Clarissa Harlowe - Samuel Richardson (reading cloud ebooks txt) 📗

is proposed to me!

All of them, at the same time, are afraid of Mr. Lovelace; yet not afraid to provoke him!⁠—How am I entangled!⁠—to be obliged to go on corresponding with him for their sakes⁠—Heaven forbid, that their persisted-in violence should so drive me, as to make it necessary for my own!

But surely they will yield⁠—Indeed I cannot.

I believe the gentlest spirits when provoked (causelessly and cruelly provoked) are the most determined. The reason may be, that not taking up resolutions lightly⁠—their very deliberation makes them the more immovable.⁠—And then when a point is clear and self-evident, how can one with patience think of entering into an argument or contention upon it?⁠—

An interruption obliges me to conclude myself, in some hurry, as well as fright, what I must ever be,

Yours more than my own,

Clarissa Harlowe.

Letter 15 Miss Howe, to Miss Clarissa Harlowe

Friday, March 3

I have both your letters at once. It is very unhappy, my dear, since your friends will have you marry, that a person of your merit should be addressed by a succession of worthless creatures, who have nothing but their presumption for their excuse.

That these presumers appear not in this very unworthy light to some of your friends, is, because their defects are not so striking to them as to others.⁠—And why? Shall I venture to tell you?⁠—Because they are nearer their own standard⁠—Modesty, after all, perhaps has a concern in it; for how should they think that a niece or sister of theirs (I will not go higher, for fear of incurring your displeasure) should be an angel?

But where indeed is the man to be found (who has the least share of due diffidence) that dares to look up to Miss Clarissa Harlowe with hope, or with anything but wishes? Thus the bold and forward, not being sensible of their defects, aspire; while the modesty of the really worthy fills them with too much reverence to permit them to explain themselves. Hence your Symmes’s, your Byron’s, your Mullins’s, your Wyerley’s (the best of the herd), and your Solmes’s, in turn, invade you⁠—Wretches that, looking upon the rest of your family, need not despair of succeeding in an alliance with it⁠—But to you, what an inexcusable presumption!

Yet I am afraid all opposition will be in vain. You must, you will, I doubt, be sacrificed to this odious man. I know your family. There will be no resisting such baits as he has thrown out. O, my dear, my beloved friend! and are such charming qualities, is such exalted merit, to be sunk in such a marriage!⁠—You must not, your uncle tells your mother, dispute their authority. Authority! what a full word is that in the mouth of a narrow-minded person, who happened to be born thirty years before one!⁠—Of your uncles I speak; for as to the paternal authority, that ought to be sacred.⁠—But should not parents have reason for what they do?

Wonder not, however, at your Bell’s unsisterly behaviour in this affair: I have a particular to add to the inducements your insolent brother is governed by, which will account for all her driving. You have already owned, that her outward eye was from the first struck with the figure and address of the man whom she pretends to despise, and who, ’tis certain, thoroughly despises her: but you have not told me, that still she loves him of all men. Bell has a meanness in her very pride; that meanness rises with her pride, and goes hand in hand with it; and no one is so proud as Bell. She has owned her love, her uneasy days, and sleepless nights, and her revenge grafted upon her love, to her favourite Betty Barnes⁠—To lay herself in the power of a servant’s tongue! Poor creature!⁠—But like little souls will find one another out, and mingle, as well as like great ones. This, however, she told the wench in strict confidence: and thus, by way of the female roundabout, as Lovelace had the sauciness on such another occasion, in ridicule of our sex, to call it, Betty (pleased to be thought worthy of a secret, and to have an opportunity of inveighing against Lovelace’s perfidy, as she would have it to be) told it to one of her confidants: that confidant, with like injunctions of secrecy, to Miss Lloyd’s Harriot⁠—Harriot to Miss Lloyd⁠—Miss Lloyd to me⁠—I to you⁠—with leave to make what you please of it.

And now you will not wonder to find Miss Bell an implacable rival, rather than an affectionate sister; and will be able to account for the words witchcraft, siren, and suchlike, thrown out against you; and for her driving on for a fixed day for sacrificing you to Solmes: in short, for her rudeness and violence of every kind.

What a sweet revenge will she take, as well upon Lovelace as upon you, if she can procure her rival sister to be married to the man that sister hates; and so prevent her having the man whom she herself loves (whether she have hope of him or not), and whom she suspects her sister loves!

Poisons and poniard have often been set to work by minds inflamed by disappointed love, and actuated by revenge.⁠—Will you wonder, then, that the ties of relationship in such a case have no force, and that a sister forgets to be a sister?

Now I know this to be her secret motive, (the more grating to her, as her pride is concerned to make her disavow it), and can consider it joined with her former envy, and as strengthened by a brother, who has such an ascendant over the whole family; and whose interest (slave to it as he always was) engaged him to ruin you with everyone: both possessed of the ears of all your family, and having it as much in their power as in their will to misrepresent all you say, all you do; such subject also as