Chapter XVIII: 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.