The Mormon Prophet Part 11

"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 n.o.bly, using your faculties to glorify G.o.d."

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 G.o.d'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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude 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 c.o.c.ks 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."