RASH MARRIAGES. AN EARLY WIDOWHOOD. AFFLICTION RENDERED A BLESSING TO
THE SUFFERERS; 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.