CHAPTER CLI.
SOMETHING SERIOUS.
If thou hast read all this Book, and art never the better, yet catch this flower before thou go out of the garden, and peradventure the scent thereof will bring thee back to smell the rest.
HENRY SMITH.
Deborah found no one in Doncaster to supply the place of Betsy Allison in the daily intercourse of familiar and perfect friendship. That indeed was impossible; no after-math has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop. But why do I call her Deborah? She had never been known by that name to her new neighbours; and to her very Father she was now spoken of as Mrs. Dove. Even the Allisons called her so in courteous and customary usage, but not without a melancholy reflection that when Deborah Bacon became Mrs. Dove, she was in a great measure lost to them.
“Friendship, although it cease not
In marriage, is yet at less command
Than when a single freedom can dispose it.”1
1 FORD.
Doncaster has less of the Rus in Urbe now than it had in those days, and than Bath had when those words were placed over the door of a Lodging House, on the North Parade. And the house to which the Doctor brought home his bride, had less of it than when Peter Hopkins set up the gilt pestle and mortar there as the cognizance of his vocation. It had no longer that air of quiet respectability which belongs to such a dwelling in the best street of a small country town. The Mansion House by which it was dwarfed and inconvenienced in many ways, occasioned a stir and bustle about it, unlike the cheerful business of a market day. The back windows, however, still looked to the fields, and there was still a garden. But neither fields nor garden could prevail over the odour of the shop, in which, like
hot, cold, moist and dry, four champions fierce,
in Milton's Chaos, rhubarb and peppermint, and valerian, and assafetida, “strove for mastery” and to battle brought their atoms. Happy was the day when peppermint predominated; though it always reminded Mrs. Dove of Thaxted Grange, and the delight with which she used to assist Miss Allison in her distillations. There is an Arabian proverb which says, “the remembrance of youth is a sigh;” Southey has taken it for the text of one of those juvenile poems in which he dwells with thoughtful forefeeling upon the condition of declining life.
Miss Allison had been to her, not indeed as a mother, but as what a step-mother is, who is led by natural benevolence and a religious sense of duty, to perform as far as possible a mother's part to her husband's children. There are more such step-mothers than the world is willing to believe, and they have their reward here as well as hereafter. It was impossible that any new friend could fill up her place in Mrs. Dove's affections,—impossible that she could ever feel for another woman the respect and reverence, and gratitude, which blended with her love for this excellent person. Though she was born within four miles of Doncaster, and had lived till her marriage in the humble vicarage in which she was born, she had never passed four-and-twenty hours in that town before she went to reside there; nor had she the slightest acquaintance with any of its inhabitants, except the few shop-keepers with whom her little dealings had lain, and the occasional visitants whom she had met at the Grange.
An Irish officer in the army, happening to be passenger in an armed vessel during the last war, used frequently to wish that they might fall in with an enemy's ship, because he said, he had been in many land battles, and there was nothing in the world which he desired more than to see what sort of a thing a sea fight was. He had his wish, and when after a smart action, in which he bore his part bravely, an enemy of superior force had been beaten off, he declared with the customary emphasis of an Hibernian adjuration, that a sea-fight was a mighty sairious sort of thing.
The Doctor and Deborah, as soon as they were betrothed had come to just the same conclusion upon a very different subject. Till the day of their engagement, nay till the hour of proposal on his part, and the very instant of acceptance on hers, each had looked upon marriage, when the thought of it occurred, as a distant possibility, more or less desirable, according to the circumstances which introduced the thought, and the mood in which it was entertained. And when it was spoken of sportively, as might happen, in relation to either the one or the other, it was lightly treated as a subject in which they had no concern. But from the time of their engagement, it seemed to both, the most serious event of their lives.
In the Dutch village of Broek, concerning which singular as the habits of the inhabitants are, travellers have related more peculiarities than ever prevailed there, one remarkable custom shows with how serious a mind some of the Hollanders regard marriage. The great house door is never opened but when the Master of the House brings home his Bride from the altar, and when Husband and Wife are borne out to the grave. Dr. Dove had seen that village of great Baby-houses, but though much attached to Holland, and to the Dutch as a people, and disposed to think that we might learn many useful lessons from our prudent and thrifty neighbours, he thought this to be as preposterous, if not as shocking a custom, as it would be to have the bell toll at a marriage, and to wear a winding sheet for a wedding garment.
We look with wonder at the transformations that take place in insects, and yet their physical metamorphoses are not greater than the changes which we ourselves undergo morally and intellectually, both in our relations to others and in our individual nature. “Chaque individu, considéré separément, differe encore de lui même par l'effet du tems; il devient un autre, en quelque maniere, aux diverses epoques de sa vie. L'enfant, l'homme fait, le viellard, sont comme autant d'etrangers unis dans une seule personne par le lien mysterieux du souvenir.”2 Of all changes in life marriage is certainly the greatest, and though less change in every respect can very rarely be produced by it in any persons than in the Doctor and his wife, it was very great to both. On his part it was altogether an increase of happiness; or rather from having been contented in his station he became happy in it, so happy as to be experimentally convinced that there can be no “single blessedness” for man. There were some drawbacks on her part,—in the removal from a quiet vicarage to a busy street; in the obstacle which four miles opposed to that daily and intimate intercourse with her friends at the Grange which had been the chief delight of her maiden life; and above all in the separation from her father, for even at a distance which may appear so inconsiderable, such it was; but there was the consolatory reflection that those dear friends and that dear father concurred in approving her marriage, and in rejoicing in it for her sake; and the experience of every day and every year made her more and more thankful for her lot. In the full liturgic sense of the word, he worshipped her, that is, he loved, and cherished, and respected, and honoured her; and she would have obeyed him cheerfully as well as dutifully, if obedience could have been shown where there was ever but one will.
2 NECKER.
