I am actually now employed in taking leave of my friends in the country. I had once thought of taking Tomlinson, as I called him, with me: but his destiny has frustrated that intention.
Next Monday I think to see you in town; and then you, and I, and Mowbray, and Tourville, will laugh off that evening together. They will both accompany me (as I expect you will) to Dover, if not cross the water. I must leave you and them good friends. They take extremely amiss the treatment you have given them in your last letters. They say, you strike at their understandings. I laugh at them; and tell them, that those people who have least, are the most apt to be angry when it is called into question.
Make up all the papers and narratives you can spare me against the time. The will, particularly, I expect to take with me. Who knows but that those things, which will help to secure you in the way you are got into, may convert me?
Thou talkest of a wife, Jack: What thinkest you of our Charlotte? Her family and fortune, I doubt, according to thy scheme, are a little too high. Will those be an objection? Charlotte is a smart girl. For piety (thy present turn) I cannot say much: yet she is as serious as most of her sex at her time of life—Would flaunt it a little, I believe, too, like the rest of them, were her reputation under covert.
But it won't do neither, now I think of it:—Thou art so homely, and so awkward a creature! Hast such a boatswain-like air!—People would think she had picked thee up in Wapping, or Rotherhithe; or in going to see some new ship launched, or to view the docks at Chatham, or Portsmouth. So gaudy and so clumsy! Thy tawdriness won't do with Charlotte!—So sit thee down contented, Belford: although I think, in a whimsical way, as now, I mentioned Charlotte to thee once before.* Yet would I fain secure thy morals too, if matrimony will do it.—Let me see!—Now I have it.—— Has not the widow Lovick a daughter, or a niece? It is not every girl of fortune and family that will go to prayers with thee once or twice a day. But since thou art for taking a wife to mortify with, what if thou marriest the widow herself?—She will then have a double concern in thy conversation. You and she may, tête à tête, pass many a comfortable winter's evening together, comparing experiences, as the good folks call them.
* See the Postscript to Letter XL. of Vol. VIII.
I am serious, Jack, faith I am. And I would have thee take it into thy wise consideration.
R.L.
Mr. Belford returns a very serious answer to the preceding letter; which
appears not.
In it, he most heartily wishes that he had withstood Mr. Lovelace,
whatever had been the consequence, in designs so elaborately base
and ungrateful, and so long and steadily pursued, against a lady
whose merit and innocence entitled her to the protection of every
man who had the least pretences to the title of a gentleman; and
who deserved to be even the public care.