She now finding all was over, and seized with a sudden fit of frenzy, or something like it, ran to his sword, which he had pulled off and laid in the window, and was about to plunge it in her breast. He easily wrested it from her; and, putting it by his side, 'O thou serpent!—thou viper!' cried he. 'If thou wert a man, thou shouldest not need to be thy own executioner!' The tide of her passion then turning another way, she threw herself at his feet, clung round his legs, and, in a voice rather screaming than speaking, uttered these words—'O pardon me!—pity me! Whatever I have done, my love of you occasioned it!'—'Curse on such poisonous love!' rejoined he. 'Hell, and its worst effects, are in the name, when mentioned by a mouth like thine!' Then finding it a little difficult to disentangle himself from the hold she had taken of him, 'Thou shame and scandal to that sex to which alone thou owest thy safety!' cried he furiously, 'quit me this instant, lest I forget thou art a woman!—lest I spurn thee from me, and use thee as the worst of reptiles!'
On hearing these dreadful words, all her strength forsook her; the sinews of her hand relaxed, and lost their grasp. She fell a second time into a fainting-fit; but of a nature as different from what the former had been as were the emotions that occasioned it. Mr. Trueworth was now too much and too justly irritated to be capable of relenting: he left her in this condition, and only bid the people at the bar, as he went out of the house, send somebody up to her assistance.
The humour he was at present in rendering him altogether unfit for company, he went directly to his lodgings; where examining the letter with more attention than he could do before, he presently imagined he was not altogether unacquainted with the hand-writing. He very well knew it was not that of Miss Flora, yet positive that he had somewhere seen it before: that which he had received concerning Miss Betsy and the child at Denham came fresh into his head; he found them, indeed, the same on comparing; and, as the reader may suppose, this discovery added not a little to the resentment he was before inflamed with against the base inventress of these double falsehoods.
CHAPTER XX
Contains divers things
Miss Betsy was all this time enjoying the little fraud she had been guilty of: the idea how Mr. Trueworth would be surprized at finding his picture had been taken away, and the various conjectures that would naturally rise in his mind upon so odd an accident, gave her more real pleasure than others feel on the accomplishment of the most material event.
She was, indeed, of a humour the most perfectly happy for herself that could be: chearful, gay—not apt to create imaginary ills, as too many do, and become wretched for misfortunes which have no existence but in their own fretful dispositions. On any real cause, either for grief or anger, that happened to her, nobody, it is certain, felt them with a more poignant sensibility; but then she was affected with them but for a short time. The turbulent passion could obtain no residence in her mind; and, on the first approaches of their opposite emotions, entirely vanished, as if they had never been. The arrows of affliction, of what kind soever they were, but slightly glanced upon her heart, nor pierced it, much less were able to make any lasting impression there.
She now visited as usual—saw as much company as ever; and hearing no mention made, wherever she went, of her adventure with the mock baronet, concluded the whole thing was, and would remain, an eternal secret, and therefore easily forgot it; or, if it came into her head, remembered it only on account of her deliverer.