In a transport of joy, he would have raised himself at my entrance, but
had like to have pitched out of the chair: and when recovered, called me
his best friend! his kindest friend! but burst into a flood of tears: O
Jack! O Belford! said he, see the way I am in! See how weak! So much,
and so soon reduced! Do you know me? Do you know your poor friend
Belton?
You are not so much altered, my dear Belton, as you think you are. But I
see you are weak; very weak--and I am sorry for it.
Weak, weak, indeed, my dearest Belford, said he, and weaker in mind, if
possible, than in body; and wept bitterly--or I should not thus unman
myself. I, who never feared any thing, to be forced to show myself such
a nursling!--I am quite ashamed of myself!--But don't despise me; dear
Belford, don't despise me, I beseech thee.
I ever honoured a man that could weep for the distresses of others; and
ever shall, said I; and such a one cannot be insensible of his own.
However, I could not help being visibly moved at the poor fellow's emotion.
Now, said the brutal Mowbray, do I think thee insufferable, Jack. Our
poor friend is already a peg too low; and here thou art letting him down
lower and lower still. This soothing of him in his dejected moments, and
joining thy womanish tears with his, is not the way; I am sure it is not.
If our Lovelace were here, he'd tell thee so.
Thou art an impenetrable creature, replied I; unfit to be present at a
scene, the terrors of which thou wilt not be able to feel till thou
feelest them in thyself; and then, if thou hadst time for feeling, my
life for thine, thou behavest as pitifully as those thou thinkest most
pitiful.
Then turning to the poor sick man, Tears, my dear Belton, are no signs of
an unmanly, but, contrarily of a humane nature; they ease the
over-charged heart, which would burst but for that kindly and natural
relief.
Give sorrow words (says Shakspeare)
--The grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
I know, my dear Belton, thou usedst to take pleasure in repetitions from
the poets; but thou must be tasteless of their beauties now: yet be not
discountenanced by this uncouth and unreflecting Mowbray, for, as Juvenal
says, Tears are the prerogative of manhood.
'Tis at least seasonably said, my dear Belford. It is kind to keep me in
countenance for this womanish weakness, as Mowbray has been upbraidingly
calling it, ever since he has been with me: and in so doing, (whatever I
might have thought in such high health as he enjoys,) has convinced me,
that bottle-friends feel nothing but what moves in that little circle.
Well, well, proceed in your own way, Jack. I love my friend Belton as
well as you can do; yet for the blood of me, I cannot but think, that
soothing a man's weakness is increasing it.
If it be a weakness, to be touched at great and concerning events, in
which our humanity is concerned, said I, thou mayest be right.
I have seen many a man, said the rough creature, going up Holborn-hill,
that has behaved more like a man than either of you.
Ay, but, Mowbray, replied the poor man, those wretches have not had their
minds enervated by such infirmities of body as I have long laboured
under. Thou art a shocking fellow, and ever wert.--But to be able to
remember nothing in these moments but what reproaches me, and to know
that I cannot hold it long, and what may then be my lot, if--but
interrupting himself, and turning to me, Give me thy pity, Jack; 'tis
balm to my wounded soul; and let Mowbray sit indifferent enough to the
pangs of a dying friend, to laugh at us both.
The hardened fellow then retired, with the air of a Lovelace; only more
stupid; yawning and stretching, instead of humming a tune as thou didst
at Smith's.
I assisted to get the poor man into bed. He was so weak and low, that he
could not bear the fatigue, and fainted away; and I verily thought was
quite gone. But recovering, and his doctor coming, and advising to keep
him quiet, I retired, and joined Mowbray in the garden; who took more
delight to talk of the living Lovelace and levities, than of the dying
Belton and his repentance.
I just saw him again on Saturday night before I went to bed; which I did
early; for I was surfeited with Mowbray's frothy insensibility, and could
not bear him.
It is such a horrid thing to think of, that a man who had lived in such
strict terms of--what shall I call it? with another; the proof does not
come out so, as to say, friendship; who had pretended so much love for
him; could not bear to be out of his company; would ride an hundred miles
on end to enjoy it; and would fight for him, be the cause right or wrong:
yet now, could be so little moved to see him in such misery of body and
mind, as to be able to rebuke him, and rather ridicule than pity him,
because he was more affected by what he felt, than he had seen a
malefactor, (hardened perhaps by liquor, and not softened by previous
sickness,) on his going to execution.
This put me strongly in mind of what the divine Miss HARLOWE once said to
me, talking of friendship, and what my friendship to you required of me:
'Depend upon it, Mr. Belford,' said she, 'that one day you will be
convinced, that what you call friendship, is chaff and stubble; and that
nothing is worthy of that sacred name,
'That has not virtue for its base.'
Sunday morning, I was called up at six o'clock, at the poor man's earnest
request, and found him in a terrible agony. O Jack! Jack! said he,
looking wildly, as if he had seen a spectre--Come nearer me!--Dear, dear
Belford, save me! Then clasping my arm with both his hands, and rearing
up his head towards me, his eyes strangely rolling, Save me! dear
Belford, save me! repeated he.
I put my other arm about him--Save you from what, my dear Belton! said I;
save you from what? Nothing shall hurt you. What must I save you from?
Recovering from his terror, he sunk down again, O save me from myself!
said he; save me from my own reflections. O dear Jack! what a thing it
is to die; and not to have one comfortable reflection to revolve! What
would I give for one year of my past life?--only one year--and to have
the same sense of things that I now have?
I tried to comfort him as well as I could: but free-livers to free-livers
are sorry death-bed comforters. And he broke in upon me: O my dear
Belford, said he, I am told, (and I have heard you ridiculed for it,)
that the excellent Miss Harlowe has wrought a conversion in you. May it
be so! You are a man of sense: O may it be so! Now is your time! Now,
that you are in full vigour of mind and body!--But your poor Belton,
alas! your poor Belton kept his vices, till they left him--and see the
miserable effects in debility of mind and despondency! Were Mowbray
here, and were he to laugh at me, I would own that this is the cause of
my despair--that God's justice cannot let his mercy operate for my
comfort: for, Oh! I have been very, very wicked; and have despised the
offers of his grace, till he has withdrawn it from me for ever.
I used all the arguments I could think of to give him consolation: and
what I said had such an effect upon him, as to quiet his mind for the
greatest part of the day; and in a lucid hour his memory served him to
repeat these lines of Dryden, grasping my hand, and looking wistfully
upon me:
O that I less could fear to lose this being,
Which, like a snow-ball, in my coward hand,
The more 'tis grasped, the faster melts away!
In the afternoon of Sunday, he was inquisitive after you, and your
present behaviour to Miss Harlowe. I told him how you had been, and how
light you made of it. Mowbray was pleased with your impenetrable
hardness of heart, and said, Bob. Lovelace was a good edge-tool, and
steel to the back: and such coarse but hearty praises he gave you, as an
abandoned man might give, and only an abandoned man could wish to
deserve.
But hadst thou heard what the poor dying Belton said on this occasion,
perhaps it would have made thee serious an hour or two, at least.
'When poor Lovelace is brought,' said he, 'to a sick-bed, as I am now,
and his mind forebodes that it is impossible he should recover, (which
his could not do in his late illness: if it had, he could not have
behaved so lightly in it;) when he revolves his past mis-spent life; his
actions of offence to helpless innocents; in Miss Harlowe's case
particularly; what then will he think of himself, or of his past actions?
his mind debilitated; his strength turned into weakness; unable to stir
or to move without help; not one ray of hope darting in upon his
benighted soul; his conscience standing in the place of a thousand
witnesses; his pains excruciating; weary of the poor remnant of life he
drags, yet dreading, that, in a few short hours, his bad will be changed
to worse, nay, to worst of all; and that worst of all, to last beyond
time and to all eternity; O Jack! what will he then think of the poor
transitory gratifications of sense, which now engage all his attention?
Tell him, dear Belford, tell him, how happy he is if he know his own
dying happiness; how happy, compared to his poor dying friend, that he
has recovered from his illness, and has still an opportunity lent him,
for which I would give a thousand worlds, had I them to give!'
I approved exceedingly of his reflections, as suited to his present
circumstances; and inferred consolations to him from a mind so properly
touched.
He proceeded in the like penitent strain. I have lived a very wicked
life; so have we all. We have never made a conscience of doing whatever
mischief either force or fraud enabled us to do. We have laid snares for
the innocent heart; and have not scrupled by the too-ready sword to
extend, as occasions offered, the wrongs we did to the persons whom we
had before injured in their dearest relations. But yet, I flatter
myself, sometimes, that I have less to answer for than either Lovelace or
Mowbray; for I, by taking to myself that accursed deceiver from whom thou
hast freed me, (and who, for years, unknown to me, was retaliating upon
my own head some of the evils I had brought upon others,) and retiring,
and living with her as a wife, was not party to half the mischiefs, that
I doubt they, and Tourville, and even you, Belford, committed. As to the
ungrateful Thomasine, I hope I have met with my punishment in her. But
notwithstanding this, dost thou not think, that such an action--and such
an action--and such an action; [and then he recapitulated several
enormities, in the perpetration of which (led on by false bravery, and
the heat of youth and wine) we have all been concerned;] dost thou not
think that these villanies, (let me call them now by their proper name,)
joined to the wilful and gloried-in neglect of every duty that our better
sense and education gave us to know were required of us as men and
christians, are not enough to weigh down my soul into despondency?--
Indeed, indeed, they are! and now to hope for mercy; and to depend upon
the efficacy of that gracious attribute, when that no less shining one of
justice forbids me to hope; how can I!--I, who have despised all
warnings, and taken no advantage of the benefit I might have reaped from
the lingering consumptive illness I have laboured under, but left all to
the last stake; hoping for recovery against hope, and driving off
repentance, till that grace is denied me; for, oh! my dear Belford! I can
now neither repent, nor pray, as I ought; my heart is hardened, and I can
do nothing but despair!--
More he would have said; but, overwhelmed with grief and infirmity, he
bowed his head upon his pangful bosom, endeavouring to hide from the
sight of the hardened Mowbray, who just then entered the room, those
tears which he could not restrain.
Prefaced by a phlegmatic hem; sad, very sad, truly! cried Mowbray; who
sat himself down on one side of the bed, as I sat on the other: his eyes
half closed, and his lips pouting out to his turned-up nose, his chin
curdled [to use one of thy descriptions]; leaving one at a loss to know
whether stupid drowsiness or intense contemplation had got most hold of
him.
An excellent, however uneasy lesson, Mowbray! said I.--By my faith it is!
It may one day, who knows how soon? be our own case!
I thought of thy yawning-fit, as described in thy letter of Aug. 13. For
up started Mowbray, writhing and shaking himself as in an ague-fit; his
hands stretched over his head--with thy hoy! hoy! hoy! yawning. And then
recovering himself, with another stretch and a shake, What's o'clock?
cried he; pulling out his watch--and stalking by long tip-toe strides
through the room, down stairs he went; and meeting the maid in the
passage, I heard him say--Betty, bring me a bumper of claret; thy poor
master, and this d----d Belford, are enough to throw a Hercules into the
vapours.
Mowbray, after this, assuming himself in our friend's library, which is,
as thou knowest, chiefly classical and dramatical, found out a passage in
Lee's Oedipus, which he would needs have to be extremely apt; and in he
came full fraught with the notion of the courage it would give the dying
man, and read it to him. 'Tis poetical and pretty. This is it:
When the sun sets, shadows that show'd at noon
But small, appear most long and terrible:
So when we think fate hovers o'er our heads,
Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds:
Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of death;
Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons:
Echoes, the very leavings of a voice,
Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves.
Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus;
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff,
And sweat with our imagination's weight.
He expected praises for finding this out. But Belton turning his head
from him, Ah, Dick! (said he,) these are not the reflections of a dying
man!--What thou wilt one day feel, if it be what I now feel, will
convince thee that the evils before thee, and with thee, are more than
the effects of imagination.
I was called twice on Sunday night to him; for the poor fellow, when his
reflections on his past life annoy him most, is afraid of being left with
the women; and his eyes, they tell me, hunt and roll about for me.
Where's Mr. Belford?--But I shall tire him out, cries he--yet beg of him
to step to me--yet don't--yet do; were once the doubting and changeful
orders he gave: and they called me accordingly.
But, alas! What could Belford do for him? Belford, who had been but too
often the companion of his guilty hours; who wants mercy as much as he
does; and is unable to promise it to himself, though 'tis all he can bid
his poor friend rely upon!
What miscreants are we! What figures shall we make in these terrible
hours!
If Miss HARLOWE'S glorious example, on one hand, and the terrors of this
poor man's last scene on the other, affect me not, I must be abandoned to
perdition; as I fear thou wilt be, if thou benefittest not thyself from
both.
Among the consolatory things I urged, when I was called up the last time
on Sunday night, I told him, that he must not absolutely give himself up
to despair: that many of the apprehensions he was under, were such as the
best men must have, on the dreadful uncertainty of what was to succeed to
this life. 'Tis well observed, said I, by a poetical divine, who was an
excellent christian,* That
Death could not a more sad retinue find,
Sickness and pain before, and darkness all behind.
* The Rev Mr. Norris, of Bremerton.
About eight o'clock yesterday (Monday) morning, I found him a little
calmer. He asked me who was the author of the two lines I had repeated
to him; and made me speak them over again. A sad retinue, indeed! said
the poor man. And then expressing his hopelessness of life, and his
terrors at the thoughts of dying; and drawing from thence terrible
conclusions with regard to his future state; There is, said I, such a
natural aversion to death in human nature, that you are not to imagine,
that you, my dear Belton, are singular in the fear of it, and in the
apprehensions that fill the thoughtful mind upon its approach; but you
ought, as much as possible, to separate those natural fears which all men
must have on so solemn an occasion, from those particular ones which your
justly-apprehended unfitness fills you with. Mr. Pomfret, in his
Prospect of Death, which I dipped into last night from a collection in
your closet, which I put into my pocket, says, [and I turned to the
place]
Merely to die, no man of reason fears;
For certainly we must,
As we are born, return to dust;
'Tis the last point of many ling-ring years;
But whither then we go,
Whither, we fain would know;
But human understanding cannot show.
This makes US tremble----
Mr. Pomfret, therefore, proceeded I, had such apprehensions of this dark
state as you have: and the excellent divine I hinted at last night, who
had very little else but human frailties to reproach himself with, and
whose miscellanies fell into my hands among my uncle's books in my
attendance upon him in his last hours, says,
It must be done, my soul: but 'tis a strange,
A dismal, and mysterious change,
When thou shalt leave this tenement of clay,
And to an unknown--somewhere--wing away;
When time shall be eternity, and thou
Shalt be--thou know'st not what--and live--
thou know'st not how!
Amazing state! no wonder that we dread
To think of death, or view the dead;
Thou'rt all wrapt up in clouds, as if to thee
Our very knowledge had antipathy.
Then follows, what I repeated,
Death could not a more sad retinue find,
Sickness and pain before, and darkness all behind.
Alas! my dear Belford [inferred the unhappy deep-thinker] what poor
creatures does this convince me we mortals are at best!--But what then
must be the case of such a profligate as I, who by a past wicked life
have added greater force to these natural terrors? If death be so
repugnant a thing to human nature, that good men will be startled at it,
what must it be to one who has lived a life of sense and appetite; nor
ever reflected upon the end which I now am within view of?
What could I say to an inference so fairly drawn? Mercy, mercy,
unbounded mercy, was still my plea, though his repeated opposition of
justice to it, in a manner silenced that plea: and what would I have
given to have had rise in my mind, one good, eminently good action to
have remembered him of, in order to combat his fears with it?
I believe, Lovelace, I shall tire thee, and that more with the subject
of my letter, than even with the length of it. But really, I think thy
spirits are so offensively up since thy recovery, that I ought, as the
melancholy subjects offer, to endeavour to reduce thee to the standard
of humanity, by expatiating upon them. And then thou canst not but be
curious to know every thing that concerns the poor man, for whom thou
hast always expressed a great regard. I will therefore proceed as I have
begun. If thou likest not to read it now, lay it by, if thou wilt, till
the like circumstances befall thee, till like reflections from those
circumstances seize thee; and then take it up, and compare the two cases
together.
***
At his earnest request, I sat up with him last night; and, poor man! it
is impossible to tell thee, how easy and safe he thought himself in my
company, for the first part of the night: A drowning man will catch at a
straw, the proverb well says: and a straw was I, with respect to any real
help I could give him. He often awaked in terrors; and once calling out
for me, Dear Belford, said he, Where are you!--Oh! There you are!--Give
me your friendly hand!--Then grasping it, and putting his clammy,
half-cold lips to it--How kind! I fear every thing when you are absent.
But the presence of a friend, a sympathising friend--Oh! how comfortable!
But, about four in the morning, he frighted me much: he waked with three
terrible groans; and endeavoured to speak, but could not presently--and
when he did,--Jack, Jack, Jack, five or six times repeated he as quick as
thought, now, now, now, save me, save me, save me--I am going--going
indeed!
I threw my arms about him, and raised him upon his pillow, as he was
sinking (as if to hide himself) in the bed-clothes--And staring wildly,
Where am I? said he, a little recovering. Did you not see him? turning
his head this way and that; horror in his countenance; Did you not see
him?
See whom, see what, my dear Belton!
O lay me upon the bed again, cried he!--Let me not die upon the floor!--
Lay me down gently; and stand by me!--Leave me not!--All, all will soon
be over!
You are already, my dear Belton, upon the bed. You have not been upon
the floor. This is a strong delirium; you are faint for want of
refreshment [for he had refused several times to take any thing]: let me
persuade you to take some of this cordial julap. I will leave you, if
you will not oblige me.
He then readily took it; but said he could have sworn that Tom. Metcalfe
had been in the room, and had drawn him out of bed by the throat,
upbraiding him with the injuries he had first done his sister, and then
him, in the duel to which he owed that fever which cost him his life.
Thou knowest the story, Lovelace, too well, to need my repeating it: but,
mercy on us, if in these terrible moments all the evils we do rise to our
frighted imaginations!--If so, what shocking scenes have I, but still
what more shocking ones hast thou, to go through, if, as the noble poet
says,
If any sense at that sad time remains!
The doctor ordered him an opiate this morning early, which operated so
well, that he dosed and slept several hours more quietly than he had done
for the two past days and nights, though he had sleeping-draughts given
him before. But it is more and more evident every hour that nature is
almost worn out in him.
***
Mowbray, quite tired with this house of mourning, intends to set out in
the morning to find you. He was not a little rejoiced to hear you were
in town; I believe to have a pretence to leave us.
***
He has just taken leave of his poor friend, intending to go away early:
an everlasting leave, I may venture to say; for I think he will hardly
live till to-morrow night.
I believe the poor man would not have been sorry had he left him when I
arrived; for 'tis a shocking creature, and enjoys too strong health to
know how to pity the sick. Then (to borrow an observation from thee) he
has, by nature, strong bodily organs, which those of his soul are not
likely to whet out; and he, as well as the wicked friend he is going to,
may last a great while from the strength of their constitutions, though
so greatly different in their talents, if neither the sword nor the
halter interpose.
I must repeat, That I cannot but be very uneasy for the poor lady whom
you so cruelly persecute; and that I do not think that you have kept your
honour with me. I was apprehensive, indeed, that you would attempt to
see her, as soon as you got well enough to come up; and I told her as
much, making use of it as an argument to prepare her for your visit, and
to induce her to stand it. But she could not, it is plain, bear the
shock of it: and indeed she told me that she would not see you, though
but for one half-hour, for the world.
Could she have prevailed upon herself, I know that the sight of her would
have been as affecting to you, as your visit could have been to her; when
you had seen to what a lovely skeleton (for she is really lovely still,
nor can she, with such a form and features, be otherwise) you have, in a
few weeks, reduced one of the most charming women in the world; and that
in the full bloom of her youth and beauty.
Mowbray undertakes to carry this, that he may be more welcome to you, he
says. Were it to be sent unsealed, the characters we write in would be
Hebrew to the dunce. I desire you to return it; and I'll give you a copy
of it upon demand; for I intend to keep it by me, as a guard against the
infection of your company, which might otherwise, perhaps, some time
hence, be apt to weaken the impressions I always desire to have of the
awful scene before me. God convert us both!