Adeline gratefully smiled and bowed her head in silent assent. The lady now quitted the room for a medicine; having given which to Adeline, the curtain was closed and she was left to repose. But her thoughts were too busy to suffer her to profit by the opportunity:—she contemplated the past and viewed the present; and when she compared them, the contrast struck her with astonishment: the whole appeared like one of those sudden transitions so frequent in dreams, in which we pass from grief and despair, we know not how, to comfort and delight.
Yet she looked forward to the future with a trembling anxiety that threatened to retard her recovery, and which when she remembered the words of her generous benefactress, she endeavoured to suppress. Had she better known the disposition of the persons in whose house she now was, her anxiety, as far as it regarded herself, must in a great measure have been done away; for La Luc, its owner, was one of those rare characters to whom misfortune seldom looks in vain, and whose native goodness, confirmed by principle, is uniform and unassuming in its acts. The following little picture of his domestic life, his family, and his manners, will more fully illustrate his character. It was drawn from the life, and its exactness will, it is hoped, compensate for its length.
THE FAMILY OF LA LUC.
But half mankind, like Handel's fool, destroy,
Through rage and ignorance, the strain of joy;
Irregularly wild, the passions roll
Through Nature's finest instrument, the soul:—
While men of sense, with Handel's happier skill,
Correct the taste and harmonize the will;
Teach their affections like his notes to flow,
Nor raised too high, nor ever sunk too low;
Till every virtue, measured and refined,
As fits the concert of the master mind,
Melts in its kindred sounds, and pours along
Th' according music of the moral song.
CAWTHORNE.
In the village of Leloncourt, celebrated for its picturesque situation at the foot of the Savoy Alps, lived Arnaud La Luc, a clergyman descended from an ancient family of France, whose decayed fortunes occasioned them to seek a retreat in Switzerland, in an age when the violence of civil commotion seldom spared the conquered. He was minister of the village, and equally loved for the piety and benevolence of the Christian, as respected for the dignity and elevation of the philosopher. His was the philosophy of nature, directed by common sense. He despised the jargon of the modern schools, and the brilliant absurdities of systems which dazzled without enlightening, and guided without convincing their disciples.
His mind was penetrating; his views extensive; and his systems, like his religion, were simple, rational, and sublime. The people of his parish looked up to him as to a father; for while his precepts directed their minds, his example touched their hearts.
In early youth La Luc lost a wife whom he tenderly loved. This event threw a tincture of soft and interesting melancholy over his character, which remained when time had mellowed the remembrance that occasioned it. Philosophy had strengthened, not hardened, his heart; it enabled him to resist the pressure of affliction, rather than to overcome it.
Calamity taught him to feel with peculiar sympathy the distresses of others. His income from the parish was small, and what remained from the divided and reduced estates of his ancestors did not much increase it; but though he could not always relieve the necessities of the indigent, his tender pity and holy conversation seldom failed in administering consolation to the mental sufferer. On these occasions the sweet and exquisite emotions of his heart have often induced him to say, that could the voluptuary be once sensible of these feelings, he would never after forego the luxury of doing good. Ignorance of true pleasure, he would say, more frequently than temptation to that which is false, leads to vice.
La Luc had one son and a daughter, who were too young when their mother died to lament their loss. He loved them with peculiar tenderness, as the children of her whom he never ceased to deplore; and it was for some time his sole amusement to observe the gradual unfolding of their infant minds, and to bend them to virtue. His was the deep and silent sorrow of the heart: his complaints he never obtruded upon others, and very seldom did he even mention his wife. His grief was too sacred for the eye of the vulgar. Often he retired to the deep solitude of the mountains, and amid their solemn and tremendous scenery would brood over the remembrance of times past, and resign himself to the luxury of grief. On his return from these little excursions he was always more placid and contented. A sweet tranquillity, which arose almost to happiness, was diffused over his mind, and his manners were more than usually benevolent. As he gazed on his children, and fondly kissed them, a tear would sometimes steal into his eye: but it was a tear of tender regret, unmingled with the darker qualities of sorrow, and was most precious to his heart.
On the death of his wife he received into his house a maiden sister, a sensible, worthy woman, who was deeply interested in the happiness of her brother. Her affectionate attention and judicious conduct anticipated the effect of time in softening the poignancy of his distress; and her unremitted care of his children, while it proved the goodness of her own heart, attracted her more closely to his.
It was with inexpressible pleasure that he traced in the infant features of Clara the resemblance of her mother. The same gentleness of manner and the same sweetness of disposition soon displayed themselves; and as she grew up, her actions frequently reminded him so strongly of his lost wife as to fix him in reveries, which absorbed all his soul.