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.