The Mormon Prophet Part 36

"What a mercy!" she sighed comfortably. "Such awful people! Why, I hear that when any child among them is weak or deformed they just murder it."

Like one who is enraged with his own kin but cannot hear them falsely accused, Susannah contradicted this statement.

"It is perfectly true," the Governor's wife declared. "I have heard it several times. How long have you been at Nauvoo?"

"Three weeks."

"And in that time they offered to kill you! Well, I a.s.sure you if you had been a sickly child they wouldn't have let you live three days. And they say that that monster they call the prophet has at least a dozen wives."

"Oh, no."

"Ten or eleven, at any rate."

"He has only one, and he has always been very kind to her."

"How they have imposed upon you! Where have you been living that you have not heard more of their iniquitous doings than that?"

Susannah was faint and ill with the conflict within her own breast when the dapper Kentucky Governor, on business intent, came to them from a group of the smoking men.

"James," cried his wife, with an edge of sharpness in her low voice, "this lady doesn't even know a t.i.the of the enormities that are practised in Nauvoo."

He shook his head, and said that it was a compliment to Susannah's heart and mind that the tenth part had been sufficient to alarm.

His manner was stiff and formal, but his disposition seemed very kind.

He asked Susannah if the Mormons had retained all her property, and what destination she now proposed for herself; and then with great delicacy informed her that there was a proposition among the pa.s.sengers to make a collection, to defray the expenses of her whole journey.

Susannah's cheek paled again.

"How could I return it if it came from so many?" she asked. Her white hands were clasping and unclasping themselves. Must it indeed be by means of such humiliation that she saved herself from Angel's Church?

The Governor determined upon further generosity. "If you would prefer, take it from me as a loan," he said.

She gave him Ephraim's address. It was so long since she had spoken her cousin's name to any one that tears came when she felt herself bound to explain that she was not certain that he was alive.

"He is probably alive. Ill news travels fast."

She blessed the dapper gentleman for this unfounded opinion, for the kindness that prompted it, more than for all else that he had done.

His advice was that Susannah should continue upon that boat with them as far south as Cairo, in order to take advantage of the steam-boats now plying on the Ohio River, so that the expense and weariness of the land journey would be diminished to the small s.p.a.ce between the uppermost point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Ca.n.a.l. There were several men upon the boat, he said, who could commend her to the care of every captain on the Ohio.

Susannah felt too weak and weary to say more in defence of the morals of Nauvoo. She could not struggle against the fact that her claim to the generosity of which she stood in such helpless need was recognised and satisfied by the hatred of these Gentiles.

When in the succeeding days she had time to meditate, while she spent many a long hour on the decks of river-boats watching the shimmering lights and shades that pa.s.s upon open river surfaces, the perplexing and contrasting aspects of her situation played in like manner upon her heart.

She had suffered so much, such long and deadly ill, as a member of this almost innocent sect, suffered bravely in protest against the vile injustice of the persecution, and now that she was escaping from miseries inflicted by this same sect, she was wrapped in the kindly reverse side of the persecuting spirit, and carried home in it, with all the deference that would be accorded to a lost child. She was too tired and helpless now to defy the good thus given. Did all her former suffering go for nothing as a protest against the wrong?

With more curious feelings, more involved sentiments, she regarded the history of her more inward life. With what strong protest against the obvious evils attendant upon unreasoning faith had she resisted through many years the infectious influences of belief in an interfering spiritual world. Now she had defied Smith with a faith in the ideal marriage unsupported by any conscious reason, and when she had looked to the interference of Providence, not even in meekness, but in desperate challenge, she had strong impression of being encompa.s.sed by invisible power and protection. In vain she said to herself that the simple and unlooked-for method of her escape was one of those coincidences which only appear to support faith, that her deliverance had been of no unearthly sort, but brought about by means doubtfully righteous--consent to trick the boy and to say little on hearing the Mormons falsely accused. When she had told herself this, the impression that underneath her folly a guiding hand had impelled and saved her, in spite of her small marring of the work, remained. Even while her bosom was swelling with shame at hearing her husband's sect derided, and eating the bread of that derision, and still greater shame at knowing that condemnation was merited, she would find herself resting in the a.s.surance that beyond and beneath all this confusion of pain there was for her and for all men an eternal and beneficent purpose.

CHAPTER VI.

Susannah left the ca.n.a.l boat at Rochester. She had borrowed as small a sum as might be, and was now penniless, possessing only her travel-worn garments; she had no choice but to start toward Manchester on foot. Food was easily to be had; such a woman as Susannah had but to enter any house and state her need. She got a long lift on her way from a farmer driving to Canandaigua. Of the farmer she asked, while her pulses almost stopped, some information about Ephraim.

"He's kep up the place to a wonderful degree like his father," said the farmer.

From this she gathered that Ephraim was alive and in better health.

She asked no more; her lips refused to form his name again.

"The old lady, she was took off with a stroke; she and the old gentleman is laying together in the graveyard." The farmer volunteered this information, and Susannah, who had nerved herself to meet Ephraim's mother with humility, now wept for her loss.

From the town of Canandaigua she walked beside the winding river and entered Manchester from the west at the hour when the May dusk was melting into moonlight.

The public road, then as now, was lined with elms and many an apple-tree. The dusk of the elm branches was flecked with half-grown fluttering leaves, and the outline of the apple branches was heavy with blossom. The air was sweet in the shade of the night-folded petals, the perfume bringing involuntarily the thought of the hum of bees which had gone to rest. There were some new houses on the road, but the tide of progress had here ebbed, leaving the once ambitious village like a rock pool, beautified only by those ornaments of nature which thrive in stillness. There was more on the road of gable and shrub and tree which was familiar than of objects strange to her eye. The few people who were abroad gave her scarcely a glance, the half light veiling all that was foreign in her garb. The round moon hung above the willows of the river.

When she came in sight of the white Baptist meeting-house she scanned its homely appearance as one looks at the face of an old friend. The yellow light within was put out as she approached. Out of the door a group of men were issuing as if from some evening service.

What vivid memories the scene brought her!--memories of her uncle singing psalms with slow and solemn demeanour, of her aunt's high and more emotional voice, of the pew in which as a girl she had sat between them, listless and impatient, wondering at times why Ephraim remained at home.

Her uncle and aunt were now lying in the graveyard. She paused a moment at the thought, looking at the small host of modest headstones surrounded by wild-flowers and half-fledged shrubs. It has never been the custom in Manchester to cultivate G.o.d's acre. Above, the branches of the nut-trees stretched themselves in the sweet spring air--they too were just leafing.

Standing by the low, unpainted rail, Susannah wondered in what part of the yard her aunt and uncle lay.

She observed that the small coterie of deacons had pa.s.sed on to the road and dispersed, leaving only one of their number, who was locking the main door with an air of responsibility. Susannah did not look twice; she knew that this man was Ephraim. He stooped slightly to fit the key in the lock; then, evidently having forgotten something, pushed the door again and went inside.

Susannah did not wait; she went up the graveyard path and in where the great square windows cast each a strip of light athwart the dark pews.

Ephraim turned from his errand and met her in the aisle.

"Ephraim."

Ephraim Croom fell back a step or two, as if his breath was set too quick by joy or fear.

Susannah could not speak again.

At length Ephraim stretched out his hands and grasped her arms gently, then more strongly, making sure that she was not a trick of light and shade. Then, not knowing at all what he did, he clasped her in sudden haste to his breast.

Susannah felt his arms wrap about her as if she had been a little child.

She had never felt, never conceived, of closeness and tenderness like this. Ephraim, his breast heaving and his arms folding closer and closer, was out of himself. There was no conscious meaning expressed by him, but she knew, knew at once without shadow of doubt that he himself had been the dreamer of whom he wrote to her, who had learned so much by yielding all the loves of his heart to one, and that she was that woman.

It was a long moment; at last, as if waking from a dream, Ephraim relinquished his hold. He leaned against the side of a pew, and his eager look seemed to hold and fold her still. In the dim light she could not see his eye, but she felt the delight of his glance falling upon her, a brighter, softer influence than the mantle of the moonlight.

She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder with a motherly touch.

"I have startled you, dear Ephraim; I hope I have done you no harm."