Col. It looks not like any such thing to me, Mr. Lovelace, who have as
good an opinion of your spirit as man can have. And what, pray, is the
part I act, and my motives for it? Are they not, in desiring that
justice may be done to my Cousin Clarissa Harlowe, that I seek to
establish the honour of Mrs. Lovelace, if matters can once be brought to
bear?
Lovel. Were she to honour me with her acceptance of that name, Mr.
Morden, I should not want you or any man to assert the honour of Mrs.
Lovelace.
Col. I believe it. But still she has honoured you with that
acceptance, she is nearer to me than to you, Mr. Lovelace. And I speak
this, only to show you that, in the part I take, I mean rather to deserve
your thanks than your displeasure, though against yourself, were there
occasion. Nor ought you take it amiss, if you rightly weigh the matter:
For, Sir, whom does a lady want protection against but her injurers? And
who has been her greatest injurer?--Till, therefore, she becomes entitled
to your protection, as your wife, you yourself cannot refuse me some
merit in wishing to have justice done my cousin. But, Sir, you were
going to say, that if it were not to look like capitulating, you would
hint the reasons my cousin gives against accepting such an honourable
mediation?
I then told him of my sincere offers of marriage: 'I made no difficulty,
I said, to own my apprehensions, that my unhappy behaviour to her had
greatly affected her: but that it was the implacableness of her friends
that had thrown her into despair, and given her a contempt for life.' I
told him, 'that she had been so good as to send me a letter to divert me
from a visit my heart was set upon making her: a letter on which I built
great hopes, because she assured me that in it she was going to her
father's; and that I might see her there, when she was received, if it
were not my own fault.
Col. Is it possible? And were you, Sir, thus earnest? And did she
send you such a letter?
Lord M. confirmed both; and also, that, in obedience to her desires, and
that intimation, I had come down without the satisfaction I had proposed
to myself in seeing her.
It is very true, Colonel, said I: and I should have told you this before:
but your heat made me decline it; for, as I said, it had an appearance of
meanly capitulating with you. An abjectness of heart, of which, had I
been capable, I should have despised myself as much as I might have
expected you would despise me.
Lord M. proposed to enter into the proof of all this. He said, in his
phraseological way, That one story was good till another was heard; and
that the Harlowe family and I, 'twas true, had behaved like so many
Orsons to one another; and that they had been very free with all our
family besides: that nevertheless, for the lady's sake, more than for
their's, or even for mine, (he could tell me,) he would do greater things
for me than they could ask, if she could be brought to have me: and that
this he wanted to declare, and would sooner have declared, if he could
have brought us sooner to patience, and a good understanding.
The Colonel made excuses for his warmth, on the score of his affection to
his cousin.
My regard for her made me readily admit them: and so a fresh bottle of
Burgundy, and another of Champagne, being put upon the table, we sat down
in good humour, after all this blustering, in order to enter closer into
the particulars of the case: which I undertook, at both their desires, to
do.
But these things must be the subject of another letter, which shall
immediately follow this, if it do not accompany it.
Mean time you will observe that a bad cause gives a man great
disadvantages: for I myself think that the interrogatories put to me with
so much spirit by the Colonel made me look cursedly mean; at the same
time that it gave him a superiority which I know not how to allow to the
best man in Europe. So that, literally speaking, as a good man would
infer, guilt is its own punisher: in that it makes the most lofty spirit
look like the miscreant he is--a good man, I say: So, Jack, proleptically
I add, thou hast no right to make the observation.