Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/390

382 A movement of surprise amid the audience. Brother Jarrum went on:

“I can’t say I have knowed many as have stopped servants even at that high rate of pay. My memory won’t charge me with one. They have married and settled, and so have secured for themselves paradise.”

This might be taken as a delicate hint that the married state, generally, deserved that happy title. Some of the experiences of those present, however, rather tended to accord it a less satisfactory one, and there arose some murmuring. Brother Jarrum explained:

“Women is not married with us for time, but for eternity—as I tried to beat into you last night. Once the wife of a saint, their entrance into paradise is safe and certain. We have not got a old maid among us—not a single old maid!”

The sensation that this information caused, I’ll leave you to judge; considering that Deerham was famous for old maids, and that several were present.

“No old maids and no widders,” continued Brother Jarrum, wiping his forehead, which was becoming moist with the heat of argument. “We have respect to our women, we have, and like to make ’em comfortable.”

“But if their husbands die off?” suggested a puzzled listener.

“The husband’s successor marries his widders,” explained Brother Jarrum. “Look at our late head and prophet, Mr. Joe Smith,—him that appeared in a vision to our present prophet, and pointed out the spot for the new temple. He died a martyr, Mr. Joe Smith did,—a prey to wicked murderers. Were his widders left to grieve and die out after him? No. Mr. Brigham Young, he succeeded to his honours, and he married the widders.”

This was received somewhat dubiously: the assemblage not clear whether to approve it or to cavil at it.

“Not so much to be his wives, you know, as to be a kind of ruling matrons in his household,” went on Brother Jarrum. “To have their own places apart, their own rooms in the house, and to be as happy as the day’s long. They don’t”

“How they must quarrel, a lot of wives together!” interrupted a discontented voice.

Brother Jarrum set himself energetically to disprove this supposition. He succeeded. Belief is easy to willing minds.

“Which is best?” asked he. “To be one of the wives of a rich saint, where all the wives is happy, and honoured, and well dressed; or to toil and starve, and go next door to naked, as a poor man’s solitary wife does here? I know which I should choose if the two chances was offered me. A woman can’t put her foot inside the heavenly kingdom, I tell you, unless she has got a husband to lay hold of her hand and draw her in. The wives of a saint are safe; paradise is in store for ’em: and that’s why the Gentiles’ wives—them folks that’s for ever riling at us—leave their husbands and marry a saint.”

“Does the saints’ wives ever leave ’em to marry them others—the Gentiles?” asked that troublesome Davies.

“Such cases have been heered of,” responded Brother Jarrum, shaking his head with a grave solemnity of manner. “They have braved the punishment, and done it. But the act has been rare.”

“What is the punishment?” inquired somebody’s wife.

“When a female belonging to the Latter Day Saints—whether she’s married or single—falls off from grace and goes over to them Gentiles, and marries one of ’em, she’s condemned to be buffeted by Satan for a thousand years.”

A pause of consternation.

“Who condemns her?” a voice, more venturesome than the rest, was heard to ask.

“There’s mysteries in our faith which can’t be disclosed even to you,” was the reply of Brother Jarrum. “Them apostate women are condemned to it; and that’s enough. It’s not everybody as can see the truth. Ninety-nine may see it, and the hundredth mayn’t.”

“Very true, very true,” was murmured around.

“I think I see the waggins and the other vehicles arriving now!” rapturously exclaimed Brother Jarrum, turning his eyes right up into his head, the better to take in the mental vision. “The travellers, tired with their journey, washed and shaved, and dressed, and the women’s hair anointed, all flagrant with oil and frantic with joy,—shouting, singing, and dancing to the tune of the advancing fiddles! I think I see the great prophet himself, with his brass-band in front and his body-guard around him—sometimes he goes out with his body-guard—meeting the travellers and shaking their hands individ’ally! I think I see the joy of the women, and the nice young girls, when they are led to the hyminial halter in our temple by the saints that have chosen them, to be inducted into the safety of paradise! Happy those that the prophet chooses for himself! While them other poor mistaken backsliders shall be undergoing their thousand years of buffetings, they’ll reign triumphant, the saved saints of the Mil”

How long Brother Jarrum’s harangue might have rung on the wide ears of his delighted listeners, it is not easy to say. But an interruption occurred to the proceedings. It was caused by the entrance of Peckaby; and the meeting was terminated somewhat abruptly. While Susan Peckaby sat at the feet of the saint, a willing disciple of his doctrine, her lord and master, however disheartening it may be to record it, could not, by any means, be induced to open his heart and receive the grace. He remained obdurate—passively obdurate during the day; but rather demonstratively obdurate towards night. Peckaby, a quiet, civil man enough when sober, was just the contrary when ivre; and since he had joined the blacksmith’s shop, his evening visits to a noted public-house—the Plough and Harrow—had become frequent. On his return home from these visits, his mind had once or twice been spoken out pretty freely as to the Latter Day Saint doctrine; once he had gone the length of