“Yes,” he said; “I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively, we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her.”
“Octavius is a healthy place—that's generally admitted,” replied the lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.
Theron made haste to revert to his errand. “Of course, your not being in the Quarterly Conference,” he said, “renders certain things impossible. But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have agreed to tell me nothing.”
“Well, I HAVE heard this much,” responded Gorringe. “They're figuring on getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of it?”
“Not a breath!” exclaimed Theron, mournfully. “Well,” he added upon reflection, “I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me about the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I think I saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head of the firm.”
“Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand,” said Gorringe sententiously.
“I HAD hoped,” the young minister began with a rueful sigh, “in fact, I felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and put the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I have been, my preaching has been rather—rather a feature in the town itself. I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April. I know the collections are not.”
“No,” commented the lawyer, slowly; “you'll never do anything in that line in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and work hard at it for five or six years—”
“Heaven forbid!” groaned Mr. Ware.
“Quite so,” put in the other. “The point is that the Methodists here are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church, or even the Baptist—he might have a chance to create talk, and make a stir. But Methodist—no! People who don't belong won't come near the Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here have got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you.”