Borrowing Trouble by Mrs. H. G. Francis

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 30, 1879

Borrowing Trouble.

By Mrs. H. G. Francis

It was a beautiful twilight; the western sky full of clouds, rosy and golden, piled and arched, with just the faintest somber tinge crowning the whole, enhancing the beauty of the radiant hues. The full moon glimmered through the eastern trees, and sent long waves and curves, tying up huge bouquets of pansies and lilies, and spreading out fan-like where the soft grass waved, and tossed, and bent downward, as if a thing of life, replete with joy at the flooding baptism. All this was in sight of Mrs. Edwards’s open window, where she sat rocking backward and forward, with one hand upon her baby’s crib, swaying it to the same motion, yet unheeding it, or aught except her own gloomy forebodings. For the first time in her married life her husband had been absent from home a week. It had been a trial from the first to have him go; and only his cheerful words, and the promise of daily letters, had won her consent; and now day after day had dragged on, and she had not received one line. Her imagination was very strong, and ruled her day and night; and the harassing picture of seeing him sink helpless before the buffeting waves, or lying stricken with fever among strangers, too delirious to give a clew to his home or friends, or waylaid and murdered, and his poor body hid where no kind hand could smooth the tangled locks and give it a decent burial, had taken from her appetite and rest, till she was weak as a child in reason.

“There, there, Mrs. Edwards, don’t cry any more!” These words came sympathizingly, just as a motherly form came through the back door into the room, and paused with one hand on the weeping woman’s shoulder.

“But Mrs. Douglass, Lewis must be sick or killed. I did not get a word in to-day’s mail, and it is a week.”

“I know, Sarah said so, and I hurried up my work and came over, for I knew just how you would feel. But I do not think there is anything wrong, there are so many causes for retention of letters. You are all worried out, and can only look on the dark side.”

“I felt so sad before he started, and now I know it was almost a presentiment. You don’t know.”

“Yes, I do know; and when I look back over one worry and another that used to rob me of comfort, when it came out right after all, I always think how much happier we should be if we could trust God more, and feel that he rules, and does not willingly afflict his children. If we could only rest with the confidence that we do in our earthly fathers, and they, with the best intentions, often are weak in wisdom.”

“But accident does come, and death sometimes.”

“Yes, we must all die, and ofttimes a quick transition is a blessing. Think of a loved one going by lingering disease, painful days and sleepless nights! But most of our worries are nothing but worries, all needless. We say in our prayers, ‘Father, thou art unerring in wisdom, take us and do with us as thou seest for our good;’ and then we go right away and fret and trouble, as if the care and destiny of our loved ones and ourselves was in our own hands. There is a peace in religion that the world can neither give nor take away, but with too many of us it takes many years of lessons to attain to that perfect peace.”

“But he has come near being hurt so many times, Mrs. Douglass—when the lightning prostrated him, and last Fall when he cut him so near an artery.”

“And yet escaped uninjured. You make me think of my Willie, who seems to have equal fear of the dark and cows. He came in at dusk the other night, and finding no one at home, he ran into the street crying very loudly. The neighbors finding they could not pacify him, told him the direction I had taken, and when he overtook me his form was quivering, with the sobs that had convulsed him. I tried to reason with him, when he said he was afraid of the dark, and told him that God could take care of him in the dark as well as in the light, and he would not let anything hurt him, and questioned if he did not believe this. His reply was, ‘I don’t know, mother. What makes him let the cows run after me, then?’ ‘But, Willie, he did not let them hurt you,’ was all the reply that I could think of at the moment. I do not suppose that there is hardly a day of our lives that we are not in some danger, more often hid than apparent. Perhaps I was not in any more peril when in the Mississippi river than sitting here. I do not know.”

“And I have lived by you so many years, and you have never told me.”

“Are you sure? I have related it till it seems stale to me. I was a young woman, and had been on a trip with my husband, who was captain of the boat, far into the Indian Territory; and we had returned to St. Louis, and were lying by over night. Almost all the passengers had left for the city the night before, and I was quietly sleeping in my berth, when the wild cry of ‘fire! fire!’ startled me like the shock of an earthquake. I sprang from the berth, and as my husband opened the door the forked flames rushed in and caught the curtains and bed, and shot out lurid flames along the wainscoted ceiling. Mr. Douglass and I rushed to the end of the boat ere he remembered his papers and all the wealth of his profitable trip, and he told me to stay just where I was till he returned, and he disappeared, to find papers, money, and room eaten up by the devouring flames. The roof of the boat had been newly pitched, and the fire ran along it with hissing breath, and shot up into the air; and, quivering in my night clothes, I stood, what seemed hours, for the return of my husband. Two of the crew had unloosed a boat, and waited near by, almost under me, begging and pleading for me, to jump into their arms. I told them that I should fall into the water and be drowned, but they said if I waited I should be burned to death, and they would surely catch me; and with them, the roaring, hissing flames urging me on I gave a spring, and the cold waters closed over my form. As I came up to the surface, under the burning boat, I could hear the frantic cries of my husband urging all to help save his wife, and let everything else perish; and some of the crew crying out, ‘Keep calm, Captain, we will rescue her,’ and the waters closed over me again. The third time that I was sinking I was lifted by my hair out of the water, and I knew no more till I was reclining upon a pile of lead on the shore, and an Indian was bending over me, chafing my arms, under a blanket taken from his own shoulders, and rubbing my face as tenderly as if with a mother’s hand. He had been the first to spring ashore when the flames burst out, and he knew what the others did not, or had forgotten in their excitement, that I had fallen where there was an eddy that would carry me up stream; and while the rest were searching below the boat, he was looking up stream, watching the bubbles that arose above my form, and sprang in as I was sinking the last time, and saved me alive. We would have loaded him with presents, but he would accept nothing but some flame-colored leggins, and a sort of loose gown that was made of bright red material, scrawled over with yellow flowers, which he would wear with the greatest pride when he came up to the Planter’s Hotel to make a daily visit.”

“If the Indian had not been in the boat; if he had not known that the eddy would carry me up stream; if he had missed me, at the last moment, I should have been given, if at all, to my husband’s arms a lifeless corpse; and who ordered all this, Mrs. Edwards?”

“God does not let even a sparrow fall to the ground without his notice, but I forget so often;” and then, abruptly, after holding her breath to listen a moment, “Did you hear the gate open?”

“Yes, a gentleman and lady are coming up the walk. It is Hattie Sinclair, I am sure.”

Miss Hattie was a very unceremonious young woman, and before Mrs. Edwards could rise to her feet to answer the bell, whose loud peal brought baby’s eyes wide open, the door was thrust ajar, and with the exulting words, “Here are your letters, Mrs. Edwards; they were carried by this morning and brought back after mail time by the express train;” two white missives were thrown into her lap. Mrs. Edwards cried and laughed hysterically as she read them to herself, and then exclaimed, “It is the strangest thing! Not a word has he heard from home since he left! He thinks my letters must have been burned in the great fire that destroyed the depot east. He says the trains connected so closely that he had not a moment to post a letter till the second day night; and to think how I have worried!”

“Catch me fretting so over a husband,” said pretty Miss Hattie, as she turned a roguish look upon her attendant, and took his arm to leave; but Mrs. Douglass only said, “Mrs. Edwards, you will never forget this lesson;” and the reply, “No, I trust I shall not,” came softly as the now happy mother kneeled by her sleeping baby, ostensibly to kiss its soft, fair cheek, but really to ask her Heavenly Father to forgive her for the sinful distrust.—Mrs. H. G. Francis.