None of your applications, cried my cousins, both in a breath.
None of your applications, and be d----d to you, the passionate Peer.
Well then, returned I, I am to conclude it to be a case so plain that it
needs none; looking at the two girls, who tried for a blush a-piece. And
I hold myself, of consequence, acquitted of the death.
Not so, cried my Lord, [Peers are judges, thou knowest, Jack, in the last
resort:] for if, by committing an unlawful act, a capital crime is the
consequence, you are answerable for both.
Say you so, my good Lord?--But will you take upon you to say, supposing
(as in the present case) a rape (saving your presence, cousin Charlotte,
saving your presence, cousin Patty)--Is death the natural consequence of
a rape?--Did you ever hear, my Lord, or did you, Ladies, that it was?--
And if not the natural consequence, and a lady will destroy herself,
whether by a lingering death, as of grief; or by the dagger, as Lucretia
did; is there more than one fault the man's?--Is not the other her's?--
Were it not so, let me tell you, my dears, chucking each of my blushing
cousins under the chin, we either would have had no men so wicked as
young Tarquin was, or no women so virtuous as Lucretia, in the space of--
How many thousand years, my Lord?--And so Lucretia is recorded as a
single wonder!
You may believe I was cried out upon. People who cannot answer, will
rave: and this they all did. But I insisted upon it to them, and so I do
to you, Jack, that I ought to be acquitted of every thing but a common
theft, a private larceny, as the lawyers call it, in this point. And
were my life to be a forfeit of the law, it would not be for murder.
Besides, as I told them, there was a circumstance strongly in my favour
in this case: for I would have been glad, with all my soul, to have
purchased my forgiveness by a compliance with the terms I first boggled
at. And this, you all know, I offered; and my Lord, and Lady Betty, and
Lady Sarah, and my two cousins, and all my cousins' cousins, to the
fourteenth generation, would have been bound for me--But it would not do:
the sweet miser would break her heart, and die: And how could I help it?
Upon the whole, Jack, had not the lady died, would there have been half
so much said of it, as there is? Was I the cause of her death? or could
I help it? And have there not been, in a million of cases like this,
nine hundred and ninty-nine thousand that have not ended as this has
ended?--How hard, then, is my fate!--Upon my soul, I won't bear it as I
have done; but, instead of taking guilt to myself, claim pity. And this
(since yesterday cannot be recalled) is the only course I can pursue to
make myself easy. Proceed anon.