What can I advise you to do, my noble creature? Your merit is your
crime. You can no more change your nature, than your persecutors can
theirs. Your distress is owing to the vast disparity between you and
them. What would you have of them? Do they not act in character?--And to
whom? To an alien. You are not one of them. They have two dependencies
in their hope to move you to compliance.--Upon their impenetrableness
one [I'd give it a more proper name, if I dared]; the other, on the
regard you have always had for your character, [Have they not heretofore
owned as much?] and upon your apprehensions from that of Lovelace, which
would discredit you, should you take any step by his means to extricate
yourself. Then they know, that resentment and unpersuadableness are not
natural to you; and that the anger they have wrought you up to, will
subside, as all extraordinaries soon do; and that once married, you will
make the best of it.
But surely your father's son and eldest daughter have a view (by
communicating to so narrow a soul all they know of your just aversion to
him) to entail unhappiness for life upon you, were you to have the man
who is already more nearly related to them, than ever he can be to you,
although the shocking compulsion should take place.
As to that wretch's perseverance, those only, who know not the man,
will wonder at it. He has not the least delicacy. His principal view in
marriage is not to the mind. How shall those beauties be valued, which
cannot be comprehended? Were you to be his, and shew a visible want of
tenderness to him, it is my opinion, he would not be much concerned at
it. I have heard you well observe, from your Mrs. Norton, That a person
who has any over-ruling passion, will compound by giving up twenty
secondary or under-satisfactions, though more laudable ones, in order to
have that gratified.
I'll give you the substance of a conversation [no fear you can be made
to like him worse than you do already] that passed between Sir Harry
Downeton and this Solmes, but three days ago, as Sir Harry told it but
yesterday to my mother and me. It will confirm to you that what your
sister's insolent Betty reported he should say, of governing by fear,
was not of her own head.
Sir Harry told her, he wondered he should wish to obtain you so much
against you inclination as every body knew it would be, if he did.
He matter'd not that, he said: coy maids made the fondest wives: [A
sorry fellow!] It would not at all grieve him to see a pretty woman make
wry faces, if she gave him cause to vex her. And your estate, by the
convenience of its situation, would richly pay him for all he could bear
with your shyness.
He should be sure, he said, after a while, of your complaisance, if not
of your love: and in that should be happier than nine parts in ten of
his married acquaintance.
What a wretch is this!
For the rest, your known virtue would be as great a security to him, as
he could wish for.
She will look upon you, said Sir Harry, if she be forced to marry you,
as Elizabeth of France did upon Philip II. of Spain, when he received
her on his frontiers as her husband, who was to have been but her
father-in-law: that is, with fear and terror, rather than with
complaisance and love: and you will perhaps be as surly to her, as that
old monarch was to his young bride.
Fear and terror, the wretch, the horrid wretch! said, looked pretty in
a bride as well as in a wife: and, laughing, [yes, my dear, the hideous
fellow laughed immoderately, as Sir Harry told us, when he said it,] it
should be his care to perpetuate the occasion for that fear, if he could
not think he had the love. And, truly, he was of opinion, that if
LOVE and FEAR must be separated in matrimony, the man who made himself
feared, fared best.
If my eyes would carry with them the execution which the eyes of the
basilisk are said to do, I would make it my first business to see this
creature.
My mother, however, says, it would be a prodigious merit in you, if you
could get over your aversion to him. Where, asks she [as you have been
asked before], is the praise-worthiness of obedience, if it be only paid
in instance where we give up nothing?
What a fatality, that you have no better an option--either a Scylla or a
Charybdis.
Were it not you, I should know how (barbarously as you are used) to
advise you in a moment. But such a noble character to suffer from a
(supposed) rashness and indiscretion of such a nature, would, as I have
heretofore observed, be a wound to the sex.
While I was in hope, that the asserting of your own independence would
have helped you, I was pleased that you had one resource, as I thought.
But now, that you have so well proved, that such a step would not avail
you, I am entirely at a loss what to say.