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.