The Mormon Prophet by Lily Dougall (best books for 20 year olds TXT) 📕

square brick fireplace burning pine sticks crackled, bidding the chill of the April evening retire to its own place beyond the dark window pane. The paint upon the walls and floor glistened but faintly to the fire and the small flames of two candles that stood among the viands upon the table.

The elder Croom sat in his place. He was burly and ruddy, a wholesome man, very silent, very strong, a person to be feared and relied on. Ephraim believed that force went forth from his father's presence like perfume from a flower. There were many kinds of flowers whose perfume was too strong for Ephraim, but he felt that to be a proof of his own weakness.

Martha Croom, also of New England stock, was of a different type. At fifty years she was still as slender as a girl--tall and too slender, but the small shapely head was set gracefully on the neck as a flower upon its stalk. Her hair, which was wholly silvered, was still abundant and glossily brushed. Her mind was not judicial. She was more quick to decide than to comprehend, full of intense activities and emotions.

"I have heard," said the preacher slowly, "certain distressing rumours concerning--"

Mrs. Croom gave an upward bridling motion of her head, and a red spot of indignant fire came in each of her cheeks. "Joe Smith?", she cried. "A blasphemous wretch! And there is nothing, Mr. Finney, that so well indicates the luke-warmishness into which so many have fallen as that his blasphemy is made a jest of."

Ephraim moved uneasily in his chair.

Mr. Croom made a remark brief and judicial. "The Smiths are a _low_ family."

Mrs. Croom answered the tone. "If the dirt beneath our feet were to begin using profane language, I don't suppose it would be beneath our dignity to put a stop to it."

"It is the Inquisition that my mother wishes to reinstate," said Ephraim.

The master of the house again spoke with the _naivete_ of unquestioning bias. "No, Ephraim; for your mother would be the last to interfere with any for doing righteousness or believing the truth."

Mrs. Croom's slender head trembled and her eyes showed signs of tears at her son's opposition. "If God-fearing people cannot prevent the most horrible iniquities from being practised in their own town, the laws are in a poor condition."

"You have made no candid inquiry concerning Smith, mother; your judgment of him, whether true or false, is based on angry sentiment and wilful ignorance."

The preacher sighed. "This Smith is deceiving the people."

"His book," said Ephraim, "is a history of the North American Indians from the time of the flood until some epoch prior to Columbus. It would be as difficult to prove that it was not true as to prove that Smith is not honest in his delusion. We can only fall back upon what Butler would call 'a strong presumption.'"

Mrs. Croom, consciously or not, made a little sharp rap on the table, and there was a movement of suppressed misery like a quiver in her slender upright form. Her voice was low and tremulous. "If you'd got religion, Ephraim, you wouldn't speak in that light manner of one who has the awful wickedness of adding to the words of the Book."

Ephraim continued to enlighten the preacher in a stronger tone. "Whether the man is mad or false, almost all the immoralities that you will hear reported about him are, as far as I can make out, not true. He doesn't teach that it's unnecessary to obey the ten commandments, or beat his wife, nor is he drunken. He's got the sense to see that all that sort of thing wouldn't make a big man of him. It's merely a revised form of Christianity, with a few silly additions, that he claims to be the prophet of."

Mrs. Croom began to weep bitterly.

The elder Croom asked a pertinent question. "Why do you wilfully distress your mother, Ephraim?"

"Because, sir, I love my mother too well to sit silent and let her think that injustice can glorify God."

It was a family jar.

Finney was a man of about forty years of age; his eyes under over-reaching brows were bright and penetrating; his face was shaven, but his mouth had an expression of peculiar strength and gentleness. He looked keenly at the son of the house, who was held to be irreligious. And then he looked upon Susannah, whose beauty and frivolity had not escaped his keen observation. He lived always in the consciousness of an invisible presence; when he felt the arms of Heaven around him, wooing him to prayer, he dared not disobey.

He arose now, setting his chair back against the wall with preoccupied precision. "The spirit of prayer is upon me," he said; and in a moment he added, "Let us pray."

Susannah was eating, and with relish. She laid down her bit of pumpkin pie and stared astonished. Then, being a girl of good sense and good feeling, she relinquished the remainder of her supper, and, following her aunt's example, knelt beside her chair.

The two candles and the firelight left shadowy spaces in parts of the room, and cast grotesque outlines against the walls. Nothing was familiar to Susannah's eye; she could not help looking about her. Ephraim was nearest to her. He was a bearded man, and seemed to her very old. She saw that his face looked pale and distressed; his eyes were closed, his lips tight set, like one bearing transient pain. At the end of the table her uncle knelt upright, with hands clasped and face uplifted, no feature or muscle moving--a strong figure rapt in devotion. On her other side, as a slight tree waves in the wind, her aunt's slim figure was swaying and bending with feeling that was now convulsive and now restrained. Sometimes she moaned audibly or whispered "Amen." Across the richly-spread table Susannah saw the preacher kneeling in a full flickering glare of the pine fire, one hand upon the brick jamb, the other covering his eyes, as if to hide from himself all things that were seen and temporal in order that he might speak face to face with the Eternal.

It was some time before she listened to the words of the prayer. When she heard Ephraim Croom spoken of by name, there was no room in her mind for anything but curiosity. After a while she heard her own name, and curiosity began to subside into awe. After this the preacher brought forward the case of Joseph Smith.

Before the prayer ended Susannah was troubled by so strong a sense of emotion that she desired nothing so much as relief. It seemed to her that the emotion was not so much in herself as in the others, or like an influence in the room pressing upon them all. At length a kitten that had been lying by the hearth got up as if disturbed by the same influence, and, walking round the room, rubbed its fur against Ephraim's knee. She saw the start run through his whole nervous frame. Opening his eyes, he put down his hand and stroked it. Susannah liked Ephraim the better for this. The kitten was not to be comforted; it looked up in his face and gave a piteous mew. Susannah tittered; then she felt sorry and ashamed.


CHAPTER II.

Two quiet years passed, and Susannah had attained her eighteenth birthday.

On a certain day in the week there befell what the aunt called a "season" of baking. It was the only occasion in the week when Mrs. Croom was sure to stay for some length of time in the same place with Susannah beside her. Ephraim brought down his books to the hospitable kitchen, and sat aloof at a corner table. He said the sun was too strong upon his upper windows, or that the rain was blowing in. The first time that Ephraim sought refuge in the kitchen Mrs. Croom was quite flustered with delight. She always coveted more of her son's society. But when he came a third time she began to suspect trouble.

Mrs. Croom stood by the baking-board, her slender hands immersed in a heap of pearly flour; baskets of scarlet currants lay at her feet. All things in the kitchen shone by reason of her diligence, and the windows were open to the summer sunshine. Susannah sat with a large pan of red gooseberries beside her; she was picking them over one by one. Somewhere in the outer kitchen the hired boy had been plucking a goose, and some tiny fragments of the down were floating in the air. One of them rode upon a movement of the summer air and danced before Susannah's eyes. She put her pretty red lips beneath it and blew it upwards.

Mrs. Croom's suspicions concerning Ephraim had produced in her a desire to reprove some one, but she refrained as yet.

Susannah having wafted the summer snowflake aloft, still sat, her young face tilted upward like the faces of saints in the holy pictures, her bright eyes fixed upon the feather now descending. Ephraim looked with obvious pleasure. Her head was framed for him by the window; a dark stiff evergreen and the summer sky gave a Raphaelite setting.

The feather dropped till it all but touched the tip of the girl's nose. Then from the lips, puckered and rosy, came a small gust; the fragment of down ascended, but this time aslant.

"You didn't blow straight enough up," said Ephraim.

Susannah smiled to know that her pastime was observed. The smile was a flash of pleasure that went through her being. She ducked her laughing face farther forward to be under the feather.

Mrs. Croom shot one glance at Ephraim, eager and happy in his watching. She did what nothing but the lovelight in her son's face could have caused her to do. She struck the girl lightly but testily on the side of the face.

Ephraim was as foolish as are most men in sight of a damsel in distress. He made no impartial inquiry into the real cause of trouble; he did not seek Justice in her place of hiding. He stepped to his mother's side, stern and determined, remembering only that she was often unwise, and that he could control her.

"You ought not to have done that. You must never do it again."

With the print of floury fingers on her glowing cheeks the girl sat more astonished than angry, full of ruth when her aunt began to sob aloud.

The mother knew that she was no longer the first woman in her son's love.

It was without doubt, Mrs. Croom's first bitter pang of jealousy that lay at the beginning of those causes which drove Susannah out upon a strange pilgrimage. But above and beyond her personal jealousy was a consideration certainly dearer to a woman into whose inmost religious life was woven the fibre of the partisan. As she expressed it to herself, she agonised before the Lord in a new fear lest her unconverted son should be established in his unbelief by love for a woman who had never sought for heavenly grace; but, in truth, that which she sought was that both should swear allegiance to her own interpretation of grace. In this prayer some good came to her, the willingness to sacrifice her jealousy if need be; but, after the prayer another thought entered into her mind, which she held to be divine direction; she must focus all her efforts upon the girl's conversion. In her heart all the time a