"You have been very kind, Ephraim. There is not much use in my trying to
say anything about how good you are, but--" She stopped, thinking of her
recovered confidence in his character and her husband's; in this
thought she experienced an elevation of the spirits, a new hopefulness,
which, after the dreary blank of the morning's outlook, was like
sunshine after rain. With this elevation the religious habit of thought
which she had learned from Halsey intermingled. "O Ephraim," she cried,
"I believe that God sent you to give me back my faith."
He had nothing more to say after that. He rode away leaving her standing
upon the tawny carpet of the fallen leaf, standing in the pink sunshine
under naked trees, and looking after him with tears of gratitude in her
eyes. Ephraim looked back once, but not again.
CHAPTER XIII.
When Susannah was returning from her parting with Ephraim Croom, she
found Joseph Smith was walking slowly upon the road not far from John
Biery's hotel. He was holding a small book open before his eyes, conning
a lesson, repeating the words aloud again and again as a schoolboy
might.
"It has been given to me to see that the Lord hath need of the learning
of this world, Mrs. Halsey. When I have got the Latin and the Greek, I
shall try to find some man who can teach me the Egyptian language, that
I may know how far the ancient Egyptian from which I translated the Book
differs therefrom."
Susannah had expected to find him excited after the events of the past
night, but instead he was intent only upon committing a portion of the
Latin grammar to memory, learning by rote as children did in those days.
"My husband told me," she began. She stood in awe of Smith, hardly
knowing how to express herself to him; then she went on, almost roughly,
"I don't see how Newell Knight could have gone up in the air and come
down again; it does not seem to me sensible."
He clasped his hands behind his back, his large thumb holding his place
open in the lesson-book, and walked beside her, his head bent somewhat
forward in reverie.
"I am often much taken aback at what happens to me now, Mrs. Halsey, but
I do declare to ye that that was the greatest wonder I ever saw before
my eyes; and it's given to me to see that ye've got the same sort of
difficulty about him as it's natural for me to have." He began to lapse
in his own dialect. "Ye want to see the reason why of things. Well, I
tell ye, I've just got down to this point, that I've give up tryin' to
see why. If ye come to that, why was I chosen to lead this people? I
tell ye when the words of the interpretation of the Book began to pour
through my mind, and I'd no power to stop them, and I just felt as if I
could cry like a baby when I couldn't get any one to write 'em down--I
tell ye, I used often to ask why. But it ain't no use. What I've got to
do is jest to get hold of the guiding that comes to me as clear as I
can, and jest walk straight along those lines."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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