and my supreme wish, Charles, on one knee, holding me fast by the hand
and gazing on me with a transport of fondness. Observing my recovery,
he attempted to speak, and give vent to his patience of hearing my
voice again, to satisfy him once more that it was I; but the mightiness
and suddenness of the surprise continuing to stun him, choked his
utterance: he could only stammer out a few broken, half-formed,
filtering accents, which my ears greedily drinking in, spelt, and put
together, so as to make out their sense: “After so long!... so cruel an
absence!... my dearest Fanny!... can it?... can it be you?...” stifling
me at the time with kisses, that, stopping my opening mouth, at once
prevented the answer that he panted for, and increased the delicious
disorder in which all my senses were rapturously lost. However, amidst
this crowd of ideas, and all blissful ones, there obtruded only one
cruel doubt that poisoned nearly all the transcendant happiness: and
what was it, but my dread of its being too excessive to be real? I
trembled now with my fear of its being no more than a dream, and of
waking out of it into the horrors of finding it one. Under this fond
apprehension, imagining I could not make too much of the present
prodigious joy, before it would vanish and leave me in the desert
again, nor verify its reality too strongly, I clung to him, I clasped
him, as if to hinder him from escaping me again: “Where have you
been?... how could you... could you leave me?... Say you are still
mine... that you still love me... and thus! thus!” (kissing him as if I
would consolidated lips with him) “I forgive you... forgive my hard
fortune in favour of this restoration.”
All these interjections breaking from me, in that wildness of
expression that justly passes for eloquence in love, drew from him all
the returns my fond heart could wish or require. Our caresses, our
questions, our answers, for some time observed no order; all crossing,
or interrupting one another in sweet confusion, whilst we exchanged
hearts at our eyes, and renewed the ratifications of a love unabated by
time or absence: not a breath, not a motion, not a gesture on either
side, but what was strongly impressed with it. Our hands, locked in
each other, repeated the most passionate squeezes, so that their fiery
thrill went to the heart again.
Thus absorbed, and concentered in this unutterable delight, I had not
attended to the sweet author of it being thoroughly wet, and in danger
of catching cold; when, in good time, the landlady, whom the appearance
of my equipage (which, bye the bye Charles knew nothing of) had gained
me an interest in, for me and mine interrupted us by bringing in a
decent shift of linen and clothes; which now, somewhat recovered into a
calmer composure by the coming in of a third person, I pressed him to
take the benefit of, with a tender concern and anxiety that made me
tremble for his health.
The landlady leaving us again, he proceeded to shift; in the act of
which, though he proceeded with all that modesty which became these
first solemner instants of our re-meeting, after so long an absence, I
could not refrain certain snatches of my eyes, lured by the dazzling
discoveries of his naked skin, that escaped him as he changed his
linen, and which I could not observe the unfaded life and complexion of
without emotions of tenderness and joy, that had himself too purely for
their object, to partake of a loose or mis-timed desire.
He was soon dressed in these temporary clothes, which neither fitted
him, nor became the light my passion placed him in, to me at least;
yet, as they were on him, they looked extremely well, in virtue of that
magic charm which love put into every thing that he touched, or had
relation to him: and where, indeed, was that dress that a figure like
his would not give grace to? For now, as I eyed him more in detail, I
could not but observe the even favourable alteration which the time of
his absence had produced in his person.
There were still the requisite lineaments, still the same vivid
vermillion and bloom reigning in his face; but now the roses were more
fully blown; the tan of his travels, and a beard somewhat more
distinguishable, had, at the expense of no more delicacy than what he
could well spare, given it an air of becoming manliness and maturity,
that symmetrized nobly with that air of distinction and empire with
which nature had stamped it, in a rare mixture with the sweetness of
it; still nothing had he lost of that smooth plumpness of flesh, which,
glowing with freshness, blooms florid to the eye, and delicious to the
touch; then his shoulders were grown more square, his shape more
formed, more portly, but still free and airy. In short, his figure
showed riper, greater, and perfecter to the experienced eye, than in
his tender youth; and now he was not much more than two and twenty.
In this interval, however, I picked out of the broken, often pleasingly
interrupted account of himself, that he was, at that instant, actually
on his road to London, in not a very paramount plight or condition,
having been wrecked on the Irish coast for which he had prematurely
embarked, and lost the little all he had brought with him from the
South Seas: so that he had not till after great shifts and hardships,
in the company of his fellow-traveller, the captain, got so far on his
journey; that so it was (having heard of his father’s death and
circumstances,) he had now the world to begin again, on a new account:
a situation, which he assured me, in a vein of sincerity, that flowing
from his heart, penetrated mine, gave him to farther pain, than that he
had not his power to make me as happy as he could wish. My fortune, you
will please to observe, I had not entered upon any overture of,
reserving, to feast myself with the surprise of it to him, in calmer
instants. And, as to my dress, it could give him no idea of the truth,
not only as it was mourning, but likewise in a style of plainness and
simplicity that I had ever kept to with studied art. He pressed me
indeed tenderly to satisfy his ardent curiosity, both with regard to my
past and present state of life, since his being torn away from me: but
I found means to elude his questions, by answers that shewing his
satisfaction at no great distance, won upon him to waive his
impatience, in favour of the thorough confidence he had in my not
delaying it, but for respect I should in good time acquaint him with.
Charles, however, thus returned to my longing arms, tender, faithful,
and in health, was already a blessing too mighty for my conception: but
Charles in distress!... Charles reduced, and broken down to his naked
personal merit, was such a circumstance, in favour of the sentiments I
had for him, as exceeded my utmost desire; and accordingly I seemed so
visibly charmed, so out of time and measure pleased at his mention of
his ruined fortune, that he could account for it no way, but that the
joy of seeing him again had swallowed up every other sense of concern.
In the mean time, my woman had taken, all possible care of Charles’s
travelling companion; and as supper was coming in, he was introduced to
me, when I received him as became my regard for all of Charles’s
acquaintance or friends.
We four then supped together, in the style of joy, congratulation, and
pleasing disorder that you may guess. For my part, though all these
agitations had left me not the least stomach, but for that uncloying
feast, the sight of my adored youth, I endeavoured to force it, by way
of example for him, who I conjectured must want such a recruit after
riding; and, indeed, he; ate like a traveller, but gazed at, and
addressed me all the time like a lover.
After the cloth was taken away, and the hour of repose came on, Charles
and I were, without further ceremony, in quality of man and wife, shown
up together to a very handsome apartment, and, all in course, the bed,
they said, the best in the inn.
And here, Decency, forgive me! if once more I violate thy laws and
keeping the curtains undrawn, sacrifice thee for the last time to that
confidence, without reserve, with which I engaged to recount to you the
most striking circumstances of my youthful disorders.
As soon, then, as we were in the room together, left to ourselves, the
sight of the bed starving the remembrance of our first joys, and the
thought of my being instantly to share it with the dear possessor of my
virgin heart, moved me so strongly, that it was well I leaned upon him,
or I must have fainted again under the overpowering sweet alarm.
Charles saw into my confusion, and forgot his own, that was scarce
less, to apply himself to the removal of mine.
But now the true refining passion had regained throughout possession of
me, with all its train of symptoms: a sweet sensibility, a tender
timidity, love-sick yearnings tempered with diffidence and modesty, all
held me in a subjection of soul, incomparably dearer to me than the
liberty of heart which I had been long, too long! the mistress of, in
the course of those grosser gallantries, the consciousness of which now
made me sigh with a virtuous confusion and regret. No real virgin, in
short, in view of the nuptial bed, could give more bashful blushes to
unblemished innocence, than I did to a sense of guilt; and indeed I
loved Charles too truly not to feel severely that I did not deserve
him.
As I kept hesitating and disconcerted under this soft distraction,
Charles, with a fond impatience, took the pains to undress me; and all
I can remember amidst the nutter and discomposure of my senses, was,
some flattering exclamation of joy and admiration, more specially at
the feel of my breasts, now set at liberty from my stays, and which
panting and rising in tumultous throbs, swelled upon his dear touch,
and gave it the welcome pleasure of finding them well formed, and
un-failed in firmness.
I was soon laid in bed, and scarce languished an instant for the
darling partner of it, before he was undressed and got between the
sheets, with his arms clasped round me, giving and taking, with gust
inexpressible, a kiss of welcome, that my heart rising to my lips
stamped with its warmest impression, concurring to my bliss, with that
delicate and voluptuous emotion which Charles alone had the secret to
excite, and which constitutes the very life, the essence of pleasure.
Mean while, two candles lighted on a side-table near us, and a joyous
wood fire, threw a light into the bed, that took from one sense, of
great importance to our joys, all pretext for complaining of its being
shut out of its share of them; and, indeed, the sight of my idolized
youth was alone, from the ardour with which I had wished for it,
without other circumstance, a pleasure to die of.
But as action was now a necessity to desires so much on edge as ours,
Charles, after a very short prelusive dalliance, lifting up my linen
and his own, laid the broad treasures of his manly chest close to my
bosom, both beating with the tenderest alarms: when now, the sense of
his glowing body, in naked touch with mine, took all power over my
thoughts out of my own disposal, and delivered up every faculty of the
soul to the sensiblest of joys, that affecting me infinitely more with
my distinction of the person, than of the sex, now brought my heart
deliriously into play: my heart, which, eternally constant to Charles,
had never taken any part in my original sacrifices to the calls of
constitution, complaisance, or interest. But ah! what became of me,
when as the powers of solid pleasure thickened upon me, I could not
help feeling the stiff stake that had been adorned with the trophies of
my despoiled virginity, bearing hard and inflexible against one of my
thighs, which I had not yet opened, from a true principle of modesty,
revived by a passion too sincere to suffer any aiming at the false
merit of difficulty, or my putting on an impertinent mock coyness.
I have, I believe, somewhere before remarked, that feel of that
favourite piece of manhood has, in the very nature of it, something
inimitably pathetic. Nothing can be dearer to the touch, nor can affect
it with a more delirious sensation. Think then! as a love thinks, what
must be the consummate transport of that quickest of our senses, in
their central seat too! when, after so long a deprival, it felt itself
re-inflamed under the pressure of that peculiar sceptre-member, which
commands us all: but especially my darling, elect from the face of the
whole earth. And now, at its mightiest point of stiffness, it felt to
me something so subduing so active, so solid and agreeable, that I know
not what name to give its singular impression: but the sentiment of
consciousness of its belonging to my supremely beloved youth, gave me
so pleasing an agitation, and worked so strongly on my soul, that it
sent all its sensitive spirits to that organ of bliss in me, dedicated
to its reception. There, concentering to a point, like rays in a
burning glass, they glowed, they burnt with the intensest heat; the
springs of pleasure were, in short, wound up to such a pitch, I panted
now with so exquisitely keen an appetite for the eminent enjoyment,
that I was even sick with desire, and unequal to support the
combination of two distinct ideas, that delightfully distracted me: for
all the thought I was capable of, was that I was now in touch, at once,
with the instrument of pleasure, and the great seal of love. Ideas
that, mingling streams, poured such an ocean of intoxicating bliss on a
weak vessel, all too narrow to contain it, that I lay overwhelmed,
absorbed, lost in an abyss of joy, and dying of nothing but immoderate
delight.
Charles then roused me somewhat out of this ecstatic distraction, with
a complaint softly murmured, amidst a crowd of kisses, at the position,
not so favourable to his desires, in which I received his urgent
insistance for admission, where that insistance was alone so engrossing
a pleasure, that it made me inconsistently suffer a much dearer one to
be kept out; but how sweet to correct such a mistake! My thighs, now
obedient to the intimations of love and nature, gladly disclose, and
with a ready submission, resign up the soft gateway to the entrance of
pleasure: I see, I feel the delicious velvet tip!... he enters me might
and main, with... oh! my pen drops from here in the extasy now present
to my faithful memory! Description too deserts me, and delivers over a
task, above its strength of wing, to the imagination: but it must be an
imagination exalted by such a flame as mine that can do justice to that
sweetest, noblest of all sensations, that hailed and accompanied the
stiff insinuation all the way up, till it was at the end of its
penetration, sending up, through my eyes, the sparks of the love-fire
that ran all over me and blazed in every vein and every pore of me; a
system incarnate of joy all over.
I had now totally taken in love’s true arrow from the point up to the
feather, in that part, where making no new wound, the lips or the
original one of nature, which had owed its first breathing to this dear
instrument, clung, as if sensible of gratitude, in eager suction round
it, whilst all its inwards embraced it tenderly, with a warmth of gust,
a compressive energy, that gave it, in its way, the heartiest welcome
in nature; every fibre there gathering tight round it, and straining
ambitiously to come in for its share of the blissful touch.
As we were giving them a few moments pause to the the delectations of
the senses, in dwelling with the highest relish on this intimatest
point of re-union, and chewing the cud of enjoyment, the impatience
natural to the pleasure soon drove us into action. Then began the
driving tumult on his side, and the responsive heaves on mine, which
kept me up to him; whilst, as our joys grew too great for utterance,
the organs of our voices, voluptuously intermixing, became organs of
the touch... how delicious!... how poignantly luscious!... And now! now
I felt, to the heart of me! I felt the prodigious keen edge, with which
love, presiding over this act, points the pleasure: love! that may be
styled the Attic salt of enjoyment; and indeed, without it, the joy,
great as it is, is still a vulgar one, whether in a king or a beggar;
for it is, undoubtedly, love alone that refines, ennobles, and exalts
it.
Thus, happy, then, by the heart, happy by the senses, it was beyond all
power, even of thought, to form the conception of a greater delight
than what I now am consummating the fruition of.
Charles, whose whole frame was convulsed with the agitation of his
rapture, whilst the tenderest fires trembled in his eyes, all assured
me of a perfect concord of joy, penetrated me so profoundly, touched me
so vitally, took me so much out of my own possession, whilst he seemed
himself so much in mine, that in a delicious enthusiasm, I imagined
such a transfusion of heart and spirit, as that coalescing, and making
one body and soul with him, I was he, and he me.
But all this pleasure tending, like life from its first instants,
towards its own dissolution, lived too fast not to bring on upon the
spur its delicious moment of mortality; for presently the approach of
the tender agony discovered itself by its usual signals, that were
quickly followed by my dear lover’s emanation of himself, that spun
out, and shot, feelingly indeed! up the ravished indraught: where the
sweetly soothing balmy titillation opened all the juices of joy on my
side, which ecstatically in flow helped to allay the prurient glow, and
drowned our pleasure for a while. Soon, however, to be on float again!
for Charles, true to nature’s laws, in one breath, expiring and
ejaculating, languished not long in the dissolving trance, but
recovering spirit again, soon gave me to feel that the true mettle
spring! of his instrument of pleasure, were, by love, and perhaps, by a
long vacation, wound up too high to be let down by a single explosion:
his stiffnesss till stood my friend. Resuming then the action afresh,
without dislodging, or giving me the trouble of parting from my sweet
tenant, we played over again the same opera, with the same harmony and
concert: our ardours, like our love, knew no remission; and all the
tide serving my lover, lavish of his stores, and pleasure-milked, he
over-flowed me once more from the fulness of his oval reservoirs of the
genial emulsion: whilst, on my side, a convulsive grasp, in the instant
of my giving down the liquid contribution, rendered me sweetly
subservient at once to the increase of joy, and to its effusions:
moving me so, as to make me exert all those springs of the compressive
exsuction, with which the sensitive mechanism of that part thirstily
draws and drains the nipple of Love; with much such an instinctive
eagerness and attachment, as to compare great with less, kind nature
engages infants at the breasts, by the pleasure they find in the motion
of their little mouths and cheeks, to extract the milky stream prepared
for their nourishment.
But still there was no end of his vigour: this double discharge had so
far from extinguished his desires, for that time, that it had not even
calmed them; and at his age, desires are power. He was proceeding then
amazingly to push it to a third triumph, still without uncasing, if a
tenderness, natural to true love, had not inspired me with self-denial
enough to spare, and not over-strain him: and accordingly, entreating
him to give himself and me quarter, I obtained, at length, a short
suspension of arms, but not before he had exultingly satisfied me that
he gave out standing.
The remainder of the night, with what we borrowed upon the day, we
employed with unwearied fervour in celebrating thus the festival of our
remeeting; and got up pretty late in the morning, gay, brisk and alert,
though rest had been a stranger to us: but the pleasures of love had
been to us, what the joy of victory is to an army: repose, refreshment,
every thing.
The journey into the country being now entirely out of the question,
and orders having been given overnight for turning the horses’ heads
towards London, we left the inn as soon as we had breakfasted, not
without a liberal distribution of the tokens of my grateful sense of
the happiness I had met with in it.
Charles and I were in my coach; the captain and my companion in a
chaise hired purposely for them, to leave us the conveniency of a
_tête-à-tête_.
Here, on the road, as the tumult of my senses was tolerably composed, I
had command enough of head to break properly to his the course of life
that the consequences of my separation from him had driven me into:
which, at the same time that he tenderly deplored with me, he was the
less shocked at; as, on reflecting how he had left me circumstances, he
could not be entirely unprepared for it.
But when I opened the state of my fortune to him, and with that
sincerity which, from me to him, was so much a nature in me, I beged of
him his acceptance of it, on his own terms. I should appear to you
perhaps too partial to my passion, were I to attempt the doing his
delicacy justice, I shall content myself then with assuring you, that
after his flatly refusing the unreserved, unconditional donation that I
long persecuted him in vain to accept, it was at length, in obedience
to his serious commands (for I stood out unaffectedly, till he exerted
the sovereign authority which love had given him over me), that I
yielded my consent to waive the remonstrance I did not fail of making
strongly to him, against his degrading himself, and incurring the
reflection, however unjust, of having, for respects of fortune,
bartered his honour for infamy and prostitution, in making one his
wife, who thought herself too much honoured in being but his mistress.
The plea of love then over-ruling all objections, for him, which he
could not but read the sincerity of in a heart ever open to him,
obliged me to receive his hand, by which means I was in pass, among
other innumerable blessings, to bestow a legal parentage on those fine
children you have seen by this happiest of matches.
Thus, at length, I got snug into port, where, in the bosom of virtue, I
gathered the only uncorrupt sweets: where, looking back on the course
of vice I had run, and comparing its infamous blandishments with the
infinitely superior joys of innocence, I could not help pitying, even
in point of taste, those who, immersed in gross sensuality, are
insensible to the so delicate charms of VIRTUE, than which even
PLEASURE has not a greater friend, nor VICE a greater enemy. Thus
temperance makes men lords over those pleasures that intemperance
enslaves them to: the one, parent of health, vigour fertility
cheerfulness, and every other desirable good of life; the other, of
diseases, debility, barrenness, self-loathing, with only every evil
incident to human nature.
You laugh, perhaps, at this tail-piece of morality, extracted from me
by the force of truth, resulting from compared experiences: you think
it, no doubt, out of character; possibly too you may look on it as the
paultry finesse of one who seeks to mask a devotee to vice under a rag
of a veil, impudently smuggled from the shrine of Virtue: just as if
one was to fancy one’s self completely disguised at a masquerade, with
no other change of dress than turning one’s shoes into slippers; or, as
if a writer should think to shield a treasonable libel, by concluding
it with a formal prayer for the King. But, independent of my flattering
myself that you have a juster opinion of my sense and sincerity, give
me leave to represent to you, that such a supposition is even more
injurious to Virtue than to me: since, consistently with candour and
good nature, it san have no foundation but in the falsest of fears,
that its pleasures cannot stand in comparison with those of Vice; but
let truth dare to hold it up in its most alluring light: then mark, how
spurious, how low of taste, how comparatively inferior its joys are to
those which Virtue gives sanction to, and whose sentiments are not
above making even a sauce for the senses, but a sauce of the highest
relish; whilst Vices are the harpies that infect and foul the feast.
The paths of Vice are sometimes strewed with roses, but then they are
for ever infamous for many a thorn, for many a cankerworm: those of
Virtue are strewed with roses purely, and those eternally unfading
ones.
If you do me then justice, you will esteem me perfectly consistent in
the incense I burn to Virtue. If I have painted Vice in all its gayest
colours, if I have decked it with flowers, it has been solely in order
to make the worthier, the solemner sacrifice of it to Virtue.