The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

by Eliza Fowler Haywood

'Good Heavens!' cried she, 'defend me, and all virtuous women, from such gallantries! But know, Sir,' continued she, with a great deal of vehemence, 'that, but for that idle resentment, as you are pleased to call it, my ruin and your dishonour would have been compleated by this best of friends.'

'How!' said Mr. Munden, eagerly; 'he did not, sure, proceed to action?' Perceiving he was now in a disposition to listen with more attention to what she said, than hitherto he had done, she hesitated not to acquaint him with every particular of his lordship's behaviour to her, and the means by which she had defended herself.

During this recital, Mr. Munden bit his lips, and appeared in very great emotions. He spoke not a word, however, till his fair wife, pitying the anxieties she saw him under, desired him to think no more of this accident, since it was so happily got over. 'It may be so in your opinion,' answered he fiercely; 'but not in mine. I foresee the consequences; though you, perhaps, think not of them. It is true, my lord's behaviour is not to be justified; nor can yours in regard to me be so: you ought to have considered the dependence I had on him, and not have carried things with so high an hand. You might have doubtless evaded this attempt by more gentle and less affrontive methods: but that cursed pride of yours must be gratified, though at the expence of all my expectations.' With these words he flung out of the room; and this was all the return she met with from her ungrateful husband, for having resisted, with such courage and resolution, temptations which some women would have thought themselves absolved for yielding to the force of.

Ill-natured and perverse as Mr. Munden was, it must be confessed that his present situation, nevertheless, merited some compassion: he had a great share of ambition—loved both pleasure and grandeur to an excess; and, though far from being of a generous disposition, the pride and vanity of his humour made him do many things, through ostentation, which his estate would not well support. He kept company with persons of rank and fortune much superior to his own; and, as he bore an equal part in their expences whenever he was with them, he stood in need of some addition to his revenue: well, therefore, might he be chagrined at an accident that cast so dark a cloud over that prospect of interest and preferment he had flattered himself with from Lord ——.

But though this was the main point, it was not the sole subject of his discontent. The motives for his being sent by Lord —— to Mr. W——, the pretended quarrel between them, and the trifling excuses made by the latter to detain him from making too quick a return, were all too obvious for him not to be assured that gentleman was privy to, and agreed to be an assistant in, the design his lordship had upon his wife.

Mr. W——, though the representative of a borough in C——, was, indeed, no more than a creature of Lord ——; to whose interest alone he was indebted for his seat in parliament: but it was not because Mr. Munden knew him to be obliged to do everything enjoined by his lordship, that restrained the resentment he conceived against him from breaking out, but because he considered that a quarrel between them on this score might occasion the affair to become publick, and expose both himself and wife to the ridicule of as many as should hear it.

Wrath, when enervate, especially if inflamed by any just provocation, is certainly very dreadful to be borne; and what this injured husband sustained in the first emotions of it, must have excited the pity of every reader of this history, if he had not afterwards meanly vented it where he had not the least occasion for disgust, but rather of the highest tenderness and admiration.

In the midst of these perplexities, however, let us leave him for a while, and return to her whose beauty had been the innocent cause of all this trouble to him, and danger to herself.

Wonderful, indeed, were the effects this last adventure produced in her. Many times before she had been on the very verge of ruin, and as often indebted merely to fortune for her preservation from the mischiefs into which her inadvertency had almost plunged her: but none of those dangers, those escapes, had ever been capable of making any lasting impression on her mind, or fixing her resolution to avoid running again into the same mistakes.

The cruel reproaches and reflections cast on her by Mr. Munden, filled her not now with the least resentment; for though she deserved them not upon the score he made them, yet she was conscious that she did so for going to the house of Lord ——, after having the strongest reasons to believe he had dishonourable intentions upon her.