THE SICK WIFE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 14, 1880

THE SICK WIFE.

"WELL, Dr. Wynn, I hope you will soon have her cured up," said George Morley, as the doctor came from the sick wife's room.

"No, George—I am afraid"—and the doctor hesitated. "No, I do not think that I can cure her," he continued, and, cruel as it may seem, he noticed with pleasure the shock of pain which his words gave. "I might give her medicine for the next ten years, if she lives so long, but it would be useless. You must take the case in hand yourself. No one else can do her any good. You seem astonished, but I only wonder you do not know it yourself. I'll tell you just how it is.

Your wife grew up in the city, with brothers and sisters, and other relatives around her, and they made her life happy. There were birds, and pictures, and flowers, and books, to make the days pass pleasantly, and there were entertainments to attend whenever she wished to break the monotony of home life. You know how it is here in this isolated farm-house—but always being a farmer, you do not realize what a sad change it is to the poor girl. I do not believe you have bought a book, or a picture, since she came here. I miss even her papers and magazines. She has not a relative within hundreds of miles, and naturally misses the sympathy of her old friends. How can she help being discouraged? Three years of such life is enough to kill a woman with any heart at all."

"But, doctor, Laura thinks just as I do; that is, that we must be very saving until we get the farm paid for. When this is off my hands, I will build a new house and have all the fine things she used to have at home, but we never should get along in the world if we began that way."

"Much good a new house will do your wife, if you keep on in this way. 'Two by six' will be enough for her, long before you get ready to build it, unless you try to cure her yourself. What a pity you did not marry one of your neighbor's girls! They are used to farm life, and would be at home here, but of course you thought you must have some one a little different. But it would be just as sensible to set one of the florist's hot-house plants in your pasture, and expect it to repay you with an abundance of fragrant blooms, as to take such a girl from her home and expect her to thrive in yours!" and after that long speech, the doctor got into his buggy and took up the lines.

"But, doctor, wait—don't go yet," said Mr. Morley, whose face expressed his puzzled mind. "I do not see how I could change things here, even if my life depended upon it."

"Nonsense, Morley! You can and will, I know. In the first place, be a lover as well as a husband, and work for her as if you enjoyed it as well as when she was Laura Bateman. Make a shutter for that south window, and put some shelves in it so that she can keep plants. Two or three evenings' work will do it, and such labor of love on your part will bring roses to Laura's pale cheeks again!"

"But plants, and pots, and seeds cost something, doctor, and I am a poor man, you know!"

"Well, I guess sickness 'costs something' too, as you are in a fair way to find out! My coming to-day will be five dollars, and that, expended for pots and plants, or papers, would be a mine of pleasure to your wife. I tell you, your wife is starving to death."

"Why, doctor, we have everything we need to eat! You just ought to see our cellar!"

"Fudge!" said the doctor; "that is just like a man. He is always groveling around in the cellar, and never thinks of getting any higher! Of course I know you have enough for the physical life, and if you were cattle you might thrive on your abundance, but what do you do for that finer sense of man, the spiritual life? How often, now, do you exchange social visits with your neighbors?"

"Why, not often, of course. Laura does not care to go without me, and I am always busy on the farm."

"And how often do you go to church or lectures?"

"Well, we used to go now and then, but we are so far from town that it does not seem to pay to hitch up and go so far."

"No! but I remember when a young man of your size didn't think it any hardship to do his chores early, and gallop off five or ten miles to walk with Laura Bateman down to prayer-meeting! Now, although she needs to go much more than she did then, it is too much trouble to hitch up the horses to take her anywhere! George, you are just getting selfish and lazy, and if you do not cure yourself, there is no hope for your wife. Of course it will cost something to keep her well, but it will cost more to have her sick. First, there'll be extra help in the house, then a doctor's bill of a hundred or so dollars a year, and then a coffin and funeral—"

"For heaven's sake, doctor, stop!" cried the long-suffering husband. "I'll try to do better in the future. You have told me the truth, and I am ashamed of myself. I'll show you a happy girl again, if I live!"

"That is right, my boy! Only love your wife enough, and the rest will be easy. Now I am going in to tell her about the lectures, and if she gets interested in them, see that you do, too, and take her to hear them. They will do her more good than anything in the drug store."

Dr. Wynn entered the sick woman's room with a smiling face. "I came back," he said, "to tell you that Prof. White, of Waynesville, is to give us five lectures next month, and you are to get well right away, so that you may be able to attend."

"Prof. White! Oh, how I should like to hear him!" said Laura, brightening up instantly. "He lectured for the lyceum at home, the winter before I came away. It would seem like old times to hear him again; but George has so much to do that I do not suppose we can go."

"Oh, pshaw, now," broke in the doctor, "if George cannot manage his work I'll come out and help him, for go you must! Just remember that, now, and act accordingly," laughed the doctor, as he drew his gloves on again. "And you are to stop at our house the first time you come to town, for I heard my wife say she had some fine geranium slips for anyone that wanted them."

"Thank you, doctor. I should like so much to have them if I had any place to keep them. I tried keeping plants when I first came here, but I had no good window for them, so I gave it up."

"Well, 'try, try again,' you know," said the doctor. "A shelf or two in this sunny south window would give them a good chance, and outside shutters would prevent the room's freezing, I guess. Try again, and make it more homelike here!"

The doctor spoke cheerily, but the pale lips quivered, and the tears came in spite of the invalid's effort to keep them back. "Nothing will ever be 'homelike here,'" was her thought, although it was unspoken.

"Now, Laura, you must cheer up. Better times are coming, and we will soon have you up again. I will come to-morrow to see how you are getting along, so good-bye!"

The doctor bowed himself out, but looking back, saw the homesick, sobbing wife, folded in her husband's arms. "They will be all right now," he said, as he gave Selim the lines for his homeward drive.

Mr. Morley was thoroughly aroused, and set about "curing" his wife at once. When his evening work was done, he washed and brushed up, and instead of sitting down with his paper, sat by his wife and talked of the past, the present, and the future. They talked over many little plans for making the home pleasant, that had long laid dormant in Laura's mind, for there was little encouragement to tell them to the man who was always "too busy to attend to it now." He found that it was not time nor money that was needed, so much as a willing hand and heart. The window-shelves were talked over and planned, a needful ventilator settled at last, and the lectures decided upon. Hope sprang up at the touch of loving fingers tenderly stroking her brown hair again, and when the doctor came next day he found his patient in the rocking chair, watching her husband put up the nicely made walnut shelves. He had a wide shelf for the lower part of the window, and two narrow ones to go higher up, and was laughing and chatting as if it were no great hardship to do something to please his wife, although he knew that in consequence of his day spent in "fooling around," as neighbor Stubs called it, he might have to get a load of wood or corn, on a stormy day. He remembered that there had been many a rainy day when he could have done it as well as not if he had wished to. The doctor brought a thrifty little rose-geranium. "Mrs. Wynn said it would cheer you up," he said, as he placed it in the thin, toil-stained hands, that eagerly received it.

"Thanks for her kindness," said Laura. "George is so good! Isn't he fixing my window nicely? Tell Mrs. Wynn not to give all her slips away, for I am going after some myself, soon. George says we cannot afford to miss those lectures, anyway. I am so glad you spoke of them. I shall be so happy to be going somewhere, again." There was no need for the doctor to leave medicine, although he put up a few powders "for the looks of it."

"Ten dollars thrown away," said Mr. Morley to himself when he paid the bill, "or it would have been, rather, if the doctor had not talked to me like a father. Why can't a man have a little sense of his own, I wonder?"

As he went on with his work, he thought of Laura's words to the doctor. "George is so good!" "So good," he soliloquized, "when I've driven all the pleasantness out of her life with my foolish plea of economy, that was not economy at all! 'So good,' when I have failed to cherish her ever since I brought her to this place, that must seem like a desert to her, compared with her old home! 'So good!' Well, I'll try to deserve the name in the future."

And he did deserve it. He discovered that he could do the chores, now, in time for church or lecture, as well as when he was courting Laura, four years ago. Prof. White's lectures well repaid him for all they cost him, and one night they took him home with them, and Mrs. Morley enjoyed the visit as she had not enjoyed a visit for many a day. The plants were not admired by Mrs. Morley alone, for they had a refining influence on her husband also, but he ever declared that the sweetest flowers he knew of, were the pink roses in Laura's cheeks, and a fading leaf on the house plants ever reminded him of the gloomy days when the roses faded from the dear face that might have been hidden from him forever.

As they grew old together the husband learned how a woman might be starving, even when there was a surplus "in the cellar." And giving her the pure and unselfish love, that pertains more to the spiritual than to the physical life, he found it returned to himself in blessings "an hundred fold."—Western Rural.