Читать книгу The Mormon Prophet - L. Dougall - Страница 11

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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."

The loud voice carried with it an impression of strong personal feeling; the effect on the bystanders was such as the words alone were wholly inadequate to produce. Cowdery, who during the speech had frequently groaned and responded, after the Methodist fashion, now shouted and clapped his hands towards the heavens, whereupon Lucy Smith fell into a convulsive state between laughter and tears, and the men standing beside her dropped upon their knees. Emma Smith remained standing; upon her face was a rapt triumphant expression. She put her arm round Susannah protectingly, and Susannah did not repulse the familiar action.

Joseph Smith now in the same voice called upon his father to be baptized. He addressed him formally as "Joseph Smith senior." The old man had, as it seemed, a great fear of the water. It took both priests of the new sect together to lift and immerse him. There was more splashing than was seemly. The baptism of a farmer named Martin Harris, which followed, was more decorous.

The sunlight lay bright on the other side of the flowing river, and the shadow of the willow tops above them was outlined on the stream. On the sunny bank opposite there was a thicket of sumac trees reddening to the autumn heat; the wild vine was climbing upon them, making their foliage the more dense, and at their roots, by the edge of the stream, the golden rod was massed. On the bank on which they stood the colouring was more quiet. A few ragged spikes of the purple aster were all that grew under the gray green willows, which with every breath turned the silver underside of their soft foliage to the wind. The place for the baptism had no doubt been chosen because of the depth of the water, and because the bank here was comparatively bare.

It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. The steady sound of the mattock in a neighbouring field was the only token of the common bustling world that lay close around the curious isolation of the hour.

It was time that Angel Halsey should be baptized. In his Quaker clothes he waded into the water. His manner now was entirely serene, his face full of joy.

A thought was struck wedge-like into Susannah's understanding. If Halsey, who was so manifestly on a higher plane of education and refinement than these others, could so triumphantly embrace the new faith, it must surely contain more of virtue and reason than she could see. The influence of what he was, being so much greater than the influence of what he had said, caused her mind to work with solemn earnestness as she followed him in sympathy through the symbol of death and resurrection.

When the prophet came back to the shore he appeared for the first time to recognise Susannah, and stopped before her, but at first with a distraught manner, as if he were trying to recollect some dream that eluded him. He still had his hand familiarly on Halsey's arm, for he had been conducting him out of the water.

"This is the elect sister?" Smith asked in a hesitating tone, as if still striving with memory. "Does she desire baptism?"

"Not yet," answered Halsey, "but I have asked the Lord for her soul, and I believe that it has been given."

In Halsey's mind up to this moment there was, no doubt, only the solicitude of the missionary spirit; but Smith was a man whose mind was cast in a different mould; he had already marked the solicitude and given it his own interpretation, and he had already opened his own eyes upon her beauty. How far this had conscious connection with the condition of actual trance into which he now fell cannot be known. It is probable that what the Psalmist calls the "secret parts" are not in such minds as Smith's open to the man's own eye.

Smith became wrapped in a sudden ecstasy. Oblivious of all around him, he looked up into the heavens, and it was apparent that his eyes were not beholding the material objects around. Those about him gazed awe-struck, waiting and listening, for he began to speak in a low unknown tongue, as if holding converse with some one above.

Susannah shrank back, but was held by Emma's encouraging arm. Halsey stayed perforce, for the prophet's grasp had tightened convulsively upon him.

In a few moments the vision was over, and Joseph Smith opened his eyes and smiled in his own slow kindly way upon the frightened girl and upon Angel Halsey, who stood with steadfast mien.

"It has been revealed to me in heaven that the soul of the elect sister is indeed given to be united to the soul of this young disciple, that thereby she may obtain salvation."

He took Susannah's hand, and she felt no power to resist him; he clasped Halsey's almost more timid and reluctant hand over it.

"Wherefore in the sight of God and in the sight of these elect saints now present I declare that these two are joined together in the mystical union of a most holy marriage which God himself has revealed from heaven."

For some moments Susannah gazed fascinated; then she snatched away her hand; dignity sought to maintain itself; pride rose up in anger. Her growing awe of the prophet numbed to a certain extent both these sentiments, but stronger than pride and self-respect and awe was some tender shame within her heart which was hurt beyond enduring, so that she put her hands before her face and wept, and walked away from them weeping, followed by Emma, who began, as they walked, to weep in sympathy.

Tears bring relief to the brain, a relief it is hard to distinguish from comfort of soul. When Susannah could check her unaccustomed sobs, when she found herself walking quietly homeward with only the weeping Emma by her side, the spirit of long suffering and patience stole upon her unawares.

"Why do you cry?" she asked gently.

"I think it must be so hard for you," said Emma; "it's been very hard for me, although I love Joseph with all my heart; but you are so childish and so good-looking, it seems someways as if it came harder on you; and then that Mr. Halsey hasn't got the warmth of heart that Joseph has."

To this astonishing reply Susannah found no answer. Emma was too respectable, too honest in her sympathy, to be derided, but Susannah's understanding could ill endure the thought that the incident of the hour was important. As the outcome of honest delusion, she might forgive it; something in the pathos of Halsey's strained face as she remembered his look when she turned away weeping, urged her to forgiveness.

"Mr. Halsey is nothing to me," said Susannah at last; she spoke with a falter in her voice, for Emma's unfeigned grief touched her.

"Oh! don't say that. Some judgment might come on you that would be worse than any suffering that would come from obedience to the word of the Lord; and besides, it's the will of God, you see; and of course He'll see that it's done, so you'd be punished for rebellion, and you'd have to obey all the same."

Susannah was beginning to be infected by this steady assumption that God had indeed spoken. Could it be possible?