CHAPTER V.

When that day began to wane Susannah was still sitting in the empty curtained room.  No plan which offered even a fair hope of escape had occurred to her mind.  Although in pictures of adventure her imagination had been fertile, throwing out suggestions unbidden, her judgment would have none of them.  No one disturbed her.  She was left in isolation, a prey to dismal thoughts.

She saw the happy crowds dispersing in the Square from evening recreation.  There was nothing to hinder her from joining them.  Sometimes her sense of imprisonment seemed only a morbid dream, for on all sides of the fair white city there was open ingress and egress for the faithful and the stranger.  It was hard to believe that at wharfs and on the high roads fanatics watched for her, and yet after Smith’s reluctant avowal she dare not doubt it.

She saw evening fade over the broad semi-circle of the river, over the multitude of cheerful homes that sloped to its edge.  When darkness came she found herself more than ever pressed and tormented by the grim shapes of fear and remorse and despair.  She had terrible reason to fear, and felt as never before that she had brought this horrid situation upon herself by joining and rejoining the prophet’s following.  She had no hope now that Smith would relent.

Beyond the city, eastward toward the sun-rising, lay the home of Ephraim’s friendship, whither in the morning she had thought to bend her steps.  She saw it through the glad glamour of her recent knowledge that he had not neglected her letters.  All her desires fled to this thought of his friendship, like birds flying home.  All her fancies clustered round it, like climbing flowers that caress and kiss the object they enfold when some rude wind disturbs.  Whenever she withdrew her mind from its contemplation, the circumstances on which she looked were the more revolting.

Ever since Smith left she had been more or less under the impression that an unseen person there in that very room had contended with him.  Again and again she had swept it aside as an infectious madness that she was catching from the fanatics about her, but it had recurred; and now as, not caring to light her lamps, she sat alone in the darkness by the very table against which Smith had writhed and wailed, she felt pressed upon by a spiritual life external to her own.

Within her soul from some unknown depth the word arose distinctly as if spoken, “Pray.  You cannot save yourself.  Pray.”

“I am going mad.”  Susannah whispered the words audibly.  It was a comfort to her even to hear her own voice.  But when her whisper was past she again listened involuntarily.

The words within her rose again.  “Even so.  Pray.  If you are going mad, you have the more need.”

Susannah had come to class all search for definite and material answer to prayer as one of the superstitions of false religion.  In this category stood also the hearing of voices and obedience to monitions from the unseen.  Now she reproached herself because she could not immediately silence this fancy of disturbed nerves.