CHAPTER LXXIII.

RASH MARRIAGES. AN EARLY WIDOWHOOD. AFFLICTION RENDERED A BLESSING TO THE SUFFERER; AND TWO ORPHANS LEFT, THOUGH NOT DESTITUTE, YET FRIENDLESS.

Love built a stately house; where Fortune came,
    And spinning fancies, she was heard to say
That her fine cobwebs did support the frame;
Whereas they were supported by the same.
    But Wisdom quickly swept them all away.
                                                                    HERBERT.

Mrs. Dove was the only child of a clergyman who held a small vicarage in the West Riding. Leonard Bacon her father had been left an orphan in early youth. He had some wealthy relations by whose contributions he was placed at an endowed grammar school in the country, and having through their influence gained a scholarship to which his own deserts might have entitled him, they continued to assist him—sparingly enough indeed—at the University, till he succeeded to a fellowship. Leonard was made of Nature's finest clay, and Nature had tempered it with the choicest dews of Heaven.

He had a female cousin about three years younger than himself, and in like manner an orphan, equally destitute, but far more forlorn. Man hath a fleece about him which enables him to bear the buffetings of the storm;—but woman when young, and lovely and poor, is as a shorn lamb for which the wind has not been tempered.

Leonard's father and Margaret's had been bosom friends. They were subalterns in the same regiment, and being for a long time stationed at Salisbury had become intimate at the house of Mr. Trewbody, a gentleman of one of the oldest families in Wiltshire. Mr. Trewbody had three daughters. Melicent the eldest was a celebrated beauty, and the knowledge of this had not tended to improve a detestable temper. The two youngest Deborah and Margaret, were lively, good-natured, thoughtless, and attractive. They danced with the two Lieutenants, played to them on the spinnet, sung with them and laughed with them,— till this mirthful intercourse became serious, and knowing that it would be impossible to obtain their father's consent they married the men of their hearts without it. Palmer and Bacon were both without fortune, and without any other means of subsistence than their commissions. For four years they were as happy as love could make them; at the end of that time Palmer was seized with an infectious fever. Deborah was then far advanced in pregnancy, and no solicitations could induce Bacon to keep from his friend's bed-side. The disease proved fatal; it communicated to Bacon and his wife, the former only survived his friend ten days, and he and Margaret were then laid in the same grave. They left an only boy of three years old, and in less than a month the widow Palmer was delivered of a daughter.

In the first impulse of anger at the flight of his daughters and the degradation of his family, (for Bacon was the son of a tradesman, and Palmer was nobody knew who) Mr. Trewbody had made his will, and left the whole sum which he had designed for his three daughters, to the eldest. Whether the situation of Margaret and the two orphans might have touched him is perhaps doubtful,—for the family were either light-hearted, or hard-hearted, and his heart was of the hard sort; but he died suddenly a few months before his sons-in-law. The only son, Trewman Trewbody, Esq. a Wiltshire fox-hunter like his father, succeeded to the estate; and as he and his eldest sister hated each other cordially, Miss Melicent left the manor-house and established herself in the Close at Salisbury, where she lived in that style which a portion of £6000. enabled her in those days to support.

The circumstance which might appear so greatly to have aggravated Mrs. Palmer's distress, if such distress be capable of aggravation, prevented her perhaps from eventually sinking under it. If the birth of her child was no alleviation of her sorrow, it brought with it new feelings, new duties, new cause for exertion, and new strength for it. She wrote to Melicent and to her brother, simply stating her own destitute situation, and that of the orphan Leonard; she believed that their pride would not suffer them either to let her starve or go to the parish for support, and in this she was not disappointed. An answer was returned by Miss Trewbody informing her that she had nobody to thank but herself for her misfortunes; but that notwithstanding the disgrace which she had brought upon the family, she might expect an annual allowance of ten pounds from the writer, and a like sum from her brother; upon this she must retire into some obscure part of the country, and pray God to forgive her for the offence she had committed in marrying beneath her birth and against her father's consent.

Mrs. Palmer had also written to the friends of Lieutenant Bacon,—her own husband had none who could assist her. She expressed her willingness and her anxiety to have the care of her sister's orphan, but represented her forlorn state. They behaved more liberally than her own kin had done, and promised five pounds a year as long as the boy should require it. With this and her pension she took a cottage in a retired village. Grief had acted upon her heart like the rod of Moses upon the rock in the desert; it had opened it, and the well-spring of piety had gushed forth. Affliction made her religious, and religion brought with it consolation and comfort and joy. Leonard became as dear to her as Margaret. The sense of duty educed a pleasure from every privation to which she subjected herself for the sake of economy; and in endeavouring to fulfil her duties in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her, she was happier than she had ever been in her father's house, and not less so than in her marriage state. Her happiness indeed was different in kind, but it was higher in degree. For the sake of these dear children she was contented to live, and even prayed for life; while if it had respected herself only, Death had become to her rather an object of desire than of dread. In this manner she lived seven years after the loss of her husband, and was then carried off by an acute disease, to the irreparable loss of the orphans, who were thus orphaned indeed.