Mrs. Martin's Mistake by J. B. T. Marsh

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, April 15, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 16

Mrs. Martin's Mistake.

By J. B. T. Marsh

A GENTLE ripple of admiration passed over the faces of the ladies in the village missionary-meeting as Mrs. Mayhew sat down. Her essay on “The Macedonian Call from Africa,” was felicitous in its adjectives, fresh in its information, almost rapturous in its devout enthusiasm. The society took a pardonable pride in Mrs. Mayhew’s talent. Mrs. Brown thought the paper ought to be read at the approaching annual meeting of the “Board.” Miss Spencer wished it could be printed for general circulation. As for Mrs. Mayhew, she was appropriately modest; if the paper had any value, it was because her soul had been deeply stirred by the thought of the wide doors that were opening in pagan lands for the heralds of the gospel. There was nothing that made our petty every-day affairs seem so petty as an adequate conception of the grandeur of this glorious missionary campaign to conquer the heathen world for Christ.

Poor Mrs. Martin, sitting on a back seat in the lecture-room, listened to the essay and the comments that followed with a humbling sense of her own incapacity and short-comings. Mr. Mayhew was absorbed in his banking business; but he took a husbandly satisfaction in his wife’s prominence in church activities, and encouraged her to lead the list of the monthly contributors to the support of the society’s Bible-reader in Bulgaria. Having no literary gifts himself, it was pleasant to think that he shone with a sort of reflected light in the papers which his wife read, now and then, before the Temperance League and Missionary Society. To pay well for it seemed as much a matter of course as to respond cheerfully to the assessment which his political party made upon him for the honor of nominal membership on the Central Committee. Mr. Martin, on the other hand, was making but a meager living from his shop;—neighbors said he had too many scruples and too little faculty to hold his own with his sharp rivals;—and while Mrs. Mayhew gave a dollar a week to the Bible-reader, Mrs. Martin could give but half a dime. Mrs. Mayhew was one of the officers, too, of the State Society; and her name was always to be found in the somewhat effusive newspaper reports of the annual meeting, where her talents found a pleasant field of activity. But Mrs. Martin had never even attended an annual meeting. And while Mrs. Mayhew stirred every one up to new zeal by her fervent essays, a short and stumbling prayer was the most that Mrs. Martin had ever been able to contribute to the exercises of the semi-monthly missionary-meeting. It was this comparison of Mrs. Mayhew’s abilities and opportunities with her own, as she sat there on the back seat, that made Mrs. Martin feel that any aspirations of her own toward active Christian usefulness were almost absurd. There was nothing elating to Mrs. Martin in the hour that was all elixir to Mrs. Mayhew. Reaching home, however, Mrs. Mayhew found need of all the tonic there was in the exhilarating atmosphere of the missionary-meeting, to prepare her for an unexpected complication in her domestic affairs. The widow Way, whose eldest daughter, Eliza, had been for some time Mrs. Mayhew’s efficient right

hand in housework, had met with a serious hurt. Eliza had been sent for at once, as the only one who could be looked to, to stand in the wide gap of work and care. She was waiting, her eyes red with weeping, for Mrs. Mayhew’s permission to go.

Mrs. Mayhew was “tried.” Dr. Traley, the eloquent missionary from India, was to occupy their pulpit the next Sunday, and she had planned to detain him for a select tea-party at her house on Monday evening. Young Campbell’s wife was only too glad to come over for a day’s work any time, it was true; but no one rose to the supreme demands of Mrs. Mayhew’s ideal for such an occasion as Eliza did. She felt as if Mrs. Way’s accident was little better than a deliberate disregard of her comfort. In her momentary impatience she told Eliza that she should think the boys could wait on her mother and do the housework—anyhow she didn’t see how she could spare her now; but if Eliza was determined to go, she could not keep her place open for her, if Mary Gowan, who was looking for work last week, chose to take it.

Poor Eliza! this was the last straw. Her heart ached for the hard-worked mother, lying at home in painful helplessness. She must go to her, of course. But the thought of losing her own wages for several weeks was none the less a trial to her; for Eliza was studiously saving every penny she could earn, and carrying a light heart under all the exactions of Mrs. Mayhew’s service, since John, the hard-working, manly carpenter, who had loved her so long, was sure that his little cottage would be ready for a housekeeper next year. How many times she had spent, in imagination, every dollar of her next twelve months’ wages, how well she knew just how far it would all go in house-furnishing! And now to lose not only her wages for some weeks to come, as she must at the best, but to lose her situation altogether, was doubly hard. She choked down, though, the appeal that it was in her heart to make that the place might somehow be reserved a little while for her. Long as she had lived with Mrs. Mayhew, and liberal as her wages had always been, she had never felt encouraged to carry to her any of her woman confidences, and had never looked to her for counsel or sympathy in her trouble. Mrs. Mayhew was not stony-hearted; but she was too busy in broader fields of benevolence to explore the lives that were lived in her kitchen.

So with what courage and cheer she could rally from her own buffeted heart, Eliza went back to the fatherless family,—to nurse the dispirited mother; to care for the younger brothers, who were none the more tractable that they had not been under a father’s eye for several years; to do the washing which had so long been the chief reliance for the support of the family. But the hill was very steep, and her load was very heavy. She chafed sorely, sometimes, under her burden. She cried herself to sleep at night, and started in the morning with the shivering consciousness of the dread presence of trouble, even before she had waked enough to define it in her thought. Mrs. Mayhew met her one day on the street. “Good morning, Eliza,” she said. “Is your father about well? No, it was your mother that was hurt, wasn’t it?” And then, without waiting for an answer, she added the hope that Eliza would return to her old place soon, for Mary Gowan wasn’t suiting her very well—and then went on her way. For some reason Mrs. Mayhew’s well-meant words, even when coupled with the promise of her old situation again, carried no special comfort in them. They did not come from the deep place in one heart, and they could not find the deep place in the other.

But there was one woman whose commonplace, neighborly kindness was to Eliza like cold water to a thirsty soul. Mrs. Martin lived on the other side of the town, but heard of Mrs. Way’s accident from the doctor as he was driving by the next day, the fact being that the kind-hearted physician really drove down there for the sake of telling her. She came over that afternoon—some cookies in her pocket for the children—to cheer up the sufferer, and lend a hand for an hour in any service she could render. She had no lack of work, good woman, at home; but she found time to drop in one day and piece down a pair of trousers for little Bennie; to come another and cut out the new coat that was the despair of Eliza’s small skill at tailoring; to send one of her children over occasionally with a last week’s paper borrowed of a neighbor; to sit now and then in the early evening for a while by the bed-ridden woman, so that Eliza could have an airing for an hour or two in a quiet walk with the young carpenter.

It was worth everything to Eliza to have such a sympathetic, sister-like friend with whom she could talk over her household perplexities, to whom she could confide all the little precious nothings of her affairs, on whose shoulder she could cry a little when things had gone harder with her than usual. And it was worth more to her than she knew till years afterward to get so near a Christian woman’s heart, and see, underneath all mere profession, its generous purpose of personal helpfulness, and its loving, joyful faithfulness to humble, every-day ministries. She had never before seen just that side of the religious life, in just that setting. It touched her heart and won her into something of its own beautiful likeness. From it came, by-and-by, a family altar in the carpenter’s cottage, and a family life that shed gracious influences through the community. Even the rattle-headed, fatherless little boys, who seemed to shed the religious appeals and rebukes of all other people with such impartial nonchalance, were wound about with some subtle influence from this friend in family need who never once in set fashion “talked religion” to them, and years afterward they recognized its stimulus and restraint.

But of all this Mrs. Martin suspected nothing. Year by year she never read the reports of “the annual meeting” without a little pang from the thought that her usefulness was so small as compared with Mrs. Mayhew’s. Perhaps she is not the only humble soul, in these days of “Christian activities,” that makes a similar mistake.—J. B. T. Marsh, in Christian Weekly.