may see farther into the thing than I; and see if she has been so positive as Robin says she has been, or no.” This was as well as he could wish, and he, as it were, yielding to talk with me at his mother’s request, she brought me to him into her own chamber; told me her son had some business with me at her request, and then she left us together, and he shut the door after her.
He came back to me, and took me in his arms and kissed me very tenderly; but told me it was now come to that crisis, that I should make myself happy or miserable, as long as I lived: that if I could not comply to his desire, we should both be ruined. Then he told me the whole story between Robin, as he called him, and his mother, and his sisters, and himself, as above. “And now, dear child,” says he, “consider what it will be to marry a gentleman of a good family, in good circumstances, and with the consent of the whole house, and to enjoy all that the world can give you; and what on the other hand, to be sunk into the dark circumstances of a woman that has lost her reputation; and that though I shall be a private friend to you while I live, yet as I shall be suspected always, so you will be afraid to see me, and I shall be afraid to own you.”
He gave me no time to reply, but went on with me thus: “What has happened between us, child, so long as we both agree to do so, may be buried and forgotten: I shall always be your sincere friend, without inclination to nearer intimacy, when you become my sister; and we shall have all the honest part of conversation without any reproaches between us, of having done amiss: I beg of you to consider it, and do not stand in the way of your own safety and prosperity; and to satisfy you that I am sincere,” added he, “I here offer you five hundred pounds to make you some amends for the freedoms I have taken with you, which we shall look upon as some of the follies of our lives, which ‘tis hoped we may repent of.”
He spoke this in so much more moving terms than it is possible for me to express, that you may suppose as he held me above an hour and a half in that discourse, so he answered all my objections, and fortified his discourse with all the arguments that human wit and art could devise.
I cannot say, however, that anything he said made impression enough upon me, so as to give me any thought of the matter, till he told me at last very plainly, that if I refused, he was sorry to add, that he could never go on with me in that station as we stood before; that though he loved me as well as ever, and that I was as agreeable to him; yet the sense of virtue had not so forsaken him as to suffer him to lie with a woman that his brother courted to make his wife; that if he took his leave of me, with a denial from me in this affair, whatever he might do for me in the point of support, grounded on his first engagement of maintaining me, yet he would not have me be surprised, that he was obliged to tell me, he could not allow himself to see me any more, and that indeed I could not expect it of him.
I received this last part with some tokens of surprise and disorder, and had much ado to avoid sinking down, for indeed I loved him to an extravagance not easy to imagine; but he perceived my disorder, and entreated me to consider seriously of it, assured me that it was the only way to preserve our mutual affection; that in this station we might love as friends, with the utmost passion, and with a love of relation untainted, free from our own just reproaches, and free from other people’s suspicions: that he should ever acknowledge his happiness owing to me; that he would be debtor to me as long as he lived, and would be paying that debt as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world, a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such; with little to provide for myself; with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay; all this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions to lay it home to me, in the worst colours; on the other hand, he failed not to set forth the easy prosperous life, which I was going to live.
He answered all that I could object from affection, and from former engagements, with telling me the necessity that was before us of taking other measures now; and as to his promises of marriage, the nature of things, he said, had put an end to that, by the probability of my being his brother’s wife, before the time to which his promises all referred.
Thus, in a word, I may say, he reasoned me out of my reason; he conquered all my arguments, and I began to see a danger that I was in, which I had not considered of before, and that was, of being dropped by both of them, and left alone in the world to shift for myself.
This, and his persuasion, at length prevailed with me to consent, though with so much reluctance, that it was easy to see I should go to church like a bear to the stake; I had some little apprehensions about me too, lest my new spouse, who, by the way, I had not the least affection for, should be skilful enough to challenge me on another account, upon our first coming to bed together; but whether he did it with design or not, I know not; but his elder brother took care to make him very much fuddled before he went to bed, so that I had the satisfaction of a drunken bedfellow the first night. How he did it I know not, but I concluded that he certainly contrived it, that his brother might be able to make no judgment of the difference between a maid and a married woman, nor did he ever entertain any notions of it, or disturb his thoughts about it.
I should go back a little here, to where I left off. The elder brother having thus managed me, his next business was to manage his mother, and he never left till he had brought her to acquiesce, and be passive even without acquainting the father, other than by post letters: so that she consented to our marrying privately, leaving her to manage the father afterwards.
Then he cajoled with his brother, and persuaded him what service he had done him, and how he had brought his mother to consent, which though true, was not indeed done to serve him, but to serve himself; but thus diligently did he cheat him, and had the thanks of a faithful friend for shifting off his whore into his brother’s arms for a wife. So naturally do men give up honour and justice and even Christianity to secure themselves.
I must now come back to Brother Robin, as we always called him, who having got his mother’s consent, as above, came big with the news to me, and told me the whole story of it, with a sincerity so visible, that I must confess it grieved me that I must be the instrument to abuse so honest a gentleman; but there was no remedy, he would have me, and I was not obliged to tell him that I was his brother’s whore, though I had no other way to put him off; so I came gradually into it, and behold we were married.
Modesty forbids me to reveal the secrets of the marriage bed, but nothing could have happened more suitable to my circumstances than that, as above, my husband was so fuddled when he came to bed, that he could not remember in the morning, whether he had had any conversation with me or no, and I was obliged to tell him he had, though in reality he had not, that I might be sure he could make no inquiry about anything else.
It concerns the story in hand very little to enter into the farther particulars of the family, or of myself, for the five years that I lived with this husband, only to observe that I had two children by him, and that at the end of the five years he died. He had been really a very good husband to me, and we lived very agreeably together; but as he had not received much from them, and had in the little time he lived acquired no great matters, so my circumstances were not great, nor was I much mended by the match. Indeed, I had preserved the elder brother’s bonds to me, to pay me £500, which he offered me for my consent to marry his brother; and this, with what I had saved of the money he formerly gave me, and about as much more by my husband, left me a widow with about £1,200 in my pocket.
My two children were indeed taken happily off of my hands, by my husband’s father and mother, and that was all they got by Mrs. Betty.
I confess I was not suitably affected with the loss of my husband; nor can I say that I ever loved him as I ought to have done, or was suitable to the good usage I had from him, for he was a tender, kind, good-humoured man as any woman could desire; but his brother being so always in my sight, at least while we were in the country, was a continual snare to me; and I never was in bed with my husband, but I wished myself in the arms of his brother; and though his brother never offered me the least kindness that way, after our marriage, but carried it just as a brother ought to do; yet it was impossible for me to do so to him: in short, I committed adultery and incest with him every