O wretch! wringing her uplifted hands, had I not been robbed of my
senses, and that in the basest manner—you best know how—had I been able
to account for myself, and your proceedings, or to have known but how
the days passed—a whole week should not have gone over my head, as I
find it has done, before I had told you, what I now tell you—That the
man who has been the villain to me you have been, shall never make me
his wife.—I will write to my uncle, to lay aside his kind intentions in
my favour—all my prospects are shut in—I give myself up for a lost
creature as to this world—hinder me not from entering upon a life of
severe penitence, for corresponding, after prohibition, with a wretch
who has too well justified all their warnings and inveteracy; and for
throwing myself into the power of your vile artifices. Let me try to
secure the only hope I have left. This is all the amends I ask of you.
I repeat, therefore, Am I now at liberty to dispose of myself as I
please?
Now comes the fool, the miscreant again, hesitating his broken answer:
My dearest love, I am confounded, quite confounded, at the thought of
what—of what has been done; and at the thought of—to whom. I see, I
see, there is no withstanding your eloquence!—Such irresistible proofs
of the love of virtue, for its own sake, did I never hear of, nor meet
with, in all my reading. And if you can forgive a repentant villain,
who thus on his knees implores your forgiveness, [then down I dropt,
absolutely in earnest in all I said,] I vow by all that’s sacred and
just, (and may a thunderbolt strike me dead at your feet, if I am not
sincere!) that I will by marriage before to-morrow noon, without
waiting for your uncle, or any body, do you all the justice I now can
do you. And you shall ever after controul and direct me as you please,
till you have made me more worthy of your angelic purity than now I am:
nor will I presume so much as to touch your garment, till I have the
honour to call so great a blessing lawfully mine.
O thou guileful betrayer! there is a just God, whom thou invokest: yet
the thunderbolt descends not; and thou livest to imprecate and deceive!