University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.

Mervyn's auditors allowed no pause in their attention
to this story. Having ended, a deep silence took
place. The clock which stood upon the mantle, had
sounded twice the customary larum, but had not been
heard by us. It was now struck a third time. It was
one. Our guest appeared somewhat startled at this signal,
and looked, with a mournful sort of earnestness, at
the clock. There was an air of inquietude about him,
which I had never observed in an equal degree before.

I was not without much curiosity respecting other
incidents than those which had just been related by
him; but after so much fatigue as he had undergone, I
thought it improper to prolong the conversation.

Come, said I, my friend, let us to bed. This is a
drowsy time, and after so much exercise of mind and
body, you cannot but need some repose. Much has
happened in your absence, which is proper to be known
to you, but our discourse will be best deferred till tomorrow.
I will come into your chamber by day-dawn,
and unfold to you my particular.

Nay, said he, withdraw not on my account. If I
go to my chamber, it will not be to sleep, but to meditate,
especially after your assurance that something of
moment has occurred in my absence. My thoughts,

independently of any cause of sorrow or fear, have received
an impulse which solitude and darkness will not
stop. It is impossible to know too much for our safety
and integrity, or to know it too soon. What has happened?

I did not hesitate to comply with his request, for it
was not difficult to conceive that, however tired the
limbs might be, the adventures of this day would not
be easily expelled from the memory at night. I told
him the substance of the conversation with Mrs. Althorpe.
He smiled at these parts of the narrative
which related to himself; but when his father's depravity
and poverty were mentioned, he melted into tears.

Poor wretch! I that knew thee in thy better days,
might have easily divined this consequence. I foresaw
thy poverty and degradation in the same hour that I
left thy roof. My soul drooped at the prospect, but I
said, it cannot be prevented, and this reflection was an
antidote to grief, but now that thy ruin is complete, it
seems as if some of it were imputable to me, who forsook
thee when the succour and counsel of a son were
most needed. Thou art ignorant and vicious, but thou
art my father still. I see that the sufferings of a better
man than thou art would less afflict me than thine.
Perhaps it is still in my power to restore thy liberty and
good name, and yet—that is a fond wish. Thou art
past the age when the ignorance and groveling habits of
a human being are susceptible of cure—There he
stopt, and after a gloomy pause, continued:

I am not surprized or afflicted at the misconceptions
of my neighbors, with relation to my own character.
Men must judge from what they see: they must build
their conclusions on their knowledge. I never saw in
the rebukes of my neighbors, any thing but laudable
abhorrence of vice. They were not eager to blame,
to collect materials of censure rather than of praise.
It was not me whom they hated and despised. It was
the phantom that passed under my name, which existed
only in their imagination, and which was worthy of
all their scorn and all their enmity.

What I appeared to be in their eyes, was as much
the object of my own disapprobation as of theirs. Their
reproaches only evidence the rectitude of their decisions,
as well as of my own. I drew from them new motives
to complacency. They fortified my perseverance in
the path which I had chosen as best; they raised me
higher in my own esteem; they hightened the claims
of the reproachers themselves to my respect and my
gratitude.

They thought me slothful, incurious, destitute of
knowledge, and of all thirst of knowledge, insolent and
profligate. They say that in the treatment of my father,
I have been ungrateful and inhuman. I have
stolen his property, and deserted him in his calamity.
Therefore they hate and revile me. It is well: I love
them for these proofs of their discernment and integrity.
Their indignation at wrong is the truest test of
their virtue.

It is true that they mistake me, but that arises from,
the circumstances of our mutual situation. They examined
what was exposed to their view: they grasped
at what was placed within their reach. To decide contrary
to appearances; to judge from what they know
not, would prove them to be brutish and not rational,
would make their decision of no worth, and render
them, in their turn, objects of neglect and contempt.

It is true that I hated school; that I sought occasions
of absence, and finally, on being struck by the
master, determined to enter his presence no more. I
loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees, and to
clamber up rocks, to shroud myself in thickets, and
stroll among woods, to obey the impulse of the moment,
and to prate or be silent, just as my humor prompted
me. All this I loved more than to go to and fro in the
same path, and at stated hours, to look off and on a
book, to read just as much, and of such a kind, to stand
up and be seated, just as another thought proper to direct.
I hated to be classed, cribbed, rebuked and feruled
at the pleasure of one, who, as it seemed to me,

knew no guide in his rewards but caprice, and no
prompter in his punishments but passion.

It is true that I took up the spade and the hoe as
rarely, and for as short a time, as possible. I preferred
to ramble in the forest and loiter on the hill: perpetually
to change the scene; to scrutinize the endless
variety of objects; to compare one leaf and pebble
with another; to pursue those trains of thought which
their resemblances and differences suggested; to enquire
what it was that gave them this place, structure,
and form, were more agreeable employments than
plowing and threshing.

My father could well afford to hire labor. What
my age and my constitution enabled me to do could be
done by a sturdy boy, in half the time, with half the
toil, and with none of the reluctance. The boy was
a bond servant, and the cost of his clothing and food
was next to nothing. True it is, that my service
would have saved him even this expence, but my motives
for declining the effort were not hastily weighed
or superficially examined. These were my motives:

My frame was delicate and feeble. Exposure to
wet blasts and vertical suns was sure to make me sick.
My father was insensible to this consequence; and no
degree of diligence would please him, but that which
would destroy my health. My health was dearer to my
mother than to me. She was more anxious to exempt
me from possible injuries than reason justified; but
anxions she was, and I could not save her from anxiety,
but by almost wholly abstaining from labor. I
thought her peace of mind was of some value, and
that, if the inclination of either of my parents must
be gratified at the expence of the other, the preference
was due to the woman who bore me; who nursed me
in disease; who watched over my safety with incessant
tenderness; whose life and whose peace were involved
in mine. I should have deemed myself brutish and
obdurately wicked to have loaded her with fears and
cares merely to smooth the brow of a froward old man,
whose avarice called on me to sacrifice my ease and my

health, and who shifted to other shoulders the province
of sustaining me when sick, and of mourning for me
when dead.

I likewise believed, that it became me to reflect upon
the influence of my decision on my own happiness;
and to weigh the profits flowing to my father from my
labor, against the benefits of mental exercise, the
pleasures of the woods and streams, healthful sensations,
and the luxury of musing. The pecuniary profit
was petty and contemptible. It obviated no necessity.
It purchased no rational enjoyment. It merely
provoked, by furnishing the means of indulgence, an
appetite from which my father was not exempt. It
cherished the seeds of depravity in him, and lessened
the little stock of happiness belonging to my mother.

I did not detain you long, my friends, in pourtraying
my parents, and recounting domestic incidents,
when I first told you my story. What had noc onnection
with the history of Welbeck and with the part that I
have acted upon this stage, I thought it proper to omit.
My omission was likewise prompted by other reasons.
My mind is ennervated and feeble like my body. I
cannot look upon the sufferings of those I love without
exquisite pain. I cannot steel my heart by the
force of reason, and by submission to necessity; and,
therefore, too frequently employ the cowardly expedient
of endeavoring to forget what I cannot remember
without agony.

I told you that my father was sober and industrious
by habit, but habit is not uniform. There were intervals
when his plodding and tame spirit gave place to
the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not
sought by him, but he could not withstand entreaty,
and a potion that produced no effect upon others changed
him into a maniac.

I told you that I had a sister, whom the arts of a
villain destroyed. Alas! the work of her destruction
was left unfinished by him. The blows and contumelies
of a misjudging and implacable parent, who scrupled
not to thrust her, with her new-born infant, out

of doors; the curses and taunts of unnatural brothers
left her no alternative but death—But I must not
think of this; I must not think of the wrongs which
my mother endured in the person of her only and darling
daughter.

My brothers were the copyists of the father, whom
they resembled in temper and person. My mother
doated on her own image in her daughter and in me.
This daughter was ravished from her by self-violence,
and her other children by disease. I only remained to
appropriate her affections and fulfil her hopes. This
alone had furnished a sufficient reason why I should be
careful of my health and my life, but my father's character
supplied me with a motive infinitely more cogent.

It is almost incredible, but, nevertheless, true, that
the only being whose presence presence and remonstrances had
any influence on my father, at moments when his reason
was extinct, was myself. As to my personal strength, it was nothing; yet my mother's person was
rescued from brutal violence: he was checked, in the
midst of his ferocious career, by a single look or exclamation
from me. The fear of my rebukes had even
some influence in enabling him to resist temptation.
If I entered the tavern, at the moment when he was
lifting the glass to his lips, I never weighed the injunctions
of decorum, but, snatching the vessel from his
hand, I threw it on the ground. I was not deterred by
the presence of others; and their censures, on my want
of filial respect and duty, were listened to with unconcern.
I chose not to justify myself by expatiating on
domestic miseries, and by calling down that pity on my
mother, which I knew would only have increased her
distress.

The world regarded my deportment as insolent and
perverse to a degree of insanity. To deny my father
an indulgence which they thought harmless, and which,
indeed, was harmless in its influence on other men;
to interfere thus publicly with his social enjoyments,
and expose him to mortification and shame, was loudly
condemned; but my duty to my mother debarred me

from eluding this censure on the only terms on which
it could have been eluded. Now it has ceased to be necessary
to conceal what passed in domestic retirements,
and I should willingly confess the truth before any
audience.

At first my father imagined, that threats and blows
would intimidate his monitor. In this he was mistaken,
and the detection of this mistake impressed him
with an involuntary reverence for me, which set bounds
to those excesses which disdained any other controul.
Hence, I derived new motives for cherishing a life
which was useful, in so many ways, to my mother.

My condition is now changed. I am no longer on
that field to which the law, as well as reason, must acknowledge
that I had some right, while there was any
in my father. I must hazard my life, if need be, in
the pursuit of the means of honest subsistence. I never
spared myself while in the service of Mr. Hadwin;
and, at a more inclement season, should probably have
incurred some hazard by my diligence.

These were the motives of my idleness—for, my
abstaining from the common toils of the farm passed
by that name among my neighbors; though, in truth,
my time was far from being wholly unoccupied by manual
employments, but these required less exertion of
body or mind, or were more connected with intellectual
efforts. They were pursued in the seclusion of
my chamber or the recesses of a wood. I did not labor
to conceal them, but neither was I anxious to attract
notice. It was sufficient that the censure of my
neighbors was unmerited, to make me regard it with
indifference.

I sought not the society of persons of my own age,
not from sullen or unsociable habits, but merely because
those around me were totally unlike myself.
Their tastes and occupations were incompatible with
mine. In my few books, in my pen, in the vegetable
and animal existences around me, I found companions
who adapted their visits and intercourse to my convenience

and caprice, and with whom I was never
tired of communing.

I was not unaware of the opinion which my neighbors
had formed of my being improperly connected with
Betty Lawrence. I am not sorry that I fell into company
with that girl. Her intercourse has instructed
me in what some would think impossible to be attained
by one who had never haunted the impure recesses
of licentiousness in a city. The knowledge, which residence
in this town for ten years gave her audacious
and inquisitive spirit, she imparted to me. Her character,
profligate and artful, libidinous and impudent,
and made up of the impressions which a city life had
produced on her coarse but active mind, was open to
my study, and I studied it.

I scarcely know how to repel the charge of illicit
conduct, and to depict the exact species of intercourse
subsisting between us. I always treated her with freedom,
and sometimes with gaiety. I had no motives to
reserve. I was so formed that a creature like her had
no power over my senses. That species of temptation
adapted to entice me from the true path, was widely
different from the artifices of Betty. There was no
point at which it was possible for her to get possession
of my fancy. I watched her while she practised all
her tricks and blandishments, just as I regarded a similar
deportment in the animal salax ignavumque who
inhabits the stye. I made efforts to pursue my observations
unembarrassed; but my efforts were made, not
to restrain desire, but to suppress disgust. The difficulty
lay, not in withholding my caresses, but in forbearing
to repulse her with rage.

Decorum, indeed, was not outraged, and all limits
were not overstept, at once. Dubious advances were
employed; but, when found unavailing, were displaced
by more shameless and direct proceedings. She was
too little versed in human nature to see that her last
expedient was always worse than the preceding; and
that, in proportion as she lost sight of decency, she
multiplied the obstacles to her success.

Betty had many enticements in person and air. She
was ruddy, smooth, and plump. To these she added
—I must not say what, for it is strange to what lengths
a woman destitute of modesty will sometimes go. But
all her artifices availing her not at all in the contest
with my insensibilities, she resorted to extremes which
it would serve no good purpose to describe in this audience.
They produced not the consequences she wished,
but they produced another which was by no means
displeasing to her. An incident one night occurred,
from which a sagacious observer deduced the existence
of an intrigue. It was useless to attempt to rectify
his mistake, by explaining appearances, in a manner
consistent with my innocence. This mode of explication
implied a continence in me which he denied to be
possible. The standard of possibilities, especially in
vice and virtue, is fashioned by most men after their
own character. A temptation which this judge of
human nature knew that he was unable to resist, he
sagely concluded to be irresistible by any other man,
and quickly established the belief among my neighbors,
that the woman who married the father had been prostituted
to the son. Though I never admitted the
truth of this aspersion, I believe it useless to deny,
because no one would credit my denial, and because I
had no power to disprove it.