Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.‘My true name is so well known in the Records or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my name or the account of my family to this work.’Born into the seedy world of Newgate Prison and abandoned as a baby at six months old, Moll Flanders soon learns that she can only rely on herself. Her story is an unapologetic one of bigamy, prostitution and theft told in her own indomitable and alluring way. Scurrilous and incorrigible, the reader is left wondering whether Moll is merely a brazen criminal, or a victim or her own circumstance.Defoe’s witty romp through the eighteenth-century underworld has much to say about the forces of good and evil and is undeniably one of his most satirical novels.
MOLL
FLANDERS
Daniel Defoe
Contents
Cover (#ue443b0df-9d7e-52c9-bee3-27e953d697d9)
Title Page (#u013bd29d-8549-5da2-873b-761d32e8847e)
Author’s Preface (#uccb7d413-22b1-5c9c-98d7-9b3180e5d487)
Chapter 1 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (#u8456bd6b-c318-59e5-af5d-b93825bbacb3)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
History of Collins (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Preface (#ulink_ce4f3fb7-f08a-5c0a-812c-12276e55702c)
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed; and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheets, and take it just as he pleases.
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very beginning of her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal her true name, after which there is no occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous lady we here speak of, is a little altered, particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words than she told it at first; the copy which came first to hand having been written in language more like one still in Newgate, than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.
The pen employed in finishing her story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak language fit to be read: when a woman debauched from her youth, nay, even being the offspring of debauchery and vice, comes to give an account of all her vicious practices, and even to descend to the particular occasions and circumstances by which she first became wicked, and of all the progressions of crime which she run through in threescore years, an author must be hard put to it to wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his disadvantage.
All possible care, however, has been taken to give no lewd ideas, no immodest turns in the new dressing up of this story, no, not to the worst part of her expressions; to this purpose some of the vicious part of her life, which could not be modestly told, is quite left out, and several other parts are very much shortened; what is left ‘tis hoped will not offend the chastest reader, or the modestest hearer; and as the best use is to be made even of the worst story, the moral ‘tis hoped will keep the reader serious, even where the story might incline him to be otherwise; to give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal spirit and life.
It is suggested there cannot be the same life, the same brightness and beauty in relating the penitent part, as is in the criminal part: if there is any truth in that suggestion. I must be allowed to say, ‘tis because there is not the same taste and relish in the reading; and indeed it is too true that the difference lies not in the real worth of the subject so much as in the gust and palate of the reader.
But as this work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to read it, and how to make the good uses of it which the story all along recommends to them; so it is to be hoped that such readers will be much more pleased with the moral than the fable, with the application than with the relation, and with the end of the writer than with the life of the person written of.
There is in this story abundance of delightful incidents, and all of them usefully applied. There is an agreeable turn artfully given them in the relating, that naturally instructs the reader, either one way or another. The first part of her lewd life with the young gentleman at Colchester, has so many happy turns given it to expose the crime, and warn all whose circumstances are adapted to it, of the ruinous end of such things, and the foolish, thoughtless, and abhorred conduct of both the parties, that it abundantly atones for all the lively description she gives of her folly and wickedness.
The repentance of her lover at the Bath, and how brought by the just alarm of his fit of sickness to abandon her; the just caution given there against even the lawful intimacies of the dearest friends, and how unable they are to preserve the most solemn resolutions of virtue without divine assistance; these are parts which to a just discernment will appear to have more real beauty in them, than all the amorous chain of story which introduces it.
In a word, as the whole relation is carefully garbled of all the levity and looseness that was in it: so it is applied, and with the utmost care, to virtuous and religious uses. None can without being guilty of manifest injustice, cast any reproach upon it, or upon our design in publishing it.
The advocates for the stage have in all ages made this the great argument to persuade people that their plays are useful, and that they ought to be allowed in the most civilized and in the most religious government, namely, that they are applied to virtuous purposes, and that by the most lively representations, they fail not to recommend virtue and generous principles, and to discourage and expose all sorts of vice and corruption of manners; and were it true that they did so, and that they constantly adhered to that rule, as the test of their acting on the theatre, much might be said in their favour.
Throughout the infinite variety of this book this fundamental is most strictly adhered to; there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor a virtuous just thing but it carries its praise along with it. What can more exactly answer the rule laid down, to recommend even those representations of things which have so many other just objections lying against them? Namely, of example of bad company, obscene language, and the like.
Upon this foundation this book is recommended to the reader, as a work from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious inference is drawn by which the reader will have something of instruction, if he pleases to make use of it.
All the exploits of this lady of fame, in her depredations upon mankind, stand as so many warnings to honest people to beware of them, intimating to them by what methods innocent people are drawn in, plundered, and robbed, and by consequence how to avoid them. Her robbing a little child, dressed fine by the vanity of the mother, to go to the dancing school, is a good memento to such people hereafter; as is likewise her picking the gold watch from the young lady’s side in the park.
Her getting a parcel from a hairbrained wench at the coaches in St. John’s Street; her booty at the fire, and also at Harwich; all give us excellent warning in such cases to be more present to ourselves in sudden surprises of every sort.
Her application to a sober life, and industrious management at last in Virginia, with her transported spouse, is a story fruitful of instruction to all the unfortunate creatures who are obliged to seek their re-establishment abroad, whether by the misery of transportation, or other disaster; letting them know that diligence and application have their due encouragement, even in the remotest part of the world, and that no case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of prospect, but that an unwearied industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest creature to appear again in the world, and give him a new cast for his life.
These are a few of the serious inferences which we are led by the hand to in this book, and these are fully sufficient to justify any man in recommending it to the world, and much more to justify the publication of it.
There are two of the most beautiful parts still behind, which this story gives some idea of, and lets us into the parts of them, but they are either of them too long to be brought into the same volume; and indeed are, as I may call them, whole volumes of themselves, viz., 1. the life of her governess, as she calls her, who had run through, it seems in a few years, all the eminent degrees of a gentlewoman, a whore, and a bawd; a midwife, and a midwife keeper, as they are called; a pawnbroker, a child-taker, a receiver of thieves, and of stolen goods; and in a word, herself a thief, a breeder up of thieves, and the like, and yet at last a penitent.
The second is the life of her transported husband, a highwayman; who it seems lived a twelve years’ life of successful villainy upon the road, and even at last came off so well as to be a volunteer transport, not a convict; and in whose life there is an incredible variety.
But, as I said, these are things too long to bring in here, so neither can I make a promise of their coming out by themselves.
We cannot say indeed, that this history is carried on quite to the end of the life of this famous Moll Flanders, for nobody can write their own life to the full end of it, unless they can write it after they are dead: but her husband’s life being written by a third hand, gives a full account of them both, how long they lived together in that country, and how they came both to England again, after about eight years, in which time they were grown very rich, and where she lived, it seems, to be very old; but was not so extraordinary a penitent, as she was at first; it seems only that indeed she always spoke with abhorrence of her former life, and of every part of it.
In her last scene at Maryland and Virginia, many pleasant things happened, which makes that part of her life very agreeable, but they are not told with the same elegancy as those accounted for by herself; so it is still to the more advantage that we break off here.
CHAPTER 1 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (#ulink_8cc5b134-4875-5b2d-8f19-12cc5d0c8b3e)
My true name is so well known in the Records or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my name or the account of my family to this work; perhaps after my death it may be better known, at present it would not be proper, no, not though a general pardon should be issued, even without exceptions of persons or crimes.
It is enough to tell you, that as some of my worst comrades, who are out of the way of doing me harm, having gone out of the world by the steps and the string (as I often expected to go), knew me by the name of Moll Flanders; so you may give me leave to go under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.
I have been told, that in one of our neighbour nations, whether it be in France, or where else, I know not, they have an order from the king, that when any criminal is condemned, either to die, or to the galleys, or to be transported, if they leave any children, as such are generally unprovided for, by the forfeiture of their parents, so they are immediately taken into the care of the government, and put into an hospital called the House of Orphans, where they are bred up, clothed, fed, taught, and when fit to go out, are placed to trades, or to services, so as to be well able to provide for themselves by an honest industrious behaviour.
Had this been the custom in our country, I had not been left a poor desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper, as was my fate; and by which I was not only exposed to very great distresses, even before I was capable either of understanding my case or how to amend it, but brought into a course of life, scandalous in itself, and which in its ordinary course tended to the swift destruction both of soul and body.
But the case was otherwise here, my mother was convicted of felony for a petty theft scarce worth naming, viz., borrowing three pieces of fine Holland of a certain draper in Cheapside: the circumstances are too long to repeat, and I have heard them related so many ways that I can scarce tell which is the right account.
However it was, they all agree in this, that my mother pleaded her belly, and being found quick with child, she was respited for about seven months; after which she was called down, as they term it, to her former judgement, but obtained the favour afterwards of being transported to the plantations, and left me about half a year old; and in bad hands you may be sure.
This is too near the first hours of my life, for me to relate anything of my self but by hearsay; it is enough to mention, that as I was born in such an unhappy place, I had no parish to have recourse to for my nourishment in my infancy, nor can I give the least account how I was kept alive; other than that, as I have been told, some relation of my mother took me away, but at whose expense, or by whose direction, I know nothing at all of it.
The first account that I can recollect, or could ever learn of myself, was that I had wandered among a crew of those people they call gypsies, or Egyptians; but I believe it was but a little while that I had been among them, for I had not had my skin discoloured, as they do to all children they carry about with them, nor can I tell how I came among them, or how I got from them.
It was at Colchester in Essex, that those people left me; and I have a notion in my head, that I left them there (that is, that I hid myself and would not go any farther with them), but I am not able to be particular in that account; only this I remember, that being taken up by some of the parish officers of Colchester, I gave an account that I came into the town with the gypsies, but that I would not go any farther with them, and that so they had left me, but whither they were gone that I knew not, for though they sent round the country to enquire after them, it seems they could not be found.
I was now in a way to be provided for; for though I was not a parish charge upon this or that part of the town by law; yet as my case came to be known, and that I was too young to do any work, being not above three years old, compassion moved the magistrates of the town to take care of me, and I became one of their own as much as if I had been born in the place.
In the provision they made for me, it was my good hap to be put to nurse, as they call it, to a woman who was indeed poor, but had been in better circumstances, and who got a little livelihood by taking such as I was supposed to be, and keeping them with all necessaries, till they were at a certain age, in which it might be supposed they might go to service, or get their own bread.
This woman had also a little school, which she kept to teach children to read and to work; and having, I say, lived before that in good fashion, she bred up the children with a great deal of art, as well as with a great deal of care.
But which was worth all the rest, she bred them up very religiously also, being herself a very sober, pious woman, (2) very housewifely and clean, and, (3) very mannerly, and with good behaviour: so that excepting a plain diet, coarse lodging, and mean clothes, we were brought up as mannerly as if we had been at the dancing school.
I was continued here till I was eight years old, when I was terrified with news that the magistrates (as I think they called them) had ordered that I should go to service; I was able to do but very little wherever I was to go, except it was to run of errands, and be a drudge to some cook-maid, and this they told me of often, which put me into a great fright; for I had a thorough aversion to going to service, as they called it, though I was so young; and I told my nurse, that I believed I could get my living without going to service if she pleased to let me; for she had taught me to work with my needle, and spin worsted, which is the chief trade of that city, and I told her that if she would keep me, I would work for her, and I would work very hard.
I talked to her almost every day of working hard; and in short I did nothing but work and cry all day, which grieved the good kind woman so much, that at last she began to be concerned for me, for she loved me very well.
One day after this, as she came into the room, where all the poor children were at work, she sat down just over against me, not in her usual place as mistress, but as if she had set herself on purpose to observe me, and see me work: I was doing something she had set me to, as I remember it was marking some shirts, which she had taken to make, and after a while she began to talk to me: “Thou foolish child,” says she, “thou art always crying,” (for I was crying then). “Prithee, what dost cry for?”
“Because they will take me away,” says I, “and put me to service, and I can’t work housework.”
“Well, child,” says she, “but though you can’t work housework you will learn it in time, and they won’t put you to hard things at first.”
“Yes they will,” says I, “and if I can’t do it, they will beat me, and the maids will beat me to make me do great work, and I am but a little girl, and I can’t do it.” And then I cried again, till I could not speak any more.
This moved my good motherly nurse, so that she resolved I should not go to service yet, so she bid me not cry, and she would speak to Mr. Mayor, and I should not go to service till I was bigger.
Well, this did not satisfy me, for to think of going to service at all was such a frightful thing to me, that if she had assured me I should not have gone till I was twenty years old, it would have been the same to me, I should have cried all the time, with the very apprehension of its being to be so at last.
When she saw that I was not pacified yet, she began to be angry with me. “And what would you have,” says she. “Don’t I tell you that you shall not go to service till you are bigger?”
“Ay,” says I, “but then I must go at last.”
“Why, what,” said she, “is the girl mad? What would you be, a gentlewoman?”
“Yes,” says I, and cried heartily till I roared out again.
This set the old gentlewoman a-laughing at me, as you may be sure it would.
“Well, madam, forsooth,” says she, gibing at me, “you would be a gentlewoman, and how will you come to be a gentlewoman? What, will you do it by your fingers’ ends?”
“Yes,” says I again, very innocently.
“Why, what can you earn,” says she, “what can you get a day at your work?”
“Threepence,” said I, “when I spin, and fourpence when I work plain work.”
“Alas! poor gentlewoman,” said she again, laughing, “what will that do for thee?”
“It will keep me,” says I, “if you will let me live with you;” and this I said in such a poor petitioning tone, that it made the poor woman’s heart yearn to me, as she told me afterwards.
“But,” says she, “that will not keep you and buy you clothes too; and who must buy the little gentlewoman clothes?” says she, and smiled all the while at me.
“I will work harder then,” says I, “and you shall have it all.”
“Poor child! It won’t keep you,” said she, “it will hardly find you victuals.”
“Then I would have no victuals,” says I again, very innocently, “let me but live with you.”
“Why, can you live without victuals?” says she.
“Yes,” again says I, very much like a child, you may be sure, and still I cried heartily.
I had no policy in all this, you may easily see it was all nature, but it was joined with so much innocence, and so much passion, that in short, it set the good motherly creature a-weeping too, and at last she cried as fast as I did, and then took me, and led me out of the teaching room.
“Come,” says she, “you shan’t go to service, you shall live with me,” and this pacified me for the present.
After this, she going to wait on the Mayor, my story came up, and my good nurse told Mr. Mayor the whole tale: he was so pleased with it, that he would call his lady and his two daughters to hear it, and it made mirth enough among them, you may be sure.
However, not a week had passed over, but on a sudden comes Mrs. Mayoress and her two daughters to the house to see my old nurse, and to see her school and the children: when they had looked about them a little: “Well, Mrs.—,” says the Mayoress to my nurse; “and pray which is the little lass that is to be a gentlewoman?” I heard her, and I was terrible frighted, though I did not know why neither; but Mrs. Mayoress comes up to me, “Well, Miss,” says she, “and what are you at work upon?”
The word “Miss” was a language that had hardly been heard of in our school, and I wondered what sad name it was she called me; however, I stood up, made a curtsy, and she took my work out of my hand, looked on it, and said it was very well; then she looked upon one of my hands. “Nay, she may come to be a gentlewoman,” says she, “for ought I know; she has a lady’s hand, I assure you.” This pleased me mightily; but Mrs. Mayoress did not stop there, but put her hand in her pocket, gave me a shilling, and bid me mind my work, and learn to work well, and I might be a gentlewoman for ought she knew.
All this while, my good old nurse, Mrs. Mayoress, and all the rest of them, did not understand me at all, for they meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I meant quite another: for alas, all I understood by being a gentlewoman, was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without going to service, whereas they meant to live great and high, and I know not what.
Well, after Mrs. Mayoress was gone, her two daughters came in, and they called for the gentlewoman too, and they talked a long while to me, and I answered them in my innocent way; but always if they asked whether I resolved to be a gentlewoman, I answered, “Yes.” At last they asked me, what a gentlewoman was? That puzzled me much; however, I explained myself negatively, that it was one that did not go to service, to do housework; they were mightily pleased, and liked my little prattle to them, which it seems was agreeable enough to them, and they gave me money too.
As for my money, I gave it all to my Mistress Nurse, as I called her, and told her, she should have all I got when I was a gentlewoman, as well as now; by this and some other of my talk, my old tutoress began to understand what I meant by being a gentlewoman; and that it was no more than to be able to get my bread by my own work, and at last, she asked me whether it was not so.
I told her, “Yes,” and insisted on it, that to do so, was to be a gentlewoman; “for,” says I, “there is such a one,” naming a woman that mended lace, and washed the ladies’ laced-heads; “she,” says I, “is a gentlewoman, and they call her madam.”
“Poor child,” says my good old nurse, “you may soon be such a gentlewoman as that, for she is a person of ill fame, and has had two bastards.”
I did not understand anything of that; but I answered, “I am sure they call her madam, and she does not go to service nor do housework,” and therefore I insisted, that she was a gentlewoman, and I would be such a gentlewoman as that.
The ladies were told all this again, and they made themselves merry with it, and every now and then Mr. Mayor’s daughters would come and see me, and ask where the little gentlewoman was, which made me not a little proud of myself besides. I was often visited by these young ladies, and sometimes they brought others with them; so that I was known by it almost all over the town.
I was now about ten years old, and began to look a little womanish, for I was mighty grave, very mannerly, and as I had often heard the ladies say I was pretty, and would be very handsome, you may be sure it made me not a little proud: however, that pride had no ill effect upon me yet, only as they often gave me money, and I gave it my old nurse, she, honest woman, was so just as to lay it out again for me, and gave me head-dresses, and linen, and gloves, and I went very neat, for if I had rags on, I would always be clean, or else I would dabble them in water myself; but I say, my good nurse, when I had money given me, very honestly laid it out for me, and would always tell the ladies this, or that, was bought with their money; and this made them give me more, till at last, I was indeed called upon by the magistrates to go out to service; but then I was become so good a workwoman myself, and the ladies were so kind to me, that I was past it; for I could earn as much for my nurse as was enough to keep me; so she told them, that if they would give her leave, she would keep the gentlewoman, as she called me, to be her assistant, and teach the children, which I was very well able to do; for I was very nimble at my work, though I was yet very young.
But the kindness of the ladies did not end here, for when they understood that I was no more maintained by the town as before, they gave me money oftener; and as I grew up, they brought me work to do for them; such as linen to make, laces to mend, and heads to dress up, and not only paid me for doing them, but even taught me how to do them; so that I was a gentlewoman indeed, as I understood that word; for before I was twelve years old, I not only found myself clothes, and paid my nurse for my keeping, but got money in my pocket too.
The ladies also gave me clothes frequently of their own or their children’s; some stockings, some petticoats, some gowns, some one thing, some another, and these my old woman managed for me like a mother, and kept them for me, obliged me to mend them, and turn them to the best advantage, for she was a rare housewife.
At last one of the ladies took such a fancy to me, that she would have me home to her house, for a month, she said, to be among her daughters.
Now though this was exceeding kind in her, yet as my good woman said to her, unless she resolved to keep me for good and all, she would do the little gentlewoman more harm than good.
“Well,” says the lady, “that’s true, I’ll only take her home for a week then, that I may see how my daughters and she agree, and how I like her temper, and then I’ll tell you more; and in the meantime, if anybody comes to see her as they used to do, you may only tell them, you have sent her out to my house.”
This was prudently managed enough, and I went to the lady’s house, but I was so pleased there with the young ladies, and they so pleased with me, that I had enough to do to come away, and they were so unwilling to part with me.
However, I did come away, and lived almost a year more with my honest old woman, and began now to be very helpful to her; for I was almost fourteen years old, was tall of my age, and looked a little womanish; but I had such a taste of genteel living at the lady’s house, that I was not so easy in my old quarters as I used to be, and I thought it was fine to be a gentlewoman indeed, for I had quite other notions of a gentlewoman now, than I had before; and as I thought that it was fine to be a gentlewoman, so I loved to be among gentlewomen, and therefore I longed to be there again.
When I was about fourteen years and a quarter old, my good old nurse, mother, I ought to call her, fell sick and died; I was then in a sad condition indeed, for as there is no great bustle in putting an end to a poor body’s family, when once they are carried to the grave; so the poor good woman being buried, the parish children were immediately removed by the churchwardens; the school was at an end, and the day children of it had no more to do but just stay at home, till they were sent somewhere else; as for what she left, a daughter, a married woman, came and swept it all away, and removing the goods, they had no more to say to me than to jest with me, and tell me, that the little gentlewoman might set up for herself, if she pleased.
I was frighted out of my wits almost, and knew not what to do; for I was, as it were, turned out of doors to the wide world, and that which was still worse, the old honest woman had two-and-twenty shillings of mine in her hand, which was all the estate the little gentlewoman had in the world; and when I asked the daughter for it, she huffed me, and told me she had nothing to do with it.
It was true the good poor woman had told her daughter of it, and that it lay in such a place, that it was the child’s money, and had called once or twice for me to give it me, but I was unhappily out of the way, and when I came back she was past being in a condition to speak of it: however, the daughter was so honest afterwards as to give it me, though at first she used me cruelly about it.
Now was I a poor gentlewoman indeed, and I was just that very night to be turned into the wide world; for the daughter removed all the goods, and I had not so much as a lodging to go to, or a bit of bread to eat: but it seems some of the neighbours took so much compassion of me, as to acquaint the lady in whose family I had been; and immediately she sent her maid to fetch me; and away I went with them bag and baggage, and with a glad heart you may be sure: the fright of my condition had made such an impression upon me, that I did not want now to be a gentlewoman, but was very willing to be a servant, and that any kind of servant they thought fit to have me be.
But my new generous mistress had better thoughts for me. I call her generous, for she exceeded the good woman I was with before in everything, as in estate; I say, in everything except honesty; and for that, though this was a lady most exactly just, yet I must not forget to say on all occasions, that the first, though poor, was as uprightly honest as it was possible.
I was no sooner carried away as I have said by this good gentlewoman, but the first lady, that is to say, the Mayoress that was, sent her daughters to take care of me; and another family which had taken notice of me when I was the little gentlewoman, sent for me after her, so that I was mightily made of; nay, and they were not a little angry, especially the Mayoress, that her friend had taken me away from her; for as she said, I was hers by right, she having been the first that took any notice of me; but they that had me, would not part with me; and as for me I could not be better than where I was.
Here I continued till I was between seventeen and eighteen years old, and here I had all the advantages for my education, that could be imagined; the lady had masters home to teach her daughters to dance, and to speak French, and to write, and others to teach them music; and as I was always with them, I learned as fast as they; and though the masters were not appointed to teach me, yet I learned by imitation and enquiry, all that they learned by instruction and direction. So that in short, I learned to dance and speak French as well as any of them, and to sing much better, for I had a better voice than any of them; I could not so readily come at playing the harpsichord or spinnet, because I had no instrument of my own to practise on, and could only come at theirs in the intervals when they left it; but yet I learned tolerably well, and the young ladies at length got two instruments, that is to say, a harpsichord and a spinnet too, and then they taught me themselves; but as to dancing, they could hardly help my learning country dances, because they always wanted me to make up even number; and on the other hand, they were as heartily willing to learn me everything that they had been taught themselves, as I could be to take the learning.
By this means I had, as I have said, all the advantages of education that I could have had, if I had been as much a gentlewoman as they were, with whom I lived; and in some things I had the advantage of my ladies, though they were my superiors, viz., that mine were all the gifts of Nature, and which all their fortunes could not furnish. First, I was apparently handsomer than any of them. Secondly, I was better shaped, and thirdly, I sung better, by which I mean, I had a better voice; in all which you will, I hope, allow me to say, I do not speak my own conceit, but the opinion of all that knew the family.
I had with all these the common vanity of my sex, viz., that being really taken for very handsome, or if you please for a great beauty, I very well knew it, and had as good an opinion of myself, as anybody else could have of me, and particularly I loved to hear anybody speak of it, which happened often, and was a great satisfaction to me.
Thus far I have had a smooth story to tell of myself, and in all this part of my life, I not only had the reputation of living in a very good family, and a family noted and respected everywhere for virtue and sobriety, and for every valuable thing; but I had the character too of a very sober, modest, and virtuous young woman, and such I had always been; neither had I yet any occasion to think of anything else, or to know what a temptation to wickedness meant.
But that which I was too vain of, was my ruin, or rather my vanity was the cause of it. The lady in the house where I was, had two sons, young gentlemen of extraordinary parts and behaviour; and it was my misfortune to be very well with them both, but they managed themselves with me in a quite different manner.
The eldest, a gay gentleman that knew the town as well as the country, and though he had levity enough to do an ill-natured thing, yet had too much judgment of things to pay too dear for his pleasures; he began with that unhappy snare to all women, viz., taking notice upon all occasions how pretty I was, as he called it, how agreeable, how well carriaged, and the like; and this he contrived so subtly, as if he had known as well how to catch a woman in his net, as a partridge when he went a setting; for he would contrive to be talking this to his sisters, when though I was not by, yet when he knew I was not so far off, but that I should be sure to hear him: his sisters would return softly to him, “Hush, brother, she will hear you, she is but in the next room”; then he would put it off, and talk softlier as if he had not known it, and begin to acknowledge he was wrong; and then as if he had forgot himself, he would speak aloud again, and I that was so well pleased to hear it, was sure to listen for it upon all occasions.
After he had thus baited his hook, and found easily enough the method how to lay it in my way, he played an open game; and one day going by his sister’s chamber when I was there, he comes in with an air of gaiety, “O! Mrs. Betty,” said he to me, “how do you do, Mrs. Betty? Don’t your cheeks burn, Mrs. Betty?” I made a curtsy, and blushed, but said nothing.
“What makes you talk so, brother?” says the lady.
“Why,” says he, “we have been talking of her below stairs this half hour.”
“Well,” says his sister, “you can say no harm of her, that I am sure, so it is no matter what you have been talking about.”
“Nay,” says he, “it is so far from talking harm of her, that we have been talking a great deal of good, and a great many fine things have been said of Mrs. Betty, I assure you; and particularly, that she is the handsomest young woman in Colchester, and, in short, they begin to toast her health in the town.”
“I wonder at you brother,” says the sister. “Betty wants but one thing, but she had as good want everything, for the market is against our sex just now; and if a young woman has beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all to an extreme; yet if she has not money, she’s nobody, she had as good want them all; nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands.”
Her younger brother, who was by, cried, “Hold, sister, you run too fast, I am an exception to your rule: I assure you, if I find a woman so accomplished as you talk of, I won’t trouble myself about the money.”
“O,” says the sister, “but you will take care not to fancy one then without the money.”
“You don’t know that neither,” says the brother.
“But why, sister,” says the elder brother, “why do you exclaim so about the fortune? You are none of them that want a fortune, whatever else you want.”
“I understand you, brother,” replies the lady very smartly, “you suppose I have the money and want the beauty; but as times go now, the first will do, so I have the better of my neighbours.”
“Well,” says the younger brother, “but your neighbours may be even with you; for beauty will steal a husband sometimes in spite of money; and when the maid chances to be handsomer than the mistress, she oftentimes makes as good a market, and rides in a coach before her.”
I thought it was time for me to withdraw, and I did so; but not so far, but that I heard all their discourse, in which I heard abundance of fine things said of myself, which prompted my vanity, but, as I soon found, was not the way to increase my interest in the family, for the sister and the younger brother fell grievously out about it; and as he said some very disobliging things to her, upon my account, so I could easily see that she resented them, by her future conduct to me, which indeed was very unjust; for I had never had the least thought of what she suspected, as to her younger brother: indeed the elder brother in his distant remote way had said a great many things as in jest, which I had the folly to believe were in earnest, or to flatter myself with the hopes of what I ought to have supposed he never intended.
It happened one day that he came running upstairs, towards the room where his sister used to sit and work, as he often used to do; and calling to them before he came in, as was his way too, I being there alone, stepped to the door, and said, “Sir, the ladies are not here, they are walked down the garden.”
As I stepped forward to say this, he was just got to the door, and clasping me in his arms, as if it had been by chance, “O! Mrs. Betty,” says he, “are you here? that’s better still, I want to speak with you, more than I do with them.” And then having me in his arms he kissed me three or four times.
I struggled to get away, and yet did it but faintly neither, and he held me fast, and still kissed me, till he was out of breath, and, sitting down, says he, “Dear Betty, I am in love with you.”
His words, I must confess, fired my blood; all my spirits flew about my heart, and put me into disorder enough. He repeated it afterwards several times, that he was in love with me, and my heart spoke as plain as a voice, that I liked it; nay, whenever he said, “I am in love with you,” my blushes plainly replied “Would you were, Sir.” However, nothing else passed at that time; it was but a surprise, and I soon recovered myself. He had stayed longer with me, but he happened to look out at the window and see his sisters coming up the garden, so he took his leave, kissed me again, told me he was very serious, and I should hear more of him very quickly, and away he went infinitely pleased, and had there not been one misfortune in it, I had been in the right, but the mistake lay here, that Mrs. Betty was in earnest, and the gentleman was not.
From this time my head run upon strange things, and I may truly say, I was not myself, to have such a gentleman talk to me of being in love with me, and of my being such a charming creature, as he told me I was, these were things I knew not how to bear, my vanity was elevated to the last degree. It is true, I had my head full of pride, but knowing nothing of the wickedness of the times, I had not one thought of my virtue about me; and had my young master offered it at first sight, he might have taken any liberty he thought fit with me; but he did not see his advantage, which was my happiness for that time.
It was not long but he found an opportunity to catch me again, and almost in the same posture, indeed it had more of design in it on his part, though not on my part. It was thus: the young ladies were gone a-visiting with their mother; his brother was out of town, and as for his father he had been at London for a week before; he had so well watched me, that he knew where I was, though I did not so much as know that he was in the house, and he briskly comes up the stairs, and seeing me at work, comes into the room to me directly, and began just as he did before, with taking me in his arms, and kissing me for almost a quarter of an hour together.
It was his younger sister’s chamber that I was in, and as there was nobody in the house but the maid below stairs, he was it may be the ruder: in short, he began to be in earnest with me indeed; perhaps he found me a little too easy, for I made no resistance to him while he only held me in his arms and kissed me; indeed I was too well pleased with it, to resist him much.
Well, tired with that kind of work, we sat down, and there he talked with me a great while; he said, he was charmed with me, and that he could not rest till he had told me how he was in love with me, and if I could love him again, and would make him happy, I should be the saving of his life; and many such fine things. I said little to him again, but easily discovered that I was a fool, and that I did not in the least perceive what he meant.
Then he walked about the room, and taking me by the hand, I walked with him; and by and by taking his advantage, he threw me down upon the bed, and kissed me there most violently; but to give him his due, offered no manner of rudeness to me, only kissed me a great while; after this he thought he had heard somebody come upstairs, so he got off from the bed, lifted me up, professing a great deal of love for me, but told me it was all an honest affection, and that he meant no ill to me, and with that put five guineas into my hand, and went downstairs.
I was more confounded with the money than I was before with the love; and began to be so elevated, that I scarce knew the ground I stood on: I am the more particular in this, that if it comes to be read by any innocent young body, they may learn from it to guard themselves against the mischiefs which attend an early knowledge of their own beauty; if a young woman once thinks herself handsome, she never doubts the truth of any man that tells her he is in love with her; for if she believes herself charming enough to captivate him, it is natural to expect the effects of it.
This gentleman had now fired his inclination, as much as he had my vanity, and as if he had found that he had an opportunity, and was sorry he did not take hold of it, he comes up again in about half an hour, and falls to work with me again just as he did before, only with a little less introduction.
And first, when he entered the room, he turned about, and shut the door. “Mrs. Betty,” said he, “I fancied before somebody was coming upstairs, but it was not so. However,” adds he, “if they find me in the room with you, they shan’t catch me a-kissing you.”
I told him I did not know who should be coming upstairs, for I believed there was nobody in the house, but the cook, and the other maid, and they never came up those stairs.
“Well, my dear,” says he, “it is good to be sure however,” and so he sits down and we began to talk; and now, though I was still on fire with his first visit, and said little, he did as it were put words in my mouth, telling me how passionately he loved me, and that though he could not till he came to his estate, yet he was resolved to make me happy then, and himself too; that is to say, to marry me, and abundance of such things, which I, poor fool, did not understand the drift of, but acted as if there was no kind of love but that which tended to matrimony; and if he had spoken of that, I had no room, as well as no power, to have said no; but we were not come to that length yet.
We had not sat long, but he got up, and stopping my very breath with kisses, threw me upon the bed again; but then he went further with me than decency permits me to mention, nor had it been in my power to have denied him at that moment, had he offered much more than he did.
However, though he took these freedoms with me, it did not go to that which they call the last favour, which, to do him justice, he did not attempt; and he made that self-denial of his a plea for all his freedoms with me upon other occasions after this: when this was over, he stayed but a little while, but he put almost a handful of gold in my hand, and left me a thousand protestations of his passion for me, and of his loving me above all the women in the world.
It will not be strange, if I now began to think; but alas! it was but with very little solid reflections: I had a most unbounded stock of vanity and pride, and but a very little stock of virtue: I did indeed cast sometimes with myself what my young master aimed at, but thought of nothing but the fine words and the gold; whether he intended to marry me or not seemed a matter of no great consequence to me; nor did I so much as think of making any capitulation for myself, until he made a kind of formal proposal to me, as you shall hear presently.
Thus I gave up myself to ruin without the least concern, and am a fair memento to all young women, whose vanity prevails over their virtue: nothing was ever so stupid on both sides, had I acted as became me, and resisted as virtue and honour required, he had either desisted his attacks, finding no room to expect the end of his design, or had made fair and honourable proposals of marriage; in which case, whoever blamed him, nobody could have blamed me. In short, if he had known me, and how easy the trifle he aimed at was to be had, he would have troubled his head no farther, but have given me four or five guineas, and have lain with me the next time he had come at me: on the other hand, if I had known his thoughts, and how hard he supposed I would be to be gained, I might have made my own terms, and if I had not capitulated for an immediate marriage, I might for a maintenance till marriage, and might have had what I would; for he was rich to excess, besides what he had in expectation; but I had wholly abandoned all such thoughts, and was taken up only with the pride of my beauty, and of being beloved by such a gentleman: as for the gold, I spent whole hours in looking upon it; I told the guineas over a thousand times a day: never poor vain creature was so wrapt up with every part of the story as I was, not considering what was before me, and how near my ruin was at the door; and indeed I think, I rather wished for that ruin, than studied to avoid it.
In the meantime, however, I was cunning enough, not to give the least room to any in the family to imagine that I had the least correspondence with him; I scarce ever looked towards him in public, or answered if he spoke to me; when, but for all that, we had every now and then a little encounter, where we had room for a word or two, and now and then a kiss, but no fair opportunity for the mischief intended; and especially considering that he made more circumlocution than he had occasion for, and the work appearing difficult to him, he really made it so.
But as the Devil is an unwearied tempter, so he never fails to find an opportunity for the wickedness he invites to: it was one evening that I was in the garden, with his two younger sisters and himself, when he found means to convey a note into my hand, by which he told me that he would tomorrow desire me publicly to go of an errand for him, and that I should see him somewhere by the way.
Accordingly after dinner, he very gravely says to me, his sisters being all by, “Mrs. Betty, I must ask a favour of you.”
“What’s that?” says the second sister.
“Nay, sister,” says he, very gravely, “if you can’t spare Mrs. Betty today, any other time will do.”
Yes, they said, they could spare her well enough, and the sister begged pardon for asking.
“Well, but,” says the eldest sister, “you must tell Mrs. Betty what it is; if it be any private business that we must not hear, you may call her out, there she is.”
“Why, sister,” says the gentleman very gravely, “what do you mean? I only desire her to go into the High Street” (and then he pulls out a turnover), “to such a shop.” And then he tells them a long story of two fine neckcloths he had bid money for, and he wanted to have me go and make an errand to buy a neck to that turnover that he showed, and if they would not take my money for the neckcloths to bid a shilling more, and haggle with them; and then he made more errands, and so continued to have such petty business to do, that I should be sure to stay a good while.
When he had given me my errands, he told them a long story of a visit he was going to make to a family they all knew, and where was to be such and such gentlemen, and very formally asked his sisters to go with him, and they as formally excused themselves, because of company that they had notice was to come and visit them that afternoon, all which by the way he had contrived on purpose.
He had scarce done speaking, but his man came up to tell him that Sir W — H —’s coach stopped at the door; so he runs down, and comes up again immediately. “Alas!” says he aloud, “there’s all my mirth spoiled at once; Sir W — has sent his coach for me, and desires to speak with me.” It seems this Sir W — was a gentleman who lived about three miles off, to whom he had spoke on purpose to lend him his chariot for a particular occasion, and had appointed it to call for him, as it did, about three o’clock.
Immediately he calls for his best wig, hat, and sword, and ordering his man to go to the other place to make his excuse, that was to say, he made an excuse to send his man away, he prepares to go into the coach. As he was going, he stopped awhile, and speaks mightily earnestly to me about his business, and finds an opportunity to say very softly, “Come away, my dear, as soon as ever you can.” I said nothing, but made a curtsy, as if I had done so to what he said in public; in about a quarter of an hour I went out too; I had no dress, other than before, except that I had a hood, a mask, a fan, and a pair of gloves in my pocket; so that there was not the least suspicion in the house. He waited for me in a back lane, which he knew I must pass by, and the coachman knew whither to go, which was to a certain place called Mile End, where lived a confidant of his, where we went in, and where was all the convenience in the world to be as wicked as we pleased.
When we were together, he began to talk very gravely to me, and to tell me, he did not bring me there to betray me; that his passion for me would not suffer him to abuse me: that he resolved to marry me as soon as he came to his estate; that in the meantime, if I would grant his request, he would maintain me very honourably, and made me a thousand protestations of his sincerity, and of his affection to me; and that he would never abandon me, and, as I may say, made a thousand more preambles than he need to have done.
However, as he pressed me to speak, I told him I had no reason to question the sincerity of his love to me, after so many protestations, but— and there I stopped, as if I left him to guess the rest.
“But what, my dear,” says he, “I guess what you mean, what if you should be with child, is not that it? Why then,” says he, “I’ll take care of you, and provide for you, and the child, too, and that you may see I am not in jest,” says he, “here’s an earnest for you”— and with that he pulls out a silk purse with an hundred guineas in it, and gave it me— “and I’ll give you such another,” says he, “every year till I marry you.”
My colour came and went at the sight of the purse, and with the fire of his proposal together, so that I could not say a word, and he easily perceived it; so putting the purse into my bosom, I made no more resistance to him, but let him do just what he pleased, and as often as he pleased; and thus I finished my own destruction at once, for from this day, being forsaken of my virtue, and my modesty, I had nothing of value left to recommend me, either to God’s blessing, or man’s assistance.
But things did not end here, I went back to the town, did the business he directed me to, and was at home before anybody thought me long; as for my gentleman, he stayed out till late at night, and there was not the least suspicion in the family, either on his account or on mine.
We had after this, frequent opportunities to repeat our crime, and especially at home when his mother and the young ladies went abroad a-visiting, which he watched so narrowly, as never to miss; knowing always beforehand when they went out, and then failed not to catch me all alone, and securely enough; so that we took our fill of our wicked pleasures for near half a year; and yet, which was the most to my satisfaction, I was not with child.
But before this half year was expired, his younger brother, of whom I have made some mention in the beginning of the story, falls to work with me; and he finding me alone in the garden one evening, begins a story of the same kind to me, made good honest professions of being in love with me; and, in short, proposes fairly and honourably to marry me.
I was now confounded, and driven to such an extremity, as the like was never known to me; I resisted the proposal with obstinacy, and began to arm myself with arguments: I laid before him the inequality of the match, the treatment I should meet with in the family, the ingratitude it would be to his good father and mother, who had taken me into their house upon such generous principles, and when I was in such a low condition; and, in short, I said everything to dissuade him that I could imagine except telling him the truth, which would indeed have put an end to it all, but that I durst not think of mentioning.
But here happened a circumstance that I did not expect indeed, which put me to my shifts; for this young gentleman, as he was plain and honest, so he pretended to nothing but what was so too; and knowing his own innocence, he was not so careful to make his having a kindness for Mrs. Betty a secret in the house, as his brother was; and though he did not let them know that he had talked to me about it, yet he said enough to let his sisters perceive he loved me, and his mother saw it too, which though they took no notice of to me, yet they did to him, and immediately I found their carriage to me altered more than ever before.
I saw the cloud, though I did not foresee the storm; it was easy, I say, to see their carriage was altered, and that it grew worse and worse every day, until at last I got information that I should in a very little while be desired to remove.
I was not alarmed at the news, having a full satisfaction that I should be provided for; and especially considering that I had reason every day to expect I should be with child, and that then I should be obliged to remove without any pretences for it.
After some time, the younger gentleman took an opportunity to tell me, that the kindness he had for me had got vent in the family; he did not charge me with it, he said, for he knew well enough which way it came out; he told me his way of talking had been the occasion of it, for that he did not make his respect for me so much a secret as he might have done, and the reason was, that he was at a point that if I would consent to have him, he would tell them all openly that he loved me, and that he intended to marry me: that it was true, his father and mother might resent it, and be unkind, but he was now in a way to live, being bred to the law, and he did not fear maintaining me, and that in short, as he believed I would not be ashamed of him, so he was resolved not to be ashamed of me, and that he scorned to be afraid to own me now, who he resolved to own after I was his wife, and therefore I had nothing to do but to give him my hand, and he would answer for all the rest.
I was now in a dreadful condition indeed, and now I repented heartily my easiness with the eldest brother, not from any reflection of conscience, for I was a stranger to those things, but I could not think of being a whore to one brother, and a wife to the other; it came also into my thoughts, that the first brother had promised to make me his wife when he came to his estate; but I presently remembered, what I had often thought of, that he had never spoken a word of having me for a wife, after he had conquered me for a mistress; and indeed till now, though I said I thought of it often, yet it gave no disturbance at all, for as he did not seem in the least to lessen his affection to me, so neither did he lessen his bounty, though he had the discretion himself to desire me not to lay out a penny in clothes, or to make the least show extraordinary, because it would necessarily give jealousy in the family, since everybody knew I could come at such things no manner of ordinary way, but by some private friendship, which they would presently have suspected.
I was now in a great strait, and knew not what to do; the main difficulty was this, the younger brother not only laid close siege to me, but suffered it to be seen; he would come into his sister’s room, and his mother’s room, and sit down, and talk a thousand kind things to me, even before their faces; so that the whole house talked of it, and his mother reproved him for it, and their carriage to me appeared quite altered; in short, his mother had let fall some speeches, as if she intended to put me out of the family, that is in English, to turn me out of doors. Now, I was sure this could not be a secret to his brother, only that he might think, as indeed nobody else yet did, that the youngest brother had made any proposal to me about it; but as I easily could see that it would go farther, so I saw likewise there was an absolute necessity to speak of it to him, or that he would speak of it to me, but knew not whether I should break it to him, or let it alone till he should break it to me.
Upon serious consideration, for indeed now I began to consider things very seriously, and never till now, I resolved to tell him of it first, and it was not long before I had an opportunity, for the very next day his brother went to London upon some business, and the family being out a-visiting, just as it happened before, and as indeed was often the case, he came according to his custom to spend an hour or two with Mrs. Betty.
When he had sat down awhile, he easily perceived there was an alteration in my countenance, that I was not so free and pleasant with him as I used to be, and particularly, that I had been a crying; he was not long before he took notice of it, and asked me in very kind terms what was the matter, and if anything troubled me: I would have put it off if I could, but it was not to be concealed; so after suffering many importunities to draw that out of me which I longed as much as possible to disclose, I told him that it was true, something did trouble me, and something of such a nature that I could hardly conceal from him, and yet that I could not tell how to tell him of it neither; that it was a thing that not only surprised me, but greatly perplexed me, and that I knew not what course to take, unless he would direct me. He told me with great tenderness, that let it be what it would, I should not let it trouble me, for he would protect me from all the world.
I then began at a distance, and told him I was afraid the ladies had got some secret information of our correspondence; for that it was easy to see that their conduct was very much changed towards me, and that now it was come to pass, that they frequently found fault with me, and sometimes fell quite out with me, though I never gave them the least occasion: that whereas I used always to lie with the eldest sister, I was lately put to lie by myself, or with one of the maids; and that I had overheard them several times talking very unkindly about me; but that which confirmed it all was, that one of the servants had told me that she had heard I was to be turned out, and that it was not safe for the family that I should be any longer in the house.
He smiled when he heard of this, and I asked him how he could make so light of it, when he must need know that if there was any discovery, I was undone, and that it would hurt him, though not ruin him, as it would me: I upbraided him, that he was like the rest of his sex, that when they had the character of a woman at their mercy, oftentimes made it their jest, and at least looked upon it as a trifle, and counted the ruin of those they had had their will of, as a thing of no value.
He saw me warm and serious, and he changed his style immediately; he told me, he was sorry I should have such a thought of him: that he had never given me the least occasion for it, but had been as tender of my reputation, as he could be of his own; that he was sure our correspondence had been managed with so much address, that not one creature in the family had so much as a suspicion of it; that if he smiled when I told him my thoughts, it was at the assurance he lately received, that our understanding one another was not so much as guessed at, and that when he had told me how much reason he had to be easy, I should smile as he did, for he was very certain it would give me a full satisfaction.
“This is a mystery I cannot understand,” says I, “or how it should be to my satisfaction, that I am to be turned out of doors; for if our correspondence is not discovered, I know not what else I have done to change the faces of the whole family to me, who formerly used me with so much tenderness, as if I had been one of their own children.”
“Why, look you, child,” says he; “that they are uneasy about you, that is true, but that they have the least suspicion of the case as it is, and as it respects you and I, is so far from being true, that they suspect my brother Robin, and, in short, they are fully persuaded he makes love to you: nay, the fool has put it into their heads too himself, for he is continually bantering them about it, and making a jest of himself; I confess I think he is wrong to do so, because he cannot but see it vexes them, and makes them unkind to you; but it is a satisfaction to me, because of the assurance it gives me, that they do not suspect me in the least, and I hope this will be to your satisfaction too.”
“So it is,” says I, “one way, but this does not reach my case at all, nor is this the chief thing that troubles me, though I have been concerned about that too.”
“What is it then?” says he. With which, I fell into tears, and could say nothing to him at all. He strove to pacify me all he could, but began at last to be very pressing upon me, to tell what it was; at last I answered, that I thought I ought to tell him too, and that he had some right to know it, besides, that I wanted his direction in the case, for I was in such perplexity that I knew not what course to take, and then I related the whole affair to him; I told him, how imprudently his brother had managed himself, in making himself so public; for that if he had kept it a secret, I could but have denied him positively, without giving any reason for it, and he would in time have ceased his solicitations; but that he had the vanity, first, to depend upon it that I would not deny him, and then had taken the freedom to tell his design to the whole house.
I told him how far I had resisted him, and how sincere and honourable his offers were. “But,” says I, “my case will be doubly hard; for as they carry it ill to me now, because he desires to have me, they’ll carry it worse when they shall find I have denied him: and they will presently say, there’s something else in it, and that I am married already to some body else, or that I would never refuse a match so much above me as this was.”
This discourse surprised him indeed very much. He told me that it was a critical point indeed for me to manage, and he did not see which way I should get out of it; but he would consider of it, and let me know next time we met, what resolution he was come to about it; and in the mean time, desired I would not give my consent to his brother, nor yet give him a flat denial, but that I would hold him in suspense awhile.
I seemed to start at his saying, I should not give him my consent; I told him he knew very well, I had no consent to give; that he had engaged himself to marry me, and that I was thereby engaged to him; that he had all along told me, I was his wife, and I looked upon myself as effectually so, as if the ceremony had passed; and that it was from his own mouth that I did so, he having all along persuaded me to call myself his wife.
“Well, my dear,” says he, “don’t be concerned at that now; if I am not your husband, I’ll be as good as a husband to you, and do not let those things trouble you now, but let me look a little farther into this affair, and I shall be able to say more next time we meet.”
He pacified me as well as he could with this, but I found he was very thoughtful, and that though he was very kind to me, and kissed me a thousand times, and more I believe, and gave me money too, yet he offered no more all the while we were together, which was above two hours, and which I much wondered at, considering how it used to be, and what opportunity we had.
His brother did not come from London for five or six days, and it was two days before he got an opportunity to talk with him; but then getting him by himself, he talked very close to him about it; and the same evening found means (for we had a long conference together) to repeat all their discourse to me, which as near as I can remember, was to the purpose following:
He told him he heard strange news of him since he went, viz., that he had made love to Mrs. Betty.
“Well,” says his brother, a little angrily, “and what then? What has anybody to do with that?”
“Nay,” says his brother, “don’t be angry, Robin, I don’t pretend to have anything to do with it; but I find they do concern themselves about it, and that they have used the poor girl ill about it, which I should take as done to myself.”
“Who do you mean by they?” says Robin.
“I mean my mother and the girls,” says the elder brother.
“But hark ye,” says his brother, “are you in earnest, do you really love the girl?”
“Why then,” says Robin, “I will be free with you, I do love her above all the women in the world, and I will have her, let them say and do what they will, I believe the girl will not deny me.”
It stuck me to the heart when he told me this, for though it was most rational to think I would not deny him, yet I knew in my own conscience, I must, and I saw my ruin in my being obliged to do so; but I knew it was my business to talk otherwise then, so I interrupted him in his story thus:
“Ay!” said I, “does he think I cannot deny him? but he shall find I can deny him for all that.”
“Well, my dear,” says he, “but let me give you the whole story as it went on between us, and then say what you will.”
Then he went on and told me, that he replied thus:
“But, brother, you know she has nothing, and you may have several ladies with good fortunes.”
“‘Tis no matter for that,” said Robin, “I love the girl; and I will never please my pocket in marrying, and not please my fancy.”
“And so, my dear,” adds he, “there is no opposing him.”
“Yes, yes,” says I, “I can oppose him, I have learnt to say ‘No,’ now, though I had not learnt it before; if the best lord in the land offered me marriage now, I could very cheerfully say ‘No’ to him.”
“Well, but, my dear,” says he, “what can you say to him? You know, as you said before, he will ask you many questions about it, and all the house will wonder what the meaning of it should be.”
“Why,” says I, smiling, “I can stop all their mouths at one clap, by telling him and them too, that I am married already to his elder brother.”
He smiled a little too at the word, but I could see it startled him, and he could not hide the disorder it put him into: however, he returned, “Why though that may be true, in some sense, yet I suppose you are but in jest, when you talk of giving such an answer as that, it may not be convenient on many accounts.”
“No, no,” says I pleasantly, “I am not so fond of letting that secret come out, without your consent.”
“But what then can you say to them,” says he, “when they find you positive against a match which would be apparently so much to your advantage?”
“Why,” says I, “should I be at a loss? First, I am not obliged to give them any reason: on the other hand, I may tell them I am married already, and stop there, and that will be a full stop too to him, for he can have no reason to ask one question after it.”
“Ay,” says he, “but the whole house will tease you about that, and if you deny them positively, they will be disobliged at you, and suspicious besides.”
“Why,” says I, “what can I do? What would you have me do? I was in strait enough before, as I told you, and acquainted you with the circumstances, that I might have your advice.”
“My dear,” says he, “I have been considering very much upon it, you may be sure, and though the advice has many mortifications in it to me, and may at first seem strange to you, yet all things considered, I see no better way for you, than to let him go on; and if you find him hearty and in earnest, marry him.”
I gave him a look full of horror at those words, and turning pale as death, was at the very point of sinking down out of the chair I sat in: when giving a start, “My dear,” says he aloud, “what’s the matter with you? Where are you agoing?”—and a great many such things; and with jogging and calling to me, fetched me a little to myself, though it was a good while before I fully recovered my senses, and was not able to speak for several minutes.
When I was fully recovered, he began again: “My dear,” says he, “I would have you consider seriously of it: you may see plainly how the family stand in this case, and they would be stark mad if it was my case, as it is my brother’s, and for ought I see, it would be my ruin and yours too.”
“Ay!” says I, still speaking angrily; “are all your protestations and vows to be shaken by the dislike of the family? Did I not always object that to you, and you made a light thing of it, as what you were above, and would not value; and is it come to this now? Is this your faith and honour, your love, and the solidity of your promises?”
He continued perfectly calm, notwithstanding all my reproaches, and I was not sparing of them at all; but he replied at last, “My dear, I have not broken one promise with you yet; I did tell you I would marry you when I was come to my estate; but you see my father is a hail, healthy man, and may live these thirty years still, and not be older than several are round us in the town; and you never proposed my marrying you sooner, because you know it might be my ruin; and as to the rest, I have not failed you in anything.”
I could not deny a word of this. “But why then,” says I, “can you persuade me to such a horrid step, as leaving you, since you have not left me? Will you allow no affection, no love on my side, where there has been so much on your side? Have I made you no returns?
Have I given no testimony of my sincerity, and of my passion? Are the sacrifices I have made of honour and modesty to you, no proof of my being tied to you in bonds too strong to be broken?”
“But here, my dear,” says he, “you may come into a safe station, and appear with honour, and the remembrance of what we have done may be wrapped up in an eternal silence, as if it had never happened; you shall always have my sincere affection, only then it shall be honest, and perfectly just to my brother; you shall be my dear sister, as now you are my dear—” and there he stopped.
“Your dear whore,” says I, “you would have said, and you might as well have said it; but I understand you: however, I desire you to remember the long discourses you have had with me, and the many hours’ pains you have taken to persuade me to believe myself an honest woman; that I was your wife intentionally, and that it was as effectual a marriage that had passed between us, as if we had been publicly wedded by the parson of the parish; you know these have been your own words to me.”
I found this was a little too close upon him, but I made it up in what follows; he stood stock still for a while, and said nothing, and I went on thus:
“You cannot,” says I, “without the highest injustice believe that I yielded upon all these persuasions without a love not to be questioned, not to be shaken again by anything that could happen afterward. If you have such dishonourable thoughts of me, I must ask you what foundation have I given for such a suggestion. If then I have yielded to the importunities of my affection, and if I have been persuaded to believe that I am really your wife, shall I now give the lie to all those arguments, and call myself your whore, or mistress, which is the same thing? And will you transfer me to your brother? Can you transfer my affection? Can you bid me cease loving you, and bid me love him? Is it in my power, think you, to make such a change at demand? No, sir,” said I, “depend upon it, it is impossible, and whatever the change on your side may be, I will ever be true; and I had much rather, since it is come that unhappy length, be your whore than your brother’s wife.”
He appeared pleased and touched with the impression of this last discourse, and told me that he stood where he did before; that he had not been unfaithful to me in any one promise he had ever made yet, but that there were so many terrible things presented themselves to his view in the affair before me, that he had thought of the other as a remedy, only that he thought this would not be an entire parting us, but we might love as friends all our days, and perhaps with more satisfaction than we should in the station we were now in. That he durst say, I could not apprehend anything from him, as to betraying a secret, which could not but be the destruction of us both if it came out: that he had but one question to ask of me, that could lie in the way of it, and if that question was answered, he could not but think still it was the only step I could take.
I guessed at his question presently, namely, whether I was not with child? As to that, I told him, he need not be concerned about it, for I was not with child.
“Why then, my dear,” says he, “we have no time to talk farther now; consider of it, I cannot but be of the opinion still, that it will be the best course you can take.” And with this, he took his leave, and the more hastily too, his mother and sisters ringing at the gate just at the moment he had risen up to go.
He left me in the utmost confusion of thought; and he easily perceived it the next day, and all the rest of the week, but he had no opportunity to come at me all that week, till the Sunday after, when I being indisposed did not go to Church, and he making some excuse stayed at home.
And now he had me an hour and a half again by myself, and we fell into the same arguments all over again; at last I asked him warmly, “What opinion he must have of my modesty, that he could suppose, I should so much as entertain a thought of lying with two brothers?” And assured him it could never be. I added, “If he was to tell me that he would never see me more, than which nothing but death could be more terrible, yet I could never entertain a thought so dishonourable to myself, and so base to him; and therefore, I entreated him, if he had one grain of respect or affection left for me, that he would speak no more of it to me, or that he would pull his sword out and kill me.”
He appeared surprised at my obstinacy, as he called it, told me I was unkind to myself, and unkind to him in it; that it was a crisis unlooked for upon us both, but that he did not see any other way to save us both from ruin, and therefore he thought it the more unkind; but that if he must say no more of it to me, he added with an unusual coldness, that he did not know anything else we had to talk of; and so he rose up to take his leave; I rose up too, as if with the same indifference, but when he came to give me, as it were, a parting kiss, I burst out into such a passion of crying, that though I would have spoke, I could not, and only pressing his hand, seemed to give him the adieu, but cried vehemently.
He was sensibly moved with this; so he sat down again, and said a great many kind things to me, but still urged the necessity of what he had proposed; all the while insisting, that if I did refuse, he would notwithstanding provide for me; but letting me plainly see that he would decline me in the main point; nay, even as a mistress; making it a point of honour not to lie with the woman, that for ought he knew, might one time or other come to be his brother’s wife.
The bare loss of him as a gallant was not so much my affliction, as the loss of his person, whom indeed I loved to distraction; and the loss of all the expectations I had, and which I always built my hopes upon, of having him one day for my husband: these things oppressed my mind so much, that, in short, the agonies of my mind threw me into a high fever, and long it was, that none in the family expected my life.
I was reduced very low indeed, and was often delirious; but nothing lay so near me, as the fear that when I was light-headed, I should say something or other to his prejudice. I was distressed in my mind also to see him, and so he was to see me, for he really loved me most passionately; but it could not be; there was not the least room to desire it on one side, or other.
It was near five weeks that I kept my bed, and though the violence of my fever abated in three weeks, yet it several times returned; and the physicians said two or three times they could do no more for me, but that they must leave nature and the distemper to fight it out. After the end of five weeks I grew better, but was so weak, so altered, and recovered so slowly, that the physicians apprehended I should go into a consumption; and which vexed me most, they gave their opinion, that my mind was oppressed, that something troubled me, and, in short, that I was in love: upon this, the whole house set upon me to press me to tell, whether I was in love or not, and with whom? But as I well might, I denied my being in love at all.
They had on this occasion a squabble one day about me at table, that had like to put the whole family in an uproar, they happened to be all at table, but the father; as for me I was ill, and in my chamber. At the beginning of the talk, the old gentlewoman, who had sent me somewhat to eat, bid her maid go up, and ask me if I would have any more; but the maid brought down word, I had not eaten half what she had sent me already.
“Alas,” says the old lady, “that poor girl; I am afraid she will never be well.”
“Well!” says the elder brother, “how should Mrs. Betty be well, they say she is in love?”
“I believe nothing of it,” says the old gentlewoman.
“I don’t know,” says the eldest sister, “what to say to it, they have made such a rout about her being so handsome, and so charming, and I know not what, and that in her hearing, too, that has turned the creature’s head, I believe, and who knows what possessions may follow such doing? For my part I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Why, sister, you must acknowledge she is very handsome,” says the elder brother.
“Aye, and a great deal handsomer than you, sister,” says Robin, “and that’s your mortification.”
“Well, well, that is not the question,” says his sister. “The girl is well enough, and she knows it, she need not be told of it to make her vain.”
“We don’t talk of her being vain,” says the elder brother, “but of her being in love; maybe she is in love with herself, it seems my sisters think so.”
“I would she was in love with me,” says Robin. “I’d quickly put her out of her pain.”
“What do you mean by that, son?” says the old lady, “how can you talk so?”
“Why, madam,” says Robin again, very honestly, “do you think I’d let the poor girl die for love, and of me too, that is so near at hand to be had.”
“Fie, brother,” says the second sister, “how can you talk so? Would you take a creature that has not a groat in the world?”
“Prithee, child,” says Robin. “Beauty’s a portion, and good humour with it is a double portion; I wish thou hadst half her stock of both for thy portion.”
So there was her mouth stopped.
“I find,” says the eldest sister, “if Betty is not in love, my brother is. I wonder he had not broke his mind to Betty. I warrant she won’t say ‘No’.”
“They that yield when they are asked,” said Robin, “are one step before them that were never asked to yield, and two steps before them that yield before they are asked; and that’s an answer to you, sister.”
This fired the sister, and she flew into a passion, and said, things were come to that pass, that it was time the wench—meaning me—was out of the family; and but that she was not fit to be turned out, she hoped her father and mother would consider of it, as soon as she could be removed.
Robin replied, that was for the master and mistress of the family, who were not to be taught by one that had so little judgement as his eldest sister.
It run up a great deal farther; the sister scolded, Robin rallied and bantered, but poor Betty lost ground by it extremely in the family: I heard of it, and cried heartily, and the old lady came up to me, somebody having told her that I was so much concerned about it. I complained to her, that it was very hard the doctors should pass such a censure upon me, for which they had no ground; and that it was still harder, considering the circumstances I was under in the family; that I hoped I had done nothing to lessen her esteem for me, or given any occasion for the bickering between her sons and daughters; and I had more need to think of a coffin, than of being in love, and begged she would not let me suffer in her opinion for anybody’s mistakes but my own.
She was sensible of the justice of what I said, but told me, since there had been such a clamour among them, and that her younger son talked after such a rattling way as he did, she desired I would be so faithful to her, as to answer her but one question sincerely.
I told her I would, and with the utmost plainness and sincerity. Why then the question was, “whether there was anything between her son Robert and me?”
I told her with all the protestations of sincerity that I was able to make, and as I might well do, that there was not, nor ever had been; I told her, that Mr. Robert had rattled and jested, as she knew it was his way, and that I took it always as I supposed he meant it, to be a wild airy way of discourse that had no signification in it; and assured her, that there was not the least tittle of what she understood by it between us; and that those who had suggested it, had done me a great deal of wrong, and Mr. Robert no service at all.
The old lady was fully satisfied, and kissed me, spoke cheerfully to me, and bid me take care of my health, and want for nothing, and so took her leave. But when she came down, she found the brother and all his sisters together by the ears; they were angry even to passion, at his upbraiding them with their being homely, and having never had any sweethearts, never having been asked the question, their being so forward as almost to ask first, and the like. He rallied them with Mrs. Betty; how pretty, how good humoured, how she sung better than they did, and danced better, and how much handsomer she was; and in doing this, he omitted no ill-natured thing that could vex them. The old lady came down in the height of it, and to stop it, told them the discourse she had had with me, and how I answered, that there was nothing between Mr. Robert and I.
“She’s wrong there,” says Robin, “for if there was not a great deal between us, we should be closer together than we are. I told her I loved her hugely,” says he, “but I could never make the jade believe I was in earnest.”
“I do not know how you should,” says his mother, “nobody in their senses could believe you were in earnest, to talk so to a poor girl, whose circumstances you know so well.”
“But prithee, son,” adds she, “since you tell us you could not make her believe you were in earnest, what must we believe about it? For you ramble so in your discourse, that nobody knows whether you are in earnest or in jest. But as I find the girl by her own confession has answered truly, I wish you would do so too, and tell me seriously, so that I may depend upon it. Is there anything in it or no? Are you in earnest or no? Are you distracted indeed, or are you not? ‘Tis a weighty question, I wish you would make us easy about it.”
“By my faith, madam,” says Robin, “‘tis in vain to mince the matter, or tell any more lies about it, I am in earnest, as much as a man is that’s going to be hanged. If Mrs. Betty would say she loved me, and that she would marry me, I’d have her tomorrow morning fasting; and say ‘To have and to hold,’ instead of eating my breakfast.”
“Well,” says the mother, “then there’s one son lost.” And she said it in a very mournful tone, as one greatly concerned at it.
“I hope not, madam,” says Robin, “no man is lost, when a good wife has found him.”
“Why, but child,” says the old lady, “she is a beggar.”
“Why, then, madam, she has the more need of charity,” says Robin. “I’ll take her off the hands of the parish, and she and I’ll beg together.”
“It’s bad jesting with such things,” says the mother.
“I don’t jest, madam,” says Robin: “we’ll come and beg your pardon, madam; and your blessing, madam, and my father’s.”
“This is all out of the way, son,” says the mother, “if you are in earnest, you are undone.”
“I am afraid not,” says he, “for I am really afraid she won’t have me, after all my sister’s huffing, I believe I shall never be able to persuade her to it.”
“That’s a fine tale indeed, she is not so far gone neither. Mrs. Betty is no fool,” says the youngest sister, “do you think she has learned to say ‘no,’ any more than other people?”
“No, Mrs. Mirth-Wit,” says Robin, “Mrs. Betty’s no fool, but Mrs. Betty may be engaged some other way, and what then?”
“Nay,” says the eldest sister, “we can say nothing to that. Who must it be to then? She is never out of the doors, it must be between you.”
“I have nothing to say to that,” says Robin. “I have been examined enough; there’s my brother, if it must be between us, go to work with him.”
This stung the elder brother to the quick, and he concluded that Robin had discovered something. However, he kept himself from appearing disturbed. “Prithee,” says he, “don’t go to sham your stories off upon me, I tell you. I deal in no such ware. I have nothing to say to no Mrs. Bettys in the parish.” And with that he rose up, and brushed off.
“No,” says the eldest sister, “I dare answer for my brother, he knows the world better.”
Thus the discourse ended; but it left the eldest brother quite confounded: he concluded his brother had made a full discovery, and he began to doubt, whether I had been concerned in it, or not; but with all his management, he could not bring it about to get at me; at last he was so perplexed, that he was quite desperate, and resolved he would see me whatever came of it. In order to do this, he contrived it so, that one day after dinner, watching his eldest sister, till he could see her go upstairs, he runs after her, “Hark ye, sister,” says he, “where is this sick woman? May not a body see her?”
“Yes,” says the sister, “I believe you may, but let me go in first a little, and I’ll tell you.” So she ran up to the door, and gave me notice, and presently called to him again: “Brother,” says she, “you may come in if you please.” So in he came, just in the same kind of rant.
“Well,” says he, at the door, as he came in, “where’s this sick body that’s in love? How do ye do, Mrs. Betty?”
I would have got up out of my chair, but was so weak I could not for a good while; and he saw it, and his sister too, and she said, “Come, do not strive to stand up, my brother desires no ceremony, especially now you are so weak.”
“No, no, Mrs. Betty. Pray sit still,” says he, and so sits himself down in a chair over against me, and appeared as if he was mighty merry.
He talked a deal of rambling stuff to his sister, and to me, sometimes of one thing, sometimes another, on purpose to amuse her, and every now and then would turn it upon the old story: “Poor Mrs. Betty,” says he, “it is a sad thing to be in love, why it has reduced you sadly.”
At last I spoke a little, “I am glad to see you so merry, sir,” says I, “but I think the doctor might have found something better to do, than to make his game of his patients. If I had been ill of no other distemper, I know the proverb too well to have let him come to me.”
“What proverb?” says he: “what,
‘Where love is the case,
The doctor’s an ass.’
“Is that not it, Mrs. Betty?”
I smiled, and said nothing.
“Nay,” says he, “I think the effect has proved it to be love; for it seems the doctor has done you little service, you mend very slowly, they say. I doubt there’s somewhat in it, Mrs. Betty. I doubt you are sick of the incurables.”
I smiled and said, “No, indeed sir, that’s none of my distemper.”
We had a deal of such discourse, and sometimes others that signified as little; by and by he asked me to sing them a song; at which I smiled, and said, my singing days were over. At last he asked me, if he should play upon his flute to me. His sister said she believed my head could not bear it. I bowed and said, “Pray, madam, do not hinder it. I love the flute very much.”
Then his sister said, “Well, do then, brother.”
With that he pulled out the key of his closet. “Dear sister,” says he, “I am very lazy, do step and fetch my flute, it lies in such a drawer,” naming a place where he was sure it was not, that she might be a little while a-looking for it.
As soon as she was gone, he related the whole story to me of the discourse his brother had about me, and his concern about it, which was the reason of his contriving this visit. I assured him, I had never opened my mouth, either to his brother or to anybody else: I told him the dreadful exigence I was in; that my love to him, and his offering to have me forget that affection, and remove it to another, had thrown me down; and that I had a thousand times wished I might die, rather than recover, and to have the same circumstances to struggle with as I had before. I added, that I foresaw, that as soon as I was well, I must quit the family, and that as for marrying his brother, I abhorred the thoughts of it, after what had been my case with him, and that he might depend upon it I would never see his brother again upon that subject: that if he would break all his vows and oaths, and engagements with me, be that between his conscience and himself: but he should never be able to say, that I who he had persuaded to call myself his wife, and who had given him the liberty to use me as a wife, was not as faithful to him as a wife ought to be, whatever he might be to me.
He was going to reply, and had said, that he was sorry I could not be persuaded, and was a-going to say more, but he heard his sister a-coming, and so did I; and yet I forced out these few words as a reply, “That I could never be persuaded to love one brother and marry the other.”
He shook his head, and said, “Then I am ruined,” meaning himself; and that moment his sister entered the room, and told him she could not find the flute. “Well,” says he merrily, “this laziness won’t do,” so he gets up and goes himself to look for it, but comes back without it too, not but that he could have found it, but he had no mind to play; and, besides, the errand he sent his sister on was answered another way; for he only wanted to speak to me, which he had done, though not much to his satisfaction.
I had, however, a great deal of satisfaction in having spoken my mind to him in freedom, and with such an honest plainness, as I have related; and though it did not at all work the way I desired, that is to say, to oblige the person to me the more; yet it took from him all possibility of quitting me, but by a downright breach of honour, and giving up all the faith of a gentleman which he had so often engaged by never to abandon me, but to make me his wife as soon as he came to his estate.
It was not many weeks after this, before I was about the house again, and began to grow well; but I continued melancholy and retired, which amazed the whole family, except he that knew the reason of it; yet it was a great while before he took any notice of it, and I, as backward to speak as he, carried as respectfully to him, but never offered to speak a word that was particular of any kind whatsover; and this continued for sixteen or seventeen weeks; so that as I expected every day to be dismissed the family, on account of what distaste they had taken another way, in which I had no guilt,
I expected to hear no more of this gentleman, after all his solemn vows, but to be ruined and abandoned.
At last I broke the way myself in the family, for my removing; for being talking seriously with the old lady one day, about my own circumstances, and how my distemper had left a heaviness upon my spirits; the old lady said, “I am afraid, Betty, what I have said to you about my son, has had some influence upon you, and that you are melancholy on his account; pray will you let me know how the matter stands with you both? If it may not be improper, for as for Robin, he does nothing but rally and banter when I speak of it to him.”
“Why, truly, madam,” said I, “that matter stands as I wish it did not, and I shall be very sincere with you in it, whatever befalls me. Mr. Robin has several times proposed marriage to me, which is what I had no reason to expect, my poor circumstances considered; but I have always resisted him, and that perhaps in terms more positive than became me, considering the regard that I ought to have for every branch of your family: but,” said I, “Madam, I could never so far forget my obligations to you, and all your house, to offer to consent to a thing which I knew must needs be disobliging to you, and have positively told him that I would never entertain a thought of that kind, unless I had your consent, and his father’s also, to whom I was bound by so many invincible obligations.”
“And is this possible, Mrs. Betty?” says the old lady. “Then you have been much juster to us than we have been to you; for we have all looked upon you as a kind of snare to my son; and I had a proposal to make you, for your removing for fear of it; but I had not yet mentioned it to you, because I was afraid of grieving you too much, lest it should throw you down again, for we have a respect for you still, though not so much as to have it be the ruin of my son; but if it be as you say, we have all wronged you very much.”
“As to the truth of what I say, madam,” said I, “I refer to your son himself, if he will do me any justice, he must tell you the story just as I have told it.”
Away goes the old lady to her daughters, and tells them the whole story, just as I had told it her, and they were surprised at it, you may be sure, as I believed they would be; one said she could never have thought it, another said Robin was a fool; a third said, she would not believe a word of it, and she would warrant that Robin would tell the story another way; but the old lady, who was resolved to go to the bottom of it, before I could have the least opportunity of acquainting her son with what had passed, resolved too, that she would talk with her son immediately, and to that purpose sent for him, for he was gone but to a lawyer’s house in the town, and upon her sending he returned immediately.
Upon his coming up to them, for they were all together, “Sit down, Robin,” says the old lady, ‘I must have some talk with you.”
“With all my heart, madam,” says Robin, looking very merry, “I hope it is about a good wife, for I am at a great loss in that affair.”
“How can that be,” says his mother, “did you not say you resolved to have Mrs. Betty?”
“Ay, madam,” says Robin, “but there is one that has forbid the banns.”
“Forbid the banns, who can that be?”
“Even Mrs. Betty herself,” says Robin.
“How so,” says his mother, “have you not asked her the question then?”
“Yes indeed, madam,” says Robin, “I have attacked her in form five times since she was sick, and am beaten off: the jade is so stout, she won’t capitulate, nor yield upon any terms except such as I can’t effectually grant.”
“Explain yourself,” says the mother, “for I am surprised, I do not understand you. I hope you are not in earnest.”
“Why, madam,” says he, “the case is plain enough upon me, it explains itself; she won’t have me, she says. Is not that plain enough? I think ‘tis plain, and pretty rough too.”
“Well, but,” says the mother, “you talk of conditions, that you cannot grant. What does she want, a settlement? Her jointure ought to be according to her portion; what does she bring?”
“Nay, as to fortune,” says Robin, “she is rich enough; I am satisfied in that point; but ‘tis that I am not able to come up to her terms, and she is positive she will not have me without.”
Here the sisters put in. “Madam,” says the second sister, “‘tis impossible to be serious with him, he will never give a direct answer to anything; you had better let him alone, and talk no more of it, you know how to dispose of her out of his way.”
Robin was a little warmed with his sister’s rudeness, but he was even with her presently: “There are two sorts of people, madam,” says he, turning to his mother, “that there is no contending with, that is a wise body and a fool. ‘Tis a little hard I should engage with both of them together.”
The younger sister then put in, “We must be fools indeed,” says she, “in my brother’s opinion, that he should make us believe he has seriously asked Mrs. Betty to marry him, and she has refused him.”
“‘Answer, and answer not,’ says Solomon,” replied her brother. “When your brother had said that he had asked her no less than five times, and that she positively denied him, methinks a younger sister need not question the truth of it, when her mother did not.”
“My mother, you see, did not understand it,” says the second sister.
“There’s some difference,” says Robin, “between desiring me to explain it, and telling me she did not believe it.”
“Well, but son,” says the old lady, “if you are disposed to let us into the mystery of it, what were these hard conditions?”
“Yes, madam,” says Robin, “I had done it before now, if the teasers here had not worried me by way of interruption. The conditions are, that I bring my father and you to consent to it, and without that, she protests, she will never see me more upon that head; and the conditions, as I said, I suppose I shall never be able to grant. I hope my warm sisters will be answered now, and blush a little.”
This answer was surprising to them all, though less to the mother, because of what I had said to her. As to the daughters they stood mute a great while; but the mother said with some passion, “Well, I heard this before, but I could not believe it, but if it is so, then we have all done Betty wrong, and she has behaved better than I expected.”
“Nay,” says the eldest sister, “if it is so, she has acted handsomely indeed.”
“I confess,” says the mother, “it was none of her fault, if he was enough fool to take a fancy to her; but to give such an answer to him, shews more respect to us, than I can tell how to express; I shall value the girl the better for it, as long as I know her.”
“But I shall not,” says Robin, “unless you will give your consent.”
“I’ll consider of that awhile,” says the mother. “I assure you, if there were not some other objections, this conduct of hers would go a great way to bring me to consent.”
“I wish it would go quite through with it,” says Robin, “if you had as much thought about making me easy, as you have about making me rich, you would soon consent to it.”
“Why Robin,” says the mother again, “are you really in earnest? Would you fain have her?”
“Really, madam,” says Robin, “I think ‘tis hard you should question me again upon that head; I won’t say that I will have her, how can I resolve that point, when you see I cannot have her without your consent? But this I will say, I am earnest that I will never have anybody else, if I can help it; Betty or nobody is the word, and the question which of the two shall be in your breast to decide, madam, provided only, that my good-humoured sisters here may have no vote in it.”
All this was dreadful to me, for the mother began to yield, and Robin pressed her home in it. On the other hand, she advised with the eldest son, and he used all the arguments in the world to persuade her to consent; alleging his brother’s passionate love for me, and my generous regard to the family, in refusing my own advantages upon such a nice point of honour, and a thousand such things; and as to the father, he was a man in a hurry of public affairs, and getting money, seldom at home, thoughtful of the main chance, but left all those things to his wife.
You may easily believe, that when the plot was thus, as they thought, broke out: it was not so difficult, or so dangerous, for the elder brother, who nobody suspected of anything, to have a freer access than before. Nay, the mother, which was just as he wished, proposed it to him to talk with Mrs. Betty. “It may be, son,” said she, “you may see farther into the thing than I; and see if she has been so positive as Robin says she has been, or no.” This was as well as he could wish, and he, as it were, yielding to talk with me at his mother’s request, she brought me to him into her own chamber; told me her son had some business with me at her request, and then she left us together, and he shut the door after her.
He came back to me, and took me in his arms and kissed me very tenderly; but told me it was now come to that crisis, that I should make myself happy or miserable, as long as I lived: that if I could not comply to his desire, we should both be ruined. Then he told me the whole story between Robin, as he called him, and his mother, and his sisters, and himself, as above. “And now, dear child,” says he, “consider what it will be to marry a gentleman of a good family, in good circumstances, and with the consent of the whole house, and to enjoy all that the world can give you; and what on the other hand, to be sunk into the dark circumstances of a woman that has lost her reputation; and that though I shall be a private friend to you while I live, yet as I shall be suspected always, so you will be afraid to see me, and I shall be afraid to own you.”
He gave me no time to reply, but went on with me thus: “What has happened between us, child, so long as we both agree to do so, may be buried and forgotten: I shall always be your sincere friend, without inclination to nearer intimacy, when you become my sister; and we shall have all the honest part of conversation without any reproaches between us, of having done amiss: I beg of you to consider it, and do not stand in the way of your own safety and prosperity; and to satisfy you that I am sincere,” added he, “I here offer you five hundred pounds to make you some amends for the freedoms I have taken with you, which we shall look upon as some of the follies of our lives, which ‘tis hoped we may repent of.”
He spoke this in so much more moving terms than it is possible for me to express, that you may suppose as he held me above an hour and a half in that discourse, so he answered all my objections, and fortified his discourse with all the arguments that human wit and art could devise.
I cannot say, however, that anything he said made impression enough upon me, so as to give me any thought of the matter, till he told me at last very plainly, that if I refused, he was sorry to add, that he could never go on with me in that station as we stood before; that though he loved me as well as ever, and that I was as agreeable to him; yet the sense of virtue had not so forsaken him as to suffer him to lie with a woman that his brother courted to make his wife; that if he took his leave of me, with a denial from me in this affair, whatever he might do for me in the point of support, grounded on his first engagement of maintaining me, yet he would not have me be surprised, that he was obliged to tell me, he could not allow himself to see me any more, and that indeed I could not expect it of him.
I received this last part with some tokens of surprise and disorder, and had much ado to avoid sinking down, for indeed I loved him to an extravagance not easy to imagine; but he perceived my disorder, and entreated me to consider seriously of it, assured me that it was the only way to preserve our mutual affection; that in this station we might love as friends, with the utmost passion, and with a love of relation untainted, free from our own just reproaches, and free from other people’s suspicions: that he should ever acknowledge his happiness owing to me; that he would be debtor to me as long as he lived, and would be paying that debt as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world, a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such; with little to provide for myself; with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay; all this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions to lay it home to me, in the worst colours; on the other hand, he failed not to set forth the easy prosperous life, which I was going to live.
He answered all that I could object from affection, and from former engagements, with telling me the necessity that was before us of taking other measures now; and as to his promises of marriage, the nature of things, he said, had put an end to that, by the probability of my being his brother’s wife, before the time to which his promises all referred.
Thus, in a word, I may say, he reasoned me out of my reason; he conquered all my arguments, and I began to see a danger that I was in, which I had not considered of before, and that was, of being dropped by both of them, and left alone in the world to shift for myself.
This, and his persuasion, at length prevailed with me to consent, though with so much reluctance, that it was easy to see I should go to church like a bear to the stake; I had some little apprehensions about me too, lest my new spouse, who, by the way, I had not the least affection for, should be skilful enough to challenge me on another account, upon our first coming to bed together; but whether he did it with design or not, I know not; but his elder brother took care to make him very much fuddled before he went to bed, so that I had the satisfaction of a drunken bedfellow the first night. How he did it I know not, but I concluded that he certainly contrived it, that his brother might be able to make no judgment of the difference between a maid and a married woman, nor did he ever entertain any notions of it, or disturb his thoughts about it.
I should go back a little here, to where I left off. The elder brother having thus managed me, his next business was to manage his mother, and he never left till he had brought her to acquiesce, and be passive even without acquainting the father, other than by post letters: so that she consented to our marrying privately, leaving her to manage the father afterwards.
Then he cajoled with his brother, and persuaded him what service he had done him, and how he had brought his mother to consent, which though true, was not indeed done to serve him, but to serve himself; but thus diligently did he cheat him, and had the thanks of a faithful friend for shifting off his whore into his brother’s arms for a wife. So naturally do men give up honour and justice and even Christianity to secure themselves.
I must now come back to Brother Robin, as we always called him, who having got his mother’s consent, as above, came big with the news to me, and told me the whole story of it, with a sincerity so visible, that I must confess it grieved me that I must be the instrument to abuse so honest a gentleman; but there was no remedy, he would have me, and I was not obliged to tell him that I was his brother’s whore, though I had no other way to put him off; so I came gradually into it, and behold we were married.
Modesty forbids me to reveal the secrets of the marriage bed, but nothing could have happened more suitable to my circumstances than that, as above, my husband was so fuddled when he came to bed, that he could not remember in the morning, whether he had had any conversation with me or no, and I was obliged to tell him he had, though in reality he had not, that I might be sure he could make no inquiry about anything else.
It concerns the story in hand very little to enter into the farther particulars of the family, or of myself, for the five years that I lived with this husband, only to observe that I had two children by him, and that at the end of the five years he died. He had been really a very good husband to me, and we lived very agreeably together; but as he had not received much from them, and had in the little time he lived acquired no great matters, so my circumstances were not great, nor was I much mended by the match. Indeed, I had preserved the elder brother’s bonds to me, to pay me £500, which he offered me for my consent to marry his brother; and this, with what I had saved of the money he formerly gave me, and about as much more by my husband, left me a widow with about £1,200 in my pocket.
My two children were indeed taken happily off of my hands, by my husband’s father and mother, and that was all they got by Mrs. Betty.
I confess I was not suitably affected with the loss of my husband; nor can I say that I ever loved him as I ought to have done, or was suitable to the good usage I had from him, for he was a tender, kind, good-humoured man as any woman could desire; but his brother being so always in my sight, at least while we were in the country, was a continual snare to me; and I never was in bed with my husband, but I wished myself in the arms of his brother; and though his brother never offered me the least kindness that way, after our marriage, but carried it just as a brother ought to do; yet it was impossible for me to do so to him: in short, I committed adultery and incest with him every day in my desires, which without doubt was as effectually criminal.
Before my husband died, his elder brother was married, and we being then removed to London, were written to by the old lady to come and be at the wedding; my husband went, but I pretended indisposition, so I stayed behind; for, in short, I could not bear the sight of his being given to another woman, though I knew I was never to have him myself.
I was now, as above, left loose to the world, and being still young and handsome, as everybody said of me, and I assure you I thought myself so, and with a tolerable fortune in my pocket, I put no small value upon myself. I was courted by several very considerable tradesmen, and particularly very warmly by one, a linen draper, at whose house, after my husband’s death, I took a lodging, his sister being my acquaintance; here I had all the liberty and opportunity to be gay, and appear in company that I could desire; my landlord’s sister being one of the maddest, gayest things alive, and not so much mistress of her virtue as I thought at first she had been. She brought me into a world of wild company, and even brought home several persons, such as she liked well enough to gratify, to see her pretty widow. Now as fame and fools make an assembly, I was here wonderfully caressed; had abundance of admirers, and such as called themselves lovers; but I found not one fair proposal among them all; as for their common design, that I understood too well to be drawn into any more snares of that kind. The case was altered with me, I had money in my pocket, and had nothing to say to them. I had been tricked once by that cheat called Love, but the game was over. I was resolved now to be married or nothing, and to be well married or not at all.
I loved the company, indeed, of men of mirth and wit, and was often entertained with such, as I was also with others; but I found by just observation, that the brightest men came upon the dullest errand, that is to say, the dullest as to what I aimed at; on the other hand, those who came with the best proposals were the dullest and most disagreeable part of the world. I was not averse to a tradesman, but then I would have a tradesman, forsooth, that was something of a gentleman too; that when my husband had a mind to carry me to the court, or to the play, he might become a sword, and look as like a gentleman as another man; and not like one that had the mark of his apron-strings upon his coat, or the mark of his hat upon his periwig; that should look as if he was set on to his sword, when his sword was put on to him, and that carried his trade in his countenance.
Well, at last I found this amphibious creature, this land-waterthing, called a gentleman-tradesman, and as a just plague upon my folly, I was catched in the very snare which, as I might say, I laid for myself.
This was a draper too, for though my comrade would have bargained for me with her brother; yet when they came to the point, it was it seems for a mistress, and I kept true to this notion, that a woman should never be kept for a mistress, that had money to make herself a wife.
Thus my pride, not my principle, my money, not my virtue, kept me honest; though, as it proved, I found I had much better have been sold by my she comrade, to her brother, than have sold myself as I did to a tradesman that was rake, gentleman, shopkeeper, and beggar all together.
But I was hurried on (by my fancy to a gentleman) to ruin myself in the grossest manner that ever woman did; for my new husband, coming to a lump of money at once, fell into such a profusion of expense, that all I had, and all he had, would not have held it out above one year.
He was very fond of me for about a quarter of a year, and what I got by that, was, that I had the pleasure of seeing a great deal of my money spent upon myself. “Come, my dear,” says he to me one day, “shall we go and take a turn into the country for a week?”
“Ay, my dear,” says I. “Whither would you go?”
“I care not whither,” says he, “but I have a mind to look like quality for a week, we’ll go to Oxford,” says he.
“How,” says I, “shall we go? I am no horse-woman, and ‘tis too far for a coach.”
“Too far?” says he; “no place is too far for a coach and six. If I carry you out, you shall travel like a duchess.”
“Hum,” says I, “my dear, ‘tis a frolic, but if you have a mind to it, I don’t care.”
Well, the time was appointed, we had a rich coach, very good horses, a coachman, postillion, and two footmen in very good liveries; a gentleman on horseback, and a page with a feather in his hat upon another horse; the servants all called him “My Lord,” and I was “Her Honour, the Countess,” and thus we travelled to Oxford, and a pleasant journey we had; for give him his due, not a beggar alive knew better how to be a lord than my husband. We saw all the rarities at Oxford, talked with two or three Fellows of Colleges, about putting a nephew, that was left to his lordship’s care, to the University, and of their being his tutors; we diverted ourselves with bantering several other poor scholars, with the hopes of being at least his lordship’s chaplain and putting on a scarf; and thus having lived like quality indeed, as to expense, we went away for Northampton, and in a word, in about twelve days’ ramble came home again, to the tune of about £93 expense.
Vanity is the perfection of a fop; my husband had this excellence, that he valued nothing of expense; as his history, you may be sure, has very little weight in it, ‘tis enough to tell you, that in about two years and a quarter he broke, got into a Spunging-House, being arrested in an action too heavy for him to give bail, so he sent for me to come to him.
It was no surprise to me, for I had foreseen something before that all was going to wreck, and had been taking care to reserve something if I could for myself. But when he sent for me, he behaved much better than I expected: he told me plainly, he had played the fool, and suffered himself to be surprised, which he might have prevented: that now he foresaw he could not stand it, and therefore he would have me go home, and in the night take away everything I had in the house of any value, and secure it; and alter that, he told me, that if I could get away £100 or £200 in goods out of the shop, I should do it. “Only,” says he, “let me know nothing of it, neither what you take, or whither you carry it; for as for me,” says he, “I am resolved to get out of this house and be gone; and if you never hear of me more, my dear,” says he, “I wish you well; I am only sorry for the injury I have done you.” He said some very handsome things to me indeed at parting; for I told you he was a gentleman, and that was all the benefit I had of his being so; that he used me very handsomely, even to the last, only spent all I had, and left me to rob the creditors for something to subsist on.
However, I did as he bade me, that you may be sure, and having thus taken my leave of him I never saw him more; for he found means to break out of the bailiff’s house that night or the next: how I knew not, for I could come at no knowledge of anything more than this, that he came home about three o’clock in the morning, caused the rest of his goods to be removed into the Mint and the shop to be shut up; and having raised what money he could he got over to France, from whence I had one or two letters from him and no more.
I did not see him when he came home, for he having given me such instructions as above and I having made the best of my time, I had no more business back again at the house, not knowing but
I might have been stopped there by the creditors; for a Commission of Bankrupt being soon after issued, they might have stopped me by orders from the Commissioners. But my husband having desperately got out from the bailiff’s by letting himself down from almost the top of the house to the top of another building and leaping from thence, which was almost two stories, and which was enough indeed to have broken his neck: he came home and got away his goods before the creditors could come to seize, that is to say, before they could get out the commission and be ready to send their officers to take possession.
My husband was so civil to me, for still I say he was much of a gentleman, that in the first letter he wrote me he let me know where he had pawned twenty pieces of fine holland for £30 which were worth above £90, and enclosed me the token for the taking them up, paying the money, which I did, and made in time above £100 of them, having leisure to cut them and sell them to private families, as opportunity offered.
However, with all this and all that I had secured before, I found upon casting things up, my case was very much altered and my fortune much lessened; for including the hollands and a parcel of fine muslins, which I carried off before, and some plate and other things, I found I could hardly muster up £500, and my condition was very odd, for though I had no child (I had had one by my gentleman draper but it was buried), yet I was a widow bewitched, I had a husband and no husband, and I could not pretend to marry again, though I knew well enough my husband would never see England any more, if he lived fifty years. Thus, I say, I was limited from marriage, what offer soever might be made me; and I had not one friend to advise with in the condition I was in, at least, not one who I could trust the secret of my circumstances to, for if the commissioners were to have been informed where I was, I should have been fetched up and all I had saved be taken away.
Upon these apprehensions the first thing I did was to go quite out of my knowledge, and go by another name. This I did effectually, for I went into the Mint too, took lodgings in a very private place, dressed me up in the habit of a widow, and called myself Mrs. Flanders.
Here, however, I concealed myself and though my new acquaintance knew nothing of me, yet I soon got a great deal of company about me; and whether it be that women are scarce among the people that generally are to be found there, or that some consolations in the miseries of that place are more requisite than on other occasions, I soon found that an agreeable woman was exceedingly valuable among the sons of affliction there; and that those that could not pay half a crown in the pound to their creditors and run in debt at the Sign of the Bull for their dinners, would yet find money for a supper if they liked the woman.
However, I kept myself safe yet, though I began, like my Lord Rochester’s mistress that loved his company but would not admit him farther, to have the scandal of a whore without the joy; and upon this score, tired with the place and with the company too, I began to think of removing.
It was indeed a subject of strange reflection to me to see men in the most perplexed circumstances, who were reduced some degrees below being ruined, whose families were objects of their own terror and other people’s charity; yet while a penny lasted, nay, even beyond it, endeavouring to drown their sorrow in their wickedness; heaping up more guilt upon themselves, labouring to forget former things, which now it was the proper time to remember, making more work for repentance, and sinning on as a remedy for sin past.
But it is none of my talent to preach; these men were too wicked even for me; there was something horrid and absurd in their way of sinning, for it was all a force even upon themselves; they did not only act against conscience, but against nature, and nothing was more easy than to see how sighs would interrupt their songs, and paleness and anguish sit upon their brows in spite of the forced smiles they put on; nay, sometimes it would break out at their very mouths, when they had parted with their money for a lewd treat or a wicked embrace; I have heard them, turning about, fetch a deep sigh, and cry “What a dog am I! Well, Betty, my dear, I’ll drink thy health though,” meaning the honest wife, that perhaps had not half a crown for herself, and three or four children. The next morning they were at their penitentials again, and perhaps the poor weeping wife comes over to him, either brings him some account of what his creditors are doing and how she and the children are turned out of doors, or some other dreadful news, and this adds to his self-reproaches; but when he has thought and pored on it till he is almost mad, having no principles to support him, nothing within him, or above him, to comfort him; but finding it all darkness on every side, he flies to the same relief again, namely, to drink it away, debauch it away, and falling into company of men in just the same condition with himself, he repeats the crime, and thus he goes every day one step onward of his way to destruction.
I was not wicked enough for such fellows as these yet, on the contrary, I began to consider here very seriously what I had to do; how things stood with me, and what course I ought to take. I knew I had no friends, no not one friend or relation in the world; and that little I had left apparently wasted, which when it was gone, I saw nothing but misery and starving was before me. Upon these considerations, I say, and filled with horror at the place I was in, I resolved to be gone.
I had made an acquaintance with a sober good sort of a woman who was a widow, too, like me, but in better circumstances; her husband had been a captain of a ship, and having had the misfortune to be cast away coming home from the West Indies, was so reduced by the loss that though he had saved his life then, it broke his heart and killed him afterwards, and his widow being pursued by the creditors was forced to take shelter in the Mint. She soon made things up with the help of friends, and was at liberty again; and finding that I rather was there to be concealed than by any particular prosecutions, and finding also that I agreed with her, or rather she with me, in a just abhorrence of the place and of the company, she invited me to go home with her till I could put myself in some posture of settling in the world to my mind; withal telling me that it was ten to one but some good captain of a ship might take a fancy to me and court me, in that part of the town where she lived.
I accepted of her offer and was with her half a year, and should have been longer, but in that interval what she proposed to me happened to herself, and she married very much to her advantage; but whose fortune soever was upon the increase mine seemed to be upon the wane, and I found nothing present except two or three boatswains, or such fellows, but as for the commanders they were generally of two sorts. I. Such as having good business, that is to say, a good ship, resolved not to marry but with advantage. 2.
Such as being out of employ wanted a wife to help them to a ship. I mean, (I) a wife, who having some money could enable them to hold a good part of a ship themselves, so to encourage owners to come in; or (2) a wife, who if she had not money had friends who were concerned in shipping, and so could help to put the young man into a good ship, and neither of these was my case; so I looked like one that was to lie on hand.
This knowledge I soon learnt by experience, namely, that the state of things was altered, as to matrimony, that marriages were here the consequences of politic schemes for forming interests, carrying on business, and that love had no share or but very little in the matter.
That, as my sister-in-law at Colchester had said, beauty, wit, manners, sense, good humour, good behaviour, education, virtue, piety, or any other qualification, whether of body or mind, had no power to recommend: that money only made a woman agreeable: that men chose mistresses indeed by the gust of their affection, and it was requisite for a whore to be handsome, well-shaped, have a good mien, and a graceful behaviour; but that for a wife, no deformity would shock the fancy, no ill qualities the judgment; the money was the thing; the portion was neither crooked nor monstrous, but the money was always agreeable, whatever the wife was.
On the other hand, as the market run all on the men’s side, I found the women had lost the privilege of saying “No”; that it was a favour now for a woman to have the question asked, and if any young lady had so much arrogance as to counterfeit a negative, she never had the opportunity of denying twice; much less of recovering that false step and accepting what she had seemed to decline. The men had such choice everywhere, that the case of the women was very unhappy; for they seemed to ply at every door, and if the man was by great chance refused at one house he was sure to be received at the next.
Besides this, I observed that the men made no scruple to set themselves out and to go a fortune hunting, as they call it, when they had really no fortune themselves to demand it or merit to deserve it; and they carried it so high, that a woman was scarce allowed to enquire after the character or estate of the person that pretended to her. This I had an example of in a young lady at the next house to me, and with whom I had contracted an intimacy; she was courted by a young captain, and though she had near £2,000 to her fortune, she did but enquire of some of his neighbours about his character, his morals, or substance; and he took occasion at the next visit to let her know, truly, that he took it very ill, and that he should not give her the trouble of his visits any more. I heard of it, and I had begun my acquaintance with her, I went to see her upon it. She entered into a close conversation with me about it, and unbosomed herself very freely. I perceived presently that though she thought herself very ill used, yet she had no power to resent it; that she was exceedingly piqued she had lost him, and particularly that another of less fortune had gained him.
I fortified her mind against such a meanness, as I called it. I told her that as low as I was in the world, I would have despised a man that should think I ought to take him upon his own recommendation only; also I told her that as she had a good fortune, she had no need to stoop to the disaster of the times; that it was enough that the men could insult us that had but little money, but if she suffered such an affront to pass upon her without resenting it she would be rendered low-prized upon all occasions, that a woman can never want an opportunity to be revenged of a man that has used her ill, and that there were ways enough to humble such a fellow as that or else certainly women were the most unhappy creatures in the world.
She was very well pleased with the discourse, and told me seriously that she would be very glad to make him sensible of her resentment, and either to bring him on again, or have the satisfaction of her revenge being as public as possible.
I told her that if she would take my advice, I would tell her how she should obtain her wishes in both those things; and that I would engage I would bring the man to her door again and make him beg to be let in. She smiled at that, and soon let me see that if he came to her door, her resentment was not so great to let him stand long there.
However, she listened very willingly to my offer of advice; so I told her that the first thing she ought to do was a piece of justice to herself; namely, that whereas he had reported among the ladies that he had left her, and pretended to give the advantage of the negative to himself, she should take care to have it well spread among the women, which she could not fail of an opportunity to do, that she had enquired into his circumstances and found he was not the man he pretended to be. “Let them be told, too, madam,” said I, “that you found he was not the man you expected and that you thought it was not safe to meddle with him, that you heard he was of an ill temper, and that he boasted how he had used the women ill upon many occasions, and that particularly he was debauched in his morals, et cetera.” The last of which indeed had some truth in it; but I did not find that she seemed to like him much the worse for that part.
She came most readily into all this, and immediately she went to work to find instruments she had very little difficulty in the search; for telling her story in general to a couple of her gossips, it was the chat of the tea table all over that part of the town, and I met with it wherever I visited: also, as it was known that I was acquainted with the young lady herself, my opinion was asked very often, and I confirmed it with all the necessary aggravations, and set out his character in the blackest colours; and as a piece of secret intelligence, I added what the gossips knew nothing of, namely, that I had heard he was in very bad circumstances; that he was under a necessity of a fortune to support his interest with the owners of the ship he commanded: that his own part was not paid for, and if it was not paid quickly, his owners would put him out of the ship, and his chief mate was likely to command it, who offered to buy that part which the captain had promised to take.
I added, for I was heartily piqued at the rogue as I called him, that I had heard a rumour too, that he had a wife alive at Plymouth and another in the West Indies, a thing which they all knew was not uncommon for such kind of gentlemen.
This worked as we both desired it, for presently the young lady at the next door, who had a father and mother that governed both her and her fortune, was shut up, and her father forbid him the house: also in one place more the woman had the courage, however strange it was, to say “No”; and he could try nowhere but he was reproached with his pride, and that he pretended not to give the women leave to enquire into his character, and the like.
By this time he began to be sensible of his mistake; and seeing all the women on that side the water alarmed, he went over to Ratcliff and got access to some of the ladies there; but though the young women there too were according to the fate of the day pretty willing to be asked, yet such was his ill luck, that his character followed him over the water; so that though he might have had wives enough, yet it did not happen among the women that had good fortunes, which was what he wanted.
But this was not all; she very ingeniously managed another thing herself, for she got a young gentleman who was a relation to come and visit her two or three times a week in a very fine chariot and good liveries, and her two agents and I also presently spread a report all over that this gentleman came to court her; that he was a gentleman of a thousand pounds a year, and that he was fallen in love with her, and that she was going to her aunt’s in the City, because it was inconvenient for the gentleman to come to her with his coach to Rotherhithe, the streets being so narrow and difficult.
This took immediately, the captain was laughed at in all companies, and was ready to hang himself; he tried all the ways possible to come at her again, and wrote the most passionate letters to her in the world, and, in short, by great application, obtained leave to wait on her again, as he said, only to clear his reputation.
At this meeting she had her full revenge of him; for she told him she wondered what he took her to be, that she should admit any man to a treaty of so much consequence as that of marriage, without enquiring into his circumstances; that if he thought she was to be huffed into wedlock, and that she was in the same circumstances which her neighbours might be in, namely, to take up with the first good Christian that came, he was mistaken; that in a word his character was really bad, or he was very ill beholden to his neighbours; and that unless he could clear up some points in which she had justly been prejudiced she had no more to say to him, but give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was not afraid to say “No” either to him, or any man else.
With that she told him what she had heard, or rather raised herself by my means, of his character; his not having paid for the part he pretended to own of the ship he commanded; of the resolution of his owners to put him out of the command, and to put his mate in his stead; and of the scandal raised on his morals; his having been reproached with such and such women, and his having a wife at Plymouth and another in the West Indies, and the like; and she asked him whether she had not good reason, if these things were not cleared up, to refuse him and to insist upon having satisfaction in points so significant as they were?
He was so confounded at her discourse that he could not answer a word, and she began to believe that all was true by his disorder, though she knew that she had been the raiser of these reports herself.
After some time he recovered a little, and from that time was the most humble, modest, and importunate man alive in his courtship.
She asked him if he thought she was so at her last shift that she could or ought to bear such treatment, and if he did not see that she did not want those who thought it worth their while to come farther to her than he did, meaning the gentleman whom she had brought to visit her by way of sham.
She brought him by these tricks to submit to all possible measures to satisfy her, as well of his circumstances as of his behaviour. He brought her undeniable evidence of his having paid for his part of the ship; he brought her certificates from his owners that the report of their intending to remove him from the command of the ship was false and groundless; in short, he was quite the reverse of what he was before.
Thus I convinced her that if the men made their advantage of our sex in the affair of marriage upon the supposition of there being such a choice to be had, and of the women being so easy, it was only owing to this, that the women wanted courage to maintain their ground, and that according to my Lord Rochester
“A woman’s ne’er so ruined but she can
Revenge herself on her undoer, man.”
After these things this young lady played her part so well, that though she resolved to have him, and that indeed having him was the main bent of her design, yet she made his obtaining her to be to him the most difficult thing in the world; and this she did, not by a haughty reserved carriage, but by a just policy, playing back upon him his own game; for as he pretended by a kind of lofty carriage to place himself above the occasion of a character, she broke with him upon that subject, and at the same time that she made him submit to all possible enquiry after his affairs, she apparently shut the door against his looking into her own.
It was enough to him to obtain her for a wife; as to what she had, she told him plainly that as he knew her circumstances it was but just she should know his; and though at the same time he had only known her circumstances by common fame, yet he had made so many protestations of his passion for her that he could ask no more but her hand to his grand request, and the like ramble according to the custom of lovers: in short, he left himself no room to ask any more questions about her estate, and she took the advantage of it; for she placed part of her fortune so in trustees, without letting him know anything of it, that it was quite out of his reach, and made him very well contented with the rest.
It is true she was pretty well besides, that is to say, she had about £1,400 in money which she gave him, and the other, after some time, she brought to light as a perquisite to herself, which he was to accept as a mighty favour, seeing, though it was not to be his, it might ease him in the article of her particular expenses; and I must add that by this conduct the gentleman himself became not only more humble in his applications to her to obtain her, but also was much the more an obliging husband when he had her. I cannot but remind the ladies how much they place themselves below the common station of a wife, which if I may be allowed not to be partial, is low enough already; I say, they place themselves below their common station, and prepare their own mortifications, by their submitting so to be insulted by the men beforehand, which I confess I see no necessity of.
This relation may serve therefore to let the ladies see that the advantage is not so much on the other side as the men think it is; and that though it may be true the men have but too much choice among us, and that some women may be found who will dishonour themselves, be cheap, and too easy to come at; yet if they will have women worth having they may find them as uncome-at-able a’s ever; and that those that are otherwise have often such deficiencies when had, as rather recommend the ladies that are difficult, than encourage the men to go on with their easy courtship and expect wives equally valuable that will come at first call.
Nothing is more certain than that the ladies always gain of the men by keeping their ground and letting their pretended lovers see they can resent being slighted, and that they are not afraid of saying. “No.” They insult us mightily with telling us of the number of women; that the wars and the sea, and trade, and other incidents have carried the men so much away that there is no proportion between the numbers of the sexes; but I am far from granting that the number of the women is so great, or the number of the men so small; but if they will have me tell the truth, the disadvantage of the women is a terrible scandal upon the men, and it lies here only, namely, that the age is so wicked, and the sex so debauched, that in short, the number of such men as an honest woman ought to meddle with is small indeed; and it is but here and there that a man is to be found who is fit for an honest woman to venture upon.
But the consequence even of that too amounts to no more than this, that women ought to be the more nice; for how do we know the just character of the man that makes the offer? To say that the woman should be the more easy on this occasion is to say we should be the forwarder to venture, because of the greatness of the danger, which is very absurd.
On the contrary, the women have ten thousand times the more reason to be wary and backward, by how much the hazard of being betrayed is the greater, and would the ladies act the wary part, they would discover every cheat that offered; for, in short, the lives of very few men now-a-days will bear a character; and if the ladies do but make a little enquiry, they would soon be able to distinguish the men and deliver themselves: as for women that do not think their own safety worth their own thought, that impatient of their present state run into matrimony as a horse rushes into the battle, I can say nothing to them but this, that they are a sort of ladies that are to be prayed for among the rest of distempered people, and they look like people that venture their estates in a lottery where there is a hundred thousand blanks to one prize.
No man of common sense will value a woman the less for not giving up herself at the first attack, or for not accepting his proposal without enquiring into his person or character; on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all creatures, as the rate of men now goes: in short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her capacities, that having but one cast for her life shall cast that life away at once, and make matrimony like death, be a leap in the dark.
I would fain have the conduct of my sex a little regulated in this particular, which is the same thing in which of all the parts of life I think at this time we suffer most in: ‘tis nothing but lack of courage, the fear of not being married at all, and of that frightful state of life, called an old maid. This, I say, is the woman’s snare; but would the ladies once but get above that fear and manage rightly, they would more certainly avoid it by standing their ground in a case so absolutely necessary to their felicity, than by exposing themselves as they do; and if they did not marry so soon, they would make themselves amends by marrying safer; she is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one: in a word, there is no woman, deformity or lost reputation excepted, but if she manages well may be married safely one time or other; but if she precipitates herself it is ten thousand to one but she is undone.
But I come now to my own case, in which there was at this time no little nicety. The circumstances I was in made the offer of a good husband the most necessary thing in the world to me; but I found soon that to be made cheap and easy, was not the way: it soon began to be found that the widow had no fortune, and to say this was to say all that was ill of me: being well bred, handsome, witty, modest, and agreeable; all which I had allowed to my character, whether justly or no is not to the purpose: I say, all these would not do without the dross. In short, the widow, they said, had no money!
I resolved therefore that it was necessary to change my station and make a new appearance in some other place, and even to pass by another name if I found occasion.
I communicated my thoughts to my intimate friend the captain’s lady, who I had so faithfully served in her case with the captain, and who was as ready to serve me in the same kind as I could desire: I made no scruple to lay my circumstances open to her; my stock was but low, for I had made but about £540 at the close of my last affair, and I had wasted some of that: however, I had about £460 left, a great many very rich clothes, a gold watch and some jewels, though of no extraordinary value, and about £30 or £40 left in linen not disposed of.
My dear and faithful friend, the captain’s wife, was so sensible of the service I had done her in the affair above that she was not only a steady friend to me, but knowing my circumstances she frequently made me presents as money came into her hands; such as fully amounted to a maintenance, so that I spent none of my own; and at last she made this unhappy proposal to me, namely, that as we had observed, as above, how the men made no scruple to set themselves out as persons meriting a woman of fortune of their own, it was but just to deal with them in their own way, and if it was possible to deceive the deceiver.
The captain’s lady, in short, put this project into my head, and told me if I would be ruled by her I should certainly get a husband of fortune without leaving him any room to reproach me with want of my own. I told her that I would give up myself wholly to her directions, and that I would have neither tongue to speak, or feet to step in that affair, but as she should direct me; depending that she would extricate me out of every difficulty that she brought me into, which she said she would answer for.
The first step she put me upon was to call her cousin, and go to a relation’s house of hers in the country where she directed me, and where she brought her husband to visit me, and calling me cousin, she worked matters so about that her husband and she together invited me most passionately to come to town and live with them, for they now lived in a quite different place from where they were before. In the next place she tells her husband that I had at least £1,500 fortune, and that I was like to have a great deal more.
It was enough to tell her husband this, there needed nothing on my side; I was but to sit still and wait the event, for it presently went all over the neighbourhood that the young widow at Captain —’s was a fortune, that she had at least £1,500, and perhaps a great deal more, and that the captain said so, and if the captain was asked at any time about me he made no scruple to affirm it, though he knew not one word of the matter other than that his wife had told him so; and in this he thought no harm, for he really believed it to be so. With the reputation of this fortune, I presently found myself blessed with admirers enough, and that I had my choice of men, as they said they were, which, by the way, confirms what I was saying before: this being my case, I who had a subtle game to play, had nothing now to do but to single out from them all the properest man that might be for my purpose; that is to say, the man who was most likely to depend upon the hearsay of fortune, and not enquire too far into the particulars; and unless I did this I did nothing, for my case would not bear much enquiry.
I picked out my man without much difficulty by the judgment I made of his way of courting me: I had let him run on with his protestations that he loved me above all the world; that if I would make him happy, that was enough; all which I knew was upon supposition that I was very rich, though I never told him a word of it myself.
This was my man, but I was to try him to the bottom, and indeed in that consisted my safety, for if he baulked I knew I was undone as surely as he was undone if he took me; and if I did not make some scruple about his fortune, it was the way to lead him to raise some about mine; and first therefore, I pretended on all occasions to doubt his sincerity, and told him perhaps he only courted me for my fortune; he stopped my mouth in that part with the thunder of his protestations as above, but still I pretended to doubt.
One morning he pulls off his diamond ring, and writes upon the glass of the sash in my chamber this line,
You I love, and you alone.
I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus,
And so in love says everyone.
He takes his ring again, and writes another line thus,
Virtue alone is an estate.
I borrowed it again and I wrote under it,
But money’s virtue, gold is fate.
He coloured as red as fire to see me turn so quick upon him, and in a kind of rage told me he would conquer me, and wrote again thus,
I scorn your gold, and yet I love.
I ventured all upon the last cast of poetry, as you’ll see, for I wrote boldly under his last, I’m poor: let’s see how kind you’ll prove.
This was a sad truth to me, whether he believed me or no I could not tell; I supposed then that he did not. However he flew to me, took me in his arms, and kissing me very eagerly, and with the greatest passion imaginable, he held me fast till he called for a pen and ink, and told me he could not wait the tedious writing on a glass, but pulling out a piece of paper he began and wrote again,
Be mine with all your poverty.
I took his pen, and followed immediately thus,
Yet secretly you hope I lie.
He told me that was unkind because it was not just, and that I put him upon contradicting me, which did not consist with good manners, and therefore since I had insensibly drawn him into this poetical scribble, he begged I would not oblige him to break it off, so he writes again,
Let love alone be our debate.
I wrote again,
She loves enough that does not hate.
This he took for a favour, and so laid down the cudgels, that is to say, the pen; I say he took it for a favour, and a mighty one it was if he had known all: however, he took it as I meant it, that is, to let him think I was inclined to go on with him, as indeed I had reason to do, for he was the best-humoured merry sort of a fellow that I ever met with; and I often reflected how doubly criminal it was to deceive such a man; but that necessity which pressed me to a settlement suitable to my condition was my authority for it, and certainly his affection to me and the goodness of his temper, however they might argue against using him ill, yet they strongly argued to me that he would better take the disappointment than some fiery tempered wretch, who might have nothing to recommend him but those passions which would serve only to make a woman miserable.
Besides, though I had jested with him (as he supposed it) so often about my poverty, yet when he found it to be true, he had foreclosed all manner of objection, seeing, whether he was in jest or in earnest, he had declared he took me without any regard to my portion, and, whether I was in jest or in earnest, I had declared myself to be very poor, so that, in a word, I had him fast both ways; and though he might say afterwards he was cheated yet he could never say that I had cheated him.
He pursued me close after this, and, as I saw there was no need to fear losing him, I played the indifferent part with him longer than prudence might otherwise have dictated to me: but I considered how much this caution and indifference would give me the advantage over him when I should come to own my circumstances to him; and I managed it the more warily because I found he inferred from thence that I had either the more money or the more judgment, and would not venture at all.
I took the freedom one day to tell him that it was true I had received the compliment of a lover from him, namely, that he would take me without enquiring into my fortune, and I would make him a suitable return in this, namely, that I would make as little enquiry into his as consisted with reason, but I hoped he would allow me to ask some questions which he should answer or not as he thought fit; one of these questions related to our manner of living, and the place where, because I had heard he had a great plantation in Virginia, and I told him I did not care to be transported.
He began from this discourse to let me voluntarily into all his affairs, and to tell me in a frank open way all his circumstances, by which I found he was very well to pass in the world; but that great part of his estate consisted of three plantations which he had in
Virginia, which brought him in a very good income of about £300 a year; but that if he was to live on them, would bring him in four times as much. Very well, thought I, you shall carry me thither then as soon as you please, though I won’t tell you so beforehand.
I jested with him about the figure he would make in Virginia; but found he would do anything I desired, so I turned my tale. I told him I had good reason not to desire to go there to live, because if his plantations were worth so much there, I had not a fortune suitable to a gentleman of £1,200 a year, as he said his estate would be.
He replied he did not ask what my fortune was, he had told me from the beginning he would not, and he would be as good as his word; but whatever it was, he assured me he would never desire me to go to Virginia with him, or go thither himself without me, unless I made it my choice.
All this, you may be sure, was as I wished, and indeed nothing could have happened more perfectly agreeable; I carried it on as far as this with a sort of indifferency that he often wondered at, and I mention it the rather to intimate again to the ladies that nothing but want of courage for such an indifferency makes our sex so cheap, and prepares them to be ill used as they are; would they venture the loss of a pretending fop now and then, who carries it high upon the point of his own merit, they would certainly be slighted less, and courted more; had I discovered really what my great fortune was, and that in all I had not full £500 when he expected £1,500, yet I hooked him so fast and played with him so long, that I was satisfied he would have had me in my worst circumstances; and indeed it was less a surprise to him when he learnt the truth than it would have been, because having not the least blame to lay on me who had carried it with an air of indifference to the last, he could not say one word except that indeed he thought it had been more, but that if it had been less, he did not repent his bargain; only that he should not be able to maintain me so well as he intended.
In short, we were married, and very happily married on my side, I assure you, as to the man: for he was the best humoured man that ever woman had, but his circumstances were not so good as I imagined, as on the other hand he had not bettered himself so much as he expected.
When we were married I was shrewdly put to it to bring him that little stock I had, and to let him see it was no more; but there was a necessity for it, so I took my opportunity one day when we were alone to enter into a short dialogue with him about it. “My dear,” said I, “we have been married a fortnight, is it not time to let you know whether you have got a wife with something or with nothing?”
“Your own time for that, my dear,” says he; “I am satisfied I have got the wife I love; I have not troubled you much,” says he, “with my enquiry after it.”
“That’s true,” said I, “but I have a great difficulty about it, which I scarce know how to manage.”
“What’s that, my dear?” says he.
“Why,” says I, “‘tis a little hard upon me, and ‘tis harder upon you; I am told that Captain—” (meaning my friend’s husband) “has told you I had a great deal more than ever I pretended to have, and I am sure I never employed him so to do.”
“Well,” says he, “Captain — may have told me so, but what then, if you have not so much, that may lie at his door, but you never told me what you had, so I have no reason to blame you if you have nothing at all.”
“That is so just,” said I, “and so generous, that it makes my having but a little a double affliction to me.”
“The less you have, my dear,” says he, “the worse for us both; but I hope your affliction is not caused for fear I should be unkind to you for want of a portion; no, no, if you have nothing, tell me plainly; I may perhaps tell the Captain he has cheated me, but I can never say you have, for did not you give it under your hand that you was poor, and so I ought to expect you to be?”
“Well,” said I, “my dear, I am glad I have not been concerned in deceiving you before marriage, if I deceive you since, ‘tis ne’er the worse; that I am poor, ‘tis too true, but not so poor as to have nothing neither.” So I pulled out some bank bills and gave him about a hundred and sixty pounds. “There is something, my dear,” says I, “and not quite all neither.”
I had brought him so near to expecting nothing, by what I had said before, that the money, though the sum was small in itself, was doubly welcome; he owned it was more than he looked for, and that he did not question by my discourse to him but that my fine clothes, gold watch, and a diamond ring or two, had been all my fortune.
I let him please himself with that £160 two or three days, and then having been abroad that day, and as if I had been to fetch it, I brought him a hundred pounds more home in gold, and told him there was a little more portion for him; and, in short, in about a week more, I brought him £180 more, and about £60 in linen, which I made believe I had been obliged to take with the £100 which I gave him in gold, as a composition for a debt of £600, being little more than five shillings in the pound, and over-valued too.
“And now, my dear,” says I to him, “I am very sorry to tell you, that I have given you my whole fortune.” I added that if the person who had my £600 had not abused me, I had been worth a thousand pound to him, but that as it was, I had been faithful, and reserved nothing to myself, but if it had been more he should have had it.
He was so obliged by the manner and so pleased with the sum, for he had been in a terrible fright lest it had been nothing at all, that he accepted it very thankfully: and thus I got over the fraud of passing for a fortune without money and cheated a man into marrying me on pretence of it, which, by the way, I take to be one of the most dangerous steps a woman can take, and in which she runs the most hazards of being ill used afterwards.
My husband, to give him his due, was a man of infinite good nature, but he was no fool; and finding his income not suited to the manner of living which he had intended, if I had brought him what he expected, and being under a disappointment in his return of his plantations in Virginia, he discovered many times his inclination of going over to Virginia to live upon his own; and often would be magnifying the way of living there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and the like.
I began presently to understand his meaning, and I took him up very plainly one morning and told him that I did so; that I found his estate turned to no account at this distance, compared to what it would do if he lived upon the spot, and that I found he had a mind to go and live there; that I was sensible he had been disappointed in a wife, and that finding his expectations not answered that way I could do no less, to make amends, than tell him that I was very willing to go to Virginia with him and live there.
He said a thousand kind things to me upon the subject of my making such a proposal to him: he told me that though he was disappointed in his expectations of a fortune, he was not disappointed in a wife, and that I was all to him that a wife could be, but that this offer was so kind that it was more than he could express.
To bring the story short, we agreed to go: he told me that he had a very good house there well furnished, that his mother lived in it and one sister, which was all the relations he had; that as soon as he came there they would remove to another house which was her own for life, and his after her decease; so that I should have all the house to myself; and I found it all exactly as he said.
We put on board the ship which we went in a large quantity of good furniture for our house, with stores of linen and other necessaries and a good cargo for sale, and away we went.
To give an account of the manner of our voyage, which was long and full of dangers, is out of my way. I kept no journal, neither did my husband; all that I can say is, that after a terrible passage, frighted twice with dreadful storms, and once with what was still more terrible, I mean a pirate, who came on board and took away almost all our provisions; and, which would have been beyond all to me, they had once taken my husband, but by entreaties were prevailed with to leave him; I say, after all these terrible things we arrived in York River in Virginia, and coming to our plantation we were received with all the tenderness and affection (by my husband’s mother) that could be expressed.
We lived here all together, my mother-in-law at my entreaty continuing in the house, for she was too kind a mother to be parted with; my husband likewise continued the same at first, and I thought myself the happiest creature alive, when an odd and surprising event put an end to all that felicity in a moment, and rendered my condition the most uncomfortable in the world.
My mother was a mighty cheerful, good-humoured old woman, I may call her so, for her son was above thirty: I say, she was very pleasant good company, and used to entertain me in particular with abundance of stories to divert me, as well as of the country we were in, as of the people.
Among the rest she often told me how the greatest part of the inhabitants of that Colony came thither in very indifferent circumstances from England; that, generally speaking, they were of two sorts: either (I) such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants; or, (2) such as are transported after having been found guilty of crimes punishable with death.
“When they come here,” says she, “we make no difference, the planters buy them, and they work together in the field till their time is out; when ‘tis expired,” said she, “they have encouragement given them to plant for themselves; for they have a certain number of acres of land allotted them by the country, and they go to work to clear and cure the land, and then to plant it with tobacco and corn for their own use; and as the merchants will trust them with tools and necessaries upon the credit of their crop before it is grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year before, and so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before them. Hence, child,” says she, “many a Newgate bird becomes a great man, and we have,” continued she, “several justices of the peace, officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the hand.”
She was going on with that part of the story when her own part in it interrupted her, and with a great deal of good-humoured confidence she told me she was one of the second sort of inhabitants herself; that she came away openly, having ventured too far in a particular case, so that she was become a criminal, and “Here’s the mark of it, child,” says she, and shewed me a very fine white arm and hand, but branded in the inside of the hand, as in such cases it must be.
This story was very moving to me, but my mother (smiling) said, “You need not think such a thing strange, daughter, for some of the best men in the country are burnt in the hand, and they are not ashamed to own it; there’s Major—,” says she, “he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba—r, was a shoplifter, and both of them were burnt in the hand, and I could name you several such as they are.”
We had frequent discourses of this kind, and abundance of instances she gave me of the like; after some time, as she was telling some stories of one that was transported but a few weeks ago, I began in an intimate kind of way to ask her to tell me something of her own story, which she did with the utmost plainness and sincerity; how she had fallen into very ill company in London in her young days, occassioned by her mother sending her frequently to carry victuals to a kinswoman of hers who was a prisoner in Newgate, in a miserable starving condition, who was afterwards condemned to die, but having got respite by pleading her belly perished afterwards in the prison.
Here my mother-in-law ran out in a long account of the wicked practices in that dreadful place. “And, child,” says my mother, “perhaps you may know little of it, or it may be have heard nothing about it; but depend upon it,” says she, “we all know here, that there are more thieves and rogues made by that one prison of Newgate, than by all the clubs and societies of villains in the nation; ‘tis that cursed place,” says my mother, “that half peoples this Colony.”
Here she went on with her own story so long and in so particular a manner that I began to be very uneasy, but coming to one particular that required telling her name, I thought I should have sunk down in the place; she perceived I was out of order, and asked me if I was not well, and what ailed me? I told her I was so affected with the melancholy story she had told that it had overcome me, and I begged her to talk no more of it.
“Why, my dear,” says she very kindly, “what need these things trouble you? These passages were long before your time, and they give me no trouble at all now, nay, I look back on them with a particular satisfaction, as they have been a means to bring me to this place.” Then she went on to tell me how she fell into a good family, where behaving herself well and her mistress dying, her master married her, by whom she had my husband and his sister, and that by her diligence and good management after her husband’s death she had improved the plantations to such a degree as they then were, so that most of the estate was of her getting, not of her husband’s, for she had been a widow upwards of sixteen years.
I heard this part of the story with very little attention, because I wanted much to retire and give vent to my passions; and let anyone judge what must be the anguish of my mind, when I came to reflect that this was certainly no more or less than my own mother, and that I had now had two children, and was big with another, by my own brother, and lay with him still every night.
I was now the most unhappy of all women in the world. O! had the story never been told me, all had been well; it had been no crime to have lain with my husband if I had known nothing of it.
I had now such a load on my mind that it kept me perpetually waking; to reveal it I could not find would be to any purpose, and yet to conceal it would be next to impossible; nay, I did not doubt but I should talk in my sleep and tell my husband of it whether I would or no; if I discovered it, the least thing I could expect to lose was my husband, for he was too nice and too honest a man to have continued my husband after he had known I had been his sister, so that I was perplexed to the last degree.
I leave it to any man to judge what difficulties presented to my view. I was away from my native country at a distance prodigious, and the return to me unpassable; I lived very well, but in a circumstance unsufferable in itself; if I had discovered myself to my mother it might be difficult to convince her of the particulars, and I had no way to prove them. On the other hand, if she had questioned or doubted me I had been undone, for the bare suggestion would have immediately separated me from my husband, without gaining my mother or him, so that between the surprise on one hand and the uncertainty on the other, I had been sure to be undone.
In the meantime, as I was but too sure of the fact, I lived therefore in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest wife; and though I was not much touched with the crime of it, yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my husband even nauseous to me. However, upon the most sedate consideration, I resolved that it was absolutely necessary to conceal it all, and not make the least discovery of it either to mother or husband; and thus I lived with the greatest pressure imaginable for three years or more.
During this time my mother used to be frequently telling me old stories of her former adventures, which however were no ways pleasant to me; for by it, though she did not tell it me in plain terms, yet I could understand, joined with what I heard myself of my first tutors, that in her younger days she had been whore and thief; but I verily believe she had lived to repent sincerely of both, and that she was then a very pious, sober, and religious woman.
Well, let her life have been what it would then, it was certain that my life was very uneasy to me; for I lived, as I have said, but in the worst sort of whoredom, and as I could expect no good of it, so really no good issue came of it, and all my seeming prosperity wore off and ended in misery and destruction. It was some time indeed before it came to this, for everything went wrong with us afterwards, and that which was worse, my husband grew strangely altered, froward, jealous, and unkind, and I was as impatient of bearing his carriage as the carriage was unreasonable and unjust. These things proceeded so far, and we came at last to be in such ill terms with one another, that I claimed a promise of him which he entered willingly into with me when I consented to come from England with him, namely, that if I did not like to live there I should come away to England again when I pleased, giving him a year’s warning to settle his affairs.
I say, I now claimed this promise of him, and I must confess I did it not in the most obliging terms that could be neither; but I insisted that he treated me ill, that I was remote from my friends, and could do myself no justice, and that he was jealous without cause, my conversation having been unblamable and he having no pretence for it, and that to remove to England would take away all occasion from him.
I insisted so peremptorily upon it that he could not avoid coming to a point, either to keep his word with me or to break it; and this, notwithstanding he used all the skill he was master of, and employed his mother and other agents to prevail with me to alter my resolutions; indeed the bottom of the thing lay at my heart, and that made all his endeavours fruitless, for my heart was alienated from him. I loathed the thoughts of bedding with him, and used a thousand pretences of illness and humour to prevent his touching me, fearing nothing more than to be with child again, which to be sure would have prevented or at least delayed my going over to England.
However, at last I put him so out of humour that he took up a rash and fatal resolution, that in short I should not go to England; that though he had promised me, yet it was an unreasonable thing, that it would be ruinous to his affairs, would unhinge his whole family and be next to an undoing him in the world; that therefore I ought not to desire it of him, and that no wife in the world that valued her family and her husband’s prosperity, would insist upon such a thing.
This plunged me again, for when I considered the thing calmly, and took my husband as he really was, a diligent careful man in the main, and that he knew nothing of the dreadful circumstances that he was in, I could not but confess to myself that my proposal was very unreasonable and what no wife that had the good of her family at heart would have desired.
But my discontents were of another nature; I looked upon him no longer as a husband but as a near relation, the son of my own mother, and I resolved somehow or other to be clear of him, but which way I did not know.
It is said by the ill-natured world of our sex, that if we are set on a thing it is impossible to turn us from our resolutions: in short, I never ceased poring upon the means to bring to pass my voyage, and came that length with my husband at last as to propose going without him. This provoked him to the last degree, and he called me not only an unkind wife but an unnatural mother, and asked me how I could entertain such a thought without horror as that of leaving my two children (for one was dead) without a mother, and never to see them more. It was true, had things been right, I should not have done it, but now, it was my real desire never to see them or him either any more; and as to the charge of unnatural, I could easily answer it myself, while I knew that the whole relation was unnatural in the highest degree.
However, there was no bringing my husband to anything; he would neither go with me or let me go without him, and it was out of my power to stir without his consent, as anyone that is acquainted with the constitution of that country knows very well.
We had many family quarrels about it, and they began to grow up to a dangerous height; for as I was quite estranged from him in affection, so I took no heed to my words, but sometimes gave him language that was provoking: in short, I strove all I could to bring him to a parting with me, which was what above all things I desired most.
He took my carriage very ill, and indeed he might well do so, for at last I refused to bed with him, and carrying on the breach upon all occasions to extremity, he told me once he thought I was mad, and if I did not alter my conduct he would put me under cure; that is to say, into a mad-house. I told him he should find I was far enough from mad, and that it was not in his power or any other villain’s to murder me. I confess at the same time I was heartily frighted at his thoughts of putting me into a mad-house, which would at once have destroyed all the possibility of bringing the truth out; for that then no one would have given credit to a word of it.
This therefore brought me to a resolution, whatever came of it, to lay open my whole case; but which way to do it, or to whom, was an inextricable difficulty; when another quarrel with my husband happened, which came up to such an extreme as almost pushed me on to tell it him all to his face; but though I kept it in so as not to come to the particulars, I spoke so much as put him into the utmost confusion, and in the end brought out the whole story.
He began with a calm expostulation upon my being so resolute to go to England; I defended it, and one hard word bringing on another, as is usual in all family strife, he told me, I did not treat him as if he was my husband, or talk of my children as if I was a mother; and in short, that I did not deserve to be used as a wife: that he had used all the fair means possible with me; that he had argued with all the kindness and calmness that a husband or a Christian ought to do, and that I made him such a vile return that I treated him rather like a dog than a man, and rather like the most contemptible stranger than a husband: that he was very loath to use violence with me, and that, in short, he saw a necessity of it now, and that for the future he should be obliged to take such measures as should reduce me to my duty.
My blood was now fired to the utmost, and nothing could appear more provoked; I told him, for his fair means and his foul, they were equally condemned by me; that for my going to England I was resolved on it, come what would; and that as to treating him not like a husband, and not showing myself a mother to my children, there might be something more in it than he understood at present; but I thought fit to tell him thus much, that he neither was my lawful husband nor they lawful children, and that I had reason to regard neither of them more than I did.
I confess I was moved to pity him when I spoke it, for he turned pale as death and stood mute as one thunder-struck, and once or twice I thought he would have fainted; in short, it put him in a fit something like an apoplex; he trembled, a sweat or dew ran off his face, and yet he was cold as a clod, so that I was forced to fetch something to keep life in him; when he recovered of that, he grew sick and vomited, and in a little after was put to bed, and the next morning was in a violent fever.
However, it went off again and he recovered, though but slowly, and when he came to be a little better he told me I had given him a mortal wound with my tongue, and he had only one thing to ask before he desired an explanation. I interrupted him, and told him I was sorry I had gone so far, since I saw what disorder it put him into, but I desired him not to talk to me of explanations, for that would but make things worse.
This heightened his impatience, and indeed perplexed him beyond all bearing; for now he began to suspect that there was some mystery yet unfolded, but could not make the least guess at it; all that run in his brain was that I had another husband alive, but I assured him there was not the least of that in it; indeed as to my other husband, he was effectually dead to me, and had told me I should look on him as such, so I had not the least uneasiness on that score.
But now I found the thing too far gone to conceal it much longer, and my husband himself gave me an opportunity to ease myself of the secret much to my satisfaction; he had laboured with me three or four weeks, but to no purpose, only to tell him whether I had spoken those words only to put him in a passion, or whether there was anything of truth in the bottom of them: but I continued inflexible and would explain nothing, unless he would first consent to my going to England, which he would never do, he said, while he lived; on the other hand, I said it was in my power to make him willing when I pleased, nay, to make him entreat me to go; and this increased his curiosity and made him importunate to the highest degree.
At length he tells all this story to his mother, and sets her upon me to get it out of me, and she used her utmost skill indeed; but I put her to a full stop at once by telling her that the mystery of the whole matter lay in herself; that it was my respect to her had made me conceal it, and that, in short, I could go no farther and therefore conjured her not to insist upon it.
She was struck dumb at this suggestion, and could not tell what to say or to think; but laying aside the supposition as a policy of mine, continued her importunity on account of her son, and if possible, to make up the breach between us two; as to that, I told her that it was indeed a good design in her, but that it was impossible to be done; and that if I should reveal to her the truth of what she desired, she would grant it to be impossible and cease to desire it. At last I seemed to be prevailed on by her importunity, and told her I dare trust her with a secret of the greatest importance, and she would soon see that this was so, and that I would consent to lodge it in her breast if she would engage solemnly not to acquaint her son with it without my consent.
She was long in promising this part, but rather than not come at the main secret she agreed to that too, and after a great many other preliminaries I began and told her the whole story. First I told her how much she was concerned in all the unhappy breach which had happened between her son and me, by telling me her own story and her London name; and that the surprise she saw I was in was upon that occasion: then I told her my own story, and my name, and assured her by such other tokens as she could not deny, that I was no other nor more or less than her own child, her daughter born of her body in Newgate; the same that had saved her from the gallows by being in her belly, and that she left in such and such hands when she was transported.
It is impossible to express the astonishment she was in; she was not inclined to believe the story or to remember the particulars; for she immediately foresaw the confusion that must follow in the family upon it; but everything concurred so exactly with the stories she had told me of herself, and which if she had not told me, she would perhaps have been content to have denied, that she had stopped her own mouth, and she had nothing to do but take me about the neck and kiss me and cry most vehemently over me, without speaking one word for a long time together; at last she broke out, “Unhappy child!” says she, “what miserable chance could bring thee hither? and in the arms of my son too! Dreadful girl!” says she, “why we are all undone! Married to thy own brother! Three children, and two alive, all of the same flesh and blood! My son and my daughter lying together as husband and wife! All confusion and distraction, miserable family! What will become of us? What is to be said? What is to be done?” And thus she run on a great while, nor had I any power to speak, or if I had, did I know what to say, for every word wounded me to the soul: with this kind of amazement we parted for the first time, though my mother was more surprised than I was, because it was more news to her than to me: however, she promised again that she would say nothing of it to her son till we had talked of it again.
It was not long, you may be sure, before we had a second conference upon the same subject; when, as if she had been willing to forget the story she had told me of herself, or to suppose that I had forgot some of the particulars, she began to tell them with alterations and omissions; but I refreshed her memory in many things which I supposed she had forgot, and then came in so opportunely with the whole history that it was impossible for her to go from it; and then she fell into her rhapsodies again, and exclamations at the severity of her misfortunes: when these things were a little over with her, we fell into a close debate about what should be first done before we gave an account of the matter to my husband. But to what purpose could be all our consultations? We could neither of us see our way through it, or how it could be safe to open such a scene to him; it was impossible to make any judgment, or give any guess at what temper he would receive it in, or what measures he would take upon it; and if he should have so little government of himself as to make it public, we easily foresaw that it would be the ruin of the whole family, and if at last he should take the advantage the law would give him, he might put me away with disdain and leave me to sue for the little portion that I had, and perhaps waste it all in the suit and then be a beggar; and thus I should see him perhaps in the arms of another wife in a few months, and be myself the most miserable creature alive.
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