The Mormon Prophet Part 33

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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 embarra.s.sment, 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, a.s.sert 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 m.u.f.fled 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 s.p.a.ces 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 grat.i.tude 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.