His manner was pitying. "I saw it last night in the way I see things, in my visions, but Emmar she heard from some of the Saints that came from Palmyra that your uncle was sick unto death, and last night the Lord told me he was dead."
She rose up suddenly. She had known too many instances of this man's curious knowledge of distant events to think of doubting. Her first thought was that if Ephraim was in this trouble she must go to him at once.
"Your aunt will be awful jealous of your cousin now she's only got him."
Then under Smith's pitying glance Susannah shrank from the first impulse to go. She felt that there was something within her that merited his pity. She could not rush to Ephraim without invitation, because it was not for his sake but for her own she wanted to go. She believed that Smith knew it. She felt thankful, as he had dared to accuse her of not loving her husband, that he had the kindness not to accuse her of this. A certain awe of Smith came over her; he could be violent with those who were violent, coarse and jocular with his public who could be worked upon thus, but to her he spoke delicately, and he had shown her at times before this that he knew her better than she knew herself.
"Sister Susannah," said Smith humbly, "it's my fault that you've become the brainy woman that you are, for I encouraged you at book learning (knowing as how when you found your heart 'twould shine with the more lustre), but if you were to go and live along side of a man as is a bookworm you'd lose your chance of this life (let alone your soul's salvation by the apostasy which you think lightly of now). Anyhow I'd wait if I was you till his mother asks you, for she'd be in an awful taking if you and he were talk, talk, talking of what she didn't understand. And he is her only son, and she is a widow."
With this last phrase, which had a good and Scriptural sound, Smith had done.
Susannah gave him her hand in farewell, and listened gently while again he told her, as on the night of his flight from Kirtland, that his friendship and the friendship of his Church were always at her service.
The prophet walked down the street. A crowd of the Saints and a group of elders were waiting for him with impatience. Darling eyed his coming with looks gloomy and furtive, but the prophet was no longer, as on the previous night, wrathful and pompous. He spoke aside to Darling.
"I thought it right to tell our sister Susannah Halsey that her Gentile home had suffered bereavement. The uncle who has been as a father unto her is dead. I have been greatly exercised in grief for her," continued Smith, briefly and truly; and then he added, also with truth, but with subtle suggestion, "I cannot think that further dealing with that household could be of advantage to her, but having laid the matter before the Lord, I was made aware that we must seek the good of all our sisters not with regard to outward appearance or inclination of the eyes; therefore, Brother Darling, let your motive be lowly, not having respect unto persons," and he added with the simplicity of a child, "as mine is."
Susannah was left with the bad picture in her mind which Smith had sketched there. She saw herself cold to her husband, lacking in passionate motherliness to his child, eager for the society of another man not out of love but intellectual vanity, and cavilling also at all religion because faith had no good soil to rest in. She sat long on the window-sill of the empty room, looking at an uncultivated patch of ground that even in May had no beauty save for here and there the stirring of a weed in the damp scented earth. She was stunned to see her life limned in such lines, and the truth in the drawing made it at first seem wholly true.