AN EARLY BEREAVEMENT. TRUE LOVE ITS OWN COMFORTER. A LONELY FATHER AND
AN ONLY CHILD.
Read ye that run the aweful truth,
With which I charge my page;
A worm is in the bud of youth,
And at the root of age.
COWPER.
Leonard was not more than eight and twenty when he obtained a living,
a few miles from Doncaster. He took his bride with him to the
vicarage. The house was as humble as the benefice, which was worth
less than £50. a year; but it was soon made the neatest cottage in the
country round, and upon a happier dwelling the sun never shone. A few
acres of good glebe were attached to it; and the garden was large
enough to afford healthful and pleasurable employment to its owners.
The course of true love never ran more smoothly; but its course was
short.
O how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away![1]
Little more than five years from the time of their marriage had
elapsed, before a headstone in the adjacent churchyard told where the
remains of Margaret Bacon had been deposited in the 30th year of her
age.
[Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.]
When the stupor and the agony of that bereavement had past away, the
very intensity of Leonard's affection became a source of consolation.
Margaret had been to him a purely ideal object during the years of his
youth; death had again rendered her such. Imagination had beautified
and idolized her then; faith sanctified and glorified her now. She had
been to him on earth all that he had fancied, all that he had hoped,
all that he had desired. She would again be so in Heaven. And this
second union nothing could impede, nothing could interrupt, nothing
could dissolve. He had only to keep himself worthy of it by cherishing
her memory, hallowing his heart to it while he performed a parent's
duty to their child; and so doing to await his own summons, which must
one day come, which every day was brought nearer, and which any day
might bring.
——'Tis the only discipline we are born for;
All studies else are but as circular lines,
And death the centre where they must all meet.[2]
[Footnote 2: MASSINGER.]
The same feeling which from his childhood had refined Leonard's heart,
keeping it pure and undefiled, had also corroborated the natural
strength of his character, and made him firm of purpose. It was a
saying of Bishop Andrews that “good husbandry is good divinity;” “the
truth whereof,” says Fuller, “no wise man will deny.” Frugality he had
always practised as a needful virtue, and found that in an especial
manner it brings with it its own reward. He now resolved upon
scrupulously setting apart a fourth of his small income to make a
provision for his child, in case of her surviving him, as in the
natural course of things might be expected. If she should be removed
before him,—for this was an event the possibility of which he always
bore in mind,—he had resolved that whatever should have been
accumulated with this intent, should be disposed of to some other
pious purpose,—for such, within the limits to which his poor means
extended, he properly considered this. And having entered on this
prudential course with a calm reliance upon Providence in case his
hour should come before that purpose could be accomplished, he was
without any earthly hope or fear,—those alone excepted, from which no
parent can be free.
The child had been christened Deborah after her maternal grandmother,
for whom Leonard ever gratefully retained a most affectionate and
reverential remembrance. She was a healthy, happy creature in body and
in mind; at first
——one of those little prating girls
Of whom fond parents tell such tedious stories;[3]
afterwards, as she grew up, a favourite with the village
school-mistress, and with the whole parish; docile, good-natured,
lively and yet considerate, always gay as a lark and busy as a bee.
One of the pensive pleasures in which Leonard indulged was to gaze on
her unperceived, and trace the likeness to her mother.
Oh Christ!
How that which was the life's life of our being,
Can pass away, and we recall it thus![4]
[Footnote 3: DRYDEN.]
[Footnote 4: ISAAC COMNENUS.]
That resemblance which was strong in childhood, lessened as the child
grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired a cast of meek
melancholy during those years in which the bread of bitterness had
been her portion; and when hope came to her, it was that “hope
deferred” which takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart
instead of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy
circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's
spirits. Deborah brought into the world the happiest of all nature's
endowments, an easy temper and a light heart. Resemblant therefore as
the features were, the dissimilitude of expression was more apparent;
and when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity that
lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness
which had given a serene and saint-like character to her mother's, he
wished to persuade himself that as the early translation of the one
seemed to have been thus prefigured, the other might be destined to
live for the happiness of others till a good old age, while length of
years in their course should ripen her for heaven.