet the travelling
+company of new converts which brought Elvira Halsey. That young lady had
+seen about twenty-five years of life's vicissitudes, and had sharpened
+her wits thereon. Slight, pretty, and dressed with an effort at fashion
+that was quite astonishing in the Kirtland settlement, Elvira sprang
+from the waggon.
+
+"I've come to be a Mormon. How do you begin?" With these words she
+presented to Susannah a new type of character, fresh, and in some ways
+delightful.
+
+There was quite a crowd at the stopping place of the waggons. Halsey,
+with other elders and Smith, came to welcome the newcomer. Elvira stood
+on tip-toe, peeping about, pressing Susannah's arm with whispers.
+"Which is Joe Smith, do tell me? Do you go down on your knees to him,
+and does he pat your head?"
+
+Guided by keen instinct, Elvira did not make remarks in Halsey's hearing
+which would have shocked him, but perhaps by the same instinct she at
+once claimed Susannah as a confidante in spite of some feeble
+remonstrance.
+
+"Are you not wrong to speak so lightly of our religion?" asked Susannah,
+feeling that she was an elder's wife.
+
+"First let me be sure that you have any religion to speak of." She
+looked up prettily in Susannah's face. "What a beautiful creature you
+are!" she cried. "And is it to please my cousin Angel that you wear a
+snuff-coloured dress and a white cap and a neckerchief like an old lady
+of seventy?"
+
+As they proceeded together up the white curving road, over the crest of
+the verdant bluff, Elvira announced her further intentions.
+
+"I am not going to live with you. I am going to board with the Smiths. I
+want to get to the bottom of this business, and see the apparitions
+myself."
+
+"There are no apparitions," said Susannah gently.
+
+"Gold books, you know, flying about in the air, and the angel Maroni and
+hosts of the slain Lamanites."
+
+"You expect too much. Such visions as Mr. Smith had came but at the
+beginning to attest his mission and give him confidence."
+
+"Tut! I should think he had sufficient of that commodity. It is I who
+require the confidence, and have I come too late?"
+
+"I would question, if it did not appear unkind, why you have come at
+all?"
+
+"Bless you, it's relations, not revelations, that I came after."
+
+"I fear that Angel will not be satisfied with that attitude," Susannah
+sighed. She supposed that Elvira represented all too well the attitude
+of educated minds in that far-off world whose existence she tried to
+forget.
+
+"Therefore," said Elvira, "I will board with the Smiths."
+
+Elvira's whim to be received into the prophet's family could not be
+carried out, but by persistency she succeeded in establishing herself in
+the household of Hyrum Smith, where she distinguished herself by two
+peculiarities--a refusal to marry any of the saintly bachelors who were
+proposed to her, and a perpetual good-natured delight in all that she
+saw and heard. She resisted baptism, but to Susannah's surprise,
+remained on perfectly friendly terms with the leaders of the sect.
+
+The next two years passed quietly in Kirtland. Susannah, imbued, as
+indeed were all Smith's friends, with his belief that the peace was but
+for a time, cherished her husband as though death were near, and grieved
+him by no outward nonconformity to pious practices. Many chance comments
+which she made were straws which might have shown him the way the
+current of her thought tended underneath her habitual silence, but they
+showed him nothing. It was mortifying to her to observe that Smith,
+rarely as he saw her, was always cognisant of her mental attitude, while
+her husband remained ignorant.
+
+Susannah gave up the girlish habit of fencing with facts that it
+appeared modest to ignore. She was perfectly aware that she exercised a
+distinct influence over the prophet, of what sort or degree she could
+not determine. Little as she desired this influence, she could not
+withhold a puzzled admiration for Smith's conduct. He rarely spoke to
+her except in the most meagre and formal way, and all his decrees which
+tended for her elevation in the eyes of the community or for her
+personal comfort were so expressed that no personal bias could be
+detected.
+
+She asked herself if Smith practised this self-restraint for conscience'
+sake, or from motives of policy, or whether it was that several distinct
+selves were living together within him, and that what appeared restraint
+was in reality the usual predominance of a part of him to which she bore
+little or no relation. There was much else in his character to admire
+and much to condemn. He had steadily improved himself in education, in
+mental discipline, and in personal appearance and address. He could
+hardly now be thought the same man as when he had first preached the new
+doctrine in Manchester. This bespoke an intense and unresting ambition,
+and yet the selfishness that is the natural result of such ambition was
+absent. As far as his arduous work would permit, he gave himself
+lavishly to wife and child, to all the brethren, rich and poor, when
+they asked for his ministrations. The motherless babies whom he had
+helped Emma to nurse through their infancy had gone back to their
+father's care, but there was never a time when some poor child or
+destitute woman was not a member of his household. On the other hand,
+many of the actions of his public life were questionable. He had
+established a bank in Kirtland, of which he was the president. Even
+Halsey admitted to Susannah that this was a great mistake, that the bank
+ought to have been under the control of some one who understood money
+matters; the prophet did not. He had also set up a cloth mill, and
+undertaken to farm a large tract of land in the public interest. The
+prophet showed to much better advantage when instituting new religious
+ceremonies, of which there were now many and curious, or when giving
+forth "revelations" which had to do with the principles of economy
+rather than its practical details. Susannah thought that the voice of
+the Gentiles all around them, shouting false accusations of greed and
+dishonesty, would sooner or later find much apparent confirmation if no
+financier could be found to lay a firm hand upon the prophet's sanguine
+tendency toward business speculation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+In the bleak December two elders came from Zion, the holy city in
+Missouri, bringing the history of dire tribulation.
+
+It was a cold night; the first snow was falling upon the wings of a
+gale. Susannah was sitting alone quietly working out problems in
+algebra, in which study Smith had desired that her elder pupils should
+advance. The storm beat upon the window pane, and set the bright logs of
+the fireplace now flaming and now smoking, the varnished wooden walls
+dimly reflecting light and shadow.
+
+Halsey had been out to see the newcomers, who were staying at the
+prophet's house. It was late when she heard his tread, muffled in the
+drifted snow. He hardly paused to shake it from his clothes before he
+came near. She saw that he was in a mood of strong grief and excitement.
+
+"Angel," she spoke pityingly, "you have had a hard, hard day; you have
+stayed so very late at this evening's conference." She held out her hand
+to him. "Do not tell me to-night if you can rest before telling." Young
+as she was, her countenance, as she lifted it toward him, was motherly.
+She remembered what a mere boy he was, fair and hopeful, when she had
+first seen him three years before, and now strong lines of purpose and
+endurance were written upon the face that was thin and pale, the paler,
+it seemed, because of the transient colour that the storm had given a
+moment since to the clear skin.
+
+"I would that thou didst not need to hear, but it is not for us to turn
+our eyes from that which the Lord hath written for our instruction in
+the suffering of our brethren." Then he added, "The elders from Zion
+have told us all. There was great joy and prosperity among them, and the
+more foolish boasted of their wealth to the Gentiles, saying also that
+the Lord had given the whole land to them for an inheritance."
+
+"That, indeed, was very foolish," said Susannah.
+
+"Nay, but it was small blame to them, for that which they said is true.
+But among the Gentiles the political demagogues began to be afraid that
+we should rule the country by the number of our votes. The Gentiles
+gathered together in the town of Independence, and three hundred of them
+signed a declaration demanding that every one in Zion should sell all
+that he possessed and leave the country within a certain time, and that
+none other of us should settle there."
+
+"But forced sale would mean that no fair value would be given for the
+property; it would be simple robbery," she cried; "and they call this
+the land of freedom!"
+
+"They appealed to the Governor of Missouri, but they found that the
+Lieutenant-Governor, a man called Boggs, was among the fiercest of the
+persecutors. As for the Governor himself, he advised them to resort to
+the courts for damages."
+
+"What next?" She was impatient at a pause he made.
+
+He knelt down upon the floor in front of her, laying a calming hand upon
+her shoulder. "Susannah, there is this one great cause for our deep
+gratitude to heaven, that this time all our elders with one voice called
+upon our people to bear with patience, to cry to God to cleanse their
+hearts from all anger and revenge."
+
+"I suppose that was well," she said, but with hesitation.
+
+By the gentle pressure of his hand he still expressed his sympathy for
+her pain in listening. "Lawyers were engaged to carry the matter through
+the courts. But no sooner was it known that the thing was to be publicly
+tried than the Gentiles rose in arms. For three nights they entered the
+houses of the Saints, beating the men, burning their barns, and in many
+cases unroofing the houses. Some of our brethren went to Lexington for a
+peace warrant, but the judge was frightened at the mob, and, moreover,
+if he had offended them he would have lost much money, so he told the
+Saints to arm and defend themselves."
+
+Halsey had paused again. The moral question here involved was to him of
+deep importance.
+
+"If it was only for self-defence, Angel--" she began.
+
+He shook his head. "Nay, it was a fierce temptation, and our people are
+not yet sanctified, but God in his great mercy withheld them from
+sinning against him. For they had no sooner obtained arms than Lilburn
+Boggs, the Lieutenant-Governor, came and disarmed them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Our people were driven from their homes. In the cold storms of
+November, women and little children and wounded men were forced to flee
+out upon the open prairie, and up and down the banks of the Missouri
+River. At last they gathered together on the river-side, and many of
+them have now crossed it, remaining in the opposite county, and the
+others have dispersed, poor and homeless, into less unfriendly parts of
+the State. These elders have come here that the prophet may send back
+some revelation at their hand, and that we may all gather together what
+we can spare from our abundance for the relief of our fugitive
+brethren."
+
+His eyes were shining with triumphant faith, even though the close of
+his narrative seemed to admit of so little hope.
+
+"And will Mr. Smith still teach them that they must not strike a blow
+for their rights?" she asked.
+
+This was fast becoming the critical question of the hour.
+
+In February the snow lay deep on the land. Susannah, like all her
+neighbours, spent some days isolated by the drifts, the men only going
+abroad. On one of these afternoons the prophet tapped at her door. His
+visit in Halsey's absence was unprecedented.
+
+Without preface he began to make a statement as to the affairs of the
+Church in Missouri.
+
+"The greater part of our fugitive brethren have at my desire gathered
+together upon a large tract of uncleared land that lies just across the
+river from Zion. It is the desire of the Lord that they should there
+await until it is his will to open the gates of Zion once more."
+
+"It is _your_ desire that they should gather and wait there."
+
+She spoke with no rude emphasis, but he understood. This man could read
+her thought before it was expressed. He pushed his thick hair from his
+forehead with a heavy hand.
+
+"Understand, Mrs. Halsey, that I _believe_ the voice of the Lord has
+spoken, but it is also my desire."
+
+"Does the voice of the Lord ever speak but in accordance with your
+desire?"
+
+The answer burst from him with almost hysterical force, "I would to
+heaven it did not."
+
+"But in such cases are not your desires divided against themselves? and
+the word of the Lord comes perhaps in accordance with one desire and in
+contradiction of another?"
+
+He sat for some time looking absently upon the floor.
+
+"The things of the Lord," he said, "are of vast importance, and require
+time and experience, as well as deep and solemn thought, to find them
+out. And if we would bring the world to salvation it requires that our
+minds should rise to the highest, and also search into and contemplate
+the lowest abyss"--he paused for a moment, and then added in sad
+undertone--"that is within our own hearts."
+
+Susannah was silent, wondering what was the true secret of his elusive
+thought.
+
+He went on with an effort. "Accepting your own words, Mrs. Halsey, that
+it is at my desire that they are there instead of being scattered among
+friendly settlements where they could obtain support, it remains true
+that they are naked, hungry, and cold. When I sleep the vision of their
+sufferings comes before me." He went on again with more vehemence. "It
+is also by obeying my doctrine that they are cast out of their own lands
+and from their own hearths. Whether the Lord hath spoken or no, it is by
+obeying the doctrines that I have taught that they are in
+wretchedness." He rose, pacing the room, apparently unconscious of what
+he did.
+
+"I know that this has been weighing upon you, as it has upon my
+husband."
+
+He shook his head impatiently, striking his breast suddenly with one
+hand. "There is but one heart," he said, "in which the pains and sorrows
+of them all are gathered."
+
+She began to see that he had a plan to unfold.
+
+At length he stopped in his pacing, looking toward her. "We must go to
+their relief," he said. "We must gather an army and conduct our
+suffering brethren back to their homes in Zion."
+
+"By force of arms?" she asked.
+
+"If need be."
+
+He left time for the significance of these words to be fully
+comprehended, and then went on speaking as he paced again. "It may be
+that we will not need to fight, that if we get ourselves in readiness we
+shall need but to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord; and in
+plain language to you, who expect no miracle, Mrs. Halsey, I would be
+understood to say that if a sufficient number of our strong men, armed
+for defence, join our brethren in Missouri, the Gentiles will be afraid
+to attack."
+
+At last she asked, not without excited tremor in her voice, "Who? How
+many? When?"
+
+These were important questions with regard to the organising of an army,
+but the prophet had in mind a point that must previously be determined.
+
+"Your husband," he began abruptly, "he has still upon him the taint of
+his Quaker upbringing, for the Lord Christ indeed taught long-suffering,
+and he sent them out at first, as we also have sent our missionaries,
+with nothing in their hand save a staff only, but afterwards he said,
+'Let him that hath a sword take it,' and they said unto him, 'Lord, here
+are two swords,' and he said, 'It is enough,' which I take to mean that
+where one sword is raised there must be another to ward off a blow or to
+strike in return. But your husband is teaching the people that to bear
+arms, even in self-defence, is wrong."
+
+Susannah saw that already in Smith's indomitable will the era of armed
+defence had begun. Her hatred of the persecution caused her sentiments
+to chime with his. She only said in defence of Halsey's meekness, "My
+husband would have gone before now to give himself and all that he has
+to help these poor people if you had not interfered, Mr. Smith."
+
+A change of expression came in a moment over Smith's hulking form, as if
+a different phase of him came forward to deal with a change of subject.
+He turned upon her almost sharply, "There is one man in Kirtland who
+shall not go to Zion till peace is there. If he went, would he not of
+his own accord rush into the forefront, into the hottest of the battle,
+not to fight but to receive the sword in his breast and be slain, even
+as Uriah the Hittite was slain? Wherefore, I say unto you, he shall not
+go."
+
+Susannah, like all good women, had no keenness of scent for scandals,
+ancient or modern. She did not remember who Uriah was, and took no
+offence.
+
+The prophet had tarried in his pacing by the window; with hands clasped
+behind him he was looking absently out upon the driven snow. Upon his
+face was an expression which Susannah only sometimes saw, and that in
+the moments which she felt to be his best. She believed this man to have
+true moments of humility and high resolve; it was only a question with
+her how far they permeated his life. In a minute more he turned again
+and spoke modestly and sadly enough.
+
+"As I have said before, it is not in me to greatly love our brother
+Halsey's manner of thought, but I perceive his holiness and the Church
+shall not lack his counsel. I am here to-day to tell you how much it
+grieves me to set a constraint upon his conscience, yet I am here also
+to ask you to tell him from me that it is not the will of the Lord that
+he should continue to preach against the spirit of self-defence."
+
+When he was gone Susannah realised how angry she would have been if she
+had heard that Smith had rebuked her husband on this subject, yet now
+that the fiat lay in her own hands to impart with all gentleness, the
+task, because of her own fierce attitude toward the oppression, was
+grateful to her.
+
+When the roof had been set on the white walls of the first great Mormon
+temple upon Kirtland Bluff, a small army, well armed, well provisioned,
+went out from Kirtland for the deliverance of Zion amid the prayers and
+huzzahs of the little community. There were many who, like Halsey,
+bewailed in secret this taking of the sword, but the doctrine of
+non-resistance was never preached again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+After this Susannah's attention was centred upon the coming of her first
+child.
+
+"'Tain't lucky to have a child when the leaves are falling," said Elvira
+Halsey, a certain mist of far-off vision clouding her sparkling eyes.
+
+Susannah had been greatly weighed down by depression, not fearing
+ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had
+ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured.
+For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had
+mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she
+would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally
+found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only
+have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too
+courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good to be gained.
+Yet when the baby at length lay on her lap, grew and smiled, kicked and
+crowed, Susannah forgot at times, for hours together, the superstitions
+of the Latter-Day Saints. The motherly solicitude which she had long
+exercised over Halsey changed into something more like friendship when
+she saw him hang over her and her child as they played together.
+
+Susannah had given up her school. The winter was severe, and mother and
+child hibernated together by the sweet-scented pinewood fires till the
+stronger sun had melted the frost flowers on the panes. Spring had
+nearly come before Susannah divined that for the child's sake Halsey had
+been protecting her for months from the fear of a near disaster that was
+weighing upon his own heart.
+
+This was the year of what was called in the early Mormon Church "the
+great apostasy." One evening Halsey came in looking so white and ill
+that Susannah drew back the baby, which she had held out for his evening
+kiss.
+
+In a few minutes she understood what had occurred. Some four or five
+leaders in the Church, with their families and friends, had charged
+Smith with hypocrisy and fraud.
+
+It was not Susannah's own opinion that such a charge could be
+maintained. Smith appeared to her to be like a child playing among awful
+forces--clever enough often to control them, to the amazement of himself
+and others, but never comprehending the force he used; often naughty; on
+the whole a well-intentioned child. But she could well see that
+childishness combined with power is a more difficult conception for the
+common mind than rank hypocrisy.
+
+Angel had been assisting in a solemn excommunication of the apostates.
+He looked upon them as having been overcome by the devil.
+
+After this Halsey instituted a series of unusual meetings for prayer and
+revival preaching, which he held after the ordinary evening classes in
+the School of the Prophets, which was now removed to the upper chambers
+of the finished temple. Now, as at other times, his preaching was
+successful. His power was with men rather than with women; they gathered
+in excited crowds, and their prayer and praise went up in the midnight
+hour.
+
+Susannah was not in the habit of going to bed till her husband returned.
+One night, after twelve had struck, while she sat warming the dimpled
+feet of her restless babe at the rosy fire-light, she was greatly
+astonished to hear a tapping, low but distinct, on a window that opened
+to the back of the house. She lifted her head as mother animals prick
+their ears above their young at the faint sound of any danger.
+
+After an interval the tap was repeated; it was no accidental noise.
+Susannah laid the child in its cradle and went nearer the window
+shutters, hesitating.
+
+She knew only too well that this secrecy was the sign of some one's dire
+distress. She knew the habits of the people; a neighbour's aid was
+sought freely and with confidence; doors were open at all times to need
+or social intercourse.
+
+To her intent listening the accents of a low and guarded tone came in
+reply to her challenge; the voice was Joseph Smith's.
+
+Susannah looked with anguish toward her child's cradle. Had some army of
+mad persecutors invested Kirtland? Nothing less than fierce persecution
+could be thus heralded.
+
+For years Susannah had known Smith as a near neighbour, and the stuff of
+which the man was at this time made is indicated by the fact that
+instinctively she opened the window with noiseless haste.
+
+Smith climbed in. "Has Halsey returned?"
+
+The fire gave the only light in the room. Smith did not shut the window,
+but remained sitting on the sill. A bake-house at the back hid the place
+from neighbouring eyes.
+
+"It's all up with our bank," said Smith.
+
+"I feared so," said Susannah.
+
+"The apostates took such a lot of money out of it. No bank anywhere in
+this region could have stood it. You have always been down on our
+management of the bank, Mrs. Halsey, but if it was not good, why then
+have so many of the Gentiles put in their money, and why have they taken
+our notes all over the State?"
+
+"You never had the capital you advertised."
+
+"We have land that stands for it."
+
+"It is not worth half what you value it at."
+
+Then Susannah became sorry for her sharp recrimination. Punishment had
+befallen; it was a time for mutual help, not for reproach. She saw that
+although Smith kept himself calm he was greatly stirred.
+
+"Why are you here?" she asked.
+
+Smith's huge frame was poised awkwardly on the window sill. He moved
+restlessly and touched one thing and another with nervous hands. Then he
+said with a short laugh, "The size of it is, I'm running away, Mrs.
+Halsey. Ye may think I feel pretty mean, but ye'll do me the justice
+just to think how it is. If they'd shoot me in fair fight, I'd go and,
+if it were the Lord's will, be shot to-morrow, and be thankful too; but
+ye know the sort of vengeance they'll take. I have been beaten time and
+again before now, and covered with pitch, and I've been knocked down and
+kicked and ducked in ponds a good many times, as ye know, and I ain't
+ashamed to say that I'm afraid of that sort of thing and afraid of the
+results on Emmar and the children. If the Lord clearly told that 'twas
+his will to stay and stand it, why then I'd have no choice, but I
+haven't had no word from the Lord."
+
+His face was livid; in the effort to make his explanation, whether
+shaken by the recollections he described or by fear of her contempt,
+she saw that his limbs were actually trembling as if with cold.
+
+"There ain't many men, Mrs. Halsey, as would stay and face that sort of
+music when they could get away, but if it was to do good to mortal
+creature I'd think about staying, but it's t'other way. It's me and
+Rigdon as has been advertised as working the bank; it's my blood and his
+the Gentiles that have our notes are thirsting for. Suppose we stayed
+and they took to mauling us again, wouldn't the Saints here take to
+fighting to protect us? I've taught them to fight in self-defence and
+they'd fight to defend me. God knows there are better men than we are
+that would be killed right and left if we stayed, and 'twould be no use,
+for the Gentile numbers would overpower us. 'Tain't no use. When I found
+to-day that there wasn't a chance of staving off the bankruptcy I sent
+Emmar and the children and Rigdon's folks off in a close waggon after
+sundown. Rigdon's rid off by another road, and I've got my horse ready
+and ought to be gone. And there ain't a man in Kirtland as will know
+which way we've gone by to-morrow, so that no Saint will need to do any
+lying on my account."
+
+"You are very sorry for the mistakes you have made about the bank," she
+said pityingly.
+
+He gave another short laugh that, like the first, was less like a laugh
+than a sob.
+
+"I guess I'm sorry enough, but I don't know whether it's repentance, for
+I thought I'd done all just what the Lord told me to do, but at times
+like these I'm not so sure of the revelations I hear in my soul, but I
+know I thought I was right at the time; but as for being sorry, if ye
+had the burden of all these children of Israel in the desert on your
+heart, knowing that ye had brought them into the desert, and brought the
+hunger and the thirst and the pestilence and the enemy upon them, and
+weren't quite sure at times whether the thing that ye saw leading was
+the Lord's pillar of cloud or the devil's, and if ye was now being cast
+out before the face of men and called a liar and a swindler, and without
+a dollar in the world, I guess ye'd know what it felt like to feel
+sorry."
+
+The room was a long one; in the fore part the glow from the hearth made
+clear the baby's cradle, the table set for Halsey's supper, the close
+shutters of the front windows, but the red flame rays were fainter as
+they came into this back portion where Susannah stood in dull distress a
+few paces from the stricken intruder.
+
+This man had always the power at close quarters of producing strange
+disturbance in the emotions of his friends. Susannah was trembling, her
+heart heaving, if not with pure compassion, at least with wild
+excitement on his account.
+
+With an effort Smith held himself still, but gave again the
+heart-broken laugh that appealed more than all else to her woman's
+heart. "'Tain't all that neither, that makes me the most 'sorry,' as ye
+call it. I tried to go in and out before this people, Mrs. Halsey,
+loving and serving all alike as a prophet should, but I wouldn't be
+human man, no, nor fit to be chosen by God for the honour he's put upon
+me, if I didn't know who amongst us was most worth care and respect, and
+it's come to my soul this night, now that I can't no longer stand
+between you and all the dangers that beset our people in the wilderness,
+that I wasn't right, maybe, to egg on Halsey to take ye away from your
+happy home, or to make a point as I did, first off, of getting ye
+converted--for I was more set on it than I showed at the time. It's
+because 'twas my doing you married, that I've come to say this; and I
+see well enough that 'tain't love that is between you and Halsey, though
+you are too tender of him to let him see."
+
+She made a movement of the head, an effort to show reproving dignity,
+while in fact taken by surprise, her nerves in distressful panic, she
+had scarce the power to control herself, none to control him.
+
+He answered her impulse, although he had not looked up to see the
+gesture. "Ye haven't got any call to-night to be offended with me, for
+I'm worth no more, unless the Lord see fit to lift me up agen, than the
+paper our bank-notes is written on; and I have just got one more thing
+to say, then I'm gone. If there's any grit in Joseph Smith, and if it
+pleases God that he's not going now to his death, he'll not make another
+home for himself without providing as good a place for you and the young
+one. Ye may depend on it."
+
+He rose up now. "'Tain't no use disguising facts; I'm running away, and
+I'm leaving ye to dangers and privations. Your money and Halsey's is
+gone the way of all the rest, and without me to stop him Halsey will fly
+in the face of the first persecution that's within his reach. If I
+hadn't known that there was no chance at all of your coming I'd have
+asked you and the child to git into Emmar's waggon; but there's just
+this to say, there ain't a tribulation that can come to you that won't
+hurt me, living or dead, more than it can hurt you." Then after a pause
+he added, "Emmar sent her dear love and good-bye to ye."
+
+He stood still a moment before her in humble attitude, the words of
+Emma's tender farewell lingering, as it were, in the air between them.
+
+"Have a care what you do." (He resumed a more dignified manner of
+speech.) "It's borne in upon my mind that great dangers will lie round
+you. Tell brother Halsey from me that it is the will of the Lord that he
+should seek first the safety of his wife and child, and to abide in a
+place of safety till the child be grown."
+
+He climbed through the window. His last act was to close the casement
+behind him to save her trembling hands the exertion. His movements must
+have been very stealthy, for she did not hear the sound of his steps or
+the steps of his horse in the silent night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+After Smith left Kirtland there was a great exodus Missouri-ward of his
+more devout followers. The army which had gone out from Kirtland in '34
+to the rescue of the fugitives from the city of Zion in Missouri had
+failed, through disease and exhaustion, to make warlike demonstration;
+but the principle then accepted by the children of Zion of opposing
+force to force in self-defence, had been bearing fruit ever since in a
+bloody warfare between the hunted Saints of Missouri and their more
+powerful neighbours.
+
+Before the Saints took up arms the Missourians had, it would seem, no
+real ground of offence against them except the religious faith which led
+them to proclaim that the land was to be given to them by the Lord for
+an everlasting possession. Now this provocation was still in force,
+added to the greater one that the worm had turned.
+
+So futile had been the mad persecutions, so fruitful the blood of the
+martyrs, that by this time there were some ten thousand Saints in
+Missouri, all heads of families, for although Zion in Jackson County
+still lay waste, and the colonies of Clay County had been swept away,
+the cities of Far West and Diahman, and numerous villages near them, had
+risen like magic, built by the thrift, the organisation, and the
+temperance of the Saints.
+
+As for Kirtland, the hope of making it a prosperous city had died with
+the failure of the bank. Of the few who remained two distinct parties
+were formed--the orthodox, headed by Halsey, and the reformers,
+encouraged, if not headed, by the former leaders who were now apostate.
+In the camp of the reformers there were those who saw visions and had
+revelations. Before this, when Smith was at the helm, it had been
+counted unlawful for any but himself to have direct dealings with the
+Unseen; but the prophet was distant, directing the sect only through his
+published journal, and in this case it were hard indeed if no
+authoritative local word were spoken in the orthodox party. Angel
+Halsey's mystic soul fell easily into the region of voices and visions.
+In his adversity, fasting and praying more than ever before, he heard
+voices which gave practical directions not only for himself but for his
+neighbours. When the neighbours refused to accept these ghostly
+counsels, which all tended toward a more rigorous holiness, there was no
+room left for Halsey's work in Kirtland. He determined to fare forth to
+Missouri, there to comfort and edify the Saints scattered abroad in the
+rural districts.
+
+It was now that Susannah expected the sprightly Elvira Halsey, still
+unbaptized, to return to the east. Instead of that she proposed to
+travel with them, helping to take care of the child.
+
+"Why should I take the trouble to help you and the young un?" she asked,
+sitting on Susannah's doorstep, languid with the heat. "When I was going
+along the lane last night I met a spirit, so I held out my hand
+according to Joe's latest. You've not heard! My! it's in the Millenial
+Star that if any sort of a voice or dream comes to you, the way to know,
+whether it's an angel or devil is to shake hands, and if it is an angel
+you'll feel a good, firm, solid grip sort of coming out of nowhere, but
+if it isn't an angel you'll feel nothing. It's kind of Joe to put it in
+a nutshell, necessary nowadays that we're all hard at it having
+revelations of our own. He thought that nobody would feel the grip but
+himself. Quite mistaken. I shook hands with my angel, tho' I couldn't
+see a ghost of him, and when he said, 'You come along now to Missouri,
+and carry the child half way,' I had nothing to do but say 'Amen.'"
+
+But Susannah was too much afraid of what the result of private
+revelations might be to laugh at them; she expressed her fears.
+
+"Bless you, all the dreams and 'voices' in this hustling world wouldn't
+have put any guile into the soul of Nathaniel, and they won't into Angel
+Halsey's. Saints are saints, sinners are sinners, middling folks are
+middling, just the same whether they have three 'revelations' a day
+apiece, or one once a year, or none at all. You're fretting because you
+think a righteous man might do something wicked, thinking that the voice
+of the Lord had told him. Not a bit of it! The Lord will take care of
+his own when they're a little off their heads just as much as at any
+other time."
+
+What few worldly goods Susannah chose to keep were packed in two single
+waggons, Halsey driving the one, and Elvira and Susannah by turns
+driving the other and holding the child. Their long journey through the
+month of June was the most perfect pleasure that Susannah and Angel ever
+enjoyed together, the long nightmare of the last months at Kirtland left
+behind for ever, the stage of the future veiled, and the lineaments of
+natural hope painted upon the drop-curtain. A loving fate sent fresh
+showers on their behoof during the nights, which laid the dust and
+dressed field and forest in their daintiest array. The child, who had
+been pining somewhat, affected by the anxiety in the Kirtland home,
+became lusty and merry.
+
+"If it wasn't that we are shortly going to be robbed of all we possess
+by the Missourians," observed Elvira, "this sort of jog-trot comfort
+would become too monotonous, but it adds spice to be saying, so to
+speak, 'Hulloa there! we've come to be persecuted too.' Of course we'll
+all be killed to begin with, but that's a detail; after that we'll take
+our rural mission bespoken for us in the dream."
+
+Susannah actually smiled and called "gee-up" to the horse.
+
+"How very little people know," she observed, "who talk about a
+persecution as if it would be a means of grace. There is nothing that so
+hardens and degrades as the constant report of barbarities; the more
+nearly seen, the more closely inspected, the worse is the moral result."
+
+"Speak for yourself," cooed Elvira, "there's one person out there that
+isn't hardened and degraded." She looked with reverent eyes at Angel,
+who was walking at the head of the foremost horse, crooning a psalm;
+"and, as for me, I still feel myself quite soft, almost pulpy, and on an
+elevated plane."
+
+"You could never talk in your irreverent way if you weren't a good deal
+hardened and degraded," persisted Susannah affectionately, "and, as for
+me, I know that I am. Is there any instance in history of a people
+emerging from prolonged persecution with high ideals of love toward
+their enemies and candour?"
+
+"'Tis commonly said that faith rises from this fire," said Elvira.
+
+"Faith that gives its body to be burned and has not charity," said
+Susannah.
+
+When they reached the vicinity of Diahman and Far West the State
+elections were about to be held. It was reported that over all Missouri
+the stronger party, that of Lilburn Boggs, was threatening to prevent
+by force the Mormon vote.
+
+Before commencing his mission to the outlying Mormon districts, Halsey,
+hoping to avoid this contest, stopped in the Gentile town of Gallatin to
+rest and obtain a fresh outfit.
+
+"But why don't we pay our respects to 'Joe' now we are within reach?"
+inquired Elvira with pensive inflection.
+
+"The prophet is full of cares. A man whom I met at the tavern said that
+his activity on behalf of the Saints in Far West is amazing, and since
+his public appearance there the Lord has prospered the city exceedingly;
+but, as for me, I have been commanded to turn aside to those of our
+people who are not encompassed by a shepherd's care."
+
+"If he would but confess it," said Susannah with a sigh, "my husband was
+so sorely hurt with the appearances of fraud in connection with the
+bank--"
+
+"Suppose you put that appearance of a child down and come and eat this
+appearance of your breakfast, and then we'll put on what appear to be
+our bonnets, and go for what appears to be a walk." Elvira's sunny
+serenity never deserted her. "Say rather," she cried, "that the prophet
+did defraud, but has repented."
+
+That day was the 6th of August. The voting for the State legislature had
+commenced. The travellers did not know that there was any number of
+Mormon landholders in this place, but now they could not extricate
+themselves from the very contest that they had hoped to avoid. When the
+two women strolled through the streets to see the town they became
+involved in a crowd at one of the polling places.
+
+Penniston, a candidate of the Boggs party, standing on a barrel, was
+haranguing the crowd, and the two women quickly heard the name of their
+sect mentioned with contumely.
+
+"Shall we," cried Penniston, "allow our State to come under the control
+of Mormon horse-thieves and robbers by allowing these outlaws the civil
+rights that are intended only for good citizens?"
+
+There was a commotion in the crowd near him. Susannah, knowing that her
+husband was abroad, felt a sudden heart-sick prophecy of evil. The next
+moment she saw Halsey spring into sight upon a low wall at the side of
+the crowd.
+
+"Look on this picture and on this," cried Elvira in a voice audible to
+many too illiterate to comprehend.
+
+The two men, each standing erect above the heads of the crowd, could not
+have showed sharper contrast. Penniston was coarse of limb and feature;
+a low grade of moral disorder stamped his face as clearly as inferior
+articles are ever stamped; no inspector of goods so relentless as God's
+servant Time! Halsey had bared his head to the open sky, as though
+invoking the presence of God in his temple. Upon features too thin and
+haggard for beauty, patience and love and truth were written by every
+line.
+
+Halsey's voice, accustomed to preaching, fell with clear modulations
+upon the summer air.
+
+"'Blessed are ye, when men shall persecute you, and shall say all manner
+of evil against you falsely, for my name's sake and the gospel's.'
+Friends, this evil that is spoken against us whom ye call Mormons is
+falsely spoken, and I stand here before you, and before the great Father
+of Truth, who is calling his children everywhere to repent, to say that
+every Mormon who has a vote has a right to exercise it, for we have
+committed none of the crimes of which you accuse us, but you yourselves,
+as you well know, are many of you here to try to put into office men who
+are undoubted criminals."
+
+In surprise Penniston and his hearers had listened, but now a man,
+half-drunk perhaps, sprang upon the low wall upon which Halsey stood,
+and struck him savagely.
+
+"He is all alone," cried Susannah, "all alone among so many." She tried
+to struggle forward toward her husband through the crowd.
+
+Halsey believed himself to be alone, and it was not in accordance with
+his principles to make any attempt to return the violence by which he
+had been assailed; but to his astonishment now a stout man leaped to
+his assistance, suddenly belabouring his assailant with blows, and from
+far and near in the crowd there were shouts of encouragement from burly
+Mormon farmers who had only needed the voice of a leader to declare
+themselves. Halsey had thrown a spark, unconscious that a mass of powder
+lay near. When the men of Penniston's party turned with savage fury upon
+the Mormon who was beating their companion, and the Mormons, no less
+fierce, rallied round Halsey and his defender, the fight became general.
+
+Elvira set her quick wits to work to weave a cord that would be strong
+enough to draw Susannah back to their inn. "They may find out that baby
+is alone," she said; "they're wicked enough to injure him out of
+revenge."
+
+Along the wooden pavements of Gallatin, past the gaily-painted wooden
+houses, through the doors of which whole families were now emerging to
+ask the cause of disturbance, Susannah fled miserably, her cheeks
+blanched beneath her veil, her heart within weeping.
+
+The sun was shining brightly on just and unjust; the gardens of Gallatin
+were brilliant with such flowers as had bloomed in the August when she
+first met her husband. Susannah felt then that the reason why she
+desired to clasp and guard the sleeping child she had left was that he
+was Angel's son; the pity for injured innocence had been from the first
+until now her strongest passion, and at the thought of Halsey, innocent
+and gentle, in the midst of the brutal fight she had left, her soul wept
+as it were the scalding tears that her eyes refused to shed.
+
+The boy lay in rosy sleep, a woman of the inn keeping a kindly eye upon
+him. Probably nothing but a mother's love could have fancied him of
+sufficient importance to attract public attention, but Susannah, locking
+her door, knelt by the bed, and spreading protecting arms above him,
+listened with strained senses for news of Halsey's injury or death. For
+years she had feared that the violence she had seen wreaked upon others
+would touch her husband; violence offered to herself would have seemed a
+trivial grief in comparison. The fear that has long harped upon sore
+nerves has a cumulative action upon the pain of its realisation.
+
+Susannah found herself giving forth short ejaculatory whispers of prayer
+upon the close air of the plain, small room in which she knelt. It was
+such prayer only as we come at by inheritance, prayer that is one of the
+habits by which the fittest have survived.
+
+Before two hours were past Halsey had returned. He was bruised and much
+shaken, but appeared unconscious of injury, and made light of it. The
+open fight had ended with no decisive victory for either party; the
+chief result appeared to be that malice on either side was for the hour
+exhausted. Whether because of this or because Halsey gave himself to
+prayer on behalf of his brethren, the polls were opened quietly at noon
+and the Mormons voted with the other citizens.
+
+In the cool of the evening Susannah was sitting beside her husband
+holding the sleeping child. The window of their humble room was open,
+not to any broad, fair landscape such as their eyes were accustomed to
+feast upon, but upon the yard of the small tavern. There is, however, in
+new countries no crowding; space, like air and sunshine, is the common
+heritage. Grass grew round the edges of the large yard, and an old white
+horse was cropping it contentedly. A cool air was blowing, and over the
+wooden roofs of the town stars were beginning to gather themselves from
+out the pale dusk. An old negro and two mulatto boys were sitting upon a
+log at the side of one of the sheds, quarrelling and singing slave
+melodies by turns.
+
+Angel took the hand of the sleeping child and Susannah's hand and folded
+them in his own. "Susannah, it has been given to me to see this
+afternoon more clearly than ever before the material triumph of our
+people. They will rear high cities; they will lead armies; they will
+command wealth; but it has also been shown me that Zion will not be, as
+I had heretofore believed, pure from sin, for evil has already entered
+into her. Because she has taken the sword her spiritual warfare will not
+be soon accomplished; the wheat and the tares shall grow together, and
+I do not yet see the end."
+
+There was a pause. Susannah watched the slaves taking their evening ease
+so light-heartedly. She looked down at the three hands which Angel had
+gathered together. The dusk was beginning to make all things indistinct.
+
+Angel went on. "I would have thee teach the child above all things the
+unspeakable wretchedness of sin, for the least sin closes the eye of the
+soul by which we see God and the things of God, clogs them with the dust
+and dirt of the world; and when there is no more any clear vision,
+selfishness is mistaken for love, malice for righteousness, and folly
+for truth. So I pray thee, dear heart, be wary, and slay within thyself
+the evil nature, for though I cannot see it, perchance God does; and
+teach the child above all things from the first to fear sin more than
+death."
+
+"You shall teach him, Angel."
+
+"Dear heart, I would not lay upon thee the burden of knowledge of coming
+sorrow if I dared to withhold it, but I believe, Susannah, that it will
+soon be given to me to die for the truth and for our people." After a
+moment's pause he went on, and his tone, which had dropped
+involuntarily, became again cheerful. "That is why I have to-day
+determined to change the plan that we have made and to send thee and the
+child to-morrow with the company who are about to travel to Far West,
+where the prophet is now dwelling with his wife, for I know he will
+never see thee want."
+
+Susannah rose up. In the dusk of the low, small room her figure, the
+child still in her arms, seemed to tower like a misty goddess or
+Madonna, such as praying men have often seen appearing for their
+succour; her voice came clear and strong from a heaving breast.
+
+"Angel, I will never leave you, never," and then she added in a voice
+that faltered, "Send the child if you will."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+They did not send the child to Far West, or even insist on Elvira
+seeking safety there, because that town also became swiftly involved in
+the flames of the war which had flashed into new life at the Gallatin
+fight. The whole land was full of threats and terrors, and many open
+fights at the polling-booths were soon reported. The Mormons and
+anti-Mormons in various localities entered into mutual bonds to keep the
+peace, but in many cases these bonds were soon broken.
+
+To the Mormons everywhere had been issued a proclamation, signed by
+Smith and the elders, commanding that no official tyranny, however
+unjust, was to be resisted. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher
+powers." "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's
+sake." But when private violence was offered the order was that the men
+should fight in defence of their families.
+
+It seems to have been this order to fight, and the fact that the Mormons
+proved themselves sturdy fighters, which alone caused any of the
+Gentiles to enter into a compact of peace. So mad was their anger
+against a sect claiming the land as an inheritance from God and voting
+to a man in obedience to its leader, that the Missouri journals of the
+day openly taught that to kill a Mormon was no worse than to kill an
+Indian, and to kill an Indian was tacitly considered as meritorious as
+killing a wild beast.
+
+"I am just about as safe jogging along in one of your waggons as
+anywhere in this part of the country," observed Elvira; "and if it was a
+craving for peace and safety we had, why did we come to Missouri at all?
+I feel exactly like a rabbit when the men are out trying to thin them; I
+notice they get very frisky."
+
+There was psychological truth underlying this statement. Stimulated by
+the excitements of sudden alarms, Susannah also found herself enjoying
+intervals of temporary security with peculiar zest.
+
+They set forth again upon the country roads. Halsey had the burden of
+his message upon his spirit; wherever they found a few Mormon households
+gathered together, he preached to them the high ideals of Christian
+living and the need of humility and constant prayer. Another theme he
+had which he considered of equal importance; this was the interpretation
+of prophecy. He gave long rapt discourses upon the most obscure passages
+in the books of the prophets, the Revelation of St. John, and the Book
+of Mormon. These passages were found chiefly to refer to the rise of
+the Mormon Church, the iniquity of her enemies, and her glorious future.
+Susannah, who saw the value of his practical teachings, bitterly
+regretted this use of half his opportunities.
+
+Only once or twice in many weeks did they come upon a Mormon household
+whose management was not such as the moralist would approve, and in
+those cases before Halsey's passionate denunciation sins were confessed
+and repentance promised.
+
+So they journeyed slowly out of the September heats and oppressive
+shades into the cooler and more open glories of autumn. In that part of
+the country wild flowers run riot at the approach of winter, painting
+the land in broad leagues of colour, white and gold and blue, and the
+trees of the forest hang in red curtains overhead. The air was so light
+and invigorating that they all felt its tonic properties. Halsey seemed
+eased of his burden; the child began to talk, babbling wise and
+wonderful speeches. Elvira was even more frivolous than was her wont,
+and Susannah almost forgot Halsey's dismal prophecy of martyrdom.
+
+About the middle of October they reached the place called Haun's Mill,
+where a small Mormon community was settled. Here they thought well to
+pause, shocked by renewed rumours of warfare. A truce for the whole
+region, which had been signed by Smith and some of his elders on the one
+side, and by a magistrate, by name Adam Black, for the Gentiles, had
+been broken by Gentile mobs in several of the counties near Far West. A
+number of the saints had been brutally killed, their wives and children
+driven from their homes at the point of the bayonet. This renewed
+outrage roused at last the fires of revenge, long smouldering in the
+breasts of the refugees from the desolate city of Zion, who had
+themselves known the bitterness of such unmerited wrong. These fires
+fused religious principle and natural wrath together, till a chain was
+forged which bound many strong men in a secret society, whose members
+swore to fight, not only in defence, but especially in vengeance.
+
+It was at Haun's Mill that Halsey first heard of this society, and he
+was deeply concerned. A young Mormon who had lately come to the place
+belonged to it, and after one of Halsey's sermons, in which the posts of
+the Gate of Life were represented as meekness and forgiveness, this
+young man came to the preacher by night to confess, but also to
+vindicate his position.
+
+The missionary's little party, with the exception of Elvira, who had
+accepted hospitality at a neighbouring farm, were camping in a meadow
+not far from a stream called Shoal Creek, which drove the mill. The logs
+of their evening fire were still alight. Susannah sat just within the
+dark opening of a low canvas-covered waggon; the unsteady flame light
+fell upon her, and sometimes showed a farther interior where the child
+lay sleeping. Halsey was sitting at the roots of a tree, the utensils of
+a simple supper at his side. The gentle horses tethered near were to be
+heard softly cropping the grass, and the sound of the creek came from a
+farther distance. Above, the poplar boughs, whose yellow foliage had
+been thinned by the advancing season, let through the rays of the
+brilliant stars. These were the sights and sounds which met the young
+man's senses as he came brushing the fallen leaves with his feet.
+
+He leaned against the pole of the farther waggon and looked across the
+low-glowing fire at the preacher and his wife.
+
+"Look here! I'm a Danite. Do you mean to say that the Lord's not going
+to accept of me because I can't stand by and see weak men and women and
+children killed, or worse than killed, without punishing the murderers?
+Supposing that a hundred of Boggs' men were to come down now and put an
+end to you, your wife, and your child, would you have me go along with
+them peaceably afterwards and pray they might be forgiven?"
+
+"What is a Danite?" asked Susannah.
+
+The stranger took off his hat and answered her very respectfully. "We
+are under an oath, ma'am, not to tell who belong to us, but we've bound
+ourselves to punish them as take the blood of the helpless and
+innocent."
+
+He seemed, as far as the light would show, a well-made youth, and his
+voice was clear and honest.
+
+Halsey had not spoken, and Susannah asked again, this time of her
+husband, "Can it be wrong to do as this gentleman says?"
+
+The preacher spoke slowly. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the
+Lord."
+
+"But," said the young man eagerly, "the Scripture also says 'There's a
+time for wrath,' and 'he that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
+blood be shed.'"
+
+Halsey rose up. It was a strong moment for him, for he had long seen
+that the spirit of retaliation, following hard on the spirit of defence,
+was the coming curse of his beloved church, and had prayed that he might
+be the means of helping to ward it off. Here was one asking counsel who
+from the strength of his person and character might have influence among
+the avengers of blood, yet with his helpless wife and child beside him
+none felt more keenly than Halsey the force of the Danite's arguments,
+and none knew better the multitude of Scripture prophecies that could be
+brought up in support of them. In the strength of his need this man, who
+had been spending the precious time of many a hardly-won audience in
+dwelling on obscure poesies in books held sacred, now seemed to step
+forth into a sudden illumination of truth just as he stepped from the
+shadow of the poplar bole into the light of the fire.
+
+"Friend, I did wrong to answer you in this matter from any part of
+Scripture save from the mouth of our most blessed Lord himself, for he
+alone is the gate by which we must enter into life, and I would have you
+to consider most carefully his life and words, and find out if there be
+any promise of blessedness to those who strike back when they are
+struck, or any command to punish the evil-doer, or any example for such
+punishment. But if you would be more manly and more gallant than the
+Saviour of the world, I tell you it must be at your own peril, for he
+alone is the gate of that road which leads to everlasting life."
+
+There was a silence for some long moments. Embers in the fire broke and
+fell; the horses cropped the grass; a nut or twig dropped somewhere
+among the adjacent trees.
+
+"Well," said the young Danite reflectively, "if that's it, I guess I'll
+have to take my fling first and seek salvation after; but Smith and
+Rigdon don't only preach that sort of Gospel now; they are all for the
+Old Testament kind of thing, and the destroying angels in the
+Revelations."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+So near came the rumours of war that the Mormons of Haun's Mill entered
+into a renewed compact of mutual peace with the Gentiles around them.
+The place was about twenty miles below the town of Far West, on the same
+stream of Shoal Creek. Around Far West the roads presently became very
+dangerous, haunted, it was said, by armed parties of bloodthirsty
+Gentiles who lay in wait for trains of Mormon emigrants coming from the
+east to the prophet's city. All travellers became alarmed; Halsey
+remained where he was; the people of the place accepted his pastoral
+services gladly. A train of Gentile emigrants also waited at Haun's Mill
+for the cessation of hostilities.
+
+These emigrants were quiet folk and had children with them. Susannah
+used to go out upon sunny days with her sturdy yearling, talking to all
+mothers, Gentile or Mormon, who carried little children. The beauty of
+the season, the cloudless sun, gilded these few peaceful days. Susannah
+compared her child with other children, marvelled at the baby
+intercourse he held with them, at the likes and dislikes displayed among
+these pigmy associates; and the other mothers had like sources of
+interest in these interviews.
+
+One among the emigrants, a dark-eyed woman of about forty years of age,
+was of better position and education than the others. One morning she
+noticed Susannah's child very kindly, speaking of things that did not
+lie on the surface of life.
+
+"There is a seeking look in his eyes," the lady said; "he smiles, he
+plays with us all, but he looks beyond for something. I have seen that
+look in the eyes of children who were in pain, but yours is at ease."
+
+"He has his father's eyes," Susannah sighed. "My husband is always
+looking for a virtue that seems to me impossible."
+
+Both women turned toward an open grassy space in the midst of the
+clustered houses where Halsey was now standing, Bible in hand, teaching
+a little group of children to repeat the beatitudes. Only four children,
+one sickly boy and three girls, were willing to stand and repeat the
+lesson; others had straggled away and were shouting at their play.
+
+Not far from where Halsey stood some fifteen of the neighbours had
+gathered together to put up a new wooden house; piles of sweet-smelling
+deal lay about them as they worked.
+
+Just then on the road from Far West a horse bearing an old man was seen
+straining itself to the swiftest gallop. The old man began to shout as
+he came within hearing. No one could understand what he said. He
+shouted more loudly, and many women ran out of their doors to see his
+arrival. Before his words were articulate a cloud of dust was seen
+rising round a turning of the same road, and a large company of horsemen
+came swiftly into view.
+
+The old man's voice was raised in a cry, but only the accent of terror
+was intelligible. He threw himself off his horse, brandishing his arms.
+Afterwards it was known that he wanted the villagers to take refuge in
+their houses, but now they only stared the more at him and at the small
+army that was approaching.
+
+Susannah heard a shot; then she was deafened by the sound of a volley of
+muskets. Paralysed, she stood staring down the road, unable to believe
+that the two or three hundred mounted men had deliberately levelled
+their muskets and fired. Then all around her she became aware of shrieks
+and sobs and prayers that went up to God. The brown-eyed Gentile lady
+who stood beside her had fallen in a curious attitude at her feet.
+
+Susannah darted into the emigrants' tent and, putting down the child,
+dragged the lady within. She perceived to her horror that the lady was
+shot; the bullet had passed through her neck. Not knowing whether she
+was dead or dying, Susannah stretched her on the floor. Then she lifted
+her hands above her head, wrung them together in agony of nerve and
+thought. She remembered afterwards looking upward in the cave of the
+warm tent and saying aloud "O God! O God!" many times.
+
+The first thing she saw was her child standing watching her; both his
+little brown fists were full of flowers. Hearing the sound of horses
+trampling near, loud voices, and occasional shots, she bethought her
+that the canvas of the tent was no protection for the child, and,
+snatching him in her arms, she ran madly out into the sunshine and into
+the open war.
+
+A large number of the horsemen had already passed on down the road; the
+sounds that came from them seemed to be of oaths and laughter. A number
+were still galloping in and out among the houses; the ground was strewed
+with bodies of the dead and wounded; the able-bodied, it seemed, must
+have suddenly huddled within their doors.
+
+Susannah remembered her husband now, remembered where he had been
+standing. She forgot all else; she rushed toward the middle of the
+green, drawing back only when some of the horsemen dashed across her
+path to follow their fellows. They stared at her and, as they went,
+called to some who were still behind them.
+
+One of these came on, checked his horse, and looked in Susannah's face
+insultingly. No doubt her eyes were dazed, and she looked to him like a
+mad woman, but she remembered afterwards that the child showed anger
+and babbled that the horseman was a bad man. At this the rider took out
+his pistol and pointed it at the child and fired and rode off laughing.
+
+Susannah saw the young Danite bending over her. His words were hoarse
+and so sorrowful that she gathered from their tone that she was in great
+distress before she understood their purport or memory awoke. "Ma'am,"
+he said, "I'll take you down to your own waggon by the creek."
+
+She found herself sitting on the ground, her child in her arms. The
+child was dead; she knew that as soon as she looked at him. There was a
+little trickle of blood upon the light frock over his heart, but not
+much.
+
+As yet no women, only a few men, had ventured forth, and the sound of
+the enemy's horses and shouting were still in the air. Susannah rose up,
+folding in her arms the body of the child; the momentum of her first
+intention was upon her will and muscles; she moved straight on toward
+the place where she had last seen Halsey.
+
+The young Danite took hold of her sleeve when he perceived whither she
+went.
+
+"'Tisn't no use, ma'am. Some of the brothers have attended to him."
+
+Susannah looked straight in the young man's face with perfect courage.
+"Is he dead?"
+
+But the Danite had not courage for this; he turned away and put his arm
+over his eyes; she heard him grind his teeth in dumb passion.
+
+Some of the men and women lying on the grass were moaning or screaming
+with the pain of their injuries. The thought that Halsey might be in
+like pain made Susannah imperative. "Is he dead?" she asked again in
+precise repetition of tone and accent. "Is he dead?"
+
+The Danite lifted his head. "He is quite dead, and I marked the man that
+did it, and I marked the man that did this too." He touched reverently,
+not the child, but the wilting asters that were still grasped in the
+baby hand. "If I'd only had a gun--but"--he ground his teeth again and
+muttered, "God helping me, they shall both die."
+
+Susannah understood nothing then but the first part of this speech.
+
+By this time many of the women and children had again flocked out of the
+houses. It was reported that the horsemen had been a detachment of State
+militia, that one of them had taken the trouble to explain to a wounded
+man that they had received orders from Governor Boggs to exterminate the
+Mormons. Immediately by other frightened tongues it was stated that the
+armed company were halting round the turn of the road, intending to
+return and shoot again when the people had come out from shelter. At
+this the greater number made a stampede for a thicket of poplar and
+willow saplings that was near the creek. The Danite still held by
+Susannah's sleeve.
+
+"Where is my husband?" she again asked. She had not moved since he last
+spoke to her.
+
+Some men were busy laying the dead, of whom there were eighteen, on the
+floor of a shed which was not far off. Susannah and the Danite moved
+about together and found Halsey lying still on the green, his limbs
+decently composed, his eyes for ever shut. The bearers were about to
+lift him, but the Danite interposed. He had an excited fancy concerning
+Susannah's dead and what must be done for them. He lifted Halsey easily
+in both his arms and walked away, Susannah following with the dead
+child.
+
+Without a word they went till they came to Halsey's camp. Nothing had
+been touched since Susannah left in the morning. The Danite, remembering
+the camp as he had seen it a few evenings before, looked about him now
+curiously, and laid Halsey down on the very spot where he had stood to
+plead for a divine righteousness.
+
+It was not a time for words. Having deposited his burden, he looked to
+Susannah, but she had no directions to give. She sat down beside her
+husband, as though preparing to remain.
+
+"I thought you'd like to lay them both out here, but I guess I ought to
+get you into the bush, ma'am."
+
+"I will stay here," she said; "you had better go to help some one else."
+
+The cries of the wounded were still heard from the vicinity of the
+houses. A crowd of the uninjured people were to be seen making their way
+through the first bushes of the thicket. They seemed to be carrying the
+wounded thither, for men bearing shutters, and doors upon which the sick
+were stretched now started in the direction of the bush. There was need
+for help, as the Danite well saw; then, too, inactivity was torture. He
+left Susannah and ran back to bear his part in the common task.
+
+When almost every other living soul was lost in the close thicket he
+came again, approaching the camp with soft footsteps, peering anxiously.
+Susannah had laid the child in his father's arms. Their enemies seemed
+to have taken aim for the heart, for Halsey's wound was also there. She
+had so laid the child within his arms, heart to heart, that no sign of
+injury appeared. She sat by them now, sobbing her tearless sobs,
+stroking gently, sometimes the hair of the child, more often the thick
+locks of light hair that lay above her husband's brow. She was talking
+to them between her sobs in rapid phrases exactly as if they were not
+dead. The young Danite was sure that she had lost her wits; he leant
+against a tree confounded.
+
+Susannah was saying, "I wanted to keep baby, Angel, I wanted so much to
+keep him, but I could not have taught him your way; there was no use
+telling you that before, for you could not understand. When you told me
+that you would go you did not tell me you meant to take baby. You have
+the best right to him, dear, he is all yours, but oh! remember--remember
+that I will be very lonely--very lonely--O Angel." There were a few
+moments of wordless moans and sobs, but she went on clearly enough, "I
+want you to know, Angel, that I never was disappointed in you--never
+disappointed in you, dear; and about my lack of faith--it would have
+been no use to tell you before, would it?"
+
+She took her hand from Halsey's hair and played a moment with the rings
+of gold on the baby's head lying on his breast. She laid her hand upon
+Halsey's hands that she had clasped together above the child. "It is
+better for you to have baby with you. I could not have taught him your
+thoughts. It is better, dear, isn't it?"
+
+The earnest inflection of her voice in these interrogations brought so
+wild a sense of pathos to the Danite's heart that his eyes filled with
+tears and brimmed over, but Susannah's sobs were like a nervous gasping
+of which she was scarcely conscious, and no hint of tears.
+
+She lightly touched the baby hand that was lying on its father's
+shoulder, still grasping the blue blossoms. "See," she sobbed, "he has
+brought his flowers to you; he always loved you best."
+
+There had been a great silence in the air about them, but now there was
+again the sound of firing at the distance of about a mile. The Danite's
+pulses leaped, but he did not, because of that, allow himself to speak
+or move.
+
+Susannah spoke again, resting her hand on Halsey's brow, "You know,
+dear, I don't know whether you and baby are anywhere--anywhere"; wildly,
+as if the appalling loneliness of its meaning had flashed upon her
+dulled brain, she repeated the word.
+
+The Danite's sympathy rose within him; he staggered forward and bent
+over her. "Don't, ma'am," he said, "don't go on talking like that. I was
+with my own mother when she died, when I was a little chap, and I know
+how it is, and you'd much better try to shed tears, ma'am, indeed you
+had."
+
+Susannah lifted to him a blank face, disturbed but uncomprehending.
+
+He decided what to do; the thought of action restored him. He ran with
+all his might back to the houses, and, finding a pick and spade, came
+again. This time, more confident of himself, he had more control over
+Susannah.
+
+"We must make the grave right here, ma'am, and do you go and gather some
+flowers to put on it, for we must just put them two away out of sight
+before the devils come back. It's what he would want, you know." He
+pointed to Halsey and repeated the words until she understood.
+
+It even seemed a relief to her then to move about too, and find that
+there was something she could do, but she did not obey him blindly.
+While in a soft place close by he delved with might and main, displacing
+the earth with incredible speed, Susannah, sobbing all the time, but
+tearless, went into the waggon and brought out certain things which she
+chose with care--a locked box, the best garments belonging to herself,
+her husband, and child, and the baby's toys.
+
+It was no neat gravedigger's work that the Danite accomplished; he had
+made a deep, large hole, but the cavity sloped at the sides so that they
+could step in and out. Susannah brought her little store and lined the
+earth first with the garments.
+
+"You may want some of those things of your own, ma'am," said the Danite.
+
+She paid no heed; when she had made the couch to her mind she signed to
+him to lay Halsey and the child in it, which he did. She herself stooped
+in the grave to clasp the dead man's hands more tightly over the little
+one's form, and her last touch was to stroke Halsey's hair from off the
+brow. She laid the baby playthings at Halsey's feet; she unlocked the
+box and took from it all the household treasures that so far she had
+sought to keep--some silver, a few small ornaments, a few books, and
+Halsey's Book of Mormon, in which was written their marriage and the
+baby's birth. She brought a silken shawl, the one bit of finery that
+remained from her girlish days. She covered her dead with it very
+carefully, tucking it in as though they slept; then she moved away,
+wringing her hands and heaving convulsive sighs. The Danite put back the
+earth.
+
+All the grass was strewn pretty thickly with poplar leaves, gold, lined
+with white, and after leaning against a tree some minutes looking away
+from the grave, Susannah began gathering up these leaves hastily, so
+that when he levelled the earth she could strew the top, hiding the
+place from the curious eyes of strangers.
+
+"I guess, ma'am, if there's anything you would like to take with you
+now, we'd better go into the bush."
+
+"No, there is nothing, but," she cried, "I thank you very much, and if
+there is anything that would be of use to you--"
+
+When the Danite had first laid Halsey under the tree he had taken a
+white cloth from the tent and wiped the blood from the coat, that
+Susannah might not be too much shocked at the sight. He took this cloth
+now and tore it till the stained fragment alone remained in his hand. He
+thrust it in his breast.
+
+"This will stand for the blood of them both," he said. "I guess that's
+all I want." But when he had started towards the thicket he remembered
+Susannah's needs, and went back for a blanket.
+
+The poplar saplings that bordered the creek were still holding a thin
+gold canopy overhead, and the dogwood was glinting with scarlet. The
+other members of the community had gone so far ahead that it was a long
+time before, making their toilsome way, they came upon their former
+neighbours.
+
+The fugitives had called a halt where a brook which passed through the
+bush offered some relief to the pain and fever of those who were
+wounded. One of these, a little girl, had already died by the way, and
+her frantic mother began to reproach Susannah, wailing that if the child
+had not been saying her texts to the elder she would not have been a
+mark for the enemy.
+
+The men were cutting down saplings to make place for a camp. It was
+their intention to remain, going back under the cover of night to get
+food and blankets from the houses, if they were not pillaged and burned,
+going back in any case to bury their dead at the first streak of dawn.
+
+The Danite turned to Susannah. "I guess, ma'am, neither you nor I have
+got any business to take us back, and there's enough of the brothers
+here to do the work."
+
+Susannah went on with the young man through hour after hour of the
+afternoon farther and farther into the unknown fastnesses of the wood.
+They left behind them the low thicket of second growth, and penetrated
+into an uncleared Missouri forest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+All the powers of the young Danite were strung by excitement into the
+fiercest vitality, and he thought that physical fatigue was the best
+medicine for Susannah's mind. Why he had accepted the work of saving her
+as part of his mission of Mormon defence he did not ask himself. In him,
+as in many athletes, thought and action seemed one. He acted because he
+acted; he knew no other reason.
+
+In the middle of the night Susannah woke up. The stars glimmered above
+the trees; she was lying on a heap of autumn leaves wrapped in the
+blanket. Sitting up, she remembered slowly the events of the preceding
+day.
+
+Her movement had caused another movement at some distance. The Danite,
+sleeping on the alert like soldier or huntsman, was roused by the first
+sound she made, and when she continued to sit up he came near in the
+glimmering light. She saw his dark form where he tarried a few paces
+away.
+
+"You're all safe, ma'am. Can't you go on sleeping?"
+
+A watch of the night often brings to recollection some duty forgotten
+during the day. "Do you know where Elvira Halsey is?"
+
+"The young lady with the brown eyes that I have sometimes seen you with,
+ma'am?"
+
+"Yes." Then Susannah added with the weak detail of a wretched mind, "She
+isn't very young."
+
+"Was she any relation to you, ma'am? Were you very affectionate with
+her?"
+
+Susannah explained the relationship.
+
+The Danite thought, "If I tell her she's there she'll think it her duty
+to trapse back all the way to find her; she's that sort." Therefore,
+judging that a minor grief could not make much difference, he gave it as
+his opinion that Elvira was dead. At this Susannah shed tears for the
+first time, which eased his anxiety not a little.
+
+Susannah did not know the Danite's name; it never occurred to her to ask
+him any question about himself.
+
+At dawn they started again upon their tramp. The man knew the country,
+and when the sun was up he brought Susannah out of the forest to a
+settler's farm. She was faint now for want of food, walking again, as
+she had walked last night, with vacant eyes and dull mechanical tread.
+
+The Danite made her sit down upon a stone near the house, and brought a
+woman to her who carried bread and milk. Susannah ate and drank without
+speaking.
+
+"My! but she's tired," said the farmer's wife. "It's a cruel shame to
+make her walk so far; you're not a good husband to her, I'm thinking."
+
+Having satisfied her need, Susannah turned away dully without a word.
+The settler's wife offered the remainder of the bread and milk to the
+Danite, who regarded it with famished eyes.
+
+"Where's your husband?" he asked.
+
+"We've enough men about the place."
+
+"Where is your husband?"
+
+"He's away with the militia under Lucas."
+
+"Then I'll not touch his food," said the Danite. With an oath he flung
+the cup and plate upon the ground. "Do you see that woman there?" He
+pointed to Susannah. "I took the food for her, for she had died without
+it. Yesterday devils like your husband shot her child in her arms and
+her husband before her eyes, and to Almighty God I pray that when I've
+got her to some safe place I may have strength yet to shoot your husband
+and your children, shoot them down like dogs, and laugh at you because
+you don't like it." The restrained passion of all the long preceding
+hours broke out. His face was ashen, his eyes burning; there was foam
+about his lips as, with thick utterance, he hurled the words at her.
+
+The woman stepped back in dismay, but she, too, was enraged now, and
+courage was the habit of the free life she led. "You are a bloody
+Mormon," she cried, "and if I'd known it I'd have let your woman die
+before I'd have fed her." She walked backwards, her voice rising higher
+with passion. Unable to think connectedly, she shrieked the phrases she
+had in mind. "Coming here to spread idolatry in a Christian country!
+Teaching superstition in a free Christian land!" She was still shrieking
+some jargon about the United States being founded on the Word of God,
+and the divine right to exterminate all Mormons, when he, walking fast,
+joined Susannah.
+
+They had not gone much further before a large dog which the settler's
+wife had evidently let loose, came after them with fierce intent. The
+Danite turned, and as the dog sprang, slew it with one stab of his
+knife, and, leaving it bleeding upon the road, hurried Susannah into the
+forest.
+
+It was a tradition upon that farm for years afterwards that these two
+Mormons, after receiving charity, had made an open display of that
+wanton wickedness which was habitual to them.
+
+Susannah and the Danite travelled on for many hours. The way was not
+easy. Sometimes where the trees were thin their legs were tangled
+knee-deep in a plant covered with minute white feathery blossoms,
+looking like white swan's-down shot through with green light, that
+carpeted miles of the ground; sometimes the trees had fallen so thickly
+that they had to clamber from log to log rather than walk; sometimes
+their way was a bog, and they were in danger of sinking deeper than was
+safe.
+
+Susannah asked no questions. She had heard and understood all the words
+that had passed in the incident of the morning. She felt cowed now,
+afraid to think what might come next; it was enough that the Danite had
+evidently some point in view.
+
+About four in the afternoon they left the forest and came 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 divine counsel in which he asked her to believe; his answer was to
+send her Bushnell's sermons on the suffering of God. Ephraim had added:
+"When you went from us, Susy, would you ever have been satisfied if we
+had detained you by force? Yet that is what you ask of God. If you were
+right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it
+appear by time. So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in;
+so also has every human friendship. Let us wait, but in faith." This
+ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so
+often that she knew the words by heart.
+
+The next letter had been written more recently, after a long interval.
+At the end of this letter Ephraim had said, "I am persuaded that what we
+need to help our faith is never more knowledge, but always more love. I
+cannot interpret this but by telling you of a fact which I feel to be
+the key to a great--the greatest--truth. I know a man who believed in
+God. He met a woman whom he loved, not as many love, but (I know not
+why) with all the loves of his heart, as father, as mother, as brother,
+friend, might love; as lover he loved her with all these loves. After
+that he knew God with a knowledge that passed belief. He could argue no
+more, but he _knew_. This I think is the sort of knowledge which guides
+unerringly." Susannah remembered, if not the words, all that this
+passage contained. She had wondered at it not a little.
+
+Up to the time of Angel's death she had rejoiced in these letters, not
+doubting that Ephraim had remained the same self-sacrificing
+friend--ready out of mere but perfect kindness to befriend her to the
+uttermost. She had not doubted because she had not questioned. Now
+disquieting thoughts intervened, producing a new shyness. She remembered
+their last interview, and wondered if Ephraim would feel the same
+responsibility for her if she returned destitute. Perhaps the ardour of
+his friendship had cooled. Perhaps in the last letter he had intended to
+suggest to her that he thought of marriage, and this time for love, not
+kindness, the lady being one of his new Hartford friends.
+
+But no doubt the principal reason of Susannah's dalliance with time in
+those first weeks of her moral freedom was the mental weakness that
+succeeds shock. Every day she thought that she would soon write that
+begging letter, until the day came when opportunity ceased.
+
+When the Danite left he had promised the farmer to return as soon as it
+was possible to place Susannah in safety with her Mormon friends. When
+she began to speak of leaving, her host told her this for the first
+time.
+
+"And what is the young man's name?" the old man asked of Susannah. They
+were in the long living-room at the mid-day meal. His sons, who were
+leaving the table, waited to hear the answer; the mother, the very
+children, looked at her with interest.
+
+"I do not know," said Susannah.
+
+There was a pause, and for the first time she was aware that there was
+some sentiment in the minds of her hearers which did not appear upon the
+surface.
+
+She went on, "I don't know why he should trouble himself to come back
+for me except that--I think that he was much touched by some earnest
+words my husband said to him that he did not see his way to accept, and
+I think also that he is zealous for the Church."
+
+Her surpassing wrongs had so far set her apart and made all that she
+said and did sacred. No one questioned her further.
+
+In the beginning of February the Danite reappeared. He came under the
+cover of night, but showed himself only when the household was awake. He
+was much thinner, more gaunt than before, but in frankness and quietude
+the same. His first words to Susannah had an import she did not expect.
+
+"That young lady you mentioned to me--I said she was dead because you
+were half crazy, and would have gone back to her, but I worked round
+till I found her; she got to the city of Far West right enough."
+
+After a while he said, "That young lady and some other of our folks have
+got horses and they're going into Illinois now. Most of our folks are
+walking. It's about as bad as can be, but I guess you'll have to go.
+We'll be safe enough, for as long as we go straight on the Gentiles are
+bound to let us pass. I tried to get some better sort of a way for you
+and her, but there ain't no way unless we would have sworn we weren't
+Saints and gone pretending to be Gentiles, but even then we haven't got
+the money."
+
+Susannah was thrilled with excited distress. She was not prepared to
+make an abrupt decision, and it appeared that if she desired to join
+this company she must go that evening or not at all.
+
+During the hours of the morning her mind cowered, dismayed. Should she
+now renounce her husband's sect, refusing to suffer with them? She had
+not as yet fortitude to do this. Halsey's eyes, the touch of his hand,
+her baby's voice lisping the tenets of their faith in repetition of his
+father's solemn tones, these were sights and sounds as yet too near her.
+To her shocked fancy the child and his father were only gone out of
+sight, but near enough to be cruelly hurt by her public perversion. And,
+moreover, if she should take this course she must write to Ephraim at
+once, for she could not well remain where she was without definite
+purpose in view.
+
+Susannah had sought seclusion in which to think, and the younger son of
+the house intruded himself. He was perhaps about thirty years of age, a
+burly man, resolute and passionate. He spoke fairly enough. The Danite
+himself had said that the journey to which she was haled by her friends
+was one of untold hardship, its end uncertain; he offered her all that
+an honest and prosperous man could offer, but went on to urge on his own
+behalf the strength of those sentiments which he had learned to
+entertain for her--his admiration (Susannah sickened at the word), his
+love (she shrank in fear).
+
+She rose up with the moan of a hunted thing. She did not pause to make
+excuses for the hunter, to consider the pioneer life that wots little of
+sentiment in proportion to utility; she only saw again the grave at
+Haun's Mill and the white faces of her dead upturned to hers. It seemed
+that this man, with the consent of his people, was urging his suit as it
+were beside the very corpse of her husband. The Danite had shown Angel
+reverence, had shown by his every word and glance that he counted her as
+belonging to the dead man whose blood he carried at his heart.
+
+Susannah rode out from that temporary home at nightfall upon the
+Danite's horse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+It was the season of rain and sleet, of rude northerly winds. The roads,
+across a tract of flat fields and in among the low woods that fringed
+the rivers, were heavy with mud.
+
+After riding half the night on a pillion behind the Danite, Susannah
+entered the Mormon camp. Up and down the sides of a dirty road, in
+waggons, in small tents, and in the open, men, women, and children were
+lying huddled in family groups. How far these crowds extended she could
+not see. Watch-fires were burning here and there, and in the fields on
+either side a patrol of Missouri militia were heard scoffing and
+shouting in the darkness. The Danite answered the challenge of one of
+these men with apparent meekness; Susannah perceived that he had gained
+in self-control. When they had entered the road, along the sides of
+which the forlorn multitude lay, they travelled for some way upon it,
+the Danite speaking in low tones now and then to the Mormon watchers. At
+length they came to a place where a few waggons of better description
+were standing and a number of horses were tied; here he lifted Susannah
+from the horse. Three of the Mormon leaders came up; they evidently
+knew her and her story. The eldest took her hand and spoke in broken
+tones of the crown which Halsey had won in the unseen city of God.
+
+These were the first words that Susannah had heard in unison with
+Halsey's own thoughts, and for his sake they endeared the whole wretched
+Mormon encampment to her.
+
+A woman, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl, sprang down from one
+of the waggons, and Elvira encountered Susannah.
+
+"You expect me to say that I am sorry for you," she said hurriedly; "I
+will not. It is not a time for grief. We each of us have just so much
+power of being sorry and no more, and the well has gone dry. I am glad
+you have come. There are a great many things that one can yet be a
+little glad for; but you must make haste to lie down, for we shall soon
+enough be called to the march."
+
+The beds shaken down on the floor of the waggon were covered with
+reclining women. Some of them squeezed themselves together to make the
+place Elvira had vacated large enough for two. Susannah stretched
+herself out, loathing with her senses the crowded bed, but with a tender
+heart for her fellow-sufferers. After the long dumb weeks of her stern
+sorrow, after that day's revolt of injured sentiment, she felt that it
+was worth while to have come here if only to have made some one else, as
+Elvira had said, "a little glad."
+
+The dawn came sighing fitfully, long sighs that rose in the distant
+fields to the east meeting them in their pilgrimage and dying away
+westward; the dawn wept also, scattering her tears upon them in like
+transient showers.
+
+Elvira found her own horse. The Danite had used yesterday the animal he
+had provided for Susannah.
+
+"But what right have I to his horse?" Susannah began her question
+impetuously, but Elvira silenced her.
+
+"Hush! Don't let the other women know that it isn't yours. Poor things,
+they will begin to ask why it isn't theirs. Do you think that we are
+living on bowing terms, curtseying to each other and saying, 'After you,
+madam, if you please'?"
+
+Elvira was changed. Terror had at last done its work. Her pretty
+features were drawn with anxiety; her eye glittered.
+
+"I have been baptized," she said to Susannah in hard tones. "When I saw
+the water red with blood I went down into it."
+
+Eastward, facing the gusty sobs of the winter morning, they went. The
+road was soft, and hundreds of feet treading in front of them had
+kneaded water and earth together into a slippery mass. As far as could
+be seen in front and behind, the line of the pilgrimage stretched, women
+and children plodding with burdens on their backs, men pushing
+hand-carts before them, only here and there a waggon or a group of
+horses.
+
+Elvira took up several children on her horse, and pointed out to
+Susannah a sickly woman to whom she could give a turn upon the pillion
+that she herself had ridden during the night. So they began one of many
+weary days.
+
+To the good the necessities of compassion are as strong as are the
+necessities of selfishness to the wicked. Within a day or two both
+Susannah and Elvira had given up their horses entirely to women who had
+been taken ill by the way. At first they plodded arm in arm, thinking
+that merely to walk was all that their strength could endure; but there
+were other women who had children to carry, women even who must push
+hand-carts before them, and there were little children who sank one by
+one exhausted on the winter road, as lambs fall when their mothers are
+driven far.
+
+After the march had continued for a few days there was much illness. All
+clothing and bedding was wet with the winter rain, chilled and stiff
+with the frosts. On the faces of many the unnatural flush and excitement
+of fever were seen, and other faces grew pallid, the lips blue or dark,
+and the eyes sunken. To all who retained the natural hue and pulses of
+health a heavier burden was added every day because of the help they
+must needs give if they would not bury too many of their comrades by the
+wayside. In that sad caravan souls were born into the world or freed
+from it by death almost every hour.
+
+Susannah was greatly struck by the meek manner of the boldest and
+roughest of the Mormon leaders in their dealings with the parties of
+Missouri militia who, with the ostensible purpose of defending Missouri
+homesteads from Mormon violence, drove the stricken multitude as with
+goads. She had learned from her husband what the strength of true
+meekness could be, the lightness of heart which commits itself to God,
+who judgeth righteously, the glance of love that has no reserve of
+hatred, the infinite force that can afford to be gentle. Such a spirit
+had upheld Angel Halsey, but his widow looked in vain among the leaders
+of this band for a face that bespoke the same upholding. She soon
+perceived that there was among them a free-masonry of understanding, and
+that their mildness was assumed to serve the temporary purpose. By many
+a prayer she heard breathed, which was in truth, though not in form, a
+curse, she knew that in the souls of Halsey's successors there was no
+forgiveness, yet her heart went out in sympathy to men who were
+sacrificing their own sense of honour, holding in check their most
+delicious impulses of revenge, for the sake of being worthy shepherds to
+the weak.
+
+"Do you love them the less because they are not angels?" asked Elvira.
+"Have you forgiven?"
+
+Susannah shuddered at the intensity of the hard low tones, the passion
+in the word "love," the sneer in the word "forgive." Yet she knew that
+the rage against injustice which in youth had driven her forth upon this
+journey had, since the death of her child, changed into such fierce
+hatred of the persecutors that she could, except for very fear of
+herself, have taken upon her own soul the Danite's vow. In these days
+the pain of bodily suffering or heart-felt grief was as nothing compared
+with her agony when at times waves of this hatred passed over her heart.
+
+The two friends were walking together, pushing before them a small cart
+in which, on the top of the bundles of household goods, a wretched woman
+and her newborn child were lying, covered under a scanty tarpauling from
+the driving sleet. The mud splashed beneath their feet; Susannah had
+little breath or strength for speech. Elvira, more slightly made, in
+every way more fragile, had seemed to develop, with every new phase of
+suffering, more strength of muscle and hatred and love.
+
+They passed now two of the leaders. It was the custom for a certain
+number of these men to go forward and station themselves in pairs at
+intervals upon the road, cheering each group as it passed them, noting
+with careful eyes if any ill could be remedied by change of posture or
+exchange of burdens. One of them now, seeing the work to which Susannah
+had set herself, interfered. He was about sixty years of age, coarse in
+appearance, an elder whose wife and family Susannah knew by reputation.
+He and his fellows called a halt, looking for some man who might push
+the cart, but there was none within sight who was not already
+overburdened, nor was there a waggon that was not already overfilled
+with the sick and exhausted. The elder, whose name happened to be
+Darling, found in this particular instance reason to swerve from his
+position of guard. He left the post in charge of his fellow and pushed
+the cart. It was a habit with many of these leaders to seek to lighten
+the way by jocularities, and Susannah had before observed that, whether
+the jests arose with ease or effort from the heavy hearts of those who
+made them, a large proportion of the people were evidently cheered
+thereby. She could put aside her own tastes for the public good; she
+could even excuse when this rough comfort was offered to herself.
+Darling, labouring behind the cart, made light of the service he
+rendered.
+
+He said first that the newborn babe must be called after him, and when
+he learned its sex he gave permission to the ladies to decide between
+them which should share this honour.
+
+"Shall it be 'darling Susannah'?" he asked, making gentle his tone as he
+addressed the stately widow, "or shall it be 'Elvira darling'?" This
+time he turned his head with a broader smile toward Elvira's sharp
+little features.
+
+Susannah felt that her hypersensitive nerves could almost have called
+his smile a leer; but she looked at the man's broad face, whose lines
+told of no resources of thought, no great natural capacity for heroism,
+and yet were furrowed by the sharpness of this persecution. The face
+would have been fat had it not been half-starved. It was pale now under
+the ill-kempt hair, and the set purpose of helpfulness was stamped upon
+it. She took back the word "leer" out of mere respect. Darling had given
+away his shoes; he was walking barefoot; he had given away coat and vest
+also, and the rotund lines of his figure were unpleasantly obvious under
+the wet shirt, and yet Susannah knew and bowed to the fact that some
+sick man or little child was wrapped in the garments that were gone.
+
+But Elvira was expressing with hysterical warmth the same sentiments.
+
+"I guess I'll feel it an honour to have my name joined with yours. I
+haven't got the length of taking off my shoes yet."
+
+Darling began to sing one of the inspiriting Mormon hymns.
+
+    "When Joseph to Cumorah came."
+
+"Poor Joe!" Elvira spoke to the elder in a confidential whisper, "when
+he cheated over the bank I thought some fiend had put a ring in his
+nose, and was leading him out to dance, and that I should be able to sit
+and laugh. Now he's lying upon straw in the gaol. What will they do to
+him if they lynch him?"
+
+"Tear him limb from limb," whispered Darling, also under his breath. He
+was probably shrewd enough to know the force of Smith's suffering in
+stimulating the piety of the faithful, but truth, and grief concerning
+the truth, were in his words also. He sighed a big sincere sigh, and
+repeated sadly, "Tear him limb from limb, or burn him to death by a slow
+fire." Such atrocities, as practised upon criminal negroes, were not
+unknown in the locality, which gave the elder's words a graphic power,
+but Elvira's answer was wholly unexpected.
+
+"How droll!" she returned.
+
+The elder was annoyed. He had not refined susceptibilities which sought
+immediate relief from the dreadful pictures he had suggested, nor did he
+at all comprehend that her rippling smile was hysterical. "I don't see
+anything droll about it, sister," he said sulkily.
+
+"Don't you? Now, it all seems to me very droll--you splashing along
+there barefoot, why" (she drew back a little to get the better view,
+laughing excitedly), "you've no idea how ridiculous you look; and Mrs.
+Halsey stalking along like a dignified ghost, afraid that you and I will
+kiss one another if we take to whispering, and this woman dying here
+with her head resting on a sack of potatoes, and the impudent little
+person you've just christened intruding herself upon the world only to
+go out of it again, and all these fine people in Missouri rubbing their
+hands and thinking they have done such a noble deed. I think," she
+added, laughing more loudly, "that they are the drollest part of it
+all."
+
+"This nation will find that there's a sequel to it that they won't laugh
+at." These words of Darling came from some region underneath that of his
+ordinary conversation, as a man takes a dagger from under his cloak and
+lets it flash ere he hides it again. "The government of these United
+States that has laughed at our sufferings will rue the day."
+
+"Even your saying that is very droll, but I love you for it." Elvira
+lifted both her hands as if testifying to her own sincerity. "I love you
+for it."
+
+The elder thought it needful here to be again jocose. "Oh, come now, I
+am married."
+
+Elvira did not feel herself insulted. "These United States," she cried,
+"they cackle over the word 'freedom' like so many hens that have each of
+them laid an egg and go strutting and boasting while the housewife
+empties their nests. The housewife represents the natural course of
+events, and in this case her name is 'Mrs. Mobocracy.'"
+
+At other times, after a long period of silence, Elvira would burst forth
+in excited soliloquy audible to Susannah and others about her. On the
+last day when they were descending the hills to the Mississippi her
+increasing excitement culminated in a greater demonstration. The sun was
+shining, and a clear frost had hardened the roads. Elvira broke forth
+thus--
+
+"It is Joe Smith who is conducting this march. We say that he is lying
+in gaol," she laughed. "In gaol is he? Have they got him safe? But it
+was he who taught all these men to work together, one under the other,
+and none of them kicking; and it was he who taught these women and
+children to do as they are bid--a wonderful thing that in the land of
+the free. It was he who taught one and all of us to be kind to each
+other, to the poor and the sick and the young, to the very beasts. Do
+you remember that when they caught our prophet at Hiram and dragged him
+out to be beaten and insulted, they had first to take from his arms a
+sick motherless baby that he was sitting up all night to nurse? Do you
+remember how he gave commandment about the animals? how he said that any
+man striking a beast in anger was thrown so far back on his road to
+heaven?" She paused when she had thrown out this question, and the men
+and women within hearing answered in broken chorus, "Yes, blessed be the
+Lord; we do remember."
+
+"And who was it that taught us to give up the filthy Gentile habits of
+strong drink and tobacco?" (Again in the pause the chorus of
+thanksgiving to Heaven was heard.) "It was Joe Smith," Elvira cried more
+loudly. "And when the Gentiles thought that we would be scattered and
+separated and ruined, his spirit has gone like a banner before us.
+Twice they have taken our lands that we bought with our own money and
+cleared with our own hands, and the houses that we have built, and cast
+us out destitute, but we are not destroyed."
+
+The enthusiasm of the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to
+her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her
+small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down,
+but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a prophet, and a
+great prophet."
+
+And the people around her answered again, "Blessed be the name of the
+Lord."
+
+It was whispered about the camp that the spirit of prophecy had fallen
+upon Elvira Halsey.
+
+On the afternoon of that day they saw the ice that floated in large
+cakes on the breast of the Mississippi flash back the sunbeams to their
+straining eyes. The sight of the limits of the hostile State from which
+they were flying was a great joy to every one of them. Susannah felt her
+heart leap; Elvira, with the growing tendency to cling to her which she
+had displayed since their last meeting, cast her arms around her and
+sobbed for joy.
+
+After this blessed glimpse of the river they went down through the
+recesses of a low forest, the frost and the sunshine still inspiriting
+them. As they went, the melody of a hymn was taken up from one end of
+the caravan to the other by all those well enough to join in the song.
+It was a swinging triumphant air, and Susannah found herself uplifted
+for the first time since the days of her baptism upon the party spirit
+of the sect, and singing with them, although she could only catch the
+words of the refrain often repeated,
+
+    "Missouri,
+    In her lawless fury,
+    Without judge or jury,
+    Drove the Saints and spilt their blood."
+
+Again the mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As
+Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship,
+imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this
+motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of
+reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of
+her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. The
+true secret of human leadership is, perhaps, known only to the Divine
+mind, perhaps also to the Satanic. It would certainly seem that the men
+who chance upon the power and wield it, have often little understanding
+of the law by which they work, and their critics less.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+The Mississippi was filled with large cakes of floating ice. Another
+company which had gone out from Far West some weeks before was still
+encamped on the Missouri banks of the river. Yet other companies from
+Far West came up before the main body of the Saints with which Susannah
+had travelled was able to cross. The surrounding woods were cut down to
+make shanties; the surrounding country was scoured for food. In the
+intervening weeks, while they lay encamped on the banks, the last enemy
+to be vanquished in that region, the malarial fever, grappled with the
+sect and dealt deadly wounds. Illinois, shocked by the cruelty of her
+sister State, held out kind hands and fed the fugitives to some extent,
+and when April came, helped them to cross the river.
+
+Elvira had been ill in one of the women's sheds, now shrieking in hot
+delirium, now shaken with ague as if by a strong beast that worried its
+prey. When they at last crossed the river to the city of Quincy,
+Susannah was established with her charge, the one legacy of relationship
+Halsey had left her, in a meagre home with some of the Saints who
+already lived there.
+
+Within a few days Susannah went to the tithing office, which had been
+swiftly established for the relief of the destitute Saints, and asked
+for paper on which she could write a letter. It was her first chance,
+since leaving her last asylum, of writing the proposed letter to Ephraim
+Croom. Elder Darling was officiating. She fancied that he looked at her
+with rude curiosity.
+
+Until this moment she had presented so sad an exterior, had seemed so
+indifferent to all the ills of their common lot, that Darling and the
+other men who had dealings with her had stood not a little in awe. As
+outward physical details of suffering always appeal more largely to
+common sympathy than inward grief, the manner of her loss had set a
+temporary crown upon her head, to which the elders had knelt, refusing
+to admonish her because she took no part in their public services, or
+because, except for attention to the sick, she did not give much sign of
+social comradeship.
+
+Now when she asked for the paper, Darling felt that the ice was
+beginning to break, and gave what seemed to him genial encouragement.
+
+"First time that you've asked for anything but daily rations, Sister
+Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all
+things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous
+drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to--enjoy. Well now, I
+was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than
+welcome to such as there is."
+
+The stores indeed were scanty enough; food, cloth, household utensils, a
+little stationery, a large pile of devotional books, were arranged in
+meagre order in the shed used as a warehouse. Darling had as yet
+scarcely respectable clothes to wear, but Susannah was astonished only
+at the energy that had in a few days collected so much, at the order and
+patient kindliness which ruled in this poverty-stricken administration.
+Already those who could work paid into the common store, and those who
+had lost all had but to state their needs to have them supplied as well
+as might be.
+
+"One, two, three--will three sheets be enough, Sister Halsey? You've
+been hearing, I suppose, that Mr. Smith is going to be moved to the town
+of Boome, and that he is going to be allowed to get his letters now?
+He'd be real cheered to hear from you, although"--he added this with
+decent haste--"it will be a great grief to him to hear of your loss!"
+
+"Is he well?" she asked.
+
+"The State authorities are in a fine to-do about him, I suppose you
+know, sister, for they can't find a single charge to bring him to trial
+on. You bet the trial would have been on long ago if they'd had a
+single leg to stand on. Anything else that I can serve you with to-day?
+We've got some new women's shawls and hats come in. Won't you just step
+here and have a look at them? No? Well, next time; but there ain't one
+of our women as doesn't want one of them new bonnets."
+
+Susannah went out into the spring on the outskirts of the town. The
+birds were singing; everywhere the dandelions swelled out their happy
+tufted breasts to the sunshine; even a long worm that she noticed
+crawling lazily in the heat spoke to her of enjoyment of some sort. Her
+own heart leaped, and she thought it was in answer to the spring. She
+forgot the dire fates with which she had been grappling, forgot to hate
+and to grieve.
+
+In the small wooden room that she shared with Elvira, while the invalid
+slept, she wrote to Ephraim, telling him all that had befallen her. She
+confessed to Ephraim the passion of hatred which had long tormented her,
+but she added, "To-day I do not feel it; to-day, with the sweet voices
+of the birds everywhere in my ears, I feel that if I could be beside you
+again you could teach me to forgive as my husband forgave, for I do know
+to-day that in forgiveness alone is the true triumph, the only healing.
+I am more one with my husband's sect now than I ever was in heart and
+hope. I long to see it triumphant; I long to see its enemies abashed;
+but I will leave this people and come back to you, if you will have me,
+for with regard to their religious faith my life with them is a lie."
+
+The writing took so long that when she carried the letter again to the
+tithing office to be stamped and sent, the post-bag of that day had
+already gone. Later, when the office was closed to the public and Elder
+Darling was alone, he took up the letter which Susannah had brought and
+looked at it curiously. His eyes had caught the address. He was not sure
+that he would have put it in the bag even if it had been in time, and
+now it was clearly his duty to consider. His was a mind in which there
+was no place for platonic friendship, and Susannah was obviously a most
+desirable piece of property to the struggling Church. The Church had
+provided the paper for this letter, must needs provide the stamp; he was
+officially responsible to the Church. The elder had been an honest man
+according to the average notions of honesty until within the last weeks,
+when stress of circumstance had made him reconsider, not for himself but
+for others, more than one rule of life, and obtain larger latitude. The
+building up of the Church in her present sore strait was surely an end
+to override small scruples. He acted now as an official, as a priest,
+when, after a good many painful qualms of conscience, he opened the
+letter. After having read its contents, he became convinced that it was
+for the good of Susannah's own soul that it should not go.
+
+The ground about Quincy had been drained; the town was comparatively
+healthy; in a few days more some two thousand of the fugitives felt
+again the pulse of life in their veins. Then they looked abroad and
+clasped every man the hand of his neighbour, and said "Thanks be to
+God," and even embraced one another in the joy of relief. History often
+shows how exuberant is the joy of human nature at escape, and that the
+impulse of joy is almost one with the impulse of affection. At the
+abatement of the London plague we see Britons kiss each other in the
+streets, and at the relief of besieged towns, in our own day, staid
+persons have caressed one another, unmindful of what they did. So it was
+now with the members of this driven sect. The spirit of joy and a closer
+bond of affection went infectiously through the gathering Church. Upon
+the first Sunday they met together in the open air, and sang words that
+they verily believed had been written in particular prophecy for
+themselves at this very hour.
+
+    "If it had not been the Lord that was on our side."
+
+The psalm rose from every throat with the swelling tide of joy.
+
+     "If it had not been the Lord that was on our side when men rose up
+     against us."
+
+Susannah, advancing, a little belated, to the rural preaching which was
+held in a dip of the plain, heard the lusty chant of irrepressible
+gladness rising to the blue heavens, and quickened her steps. In spite
+of herself she was carried into song by the enthusiasm which seemed to
+dart like a flame from the assembled multitude and enveloped her.
+
+     "Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us as a prey to their
+     teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the
+     fowler: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the
+     name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth."
+
+While she was exalted by the song she saw the face of her friend the
+Danite for the first time since the night on which they had ridden so
+far together. He was standing now upon the outskirts of the crowd as one
+who had newly come from a solitary journey. When he met Susannah's eye
+his solitary look passed into one of lofty and intense comradeship. He
+ran to her and embraced her, and emptied an inner pocket of a purse of
+money which he thrust eagerly into her possession.
+
+"I have killed one of them," he said, speaking eagerly, as a child tells
+of some exploit. "His pockets were fat with money, and it is yours."
+
+"See!" He took the fragment of linen upon which the stain of Halsey's
+blood had turned dark with time, and showed her a new and brighter stain
+upon its edges.
+
+All around them were men and women, who now, for the first time since
+the hour of some terrible parting, spied kindred or comrades. By a
+common impulse these moved toward one another, and there was an
+interlude in the service for sobs of joy and frantic embracings, and
+many men and women clasped one another who could claim no kindred, and
+none forbade, for tears of mutual love were in all eyes.
+
+After that, in the streets or in chance meetings in the houses, the
+remembrance of this festival of rapturous comradeship gave a new
+standard to the manners of private life. The Saints had, as it were,
+passed from death unto life; former things had passed away; the praises
+of God were ever upon their lips; they entered with joy into a kingdom
+of love which they doubted not God had ordained for his elect; many a
+command of Scripture became illumined with a new practical meaning.
+"Greet _all_ the brethren with a holy kiss." "Greet ye one another with
+a kiss of charity."
+
+Susannah was not much abroad, but she saw the new customs inaugurated.
+Believing that they must be transient, knowing, too, that the fierce
+undercurrent that they expressed must have outlet, and was not of that
+range of emotions which had to do with the common relationships of life,
+she felt no shock of offended sentiment. But in a short space of time,
+as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature
+of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds. This grieved her
+because of the sacred memory of her husband's efforts for these people,
+and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous
+personal desire that they should acquit themselves well. Just here she
+found occupation; she gathered the young girls about her in a temporary
+school, and set herself to soothe and calm the excitement of the women.
+The work was intended to last but a few weeks, until Ephraim's answer
+came.
+
+To the unspeakable joy of his followers, Joseph Smith appeared suddenly
+in Quincy. It appeared to be true, as Darling said, that the Missouri
+authorities could in fact find no charge on which to try him.
+
+Smith, with his brother Hyrum and their fellows, had suffered severely,
+but later their confinement had been more easy, and the news of the
+triumphant gathering of his people, together with the excitement of the
+escape, had induced in Smith a mood which spurned past failures with a
+foot that sped to a new goal. The acclamation, the sincere and touching
+joy, with which Smith was received by men and women and children, were
+enough to raise any man in his own esteem, and to set free the ambition
+which had been perhaps drooping in confinement.
+
+Smith had not been in Quincy twenty-four hours before he mastered the
+situation there in all its details. He promptly sent out a decree
+against the new doctrine of what he called "lax manners." He preached a
+great sermon in the open air that night. "A man shall kiss his own wife
+and daughters and no other women," said Smith. The elders who had
+preached from St. Paul's texts on the subject were accused of error and
+called upon to recant. Smith commanded that the women should work and
+the children should study, and he publicly pronounced Susannah to be a
+fitting model for the women and a fitting teacher for the young.
+Susannah had not as yet met Smith face to face when she found herself
+made, as it were, an object of licensed admiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+It was that same evening, after Smith's commendation of Susannah, that
+Darling decided to lay the destruction of her letter before the prophet,
+hoping for approval.
+
+Smith was looking over Darling's accounts in the tithing office, giving
+voluminous and minute directions. The May night had closed in. The men
+were in a corner of the large shed in which the stores were kept, a
+corner fenced off for an office by a low wooden partition. The candle
+flickered on the table between them.
+
+The business side of Smith's soul was uppermost. He had power to keep in
+mind a huge number of details, and to classify them, and he estimated
+the relative importance of the classes as no other man would have
+estimated it.
+
+Darling interrupted before Smith's interest in business began to wane.
+He prefaced his communication concerning Susannah by speaking of the
+much shepherding needed by the sheep. Some, he said, had done worse than
+be lax in manners; some had presumed to have revelations; some had
+doubted the faith.
+
+Here Darling paused, feeling sure of rousing Smith to the mood he
+desired.
+
+At the mention of revelations Smith's soul took a turn, like a ball on
+its axis; the plain speech that he had been using about business and
+stores and accounts changed into phraseology of a Scriptural cast, and
+the shrewd glance of his blue eye into a more distraught and distant
+look. Heretofore, as Darling well knew, heresy had been a greater evil
+in his eyes than any other; but Smith had come now out of long months of
+prison; days and nights in which a horrible death had faced him closely
+had not passed over this particular soul of his dreams without moulding
+it. It is noticed by all his historians that after this period he spoke
+little "by revelation," in comparison with his former full habit in this
+respect. At Darling's abrupt speech he sighed heavily. He looked, not at
+Darling as before, but at some vague object beyond him.
+
+"There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy," he said
+wearily, and then, gathering himself up with more pompous unction, he
+asked of the surprised Darling, "Who art thou that judgest another?"
+
+Darling had grown fatter since he came to Quincy; the lines of haggard
+care were still upon his face, but were modified by dimples of good
+cheer. Much taken aback by the unexpected rebuff, he rubbed his head.
+
+"But, Mr. Smith, if they are all going to be allowed to think whatever
+they like--"
+
+The obvious difficulty of church government under these conditions
+confronted the nobler impulse of humility in the visionary's mind. "When
+have I said, Brother Darling, that they all should think what they like?
+But, behold, I say unto thee, it is not with the Lord to save with many
+or with few, but by whom he will send."
+
+This was a little vague as to grammar and as to sense, but Darling had
+not the ability to criticise. He only perceived that to secure
+commendation he must be tactful in the setting forth of his act.
+
+"It was in the case of Sister Susannah Halsey--" he began again
+apologetically.
+
+A more eager look came into Smith's eyes; still a third phase of his
+character there was, the soul of his personal affections, and this began
+to merge now with his religious self. "Hath she prophesied? Hath any
+revelation been granted to her?"
+
+If Darling had not understood the prophetical vein, he did understand a
+certain vibration in this tone. "Ha!" thought he, "if the prophet ain't
+a bit soft on her himself I'm out." He had lowered his eyes, and now he
+said evasively, "It is our sister Elvira on whom the spirit of prophecy
+has fallen; you will have heard how she gave praise concerning you
+before the Saints upon the road and was moved to dance before the Lord."
+
+Smith saw through the evasion, but by shrewd reading of the
+sanctimonious face, saw also the inward suspicion as clearly as if
+Darling had spoken it. His tone and manner betrayed him no more.
+
+"The head of our sister Elvira is not always set firmly on her
+shoulders," he remarked, "but I am glad if the Lord has given her
+grace."
+
+"I've been hoping that he'd give grace to our sister Susannah, for she's
+been writing a letter to say as how she was without faith and wanting to
+leave us."
+
+Smith answered him now only with a cool silence that puzzled his coarser
+understanding.
+
+"'Twas in our first days here, when a good many of the women were
+flighty, and Elvira Halsey, she was ill enough to have worked the
+patience out of any one as they work the milk out of butter, and Sister
+Susannah came with a letter. She gave it to me unsealed."
+
+"Was she without wax to seal it?" interrupted Smith in a casual tone.
+Darling could not know that the thought of such poverty wrung Smith's
+heart.
+
+"Waal, I dunno" (which was a lie). "Mebbe she had no wax--I didn't think
+of that, but anyhow she gave me the letter. 'Twas too late for the mail;
+'twas too heavy for one stamp. An' I didn't like to tell her, poor
+thing, that we'd mighty little to spend on stamps. So after she'd gone I
+just had a look to see who it was to."
+
+"The address would be on the outside?" Smith rose, hat in hand, as if to
+depart, but fixed his eyes on the candle till Darling should have done.
+
+"The name gave me very little hint as to whether the matter was worth
+the two stamps, so I just had a glance inside. Thought it might be but a
+line asking money of her friends, which, under the sad circumstances, of
+course I knew you'd rather the Church would supply."
+
+This drew the first spark of the approval he was expecting. "Certainly,
+certainly, the widows and the orphans of those who have perished for the
+truth must ever be our most tender care."
+
+"Exactly so, prophet; I knew that would be your opinion; so when I saw
+that our sister had felt drove to asking for money from some fellow--I
+guess there must have been some sweethearting between him and her before
+she married Halsey. She said in this letter that she'd go to him if he'd
+send her cash. She said as how she thought the religion of the
+Latter-Day Saints was a lie; but of course I could see it was not her
+right judgment, that she was awful lonesome."
+
+"It was taking a great liberty, Mr. Darling." Smith tapped his stick
+upon the floor. He was far more angry than he showed, for policy had
+laid a soft hand of reminder on his shoulder. "Our sister, Mrs. Halsey,
+is not--" he coughed slightly, and sought by prophetical phrases to
+explain that Susannah was not upon the level of Darling and his
+kind--"is not, as it would be said in the Scriptures, among those who
+deck themselves with crisping pins or are busybodies, but she is as that
+lady to whom John wrote (and the letter is preserved unto the
+edification of the Church unto this day); for it was revealed unto me in
+the beginning that she was the elect sister, and to sit as one who
+judges--as one who judges Israel." He was just going to add in the flow
+of his phrases "upon twelve thrones," but the words died because even he
+perceived the lack of sense.
+
+Darling grew testy. "Waal, I dunno, but it seems to me that if she'd
+gone off by now to be Mrs. Ephraim Croom somewheres in the East there
+wouldn't be much more elect sister about her."
+
+"The gentleman whose name you have just been mentioning, Mr. Darling, is
+the lady's uncle. I was reared alongside them, and I know." He knew that
+he fibbed between uncle and cousin, but the slip was so slight and the
+end so worthy--to silence Darling.
+
+"'Twas no uncle that she wrote that 'ere letter to," said Darling hotly.
+He stuck out his legs and leant back in his chair, the picture of
+offence.
+
+"You are mistaken concerning the meaning of the letter, Brother Darling,
+and it appears to me that in casting your eyes upon it you have gone
+beyond what is written concerning the duty of an elder; but as to your
+duty in destroying it--considering that our sister asked for money,
+which it is our duty and privilege to supply--But I promised Emmar to be
+back soon. I will consult the Lord, Brother Darling, and have a word
+with you in the morning."
+
+Smith tramped with dignity over the long wooden floor of the darkened
+shed and let himself out with decisive clatter of the latch.
+
+To his right lay the wooden town with twinkling lights, to his left the
+black prairie, and above the crystal vast a moonless night, so clear
+that the upward glance almost saw the perspective between nearer and
+farther stars innumerable.
+
+This man was at all times possessed with the sense of otherness, sense
+of a presence around and above. He was no sooner beneath the stars than
+he hung his head as if some one saw him. With shame and pain written in
+the attitude of his hulking figure, he skulked out into the black
+fields.
+
+Later that night, a lad, not of the Mormon brotherhood, making his way
+home in the dark to the town of Quincy, a little afraid of the dark, as
+lads are apt to be, was terrified by hearing a voice in the darkness, by
+dimly descrying a man's figure prostrate upon the ground. The lad shrank
+back to a recess of the snake fence. There, trembling, he listened.
+
+The voice in the hoarse whisper of intensity repeated, "Give me--this
+woman--give--give." The breathing, like command rather than prayer, set
+the words grating on the air again and again. "This woman--this
+woman--give! give! give!"
+
+The cause of the lad's terror was a strange conviction that the writhing
+creature on the earth was certainly conversing with something not of
+earth, whether God, or angel, or devil he did not ask. He was
+encompassed by the dreadful belief that the other saw and heard what he
+could not.
+
+The prostrate man clenched his fists and struck the black ground on
+which he lay. There was an intense silence, and then again the grating
+breath of a hoarse throat that lay among the grass blades babbled forth
+a multitude of confessions and fiercely-worded supplications which the
+little lad could neither understand nor remember.
+
+There was a sudden change of attitude and voice. The lad saw that the
+man on the grass sat up, and as if he had received an answer, spoke in
+reply, not now in wailing supplication, but in quick whispered argument.
+The lad cowered with a fresh thrill of ghostly terror which burned the
+mad words into his memory.
+
+"The loss would be to thee of the fairest of thine handmaids, and to her
+of her own soul, and to me--" but here the words of irritable contention
+failed in deep choking sobs. Then, to the lad's perfect dismay, the
+black figure bounded to its feet and the arms were flung about in the
+darkness as if wrestling with an unseen enemy. Now, being desperate, the
+lad darted forth from his nook; passing in tip-toe rush at the back of
+this struggling figure, he sped home in his gust of fear, and, with the
+fantastic secrecy of youth, did not tell what he had heard and seen till
+years had come and gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+The May morning was wreathing itself with opening flowers to meet the
+first hour of sunlight when Susannah was startled by hearing that the
+prophet inquired for her. There was in the house where she lived an
+empty chamber, unfurnished because of poverty; it was in this that the
+prophet, who demanded a private audience, awaited her.
+
+So vexed was she at the public advertisement which he had made of her,
+that she forgot the bereavement she had suffered since she last saw him;
+but when she looked up she saw that Smith's face wore signs of emotion
+that he was not trying to conceal.
+
+At first he made an attempt at some unctuous form of address, an effort
+at formality, a mechanical tribute to habit. Failing to finish his
+phrase, he stood before her, not as the lauded leader, not as the
+interesting martyr, but claiming recognition merely as a man, a large,
+coarse man feeling his own coarseness in her presence, a sinful man
+feeling his own sinfulness, but at the same time a man with a warm
+heart, which was now so beating with emotions of shame and pity and glad
+recognition that at first he could not speak, could not raise his eyes
+to hers until the warmth of his feeling rid him of self-consciousness.
+
+Susannah had not expected to awake this emotion. She desired nothing
+less than condolence; and yet she was touched by seeing his huge
+strength broken down for the moment by her appearing. When he spoke his
+voice was hoarse.
+
+"I--I told him--it was my earnest command to him not to go where there
+was danger."
+
+Halsey's name was not spoken, but all through that interview Smith
+appeared to be haunted by his presence. "He was the best man amongst
+us," he said.
+
+"My husband is gone." Susannah hoped by the reticence of her tone to
+ward off further excess of sympathy. "I am no longer bound to your
+Church, Mr. Smith. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I
+hold myself free."
+
+He faced her frankly, but with a glance of searching pain. "It must seem
+a rather poor trade I've chosen if there ain't no truth in it."
+
+"But I did not accuse you of not believing it, Mr. Smith."
+
+"Do you think I do?"
+
+She remembered the day that he had first shown her his peep-stone with
+simple, childlike importance. How young they had both been! The sunshine
+on the hill, the voice of the golden woodpecker, the scent of the fallen
+beech leaves, came back to her. A decade of terrible years had passed
+over them both, and he stood seeking her faith just as simply.
+
+"I have tried very hard to understand you, Mr. Smith, but I do not. I
+think you must believe most of what you claim for yourself, if not all.
+If you had made your story up for the love of power you wouldn't always
+be wanting the people to get a better education; you would, as they say
+of the Roman Catholic priests, want to keep the people ignorant."
+
+"Go on," he said. She found that he was looking at her with intense
+sadness, but there was not a shadow of evasion in the eager look that
+met her steadily.
+
+She went on, looking gravely into his face. "I do not believe that your
+story was false, Mr. Smith, but it seems to me that you must suspect now
+that your visions and the gold plates were hallucination, not reality."
+She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the
+head, not of the heart.
+
+He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful
+and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or
+not. Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment
+bar.
+
+"Where is your heart? Didn't you see how that man Angel--angel of purity
+if ever one walked in human form--kissed every day the ground you
+walked upon? And you did not love him. The child--you thought you cared
+for the child: I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like
+the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his
+grave and died there. There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if
+you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they
+had taken and killed us over there in Missouri." He added, "If you were
+another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little
+shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?"
+
+Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent
+truth. Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had
+said that love, not knowledge, was needed. She had not loved Halsey and
+his child as she might have loved.
+
+Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character
+because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child;
+now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about
+hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her,
+and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had
+demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not
+with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken
+tears.
+
+"And you," she said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us
+all freely, but why?" The imperious need of truth awoke again. "Why have
+you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly
+threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?" She
+repeated the question. "If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when
+there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could
+survive, or that you would escape death?"
+
+She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to
+realise what she had of respect and friendship for this man.
+
+"I hain't got the courage most people think I have," he replied sadly;
+"I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into
+to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more
+afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them
+there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire. I don't say
+that it would be the same for any of you. I used to preach that it
+would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be
+killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in
+preaching that way; but as for me, I've seen and I've heard."
+
+He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor. It would have
+been a relief to her if he had 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
+self-appointed task. So cheerful and energetic was she that she appeared
+to her pupils and acquaintance as a radiant being, and received the most
+genuine honour and affection from the Mormon settlement in Quincy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+With the jubilant Saints at Quincy the prophet could not remain long. He
+journeyed up the banks of the Mississippi. Here and there communities of
+his people welcomed him with touching joy; their numbers and their
+faithfulness must have raised his heart. He came at last to a poor,
+sickly locality, around which the great river took a majestic sweep, and
+here the prophet saw what no one else had seen--a site of great beauty
+and advantage. The inhabitants were dying of malarial fever. Smith
+bought their lands at a low price and drained them. Thus arose the
+beautiful city of Nauvoo.
+
+In the Illinois State Legislature two parties were nearly equal in
+strength, and both coveted the Mormon vote. When Smith applied for the
+city charter, for charters also for a university and a force of militia
+to be called "The Nauvoo Legion," they were granted, and worded to his
+will.
+
+White limestone, found in great abundance near the surface of the earth,
+served as material for the public buildings and the better houses.
+Wooden houses, and even log huts, were washed with white lime. On three
+sides of the town the air of the beautiful river blew fresh and cool
+from its rippling tide; the surrounding land was fertile. Fortune
+certainly smiled upon the sect that had borne itself so sturdily under
+persecution. The prophet's laws had much to do with the prosperity;
+neither strong drink nor tobacco were admitted within the city limit;
+cleanliness and thrift were enforced.
+
+The Saints in settlement in the town of Quincy and other places remained
+while they could obtain lucrative employment and thus transmit the
+larger tithes for the building up of their future home; but from the
+poorer settlements artisans and farmers flocked to Nauvoo. Thither also
+the missionaries scattered in the eastern States, in England, and in
+further Europe sent the bands of converts who had been kept waiting till
+a city of refuge was founded. It was not long, not many months, before
+fifteen thousand people were hurrying up and down the broad streets of
+the new city.
+
+During the rise of Nauvoo, Emma Smith was living at Quincy in a small
+house with her three children. She was Susannah's best neighbour. The
+prophet's enormous activity was fully occupied with the new city and the
+care of the scattered Church, so that he could not visit his wife often.
+Each time he came he sent for Susannah to listen with Emma to the
+triumphant accounts that he gave of his present successes. He was all
+aglow with the resurrection of his Church, tender towards its renewed
+enthusiasm for himself, compassionate more than ever for the pains it
+had endured; fixed in purpose to establish his suffering and loyal
+people in such a manner as might reward them for all that they had
+undergone. His spirit of revenge against the Gentiles, and especially
+against the perverts from his own sect who had sought to trample it
+down, was also increased; the prayers of the Hebrew Psalmist against the
+enemies of Israel were constantly upon his lips. More than once when at
+Quincy he preached to the little flock there with great effect from the
+blessings and cursings conditionally delivered to Israel in the Book of
+Deuteronomy, arguing that evils of a very material kind were to befall
+apostates, and blessings of a like kind were to be given to the faithful
+in the new city.
+
+"It is not true," Susannah said to him defiantly. "There is no
+righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly
+wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing."
+
+"Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not
+teach a true religion?" As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of
+the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon
+Emma's centre table.
+
+In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word "apostate."
+Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community,
+the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the
+furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against
+perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely
+spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them. Personally she
+had no fear. The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was
+increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked
+exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny. Yet it was but natural, she
+admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed
+were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his
+liberty. The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.
+
+Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own
+small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations
+which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he
+were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn
+importance of these things. He said to her that her judgment would
+always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her
+in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if
+they had lived. He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship
+between herself and Emma. He spoke also of Emma's worthiness, and of her
+devotion to himself.
+
+His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken
+of her in the first years. Susannah perceived a change analogous to
+that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself. In the
+beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving
+herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith's words and ways. Now she
+was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children,
+and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of
+remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith's vagaries as unworthy of
+attention. She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and
+appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private
+she grumbled at his personal extravagance. At both these changes
+Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour
+of Ephraim's constancy, they seemed an ill omen. It was because she was
+absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret
+case that she paid less attention to the prophet's remarks.
+
+Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling
+at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon
+settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing
+and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their
+manner.
+
+She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister
+parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly
+and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new
+city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira's hand. Susannah was very
+angry.
+
+Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial
+fever leaves behind it. Susannah had need to support her, as well as
+herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford. She had
+had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to
+health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady's
+words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had
+slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the
+insane.
+
+Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and
+his new satellite. She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that
+her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast
+was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly
+but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's
+stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in
+sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the
+period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were
+there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray
+and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the
+proposition they had made.
+
+But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she
+could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending
+towards that obedience, Elvira, curious to see the strangers, entered.
+
+Elvira raised a coquettish finger and told Smith that he was a very
+naughty man. This was a new freak in her conduct toward the prophet.
+Light and frivolous as she had become, the title of prophetess, coveted
+among Mormon women, had been conferred upon her because some strange
+power of divination governed her freaks.
+
+"A very naughty man." With her delicate prettiness, decked in what
+gewgaws she could afford, Elvira stood shaking her forefinger. "You
+don't know why? Oh, fie! you know very well, naughty, naughty creature."
+
+Smith had the air of some unwieldy animal trying to adapt itself to the
+unexpected gambols of a light one. The first supposition was that Elvira
+had in some way learnt the object of his mission, so he began to declare
+it with a reproachful look at Susannah. "Our sister Halsey," he said,
+"does not wish you to wear jewels and beautiful clothes, and yet it is
+said in the Scripture that the clothing of ladies should be even of
+wrought gold."
+
+"Naughty creature," she cried, "don't quote the Scriptures to me. I am
+not the lady you are thinking about. I am not the lady that you come
+here to see."
+
+So intent they all were upon her and her affairs that this statement was
+somewhat puzzling. The only sign that Smith gave that he gathered any
+sense out of the vivacious nonsense she was pleased to talk was that he
+precipitated his explanation.
+
+The brother by his side was very rich; it had been foretold him in a
+vision of the night that when he had professed the Mormon faith a pretty
+wife would be his reward. Smith had had it borne in upon his mind that
+Elvira was the lady designed by the vision. "For," said he unctuously;
+"the Holy Scripture saith that the solitary shall be set in families."
+
+Elvira laughed. "How very amusing," she cried. "And into what family
+shall our sister Susannah be set?"
+
+Smith frowned. "Our sister Susannah," he said, "is not solitary, but is
+surrounded by her spiritual children, to whom she imparts her own
+learning and goodness, to the great benefit of the Church; and I cannot
+but think, Sister Elvira"--the severity in his voice was growing--"that
+you are a great care to her, for she toils hard to give you even such
+poor raiment as you are now wearing, not wishing to accept of the bounty
+of the Church, while she would be an example of industry to others."
+
+The hard truth of this statement, combined with the commanding voice and
+manner he now assumed, controlled Elvira. She stood for some minutes
+meekly contemplating her senile and smirking suitor. Susannah protested
+and warned her, but in caprice, as sudden as it was unexpected, Elvira
+decided to comply with the prophet's request without further persuasion
+or command.
+
+When left alone with Susannah she only shrugged her shoulders and said,
+"I saw that I should lose my soul if I didn't; the prophet was so
+determined. Why should we bicker and consider, and why should I fly
+round and round, like a bird round the green eyes of a cat, or try to
+escape half a dozen times like a mouse when it is once caught, when I
+know from the beginning that Joe Smith will curse me if I don't do his
+will?"
+
+"You are quite mistaken. He was not determined; he told me that he only
+wished to lay the matter before you and let you decide for yourself."
+
+Elvira let her white eyelids droop until but a narrow slit of the dark
+eye was visible. "La! child," she said.
+
+"And you cannot seriously think that Smith's curse, even if he were
+barbarous enough to denounce you, could make the slightest difference to
+your soul's salvation. You often talk that way, but you cannot seriously
+think it, Elvira."
+
+But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion's
+mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible
+streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun's Mill.
+
+"Don't speak of it," cried Elvira with a shudder. "Don't you know that
+Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death?
+Didn't Angel Halsey die to teach us that? Weren't we baptized into it by
+being dipped in blood?"
+
+She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals "dipped in
+blood," "dipped in blood."
+
+Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this
+nefarious marriage. The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her
+indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could
+seek. In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate
+entreaty. With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by
+Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.
+
+No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.
+
+After Elvira's departure Susannah began to save out of her little
+income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern
+journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could
+obtain employment. She had little heart for the object of her saving;
+she might, she knew, be going to ignominy and starvation, for with the
+stigma of Mormonism upon her, she felt that it was unlikely that she
+would be received with credit in any town where she was friendless and
+unknown.
+
+Although the community prospered greatly, Smith did not again interfere
+to increase Susannah's school fees. Emma began to talk largely of the
+splendour of Nauvoo, reading from her husband's letters of the Nauvoo
+House, a huge hotel, which was being rapidly and grandly built for the
+perpetual occupation of himself and family and the entertainment of all
+such as the Church of the Saints should delight to honour.
+
+Susannah found it hard to understand why Emma was not taken to Nauvoo
+even before the great house was built for her reception. It was indeed
+commonly reported among the Gentiles at this time that the prophet had
+secretly espoused other wives; but a malignant report of this nature,
+together with accusations of drunkenness and rank dishonesty, had
+persistently followed the sect from its beginning, and, as far as
+Susannah knew, were now, as before, totally untrue. This special report,
+however, reached Emma in an hour of depression, and she came to Susannah
+for sympathy, shaken with grief and indignation.
+
+"What does it mean that they always say that of him when the one thing
+that he's done has been to excommunicate any of the brethren that taught
+any such thing? And there's just been an awful row on in the Council of
+Nauvoo against Sydney Rigdon and some pamphlet he's written on a
+doctrine he calls 'Spiritual Wives,' and Joseph has risen up and cast
+him out, even though he was his best friend."
+
+The reason of the calumny seemed to Susannah clear enough; it was a
+natural one for low-minded politicians who hated Smith to formulate, and
+the religious world outside thought they were doing God service by
+believing any ill of a blasphemer; but this charge was an old one, and
+she probed further to-day for the real cause of Emma's excitement. She
+was first given a letter in which Smith told of Rigdon's
+excommunication.
+
+"Rigdon's doctrine," wrote Smith, "is a vile one because it is held by
+the whole sect of Perfectionists which are now scattered through the
+Churches of the eastern States, and is a proof that the glory of the
+Lord is departed from them, for they say that a man may be married to
+one wife in an earthly manner, and she who is to be his in a spiritual
+and eternal manner may be another woman, and this is vile; therefore
+I've cast out Sydney Rigdon and called him apostate. But it seems to me
+in this matter and in the perpetual slander of the Gentiles it may be
+that it is being shown to us, even as things were shown by outward signs
+at times to the ancient prophets, that there is somewhat concerning the
+existing form of marriage that it would be well to reconsider, for I
+perceive that the more my revelations cause a difference to be set
+between our people and the Gentiles, the more shall we be bound closely
+together, which unity is undoubtedly of the Lord."
+
+Susannah always found it difficult to gather much information from the
+prophet's vague and incoherent style. "Has he ever written anything else
+about this affair of Rigdon's?" she asked.
+
+Then it transpired that another letter had that day arrived, giving
+another and more graphic account of Rigdon's rebellion and overthrow,
+after which Joseph inconsistently wrote:
+
+"Yet with regard to the matter of his heresy it remains undoubtedly true
+for men who are called to some great and special work one woman may be
+needed as a bride upon earth and another woman may be called as a
+spiritual bride" (this word "bride" was crossed out, though left legible
+enough, and "guide" written above it) "to lead him into higher and
+heavenly places prepared of the Lord for this purpose."
+
+After perusing this passage carefully, and with inward laughter at its
+inconsistency, she gave the letter back, endeavouring to render some
+help.
+
+"Have you not observed that your husband's mind is very peculiar? When
+any idea is forcibly suggested to him, all his thoughts seem to eddy
+round it until he thinks that the whole world is to be revolutionised by
+it, and then when diverted to something else he forgets all about it
+like a child, and never thinks of it again perhaps for years."
+
+Emma, unable to comprehend the analysis, drew back offended.
+
+"Joseph has a great deal finer mind than any person I know." The last
+words were levelled with a nettled glance at Susannah.
+
+On Emma's behalf Susannah confidently hoped that the prophet would
+forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories
+which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which
+he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on
+his visionary notions--never in thought, for he did not seem able to
+exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice--and
+Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear
+feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier around the
+fold, and in consequence draw its votaries closer together.
+
+Soon after this Emma was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She
+could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered
+career.
+
+For a few days Susannah worked on still with a sense of mission towards
+her pupils, but of necessity also, for her work meant daily bread. It
+produced little more than that.
+
+But at Nauvoo new schools in emulation of the State schools of other
+towns had been set up, and now a teacher with certificates of the latest
+style of education arrived in the Mormon settlement at Quincy,
+commissioned by the prophet to gather all the Mormon youth there into a
+new school under the direction of the Church. Susannah's mission and
+her means of livelihood were alike gone.
+
+The change was made. It was not until Susannah had passed the first
+desolate day of her dethronement that Darling came to her, sent with
+profuse apologies from the prophet and the explanation that the chief
+motive of the change had been to relieve her from labour now that the
+Church was in a position to offer her adequate support. The message was
+accompanied by many compliments upon her work and her fidelity, and a
+document officially signed, in which it was set forth that the part and
+lot which would have pertained to Halsey in the Holy City was considered
+as hers; rooms and entertainment at the Nauvoo House were offered. It
+was handsomely done. Smith in his poverty had been no niggard, and of
+his wealth he was lavish. The documents explained what rooms, size and
+position given, should be hers, what furniture at her disposal, what
+ailment, what allowance from the Treasury for clothing and charity. The
+scale was magnificent. Darling was also commissioned to offer her a
+ticket on one of the river boats to Nauvoo, and his own escort. He urged
+her instant acceptance. Darling had been promoted from his post at
+Quincy to that of postmaster at Nauvoo, and he could not delay his
+journey.
+
+Susannah sat long into the night and counted her little hoard, and
+figured to herself what the long-eastward journey, then a matter of
+great expense, would cost. Since Elvira left her she had with all her
+efforts saved hardly fifty dollars. No course lay open to her but to go
+first to Nauvoo, and there compound with Smith for a sum of money to be
+given in return for the relinquishment of all further claim upon the
+Church.
+
+
+
+
+_Book III._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In a suite in the pretentious Nauvoo House Susannah found herself
+established.
+
+She stood at her windows and looked east and west upon the fair white
+city, and more immediately upon the broad public square in which
+well-dressed people and handsome equipages were constantly seen. In this
+square a man called Bennet drilled the Nauvoo Legion in the cool of the
+evenings. This man had served in the regular army and had a native
+genius for soldiery. Smith, alive always to the educational importance
+of shows, now provided money lavishly for uniforms, horses, and
+accoutrements, and the Nauvoo Legion formed a much grander spectacle
+than any body of State militia.
+
+Twice a day under Susannah's windows Smith's carriage drew up, a pair of
+fine gray horses carrying the prophet to and fro upon the affairs of
+Church and State. When he took Emma with him Susannah observed that she
+was always richly attired, and the other members of the Mormon
+hierarchy resident in Nauvoo, "bishops," "elders," "apostles,"
+"prophets," passed constantly in and out of the house, positively
+shining in broadcloth and silken hats, their wives and daughters also in
+brilliant array.
+
+Externally the success appeared to be complete, and beyond even the
+visionary's most glorious dreams. In the whole of the city no one was
+poor, no one ignorant of such knowledge as school-books could afford, no
+one drunken. Every one was uplifted and animated beyond their ordinary
+capacity for effort and enjoyment by this material fulfilment of
+prophecy and the more glorious future hope which it involved. Susannah
+was not well rested after her journey when Emma descended upon her with
+lavish gifts of silks and fine feathers. Emma, grown patronising with
+prosperity, always plain and maternal, displayed her gifts and argued
+for their acceptance with broad satisfaction.
+
+"Joseph says now that the Lord has given us freedom as touching wealth
+and plenty, it looks real mean, when your husband gave all he had to the
+Church in her tribulation, for you to be wearing plain clothes when
+you're riding out with us. What will the folks say? Joseph says it looks
+to him as if you were real offended at being left so long up to Quincy
+when he was only waiting to get your rooms finished."
+
+Carried away, as was only natural, by her husband's doctrine that the
+era of indulgence was ordained and not to be rejected, there was
+temporary deterioration in the fibre of Emma's character.
+
+Susannah would gladly have walked out and seen the beauty of the city
+and its surroundings alone, but she did not think it kind or polite to
+resist the good-natured importunity of her friends. She was invited to
+drive with Smith to a grand review of the Nauvoo Legion which was to
+take place outside the town; then, finding that Emma and the children
+were to occupy another carriage, she made objection. It ended in
+Susannah being driven alone in a very fine carriage. Smith, resplendent
+in uniform and seated upon a very fine charger, rode in his capacity of
+Commander-in-Chief. Several other men whom she had known first in
+homespun, and latterly in cloth, were also riding in bedizened uniforms.
+The scene was very perplexing to Susannah. Elvira, with great display of
+dress and equipage, was not far from her, and waved her hand with
+patronising encouragement. The coach in which were Emma and her children
+presented also a very smart appearance. All the town drove to the scene
+of the review in what splendour they could afford.
+
+Susannah was greatly occupied in looking from face to face, striving, to
+recognise some of her husband's friends of earlier days. She fully
+expected to see Smith or some of his friends fall from their saddles,
+as they could be little accustomed to manoeuvring such light-footed
+steeds, but she was forced to admit that Smith rode well and his
+officers kept their seats. She had so much to observe, so much to think
+about, she hardly noticed that Smith rode constantly by her carriage,
+pointing out the beauties of the road.
+
+When they stopped at the place of parade, many of the gentlemen in
+uniform approached her, and as this was her first appearance in public,
+Smith performed the introductions. Among them was the Rev. General John
+Bennet, a man who had "knave" written on his countenance, but who
+appeared to have duped Smith, for, as Lieutenant-General of the forces,
+he was actually in command. Her old friend the Danite also came, older
+than when she had seen him last by the hardships of an arduous
+missionary journey. He passed now by the name of "Apostle Heber."
+Susannah was so glad to be able to inquire concerning his welfare, so
+curious to speak with him again and judge of his development, that her
+manner gained the appearance of animation.
+
+After some time Susannah perceived that she was, as it were, holding
+court. In their carriages the other women sat comparatively neglected.
+It was in vain that she tried to put a quick end to this curious and
+undesirable state of things. Smith continued to bring to her side all
+those whom he delighted to honour.
+
+And this was only one of several fêtes which took place in rapid
+succession, to all of which Susannah was by some persuasion taken. At
+each she found herself an object of public attention. She was told that
+this occurred because she was a stranger, or out of respect to her
+husband's memory, and she placed more trust at first in these statements
+than a less modest or more worldly-wise woman would have done.
+
+Soon her credulity ceased. She despised her own beauty because it was
+made a gazing stock. An article in the Nauvoo newspaper, officially
+inspired, spoke of her as a "Venus in appearance and an angel at heart."
+She was elsewhere publicly mentioned as the "Venus of Nauvoo."
+
+It was indeed a strange experience, a strange time and place for the
+social _début_ of this beautiful woman. Smith had calculated well when
+in her youth he had told her that her beauty would not diminish but
+increase until her prime was past, but she very modestly inferred that
+she might have passed, as heretofore, without much notice, if an
+agitation concerning her had not urged to admiration a band of men who
+were fast growing luxurious and pleasure-loving, and she knew that Smith
+was the author of that agitation.
+
+It appeared to Susannah more dignified to ignore than to upbraid. She
+secretly laughed, she secretly cried with vexation, but she desired to
+leave the place without betraying her recognition of the homage offered.
+
+She sought to discuss her plan for departure with Emma, but Emma's
+manner had changed to her. It was not jealousy so much as constraint
+that she showed, as if secretly persuaded into unusual reticence.
+Susannah then asked Smith for such a sum of money as he should consider
+to be a right acknowledgment of the property Halsey had given to the
+Church. At this Smith looked greatly aggrieved, and withdrew muttering
+that he would consider her request.
+
+The only sign of this consideration which she immediately received was a
+gift of showily-bound books, and a rich shawl which he had fetched from
+New York.
+
+Susannah's career as the queen of Nauvoo society came to a swift end,
+for she determinedly retired into seclusion. This was not because the
+men who paid court to her were all ignoble. Among the officers of the
+Church or of the Legion there were not few who were wholesome and
+friendly companions, or who, like her early Danite friend, the Apostle
+Heber, had frank modest eyes, incapable of any enthusiasms that were not
+religious. But in her long companionship with Angel Halsey Susannah had
+had her soul deep dyed in a delicate hue of Quaker sentiment. She could
+not admit for a moment that conscious display of personal charm was
+consonant with dignity.
+
+She again sought friendly intercourse with Emma.
+
+"There ain't no use in opposing the Lord," said Emma excitedly. "If the
+Lord, as Joseph says, has given you beauty and wants to set you to be a
+star, or a Venus; or whatever he calls it, in Nauvoo, I don't see that
+there's any good your talking of going away. I guess the Lord'll have
+his own way."
+
+Susannah remembered how before her marriage the bigness of the authority
+quoted had confused her as to the truth of the message. "Ah! Emma,
+Emma," she cried, taking the fat, comfortable hand in her own, "if in
+the first days I had offered a little more humility, a little more love,
+to those to whom I owed duty, I should never have believed what you told
+me about the 'Lord's way,' but I have learned by hard experience, and I
+do not believe you now, Emma." She spoke the name in quicker tone, as if
+recalling her companion to common sense. "Emma," she repeated the name
+with all the tenderness she could muster, "don't you know that it is
+better for me to go away--better for you, better for _us all_?"
+
+But Emma was obstinately evasive. She seemed almost like one possessed
+by a hardened spirit, not her own. On the afternoon of that same day she
+bustled cheerfully into Susannah's room asking the loan of what money
+she had to meet a temporary call.
+
+Susannah never had the slightest reason to suspect Emma's good faith and
+good nature. She gave her money without a thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The parlour which Joseph Smith had provided for Susannah was large and
+high. On its Brussels carpet immense vases of flowers and peacock's
+feathers sprawled; stiff and gaudy furniture was ranged round the
+painted walls; stiff window curtains fell from stiff borders of
+tasteless upholstery. Susannah, long ignorant of anything but deal and
+rag carpets, knew hardly more than Smith how to criticise, and her taste
+was only above his in the fact that she did not admire.
+
+Smith came to reason with the rebellious woman.
+
+Susannah no sooner saw him than she knew that he had come braced to try
+the conclusion with her. He sat himself before her in silence. His
+waistcoat was white, his neck-cloth white, his collar starched and high;
+his thick light hair was carefully oiled according to the fashion of the
+day, and brushed with curling locks upon the sides of the brow. At this
+critical hour Susannah observed him more narrowly than ever before. His
+smooth-shaven face, in spite of all his prosperity, was not so stout now
+as she had seen it in more troublous years; the accentuated arch of the
+eyebrows was more distinct, the beak line of the nose cut more finely.
+She noted certain lines of thickness about the nape of the neck and the
+jaw which in former years had always spoken to her of the
+self-indulgence of which she now accused him; yet she could not see that
+they were more accentuated. She had been schooling her heart to remember
+that Smith had been her husband's friend; Angel Halsey had loved him,
+had daily prayed for his faults and failings, and thanked God for his
+every virtue and success. Through the medium of these memories now
+Susannah looked upon him with the clearness of insight which the more
+divine attitude of mind will always give, the insight which penetrates
+through the evil and is focussed only on the good.
+
+The prophet's breath came quickly, making his words a little thick.
+"Emmar tells me that you have some thoughts of wanting to leave us."
+
+"You know that very well, for I have told you so myself. I want you to
+give me money for my journey. If I can I will repay it, as you well
+know; if not, I will take it instead of all this finery you offer."
+
+He had folded a newspaper in his hand, and now he unfolded it. She was
+surprised to see that his hands trembled slightly as he did so, for she
+had seen him act in many a tragic scene with iron nerve.
+
+"'Tain't often that the Gentile newspapers have a word of justice to
+say about us," he observed. "This is a number of the St. Louis Atlas. It
+seems there's one man on it can speak the truth." He gave forth the name
+of the newspaper as if expecting her to be duly impressed by its
+importance, and she looked at the outspread sheet amazed.
+
+He went on, "There's an article here entitled, 'The City of Nauvoo. The
+Holy City. The City of Joseph.' I'd like to read it to you if you don't
+object, Sister Halsey."
+
+The pronunciation of the last title seemed to inflate him; his hands
+ceased to tremble. A flicker of amusement lighted the gravity of
+Susannah's mind.
+
+Joseph read, "'The city is laid out in streets of convenient width,
+along which are built good houses, and around every good-sized house are
+grounds and gardens. It is incorporated by charter, and contains the
+best institutions of the latest civilisation.'" He gave this the
+emphasis of pause. "Is that true. Sister Halsey, or is it not?"
+
+She smiled as upon a child. "Yes, Mr. Smith, it is true."
+
+"'Most conspicuous among the buildings of the Holy City is the temple
+built of white stone upon the hill-top. It is intended as a shrine in
+the western wilderness whereat all nations of the earth may worship, for
+on March 1, 1841, the prophet gave it as an ordinance that people of all
+sects and religions should live and worship in the City if they would,
+and that any person guilty of ridiculing or otherwise deprecating
+another in consequence of his religion should be imprisoned.' Is that
+true?" Smith inquired again. His questions came in the tone of a pompous
+refrain.
+
+"Except in the case of those who have joined you and gone back from your
+doctrine," she said, but not thinking of herself.
+
+He read on: "'Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Smith has attended first to the
+education of his people. The president of the Nauvoo University is
+Professor James Kelly, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and a ripe
+scholar; the professor of English literature is Professor Orson Pratte,
+a man of pure mind and high order of ability, who without early
+advantages has had to educate himself amid great difficulties and has
+achieved learning. The professor of languages is Professor Orson
+Spencer, graduate of Union College, New York, and of the Baptist
+theological seminary of that city. No expense has been spared upon
+school buildings for the youth of both sexes, and the curriculum is
+good.' Is that true?"
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+He read on: "'The population is made up chiefly from the labouring
+classes of the United States and the manufacturing districts of England.
+They have been grossly misunderstood and shamefully libelled. They are
+at least quite as honest as the rest of us, in this part of the world or
+any other. Ardent spirits as a drink; are not in use among them;
+tobacco is a weed which they almost universally despise. There is not an
+oath to be heard in the city; everywhere the people are cheerful and
+polite; there is not a lounger in the streets. Industry is insisted
+upon, and with the hum of industry the voice of innocent merriment is
+everywhere heard. Now, as to their morality, if you should throw cold
+water upon melted iron, the scene would be terrific because the contrast
+would be so great; so it is with the Saints; if a small portion of
+wickedness happens among them, the contrast between the spirit of
+holiness, and the spirit of darkness is so great that it makes a great
+up-stir and excitement. In other communities the same amount of crime
+would hardly be noticed.'" Again he asked, "Sister Halsey, does this
+evidence of an impartial witness coincide with your observation?"
+
+"Of the people it is undoubtedly true," she said. There was a
+reservation in her mind concerning certain leaders in the Church, but
+she did not make it in words.
+
+He read on: "'With a shrewd head like that of the prophet to direct,
+with a spiritual power like his to say "do" and it is done, what wonder
+that this thrifty and virtuous people should have made Nauvoo that which
+its name denotes--the Beautiful City, the home of peace and joy.'"
+
+He laid down the newspaper upon the marble-topped table, his large hand
+outspread upon it. "My sister, why do you wish to leave this beautiful
+city? It is a place where each may have home and part and lot in its
+delights, but to you _all_ its wealth and power and beauty is offered.
+Did I not say unto you, when as a beautiful damsel you gave up home and
+kindred for the sake of the Church, that you should be as a queen among
+its elect women, riding as in a carriage drawn by white horses and
+receiving the elect from among the nations?"
+
+The recollection of the prophecy which he had delivered concerning her
+upon the desolate autumn road at Fayette brought with it another
+recollection--that of her parting with Ephraim the same morning--so
+vividly that her eyes filled with tears. Yet she marvelled too, with
+inquisitive recognition of the miracle, that the words of the visionary,
+then a beggar, should have been so nearly fulfilled.
+
+"It is quite true, Mr. Smith, and very marvellous that what you promised
+me should almost be literally fulfilled. We have come to it, as you also
+foretold, by a path most terrible, and now we arrive at the
+consummation. We live in a palace, and at its doors pilgrims from
+England and all parts of Europe are arriving every day, and the richest
+of gowns, the grandest of carriages, and the whitest of horses are truly
+at my disposal. But there is one discrepancy between your vision and the
+fact--I will not wear the silk robes, nor welcome the pilgrims with the
+assurance that they have here reached the City of God. I will not
+because I cannot. I refuse to accept from the hand of God such paltry
+things as money and display, or even the honest affluence of our people,
+as compensation for the fire and blood through which we have waded. If
+there be a God who is the shepherd of those who seek him, this is not
+the sort of table that he spreads, this is not the cup which he causes
+to run over"--she had begun lightly, but her voice became more earnest.
+"Mr. Smith, we have walked through the shadow of death together; if you
+would be exalted in the presence of your enemies, have done with your
+childish delight in such toys."
+
+Smith moved uneasily on his velvet-covered chair, and it, being of a
+rather cheap sort, creaked under his bulk.
+
+"What says it in the end of the Book of Job, Sister Halsey? and what
+compensation did the Lord give for the sore temptations with which he
+had allowed the devil to tempt his servant? As I read, it was fourteen
+thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and--"
+
+She gave him credit for knowing the passage by heart; she had the
+rudeness to interrupt. She rose and stood before him. All the long
+latent defiance which her heart had treasured against him found vent in
+her tone, "Very well, Mr. Smith, if that satisfied Job, it will not
+satisfy me."
+
+Smith, cast out of all his shrewd calculations as to what would win
+this woman, fell back upon the inner genius of that priestcraft which so
+often surpassed his conscious intelligence.
+
+"_What would satisfy you?_" It was a simple question, and he asked it
+with overwhelming force. "By the hand of trust and affection which your
+husband gave me; by the memory of the beautiful babe that he brought
+first to me for my blessing (and I laid my hand on its little warm head
+and blessed it); by these I claim the right to ask, Sister Halsey, what
+is it that in Nauvoo or in any other city would satisfy you?"
+
+She was humiliated in her own eyes. Alas! she had strong evidence that
+Ephraim's affection, on which she had staked all earthly hope of
+happiness, had in some way failed. Now under Smith's eye all courage to
+hold the unrealised ideal was lost; as the fixed stars twinkle, so her
+faith went out for the moment of his interrogation. Her head sank in a
+shame she could not confess.
+
+While she hesitated he was looking at her shrewdly. "You know not what.
+Shall I tell you? There is but one thing, and that is love--the love
+that works, for those who are in need. Work for the needy is love to God
+and man, my sister."
+
+He paused, looking at her with a glow of enthusiasm. Whatever he might
+be to others, this man, coarse in his outer nature, but liable always to
+eruptions of the sensitive inward soul of the visionary, was in this
+woman's presence often merely what she compelled him to be. If she had
+known that this was the secret of his power over her, the spell might
+have been less.
+
+"Is it not true, Sister Susannah?" he asked.
+
+She gave the admission mechanically.
+
+He went on, "I don't take it at all hard that you should feel that we
+are none of us up to you, but feel as you do that we are beneath you,
+for there isn't a lady in the place that's equal to you in delicate ways
+and sense and a mind to study books; but it seems to me that that's a
+reason why you should love us, Sister Halsey. There is work for you to
+do; we need your guiding hand. You say to me that I am content with
+horses and sumptuous living and fine raiment; and knowest thou not that
+there is upon my soul a great burden, even the burden of this great
+people, to go in and out before them and guide them aright? I have need
+of thy counsel, my sister; there's that which at this time is greatly
+agitating my own mind and the minds of our bishops and apostles, Sister
+Halsey, and it is of such nature that we cannot proclaim it openly until
+we know the mind of the Lord. On all other matters we have accepted the
+teaching of the Scriptures. For, behold, we have now the priesthood of
+Aaron in our midst, and the priesthood of Melchizedek, and the rites of
+the temple, save only the spilling of the blood of bulls and goats,
+which has been done away with by the Gospel. We have gone back to the
+first things, as is well known to you, Sister Susannah, and even here in
+the wilderness we have set up our theocracy, and for its civil law we
+have sought where alone such law can be found, in the command given unto
+the children of Israel before they desired a king, just as for all
+spiritual law we have accepted the commands given to the apostles in the
+new dispensation, taking them as they were, without whittling them away
+as a boy whittles a stick with a knife, as all those sects which will
+not hear our voice have done. Now, Sister Susannah, is this true?" He
+put his head a little on one side and looked at her with his eyes
+partially closed.
+
+"You need not take very long to explain that you worship the letter of
+the Scriptures, for I know it already, Mr. Smith."
+
+But he was in full tide, and went on, "When the Book says, 'Heal the
+sick,' we don't say that that means something else, but we set about and
+heal 'em." He slapped his knee with the palm of his hand. "When it says,
+'Cast out devils,' we don't stare round like the other sects and say,
+'There ain't no devils,' but we cast 'em out; and in the same way, when
+the Book says that the priesthood of Aaron and the priesthood after the
+order of Melchizedek shall be serving always in the church and in the
+temple, then we say, 'Amen, so shall it be'; and the same way with
+regard to tithing, for the Lord's tithes are recognised among us, and
+the first-fruits, and the Sabbath day, and all such ordinances, no
+picking and choosing as others."
+
+Then he explained to her again, as in Kirtland, that he was in doubt
+concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched
+the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully
+convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church
+(in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared)
+that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the
+Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews
+and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the
+apostles, and yet they had not preached against this as an evil.
+
+"They did not preach against slavery," said Susannah.
+
+"They did not," he said, "and I would say parenthetically, my sister,
+that it may be that our views on that subject, coming from the northern
+States as you and I have done, have not been according to the mind of
+the Lord. I would have no man a slave because of misfortune, but if a
+man proved himself unfit to rule himself, I'm not sure about his being
+free."
+
+"Do you intend to revive slavery in our own race? Will your own people
+when they fail in business be sold, with their wives and children, as
+in the Old Testament?"
+
+"I can't see but that it would be a deal less mean to arrange it that
+way than to bring a race of free blacks from their own country and make
+every child they have a slave because he happens to be a nigger." She
+remarked that his mild blue eye lit up with the true flash of the
+indignation of contemplative justice. "There's one thing certain,"
+continued he, "in my Church of the Latter-Day Saints no man shall be a
+slave to his brother because he happens to have a black skin, for, as
+the Scripture says, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin?'"
+
+Surrounded as they were by the atmosphere of slavery, there was the
+resonance of true heroism, of true insight into the right, in his tone,
+but the reason he gave--could it be possible that he thought that the
+text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice? It was
+obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry
+flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy
+and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence of common men.
+
+He went on, "But, anyhow, it isn't the institootion of slavery that's
+come up for me to decide just here and now. Since we have been blessed
+with peace and prosperity, the female converts that our missionaries
+have been making all over the world (whom they have kept back from
+coming to us, letting no unmarried female come whilst the fires of
+persecution were passing over us) have arrived in great numbers, and the
+question is, Sister Susannah, how are we to steady 'em?"
+
+What seemed so impossible to achieve in a pioneer State had in Nauvoo
+actually been achieved--the women were in excess of the men. He had, in
+sober truth, a social problem to solve, and the responsibility rested
+alone upon him. Brotherly love having been inculcated, the manners of
+the Saints were cheerful and familiar, more familiar, he said, than he
+desired; but after all that they had endured he was fain to lay upon
+them no greater burden than need be. He appealed to her, asking if on
+his first release from imprisonment he had not been strict in his
+injunctions.
+
+"But now," he said, "who am I that I should be able to take care of all
+the young women that the Lord is sending to us from all parts of the
+world? or am I to deny to them the privilege of coming to live among the
+Lord's people? Am I to say to them that unless they have learning and
+wisdom and are perfect they shall not come? I guess that if it had been
+required of me to be perfect before I came to seek salvation, I wouldn't
+have come at all. But it's just like this--here they are! and they are
+nothing but poor ignorant working girls from England and Ireland and all
+parts of Europe. And am I to make nunneries to put them into?"
+
+He confessed with some delicacy of language and words of bitter regret
+that there had been of late some cases in Nauvoo such as were common
+enough, alas! in Gentile society, but whose occurrence among the Saints
+had caused excitement. Joseph Smith paced Susannah's room; his
+harassment and distress on behalf of his people were either deeply felt
+or well feigned, and Susannah had no doubt that his feeling was true,
+that phase of him being for the time uppermost. When he came to sit down
+beside her again, it was to sketch the misery to men and women and
+children which existed in Gentile society from this evil, which he
+affirmed to run riot through the warp and woof of so-called orthodox
+communities.
+
+Her ignorance of the world was so great that she assumed this accusation
+to be of the same stuff as the anathemas he constantly cast against the
+integrity of the orthodox clergy. The point that she grasped was that he
+believed the thing that he said. She had at first assumed that should he
+propose to institute polygamy she would know then, once for all, that he
+was a villain; but now this test deserted her. He was meditating this
+step, and it seemed that his arguments, if the facts on which he based
+them were admitted, had some value.
+
+"There's that for one thing, Sister Susannah," Smith went on in a broken
+voice; "it has been a mean sort of thing to have to tell you, but it
+had to be said, and now there's another thing to be considered. Among
+the Gentiles who is it that has the most children? Is it your man that's
+high up in the ranks of society, who has money enough to give them a
+good education, to feed and clothe 'em? or is it your poor man, whose
+children run over one another like little pigs in a sty, and he caring
+nothing for them, and they have rickety bones and are half starved and
+grow up to be idle and steal? I have noticed that a good man is apt to
+have good children, and a clever man is apt to have clever children, and
+a worthless man is apt to have worthless children. Ain't that so? And
+what sort of children do we want the most of? Well, in this way we
+wouldn't let your worthless fellow have any wife at all until he had
+brought forth fruit meet for repentance, and your common man only one;
+but I don't see but that it would be a real benefit to the State if your
+good, all-round man, as would be apt to have pious and clever children,
+had two or three or four families agrowing up to be an honour to him and
+to the Church, if it ain't against the command of the Lord; and in Holy
+Writ the Lord himself says to Solomon that he would have given him as
+many wives as he wanted, barring them being Gentiles."
+
+"I will not argue about the Bible; you and I interpret it very
+differently," she cried. "Your social argument might be well enough if
+it were not that your good man when he had more than one wife _would
+cease to be a good man_"--her voice was vibrating with faith--"and his
+children would therefore have the poorest chance from inheritance or
+training."
+
+He was again pacing, but paused in his ponderous walk, struck by a flaw
+in his argument which he had not before seen. "But if it were commanded
+by the Lord, Sister Susannah?"
+
+"God does not command this wickedness. What you command in his name is
+at your own peril, Mr. Smith."
+
+He paused before her, asking with reflective curiosity, "Why are you so
+sure that it would be wickedness, sister?"
+
+She had not arguments at command; she held fast to her assurance with
+the same dogged unreasoning faith with which Ephraim's mother had of old
+held her belief that this Smith must be an arch-villain; she had put the
+whole power of her volitionary nature upon the side of faith in the
+ideal marriage, although she was painfully conscious that she had come
+across no particle of evidence for the existence of such a state. Out of
+faith, out of mere instinct of heart, which had not worked itself out in
+intelligent thought, she gave her unhesitating judgment. "I say that it
+would be wicked because I _feel_ that it would be wicked; and any good
+woman," she paused and looked him straight in the eyes, "and any good
+man, would know its wickedness without arguments, and without weighing
+all possible considerations."
+
+His eyes fell before hers. He looked not angry, but grieved. As for
+Susannah, in the heat of her indignation she did not know that her own
+long effort to resist the unreasoning acceptance of cut-and-dried
+doctrines and any dogmatic insistance upon opinion had here failed.
+
+Smith stood for some moments before her, and her fire cooled. He sighed
+at her dictum. Then he said gently, "But your judgment in this matter
+has great weight with me, sister, and if I accept it you will perceive
+that you are indeed the elect lady, and that by living in the light of
+your countenance I shall obtain peace."
+
+It was difficult for her not to suppose that her influence was
+beneficial. She thought at the moment that when she had left this place
+she might still correspond with Smith if he desired it. If it was part
+of his eccentricity to be willing to listen to her, why should she not
+be willing to speak, and thus keep his madness under control?
+
+Smith, regarding her, caught the gracious look upon her face which had
+opposed to him so often only a mask of reserve. His imaginative hopes
+were always ready to magnify by many dimensions the smallest fact which
+favoured them. His unsteady mind was fired by the presumption of some
+triumph.
+
+"Have not I, even the prophet of this great people, waited with great
+patience? As the apostle saith, 'Let patience have her perfect work.'"
+
+Susannah started and wondered.
+
+"For behold I did not desire that our dear brother, Angel Halsey, should
+go into the forefront of the battle, nor would I trouble the first grief
+of thy widowhood, but behold I have waited."
+
+"For what?" Her question came sharply. His tone had changed her mood
+suddenly; a memory flashed on her of the ill-written letter which Emma
+had shown her of the phrases concerning the spiritual "bride" or "guide"
+who, even if all licence were denied to humbler folk, was to be a
+prophet's special perquisite. "What have you been waiting for, Mr.
+Smith?
+
+"Nay, but I have waited, sister, until, having eyes, you should see, and
+ears, you should hear, till you should understand that, going in and out
+before this great people, it is necessary for me to seek wisdom in
+counsel, and, above all, of a woman who hath a finer sense than man. And
+it has been revealed to me, sister, that this may only be if thou
+shouldst give the counsels of thy mind and the smile of thy beauty to me
+alone and to none other, for that which is divided is not to be accepted
+for the building up of the Church."
+
+"You would have me believe that you have waited many years with the
+virtue of patience before you say this? Understand yourself better. It
+was not patience; it was fear. You have known perfectly well always that
+I would never have listened to such a proposal for a moment. It has been
+fear and prudence that have hitherto kept you silent. What is it that
+has made you speak now?"
+
+With sharp decisive tones she chid him as children are chidden in anger,
+but childish as he often was, he had yet other elements in his
+character; his blue eyes gave an answering flash that was ominous; the
+droop of his attitude stiffened.
+
+"That which is ordained by the Lord is ordained, sister, and it causeth
+me grief to know that this revelation, which I told thee many years
+since, is yet to be received of thee as a grievous thing,
+nevertheless--"
+
+"Nevertheless," she repeated in a mocking tone, as one weary of
+foolishness, "what nevertheless? Let us talk on some better subject, Mr.
+Smith, and after this be kind enough to have no dreams or revelations
+about me. Dream of your Church, if you like. I cannot hinder your
+people's credulity, and I hope that you will continue, as you have
+begun, to lead them in the main by righteous paths. And have your dreams
+and visions about yourself, if you must, for I sometimes think that you
+cannot be much madder than you are now, but be kind enough to leave me
+out of them, for I am going away."
+
+She had now made him very angry. He was standing with flushed face,
+quivering with uncertain impulses of rising wrath, yet he still
+struggled for self-control.
+
+"Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that you should make a mock of
+that which is sacred"--he gave a gasp here of stifled anger, and there
+was a perceptible note of wounded affection beside the louder one of
+offended vanity--"of that which is above all sacred," he stuttered, "it
+is not meet--meet--to mock--to mock." The veins on his forehead were
+standing out and growing purple.
+
+She had often heard of Joseph Smith's power of rage, before which all
+the Saints quailed. She saw it now for the first time.
+
+She rose up, trying now a tone of gentle severity. "I spoke lightly
+because your words appeared to me childish and silly, but the more in
+earnest you were, Mr. Smith, the more need there is you should have done
+with a thought that could lead to no good. I am no elect lady. Why do
+you deceive yourself? I have told you before that I do not even believe
+in your religion."
+
+As she spoke she became more and more amazed at the thought of what his
+self-deception must have been, for in his ever-shifting mind he knew her
+infidelity perfectly, and yet had persuaded himself that she would
+accept some fantastic position as prophetess-in-chief.
+
+"How mad you are," she said pityingly, "to know a thing and yet to
+pretend to yourself you do not know it. Go and get your supper, Mr.
+Smith. Emma will be waiting to give it to you. And when you have
+thought quietly over what I have said, you are quite clever enough to
+see that my way of looking at it is more sensible than yours."
+
+She had perhaps supposed that the mention of the domestic supper would
+be punitive rather than soothing, but she was not prepared to find that
+she had displayed scarlet to the blood-shot eyes of a bull.
+
+"Woman," his voice, deep and hoarse, was like thunder about her ears,
+"woman, is it not enough that the Lord has spoken?"
+
+She saw by his purple face and parched lip, by the hard shudder that
+went through his frame, that his fury was stronger than he. She quailed
+inwardly.
+
+"It is not enough for me that you say the Lord has spoken."
+
+His lips worked as if in the effort to form anathemas his dry throat
+refused to utter. Then, regaining his loud hoarse speech, with a choking
+noise he lifted his hand in a gesture of sacerdotal menace.
+
+"Woman, it is the last time. Choose ye this day between blessing and
+cursing, for the Lord shall send the cursing until thou be destroyed and
+perish quickly, because of the wickedness of thy doings whereby thou
+hast forsaken me."
+
+She cried in answering excitement, "I choose your curse rather than your
+blessing under the conditions you propose. You are mad; go and calm
+yourself."
+
+Then, having exhausted her physical courage in this last defiance, she
+went into her inner room, locking the door, leaving him in the manifest
+suffering of an almost unendurable rage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+That night Susannah packed her possessions in the smallest possible
+compass. The money she had lent to Emma would be sufficient for the
+journey to Carthage, which was the nearest Gentile town, and thither she
+was determined to go without an hour's delay, ready now to work or beg
+her way on the journey farther eastward.
+
+As soon as the business of the next day was fairly started she went to
+the suite of rooms inhabited by the Smiths, confident that Joseph's
+excess of fury had been transient. Emma was surrounded by her children,
+to whom she had just given breakfast. The prophet was about to descend
+to his business office. They both received Susannah with moderate
+kindness.
+
+The March sun shone in through the large windows upon the garish
+furniture of the apartment, upon Emma's gay attire, and upon the shining
+faces of the three children, who stood gazing upward at Susannah, quick,
+as children always are, to perceive signs of suppressed excitement.
+
+Susannah explained that she had determined to go to Carthage that day,
+where she hoped soon to find some party of travellers in whose escort
+she could travel farther; she hoped that it would be quite convenient
+for Emma to return the money that morning.
+
+Smith gazed at Susannah intently, but only for a few moments. It seemed
+that his mood had changed entirely, that he was now too much absorbed in
+the business of the day, whatever it might be, to care whether she went
+or stayed. He left them, saying that he would send money to Emma as soon
+as he could, that the trifling debt might be paid.
+
+Money flowed in such easy streams through the hands of the leading men
+of Nauvoo, that Susannah supposed that a messenger with the required
+amount would come up the stairs in a few minutes. She sat with Emma in
+this expectation.
+
+"You are offended with me for going?" she asked, for Emma's mask of
+indifference was worn obviously.
+
+"You wish to destroy your soul," said Emma.
+
+"Ah, but you know, you have long known, that I do not believe that
+salvation in this world or the next depends on the rites of Mr. Smith's
+Church."
+
+"If I told this child that he would be dashed to pieces if he walked out
+of the window, and he did not believe me, would that save him?"
+
+Emma made this inquiry with triumphant scorn; then she rose and began to
+attend to the wants of her children in a bustling manner.
+
+Susannah sighed and smiled. "I have at least the right to reject your
+faith at my own peril, for there is not in the wide world, as far as I
+know, man or woman who cares whether I save my soul or not."
+
+"And whose fault?" cried Emma, coarse now in her discomposure. "If you
+are so stuck-up that you think you can read your books and look down on
+us all, just because you are a beauty and the gentlemen bow down to you,
+'tisn't likely that you'd have any friends acting that way. You can't
+even behave civil to the gentlemen when they offer you the best that's
+going."
+
+It was evident that some version of Smith's interviews with her had been
+given to his wife. Susannah wondered how much truth, how much fiction,
+had been in the relation. It did not matter much to her now, since she
+had resolved to go at once. The whole of her life with that troublous
+sect seemed to be dropping from her like a dream.
+
+Leaving word that she would receive the money on her return or else call
+at Smith's office for it when she was ready, she went down into the
+cheerful noise of the street and bargained with a man who had horses and
+vehicles for hire. Having arranged that he should come for her at noon,
+she went about to make the few farewells she felt to be desirable.
+
+Darling was now postmaster of Nauvoo and one of the first presidency. To
+him she went first. She shrank from him because of his coarseness and
+the jocular admiration which he sometimes had the audacity to express
+for her, but she could not forget how assiduous his kindness had been in
+the days of Elvira's illness. She found him sitting, his heels on the
+upper part of a chimney-piece with a fireless grate, reading the
+Millenial Star. The hot April sun, streaming through the windows of his
+office, had caused him to take off his coat, which was no longer
+thread-bare. His shirt sleeves were fine enough and white; the high hat
+that was pushed far on the back of his head was highly polished.
+Opulence, self-indulgence, good-nature, and a certain element of
+fanatical fire mingled in the atmosphere of the postmaster's office, and
+made it somewhat turgid.
+
+When Darling heard Susannah's errand he became serious enough. An
+apoplectic sort of breathlessness came over him, expressing a degree of
+interest which she could not understand. He settled his hat more firmly
+upon his head. "Does the prophet know?"
+
+"He knows. I have said good-bye to him and to Mrs. Smith. It is sad to
+part with friends that I have known for so many years."
+
+"And the prophet's going to let you go, is he?"
+
+Darling, clumsy at all times, in this speech conveyed to Susannah the
+first faint suspicion that Smith might dream of detaining her by force.
+
+Darling's youngest daughter, who had been an affectionate pupil to
+Susannah at Quincy, waylaid her as she came out, and clasped her about
+the waist with the ardour of an indulged child. She was a blithesome
+girl of about fourteen.
+
+"I heard you tell father that you are going away. Is it true?" she asked
+impetuously.
+
+Susannah tried to release herself from the embrace. "Yes, it is true.
+Never mind, you like your new teacher, you know, just as well as you
+used to like me."
+
+"I just guess I don't," cried the child defiantly. "But anyhow, if you
+are going away, I'm going to tell you something."
+
+Whether the childish love of telling a secret, the girlish love of
+mischief, or a dawning sense of womanly responsibility was uppermost, it
+would be hard to tell. There, in the open square, while worthy Saints
+hurried to and fro on the pavement beside them, while horses jangled
+their harness and drivers shouted and exchanged their morning greetings,
+Darling's youngest daughter drew Susannah's head downward and hastily
+whispered to her the fate of her letters to Ephraim Croom.
+
+"I know, for one day since we came here I heard father talking to the
+prophet. He said you'd written lately while you were at Quincy, and all
+your letters had been burned. Now that's the truth; and I said to myself
+'twas a sin and a shame, and that you ought to know. Now don't go and
+tell tales of me, or father will be mad--at least, as mad as he ever can
+be with _me_." A toss of the pretty head accompanied these words, a
+flash of conscious power in the bright eyes, the spoilt child knowing
+that her father was in her toils now, as truly as any future lover would
+ever be. The school bell was ringing. The girl, her bag of books hanging
+from her arm, ran with the crowd of belated children.
+
+Susannah walked on, almost stunned at first by the throb of intense
+anger that came with this surprise. Then the anger was suddenly
+superseded, hidden and crushed down by a rush of joy. Ephraim had not
+neglected her; Ephraim had given her up for dead; but she had no reason
+to suppose that he was dead, no reason to doubt his faithfulness.
+Susannah trod the common street in love with motion as some happy
+woodland creature treads the dells in the hour of dawn and spring.
+
+When Elvira looked up to see Susannah enter her gate she saw her friend
+transfigured in a glow of returning youth and hope. Elvira looked at her
+timidly; this Susannah she had never seen before. Elvira's husband was
+not present. The interior of the house was fantastic almost as its
+mistress, but sultry with luxury.
+
+"Well now, you think you are going," said Elvira. "Who'd have thought
+it? And only last week General Bennet said to the prophet that if he'd
+marry you to him he'd send to New York for diamonds both for you and
+Emma Smith. He said he'd get a thousand dollars' worth of diamonds
+apiece for each of you; but Mr. Darling said that you ought to be
+married to Mr. Heber, who has just been elected an apostle, because--"
+She stopped suddenly, nodding her head. "You know why--blood is blood,
+and we have seen it run in rivers, but we don't mention it here in
+Nauvoo."
+
+Elvira set the French heel of her slipper in the centre of a rose upon
+her carpet and spun round upon it till her flounces stood out.
+
+    "We don't mention it here in Nauvoo."
+
+She sang as if it were the refrain to a song.
+
+Susannah felt from within her shield of new delight an immense pity.
+Here again was a revelation of the coarse and frivolous talk that went
+on at the church meetings, and Elvira was privy to it through that old
+fool, her husband. How could she endure him!
+
+"O Elvira, in the last few days I have realised as I did not before that
+riches are making fools of these men. How glad I am that my husband died
+before he knew that this was to be the reward of his lifework and his
+prayers!"
+
+Elvira stopped dancing. The mystical side of her character now, as
+ever, came forward suddenly in the midst of her other interests. The
+sunshine was bright in the gaudy room. A tiny spaniel, which Elvira's
+senile slave had procured for her, lay on a red cushion in its full
+beam, looking more like a toy than a living thing. When Elvira stopped
+dancing her flounces settled themselves with an audible rustle, and her
+thin delicately-cut face looked at Susannah from out its frame of curled
+hair and gold ornaments like the face of a spirit imprisoned in some
+unseemly place.
+
+"Heaven help us, Susannah," she cried shrilly, "if you call Nauvoo the
+reward of Angel's prayers. Look!" she cried, pointing out of the window,
+"see how the new temple rises; how its white walls shine in the sun! We
+are putting thousands upon thousands of dollars into it. It will be the
+grandest building this side of the Alleghany mountains." She let her
+small jewelled hand, with its pointing finger, fall suddenly, "and there
+shall not be left one stone of it upon another, for the House of God is
+not made with hands."
+
+"I see little signs of its foundations here." Susannah spoke with fire.
+"Treachery and tyranny are poor bricks."
+
+"Child, its foundations are in the whole earth, here and everywhere, in
+every nation and kindred. Men like Angel Halsey sow wheat; other people
+have sown tares. The tares happen to be in blossom just now here in
+Nauvoo." She seemed to forget her seriousness as suddenly, for again
+she spun round upon the centre of her rose, singing her little musical
+refrain.
+
+Susannah made one more appeal of the sort that she had made so often
+before Elvira's marriage.
+
+"You will not come away with me, Elvira? I do not like to leave you
+here; you have not been yourself since Angel died. You are not bound to
+this man because you were not sane enough to make a valid choice."
+
+It was plain speaking, but it did not ruffle Elvira's composure in the
+slightest. She laughed and began to caress her spaniel. "Mad. Oh yes, we
+are all mad, and growing madder, but it is because they have huddled us
+together at the point of the sword, until now to be a Mormon means to be
+shut out from the world and shut in to--to what? To the prophet's
+dreams; and some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and some of
+them are mad; and let us thank Heaven that they are as good as they are,
+for to go back to the Gentiles who shot down Angel and the children he
+was teaching to pray, and your child in your arms, that would be the
+baddest and maddest act of life." She rose up suddenly again. "Go!" she
+cried. There was a flame of real anger in her eyes. "Since the wish is
+in your heart, go! We believe now in strange doctrines. Two new
+doctrines we have learned at Nauvoo. Do you know what they are? One is
+'baptism of the dead.' If you get off safely, Susannah, and die in your
+sins, one of us must be baptized again for you, so that you will be
+saved in spite of yourself. But the _other_ doctrine is '_salvation by
+the shedding of blood_.' Do you understand _that_ doctrine?"
+
+"Indeed I do not."
+
+"And you speak with a tone that says that you neither know nor care what
+new things we have been learning. But you may have reason to care before
+many hours are over."
+
+She came near and whispered, "They teach us now that if a _man_ sin
+wilfully and will not repent, it is better that a minister of the church
+should slay him, for then his blood will make atonement for his soul."
+She ceased to speak until she had thrust Susannah out of her door, and
+her last words were in a whisper of awesome import. "Perhaps _a woman's
+soul can be saved in the same way_."
+
+Susannah was out again in the cheerful busy street. She made haste to
+fulfil the one remaining call before she met her chaise at the hotel.
+She felt that her last word was due to the member of the Danite band who
+had saved her in her hour of need and who had avenged her husband's
+blood.
+
+To each of those who had made sacrifice for the sect, a lot of land in
+the best part of the city had been awarded. Heber, Danite and apostle,
+had built upon his lot, and there she found him at the back of the
+cottage feeding a mare and foal which were tied in a small plot of
+ragged grass. He was much older now than when she had first seen him;
+daring and danger can lengthen time. He had the same indomitable
+frankness in his dark eyes, but his face was hardened and fanaticism was
+stamped thereon. It was a homely precinct, with utensils of house and
+stable-work lying about. The mare was drinking from a bucket, her gentle
+head so near his shoulder that her love for him was easily seen.
+
+"I am going away," Susannah said. "I have come to thank you for the last
+time for all your kindness to me and to say good-bye."
+
+"You shall not go," he said harshly.
+
+It was the echo of something which she had heard twice before this
+morning. This time it began to enter her mind with some sharpness.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"If you saw a friend hastening to destruction would you not stop her? It
+is well known amongst us that you desire to go, and at the meeting of
+the presidency last night the prophet told us that you sought to
+apostatise. Go home, Sister Halsey, and repent, and obtain forgiveness
+from the Lord and from his prophet for your unbelief."
+
+She was able to stand for a moment quietly and watch him still busy
+watering the mare, admiring the skill and gentleness with which he did
+it, thinking sadly enough that she would never see this remarkable man
+again, nor know to what the mingled fierceness and gentleness of his
+nature would grow. Then she offered him her hand in farewell without
+further argument.
+
+He shook the mare's head from his shoulder and, taking her hand, held it
+in an iron grasp. "As your friend, and for the sake of that good man,
+your husband, I beseech you to repent; but if you will not repent, for
+his sake and for our sakes, because we have prayed for you, you shall
+still be saved."
+
+Although beginning to be apprehensive of some coming evil, she smiled;
+and even rallied him upon one of the new doctrines to which Elvira had
+alluded.
+
+"Do you believe that if I go away some one else will have to be baptized
+over again for me?"
+
+He looked at her with the same steadfast glance. "It could do no good.
+Such salvation is for those who die in ignorance of the truth. But for
+you, who have been baptized into the truth and have fallen away, there
+is no hope except repentance or the shedding of blood."
+
+Over the low paling she heard the neighbours' children at their play.
+Upon the other side was an open lot across which she saw the passers in
+the street. She withdrew her hand from his now, but with a sinking at
+heart which did not appear to her reasonable because the surroundings
+were so tranquil.
+
+He let her go, accompanying her, as any gentleman might, to the gate of
+his ground. As he opened it he had taken something from his coat, and he
+showed it to her. It was a knife, very bright and sharp. Its blade when
+drawn out had a double edge. "It will be better for you," he said
+mournfully, "to die than to go"; and then he hid the thing again and
+went back.
+
+This time the idea that had been forcing itself into her mind took
+possession. For a moment all her strength forsook her; she held to the
+post of the gate, looking after him as he disappeared up the narrow
+passage between the paling and the house, and then, hurrying onward, she
+found that it was only by the greatest effort she could walk with
+outward composure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Susannah found her rooms as she had left them. Emma was not there to bid
+her good-bye, nor did any messenger wait with the money. She set her
+parcels ready for the driver to lift and waited until after the hour,
+but the chaise did not come.
+
+At last she went down again to the livery stable, hoping, as against
+vague but almost overpowering fears, that mere delay was the cause. The
+man told her that he understood that she had countermanded her order.
+She gave the order again, but now he said that he could not go for the
+price named, and when she offered a larger sum, he assured her that his
+horses were all out. She knew now that her order had indeed been
+countermanded, and by an authority higher than hers. She went back and
+boldly entered the prophet's public office.
+
+There were five men in the office. Joseph Smith sat in an elbow-chair
+before a central table. His secretary, a middle-aged man, sat at a small
+table beside him. Two of the leaders of the Church happened to be
+waiting upon some business, and a fresh convert was standing with them,
+a well-dressed English artisan but newly arrived. Susannah walked up to
+the table and addressed Smith.
+
+"Will you go down to the stable and bring me up a travelling-chaise?"
+
+Smith rose with mechanical politeness, or perhaps with a feint of
+politeness. "My dear madam," he expostulated, "I must say--"
+
+"I am sorry," she replied, "that I have not time to hear what you would
+like to say. I must ask you to be quick and get me the chaise."
+
+By this time she perceived that his companions were looking at her with
+ill-concealed curiosity and excitement, which proved to her that she was
+a marked woman. Her bosom dilated with a wilder anger as she looked at
+Smith expectantly; he returned the gaze sheepishly, as if dazzled by the
+audacity of her command. His face after last night's passion had an
+exhausted look like that of a man recovering from an illness.
+
+"You also owe me money," she proclaimed clearly. "Your wife borrowed all
+that I had of the money I earned by my school. When you have brought the
+chaise you can give me the money."
+
+One of the elders, a sleek man, thinking the prophet at a loss, now made
+a wily comment. "Has Sister Halsey paid anything for living in the House
+this month back?"
+
+At the insinuation that her money might be justly kept in payment of
+this debt if she spurned the Church's hospitality, Susannah's heart
+sank. She admitted its justice. It was part of her character to admit
+all possible claim against her.
+
+The sleek elder, following his advantage, spoke again. "The money given
+for tuition was given because of the ordinance of the prophet, and
+should in any case hardly belong to this lady if she is apostate."
+
+Smith had the tact to see his opportunity, and, moreover, it hurt him
+sharply, hurt him far more than it hurt Susannah, to hear her right to
+the privileges of the place called in question, to hear the opprobrious
+term "apostate" cast at her. There were unbelievers in his community
+with whose hypocrisy or apostasy he could trifle, but he still had his
+faith and his inner circle of affections. Susannah, standing friendless
+and penniless, appealed to all that was sacred in the memory of early
+days, while her beauty, her courage, her unbounded wrath, stimulated his
+love of power. He spoke to the sleek elder in what was commonly called
+the prophet's "awful voice," rising, his blue eyes becoming black in
+their authoritative flash.
+
+"Our sister Susannah Halsey, because of faithfulness when the Church was
+yet poor and unknown, and because of the faithfulness of her husband,
+who wears the martyr's crown--our sister Susannah Halsey, I say, is
+welcome to the hospitality of the Nauvoo House as long as she has
+remained and shall remain; and the money which has been given to her
+for the school shall be returned to her, and more shall be added to it,
+for she laboured faithfully."
+
+He had left behind his moment of sheepish distress; with the return of
+his formal phrases he assumed full prophetical state and escorted
+Susannah out of the office with a manner of pompous deference. When they
+two stood alone together Susannah was aware that, although circumstances
+had not altered in the slightest, although she had just as much reason
+for extreme anger as a minute before, yet she could not summon the same
+haughty air of command.
+
+"Will you get me the chaise and the money and let me go?"
+
+"But in Carthage," he asked kindly, "who will attend to your wants there
+and protect you? I guess, sister, you haven't much notion how difficult
+a lady like yourself travelling alone might find it to get along. It
+isn't among the Gentiles as with the Saints, where brotherly-kindness is
+the rule. I guess you'd better go back to your room and think it over a
+day or two longer," he said soothingly. "I'd be very glad to take you
+and Emma out for a ride this afternoon if you'd be willing to go--"
+
+"Be quiet." Her words fell sharp and quick in the midst of his gentle
+tones. "Make arrangements at once for me to go peaceably, or I will go
+out, if need be, to the middle of the Square and proclaim my wrongs, so
+that every woman and child in Nauvoo shall know what comes of trusting
+to you."
+
+She had chosen her threat carefully. She knew well that he understood
+the force of object lessons, and that to have even a suspicion against
+his kindness, bred in the minds of the children would be exquisite pain
+to him.
+
+"You know that I wouldn't like that, Sister Halsey; but when you come to
+think of it you'll see that it wouldn't serve your turn neither. It
+would only need for a few of us to say you was crazy and the whole town
+'ud see the more reason for not letting you go. Moreover, it would be a
+monstrous injustice to me. When have I failed to do anything that I ever
+promised you? Did I ever promise to let you apostatise? I guess, Sister
+Halsey, that you're excited, and if you just think over things for a day
+or two you would see that we're not so bad as you think. But, anyway,
+this ain't just the place for us to have a talk together."
+
+When Smith moved on to lead her back to her own rooms, she followed
+quietly until they stood together in her parlour, the scene of their
+last quarrel.
+
+"And now," said Susannah, "you understand very well that it is no sudden
+intention of mine to go, that it is my irrevocable decision. I have this
+morning had my very life threatened; and I see now that unless you
+command that it should be respected I should very possibly be in danger
+if I went away alone. You have offered again and again to drive me in
+your carriage; I will accept the offer now. Get out your own horses, and
+drive me yourself to Carthage."
+
+She saw a look of faint pleasure steal over his face. He liked to stand
+there in the quiet room listening while she spoke with some evidence of
+trust. The pleasure faded into embarrassment, but she had seen it.
+
+"You have a good and a bad nature struggling within you, Mr. Smith. By
+all that we have suffered, you and I, since the day that by some
+mysterious power you forced me to come to your baptism" (she stammered
+in her eagerness), "by all that we have suffered, by that sympathy which
+we have at times felt for one another, assert yourself now. Do this one
+right thing for me, and in all the future I will try to remember only
+the good in your life and not the bad."
+
+But he stood so long still looking steadfastly before him that she began
+to fear that, unnerved by his last night's fit of fury, he was ready to
+pass into one of those visionary trances which had been common in his
+younger days.
+
+She touched the sleeve of his coat. "I do not know if Mr. Heber's threat
+could be serious, but it frightened me, and I know that I shall be safe
+on the road to Carthage if you take me. Go, get your horses and take me
+away yourself."
+
+He looked at her pitifully, slipping into the style of his religious
+moods. "Thou sayest truly, sister, that there is none but I who could do
+this thing, for since in mine anger last night, fearing that I had no
+strength of my own to keep thee by me, I denounced thee to the council,
+there is no safety for thy life beyond the boundary of Nauvoo." He
+winced here, as if seeing what he suggested.
+
+Noting how the idea of her violent death wrung his heart, she went on
+pleading with him. She quoted the exalted character of his early
+visions, reminding him of the hour when the angel had shown him the dark
+furnace of temptations through which he must pass. At this he was
+visibly stirred; the angelic vision of warning seemed to be again before
+his eyes. He roused himself, speaking in that tone of voice in which,
+when he rarely used it, she recognised his best spirit. "Sister, thou
+hast always been to me as Isaac to Abraham; for in the beginning when I
+was poor and alone and had nought in the world save the revelation which
+the Lord had given, and was tempted to doubt, then I saw thee and prayed
+that thou shouldst be given me for a sign; and behold when I put forth
+my whole strength to desire thee, thou didst come as a moth to the
+light, burning thy beautiful wings of youth and joy. But I said, 'It is
+well, for that which she has lost shall be restored to her with usury,'
+and I knew in my heart that our brother Angel Halsey would not live
+long, and that thou wouldst forget thy sorrow for him. But I swear unto
+thee that thou hast never been to me as other women, but, as I said unto
+thee just now, like the voice of the angel."
+
+She never knew how far he was entirely under his own control when the
+tendency to a state of trance was upon him, but she was anxious to take
+advantage of the better mood.
+
+She said, "And now what is required of you is that you should give me
+up. No blessing" (she spoke strongly), "no blessing can come to you or
+to your people until you do this one right thing."
+
+He was again looking not at her but at the blank space of the shadowed
+wall, and as if the wall was not there and his look went far beyond it.
+
+"You have loosened the bloodhounds and set them on my track," she cried.
+
+He did not speak.
+
+"You--you alone will be guilty of my murder, for, I tell you, if you do
+not take me, I will go alone and meet my death."
+
+His head sank upon his breast with a groan such as a dumb creature in
+the utmost pain might give. Almost immediately, to her surprise, he went
+out.
+
+She was left alone. She was under the impression that Smith had gone to
+do her bidding, but she could not be sure. No faith in angelic vision,
+no spell of psychic warfare, relieved the situation for her. The
+external evidences of some crisis which he had undergone only produced
+in her repulsion. Now, as ever since the temporary delusion that
+accompanied her baptism, Susannah endeavoured to possess her soul free
+from that sense of touch with mysterious powers which had worked such
+havoc with the sanity of the members of this sect.
+
+From the window she saw the prophet crossing the road in the direction
+of his stables. He went, it was true, with slow, dreamy gait, but
+steadily. Strange mixture that he was of sanity and shrewdness,
+mysticism and grosser evil, he was at that moment her only star of hope.
+She paced the room unable to forecast the happenings of the next hour,
+yet supposing that her very life depended upon its content. The sudden
+joy that had come to her this morning joined with her fear, and produced
+panic of heart.
+
+She computed the time it might take to harness the gay steeds, and tried
+to give the rein of her expectation the utmost length. To her delight
+she saw the prophet's horses and the light vehicle he drove upon long
+journeys emerge into the square. A servant led them up 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 early dawn she opened her eyes. In the first moments of
+half-awaked consciousness she was aware that one thought lay alone in
+the empty horizon of her mind, like a trace left by a dream that had
+passed, as a wisp of cloud may be left in an empty sky.
+
+This thought was that she would at once go down to the river bank upon
+the southwest of the town.
+
+When other thoughts awoke and crowded within her ken this thought
+appeared foolish, and still more so the strong influence it had left
+upon her will, for in the momentum of this influence she had risen
+without debating the point.
+
+She was not aware that she had moved in her sleep or dreamed. She was
+greatly refreshed and again unreasonably light-hearted. She opened her
+shutters and saw that the dawn was calm and fair. As yet the sleeping
+town had scarcely stirred.
+
+"It is better to go out than to stay in," she said to herself as she
+remembered that this hour would be her one chance of taking air and
+exercise unobserved. She heard the main door of the house open and,
+looking over the banister, saw a slattern with bucket and mop passing
+into some back passage. She went lightly down and out into the fresh
+frosty air.
+
+What had that dream been concerning the river bank on the south-western
+side? She could not recall it, nor had she ever explored the streets of
+white wooden villas and cottages that lay upon that side. She went
+thither now. There was no reason why she should not go, no reason to go
+elsewhere. It was a pleasant walk. When she had passed the last house,
+the bank sloped in open uncared-for grass where cows were grazing. Only
+here and there she had seen a house-door open, and as yet in this place
+no one was abroad except a boy who was playing idly in a boat, which was
+drawn half up on the muddy bank.
+
+The broad river, milk-white under a dappled sky, stretched south and
+west. The other side was dim and blue in the faint vapour of the
+relaxing frost. The air was sweet and still. The sunbeams, imprisoned in
+eastern vapour, shone through the white veil with soft glow that cast no
+shadow but comforted the earth with hope.
+
+Susannah had a further thought in her mind now, but she felt no haste or
+impatience of excitement.
+
+The boy was of an active, restless disposition or he would hardly have
+been out so early. Lithe and idle, he sat see-sawing in the floating
+end of the boat, uncertain how to amuse himself. He returned Susannah's
+greeting with a lively flow of talk.
+
+"You don't know how to row," said Susannah.
+
+She showed no eagerness, for she felt none. The hope she had just formed
+was most uncertain, for it appeared not at all likely that she could
+escape in this way without being molested.
+
+"I bet I can row," said the boy, "as well as any man in town."
+
+"That isn't saying much," said Susannah. "The men about here have very
+few boats, and they are most of them afraid to go on anything smaller
+than the steamer."
+
+"I could row t'other side and back," bragged the boy. "I could row
+t'other side and back three times in the day."
+
+"You couldn't."
+
+"I couldn't! What will you bet?"
+
+"I suppose your father wouldn't allow you to go, anyway."
+
+He was a fresh-faced, mischievous, eager young rascal, and he found
+Susannah's manner pleasant and provoking.
+
+"Will you lay five dollars on it?" he cried. "Pap is away down to
+Quincy. If you'll lay five dollars on it I'll do it."
+
+"But I won't."
+
+The gambling spirit of the young pioneer was aroused.
+
+"What will you lay on it, then?"
+
+"I don't believe you could row once to the other side."
+
+He bragged loudly and with much exaggeration of what he had done and
+what he could do, and began pushing off the boat to show her his speed.
+
+The boat was a rude craft, unpainted, flat-bottomed, but light enough,
+and not badly formed for speed. Susannah stepped into it without much
+hope, scarcely caring what she did, but still provoking the young
+boatman to attempt the crossing.
+
+"I shan't give you any money," she said, "but you can row me a bit if
+you like till I see how fast you can go. You don't understand the
+currents, I am sure."
+
+"Currents!" said the boy, "I guess I understand all there is to know
+about them."
+
+Talking thus in light banter, they actually proceeded out onto the bosom
+of the milky flood without hearing any cry from the shore or seeing any
+one who took note of their departure. The pellucid and comforting light
+of the blinded sun grew warmer; the hum of industry in the town behind
+rose cheerfully upon the quiet air, and as the calling of the April
+bluebird in the fields grew more faint, the splash of the oars and the
+whirr of the gray water-fowl began to be accompanied by a low distant
+sound as of a watermill.
+
+"It's the excursion steamer," said the boy. "We'll get in her waves and
+you'll be scared. Ladies is always scared of waves."
+
+She asked if the steam-boat would stop at the Nauvoo wharf, but he
+explained, with the knowledge that boys are apt to have of such details,
+that this steamer was coming from Fort Madison, and would keep to the
+Missouri side, that he had heard that there were some State officials on
+board her, escorting the Governor of Kentucky, who was prospecting for a
+Land Company.
+
+They saw the white hulk of the steam-boat looming upon the water to the
+north. Her side paddle-wheels churned the flood. A strong purpose took
+possession of Susannah; she knew what she was going to do.
+
+She said to the boy, "No one could stop a steamer when she once starts
+until she gets to her next port."
+
+"I bet the engineman could stop her just as easy as that." The boy
+backed water with his oars suddenly.
+
+"But no one on the river could make him stop and get aboard."
+
+"Yes, they could. My pap stopped one once. We was living down near
+Cairo, but not near a wharf."
+
+"How did he do it?" she asked, and her interest was intense.
+
+"Why, you just put up your hands like a trumpet and yell through them as
+loud as you can, and you go on waving and hollering. My pap said the
+best plan was to call out 'Runaway nigger! Large reward!' They'd be sure
+to stop then to know all about it, and when they'd once stopped they
+don't mind your clambering up, if you can pay the fare."
+
+Susannah felt herself wholly unequal to the loud task described.
+
+"They would never stop for you," she, said. "You are only a boy, and
+they would know 'twas only mischief."
+
+His reply was as before. He would lay five dollars on it that he could
+stop the boat.
+
+She incited him to do this thing also. What faculty of caution the boy
+possessed was not as yet developed; he left the care for consequences to
+the sedate lady in the stern, and forgetting his quest of the Missouri
+shore, lay in the path of the steam-boat and howled unmusically, and
+marred the peace of the placid morning by shouting concerning a runaway
+slave and a fabulous reward that was offered for him taken alive or
+dead.
+
+It is probable that what he said never rightly reached the ears of the
+men on the deck, but that they regarded the lady as a possible
+passenger; the engine was stopped.
+
+"We'd better cut now as fast as we can," said the boy, somewhat
+frightened. He seized his oars excitedly. "Or shall I tell them a big
+yarn about the nigger?"
+
+They were but slightly to one side. The prow of the steam-boat, which
+drew but little water, had already passed below them. A small crowd on
+the vessel's deck leaned over the paddle-box. Standing up in the boat,
+Susannah searched the faces of the men looking down. They all looked at
+her.
+
+She singled out the captain by some sign in his dress, and pleaded
+urgent necessity for travelling with him.
+
+"Look here," said the boy, looking up at her from beneath, "I call that
+a low-down, mean sort of thing to do. Why didn't you tell me square? I'd
+have brought you if you wanted do come."
+
+She pleaded with the boy too. "It was better for you not to know my
+secrets. If they ask you in the city you can say that you didn't know."
+
+A dozen hands were held out to help her to climb the ladder on the
+shelving paddle-box. "Keep off," they cried to the boy, and he swung
+away from the churning wheel.
+
+Susannah stood upon the deck pale and trembling. The magnitude of the
+step came upon her, and she was beset by natural timidity and the
+painfulness of her dependence. The men who stood around her with the
+right to question were not of a low class. The captain, brawny and
+respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified
+gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor
+of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were
+several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other
+passengers pressed in an outer circle.
+
+She would fain have explained herself more privately, but she could not
+endure to accept the privileges of the boat without explaining first
+that she was not able to pay for them. "Gentlemen, I have no money. I am
+entirely unprotected. I have escaped in fear of my life from Nauvoo."
+
+She spoke instinctively, only desiring to set herself right, but when
+the words were said she knew that she had helped to heap opprobrium on
+the sect in whose cause so short a time ago she would have died. The
+passengers were Missourians, as was the captain. Among them went a
+whisper of chivalrous pity for her and of execration for the prophet and
+his followers.
+
+"Madam," said the captain, "any lady as is escaping from those devils
+has the freedom of this boat, and no ticket required, as long as I'm in
+command. Isn't that so?" he asked of the crowd.
+
+The murmur broke into an open chorus of enthusiastic speech.
+
+Wild and deep as was her panting anger against Smith's oppression,
+Susannah shrank. The thought of profiting by this spirit of partisan
+hatred scorched her heart.
+
+The Kentucky Governor, a dapper man, who had been regarding her with a
+temperate and critical eye, now, urged by her obvious distressed
+timidity, came forward.
+
+"How did you get among the Mormons, may I ask?"
+
+"My husband," faltered Susannah, "but he is dead."
+
+It would appear that her words tallied with some conclusion he had been
+drawing concerning her, for without further parley Susannah found
+herself being led in a formal manner down the companion-way. The brief
+report which she had given of herself had preceded her through the boat.
+She heard the passengers whom she left on the deck making sentimental
+remarks. Two coloured girls who were washing dishes in a pantry came to
+its door and gasped with emotion as they stared at her. In the saloon
+the coloured waiters gaped.
+
+At the farther end of the saloon a stout and magnificent lady in silk
+and diamonds was seated before innumerable viands which were spread in
+circles around her plate. She stopped eating while her husband presented
+Susannah. She alone of all upon the boat seemed to be overburdened by no
+surge of sentiment or curiosity. She was a most comfortable person.
+
+Seated in safety beside her, Susannah could indulge the pent-up
+indignation of her outraged spirit in silent musings upon Smith's
+degradation and, the certain downfall of all righteousness under the new
+tyranny. And yet--and yet--the shock of the last few days, forcibly as
+it vibrated through all her nature, could not eradicate the sympathy of
+years--the memories of Hiram and Kirtland, Haun's Mill and the
+desperate winter's march. Justice, her old friend, now her inquisitor,
+said sternly, "It was in these scenes in which some lost life and some
+reason that these men lost their moral standards." But her heart cried,
+"Now that _I_ am insulted, I cannot forgive."
+
+The words of the Governor's wife, cheerful, continuous, and not without
+diverting sparkle, were an unspeakable rest to Susannah, weary above all
+things of herself. Whether because of a strong undercurrent of tactful
+kindness, or in mere garrulity, the good lady's talk for some time
+flowed on concerning all things small, and nothing great, like the
+lapping of the river against the vessel's bows.
+
+But at last her companion's situation grew upon her; she enlarged more
+than once upon her surprise at Susannah's advent, and her feelings of
+extreme relief that she was safely there.
+
+"What a mercy!" she sighed comfortably. "Such awful people! Why, I hear
+that when any child among them is weak or deformed they just murder it."
+
+Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely
+accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.
+
+"It is perfectly true," the Governor's wife declared. "I have heard it
+several times. How long have you been at Nauvoo?"
+
+"Three weeks."
+
+"And in that time they offered to kill you! Well, I assure you if you
+had been a sickly child they wouldn't have let you live three days. And
+they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen
+wives."
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Ten or eleven, at any rate."
+
+"He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her."
+
+"How they have imposed upon you! Where have you been living that you
+have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?"
+
+Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when
+the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a
+group of the smoking men.
+
+"James," cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice,
+"this lady doesn't even know a tithe of the enormities that are
+practised in Nauvoo."
+
+He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah's heart
+and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.
+
+His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.
+
+He asked Susannah if the Mormons had retained all her property, and what
+destination she now proposed for herself; and then with great delicacy
+informed her that there was a proposition among the passengers to make
+a collection, to defray the expenses of her whole journey.
+
+Susannah's cheek paled again.
+
+"How could I return it if it came from so many?" she asked. Her white
+hands were clasping and unclasping themselves. Must it indeed be by
+means of such humiliation that she saved herself from Angel's Church?
+
+The Governor determined upon further generosity. "If you would prefer,
+take it from me as a loan," he said.
+
+She gave him Ephraim's address. It was so long since she had spoken her
+cousin's name to any one that tears came when she felt herself bound to
+explain that she was not certain that he was alive.
+
+"He is probably alive. Ill news travels fast."
+
+She blessed the dapper gentleman for this unfounded opinion, for the
+kindness that prompted it, more than for all else that he had done.
+
+His advice was that Susannah should continue upon that boat with them as
+far south as Cairo, in order to take advantage of the steam-boats now
+plying on the Ohio River, so that the expense and weariness of the land
+journey would be diminished to the small space between the uppermost
+point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Canal. There were
+several men upon the boat, he said, who could commend her to the care of
+every captain on the Ohio.
+
+Susannah felt too weak and weary to say more in defence of the morals of
+Nauvoo. She could not struggle against the fact that her claim to the
+generosity of which she stood in such helpless need was recognised and
+satisfied by the hatred of these Gentiles.
+
+When in the succeeding days she had time to meditate, while she spent
+many a long hour on the decks of river-boats watching the shimmering
+lights and shades that pass upon open river surfaces, the perplexing and
+contrasting aspects of her situation played in like manner upon her
+heart.
+
+She had suffered so much, such long and deadly ill, as a member of this
+almost innocent sect, suffered bravely in protest against the vile
+injustice of the persecution, and now that she was escaping from
+miseries inflicted by this same sect, she was wrapped in the kindly
+reverse side of the persecuting spirit, and carried home in it, with all
+the deference that would be accorded to a lost child. She was too tired
+and helpless now to defy the good thus given. Did all her former
+suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?
+
+With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the
+history of her more inward life. With what strong protest against the
+obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through
+many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering
+spiritual world. Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal
+marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked
+to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in
+desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompassed by
+invisible power and protection. In vain she said to herself that the
+simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those
+coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance
+had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully
+righteous--consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the
+Mormons falsely accused. When she had told herself this, the impression
+that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in
+spite of her small marring of the work, remained. Even while her bosom
+was swelling with shame at hearing her husband's sect derided, and
+eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing
+that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the
+assurance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was
+for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Susannah left the canal boat at Rochester. She had borrowed as small a
+sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn
+garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot. Food
+was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any
+house and state her need. She got a long lift on her way from a farmer
+driving to Canandaigua. Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost
+stopped, some information about Ephraim.
+
+"He's kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father," said the
+farmer.
+
+From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.
+
+She asked no more; her lips refused to form his name again.
+
+"The old lady, she was took off with a stroke; she and the old gentleman
+is laying together in the graveyard." The farmer volunteered this
+information, and Susannah, who had nerved herself to meet Ephraim's
+mother with humility, now wept for her loss.
+
+From the town of Canandaigua she walked beside the winding river and
+entered Manchester from the west at the hour when the May dusk was
+melting into moonlight.
+
+The public road, then as now, was lined with elms and many an
+apple-tree. The dusk of the elm branches was flecked with half-grown
+fluttering leaves, and the outline of the apple branches was heavy with
+blossom. The air was sweet in the shade of the night-folded petals, the
+perfume bringing involuntarily the thought of the hum of bees which had
+gone to rest. There were some new houses on the road, but the tide of
+progress had here ebbed, leaving the once ambitious village like a rock
+pool, beautified only by those ornaments of nature which thrive in
+stillness. There was more on the road of gable and shrub and tree which
+was familiar than of objects strange to her eye. The few people who were
+abroad gave her scarcely a glance, the half light veiling all that was
+foreign in her garb. The round moon hung above the willows of the river.
+
+When she came in sight of the white Baptist meeting-house she scanned
+its homely appearance as one looks at the face of an old friend. The
+yellow light within was put out as she approached. Out of the door a
+group of men were issuing as if from some evening service.
+
+What vivid memories the scene brought her!--memories of her uncle
+singing psalms with slow and solemn demeanour, of her aunt's high and
+more emotional voice, of the pew in which as a girl she had sat between
+them, listless and impatient, wondering at times why Ephraim remained at
+home.
+
+Her uncle and aunt were now lying in the graveyard. She paused a moment
+at the thought, looking at the small host of modest headstones
+surrounded by wild-flowers and half-fledged shrubs. It has never been
+the custom in Manchester to cultivate God's acre. Above, the branches of
+the nut-trees stretched themselves in the sweet spring air--they too
+were just leafing.
+
+Standing by the low, unpainted rail, Susannah wondered in what part of
+the yard her aunt and uncle lay.
+
+She observed that the small coterie of deacons had passed on to the road
+and dispersed, leaving only one of their number, who was locking the
+main door with an air of responsibility. Susannah did not look twice;
+she knew that this man was Ephraim. He stooped slightly to fit the key
+in the lock; then, evidently having forgotten something, pushed the door
+again and went inside.
+
+Susannah did not wait; she went up the graveyard path and in where the
+great square windows cast each a strip of light athwart the dark pews.
+Ephraim turned from his errand and met her in the aisle.
+
+"Ephraim."
+
+Ephraim Croom fell back a step or two, as if his breath was set too
+quick by joy or fear.
+
+Susannah could not speak again.
+
+At length Ephraim stretched out his hands and grasped her arms gently,
+then more strongly, making sure that she was not a trick of light and
+shade. Then, not knowing at all what he did, he clasped her in sudden
+haste to his breast.
+
+Susannah felt his arms wrap about her as if she had been a little child.
+She had never felt, never conceived, of closeness and tenderness like
+this. Ephraim, his breast heaving and his arms folding closer and
+closer, was out of himself. There was no conscious meaning expressed by
+him, but she knew, knew at once without shadow of doubt that he himself
+had been the dreamer of whom he wrote to her, who had learned so much by
+yielding all the loves of his heart to one, and that she was that woman.
+
+It was a long moment; at last, as if waking from a dream, Ephraim
+relinquished his hold. He leaned against the side of a pew, and his
+eager look seemed to hold and fold her still. In the dim light she could
+not see his eye, but she felt the delight of his glance falling upon
+her, a brighter, softer influence than the mantle of the moonlight.
+
+She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder with a motherly touch.
+
+"I have startled you, dear Ephraim; I hope I have done you no harm."
+
+He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough
+heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.
+
+Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for
+very joy, not amusement. "Speak to me," she coaxed. "I have come back to
+you. Do you think we are in a dream?" She let herself kneel on the old
+floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against
+her cheek.
+
+With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner
+would have returned had she remained in any common attitude, but to this
+coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had passed
+without caresses) could not behave with reticence.
+
+One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she
+should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of
+this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene
+reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her
+hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering
+words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his
+unaccustomed lips.
+
+"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked
+most of the way from Rochester to-day."
+
+"Are you very tired?"--as if the fact that she had been walking that day
+was all that needed his immediate attention.
+
+"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have
+long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child
+died I have been quite alone."
+
+"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone
+of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I--I
+supposed that if you were alive you--you preferred to remain, Susy."
+
+She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had
+raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are
+you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"
+
+"We have been having a prayer meeting," he answered. "And I keep the key
+because--because my father used to." He gave the reason with an
+intonation half playful. "I do many a thing now because he did."
+
+"I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are
+they less foolish" (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their
+late inmates), "less unjust than they used to be?"
+
+As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his
+manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. "I don't know
+that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that
+I am either, Susy, but--it is not good to worship God alone."
+
+She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom
+of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more
+homelike by his tones.
+
+"The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the
+earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the
+mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?"
+
+She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran
+like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the
+memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the
+grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.
+So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under
+the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child's desire to hear
+a story that she knew by heart.
+
+"Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved--"
+
+When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick
+path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths
+flanked it in orderly ranks. Their light forms glimmered in the branch
+shadows of the budding quince. It was true, what people said, that
+Ephraim had not let his father's home decay. The door stood open, as
+country doors are apt to do.
+
+There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the
+sitting-room. The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and
+sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed
+to see again. Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens. A
+candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing
+beside it. Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a
+student lamp--the fire of a new hearth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought
+with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.
+
+The stranger was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply
+furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped
+in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came
+in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and Susannah
+sat.
+
+"You are one of the Latter-Day Saints?" Susannah asked.
+
+"I am, ma'am, and it's real strange to hear you say them words, for it's
+'Mormons' the Gentiles calls us."
+
+Then to her questioning he told the story of the downfall of Nauvoo.
+
+"There was two causes for the persecution; we had got too powerful and
+too great for the folks in Illinois, just as we had done in Missouri;
+but there was another thing, and that was that wickedness crept in
+amongst us. 'Twasn't as bad as was reported, though, but 'twas
+there--I'm afraid 'twas there."
+
+The man sighed.
+
+"It's twelve years now since I joined the Saints in Missouri and when we
+were driven out there I went with them to Illinois; and I can never
+believe other but that the Latter-Day Saints has the truth, for the
+power of it is always to be seen among them; and now that I've lost
+everything a second time, and know that I have a sickness that I'll
+never get the better of, I have come east to see my folks once more and
+to testify to them of the truth."
+
+He was going on into Vermont, passing by that way that he might refresh
+his eyes with a view of the sacred hill, and had only remained at
+Ephraim's request to relate his tidings to Susannah.
+
+"After coming out of Missouri I never lived at Nauvoo. I had a farm
+midways, between Nauvoo and Quincy. As near as I can make out, the
+scandal they've got agen us, which they've always had agen us because of
+the wickedness of the Gentile mind, began to have some truth in it when
+Rigdon came out with his teaching concerning the nonsense of spiritual
+wives, which wasn't new with him, for I hear that it's held among all
+the folks as call themselves 'Perfectionists.' Well, our prophet made
+pretty quick work of that doctrine, and he rebuked Rigdon in public and
+private, and packed him out of the place, and no one can say that our
+prophet has ever done otherwise with any one as has had notions about
+marriage."
+
+Susannah sighed. "I have heard that he has acted the same way in several
+other instances."
+
+"You have, ma'am? Well, it's strange, too, to hear a Gentile say a good
+word for our prophet, but perhaps, as he came from here, ma'am, you may
+be some relation of his; and I ask you, is it likely, as he's always
+acted so severe in that matter, that he should have taught a false
+doctrine himself? But even some of the Saints do say nowadays that he
+was led away by some strange doctrines before he died; but, for my own
+part, I believe that the tales have arisen from the sinful natures of
+many of the men that he trusted; for he was too trustful, and there's
+apostles and bishops and elders amongst us that are servants of hell.
+There's been evil work since our prophet's martyrdom, for there's
+thousands of our people now deluded by them and going out after Mr.
+Brigham Young and his crew.
+
+"You want to know how the prophet's death came about, and I can tell
+you; for when my disease came on, and the doctor told me 'twas fatal, I
+started to go up to Nauvoo to ask the prophet to lay his hands upon me
+and heal me. But when I got there the city was all in a buzz, for the
+cause that some of the elders had got out a paper accusing the prophet
+of having a lot of ladies for wives. Well now, I can tell you how that
+came about. When our prophet first got the charter for the Nauvoo Legion
+there was a man called Bennet, who had been general in the American
+army, and who was steeped in unbelief and ambition, and who came and
+offered his services to the prophet, and was allowed to build up the
+Nauvoo Legion. He was a most sinful man, and the prophet, he knew his
+sinfulness, but thought that he ought to take any help to build up an
+army to preserve his people from the fearful persecutions. Bennet got
+hold of the worst side of the worst men we had in the Church, among
+which was the new usurper." He paused here with ire in his eye. "I would
+be understood to mean Mr. Brigham Young, who has falsely usurped the
+prophet's place; but there are many of us who will not follow him, no,
+not one step. The Lord will requite him and his confederates, and will
+establish his true servants."
+
+"I fear, my good friend," said Ephraim, "that although it is true that
+the Lord will establish his true servants, it is also true that their
+kingdom is not of this world."
+
+"Well, sir, tramping along as I've done many a day, with no companion
+but the disease that's prevailing against me, I've thought that that may
+be true; but, whichever way it is, Bennet set himself to work iniquity,
+and they say that when the prophet could endure him no longer and gave
+him the sack, he had the vileness to dress himself up in the prophet's
+clothes and go about in disguise, talking Sydney Rigdon's rank
+spiritual-wife doctrine to the ladies and some of them were such fools
+that they thought it was the prophet, and that he disguised his voice
+and kept something over his face in order to work the iniquity in
+secret. That's what a gentleman who knew very well about it told me. But
+anyway, when Bennet was gone out he wrote awful things to the Gentile
+newspapers concerning the domestic iniquities of Nauvoo; and he had his
+own party in the sacred city, and they up and put their scandals in the
+public print in the prophet's own city.
+
+"But the prophet he rose up and shook himself, like Samson when his arms
+were tied with the withes, and he denounced the wickedness, and went to
+the house where the paper was published, and kicked the printing press
+down himself, and burned the paper. And that day he preached most
+powerful in the Nauvoo Temple."
+
+"We heard that it was on account of the illegality of his action in the
+printing office that the people of Illinois arrested him."
+
+The stranger did not answer directly. His mind had passed on to scenes
+which had stirred him more personally.
+
+"I was in the city all the time. The Government of Illinois sent to
+arrest Mr. Smith, but his people rallied round him, and said that in
+consequence of the lawless persecutions that had passed in Missouri they
+had a right to mistrust the justice of the State. They called out the
+Nauvoo Legion, and sent back the constables that had come from
+Carthage. That made the Gentiles terribly angry. The Illinois
+militiamen went about saying openly that they would burn down the town
+and kill every man, woman, and child in it. So then Governor Ford
+himself advised our prophet to keep the Legion under arms, for he said
+the Gentiles were so furious; but he asked the prophet to go to Carthage
+and pledge himself to appear for the trial when it came on, for it was a
+civil suit, and no harm could come to him and his. Governor Ford pledged
+his honour as the Governor of the State.
+
+"I had been waiting about the town until the prophet should be less
+bothered before asking him to heal my sickness, but when I heard that he
+was going away, then I misdoubted that it would be long before he came
+back. I thought I'd make a push for it, so I went and hung round the
+door of the prophet's house. I was only a poor man and I did not like to
+go in, for the bishops and elders and all the grand folks were going in
+and out all that day. I heard the things they said, and most of them
+were saying that the prophet had had a vision, and that if he went to
+Carthage he would never come back alive. They said too that if he
+stayed, the town would be sacked, and I understood that they were asking
+him to run away. Towards evening I saw a buggy draw up at the back door
+of the hotel, and all the elders seemed to be holding a meeting, for
+they were singing hymns; so then it just come to me that they were going
+to get the prophet off, and I ran down the road to the ferry, for I
+knew he would have to go that way. I waited in the boat, and the same
+buggy came down to it, and a man with a cloak on and his hat over his
+eyes came out and sat in the corner of the boat, and we all knew that it
+was the prophet, and none of us durst speak to him. But I went over in
+the boat, for I hoped I'd get up courage to ask him when we came to the
+other side. When he stood on the shore he seemed like a man that didn't
+know what to do, although there was horses there for him to take, and he
+turned round and went off the road up on to a little hill; and I went
+after him a bit of the way behind, and I came and found him just
+standing looking at the city, for the river swept round two sides of it
+so noble like, and blue as the sky above, and the city stood all white,
+and the temple stood high in the middle, and all of it glistened in the
+sun. The prophet had taken off his hat, and he stood with his hands
+folded on the stick he carried, and he just looked and looked at the
+city. I had never seen a man look like that but once before, and then it
+was a man I knew whose wife died, and he looked at her face just
+steadfast like that. I couldn't think to speak to him about myself just
+then, although I'd got him alone, for my heart was just broke to see how
+sad he looked, and him just in the prime of life; for it was his own
+city, and the sound of all its work came over to us as we stood there,
+and the thousands and thousands of happy homes in it belonged to his
+own people.
+
+"But when I moved a bit he saw me, and he started at first as if I'd
+been going to shoot him, thinking no doubt that I was an enemy spying on
+him. At that, because my disease had weakened me, and because I seemed
+to feel nothing all through me but the grief that he was bearing, I
+began to cry like a child.
+
+"Then he stretched out his hands towards the city and I heard him say,
+'My Lord, thou hast given me this people, and if I leave them without a
+shepherd they will be stricken and scattered and robbed by the
+destroyer.'
+
+"So then in a few minutes he held out his hand to me, so gentlemanlike,
+as if I was as good as him, and he said, 'Come, my friend, let us go
+back, and let God determine what we shall do or suffer.' So we went and
+got on the ferry-boat and went back, and I never spoke to him; but I
+went with him all the way to his house.
+
+"The next morning I heard that he and Mr. Hyrum were going to set off
+for Carthage to be tried. So I got a horse and went to Carthage before
+them, for I felt then that I cared for nothing but to see the prophet
+again. But I heard tell how, as they went along, their wives and their
+friends went with them part way, and they turned back two or three times
+as they were parting from them, for the prophet said that they would
+never see his face again.
+
+"Governor Ford he met them at Carthage with a great to-do. He pledged
+the honour of the State that they should be safe, and he had the troops
+drawn upon either side, and he passed down between them with the prophet
+and Mr. Hyrum and showed them himself into the gaol. The prophet said
+that it was illegal to put them in the gaol, for it was a civil matter,
+and Governor Ford said, for I heard him, that it was because they would
+be safer there. I was standing just behind the line of soldiers jostling
+up with the crowd, and I heard the Governor say, 'I pledge you my
+honour, and the faith and honour of this State, that no harm shall come
+to you while undergoing this imprisonment.' So then they were shut in;
+but the crowd and the soldiers remained in the streets, and I heard
+enough to know that harm would come.
+
+"The next morning the Governor went away from Carthage, to be out of it,
+and that day, in the afternoon, a mob of men with faces painted like
+Indians came out with guns, and we knew that their purpose was to murder
+the prophet. I went to the gaol and sat upon the steps, and the militia,
+which was called the Carthage Greys, came out, and halted, about eight
+rods from the gaol, and I thought at first that they would fire on the
+mob when they came, but they never moved, but stood and looked on. So
+the murder was done by them all in cold blood as well as by the mob."
+
+"Did you see him die?" asked Susannah with white lips.
+
+"If he was a relation of yours, ma'am, I can tell you that he died like
+a man. First I thought that I would spend what little strength I had
+left in fighting the mob at the door, and that they should not go in
+except over my body; but the gaoler opened the door in pretence of
+finding out what was the matter, for he was in the plot; so I thought
+that I would run up and give warning. But by the time I got to the door
+of the upper room where the prophet was, the mob was up behind me, so I
+never rightly knew what I did, for they knocked me down just within the
+room. There were four or five men with the prophet and Mr. Hyrum, and
+these kept the mob back for a few minutes at the door, but a bullet hit
+Mr. Hyrum in the head, and I saw the prophet leaning over him, and he
+said in a voice that was very sad, 'My dear, dear brother!'
+
+"Then the prophet stood up quite calmly and pulled out a pistol and shot
+at the mob until all its barrels were discharged. His firing made the
+men hold back, for a good number of the mob were struck. Then they came
+on again until the door was literally full with muskets and rifles, but
+I was lying on the floor below the shots, so I saw them pass over my
+head. The very walls were riddled with them, and the prophet stood in
+the midst of the shots and threw up his hands towards heaven and cried,
+'O Lord, my God.' Then, not knowing what he did, he staggered to the
+window, dying from his wounds, and he fell outside the window, and I
+heard that the mob out there propped up his body and used it for a
+target."
+
+Susannah rose up with clenched hands and pitiful face, but she went out
+of the room, leaving the two men together. "Were you injured?" asked
+Ephraim of the stranger.
+
+"Well, sir, I was bruised by being trampled on, but the gaoler got hold
+of me and dragged me into an iron cell and locked me in, and the next
+morning he came and let me out."
+
+"That was a year ago," said Ephraim. "Have you been in Nauvoo since
+then?"
+
+"Yes, I went back. I wanted to know, sir, what would come, and take my
+share of the suffering after seeing the prophet die so courageous; but,
+sir, the Church is sorely divided. I didn't like to say it before your
+lady, for I see that she's got some one she cares for amongst us, but
+there's a strong party among the apostles and elders that are
+worshippers of Baal, and are most evil in their conduct and practice,
+and are apostate, though they call themselves followers of the prophet.
+And Mr. Brigham Young is at the head of them. It's a bad thing that the
+Illinois militia is set out to fight against us and turn us out of the
+city without mercy, but it's a sorer thing that the greater part of our
+people, being ignorant, will follow Mr. Brigham Young; and he's bent on
+going west, sir, into the heart of the Rocky Mountains, where he can set
+up a kingdom of his own. His teaching is against good doctrine in two
+respects; he says that they will wax strong there until they can avenge
+the blood of their brethren who have been hunted and slain, and that the
+elders and apostles will live like the patriarchs of old, and have many
+wives, in order to build up the Church."
+
+"And has the other party in your sect no strength to resist?"
+
+"Very little strength, sir, except that God is on the side of the
+righteous; but Mrs. Smith, the prophet's widow, with his sons and many
+hundreds of us, will not give in to the evil, but will stay in Illinois
+and Missouri in face of the worst that persecution can do, for it was
+thereabouts that the prophet said that the Holy City should be, and he
+gave us no word to kill and destroy our fellow-men; and although perhaps
+he was led away and sinned sometimes as other men do, it is a scandalous
+lie to say that he thought to teach wickedness and falsehood to his
+Church."
+
+"I wonder," asked Ephraim within himself, "if that is true, or what
+strange secret that troubled soul took with him to the other side of
+death?"
+
+In the evening after the stranger was gone Susannah sat with Ephraim in
+the old doorway. Before them, mid the harvest fields, winding over hill
+and dale, lay the long white road which led to the hill of Smith's early
+visions--the road on which Susannah had set forth with Angel Halsey on
+her wedding journey.
+
+"You are a-weary, wife, to-night," said Ephraim. He smoothed the hair
+upon her brow. "You have exhausted yourself with long weeping, and
+yet--"
+
+He did not say, "Have you reason to bemoan this man's tragic end?" for
+he knew that more sacred memories had caused the tears; of these some
+faint jealousy rose in his breast and kindness sealed his lips.
+
+She told him the truth in very simple words such as loving women use.
+
+"To-day I seemed to see" (she laid her hand across her knit brows) "all
+the passion of it again, the wrong, the right, the misery--from the day
+that Angel and I went out with such young passionate desire to divide
+the right from the wrong. I could see Angel and my baby shot before my
+eyes as Joseph Smith was shot. It is terrible to see death come that
+way. But they are all three lying now in the perfect peace of death."
+She put her hand in his. "Then, dear, my mind came back, from the rage
+and terror of war. I thought of their peace and of you--how God has
+healed my life by your love, and given me such joy. Is he not able to
+provide for the healing of the nations?"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Mormon Prophet
+
+Author: Lily Dougall
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2005 [EBook #17279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MORMON PROPHET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by the Canadian Institute for Historical
+Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org))
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>The Mormon Prophet</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>LILY DOUGALL</h2>
+
+<h3>Author of The Mermaid, The Zeitgeist, The Madonna of a Day, Beggars All,
+Etc.</h3>
+
+
+<h4>TORONTO</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+THE W.J. GAGE COMPANY (<span class="smcap">limited</span>)<br />
+1899<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1899,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By</span> D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.<br />
+<br />
+<i>All rights reserved.</i><br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>Transcriber's note. Cotents generated for HTML</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p class="center">
+<a href="#PREFACE">PREFACE.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_I">BOOK I.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#BOOK_II">BOOK II.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_Ia">CHAPTER I.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IIa">CHAPTER II.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IIIa">CHAPTER III.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IVa">CHAPTER IV.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_Va">CHAPTER V.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIa">CHAPTER VI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIIa">CHAPTER VII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIIIa">CHAPTER VIII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IXa">CHAPTER IX.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_Xa">CHAPTER X.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIa">CHAPTER XI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIIa">CHAPTER XII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIIIa">CHAPTER XIII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIVa">CHAPTER XIV.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVa">CHAPTER XV.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIa">CHAPTER XVI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIIa">CHAPTER XVII.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIIIa">CHAPTER XVIII.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#Book_III">Book III.</a><br /><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_Ib">CHAPTER I.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IIb">CHAPTER II.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IIIb">CHAPTER III.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IVb">CHAPTER IV.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_Vb">CHAPTER V.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIb">CHAPTER VI.</a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIIb">CHAPTER VII.</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In studying the rise of this curious sect I have discovered that certain
+misconceptions concerning it are deeply rooted in the minds of many of
+the more earnest of the well-wishers to society. Some otherwise
+well-informed people hold Mormonism to be synonymous with polygamy,
+believe that Brigham Young was its chief prophet, and are convinced that
+the miseries of oppressed women and tyrannies exercised over helpless
+subjects of both sexes are the only themes that the religion of more
+than two hundred thousand people can afford. When I have ventured in
+conversation to deny these somewhat fabulous notions, it has been
+earnestly suggested to me that to write on so false a religion in other
+than a polemic spirit would tend to the undermining of civilised life.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of these warnings, and although I know it to be a most
+dangerous commodity, I have ventured to offer the simple truth, as far
+as I have been able to discern it, consoling my advisers with the
+assurance that its insidious influence will be unlikely to do harm,
+because, however potent may be the direful latitude of other religious
+novels, this particular book can only interest those wiser folk who are
+best able to deal with it.</p>
+
+<p>As, however, to many who have preconceived the case, this narrative
+might, in the absence of explanation, seem purely fanciful, let me
+briefly refer to the historical facts on which it is based. The Mormons
+revere but one prophet. As to his identity there can be no mistake,
+since many of the "revelations" were addressed to him by name&mdash;"To
+Joseph Smith, Junior." He never saw Utah, and his public teachings were
+for the most part unexceptionable. Taking necessary liberty with
+incidents, I have endeavoured to present Smith's character as I found it
+in his own writings, in the narratives of contemporary writers, and in
+the memories of the older inhabitants of Kirtland.</p>
+
+<p>In reviewing the evidence I am unable to believe that, had Smith's
+doctrine been conscious invention, it would have lent sufficient power
+to carry him through persecutions in which his life hung in the
+balance, and his cause appeared to be lost, or that the class of earnest
+men who constituted the rank and file of his early following would have
+been so long deceived by a deliberate hypocrite. It appears to me more
+likely that Smith was genuinely deluded by the automatic freaks of a
+vigorous but undisciplined brain, and that, yielding to these, he became
+confirmed in the hysterical temperament which always adds to delusion
+self-deception, and to self-deception half-conscious fraud. In his day
+it was necessary to reject a marvel or admit its spiritual significance;
+granting an honest delusion as to his visions and his book, his only
+choice lay between counting himself the sport of devils or the agent of
+Heaven; an optimistic temperament cast the die.</p>
+
+<p>In describing the persecutions of his early followers I have modified
+rather than enlarged upon the facts. It would, indeed, be difficult to
+exaggerate the sufferings of this unhappy and extraordinarily successful
+sect.</p>
+
+<p>A large division of the Mormons of to-day, who claim to be Smith's
+orthodox following, and who have never settled in Utah, are strictly
+monogamous. These have never owned Brigham Young as a leader, never
+murdered their neighbours or defied the law in any way, and so vigorous
+their growth still appears that they claim to have increased their
+number by fifty thousand since the last census in 1890. Of all their
+characteristics, the sincerity of their belief is the most striking. In
+Ohio, when one of the preachers of these "Smithite" Mormons was
+conducting me through the many-storied temple, still standing huge and
+gray on Kirtland Bluff, he laid his hand on a pile of copies of the Book
+of Mormon, saying solemnly, "Sister, here is the solidest thing in
+religion that you'll find anywhere." I bought the "solidest" thing for
+fifty cents, and do not advise the same outlay to others. The prophet's
+life is more marvellous and more instructive than the book whose
+production was its chief triumph. That it was an original production
+seems probable, as the recent discovery of the celebrated Spalding
+manuscript, and a critical examination of the evidence of Mrs. Spalding,
+go far to discredit the popular accusation of plagiarism.</p>
+
+<p>Near Kirtland I visited a sweet-faced old lady&mdash;not, however, of the
+Mormon persuasion&mdash;who as a child had climbed on the prophet's knee. "My
+mother always said," she told us, "that if she had to die and leave
+young children, she would rather have left them to Joseph Smith than to
+any one else in the world: he was always kind." This testimony as to
+Smith's kindheartedness I found to be often repeated in the annals of
+Mormon families.</p>
+
+<p>In criticising my former stories several reviewers, some of them
+distinguished in letters, have done me the honour to remark that there
+was latent laughter in many of my scenes and conversations, but that I
+was unconscious of it. Be that as it may, those who enjoy unconscious
+absurdity will certainly find it in the utterances of the self-styled
+prophet of the Mormons. Probably one gleam of the sacred fire of humour
+would have saved him and his apostles the very unnecessary trouble of
+being Mormons at all.</p>
+
+<p>In looking over the problems involved in such a career as Smith's, we
+must be struck by the necessity for able and unprejudiced research into
+the laws which govern apparent marvels. Notwithstanding the very natural
+and sometimes justifiable aspersions which have been cast upon the work
+of the Society for Psychical Research, it does appear that the
+disinterested service rendered by its more distinguished members is the
+only attempt hitherto made to aid people of the so-called "mediumistic"
+temperament to understand rather than be swayed by their delusions.
+Whether such a result is as yet possible or not, Mormonism affords a
+gigantic proof of the crying need of an effort in this direction; for
+men are obviously more ignorant of their own elusive mental conditions
+than of any other branch of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>L.D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Montreal</span>, December, 1898.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE MORMON PROPHET.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_I" id="BOOK_I"></a><i>BOOK I.</i></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the United States of America there was, in the early decades of this
+century, a very widely spread excitement of a religious sort. Except in
+the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were
+scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from
+a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the
+settlers. In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had
+been persecuted for their faith: Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of
+diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of
+fiery zeal, their cravings for "the light that never was on sea or
+land," but not that education by contact with law and order which, in
+older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.</p>
+
+<p>With the religious revivals came signs and wonders. A wave of peculiar
+psychical phenomena swept over the country, in explanation of which the
+belief most widely received was that of the direct interposition of God
+or the devil. The difficulty of discerning between the working of the
+good and the bad spirit in abnormal manifestations was to most minds
+obviated by the fact that they looked out upon the confusing scene
+through the glasses of rigidly defined opinion, and according as the
+affected person did or did not conform to the spectator's view of truth,
+so he was judged to be a saint or a demoniac. Few sought to learn rather
+than to judge; one of these very few was a young man by name Ephraim
+Croom. He was by nature a student, and, being of a feeble constitution,
+he enjoyed what, in that country and time, was the very rare privilege
+of indulging his literary tastes under the shelter of the parental roof.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the last years of the eighteenth century Croom the elder had
+come with a young wife from his father's home in Massachusetts to settle
+in a township called New Manchester, in the State of New York. He was a
+Baptist by creed; a man of strong will, strong affections, and strong
+self-respect. Taking the portion of goods which was his by right, he
+sallied forth into the new country, thrift and intelligence written upon
+his forehead, thinking there the more largely to establish the
+prosperity of the green bay tree, and to serve his God and generation
+the better by planting his race in the newer land.</p>
+
+<p>The thirtieth year after his emigration found him a notable person in
+the place that he had chosen, with almost the same physical strength as
+in youth, stern, upright, thrifty, the owner of large mills, of a
+substantial wooden residence, and of many acres of land. He was as rich
+as he had intended to be; his ideal of righteousness, being of the
+obtainable sort, had been realised and strictly adhered to. The one
+disappointment of his life was the lack of those sturdy sons and
+daughters who, to his mind, should have surrounded the virtuous man in
+his old age. They had not come into the world. His wife, a good woman
+and energetic helpmeet, had brought him but the one studious son.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim was thirty-two years of age when a young girl, strong,
+beautiful, impetuous, entered under the sloping eaves of his father's
+huge gray shingle roof. The girl was a niece on the maternal side. Her
+New England mother had, by freak of love, married a reckless young
+Englishman of gentle blood who was settled on a Canadian farm. Pining
+for her puritan home, she died early. The father made a toy of his
+daughter till he too died in the fortified town of Kingston, on the
+northern shore of Lake Ontario. No other relatives coming forward to
+assume his debts or to claim his child, their duty in the matter was
+clear to the minds of the Croom household, and the girl was sent for.
+Her name was Susannah, but she herself gave it the softer form that she
+had been accustomed to hear; when she first entered the sitting-room of
+the grave Croom family trio, like a sunbeam striking suddenly through
+the clouds on a dark day, she held out her hand and her lips to each in
+turn, saying, "I am Susianne."</p>
+
+<p>That first time Ephraim kissed her. It was done in surprise and
+embarrassed formality. He knew, when the moment was past that his
+parents had perceived that Susannah needed more decorous training. He
+concurred in believing this to be desirable, for the manners that had
+surrounded him were very stiff. Yet the memory of the greeting remained
+with him, a thing to be wondered at while he turned the whispering
+leaves of his great books.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had travelled from the Canadian fort in the care of the
+preacher Finney. He was a revivalist of great renown, possessing a
+lawyer-like keenness of intellect, much rhetorical power, and Pauline
+singleness of purpose. That night he ate and slept in the house.</p>
+
+<p>The original Calvinism of the Croom household had already been modified
+by the waves of Methodist revival from the Eastern States. Finney was an
+Independent, but Martha Croom had an abounding respect for him; his
+occasional visits were epochs in her life. She had prepared many baked
+meats for his entertainment before the evening of his arrival with
+Susannah, but while he was present she devoted herself wholly to his
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>The feast was spread in the inner kitchen. In the square brick fireplace
+burning pine sticks crackled, bidding the chill of the April evening
+retire to its own place beyond the dark window pane. The paint upon the
+walls and floor glistened but faintly to the fire and the small flames
+of two candles that stood among the viands upon the table.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Croom sat in his place. He was burly and ruddy, a wholesome
+man, very silent, very strong, a person to be feared and relied on.
+Ephraim believed that force went forth from his father's presence like
+perfume from a flower. There were many kinds of flowers whose perfume
+was too strong for Ephraim, but he felt that to be a proof of his own
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>Martha Croom, also of New England stock, was of a different type. At
+fifty years she was still as slender as a girl&mdash;tall and too slender,
+but the small shapely head was set gracefully on the neck as a flower
+upon its stalk. Her hair, which was wholly silvered, was still abundant
+and glossily brushed. Her mind was not judicial. She was more quick to
+decide than to comprehend, full of intense activities and emotions.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard," said the preacher slowly, "certain distressing rumours
+concerning&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom gave an upward bridling motion of her head, and a red spot
+of indignant fire came in each of her cheeks. "Joe Smith?", she cried.
+"A blasphemous wretch! And there is nothing, Mr. Finney, that so well
+indicates the luke-warmishness into which so many have fallen as that
+his blasphemy is made a jest of."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim moved uneasily in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Croom made a remark brief and judicial. "The Smiths are a <i>low</i>
+family."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom answered the tone. "If the dirt beneath our feet were to
+begin using profane language, I don't suppose it would be beneath our
+dignity to put a stop to it."</p>
+
+<p>"It is the Inquisition that my mother wishes to reinstate," said
+Ephraim.</p>
+
+<p>The master of the house again spoke with the <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i> of unquestioning
+bias. "No, Ephraim; for your mother would be the last to interfere with
+any for doing righteousness or believing the truth."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom's slender head trembled and her eyes showed signs of tears at
+her son's opposition. "If God-fearing people cannot prevent the most
+horrible iniquities from being practised in their own town, the laws are
+in a poor condition."</p>
+
+<p>"You have made no candid inquiry concerning Smith, mother; your judgment
+of him, whether true or false, is based on angry sentiment and wilful
+ignorance."</p>
+
+<p>The preacher sighed. "This Smith is deceiving the people."</p>
+
+<p>"His book," said Ephraim, "is a history of the North American Indians
+from the time of the flood until some epoch prior to Columbus. It would
+be as difficult to prove that it was not true as to prove that Smith is
+not honest in his delusion. We can only fall back upon what Butler would
+call 'a strong presumption.'"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom, consciously or not, made a little sharp rap on the table,
+and there was a movement of suppressed misery like a quiver in her
+slender upright form. Her voice was low and tremulous. "If you'd got
+religion, Ephraim, you wouldn't speak in that light manner of one who
+has the awful wickedness of adding to the words of the Book."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim continued to enlighten the preacher in a stronger tone. "Whether
+the man is mad or false, almost all the immoralities that you will hear
+reported about him are, as far as I can make out, not true. He doesn't
+teach that it's unnecessary to obey the ten commandments, or beat his
+wife, nor is he drunken. He's got the sense to see that all that sort of
+thing wouldn't make a big man of him. It's merely a revised form of
+Christianity, with a few silly additions, that he claims to be the
+prophet of."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom began to weep bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Croom asked a pertinent question. "Why do you wilfully
+distress your mother, Ephraim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, sir, I love my mother too well to sit silent and let her
+think that injustice can glorify God."</p>
+
+<p>It was a family jar.</p>
+
+<p>Finney was a man of about forty years of age; his eyes under
+over-reaching brows were bright and penetrating; his face was shaven,
+but his mouth had an expression of peculiar strength and gentleness. He
+looked keenly at the son of the house, who was held to be irreligious.
+And then he looked upon Susannah, whose beauty and frivolity had not
+escaped his keen observation. He lived always in the consciousness of an
+invisible presence; when he felt the arms of Heaven around him, wooing
+him to prayer, he dared not disobey.</p>
+
+<p>He arose now, setting his chair back against the wall with preoccupied
+precision. "The spirit of prayer is upon me," he said; and in a moment
+he added, "Let us pray."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was eating, and with relish. She laid down her bit of pumpkin
+pie and stared astonished. Then, being a girl of good sense and good
+feeling, she relinquished the remainder of her supper, and, following
+her aunt's example, knelt beside her chair.</p>
+
+<p>The two candles and the firelight left shadowy spaces in parts of the
+room, and cast grotesque outlines against the walls. Nothing was
+familiar to Susannah's eye; she could not help looking about her.
+Ephraim was nearest to her. He was a bearded man, and seemed to her very
+old. She saw that his face looked pale and distressed; his eyes were
+closed, his lips tight set, like one bearing transient pain. At the end
+of the table her uncle knelt upright, with hands clasped and face
+uplifted, no feature or muscle moving&mdash;a strong figure rapt in devotion.
+On her other side, as a slight tree waves in the wind, her aunt's slim
+figure was swaying and bending with feeling that was now convulsive and
+now restrained. Sometimes she moaned audibly or whispered "Amen." Across
+the richly-spread table Susannah saw the preacher kneeling in a full
+flickering glare of the pine fire, one hand upon the brick jamb, the
+other covering his eyes, as if to hide from himself all things that were
+seen and temporal in order that he might speak face to face with the
+Eternal.</p>
+
+<p>It was some time before she listened to the words of the prayer. When
+she heard Ephraim Croom spoken of by name, there was no room in her mind
+for anything but curiosity. After a while she heard her own name, and
+curiosity began to subside into awe. After this the preacher brought
+forward the case of Joseph Smith.</p>
+
+<p>Before the prayer ended Susannah was troubled by so strong a sense of
+emotion that she desired nothing so much as relief. It seemed to her
+that the emotion was not so much in herself as in the others, or like an
+influence in the room pressing upon them all. At length a kitten that
+had been lying by the hearth got up as if disturbed by the same
+influence, and, walking round the room, rubbed its fur against Ephraim's
+knee. She saw the start run through his whole nervous frame. Opening his
+eyes, he put down his hand and stroked it. Susannah liked Ephraim the
+better for this. The kitten was not to be comforted; it looked up in his
+face and gave a piteous mew. Susannah tittered; then she felt sorry and
+ashamed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Two quiet years passed, and Susannah had attained her eighteenth
+birthday.</p>
+
+<p>On a certain day in the week there befell what the aunt called a
+"season" of baking. It was the only occasion in the week when Mrs. Croom
+was sure to stay for some length of time in the same place with Susannah
+beside her. Ephraim brought down his books to the hospitable kitchen,
+and sat aloof at a corner table. He said the sun was too strong upon his
+upper windows, or that the rain was blowing in. The first time that
+Ephraim sought refuge in the kitchen Mrs. Croom was quite flustered with
+delight. She always coveted more of her son's society. But when he came
+a third time she began to suspect trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom stood by the baking-board, her slender hands immersed in a
+heap of pearly flour; baskets of scarlet currants lay at her feet. All
+things in the kitchen shone by reason of her diligence, and the windows
+were open to the summer sunshine. Susannah sat with a large pan of red
+gooseberries beside her; she was picking them over one by one.
+Somewhere in the outer kitchen the hired boy had been plucking a goose,
+and some tiny fragments of the down were floating in the air. One of
+them rode upon a movement of the summer air and danced before Susannah's
+eyes. She put her pretty red lips beneath it and blew it upwards.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom's suspicions concerning Ephraim had produced in her a desire
+to reprove some one, but she refrained as yet.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah having wafted the summer snowflake aloft, still sat, her young
+face tilted upward like the faces of saints in the holy pictures, her
+bright eyes fixed upon the feather now descending. Ephraim looked with
+obvious pleasure. Her head was framed for him by the window; a dark
+stiff evergreen and the summer sky gave a Raphaelite setting.</p>
+
+<p>The feather dropped till it all but touched the tip of the girl's nose.
+Then from the lips, puckered and rosy, came a small gust; the fragment
+of down ascended, but this time aslant.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't blow straight enough up," said Ephraim.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah smiled to know that her pastime was observed. The smile was a
+flash of pleasure that went through her being. She ducked her laughing
+face farther forward to be under the feather.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Croom shot one glance at Ephraim, eager and happy in his watching.
+She did what nothing but the lovelight in her son's face could have
+caused her to do. She struck the girl lightly but testily on the side of
+the face.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim was as foolish as are most men in sight of a damsel in distress.
+He made no impartial inquiry into the real cause of trouble; he did not
+seek Justice in her place of hiding. He stepped to his mother's side,
+stern and determined, remembering only that she was often unwise, and
+that he could control her.</p>
+
+<p>"You ought not to have done that. You must never do it again."</p>
+
+<p>With the print of floury fingers on her glowing cheeks the girl sat more
+astonished than angry, full of ruth when her aunt began to sob aloud.</p>
+
+<p>The mother knew that she was no longer the first woman in her son's
+love.</p>
+
+<p>It was without doubt, Mrs. Croom's first bitter pang of jealousy that
+lay at the beginning of those causes which drove Susannah out upon a
+strange pilgrimage. But above and beyond her personal jealousy was a
+consideration certainly dearer to a woman into whose inmost religious
+life was woven the fibre of the partisan. As she expressed it to
+herself, she agonised before the Lord in a new fear lest her unconverted
+son should be established in his unbelief by love for a woman who had
+never sought for heavenly grace; but, in truth, that which she sought
+was that both should swear allegiance to her own interpretation of
+grace. In this prayer some good came to her, the willingness to
+sacrifice her jealousy if need be; but, after the prayer another thought
+entered into her mind, which she held to be divine direction; she must
+focus all her efforts upon the girl's conversion. In her heart all the
+time a still small voice told her that love was the fulfilling of the
+law, but so still, so small, so habitual was it that she lost it as we
+lose the ticking of a clock, and it was not with increased love for
+Susannah that she began a course of redoubled zeal.</p>
+
+<p>The girl became frightened, not so much of her aunt as of God. The
+simple child's prayer for the keeping of her soul which she had been in
+the habit of repeating morning and evening became a terror to her,
+because she did not understand her aunt's phraseology. The "soul" it
+dealt with was not herself, her thoughts, feelings, and powers, but a
+mysterious something apart from these, for whose welfare these must all
+be sacrificed.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had heard of fairies and ghosts; she inclined to shove this
+sort of soul into the same unreal region. The dreary artificial heaven,
+which seemed to follow logically if she accepted the basal fact of a
+soul separated from all her natural powers, could be dispensed with
+also. This was her hope, but she was not sure. How could she be sure
+when she was so young and dependent? It was almost her only solace to
+interpret Ephraim's silence by her own unbelief, and she rested her
+weary mind against her vague notions of Ephraim's support.</p>
+
+<p>One August day Mrs. Croom drove with her husband to a distant funeral.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon when the sunshine was falling upon the fields of maize,
+when the wind was busy setting their ribbon-like leaves flapping, and
+rocking the tree-tops, Ephraim Croom was disturbed in his private room
+by the blustering entrance of Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>The room was an attic; the windows of the gable looked west; slanting
+windows in the shingle roof looked north and south. The room was large
+and square, spare of furniture, lined with books. At a square table in
+the centre sat Ephraim.</p>
+
+<p>When Susannah entered a gust of wind came with her. The handkerchief
+folded across her bosom was blown awry. Her sun-bonnet had slipped back
+upon her neck; her ringlets were tossed.</p>
+
+<p>"Cousin Ephraim, my aunt has gone; come out and play with me." Then she
+added more disconsolately, "I am lonely; I want you to talk to me,
+cousin."</p>
+
+<p>The gust had lifted Ephraim's papers and shed them upon the floor. He
+looked down at them without moving. Life in a world of thoughts in which
+his fellows took no interest, had produced in him a singularly
+undemonstrative manner.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah's red lips were pouting. "Come, cousin, I am so tired of
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>But Ephraim had been privately accused of amative emotions. Offended
+with his mother, mortified he knew not why, uncertain of his own
+feeling, as scholars are apt to be, he had no wish then but to retire.</p>
+
+<p>"I am too busy, Susianne."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I will go alone; I will go for a long, long walk by myself." She
+gave her foot a defiant stamp upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>He looked out of his windows north and south; safer district could not
+be. "I do not think it will rain," he said.</p>
+
+<p>A suspicion of laughter was lurking in his clear quiet eyes, which were
+framed in heavy brown eyebrows and thick lashes. Nature, who had stinted
+this man in physical strength, had fitted him out fairly well as to
+figure and feature.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah, vexed at his indifference, but fearing that he would retract
+his unexpected permission, was again in the draught of the open door.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I will walk away, away into the woods and never come back; what
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indians," suggested he, "or starvation, or perhaps wolves, Susianne."</p>
+
+<p>"But I love you for not forbidding me to go, cousin Ephraim."</p>
+
+<p>The smile that repaid him for his indulgence comforted him for an hour;
+then a storm arose.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Susannah had walked far. A squatter's old log-house
+stood by the green roadside; the wood of the roof and walls was
+weathered and silver-gray. Before it a clothes-line was stretched,
+heaved tent-like by a cleft pole, and a few garments were flapping in
+the wind, chiefly white, but one was vivid pink and one tawny yellow.</p>
+
+<p>The nearer aspect of the log-house was squalid. An early apple-tree at
+the side had shed part of its fruit, which was left to rot in the grass
+and collect flies, and close to the road, under a juniper bush, the rind
+of melons and potato peelings had been thrown. There was no fence; the
+grass was uncut. Upon the door-step sat a tall woman, unkempt-looking,
+almost ragged. She had short gray hair that curled about her temples;
+her face was handsome, clever-looking too, but, above all, eager. This
+eagerness amounted to hunger. She was looking toward the sky, nodding
+and smiling to herself.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah stopped upon the road a few feet from the juniper bush. It
+occurred to her that this was Joseph Smith's mother, who had the
+reputation of being a speywife. The sky-gazer did not look at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you Lucy Smith?"</p>
+
+<p>The woman clapped her hands suddenly together and laughed aloud. Then
+she rose, but, only glancing a moment at the visitor, she turned her
+smiling face again toward the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Into Susannah's still defiant mood darted the thought of a new
+adventure. "Will you tell my fortune?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who am I to tell fortunes when my son Joseph has come home?" Again came
+the excited laugh. "It's the grace of God that's fallen on this house,
+and Lucy Smith, like Elizabeth, the wife of Zacharias, is the mother of
+a prophet."</p>
+
+<p>"He isn't a prophet," said Susannah, taking a step backward.</p>
+
+<p>"Seven years ago was his first vision, and all the people trampling upon
+him since to make him gainsay it, but he stood steadfast. I dreamed
+it&mdash;when he was a little child I dreamed it, and it has come true."
+Then, seeming to return into herself, her gaze wandered again to the
+sky, and she murmured, "The mother of a prophet, the mother of a
+prophet!"</p>
+
+<p>On the other side of the road a few acres of ground were lying under
+disorderly cultivation. In one patch the stalks of sweet maize had been
+fastened together in high stooks, disclosing the pumpkin vines, which
+beneath them had plentifully borne their huge fruit, green as yet. At
+the back of this cultivated portion an old man, the elder Joseph Smith,
+was digging potatoes; his torn shirt fluttered like the dress of a
+scarecrow. Behind him and all around was the green wood, close-growing
+bushes hedging in the short trees of a second growth which covered a
+long low hill. Above the hill ominous clouds like smoking censers were
+being rolled up from the east; the waving beards of the corn stooks
+rustled and streamed in wind which was growing colder. Susannah's dress
+and bonnet were roughly blown, and the clothes on the line flapped again
+around the tall figure of the witch in the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah contradicted again with the scornful superiority of youth. "I
+don't believe that your son is a prophet."</p>
+
+<p>Lucy Smith, having the sensitive receptive power of an hysteric, was
+sobered now by the determination of Susannah's aspect. She looked almost
+repentant for a moment, and then said humbly, "If you'll come in and see
+Emmar&mdash;Joseph and Emmar have come home&mdash;Emmar will tell you the same."</p>
+
+<p>A gray vaporous tint was being spread over the heavens, folding this
+portion of earth in its shadow and darkening the interior of the cabin
+which Susannah entered.</p>
+
+<p>Upon a decent bedstead reclined a young woman. Everything near her was
+orderly and clean. She belonged, it would seem, to a better class of the
+social order than the other, certainly to a higher type of womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you got? Is it a kitten?" asked Susannah. Advancing across
+the dark uneven floor, she perceived that the reclining woman was
+caressing some small creature beneath her shawl.</p>
+
+<p>"Emmar, Emmar," said Lucy Smith, "tell Miss from the mill about the
+angel that appeared to Joseph."</p>
+
+<p>Emma Smith was a nobly made, dignified young creature. She looked at
+Susannah's beautiful and open countenance, and straightway drew forth
+the young thing she was nursing for her inspection. It was an infant but
+a few days old. Surprised, reverent, and delighted, Susannah bent over
+it. The child made them all akin&mdash;the squalid old hysteric, the
+respectable young mother, the beautiful girl in her silken shawl.</p>
+
+<p>Some minutes elapsed.</p>
+
+<p>"Emmar, Miss here doesn't know nothing about Joseph. She says it ain't
+true."</p>
+
+<p>The young mother smiled frankly. "I suppose it seems very hard for you
+to believe," she said, "but it's quite true, and the Lord told Joseph
+where to find the new part of the Bible that he's going now to make
+known to the world. Shall I tell you about it?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah looked at her dazed; she had heretofore heard of the Smiths'
+doctrines as of the ravings of the mad. It had not occurred to her that
+a sane mind could regard them seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"It was seven years ago," said Emma, "at the time the big revival was
+here and Joseph was converted; but he heard all the Methodists and
+Baptists and Presbyterians disputing together as to which of them was
+right, and he felt so burdened to know which was right, and he felt a
+sort of longing in him to be a great man, bigger than the revival
+preacher that had been here that all the people ran after, and Joseph
+felt that he could be bigger than that, and preach and tell all the
+people what was right, if they would all come to hear him. And he was so
+burdened that one day he went out into the woods, and he began crying
+and confessing his sins and calling out to God to show him what was
+right and make him a great preacher. Well, when he had been crying and
+going on like that for a long time, he just fell right down as if he was
+asleep, and it was all dark till a light fell from heaven and an angel
+came in the light." Emma went on to tell of Smith's vision and first
+call, of his backsliding and final commission.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah stared. The young mother was a reality; the baby was a reality.
+Could the statements in this wild story bear any relation to reality?
+The old woman stood by, nodding and smiling. The young girl's mind
+became perplexed.</p>
+
+<p>"It was just before he began to translate the gold book that he came to
+board at my father's in Susquehannah County, and he told me all about
+it, and I believed him; but my father wouldn't, so I had to go away with
+Joseph to get married; but since then father's forgiven us; and we've
+been back home this last summer, and we've been to Fayette too, living
+with a gentleman called Mr. Whitmer, who believes in Joseph, and all the
+time Joseph's been translating the book that was written on the gold
+plates that he found in the hill. It's been very hard work, and we've
+had to live very poor, because Joseph couldn't earn anything while he
+was doing it, but it's done now, so we feel cheered. And now that it's
+going to be printed, and Joseph can begin to gather in the elect very
+soon, and now that baby's come&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Emma stopped again; the last domestic detail seemed to involve her mind
+in such meshes of bliss that she lost sight of the end of her sentence.
+All her words had been calm, and the baby that lay upon the bed beside
+her stretching its crumpled rose-leaf fists into the air and making
+strange grotesque smiles with its little red chin and cheeks was
+undoubtedly a true baby, a good and delightful thing in Susannah's
+estimation. Had the Bible in the hill been a true Bible? Susannah
+intuitively knew that Emma Smith, bending with grave rapture over her
+firstborn, was not trying to deceive her.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me," she said, "that it is terribly wicked of you to
+believe about this Bible." Her utterance became thick with her rising
+indignation. "How can you sit and hold that child and say such terribly
+wicked things?" She could not have told why she referred to the child;
+the moment before it was spoken she had not formulated the thought. She
+was not old enough to reason about the sacredness of babies; she only
+felt.</p>
+
+<p>The tears started to Emma's eyes. She clasped her child to her breast.
+"Yes, I know how you feel. I felt that way too myself, and sometimes
+even yet it frightens me; but, you see, I know it is true, so it must be
+right. But I've given up expecting other people to believe it just yet,
+until Joseph is allowed to preach, and then it's been revealed to him
+that the nations shall be gathered in. Only you looked so&mdash;so
+beautiful&mdash;you see, I thought perhaps God might have sent you to be a
+friend to me. I have no friends because of the way they persecute
+Joseph."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah turned in incredulous wrath and tramped, young and haughty, to
+the outer door. The first drops of a heavy shower were falling; she
+hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"But tell her about the witnesses, Emmar." Old Lucy stood half-way
+between the bed and the door, making nods and becks in her excited
+desire that Susannah should be impressed. "For when the dear Lord saw
+that folks wouldn't b'lieve Joseph, He didn't leave him without
+witnesses."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah, stopped by the weather, felt more willing to conciliate. She
+returned gloomily within the sound of Emma's gentle voice.</p>
+
+<p>"It was Mr. Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer and Mr. Harris," Emma said. "Mr.
+Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer saw the gold plates held in the air, as it were
+by hands they couldn't see, but Martin Harris he had to withdraw himself
+because he couldn't see the vision, and he went away by himself and
+sobbed and cried. But Joseph went and put his arm around him and prayed
+that his faith might be strengthened, and then he saw it. So they three
+have written their testimony in the front of the book that's being
+printed."</p>
+
+<p>A storm had now broken upon the house in torrents. The door was shut.
+Emma wrapped her child closer in her shawl. Susannah sat sulky and
+disconsolate. She had a vague idea that the vengeance of heaven was
+overtaking her for merely listening to such heresy. Over against this
+was a shadowy doubt whether it might not be true, roused by Emma's
+continued persistency.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it any easier to believe that those things happened to folks when
+the Bible was written? Don't you believe that God appeared to Moses and
+Samuel and told them the very words to write down, and showed them
+visions; and isn't He the same God yesterday, to-day, and for ever? It's
+just what it says in the Bible shall come about in the latter days. It's
+because of the great apostasy of the Church, no one really believing in
+Jesus Christ, that a new prophet had to appear&mdash;that's Joseph."</p>
+
+<p>"They do believe," Susannah spoke sullenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, there's your aunt, Mis' Croom. Now she's as good as there is in
+the modern Church, isn't she? She's doing all she can to save her soul.
+She can't do it, for she don't believe. Why the Lord, He said that signs
+and wonders should follow them that believe. Have they any signs and
+wonders up at your place? And He said that believers must forsake all,
+houses and lands and all; what have your people forsook? And as to its
+being hard to believe about Joseph&mdash;you just take the things in the
+Bible, Elisha and the bears, for instance, and Paul bringing back Dorcas
+to life, and just think how hard they'd be to believe if you heard they
+happened yesterday, next door to you. And with God all times and places
+is the same. Souls is only saved by believing; the Lord says so, and
+accepting the things of faith to come to pass, and being baptized and
+giving up all and following; and it's an awful thing to lose one's
+soul."</p>
+
+<p>At this reiteration of the doctrine of the soul as a thing apart from
+the development of reason and character, Susannah rose, ready to cry
+with anger. Her aunt's agitation on the subject had left a sore to which
+the gentlest touch was pain.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe it," she cried. "I don't believe God wants us to do
+anything except just good. That's what <i>my</i> father told me. I'm going
+home. I don't care how it rains."</p>
+
+<p>Emma did not hear her. Over her pale young face had come the peculiar
+expression of alert and loving listening. She had detected the sound of
+a footstep which Susannah now heard coming heavily near.</p>
+
+<p>A large man of about twenty-five years of age entered from the bluster
+of the storm. As Susannah was trying to push out past him into its fury,
+he paused, staring in rough astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>Lucy hung on to her arm. "Stay a bit! Joseph must hold the umbrella over
+Miss. Emmar, tell her she can't no wise go alone."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah fled into the driving sheets of rain, but Joseph Smith,
+umbrella in hand, followed her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The umbrella was a very heavy one. Susannah certainly could not have
+held it against the wind. Joseph Smith held the shelter between Susannah
+and the blast, looking at her occasionally with a kindly expression in
+his blue eyes, but merely to see how far it sheltered her.</p>
+
+<p>They walked in silence for about a quarter of a mile. The rain swept
+upon her skirt and feet; she saw it falling thick on either side; she
+saw it beating upon Smith's shoulder, upon one side of his hat, and
+dripping from his light hair. The wind was so strong that the very drops
+that trickled from his hair were blown backward. His blue coat was
+old&mdash;not much protection, she thought, against the storm.</p>
+
+<p>The false prophet had hitherto appeared quite as terrible to her
+imagination and as far removed from real life as the wild beast of story
+books; now he appeared very much like any other man&mdash;rather more kind in
+his actions, perhaps, and distrait in his thought. Susannah began to
+think herself a discoverer.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not keeping the rain off yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"It don't matter about me. I don't mind getting wet."</p>
+
+<p>His tone carried conviction. After a while gratitude again stirred her
+into speech.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you find it awfully hard holding up the umbrella."</p>
+
+<p>He gave a glance downward at her as she toiled by his side. "Why you're
+most blown away as it is. You couldn't get along without the umbrellar."
+Regarding her attentively for a minute, he added, "Emmar will be vexed
+when she hears that your dress got so splashed."</p>
+
+<p>They were both bending somewhat forward against the wind; the road
+beneath them was glistening with standing water. When they passed by the
+woods the trees were creaking and cracking, and over the meadows hung
+shifting veils of clouds and rain.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'd better not take you farther than Sharon Peck's. Your folks
+would be pretty mad if you walked through the village with Joe Smith."</p>
+
+<p>The lines round Susannah's mouth strengthened themselves; she felt
+herself superior to those whose attitude of mind he had thus described.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been very kind to come with me. I'd like better to go home
+than stop, if it isn't too far."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess not. If you'd lived here longer you'd know that there was all
+manner of evil said about me, and the worst of it is that some of it's
+true. I've been a pretty low sort of fellow, and I hain't got any
+education to speak of."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him in astonishment; the expression of his face was
+peaceful and kindly. "Then why do you go about preaching and saying&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I hain't got nothing to do with that at all. If an angel comes from
+heaven and gives me a partic'lar revelation, calling me by name, namely,
+'Joseph Smith, Junior,' tain't for me to say he's made a mistake and
+come to the wrong man, though goodness knows I hev said it to the Lord
+often enough; but now I've come to see that it's my business just to do
+what I'm told. But as to the low ways I hed&mdash;why, I've repented and give
+them up, and as to the education, I'm trying to get that, but it won't
+come in a minute."</p>
+
+<p>Her conscience was not at rest; to be silent was like telling a lie, and
+from motives of fear, too! At length she burst out, "I don't believe you
+ever saw an angel, Mr. Smith. I think it's very wicked of you to have
+made it up, and about the gold Bible too."</p>
+
+<p>They were still half a mile from the nearest house. Susannah gasped.
+When she had spoken her defiance she realised that if she had nothing
+worse to fear, she at least deserved to be left alone among the raging
+elements. She staggered somewhat, expecting a rebuff.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you'd better take my arm," he said. "It ain't no sort of a day
+for a woman to be out."</p>
+
+<p>When she hesitated, flushed and frightened, a smile came for the first
+time across his face. "You're almost beat back by the wind. It won't
+hurt you to grip hold of my sleeve, you know, even if I am a thundering
+big liar. I don't know as I can expect you to believe anything else.
+Emmar didn't for a long time, but then, after a spell, she gave up all
+the comforts of her father's house just to stand by me, and no one's
+ever had a word to say against Emmar."</p>
+
+<p>They stopped at a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village.</p>
+
+<p>Smith had said to Susannah, "There's a gentleman I know stopping at
+Sharon Peck's. I'll pass the umbrellar on to him, and he'll take you
+home. He's been a Quaker, but I guess you'll find him a pretty nice
+young gentleman. Mrs. Peck, she isn't to home."</p>
+
+<p>He left Susannah standing upon the lee side of a wooden house amid
+treeless fields. The eaves sheltered her. She stooped down and with both
+hands wrung the water from her skirts. She was busy over this when the
+promised escort joined her.</p>
+
+<p>The remnants of his forsaken Quakerism hung around him; his coat was
+buff, his hat straight in the brim, his manner prim, and when he spoke
+it was in the speech of his people. His complexion was very light, hair,
+eyebrows and lashes, and the down on his chin&mdash;almost flaxen; his face
+was browned by exposure to the weather, but so well formed that Susannah
+found him very good to look upon, the features pointed and delicate, but
+not without strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou wilt walk as far as thy home with me?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>He held Smith's huge umbrella, but he did not hold it with the same
+strength, nor did he show the same skill in keeping it against the wind.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke as they walked. "Thou hast walked a long way. Art weary?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;no&mdash;I don't know." What did it matter whether she was tired or
+not? Baffled curiosity was exciting her. "You are a stranger here. Are
+you a friend of the Smiths?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have experienced the great benefit of being acquainted with the
+prophet for the last fourteen days."</p>
+
+<p>"But he's not a prophet," said Susannah resentfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Did'st thou never find thyself to be mistaken when thou wast most sure?
+Hast thou not perceived that thy Bible tells thee in many different ways
+that God chooses not as men choose?"</p>
+
+<p>Then with great ardour he preached to her the doctrine of this new
+Christian sect. He was a convert; his preaching was rather the eager
+recital of his own experience, which would out, like some dynamic force
+within him, than pressure brought wilfully to bear upon her.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "I do not ask thee, friend, if thou art Methodist or Baptist or
+Presbyterian, but I do ask thee, canst thou read the promises of thy
+Lord to his church and be content with its present low estate?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was habituated to some recognition of her beauty; she missed it
+here, not knowing what she missed. Smith had known that it was important
+for her to be sheltered from the wind; he was sorry that her skirts were
+splashed; his manner, casual as it had been, had at least had in it that
+element of "because you are you," the first essential of any human
+relationship. But Susannah liked the young Quaker much better than
+Smith; he was of finer fibre, and her heart was agape for young
+companionship; so, unconsciously, she resented his indifference, not
+only as to her sect but as to her sex.</p>
+
+<p>"My father was an Englishman," she replied with dignity, not knowing why
+this seemed sufficient answer.</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker proceeded eagerly with his own story. He had searched the
+Scriptures diligently, and found in them no warrant for believing that
+the age of miracles and direct revelations would ever pass from the
+church. Then upon the gloom of his deep despondency a star had arisen.
+He had heard of a young man, poor, obscure, illiterate, who had dared to
+come forth saying again, as St. Peter had once said, "This is that which
+was spoken by the prophet Joel." He had come far to hear the word, and,
+upon hearing it, he had found rest for himself and a hope for the world.</p>
+
+<p>His ardour was beginning to tell upon Susannah's mind. The desire awoke
+within her for some fellowship with his enthusiasm. Stronger was the
+desire to receive personal recognition from the fair-faced youth.</p>
+
+<p>"I am English," she repeated, "and of course I think it very wicked to
+add anything to the Bible; it says so in the Revelation."</p>
+
+<p>"That to me also was a stumbling-block for a short time; but if thou
+wilt consider, friend, that the Book of Mormon is the history of God's
+dealing with the wild races of our own continent from the time of Noah
+until the time of Maroni, which would be about three hundred years after
+the first coming of the Lord, and that this sacred history, so necessary
+for the instruction of us who must now dwell in the same land, could not
+be given until this continent was known to the world, thou wilt cease to
+cavil, and wilt in all humility believe that that which is done of the
+hand of the Lord cannot be wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Faith begging the question is a sight to which the eye of experience
+becomes accustomed, but Susannah, standing upon the threshold of life,
+blinked and failed to focus her vision, feeling vaguely that during the
+last phrase some one had turned a somersault, and that too quickly to be
+watched.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou wilt think upon these things?" The young Quaker stood in the storm
+and looked earnestly upon Susannah, who was upon her uncle's doorstep,
+within shelter of the brown pent house.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah smiled. It was a perfectly instinctive smile, not one
+self-conscious thought went behind or before. She smiled because the
+young man was comely, and because she was young and wanted
+companionship.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she said with perfect frankness; "my aunt will be so
+vexed with me when she hears that I've been to the Smiths that I don't
+believe I'll be allowed to think of anything this good while."</p>
+
+<p>Her smile, her girlishness, seemed at last to pierce beneath the armour
+of his devout abstraction. Fortune at work chooses her a fine-edged
+instrument, and Joseph Smith, with unerring but probably half conscious
+instinct, had sent the right messenger. The cloud of serious intent on
+the youth's face broke now into a sudden admiring glance, half playful
+yet fully earnest. His gray eyes held for a moment gracious parley with
+hers. "Wilt thou," he asked, still smiling, "give it as excuse in the
+day of judgment that they would not let thee think?"</p>
+
+<p>"N-n-no." She was more struck with the inadequacy of the excuse than
+with the fact that she had a better one if she had chosen to give it.</p>
+
+<p>He was again grave, but he was not now unappreciative. "Thou art very
+fair, and beauty to a young woman is, no doubt, a great snare. I will
+wrestle in prayer for thee."</p>
+
+<p>He was going down the brick walk between the masses of drenched flowers.
+"Don't," cried Susannah faintly, "don't do that." But he did not hear
+her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The wind that in the hurly-burly out of doors had been a cheerful if
+boisterous enemy, seemed suddenly transformed into a wailing spirit when
+Susannah was making her way up the stairs of the darkening wooden house.
+Its master and mistress had not yet returned from burying the dead. The
+girl made her way up to Ephraim's room. The books were left open upon
+the table; no one was there.</p>
+
+<p>It was a new thing that Ephraim should breast a storm.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah trudged downstairs again and dried her bedraggled skirts at the
+fire&mdash;an empty house, a dreary wailing wind, and gathering twilight for
+her sole companions.</p>
+
+<p>At length a step was heard. Ephraim came in bearing Susannah's rain
+cloak and goloshes. He was wet, pale, and breathless, but he would not
+betray his weakness and excitement by a word.</p>
+
+<p>"You were looking for me, Ephraim, and some one told you that I had come
+home. Did you hear who brought me? O Ephraim! I have been out walking
+with the false prophet, and then with one of his disciples." Susannah,
+sitting by the fire, looked at him trying to smile through his gloom.</p>
+
+<p>She began again, then stopped; how to impart the full flavour of that
+which had befallen her she did not know. It seemed to her that the
+difficulty lay in Ephraim's silence. She was not aware that she had not
+even a distinct thought for a certain interest in her late companion
+which she most wanted to put into words. "Ephraim, it's all very well
+for you to stand there drying your feet, but&mdash;but&mdash;they were just like
+other people, as you told Mr. Finney, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you expect them to have horns and tails?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think they are very wicked," said Susannah. She looked down as
+she said it, speaking with a certain undefined tenderness of tone
+begotten of a new experience.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's all."</p>
+
+<p>"How could you know whether they are wicked or not?" he burst out
+angrily. "Do you suppose that they would show <i>you</i> the iniquity of
+their hearts?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Ephraim, you've always stood up for them before!"</p>
+
+<p>He gave a sort of snort. "I never stood up for them by making eyes at my
+hands and cooing out my words."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up in entire bewilderment.</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter what I mean," he added. "What did they say? What did
+they do? Tell me. If I'd known these fellows had come back, do you
+suppose I'd have let you go?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are so strange," she said. "They did nothing but just bring me home
+and hold the umbrella, and Joseph Smith said he knew he'd been a bad man
+and didn't know anything. I thought you'd be interested to hear about
+them, Ephraim."</p>
+
+<p>"I should have thought you'd had too much self-respect to allow him to
+talk to you like that. Of course he was trying to work on your
+feelings."</p>
+
+<p>"No, he wasn't, Ephraim. You are quite as unjust as my aunt to-day. He
+wasn't trying to work on my feelings. He was just&mdash;well, he was sorry
+that my frock got so wet, and he just happened to say the other thing. I
+am sure&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her conviction concerning the naturalness of Smith's conduct and the
+Quaker's sincerity had arisen in the presence of each, and was not now
+to be ascribed to any particular word or action which she could remember
+and repeat.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he was sorry your frock was splashed, was he? And the other fellow
+they call Halsey, was he concerned about that too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you that his name was Halsey?" The interest of her tone was
+unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>"That is his name, and he must be a degraded fellow to take up with
+Smith."</p>
+
+<p>She saw that Ephraim's clothes were very wet; he must have walked far.
+She attributed his exhausted look entirely to fatigue, and his
+ill-temper to the same cause. "Mr. Halsey seemed quite good and in
+earnest, like the people that come to see Mr. Finney when he stays here,
+asking about saving their souls, as if their souls were something quite
+different from the other part of them; and, Ephraim, I have often wanted
+to ask you, but I didn't like to. You don't believe what aunt and uncle
+do, do you? Aunt talks as if you didn't believe. Do you think"&mdash;her
+voice trembled&mdash;"do you think that I ought to think about my soul&mdash;that
+way?"</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim never perceived the nature of her difficulty. He thought she
+questioned the earnestness of life. He leaned back against the jamb of
+the chimney, vainly trying to dispel his anger and bring his mind under
+the command of reason. He looked at Susannah steadily; she was somewhat
+pale with weariness and excitement; she could never be other than
+beautiful. How perfect was the moulding of the strong firm chin, of the
+curving nostrils! The breadth of the cheek bone, the height and breadth
+of the brow, beautiful as they were in their pink and white tinting,
+conveyed to him almost more strongly the sense of mental completeness
+than of outward beauty. He did not dare to look at her questioning
+eyes; his glance travelled over the amber ringlets, damp and tossed
+just now, drooping as if to say "Susannah is lonely and perplexed, and
+she needs your help." Ephraim, proud, and mortified to think how ill he
+compared with her, laughed fiercely within himself. This was a young
+woman of distinction, and just now she knew it so little that she sat
+looking up with respect at his ill-conditioned self. How long would that
+last? How long would she remember any word that he chanced to say to
+her?</p>
+
+<p>"Susannah, I think you are very ignorant. Were you never taught anything
+when you were a little girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"My father and his friends were always polite to me." She spoke with
+grave, rather than offended, dignity.</p>
+
+<p>"She is entirely sweet," he said to himself; "she will never answer me
+in anger." Then he went on aloud, "And I am not polite; I am ill-trained
+and ill-bred. Well, listen, Susannah. Whatever my mother may or may not
+tell you about my peculiar opinions, whatever <i>I</i> choose to believe or
+to do, remember this, that I tell you that <i>you have</i> a soul to be
+eternally lost or saved, and it behoves you to walk carefully and
+concern yourself about your salvation." There was a vibration of intense
+warning in his voice. He was thinking of the life that might be so noble
+if will and reason sided with God, and of the snares that the world lays
+for beauty, and the light way in which beauty might walk into them;
+and, as with all dreamy minds, he was too absorbed in his thought to
+know how little it shone through the veil in which he wrapped it.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah grew a shade paler. She had struggled in a blind child-fashion
+to maintain a religion that would embrace her manifold life, but now it
+appeared that, after all, Ephraim endorsed the general view; his refusal
+to comply openly with it came of wilfulness, not unbelief. The
+stronghold of her peace was gone. "My papa never spoke to me about
+religion in that way, but I don't think he believed that."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim thought of the weak and reckless young father, of the careless
+life broken suddenly by death.</p>
+
+<p>"He has learned the truth now," he said shortly.</p>
+
+<p>After a pause, in which she did not speak, he betook himself to his own
+rooms, leaving Susannah to the companionship of the lonely house, the
+howling wind, the gathering night, and a new fear of a state eternal and
+infernal, into which she might so easily slip. Ephraim said so, and he
+would never have proclaimed what he would not comply with unless its
+truth were very sure.</p>
+
+<p>As for him, his self-despite was pain that rendered him oblivious of her
+real danger. Where was his boasted justice? Gone before a breath of
+jealousy. The neighbours had told him that she had smiled on Halsey,
+and the abuse of the Smithites, in which his mother indulged in the
+blindness of religious party-spirit, had fallen from his lips as soon as
+his own passion had been touched. Had his former candour, then, been the
+thing his mother called it, <i>indifference</i> to, rather than reverence for
+truth?</p>
+
+<p>This was the travail of soul that Susannah could have as little thought
+of as he had of hers. It held Ephraim in its fangs for many days.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The return of Smith and his few followers, and the speedy publication of
+the first edition of the Book of Mormon, stirred anew the flames of
+religious excitement. All other sects were at one in decrying "the
+Mormons," as they now began to be called by their enemies. There was
+perhaps good reason for intelligent disapprobation, but Understanding
+was left far behind the flying feet of Zeal, who, torch in hand, rushed
+from house to house. It was related that Joseph Smith was in the habit
+of wounding inoffensive sheep and leading them bleeding over the
+neighbouring hills under the pretext that treasure would be found
+beneath the spot where they would at last drop exhausted; and there were
+dark hints concerning benighted travellers who, staying all night at the
+Smiths' cabin, had seen awful apparitions and been glad to fly from the
+place, leaving their property behind. There was a story of diabolical
+influence which Smith had exercised in order to gain the young wife whom
+he had stolen from her father's roof, and, worse than all, there were
+descriptions of occult rites carried on in secret places, where the
+most bloody mysteries of the Mosaic priesthood were horribly travestied
+by Smith and his friends, Cowdery and Rigdon, in order to dupe the
+simple into belief in the new revelation.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim Croom had again withdrawn himself out of hearing of the
+controversy. Judging that Susannah was sufficiently guarded by his
+parents to be safe, he became almost oblivious of conversation which he
+despised. He did not reflect that Susannah knew nothing of his hidden
+conflict, that she could only perceive that, after uttering an ominous
+warning, he had left her to work out its application alone.</p>
+
+<p>It was at first not at all her liking for the Smiths, but only her
+unbiassed common sense, which convinced her that the wild stories told
+concerning them were untrue. When she became enraged at their untruth
+she became more kindly disposed toward the young mother, whose baby had
+made a strong appeal to her girlish heart, and the big kindly lout of a
+man who had sheltered her from the rain. This benevolent disposition
+might have slumbered unfruitful but for the memory of the fine and
+resolute face of the young disciple who had promised to wrestle in
+prayer for her. There was novelty in the thought. The gay witch Novelty
+often apes the form of Love. Susannah did not know Love, so she did not
+recognise even the vestments falsely worn, but they attracted her all
+the same. Her young blood boiled when her aunt, dimly discerning some
+unlooked-for obstinacy in her niece's mind, repeated each new report in
+disfavour of the Mormons. It was the old story about the blood of the
+martyrs, for ridicule and slander spill the pregnant blood of the soul;
+but they who believe themselves to be of the Church can seldom believe
+that any blood but their own will bear fruit. Every stab given to the
+reputation of the Smiths was an appeal to Susannah's sympathy for them.
+Mrs. Croom, with a sense of solemn responsibility, was at great cost
+bringing all her influence to bear upon the young girl whom her son
+loved. She drearily said to herself, after many days, that her influence
+was weak, that it accomplished nothing. The strength of it pushed
+Susannah, who stood faltering at the parting of the ways, and the
+impetus of that push was felt in her rapid and unsteady step for many
+and many a year.</p>
+
+<p>One day, when the men were out cutting the maize, Susannah rode with her
+uncle to the most distant of his fields, and found herself on the hill
+called in Smith's revelation Cumorah.</p>
+
+<p>The sound of the men at work and the horses shaking their harness was
+close in her ears while she strayed over this bit of hilly woodland. It
+is one of the low ridges that intersect the meadows on the banks of the
+Canandaigua, and here Smith professed to have found the golden book. It
+was because of this that Susannah had the curiosity to climb it now.</p>
+
+<p>The beech wood grew thick upon it; the afternoon sun struck its slant
+sunbeams across their boles. Once, where the beeches parted, she came
+upon a fairy glade where two or three maples, fading early, had carpeted
+the ground with a mosaic of gold and red, and were holding up the
+remainder of their foliage, pink and yellow, in the light. The beauty
+wrought in her a dreamy receptive mood. Climbing higher, she came upon a
+very curious dip or hollow in the ground. In its narrowest part a man
+was lying prostrate; his face was buried in his hat, which was lying
+upon the ground between his hands; the whole expression of his body was
+that of attention concentrated upon something within the hat. When she
+came close he moved with a convulsive start, and she saw that it was
+Joseph Smith.</p>
+
+<p>His look changed into one of deference and satisfaction. He rose up,
+lifting his hat carefully; in it lay a curious stone composed of bright
+crystals, in shape not unlike a child's foot.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my peepstone," he said. "It's the stone I look into when I pray
+that I may be shown what to do." Exactly as one child might show to
+another some worthless object he deemed choice, he showed the stone to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what you mean. How could a stone help you?"</p>
+
+<p>"All I know is that when I've been lying for a long time, feeling that
+I'm a poor fellow and haven't got no sense anyway, and the tears come to
+my eyes and gush out, feeling I'm so poor and mean, then when I lie and
+look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of
+things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening
+alongside of me that I didn't know any other way. I can't say how it may
+be; I only know when I see it that I am 'accounted worthy.'"</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't see anything in the stone."</p>
+
+<p>"No more I couldn't. The stone's nothing, an' I'm nothing, and that's
+why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the
+devil that sends them; and it's not the devil, for I always work myself
+up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come
+after that if it was the devil?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you one thing I have seen. Mebbe you'll know what it means;
+mebbe you won't. I don't know myself rightly yet. I've often to study on
+those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I've
+seen you."</p>
+
+<p>"Me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside
+the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables
+and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light
+hair."</p>
+
+<p>"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.</p>
+
+<p>"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own
+heart seemed to say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it.
+Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your
+folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began
+again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.
+"The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and
+shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul;
+and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her
+to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and
+grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and
+honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the
+sunlight, before her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing
+remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself,
+and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start
+from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was
+going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the
+prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her
+mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in
+childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision
+within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never
+heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then
+been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that
+she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic
+suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety
+and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of
+policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her
+gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this
+man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again
+to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound,
+suggested piety. "She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the
+salvation of her soul," "She is chosen to go through suffering and grief
+for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these
+words had come to her&mdash;to her&mdash;direct from the mind of the Almighty!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family
+room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.</p>
+
+<p>Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges,
+their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun
+and gray. Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken
+distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines. That far
+outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds,
+but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the
+moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane&mdash;steel blue, so
+full of light as to be luminous in itself. From this the nearer contour
+of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of
+russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in
+the sunlight, the fields were yellow. From the top of a low hill which
+met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it
+passed the door. Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent,
+of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the
+hill?</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with
+his mother, and her uncle was at the mill. On the white road she saw a
+man approaching whose dress showed him to be Smith's Quaker convert,
+Angel Halsey, a name she had conned till it had become familiar. He did
+not pass, but opened the gate of the small garden path and came up
+between the two borders of sweet-smelling box. In the garden China
+asters, zenias, and prince's feather, dahlias, marigolds, and
+love-lies-bleeding were falling over one another in luxuriant waste. The
+young man neither looked to night nor to left. He scanned the house
+eagerly, and his eyes found the window at which Susannah sat. He stepped
+across the flowers and stood, his blonde face upturned, below the open
+sash. Under his light eyebrows his hazel eyes shone with a singularly
+bright and exalted expression.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, friend Susannah," said he, "I have been sent to bring you to
+witness my baptism," and with that he turned and walked slowly down the
+path, as if waiting for her to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah, filled with surprise, watched him as he made slowly for the
+gate, as if assured that she would come. When he got to it he set it
+open, and, holding it, looked back.</p>
+
+<p>She dropped the long folds of muslin, and they fell upon the floor
+knee-deep about her; she stepped out of them and walked across the old
+familiar living-room, with its long strips of worn rag-carpet, its old
+polished chairs, and smoky walls. The face of the eight-day clock stared
+hard at her with impassive yet kindly glance, but its voice only
+steadily recorded that the moments were passing one by one, like to all
+other moments.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went out of the door. The sun drew forth aromatic scent from
+the borders of box, and her light skirt brushed the blossoms that leaned
+too far over. Outside the wicket gate at which the young man stood was a
+young quince tree laden with pale-green fruit. Susannah let her eyes
+rest upon it as she spoke: she even let her mind wander for a second to
+think how soon the fruit would be gathered.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I come to see your baptism?" she asked, with her voice on
+the upward cadence.</p>
+
+<p>The young man blushed deeply. "I am come to thee with a message from
+heaven." He glanced upward to the great sky that was the colour of
+turquoise, cloudless, serene.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a strange errand." There was a touch of reproof in her voice, and
+yet also the vibration of awe-struck inquiry. Her mind rushed at once to
+the memory of Joseph Smith's prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, friend," said the young Quaker very gently.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't possibly go."</p>
+
+<p>His strange reply was, "With God all things are possible."</p>
+
+<p>The text fell upon her mind with force.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said gently, and he motioned that he would shut the gate
+behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"Not now; my shoes are not stout; I have no bonnet or shawl."</p>
+
+<p>"Put thy kerchief over thy head and come, friend Susannah, for 'no man,
+putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom
+of heaven.'"</p>
+
+<p>At this he walked on, and she was forced to follow for a few steps to
+ask an explanation. She tied her kerchief over her head and the thick
+white dust covered her slender shoes.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want me to come for?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He looked upon her, colouring again with the effort to express what was
+to him sacred. "It has been given to me to pray for thy soul. To-day, as
+I prayed, it was borne in upon me that thou shouldst be with me in the
+waters of baptism."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah paused on the road, planting the heels of her shoes deeply in
+the dust. "I will not," she cried. "I will never believe in Joseph
+Smith."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet it has been revealed, friend, that thou art one of the elect.
+The time will come very soon when thou wilt believe to the salvation of
+thy soul."</p>
+
+<p>He walked slowly onward, and after a minute Susannah, with quickened
+steps, followed him, in high anger now. "I do not believe in the
+revelations of Joseph Smith," she cried. And because he did not appear
+offended she spoke more rudely, catching at phrases to which she had
+become accustomed. "If the salvation of my soul should depend upon it, I
+would rather lose it than believe."</p>
+
+<p>But when she had said these last words a little gasp came in her breath,
+and her heart quailed in realising the possibility of which she had
+spoken. Her own angry words had diverted her attention from questioning
+the reasonableness of the new faith to the fearful contemplation of what
+might be the result of rejection.</p>
+
+<p>If she quailed at her own speech, the grief of the young Quaker was more
+obvious. He put up his hands as if in fear that she should add to her
+sin by repeating her words. Quiet as was his demeanour, the emotional
+side of his nature had evidently been deeply wrought upon to-day, for
+when he tried to speak to reprove her, grief choked his utterance. It
+was not at that time a strange thing for men under the influence of
+religious convictions to weep easily. On the contrary, it was accounted
+by evangelists a sign of great grace; but Susannah, accustomed only to
+the reserve of English gentlemen and her uncle's stern Puritan
+self-repression, seeing this young Quaker weep for her sake, was greatly
+touched. She became possessed by an excited desire to console him.</p>
+
+<p>The young man turned, weeping as he went, into a little wood that here
+bordered the road. Susannah followed, full of ruth, thinking that he
+merely sought temporary shade.</p>
+
+<p>They had proceeded under the trees a few paces when Emma Smith came up
+from the bank of the river to meet them. Halsey controlled himself and
+spoke to Emma.</p>
+
+<p>"She has refused. For this time she has rejected the truth."</p>
+
+<p>Now to Susannah the matter for amazement was that she had come so far
+from home (although, it was not very far), that she had actually
+arrived, as it seemed, at an appointed place. The sting that this gave
+to her pride was greatly eased by perceiving that she had not by this
+fulfilled his hopes.</p>
+
+<p>Emma Smith had a pale, patient face, which was at this time made
+peculiarly dignified by a look of solemn excitement. Young as she was,
+she turned to Susannah with a protecting motherly air.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps next time the opportunity is offered the young lady will
+embrace it and save her soul." She spoke consolingly to Halsey, but
+looked at Susannah with encouraging and respectful eyes. "You will see
+this young man baptized?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Under the protection of Emma Smith, Susannah stooped under the willow
+boughs and found herself upon the bank of the river in the presence of
+Joseph Smith, his mother, and some half-dozen men.</p>
+
+<p>Lucy Smith was muttering somewhat concerning a vision of angels, and the
+suppressed excitement of them all was manifest. Susannah was infected by
+it; she was now tremulous and eager to see what was to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Smith advanced into the flowing river and stood in a pool where
+the water was well up to his thighs. Standing thus, he began to speak in
+the same formal tone and with the same solemn expression that Susannah
+had marked when he spoke the revelation concerning herself, but more
+loudly. "Behold! we have gathered together according to the revelation
+which has been given to me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Here a dark young man called Oliver Cowdery groaned and said "Amen." A
+tremble of excitement went through the group upon the shore.</p>
+
+<p>Loudly the prophet went on&mdash;"Knowing well that there is nothing in me,
+who was wicked and graceless to a very high degree, and wanting in
+knowledge, but was yet chosen, upon this sinful earth and in these last
+days, when wickedness and hypocrisy is abounding, to open to all who
+would be saved a new church which is such as that which the angel hath
+revealed to me a church should be, and all them which shall receive my
+word and shall be baptized of me or of Mr. Oliver Cowdery, whom the
+angel Maroni, descending in a cloud of light, has ordained with me to
+the priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of
+angels and of the gospel of repentance and of baptism by immersion for
+the remission of sins. And this shall never again be taken from the
+earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in
+the new Jerusalem."</p>
+
+<p>The loud voice carried with it an impression of strong personal feeling;
+the effect on the bystanders was such as the words alone were wholly
+inadequate to produce. Cowdery, who during the speech had frequently
+groaned and responded, after the Methodist fashion, now shouted and
+clapped his hands towards the heavens, whereupon Lucy Smith fell into a
+convulsive state between laughter and tears, and the men standing beside
+her dropped upon their knees. Emma Smith remained standing; upon her
+face was a rapt triumphant expression. She put her arm round Susannah
+protectingly, and Susannah did not repulse the familiar action.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Smith now in the same voice called upon his father to be
+baptized. He addressed him formally as "Joseph Smith senior." The old
+man had, as it seemed, a great fear of the water. It took both priests
+of the new sect together to lift and immerse him. There was more
+splashing than was seemly. The baptism of a farmer named Martin Harris,
+which followed, was more decorous.</p>
+
+<p>The sunlight lay bright on the other side of the flowing river, and the
+shadow of the willow tops above them was outlined on the stream. On the
+sunny bank opposite there was a thicket of sumac trees reddening to the
+autumn heat; the wild vine was climbing upon them, making their foliage
+the more dense, and at their roots, by the edge of the stream, the
+golden rod was massed. On the bank on which they stood the colouring was
+more quiet. A few ragged spikes of the purple aster were all that grew
+under the gray green willows, which with every breath turned the silver
+underside of their soft foliage to the wind. The place for the baptism
+had no doubt been chosen because of the depth of the water, and because
+the bank here was comparatively bare.</p>
+
+<p>It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. The steady sound of the
+mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common
+bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of the hour.</p>
+
+<p>It was time that Angel Halsey should be baptized. In his Quaker clothes
+he waded into the water. His manner now was entirely serene, his face
+full of joy.</p>
+
+<p>A thought was struck wedge-like into Susannah's understanding. If
+Halsey, who was so manifestly on a higher plane of education and
+refinement than these others, could so triumphantly embrace the new
+faith, it must surely contain more of virtue and reason than she could
+see. The influence of what he was, being so much greater than the
+influence of what he had said, caused her mind to work with solemn
+earnestness as she followed him in sympathy through the symbol of death
+and resurrection.</p>
+
+<p>When the prophet came back to the shore he appeared for the first time
+to recognise Susannah, and stopped before her, but at first with a
+distraught manner, as if he were trying to recollect some dream that
+eluded him. He still had his hand familiarly on Halsey's arm, for he had
+been conducting him out of the water.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the elect sister?" Smith asked in a hesitating tone, as if
+still striving with memory. "Does she desire baptism?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet," answered Halsey, "but I have asked the Lord for her soul, and
+I believe that it has been given."</p>
+
+<p>In Halsey's mind up to this moment there was, no doubt, only the
+solicitude of the missionary spirit; but Smith was a man whose mind was
+cast in a different mould; he had already marked the solicitude and
+given it his own interpretation, and he had already opened his own eyes
+upon her beauty. How far this had conscious connection with the
+condition of actual trance into which he now fell cannot be known. It is
+probable that what the Psalmist calls the "secret parts" are not in
+such minds as Smith's open to the man's own eye.</p>
+
+<p>Smith became wrapped in a sudden ecstasy. Oblivious of all around him,
+he looked up into the heavens, and it was apparent that his eyes were
+not beholding the material objects around. Those about him gazed
+awe-struck, waiting and listening, for he began to speak in a low
+unknown tongue, as if holding converse with some one above.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah shrank back, but was held by Emma's encouraging arm. Halsey
+stayed perforce, for the prophet's grasp had tightened convulsively upon
+him.</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments the vision was over, and Joseph Smith opened his eyes
+and smiled in his own slow kindly way upon the frightened girl and upon
+Angel Halsey, who stood with steadfast mien.</p>
+
+<p>"It has been revealed to me in heaven that the soul of the elect sister
+is indeed given to be united to the soul of this young disciple, that
+thereby she may obtain salvation."</p>
+
+<p>He took Susannah's hand, and she felt no power to resist him; he clasped
+Halsey's almost more timid and reluctant hand over it.</p>
+
+<p>"Wherefore in the sight of God and in the sight of these elect saints
+now present I declare that these two are joined together in the mystical
+union of a most holy marriage which God himself has revealed from
+heaven."</p>
+
+<p>For some moments Susannah gazed fascinated; then she snatched away her
+hand; dignity sought to maintain itself; pride rose up in anger. Her
+growing awe of the prophet numbed to a certain extent both these
+sentiments, but stronger than pride and self-respect and awe was some
+tender shame within her heart which was hurt beyond enduring, so that
+she put her hands before her face and wept, and walked away from them
+weeping, followed by Emma, who began, as they walked, to weep in
+sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>Tears bring relief to the brain, a relief it is hard to distinguish from
+comfort of soul. When Susannah could check her unaccustomed sobs, when
+she found herself walking quietly homeward with only the weeping Emma by
+her side, the spirit of long suffering and patience stole upon her
+unawares.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you cry?" she asked gently.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it must be so hard for you," said Emma; "it's been very hard
+for me, although I love Joseph with all my heart; but you are so
+childish and so good-looking, it seems someways as if it came harder on
+you; and then that Mr. Halsey hasn't got the warmth of heart that Joseph
+has."</p>
+
+<p>To this astonishing reply Susannah found no answer. Emma was too
+respectable, too honest in her sympathy, to be derided, but Susannah's
+understanding could ill endure the thought that the incident of the hour
+was important. As the outcome of honest delusion, she might forgive it;
+something in the pathos of Halsey's strained face as she remembered his
+look when she turned away weeping, urged her to forgiveness.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Halsey is nothing to me," said Susannah at last; she spoke with a
+falter in her voice, for Emma's unfeigned grief touched her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! don't say that. Some judgment might come on you that would be worse
+than any suffering that would come from obedience to the word of the
+Lord; and besides, it's the will of God, you see; and of course He'll
+see that it's done, so you'd be punished for rebellion, and you'd have
+to obey all the same."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was beginning to be infected by this steady assumption that God
+had indeed spoken. Could it be possible?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>How much better humanity might have been had we been at the world's
+making we cannot tell, but as it is, the Creator knows that a woman
+whose veins are pulsing with youth does not know, as she stands between
+her lovers, how far influences not born of reason are affecting her
+understanding. Ephraim remained neglectful, and Susannah remembered with
+more and more distinct compassion Halsey's wistful face and the touch of
+his trembling hand. But the emotion which is deeper than human love was
+also in ferment. The shock which she had received, aided by the pressure
+at home, had effectually worked religious unrest. She was certain now
+that she must do some new thing to obtain peace with God. Long
+monotonous days ripened within her this altered mind.</p>
+
+<p>On one of the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when
+such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were
+loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in
+the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads
+on the old highroad to Palmyra, where a small wooden bridge carries
+over a creek that runs through the meadow to the Canandaigua. Here in
+the leisure time of the afternoon Smith lifted up his voice and preached
+to an ever-increasing crowd, composed first of men, and added to by
+whole families from most of those houses within touch of the village.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Croom, his wife, and Susannah were returning from the weekly
+shopping at Palmyra's store; they came upon the crowd, and stopped
+perforce. Wrath was upon the faces of the elder couple, and nothing less
+than terror upon Susannah's white cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah would have run far to have been saved the awful interrogation
+of opportunity. Perhaps all that she knew just then, in her childlike
+bewilderment, was that the slanders of the persecution were wrong, and
+her untrained mind jumped to the conclusion that the God of truth must
+therefore be with Smith. Beyond this there was unnamed wonder at the
+unexplained influence that Smith held over her, and more curious
+thoughts, stretching out like the delicate tendrils of an unsupported
+vine, concerning Halsey, his prayers and warnings, and the strength of
+selfless devotion that she had read in his innocent eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Old Croom, deacon and magistrate, was not one to tarry at such a
+gathering longer than need be. When he perceived that some of the planks
+of the bridge had been taken to support the dam he alighted and broke
+down a log fence in order to drive his horses through meadow and stream
+to join the road nearer home. His women must needs walk over the scanty
+beams. Mrs. Croom, stately and well attired, could make her way through
+the crowd; no one there was so rapt but that he let her pass when, with
+eyes flashing in righteous indignation, she tapped him on the shoulder
+and bid him stand aside. Susannah followed in her aunt's wake, the crowd
+of neighbours and strange labourers closing behind them again as they
+worked their way, of necessity slowly, nearer and nearer the preacher
+and the little band of adherents that stood steadfast around him.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah heard the words of the sermon in which open confession of his
+own past sin, bold persuasions to Christianity and righteousness, were
+strangely mingled with the claim of the new prophet. She could not
+remember one moment what he had said the last. Low hisses and muttered
+threats of the angry men about her fell on her ears in the same way,
+making their own impression, but not on reason or memory. A sickening
+dread of a call that would come before she got away was all that she
+fully realised. It came when, in her white gala dress, she stood still
+at last near to, and under the eye of, the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>The sermon was finished. There was a silence at its end so unexpected
+that none in the crowd broke it. It seemed for those moments to reach
+not only into the hearts of the crowd, but into the wide, empty vault of
+sunny blue above them, and over the open fields and golden woods. Then,
+before the wrath of the crowd had gathered strength to break into
+violence, Smith went down into the water and called loudly to all such
+as felt the need of saving their souls to enter upon the heavenly
+pilgrimage by the gate of his baptism. His adherents had cast themselves
+upon their knees in prayer. Susannah saw the strong, dark face of Oliver
+Cowdery looking up to the sky as though he saw the heavens opened, and
+she saw Angel Halsey look at herself, and then, clasping his hands over
+his fair young face, bow himself in supplication.</p>
+
+<p>A man, ragged in dress, and bearing the look of ill deeds in his face,
+made his way out of the crowd into the water. He was a stranger to the
+place, and the spectators looked on in silent surprise. Before Smith had
+dipped him in the stream and blessed him another man came forward, pale
+and thin, with a hectic flush upon his cheeks. He was a well-known
+resident of Manchester; all knew that his days on earth must be few. A
+low howl began to rise, loudest on the outskirts of the crowd, but the
+fact that the man was dying kept many silent, feeling that the doomed
+may surely have their own will.</p>
+
+<p>Before Joseph Smith had spoken his benediction over this trembling,
+gasping creature, when Halsey had left his kneeling to spring forward
+and lead him to the shore, Susannah began to move forward to the water.
+No one who saw her move at first dreamed of what she sought. Her aunt
+had pushed on some distance farther and stood waiting, almost too
+astonished at this last baptism to notice that she was separated from
+her charge. Now, when she saw Susannah pushing forward, she only
+wondered with others what she would be at, and spoke to her
+ineffectually, without the shriek and struggle which she made when the
+girl was beyond her reach.</p>
+
+<p>So Susannah, moving like one in an agonised dream, came to the edge of
+the pool. Among the praying band there was no doubt as to her intention,
+no astonishment; the kneeling men gave instant thanks to God for her
+decision, and Halsey, having helped the feeble man to land, led Susannah
+down into the water, his face illuminated by the victory of faith.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah heard now her aunt's wild shrieks; she heard too the surging of
+the crowd, but the meaning of neither sound came to her. She waded on to
+where Smith stood, with only the dazed sense of a goal to be reached.
+She was perfectly passive in his hands as he dipped her beneath the
+surface and raised her up, but she listened to the blessing he
+pronounced with a sudden leap of the heart, feeling that now at last the
+misery of fear was past and the demand of God satisfied&mdash;it must be so
+because it had cost so much.</p>
+
+<p>When she came to herself she saw that the crowd, like a wild beast, had
+sprung downward upon the disciples. Even in her first terrified glance
+she was impressed by the strange and awful difference between the
+distorted and hideous faces of the mob and the exalted calm of the few
+men who had at this time fixed their minds on the unseen rather than the
+seen. She looked up to Smith in the swift appeal of terror, and felt
+once for all the huge courage by which his life was marked. His hand,
+helping her to the shore, never trembled. He calmly directed her steps
+into the quiet meadow before he gave himself to the battle.</p>
+
+<p>When her person was no longer there to be protected, the Mormons gave
+way at once before the gathering strength of the mob. She saw them
+beaten down mercilessly; she saw Smith himself beaten and thrown
+prostrate in the water. The still, warm air that a few minutes before
+had seemed instinct with prayer was now vibrating to the howls and
+taunts and curses of the mob. Susannah had no doubt that these, who were
+now her friends, were being killed; their sufferings justified her to
+herself and produced a fierce exaltation in the step which she had
+taken. In her experience of life she thought that the mob would turn
+upon her next, and stood waiting, every muscle tense, her hands
+clenched, feeling excitedly that she would rather die than live to see
+such intolerable wrong.</p>
+
+<p>This tension of nerve relaxed somewhat when her uncle lifted her
+forcibly into the waggon. With eyes wide open with horror and lips
+trembling, she asked, "Did they kill them, uncle?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, child, they only gave them a good trouncing in their own pond." He
+choked here, out of pity for her, keeping back the torrent of his anger.</p>
+
+<p>Even at this early date it was bruited that Joseph Smith exercised some
+unseemly force of will by which he distorted the reason of his converts.
+This report explained the fact that for the first day after the shock of
+Susannah's baptism her aunt and uncle did not lay the blame of it at her
+door, did not argue or persuade, only watched her as one recovering from
+a strange disease. But in the afternoon of that first day the pent-up
+fever of the aunt's wrath against those whom she thought to blame broke
+forth, and almost in delirium.</p>
+
+<p>The last hot weather of the autumn still held; in the same still hour of
+the afternoon, the hour in which Susannah's baptism had taken place the
+day before, Angel Halsey, pallid with his yesterday's beating and
+ill-usage, but steadfast and even joyful of face, walked up to the front
+door of the magistrate's house.</p>
+
+<p>This door opened upon an unfrequented entrance-hall. Susannah heard the
+knock, heard her aunt move with the dignity befitting an expected
+visitor. Then she heard Ephraim's step on the stair for the first time
+that day, and reflected dully that he must have seen the advent of some
+important person from his window to be thus answering the call of the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>After that she heard words that had the sound of suppressed screams in
+them. She realised that the house mistress was ordering some enemy from
+her door. These commands were not obeyed, and Susannah, hearing that the
+intruder remained, began in fear to suspect the meaning of the
+intrusion. As she rose the report of a fire-arm startled her from all
+the remnants of her selfish dulness, causing her feet to fly.</p>
+
+<p>From within the sitting-room she saw the entrance-hall. Its door was
+open to the wide sweep of land that lay in floods of sunshine. In the
+light, half turning now to go as he had come, stood Angel Halsey. Her
+eager eyes drank in the sight of him, because last night she had thought
+to see him die. She saw his quietness even while, it seemed to her, the
+gun still echoed, and it was Ephraim who held the gun! Beside Ephraim
+her aunt stood, like one in a frenzy, her very garments twitching and
+her gray hair fallen loose. None of them looked to see the girl within
+the shaded room.</p>
+
+<p>"Friends," said Halsey, "I came to say 'Peace be with this house,' and
+to speak with her to whom God has given the spirit of obedience to his
+truth, but it is written that when any house refuses to receive us we
+must depart."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was for some cause growing fainter, but Susannah was certain
+that the cause was not fear.</p>
+
+<p>He took a letter from his breast. "I wrote it," he said, "in case I
+might not enter to speak with her."</p>
+
+<p>He gave the letter to Ephraim, who took it reluctantly, as one impelled
+by some strong sense of right.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey went out. He tottered upon the path, but he opened the gate and
+walked on. Ephraim, still holding the gun and the letter, turned and saw
+Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim's face was gaunt and haggard as she had never seen it before;
+his eyes were large, and she thought she read unutterable distress in
+them, but could not understand. She held out her hand for the letter,
+but as he gave it both she and he perceived for the first time that it
+was stained with blood; they felt mutually the thrill that the sight
+gave.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand out suddenly and pushed her within the room. "Go," he
+entreated, "for God's sake, Susy, go to your own room; take his letter
+with you if you will, but go."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went amazed, but she began to think that Ephraim's distress had
+not been a gracious sorrow, but remorse for his own crime. He must have
+shot Halsey as he would have shot at some evil beast. When she had time
+to remember that Halsey had tottered when he walked, she fled back,
+straining the blood-stained letter to her breast, and tore open the
+closed door. Her aunt was sitting in a low chair sobbing. Ephraim,
+bareheaded in the sunshine, was standing on the path shading his eyes to
+scan the road. Susannah ran out, not to him (her shame and grief for him
+were too deep for any word), but with intent to run after the wounded
+man and nurse his wound.</p>
+
+<p>"It can be but a slight flesh wound," said Ephraim mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>She looked first where he was gazing, and saw that some distance down
+the road Halsey was stepping into a chaise. Another man took the seat
+beside him and they drove away.</p>
+
+<p>Then she looked at Ephraim. He did not appear as though he felt his
+guilt; he had the mien rather of one who was striving bravely to endure
+hardship. Then indeed she felt that the gulf of thought must yawn wide
+between them; she could even yet have pitied Ephraim's contrition, but
+he was not contrite. In indignation she retired, sitting in the privacy
+of her little bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange letter, not alone because the ink was blurred by blood
+that, still warm, soaked it through in parts, but because, coming from
+a young man to a maid, in the first flush of her strength and beauty, it
+offered love and marriage, giving only as his reason, urging only as her
+motive, the service of God.</p>
+
+<p>"If," the letter read, "thou canst see thy way, dear friend, to hold
+fast that thou hast in the house of thy friends, if thou canst see thy
+way, by steadfast confession and by the grace of thy demeanour, to
+strive among them for their conversion, it would be well while thou art
+still so young to remain with them for a time&mdash;at least so I think. But
+our prophet thinks, and I also greatly desire to think, that the strain
+upon thy faith would be too great, that thou mightst fail; and
+remembering that it has been revealed to him that our union has been
+sealed in heaven, he thinks that thou wouldst do well to commit thy
+tender life now to my keeping."</p>
+
+<p>The phrase "and I greatly desire to think" was almost as strong as any
+in a long letter to tell which way his delight would lie, and Susannah's
+was not a mind upon which this indication of reserve force was thrown
+away. She trusted, vaguely in thought but implicitly in heart, to that
+which lay behind&mdash;something which did not alarm her, which in her inner
+vision wore no warm nor obtrusive colouring, but which she knew to be
+intense and of enduring quality. And she saw herself alone, beaten by
+adverse winds and without other shelter.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey touched upon the fact that Smith and his disciples (he did not
+say himself) had suffered greatly from yesterday's ill-usage, and said
+that, having given their message to the people, they were that day
+leaving for a place called Fayette, in Seneca county, where it had
+previously been determined that the new church should be organised. He
+himself would wait either until Susannah saw her way to come with him,
+or until he knew that she was at peace, having chosen of her own accord
+to remain. He would bring a chaise, in which she could travel if she
+would, near her uncle's house at dawn upon the next morning. He would
+take her, he said, to the house where the Smiths were in Fayette, but it
+was implied through all the letter that the mystic marriage which Smith
+had solemnised was considered by Halsey as valid, and that if she joined
+her material fortunes now to those of the persecuted sect, it would be
+as his wife.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking of the future he did not gloss over the persecution; he did
+not even promise, as Smith had done, a sure and material reward. The
+mind of the young Quaker convert was fixed upon the things that are
+unseen. This was not hidden from the girl. The thought of being with him
+in his faith and resignation gave her peace. Poverty and persecution
+seemed as nothing compared with the torture of being surrounded by
+people whose thought and actions aroused in her young heart whirlwinds
+of passionate opposition. Even Ephraim, instead of rising in his
+strength to condemn the outrage of yesterday, had attempted to-day to
+wound or kill. Her amazement and dismay at this drove her out as it were
+with a scourge.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey had told her to pray, and she had tried to pray. Halsey had told
+her to search the Scriptures for guidance, and she read. Text after text
+came home to her heart, bidding her leave her kindred to share the
+fortunes of the persecuted children of faith.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>At break of day Halsey was waiting upon the road with a fairly good
+horse and a comfortable chaise. Susannah never forgot the light that
+came to his eyes when he saw her approach; it was like dawn in paradise.</p>
+
+<p>Angel Halsey was not without shrewd worldly wisdom. He turned into a
+cross corduroy road that led through the woods, passing only some small
+clearings to the west of Palmyra, and thus by a detour avoiding that
+village, he returned again to the highroad between Canandaigua and
+Geneva. The pursuers, upon failing to hear that the chaise had passed
+through Palmyra, might turn back, or if they had gone on they might have
+outstripped them on the road, and be in front rather than behind. This
+danger peopled the long lonely road with possible enemies both before
+and behind. The strain upon the imagination was very great. The road was
+heavy and rough.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah perceived that Halsey's apprehension of being overtaken was
+almost solely on her account. He was so upborne by his religious
+enthusiasm as to be oblivious to the pain which his wound of yesterday
+gave him, and was perfectly willing to encounter the violence of her
+kindred again if need be, yet, seeing her terror with a quickness of
+sympathy which roused her gratitude, he took every possible precaution
+that could allay her fears. All through the weary, weary day she hardly
+spoke to him, never addressed him by name.</p>
+
+<p>They reached the new town of Geneva at sundown. When they had set forth
+again, it was a great comfort to Susannah that grayness had succeeded to
+sunshine. She was weary of the yellow light, of the dull glare from the
+stubble fields, of the obtrusive colours of the autumn foliage, of the
+blueness of the sky, of everything, indeed, that she had seen and heard
+during the wretched hours of the day. They now travelled through a very
+flat tract; little of the land was cleared; the road was straight. It is
+hard to explain the mental weariness produced by a straight level road.
+The hope and interest inspired by undulations or curves are lost. The
+distance ever gives a farther reach of the weary way to the view, as if
+by a parable it would impress on the traveller the knowledge that the
+future was to be barren of delight.</p>
+
+<p>About two miles from Geneva, before the daylight was quite gone, they
+were both startled by hearing a rushing, crashing sound coming toward
+them in the woods. Were their pursuers upon them after all? Had they
+chosen this, the most lonely part of their road, to fall upon them?</p>
+
+<p>They did not speak their thoughts to one another. Angel struck the
+horse, and it galloped forward perhaps about a hundred yards, and then,
+of its own accord, stopped suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the side of the road, pushing itself backward among the bushes, the
+better to gain space for its run, was a bull. Its eyes were bloodshot,
+its head lowered for a long moment to measure its distance ere it made
+the attack. The horse seemed palsied with terror. It moved backward with
+tottering steps, trembling all over, heedless of whip or rein.</p>
+
+<p>The backward movement prolonged the hesitation of the bull, which turned
+itself to take another aim. The horse uttered an almost human cry. In
+the moment of hearing that cry Susannah felt that she had already gone
+through some shocking form of death. Halsey brought down his whip,
+striking the horse with all his might; it leaped forward, lifting the
+chaise almost into the air; then it was rushing madly on, dragging the
+wheels behind it with terrible velocity.</p>
+
+<p>They had caught sight of the rush of the bull. They felt the animal's
+heavy side just graze the back of the chaise, and they heard behind them
+a bellow of rage that seemed to fill all the solitary place with
+diabolical echoes.</p>
+
+<p>The body of the chaise was bounding upon its leather bands, jolting
+cruelly against the axle. Susannah cried out that she should be thrown
+from her seat. The swift-falling darkness encompassed their path. Their
+hope lay in the straightness of the road, and their chief fear was that
+by some greater roughness of the way the chaise, which was now swaying
+fearfully, might be overturned.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the sound of the bull's galloping became less distinct. The
+chaise was still upright. The horse, beginning to falter in his pace,
+took more kindly to the accustomed control of the rein. It was then
+Susannah found that she had been clinging to Halsey for support, and
+that he, by bracing himself with one arm to the side of the chaise and
+holding her with the other, had prevented her from being thrown out.</p>
+
+<p>In gathering her shawl about her she wrapped herself again in a certain
+amount of her former reserve, but the excitement that she had been
+through made her former silence impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey at first received her remarks in silence, then as he essayed to
+answer, his voice grew low and faint, and a sudden suspicion of the
+cause pierced through her mind.</p>
+
+<p>In another moment he sank, leaning against her. Putting her hand beneath
+his coat, she found to her dismay that the strain of holding her had
+opened his wound; his clothes were again wet with blood.</p>
+
+<p>The reins slipped from his hands. Susannah tied them loose to the front
+of the chaise and, putting her arms round the fainting man, drew the
+bandages tightly but with unskilful hands; she lessened the bleeding and
+caused him such acute pain that he lifted his head and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I do?" she asked piteously. The blood, diverted from the
+brain, had left it without healthy circulation, but she did not know yet
+that this was affecting his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Friend," he whispered, "that was in truth no bull; it was the devil
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>"The devil?" she asked faintly.</p>
+
+<p>"He almost succeeded in his cruel attempt to cause us to be discouraged
+from the way."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me he only succeeded in causing us to take the way with
+greater vehemence," she replied in some scorn.</p>
+
+<p>In the next minute she heard him whisper eagerly, "Look up; look between
+the branches; quick! Do you not see the face looking at us?"</p>
+
+<p>The branches of the overhanging tree were black with night. She looked
+up in the direction that his feeble hand indicated, and with
+indescribable terror scanned the blank spaces in which no human face
+could possibly be.</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" he whispered again impatiently. "Don't you see it? It is the
+face of a man. A white face! It is the face of thy cousin as I saw it
+yesterday when I was counted worthy to suffer. Look! look! does thou
+not see him?"</p>
+
+<p>His words had the effect of producing in her that maddening fear of the
+dark which ghostly tales induce, and now he fainted again. She was
+afraid to cry for help, afraid even of the rustle of her own garments.
+She did not know how far she was from any house. And it seemed to her
+that this lover, who was almost a stranger, was dying in her arms. The
+misery of this hour governed her action in the next.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey in the bottom of the chaise lay with his head against her knee,
+and soon, holding the bandages of his wound close upon it with one hand,
+she took the reins with the other and urged the horse forward. She had
+had no thought all that day but to go, as Halsey had said, to Emma
+Smith's protection. She hoped now that there was but one road; that when
+she came to the first settlement she would be with the Smiths. This was
+not the case. She travelled an hour, obliged to pass more than one
+cross-road because she dared not turn down it. At length she found
+herself in front of a large house with lighted windows, which was
+evidently an inn.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, letting out a stream of candlelight. A man stood in the
+doorway. "What place is this?" cried Susannah's voice from the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"It's John Biery's hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you have the kindness to tell me if you know of any one called
+Mr. Joseph Smith?"</p>
+
+<p>There was some talking within. "No, we never heard of Mr. Joseph Smith."</p>
+
+<p>"Or Mr. Oliver Cowdery?" Again there was talking.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it don't seem that we've any of us heard o' those names before. Be
+you alone?" The deep bass voice of John Biery was becoming more
+insistent in its rising inflection.</p>
+
+<p>For some half-minute Susannah did not answer, and then fear of being
+compelled to retake the road made irresolution impossible.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, sir, I am not alone. I have in the chaise with me a sick man,
+and I fear that he may be dying. I thought to find friends, but it seems
+in the darkness I have missed my way. I must beg of you to assist me to
+lift him into the house and give us shelter for the night."</p>
+
+<p>The men had remained perfectly still, drinking in her every syllable
+with that fierce thirst for news which is a first passion of dwellers in
+such desolate places; then, aroused by what they heard, they came
+forward across a rough bit of ground to the road. The burly form of John
+Biery came first, and he called for a lantern, which was instantly
+produced by one of those who followed. They held it up over Angel's
+crouching form and death-like face. Then they held it higher and stared
+at Susannah. Her shawl had fallen from off her shoulders. The
+handkerchief upon her neck was loose, and underneath the pink border of
+her bonnet the ringlets had begun to stray. Her resolute face, so young
+and beautiful, startled them almost as an apparition might have done.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm dead beat," said the hotel-keeper under his breath, "if I ever seed
+anything like that!" But with the ready suspicion of a prudent
+householder he questioned her. Where had the man come by the wound? For
+they saw the blood-stained bandages she clasped.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, she explained, he had received a slight bullet-wound by
+accident, and to-day, in their long travel, the loss of blood had
+disabled him.</p>
+
+<p>"Does he belong to you, young lady?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah busied herself with the bandages for a moment, but terror had
+carried her far. She replied with gentle decision, "He is my husband."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+
+<p>"It is our fault."</p>
+
+<p>That evening Ephraim Croom stood in his father's sitting-room, near the
+door of the dark stair that led up to his own rooms. His shoulders were
+drooping. His face was gray and haggard. Even his hair and beard, damp,
+unkempt, seemed to express remorse in their outline. He stood doggedly
+facing his father and mother, repeating the thing that he saw to be
+true, but with no further words to interpret his insight.</p>
+
+<p>To his parents his opinions, his attitude, appeared as an outrage upon
+reason. His father looked at him with greater severity than he had ever
+before exercised upon his only child. "I reckon, Ephraim, that you speak
+without using the sense that the Almighty has been mercifully pleased to
+give you. You know, Ephraim, the girl has been as a daughter in this
+house. When has it been said to her that her father, dying in his
+worldly follies, left her destitute, the pittance she gets needing to go
+for his debts? She's had about as good a home as any girl should want,
+and your mother and the ministers have dealt faithfully with her
+concerning her soul."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim made a movement of the head as if for a moment he could have
+stood upright, feeling in one respect innocent; then again there was
+nothing but the droop of shame visible.</p>
+
+<p>His mother looked at him with eyes that were red with weeping. She had
+been wiping them with fierce furtive rubs of her handkerchief; now she
+was rubbing the handkerchief, a hard ball, in the palm of one hand.
+Perhaps grief at Susannah's loss had been dominant until Ephraim's
+accusation had fanned her anger. "She'd better have gone with him openly
+from the baptising. I never thought then that it was love-making she was
+after." Deep scorn was here expressed. "Religion! 'Twasn't much religion
+she had in her mind. And we treated her real kindly, Ephraim, thinking
+'twas the hold of delusion they had upon her. 'Twould be very small use
+to bring her back even if you or your father could have found out which
+way they'd gone. 'Tisn't likely she'd stay long if you fetched her,
+seeing she's that sort of a girl, with a hankering for the man. There
+isn't a place in this house to lock her into unless it is the cellar."</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps the thought of the unspeakable degradation it would be to
+the worthy house to hold a girl as prisoner in the cellar, perhaps the
+dismal knowledge that that which had already befallen them and her was
+not much better than this, that caused his mother here to lose her
+self-control entirely and weep bitterly. Ephraim shrank under her words
+as if they had been the strokes of a whip striking him. When she had
+ended he went on heavily up the dark stair.</p>
+
+<p>Both the men were in riding-dress. The elder man, when he had comforted
+his wife as best he might, laid aside his boots and whip determinedly,
+believing that the use for them, as far as concerned the search for his
+niece, was at an end. Upstairs, sitting between the three windows that
+looked east and north and south, Ephraim sat as long as exhaustion made
+rest necessary. He was still equipped for the road, thinking only which
+way it behoved him to travel, and when.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The next day, toward afternoon, Joseph Smith stood by the bedside of
+Angel Halsey. Susannah, wan and weary with a long night's nursing, was
+sitting beside the pillow. Smith looked upon them both benevolently. It
+was some minutes before he spoke. Susannah was too much in awe of him to
+say much, but his presence was welcome. Since Halsey's rational self had
+been lost in his delirium, loneliness like darkness that could be felt
+had pressed upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"Our brother will be healed," said Smith at length. "It is given to me
+to know that he will be healed." He then spread his hands over the sick
+man and made a short prayer. There was much fervour in his words and his
+voice was loud.</p>
+
+<p>"Give him to drink," said Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"Biery's wife told me as long as he was in fever not to give him water."</p>
+
+<p>Smith looked down upon her kindly, but he spoke in a tone of absolute
+authority. "My sister, I say unto thee give him water. It is given to me
+to know that he must have water and that he will do well."</p>
+
+<p>"It is never done in such cases," said Susannah. "I remember when my
+father&mdash;" She had not the faith that Smith required of her.</p>
+
+<p>Without a frown, with perfect gentleness, Smith fetched the water and,
+lifting the sick man's head, allowed him to drink eagerly. Halsey was
+obviously comforted.</p>
+
+<p>Smith had something else to say. If he had not been who he was Susannah
+might have perceived that he was somewhat perplexed, even embarrassed.
+Just as a child does not easily attribute to the adult such hindering
+emotions, so she supposed him to be upon a plane above them.</p>
+
+<p>He lingered by the bedside, apparently watching the sufferer. At length
+he said, "You set out with this young man&mdash;yesterday morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, very early."</p>
+
+<p>There was another pause, then he said, "Did you go before a justice of
+the peace?"</p>
+
+<p>"A justice of the peace?" Then she added inconsequently, "My uncle is a
+justice of the peace." She had never heard of a civil marriage; she did
+not know in the least what he meant.</p>
+
+<p>"Or&mdash;or a minister?"</p>
+
+<p>She began to understand now.</p>
+
+<p>"I married you myself, sister, and it was sealed in heaven, but I
+haven't got a license to marry, so that the Gentiles would say&mdash;that the
+knot wasn't tied, ye know." The last words were a lapse into common
+parlance. She had grown accustomed to the hybrid nature of his
+mannerism.</p>
+
+<p>He had expected and feared to see her white face flame into excitement,
+but to Susannah it seemed a small thing now what the Gentiles might say.
+If the marriage was indeed sealed in heaven, then all was well. And if
+it was not, worse could not be. She was too weary now to respond to the
+prophet's worldly solicitude for her. Looking at the still unconscious
+Halsey, she felt that there was time enough for further action.</p>
+
+<p>Smith said, "Emma would have come, but the child has spasms."</p>
+
+<p>"We meant to go to you," said Susannah. "We lost our way. I only heard
+to-day where you were."</p>
+
+<p>After a while he said, "I might stop here with our sick brother and send
+you to Emma, but there is a congregation called for to-night. Mr.
+Cowdery would have come, but he was at the baptising."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you leave the baptising just to come and see us?" It occurred to
+her that from his point of view two stray disciples such as herself and
+Halsey could be of little importance compared with his appearance at the
+solemn function.</p>
+
+<p>Smith busied himself giving Halsey more water. That done, he went away
+without further words. Susannah heard his horse gallop from the door.
+She knew that he had travelled some five miles to pay this visit, and
+she supposed that he desired to return if possible before the converts
+had come up from the water. His visit had undoubtedly brought her
+comfort. His response to her message had been prompt and kind. She knew
+now that his thoughts and Emma's were busy concerning her. And then,
+too, the sick man was better. He had gone quietly to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The woman of the house brought her for food an unusual delicacy. Smith
+had ordered this. Mrs. Biery made some remarks concerning him. She said
+that his coat seemed very old, but that he had given her money and bid
+her attend diligently upon the sick man and his wife. Susannah, who knew
+how little money the Smiths had hitherto possessed, how many things they
+must want for themselves, was touched.</p>
+
+<p>As her spirits revived, her faith and hope in the new sect revived also.
+She looked among the few possessions Halsey had brought with him for the
+precious copy of the Book of Mormon, and sat reading it by Angel's
+bedside while the autumn sun was sinking.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes she heard a traveller stop at the inn door and pass on again.
+At dusk there was a sounds of horses coming with speed. To her surprise
+Joseph Smith came into the room again. He looked as if he had been
+riding hard, but he spoke as quietly as though he had gone only from
+that room to the next.</p>
+
+<p>"I have brought a gentleman who can marry you according to the law of
+the State." Susannah had gone forward to greet him, but now she looked
+suddenly back toward the unconscious man, whose form was almost
+indistinguishable in the dusk.</p>
+
+<p>Smith brought candles and set them at the foot of the bed. He took
+Halsey by the hand and lifted him to a sitting posture, telling him in
+clear strong tones what was required of him. Halsey understood. He
+became completely conscious under Smith's influence, and for the hour
+almost strong. He would know where he was and how he came there, who the
+minister was that had come. He even required that this stranger should
+show his license to marry.</p>
+
+<p>The minister was a common-looking man, small, shaggy as to the beard,
+business-like. He knew nothing of Joseph Smith's prophetical claims, and
+cared only to know that Susannah was over eighteen years of age.
+Marriage was a thing easily accomplished in that day and region. A few
+minutes more and Susannah was a wife.</p>
+
+<p>In after years, when she used to think of Angel Halsey as having gone
+before her into the unseen, Susannah held the belief that the part of
+him which she would meet there would be that which shone out in the rare
+half-playful smiles he gave, in the glance which, at the moment of
+smiling, he bent on her. He was a very grave man, shrewd, in many ways,
+in others as simple as a child, but above all greatly religious. His
+religion, however deep might be its root, was also always upon the
+surface. Only now and then, when, as at their first meeting, he
+recognised in his serious way that something else was required if he
+would truly hold communion with Susannah, the smile would come as from
+some inward part of his spirit, like a dawning light slowly breaking
+through the surface, soon withdrawn again by the power of custom. When
+he thus smiled, Susannah in those days trusted him absolutely, avowed
+herself entirely to his service, and felt within her heart a large
+measure of affection.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey's was the first case of illness in the newly-formed sect that
+called itself already "<i>The</i> Church of Christ." Joseph Smith and Cowdery
+and a man named Whitmer, with whom the Smiths were now housed, having
+consulted upon it, decided that they must begin at once to carry out the
+commands of Scripture. They came together, therefore, and anointed
+Halsey with oil, laying their hands upon him and praying fervently.
+Halsey, believing himself to be healed, got up from his sick-bed, and
+his recovery progressed rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>Full of excitement, fervour, superstition, and faith, the apostles of
+the new doctrine were fully persuaded that they might expect a literal
+fulfilment of the promise that signs and wonders should follow them that
+believe. The fierce opposition and hatred which were roused by the
+reports of their doings are easily accounted for when we consider that
+their opinions had to encounter that curious distortion of reason which
+has caused religious warfare in all times and places to become the worst
+sort of warfare, and the fact which Smith himself had acknowledged when
+he first saw Susannah, that many evil reports about him had formerly
+been true; then also the new sect produced vehement psychical
+disturbance wherever it touched the surrounding population, and many
+things occurred which might, or might not, be termed miracles, according
+to the interpretation of the observer. It was no longer possible for
+Joseph Smith to ride, as he had done on the day of Susannah's marriage,
+with a minister of one of the older sects. He became very notorious, and
+to every one except those who were interested enough in his doctrine to
+give him a fair hearing, his name became a synonym for all evil.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey remained with Susannah at John Biery's hotel. Halsey was one of
+the few converts who could afford to live in comparative comfort and to
+pay something for the entertainment of destitute disciples. For that
+reason the landlord, John Biery, held himself from the religious quarrel
+that was shaking the region.</p>
+
+<p>Even before Halsey had regained his strength he drove Susannah to swell
+the congregation at the preachings which were daily taking place in
+different places within the township, for such converts as had already
+professed themselves were gathered now in the neighbourhood of Fayette.</p>
+
+<p>Experiences came to Susannah in such quick succession that this was not
+a time of reflection. Such part of her husband's religion as she could
+appropriate she endeavoured very sincerely to embrace. After the manner
+of the thought, of the time she supposed that the sect was either right
+or wrong&mdash;if right, all right; if wrong, all wrong. Sometimes the
+ghastly fear that her growing belief was false would arise with hideous
+menace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All the doings of the infant sect were directed by those utterances of
+Joseph Smith which he held to be revelations. These were confided
+sometimes to the elders, sometimes to the converts at large. Susannah
+frequently heard of them first through Emma Smith, whose pious heart was
+constantly filled with wonder and thankfulness at the thought of the
+great honour vouchsafed to her husband. These revelations, sometimes
+illimitable in their sweep, and sometimes having reference only to the
+most minute practical details, were at this time all in accordance
+either with the dictates of common sense or with the severely literal
+meaning of some Scripture text. They were therefore easily justified
+either to reason or to the eye of faith, but the results of their
+application were often startling, and it was facts, not theories, that
+chiefly caused Susannah to stagger.</p>
+
+<p>At length the growing excitement among the congregation seemed to gather
+toward some climax. It was then that Joseph Smith was said for the first
+time to cast out devils.</p>
+
+<p>Near to John Biery's hotel lived a family of the name of Knight. The
+worthy farmer became a convert, and so also, in appearance, did his son.
+Susannah first saw them at their baptism, which took place one cold
+bleak day in the margin of Seneca Lake. The horses which had brought the
+little company to the edge of the water, having been tied among the
+trees, made a constant rustling and trampling among the fallen leaves.
+The sharp rustle, the thud of the hoofs upon the ground, were sounds
+long connected in her mind with the crisis of her doubt, which then
+began. The maples stood above them, tall and leafless; the waters of the
+lake were leaden in hue and cold. Looking southward on either side of
+its long flood, the snores with their many points and headlands lay
+cold, almost hueless, near by, and in the distance blue as tarnished
+steel.</p>
+
+<p>It was a bitter day for baptist and for the immersed. Joseph Smith went
+out alone into the water, commanding the other elders to remain upon the
+shore. Whatever else the man had or had not, he had splendid courage in
+facing physical ills. There were but few candidates. Susannah, standing
+apart near the shore, chanced to be in the path by which the younger
+Knight descended to the water. He was a young man with strong features
+and a thick, unhealthy skin. He was dressed in the wet garments which
+another candidate had taken off. Cold he might have been, but as he
+passed she heard his teeth chatter so loudly that it almost seemed to
+her that his very bones rattled. She drew back with the impression that
+some horrible thing had passed by. Before she had time to wonder that
+the chill should have had such an effect upon the hardy fellow, his feet
+were in the water, and he turned and caught her eye. The look he gave
+her became suddenly one of terrified entreaty.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah did not move; she was spell-bound. He began to wade toward
+Smith, who stood in the deeper water. She wondered why he allowed
+himself to be immersed. She was certain that he did not desire it, was
+certain also that no motives of interest, no physical force, could have
+operated to compel, when suddenly she asked herself sharply, what force
+had taken her into the waters of this extraordinary baptism?</p>
+
+<p>To her astonishment, when Newell Knight came up from the water he was
+shouting aloud. She thought that his accents were a horrible simulation
+of merriment, but by the others they were accepted as an evidence of
+holy joy.</p>
+
+<p>Two days after, when Susannah and her husband were returning from
+Smith's preaching through the autumn night, they were met as they were
+approaching Biery's hotel by a messenger from Knight's house. The
+messenger had been sent to fetch Halsey. He reported that Newell Knight
+was in "an awful way." Susannah alighted at once and walked to the
+tavern, in order that her husband might drive with all speed to the
+afflicted man.</p>
+
+<p>The lights as they shone from John Biery's windows reminded her vividly
+of the first time, a month since, when she had driven to that house at
+night. She had grown much older since then, stronger in many ways,
+weaker in some, but she was not conscious of this; it was not her way to
+give even so much as a passing glance at herself as one of the actors in
+life's drama. The road on which she trod was heavy with mud. The
+night-winds cried around and through the empty branches of two or three
+neglected trees in the clearing. The square wooden tavern stood at the
+cross-roads. The light from the door made a pathway through the
+darkness, up which Susannah walked.</p>
+
+<p>When she entered, the heat and fumes from fire, candles, tobacco-pipes,
+and steaming mugs met her. She was accustomed to walking through John
+Biery's main room to gain the stair that led to her own; on the whole it
+was not disorderly, or Susannah had but to appear on the threshold to
+reduce it to order. To-night the men did not let her pass with their
+usual civil "Good evening"; they assumed that she had an interest in
+their talk.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Mr. Halsey stopping over to Farmer Knight's?" asked Biery. "My! and
+they'll be real glad to get him, ye know. Twiced they've been here fur
+him. They say that Newell Knight he's possessed with a devil."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah wrapped her shawl tightly across her breast, a nervous movement
+caused not by cold but by the desire to withdraw her real self from the
+surrounding circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>A tall thin man sitting by the table set down his mug with a clatter
+upon it. "Wall now, tain't my idea thet thet's exectly what's taken
+Newell. I saw a case of a man thet was taken under the preacher Finney.
+'Twas over to Ithica. The hull town knew about it. A lot of folks went
+in. I jest looked in when I was passing, and seen the man meself. He was
+lyin' on the floor. His wife was aholdin' his head, but he didn't know
+her. He hedn't no knowledge of any of the folks. He jest lay there
+rollin', and his eyes was rollin'. And when Finney was fetched, Finney
+he said 'twas 'conviction.' I don't know what the man was convicted of,
+but 'twas 'conviction' Finney called it. He didn't say nothing about
+being possessed with devils."</p>
+
+<p>The third speaker was a small fat man. His face was smooth and had the
+peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the
+middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he glanced at
+Susannah critically.</p>
+
+<p>"When they're taken that way under Finney," he said, as if meditating,
+"'conviction' commonly means conviction of sins&mdash;their own sins, ye
+know, not other folk's; and when they git up, if they've taken anything
+wrongfully they hev to restore it fourfold afore the conviction will
+leave off a-worrittin' them. I don't know how 'tis among the Mormons."
+The last words were said in an undertone and he had dropped his eyes. It
+would have required a brave man to treat Susannah to open sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>She stood looking from one to the other. She still wore her girlish
+cottage bonnet, and as its fashion was, it had slipped backwards upon
+the amber ringlets that hung upon her neck; but the girlish look was
+fast passing from the face, the hair parting fell on either side of pale
+cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, as to thet, 's fur as I know, one religion's as good as another,"
+said the politic Biery.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah looked at the fat, bright-eyed man who was no longer looking at
+her. "I know" (her voice fell with a strange gentleness through the
+thickened atmosphere of the room) "that there are many malicious stories
+abroad about the dishonesty of our people which are not true."</p>
+
+<p>But as she went up the stair she remembered that she had heard of no
+case where reformation of character had been followed by the returning
+of the fourfold. Most of these saints of the new sect had before their
+conversion been, like her husband, already God-fearing and righteous,
+but in cases where, like their leader, they had been reclaimed from
+evil courses, had they not been satisfied with offering the present and
+future to God, leaving the past? She had heard of no case of restitution
+such as Finney insisted upon.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah entered the low, wide room in which she lived. The chimney from
+the lower room passed up and was always warm. She went and laid her cold
+hands against the rough plaster that covered its bricks, and, being
+tired, she leaned, laying her cheek too against its warm surface. The
+one candle cast but a faint light upon the chairs, the bed, the table.
+The small panes of the window-glass were bare to the darkness without
+and the empty tree-branches. The heavy latch of the closed door was
+fastened crookedly for lack of good workmanship.</p>
+
+<p>Her unsatisfied mind ached for counsel, and her thought, roving over the
+world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know
+him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to
+lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then
+the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked
+back her tears.</p>
+
+<p>She waited an hour, two hours; then, becoming anxious on Halsey's
+account, she borrowed a lantern and went across the fields to Knight's
+farmhouse.</p>
+
+<p>Quite a number of people had gathered. Susannah met some of them coming
+from the house, but others were still there, standing about the fire in
+the kitchen. She heard that the later arrivals had all been disappointed
+of the sight of Newell Knight in his fit. Halsey had assumed authority,
+stating that it was indeed a case of possession, and that none but those
+who were strong in faith and in the power of prayer must come near the
+possessed. The craving of the visitors for excitement was only fed by
+the sound of the young man's voice, heard at short intervals.</p>
+
+<p>He cried aloud, sometimes shrieking that he was being taken into "the
+pit" and that Joseph Smith could alone deliver him, sometimes exclaiming
+in a strange voice that he was no longer Newell Knight but a demon, and
+sometimes only moaning and gibbering words that no one could understand.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey came out to Susannah. "Wouldst thou see him?" he asked tenderly.
+"The sight will distress thee, for it is truly terrible to see with the
+eye of flesh the power of hell, and yet I cannot forbid thee if thou
+wouldst come, for perchance the Lord may mean it for our edification."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went with him into the inner room, hardly knowing why she went,
+but probably impelled by the instinctive desire to relieve suffering
+which was part of her womanhood. The young man's father and mother,
+together with two or three Mormon converts, were kneeling upon the
+floor, saying prayers for the sufferer in more or less audible, more or
+less agonised tones.</p>
+
+<p>The young man lay upon a pallet-bed, in what would have been called by
+the medical science of the time "convulsions." His eyeballs were rolled
+upwards in a manner most disfiguring to his face. His hands were
+clenched. Halsey no sooner entered the room than he, too, fell upon his
+knees, lifting his face upward as if in silent and fervent prayer.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Susannah felt impelled to follow his example. "But
+perhaps," she thought to herself, "cold water upon the patient's head,
+or a warm foot-bath&mdash;" Such suggestions caused her to resist the impulse
+to join the praying band, and, having resisted it, she suddenly
+experienced, as one feels a fresh breeze entering a close room, a
+strong, clear sense of knowledge that in this matter, at least, her
+husband was deluded, that the friends had better rise from their knees
+and betake themselves to ruder remedies.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had never learned to command; she had never even learned to
+advise. She had too much reverence to speak aloud, disturbing those who
+were at prayer. She stood hesitating, and then, in very low tones,
+whispered her belief in her husband's ear.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt Halsey was shocked at his wife's unbelief; perhaps by the law
+of telepathy, for whose existence some psychical experts vouch, his
+thought penetrated the mind of the sensitive upon the bed. Whatever the
+cause, Newell Knight sat up and pointed at Susannah, crying aloud that
+he saw the devil about to seize upon her. So excited was the mental
+atmosphere, so vivid were the sufferer's words and the effect of his
+pointing finger, or, perhaps, so substantial was his vision, that more
+than one of the saints afterwards averred that they had seen the Evil
+One about to embrace Susannah. But they did not agree in the description
+of his form.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey wrapped his arms about his wife, and led her like a child from
+the room and from the house. She hardly had time to speak before she saw
+the night again about her. He set her down upon an old log that chanced
+to lie against Knight's barn, kneeling beside her. There, when they were
+alone in the darkness, he invoked that name to which throughout all
+Christendom the devils are believed to be subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Angel," she said gently, "stop praying and listen to me. If you can
+command the devil in the name of our Lord, why don't you do that to poor
+Newell Knight?" She felt strong sympathy for the young man; she was
+moved almost to tears to think they were taking the wrong way with him.</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried and failed. We have sent for Joseph Smith. My faith is not
+strong enough," he added humbly. "This cometh not forth but by prayer
+and by fasting. Look! I am even now unfaithful to my charge because I
+love thee, friend, more, I fear, than the work of the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>They were left alone because Halsey in passing out had left the door of
+the sick room open to the eager neighbours. Now reluctantly he went back
+to his task of guarding the patient, and Susannah, after assuring his
+anxious soul that she felt no ill effects whatever from the dire
+proximity, went home again across the dark frozen fields with her
+lantern. She sat half the night watching and waiting.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the darkest hour before the dawn that she heard Halsey's step
+and crept down through the black house to unlock the door for him. When
+they had come again into the room she saw that he was greatly excited,
+filled with apparent calm of an exalted mood.</p>
+
+<p>"We have beheld a most glorious victory, friend; and truly we have been
+shown signs and wonders, and a very great miracle has been wrought. I
+wish thou couldst have seen with thine own eyes, and yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She thought that he had been going to say that her lack of faith had
+made it more expedient for her to be away, but that he had checked in
+himself even the thought that he was more worthy of privilege than she.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that Joseph Smith, having been preaching the evening before at
+a place some twenty miles away, had not been able to reach Knight's
+house until nearly two in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>"He rode all night," said Halsey, "and lost not a moment in coming to
+the inner room; it was like him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Susannah, "it was like him; he is very kind."</p>
+
+<p>Halsey went on. "He spread his hands over Newell and commanded the
+devils to come out of him."</p>
+
+<p>"And did they come?"</p>
+
+<p>"They left him. Joseph said that it was given to him to see that there
+were three of them; but they departed, going out into the darkness."</p>
+
+<p>The wind moaned against the window near which Susannah sat.</p>
+
+<p>"They left Newell very weak, but at peace like an infant sleeping. But
+at first I feared that he was as one dead, for I could not see him
+breathe; but Joseph's faith was strong, for he lifted up his voice and
+began to give praise, and he took Newell by the hand and bade him rise,
+but his hand fell back as if there was no life in it. Then Joseph Smith
+knelt with us upon the floor, and Newell lay smiling, but his eyes were
+closed, and he seemed dead to this world, although the body was warm.
+Afterwards he told us that at the time he was seeing a vision of
+unspeakable light and glory. And then, as we watched him, I fearing
+because my faith was weak, a marvel happened as a sign and seal to our
+faith that Joseph is indeed called to be a great prophet. I wish that
+thou couldst have seen it, Susannah, for the miracle has given me a
+great uplifting in spirit, but I am come to bear witness to it, that
+thou, too, mayest rejoice in the marvel."</p>
+
+<p>There was a few moments' pause. "What was it?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Newell began to rise from the bed. He did not sit up or move himself,
+but he was raised slowly into the air, still reclining as though upon
+his pillow. The invisible hands of angels bore him upwards."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah knit her brows. "Did you see the angels? I don't understand."
+And then more vehemently she asked, "What was it that you did see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, friend, it was not vouchsafed to us to see the blessed spirits,
+but surely they must have lifted him, for he rose, soaring upwards, as
+thou hast seen the thistledown ascend gently, almost as high as the roof
+of the room. As we gazed in great astonishment, and the women fainted
+for fear, he sank again as slowly till he rested upon his bed, and he
+opened his eyes and spoke to us of the wonderful vision of light which
+he had seen, and then he arose in perfect health and walked."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah sat silent for a minute or two. Her husband was also silent,
+wrapped in contemplation. Then Susannah said, "You are very tired,
+Angel. You were overwrought last night, even before you were called to
+the Knights'; you had better go to sleep now."</p>
+
+<p>She darkened the window against the coming of the dawn that her husband
+might sleep in the day instead of the night. She herself went downstairs
+with the earliest stir of footsteps. Because of a whim that seized her,
+she helped to prepare the breakfast that was to be served to the
+household at sunrise, and then she partook of it heartily, looking out
+of a southern window as she ate, watching the red sun ascend behind the
+naked boles of the elms. She was glad that the new day had come. Her
+heart ached not so much with pure grief now as with mocking laughter.
+Her husband was mad, quite mad, or else&mdash;and this was the more bitter
+belief&mdash;he had seen that she was in danger of disaffection, and had told
+this lie to dupe her, thinking that because she was a woman she would be
+impressed by it. As the sincerity of Angel's look came before her she
+said to herself that if that were the case no doubt Joseph Smith had
+invented the story, and laid it upon Angel's conscience to tell it. That
+or madness was the only explanation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was long after the day of her departure before Ephraim again set out
+to find Susannah. An illness to which he was subject first came upon
+him, and then, when days were past and he was able to leave his bed,
+conflicting reports concerning Susannah had been brought to the house,
+and Ephraim's courage failed. Why should he go if by seeing her he could
+neither give her pleasure nor do her good? It was natural that report,
+dwelling on what it could understand rather than on what was
+incomprehensible, should magnify Susannah's love for Halsey. No man in
+New Manchester who in the past month had chanced to catch sight of any
+maid holding secret parlance with any lover but now swore stoutly that
+that maid had been Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>It often happens that schemes least calculated to succeed attain
+success. Susannah and Halsey had not gone far, nor had they gone with
+great secrecy, yet it had happened that no one had observed them as they
+travelled, and as there was at that time of the year little
+communication between the towns to the east and west of Geneva Market,
+it was long before real news concerning them transpired.</p>
+
+<p>At length, when many days had passed, it was told in Manchester where
+Susannah really was; and as if the mischief Rumour was ashamed of being
+caught telling the truth, she hastily added a lie, and one that had a
+fair show of evidence in its favour. She declared that Susannah had not
+been married except by some mystical Mormon ceremony which was void in
+law.</p>
+
+<p>When Ephraim heard this circumstantial story, and with it many new tales
+concerning wicked mysteries practised by the Mormons in Fayette, he
+threw down his books, as long ago the fabled fruit that had turned to
+ashes was thrown down, and prepared for the road.</p>
+
+<p>In the first day's journey he reached Geneva, and setting out again
+before it was light, he came to John Biery's hotel when the sun was
+rising red beyond the gray elm boughs on the morning on which Susannah
+breakfasted alone.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah looked up from her breakfast and saw Ephraim standing beside
+her. It was his way to look calm outwardly, but she could see that he
+was struggling with the nervous untoward beating of his heart, so that
+he could not speak. Susannah did not understand why she could not
+immediately rise and speak. She was conscious of a red flush that rose
+and mantled her face, but she did not understand the emotion from which
+it arose. She only knew that she was glad to see Ephraim, more glad than
+she could have thought to be of anything upon a day when her heart had
+been set mocking.</p>
+
+<p>"You have come at last," she whispered, and only knew when the words
+were said that she had hoped to see him before. Her whisper was broken
+by rising tears, which she checked in very shame.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to speak to you," said Ephraim briefly.</p>
+
+<p>So she rose and went out with him. She put her shawl over her head and
+walked upon the roadside. The day was mild, the first of the Indian
+summer. Ephraim had not put up his horse; he led it by the bridle as he
+walked.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure as I'm alive, it's her uncle as has come after her at last," said
+the wife of John Biery, gazing through the small panes of the kitchen
+window. And, in truth, Ephraim did look many years older than Susannah,
+for his figure was bowed somewhat for lack of strength.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah did not now think of Ephraim as old, neither did she think of
+him as young. To her he was just Ephraim, bearing no more relation of
+comparison to any other mortal than if his had been the only soul in the
+world beside her own. She was not aware of this; she was only thinking
+that if he had not shot Halsey she would have been able to speak freely
+to him now. It was so wicked of Ephraim, above all others, to do such a
+thing. It was, in fact, unforgivable because of the stain upon Ephraim's
+own character more than because of Halsey's blood. But that again she
+did not analyse. She only knew that her feeling kept her silent.</p>
+
+<p>"I am here, Susannah"&mdash;in his battle to speak Ephraim economised
+words&mdash;"to ask you to come back with me."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah considered. It would be perhaps the best thing that she could
+do after she had spoken her mind to Angel. He would not ask her to
+remain to join in a service she loathed. But when she thought of her
+aunt, and of the voice of an outraged Puritan neighbourhood, her heart
+naturally failed her.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this man more to you&mdash;I do not say than the ties of kindred, for
+that is natural&mdash;but more to you than the obligation to live a life of
+reason and duty?"</p>
+
+<p>"No." Susannah spoke the answer aloud because it arose so simply and
+strongly within her. Had she not just come to a crisis in which her
+desire to abide by reason proved far stronger than the feeling which
+bound her to Halsey? And yet, as she thought of his love and his
+tenderness for her, she felt only pity for him, even if he had told a
+lie.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim had grown calmer, but at the clear denial his heart again beat
+against the breath he was trying to draw. She did not love Halsey then!
+she was not married to him! He could conceive of nothing that could have
+brought that word and tone to Susannah's lips if she were bound.</p>
+
+<p>"Does not duty and reason, does not even mere sanity, call upon you to
+come back with me, Susannah, and spend your life where you can exercise
+the gifts God has given you among those who abide by law and order?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, Ephraim, it is so; but I am too great a coward. Think of the
+shame that I should have to endure from my aunt, and all the world would
+taunt me with my folly and madness. I think it would kill what little
+good there is in me. For although I should be willing to suffer if I
+have done wrong, yet there would be no use in going where my punishment
+would be greater than I could bear."</p>
+
+<p>He was shocked to think of the days that had elapsed before he had come
+to her. She had suffered much before she could speak in this way, and
+when he saw how mild and sad she was, and, above all, rational, he
+longed to comfort her as he would comfort a child with caresses and the
+promise of future joys. He could give her neither, because he believed
+that she cared for neither caress nor joy from his hand. There was
+something he could offer&mdash;all that he had to give that she could take,
+but the offer was so hard to make that he prefaced it.</p>
+
+<p>"A way might be found by which you could return to our house, Susannah,
+and be troubled by no spoken reproach, and you could live down that
+which was unspoken." He paused a minute, and then said, "But I would
+know first that you leave all that pertains to your life here freely.
+You have found it true, what is so much reported, that the Mormons
+follow wicked practices?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, oh no, Ephraim; that is not true&mdash;mad, deluded perhaps, but not
+wicked. The stories of wickedness told are malicious even where there is
+a colour of truth, and for the most part there is none. In the matter of
+daily life they abide by the laws of God and man, and nothing else is
+taught."</p>
+
+<p>It was the thought of the sacerdotal deception that she felt had been so
+lately practised upon herself that caused her to put in the reserving
+words "in the matter of daily life"; but when she remembered the malice
+that had instigated report, the unlovely lives of the malicious
+fault-finders, the evil stains that lie even upon the best lives, she
+burst out, "There is not one in our community, Ephraim, who would stoop
+to a cruel act either in word or deed. There is not one of us, even
+among those who have recently repented from very wicked lives, who would
+try to take the life of a defenceless man when he was, at a great cost
+to himself, pursuing what he thought to be the path of duty&mdash;as you did,
+Ephraim."</p>
+
+<p>Before this he had kept his eyes upon the ground; standing still now, he
+looked straight into hers. So for a minute they stood, the horse's head
+drooping beside his shoulder, the woman upon the roadside erect,
+passionate; around them the leafless wood through which the long
+straight road was cut. The long level red beams of the sun struck
+through between the gray trunks, burnishing the wet carpet of the fallen
+leaf.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you think it was I who fired?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went on with the horse, and she at the side.</p>
+
+<p>She was utterly astonished. "Who, Ephraim&mdash;who fired?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked straight in front of him again. "It was my mother. She
+brandished the gun in his face. She couldn't have intended to shoot."</p>
+
+<p>From Susannah's heart a great cloud was lifted. She felt no confused
+need to readjust her thoughts; rather it was that in a moment her
+apprehension of Ephraim's character slipped easily from some abnormal
+strain into normal pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>She pressed her hands to her breast as if fondling some delight.
+"Forgive me," she said, "but I am so glad, oh, so very glad." She drew a
+long breath as if inhaling not the autumn but the new sweetness of
+spring.</p>
+
+<p>So they went on a little way, he somewhat shy because of her emotion,
+she meditating again, and this question pressed.</p>
+
+<p>"And you think," she asked, "that your mother would receive me if I went
+back with you? that I could live at peace with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think that whatever I might do she would ever try to shoot
+<i>me</i>?" he asked with half a smile. "Do you think that she would ever, by
+word or deed, do anything that would hurt <i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never." Susannah said the word as a matter of course.</p>
+
+<p>"Or that my father would ever deny me anything that I seriously asked
+for, or that he knew my happiness depended upon?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, surely not; but, Ephraim&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he continued, growing distress in his voice, "Susannah, is there
+any place else in the whole world that you can go for shelter and
+comfort but to our house? You have spoken of this madness and delusion;
+you are satisfied that you must leave&mdash;" He had meant to say "this man,"
+but he was too shy, and he faltered&mdash;"that you must leave these people?"</p>
+
+<p>She cast her eyes far in among the trunks of the close-growing trees,
+upon one side and then upon another, as if looking for a way of escape.
+Yes, surely her faith in Angel's creed had been hurt beyond recovery,
+and she must free herself, but how? She dallied with Ephraim's offer of
+asylum because she could think of no other.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said mechanically; "yes, but how can I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear cousin, don't you see that it is wrong for you to stay one
+day longer here? If you believed at first that the bond that united you
+to this man was binding, you do not believe it now. You were so young
+when you went, yet the thing cannot be undone on that account. You were
+so beautiful that I had hoped a great and prosperous life lay before
+you. Now, of course, that cannot be, but&mdash;but&mdash;at least you can live a
+life of peace, live truly and nobly, using your faculties to glorify
+God."</p>
+
+<p>She began to see that he was trying to work up to something else that he
+had to say. She followed him heedfully, knowing that with Ephraim the
+steps in an argument were important. He saw some way out which she did
+not see, and her whole mind paused in eager listening.</p>
+
+<p>He turned and faced her again, lifting his eyes, holding out his hand;
+his voice, usually weak, was strong. She knew that it was a strong man
+who spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Susannah, will you take my name and protection?"</p>
+
+<p>She gazed at him incredulous, and then, beginning to understand what it
+was that he thought, and all that he meant, she leaned against one of
+the cold gray tree trunks, weeping weakly like a child.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am married," the words came with a long sobbing sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Not legally?" and then he added, "nor in God's sight."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, oh! you are making a great mistake, Ephraim. Joseph Smith and
+my husband are not like that. A minister came and did it. He had his
+license, and we have the paper he signed."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim set his teeth hard together and kept silence. He said to himself
+that he might have known that the rascals would be clever enough to make
+the tie secure.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah wept on, not loudly, but with long convulsive sighs that broke
+into the tears she was endeavouring to check.</p>
+
+<p>"And, Ephraim, my husband is good&mdash;oh, very good, and very kind to me,
+and up to last night I thought that what he believed might be true. I
+was not sure, but I thought that Joseph Smith might be a prophet. I knew
+they were far, far better than the other people who despise them, and so
+I was glad to be with them; and up till last night" (she repeated the
+words, controlling herself to give them emphasis)&mdash;"up till last night I
+thought that they at least believed everything they said to be true."</p>
+
+<p>Then, after an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he
+had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right
+moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was
+broken; she had detected some fraud. His hope, dazed by one blow, now
+began to look through the circumstance more clearly. If he could lead
+her to renounce the religion in which she had apparently ceased to
+believe, and persuade her to return to his father's roof, the Mormon
+husband himself might seek the dissolution of the marriage. Therefore
+Ephraim made no comment on what had passed, but asked gently, "What of
+last night, Susy?"</p>
+
+<p>With a great effort she stood up, brushing away her tears, brushing back
+with both hands the hair that had fallen about her face. In the shock
+which Ephraim's proposal had given, in the brief interval of her tears,
+she had realised as never before that she could not shake off her duty
+to Angel as she had thought to shake off his creed. She spoke
+tremblingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ephraim, you are so good that you are above us all. You live in some
+higher place. You would have made this great sacrifice to help me." (She
+never doubted that Ephraim's proposal had been born in self-abnegation.)
+"Surely you can tell me what to do, for I am in great distress; but I
+want you first to remember that my husband is good, and that he loves me
+more than all the world, more than everything except God, and if he has
+told me a lie now, it must have been because he thought to save my soul
+by it, but I think&mdash;I think that the lie could not have been his. I
+think it must have been Joseph Smith's." She spoke very wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it?" he asked again, tender of the shock she had received, yet
+still confident that it would be his part to widen this breach.</p>
+
+<p>Looking down with burning cheeks, she told him what Halsey's story about
+Newell Knight's levitation had been. She remembered it quite clearly and
+told it baldly.</p>
+
+<p>Before she finished it she heard him mutter below his breath that it was
+very strange. She was surprised at his tone of perplexity.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very strange to me," she cried, "because I know my husband, and
+up till now he has been so upright and, except that he believed in
+Joseph Smith, so sensible and wise."</p>
+
+<p>"And is this all?" asked Ephraim. "If it were not for this, would you be
+content to go on as before?"</p>
+
+<p>He had begun to walk slowly on with the horse, and she too walked. After
+she had answered him the long silence became oppressive, and she knew
+that Ephraim was suffering to a degree that she could not understand. At
+length when he did speak his words were most unexpected.</p>
+
+<p>He was looking toward the rising sun, which was still dim and flushed
+with the autumn haze. "The Christ whom we all worship," he began
+abruptly, "each in our different way, called himself by the sacred name
+of Truth. Does he desire, do you think, that we must worship him by
+adhering to what we know to be fact, no matter what would seem to be
+gained by slighting facts? It is a great temptation to me to conceal
+from you, Susannah, a part of my book knowledge which I cannot help
+thinking has some bearing upon this case&mdash;how much or how little I do
+not know."</p>
+
+<p>He walked on for a little way, and at length, with a great sigh, he
+began to speak again, answering her first appeal for advice.</p>
+
+<p>"I think that your prophet is mad or false, that his Mormonism is utter
+folly, but you knew that I thought that long ago. As to this story your
+husband has told you, I am bound to say that it has happened before in
+the world's history many times that men have seen, or thought they saw,
+a man rise into the air. In my opinion it is not the indication of a
+sound mind when men see such things, and I feel sure that such a
+phenomenon, fact or delusion, whatever it may be, cannot bear any
+relation to the religious life. My advice to you is&mdash;ah, Susannah, I can
+say it truly in the sight of God and of my own conscience&mdash;my advice to
+you is to be quit of such men and such scenes, but I dare not keep back
+from you the truth that this one story, so far from lessening my
+confidence in your husband's probity or in Smith's, has rather increased
+it; for, being very ignorant men, they could not have heard of these
+stories that I have told you, for I have read them only in rare books;
+that they have reproduced the same incident seems rather to prove that
+they have by accident stumbled upon the same fact&mdash;whether a dizziness
+of the eyes, or an affection of the brain, or an actual counteraction of
+gravity, I cannot tell."</p>
+
+<p>She listened, drinking in each slow word. After all, then, to-day was
+just like yesterday, and that which she had to decide was as to the
+reasonableness of the whole new doctrine, as to her willingness to live
+among such scenes and such men.</p>
+
+<p>There had been no sudden madness or deceit to give her reason for sudden
+revolt (perhaps her heart said excuse instead of reason).</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim had grown very pale. After he had watched her for a while, he
+said with a sad smile, "You will not come home with me to-day,
+Susannah?"</p>
+
+<p>"I must think over all this again, Ephraim. I don't know how these
+things can be, but what you admit is very strange."</p>
+
+<p>He knew from her tone that the die was cast; he had no heart to discuss
+the laws that govern marvels.</p>
+
+<p>"If at any time, any hour of the day or night, you should wish to come
+to us, Susannah, the door is open."</p>
+
+<p>"You have been very kind, Ephraim. There is not much use in my trying to
+say anything about how good you are, but&mdash;" She stopped, thinking of her
+recovered confidence in his character and her husband's; in this
+thought she experienced an elevation of the spirits, a new hopefulness,
+which, after the dreary blank of the morning's outlook, was like
+sunshine after rain. With this elevation the religious habit of thought
+which she had learned from Halsey intermingled. "O Ephraim," she cried,
+"I believe that God sent you to give me back my faith."</p>
+
+<p>He had nothing more to say after that. He rode away leaving her standing
+upon the tawny carpet of the fallen leaf, standing in the pink sunshine
+under naked trees, and looking after him with tears of gratitude in her
+eyes. Ephraim looked back once, but not again.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>When Susannah was returning from her parting with Ephraim Croom, she
+found Joseph Smith was walking slowly upon the road not far from John
+Biery's hotel. He was holding a small book open before his eyes, conning
+a lesson, repeating the words aloud again and again as a schoolboy
+might.</p>
+
+<p>"It has been given to me to see that the Lord hath need of the learning
+of this world, Mrs. Halsey. When I have got the Latin and the Greek, I
+shall try to find some man who can teach me the Egyptian language, that
+I may know how far the ancient Egyptian from which I translated the Book
+differs therefrom."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had expected to find him excited after the events of the past
+night, but instead he was intent only upon committing a portion of the
+Latin grammar to memory, learning by rote as children did in those days.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband told me," she began. She stood in awe of Smith, hardly
+knowing how to express herself to him; then she went on, almost roughly,
+"I don't see how Newell Knight could have gone up in the air and come
+down again; it does not seem to me sensible."</p>
+
+<p>He clasped his hands behind his back, his large thumb holding his place
+open in the lesson-book, and walked beside her, his head bent somewhat
+forward in reverie.</p>
+
+<p>"I am often much taken aback at what happens to me now, Mrs. Halsey, but
+I do declare to ye that that was the greatest wonder I ever saw before
+my eyes; and it's given to me to see that ye've got the same sort of
+difficulty about him as it's natural for me to have." He began to lapse
+in his own dialect. "Ye want to see the reason why of things. Well, I
+tell ye, I've just got down to this point, that I've give up tryin' to
+see why. If ye come to that, why was I chosen to lead this people? I
+tell ye when the words of the interpretation of the Book began to pour
+through my mind, and I'd no power to stop them, and I just felt as if I
+could cry like a baby when I couldn't get any one to write 'em down&mdash;I
+tell ye, I used often to ask why. But it ain't no use. What I've got to
+do is jest to get hold of the guiding that comes to me as clear as I
+can, and jest walk straight along those lines."</p>
+
+<p>She was returning with a heart bruised with the pain of the recent
+colloquy at parting, but full too of purpose, feeling that she owed it
+to Ephraim to reconsider the evidence for Smith's prophetical claim. She
+glanced shrewdly at him as he walked and spoke&mdash;young, blue-eyed,
+large, and mild. The man seemed to her harder to comprehend if his word
+was disbelieved than if it was believed. On either supposition her
+understanding faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very hard for me to believe these things, Mr. Smith. It is very
+hard for me to believe, for instance, about the gold plates. How could
+they appear only to you and vanish again? It doesn't seem to me
+reasonable."</p>
+
+<p>"No more is it reasonable, but lots of things in the Bible is as lacking
+in reason, like the sheet that appeared to Peter with beasts. But about
+the plates, I'll tell you just how it was, even though it's not just the
+way other folks has got hold of it. This is the truth, and you can think
+how hard it was to put it much straighter to folks who didn't believe in
+me then as they do now. The night that the angel came down three times
+and stood at the foot of my bed, and told me to go and get the plates
+and where they were to be found, my brain just seemed to go on fire. I
+could see things I never saw any other time. Why, that night I saw
+through the wooden wall and into the next room, just as if there hadn't
+been any boards there, and I saw all the air about me full of motes,
+just as they are in that sunbeam, and it was dark to other people. I
+could hear, too, the cocks crowing and dogs barking for miles round; and
+when morning came I got up and looked out, and it was as if I had my
+eyes to a telescope. I could see the houses for miles and miles. I ran
+up the hill and worked into the hole, and there I saw the plates, just
+as the angel had said. I'll never forget to my dying day just what they
+looked like, and the sort of writing they had. I took them up and
+covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid
+them, and told my folks. That night I was an awful sick man, and the
+sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates
+they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were
+really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were
+changed lest any one should see them and die. And I was to keep them
+hidden. I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs;
+firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words
+of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry
+out if I couldn't get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it
+and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he
+believed, and likewise the Whitmers. And the second proof is that after
+I had buried the bricks by command, and we was far away from the place
+where they lay, Martin Harris and Cowdery and David Whitmer saw the
+plates, the very same as I had told them; they were floating in the air
+at the time of prayer."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mr. Smith, St. Peter saw the sheet in a dream; there isn't
+anything in the Bible about things or people floating in the air when
+people are awake."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know, sister, about that. There was Philip when he
+finished baptisin' the African. Ye see, in going to Azotus he must have
+gone up before he went along, or he'd have struck agen the trees; and
+our brother Newell, not being as good as Philip, and not having as much
+faith, ye see, he jest began to go and had to come back again. Mebbe
+when he's engaged in the work for a year or two he'll become an apostle
+too. Did ye never think, Sister Halsey, that Providence might take us
+up, intending to do great things with us, and jest have to set us down
+because we hadn't learned to have faith enough?"</p>
+
+<p>This spiritual significance of the episode of Newell Knight had not
+occurred to Susannah before. It touched her own case.</p>
+
+<p>He went on. "When I think of the future that is opening before us,
+Sister Halsey&mdash;why, when I think of how all the nations are to be
+gathered in&mdash;there's persecutions in store, and we must be tried by
+fire, but there's riches and honour and blessing for those as shall be
+steadfast; and it's borne in upon me that the Kingdom shall be set up in
+the west of this land." He turned and looked at her, becoming elevated
+in mind and rising again into finer language. "And the men that are like
+unto thy husband, and have the single eye to believe and obey the word
+of the Lord, shall become as princes, dispensing bread to the hungry,
+and the water of life to them that are athirst; and the beautiful women
+who fail not but continue faithful, shall be as princesses driving
+behind white horses and wearing silken robes, and comforting the sick in
+their sickness, and welcoming the women of the nations as they come from
+distant lands, teaching them that which is good&mdash;" He drew his breath,
+as if about to say more and yet larger words, but remained silent,
+looking upon the open space of the fields. Then his mien, which had
+become enlarged, contracted somewhat, as if the vision were past.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mrs. Halsey, when I do think of it, it seems as if one day at a
+time were'nt enough, and as if I couldn't just set myself to get the
+Latin and the Greek, and preach just to a few folks and help a person
+that's needing a bit of help; but it's borne right in here upon me that
+what we need is the learning of the world, otherwise called the wisdom
+of the serpent. I never was a great hand to learn, and father he didn't
+make me, so it comes harder now; but I'll see to it that the young ones
+of our folks shall take to learning mighty early; and what we want is to
+be faithful in small things, and not stumble in our faith if now and
+then a man do rise into the air."</p>
+
+<p>She felt his blue eyes, mild but shrewd, meeting hers as he came to this
+last item.</p>
+
+<p>"Sister, 'twas given to me to know the first time as I saw you that
+there was a great work for you to do in comforting and establishing the
+elect, and it comes to me now that you'd better be getting some more
+education, for although I suffer not a woman to teach, yet she may
+establish that which is already taught."</p>
+
+<p>Inclined to put some question that would bring out more definite
+instruction as to her own special function in the Church, she did not
+notice two men who were approaching from the other side in a gig until
+they were close upon them.</p>
+
+<p>One of these was a well-to-do farmer, the brother of a woman who had
+recently been converted at one of Smith's meetings. Now he was breathing
+out revenge. He sprang to the ground, striking at Smith with a heavy
+whip. Susannah saw the mildness of the prophet's eye turn into a sharp
+glitter. She realised that he was not afraid, although when the other
+man also sprang upon him there was not the least doubt but that he must
+be worsted in such an assault.</p>
+
+<p>In the minute that Smith was wrestling with the farmer for the
+possession of the whip, Susannah wrung her hands in an agony and ran
+forward toward the hotel, screaming aloud for help; then, afraid of what
+might befall in her absence, she ran back. By this time the two men had
+thrown Smith down. Even then he showed his strength, for they struggled
+hard to get the whip, which he had seized from them.</p>
+
+<p>In her storm of feeling Susannah for the first time came out from the
+habits of girlish timidity. Hardly knowing what she said, what she was
+about to say, she heard the words of her own fierce indignation ring out
+on the air of the mild autumn morning. The scene&mdash;the bare road, the
+sere weeds and grasses, the prostrate prophet, the flushed faces of the
+two burly countrymen upturned to hers as they stooped, crushing him
+down&mdash;all was photographed on her mind by excitement.</p>
+
+<p>By the intensity of her upbraiding she arrested the attention of Smith's
+enemies for a minute till, as if he revolted against his own weakness,
+one of them gave vent to a loud jest, at which the other laughed.</p>
+
+<p>The words meant nothing to Susannah, nothing more than the Latin words
+of the lesson-book that lay torn and muddy at her feet, but Smith no
+sooner heard them than he hurled himself from the ground with almost
+superhuman strength.</p>
+
+<p>Both men were forced in self-defence to close upon him. Smith shouted
+aloud, although a hand on his throat almost choked him, "Go to the
+hotel, Mrs. Halsey; go in to your husband." Susannah knew now that he
+was fighting for her, not for himself; the allegiance of his glance gave
+her a thrill of loyalty to him which was wholly new.</p>
+
+<p>Two men ran out from the hotel, and behind them John Biery. When they
+neared the place the farmer and his accomplice got into their gig and
+called back fierce threats against Smith as they went. John Biery was a
+constable, yet, although he saw that Smith had been brutally assaulted,
+he made no attempt to pursue and capture the offenders. The other men
+contented themselves with picking up his hat and book and remarking that
+the men that had run away hadn't had no sort of right, and that Smith
+ought to have the law on them. Susannah was the more enraged by this
+refusal to interfere.</p>
+
+<p>Smith wiped his face from dust and blood. It pleased Susannah's love of
+dignity to observe that when he spoke it was not in impotent wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"Go in to your husband, Mrs. Halsey, and tell him to rejoice that we are
+accounted worthy to suffer."</p>
+
+<p>That was not exactly the news that Susannah did bring when she went back
+to her husband's room. Her feelings were so upwrought that it was some
+time before, in pouring out to Halsey her indignation, she could find
+relief. Whatever might or might not be the truth of Smith's heart, it
+remained true that in this persecution the many were ranged against the
+few, and were lashing each other on by false reports to lawless
+brutality. Like the Psalmist, Halsey led her as it were into the house
+of the Lord, and pointed out the end of the wicked and the award of the
+righteous. He added to the then popular notion of external reward
+thoughts which had been working in his own mind under the influence of
+that time-spirit which leads such minds as his in the foremost paths. He
+spoke to her of the strength of character gained and lost by all that
+was done and suffered in the right way or in the wrong.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was soothed. She knew that the truth was being spoken to her,
+and her heart leaped forth to do reverence, not only to it, but to the
+man who could find it in the midst of such insults. Ephraim was good. If
+he could only know how good Angel was, he would not have asked her to
+return. All thought of deserting the new cause now was gone; the blood
+that had trickled from Smith's bruised head, the danger that menaced
+Halsey, sustained her. She wrote to Ephraim to that effect.</p>
+
+<p>Some days after, when driving past Biery's hotel from a meeting he had
+been holding in the town of Geneva, Joseph Smith entered and laid before
+Susannah books for the cultivation of her mind&mdash;a Latin grammar and
+exercise book like his own, a Universal History, and a primer of Natural
+Philosophy. He told her that in two weeks, when she had mastered their
+contents, he would bring her others. He left hastily, the business of
+the Church pressing.</p>
+
+<p>In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no
+longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a
+popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men
+know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that
+writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart.
+There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism,
+and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from
+brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits
+down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson.
+Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his
+grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far
+behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her.</p>
+
+<p>There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for
+the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of
+lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave
+the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle
+flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a
+large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked
+counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with
+whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising
+that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her
+understanding, not her heart, developed. "Why believe in Moses and the
+prophets if not in Smith&mdash;in the miracles of yesterday if not in those
+of to-day?" was the question with which Halsey prefaced the sermons he
+began to preach. The answer that his logic deduced carried conviction to
+many of his hearers, but in Susannah's mind the question alone made
+way.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BOOK_II" id="BOOK_II"></a><i>BOOK II.</i></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Ia" id="CHAPTER_Ia"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the next year, 1831, the new church was formally organised, and this
+was the "revelation" given for her direction by the mouth of Joseph
+Smith&mdash;"And now, behold, I speak unto the Church; thou shalt not kill;
+thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt love thy wife,
+cleaving unto her and to none else; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou
+shalt not speak evil of thy neighbour, nor do him any harm. Let him that
+goeth to the East tell them that shall be converted to flee to the
+West."</p>
+
+<p>The reports of the first missionaries, who had travelled westward,
+preaching both to the Indians (called by the "Saints," Lamanites) and to
+white men, were received in the beginning of this year, and the point
+designated for the first station of the Church on its way westward was a
+place called Kirtland, on the banks of the Chagrin River, in northern
+Ohio. Thither Halsey was sent, having commands to preach by the way.</p>
+
+<p>At Halsey's wayside meetings the old hymns and the old tunes were sung.
+The new doctrine embraced all that was supposed to be alive in the old;
+it repudiated only what was supposed to be dead. It offered that
+enlargement of human powers which the belief in wonders implies, a new
+form of church government, a new land to live in, a new hope of a
+visible and glorious church, and, above all, a living prophet. If the
+personality of the prophet seemed more attractive to those who believed,
+not having seen him, to Susannah, who knew the baseness of his origin so
+well, the sudden increase of his influence over hundreds of people
+seemed the greatest of marvels; and it was impossible but that even his
+person should gain some added grace from the reflected light of success.
+Halsey was only one of a dozen successful Mormon preachers who were
+converging with their train of followers upon the first station of the
+new church.</p>
+
+<p>There is no spot in northern Ohio more lovely than the five hills or
+bluffs that rise from the banks of the Chagrin River and its tributary
+brooks twelve miles to the south-east of what is now the city of
+Cleveland. On the shores of the river and its streams lie green levels;
+from these the bluffs rise steeply for some one or two hundred feet to
+tablelands of great fertility.</p>
+
+<p>The site for the first Mormon temple was on the highest of these hills
+overlooking the three valleys. Its foundations were quickly laid.
+Around it upon the slope and tableland, up and down the valleys, and
+upon the opposite hills, the wooden houses of the converts began to
+spring up, not unlike in colour to a crop of mushrooms, and very like in
+the suddenness of their growth.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after Susannah and Halsey had reached Kirtland, Joseph Smith,
+with a convert named Rigdon, went on, with missionaries who were
+travelling farther west, in order to find in the wilderness the place
+that was appointed for the building of Zion or the New Jerusalem. At the
+same time all those men among the converts who were deemed fit were sent
+out in couples to preach the new Gospel, some back to the eastern States
+whence they had come, some to Canada, some to the south. To Joseph Smith
+it was given to know who was to go and who to stay. Halsey was directed
+to remain, to receive and establish the new converts who came, to tithe
+their property for the building of the temple, and to found, according
+to Smith's direction, a school of the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>"And to thy wife, Susannah, it shall be given to teach the children such
+worldly learning as she has herself acquired, until it may be possible
+for us to appoint for them a more learned male instructor."</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Smith spoke these words in the room which served him as business
+office and chapel. He was drawing on his gloves, ready to go forth upon
+the journey to Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>Several of the elders and their wives were present, some busy on one
+errand and some on another. Susannah, being with Halsey, received the
+command in person, although it was not directly addressed to her. She
+had observed that since her arrival at Kirtland the prophet never
+addressed himself to her directly when in public. In many ways his
+manners were becoming gradually more formal, and his relapses into his
+native speech less frequent.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah could not criticise keenly, so much she marvelled at the man.
+His activities before starting on this journey were almost incredible.
+Every hour he had made decisions, for the most part successful,
+concerning the adaptability of men whom he had only seen, for labours of
+which he knew as little. He had preached continually. He had baptised
+newcomers in the icy floods of the April stream. He had advised as to
+the choice of lands and their manner of cultivation, as to the size and
+form of houses. He had visited the sick and planned merry-makings for
+the young. In addition to all this, even while preparing for the long
+journey into an unknown region, he was busy learning three languages,
+and was laying plans, not only for missionary campaigns that were to
+spread over the whole earth, but for a new translation of the Old
+Testament. If the better clothes that he had begun to wear sat somewhat
+pompously upon him, if his manners now sometimes indicated an attempt
+not only to be, but to appear, a prophet, such small affectations sank
+out of sight in the light of such extraordinary ability.</p>
+
+<p>After Smith and Sydney Rigdon had started westward, Susannah went over
+to console Emma. The prophet's wife was at that time living in a
+building of which the front part was the general store whence the
+material needs of the growing church were as far as possible provided.
+Susannah passed through between bales of cloths, boxes, and barrels of
+provisions. It was dusk; a young man who served in the store carried a
+candle before her, and the odd-shaped piles of merchandise threw strange
+moving shadows upon the low beams of the roof and walls. The young man
+held the candle to light the way up a straight staircase. "Mis' Smith,"
+he shouted, "here's Mis' Halsey come to see you."</p>
+
+<p>At the top of the staircase Susannah was met by a cooing, creeping baby,
+who beat with its little fist upon a wicket gate fencing off the stair.</p>
+
+<p>"It was the last thing he did before setting out, to nail that gate
+together and fasten it up with his own hands, so as I wouldn't need
+always to be running after the young one, lest he should fall down the
+stair." It was Emma Smith who spoke; she emerged dishevelled and tearful
+from an upper room. "When he has so much to think about and all, and
+Elder Rigdon waiting for him at the office till he'd finished. Mr.
+Smith, he's always so kind, and he knew as that would be the thing as
+would give me the most help of anything."</p>
+
+<p>Emma subsided again into tears&mdash;tears that were the more touching to
+Susannah because Emma was not like most women; she seldom wept.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean to give way," Emma continued, "but if it was your husband
+as had gone, you'd know how it was, and it's the first time I've ever
+been separate from him so long."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah sat down with the child in her arms. When the question was
+brought home to her she did not believe that temporary separation from
+Halsey would cause her tears.</p>
+
+<p>Emma began again with an effort at self-control. "It's a long way to
+Jackson County, quite across Missouri. It's all Elder Rigdon's doing,
+his going just now."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah found something that she could say here in agreement. "It may
+be wrong, but I&mdash;I don't like Elder Rigdon."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course the way he believed, and all his congregation, when the
+word was first preached to them makes Joseph think that he must be full
+of grace. Ye know, to see Joseph when he's quite by himself, ye'd be
+surprised to see how desponding he is by nature. He's that desponding he
+was real surprised, real right down taken by surprise, when he heard
+that Mr. Rigdon, so clever a minister as he was, and of the Campbellites
+too, had been baptized and a hundred and twenty-seven of his
+congregation with him. (That was first off, and ye know how many he's
+brought in since.) He could hardly believe it; he says, 'It seems as if
+I hadn't any faith at all.' And that night he couldn't sleep, but just
+walked up and down, and two revelations came to him before morning, and
+one of them addressed to Rigdon, so Joseph knows of course he's got the
+right thing in him. Then his education, too; he's got a sight more
+education than Cowdery. Joseph thinks a deal of education."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like him." Susannah sat upright; her hands were busy with the
+baby upon her knee.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I dunno." Emma spoke meditatively. "It said in one of Joseph's
+revelations that we should dwell together in love."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah laughed; it was a bright, trilling laugh, and filled the large,
+low room with its sudden music. It almost seemed like a light in the
+growing darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'll light up," said Emma, "it'll be more cheerful."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was still playing with the baby, and Emma looked at her
+critically. "Joseph thinks a great deal of you, Mrs. Halsey; he's told
+ye to teach school?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have got more time than most of the women, and my husband can afford
+to hire a school-room."</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't that," said Emma decidedly, "it's the same thing as makes ye
+say that you don't talk to any of the other folks except in a civil way.
+Ye're a bit above all the rest of us ladies in the way ye hold yerself
+and the way ye speak. I guess it comes of yer father's folks having been
+somebody, and then being so clever at books&mdash;ye see, Joseph sees all
+that; there ain't anything that he doesn't see."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah perceived that there was something behind this. "You're not
+vexed, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>Emma continued with more hesitation in her tones. "No, I'm not vexed.
+Why should I be? And besides I like you and Mr. Halsey better than any
+of the folks, although I couldn't let it be known."</p>
+
+<p>"There's something that you are thinking about."</p>
+
+<p>Emma sighed deeply; her mien faltered; she subsided again into her seat
+by the wall and into tears. "It's only that I feel that Joseph's getting
+to be such a great man. Why, there's more than a thousand folks now
+looking to him all the time to be told what to do, and thousands more
+drawing in, and Joseph beginning to wear the kid gloves whenever he goes
+on the street."</p>
+
+<p>There was an interval of sighs and suppressed sobs.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you glad? I thought you were glad about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I declare papa and mamma were just wild when I ran away and married
+Joseph, because they said that he was a low fellow, and poor, and not
+good enough for me, and now&mdash;and now&mdash;I begin to feel that I'm not good
+enough for him."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went over and sat beside her, chiding indignantly. "You know
+very well that nobody could be the same help to him that you are, and
+you know very well that there's nobody in the world that he thinks so
+much of as you." She did not say all she thought. She considered Emma to
+be Smith's superior, but that opinion would have given acute pain.</p>
+
+<p>The young church worked upon Smith's principles of thrift, temperance,
+and co-operation, and Kirtland rapidly assumed the proportions of a
+town. Susannah became the mistress of the children's school. Smith was a
+good economist; although he helped the needy, nothing that his converts
+could pay for was given to them for nothing. Hence it was that
+Susannah's private purse was well filled with tuition fees.</p>
+
+<p>She had already in mind what she would do with this money; she would
+write to the booksellers in Boston who fulfilled Ephraim's orders, and
+obtain from them some of the books whose names she remembered to have
+seen on his shelves. She knew nothing of their contents, she hardly
+knew whether she wanted them more for the sake of their contents or for
+their familiar appearance, but she thought that if she did not
+understand them when reading, she could write to Ephraim and ask for an
+explanation. She could not think of any other excuse for writing to him
+again. It had taken her a good many months to think of this one.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey, who had learned to drop the Quaker forms of speech when speaking
+to others, still, moved by the remembrances of his early home, used them
+in speech to Susannah. He inquired somewhat anxiously concerning the
+proposed purchase.</p>
+
+<p>"Dost think that they will contain what the prophet has called 'sound
+learning,' and that there will be nothing in them to distract thy soul?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I tell when I do not know what is in them?" She did not speak
+with impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"Art wise, dear heart, in this longing?" he asked wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>Then he carried away her order and despatched it.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Smith had returned from Missouri, his mind filled and,
+as it were, enlarged by the new land which he said was appointed by
+revelation as the site of the New Jerusalem. Jackson County, on the
+south bank of the Missouri River, was the place. He had already gathered
+four or five hundred new converts there, and he was now possessed with
+the desire for money to build the new city, and for a million proselytes
+to dwell in it. In spite of this, after sending out new relays of
+missionaries in all directions, he settled down to the most sober
+routine of study. Hebrew was the new language he wished to acquire, and
+he felt the call to revise the Old Testament.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIa" id="CHAPTER_IIa"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Only one unusual incident occurred in Susannah's presently peaceful
+life. One day in the golden October she set out to walk some distance up
+the valley of the Chagrin River. The object of the walk was a visit to
+one of the outlying farmhouses occupied by a family of the Saints; but
+Susannah, as was her wont, found more joy in the walk than in the visit.
+When she had passed beyond the meeting of the waters, the valley lay
+long before her, about a mile in width and quite flat. The stream was
+scarcely seen; the ground was covered with flowery weeds, white asters
+with their myriad tiny stars, the pale seed feathers of the golden rod,
+high grasses, and wild things innumerable which had been turned brown
+and gray by the autumn sun, pink clumps of the rice weed, and small
+groves of the scarlet stalks of the wild buckwheat. This level sea of
+weeds stood so high that when she threaded the narrow path they reached
+above her waist. The bees in the white asters were humming as they hum
+in apple bloom. The blue jays were calling and flying in low horizontal
+flights. The valley stretched to the south-east, then curved; a little
+mountain barred the view, upon whose pine-trees the distant air began to
+tinge with blue. On the curving bluffs on either side the trees stood in
+stately crowds; hardly a leaf had fallen, except from the golden
+walnut-trees; the colour of the foliage was for the most part like the
+plumage of some green southern bird, iridescence of gold and red shot
+through. To her right, where a part of the long hill had been cleared of
+trees, the sun shone upon bare gullies in the soap-stone cliffs, making
+the colour of that particular brown bit of earth very vivid. Everywhere
+a soft autumn haze was lying, and above white clouds were swinging
+across the pale blue sky.</p>
+
+<p>After threading the valley path for a mile Susannah was ascending the
+bluff to get to the level of the upper farms, when, much to her
+surprise, she came, as once before upon the hill Cumorah, upon Joseph
+Smith. He was lying under a group of giant walnut-trees, whose boles
+were sheltered from the road by a natural hedge of red dogwood and
+brambles. He had apparently been occupied at his devotions, but she only
+saw him arising hastily. This time there was no peep-stone; it had long
+since been discarded. The prophet had a Bible in his hand, and it was
+evident that he had been weeping. It was in those lands the habit of
+religious men of all sects to make oratories of the woods. Susannah's
+only desire was to pass and leave him undisturbed, but he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>He began severely, "Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that a woman
+should stray so far from home and without companions."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Susannah stood abashed. Unaccustomed to censure, she
+supposed that she must have done wrong. "I have walked this way before,"
+she began meekly, "but if&mdash;" She stopped here, her own judgment in the
+matter beginning to assert itself.</p>
+
+<p>The prophet had forgotten his reproof. At all times his conversation was
+apt to reveal that sudden changes of mental phase took place within him
+apparently without conscious volition. He now exclaimed with more modest
+mien, "It is, no doubt, by the will of the Lord that you are come, for I
+stood in sore need of comfort, for the revelation of the truth is a
+trial hard to endure, and at times very bitter."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?" asked Susannah intently. It was impossible but that her long
+curiosity should find some vent, and yet she shrank inwardly from her
+own prying.</p>
+
+<p>The prophet leaned against a huge bole. The ground at his feet was
+covered with yellow walnut leaves and the olive-coloured nuts. The
+sunlight fell upon him in patches of yellow light. He opened the Bible,
+turning over the leaves of the Old Testament as if making a rapid survey
+of its history in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Sister Halsey," he began, "when the favour of the Lord rested chiefly
+upon the Jewish nation, at the times of the patriarchs and David, and
+when Solomon, arrayed in all his glory and in the greatness of his
+wisdom, reigned from Dan to Beersheba, mustn't those have been the times
+when the people walked most closely with the Lord?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so, Mr. Smith."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not enough to suppose, Sister Halsey, for it is clearly written
+that when the Jews went contrary to the will of the Lord they were given
+over into the hands of their enemies."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah endeavoured to give a more unqualified assent.</p>
+
+<p>"Sister Halsey, there has come to my soul in reading this book in these
+last days a word, and I know not if it be the word of the Lord or no."</p>
+
+<p>She saw with astonishment that his whole frame was trembling now. She
+began to realise that he was truly in trouble, whether because of the
+greatness of the revelation or because of private distress she could not
+tell. She became more pitiful.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you are well, Mr. Smith, and that Emma is well. There is nothing
+to really distress you, is there?"</p>
+
+<p>In hearing the increased gentleness of her tone he seemed to find a more
+easy expression for his pent-up feeling. "It's come upon me in a very
+cutting way, truly as the prophets said like a two-edged sword, and at
+the time too when I was inquiring of the Lord concerning&mdash;" He stopped
+here, and she felt that his manner grew more confidential, but he did
+not look at her, his eyes sought the ground&mdash;"concerning a matter which
+has given me no little heart searching." He stopped again, she listening
+with a good deal of interest.</p>
+
+<p>"It's come to me to observe that among the chosen people&mdash;there ain't no
+gainsayin' it, Sister Halsey, though I trust you to be discreet and not
+mention the matter, but in the days when the divine favour rested on
+Israel each man had more than one wife; and the Lord Himself says He
+give them to Solomon, the only objection being to heathen partners."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean, Mr. Smith, that I'm not to mention what everybody knows
+already, that in the Old Testament times polygamy was practised?"</p>
+
+<p>The now entire lack of sympathy in her tone affected him as an
+intentional act of rudeness would affect an ordinary man. The tissue of
+his mind, which had relaxed into confidence, grew visibly firmer. He
+assumed the teaching tone.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Mrs. Halsey, the only thing that I asked you not to mention was
+that I had any light of revelation on a point on which most of our minds
+is already made up."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Smith, you can't possibly be in the slightest doubt but that it
+would be very wicked for any man now to have more than one wife."</p>
+
+<p>"I've heard a great many of the ministers who in times past, in the time
+of our bondage we heard and believed, say as it would be very wicked for
+any one nowadays to take God at His word and expect Him to do a miracle
+or heal the sick; but I've come to the conclusion, Mrs. Halsey, that it
+isn't a question of what we in our ignorance and prejudice might think
+wicked, but it's a question of what's taught in this book, looked at
+without the eye of prejudice and tradition. What we call civilisation is
+too often devilisation&mdash;<i>devilisation</i>, Mrs. Halsey."</p>
+
+<p>He tapped the book. He was becoming oratorical. "The idea of one wife
+came in with the Romans. 'Twas no institution of Jehovah, Mrs. Halsey."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah, more accustomed to his oratorical vein than to private
+conference, became now more frank and at ease.</p>
+
+<p>"You said you didn't know that the idea was from the Lord, Mr. Smith,
+and I don't think it is. I don't think you'll entertain it very long,
+and I don't think, if you did, many of the Saints would stay in your
+church."</p>
+
+<p>She bade him good-day, and went on up the slope. When she was walking
+along the brink of the bluff in the open beyond the nut-trees she heard
+him call. He came after her with hastened gait, Bible still in hand. She
+was surprised to find that what he had to say was very simple, but not
+the less dignified for that.</p>
+
+<p>"I sometimes think, Sister Halsey, that you look down on us all as if we
+weren't good enough for you, although you're too kindly to let it be
+seen. According to the ways of the world, of course, it's so. If I'm as
+rough and uneducated as most of our folks, at least I can think in my
+mind what it would be not to be rough, and I can think sometimes how it
+all seems to you."</p>
+
+<p>His words appealed directly to strong private feeling which had no
+outlet. While she stood seeking a reply the natural power that he had of
+working upon the feelings of others, vulgarly called magnetism, so far
+worked in connection with his words that tears came to her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't often think about my old life," she said with brief pathos.</p>
+
+<p>Smith was looking at the ground, as a huge, shy boy might stand when
+anxious to express sympathy of which he was somewhat ashamed. "I know it
+must be a sort of abiding trial to you." After a moment he added, "I
+wouldn't like to make it worse by having you think that I was goin' to
+preach any strange doctrine. I'd sometimes give a good deal if the Lord
+would raise me up a friend that I could speak to concerning the lights
+that come to me that I know that it wouldn't do to speak of in the
+public congregations, because of their upsetting nature, and likewise
+because I doubt concerning their meaning. And of this matter there was
+no thought in my mind to speak in public, for it is for the future to
+declare whether it be of the darkness or of the light; but to you I
+spoke, almost unwittingly, and perhaps in disobedience to the dictates
+of wisdom."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah leaned her arm upon the topmost log of the snake fence and
+looked down the slope. His insight into her own trials caused her to
+sympathise with him in spite of his absurdity. She made an honest effort
+to assist him to self-analysis. She said, "A great many things come into
+our minds at times, Mr. Smith, that seem important, but, as you say, if
+we do not speak about them, afterwards we see that they are silly. Of
+course with you, if you think some of your thoughts are revelations, it
+must make you often fancy that the others may be very important too, but
+it does not follow that they are, and, as you say, time will weed them
+out if you are trying to do right." She wondered if he would resent her
+<i>ifs</i>. She stood looking down the bank in the short silence that
+followed, feeling somewhat timorous. The steep ground was covered with
+the feathery sprays of asters, seen through a velvety host of gray
+teasles which grew to greater height. Through the teasles the white and
+purple flowers showed as colours reflected in rippled water&mdash;rich, soft,
+vague in outline. At one side, by an old stump, there was a splendid
+feather, yellow and green, of fading golden rod; yellow butterflies,
+that looked as if they had dyed their wings in the light reflected from
+this flower, repeated its gold in glint and gleam over all the gray
+hillside, shot with the white and the blue. At the foot of the bank lay
+the flat valley, and from this vantage ground the river could be seen.
+The soft musical chat of its waters ascended to her ears, and among the
+huge bronze-leafed nut-trees, whose shelter she had just left, the
+woodpeckers were tapping and whistling to one another.</p>
+
+<p>At length Smith sighed deeply, but without affectation. "Yes, I reckon
+that's a good deal how it is. It ain't easy, Mrs. Halsey&mdash;I hope in your
+thoughts when judgin' of me you'll always remember that it ain't easy to
+be a prophet."</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Susannah found herself laughing, but for Halsey's sake
+the laughter was akin to tears.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIIa" id="CHAPTER_IIIa"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ohio was being quickly settled. Within a few miles of Kirtland,
+Cleveland and Paynesville were rising on the lake shore, and to the
+south there were numerous villages; but the society of the Saints at
+Kirtland was especially prosperous, and so sudden had been the increase
+of its numbers and its wealth that the wonder of the neighbouring
+settlers gave birth to envy, and envy intensified their religious
+hatred. Twice before Smith had left Fayette he had been arrested and
+brought before a magistrate, accused of committing crimes of which the
+courts were unable to convict him. Now the same spirit gave rise to the
+same accusations against his followers. About this time webs of cloth
+were taken from a woollen mill near Paynesville, and several horses were
+also stolen. The Mormons, whether guilty or not, were accused by common
+consent of the orthodox and irreligious part of the community. Hatred of
+the adherents of the new sect began to rise in all the neighbouring
+country, as a ripple rises on the sea when the wind begins to blow; the
+growing wave broke here and there in little ebullitions of wrath, and
+still gained strength until it bid fair to surge high.</p>
+
+<p>About Christmas time there were a number of cases of illness in
+Kirtland. Joseph Smith healed one woman, who appeared to be dying, by
+merely taking her by the hand, after praying, and commanding her to get
+up. After that he went about with great confidence to others who were
+stricken, and in many cases health seemed to return with remarkable
+celerity. It is hard to understand why the report of this, going abroad
+with such addition as gossip gives, should have greatly added to the
+rage of the members of other religious sects. Perhaps they supposed that
+the prophet arrogated to himself powers that were even more than
+apostolic. They threatened violence to Kirtland on the prophet's
+account, so that before the new year he took Emma and the child and
+established himself with them in an obscure place called Hiram, some
+twenty miles to the south. Sydney Rigdon, who by this time was, under
+the prophet, the chief leader of the Saints, went also to Hiram to be
+beside him. Smith was toiling night and day to produce a new version of
+the Hebrew Scriptures, believing that he was taught by inspiration to
+correct errors in them. Rigdon was scribe and reviser. These two being
+absent from Kirtland, responsibility and work without limit rested again
+with Angel Halsey.</p>
+
+<p>With unsatisfied affections and thoughts wholly perplexed, Susannah
+beheld the days of the new year lengthening. Then she fell into the
+weakness, to which humanity is prone, of hoping eagerly for some
+external circumstance that should lighten the inner darkness. A bit of
+stray news one day came to her with the shock of an apparent fulfilment
+of her vague expectation. Finney was passing through that part of the
+country preaching. Of all human beings she had ever met, this remarkable
+evangelist most impressed her as a man who had intimate dealing, awful,
+yet friendly, with an unseen power. She had no sooner heard that he was
+within reach than her mind leaped to the determination to hear him
+preach and speak with him again. She would lay her difficulties before
+him; she would hear from him more intelligence concerning the home which
+she had left than a thousand letters could convey.</p>
+
+<p>It was March now. The winter's snow was gone. Finney, as it chanced, was
+to come as near to Kirtland as the village of Hiram. Susannah spoke to
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear that Mr. Finney was going to preach at Hiram?"</p>
+
+<p>She stood turning from the white spread table in the centre of the room.
+The morning light was shining on the satin surface of the planed maple
+wood with which walls and ceiling were lined. Halsey was putting on his
+boots to go out to his day's round of business and pastoral work. He
+knew just as well as if she had explained it to him that a great deal
+lay behind what she said. He fell to wondering at once what she could
+want. Was it to send a message to the old home by the man whose very
+name must recall all its memories?</p>
+
+<p>"I want to go and hear him preach," Susannah went on.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey was disturbed. "Thou canst not really have such a desire," he
+said severely.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? A great deal that he preaches is just the same as what you
+preach, Angel."</p>
+
+<p>He saw that she was in a turbulent mood, and that grieved him; but as
+for her request, he could not believe it to be serious.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou art speaking idle words," he said with a sigh, and he rose to go
+out.</p>
+
+<p>"You have not answered me. Why shouldn't I hear him when you agree that
+much that he says is true?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is in the camp of those whom Satan has stirred up to do us injury.
+That which thou callest truth in his mouth is but the form of godliness,
+for it is clear that if God be with those who fight against us he cannot
+be with us."</p>
+
+<p>Something in the expression of her face brought him now a more distinct
+feeling of alarm. His nature was singularly direct. He had scarcely
+finished his meditative argument ere he sought to clinch its purport,
+and, stepping near, he laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Dost thou doubt, Susannah, that God is with us?"</p>
+
+<p>The crimson colour mounted from her cheeks and spread over her white
+brow. It was as if Angel had asked what he never had asked, whether she
+loved him or not, whether all her thoughts and feelings were loyal. She
+knew that for him there was no line of separation between life and love,
+and love and religion. She was careful for him always, as a mother is
+for a delicate child, as a sick nurse is for a patient. She could not
+have endured to give him the pain of hearing her denial, even if such
+denial would have expressed her attitude truly.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, Angel, I&mdash;I know that you&mdash;" she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble in his face was growing. "Has not <i>God</i> made the signs of
+his presence clear to us, and even visible before our eyes? If thou
+shouldst deny the outward signs, is it not by his grace that we live?
+Susannah, dost thou think that it is in me by nature to bear with the
+infirmities and murmurings of our people as I bear with them
+daily&mdash;babes as they are, learning, but not yet having learned, to live
+at peace with one another? Or dost thou think that it is in me to
+forgive daily the outrageous acts and words of our enemies, trying as
+they do to injure our innocent brothers, or even our prophet himself?
+Yet, Susannah" (his voice was stirred with emotion), "I would bear
+witness to thee that every day, as I pray, the anger is taken out of my
+heart, and I can deal with these very men in the spirit of love."</p>
+
+<p>Standing erect before him, confused and distressed, she made another
+effort to soothe, even taking his hand from her shoulder and trying to
+caress it between her own, but so tense was the question in his mind
+that his fingers were limp and unresponsive to her touch.</p>
+
+<p>"I know all that you would say, Angel; I know that you are good; I know
+that our people, although they have many faults, are trying to do right,
+and I believe that the people in other sects around us are far more
+wicked, but&mdash;Mr. Finney is not like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear heart, thou knowest well that there is no goodness but that which
+comes from above, and although this Mr. Finney may have a show of
+goodness, as thou or I might have in his place, yet what avail can his
+preaching be if God be not with him? So what show of goodness he has
+only aideth the devil; for how can it be possible, when two armies are
+encamped one against another, that God can fight upon both sides? Is
+Christ divided?"</p>
+
+<p>A loud knock came to the outer door; Elder Halsey was late in getting to
+his work; men were waiting for him. He let the sound of the raps die
+away before he answered them; his searching look was upon her face,
+hungering for some assurance that his words had met and slain her
+doubts. Then he was forced to leave her.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy for Susannah to obtain a horse to go to the village of
+Hiram. When the day of Finney's preaching came, after her husband had
+gone to his afternoon work, she rode out of Kirtland.</p>
+
+<p>Since she had made up her mind to disobey she had said nothing further
+to Angel. Why inflict upon him the painful attempt to hinder her which
+his conscience would demand?</p>
+
+<p>The last snow-wreath had faded, but there was not as yet a bud or blade
+of perfect green. The valley of the Chagrin lay almost hueless in the
+cold sunshine. A light wind was blowing over its levels of standing
+weeds, and whispering in the bare arms of the huge nut-trees upon its
+bluffs.</p>
+
+<p>When the sun began to sink, Susannah had reached the low rolling ground
+that surrounds Hiram. The landscape here had a less distinctive
+character, and there was no vapour in the sky to make the sunset
+beautiful. She was weary of her horse's rough trot, and still more so of
+its slow plodding, but she felt excitement. She had conquered those
+forces, part of her womanhood, which urged compliance with her husband's
+desire and her own desire to abide by the homely routine whatever it
+might be. The thing that she had done seemed so large that her
+imagination told her that the event must justify it.</p>
+
+<p>She had no thought of concealment. She knew only the two families in the
+village of Hiram. Her plan was to go first to the Rigdons and ask for
+refreshment, thence to the meeting, and after that to ask for the
+night's lodging which she knew that Emma Smith would not refuse.</p>
+
+<p>In the village she saw that people were moving about and talking with an
+air of excitement. When she turned to a quiet corner and asked an
+elderly man for Mrs. Rigdon's house, he stared at her as if at an
+apparition.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it Sydney Rigdon's wife that you're wanting?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had raised her veil, and he looked at her face with the
+greatest curiosity. Flushed with exercise, braced by the sharp air, her
+colour was brilliant and her eyes sparkling. Her plain dress and heavy
+veil appeared to the man to be a disguise, so surprising to him was the
+brilliancy of her face and the modulation of her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you not know where the Rigdons live?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He was chewing tobacco, and now he spat upon the ground, not rudely, but
+as performing an habitual action in a moment of abstracted thought. "Oh,
+I know well enough, but if ye won't mind my saying a word to ye, young
+lady, I'd advise ye to put up somewhere else. I've got darters of my
+own&mdash;in course I don't know who ye may be or what ye may be doing
+here." This last was added in an apparent attempt to attain to some
+suspicion that he felt to be reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>"You think ill of them because you despise their sect," she said gently,
+"but I am the wife of one of the elders."</p>
+
+<p>"Have ye got hold of some news that ye're carrying to them?" He evinced
+a sudden interest that appeared to her extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>"What news?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>I</i> don't know. I jest thought 'twas queer, if you'd got hold of
+anybody's secrets, that you should be asking where they lived, straight
+out and open in the street like this."</p>
+
+<p>His words suggested to her only the idle fancies of prejudice. Some
+other people drew near, and, dropping her veil, she was starting in the
+direction in which he pointed when he spoke again in a more determined
+voice. "You jest tell me one thing, will you?" He even laid his hand
+upon her bridle with authority, "Are ye going to stop at Rigdons' all
+night?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Sartin?"</p>
+
+<p>When he received her reply he let go the bridle, saying in warning
+tones, "Well, see that ye don't do it, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>The incident left a disagreeable impression on Susannah's, mind, but she
+did not attach any distinct meaning to it.</p>
+
+<p>Rigdon and his wife were both within. Rigdon locked the door when
+Susannah had entered. Then with crossed arms, standing where he could
+watch against intruders from the window, he began to tell her news of
+import. His mother, who was an old woman, his wife, and some younger
+members of the family, gathered round.</p>
+
+<p>The light fell sideways upon his thickset form and large hairy face. His
+manner was the result of struggle between effort for heroic pose and an
+almost overmastering alarm. His matter was the evil conduct of the
+surrounding Gentiles toward the Saints. It seemed that in this and
+neighbouring places, evangelistic meetings had been held in which
+Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists had joined, and Rigdon averred
+that the preachers had used threatening and abusive language with regard
+to the Saints. A series of such meetings had begun in Hiram, small as it
+was; and Joseph Smith, like a war-horse scenting the battle, had set
+aside his arduous task of correcting the Old Testament and gone forth to
+preach in the open air. At first he had been greeted only with derision
+or pelted with mud, but in the last few days he had made and baptized
+converts, and now the fury of the other sects was at white heat.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah's mind swiftly sifted out the improbabilities from Rigdon's
+wrathful tale.</p>
+
+<p>"But the people that gather to such meetings as Mr. Finney holds are for
+the most part awaked, for the time at least, to a higher Christian
+life. It cannot be they who have used the vile language that you
+repeat."</p>
+
+<p>She almost felt the disagreeable heat of Rigdon's breath as he threw out
+in answer stories of coarse and brutal insult which had been heaped upon
+himself and Smith. The large animal nature of this man always annoyed
+her. There was much of breath in his words, much of physical sensation
+always clinging to his thoughts. At present, however, she was not
+inclined to judge him too hardly; although visibly unstrung, unwise in
+his sweeping condemnation, coarse in his anger, and somewhat
+grandiloquent in his pose, there was still much of real heroism in his
+mental attitude. Braced by the fiercest party spirit, he stood staunch
+in his loyalty to Smith and the cause, with no thought of yielding an
+inch of ground to the oppressors.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not believe," repeated Susannah sturdily, "that it is the more
+religious of the Gentiles who have said and done these things. I have
+come here to-night to hear and to speak with Mr. Finney, whom I know to
+be a very godly and patient man."</p>
+
+<p>"Why has he come here?" demanded Rigdon. "He who by his preaching can
+gather thousands in populous places, why should he ride across this
+thinly settled parcel of land, preaching to mere handfuls, if it is not
+to denounce us? And he has not the courage to go nearer to the place
+where the Saints are gathered in numbers. He will teach his hearers
+first to ravage the few sheep that are scattered in the wilderness, that
+by that they may gain courage even to attack the fold."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah drew upon herself their anger, and so strong was Rigdon's
+physical nature that even his transient anger seemed to embody itself in
+some sensible influence that went out from him and preyed upon her
+nervous force.</p>
+
+<p>The night had fallen. A bell, the rare possession of the largest
+meeting-house, had already begun to ring for Finney's preaching.
+Susannah went out on foot. The Rigdons, as also the Smiths, were living
+some way from the village. She had now a mile of dark road to traverse.</p>
+
+<p>Closely veiled, Susannah stepped onward eagerly. She felt like a child
+going home. The scene which she had left showed up vividly the elements
+of Mormon life that were most repulsive to her, the broad assumptions of
+ignorance, the fierce beliefs born of isolation, and the growth by
+indulgence of such animal characteristics as were not kept under by a
+literal morality or enforced by privations. She was going to see a man
+who could speak with the voice of the sober past, whose tones would
+bring back to her the intellectual delicacies of Ephraim's conversation,
+the broad, pure vision of life which he beheld, and the dignified
+religion of his people.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting-house was of moderate size. It was already filled when
+Susannah entered, but she was able to press down one of the passage-ways
+between the pews and seat herself near the front, where temporary
+benches were being rapidly set up.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the congregation had doubtless come as far as she. Men and women
+of all ages, and even children, were there. Some, who it seemed had
+followed Finney from his last place of preaching, were talking excitedly
+concerning the work of God which he had wrought there. On every face
+solemnity was written, and stories were being told of one and another
+who in his recent meetings had "fallen under the power of God."</p>
+
+<p>When Finney ascended the pulpit Susannah forgot all else. The chapel was
+not well lighted, but the pulpit lamps shone upon him. He had a smooth,
+strong face; his complexion was healthy and weather-beaten; his dark
+eyes flashed brightly under bushy brows. His manner was calm; his style,
+even in prayer, was that of keen, terse argument; he spoke and behaved
+like a man who, having spent the emotional side of his nature in some
+private gust of passionate prayer, had come forth nerved to cool and
+determined action.</p>
+
+<p>With her whole soul Susannah hung upon his every word, unreasonably
+expecting to find some new and unforeseen solution to the problems of
+her life. He had pointed out a straight path to multitudes; she hoped
+that he could now show it to her.</p>
+
+<p>The power of Finney's preaching lay in its close logical reasoning, by
+which, accepting certain premises, he built up the conclusion that if a
+man would escape eternal punishment he must forsake his sin and accept
+salvation by faith in the doctrine of the substitution. He began always
+by speaking to the indifferent and the unconvinced; he led them step by
+step, until it appeared that there was but one step between them and
+destruction, and that faith must make one quick, long leap to gain the
+safety of the higher plane, whose joys he depicted in glowing terms.</p>
+
+<p>For the most part there was intense silence in the congregation,
+although sometimes an audible whisper of prayer or a groan of suppressed
+emotion was heard. The infection of mental excitement was strong.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was experiencing disappointment. Accustomed as she was to
+excitement in the meetings of the Saints, her mind easily resisted the
+infectious influence. Finney's teaching had not differed in any respect
+from the doctrine which she heard from her husband daily, a doctrine
+which she knew by experience did not save men from delusion and rancour.
+She still listened eagerly to hear of some provision made in the scheme
+of salvation against injustice and folly. Surely Finney would say
+something more.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened he did say something more. When for more than an hour he
+had explained the great plan of salvation he touched upon the
+responsibility that the hearing of such conclusive reasoning imposed.
+The sower had sown broadcast; it remained for him to speak with awful
+impressiveness of those forces which would be arrayed against the
+convicted soul. Under this head he referred at once and with deep
+emotion to the devil, who, in the guise of false teachers lying in wait,
+caught up the seed.</p>
+
+<p>There could be no doubt that the Mormon leaders were in his mind, as
+they were in the mind of his congregation. It became swiftly evident to
+Susannah that Finney was stirred by what he believed to be righteous
+indignation, and that he was as content to be ignorant concerning the
+doctrines and morals of the people against whom he spoke as were the
+rudest members of the outside rabble who now pressed with excitement to
+the open doors and windows.</p>
+
+<p>The righteous Finney had no thought of unrestrained violence. He spoke
+out of that deep well of hatred for evil that is, and ought to be, in
+every good man's heart, but he had not humbled himself to gain any real
+insight into the mingling of good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>"They are liars, and they know that they are liars," said Finney,
+striking the pulpit cushion. "The hypocrisy of their religion is proved
+by the lawless habits of their daily lives. Having sold themselves to
+the great enemy of souls, they lie in wait for you and for your
+children, seeking to beguile the most tender and innocent, that they
+may rejoice in their destruction."</p>
+
+<p>He used only such phrases as the thought of the time warranted with
+regard to those who had been proved to be workers of iniquity, but to
+Susannah it was clear, in one brief moment, what effect his words would
+have when heard by, or reported to, more brutal men. She knew now that
+Rigdon's words were true. The so-called Christian ministers, even the
+noblest of them, stirred up the low spirit of party persecution.</p>
+
+<p>She rose suddenly, sweeping back her veil from her face. "I will go
+out." She said the words in a clear voice.</p>
+
+<p>A way was made to a back door by the side of the pulpit. Every one
+looked at her. Finney, going on with his preaching, recognised her as
+she began to push forward, and he faltered, as if seeing the face of one
+who had arisen from the dead. The excited audience felt the tremor that
+passed over its leader; it was the first signal for such obvious nervous
+affections as frequently befell people under his preaching; before
+Susannah had reached the door a stalwart man fell as if dead in her
+path.</p>
+
+<p>There was a groan and a whisper of awe all round. This was the "falling"
+which was taken by many as an indubitable sign of the divine power.
+Susannah had seen it often under Smith's preaching. She waited with
+indifference until he was lifted up.</p>
+
+<p>Then the sea of faces around her, the powerful voice of the preacher
+resounding above, passed away like a dream, and were exchanged for a
+small room and a dim light, where two or three people were gathered
+round the form of the insensible man. She escaped unnoticed through a
+private door into the fields, where the March wind eddied in the black
+night.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IVa" id="CHAPTER_IVa"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The house in which the Smiths lived was small. Susannah crossed a
+field-path, led by a light in their window. In the living room a truckle
+bed had already been made up. By the fire Joseph and Emma were both
+occupied with two sick children. These children, twins of about a year,
+had been taken out of pity at their mother's death, and Susannah was
+told as she entered that they had been attacked by measles.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah found that the fact that she had been to the meeting had not
+irritated the Smiths, although Mrs. Rigdon had called to make the most
+of the story. Emma, absorbed in manifold cares for the children, was
+only solicitous on Susannah's account lest a night's rest in that house
+should be impossible. Smith, pacing with a child in his arms, seemed to
+be head and shoulders above the level whose surface could be ruffled by
+life's minor affairs. With the eye of his inner mind he was gazing
+either at some lofty scheme of his own imagining, or at heaven or at
+vacancy. All of him that was looking at the smaller beings about him was
+composed and kind.</p>
+
+<p>One of the twins, less ill than the other, had fallen asleep in Emma's
+arms. The other was wailing pitifully upon the prophet's breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you and Mrs. Halsey go in and lie down with that young un, Emmar,
+and rest now for a bit while ye can."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't leave ye, Joseph, with the child setting out to cry all night
+like that."</p>
+
+<p>But he had his way. Long after they had lain down in the inner room
+Susannah heard him rocking the wailing babe, or trying to feed it, or
+pacing the floor. Emma, worn out, slept beside her. Upstairs the owners
+of the house, an old couple named Johnson, and Emma's own child, were at
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah lay rigidly still in the small portion of the bed which fell to
+her share. Her mind was up, wandering through waste places, seeking rest
+in vain. The wail of the child in the next room at last had ceased. The
+prophet had lain down with it on the truckle bed. Long after midnight
+Susannah began to hear a low sound as of creeping footsteps in the
+field. Some people were passing very near, surely they would go past in
+a moment? She heard them brushing against the outer wall, and gleams of
+a light carried fell upon the window.</p>
+
+<p>In a minute more the outer door of the house was broken open. Emma woke
+with a cry; instinct, even in sleep, made her spring toward the door
+that separated her from her husband.</p>
+
+<p>The two women stood in the inner doorway, but the coarse arm of a masked
+man was already stretched across it, an impassable barrier. The prophet
+lay on the child's bed, so heavy with sleep tardily sought that he did
+not awake until four men had laid hold of him. All the light upon the
+scene came from a smoking torch which one of the housebreakers held.
+Some twenty men might have been there inside the room and out. The women
+could barely see that Smith was borne out in the midst of the band. He
+struggled fiercely when aroused, but was overpowered by numbers.</p>
+
+<p>The owners of the house came down from above, huddling together and
+holding Emma, who would have thrown herself in the midst of the mob.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had not undressed. She threw her cloak over her head and ran
+out, determined to go to the village and demand help in the name of law
+and a common humanity. She was in a mood to be reckless in aiding the
+cause she had espoused.</p>
+
+<p>By the glow of the torch which the felons held she saw the group close
+about the one struggling man as they carried him away. She fled in a
+different direction.</p>
+
+<p>She had gone perhaps sixty rods in the darkness out of sight of Smith
+and his tormentors when she was stopped by three men and her name and
+purpose demanded. When she declared it in breathless voice they laughed
+aloud. In the darkness she was deprived of that weapon, her beauty, by
+which she habitually, although unconsciously, held men in awe.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, see here, sister, you jest sit quietly on the fence here, and see
+which of them's going to get the best of it. Your man's a prophet, you
+know; let him call out his miracles now, and give us a good show of them
+for once. He's jest got a few ordinary men to deal with; if he and his
+miracles can't git the best of them he ain't no prophet. Here's a
+flattish log now on top. Git up and sit on the fence, sister."</p>
+
+<p>While she struggled in custody another group of dark figures came
+suddenly at a swinging trot round the dark outline of one of the nearer
+houses. They brought with them the same kind of lurid torch and a
+smoking kettle or cauldron carried between two. The foremost among them
+were also carrying the body of a man, whether dead or alive she could
+not see. When he was thrown upon the ground he moved and spoke. It was
+Rigdon's voice. She perceived that he was helpless with terror. The
+prophet had certainly struggled more lustily.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you jest keep still, sister," said the loudest of her three
+companions. "Kill him? not if ye don't make a mess of it by interferin'.
+It's only boilin' tar they've got in the pot."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah covered her face with her hands; then, too frightened to
+abstract her mind, she gazed again, as if her watchfulness might hinder
+some outrage. The group was not near enough, the light was too
+uncertain, for her to see clearly. The shadows of the men were cast
+about upon field and wall as if horrible goblins surrounded and
+overshadowed the more material goblins who were at work. They were
+taking Rigdon's clothes from him. Their language did not come to her
+clearly, but it was of the vilest sort, and she heard enough to make her
+heart shiver and sicken. They held over him the constant threat that if
+he resisted they would kill him outright. If Smith, too, were exposed to
+such treatment she did not believe that he would submit, and perhaps he
+was now being done to death not far off.</p>
+
+<p>When they began to beat Rigdon with rods and his screams rang out,
+Susannah could endure no longer. She broke madly away from her keepers,
+running back along the road towards Emma's house. They essayed to
+follow; then with a laugh and a shrug let her go, calling to her to run
+quick and see if the prophet had fetched down angels to protect him.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah ran a long way, then, breathless and exhausted, found that she
+had missed a turning and gone much too far. Afraid lest she should lose
+herself by mistaking even the main direction in which she wanted to go,
+and that while out of reach of any respectable house she might again be
+assailed by members of the mob, she came back, walking with more
+caution. She had no hope now of being the means of bringing help. She
+had come farther from the village instead of nearing it, and what few
+neighbours there were, having failed to interfere, were evidently
+inimical.</p>
+
+<p>When she found the right turning she again heard the shouts of some
+assaulting party, and, creeping within the shadow of trees, she waited.</p>
+
+<p>At length they passed her, straggling along the road, shouting and
+singing, carrying with them some garments which, in rough horse-play,
+they were tearing into fragments. When the last had turned his back to
+where she stood she crept out, running again like a hunted thing,
+fearing what she might find as the result of their work. To increase her
+distress the thought came that it was more than possible that like work
+had been going on at Kirtland that night. Tears of unutterable
+indignation and pitiful love came to her eyes at the thought that Angel,
+too, might be suffering this shameful treatment. Across some acres of
+open ground she saw the Smiths' house, doors and windows lit by candles.
+Thither she was hastening when, in the black space of the nearer field,
+she almost fell upon a whitish form, grotesque and horrible, which was
+rising from the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is it?" asked Joseph Smith.</p>
+
+<p>He stood up now, but not steadily; his voice was weak, as if he had
+been stunned, and his utterance indistinct because his mouth had
+apparently received some injury. She thought of nothing now but that he
+was Angel's master, and that Angel might be in like plight.</p>
+
+<p>"What have they done? What is the matter?" she whispered tenderly, tears
+in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it you?" he asked curiously. He said nothing for a minute and then,
+"They've covered me with the tar and emptied a feather-bed on me. If
+ye'd have the goodness to tell Brother Johnson to come out to me, Mrs.
+Halsey&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"They have hurt you other ways," she said tremulously, "you are
+bruised."</p>
+
+<p>"A man don't like to own up to having been flogged, ye see; but Peter
+and Paul and all of <i>them</i> had to stand it in their time, so I don't
+know why a fellow like me need be shamefaced over it. But if you'd be
+good enough, Mrs. Halsey, to go and tell Emmar that I ain't much hurt,
+and send Brother Johnson out with some clothes or a blanket&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped without adding that he would feel obliged. As she went she
+heard him say with another sort of unsteadiness in his tone, "It's real
+kind of you to care for me that much."</p>
+
+<p>In her excitement she did not know that she was weeping bitterly until
+she found herself surrounded by other shuddering and weeping women in
+Emma's room; for other of the converts in Hiram, hearing of the violence
+abroad, had crept to this house for mutual safety and aid.</p>
+
+<p>It is the low, small details of physical discomfort that make the
+bitterest part of the bread of sorrow. Now and afterwards, through all
+the persecutions in which she shared, Susannah often felt this. If she
+could have stood off and looked at the main issues of the battle she
+might have felt, even on the mere earthly plane, exaltation. Yet one
+truth her experience confirmed&mdash;that no human being who in his time and
+way has been hunted as the offscouring of the world&mdash;no, not the
+noblest&mdash;has ever had his martyrdom presented in a form that seemed to
+him majestic. It is only those who bear persecution, not in its reality
+but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.</p>
+
+<p>All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with
+the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the
+painful operation of taking the tar from Smith's lacerated skin. The
+prophet bore himself well. Now and then, through the thin partition the
+watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his
+determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had
+appointed the next day.</p>
+
+<p>At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon's house. The animal was
+safe. When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those
+within the house. Rigdon was raving in delirium. He had, it seemed, been
+dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony
+ground. They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers. He lay
+upon a small bed in horrible condition. His wife, with swollen eyes and
+pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out
+with vain efforts to soothe him. His mother, a thin and dark old woman,
+vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out
+of the room silently, as though to say, "This is the work of those whose
+virtue you extolled."</p>
+
+<p>The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of
+dawn. The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as
+innocence may sleep. The famous preacher, and all those souls that he
+had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in
+silence. Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the
+roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to
+renewed wrath. Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past
+night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey's safety. She gave her
+horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had
+reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was
+being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight,
+with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths
+of the leafless nut woods. It was high day, and the people were
+gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through
+the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.</p>
+
+<p>As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to
+preach. His face was very white and sad. Susannah's glad relief,
+fatigue, and excitement found vent in tears.</p>
+
+<p>"You are safe!" she cried. "Oh, my dear, I will never leave you again
+while danger is near&mdash;never, never again!"</p>
+
+<p>In the evening of that day further news came from Hiram. The prophet had
+preached long and gloriously in the open air. New converts had been
+made, and he himself, scarified and bruised as he was, had gone down
+into the icy river and baptized them in sight of all. The mob had
+shrieked and jeered, but had been withheld by God, as the messenger
+said, from further violence.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah made no further effort to find new life in the old doctrines.
+All her sentiments of justice and mercy combined to make her espouse her
+husband's cause with renewed ardour.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Va" id="CHAPTER_Va"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>In the summer of that same year, while the wheat in the Manchester
+fields was still green, and the maize had attained but half its growth,
+while the ox-eyed daisies still stood a happy crowd in the unmown
+meadows, and pink and yellow orchids blazed in unfrequented dells, the
+preacher Finney, after long absence, chanced to be again travelling on
+the Palmyra road. As was his habit, he sought entertainment at the house
+of Deacon Croom in New Manchester.</p>
+
+<p>The preacher remembered always that his citizenship was in heaven. From
+the thought he drew great nourishment of peace and hope, but as far as
+his earthly affairs were concerned the outlook was at present grievous.</p>
+
+<p>He was returning from a long and dreary religious convention held in an
+eastern town, where one, Mr. Lyman Beecher, had stirred up against him
+the foremost divines of New York and Boston. They had asserted that
+Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of God could suddenly turn men from
+following evil to pursuing good, was false and pernicious; that his
+method stirred up the people to unholy excitements which were productive
+of great evil. Now the accusations of these divines (who, thinking that
+a man's change of mind must needs be so slow a thing, some of them,
+gray-haired, had not as yet produced this change in a single sinner)
+were in many points wholly false, in many exaggerated, and where the
+article of truth remained in the accusation there was much to be said in
+defence of work that had resulted, if in some evil, certainly in much
+palpable good. To such groups of priests and soldiers and publicans as
+came forth to John's baptism of repentance, the godly Finney, travelling
+now east and now west, had appealed, and that the wide land was the
+better for the crying of his voice no candid person who knew the result
+of his labours could deny. He that had two coats had imparted to him
+that had none; the extortioner had returned his unfair gains, and some
+rough men had become gentle. But in the assembly from which Finney had
+just come the larger numbers and the greater power of rhetoric had been
+on that side which appeared to show least faith in God and least zeal
+for men, and Finney had come out from the combat bruised in spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Some natural comfort the weary man experienced from the sweet charm of
+the summer afternoon, from anticipation of the welcome and sympathy
+which would soon be his. He heard, but could not see, the Canandaigua
+water as it ran under its canopy of willows, over whose foliage the
+light wind passed in silver waves. On the height of the hill above the
+mill-dam he turned his horse into the yard of the Croom homestead. The
+stalwart deacon in overalls, his excitable, slender wife, her
+cap-strings flying, came forth, the one from the barn, the other from
+her bake-house.</p>
+
+<p>It was not to either of these worthy souls that Finney intended first to
+confide the story of his glimpse of Susannah. It said much for the
+sterling truth of this man's soul that, accustomed as he was to demand
+from himself and others public confession of those experiences most
+private to the individual soul, he had not lost delicacy of feeling or
+reverence for individual privacy in human relationships. He had not been
+at this house since the month after Susannah's departure, when
+excitement and wrath still raged concerning her. He judged that in the
+hearts of the older members the wound had healed, leaving only the
+healthy scar that such sorrows leave in busy lives. He knew, too, that
+in Ephraim's heart the blade of this grief had cut deeper.</p>
+
+<p>The supper over, the full moon already gilding the last hour of the
+summer daylight, Ephraim donned his hat to take the solitary evening
+stroll to which he had become accustomed. He thought to leave the trio
+who were in complete accord of sentiment to talk longer over the
+persecution which Finney endured, but on the little brick path between
+the flower-beds the evangelist came up with him.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim was but half pleased. It was in this brief evening hour that he
+set his thoughts free, like children at playtime. Like other students
+forced to live in invalidish habits, he had established a rule of
+thought more strict than men of active callings need. At certain hours
+he would study his country's social, political needs; at others he would
+help in his father's farm management; at others he would study some
+exact science. But when the measured hours of his day were over, and
+before he lit his student's lamp, for a while he turned his fancies
+loose, and they ran all too surely to play about Susannah's charms,
+about the circumstances of her life. This was not his happiest hour. The
+eternal advantage of love was lost for the time in its present distress.
+Hateful thoughts were the results of this self-indulgence, yet he hated
+more anything that came as interruption. During these years the lover in
+him had not grown what the world calls wise.</p>
+
+<p>For some minutes Finney, controlling the briskness of his ordinary pace,
+walked by Ephraim's side and contented himself with the gracious scene,
+passing remarks upon weather and crops. Soon, for the value of time
+always pressed upon him, his business-like voice took a softened tone,
+and he began preaching a heart-felt sermon to his one listener.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of the sermon was "the fire God gave for other ends," and he
+ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was
+wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile. "Did it ever
+occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been
+the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made? What
+time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing
+the iridescence on a beetle's wing, in adjusting man's soul till it
+responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the
+surface of the ocean to weather?"</p>
+
+<p>Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim's <i>bonhomie</i> and his
+strange ideas. "But what have you to advance against what I have already
+said, Ephraim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Advance? I advance nothing. I even withdraw my painted insects and the
+storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best
+teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use
+without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us
+the most dangerous things. I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in
+order to thank you for having spoken her name. No one else has spoken it
+in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I&mdash;I am
+fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps
+would name her."</p>
+
+<p>The voice of the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland
+in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air. Beside this and
+the throb of insect voices there was no sound. "I came out this
+evening," said Finney, "to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw
+<i>her</i>." His voice fell at the pronoun in sympathetic sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go
+northward to the Erie Canal, in order that I might pass through that
+part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that
+hypocrite's teaching."</p>
+
+<p>There was no need in the district of Manchester for Finney to explain
+what hypocrite he meant. In his own country Smith was commonly held to
+be the arch-hypocrite.</p>
+
+<p>"The devil has surely espoused that cause in earnest, for the number of
+deluded souls in that part of Ohio and in southern Missouri, and
+scattered as missionaries up and down the country, is, I hear, between
+three and four thousand."</p>
+
+<p>"And always among those who worship the letter of the Scripture,"
+remarked Ephraim, "for their missionaries give chapter and verse for all
+they teach."</p>
+
+<p>"I was told that their customs were peculiarly evil. Even among
+themselves they lie and steal and are violent and licentious; and they
+teach openly that it is a merit to steal from the Gentiles, as they call
+those not of themselves; and, furthermore, they aim at nothing less
+than setting up a government of their own in the west."</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you all this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to say that I had it on good authority. Some of the western
+brethren had it from a poor fellow who had been deluded into entering
+the Mormon community, and had barely escaped with his life when he
+desired to withdraw."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you consider a pervert from your own sect the best witness of its
+tenets? But you say that you saw my cousin?"</p>
+
+<p>Finney told what had led him to the village of Hiram, and said, "When I
+spoke of the sins of the Mormons, a young woman seated near the front of
+the congregation rose up. It was your cousin. I saw at once by the
+pallor of her face that the Lord was having direct dealing with her
+soul. The 'power' was indeed very great; a strong man fell as dead near
+her, who before the night was over gave testimony of sound conversion.
+After he and your cousin had been led out, many others in different
+parts of the building cried to God for mercy. When the sermon was over I
+sought for your cousin, but when I told who she was, the people of the
+place said that no doubt Mormon messengers had come while she was
+waiting, and forced her to depart. That night there was a disturbance in
+the place; some of the more hot-headed men had the leaders out, and
+tarred and feathered them&mdash;a dastardly deed! I have been threatened
+myself with being rid on a rail and tarred when the devil stirred up the
+people against my preaching, but the Lord mercifully preserved me. 'Tis
+a shameful practice, but I hear it was done to these men to intimidate
+them from the more violent crimes which they had conspired to commit. In
+the morning I was forced to go, as I was advertised to preach at many
+stations farther on, or I would have denounced the violence from the
+pulpit. I could not find out anything more concerning your cousin, but
+the Lord has never allowed me to doubt that the many prayers which we
+have offered on her behalf were answered that night, for I could see by
+the expression of her face that she, like those upon the day of
+Pentecost, was cut to the heart."</p>
+
+<p>At the garden gate, under the boughs of the quince-tree, which had
+increased its branches since the day in which Susannah had last passed
+under them, Ephraim now stood in the moonlight, barring the entrance. At
+length with a sigh he said, "Alas! Finney, I believe that there are few
+souls under heaven more true and more worthy than your own; but as for
+the power of God, 'His way is in the sea and his path in the great
+waters, but his footsteps are not known.'"</p>
+
+<p>Out of his breast Ephraim took a thin leather book, and from out of the
+book gave Finney a letter much worn with reading.</p>
+
+<p>Finney took the letter reverently, and read it by the light of his
+bedroom candle. In those days letters were more formally written; this
+one from Susannah to Ephraim began with wishes concerning her aunt and
+uncle and the prosperity of the household. The fine flowing writing
+filled the large sheet.</p>
+
+<p>"I write to you, my dear cousin, rather than to my aunt, to whom I fear
+my letter would not be acceptable, for although I can say that I regret
+my wilfulness and the manner of my disobedience, still I can never
+regret that, having been forced to choose, I threw in my lot with those
+who can suffer wrong rather than with those who have it in their hearts
+to inflict wrong, for if there be a God&mdash;ah, Ephraim, this is another
+reason why I address you, for I am in sore doubt concerning the
+knowledge of God, as to whether any knowledge is possible. My husband,
+who denies me nothing, has allowed me to send for some of your books
+whose names I remembered. I thought at first to write to you about them,
+but I distrust now my own understanding too much to venture. I would
+like you to know that they have helped me somewhat, for I do not now say
+to myself in hard, tearless fashion that I know there is no God, to
+which thought I was driven by the reflection that most of those who seek
+him most diligently sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>"But the more immediate occasion of this letter is to tell you that a
+month since Mr. Finney held a meeting not far from us. I went, thinking
+to gain some help from him, and to hear news of you, but I was greatly
+disappointed, and made very angry. He preached as my husband and many of
+our elders preach, and there were among the crowd the same signs of
+excitement and peculiar manifestations that we have constantly among us.
+But toward the end of his sermon Mr. Finney spoke of my husband's
+Church, and he lent the weight of his influence to very evil slanders
+that are constantly repeated about us by those who have not sought to
+know the truth. He did us great injury by stirring up the roughest of
+the people to violence. Mr. Finney will, I suppose, visit you and repeat
+those lies, which no doubt he believes, but is most culpable in
+believing, because he has not investigated the scandal against us as he
+would have investigated scandal against any who are orthodox. I write
+now to tell you that that which he says is not true. For although there
+are a few criminals amongst us, as in every community, evil is not
+taught or condoned."</p>
+
+<p>As Finney read this letter by his lonely candle he was so far stirred by
+what he deemed the merely human side of the incident as to say to
+himself, "Poor Ephraim! She has never even known that he loved her." But
+next day, in speaking to Ephraim, he pointed out that in the worst
+communities there were always pure-minded women who knew little or
+nothing of the evil around them, and said he believed that his message
+would still be the means of bringing home the truth to Susannah's heart.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIa" id="CHAPTER_VIa"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the meantime an interval of comparative peace had come to Kirtland.
+The Gentiles, because they discovered that the town was a good market
+for the produce of more fields than the Saints could till, allowed their
+religious zeal to slumber.</p>
+
+<p>A female relative of Halsey, having lost her friends by death, came from
+the east to Kirtland upon his invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went down the hill one summer day to meet the travelling
+company of new converts which brought Elvira Halsey. That young lady had
+seen about twenty-five years of life's vicissitudes, and had sharpened
+her wits thereon. Slight, pretty, and dressed with an effort at fashion
+that was quite astonishing in the Kirtland settlement, Elvira sprang
+from the waggon.</p>
+
+<p>"I've come to be a Mormon. How do you begin?" With these words she
+presented to Susannah a new type of character, fresh, and in some ways
+delightful.</p>
+
+<p>There was quite a crowd at the stopping place of the waggons. Halsey,
+with other elders and Smith, came to welcome the newcomer. Elvira stood
+on tip-toe, peeping about, pressing Susannah's arm with whispers.
+"Which is Joe Smith, do tell me? Do you go down on your knees to him,
+and does he pat your head?"</p>
+
+<p>Guided by keen instinct, Elvira did not make remarks in Halsey's hearing
+which would have shocked him, but perhaps by the same instinct she at
+once claimed Susannah as a confidante in spite of some feeble
+remonstrance.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you not wrong to speak so lightly of our religion?" asked Susannah,
+feeling that she was an elder's wife.</p>
+
+<p>"First let me be sure that you have any religion to speak of." She
+looked up prettily in Susannah's face. "What a beautiful creature you
+are!" she cried. "And is it to please my cousin Angel that you wear a
+snuff-coloured dress and a white cap and a neckerchief like an old lady
+of seventy?"</p>
+
+<p>As they proceeded together up the white curving road, over the crest of
+the verdant bluff, Elvira announced her further intentions.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not going to live with you. I am going to board with the Smiths. I
+want to get to the bottom of this business, and see the apparitions
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>"There are no apparitions," said Susannah gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Gold books, you know, flying about in the air, and the angel Maroni and
+hosts of the slain Lamanites."</p>
+
+<p>"You expect too much. Such visions as Mr. Smith had came but at the
+beginning to attest his mission and give him confidence."</p>
+
+<p>"Tut! I should think he had sufficient of that commodity. It is I who
+require the confidence, and have I come too late?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would question, if it did not appear unkind, why you have come at
+all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bless you, it's relations, not revelations, that I came after."</p>
+
+<p>"I fear that Angel will not be satisfied with that attitude," Susannah
+sighed. She supposed that Elvira represented all too well the attitude
+of educated minds in that far-off world whose existence she tried to
+forget.</p>
+
+<p>"Therefore," said Elvira, "I will board with the Smiths."</p>
+
+<p>Elvira's whim to be received into the prophet's family could not be
+carried out, but by persistency she succeeded in establishing herself in
+the household of Hyrum Smith, where she distinguished herself by two
+peculiarities&mdash;a refusal to marry any of the saintly bachelors who were
+proposed to her, and a perpetual good-natured delight in all that she
+saw and heard. She resisted baptism, but to Susannah's surprise,
+remained on perfectly friendly terms with the leaders of the sect.</p>
+
+<p>The next two years passed quietly in Kirtland. Susannah, imbued, as
+indeed were all Smith's friends, with his belief that the peace was but
+for a time, cherished her husband as though death were near, and grieved
+him by no outward nonconformity to pious practices. Many chance comments
+which she made were straws which might have shown him the way the
+current of her thought tended underneath her habitual silence, but they
+showed him nothing. It was mortifying to her to observe that Smith,
+rarely as he saw her, was always cognisant of her mental attitude, while
+her husband remained ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah gave up the girlish habit of fencing with facts that it
+appeared modest to ignore. She was perfectly aware that she exercised a
+distinct influence over the prophet, of what sort or degree she could
+not determine. Little as she desired this influence, she could not
+withhold a puzzled admiration for Smith's conduct. He rarely spoke to
+her except in the most meagre and formal way, and all his decrees which
+tended for her elevation in the eyes of the community or for her
+personal comfort were so expressed that no personal bias could be
+detected.</p>
+
+<p>She asked herself if Smith practised this self-restraint for conscience'
+sake, or from motives of policy, or whether it was that several distinct
+selves were living together within him, and that what appeared restraint
+was in reality the usual predominance of a part of him to which she bore
+little or no relation. There was much else in his character to admire
+and much to condemn. He had steadily improved himself in education, in
+mental discipline, and in personal appearance and address. He could
+hardly now be thought the same man as when he had first preached the new
+doctrine in Manchester. This bespoke an intense and unresting ambition,
+and yet the selfishness that is the natural result of such ambition was
+absent. As far as his arduous work would permit, he gave himself
+lavishly to wife and child, to all the brethren, rich and poor, when
+they asked for his ministrations. The motherless babies whom he had
+helped Emma to nurse through their infancy had gone back to their
+father's care, but there was never a time when some poor child or
+destitute woman was not a member of his household. On the other hand,
+many of the actions of his public life were questionable. He had
+established a bank in Kirtland, of which he was the president. Even
+Halsey admitted to Susannah that this was a great mistake, that the bank
+ought to have been under the control of some one who understood money
+matters; the prophet did not. He had also set up a cloth mill, and
+undertaken to farm a large tract of land in the public interest. The
+prophet showed to much better advantage when instituting new religious
+ceremonies, of which there were now many and curious, or when giving
+forth "revelations" which had to do with the principles of economy
+rather than its practical details. Susannah thought that the voice of
+the Gentiles all around them, shouting false accusations of greed and
+dishonesty, would sooner or later find much apparent confirmation if no
+financier could be found to lay a firm hand upon the prophet's sanguine
+tendency toward business speculation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIa"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the bleak December two elders came from Zion, the holy city in
+Missouri, bringing the history of dire tribulation.</p>
+
+<p>It was a cold night; the first snow was falling upon the wings of a
+gale. Susannah was sitting alone quietly working out problems in
+algebra, in which study Smith had desired that her elder pupils should
+advance. The storm beat upon the window pane, and set the bright logs of
+the fireplace now flaming and now smoking, the varnished wooden walls
+dimly reflecting light and shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey had been out to see the newcomers, who were staying at the
+prophet's house. It was late when she heard his tread, muffled in the
+drifted snow. He hardly paused to shake it from his clothes before he
+came near. She saw that he was in a mood of strong grief and excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Angel," she spoke pityingly, "you have had a hard, hard day; you have
+stayed so very late at this evening's conference." She held out her hand
+to him. "Do not tell me to-night if you can rest before telling." Young
+as she was, her countenance, as she lifted it toward him, was motherly.
+She remembered what a mere boy he was, fair and hopeful, when she had
+first seen him three years before, and now strong lines of purpose and
+endurance were written upon the face that was thin and pale, the paler,
+it seemed, because of the transient colour that the storm had given a
+moment since to the clear skin.</p>
+
+<p>"I would that thou didst not need to hear, but it is not for us to turn
+our eyes from that which the Lord hath written for our instruction in
+the suffering of our brethren." Then he added, "The elders from Zion
+have told us all. There was great joy and prosperity among them, and the
+more foolish boasted of their wealth to the Gentiles, saying also that
+the Lord had given the whole land to them for an inheritance."</p>
+
+<p>"That, indeed, was very foolish," said Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, but it was small blame to them, for that which they said is true.
+But among the Gentiles the political demagogues began to be afraid that
+we should rule the country by the number of our votes. The Gentiles
+gathered together in the town of Independence, and three hundred of them
+signed a declaration demanding that every one in Zion should sell all
+that he possessed and leave the country within a certain time, and that
+none other of us should settle there."</p>
+
+<p>"But forced sale would mean that no fair value would be given for the
+property; it would be simple robbery," she cried; "and they call this
+the land of freedom!"</p>
+
+<p>"They appealed to the Governor of Missouri, but they found that the
+Lieutenant-Governor, a man called Boggs, was among the fiercest of the
+persecutors. As for the Governor himself, he advised them to resort to
+the courts for damages."</p>
+
+<p>"What next?" She was impatient at a pause he made.</p>
+
+<p>He knelt down upon the floor in front of her, laying a calming hand upon
+her shoulder. "Susannah, there is this one great cause for our deep
+gratitude to heaven, that this time all our elders with one voice called
+upon our people to bear with patience, to cry to God to cleanse their
+hearts from all anger and revenge."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that was well," she said, but with hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>By the gentle pressure of his hand he still expressed his sympathy for
+her pain in listening. "Lawyers were engaged to carry the matter through
+the courts. But no sooner was it known that the thing was to be publicly
+tried than the Gentiles rose in arms. For three nights they entered the
+houses of the Saints, beating the men, burning their barns, and in many
+cases unroofing the houses. Some of our brethren went to Lexington for a
+peace warrant, but the judge was frightened at the mob, and, moreover,
+if he had offended them he would have lost much money, so he told the
+Saints to arm and defend themselves."</p>
+
+<p>Halsey had paused again. The moral question here involved was to him of
+deep importance.</p>
+
+<p>"If it was only for self-defence, Angel&mdash;" she began.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. "Nay, it was a fierce temptation, and our people are
+not yet sanctified, but God in his great mercy withheld them from
+sinning against him. For they had no sooner obtained arms than Lilburn
+Boggs, the Lieutenant-Governor, came and disarmed them."</p>
+
+<p>"And then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Our people were driven from their homes. In the cold storms of
+November, women and little children and wounded men were forced to flee
+out upon the open prairie, and up and down the banks of the Missouri
+River. At last they gathered together on the river-side, and many of
+them have now crossed it, remaining in the opposite county, and the
+others have dispersed, poor and homeless, into less unfriendly parts of
+the State. These elders have come here that the prophet may send back
+some revelation at their hand, and that we may all gather together what
+we can spare from our abundance for the relief of our fugitive
+brethren."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were shining with triumphant faith, even though the close of
+his narrative seemed to admit of so little hope.</p>
+
+<p>"And will Mr. Smith still teach them that they must not strike a blow
+for their rights?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>This was fast becoming the critical question of the hour.</p>
+
+<p>In February the snow lay deep on the land. Susannah, like all her
+neighbours, spent some days isolated by the drifts, the men only going
+abroad. On one of these afternoons the prophet tapped at her door. His
+visit in Halsey's absence was unprecedented.</p>
+
+<p>Without preface he began to make a statement as to the affairs of the
+Church in Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>"The greater part of our fugitive brethren have at my desire gathered
+together upon a large tract of uncleared land that lies just across the
+river from Zion. It is the desire of the Lord that they should there
+await until it is his will to open the gates of Zion once more."</p>
+
+<p>"It is <i>your</i> desire that they should gather and wait there."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with no rude emphasis, but he understood. This man could read
+her thought before it was expressed. He pushed his thick hair from his
+forehead with a heavy hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Understand, Mrs. Halsey, that I <i>believe</i> the voice of the Lord has
+spoken, but it is also my desire."</p>
+
+<p>"Does the voice of the Lord ever speak but in accordance with your
+desire?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer burst from him with almost hysterical force, "I would to
+heaven it did not."</p>
+
+<p>"But in such cases are not your desires divided against themselves? and
+the word of the Lord comes perhaps in accordance with one desire and in
+contradiction of another?"</p>
+
+<p>He sat for some time looking absently upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"The things of the Lord," he said, "are of vast importance, and require
+time and experience, as well as deep and solemn thought, to find them
+out. And if we would bring the world to salvation it requires that our
+minds should rise to the highest, and also search into and contemplate
+the lowest abyss"&mdash;he paused for a moment, and then added in sad
+undertone&mdash;"that is within our own hearts."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was silent, wondering what was the true secret of his elusive
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>He went on with an effort. "Accepting your own words, Mrs. Halsey, that
+it is at my desire that they are there instead of being scattered among
+friendly settlements where they could obtain support, it remains true
+that they are naked, hungry, and cold. When I sleep the vision of their
+sufferings comes before me." He went on again with more vehemence. "It
+is also by obeying my doctrine that they are cast out of their own lands
+and from their own hearths. Whether the Lord hath spoken or no, it is by
+obeying the doctrines that I have taught that they are in
+wretchedness." He rose, pacing the room, apparently unconscious of what
+he did.</p>
+
+<p>"I know that this has been weighing upon you, as it has upon my
+husband."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head impatiently, striking his breast suddenly with one
+hand. "There is but one heart," he said, "in which the pains and sorrows
+of them all are gathered."</p>
+
+<p>She began to see that he had a plan to unfold.</p>
+
+<p>At length he stopped in his pacing, looking toward her. "We must go to
+their relief," he said. "We must gather an army and conduct our
+suffering brethren back to their homes in Zion."</p>
+
+<p>"By force of arms?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"If need be."</p>
+
+<p>He left time for the significance of these words to be fully
+comprehended, and then went on speaking as he paced again. "It may be
+that we will not need to fight, that if we get ourselves in readiness we
+shall need but to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord; and in
+plain language to you, who expect no miracle, Mrs. Halsey, I would be
+understood to say that if a sufficient number of our strong men, armed
+for defence, join our brethren in Missouri, the Gentiles will be afraid
+to attack."</p>
+
+<p>At last she asked, not without excited tremor in her voice, "Who? How
+many? When?"</p>
+
+<p>These were important questions with regard to the organising of an army,
+but the prophet had in mind a point that must previously be determined.</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband," he began abruptly, "he has still upon him the taint of
+his Quaker upbringing, for the Lord Christ indeed taught long-suffering,
+and he sent them out at first, as we also have sent our missionaries,
+with nothing in their hand save a staff only, but afterwards he said,
+'Let him that hath a sword take it,' and they said unto him, 'Lord, here
+are two swords,' and he said, 'It is enough,' which I take to mean that
+where one sword is raised there must be another to ward off a blow or to
+strike in return. But your husband is teaching the people that to bear
+arms, even in self-defence, is wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah saw that already in Smith's indomitable will the era of armed
+defence had begun. Her hatred of the persecution caused her sentiments
+to chime with his. She only said in defence of Halsey's meekness, "My
+husband would have gone before now to give himself and all that he has
+to help these poor people if you had not interfered, Mr. Smith."</p>
+
+<p>A change of expression came in a moment over Smith's hulking form, as if
+a different phase of him came forward to deal with a change of subject.
+He turned upon her almost sharply, "There is one man in Kirtland who
+shall not go to Zion till peace is there. If he went, would he not of
+his own accord rush into the forefront, into the hottest of the battle,
+not to fight but to receive the sword in his breast and be slain, even
+as Uriah the Hittite was slain? Wherefore, I say unto you, he shall not
+go."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah, like all good women, had no keenness of scent for scandals,
+ancient or modern. She did not remember who Uriah was, and took no
+offence.</p>
+
+<p>The prophet had tarried in his pacing by the window; with hands clasped
+behind him he was looking absently out upon the driven snow. Upon his
+face was an expression which Susannah only sometimes saw, and that in
+the moments which she felt to be his best. She believed this man to have
+true moments of humility and high resolve; it was only a question with
+her how far they permeated his life. In a minute more he turned again
+and spoke modestly and sadly enough.</p>
+
+<p>"As I have said before, it is not in me to greatly love our brother
+Halsey's manner of thought, but I perceive his holiness and the Church
+shall not lack his counsel. I am here to-day to tell you how much it
+grieves me to set a constraint upon his conscience, yet I am here also
+to ask you to tell him from me that it is not the will of the Lord that
+he should continue to preach against the spirit of self-defence."</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone Susannah realised how angry she would have been if she
+had heard that Smith had rebuked her husband on this subject, yet now
+that the fiat lay in her own hands to impart with all gentleness, the
+task, because of her own fierce attitude toward the oppression, was
+grateful to her.</p>
+
+<p>When the roof had been set on the white walls of the first great Mormon
+temple upon Kirtland Bluff, a small army, well armed, well provisioned,
+went out from Kirtland for the deliverance of Zion amid the prayers and
+huzzahs of the little community. There were many who, like Halsey,
+bewailed in secret this taking of the sword, but the doctrine of
+non-resistance was never preached again.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIIa" id="CHAPTER_VIIIa"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>After this Susannah's attention was centred upon the coming of her first
+child.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't lucky to have a child when the leaves are falling," said Elvira
+Halsey, a certain mist of far-off vision clouding her sparkling eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had been greatly weighed down by depression, not fearing
+ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had
+ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured.
+For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had
+mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she
+would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally
+found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only
+have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too
+courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good to be gained.
+Yet when the baby at length lay on her lap, grew and smiled, kicked and
+crowed, Susannah forgot at times, for hours together, the superstitions
+of the Latter-Day Saints. The motherly solicitude which she had long
+exercised over Halsey changed into something more like friendship when
+she saw him hang over her and her child as they played together.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had given up her school. The winter was severe, and mother and
+child hibernated together by the sweet-scented pinewood fires till the
+stronger sun had melted the frost flowers on the panes. Spring had
+nearly come before Susannah divined that for the child's sake Halsey had
+been protecting her for months from the fear of a near disaster that was
+weighing upon his own heart.</p>
+
+<p>This was the year of what was called in the early Mormon Church "the
+great apostasy." One evening Halsey came in looking so white and ill
+that Susannah drew back the baby, which she had held out for his evening
+kiss.</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes she understood what had occurred. Some four or five
+leaders in the Church, with their families and friends, had charged
+Smith with hypocrisy and fraud.</p>
+
+<p>It was not Susannah's own opinion that such a charge could be
+maintained. Smith appeared to her to be like a child playing among awful
+forces&mdash;clever enough often to control them, to the amazement of himself
+and others, but never comprehending the force he used; often naughty; on
+the whole a well-intentioned child. But she could well see that
+childishness combined with power is a more difficult conception for the
+common mind than rank hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>Angel had been assisting in a solemn excommunication of the apostates.
+He looked upon them as having been overcome by the devil.</p>
+
+<p>After this Halsey instituted a series of unusual meetings for prayer and
+revival preaching, which he held after the ordinary evening classes in
+the School of the Prophets, which was now removed to the upper chambers
+of the finished temple. Now, as at other times, his preaching was
+successful. His power was with men rather than with women; they gathered
+in excited crowds, and their prayer and praise went up in the midnight
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was not in the habit of going to bed till her husband returned.
+One night, after twelve had struck, while she sat warming the dimpled
+feet of her restless babe at the rosy fire-light, she was greatly
+astonished to hear a tapping, low but distinct, on a window that opened
+to the back of the house. She lifted her head as mother animals prick
+their ears above their young at the faint sound of any danger.</p>
+
+<p>After an interval the tap was repeated; it was no accidental noise.
+Susannah laid the child in its cradle and went nearer the window
+shutters, hesitating.</p>
+
+<p>She knew only too well that this secrecy was the sign of some one's dire
+distress. She knew the habits of the people; a neighbour's aid was
+sought freely and with confidence; doors were open at all times to need
+or social intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>To her intent listening the accents of a low and guarded tone came in
+reply to her challenge; the voice was Joseph Smith's.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah looked with anguish toward her child's cradle. Had some army of
+mad persecutors invested Kirtland? Nothing less than fierce persecution
+could be thus heralded.</p>
+
+<p>For years Susannah had known Smith as a near neighbour, and the stuff of
+which the man was at this time made is indicated by the fact that
+instinctively she opened the window with noiseless haste.</p>
+
+<p>Smith climbed in. "Has Halsey returned?"</p>
+
+<p>The fire gave the only light in the room. Smith did not shut the window,
+but remained sitting on the sill. A bake-house at the back hid the place
+from neighbouring eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all up with our bank," said Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"I feared so," said Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"The apostates took such a lot of money out of it. No bank anywhere in
+this region could have stood it. You have always been down on our
+management of the bank, Mrs. Halsey, but if it was not good, why then
+have so many of the Gentiles put in their money, and why have they taken
+our notes all over the State?"</p>
+
+<p>"You never had the capital you advertised."</p>
+
+<p>"We have land that stands for it."</p>
+
+<p>"It is not worth half what you value it at."</p>
+
+<p>Then Susannah became sorry for her sharp recrimination. Punishment had
+befallen; it was a time for mutual help, not for reproach. She saw that
+although Smith kept himself calm he was greatly stirred.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you here?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Smith's huge frame was poised awkwardly on the window sill. He moved
+restlessly and touched one thing and another with nervous hands. Then he
+said with a short laugh, "The size of it is, I'm running away, Mrs.
+Halsey. Ye may think I feel pretty mean, but ye'll do me the justice
+just to think how it is. If they'd shoot me in fair fight, I'd go and,
+if it were the Lord's will, be shot to-morrow, and be thankful too; but
+ye know the sort of vengeance they'll take. I have been beaten time and
+again before now, and covered with pitch, and I've been knocked down and
+kicked and ducked in ponds a good many times, as ye know, and I ain't
+ashamed to say that I'm afraid of that sort of thing and afraid of the
+results on Emmar and the children. If the Lord clearly told that 'twas
+his will to stay and stand it, why then I'd have no choice, but I
+haven't had no word from the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>His face was livid; in the effort to make his explanation, whether
+shaken by the recollections he described or by fear of her contempt,
+she saw that his limbs were actually trembling as if with cold.</p>
+
+<p>"There ain't many men, Mrs. Halsey, as would stay and face that sort of
+music when they could get away, but if it was to do good to mortal
+creature I'd think about staying, but it's t'other way. It's me and
+Rigdon as has been advertised as working the bank; it's my blood and his
+the Gentiles that have our notes are thirsting for. Suppose we stayed
+and they took to mauling us again, wouldn't the Saints here take to
+fighting to protect us? I've taught them to fight in self-defence and
+they'd fight to defend me. God knows there are better men than we are
+that would be killed right and left if we stayed, and 'twould be no use,
+for the Gentile numbers would overpower us. 'Tain't no use. When I found
+to-day that there wasn't a chance of staving off the bankruptcy I sent
+Emmar and the children and Rigdon's folks off in a close waggon after
+sundown. Rigdon's rid off by another road, and I've got my horse ready
+and ought to be gone. And there ain't a man in Kirtland as will know
+which way we've gone by to-morrow, so that no Saint will need to do any
+lying on my account."</p>
+
+<p>"You are very sorry for the mistakes you have made about the bank," she
+said pityingly.</p>
+
+<p>He gave another short laugh that, like the first, was less like a laugh
+than a sob.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'm sorry enough, but I don't know whether it's repentance, for
+I thought I'd done all just what the Lord told me to do, but at times
+like these I'm not so sure of the revelations I hear in my soul, but I
+know I thought I was right at the time; but as for being sorry, if ye
+had the burden of all these children of Israel in the desert on your
+heart, knowing that ye had brought them into the desert, and brought the
+hunger and the thirst and the pestilence and the enemy upon them, and
+weren't quite sure at times whether the thing that ye saw leading was
+the Lord's pillar of cloud or the devil's, and if ye was now being cast
+out before the face of men and called a liar and a swindler, and without
+a dollar in the world, I guess ye'd know what it felt like to feel
+sorry."</p>
+
+<p>The room was a long one; in the fore part the glow from the hearth made
+clear the baby's cradle, the table set for Halsey's supper, the close
+shutters of the front windows, but the red flame rays were fainter as
+they came into this back portion where Susannah stood in dull distress a
+few paces from the stricken intruder.</p>
+
+<p>This man had always the power at close quarters of producing strange
+disturbance in the emotions of his friends. Susannah was trembling, her
+heart heaving, if not with pure compassion, at least with wild
+excitement on his account.</p>
+
+<p>With an effort Smith held himself still, but gave again the
+heart-broken laugh that appealed more than all else to her woman's
+heart. "'Tain't all that neither, that makes me the most 'sorry,' as ye
+call it. I tried to go in and out before this people, Mrs. Halsey,
+loving and serving all alike as a prophet should, but I wouldn't be
+human man, no, nor fit to be chosen by God for the honour he's put upon
+me, if I didn't know who amongst us was most worth care and respect, and
+it's come to my soul this night, now that I can't no longer stand
+between you and all the dangers that beset our people in the wilderness,
+that I wasn't right, maybe, to egg on Halsey to take ye away from your
+happy home, or to make a point as I did, first off, of getting ye
+converted&mdash;for I was more set on it than I showed at the time. It's
+because 'twas my doing you married, that I've come to say this; and I
+see well enough that 'tain't love that is between you and Halsey, though
+you are too tender of him to let him see."</p>
+
+<p>She made a movement of the head, an effort to show reproving dignity,
+while in fact taken by surprise, her nerves in distressful panic, she
+had scarce the power to control herself, none to control him.</p>
+
+<p>He answered her impulse, although he had not looked up to see the
+gesture. "Ye haven't got any call to-night to be offended with me, for
+I'm worth no more, unless the Lord see fit to lift me up agen, than the
+paper our bank-notes is written on; and I have just got one more thing
+to say, then I'm gone. If there's any grit in Joseph Smith, and if it
+pleases God that he's not going now to his death, he'll not make another
+home for himself without providing as good a place for you and the young
+one. Ye may depend on it."</p>
+
+<p>He rose up now. "'Tain't no use disguising facts; I'm running away, and
+I'm leaving ye to dangers and privations. Your money and Halsey's is
+gone the way of all the rest, and without me to stop him Halsey will fly
+in the face of the first persecution that's within his reach. If I
+hadn't known that there was no chance at all of your coming I'd have
+asked you and the child to git into Emmar's waggon; but there's just
+this to say, there ain't a tribulation that can come to you that won't
+hurt me, living or dead, more than it can hurt you." Then after a pause
+he added, "Emmar sent her dear love and good-bye to ye."</p>
+
+<p>He stood still a moment before her in humble attitude, the words of
+Emma's tender farewell lingering, as it were, in the air between them.</p>
+
+<p>"Have a care what you do." (He resumed a more dignified manner of
+speech.) "It's borne in upon my mind that great dangers will lie round
+you. Tell brother Halsey from me that it is the will of the Lord that he
+should seek first the safety of his wife and child, and to abide in a
+place of safety till the child be grown."</p>
+
+<p>He climbed through the window. His last act was to close the casement
+behind him to save her trembling hands the exertion. His movements must
+have been very stealthy, for she did not hear the sound of his steps or
+the steps of his horse in the silent night.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IXa" id="CHAPTER_IXa"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+
+<p>After Smith left Kirtland there was a great exodus Missouri-ward of his
+more devout followers. The army which had gone out from Kirtland in '34
+to the rescue of the fugitives from the city of Zion in Missouri had
+failed, through disease and exhaustion, to make warlike demonstration;
+but the principle then accepted by the children of Zion of opposing
+force to force in self-defence, had been bearing fruit ever since in a
+bloody warfare between the hunted Saints of Missouri and their more
+powerful neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>Before the Saints took up arms the Missourians had, it would seem, no
+real ground of offence against them except the religious faith which led
+them to proclaim that the land was to be given to them by the Lord for
+an everlasting possession. Now this provocation was still in force,
+added to the greater one that the worm had turned.</p>
+
+<p>So futile had been the mad persecutions, so fruitful the blood of the
+martyrs, that by this time there were some ten thousand Saints in
+Missouri, all heads of families, for although Zion in Jackson County
+still lay waste, and the colonies of Clay County had been swept away,
+the cities of Far West and Diahman, and numerous villages near them, had
+risen like magic, built by the thrift, the organisation, and the
+temperance of the Saints.</p>
+
+<p>As for Kirtland, the hope of making it a prosperous city had died with
+the failure of the bank. Of the few who remained two distinct parties
+were formed&mdash;the orthodox, headed by Halsey, and the reformers,
+encouraged, if not headed, by the former leaders who were now apostate.
+In the camp of the reformers there were those who saw visions and had
+revelations. Before this, when Smith was at the helm, it had been
+counted unlawful for any but himself to have direct dealings with the
+Unseen; but the prophet was distant, directing the sect only through his
+published journal, and in this case it were hard indeed if no
+authoritative local word were spoken in the orthodox party. Angel
+Halsey's mystic soul fell easily into the region of voices and visions.
+In his adversity, fasting and praying more than ever before, he heard
+voices which gave practical directions not only for himself but for his
+neighbours. When the neighbours refused to accept these ghostly
+counsels, which all tended toward a more rigorous holiness, there was no
+room left for Halsey's work in Kirtland. He determined to fare forth to
+Missouri, there to comfort and edify the Saints scattered abroad in the
+rural districts.</p>
+
+<p>It was now that Susannah expected the sprightly Elvira Halsey, still
+unbaptized, to return to the east. Instead of that she proposed to
+travel with them, helping to take care of the child.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I take the trouble to help you and the young un?" she asked,
+sitting on Susannah's doorstep, languid with the heat. "When I was going
+along the lane last night I met a spirit, so I held out my hand
+according to Joe's latest. You've not heard! My! it's in the Millenial
+Star that if any sort of a voice or dream comes to you, the way to know,
+whether it's an angel or devil is to shake hands, and if it is an angel
+you'll feel a good, firm, solid grip sort of coming out of nowhere, but
+if it isn't an angel you'll feel nothing. It's kind of Joe to put it in
+a nutshell, necessary nowadays that we're all hard at it having
+revelations of our own. He thought that nobody would feel the grip but
+himself. Quite mistaken. I shook hands with my angel, tho' I couldn't
+see a ghost of him, and when he said, 'You come along now to Missouri,
+and carry the child half way,' I had nothing to do but say 'Amen.'"</p>
+
+<p>But Susannah was too much afraid of what the result of private
+revelations might be to laugh at them; she expressed her fears.</p>
+
+<p>"Bless you, all the dreams and 'voices' in this hustling world wouldn't
+have put any guile into the soul of Nathaniel, and they won't into Angel
+Halsey's. Saints are saints, sinners are sinners, middling folks are
+middling, just the same whether they have three 'revelations' a day
+apiece, or one once a year, or none at all. You're fretting because you
+think a righteous man might do something wicked, thinking that the voice
+of the Lord had told him. Not a bit of it! The Lord will take care of
+his own when they're a little off their heads just as much as at any
+other time."</p>
+
+<p>What few worldly goods Susannah chose to keep were packed in two single
+waggons, Halsey driving the one, and Elvira and Susannah by turns
+driving the other and holding the child. Their long journey through the
+month of June was the most perfect pleasure that Susannah and Angel ever
+enjoyed together, the long nightmare of the last months at Kirtland left
+behind for ever, the stage of the future veiled, and the lineaments of
+natural hope painted upon the drop-curtain. A loving fate sent fresh
+showers on their behoof during the nights, which laid the dust and
+dressed field and forest in their daintiest array. The child, who had
+been pining somewhat, affected by the anxiety in the Kirtland home,
+became lusty and merry.</p>
+
+<p>"If it wasn't that we are shortly going to be robbed of all we possess
+by the Missourians," observed Elvira, "this sort of jog-trot comfort
+would become too monotonous, but it adds spice to be saying, so to
+speak, 'Hulloa there! we've come to be persecuted too.' Of course we'll
+all be killed to begin with, but that's a detail; after that we'll take
+our rural mission bespoken for us in the dream."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah actually smiled and called "gee-up" to the horse.</p>
+
+<p>"How very little people know," she observed, "who talk about a
+persecution as if it would be a means of grace. There is nothing that so
+hardens and degrades as the constant report of barbarities; the more
+nearly seen, the more closely inspected, the worse is the moral result."</p>
+
+<p>"Speak for yourself," cooed Elvira, "there's one person out there that
+isn't hardened and degraded." She looked with reverent eyes at Angel,
+who was walking at the head of the foremost horse, crooning a psalm;
+"and, as for me, I still feel myself quite soft, almost pulpy, and on an
+elevated plane."</p>
+
+<p>"You could never talk in your irreverent way if you weren't a good deal
+hardened and degraded," persisted Susannah affectionately, "and, as for
+me, I know that I am. Is there any instance in history of a people
+emerging from prolonged persecution with high ideals of love toward
+their enemies and candour?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis commonly said that faith rises from this fire," said Elvira.</p>
+
+<p>"Faith that gives its body to be burned and has not charity," said
+Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the vicinity of Diahman and Far West the State
+elections were about to be held. It was reported that over all Missouri
+the stronger party, that of Lilburn Boggs, was threatening to prevent
+by force the Mormon vote.</p>
+
+<p>Before commencing his mission to the outlying Mormon districts, Halsey,
+hoping to avoid this contest, stopped in the Gentile town of Gallatin to
+rest and obtain a fresh outfit.</p>
+
+<p>"But why don't we pay our respects to 'Joe' now we are within reach?"
+inquired Elvira with pensive inflection.</p>
+
+<p>"The prophet is full of cares. A man whom I met at the tavern said that
+his activity on behalf of the Saints in Far West is amazing, and since
+his public appearance there the Lord has prospered the city exceedingly;
+but, as for me, I have been commanded to turn aside to those of our
+people who are not encompassed by a shepherd's care."</p>
+
+<p>"If he would but confess it," said Susannah with a sigh, "my husband was
+so sorely hurt with the appearances of fraud in connection with the
+bank&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you put that appearance of a child down and come and eat this
+appearance of your breakfast, and then we'll put on what appear to be
+our bonnets, and go for what appears to be a walk." Elvira's sunny
+serenity never deserted her. "Say rather," she cried, "that the prophet
+did defraud, but has repented."</p>
+
+<p>That day was the 6th of August. The voting for the State legislature had
+commenced. The travellers did not know that there was any number of
+Mormon landholders in this place, but now they could not extricate
+themselves from the very contest that they had hoped to avoid. When the
+two women strolled through the streets to see the town they became
+involved in a crowd at one of the polling places.</p>
+
+<p>Penniston, a candidate of the Boggs party, standing on a barrel, was
+haranguing the crowd, and the two women quickly heard the name of their
+sect mentioned with contumely.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we," cried Penniston, "allow our State to come under the control
+of Mormon horse-thieves and robbers by allowing these outlaws the civil
+rights that are intended only for good citizens?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a commotion in the crowd near him. Susannah, knowing that her
+husband was abroad, felt a sudden heart-sick prophecy of evil. The next
+moment she saw Halsey spring into sight upon a low wall at the side of
+the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"Look on this picture and on this," cried Elvira in a voice audible to
+many too illiterate to comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>The two men, each standing erect above the heads of the crowd, could not
+have showed sharper contrast. Penniston was coarse of limb and feature;
+a low grade of moral disorder stamped his face as clearly as inferior
+articles are ever stamped; no inspector of goods so relentless as God's
+servant Time! Halsey had bared his head to the open sky, as though
+invoking the presence of God in his temple. Upon features too thin and
+haggard for beauty, patience and love and truth were written by every
+line.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey's voice, accustomed to preaching, fell with clear modulations
+upon the summer air.</p>
+
+<p>"'Blessed are ye, when men shall persecute you, and shall say all manner
+of evil against you falsely, for my name's sake and the gospel's.'
+Friends, this evil that is spoken against us whom ye call Mormons is
+falsely spoken, and I stand here before you, and before the great Father
+of Truth, who is calling his children everywhere to repent, to say that
+every Mormon who has a vote has a right to exercise it, for we have
+committed none of the crimes of which you accuse us, but you yourselves,
+as you well know, are many of you here to try to put into office men who
+are undoubted criminals."</p>
+
+<p>In surprise Penniston and his hearers had listened, but now a man,
+half-drunk perhaps, sprang upon the low wall upon which Halsey stood,
+and struck him savagely.</p>
+
+<p>"He is all alone," cried Susannah, "all alone among so many." She tried
+to struggle forward toward her husband through the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey believed himself to be alone, and it was not in accordance with
+his principles to make any attempt to return the violence by which he
+had been assailed; but to his astonishment now a stout man leaped to
+his assistance, suddenly belabouring his assailant with blows, and from
+far and near in the crowd there were shouts of encouragement from burly
+Mormon farmers who had only needed the voice of a leader to declare
+themselves. Halsey had thrown a spark, unconscious that a mass of powder
+lay near. When the men of Penniston's party turned with savage fury upon
+the Mormon who was beating their companion, and the Mormons, no less
+fierce, rallied round Halsey and his defender, the fight became general.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira set her quick wits to work to weave a cord that would be strong
+enough to draw Susannah back to their inn. "They may find out that baby
+is alone," she said; "they're wicked enough to injure him out of
+revenge."</p>
+
+<p>Along the wooden pavements of Gallatin, past the gaily-painted wooden
+houses, through the doors of which whole families were now emerging to
+ask the cause of disturbance, Susannah fled miserably, her cheeks
+blanched beneath her veil, her heart within weeping.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was shining brightly on just and unjust; the gardens of Gallatin
+were brilliant with such flowers as had bloomed in the August when she
+first met her husband. Susannah felt then that the reason why she
+desired to clasp and guard the sleeping child she had left was that he
+was Angel's son; the pity for injured innocence had been from the first
+until now her strongest passion, and at the thought of Halsey, innocent
+and gentle, in the midst of the brutal fight she had left, her soul wept
+as it were the scalding tears that her eyes refused to shed.</p>
+
+<p>The boy lay in rosy sleep, a woman of the inn keeping a kindly eye upon
+him. Probably nothing but a mother's love could have fancied him of
+sufficient importance to attract public attention, but Susannah, locking
+her door, knelt by the bed, and spreading protecting arms above him,
+listened with strained senses for news of Halsey's injury or death. For
+years she had feared that the violence she had seen wreaked upon others
+would touch her husband; violence offered to herself would have seemed a
+trivial grief in comparison. The fear that has long harped upon sore
+nerves has a cumulative action upon the pain of its realisation.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah found herself giving forth short ejaculatory whispers of prayer
+upon the close air of the plain, small room in which she knelt. It was
+such prayer only as we come at by inheritance, prayer that is one of the
+habits by which the fittest have survived.</p>
+
+<p>Before two hours were past Halsey had returned. He was bruised and much
+shaken, but appeared unconscious of injury, and made light of it. The
+open fight had ended with no decisive victory for either party; the
+chief result appeared to be that malice on either side was for the hour
+exhausted. Whether because of this or because Halsey gave himself to
+prayer on behalf of his brethren, the polls were opened quietly at noon
+and the Mormons voted with the other citizens.</p>
+
+<p>In the cool of the evening Susannah was sitting beside her husband
+holding the sleeping child. The window of their humble room was open,
+not to any broad, fair landscape such as their eyes were accustomed to
+feast upon, but upon the yard of the small tavern. There is, however, in
+new countries no crowding; space, like air and sunshine, is the common
+heritage. Grass grew round the edges of the large yard, and an old white
+horse was cropping it contentedly. A cool air was blowing, and over the
+wooden roofs of the town stars were beginning to gather themselves from
+out the pale dusk. An old negro and two mulatto boys were sitting upon a
+log at the side of one of the sheds, quarrelling and singing slave
+melodies by turns.</p>
+
+<p>Angel took the hand of the sleeping child and Susannah's hand and folded
+them in his own. "Susannah, it has been given to me to see this
+afternoon more clearly than ever before the material triumph of our
+people. They will rear high cities; they will lead armies; they will
+command wealth; but it has also been shown me that Zion will not be, as
+I had heretofore believed, pure from sin, for evil has already entered
+into her. Because she has taken the sword her spiritual warfare will not
+be soon accomplished; the wheat and the tares shall grow together, and
+I do not yet see the end."</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. Susannah watched the slaves taking their evening ease
+so light-heartedly. She looked down at the three hands which Angel had
+gathered together. The dusk was beginning to make all things indistinct.</p>
+
+<p>Angel went on. "I would have thee teach the child above all things the
+unspeakable wretchedness of sin, for the least sin closes the eye of the
+soul by which we see God and the things of God, clogs them with the dust
+and dirt of the world; and when there is no more any clear vision,
+selfishness is mistaken for love, malice for righteousness, and folly
+for truth. So I pray thee, dear heart, be wary, and slay within thyself
+the evil nature, for though I cannot see it, perchance God does; and
+teach the child above all things from the first to fear sin more than
+death."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall teach him, Angel."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear heart, I would not lay upon thee the burden of knowledge of coming
+sorrow if I dared to withhold it, but I believe, Susannah, that it will
+soon be given to me to die for the truth and for our people." After a
+moment's pause he went on, and his tone, which had dropped
+involuntarily, became again cheerful. "That is why I have to-day
+determined to change the plan that we have made and to send thee and the
+child to-morrow with the company who are about to travel to Far West,
+where the prophet is now dwelling with his wife, for I know he will
+never see thee want."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah rose up. In the dusk of the low, small room her figure, the
+child still in her arms, seemed to tower like a misty goddess or
+Madonna, such as praying men have often seen appearing for their
+succour; her voice came clear and strong from a heaving breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Angel, I will never leave you, never," and then she added in a voice
+that faltered, "Send the child if you will."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Xa" id="CHAPTER_Xa"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+
+<p>They did not send the child to Far West, or even insist on Elvira
+seeking safety there, because that town also became swiftly involved in
+the flames of the war which had flashed into new life at the Gallatin
+fight. The whole land was full of threats and terrors, and many open
+fights at the polling-booths were soon reported. The Mormons and
+anti-Mormons in various localities entered into mutual bonds to keep the
+peace, but in many cases these bonds were soon broken.</p>
+
+<p>To the Mormons everywhere had been issued a proclamation, signed by
+Smith and the elders, commanding that no official tyranny, however
+unjust, was to be resisted. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher
+powers." "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's
+sake." But when private violence was offered the order was that the men
+should fight in defence of their families.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to have been this order to fight, and the fact that the Mormons
+proved themselves sturdy fighters, which alone caused any of the
+Gentiles to enter into a compact of peace. So mad was their anger
+against a sect claiming the land as an inheritance from God and voting
+to a man in obedience to its leader, that the Missouri journals of the
+day openly taught that to kill a Mormon was no worse than to kill an
+Indian, and to kill an Indian was tacitly considered as meritorious as
+killing a wild beast.</p>
+
+<p>"I am just about as safe jogging along in one of your waggons as
+anywhere in this part of the country," observed Elvira; "and if it was a
+craving for peace and safety we had, why did we come to Missouri at all?
+I feel exactly like a rabbit when the men are out trying to thin them; I
+notice they get very frisky."</p>
+
+<p>There was psychological truth underlying this statement. Stimulated by
+the excitements of sudden alarms, Susannah also found herself enjoying
+intervals of temporary security with peculiar zest.</p>
+
+<p>They set forth again upon the country roads. Halsey had the burden of
+his message upon his spirit; wherever they found a few Mormon households
+gathered together, he preached to them the high ideals of Christian
+living and the need of humility and constant prayer. Another theme he
+had which he considered of equal importance; this was the interpretation
+of prophecy. He gave long rapt discourses upon the most obscure passages
+in the books of the prophets, the Revelation of St. John, and the Book
+of Mormon. These passages were found chiefly to refer to the rise of
+the Mormon Church, the iniquity of her enemies, and her glorious future.
+Susannah, who saw the value of his practical teachings, bitterly
+regretted this use of half his opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>Only once or twice in many weeks did they come upon a Mormon household
+whose management was not such as the moralist would approve, and in
+those cases before Halsey's passionate denunciation sins were confessed
+and repentance promised.</p>
+
+<p>So they journeyed slowly out of the September heats and oppressive
+shades into the cooler and more open glories of autumn. In that part of
+the country wild flowers run riot at the approach of winter, painting
+the land in broad leagues of colour, white and gold and blue, and the
+trees of the forest hang in red curtains overhead. The air was so light
+and invigorating that they all felt its tonic properties. Halsey seemed
+eased of his burden; the child began to talk, babbling wise and
+wonderful speeches. Elvira was even more frivolous than was her wont,
+and Susannah almost forgot Halsey's dismal prophecy of martyrdom.</p>
+
+<p>About the middle of October they reached the place called Haun's Mill,
+where a small Mormon community was settled. Here they thought well to
+pause, shocked by renewed rumours of warfare. A truce for the whole
+region, which had been signed by Smith and some of his elders on the one
+side, and by a magistrate, by name Adam Black, for the Gentiles, had
+been broken by Gentile mobs in several of the counties near Far West. A
+number of the saints had been brutally killed, their wives and children
+driven from their homes at the point of the bayonet. This renewed
+outrage roused at last the fires of revenge, long smouldering in the
+breasts of the refugees from the desolate city of Zion, who had
+themselves known the bitterness of such unmerited wrong. These fires
+fused religious principle and natural wrath together, till a chain was
+forged which bound many strong men in a secret society, whose members
+swore to fight, not only in defence, but especially in vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>It was at Haun's Mill that Halsey first heard of this society, and he
+was deeply concerned. A young Mormon who had lately come to the place
+belonged to it, and after one of Halsey's sermons, in which the posts of
+the Gate of Life were represented as meekness and forgiveness, this
+young man came to the preacher by night to confess, but also to
+vindicate his position.</p>
+
+<p>The missionary's little party, with the exception of Elvira, who had
+accepted hospitality at a neighbouring farm, were camping in a meadow
+not far from a stream called Shoal Creek, which drove the mill. The logs
+of their evening fire were still alight. Susannah sat just within the
+dark opening of a low canvas-covered waggon; the unsteady flame light
+fell upon her, and sometimes showed a farther interior where the child
+lay sleeping. Halsey was sitting at the roots of a tree, the utensils of
+a simple supper at his side. The gentle horses tethered near were to be
+heard softly cropping the grass, and the sound of the creek came from a
+farther distance. Above, the poplar boughs, whose yellow foliage had
+been thinned by the advancing season, let through the rays of the
+brilliant stars. These were the sights and sounds which met the young
+man's senses as he came brushing the fallen leaves with his feet.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned against the pole of the farther waggon and looked across the
+low-glowing fire at the preacher and his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here! I'm a Danite. Do you mean to say that the Lord's not going
+to accept of me because I can't stand by and see weak men and women and
+children killed, or worse than killed, without punishing the murderers?
+Supposing that a hundred of Boggs' men were to come down now and put an
+end to you, your wife, and your child, would you have me go along with
+them peaceably afterwards and pray they might be forgiven?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is a Danite?" asked Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger took off his hat and answered her very respectfully. "We
+are under an oath, ma'am, not to tell who belong to us, but we've bound
+ourselves to punish them as take the blood of the helpless and
+innocent."</p>
+
+<p>He seemed, as far as the light would show, a well-made youth, and his
+voice was clear and honest.</p>
+
+<p>Halsey had not spoken, and Susannah asked again, this time of her
+husband, "Can it be wrong to do as this gentleman says?"</p>
+
+<p>The preacher spoke slowly. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the
+Lord."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said the young man eagerly, "the Scripture also says 'There's a
+time for wrath,' and 'he that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
+blood be shed.'"</p>
+
+<p>Halsey rose up. It was a strong moment for him, for he had long seen
+that the spirit of retaliation, following hard on the spirit of defence,
+was the coming curse of his beloved church, and had prayed that he might
+be the means of helping to ward it off. Here was one asking counsel who
+from the strength of his person and character might have influence among
+the avengers of blood, yet with his helpless wife and child beside him
+none felt more keenly than Halsey the force of the Danite's arguments,
+and none knew better the multitude of Scripture prophecies that could be
+brought up in support of them. In the strength of his need this man, who
+had been spending the precious time of many a hardly-won audience in
+dwelling on obscure poesies in books held sacred, now seemed to step
+forth into a sudden illumination of truth just as he stepped from the
+shadow of the poplar bole into the light of the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Friend, I did wrong to answer you in this matter from any part of
+Scripture save from the mouth of our most blessed Lord himself, for he
+alone is the gate by which we must enter into life, and I would have you
+to consider most carefully his life and words, and find out if there be
+any promise of blessedness to those who strike back when they are
+struck, or any command to punish the evil-doer, or any example for such
+punishment. But if you would be more manly and more gallant than the
+Saviour of the world, I tell you it must be at your own peril, for he
+alone is the gate of that road which leads to everlasting life."</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence for some long moments. Embers in the fire broke and
+fell; the horses cropped the grass; a nut or twig dropped somewhere
+among the adjacent trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the young Danite reflectively, "if that's it, I guess I'll
+have to take my fling first and seek salvation after; but Smith and
+Rigdon don't only preach that sort of Gospel now; they are all for the
+Old Testament kind of thing, and the destroying angels in the
+Revelations."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIa" id="CHAPTER_XIa"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>So near came the rumours of war that the Mormons of Haun's Mill entered
+into a renewed compact of mutual peace with the Gentiles around them.
+The place was about twenty miles below the town of Far West, on the same
+stream of Shoal Creek. Around Far West the roads presently became very
+dangerous, haunted, it was said, by armed parties of bloodthirsty
+Gentiles who lay in wait for trains of Mormon emigrants coming from the
+east to the prophet's city. All travellers became alarmed; Halsey
+remained where he was; the people of the place accepted his pastoral
+services gladly. A train of Gentile emigrants also waited at Haun's Mill
+for the cessation of hostilities.</p>
+
+<p>These emigrants were quiet folk and had children with them. Susannah
+used to go out upon sunny days with her sturdy yearling, talking to all
+mothers, Gentile or Mormon, who carried little children. The beauty of
+the season, the cloudless sun, gilded these few peaceful days. Susannah
+compared her child with other children, marvelled at the baby
+intercourse he held with them, at the likes and dislikes displayed among
+these pigmy associates; and the other mothers had like sources of
+interest in these interviews.</p>
+
+<p>One among the emigrants, a dark-eyed woman of about forty years of age,
+was of better position and education than the others. One morning she
+noticed Susannah's child very kindly, speaking of things that did not
+lie on the surface of life.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a seeking look in his eyes," the lady said; "he smiles, he
+plays with us all, but he looks beyond for something. I have seen that
+look in the eyes of children who were in pain, but yours is at ease."</p>
+
+<p>"He has his father's eyes," Susannah sighed. "My husband is always
+looking for a virtue that seems to me impossible."</p>
+
+<p>Both women turned toward an open grassy space in the midst of the
+clustered houses where Halsey was now standing, Bible in hand, teaching
+a little group of children to repeat the beatitudes. Only four children,
+one sickly boy and three girls, were willing to stand and repeat the
+lesson; others had straggled away and were shouting at their play.</p>
+
+<p>Not far from where Halsey stood some fifteen of the neighbours had
+gathered together to put up a new wooden house; piles of sweet-smelling
+deal lay about them as they worked.</p>
+
+<p>Just then on the road from Far West a horse bearing an old man was seen
+straining itself to the swiftest gallop. The old man began to shout as
+he came within hearing. No one could understand what he said. He
+shouted more loudly, and many women ran out of their doors to see his
+arrival. Before his words were articulate a cloud of dust was seen
+rising round a turning of the same road, and a large company of horsemen
+came swiftly into view.</p>
+
+<p>The old man's voice was raised in a cry, but only the accent of terror
+was intelligible. He threw himself off his horse, brandishing his arms.
+Afterwards it was known that he wanted the villagers to take refuge in
+their houses, but now they only stared the more at him and at the small
+army that was approaching.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah heard a shot; then she was deafened by the sound of a volley of
+muskets. Paralysed, she stood staring down the road, unable to believe
+that the two or three hundred mounted men had deliberately levelled
+their muskets and fired. Then all around her she became aware of shrieks
+and sobs and prayers that went up to God. The brown-eyed Gentile lady
+who stood beside her had fallen in a curious attitude at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah darted into the emigrants' tent and, putting down the child,
+dragged the lady within. She perceived to her horror that the lady was
+shot; the bullet had passed through her neck. Not knowing whether she
+was dead or dying, Susannah stretched her on the floor. Then she lifted
+her hands above her head, wrung them together in agony of nerve and
+thought. She remembered afterwards looking upward in the cave of the
+warm tent and saying aloud "O God! O God!" many times.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing she saw was her child standing watching her; both his
+little brown fists were full of flowers. Hearing the sound of horses
+trampling near, loud voices, and occasional shots, she bethought her
+that the canvas of the tent was no protection for the child, and,
+snatching him in her arms, she ran madly out into the sunshine and into
+the open war.</p>
+
+<p>A large number of the horsemen had already passed on down the road; the
+sounds that came from them seemed to be of oaths and laughter. A number
+were still galloping in and out among the houses; the ground was strewed
+with bodies of the dead and wounded; the able-bodied, it seemed, must
+have suddenly huddled within their doors.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah remembered her husband now, remembered where he had been
+standing. She forgot all else; she rushed toward the middle of the
+green, drawing back only when some of the horsemen dashed across her
+path to follow their fellows. They stared at her and, as they went,
+called to some who were still behind them.</p>
+
+<p>One of these came on, checked his horse, and looked in Susannah's face
+insultingly. No doubt her eyes were dazed, and she looked to him like a
+mad woman, but she remembered afterwards that the child showed anger
+and babbled that the horseman was a bad man. At this the rider took out
+his pistol and pointed it at the child and fired and rode off laughing.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah saw the young Danite bending over her. His words were hoarse
+and so sorrowful that she gathered from their tone that she was in great
+distress before she understood their purport or memory awoke. "Ma'am,"
+he said, "I'll take you down to your own waggon by the creek."</p>
+
+<p>She found herself sitting on the ground, her child in her arms. The
+child was dead; she knew that as soon as she looked at him. There was a
+little trickle of blood upon the light frock over his heart, but not
+much.</p>
+
+<p>As yet no women, only a few men, had ventured forth, and the sound of
+the enemy's horses and shouting were still in the air. Susannah rose up,
+folding in her arms the body of the child; the momentum of her first
+intention was upon her will and muscles; she moved straight on toward
+the place where she had last seen Halsey.</p>
+
+<p>The young Danite took hold of her sleeve when he perceived whither she
+went.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tisn't no use, ma'am. Some of the brothers have attended to him."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah looked straight in the young man's face with perfect courage.
+"Is he dead?"</p>
+
+<p>But the Danite had not courage for this; he turned away and put his arm
+over his eyes; she heard him grind his teeth in dumb passion.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the men and women lying on the grass were moaning or screaming
+with the pain of their injuries. The thought that Halsey might be in
+like pain made Susannah imperative. "Is he dead?" she asked again in
+precise repetition of tone and accent. "Is he dead?"</p>
+
+<p>The Danite lifted his head. "He is quite dead, and I marked the man that
+did it, and I marked the man that did this too." He touched reverently,
+not the child, but the wilting asters that were still grasped in the
+baby hand. "If I'd only had a gun&mdash;but"&mdash;he ground his teeth again and
+muttered, "God helping me, they shall both die."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah understood nothing then but the first part of this speech.</p>
+
+<p>By this time many of the women and children had again flocked out of the
+houses. It was reported that the horsemen had been a detachment of State
+militia, that one of them had taken the trouble to explain to a wounded
+man that they had received orders from Governor Boggs to exterminate the
+Mormons. Immediately by other frightened tongues it was stated that the
+armed company were halting round the turn of the road, intending to
+return and shoot again when the people had come out from shelter. At
+this the greater number made a stampede for a thicket of poplar and
+willow saplings that was near the creek. The Danite still held by
+Susannah's sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is my husband?" she again asked. She had not moved since he last
+spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p>Some men were busy laying the dead, of whom there were eighteen, on the
+floor of a shed which was not far off. Susannah and the Danite moved
+about together and found Halsey lying still on the green, his limbs
+decently composed, his eyes for ever shut. The bearers were about to
+lift him, but the Danite interposed. He had an excited fancy concerning
+Susannah's dead and what must be done for them. He lifted Halsey easily
+in both his arms and walked away, Susannah following with the dead
+child.</p>
+
+<p>Without a word they went till they came to Halsey's camp. Nothing had
+been touched since Susannah left in the morning. The Danite, remembering
+the camp as he had seen it a few evenings before, looked about him now
+curiously, and laid Halsey down on the very spot where he had stood to
+plead for a divine righteousness.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a time for words. Having deposited his burden, he looked to
+Susannah, but she had no directions to give. She sat down beside her
+husband, as though preparing to remain.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you'd like to lay them both out here, but I guess I ought to
+get you into the bush, ma'am."</p>
+
+<p>"I will stay here," she said; "you had better go to help some one else."</p>
+
+<p>The cries of the wounded were still heard from the vicinity of the
+houses. A crowd of the uninjured people were to be seen making their way
+through the first bushes of the thicket. They seemed to be carrying the
+wounded thither, for men bearing shutters, and doors upon which the sick
+were stretched now started in the direction of the bush. There was need
+for help, as the Danite well saw; then, too, inactivity was torture. He
+left Susannah and ran back to bear his part in the common task.</p>
+
+<p>When almost every other living soul was lost in the close thicket he
+came again, approaching the camp with soft footsteps, peering anxiously.
+Susannah had laid the child in his father's arms. Their enemies seemed
+to have taken aim for the heart, for Halsey's wound was also there. She
+had so laid the child within his arms, heart to heart, that no sign of
+injury appeared. She sat by them now, sobbing her tearless sobs,
+stroking gently, sometimes the hair of the child, more often the thick
+locks of light hair that lay above her husband's brow. She was talking
+to them between her sobs in rapid phrases exactly as if they were not
+dead. The young Danite was sure that she had lost her wits; he leant
+against a tree confounded.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was saying, "I wanted to keep baby, Angel, I wanted so much to
+keep him, but I could not have taught him your way; there was no use
+telling you that before, for you could not understand. When you told me
+that you would go you did not tell me you meant to take baby. You have
+the best right to him, dear, he is all yours, but oh! remember&mdash;remember
+that I will be very lonely&mdash;very lonely&mdash;O Angel." There were a few
+moments of wordless moans and sobs, but she went on clearly enough, "I
+want you to know, Angel, that I never was disappointed in you&mdash;never
+disappointed in you, dear; and about my lack of faith&mdash;it would have
+been no use to tell you before, would it?"</p>
+
+<p>She took her hand from Halsey's hair and played a moment with the rings
+of gold on the baby's head lying on his breast. She laid her hand upon
+Halsey's hands that she had clasped together above the child. "It is
+better for you to have baby with you. I could not have taught him your
+thoughts. It is better, dear, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>The earnest inflection of her voice in these interrogations brought so
+wild a sense of pathos to the Danite's heart that his eyes filled with
+tears and brimmed over, but Susannah's sobs were like a nervous gasping
+of which she was scarcely conscious, and no hint of tears.</p>
+
+<p>She lightly touched the baby hand that was lying on its father's
+shoulder, still grasping the blue blossoms. "See," she sobbed, "he has
+brought his flowers to you; he always loved you best."</p>
+
+<p>There had been a great silence in the air about them, but now there was
+again the sound of firing at the distance of about a mile. The Danite's
+pulses leaped, but he did not, because of that, allow himself to speak
+or move.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah spoke again, resting her hand on Halsey's brow, "You know,
+dear, I don't know whether you and baby are anywhere&mdash;anywhere"; wildly,
+as if the appalling loneliness of its meaning had flashed upon her
+dulled brain, she repeated the word.</p>
+
+<p>The Danite's sympathy rose within him; he staggered forward and bent
+over her. "Don't, ma'am," he said, "don't go on talking like that. I was
+with my own mother when she died, when I was a little chap, and I know
+how it is, and you'd much better try to shed tears, ma'am, indeed you
+had."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah lifted to him a blank face, disturbed but uncomprehending.</p>
+
+<p>He decided what to do; the thought of action restored him. He ran with
+all his might back to the houses, and, finding a pick and spade, came
+again. This time, more confident of himself, he had more control over
+Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"We must make the grave right here, ma'am, and do you go and gather some
+flowers to put on it, for we must just put them two away out of sight
+before the devils come back. It's what he would want, you know." He
+pointed to Halsey and repeated the words until she understood.</p>
+
+<p>It even seemed a relief to her then to move about too, and find that
+there was something she could do, but she did not obey him blindly.
+While in a soft place close by he delved with might and main, displacing
+the earth with incredible speed, Susannah, sobbing all the time, but
+tearless, went into the waggon and brought out certain things which she
+chose with care&mdash;a locked box, the best garments belonging to herself,
+her husband, and child, and the baby's toys.</p>
+
+<p>It was no neat gravedigger's work that the Danite accomplished; he had
+made a deep, large hole, but the cavity sloped at the sides so that they
+could step in and out. Susannah brought her little store and lined the
+earth first with the garments.</p>
+
+<p>"You may want some of those things of your own, ma'am," said the Danite.</p>
+
+<p>She paid no heed; when she had made the couch to her mind she signed to
+him to lay Halsey and the child in it, which he did. She herself stooped
+in the grave to clasp the dead man's hands more tightly over the little
+one's form, and her last touch was to stroke Halsey's hair from off the
+brow. She laid the baby playthings at Halsey's feet; she unlocked the
+box and took from it all the household treasures that so far she had
+sought to keep&mdash;some silver, a few small ornaments, a few books, and
+Halsey's Book of Mormon, in which was written their marriage and the
+baby's birth. She brought a silken shawl, the one bit of finery that
+remained from her girlish days. She covered her dead with it very
+carefully, tucking it in as though they slept; then she moved away,
+wringing her hands and heaving convulsive sighs. The Danite put back the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>All the grass was strewn pretty thickly with poplar leaves, gold, lined
+with white, and after leaning against a tree some minutes looking away
+from the grave, Susannah began gathering up these leaves hastily, so
+that when he levelled the earth she could strew the top, hiding the
+place from the curious eyes of strangers.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess, ma'am, if there's anything you would like to take with you
+now, we'd better go into the bush."</p>
+
+<p>"No, there is nothing, but," she cried, "I thank you very much, and if
+there is anything that would be of use to you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>When the Danite had first laid Halsey under the tree he had taken a
+white cloth from the tent and wiped the blood from the coat, that
+Susannah might not be too much shocked at the sight. He took this cloth
+now and tore it till the stained fragment alone remained in his hand. He
+thrust it in his breast.</p>
+
+<p>"This will stand for the blood of them both," he said. "I guess that's
+all I want." But when he had started towards the thicket he remembered
+Susannah's needs, and went back for a blanket.</p>
+
+<p>The poplar saplings that bordered the creek were still holding a thin
+gold canopy overhead, and the dogwood was glinting with scarlet. The
+other members of the community had gone so far ahead that it was a long
+time before, making their toilsome way, they came upon their former
+neighbours.</p>
+
+<p>The fugitives had called a halt where a brook which passed through the
+bush offered some relief to the pain and fever of those who were
+wounded. One of these, a little girl, had already died by the way, and
+her frantic mother began to reproach Susannah, wailing that if the child
+had not been saying her texts to the elder she would not have been a
+mark for the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>The men were cutting down saplings to make place for a camp. It was
+their intention to remain, going back under the cover of night to get
+food and blankets from the houses, if they were not pillaged and burned,
+going back in any case to bury their dead at the first streak of dawn.</p>
+
+<p>The Danite turned to Susannah. "I guess, ma'am, neither you nor I have
+got any business to take us back, and there's enough of the brothers
+here to do the work."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went on with the young man through hour after hour of the
+afternoon farther and farther into the unknown fastnesses of the wood.
+They left behind them the low thicket of second growth, and penetrated
+into an uncleared Missouri forest.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIIa" id="CHAPTER_XIIa"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All the powers of the young Danite were strung by excitement into the
+fiercest vitality, and he thought that physical fatigue was the best
+medicine for Susannah's mind. Why he had accepted the work of saving her
+as part of his mission of Mormon defence he did not ask himself. In him,
+as in many athletes, thought and action seemed one. He acted because he
+acted; he knew no other reason.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the night Susannah woke up. The stars glimmered above
+the trees; she was lying on a heap of autumn leaves wrapped in the
+blanket. Sitting up, she remembered slowly the events of the preceding
+day.</p>
+
+<p>Her movement had caused another movement at some distance. The Danite,
+sleeping on the alert like soldier or huntsman, was roused by the first
+sound she made, and when she continued to sit up he came near in the
+glimmering light. She saw his dark form where he tarried a few paces
+away.</p>
+
+<p>"You're all safe, ma'am. Can't you go on sleeping?"</p>
+
+<p>A watch of the night often brings to recollection some duty forgotten
+during the day. "Do you know where Elvira Halsey is?"</p>
+
+<p>"The young lady with the brown eyes that I have sometimes seen you with,
+ma'am?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." Then Susannah added with the weak detail of a wretched mind, "She
+isn't very young."</p>
+
+<p>"Was she any relation to you, ma'am? Were you very affectionate with
+her?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah explained the relationship.</p>
+
+<p>The Danite thought, "If I tell her she's there she'll think it her duty
+to trapse back all the way to find her; she's that sort." Therefore,
+judging that a minor grief could not make much difference, he gave it as
+his opinion that Elvira was dead. At this Susannah shed tears for the
+first time, which eased his anxiety not a little.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah did not know the Danite's name; it never occurred to her to ask
+him any question about himself.</p>
+
+<p>At dawn they started again upon their tramp. The man knew the country,
+and when the sun was up he brought Susannah out of the forest to a
+settler's farm. She was faint now for want of food, walking again, as
+she had walked last night, with vacant eyes and dull mechanical tread.</p>
+
+<p>The Danite made her sit down upon a stone near the house, and brought a
+woman to her who carried bread and milk. Susannah ate and drank without
+speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"My! but she's tired," said the farmer's wife. "It's a cruel shame to
+make her walk so far; you're not a good husband to her, I'm thinking."</p>
+
+<p>Having satisfied her need, Susannah turned away dully without a word.
+The settler's wife offered the remainder of the bread and milk to the
+Danite, who regarded it with famished eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's your husband?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"We've enough men about the place."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your husband?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's away with the militia under Lucas."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll not touch his food," said the Danite. With an oath he flung
+the cup and plate upon the ground. "Do you see that woman there?" He
+pointed to Susannah. "I took the food for her, for she had died without
+it. Yesterday devils like your husband shot her child in her arms and
+her husband before her eyes, and to Almighty God I pray that when I've
+got her to some safe place I may have strength yet to shoot your husband
+and your children, shoot them down like dogs, and laugh at you because
+you don't like it." The restrained passion of all the long preceding
+hours broke out. His face was ashen, his eyes burning; there was foam
+about his lips as, with thick utterance, he hurled the words at her.</p>
+
+<p>The woman stepped back in dismay, but she, too, was enraged now, and
+courage was the habit of the free life she led. "You are a bloody
+Mormon," she cried, "and if I'd known it I'd have let your woman die
+before I'd have fed her." She walked backwards, her voice rising higher
+with passion. Unable to think connectedly, she shrieked the phrases she
+had in mind. "Coming here to spread idolatry in a Christian country!
+Teaching superstition in a free Christian land!" She was still shrieking
+some jargon about the United States being founded on the Word of God,
+and the divine right to exterminate all Mormons, when he, walking fast,
+joined Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>They had not gone much further before a large dog which the settler's
+wife had evidently let loose, came after them with fierce intent. The
+Danite turned, and as the dog sprang, slew it with one stab of his
+knife, and, leaving it bleeding upon the road, hurried Susannah into the
+forest.</p>
+
+<p>It was a tradition upon that farm for years afterwards that these two
+Mormons, after receiving charity, had made an open display of that
+wanton wickedness which was habitual to them.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah and the Danite travelled on for many hours. The way was not
+easy. Sometimes where the trees were thin their legs were tangled
+knee-deep in a plant covered with minute white feathery blossoms,
+looking like white swan's-down shot through with green light, that
+carpeted miles of the ground; sometimes the trees had fallen so thickly
+that they had to clamber from log to log rather than walk; sometimes
+their way was a bog, and they were in danger of sinking deeper than was
+safe.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah asked no questions. She had heard and understood all the words
+that had passed in the incident of the morning. She felt cowed now,
+afraid to think what might come next; it was enough that the Danite had
+evidently some point in view.</p>
+
+<p>About four in the afternoon they left the forest and came 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.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah thought that the concern of this household must arise from fear
+on their own account. "Are you Latter-Day Saints?" she asked
+mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The next night the young Danite went away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIIIa" id="CHAPTER_XIIIa"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At last she said simply, "I thank you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you, sir," she said again, and went back to the household tasks
+she had fallen into the habit of performing.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Canadian farm, the remote country village of Manchester, and the
+Mormon sect&mdash;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&mdash;these were her real world, and
+of them only Ephraim was left.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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>i.e.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 divine counsel in which he asked her to believe; his answer was to
+send her Bushnell's sermons on the suffering of God. Ephraim had added:
+"When you went from us, Susy, would you ever have been satisfied if we
+had detained you by force? Yet that is what you ask of God. If you were
+right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it
+appear by time. So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in;
+so also has every human friendship. Let us wait, but in faith." This
+ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so
+often that she knew the words by heart.</p>
+
+<p>The next letter had been written more recently, after a long interval.
+At the end of this letter Ephraim had said, "I am persuaded that what we
+need to help our faith is never more knowledge, but always more love. I
+cannot interpret this but by telling you of a fact which I feel to be
+the key to a great&mdash;the greatest&mdash;truth. I know a man who believed in
+God. He met a woman whom he loved, not as many love, but (I know not
+why) with all the loves of his heart, as father, as mother, as brother,
+friend, might love; as lover he loved her with all these loves. After
+that he knew God with a knowledge that passed belief. He could argue no
+more, but he <i>knew</i>. This I think is the sort of knowledge which guides
+unerringly." Susannah remembered, if not the words, all that this
+passage contained. She had wondered at it not a little.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the time of Angel's death she had rejoiced in these letters, not
+doubting that Ephraim had remained the same self-sacrificing
+friend&mdash;ready out of mere but perfect kindness to befriend her to the
+uttermost. She had not doubted because she had not questioned. Now
+disquieting thoughts intervened, producing a new shyness. She remembered
+their last interview, and wondered if Ephraim would feel the same
+responsibility for her if she returned destitute. Perhaps the ardour of
+his friendship had cooled. Perhaps in the last letter he had intended to
+suggest to her that he thought of marriage, and this time for love, not
+kindness, the lady being one of his new Hartford friends.</p>
+
+<p>But no doubt the principal reason of Susannah's dalliance with time in
+those first weeks of her moral freedom was the mental weakness that
+succeeds shock. Every day she thought that she would soon write that
+begging letter, until the day came when opportunity ceased.</p>
+
+<p>When the Danite left he had promised the farmer to return as soon as it
+was possible to place Susannah in safety with her Mormon friends. When
+she began to speak of leaving, her host told her this for the first
+time.</p>
+
+<p>"And what is the young man's name?" the old man asked of Susannah. They
+were in the long living-room at the mid-day meal. His sons, who were
+leaving the table, waited to hear the answer; the mother, the very
+children, looked at her with interest.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know," said Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause, and for the first time she was aware that there was
+some sentiment in the minds of her hearers which did not appear upon the
+surface.</p>
+
+<p>She went on, "I don't know why he should trouble himself to come back
+for me except that&mdash;I think that he was much touched by some earnest
+words my husband said to him that he did not see his way to accept, and
+I think also that he is zealous for the Church."</p>
+
+<p>Her surpassing wrongs had so far set her apart and made all that she
+said and did sacred. No one questioned her further.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning of February the Danite reappeared. He came under the
+cover of night, but showed himself only when the household was awake. He
+was much thinner, more gaunt than before, but in frankness and quietude
+the same. His first words to Susannah had an import she did not expect.</p>
+
+<p>"That young lady you mentioned to me&mdash;I said she was dead because you
+were half crazy, and would have gone back to her, but I worked round
+till I found her; she got to the city of Far West right enough."</p>
+
+<p>After a while he said, "That young lady and some other of our folks have
+got horses and they're going into Illinois now. Most of our folks are
+walking. It's about as bad as can be, but I guess you'll have to go.
+We'll be safe enough, for as long as we go straight on the Gentiles are
+bound to let us pass. I tried to get some better sort of a way for you
+and her, but there ain't no way unless we would have sworn we weren't
+Saints and gone pretending to be Gentiles, but even then we haven't got
+the money."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was thrilled with excited distress. She was not prepared to
+make an abrupt decision, and it appeared that if she desired to join
+this company she must go that evening or not at all.</p>
+
+<p>During the hours of the morning her mind cowered, dismayed. Should she
+now renounce her husband's sect, refusing to suffer with them? She had
+not as yet fortitude to do this. Halsey's eyes, the touch of his hand,
+her baby's voice lisping the tenets of their faith in repetition of his
+father's solemn tones, these were sights and sounds as yet too near her.
+To her shocked fancy the child and his father were only gone out of
+sight, but near enough to be cruelly hurt by her public perversion. And,
+moreover, if she should take this course she must write to Ephraim at
+once, for she could not well remain where she was without definite
+purpose in view.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had sought seclusion in which to think, and the younger son of
+the house intruded himself. He was perhaps about thirty years of age, a
+burly man, resolute and passionate. He spoke fairly enough. The Danite
+himself had said that the journey to which she was haled by her friends
+was one of untold hardship, its end uncertain; he offered her all that
+an honest and prosperous man could offer, but went on to urge on his own
+behalf the strength of those sentiments which he had learned to
+entertain for her&mdash;his admiration (Susannah sickened at the word), his
+love (she shrank in fear).</p>
+
+<p>She rose up with the moan of a hunted thing. She did not pause to make
+excuses for the hunter, to consider the pioneer life that wots little of
+sentiment in proportion to utility; she only saw again the grave at
+Haun's Mill and the white faces of her dead upturned to hers. It seemed
+that this man, with the consent of his people, was urging his suit as it
+were beside the very corpse of her husband. The Danite had shown Angel
+reverence, had shown by his every word and glance that he counted her as
+belonging to the dead man whose blood he carried at his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah rode out from that temporary home at nightfall upon the
+Danite's horse.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIVa" id="CHAPTER_XIVa"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was the season of rain and sleet, of rude northerly winds. The roads,
+across a tract of flat fields and in among the low woods that fringed
+the rivers, were heavy with mud.</p>
+
+<p>After riding half the night on a pillion behind the Danite, Susannah
+entered the Mormon camp. Up and down the sides of a dirty road, in
+waggons, in small tents, and in the open, men, women, and children were
+lying huddled in family groups. How far these crowds extended she could
+not see. Watch-fires were burning here and there, and in the fields on
+either side a patrol of Missouri militia were heard scoffing and
+shouting in the darkness. The Danite answered the challenge of one of
+these men with apparent meekness; Susannah perceived that he had gained
+in self-control. When they had entered the road, along the sides of
+which the forlorn multitude lay, they travelled for some way upon it,
+the Danite speaking in low tones now and then to the Mormon watchers. At
+length they came to a place where a few waggons of better description
+were standing and a number of horses were tied; here he lifted Susannah
+from the horse. Three of the Mormon leaders came up; they evidently
+knew her and her story. The eldest took her hand and spoke in broken
+tones of the crown which Halsey had won in the unseen city of God.</p>
+
+<p>These were the first words that Susannah had heard in unison with
+Halsey's own thoughts, and for his sake they endeared the whole wretched
+Mormon encampment to her.</p>
+
+<p>A woman, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl, sprang down from one
+of the waggons, and Elvira encountered Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"You expect me to say that I am sorry for you," she said hurriedly; "I
+will not. It is not a time for grief. We each of us have just so much
+power of being sorry and no more, and the well has gone dry. I am glad
+you have come. There are a great many things that one can yet be a
+little glad for; but you must make haste to lie down, for we shall soon
+enough be called to the march."</p>
+
+<p>The beds shaken down on the floor of the waggon were covered with
+reclining women. Some of them squeezed themselves together to make the
+place Elvira had vacated large enough for two. Susannah stretched
+herself out, loathing with her senses the crowded bed, but with a tender
+heart for her fellow-sufferers. After the long dumb weeks of her stern
+sorrow, after that day's revolt of injured sentiment, she felt that it
+was worth while to have come here if only to have made some one else, as
+Elvira had said, "a little glad."</p>
+
+<p>The dawn came sighing fitfully, long sighs that rose in the distant
+fields to the east meeting them in their pilgrimage and dying away
+westward; the dawn wept also, scattering her tears upon them in like
+transient showers.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira found her own horse. The Danite had used yesterday the animal he
+had provided for Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"But what right have I to his horse?" Susannah began her question
+impetuously, but Elvira silenced her.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! Don't let the other women know that it isn't yours. Poor things,
+they will begin to ask why it isn't theirs. Do you think that we are
+living on bowing terms, curtseying to each other and saying, 'After you,
+madam, if you please'?"</p>
+
+<p>Elvira was changed. Terror had at last done its work. Her pretty
+features were drawn with anxiety; her eye glittered.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been baptized," she said to Susannah in hard tones. "When I saw
+the water red with blood I went down into it."</p>
+
+<p>Eastward, facing the gusty sobs of the winter morning, they went. The
+road was soft, and hundreds of feet treading in front of them had
+kneaded water and earth together into a slippery mass. As far as could
+be seen in front and behind, the line of the pilgrimage stretched, women
+and children plodding with burdens on their backs, men pushing
+hand-carts before them, only here and there a waggon or a group of
+horses.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira took up several children on her horse, and pointed out to
+Susannah a sickly woman to whom she could give a turn upon the pillion
+that she herself had ridden during the night. So they began one of many
+weary days.</p>
+
+<p>To the good the necessities of compassion are as strong as are the
+necessities of selfishness to the wicked. Within a day or two both
+Susannah and Elvira had given up their horses entirely to women who had
+been taken ill by the way. At first they plodded arm in arm, thinking
+that merely to walk was all that their strength could endure; but there
+were other women who had children to carry, women even who must push
+hand-carts before them, and there were little children who sank one by
+one exhausted on the winter road, as lambs fall when their mothers are
+driven far.</p>
+
+<p>After the march had continued for a few days there was much illness. All
+clothing and bedding was wet with the winter rain, chilled and stiff
+with the frosts. On the faces of many the unnatural flush and excitement
+of fever were seen, and other faces grew pallid, the lips blue or dark,
+and the eyes sunken. To all who retained the natural hue and pulses of
+health a heavier burden was added every day because of the help they
+must needs give if they would not bury too many of their comrades by the
+wayside. In that sad caravan souls were born into the world or freed
+from it by death almost every hour.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was greatly struck by the meek manner of the boldest and
+roughest of the Mormon leaders in their dealings with the parties of
+Missouri militia who, with the ostensible purpose of defending Missouri
+homesteads from Mormon violence, drove the stricken multitude as with
+goads. She had learned from her husband what the strength of true
+meekness could be, the lightness of heart which commits itself to God,
+who judgeth righteously, the glance of love that has no reserve of
+hatred, the infinite force that can afford to be gentle. Such a spirit
+had upheld Angel Halsey, but his widow looked in vain among the leaders
+of this band for a face that bespoke the same upholding. She soon
+perceived that there was among them a free-masonry of understanding, and
+that their mildness was assumed to serve the temporary purpose. By many
+a prayer she heard breathed, which was in truth, though not in form, a
+curse, she knew that in the souls of Halsey's successors there was no
+forgiveness, yet her heart went out in sympathy to men who were
+sacrificing their own sense of honour, holding in check their most
+delicious impulses of revenge, for the sake of being worthy shepherds to
+the weak.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you love them the less because they are not angels?" asked Elvira.
+"Have you forgiven?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah shuddered at the intensity of the hard low tones, the passion
+in the word "love," the sneer in the word "forgive." Yet she knew that
+the rage against injustice which in youth had driven her forth upon this
+journey had, since the death of her child, changed into such fierce
+hatred of the persecutors that she could, except for very fear of
+herself, have taken upon her own soul the Danite's vow. In these days
+the pain of bodily suffering or heart-felt grief was as nothing compared
+with her agony when at times waves of this hatred passed over her heart.</p>
+
+<p>The two friends were walking together, pushing before them a small cart
+in which, on the top of the bundles of household goods, a wretched woman
+and her newborn child were lying, covered under a scanty tarpauling from
+the driving sleet. The mud splashed beneath their feet; Susannah had
+little breath or strength for speech. Elvira, more slightly made, in
+every way more fragile, had seemed to develop, with every new phase of
+suffering, more strength of muscle and hatred and love.</p>
+
+<p>They passed now two of the leaders. It was the custom for a certain
+number of these men to go forward and station themselves in pairs at
+intervals upon the road, cheering each group as it passed them, noting
+with careful eyes if any ill could be remedied by change of posture or
+exchange of burdens. One of them now, seeing the work to which Susannah
+had set herself, interfered. He was about sixty years of age, coarse in
+appearance, an elder whose wife and family Susannah knew by reputation.
+He and his fellows called a halt, looking for some man who might push
+the cart, but there was none within sight who was not already
+overburdened, nor was there a waggon that was not already overfilled
+with the sick and exhausted. The elder, whose name happened to be
+Darling, found in this particular instance reason to swerve from his
+position of guard. He left the post in charge of his fellow and pushed
+the cart. It was a habit with many of these leaders to seek to lighten
+the way by jocularities, and Susannah had before observed that, whether
+the jests arose with ease or effort from the heavy hearts of those who
+made them, a large proportion of the people were evidently cheered
+thereby. She could put aside her own tastes for the public good; she
+could even excuse when this rough comfort was offered to herself.
+Darling, labouring behind the cart, made light of the service he
+rendered.</p>
+
+<p>He said first that the newborn babe must be called after him, and when
+he learned its sex he gave permission to the ladies to decide between
+them which should share this honour.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall it be 'darling Susannah'?" he asked, making gentle his tone as he
+addressed the stately widow, "or shall it be 'Elvira darling'?" This
+time he turned his head with a broader smile toward Elvira's sharp
+little features.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah felt that her hypersensitive nerves could almost have called
+his smile a leer; but she looked at the man's broad face, whose lines
+told of no resources of thought, no great natural capacity for heroism,
+and yet were furrowed by the sharpness of this persecution. The face
+would have been fat had it not been half-starved. It was pale now under
+the ill-kempt hair, and the set purpose of helpfulness was stamped upon
+it. She took back the word "leer" out of mere respect. Darling had given
+away his shoes; he was walking barefoot; he had given away coat and vest
+also, and the rotund lines of his figure were unpleasantly obvious under
+the wet shirt, and yet Susannah knew and bowed to the fact that some
+sick man or little child was wrapped in the garments that were gone.</p>
+
+<p>But Elvira was expressing with hysterical warmth the same sentiments.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'll feel it an honour to have my name joined with yours. I
+haven't got the length of taking off my shoes yet."</p>
+
+<p>Darling began to sing one of the inspiriting Mormon hymns.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When Joseph to Cumorah came."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Poor Joe!" Elvira spoke to the elder in a confidential whisper, "when
+he cheated over the bank I thought some fiend had put a ring in his
+nose, and was leading him out to dance, and that I should be able to sit
+and laugh. Now he's lying upon straw in the gaol. What will they do to
+him if they lynch him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tear him limb from limb," whispered Darling, also under his breath. He
+was probably shrewd enough to know the force of Smith's suffering in
+stimulating the piety of the faithful, but truth, and grief concerning
+the truth, were in his words also. He sighed a big sincere sigh, and
+repeated sadly, "Tear him limb from limb, or burn him to death by a slow
+fire." Such atrocities, as practised upon criminal negroes, were not
+unknown in the locality, which gave the elder's words a graphic power,
+but Elvira's answer was wholly unexpected.</p>
+
+<p>"How droll!" she returned.</p>
+
+<p>The elder was annoyed. He had not refined susceptibilities which sought
+immediate relief from the dreadful pictures he had suggested, nor did he
+at all comprehend that her rippling smile was hysterical. "I don't see
+anything droll about it, sister," he said sulkily.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you? Now, it all seems to me very droll&mdash;you splashing along
+there barefoot, why" (she drew back a little to get the better view,
+laughing excitedly), "you've no idea how ridiculous you look; and Mrs.
+Halsey stalking along like a dignified ghost, afraid that you and I will
+kiss one another if we take to whispering, and this woman dying here
+with her head resting on a sack of potatoes, and the impudent little
+person you've just christened intruding herself upon the world only to
+go out of it again, and all these fine people in Missouri rubbing their
+hands and thinking they have done such a noble deed. I think," she
+added, laughing more loudly, "that they are the drollest part of it
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"This nation will find that there's a sequel to it that they won't laugh
+at." These words of Darling came from some region underneath that of his
+ordinary conversation, as a man takes a dagger from under his cloak and
+lets it flash ere he hides it again. "The government of these United
+States that has laughed at our sufferings will rue the day."</p>
+
+<p>"Even your saying that is very droll, but I love you for it." Elvira
+lifted both her hands as if testifying to her own sincerity. "I love you
+for it."</p>
+
+<p>The elder thought it needful here to be again jocose. "Oh, come now, I
+am married."</p>
+
+<p>Elvira did not feel herself insulted. "These United States," she cried,
+"they cackle over the word 'freedom' like so many hens that have each of
+them laid an egg and go strutting and boasting while the housewife
+empties their nests. The housewife represents the natural course of
+events, and in this case her name is 'Mrs. Mobocracy.'"</p>
+
+<p>At other times, after a long period of silence, Elvira would burst forth
+in excited soliloquy audible to Susannah and others about her. On the
+last day when they were descending the hills to the Mississippi her
+increasing excitement culminated in a greater demonstration. The sun was
+shining, and a clear frost had hardened the roads. Elvira broke forth
+thus&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is Joe Smith who is conducting this march. We say that he is lying
+in gaol," she laughed. "In gaol is he? Have they got him safe? But it
+was he who taught all these men to work together, one under the other,
+and none of them kicking; and it was he who taught these women and
+children to do as they are bid&mdash;a wonderful thing that in the land of
+the free. It was he who taught one and all of us to be kind to each
+other, to the poor and the sick and the young, to the very beasts. Do
+you remember that when they caught our prophet at Hiram and dragged him
+out to be beaten and insulted, they had first to take from his arms a
+sick motherless baby that he was sitting up all night to nurse? Do you
+remember how he gave commandment about the animals? how he said that any
+man striking a beast in anger was thrown so far back on his road to
+heaven?" She paused when she had thrown out this question, and the men
+and women within hearing answered in broken chorus, "Yes, blessed be the
+Lord; we do remember."</p>
+
+<p>"And who was it that taught us to give up the filthy Gentile habits of
+strong drink and tobacco?" (Again in the pause the chorus of
+thanksgiving to Heaven was heard.) "It was Joe Smith," Elvira cried more
+loudly. "And when the Gentiles thought that we would be scattered and
+separated and ruined, his spirit has gone like a banner before us.
+Twice they have taken our lands that we bought with our own money and
+cleared with our own hands, and the houses that we have built, and cast
+us out destitute, but we are not destroyed."</p>
+
+<p>The enthusiasm of the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to
+her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her
+small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down,
+but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a prophet, and a
+great prophet."</p>
+
+<p>And the people around her answered again, "Blessed be the name of the
+Lord."</p>
+
+<p>It was whispered about the camp that the spirit of prophecy had fallen
+upon Elvira Halsey.</p>
+
+<p>On the afternoon of that day they saw the ice that floated in large
+cakes on the breast of the Mississippi flash back the sunbeams to their
+straining eyes. The sight of the limits of the hostile State from which
+they were flying was a great joy to every one of them. Susannah felt her
+heart leap; Elvira, with the growing tendency to cling to her which she
+had displayed since their last meeting, cast her arms around her and
+sobbed for joy.</p>
+
+<p>After this blessed glimpse of the river they went down through the
+recesses of a low forest, the frost and the sunshine still inspiriting
+them. As they went, the melody of a hymn was taken up from one end of
+the caravan to the other by all those well enough to join in the song.
+It was a swinging triumphant air, and Susannah found herself uplifted
+for the first time since the days of her baptism upon the party spirit
+of the sect, and singing with them, although she could only catch the
+words of the refrain often repeated,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Missouri,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In her lawless fury,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without judge or jury,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drove the Saints and spilt their blood."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Again the mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As
+Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship,
+imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this
+motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of
+reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of
+her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. The
+true secret of human leadership is, perhaps, known only to the Divine
+mind, perhaps also to the Satanic. It would certainly seem that the men
+who chance upon the power and wield it, have often little understanding
+of the law by which they work, and their critics less.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVa" id="CHAPTER_XVa"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The Mississippi was filled with large cakes of floating ice. Another
+company which had gone out from Far West some weeks before was still
+encamped on the Missouri banks of the river. Yet other companies from
+Far West came up before the main body of the Saints with which Susannah
+had travelled was able to cross. The surrounding woods were cut down to
+make shanties; the surrounding country was scoured for food. In the
+intervening weeks, while they lay encamped on the banks, the last enemy
+to be vanquished in that region, the malarial fever, grappled with the
+sect and dealt deadly wounds. Illinois, shocked by the cruelty of her
+sister State, held out kind hands and fed the fugitives to some extent,
+and when April came, helped them to cross the river.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira had been ill in one of the women's sheds, now shrieking in hot
+delirium, now shaken with ague as if by a strong beast that worried its
+prey. When they at last crossed the river to the city of Quincy,
+Susannah was established with her charge, the one legacy of relationship
+Halsey had left her, in a meagre home with some of the Saints who
+already lived there.</p>
+
+<p>Within a few days Susannah went to the tithing office, which had been
+swiftly established for the relief of the destitute Saints, and asked
+for paper on which she could write a letter. It was her first chance,
+since leaving her last asylum, of writing the proposed letter to Ephraim
+Croom. Elder Darling was officiating. She fancied that he looked at her
+with rude curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Until this moment she had presented so sad an exterior, had seemed so
+indifferent to all the ills of their common lot, that Darling and the
+other men who had dealings with her had stood not a little in awe. As
+outward physical details of suffering always appeal more largely to
+common sympathy than inward grief, the manner of her loss had set a
+temporary crown upon her head, to which the elders had knelt, refusing
+to admonish her because she took no part in their public services, or
+because, except for attention to the sick, she did not give much sign of
+social comradeship.</p>
+
+<p>Now when she asked for the paper, Darling felt that the ice was
+beginning to break, and gave what seemed to him genial encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>"First time that you've asked for anything but daily rations, Sister
+Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all
+things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous
+drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to&mdash;enjoy. Well now, I
+was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than
+welcome to such as there is."</p>
+
+<p>The stores indeed were scanty enough; food, cloth, household utensils, a
+little stationery, a large pile of devotional books, were arranged in
+meagre order in the shed used as a warehouse. Darling had as yet
+scarcely respectable clothes to wear, but Susannah was astonished only
+at the energy that had in a few days collected so much, at the order and
+patient kindliness which ruled in this poverty-stricken administration.
+Already those who could work paid into the common store, and those who
+had lost all had but to state their needs to have them supplied as well
+as might be.</p>
+
+<p>"One, two, three&mdash;will three sheets be enough, Sister Halsey? You've
+been hearing, I suppose, that Mr. Smith is going to be moved to the town
+of Boome, and that he is going to be allowed to get his letters now?
+He'd be real cheered to hear from you, although"&mdash;he added this with
+decent haste&mdash;"it will be a great grief to him to hear of your loss!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is he well?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The State authorities are in a fine to-do about him, I suppose you
+know, sister, for they can't find a single charge to bring him to trial
+on. You bet the trial would have been on long ago if they'd had a
+single leg to stand on. Anything else that I can serve you with to-day?
+We've got some new women's shawls and hats come in. Won't you just step
+here and have a look at them? No? Well, next time; but there ain't one
+of our women as doesn't want one of them new bonnets."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah went out into the spring on the outskirts of the town. The
+birds were singing; everywhere the dandelions swelled out their happy
+tufted breasts to the sunshine; even a long worm that she noticed
+crawling lazily in the heat spoke to her of enjoyment of some sort. Her
+own heart leaped, and she thought it was in answer to the spring. She
+forgot the dire fates with which she had been grappling, forgot to hate
+and to grieve.</p>
+
+<p>In the small wooden room that she shared with Elvira, while the invalid
+slept, she wrote to Ephraim, telling him all that had befallen her. She
+confessed to Ephraim the passion of hatred which had long tormented her,
+but she added, "To-day I do not feel it; to-day, with the sweet voices
+of the birds everywhere in my ears, I feel that if I could be beside you
+again you could teach me to forgive as my husband forgave, for I do know
+to-day that in forgiveness alone is the true triumph, the only healing.
+I am more one with my husband's sect now than I ever was in heart and
+hope. I long to see it triumphant; I long to see its enemies abashed;
+but I will leave this people and come back to you, if you will have me,
+for with regard to their religious faith my life with them is a lie."</p>
+
+<p>The writing took so long that when she carried the letter again to the
+tithing office to be stamped and sent, the post-bag of that day had
+already gone. Later, when the office was closed to the public and Elder
+Darling was alone, he took up the letter which Susannah had brought and
+looked at it curiously. His eyes had caught the address. He was not sure
+that he would have put it in the bag even if it had been in time, and
+now it was clearly his duty to consider. His was a mind in which there
+was no place for platonic friendship, and Susannah was obviously a most
+desirable piece of property to the struggling Church. The Church had
+provided the paper for this letter, must needs provide the stamp; he was
+officially responsible to the Church. The elder had been an honest man
+according to the average notions of honesty until within the last weeks,
+when stress of circumstance had made him reconsider, not for himself but
+for others, more than one rule of life, and obtain larger latitude. The
+building up of the Church in her present sore strait was surely an end
+to override small scruples. He acted now as an official, as a priest,
+when, after a good many painful qualms of conscience, he opened the
+letter. After having read its contents, he became convinced that it was
+for the good of Susannah's own soul that it should not go.</p>
+
+<p>The ground about Quincy had been drained; the town was comparatively
+healthy; in a few days more some two thousand of the fugitives felt
+again the pulse of life in their veins. Then they looked abroad and
+clasped every man the hand of his neighbour, and said "Thanks be to
+God," and even embraced one another in the joy of relief. History often
+shows how exuberant is the joy of human nature at escape, and that the
+impulse of joy is almost one with the impulse of affection. At the
+abatement of the London plague we see Britons kiss each other in the
+streets, and at the relief of besieged towns, in our own day, staid
+persons have caressed one another, unmindful of what they did. So it was
+now with the members of this driven sect. The spirit of joy and a closer
+bond of affection went infectiously through the gathering Church. Upon
+the first Sunday they met together in the open air, and sang words that
+they verily believed had been written in particular prophecy for
+themselves at this very hour.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If it had not been the Lord that was on our side."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The psalm rose from every throat with the swelling tide of joy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"If it had not been the Lord that was on our side when men rose up
+against us."</p></div>
+
+<p>Susannah, advancing, a little belated, to the rural preaching which was
+held in a dip of the plain, heard the lusty chant of irrepressible
+gladness rising to the blue heavens, and quickened her steps. In spite
+of herself she was carried into song by the enthusiasm which seemed to
+dart like a flame from the assembled multitude and enveloped her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us as a prey to their
+teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the
+fowler: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the
+name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth."</p></div>
+
+<p>While she was exalted by the song she saw the face of her friend the
+Danite for the first time since the night on which they had ridden so
+far together. He was standing now upon the outskirts of the crowd as one
+who had newly come from a solitary journey. When he met Susannah's eye
+his solitary look passed into one of lofty and intense comradeship. He
+ran to her and embraced her, and emptied an inner pocket of a purse of
+money which he thrust eagerly into her possession.</p>
+
+<p>"I have killed one of them," he said, speaking eagerly, as a child tells
+of some exploit. "His pockets were fat with money, and it is yours."</p>
+
+<p>"See!" He took the fragment of linen upon which the stain of Halsey's
+blood had turned dark with time, and showed her a new and brighter stain
+upon its edges.</p>
+
+<p>All around them were men and women, who now, for the first time since
+the hour of some terrible parting, spied kindred or comrades. By a
+common impulse these moved toward one another, and there was an
+interlude in the service for sobs of joy and frantic embracings, and
+many men and women clasped one another who could claim no kindred, and
+none forbade, for tears of mutual love were in all eyes.</p>
+
+<p>After that, in the streets or in chance meetings in the houses, the
+remembrance of this festival of rapturous comradeship gave a new
+standard to the manners of private life. The Saints had, as it were,
+passed from death unto life; former things had passed away; the praises
+of God were ever upon their lips; they entered with joy into a kingdom
+of love which they doubted not God had ordained for his elect; many a
+command of Scripture became illumined with a new practical meaning.
+"Greet <i>all</i> the brethren with a holy kiss." "Greet ye one another with
+a kiss of charity."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was not much abroad, but she saw the new customs inaugurated.
+Believing that they must be transient, knowing, too, that the fierce
+undercurrent that they expressed must have outlet, and was not of that
+range of emotions which had to do with the common relationships of life,
+she felt no shock of offended sentiment. But in a short space of time,
+as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature
+of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds. This grieved her
+because of the sacred memory of her husband's efforts for these people,
+and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous
+personal desire that they should acquit themselves well. Just here she
+found occupation; she gathered the young girls about her in a temporary
+school, and set herself to soothe and calm the excitement of the women.
+The work was intended to last but a few weeks, until Ephraim's answer
+came.</p>
+
+<p>To the unspeakable joy of his followers, Joseph Smith appeared suddenly
+in Quincy. It appeared to be true, as Darling said, that the Missouri
+authorities could in fact find no charge on which to try him.</p>
+
+<p>Smith, with his brother Hyrum and their fellows, had suffered severely,
+but later their confinement had been more easy, and the news of the
+triumphant gathering of his people, together with the excitement of the
+escape, had induced in Smith a mood which spurned past failures with a
+foot that sped to a new goal. The acclamation, the sincere and touching
+joy, with which Smith was received by men and women and children, were
+enough to raise any man in his own esteem, and to set free the ambition
+which had been perhaps drooping in confinement.</p>
+
+<p>Smith had not been in Quincy twenty-four hours before he mastered the
+situation there in all its details. He promptly sent out a decree
+against the new doctrine of what he called "lax manners." He preached a
+great sermon in the open air that night. "A man shall kiss his own wife
+and daughters and no other women," said Smith. The elders who had
+preached from St. Paul's texts on the subject were accused of error and
+called upon to recant. Smith commanded that the women should work and
+the children should study, and he publicly pronounced Susannah to be a
+fitting model for the women and a fitting teacher for the young.
+Susannah had not as yet met Smith face to face when she found herself
+made, as it were, an object of licensed admiration.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIa" id="CHAPTER_XVIa"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was that same evening, after Smith's commendation of Susannah, that
+Darling decided to lay the destruction of her letter before the prophet,
+hoping for approval.</p>
+
+<p>Smith was looking over Darling's accounts in the tithing office, giving
+voluminous and minute directions. The May night had closed in. The men
+were in a corner of the large shed in which the stores were kept, a
+corner fenced off for an office by a low wooden partition. The candle
+flickered on the table between them.</p>
+
+<p>The business side of Smith's soul was uppermost. He had power to keep in
+mind a huge number of details, and to classify them, and he estimated
+the relative importance of the classes as no other man would have
+estimated it.</p>
+
+<p>Darling interrupted before Smith's interest in business began to wane.
+He prefaced his communication concerning Susannah by speaking of the
+much shepherding needed by the sheep. Some, he said, had done worse than
+be lax in manners; some had presumed to have revelations; some had
+doubted the faith.</p>
+
+<p>Here Darling paused, feeling sure of rousing Smith to the mood he
+desired.</p>
+
+<p>At the mention of revelations Smith's soul took a turn, like a ball on
+its axis; the plain speech that he had been using about business and
+stores and accounts changed into phraseology of a Scriptural cast, and
+the shrewd glance of his blue eye into a more distraught and distant
+look. Heretofore, as Darling well knew, heresy had been a greater evil
+in his eyes than any other; but Smith had come now out of long months of
+prison; days and nights in which a horrible death had faced him closely
+had not passed over this particular soul of his dreams without moulding
+it. It is noticed by all his historians that after this period he spoke
+little "by revelation," in comparison with his former full habit in this
+respect. At Darling's abrupt speech he sighed heavily. He looked, not at
+Darling as before, but at some vague object beyond him.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy," he said
+wearily, and then, gathering himself up with more pompous unction, he
+asked of the surprised Darling, "Who art thou that judgest another?"</p>
+
+<p>Darling had grown fatter since he came to Quincy; the lines of haggard
+care were still upon his face, but were modified by dimples of good
+cheer. Much taken aback by the unexpected rebuff, he rubbed his head.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mr. Smith, if they are all going to be allowed to think whatever
+they like&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The obvious difficulty of church government under these conditions
+confronted the nobler impulse of humility in the visionary's mind. "When
+have I said, Brother Darling, that they all should think what they like?
+But, behold, I say unto thee, it is not with the Lord to save with many
+or with few, but by whom he will send."</p>
+
+<p>This was a little vague as to grammar and as to sense, but Darling had
+not the ability to criticise. He only perceived that to secure
+commendation he must be tactful in the setting forth of his act.</p>
+
+<p>"It was in the case of Sister Susannah Halsey&mdash;" he began again
+apologetically.</p>
+
+<p>A more eager look came into Smith's eyes; still a third phase of his
+character there was, the soul of his personal affections, and this began
+to merge now with his religious self. "Hath she prophesied? Hath any
+revelation been granted to her?"</p>
+
+<p>If Darling had not understood the prophetical vein, he did understand a
+certain vibration in this tone. "Ha!" thought he, "if the prophet ain't
+a bit soft on her himself I'm out." He had lowered his eyes, and now he
+said evasively, "It is our sister Elvira on whom the spirit of prophecy
+has fallen; you will have heard how she gave praise concerning you
+before the Saints upon the road and was moved to dance before the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>Smith saw through the evasion, but by shrewd reading of the
+sanctimonious face, saw also the inward suspicion as clearly as if
+Darling had spoken it. His tone and manner betrayed him no more.</p>
+
+<p>"The head of our sister Elvira is not always set firmly on her
+shoulders," he remarked, "but I am glad if the Lord has given her
+grace."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been hoping that he'd give grace to our sister Susannah, for she's
+been writing a letter to say as how she was without faith and wanting to
+leave us."</p>
+
+<p>Smith answered him now only with a cool silence that puzzled his coarser
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"'Twas in our first days here, when a good many of the women were
+flighty, and Elvira Halsey, she was ill enough to have worked the
+patience out of any one as they work the milk out of butter, and Sister
+Susannah came with a letter. She gave it to me unsealed."</p>
+
+<p>"Was she without wax to seal it?" interrupted Smith in a casual tone.
+Darling could not know that the thought of such poverty wrung Smith's
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Waal, I dunno" (which was a lie). "Mebbe she had no wax&mdash;I didn't think
+of that, but anyhow she gave me the letter. 'Twas too late for the mail;
+'twas too heavy for one stamp. An' I didn't like to tell her, poor
+thing, that we'd mighty little to spend on stamps. So after she'd gone I
+just had a look to see who it was to."</p>
+
+<p>"The address would be on the outside?" Smith rose, hat in hand, as if to
+depart, but fixed his eyes on the candle till Darling should have done.</p>
+
+<p>"The name gave me very little hint as to whether the matter was worth
+the two stamps, so I just had a glance inside. Thought it might be but a
+line asking money of her friends, which, under the sad circumstances, of
+course I knew you'd rather the Church would supply."</p>
+
+<p>This drew the first spark of the approval he was expecting. "Certainly,
+certainly, the widows and the orphans of those who have perished for the
+truth must ever be our most tender care."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly so, prophet; I knew that would be your opinion; so when I saw
+that our sister had felt drove to asking for money from some fellow&mdash;I
+guess there must have been some sweethearting between him and her before
+she married Halsey. She said in this letter that she'd go to him if he'd
+send her cash. She said as how she thought the religion of the
+Latter-Day Saints was a lie; but of course I could see it was not her
+right judgment, that she was awful lonesome."</p>
+
+<p>"It was taking a great liberty, Mr. Darling." Smith tapped his stick
+upon the floor. He was far more angry than he showed, for policy had
+laid a soft hand of reminder on his shoulder. "Our sister, Mrs. Halsey,
+is not&mdash;" he coughed slightly, and sought by prophetical phrases to
+explain that Susannah was not upon the level of Darling and his
+kind&mdash;"is not, as it would be said in the Scriptures, among those who
+deck themselves with crisping pins or are busybodies, but she is as that
+lady to whom John wrote (and the letter is preserved unto the
+edification of the Church unto this day); for it was revealed unto me in
+the beginning that she was the elect sister, and to sit as one who
+judges&mdash;as one who judges Israel." He was just going to add in the flow
+of his phrases "upon twelve thrones," but the words died because even he
+perceived the lack of sense.</p>
+
+<p>Darling grew testy. "Waal, I dunno, but it seems to me that if she'd
+gone off by now to be Mrs. Ephraim Croom somewheres in the East there
+wouldn't be much more elect sister about her."</p>
+
+<p>"The gentleman whose name you have just been mentioning, Mr. Darling, is
+the lady's uncle. I was reared alongside them, and I know." He knew that
+he fibbed between uncle and cousin, but the slip was so slight and the
+end so worthy&mdash;to silence Darling.</p>
+
+<p>"'Twas no uncle that she wrote that 'ere letter to," said Darling hotly.
+He stuck out his legs and leant back in his chair, the picture of
+offence.</p>
+
+<p>"You are mistaken concerning the meaning of the letter, Brother Darling,
+and it appears to me that in casting your eyes upon it you have gone
+beyond what is written concerning the duty of an elder; but as to your
+duty in destroying it&mdash;considering that our sister asked for money,
+which it is our duty and privilege to supply&mdash;But I promised Emmar to be
+back soon. I will consult the Lord, Brother Darling, and have a word
+with you in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>Smith tramped with dignity over the long wooden floor of the darkened
+shed and let himself out with decisive clatter of the latch.</p>
+
+<p>To his right lay the wooden town with twinkling lights, to his left the
+black prairie, and above the crystal vast a moonless night, so clear
+that the upward glance almost saw the perspective between nearer and
+farther stars innumerable.</p>
+
+<p>This man was at all times possessed with the sense of otherness, sense
+of a presence around and above. He was no sooner beneath the stars than
+he hung his head as if some one saw him. With shame and pain written in
+the attitude of his hulking figure, he skulked out into the black
+fields.</p>
+
+<p>Later that night, a lad, not of the Mormon brotherhood, making his way
+home in the dark to the town of Quincy, a little afraid of the dark, as
+lads are apt to be, was terrified by hearing a voice in the darkness, by
+dimly descrying a man's figure prostrate upon the ground. The lad shrank
+back to a recess of the snake fence. There, trembling, he listened.</p>
+
+<p>The voice in the hoarse whisper of intensity repeated, "Give me&mdash;this
+woman&mdash;give&mdash;give." The breathing, like command rather than prayer, set
+the words grating on the air again and again. "This woman&mdash;this
+woman&mdash;give! give! give!"</p>
+
+<p>The cause of the lad's terror was a strange conviction that the writhing
+creature on the earth was certainly conversing with something not of
+earth, whether God, or angel, or devil he did not ask. He was
+encompassed by the dreadful belief that the other saw and heard what he
+could not.</p>
+
+<p>The prostrate man clenched his fists and struck the black ground on
+which he lay. There was an intense silence, and then again the grating
+breath of a hoarse throat that lay among the grass blades babbled forth
+a multitude of confessions and fiercely-worded supplications which the
+little lad could neither understand nor remember.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sudden change of attitude and voice. The lad saw that the
+man on the grass sat up, and as if he had received an answer, spoke in
+reply, not now in wailing supplication, but in quick whispered argument.
+The lad cowered with a fresh thrill of ghostly terror which burned the
+mad words into his memory.</p>
+
+<p>"The loss would be to thee of the fairest of thine handmaids, and to her
+of her own soul, and to me&mdash;" but here the words of irritable contention
+failed in deep choking sobs. Then, to the lad's perfect dismay, the
+black figure bounded to its feet and the arms were flung about in the
+darkness as if wrestling with an unseen enemy. Now, being desperate, the
+lad darted forth from his nook; passing in tip-toe rush at the back of
+this struggling figure, he sped home in his gust of fear, and, with the
+fantastic secrecy of youth, did not tell what he had heard and seen till
+years had come and gone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIIa" id="CHAPTER_XVIIa"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The May morning was wreathing itself with opening flowers to meet the
+first hour of sunlight when Susannah was startled by hearing that the
+prophet inquired for her. There was in the house where she lived an
+empty chamber, unfurnished because of poverty; it was in this that the
+prophet, who demanded a private audience, awaited her.</p>
+
+<p>So vexed was she at the public advertisement which he had made of her,
+that she forgot the bereavement she had suffered since she last saw him;
+but when she looked up she saw that Smith's face wore signs of emotion
+that he was not trying to conceal.</p>
+
+<p>At first he made an attempt at some unctuous form of address, an effort
+at formality, a mechanical tribute to habit. Failing to finish his
+phrase, he stood before her, not as the lauded leader, not as the
+interesting martyr, but claiming recognition merely as a man, a large,
+coarse man feeling his own coarseness in her presence, a sinful man
+feeling his own sinfulness, but at the same time a man with a warm
+heart, which was now so beating with emotions of shame and pity and glad
+recognition that at first he could not speak, could not raise his eyes
+to hers until the warmth of his feeling rid him of self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had not expected to awake this emotion. She desired nothing
+less than condolence; and yet she was touched by seeing his huge
+strength broken down for the moment by her appearing. When he spoke his
+voice was hoarse.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I told him&mdash;it was my earnest command to him not to go where there
+was danger."</p>
+
+<p>Halsey's name was not spoken, but all through that interview Smith
+appeared to be haunted by his presence. "He was the best man amongst
+us," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband is gone." Susannah hoped by the reticence of her tone to
+ward off further excess of sympathy. "I am no longer bound to your
+Church, Mr. Smith. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I
+hold myself free."</p>
+
+<p>He faced her frankly, but with a glance of searching pain. "It must seem
+a rather poor trade I've chosen if there ain't no truth in it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I did not accuse you of not believing it, Mr. Smith."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I do?"</p>
+
+<p>She remembered the day that he had first shown her his peep-stone with
+simple, childlike importance. How young they had both been! The sunshine
+on the hill, the voice of the golden woodpecker, the scent of the fallen
+beech leaves, came back to her. A decade of terrible years had passed
+over them both, and he stood seeking her faith just as simply.</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried very hard to understand you, Mr. Smith, but I do not. I
+think you must believe most of what you claim for yourself, if not all.
+If you had made your story up for the love of power you wouldn't always
+be wanting the people to get a better education; you would, as they say
+of the Roman Catholic priests, want to keep the people ignorant."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," he said. She found that he was looking at her with intense
+sadness, but there was not a shadow of evasion in the eager look that
+met her steadily.</p>
+
+<p>She went on, looking gravely into his face. "I do not believe that your
+story was false, Mr. Smith, but it seems to me that you must suspect now
+that your visions and the gold plates were hallucination, not reality."
+She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the
+head, not of the heart.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful
+and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or
+not. Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment
+bar.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your heart? Didn't you see how that man Angel&mdash;angel of purity
+if ever one walked in human form&mdash;kissed every day the ground you
+walked upon? And you did not love him. The child&mdash;you thought you cared
+for the child: I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like
+the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his
+grave and died there. There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if
+you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they
+had taken and killed us over there in Missouri." He added, "If you were
+another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little
+shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?"</p>
+
+<p>Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent
+truth. Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had
+said that love, not knowledge, was needed. She had not loved Halsey and
+his child as she might have loved.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character
+because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child;
+now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about
+hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her,
+and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had
+demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not
+with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken
+tears.</p>
+
+<p>"And you," she said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us
+all freely, but why?" The imperious need of truth awoke again. "Why have
+you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly
+threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?" She
+repeated the question. "If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when
+there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could
+survive, or that you would escape death?"</p>
+
+<p>She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to
+realise what she had of respect and friendship for this man.</p>
+
+<p>"I hain't got the courage most people think I have," he replied sadly;
+"I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into
+to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more
+afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them
+there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire. I don't say
+that it would be the same for any of you. I used to preach that it
+would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be
+killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in
+preaching that way; but as for me, I've seen and I've heard."</p>
+
+<p>He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor. It would have
+been a relief to her if he had moved; but he remained just where he
+first stood, strong enough to have this colloquy over without
+restlessness.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"The men who were your witnesses as to the reality of the plates are
+apostate," she said gently.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;you who have been with us from the
+beginning&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it any proof to you that I hadn't the wits nor the education to
+make the book?" His words were wistful.</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on the sill of the open window, the only seat in the room,
+and looked out on the moist earth.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I paid it into the treasury."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you don't believe, maybe you are thinking of going east?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He came a step nearer now. "If you went east who have you to go to? Your
+uncle, he's dead."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah started. "How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Your aunt will be awful jealous of your cousin now she's only got him."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>With this last phrase, which had a good and Scriptural sound, Smith had
+done.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The girl looked up to see the face of the schoolmistress flushed and
+shining with sudden tears.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," said Susannah gently, "when I was your age flowers were given
+to me, but I did not love them half enough."</p>
+
+<p>The maiden tripped away, resolving at heart to heed the admonition,
+although she understood it very vaguely.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah knelt down upon the floor behind the sill, pressing both hands
+upon her breast lest she should cry aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"No! No! No!" she whispered, "I loved Ephraim, and it was because I left
+him that my heart closed up&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah wrote again to Ephraim, to his mother and to Mr.
+Bushnell&mdash;three separate letters. She worked with the more zeal at her
+self-appointed task. So cheerful and energetic was she that she appeared
+to her pupils and acquaintance as a radiant being, and received the most
+genuine honour and affection from the Mormon settlement in Quincy.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIIIa" id="CHAPTER_XVIIIa"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the jubilant Saints at Quincy the prophet could not remain long. He
+journeyed up the banks of the Mississippi. Here and there communities of
+his people welcomed him with touching joy; their numbers and their
+faithfulness must have raised his heart. He came at last to a poor,
+sickly locality, around which the great river took a majestic sweep, and
+here the prophet saw what no one else had seen&mdash;a site of great beauty
+and advantage. The inhabitants were dying of malarial fever. Smith
+bought their lands at a low price and drained them. Thus arose the
+beautiful city of Nauvoo.</p>
+
+<p>In the Illinois State Legislature two parties were nearly equal in
+strength, and both coveted the Mormon vote. When Smith applied for the
+city charter, for charters also for a university and a force of militia
+to be called "The Nauvoo Legion," they were granted, and worded to his
+will.</p>
+
+<p>White limestone, found in great abundance near the surface of the earth,
+served as material for the public buildings and the better houses.
+Wooden houses, and even log huts, were washed with white lime. On three
+sides of the town the air of the beautiful river blew fresh and cool
+from its rippling tide; the surrounding land was fertile. Fortune
+certainly smiled upon the sect that had borne itself so sturdily under
+persecution. The prophet's laws had much to do with the prosperity;
+neither strong drink nor tobacco were admitted within the city limit;
+cleanliness and thrift were enforced.</p>
+
+<p>The Saints in settlement in the town of Quincy and other places remained
+while they could obtain lucrative employment and thus transmit the
+larger tithes for the building up of their future home; but from the
+poorer settlements artisans and farmers flocked to Nauvoo. Thither also
+the missionaries scattered in the eastern States, in England, and in
+further Europe sent the bands of converts who had been kept waiting till
+a city of refuge was founded. It was not long, not many months, before
+fifteen thousand people were hurrying up and down the broad streets of
+the new city.</p>
+
+<p>During the rise of Nauvoo, Emma Smith was living at Quincy in a small
+house with her three children. She was Susannah's best neighbour. The
+prophet's enormous activity was fully occupied with the new city and the
+care of the scattered Church, so that he could not visit his wife often.
+Each time he came he sent for Susannah to listen with Emma to the
+triumphant accounts that he gave of his present successes. He was all
+aglow with the resurrection of his Church, tender towards its renewed
+enthusiasm for himself, compassionate more than ever for the pains it
+had endured; fixed in purpose to establish his suffering and loyal
+people in such a manner as might reward them for all that they had
+undergone. His spirit of revenge against the Gentiles, and especially
+against the perverts from his own sect who had sought to trample it
+down, was also increased; the prayers of the Hebrew Psalmist against the
+enemies of Israel were constantly upon his lips. More than once when at
+Quincy he preached to the little flock there with great effect from the
+blessings and cursings conditionally delivered to Israel in the Book of
+Deuteronomy, arguing that evils of a very material kind were to befall
+apostates, and blessings of a like kind were to be given to the faithful
+in the new city.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not true," Susannah said to him defiantly. "There is no
+righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly
+wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not
+teach a true religion?" As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of
+the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon
+Emma's centre table.</p>
+
+<p>In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word "apostate."
+Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community,
+the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the
+furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against
+perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely
+spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them. Personally she
+had no fear. The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was
+increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked
+exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny. Yet it was but natural, she
+admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed
+were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his
+liberty. The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own
+small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations
+which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he
+were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn
+importance of these things. He said to her that her judgment would
+always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her
+in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if
+they had lived. He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship
+between herself and Emma. He spoke also of Emma's worthiness, and of her
+devotion to himself.</p>
+
+<p>His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken
+of her in the first years. Susannah perceived a change analogous to
+that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself. In the
+beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving
+herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith's words and ways. Now she
+was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children,
+and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of
+remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith's vagaries as unworthy of
+attention. She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and
+appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private
+she grumbled at his personal extravagance. At both these changes
+Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour
+of Ephraim's constancy, they seemed an ill omen. It was because she was
+absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret
+case that she paid less attention to the prophet's remarks.</p>
+
+<p>Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling
+at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon
+settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing
+and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister
+parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly
+and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new
+city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira's hand. Susannah was very
+angry.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial
+fever leaves behind it. Susannah had need to support her, as well as
+herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford. She had
+had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to
+health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady's
+words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had
+slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the
+insane.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and
+his new satellite. She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that
+her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast
+was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly
+but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's
+stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in
+sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the
+period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were
+there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray
+and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the
+proposition they had made.</p>
+
+<p>But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she
+could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending
+towards that obedience, Elvira, curious to see the strangers, entered.</p>
+
+<p>Elvira raised a coquettish finger and told Smith that he was a very
+naughty man. This was a new freak in her conduct toward the prophet.
+Light and frivolous as she had become, the title of prophetess, coveted
+among Mormon women, had been conferred upon her because some strange
+power of divination governed her freaks.</p>
+
+<p>"A very naughty man." With her delicate prettiness, decked in what
+gewgaws she could afford, Elvira stood shaking her forefinger. "You
+don't know why? Oh, fie! you know very well, naughty, naughty creature."</p>
+
+<p>Smith had the air of some unwieldy animal trying to adapt itself to the
+unexpected gambols of a light one. The first supposition was that Elvira
+had in some way learnt the object of his mission, so he began to declare
+it with a reproachful look at Susannah. "Our sister Halsey," he said,
+"does not wish you to wear jewels and beautiful clothes, and yet it is
+said in the Scripture that the clothing of ladies should be even of
+wrought gold."</p>
+
+<p>"Naughty creature," she cried, "don't quote the Scriptures to me. I am
+not the lady you are thinking about. I am not the lady that you come
+here to see."</p>
+
+<p>So intent they all were upon her and her affairs that this statement was
+somewhat puzzling. The only sign that Smith gave that he gathered any
+sense out of the vivacious nonsense she was pleased to talk was that he
+precipitated his explanation.</p>
+
+<p>The brother by his side was very rich; it had been foretold him in a
+vision of the night that when he had professed the Mormon faith a pretty
+wife would be his reward. Smith had had it borne in upon his mind that
+Elvira was the lady designed by the vision. "For," said he unctuously;
+"the Holy Scripture saith that the solitary shall be set in families."</p>
+
+<p>Elvira laughed. "How very amusing," she cried. "And into what family
+shall our sister Susannah be set?"</p>
+
+<p>Smith frowned. "Our sister Susannah," he said, "is not solitary, but is
+surrounded by her spiritual children, to whom she imparts her own
+learning and goodness, to the great benefit of the Church; and I cannot
+but think, Sister Elvira"&mdash;the severity in his voice was growing&mdash;"that
+you are a great care to her, for she toils hard to give you even such
+poor raiment as you are now wearing, not wishing to accept of the bounty
+of the Church, while she would be an example of industry to others."</p>
+
+<p>The hard truth of this statement, combined with the commanding voice and
+manner he now assumed, controlled Elvira. She stood for some minutes
+meekly contemplating her senile and smirking suitor. Susannah protested
+and warned her, but in caprice, as sudden as it was unexpected, Elvira
+decided to comply with the prophet's request without further persuasion
+or command.</p>
+
+<p>When left alone with Susannah she only shrugged her shoulders and said,
+"I saw that I should lose my soul if I didn't; the prophet was so
+determined. Why should we bicker and consider, and why should I fly
+round and round, like a bird round the green eyes of a cat, or try to
+escape half a dozen times like a mouse when it is once caught, when I
+know from the beginning that Joe Smith will curse me if I don't do his
+will?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite mistaken. He was not determined; he told me that he only
+wished to lay the matter before you and let you decide for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Elvira let her white eyelids droop until but a narrow slit of the dark
+eye was visible. "La! child," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"And you cannot seriously think that Smith's curse, even if he were
+barbarous enough to denounce you, could make the slightest difference to
+your soul's salvation. You often talk that way, but you cannot seriously
+think it, Elvira."</p>
+
+<p>But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion's
+mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible
+streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun's Mill.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't speak of it," cried Elvira with a shudder. "Don't you know that
+Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death?
+Didn't Angel Halsey die to teach us that? Weren't we baptized into it by
+being dipped in blood?"</p>
+
+<p>She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals "dipped in
+blood," "dipped in blood."</p>
+
+<p>Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this
+nefarious marriage. The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her
+indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could
+seek. In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate
+entreaty. With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by
+Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.</p>
+
+<p>No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.</p>
+
+<p>After Elvira's departure Susannah began to save out of her little
+income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern
+journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could
+obtain employment. She had little heart for the object of her saving;
+she might, she knew, be going to ignominy and starvation, for with the
+stigma of Mormonism upon her, she felt that it was unlikely that she
+would be received with credit in any town where she was friendless and
+unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Although the community prospered greatly, Smith did not again interfere
+to increase Susannah's school fees. Emma began to talk largely of the
+splendour of Nauvoo, reading from her husband's letters of the Nauvoo
+House, a huge hotel, which was being rapidly and grandly built for the
+perpetual occupation of himself and family and the entertainment of all
+such as the Church of the Saints should delight to honour.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah found it hard to understand why Emma was not taken to Nauvoo
+even before the great house was built for her reception. It was indeed
+commonly reported among the Gentiles at this time that the prophet had
+secretly espoused other wives; but a malignant report of this nature,
+together with accusations of drunkenness and rank dishonesty, had
+persistently followed the sect from its beginning, and, as far as
+Susannah knew, were now, as before, totally untrue. This special report,
+however, reached Emma in an hour of depression, and she came to Susannah
+for sympathy, shaken with grief and indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it mean that they always say that of him when the one thing
+that he's done has been to excommunicate any of the brethren that taught
+any such thing? And there's just been an awful row on in the Council of
+Nauvoo against Sydney Rigdon and some pamphlet he's written on a
+doctrine he calls 'Spiritual Wives,' and Joseph has risen up and cast
+him out, even though he was his best friend."</p>
+
+<p>The reason of the calumny seemed to Susannah clear enough; it was a
+natural one for low-minded politicians who hated Smith to formulate, and
+the religious world outside thought they were doing God service by
+believing any ill of a blasphemer; but this charge was an old one, and
+she probed further to-day for the real cause of Emma's excitement. She
+was first given a letter in which Smith told of Rigdon's
+excommunication.</p>
+
+<p>"Rigdon's doctrine," wrote Smith, "is a vile one because it is held by
+the whole sect of Perfectionists which are now scattered through the
+Churches of the eastern States, and is a proof that the glory of the
+Lord is departed from them, for they say that a man may be married to
+one wife in an earthly manner, and she who is to be his in a spiritual
+and eternal manner may be another woman, and this is vile; therefore
+I've cast out Sydney Rigdon and called him apostate. But it seems to me
+in this matter and in the perpetual slander of the Gentiles it may be
+that it is being shown to us, even as things were shown by outward signs
+at times to the ancient prophets, that there is somewhat concerning the
+existing form of marriage that it would be well to reconsider, for I
+perceive that the more my revelations cause a difference to be set
+between our people and the Gentiles, the more shall we be bound closely
+together, which unity is undoubtedly of the Lord."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah always found it difficult to gather much information from the
+prophet's vague and incoherent style. "Has he ever written anything else
+about this affair of Rigdon's?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Then it transpired that another letter had that day arrived, giving
+another and more graphic account of Rigdon's rebellion and overthrow,
+after which Joseph inconsistently wrote:</p>
+
+<p>"Yet with regard to the matter of his heresy it remains undoubtedly true
+for men who are called to some great and special work one woman may be
+needed as a bride upon earth and another woman may be called as a
+spiritual bride" (this word "bride" was crossed out, though left legible
+enough, and "guide" written above it) "to lead him into higher and
+heavenly places prepared of the Lord for this purpose."</p>
+
+<p>After perusing this passage carefully, and with inward laughter at its
+inconsistency, she gave the letter back, endeavouring to render some
+help.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you not observed that your husband's mind is very peculiar? When
+any idea is forcibly suggested to him, all his thoughts seem to eddy
+round it until he thinks that the whole world is to be revolutionised by
+it, and then when diverted to something else he forgets all about it
+like a child, and never thinks of it again perhaps for years."</p>
+
+<p>Emma, unable to comprehend the analysis, drew back offended.</p>
+
+<p>"Joseph has a great deal finer mind than any person I know." The last
+words were levelled with a nettled glance at Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>On Emma's behalf Susannah confidently hoped that the prophet would
+forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories
+which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which
+he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on
+his visionary notions&mdash;never in thought, for he did not seem able to
+exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice&mdash;and
+Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear
+feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier around the
+fold, and in consequence draw its votaries closer together.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after this Emma was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She
+could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered
+career.</p>
+
+<p>For a few days Susannah worked on still with a sense of mission towards
+her pupils, but of necessity also, for her work meant daily bread. It
+produced little more than that.</p>
+
+<p>But at Nauvoo new schools in emulation of the State schools of other
+towns had been set up, and now a teacher with certificates of the latest
+style of education arrived in the Mormon settlement at Quincy,
+commissioned by the prophet to gather all the Mormon youth there into a
+new school under the direction of the Church. Susannah's mission and
+her means of livelihood were alike gone.</p>
+
+<p>The change was made. It was not until Susannah had passed the first
+desolate day of her dethronement that Darling came to her, sent with
+profuse apologies from the prophet and the explanation that the chief
+motive of the change had been to relieve her from labour now that the
+Church was in a position to offer her adequate support. The message was
+accompanied by many compliments upon her work and her fidelity, and a
+document officially signed, in which it was set forth that the part and
+lot which would have pertained to Halsey in the Holy City was considered
+as hers; rooms and entertainment at the Nauvoo House were offered. It
+was handsomely done. Smith in his poverty had been no niggard, and of
+his wealth he was lavish. The documents explained what rooms, size and
+position given, should be hers, what furniture at her disposal, what
+ailment, what allowance from the Treasury for clothing and charity. The
+scale was magnificent. Darling was also commissioned to offer her a
+ticket on one of the river boats to Nauvoo, and his own escort. He urged
+her instant acceptance. Darling had been promoted from his post at
+Quincy to that of postmaster at Nauvoo, and he could not delay his
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah sat long into the night and counted her little hoard, and
+figured to herself what the long-eastward journey, then a matter of
+great expense, would cost. Since Elvira left her she had with all her
+efforts saved hardly fifty dollars. No course lay open to her but to go
+first to Nauvoo, and there compound with Smith for a sum of money to be
+given in return for the relinquishment of all further claim upon the
+Church.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Book_III" id="Book_III"></a><i>Book III.</i></h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Ib" id="CHAPTER_Ib"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In a suite in the pretentious Nauvoo House Susannah found herself
+established.</p>
+
+<p>She stood at her windows and looked east and west upon the fair white
+city, and more immediately upon the broad public square in which
+well-dressed people and handsome equipages were constantly seen. In this
+square a man called Bennet drilled the Nauvoo Legion in the cool of the
+evenings. This man had served in the regular army and had a native
+genius for soldiery. Smith, alive always to the educational importance
+of shows, now provided money lavishly for uniforms, horses, and
+accoutrements, and the Nauvoo Legion formed a much grander spectacle
+than any body of State militia.</p>
+
+<p>Twice a day under Susannah's windows Smith's carriage drew up, a pair of
+fine gray horses carrying the prophet to and fro upon the affairs of
+Church and State. When he took Emma with him Susannah observed that she
+was always richly attired, and the other members of the Mormon
+hierarchy resident in Nauvoo, "bishops," "elders," "apostles,"
+"prophets," passed constantly in and out of the house, positively
+shining in broadcloth and silken hats, their wives and daughters also in
+brilliant array.</p>
+
+<p>Externally the success appeared to be complete, and beyond even the
+visionary's most glorious dreams. In the whole of the city no one was
+poor, no one ignorant of such knowledge as school-books could afford, no
+one drunken. Every one was uplifted and animated beyond their ordinary
+capacity for effort and enjoyment by this material fulfilment of
+prophecy and the more glorious future hope which it involved. Susannah
+was not well rested after her journey when Emma descended upon her with
+lavish gifts of silks and fine feathers. Emma, grown patronising with
+prosperity, always plain and maternal, displayed her gifts and argued
+for their acceptance with broad satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"Joseph says now that the Lord has given us freedom as touching wealth
+and plenty, it looks real mean, when your husband gave all he had to the
+Church in her tribulation, for you to be wearing plain clothes when
+you're riding out with us. What will the folks say? Joseph says it looks
+to him as if you were real offended at being left so long up to Quincy
+when he was only waiting to get your rooms finished."</p>
+
+<p>Carried away, as was only natural, by her husband's doctrine that the
+era of indulgence was ordained and not to be rejected, there was
+temporary deterioration in the fibre of Emma's character.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah would gladly have walked out and seen the beauty of the city
+and its surroundings alone, but she did not think it kind or polite to
+resist the good-natured importunity of her friends. She was invited to
+drive with Smith to a grand review of the Nauvoo Legion which was to
+take place outside the town; then, finding that Emma and the children
+were to occupy another carriage, she made objection. It ended in
+Susannah being driven alone in a very fine carriage. Smith, resplendent
+in uniform and seated upon a very fine charger, rode in his capacity of
+Commander-in-Chief. Several other men whom she had known first in
+homespun, and latterly in cloth, were also riding in bedizened uniforms.
+The scene was very perplexing to Susannah. Elvira, with great display of
+dress and equipage, was not far from her, and waved her hand with
+patronising encouragement. The coach in which were Emma and her children
+presented also a very smart appearance. All the town drove to the scene
+of the review in what splendour they could afford.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was greatly occupied in looking from face to face, striving, to
+recognise some of her husband's friends of earlier days. She fully
+expected to see Smith or some of his friends fall from their saddles,
+as they could be little accustomed to man&#339;uvring such light-footed
+steeds, but she was forced to admit that Smith rode well and his
+officers kept their seats. She had so much to observe, so much to think
+about, she hardly noticed that Smith rode constantly by her carriage,
+pointing out the beauties of the road.</p>
+
+<p>When they stopped at the place of parade, many of the gentlemen in
+uniform approached her, and as this was her first appearance in public,
+Smith performed the introductions. Among them was the Rev. General John
+Bennet, a man who had "knave" written on his countenance, but who
+appeared to have duped Smith, for, as Lieutenant-General of the forces,
+he was actually in command. Her old friend the Danite also came, older
+than when she had seen him last by the hardships of an arduous
+missionary journey. He passed now by the name of "Apostle Heber."
+Susannah was so glad to be able to inquire concerning his welfare, so
+curious to speak with him again and judge of his development, that her
+manner gained the appearance of animation.</p>
+
+<p>After some time Susannah perceived that she was, as it were, holding
+court. In their carriages the other women sat comparatively neglected.
+It was in vain that she tried to put a quick end to this curious and
+undesirable state of things. Smith continued to bring to her side all
+those whom he delighted to honour.</p>
+
+<p>And this was only one of several f&ecirc;tes which took place in rapid
+succession, to all of which Susannah was by some persuasion taken. At
+each she found herself an object of public attention. She was told that
+this occurred because she was a stranger, or out of respect to her
+husband's memory, and she placed more trust at first in these statements
+than a less modest or more worldly-wise woman would have done.</p>
+
+<p>Soon her credulity ceased. She despised her own beauty because it was
+made a gazing stock. An article in the Nauvoo newspaper, officially
+inspired, spoke of her as a "Venus in appearance and an angel at heart."
+She was elsewhere publicly mentioned as the "Venus of Nauvoo."</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed a strange experience, a strange time and place for the
+social <i>d&eacute;but</i> of this beautiful woman. Smith had calculated well when
+in her youth he had told her that her beauty would not diminish but
+increase until her prime was past, but she very modestly inferred that
+she might have passed, as heretofore, without much notice, if an
+agitation concerning her had not urged to admiration a band of men who
+were fast growing luxurious and pleasure-loving, and she knew that Smith
+was the author of that agitation.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared to Susannah more dignified to ignore than to upbraid. She
+secretly laughed, she secretly cried with vexation, but she desired to
+leave the place without betraying her recognition of the homage offered.</p>
+
+<p>She sought to discuss her plan for departure with Emma, but Emma's
+manner had changed to her. It was not jealousy so much as constraint
+that she showed, as if secretly persuaded into unusual reticence.
+Susannah then asked Smith for such a sum of money as he should consider
+to be a right acknowledgment of the property Halsey had given to the
+Church. At this Smith looked greatly aggrieved, and withdrew muttering
+that he would consider her request.</p>
+
+<p>The only sign of this consideration which she immediately received was a
+gift of showily-bound books, and a rich shawl which he had fetched from
+New York.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah's career as the queen of Nauvoo society came to a swift end,
+for she determinedly retired into seclusion. This was not because the
+men who paid court to her were all ignoble. Among the officers of the
+Church or of the Legion there were not few who were wholesome and
+friendly companions, or who, like her early Danite friend, the Apostle
+Heber, had frank modest eyes, incapable of any enthusiasms that were not
+religious. But in her long companionship with Angel Halsey Susannah had
+had her soul deep dyed in a delicate hue of Quaker sentiment. She could
+not admit for a moment that conscious display of personal charm was
+consonant with dignity.</p>
+
+<p>She again sought friendly intercourse with Emma.</p>
+
+<p>"There ain't no use in opposing the Lord," said Emma excitedly. "If the
+Lord, as Joseph says, has given you beauty and wants to set you to be a
+star, or a Venus; or whatever he calls it, in Nauvoo, I don't see that
+there's any good your talking of going away. I guess the Lord'll have
+his own way."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah remembered how before her marriage the bigness of the authority
+quoted had confused her as to the truth of the message. "Ah! Emma,
+Emma," she cried, taking the fat, comfortable hand in her own, "if in
+the first days I had offered a little more humility, a little more love,
+to those to whom I owed duty, I should never have believed what you told
+me about the 'Lord's way,' but I have learned by hard experience, and I
+do not believe you now, Emma." She spoke the name in quicker tone, as if
+recalling her companion to common sense. "Emma," she repeated the name
+with all the tenderness she could muster, "don't you know that it is
+better for me to go away&mdash;better for you, better for <i>us all</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>But Emma was obstinately evasive. She seemed almost like one possessed
+by a hardened spirit, not her own. On the afternoon of that same day she
+bustled cheerfully into Susannah's room asking the loan of what money
+she had to meet a temporary call.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah never had the slightest reason to suspect Emma's good faith and
+good nature. She gave her money without a thought.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIb" id="CHAPTER_IIb"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The parlour which Joseph Smith had provided for Susannah was large and
+high. On its Brussels carpet immense vases of flowers and peacock's
+feathers sprawled; stiff and gaudy furniture was ranged round the
+painted walls; stiff window curtains fell from stiff borders of
+tasteless upholstery. Susannah, long ignorant of anything but deal and
+rag carpets, knew hardly more than Smith how to criticise, and her taste
+was only above his in the fact that she did not admire.</p>
+
+<p>Smith came to reason with the rebellious woman.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah no sooner saw him than she knew that he had come braced to try
+the conclusion with her. He sat himself before her in silence. His
+waistcoat was white, his neck-cloth white, his collar starched and high;
+his thick light hair was carefully oiled according to the fashion of the
+day, and brushed with curling locks upon the sides of the brow. At this
+critical hour Susannah observed him more narrowly than ever before. His
+smooth-shaven face, in spite of all his prosperity, was not so stout now
+as she had seen it in more troublous years; the accentuated arch of the
+eyebrows was more distinct, the beak line of the nose cut more finely.
+She noted certain lines of thickness about the nape of the neck and the
+jaw which in former years had always spoken to her of the
+self-indulgence of which she now accused him; yet she could not see that
+they were more accentuated. She had been schooling her heart to remember
+that Smith had been her husband's friend; Angel Halsey had loved him,
+had daily prayed for his faults and failings, and thanked God for his
+every virtue and success. Through the medium of these memories now
+Susannah looked upon him with the clearness of insight which the more
+divine attitude of mind will always give, the insight which penetrates
+through the evil and is focussed only on the good.</p>
+
+<p>The prophet's breath came quickly, making his words a little thick.
+"Emmar tells me that you have some thoughts of wanting to leave us."</p>
+
+<p>"You know that very well, for I have told you so myself. I want you to
+give me money for my journey. If I can I will repay it, as you well
+know; if not, I will take it instead of all this finery you offer."</p>
+
+<p>He had folded a newspaper in his hand, and now he unfolded it. She was
+surprised to see that his hands trembled slightly as he did so, for she
+had seen him act in many a tragic scene with iron nerve.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tain't often that the Gentile newspapers have a word of justice to
+say about us," he observed. "This is a number of the St. Louis Atlas. It
+seems there's one man on it can speak the truth." He gave forth the name
+of the newspaper as if expecting her to be duly impressed by its
+importance, and she looked at the outspread sheet amazed.</p>
+
+<p>He went on, "There's an article here entitled, 'The City of Nauvoo. The
+Holy City. The City of Joseph.' I'd like to read it to you if you don't
+object, Sister Halsey."</p>
+
+<p>The pronunciation of the last title seemed to inflate him; his hands
+ceased to tremble. A flicker of amusement lighted the gravity of
+Susannah's mind.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph read, "'The city is laid out in streets of convenient width,
+along which are built good houses, and around every good-sized house are
+grounds and gardens. It is incorporated by charter, and contains the
+best institutions of the latest civilisation.'" He gave this the
+emphasis of pause. "Is that true. Sister Halsey, or is it not?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled as upon a child. "Yes, Mr. Smith, it is true."</p>
+
+<p>"'Most conspicuous among the buildings of the Holy City is the temple
+built of white stone upon the hill-top. It is intended as a shrine in
+the western wilderness whereat all nations of the earth may worship, for
+on March 1, 1841, the prophet gave it as an ordinance that people of all
+sects and religions should live and worship in the City if they would,
+and that any person guilty of ridiculing or otherwise deprecating
+another in consequence of his religion should be imprisoned.' Is that
+true?" Smith inquired again. His questions came in the tone of a pompous
+refrain.</p>
+
+<p>"Except in the case of those who have joined you and gone back from your
+doctrine," she said, but not thinking of herself.</p>
+
+<p>He read on: "'Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Smith has attended first to the
+education of his people. The president of the Nauvoo University is
+Professor James Kelly, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and a ripe
+scholar; the professor of English literature is Professor Orson Pratte,
+a man of pure mind and high order of ability, who without early
+advantages has had to educate himself amid great difficulties and has
+achieved learning. The professor of languages is Professor Orson
+Spencer, graduate of Union College, New York, and of the Baptist
+theological seminary of that city. No expense has been spared upon
+school buildings for the youth of both sexes, and the curriculum is
+good.' Is that true?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>He read on: "'The population is made up chiefly from the labouring
+classes of the United States and the manufacturing districts of England.
+They have been grossly misunderstood and shamefully libelled. They are
+at least quite as honest as the rest of us, in this part of the world or
+any other. Ardent spirits as a drink; are not in use among them;
+tobacco is a weed which they almost universally despise. There is not an
+oath to be heard in the city; everywhere the people are cheerful and
+polite; there is not a lounger in the streets. Industry is insisted
+upon, and with the hum of industry the voice of innocent merriment is
+everywhere heard. Now, as to their morality, if you should throw cold
+water upon melted iron, the scene would be terrific because the contrast
+would be so great; so it is with the Saints; if a small portion of
+wickedness happens among them, the contrast between the spirit of
+holiness, and the spirit of darkness is so great that it makes a great
+up-stir and excitement. In other communities the same amount of crime
+would hardly be noticed.'" Again he asked, "Sister Halsey, does this
+evidence of an impartial witness coincide with your observation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of the people it is undoubtedly true," she said. There was a
+reservation in her mind concerning certain leaders in the Church, but
+she did not make it in words.</p>
+
+<p>He read on: "'With a shrewd head like that of the prophet to direct,
+with a spiritual power like his to say "do" and it is done, what wonder
+that this thrifty and virtuous people should have made Nauvoo that which
+its name denotes&mdash;the Beautiful City, the home of peace and joy.'"</p>
+
+<p>He laid down the newspaper upon the marble-topped table, his large hand
+outspread upon it. "My sister, why do you wish to leave this beautiful
+city? It is a place where each may have home and part and lot in its
+delights, but to you <i>all</i> its wealth and power and beauty is offered.
+Did I not say unto you, when as a beautiful damsel you gave up home and
+kindred for the sake of the Church, that you should be as a queen among
+its elect women, riding as in a carriage drawn by white horses and
+receiving the elect from among the nations?"</p>
+
+<p>The recollection of the prophecy which he had delivered concerning her
+upon the desolate autumn road at Fayette brought with it another
+recollection&mdash;that of her parting with Ephraim the same morning&mdash;so
+vividly that her eyes filled with tears. Yet she marvelled too, with
+inquisitive recognition of the miracle, that the words of the visionary,
+then a beggar, should have been so nearly fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite true, Mr. Smith, and very marvellous that what you promised
+me should almost be literally fulfilled. We have come to it, as you also
+foretold, by a path most terrible, and now we arrive at the
+consummation. We live in a palace, and at its doors pilgrims from
+England and all parts of Europe are arriving every day, and the richest
+of gowns, the grandest of carriages, and the whitest of horses are truly
+at my disposal. But there is one discrepancy between your vision and the
+fact&mdash;I will not wear the silk robes, nor welcome the pilgrims with the
+assurance that they have here reached the City of God. I will not
+because I cannot. I refuse to accept from the hand of God such paltry
+things as money and display, or even the honest affluence of our people,
+as compensation for the fire and blood through which we have waded. If
+there be a God who is the shepherd of those who seek him, this is not
+the sort of table that he spreads, this is not the cup which he causes
+to run over"&mdash;she had begun lightly, but her voice became more earnest.
+"Mr. Smith, we have walked through the shadow of death together; if you
+would be exalted in the presence of your enemies, have done with your
+childish delight in such toys."</p>
+
+<p>Smith moved uneasily on his velvet-covered chair, and it, being of a
+rather cheap sort, creaked under his bulk.</p>
+
+<p>"What says it in the end of the Book of Job, Sister Halsey? and what
+compensation did the Lord give for the sore temptations with which he
+had allowed the devil to tempt his servant? As I read, it was fourteen
+thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She gave him credit for knowing the passage by heart; she had the
+rudeness to interrupt. She rose and stood before him. All the long
+latent defiance which her heart had treasured against him found vent in
+her tone, "Very well, Mr. Smith, if that satisfied Job, it will not
+satisfy me."</p>
+
+<p>Smith, cast out of all his shrewd calculations as to what would win
+this woman, fell back upon the inner genius of that priestcraft which so
+often surpassed his conscious intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What would satisfy you?</i>" It was a simple question, and he asked it
+with overwhelming force. "By the hand of trust and affection which your
+husband gave me; by the memory of the beautiful babe that he brought
+first to me for my blessing (and I laid my hand on its little warm head
+and blessed it); by these I claim the right to ask, Sister Halsey, what
+is it that in Nauvoo or in any other city would satisfy you?"</p>
+
+<p>She was humiliated in her own eyes. Alas! she had strong evidence that
+Ephraim's affection, on which she had staked all earthly hope of
+happiness, had in some way failed. Now under Smith's eye all courage to
+hold the unrealised ideal was lost; as the fixed stars twinkle, so her
+faith went out for the moment of his interrogation. Her head sank in a
+shame she could not confess.</p>
+
+<p>While she hesitated he was looking at her shrewdly. "You know not what.
+Shall I tell you? There is but one thing, and that is love&mdash;the love
+that works, for those who are in need. Work for the needy is love to God
+and man, my sister."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, looking at her with a glow of enthusiasm. Whatever he might
+be to others, this man, coarse in his outer nature, but liable always to
+eruptions of the sensitive inward soul of the visionary, was in this
+woman's presence often merely what she compelled him to be. If she had
+known that this was the secret of his power over her, the spell might
+have been less.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it not true, Sister Susannah?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She gave the admission mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>He went on, "I don't take it at all hard that you should feel that we
+are none of us up to you, but feel as you do that we are beneath you,
+for there isn't a lady in the place that's equal to you in delicate ways
+and sense and a mind to study books; but it seems to me that that's a
+reason why you should love us, Sister Halsey. There is work for you to
+do; we need your guiding hand. You say to me that I am content with
+horses and sumptuous living and fine raiment; and knowest thou not that
+there is upon my soul a great burden, even the burden of this great
+people, to go in and out before them and guide them aright? I have need
+of thy counsel, my sister; there's that which at this time is greatly
+agitating my own mind and the minds of our bishops and apostles, Sister
+Halsey, and it is of such nature that we cannot proclaim it openly until
+we know the mind of the Lord. On all other matters we have accepted the
+teaching of the Scriptures. For, behold, we have now the priesthood of
+Aaron in our midst, and the priesthood of Melchizedek, and the rites of
+the temple, save only the spilling of the blood of bulls and goats,
+which has been done away with by the Gospel. We have gone back to the
+first things, as is well known to you, Sister Susannah, and even here in
+the wilderness we have set up our theocracy, and for its civil law we
+have sought where alone such law can be found, in the command given unto
+the children of Israel before they desired a king, just as for all
+spiritual law we have accepted the commands given to the apostles in the
+new dispensation, taking them as they were, without whittling them away
+as a boy whittles a stick with a knife, as all those sects which will
+not hear our voice have done. Now, Sister Susannah, is this true?" He
+put his head a little on one side and looked at her with his eyes
+partially closed.</p>
+
+<p>"You need not take very long to explain that you worship the letter of
+the Scriptures, for I know it already, Mr. Smith."</p>
+
+<p>But he was in full tide, and went on, "When the Book says, 'Heal the
+sick,' we don't say that that means something else, but we set about and
+heal 'em." He slapped his knee with the palm of his hand. "When it says,
+'Cast out devils,' we don't stare round like the other sects and say,
+'There ain't no devils,' but we cast 'em out; and in the same way, when
+the Book says that the priesthood of Aaron and the priesthood after the
+order of Melchizedek shall be serving always in the church and in the
+temple, then we say, 'Amen, so shall it be'; and the same way with
+regard to tithing, for the Lord's tithes are recognised among us, and
+the first-fruits, and the Sabbath day, and all such ordinances, no
+picking and choosing as others."</p>
+
+<p>Then he explained to her again, as in Kirtland, that he was in doubt
+concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched
+the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully
+convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church
+(in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared)
+that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the
+Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews
+and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the
+apostles, and yet they had not preached against this as an evil.</p>
+
+<p>"They did not preach against slavery," said Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"They did not," he said, "and I would say parenthetically, my sister,
+that it may be that our views on that subject, coming from the northern
+States as you and I have done, have not been according to the mind of
+the Lord. I would have no man a slave because of misfortune, but if a
+man proved himself unfit to rule himself, I'm not sure about his being
+free."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you intend to revive slavery in our own race? Will your own people
+when they fail in business be sold, with their wives and children, as
+in the Old Testament?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't see but that it would be a deal less mean to arrange it that
+way than to bring a race of free blacks from their own country and make
+every child they have a slave because he happens to be a nigger." She
+remarked that his mild blue eye lit up with the true flash of the
+indignation of contemplative justice. "There's one thing certain,"
+continued he, "in my Church of the Latter-Day Saints no man shall be a
+slave to his brother because he happens to have a black skin, for, as
+the Scripture says, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin?'"</p>
+
+<p>Surrounded as they were by the atmosphere of slavery, there was the
+resonance of true heroism, of true insight into the right, in his tone,
+but the reason he gave&mdash;could it be possible that he thought that the
+text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice? It was
+obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry
+flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy
+and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence of common men.</p>
+
+<p>He went on, "But, anyhow, it isn't the institootion of slavery that's
+come up for me to decide just here and now. Since we have been blessed
+with peace and prosperity, the female converts that our missionaries
+have been making all over the world (whom they have kept back from
+coming to us, letting no unmarried female come whilst the fires of
+persecution were passing over us) have arrived in great numbers, and the
+question is, Sister Susannah, how are we to steady 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>What seemed so impossible to achieve in a pioneer State had in Nauvoo
+actually been achieved&mdash;the women were in excess of the men. He had, in
+sober truth, a social problem to solve, and the responsibility rested
+alone upon him. Brotherly love having been inculcated, the manners of
+the Saints were cheerful and familiar, more familiar, he said, than he
+desired; but after all that they had endured he was fain to lay upon
+them no greater burden than need be. He appealed to her, asking if on
+his first release from imprisonment he had not been strict in his
+injunctions.</p>
+
+<p>"But now," he said, "who am I that I should be able to take care of all
+the young women that the Lord is sending to us from all parts of the
+world? or am I to deny to them the privilege of coming to live among the
+Lord's people? Am I to say to them that unless they have learning and
+wisdom and are perfect they shall not come? I guess that if it had been
+required of me to be perfect before I came to seek salvation, I wouldn't
+have come at all. But it's just like this&mdash;here they are! and they are
+nothing but poor ignorant working girls from England and Ireland and all
+parts of Europe. And am I to make nunneries to put them into?"</p>
+
+<p>He confessed with some delicacy of language and words of bitter regret
+that there had been of late some cases in Nauvoo such as were common
+enough, alas! in Gentile society, but whose occurrence among the Saints
+had caused excitement. Joseph Smith paced Susannah's room; his
+harassment and distress on behalf of his people were either deeply felt
+or well feigned, and Susannah had no doubt that his feeling was true,
+that phase of him being for the time uppermost. When he came to sit down
+beside her again, it was to sketch the misery to men and women and
+children which existed in Gentile society from this evil, which he
+affirmed to run riot through the warp and woof of so-called orthodox
+communities.</p>
+
+<p>Her ignorance of the world was so great that she assumed this accusation
+to be of the same stuff as the anathemas he constantly cast against the
+integrity of the orthodox clergy. The point that she grasped was that he
+believed the thing that he said. She had at first assumed that should he
+propose to institute polygamy she would know then, once for all, that he
+was a villain; but now this test deserted her. He was meditating this
+step, and it seemed that his arguments, if the facts on which he based
+them were admitted, had some value.</p>
+
+<p>"There's that for one thing, Sister Susannah," Smith went on in a broken
+voice; "it has been a mean sort of thing to have to tell you, but it
+had to be said, and now there's another thing to be considered. Among
+the Gentiles who is it that has the most children? Is it your man that's
+high up in the ranks of society, who has money enough to give them a
+good education, to feed and clothe 'em? or is it your poor man, whose
+children run over one another like little pigs in a sty, and he caring
+nothing for them, and they have rickety bones and are half starved and
+grow up to be idle and steal? I have noticed that a good man is apt to
+have good children, and a clever man is apt to have clever children, and
+a worthless man is apt to have worthless children. Ain't that so? And
+what sort of children do we want the most of? Well, in this way we
+wouldn't let your worthless fellow have any wife at all until he had
+brought forth fruit meet for repentance, and your common man only one;
+but I don't see but that it would be a real benefit to the State if your
+good, all-round man, as would be apt to have pious and clever children,
+had two or three or four families agrowing up to be an honour to him and
+to the Church, if it ain't against the command of the Lord; and in Holy
+Writ the Lord himself says to Solomon that he would have given him as
+many wives as he wanted, barring them being Gentiles."</p>
+
+<p>"I will not argue about the Bible; you and I interpret it very
+differently," she cried. "Your social argument might be well enough if
+it were not that your good man when he had more than one wife <i>would
+cease to be a good man</i>"&mdash;her voice was vibrating with faith&mdash;"and his
+children would therefore have the poorest chance from inheritance or
+training."</p>
+
+<p>He was again pacing, but paused in his ponderous walk, struck by a flaw
+in his argument which he had not before seen. "But if it were commanded
+by the Lord, Sister Susannah?"</p>
+
+<p>"God does not command this wickedness. What you command in his name is
+at your own peril, Mr. Smith."</p>
+
+<p>He paused before her, asking with reflective curiosity, "Why are you so
+sure that it would be wickedness, sister?"</p>
+
+<p>She had not arguments at command; she held fast to her assurance with
+the same dogged unreasoning faith with which Ephraim's mother had of old
+held her belief that this Smith must be an arch-villain; she had put the
+whole power of her volitionary nature upon the side of faith in the
+ideal marriage, although she was painfully conscious that she had come
+across no particle of evidence for the existence of such a state. Out of
+faith, out of mere instinct of heart, which had not worked itself out in
+intelligent thought, she gave her unhesitating judgment. "I say that it
+would be wicked because I <i>feel</i> that it would be wicked; and any good
+woman," she paused and looked him straight in the eyes, "and any good
+man, would know its wickedness without arguments, and without weighing
+all possible considerations."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes fell before hers. He looked not angry, but grieved. As for
+Susannah, in the heat of her indignation she did not know that her own
+long effort to resist the unreasoning acceptance of cut-and-dried
+doctrines and any dogmatic insistance upon opinion had here failed.</p>
+
+<p>Smith stood for some moments before her, and her fire cooled. He sighed
+at her dictum. Then he said gently, "But your judgment in this matter
+has great weight with me, sister, and if I accept it you will perceive
+that you are indeed the elect lady, and that by living in the light of
+your countenance I shall obtain peace."</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult for her not to suppose that her influence was
+beneficial. She thought at the moment that when she had left this place
+she might still correspond with Smith if he desired it. If it was part
+of his eccentricity to be willing to listen to her, why should she not
+be willing to speak, and thus keep his madness under control?</p>
+
+<p>Smith, regarding her, caught the gracious look upon her face which had
+opposed to him so often only a mask of reserve. His imaginative hopes
+were always ready to magnify by many dimensions the smallest fact which
+favoured them. His unsteady mind was fired by the presumption of some
+triumph.</p>
+
+<p>"Have not I, even the prophet of this great people, waited with great
+patience? As the apostle saith, 'Let patience have her perfect work.'"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah started and wondered.</p>
+
+<p>"For behold I did not desire that our dear brother, Angel Halsey, should
+go into the forefront of the battle, nor would I trouble the first grief
+of thy widowhood, but behold I have waited."</p>
+
+<p>"For what?" Her question came sharply. His tone had changed her mood
+suddenly; a memory flashed on her of the ill-written letter which Emma
+had shown her of the phrases concerning the spiritual "bride" or "guide"
+who, even if all licence were denied to humbler folk, was to be a
+prophet's special perquisite. "What have you been waiting for, Mr.
+Smith?</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, but I have waited, sister, until, having eyes, you should see, and
+ears, you should hear, till you should understand that, going in and out
+before this great people, it is necessary for me to seek wisdom in
+counsel, and, above all, of a woman who hath a finer sense than man. And
+it has been revealed to me, sister, that this may only be if thou
+shouldst give the counsels of thy mind and the smile of thy beauty to me
+alone and to none other, for that which is divided is not to be accepted
+for the building up of the Church."</p>
+
+<p>"You would have me believe that you have waited many years with the
+virtue of patience before you say this? Understand yourself better. It
+was not patience; it was fear. You have known perfectly well always that
+I would never have listened to such a proposal for a moment. It has been
+fear and prudence that have hitherto kept you silent. What is it that
+has made you speak now?"</p>
+
+<p>With sharp decisive tones she chid him as children are chidden in anger,
+but childish as he often was, he had yet other elements in his
+character; his blue eyes gave an answering flash that was ominous; the
+droop of his attitude stiffened.</p>
+
+<p>"That which is ordained by the Lord is ordained, sister, and it causeth
+me grief to know that this revelation, which I told thee many years
+since, is yet to be received of thee as a grievous thing,
+nevertheless&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless," she repeated in a mocking tone, as one weary of
+foolishness, "what nevertheless? Let us talk on some better subject, Mr.
+Smith, and after this be kind enough to have no dreams or revelations
+about me. Dream of your Church, if you like. I cannot hinder your
+people's credulity, and I hope that you will continue, as you have
+begun, to lead them in the main by righteous paths. And have your dreams
+and visions about yourself, if you must, for I sometimes think that you
+cannot be much madder than you are now, but be kind enough to leave me
+out of them, for I am going away."</p>
+
+<p>She had now made him very angry. He was standing with flushed face,
+quivering with uncertain impulses of rising wrath, yet he still
+struggled for self-control.</p>
+
+<p>"Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that you should make a mock of
+that which is sacred"&mdash;he gave a gasp here of stifled anger, and there
+was a perceptible note of wounded affection beside the louder one of
+offended vanity&mdash;"of that which is above all sacred," he stuttered, "it
+is not meet&mdash;meet&mdash;to mock&mdash;to mock." The veins on his forehead were
+standing out and growing purple.</p>
+
+<p>She had often heard of Joseph Smith's power of rage, before which all
+the Saints quailed. She saw it now for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>She rose up, trying now a tone of gentle severity. "I spoke lightly
+because your words appeared to me childish and silly, but the more in
+earnest you were, Mr. Smith, the more need there is you should have done
+with a thought that could lead to no good. I am no elect lady. Why do
+you deceive yourself? I have told you before that I do not even believe
+in your religion."</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke she became more and more amazed at the thought of what his
+self-deception must have been, for in his ever-shifting mind he knew her
+infidelity perfectly, and yet had persuaded himself that she would
+accept some fantastic position as prophetess-in-chief.</p>
+
+<p>"How mad you are," she said pityingly, "to know a thing and yet to
+pretend to yourself you do not know it. Go and get your supper, Mr.
+Smith. Emma will be waiting to give it to you. And when you have
+thought quietly over what I have said, you are quite clever enough to
+see that my way of looking at it is more sensible than yours."</p>
+
+<p>She had perhaps supposed that the mention of the domestic supper would
+be punitive rather than soothing, but she was not prepared to find that
+she had displayed scarlet to the blood-shot eyes of a bull.</p>
+
+<p>"Woman," his voice, deep and hoarse, was like thunder about her ears,
+"woman, is it not enough that the Lord has spoken?"</p>
+
+<p>She saw by his purple face and parched lip, by the hard shudder that
+went through his frame, that his fury was stronger than he. She quailed
+inwardly.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not enough for me that you say the Lord has spoken."</p>
+
+<p>His lips worked as if in the effort to form anathemas his dry throat
+refused to utter. Then, regaining his loud hoarse speech, with a choking
+noise he lifted his hand in a gesture of sacerdotal menace.</p>
+
+<p>"Woman, it is the last time. Choose ye this day between blessing and
+cursing, for the Lord shall send the cursing until thou be destroyed and
+perish quickly, because of the wickedness of thy doings whereby thou
+hast forsaken me."</p>
+
+<p>She cried in answering excitement, "I choose your curse rather than your
+blessing under the conditions you propose. You are mad; go and calm
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Then, having exhausted her physical courage in this last defiance, she
+went into her inner room, locking the door, leaving him in the manifest
+suffering of an almost unendurable rage.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IIIb" id="CHAPTER_IIIb"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>That night Susannah packed her possessions in the smallest possible
+compass. The money she had lent to Emma would be sufficient for the
+journey to Carthage, which was the nearest Gentile town, and thither she
+was determined to go without an hour's delay, ready now to work or beg
+her way on the journey farther eastward.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the business of the next day was fairly started she went to
+the suite of rooms inhabited by the Smiths, confident that Joseph's
+excess of fury had been transient. Emma was surrounded by her children,
+to whom she had just given breakfast. The prophet was about to descend
+to his business office. They both received Susannah with moderate
+kindness.</p>
+
+<p>The March sun shone in through the large windows upon the garish
+furniture of the apartment, upon Emma's gay attire, and upon the shining
+faces of the three children, who stood gazing upward at Susannah, quick,
+as children always are, to perceive signs of suppressed excitement.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah explained that she had determined to go to Carthage that day,
+where she hoped soon to find some party of travellers in whose escort
+she could travel farther; she hoped that it would be quite convenient
+for Emma to return the money that morning.</p>
+
+<p>Smith gazed at Susannah intently, but only for a few moments. It seemed
+that his mood had changed entirely, that he was now too much absorbed in
+the business of the day, whatever it might be, to care whether she went
+or stayed. He left them, saying that he would send money to Emma as soon
+as he could, that the trifling debt might be paid.</p>
+
+<p>Money flowed in such easy streams through the hands of the leading men
+of Nauvoo, that Susannah supposed that a messenger with the required
+amount would come up the stairs in a few minutes. She sat with Emma in
+this expectation.</p>
+
+<p>"You are offended with me for going?" she asked, for Emma's mask of
+indifference was worn obviously.</p>
+
+<p>"You wish to destroy your soul," said Emma.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but you know, you have long known, that I do not believe that
+salvation in this world or the next depends on the rites of Mr. Smith's
+Church."</p>
+
+<p>"If I told this child that he would be dashed to pieces if he walked out
+of the window, and he did not believe me, would that save him?"</p>
+
+<p>Emma made this inquiry with triumphant scorn; then she rose and began to
+attend to the wants of her children in a bustling manner.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah sighed and smiled. "I have at least the right to reject your
+faith at my own peril, for there is not in the wide world, as far as I
+know, man or woman who cares whether I save my soul or not."</p>
+
+<p>"And whose fault?" cried Emma, coarse now in her discomposure. "If you
+are so stuck-up that you think you can read your books and look down on
+us all, just because you are a beauty and the gentlemen bow down to you,
+'tisn't likely that you'd have any friends acting that way. You can't
+even behave civil to the gentlemen when they offer you the best that's
+going."</p>
+
+<p>It was evident that some version of Smith's interviews with her had been
+given to his wife. Susannah wondered how much truth, how much fiction,
+had been in the relation. It did not matter much to her now, since she
+had resolved to go at once. The whole of her life with that troublous
+sect seemed to be dropping from her like a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving word that she would receive the money on her return or else call
+at Smith's office for it when she was ready, she went down into the
+cheerful noise of the street and bargained with a man who had horses and
+vehicles for hire. Having arranged that he should come for her at noon,
+she went about to make the few farewells she felt to be desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Darling was now postmaster of Nauvoo and one of the first presidency. To
+him she went first. She shrank from him because of his coarseness and
+the jocular admiration which he sometimes had the audacity to express
+for her, but she could not forget how assiduous his kindness had been in
+the days of Elvira's illness. She found him sitting, his heels on the
+upper part of a chimney-piece with a fireless grate, reading the
+Millenial Star. The hot April sun, streaming through the windows of his
+office, had caused him to take off his coat, which was no longer
+thread-bare. His shirt sleeves were fine enough and white; the high hat
+that was pushed far on the back of his head was highly polished.
+Opulence, self-indulgence, good-nature, and a certain element of
+fanatical fire mingled in the atmosphere of the postmaster's office, and
+made it somewhat turgid.</p>
+
+<p>When Darling heard Susannah's errand he became serious enough. An
+apoplectic sort of breathlessness came over him, expressing a degree of
+interest which she could not understand. He settled his hat more firmly
+upon his head. "Does the prophet know?"</p>
+
+<p>"He knows. I have said good-bye to him and to Mrs. Smith. It is sad to
+part with friends that I have known for so many years."</p>
+
+<p>"And the prophet's going to let you go, is he?"</p>
+
+<p>Darling, clumsy at all times, in this speech conveyed to Susannah the
+first faint suspicion that Smith might dream of detaining her by force.</p>
+
+<p>Darling's youngest daughter, who had been an affectionate pupil to
+Susannah at Quincy, waylaid her as she came out, and clasped her about
+the waist with the ardour of an indulged child. She was a blithesome
+girl of about fourteen.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you tell father that you are going away. Is it true?" she asked
+impetuously.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah tried to release herself from the embrace. "Yes, it is true.
+Never mind, you like your new teacher, you know, just as well as you
+used to like me."</p>
+
+<p>"I just guess I don't," cried the child defiantly. "But anyhow, if you
+are going away, I'm going to tell you something."</p>
+
+<p>Whether the childish love of telling a secret, the girlish love of
+mischief, or a dawning sense of womanly responsibility was uppermost, it
+would be hard to tell. There, in the open square, while worthy Saints
+hurried to and fro on the pavement beside them, while horses jangled
+their harness and drivers shouted and exchanged their morning greetings,
+Darling's youngest daughter drew Susannah's head downward and hastily
+whispered to her the fate of her letters to Ephraim Croom.</p>
+
+<p>"I know, for one day since we came here I heard father talking to the
+prophet. He said you'd written lately while you were at Quincy, and all
+your letters had been burned. Now that's the truth; and I said to myself
+'twas a sin and a shame, and that you ought to know. Now don't go and
+tell tales of me, or father will be mad&mdash;at least, as mad as he ever can
+be with <i>me</i>." A toss of the pretty head accompanied these words, a
+flash of conscious power in the bright eyes, the spoilt child knowing
+that her father was in her toils now, as truly as any future lover would
+ever be. The school bell was ringing. The girl, her bag of books hanging
+from her arm, ran with the crowd of belated children.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah walked on, almost stunned at first by the throb of intense
+anger that came with this surprise. Then the anger was suddenly
+superseded, hidden and crushed down by a rush of joy. Ephraim had not
+neglected her; Ephraim had given her up for dead; but she had no reason
+to suppose that he was dead, no reason to doubt his faithfulness.
+Susannah trod the common street in love with motion as some happy
+woodland creature treads the dells in the hour of dawn and spring.</p>
+
+<p>When Elvira looked up to see Susannah enter her gate she saw her friend
+transfigured in a glow of returning youth and hope. Elvira looked at her
+timidly; this Susannah she had never seen before. Elvira's husband was
+not present. The interior of the house was fantastic almost as its
+mistress, but sultry with luxury.</p>
+
+<p>"Well now, you think you are going," said Elvira. "Who'd have thought
+it? And only last week General Bennet said to the prophet that if he'd
+marry you to him he'd send to New York for diamonds both for you and
+Emma Smith. He said he'd get a thousand dollars' worth of diamonds
+apiece for each of you; but Mr. Darling said that you ought to be
+married to Mr. Heber, who has just been elected an apostle, because&mdash;"
+She stopped suddenly, nodding her head. "You know why&mdash;blood is blood,
+and we have seen it run in rivers, but we don't mention it here in
+Nauvoo."</p>
+
+<p>Elvira set the French heel of her slipper in the centre of a rose upon
+her carpet and spun round upon it till her flounces stood out.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We don't mention it here in Nauvoo."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She sang as if it were the refrain to a song.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah felt from within her shield of new delight an immense pity.
+Here again was a revelation of the coarse and frivolous talk that went
+on at the church meetings, and Elvira was privy to it through that old
+fool, her husband. How could she endure him!</p>
+
+<p>"O Elvira, in the last few days I have realised as I did not before that
+riches are making fools of these men. How glad I am that my husband died
+before he knew that this was to be the reward of his lifework and his
+prayers!"</p>
+
+<p>Elvira stopped dancing. The mystical side of her character now, as
+ever, came forward suddenly in the midst of her other interests. The
+sunshine was bright in the gaudy room. A tiny spaniel, which Elvira's
+senile slave had procured for her, lay on a red cushion in its full
+beam, looking more like a toy than a living thing. When Elvira stopped
+dancing her flounces settled themselves with an audible rustle, and her
+thin delicately-cut face looked at Susannah from out its frame of curled
+hair and gold ornaments like the face of a spirit imprisoned in some
+unseemly place.</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven help us, Susannah," she cried shrilly, "if you call Nauvoo the
+reward of Angel's prayers. Look!" she cried, pointing out of the window,
+"see how the new temple rises; how its white walls shine in the sun! We
+are putting thousands upon thousands of dollars into it. It will be the
+grandest building this side of the Alleghany mountains." She let her
+small jewelled hand, with its pointing finger, fall suddenly, "and there
+shall not be left one stone of it upon another, for the House of God is
+not made with hands."</p>
+
+<p>"I see little signs of its foundations here." Susannah spoke with fire.
+"Treachery and tyranny are poor bricks."</p>
+
+<p>"Child, its foundations are in the whole earth, here and everywhere, in
+every nation and kindred. Men like Angel Halsey sow wheat; other people
+have sown tares. The tares happen to be in blossom just now here in
+Nauvoo." She seemed to forget her seriousness as suddenly, for again
+she spun round upon the centre of her rose, singing her little musical
+refrain.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah made one more appeal of the sort that she had made so often
+before Elvira's marriage.</p>
+
+<p>"You will not come away with me, Elvira? I do not like to leave you
+here; you have not been yourself since Angel died. You are not bound to
+this man because you were not sane enough to make a valid choice."</p>
+
+<p>It was plain speaking, but it did not ruffle Elvira's composure in the
+slightest. She laughed and began to caress her spaniel. "Mad. Oh yes, we
+are all mad, and growing madder, but it is because they have huddled us
+together at the point of the sword, until now to be a Mormon means to be
+shut out from the world and shut in to&mdash;to what? To the prophet's
+dreams; and some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and some of
+them are mad; and let us thank Heaven that they are as good as they are,
+for to go back to the Gentiles who shot down Angel and the children he
+was teaching to pray, and your child in your arms, that would be the
+baddest and maddest act of life." She rose up suddenly again. "Go!" she
+cried. There was a flame of real anger in her eyes. "Since the wish is
+in your heart, go! We believe now in strange doctrines. Two new
+doctrines we have learned at Nauvoo. Do you know what they are? One is
+'baptism of the dead.' If you get off safely, Susannah, and die in your
+sins, one of us must be baptized again for you, so that you will be
+saved in spite of yourself. But the <i>other</i> doctrine is '<i>salvation by
+the shedding of blood</i>.' Do you understand <i>that</i> doctrine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I do not."</p>
+
+<p>"And you speak with a tone that says that you neither know nor care what
+new things we have been learning. But you may have reason to care before
+many hours are over."</p>
+
+<p>She came near and whispered, "They teach us now that if a <i>man</i> sin
+wilfully and will not repent, it is better that a minister of the church
+should slay him, for then his blood will make atonement for his soul."
+She ceased to speak until she had thrust Susannah out of her door, and
+her last words were in a whisper of awesome import. "Perhaps <i>a woman's
+soul can be saved in the same way</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was out again in the cheerful busy street. She made haste to
+fulfil the one remaining call before she met her chaise at the hotel.
+She felt that her last word was due to the member of the Danite band who
+had saved her in her hour of need and who had avenged her husband's
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>To each of those who had made sacrifice for the sect, a lot of land in
+the best part of the city had been awarded. Heber, Danite and apostle,
+had built upon his lot, and there she found him at the back of the
+cottage feeding a mare and foal which were tied in a small plot of
+ragged grass. He was much older now than when she had first seen him;
+daring and danger can lengthen time. He had the same indomitable
+frankness in his dark eyes, but his face was hardened and fanaticism was
+stamped thereon. It was a homely precinct, with utensils of house and
+stable-work lying about. The mare was drinking from a bucket, her gentle
+head so near his shoulder that her love for him was easily seen.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going away," Susannah said. "I have come to thank you for the last
+time for all your kindness to me and to say good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall not go," he said harshly.</p>
+
+<p>It was the echo of something which she had heard twice before this
+morning. This time it began to enter her mind with some sharpness.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you saw a friend hastening to destruction would you not stop her? It
+is well known amongst us that you desire to go, and at the meeting of
+the presidency last night the prophet told us that you sought to
+apostatise. Go home, Sister Halsey, and repent, and obtain forgiveness
+from the Lord and from his prophet for your unbelief."</p>
+
+<p>She was able to stand for a moment quietly and watch him still busy
+watering the mare, admiring the skill and gentleness with which he did
+it, thinking sadly enough that she would never see this remarkable man
+again, nor know to what the mingled fierceness and gentleness of his
+nature would grow. Then she offered him her hand in farewell without
+further argument.</p>
+
+<p>He shook the mare's head from his shoulder and, taking her hand, held it
+in an iron grasp. "As your friend, and for the sake of that good man,
+your husband, I beseech you to repent; but if you will not repent, for
+his sake and for our sakes, because we have prayed for you, you shall
+still be saved."</p>
+
+<p>Although beginning to be apprehensive of some coming evil, she smiled;
+and even rallied him upon one of the new doctrines to which Elvira had
+alluded.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you believe that if I go away some one else will have to be baptized
+over again for me?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with the same steadfast glance. "It could do no good.
+Such salvation is for those who die in ignorance of the truth. But for
+you, who have been baptized into the truth and have fallen away, there
+is no hope except repentance or the shedding of blood."</p>
+
+<p>Over the low paling she heard the neighbours' children at their play.
+Upon the other side was an open lot across which she saw the passers in
+the street. She withdrew her hand from his now, but with a sinking at
+heart which did not appear to her reasonable because the surroundings
+were so tranquil.</p>
+
+<p>He let her go, accompanying her, as any gentleman might, to the gate of
+his ground. As he opened it he had taken something from his coat, and he
+showed it to her. It was a knife, very bright and sharp. Its blade when
+drawn out had a double edge. "It will be better for you," he said
+mournfully, "to die than to go"; and then he hid the thing again and
+went back.</p>
+
+<p>This time the idea that had been forcing itself into her mind took
+possession. For a moment all her strength forsook her; she held to the
+post of the gate, looking after him as he disappeared up the narrow
+passage between the paling and the house, and then, hurrying onward, she
+found that it was only by the greatest effort she could walk with
+outward composure.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IVb" id="CHAPTER_IVb"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Susannah found her rooms as she had left them. Emma was not there to bid
+her good-bye, nor did any messenger wait with the money. She set her
+parcels ready for the driver to lift and waited until after the hour,
+but the chaise did not come.</p>
+
+<p>At last she went down again to the livery stable, hoping, as against
+vague but almost overpowering fears, that mere delay was the cause. The
+man told her that he understood that she had countermanded her order.
+She gave the order again, but now he said that he could not go for the
+price named, and when she offered a larger sum, he assured her that his
+horses were all out. She knew now that her order had indeed been
+countermanded, and by an authority higher than hers. She went back and
+boldly entered the prophet's public office.</p>
+
+<p>There were five men in the office. Joseph Smith sat in an elbow-chair
+before a central table. His secretary, a middle-aged man, sat at a small
+table beside him. Two of the leaders of the Church happened to be
+waiting upon some business, and a fresh convert was standing with them,
+a well-dressed English artisan but newly arrived. Susannah walked up to
+the table and addressed Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you go down to the stable and bring me up a travelling-chaise?"</p>
+
+<p>Smith rose with mechanical politeness, or perhaps with a feint of
+politeness. "My dear madam," he expostulated, "I must say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," she replied, "that I have not time to hear what you would
+like to say. I must ask you to be quick and get me the chaise."</p>
+
+<p>By this time she perceived that his companions were looking at her with
+ill-concealed curiosity and excitement, which proved to her that she was
+a marked woman. Her bosom dilated with a wilder anger as she looked at
+Smith expectantly; he returned the gaze sheepishly, as if dazzled by the
+audacity of her command. His face after last night's passion had an
+exhausted look like that of a man recovering from an illness.</p>
+
+<p>"You also owe me money," she proclaimed clearly. "Your wife borrowed all
+that I had of the money I earned by my school. When you have brought the
+chaise you can give me the money."</p>
+
+<p>One of the elders, a sleek man, thinking the prophet at a loss, now made
+a wily comment. "Has Sister Halsey paid anything for living in the House
+this month back?"</p>
+
+<p>At the insinuation that her money might be justly kept in payment of
+this debt if she spurned the Church's hospitality, Susannah's heart
+sank. She admitted its justice. It was part of her character to admit
+all possible claim against her.</p>
+
+<p>The sleek elder, following his advantage, spoke again. "The money given
+for tuition was given because of the ordinance of the prophet, and
+should in any case hardly belong to this lady if she is apostate."</p>
+
+<p>Smith had the tact to see his opportunity, and, moreover, it hurt him
+sharply, hurt him far more than it hurt Susannah, to hear her right to
+the privileges of the place called in question, to hear the opprobrious
+term "apostate" cast at her. There were unbelievers in his community
+with whose hypocrisy or apostasy he could trifle, but he still had his
+faith and his inner circle of affections. Susannah, standing friendless
+and penniless, appealed to all that was sacred in the memory of early
+days, while her beauty, her courage, her unbounded wrath, stimulated his
+love of power. He spoke to the sleek elder in what was commonly called
+the prophet's "awful voice," rising, his blue eyes becoming black in
+their authoritative flash.</p>
+
+<p>"Our sister Susannah Halsey, because of faithfulness when the Church was
+yet poor and unknown, and because of the faithfulness of her husband,
+who wears the martyr's crown&mdash;our sister Susannah Halsey, I say, is
+welcome to the hospitality of the Nauvoo House as long as she has
+remained and shall remain; and the money which has been given to her
+for the school shall be returned to her, and more shall be added to it,
+for she laboured faithfully."</p>
+
+<p>He had left behind his moment of sheepish distress; with the return of
+his formal phrases he assumed full prophetical state and escorted
+Susannah out of the office with a manner of pompous deference. When they
+two stood alone together Susannah was aware that, although circumstances
+had not altered in the slightest, although she had just as much reason
+for extreme anger as a minute before, yet she could not summon the same
+haughty air of command.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you get me the chaise and the money and let me go?"</p>
+
+<p>"But in Carthage," he asked kindly, "who will attend to your wants there
+and protect you? I guess, sister, you haven't much notion how difficult
+a lady like yourself travelling alone might find it to get along. It
+isn't among the Gentiles as with the Saints, where brotherly-kindness is
+the rule. I guess you'd better go back to your room and think it over a
+day or two longer," he said soothingly. "I'd be very glad to take you
+and Emma out for a ride this afternoon if you'd be willing to go&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Be quiet." Her words fell sharp and quick in the midst of his gentle
+tones. "Make arrangements at once for me to go peaceably, or I will go
+out, if need be, to the middle of the Square and proclaim my wrongs, so
+that every woman and child in Nauvoo shall know what comes of trusting
+to you."</p>
+
+<p>She had chosen her threat carefully. She knew well that he understood
+the force of object lessons, and that to have even a suspicion against
+his kindness, bred in the minds of the children would be exquisite pain
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>"You know that I wouldn't like that, Sister Halsey; but when you come to
+think of it you'll see that it wouldn't serve your turn neither. It
+would only need for a few of us to say you was crazy and the whole town
+'ud see the more reason for not letting you go. Moreover, it would be a
+monstrous injustice to me. When have I failed to do anything that I ever
+promised you? Did I ever promise to let you apostatise? I guess, Sister
+Halsey, that you're excited, and if you just think over things for a day
+or two you would see that we're not so bad as you think. But, anyway,
+this ain't just the place for us to have a talk together."</p>
+
+<p>When Smith moved on to lead her back to her own rooms, she followed
+quietly until they stood together in her parlour, the scene of their
+last quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," said Susannah, "you understand very well that it is no sudden
+intention of mine to go, that it is my irrevocable decision. I have this
+morning had my very life threatened; and I see now that unless you
+command that it should be respected I should very possibly be in danger
+if I went away alone. You have offered again and again to drive me in
+your carriage; I will accept the offer now. Get out your own horses, and
+drive me yourself to Carthage."</p>
+
+<p>She saw a look of faint pleasure steal over his face. He liked to stand
+there in the quiet room listening while she spoke with some evidence of
+trust. The pleasure faded into embarrassment, but she had seen it.</p>
+
+<p>"You have a good and a bad nature struggling within you, Mr. Smith. By
+all that we have suffered, you and I, since the day that by some
+mysterious power you forced me to come to your baptism" (she stammered
+in her eagerness), "by all that we have suffered, by that sympathy which
+we have at times felt for one another, assert yourself now. Do this one
+right thing for me, and in all the future I will try to remember only
+the good in your life and not the bad."</p>
+
+<p>But he stood so long still looking steadfastly before him that she began
+to fear that, unnerved by his last night's fit of fury, he was ready to
+pass into one of those visionary trances which had been common in his
+younger days.</p>
+
+<p>She touched the sleeve of his coat. "I do not know if Mr. Heber's threat
+could be serious, but it frightened me, and I know that I shall be safe
+on the road to Carthage if you take me. Go, get your horses and take me
+away yourself."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her pitifully, slipping into the style of his religious
+moods. "Thou sayest truly, sister, that there is none but I who could do
+this thing, for since in mine anger last night, fearing that I had no
+strength of my own to keep thee by me, I denounced thee to the council,
+there is no safety for thy life beyond the boundary of Nauvoo." He
+winced here, as if seeing what he suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Noting how the idea of her violent death wrung his heart, she went on
+pleading with him. She quoted the exalted character of his early
+visions, reminding him of the hour when the angel had shown him the dark
+furnace of temptations through which he must pass. At this he was
+visibly stirred; the angelic vision of warning seemed to be again before
+his eyes. He roused himself, speaking in that tone of voice in which,
+when he rarely used it, she recognised his best spirit. "Sister, thou
+hast always been to me as Isaac to Abraham; for in the beginning when I
+was poor and alone and had nought in the world save the revelation which
+the Lord had given, and was tempted to doubt, then I saw thee and prayed
+that thou shouldst be given me for a sign; and behold when I put forth
+my whole strength to desire thee, thou didst come as a moth to the
+light, burning thy beautiful wings of youth and joy. But I said, 'It is
+well, for that which she has lost shall be restored to her with usury,'
+and I knew in my heart that our brother Angel Halsey would not live
+long, and that thou wouldst forget thy sorrow for him. But I swear unto
+thee that thou hast never been to me as other women, but, as I said unto
+thee just now, like the voice of the angel."</p>
+
+<p>She never knew how far he was entirely under his own control when the
+tendency to a state of trance was upon him, but she was anxious to take
+advantage of the better mood.</p>
+
+<p>She said, "And now what is required of you is that you should give me
+up. No blessing" (she spoke strongly), "no blessing can come to you or
+to your people until you do this one right thing."</p>
+
+<p>He was again looking not at her but at the blank space of the shadowed
+wall, and as if the wall was not there and his look went far beyond it.</p>
+
+<p>"You have loosened the bloodhounds and set them on my track," she cried.</p>
+
+<p>He did not speak.</p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;you alone will be guilty of my murder, for, I tell you, if you do
+not take me, I will go alone and meet my death."</p>
+
+<p>His head sank upon his breast with a groan such as a dumb creature in
+the utmost pain might give. Almost immediately, to her surprise, he went
+out.</p>
+
+<p>She was left alone. She was under the impression that Smith had gone to
+do her bidding, but she could not be sure. No faith in angelic vision,
+no spell of psychic warfare, relieved the situation for her. The
+external evidences of some crisis which he had undergone only produced
+in her repulsion. Now, as ever since the temporary delusion that
+accompanied her baptism, Susannah endeavoured to possess her soul free
+from that sense of touch with mysterious powers which had worked such
+havoc with the sanity of the members of this sect.</p>
+
+<p>From the window she saw the prophet crossing the road in the direction
+of his stables. He went, it was true, with slow, dreamy gait, but
+steadily. Strange mixture that he was of sanity and shrewdness,
+mysticism and grosser evil, he was at that moment her only star of hope.
+She paced the room unable to forecast the happenings of the next hour,
+yet supposing that her very life depended upon its content. The sudden
+joy that had come to her this morning joined with her fear, and produced
+panic of heart.</p>
+
+<p>She computed the time it might take to harness the gay steeds, and tried
+to give the rein of her expectation the utmost length. To her delight
+she saw the prophet's horses and the light vehicle he drove upon long
+journeys emerge into the square. A servant led them up 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.</p>
+
+<p>"But I cannot do it," he gasped. "I cannot."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Her refusal was concise and severe.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Smith got up and went to the window. His horses and buggy were still
+parading.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>She recoiled, looking at him in steady reproach.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_Vb" id="CHAPTER_Vb"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Within her soul from some unknown depth the word arose distinctly as if
+spoken, "Pray. You cannot save yourself. Pray."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>The words within her rose again. "Even so. Pray. If you are going mad,
+you have the more need."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Stung by the fear that she was losing her mind, she rose as she would
+have faced a human antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>"God's arm!" she said aloud, "my husband prayed such prayers, but I will
+ask nothing till I see his request fulfilled."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well," she said within herself, "it is quite true that it is
+useless to consider when I can give myself no help."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With the early dawn she opened her eyes. In the first moments of
+half-awaked consciousness she was aware that one thought lay alone in
+the empty horizon of her mind, like a trace left by a dream that had
+passed, as a wisp of cloud may be left in an empty sky.</p>
+
+<p>This thought was that she would at once go down to the river bank upon
+the southwest of the town.</p>
+
+<p>When other thoughts awoke and crowded within her ken this thought
+appeared foolish, and still more so the strong influence it had left
+upon her will, for in the momentum of this influence she had risen
+without debating the point.</p>
+
+<p>She was not aware that she had moved in her sleep or dreamed. She was
+greatly refreshed and again unreasonably light-hearted. She opened her
+shutters and saw that the dawn was calm and fair. As yet the sleeping
+town had scarcely stirred.</p>
+
+<p>"It is better to go out than to stay in," she said to herself as she
+remembered that this hour would be her one chance of taking air and
+exercise unobserved. She heard the main door of the house open and,
+looking over the banister, saw a slattern with bucket and mop passing
+into some back passage. She went lightly down and out into the fresh
+frosty air.</p>
+
+<p>What had that dream been concerning the river bank on the south-western
+side? She could not recall it, nor had she ever explored the streets of
+white wooden villas and cottages that lay upon that side. She went
+thither now. There was no reason why she should not go, no reason to go
+elsewhere. It was a pleasant walk. When she had passed the last house,
+the bank sloped in open uncared-for grass where cows were grazing. Only
+here and there she had seen a house-door open, and as yet in this place
+no one was abroad except a boy who was playing idly in a boat, which was
+drawn half up on the muddy bank.</p>
+
+<p>The broad river, milk-white under a dappled sky, stretched south and
+west. The other side was dim and blue in the faint vapour of the
+relaxing frost. The air was sweet and still. The sunbeams, imprisoned in
+eastern vapour, shone through the white veil with soft glow that cast no
+shadow but comforted the earth with hope.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah had a further thought in her mind now, but she felt no haste or
+impatience of excitement.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was of an active, restless disposition or he would hardly have
+been out so early. Lithe and idle, he sat see-sawing in the floating
+end of the boat, uncertain how to amuse himself. He returned Susannah's
+greeting with a lively flow of talk.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know how to row," said Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>She showed no eagerness, for she felt none. The hope she had just formed
+was most uncertain, for it appeared not at all likely that she could
+escape in this way without being molested.</p>
+
+<p>"I bet I can row," said the boy, "as well as any man in town."</p>
+
+<p>"That isn't saying much," said Susannah. "The men about here have very
+few boats, and they are most of them afraid to go on anything smaller
+than the steamer."</p>
+
+<p>"I could row t'other side and back," bragged the boy. "I could row
+t'other side and back three times in the day."</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't! What will you bet?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose your father wouldn't allow you to go, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>He was a fresh-faced, mischievous, eager young rascal, and he found
+Susannah's manner pleasant and provoking.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you lay five dollars on it?" he cried. "Pap is away down to
+Quincy. If you'll lay five dollars on it I'll do it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I won't."</p>
+
+<p>The gambling spirit of the young pioneer was aroused.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you lay on it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe you could row once to the other side."</p>
+
+<p>He bragged loudly and with much exaggeration of what he had done and
+what he could do, and began pushing off the boat to show her his speed.</p>
+
+<p>The boat was a rude craft, unpainted, flat-bottomed, but light enough,
+and not badly formed for speed. Susannah stepped into it without much
+hope, scarcely caring what she did, but still provoking the young
+boatman to attempt the crossing.</p>
+
+<p>"I shan't give you any money," she said, "but you can row me a bit if
+you like till I see how fast you can go. You don't understand the
+currents, I am sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Currents!" said the boy, "I guess I understand all there is to know
+about them."</p>
+
+<p>Talking thus in light banter, they actually proceeded out onto the bosom
+of the milky flood without hearing any cry from the shore or seeing any
+one who took note of their departure. The pellucid and comforting light
+of the blinded sun grew warmer; the hum of industry in the town behind
+rose cheerfully upon the quiet air, and as the calling of the April
+bluebird in the fields grew more faint, the splash of the oars and the
+whirr of the gray water-fowl began to be accompanied by a low distant
+sound as of a watermill.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the excursion steamer," said the boy. "We'll get in her waves and
+you'll be scared. Ladies is always scared of waves."</p>
+
+<p>She asked if the steam-boat would stop at the Nauvoo wharf, but he
+explained, with the knowledge that boys are apt to have of such details,
+that this steamer was coming from Fort Madison, and would keep to the
+Missouri side, that he had heard that there were some State officials on
+board her, escorting the Governor of Kentucky, who was prospecting for a
+Land Company.</p>
+
+<p>They saw the white hulk of the steam-boat looming upon the water to the
+north. Her side paddle-wheels churned the flood. A strong purpose took
+possession of Susannah; she knew what she was going to do.</p>
+
+<p>She said to the boy, "No one could stop a steamer when she once starts
+until she gets to her next port."</p>
+
+<p>"I bet the engineman could stop her just as easy as that." The boy
+backed water with his oars suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"But no one on the river could make him stop and get aboard."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they could. My pap stopped one once. We was living down near
+Cairo, but not near a wharf."</p>
+
+<p>"How did he do it?" she asked, and her interest was intense.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you just put up your hands like a trumpet and yell through them as
+loud as you can, and you go on waving and hollering. My pap said the
+best plan was to call out 'Runaway nigger! Large reward!' They'd be sure
+to stop then to know all about it, and when they'd once stopped they
+don't mind your clambering up, if you can pay the fare."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah felt herself wholly unequal to the loud task described.</p>
+
+<p>"They would never stop for you," she, said. "You are only a boy, and
+they would know 'twas only mischief."</p>
+
+<p>His reply was as before. He would lay five dollars on it that he could
+stop the boat.</p>
+
+<p>She incited him to do this thing also. What faculty of caution the boy
+possessed was not as yet developed; he left the care for consequences to
+the sedate lady in the stern, and forgetting his quest of the Missouri
+shore, lay in the path of the steam-boat and howled unmusically, and
+marred the peace of the placid morning by shouting concerning a runaway
+slave and a fabulous reward that was offered for him taken alive or
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that what he said never rightly reached the ears of the
+men on the deck, but that they regarded the lady as a possible
+passenger; the engine was stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"We'd better cut now as fast as we can," said the boy, somewhat
+frightened. He seized his oars excitedly. "Or shall I tell them a big
+yarn about the nigger?"</p>
+
+<p>They were but slightly to one side. The prow of the steam-boat, which
+drew but little water, had already passed below them. A small crowd on
+the vessel's deck leaned over the paddle-box. Standing up in the boat,
+Susannah searched the faces of the men looking down. They all looked at
+her.</p>
+
+<p>She singled out the captain by some sign in his dress, and pleaded
+urgent necessity for travelling with him.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," said the boy, looking up at her from beneath, "I call that
+a low-down, mean sort of thing to do. Why didn't you tell me square? I'd
+have brought you if you wanted do come."</p>
+
+<p>She pleaded with the boy too. "It was better for you not to know my
+secrets. If they ask you in the city you can say that you didn't know."</p>
+
+<p>A dozen hands were held out to help her to climb the ladder on the
+shelving paddle-box. "Keep off," they cried to the boy, and he swung
+away from the churning wheel.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah stood upon the deck pale and trembling. The magnitude of the
+step came upon her, and she was beset by natural timidity and the
+painfulness of her dependence. The men who stood around her with the
+right to question were not of a low class. The captain, brawny and
+respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified
+gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor
+of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were
+several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other
+passengers pressed in an outer circle.</p>
+
+<p>She would fain have explained herself more privately, but she could not
+endure to accept the privileges of the boat without explaining first
+that she was not able to pay for them. "Gentlemen, I have no money. I am
+entirely unprotected. I have escaped in fear of my life from Nauvoo."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke instinctively, only desiring to set herself right, but when
+the words were said she knew that she had helped to heap opprobrium on
+the sect in whose cause so short a time ago she would have died. The
+passengers were Missourians, as was the captain. Among them went a
+whisper of chivalrous pity for her and of execration for the prophet and
+his followers.</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said the captain, "any lady as is escaping from those devils
+has the freedom of this boat, and no ticket required, as long as I'm in
+command. Isn't that so?" he asked of the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>The murmur broke into an open chorus of enthusiastic speech.</p>
+
+<p>Wild and deep as was her panting anger against Smith's oppression,
+Susannah shrank. The thought of profiting by this spirit of partisan
+hatred scorched her heart.</p>
+
+<p>The Kentucky Governor, a dapper man, who had been regarding her with a
+temperate and critical eye, now, urged by her obvious distressed
+timidity, came forward.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you get among the Mormons, may I ask?"</p>
+
+<p>"My husband," faltered Susannah, "but he is dead."</p>
+
+<p>It would appear that her words tallied with some conclusion he had been
+drawing concerning her, for without further parley Susannah found
+herself being led in a formal manner down the companion-way. The brief
+report which she had given of herself had preceded her through the boat.
+She heard the passengers whom she left on the deck making sentimental
+remarks. Two coloured girls who were washing dishes in a pantry came to
+its door and gasped with emotion as they stared at her. In the saloon
+the coloured waiters gaped.</p>
+
+<p>At the farther end of the saloon a stout and magnificent lady in silk
+and diamonds was seated before innumerable viands which were spread in
+circles around her plate. She stopped eating while her husband presented
+Susannah. She alone of all upon the boat seemed to be overburdened by no
+surge of sentiment or curiosity. She was a most comfortable person.</p>
+
+<p>Seated in safety beside her, Susannah could indulge the pent-up
+indignation of her outraged spirit in silent musings upon Smith's
+degradation and, the certain downfall of all righteousness under the new
+tyranny. And yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;the shock of the last few days, forcibly as
+it vibrated through all her nature, could not eradicate the sympathy of
+years&mdash;the memories of Hiram and Kirtland, Haun's Mill and the
+desperate winter's march. Justice, her old friend, now her inquisitor,
+said sternly, "It was in these scenes in which some lost life and some
+reason that these men lost their moral standards." But her heart cried,
+"Now that <i>I</i> am insulted, I cannot forgive."</p>
+
+<p>The words of the Governor's wife, cheerful, continuous, and not without
+diverting sparkle, were an unspeakable rest to Susannah, weary above all
+things of herself. Whether because of a strong undercurrent of tactful
+kindness, or in mere garrulity, the good lady's talk for some time
+flowed on concerning all things small, and nothing great, like the
+lapping of the river against the vessel's bows.</p>
+
+<p>But at last her companion's situation grew upon her; she enlarged more
+than once upon her surprise at Susannah's advent, and her feelings of
+extreme relief that she was safely there.</p>
+
+<p>"What a mercy!" she sighed comfortably. "Such awful people! Why, I hear
+that when any child among them is weak or deformed they just murder it."</p>
+
+<p>Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely
+accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.</p>
+
+<p>"It is perfectly true," the Governor's wife declared. "I have heard it
+several times. How long have you been at Nauvoo?"</p>
+
+<p>"Three weeks."</p>
+
+<p>"And in that time they offered to kill you! Well, I assure you if you
+had been a sickly child they wouldn't have let you live three days. And
+they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen
+wives."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no."</p>
+
+<p>"Ten or eleven, at any rate."</p>
+
+<p>"He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her."</p>
+
+<p>"How they have imposed upon you! Where have you been living that you
+have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?"</p>
+
+<p>Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when
+the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a
+group of the smoking men.</p>
+
+<p>"James," cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice,
+"this lady doesn't even know a tithe of the enormities that are
+practised in Nauvoo."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah's heart
+and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.</p>
+
+<p>His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.</p>
+
+<p>He asked Susannah if the Mormons had retained all her property, and what
+destination she now proposed for herself; and then with great delicacy
+informed her that there was a proposition among the passengers to make
+a collection, to defray the expenses of her whole journey.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah's cheek paled again.</p>
+
+<p>"How could I return it if it came from so many?" she asked. Her white
+hands were clasping and unclasping themselves. Must it indeed be by
+means of such humiliation that she saved herself from Angel's Church?</p>
+
+<p>The Governor determined upon further generosity. "If you would prefer,
+take it from me as a loan," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She gave him Ephraim's address. It was so long since she had spoken her
+cousin's name to any one that tears came when she felt herself bound to
+explain that she was not certain that he was alive.</p>
+
+<p>"He is probably alive. Ill news travels fast."</p>
+
+<p>She blessed the dapper gentleman for this unfounded opinion, for the
+kindness that prompted it, more than for all else that he had done.</p>
+
+<p>His advice was that Susannah should continue upon that boat with them as
+far south as Cairo, in order to take advantage of the steam-boats now
+plying on the Ohio River, so that the expense and weariness of the land
+journey would be diminished to the small space between the uppermost
+point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Canal. There were
+several men upon the boat, he said, who could commend her to the care of
+every captain on the Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah felt too weak and weary to say more in defence of the morals of
+Nauvoo. She could not struggle against the fact that her claim to the
+generosity of which she stood in such helpless need was recognised and
+satisfied by the hatred of these Gentiles.</p>
+
+<p>When in the succeeding days she had time to meditate, while she spent
+many a long hour on the decks of river-boats watching the shimmering
+lights and shades that pass upon open river surfaces, the perplexing and
+contrasting aspects of her situation played in like manner upon her
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>She had suffered so much, such long and deadly ill, as a member of this
+almost innocent sect, suffered bravely in protest against the vile
+injustice of the persecution, and now that she was escaping from
+miseries inflicted by this same sect, she was wrapped in the kindly
+reverse side of the persecuting spirit, and carried home in it, with all
+the deference that would be accorded to a lost child. She was too tired
+and helpless now to defy the good thus given. Did all her former
+suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?</p>
+
+<p>With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the
+history of her more inward life. With what strong protest against the
+obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through
+many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering
+spiritual world. Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal
+marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked
+to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in
+desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompassed by
+invisible power and protection. In vain she said to herself that the
+simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those
+coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance
+had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully
+righteous&mdash;consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the
+Mormons falsely accused. When she had told herself this, the impression
+that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in
+spite of her small marring of the work, remained. Even while her bosom
+was swelling with shame at hearing her husband's sect derided, and
+eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing
+that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the
+assurance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was
+for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIb" id="CHAPTER_VIb"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Susannah left the canal boat at Rochester. She had borrowed as small a
+sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn
+garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot. Food
+was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any
+house and state her need. She got a long lift on her way from a farmer
+driving to Canandaigua. Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost
+stopped, some information about Ephraim.</p>
+
+<p>"He's kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father," said the
+farmer.</p>
+
+<p>From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.</p>
+
+<p>She asked no more; her lips refused to form his name again.</p>
+
+<p>"The old lady, she was took off with a stroke; she and the old gentleman
+is laying together in the graveyard." The farmer volunteered this
+information, and Susannah, who had nerved herself to meet Ephraim's
+mother with humility, now wept for her loss.</p>
+
+<p>From the town of Canandaigua she walked beside the winding river and
+entered Manchester from the west at the hour when the May dusk was
+melting into moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>The public road, then as now, was lined with elms and many an
+apple-tree. The dusk of the elm branches was flecked with half-grown
+fluttering leaves, and the outline of the apple branches was heavy with
+blossom. The air was sweet in the shade of the night-folded petals, the
+perfume bringing involuntarily the thought of the hum of bees which had
+gone to rest. There were some new houses on the road, but the tide of
+progress had here ebbed, leaving the once ambitious village like a rock
+pool, beautified only by those ornaments of nature which thrive in
+stillness. There was more on the road of gable and shrub and tree which
+was familiar than of objects strange to her eye. The few people who were
+abroad gave her scarcely a glance, the half light veiling all that was
+foreign in her garb. The round moon hung above the willows of the river.</p>
+
+<p>When she came in sight of the white Baptist meeting-house she scanned
+its homely appearance as one looks at the face of an old friend. The
+yellow light within was put out as she approached. Out of the door a
+group of men were issuing as if from some evening service.</p>
+
+<p>What vivid memories the scene brought her!&mdash;memories of her uncle
+singing psalms with slow and solemn demeanour, of her aunt's high and
+more emotional voice, of the pew in which as a girl she had sat between
+them, listless and impatient, wondering at times why Ephraim remained at
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Her uncle and aunt were now lying in the graveyard. She paused a moment
+at the thought, looking at the small host of modest headstones
+surrounded by wild-flowers and half-fledged shrubs. It has never been
+the custom in Manchester to cultivate God's acre. Above, the branches of
+the nut-trees stretched themselves in the sweet spring air&mdash;they too
+were just leafing.</p>
+
+<p>Standing by the low, unpainted rail, Susannah wondered in what part of
+the yard her aunt and uncle lay.</p>
+
+<p>She observed that the small coterie of deacons had passed on to the road
+and dispersed, leaving only one of their number, who was locking the
+main door with an air of responsibility. Susannah did not look twice;
+she knew that this man was Ephraim. He stooped slightly to fit the key
+in the lock; then, evidently having forgotten something, pushed the door
+again and went inside.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah did not wait; she went up the graveyard path and in where the
+great square windows cast each a strip of light athwart the dark pews.
+Ephraim turned from his errand and met her in the aisle.</p>
+
+<p>"Ephraim."</p>
+
+<p>Ephraim Croom fell back a step or two, as if his breath was set too
+quick by joy or fear.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah could not speak again.</p>
+
+<p>At length Ephraim stretched out his hands and grasped her arms gently,
+then more strongly, making sure that she was not a trick of light and
+shade. Then, not knowing at all what he did, he clasped her in sudden
+haste to his breast.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah felt his arms wrap about her as if she had been a little child.
+She had never felt, never conceived, of closeness and tenderness like
+this. Ephraim, his breast heaving and his arms folding closer and
+closer, was out of himself. There was no conscious meaning expressed by
+him, but she knew, knew at once without shadow of doubt that he himself
+had been the dreamer of whom he wrote to her, who had learned so much by
+yielding all the loves of his heart to one, and that she was that woman.</p>
+
+<p>It was a long moment; at last, as if waking from a dream, Ephraim
+relinquished his hold. He leaned against the side of a pew, and his
+eager look seemed to hold and fold her still. In the dim light she could
+not see his eye, but she felt the delight of his glance falling upon
+her, a brighter, softer influence than the mantle of the moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder with a motherly touch.</p>
+
+<p>"I have startled you, dear Ephraim; I hope I have done you no harm."</p>
+
+<p>He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough
+heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for
+very joy, not amusement. "Speak to me," she coaxed. "I have come back to
+you. Do you think we are in a dream?" She let herself kneel on the old
+floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against
+her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner
+would have returned had she remained in any common attitude, but to this
+coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had passed
+without caresses) could not behave with reticence.</p>
+
+<p>One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she
+should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of
+this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene
+reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her
+hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering
+words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his
+unaccustomed lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked
+most of the way from Rochester to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you very tired?"&mdash;as if the fact that she had been walking that day
+was all that needed his immediate attention.</p>
+
+<p>"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have
+long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child
+died I have been quite alone."</p>
+
+<p>"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone
+of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I&mdash;I
+supposed that if you were alive you&mdash;you preferred to remain, Susy."</p>
+
+<p>She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had
+raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are
+you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have been having a prayer meeting," he answered. "And I keep the key
+because&mdash;because my father used to." He gave the reason with an
+intonation half playful. "I do many a thing now because he did."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are
+they less foolish" (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their
+late inmates), "less unjust than they used to be?"</p>
+
+<p>As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his
+manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. "I don't know
+that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that
+I am either, Susy, but&mdash;it is not good to worship God alone."</p>
+
+<p>She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom
+of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more
+homelike by his tones.</p>
+
+<p>"The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the
+earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the
+mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?"</p>
+
+<p>She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran
+like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the
+memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the
+grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.
+So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under
+the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child's desire to hear
+a story that she knew by heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick
+path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths
+flanked it in orderly ranks. Their light forms glimmered in the branch
+shadows of the budding quince. It was true, what people said, that
+Ephraim had not let his father's home decay. The door stood open, as
+country doors are apt to do.</p>
+
+<p>There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the
+sitting-room. The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and
+sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed
+to see again. Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens. A
+candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing
+beside it. Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a
+student lamp&mdash;the fire of a new hearth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIIb" id="CHAPTER_VIIb"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought
+with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply
+furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped
+in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came
+in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and Susannah
+sat.</p>
+
+<p>"You are one of the Latter-Day Saints?" Susannah asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I am, ma'am, and it's real strange to hear you say them words, for it's
+'Mormons' the Gentiles calls us."</p>
+
+<p>Then to her questioning he told the story of the downfall of Nauvoo.</p>
+
+<p>"There was two causes for the persecution; we had got too powerful and
+too great for the folks in Illinois, just as we had done in Missouri;
+but there was another thing, and that was that wickedness crept in
+amongst us. 'Twasn't as bad as was reported, though, but 'twas
+there&mdash;I'm afraid 'twas there."</p>
+
+<p>The man sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's twelve years now since I joined the Saints in Missouri and when we
+were driven out there I went with them to Illinois; and I can never
+believe other but that the Latter-Day Saints has the truth, for the
+power of it is always to be seen among them; and now that I've lost
+everything a second time, and know that I have a sickness that I'll
+never get the better of, I have come east to see my folks once more and
+to testify to them of the truth."</p>
+
+<p>He was going on into Vermont, passing by that way that he might refresh
+his eyes with a view of the sacred hill, and had only remained at
+Ephraim's request to relate his tidings to Susannah.</p>
+
+<p>"After coming out of Missouri I never lived at Nauvoo. I had a farm
+midways, between Nauvoo and Quincy. As near as I can make out, the
+scandal they've got agen us, which they've always had agen us because of
+the wickedness of the Gentile mind, began to have some truth in it when
+Rigdon came out with his teaching concerning the nonsense of spiritual
+wives, which wasn't new with him, for I hear that it's held among all
+the folks as call themselves 'Perfectionists.' Well, our prophet made
+pretty quick work of that doctrine, and he rebuked Rigdon in public and
+private, and packed him out of the place, and no one can say that our
+prophet has ever done otherwise with any one as has had notions about
+marriage."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah sighed. "I have heard that he has acted the same way in several
+other instances."</p>
+
+<p>"You have, ma'am? Well, it's strange, too, to hear a Gentile say a good
+word for our prophet, but perhaps, as he came from here, ma'am, you may
+be some relation of his; and I ask you, is it likely, as he's always
+acted so severe in that matter, that he should have taught a false
+doctrine himself? But even some of the Saints do say nowadays that he
+was led away by some strange doctrines before he died; but, for my own
+part, I believe that the tales have arisen from the sinful natures of
+many of the men that he trusted; for he was too trustful, and there's
+apostles and bishops and elders amongst us that are servants of hell.
+There's been evil work since our prophet's martyrdom, for there's
+thousands of our people now deluded by them and going out after Mr.
+Brigham Young and his crew.</p>
+
+<p>"You want to know how the prophet's death came about, and I can tell
+you; for when my disease came on, and the doctor told me 'twas fatal, I
+started to go up to Nauvoo to ask the prophet to lay his hands upon me
+and heal me. But when I got there the city was all in a buzz, for the
+cause that some of the elders had got out a paper accusing the prophet
+of having a lot of ladies for wives. Well now, I can tell you how that
+came about. When our prophet first got the charter for the Nauvoo Legion
+there was a man called Bennet, who had been general in the American
+army, and who was steeped in unbelief and ambition, and who came and
+offered his services to the prophet, and was allowed to build up the
+Nauvoo Legion. He was a most sinful man, and the prophet, he knew his
+sinfulness, but thought that he ought to take any help to build up an
+army to preserve his people from the fearful persecutions. Bennet got
+hold of the worst side of the worst men we had in the Church, among
+which was the new usurper." He paused here with ire in his eye. "I would
+be understood to mean Mr. Brigham Young, who has falsely usurped the
+prophet's place; but there are many of us who will not follow him, no,
+not one step. The Lord will requite him and his confederates, and will
+establish his true servants."</p>
+
+<p>"I fear, my good friend," said Ephraim, "that although it is true that
+the Lord will establish his true servants, it is also true that their
+kingdom is not of this world."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, tramping along as I've done many a day, with no companion
+but the disease that's prevailing against me, I've thought that that may
+be true; but, whichever way it is, Bennet set himself to work iniquity,
+and they say that when the prophet could endure him no longer and gave
+him the sack, he had the vileness to dress himself up in the prophet's
+clothes and go about in disguise, talking Sydney Rigdon's rank
+spiritual-wife doctrine to the ladies and some of them were such fools
+that they thought it was the prophet, and that he disguised his voice
+and kept something over his face in order to work the iniquity in
+secret. That's what a gentleman who knew very well about it told me. But
+anyway, when Bennet was gone out he wrote awful things to the Gentile
+newspapers concerning the domestic iniquities of Nauvoo; and he had his
+own party in the sacred city, and they up and put their scandals in the
+public print in the prophet's own city.</p>
+
+<p>"But the prophet he rose up and shook himself, like Samson when his arms
+were tied with the withes, and he denounced the wickedness, and went to
+the house where the paper was published, and kicked the printing press
+down himself, and burned the paper. And that day he preached most
+powerful in the Nauvoo Temple."</p>
+
+<p>"We heard that it was on account of the illegality of his action in the
+printing office that the people of Illinois arrested him."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger did not answer directly. His mind had passed on to scenes
+which had stirred him more personally.</p>
+
+<p>"I was in the city all the time. The Government of Illinois sent to
+arrest Mr. Smith, but his people rallied round him, and said that in
+consequence of the lawless persecutions that had passed in Missouri they
+had a right to mistrust the justice of the State. They called out the
+Nauvoo Legion, and sent back the constables that had come from
+Carthage. That made the Gentiles terribly angry. The Illinois
+militiamen went about saying openly that they would burn down the town
+and kill every man, woman, and child in it. So then Governor Ford
+himself advised our prophet to keep the Legion under arms, for he said
+the Gentiles were so furious; but he asked the prophet to go to Carthage
+and pledge himself to appear for the trial when it came on, for it was a
+civil suit, and no harm could come to him and his. Governor Ford pledged
+his honour as the Governor of the State.</p>
+
+<p>"I had been waiting about the town until the prophet should be less
+bothered before asking him to heal my sickness, but when I heard that he
+was going away, then I misdoubted that it would be long before he came
+back. I thought I'd make a push for it, so I went and hung round the
+door of the prophet's house. I was only a poor man and I did not like to
+go in, for the bishops and elders and all the grand folks were going in
+and out all that day. I heard the things they said, and most of them
+were saying that the prophet had had a vision, and that if he went to
+Carthage he would never come back alive. They said too that if he
+stayed, the town would be sacked, and I understood that they were asking
+him to run away. Towards evening I saw a buggy draw up at the back door
+of the hotel, and all the elders seemed to be holding a meeting, for
+they were singing hymns; so then it just come to me that they were going
+to get the prophet off, and I ran down the road to the ferry, for I
+knew he would have to go that way. I waited in the boat, and the same
+buggy came down to it, and a man with a cloak on and his hat over his
+eyes came out and sat in the corner of the boat, and we all knew that it
+was the prophet, and none of us durst speak to him. But I went over in
+the boat, for I hoped I'd get up courage to ask him when we came to the
+other side. When he stood on the shore he seemed like a man that didn't
+know what to do, although there was horses there for him to take, and he
+turned round and went off the road up on to a little hill; and I went
+after him a bit of the way behind, and I came and found him just
+standing looking at the city, for the river swept round two sides of it
+so noble like, and blue as the sky above, and the city stood all white,
+and the temple stood high in the middle, and all of it glistened in the
+sun. The prophet had taken off his hat, and he stood with his hands
+folded on the stick he carried, and he just looked and looked at the
+city. I had never seen a man look like that but once before, and then it
+was a man I knew whose wife died, and he looked at her face just
+steadfast like that. I couldn't think to speak to him about myself just
+then, although I'd got him alone, for my heart was just broke to see how
+sad he looked, and him just in the prime of life; for it was his own
+city, and the sound of all its work came over to us as we stood there,
+and the thousands and thousands of happy homes in it belonged to his
+own people.</p>
+
+<p>"But when I moved a bit he saw me, and he started at first as if I'd
+been going to shoot him, thinking no doubt that I was an enemy spying on
+him. At that, because my disease had weakened me, and because I seemed
+to feel nothing all through me but the grief that he was bearing, I
+began to cry like a child.</p>
+
+<p>"Then he stretched out his hands towards the city and I heard him say,
+'My Lord, thou hast given me this people, and if I leave them without a
+shepherd they will be stricken and scattered and robbed by the
+destroyer.'</p>
+
+<p>"So then in a few minutes he held out his hand to me, so gentlemanlike,
+as if I was as good as him, and he said, 'Come, my friend, let us go
+back, and let God determine what we shall do or suffer.' So we went and
+got on the ferry-boat and went back, and I never spoke to him; but I
+went with him all the way to his house.</p>
+
+<p>"The next morning I heard that he and Mr. Hyrum were going to set off
+for Carthage to be tried. So I got a horse and went to Carthage before
+them, for I felt then that I cared for nothing but to see the prophet
+again. But I heard tell how, as they went along, their wives and their
+friends went with them part way, and they turned back two or three times
+as they were parting from them, for the prophet said that they would
+never see his face again.</p>
+
+<p>"Governor Ford he met them at Carthage with a great to-do. He pledged
+the honour of the State that they should be safe, and he had the troops
+drawn upon either side, and he passed down between them with the prophet
+and Mr. Hyrum and showed them himself into the gaol. The prophet said
+that it was illegal to put them in the gaol, for it was a civil matter,
+and Governor Ford said, for I heard him, that it was because they would
+be safer there. I was standing just behind the line of soldiers jostling
+up with the crowd, and I heard the Governor say, 'I pledge you my
+honour, and the faith and honour of this State, that no harm shall come
+to you while undergoing this imprisonment.' So then they were shut in;
+but the crowd and the soldiers remained in the streets, and I heard
+enough to know that harm would come.</p>
+
+<p>"The next morning the Governor went away from Carthage, to be out of it,
+and that day, in the afternoon, a mob of men with faces painted like
+Indians came out with guns, and we knew that their purpose was to murder
+the prophet. I went to the gaol and sat upon the steps, and the militia,
+which was called the Carthage Greys, came out, and halted, about eight
+rods from the gaol, and I thought at first that they would fire on the
+mob when they came, but they never moved, but stood and looked on. So
+the murder was done by them all in cold blood as well as by the mob."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see him die?" asked Susannah with white lips.</p>
+
+<p>"If he was a relation of yours, ma'am, I can tell you that he died like
+a man. First I thought that I would spend what little strength I had
+left in fighting the mob at the door, and that they should not go in
+except over my body; but the gaoler opened the door in pretence of
+finding out what was the matter, for he was in the plot; so I thought
+that I would run up and give warning. But by the time I got to the door
+of the upper room where the prophet was, the mob was up behind me, so I
+never rightly knew what I did, for they knocked me down just within the
+room. There were four or five men with the prophet and Mr. Hyrum, and
+these kept the mob back for a few minutes at the door, but a bullet hit
+Mr. Hyrum in the head, and I saw the prophet leaning over him, and he
+said in a voice that was very sad, 'My dear, dear brother!'</p>
+
+<p>"Then the prophet stood up quite calmly and pulled out a pistol and shot
+at the mob until all its barrels were discharged. His firing made the
+men hold back, for a good number of the mob were struck. Then they came
+on again until the door was literally full with muskets and rifles, but
+I was lying on the floor below the shots, so I saw them pass over my
+head. The very walls were riddled with them, and the prophet stood in
+the midst of the shots and threw up his hands towards heaven and cried,
+'O Lord, my God.' Then, not knowing what he did, he staggered to the
+window, dying from his wounds, and he fell outside the window, and I
+heard that the mob out there propped up his body and used it for a
+target."</p>
+
+<p>Susannah rose up with clenched hands and pitiful face, but she went out
+of the room, leaving the two men together. "Were you injured?" asked
+Ephraim of the stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, I was bruised by being trampled on, but the gaoler got hold
+of me and dragged me into an iron cell and locked me in, and the next
+morning he came and let me out."</p>
+
+<p>"That was a year ago," said Ephraim. "Have you been in Nauvoo since
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I went back. I wanted to know, sir, what would come, and take my
+share of the suffering after seeing the prophet die so courageous; but,
+sir, the Church is sorely divided. I didn't like to say it before your
+lady, for I see that she's got some one she cares for amongst us, but
+there's a strong party among the apostles and elders that are
+worshippers of Baal, and are most evil in their conduct and practice,
+and are apostate, though they call themselves followers of the prophet.
+And Mr. Brigham Young is at the head of them. It's a bad thing that the
+Illinois militia is set out to fight against us and turn us out of the
+city without mercy, but it's a sorer thing that the greater part of our
+people, being ignorant, will follow Mr. Brigham Young; and he's bent on
+going west, sir, into the heart of the Rocky Mountains, where he can set
+up a kingdom of his own. His teaching is against good doctrine in two
+respects; he says that they will wax strong there until they can avenge
+the blood of their brethren who have been hunted and slain, and that the
+elders and apostles will live like the patriarchs of old, and have many
+wives, in order to build up the Church."</p>
+
+<p>"And has the other party in your sect no strength to resist?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very little strength, sir, except that God is on the side of the
+righteous; but Mrs. Smith, the prophet's widow, with his sons and many
+hundreds of us, will not give in to the evil, but will stay in Illinois
+and Missouri in face of the worst that persecution can do, for it was
+thereabouts that the prophet said that the Holy City should be, and he
+gave us no word to kill and destroy our fellow-men; and although perhaps
+he was led away and sinned sometimes as other men do, it is a scandalous
+lie to say that he thought to teach wickedness and falsehood to his
+Church."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," asked Ephraim within himself, "if that is true, or what
+strange secret that troubled soul took with him to the other side of
+death?"</p>
+
+<p>In the evening after the stranger was gone Susannah sat with Ephraim in
+the old doorway. Before them, mid the harvest fields, winding over hill
+and dale, lay the long white road which led to the hill of Smith's early
+visions&mdash;the road on which Susannah had set forth with Angel Halsey on
+her wedding journey.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a-weary, wife, to-night," said Ephraim. He smoothed the hair
+upon her brow. "You have exhausted yourself with long weeping, and
+yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He did not say, "Have you reason to bemoan this man's tragic end?" for
+he knew that more sacred memories had caused the tears; of these some
+faint jealousy rose in his breast and kindness sealed his lips.</p>
+
+<p>She told him the truth in very simple words such as loving women use.</p>
+
+<p>"To-day I seemed to see" (she laid her hand across her knit brows) "all
+the passion of it again, the wrong, the right, the misery&mdash;from the day
+that Angel and I went out with such young passionate desire to divide
+the right from the wrong. I could see Angel and my baby shot before my
+eyes as Joseph Smith was shot. It is terrible to see death come that
+way. But they are all three lying now in the perfect peace of death."
+She put her hand in his. "Then, dear, my mind came back, from the rage
+and terror of war. I thought of their peace and of you&mdash;how God has
+healed my life by your love, and given me such joy. Is he not able to
+provide for the healing of the nations?"</p>
+
+
+<p>THE END.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Mormon Prophet
+
+Author: Lily Dougall
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2005 [EBook #17279]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MORMON PROPHET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by the Canadian Institute for Historical
+Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org))
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Mormon Prophet
+
+BY
+
+LILY DOUGALL
+
+Author of The Mermaid, The Zeitgeist, The Madonna of a Day, Beggars All,
+Etc.
+
+
+TORONTO
+
+THE W.J. GAGE COMPANY (LIMITED)
+1899
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1899,
+BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In studying the rise of this curious sect I have discovered that certain
+misconceptions concerning it are deeply rooted in the minds of many of
+the more earnest of the well-wishers to society. Some otherwise
+well-informed people hold Mormonism to be synonymous with polygamy,
+believe that Brigham Young was its chief prophet, and are convinced that
+the miseries of oppressed women and tyrannies exercised over helpless
+subjects of both sexes are the only themes that the religion of more
+than two hundred thousand people can afford. When I have ventured in
+conversation to deny these somewhat fabulous notions, it has been
+earnestly suggested to me that to write on so false a religion in other
+than a polemic spirit would tend to the undermining of civilised life.
+
+In spite of these warnings, and although I know it to be a most
+dangerous commodity, I have ventured to offer the simple truth, as far
+as I have been able to discern it, consoling my advisers with the
+assurance that its insidious influence will be unlikely to do harm,
+because, however potent may be the direful latitude of other religious
+novels, this particular book can only interest those wiser folk who are
+best able to deal with it.
+
+As, however, to many who have preconceived the case, this narrative
+might, in the absence of explanation, seem purely fanciful, let me
+briefly refer to the historical facts on which it is based. The Mormons
+revere but one prophet. As to his identity there can be no mistake,
+since many of the "revelations" were addressed to him by name--"To
+Joseph Smith, Junior." He never saw Utah, and his public teachings were
+for the most part unexceptionable. Taking necessary liberty with
+incidents, I have endeavoured to present Smith's character as I found it
+in his own writings, in the narratives of contemporary writers, and in
+the memories of the older inhabitants of Kirtland.
+
+In reviewing the evidence I am unable to believe that, had Smith's
+doctrine been conscious invention, it would have lent sufficient power
+to carry him through persecutions in which his life hung in the
+balance, and his cause appeared to be lost, or that the class of earnest
+men who constituted the rank and file of his early following would have
+been so long deceived by a deliberate hypocrite. It appears to me more
+likely that Smith was genuinely deluded by the automatic freaks of a
+vigorous but undisciplined brain, and that, yielding to these, he became
+confirmed in the hysterical temperament which always adds to delusion
+self-deception, and to self-deception half-conscious fraud. In his day
+it was necessary to reject a marvel or admit its spiritual significance;
+granting an honest delusion as to his visions and his book, his only
+choice lay between counting himself the sport of devils or the agent of
+Heaven; an optimistic temperament cast the die.
+
+In describing the persecutions of his early followers I have modified
+rather than enlarged upon the facts. It would, indeed, be difficult to
+exaggerate the sufferings of this unhappy and extraordinarily successful
+sect.
+
+A large division of the Mormons of to-day, who claim to be Smith's
+orthodox following, and who have never settled in Utah, are strictly
+monogamous. These have never owned Brigham Young as a leader, never
+murdered their neighbours or defied the law in any way, and so vigorous
+their growth still appears that they claim to have increased their
+number by fifty thousand since the last census in 1890. Of all their
+characteristics, the sincerity of their belief is the most striking. In
+Ohio, when one of the preachers of these "Smithite" Mormons was
+conducting me through the many-storied temple, still standing huge and
+gray on Kirtland Bluff, he laid his hand on a pile of copies of the Book
+of Mormon, saying solemnly, "Sister, here is the solidest thing in
+religion that you'll find anywhere." I bought the "solidest" thing for
+fifty cents, and do not advise the same outlay to others. The prophet's
+life is more marvellous and more instructive than the book whose
+production was its chief triumph. That it was an original production
+seems probable, as the recent discovery of the celebrated Spalding
+manuscript, and a critical examination of the evidence of Mrs. Spalding,
+go far to discredit the popular accusation of plagiarism.
+
+Near Kirtland I visited a sweet-faced old lady--not, however, of the
+Mormon persuasion--who as a child had climbed on the prophet's knee. "My
+mother always said," she told us, "that if she had to die and leave
+young children, she would rather have left them to Joseph Smith than to
+any one else in the world: he was always kind." This testimony as to
+Smith's kindheartedness I found to be often repeated in the annals of
+Mormon families.
+
+In criticising my former stories several reviewers, some of them
+distinguished in letters, have done me the honour to remark that there
+was latent laughter in many of my scenes and conversations, but that I
+was unconscious of it. Be that as it may, those who enjoy unconscious
+absurdity will certainly find it in the utterances of the self-styled
+prophet of the Mormons. Probably one gleam of the sacred fire of humour
+would have saved him and his apostles the very unnecessary trouble of
+being Mormons at all.
+
+In looking over the problems involved in such a career as Smith's, we
+must be struck by the necessity for able and unprejudiced research into
+the laws which govern apparent marvels. Notwithstanding the very natural
+and sometimes justifiable aspersions which have been cast upon the work
+of the Society for Psychical Research, it does appear that the
+disinterested service rendered by its more distinguished members is the
+only attempt hitherto made to aid people of the so-called "mediumistic"
+temperament to understand rather than be swayed by their delusions.
+Whether such a result is as yet possible or not, Mormonism affords a
+gigantic proof of the crying need of an effort in this direction; for
+men are obviously more ignorant of their own elusive mental conditions
+than of any other branch of knowledge.
+
+L.D.
+
+MONTREAL, December, 1898.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORMON PROPHET.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK I._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In the United States of America there was, in the early decades of this
+century, a very widely spread excitement of a religious sort. Except in
+the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were
+scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from
+a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the
+settlers. In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had
+been persecuted for their faith: Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of
+diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of
+fiery zeal, their cravings for "the light that never was on sea or
+land," but not that education by contact with law and order which, in
+older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.
+
+With the religious revivals came signs and wonders. A wave of peculiar
+psychical phenomena swept over the country, in explanation of which the
+belief most widely received was that of the direct interposition of God
+or the devil. The difficulty of discerning between the working of the
+good and the bad spirit in abnormal manifestations was to most minds
+obviated by the fact that they looked out upon the confusing scene
+through the glasses of rigidly defined opinion, and according as the
+affected person did or did not conform to the spectator's view of truth,
+so he was judged to be a saint or a demoniac. Few sought to learn rather
+than to judge; one of these very few was a young man by name Ephraim
+Croom. He was by nature a student, and, being of a feeble constitution,
+he enjoyed what, in that country and time, was the very rare privilege
+of indulging his literary tastes under the shelter of the parental roof.
+
+In one of the last years of the eighteenth century Croom the elder had
+come with a young wife from his father's home in Massachusetts to settle
+in a township called New Manchester, in the State of New York. He was a
+Baptist by creed; a man of strong will, strong affections, and strong
+self-respect. Taking the portion of goods which was his by right, he
+sallied forth into the new country, thrift and intelligence written upon
+his forehead, thinking there the more largely to establish the
+prosperity of the green bay tree, and to serve his God and generation
+the better by planting his race in the newer land.
+
+The thirtieth year after his emigration found him a notable person in
+the place that he had chosen, with almost the same physical strength as
+in youth, stern, upright, thrifty, the owner of large mills, of a
+substantial wooden residence, and of many acres of land. He was as rich
+as he had intended to be; his ideal of righteousness, being of the
+obtainable sort, had been realised and strictly adhered to. The one
+disappointment of his life was the lack of those sturdy sons and
+daughters who, to his mind, should have surrounded the virtuous man in
+his old age. They had not come into the world. His wife, a good woman
+and energetic helpmeet, had brought him but the one studious son.
+
+Ephraim was thirty-two years of age when a young girl, strong,
+beautiful, impetuous, entered under the sloping eaves of his father's
+huge gray shingle roof. The girl was a niece on the maternal side. Her
+New England mother had, by freak of love, married a reckless young
+Englishman of gentle blood who was settled on a Canadian farm. Pining
+for her puritan home, she died early. The father made a toy of his
+daughter till he too died in the fortified town of Kingston, on the
+northern shore of Lake Ontario. No other relatives coming forward to
+assume his debts or to claim his child, their duty in the matter was
+clear to the minds of the Croom household, and the girl was sent for.
+Her name was Susannah, but she herself gave it the softer form that she
+had been accustomed to hear; when she first entered the sitting-room of
+the grave Croom family trio, like a sunbeam striking suddenly through
+the clouds on a dark day, she held out her hand and her lips to each in
+turn, saying, "I am Susianne."
+
+That first time Ephraim kissed her. It was done in surprise and
+embarrassed formality. He knew, when the moment was past that his
+parents had perceived that Susannah needed more decorous training. He
+concurred in believing this to be desirable, for the manners that had
+surrounded him were very stiff. Yet the memory of the greeting remained
+with him, a thing to be wondered at while he turned the whispering
+leaves of his great books.
+
+Susannah had travelled from the Canadian fort in the care of the
+preacher Finney. He was a revivalist of great renown, possessing a
+lawyer-like keenness of intellect, much rhetorical power, and Pauline
+singleness of purpose. That night he ate and slept in the house.
+
+The original Calvinism of the Croom household had already been modified
+by the waves of Methodist revival from the Eastern States. Finney was an
+Independent, but Martha Croom had an abounding respect for him; his
+occasional visits were epochs in her life. She had prepared many baked
+meats for his entertainment before the evening of his arrival with
+Susannah, but while he was present she devoted herself wholly to his
+conversation.
+
+The feast was spread in the inner kitchen. In the square brick fireplace
+burning pine sticks crackled, bidding the chill of the April evening
+retire to its own place beyond the dark window pane. The paint upon the
+walls and floor glistened but faintly to the fire and the small flames
+of two candles that stood among the viands upon the table.
+
+The elder Croom sat in his place. He was burly and ruddy, a wholesome
+man, very silent, very strong, a person to be feared and relied on.
+Ephraim believed that force went forth from his father's presence like
+perfume from a flower. There were many kinds of flowers whose perfume
+was too strong for Ephraim, but he felt that to be a proof of his own
+weakness.
+
+Martha Croom, also of New England stock, was of a different type. At
+fifty years she was still as slender as a girl--tall and too slender,
+but the small shapely head was set gracefully on the neck as a flower
+upon its stalk. Her hair, which was wholly silvered, was still abundant
+and glossily brushed. Her mind was not judicial. She was more quick to
+decide than to comprehend, full of intense activities and emotions.
+
+"I have heard," said the preacher slowly, "certain distressing rumours
+concerning--"
+
+Mrs. Croom gave an upward bridling motion of her head, and a red spot
+of indignant fire came in each of her cheeks. "Joe Smith?", she cried.
+"A blasphemous wretch! And there is nothing, Mr. Finney, that so well
+indicates the luke-warmishness into which so many have fallen as that
+his blasphemy is made a jest of."
+
+Ephraim moved uneasily in his chair.
+
+Mr. Croom made a remark brief and judicial. "The Smiths are a _low_
+family."
+
+Mrs. Croom answered the tone. "If the dirt beneath our feet were to
+begin using profane language, I don't suppose it would be beneath our
+dignity to put a stop to it."
+
+"It is the Inquisition that my mother wishes to reinstate," said
+Ephraim.
+
+The master of the house again spoke with the _naivete_ of unquestioning
+bias. "No, Ephraim; for your mother would be the last to interfere with
+any for doing righteousness or believing the truth."
+
+Mrs. Croom's slender head trembled and her eyes showed signs of tears at
+her son's opposition. "If God-fearing people cannot prevent the most
+horrible iniquities from being practised in their own town, the laws are
+in a poor condition."
+
+"You have made no candid inquiry concerning Smith, mother; your judgment
+of him, whether true or false, is based on angry sentiment and wilful
+ignorance."
+
+The preacher sighed. "This Smith is deceiving the people."
+
+"His book," said Ephraim, "is a history of the North American Indians
+from the time of the flood until some epoch prior to Columbus. It would
+be as difficult to prove that it was not true as to prove that Smith is
+not honest in his delusion. We can only fall back upon what Butler would
+call 'a strong presumption.'"
+
+Mrs. Croom, consciously or not, made a little sharp rap on the table,
+and there was a movement of suppressed misery like a quiver in her
+slender upright form. Her voice was low and tremulous. "If you'd got
+religion, Ephraim, you wouldn't speak in that light manner of one who
+has the awful wickedness of adding to the words of the Book."
+
+Ephraim continued to enlighten the preacher in a stronger tone. "Whether
+the man is mad or false, almost all the immoralities that you will hear
+reported about him are, as far as I can make out, not true. He doesn't
+teach that it's unnecessary to obey the ten commandments, or beat his
+wife, nor is he drunken. He's got the sense to see that all that sort of
+thing wouldn't make a big man of him. It's merely a revised form of
+Christianity, with a few silly additions, that he claims to be the
+prophet of."
+
+Mrs. Croom began to weep bitterly.
+
+The elder Croom asked a pertinent question. "Why do you wilfully
+distress your mother, Ephraim?"
+
+"Because, sir, I love my mother too well to sit silent and let her
+think that injustice can glorify God."
+
+It was a family jar.
+
+Finney was a man of about forty years of age; his eyes under
+over-reaching brows were bright and penetrating; his face was shaven,
+but his mouth had an expression of peculiar strength and gentleness. He
+looked keenly at the son of the house, who was held to be irreligious.
+And then he looked upon Susannah, whose beauty and frivolity had not
+escaped his keen observation. He lived always in the consciousness of an
+invisible presence; when he felt the arms of Heaven around him, wooing
+him to prayer, he dared not disobey.
+
+He arose now, setting his chair back against the wall with preoccupied
+precision. "The spirit of prayer is upon me," he said; and in a moment
+he added, "Let us pray."
+
+Susannah was eating, and with relish. She laid down her bit of pumpkin
+pie and stared astonished. Then, being a girl of good sense and good
+feeling, she relinquished the remainder of her supper, and, following
+her aunt's example, knelt beside her chair.
+
+The two candles and the firelight left shadowy spaces in parts of the
+room, and cast grotesque outlines against the walls. Nothing was
+familiar to Susannah's eye; she could not help looking about her.
+Ephraim was nearest to her. He was a bearded man, and seemed to her very
+old. She saw that his face looked pale and distressed; his eyes were
+closed, his lips tight set, like one bearing transient pain. At the end
+of the table her uncle knelt upright, with hands clasped and face
+uplifted, no feature or muscle moving--a strong figure rapt in devotion.
+On her other side, as a slight tree waves in the wind, her aunt's slim
+figure was swaying and bending with feeling that was now convulsive and
+now restrained. Sometimes she moaned audibly or whispered "Amen." Across
+the richly-spread table Susannah saw the preacher kneeling in a full
+flickering glare of the pine fire, one hand upon the brick jamb, the
+other covering his eyes, as if to hide from himself all things that were
+seen and temporal in order that he might speak face to face with the
+Eternal.
+
+It was some time before she listened to the words of the prayer. When
+she heard Ephraim Croom spoken of by name, there was no room in her mind
+for anything but curiosity. After a while she heard her own name, and
+curiosity began to subside into awe. After this the preacher brought
+forward the case of Joseph Smith.
+
+Before the prayer ended Susannah was troubled by so strong a sense of
+emotion that she desired nothing so much as relief. It seemed to her
+that the emotion was not so much in herself as in the others, or like an
+influence in the room pressing upon them all. At length a kitten that
+had been lying by the hearth got up as if disturbed by the same
+influence, and, walking round the room, rubbed its fur against Ephraim's
+knee. She saw the start run through his whole nervous frame. Opening his
+eyes, he put down his hand and stroked it. Susannah liked Ephraim the
+better for this. The kitten was not to be comforted; it looked up in his
+face and gave a piteous mew. Susannah tittered; then she felt sorry and
+ashamed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Two quiet years passed, and Susannah had attained her eighteenth
+birthday.
+
+On a certain day in the week there befell what the aunt called a
+"season" of baking. It was the only occasion in the week when Mrs. Croom
+was sure to stay for some length of time in the same place with Susannah
+beside her. Ephraim brought down his books to the hospitable kitchen,
+and sat aloof at a corner table. He said the sun was too strong upon his
+upper windows, or that the rain was blowing in. The first time that
+Ephraim sought refuge in the kitchen Mrs. Croom was quite flustered with
+delight. She always coveted more of her son's society. But when he came
+a third time she began to suspect trouble.
+
+Mrs. Croom stood by the baking-board, her slender hands immersed in a
+heap of pearly flour; baskets of scarlet currants lay at her feet. All
+things in the kitchen shone by reason of her diligence, and the windows
+were open to the summer sunshine. Susannah sat with a large pan of red
+gooseberries beside her; she was picking them over one by one.
+Somewhere in the outer kitchen the hired boy had been plucking a goose,
+and some tiny fragments of the down were floating in the air. One of
+them rode upon a movement of the summer air and danced before Susannah's
+eyes. She put her pretty red lips beneath it and blew it upwards.
+
+Mrs. Croom's suspicions concerning Ephraim had produced in her a desire
+to reprove some one, but she refrained as yet.
+
+Susannah having wafted the summer snowflake aloft, still sat, her young
+face tilted upward like the faces of saints in the holy pictures, her
+bright eyes fixed upon the feather now descending. Ephraim looked with
+obvious pleasure. Her head was framed for him by the window; a dark
+stiff evergreen and the summer sky gave a Raphaelite setting.
+
+The feather dropped till it all but touched the tip of the girl's nose.
+Then from the lips, puckered and rosy, came a small gust; the fragment
+of down ascended, but this time aslant.
+
+"You didn't blow straight enough up," said Ephraim.
+
+Susannah smiled to know that her pastime was observed. The smile was a
+flash of pleasure that went through her being. She ducked her laughing
+face farther forward to be under the feather.
+
+Mrs. Croom shot one glance at Ephraim, eager and happy in his watching.
+She did what nothing but the lovelight in her son's face could have
+caused her to do. She struck the girl lightly but testily on the side of
+the face.
+
+Ephraim was as foolish as are most men in sight of a damsel in distress.
+He made no impartial inquiry into the real cause of trouble; he did not
+seek Justice in her place of hiding. He stepped to his mother's side,
+stern and determined, remembering only that she was often unwise, and
+that he could control her.
+
+"You ought not to have done that. You must never do it again."
+
+With the print of floury fingers on her glowing cheeks the girl sat more
+astonished than angry, full of ruth when her aunt began to sob aloud.
+
+The mother knew that she was no longer the first woman in her son's
+love.
+
+It was without doubt, Mrs. Croom's first bitter pang of jealousy that
+lay at the beginning of those causes which drove Susannah out upon a
+strange pilgrimage. But above and beyond her personal jealousy was a
+consideration certainly dearer to a woman into whose inmost religious
+life was woven the fibre of the partisan. As she expressed it to
+herself, she agonised before the Lord in a new fear lest her unconverted
+son should be established in his unbelief by love for a woman who had
+never sought for heavenly grace; but, in truth, that which she sought
+was that both should swear allegiance to her own interpretation of
+grace. In this prayer some good came to her, the willingness to
+sacrifice her jealousy if need be; but, after the prayer another thought
+entered into her mind, which she held to be divine direction; she must
+focus all her efforts upon the girl's conversion. In her heart all the
+time a still small voice told her that love was the fulfilling of the
+law, but so still, so small, so habitual was it that she lost it as we
+lose the ticking of a clock, and it was not with increased love for
+Susannah that she began a course of redoubled zeal.
+
+The girl became frightened, not so much of her aunt as of God. The
+simple child's prayer for the keeping of her soul which she had been in
+the habit of repeating morning and evening became a terror to her,
+because she did not understand her aunt's phraseology. The "soul" it
+dealt with was not herself, her thoughts, feelings, and powers, but a
+mysterious something apart from these, for whose welfare these must all
+be sacrificed.
+
+Susannah had heard of fairies and ghosts; she inclined to shove this
+sort of soul into the same unreal region. The dreary artificial heaven,
+which seemed to follow logically if she accepted the basal fact of a
+soul separated from all her natural powers, could be dispensed with
+also. This was her hope, but she was not sure. How could she be sure
+when she was so young and dependent? It was almost her only solace to
+interpret Ephraim's silence by her own unbelief, and she rested her
+weary mind against her vague notions of Ephraim's support.
+
+One August day Mrs. Croom drove with her husband to a distant funeral.
+
+In the afternoon when the sunshine was falling upon the fields of maize,
+when the wind was busy setting their ribbon-like leaves flapping, and
+rocking the tree-tops, Ephraim Croom was disturbed in his private room
+by the blustering entrance of Susannah.
+
+The room was an attic; the windows of the gable looked west; slanting
+windows in the shingle roof looked north and south. The room was large
+and square, spare of furniture, lined with books. At a square table in
+the centre sat Ephraim.
+
+When Susannah entered a gust of wind came with her. The handkerchief
+folded across her bosom was blown awry. Her sun-bonnet had slipped back
+upon her neck; her ringlets were tossed.
+
+"Cousin Ephraim, my aunt has gone; come out and play with me." Then she
+added more disconsolately, "I am lonely; I want you to talk to me,
+cousin."
+
+The gust had lifted Ephraim's papers and shed them upon the floor. He
+looked down at them without moving. Life in a world of thoughts in which
+his fellows took no interest, had produced in him a singularly
+undemonstrative manner.
+
+Susannah's red lips were pouting. "Come, cousin, I am so tired of
+myself."
+
+But Ephraim had been privately accused of amative emotions. Offended
+with his mother, mortified he knew not why, uncertain of his own
+feeling, as scholars are apt to be, he had no wish then but to retire.
+
+"I am too busy, Susianne."
+
+"Then I will go alone; I will go for a long, long walk by myself." She
+gave her foot a defiant stamp upon the floor.
+
+He looked out of his windows north and south; safer district could not
+be. "I do not think it will rain," he said.
+
+A suspicion of laughter was lurking in his clear quiet eyes, which were
+framed in heavy brown eyebrows and thick lashes. Nature, who had stinted
+this man in physical strength, had fitted him out fairly well as to
+figure and feature.
+
+Susannah, vexed at his indifference, but fearing that he would retract
+his unexpected permission, was again in the draught of the open door.
+
+"Perhaps I will walk away, away into the woods and never come back; what
+then?"
+
+"Indians," suggested he, "or starvation, or perhaps wolves, Susianne."
+
+"But I love you for not forbidding me to go, cousin Ephraim."
+
+The smile that repaid him for his indulgence comforted him for an hour;
+then a storm arose.
+
+In the meantime Susannah had walked far. A squatter's old log-house
+stood by the green roadside; the wood of the roof and walls was
+weathered and silver-gray. Before it a clothes-line was stretched,
+heaved tent-like by a cleft pole, and a few garments were flapping in
+the wind, chiefly white, but one was vivid pink and one tawny yellow.
+
+The nearer aspect of the log-house was squalid. An early apple-tree at
+the side had shed part of its fruit, which was left to rot in the grass
+and collect flies, and close to the road, under a juniper bush, the rind
+of melons and potato peelings had been thrown. There was no fence; the
+grass was uncut. Upon the door-step sat a tall woman, unkempt-looking,
+almost ragged. She had short gray hair that curled about her temples;
+her face was handsome, clever-looking too, but, above all, eager. This
+eagerness amounted to hunger. She was looking toward the sky, nodding
+and smiling to herself.
+
+Susannah stopped upon the road a few feet from the juniper bush. It
+occurred to her that this was Joseph Smith's mother, who had the
+reputation of being a speywife. The sky-gazer did not look at her.
+
+"Are you Lucy Smith?"
+
+The woman clapped her hands suddenly together and laughed aloud. Then
+she rose, but, only glancing a moment at the visitor, she turned her
+smiling face again toward the sky.
+
+Into Susannah's still defiant mood darted the thought of a new
+adventure. "Will you tell my fortune?"
+
+"Who am I to tell fortunes when my son Joseph has come home?" Again came
+the excited laugh. "It's the grace of God that's fallen on this house,
+and Lucy Smith, like Elizabeth, the wife of Zacharias, is the mother of
+a prophet."
+
+"He isn't a prophet," said Susannah, taking a step backward.
+
+"Seven years ago was his first vision, and all the people trampling upon
+him since to make him gainsay it, but he stood steadfast. I dreamed
+it--when he was a little child I dreamed it, and it has come true."
+Then, seeming to return into herself, her gaze wandered again to the
+sky, and she murmured, "The mother of a prophet, the mother of a
+prophet!"
+
+On the other side of the road a few acres of ground were lying under
+disorderly cultivation. In one patch the stalks of sweet maize had been
+fastened together in high stooks, disclosing the pumpkin vines, which
+beneath them had plentifully borne their huge fruit, green as yet. At
+the back of this cultivated portion an old man, the elder Joseph Smith,
+was digging potatoes; his torn shirt fluttered like the dress of a
+scarecrow. Behind him and all around was the green wood, close-growing
+bushes hedging in the short trees of a second growth which covered a
+long low hill. Above the hill ominous clouds like smoking censers were
+being rolled up from the east; the waving beards of the corn stooks
+rustled and streamed in wind which was growing colder. Susannah's dress
+and bonnet were roughly blown, and the clothes on the line flapped again
+around the tall figure of the witch in the doorway.
+
+Susannah contradicted again with the scornful superiority of youth. "I
+don't believe that your son is a prophet."
+
+Lucy Smith, having the sensitive receptive power of an hysteric, was
+sobered now by the determination of Susannah's aspect. She looked almost
+repentant for a moment, and then said humbly, "If you'll come in and see
+Emmar--Joseph and Emmar have come home--Emmar will tell you the same."
+
+A gray vaporous tint was being spread over the heavens, folding this
+portion of earth in its shadow and darkening the interior of the cabin
+which Susannah entered.
+
+Upon a decent bedstead reclined a young woman. Everything near her was
+orderly and clean. She belonged, it would seem, to a better class of the
+social order than the other, certainly to a higher type of womanhood.
+
+"What have you got? Is it a kitten?" asked Susannah. Advancing across
+the dark uneven floor, she perceived that the reclining woman was
+caressing some small creature beneath her shawl.
+
+"Emmar, Emmar," said Lucy Smith, "tell Miss from the mill about the
+angel that appeared to Joseph."
+
+Emma Smith was a nobly made, dignified young creature. She looked at
+Susannah's beautiful and open countenance, and straightway drew forth
+the young thing she was nursing for her inspection. It was an infant but
+a few days old. Surprised, reverent, and delighted, Susannah bent over
+it. The child made them all akin--the squalid old hysteric, the
+respectable young mother, the beautiful girl in her silken shawl.
+
+Some minutes elapsed.
+
+"Emmar, Miss here doesn't know nothing about Joseph. She says it ain't
+true."
+
+The young mother smiled frankly. "I suppose it seems very hard for you
+to believe," she said, "but it's quite true, and the Lord told Joseph
+where to find the new part of the Bible that he's going now to make
+known to the world. Shall I tell you about it?"
+
+Susannah looked at her dazed; she had heretofore heard of the Smiths'
+doctrines as of the ravings of the mad. It had not occurred to her that
+a sane mind could regard them seriously.
+
+"It was seven years ago," said Emma, "at the time the big revival was
+here and Joseph was converted; but he heard all the Methodists and
+Baptists and Presbyterians disputing together as to which of them was
+right, and he felt so burdened to know which was right, and he felt a
+sort of longing in him to be a great man, bigger than the revival
+preacher that had been here that all the people ran after, and Joseph
+felt that he could be bigger than that, and preach and tell all the
+people what was right, if they would all come to hear him. And he was so
+burdened that one day he went out into the woods, and he began crying
+and confessing his sins and calling out to God to show him what was
+right and make him a great preacher. Well, when he had been crying and
+going on like that for a long time, he just fell right down as if he was
+asleep, and it was all dark till a light fell from heaven and an angel
+came in the light." Emma went on to tell of Smith's vision and first
+call, of his backsliding and final commission.
+
+Susannah stared. The young mother was a reality; the baby was a reality.
+Could the statements in this wild story bear any relation to reality?
+The old woman stood by, nodding and smiling. The young girl's mind
+became perplexed.
+
+"It was just before he began to translate the gold book that he came to
+board at my father's in Susquehannah County, and he told me all about
+it, and I believed him; but my father wouldn't, so I had to go away with
+Joseph to get married; but since then father's forgiven us; and we've
+been back home this last summer, and we've been to Fayette too, living
+with a gentleman called Mr. Whitmer, who believes in Joseph, and all the
+time Joseph's been translating the book that was written on the gold
+plates that he found in the hill. It's been very hard work, and we've
+had to live very poor, because Joseph couldn't earn anything while he
+was doing it, but it's done now, so we feel cheered. And now that it's
+going to be printed, and Joseph can begin to gather in the elect very
+soon, and now that baby's come--"
+
+Emma stopped again; the last domestic detail seemed to involve her mind
+in such meshes of bliss that she lost sight of the end of her sentence.
+All her words had been calm, and the baby that lay upon the bed beside
+her stretching its crumpled rose-leaf fists into the air and making
+strange grotesque smiles with its little red chin and cheeks was
+undoubtedly a true baby, a good and delightful thing in Susannah's
+estimation. Had the Bible in the hill been a true Bible? Susannah
+intuitively knew that Emma Smith, bending with grave rapture over her
+firstborn, was not trying to deceive her.
+
+"It seems to me," she said, "that it is terribly wicked of you to
+believe about this Bible." Her utterance became thick with her rising
+indignation. "How can you sit and hold that child and say such terribly
+wicked things?" She could not have told why she referred to the child;
+the moment before it was spoken she had not formulated the thought. She
+was not old enough to reason about the sacredness of babies; she only
+felt.
+
+The tears started to Emma's eyes. She clasped her child to her breast.
+"Yes, I know how you feel. I felt that way too myself, and sometimes
+even yet it frightens me; but, you see, I know it is true, so it must be
+right. But I've given up expecting other people to believe it just yet,
+until Joseph is allowed to preach, and then it's been revealed to him
+that the nations shall be gathered in. Only you looked so--so
+beautiful--you see, I thought perhaps God might have sent you to be a
+friend to me. I have no friends because of the way they persecute
+Joseph."
+
+Susannah turned in incredulous wrath and tramped, young and haughty, to
+the outer door. The first drops of a heavy shower were falling; she
+hesitated.
+
+"But tell her about the witnesses, Emmar." Old Lucy stood half-way
+between the bed and the door, making nods and becks in her excited
+desire that Susannah should be impressed. "For when the dear Lord saw
+that folks wouldn't b'lieve Joseph, He didn't leave him without
+witnesses."
+
+Susannah, stopped by the weather, felt more willing to conciliate. She
+returned gloomily within the sound of Emma's gentle voice.
+
+"It was Mr. Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer and Mr. Harris," Emma said. "Mr.
+Cowdery and Mr. Whitmer saw the gold plates held in the air, as it were
+by hands they couldn't see, but Martin Harris he had to withdraw himself
+because he couldn't see the vision, and he went away by himself and
+sobbed and cried. But Joseph went and put his arm around him and prayed
+that his faith might be strengthened, and then he saw it. So they three
+have written their testimony in the front of the book that's being
+printed."
+
+A storm had now broken upon the house in torrents. The door was shut.
+Emma wrapped her child closer in her shawl. Susannah sat sulky and
+disconsolate. She had a vague idea that the vengeance of heaven was
+overtaking her for merely listening to such heresy. Over against this
+was a shadowy doubt whether it might not be true, roused by Emma's
+continued persistency.
+
+"Is it any easier to believe that those things happened to folks when
+the Bible was written? Don't you believe that God appeared to Moses and
+Samuel and told them the very words to write down, and showed them
+visions; and isn't He the same God yesterday, to-day, and for ever? It's
+just what it says in the Bible shall come about in the latter days. It's
+because of the great apostasy of the Church, no one really believing in
+Jesus Christ, that a new prophet had to appear--that's Joseph."
+
+"They do believe," Susannah spoke sullenly.
+
+"Well, there's your aunt, Mis' Croom. Now she's as good as there is in
+the modern Church, isn't she? She's doing all she can to save her soul.
+She can't do it, for she don't believe. Why the Lord, He said that signs
+and wonders should follow them that believe. Have they any signs and
+wonders up at your place? And He said that believers must forsake all,
+houses and lands and all; what have your people forsook? And as to its
+being hard to believe about Joseph--you just take the things in the
+Bible, Elisha and the bears, for instance, and Paul bringing back Dorcas
+to life, and just think how hard they'd be to believe if you heard they
+happened yesterday, next door to you. And with God all times and places
+is the same. Souls is only saved by believing; the Lord says so, and
+accepting the things of faith to come to pass, and being baptized and
+giving up all and following; and it's an awful thing to lose one's
+soul."
+
+At this reiteration of the doctrine of the soul as a thing apart from
+the development of reason and character, Susannah rose, ready to cry
+with anger. Her aunt's agitation on the subject had left a sore to which
+the gentlest touch was pain.
+
+"I don't believe it," she cried. "I don't believe God wants us to do
+anything except just good. That's what _my_ father told me. I'm going
+home. I don't care how it rains."
+
+Emma did not hear her. Over her pale young face had come the peculiar
+expression of alert and loving listening. She had detected the sound of
+a footstep which Susannah now heard coming heavily near.
+
+A large man of about twenty-five years of age entered from the bluster
+of the storm. As Susannah was trying to push out past him into its fury,
+he paused, staring in rough astonishment.
+
+Lucy hung on to her arm. "Stay a bit! Joseph must hold the umbrella over
+Miss. Emmar, tell her she can't no wise go alone."
+
+Susannah fled into the driving sheets of rain, but Joseph Smith,
+umbrella in hand, followed her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The umbrella was a very heavy one. Susannah certainly could not have
+held it against the wind. Joseph Smith held the shelter between Susannah
+and the blast, looking at her occasionally with a kindly expression in
+his blue eyes, but merely to see how far it sheltered her.
+
+They walked in silence for about a quarter of a mile. The rain swept
+upon her skirt and feet; she saw it falling thick on either side; she
+saw it beating upon Smith's shoulder, upon one side of his hat, and
+dripping from his light hair. The wind was so strong that the very drops
+that trickled from his hair were blown backward. His blue coat was
+old--not much protection, she thought, against the storm.
+
+The false prophet had hitherto appeared quite as terrible to her
+imagination and as far removed from real life as the wild beast of story
+books; now he appeared very much like any other man--rather more kind in
+his actions, perhaps, and distrait in his thought. Susannah began to
+think herself a discoverer.
+
+"You are not keeping the rain off yourself."
+
+"It don't matter about me. I don't mind getting wet."
+
+His tone carried conviction. After a while gratitude again stirred her
+into speech.
+
+"I'm afraid you find it awfully hard holding up the umbrella."
+
+He gave a glance downward at her as she toiled by his side. "Why you're
+most blown away as it is. You couldn't get along without the umbrellar."
+Regarding her attentively for a minute, he added, "Emmar will be vexed
+when she hears that your dress got so splashed."
+
+They were both bending somewhat forward against the wind; the road
+beneath them was glistening with standing water. When they passed by the
+woods the trees were creaking and cracking, and over the meadows hung
+shifting veils of clouds and rain.
+
+"I guess I'd better not take you farther than Sharon Peck's. Your folks
+would be pretty mad if you walked through the village with Joe Smith."
+
+The lines round Susannah's mouth strengthened themselves; she felt
+herself superior to those whose attitude of mind he had thus described.
+
+"You have been very kind to come with me. I'd like better to go home
+than stop, if it isn't too far."
+
+"I guess not. If you'd lived here longer you'd know that there was all
+manner of evil said about me, and the worst of it is that some of it's
+true. I've been a pretty low sort of fellow, and I hain't got any
+education to speak of."
+
+She looked up at him in astonishment; the expression of his face was
+peaceful and kindly. "Then why do you go about preaching and saying--"
+
+"I hain't got nothing to do with that at all. If an angel comes from
+heaven and gives me a partic'lar revelation, calling me by name, namely,
+'Joseph Smith, Junior,' tain't for me to say he's made a mistake and
+come to the wrong man, though goodness knows I hev said it to the Lord
+often enough; but now I've come to see that it's my business just to do
+what I'm told. But as to the low ways I hed--why, I've repented and give
+them up, and as to the education, I'm trying to get that, but it won't
+come in a minute."
+
+Her conscience was not at rest; to be silent was like telling a lie, and
+from motives of fear, too! At length she burst out, "I don't believe you
+ever saw an angel, Mr. Smith. I think it's very wicked of you to have
+made it up, and about the gold Bible too."
+
+They were still half a mile from the nearest house. Susannah gasped.
+When she had spoken her defiance she realised that if she had nothing
+worse to fear, she at least deserved to be left alone among the raging
+elements. She staggered somewhat, expecting a rebuff.
+
+"I guess you'd better take my arm," he said. "It ain't no sort of a day
+for a woman to be out."
+
+When she hesitated, flushed and frightened, a smile came for the first
+time across his face. "You're almost beat back by the wind. It won't
+hurt you to grip hold of my sleeve, you know, even if I am a thundering
+big liar. I don't know as I can expect you to believe anything else.
+Emmar didn't for a long time, but then, after a spell, she gave up all
+the comforts of her father's house just to stand by me, and no one's
+ever had a word to say against Emmar."
+
+They stopped at a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village.
+
+Smith had said to Susannah, "There's a gentleman I know stopping at
+Sharon Peck's. I'll pass the umbrellar on to him, and he'll take you
+home. He's been a Quaker, but I guess you'll find him a pretty nice
+young gentleman. Mrs. Peck, she isn't to home."
+
+He left Susannah standing upon the lee side of a wooden house amid
+treeless fields. The eaves sheltered her. She stooped down and with both
+hands wrung the water from her skirts. She was busy over this when the
+promised escort joined her.
+
+The remnants of his forsaken Quakerism hung around him; his coat was
+buff, his hat straight in the brim, his manner prim, and when he spoke
+it was in the speech of his people. His complexion was very light, hair,
+eyebrows and lashes, and the down on his chin--almost flaxen; his face
+was browned by exposure to the weather, but so well formed that Susannah
+found him very good to look upon, the features pointed and delicate, but
+not without strength.
+
+"Thou wilt walk as far as thy home with me?" he asked.
+
+He held Smith's huge umbrella, but he did not hold it with the same
+strength, nor did he show the same skill in keeping it against the wind.
+
+He spoke as they walked. "Thou hast walked a long way. Art weary?"
+
+"Yes--no--I don't know." What did it matter whether she was tired or
+not? Baffled curiosity was exciting her. "You are a stranger here. Are
+you a friend of the Smiths?"
+
+"I have experienced the great benefit of being acquainted with the
+prophet for the last fourteen days."
+
+"But he's not a prophet," said Susannah resentfully.
+
+"Did'st thou never find thyself to be mistaken when thou wast most sure?
+Hast thou not perceived that thy Bible tells thee in many different ways
+that God chooses not as men choose?"
+
+Then with great ardour he preached to her the doctrine of this new
+Christian sect. He was a convert; his preaching was rather the eager
+recital of his own experience, which would out, like some dynamic force
+within him, than pressure brought wilfully to bear upon her.
+
+He said, "I do not ask thee, friend, if thou art Methodist or Baptist or
+Presbyterian, but I do ask thee, canst thou read the promises of thy
+Lord to his church and be content with its present low estate?"
+
+Susannah was habituated to some recognition of her beauty; she missed it
+here, not knowing what she missed. Smith had known that it was important
+for her to be sheltered from the wind; he was sorry that her skirts were
+splashed; his manner, casual as it had been, had at least had in it that
+element of "because you are you," the first essential of any human
+relationship. But Susannah liked the young Quaker much better than
+Smith; he was of finer fibre, and her heart was agape for young
+companionship; so, unconsciously, she resented his indifference, not
+only as to her sect but as to her sex.
+
+"My father was an Englishman," she replied with dignity, not knowing why
+this seemed sufficient answer.
+
+The Quaker proceeded eagerly with his own story. He had searched the
+Scriptures diligently, and found in them no warrant for believing that
+the age of miracles and direct revelations would ever pass from the
+church. Then upon the gloom of his deep despondency a star had arisen.
+He had heard of a young man, poor, obscure, illiterate, who had dared to
+come forth saying again, as St. Peter had once said, "This is that which
+was spoken by the prophet Joel." He had come far to hear the word, and,
+upon hearing it, he had found rest for himself and a hope for the world.
+
+His ardour was beginning to tell upon Susannah's mind. The desire awoke
+within her for some fellowship with his enthusiasm. Stronger was the
+desire to receive personal recognition from the fair-faced youth.
+
+"I am English," she repeated, "and of course I think it very wicked to
+add anything to the Bible; it says so in the Revelation."
+
+"That to me also was a stumbling-block for a short time; but if thou
+wilt consider, friend, that the Book of Mormon is the history of God's
+dealing with the wild races of our own continent from the time of Noah
+until the time of Maroni, which would be about three hundred years after
+the first coming of the Lord, and that this sacred history, so necessary
+for the instruction of us who must now dwell in the same land, could not
+be given until this continent was known to the world, thou wilt cease to
+cavil, and wilt in all humility believe that that which is done of the
+hand of the Lord cannot be wrong."
+
+Faith begging the question is a sight to which the eye of experience
+becomes accustomed, but Susannah, standing upon the threshold of life,
+blinked and failed to focus her vision, feeling vaguely that during the
+last phrase some one had turned a somersault, and that too quickly to be
+watched.
+
+"Thou wilt think upon these things?" The young Quaker stood in the storm
+and looked earnestly upon Susannah, who was upon her uncle's doorstep,
+within shelter of the brown pent house.
+
+Susannah smiled. It was a perfectly instinctive smile, not one
+self-conscious thought went behind or before. She smiled because the
+young man was comely, and because she was young and wanted
+companionship.
+
+"I don't know," she said with perfect frankness; "my aunt will be so
+vexed with me when she hears that I've been to the Smiths that I don't
+believe I'll be allowed to think of anything this good while."
+
+Her smile, her girlishness, seemed at last to pierce beneath the armour
+of his devout abstraction. Fortune at work chooses her a fine-edged
+instrument, and Joseph Smith, with unerring but probably half conscious
+instinct, had sent the right messenger. The cloud of serious intent on
+the youth's face broke now into a sudden admiring glance, half playful
+yet fully earnest. His gray eyes held for a moment gracious parley with
+hers. "Wilt thou," he asked, still smiling, "give it as excuse in the
+day of judgment that they would not let thee think?"
+
+"N-n-no." She was more struck with the inadequacy of the excuse than
+with the fact that she had a better one if she had chosen to give it.
+
+He was again grave, but he was not now unappreciative. "Thou art very
+fair, and beauty to a young woman is, no doubt, a great snare. I will
+wrestle in prayer for thee."
+
+He was going down the brick walk between the masses of drenched flowers.
+"Don't," cried Susannah faintly, "don't do that." But he did not hear
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The wind that in the hurly-burly out of doors had been a cheerful if
+boisterous enemy, seemed suddenly transformed into a wailing spirit when
+Susannah was making her way up the stairs of the darkening wooden house.
+Its master and mistress had not yet returned from burying the dead. The
+girl made her way up to Ephraim's room. The books were left open upon
+the table; no one was there.
+
+It was a new thing that Ephraim should breast a storm.
+
+Susannah trudged downstairs again and dried her bedraggled skirts at the
+fire--an empty house, a dreary wailing wind, and gathering twilight for
+her sole companions.
+
+At length a step was heard. Ephraim came in bearing Susannah's rain
+cloak and goloshes. He was wet, pale, and breathless, but he would not
+betray his weakness and excitement by a word.
+
+"You were looking for me, Ephraim, and some one told you that I had come
+home. Did you hear who brought me? O Ephraim! I have been out walking
+with the false prophet, and then with one of his disciples." Susannah,
+sitting by the fire, looked at him trying to smile through his gloom.
+
+She began again, then stopped; how to impart the full flavour of that
+which had befallen her she did not know. It seemed to her that the
+difficulty lay in Ephraim's silence. She was not aware that she had not
+even a distinct thought for a certain interest in her late companion
+which she most wanted to put into words. "Ephraim, it's all very well
+for you to stand there drying your feet, but--but--they were just like
+other people, as you told Mr. Finney, you know."
+
+"Did you expect them to have horns and tails?"
+
+"I don't think they are very wicked," said Susannah. She looked down as
+she said it, speaking with a certain undefined tenderness of tone
+begotten of a new experience.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That's all."
+
+"How could you know whether they are wicked or not?" he burst out
+angrily. "Do you suppose that they would show _you_ the iniquity of
+their hearts?"
+
+"Why, Ephraim, you've always stood up for them before!"
+
+He gave a sort of snort. "I never stood up for them by making eyes at my
+hands and cooing out my words."
+
+She looked up in entire bewilderment.
+
+"It doesn't matter what I mean," he added. "What did they say? What did
+they do? Tell me. If I'd known these fellows had come back, do you
+suppose I'd have let you go?"
+
+"You are so strange," she said. "They did nothing but just bring me home
+and hold the umbrella, and Joseph Smith said he knew he'd been a bad man
+and didn't know anything. I thought you'd be interested to hear about
+them, Ephraim."
+
+"I should have thought you'd had too much self-respect to allow him to
+talk to you like that. Of course he was trying to work on your
+feelings."
+
+"No, he wasn't, Ephraim. You are quite as unjust as my aunt to-day. He
+wasn't trying to work on my feelings. He was just--well, he was sorry
+that my frock got so wet, and he just happened to say the other thing. I
+am sure--"
+
+Her conviction concerning the naturalness of Smith's conduct and the
+Quaker's sincerity had arisen in the presence of each, and was not now
+to be ascribed to any particular word or action which she could remember
+and repeat.
+
+"Oh, he was sorry your frock was splashed, was he? And the other fellow
+they call Halsey, was he concerned about that too?"
+
+"Who told you that his name was Halsey?" The interest of her tone was
+unmistakable.
+
+"That is his name, and he must be a degraded fellow to take up with
+Smith."
+
+She saw that Ephraim's clothes were very wet; he must have walked far.
+She attributed his exhausted look entirely to fatigue, and his
+ill-temper to the same cause. "Mr. Halsey seemed quite good and in
+earnest, like the people that come to see Mr. Finney when he stays here,
+asking about saving their souls, as if their souls were something quite
+different from the other part of them; and, Ephraim, I have often wanted
+to ask you, but I didn't like to. You don't believe what aunt and uncle
+do, do you? Aunt talks as if you didn't believe. Do you think"--her
+voice trembled--"do you think that I ought to think about my soul--that
+way?"
+
+Ephraim never perceived the nature of her difficulty. He thought she
+questioned the earnestness of life. He leaned back against the jamb of
+the chimney, vainly trying to dispel his anger and bring his mind under
+the command of reason. He looked at Susannah steadily; she was somewhat
+pale with weariness and excitement; she could never be other than
+beautiful. How perfect was the moulding of the strong firm chin, of the
+curving nostrils! The breadth of the cheek bone, the height and breadth
+of the brow, beautiful as they were in their pink and white tinting,
+conveyed to him almost more strongly the sense of mental completeness
+than of outward beauty. He did not dare to look at her questioning
+eyes; his glance travelled over the amber ringlets, damp and tossed
+just now, drooping as if to say "Susannah is lonely and perplexed, and
+she needs your help." Ephraim, proud, and mortified to think how ill he
+compared with her, laughed fiercely within himself. This was a young
+woman of distinction, and just now she knew it so little that she sat
+looking up with respect at his ill-conditioned self. How long would that
+last? How long would she remember any word that he chanced to say to
+her?
+
+"Susannah, I think you are very ignorant. Were you never taught anything
+when you were a little girl?"
+
+"My father and his friends were always polite to me." She spoke with
+grave, rather than offended, dignity.
+
+"She is entirely sweet," he said to himself; "she will never answer me
+in anger." Then he went on aloud, "And I am not polite; I am ill-trained
+and ill-bred. Well, listen, Susannah. Whatever my mother may or may not
+tell you about my peculiar opinions, whatever _I_ choose to believe or
+to do, remember this, that I tell you that _you have_ a soul to be
+eternally lost or saved, and it behoves you to walk carefully and
+concern yourself about your salvation." There was a vibration of intense
+warning in his voice. He was thinking of the life that might be so noble
+if will and reason sided with God, and of the snares that the world lays
+for beauty, and the light way in which beauty might walk into them;
+and, as with all dreamy minds, he was too absorbed in his thought to
+know how little it shone through the veil in which he wrapped it.
+
+Susannah grew a shade paler. She had struggled in a blind child-fashion
+to maintain a religion that would embrace her manifold life, but now it
+appeared that, after all, Ephraim endorsed the general view; his refusal
+to comply openly with it came of wilfulness, not unbelief. The
+stronghold of her peace was gone. "My papa never spoke to me about
+religion in that way, but I don't think he believed that."
+
+Ephraim thought of the weak and reckless young father, of the careless
+life broken suddenly by death.
+
+"He has learned the truth now," he said shortly.
+
+After a pause, in which she did not speak, he betook himself to his own
+rooms, leaving Susannah to the companionship of the lonely house, the
+howling wind, the gathering night, and a new fear of a state eternal and
+infernal, into which she might so easily slip. Ephraim said so, and he
+would never have proclaimed what he would not comply with unless its
+truth were very sure.
+
+As for him, his self-despite was pain that rendered him oblivious of her
+real danger. Where was his boasted justice? Gone before a breath of
+jealousy. The neighbours had told him that she had smiled on Halsey,
+and the abuse of the Smithites, in which his mother indulged in the
+blindness of religious party-spirit, had fallen from his lips as soon as
+his own passion had been touched. Had his former candour, then, been the
+thing his mother called it, _indifference_ to, rather than reverence for
+truth?
+
+This was the travail of soul that Susannah could have as little thought
+of as he had of hers. It held Ephraim in its fangs for many days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The return of Smith and his few followers, and the speedy publication of
+the first edition of the Book of Mormon, stirred anew the flames of
+religious excitement. All other sects were at one in decrying "the
+Mormons," as they now began to be called by their enemies. There was
+perhaps good reason for intelligent disapprobation, but Understanding
+was left far behind the flying feet of Zeal, who, torch in hand, rushed
+from house to house. It was related that Joseph Smith was in the habit
+of wounding inoffensive sheep and leading them bleeding over the
+neighbouring hills under the pretext that treasure would be found
+beneath the spot where they would at last drop exhausted; and there were
+dark hints concerning benighted travellers who, staying all night at the
+Smiths' cabin, had seen awful apparitions and been glad to fly from the
+place, leaving their property behind. There was a story of diabolical
+influence which Smith had exercised in order to gain the young wife whom
+he had stolen from her father's roof, and, worse than all, there were
+descriptions of occult rites carried on in secret places, where the
+most bloody mysteries of the Mosaic priesthood were horribly travestied
+by Smith and his friends, Cowdery and Rigdon, in order to dupe the
+simple into belief in the new revelation.
+
+Ephraim Croom had again withdrawn himself out of hearing of the
+controversy. Judging that Susannah was sufficiently guarded by his
+parents to be safe, he became almost oblivious of conversation which he
+despised. He did not reflect that Susannah knew nothing of his hidden
+conflict, that she could only perceive that, after uttering an ominous
+warning, he had left her to work out its application alone.
+
+It was at first not at all her liking for the Smiths, but only her
+unbiassed common sense, which convinced her that the wild stories told
+concerning them were untrue. When she became enraged at their untruth
+she became more kindly disposed toward the young mother, whose baby had
+made a strong appeal to her girlish heart, and the big kindly lout of a
+man who had sheltered her from the rain. This benevolent disposition
+might have slumbered unfruitful but for the memory of the fine and
+resolute face of the young disciple who had promised to wrestle in
+prayer for her. There was novelty in the thought. The gay witch Novelty
+often apes the form of Love. Susannah did not know Love, so she did not
+recognise even the vestments falsely worn, but they attracted her all
+the same. Her young blood boiled when her aunt, dimly discerning some
+unlooked-for obstinacy in her niece's mind, repeated each new report in
+disfavour of the Mormons. It was the old story about the blood of the
+martyrs, for ridicule and slander spill the pregnant blood of the soul;
+but they who believe themselves to be of the Church can seldom believe
+that any blood but their own will bear fruit. Every stab given to the
+reputation of the Smiths was an appeal to Susannah's sympathy for them.
+Mrs. Croom, with a sense of solemn responsibility, was at great cost
+bringing all her influence to bear upon the young girl whom her son
+loved. She drearily said to herself, after many days, that her influence
+was weak, that it accomplished nothing. The strength of it pushed
+Susannah, who stood faltering at the parting of the ways, and the
+impetus of that push was felt in her rapid and unsteady step for many
+and many a year.
+
+One day, when the men were out cutting the maize, Susannah rode with her
+uncle to the most distant of his fields, and found herself on the hill
+called in Smith's revelation Cumorah.
+
+The sound of the men at work and the horses shaking their harness was
+close in her ears while she strayed over this bit of hilly woodland. It
+is one of the low ridges that intersect the meadows on the banks of the
+Canandaigua, and here Smith professed to have found the golden book. It
+was because of this that Susannah had the curiosity to climb it now.
+
+The beech wood grew thick upon it; the afternoon sun struck its slant
+sunbeams across their boles. Once, where the beeches parted, she came
+upon a fairy glade where two or three maples, fading early, had carpeted
+the ground with a mosaic of gold and red, and were holding up the
+remainder of their foliage, pink and yellow, in the light. The beauty
+wrought in her a dreamy receptive mood. Climbing higher, she came upon a
+very curious dip or hollow in the ground. In its narrowest part a man
+was lying prostrate; his face was buried in his hat, which was lying
+upon the ground between his hands; the whole expression of his body was
+that of attention concentrated upon something within the hat. When she
+came close he moved with a convulsive start, and she saw that it was
+Joseph Smith.
+
+His look changed into one of deference and satisfaction. He rose up,
+lifting his hat carefully; in it lay a curious stone composed of bright
+crystals, in shape not unlike a child's foot.
+
+"It's my peepstone," he said. "It's the stone I look into when I pray
+that I may be shown what to do." Exactly as one child might show to
+another some worthless object he deemed choice, he showed the stone to
+her.
+
+"I don't know what you mean. How could a stone help you?"
+
+"All I know is that when I've been lying for a long time, feeling that
+I'm a poor fellow and haven't got no sense anyway, and the tears come to
+my eyes and gush out, feeling I'm so poor and mean, then when I lie and
+look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of
+things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening
+alongside of me that I didn't know any other way. I can't say how it may
+be; I only know when I see it that I am 'accounted worthy.'"
+
+"You couldn't see anything in the stone."
+
+"No more I couldn't. The stone's nothing, an' I'm nothing, and that's
+why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the
+devil that sends them; and it's not the devil, for I always work myself
+up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come
+after that if it was the devil?"
+
+"What do you see?"
+
+"I'll tell you one thing I have seen. Mebbe you'll know what it means;
+mebbe you won't. I don't know myself rightly yet. I've often to study on
+those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I've
+seen you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside
+the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables
+and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light
+hair."
+
+"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.
+
+"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own
+heart seemed to say--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it.
+Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your
+folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began
+again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.
+"The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and
+shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul;
+and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her
+to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and
+grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and
+honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"
+
+As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the
+sunlight, before her eyes.
+
+Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing
+remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself,
+and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start
+from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was
+going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the
+prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her
+mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in
+childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision
+within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never
+heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then
+been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that
+she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic
+suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety
+and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of
+policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her
+gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this
+man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again
+to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound,
+suggested piety. "She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the
+salvation of her soul," "She is chosen to go through suffering and grief
+for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these
+words had come to her--to her--direct from the mind of the Almighty!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family
+room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.
+
+Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges,
+their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun
+and gray. Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken
+distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines. That far
+outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds,
+but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the
+moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane--steel blue, so
+full of light as to be luminous in itself. From this the nearer contour
+of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of
+russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in
+the sunlight, the fields were yellow. From the top of a low hill which
+met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it
+passed the door. Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent,
+of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the
+hill?
+
+Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with
+his mother, and her uncle was at the mill. On the white road she saw a
+man approaching whose dress showed him to be Smith's Quaker convert,
+Angel Halsey, a name she had conned till it had become familiar. He did
+not pass, but opened the gate of the small garden path and came up
+between the two borders of sweet-smelling box. In the garden China
+asters, zenias, and prince's feather, dahlias, marigolds, and
+love-lies-bleeding were falling over one another in luxuriant waste. The
+young man neither looked to night nor to left. He scanned the house
+eagerly, and his eyes found the window at which Susannah sat. He stepped
+across the flowers and stood, his blonde face upturned, below the open
+sash. Under his light eyebrows his hazel eyes shone with a singularly
+bright and exalted expression.
+
+"Come, friend Susannah," said he, "I have been sent to bring you to
+witness my baptism," and with that he turned and walked slowly down the
+path, as if waiting for her to follow.
+
+Susannah, filled with surprise, watched him as he made slowly for the
+gate, as if assured that she would come. When he got to it he set it
+open, and, holding it, looked back.
+
+She dropped the long folds of muslin, and they fell upon the floor
+knee-deep about her; she stepped out of them and walked across the old
+familiar living-room, with its long strips of worn rag-carpet, its old
+polished chairs, and smoky walls. The face of the eight-day clock stared
+hard at her with impassive yet kindly glance, but its voice only
+steadily recorded that the moments were passing one by one, like to all
+other moments.
+
+Susannah went out of the door. The sun drew forth aromatic scent from
+the borders of box, and her light skirt brushed the blossoms that leaned
+too far over. Outside the wicket gate at which the young man stood was a
+young quince tree laden with pale-green fruit. Susannah let her eyes
+rest upon it as she spoke: she even let her mind wander for a second to
+think how soon the fruit would be gathered.
+
+"Why should I come to see your baptism?" she asked, with her voice on
+the upward cadence.
+
+The young man blushed deeply. "I am come to thee with a message from
+heaven." He glanced upward to the great sky that was the colour of
+turquoise, cloudless, serene.
+
+"It is a strange errand." There was a touch of reproof in her voice, and
+yet also the vibration of awe-struck inquiry. Her mind rushed at once to
+the memory of Joseph Smith's prophecy.
+
+"Come, friend," said the young Quaker very gently.
+
+"I can't possibly go."
+
+His strange reply was, "With God all things are possible."
+
+The text fell upon her mind with force.
+
+"Come," he said gently, and he motioned that he would shut the gate
+behind her.
+
+"Not now; my shoes are not stout; I have no bonnet or shawl."
+
+"Put thy kerchief over thy head and come, friend Susannah, for 'no man,
+putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom
+of heaven.'"
+
+At this he walked on, and she was forced to follow for a few steps to
+ask an explanation. She tied her kerchief over her head and the thick
+white dust covered her slender shoes.
+
+"What do you want me to come for?" she asked.
+
+He looked upon her, colouring again with the effort to express what was
+to him sacred. "It has been given to me to pray for thy soul. To-day, as
+I prayed, it was borne in upon me that thou shouldst be with me in the
+waters of baptism."
+
+Susannah paused on the road, planting the heels of her shoes deeply in
+the dust. "I will not," she cried. "I will never believe in Joseph
+Smith."
+
+"And yet it has been revealed, friend, that thou art one of the elect.
+The time will come very soon when thou wilt believe to the salvation of
+thy soul."
+
+He walked slowly onward, and after a minute Susannah, with quickened
+steps, followed him, in high anger now. "I do not believe in the
+revelations of Joseph Smith," she cried. And because he did not appear
+offended she spoke more rudely, catching at phrases to which she had
+become accustomed. "If the salvation of my soul should depend upon it, I
+would rather lose it than believe."
+
+But when she had said these last words a little gasp came in her breath,
+and her heart quailed in realising the possibility of which she had
+spoken. Her own angry words had diverted her attention from questioning
+the reasonableness of the new faith to the fearful contemplation of what
+might be the result of rejection.
+
+If she quailed at her own speech, the grief of the young Quaker was more
+obvious. He put up his hands as if in fear that she should add to her
+sin by repeating her words. Quiet as was his demeanour, the emotional
+side of his nature had evidently been deeply wrought upon to-day, for
+when he tried to speak to reprove her, grief choked his utterance. It
+was not at that time a strange thing for men under the influence of
+religious convictions to weep easily. On the contrary, it was accounted
+by evangelists a sign of great grace; but Susannah, accustomed only to
+the reserve of English gentlemen and her uncle's stern Puritan
+self-repression, seeing this young Quaker weep for her sake, was greatly
+touched. She became possessed by an excited desire to console him.
+
+The young man turned, weeping as he went, into a little wood that here
+bordered the road. Susannah followed, full of ruth, thinking that he
+merely sought temporary shade.
+
+They had proceeded under the trees a few paces when Emma Smith came up
+from the bank of the river to meet them. Halsey controlled himself and
+spoke to Emma.
+
+"She has refused. For this time she has rejected the truth."
+
+Now to Susannah the matter for amazement was that she had come so far
+from home (although, it was not very far), that she had actually
+arrived, as it seemed, at an appointed place. The sting that this gave
+to her pride was greatly eased by perceiving that she had not by this
+fulfilled his hopes.
+
+Emma Smith had a pale, patient face, which was at this time made
+peculiarly dignified by a look of solemn excitement. Young as she was,
+she turned to Susannah with a protecting motherly air.
+
+"Perhaps next time the opportunity is offered the young lady will
+embrace it and save her soul." She spoke consolingly to Halsey, but
+looked at Susannah with encouraging and respectful eyes. "You will see
+this young man baptized?" she asked.
+
+Under the protection of Emma Smith, Susannah stooped under the willow
+boughs and found herself upon the bank of the river in the presence of
+Joseph Smith, his mother, and some half-dozen men.
+
+Lucy Smith was muttering somewhat concerning a vision of angels, and the
+suppressed excitement of them all was manifest. Susannah was infected by
+it; she was now tremulous and eager to see what was to be seen.
+
+Joseph Smith advanced into the flowing river and stood in a pool where
+the water was well up to his thighs. Standing thus, he began to speak in
+the same formal tone and with the same solemn expression that Susannah
+had marked when he spoke the revelation concerning herself, but more
+loudly. "Behold! we have gathered together according to the revelation
+which has been given to me--"
+
+Here a dark young man called Oliver Cowdery groaned and said "Amen." A
+tremble of excitement went through the group upon the shore.
+
+Loudly the prophet went on--"Knowing well that there is nothing in me,
+who was wicked and graceless to a very high degree, and wanting in
+knowledge, but was yet chosen, upon this sinful earth and in these last
+days, when wickedness and hypocrisy is abounding, to open to all who
+would be saved a new church which is such as that which the angel hath
+revealed to me a church should be, and all them which shall receive my
+word and shall be baptized of me or of Mr. Oliver Cowdery, whom the
+angel Maroni, descending in a cloud of light, has ordained with me to
+the priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of
+angels and of the gospel of repentance and of baptism by immersion for
+the remission of sins. And this shall never again be taken from the
+earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in
+the new Jerusalem."
+
+The loud voice carried with it an impression of strong personal feeling;
+the effect on the bystanders was such as the words alone were wholly
+inadequate to produce. Cowdery, who during the speech had frequently
+groaned and responded, after the Methodist fashion, now shouted and
+clapped his hands towards the heavens, whereupon Lucy Smith fell into a
+convulsive state between laughter and tears, and the men standing beside
+her dropped upon their knees. Emma Smith remained standing; upon her
+face was a rapt triumphant expression. She put her arm round Susannah
+protectingly, and Susannah did not repulse the familiar action.
+
+Joseph Smith now in the same voice called upon his father to be
+baptized. He addressed him formally as "Joseph Smith senior." The old
+man had, as it seemed, a great fear of the water. It took both priests
+of the new sect together to lift and immerse him. There was more
+splashing than was seemly. The baptism of a farmer named Martin Harris,
+which followed, was more decorous.
+
+The sunlight lay bright on the other side of the flowing river, and the
+shadow of the willow tops above them was outlined on the stream. On the
+sunny bank opposite there was a thicket of sumac trees reddening to the
+autumn heat; the wild vine was climbing upon them, making their foliage
+the more dense, and at their roots, by the edge of the stream, the
+golden rod was massed. On the bank on which they stood the colouring was
+more quiet. A few ragged spikes of the purple aster were all that grew
+under the gray green willows, which with every breath turned the silver
+underside of their soft foliage to the wind. The place for the baptism
+had no doubt been chosen because of the depth of the water, and because
+the bank here was comparatively bare.
+
+It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. The steady sound of the
+mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common
+bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of the hour.
+
+It was time that Angel Halsey should be baptized. In his Quaker clothes
+he waded into the water. His manner now was entirely serene, his face
+full of joy.
+
+A thought was struck wedge-like into Susannah's understanding. If
+Halsey, who was so manifestly on a higher plane of education and
+refinement than these others, could so triumphantly embrace the new
+faith, it must surely contain more of virtue and reason than she could
+see. The influence of what he was, being so much greater than the
+influence of what he had said, caused her mind to work with solemn
+earnestness as she followed him in sympathy through the symbol of death
+and resurrection.
+
+When the prophet came back to the shore he appeared for the first time
+to recognise Susannah, and stopped before her, but at first with a
+distraught manner, as if he were trying to recollect some dream that
+eluded him. He still had his hand familiarly on Halsey's arm, for he had
+been conducting him out of the water.
+
+"This is the elect sister?" Smith asked in a hesitating tone, as if
+still striving with memory. "Does she desire baptism?"
+
+"Not yet," answered Halsey, "but I have asked the Lord for her soul, and
+I believe that it has been given."
+
+In Halsey's mind up to this moment there was, no doubt, only the
+solicitude of the missionary spirit; but Smith was a man whose mind was
+cast in a different mould; he had already marked the solicitude and
+given it his own interpretation, and he had already opened his own eyes
+upon her beauty. How far this had conscious connection with the
+condition of actual trance into which he now fell cannot be known. It is
+probable that what the Psalmist calls the "secret parts" are not in
+such minds as Smith's open to the man's own eye.
+
+Smith became wrapped in a sudden ecstasy. Oblivious of all around him,
+he looked up into the heavens, and it was apparent that his eyes were
+not beholding the material objects around. Those about him gazed
+awe-struck, waiting and listening, for he began to speak in a low
+unknown tongue, as if holding converse with some one above.
+
+Susannah shrank back, but was held by Emma's encouraging arm. Halsey
+stayed perforce, for the prophet's grasp had tightened convulsively upon
+him.
+
+In a few moments the vision was over, and Joseph Smith opened his eyes
+and smiled in his own slow kindly way upon the frightened girl and upon
+Angel Halsey, who stood with steadfast mien.
+
+"It has been revealed to me in heaven that the soul of the elect sister
+is indeed given to be united to the soul of this young disciple, that
+thereby she may obtain salvation."
+
+He took Susannah's hand, and she felt no power to resist him; he clasped
+Halsey's almost more timid and reluctant hand over it.
+
+"Wherefore in the sight of God and in the sight of these elect saints
+now present I declare that these two are joined together in the mystical
+union of a most holy marriage which God himself has revealed from
+heaven."
+
+For some moments Susannah gazed fascinated; then she snatched away her
+hand; dignity sought to maintain itself; pride rose up in anger. Her
+growing awe of the prophet numbed to a certain extent both these
+sentiments, but stronger than pride and self-respect and awe was some
+tender shame within her heart which was hurt beyond enduring, so that
+she put her hands before her face and wept, and walked away from them
+weeping, followed by Emma, who began, as they walked, to weep in
+sympathy.
+
+Tears bring relief to the brain, a relief it is hard to distinguish from
+comfort of soul. When Susannah could check her unaccustomed sobs, when
+she found herself walking quietly homeward with only the weeping Emma by
+her side, the spirit of long suffering and patience stole upon her
+unawares.
+
+"Why do you cry?" she asked gently.
+
+"I think it must be so hard for you," said Emma; "it's been very hard
+for me, although I love Joseph with all my heart; but you are so
+childish and so good-looking, it seems someways as if it came harder on
+you; and then that Mr. Halsey hasn't got the warmth of heart that Joseph
+has."
+
+To this astonishing reply Susannah found no answer. Emma was too
+respectable, too honest in her sympathy, to be derided, but Susannah's
+understanding could ill endure the thought that the incident of the hour
+was important. As the outcome of honest delusion, she might forgive it;
+something in the pathos of Halsey's strained face as she remembered his
+look when she turned away weeping, urged her to forgiveness.
+
+"Mr. Halsey is nothing to me," said Susannah at last; she spoke with a
+falter in her voice, for Emma's unfeigned grief touched her.
+
+"Oh! don't say that. Some judgment might come on you that would be worse
+than any suffering that would come from obedience to the word of the
+Lord; and besides, it's the will of God, you see; and of course He'll
+see that it's done, so you'd be punished for rebellion, and you'd have
+to obey all the same."
+
+Susannah was beginning to be infected by this steady assumption that God
+had indeed spoken. Could it be possible?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+How much better humanity might have been had we been at the world's
+making we cannot tell, but as it is, the Creator knows that a woman
+whose veins are pulsing with youth does not know, as she stands between
+her lovers, how far influences not born of reason are affecting her
+understanding. Ephraim remained neglectful, and Susannah remembered with
+more and more distinct compassion Halsey's wistful face and the touch of
+his trembling hand. But the emotion which is deeper than human love was
+also in ferment. The shock which she had received, aided by the pressure
+at home, had effectually worked religious unrest. She was certain now
+that she must do some new thing to obtain peace with God. Long
+monotonous days ripened within her this altered mind.
+
+On one of the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when
+such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were
+loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in
+the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads
+on the old highroad to Palmyra, where a small wooden bridge carries
+over a creek that runs through the meadow to the Canandaigua. Here in
+the leisure time of the afternoon Smith lifted up his voice and preached
+to an ever-increasing crowd, composed first of men, and added to by
+whole families from most of those houses within touch of the village.
+
+The elder Croom, his wife, and Susannah were returning from the weekly
+shopping at Palmyra's store; they came upon the crowd, and stopped
+perforce. Wrath was upon the faces of the elder couple, and nothing less
+than terror upon Susannah's white cheeks.
+
+Susannah would have run far to have been saved the awful interrogation
+of opportunity. Perhaps all that she knew just then, in her childlike
+bewilderment, was that the slanders of the persecution were wrong, and
+her untrained mind jumped to the conclusion that the God of truth must
+therefore be with Smith. Beyond this there was unnamed wonder at the
+unexplained influence that Smith held over her, and more curious
+thoughts, stretching out like the delicate tendrils of an unsupported
+vine, concerning Halsey, his prayers and warnings, and the strength of
+selfless devotion that she had read in his innocent eyes.
+
+Old Croom, deacon and magistrate, was not one to tarry at such a
+gathering longer than need be. When he perceived that some of the planks
+of the bridge had been taken to support the dam he alighted and broke
+down a log fence in order to drive his horses through meadow and stream
+to join the road nearer home. His women must needs walk over the scanty
+beams. Mrs. Croom, stately and well attired, could make her way through
+the crowd; no one there was so rapt but that he let her pass when, with
+eyes flashing in righteous indignation, she tapped him on the shoulder
+and bid him stand aside. Susannah followed in her aunt's wake, the crowd
+of neighbours and strange labourers closing behind them again as they
+worked their way, of necessity slowly, nearer and nearer the preacher
+and the little band of adherents that stood steadfast around him.
+
+Susannah heard the words of the sermon in which open confession of his
+own past sin, bold persuasions to Christianity and righteousness, were
+strangely mingled with the claim of the new prophet. She could not
+remember one moment what he had said the last. Low hisses and muttered
+threats of the angry men about her fell on her ears in the same way,
+making their own impression, but not on reason or memory. A sickening
+dread of a call that would come before she got away was all that she
+fully realised. It came when, in her white gala dress, she stood still
+at last near to, and under the eye of, the preacher.
+
+The sermon was finished. There was a silence at its end so unexpected
+that none in the crowd broke it. It seemed for those moments to reach
+not only into the hearts of the crowd, but into the wide, empty vault of
+sunny blue above them, and over the open fields and golden woods. Then,
+before the wrath of the crowd had gathered strength to break into
+violence, Smith went down into the water and called loudly to all such
+as felt the need of saving their souls to enter upon the heavenly
+pilgrimage by the gate of his baptism. His adherents had cast themselves
+upon their knees in prayer. Susannah saw the strong, dark face of Oliver
+Cowdery looking up to the sky as though he saw the heavens opened, and
+she saw Angel Halsey look at herself, and then, clasping his hands over
+his fair young face, bow himself in supplication.
+
+A man, ragged in dress, and bearing the look of ill deeds in his face,
+made his way out of the crowd into the water. He was a stranger to the
+place, and the spectators looked on in silent surprise. Before Smith had
+dipped him in the stream and blessed him another man came forward, pale
+and thin, with a hectic flush upon his cheeks. He was a well-known
+resident of Manchester; all knew that his days on earth must be few. A
+low howl began to rise, loudest on the outskirts of the crowd, but the
+fact that the man was dying kept many silent, feeling that the doomed
+may surely have their own will.
+
+Before Joseph Smith had spoken his benediction over this trembling,
+gasping creature, when Halsey had left his kneeling to spring forward
+and lead him to the shore, Susannah began to move forward to the water.
+No one who saw her move at first dreamed of what she sought. Her aunt
+had pushed on some distance farther and stood waiting, almost too
+astonished at this last baptism to notice that she was separated from
+her charge. Now, when she saw Susannah pushing forward, she only
+wondered with others what she would be at, and spoke to her
+ineffectually, without the shriek and struggle which she made when the
+girl was beyond her reach.
+
+So Susannah, moving like one in an agonised dream, came to the edge of
+the pool. Among the praying band there was no doubt as to her intention,
+no astonishment; the kneeling men gave instant thanks to God for her
+decision, and Halsey, having helped the feeble man to land, led Susannah
+down into the water, his face illuminated by the victory of faith.
+
+Susannah heard now her aunt's wild shrieks; she heard too the surging of
+the crowd, but the meaning of neither sound came to her. She waded on to
+where Smith stood, with only the dazed sense of a goal to be reached.
+She was perfectly passive in his hands as he dipped her beneath the
+surface and raised her up, but she listened to the blessing he
+pronounced with a sudden leap of the heart, feeling that now at last the
+misery of fear was past and the demand of God satisfied--it must be so
+because it had cost so much.
+
+When she came to herself she saw that the crowd, like a wild beast, had
+sprung downward upon the disciples. Even in her first terrified glance
+she was impressed by the strange and awful difference between the
+distorted and hideous faces of the mob and the exalted calm of the few
+men who had at this time fixed their minds on the unseen rather than the
+seen. She looked up to Smith in the swift appeal of terror, and felt
+once for all the huge courage by which his life was marked. His hand,
+helping her to the shore, never trembled. He calmly directed her steps
+into the quiet meadow before he gave himself to the battle.
+
+When her person was no longer there to be protected, the Mormons gave
+way at once before the gathering strength of the mob. She saw them
+beaten down mercilessly; she saw Smith himself beaten and thrown
+prostrate in the water. The still, warm air that a few minutes before
+had seemed instinct with prayer was now vibrating to the howls and
+taunts and curses of the mob. Susannah had no doubt that these, who were
+now her friends, were being killed; their sufferings justified her to
+herself and produced a fierce exaltation in the step which she had
+taken. In her experience of life she thought that the mob would turn
+upon her next, and stood waiting, every muscle tense, her hands
+clenched, feeling excitedly that she would rather die than live to see
+such intolerable wrong.
+
+This tension of nerve relaxed somewhat when her uncle lifted her
+forcibly into the waggon. With eyes wide open with horror and lips
+trembling, she asked, "Did they kill them, uncle?"
+
+"No, child, they only gave them a good trouncing in their own pond." He
+choked here, out of pity for her, keeping back the torrent of his anger.
+
+Even at this early date it was bruited that Joseph Smith exercised some
+unseemly force of will by which he distorted the reason of his converts.
+This report explained the fact that for the first day after the shock of
+Susannah's baptism her aunt and uncle did not lay the blame of it at her
+door, did not argue or persuade, only watched her as one recovering from
+a strange disease. But in the afternoon of that first day the pent-up
+fever of the aunt's wrath against those whom she thought to blame broke
+forth, and almost in delirium.
+
+The last hot weather of the autumn still held; in the same still hour of
+the afternoon, the hour in which Susannah's baptism had taken place the
+day before, Angel Halsey, pallid with his yesterday's beating and
+ill-usage, but steadfast and even joyful of face, walked up to the front
+door of the magistrate's house.
+
+This door opened upon an unfrequented entrance-hall. Susannah heard the
+knock, heard her aunt move with the dignity befitting an expected
+visitor. Then she heard Ephraim's step on the stair for the first time
+that day, and reflected dully that he must have seen the advent of some
+important person from his window to be thus answering the call of the
+door.
+
+After that she heard words that had the sound of suppressed screams in
+them. She realised that the house mistress was ordering some enemy from
+her door. These commands were not obeyed, and Susannah, hearing that the
+intruder remained, began in fear to suspect the meaning of the
+intrusion. As she rose the report of a fire-arm startled her from all
+the remnants of her selfish dulness, causing her feet to fly.
+
+From within the sitting-room she saw the entrance-hall. Its door was
+open to the wide sweep of land that lay in floods of sunshine. In the
+light, half turning now to go as he had come, stood Angel Halsey. Her
+eager eyes drank in the sight of him, because last night she had thought
+to see him die. She saw his quietness even while, it seemed to her, the
+gun still echoed, and it was Ephraim who held the gun! Beside Ephraim
+her aunt stood, like one in a frenzy, her very garments twitching and
+her gray hair fallen loose. None of them looked to see the girl within
+the shaded room.
+
+"Friends," said Halsey, "I came to say 'Peace be with this house,' and
+to speak with her to whom God has given the spirit of obedience to his
+truth, but it is written that when any house refuses to receive us we
+must depart."
+
+His voice was for some cause growing fainter, but Susannah was certain
+that the cause was not fear.
+
+He took a letter from his breast. "I wrote it," he said, "in case I
+might not enter to speak with her."
+
+He gave the letter to Ephraim, who took it reluctantly, as one impelled
+by some strong sense of right.
+
+Halsey went out. He tottered upon the path, but he opened the gate and
+walked on. Ephraim, still holding the gun and the letter, turned and saw
+Susannah.
+
+Ephraim's face was gaunt and haggard as she had never seen it before;
+his eyes were large, and she thought she read unutterable distress in
+them, but could not understand. She held out her hand for the letter,
+but as he gave it both she and he perceived for the first time that it
+was stained with blood; they felt mutually the thrill that the sight
+gave.
+
+He put his hand out suddenly and pushed her within the room. "Go," he
+entreated, "for God's sake, Susy, go to your own room; take his letter
+with you if you will, but go."
+
+Susannah went amazed, but she began to think that Ephraim's distress had
+not been a gracious sorrow, but remorse for his own crime. He must have
+shot Halsey as he would have shot at some evil beast. When she had time
+to remember that Halsey had tottered when he walked, she fled back,
+straining the blood-stained letter to her breast, and tore open the
+closed door. Her aunt was sitting in a low chair sobbing. Ephraim,
+bareheaded in the sunshine, was standing on the path shading his eyes to
+scan the road. Susannah ran out, not to him (her shame and grief for him
+were too deep for any word), but with intent to run after the wounded
+man and nurse his wound.
+
+"It can be but a slight flesh wound," said Ephraim mechanically.
+
+She looked first where he was gazing, and saw that some distance down
+the road Halsey was stepping into a chaise. Another man took the seat
+beside him and they drove away.
+
+Then she looked at Ephraim. He did not appear as though he felt his
+guilt; he had the mien rather of one who was striving bravely to endure
+hardship. Then indeed she felt that the gulf of thought must yawn wide
+between them; she could even yet have pitied Ephraim's contrition, but
+he was not contrite. In indignation she retired, sitting in the privacy
+of her little bedroom.
+
+It was a strange letter, not alone because the ink was blurred by blood
+that, still warm, soaked it through in parts, but because, coming from
+a young man to a maid, in the first flush of her strength and beauty, it
+offered love and marriage, giving only as his reason, urging only as her
+motive, the service of God.
+
+"If," the letter read, "thou canst see thy way, dear friend, to hold
+fast that thou hast in the house of thy friends, if thou canst see thy
+way, by steadfast confession and by the grace of thy demeanour, to
+strive among them for their conversion, it would be well while thou art
+still so young to remain with them for a time--at least so I think. But
+our prophet thinks, and I also greatly desire to think, that the strain
+upon thy faith would be too great, that thou mightst fail; and
+remembering that it has been revealed to him that our union has been
+sealed in heaven, he thinks that thou wouldst do well to commit thy
+tender life now to my keeping."
+
+The phrase "and I greatly desire to think" was almost as strong as any
+in a long letter to tell which way his delight would lie, and Susannah's
+was not a mind upon which this indication of reserve force was thrown
+away. She trusted, vaguely in thought but implicitly in heart, to that
+which lay behind--something which did not alarm her, which in her inner
+vision wore no warm nor obtrusive colouring, but which she knew to be
+intense and of enduring quality. And she saw herself alone, beaten by
+adverse winds and without other shelter.
+
+Halsey touched upon the fact that Smith and his disciples (he did not
+say himself) had suffered greatly from yesterday's ill-usage, and said
+that, having given their message to the people, they were that day
+leaving for a place called Fayette, in Seneca county, where it had
+previously been determined that the new church should be organised. He
+himself would wait either until Susannah saw her way to come with him,
+or until he knew that she was at peace, having chosen of her own accord
+to remain. He would bring a chaise, in which she could travel if she
+would, near her uncle's house at dawn upon the next morning. He would
+take her, he said, to the house where the Smiths were in Fayette, but it
+was implied through all the letter that the mystic marriage which Smith
+had solemnised was considered by Halsey as valid, and that if she joined
+her material fortunes now to those of the persecuted sect, it would be
+as his wife.
+
+In speaking of the future he did not gloss over the persecution; he did
+not even promise, as Smith had done, a sure and material reward. The
+mind of the young Quaker convert was fixed upon the things that are
+unseen. This was not hidden from the girl. The thought of being with him
+in his faith and resignation gave her peace. Poverty and persecution
+seemed as nothing compared with the torture of being surrounded by
+people whose thought and actions aroused in her young heart whirlwinds
+of passionate opposition. Even Ephraim, instead of rising in his
+strength to condemn the outrage of yesterday, had attempted to-day to
+wound or kill. Her amazement and dismay at this drove her out as it were
+with a scourge.
+
+Halsey had told her to pray, and she had tried to pray. Halsey had told
+her to search the Scriptures for guidance, and she read. Text after text
+came home to her heart, bidding her leave her kindred to share the
+fortunes of the persecuted children of faith.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+At break of day Halsey was waiting upon the road with a fairly good
+horse and a comfortable chaise. Susannah never forgot the light that
+came to his eyes when he saw her approach; it was like dawn in paradise.
+
+Angel Halsey was not without shrewd worldly wisdom. He turned into a
+cross corduroy road that led through the woods, passing only some small
+clearings to the west of Palmyra, and thus by a detour avoiding that
+village, he returned again to the highroad between Canandaigua and
+Geneva. The pursuers, upon failing to hear that the chaise had passed
+through Palmyra, might turn back, or if they had gone on they might have
+outstripped them on the road, and be in front rather than behind. This
+danger peopled the long lonely road with possible enemies both before
+and behind. The strain upon the imagination was very great. The road was
+heavy and rough.
+
+Susannah perceived that Halsey's apprehension of being overtaken was
+almost solely on her account. He was so upborne by his religious
+enthusiasm as to be oblivious to the pain which his wound of yesterday
+gave him, and was perfectly willing to encounter the violence of her
+kindred again if need be, yet, seeing her terror with a quickness of
+sympathy which roused her gratitude, he took every possible precaution
+that could allay her fears. All through the weary, weary day she hardly
+spoke to him, never addressed him by name.
+
+They reached the new town of Geneva at sundown. When they had set forth
+again, it was a great comfort to Susannah that grayness had succeeded to
+sunshine. She was weary of the yellow light, of the dull glare from the
+stubble fields, of the obtrusive colours of the autumn foliage, of the
+blueness of the sky, of everything, indeed, that she had seen and heard
+during the wretched hours of the day. They now travelled through a very
+flat tract; little of the land was cleared; the road was straight. It is
+hard to explain the mental weariness produced by a straight level road.
+The hope and interest inspired by undulations or curves are lost. The
+distance ever gives a farther reach of the weary way to the view, as if
+by a parable it would impress on the traveller the knowledge that the
+future was to be barren of delight.
+
+About two miles from Geneva, before the daylight was quite gone, they
+were both startled by hearing a rushing, crashing sound coming toward
+them in the woods. Were their pursuers upon them after all? Had they
+chosen this, the most lonely part of their road, to fall upon them?
+
+They did not speak their thoughts to one another. Angel struck the
+horse, and it galloped forward perhaps about a hundred yards, and then,
+of its own accord, stopped suddenly.
+
+Upon the side of the road, pushing itself backward among the bushes, the
+better to gain space for its run, was a bull. Its eyes were bloodshot,
+its head lowered for a long moment to measure its distance ere it made
+the attack. The horse seemed palsied with terror. It moved backward with
+tottering steps, trembling all over, heedless of whip or rein.
+
+The backward movement prolonged the hesitation of the bull, which turned
+itself to take another aim. The horse uttered an almost human cry. In
+the moment of hearing that cry Susannah felt that she had already gone
+through some shocking form of death. Halsey brought down his whip,
+striking the horse with all his might; it leaped forward, lifting the
+chaise almost into the air; then it was rushing madly on, dragging the
+wheels behind it with terrible velocity.
+
+They had caught sight of the rush of the bull. They felt the animal's
+heavy side just graze the back of the chaise, and they heard behind them
+a bellow of rage that seemed to fill all the solitary place with
+diabolical echoes.
+
+The body of the chaise was bounding upon its leather bands, jolting
+cruelly against the axle. Susannah cried out that she should be thrown
+from her seat. The swift-falling darkness encompassed their path. Their
+hope lay in the straightness of the road, and their chief fear was that
+by some greater roughness of the way the chaise, which was now swaying
+fearfully, might be overturned.
+
+Gradually the sound of the bull's galloping became less distinct. The
+chaise was still upright. The horse, beginning to falter in his pace,
+took more kindly to the accustomed control of the rein. It was then
+Susannah found that she had been clinging to Halsey for support, and
+that he, by bracing himself with one arm to the side of the chaise and
+holding her with the other, had prevented her from being thrown out.
+
+In gathering her shawl about her she wrapped herself again in a certain
+amount of her former reserve, but the excitement that she had been
+through made her former silence impossible.
+
+Halsey at first received her remarks in silence, then as he essayed to
+answer, his voice grew low and faint, and a sudden suspicion of the
+cause pierced through her mind.
+
+In another moment he sank, leaning against her. Putting her hand beneath
+his coat, she found to her dismay that the strain of holding her had
+opened his wound; his clothes were again wet with blood.
+
+The reins slipped from his hands. Susannah tied them loose to the front
+of the chaise and, putting her arms round the fainting man, drew the
+bandages tightly but with unskilful hands; she lessened the bleeding and
+caused him such acute pain that he lifted his head and spoke.
+
+"What shall I do?" she asked piteously. The blood, diverted from the
+brain, had left it without healthy circulation, but she did not know yet
+that this was affecting his mind.
+
+"Friend," he whispered, "that was in truth no bull; it was the devil
+himself."
+
+"The devil?" she asked faintly.
+
+"He almost succeeded in his cruel attempt to cause us to be discouraged
+from the way."
+
+"It seems to me he only succeeded in causing us to take the way with
+greater vehemence," she replied in some scorn.
+
+In the next minute she heard him whisper eagerly, "Look up; look between
+the branches; quick! Do you not see the face looking at us?"
+
+The branches of the overhanging tree were black with night. She looked
+up in the direction that his feeble hand indicated, and with
+indescribable terror scanned the blank spaces in which no human face
+could possibly be.
+
+"Look!" he whispered again impatiently. "Don't you see it? It is the
+face of a man. A white face! It is the face of thy cousin as I saw it
+yesterday when I was counted worthy to suffer. Look! look! does thou
+not see him?"
+
+His words had the effect of producing in her that maddening fear of the
+dark which ghostly tales induce, and now he fainted again. She was
+afraid to cry for help, afraid even of the rustle of her own garments.
+She did not know how far she was from any house. And it seemed to her
+that this lover, who was almost a stranger, was dying in her arms. The
+misery of this hour governed her action in the next.
+
+Halsey in the bottom of the chaise lay with his head against her knee,
+and soon, holding the bandages of his wound close upon it with one hand,
+she took the reins with the other and urged the horse forward. She had
+had no thought all that day but to go, as Halsey had said, to Emma
+Smith's protection. She hoped now that there was but one road; that when
+she came to the first settlement she would be with the Smiths. This was
+not the case. She travelled an hour, obliged to pass more than one
+cross-road because she dared not turn down it. At length she found
+herself in front of a large house with lighted windows, which was
+evidently an inn.
+
+The door opened, letting out a stream of candlelight. A man stood in the
+doorway. "What place is this?" cried Susannah's voice from the darkness.
+
+"It's John Biery's hotel."
+
+"Will you have the kindness to tell me if you know of any one called
+Mr. Joseph Smith?"
+
+There was some talking within. "No, we never heard of Mr. Joseph Smith."
+
+"Or Mr. Oliver Cowdery?" Again there was talking.
+
+"No, it don't seem that we've any of us heard o' those names before. Be
+you alone?" The deep bass voice of John Biery was becoming more
+insistent in its rising inflection.
+
+For some half-minute Susannah did not answer, and then fear of being
+compelled to retake the road made irresolution impossible.
+
+"Indeed, sir, I am not alone. I have in the chaise with me a sick man,
+and I fear that he may be dying. I thought to find friends, but it seems
+in the darkness I have missed my way. I must beg of you to assist me to
+lift him into the house and give us shelter for the night."
+
+The men had remained perfectly still, drinking in her every syllable
+with that fierce thirst for news which is a first passion of dwellers in
+such desolate places; then, aroused by what they heard, they came
+forward across a rough bit of ground to the road. The burly form of John
+Biery came first, and he called for a lantern, which was instantly
+produced by one of those who followed. They held it up over Angel's
+crouching form and death-like face. Then they held it higher and stared
+at Susannah. Her shawl had fallen from off her shoulders. The
+handkerchief upon her neck was loose, and underneath the pink border of
+her bonnet the ringlets had begun to stray. Her resolute face, so young
+and beautiful, startled them almost as an apparition might have done.
+
+"I'm dead beat," said the hotel-keeper under his breath, "if I ever seed
+anything like that!" But with the ready suspicion of a prudent
+householder he questioned her. Where had the man come by the wound? For
+they saw the blood-stained bandages she clasped.
+
+Yesterday, she explained, he had received a slight bullet-wound by
+accident, and to-day, in their long travel, the loss of blood had
+disabled him.
+
+"Does he belong to you, young lady?"
+
+Susannah busied herself with the bandages for a moment, but terror had
+carried her far. She replied with gentle decision, "He is my husband."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+"It is our fault."
+
+That evening Ephraim Croom stood in his father's sitting-room, near the
+door of the dark stair that led up to his own rooms. His shoulders were
+drooping. His face was gray and haggard. Even his hair and beard, damp,
+unkempt, seemed to express remorse in their outline. He stood doggedly
+facing his father and mother, repeating the thing that he saw to be
+true, but with no further words to interpret his insight.
+
+To his parents his opinions, his attitude, appeared as an outrage upon
+reason. His father looked at him with greater severity than he had ever
+before exercised upon his only child. "I reckon, Ephraim, that you speak
+without using the sense that the Almighty has been mercifully pleased to
+give you. You know, Ephraim, the girl has been as a daughter in this
+house. When has it been said to her that her father, dying in his
+worldly follies, left her destitute, the pittance she gets needing to go
+for his debts? She's had about as good a home as any girl should want,
+and your mother and the ministers have dealt faithfully with her
+concerning her soul."
+
+Ephraim made a movement of the head as if for a moment he could have
+stood upright, feeling in one respect innocent; then again there was
+nothing but the droop of shame visible.
+
+His mother looked at him with eyes that were red with weeping. She had
+been wiping them with fierce furtive rubs of her handkerchief; now she
+was rubbing the handkerchief, a hard ball, in the palm of one hand.
+Perhaps grief at Susannah's loss had been dominant until Ephraim's
+accusation had fanned her anger. "She'd better have gone with him openly
+from the baptising. I never thought then that it was love-making she was
+after." Deep scorn was here expressed. "Religion! 'Twasn't much religion
+she had in her mind. And we treated her real kindly, Ephraim, thinking
+'twas the hold of delusion they had upon her. 'Twould be very small use
+to bring her back even if you or your father could have found out which
+way they'd gone. 'Tisn't likely she'd stay long if you fetched her,
+seeing she's that sort of a girl, with a hankering for the man. There
+isn't a place in this house to lock her into unless it is the cellar."
+
+It was perhaps the thought of the unspeakable degradation it would be to
+the worthy house to hold a girl as prisoner in the cellar, perhaps the
+dismal knowledge that that which had already befallen them and her was
+not much better than this, that caused his mother here to lose her
+self-control entirely and weep bitterly. Ephraim shrank under her words
+as if they had been the strokes of a whip striking him. When she had
+ended he went on heavily up the dark stair.
+
+Both the men were in riding-dress. The elder man, when he had comforted
+his wife as best he might, laid aside his boots and whip determinedly,
+believing that the use for them, as far as concerned the search for his
+niece, was at an end. Upstairs, sitting between the three windows that
+looked east and north and south, Ephraim sat as long as exhaustion made
+rest necessary. He was still equipped for the road, thinking only which
+way it behoved him to travel, and when.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+The next day, toward afternoon, Joseph Smith stood by the bedside of
+Angel Halsey. Susannah, wan and weary with a long night's nursing, was
+sitting beside the pillow. Smith looked upon them both benevolently. It
+was some minutes before he spoke. Susannah was too much in awe of him to
+say much, but his presence was welcome. Since Halsey's rational self had
+been lost in his delirium, loneliness like darkness that could be felt
+had pressed upon her.
+
+"Our brother will be healed," said Smith at length. "It is given to me
+to know that he will be healed." He then spread his hands over the sick
+man and made a short prayer. There was much fervour in his words and his
+voice was loud.
+
+"Give him to drink," said Smith.
+
+"Biery's wife told me as long as he was in fever not to give him water."
+
+Smith looked down upon her kindly, but he spoke in a tone of absolute
+authority. "My sister, I say unto thee give him water. It is given to me
+to know that he must have water and that he will do well."
+
+"It is never done in such cases," said Susannah. "I remember when my
+father--" She had not the faith that Smith required of her.
+
+Without a frown, with perfect gentleness, Smith fetched the water and,
+lifting the sick man's head, allowed him to drink eagerly. Halsey was
+obviously comforted.
+
+Smith had something else to say. If he had not been who he was Susannah
+might have perceived that he was somewhat perplexed, even embarrassed.
+Just as a child does not easily attribute to the adult such hindering
+emotions, so she supposed him to be upon a plane above them.
+
+He lingered by the bedside, apparently watching the sufferer. At length
+he said, "You set out with this young man--yesterday morning?"
+
+"Yes, very early."
+
+There was another pause, then he said, "Did you go before a justice of
+the peace?"
+
+"A justice of the peace?" Then she added inconsequently, "My uncle is a
+justice of the peace." She had never heard of a civil marriage; she did
+not know in the least what he meant.
+
+"Or--or a minister?"
+
+She began to understand now.
+
+"I married you myself, sister, and it was sealed in heaven, but I
+haven't got a license to marry, so that the Gentiles would say--that the
+knot wasn't tied, ye know." The last words were a lapse into common
+parlance. She had grown accustomed to the hybrid nature of his
+mannerism.
+
+He had expected and feared to see her white face flame into excitement,
+but to Susannah it seemed a small thing now what the Gentiles might say.
+If the marriage was indeed sealed in heaven, then all was well. And if
+it was not, worse could not be. She was too weary now to respond to the
+prophet's worldly solicitude for her. Looking at the still unconscious
+Halsey, she felt that there was time enough for further action.
+
+Smith said, "Emma would have come, but the child has spasms."
+
+"We meant to go to you," said Susannah. "We lost our way. I only heard
+to-day where you were."
+
+After a while he said, "I might stop here with our sick brother and send
+you to Emma, but there is a congregation called for to-night. Mr.
+Cowdery would have come, but he was at the baptising."
+
+"Did you leave the baptising just to come and see us?" It occurred to
+her that from his point of view two stray disciples such as herself and
+Halsey could be of little importance compared with his appearance at the
+solemn function.
+
+Smith busied himself giving Halsey more water. That done, he went away
+without further words. Susannah heard his horse gallop from the door.
+She knew that he had travelled some five miles to pay this visit, and
+she supposed that he desired to return if possible before the converts
+had come up from the water. His visit had undoubtedly brought her
+comfort. His response to her message had been prompt and kind. She knew
+now that his thoughts and Emma's were busy concerning her. And then,
+too, the sick man was better. He had gone quietly to sleep.
+
+The woman of the house brought her for food an unusual delicacy. Smith
+had ordered this. Mrs. Biery made some remarks concerning him. She said
+that his coat seemed very old, but that he had given her money and bid
+her attend diligently upon the sick man and his wife. Susannah, who knew
+how little money the Smiths had hitherto possessed, how many things they
+must want for themselves, was touched.
+
+As her spirits revived, her faith and hope in the new sect revived also.
+She looked among the few possessions Halsey had brought with him for the
+precious copy of the Book of Mormon, and sat reading it by Angel's
+bedside while the autumn sun was sinking.
+
+Sometimes she heard a traveller stop at the inn door and pass on again.
+At dusk there was a sounds of horses coming with speed. To her surprise
+Joseph Smith came into the room again. He looked as if he had been
+riding hard, but he spoke as quietly as though he had gone only from
+that room to the next.
+
+"I have brought a gentleman who can marry you according to the law of
+the State." Susannah had gone forward to greet him, but now she looked
+suddenly back toward the unconscious man, whose form was almost
+indistinguishable in the dusk.
+
+Smith brought candles and set them at the foot of the bed. He took
+Halsey by the hand and lifted him to a sitting posture, telling him in
+clear strong tones what was required of him. Halsey understood. He
+became completely conscious under Smith's influence, and for the hour
+almost strong. He would know where he was and how he came there, who the
+minister was that had come. He even required that this stranger should
+show his license to marry.
+
+The minister was a common-looking man, small, shaggy as to the beard,
+business-like. He knew nothing of Joseph Smith's prophetical claims, and
+cared only to know that Susannah was over eighteen years of age.
+Marriage was a thing easily accomplished in that day and region. A few
+minutes more and Susannah was a wife.
+
+In after years, when she used to think of Angel Halsey as having gone
+before her into the unseen, Susannah held the belief that the part of
+him which she would meet there would be that which shone out in the rare
+half-playful smiles he gave, in the glance which, at the moment of
+smiling, he bent on her. He was a very grave man, shrewd, in many ways,
+in others as simple as a child, but above all greatly religious. His
+religion, however deep might be its root, was also always upon the
+surface. Only now and then, when, as at their first meeting, he
+recognised in his serious way that something else was required if he
+would truly hold communion with Susannah, the smile would come as from
+some inward part of his spirit, like a dawning light slowly breaking
+through the surface, soon withdrawn again by the power of custom. When
+he thus smiled, Susannah in those days trusted him absolutely, avowed
+herself entirely to his service, and felt within her heart a large
+measure of affection.
+
+Halsey's was the first case of illness in the newly-formed sect that
+called itself already "_The_ Church of Christ." Joseph Smith and Cowdery
+and a man named Whitmer, with whom the Smiths were now housed, having
+consulted upon it, decided that they must begin at once to carry out the
+commands of Scripture. They came together, therefore, and anointed
+Halsey with oil, laying their hands upon him and praying fervently.
+Halsey, believing himself to be healed, got up from his sick-bed, and
+his recovery progressed rapidly.
+
+Full of excitement, fervour, superstition, and faith, the apostles of
+the new doctrine were fully persuaded that they might expect a literal
+fulfilment of the promise that signs and wonders should follow them that
+believe. The fierce opposition and hatred which were roused by the
+reports of their doings are easily accounted for when we consider that
+their opinions had to encounter that curious distortion of reason which
+has caused religious warfare in all times and places to become the worst
+sort of warfare, and the fact which Smith himself had acknowledged when
+he first saw Susannah, that many evil reports about him had formerly
+been true; then also the new sect produced vehement psychical
+disturbance wherever it touched the surrounding population, and many
+things occurred which might, or might not, be termed miracles, according
+to the interpretation of the observer. It was no longer possible for
+Joseph Smith to ride, as he had done on the day of Susannah's marriage,
+with a minister of one of the older sects. He became very notorious, and
+to every one except those who were interested enough in his doctrine to
+give him a fair hearing, his name became a synonym for all evil.
+
+Halsey remained with Susannah at John Biery's hotel. Halsey was one of
+the few converts who could afford to live in comparative comfort and to
+pay something for the entertainment of destitute disciples. For that
+reason the landlord, John Biery, held himself from the religious quarrel
+that was shaking the region.
+
+Even before Halsey had regained his strength he drove Susannah to swell
+the congregation at the preachings which were daily taking place in
+different places within the township, for such converts as had already
+professed themselves were gathered now in the neighbourhood of Fayette.
+
+Experiences came to Susannah in such quick succession that this was not
+a time of reflection. Such part of her husband's religion as she could
+appropriate she endeavoured very sincerely to embrace. After the manner
+of the thought, of the time she supposed that the sect was either right
+or wrong--if right, all right; if wrong, all wrong. Sometimes the
+ghastly fear that her growing belief was false would arise with hideous
+menace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+All the doings of the infant sect were directed by those utterances of
+Joseph Smith which he held to be revelations. These were confided
+sometimes to the elders, sometimes to the converts at large. Susannah
+frequently heard of them first through Emma Smith, whose pious heart was
+constantly filled with wonder and thankfulness at the thought of the
+great honour vouchsafed to her husband. These revelations, sometimes
+illimitable in their sweep, and sometimes having reference only to the
+most minute practical details, were at this time all in accordance
+either with the dictates of common sense or with the severely literal
+meaning of some Scripture text. They were therefore easily justified
+either to reason or to the eye of faith, but the results of their
+application were often startling, and it was facts, not theories, that
+chiefly caused Susannah to stagger.
+
+At length the growing excitement among the congregation seemed to gather
+toward some climax. It was then that Joseph Smith was said for the first
+time to cast out devils.
+
+Near to John Biery's hotel lived a family of the name of Knight. The
+worthy farmer became a convert, and so also, in appearance, did his son.
+Susannah first saw them at their baptism, which took place one cold
+bleak day in the margin of Seneca Lake. The horses which had brought the
+little company to the edge of the water, having been tied among the
+trees, made a constant rustling and trampling among the fallen leaves.
+The sharp rustle, the thud of the hoofs upon the ground, were sounds
+long connected in her mind with the crisis of her doubt, which then
+began. The maples stood above them, tall and leafless; the waters of the
+lake were leaden in hue and cold. Looking southward on either side of
+its long flood, the snores with their many points and headlands lay
+cold, almost hueless, near by, and in the distance blue as tarnished
+steel.
+
+It was a bitter day for baptist and for the immersed. Joseph Smith went
+out alone into the water, commanding the other elders to remain upon the
+shore. Whatever else the man had or had not, he had splendid courage in
+facing physical ills. There were but few candidates. Susannah, standing
+apart near the shore, chanced to be in the path by which the younger
+Knight descended to the water. He was a young man with strong features
+and a thick, unhealthy skin. He was dressed in the wet garments which
+another candidate had taken off. Cold he might have been, but as he
+passed she heard his teeth chatter so loudly that it almost seemed to
+her that his very bones rattled. She drew back with the impression that
+some horrible thing had passed by. Before she had time to wonder that
+the chill should have had such an effect upon the hardy fellow, his feet
+were in the water, and he turned and caught her eye. The look he gave
+her became suddenly one of terrified entreaty.
+
+Susannah did not move; she was spell-bound. He began to wade toward
+Smith, who stood in the deeper water. She wondered why he allowed
+himself to be immersed. She was certain that he did not desire it, was
+certain also that no motives of interest, no physical force, could have
+operated to compel, when suddenly she asked herself sharply, what force
+had taken her into the waters of this extraordinary baptism?
+
+To her astonishment, when Newell Knight came up from the water he was
+shouting aloud. She thought that his accents were a horrible simulation
+of merriment, but by the others they were accepted as an evidence of
+holy joy.
+
+Two days after, when Susannah and her husband were returning from
+Smith's preaching through the autumn night, they were met as they were
+approaching Biery's hotel by a messenger from Knight's house. The
+messenger had been sent to fetch Halsey. He reported that Newell Knight
+was in "an awful way." Susannah alighted at once and walked to the
+tavern, in order that her husband might drive with all speed to the
+afflicted man.
+
+The lights as they shone from John Biery's windows reminded her vividly
+of the first time, a month since, when she had driven to that house at
+night. She had grown much older since then, stronger in many ways,
+weaker in some, but she was not conscious of this; it was not her way to
+give even so much as a passing glance at herself as one of the actors in
+life's drama. The road on which she trod was heavy with mud. The
+night-winds cried around and through the empty branches of two or three
+neglected trees in the clearing. The square wooden tavern stood at the
+cross-roads. The light from the door made a pathway through the
+darkness, up which Susannah walked.
+
+When she entered, the heat and fumes from fire, candles, tobacco-pipes,
+and steaming mugs met her. She was accustomed to walking through John
+Biery's main room to gain the stair that led to her own; on the whole it
+was not disorderly, or Susannah had but to appear on the threshold to
+reduce it to order. To-night the men did not let her pass with their
+usual civil "Good evening"; they assumed that she had an interest in
+their talk.
+
+"Is Mr. Halsey stopping over to Farmer Knight's?" asked Biery. "My! and
+they'll be real glad to get him, ye know. Twiced they've been here fur
+him. They say that Newell Knight he's possessed with a devil."
+
+Susannah wrapped her shawl tightly across her breast, a nervous movement
+caused not by cold but by the desire to withdraw her real self from the
+surrounding circumstance.
+
+A tall thin man sitting by the table set down his mug with a clatter
+upon it. "Wall now, tain't my idea thet thet's exectly what's taken
+Newell. I saw a case of a man thet was taken under the preacher Finney.
+'Twas over to Ithica. The hull town knew about it. A lot of folks went
+in. I jest looked in when I was passing, and seen the man meself. He was
+lyin' on the floor. His wife was aholdin' his head, but he didn't know
+her. He hedn't no knowledge of any of the folks. He jest lay there
+rollin', and his eyes was rollin'. And when Finney was fetched, Finney
+he said 'twas 'conviction.' I don't know what the man was convicted of,
+but 'twas 'conviction' Finney called it. He didn't say nothing about
+being possessed with devils."
+
+The third speaker was a small fat man. His face was smooth and had the
+peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the
+middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he glanced at
+Susannah critically.
+
+"When they're taken that way under Finney," he said, as if meditating,
+"'conviction' commonly means conviction of sins--their own sins, ye
+know, not other folk's; and when they git up, if they've taken anything
+wrongfully they hev to restore it fourfold afore the conviction will
+leave off a-worrittin' them. I don't know how 'tis among the Mormons."
+The last words were said in an undertone and he had dropped his eyes. It
+would have required a brave man to treat Susannah to open sarcasm.
+
+She stood looking from one to the other. She still wore her girlish
+cottage bonnet, and as its fashion was, it had slipped backwards upon
+the amber ringlets that hung upon her neck; but the girlish look was
+fast passing from the face, the hair parting fell on either side of pale
+cheeks.
+
+"Oh, as to thet, 's fur as I know, one religion's as good as another,"
+said the politic Biery.
+
+Susannah looked at the fat, bright-eyed man who was no longer looking at
+her. "I know" (her voice fell with a strange gentleness through the
+thickened atmosphere of the room) "that there are many malicious stories
+abroad about the dishonesty of our people which are not true."
+
+But as she went up the stair she remembered that she had heard of no
+case where reformation of character had been followed by the returning
+of the fourfold. Most of these saints of the new sect had before their
+conversion been, like her husband, already God-fearing and righteous,
+but in cases where, like their leader, they had been reclaimed from
+evil courses, had they not been satisfied with offering the present and
+future to God, leaving the past? She had heard of no case of restitution
+such as Finney insisted upon.
+
+Susannah entered the low, wide room in which she lived. The chimney from
+the lower room passed up and was always warm. She went and laid her cold
+hands against the rough plaster that covered its bricks, and, being
+tired, she leaned, laying her cheek too against its warm surface. The
+one candle cast but a faint light upon the chairs, the bed, the table.
+The small panes of the window-glass were bare to the darkness without
+and the empty tree-branches. The heavy latch of the closed door was
+fastened crookedly for lack of good workmanship.
+
+Her unsatisfied mind ached for counsel, and her thought, roving over the
+world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know
+him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to
+lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then
+the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked
+back her tears.
+
+She waited an hour, two hours; then, becoming anxious on Halsey's
+account, she borrowed a lantern and went across the fields to Knight's
+farmhouse.
+
+Quite a number of people had gathered. Susannah met some of them coming
+from the house, but others were still there, standing about the fire in
+the kitchen. She heard that the later arrivals had all been disappointed
+of the sight of Newell Knight in his fit. Halsey had assumed authority,
+stating that it was indeed a case of possession, and that none but those
+who were strong in faith and in the power of prayer must come near the
+possessed. The craving of the visitors for excitement was only fed by
+the sound of the young man's voice, heard at short intervals.
+
+He cried aloud, sometimes shrieking that he was being taken into "the
+pit" and that Joseph Smith could alone deliver him, sometimes exclaiming
+in a strange voice that he was no longer Newell Knight but a demon, and
+sometimes only moaning and gibbering words that no one could understand.
+
+Halsey came out to Susannah. "Wouldst thou see him?" he asked tenderly.
+"The sight will distress thee, for it is truly terrible to see with the
+eye of flesh the power of hell, and yet I cannot forbid thee if thou
+wouldst come, for perchance the Lord may mean it for our edification."
+
+Susannah went with him into the inner room, hardly knowing why she went,
+but probably impelled by the instinctive desire to relieve suffering
+which was part of her womanhood. The young man's father and mother,
+together with two or three Mormon converts, were kneeling upon the
+floor, saying prayers for the sufferer in more or less audible, more or
+less agonised tones.
+
+The young man lay upon a pallet-bed, in what would have been called by
+the medical science of the time "convulsions." His eyeballs were rolled
+upwards in a manner most disfiguring to his face. His hands were
+clenched. Halsey no sooner entered the room than he, too, fell upon his
+knees, lifting his face upward as if in silent and fervent prayer.
+
+For a moment Susannah felt impelled to follow his example. "But
+perhaps," she thought to herself, "cold water upon the patient's head,
+or a warm foot-bath--" Such suggestions caused her to resist the impulse
+to join the praying band, and, having resisted it, she suddenly
+experienced, as one feels a fresh breeze entering a close room, a
+strong, clear sense of knowledge that in this matter, at least, her
+husband was deluded, that the friends had better rise from their knees
+and betake themselves to ruder remedies.
+
+Susannah had never learned to command; she had never even learned to
+advise. She had too much reverence to speak aloud, disturbing those who
+were at prayer. She stood hesitating, and then, in very low tones,
+whispered her belief in her husband's ear.
+
+No doubt Halsey was shocked at his wife's unbelief; perhaps by the law
+of telepathy, for whose existence some psychical experts vouch, his
+thought penetrated the mind of the sensitive upon the bed. Whatever the
+cause, Newell Knight sat up and pointed at Susannah, crying aloud that
+he saw the devil about to seize upon her. So excited was the mental
+atmosphere, so vivid were the sufferer's words and the effect of his
+pointing finger, or, perhaps, so substantial was his vision, that more
+than one of the saints afterwards averred that they had seen the Evil
+One about to embrace Susannah. But they did not agree in the description
+of his form.
+
+Halsey wrapped his arms about his wife, and led her like a child from
+the room and from the house. She hardly had time to speak before she saw
+the night again about her. He set her down upon an old log that chanced
+to lie against Knight's barn, kneeling beside her. There, when they were
+alone in the darkness, he invoked that name to which throughout all
+Christendom the devils are believed to be subject.
+
+"Angel," she said gently, "stop praying and listen to me. If you can
+command the devil in the name of our Lord, why don't you do that to poor
+Newell Knight?" She felt strong sympathy for the young man; she was
+moved almost to tears to think they were taking the wrong way with him.
+
+"I have tried and failed. We have sent for Joseph Smith. My faith is not
+strong enough," he added humbly. "This cometh not forth but by prayer
+and by fasting. Look! I am even now unfaithful to my charge because I
+love thee, friend, more, I fear, than the work of the Lord."
+
+They were left alone because Halsey in passing out had left the door of
+the sick room open to the eager neighbours. Now reluctantly he went back
+to his task of guarding the patient, and Susannah, after assuring his
+anxious soul that she felt no ill effects whatever from the dire
+proximity, went home again across the dark frozen fields with her
+lantern. She sat half the night watching and waiting.
+
+It was in the darkest hour before the dawn that she heard Halsey's step
+and crept down through the black house to unlock the door for him. When
+they had come again into the room she saw that he was greatly excited,
+filled with apparent calm of an exalted mood.
+
+"We have beheld a most glorious victory, friend; and truly we have been
+shown signs and wonders, and a very great miracle has been wrought. I
+wish thou couldst have seen with thine own eyes, and yet--"
+
+She thought that he had been going to say that her lack of faith had
+made it more expedient for her to be away, but that he had checked in
+himself even the thought that he was more worthy of privilege than she.
+
+It seemed that Joseph Smith, having been preaching the evening before at
+a place some twenty miles away, had not been able to reach Knight's
+house until nearly two in the morning.
+
+"He rode all night," said Halsey, "and lost not a moment in coming to
+the inner room; it was like him."
+
+"Yes," said Susannah, "it was like him; he is very kind."
+
+Halsey went on. "He spread his hands over Newell and commanded the
+devils to come out of him."
+
+"And did they come?"
+
+"They left him. Joseph said that it was given to him to see that there
+were three of them; but they departed, going out into the darkness."
+
+The wind moaned against the window near which Susannah sat.
+
+"They left Newell very weak, but at peace like an infant sleeping. But
+at first I feared that he was as one dead, for I could not see him
+breathe; but Joseph's faith was strong, for he lifted up his voice and
+began to give praise, and he took Newell by the hand and bade him rise,
+but his hand fell back as if there was no life in it. Then Joseph Smith
+knelt with us upon the floor, and Newell lay smiling, but his eyes were
+closed, and he seemed dead to this world, although the body was warm.
+Afterwards he told us that at the time he was seeing a vision of
+unspeakable light and glory. And then, as we watched him, I fearing
+because my faith was weak, a marvel happened as a sign and seal to our
+faith that Joseph is indeed called to be a great prophet. I wish that
+thou couldst have seen it, Susannah, for the miracle has given me a
+great uplifting in spirit, but I am come to bear witness to it, that
+thou, too, mayest rejoice in the marvel."
+
+There was a few moments' pause. "What was it?" she asked.
+
+"Newell began to rise from the bed. He did not sit up or move himself,
+but he was raised slowly into the air, still reclining as though upon
+his pillow. The invisible hands of angels bore him upwards."
+
+Susannah knit her brows. "Did you see the angels? I don't understand."
+And then more vehemently she asked, "What was it that you did see?"
+
+"Nay, friend, it was not vouchsafed to us to see the blessed spirits,
+but surely they must have lifted him, for he rose, soaring upwards, as
+thou hast seen the thistledown ascend gently, almost as high as the roof
+of the room. As we gazed in great astonishment, and the women fainted
+for fear, he sank again as slowly till he rested upon his bed, and he
+opened his eyes and spoke to us of the wonderful vision of light which
+he had seen, and then he arose in perfect health and walked."
+
+Susannah sat silent for a minute or two. Her husband was also silent,
+wrapped in contemplation. Then Susannah said, "You are very tired,
+Angel. You were overwrought last night, even before you were called to
+the Knights'; you had better go to sleep now."
+
+She darkened the window against the coming of the dawn that her husband
+might sleep in the day instead of the night. She herself went downstairs
+with the earliest stir of footsteps. Because of a whim that seized her,
+she helped to prepare the breakfast that was to be served to the
+household at sunrise, and then she partook of it heartily, looking out
+of a southern window as she ate, watching the red sun ascend behind the
+naked boles of the elms. She was glad that the new day had come. Her
+heart ached not so much with pure grief now as with mocking laughter.
+Her husband was mad, quite mad, or else--and this was the more bitter
+belief--he had seen that she was in danger of disaffection, and had told
+this lie to dupe her, thinking that because she was a woman she would be
+impressed by it. As the sincerity of Angel's look came before her she
+said to herself that if that were the case no doubt Joseph Smith had
+invented the story, and laid it upon Angel's conscience to tell it. That
+or madness was the only explanation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+It was long after the day of her departure before Ephraim again set out
+to find Susannah. An illness to which he was subject first came upon
+him, and then, when days were past and he was able to leave his bed,
+conflicting reports concerning Susannah had been brought to the house,
+and Ephraim's courage failed. Why should he go if by seeing her he could
+neither give her pleasure nor do her good? It was natural that report,
+dwelling on what it could understand rather than on what was
+incomprehensible, should magnify Susannah's love for Halsey. No man in
+New Manchester who in the past month had chanced to catch sight of any
+maid holding secret parlance with any lover but now swore stoutly that
+that maid had been Susannah.
+
+It often happens that schemes least calculated to succeed attain
+success. Susannah and Halsey had not gone far, nor had they gone with
+great secrecy, yet it had happened that no one had observed them as they
+travelled, and as there was at that time of the year little
+communication between the towns to the east and west of Geneva Market,
+it was long before real news concerning them transpired.
+
+At length, when many days had passed, it was told in Manchester where
+Susannah really was; and as if the mischief Rumour was ashamed of being
+caught telling the truth, she hastily added a lie, and one that had a
+fair show of evidence in its favour. She declared that Susannah had not
+been married except by some mystical Mormon ceremony which was void in
+law.
+
+When Ephraim heard this circumstantial story, and with it many new tales
+concerning wicked mysteries practised by the Mormons in Fayette, he
+threw down his books, as long ago the fabled fruit that had turned to
+ashes was thrown down, and prepared for the road.
+
+In the first day's journey he reached Geneva, and setting out again
+before it was light, he came to John Biery's hotel when the sun was
+rising red beyond the gray elm boughs on the morning on which Susannah
+breakfasted alone.
+
+Susannah looked up from her breakfast and saw Ephraim standing beside
+her. It was his way to look calm outwardly, but she could see that he
+was struggling with the nervous untoward beating of his heart, so that
+he could not speak. Susannah did not understand why she could not
+immediately rise and speak. She was conscious of a red flush that rose
+and mantled her face, but she did not understand the emotion from which
+it arose. She only knew that she was glad to see Ephraim, more glad than
+she could have thought to be of anything upon a day when her heart had
+been set mocking.
+
+"You have come at last," she whispered, and only knew when the words
+were said that she had hoped to see him before. Her whisper was broken
+by rising tears, which she checked in very shame.
+
+"I want to speak to you," said Ephraim briefly.
+
+So she rose and went out with him. She put her shawl over her head and
+walked upon the roadside. The day was mild, the first of the Indian
+summer. Ephraim had not put up his horse; he led it by the bridle as he
+walked.
+
+"Sure as I'm alive, it's her uncle as has come after her at last," said
+the wife of John Biery, gazing through the small panes of the kitchen
+window. And, in truth, Ephraim did look many years older than Susannah,
+for his figure was bowed somewhat for lack of strength.
+
+Susannah did not now think of Ephraim as old, neither did she think of
+him as young. To her he was just Ephraim, bearing no more relation of
+comparison to any other mortal than if his had been the only soul in the
+world beside her own. She was not aware of this; she was only thinking
+that if he had not shot Halsey she would have been able to speak freely
+to him now. It was so wicked of Ephraim, above all others, to do such a
+thing. It was, in fact, unforgivable because of the stain upon Ephraim's
+own character more than because of Halsey's blood. But that again she
+did not analyse. She only knew that her feeling kept her silent.
+
+"I am here, Susannah"--in his battle to speak Ephraim economised
+words--"to ask you to come back with me."
+
+Susannah considered. It would be perhaps the best thing that she could
+do after she had spoken her mind to Angel. He would not ask her to
+remain to join in a service she loathed. But when she thought of her
+aunt, and of the voice of an outraged Puritan neighbourhood, her heart
+naturally failed her.
+
+"I cannot."
+
+"Is this man more to you--I do not say than the ties of kindred, for
+that is natural--but more to you than the obligation to live a life of
+reason and duty?"
+
+"No." Susannah spoke the answer aloud because it arose so simply and
+strongly within her. Had she not just come to a crisis in which her
+desire to abide by reason proved far stronger than the feeling which
+bound her to Halsey? And yet, as she thought of his love and his
+tenderness for her, she felt only pity for him, even if he had told a
+lie.
+
+Ephraim had grown calmer, but at the clear denial his heart again beat
+against the breath he was trying to draw. She did not love Halsey then!
+she was not married to him! He could conceive of nothing that could have
+brought that word and tone to Susannah's lips if she were bound.
+
+"Does not duty and reason, does not even mere sanity, call upon you to
+come back with me, Susannah, and spend your life where you can exercise
+the gifts God has given you among those who abide by law and order?"
+
+"Perhaps, Ephraim, it is so; but I am too great a coward. Think of the
+shame that I should have to endure from my aunt, and all the world would
+taunt me with my folly and madness. I think it would kill what little
+good there is in me. For although I should be willing to suffer if I
+have done wrong, yet there would be no use in going where my punishment
+would be greater than I could bear."
+
+He was shocked to think of the days that had elapsed before he had come
+to her. She had suffered much before she could speak in this way, and
+when he saw how mild and sad she was, and, above all, rational, he
+longed to comfort her as he would comfort a child with caresses and the
+promise of future joys. He could give her neither, because he believed
+that she cared for neither caress nor joy from his hand. There was
+something he could offer--all that he had to give that she could take,
+but the offer was so hard to make that he prefaced it.
+
+"A way might be found by which you could return to our house, Susannah,
+and be troubled by no spoken reproach, and you could live down that
+which was unspoken." He paused a minute, and then said, "But I would
+know first that you leave all that pertains to your life here freely.
+You have found it true, what is so much reported, that the Mormons
+follow wicked practices?"
+
+"No, oh no, Ephraim; that is not true--mad, deluded perhaps, but not
+wicked. The stories of wickedness told are malicious even where there is
+a colour of truth, and for the most part there is none. In the matter of
+daily life they abide by the laws of God and man, and nothing else is
+taught."
+
+It was the thought of the sacerdotal deception that she felt had been so
+lately practised upon herself that caused her to put in the reserving
+words "in the matter of daily life"; but when she remembered the malice
+that had instigated report, the unlovely lives of the malicious
+fault-finders, the evil stains that lie even upon the best lives, she
+burst out, "There is not one in our community, Ephraim, who would stoop
+to a cruel act either in word or deed. There is not one of us, even
+among those who have recently repented from very wicked lives, who would
+try to take the life of a defenceless man when he was, at a great cost
+to himself, pursuing what he thought to be the path of duty--as you did,
+Ephraim."
+
+Before this he had kept his eyes upon the ground; standing still now, he
+looked straight into hers. So for a minute they stood, the horse's head
+drooping beside his shoulder, the woman upon the roadside erect,
+passionate; around them the leafless wood through which the long
+straight road was cut. The long level red beams of the sun struck
+through between the gray trunks, burnishing the wet carpet of the fallen
+leaf.
+
+"Did you think it was I who fired?" he asked.
+
+Then he went on with the horse, and she at the side.
+
+She was utterly astonished. "Who, Ephraim--who fired?"
+
+He looked straight in front of him again. "It was my mother. She
+brandished the gun in his face. She couldn't have intended to shoot."
+
+From Susannah's heart a great cloud was lifted. She felt no confused
+need to readjust her thoughts; rather it was that in a moment her
+apprehension of Ephraim's character slipped easily from some abnormal
+strain into normal pleasure.
+
+She pressed her hands to her breast as if fondling some delight.
+"Forgive me," she said, "but I am so glad, oh, so very glad." She drew a
+long breath as if inhaling not the autumn but the new sweetness of
+spring.
+
+So they went on a little way, he somewhat shy because of her emotion,
+she meditating again, and this question pressed.
+
+"And you think," she asked, "that your mother would receive me if I went
+back with you? that I could live at peace with her?"
+
+"Do you think that whatever I might do she would ever try to shoot
+_me_?" he asked with half a smile. "Do you think that she would ever, by
+word or deed, do anything that would hurt _me_?"
+
+"Never." Susannah said the word as a matter of course.
+
+"Or that my father would ever deny me anything that I seriously asked
+for, or that he knew my happiness depended upon?"
+
+"No, surely not; but, Ephraim--"
+
+"Oh," he continued, growing distress in his voice, "Susannah, is there
+any place else in the whole world that you can go for shelter and
+comfort but to our house? You have spoken of this madness and delusion;
+you are satisfied that you must leave--" He had meant to say "this man,"
+but he was too shy, and he faltered--"that you must leave these people?"
+
+She cast her eyes far in among the trunks of the close-growing trees,
+upon one side and then upon another, as if looking for a way of escape.
+Yes, surely her faith in Angel's creed had been hurt beyond recovery,
+and she must free herself, but how? She dallied with Ephraim's offer of
+asylum because she could think of no other.
+
+"Yes," she said mechanically; "yes, but how can I?"
+
+"Oh, my dear cousin, don't you see that it is wrong for you to stay one
+day longer here? If you believed at first that the bond that united you
+to this man was binding, you do not believe it now. You were so young
+when you went, yet the thing cannot be undone on that account. You were
+so beautiful that I had hoped a great and prosperous life lay before
+you. Now, of course, that cannot be, but--but--at least you can live a
+life of peace, live truly and nobly, using your faculties to glorify
+God."
+
+She began to see that he was trying to work up to something else that he
+had to say. She followed him heedfully, knowing that with Ephraim the
+steps in an argument were important. He saw some way out which she did
+not see, and her whole mind paused in eager listening.
+
+He turned and faced her again, lifting his eyes, holding out his hand;
+his voice, usually weak, was strong. She knew that it was a strong man
+who spoke to her.
+
+"Susannah, will you take my name and protection?"
+
+She gazed at him incredulous, and then, beginning to understand what it
+was that he thought, and all that he meant, she leaned against one of
+the cold gray tree trunks, weeping weakly like a child.
+
+"But I am married," the words came with a long sobbing sigh.
+
+"Not legally?" and then he added, "nor in God's sight."
+
+"Yes, yes, oh! you are making a great mistake, Ephraim. Joseph Smith and
+my husband are not like that. A minister came and did it. He had his
+license, and we have the paper he signed."
+
+Ephraim set his teeth hard together and kept silence. He said to himself
+that he might have known that the rascals would be clever enough to make
+the tie secure.
+
+Susannah wept on, not loudly, but with long convulsive sighs that broke
+into the tears she was endeavouring to check.
+
+"And, Ephraim, my husband is good--oh, very good, and very kind to me,
+and up to last night I thought that what he believed might be true. I
+was not sure, but I thought that Joseph Smith might be a prophet. I knew
+they were far, far better than the other people who despise them, and so
+I was glad to be with them; and up till last night" (she repeated the
+words, controlling herself to give them emphasis)--"up till last night I
+thought that they at least believed everything they said to be true."
+
+Then, after an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he
+had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right
+moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was
+broken; she had detected some fraud. His hope, dazed by one blow, now
+began to look through the circumstance more clearly. If he could lead
+her to renounce the religion in which she had apparently ceased to
+believe, and persuade her to return to his father's roof, the Mormon
+husband himself might seek the dissolution of the marriage. Therefore
+Ephraim made no comment on what had passed, but asked gently, "What of
+last night, Susy?"
+
+With a great effort she stood up, brushing away her tears, brushing back
+with both hands the hair that had fallen about her face. In the shock
+which Ephraim's proposal had given, in the brief interval of her tears,
+she had realised as never before that she could not shake off her duty
+to Angel as she had thought to shake off his creed. She spoke
+tremblingly.
+
+"Ephraim, you are so good that you are above us all. You live in some
+higher place. You would have made this great sacrifice to help me." (She
+never doubted that Ephraim's proposal had been born in self-abnegation.)
+"Surely you can tell me what to do, for I am in great distress; but I
+want you first to remember that my husband is good, and that he loves me
+more than all the world, more than everything except God, and if he has
+told me a lie now, it must have been because he thought to save my soul
+by it, but I think--I think that the lie could not have been his. I
+think it must have been Joseph Smith's." She spoke very wistfully.
+
+"What was it?" he asked again, tender of the shock she had received, yet
+still confident that it would be his part to widen this breach.
+
+Looking down with burning cheeks, she told him what Halsey's story about
+Newell Knight's levitation had been. She remembered it quite clearly and
+told it baldly.
+
+Before she finished it she heard him mutter below his breath that it was
+very strange. She was surprised at his tone of perplexity.
+
+"It is very strange to me," she cried, "because I know my husband, and
+up till now he has been so upright and, except that he believed in
+Joseph Smith, so sensible and wise."
+
+"And is this all?" asked Ephraim. "If it were not for this, would you be
+content to go on as before?"
+
+He had begun to walk slowly on with the horse, and she too walked. After
+she had answered him the long silence became oppressive, and she knew
+that Ephraim was suffering to a degree that she could not understand. At
+length when he did speak his words were most unexpected.
+
+He was looking toward the rising sun, which was still dim and flushed
+with the autumn haze. "The Christ whom we all worship," he began
+abruptly, "each in our different way, called himself by the sacred name
+of Truth. Does he desire, do you think, that we must worship him by
+adhering to what we know to be fact, no matter what would seem to be
+gained by slighting facts? It is a great temptation to me to conceal
+from you, Susannah, a part of my book knowledge which I cannot help
+thinking has some bearing upon this case--how much or how little I do
+not know."
+
+He walked on for a little way, and at length, with a great sigh, he
+began to speak again, answering her first appeal for advice.
+
+"I think that your prophet is mad or false, that his Mormonism is utter
+folly, but you knew that I thought that long ago. As to this story your
+husband has told you, I am bound to say that it has happened before in
+the world's history many times that men have seen, or thought they saw,
+a man rise into the air. In my opinion it is not the indication of a
+sound mind when men see such things, and I feel sure that such a
+phenomenon, fact or delusion, whatever it may be, cannot bear any
+relation to the religious life. My advice to you is--ah, Susannah, I can
+say it truly in the sight of God and of my own conscience--my advice to
+you is to be quit of such men and such scenes, but I dare not keep back
+from you the truth that this one story, so far from lessening my
+confidence in your husband's probity or in Smith's, has rather increased
+it; for, being very ignorant men, they could not have heard of these
+stories that I have told you, for I have read them only in rare books;
+that they have reproduced the same incident seems rather to prove that
+they have by accident stumbled upon the same fact--whether a dizziness
+of the eyes, or an affection of the brain, or an actual counteraction of
+gravity, I cannot tell."
+
+She listened, drinking in each slow word. After all, then, to-day was
+just like yesterday, and that which she had to decide was as to the
+reasonableness of the whole new doctrine, as to her willingness to live
+among such scenes and such men.
+
+There had been no sudden madness or deceit to give her reason for sudden
+revolt (perhaps her heart said excuse instead of reason).
+
+Ephraim had grown very pale. After he had watched her for a while, he
+said with a sad smile, "You will not come home with me to-day,
+Susannah?"
+
+"I must think over all this again, Ephraim. I don't know how these
+things can be, but what you admit is very strange."
+
+He knew from her tone that the die was cast; he had no heart to discuss
+the laws that govern marvels.
+
+"If at any time, any hour of the day or night, you should wish to come
+to us, Susannah, the door is open."
+
+"You have been very kind, Ephraim. There is not much use in my trying to
+say anything about how good you are, but--" She stopped, thinking of her
+recovered confidence in his character and her husband's; in this
+thought she experienced an elevation of the spirits, a new hopefulness,
+which, after the dreary blank of the morning's outlook, was like
+sunshine after rain. With this elevation the religious habit of thought
+which she had learned from Halsey intermingled. "O Ephraim," she cried,
+"I believe that God sent you to give me back my faith."
+
+He had nothing more to say after that. He rode away leaving her standing
+upon the tawny carpet of the fallen leaf, standing in the pink sunshine
+under naked trees, and looking after him with tears of gratitude in her
+eyes. Ephraim looked back once, but not again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+When Susannah was returning from her parting with Ephraim Croom, she
+found Joseph Smith was walking slowly upon the road not far from John
+Biery's hotel. He was holding a small book open before his eyes, conning
+a lesson, repeating the words aloud again and again as a schoolboy
+might.
+
+"It has been given to me to see that the Lord hath need of the learning
+of this world, Mrs. Halsey. When I have got the Latin and the Greek, I
+shall try to find some man who can teach me the Egyptian language, that
+I may know how far the ancient Egyptian from which I translated the Book
+differs therefrom."
+
+Susannah had expected to find him excited after the events of the past
+night, but instead he was intent only upon committing a portion of the
+Latin grammar to memory, learning by rote as children did in those days.
+
+"My husband told me," she began. She stood in awe of Smith, hardly
+knowing how to express herself to him; then she went on, almost roughly,
+"I don't see how Newell Knight could have gone up in the air and come
+down again; it does not seem to me sensible."
+
+He clasped his hands behind his back, his large thumb holding his place
+open in the lesson-book, and walked beside her, his head bent somewhat
+forward in reverie.
+
+"I am often much taken aback at what happens to me now, Mrs. Halsey, but
+I do declare to ye that that was the greatest wonder I ever saw before
+my eyes; and it's given to me to see that ye've got the same sort of
+difficulty about him as it's natural for me to have." He began to lapse
+in his own dialect. "Ye want to see the reason why of things. Well, I
+tell ye, I've just got down to this point, that I've give up tryin' to
+see why. If ye come to that, why was I chosen to lead this people? I
+tell ye when the words of the interpretation of the Book began to pour
+through my mind, and I'd no power to stop them, and I just felt as if I
+could cry like a baby when I couldn't get any one to write 'em down--I
+tell ye, I used often to ask why. But it ain't no use. What I've got to
+do is jest to get hold of the guiding that comes to me as clear as I
+can, and jest walk straight along those lines."
+
+She was returning with a heart bruised with the pain of the recent
+colloquy at parting, but full too of purpose, feeling that she owed it
+to Ephraim to reconsider the evidence for Smith's prophetical claim. She
+glanced shrewdly at him as he walked and spoke--young, blue-eyed,
+large, and mild. The man seemed to her harder to comprehend if his word
+was disbelieved than if it was believed. On either supposition her
+understanding faltered.
+
+"It is very hard for me to believe these things, Mr. Smith. It is very
+hard for me to believe, for instance, about the gold plates. How could
+they appear only to you and vanish again? It doesn't seem to me
+reasonable."
+
+"No more is it reasonable, but lots of things in the Bible is as lacking
+in reason, like the sheet that appeared to Peter with beasts. But about
+the plates, I'll tell you just how it was, even though it's not just the
+way other folks has got hold of it. This is the truth, and you can think
+how hard it was to put it much straighter to folks who didn't believe in
+me then as they do now. The night that the angel came down three times
+and stood at the foot of my bed, and told me to go and get the plates
+and where they were to be found, my brain just seemed to go on fire. I
+could see things I never saw any other time. Why, that night I saw
+through the wooden wall and into the next room, just as if there hadn't
+been any boards there, and I saw all the air about me full of motes,
+just as they are in that sunbeam, and it was dark to other people. I
+could hear, too, the cocks crowing and dogs barking for miles round; and
+when morning came I got up and looked out, and it was as if I had my
+eyes to a telescope. I could see the houses for miles and miles. I ran
+up the hill and worked into the hole, and there I saw the plates, just
+as the angel had said. I'll never forget to my dying day just what they
+looked like, and the sort of writing they had. I took them up and
+covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid
+them, and told my folks. That night I was an awful sick man, and the
+sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates
+they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were
+really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were
+changed lest any one should see them and die. And I was to keep them
+hidden. I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs;
+firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words
+of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry
+out if I couldn't get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it
+and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he
+believed, and likewise the Whitmers. And the second proof is that after
+I had buried the bricks by command, and we was far away from the place
+where they lay, Martin Harris and Cowdery and David Whitmer saw the
+plates, the very same as I had told them; they were floating in the air
+at the time of prayer."
+
+"But, Mr. Smith, St. Peter saw the sheet in a dream; there isn't
+anything in the Bible about things or people floating in the air when
+people are awake."
+
+"Well, I don't know, sister, about that. There was Philip when he
+finished baptisin' the African. Ye see, in going to Azotus he must have
+gone up before he went along, or he'd have struck agen the trees; and
+our brother Newell, not being as good as Philip, and not having as much
+faith, ye see, he jest began to go and had to come back again. Mebbe
+when he's engaged in the work for a year or two he'll become an apostle
+too. Did ye never think, Sister Halsey, that Providence might take us
+up, intending to do great things with us, and jest have to set us down
+because we hadn't learned to have faith enough?"
+
+This spiritual significance of the episode of Newell Knight had not
+occurred to Susannah before. It touched her own case.
+
+He went on. "When I think of the future that is opening before us,
+Sister Halsey--why, when I think of how all the nations are to be
+gathered in--there's persecutions in store, and we must be tried by
+fire, but there's riches and honour and blessing for those as shall be
+steadfast; and it's borne in upon me that the Kingdom shall be set up in
+the west of this land." He turned and looked at her, becoming elevated
+in mind and rising again into finer language. "And the men that are like
+unto thy husband, and have the single eye to believe and obey the word
+of the Lord, shall become as princes, dispensing bread to the hungry,
+and the water of life to them that are athirst; and the beautiful women
+who fail not but continue faithful, shall be as princesses driving
+behind white horses and wearing silken robes, and comforting the sick in
+their sickness, and welcoming the women of the nations as they come from
+distant lands, teaching them that which is good--" He drew his breath,
+as if about to say more and yet larger words, but remained silent,
+looking upon the open space of the fields. Then his mien, which had
+become enlarged, contracted somewhat, as if the vision were past.
+
+"Why, Mrs. Halsey, when I do think of it, it seems as if one day at a
+time were'nt enough, and as if I couldn't just set myself to get the
+Latin and the Greek, and preach just to a few folks and help a person
+that's needing a bit of help; but it's borne right in here upon me that
+what we need is the learning of the world, otherwise called the wisdom
+of the serpent. I never was a great hand to learn, and father he didn't
+make me, so it comes harder now; but I'll see to it that the young ones
+of our folks shall take to learning mighty early; and what we want is to
+be faithful in small things, and not stumble in our faith if now and
+then a man do rise into the air."
+
+She felt his blue eyes, mild but shrewd, meeting hers as he came to this
+last item.
+
+"Sister, 'twas given to me to know the first time as I saw you that
+there was a great work for you to do in comforting and establishing the
+elect, and it comes to me now that you'd better be getting some more
+education, for although I suffer not a woman to teach, yet she may
+establish that which is already taught."
+
+Inclined to put some question that would bring out more definite
+instruction as to her own special function in the Church, she did not
+notice two men who were approaching from the other side in a gig until
+they were close upon them.
+
+One of these was a well-to-do farmer, the brother of a woman who had
+recently been converted at one of Smith's meetings. Now he was breathing
+out revenge. He sprang to the ground, striking at Smith with a heavy
+whip. Susannah saw the mildness of the prophet's eye turn into a sharp
+glitter. She realised that he was not afraid, although when the other
+man also sprang upon him there was not the least doubt but that he must
+be worsted in such an assault.
+
+In the minute that Smith was wrestling with the farmer for the
+possession of the whip, Susannah wrung her hands in an agony and ran
+forward toward the hotel, screaming aloud for help; then, afraid of what
+might befall in her absence, she ran back. By this time the two men had
+thrown Smith down. Even then he showed his strength, for they struggled
+hard to get the whip, which he had seized from them.
+
+In her storm of feeling Susannah for the first time came out from the
+habits of girlish timidity. Hardly knowing what she said, what she was
+about to say, she heard the words of her own fierce indignation ring out
+on the air of the mild autumn morning. The scene--the bare road, the
+sere weeds and grasses, the prostrate prophet, the flushed faces of the
+two burly countrymen upturned to hers as they stooped, crushing him
+down--all was photographed on her mind by excitement.
+
+By the intensity of her upbraiding she arrested the attention of Smith's
+enemies for a minute till, as if he revolted against his own weakness,
+one of them gave vent to a loud jest, at which the other laughed.
+
+The words meant nothing to Susannah, nothing more than the Latin words
+of the lesson-book that lay torn and muddy at her feet, but Smith no
+sooner heard them than he hurled himself from the ground with almost
+superhuman strength.
+
+Both men were forced in self-defence to close upon him. Smith shouted
+aloud, although a hand on his throat almost choked him, "Go to the
+hotel, Mrs. Halsey; go in to your husband." Susannah knew now that he
+was fighting for her, not for himself; the allegiance of his glance gave
+her a thrill of loyalty to him which was wholly new.
+
+Two men ran out from the hotel, and behind them John Biery. When they
+neared the place the farmer and his accomplice got into their gig and
+called back fierce threats against Smith as they went. John Biery was a
+constable, yet, although he saw that Smith had been brutally assaulted,
+he made no attempt to pursue and capture the offenders. The other men
+contented themselves with picking up his hat and book and remarking that
+the men that had run away hadn't had no sort of right, and that Smith
+ought to have the law on them. Susannah was the more enraged by this
+refusal to interfere.
+
+Smith wiped his face from dust and blood. It pleased Susannah's love of
+dignity to observe that when he spoke it was not in impotent wrath.
+
+"Go in to your husband, Mrs. Halsey, and tell him to rejoice that we are
+accounted worthy to suffer."
+
+That was not exactly the news that Susannah did bring when she went back
+to her husband's room. Her feelings were so upwrought that it was some
+time before, in pouring out to Halsey her indignation, she could find
+relief. Whatever might or might not be the truth of Smith's heart, it
+remained true that in this persecution the many were ranged against the
+few, and were lashing each other on by false reports to lawless
+brutality. Like the Psalmist, Halsey led her as it were into the house
+of the Lord, and pointed out the end of the wicked and the award of the
+righteous. He added to the then popular notion of external reward
+thoughts which had been working in his own mind under the influence of
+that time-spirit which leads such minds as his in the foremost paths. He
+spoke to her of the strength of character gained and lost by all that
+was done and suffered in the right way or in the wrong.
+
+Susannah was soothed. She knew that the truth was being spoken to her,
+and her heart leaped forth to do reverence, not only to it, but to the
+man who could find it in the midst of such insults. Ephraim was good. If
+he could only know how good Angel was, he would not have asked her to
+return. All thought of deserting the new cause now was gone; the blood
+that had trickled from Smith's bruised head, the danger that menaced
+Halsey, sustained her. She wrote to Ephraim to that effect.
+
+Some days after, when driving past Biery's hotel from a meeting he had
+been holding in the town of Geneva, Joseph Smith entered and laid before
+Susannah books for the cultivation of her mind--a Latin grammar and
+exercise book like his own, a Universal History, and a primer of Natural
+Philosophy. He told her that in two weeks, when she had mastered their
+contents, he would bring her others. He left hastily, the business of
+the Church pressing.
+
+In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no
+longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a
+popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men
+know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that
+writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart.
+There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism,
+and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from
+brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits
+down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson.
+Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his
+grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far
+behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her.
+
+There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for
+the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of
+lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity.
+
+Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave
+the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle
+flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a
+large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked
+counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with
+whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising
+that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her
+understanding, not her heart, developed. "Why believe in Moses and the
+prophets if not in Smith--in the miracles of yesterday if not in those
+of to-day?" was the question with which Halsey prefaced the sermons he
+began to preach. The answer that his logic deduced carried conviction to
+many of his hearers, but in Susannah's mind the question alone made
+way.
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK II._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In the next year, 1831, the new church was formally organised, and this
+was the "revelation" given for her direction by the mouth of Joseph
+Smith--"And now, behold, I speak unto the Church; thou shalt not kill;
+thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt love thy wife,
+cleaving unto her and to none else; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou
+shalt not speak evil of thy neighbour, nor do him any harm. Let him that
+goeth to the East tell them that shall be converted to flee to the
+West."
+
+The reports of the first missionaries, who had travelled westward,
+preaching both to the Indians (called by the "Saints," Lamanites) and to
+white men, were received in the beginning of this year, and the point
+designated for the first station of the Church on its way westward was a
+place called Kirtland, on the banks of the Chagrin River, in northern
+Ohio. Thither Halsey was sent, having commands to preach by the way.
+
+At Halsey's wayside meetings the old hymns and the old tunes were sung.
+The new doctrine embraced all that was supposed to be alive in the old;
+it repudiated only what was supposed to be dead. It offered that
+enlargement of human powers which the belief in wonders implies, a new
+form of church government, a new land to live in, a new hope of a
+visible and glorious church, and, above all, a living prophet. If the
+personality of the prophet seemed more attractive to those who believed,
+not having seen him, to Susannah, who knew the baseness of his origin so
+well, the sudden increase of his influence over hundreds of people
+seemed the greatest of marvels; and it was impossible but that even his
+person should gain some added grace from the reflected light of success.
+Halsey was only one of a dozen successful Mormon preachers who were
+converging with their train of followers upon the first station of the
+new church.
+
+There is no spot in northern Ohio more lovely than the five hills or
+bluffs that rise from the banks of the Chagrin River and its tributary
+brooks twelve miles to the south-east of what is now the city of
+Cleveland. On the shores of the river and its streams lie green levels;
+from these the bluffs rise steeply for some one or two hundred feet to
+tablelands of great fertility.
+
+The site for the first Mormon temple was on the highest of these hills
+overlooking the three valleys. Its foundations were quickly laid.
+Around it upon the slope and tableland, up and down the valleys, and
+upon the opposite hills, the wooden houses of the converts began to
+spring up, not unlike in colour to a crop of mushrooms, and very like in
+the suddenness of their growth.
+
+Not long after Susannah and Halsey had reached Kirtland, Joseph Smith,
+with a convert named Rigdon, went on, with missionaries who were
+travelling farther west, in order to find in the wilderness the place
+that was appointed for the building of Zion or the New Jerusalem. At the
+same time all those men among the converts who were deemed fit were sent
+out in couples to preach the new Gospel, some back to the eastern States
+whence they had come, some to Canada, some to the south. To Joseph Smith
+it was given to know who was to go and who to stay. Halsey was directed
+to remain, to receive and establish the new converts who came, to tithe
+their property for the building of the temple, and to found, according
+to Smith's direction, a school of the prophets.
+
+"And to thy wife, Susannah, it shall be given to teach the children such
+worldly learning as she has herself acquired, until it may be possible
+for us to appoint for them a more learned male instructor."
+
+Joseph Smith spoke these words in the room which served him as business
+office and chapel. He was drawing on his gloves, ready to go forth upon
+the journey to Missouri.
+
+Several of the elders and their wives were present, some busy on one
+errand and some on another. Susannah, being with Halsey, received the
+command in person, although it was not directly addressed to her. She
+had observed that since her arrival at Kirtland the prophet never
+addressed himself to her directly when in public. In many ways his
+manners were becoming gradually more formal, and his relapses into his
+native speech less frequent.
+
+Susannah could not criticise keenly, so much she marvelled at the man.
+His activities before starting on this journey were almost incredible.
+Every hour he had made decisions, for the most part successful,
+concerning the adaptability of men whom he had only seen, for labours of
+which he knew as little. He had preached continually. He had baptised
+newcomers in the icy floods of the April stream. He had advised as to
+the choice of lands and their manner of cultivation, as to the size and
+form of houses. He had visited the sick and planned merry-makings for
+the young. In addition to all this, even while preparing for the long
+journey into an unknown region, he was busy learning three languages,
+and was laying plans, not only for missionary campaigns that were to
+spread over the whole earth, but for a new translation of the Old
+Testament. If the better clothes that he had begun to wear sat somewhat
+pompously upon him, if his manners now sometimes indicated an attempt
+not only to be, but to appear, a prophet, such small affectations sank
+out of sight in the light of such extraordinary ability.
+
+After Smith and Sydney Rigdon had started westward, Susannah went over
+to console Emma. The prophet's wife was at that time living in a
+building of which the front part was the general store whence the
+material needs of the growing church were as far as possible provided.
+Susannah passed through between bales of cloths, boxes, and barrels of
+provisions. It was dusk; a young man who served in the store carried a
+candle before her, and the odd-shaped piles of merchandise threw strange
+moving shadows upon the low beams of the roof and walls. The young man
+held the candle to light the way up a straight staircase. "Mis' Smith,"
+he shouted, "here's Mis' Halsey come to see you."
+
+At the top of the staircase Susannah was met by a cooing, creeping baby,
+who beat with its little fist upon a wicket gate fencing off the stair.
+
+"It was the last thing he did before setting out, to nail that gate
+together and fasten it up with his own hands, so as I wouldn't need
+always to be running after the young one, lest he should fall down the
+stair." It was Emma Smith who spoke; she emerged dishevelled and tearful
+from an upper room. "When he has so much to think about and all, and
+Elder Rigdon waiting for him at the office till he'd finished. Mr.
+Smith, he's always so kind, and he knew as that would be the thing as
+would give me the most help of anything."
+
+Emma subsided again into tears--tears that were the more touching to
+Susannah because Emma was not like most women; she seldom wept.
+
+"I don't mean to give way," Emma continued, "but if it was your husband
+as had gone, you'd know how it was, and it's the first time I've ever
+been separate from him so long."
+
+Susannah sat down with the child in her arms. When the question was
+brought home to her she did not believe that temporary separation from
+Halsey would cause her tears.
+
+Emma began again with an effort at self-control. "It's a long way to
+Jackson County, quite across Missouri. It's all Elder Rigdon's doing,
+his going just now."
+
+Susannah found something that she could say here in agreement. "It may
+be wrong, but I--I don't like Elder Rigdon."
+
+"Well, of course the way he believed, and all his congregation, when the
+word was first preached to them makes Joseph think that he must be full
+of grace. Ye know, to see Joseph when he's quite by himself, ye'd be
+surprised to see how desponding he is by nature. He's that desponding he
+was real surprised, real right down taken by surprise, when he heard
+that Mr. Rigdon, so clever a minister as he was, and of the Campbellites
+too, had been baptized and a hundred and twenty-seven of his
+congregation with him. (That was first off, and ye know how many he's
+brought in since.) He could hardly believe it; he says, 'It seems as if
+I hadn't any faith at all.' And that night he couldn't sleep, but just
+walked up and down, and two revelations came to him before morning, and
+one of them addressed to Rigdon, so Joseph knows of course he's got the
+right thing in him. Then his education, too; he's got a sight more
+education than Cowdery. Joseph thinks a deal of education."
+
+"I don't like him." Susannah sat upright; her hands were busy with the
+baby upon her knee.
+
+"Well, I dunno." Emma spoke meditatively. "It said in one of Joseph's
+revelations that we should dwell together in love."
+
+Susannah laughed; it was a bright, trilling laugh, and filled the large,
+low room with its sudden music. It almost seemed like a light in the
+growing darkness.
+
+"I guess I'll light up," said Emma, "it'll be more cheerful."
+
+Susannah was still playing with the baby, and Emma looked at her
+critically. "Joseph thinks a great deal of you, Mrs. Halsey; he's told
+ye to teach school?"
+
+"I have got more time than most of the women, and my husband can afford
+to hire a school-room."
+
+"'Tain't that," said Emma decidedly, "it's the same thing as makes ye
+say that you don't talk to any of the other folks except in a civil way.
+Ye're a bit above all the rest of us ladies in the way ye hold yerself
+and the way ye speak. I guess it comes of yer father's folks having been
+somebody, and then being so clever at books--ye see, Joseph sees all
+that; there ain't anything that he doesn't see."
+
+Susannah perceived that there was something behind this. "You're not
+vexed, are you?"
+
+Emma continued with more hesitation in her tones. "No, I'm not vexed.
+Why should I be? And besides I like you and Mr. Halsey better than any
+of the folks, although I couldn't let it be known."
+
+"There's something that you are thinking about."
+
+Emma sighed deeply; her mien faltered; she subsided again into her seat
+by the wall and into tears. "It's only that I feel that Joseph's getting
+to be such a great man. Why, there's more than a thousand folks now
+looking to him all the time to be told what to do, and thousands more
+drawing in, and Joseph beginning to wear the kid gloves whenever he goes
+on the street."
+
+There was an interval of sighs and suppressed sobs.
+
+"Aren't you glad? I thought you were glad about it."
+
+"I declare papa and mamma were just wild when I ran away and married
+Joseph, because they said that he was a low fellow, and poor, and not
+good enough for me, and now--and now--I begin to feel that I'm not good
+enough for him."
+
+Susannah went over and sat beside her, chiding indignantly. "You know
+very well that nobody could be the same help to him that you are, and
+you know very well that there's nobody in the world that he thinks so
+much of as you." She did not say all she thought. She considered Emma to
+be Smith's superior, but that opinion would have given acute pain.
+
+The young church worked upon Smith's principles of thrift, temperance,
+and co-operation, and Kirtland rapidly assumed the proportions of a
+town. Susannah became the mistress of the children's school. Smith was a
+good economist; although he helped the needy, nothing that his converts
+could pay for was given to them for nothing. Hence it was that
+Susannah's private purse was well filled with tuition fees.
+
+She had already in mind what she would do with this money; she would
+write to the booksellers in Boston who fulfilled Ephraim's orders, and
+obtain from them some of the books whose names she remembered to have
+seen on his shelves. She knew nothing of their contents, she hardly
+knew whether she wanted them more for the sake of their contents or for
+their familiar appearance, but she thought that if she did not
+understand them when reading, she could write to Ephraim and ask for an
+explanation. She could not think of any other excuse for writing to him
+again. It had taken her a good many months to think of this one.
+
+Halsey, who had learned to drop the Quaker forms of speech when speaking
+to others, still, moved by the remembrances of his early home, used them
+in speech to Susannah. He inquired somewhat anxiously concerning the
+proposed purchase.
+
+"Dost think that they will contain what the prophet has called 'sound
+learning,' and that there will be nothing in them to distract thy soul?"
+
+"How can I tell when I do not know what is in them?" She did not speak
+with impatience.
+
+"Art wise, dear heart, in this longing?" he asked wistfully.
+
+Then he carried away her order and despatched it.
+
+In the meantime Smith had returned from Missouri, his mind filled and,
+as it were, enlarged by the new land which he said was appointed by
+revelation as the site of the New Jerusalem. Jackson County, on the
+south bank of the Missouri River, was the place. He had already gathered
+four or five hundred new converts there, and he was now possessed with
+the desire for money to build the new city, and for a million proselytes
+to dwell in it. In spite of this, after sending out new relays of
+missionaries in all directions, he settled down to the most sober
+routine of study. Hebrew was the new language he wished to acquire, and
+he felt the call to revise the Old Testament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Only one unusual incident occurred in Susannah's presently peaceful
+life. One day in the golden October she set out to walk some distance up
+the valley of the Chagrin River. The object of the walk was a visit to
+one of the outlying farmhouses occupied by a family of the Saints; but
+Susannah, as was her wont, found more joy in the walk than in the visit.
+When she had passed beyond the meeting of the waters, the valley lay
+long before her, about a mile in width and quite flat. The stream was
+scarcely seen; the ground was covered with flowery weeds, white asters
+with their myriad tiny stars, the pale seed feathers of the golden rod,
+high grasses, and wild things innumerable which had been turned brown
+and gray by the autumn sun, pink clumps of the rice weed, and small
+groves of the scarlet stalks of the wild buckwheat. This level sea of
+weeds stood so high that when she threaded the narrow path they reached
+above her waist. The bees in the white asters were humming as they hum
+in apple bloom. The blue jays were calling and flying in low horizontal
+flights. The valley stretched to the south-east, then curved; a little
+mountain barred the view, upon whose pine-trees the distant air began to
+tinge with blue. On the curving bluffs on either side the trees stood in
+stately crowds; hardly a leaf had fallen, except from the golden
+walnut-trees; the colour of the foliage was for the most part like the
+plumage of some green southern bird, iridescence of gold and red shot
+through. To her right, where a part of the long hill had been cleared of
+trees, the sun shone upon bare gullies in the soap-stone cliffs, making
+the colour of that particular brown bit of earth very vivid. Everywhere
+a soft autumn haze was lying, and above white clouds were swinging
+across the pale blue sky.
+
+After threading the valley path for a mile Susannah was ascending the
+bluff to get to the level of the upper farms, when, much to her
+surprise, she came, as once before upon the hill Cumorah, upon Joseph
+Smith. He was lying under a group of giant walnut-trees, whose boles
+were sheltered from the road by a natural hedge of red dogwood and
+brambles. He had apparently been occupied at his devotions, but she only
+saw him arising hastily. This time there was no peep-stone; it had long
+since been discarded. The prophet had a Bible in his hand, and it was
+evident that he had been weeping. It was in those lands the habit of
+religious men of all sects to make oratories of the woods. Susannah's
+only desire was to pass and leave him undisturbed, but he spoke.
+
+He began severely, "Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that a woman
+should stray so far from home and without companions."
+
+For a moment Susannah stood abashed. Unaccustomed to censure, she
+supposed that she must have done wrong. "I have walked this way before,"
+she began meekly, "but if--" She stopped here, her own judgment in the
+matter beginning to assert itself.
+
+The prophet had forgotten his reproof. At all times his conversation was
+apt to reveal that sudden changes of mental phase took place within him
+apparently without conscious volition. He now exclaimed with more modest
+mien, "It is, no doubt, by the will of the Lord that you are come, for I
+stood in sore need of comfort, for the revelation of the truth is a
+trial hard to endure, and at times very bitter."
+
+"Is it?" asked Susannah intently. It was impossible but that her long
+curiosity should find some vent, and yet she shrank inwardly from her
+own prying.
+
+The prophet leaned against a huge bole. The ground at his feet was
+covered with yellow walnut leaves and the olive-coloured nuts. The
+sunlight fell upon him in patches of yellow light. He opened the Bible,
+turning over the leaves of the Old Testament as if making a rapid survey
+of its history in his mind.
+
+"Sister Halsey," he began, "when the favour of the Lord rested chiefly
+upon the Jewish nation, at the times of the patriarchs and David, and
+when Solomon, arrayed in all his glory and in the greatness of his
+wisdom, reigned from Dan to Beersheba, mustn't those have been the times
+when the people walked most closely with the Lord?"
+
+"I suppose so, Mr. Smith."
+
+"It is not enough to suppose, Sister Halsey, for it is clearly written
+that when the Jews went contrary to the will of the Lord they were given
+over into the hands of their enemies."
+
+Susannah endeavoured to give a more unqualified assent.
+
+"Sister Halsey, there has come to my soul in reading this book in these
+last days a word, and I know not if it be the word of the Lord or no."
+
+She saw with astonishment that his whole frame was trembling now. She
+began to realise that he was truly in trouble, whether because of the
+greatness of the revelation or because of private distress she could not
+tell. She became more pitiful.
+
+"I hope you are well, Mr. Smith, and that Emma is well. There is nothing
+to really distress you, is there?"
+
+In hearing the increased gentleness of her tone he seemed to find a more
+easy expression for his pent-up feeling. "It's come upon me in a very
+cutting way, truly as the prophets said like a two-edged sword, and at
+the time too when I was inquiring of the Lord concerning--" He stopped
+here, and she felt that his manner grew more confidential, but he did
+not look at her, his eyes sought the ground--"concerning a matter which
+has given me no little heart searching." He stopped again, she listening
+with a good deal of interest.
+
+"It's come to me to observe that among the chosen people--there ain't no
+gainsayin' it, Sister Halsey, though I trust you to be discreet and not
+mention the matter, but in the days when the divine favour rested on
+Israel each man had more than one wife; and the Lord Himself says He
+give them to Solomon, the only objection being to heathen partners."
+
+"Do you mean, Mr. Smith, that I'm not to mention what everybody knows
+already, that in the Old Testament times polygamy was practised?"
+
+The now entire lack of sympathy in her tone affected him as an
+intentional act of rudeness would affect an ordinary man. The tissue of
+his mind, which had relaxed into confidence, grew visibly firmer. He
+assumed the teaching tone.
+
+"No, Mrs. Halsey, the only thing that I asked you not to mention was
+that I had any light of revelation on a point on which most of our minds
+is already made up."
+
+"Mr. Smith, you can't possibly be in the slightest doubt but that it
+would be very wicked for any man now to have more than one wife."
+
+"I've heard a great many of the ministers who in times past, in the time
+of our bondage we heard and believed, say as it would be very wicked for
+any one nowadays to take God at His word and expect Him to do a miracle
+or heal the sick; but I've come to the conclusion, Mrs. Halsey, that it
+isn't a question of what we in our ignorance and prejudice might think
+wicked, but it's a question of what's taught in this book, looked at
+without the eye of prejudice and tradition. What we call civilisation is
+too often devilisation--_devilisation_, Mrs. Halsey."
+
+He tapped the book. He was becoming oratorical. "The idea of one wife
+came in with the Romans. 'Twas no institution of Jehovah, Mrs. Halsey."
+
+Susannah, more accustomed to his oratorical vein than to private
+conference, became now more frank and at ease.
+
+"You said you didn't know that the idea was from the Lord, Mr. Smith,
+and I don't think it is. I don't think you'll entertain it very long,
+and I don't think, if you did, many of the Saints would stay in your
+church."
+
+She bade him good-day, and went on up the slope. When she was walking
+along the brink of the bluff in the open beyond the nut-trees she heard
+him call. He came after her with hastened gait, Bible still in hand. She
+was surprised to find that what he had to say was very simple, but not
+the less dignified for that.
+
+"I sometimes think, Sister Halsey, that you look down on us all as if we
+weren't good enough for you, although you're too kindly to let it be
+seen. According to the ways of the world, of course, it's so. If I'm as
+rough and uneducated as most of our folks, at least I can think in my
+mind what it would be not to be rough, and I can think sometimes how it
+all seems to you."
+
+His words appealed directly to strong private feeling which had no
+outlet. While she stood seeking a reply the natural power that he had of
+working upon the feelings of others, vulgarly called magnetism, so far
+worked in connection with his words that tears came to her eyes.
+
+"I don't often think about my old life," she said with brief pathos.
+
+Smith was looking at the ground, as a huge, shy boy might stand when
+anxious to express sympathy of which he was somewhat ashamed. "I know it
+must be a sort of abiding trial to you." After a moment he added, "I
+wouldn't like to make it worse by having you think that I was goin' to
+preach any strange doctrine. I'd sometimes give a good deal if the Lord
+would raise me up a friend that I could speak to concerning the lights
+that come to me that I know that it wouldn't do to speak of in the
+public congregations, because of their upsetting nature, and likewise
+because I doubt concerning their meaning. And of this matter there was
+no thought in my mind to speak in public, for it is for the future to
+declare whether it be of the darkness or of the light; but to you I
+spoke, almost unwittingly, and perhaps in disobedience to the dictates
+of wisdom."
+
+He looked at her wistfully.
+
+Susannah leaned her arm upon the topmost log of the snake fence and
+looked down the slope. His insight into her own trials caused her to
+sympathise with him in spite of his absurdity. She made an honest effort
+to assist him to self-analysis. She said, "A great many things come into
+our minds at times, Mr. Smith, that seem important, but, as you say, if
+we do not speak about them, afterwards we see that they are silly. Of
+course with you, if you think some of your thoughts are revelations, it
+must make you often fancy that the others may be very important too, but
+it does not follow that they are, and, as you say, time will weed them
+out if you are trying to do right." She wondered if he would resent her
+_ifs_. She stood looking down the bank in the short silence that
+followed, feeling somewhat timorous. The steep ground was covered with
+the feathery sprays of asters, seen through a velvety host of gray
+teasles which grew to greater height. Through the teasles the white and
+purple flowers showed as colours reflected in rippled water--rich, soft,
+vague in outline. At one side, by an old stump, there was a splendid
+feather, yellow and green, of fading golden rod; yellow butterflies,
+that looked as if they had dyed their wings in the light reflected from
+this flower, repeated its gold in glint and gleam over all the gray
+hillside, shot with the white and the blue. At the foot of the bank lay
+the flat valley, and from this vantage ground the river could be seen.
+The soft musical chat of its waters ascended to her ears, and among the
+huge bronze-leafed nut-trees, whose shelter she had just left, the
+woodpeckers were tapping and whistling to one another.
+
+At length Smith sighed deeply, but without affectation. "Yes, I reckon
+that's a good deal how it is. It ain't easy, Mrs. Halsey--I hope in your
+thoughts when judgin' of me you'll always remember that it ain't easy to
+be a prophet."
+
+When he had gone, Susannah found herself laughing, but for Halsey's sake
+the laughter was akin to tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Ohio was being quickly settled. Within a few miles of Kirtland,
+Cleveland and Paynesville were rising on the lake shore, and to the
+south there were numerous villages; but the society of the Saints at
+Kirtland was especially prosperous, and so sudden had been the increase
+of its numbers and its wealth that the wonder of the neighbouring
+settlers gave birth to envy, and envy intensified their religious
+hatred. Twice before Smith had left Fayette he had been arrested and
+brought before a magistrate, accused of committing crimes of which the
+courts were unable to convict him. Now the same spirit gave rise to the
+same accusations against his followers. About this time webs of cloth
+were taken from a woollen mill near Paynesville, and several horses were
+also stolen. The Mormons, whether guilty or not, were accused by common
+consent of the orthodox and irreligious part of the community. Hatred of
+the adherents of the new sect began to rise in all the neighbouring
+country, as a ripple rises on the sea when the wind begins to blow; the
+growing wave broke here and there in little ebullitions of wrath, and
+still gained strength until it bid fair to surge high.
+
+About Christmas time there were a number of cases of illness in
+Kirtland. Joseph Smith healed one woman, who appeared to be dying, by
+merely taking her by the hand, after praying, and commanding her to get
+up. After that he went about with great confidence to others who were
+stricken, and in many cases health seemed to return with remarkable
+celerity. It is hard to understand why the report of this, going abroad
+with such addition as gossip gives, should have greatly added to the
+rage of the members of other religious sects. Perhaps they supposed that
+the prophet arrogated to himself powers that were even more than
+apostolic. They threatened violence to Kirtland on the prophet's
+account, so that before the new year he took Emma and the child and
+established himself with them in an obscure place called Hiram, some
+twenty miles to the south. Sydney Rigdon, who by this time was, under
+the prophet, the chief leader of the Saints, went also to Hiram to be
+beside him. Smith was toiling night and day to produce a new version of
+the Hebrew Scriptures, believing that he was taught by inspiration to
+correct errors in them. Rigdon was scribe and reviser. These two being
+absent from Kirtland, responsibility and work without limit rested again
+with Angel Halsey.
+
+With unsatisfied affections and thoughts wholly perplexed, Susannah
+beheld the days of the new year lengthening. Then she fell into the
+weakness, to which humanity is prone, of hoping eagerly for some
+external circumstance that should lighten the inner darkness. A bit of
+stray news one day came to her with the shock of an apparent fulfilment
+of her vague expectation. Finney was passing through that part of the
+country preaching. Of all human beings she had ever met, this remarkable
+evangelist most impressed her as a man who had intimate dealing, awful,
+yet friendly, with an unseen power. She had no sooner heard that he was
+within reach than her mind leaped to the determination to hear him
+preach and speak with him again. She would lay her difficulties before
+him; she would hear from him more intelligence concerning the home which
+she had left than a thousand letters could convey.
+
+It was March now. The winter's snow was gone. Finney, as it chanced, was
+to come as near to Kirtland as the village of Hiram. Susannah spoke to
+her husband.
+
+"Did you hear that Mr. Finney was going to preach at Hiram?"
+
+She stood turning from the white spread table in the centre of the room.
+The morning light was shining on the satin surface of the planed maple
+wood with which walls and ceiling were lined. Halsey was putting on his
+boots to go out to his day's round of business and pastoral work. He
+knew just as well as if she had explained it to him that a great deal
+lay behind what she said. He fell to wondering at once what she could
+want. Was it to send a message to the old home by the man whose very
+name must recall all its memories?
+
+"I want to go and hear him preach," Susannah went on.
+
+Halsey was disturbed. "Thou canst not really have such a desire," he
+said severely.
+
+"Why not? A great deal that he preaches is just the same as what you
+preach, Angel."
+
+He saw that she was in a turbulent mood, and that grieved him; but as
+for her request, he could not believe it to be serious.
+
+"Thou art speaking idle words," he said with a sigh, and he rose to go
+out.
+
+"You have not answered me. Why shouldn't I hear him when you agree that
+much that he says is true?"
+
+"He is in the camp of those whom Satan has stirred up to do us injury.
+That which thou callest truth in his mouth is but the form of godliness,
+for it is clear that if God be with those who fight against us he cannot
+be with us."
+
+Something in the expression of her face brought him now a more distinct
+feeling of alarm. His nature was singularly direct. He had scarcely
+finished his meditative argument ere he sought to clinch its purport,
+and, stepping near, he laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.
+
+"Dost thou doubt, Susannah, that God is with us?"
+
+The crimson colour mounted from her cheeks and spread over her white
+brow. It was as if Angel had asked what he never had asked, whether she
+loved him or not, whether all her thoughts and feelings were loyal. She
+knew that for him there was no line of separation between life and love,
+and love and religion. She was careful for him always, as a mother is
+for a delicate child, as a sick nurse is for a patient. She could not
+have endured to give him the pain of hearing her denial, even if such
+denial would have expressed her attitude truly.
+
+"Indeed, Angel, I--I know that you--" she faltered.
+
+The trouble in his face was growing. "Has not _God_ made the signs of
+his presence clear to us, and even visible before our eyes? If thou
+shouldst deny the outward signs, is it not by his grace that we live?
+Susannah, dost thou think that it is in me by nature to bear with the
+infirmities and murmurings of our people as I bear with them
+daily--babes as they are, learning, but not yet having learned, to live
+at peace with one another? Or dost thou think that it is in me to
+forgive daily the outrageous acts and words of our enemies, trying as
+they do to injure our innocent brothers, or even our prophet himself?
+Yet, Susannah" (his voice was stirred with emotion), "I would bear
+witness to thee that every day, as I pray, the anger is taken out of my
+heart, and I can deal with these very men in the spirit of love."
+
+Standing erect before him, confused and distressed, she made another
+effort to soothe, even taking his hand from her shoulder and trying to
+caress it between her own, but so tense was the question in his mind
+that his fingers were limp and unresponsive to her touch.
+
+"I know all that you would say, Angel; I know that you are good; I know
+that our people, although they have many faults, are trying to do right,
+and I believe that the people in other sects around us are far more
+wicked, but--Mr. Finney is not like that."
+
+"Dear heart, thou knowest well that there is no goodness but that which
+comes from above, and although this Mr. Finney may have a show of
+goodness, as thou or I might have in his place, yet what avail can his
+preaching be if God be not with him? So what show of goodness he has
+only aideth the devil; for how can it be possible, when two armies are
+encamped one against another, that God can fight upon both sides? Is
+Christ divided?"
+
+A loud knock came to the outer door; Elder Halsey was late in getting to
+his work; men were waiting for him. He let the sound of the raps die
+away before he answered them; his searching look was upon her face,
+hungering for some assurance that his words had met and slain her
+doubts. Then he was forced to leave her.
+
+It was easy for Susannah to obtain a horse to go to the village of
+Hiram. When the day of Finney's preaching came, after her husband had
+gone to his afternoon work, she rode out of Kirtland.
+
+Since she had made up her mind to disobey she had said nothing further
+to Angel. Why inflict upon him the painful attempt to hinder her which
+his conscience would demand?
+
+The last snow-wreath had faded, but there was not as yet a bud or blade
+of perfect green. The valley of the Chagrin lay almost hueless in the
+cold sunshine. A light wind was blowing over its levels of standing
+weeds, and whispering in the bare arms of the huge nut-trees upon its
+bluffs.
+
+When the sun began to sink, Susannah had reached the low rolling ground
+that surrounds Hiram. The landscape here had a less distinctive
+character, and there was no vapour in the sky to make the sunset
+beautiful. She was weary of her horse's rough trot, and still more so of
+its slow plodding, but she felt excitement. She had conquered those
+forces, part of her womanhood, which urged compliance with her husband's
+desire and her own desire to abide by the homely routine whatever it
+might be. The thing that she had done seemed so large that her
+imagination told her that the event must justify it.
+
+She had no thought of concealment. She knew only the two families in the
+village of Hiram. Her plan was to go first to the Rigdons and ask for
+refreshment, thence to the meeting, and after that to ask for the
+night's lodging which she knew that Emma Smith would not refuse.
+
+In the village she saw that people were moving about and talking with an
+air of excitement. When she turned to a quiet corner and asked an
+elderly man for Mrs. Rigdon's house, he stared at her as if at an
+apparition.
+
+"Is it Sydney Rigdon's wife that you're wanting?"
+
+Susannah had raised her veil, and he looked at her face with the
+greatest curiosity. Flushed with exercise, braced by the sharp air, her
+colour was brilliant and her eyes sparkling. Her plain dress and heavy
+veil appeared to the man to be a disguise, so surprising to him was the
+brilliancy of her face and the modulation of her voice.
+
+"Do you not know where the Rigdons live?" she asked.
+
+He was chewing tobacco, and now he spat upon the ground, not rudely, but
+as performing an habitual action in a moment of abstracted thought. "Oh,
+I know well enough, but if ye won't mind my saying a word to ye, young
+lady, I'd advise ye to put up somewhere else. I've got darters of my
+own--in course I don't know who ye may be or what ye may be doing
+here." This last was added in an apparent attempt to attain to some
+suspicion that he felt to be reasonable.
+
+"You think ill of them because you despise their sect," she said gently,
+"but I am the wife of one of the elders."
+
+"Have ye got hold of some news that ye're carrying to them?" He evinced
+a sudden interest that appeared to her extraordinary.
+
+"What news?"
+
+"Oh, _I_ don't know. I jest thought 'twas queer, if you'd got hold of
+anybody's secrets, that you should be asking where they lived, straight
+out and open in the street like this."
+
+His words suggested to her only the idle fancies of prejudice. Some
+other people drew near, and, dropping her veil, she was starting in the
+direction in which he pointed when he spoke again in a more determined
+voice. "You jest tell me one thing, will you?" He even laid his hand
+upon her bridle with authority, "Are ye going to stop at Rigdons' all
+night?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Sartin?"
+
+When he received her reply he let go the bridle, saying in warning
+tones, "Well, see that ye don't do it, that's all."
+
+The incident left a disagreeable impression on Susannah's, mind, but she
+did not attach any distinct meaning to it.
+
+Rigdon and his wife were both within. Rigdon locked the door when
+Susannah had entered. Then with crossed arms, standing where he could
+watch against intruders from the window, he began to tell her news of
+import. His mother, who was an old woman, his wife, and some younger
+members of the family, gathered round.
+
+The light fell sideways upon his thickset form and large hairy face. His
+manner was the result of struggle between effort for heroic pose and an
+almost overmastering alarm. His matter was the evil conduct of the
+surrounding Gentiles toward the Saints. It seemed that in this and
+neighbouring places, evangelistic meetings had been held in which
+Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists had joined, and Rigdon averred
+that the preachers had used threatening and abusive language with regard
+to the Saints. A series of such meetings had begun in Hiram, small as it
+was; and Joseph Smith, like a war-horse scenting the battle, had set
+aside his arduous task of correcting the Old Testament and gone forth to
+preach in the open air. At first he had been greeted only with derision
+or pelted with mud, but in the last few days he had made and baptized
+converts, and now the fury of the other sects was at white heat.
+
+Susannah's mind swiftly sifted out the improbabilities from Rigdon's
+wrathful tale.
+
+"But the people that gather to such meetings as Mr. Finney holds are for
+the most part awaked, for the time at least, to a higher Christian
+life. It cannot be they who have used the vile language that you
+repeat."
+
+She almost felt the disagreeable heat of Rigdon's breath as he threw out
+in answer stories of coarse and brutal insult which had been heaped upon
+himself and Smith. The large animal nature of this man always annoyed
+her. There was much of breath in his words, much of physical sensation
+always clinging to his thoughts. At present, however, she was not
+inclined to judge him too hardly; although visibly unstrung, unwise in
+his sweeping condemnation, coarse in his anger, and somewhat
+grandiloquent in his pose, there was still much of real heroism in his
+mental attitude. Braced by the fiercest party spirit, he stood staunch
+in his loyalty to Smith and the cause, with no thought of yielding an
+inch of ground to the oppressors.
+
+"I do not believe," repeated Susannah sturdily, "that it is the more
+religious of the Gentiles who have said and done these things. I have
+come here to-night to hear and to speak with Mr. Finney, whom I know to
+be a very godly and patient man."
+
+"Why has he come here?" demanded Rigdon. "He who by his preaching can
+gather thousands in populous places, why should he ride across this
+thinly settled parcel of land, preaching to mere handfuls, if it is not
+to denounce us? And he has not the courage to go nearer to the place
+where the Saints are gathered in numbers. He will teach his hearers
+first to ravage the few sheep that are scattered in the wilderness, that
+by that they may gain courage even to attack the fold."
+
+Susannah drew upon herself their anger, and so strong was Rigdon's
+physical nature that even his transient anger seemed to embody itself in
+some sensible influence that went out from him and preyed upon her
+nervous force.
+
+The night had fallen. A bell, the rare possession of the largest
+meeting-house, had already begun to ring for Finney's preaching.
+Susannah went out on foot. The Rigdons, as also the Smiths, were living
+some way from the village. She had now a mile of dark road to traverse.
+
+Closely veiled, Susannah stepped onward eagerly. She felt like a child
+going home. The scene which she had left showed up vividly the elements
+of Mormon life that were most repulsive to her, the broad assumptions of
+ignorance, the fierce beliefs born of isolation, and the growth by
+indulgence of such animal characteristics as were not kept under by a
+literal morality or enforced by privations. She was going to see a man
+who could speak with the voice of the sober past, whose tones would
+bring back to her the intellectual delicacies of Ephraim's conversation,
+the broad, pure vision of life which he beheld, and the dignified
+religion of his people.
+
+The meeting-house was of moderate size. It was already filled when
+Susannah entered, but she was able to press down one of the passage-ways
+between the pews and seat herself near the front, where temporary
+benches were being rapidly set up.
+
+Many of the congregation had doubtless come as far as she. Men and women
+of all ages, and even children, were there. Some, who it seemed had
+followed Finney from his last place of preaching, were talking excitedly
+concerning the work of God which he had wrought there. On every face
+solemnity was written, and stories were being told of one and another
+who in his recent meetings had "fallen under the power of God."
+
+When Finney ascended the pulpit Susannah forgot all else. The chapel was
+not well lighted, but the pulpit lamps shone upon him. He had a smooth,
+strong face; his complexion was healthy and weather-beaten; his dark
+eyes flashed brightly under bushy brows. His manner was calm; his style,
+even in prayer, was that of keen, terse argument; he spoke and behaved
+like a man who, having spent the emotional side of his nature in some
+private gust of passionate prayer, had come forth nerved to cool and
+determined action.
+
+With her whole soul Susannah hung upon his every word, unreasonably
+expecting to find some new and unforeseen solution to the problems of
+her life. He had pointed out a straight path to multitudes; she hoped
+that he could now show it to her.
+
+The power of Finney's preaching lay in its close logical reasoning, by
+which, accepting certain premises, he built up the conclusion that if a
+man would escape eternal punishment he must forsake his sin and accept
+salvation by faith in the doctrine of the substitution. He began always
+by speaking to the indifferent and the unconvinced; he led them step by
+step, until it appeared that there was but one step between them and
+destruction, and that faith must make one quick, long leap to gain the
+safety of the higher plane, whose joys he depicted in glowing terms.
+
+For the most part there was intense silence in the congregation,
+although sometimes an audible whisper of prayer or a groan of suppressed
+emotion was heard. The infection of mental excitement was strong.
+
+Susannah was experiencing disappointment. Accustomed as she was to
+excitement in the meetings of the Saints, her mind easily resisted the
+infectious influence. Finney's teaching had not differed in any respect
+from the doctrine which she heard from her husband daily, a doctrine
+which she knew by experience did not save men from delusion and rancour.
+She still listened eagerly to hear of some provision made in the scheme
+of salvation against injustice and folly. Surely Finney would say
+something more.
+
+As it happened he did say something more. When for more than an hour he
+had explained the great plan of salvation he touched upon the
+responsibility that the hearing of such conclusive reasoning imposed.
+The sower had sown broadcast; it remained for him to speak with awful
+impressiveness of those forces which would be arrayed against the
+convicted soul. Under this head he referred at once and with deep
+emotion to the devil, who, in the guise of false teachers lying in wait,
+caught up the seed.
+
+There could be no doubt that the Mormon leaders were in his mind, as
+they were in the mind of his congregation. It became swiftly evident to
+Susannah that Finney was stirred by what he believed to be righteous
+indignation, and that he was as content to be ignorant concerning the
+doctrines and morals of the people against whom he spoke as were the
+rudest members of the outside rabble who now pressed with excitement to
+the open doors and windows.
+
+The righteous Finney had no thought of unrestrained violence. He spoke
+out of that deep well of hatred for evil that is, and ought to be, in
+every good man's heart, but he had not humbled himself to gain any real
+insight into the mingling of good and evil.
+
+"They are liars, and they know that they are liars," said Finney,
+striking the pulpit cushion. "The hypocrisy of their religion is proved
+by the lawless habits of their daily lives. Having sold themselves to
+the great enemy of souls, they lie in wait for you and for your
+children, seeking to beguile the most tender and innocent, that they
+may rejoice in their destruction."
+
+He used only such phrases as the thought of the time warranted with
+regard to those who had been proved to be workers of iniquity, but to
+Susannah it was clear, in one brief moment, what effect his words would
+have when heard by, or reported to, more brutal men. She knew now that
+Rigdon's words were true. The so-called Christian ministers, even the
+noblest of them, stirred up the low spirit of party persecution.
+
+She rose suddenly, sweeping back her veil from her face. "I will go
+out." She said the words in a clear voice.
+
+A way was made to a back door by the side of the pulpit. Every one
+looked at her. Finney, going on with his preaching, recognised her as
+she began to push forward, and he faltered, as if seeing the face of one
+who had arisen from the dead. The excited audience felt the tremor that
+passed over its leader; it was the first signal for such obvious nervous
+affections as frequently befell people under his preaching; before
+Susannah had reached the door a stalwart man fell as if dead in her
+path.
+
+There was a groan and a whisper of awe all round. This was the "falling"
+which was taken by many as an indubitable sign of the divine power.
+Susannah had seen it often under Smith's preaching. She waited with
+indifference until he was lifted up.
+
+Then the sea of faces around her, the powerful voice of the preacher
+resounding above, passed away like a dream, and were exchanged for a
+small room and a dim light, where two or three people were gathered
+round the form of the insensible man. She escaped unnoticed through a
+private door into the fields, where the March wind eddied in the black
+night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The house in which the Smiths lived was small. Susannah crossed a
+field-path, led by a light in their window. In the living room a truckle
+bed had already been made up. By the fire Joseph and Emma were both
+occupied with two sick children. These children, twins of about a year,
+had been taken out of pity at their mother's death, and Susannah was
+told as she entered that they had been attacked by measles.
+
+Susannah found that the fact that she had been to the meeting had not
+irritated the Smiths, although Mrs. Rigdon had called to make the most
+of the story. Emma, absorbed in manifold cares for the children, was
+only solicitous on Susannah's account lest a night's rest in that house
+should be impossible. Smith, pacing with a child in his arms, seemed to
+be head and shoulders above the level whose surface could be ruffled by
+life's minor affairs. With the eye of his inner mind he was gazing
+either at some lofty scheme of his own imagining, or at heaven or at
+vacancy. All of him that was looking at the smaller beings about him was
+composed and kind.
+
+One of the twins, less ill than the other, had fallen asleep in Emma's
+arms. The other was wailing pitifully upon the prophet's breast.
+
+"Do you and Mrs. Halsey go in and lie down with that young un, Emmar,
+and rest now for a bit while ye can."
+
+"I can't leave ye, Joseph, with the child setting out to cry all night
+like that."
+
+But he had his way. Long after they had lain down in the inner room
+Susannah heard him rocking the wailing babe, or trying to feed it, or
+pacing the floor. Emma, worn out, slept beside her. Upstairs the owners
+of the house, an old couple named Johnson, and Emma's own child, were at
+rest.
+
+Susannah lay rigidly still in the small portion of the bed which fell to
+her share. Her mind was up, wandering through waste places, seeking rest
+in vain. The wail of the child in the next room at last had ceased. The
+prophet had lain down with it on the truckle bed. Long after midnight
+Susannah began to hear a low sound as of creeping footsteps in the
+field. Some people were passing very near, surely they would go past in
+a moment? She heard them brushing against the outer wall, and gleams of
+a light carried fell upon the window.
+
+In a minute more the outer door of the house was broken open. Emma woke
+with a cry; instinct, even in sleep, made her spring toward the door
+that separated her from her husband.
+
+The two women stood in the inner doorway, but the coarse arm of a masked
+man was already stretched across it, an impassable barrier. The prophet
+lay on the child's bed, so heavy with sleep tardily sought that he did
+not awake until four men had laid hold of him. All the light upon the
+scene came from a smoking torch which one of the housebreakers held.
+Some twenty men might have been there inside the room and out. The women
+could barely see that Smith was borne out in the midst of the band. He
+struggled fiercely when aroused, but was overpowered by numbers.
+
+The owners of the house came down from above, huddling together and
+holding Emma, who would have thrown herself in the midst of the mob.
+
+Susannah had not undressed. She threw her cloak over her head and ran
+out, determined to go to the village and demand help in the name of law
+and a common humanity. She was in a mood to be reckless in aiding the
+cause she had espoused.
+
+By the glow of the torch which the felons held she saw the group close
+about the one struggling man as they carried him away. She fled in a
+different direction.
+
+She had gone perhaps sixty rods in the darkness out of sight of Smith
+and his tormentors when she was stopped by three men and her name and
+purpose demanded. When she declared it in breathless voice they laughed
+aloud. In the darkness she was deprived of that weapon, her beauty, by
+which she habitually, although unconsciously, held men in awe.
+
+"Now, see here, sister, you jest sit quietly on the fence here, and see
+which of them's going to get the best of it. Your man's a prophet, you
+know; let him call out his miracles now, and give us a good show of them
+for once. He's jest got a few ordinary men to deal with; if he and his
+miracles can't git the best of them he ain't no prophet. Here's a
+flattish log now on top. Git up and sit on the fence, sister."
+
+While she struggled in custody another group of dark figures came
+suddenly at a swinging trot round the dark outline of one of the nearer
+houses. They brought with them the same kind of lurid torch and a
+smoking kettle or cauldron carried between two. The foremost among them
+were also carrying the body of a man, whether dead or alive she could
+not see. When he was thrown upon the ground he moved and spoke. It was
+Rigdon's voice. She perceived that he was helpless with terror. The
+prophet had certainly struggled more lustily.
+
+"Now you jest keep still, sister," said the loudest of her three
+companions. "Kill him? not if ye don't make a mess of it by interferin'.
+It's only boilin' tar they've got in the pot."
+
+Susannah covered her face with her hands; then, too frightened to
+abstract her mind, she gazed again, as if her watchfulness might hinder
+some outrage. The group was not near enough, the light was too
+uncertain, for her to see clearly. The shadows of the men were cast
+about upon field and wall as if horrible goblins surrounded and
+overshadowed the more material goblins who were at work. They were
+taking Rigdon's clothes from him. Their language did not come to her
+clearly, but it was of the vilest sort, and she heard enough to make her
+heart shiver and sicken. They held over him the constant threat that if
+he resisted they would kill him outright. If Smith, too, were exposed to
+such treatment she did not believe that he would submit, and perhaps he
+was now being done to death not far off.
+
+When they began to beat Rigdon with rods and his screams rang out,
+Susannah could endure no longer. She broke madly away from her keepers,
+running back along the road towards Emma's house. They essayed to
+follow; then with a laugh and a shrug let her go, calling to her to run
+quick and see if the prophet had fetched down angels to protect him.
+
+Susannah ran a long way, then, breathless and exhausted, found that she
+had missed a turning and gone much too far. Afraid lest she should lose
+herself by mistaking even the main direction in which she wanted to go,
+and that while out of reach of any respectable house she might again be
+assailed by members of the mob, she came back, walking with more
+caution. She had no hope now of being the means of bringing help. She
+had come farther from the village instead of nearing it, and what few
+neighbours there were, having failed to interfere, were evidently
+inimical.
+
+When she found the right turning she again heard the shouts of some
+assaulting party, and, creeping within the shadow of trees, she waited.
+
+At length they passed her, straggling along the road, shouting and
+singing, carrying with them some garments which, in rough horse-play,
+they were tearing into fragments. When the last had turned his back to
+where she stood she crept out, running again like a hunted thing,
+fearing what she might find as the result of their work. To increase her
+distress the thought came that it was more than possible that like work
+had been going on at Kirtland that night. Tears of unutterable
+indignation and pitiful love came to her eyes at the thought that Angel,
+too, might be suffering this shameful treatment. Across some acres of
+open ground she saw the Smiths' house, doors and windows lit by candles.
+Thither she was hastening when, in the black space of the nearer field,
+she almost fell upon a whitish form, grotesque and horrible, which was
+rising from the ground.
+
+"Who is it?" asked Joseph Smith.
+
+He stood up now, but not steadily; his voice was weak, as if he had
+been stunned, and his utterance indistinct because his mouth had
+apparently received some injury. She thought of nothing now but that he
+was Angel's master, and that Angel might be in like plight.
+
+"What have they done? What is the matter?" she whispered tenderly, tears
+in her voice.
+
+"Is it you?" he asked curiously. He said nothing for a minute and then,
+"They've covered me with the tar and emptied a feather-bed on me. If
+ye'd have the goodness to tell Brother Johnson to come out to me, Mrs.
+Halsey--"
+
+"They have hurt you other ways," she said tremulously, "you are
+bruised."
+
+"A man don't like to own up to having been flogged, ye see; but Peter
+and Paul and all of _them_ had to stand it in their time, so I don't
+know why a fellow like me need be shamefaced over it. But if you'd be
+good enough, Mrs. Halsey, to go and tell Emmar that I ain't much hurt,
+and send Brother Johnson out with some clothes or a blanket--"
+
+He stopped without adding that he would feel obliged. As she went she
+heard him say with another sort of unsteadiness in his tone, "It's real
+kind of you to care for me that much."
+
+In her excitement she did not know that she was weeping bitterly until
+she found herself surrounded by other shuddering and weeping women in
+Emma's room; for other of the converts in Hiram, hearing of the violence
+abroad, had crept to this house for mutual safety and aid.
+
+It is the low, small details of physical discomfort that make the
+bitterest part of the bread of sorrow. Now and afterwards, through all
+the persecutions in which she shared, Susannah often felt this. If she
+could have stood off and looked at the main issues of the battle she
+might have felt, even on the mere earthly plane, exaltation. Yet one
+truth her experience confirmed--that no human being who in his time and
+way has been hunted as the offscouring of the world--no, not the
+noblest--has ever had his martyrdom presented in a form that seemed to
+him majestic. It is only those who bear persecution, not in its reality
+but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.
+
+All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with
+the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the
+painful operation of taking the tar from Smith's lacerated skin. The
+prophet bore himself well. Now and then, through the thin partition the
+watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his
+determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had
+appointed the next day.
+
+At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon's house. The animal was
+safe. When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those
+within the house. Rigdon was raving in delirium. He had, it seemed, been
+dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony
+ground. They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers. He lay
+upon a small bed in horrible condition. His wife, with swollen eyes and
+pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out
+with vain efforts to soothe him. His mother, a thin and dark old woman,
+vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out
+of the room silently, as though to say, "This is the work of those whose
+virtue you extolled."
+
+The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of
+dawn. The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as
+innocence may sleep. The famous preacher, and all those souls that he
+had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in
+silence. Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the
+roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to
+renewed wrath. Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past
+night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey's safety. She gave her
+horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had
+reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was
+being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight,
+with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths
+of the leafless nut woods. It was high day, and the people were
+gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through
+the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.
+
+As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to
+preach. His face was very white and sad. Susannah's glad relief,
+fatigue, and excitement found vent in tears.
+
+"You are safe!" she cried. "Oh, my dear, I will never leave you again
+while danger is near--never, never again!"
+
+In the evening of that day further news came from Hiram. The prophet had
+preached long and gloriously in the open air. New converts had been
+made, and he himself, scarified and bruised as he was, had gone down
+into the icy river and baptized them in sight of all. The mob had
+shrieked and jeered, but had been withheld by God, as the messenger
+said, from further violence.
+
+Susannah made no further effort to find new life in the old doctrines.
+All her sentiments of justice and mercy combined to make her espouse her
+husband's cause with renewed ardour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+In the summer of that same year, while the wheat in the Manchester
+fields was still green, and the maize had attained but half its growth,
+while the ox-eyed daisies still stood a happy crowd in the unmown
+meadows, and pink and yellow orchids blazed in unfrequented dells, the
+preacher Finney, after long absence, chanced to be again travelling on
+the Palmyra road. As was his habit, he sought entertainment at the house
+of Deacon Croom in New Manchester.
+
+The preacher remembered always that his citizenship was in heaven. From
+the thought he drew great nourishment of peace and hope, but as far as
+his earthly affairs were concerned the outlook was at present grievous.
+
+He was returning from a long and dreary religious convention held in an
+eastern town, where one, Mr. Lyman Beecher, had stirred up against him
+the foremost divines of New York and Boston. They had asserted that
+Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of God could suddenly turn men from
+following evil to pursuing good, was false and pernicious; that his
+method stirred up the people to unholy excitements which were productive
+of great evil. Now the accusations of these divines (who, thinking that
+a man's change of mind must needs be so slow a thing, some of them,
+gray-haired, had not as yet produced this change in a single sinner)
+were in many points wholly false, in many exaggerated, and where the
+article of truth remained in the accusation there was much to be said in
+defence of work that had resulted, if in some evil, certainly in much
+palpable good. To such groups of priests and soldiers and publicans as
+came forth to John's baptism of repentance, the godly Finney, travelling
+now east and now west, had appealed, and that the wide land was the
+better for the crying of his voice no candid person who knew the result
+of his labours could deny. He that had two coats had imparted to him
+that had none; the extortioner had returned his unfair gains, and some
+rough men had become gentle. But in the assembly from which Finney had
+just come the larger numbers and the greater power of rhetoric had been
+on that side which appeared to show least faith in God and least zeal
+for men, and Finney had come out from the combat bruised in spirit.
+
+Some natural comfort the weary man experienced from the sweet charm of
+the summer afternoon, from anticipation of the welcome and sympathy
+which would soon be his. He heard, but could not see, the Canandaigua
+water as it ran under its canopy of willows, over whose foliage the
+light wind passed in silver waves. On the height of the hill above the
+mill-dam he turned his horse into the yard of the Croom homestead. The
+stalwart deacon in overalls, his excitable, slender wife, her
+cap-strings flying, came forth, the one from the barn, the other from
+her bake-house.
+
+It was not to either of these worthy souls that Finney intended first to
+confide the story of his glimpse of Susannah. It said much for the
+sterling truth of this man's soul that, accustomed as he was to demand
+from himself and others public confession of those experiences most
+private to the individual soul, he had not lost delicacy of feeling or
+reverence for individual privacy in human relationships. He had not been
+at this house since the month after Susannah's departure, when
+excitement and wrath still raged concerning her. He judged that in the
+hearts of the older members the wound had healed, leaving only the
+healthy scar that such sorrows leave in busy lives. He knew, too, that
+in Ephraim's heart the blade of this grief had cut deeper.
+
+The supper over, the full moon already gilding the last hour of the
+summer daylight, Ephraim donned his hat to take the solitary evening
+stroll to which he had become accustomed. He thought to leave the trio
+who were in complete accord of sentiment to talk longer over the
+persecution which Finney endured, but on the little brick path between
+the flower-beds the evangelist came up with him.
+
+Ephraim was but half pleased. It was in this brief evening hour that he
+set his thoughts free, like children at playtime. Like other students
+forced to live in invalidish habits, he had established a rule of
+thought more strict than men of active callings need. At certain hours
+he would study his country's social, political needs; at others he would
+help in his father's farm management; at others he would study some
+exact science. But when the measured hours of his day were over, and
+before he lit his student's lamp, for a while he turned his fancies
+loose, and they ran all too surely to play about Susannah's charms,
+about the circumstances of her life. This was not his happiest hour. The
+eternal advantage of love was lost for the time in its present distress.
+Hateful thoughts were the results of this self-indulgence, yet he hated
+more anything that came as interruption. During these years the lover in
+him had not grown what the world calls wise.
+
+For some minutes Finney, controlling the briskness of his ordinary pace,
+walked by Ephraim's side and contented himself with the gracious scene,
+passing remarks upon weather and crops. Soon, for the value of time
+always pressed upon him, his business-like voice took a softened tone,
+and he began preaching a heart-felt sermon to his one listener.
+
+The subject of the sermon was "the fire God gave for other ends," and he
+ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was
+wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.
+
+Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile. "Did it ever
+occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been
+the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made? What
+time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing
+the iridescence on a beetle's wing, in adjusting man's soul till it
+responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the
+surface of the ocean to weather?"
+
+Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim's _bonhomie_ and his
+strange ideas. "But what have you to advance against what I have already
+said, Ephraim?"
+
+"Advance? I advance nothing. I even withdraw my painted insects and the
+storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best
+teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use
+without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us
+the most dangerous things. I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in
+order to thank you for having spoken her name. No one else has spoken it
+in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I--I am
+fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps
+would name her."
+
+The voice of the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland
+in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air. Beside this and
+the throb of insect voices there was no sound. "I came out this
+evening," said Finney, "to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw
+_her_." His voice fell at the pronoun in sympathetic sorrow.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go
+northward to the Erie Canal, in order that I might pass through that
+part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that
+hypocrite's teaching."
+
+There was no need in the district of Manchester for Finney to explain
+what hypocrite he meant. In his own country Smith was commonly held to
+be the arch-hypocrite.
+
+"The devil has surely espoused that cause in earnest, for the number of
+deluded souls in that part of Ohio and in southern Missouri, and
+scattered as missionaries up and down the country, is, I hear, between
+three and four thousand."
+
+"And always among those who worship the letter of the Scripture,"
+remarked Ephraim, "for their missionaries give chapter and verse for all
+they teach."
+
+"I was told that their customs were peculiarly evil. Even among
+themselves they lie and steal and are violent and licentious; and they
+teach openly that it is a merit to steal from the Gentiles, as they call
+those not of themselves; and, furthermore, they aim at nothing less
+than setting up a government of their own in the west."
+
+"Who told you all this?"
+
+"I am sorry to say that I had it on good authority. Some of the western
+brethren had it from a poor fellow who had been deluded into entering
+the Mormon community, and had barely escaped with his life when he
+desired to withdraw."
+
+"Would you consider a pervert from your own sect the best witness of its
+tenets? But you say that you saw my cousin?"
+
+Finney told what had led him to the village of Hiram, and said, "When I
+spoke of the sins of the Mormons, a young woman seated near the front of
+the congregation rose up. It was your cousin. I saw at once by the
+pallor of her face that the Lord was having direct dealing with her
+soul. The 'power' was indeed very great; a strong man fell as dead near
+her, who before the night was over gave testimony of sound conversion.
+After he and your cousin had been led out, many others in different
+parts of the building cried to God for mercy. When the sermon was over I
+sought for your cousin, but when I told who she was, the people of the
+place said that no doubt Mormon messengers had come while she was
+waiting, and forced her to depart. That night there was a disturbance in
+the place; some of the more hot-headed men had the leaders out, and
+tarred and feathered them--a dastardly deed! I have been threatened
+myself with being rid on a rail and tarred when the devil stirred up the
+people against my preaching, but the Lord mercifully preserved me. 'Tis
+a shameful practice, but I hear it was done to these men to intimidate
+them from the more violent crimes which they had conspired to commit. In
+the morning I was forced to go, as I was advertised to preach at many
+stations farther on, or I would have denounced the violence from the
+pulpit. I could not find out anything more concerning your cousin, but
+the Lord has never allowed me to doubt that the many prayers which we
+have offered on her behalf were answered that night, for I could see by
+the expression of her face that she, like those upon the day of
+Pentecost, was cut to the heart."
+
+At the garden gate, under the boughs of the quince-tree, which had
+increased its branches since the day in which Susannah had last passed
+under them, Ephraim now stood in the moonlight, barring the entrance. At
+length with a sigh he said, "Alas! Finney, I believe that there are few
+souls under heaven more true and more worthy than your own; but as for
+the power of God, 'His way is in the sea and his path in the great
+waters, but his footsteps are not known.'"
+
+Out of his breast Ephraim took a thin leather book, and from out of the
+book gave Finney a letter much worn with reading.
+
+Finney took the letter reverently, and read it by the light of his
+bedroom candle. In those days letters were more formally written; this
+one from Susannah to Ephraim began with wishes concerning her aunt and
+uncle and the prosperity of the household. The fine flowing writing
+filled the large sheet.
+
+"I write to you, my dear cousin, rather than to my aunt, to whom I fear
+my letter would not be acceptable, for although I can say that I regret
+my wilfulness and the manner of my disobedience, still I can never
+regret that, having been forced to choose, I threw in my lot with those
+who can suffer wrong rather than with those who have it in their hearts
+to inflict wrong, for if there be a God--ah, Ephraim, this is another
+reason why I address you, for I am in sore doubt concerning the
+knowledge of God, as to whether any knowledge is possible. My husband,
+who denies me nothing, has allowed me to send for some of your books
+whose names I remembered. I thought at first to write to you about them,
+but I distrust now my own understanding too much to venture. I would
+like you to know that they have helped me somewhat, for I do not now say
+to myself in hard, tearless fashion that I know there is no God, to
+which thought I was driven by the reflection that most of those who seek
+him most diligently sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
+
+"But the more immediate occasion of this letter is to tell you that a
+month since Mr. Finney held a meeting not far from us. I went, thinking
+to gain some help from him, and to hear news of you, but I was greatly
+disappointed, and made very angry. He preached as my husband and many of
+our elders preach, and there were among the crowd the same signs of
+excitement and peculiar manifestations that we have constantly among us.
+But toward the end of his sermon Mr. Finney spoke of my husband's
+Church, and he lent the weight of his influence to very evil slanders
+that are constantly repeated about us by those who have not sought to
+know the truth. He did us great injury by stirring up the roughest of
+the people to violence. Mr. Finney will, I suppose, visit you and repeat
+those lies, which no doubt he believes, but is most culpable in
+believing, because he has not investigated the scandal against us as he
+would have investigated scandal against any who are orthodox. I write
+now to tell you that that which he says is not true. For although there
+are a few criminals amongst us, as in every community, evil is not
+taught or condoned."
+
+As Finney read this letter by his lonely candle he was so far stirred by
+what he deemed the merely human side of the incident as to say to
+himself, "Poor Ephraim! She has never even known that he loved her." But
+next day, in speaking to Ephraim, he pointed out that in the worst
+communities there were always pure-minded women who knew little or
+nothing of the evil around them, and said he believed that his message
+would still be the means of bringing home the truth to Susannah's heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+In the meantime an interval of comparative peace had come to Kirtland.
+The Gentiles, because they discovered that the town was a good market
+for the produce of more fields than the Saints could till, allowed their
+religious zeal to slumber.
+
+A female relative of Halsey, having lost her friends by death, came from
+the east to Kirtland upon his invitation.
+
+Susannah went down the hill one summer day to meet the travelling
+company of new converts which brought Elvira Halsey. That young lady had
+seen about twenty-five years of life's vicissitudes, and had sharpened
+her wits thereon. Slight, pretty, and dressed with an effort at fashion
+that was quite astonishing in the Kirtland settlement, Elvira sprang
+from the waggon.
+
+"I've come to be a Mormon. How do you begin?" With these words she
+presented to Susannah a new type of character, fresh, and in some ways
+delightful.
+
+There was quite a crowd at the stopping place of the waggons. Halsey,
+with other elders and Smith, came to welcome the newcomer. Elvira stood
+on tip-toe, peeping about, pressing Susannah's arm with whispers.
+"Which is Joe Smith, do tell me? Do you go down on your knees to him,
+and does he pat your head?"
+
+Guided by keen instinct, Elvira did not make remarks in Halsey's hearing
+which would have shocked him, but perhaps by the same instinct she at
+once claimed Susannah as a confidante in spite of some feeble
+remonstrance.
+
+"Are you not wrong to speak so lightly of our religion?" asked Susannah,
+feeling that she was an elder's wife.
+
+"First let me be sure that you have any religion to speak of." She
+looked up prettily in Susannah's face. "What a beautiful creature you
+are!" she cried. "And is it to please my cousin Angel that you wear a
+snuff-coloured dress and a white cap and a neckerchief like an old lady
+of seventy?"
+
+As they proceeded together up the white curving road, over the crest of
+the verdant bluff, Elvira announced her further intentions.
+
+"I am not going to live with you. I am going to board with the Smiths. I
+want to get to the bottom of this business, and see the apparitions
+myself."
+
+"There are no apparitions," said Susannah gently.
+
+"Gold books, you know, flying about in the air, and the angel Maroni and
+hosts of the slain Lamanites."
+
+"You expect too much. Such visions as Mr. Smith had came but at the
+beginning to attest his mission and give him confidence."
+
+"Tut! I should think he had sufficient of that commodity. It is I who
+require the confidence, and have I come too late?"
+
+"I would question, if it did not appear unkind, why you have come at
+all?"
+
+"Bless you, it's relations, not revelations, that I came after."
+
+"I fear that Angel will not be satisfied with that attitude," Susannah
+sighed. She supposed that Elvira represented all too well the attitude
+of educated minds in that far-off world whose existence she tried to
+forget.
+
+"Therefore," said Elvira, "I will board with the Smiths."
+
+Elvira's whim to be received into the prophet's family could not be
+carried out, but by persistency she succeeded in establishing herself in
+the household of Hyrum Smith, where she distinguished herself by two
+peculiarities--a refusal to marry any of the saintly bachelors who were
+proposed to her, and a perpetual good-natured delight in all that she
+saw and heard. She resisted baptism, but to Susannah's surprise,
+remained on perfectly friendly terms with the leaders of the sect.
+
+The next two years passed quietly in Kirtland. Susannah, imbued, as
+indeed were all Smith's friends, with his belief that the peace was but
+for a time, cherished her husband as though death were near, and grieved
+him by no outward nonconformity to pious practices. Many chance comments
+which she made were straws which might have shown him the way the
+current of her thought tended underneath her habitual silence, but they
+showed him nothing. It was mortifying to her to observe that Smith,
+rarely as he saw her, was always cognisant of her mental attitude, while
+her husband remained ignorant.
+
+Susannah gave up the girlish habit of fencing with facts that it
+appeared modest to ignore. She was perfectly aware that she exercised a
+distinct influence over the prophet, of what sort or degree she could
+not determine. Little as she desired this influence, she could not
+withhold a puzzled admiration for Smith's conduct. He rarely spoke to
+her except in the most meagre and formal way, and all his decrees which
+tended for her elevation in the eyes of the community or for her
+personal comfort were so expressed that no personal bias could be
+detected.
+
+She asked herself if Smith practised this self-restraint for conscience'
+sake, or from motives of policy, or whether it was that several distinct
+selves were living together within him, and that what appeared restraint
+was in reality the usual predominance of a part of him to which she bore
+little or no relation. There was much else in his character to admire
+and much to condemn. He had steadily improved himself in education, in
+mental discipline, and in personal appearance and address. He could
+hardly now be thought the same man as when he had first preached the new
+doctrine in Manchester. This bespoke an intense and unresting ambition,
+and yet the selfishness that is the natural result of such ambition was
+absent. As far as his arduous work would permit, he gave himself
+lavishly to wife and child, to all the brethren, rich and poor, when
+they asked for his ministrations. The motherless babies whom he had
+helped Emma to nurse through their infancy had gone back to their
+father's care, but there was never a time when some poor child or
+destitute woman was not a member of his household. On the other hand,
+many of the actions of his public life were questionable. He had
+established a bank in Kirtland, of which he was the president. Even
+Halsey admitted to Susannah that this was a great mistake, that the bank
+ought to have been under the control of some one who understood money
+matters; the prophet did not. He had also set up a cloth mill, and
+undertaken to farm a large tract of land in the public interest. The
+prophet showed to much better advantage when instituting new religious
+ceremonies, of which there were now many and curious, or when giving
+forth "revelations" which had to do with the principles of economy
+rather than its practical details. Susannah thought that the voice of
+the Gentiles all around them, shouting false accusations of greed and
+dishonesty, would sooner or later find much apparent confirmation if no
+financier could be found to lay a firm hand upon the prophet's sanguine
+tendency toward business speculation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+In the bleak December two elders came from Zion, the holy city in
+Missouri, bringing the history of dire tribulation.
+
+It was a cold night; the first snow was falling upon the wings of a
+gale. Susannah was sitting alone quietly working out problems in
+algebra, in which study Smith had desired that her elder pupils should
+advance. The storm beat upon the window pane, and set the bright logs of
+the fireplace now flaming and now smoking, the varnished wooden walls
+dimly reflecting light and shadow.
+
+Halsey had been out to see the newcomers, who were staying at the
+prophet's house. It was late when she heard his tread, muffled in the
+drifted snow. He hardly paused to shake it from his clothes before he
+came near. She saw that he was in a mood of strong grief and excitement.
+
+"Angel," she spoke pityingly, "you have had a hard, hard day; you have
+stayed so very late at this evening's conference." She held out her hand
+to him. "Do not tell me to-night if you can rest before telling." Young
+as she was, her countenance, as she lifted it toward him, was motherly.
+She remembered what a mere boy he was, fair and hopeful, when she had
+first seen him three years before, and now strong lines of purpose and
+endurance were written upon the face that was thin and pale, the paler,
+it seemed, because of the transient colour that the storm had given a
+moment since to the clear skin.
+
+"I would that thou didst not need to hear, but it is not for us to turn
+our eyes from that which the Lord hath written for our instruction in
+the suffering of our brethren." Then he added, "The elders from Zion
+have told us all. There was great joy and prosperity among them, and the
+more foolish boasted of their wealth to the Gentiles, saying also that
+the Lord had given the whole land to them for an inheritance."
+
+"That, indeed, was very foolish," said Susannah.
+
+"Nay, but it was small blame to them, for that which they said is true.
+But among the Gentiles the political demagogues began to be afraid that
+we should rule the country by the number of our votes. The Gentiles
+gathered together in the town of Independence, and three hundred of them
+signed a declaration demanding that every one in Zion should sell all
+that he possessed and leave the country within a certain time, and that
+none other of us should settle there."
+
+"But forced sale would mean that no fair value would be given for the
+property; it would be simple robbery," she cried; "and they call this
+the land of freedom!"
+
+"They appealed to the Governor of Missouri, but they found that the
+Lieutenant-Governor, a man called Boggs, was among the fiercest of the
+persecutors. As for the Governor himself, he advised them to resort to
+the courts for damages."
+
+"What next?" She was impatient at a pause he made.
+
+He knelt down upon the floor in front of her, laying a calming hand upon
+her shoulder. "Susannah, there is this one great cause for our deep
+gratitude to heaven, that this time all our elders with one voice called
+upon our people to bear with patience, to cry to God to cleanse their
+hearts from all anger and revenge."
+
+"I suppose that was well," she said, but with hesitation.
+
+By the gentle pressure of his hand he still expressed his sympathy for
+her pain in listening. "Lawyers were engaged to carry the matter through
+the courts. But no sooner was it known that the thing was to be publicly
+tried than the Gentiles rose in arms. For three nights they entered the
+houses of the Saints, beating the men, burning their barns, and in many
+cases unroofing the houses. Some of our brethren went to Lexington for a
+peace warrant, but the judge was frightened at the mob, and, moreover,
+if he had offended them he would have lost much money, so he told the
+Saints to arm and defend themselves."
+
+Halsey had paused again. The moral question here involved was to him of
+deep importance.
+
+"If it was only for self-defence, Angel--" she began.
+
+He shook his head. "Nay, it was a fierce temptation, and our people are
+not yet sanctified, but God in his great mercy withheld them from
+sinning against him. For they had no sooner obtained arms than Lilburn
+Boggs, the Lieutenant-Governor, came and disarmed them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Our people were driven from their homes. In the cold storms of
+November, women and little children and wounded men were forced to flee
+out upon the open prairie, and up and down the banks of the Missouri
+River. At last they gathered together on the river-side, and many of
+them have now crossed it, remaining in the opposite county, and the
+others have dispersed, poor and homeless, into less unfriendly parts of
+the State. These elders have come here that the prophet may send back
+some revelation at their hand, and that we may all gather together what
+we can spare from our abundance for the relief of our fugitive
+brethren."
+
+His eyes were shining with triumphant faith, even though the close of
+his narrative seemed to admit of so little hope.
+
+"And will Mr. Smith still teach them that they must not strike a blow
+for their rights?" she asked.
+
+This was fast becoming the critical question of the hour.
+
+In February the snow lay deep on the land. Susannah, like all her
+neighbours, spent some days isolated by the drifts, the men only going
+abroad. On one of these afternoons the prophet tapped at her door. His
+visit in Halsey's absence was unprecedented.
+
+Without preface he began to make a statement as to the affairs of the
+Church in Missouri.
+
+"The greater part of our fugitive brethren have at my desire gathered
+together upon a large tract of uncleared land that lies just across the
+river from Zion. It is the desire of the Lord that they should there
+await until it is his will to open the gates of Zion once more."
+
+"It is _your_ desire that they should gather and wait there."
+
+She spoke with no rude emphasis, but he understood. This man could read
+her thought before it was expressed. He pushed his thick hair from his
+forehead with a heavy hand.
+
+"Understand, Mrs. Halsey, that I _believe_ the voice of the Lord has
+spoken, but it is also my desire."
+
+"Does the voice of the Lord ever speak but in accordance with your
+desire?"
+
+The answer burst from him with almost hysterical force, "I would to
+heaven it did not."
+
+"But in such cases are not your desires divided against themselves? and
+the word of the Lord comes perhaps in accordance with one desire and in
+contradiction of another?"
+
+He sat for some time looking absently upon the floor.
+
+"The things of the Lord," he said, "are of vast importance, and require
+time and experience, as well as deep and solemn thought, to find them
+out. And if we would bring the world to salvation it requires that our
+minds should rise to the highest, and also search into and contemplate
+the lowest abyss"--he paused for a moment, and then added in sad
+undertone--"that is within our own hearts."
+
+Susannah was silent, wondering what was the true secret of his elusive
+thought.
+
+He went on with an effort. "Accepting your own words, Mrs. Halsey, that
+it is at my desire that they are there instead of being scattered among
+friendly settlements where they could obtain support, it remains true
+that they are naked, hungry, and cold. When I sleep the vision of their
+sufferings comes before me." He went on again with more vehemence. "It
+is also by obeying my doctrine that they are cast out of their own lands
+and from their own hearths. Whether the Lord hath spoken or no, it is by
+obeying the doctrines that I have taught that they are in
+wretchedness." He rose, pacing the room, apparently unconscious of what
+he did.
+
+"I know that this has been weighing upon you, as it has upon my
+husband."
+
+He shook his head impatiently, striking his breast suddenly with one
+hand. "There is but one heart," he said, "in which the pains and sorrows
+of them all are gathered."
+
+She began to see that he had a plan to unfold.
+
+At length he stopped in his pacing, looking toward her. "We must go to
+their relief," he said. "We must gather an army and conduct our
+suffering brethren back to their homes in Zion."
+
+"By force of arms?" she asked.
+
+"If need be."
+
+He left time for the significance of these words to be fully
+comprehended, and then went on speaking as he paced again. "It may be
+that we will not need to fight, that if we get ourselves in readiness we
+shall need but to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord; and in
+plain language to you, who expect no miracle, Mrs. Halsey, I would be
+understood to say that if a sufficient number of our strong men, armed
+for defence, join our brethren in Missouri, the Gentiles will be afraid
+to attack."
+
+At last she asked, not without excited tremor in her voice, "Who? How
+many? When?"
+
+These were important questions with regard to the organising of an army,
+but the prophet had in mind a point that must previously be determined.
+
+"Your husband," he began abruptly, "he has still upon him the taint of
+his Quaker upbringing, for the Lord Christ indeed taught long-suffering,
+and he sent them out at first, as we also have sent our missionaries,
+with nothing in their hand save a staff only, but afterwards he said,
+'Let him that hath a sword take it,' and they said unto him, 'Lord, here
+are two swords,' and he said, 'It is enough,' which I take to mean that
+where one sword is raised there must be another to ward off a blow or to
+strike in return. But your husband is teaching the people that to bear
+arms, even in self-defence, is wrong."
+
+Susannah saw that already in Smith's indomitable will the era of armed
+defence had begun. Her hatred of the persecution caused her sentiments
+to chime with his. She only said in defence of Halsey's meekness, "My
+husband would have gone before now to give himself and all that he has
+to help these poor people if you had not interfered, Mr. Smith."
+
+A change of expression came in a moment over Smith's hulking form, as if
+a different phase of him came forward to deal with a change of subject.
+He turned upon her almost sharply, "There is one man in Kirtland who
+shall not go to Zion till peace is there. If he went, would he not of
+his own accord rush into the forefront, into the hottest of the battle,
+not to fight but to receive the sword in his breast and be slain, even
+as Uriah the Hittite was slain? Wherefore, I say unto you, he shall not
+go."
+
+Susannah, like all good women, had no keenness of scent for scandals,
+ancient or modern. She did not remember who Uriah was, and took no
+offence.
+
+The prophet had tarried in his pacing by the window; with hands clasped
+behind him he was looking absently out upon the driven snow. Upon his
+face was an expression which Susannah only sometimes saw, and that in
+the moments which she felt to be his best. She believed this man to have
+true moments of humility and high resolve; it was only a question with
+her how far they permeated his life. In a minute more he turned again
+and spoke modestly and sadly enough.
+
+"As I have said before, it is not in me to greatly love our brother
+Halsey's manner of thought, but I perceive his holiness and the Church
+shall not lack his counsel. I am here to-day to tell you how much it
+grieves me to set a constraint upon his conscience, yet I am here also
+to ask you to tell him from me that it is not the will of the Lord that
+he should continue to preach against the spirit of self-defence."
+
+When he was gone Susannah realised how angry she would have been if she
+had heard that Smith had rebuked her husband on this subject, yet now
+that the fiat lay in her own hands to impart with all gentleness, the
+task, because of her own fierce attitude toward the oppression, was
+grateful to her.
+
+When the roof had been set on the white walls of the first great Mormon
+temple upon Kirtland Bluff, a small army, well armed, well provisioned,
+went out from Kirtland for the deliverance of Zion amid the prayers and
+huzzahs of the little community. There were many who, like Halsey,
+bewailed in secret this taking of the sword, but the doctrine of
+non-resistance was never preached again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+After this Susannah's attention was centred upon the coming of her first
+child.
+
+"'Tain't lucky to have a child when the leaves are falling," said Elvira
+Halsey, a certain mist of far-off vision clouding her sparkling eyes.
+
+Susannah had been greatly weighed down by depression, not fearing
+ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had
+ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured.
+For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had
+mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she
+would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally
+found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only
+have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too
+courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good to be gained.
+Yet when the baby at length lay on her lap, grew and smiled, kicked and
+crowed, Susannah forgot at times, for hours together, the superstitions
+of the Latter-Day Saints. The motherly solicitude which she had long
+exercised over Halsey changed into something more like friendship when
+she saw him hang over her and her child as they played together.
+
+Susannah had given up her school. The winter was severe, and mother and
+child hibernated together by the sweet-scented pinewood fires till the
+stronger sun had melted the frost flowers on the panes. Spring had
+nearly come before Susannah divined that for the child's sake Halsey had
+been protecting her for months from the fear of a near disaster that was
+weighing upon his own heart.
+
+This was the year of what was called in the early Mormon Church "the
+great apostasy." One evening Halsey came in looking so white and ill
+that Susannah drew back the baby, which she had held out for his evening
+kiss.
+
+In a few minutes she understood what had occurred. Some four or five
+leaders in the Church, with their families and friends, had charged
+Smith with hypocrisy and fraud.
+
+It was not Susannah's own opinion that such a charge could be
+maintained. Smith appeared to her to be like a child playing among awful
+forces--clever enough often to control them, to the amazement of himself
+and others, but never comprehending the force he used; often naughty; on
+the whole a well-intentioned child. But she could well see that
+childishness combined with power is a more difficult conception for the
+common mind than rank hypocrisy.
+
+Angel had been assisting in a solemn excommunication of the apostates.
+He looked upon them as having been overcome by the devil.
+
+After this Halsey instituted a series of unusual meetings for prayer and
+revival preaching, which he held after the ordinary evening classes in
+the School of the Prophets, which was now removed to the upper chambers
+of the finished temple. Now, as at other times, his preaching was
+successful. His power was with men rather than with women; they gathered
+in excited crowds, and their prayer and praise went up in the midnight
+hour.
+
+Susannah was not in the habit of going to bed till her husband returned.
+One night, after twelve had struck, while she sat warming the dimpled
+feet of her restless babe at the rosy fire-light, she was greatly
+astonished to hear a tapping, low but distinct, on a window that opened
+to the back of the house. She lifted her head as mother animals prick
+their ears above their young at the faint sound of any danger.
+
+After an interval the tap was repeated; it was no accidental noise.
+Susannah laid the child in its cradle and went nearer the window
+shutters, hesitating.
+
+She knew only too well that this secrecy was the sign of some one's dire
+distress. She knew the habits of the people; a neighbour's aid was
+sought freely and with confidence; doors were open at all times to need
+or social intercourse.
+
+To her intent listening the accents of a low and guarded tone came in
+reply to her challenge; the voice was Joseph Smith's.
+
+Susannah looked with anguish toward her child's cradle. Had some army of
+mad persecutors invested Kirtland? Nothing less than fierce persecution
+could be thus heralded.
+
+For years Susannah had known Smith as a near neighbour, and the stuff of
+which the man was at this time made is indicated by the fact that
+instinctively she opened the window with noiseless haste.
+
+Smith climbed in. "Has Halsey returned?"
+
+The fire gave the only light in the room. Smith did not shut the window,
+but remained sitting on the sill. A bake-house at the back hid the place
+from neighbouring eyes.
+
+"It's all up with our bank," said Smith.
+
+"I feared so," said Susannah.
+
+"The apostates took such a lot of money out of it. No bank anywhere in
+this region could have stood it. You have always been down on our
+management of the bank, Mrs. Halsey, but if it was not good, why then
+have so many of the Gentiles put in their money, and why have they taken
+our notes all over the State?"
+
+"You never had the capital you advertised."
+
+"We have land that stands for it."
+
+"It is not worth half what you value it at."
+
+Then Susannah became sorry for her sharp recrimination. Punishment had
+befallen; it was a time for mutual help, not for reproach. She saw that
+although Smith kept himself calm he was greatly stirred.
+
+"Why are you here?" she asked.
+
+Smith's huge frame was poised awkwardly on the window sill. He moved
+restlessly and touched one thing and another with nervous hands. Then he
+said with a short laugh, "The size of it is, I'm running away, Mrs.
+Halsey. Ye may think I feel pretty mean, but ye'll do me the justice
+just to think how it is. If they'd shoot me in fair fight, I'd go and,
+if it were the Lord's will, be shot to-morrow, and be thankful too; but
+ye know the sort of vengeance they'll take. I have been beaten time and
+again before now, and covered with pitch, and I've been knocked down and
+kicked and ducked in ponds a good many times, as ye know, and I ain't
+ashamed to say that I'm afraid of that sort of thing and afraid of the
+results on Emmar and the children. If the Lord clearly told that 'twas
+his will to stay and stand it, why then I'd have no choice, but I
+haven't had no word from the Lord."
+
+His face was livid; in the effort to make his explanation, whether
+shaken by the recollections he described or by fear of her contempt,
+she saw that his limbs were actually trembling as if with cold.
+
+"There ain't many men, Mrs. Halsey, as would stay and face that sort of
+music when they could get away, but if it was to do good to mortal
+creature I'd think about staying, but it's t'other way. It's me and
+Rigdon as has been advertised as working the bank; it's my blood and his
+the Gentiles that have our notes are thirsting for. Suppose we stayed
+and they took to mauling us again, wouldn't the Saints here take to
+fighting to protect us? I've taught them to fight in self-defence and
+they'd fight to defend me. God knows there are better men than we are
+that would be killed right and left if we stayed, and 'twould be no use,
+for the Gentile numbers would overpower us. 'Tain't no use. When I found
+to-day that there wasn't a chance of staving off the bankruptcy I sent
+Emmar and the children and Rigdon's folks off in a close waggon after
+sundown. Rigdon's rid off by another road, and I've got my horse ready
+and ought to be gone. And there ain't a man in Kirtland as will know
+which way we've gone by to-morrow, so that no Saint will need to do any
+lying on my account."
+
+"You are very sorry for the mistakes you have made about the bank," she
+said pityingly.
+
+He gave another short laugh that, like the first, was less like a laugh
+than a sob.
+
+"I guess I'm sorry enough, but I don't know whether it's repentance, for
+I thought I'd done all just what the Lord told me to do, but at times
+like these I'm not so sure of the revelations I hear in my soul, but I
+know I thought I was right at the time; but as for being sorry, if ye
+had the burden of all these children of Israel in the desert on your
+heart, knowing that ye had brought them into the desert, and brought the
+hunger and the thirst and the pestilence and the enemy upon them, and
+weren't quite sure at times whether the thing that ye saw leading was
+the Lord's pillar of cloud or the devil's, and if ye was now being cast
+out before the face of men and called a liar and a swindler, and without
+a dollar in the world, I guess ye'd know what it felt like to feel
+sorry."
+
+The room was a long one; in the fore part the glow from the hearth made
+clear the baby's cradle, the table set for Halsey's supper, the close
+shutters of the front windows, but the red flame rays were fainter as
+they came into this back portion where Susannah stood in dull distress a
+few paces from the stricken intruder.
+
+This man had always the power at close quarters of producing strange
+disturbance in the emotions of his friends. Susannah was trembling, her
+heart heaving, if not with pure compassion, at least with wild
+excitement on his account.
+
+With an effort Smith held himself still, but gave again the
+heart-broken laugh that appealed more than all else to her woman's
+heart. "'Tain't all that neither, that makes me the most 'sorry,' as ye
+call it. I tried to go in and out before this people, Mrs. Halsey,
+loving and serving all alike as a prophet should, but I wouldn't be
+human man, no, nor fit to be chosen by God for the honour he's put upon
+me, if I didn't know who amongst us was most worth care and respect, and
+it's come to my soul this night, now that I can't no longer stand
+between you and all the dangers that beset our people in the wilderness,
+that I wasn't right, maybe, to egg on Halsey to take ye away from your
+happy home, or to make a point as I did, first off, of getting ye
+converted--for I was more set on it than I showed at the time. It's
+because 'twas my doing you married, that I've come to say this; and I
+see well enough that 'tain't love that is between you and Halsey, though
+you are too tender of him to let him see."
+
+She made a movement of the head, an effort to show reproving dignity,
+while in fact taken by surprise, her nerves in distressful panic, she
+had scarce the power to control herself, none to control him.
+
+He answered her impulse, although he had not looked up to see the
+gesture. "Ye haven't got any call to-night to be offended with me, for
+I'm worth no more, unless the Lord see fit to lift me up agen, than the
+paper our bank-notes is written on; and I have just got one more thing
+to say, then I'm gone. If there's any grit in Joseph Smith, and if it
+pleases God that he's not going now to his death, he'll not make another
+home for himself without providing as good a place for you and the young
+one. Ye may depend on it."
+
+He rose up now. "'Tain't no use disguising facts; I'm running away, and
+I'm leaving ye to dangers and privations. Your money and Halsey's is
+gone the way of all the rest, and without me to stop him Halsey will fly
+in the face of the first persecution that's within his reach. If I
+hadn't known that there was no chance at all of your coming I'd have
+asked you and the child to git into Emmar's waggon; but there's just
+this to say, there ain't a tribulation that can come to you that won't
+hurt me, living or dead, more than it can hurt you." Then after a pause
+he added, "Emmar sent her dear love and good-bye to ye."
+
+He stood still a moment before her in humble attitude, the words of
+Emma's tender farewell lingering, as it were, in the air between them.
+
+"Have a care what you do." (He resumed a more dignified manner of
+speech.) "It's borne in upon my mind that great dangers will lie round
+you. Tell brother Halsey from me that it is the will of the Lord that he
+should seek first the safety of his wife and child, and to abide in a
+place of safety till the child be grown."
+
+He climbed through the window. His last act was to close the casement
+behind him to save her trembling hands the exertion. His movements must
+have been very stealthy, for she did not hear the sound of his steps or
+the steps of his horse in the silent night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+After Smith left Kirtland there was a great exodus Missouri-ward of his
+more devout followers. The army which had gone out from Kirtland in '34
+to the rescue of the fugitives from the city of Zion in Missouri had
+failed, through disease and exhaustion, to make warlike demonstration;
+but the principle then accepted by the children of Zion of opposing
+force to force in self-defence, had been bearing fruit ever since in a
+bloody warfare between the hunted Saints of Missouri and their more
+powerful neighbours.
+
+Before the Saints took up arms the Missourians had, it would seem, no
+real ground of offence against them except the religious faith which led
+them to proclaim that the land was to be given to them by the Lord for
+an everlasting possession. Now this provocation was still in force,
+added to the greater one that the worm had turned.
+
+So futile had been the mad persecutions, so fruitful the blood of the
+martyrs, that by this time there were some ten thousand Saints in
+Missouri, all heads of families, for although Zion in Jackson County
+still lay waste, and the colonies of Clay County had been swept away,
+the cities of Far West and Diahman, and numerous villages near them, had
+risen like magic, built by the thrift, the organisation, and the
+temperance of the Saints.
+
+As for Kirtland, the hope of making it a prosperous city had died with
+the failure of the bank. Of the few who remained two distinct parties
+were formed--the orthodox, headed by Halsey, and the reformers,
+encouraged, if not headed, by the former leaders who were now apostate.
+In the camp of the reformers there were those who saw visions and had
+revelations. Before this, when Smith was at the helm, it had been
+counted unlawful for any but himself to have direct dealings with the
+Unseen; but the prophet was distant, directing the sect only through his
+published journal, and in this case it were hard indeed if no
+authoritative local word were spoken in the orthodox party. Angel
+Halsey's mystic soul fell easily into the region of voices and visions.
+In his adversity, fasting and praying more than ever before, he heard
+voices which gave practical directions not only for himself but for his
+neighbours. When the neighbours refused to accept these ghostly
+counsels, which all tended toward a more rigorous holiness, there was no
+room left for Halsey's work in Kirtland. He determined to fare forth to
+Missouri, there to comfort and edify the Saints scattered abroad in the
+rural districts.
+
+It was now that Susannah expected the sprightly Elvira Halsey, still
+unbaptized, to return to the east. Instead of that she proposed to
+travel with them, helping to take care of the child.
+
+"Why should I take the trouble to help you and the young un?" she asked,
+sitting on Susannah's doorstep, languid with the heat. "When I was going
+along the lane last night I met a spirit, so I held out my hand
+according to Joe's latest. You've not heard! My! it's in the Millenial
+Star that if any sort of a voice or dream comes to you, the way to know,
+whether it's an angel or devil is to shake hands, and if it is an angel
+you'll feel a good, firm, solid grip sort of coming out of nowhere, but
+if it isn't an angel you'll feel nothing. It's kind of Joe to put it in
+a nutshell, necessary nowadays that we're all hard at it having
+revelations of our own. He thought that nobody would feel the grip but
+himself. Quite mistaken. I shook hands with my angel, tho' I couldn't
+see a ghost of him, and when he said, 'You come along now to Missouri,
+and carry the child half way,' I had nothing to do but say 'Amen.'"
+
+But Susannah was too much afraid of what the result of private
+revelations might be to laugh at them; she expressed her fears.
+
+"Bless you, all the dreams and 'voices' in this hustling world wouldn't
+have put any guile into the soul of Nathaniel, and they won't into Angel
+Halsey's. Saints are saints, sinners are sinners, middling folks are
+middling, just the same whether they have three 'revelations' a day
+apiece, or one once a year, or none at all. You're fretting because you
+think a righteous man might do something wicked, thinking that the voice
+of the Lord had told him. Not a bit of it! The Lord will take care of
+his own when they're a little off their heads just as much as at any
+other time."
+
+What few worldly goods Susannah chose to keep were packed in two single
+waggons, Halsey driving the one, and Elvira and Susannah by turns
+driving the other and holding the child. Their long journey through the
+month of June was the most perfect pleasure that Susannah and Angel ever
+enjoyed together, the long nightmare of the last months at Kirtland left
+behind for ever, the stage of the future veiled, and the lineaments of
+natural hope painted upon the drop-curtain. A loving fate sent fresh
+showers on their behoof during the nights, which laid the dust and
+dressed field and forest in their daintiest array. The child, who had
+been pining somewhat, affected by the anxiety in the Kirtland home,
+became lusty and merry.
+
+"If it wasn't that we are shortly going to be robbed of all we possess
+by the Missourians," observed Elvira, "this sort of jog-trot comfort
+would become too monotonous, but it adds spice to be saying, so to
+speak, 'Hulloa there! we've come to be persecuted too.' Of course we'll
+all be killed to begin with, but that's a detail; after that we'll take
+our rural mission bespoken for us in the dream."
+
+Susannah actually smiled and called "gee-up" to the horse.
+
+"How very little people know," she observed, "who talk about a
+persecution as if it would be a means of grace. There is nothing that so
+hardens and degrades as the constant report of barbarities; the more
+nearly seen, the more closely inspected, the worse is the moral result."
+
+"Speak for yourself," cooed Elvira, "there's one person out there that
+isn't hardened and degraded." She looked with reverent eyes at Angel,
+who was walking at the head of the foremost horse, crooning a psalm;
+"and, as for me, I still feel myself quite soft, almost pulpy, and on an
+elevated plane."
+
+"You could never talk in your irreverent way if you weren't a good deal
+hardened and degraded," persisted Susannah affectionately, "and, as for
+me, I know that I am. Is there any instance in history of a people
+emerging from prolonged persecution with high ideals of love toward
+their enemies and candour?"
+
+"'Tis commonly said that faith rises from this fire," said Elvira.
+
+"Faith that gives its body to be burned and has not charity," said
+Susannah.
+
+When they reached the vicinity of Diahman and Far West the State
+elections were about to be held. It was reported that over all Missouri
+the stronger party, that of Lilburn Boggs, was threatening to prevent
+by force the Mormon vote.
+
+Before commencing his mission to the outlying Mormon districts, Halsey,
+hoping to avoid this contest, stopped in the Gentile town of Gallatin to
+rest and obtain a fresh outfit.
+
+"But why don't we pay our respects to 'Joe' now we are within reach?"
+inquired Elvira with pensive inflection.
+
+"The prophet is full of cares. A man whom I met at the tavern said that
+his activity on behalf of the Saints in Far West is amazing, and since
+his public appearance there the Lord has prospered the city exceedingly;
+but, as for me, I have been commanded to turn aside to those of our
+people who are not encompassed by a shepherd's care."
+
+"If he would but confess it," said Susannah with a sigh, "my husband was
+so sorely hurt with the appearances of fraud in connection with the
+bank--"
+
+"Suppose you put that appearance of a child down and come and eat this
+appearance of your breakfast, and then we'll put on what appear to be
+our bonnets, and go for what appears to be a walk." Elvira's sunny
+serenity never deserted her. "Say rather," she cried, "that the prophet
+did defraud, but has repented."
+
+That day was the 6th of August. The voting for the State legislature had
+commenced. The travellers did not know that there was any number of
+Mormon landholders in this place, but now they could not extricate
+themselves from the very contest that they had hoped to avoid. When the
+two women strolled through the streets to see the town they became
+involved in a crowd at one of the polling places.
+
+Penniston, a candidate of the Boggs party, standing on a barrel, was
+haranguing the crowd, and the two women quickly heard the name of their
+sect mentioned with contumely.
+
+"Shall we," cried Penniston, "allow our State to come under the control
+of Mormon horse-thieves and robbers by allowing these outlaws the civil
+rights that are intended only for good citizens?"
+
+There was a commotion in the crowd near him. Susannah, knowing that her
+husband was abroad, felt a sudden heart-sick prophecy of evil. The next
+moment she saw Halsey spring into sight upon a low wall at the side of
+the crowd.
+
+"Look on this picture and on this," cried Elvira in a voice audible to
+many too illiterate to comprehend.
+
+The two men, each standing erect above the heads of the crowd, could not
+have showed sharper contrast. Penniston was coarse of limb and feature;
+a low grade of moral disorder stamped his face as clearly as inferior
+articles are ever stamped; no inspector of goods so relentless as God's
+servant Time! Halsey had bared his head to the open sky, as though
+invoking the presence of God in his temple. Upon features too thin and
+haggard for beauty, patience and love and truth were written by every
+line.
+
+Halsey's voice, accustomed to preaching, fell with clear modulations
+upon the summer air.
+
+"'Blessed are ye, when men shall persecute you, and shall say all manner
+of evil against you falsely, for my name's sake and the gospel's.'
+Friends, this evil that is spoken against us whom ye call Mormons is
+falsely spoken, and I stand here before you, and before the great Father
+of Truth, who is calling his children everywhere to repent, to say that
+every Mormon who has a vote has a right to exercise it, for we have
+committed none of the crimes of which you accuse us, but you yourselves,
+as you well know, are many of you here to try to put into office men who
+are undoubted criminals."
+
+In surprise Penniston and his hearers had listened, but now a man,
+half-drunk perhaps, sprang upon the low wall upon which Halsey stood,
+and struck him savagely.
+
+"He is all alone," cried Susannah, "all alone among so many." She tried
+to struggle forward toward her husband through the crowd.
+
+Halsey believed himself to be alone, and it was not in accordance with
+his principles to make any attempt to return the violence by which he
+had been assailed; but to his astonishment now a stout man leaped to
+his assistance, suddenly belabouring his assailant with blows, and from
+far and near in the crowd there were shouts of encouragement from burly
+Mormon farmers who had only needed the voice of a leader to declare
+themselves. Halsey had thrown a spark, unconscious that a mass of powder
+lay near. When the men of Penniston's party turned with savage fury upon
+the Mormon who was beating their companion, and the Mormons, no less
+fierce, rallied round Halsey and his defender, the fight became general.
+
+Elvira set her quick wits to work to weave a cord that would be strong
+enough to draw Susannah back to their inn. "They may find out that baby
+is alone," she said; "they're wicked enough to injure him out of
+revenge."
+
+Along the wooden pavements of Gallatin, past the gaily-painted wooden
+houses, through the doors of which whole families were now emerging to
+ask the cause of disturbance, Susannah fled miserably, her cheeks
+blanched beneath her veil, her heart within weeping.
+
+The sun was shining brightly on just and unjust; the gardens of Gallatin
+were brilliant with such flowers as had bloomed in the August when she
+first met her husband. Susannah felt then that the reason why she
+desired to clasp and guard the sleeping child she had left was that he
+was Angel's son; the pity for injured innocence had been from the first
+until now her strongest passion, and at the thought of Halsey, innocent
+and gentle, in the midst of the brutal fight she had left, her soul wept
+as it were the scalding tears that her eyes refused to shed.
+
+The boy lay in rosy sleep, a woman of the inn keeping a kindly eye upon
+him. Probably nothing but a mother's love could have fancied him of
+sufficient importance to attract public attention, but Susannah, locking
+her door, knelt by the bed, and spreading protecting arms above him,
+listened with strained senses for news of Halsey's injury or death. For
+years she had feared that the violence she had seen wreaked upon others
+would touch her husband; violence offered to herself would have seemed a
+trivial grief in comparison. The fear that has long harped upon sore
+nerves has a cumulative action upon the pain of its realisation.
+
+Susannah found herself giving forth short ejaculatory whispers of prayer
+upon the close air of the plain, small room in which she knelt. It was
+such prayer only as we come at by inheritance, prayer that is one of the
+habits by which the fittest have survived.
+
+Before two hours were past Halsey had returned. He was bruised and much
+shaken, but appeared unconscious of injury, and made light of it. The
+open fight had ended with no decisive victory for either party; the
+chief result appeared to be that malice on either side was for the hour
+exhausted. Whether because of this or because Halsey gave himself to
+prayer on behalf of his brethren, the polls were opened quietly at noon
+and the Mormons voted with the other citizens.
+
+In the cool of the evening Susannah was sitting beside her husband
+holding the sleeping child. The window of their humble room was open,
+not to any broad, fair landscape such as their eyes were accustomed to
+feast upon, but upon the yard of the small tavern. There is, however, in
+new countries no crowding; space, like air and sunshine, is the common
+heritage. Grass grew round the edges of the large yard, and an old white
+horse was cropping it contentedly. A cool air was blowing, and over the
+wooden roofs of the town stars were beginning to gather themselves from
+out the pale dusk. An old negro and two mulatto boys were sitting upon a
+log at the side of one of the sheds, quarrelling and singing slave
+melodies by turns.
+
+Angel took the hand of the sleeping child and Susannah's hand and folded
+them in his own. "Susannah, it has been given to me to see this
+afternoon more clearly than ever before the material triumph of our
+people. They will rear high cities; they will lead armies; they will
+command wealth; but it has also been shown me that Zion will not be, as
+I had heretofore believed, pure from sin, for evil has already entered
+into her. Because she has taken the sword her spiritual warfare will not
+be soon accomplished; the wheat and the tares shall grow together, and
+I do not yet see the end."
+
+There was a pause. Susannah watched the slaves taking their evening ease
+so light-heartedly. She looked down at the three hands which Angel had
+gathered together. The dusk was beginning to make all things indistinct.
+
+Angel went on. "I would have thee teach the child above all things the
+unspeakable wretchedness of sin, for the least sin closes the eye of the
+soul by which we see God and the things of God, clogs them with the dust
+and dirt of the world; and when there is no more any clear vision,
+selfishness is mistaken for love, malice for righteousness, and folly
+for truth. So I pray thee, dear heart, be wary, and slay within thyself
+the evil nature, for though I cannot see it, perchance God does; and
+teach the child above all things from the first to fear sin more than
+death."
+
+"You shall teach him, Angel."
+
+"Dear heart, I would not lay upon thee the burden of knowledge of coming
+sorrow if I dared to withhold it, but I believe, Susannah, that it will
+soon be given to me to die for the truth and for our people." After a
+moment's pause he went on, and his tone, which had dropped
+involuntarily, became again cheerful. "That is why I have to-day
+determined to change the plan that we have made and to send thee and the
+child to-morrow with the company who are about to travel to Far West,
+where the prophet is now dwelling with his wife, for I know he will
+never see thee want."
+
+Susannah rose up. In the dusk of the low, small room her figure, the
+child still in her arms, seemed to tower like a misty goddess or
+Madonna, such as praying men have often seen appearing for their
+succour; her voice came clear and strong from a heaving breast.
+
+"Angel, I will never leave you, never," and then she added in a voice
+that faltered, "Send the child if you will."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+They did not send the child to Far West, or even insist on Elvira
+seeking safety there, because that town also became swiftly involved in
+the flames of the war which had flashed into new life at the Gallatin
+fight. The whole land was full of threats and terrors, and many open
+fights at the polling-booths were soon reported. The Mormons and
+anti-Mormons in various localities entered into mutual bonds to keep the
+peace, but in many cases these bonds were soon broken.
+
+To the Mormons everywhere had been issued a proclamation, signed by
+Smith and the elders, commanding that no official tyranny, however
+unjust, was to be resisted. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher
+powers." "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's
+sake." But when private violence was offered the order was that the men
+should fight in defence of their families.
+
+It seems to have been this order to fight, and the fact that the Mormons
+proved themselves sturdy fighters, which alone caused any of the
+Gentiles to enter into a compact of peace. So mad was their anger
+against a sect claiming the land as an inheritance from God and voting
+to a man in obedience to its leader, that the Missouri journals of the
+day openly taught that to kill a Mormon was no worse than to kill an
+Indian, and to kill an Indian was tacitly considered as meritorious as
+killing a wild beast.
+
+"I am just about as safe jogging along in one of your waggons as
+anywhere in this part of the country," observed Elvira; "and if it was a
+craving for peace and safety we had, why did we come to Missouri at all?
+I feel exactly like a rabbit when the men are out trying to thin them; I
+notice they get very frisky."
+
+There was psychological truth underlying this statement. Stimulated by
+the excitements of sudden alarms, Susannah also found herself enjoying
+intervals of temporary security with peculiar zest.
+
+They set forth again upon the country roads. Halsey had the burden of
+his message upon his spirit; wherever they found a few Mormon households
+gathered together, he preached to them the high ideals of Christian
+living and the need of humility and constant prayer. Another theme he
+had which he considered of equal importance; this was the interpretation
+of prophecy. He gave long rapt discourses upon the most obscure passages
+in the books of the prophets, the Revelation of St. John, and the Book
+of Mormon. These passages were found chiefly to refer to the rise of
+the Mormon Church, the iniquity of her enemies, and her glorious future.
+Susannah, who saw the value of his practical teachings, bitterly
+regretted this use of half his opportunities.
+
+Only once or twice in many weeks did they come upon a Mormon household
+whose management was not such as the moralist would approve, and in
+those cases before Halsey's passionate denunciation sins were confessed
+and repentance promised.
+
+So they journeyed slowly out of the September heats and oppressive
+shades into the cooler and more open glories of autumn. In that part of
+the country wild flowers run riot at the approach of winter, painting
+the land in broad leagues of colour, white and gold and blue, and the
+trees of the forest hang in red curtains overhead. The air was so light
+and invigorating that they all felt its tonic properties. Halsey seemed
+eased of his burden; the child began to talk, babbling wise and
+wonderful speeches. Elvira was even more frivolous than was her wont,
+and Susannah almost forgot Halsey's dismal prophecy of martyrdom.
+
+About the middle of October they reached the place called Haun's Mill,
+where a small Mormon community was settled. Here they thought well to
+pause, shocked by renewed rumours of warfare. A truce for the whole
+region, which had been signed by Smith and some of his elders on the one
+side, and by a magistrate, by name Adam Black, for the Gentiles, had
+been broken by Gentile mobs in several of the counties near Far West. A
+number of the saints had been brutally killed, their wives and children
+driven from their homes at the point of the bayonet. This renewed
+outrage roused at last the fires of revenge, long smouldering in the
+breasts of the refugees from the desolate city of Zion, who had
+themselves known the bitterness of such unmerited wrong. These fires
+fused religious principle and natural wrath together, till a chain was
+forged which bound many strong men in a secret society, whose members
+swore to fight, not only in defence, but especially in vengeance.
+
+It was at Haun's Mill that Halsey first heard of this society, and he
+was deeply concerned. A young Mormon who had lately come to the place
+belonged to it, and after one of Halsey's sermons, in which the posts of
+the Gate of Life were represented as meekness and forgiveness, this
+young man came to the preacher by night to confess, but also to
+vindicate his position.
+
+The missionary's little party, with the exception of Elvira, who had
+accepted hospitality at a neighbouring farm, were camping in a meadow
+not far from a stream called Shoal Creek, which drove the mill. The logs
+of their evening fire were still alight. Susannah sat just within the
+dark opening of a low canvas-covered waggon; the unsteady flame light
+fell upon her, and sometimes showed a farther interior where the child
+lay sleeping. Halsey was sitting at the roots of a tree, the utensils of
+a simple supper at his side. The gentle horses tethered near were to be
+heard softly cropping the grass, and the sound of the creek came from a
+farther distance. Above, the poplar boughs, whose yellow foliage had
+been thinned by the advancing season, let through the rays of the
+brilliant stars. These were the sights and sounds which met the young
+man's senses as he came brushing the fallen leaves with his feet.
+
+He leaned against the pole of the farther waggon and looked across the
+low-glowing fire at the preacher and his wife.
+
+"Look here! I'm a Danite. Do you mean to say that the Lord's not going
+to accept of me because I can't stand by and see weak men and women and
+children killed, or worse than killed, without punishing the murderers?
+Supposing that a hundred of Boggs' men were to come down now and put an
+end to you, your wife, and your child, would you have me go along with
+them peaceably afterwards and pray they might be forgiven?"
+
+"What is a Danite?" asked Susannah.
+
+The stranger took off his hat and answered her very respectfully. "We
+are under an oath, ma'am, not to tell who belong to us, but we've bound
+ourselves to punish them as take the blood of the helpless and
+innocent."
+
+He seemed, as far as the light would show, a well-made youth, and his
+voice was clear and honest.
+
+Halsey had not spoken, and Susannah asked again, this time of her
+husband, "Can it be wrong to do as this gentleman says?"
+
+The preacher spoke slowly. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the
+Lord."
+
+"But," said the young man eagerly, "the Scripture also says 'There's a
+time for wrath,' and 'he that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
+blood be shed.'"
+
+Halsey rose up. It was a strong moment for him, for he had long seen
+that the spirit of retaliation, following hard on the spirit of defence,
+was the coming curse of his beloved church, and had prayed that he might
+be the means of helping to ward it off. Here was one asking counsel who
+from the strength of his person and character might have influence among
+the avengers of blood, yet with his helpless wife and child beside him
+none felt more keenly than Halsey the force of the Danite's arguments,
+and none knew better the multitude of Scripture prophecies that could be
+brought up in support of them. In the strength of his need this man, who
+had been spending the precious time of many a hardly-won audience in
+dwelling on obscure poesies in books held sacred, now seemed to step
+forth into a sudden illumination of truth just as he stepped from the
+shadow of the poplar bole into the light of the fire.
+
+"Friend, I did wrong to answer you in this matter from any part of
+Scripture save from the mouth of our most blessed Lord himself, for he
+alone is the gate by which we must enter into life, and I would have you
+to consider most carefully his life and words, and find out if there be
+any promise of blessedness to those who strike back when they are
+struck, or any command to punish the evil-doer, or any example for such
+punishment. But if you would be more manly and more gallant than the
+Saviour of the world, I tell you it must be at your own peril, for he
+alone is the gate of that road which leads to everlasting life."
+
+There was a silence for some long moments. Embers in the fire broke and
+fell; the horses cropped the grass; a nut or twig dropped somewhere
+among the adjacent trees.
+
+"Well," said the young Danite reflectively, "if that's it, I guess I'll
+have to take my fling first and seek salvation after; but Smith and
+Rigdon don't only preach that sort of Gospel now; they are all for the
+Old Testament kind of thing, and the destroying angels in the
+Revelations."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+So near came the rumours of war that the Mormons of Haun's Mill entered
+into a renewed compact of mutual peace with the Gentiles around them.
+The place was about twenty miles below the town of Far West, on the same
+stream of Shoal Creek. Around Far West the roads presently became very
+dangerous, haunted, it was said, by armed parties of bloodthirsty
+Gentiles who lay in wait for trains of Mormon emigrants coming from the
+east to the prophet's city. All travellers became alarmed; Halsey
+remained where he was; the people of the place accepted his pastoral
+services gladly. A train of Gentile emigrants also waited at Haun's Mill
+for the cessation of hostilities.
+
+These emigrants were quiet folk and had children with them. Susannah
+used to go out upon sunny days with her sturdy yearling, talking to all
+mothers, Gentile or Mormon, who carried little children. The beauty of
+the season, the cloudless sun, gilded these few peaceful days. Susannah
+compared her child with other children, marvelled at the baby
+intercourse he held with them, at the likes and dislikes displayed among
+these pigmy associates; and the other mothers had like sources of
+interest in these interviews.
+
+One among the emigrants, a dark-eyed woman of about forty years of age,
+was of better position and education than the others. One morning she
+noticed Susannah's child very kindly, speaking of things that did not
+lie on the surface of life.
+
+"There is a seeking look in his eyes," the lady said; "he smiles, he
+plays with us all, but he looks beyond for something. I have seen that
+look in the eyes of children who were in pain, but yours is at ease."
+
+"He has his father's eyes," Susannah sighed. "My husband is always
+looking for a virtue that seems to me impossible."
+
+Both women turned toward an open grassy space in the midst of the
+clustered houses where Halsey was now standing, Bible in hand, teaching
+a little group of children to repeat the beatitudes. Only four children,
+one sickly boy and three girls, were willing to stand and repeat the
+lesson; others had straggled away and were shouting at their play.
+
+Not far from where Halsey stood some fifteen of the neighbours had
+gathered together to put up a new wooden house; piles of sweet-smelling
+deal lay about them as they worked.
+
+Just then on the road from Far West a horse bearing an old man was seen
+straining itself to the swiftest gallop. The old man began to shout as
+he came within hearing. No one could understand what he said. He
+shouted more loudly, and many women ran out of their doors to see his
+arrival. Before his words were articulate a cloud of dust was seen
+rising round a turning of the same road, and a large company of horsemen
+came swiftly into view.
+
+The old man's voice was raised in a cry, but only the accent of terror
+was intelligible. He threw himself off his horse, brandishing his arms.
+Afterwards it was known that he wanted the villagers to take refuge in
+their houses, but now they only stared the more at him and at the small
+army that was approaching.
+
+Susannah heard a shot; then she was deafened by the sound of a volley of
+muskets. Paralysed, she stood staring down the road, unable to believe
+that the two or three hundred mounted men had deliberately levelled
+their muskets and fired. Then all around her she became aware of shrieks
+and sobs and prayers that went up to God. The brown-eyed Gentile lady
+who stood beside her had fallen in a curious attitude at her feet.
+
+Susannah darted into the emigrants' tent and, putting down the child,
+dragged the lady within. She perceived to her horror that the lady was
+shot; the bullet had passed through her neck. Not knowing whether she
+was dead or dying, Susannah stretched her on the floor. Then she lifted
+her hands above her head, wrung them together in agony of nerve and
+thought. She remembered afterwards looking upward in the cave of the
+warm tent and saying aloud "O God! O God!" many times.
+
+The first thing she saw was her child standing watching her; both his
+little brown fists were full of flowers. Hearing the sound of horses
+trampling near, loud voices, and occasional shots, she bethought her
+that the canvas of the tent was no protection for the child, and,
+snatching him in her arms, she ran madly out into the sunshine and into
+the open war.
+
+A large number of the horsemen had already passed on down the road; the
+sounds that came from them seemed to be of oaths and laughter. A number
+were still galloping in and out among the houses; the ground was strewed
+with bodies of the dead and wounded; the able-bodied, it seemed, must
+have suddenly huddled within their doors.
+
+Susannah remembered her husband now, remembered where he had been
+standing. She forgot all else; she rushed toward the middle of the
+green, drawing back only when some of the horsemen dashed across her
+path to follow their fellows. They stared at her and, as they went,
+called to some who were still behind them.
+
+One of these came on, checked his horse, and looked in Susannah's face
+insultingly. No doubt her eyes were dazed, and she looked to him like a
+mad woman, but she remembered afterwards that the child showed anger
+and babbled that the horseman was a bad man. At this the rider took out
+his pistol and pointed it at the child and fired and rode off laughing.
+
+Susannah saw the young Danite bending over her. His words were hoarse
+and so sorrowful that she gathered from their tone that she was in great
+distress before she understood their purport or memory awoke. "Ma'am,"
+he said, "I'll take you down to your own waggon by the creek."
+
+She found herself sitting on the ground, her child in her arms. The
+child was dead; she knew that as soon as she looked at him. There was a
+little trickle of blood upon the light frock over his heart, but not
+much.
+
+As yet no women, only a few men, had ventured forth, and the sound of
+the enemy's horses and shouting were still in the air. Susannah rose up,
+folding in her arms the body of the child; the momentum of her first
+intention was upon her will and muscles; she moved straight on toward
+the place where she had last seen Halsey.
+
+The young Danite took hold of her sleeve when he perceived whither she
+went.
+
+"'Tisn't no use, ma'am. Some of the brothers have attended to him."
+
+Susannah looked straight in the young man's face with perfect courage.
+"Is he dead?"
+
+But the Danite had not courage for this; he turned away and put his arm
+over his eyes; she heard him grind his teeth in dumb passion.
+
+Some of the men and women lying on the grass were moaning or screaming
+with the pain of their injuries. The thought that Halsey might be in
+like pain made Susannah imperative. "Is he dead?" she asked again in
+precise repetition of tone and accent. "Is he dead?"
+
+The Danite lifted his head. "He is quite dead, and I marked the man that
+did it, and I marked the man that did this too." He touched reverently,
+not the child, but the wilting asters that were still grasped in the
+baby hand. "If I'd only had a gun--but"--he ground his teeth again and
+muttered, "God helping me, they shall both die."
+
+Susannah understood nothing then but the first part of this speech.
+
+By this time many of the women and children had again flocked out of the
+houses. It was reported that the horsemen had been a detachment of State
+militia, that one of them had taken the trouble to explain to a wounded
+man that they had received orders from Governor Boggs to exterminate the
+Mormons. Immediately by other frightened tongues it was stated that the
+armed company were halting round the turn of the road, intending to
+return and shoot again when the people had come out from shelter. At
+this the greater number made a stampede for a thicket of poplar and
+willow saplings that was near the creek. The Danite still held by
+Susannah's sleeve.
+
+"Where is my husband?" she again asked. She had not moved since he last
+spoke to her.
+
+Some men were busy laying the dead, of whom there were eighteen, on the
+floor of a shed which was not far off. Susannah and the Danite moved
+about together and found Halsey lying still on the green, his limbs
+decently composed, his eyes for ever shut. The bearers were about to
+lift him, but the Danite interposed. He had an excited fancy concerning
+Susannah's dead and what must be done for them. He lifted Halsey easily
+in both his arms and walked away, Susannah following with the dead
+child.
+
+Without a word they went till they came to Halsey's camp. Nothing had
+been touched since Susannah left in the morning. The Danite, remembering
+the camp as he had seen it a few evenings before, looked about him now
+curiously, and laid Halsey down on the very spot where he had stood to
+plead for a divine righteousness.
+
+It was not a time for words. Having deposited his burden, he looked to
+Susannah, but she had no directions to give. She sat down beside her
+husband, as though preparing to remain.
+
+"I thought you'd like to lay them both out here, but I guess I ought to
+get you into the bush, ma'am."
+
+"I will stay here," she said; "you had better go to help some one else."
+
+The cries of the wounded were still heard from the vicinity of the
+houses. A crowd of the uninjured people were to be seen making their way
+through the first bushes of the thicket. They seemed to be carrying the
+wounded thither, for men bearing shutters, and doors upon which the sick
+were stretched now started in the direction of the bush. There was need
+for help, as the Danite well saw; then, too, inactivity was torture. He
+left Susannah and ran back to bear his part in the common task.
+
+When almost every other living soul was lost in the close thicket he
+came again, approaching the camp with soft footsteps, peering anxiously.
+Susannah had laid the child in his father's arms. Their enemies seemed
+to have taken aim for the heart, for Halsey's wound was also there. She
+had so laid the child within his arms, heart to heart, that no sign of
+injury appeared. She sat by them now, sobbing her tearless sobs,
+stroking gently, sometimes the hair of the child, more often the thick
+locks of light hair that lay above her husband's brow. She was talking
+to them between her sobs in rapid phrases exactly as if they were not
+dead. The young Danite was sure that she had lost her wits; he leant
+against a tree confounded.
+
+Susannah was saying, "I wanted to keep baby, Angel, I wanted so much to
+keep him, but I could not have taught him your way; there was no use
+telling you that before, for you could not understand. When you told me
+that you would go you did not tell me you meant to take baby. You have
+the best right to him, dear, he is all yours, but oh! remember--remember
+that I will be very lonely--very lonely--O Angel." There were a few
+moments of wordless moans and sobs, but she went on clearly enough, "I
+want you to know, Angel, that I never was disappointed in you--never
+disappointed in you, dear; and about my lack of faith--it would have
+been no use to tell you before, would it?"
+
+She took her hand from Halsey's hair and played a moment with the rings
+of gold on the baby's head lying on his breast. She laid her hand upon
+Halsey's hands that she had clasped together above the child. "It is
+better for you to have baby with you. I could not have taught him your
+thoughts. It is better, dear, isn't it?"
+
+The earnest inflection of her voice in these interrogations brought so
+wild a sense of pathos to the Danite's heart that his eyes filled with
+tears and brimmed over, but Susannah's sobs were like a nervous gasping
+of which she was scarcely conscious, and no hint of tears.
+
+She lightly touched the baby hand that was lying on its father's
+shoulder, still grasping the blue blossoms. "See," she sobbed, "he has
+brought his flowers to you; he always loved you best."
+
+There had been a great silence in the air about them, but now there was
+again the sound of firing at the distance of about a mile. The Danite's
+pulses leaped, but he did not, because of that, allow himself to speak
+or move.
+
+Susannah spoke again, resting her hand on Halsey's brow, "You know,
+dear, I don't know whether you and baby are anywhere--anywhere"; wildly,
+as if the appalling loneliness of its meaning had flashed upon her
+dulled brain, she repeated the word.
+
+The Danite's sympathy rose within him; he staggered forward and bent
+over her. "Don't, ma'am," he said, "don't go on talking like that. I was
+with my own mother when she died, when I was a little chap, and I know
+how it is, and you'd much better try to shed tears, ma'am, indeed you
+had."
+
+Susannah lifted to him a blank face, disturbed but uncomprehending.
+
+He decided what to do; the thought of action restored him. He ran with
+all his might back to the houses, and, finding a pick and spade, came
+again. This time, more confident of himself, he had more control over
+Susannah.
+
+"We must make the grave right here, ma'am, and do you go and gather some
+flowers to put on it, for we must just put them two away out of sight
+before the devils come back. It's what he would want, you know." He
+pointed to Halsey and repeated the words until she understood.
+
+It even seemed a relief to her then to move about too, and find that
+there was something she could do, but she did not obey him blindly.
+While in a soft place close by he delved with might and main, displacing
+the earth with incredible speed, Susannah, sobbing all the time, but
+tearless, went into the waggon and brought out certain things which she
+chose with care--a locked box, the best garments belonging to herself,
+her husband, and child, and the baby's toys.
+
+It was no neat gravedigger's work that the Danite accomplished; he had
+made a deep, large hole, but the cavity sloped at the sides so that they
+could step in and out. Susannah brought her little store and lined the
+earth first with the garments.
+
+"You may want some of those things of your own, ma'am," said the Danite.
+
+She paid no heed; when she had made the couch to her mind she signed to
+him to lay Halsey and the child in it, which he did. She herself stooped
+in the grave to clasp the dead man's hands more tightly over the little
+one's form, and her last touch was to stroke Halsey's hair from off the
+brow. She laid the baby playthings at Halsey's feet; she unlocked the
+box and took from it all the household treasures that so far she had
+sought to keep--some silver, a few small ornaments, a few books, and
+Halsey's Book of Mormon, in which was written their marriage and the
+baby's birth. She brought a silken shawl, the one bit of finery that
+remained from her girlish days. She covered her dead with it very
+carefully, tucking it in as though they slept; then she moved away,
+wringing her hands and heaving convulsive sighs. The Danite put back the
+earth.
+
+All the grass was strewn pretty thickly with poplar leaves, gold, lined
+with white, and after leaning against a tree some minutes looking away
+from the grave, Susannah began gathering up these leaves hastily, so
+that when he levelled the earth she could strew the top, hiding the
+place from the curious eyes of strangers.
+
+"I guess, ma'am, if there's anything you would like to take with you
+now, we'd better go into the bush."
+
+"No, there is nothing, but," she cried, "I thank you very much, and if
+there is anything that would be of use to you--"
+
+When the Danite had first laid Halsey under the tree he had taken a
+white cloth from the tent and wiped the blood from the coat, that
+Susannah might not be too much shocked at the sight. He took this cloth
+now and tore it till the stained fragment alone remained in his hand. He
+thrust it in his breast.
+
+"This will stand for the blood of them both," he said. "I guess that's
+all I want." But when he had started towards the thicket he remembered
+Susannah's needs, and went back for a blanket.
+
+The poplar saplings that bordered the creek were still holding a thin
+gold canopy overhead, and the dogwood was glinting with scarlet. The
+other members of the community had gone so far ahead that it was a long
+time before, making their toilsome way, they came upon their former
+neighbours.
+
+The fugitives had called a halt where a brook which passed through the
+bush offered some relief to the pain and fever of those who were
+wounded. One of these, a little girl, had already died by the way, and
+her frantic mother began to reproach Susannah, wailing that if the child
+had not been saying her texts to the elder she would not have been a
+mark for the enemy.
+
+The men were cutting down saplings to make place for a camp. It was
+their intention to remain, going back under the cover of night to get
+food and blankets from the houses, if they were not pillaged and burned,
+going back in any case to bury their dead at the first streak of dawn.
+
+The Danite turned to Susannah. "I guess, ma'am, neither you nor I have
+got any business to take us back, and there's enough of the brothers
+here to do the work."
+
+Susannah went on with the young man through hour after hour of the
+afternoon farther and farther into the unknown fastnesses of the wood.
+They left behind them the low thicket of second growth, and penetrated
+into an uncleared Missouri forest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+All the powers of the young Danite were strung by excitement into the
+fiercest vitality, and he thought that physical fatigue was the best
+medicine for Susannah's mind. Why he had accepted the work of saving her
+as part of his mission of Mormon defence he did not ask himself. In him,
+as in many athletes, thought and action seemed one. He acted because he
+acted; he knew no other reason.
+
+In the middle of the night Susannah woke up. The stars glimmered above
+the trees; she was lying on a heap of autumn leaves wrapped in the
+blanket. Sitting up, she remembered slowly the events of the preceding
+day.
+
+Her movement had caused another movement at some distance. The Danite,
+sleeping on the alert like soldier or huntsman, was roused by the first
+sound she made, and when she continued to sit up he came near in the
+glimmering light. She saw his dark form where he tarried a few paces
+away.
+
+"You're all safe, ma'am. Can't you go on sleeping?"
+
+A watch of the night often brings to recollection some duty forgotten
+during the day. "Do you know where Elvira Halsey is?"
+
+"The young lady with the brown eyes that I have sometimes seen you with,
+ma'am?"
+
+"Yes." Then Susannah added with the weak detail of a wretched mind, "She
+isn't very young."
+
+"Was she any relation to you, ma'am? Were you very affectionate with
+her?"
+
+Susannah explained the relationship.
+
+The Danite thought, "If I tell her she's there she'll think it her duty
+to trapse back all the way to find her; she's that sort." Therefore,
+judging that a minor grief could not make much difference, he gave it as
+his opinion that Elvira was dead. At this Susannah shed tears for the
+first time, which eased his anxiety not a little.
+
+Susannah did not know the Danite's name; it never occurred to her to ask
+him any question about himself.
+
+At dawn they started again upon their tramp. The man knew the country,
+and when the sun was up he brought Susannah out of the forest to a
+settler's farm. She was faint now for want of food, walking again, as
+she had walked last night, with vacant eyes and dull mechanical tread.
+
+The Danite made her sit down upon a stone near the house, and brought a
+woman to her who carried bread and milk. Susannah ate and drank without
+speaking.
+
+"My! but she's tired," said the farmer's wife. "It's a cruel shame to
+make her walk so far; you're not a good husband to her, I'm thinking."
+
+Having satisfied her need, Susannah turned away dully without a word.
+The settler's wife offered the remainder of the bread and milk to the
+Danite, who regarded it with famished eyes.
+
+"Where's your husband?" he asked.
+
+"We've enough men about the place."
+
+"Where is your husband?"
+
+"He's away with the militia under Lucas."
+
+"Then I'll not touch his food," said the Danite. With an oath he flung
+the cup and plate upon the ground. "Do you see that woman there?" He
+pointed to Susannah. "I took the food for her, for she had died without
+it. Yesterday devils like your husband shot her child in her arms and
+her husband before her eyes, and to Almighty God I pray that when I've
+got her to some safe place I may have strength yet to shoot your husband
+and your children, shoot them down like dogs, and laugh at you because
+you don't like it." The restrained passion of all the long preceding
+hours broke out. His face was ashen, his eyes burning; there was foam
+about his lips as, with thick utterance, he hurled the words at her.
+
+The woman stepped back in dismay, but she, too, was enraged now, and
+courage was the habit of the free life she led. "You are a bloody
+Mormon," she cried, "and if I'd known it I'd have let your woman die
+before I'd have fed her." She walked backwards, her voice rising higher
+with passion. Unable to think connectedly, she shrieked the phrases she
+had in mind. "Coming here to spread idolatry in a Christian country!
+Teaching superstition in a free Christian land!" She was still shrieking
+some jargon about the United States being founded on the Word of God,
+and the divine right to exterminate all Mormons, when he, walking fast,
+joined Susannah.
+
+They had not gone much further before a large dog which the settler's
+wife had evidently let loose, came after them with fierce intent. The
+Danite turned, and as the dog sprang, slew it with one stab of his
+knife, and, leaving it bleeding upon the road, hurried Susannah into the
+forest.
+
+It was a tradition upon that farm for years afterwards that these two
+Mormons, after receiving charity, had made an open display of that
+wanton wickedness which was habitual to them.
+
+Susannah and the Danite travelled on for many hours. The way was not
+easy. Sometimes where the trees were thin their legs were tangled
+knee-deep in a plant covered with minute white feathery blossoms,
+looking like white swan's-down shot through with green light, that
+carpeted miles of the ground; sometimes the trees had fallen so thickly
+that they had to clamber from log to log rather than walk; sometimes
+their way was a bog, and they were in danger of sinking deeper than was
+safe.
+
+Susannah asked no questions. She had heard and understood all the words
+that had passed in the incident of the morning. She felt cowed now,
+afraid to think what might come next; it was enough that the Danite had
+evidently some point in view.
+
+About four in the afternoon they left the forest and came 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 divine counsel in which he asked her to believe; his answer was to
+send her Bushnell's sermons on the suffering of God. Ephraim had added:
+"When you went from us, Susy, would you ever have been satisfied if we
+had detained you by force? Yet that is what you ask of God. If you were
+right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it
+appear by time. So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in;
+so also has every human friendship. Let us wait, but in faith." This
+ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so
+often that she knew the words by heart.
+
+The next letter had been written more recently, after a long interval.
+At the end of this letter Ephraim had said, "I am persuaded that what we
+need to help our faith is never more knowledge, but always more love. I
+cannot interpret this but by telling you of a fact which I feel to be
+the key to a great--the greatest--truth. I know a man who believed in
+God. He met a woman whom he loved, not as many love, but (I know not
+why) with all the loves of his heart, as father, as mother, as brother,
+friend, might love; as lover he loved her with all these loves. After
+that he knew God with a knowledge that passed belief. He could argue no
+more, but he _knew_. This I think is the sort of knowledge which guides
+unerringly." Susannah remembered, if not the words, all that this
+passage contained. She had wondered at it not a little.
+
+Up to the time of Angel's death she had rejoiced in these letters, not
+doubting that Ephraim had remained the same self-sacrificing
+friend--ready out of mere but perfect kindness to befriend her to the
+uttermost. She had not doubted because she had not questioned. Now
+disquieting thoughts intervened, producing a new shyness. She remembered
+their last interview, and wondered if Ephraim would feel the same
+responsibility for her if she returned destitute. Perhaps the ardour of
+his friendship had cooled. Perhaps in the last letter he had intended to
+suggest to her that he thought of marriage, and this time for love, not
+kindness, the lady being one of his new Hartford friends.
+
+But no doubt the principal reason of Susannah's dalliance with time in
+those first weeks of her moral freedom was the mental weakness that
+succeeds shock. Every day she thought that she would soon write that
+begging letter, until the day came when opportunity ceased.
+
+When the Danite left he had promised the farmer to return as soon as it
+was possible to place Susannah in safety with her Mormon friends. When
+she began to speak of leaving, her host told her this for the first
+time.
+
+"And what is the young man's name?" the old man asked of Susannah. They
+were in the long living-room at the mid-day meal. His sons, who were
+leaving the table, waited to hear the answer; the mother, the very
+children, looked at her with interest.
+
+"I do not know," said Susannah.
+
+There was a pause, and for the first time she was aware that there was
+some sentiment in the minds of her hearers which did not appear upon the
+surface.
+
+She went on, "I don't know why he should trouble himself to come back
+for me except that--I think that he was much touched by some earnest
+words my husband said to him that he did not see his way to accept, and
+I think also that he is zealous for the Church."
+
+Her surpassing wrongs had so far set her apart and made all that she
+said and did sacred. No one questioned her further.
+
+In the beginning of February the Danite reappeared. He came under the
+cover of night, but showed himself only when the household was awake. He
+was much thinner, more gaunt than before, but in frankness and quietude
+the same. His first words to Susannah had an import she did not expect.
+
+"That young lady you mentioned to me--I said she was dead because you
+were half crazy, and would have gone back to her, but I worked round
+till I found her; she got to the city of Far West right enough."
+
+After a while he said, "That young lady and some other of our folks have
+got horses and they're going into Illinois now. Most of our folks are
+walking. It's about as bad as can be, but I guess you'll have to go.
+We'll be safe enough, for as long as we go straight on the Gentiles are
+bound to let us pass. I tried to get some better sort of a way for you
+and her, but there ain't no way unless we would have sworn we weren't
+Saints and gone pretending to be Gentiles, but even then we haven't got
+the money."
+
+Susannah was thrilled with excited distress. She was not prepared to
+make an abrupt decision, and it appeared that if she desired to join
+this company she must go that evening or not at all.
+
+During the hours of the morning her mind cowered, dismayed. Should she
+now renounce her husband's sect, refusing to suffer with them? She had
+not as yet fortitude to do this. Halsey's eyes, the touch of his hand,
+her baby's voice lisping the tenets of their faith in repetition of his
+father's solemn tones, these were sights and sounds as yet too near her.
+To her shocked fancy the child and his father were only gone out of
+sight, but near enough to be cruelly hurt by her public perversion. And,
+moreover, if she should take this course she must write to Ephraim at
+once, for she could not well remain where she was without definite
+purpose in view.
+
+Susannah had sought seclusion in which to think, and the younger son of
+the house intruded himself. He was perhaps about thirty years of age, a
+burly man, resolute and passionate. He spoke fairly enough. The Danite
+himself had said that the journey to which she was haled by her friends
+was one of untold hardship, its end uncertain; he offered her all that
+an honest and prosperous man could offer, but went on to urge on his own
+behalf the strength of those sentiments which he had learned to
+entertain for her--his admiration (Susannah sickened at the word), his
+love (she shrank in fear).
+
+She rose up with the moan of a hunted thing. She did not pause to make
+excuses for the hunter, to consider the pioneer life that wots little of
+sentiment in proportion to utility; she only saw again the grave at
+Haun's Mill and the white faces of her dead upturned to hers. It seemed
+that this man, with the consent of his people, was urging his suit as it
+were beside the very corpse of her husband. The Danite had shown Angel
+reverence, had shown by his every word and glance that he counted her as
+belonging to the dead man whose blood he carried at his heart.
+
+Susannah rode out from that temporary home at nightfall upon the
+Danite's horse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+It was the season of rain and sleet, of rude northerly winds. The roads,
+across a tract of flat fields and in among the low woods that fringed
+the rivers, were heavy with mud.
+
+After riding half the night on a pillion behind the Danite, Susannah
+entered the Mormon camp. Up and down the sides of a dirty road, in
+waggons, in small tents, and in the open, men, women, and children were
+lying huddled in family groups. How far these crowds extended she could
+not see. Watch-fires were burning here and there, and in the fields on
+either side a patrol of Missouri militia were heard scoffing and
+shouting in the darkness. The Danite answered the challenge of one of
+these men with apparent meekness; Susannah perceived that he had gained
+in self-control. When they had entered the road, along the sides of
+which the forlorn multitude lay, they travelled for some way upon it,
+the Danite speaking in low tones now and then to the Mormon watchers. At
+length they came to a place where a few waggons of better description
+were standing and a number of horses were tied; here he lifted Susannah
+from the horse. Three of the Mormon leaders came up; they evidently
+knew her and her story. The eldest took her hand and spoke in broken
+tones of the crown which Halsey had won in the unseen city of God.
+
+These were the first words that Susannah had heard in unison with
+Halsey's own thoughts, and for his sake they endeared the whole wretched
+Mormon encampment to her.
+
+A woman, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl, sprang down from one
+of the waggons, and Elvira encountered Susannah.
+
+"You expect me to say that I am sorry for you," she said hurriedly; "I
+will not. It is not a time for grief. We each of us have just so much
+power of being sorry and no more, and the well has gone dry. I am glad
+you have come. There are a great many things that one can yet be a
+little glad for; but you must make haste to lie down, for we shall soon
+enough be called to the march."
+
+The beds shaken down on the floor of the waggon were covered with
+reclining women. Some of them squeezed themselves together to make the
+place Elvira had vacated large enough for two. Susannah stretched
+herself out, loathing with her senses the crowded bed, but with a tender
+heart for her fellow-sufferers. After the long dumb weeks of her stern
+sorrow, after that day's revolt of injured sentiment, she felt that it
+was worth while to have come here if only to have made some one else, as
+Elvira had said, "a little glad."
+
+The dawn came sighing fitfully, long sighs that rose in the distant
+fields to the east meeting them in their pilgrimage and dying away
+westward; the dawn wept also, scattering her tears upon them in like
+transient showers.
+
+Elvira found her own horse. The Danite had used yesterday the animal he
+had provided for Susannah.
+
+"But what right have I to his horse?" Susannah began her question
+impetuously, but Elvira silenced her.
+
+"Hush! Don't let the other women know that it isn't yours. Poor things,
+they will begin to ask why it isn't theirs. Do you think that we are
+living on bowing terms, curtseying to each other and saying, 'After you,
+madam, if you please'?"
+
+Elvira was changed. Terror had at last done its work. Her pretty
+features were drawn with anxiety; her eye glittered.
+
+"I have been baptized," she said to Susannah in hard tones. "When I saw
+the water red with blood I went down into it."
+
+Eastward, facing the gusty sobs of the winter morning, they went. The
+road was soft, and hundreds of feet treading in front of them had
+kneaded water and earth together into a slippery mass. As far as could
+be seen in front and behind, the line of the pilgrimage stretched, women
+and children plodding with burdens on their backs, men pushing
+hand-carts before them, only here and there a waggon or a group of
+horses.
+
+Elvira took up several children on her horse, and pointed out to
+Susannah a sickly woman to whom she could give a turn upon the pillion
+that she herself had ridden during the night. So they began one of many
+weary days.
+
+To the good the necessities of compassion are as strong as are the
+necessities of selfishness to the wicked. Within a day or two both
+Susannah and Elvira had given up their horses entirely to women who had
+been taken ill by the way. At first they plodded arm in arm, thinking
+that merely to walk was all that their strength could endure; but there
+were other women who had children to carry, women even who must push
+hand-carts before them, and there were little children who sank one by
+one exhausted on the winter road, as lambs fall when their mothers are
+driven far.
+
+After the march had continued for a few days there was much illness. All
+clothing and bedding was wet with the winter rain, chilled and stiff
+with the frosts. On the faces of many the unnatural flush and excitement
+of fever were seen, and other faces grew pallid, the lips blue or dark,
+and the eyes sunken. To all who retained the natural hue and pulses of
+health a heavier burden was added every day because of the help they
+must needs give if they would not bury too many of their comrades by the
+wayside. In that sad caravan souls were born into the world or freed
+from it by death almost every hour.
+
+Susannah was greatly struck by the meek manner of the boldest and
+roughest of the Mormon leaders in their dealings with the parties of
+Missouri militia who, with the ostensible purpose of defending Missouri
+homesteads from Mormon violence, drove the stricken multitude as with
+goads. She had learned from her husband what the strength of true
+meekness could be, the lightness of heart which commits itself to God,
+who judgeth righteously, the glance of love that has no reserve of
+hatred, the infinite force that can afford to be gentle. Such a spirit
+had upheld Angel Halsey, but his widow looked in vain among the leaders
+of this band for a face that bespoke the same upholding. She soon
+perceived that there was among them a free-masonry of understanding, and
+that their mildness was assumed to serve the temporary purpose. By many
+a prayer she heard breathed, which was in truth, though not in form, a
+curse, she knew that in the souls of Halsey's successors there was no
+forgiveness, yet her heart went out in sympathy to men who were
+sacrificing their own sense of honour, holding in check their most
+delicious impulses of revenge, for the sake of being worthy shepherds to
+the weak.
+
+"Do you love them the less because they are not angels?" asked Elvira.
+"Have you forgiven?"
+
+Susannah shuddered at the intensity of the hard low tones, the passion
+in the word "love," the sneer in the word "forgive." Yet she knew that
+the rage against injustice which in youth had driven her forth upon this
+journey had, since the death of her child, changed into such fierce
+hatred of the persecutors that she could, except for very fear of
+herself, have taken upon her own soul the Danite's vow. In these days
+the pain of bodily suffering or heart-felt grief was as nothing compared
+with her agony when at times waves of this hatred passed over her heart.
+
+The two friends were walking together, pushing before them a small cart
+in which, on the top of the bundles of household goods, a wretched woman
+and her newborn child were lying, covered under a scanty tarpauling from
+the driving sleet. The mud splashed beneath their feet; Susannah had
+little breath or strength for speech. Elvira, more slightly made, in
+every way more fragile, had seemed to develop, with every new phase of
+suffering, more strength of muscle and hatred and love.
+
+They passed now two of the leaders. It was the custom for a certain
+number of these men to go forward and station themselves in pairs at
+intervals upon the road, cheering each group as it passed them, noting
+with careful eyes if any ill could be remedied by change of posture or
+exchange of burdens. One of them now, seeing the work to which Susannah
+had set herself, interfered. He was about sixty years of age, coarse in
+appearance, an elder whose wife and family Susannah knew by reputation.
+He and his fellows called a halt, looking for some man who might push
+the cart, but there was none within sight who was not already
+overburdened, nor was there a waggon that was not already overfilled
+with the sick and exhausted. The elder, whose name happened to be
+Darling, found in this particular instance reason to swerve from his
+position of guard. He left the post in charge of his fellow and pushed
+the cart. It was a habit with many of these leaders to seek to lighten
+the way by jocularities, and Susannah had before observed that, whether
+the jests arose with ease or effort from the heavy hearts of those who
+made them, a large proportion of the people were evidently cheered
+thereby. She could put aside her own tastes for the public good; she
+could even excuse when this rough comfort was offered to herself.
+Darling, labouring behind the cart, made light of the service he
+rendered.
+
+He said first that the newborn babe must be called after him, and when
+he learned its sex he gave permission to the ladies to decide between
+them which should share this honour.
+
+"Shall it be 'darling Susannah'?" he asked, making gentle his tone as he
+addressed the stately widow, "or shall it be 'Elvira darling'?" This
+time he turned his head with a broader smile toward Elvira's sharp
+little features.
+
+Susannah felt that her hypersensitive nerves could almost have called
+his smile a leer; but she looked at the man's broad face, whose lines
+told of no resources of thought, no great natural capacity for heroism,
+and yet were furrowed by the sharpness of this persecution. The face
+would have been fat had it not been half-starved. It was pale now under
+the ill-kempt hair, and the set purpose of helpfulness was stamped upon
+it. She took back the word "leer" out of mere respect. Darling had given
+away his shoes; he was walking barefoot; he had given away coat and vest
+also, and the rotund lines of his figure were unpleasantly obvious under
+the wet shirt, and yet Susannah knew and bowed to the fact that some
+sick man or little child was wrapped in the garments that were gone.
+
+But Elvira was expressing with hysterical warmth the same sentiments.
+
+"I guess I'll feel it an honour to have my name joined with yours. I
+haven't got the length of taking off my shoes yet."
+
+Darling began to sing one of the inspiriting Mormon hymns.
+
+    "When Joseph to Cumorah came."
+
+"Poor Joe!" Elvira spoke to the elder in a confidential whisper, "when
+he cheated over the bank I thought some fiend had put a ring in his
+nose, and was leading him out to dance, and that I should be able to sit
+and laugh. Now he's lying upon straw in the gaol. What will they do to
+him if they lynch him?"
+
+"Tear him limb from limb," whispered Darling, also under his breath. He
+was probably shrewd enough to know the force of Smith's suffering in
+stimulating the piety of the faithful, but truth, and grief concerning
+the truth, were in his words also. He sighed a big sincere sigh, and
+repeated sadly, "Tear him limb from limb, or burn him to death by a slow
+fire." Such atrocities, as practised upon criminal negroes, were not
+unknown in the locality, which gave the elder's words a graphic power,
+but Elvira's answer was wholly unexpected.
+
+"How droll!" she returned.
+
+The elder was annoyed. He had not refined susceptibilities which sought
+immediate relief from the dreadful pictures he had suggested, nor did he
+at all comprehend that her rippling smile was hysterical. "I don't see
+anything droll about it, sister," he said sulkily.
+
+"Don't you? Now, it all seems to me very droll--you splashing along
+there barefoot, why" (she drew back a little to get the better view,
+laughing excitedly), "you've no idea how ridiculous you look; and Mrs.
+Halsey stalking along like a dignified ghost, afraid that you and I will
+kiss one another if we take to whispering, and this woman dying here
+with her head resting on a sack of potatoes, and the impudent little
+person you've just christened intruding herself upon the world only to
+go out of it again, and all these fine people in Missouri rubbing their
+hands and thinking they have done such a noble deed. I think," she
+added, laughing more loudly, "that they are the drollest part of it
+all."
+
+"This nation will find that there's a sequel to it that they won't laugh
+at." These words of Darling came from some region underneath that of his
+ordinary conversation, as a man takes a dagger from under his cloak and
+lets it flash ere he hides it again. "The government of these United
+States that has laughed at our sufferings will rue the day."
+
+"Even your saying that is very droll, but I love you for it." Elvira
+lifted both her hands as if testifying to her own sincerity. "I love you
+for it."
+
+The elder thought it needful here to be again jocose. "Oh, come now, I
+am married."
+
+Elvira did not feel herself insulted. "These United States," she cried,
+"they cackle over the word 'freedom' like so many hens that have each of
+them laid an egg and go strutting and boasting while the housewife
+empties their nests. The housewife represents the natural course of
+events, and in this case her name is 'Mrs. Mobocracy.'"
+
+At other times, after a long period of silence, Elvira would burst forth
+in excited soliloquy audible to Susannah and others about her. On the
+last day when they were descending the hills to the Mississippi her
+increasing excitement culminated in a greater demonstration. The sun was
+shining, and a clear frost had hardened the roads. Elvira broke forth
+thus--
+
+"It is Joe Smith who is conducting this march. We say that he is lying
+in gaol," she laughed. "In gaol is he? Have they got him safe? But it
+was he who taught all these men to work together, one under the other,
+and none of them kicking; and it was he who taught these women and
+children to do as they are bid--a wonderful thing that in the land of
+the free. It was he who taught one and all of us to be kind to each
+other, to the poor and the sick and the young, to the very beasts. Do
+you remember that when they caught our prophet at Hiram and dragged him
+out to be beaten and insulted, they had first to take from his arms a
+sick motherless baby that he was sitting up all night to nurse? Do you
+remember how he gave commandment about the animals? how he said that any
+man striking a beast in anger was thrown so far back on his road to
+heaven?" She paused when she had thrown out this question, and the men
+and women within hearing answered in broken chorus, "Yes, blessed be the
+Lord; we do remember."
+
+"And who was it that taught us to give up the filthy Gentile habits of
+strong drink and tobacco?" (Again in the pause the chorus of
+thanksgiving to Heaven was heard.) "It was Joe Smith," Elvira cried more
+loudly. "And when the Gentiles thought that we would be scattered and
+separated and ruined, his spirit has gone like a banner before us.
+Twice they have taken our lands that we bought with our own money and
+cleared with our own hands, and the houses that we have built, and cast
+us out destitute, but we are not destroyed."
+
+The enthusiasm of the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to
+her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her
+small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down,
+but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a prophet, and a
+great prophet."
+
+And the people around her answered again, "Blessed be the name of the
+Lord."
+
+It was whispered about the camp that the spirit of prophecy had fallen
+upon Elvira Halsey.
+
+On the afternoon of that day they saw the ice that floated in large
+cakes on the breast of the Mississippi flash back the sunbeams to their
+straining eyes. The sight of the limits of the hostile State from which
+they were flying was a great joy to every one of them. Susannah felt her
+heart leap; Elvira, with the growing tendency to cling to her which she
+had displayed since their last meeting, cast her arms around her and
+sobbed for joy.
+
+After this blessed glimpse of the river they went down through the
+recesses of a low forest, the frost and the sunshine still inspiriting
+them. As they went, the melody of a hymn was taken up from one end of
+the caravan to the other by all those well enough to join in the song.
+It was a swinging triumphant air, and Susannah found herself uplifted
+for the first time since the days of her baptism upon the party spirit
+of the sect, and singing with them, although she could only catch the
+words of the refrain often repeated,
+
+    "Missouri,
+    In her lawless fury,
+    Without judge or jury,
+    Drove the Saints and spilt their blood."
+
+Again the mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As
+Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship,
+imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this
+motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of
+reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of
+her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. The
+true secret of human leadership is, perhaps, known only to the Divine
+mind, perhaps also to the Satanic. It would certainly seem that the men
+who chance upon the power and wield it, have often little understanding
+of the law by which they work, and their critics less.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+The Mississippi was filled with large cakes of floating ice. Another
+company which had gone out from Far West some weeks before was still
+encamped on the Missouri banks of the river. Yet other companies from
+Far West came up before the main body of the Saints with which Susannah
+had travelled was able to cross. The surrounding woods were cut down to
+make shanties; the surrounding country was scoured for food. In the
+intervening weeks, while they lay encamped on the banks, the last enemy
+to be vanquished in that region, the malarial fever, grappled with the
+sect and dealt deadly wounds. Illinois, shocked by the cruelty of her
+sister State, held out kind hands and fed the fugitives to some extent,
+and when April came, helped them to cross the river.
+
+Elvira had been ill in one of the women's sheds, now shrieking in hot
+delirium, now shaken with ague as if by a strong beast that worried its
+prey. When they at last crossed the river to the city of Quincy,
+Susannah was established with her charge, the one legacy of relationship
+Halsey had left her, in a meagre home with some of the Saints who
+already lived there.
+
+Within a few days Susannah went to the tithing office, which had been
+swiftly established for the relief of the destitute Saints, and asked
+for paper on which she could write a letter. It was her first chance,
+since leaving her last asylum, of writing the proposed letter to Ephraim
+Croom. Elder Darling was officiating. She fancied that he looked at her
+with rude curiosity.
+
+Until this moment she had presented so sad an exterior, had seemed so
+indifferent to all the ills of their common lot, that Darling and the
+other men who had dealings with her had stood not a little in awe. As
+outward physical details of suffering always appeal more largely to
+common sympathy than inward grief, the manner of her loss had set a
+temporary crown upon her head, to which the elders had knelt, refusing
+to admonish her because she took no part in their public services, or
+because, except for attention to the sick, she did not give much sign of
+social comradeship.
+
+Now when she asked for the paper, Darling felt that the ice was
+beginning to break, and gave what seemed to him genial encouragement.
+
+"First time that you've asked for anything but daily rations, Sister
+Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all
+things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous
+drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to--enjoy. Well now, I
+was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than
+welcome to such as there is."
+
+The stores indeed were scanty enough; food, cloth, household utensils, a
+little stationery, a large pile of devotional books, were arranged in
+meagre order in the shed used as a warehouse. Darling had as yet
+scarcely respectable clothes to wear, but Susannah was astonished only
+at the energy that had in a few days collected so much, at the order and
+patient kindliness which ruled in this poverty-stricken administration.
+Already those who could work paid into the common store, and those who
+had lost all had but to state their needs to have them supplied as well
+as might be.
+
+"One, two, three--will three sheets be enough, Sister Halsey? You've
+been hearing, I suppose, that Mr. Smith is going to be moved to the town
+of Boome, and that he is going to be allowed to get his letters now?
+He'd be real cheered to hear from you, although"--he added this with
+decent haste--"it will be a great grief to him to hear of your loss!"
+
+"Is he well?" she asked.
+
+"The State authorities are in a fine to-do about him, I suppose you
+know, sister, for they can't find a single charge to bring him to trial
+on. You bet the trial would have been on long ago if they'd had a
+single leg to stand on. Anything else that I can serve you with to-day?
+We've got some new women's shawls and hats come in. Won't you just step
+here and have a look at them? No? Well, next time; but there ain't one
+of our women as doesn't want one of them new bonnets."
+
+Susannah went out into the spring on the outskirts of the town. The
+birds were singing; everywhere the dandelions swelled out their happy
+tufted breasts to the sunshine; even a long worm that she noticed
+crawling lazily in the heat spoke to her of enjoyment of some sort. Her
+own heart leaped, and she thought it was in answer to the spring. She
+forgot the dire fates with which she had been grappling, forgot to hate
+and to grieve.
+
+In the small wooden room that she shared with Elvira, while the invalid
+slept, she wrote to Ephraim, telling him all that had befallen her. She
+confessed to Ephraim the passion of hatred which had long tormented her,
+but she added, "To-day I do not feel it; to-day, with the sweet voices
+of the birds everywhere in my ears, I feel that if I could be beside you
+again you could teach me to forgive as my husband forgave, for I do know
+to-day that in forgiveness alone is the true triumph, the only healing.
+I am more one with my husband's sect now than I ever was in heart and
+hope. I long to see it triumphant; I long to see its enemies abashed;
+but I will leave this people and come back to you, if you will have me,
+for with regard to their religious faith my life with them is a lie."
+
+The writing took so long that when she carried the letter again to the
+tithing office to be stamped and sent, the post-bag of that day had
+already gone. Later, when the office was closed to the public and Elder
+Darling was alone, he took up the letter which Susannah had brought and
+looked at it curiously. His eyes had caught the address. He was not sure
+that he would have put it in the bag even if it had been in time, and
+now it was clearly his duty to consider. His was a mind in which there
+was no place for platonic friendship, and Susannah was obviously a most
+desirable piece of property to the struggling Church. The Church had
+provided the paper for this letter, must needs provide the stamp; he was
+officially responsible to the Church. The elder had been an honest man
+according to the average notions of honesty until within the last weeks,
+when stress of circumstance had made him reconsider, not for himself but
+for others, more than one rule of life, and obtain larger latitude. The
+building up of the Church in her present sore strait was surely an end
+to override small scruples. He acted now as an official, as a priest,
+when, after a good many painful qualms of conscience, he opened the
+letter. After having read its contents, he became convinced that it was
+for the good of Susannah's own soul that it should not go.
+
+The ground about Quincy had been drained; the town was comparatively
+healthy; in a few days more some two thousand of the fugitives felt
+again the pulse of life in their veins. Then they looked abroad and
+clasped every man the hand of his neighbour, and said "Thanks be to
+God," and even embraced one another in the joy of relief. History often
+shows how exuberant is the joy of human nature at escape, and that the
+impulse of joy is almost one with the impulse of affection. At the
+abatement of the London plague we see Britons kiss each other in the
+streets, and at the relief of besieged towns, in our own day, staid
+persons have caressed one another, unmindful of what they did. So it was
+now with the members of this driven sect. The spirit of joy and a closer
+bond of affection went infectiously through the gathering Church. Upon
+the first Sunday they met together in the open air, and sang words that
+they verily believed had been written in particular prophecy for
+themselves at this very hour.
+
+    "If it had not been the Lord that was on our side."
+
+The psalm rose from every throat with the swelling tide of joy.
+
+     "If it had not been the Lord that was on our side when men rose up
+     against us."
+
+Susannah, advancing, a little belated, to the rural preaching which was
+held in a dip of the plain, heard the lusty chant of irrepressible
+gladness rising to the blue heavens, and quickened her steps. In spite
+of herself she was carried into song by the enthusiasm which seemed to
+dart like a flame from the assembled multitude and enveloped her.
+
+     "Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us as a prey to their
+     teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the
+     fowler: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the
+     name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth."
+
+While she was exalted by the song she saw the face of her friend the
+Danite for the first time since the night on which they had ridden so
+far together. He was standing now upon the outskirts of the crowd as one
+who had newly come from a solitary journey. When he met Susannah's eye
+his solitary look passed into one of lofty and intense comradeship. He
+ran to her and embraced her, and emptied an inner pocket of a purse of
+money which he thrust eagerly into her possession.
+
+"I have killed one of them," he said, speaking eagerly, as a child tells
+of some exploit. "His pockets were fat with money, and it is yours."
+
+"See!" He took the fragment of linen upon which the stain of Halsey's
+blood had turned dark with time, and showed her a new and brighter stain
+upon its edges.
+
+All around them were men and women, who now, for the first time since
+the hour of some terrible parting, spied kindred or comrades. By a
+common impulse these moved toward one another, and there was an
+interlude in the service for sobs of joy and frantic embracings, and
+many men and women clasped one another who could claim no kindred, and
+none forbade, for tears of mutual love were in all eyes.
+
+After that, in the streets or in chance meetings in the houses, the
+remembrance of this festival of rapturous comradeship gave a new
+standard to the manners of private life. The Saints had, as it were,
+passed from death unto life; former things had passed away; the praises
+of God were ever upon their lips; they entered with joy into a kingdom
+of love which they doubted not God had ordained for his elect; many a
+command of Scripture became illumined with a new practical meaning.
+"Greet _all_ the brethren with a holy kiss." "Greet ye one another with
+a kiss of charity."
+
+Susannah was not much abroad, but she saw the new customs inaugurated.
+Believing that they must be transient, knowing, too, that the fierce
+undercurrent that they expressed must have outlet, and was not of that
+range of emotions which had to do with the common relationships of life,
+she felt no shock of offended sentiment. But in a short space of time,
+as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature
+of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds. This grieved her
+because of the sacred memory of her husband's efforts for these people,
+and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous
+personal desire that they should acquit themselves well. Just here she
+found occupation; she gathered the young girls about her in a temporary
+school, and set herself to soothe and calm the excitement of the women.
+The work was intended to last but a few weeks, until Ephraim's answer
+came.
+
+To the unspeakable joy of his followers, Joseph Smith appeared suddenly
+in Quincy. It appeared to be true, as Darling said, that the Missouri
+authorities could in fact find no charge on which to try him.
+
+Smith, with his brother Hyrum and their fellows, had suffered severely,
+but later their confinement had been more easy, and the news of the
+triumphant gathering of his people, together with the excitement of the
+escape, had induced in Smith a mood which spurned past failures with a
+foot that sped to a new goal. The acclamation, the sincere and touching
+joy, with which Smith was received by men and women and children, were
+enough to raise any man in his own esteem, and to set free the ambition
+which had been perhaps drooping in confinement.
+
+Smith had not been in Quincy twenty-four hours before he mastered the
+situation there in all its details. He promptly sent out a decree
+against the new doctrine of what he called "lax manners." He preached a
+great sermon in the open air that night. "A man shall kiss his own wife
+and daughters and no other women," said Smith. The elders who had
+preached from St. Paul's texts on the subject were accused of error and
+called upon to recant. Smith commanded that the women should work and
+the children should study, and he publicly pronounced Susannah to be a
+fitting model for the women and a fitting teacher for the young.
+Susannah had not as yet met Smith face to face when she found herself
+made, as it were, an object of licensed admiration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+It was that same evening, after Smith's commendation of Susannah, that
+Darling decided to lay the destruction of her letter before the prophet,
+hoping for approval.
+
+Smith was looking over Darling's accounts in the tithing office, giving
+voluminous and minute directions. The May night had closed in. The men
+were in a corner of the large shed in which the stores were kept, a
+corner fenced off for an office by a low wooden partition. The candle
+flickered on the table between them.
+
+The business side of Smith's soul was uppermost. He had power to keep in
+mind a huge number of details, and to classify them, and he estimated
+the relative importance of the classes as no other man would have
+estimated it.
+
+Darling interrupted before Smith's interest in business began to wane.
+He prefaced his communication concerning Susannah by speaking of the
+much shepherding needed by the sheep. Some, he said, had done worse than
+be lax in manners; some had presumed to have revelations; some had
+doubted the faith.
+
+Here Darling paused, feeling sure of rousing Smith to the mood he
+desired.
+
+At the mention of revelations Smith's soul took a turn, like a ball on
+its axis; the plain speech that he had been using about business and
+stores and accounts changed into phraseology of a Scriptural cast, and
+the shrewd glance of his blue eye into a more distraught and distant
+look. Heretofore, as Darling well knew, heresy had been a greater evil
+in his eyes than any other; but Smith had come now out of long months of
+prison; days and nights in which a horrible death had faced him closely
+had not passed over this particular soul of his dreams without moulding
+it. It is noticed by all his historians that after this period he spoke
+little "by revelation," in comparison with his former full habit in this
+respect. At Darling's abrupt speech he sighed heavily. He looked, not at
+Darling as before, but at some vague object beyond him.
+
+"There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy," he said
+wearily, and then, gathering himself up with more pompous unction, he
+asked of the surprised Darling, "Who art thou that judgest another?"
+
+Darling had grown fatter since he came to Quincy; the lines of haggard
+care were still upon his face, but were modified by dimples of good
+cheer. Much taken aback by the unexpected rebuff, he rubbed his head.
+
+"But, Mr. Smith, if they are all going to be allowed to think whatever
+they like--"
+
+The obvious difficulty of church government under these conditions
+confronted the nobler impulse of humility in the visionary's mind. "When
+have I said, Brother Darling, that they all should think what they like?
+But, behold, I say unto thee, it is not with the Lord to save with many
+or with few, but by whom he will send."
+
+This was a little vague as to grammar and as to sense, but Darling had
+not the ability to criticise. He only perceived that to secure
+commendation he must be tactful in the setting forth of his act.
+
+"It was in the case of Sister Susannah Halsey--" he began again
+apologetically.
+
+A more eager look came into Smith's eyes; still a third phase of his
+character there was, the soul of his personal affections, and this began
+to merge now with his religious self. "Hath she prophesied? Hath any
+revelation been granted to her?"
+
+If Darling had not understood the prophetical vein, he did understand a
+certain vibration in this tone. "Ha!" thought he, "if the prophet ain't
+a bit soft on her himself I'm out." He had lowered his eyes, and now he
+said evasively, "It is our sister Elvira on whom the spirit of prophecy
+has fallen; you will have heard how she gave praise concerning you
+before the Saints upon the road and was moved to dance before the Lord."
+
+Smith saw through the evasion, but by shrewd reading of the
+sanctimonious face, saw also the inward suspicion as clearly as if
+Darling had spoken it. His tone and manner betrayed him no more.
+
+"The head of our sister Elvira is not always set firmly on her
+shoulders," he remarked, "but I am glad if the Lord has given her
+grace."
+
+"I've been hoping that he'd give grace to our sister Susannah, for she's
+been writing a letter to say as how she was without faith and wanting to
+leave us."
+
+Smith answered him now only with a cool silence that puzzled his coarser
+understanding.
+
+"'Twas in our first days here, when a good many of the women were
+flighty, and Elvira Halsey, she was ill enough to have worked the
+patience out of any one as they work the milk out of butter, and Sister
+Susannah came with a letter. She gave it to me unsealed."
+
+"Was she without wax to seal it?" interrupted Smith in a casual tone.
+Darling could not know that the thought of such poverty wrung Smith's
+heart.
+
+"Waal, I dunno" (which was a lie). "Mebbe she had no wax--I didn't think
+of that, but anyhow she gave me the letter. 'Twas too late for the mail;
+'twas too heavy for one stamp. An' I didn't like to tell her, poor
+thing, that we'd mighty little to spend on stamps. So after she'd gone I
+just had a look to see who it was to."
+
+"The address would be on the outside?" Smith rose, hat in hand, as if to
+depart, but fixed his eyes on the candle till Darling should have done.
+
+"The name gave me very little hint as to whether the matter was worth
+the two stamps, so I just had a glance inside. Thought it might be but a
+line asking money of her friends, which, under the sad circumstances, of
+course I knew you'd rather the Church would supply."
+
+This drew the first spark of the approval he was expecting. "Certainly,
+certainly, the widows and the orphans of those who have perished for the
+truth must ever be our most tender care."
+
+"Exactly so, prophet; I knew that would be your opinion; so when I saw
+that our sister had felt drove to asking for money from some fellow--I
+guess there must have been some sweethearting between him and her before
+she married Halsey. She said in this letter that she'd go to him if he'd
+send her cash. She said as how she thought the religion of the
+Latter-Day Saints was a lie; but of course I could see it was not her
+right judgment, that she was awful lonesome."
+
+"It was taking a great liberty, Mr. Darling." Smith tapped his stick
+upon the floor. He was far more angry than he showed, for policy had
+laid a soft hand of reminder on his shoulder. "Our sister, Mrs. Halsey,
+is not--" he coughed slightly, and sought by prophetical phrases to
+explain that Susannah was not upon the level of Darling and his
+kind--"is not, as it would be said in the Scriptures, among those who
+deck themselves with crisping pins or are busybodies, but she is as that
+lady to whom John wrote (and the letter is preserved unto the
+edification of the Church unto this day); for it was revealed unto me in
+the beginning that she was the elect sister, and to sit as one who
+judges--as one who judges Israel." He was just going to add in the flow
+of his phrases "upon twelve thrones," but the words died because even he
+perceived the lack of sense.
+
+Darling grew testy. "Waal, I dunno, but it seems to me that if she'd
+gone off by now to be Mrs. Ephraim Croom somewheres in the East there
+wouldn't be much more elect sister about her."
+
+"The gentleman whose name you have just been mentioning, Mr. Darling, is
+the lady's uncle. I was reared alongside them, and I know." He knew that
+he fibbed between uncle and cousin, but the slip was so slight and the
+end so worthy--to silence Darling.
+
+"'Twas no uncle that she wrote that 'ere letter to," said Darling hotly.
+He stuck out his legs and leant back in his chair, the picture of
+offence.
+
+"You are mistaken concerning the meaning of the letter, Brother Darling,
+and it appears to me that in casting your eyes upon it you have gone
+beyond what is written concerning the duty of an elder; but as to your
+duty in destroying it--considering that our sister asked for money,
+which it is our duty and privilege to supply--But I promised Emmar to be
+back soon. I will consult the Lord, Brother Darling, and have a word
+with you in the morning."
+
+Smith tramped with dignity over the long wooden floor of the darkened
+shed and let himself out with decisive clatter of the latch.
+
+To his right lay the wooden town with twinkling lights, to his left the
+black prairie, and above the crystal vast a moonless night, so clear
+that the upward glance almost saw the perspective between nearer and
+farther stars innumerable.
+
+This man was at all times possessed with the sense of otherness, sense
+of a presence around and above. He was no sooner beneath the stars than
+he hung his head as if some one saw him. With shame and pain written in
+the attitude of his hulking figure, he skulked out into the black
+fields.
+
+Later that night, a lad, not of the Mormon brotherhood, making his way
+home in the dark to the town of Quincy, a little afraid of the dark, as
+lads are apt to be, was terrified by hearing a voice in the darkness, by
+dimly descrying a man's figure prostrate upon the ground. The lad shrank
+back to a recess of the snake fence. There, trembling, he listened.
+
+The voice in the hoarse whisper of intensity repeated, "Give me--this
+woman--give--give." The breathing, like command rather than prayer, set
+the words grating on the air again and again. "This woman--this
+woman--give! give! give!"
+
+The cause of the lad's terror was a strange conviction that the writhing
+creature on the earth was certainly conversing with something not of
+earth, whether God, or angel, or devil he did not ask. He was
+encompassed by the dreadful belief that the other saw and heard what he
+could not.
+
+The prostrate man clenched his fists and struck the black ground on
+which he lay. There was an intense silence, and then again the grating
+breath of a hoarse throat that lay among the grass blades babbled forth
+a multitude of confessions and fiercely-worded supplications which the
+little lad could neither understand nor remember.
+
+There was a sudden change of attitude and voice. The lad saw that the
+man on the grass sat up, and as if he had received an answer, spoke in
+reply, not now in wailing supplication, but in quick whispered argument.
+The lad cowered with a fresh thrill of ghostly terror which burned the
+mad words into his memory.
+
+"The loss would be to thee of the fairest of thine handmaids, and to her
+of her own soul, and to me--" but here the words of irritable contention
+failed in deep choking sobs. Then, to the lad's perfect dismay, the
+black figure bounded to its feet and the arms were flung about in the
+darkness as if wrestling with an unseen enemy. Now, being desperate, the
+lad darted forth from his nook; passing in tip-toe rush at the back of
+this struggling figure, he sped home in his gust of fear, and, with the
+fantastic secrecy of youth, did not tell what he had heard and seen till
+years had come and gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+The May morning was wreathing itself with opening flowers to meet the
+first hour of sunlight when Susannah was startled by hearing that the
+prophet inquired for her. There was in the house where she lived an
+empty chamber, unfurnished because of poverty; it was in this that the
+prophet, who demanded a private audience, awaited her.
+
+So vexed was she at the public advertisement which he had made of her,
+that she forgot the bereavement she had suffered since she last saw him;
+but when she looked up she saw that Smith's face wore signs of emotion
+that he was not trying to conceal.
+
+At first he made an attempt at some unctuous form of address, an effort
+at formality, a mechanical tribute to habit. Failing to finish his
+phrase, he stood before her, not as the lauded leader, not as the
+interesting martyr, but claiming recognition merely as a man, a large,
+coarse man feeling his own coarseness in her presence, a sinful man
+feeling his own sinfulness, but at the same time a man with a warm
+heart, which was now so beating with emotions of shame and pity and glad
+recognition that at first he could not speak, could not raise his eyes
+to hers until the warmth of his feeling rid him of self-consciousness.
+
+Susannah had not expected to awake this emotion. She desired nothing
+less than condolence; and yet she was touched by seeing his huge
+strength broken down for the moment by her appearing. When he spoke his
+voice was hoarse.
+
+"I--I told him--it was my earnest command to him not to go where there
+was danger."
+
+Halsey's name was not spoken, but all through that interview Smith
+appeared to be haunted by his presence. "He was the best man amongst
+us," he said.
+
+"My husband is gone." Susannah hoped by the reticence of her tone to
+ward off further excess of sympathy. "I am no longer bound to your
+Church, Mr. Smith. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I
+hold myself free."
+
+He faced her frankly, but with a glance of searching pain. "It must seem
+a rather poor trade I've chosen if there ain't no truth in it."
+
+"But I did not accuse you of not believing it, Mr. Smith."
+
+"Do you think I do?"
+
+She remembered the day that he had first shown her his peep-stone with
+simple, childlike importance. How young they had both been! The sunshine
+on the hill, the voice of the golden woodpecker, the scent of the fallen
+beech leaves, came back to her. A decade of terrible years had passed
+over them both, and he stood seeking her faith just as simply.
+
+"I have tried very hard to understand you, Mr. Smith, but I do not. I
+think you must believe most of what you claim for yourself, if not all.
+If you had made your story up for the love of power you wouldn't always
+be wanting the people to get a better education; you would, as they say
+of the Roman Catholic priests, want to keep the people ignorant."
+
+"Go on," he said. She found that he was looking at her with intense
+sadness, but there was not a shadow of evasion in the eager look that
+met her steadily.
+
+She went on, looking gravely into his face. "I do not believe that your
+story was false, Mr. Smith, but it seems to me that you must suspect now
+that your visions and the gold plates were hallucination, not reality."
+She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the
+head, not of the heart.
+
+He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful
+and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or
+not. Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment
+bar.
+
+"Where is your heart? Didn't you see how that man Angel--angel of purity
+if ever one walked in human form--kissed every day the ground you
+walked upon? And you did not love him. The child--you thought you cared
+for the child: I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like
+the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his
+grave and died there. There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if
+you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they
+had taken and killed us over there in Missouri." He added, "If you were
+another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little
+shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?"
+
+Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent
+truth. Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had
+said that love, not knowledge, was needed. She had not loved Halsey and
+his child as she might have loved.
+
+Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character
+because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child;
+now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about
+hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her,
+and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had
+demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not
+with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken
+tears.
+
+"And you," she said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us
+all freely, but why?" The imperious need of truth awoke again. "Why have
+you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly
+threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?" She
+repeated the question. "If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when
+there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could
+survive, or that you would escape death?"
+
+She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to
+realise what she had of respect and friendship for this man.
+
+"I hain't got the courage most people think I have," he replied sadly;
+"I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into
+to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more
+afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them
+there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire. I don't say
+that it would be the same for any of you. I used to preach that it
+would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be
+killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in
+preaching that way; but as for me, I've seen and I've heard."
+
+He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor. It would have
+been a relief to her if he had 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
+self-appointed task. So cheerful and energetic was she that she appeared
+to her pupils and acquaintance as a radiant being, and received the most
+genuine honour and affection from the Mormon settlement in Quincy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+With the jubilant Saints at Quincy the prophet could not remain long. He
+journeyed up the banks of the Mississippi. Here and there communities of
+his people welcomed him with touching joy; their numbers and their
+faithfulness must have raised his heart. He came at last to a poor,
+sickly locality, around which the great river took a majestic sweep, and
+here the prophet saw what no one else had seen--a site of great beauty
+and advantage. The inhabitants were dying of malarial fever. Smith
+bought their lands at a low price and drained them. Thus arose the
+beautiful city of Nauvoo.
+
+In the Illinois State Legislature two parties were nearly equal in
+strength, and both coveted the Mormon vote. When Smith applied for the
+city charter, for charters also for a university and a force of militia
+to be called "The Nauvoo Legion," they were granted, and worded to his
+will.
+
+White limestone, found in great abundance near the surface of the earth,
+served as material for the public buildings and the better houses.
+Wooden houses, and even log huts, were washed with white lime. On three
+sides of the town the air of the beautiful river blew fresh and cool
+from its rippling tide; the surrounding land was fertile. Fortune
+certainly smiled upon the sect that had borne itself so sturdily under
+persecution. The prophet's laws had much to do with the prosperity;
+neither strong drink nor tobacco were admitted within the city limit;
+cleanliness and thrift were enforced.
+
+The Saints in settlement in the town of Quincy and other places remained
+while they could obtain lucrative employment and thus transmit the
+larger tithes for the building up of their future home; but from the
+poorer settlements artisans and farmers flocked to Nauvoo. Thither also
+the missionaries scattered in the eastern States, in England, and in
+further Europe sent the bands of converts who had been kept waiting till
+a city of refuge was founded. It was not long, not many months, before
+fifteen thousand people were hurrying up and down the broad streets of
+the new city.
+
+During the rise of Nauvoo, Emma Smith was living at Quincy in a small
+house with her three children. She was Susannah's best neighbour. The
+prophet's enormous activity was fully occupied with the new city and the
+care of the scattered Church, so that he could not visit his wife often.
+Each time he came he sent for Susannah to listen with Emma to the
+triumphant accounts that he gave of his present successes. He was all
+aglow with the resurrection of his Church, tender towards its renewed
+enthusiasm for himself, compassionate more than ever for the pains it
+had endured; fixed in purpose to establish his suffering and loyal
+people in such a manner as might reward them for all that they had
+undergone. His spirit of revenge against the Gentiles, and especially
+against the perverts from his own sect who had sought to trample it
+down, was also increased; the prayers of the Hebrew Psalmist against the
+enemies of Israel were constantly upon his lips. More than once when at
+Quincy he preached to the little flock there with great effect from the
+blessings and cursings conditionally delivered to Israel in the Book of
+Deuteronomy, arguing that evils of a very material kind were to befall
+apostates, and blessings of a like kind were to be given to the faithful
+in the new city.
+
+"It is not true," Susannah said to him defiantly. "There is no
+righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly
+wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing."
+
+"Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not
+teach a true religion?" As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of
+the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon
+Emma's centre table.
+
+In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word "apostate."
+Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community,
+the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the
+furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against
+perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely
+spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them. Personally she
+had no fear. The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was
+increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked
+exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny. Yet it was but natural, she
+admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed
+were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his
+liberty. The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.
+
+Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own
+small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations
+which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he
+were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn
+importance of these things. He said to her that her judgment would
+always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her
+in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if
+they had lived. He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship
+between herself and Emma. He spoke also of Emma's worthiness, and of her
+devotion to himself.
+
+His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken
+of her in the first years. Susannah perceived a change analogous to
+that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself. In the
+beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving
+herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith's words and ways. Now she
+was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children,
+and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of
+remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith's vagaries as unworthy of
+attention. She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and
+appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private
+she grumbled at his personal extravagance. At both these changes
+Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour
+of Ephraim's constancy, they seemed an ill omen. It was because she was
+absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret
+case that she paid less attention to the prophet's remarks.
+
+Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling
+at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon
+settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing
+and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their
+manner.
+
+She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister
+parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly
+and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new
+city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira's hand. Susannah was very
+angry.
+
+Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial
+fever leaves behind it. Susannah had need to support her, as well as
+herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford. She had
+had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to
+health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady's
+words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had
+slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the
+insane.
+
+Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and
+his new satellite. She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that
+her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast
+was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly
+but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's
+stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in
+sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the
+period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were
+there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray
+and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the
+proposition they had made.
+
+But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she
+could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending
+towards that obedience, Elvira, curious to see the strangers, entered.
+
+Elvira raised a coquettish finger and told Smith that he was a very
+naughty man. This was a new freak in her conduct toward the prophet.
+Light and frivolous as she had become, the title of prophetess, coveted
+among Mormon women, had been conferred upon her because some strange
+power of divination governed her freaks.
+
+"A very naughty man." With her delicate prettiness, decked in what
+gewgaws she could afford, Elvira stood shaking her forefinger. "You
+don't know why? Oh, fie! you know very well, naughty, naughty creature."
+
+Smith had the air of some unwieldy animal trying to adapt itself to the
+unexpected gambols of a light one. The first supposition was that Elvira
+had in some way learnt the object of his mission, so he began to declare
+it with a reproachful look at Susannah. "Our sister Halsey," he said,
+"does not wish you to wear jewels and beautiful clothes, and yet it is
+said in the Scripture that the clothing of ladies should be even of
+wrought gold."
+
+"Naughty creature," she cried, "don't quote the Scriptures to me. I am
+not the lady you are thinking about. I am not the lady that you come
+here to see."
+
+So intent they all were upon her and her affairs that this statement was
+somewhat puzzling. The only sign that Smith gave that he gathered any
+sense out of the vivacious nonsense she was pleased to talk was that he
+precipitated his explanation.
+
+The brother by his side was very rich; it had been foretold him in a
+vision of the night that when he had professed the Mormon faith a pretty
+wife would be his reward. Smith had had it borne in upon his mind that
+Elvira was the lady designed by the vision. "For," said he unctuously;
+"the Holy Scripture saith that the solitary shall be set in families."
+
+Elvira laughed. "How very amusing," she cried. "And into what family
+shall our sister Susannah be set?"
+
+Smith frowned. "Our sister Susannah," he said, "is not solitary, but is
+surrounded by her spiritual children, to whom she imparts her own
+learning and goodness, to the great benefit of the Church; and I cannot
+but think, Sister Elvira"--the severity in his voice was growing--"that
+you are a great care to her, for she toils hard to give you even such
+poor raiment as you are now wearing, not wishing to accept of the bounty
+of the Church, while she would be an example of industry to others."
+
+The hard truth of this statement, combined with the commanding voice and
+manner he now assumed, controlled Elvira. She stood for some minutes
+meekly contemplating her senile and smirking suitor. Susannah protested
+and warned her, but in caprice, as sudden as it was unexpected, Elvira
+decided to comply with the prophet's request without further persuasion
+or command.
+
+When left alone with Susannah she only shrugged her shoulders and said,
+"I saw that I should lose my soul if I didn't; the prophet was so
+determined. Why should we bicker and consider, and why should I fly
+round and round, like a bird round the green eyes of a cat, or try to
+escape half a dozen times like a mouse when it is once caught, when I
+know from the beginning that Joe Smith will curse me if I don't do his
+will?"
+
+"You are quite mistaken. He was not determined; he told me that he only
+wished to lay the matter before you and let you decide for yourself."
+
+Elvira let her white eyelids droop until but a narrow slit of the dark
+eye was visible. "La! child," she said.
+
+"And you cannot seriously think that Smith's curse, even if he were
+barbarous enough to denounce you, could make the slightest difference to
+your soul's salvation. You often talk that way, but you cannot seriously
+think it, Elvira."
+
+But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion's
+mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible
+streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun's Mill.
+
+"Don't speak of it," cried Elvira with a shudder. "Don't you know that
+Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death?
+Didn't Angel Halsey die to teach us that? Weren't we baptized into it by
+being dipped in blood?"
+
+She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals "dipped in
+blood," "dipped in blood."
+
+Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this
+nefarious marriage. The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her
+indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could
+seek. In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate
+entreaty. With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by
+Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.
+
+No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.
+
+After Elvira's departure Susannah began to save out of her little
+income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern
+journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could
+obtain employment. She had little heart for the object of her saving;
+she might, she knew, be going to ignominy and starvation, for with the
+stigma of Mormonism upon her, she felt that it was unlikely that she
+would be received with credit in any town where she was friendless and
+unknown.
+
+Although the community prospered greatly, Smith did not again interfere
+to increase Susannah's school fees. Emma began to talk largely of the
+splendour of Nauvoo, reading from her husband's letters of the Nauvoo
+House, a huge hotel, which was being rapidly and grandly built for the
+perpetual occupation of himself and family and the entertainment of all
+such as the Church of the Saints should delight to honour.
+
+Susannah found it hard to understand why Emma was not taken to Nauvoo
+even before the great house was built for her reception. It was indeed
+commonly reported among the Gentiles at this time that the prophet had
+secretly espoused other wives; but a malignant report of this nature,
+together with accusations of drunkenness and rank dishonesty, had
+persistently followed the sect from its beginning, and, as far as
+Susannah knew, were now, as before, totally untrue. This special report,
+however, reached Emma in an hour of depression, and she came to Susannah
+for sympathy, shaken with grief and indignation.
+
+"What does it mean that they always say that of him when the one thing
+that he's done has been to excommunicate any of the brethren that taught
+any such thing? And there's just been an awful row on in the Council of
+Nauvoo against Sydney Rigdon and some pamphlet he's written on a
+doctrine he calls 'Spiritual Wives,' and Joseph has risen up and cast
+him out, even though he was his best friend."
+
+The reason of the calumny seemed to Susannah clear enough; it was a
+natural one for low-minded politicians who hated Smith to formulate, and
+the religious world outside thought they were doing God service by
+believing any ill of a blasphemer; but this charge was an old one, and
+she probed further to-day for the real cause of Emma's excitement. She
+was first given a letter in which Smith told of Rigdon's
+excommunication.
+
+"Rigdon's doctrine," wrote Smith, "is a vile one because it is held by
+the whole sect of Perfectionists which are now scattered through the
+Churches of the eastern States, and is a proof that the glory of the
+Lord is departed from them, for they say that a man may be married to
+one wife in an earthly manner, and she who is to be his in a spiritual
+and eternal manner may be another woman, and this is vile; therefore
+I've cast out Sydney Rigdon and called him apostate. But it seems to me
+in this matter and in the perpetual slander of the Gentiles it may be
+that it is being shown to us, even as things were shown by outward signs
+at times to the ancient prophets, that there is somewhat concerning the
+existing form of marriage that it would be well to reconsider, for I
+perceive that the more my revelations cause a difference to be set
+between our people and the Gentiles, the more shall we be bound closely
+together, which unity is undoubtedly of the Lord."
+
+Susannah always found it difficult to gather much information from the
+prophet's vague and incoherent style. "Has he ever written anything else
+about this affair of Rigdon's?" she asked.
+
+Then it transpired that another letter had that day arrived, giving
+another and more graphic account of Rigdon's rebellion and overthrow,
+after which Joseph inconsistently wrote:
+
+"Yet with regard to the matter of his heresy it remains undoubtedly true
+for men who are called to some great and special work one woman may be
+needed as a bride upon earth and another woman may be called as a
+spiritual bride" (this word "bride" was crossed out, though left legible
+enough, and "guide" written above it) "to lead him into higher and
+heavenly places prepared of the Lord for this purpose."
+
+After perusing this passage carefully, and with inward laughter at its
+inconsistency, she gave the letter back, endeavouring to render some
+help.
+
+"Have you not observed that your husband's mind is very peculiar? When
+any idea is forcibly suggested to him, all his thoughts seem to eddy
+round it until he thinks that the whole world is to be revolutionised by
+it, and then when diverted to something else he forgets all about it
+like a child, and never thinks of it again perhaps for years."
+
+Emma, unable to comprehend the analysis, drew back offended.
+
+"Joseph has a great deal finer mind than any person I know." The last
+words were levelled with a nettled glance at Susannah.
+
+On Emma's behalf Susannah confidently hoped that the prophet would
+forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories
+which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which
+he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on
+his visionary notions--never in thought, for he did not seem able to
+exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice--and
+Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear
+feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier around the
+fold, and in consequence draw its votaries closer together.
+
+Soon after this Emma was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She
+could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered
+career.
+
+For a few days Susannah worked on still with a sense of mission towards
+her pupils, but of necessity also, for her work meant daily bread. It
+produced little more than that.
+
+But at Nauvoo new schools in emulation of the State schools of other
+towns had been set up, and now a teacher with certificates of the latest
+style of education arrived in the Mormon settlement at Quincy,
+commissioned by the prophet to gather all the Mormon youth there into a
+new school under the direction of the Church. Susannah's mission and
+her means of livelihood were alike gone.
+
+The change was made. It was not until Susannah had passed the first
+desolate day of her dethronement that Darling came to her, sent with
+profuse apologies from the prophet and the explanation that the chief
+motive of the change had been to relieve her from labour now that the
+Church was in a position to offer her adequate support. The message was
+accompanied by many compliments upon her work and her fidelity, and a
+document officially signed, in which it was set forth that the part and
+lot which would have pertained to Halsey in the Holy City was considered
+as hers; rooms and entertainment at the Nauvoo House were offered. It
+was handsomely done. Smith in his poverty had been no niggard, and of
+his wealth he was lavish. The documents explained what rooms, size and
+position given, should be hers, what furniture at her disposal, what
+ailment, what allowance from the Treasury for clothing and charity. The
+scale was magnificent. Darling was also commissioned to offer her a
+ticket on one of the river boats to Nauvoo, and his own escort. He urged
+her instant acceptance. Darling had been promoted from his post at
+Quincy to that of postmaster at Nauvoo, and he could not delay his
+journey.
+
+Susannah sat long into the night and counted her little hoard, and
+figured to herself what the long-eastward journey, then a matter of
+great expense, would cost. Since Elvira left her she had with all her
+efforts saved hardly fifty dollars. No course lay open to her but to go
+first to Nauvoo, and there compound with Smith for a sum of money to be
+given in return for the relinquishment of all further claim upon the
+Church.
+
+
+
+
+_Book III._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+In a suite in the pretentious Nauvoo House Susannah found herself
+established.
+
+She stood at her windows and looked east and west upon the fair white
+city, and more immediately upon the broad public square in which
+well-dressed people and handsome equipages were constantly seen. In this
+square a man called Bennet drilled the Nauvoo Legion in the cool of the
+evenings. This man had served in the regular army and had a native
+genius for soldiery. Smith, alive always to the educational importance
+of shows, now provided money lavishly for uniforms, horses, and
+accoutrements, and the Nauvoo Legion formed a much grander spectacle
+than any body of State militia.
+
+Twice a day under Susannah's windows Smith's carriage drew up, a pair of
+fine gray horses carrying the prophet to and fro upon the affairs of
+Church and State. When he took Emma with him Susannah observed that she
+was always richly attired, and the other members of the Mormon
+hierarchy resident in Nauvoo, "bishops," "elders," "apostles,"
+"prophets," passed constantly in and out of the house, positively
+shining in broadcloth and silken hats, their wives and daughters also in
+brilliant array.
+
+Externally the success appeared to be complete, and beyond even the
+visionary's most glorious dreams. In the whole of the city no one was
+poor, no one ignorant of such knowledge as school-books could afford, no
+one drunken. Every one was uplifted and animated beyond their ordinary
+capacity for effort and enjoyment by this material fulfilment of
+prophecy and the more glorious future hope which it involved. Susannah
+was not well rested after her journey when Emma descended upon her with
+lavish gifts of silks and fine feathers. Emma, grown patronising with
+prosperity, always plain and maternal, displayed her gifts and argued
+for their acceptance with broad satisfaction.
+
+"Joseph says now that the Lord has given us freedom as touching wealth
+and plenty, it looks real mean, when your husband gave all he had to the
+Church in her tribulation, for you to be wearing plain clothes when
+you're riding out with us. What will the folks say? Joseph says it looks
+to him as if you were real offended at being left so long up to Quincy
+when he was only waiting to get your rooms finished."
+
+Carried away, as was only natural, by her husband's doctrine that the
+era of indulgence was ordained and not to be rejected, there was
+temporary deterioration in the fibre of Emma's character.
+
+Susannah would gladly have walked out and seen the beauty of the city
+and its surroundings alone, but she did not think it kind or polite to
+resist the good-natured importunity of her friends. She was invited to
+drive with Smith to a grand review of the Nauvoo Legion which was to
+take place outside the town; then, finding that Emma and the children
+were to occupy another carriage, she made objection. It ended in
+Susannah being driven alone in a very fine carriage. Smith, resplendent
+in uniform and seated upon a very fine charger, rode in his capacity of
+Commander-in-Chief. Several other men whom she had known first in
+homespun, and latterly in cloth, were also riding in bedizened uniforms.
+The scene was very perplexing to Susannah. Elvira, with great display of
+dress and equipage, was not far from her, and waved her hand with
+patronising encouragement. The coach in which were Emma and her children
+presented also a very smart appearance. All the town drove to the scene
+of the review in what splendour they could afford.
+
+Susannah was greatly occupied in looking from face to face, striving, to
+recognise some of her husband's friends of earlier days. She fully
+expected to see Smith or some of his friends fall from their saddles,
+as they could be little accustomed to manoeuvring such light-footed
+steeds, but she was forced to admit that Smith rode well and his
+officers kept their seats. She had so much to observe, so much to think
+about, she hardly noticed that Smith rode constantly by her carriage,
+pointing out the beauties of the road.
+
+When they stopped at the place of parade, many of the gentlemen in
+uniform approached her, and as this was her first appearance in public,
+Smith performed the introductions. Among them was the Rev. General John
+Bennet, a man who had "knave" written on his countenance, but who
+appeared to have duped Smith, for, as Lieutenant-General of the forces,
+he was actually in command. Her old friend the Danite also came, older
+than when she had seen him last by the hardships of an arduous
+missionary journey. He passed now by the name of "Apostle Heber."
+Susannah was so glad to be able to inquire concerning his welfare, so
+curious to speak with him again and judge of his development, that her
+manner gained the appearance of animation.
+
+After some time Susannah perceived that she was, as it were, holding
+court. In their carriages the other women sat comparatively neglected.
+It was in vain that she tried to put a quick end to this curious and
+undesirable state of things. Smith continued to bring to her side all
+those whom he delighted to honour.
+
+And this was only one of several fetes which took place in rapid
+succession, to all of which Susannah was by some persuasion taken. At
+each she found herself an object of public attention. She was told that
+this occurred because she was a stranger, or out of respect to her
+husband's memory, and she placed more trust at first in these statements
+than a less modest or more worldly-wise woman would have done.
+
+Soon her credulity ceased. She despised her own beauty because it was
+made a gazing stock. An article in the Nauvoo newspaper, officially
+inspired, spoke of her as a "Venus in appearance and an angel at heart."
+She was elsewhere publicly mentioned as the "Venus of Nauvoo."
+
+It was indeed a strange experience, a strange time and place for the
+social _debut_ of this beautiful woman. Smith had calculated well when
+in her youth he had told her that her beauty would not diminish but
+increase until her prime was past, but she very modestly inferred that
+she might have passed, as heretofore, without much notice, if an
+agitation concerning her had not urged to admiration a band of men who
+were fast growing luxurious and pleasure-loving, and she knew that Smith
+was the author of that agitation.
+
+It appeared to Susannah more dignified to ignore than to upbraid. She
+secretly laughed, she secretly cried with vexation, but she desired to
+leave the place without betraying her recognition of the homage offered.
+
+She sought to discuss her plan for departure with Emma, but Emma's
+manner had changed to her. It was not jealousy so much as constraint
+that she showed, as if secretly persuaded into unusual reticence.
+Susannah then asked Smith for such a sum of money as he should consider
+to be a right acknowledgment of the property Halsey had given to the
+Church. At this Smith looked greatly aggrieved, and withdrew muttering
+that he would consider her request.
+
+The only sign of this consideration which she immediately received was a
+gift of showily-bound books, and a rich shawl which he had fetched from
+New York.
+
+Susannah's career as the queen of Nauvoo society came to a swift end,
+for she determinedly retired into seclusion. This was not because the
+men who paid court to her were all ignoble. Among the officers of the
+Church or of the Legion there were not few who were wholesome and
+friendly companions, or who, like her early Danite friend, the Apostle
+Heber, had frank modest eyes, incapable of any enthusiasms that were not
+religious. But in her long companionship with Angel Halsey Susannah had
+had her soul deep dyed in a delicate hue of Quaker sentiment. She could
+not admit for a moment that conscious display of personal charm was
+consonant with dignity.
+
+She again sought friendly intercourse with Emma.
+
+"There ain't no use in opposing the Lord," said Emma excitedly. "If the
+Lord, as Joseph says, has given you beauty and wants to set you to be a
+star, or a Venus; or whatever he calls it, in Nauvoo, I don't see that
+there's any good your talking of going away. I guess the Lord'll have
+his own way."
+
+Susannah remembered how before her marriage the bigness of the authority
+quoted had confused her as to the truth of the message. "Ah! Emma,
+Emma," she cried, taking the fat, comfortable hand in her own, "if in
+the first days I had offered a little more humility, a little more love,
+to those to whom I owed duty, I should never have believed what you told
+me about the 'Lord's way,' but I have learned by hard experience, and I
+do not believe you now, Emma." She spoke the name in quicker tone, as if
+recalling her companion to common sense. "Emma," she repeated the name
+with all the tenderness she could muster, "don't you know that it is
+better for me to go away--better for you, better for _us all_?"
+
+But Emma was obstinately evasive. She seemed almost like one possessed
+by a hardened spirit, not her own. On the afternoon of that same day she
+bustled cheerfully into Susannah's room asking the loan of what money
+she had to meet a temporary call.
+
+Susannah never had the slightest reason to suspect Emma's good faith and
+good nature. She gave her money without a thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The parlour which Joseph Smith had provided for Susannah was large and
+high. On its Brussels carpet immense vases of flowers and peacock's
+feathers sprawled; stiff and gaudy furniture was ranged round the
+painted walls; stiff window curtains fell from stiff borders of
+tasteless upholstery. Susannah, long ignorant of anything but deal and
+rag carpets, knew hardly more than Smith how to criticise, and her taste
+was only above his in the fact that she did not admire.
+
+Smith came to reason with the rebellious woman.
+
+Susannah no sooner saw him than she knew that he had come braced to try
+the conclusion with her. He sat himself before her in silence. His
+waistcoat was white, his neck-cloth white, his collar starched and high;
+his thick light hair was carefully oiled according to the fashion of the
+day, and brushed with curling locks upon the sides of the brow. At this
+critical hour Susannah observed him more narrowly than ever before. His
+smooth-shaven face, in spite of all his prosperity, was not so stout now
+as she had seen it in more troublous years; the accentuated arch of the
+eyebrows was more distinct, the beak line of the nose cut more finely.
+She noted certain lines of thickness about the nape of the neck and the
+jaw which in former years had always spoken to her of the
+self-indulgence of which she now accused him; yet she could not see that
+they were more accentuated. She had been schooling her heart to remember
+that Smith had been her husband's friend; Angel Halsey had loved him,
+had daily prayed for his faults and failings, and thanked God for his
+every virtue and success. Through the medium of these memories now
+Susannah looked upon him with the clearness of insight which the more
+divine attitude of mind will always give, the insight which penetrates
+through the evil and is focussed only on the good.
+
+The prophet's breath came quickly, making his words a little thick.
+"Emmar tells me that you have some thoughts of wanting to leave us."
+
+"You know that very well, for I have told you so myself. I want you to
+give me money for my journey. If I can I will repay it, as you well
+know; if not, I will take it instead of all this finery you offer."
+
+He had folded a newspaper in his hand, and now he unfolded it. She was
+surprised to see that his hands trembled slightly as he did so, for she
+had seen him act in many a tragic scene with iron nerve.
+
+"'Tain't often that the Gentile newspapers have a word of justice to
+say about us," he observed. "This is a number of the St. Louis Atlas. It
+seems there's one man on it can speak the truth." He gave forth the name
+of the newspaper as if expecting her to be duly impressed by its
+importance, and she looked at the outspread sheet amazed.
+
+He went on, "There's an article here entitled, 'The City of Nauvoo. The
+Holy City. The City of Joseph.' I'd like to read it to you if you don't
+object, Sister Halsey."
+
+The pronunciation of the last title seemed to inflate him; his hands
+ceased to tremble. A flicker of amusement lighted the gravity of
+Susannah's mind.
+
+Joseph read, "'The city is laid out in streets of convenient width,
+along which are built good houses, and around every good-sized house are
+grounds and gardens. It is incorporated by charter, and contains the
+best institutions of the latest civilisation.'" He gave this the
+emphasis of pause. "Is that true. Sister Halsey, or is it not?"
+
+She smiled as upon a child. "Yes, Mr. Smith, it is true."
+
+"'Most conspicuous among the buildings of the Holy City is the temple
+built of white stone upon the hill-top. It is intended as a shrine in
+the western wilderness whereat all nations of the earth may worship, for
+on March 1, 1841, the prophet gave it as an ordinance that people of all
+sects and religions should live and worship in the City if they would,
+and that any person guilty of ridiculing or otherwise deprecating
+another in consequence of his religion should be imprisoned.' Is that
+true?" Smith inquired again. His questions came in the tone of a pompous
+refrain.
+
+"Except in the case of those who have joined you and gone back from your
+doctrine," she said, but not thinking of herself.
+
+He read on: "'Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Smith has attended first to the
+education of his people. The president of the Nauvoo University is
+Professor James Kelly, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and a ripe
+scholar; the professor of English literature is Professor Orson Pratte,
+a man of pure mind and high order of ability, who without early
+advantages has had to educate himself amid great difficulties and has
+achieved learning. The professor of languages is Professor Orson
+Spencer, graduate of Union College, New York, and of the Baptist
+theological seminary of that city. No expense has been spared upon
+school buildings for the youth of both sexes, and the curriculum is
+good.' Is that true?"
+
+"Yes," she replied.
+
+He read on: "'The population is made up chiefly from the labouring
+classes of the United States and the manufacturing districts of England.
+They have been grossly misunderstood and shamefully libelled. They are
+at least quite as honest as the rest of us, in this part of the world or
+any other. Ardent spirits as a drink; are not in use among them;
+tobacco is a weed which they almost universally despise. There is not an
+oath to be heard in the city; everywhere the people are cheerful and
+polite; there is not a lounger in the streets. Industry is insisted
+upon, and with the hum of industry the voice of innocent merriment is
+everywhere heard. Now, as to their morality, if you should throw cold
+water upon melted iron, the scene would be terrific because the contrast
+would be so great; so it is with the Saints; if a small portion of
+wickedness happens among them, the contrast between the spirit of
+holiness, and the spirit of darkness is so great that it makes a great
+up-stir and excitement. In other communities the same amount of crime
+would hardly be noticed.'" Again he asked, "Sister Halsey, does this
+evidence of an impartial witness coincide with your observation?"
+
+"Of the people it is undoubtedly true," she said. There was a
+reservation in her mind concerning certain leaders in the Church, but
+she did not make it in words.
+
+He read on: "'With a shrewd head like that of the prophet to direct,
+with a spiritual power like his to say "do" and it is done, what wonder
+that this thrifty and virtuous people should have made Nauvoo that which
+its name denotes--the Beautiful City, the home of peace and joy.'"
+
+He laid down the newspaper upon the marble-topped table, his large hand
+outspread upon it. "My sister, why do you wish to leave this beautiful
+city? It is a place where each may have home and part and lot in its
+delights, but to you _all_ its wealth and power and beauty is offered.
+Did I not say unto you, when as a beautiful damsel you gave up home and
+kindred for the sake of the Church, that you should be as a queen among
+its elect women, riding as in a carriage drawn by white horses and
+receiving the elect from among the nations?"
+
+The recollection of the prophecy which he had delivered concerning her
+upon the desolate autumn road at Fayette brought with it another
+recollection--that of her parting with Ephraim the same morning--so
+vividly that her eyes filled with tears. Yet she marvelled too, with
+inquisitive recognition of the miracle, that the words of the visionary,
+then a beggar, should have been so nearly fulfilled.
+
+"It is quite true, Mr. Smith, and very marvellous that what you promised
+me should almost be literally fulfilled. We have come to it, as you also
+foretold, by a path most terrible, and now we arrive at the
+consummation. We live in a palace, and at its doors pilgrims from
+England and all parts of Europe are arriving every day, and the richest
+of gowns, the grandest of carriages, and the whitest of horses are truly
+at my disposal. But there is one discrepancy between your vision and the
+fact--I will not wear the silk robes, nor welcome the pilgrims with the
+assurance that they have here reached the City of God. I will not
+because I cannot. I refuse to accept from the hand of God such paltry
+things as money and display, or even the honest affluence of our people,
+as compensation for the fire and blood through which we have waded. If
+there be a God who is the shepherd of those who seek him, this is not
+the sort of table that he spreads, this is not the cup which he causes
+to run over"--she had begun lightly, but her voice became more earnest.
+"Mr. Smith, we have walked through the shadow of death together; if you
+would be exalted in the presence of your enemies, have done with your
+childish delight in such toys."
+
+Smith moved uneasily on his velvet-covered chair, and it, being of a
+rather cheap sort, creaked under his bulk.
+
+"What says it in the end of the Book of Job, Sister Halsey? and what
+compensation did the Lord give for the sore temptations with which he
+had allowed the devil to tempt his servant? As I read, it was fourteen
+thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and--"
+
+She gave him credit for knowing the passage by heart; she had the
+rudeness to interrupt. She rose and stood before him. All the long
+latent defiance which her heart had treasured against him found vent in
+her tone, "Very well, Mr. Smith, if that satisfied Job, it will not
+satisfy me."
+
+Smith, cast out of all his shrewd calculations as to what would win
+this woman, fell back upon the inner genius of that priestcraft which so
+often surpassed his conscious intelligence.
+
+"_What would satisfy you?_" It was a simple question, and he asked it
+with overwhelming force. "By the hand of trust and affection which your
+husband gave me; by the memory of the beautiful babe that he brought
+first to me for my blessing (and I laid my hand on its little warm head
+and blessed it); by these I claim the right to ask, Sister Halsey, what
+is it that in Nauvoo or in any other city would satisfy you?"
+
+She was humiliated in her own eyes. Alas! she had strong evidence that
+Ephraim's affection, on which she had staked all earthly hope of
+happiness, had in some way failed. Now under Smith's eye all courage to
+hold the unrealised ideal was lost; as the fixed stars twinkle, so her
+faith went out for the moment of his interrogation. Her head sank in a
+shame she could not confess.
+
+While she hesitated he was looking at her shrewdly. "You know not what.
+Shall I tell you? There is but one thing, and that is love--the love
+that works, for those who are in need. Work for the needy is love to God
+and man, my sister."
+
+He paused, looking at her with a glow of enthusiasm. Whatever he might
+be to others, this man, coarse in his outer nature, but liable always to
+eruptions of the sensitive inward soul of the visionary, was in this
+woman's presence often merely what she compelled him to be. If she had
+known that this was the secret of his power over her, the spell might
+have been less.
+
+"Is it not true, Sister Susannah?" he asked.
+
+She gave the admission mechanically.
+
+He went on, "I don't take it at all hard that you should feel that we
+are none of us up to you, but feel as you do that we are beneath you,
+for there isn't a lady in the place that's equal to you in delicate ways
+and sense and a mind to study books; but it seems to me that that's a
+reason why you should love us, Sister Halsey. There is work for you to
+do; we need your guiding hand. You say to me that I am content with
+horses and sumptuous living and fine raiment; and knowest thou not that
+there is upon my soul a great burden, even the burden of this great
+people, to go in and out before them and guide them aright? I have need
+of thy counsel, my sister; there's that which at this time is greatly
+agitating my own mind and the minds of our bishops and apostles, Sister
+Halsey, and it is of such nature that we cannot proclaim it openly until
+we know the mind of the Lord. On all other matters we have accepted the
+teaching of the Scriptures. For, behold, we have now the priesthood of
+Aaron in our midst, and the priesthood of Melchizedek, and the rites of
+the temple, save only the spilling of the blood of bulls and goats,
+which has been done away with by the Gospel. We have gone back to the
+first things, as is well known to you, Sister Susannah, and even here in
+the wilderness we have set up our theocracy, and for its civil law we
+have sought where alone such law can be found, in the command given unto
+the children of Israel before they desired a king, just as for all
+spiritual law we have accepted the commands given to the apostles in the
+new dispensation, taking them as they were, without whittling them away
+as a boy whittles a stick with a knife, as all those sects which will
+not hear our voice have done. Now, Sister Susannah, is this true?" He
+put his head a little on one side and looked at her with his eyes
+partially closed.
+
+"You need not take very long to explain that you worship the letter of
+the Scriptures, for I know it already, Mr. Smith."
+
+But he was in full tide, and went on, "When the Book says, 'Heal the
+sick,' we don't say that that means something else, but we set about and
+heal 'em." He slapped his knee with the palm of his hand. "When it says,
+'Cast out devils,' we don't stare round like the other sects and say,
+'There ain't no devils,' but we cast 'em out; and in the same way, when
+the Book says that the priesthood of Aaron and the priesthood after the
+order of Melchizedek shall be serving always in the church and in the
+temple, then we say, 'Amen, so shall it be'; and the same way with
+regard to tithing, for the Lord's tithes are recognised among us, and
+the first-fruits, and the Sabbath day, and all such ordinances, no
+picking and choosing as others."
+
+Then he explained to her again, as in Kirtland, that he was in doubt
+concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched
+the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully
+convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church
+(in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared)
+that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the
+Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews
+and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the
+apostles, and yet they had not preached against this as an evil.
+
+"They did not preach against slavery," said Susannah.
+
+"They did not," he said, "and I would say parenthetically, my sister,
+that it may be that our views on that subject, coming from the northern
+States as you and I have done, have not been according to the mind of
+the Lord. I would have no man a slave because of misfortune, but if a
+man proved himself unfit to rule himself, I'm not sure about his being
+free."
+
+"Do you intend to revive slavery in our own race? Will your own people
+when they fail in business be sold, with their wives and children, as
+in the Old Testament?"
+
+"I can't see but that it would be a deal less mean to arrange it that
+way than to bring a race of free blacks from their own country and make
+every child they have a slave because he happens to be a nigger." She
+remarked that his mild blue eye lit up with the true flash of the
+indignation of contemplative justice. "There's one thing certain,"
+continued he, "in my Church of the Latter-Day Saints no man shall be a
+slave to his brother because he happens to have a black skin, for, as
+the Scripture says, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin?'"
+
+Surrounded as they were by the atmosphere of slavery, there was the
+resonance of true heroism, of true insight into the right, in his tone,
+but the reason he gave--could it be possible that he thought that the
+text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice? It was
+obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry
+flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy
+and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence of common men.
+
+He went on, "But, anyhow, it isn't the institootion of slavery that's
+come up for me to decide just here and now. Since we have been blessed
+with peace and prosperity, the female converts that our missionaries
+have been making all over the world (whom they have kept back from
+coming to us, letting no unmarried female come whilst the fires of
+persecution were passing over us) have arrived in great numbers, and the
+question is, Sister Susannah, how are we to steady 'em?"
+
+What seemed so impossible to achieve in a pioneer State had in Nauvoo
+actually been achieved--the women were in excess of the men. He had, in
+sober truth, a social problem to solve, and the responsibility rested
+alone upon him. Brotherly love having been inculcated, the manners of
+the Saints were cheerful and familiar, more familiar, he said, than he
+desired; but after all that they had endured he was fain to lay upon
+them no greater burden than need be. He appealed to her, asking if on
+his first release from imprisonment he had not been strict in his
+injunctions.
+
+"But now," he said, "who am I that I should be able to take care of all
+the young women that the Lord is sending to us from all parts of the
+world? or am I to deny to them the privilege of coming to live among the
+Lord's people? Am I to say to them that unless they have learning and
+wisdom and are perfect they shall not come? I guess that if it had been
+required of me to be perfect before I came to seek salvation, I wouldn't
+have come at all. But it's just like this--here they are! and they are
+nothing but poor ignorant working girls from England and Ireland and all
+parts of Europe. And am I to make nunneries to put them into?"
+
+He confessed with some delicacy of language and words of bitter regret
+that there had been of late some cases in Nauvoo such as were common
+enough, alas! in Gentile society, but whose occurrence among the Saints
+had caused excitement. Joseph Smith paced Susannah's room; his
+harassment and distress on behalf of his people were either deeply felt
+or well feigned, and Susannah had no doubt that his feeling was true,
+that phase of him being for the time uppermost. When he came to sit down
+beside her again, it was to sketch the misery to men and women and
+children which existed in Gentile society from this evil, which he
+affirmed to run riot through the warp and woof of so-called orthodox
+communities.
+
+Her ignorance of the world was so great that she assumed this accusation
+to be of the same stuff as the anathemas he constantly cast against the
+integrity of the orthodox clergy. The point that she grasped was that he
+believed the thing that he said. She had at first assumed that should he
+propose to institute polygamy she would know then, once for all, that he
+was a villain; but now this test deserted her. He was meditating this
+step, and it seemed that his arguments, if the facts on which he based
+them were admitted, had some value.
+
+"There's that for one thing, Sister Susannah," Smith went on in a broken
+voice; "it has been a mean sort of thing to have to tell you, but it
+had to be said, and now there's another thing to be considered. Among
+the Gentiles who is it that has the most children? Is it your man that's
+high up in the ranks of society, who has money enough to give them a
+good education, to feed and clothe 'em? or is it your poor man, whose
+children run over one another like little pigs in a sty, and he caring
+nothing for them, and they have rickety bones and are half starved and
+grow up to be idle and steal? I have noticed that a good man is apt to
+have good children, and a clever man is apt to have clever children, and
+a worthless man is apt to have worthless children. Ain't that so? And
+what sort of children do we want the most of? Well, in this way we
+wouldn't let your worthless fellow have any wife at all until he had
+brought forth fruit meet for repentance, and your common man only one;
+but I don't see but that it would be a real benefit to the State if your
+good, all-round man, as would be apt to have pious and clever children,
+had two or three or four families agrowing up to be an honour to him and
+to the Church, if it ain't against the command of the Lord; and in Holy
+Writ the Lord himself says to Solomon that he would have given him as
+many wives as he wanted, barring them being Gentiles."
+
+"I will not argue about the Bible; you and I interpret it very
+differently," she cried. "Your social argument might be well enough if
+it were not that your good man when he had more than one wife _would
+cease to be a good man_"--her voice was vibrating with faith--"and his
+children would therefore have the poorest chance from inheritance or
+training."
+
+He was again pacing, but paused in his ponderous walk, struck by a flaw
+in his argument which he had not before seen. "But if it were commanded
+by the Lord, Sister Susannah?"
+
+"God does not command this wickedness. What you command in his name is
+at your own peril, Mr. Smith."
+
+He paused before her, asking with reflective curiosity, "Why are you so
+sure that it would be wickedness, sister?"
+
+She had not arguments at command; she held fast to her assurance with
+the same dogged unreasoning faith with which Ephraim's mother had of old
+held her belief that this Smith must be an arch-villain; she had put the
+whole power of her volitionary nature upon the side of faith in the
+ideal marriage, although she was painfully conscious that she had come
+across no particle of evidence for the existence of such a state. Out of
+faith, out of mere instinct of heart, which had not worked itself out in
+intelligent thought, she gave her unhesitating judgment. "I say that it
+would be wicked because I _feel_ that it would be wicked; and any good
+woman," she paused and looked him straight in the eyes, "and any good
+man, would know its wickedness without arguments, and without weighing
+all possible considerations."
+
+His eyes fell before hers. He looked not angry, but grieved. As for
+Susannah, in the heat of her indignation she did not know that her own
+long effort to resist the unreasoning acceptance of cut-and-dried
+doctrines and any dogmatic insistance upon opinion had here failed.
+
+Smith stood for some moments before her, and her fire cooled. He sighed
+at her dictum. Then he said gently, "But your judgment in this matter
+has great weight with me, sister, and if I accept it you will perceive
+that you are indeed the elect lady, and that by living in the light of
+your countenance I shall obtain peace."
+
+It was difficult for her not to suppose that her influence was
+beneficial. She thought at the moment that when she had left this place
+she might still correspond with Smith if he desired it. If it was part
+of his eccentricity to be willing to listen to her, why should she not
+be willing to speak, and thus keep his madness under control?
+
+Smith, regarding her, caught the gracious look upon her face which had
+opposed to him so often only a mask of reserve. His imaginative hopes
+were always ready to magnify by many dimensions the smallest fact which
+favoured them. His unsteady mind was fired by the presumption of some
+triumph.
+
+"Have not I, even the prophet of this great people, waited with great
+patience? As the apostle saith, 'Let patience have her perfect work.'"
+
+Susannah started and wondered.
+
+"For behold I did not desire that our dear brother, Angel Halsey, should
+go into the forefront of the battle, nor would I trouble the first grief
+of thy widowhood, but behold I have waited."
+
+"For what?" Her question came sharply. His tone had changed her mood
+suddenly; a memory flashed on her of the ill-written letter which Emma
+had shown her of the phrases concerning the spiritual "bride" or "guide"
+who, even if all licence were denied to humbler folk, was to be a
+prophet's special perquisite. "What have you been waiting for, Mr.
+Smith?
+
+"Nay, but I have waited, sister, until, having eyes, you should see, and
+ears, you should hear, till you should understand that, going in and out
+before this great people, it is necessary for me to seek wisdom in
+counsel, and, above all, of a woman who hath a finer sense than man. And
+it has been revealed to me, sister, that this may only be if thou
+shouldst give the counsels of thy mind and the smile of thy beauty to me
+alone and to none other, for that which is divided is not to be accepted
+for the building up of the Church."
+
+"You would have me believe that you have waited many years with the
+virtue of patience before you say this? Understand yourself better. It
+was not patience; it was fear. You have known perfectly well always that
+I would never have listened to such a proposal for a moment. It has been
+fear and prudence that have hitherto kept you silent. What is it that
+has made you speak now?"
+
+With sharp decisive tones she chid him as children are chidden in anger,
+but childish as he often was, he had yet other elements in his
+character; his blue eyes gave an answering flash that was ominous; the
+droop of his attitude stiffened.
+
+"That which is ordained by the Lord is ordained, sister, and it causeth
+me grief to know that this revelation, which I told thee many years
+since, is yet to be received of thee as a grievous thing,
+nevertheless--"
+
+"Nevertheless," she repeated in a mocking tone, as one weary of
+foolishness, "what nevertheless? Let us talk on some better subject, Mr.
+Smith, and after this be kind enough to have no dreams or revelations
+about me. Dream of your Church, if you like. I cannot hinder your
+people's credulity, and I hope that you will continue, as you have
+begun, to lead them in the main by righteous paths. And have your dreams
+and visions about yourself, if you must, for I sometimes think that you
+cannot be much madder than you are now, but be kind enough to leave me
+out of them, for I am going away."
+
+She had now made him very angry. He was standing with flushed face,
+quivering with uncertain impulses of rising wrath, yet he still
+struggled for self-control.
+
+"Sister Susannah Halsey, it is not meet that you should make a mock of
+that which is sacred"--he gave a gasp here of stifled anger, and there
+was a perceptible note of wounded affection beside the louder one of
+offended vanity--"of that which is above all sacred," he stuttered, "it
+is not meet--meet--to mock--to mock." The veins on his forehead were
+standing out and growing purple.
+
+She had often heard of Joseph Smith's power of rage, before which all
+the Saints quailed. She saw it now for the first time.
+
+She rose up, trying now a tone of gentle severity. "I spoke lightly
+because your words appeared to me childish and silly, but the more in
+earnest you were, Mr. Smith, the more need there is you should have done
+with a thought that could lead to no good. I am no elect lady. Why do
+you deceive yourself? I have told you before that I do not even believe
+in your religion."
+
+As she spoke she became more and more amazed at the thought of what his
+self-deception must have been, for in his ever-shifting mind he knew her
+infidelity perfectly, and yet had persuaded himself that she would
+accept some fantastic position as prophetess-in-chief.
+
+"How mad you are," she said pityingly, "to know a thing and yet to
+pretend to yourself you do not know it. Go and get your supper, Mr.
+Smith. Emma will be waiting to give it to you. And when you have
+thought quietly over what I have said, you are quite clever enough to
+see that my way of looking at it is more sensible than yours."
+
+She had perhaps supposed that the mention of the domestic supper would
+be punitive rather than soothing, but she was not prepared to find that
+she had displayed scarlet to the blood-shot eyes of a bull.
+
+"Woman," his voice, deep and hoarse, was like thunder about her ears,
+"woman, is it not enough that the Lord has spoken?"
+
+She saw by his purple face and parched lip, by the hard shudder that
+went through his frame, that his fury was stronger than he. She quailed
+inwardly.
+
+"It is not enough for me that you say the Lord has spoken."
+
+His lips worked as if in the effort to form anathemas his dry throat
+refused to utter. Then, regaining his loud hoarse speech, with a choking
+noise he lifted his hand in a gesture of sacerdotal menace.
+
+"Woman, it is the last time. Choose ye this day between blessing and
+cursing, for the Lord shall send the cursing until thou be destroyed and
+perish quickly, because of the wickedness of thy doings whereby thou
+hast forsaken me."
+
+She cried in answering excitement, "I choose your curse rather than your
+blessing under the conditions you propose. You are mad; go and calm
+yourself."
+
+Then, having exhausted her physical courage in this last defiance, she
+went into her inner room, locking the door, leaving him in the manifest
+suffering of an almost unendurable rage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+That night Susannah packed her possessions in the smallest possible
+compass. The money she had lent to Emma would be sufficient for the
+journey to Carthage, which was the nearest Gentile town, and thither she
+was determined to go without an hour's delay, ready now to work or beg
+her way on the journey farther eastward.
+
+As soon as the business of the next day was fairly started she went to
+the suite of rooms inhabited by the Smiths, confident that Joseph's
+excess of fury had been transient. Emma was surrounded by her children,
+to whom she had just given breakfast. The prophet was about to descend
+to his business office. They both received Susannah with moderate
+kindness.
+
+The March sun shone in through the large windows upon the garish
+furniture of the apartment, upon Emma's gay attire, and upon the shining
+faces of the three children, who stood gazing upward at Susannah, quick,
+as children always are, to perceive signs of suppressed excitement.
+
+Susannah explained that she had determined to go to Carthage that day,
+where she hoped soon to find some party of travellers in whose escort
+she could travel farther; she hoped that it would be quite convenient
+for Emma to return the money that morning.
+
+Smith gazed at Susannah intently, but only for a few moments. It seemed
+that his mood had changed entirely, that he was now too much absorbed in
+the business of the day, whatever it might be, to care whether she went
+or stayed. He left them, saying that he would send money to Emma as soon
+as he could, that the trifling debt might be paid.
+
+Money flowed in such easy streams through the hands of the leading men
+of Nauvoo, that Susannah supposed that a messenger with the required
+amount would come up the stairs in a few minutes. She sat with Emma in
+this expectation.
+
+"You are offended with me for going?" she asked, for Emma's mask of
+indifference was worn obviously.
+
+"You wish to destroy your soul," said Emma.
+
+"Ah, but you know, you have long known, that I do not believe that
+salvation in this world or the next depends on the rites of Mr. Smith's
+Church."
+
+"If I told this child that he would be dashed to pieces if he walked out
+of the window, and he did not believe me, would that save him?"
+
+Emma made this inquiry with triumphant scorn; then she rose and began to
+attend to the wants of her children in a bustling manner.
+
+Susannah sighed and smiled. "I have at least the right to reject your
+faith at my own peril, for there is not in the wide world, as far as I
+know, man or woman who cares whether I save my soul or not."
+
+"And whose fault?" cried Emma, coarse now in her discomposure. "If you
+are so stuck-up that you think you can read your books and look down on
+us all, just because you are a beauty and the gentlemen bow down to you,
+'tisn't likely that you'd have any friends acting that way. You can't
+even behave civil to the gentlemen when they offer you the best that's
+going."
+
+It was evident that some version of Smith's interviews with her had been
+given to his wife. Susannah wondered how much truth, how much fiction,
+had been in the relation. It did not matter much to her now, since she
+had resolved to go at once. The whole of her life with that troublous
+sect seemed to be dropping from her like a dream.
+
+Leaving word that she would receive the money on her return or else call
+at Smith's office for it when she was ready, she went down into the
+cheerful noise of the street and bargained with a man who had horses and
+vehicles for hire. Having arranged that he should come for her at noon,
+she went about to make the few farewells she felt to be desirable.
+
+Darling was now postmaster of Nauvoo and one of the first presidency. To
+him she went first. She shrank from him because of his coarseness and
+the jocular admiration which he sometimes had the audacity to express
+for her, but she could not forget how assiduous his kindness had been in
+the days of Elvira's illness. She found him sitting, his heels on the
+upper part of a chimney-piece with a fireless grate, reading the
+Millenial Star. The hot April sun, streaming through the windows of his
+office, had caused him to take off his coat, which was no longer
+thread-bare. His shirt sleeves were fine enough and white; the high hat
+that was pushed far on the back of his head was highly polished.
+Opulence, self-indulgence, good-nature, and a certain element of
+fanatical fire mingled in the atmosphere of the postmaster's office, and
+made it somewhat turgid.
+
+When Darling heard Susannah's errand he became serious enough. An
+apoplectic sort of breathlessness came over him, expressing a degree of
+interest which she could not understand. He settled his hat more firmly
+upon his head. "Does the prophet know?"
+
+"He knows. I have said good-bye to him and to Mrs. Smith. It is sad to
+part with friends that I have known for so many years."
+
+"And the prophet's going to let you go, is he?"
+
+Darling, clumsy at all times, in this speech conveyed to Susannah the
+first faint suspicion that Smith might dream of detaining her by force.
+
+Darling's youngest daughter, who had been an affectionate pupil to
+Susannah at Quincy, waylaid her as she came out, and clasped her about
+the waist with the ardour of an indulged child. She was a blithesome
+girl of about fourteen.
+
+"I heard you tell father that you are going away. Is it true?" she asked
+impetuously.
+
+Susannah tried to release herself from the embrace. "Yes, it is true.
+Never mind, you like your new teacher, you know, just as well as you
+used to like me."
+
+"I just guess I don't," cried the child defiantly. "But anyhow, if you
+are going away, I'm going to tell you something."
+
+Whether the childish love of telling a secret, the girlish love of
+mischief, or a dawning sense of womanly responsibility was uppermost, it
+would be hard to tell. There, in the open square, while worthy Saints
+hurried to and fro on the pavement beside them, while horses jangled
+their harness and drivers shouted and exchanged their morning greetings,
+Darling's youngest daughter drew Susannah's head downward and hastily
+whispered to her the fate of her letters to Ephraim Croom.
+
+"I know, for one day since we came here I heard father talking to the
+prophet. He said you'd written lately while you were at Quincy, and all
+your letters had been burned. Now that's the truth; and I said to myself
+'twas a sin and a shame, and that you ought to know. Now don't go and
+tell tales of me, or father will be mad--at least, as mad as he ever can
+be with _me_." A toss of the pretty head accompanied these words, a
+flash of conscious power in the bright eyes, the spoilt child knowing
+that her father was in her toils now, as truly as any future lover would
+ever be. The school bell was ringing. The girl, her bag of books hanging
+from her arm, ran with the crowd of belated children.
+
+Susannah walked on, almost stunned at first by the throb of intense
+anger that came with this surprise. Then the anger was suddenly
+superseded, hidden and crushed down by a rush of joy. Ephraim had not
+neglected her; Ephraim had given her up for dead; but she had no reason
+to suppose that he was dead, no reason to doubt his faithfulness.
+Susannah trod the common street in love with motion as some happy
+woodland creature treads the dells in the hour of dawn and spring.
+
+When Elvira looked up to see Susannah enter her gate she saw her friend
+transfigured in a glow of returning youth and hope. Elvira looked at her
+timidly; this Susannah she had never seen before. Elvira's husband was
+not present. The interior of the house was fantastic almost as its
+mistress, but sultry with luxury.
+
+"Well now, you think you are going," said Elvira. "Who'd have thought
+it? And only last week General Bennet said to the prophet that if he'd
+marry you to him he'd send to New York for diamonds both for you and
+Emma Smith. He said he'd get a thousand dollars' worth of diamonds
+apiece for each of you; but Mr. Darling said that you ought to be
+married to Mr. Heber, who has just been elected an apostle, because--"
+She stopped suddenly, nodding her head. "You know why--blood is blood,
+and we have seen it run in rivers, but we don't mention it here in
+Nauvoo."
+
+Elvira set the French heel of her slipper in the centre of a rose upon
+her carpet and spun round upon it till her flounces stood out.
+
+    "We don't mention it here in Nauvoo."
+
+She sang as if it were the refrain to a song.
+
+Susannah felt from within her shield of new delight an immense pity.
+Here again was a revelation of the coarse and frivolous talk that went
+on at the church meetings, and Elvira was privy to it through that old
+fool, her husband. How could she endure him!
+
+"O Elvira, in the last few days I have realised as I did not before that
+riches are making fools of these men. How glad I am that my husband died
+before he knew that this was to be the reward of his lifework and his
+prayers!"
+
+Elvira stopped dancing. The mystical side of her character now, as
+ever, came forward suddenly in the midst of her other interests. The
+sunshine was bright in the gaudy room. A tiny spaniel, which Elvira's
+senile slave had procured for her, lay on a red cushion in its full
+beam, looking more like a toy than a living thing. When Elvira stopped
+dancing her flounces settled themselves with an audible rustle, and her
+thin delicately-cut face looked at Susannah from out its frame of curled
+hair and gold ornaments like the face of a spirit imprisoned in some
+unseemly place.
+
+"Heaven help us, Susannah," she cried shrilly, "if you call Nauvoo the
+reward of Angel's prayers. Look!" she cried, pointing out of the window,
+"see how the new temple rises; how its white walls shine in the sun! We
+are putting thousands upon thousands of dollars into it. It will be the
+grandest building this side of the Alleghany mountains." She let her
+small jewelled hand, with its pointing finger, fall suddenly, "and there
+shall not be left one stone of it upon another, for the House of God is
+not made with hands."
+
+"I see little signs of its foundations here." Susannah spoke with fire.
+"Treachery and tyranny are poor bricks."
+
+"Child, its foundations are in the whole earth, here and everywhere, in
+every nation and kindred. Men like Angel Halsey sow wheat; other people
+have sown tares. The tares happen to be in blossom just now here in
+Nauvoo." She seemed to forget her seriousness as suddenly, for again
+she spun round upon the centre of her rose, singing her little musical
+refrain.
+
+Susannah made one more appeal of the sort that she had made so often
+before Elvira's marriage.
+
+"You will not come away with me, Elvira? I do not like to leave you
+here; you have not been yourself since Angel died. You are not bound to
+this man because you were not sane enough to make a valid choice."
+
+It was plain speaking, but it did not ruffle Elvira's composure in the
+slightest. She laughed and began to caress her spaniel. "Mad. Oh yes, we
+are all mad, and growing madder, but it is because they have huddled us
+together at the point of the sword, until now to be a Mormon means to be
+shut out from the world and shut in to--to what? To the prophet's
+dreams; and some of them are good, and some of them are bad, and some of
+them are mad; and let us thank Heaven that they are as good as they are,
+for to go back to the Gentiles who shot down Angel and the children he
+was teaching to pray, and your child in your arms, that would be the
+baddest and maddest act of life." She rose up suddenly again. "Go!" she
+cried. There was a flame of real anger in her eyes. "Since the wish is
+in your heart, go! We believe now in strange doctrines. Two new
+doctrines we have learned at Nauvoo. Do you know what they are? One is
+'baptism of the dead.' If you get off safely, Susannah, and die in your
+sins, one of us must be baptized again for you, so that you will be
+saved in spite of yourself. But the _other_ doctrine is '_salvation by
+the shedding of blood_.' Do you understand _that_ doctrine?"
+
+"Indeed I do not."
+
+"And you speak with a tone that says that you neither know nor care what
+new things we have been learning. But you may have reason to care before
+many hours are over."
+
+She came near and whispered, "They teach us now that if a _man_ sin
+wilfully and will not repent, it is better that a minister of the church
+should slay him, for then his blood will make atonement for his soul."
+She ceased to speak until she had thrust Susannah out of her door, and
+her last words were in a whisper of awesome import. "Perhaps _a woman's
+soul can be saved in the same way_."
+
+Susannah was out again in the cheerful busy street. She made haste to
+fulfil the one remaining call before she met her chaise at the hotel.
+She felt that her last word was due to the member of the Danite band who
+had saved her in her hour of need and who had avenged her husband's
+blood.
+
+To each of those who had made sacrifice for the sect, a lot of land in
+the best part of the city had been awarded. Heber, Danite and apostle,
+had built upon his lot, and there she found him at the back of the
+cottage feeding a mare and foal which were tied in a small plot of
+ragged grass. He was much older now than when she had first seen him;
+daring and danger can lengthen time. He had the same indomitable
+frankness in his dark eyes, but his face was hardened and fanaticism was
+stamped thereon. It was a homely precinct, with utensils of house and
+stable-work lying about. The mare was drinking from a bucket, her gentle
+head so near his shoulder that her love for him was easily seen.
+
+"I am going away," Susannah said. "I have come to thank you for the last
+time for all your kindness to me and to say good-bye."
+
+"You shall not go," he said harshly.
+
+It was the echo of something which she had heard twice before this
+morning. This time it began to enter her mind with some sharpness.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"If you saw a friend hastening to destruction would you not stop her? It
+is well known amongst us that you desire to go, and at the meeting of
+the presidency last night the prophet told us that you sought to
+apostatise. Go home, Sister Halsey, and repent, and obtain forgiveness
+from the Lord and from his prophet for your unbelief."
+
+She was able to stand for a moment quietly and watch him still busy
+watering the mare, admiring the skill and gentleness with which he did
+it, thinking sadly enough that she would never see this remarkable man
+again, nor know to what the mingled fierceness and gentleness of his
+nature would grow. Then she offered him her hand in farewell without
+further argument.
+
+He shook the mare's head from his shoulder and, taking her hand, held it
+in an iron grasp. "As your friend, and for the sake of that good man,
+your husband, I beseech you to repent; but if you will not repent, for
+his sake and for our sakes, because we have prayed for you, you shall
+still be saved."
+
+Although beginning to be apprehensive of some coming evil, she smiled;
+and even rallied him upon one of the new doctrines to which Elvira had
+alluded.
+
+"Do you believe that if I go away some one else will have to be baptized
+over again for me?"
+
+He looked at her with the same steadfast glance. "It could do no good.
+Such salvation is for those who die in ignorance of the truth. But for
+you, who have been baptized into the truth and have fallen away, there
+is no hope except repentance or the shedding of blood."
+
+Over the low paling she heard the neighbours' children at their play.
+Upon the other side was an open lot across which she saw the passers in
+the street. She withdrew her hand from his now, but with a sinking at
+heart which did not appear to her reasonable because the surroundings
+were so tranquil.
+
+He let her go, accompanying her, as any gentleman might, to the gate of
+his ground. As he opened it he had taken something from his coat, and he
+showed it to her. It was a knife, very bright and sharp. Its blade when
+drawn out had a double edge. "It will be better for you," he said
+mournfully, "to die than to go"; and then he hid the thing again and
+went back.
+
+This time the idea that had been forcing itself into her mind took
+possession. For a moment all her strength forsook her; she held to the
+post of the gate, looking after him as he disappeared up the narrow
+passage between the paling and the house, and then, hurrying onward, she
+found that it was only by the greatest effort she could walk with
+outward composure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Susannah found her rooms as she had left them. Emma was not there to bid
+her good-bye, nor did any messenger wait with the money. She set her
+parcels ready for the driver to lift and waited until after the hour,
+but the chaise did not come.
+
+At last she went down again to the livery stable, hoping, as against
+vague but almost overpowering fears, that mere delay was the cause. The
+man told her that he understood that she had countermanded her order.
+She gave the order again, but now he said that he could not go for the
+price named, and when she offered a larger sum, he assured her that his
+horses were all out. She knew now that her order had indeed been
+countermanded, and by an authority higher than hers. She went back and
+boldly entered the prophet's public office.
+
+There were five men in the office. Joseph Smith sat in an elbow-chair
+before a central table. His secretary, a middle-aged man, sat at a small
+table beside him. Two of the leaders of the Church happened to be
+waiting upon some business, and a fresh convert was standing with them,
+a well-dressed English artisan but newly arrived. Susannah walked up to
+the table and addressed Smith.
+
+"Will you go down to the stable and bring me up a travelling-chaise?"
+
+Smith rose with mechanical politeness, or perhaps with a feint of
+politeness. "My dear madam," he expostulated, "I must say--"
+
+"I am sorry," she replied, "that I have not time to hear what you would
+like to say. I must ask you to be quick and get me the chaise."
+
+By this time she perceived that his companions were looking at her with
+ill-concealed curiosity and excitement, which proved to her that she was
+a marked woman. Her bosom dilated with a wilder anger as she looked at
+Smith expectantly; he returned the gaze sheepishly, as if dazzled by the
+audacity of her command. His face after last night's passion had an
+exhausted look like that of a man recovering from an illness.
+
+"You also owe me money," she proclaimed clearly. "Your wife borrowed all
+that I had of the money I earned by my school. When you have brought the
+chaise you can give me the money."
+
+One of the elders, a sleek man, thinking the prophet at a loss, now made
+a wily comment. "Has Sister Halsey paid anything for living in the House
+this month back?"
+
+At the insinuation that her money might be justly kept in payment of
+this debt if she spurned the Church's hospitality, Susannah's heart
+sank. She admitted its justice. It was part of her character to admit
+all possible claim against her.
+
+The sleek elder, following his advantage, spoke again. "The money given
+for tuition was given because of the ordinance of the prophet, and
+should in any case hardly belong to this lady if she is apostate."
+
+Smith had the tact to see his opportunity, and, moreover, it hurt him
+sharply, hurt him far more than it hurt Susannah, to hear her right to
+the privileges of the place called in question, to hear the opprobrious
+term "apostate" cast at her. There were unbelievers in his community
+with whose hypocrisy or apostasy he could trifle, but he still had his
+faith and his inner circle of affections. Susannah, standing friendless
+and penniless, appealed to all that was sacred in the memory of early
+days, while her beauty, her courage, her unbounded wrath, stimulated his
+love of power. He spoke to the sleek elder in what was commonly called
+the prophet's "awful voice," rising, his blue eyes becoming black in
+their authoritative flash.
+
+"Our sister Susannah Halsey, because of faithfulness when the Church was
+yet poor and unknown, and because of the faithfulness of her husband,
+who wears the martyr's crown--our sister Susannah Halsey, I say, is
+welcome to the hospitality of the Nauvoo House as long as she has
+remained and shall remain; and the money which has been given to her
+for the school shall be returned to her, and more shall be added to it,
+for she laboured faithfully."
+
+He had left behind his moment of sheepish distress; with the return of
+his formal phrases he assumed full prophetical state and escorted
+Susannah out of the office with a manner of pompous deference. When they
+two stood alone together Susannah was aware that, although circumstances
+had not altered in the slightest, although she had just as much reason
+for extreme anger as a minute before, yet she could not summon the same
+haughty air of command.
+
+"Will you get me the chaise and the money and let me go?"
+
+"But in Carthage," he asked kindly, "who will attend to your wants there
+and protect you? I guess, sister, you haven't much notion how difficult
+a lady like yourself travelling alone might find it to get along. It
+isn't among the Gentiles as with the Saints, where brotherly-kindness is
+the rule. I guess you'd better go back to your room and think it over a
+day or two longer," he said soothingly. "I'd be very glad to take you
+and Emma out for a ride this afternoon if you'd be willing to go--"
+
+"Be quiet." Her words fell sharp and quick in the midst of his gentle
+tones. "Make arrangements at once for me to go peaceably, or I will go
+out, if need be, to the middle of the Square and proclaim my wrongs, so
+that every woman and child in Nauvoo shall know what comes of trusting
+to you."
+
+She had chosen her threat carefully. She knew well that he understood
+the force of object lessons, and that to have even a suspicion against
+his kindness, bred in the minds of the children would be exquisite pain
+to him.
+
+"You know that I wouldn't like that, Sister Halsey; but when you come to
+think of it you'll see that it wouldn't serve your turn neither. It
+would only need for a few of us to say you was crazy and the whole town
+'ud see the more reason for not letting you go. Moreover, it would be a
+monstrous injustice to me. When have I failed to do anything that I ever
+promised you? Did I ever promise to let you apostatise? I guess, Sister
+Halsey, that you're excited, and if you just think over things for a day
+or two you would see that we're not so bad as you think. But, anyway,
+this ain't just the place for us to have a talk together."
+
+When Smith moved on to lead her back to her own rooms, she followed
+quietly until they stood together in her parlour, the scene of their
+last quarrel.
+
+"And now," said Susannah, "you understand very well that it is no sudden
+intention of mine to go, that it is my irrevocable decision. I have this
+morning had my very life threatened; and I see now that unless you
+command that it should be respected I should very possibly be in danger
+if I went away alone. You have offered again and again to drive me in
+your carriage; I will accept the offer now. Get out your own horses, and
+drive me yourself to Carthage."
+
+She saw a look of faint pleasure steal over his face. He liked to stand
+there in the quiet room listening while she spoke with some evidence of
+trust. The pleasure faded into embarrassment, but she had seen it.
+
+"You have a good and a bad nature struggling within you, Mr. Smith. By
+all that we have suffered, you and I, since the day that by some
+mysterious power you forced me to come to your baptism" (she stammered
+in her eagerness), "by all that we have suffered, by that sympathy which
+we have at times felt for one another, assert yourself now. Do this one
+right thing for me, and in all the future I will try to remember only
+the good in your life and not the bad."
+
+But he stood so long still looking steadfastly before him that she began
+to fear that, unnerved by his last night's fit of fury, he was ready to
+pass into one of those visionary trances which had been common in his
+younger days.
+
+She touched the sleeve of his coat. "I do not know if Mr. Heber's threat
+could be serious, but it frightened me, and I know that I shall be safe
+on the road to Carthage if you take me. Go, get your horses and take me
+away yourself."
+
+He looked at her pitifully, slipping into the style of his religious
+moods. "Thou sayest truly, sister, that there is none but I who could do
+this thing, for since in mine anger last night, fearing that I had no
+strength of my own to keep thee by me, I denounced thee to the council,
+there is no safety for thy life beyond the boundary of Nauvoo." He
+winced here, as if seeing what he suggested.
+
+Noting how the idea of her violent death wrung his heart, she went on
+pleading with him. She quoted the exalted character of his early
+visions, reminding him of the hour when the angel had shown him the dark
+furnace of temptations through which he must pass. At this he was
+visibly stirred; the angelic vision of warning seemed to be again before
+his eyes. He roused himself, speaking in that tone of voice in which,
+when he rarely used it, she recognised his best spirit. "Sister, thou
+hast always been to me as Isaac to Abraham; for in the beginning when I
+was poor and alone and had nought in the world save the revelation which
+the Lord had given, and was tempted to doubt, then I saw thee and prayed
+that thou shouldst be given me for a sign; and behold when I put forth
+my whole strength to desire thee, thou didst come as a moth to the
+light, burning thy beautiful wings of youth and joy. But I said, 'It is
+well, for that which she has lost shall be restored to her with usury,'
+and I knew in my heart that our brother Angel Halsey would not live
+long, and that thou wouldst forget thy sorrow for him. But I swear unto
+thee that thou hast never been to me as other women, but, as I said unto
+thee just now, like the voice of the angel."
+
+She never knew how far he was entirely under his own control when the
+tendency to a state of trance was upon him, but she was anxious to take
+advantage of the better mood.
+
+She said, "And now what is required of you is that you should give me
+up. No blessing" (she spoke strongly), "no blessing can come to you or
+to your people until you do this one right thing."
+
+He was again looking not at her but at the blank space of the shadowed
+wall, and as if the wall was not there and his look went far beyond it.
+
+"You have loosened the bloodhounds and set them on my track," she cried.
+
+He did not speak.
+
+"You--you alone will be guilty of my murder, for, I tell you, if you do
+not take me, I will go alone and meet my death."
+
+His head sank upon his breast with a groan such as a dumb creature in
+the utmost pain might give. Almost immediately, to her surprise, he went
+out.
+
+She was left alone. She was under the impression that Smith had gone to
+do her bidding, but she could not be sure. No faith in angelic vision,
+no spell of psychic warfare, relieved the situation for her. The
+external evidences of some crisis which he had undergone only produced
+in her repulsion. Now, as ever since the temporary delusion that
+accompanied her baptism, Susannah endeavoured to possess her soul free
+from that sense of touch with mysterious powers which had worked such
+havoc with the sanity of the members of this sect.
+
+From the window she saw the prophet crossing the road in the direction
+of his stables. He went, it was true, with slow, dreamy gait, but
+steadily. Strange mixture that he was of sanity and shrewdness,
+mysticism and grosser evil, he was at that moment her only star of hope.
+She paced the room unable to forecast the happenings of the next hour,
+yet supposing that her very life depended upon its content. The sudden
+joy that had come to her this morning joined with her fear, and produced
+panic of heart.
+
+She computed the time it might take to harness the gay steeds, and tried
+to give the rein of her expectation the utmost length. To her delight
+she saw the prophet's horses and the light vehicle he drove upon long
+journeys emerge into the square. A servant led them up 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 early dawn she opened her eyes. In the first moments of
+half-awaked consciousness she was aware that one thought lay alone in
+the empty horizon of her mind, like a trace left by a dream that had
+passed, as a wisp of cloud may be left in an empty sky.
+
+This thought was that she would at once go down to the river bank upon
+the southwest of the town.
+
+When other thoughts awoke and crowded within her ken this thought
+appeared foolish, and still more so the strong influence it had left
+upon her will, for in the momentum of this influence she had risen
+without debating the point.
+
+She was not aware that she had moved in her sleep or dreamed. She was
+greatly refreshed and again unreasonably light-hearted. She opened her
+shutters and saw that the dawn was calm and fair. As yet the sleeping
+town had scarcely stirred.
+
+"It is better to go out than to stay in," she said to herself as she
+remembered that this hour would be her one chance of taking air and
+exercise unobserved. She heard the main door of the house open and,
+looking over the banister, saw a slattern with bucket and mop passing
+into some back passage. She went lightly down and out into the fresh
+frosty air.
+
+What had that dream been concerning the river bank on the south-western
+side? She could not recall it, nor had she ever explored the streets of
+white wooden villas and cottages that lay upon that side. She went
+thither now. There was no reason why she should not go, no reason to go
+elsewhere. It was a pleasant walk. When she had passed the last house,
+the bank sloped in open uncared-for grass where cows were grazing. Only
+here and there she had seen a house-door open, and as yet in this place
+no one was abroad except a boy who was playing idly in a boat, which was
+drawn half up on the muddy bank.
+
+The broad river, milk-white under a dappled sky, stretched south and
+west. The other side was dim and blue in the faint vapour of the
+relaxing frost. The air was sweet and still. The sunbeams, imprisoned in
+eastern vapour, shone through the white veil with soft glow that cast no
+shadow but comforted the earth with hope.
+
+Susannah had a further thought in her mind now, but she felt no haste or
+impatience of excitement.
+
+The boy was of an active, restless disposition or he would hardly have
+been out so early. Lithe and idle, he sat see-sawing in the floating
+end of the boat, uncertain how to amuse himself. He returned Susannah's
+greeting with a lively flow of talk.
+
+"You don't know how to row," said Susannah.
+
+She showed no eagerness, for she felt none. The hope she had just formed
+was most uncertain, for it appeared not at all likely that she could
+escape in this way without being molested.
+
+"I bet I can row," said the boy, "as well as any man in town."
+
+"That isn't saying much," said Susannah. "The men about here have very
+few boats, and they are most of them afraid to go on anything smaller
+than the steamer."
+
+"I could row t'other side and back," bragged the boy. "I could row
+t'other side and back three times in the day."
+
+"You couldn't."
+
+"I couldn't! What will you bet?"
+
+"I suppose your father wouldn't allow you to go, anyway."
+
+He was a fresh-faced, mischievous, eager young rascal, and he found
+Susannah's manner pleasant and provoking.
+
+"Will you lay five dollars on it?" he cried. "Pap is away down to
+Quincy. If you'll lay five dollars on it I'll do it."
+
+"But I won't."
+
+The gambling spirit of the young pioneer was aroused.
+
+"What will you lay on it, then?"
+
+"I don't believe you could row once to the other side."
+
+He bragged loudly and with much exaggeration of what he had done and
+what he could do, and began pushing off the boat to show her his speed.
+
+The boat was a rude craft, unpainted, flat-bottomed, but light enough,
+and not badly formed for speed. Susannah stepped into it without much
+hope, scarcely caring what she did, but still provoking the young
+boatman to attempt the crossing.
+
+"I shan't give you any money," she said, "but you can row me a bit if
+you like till I see how fast you can go. You don't understand the
+currents, I am sure."
+
+"Currents!" said the boy, "I guess I understand all there is to know
+about them."
+
+Talking thus in light banter, they actually proceeded out onto the bosom
+of the milky flood without hearing any cry from the shore or seeing any
+one who took note of their departure. The pellucid and comforting light
+of the blinded sun grew warmer; the hum of industry in the town behind
+rose cheerfully upon the quiet air, and as the calling of the April
+bluebird in the fields grew more faint, the splash of the oars and the
+whirr of the gray water-fowl began to be accompanied by a low distant
+sound as of a watermill.
+
+"It's the excursion steamer," said the boy. "We'll get in her waves and
+you'll be scared. Ladies is always scared of waves."
+
+She asked if the steam-boat would stop at the Nauvoo wharf, but he
+explained, with the knowledge that boys are apt to have of such details,
+that this steamer was coming from Fort Madison, and would keep to the
+Missouri side, that he had heard that there were some State officials on
+board her, escorting the Governor of Kentucky, who was prospecting for a
+Land Company.
+
+They saw the white hulk of the steam-boat looming upon the water to the
+north. Her side paddle-wheels churned the flood. A strong purpose took
+possession of Susannah; she knew what she was going to do.
+
+She said to the boy, "No one could stop a steamer when she once starts
+until she gets to her next port."
+
+"I bet the engineman could stop her just as easy as that." The boy
+backed water with his oars suddenly.
+
+"But no one on the river could make him stop and get aboard."
+
+"Yes, they could. My pap stopped one once. We was living down near
+Cairo, but not near a wharf."
+
+"How did he do it?" she asked, and her interest was intense.
+
+"Why, you just put up your hands like a trumpet and yell through them as
+loud as you can, and you go on waving and hollering. My pap said the
+best plan was to call out 'Runaway nigger! Large reward!' They'd be sure
+to stop then to know all about it, and when they'd once stopped they
+don't mind your clambering up, if you can pay the fare."
+
+Susannah felt herself wholly unequal to the loud task described.
+
+"They would never stop for you," she, said. "You are only a boy, and
+they would know 'twas only mischief."
+
+His reply was as before. He would lay five dollars on it that he could
+stop the boat.
+
+She incited him to do this thing also. What faculty of caution the boy
+possessed was not as yet developed; he left the care for consequences to
+the sedate lady in the stern, and forgetting his quest of the Missouri
+shore, lay in the path of the steam-boat and howled unmusically, and
+marred the peace of the placid morning by shouting concerning a runaway
+slave and a fabulous reward that was offered for him taken alive or
+dead.
+
+It is probable that what he said never rightly reached the ears of the
+men on the deck, but that they regarded the lady as a possible
+passenger; the engine was stopped.
+
+"We'd better cut now as fast as we can," said the boy, somewhat
+frightened. He seized his oars excitedly. "Or shall I tell them a big
+yarn about the nigger?"
+
+They were but slightly to one side. The prow of the steam-boat, which
+drew but little water, had already passed below them. A small crowd on
+the vessel's deck leaned over the paddle-box. Standing up in the boat,
+Susannah searched the faces of the men looking down. They all looked at
+her.
+
+She singled out the captain by some sign in his dress, and pleaded
+urgent necessity for travelling with him.
+
+"Look here," said the boy, looking up at her from beneath, "I call that
+a low-down, mean sort of thing to do. Why didn't you tell me square? I'd
+have brought you if you wanted do come."
+
+She pleaded with the boy too. "It was better for you not to know my
+secrets. If they ask you in the city you can say that you didn't know."
+
+A dozen hands were held out to help her to climb the ladder on the
+shelving paddle-box. "Keep off," they cried to the boy, and he swung
+away from the churning wheel.
+
+Susannah stood upon the deck pale and trembling. The magnitude of the
+step came upon her, and she was beset by natural timidity and the
+painfulness of her dependence. The men who stood around her with the
+right to question were not of a low class. The captain, brawny and
+respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified
+gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor
+of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were
+several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other
+passengers pressed in an outer circle.
+
+She would fain have explained herself more privately, but she could not
+endure to accept the privileges of the boat without explaining first
+that she was not able to pay for them. "Gentlemen, I have no money. I am
+entirely unprotected. I have escaped in fear of my life from Nauvoo."
+
+She spoke instinctively, only desiring to set herself right, but when
+the words were said she knew that she had helped to heap opprobrium on
+the sect in whose cause so short a time ago she would have died. The
+passengers were Missourians, as was the captain. Among them went a
+whisper of chivalrous pity for her and of execration for the prophet and
+his followers.
+
+"Madam," said the captain, "any lady as is escaping from those devils
+has the freedom of this boat, and no ticket required, as long as I'm in
+command. Isn't that so?" he asked of the crowd.
+
+The murmur broke into an open chorus of enthusiastic speech.
+
+Wild and deep as was her panting anger against Smith's oppression,
+Susannah shrank. The thought of profiting by this spirit of partisan
+hatred scorched her heart.
+
+The Kentucky Governor, a dapper man, who had been regarding her with a
+temperate and critical eye, now, urged by her obvious distressed
+timidity, came forward.
+
+"How did you get among the Mormons, may I ask?"
+
+"My husband," faltered Susannah, "but he is dead."
+
+It would appear that her words tallied with some conclusion he had been
+drawing concerning her, for without further parley Susannah found
+herself being led in a formal manner down the companion-way. The brief
+report which she had given of herself had preceded her through the boat.
+She heard the passengers whom she left on the deck making sentimental
+remarks. Two coloured girls who were washing dishes in a pantry came to
+its door and gasped with emotion as they stared at her. In the saloon
+the coloured waiters gaped.
+
+At the farther end of the saloon a stout and magnificent lady in silk
+and diamonds was seated before innumerable viands which were spread in
+circles around her plate. She stopped eating while her husband presented
+Susannah. She alone of all upon the boat seemed to be overburdened by no
+surge of sentiment or curiosity. She was a most comfortable person.
+
+Seated in safety beside her, Susannah could indulge the pent-up
+indignation of her outraged spirit in silent musings upon Smith's
+degradation and, the certain downfall of all righteousness under the new
+tyranny. And yet--and yet--the shock of the last few days, forcibly as
+it vibrated through all her nature, could not eradicate the sympathy of
+years--the memories of Hiram and Kirtland, Haun's Mill and the
+desperate winter's march. Justice, her old friend, now her inquisitor,
+said sternly, "It was in these scenes in which some lost life and some
+reason that these men lost their moral standards." But her heart cried,
+"Now that _I_ am insulted, I cannot forgive."
+
+The words of the Governor's wife, cheerful, continuous, and not without
+diverting sparkle, were an unspeakable rest to Susannah, weary above all
+things of herself. Whether because of a strong undercurrent of tactful
+kindness, or in mere garrulity, the good lady's talk for some time
+flowed on concerning all things small, and nothing great, like the
+lapping of the river against the vessel's bows.
+
+But at last her companion's situation grew upon her; she enlarged more
+than once upon her surprise at Susannah's advent, and her feelings of
+extreme relief that she was safely there.
+
+"What a mercy!" she sighed comfortably. "Such awful people! Why, I hear
+that when any child among them is weak or deformed they just murder it."
+
+Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely
+accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.
+
+"It is perfectly true," the Governor's wife declared. "I have heard it
+several times. How long have you been at Nauvoo?"
+
+"Three weeks."
+
+"And in that time they offered to kill you! Well, I assure you if you
+had been a sickly child they wouldn't have let you live three days. And
+they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen
+wives."
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Ten or eleven, at any rate."
+
+"He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her."
+
+"How they have imposed upon you! Where have you been living that you
+have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?"
+
+Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when
+the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a
+group of the smoking men.
+
+"James," cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice,
+"this lady doesn't even know a tithe of the enormities that are
+practised in Nauvoo."
+
+He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah's heart
+and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.
+
+His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.
+
+He asked Susannah if the Mormons had retained all her property, and what
+destination she now proposed for herself; and then with great delicacy
+informed her that there was a proposition among the passengers to make
+a collection, to defray the expenses of her whole journey.
+
+Susannah's cheek paled again.
+
+"How could I return it if it came from so many?" she asked. Her white
+hands were clasping and unclasping themselves. Must it indeed be by
+means of such humiliation that she saved herself from Angel's Church?
+
+The Governor determined upon further generosity. "If you would prefer,
+take it from me as a loan," he said.
+
+She gave him Ephraim's address. It was so long since she had spoken her
+cousin's name to any one that tears came when she felt herself bound to
+explain that she was not certain that he was alive.
+
+"He is probably alive. Ill news travels fast."
+
+She blessed the dapper gentleman for this unfounded opinion, for the
+kindness that prompted it, more than for all else that he had done.
+
+His advice was that Susannah should continue upon that boat with them as
+far south as Cairo, in order to take advantage of the steam-boats now
+plying on the Ohio River, so that the expense and weariness of the land
+journey would be diminished to the small space between the uppermost
+point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Canal. There were
+several men upon the boat, he said, who could commend her to the care of
+every captain on the Ohio.
+
+Susannah felt too weak and weary to say more in defence of the morals of
+Nauvoo. She could not struggle against the fact that her claim to the
+generosity of which she stood in such helpless need was recognised and
+satisfied by the hatred of these Gentiles.
+
+When in the succeeding days she had time to meditate, while she spent
+many a long hour on the decks of river-boats watching the shimmering
+lights and shades that pass upon open river surfaces, the perplexing and
+contrasting aspects of her situation played in like manner upon her
+heart.
+
+She had suffered so much, such long and deadly ill, as a member of this
+almost innocent sect, suffered bravely in protest against the vile
+injustice of the persecution, and now that she was escaping from
+miseries inflicted by this same sect, she was wrapped in the kindly
+reverse side of the persecuting spirit, and carried home in it, with all
+the deference that would be accorded to a lost child. She was too tired
+and helpless now to defy the good thus given. Did all her former
+suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?
+
+With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the
+history of her more inward life. With what strong protest against the
+obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through
+many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering
+spiritual world. Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal
+marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked
+to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in
+desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompassed by
+invisible power and protection. In vain she said to herself that the
+simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those
+coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance
+had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully
+righteous--consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the
+Mormons falsely accused. When she had told herself this, the impression
+that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in
+spite of her small marring of the work, remained. Even while her bosom
+was swelling with shame at hearing her husband's sect derided, and
+eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing
+that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the
+assurance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was
+for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Susannah left the canal boat at Rochester. She had borrowed as small a
+sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn
+garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot. Food
+was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any
+house and state her need. She got a long lift on her way from a farmer
+driving to Canandaigua. Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost
+stopped, some information about Ephraim.
+
+"He's kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father," said the
+farmer.
+
+From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.
+
+She asked no more; her lips refused to form his name again.
+
+"The old lady, she was took off with a stroke; she and the old gentleman
+is laying together in the graveyard." The farmer volunteered this
+information, and Susannah, who had nerved herself to meet Ephraim's
+mother with humility, now wept for her loss.
+
+From the town of Canandaigua she walked beside the winding river and
+entered Manchester from the west at the hour when the May dusk was
+melting into moonlight.
+
+The public road, then as now, was lined with elms and many an
+apple-tree. The dusk of the elm branches was flecked with half-grown
+fluttering leaves, and the outline of the apple branches was heavy with
+blossom. The air was sweet in the shade of the night-folded petals, the
+perfume bringing involuntarily the thought of the hum of bees which had
+gone to rest. There were some new houses on the road, but the tide of
+progress had here ebbed, leaving the once ambitious village like a rock
+pool, beautified only by those ornaments of nature which thrive in
+stillness. There was more on the road of gable and shrub and tree which
+was familiar than of objects strange to her eye. The few people who were
+abroad gave her scarcely a glance, the half light veiling all that was
+foreign in her garb. The round moon hung above the willows of the river.
+
+When she came in sight of the white Baptist meeting-house she scanned
+its homely appearance as one looks at the face of an old friend. The
+yellow light within was put out as she approached. Out of the door a
+group of men were issuing as if from some evening service.
+
+What vivid memories the scene brought her!--memories of her uncle
+singing psalms with slow and solemn demeanour, of her aunt's high and
+more emotional voice, of the pew in which as a girl she had sat between
+them, listless and impatient, wondering at times why Ephraim remained at
+home.
+
+Her uncle and aunt were now lying in the graveyard. She paused a moment
+at the thought, looking at the small host of modest headstones
+surrounded by wild-flowers and half-fledged shrubs. It has never been
+the custom in Manchester to cultivate God's acre. Above, the branches of
+the nut-trees stretched themselves in the sweet spring air--they too
+were just leafing.
+
+Standing by the low, unpainted rail, Susannah wondered in what part of
+the yard her aunt and uncle lay.
+
+She observed that the small coterie of deacons had passed on to the road
+and dispersed, leaving only one of their number, who was locking the
+main door with an air of responsibility. Susannah did not look twice;
+she knew that this man was Ephraim. He stooped slightly to fit the key
+in the lock; then, evidently having forgotten something, pushed the door
+again and went inside.
+
+Susannah did not wait; she went up the graveyard path and in where the
+great square windows cast each a strip of light athwart the dark pews.
+Ephraim turned from his errand and met her in the aisle.
+
+"Ephraim."
+
+Ephraim Croom fell back a step or two, as if his breath was set too
+quick by joy or fear.
+
+Susannah could not speak again.
+
+At length Ephraim stretched out his hands and grasped her arms gently,
+then more strongly, making sure that she was not a trick of light and
+shade. Then, not knowing at all what he did, he clasped her in sudden
+haste to his breast.
+
+Susannah felt his arms wrap about her as if she had been a little child.
+She had never felt, never conceived, of closeness and tenderness like
+this. Ephraim, his breast heaving and his arms folding closer and
+closer, was out of himself. There was no conscious meaning expressed by
+him, but she knew, knew at once without shadow of doubt that he himself
+had been the dreamer of whom he wrote to her, who had learned so much by
+yielding all the loves of his heart to one, and that she was that woman.
+
+It was a long moment; at last, as if waking from a dream, Ephraim
+relinquished his hold. He leaned against the side of a pew, and his
+eager look seemed to hold and fold her still. In the dim light she could
+not see his eye, but she felt the delight of his glance falling upon
+her, a brighter, softer influence than the mantle of the moonlight.
+
+She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder with a motherly touch.
+
+"I have startled you, dear Ephraim; I hope I have done you no harm."
+
+He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough
+heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.
+
+Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for
+very joy, not amusement. "Speak to me," she coaxed. "I have come back to
+you. Do you think we are in a dream?" She let herself kneel on the old
+floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against
+her cheek.
+
+With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner
+would have returned had she remained in any common attitude, but to this
+coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had passed
+without caresses) could not behave with reticence.
+
+One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she
+should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of
+this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene
+reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her
+hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering
+words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his
+unaccustomed lips.
+
+"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked
+most of the way from Rochester to-day."
+
+"Are you very tired?"--as if the fact that she had been walking that day
+was all that needed his immediate attention.
+
+"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have
+long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child
+died I have been quite alone."
+
+"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone
+of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I--I
+supposed that if you were alive you--you preferred to remain, Susy."
+
+She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had
+raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are
+you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"
+
+"We have been having a prayer meeting," he answered. "And I keep the key
+because--because my father used to." He gave the reason with an
+intonation half playful. "I do many a thing now because he did."
+
+"I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are
+they less foolish" (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their
+late inmates), "less unjust than they used to be?"
+
+As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his
+manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. "I don't know
+that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that
+I am either, Susy, but--it is not good to worship God alone."
+
+She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom
+of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more
+homelike by his tones.
+
+"The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the
+earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the
+mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?"
+
+She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran
+like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the
+memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the
+grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.
+So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under
+the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child's desire to hear
+a story that she knew by heart.
+
+"Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved--"
+
+When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick
+path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths
+flanked it in orderly ranks. Their light forms glimmered in the branch
+shadows of the budding quince. It was true, what people said, that
+Ephraim had not let his father's home decay. The door stood open, as
+country doors are apt to do.
+
+There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the
+sitting-room. The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and
+sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed
+to see again. Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens. A
+candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing
+beside it. Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a
+student lamp--the fire of a new hearth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought
+with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.
+
+The stranger was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply
+furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped
+in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came
+in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and Susannah
+sat.
+
+"You are one of the Latter-Day Saints?" Susannah asked.
+
+"I am, ma'am, and it's real strange to hear you say them words, for it's
+'Mormons' the Gentiles calls us."
+
+Then to her questioning he told the story of the downfall of Nauvoo.
+
+"There was two causes for the persecution; we had got too powerful and
+too great for the folks in Illinois, just as we had done in Missouri;
+but there was another thing, and that was that wickedness crept in
+amongst us. 'Twasn't as bad as was reported, though, but 'twas
+there--I'm afraid 'twas there."
+
+The man sighed.
+
+"It's twelve years now since I joined the Saints in Missouri and when we
+were driven out there I went with them to Illinois; and I can never
+believe other but that the Latter-Day Saints has the truth, for the
+power of it is always to be seen among them; and now that I've lost
+everything a second time, and know that I have a sickness that I'll
+never get the better of, I have come east to see my folks once more and
+to testify to them of the truth."
+
+He was going on into Vermont, passing by that way that he might refresh
+his eyes with a view of the sacred hill, and had only remained at
+Ephraim's request to relate his tidings to Susannah.
+
+"After coming out of Missouri I never lived at Nauvoo. I had a farm
+midways, between Nauvoo and Quincy. As near as I can make out, the
+scandal they've got agen us, which they've always had agen us because of
+the wickedness of the Gentile mind, began to have some truth in it when
+Rigdon came out with his teaching concerning the nonsense of spiritual
+wives, which wasn't new with him, for I hear that it's held among all
+the folks as call themselves 'Perfectionists.' Well, our prophet made
+pretty quick work of that doctrine, and he rebuked Rigdon in public and
+private, and packed him out of the place, and no one can say that our
+prophet has ever done otherwise with any one as has had notions about
+marriage."
+
+Susannah sighed. "I have heard that he has acted the same way in several
+other instances."
+
+"You have, ma'am? Well, it's strange, too, to hear a Gentile say a good
+word for our prophet, but perhaps, as he came from here, ma'am, you may
+be some relation of his; and I ask you, is it likely, as he's always
+acted so severe in that matter, that he should have taught a false
+doctrine himself? But even some of the Saints do say nowadays that he
+was led away by some strange doctrines before he died; but, for my own
+part, I believe that the tales have arisen from the sinful natures of
+many of the men that he trusted; for he was too trustful, and there's
+apostles and bishops and elders amongst us that are servants of hell.
+There's been evil work since our prophet's martyrdom, for there's
+thousands of our people now deluded by them and going out after Mr.
+Brigham Young and his crew.
+
+"You want to know how the prophet's death came about, and I can tell
+you; for when my disease came on, and the doctor told me 'twas fatal, I
+started to go up to Nauvoo to ask the prophet to lay his hands upon me
+and heal me. But when I got there the city was all in a buzz, for the
+cause that some of the elders had got out a paper accusing the prophet
+of having a lot of ladies for wives. Well now, I can tell you how that
+came about. When our prophet first got the charter for the Nauvoo Legion
+there was a man called Bennet, who had been general in the American
+army, and who was steeped in unbelief and ambition, and who came and
+offered his services to the prophet, and was allowed to build up the
+Nauvoo Legion. He was a most sinful man, and the prophet, he knew his
+sinfulness, but thought that he ought to take any help to build up an
+army to preserve his people from the fearful persecutions. Bennet got
+hold of the worst side of the worst men we had in the Church, among
+which was the new usurper." He paused here with ire in his eye. "I would
+be understood to mean Mr. Brigham Young, who has falsely usurped the
+prophet's place; but there are many of us who will not follow him, no,
+not one step. The Lord will requite him and his confederates, and will
+establish his true servants."
+
+"I fear, my good friend," said Ephraim, "that although it is true that
+the Lord will establish his true servants, it is also true that their
+kingdom is not of this world."
+
+"Well, sir, tramping along as I've done many a day, with no companion
+but the disease that's prevailing against me, I've thought that that may
+be true; but, whichever way it is, Bennet set himself to work iniquity,
+and they say that when the prophet could endure him no longer and gave
+him the sack, he had the vileness to dress himself up in the prophet's
+clothes and go about in disguise, talking Sydney Rigdon's rank
+spiritual-wife doctrine to the ladies and some of them were such fools
+that they thought it was the prophet, and that he disguised his voice
+and kept something over his face in order to work the iniquity in
+secret. That's what a gentleman who knew very well about it told me. But
+anyway, when Bennet was gone out he wrote awful things to the Gentile
+newspapers concerning the domestic iniquities of Nauvoo; and he had his
+own party in the sacred city, and they up and put their scandals in the
+public print in the prophet's own city.
+
+"But the prophet he rose up and shook himself, like Samson when his arms
+were tied with the withes, and he denounced the wickedness, and went to
+the house where the paper was published, and kicked the printing press
+down himself, and burned the paper. And that day he preached most
+powerful in the Nauvoo Temple."
+
+"We heard that it was on account of the illegality of his action in the
+printing office that the people of Illinois arrested him."
+
+The stranger did not answer directly. His mind had passed on to scenes
+which had stirred him more personally.
+
+"I was in the city all the time. The Government of Illinois sent to
+arrest Mr. Smith, but his people rallied round him, and said that in
+consequence of the lawless persecutions that had passed in Missouri they
+had a right to mistrust the justice of the State. They called out the
+Nauvoo Legion, and sent back the constables that had come from
+Carthage. That made the Gentiles terribly angry. The Illinois
+militiamen went about saying openly that they would burn down the town
+and kill every man, woman, and child in it. So then Governor Ford
+himself advised our prophet to keep the Legion under arms, for he said
+the Gentiles were so furious; but he asked the prophet to go to Carthage
+and pledge himself to appear for the trial when it came on, for it was a
+civil suit, and no harm could come to him and his. Governor Ford pledged
+his honour as the Governor of the State.
+
+"I had been waiting about the town until the prophet should be less
+bothered before asking him to heal my sickness, but when I heard that he
+was going away, then I misdoubted that it would be long before he came
+back. I thought I'd make a push for it, so I went and hung round the
+door of the prophet's house. I was only a poor man and I did not like to
+go in, for the bishops and elders and all the grand folks were going in
+and out all that day. I heard the things they said, and most of them
+were saying that the prophet had had a vision, and that if he went to
+Carthage he would never come back alive. They said too that if he
+stayed, the town would be sacked, and I understood that they were asking
+him to run away. Towards evening I saw a buggy draw up at the back door
+of the hotel, and all the elders seemed to be holding a meeting, for
+they were singing hymns; so then it just come to me that they were going
+to get the prophet off, and I ran down the road to the ferry, for I
+knew he would have to go that way. I waited in the boat, and the same
+buggy came down to it, and a man with a cloak on and his hat over his
+eyes came out and sat in the corner of the boat, and we all knew that it
+was the prophet, and none of us durst speak to him. But I went over in
+the boat, for I hoped I'd get up courage to ask him when we came to the
+other side. When he stood on the shore he seemed like a man that didn't
+know what to do, although there was horses there for him to take, and he
+turned round and went off the road up on to a little hill; and I went
+after him a bit of the way behind, and I came and found him just
+standing looking at the city, for the river swept round two sides of it
+so noble like, and blue as the sky above, and the city stood all white,
+and the temple stood high in the middle, and all of it glistened in the
+sun. The prophet had taken off his hat, and he stood with his hands
+folded on the stick he carried, and he just looked and looked at the
+city. I had never seen a man look like that but once before, and then it
+was a man I knew whose wife died, and he looked at her face just
+steadfast like that. I couldn't think to speak to him about myself just
+then, although I'd got him alone, for my heart was just broke to see how
+sad he looked, and him just in the prime of life; for it was his own
+city, and the sound of all its work came over to us as we stood there,
+and the thousands and thousands of happy homes in it belonged to his
+own people.
+
+"But when I moved a bit he saw me, and he started at first as if I'd
+been going to shoot him, thinking no doubt that I was an enemy spying on
+him. At that, because my disease had weakened me, and because I seemed
+to feel nothing all through me but the grief that he was bearing, I
+began to cry like a child.
+
+"Then he stretched out his hands towards the city and I heard him say,
+'My Lord, thou hast given me this people, and if I leave them without a
+shepherd they will be stricken and scattered and robbed by the
+destroyer.'
+
+"So then in a few minutes he held out his hand to me, so gentlemanlike,
+as if I was as good as him, and he said, 'Come, my friend, let us go
+back, and let God determine what we shall do or suffer.' So we went and
+got on the ferry-boat and went back, and I never spoke to him; but I
+went with him all the way to his house.
+
+"The next morning I heard that he and Mr. Hyrum were going to set off
+for Carthage to be tried. So I got a horse and went to Carthage before
+them, for I felt then that I cared for nothing but to see the prophet
+again. But I heard tell how, as they went along, their wives and their
+friends went with them part way, and they turned back two or three times
+as they were parting from them, for the prophet said that they would
+never see his face again.
+
+"Governor Ford he met them at Carthage with a great to-do. He pledged
+the honour of the State that they should be safe, and he had the troops
+drawn upon either side, and he passed down between them with the prophet
+and Mr. Hyrum and showed them himself into the gaol. The prophet said
+that it was illegal to put them in the gaol, for it was a civil matter,
+and Governor Ford said, for I heard him, that it was because they would
+be safer there. I was standing just behind the line of soldiers jostling
+up with the crowd, and I heard the Governor say, 'I pledge you my
+honour, and the faith and honour of this State, that no harm shall come
+to you while undergoing this imprisonment.' So then they were shut in;
+but the crowd and the soldiers remained in the streets, and I heard
+enough to know that harm would come.
+
+"The next morning the Governor went away from Carthage, to be out of it,
+and that day, in the afternoon, a mob of men with faces painted like
+Indians came out with guns, and we knew that their purpose was to murder
+the prophet. I went to the gaol and sat upon the steps, and the militia,
+which was called the Carthage Greys, came out, and halted, about eight
+rods from the gaol, and I thought at first that they would fire on the
+mob when they came, but they never moved, but stood and looked on. So
+the murder was done by them all in cold blood as well as by the mob."
+
+"Did you see him die?" asked Susannah with white lips.
+
+"If he was a relation of yours, ma'am, I can tell you that he died like
+a man. First I thought that I would spend what little strength I had
+left in fighting the mob at the door, and that they should not go in
+except over my body; but the gaoler opened the door in pretence of
+finding out what was the matter, for he was in the plot; so I thought
+that I would run up and give warning. But by the time I got to the door
+of the upper room where the prophet was, the mob was up behind me, so I
+never rightly knew what I did, for they knocked me down just within the
+room. There were four or five men with the prophet and Mr. Hyrum, and
+these kept the mob back for a few minutes at the door, but a bullet hit
+Mr. Hyrum in the head, and I saw the prophet leaning over him, and he
+said in a voice that was very sad, 'My dear, dear brother!'
+
+"Then the prophet stood up quite calmly and pulled out a pistol and shot
+at the mob until all its barrels were discharged. His firing made the
+men hold back, for a good number of the mob were struck. Then they came
+on again until the door was literally full with muskets and rifles, but
+I was lying on the floor below the shots, so I saw them pass over my
+head. The very walls were riddled with them, and the prophet stood in
+the midst of the shots and threw up his hands towards heaven and cried,
+'O Lord, my God.' Then, not knowing what he did, he staggered to the
+window, dying from his wounds, and he fell outside the window, and I
+heard that the mob out there propped up his body and used it for a
+target."
+
+Susannah rose up with clenched hands and pitiful face, but she went out
+of the room, leaving the two men together. "Were you injured?" asked
+Ephraim of the stranger.
+
+"Well, sir, I was bruised by being trampled on, but the gaoler got hold
+of me and dragged me into an iron cell and locked me in, and the next
+morning he came and let me out."
+
+"That was a year ago," said Ephraim. "Have you been in Nauvoo since
+then?"
+
+"Yes, I went back. I wanted to know, sir, what would come, and take my
+share of the suffering after seeing the prophet die so courageous; but,
+sir, the Church is sorely divided. I didn't like to say it before your
+lady, for I see that she's got some one she cares for amongst us, but
+there's a strong party among the apostles and elders that are
+worshippers of Baal, and are most evil in their conduct and practice,
+and are apostate, though they call themselves followers of the prophet.
+And Mr. Brigham Young is at the head of them. It's a bad thing that the
+Illinois militia is set out to fight against us and turn us out of the
+city without mercy, but it's a sorer thing that the greater part of our
+people, being ignorant, will follow Mr. Brigham Young; and he's bent on
+going west, sir, into the heart of the Rocky Mountains, where he can set
+up a kingdom of his own. His teaching is against good doctrine in two
+respects; he says that they will wax strong there until they can avenge
+the blood of their brethren who have been hunted and slain, and that the
+elders and apostles will live like the patriarchs of old, and have many
+wives, in order to build up the Church."
+
+"And has the other party in your sect no strength to resist?"
+
+"Very little strength, sir, except that God is on the side of the
+righteous; but Mrs. Smith, the prophet's widow, with his sons and many
+hundreds of us, will not give in to the evil, but will stay in Illinois
+and Missouri in face of the worst that persecution can do, for it was
+thereabouts that the prophet said that the Holy City should be, and he
+gave us no word to kill and destroy our fellow-men; and although perhaps
+he was led away and sinned sometimes as other men do, it is a scandalous
+lie to say that he thought to teach wickedness and falsehood to his
+Church."
+
+"I wonder," asked Ephraim within himself, "if that is true, or what
+strange secret that troubled soul took with him to the other side of
+death?"
+
+In the evening after the stranger was gone Susannah sat with Ephraim in
+the old doorway. Before them, mid the harvest fields, winding over hill
+and dale, lay the long white road which led to the hill of Smith's early
+visions--the road on which Susannah had set forth with Angel Halsey on
+her wedding journey.
+
+"You are a-weary, wife, to-night," said Ephraim. He smoothed the hair
+upon her brow. "You have exhausted yourself with long weeping, and
+yet--"
+
+He did not say, "Have you reason to bemoan this man's tragic end?" for
+he knew that more sacred memories had caused the tears; of these some
+faint jealousy rose in his breast and kindness sealed his lips.
+
+She told him the truth in very simple words such as loving women use.
+
+"To-day I seemed to see" (she laid her hand across her knit brows) "all
+the passion of it again, the wrong, the right, the misery--from the day
+that Angel and I went out with such young passionate desire to divide
+the right from the wrong. I could see Angel and my baby shot before my
+eyes as Joseph Smith was shot. It is terrible to see death come that
+way. But they are all three lying now in the perfect peace of death."
+She put her hand in his. "Then, dear, my mind came back, from the rage
+and terror of war. I thought of their peace and of you--how God has
+healed my life by your love, and given me such joy. Is he not able to
+provide for the healing of the nations?"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Prophet, by Lily Dougall
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