Luke's wife

by Evelyn R. Garratt

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.