To pray for all your joys increase,
While life is lent to PAMELA.
XIV.
On God all future good depends:
Serve him. And so my sonnet ends,
With, thank ye, thank ye, honest friends,
For all your loves to PAMELA.
Here it is necessary the reader should know, that the fair Pamela’s trials were not yet over; but the worst were to come, at a time when she thought them at an end, and that she was returning to her father: for when her master found her virtue was not to be subdued, and he had in vain tried to conquer his passion for her, being a gentleman of pleasure and intrigue, he had ordered his Lincolnshire coachman to bring his travelling chariot from thence, not caring to trust his Bedfordshire coachman, who, with the rest of the servants, so greatly loved and honoured the fair damsel; and having given him instructions accordingly, and prohibited the other servants, on pretence of resenting Pamela’s behaviour, from accompanying her any part of the road, he drove her five miles on the way to her father’s; and then turning off, crossed the country, and carried her onwards toward his Lincolnshire estate.
It is also to be observed, that the messenger of her letters to her father, who so often pretended business that way, was an implement in his master’s hands, and employed by him for that purpose; and always gave her letters first to him, and his master used to open and read them, and then send them on; by which means, as he hints to her, (as she observes in her letter XXX) he was no stranger to what she wrote. Thus every way was the poor virgin beset: And the whole will shew the base arts of designing men to gain their wicked ends; and how much it behoves the fair sex to stand upon their guard against artful contrivances, especially when riches and power conspire against innocence and a low estate.
A few words more will be necessary to make the sequel better understood. The intriguing gentleman thought fit, however, to keep back from her father her three last letters; in which she mentions his concealing himself to hear her partitioning out her clothes, his last effort to induce her to stay a fortnight, his pretended proposal of the chaplain, and her hopes of speedily seeing them, as also her verses; and to send himself a letter to her father, which is as follows: