All the powers of the young Danite were strung by excitement into the fiercest vitality, and he thought that physical fatigue was the best medicine for Susannah's mind. Why he had accepted the work of saving her as part of his mission of Mormon defence he did not ask himself. In him, as in many athletes, thought and action seemed one. He acted because he acted; he knew no other reason.
In the middle of the night Susannah woke up. The stars glimmered above the trees; she was lying on a heap of autumn leaves wrapped in the blanket. Sitting up, she remembered slowly the events of the preceding day.
Her movement had caused another movement at some distance. The Danite, sleeping on the alert like soldier or huntsman, was roused by the first sound she made, and when she continued to sit up he came near in the glimmering light. She saw his dark form where he tarried a few paces away.
"You're all safe, ma'am. Can't you go on sleeping?"
A watch of the night often brings to recollection some duty forgotten during the day. "Do you know where Elvira Halsey is?"
"The young lady with the brown eyes that I have sometimes seen you with, ma'am?"
"Yes." Then Susannah added with the weak detail of a wretched mind, "She isn't very young."
"Was she any relation to you, ma'am? Were you very affectionate with her?"
Susannah explained the relationship.
The Danite thought, "If I tell her she's there she'll think it her duty to trapse back all the way to find her; she's that sort." Therefore, judging that a minor grief could not make much difference, he gave it as his opinion that Elvira was dead. At this Susannah shed tears for the first time, which eased his anxiety not a little.
Susannah did not know the Danite's name; it never occurred to her to ask him any question about himself.
At dawn they started again upon their tramp. The man knew the country, and when the sun was up he brought Susannah out of the forest to a settler's farm. She was faint now for want of food, walking again, as she had walked last night, with vacant eyes and dull mechanical tread.
The Danite made her sit down upon a stone near the house, and brought a woman to her who carried bread and milk. Susannah ate and drank without speaking.
"My! but she's tired," said the farmer's wife. "It's a cruel shame to make her walk so far; you're not a good husband to her, I'm thinking."
Having satisfied her need, Susannah turned away dully without a word. The settler's wife offered the remainder of the bread and milk to the Danite, who regarded it with famished eyes.
"Where's your husband?" he asked.
"We've enough men about the place."
"Where is your husband?"
"He's away with the militia under Lucas."
"Then I'll not touch his food," said the Danite. With an oath he flung the cup and plate upon the ground. "Do you see that woman there?" He pointed to Susannah. "I took the food for her, for she had died without it. Yesterday devils like your husband shot her child in her arms and her husband before her eyes, and to Almighty God I pray that when I've got her to some safe place I may have strength yet to shoot your husband and your children, shoot them down like dogs, and laugh at you because you don't like it." The restrained passion of all the long preceding hours broke out. His face was ashen, his eyes burning; there was foam about his lips as, with thick utterance, he hurled the words at her.
The woman stepped back in dismay, but she, too, was enraged now, and courage was the habit of the free life she led. "You are a bloody Mormon," she cried, "and if I'd known it I'd have let your woman die before I'd have fed her." She walked backwards, her voice rising higher with passion. Unable to think connectedly, she shrieked the phrases she had in mind. "Coming here to spread idolatry in a Christian country! Teaching superstition in a free Christian land!" She was still shrieking some jargon about the United States being founded on the Word of God, and the divine right to exterminate all Mormons, when he, walking fast, joined Susannah.
They had not gone much further before a large dog which the settler's wife had evidently let loose, came after them with fierce intent. The Danite turned, and as the dog sprang, slew it with one stab of his knife, and, leaving it bleeding upon the road, hurried Susannah into the forest.
It was a tradition upon that farm for years afterwards that these two Mormons, after receiving charity, had made an open display of that wanton wickedness which was habitual to them.
Susannah and the Danite travelled on for many hours. The way was not easy. Sometimes where the trees were thin their legs were tangled knee-deep in a plant covered with minute white feathery blossoms, looking like white swan's-down shot through with green light, that carpeted miles of the ground; sometimes the trees had fallen so thickly that they had to clamber from log to log rather than walk; sometimes their way was a bog, and they were in danger of sinking deeper than was safe.
Susannah asked no questions. She had heard and understood all the words that had passed in the incident of the morning. She felt cowed now, afraid to think what might come next; it was enough that the Danite had evidently some point in view.
About four in the afternoon they left the forest and came to another and much larger house. The Danite advanced here with more confidence and spoke with some men who gathered at their approach. Afterwards three men, a father and sons, came and one after the other shook hands respectfully with Susannah. Within the house she found a motherly woman, the wife of the elder son. When Susannah's misfortunes were related to her in undertones she cast her apron over her head and groaned as with pain.
Susannah thought that the concern of this household must arise from fear on their own account. "Are you Latter-Day Saints?" she asked mechanically.
The eldest man, with the air of a patriarch, replied, "No, madam, we are not Saints; the fact is we don't hold by religion of one sort or another; we just believe in being kind to our neighbours and living, good lives; so whatsoever your belief may be it is no affair of ours, and you shall rest here for the sake of our common humanity. We'll look after you, madam." He made a bow that was a queer mixture of uncouthness in keeping with his surroundings and a recollection of some more formal society.
The woman of the house, taking her apron from her head, suddenly bethought her of the best things that she had to offer. Gently forcing Susannah into an elbow chair, she ran, and lifting an infant a few weeks old from its cradle, put it in Susannah's arms.
The next night the young Danite went away.
Only the outline of passing events was reported to Susannah in her haven of peace. The elder man took her into his courtly care, and made a point of explaining to her what he thought she needed to know. The newspapers were sedulously kept from her, and so reticent were the other members of the household on the subject of their contents that her heart constantly sickened at the thought of what she was not allowed to hear.
"You see, madam," the old man explained, "it was Major-General Atchison that called out the militia in first defence of your people against Gilliam's mob. Gilliam had about three hundred men, and they started in the north of the State. Well, Parks and Doniphan, commanding the militia called out by Atchison, seem to have set about fighting the mob sincerely enough." The old man pushed back his spectacles and rubbed his hair. "Then you see, madam, that didn't please Governor Boggs. Here was the militia of his State shooting down his own good, honest Christian voters who keep him in office, that's Gilliam's men, and all the mob; so Boggs gets a lot of his men in all parts of the country to write him letters saying what dreadful crimes the Mormons are committing. These letters will no doubt pass into history as a genuine account of your people's doings. Well! well! I wouldn't shock your prejudices, but I'd like just to point out by the way that it's all done in the name of religion. There's Boggs has got an old mother who spends a lot of her time praying that the purity of the American religion may not be corrupted by the awful doctrines of Joe Smith."
The old man shook his head and rubbed his thin gray curly hair again with a smile of constrained patience. "You see, although I do not wish to grieve you by saying it, if we could only get rid of religion there would be a lot of brotherly kindness in the world that so far has never had a chance to say 'peep' and peck its shell. Well, but here's Boggs reading his letters, and he turns pale with horror at the thought of the corruption that has come among his good and pious people, so he writes off to the commanders of the militia that they are to stop fighting the mob, to fight against the Mormons, and only against the Mormons. So then Atchison resigns. He points out, fairly enough, that there hasn't been a single conviction in any lawful court against the Mormons for the crimes they are accused of. But what of that if Boggs is Governor? So they have taken away the arms from the Mormon company of militia, and the other day they went up to Far West with three or four thousand men, and they got Smith and his brother Hyrum and three of the elders to come out to them, and they court-martialled them and ordered them all to be shot the next day.
"But it wasn't done, madam," he added hastily. "General Doniphan had the pluck to stand out against it and say he would withdraw his troops, so they put them in irons and sent them to the gaol in Richmond, and then at the point of the bayonet they have forced the other leaders to bind themselves to pay all the expenses of the war and to get every Mormon, man, woman, and child, out of the State, or else they are all to be shot. That is how the matter stands at present."
"Do you incur any risk by the hospitality you give to me?" asked Susannah. She had not as yet had energy, even if she had had inclination, to explain that the Book of Mormon was not sacred in her eyes, nor Smith a prophet. "Do you think," she asked the old man wistfully, "that the Mormons have ever been the aggressors, that they have committed any of the atrocities they are accused of?"
"In some cases they have pillaged, and burned, and murdered; they wouldn't be human if some of them hadn't got fierce under the treatment they have been receiving; but when a man like Atchison, who has been scouring the country and knows pretty well what has happened, prefers to resign his honourable office rather than fight against them, you may be sure they are not very far in the wrong. Injuries, you know, will always set a few men mad. There is your elder, Rigdon, for instance; when he got here and heard of some of the things your folks had suffered, he up and made a wild oration on the 4th of July, and said that if any more outrages were committed on the Mormons, the Mormons would up and exterminate all the Gentiles in the State. But it has been well enough seen by any one who had eyes to see that no such language was ever countenanced by the real rulers of your sect."
When Susannah thanked the old man for his candour he drove his moral once more. "You see, madam, I can look at things as they are because I am not bound by any religion to look at them in any particular way."
Susannah rose up when the old man's story was ended, and stood for some minutes looking wistfully out through the window panes upon the leafless and storm-swept fields. They two were together in the long, scantily furnished living-room at the end of the long table. Her figure was stronger, more true in its proportions, than when she had been a girl. Her hair, trained into smooth obedience, was fastened within the muslin cap she had fashioned for herself, tied Quaker fashion under her chin. Her face was very white, as if, having blanched with terror in the tragedy of Haun's Mill, the life-blood had not as yet returned to it.
At last she said simply, "I thank you, sir."
The old man looked most approvingly at her form and at the subtle witchery which the eagerness of imprisoned thought gave to reticent features, at the depth of her blue eye. "I wish, my dear, that you could see your way to give up your religion and remain with us."
"I thank you, sir," she said again, and went back to the household tasks she had fallen into the habit of performing.
She was not eating the bread of dependence. In such a place, where woman's work is at a premium, it was easy for her to do what was reckoned of more value than what she received. The old man had two sons. The elder and his wife were in the prime of life, having a large family; the younger son was unmarried. The farm was large and prosperous. The one woman, even had she been less amiable, would have naturally desired to keep Susannah as a helper; being the kindly soul she was, she reserved the more attractive tasks for her, and bade the children call her endearing names. In her blindness, in her slow recovery from utter exhaustion of mind and nerve, Susannah never thought of connecting this long-continued kindness with the fact that the old man's younger son had as yet no wife.
At first Susannah had fixed her thoughts upon an immediate return to the east, but weeks went by and she had not written to Ephraim Croom for the money that she needed. The whole civilised world contained for her but one friend to whom she would write.
The Canadian farm, the remote country village of Manchester, and the Mormon sect—these formed her whole experience. Her father, who had scolded and played with her; Ephraim, who had understood her and had been the authority to her heart that his parents could not be; her husband, who had wrapped about her such close protection that she had tottered when she thought to walk alone—these were her real world, and of them only Ephraim was left.
It was not in her nature at any time, above all not in these stricken months, to desire to go out into the world alone to make for herself a sphere of usefulness and a circle of companions. Hence she thought only of returning to Ephraim, and by his help obtaining some occupation by which she could live simply and within his reach. But when she thought more closely of throwing herself, as it were, penniless and desolate at the feet of this one prized friendship, doubts arose about her path.
One thing which she had lost in the broken camp by her husband's grave, one that if she had had greater power of recollection she would not have left behind in that complete breaking with the past, was a packet of the few letters which Ephraim had from time to time written to her. She did not know whether she had thrown them into the grave with her treasure, or whether they were left a prey to fire and theft, but in her heart she had carried them beyond the loss of their material existence.
The first had answered her insistent question concerning the vexed condition of the devotees of prayer. It contained no word of criticism of the Mormon creed, nothing that if read aloud could have disturbed Halsey's peace. "Perchance," he had said, "as a medical man applies a poultice or blister to a diseased body to draw out the evil, so to those who pray and are too ignorant,i.e.opinionated, to follow perfectly the greatest teacher of prayer, God may apply circumstances to bring all the evil of heart to the surface, that in this life and the future it may the more quickly work itself away." Susannah had so conned this passage that she could now close her eyes and read it as written upon the red dusk of their lids.
The next letter had been written a year later. He described a great change in his life. He had gone to spend the winter in Hartford, on the Connecticut River, to be under a new physician, and had there met with a preacher called Mr. Horace Bushnell. This acquaintance was evidently much to Ephraim. Susannah had made some complaint of the harshness of the divine counsel in which he asked her to believe; his answer was to send her Bushnell's sermons on the suffering of God. Ephraim had added: "When you went from us, Susy, would you ever have been satisfied if we had detained you by force? Yet that is what you ask of God. If you were right in going, let the circumstance prove it; if we were right, let it appear by time. So says God; and his friendship has eternity to work in; so also has every human friendship. Let us wait, but in faith." This ending, somewhat enigmatical to her, had yet recurred to her heart so often that she knew the words by heart.
The next letter had been written more recently, after a long interval. At the end of this letter Ephraim had said, "I am persuaded that what we need to help our faith is never more knowledge, but always more love. I cannot interpret this but by telling you of a fact which I feel to be the key to a great—the greatest—truth. I know a man who believed in God. He met a woman whom he loved, not as many love, but (I know not why) with all the loves of his heart, as father, as mother, as brother, friend, might love; as lover he loved her with all these loves. After that he knew God with a knowledge that passed belief. He could argue no more, but heknew. This I think is the sort of knowledge which guides unerringly." Susannah remembered, if not the words, all that this passage contained. She had wondered at it not a little.
Up to the time of Angel's death she had rejoiced in these letters, not doubting that Ephraim had remained the same self-sacrificing friend—ready out of mere but perfect kindness to befriend her to the uttermost. She had not doubted because she had not questioned. Now disquieting thoughts intervened, producing a new shyness. She remembered their last interview, and wondered if Ephraim would feel the same responsibility for her if she returned destitute. Perhaps the ardour of his friendship had cooled. Perhaps in the last letter he had intended to suggest to her that he thought of marriage, and this time for love, not kindness, the lady being one of his new Hartford friends.
But no doubt the principal reason of Susannah's dalliance with time in those first weeks of her moral freedom was the mental weakness that succeeds shock. Every day she thought that she would soon write that begging letter, until the day came when opportunity ceased.
When the Danite left he had promised the farmer to return as soon as it was possible to place Susannah in safety with her Mormon friends. When she began to speak of leaving, her host told her this for the first time.
"And what is the young man's name?" the old man asked of Susannah. They were in the long living-room at the mid-day meal. His sons, who were leaving the table, waited to hear the answer; the mother, the very children, looked at her with interest.
"I do not know," said Susannah.
There was a pause, and for the first time she was aware that there was some sentiment in the minds of her hearers which did not appear upon the surface.
She went on, "I don't know why he should trouble himself to come back for me except that—I think that he was much touched by some earnest words my husband said to him that he did not see his way to accept, and I think also that he is zealous for the Church."
Her surpassing wrongs had so far set her apart and made all that she said and did sacred. No one questioned her further.
In the beginning of February the Danite reappeared. He came under the cover of night, but showed himself only when the household was awake. He was much thinner, more gaunt than before, but in frankness and quietude the same. His first words to Susannah had an import she did not expect.
"That young lady you mentioned to me—I said she was dead because you were half crazy, and would have gone back to her, but I worked round till I found her; she got to the city of Far West right enough."
After a while he said, "That young lady and some other of our folks have got horses and they're going into Illinois now. Most of our folks are walking. It's about as bad as can be, but I guess you'll have to go. We'll be safe enough, for as long as we go straight on the Gentiles are bound to let us pass. I tried to get some better sort of a way for you and her, but there ain't no way unless we would have sworn we weren't Saints and gone pretending to be Gentiles, but even then we haven't got the money."
Susannah was thrilled with excited distress. She was not prepared to make an abrupt decision, and it appeared that if she desired to join this company she must go that evening or not at all.
During the hours of the morning her mind cowered, dismayed. Should she now renounce her husband's sect, refusing to suffer with them? She had not as yet fortitude to do this. Halsey's eyes, the touch of his hand, her baby's voice lisping the tenets of their faith in repetition of his father's solemn tones, these were sights and sounds as yet too near her. To her shocked fancy the child and his father were only gone out of sight, but near enough to be cruelly hurt by her public perversion. And, moreover, if she should take this course she must write to Ephraim at once, for she could not well remain where she was without definite purpose in view.
Susannah had sought seclusion in which to think, and the younger son of the house intruded himself. He was perhaps about thirty years of age, a burly man, resolute and passionate. He spoke fairly enough. The Danite himself had said that the journey to which she was haled by her friends was one of untold hardship, its end uncertain; he offered her all that an honest and prosperous man could offer, but went on to urge on his own behalf the strength of those sentiments which he had learned to entertain for her—his admiration (Susannah sickened at the word), his love (she shrank in fear).
She rose up with the moan of a hunted thing. She did not pause to make excuses for the hunter, to consider the pioneer life that wots little of sentiment in proportion to utility; she only saw again the grave at Haun's Mill and the white faces of her dead upturned to hers. It seemed that this man, with the consent of his people, was urging his suit as it were beside the very corpse of her husband. The Danite had shown Angel reverence, had shown by his every word and glance that he counted her as belonging to the dead man whose blood he carried at his heart.
Susannah rode out from that temporary home at nightfall upon the Danite's horse.
It was the season of rain and sleet, of rude northerly winds. The roads, across a tract of flat fields and in among the low woods that fringed the rivers, were heavy with mud.
After riding half the night on a pillion behind the Danite, Susannah entered the Mormon camp. Up and down the sides of a dirty road, in waggons, in small tents, and in the open, men, women, and children were lying huddled in family groups. How far these crowds extended she could not see. Watch-fires were burning here and there, and in the fields on either side a patrol of Missouri militia were heard scoffing and shouting in the darkness. The Danite answered the challenge of one of these men with apparent meekness; Susannah perceived that he had gained in self-control. When they had entered the road, along the sides of which the forlorn multitude lay, they travelled for some way upon it, the Danite speaking in low tones now and then to the Mormon watchers. At length they came to a place where a few waggons of better description were standing and a number of horses were tied; here he lifted Susannah from the horse. Three of the Mormon leaders came up; they evidently knew her and her story. The eldest took her hand and spoke in broken tones of the crown which Halsey had won in the unseen city of God.
These were the first words that Susannah had heard in unison with Halsey's own thoughts, and for his sake they endeared the whole wretched Mormon encampment to her.
A woman, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl, sprang down from one of the waggons, and Elvira encountered Susannah.
"You expect me to say that I am sorry for you," she said hurriedly; "I will not. It is not a time for grief. We each of us have just so much power of being sorry and no more, and the well has gone dry. I am glad you have come. There are a great many things that one can yet be a little glad for; but you must make haste to lie down, for we shall soon enough be called to the march."
The beds shaken down on the floor of the waggon were covered with reclining women. Some of them squeezed themselves together to make the place Elvira had vacated large enough for two. Susannah stretched herself out, loathing with her senses the crowded bed, but with a tender heart for her fellow-sufferers. After the long dumb weeks of her stern sorrow, after that day's revolt of injured sentiment, she felt that it was worth while to have come here if only to have made some one else, as Elvira had said, "a little glad."
The dawn came sighing fitfully, long sighs that rose in the distant fields to the east meeting them in their pilgrimage and dying away westward; the dawn wept also, scattering her tears upon them in like transient showers.
Elvira found her own horse. The Danite had used yesterday the animal he had provided for Susannah.
"But what right have I to his horse?" Susannah began her question impetuously, but Elvira silenced her.
"Hush! Don't let the other women know that it isn't yours. Poor things, they will begin to ask why it isn't theirs. Do you think that we are living on bowing terms, curtseying to each other and saying, 'After you, madam, if you please'?"
Elvira was changed. Terror had at last done its work. Her pretty features were drawn with anxiety; her eye glittered.
"I have been baptized," she said to Susannah in hard tones. "When I saw the water red with blood I went down into it."
Eastward, facing the gusty sobs of the winter morning, they went. The road was soft, and hundreds of feet treading in front of them had kneaded water and earth together into a slippery mass. As far as could be seen in front and behind, the line of the pilgrimage stretched, women and children plodding with burdens on their backs, men pushing hand-carts before them, only here and there a waggon or a group of horses.
Elvira took up several children on her horse, and pointed out to Susannah a sickly woman to whom she could give a turn upon the pillion that she herself had ridden during the night. So they began one of many weary days.
To the good the necessities of compassion are as strong as are the necessities of selfishness to the wicked. Within a day or two both Susannah and Elvira had given up their horses entirely to women who had been taken ill by the way. At first they plodded arm in arm, thinking that merely to walk was all that their strength could endure; but there were other women who had children to carry, women even who must push hand-carts before them, and there were little children who sank one by one exhausted on the winter road, as lambs fall when their mothers are driven far.
After the march had continued for a few days there was much illness. All clothing and bedding was wet with the winter rain, chilled and stiff with the frosts. On the faces of many the unnatural flush and excitement of fever were seen, and other faces grew pallid, the lips blue or dark, and the eyes sunken. To all who retained the natural hue and pulses of health a heavier burden was added every day because of the help they must needs give if they would not bury too many of their comrades by the wayside. In that sad caravan souls were born into the world or freed from it by death almost every hour.
Susannah was greatly struck by the meek manner of the boldest and roughest of the Mormon leaders in their dealings with the parties of Missouri militia who, with the ostensible purpose of defending Missouri homesteads from Mormon violence, drove the stricken multitude as with goads. She had learned from her husband what the strength of true meekness could be, the lightness of heart which commits itself to God, who judgeth righteously, the glance of love that has no reserve of hatred, the infinite force that can afford to be gentle. Such a spirit had upheld Angel Halsey, but his widow looked in vain among the leaders of this band for a face that bespoke the same upholding. She soon perceived that there was among them a free-masonry of understanding, and that their mildness was assumed to serve the temporary purpose. By many a prayer she heard breathed, which was in truth, though not in form, a curse, she knew that in the souls of Halsey's successors there was no forgiveness, yet her heart went out in sympathy to men who were sacrificing their own sense of honour, holding in check their most delicious impulses of revenge, for the sake of being worthy shepherds to the weak.
"Do you love them the less because they are not angels?" asked Elvira. "Have you forgiven?"
Susannah shuddered at the intensity of the hard low tones, the passion in the word "love," the sneer in the word "forgive." Yet she knew that the rage against injustice which in youth had driven her forth upon this journey had, since the death of her child, changed into such fierce hatred of the persecutors that she could, except for very fear of herself, have taken upon her own soul the Danite's vow. In these days the pain of bodily suffering or heart-felt grief was as nothing compared with her agony when at times waves of this hatred passed over her heart.
The two friends were walking together, pushing before them a small cart in which, on the top of the bundles of household goods, a wretched woman and her newborn child were lying, covered under a scanty tarpauling from the driving sleet. The mud splashed beneath their feet; Susannah had little breath or strength for speech. Elvira, more slightly made, in every way more fragile, had seemed to develop, with every new phase of suffering, more strength of muscle and hatred and love.
They passed now two of the leaders. It was the custom for a certain number of these men to go forward and station themselves in pairs at intervals upon the road, cheering each group as it passed them, noting with careful eyes if any ill could be remedied by change of posture or exchange of burdens. One of them now, seeing the work to which Susannah had set herself, interfered. He was about sixty years of age, coarse in appearance, an elder whose wife and family Susannah knew by reputation. He and his fellows called a halt, looking for some man who might push the cart, but there was none within sight who was not already overburdened, nor was there a waggon that was not already overfilled with the sick and exhausted. The elder, whose name happened to be Darling, found in this particular instance reason to swerve from his position of guard. He left the post in charge of his fellow and pushed the cart. It was a habit with many of these leaders to seek to lighten the way by jocularities, and Susannah had before observed that, whether the jests arose with ease or effort from the heavy hearts of those who made them, a large proportion of the people were evidently cheered thereby. She could put aside her own tastes for the public good; she could even excuse when this rough comfort was offered to herself. Darling, labouring behind the cart, made light of the service he rendered.
He said first that the newborn babe must be called after him, and when he learned its sex he gave permission to the ladies to decide between them which should share this honour.
"Shall it be 'darling Susannah'?" he asked, making gentle his tone as he addressed the stately widow, "or shall it be 'Elvira darling'?" This time he turned his head with a broader smile toward Elvira's sharp little features.
Susannah felt that her hypersensitive nerves could almost have called his smile a leer; but she looked at the man's broad face, whose lines told of no resources of thought, no great natural capacity for heroism, and yet were furrowed by the sharpness of this persecution. The face would have been fat had it not been half-starved. It was pale now under the ill-kempt hair, and the set purpose of helpfulness was stamped upon it. She took back the word "leer" out of mere respect. Darling had given away his shoes; he was walking barefoot; he had given away coat and vest also, and the rotund lines of his figure were unpleasantly obvious under the wet shirt, and yet Susannah knew and bowed to the fact that some sick man or little child was wrapped in the garments that were gone.
But Elvira was expressing with hysterical warmth the same sentiments.
"I guess I'll feel it an honour to have my name joined with yours. I haven't got the length of taking off my shoes yet."
Darling began to sing one of the inspiriting Mormon hymns.
"When Joseph to Cumorah came."
"When Joseph to Cumorah came."
"Poor Joe!" Elvira spoke to the elder in a confidential whisper, "when he cheated over the bank I thought some fiend had put a ring in his nose, and was leading him out to dance, and that I should be able to sit and laugh. Now he's lying upon straw in the gaol. What will they do to him if they lynch him?"
"Tear him limb from limb," whispered Darling, also under his breath. He was probably shrewd enough to know the force of Smith's suffering in stimulating the piety of the faithful, but truth, and grief concerning the truth, were in his words also. He sighed a big sincere sigh, and repeated sadly, "Tear him limb from limb, or burn him to death by a slow fire." Such atrocities, as practised upon criminal negroes, were not unknown in the locality, which gave the elder's words a graphic power, but Elvira's answer was wholly unexpected.
"How droll!" she returned.
The elder was annoyed. He had not refined susceptibilities which sought immediate relief from the dreadful pictures he had suggested, nor did he at all comprehend that her rippling smile was hysterical. "I don't see anything droll about it, sister," he said sulkily.
"Don't you? Now, it all seems to me very droll—you splashing along there barefoot, why" (she drew back a little to get the better view, laughing excitedly), "you've no idea how ridiculous you look; and Mrs. Halsey stalking along like a dignified ghost, afraid that you and I will kiss one another if we take to whispering, and this woman dying here with her head resting on a sack of potatoes, and the impudent little person you've just christened intruding herself upon the world only to go out of it again, and all these fine people in Missouri rubbing their hands and thinking they have done such a noble deed. I think," she added, laughing more loudly, "that they are the drollest part of it all."
"This nation will find that there's a sequel to it that they won't laugh at." These words of Darling came from some region underneath that of his ordinary conversation, as a man takes a dagger from under his cloak and lets it flash ere he hides it again. "The government of these United States that has laughed at our sufferings will rue the day."
"Even your saying that is very droll, but I love you for it." Elvira lifted both her hands as if testifying to her own sincerity. "I love you for it."
The elder thought it needful here to be again jocose. "Oh, come now, I am married."
Elvira did not feel herself insulted. "These United States," she cried, "they cackle over the word 'freedom' like so many hens that have each of them laid an egg and go strutting and boasting while the housewife empties their nests. The housewife represents the natural course of events, and in this case her name is 'Mrs. Mobocracy.'"
At other times, after a long period of silence, Elvira would burst forth in excited soliloquy audible to Susannah and others about her. On the last day when they were descending the hills to the Mississippi her increasing excitement culminated in a greater demonstration. The sun was shining, and a clear frost had hardened the roads. Elvira broke forth thus—
"It is Joe Smith who is conducting this march. We say that he is lying in gaol," she laughed. "In gaol is he? Have they got him safe? But it was he who taught all these men to work together, one under the other, and none of them kicking; and it was he who taught these women and children to do as they are bid—a wonderful thing that in the land of the free. It was he who taught one and all of us to be kind to each other, to the poor and the sick and the young, to the very beasts. Do you remember that when they caught our prophet at Hiram and dragged him out to be beaten and insulted, they had first to take from his arms a sick motherless baby that he was sitting up all night to nurse? Do you remember how he gave commandment about the animals? how he said that any man striking a beast in anger was thrown so far back on his road to heaven?" She paused when she had thrown out this question, and the men and women within hearing answered in broken chorus, "Yes, blessed be the Lord; we do remember."
"And who was it that taught us to give up the filthy Gentile habits of strong drink and tobacco?" (Again in the pause the chorus of thanksgiving to Heaven was heard.) "It was Joe Smith," Elvira cried more loudly. "And when the Gentiles thought that we would be scattered and separated and ruined, his spirit has gone like a banner before us. Twice they have taken our lands that we bought with our own money and cleared with our own hands, and the houses that we have built, and cast us out destitute, but we are not destroyed."
The enthusiasm of the crowd that now pressed upon her went like wine to her head; her cheeks flamed, her eyes brightened, and she lifted her small hands in fantastic gesture and danced, crying, "We are cast down, but not destroyed, because God Almighty has given to us a prophet, and a great prophet."
And the people around her answered again, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."
It was whispered about the camp that the spirit of prophecy had fallen upon Elvira Halsey.
On the afternoon of that day they saw the ice that floated in large cakes on the breast of the Mississippi flash back the sunbeams to their straining eyes. The sight of the limits of the hostile State from which they were flying was a great joy to every one of them. Susannah felt her heart leap; Elvira, with the growing tendency to cling to her which she had displayed since their last meeting, cast her arms around her and sobbed for joy.
After this blessed glimpse of the river they went down through the recesses of a low forest, the frost and the sunshine still inspiriting them. As they went, the melody of a hymn was taken up from one end of the caravan to the other by all those well enough to join in the song. It was a swinging triumphant air, and Susannah found herself uplifted for the first time since the days of her baptism upon the party spirit of the sect, and singing with them, although she could only catch the words of the refrain often repeated,
"Missouri,In her lawless fury,Without judge or jury,Drove the Saints and spilt their blood."
"Missouri,In her lawless fury,Without judge or jury,Drove the Saints and spilt their blood."
Again the mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship, imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. The true secret of human leadership is, perhaps, known only to the Divine mind, perhaps also to the Satanic. It would certainly seem that the men who chance upon the power and wield it, have often little understanding of the law by which they work, and their critics less.
The Mississippi was filled with large cakes of floating ice. Another company which had gone out from Far West some weeks before was still encamped on the Missouri banks of the river. Yet other companies from Far West came up before the main body of the Saints with which Susannah had travelled was able to cross. The surrounding woods were cut down to make shanties; the surrounding country was scoured for food. In the intervening weeks, while they lay encamped on the banks, the last enemy to be vanquished in that region, the malarial fever, grappled with the sect and dealt deadly wounds. Illinois, shocked by the cruelty of her sister State, held out kind hands and fed the fugitives to some extent, and when April came, helped them to cross the river.
Elvira had been ill in one of the women's sheds, now shrieking in hot delirium, now shaken with ague as if by a strong beast that worried its prey. When they at last crossed the river to the city of Quincy, Susannah was established with her charge, the one legacy of relationship Halsey had left her, in a meagre home with some of the Saints who already lived there.
Within a few days Susannah went to the tithing office, which had been swiftly established for the relief of the destitute Saints, and asked for paper on which she could write a letter. It was her first chance, since leaving her last asylum, of writing the proposed letter to Ephraim Croom. Elder Darling was officiating. She fancied that he looked at her with rude curiosity.
Until this moment she had presented so sad an exterior, had seemed so indifferent to all the ills of their common lot, that Darling and the other men who had dealings with her had stood not a little in awe. As outward physical details of suffering always appeal more largely to common sympathy than inward grief, the manner of her loss had set a temporary crown upon her head, to which the elders had knelt, refusing to admonish her because she took no part in their public services, or because, except for attention to the sick, she did not give much sign of social comradeship.
Now when she asked for the paper, Darling felt that the ice was beginning to break, and gave what seemed to him genial encouragement.
"First time that you've asked for anything but daily rations, Sister Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to—enjoy. Well now, I was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than welcome to such as there is."
The stores indeed were scanty enough; food, cloth, household utensils, a little stationery, a large pile of devotional books, were arranged in meagre order in the shed used as a warehouse. Darling had as yet scarcely respectable clothes to wear, but Susannah was astonished only at the energy that had in a few days collected so much, at the order and patient kindliness which ruled in this poverty-stricken administration. Already those who could work paid into the common store, and those who had lost all had but to state their needs to have them supplied as well as might be.
"One, two, three—will three sheets be enough, Sister Halsey? You've been hearing, I suppose, that Mr. Smith is going to be moved to the town of Boome, and that he is going to be allowed to get his letters now? He'd be real cheered to hear from you, although"—he added this with decent haste—"it will be a great grief to him to hear of your loss!"
"Is he well?" she asked.
"The State authorities are in a fine to-do about him, I suppose you know, sister, for they can't find a single charge to bring him to trial on. You bet the trial would have been on long ago if they'd had a single leg to stand on. Anything else that I can serve you with to-day? We've got some new women's shawls and hats come in. Won't you just step here and have a look at them? No? Well, next time; but there ain't one of our women as doesn't want one of them new bonnets."
Susannah went out into the spring on the outskirts of the town. The birds were singing; everywhere the dandelions swelled out their happy tufted breasts to the sunshine; even a long worm that she noticed crawling lazily in the heat spoke to her of enjoyment of some sort. Her own heart leaped, and she thought it was in answer to the spring. She forgot the dire fates with which she had been grappling, forgot to hate and to grieve.
In the small wooden room that she shared with Elvira, while the invalid slept, she wrote to Ephraim, telling him all that had befallen her. She confessed to Ephraim the passion of hatred which had long tormented her, but she added, "To-day I do not feel it; to-day, with the sweet voices of the birds everywhere in my ears, I feel that if I could be beside you again you could teach me to forgive as my husband forgave, for I do know to-day that in forgiveness alone is the true triumph, the only healing. I am more one with my husband's sect now than I ever was in heart and hope. I long to see it triumphant; I long to see its enemies abashed; but I will leave this people and come back to you, if you will have me, for with regard to their religious faith my life with them is a lie."
The writing took so long that when she carried the letter again to the tithing office to be stamped and sent, the post-bag of that day had already gone. Later, when the office was closed to the public and Elder Darling was alone, he took up the letter which Susannah had brought and looked at it curiously. His eyes had caught the address. He was not sure that he would have put it in the bag even if it had been in time, and now it was clearly his duty to consider. His was a mind in which there was no place for platonic friendship, and Susannah was obviously a most desirable piece of property to the struggling Church. The Church had provided the paper for this letter, must needs provide the stamp; he was officially responsible to the Church. The elder had been an honest man according to the average notions of honesty until within the last weeks, when stress of circumstance had made him reconsider, not for himself but for others, more than one rule of life, and obtain larger latitude. The building up of the Church in her present sore strait was surely an end to override small scruples. He acted now as an official, as a priest, when, after a good many painful qualms of conscience, he opened the letter. After having read its contents, he became convinced that it was for the good of Susannah's own soul that it should not go.
The ground about Quincy had been drained; the town was comparatively healthy; in a few days more some two thousand of the fugitives felt again the pulse of life in their veins. Then they looked abroad and clasped every man the hand of his neighbour, and said "Thanks be to God," and even embraced one another in the joy of relief. History often shows how exuberant is the joy of human nature at escape, and that the impulse of joy is almost one with the impulse of affection. At the abatement of the London plague we see Britons kiss each other in the streets, and at the relief of besieged towns, in our own day, staid persons have caressed one another, unmindful of what they did. So it was now with the members of this driven sect. The spirit of joy and a closer bond of affection went infectiously through the gathering Church. Upon the first Sunday they met together in the open air, and sang words that they verily believed had been written in particular prophecy for themselves at this very hour.