Part 27 (1/2)

At first he made an attempt at some unctuous form of address, an effort at formality, a mechanical tribute to habit. Failing to finish his phrase, he stood before her, not as the lauded leader, not as the interesting martyr, but claiming recognition merely as a man, a large, coa.r.s.e man feeling his own coa.r.s.eness in her presence, a sinful man feeling his own sinfulness, but at the same time a man with a warm heart, which was now so beating with emotions of shame and pity and glad recognition that at first he could not speak, could not raise his eyes to hers until the warmth of his feeling rid him of self-consciousness.

Susannah had not expected to awake this emotion. She desired nothing less than condolence; and yet she was touched by seeing his huge strength broken down for the moment by her appearing. When he spoke his voice was hoa.r.s.e.

”I--I told him--it was my earnest command to him not to go where there was danger.”

Halsey's name was not spoken, but all through that interview Smith appeared to be haunted by his presence. ”He was the best man amongst us,” he said.

”My husband is gone.” Susannah hoped by the reticence of her tone to ward off further excess of sympathy. ”I am no longer bound to your Church, Mr. Smith. I should not be honest if I did not tell you that I hold myself free.”

He faced her frankly, but with a glance of searching pain. ”It must seem a rather poor trade I've chosen if there ain't no truth in it.”

”But I did not accuse you of not believing it, Mr. Smith.”

”Do you think I do?”

She remembered the day that he had first shown her his peep-stone with simple, childlike importance. How young they had both been! The suns.h.i.+ne on the hill, the voice of the golden woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the scent of the fallen beech leaves, came back to her. A decade of terrible years had pa.s.sed over them both, and he stood seeking her faith just as simply.

”I have tried very hard to understand you, Mr. Smith, but I do not. I think you must believe most of what you claim for yourself, if not all.

If you had made your story up for the love of power you wouldn't always be wanting the people to get a better education; you would, as they say of the Roman Catholic priests, want to keep the people ignorant.”

”Go on,” he said. She found that he was looking at her with intense sadness, but there was not a shadow of evasion in the eager look that met her steadily.

She went on, looking gravely into his face. ”I do not believe that your story was false, Mr. Smith, but it seems to me that you must suspect now that your visions and the gold plates were hallucination, not reality.”

She paused, eager question in tone and look, but the question was of the head, not of the heart.

He knew that; he knew that it did not matter greatly to this thoughtful and beautiful woman whether he had sunk to the deepest degradation or not. Suddenly he answered her, but not as one who stood at her judgment bar.

”Where is your heart? Didn't you see how that man Angel--angel of purity if ever one walked in human form--kissed every day the ground you walked upon? And you did not love him. The child--you thought you cared for the child: I tell you if I had had a child like that, with eyes like the stars and a little mind so untainted, I had laid myself down on his grave and died there. There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they had taken and killed us over there in Missouri.” He added, ”If you were another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin?”

Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent truth. Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had said that love, not knowledge, was needed. She had not loved Halsey and his child as she might have loved.

Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates? The man in him had flashed out at her, and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire. Her cheeks flushed, not with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken tears.

”And you,” she said slowly, ”you have poured out blood and soul for us all freely, but why?” The imperious need of truth awoke again. ”Why have you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?” She repeated the question. ”If it was ambition, why did you hold to it when there did not seem to be the slightest chance that your sect could survive, or that you would escape death?”

She was asking with more heart in her tone now that she had been made to realise what she had of respect and friends.h.i.+p for this man.

”I hain't got the courage most people think I have,” he replied sadly; ”I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire. I don't say that it would be the same for any of you. I used to preach that it would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in preaching that way; but as for me, I've seen and I've heard.”

He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor. It would have been a relief to her if he had moved; but he remained just where he first stood, strong enough to have this colloquy over without restlessness.

”I am no saint,” he said, ”as you know very well, and there's a lot of things I've done, thinking that my revelations told me, which I don't know whether they told me or not, for in prison I saw that the things were bad things, like that mess of the bank, and running away as I did.

I guess I could not have been living right, and the devil gulled me. But that hain't got nothing to do with the times I know that the Lord spoke.

You don't believe it was the Lord at all. Well, then, who was it? For it's the same as has told me not to do the lots of wicked things I might have done and didn't. As to them plates, I told you before I didn't have them as much in my hands as I said I did. I got wrong a bit there too, maybe, but it isn't easy to keep quite straight between the thing you see and the words you say it in, when you are trying to talk to people about what they don't understand. It isn't easy to do just only what is perfectly right about anything at any time, at least, if it is to you, it isn't to me; but I often thought I was born worse than most people.”

”The men who were your witnesses as to the reality of the plates are apostate,” she said gently.

”They are apostate,” he said gloomily, ”and why? Because I would not let them live upon the Lord's t.i.thes without labouring as we all laboured.”