And so you fear no letter will be received from me. But DON’T grieve to
tell me so! I expect every thing bad—and such is my distress, that had
you not bid me hope for mercy from the throne of mercy, I should have
been afraid that my father’s dreadful curse would be completed with
regard to both worlds.
For here, an additional misfortune!—In a fit of phrensical
heedlessness, I sent a letter to my beloved Miss Howe, without
recollecting her private address; and it has fallen into her angry
mother’s hands: and so that dear friend perhaps has anew incurred
displeasure on my account. And here too your worthy son is ill; and my
poor Hannah, you think, cannot come to me—O my dear Mrs. Norton, will
you, can you censure those whose resentments against me Heaven seems to
approve of? and will you acquit her whom that condemns?
Yet you bid me not despond.—I will not, if I can help it. And, indeed,
most seasonable consolation has your kind letter afforded me.—Yet to
God Almighty do I appeal, to avenge my wrongs, and vindicate my inno——
But hushed be my stormy passions!—Have I not but this moment said that
your letter gave me consolation?—May those be forgiven who hinder my
father from forgiving me!—and this, as to them, shall be the harshest
thing that shall drop from my pen.
But although your son should recover, I charge you, my dear Mrs.
Norton, that you do not think of coming to me. I don’t know still but
your mediation with my mother (although at present your interposition
would be so little attended to) may be of use to procure me the
revocation of that most dreadful part of my father’s curse, which only
remains to be fulfilled. The voice of Nature must at last be heard in
my favour, surely. It will only plead at first to my friends in the
still conscious plaintiveness of a young and unhardened beggar. But it
will grow more clamorous when I have the courage to be so, and shall
demand, perhaps, the paternal protection from farther ruin; and that
forgiveness, which those will be little entitled to expect, for their
own faults, who shall interpose to have it refused to me, for an
accidental, not a premeditated error: and which, but for them, I had
never fallen into.
But again, impatiency, founded perhaps on self-partiality, that strange
misleader! prevails.
Let me briefly say, that it is necessary to my present and future hopes
that you keep well with my family. And moreover, should you come, I may
be traced out by that means by the most abandoned of men. Say not then
that you think you ought to come up to me, let it be taken as it
will:—For my sake, let me repeat, (were my foster-brother recovered, as
I hope he is,) you must not come. Nor can I want your advice, while I
can write, and you can answer me. And write I will as often as I stand
in need of your counsel.
Then the people I am now with seem to be both honest and humane: and
there is in the same house a widow-lodger, of low fortunes, but of
great merit:—almost such another serious and good woman as the dear one
to whom I am now writing; who has, as she says, given over all other
thoughts of the world but such as should assist her to leave it
happily.—How suitable to my own views!—There seems to be a comfortable
providence in this at least—so that at present there is nothing of
exigence; nothing that can require, or even excuse, your coming, when
so many better ends may be answered by your staying where you are. A
time may come, when I shall want your last and best assistance: and
then, my dear Mrs. Norton—and then, I will speak it, and embrace it
with all my whole heart—and then, will it not be denied me by any body.
You are very obliging in your offer of money. But although I was forced
to leave my clothes behind me, yet I took several things of value with
me, which will keep me from present want. You’ll say, I have made a
miserable hand of it—so indeed I have—and, to look backwards, in a very
little while too.
But what shall I do, if my father cannot be prevailed upon to recall
his malediction? O my dear Mrs. Norton, what a weight must a father’s
curse have upon a heart so appreciative as mine!—Did I think I should
ever have a father’s curse to deprecate? And yet, only that the
temporary part of it is so terribly fulfilled, or I should be as
earnest for its recall, for my father’s sake, as for my own!
You must not be angry with me that I wrote not to you before. You are
very right and very kind to say you are sure I love you. Indeed I do.
And what a generosity, [so like yourself!] is there in your praise, to
attribute to me more than I merit, in order to raise an emulation to me
to deserve your praises!—you tell me what you expect from me in the
calamities I am called upon to bear. May I behave answerably!
I can a little account to myself for my silence to you, my kind, my
dear maternal friend! How equally sweetly and politely do you express
yourself on this occasion! I was very desirous, for your sake, as well
as for my own, that you should have it to say that we did not
correspond: had they thought we did, every word you could have dropt in
my favour would have been rejected; and my mother would have been
forbid to see you, or pay any regard to what you should say.
Then I had sometimes better and sometimes worse prospects before me. My
worst would only have troubled you to know: my better made me
frequently hope, that, by the next post, or the next, and so on for
weeks, I should have the best news to impart to you that then could
happen: cold as the wretch had made my heart to that best.—For how
could I think to write to you, with a confession that I was not
married, yet lived in the house (for I could not help it) with such a
man?—Who likewise had given it out to several, that we were actually
married, although with restrictions that depended on the reconciliation
with my friends? And to disguise the truth, or be guilty of a
falsehood, either direct or equivocal, that was what you had never
taught me.
But I might have written to you for advice, in my precarious situation,
perhaps you will think. But, indeed, my dear Mrs. Norton, I was not
lost for want of advice. And this will appear clear to you from what I
have already hinted, were I to explain myself no further:—For what need
had the cruel spoiler to have recourse to unprecedented arts—I will
speak out plainer still, (but you must not at present report it,) to
stupifying potions, and to the most brutal and outrageous force, had I
been wanting in my duty?