The Mormon Prophet Part 19

After this Susannah's attention was centred upon the coming of her first child.

"'Tain't lucky to have a child when the leaves are falling," said Elvira Halsey, a certain mist of far-off vision clouding her sparkling eyes.

Susannah had been greatly weighed down by depression, not fearing ill-luck, but regretting for the first time unfeignedly that she had ever joined herself to the sect in which her child must now be nurtured.

For herself, feeling often that all religions were equally false, it had mattered little; with strange inconsistency she now perceived that she would greatly prefer another faith for her child. Susannah literally found no place for repentance; to confess her grief to Halsey would only have been to crush out all the domestic joy of his life; she was too courageous to do that when she saw no corresponding good to be gained.

Yet when the baby at length lay on her lap, grew and smiled, kicked and crowed, Susannah forgot at times, for hours together, the superst.i.tions of the Latter-Day Saints. The motherly solicitude which she had long exercised over Halsey changed into something more like friends.h.i.+p when she saw him hang over her and her child as they played together.

Susannah had given up her school. The winter was severe, and mother and child hibernated together by the sweet-scented pinewood fires till the stronger sun had melted the frost flowers on the panes. Spring had nearly come before Susannah divined that for the child's sake Halsey had been protecting her for months from the fear of a near disaster that was weighing upon his own heart.

This was the year of what was called in the early Mormon Church "the great apostasy." One evening Halsey came in looking so white and ill that Susannah drew back the baby, which she had held out for his evening kiss.

In a few minutes she understood what had occurred. Some four or five leaders in the Church, with their families and friends, had charged Smith with hypocrisy and fraud.

It was not Susannah's own opinion that such a charge could be maintained. Smith appeared to her to be like a child playing among awful forces--clever enough often to control them, to the amazement of himself and others, but never comprehending the force he used; often naughty; on the whole a well-intentioned child. But she could well see that childishness combined with power is a more difficult conception for the common mind than rank hypocrisy.

Angel had been a.s.sisting in a solemn excommunication of the apostates.

He looked upon them as having been overcome by the devil.

After this Halsey inst.i.tuted a series of unusual meetings for prayer and revival preaching, which he held after the ordinary evening cla.s.ses in the School of the Prophets, which was now removed to the upper chambers of the finished temple. Now, as at other times, his preaching was successful. His power was with men rather than with women; they gathered in excited crowds, and their prayer and praise went up in the midnight hour.

Susannah was not in the habit of going to bed till her husband returned.

One night, after twelve had struck, while she sat warming the dimpled feet of her restless babe at the rosy fire-light, she was greatly astonished to hear a tapping, low but distinct, on a window that opened to the back of the house. She lifted her head as mother animals p.r.i.c.k their ears above their young at the faint sound of any danger.

After an interval the tap was repeated; it was no accidental noise.

Susannah laid the child in its cradle and went nearer the window shutters, hesitating.

She knew only too well that this secrecy was the sign of some one's dire distress. She knew the habits of the people; a neighbour's aid was sought freely and with confidence; doors were open at all times to need or social intercourse.

To her intent listening the accents of a low and guarded tone came in reply to her challenge; the voice was Joseph Smith's.

Susannah looked with anguish toward her child's cradle. Had some army of mad persecutors invested Kirtland? Nothing less than fierce persecution could be thus heralded.

For years Susannah had known Smith as a near neighbour, and the stuff of which the man was at this time made is indicated by the fact that instinctively she opened the window with noiseless haste.

Smith climbed in. "Has Halsey returned?"

The fire gave the only light in the room. Smith did not shut the window, but remained sitting on the sill. A bake-house at the back hid the place from neighbouring eyes.

"It's all up with our bank," said Smith.

"I feared so," said Susannah.

"The apostates took such a lot of money out of it. No bank anywhere in this region could have stood it. You have always been down on our management of the bank, Mrs. Halsey, but if it was not good, why then have so many of the Gentiles put in their money, and why have they taken our notes all over the State?"

"You never had the capital you advertised."

"We have land that stands for it."

"It is not worth half what you value it at."

Then Susannah became sorry for her sharp recrimination. Punishment had befallen; it was a time for mutual help, not for reproach. She saw that although Smith kept himself calm he was greatly stirred.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

Smith's huge frame was poised awkwardly on the window sill. He moved restlessly and touched one thing and another with nervous hands. Then he said with a short laugh, "The size of it is, I'm running away, Mrs.

Halsey. Ye may think I feel pretty mean, but ye'll do me the justice just to think how it is. If they'd shoot me in fair fight, I'd go and, if it were the Lord's will, be shot to-morrow, and be thankful too; but ye know the sort of vengeance they'll take. I have been beaten time and again before now, and covered with pitch, and I've been knocked down and kicked and ducked in ponds a good many times, as ye know, and I ain't ashamed to say that I'm afraid of that sort of thing and afraid of the results on Emmar and the children. If the Lord clearly told that 'twas his will to stay and stand it, why then I'd have no choice, but I haven't had no word from the Lord."

His face was livid; in the effort to make his explanation, whether shaken by the recollections he described or by fear of her contempt, she saw that his limbs were actually trembling as if with cold.

"There ain't many men, Mrs. Halsey, as would stay and face that sort of music when they could get away, but if it was to do good to mortal creature I'd think about staying, but it's t'other way. It's me and Rigdon as has been advertised as working the bank; it's my blood and his the Gentiles that have our notes are thirsting for. Suppose we stayed and they took to mauling us again, wouldn't the Saints here take to fighting to protect us? I've taught them to fight in self-defence and they'd fight to defend me. G.o.d knows there are better men than we are that would be killed right and left if we stayed, and 'twould be no use, for the Gentile numbers would overpower us. 'Tain't no use. When I found to-day that there wasn't a chance of staving off the bankruptcy I sent Emmar and the children and Rigdon's folks off in a close waggon after sundown. Rigdon's rid off by another road, and I've got my horse ready and ought to be gone. And there ain't a man in Kirtland as will know which way we've gone by to-morrow, so that no Saint will need to do any lying on my account."

"You are very sorry for the mistakes you have made about the bank," she said pityingly.

He gave another short laugh that, like the first, was less like a laugh than a sob.

"I guess I'm sorry enough, but I don't know whether it's repentance, for I thought I'd done all just what the Lord told me to do, but at times like these I'm not so sure of the revelations I hear in my soul, but I know I thought I was right at the time; but as for being sorry, if ye had the burden of all these children of Israel in the desert on your heart, knowing that ye had brought them into the desert, and brought the hunger and the thirst and the pestilence and the enemy upon them, and weren't quite sure at times whether the thing that ye saw leading was the Lord's pillar of cloud or the devil's, and if ye was now being cast out before the face of men and called a liar and a swindler, and without a dollar in the world, I guess ye'd know what it felt like to feel sorry."

The room was a long one; in the fore part the glow from the hearth made clear the baby's cradle, the table set for Halsey's supper, the close shutters of the front windows, but the red flame rays were fainter as they came into this back portion where Susannah stood in dull distress a few paces from the stricken intruder.

This man had always the power at close quarters of producing strange disturbance in the emotions of his friends. Susannah was trembling, her heart heaving, if not with pure compa.s.sion, at least with wild excitement on his account.

With an effort Smith held himself still, but gave again the heart-broken laugh that appealed more than all else to her woman's heart. "'Tain't all that neither, that makes me the most 'sorry,' as ye call it. I tried to go in and out before this people, Mrs. Halsey, loving and serving all alike as a prophet should, but I wouldn't be human man, no, nor fit to be chosen by G.o.d for the honour he's put upon me, if I didn't know who amongst us was most worth care and respect, and it's come to my soul this night, now that I can't no longer stand between you and all the dangers that beset our people in the wilderness, that I wasn't right, maybe, to egg on Halsey to take ye away from your happy home, or to make a point as I did, first off, of getting ye converted--for I was more set on it than I showed at the time. It's because 'twas my doing you married, that I've come to say this; and I see well enough that 'tain't love that is between you and Halsey, though you are too tender of him to let him see."

She made a movement of the head, an effort to show reproving dignity, while in fact taken by surprise, her nerves in distressful panic, she had scarce the power to control herself, none to control him.

He answered her impulse, although he had not looked up to see the gesture. "Ye haven't got any call to-night to be offended with me, for I'm worth no more, unless the Lord see fit to lift me up agen, than the paper our bank-notes is written on; and I have just got one more thing to say, then I'm gone. If there's any grit in Joseph Smith, and if it pleases G.o.d that he's not going now to his death, he'll not make another home for himself without providing as good a place for you and the young one. Ye may depend on it."

He rose up now. "'Tain't no use disguising facts; I'm running away, and I'm leaving ye to dangers and privations. Your money and Halsey's is gone the way of all the rest, and without me to stop him Halsey will fly in the face of the first persecution that's within his reach. If I hadn't known that there was no chance at all of your coming I'd have asked you and the child to git into Emmar's waggon; but there's just this to say, there ain't a tribulation that can come to you that won't hurt me, living or dead, more than it can hurt you." Then after a pause he added, "Emmar sent her dear love and good-bye to ye."

He stood still a moment before her in humble att.i.tude, the words of Emma's tender farewell lingering, as it were, in the air between them.

"Have a care what you do." (He resumed a more dignified manner of speech.) "It's borne in upon my mind that great dangers will lie round you. Tell brother Halsey from me that it is the will of the Lord that he should seek first the safety of his wife and child, and to abide in a place of safety till the child be grown."

He climbed through the window. His last act was to close the cas.e.m.e.nt behind him to save her trembling hands the exertion. His movements must have been very stealthy, for she did not hear the sound of his steps or the steps of his horse in the silent night.

CHAPTER IX.

After Smith left Kirtland there was a great exodus Missouri-ward of his more devout followers. The army which had gone out from Kirtland in '34 to the rescue of the fugitives from the city of Zion in Missouri had failed, through disease and exhaustion, to make warlike demonstration; but the principle then accepted by the children of Zion of opposing force to force in self-defence, had been bearing fruit ever since in a b.l.o.o.d.y warfare between the hunted Saints of Missouri and their more powerful neighbours.

Before the Saints took up arms the Missourians had, it would seem, no real ground of offence against them except the religious faith which led them to proclaim that the land was to be given to them by the Lord for an everlasting possession. Now this provocation was still in force, added to the greater one that the worm had turned.

So futile had been the mad persecutions, so fruitful the blood of the martyrs, that by this time there were some ten thousand Saints in Missouri, all heads of families, for although Zion in Jackson County still lay waste, and the colonies of Clay County had been swept away, the cities of Far West and Diahman, and numerous villages near them, had risen like magic, built by the thrift, the organisation, and the temperance of the Saints.

As for Kirtland, the hope of making it a prosperous city had died with the failure of the bank. Of the few who remained two distinct parties were formed--the orthodox, headed by Halsey, and the reformers, encouraged, if not headed, by the former leaders who were now apostate.