LETTER XVIII MR. BELFORD, TO ROBERT LOVELACE, ESQ. MONDAY NIGHT, JULY 17.
Though she was so very much disordered, I thought I would not lose this opportunity to assert your innocence of this villanous arrest.
There is no defending the unhappy man in any of his vile actions by you, Madam; but of this last outrage, by all that's good and sacred, he is innocent.
O wretches; what a sex is your's!--Have you all one dialect? good and sacred!--If, Sir, you can find an oath, or a vow, or an adjuration, that my ears have not been twenty times a day wounded with, then speak it, and I may again believe a MAN.
I was excessively touched at these words, knowing thy baseness, and the reason she had for them.
But say you, Sir, for I would not, methinks, have the wretch capable of this sordid baseness!--Say you, that he is innocent of this last wickedness? can you truly say that he is?
By the great God of Heaven!----
Nay, Sir, if you swear, I must doubt you!--If you yourself think your WORD insufficient, what reliance can I have on your OATH!--O that this my experience had not cost me so dear! but were I to love a thousand years, I would always suspect the veracity of a swearer. Excuse me, Sir; but is it likely, that he who makes so free with his GOD, will scruple any thing that may serve his turn with his fellow creature?
This was a most affecting reprimand!
Madam, said I, I have a regard, a regard a gentleman ought to have, to my word; and whenever I forfeit it to you----
Nay, Sir, don't be angry with me. It is grievous to me to question a gentleman's veracity. But your friend calls himself a gentleman--you know not what I have suffered by a gentleman!----And then again she wept.
I would give you, Madam, demonstration, if your grief and your weakness would permit it, that he has no hand in this barbarous baseness: and that he resents it as it ought to be resented.
Well, well, Sir, [with quickness,] he will have his account to make up somewhere else; not to me. I should not be sorry to find him able to acquit his intention on this occasion. Let him know, Sir, only one thing, that when you heard me in the bitterness of my spirit, most vehemently exclaim against the undeserved usage I have met with from him, that even then, in that passionate moment, I was able to say [and never did I see such an earnest and affecting exultation of hands and eyes,] 'Give him, good God! repentance and amendment; that I may be the last poor creature, who shall be ruined by him!--and, in thine own good time, receive to thy mercy the poor wretch who had none on me!--'
By my soul, I could not speak.--She had not her Bible before her for nothing.
I was forced to turn my head away, and to take out my handkerchief.
What an angel is this!--Even the gaoler, and his wife and maid, wept.
Again I wish thou hadst been there, that thou mightest have sunk down at her feet, and begun that moment to reap the effect of her generous wishes for thee; undeserving, as thou art, of any thing but perdition.
I represented to her that she would be less free where she was from visits she liked not, than at her own lodgings. I told her, that it would probably bring her, in particular, one visiter, who, otherwise I would engage, [but I durst not swear again, after the severe reprimand she had just given me,] should not come near her, without her consent. And I expressed my surprize, that she should be unwilling to quit such a place as this; when it was more than probable that some of her friends, when it was known how bad she was, would visit her.