“Oh, sir, would you deprive me of my sole diversion?” I cried.
“Deprive you, madam? Oh, this carping mercantile spirit don’t become my Clarissa! You shall have two fresh sheets for each one that I take—will that lift the storm-clouds from my charmer’s brow? How is it my star among women will so seldom permit her worshipper to bask in the light of her smiles? He don’t deserve the indulgence, that he knows, but for the sake of Clarissa’s reputation for clemency were it not well that she should show herself more complaisant?”
I gazed at him wildly while he uttered these words in a tone of tender reproach, gathering up the blank sheets the while. “Like Pamela’s Mr B.,” he continued, in a meditative style that checked the sobs which would otherwise have burst from me, “I can’t find it in my heart to deprive my charmer of the pleasure she takes in writing, even though she use it to revile myself. To be sure, I can’t read what she writes, and so improve my disposition, but then, no more can the thrice-happy being to whom it’s addressed. How could I rob Clarissa of a diversion that pleases her, and can injure no one, even myself?”
I think the wicked man looked to see me fly into a passion and demand how he knew that I had wrote anything against him, but I reflected that he could scarce imagine I should deal with his name in my letters with any great tenderness, and that he had but made a guess at what they contained, and I said no more than—
“Sure you must be very well acquainted with Mr Richardson’s works, sir?”
“Madam,” he replied, “they are the study of my life. In the French translations, they are my greatest treasures, and I admire them continually more and more. I think I may say that there en’t a virtuous sentiment, nor a neat touch of humour, that I could not give you chapter and verse for on the instant, in the whole three novels.”
Is it not extraordinary, Amelia, that a person like this can actually take pleasure in such works as Mr Richardson’s, whose whole course and tenor must be a standing rebuke to him? They say that the devil can quote Scripture, as indeed is proved by the Gospels, and this shows that evil beings will read good books without being improved by their study.
“And more,” he continued, “’tis to the good Mr Richardson that I owe the honour of meeting the lady whose portrait he had surely drawn by anticipation in his ‘Clarissa.’ When, in the dress of our great sovereign, I penetrated unknown into the Masquerade at Calcutta, drawn by the fame of a certain lady’s beauty that had reached me, I found myself attracted by one who seemed to me to be none other than Clarissa herself. ‘Here, Sinzaun,’ I said to myself, ‘is a fellow-student of the books you reverence, one who has perceived what is the crowning-point of Clarissa’s history, and has ventured to outshine all other beauties by the simplicity of her attire and the piteousness of her aspect!’ Judge, madam, what were my feelings when I discovered my Clarissa to be the very being at whose shrine I was come to worship!”
“Alas, sir!” was all I could say.
“Yes, madam,” he went on, “I have learned much from Mr Richardson. You won’t find me falling into the error of Lovelace, and making use of barbarous force to constrain my charmer, while her mind and heart remain unsubdued. It is Clarissa’s favour that I desire to gain; she must become mine by her own free consent. I can wait until she choose to oblige me, for I know she’ll make me happy at last.”