第 十七 章 · 第17章

“What’s that, my dear?” says he.

“Why,” says I, “’tis a little hard upon me, and ’tis harder upon you. I

am told that Captain ——” (meaning my friend’s husband) “has told you I

had a great deal more money than I ever pretended to have, and I am

sure I never employed him to do so.”

“Well,” says he, “Captain —— may have told me so, but what then? If you

have not so much, that may lie at his door, but you never told me what

you had, so I have no reason to blame you if you have nothing at all.”

“That’s is so just,” said I, “and so generous, that it makes my having

but a little a double affliction to me.”

“The less you have, my dear,” says he, “the worse for us both; but I

hope your affliction you speak of is not caused for fear I should be

unkind to you, for want of a portion. No, no, if you have nothing, tell

me plainly, and at once; I may perhaps tell the captain he has cheated

me, but I can never say you have cheated me, for did you not give it

under your hand that you were poor? and so I ought to expect you to

be.”

“Well,” said I, “my dear, I am glad I have not been concerned in

deceiving you before marriage. If I deceive you since, ’tis ne’er the

worse; that I am poor is too true, but not so poor as to have nothing

neither”; so I pulled out some bank bills, and gave him about £160.

“There’s something, my dear,” said I, “and not quite all neither.”

I had brought him so near to expecting nothing, by what I had said

before, that the money, though the sum was small in itself, was doubly

welcome to him; he owned it was more than he looked for, and that he

did not question by my discourse to him, but that my fine clothes, gold

watch, and a diamond ring or two, had been all my fortune.

I let him please himself with that £160 two or three days, and then,

having been abroad that day, and as if I had been to fetch it, I

brought him £100 more home in gold, and told him there was a little

more portion for him; and, in short, in about a week more I brought him

£180 more, and about £60 in linen, which I made him believe I had been

obliged to take with the £100 which I gave him in gold, as a

composition for a debt of £600, being little more than five shillings

in the pound, and overvalued too.

“And now, my dear,” says I to him, “I am very sorry to tell you, that

there is all, and that I have given you my whole fortune.” I added,

that if the person who had my £600 had not abused me, I had been worth

£1000 to him, but that as it was, I had been faithful to him, and

reserved nothing to myself, but if it had been more he should have had

it.

He was so obliged by the manner, and so pleased with the sum, for he

had been in a terrible fright lest it had been nothing at all, that he

accepted it very thankfully. And thus I got over the fraud of passing

for a fortune without money, and cheating a man into marrying me on

pretence of a fortune; which, by the way, I take to be one of the most

dangerous steps a woman can take, and in which she runs the most hazard

of being ill-used afterwards.

My husband, to give him his due, was a man of infinite good nature, but

he was no fool; and finding his income not suited to the manner of

living which he had intended, if I had brought him what he expected,

and being under a disappointment in his return of his plantations in

Virginia, he discovered many times his inclination of going over to

Virginia, to live upon his own; and often would be magnifying the way

of living there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and the like.

I began presently to understand this meaning, and I took him up very

plainly one morning, and told him that I did so; that I found his

estate turned to no account at this distance, compared to what it would

do if he lived upon the spot, and that I found he had a mind to go and

live there; and I added, that I was sensible he had been disappointed

in a wife, and that finding his expectations not answered that way, I

could do no less, to make him amends, than tell him that I was very

willing to go over to Virginia with him and live there.

He said a thousand kind things to me upon the subject of my making such

a proposal to him. He told me, that however he was disappointed in his

expectations of a fortune, he was not disappointed in a wife, and that

I was all to him that a wife could be, and he was more than satisfied

on the whole when the particulars were put together, but that this

offer was so kind, that it was more than he could express.

To bring the story short, we agreed to go. He told me that he had a

very good house there, that it was well furnished, that his mother was

alive and lived in it, and one sister, which was all the relations he

had; that as soon as he came there, his mother would remove to another

house, which was her own for life, and his after her decease; so that I

should have all the house to myself; and I found all this to be exactly

as he had said.

To make this part of the story short, we put on board the ship which we

went in, a large quantity of good furniture for our house, with stores

of linen and other necessaries, and a good cargo for sale, and away we

went.

To give an account of the manner of our voyage, which was long and full

of dangers, is out of my way; I kept no journal, neither did my

husband. All that I can say is, that after a terrible passage, frighted

twice with dreadful storms, and once with what was still more terrible,

I mean a pirate who came on board and took away almost all our

provisions; and which would have been beyond all to me, they had once

taken my husband to go along with them, but by entreaties were

prevailed with to leave him;—I say, after all these terrible things, we

arrived in York River in Virginia, and coming to our plantation, we

were received with all the demonstrations of tenderness and affection,

by my husband’s mother, that were possible to be expressed.

We lived here all together, my mother-in-law, at my entreaty,

continuing in the house, for she was too kind a mother to be parted

with; my husband likewise continued the same as at first, and I thought

myself the happiest creature alive, when an odd and surprising event

put an end to all that felicity in a moment, and rendered my condition

the most uncomfortable, if not the most miserable, in the world.

My mother was a mighty cheerful, good-humoured old woman—I may call her

old woman, for her son was above thirty; I say she was very pleasant,

good company, and used to entertain me, in particular, with abundance

of stories to divert me, as well of the country we were in as of the

people.

Among the rest, she often told me how the greatest part of the

inhabitants of the colony came thither in very indifferent

circumstances from England; that, generally speaking, they were of two

sorts; either, first, such as were brought over by masters of ships to

be sold as servants. “Such as we call them, my dear,” says she, “but

they are more properly called slaves.” Or, secondly, such as are

transported from Newgate and other prisons, after having been found

guilty of felony and other crimes punishable with death.

“When they come here,” says she, “we make no difference; the planters

buy them, and they work together in the field till their time is out.

When ’tis expired,” said she, “they have encouragement given them to

plant for themselves; for they have a certain number of acres of land

allotted them by the country, and they go to work to clear and cure the

land, and then to plant it with tobacco and corn for their own use; and

as the tradesmen and merchants will trust them with tools and clothes

and other necessaries, upon the credit of their crop before it is

grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year

before, and so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before

them.

“Hence, child,” says she, “man a Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and

we have,” continued she, “several justices of the peace, officers of

the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have

been burnt in the hand.”

She was going on with that part of the story, when her own part in it

interrupted her, and with a great deal of good-humoured confidence she

told me she was one of the second sort of inhabitants herself; that she

came away openly, having ventured too far in a particular case, so that

she was become a criminal. “And here’s the mark of it, child,” says

she; and, pulling off her glove, “look ye here,” says she, turning up

the palm of her hand, and showed me a very fine white arm and hand, but

branded in the inside of the hand, as in such cases it must be.

This story was very moving to me, but my mother, smiling, said, “You

need not think a thing strange, daughter, for as I told you, some of

the best men in this country are burnt in the hand, and they are not

ashamed to own it. There’s Major ——,” says she, “he was an eminent

pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba——r, was a shoplifter, and both of them

were burnt in the hand; and I could name you several such as they are.”

We had frequent discourses of this kind, and abundance of instances she

gave me of the like. After some time, as she was telling some stories

of one that was transported but a few weeks ago, I began in an intimate

kind of way to ask her to tell me something of her own story, which she

did with the utmost plainness and sincerity; how she had fallen into

very ill company in London in her young days, occasioned by her mother

sending her frequently to carry victuals and other relief to a

kinswoman of hers who was a prisoner in Newgate, and who lay in a

miserable starving condition, was afterwards condemned to be hanged,

but having got respite by pleading her belly, dies afterwards in the

prison.

Here my mother-in-law ran out in a long account of the wicked practices

in that dreadful place, and how it ruined more young people than all

the town besides. “And child,” says my mother, “perhaps you may know

little of it, or, it may be, have heard nothing about it; but depend

upon it,” says she, “we all know here that there are more thieves and

rogues made by that one prison of Newgate than by all the clubs and

societies of villains in the nation; ’tis that cursed place,” says my

mother, “that half peopled this colony.”