My husband was pacing the room. I knew too well all that was passing in his mind, although we had long been silent. At length I said to him, “Take courage, dear, for we are the servants of the great God, and surely He will find a means of escape for us. We were sent here; we came because the Lord wanted us to come, and surely He will provide for us!”
He turned to me in reply, and said kindly, “We can at least have some water;” and he went for some water; and then, with as reverential feeling in his soul as ever inspired a grace before dinner, he blessed it, and we drank.
We had scarcely done so when the mail-courier brought a letter to our door.
Governor Stoudeman, with a feeling of delicacy, had hesitated, when my husband visited him at Lausanne, to offer him any assistance; but, he said in his letter, he had been “impressed” to do so, and hoped that we should not be offended. As the letter was opened, a piece of gold fell upon the table. We could hardly believe that God had so soon answered our prayers, and sent us relief; and our emotions of gratitude for this timely aid, found expression in tears.
All this time our landlady knew nothing of our distress; she was as ignorant of our situation as if she had never seen us. So long as I was able to walk about, I used at regular hours to go to the kitchen, get the cooking utensils, and go through the routine of cooking, as if we had had a well-filled larder all the time. I set the table with punctilious care, and the good old widow never suspected but that we had plenty. Thus supposing that we wanted nothing, she and her children were more than ordinarily kind to us and to our little girl, who was now old enough to toddle round and go from room to room. Very often they would get her into their room at meal-time, and give her little things to please her; and while they felt honoured in being permitted to do so, we were silently thankful for our child’s sake, for her sufferings were more than we could endure.
The temporary aid from Lausanne was very welcome to us, though it only served to make us feel more keenly our dependent position. I might relate stories, alas, too true! of cold and want; of days, and even almost an entire week, passed at one time without food—stories which for painful detail would eclipse romance. It was a weary waiting for Providence! Such things are better forgotten. And yet I feel that in after years my temper was more subdued, and my mind more patient under affliction, than it would have been had I not experienced this preparatory discipline.
People who have heard, with a sneer, of Mormon missionaries and their work, would perhaps have realized that faith may be sincere, although mistaken, if they could have seen us at that time. The first teachers of a doctrine, whether it be good or evil, if only it stems the current opinions of the hour, have ever found that at the end of a rocky way there was waiting for them a crown of thorns.
Many a time since then I have felt the weight of anxious care in providing for my family; the trial of our faith has not been light, or seldom repeated; but those days of trouble in Switzerland were, I think, the darkest I ever experienced. We realized literally the necessity of trusting to God’s daily mercies for our daily bread; and the assurance that the Lord would provide, was our only hope. To say that we practised the strictest economy, would be to give but a faint idea of the way in which we had to consider and contrive in order to exist at all. For years we kept the “Word of Wisdom”—a “Revelation of Joseph Smith,” which enjoined abstinence from wine, coffee, tea, or, in fact, warm drinks of any kind; and trifling as such self-denial may at first appear, it was not really so when other privations were added thereto. For months at a time we existed—for I dare not say lived—without what are considered, even by the poorest, the most common necessaries. I can even recall to mind one trying week in Switzerland, when, for the whole seven long days, we had less than a pint of corn-flour to live upon, and that was chiefly reserved for our poor child.
As I look back to those dark, painful times I feel that it was by little short of a miracle that our lives were spared. Our faith alone saved us.