“Carrie,” I answered, “if there is anything that I can say or do that will make you feel more certain that I will keep my promise, if I live to do so, tell me, and I will do it.”
“I am afraid,” she said, “that, after all, he never loved me. He pitied my lonely situation and was so kind and good to me, that I learned to love him, and those meddlesome sisters tried to get him to marry me, but I would not be false to you. Then we both thought it was best not to tell you, as it would make you grieve, although it never could take place. Even now, had I not known that I was dying, I never would have told you. But you will not love me less when you think of me after I am gone?”
I told her that my affection for her would never change, and I talked with her, and tried to soothe her dying moments, and to make her feel less lonely; and thus the morning passed away. In the afternoon she was silent and apparently unconscious, and before another day dawned she had passed away to her rest.
CHAPTER XXXI.
MARRIAGE FOR THE DEAD—ENTERING INTO POLYGAMY—THE NEW WIFE.
The following evening I went round again to the house, to gaze once more at the form of my dear friend. She was lying in her coffin, dressed for the grave, and I looked at her long and tenderly as she rested sleeping there. Her features were peaceful and natural as if in slumber; an expression of calm tranquillity hovered around her countenance, and in the repose of death she seemed almost happy. Poor girl! her life had been short indeed, and she had known but little pleasure; but I believed that she was now beyond the reach of earthly sorrow and earthly disappointment, happy in that land where suffering and tears are all unknown. “There shall be no night there,” the Lord of that other life had said. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away from that bright and glorious land; and the grief and pain, which on earth are the portion of so many tried and weary hearts, shall find no entrance into that eternal rest which our Father in heaven has prepared for us beyond the floods of death.
Oh, better far! I thought, it is that thus she should pass away. True, she has seen but little of life, and has not tasted many of its joys; but, as a compensation, how much has she been spared! She was so gentle and so sensitive, so unfit to battle with the stern realities of existence, that I felt she had gained rather than lost in being taken away in the morning of her life.
I now expected very soon to be called upon to undergo the most painful ordeal that any wife can be required to pass through: I was to give my husband another wife—such is the sacrifice demanded of every Mormon woman.
The thought of doing this was worse than death to me. I felt injured, humiliated and degraded by it, and yet I still tried to believe that it was the will of God, and must therefore be right. To me, this outrage upon all the purest feelings of womanhood seemed more like the will of men—men of the basest and most unholy passions. It was repulsive to me in whatever form it was presented, but still I reproached my own rebellious heart for feeling so, for I had been told that the ways of the Lord were past finding out, and, however unlike Him this Revelation might appear, we Mormon women had been taught that it was our duty to bend our wills and to suffer in unquestioning and uncomplaining silence.