“Mary,” I said, “this system is a fearful curse.”
“Curse!” she exclaimed, “curse is a heavenly word to apply to such a system. Why there is nothing in hell so hateful, so vile, so detestable. It is blight and ruin to everything that is fair and good. I never pass a day but I curse with the bitterest hatred the men who devised it. Women can hate bitterly when they choose; but I hate them more than ever woman hated before.”
“Hush! hush, dear!” I said; “you mustn’t talk so, Mary!”
“I mustn’t say it perhaps—it’s dangerous, I know; but I may think so. There is not a true-hearted woman in Utah who does not feel as I do this day. Do you think that when they have ruined all our hopes for time and for eternity we shall love them still? Here, but for this wretched system, I should have been a happy wife and mother, and now see what I am—husband, child, all lost—all lost!”
“Is the child dead, Mary?” I asked very gently, for I feared to pain her.
“Yes, dear,” she replied, “in fact, I believe it never lived—the one I was thinking of. I was ill, very ill indeed, after what my husband had told me. They thought I should die, and I think he was sorry, for he became very kind and tender to me, but that only made me feel worse. Then my child was born, but I never saw it, for I was unconscious for more than a week after, and then they told me that it was not alive, but my husband would never speak to me about it. As I grew better, his cold, stern manner returned, and then at last he married that girl Wilbur, and since then he has married two more, for he is doing very well in business. I think that all his love for me has gone. At first he thought of marrying again because it was a religious principle; and as it was the time of the Reformation he did not dare to refuse; but now his heart is grown hard and cold. You see a change in me, Sister Stenhouse, but I think you’d see a greater change in him. I know, of course, that I used to look at him with the eyes of love, and of course did not see him as other people did; but that is not the only change—it isn’t in his face alone; his whole nature is altered. It quite pains me sometimes to see him.”
“Do you feel any happier now—any calmer, Mary?”
“Yes,” she said, “yes, and no. I do not love him as I used to; how could I? But when I look into my heart I find, if I tell you the truth, that a little love does remain there. If only I could quite cease to love him I think I should be happy; but when I pet and play with my little girl—for we have had one child since that dreadful time—some of my love for him comes back again, and I sit down and have a good cry. Sometimes that isn’t enough to calm me, and I shut the door and walk up and down the room and swear. There! don’t look so horrified, Sister Stenhouse, I cannot help it; if I did not give way to my feelings now and then I should die outright; and sometimes I break a few things, but he never knows it, and it does me good. We came into the city yesterday on a visit, and we shall stay for a few days. He brought me, I believe, as a matter of form; but I found out where you lived, and I came to see you. You never answered my letter, and I did not know whether you had left New York yet. I really am glad to see you, Sister Stenhouse. And is it true that Brother Stenhouse has not taken another wife yet?”
“Not yet,” I said; “but, as I told you, he has been spoken to about it, and I cannot tell what he may do. As you say, Mary, the Mormon women have not much to make them happy.”
Mary gave me a great deal of information. In that she was quite herself, as I knew her in by-gone days. Nothing escaped her observation. She sat down with me and told me all her troubles, and I need hardly say how deeply I sympathized with her. So I tried to comfort her, and spoke about her child, but even respecting that poor little thing she felt no hope. “Why, when it grows up,” she said, “it will be as miserable as I am—I can see no prospect of happiness in the future for it.” We agreed that the only way whereby we might prevent our children from experiencing sorrow and misery similar to our own was to teach them from the very first that Polygamy was the natural and proper, as well as the revealed order of marriage; in fact to “bring them up” in the system. What a miserable resource was this for a mother who loved her children!