Emma was at that time five years of age, and Martha ten. "My dear madam," said Dora, "fashion has robbed you of a great treasure. Your daughters, predisposed to consumption, cannot safely obey its whimsical demands."
"Nonsense, Dora!" replied Mrs. Lindsay. But when alone, she thought seriously upon what the good woman had said. Memory brought before her mind pictures from which she could not turn. The thin-soled shoes, and silken hose, in which fashion had required her delicate daughters to promenade the damp walks of the city; the flimsy ball-dress, the prolonged dance, and joined with these, the sudden exposure to a wintry air, were shades upon the bright picture of pleasures past,—dark shades indeed, but awfully true.
"Perhaps Martha and Emma may be spared to me," said the mother to her fashionable friends; "but how can I think of the conditions!" and her friends talked over the matter among themselves, and concluded that, after all, a person's life was of but little value, if they must live secluded from the world; and they gave Mrs. Lindsay a remote hint, that it was best to let her daughters live while they lived.
Mrs. Lindsay, however, had more than once stood upon the threshold of another life, having followed a husband and two daughters to the silent tomb: and in her secret heart she suspected the small value of what she had purchased at so great a cost. It seemed hard indeed to deprive her beautiful children of a fashionable education, and the struggle was very severe; but the mother triumphed over worldly vanity, and Monsieur de la Beaumont was told that his services in the family as dancing-master were no longer desired.
"One strange ting!" said monsieur; and the world at large thought the same.
Mrs. Lindsay considered herself as having made a great sacrifice to affection, and sometimes feared that she might live to see the day when she should wish her little novices out of sight, somewhere. One thing she determined on, however; and that was to take as much of the world as she could get herself, and thus solace herself for what she was to lose in her daughters. It cannot be supposed, that with this resolution the mother would reserve time for the care and culture of these little ones, who were given over to Dora with but one hope—the forlorn one—that she would save them alive. This the old lady could not promise to do; for she understood that having the sentence of death in ourselves, we are not to trust human means and precautions, but only Him who raiseth the dead. She, however, cheerfully undertook the precious charge committed to her trust; glad from her heart that the poor lambs had been saved from the slaughter, and praying most earnestly that they might be claimed by the Great Shepherd, and gathered to his fold.
Martha was a very quiet, thoughtful child, with speech and manner much beyond her years; she was not, therefore, strictly confined to the nursery, but allowed to mingle freely with her mother's guests. Emma, on the contrary, was much younger, and full of wayward humors. She greatly needed a mother; but the sacred writer has declared, "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth." How many little hearts have proved the bitterness of that truth! God in mercy saved little Emma from this sad experience, by raising up for her infancy and childhood such a friend as was the pious, faithful Dora.
"It is a promising bud," thought the good woman, "but it may wither even without the blight of fashion; so I will try to secure for it an immortal bloom."
Thus in the morning Dora sowed her seed, the "good seed" for an immortal harvest; and soon the tender blade began to appear—a most ungainly thing in the eyes of her mother; for the first fruit of Dora's good seed, as shown by little Emma, was a great love of truth—a love which as yet she knew not how to regulate or apply. She was a beautiful child; and for a time her mother's vanity was gratified by having her brought from the nursery to her drawing-rooms, to be caressed, admired, and praised for her smart speeches; but after a time her truth-telling propensity became too evident. The polite occupants of the drawing-room began to whisper among themselves that Miss Emma was a spoiled child, and had better be kept in the nursery.
Mrs. Lindsay was soon of the same opinion; for scarcely a day passed when Emma's truthfulness did not prove a nettle to her own vanity.