The Mormon Prophet Part 9

Halsey, believing himself to be healed, got up from his sick-bed, and his recovery progressed rapidly.

Full of excitement, fervour, superst.i.tion, and faith, the apostles of the new doctrine were fully persuaded that they might expect a literal fulfilment of the promise that signs and wonders should follow them that believe. The fierce opposition and hatred which were roused by the reports of their doings are easily accounted for when we consider that their opinions had to encounter that curious distortion of reason which has caused religious warfare in all times and places to become the worst sort of warfare, and the fact which Smith himself had acknowledged when he first saw Susannah, that many evil reports about him had formerly been true; then also the new sect produced vehement psychical disturbance wherever it touched the surrounding population, and many things occurred which might, or might not, be termed miracles, according to the interpretation of the observer. It was no longer possible for Joseph Smith to ride, as he had done on the day of Susannah's marriage, with a minister of one of the older sects. He became very notorious, and to every one except those who were interested enough in his doctrine to give him a fair hearing, his name became a synonym for all evil.

Halsey remained with Susannah at John Biery's hotel. Halsey was one of the few converts who could afford to live in comparative comfort and to pay something for the entertainment of dest.i.tute disciples. For that reason the landlord, John Biery, held himself from the religious quarrel that was shaking the region.

Even before Halsey had regained his strength he drove Susannah to swell the congregation at the preachings which were daily taking place in different places within the township, for such converts as had already professed themselves were gathered now in the neighbourhood of Fayette.

Experiences came to Susannah in such quick succession that this was not a time of reflection. Such part of her husband's religion as she could appropriate she endeavoured very sincerely to embrace. After the manner of the thought, of the time she supposed that the sect was either right or wrong--if right, all right; if wrong, all wrong. Sometimes the ghastly fear that her growing belief was false would arise with hideous menace.

CHAPTER XI.

All the doings of the infant sect were directed by those utterances of Joseph Smith which he held to be revelations. These were confided sometimes to the elders, sometimes to the converts at large. Susannah frequently heard of them first through Emma Smith, whose pious heart was constantly filled with wonder and thankfulness at the thought of the great honour vouchsafed to her husband. These revelations, sometimes illimitable in their sweep, and sometimes having reference only to the most minute practical details, were at this time all in accordance either with the dictates of common sense or with the severely literal meaning of some Scripture text. They were therefore easily justified either to reason or to the eye of faith, but the results of their application were often startling, and it was facts, not theories, that chiefly caused Susannah to stagger.

At length the growing excitement among the congregation seemed to gather toward some climax. It was then that Joseph Smith was said for the first time to cast out devils.

Near to John Biery's hotel lived a family of the name of Knight. The worthy farmer became a convert, and so also, in appearance, did his son.

Susannah first saw them at their baptism, which took place one cold bleak day in the margin of Seneca Lake. The horses which had brought the little company to the edge of the water, having been tied among the trees, made a constant rustling and trampling among the fallen leaves.

The sharp rustle, the thud of the hoofs upon the ground, were sounds long connected in her mind with the crisis of her doubt, which then began. The maples stood above them, tall and leafless; the waters of the lake were leaden in hue and cold. Looking southward on either side of its long flood, the snores with their many points and headlands lay cold, almost hueless, near by, and in the distance blue as tarnished steel.

It was a bitter day for baptist and for the immersed. Joseph Smith went out alone into the water, commanding the other elders to remain upon the sh.o.r.e. Whatever else the man had or had not, he had splendid courage in facing physical ills. There were but few candidates. Susannah, standing apart near the sh.o.r.e, chanced to be in the path by which the younger Knight descended to the water. He was a young man with strong features and a thick, unhealthy skin. He was dressed in the wet garments which another candidate had taken off. Cold he might have been, but as he pa.s.sed she heard his teeth chatter so loudly that it almost seemed to her that his very bones rattled. She drew back with the impression that some horrible thing had pa.s.sed by. Before she had time to wonder that the chill should have had such an effect upon the hardy fellow, his feet were in the water, and he turned and caught her eye. The look he gave her became suddenly one of terrified entreaty.

Susannah did not move; she was spell-bound. He began to wade toward Smith, who stood in the deeper water. She wondered why he allowed himself to be immersed. She was certain that he did not desire it, was certain also that no motives of interest, no physical force, could have operated to compel, when suddenly she asked herself sharply, what force had taken her into the waters of this extraordinary baptism?

To her astonishment, when Newell Knight came up from the water he was shouting aloud. She thought that his accents were a horrible simulation of merriment, but by the others they were accepted as an evidence of holy joy.

Two days after, when Susannah and her husband were returning from Smith's preaching through the autumn night, they were met as they were approaching Biery's hotel by a messenger from Knight's house. The messenger had been sent to fetch Halsey. He reported that Newell Knight was in "an awful way." Susannah alighted at once and walked to the tavern, in order that her husband might drive with all speed to the afflicted man.

The lights as they shone from John Biery's windows reminded her vividly of the first time, a month since, when she had driven to that house at night. She had grown much older since then, stronger in many ways, weaker in some, but she was not conscious of this; it was not her way to give even so much as a pa.s.sing glance at herself as one of the actors in life's drama. The road on which she trod was heavy with mud. The night-winds cried around and through the empty branches of two or three neglected trees in the clearing. The square wooden tavern stood at the cross-roads. The light from the door made a pathway through the darkness, up which Susannah walked.

When she entered, the heat and fumes from fire, candles, tobacco-pipes, and steaming mugs met her. She was accustomed to walking through John Biery's main room to gain the stair that led to her own; on the whole it was not disorderly, or Susannah had but to appear on the threshold to reduce it to order. To-night the men did not let her pa.s.s with their usual civil "Good evening"; they a.s.sumed that she had an interest in their talk.

"Is Mr. Halsey stopping over to Farmer Knight's?" asked Biery. "My! and they'll be real glad to get him, ye know. Twiced they've been here fur him. They say that Newell Knight he's possessed with a devil."

Susannah wrapped her shawl tightly across her breast, a nervous movement caused not by cold but by the desire to withdraw her real self from the surrounding circ.u.mstance.

A tall thin man sitting by the table set down his mug with a clatter upon it. "Wall now, tain't my idea thet thet's exectly what's taken Newell. I saw a case of a man thet was taken under the preacher Finney.

'Twas over to Ithica. The hull town knew about it. A lot of folks went in. I jest looked in when I was pa.s.sing, and seen the man meself. He was lyin' on the floor. His wife was aholdin' his head, but he didn't know her. He hedn't no knowledge of any of the folks. He jest lay there rollin', and his eyes was rollin'. And when Finney was fetched, Finney he said 'twas 'conviction.' I don't know what the man was convicted of, but 'twas 'conviction' Finney called it. He didn't say nothing about being possessed with devils."

The third speaker was a small fat man. His face was smooth and had the peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he glanced at Susannah critically.

"When they're taken that way under Finney," he said, as if meditating, "'conviction' commonly means conviction of sins--their own sins, ye know, not other folk's; and when they git up, if they've taken anything wrongfully they hev to restore it fourfold afore the conviction will leave off a-worrittin' them. I don't know how 'tis among the Mormons."

The last words were said in an undertone and he had dropped his eyes. It would have required a brave man to treat Susannah to open sarcasm.

She stood looking from one to the other. She still wore her girlish cottage bonnet, and as its fashion was, it had slipped backwards upon the amber ringlets that hung upon her neck; but the girlish look was fast pa.s.sing from the face, the hair parting fell on either side of pale cheeks.

"Oh, as to thet, 's fur as I know, one religion's as good as another,"

said the politic Biery.

Susannah looked at the fat, bright-eyed man who was no longer looking at her. "I know" (her voice fell with a strange gentleness through the thickened atmosphere of the room) "that there are many malicious stories abroad about the dishonesty of our people which are not true."

But as she went up the stair she remembered that she had heard of no case where reformation of character had been followed by the returning of the fourfold. Most of these saints of the new sect had before their conversion been, like her husband, already G.o.d-fearing and righteous, but in cases where, like their leader, they had been reclaimed from evil courses, had they not been satisfied with offering the present and future to G.o.d, leaving the past? She had heard of no case of rest.i.tution such as Finney insisted upon.

Susannah entered the low, wide room in which she lived. The chimney from the lower room pa.s.sed up and was always warm. She went and laid her cold hands against the rough plaster that covered its bricks, and, being tired, she leaned, laying her cheek too against its warm surface. The one candle cast but a faint light upon the chairs, the bed, the table.

The small panes of the window-gla.s.s were bare to the darkness without and the empty tree-branches. The heavy latch of the closed door was fastened crookedly for lack of good workmanship.

Her unsatisfied mind ached for counsel, and her thought, roving over the world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked back her tears.

She waited an hour, two hours; then, becoming anxious on Halsey's account, she borrowed a lantern and went across the fields to Knight's farmhouse.

Quite a number of people had gathered. Susannah met some of them coming from the house, but others were still there, standing about the fire in the kitchen. She heard that the later arrivals had all been disappointed of the sight of Newell Knight in his fit. Halsey had a.s.sumed authority, stating that it was indeed a case of possession, and that none but those who were strong in faith and in the power of prayer must come near the possessed. The craving of the visitors for excitement was only fed by the sound of the young man's voice, heard at short intervals.

He cried aloud, sometimes shrieking that he was being taken into "the pit" and that Joseph Smith could alone deliver him, sometimes exclaiming in a strange voice that he was no longer Newell Knight but a demon, and sometimes only moaning and gibbering words that no one could understand.

Halsey came out to Susannah. "Wouldst thou see him?" he asked tenderly.

"The sight will distress thee, for it is truly terrible to see with the eye of flesh the power of h.e.l.l, and yet I cannot forbid thee if thou wouldst come, for perchance the Lord may mean it for our edification."

Susannah went with him into the inner room, hardly knowing why she went, but probably impelled by the instinctive desire to relieve suffering which was part of her womanhood. The young man's father and mother, together with two or three Mormon converts, were kneeling upon the floor, saying prayers for the sufferer in more or less audible, more or less agonised tones.

The young man lay upon a pallet-bed, in what would have been called by the medical science of the time "convulsions." His eyeb.a.l.l.s were rolled upwards in a manner most disfiguring to his face. His hands were clenched. Halsey no sooner entered the room than he, too, fell upon his knees, lifting his face upward as if in silent and fervent prayer.

For a moment Susannah felt impelled to follow his example. "But perhaps," she thought to herself, "cold water upon the patient's head, or a warm foot-bath--" Such suggestions caused her to resist the impulse to join the praying band, and, having resisted it, she suddenly experienced, as one feels a fresh breeze entering a close room, a strong, clear sense of knowledge that in this matter, at least, her husband was deluded, that the friends had better rise from their knees and betake themselves to ruder remedies.

Susannah had never learned to command; she had never even learned to advise. She had too much reverence to speak aloud, disturbing those who were at prayer. She stood hesitating, and then, in very low tones, whispered her belief in her husband's ear.

No doubt Halsey was shocked at his wife's unbelief; perhaps by the law of telepathy, for whose existence some psychical experts vouch, his thought penetrated the mind of the sensitive upon the bed. Whatever the cause, Newell Knight sat up and pointed at Susannah, crying aloud that he saw the devil about to seize upon her. So excited was the mental atmosphere, so vivid were the sufferer's words and the effect of his pointing finger, or, perhaps, so substantial was his vision, that more than one of the saints afterwards averred that they had seen the Evil One about to embrace Susannah. But they did not agree in the description of his form.

Halsey wrapped his arms about his wife, and led her like a child from the room and from the house. She hardly had time to speak before she saw the night again about her. He set her down upon an old log that chanced to lie against Knight's barn, kneeling beside her. There, when they were alone in the darkness, he invoked that name to which throughout all Christendom the devils are believed to be subject.

"Angel," she said gently, "stop praying and listen to me. If you can command the devil in the name of our Lord, why don't you do that to poor Newell Knight?" She felt strong sympathy for the young man; she was moved almost to tears to think they were taking the wrong way with him.

"I have tried and failed. We have sent for Joseph Smith. My faith is not strong enough," he added humbly. "This cometh not forth but by prayer and by fasting. Look! I am even now unfaithful to my charge because I love thee, friend, more, I fear, than the work of the Lord."

They were left alone because Halsey in pa.s.sing out had left the door of the sick room open to the eager neighbours. Now reluctantly he went back to his task of guarding the patient, and Susannah, after a.s.suring his anxious soul that she felt no ill effects whatever from the dire proximity, went home again across the dark frozen fields with her lantern. She sat half the night watching and waiting.

It was in the darkest hour before the dawn that she heard Halsey's step and crept down through the black house to unlock the door for him. When they had come again into the room she saw that he was greatly excited, filled with apparent calm of an exalted mood.

"We have beheld a most glorious victory, friend; and truly we have been shown signs and wonders, and a very great miracle has been wrought. I wish thou couldst have seen with thine own eyes, and yet--"

She thought that he had been going to say that her lack of faith had made it more expedient for her to be away, but that he had checked in himself even the thought that he was more worthy of privilege than she.

It seemed that Joseph Smith, having been preaching the evening before at a place some twenty miles away, had not been able to reach Knight's house until nearly two in the morning.

"He rode all night," said Halsey, "and lost not a moment in coming to the inner room; it was like him."

"Yes," said Susannah, "it was like him; he is very kind."