The Mormon Prophet Part 16

The two women stood in the inner doorway, but the coa.r.s.e arm of a masked man was already stretched across it, an impa.s.sable 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 l.u.s.tily.

"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 a.s.sailed 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 a.s.saulting party, and, creeping within the shadow of trees, she waited.

At length they pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.blest--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 part.i.tion 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 gra.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.serted that Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of G.o.d 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 G.o.dly 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 a.s.sembly 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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, pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.noun in sympathetic sorrow.

"Yes?"

"When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go northward to the Erie Ca.n.a.l, in order that I might pa.s.s through that part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that hypocrite's teaching."