Tell Mr. Hickman I write this, and write it, as I believe, with my last pen; and bid him bear a little at first, and forbear; and all the future will be crowning gratitude, and rewarding love: for Miss Howe had great sense, fine judgment, and exalted generosity; and can such a one be ungrateful or easy under those obligations which his assiduity and obligingness (when he shall be so happy as to call her his) will lay her under to him?
As for me, never bride was so ready as I am. My wedding garments are bought—-and though not fine or gawdy to the sight, though not adorned with jewels, and set off with gold and silver, (for I have no beholders' eyes to wish to glitter in,) yet will they be the easiest, the happiest suit, that ever bridal maiden wore—for they are such as carry with them a security against all those anxieties, pains, and perturbations, which sometimes succeed to the most promising outsettings.
And now, my dear Mrs. Norton, do I wish for no other.
O hasten, good God, if it be thy blessed will, the happy moment that I am to be decked out in his all-quieting garb! And sustain, comfort, bless, and protect with the all-shadowing wing of thy mercy, my dear parents, my uncles, my brother, my sister, my cousin Morden, my ever-dear and ever-kind Miss Howe, my good Mrs. Norton, and every deserving person to whom they wish well! is the ardent prayer, first and last, of every beginning hour, as the clock tells it me, (hours now are days, nay, years,) of
Your now not sorrowing or afflicted, but happy, CLARISSA HARLOWE.
LETTER LXIII
MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. WED. MORN. SEPT. 6, HALF AN HOUR AFTER THREE.
I am not the savage which you and my worst enemies think me. My soul is too much penetrated by the contents of the letter which you enclosed in your last, to say one word more to it, than that my heart has bled over it from every vein!—I will fly from the subject—but what other can I choose, that will not be as grievous, and lead into the same?
I could quarrel with all the world; with thee, as well as the rest; obliging as thou supposest thyself for writing to me hourly. How darest thou, (though unknown to her,) to presume to take an apartment under the sane roof with her?—I cannot bear to think that thou shouldest be seen, at all hours passing to and repassing from her apartments, while I, who have so much reason to call her mine, and one was preferred by her to all the world, am forced to keep aloof, and hardly dare to enter the city where she is!