Worcester concluded this letter by declaring he could not and would not remain any longer absent from me, and that I was all the consolation which was left him on earth, since his father was about to turn his back on him for ever.
I answered this letter immediately, to this effect.
"If, my dear Worcester, you do not immediately write, to give me your honour that you have set your father's mind at rest by having complied with his late reasonable request, you lose me now at once and for ever. For I shall go where you will not find me. What happiness, think you, could we enjoy, at the expense of making your parents miserable? They have good reason for what they request, and to save the time it would take you to contradict this last assertion of mine, I declare to you that I never will be your wife.
"Au reste, my dear Worcester, what is there in a ceremony and what do I care for a title? I swear, so help me God, I have ever been faithful to you since the first hour in which I placed myself under your protection, and in all and everything that was in my power, I have acted, and ever will act in a way to deserve your esteem as well as that of your family, in order that the abuse of Her Grace of Beaufort may sit light on my heart and mind. What gratification think you, could I enjoy at the idea of having merely inspired you with a strong passion for me, while I felt that, by my selfish conduct and the advantage I was ready to take of such an accidental circumstance, I had forfeited all right and title to your respect or future friendship?
"I have said enough I am sure, to convince any man worthy the name, and therefore you will have made friends with your father, and be on your road to join me very shortly after the receipt of this letter. So till then God bless you; but remember I can be firm and keep my word."
In three days after I had despatched the above letter, Worcester returned to me, having made the Duke of Beaufort the promise he had required. We now enjoyed something like quietness during the remainder of our stay in London.
Although Worcester appeared to have suffered much during his visit to his father's, for he was much paler and thinner, I really thought him consumptive. It was ever his lordship's pride and delight to drive me about the streets or the park, and to accompany me wherever I went. He but seldom went into society, and when he did, he always refused to dance much as he used to like it. In short, his passion for me, which from the very first seemed so ardent that I knew not it was in human nature that it could be susceptible of increase, became stronger with the difficulty of indulging it.
"My brother is a fool," said Lord William Somerset one day to us. "I would have cured you both in less than a month, and made Worcester hate you most cordially."
"How pray?" I inquired.
"Why," continued Lord William, "merely by shutting you up in one of my country houses together, making it my request that you never left each other an instant, to the end of your lives."
Worcester called God to witness that he was as sure as of his existence, that he could never love anything in the shape of a woman but myself: and, "were Harriette ever to leave me," he continued, "I should become a mere, cold-blooded, unfeeling profligate; for all the good about me is practised by her advice and example, or for her sake, that I may be somewhat more deserving of her."
Lord William laughed at his romance, and, I remember, took advantage of his absence to try to make love to me himself! But at this I only laughed in my turn, and, in spite of that common English mistake, which he fell into, in supposing that all unmarried females must be either maids or bad women, he was, take him altogether, I rather think about the best of the whole set; and I am almost sorry I called him Lord Berwick's Tiger. But what is an extravagant fellow to do, with high rank and little or no money? And who was to drive old, stupid Tweed, c'est à dire mon très aimable beau-frère, up and down, without borrowing a trifle, or not a trifle, of his ready cash? Some short time after my sister Sophia's marriage she received from Lord Deerhurst, half a year of the annuity he had made her. My eldest brother was requested to call upon his lordship, for the purpose of restoring the amount into his own hand, which commission my brother executed without, I believe, exchanging a single syllable with that most disgusting nobleman, who ever has been a disgrace to the peerage.