Clarissa Harlowe, Samuel Richardson [black authors fiction .txt] 📗

direct for the best my beloved creature, prays

Her

Anna Howe.

Letter 82 Miss Clarissa Harlowe, to Miss Howe

Thursday, April 6

I thank you, my dearest friend, for the pains you have taken in accounting so affectionately for my papers not being taken away yesterday; and for the kind protection you would have procured for me, if you could.

This kind protection was what I wished for: but my wishes, raised at first by your love, were rather governed by my despair of other refuge (having before cast about, and not being able to determine, what I ought to do, and what I could do, in a situation so unhappy) than by a reasonable hope: For why indeed should anybody embroil themselves for others, when they can avoid it?

All my consolation is, as I have frequently said, that I have not, by my own inadvertence or folly, brought myself into this sad situation. If I had, I should not have dared to look up to anybody with the expectation of protection or assistance, nor to you for excuse of the trouble I give you. But nevertheless we should not be angry at a person’s not doing that for ourselves, or for our friend, which she thinks she ought not to do; and which she has it in her option either to do, or to let it alone. Much less have you a right to be displeased with so prudent a mother, for not engaging herself so warmly in my favour, as you wished she would. If my own aunt can give me up, and that against her judgment, as I may presume to say; and if my father and mother, and uncles, who once loved me so well, can join so strenuously against me; can I expect, or ought you, the protection of your mother, in opposition to them?

Indeed, my dear love, (permit me to be very serious), I am afraid I am singled out (either for my own faults, or for the faults of my family, or perhaps for the faults of both) to be a very unhappy creature!⁠—signally unhappy! For see you not how irresistible the waves of affliction come tumbling down upon me?

We have been till within these few weeks, every one of us, too happy. No crosses, no vexations, but what we gave ourselves from the pamperedness, as I may call it, of our own wills. Surrounded by our heaps and stores, hoarded up as fast as acquired, we have seemed to think ourselves out of the reach of the bolts of adverse fate. I was the pride of all my friends, proud myself of their pride, and glorying in my standing. Who knows what the justice of Heaven may inflict, in order to convince us, that we are not out of the reach of misfortune; and to reduce us to a better reliance, than what we have hitherto presumptuously made?

I should have been very little the better for the conversation-visits with the good Dr. Lewen used to honour me with, and for the principles wrought (as I may say) into my earliest mind by my pious Mrs. Norton, founded on her reverend father’s experience, as well as on her own, if I could not thus retrospect and argue, in such a strange situation as we are in. Strange, I may well call it; for don’t you see, my dear, that we seem all to be impelled, as it were, by a perverse fate, which none of us are able to resist?⁠—and yet all arising (with a strong appearance of self-punishment) from ourselves? Do not my parents see the hopeful children, from whom they expected a perpetuity of worldly happiness to their branching family, now grown up to answer the till now distant hope, setting their angry faces against each other, pulling up by the roots, as I may say, that hope which was ready to be carried into a probable certainty?

Your partial love will be ready to acquit me of capital and intentional faults:⁠—but oh, my dear! my calamities have humbled me enough to make me turn my gaudy eye inward; to make me look into myself.⁠—And what have I discovered there?⁠—Why, my dear friend, more secret pride and vanity than I could have thought had lain in my unexamined heart.

If I am to be singled out to be the punisher of myself and family, who so lately was the pride of it, pray for me, my dear, that I may not be left wholly to myself; and that I may be enabled to support my character, so as to be justly acquitted of wilful and premeditated faults. The will of Providence be resigned to in the rest: as that leads, let me patiently and unrepiningly follow!⁠—I shall not live always!⁠—May but my closing scene be happy!

But I will not oppress you, my dearest friend, with further reflections of this sort. I will take them all into myself. Surely I have a mind that has room for them. My afflictions are too sharp to last long. The crisis is at hand. Happier times you bid me hope for. I will hope.

But yet, I cannot be but impatient at times, to find myself thus driven, and my character so depreciated and sunk, that were all the future to be happy, I should be ashamed to show my face in public, or to look up. And all by the instigation of a selfish brother, and envious sister⁠—

But let me stop: let me reflect!⁠—Are not these suggestions the suggestions of the secret pride I have been censuring? Then, already so impatient! but this moment so resigned, so much better disposed for reflection! yet ’tis hard, ’tis very hard, to subdue an embittered spirit!⁠—in the instant of its trial too!⁠—O my cruel brother!⁠—but now it rises again.⁠—I will lay down a pen I am so little able to govern.⁠—And I will try to subdue an impatience, which (if my afflictions are sent me for corrective