The father continued—“Vile creature, I thought as much. Still I will know the father of this child.”
She cast up her eyes to Heaven, and firmly vowed she “did not know herself—nor who the mother was.”
“This is not to be borne!” exclaimed the curate in fury. “Persist in this, and you shall never see my face again. Both your child and you I’ll turn out of my house instantly, unless you confess your crime, and own the father.”
Curious to know this secret, the sisters went up to Rebecca with seeming kindness, and “conjured her to spare her father still greater grief, and her own and her child’s public infamy, by acknowledging herself its mother, and naming the man who had undone her.”
Emboldened by this insult from her own sex, Rebecca now began to declare the simple truth. But no sooner had she said that “the child was presented to her care by a young man who had found it,” than her sisters burst into laughter, and her father into redoubled rage.
Once more the women offered their advice—“to confess and be forgiven.”
Once more the father raved.
Beguiled by solicitations, and terrified by threats, like women formerly accused of witchcraft, and other wretches put to the torture, she thought her present sufferings worse than any that could possibly succeed; and felt inclined to confess a falsehood, at which her virtue shrunk, to obtain a momentary respite from reproach; she felt inclined to take the mother’s share of the infant, but was at a loss to whom to give the father’s. She thought that Henry had entailed on himself the best right to the charge; but she loved him, and could not bear the thought of accusing him falsely.
While, with agitation in the extreme, she thus deliberated, the proposition again was put,
“Whether she would trust to the mercy of her father by confessing, or draw down his immediate vengeance by denying her guilt?”