Mrs. Inchbald

“ Yet poverty and idiotism are not the same. The poor can hear, can talk, sometimes can reflect; servants will tell their equals how they live in town; listeners will smile and shake their heads; and thus hypocrisy, instead of cultivating, destroys every seed of moral virtue.
The arrival of Lord Bendham’s family at Anfield announced to the village that the dean’s would quickly follow. Rebecca’s heart bounded with joy at the prospect. Poor Agnes felt a sinking, a foreboding tremor, that wholly interrupted the joy of her expectations. She had not heard from William for five tedious months. ”

“ William inherited all the pride and ambition of the dean—Henry, all his father’s humility. And yet, so various and extensive is the acceptation of the word pride, that, on some occasions, Henry was proud even beyond his cousin. He thought it far beneath his dignity ever to honour, or contemplate with awe, any human being in whom he saw numerous failings. Nor would he, to ingratiate himself into the favour of a man above him, stoop to one servility, such as the haughty William daily practised. ”

“ Had these miseries, common to the unhappy prostitute, been alone the punishment of Agnes—had her crimes and sufferings ended in distress like this, her story had not perhaps been selected for a public recital; for it had been no other than the customary history of thousands of her sex. But Agnes had a destiny yet more fatal. Unhappily, she was endowed with a mind so sensibly alive to every joy, and every sorrow, to every mark of kindness, every token of severity, so liable to excess in passion, that, once perverted, there was no degree of error from which it would revolt. ”

“ William—in your luxurious dwelling, possessed of coffers filled with gold, relations, friends, clients, joyful around you, delicious viands and rich wines upon your sumptuous board, voluptuousness displayed in every apartment of your habitation—contemplate, for a moment, Agnes, your first love, with her son, your first and only child, walking through frost and snow to London, with a foreboding fear on the mother that, when arrived, they both may perish for the want of a friend. ”

“ That, perhaps, was easy to resolve; but she had a child to leave behind! a child, from whom to part for a day was a torment. Yet, before she submitted to a situation which filled her mind with a kind of loathing horror, often she paced up and down the street in which William lived, looked wistfully at his house, and sometimes, lost to all her finer feelings of independent pride, thought of sending a short petition to him; but, at the idea of a repulse, and of that frowning brow which she knew William could dart on her petitions, she preferred death, or the most degrading life, to the trial. ”

“ As the painter views with delight and wonder the finished picture, expressive testimony of his taste and genius; as the physician beholds with pride and gladness the recovering invalid, whom his art has snatched from the jaws of death; as the father gazes with rapture on his first child, the creature to whom he has given life; so did Henry survey, with transporting glory, his brother, dressed for the first time in canonicals, to preach at his parish church. ”

“ Agnes was formed by the rarest structure of the human frame, and destined by the tenderest thrillings of the human soul, to inspire and to experience real love: but her nice taste, her delicate thoughts, were so refined beyond the sphere of her own station in society, that nature would have produced this prodigy of attraction in vain, had not one of superior education and manners assailed her affections; and had she been accustomed to the conversation of men in William’s rank of life, she had, perhaps, treated William’s addresses with indifference ”

“ Some persons, I know, estimate happiness by fine houses, gardens, and parks; others by pictures, horses, money, and various things wholly remote from their own species; but when I wish to ascertain the real felicity of any rational man, I always inquire whom he has to love. If I find he has nobody, or does not love those he has, even in the midst of all his profusion of finery and grandeur, I pronounce him a being in deep adversity. In loving you, I am happier than my cousin William ”

“ Young Henry fixed his eyes upon his cousin, while, with steady self-complacency, he delivered this speech, and no sooner was it concluded than Henry cried out in a kind of wonder,
“A little man! as I am alive, a little man! I did not know there were such little men in this country! I never saw one in my life before!”
“This is a boy,” said the dean; “a boy not older than yourself.”
He put their hands together, and William gravely shook hands with his cousin.
“It is a man,” continued young Henry; then stroked his cousin’s chin. ”

“ Still, there are few persons whom Providence afflicts beyond the limits of all consolation; few cast so low as not to feel pride on certain occasions; and Agnes felt a comfort and a dignity in the thought, that she had both a mind and a body capable of sustaining every hardship, which her destiny might inflict, rather than submit to the disgrace of soliciting William’s charity a second time. ”

“ Often had Agnes, by the winter’s fire, listened to tales of ghosts—of the unceasing sting of a guilty conscience; often had she shuddered at the recital of murders; often had she wept over the story of the innocent put to death, and stood aghast that the human mind could premeditate the heinous crime of assassination.
From the tenderest passion the most savage impulse may arise: in the deep recesses of fondness, sometimes is implanted the root of cruelty ”

“ Lord and Lady Bendham’s birth, education, talents, and propensities, being much on the same scale of eminence, they would have been a very happy pair, had not one great misfortune intervened—the lady never bore her lord a child, while every cottage of the village was crammed with half-starved children, whose father from week to week, from year to year, exerted his manly youth, and wasted his strength in vain, to protect them from hunger; whose mother mourned over her new-born infant as a little wretch, sent into the world to deprive the rest of what already was too scanty for them ”

“ Do not be afraid you should grow old before I return; age can never alter you in my regard. It is your gentle nature, your unaffected manners, your easy cheerfulness, your clear understanding, the sincerity of all your words and actions which have gained my heart; and while you preserve charms like these, you will be dearer to me with white hairs and a wrinkled face than any of your sex, who, not possessing all these qualities, possess the form and features of perfect beauty. ”

“ At first she shuddered at those practices she saw, at those conversations she heard, and blest herself that poverty, not inclination, had caused her to be a witness of such profligacy, and had condemned her in this vile abode to be a servant, rather than in the lower rank of mistress. Use softened those horrors every day; at length self-defence, the fear of ridicule, and the hope of favour, induced her to adopt that very conduct from which her heart revolted.
In her sorrowful countenance and fading charms there yet remained attraction for many visitors ”

“ As difficult as to eradicate insanity from a mind once possessed, so difficult it is to erase from the lover’s breast the deep impression of a real affection. Coercion may prevail for a short interval, still love will rage again. Not all the ignominy which Agnes experienced in the place where she now was without a home—not the hunger which she at times suffered, and even at times saw her child endure—not every inducement for going to London, or motive for quitting her present desolate station, had the weight to affect her choice so much as—in London, she should live nearer William ”

“ If Rebecca were living, he knew it must be happiness; for his heart dwelt with confidence on her faith, her unchanging sentiments. “But death might possibly have ravished from his hopes what no mortal power could have done.” And thus the lover creates a rival in every ill, rather than suffer his fears to remain inanimate.
The elder Henry had less to fear or to hope than his son; yet he both feared and hoped with a sensibility that gave him great anxiety. ”

“ Still Henry turned over each leaf of the book, but he could meet only with luxurious details of “the fruits of the earth, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea.”
“Why, here is provision enough for all the people,” said Henry; “why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?”
“They must not,” said the dean, “unless they were their own.”
“What, uncle! does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?” ”

“ After numerous other examples had been recited of the dangers, the evils that riches draw upon their owner; the elder Henry rose from his chair, and embracing Rebecca and his son, said—“How much indebted are we to Providence, my children, who, while it inflicts poverty, bestows peace of mind; and in return for the trivial grief we meet in this world, holds out to our longing hopes the reward of the next!” ”

“ Henry rose early in the morning, and flew to the curate’s house, with more than even his usual thirst of justice, to clear injured innocence, to redeem from shame her whom he loved. With eager haste he told that he had found the mother, whose fall from virtue Rebecca, overcome by confusion and threats, had taken on herself. ”

“ Bred up with strict observance both of his moral and religious character, William did not dare to tell an unequivocal lie even to his inferiors; he never promised Agnes he would marry her; nay, even he paid so much respect to the forms of truth, that no sooner was it evident that he had obtained her heart, her whole soul entire—so that loss of innocence would be less terrifying than separation from him—no sooner did he perceive this, than he candidly told her he “could never make her his wife.” ”

“ Neither of these cases was the lot of Agnes. She experienced the sentiment before she ever heard it named in the sense with which it had possessed her—joined with numerous other sentiments; for genuine love, however rated as the chief passion of the human heart, is but a poor dependent, a retainer upon other passions; admiration, gratitude, respect, esteem, pride in the object. Divest the boasted sensation of these, and it is not more than the impression of a twelve-month, by courtesy, or vulgar error, termed love. ”

“ There is, perhaps in each individual, one parent motive to every action, good or bad. Be that as it may, it was evident, that with Lady Clementina, all she said or did, all she thought or looked, had but one foundation—vanity. If she were nice, or if she were negligent, vanity was the cause of both; for she would contemplate with the highest degree of self-complacency, “What such-a-one would say of her elegant preciseness, or what such-a-one would think of her interesting neglect.” ”

“ His curiosity was excited—he drew near, and he could distinguish (followed by elegant poetic praise) “To the memory of John Lord Viscount Bendham.”
Notwithstanding the solemn, melancholy, anxious bent of Henry’s mind, he could not read these words, and behold this costly fabric, without indulging a momentary fit of indignant laughter.
“Are sculpture and poetry thus debased,” he cried, “to perpetuate the memory of a man whose best advantage is to be forgotten; whose no one action merits record, but as an example to be shunned?” ”

“ Those, then, who alone felt sorrow at the dean’s departure were two young women, whose parents, exempt from indigence, preserved them from suffering under his unpitying piety, but whose discretion had not protected them from the bewitching smiles of his nephew, and the seducing wiles of his son.
The first morning that Rebecca rose and knew Henry was gone till the following summer, she wished she could have laid down again and slept away the whole long interval. ”

“ Year after year rolled on in pride and grandeur; the bishop and the dean passing their time in attending levées and in talking politics; Lady Clementina passing hers in attending routs and in talking of herself, till the son arrived at the age of thirteen.
Young William passed his time, from morning till night, with persons who taught him to walk, to ride, to talk, to think like a man—a foolish man, instead of a wise child, as nature designed him to be. ”

“ Perhaps our own misfortunes are the cause of our pity for others, even more than their ills; and Henry’s present sorrows had softened his heart to peculiar sympathy in woe. He had unhappily found that the ardour which had hurried him to vindicate the reputation of Rebecca was likely to deprive him of the blessing of her ever becoming his proved an offender instead of his wife; for the dean, chagrined that his son was at length nephew, submitted to the temptation of punishing the latter, while he forgave the former. ”

“ Upon this day of ringing and rejoicing the bells were not muffled, nor was conversation on the subject withheld from the ear of Agnes! She heard like her neighbours; and sitting on the side of her bed in her little chamber, suffered, under the cottage roof, as much affliction as ever visited a palace.
Tyrants, who have embrued their hands in the blood of myriads of their fellow-creatures, can call their murders “religion, justice, attention to the good of mankind.” Poor Agnes knew no sophistry to calm her sense of guilt: she felt herself a harlot and a murderer ”

“ Reader of superior rank, if the passions which rage in the bosom of the inferior class of human kind are beneath your sympathy, throw aside this little history, for Rebecca Rymer and Agnes Primrose are its heroines.
But you, unprejudiced reader, whose liberal observations are not confined to stations, but who consider all mankind alike deserving your investigation; who believe that there exists, in some, knowledge without the advantage of instruction; refinement of sentiment independent of elegant society; honourable pride of heart without dignity of blood ”

“ Agnes had been taught the full estimation of female virtue; and if her nature could have detested any one creature in a state of wretchedness, it would have been the woman who had lost her honour; yet, for William, what would not Agnes forfeit? The dignity, the peace, the serenity, the innocence of her own mind, love soon encouraged her to fancy she could easily forego ”

“ By forming a humble scheme for their remaining life, a scheme depending upon their own exertions alone, on no light promises of pretended friends, and on no sanguine hopes of certain success, but with prudent apprehension, with fortitude against disappointment, Henry, his son, and Rebecca (now his daughter) , found themselves, at the end of one year, in the enjoyment of every comfort with such distinguished minds knew how to taste.
Exempt both from patronage and from control—healthy—alive to every fruition with which Nature blesses the world ”