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

very near day, had been only fixed! And you were only to be searched for your correspondencies, and still closer confined till the day came, in order to deprive you of all means of escaping the snare laid for you!⁠—But all this you can forgive! You can wish you had stood all this; inevitable as the compulsion must have been!⁠—And the man who, at the hazard of his life, had delivered you from all these mortifications, is the only person you cannot forgive!

Can’t you go on, Sir? You see I have patience to hear you. Can’t you go on, Sir?

I can, Madam, with my sufferings: which I confess ought not to be mentioned, were I at last to be rewarded in the manner I hoped.

Your sufferings then, if you please, Sir?

Affrontingly forbidden your father’s house, after encouragement given, without any reasons they knew not before to justify the prohibition: forced upon a rencounter I wished to avoid: the first I ever, so provoked, wished to avoid. And that, because the wretch was your brother!

Wretch, Sir!⁠—And my brother!⁠—This could be from no man breathing, but from him before me!

Pardon me, Madam!⁠—But oh! how unworthy to be your brother!⁠—The quarrel grafted upon an old one, when at college; he universally known to be the aggressor; and revived for views equally sordid and injurious both to yourself and me⁠—giving life to him, who would have taken away mine!

Your generosity this, Sir; not your sufferings: a little more of your sufferings, if you please!⁠—I hope you do not repent, that you did not murder my brother!

My private life hunted into! My morals decried! Some of the accusers not unfaulty!

That’s an aspersion, Sir!

Spies set upon my conduct! One hired to bribe my own servant’s fidelity; perhaps to have poisoned me at last, if the honest fellow had not⁠—

Facts, Mr. Lovelace!⁠—Do you want facts in the display of your sufferings?⁠—None of your perhaps’s, I beseech you!

Menaces every day, and defiances, put into everyone’s mouth against me! Forced to creep about in disguises⁠—and to watch all hours⁠—

And in all weathers, I suppose, Sir⁠—That, I remember, was once your grievance! In all weathers, Sir!93 and all these hardships arising from yourself, not imposed by me.

Like a thief, or an eavesdropper, proceeded he: and yet neither by birth nor alliances unworthy of their relation, whatever I may be and am of their admirable daughter: of whom they, every one of them, are at least as unworthy!⁠—These, Madam, I call sufferings: justly call so; if at last I am to be sacrificed to an imperfect reconciliation⁠—imperfect, I say: for, can you expect to live so much as tolerably under the same roof, after all that has passed, with that brother and sister?

O Sir, Sir! What sufferings have yours been! And all for my sake, I warrant!⁠—I can never reward you for them!⁠—Never think of me more I beseech you⁠—How can you have patience with me?⁠—Nothing has been owing to your own behaviour, I presume: nothing to your defiances for defiances: nothing to your resolution declared more than once, that you would be related to a family, which, nevertheless, you would not stoop to ask a relation of: nothing, in short to courses which everybody blamed you for, you not thinking it worth your while to justify yourself. Had I not thought you used in an ungentlemanly manner, as I have heretofore told you, you had not had my notice by pen and ink.94 That notice gave you a supposed security, and you generously defied my friends the more for it: and this brought upon me (perhaps not undeservedly) my father’s displeasure; without which, my brother’s private pique, and selfish views, would have wanted a foundation to build upon: so that for all that followed of my treatment, and your redundant only’s, I might thank you principally, as you may yourself for all your sufferings, your mighty sufferings!⁠—And if, voluble Sir, you have founded any merit upon them, be so good as to revoke it: and look upon me, with my forfeited reputation, as the only sufferer⁠—For what⁠—pray hear me out, Sir (for he was going to speak) have you suffered in but your pride? Your reputation could not suffer: that it was beneath you to be solicitous about. And had you not been an unmanageable man, I should not have been driven to the extremity I now every hour, as the hour passes, deplore⁠—with this additional reflection upon myself, that I ought not to have begun, or, having begun, not continued a correspondence with one who thought it not worth his while to clear his own character for my sake, or to submit to my father for his own, in a point wherein every father ought to have an option⁠—

Darkness, light; light, darkness; by my soul;⁠—just as you please to have it. O charmer of my heart! snatching my hand, and pressing it between both of his, to his lips, in a strange wild way, take me, take me to yourself: mould me as you please: I am wax in your hands; give me your own impression; and seal me forever yours⁠—we were born for each other!⁠—You to make me happy, and save a soul⁠—I am all error, all crime. I see what I ought to have done. But do you think, Madam, I can willingly consent to be sacrificed to a partial reconciliation, in which I shall be so great, so irreparable a sufferer!⁠—Anything but that⁠—include me in your terms: prescribe to me: promise for me as you please⁠—put a halter about my neck, and lead me by it, upon condition of forgiveness on that disgraceful penance, and of a prostration as servile, to your father’s presence (your brother absent), and I will beg his consent at his feet, and bear anything but spurning from him, because he is your father. But to give you up upon cold conditions, d⁠⸺⁠n me (said the shocking wretch) if I either will, or can!

These were his words,