Previous - Next

'and not quite all neither.'

I had brought him so near to expecting nothing, by what I had
said before, that the money, though the sum was small in itself,
was doubly welcome to him; he owned it was more than he
looked for, and that he did not question by my discourse to
him, but that my fine clothes, gold watch, and a diamond ring
or two, had been all my fortune.

I let him please himself with that #160 two or three days, and
then, having been abroad that day, and as if I had been to fetch
it, I brought him #100 more home in gold, and told him there
was a little more portion for him; and, in short, in about a week
more I brought him #180 more, and about #60 in linen, which
I made him believe I had been obliged to take with the #100
which I gave him in gold, as a composition for a debt of #600,
being little more than five shillings in the pound, and overvalued too.

'And now, my dear,' says I to him, 'I am very sorry to tell you,
that there is all, and that I have given you my whole fortune.'
I added, that if the person who had my #600 had not abused
me, I had been worth #1000 to him, but that as it was, I had
been faithful to him, and reserved nothing to myself, but if it
had been more he should have had it.

He was so obliged by the manner, and so pleased with the sum,
for he had been in a terrible fright lest it had been nothing at
all, that he accepted it very thankfully. And thus I got over
the fraud of passing for a fortune without money, and cheating
a man into marrying me on pretence of a fortune; which, by
the way, I take to be one of the most dangerous steps a woman
can take, and in which she runs the most hazard of being
ill-used afterwards.

My husband, to give him his due, was a man of infinite good
nature, but he was no fool; and finding his income not suited
to the manner of living which he had intended, if I had brought
him what he expected, and being under a disappointment in
his return of his plantations in Virginia, he discovered many
times his inclination of going over to Virginia, to live upon
his own; and often would be magnifying the way of living
there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and the like.

I began presently to understand this meaning, and I took
him up very plainly one morning, and told him that I did so;
that I found his estate turned to no account at this distance,
compared to what it would do if he lived upon the spot, and
that I found he had a mind to go and live there; and I added,
that I was sensible he had been disappointed in a wife, and
that finding his expectations not answered that way, I could

Previous - Next