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

the same dark hour, in order to provoke her to meet me.” Again, “There is a fate in her error,” she says⁠—Why then should she grieve?⁠—“Adversity is her shining time,” and I can’t tell what; yet never to thank the man to whom she owes the shine!

In the next letter,152 wicked as I am, “she fears I must be her lord and master.”

I hope so.

She retracts what she said against me in her last.⁠—My behaviour to my Rosebud; Miss Harlowe to take possession of Mrs. Fretchville’s house; I to stay at Mrs. Sinclair’s; the stake I have in my country; my reversions; my economy; my person; my address; (something like in all this!) are brought in my favour, to induce her now not to leave me. How do I love to puzzle these longsighted girls!

Yet “my teasing ways,” it seems, “are intolerable.”⁠—Are women only to tease, I trow? The sex may thank themselves for teaching me to out-tease them. So the headstrong Charles XII of Sweden taught the Czar Peter to beat him, by continuing a war with the Muscovites against the ancient maxims of his kingdom.

“May eternal vengeance pursue the villain, (thank heaven, she does not say overtake), if he give room to doubt his honour!”⁠—Women can’t swear, Jack⁠—sweet souls! they can only curse.

I am said, to doubt her love⁠—Have I not reason? And she, to doubt my ardour⁠—Ardour, Jack!⁠—why, ’tis very right⁠—women, as Miss Howe says, and as every rake knows, love ardours!

She apprises her, of the “ill success of the application made to her uncle.”⁠—By Hickman no doubt!⁠—I must have this fellow’s ears in my pocket, very quickly I believe.

She says, “she is equally shocked and enraged against all her family: Mrs. Norton’s weight has been tried upon Mrs. Harlowe, as well as Mr. Hickman’s upon the uncle: but never were there,” says the vixen, “such determined brutes in the world. Her uncle concludes her ruined already.” Is not that a call upon me, as well as a reproach?⁠—“They all expected applications from her when in distress⁠—but were resolved not to stir an inch to save her life.” Miss Howe “is concerned,” she tells her, “for the revenge my pride may put me upon taking for the distance she has kept me at”⁠—and well she may.⁠—It is now evident to her, that she must be mine (for her cousin Morden, it seems, is set against her too)⁠—an act of necessity, of convenience!⁠—thy friend, Jack, to be already made a woman’s convenience! Is this to be borne by a Lovelace?

I shall make great use of this letter. From Miss Howe’s hints of what passed between her uncle Harlowe and Hickman, (it must be Hickman), I can give room for my invention to play; for she tells her, that “she will not reveal all.” I must endeavour to come at this letter myself. I must have the very words: extracts will not do. This letter, when I have it, must be my compass to steer by.

The fire of friendship then blazes and crackles. I never before imagined that so fervent a friendship could subsist between two sister-beauties, both toasts. But even here it may be inflamed by opposition, and by that contradiction which gives vigour to female spirits of a warm and romantic turn.

She raves about “coming up, if by doing so she could prevent so noble a creature from stooping too low, or save her from ruin.”⁠—One reed to support another! I think I will contrive to bring her up.

How comes it to pass, that I cannot help being pleased with this virago’s spirit, though I suffer by it? Had I her but here, I’d engage, in a week’s time, to teach her submission without reserve. What pleasure should I have in breaking such a spirit! I should wish for her but for one month, I think. She would be too tame and spiritless for me after that. How sweetly pretty to see the two lovely friends, when humbled and tame, both sitting in the darkest corner of a room, arm in arm, weeping and sobbing for each other!⁠—and I their emperor, their then acknowledged emperor, reclined at my ease in the same room, uncertain to which I should first, grand signor like, throw out my handkerchief!

Again mind the girl: “She is enraged at the Harlowes;” she is “angry at her own mother;” she is “exasperated against her foolish and low-vanity’d Lovelace.” Foolish, a little toad! (God forgive me for calling such a virtuous girl a toad!)⁠—“Let us stoop to lift the wretch out of his dirt, though we soil our fingers in doing it! He has not been guilty of direct indecency to you.” It seems extraordinary to Miss Howe that I have not.⁠—“Nor dare he!” She should be sure of that. If women have such things in their heads, why should not I in my heart? Not so much of a devil as that comes to neither. Such villainous intentions would have shown themselves before now if I had them.⁠—Lord help them!⁠—

She then puts her friend upon urging for settlements, license, and so forth.⁠—“No room for delicacy now,” she says; and tells her what she shall say, “to bring all forward from me.” Is it not as clear to thee, Jack, as it is to me, that I should have carried my point long ago, but for this vixen?⁠—She reproaches her for having modesty’d away, as she calls it, more than one opportunity, that she ought not to have slipped.⁠—Thus thou seest, that the noblest of the sex mean nothing in the world by their shyness and distance, but to pound the poor fellow they dislike not, when he comes into their purlieus.

Though “tricked into this man’s power,” she tells her, she is “not meanly subjugated to it.” There are hopes of my reformation, it seems, “from my reverence for her; since before her I never had any reverence for what was good!” I am “a great, a specious deceiver.” I thank her for this, however. A