Lily Dougall - The Mormon Prophet

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She began again, then stopped; how to impart the full flavour of that
which had befallen her she did not know. It seemed to her that the
difficulty lay in Ephraim's silence. She was not aware that she had not
even a distinct thought for a certain interest in her late companion
which she most wanted to put into words. "Ephraim, it's all very well
for you to stand there drying your feet, but--but--they were just like
other people, as you told Mr. Finney, you know."

"Did you expect them to have horns and tails?"

"I don't think they are very wicked," said Susannah. She looked down as
she said it, speaking with a certain undefined tenderness of tone
begotten of a new experience.

"Well?"

"That's all."

"How could you know whether they are wicked or not?" he burst out
angrily. "Do you suppose that they would show _you_ the iniquity of
their hearts?"

"Why, Ephraim, you've always stood up for them before!"

He gave a sort of snort. "I never stood up for them by making eyes at my
hands and cooing out my words."

She looked up in entire bewilderment.

"It doesn't matter what I mean," he added. "What did they say? What did
they do? Tell me. If I'd known these fellows had come back, do you
suppose I'd have let you go?"

"You are so strange," she said. "They did nothing but just bring me home
and hold the umbrella, and Joseph Smith said he knew he'd been a bad man
and didn't know anything. I thought you'd be interested to hear about
them, Ephraim."

"I should have thought you'd had too much self-respect to allow him to
talk to you like that. Of course he was trying to work on your
feelings."

"No, he wasn't, Ephraim. You are quite as unjust as my aunt to-day. He
wasn't trying to work on my feelings. He was just--well, he was sorry
that my frock got so wet, and he just happened to say the other thing. I
am sure--"

Her conviction concerning the naturalness of Smith's conduct and the
Quaker's sincerity had arisen in the presence of each, and was not now
to be ascribed to any particular word or action which she could remember
and repeat.

"Oh, he was sorry your frock was splashed, was he? And the other fellow
they call Halsey, was he concerned about that too?"

"Who told you that his name was Halsey?" The interest of her tone was
unmistakable.

"That is his name, and he must be a degraded fellow to take up with
Smith."

She saw that Ephraim's clothes were very wet; he must have walked far.
She attributed his exhausted look entirely to fatigue, and his
ill-temper to the same cause. "Mr. Halsey seemed quite good and in
earnest, like the people that come to see Mr. Finney when he stays here,
asking about saving their souls, as if their souls were something quite
different from the other part of them; and, Ephraim, I have often wanted
to ask you, but I didn't like to. You don't believe what aunt and uncle
do, do you? Aunt talks as if you didn't believe. Do you think"--her
voice trembled--"do you think that I ought to think about my soul--that
way?"

Ephraim never perceived the nature of her difficulty. He thought she
questioned the earnestness of life. He leaned back against the jamb of
the chimney, vainly trying to dispel his anger and bring his mind under
the command of reason. He looked at Susannah steadily; she was somewhat
pale with weariness and excitement; she could never be other than
beautiful. How perfect was the moulding of the strong firm chin, of the
curving nostrils! The breadth of the cheek bone, the height and breadth
of the brow, beautiful as they were in their pink and white tinting,
conveyed to him almost more strongly the sense of mental completeness
than of outward beauty. He did not dare to look at her questioning
eyes; his glance travelled over the amber ringlets, damp and tossed
just now, drooping as if to say "Susannah is lonely and perplexed, and
she needs your help." Ephraim, proud, and mortified to think how ill he
compared with her, laughed fiercely within himself. This was a young
woman of distinction, and just now she knew it so little that she sat
looking up with respect at his ill-conditioned self. How long would that
last? How long would she remember any word that he chanced to say to
her?

"Susannah, I think you are very ignorant. Were you never taught anything
when you were a little girl?"

"My father and his friends were always polite to me." She spoke with
grave, rather than offended, dignity.

"She is entirely sweet," he said to himself; "she will never answer me
in anger." Then he went on aloud, "And I am not polite; I am ill-trained
and ill-bred. Well, listen, Susannah. Whatever my mother may or may not
tell you about my peculiar opinions, whatever _I_ choose to believe or
to do, remember this, that I tell you that _you have_ a soul to be
eternally lost or saved, and it behoves you to walk carefully and
concern yourself about your salvation." There was a vibration of intense
warning in his voice. He was thinking of the life that might be so noble
if will and reason sided with God, and of the snares that the world lays
for beauty, and the light way in which beauty might walk into them;
and, as with all dreamy minds, he was too absorbed in his thought to
know how little it shone through the veil in which he wrapped it.

Susannah grew a shade paler. She had struggled in a blind child-fashion
to maintain a religion that would embrace her manifold life, but now it
appeared that, after all, Ephraim endorsed the general view; his refusal
to comply openly with it came of wilfulness, not unbelief. The
stronghold of her peace was gone. "My papa never spoke to me about
religion in that way, but I don't think he believed that."

Ephraim thought of the weak and reckless young father, of the careless
life broken suddenly by death.

"He has learned the truth now," he said shortly.

After a pause, in which she did not speak, he betook himself to his own
rooms, leaving Susannah to the companionship of the lonely house, the
howling wind, the gathering night, and a new fear of a state eternal and
infernal, into which she might so easily slip. Ephraim said so, and he
would never have proclaimed what he would not comply with unless its
truth were very sure.

As for him, his self-despite was pain that rendered him oblivious of her
real danger. Where was his boasted justice? Gone before a breath of
jealousy. The neighbours had told him that she had smiled on Halsey,
and the abuse of the Smithites, in which his mother indulged in the
blindness of religious party-spirit, had fallen from his lips as soon as
his own passion had been touched. Had his former candour, then, been the
thing his mother called it, _indifference_ to, rather than reverence for
truth?

This was the travail of soul that Susannah could have as little thought
of as he had of hers. It held Ephraim in its fangs for many days.

CHAPTER V.

The return of Smith and his few followers, and the speedy publication of
the first edition of the Book of Mormon, stirred anew the flames of
religious excitement. All other sects were at one in decrying "the
Mormons," as they now began to be called by their enemies. There was
perhaps good reason for intelligent disapprobation, but Understanding
was left far behind the flying feet of Zeal, who, torch in hand, rushed
from house to house. It was related that Joseph Smith was in the habit
of wounding inoffensive sheep and leading them bleeding over the
neighbouring hills under the pretext that treasure would be found
beneath the spot where they would at last drop exhausted; and there were
dark hints concerning benighted travellers who, staying all night at the
Smiths' cabin, had seen awful apparitions and been glad to fly from the
place, leaving their property behind. There was a story of diabolical
influence which Smith had exercised in order to gain the young wife whom
he had stolen from her father's roof, and, worse than all, there were
descriptions of occult rites carried on in secret places, where the
most bloody mysteries of the Mosaic priesthood were horribly travestied
by Smith and his friends, Cowdery and Rigdon, in order to dupe the
simple into belief in the new revelation.

Ephraim Croom had again withdrawn himself out of hearing of the
controversy. Judging that Susannah was sufficiently guarded by his
parents to be safe, he became almost oblivious of conversation which he
despised. He did not reflect that Susannah knew nothing of his hidden
conflict, that she could only perceive that, after uttering an ominous
warning, he had left her to work out its application alone.

It was at first not at all her liking for the Smiths, but only her
unbiassed common sense, which convinced her that the wild stories told
concerning them were untrue. When she became enraged at their untruth
she became more kindly disposed toward the young mother, whose baby had
made a strong appeal to her girlish heart, and the big kindly lout of a
man who had sheltered her from the rain. This benevolent disposition
might have slumbered unfruitful but for the memory of the fine and
resolute face of the young disciple who had promised to wrestle in
prayer for her. There was novelty in the thought. The gay witch Novelty
often apes the form of Love. Susannah did not know Love, so she did not
recognise even the vestments falsely worn, but they attracted her all
the same. Her young blood boiled when her aunt, dimly discerning some
unlooked-for obstinacy in her niece's mind, repeated each new report in
disfavour of the Mormons. It was the old story about the blood of the
martyrs, for ridicule and slander spill the pregnant blood of the soul;
but they who believe themselves to be of the Church can seldom believe
that any blood but their own will bear fruit. Every stab given to the
reputation of the Smiths was an appeal to Susannah's sympathy for them.
Mrs. Croom, with a sense of solemn responsibility, was at great cost
bringing all her influence to bear upon the young girl whom her son
loved. She drearily said to herself, after many days, that her influence
was weak, that it accomplished nothing. The strength of it pushed
Susannah, who stood faltering at the parting of the ways, and the
impetus of that push was felt in her rapid and unsteady step for many
and many a year.

One day, when the men were out cutting the maize, Susannah rode with her
uncle to the most distant of his fields, and found herself on the hill
called in Smith's revelation Cumorah.

The sound of the men at work and the horses shaking their harness was
close in her ears while she strayed over this bit of hilly woodland. It
is one of the low ridges that intersect the meadows on the banks of the
Canandaigua, and here Smith professed to have found the golden book. It
was because of this that Susannah had the curiosity to climb it now.

The beech wood grew thick upon it; the afternoon sun struck its slant
sunbeams across their boles. Once, where the beeches parted, she came
upon a fairy glade where two or three maples, fading early, had carpeted
the ground with a mosaic of gold and red, and were holding up the
remainder of their foliage, pink and yellow, in the light. The beauty
wrought in her a dreamy receptive mood. Climbing higher, she came upon a
very curious dip or hollow in the ground. In its narrowest part a man
was lying prostrate; his face was buried in his hat, which was lying
upon the ground between his hands; the whole expression of his body was
that of attention concentrated upon something within the hat. When she
came close he moved with a convulsive start, and she saw that it was
Joseph Smith.

His look changed into one of deference and satisfaction. He rose up,
lifting his hat carefully; in it lay a curious stone composed of bright
crystals, in shape not unlike a child's foot.

"It's my peepstone," he said. "It's the stone I look into when I pray
that I may be shown what to do." Exactly as one child might show to
another some worthless object he deemed choice, he showed the stone to
her.

"I don't know what you mean. How could a stone help you?"

"All I know is that when I've been lying for a long time, feeling that
I'm a poor fellow and haven't got no sense anyway, and the tears come to
my eyes and gush out, feeling I'm so poor and mean, then when I lie and
look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of
things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening
alongside of me that I didn't know any other way. I can't say how it may
be; I only know when I see it that I am 'accounted worthy.'"

"You couldn't see anything in the stone."

"No more I couldn't. The stone's nothing, an' I'm nothing, and that's
why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the
devil that sends them; and it's not the devil, for I always work myself
up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come
after that if it was the devil?"

"What do you see?"

"I'll tell you one thing I have seen. Mebbe you'll know what it means;
mebbe you won't. I don't know myself rightly yet. I've often to study on
those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I've
seen you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside
the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables
and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light
hair."

"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.

"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own
heart seemed to say--"

"What?"

"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it.
Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your
folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began
again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.
"The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and
shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul;
and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her
to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and
grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and
honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"

As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the
sunlight, before her eyes.

Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing
remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself,
and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start
from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was
going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the
prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her
mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in
childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision
within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never
heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then
been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that
she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic
suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety
and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of
policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her
gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this
man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again
to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural sound,
suggested piety. "She shall be told the thing that she shall do for the
salvation of her soul," "She is chosen to go through suffering and grief
for a little space." How strange if, impossible as it might seem, these
words had come to her--to her--direct from the mind of the Almighty!

CHAPTER VI.

Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family
room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.

Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges,
their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun
and gray. Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken
distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines. That far
outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds,
but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the
moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane--steel blue, so
full of light as to be luminous in itself. From this the nearer contour
of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of
russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in
the sunlight, the fields were yellow. From the top of a low hill which
met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it
passed the door. Who has not felt the invitation, silent, persistent,
of a road that leads through a lonely land to the unseen beyond the
hill?

Susannah was again alone in the house; this time Ephraim was absent with
his mother, and her uncle was at the mill. On the white road she saw a
man approaching whose dress showed him to be Smith's Quaker convert,
Angel Halsey, a name she had conned till it had become familiar. He did
not pass, but opened the gate of the small garden path and came up
between the two borders of sweet-smelling box. In the garden China
asters, zenias, and prince's feather, dahlias, marigolds, and
love-lies-bleeding were falling over one another in luxuriant waste. The
young man neither looked to night nor to left. He scanned the house
eagerly, and his eyes found the window at which Susannah sat. He stepped
across the flowers and stood, his blonde face upturned, below the open
sash. Under his light eyebrows his hazel eyes shone with a singularly
bright and exalted expression.

"Come, friend Susannah," said he, "I have been sent to bring you to
witness my baptism," and with that he turned and walked slowly down the
path, as if waiting for her to follow.

Susannah, filled with surprise, watched him as he made slowly for the
gate, as if assured that she would come. When he got to it he set it
open, and, holding it, looked back.

She dropped the long folds of muslin, and they fell upon the floor
knee-deep about her; she stepped out of them and walked across the old
familiar living-room, with its long strips of worn rag-carpet, its old
polished chairs, and smoky walls. The face of the eight-day clock stared
hard at her with impassive yet kindly glance, but its voice only
steadily recorded that the moments were passing one by one, like to all
other moments.

Susannah went out of the door. The sun drew forth aromatic scent from
the borders of box, and her light skirt brushed the blossoms that leaned
too far over. Outside the wicket gate at which the young man stood was a
young quince tree laden with pale-green fruit. Susannah let her eyes
rest upon it as she spoke: she even let her mind wander for a second to
think how soon the fruit would be gathered.

"Why should I come to see your baptism?" she asked, with her voice on
the upward cadence.

The young man blushed deeply. "I am come to thee with a message from
heaven." He glanced upward to the great sky that was the colour of
turquoise, cloudless, serene.

"It is a strange errand." There was a touch of reproof in her voice, and
yet also the vibration of awe-struck inquiry. Her mind rushed at once to
the memory of Joseph Smith's prophecy.

"Come, friend," said the young Quaker very gently.

"I can't possibly go."

His strange reply was, "With God all things are possible."

The text fell upon her mind with force.

"Come," he said gently, and he motioned that he would shut the gate
behind her.

"Not now; my shoes are not stout; I have no bonnet or shawl."

"Put thy kerchief over thy head and come, friend Susannah, for 'no man,
putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom
of heaven.'"

At this he walked on, and she was forced to follow for a few steps to
ask an explanation. She tied her kerchief over her head and the thick
white dust covered her slender shoes.

"What do you want me to come for?" she asked.

He looked upon her, colouring again with the effort to express what was
to him sacred. "It has been given to me to pray for thy soul. To-day, as
I prayed, it was borne in upon me that thou shouldst be with me in the
waters of baptism."

Susannah paused on the road, planting the heels of her shoes deeply in
the dust. "I will not," she cried. "I will never believe in Joseph
Smith."

"And yet it has been revealed, friend, that thou art one of the elect.
The time will come very soon when thou wilt believe to the salvation of
thy soul."

He walked slowly onward, and after a minute Susannah, with quickened
steps, followed him, in high anger now. "I do not believe in the
revelations of Joseph Smith," she cried. And because he did not appear
offended she spoke more rudely, catching at phrases to which she had
become accustomed. "If the salvation of my soul should depend upon it, I
would rather lose it than believe."

But when she had said these last words a little gasp came in her breath,
and her heart quailed in realising the possibility of which she had
spoken. Her own angry words had diverted her attention from questioning
the reasonableness of the new faith to the fearful contemplation of what
might be the result of rejection.

If she quailed at her own speech, the grief of the young Quaker was more
obvious. He put up his hands as if in fear that she should add to her
sin by repeating her words. Quiet as was his demeanour, the emotional
side of his nature had evidently been deeply wrought upon to-day, for
when he tried to speak to reprove her, grief choked his utterance. It
was not at that time a strange thing for men under the influence of
religious convictions to weep easily. On the contrary, it was accounted
by evangelists a sign of great grace; but Susannah, accustomed only to
the reserve of English gentlemen and her uncle's stern Puritan
self-repression, seeing this young Quaker weep for her sake, was greatly
touched. She became possessed by an excited desire to console him.

The young man turned, weeping as he went, into a little wood that here
bordered the road. Susannah followed, full of ruth, thinking that he
merely sought temporary shade.

They had proceeded under the trees a few paces when Emma Smith came up
from the bank of the river to meet them. Halsey controlled himself and
spoke to Emma.

"She has refused. For this time she has rejected the truth."

Now to Susannah the matter for amazement was that she had come so far
from home (although, it was not very far), that she had actually
arrived, as it seemed, at an appointed place. The sting that this gave
to her pride was greatly eased by perceiving that she had not by this
fulfilled his hopes.

Emma Smith had a pale, patient face, which was at this time made
peculiarly dignified by a look of solemn excitement. Young as she was,
she turned to Susannah with a protecting motherly air.

"Perhaps next time the opportunity is offered the young lady will
embrace it and save her soul." She spoke consolingly to Halsey, but
looked at Susannah with encouraging and respectful eyes. "You will see
this young man baptized?" she asked.

Under the protection of Emma Smith, Susannah stooped under the willow
boughs and found herself upon the bank of the river in the presence of
Joseph Smith, his mother, and some half-dozen men.

Lucy Smith was muttering somewhat concerning a vision of angels, and the
suppressed excitement of them all was manifest. Susannah was infected by
it; she was now tremulous and eager to see what was to be seen.

Joseph Smith advanced into the flowing river and stood in a pool where
the water was well up to his thighs. Standing thus, he began to speak in
the same formal tone and with the same solemn expression that Susannah
had marked when he spoke the revelation concerning herself, but more
loudly. "Behold! we have gathered together according to the revelation
which has been given to me--"

Here a dark young man called Oliver Cowdery groaned and said "Amen." A
tremble of excitement went through the group upon the shore.

Loudly the prophet went on--"Knowing well that there is nothing in me,
who was wicked and graceless to a very high degree, and wanting in
knowledge, but was yet chosen, upon this sinful earth and in these last
days, when wickedness and hypocrisy is abounding, to open to all who
would be saved a new church which is such as that which the angel hath
revealed to me a church should be, and all them which shall receive my
word and shall be baptized of me or of Mr. Oliver Cowdery, whom the
angel Maroni, descending in a cloud of light, has ordained with me to
the priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of
angels and of the gospel of repentance and of baptism by immersion for
the remission of sins. And this shall never again be taken from the
earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in
the new Jerusalem."

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