Verner's Pride eBook

Ellen Wood (author)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,003 pages of information about Verner's Pride.

Verner's Pride eBook

Ellen Wood (author)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,003 pages of information about Verner's Pride.

Poor Grind probably substituted the word “sensitive” for another, in his narrow acquaintance with the English language.  Susan Peckaby seemed to resent this new view of things.  She was habited in the very plum-coloured gown which had been prepared for the start, the white paint having been got out of it by some mysterious process, perhaps by the turpentine suggested by Chuff.  It looked tumbled and crinkled, the beauty altogether gone out of it.  Her husband, Peckaby, stood behind, grinning.

“Villains, them saints was, was they?” said he.

“They was villains,” emphatically answered Grind.

“And the saintesses?” continued Peckaby—­“What of them?”

“The less said about ’em the better, them saintesses,” responded Grind.  “We should give ’em another name over here, we should.  I had to leave my eldest girl behind me,” he added, lifting his face in a pitying appeal to Mr. Verner’s.  “She warn’t but fifteen, and one of them men took her, and she’s his thirteenth wife.”

“I say, Grind,” put in the sharp voice of Mrs. Duff, “what’s become of Nancy, as lived up here?”

“She died on the road,” he answered.  “She married Brother Jarrum in New York—­”

“Married Brother Jarrum in New York!” interrupted Polly Dawson tartly.  “You are asleep, Grind.  It was Mary Green as married him.  Leastways, news, that she did, come back to us here.”

“He married ’em both,” answered Grind.  “The consekence of which was, that the two took to quarrelling perpetual.  It was nothing but snarling and fighting everlasting.  Nancy again Mary, and Mary again her.  We hadn’t nothing else with ’em all the way to the Salt Lake city, and Nancy, she got ill.  Some said ’twas pining; some said ’twas a in’ard complaint as took her; some said ’twas the hardships killed her—­the cold, and the fatigue, and the bad food, and the starvation.  Anyhow, Nancy died.”

“And what became of Mary?” rather more meekly inquired Mrs. Peckaby.

“She’s Jarrum’s wife still.  He have got about six of ’em, he have.  They be saints, they be!”

“They bain’t as bad off as the saintesses,” interrupted Mrs. Grind.  “They has their own way, the saints, and the saintesses don’t.  Regular cowed down the saintesses be; they daredn’t say as their right hand’s their own.  That poor sick lady as went with us, Miss Kitty Baynton—­and none on us thought she’d live to get there, but she did, and one of the saints chose her.  She come to us just afore we got away, and she said she wanted to write a letter to her mother to tell her how unhappy she was, fit to die with it.  But she knowed the letter could never be got to her in England, cause letters ain’t allowed to leave the city, and she must stop in misery for her life, she said; for she couldn’t never undertake the journey back again; even if she could get clear away; it would kill her.  But she’d like her mother to know how them Mormons deceived with their tales, and what sort of a place New Jerusalem was.”

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Project Gutenberg
Verner's Pride from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.