Part 37 (1/2)

He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.

Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for very joy, not amus.e.m.e.nt. ”Speak to me,” she coaxed. ”I have come back to you. Do you think we are in a dream?” She let herself kneel on the old floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against her cheek.

With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner would have returned had she remained in any common att.i.tude, but to this coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had pa.s.sed without caresses) could not behave with reticence.

One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering words that in their audible pa.s.sion were new and strange to his unaccustomed lips.

”I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked most of the way from Rochester to-day.”

”Are you very tired?”--as if the fact that she had been walking that day was all that needed his immediate attention.

”I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child died I have been quite alone.”

”We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago.” There was no tone of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. ”You never wrote, and I--I supposed that if you were alive you--you preferred to remain, Susy.”

She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, ”Why are you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?”

”We have been having a prayer meeting,” he answered. ”And I keep the key because--because my father used to.” He gave the reason with an intonation half playful. ”I do many a thing now because he did.”

”I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are they less foolish” (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their late inmates), ”less unjust than they used to be?”

As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. ”I don't know that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that I am either, Susy, but--it is not good to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d alone.”

She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more homelike by his tones.

”The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?”

She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.

So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child's desire to hear a story that she knew by heart.

”Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved--”

When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths flanked it in orderly ranks. Their light forms glimmered in the branch shadows of the budding quince. It was true, what people said, that Ephraim had not let his father's home decay. The door stood open, as country doors are apt to do.

There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the sitting-room. The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed to see again. Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens. A candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing beside it. Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a student lamp--the fire of a new hearth.

CHAPTER VII.

Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.

The stranger was of middle age, with hair already gray and face deeply furrowed. In ragged garments, resting his bandaged feet, he sat propped in the sitting-room. The warm air blowing from rich harvest fields came in at open door and windows. Attentive before him, Ephraim and Susannah sat.

”You are one of the Latter-Day Saints?” Susannah asked.

”I am, ma'am, and it's real strange to hear you say them words, for it's 'Mormons' the Gentiles calls us.”

Then to her questioning he told the story of the downfall of Nauvoo.

”There was two causes for the persecution; we had got too powerful and too great for the folks in Illinois, just as we had done in Missouri; but there was another thing, and that was that wickedness crept in amongst us. 'Twasn't as bad as was reported, though, but 'twas there--I'm afraid 'twas there.”