Moll Flanders. Даниэль Дефо

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СКАЧАТЬ If you have such dishonourable thoughts of me, I must ask you what foundation have I given for such a suggestion. If then I have yielded to the importunities of my affection, and if I have been persuaded to believe that I am really your wife, shall I now give the lie to all those arguments, and call myself your whore, or mistress, which is the same thing? And will you transfer me to your brother? Can you transfer my affection? Can you bid me cease loving you, and bid me love him? Is it in my power, think you, to make such a change at demand? No, sir,” said I, “depend upon it, it is impossible, and whatever the change on your side may be, I will ever be true; and I had much rather, since it is come that unhappy length, be your whore than your brother’s wife.”

      He appeared pleased and touched with the impression of this last discourse, and told me that he stood where he did before; that he had not been unfaithful to me in any one promise he had ever made yet, but that there were so many terrible things presented themselves to his view in the affair before me, that he had thought of the other as a remedy, only that he thought this would not be an entire parting us, but we might love as friends all our days, and perhaps with more satisfaction than we should in the station we were now in. That he durst say, I could not apprehend anything from him, as to betraying a secret, which could not but be the destruction of us both if it came out: that he had but one question to ask of me, that could lie in the way of it, and if that question was answered, he could not but think still it was the only step I could take.

      I guessed at his question presently, namely, whether I was not with child? As to that, I told him, he need not be concerned about it, for I was not with child.

      “Why then, my dear,” says he, “we have no time to talk farther now; consider of it, I cannot but be of the opinion still, that it will be the best course you can take.” And with this, he took his leave, and the more hastily too, his mother and sisters ringing at the gate just at the moment he had risen up to go.

      He left me in the utmost confusion of thought; and he easily perceived it the next day, and all the rest of the week, but he had no opportunity to come at me all that week, till the Sunday after, when I being indisposed did not go to Church, and he making some excuse stayed at home.

      And now he had me an hour and a half again by myself, and we fell into the same arguments all over again; at last I asked him warmly, “What opinion he must have of my modesty, that he could suppose, I should so much as entertain a thought of lying with two brothers?” And assured him it could never be. I added, “If he was to tell me that he would never see me more, than which nothing but death could be more terrible, yet I could never entertain a thought so dishonourable to myself, and so base to him; and therefore, I entreated him, if he had one grain of respect or affection left for me, that he would speak no more of it to me, or that he would pull his sword out and kill me.”

      He appeared surprised at my obstinacy, as he called it, told me I was unkind to myself, and unkind to him in it; that it was a crisis unlooked for upon us both, but that he did not see any other way to save us both from ruin, and therefore he thought it the more unkind; but that if he must say no more of it to me, he added with an unusual coldness, that he did not know anything else we had to talk of; and so he rose up to take his leave; I rose up too, as if with the same indifference, but when he came to give me, as it were, a parting kiss, I burst out into such a passion of crying, that though I would have spoke, I could not, and only pressing his hand, seemed to give him the adieu, but cried vehemently.

      He was sensibly moved with this; so he sat down again, and said a great many kind things to me, but still urged the necessity of what he had proposed; all the while insisting, that if I did refuse, he would notwithstanding provide for me; but letting me plainly see that he would decline me in the main point; nay, even as a mistress; making it a point of honour not to lie with the woman, that for ought he knew, might one time or other come to be his brother’s wife.

      The bare loss of him as a gallant was not so much my affliction, as the loss of his person, whom indeed I loved to distraction; and the loss of all the expectations I had, and which I always built my hopes upon, of having him one day for my husband: these things oppressed my mind so much, that, in short, the agonies of my mind threw me into a high fever, and long it was, that none in the family expected my life.

      I was reduced very low indeed, and was often delirious; but nothing lay so near me, as the fear that when I was light-headed, I should say something or other to his prejudice. I was distressed in my mind also to see him, and so he was to see me, for he really loved me most passionately; but it could not be; there was not the least room to desire it on one side, or other.

      It was near five weeks that I kept my bed, and though the violence of my fever abated in three weeks, yet it several times returned; and the physicians said two or three times they could do no more for me, but that they must leave nature and the distemper to fight it out. After the end of five weeks I grew better, but was so weak, so altered, and recovered so slowly, that the physicians apprehended I should go into a consumption; and which vexed me most, they gave their opinion, that my mind was oppressed, that something troubled me, and, in short, that I was in love: upon this, the whole house set upon me to press me to tell, whether I was in love or not, and with whom? But as I well might, I denied my being in love at all.

      They had on this occasion a squabble one day about me at table, that had like to put the whole family in an uproar, they happened to be all at table, but the father; as for me I was ill, and in my chamber. At the beginning of the talk, the old gentlewoman, who had sent me somewhat to eat, bid her maid go up, and ask me if I would have any more; but the maid brought down word, I had not eaten half what she had sent me already.

      “Alas,” says the old lady, “that poor girl; I am afraid she will never be well.”

      “Well!” says the elder brother, “how should Mrs. Betty be well, they say she is in love?”

      “I believe nothing of it,” says the old gentlewoman.

      “I don’t know,” says the eldest sister, “what to say to it, they have made such a rout about her being so handsome, and so charming, and I know not what, and that in her hearing, too, that has turned the creature’s head, I believe, and who knows what possessions may follow such doing? For my part I don’t know what to make of it.”

      “Why, sister, you must acknowledge she is very handsome,” says the elder brother.

      “Aye, and a great deal handsomer than you, sister,” says Robin, “and that’s your mortification.”

      “Well, well, that is not the question,” says his sister. “The girl is well enough, and she knows it, she need not be told of it to make her vain.”

      “We don’t talk of her being vain,” says the elder brother, “but of her being in love; maybe she is in love with herself, it seems my sisters think so.”

      “I would she was in love with me,” says Robin. “I’d quickly put her out of her pain.”

      “What do you mean by that, son?” says the old lady, “how can you talk so?”

      “Why, madam,” says Robin again, very honestly, “do you think I’d let the poor girl die for love, and of me too, that is so near at hand to be had.”

      “Fie, brother,” says the second sister, “how can you talk so? Would you take a creature that has not a groat in the world?”

      “Prithee, child,” says Robin. “Beauty’s a portion, and good humour with it is a double portion; I wish thou hadst half her stock of both for thy portion.”

      So there was her mouth stopped.

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