Clarissa Harlowe: Or, the History of a Young Lady, Volume 8 (15 page)

I will not look back upon the measures into which you have either been led or driven. But will only say as to those, that I think you are the least to blame of any young lady that was ever reduced from happy to unhappy circumstances; and I have not been wanting to say as much, where I hoped my freedom would have been better received than I have had the mortification to find it to be.

What I principally write for now is, to put you upon doing a piece of justice to yourself, and to your sex, in the prosecuting for his life (I am assured his life is in your power) the most profligate and abandoned of men, as he must be, who could act so basely, as I understand Mr. Lovelace has acted by you.

I am very ill; and am now forced to write upon my pillow; my thoughts confused; and incapable of method: I shall not therefore aim at method: but to give you in general my opinion--and that is, that your religion, your duty to your family, the duty you owe to your honour, and even charity to your sex, oblige you to give public evidence against this very wicked man.

And let me add another consideration: The prevention, by this means, of the mischiefs that may otherwise happen between your brother and Mr. Lovelace, or between the latter and your cousin Morden, who is now, I hear, arrived, and resolves to have justice done you.

A consideration which ought to affect your conscience, [forgive me, dearest young lady, I think I am now in the way of my duty;] and to be of more concern to you, than that hard pressure upon your modesty which I know the appearance against him in an open court must be of to such a lady as you; and which, I conceive, will be your great difficulty. But I know, Madam, that you have dignity enough to become the blushes of the most naked truth, when necessity, justice, and honour, exact it from you. Rakes and ravishers would meet with encouragement indeed, and most from those who had the greatest abhorrence of their actions, if violated modesty were never to complain of the injury it received from the villanous attempters of it.

In a word, the reparation of your family dishonour now rests in your own bosom: and which only one of these two alternatives can repair; to wit, either to marry the offender, or to prosecute him at law. Bitter expedients for a soul so delicate as your's!

He, and all his friends, I understand, solicit you to the first: and it is certainly, now, all the amends within his power to make. But I am assured that you have rejected their solicitations, and his, with the indignation and contempt that his foul actions have deserved: but yet, that you refuse not to extend to him the christian forgiveness he has so little reason to expect, provided he will not disturb you farther.

But, Madam, the prosecution I advise, will not let your present and future exemption from fresh disturbance from so vile a molester depend upon his courtesy: I should think so noble and so rightly-guided a spirit as your's would not permit that it should, if you could help it.

And can indignities of any kind be properly pardoned till we have it in our power to punish them? To pretend to pardon, while we are labouring under the pain or dishonour of them, will be thought by some to be but the vaunted mercy of a pusillanimous heart, trembling to resent them. The remedy I propose is a severe one: But what pain can be more severe than the injury? Or how will injuries be believed to grieve us, that are never honourably complained of?

I am sure Miss Clarissa Harlowe, however injured and oppressed, remains unshaken in her sentiments of honour and virtue: and although she would sooner die than deserve that her modesty should be drawn into question; yet she will think no truth immodest that is to be uttered in the vindicated cause of innocence and chastity. Little, very little difference is there, my dear young lady, between a suppressed evidence, and a false one.

It is a terrible circumstance, I once more own, for a young lady of your delicacy to be under the obligation of telling so shocking a story in public court: but it is still a worse imputation, that she should pass over so mortal an injury unresented.

Conscience, honour, justice, are on your side: and modesty would, by some, be thought but an empty name, should you refuse to obey their dictates.

I have been consulted, I own, on this subject. I have given it as my opinion, that you ought to prosecute the abandoned man--but without my reasons. These I reserved, with a resolution to lay them before you unknown to any body, that the result, if what I wish, may be your own.

I will only add that the misfortunes which have befallen you, had they been the lot of a child of my own, could not have affected me more than your's have done. My own child I love: but I both love and honour you: since to love you, is to love virtue, good sense, prudence, and every thing that is good and noble in woman.

Wounded as I think all these are by the injuries you have received, you will believe that the knowledge of your distresses must have afflicted, beyond what I am able to express,

Your sincere admirer, and humble servant,
ARTHUR LEWEN.

I just now understand that your sister will, by proper authority, propose this prosecution to you. I humbly presume that the reason why you resolved not upon this step from the first, was, that you did not know that it would have the countenance and support of your relations.

I thought, till I received your affectionate and welcome letter, that I had neither father, uncle, brother left; nor hardly a friend among my former favourers of your sex. Yet, knowing you so well, and having no reason to upbraid myself with a faulty will, I was to blame, (even although I had doubted the continuance of your good opinion,) to decline the trial whether I had forfeited it or not; and if I had, whether I could not honourably reinstate myself in it.

But, Sir, it was owing to different causes that I did not; partly to shame, to think how high, in my happier days, I stood in your esteem, and how much I must be sunk in it, since those so much nearer in relation to me gave me up; partly to deep distress, which makes the humbled heart diffident; and made mine afraid to claim the kindred mind in your's, which would have supplied to me in some measure all the dear and lost relations I have named.

Then, so loth, as I sometimes was, to be thought to want to make a party against those whom both duty and inclination bid me reverence: so long trailed on between hope and doubt: so little my own mistress at one time; so fearful of making or causing mischief at another; and not being encouraged to hope, by your kind notice, that my application to you would be acceptable:--apprehending that my relations had engaged your silence at least*--THESE--But why these unavailing retrospections now?--I was to be unhappy--in order to be happy; that is my hope!--Resigning therefore to that hope, I will, without any further preamble, write a few lines, (if writing to you, I can write but a few,) in answer to the subject of your kind letter.

* The stiff visit this good divine was prevailed upon to make her, as mentioned in Vol. II. Letter XXXI. (of which, however, she was too generous to remind him) might warrant the lady to think that he had rather inclined to their party, as to the parental side, than to her's.

Permit me, then, to say, That I believe your arguments would have been unanswerable in almost every other case of this nature, but in that of the unhappy Clarissa Harlowe.

It is certain that creatures who cannot stand the shock of public shame, should be doubly careful how they expose themselves to the danger of incurring private guilt, which may possibly bring them to it. But as to myself, suppose there were no objections from the declining way I am in as to my health; and supposing I could have prevailed upon myself to appear against this man; were there not room to apprehend that the end so much wished for by my friends, (to wit, his condign punishment,) would not have been obtained, when it came to be seen that I had consented to give him a clandestine meeting; and, in consequence of that, had been weakly tricked out of living under one roof with him for several weeks; which I did, (not only without complaint, but) without cause of complaint?

Little advantage in a court, (perhaps, bandied about, and jested profligately with,) would some of those pleas in my favour have been, which out of court, and to a private and serious audience, would have carried the greatest weight against him--Such, particularly, as the infamous methods to which he had recourse--

It would, no doubt, have been a ready retort from every mouth, that I ought not to have thrown myself into the power of such a man, and that I ought to take for my pains what had befallen me.

But had the prosecution been carried on to effect, and had he even been sentenced to death, can it be supposed that his family would not have had interest enough to obtain his pardon, for a crime thought too lightly of, though one of the greatest that can be committed against a creature valuing her honour above her life?--While I had been censured as pursuing with sanguinary views a man who offered me early all the reparation in his power to make?

And had he been pardoned, would he not then have been at liberty to do as
much mischief as ever?

I dare say, Sir, such is the assurance of the man upon whom my unhappy destiny threw me; and such his inveteracy to my family, (which would then have appeared to be justified by their known inveteracy to him, and by their earnest endeavours to take away his life;) that he would not have been sorry to have had an opportunity to confront me, and my father, uncles, and brother, at the bar of a court of justice, on such an occasion. In which case, would not (on his acquittal, or pardon) resentments have been reciprocally heightened? And then would my brother, or my cousin Morden, have been more secure than now?

How do these conditions aggravate my fault! My motives, at first, were not indeed blamable: but I had forgotten the excellent caution, which yet I was not ignorant of, That we ought not to do evil that good may come of it.

In full conviction of the purity of my heart, and of the firmness of my principles, [Why may I not, thus called upon, say what I am conscious of, and yet without the imputation of faulty pride; since all is but a duty, and I should be utterly inexcusable, could I not justly say what I do?-- In this full conviction,] he has offered me marriage. He has avowed his penitence: a sincere penitence I have reason to think it, though perhaps not a christian one. And his noble relations, (kinder to the poor sufferer than her own,) on the same conviction, and his own not ungenerous acknowledgements, have joined to intercede with me to forgive and accept of him. Although I cannot comply with the latter part of their intercession, have not you, Sir, from the best rules, and from the divinest example, taught me to forgive injuries?

The injury I have received from him is indeed of the highest nature, and it was attended with circumstances of unmanly baseness and premeditation; yet, I bless God, it has not tainted my mind; it has not hurt my morals. No thanks indeed to the wicked man that it has not. No vile courses have followed it. My will is unviolated. The evil, (respecting myself, and not my friends,) is merely personal. No credulity, no weakness, no want of vigilance, have I to reproach myself with. I have, through grace, triumphed over the deepest machinations. I have escaped from him. I have renounced him. The man whom once I could have loved, I have been enabled to despise: And shall not charity complete my triumph? and shall I not enjoy it?--And where would be my triumph if he deserved my forgiveness?--Poor man! he has had a loss in losing me! I have the pride to think so, because I think I know my own heart. I have had none in losing him.

But I have another plea to make, which alone would have been enough (as I presume) to answer the contents of your very kind and friendly letter.

I know, my dear and reverend friend, the spiritual guide and director of my happier days! I know, that you will allow of my endeavour to bring myself to this charitable disposition, when I tell you how near I think myself to that great and awful moment, in which, and even in the ardent preparation to which, every sense of indignity or injury that concerns not the immortal soul, ought to be absorbed in higher and more important contemplations.

Thus much for myself.

And for the satisfaction of my friends and favourers, Miss Howe is solicitous to have all those letters and materials preserved, which will set my whole story in a true light. The good Dr. Lewen is one of the principal of those friends and favourers.

The warning that may be given from those papers to all such young creatures as may have known or heard of me, may be of more efficacy to the end wished for, as I humbly presume to think, than my appearance could have been in a court of justice, pursuing a doubtful event, under the disadvantages I have mentioned. And if, my dear and good Sir, you are now, on considering every thing, of this opinion, and I could know it, I should consider it as a particular felicity; being as solicitous as ever to be justified in what I may in your eyes.

I am sorry, Sir, that your indisposition has reduced you to the necessity of writing upon your pillow. But how much am I obliged to that kind and generous concern for me, which has impelled you, as I may say, to write a letter, containing so many paternal lines, with such inconvenience to yourself!

May the Almighty bless you, dear and reverend Sir, for all your goodness to me of long time past, as well as for that which engaged my present gratitude! Continue to esteem me to the last, as I do and will venerate you! And let me bespeak your prayers, the continuance, I should say, of your prayers; for I doubt not, that I have always had them: and to them, perhaps, has in part been owing (as well as to your pious precepts instilled through my earlier youth) that I have been able to make the stand I have made; although every thing that you prayed for has not been granted to me by that Divine Wisdom, which knows what is best for its poor creatures.

My prayers for you are, that it will please God to restore you to your affectionate flock; and after as many years of life as shall be for his service, and to your own comfort, give us a happy meeting in those regions of blessedness, which you have taught me, as well by example, as by precept, to aspire to!