Sitting on the river bank in the summer quiet, in the rosy afterglow, amidst tall sedges and wild flowers that love the river, with his child prattling at his knee, playing with his watch-ribbon, asking questions that were never answered, and his wife seated at his side supremely content in having won him to give her so much of his company, George Stobart meditated upon the great mistake of his life--his marriage!
He remembered how lovely a creature the printer's daughter had seemed to him in her ecstasy of faith, how divine a thing the soul newly awakened to a sense of sin, and a desire for saving grace. His heart had gone out to her in an overwhelming wave of enthusiasm, a feeling so exalted, so different from any passion of his unregenerate years, that he had welcomed it as the one pure and perfect love of his life. He thought God had given him this friendless, ill-used girl to be his helpmeet, the sharer of all his aspirations, his lifelong labours in the service of Christ, as of that impassioned hour in Wesley's Chapel.
Soon, too soon, he had discovered the shallow nature behind that hysterical emotion, the tepid piety which alone remained after the fervour of newly awakened feelings. Too soon he had found that petty interests and trivial domestic cares and joys filled the measure of his wife's mind; that she thought more of her tea-trays and her sofa-covers than of thousands of Kingswood miners won from Satan to Christ; that he must never look to her for sympathy with his highest aspirations, hardly for interest in his everyday work among the poor.
When he suggested that she should help in his day nurseries or his infant schools, she refused with a shudder, lest she should bring home small-pox or scarlet fever to little Georgie. That fear of pestilence hung like a funeral pall over Lambeth Marsh; and all his efforts to popularize inoculation could do very little against dense ignorance, and terror of a preventive measure that seemed as bad as the disease.
"If I've got to have the small-pox anyhow, I'd sooner leave it to Providence," was the usual argument.
His marriage, so gravely resolved, with such generous disdain of worldly advantage, had not brought him happiness. The fellowship in thought and feeling, which is the soul of marriage, was wanting in a union that had yet every appearance of domestic affection, and which sufficed for the wife's content. She was happy, looking no deeper than the surface of things, and finding content in the calm prosperity of her life, the absence of poverty and ill-usage. His marriage was a mistake, and to the man who had taken upon himself, as he had done, the service of Christ's poor, any marriage must needs be a mistake. For the itinerant preacher, for the man with a suffering populace depending on his care, home ties were fetters that needs must gall. He could not serve two masters. He must be a half-hearted philanthropist or a neglectful husband; only an occasional preacher or a deserter of his home. He remembered the priests he had met and conversed with in France, men who had no claims, no interests outside their Church and their parish; and it seemed to him that he had bound himself with a servitude that made his service of Christ a dead letter.