What you please, Madam, as to that—my service,
as well as your brother’s is now almost over
for him. The fellow has made a good hand of it.
He does not intend to stay long in his place.
He is now actually in treaty for an inn, which will
do his business for life. I can tell you further,
that he makes love to your sister’s Betty:
and that by my advice. They will be married
when he is established. An innkeeper’s
wife is every man’s mistress; and I have a scheme
in my head to set some engines at work to make her
repent her saucy behaviour to you to the last day of
her life.
What a wicked schemer you are, Sir!—Who
shall avenge upon you the still greater evils which
you have been guilty of? I forgive Betty with
all my heart. She was not my servant; and but
too probably, in what she did, obeyed the commands
of her to whom she owed duty, better than I obeyed
those to whom I owed more.
No matter for that, the wretch said [To be sure, my
dear, he must design to make me afraid of him]:
The decree was gone out—Betty must smart—
smart too by an act of her own choice. He loved,
he said, to make bad people their own punishers.—Nay,
Madam, excuse me; but if the fellow, if this Joseph,
in your opinion, deserves punishment, mine is a complicated;
a man and his wife cannot well suffer separately, and
it may come home to him too.
I had no patience with him. I told him so.
I see, Sir, said I, I see, what a man I am with.
Your rattle warns me of the snake.—And
away I flung: leaving him seemingly vexed, and
in confusion.
MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE
My plain-dealing with Mr. Lovelace, on seeing him
again, and the free dislike I expressed to his ways,
his manners, and his contrivances, as well as to his
speeches, have obliged him to recollect himself a little.
He will have it, that the menaces which he threw out
just now against my brother and Mr. Solmes, are only
the effect of an unmeaning pleasantry. He has
too great a stake in his country, he says, to be guilty
of such enterprises as should lay him under a necessity
of quitting it for ever. Twenty things, particularly,
he says, he has suffered Joseph Leman to tell him
of, that were not, and could not be true, in order
to make himself formidable in some people’s
eyes, and this purely with a view to prevent mischief.
He is unhappy, as far as he knows, in a quick invention;
in hitting readily upon expedients; and many things
are reported of him which he never said, and many
which he never did, and others which he has only talked
of, (as just now,) and which he has forgot as soon
as the words have passed his lips.
This may be so, in part, my dear. No one man
so young could be so wicked as he has been reported
to be. But such a man at the head of such wretches
as he is said to have at his beck, all men of fortune
and fearlessness, and capable of such enterprises
as I have unhappily found him capable of, what is
not to be apprehended from him!
