Your most obedient servant, R. LOVELACE.
***
Now, Jack, I have no manner of apprehension of the event of this meeting. And I think I must say he seeks me out; not I him. And so let him take the consequence.
What is infinitely nearer to my heart, is, my ingratitude to the most excellent of women—My premeditated ingratitude!—Yet all the while enabled to distinguish and to adore her excellencies, in spite of the mean opinion of the sex which I had imbibed from early manhood.
But this lady has asserted the worthiness of her sex, and most gloriously has she exalted it with me now. Yet, surely, as I have said and written an hundred times, there cannot be such another woman.
But as my loss in her departure is the greatest of any man's, and as she was dearer to me than to any other person in the world, and once she herself wished to be so, what an insolence in any man breathing to pretend to avenge her on me!—Happy! happy! thrice happy! had I known how to value, as I ought to have valued, the glory of such a preference!
I will not aggravate to myself this aggravation of the Colonel's pretending to call me to account for my treatment of a lady so much my own, lest, in the approaching interview, my heart should relent for one so nearly related to her, and who means honour and justice to her memory; and I should thereby give him advantages which otherwise he cannot have. For I know that I shall be inclined to trust to my skill, to save a man who was so much and so justly valued by her; and shall be loath to give way to my resentment, as a threatened man. And in this respect only I am sorry for his skill, and his courage, lest I should be obliged, in my own defence, to add a chalk to a score that is already too long.
***
Indeed, indeed, Belford, I am, and shall be, to my latest hour, the most miserable of beings. Such exalted generosity!—Why didst thou put into my craving hands the copy of her will? Why sentest thou to me the posthumous letter?—What thou I was earnest to see the will? thou knewest what they both were [I did not]; and that it would be cruel to oblige me.
The meeting of twenty Colonel Mordens, were there twenty to meet in turn, would be nothing to me, would not give me a moment's concern, as to my own safety: but my reflections upon my vile ingratitude to so superior an excellence will ever be my curse.