“No doubt she will, my dear,” said Miss Susan Bitterly; “accomplished ladies like her when they’re settled down among such barbarians as we, are glad to find some one as accomplished as yourself with whom to associate.”
A tart reply arose to Susan Holmes’ tongue, but an opportune look from her mother arrested it.
“I should think,” resumed Mrs. Hardmoney, “that their help would eat up all they make at any time. The Gilbert farm was never a very profitable one, and this man, Dawson, they say, knows nothing about farming. He’s hired Sara Bromley and Jim Clodpole to work on the place. Sam told my old man he was to have a kind of management of things, for Dawson hardly knew the tines of the fork from the handle. We all know that Sam is a managing fellow, and if he don’t contrive to get more out of the place than Dawson, I’m mistaken.”
“I think you do Sam injustice,” said Mrs. Holmes. “Mr. Holmes told me that Mr. Dawson came to see him about hiring Sam, and that he took him on his recommendation. Dawson is to pay him high wages, but Sam is a smart hand, and if Dawson will only keep his eyes open, he may learn a good deal from him.”
“One thing is very certain,” broke in our friend, Miss Chatterton—“I shall go see her as soon as she’s fixed, and I hope all the neighbors will. From what Sally Irish told me, I’m sure she is not a bit uppish, but will be glad to see us all. And you know, Mrs. Holmes, you can give her some of your nice recipes for country dishes, and teach her so many things, if you choose, about managing her dairy, and I am certain, from what Sally says, she will be much obliged to you for doing so.”
“Well, my dear,” said the lady, addressed, “I have been thinking about it for some time, only I thought perhaps she would not care to have any visitors until she got quite settled and began to feel quite at home. It was only to-day Mr. Holmes told me he thought it would be neighborly for me to go, and he was sure she would take it quite kindly. Mr. Dawson and he are quite sociable, and he often drops in to see how things are getting on as he goes by, and Mr. Dawson consults with him a good deal about things and is quite thankful to him for his advice.”
Mr. Holmes was one of the principal men in that part of the world. In addition to the very fine farm on which he lived, he was the owner of two or three others, and had some very comfortable snug sums invested in mortgages, and some stocks. Mr. Holmes’ opinion on any subject was then that of a man entitled to be heard, for it is astonishing what an additional force of wisdom those little things called dollars, when counted in tens of thousands, and especially in hundreds of thousands, lend to their possessor. Should it chance that they should mount into millions, Solomon himself, could he revisit the earth, would not be more regarded than are their fortunate possessors—their words are cherished as the very oracles of wisdom, and their breath is as it were the divine afflatus—men who possess them may pass their lives without contributing in the slightest degree to the comfort or happiness of their fellow men, the very incarnation of selfish avarice; but should they after their death, unable to carry it with them, build and endow an hospital, a college or a library, their names immediately ascend to heaven in grateful pæans for their wondrous bounties, and they live in brick and marble for ages, whilst those whose lives have been past in one constant act of beneficence to their fellows, sink into their graves and are forgotten in a month.
Mr. Holmes’ opinions then, were of weight in the circle in which he moved, and his good lady re-echoing them, they bore down all feeling which the natural rancor of Miss Bitterly and the contracted views of Mrs. Hardmoney might have engendered in the breasts of the females around, against our sweet Maria. None of them had yet seen her; she had not been a month in their neighborhood, but they all had heard something good about her, and after wondering why the Dawsons had not yet been seen in any place of worship, and whether they didn’t mean to go, and if they did which—the conversation turned into other channels, and Maggie Chatterton at last yielded to the solicitations of the children to go over into their corner and tell them “that nice story.”
The village of Euston, though numbering less than a thousand inhabitants, was well supplied with places of public worship, for, as we have said, it was surrounded by a populous neighborhood. First, stood the old and venerable brick building, destitute of any ornament, unless the glazed ends of the blue-colored bricks scattered profusely through the walls could be called such, with its small, venerable porch. The building was, however, becoming too large for the worshipers, or rather the worshipers were becoming too few for the building, for the great dissension, some years previous, which rent the society in twain had reached here, and a large number had gone off to seek another building other than that in which, in contemplative silence, their sires and grandsires before them had worshiped. Then came the Baptists and Methodists, in their almost equally plain buildings but with large congregations, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians, with more pretending buildings but much fewer numbers, brought up the rear.
It was not from want of a chance that the Protestant could not worship, and the number of emigrants in the neighborhood was so small that the chapel of the Roman Catholic had not yet appeared. Before removing to the country Dawson and his wife had been regular attendants on every Sunday morning, or at least on every not very wet or stormy Sunday morning, at a church of the Episcopal denomination. They went, especially the gentleman, more from a feeling that it was a tribute rendered to propriety than from any other motive. Not that he was an irreligious man; he was simply a careless one. Of religion in the abstract, he professed when he spoke of it, which was very seldom, great respect. He had never been led off either by reading or the influence of companionship to any thing beyond simple indifference. He saw that those who were called “religious people”—“church members”—most of them declined frequenting the opera, or the theatre, or ball-room. He could not understand this—he could not comprehend why what he considered the innocent pleasures of life were to be thus given up. It is true he often met these very persons in the concert-room, or at what he thought very large parties, provided there was no dancing—he could not understand those which he considered distinctions without a difference, except that the music of the concert-room would be improved by scenic representations in costume, or that the scandal of the tea-party might be advantageously broken in upon by the music of the dance. This was the reasoning of one who merely regarded the surface—beyond this he had not penetrated. Religion itself, as a vital, soul-giving principle, he had never studied. A large portion of the Bible was familiar to him—he admired the psalms of David for their exquisite pathos and simplicity—the sublimity of Isaiah, and the mournful imagery of Jeremiah had touched his fancy, but his heart had been unmoved, either by these or the gentle teachings and lofty morality of the New Testament. He read the Bible as he did the works of other great authors, to please his fancy, his imagination, but not as the Book in which choice of life and death, the mode of attaining the one and avoiding the other, is offered to mankind. Maria, like most women, possessed deeply religious sensibilities. The Bible was not to her a sealed book, and she was unconsciously most probably to herself, much influenced in her actions by its teachings. But her mode of life and that of her husband had not been such as to allow it to make any very deep impression on her. Had one charged her with being deficient in religious feeling she would have shrunk back from it with horror. But, in very truth, though the germs may have been planted in her heart, the requisite sun and rain had not yet reached them to mature them. With such views, they had not hastened their motions churchward, and, since their removal, were under some feeling of embarrassment at a first meeting with a congregation all strangers to them.