Steadily, for a moment, she looked up into his face, and, with tears in her eyes, said mournfully: “It is too late, Orson—it is too late!”
These were the last sane words which she uttered in this life, although she still lingered on insensible.
The next morning the Apostle Pratt resolved to leave for Salt Lake City and his young bride. The Bishop, however, called a council and summoned him to remain until his wife was dead. Nevertheless he did not wish to stay, and, being an Apostle, he overruled the council. At the last moment before his intended departure, one of the sisters said: “Brother Pratt, should she die, what shall we do with her?”
“Oh, she won’t die,” he replied.
“But should she?” the sister urged.
“Then bury her with her children,” he answered.
After much solicitation, he was prevailed upon to remain for a few hours, and the next morning his wife died. The language of her last moments, as she raved and tossed in mad delirium, showed how terrible had been her mental agony, and how much she had suffered from this frightful system.
But one might easily fill a large volume with stories quite as cruel as this. It is simply absurd to expect that it should be otherwise. Men and women can train and discipline their minds, they can crush out the affections of their hearts if they will; but no effort of man can change man’s nature entirely, or root out altogether humanity from the soul. Women may endure, as that poor woman did whose story I have just related, but they never can get perfectly adapted to the system of “Celestial Marriage.” The nearer they approach to its requirements, the further they recede from all that is held good and noble in womanhood; and as for the men, they are brutalized by every effort which they make to conform to it.
During the summer, about three years ago, a young-looking woman, very shabbily dressed, came frequently to my house with heavy baskets of fruit, which she entreated me to buy. One day she said: “You do not remember me, Sister Stenhouse, I think, and I do not wonder, for I am so changed. I have to work very hard now, for all I have to live upon is what I can make by selling fruit, or any little work that I can get my neighbours to give me to do; and if my husband could prevent even that, I believe he would. I am obliged to gather my fruit at night and hide it from him, and that is why I urged you so to buy, for I never know when I may meet him.”
I was very much surprised at this, as her husband, I knew, was getting a good salary, and appeared to be a most gentlemanly man. His first wife, I was aware, had left him, it was said, on account of cruelty and neglect, and he had married this one just after her arrival from England. I had every reason to believe that she had been a good wife to him, and a mother to his motherless children; but he had taken another wife since he married her, and had cruelly neglected this poor woman, leaving her his first wife’s children to take care of. She said that he was again paying his addresses to another still, and she expected that he would soon marry her. And yet this woman [his second wife] told me that all he had left for her and the children to live on was a sack of bran and about fifty pounds of corn meal. Everything else had been taken to the third wife, even to the best articles of furniture.