‘has told you I had a great deal more money than I ever
pretended to have, and I am sure I never employed him to do so.’
‘Well,’ says he, ‘Captain —- may have told me so, but what
then? If you have not so much, that may lie at his door, but
you never told me what you had, so I have no reason to blame
you if you have nothing at all.’
‘That’s is so just,’ said I, ‘and so generous, that it makes my
having but a little a double affliction to me.’
‘The less you have, my dear,’ says he, ‘the worse for us both;
but I hope your affliction you speak of is not caused for fear
I should be unkind to you, for want of a portion. No, no, if
you have nothing, tell me plainly, and at once; I may perhaps
tell the captain he has cheated me, but I can never say you
have cheated me, for did you not give it under your hand that
you were poor? and so I ought to expect you to be.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘my dear, I am glad I have not been concerned
in deceiving you before marriage. If I deceive you since, ’tis
ne’er the worse; that I am poor is too true, but not so poor as
to have nothing neither’; so I pulled out some bank bills, and
gave him about #160. ‘There’s something, my dear,’ said I,
‘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;