الفصل الفصل 45 · 第45章

I must repeat it again, that the fate of this poor woman troubled me

exceedingly, and I began to be very pensive, knowing that I was really

the instrument of her disaster; but the preservation of my own life,

which was so evidently in danger, took off all my tenderness; and

seeing that she was not put to death, I was very easy at her

transportation, because she was then out of the way of doing me any

mischief, whatever should happen.

The disaster of this woman was some months before that of the

last-recited story, and was indeed partly occasion of my governess

proposing to dress me up in men’s clothes, that I might go about

unobserved, as indeed I did; but I was soon tired of that disguise, as

I have said, for indeed it exposed me to too many difficulties.

I was now easy as to all fear of witnesses against me, for all those

that had either been concerned with me, or that knew me by the name of

Moll Flanders, were either hanged or transported; and if I should have

had the misfortune to be taken, I might call myself anything else, as

well as Moll Flanders, and no old sins could be placed into my account;

so I began to run a-tick again with the more freedom, and several

successful adventures I made, though not such as I had made before.

We had at that time another fire happened not a great way off from the

place where my governess lived, and I made an attempt there, as before,

but as I was not soon enough before the crowd of people came in, and

could not get to the house I aimed at, instead of a prize, I got a

mischief, which had almost put a period to my life and all my wicked

doings together; for the fire being very furious, and the people in a

great fright in removing their goods, and throwing them out of window,

a wench from out of a window threw a feather-bed just upon me. It is

true, the bed being soft, it broke no bones; but as the weight was

great, and made greater by the fall, it beat me down, and laid me dead

for a while. Nor did the people concern themselves much to deliver me

from it, or to recover me at all; but I lay like one dead and neglected

a good while, till somebody going to remove the bed out of the way,

helped me up. It was indeed a wonder the people in the house had not

thrown other goods out after it, and which might have fallen upon it,

and then I had been inevitably killed; but I was reserved for further

afflictions.

This accident, however, spoiled my market for that time, and I came

home to my governess very much hurt and bruised, and frighted to the

last degree, and it was a good while before she could set me upon my

feet again.

It was now a merry time of the year, and Bartholomew Fair was begun. I

had never made any walks that way, nor was the common part of the fair

of much advantage to me; but I took a turn this year into the

cloisters, and among the rest I fell into one of the raffling shops. It

was a thing of no great consequence to me, nor did I expect to make

much of it; but there came a gentleman extremely well dressed and very

rich, and as ’tis frequent to talk to everybody in those shops, he

singled me out, and was very particular with me. First he told me he

would put in for me to raffle, and did so; and some small matter coming

to his lot, he presented it to me (I think it was a feather muff); then

he continued to keep talking to me with a more than common appearance

of respect, but still very civil, and much like a gentleman.

He held me in talk so long, till at last he drew me out of the raffling

place to the shop-door, and then to a walk in the cloister, still

talking of a thousand things cursorily without anything to the purpose.

At last he told me that, without compliment, he was charmed with my

company, and asked me if I durst trust myself in a coach with him; he

told me he was a man of honour, and would not offer anything to me

unbecoming him as such. I seemed to decline it a while, but suffered

myself to be importuned a little, and then yielded.

I was at a loss in my thoughts to conclude at first what this gentleman

designed; but I found afterwards he had had some drink in his head, and

that he was not very unwilling to have some more. He carried me in the

coach to the Spring Garden, at Knightsbridge, where we walked in the

gardens, and he treated me very handsomely; but I found he drank very

freely. He pressed me also to drink, but I declined it.

Hitherto he kept his word with me, and offered me nothing amiss. We

came away in the coach again, and he brought me into the streets, and

by this time it was near ten o’clock at night, and he stopped the coach

at a house where, it seems, he was acquainted, and where they made no

scruple to show us upstairs into a room with a bed in it. At first I

seemed to be unwilling to go up, but after a few words I yielded to

that too, being willing to see the end of it, and in hope to make

something of it at last. As for the bed, etc., I was not much concerned

about that part.

Here he began to be a little freer with me than he had promised; and I

by little and little yielded to everything, so that, in a word, he did

what he pleased with me; I need say no more. All this while he drank

freely too, and about one in the morning we went into the coach again.

The air and the shaking of the coach made the drink he had get more up

in his head than it was before, and he grew uneasy in the coach, and

was for acting over again what he had been doing before; but as I

thought my game now secure, I resisted him, and brought him to be a

little still, which had not lasted five minutes but he fell fast

asleep.

I took this opportunity to search him to a nicety. I took a gold watch,

with a silk purse of gold, his fine full-bottom periwig and

silver-fringed gloves, his sword and fine snuff-box, and gently opening

the coach door, stood ready to jump out while the coach was going on;

but the coach stopped in the narrow street beyond Temple Bar to let

another coach pass, I got softly out, fastened the door again, and gave

my gentleman and the coach the slip both together, and never heard more

of them.

This was an adventure indeed unlooked for, and perfectly undesigned by

me; though I was not so past the merry part of life, as to forget how

to behave, when a fop so blinded by his appetite should not know an old

woman from a young. I did not indeed look so old as I was by ten or

twelve years; yet I was not a young wench of seventeen, and it was easy

enough to be distinguished. There is nothing so absurd, so surfeiting,

so ridiculous, as a man heated by wine in his head, and wicked gust in

his inclination together; he is in the possession of two devils at

once, and can no more govern himself by his reason than a mill can

grind without water; his vice tramples upon all that was in him that

had any good in it, if any such thing there was; nay, his very sense is

blinded by its own rage, and he acts absurdities even in his views;

such a drinking more, when he is drunk already; picking up a common

woman, without regard to what she is or who she is, whether sound or

rotten, clean or unclean, whether ugly or handsome, whether old or

young, and so blinded as not really to distinguish. Such a man is worse

than a lunatic; prompted by his vicious, corrupted head, he no more

knows what he is doing than this wretch of mine knew when I picked his

pocket of his watch and his purse of gold.

These are the men of whom Solomon says, “They go like an ox to the

slaughter, till a dart strikes through their liver”; an admirable

description, by the way, of the foul disease, which is a poisonous

deadly contagion mingling with the blood, whose centre or foundation is

in the liver; from whence, by the swift circulation of the whole mass,

that dreadful nauseous plague strikes immediately through his liver,

and his spirits are infected, his vitals stabbed through as with a

dart.

It is true this poor unguarded wretch was in no danger from me, though

I was greatly apprehensive at first of what danger I might be in from

him; but he was really to be pitied in one respect, that he seemed to

be a good sort of man in himself; a gentleman that had no harm in his

design; a man of sense, and of a fine behaviour, a comely handsome

person, a sober solid countenance, a charming beautiful face, and

everything that could be agreeable; only had unhappily had some drink

the night before, had not been in bed, as he told me when we were

together; was hot, and his blood fired with wine, and in that condition

his reason, as it were asleep, had given him up.

As for me, my business was his money, and what I could make of him; and

after that, if I could have found out any way to have done it, I would

have sent him safe home to his house and to his family, for ’twas ten

to one but he had an honest, virtuous wife and innocent children, that

were anxious for his safety, and would have been glad to have gotten

him home, and have taken care of him till he was restored to himself.

And then with what shame and regret would he look back upon himself!

how would he reproach himself with associating himself with a whore!

picked up in the worst of all holes, the cloister, among the dirt and

filth of all the town! how would he be trembling for fear he had got

the pox, for fear a dart had struck through his liver, and hate himself

every time he looked back upon the madness and brutality of his

debauch! how would he, if he had any principles of honour, as I verily

believe he had—I say, how would he abhor the thought of giving any ill

distemper, if he had it, as for aught he knew he might, to his modest

and virtuous wife, and thereby sowing the contagion in the life-blood

of his posterity.

Would such gentlemen but consider the contemptible thoughts which the

very women they are concerned with, in such cases as these, have of

them, it would be a surfeit to them. As I said above, they value not

the pleasure, they are raised by no inclination to the man, the passive

jade thinks of no pleasure but the money; and when he is, as it were,

drunk in the ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his

pockets searching for what she can find there, and of which he can no

more be sensible in the moment of his folly that he can forethink of it

when he goes about it.