الفصل الفصل 11 · 第11章

The younger sister then put in. “We must be fools indeed,” says she,

“in my brother’s opinion, that he should think we can believe he has

seriously asked Mrs. Betty to marry him, and that she has refused him.”

“Answer, and answer not, say Solomon,” replied her brother. “When your

brother had said to your mother that he had asked her no less than five

times, and that it was so, that she positively denied him, methinks a

younger sister need not question the truth of it when her mother did

not.” “My mother, you see, did not understand it,” says the second

sister. “There’s some difference,” says Robin, “between desiring me to

explain it, and telling me she did not believe it.”

“Well, but, son,” says the old lady, “if you are disposed to let us

into the mystery of it, what were these hard conditions?” “Yes, madam,”

says Robin, “I had done it before now, if the teasers here had not

worried me by way of interruption. The conditions are, that I bring my

father and you to consent to it, and without that she protests she will

never see me more upon that head; and to these conditions, as I said, I

suppose I shall never be able to grant. I hope my warm sisters will be

answered now, and blush a little; if not, I have no more to say till I

hear further.”

This answer was surprising to them all, though less to the mother,

because of what I had said to her. As to the daughters, they stood mute

a great while; but the mother said with some passion, “Well, I had

heard this before, but I could not believe it; but if it is so, then we

have all done Betty wrong, and she has behaved better than I ever

expected.” “Nay,” says the eldest sister, “if it be so, she has acted

handsomely indeed.” “I confess,” says the mother, “it was none of her

fault, if he was fool enough to take a fancy to her; but to give such

an answer to him, shows more respect to your father and me than I can

tell how to express; I shall value the girl the better for it as long

as I know her.” “But I shall not,” says Robin, “unless you will give

your consent.” “I’ll consider of that a while,” says the mother; “I

assure you, if there were not some other objections in the way, this

conduct of hers would go a great way to bring me to consent.” “I wish

it would go quite through it,” says Robin; “if you had as much thought

about making me easy as you have about making me rich, you would soon

consent to it.”

“Why, Robin,” says the mother again, “are you really in earnest? Would

you so fain have her as you pretend?” “Really, madam,” says Robin, “I

think ’tis hard you should question me upon that head after all I have

said. I won’t say that I will have her; how can I resolve that point,

when you see I cannot have her without your consent? Besides, I am not

bound to marry at all. But this I will say, I am in earnest in, that I

will never have anybody else if I can help it; so you may determine for

me. Betty or nobody is the word, and the question which of the two

shall be in your breast to decide, madam, provided only, that my

good-humoured sisters here may have no vote in it.”

All this was dreadful to me, for the mother began to yield, and Robin

pressed her home on it. On the other hand, she advised with the eldest

son, and he used all the arguments in the world to persuade her to

consent; alleging his brother’s passionate love for me, and my generous

regard to the family, in refusing my own advantages upon such a nice

point of honour, and a thousand such things. And as to the father, he

was a man in a hurry of public affairs and getting money, seldom at

home, thoughtful of the main chance, but left all those things to his

wife.

You may easily believe, that when the plot was thus, as they thought,

broke out, and that every one thought they knew how things were

carried, it was not so difficult or so dangerous for the elder brother,

whom nobody suspected of anything, to have a freer access to me than

before; nay, the mother, which was just as he wished, proposed it to

him to talk with Mrs. Betty. “For it may be, son,” said she, “you may

see farther into the thing than I, and see if you think she has been so

positive as Robin says she has been, or no.” This was as well as he

could wish, and he, as it were, yielding to talk with me at his

mother’s request, she brought me to him into her own chamber, told me

her son had some business with me at her request, and desired me to be

very sincere with him, and then she left us together, and he went and

shut the door after her.

He came back to me and took me in his arms, and kissed me very

tenderly; but told me he had a long discourse to hold with me, and it

was not come to that crisis, that I should make myself happy or

miserable as long as I lived; that the thing was now gone so far, that

if I could not comply with his desire, we would both be ruined. Then he

told the whole story between Robin, as he called him, and his mother

and sisters and himself, as it is above. “And now, dear child,” says

he, “consider what it will be to marry a gentleman of a good family, in

good circumstances, and with the consent of the whole house, and to

enjoy all that the world can give you; and what, on the other hand, to

be sunk into the dark circumstances of a woman that has lost her

reputation; and that though I shall be a private friend to you while I

live, yet as I shall be suspected always, so you will be afraid to see

me, and I shall be afraid to own you.”

He gave me no time to reply, but went on with me thus: “What has

happened between us, child, so long as we both agree to do so, may be

buried and forgotten. I shall always be your sincere friend, without

any inclination to nearer intimacy, when you become my sister; and we

shall have all the honest part of conversation without any reproaches

between us of having done amiss. I beg of you to consider it, and to

not stand in the way of your own safety and prosperity; and to satisfy

you that I am sincere,” added he, “I here offer you £500 in money, to

make you some amends for the freedoms I have taken with you, which we

shall look upon as some of the follies of our lives, which ’tis hoped

we may repent of.”

He spoke this in so much more moving terms than it is possible for me

to express, and with so much greater force of argument than I can

repeat, that I only recommend it to those who read the story, to

suppose, that as he held me above an hour and a half in that discourse,

so he answered all my objections, and fortified his discourse with all

the arguments that human wit and art could devise.

I cannot say, however, that anything he said made impression enough

upon me so as to give me any thought of the matter, till he told me at

last very plainly, that if I refused, he was sorry to add that he could

never go on with me in that station as we stood before; that though he

loved me as well as ever, and that I was as agreeable to him as ever,

yet sense of virtue had not so far forsaken him as to suffer him to lie

with a woman that his brother courted to make his wife; and if he took

his leave of me, with a denial in this affair, whatever he might do for

me in the point of support, grounded on his first engagement of

maintaining me, yet he would not have me be surprised that he was

obliged to tell me he could not allow himself to see me any more; and

that, indeed, I could not expect it of him.

I received this last part with some token of surprise and disorder, and

had much ado to avoid sinking down, for indeed I loved him to an

extravagance not easy to imagine; but he perceived my disorder. He

entreated me to consider seriously of it; assured me that it was the

only way to preserve our mutual affection; that in this station we

might love as friends, with the utmost passion, and with a love of

relation untainted, free from our just reproaches, and free from other

people’s suspicions; that he should ever acknowledge his happiness

owing to me; that he would be debtor to me as long as he lived, and

would be paying that debt as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me

up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers

on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed, heightened by my

imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off

whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to

provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world,

out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this

terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions to

lay it home to me in the worst colours that it could be possible to be

drawn in. On the other hand, he failed not to set forth the easy,

prosperous life which I was going to live.

He answered all that I could object from affection, and from former

engagements, with telling me the necessity that was before us of taking

other measures now; and as to his promises of marriage, the nature of

things, he said, had put an end to that, by the probability of my being

his brother’s wife, before the time to which his promises all referred.

Thus, in a word, I may say, he reasoned me out of my reason; he

conquered all my arguments, and I began to see a danger that I was in,

which I had not considered of before, and that was, of being dropped by

both of them and left alone in the world to shift for myself.

This, and his persuasion, at length prevailed with me to consent,

though with so much reluctance, that it was easy to see I should go to

church like a bear to the stake. I had some little apprehensions about

me, too, lest my new spouse, who, by the way, I had not the least

affection for, should be skillful enough to challenge me on another

account, upon our first coming to bed together. But whether he did it

with design or not, I know not, but his elder brother took care to make

him very much fuddled before he went to bed, so that I had the

satisfaction of a drunken bedfellow the first night. How he did it I

know not, but I concluded that he certainly contrived it, that his

brother might be able to make no judgment of the difference between a

maid and a married woman; nor did he ever entertain any notions of it,

or disturb his thoughts about it.