GAS STOVES VERSUS MOUNTAINS.
"Next year," said Rachel one day, as she and Luke were on their way
to Church, "next year we may not be able to afford a holiday. So I am
resolved that we shall have a good one this August. We will go to the
Lakes."
Rachel wrote and secured rooms at Rydal and a month after the men's
meeting mentioned in the last chapter, they started off for the North.
What the sight of the beauty that now surrounded them was to Rachel
can be imagined. She told Luke that she had seen nothing that could be
called beautiful ever since coming to Trowsby, with the exception, she
took pains to add, of her primroses and hyacinths in the little garden
of which she was inordinately proud.
To sit by the Lake in the cool of the evening and watch the lights and
shadows on the mountains, was positive bliss to Rachel. She tried to
make Luke revel in it as much as she did, but alas, his thoughts were
still engrossed with his parish, not withstanding all Rachel's efforts
to make him forget it.
"It will be so much better for the parish as well as for you if you
will only put it away from your mind," she said.
But Luke still persisted in saying that his work was his life and that
it was the most interesting of all subjects to him. Happily there was
a friend of his staying at Rydal with whom he went long excursions,
leaving Rachel to the luxury of beauty and her happy thoughts. These
excursions she felt were the only things that interested Luke or turned
his thoughts away from his parish, with the exception of the many books
he had brought with him making their luggage over weight. Rachel had
sighed as she had caught sight of him trying to force them into his
suitcase; but she knew he would not be happy without them.
The anniversary of their wedding took place while at the Lakes. Rachel
wondered if the day meant anything special to her husband, and waited
some time before she reminded him of it. They were walking on their way
to Grassmere when she said:
"Luke do you remember what day this is?"
"To-day? No, what?"
"You mean to say you don't remember?" said Rachel incredulously.
Luke looked concerned.
"I have not forgotten anything important in the parish I hope."
"Important! Yes, indeed it is important; but nothing to do with the
parish. In fact you have forgotten the most important day of our life,
anyhow, I count it so. Don't you remember the fifteenth of August last
year?"
"I'm afraid I don't. What happened? The School treat?"
"Something much more important than that. It was our wedding day."
Luke laughed.
"Our wedding day! Why I feel as if I had always had you. Is it really
only a year ago? I was afraid at first that I had forgotten some
important engagement."
"So you have. It is the most important. It was my first waking thought."
"What creatures you women are, always making so much of anniversaries."
Rachel laughed.
"I am afraid after all you are a thoroughly prosaic man. I thought you
were full of romance and beautiful things when I married you. You must
not grow prosaic or we shall be just like all the other dull couples
that we so often meet."
"How can I think of anniversaries when I have 6,000 souls under my
charge."
"You can think of them very well, that is to say if marriage is the
sacred thing I always thought it was. Don't you remember the words in
Aurora Leigh?"
"'Beloved, let us work so well
Our work shall be the better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work.'"
"Don't give up loving, Luke."
"Give up loving!" said Luke amazed. "Why, you are all the world to me."
"Then tell me so sometimes," said Rachel. "Wives need to be told. If
not they, the husband and wife I mean, drift into such commonplace,
humdrum, phlegmatic married couples."
Luke laughed. He had not noticed the slight tremor in her voice.
"By-the-bye," he said, "I hope I shall get a letter from West to-morrow
about the estimate of the new gas stove to be put in the chancel."
Rachel, who had been watching the changing shadows on the mountains,
now turned and looked at him. Was he really thinking about gas stoves!
Then she laughed, and he vaguely wondered what she found to amuse her
in gas stoves.
They were silent till they arrived at the end of the Lake.
Then Rachel said, "Just look at those lovely pink clouds and their
reflection. Isn't it perfectly heavenly?"
On getting no answer she looked again at Luke; but the expression of
his face convinced her that the beauty was quite lost upon him; his
horizon was still filled with gas stoves.
Rachel loved the quiet times she had when Luke and his friend went for
excursions. She would sit in the little garden belonging to the house
in which were their rooms, and try with her paint brush to produce
the wonderful effects of cloud and sunshine on the hills opposite to
her. She had not touched her paint brush since her marriage, and she
revelled in sketching. While she sketched, her thoughts were busy with
the past and future. She looked back in her year of married life and
was conscious of the change it had wrought in her. She found it almost
difficult to believe that she was the same girl who had lived such
a happy uneventful life in her country home. In those days her time
had been taken up with riding, driving, gardening and tennis. She had
had few thoughts for anything outside her home. She had very little
knowledge of the world and its sorrows; and scarcely any suspicion of
its sins and wickedness. It seemed now to her as if she had been living
in a happy dream.
But what she had learned from the little parish work that she had done,
and from the pained expression again and again on her husband's face,
was enough to make her realise something of the strain and stress of
life and of its misery and sin. She would gladly have been without the
knowledge that she had gathered since her marriage, had it not been,
that she was able to realise more what it all meant to Luke, and to
sympathise with him. Life seemed a different thing to her to what it
had been at home, and it made her long to be able to stretch out a
helping hand to those who were tasting its bitterness. But she was
willing now to wait till the way was made plain for her to do all that
she longed to do; and till she was more ready for the work.
For she realised now how unfit she had been for the work in her early
days of married life. She had known very little of God, or of the help
that came from above. She had learnt so much from Luke of which she
was ignorant before, of the things which matter. Although he was by no
means perfect in her eyes, and thought too little, she felt, of the
things which she ranked of importance, yet, she knew he was very far
above her in spiritual matters. She felt ashamed of her poor prayers,
when she knew he spent hours in his study in communion with his God.
His love of his people was more than she could understand; his passion
for souls and God's work absorbed him almost to the elimination of
everything else. He was more in earnest than any clergyman she had ever
met, and even when on a holiday, he never forgot that he was God's
ambassador and was on the look out to help travellers to the Radiant
City. His faults and weaknesses arose, after all, she said to herself,
from mere forgetfulness and absentness of mind. It was not that he was
neglectful of her or of the little things of life which to her made
just all the difference, but he simply did not see them or what was
needed. But oh! He was good—good all through! And she could not imagine
any mean or small ignoble thought entering his mind. Though she had
been disappointed when she found the anniversary of his wedding day
counted as nothing to him, she knew all the time that next to his God,
he loved his wife. It was just because of his love for her that he
thought it so absolutely unnecessary to remind her of it.
How much she owed to Luke she was beginning to realise more than ever.
The very fact of him being so terribly distressed at the meeting of
his men the other night, convinced her, if nothing else had done so,
of his love and adoration for his God and Saviour. That those for
whom Christ had suffered and died had begun to doubt His Word and His
Divinity pained him beyond expression. Luke might forget things which
wore of lesser importance, but he never forgot his God. Gwen might
imagine that he was slow to think of the little duties which would have
been appreciated by his wife if they had been fulfilled, but Rachel
knew that it was not laziness, or selfishness that caused them to be
neglected, but simply that his mind was full of greater things and
spiritual needs.
It was in human nature to wish that he did not live quite so much up
in the clouds, as she expressed it, and being of a truthful nature
Rachel did not hide the fact from herself, that to have recognised
these duties, and to have done them, would have made her husband a
finer man; but she had come to the conclusion that he was one who found
it difficult to think of more than one thing at a time, and it was far
more important for him to be occupied with spiritual matters than with
temporal.
Indeed she would not have had it otherwise.
Watching the changing shadows on the hills caused by clouds and the
sudden bursts of sunshine, it seemed to her that the view before her
was a picture of her life. Shadow and sunshine, and perhaps she would
not have realised the glory of the latter had it not been for the
shadows that sometimes eclipsed it. And after all, she thought to
herself, the sunshine, representing love and happiness, far outweighed
the disappointments of life. She had everything to make her happy; and
a future, the hope of which flooded her soul with joy whenever she
thought of it. And January was not very far off! The homesickness and
the loneliness of which she had often been conscious would be over then.
Both Luke and his wife were the better for their holiday, and returned
home with fresh vigour for their duties. And though Mrs. Greville shook
her head over the extravagance of going so far away, she could not but
agree with Rachel that her son looked another man.
It was a good thing for Luke that he had been refreshed and had
returned hungry for work; for he found himself in the midst of a fierce
battle with the evil one. Unbelief was spreading, and his congregation
gradually diminishing. One or two of his best workers were leaving
the town, and two of the four men who had left the Church Council on
the night of the discussion on the amusement question, had attached
themselves, while he had been away, to a neighbouring church, where
they considered the young people were better looked after. But Luke's
faith had been renewed, and he determined not to give way to depression
or discouragement, knowing that that was the atmosphere in which the
devil did some of his worst work.
So the summer wore away, giving place to autumn and winter, and on
January the first, his little son was born, and they called him
Patrick, after his maternal grandfather.
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