Lily Dougall - The Mormon Prophet

L >> Lily Dougall >> The Mormon Prophet

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

She singled out the captain by some sign in his dress, and pleaded
urgent necessity for travelling with him.

"Look here," said the boy, looking up at her from beneath, "I call that
a low-down, mean sort of thing to do. Why didn't you tell me square? I'd
have brought you if you wanted do come."

She pleaded with the boy too. "It was better for you not to know my
secrets. If they ask you in the city you can say that you didn't know."

A dozen hands were held out to help her to climb the ladder on the
shelving paddle-box. "Keep off," they cried to the boy, and he swung
away from the churning wheel.

Susannah stood upon the deck pale and trembling. The magnitude of the
step came upon her, and she was beset by natural timidity and the
painfulness of her dependence. The men who stood around her with the
right to question were not of a low class. The captain, brawny and
respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified
gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor
of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were
several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other
passengers pressed in an outer circle.

She would fain have explained herself more privately, but she could not
endure to accept the privileges of the boat without explaining first
that she was not able to pay for them. "Gentlemen, I have no money. I am
entirely unprotected. I have escaped in fear of my life from Nauvoo."

She spoke instinctively, only desiring to set herself right, but when
the words were said she knew that she had helped to heap opprobrium on
the sect in whose cause so short a time ago she would have died. The
passengers were Missourians, as was the captain. Among them went a
whisper of chivalrous pity for her and of execration for the prophet and
his followers.

"Madam," said the captain, "any lady as is escaping from those devils
has the freedom of this boat, and no ticket required, as long as I'm in
command. Isn't that so?" he asked of the crowd.

The murmur broke into an open chorus of enthusiastic speech.

Wild and deep as was her panting anger against Smith's oppression,
Susannah shrank. The thought of profiting by this spirit of partisan
hatred scorched her heart.

The Kentucky Governor, a dapper man, who had been regarding her with a
temperate and critical eye, now, urged by her obvious distressed
timidity, came forward.

"How did you get among the Mormons, may I ask?"

"My husband," faltered Susannah, "but he is dead."

It would appear that her words tallied with some conclusion he had been
drawing concerning her, for without further parley Susannah found
herself being led in a formal manner down the companion-way. The brief
report which she had given of herself had preceded her through the boat.
She heard the passengers whom she left on the deck making sentimental
remarks. Two coloured girls who were washing dishes in a pantry came to
its door and gasped with emotion as they stared at her. In the saloon
the coloured waiters gaped.

At the farther end of the saloon a stout and magnificent lady in silk
and diamonds was seated before innumerable viands which were spread in
circles around her plate. She stopped eating while her husband presented
Susannah. She alone of all upon the boat seemed to be overburdened by no
surge of sentiment or curiosity. She was a most comfortable person.

Seated in safety beside her, Susannah could indulge the pent-up
indignation of her outraged spirit in silent musings upon Smith's
degradation and, the certain downfall of all righteousness under the new
tyranny. And yet--and yet--the shock of the last few days, forcibly as
it vibrated through all her nature, could not eradicate the sympathy of
years--the memories of Hiram and Kirtland, Haun's Mill and the
desperate winter's march. Justice, her old friend, now her inquisitor,
said sternly, "It was in these scenes in which some lost life and some
reason that these men lost their moral standards." But her heart cried,
"Now that _I_ am insulted, I cannot forgive."

The words of the Governor's wife, cheerful, continuous, and not without
diverting sparkle, were an unspeakable rest to Susannah, weary above all
things of herself. Whether because of a strong undercurrent of tactful
kindness, or in mere garrulity, the good lady's talk for some time
flowed on concerning all things small, and nothing great, like the
lapping of the river against the vessel's bows.

But at last her companion's situation grew upon her; she enlarged more
than once upon her surprise at Susannah's advent, and her feelings of
extreme relief that she was safely there.

"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 assure 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 tithe 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 passengers 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 space between the uppermost
point on the Ohio and the western entrance of the Erie Canal. 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 pass 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 encompassed 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
assurance 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 canal 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 God'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 passed 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."

He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough
heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.

Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for
very joy, not amusement. "Speak to me," she coaxed. "I have come back to
you. Do you think we are in a dream?" She let herself kneel on the old
floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against
her cheek.

With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner
would have returned had she remained in any common attitude, but to this
coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had passed
without caresses) could not behave with reticence.

One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she
should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of
this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene
reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her
hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering
words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his
unaccustomed lips.

"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked
most of the way from Rochester to-day."

"Are you very tired?"--as if the fact that she had been walking that day
was all that needed his immediate attention.

"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have
long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child
died I have been quite alone."

"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone
of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I--I
supposed that if you were alive you--you preferred to remain, Susy."

She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had
raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are
you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"

"We have been having a prayer meeting," he answered. "And I keep the key
because--because my father used to." He gave the reason with an
intonation half playful. "I do many a thing now because he did."

"I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are
they less foolish" (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their
late inmates), "less unjust than they used to be?"

As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his
manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. "I don't know
that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that
I am either, Susy, but--it is not good to worship God alone."

She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom
of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more
homelike by his tones.

"The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the
earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the
mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?"

She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran
like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the
memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the
grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.
So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under
the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child's desire to hear
a story that she knew by heart.

"Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved--"

When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick
path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths
flanked it in orderly ranks. Their light forms glimmered in the branch
shadows of the budding quince. It was true, what people said, that
Ephraim had not let his father's home decay. The door stood open, as
country doors are apt to do.

There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the
sitting-room. The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and
sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed
to see again. Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens. A
candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing
beside it. Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a
student lamp--the fire of a new hearth.

CHAPTER VII.

Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought
with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.

The stranger was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply
furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped
in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came
in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and Susannah
sat.

"You are one of the Latter-Day Saints?" Susannah asked.

"I am, ma'am, and it's real strange to hear you say them words, for it's
'Mormons' the Gentiles calls us."

Then to her questioning he told the story of the downfall of Nauvoo.

"There was two causes for the persecution; we had got too powerful and
too great for the folks in Illinois, just as we had done in Missouri;
but there was another thing, and that was that wickedness crept in
amongst us. 'Twasn't as bad as was reported, though, but 'twas
there--I'm afraid 'twas there."

The man sighed.

"It's twelve years now since I joined the Saints in Missouri and when we
were driven out there I went with them to Illinois; and I can never
believe other but that the Latter-Day Saints has the truth, for the
power of it is always to be seen among them; and now that I've lost
everything a second time, and know that I have a sickness that I'll
never get the better of, I have come east to see my folks once more and
to testify to them of the truth."

He was going on into Vermont, passing by that way that he might refresh
his eyes with a view of the sacred hill, and had only remained at
Ephraim's request to relate his tidings to Susannah.

"After coming out of Missouri I never lived at Nauvoo. I had a farm
midways, between Nauvoo and Quincy. As near as I can make out, the
scandal they've got agen us, which they've always had agen us because of
the wickedness of the Gentile mind, began to have some truth in it when
Rigdon came out with his teaching concerning the nonsense of spiritual
wives, which wasn't new with him, for I hear that it's held among all
the folks as call themselves 'Perfectionists.' Well, our prophet made
pretty quick work of that doctrine, and he rebuked Rigdon in public and
private, and packed him out of the place, and no one can say that our
prophet has ever done otherwise with any one as has had notions about
marriage."

Susannah sighed. "I have heard that he has acted the same way in several
other instances."

"You have, ma'am? Well, it's strange, too, to hear a Gentile say a good
word for our prophet, but perhaps, as he came from here, ma'am, you may
be some relation of his; and I ask you, is it likely, as he's always
acted so severe in that matter, that he should have taught a false
doctrine himself? But even some of the Saints do say nowadays that he
was led away by some strange doctrines before he died; but, for my own
part, I believe that the tales have arisen from the sinful natures of
many of the men that he trusted; for he was too trustful, and there's
apostles and bishops and elders amongst us that are servants of hell.
There's been evil work since our prophet's martyrdom, for there's
thousands of our people now deluded by them and going out after Mr.
Brigham Young and his crew.

"You want to know how the prophet's death came about, and I can tell
you; for when my disease came on, and the doctor told me 'twas fatal, I
started to go up to Nauvoo to ask the prophet to lay his hands upon me
and heal me. But when I got there the city was all in a buzz, for the
cause that some of the elders had got out a paper accusing the prophet
of having a lot of ladies for wives. Well now, I can tell you how that
came about. When our prophet first got the charter for the Nauvoo Legion
there was a man called Bennet, who had been general in the American
army, and who was steeped in unbelief and ambition, and who came and
offered his services to the prophet, and was allowed to build up the
Nauvoo Legion. He was a most sinful man, and the prophet, he knew his
sinfulness, but thought that he ought to take any help to build up an
army to preserve his people from the fearful persecutions. Bennet got
hold of the worst side of the worst men we had in the Church, among
which was the new usurper." He paused here with ire in his eye. "I would
be understood to mean Mr. Brigham Young, who has falsely usurped the
prophet's place; but there are many of us who will not follow him, no,
not one step. The Lord will requite him and his confederates, and will
establish his true servants."

"I fear, my good friend," said Ephraim, "that although it is true that
the Lord will establish his true servants, it is also true that their
kingdom is not of this world."

"Well, sir, tramping along as I've done many a day, with no companion
but the disease that's prevailing against me, I've thought that that may
be true; but, whichever way it is, Bennet set himself to work iniquity,
and they say that when the prophet could endure him no longer and gave
him the sack, he had the vileness to dress himself up in the prophet's
clothes and go about in disguise, talking Sydney Rigdon's rank
spiritual-wife doctrine to the ladies and some of them were such fools
that they thought it was the prophet, and that he disguised his voice
and kept something over his face in order to work the iniquity in
secret. That's what a gentleman who knew very well about it told me. But
anyway, when Bennet was gone out he wrote awful things to the Gentile
newspapers concerning the domestic iniquities of Nauvoo; and he had his
own party in the sacred city, and they up and put their scandals in the
public print in the prophet's own city.

"But the prophet he rose up and shook himself, like Samson when his arms
were tied with the withes, and he denounced the wickedness, and went to
the house where the paper was published, and kicked the printing press
down himself, and burned the paper. And that day he preached most
powerful in the Nauvoo Temple."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22