Meantime, I will own that I think my cousin’s arguments unanswerable. No good man but must be influenced by them.—But, alas! Sir, who is good?
As to your arguments; I hope you will believe me, when I assure you, as I now do, that your opinion and your reasonings have, and will always have, great and deserved weight with me; and that I respect you still more than I did, if possible, for your expostulations in support of my cousin’s pious injunctions to me. They come from you, Sir, with the greatest propriety, as her executor and representative; and likewise as you are a man of humanity, and a well-wisher to both parties.
I am not exempt from violent passions, Sir, any more than your friend; but then I hope they are only capable of being raised by other people’s insolence, and not by my own arrogance. If ever I am stimulated by my imperfections and my resentments to act against my judgment and my cousin’s injunctions, some such reflections as these that follow will run away with my reason. Indeed they are always present with me.
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In the first place; my own disappointment: who came over with the hope of passing the remainder of my days in the conversation of a kinswoman so beloved; and to whom I have a double relation as her cousin and trustee.
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Then I reflect, too, too often perhaps for my engagements to her in her last hours, that the dear creature could only forgive for herself. She, no doubt, is happy: but who shall forgive for a whole family, in all its branches made miserable for their lives?
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That the more faulty her friends were as to her, the more enormous his ingratitude, and the more inexcusable—What! Sir, was it not enough that she suffered what she did for him, but the barbarian must make her suffer for her sufferings for his sake?—Passion makes me express this weakly; passion refuses the aid of expression sometimes, where the propriety of a resentment prima facie declares expression to be needless. I leave it to you, Sir, to give this reflection its due force.
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That the author of this diffusive mischief perpetuated it premeditatedly, wantonly, in the gaiety of his heart. To try my cousin, say you, Sir! To try the virtue of a Clarissa, Sir!—Has she then given him any cause to doubt her virtue?—It could not be.—If he avers that she did, I am indeed called upon—but I will have patience.
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That he carried her, as now appears, to a vile brothel, purposely to put her out of all human resource; himself out of the reach of all human remorse: and that, finding her proof against all the common arts of delusion, base and unmanly arts were there used to effect his wicked purposes. Once dead, the injured saint, in her will, says, he has seen her.
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That I could not know this, when I saw him at M. Hall: that, the object of his attempts considered, I could not suppose there was such a monster breathing as he: that it was natural for me to impute her refusal of him rather to transitory resentment, to consciousness of human frailty, and mingled doubts of the sincerity of his offers, than to villainies, which had given the irreversible blow, and had at that instant brought her down to the gates of death, which in a very few days enclosed her.
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That he is a man of defiance: a man who thinks to awe everyone by his insolent darings, and by his pretensions to superior courage and skill.
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That, disgrace as he is to his name, and to the character of a gentleman, the man would not want merit, who, in vindication of the dishonoured distinction, should expunge and blot him out of the worthy list.
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That the injured family has a son, who, however unworthy of such a sister, is of a temper vehement, unbridled, fierce; unequal, therefore, (as he has once indeed been found), to a contention with this man: the loss of which son, by a violent death on such an occasion, and by a hand so justly hated, would complete the misery of the whole family; and who, nevertheless, resolves to call him to account, if I do not; his very misbehaviour, perhaps, to such a sister, stimulating his perverse heart to do her memory the more signal justice; though the attempt might be fatal to himself.
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Then, Sir, to be a witness, as I am every hour, to the calamity and distress of a family to which I am related; every one of whom, however averse to an alliance with him while it had not taken place, would no doubt have been soon reconciled to the admirable creature, had the man (to whom, for his family and fortunes, it was not a disgrace to be allied) done her but common justice!
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To see them hang their pensive heads; mope about, shunning one another; though formerly never used to meet but to rejoice in each other; afflicting themselves with reflections, that the last time they respectively saw the dear creature, it was here or there, at such a place, in such an attitude; and could they have thought that it would have been the last?—Every one of them reviving instances of her excellencies that will for a long time make their very blessings a curse to them!
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Her closet, her chamber, her cabinet, given up to me to disfurnish, in order to answer (now too late obliging!) the legacies bequeathed; unable themselves to enter them; and even making use of less convenient back stairs, that they may avoid passing by the doors of her apartment!
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Her parlour locked up; the walks, the retirements, the summerhouse in which she delighted, and in which she
