It obviated
no necessity. It purchased no rational enjoyment. It merely provoked, by
furnishing the means of indulgence, an appetite from which my father was
not exempt. It cherished the seeds of depravity in him, and lessened the
little stock of happiness belonging to my mother. I did not detain you long, my friends, in portraying my parents, and
recounting domestic incidents, when I first told you my story. What had
no connection with the history of Welbeck and with the part that I have
acted upon this stage I thought it proper to omit. My omission was
likewise prompted by other reasons. My mind is enervated and feeble,
like my body. I cannot look upon the sufferings of those I love without
exquisite pain. I cannot steel my heart by the force of reason, and by
submission to necessity; and, therefore, too frequently employ the
cowardly expedient of endeavouring to forget what I cannot remember
without agony. I told you that my father was sober and industrious by habit; but habit
is not uniform. There were intervals when his plodding and tame spirit
gave place to the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not sought by
him; but he could not withstand entreaty, and a potion that produced no
effect upon others changed him into a maniac. I told you that I had a sister, whom the arts of a villain destroyed. Alas! the work of her destruction was left unfinished by him. The blows
and contumelies of a misjudging and implacable parent, who scrupled not
to thrust her, with her new-born infant, out of doors; the curses and
taunts of unnatural brothers, left her no alternative but death.----But
I must not think of this; I must not think of the wrongs which my mother
endured in the person of her only and darling daughter. My brothers were the copyists of the father, whom they resembled in
temper and person. My mother doted on her own image in her daughter and
in me. This daughter was ravished from her by self-violence, and her
other children by disease. I only remained to appropriate her affections
and fulfil her hopes. This alone had furnished a sufficient reason why I
should be careful of my health and my life, but my father's character
supplied me with a motive infinitely more cogent. It is almost incredible, but nevertheless true, that the only being
whose presence and remonstrances had any influence on my father, at
moments when his reason was extinct, was myself. As to my personal
strength, it was nothing; yet my mother's person was rescued from
brutal violence; he was checked, in the midst of his ferocious career,
by a single look or exclamation from me. The fear of my rebukes had even
some influence in enabling him to resist temptation. If I entered the
tavern at the moment when he was lifting the glass to his lips, I never
weighed the injunctions of decorum, but, snatching the vessel from his
hand, I threw it on the ground. I was not deterred by the presence of
others; and their censures on my want of filial respect and duty were
listened to with unconcern. I chose not to justify myself by expatiating
on domestic miseries, and by calling down that pity on my mother which I
knew would only have increased her distress. The world regarded my deportment as insolent and perverse to a degree of
insanity. To deny my father an indulgence which they thought harmless,
and which, indeed, was harmless in its influence on other men; to
interfere thus publicly with his social enjoyments, and expose him to
mortification and shame, was loudly condemned; but my duty to my mother
debarred me from eluding this censure on the only terms on which it
could have been eluded. Now it has ceased to be necessary to conceal
what passed in domestic retirements, and I should willingly confess the
truth before any audience. At first my father imagined that threats and blows would intimidate his
monitor. In this he was mistaken, and the detection of this mistake
impressed him with an involuntary reverence for me, which set bounds to
those excesses which disdained any other control. Hence I derived new
motives for cherishing a life which was useful, in so many ways, to my
mother. My condition is now changed. I am no longer on that field to which the
law, as well as reason, must acknowledge that I had some right, while
there was any in my father. I must hazard my life, if need be, in the
pursuit of the means of honest subsistence. I never spared myself while
in the service of Mr. Hadwin; and, at a more inclement season, should
probably have incurred some hazard by my diligence. These were the motives of my _idleness_,--for my abstaining from the
common toils of the farm passed by that name among my neighbours;
though, in truth, my time was far from being wholly unoccupied by manual
employments, but these required less exertion of body or mind, or were
more connected with intellectual efforts. They were pursued in the
seclusion of my chamber or the recesses of a wood. I did not labour to
conceal them, but neither was I anxious to attract notice. It was
sufficient that the censure of my neighbours was unmerited, to make me
regard it with indifference. I sought not the society of persons of my own age, not from sullen or
unsociable habits, but merely because those around me were totally
unlike myself. Their tastes and occupations were incompatible with mine. In my few books, in my pen, in the vegetable and animal existences
around me, I found companions who adapted their visits and intercourse
to my convenience and caprice, and with whom I was never tired of
communing. I was not unaware of the opinion which my neighbours had formed of my
being improperly connected with Betty Lawrence. I am not sorry that I
fell into company with that girl. Her intercourse has instructed me in
what some would think impossible to be attained by one who had never
haunted the impure recesses of licentiousness in a city. The knowledge
which a residence in this town for ten years gave her audacious and
inquisitive spirit she imparted to me. Her character, profligate and
artful, libidinous and impudent, and made up of the impressions which a
city life had produced on her coarse but active mind, was open to my
study, and I studied it. I scarcely know how to repel the charge of illicit conduct, and to
depict the exact species of intercourse subsisting between us. I always
treated her with freedom, and sometimes with gayety. I had no motives to
reserve. I was so formed that a creature like her had no power over my
senses. That species of temptation adapted to entice me from the true
path was widely different from the artifices of Betty. There was no
point at which it was possible for her to get possession of my fancy. I
watched her while she practised all her tricks and blandishments, as I
regarded a similar deportment in the _animal salax ignavumque_ who
inhabits the sty. I made efforts to pursue my observations
unembarrassed; but my efforts were made, not to restrain desire, but to
suppress disgust.