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

a scheme in my head to set some engines at work to make her repent her saucy behaviour to you to the last day of her life.

What a wicked schemer you are, Sir!⁠—Who shall avenge upon you the still greater evils which you have been guilty of? I forgive Betty with all my heart. She was not my servant; and but too probably, in what she did, obeyed the commands of her to whom she owed duty, better than I obeyed those to whom I owed more.

No matter for that, the wretch said (To be sure, my dear, he must design to make me afraid of him): The decree was gone out⁠—Betty must smart⁠—smart too by an act of her own choice. He loved, he said, to make bad people their own punishers.⁠—Nay, Madam, excuse me; but if the fellow, if this Joseph, in your opinion, deserves punishment, mine is a complicated scheme; a man and his wife cannot well suffer separately, and it may come home to him too.

I had no patience with him. I told him so. I see, Sir, said I, I see, what a man I am with. Your rattle warns me of the snake.⁠—And away I flung: leaving him seemingly vexed, and in confusion.

Letter 114 Miss Clarissa Harlowe, to Miss Howe

My plain-dealing with Mr. Lovelace, on seeing him again, and the free dislike I expressed to his ways, his manners, and his contrivances, as well as to his speeches, have obliged him to recollect himself a little. He will have it, that the menaces which he threw out just now against my brother and Mr. Solmes, are only the effect of an unmeaning pleasantry. He has too great a stake in his country, he says, to be guilty of such enterprises as should lay him under a necessity of quitting it forever. Twenty things, particularly, he says, he has suffered Joseph Leman to tell him of, that were not, and could not be true, in order to make himself formidable in some people’s eyes, and this purely with a view to prevent mischief. He is unhappy, as far as he knows, in a quick invention; in hitting readily upon expedients; and many things are reported of him which he never said, and many which he never did, and others which he has only talked of, (as just now), and which he has forgot as soon as the words have passed his lips.

This may be so, in part, my dear. No one man so young could be so wicked as he has been reported to be. But such a man at the head of such wretches as he is said to have at his beck, all men of fortune and fearlessness, and capable of such enterprises as I have unhappily found him capable of, what is not to be apprehended from him!

His carelessness about his character is one of his excuses: a very bad one. What hope can a woman have of a man who values not his own reputation?⁠—These gay wretches may, in mixed conversation, divert for an hour, or so: but the man of probity, the man of virtue, is the man that is to be the partner for life. What woman, who could help it, would submit it to the courtesy of a wretch, who avows a disregard to all moral sanctions, whether he will perform his part of the matrimonial obligation, and treat her with tolerable politeness?

With these notions, and with these reflections, to be thrown upon such a man myself!⁠—Would to Heaven⁠—But what avail wishes now?⁠—To whom can I fly, if I would fly from him?

Letter 115 Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, Esq.

Friday, April 14

Never did I hear of such a parcel of foolish toads as these Harlowes!⁠—Why, Belford, the lady must fall, if every hair of her head were a guardian angel, unless they were to make a visible appearance for her, or, snatching her from me at unawares, would draw her after them into the starry regions.

All I had to apprehend, was, that a daughter, so reluctantly carried off, would offer terms to her father, and would be accepted upon a mutual concedence; they to give up Solmes; she to give up me. And so I was contriving to do all I could to guard against the latter. But they seem resolved to perfect the work they have begun.

What stupid creatures are there in the world! This foolish brother not to know, that he who would be bribed to undertake a base thing by one, would be over-bribed to retort the baseness; especially when he could be put into the way to serve himself by both!⁠—Thou, Jack, wilt never know one half of my contrivances.

[He here relates the conversation between him and the Lady (upon the subject of the noise and exclamations his agent made at the garden-door) to the same effect as in the Lady’s Letter, No. 113 and proceeds exulting:]

What a capacity for glorious mischief has thy friend!⁠—Yet how near the truth all of it! The only derivation, my asserting that the fellow made the noises by mistake, and through fright, and not by previous direction: had she known the precise truth, her anger, to be so taken in, would never have let her forgive me.

Had I been a military hero, I should have made gunpowder useless; for I should have blown up all my adversaries by dint of stratagem, turning their own devices upon them.

But these fathers and mothers⁠—Lord help ’em!⁠—Were not the powers of nature stronger than those of discretion, and were not that busy dea bona to afford her genial aids, till tardy prudence qualified parents to manage their future offspring, how few people would have children!

James and Arabella may have their motives; but what can be said for a father acting as this father has acted? What for a mother? What for an aunt? What for uncles?⁠—Who can have patience