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

or accepted by a person of my cousin’s merit and sense; nor shall I wish that it should.

Lovel. Don’t think, Colonel, that I am meanly compounding off a debate, that I should as willingly go through with you as to eat or drink, if I have the occasion given me for it: but thus much I will tell you, that my Lord, that Lady Sarah Sadleir, Lady Betty Lawrance, my two cousins Montague, and myself, have written to her in the most solemn and sincere manner, to offer her such terms as no one but herself would refuse, and this long enough before Colonel Morden’s arrival was dreamt of.

Col. What reason, Sir, may I ask, does she give, against listening to so powerful a mediation, and to such offers?

Lovel. It looks like capitulating, or else⁠—

Col. It looks not like any such thing to me, Mr. Lovelace, who have as good an opinion of your spirit as man can have. And what, pray, is the part I act, and my motives for it? Are they not, in desiring that justice may be done to my Cousin Clarissa Harlowe, that I seek to establish the honour of Mrs. Lovelace, if matters can once be brought to bear?

Lovel. Were she to honour me with her acceptance of that name, Mr. Morden, I should not want you or any man to assert the honour of Mrs. Lovelace.

Col. I believe it. But still she has honoured you with that acceptance, she is nearer to me than to you, Mr. Lovelace. And I speak this, only to show you that, in the part I take, I mean rather to deserve your thanks than your displeasure, though against yourself, were there occasion. Nor ought you take it amiss, if you rightly weigh the matter: For, Sir, whom does a lady want protection against but her injurers? And who has been her greatest injurer?⁠—Till, therefore, she becomes entitled to your protection, as your wife, you yourself cannot refuse me some merit in wishing to have justice done my cousin. But, Sir, you were going to say, that if it were not to look like capitulating, you would hint the reasons my cousin gives against accepting such an honourable mediation?

I then told him of my sincere offers of marriage: “I made no difficulty, I said, to own my apprehensions, that my unhappy behaviour to her had greatly affected her: but that it was the implacableness of her friends that had thrown her into despair, and given her a contempt for life.” I told him, “that she had been so good as to send me a letter to divert me from a visit my heart was set upon making her: a letter on which I built great hopes, because she assured me that in it she was going to her father’s; and that I might see her there, when she was received, if it were not my own fault.”

Col. Is it possible? And were you, Sir, thus earnest? And did she send you such a letter?

Lord M. confirmed both; and also, that, in obedience to her desires, and that intimation, I had come down without the satisfaction I had proposed to myself in seeing her.

It is very true, Colonel, said I: and I should have told you this before: but your heat made me decline it; for, as I said, it had an appearance of meanly capitulating with you. An abjectness of heart, of which, had I been capable, I should have despised myself as much as I might have expected you would despise me.

Lord M. proposed to enter into the proof of all this. He said, in his phraseological way, That one story was good till another was heard; and that the Harlowe family and I, ’twas true, had behaved like so many Orsons to one another; and that they had been very free with all our family besides: that nevertheless, for the lady’s sake, more than for their’s, or even for mine, (he could tell me), he would do greater things for me than they could ask, if she could be brought to have me: and that this he wanted to declare, and would sooner have declared, if he could have brought us sooner to patience, and a good understanding.

The Colonel made excuses for his warmth, on the score of his affection to his cousin.

My regard for her made me readily admit them: and so a fresh bottle of Burgundy, and another of Champagne, being put upon the table, we sat down in good humour, after all this blustering, in order to enter closer into the particulars of the case: which I undertook, at both their desires, to do.

But these things must be the subject of another letter, which shall immediately follow this, if it do not accompany it.

Meantime you will observe that a bad cause gives a man great disadvantages: for I myself thing that the interrogatories put to me with so much spirit by the Colonel made me look cursedly mean; at the same time that it gave him a superiority which I know not how to allow to the best man in Europe. So that, literally speaking, as a good man would infer, guilt is its own punisher: in that it makes the most lofty spirit look like the miscreant he is⁠—a good man, I say: So, Jack, proleptically I add, thou hast no right to make the observation.

Letter 443 Mr. Lovelace

[In continuation]

Tuesday Afternoon, Aug. 29

I went back, in this part of our conversation, to the day that I was obliged to come down to attend my Lord in the dangerous illness which some feared would have been his last.

I told the Colonel, “what earnest letters I had written to a particular friend, to engage him to prevail upon the lady not to slip a day that had been proposed for the private celebration of our nuptials; and of my letters