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

the basest manner⁠—you best know how⁠—had I been able to account for myself, and your proceedings, or to have known but how the days passed⁠—a whole week should not have gone over my head, as I find it has done, before I had told you, what I now tell you⁠—That the man who has been the villain to me you have been, shall never make me his wife.⁠—I will write to my uncle, to lay aside his kind intentions in my favour⁠—all my prospects are shut in⁠—I give myself up for a lost creature as to this world⁠—hinder me not from entering upon a life of severe penitence, for corresponding, after prohibition, with a wretch who has too well justified all their warnings and inveteracy; and for throwing myself into the power of your vile artifices. Let me try to secure the only hope I have left. This is all the amends I ask of you. I repeat, therefore, Am I now at liberty to dispose of myself as I please?

Now comes the fool, the miscreant again, hesitating his broken answer: My dearest love, I am confounded, quite confounded, at the thought of what⁠—of what has been done; and at the thought of⁠—to whom. I see, I see, there is no withstanding your eloquence!⁠—Such irresistible proofs of the love of virtue, for its own sake, did I never hear of, nor meet with, in all my reading. And if you can forgive a repentant villain, who thus on his knees implores your forgiveness, (then down I dropped, absolutely in earnest in all I said), I vow by all that’s sacred and just, (and may a thunderbolt strike me dead at your feet, if I am not sincere!) that I will by marriage before tomorrow noon, without waiting for your uncle, or anybody, do you all the justice I now can do you. And you shall ever after control and direct me as you please, till you have made me more worthy of your angelic purity than now I am: nor will I presume so much as to touch your garment, till I have the honour to call so great a blessing lawfully mine.

O thou guileful betrayer! there is a just God, whom thou invokest: yet the thunderbolt descends not; and thou livest to imprecate and deceive!

My dearest life! rising; for I hoped she was relenting⁠—

Hadst thou not sinned beyond the possibility of forgiveness, interrupted she; and this had been the first time that thus thou solemnly promisest and invokest the vengeance thou hast as often defied; the desperateness of my condition might have induced me to think of taking a wretched chance with a man so profligate. But, after what I have suffered by thee, it would be criminal in me to wish to bind my soul in covenant to a man so nearly allied to perdition.

Good God!⁠—how uncharitable!⁠—I offer not to defend⁠—would to Heaven that I could recall⁠—so nearly allied to perdition, Madam!⁠—So profligate a man, Madam!⁠—

O how short is expression of thy crimes, and of my sufferings! Such premeditation is thy baseness! To prostitute the characters of persons of honour of thy own family⁠—and all to delude a poor creature, whom thou oughtest⁠—But why talk I to thee? Be thy crimes upon thy head! Once more I ask thee, Am I, or am I not, at my own liberty now?

I offered to speak in defence of the women, declaring that they really were the very persons⁠—

Presume not, interrupted she, base as thou art, to say one word in thine own vindication. I have been contemplating their behaviour, their conversation, their over-ready acquiescences, to my declarations in thy disfavour; their free, yet affectedly-reserved light manners: and now that the sad event has opened my eyes, and I have compared facts and passages together, in the little interval that has been lent me, I wonder I could not distinguish the behaviour of the unmatron-like jilt, whom thou broughtest to betray me, from the worthy lady whom thou hast the honour to call thy aunt: and that I could not detect the superficial creature whom thou passedst upon me for the virtuous Miss Montague.

Amazing uncharitableness in a lady so good herself!⁠—That the high spirits those ladies were in to see you, should subject them to such censures!⁠—I do must solemnly vow, Madam⁠—

That they were, interrupting me, verily and indeed Lady Betty Lawrance and thy cousin Montague!⁠—O wretch! I see by thy solemn averment (I had not yet averred it), what credit ought to be given to all the rest. Had I no other proof⁠—

Interrupting her, I besought her patient ear. “I had found myself, I told her, almost avowedly despised and hated. I had no hope of gaining her love, or her confidence. The letter she had left behind her, on her removal to Hampstead, sufficiently convinced me that she was entirely under Miss Howe’s influence, and waited but the return of a letter from her to enter upon measures that would deprive me of her forever: Miss Howe had ever been my enemy: more so then, no doubt, from the contents of the letter she had written to her on her first coming to Hampstead; that I dared not to stand the event of such a letter; and was glad of an opportunity, by Lady Betty’s and my cousin’s means (though they knew not my motive) to get her back to town; far, at the time, from intending the outrage which my despair, and her want of confidence in me, put me so vilely upon”⁠—

I would have proceeded; and particularly would have said something of Captain Tomlinson and her uncle; but she would not hear me further. And indeed it was with visible indignation, and not without several angry interruptions, that she heard me say so much.

Would I dare, she asked me, to offer at a palliation of my baseness? The two women, she was convinced, were impostors. She knew not but Captain Tomlinson and Mr. Mennell were so too. But