The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2)

by Daniel Defoe

they were a right of reversion which he hadto a paternal estate in his family, and a mortgage of 14,000 rixdollars,which he had upon it, in the hands of the present possessor; so that wasabout L3000 more.

  "But now hold again," says he, "for I must pay my debts out of all this,and they are very great, I assure you;" and the first he said was ablack article of 8000 pistoles, which he had a lawsuit about at Paris,but had it awarded against him, which was the loss he had told me of,and which made him leave Paris in disgust; that in other accounts heowed about L5300 sterling; but after all this, upon the whole, he hadstill L17,000 clear stock in money, and L1320 a year in rent.

  After some pause, it came to my turn to speak. "Well," says I, "'tisvery hard a gentleman with such a fortune as this should come over toEngland, and marry a wife with nothing; it shall never," says I, "besaid, but what I have, I'll bring into the public stock;" so I began toproduce.

  First, I pulled out the mortgage which good Sir Robert had procured forme, the annual rent L700 per annum; the principal money L14,000.

  Secondly, I pulled out another mortgage upon land, procured by the samefaithful friend, which at three times had advanced L12,000.

  Thirdly, I pulled him out a parcel of little securities, procured byseveral hands, by fee-farm rents, and such petty mortgages as thosetimes afforded, amounting to L10,800 principal money, and paying sixhundred and thirty-six pounds a-year. So that in the whole there was twothousand and fifty-six pounds a year ready money constantly coming in.

  When I had shown him all these, I laid them upon the table, and bade himtake them, that he might be able to give me an answer to the secondquestion. What fortune he had with his wife? And laughed a little at it.

  He looked at them awhile, and then handed them all back again to me: "Iwill not touch them," says he, "nor one of them, till they are allsettled in trustees' hands for your own use, and the management whollyyour own."

  I cannot omit what happened to me while all this was acting; though itwas cheerful work in the main, yet I trembled every joint of me, worsefor aught I know than ever Belshazzar did at the handwriting on thewall, and the occasion was every way as just. "Unhappy wretch," said Ito myself, "shall my ill-got wealth, the product of prosperous lust, andof a vile and vicious life of whoredom and adultery, be intermingledwith the honest well-gotten estate of this innocent gentleman, to be amoth and a caterpillar among it, and bring the judgments of heaven uponhim, and upon what he has, for my sake? Shall my wickedness blast hiscomforts? Shall I be fire in his flax? and be a means to provoke heavento curse his blessings? God forbid! I'll keep them asunder if it bepossible."

  This is the true reason why I have been so particular in the account ofmy vast acquired stock; and how his estate, which was perhaps theproduct of many years' fortunate industry, and which was equal if notsuperior to mine at best, was, at my request, kept apart from mine, asis mentioned above.

  I have told you how he gave back all my writings into my own handsagain. "Well," says I, "seeing you will have it be kept apart, it shallbe so, upon one condition, which I have to propose, and no other." "Andwhat is the condition?" says he. "Why," says I, "all the pretence I canhave for the making over my own estate to me is, that in case of yourmortality, I may have it reserved for me, if I outlive you." "Well,"says he, "that is true" "But then," said I, "the annual income is alwaysreceived by the husband, during his life, as 'tis supposed, for themutual subsistence of the family; now," says I, "here is L2000 a year,which I believe is as much as we shall spend, and I desire none of itmay be saved; and all the income of your own estate, the interest of theL17,000 and the L1320 a year, may be constantly laid by for the increaseof your estate; and so," added I, "by joining the interest every year tothe capital you will perhaps grow as rich as you would do if you were totrade with it all, if you were obliged to keep house out of it too."

  He liked the proposal very well, and said it should be so; and this wayI, in some measure, satisfied myself that I should not bring my husbandunder the blast of a just Providence, for mingling my cursed ill-gottenwealth with his honest estate. This was occasioned by the reflectionswhich, at some certain intervals of time, came into my thoughts of thejustice of heaven, which I had reason to expect would some time or otherstill fall upon me or my effects, for the dreadful life I had lived.

  And let nobody conclude from the strange success I met with in all mywicked doings, and the vast estate which I had raised by it, thattherefore I either was happy or easy. No, no, there was a dart struckinto the liver; there was a secret hell within, even all the while, whenour joy was at the highest; but more especially now, after it was allover, and when, according to all appearance, I was one of the happiestwomen upon earth; all this while, I say, I had such constant terror uponmy mind, as gave me every now and then very terrible shocks, and whichmade me expect something very frightful upon every accident of life.

  In a word, it never lightened or thundered, but I expected the nextflash would penetrate my vitals, and melt the sword (soul) in thisscabbard of flesh; it never blew a storm of wind, but I expected thefall of some stack of chimneys, or some part of the house, would bury mein its ruins; and so of other things.

  But I shall perhaps have occasion to speak of all these things againby-and-by; the case before us was in a manner settled; we had full fourthousand pounds per annum for our future subsistence, besides a vast sumin jewels and plate; and besides this, I had about eight thousand poundsreserved in money which I kept back from him, to provide for my twodaughters, of whom I have much yet to say.

  With this estate, settled as you have heard, and with the best husbandin the world, I left England again; I had not only, in human prudence,and by the nature of the thing, being now married and settled in soglorious a manner,--I say, I had not only abandoned all the gay andwicked course which I had gone through before, but I began to look backupon it with that horror and that detestation which is the certaincompanion, if not the forerunner, of repentance.

  Sometimes the wonders of my present circumstances would work upon me,and I should have some raptures upon my soul, upon the subject of mycoming so smoothly out of the arms of hell, that I was not ingulfed inruin, as most who lead such lives are, first or last; but this was aflight too high for me; I was not come to that repentance that is raisedfrom a sense of Heaven's goodness; I repented of the crime, but it wasof another and lower kind of repentance, and rather moved by my fears ofvengeance, than from a sense of being spared from being punished, andlanded safe after a storm.

  The first thing which happened after our coming to the Hague (where welodged for a while) was, that my spouse saluted me one morning with thetitle of countess, as he said he intended to do, by having theinheritance to which the honour was annexed made over to him. It istrue, it was a reversion, but it soon fell, and in the meantime, as allthe brothers of a count are called counts, so I had the title bycourtesy, about three years before I had it in reality.

  I was agreeably surprised at this coming so soon, and would have had myspouse have taken the money which it cost him out of my stock, but helaughed at me, and went on.

  I was now in the height of my glory and prosperity, and I was called theCountess de ----; for I had obtained that unlooked for, which I secretlyaimed at, and was really the main reason of my coming abroad. I took nowmore servants, lived in a kind of magnificence that I had not beenacquainted with, was called "your honour" at every word, and had acoronet behind my coach; though at the same time I knew little ornothing of my new pedigree.

  The first thing that my spouse took upon him to manage, was to declareourselves married eleven years before our arriving in Holland; andconsequently to acknowledge our little son, who was yet in England, tobe legitimate; order him to be brought over, and added to his family,and acknowledge him to be our own.

  This was done by giving notice to his people at Nimeguen, where hischildren (which were two sons and a daughter) were brought up, that hewas come over from England, and that he was arrived at the Hague withhis wife, and sh
ould reside there some time, and that he would have histwo sons brought down to see him; which accordingly was done, and whereI entertained them with all the kindness and tenderness that they couldexpect from their mother-in-law; and who pretended to be so ever sincethey were two or three years old.

  This supposing us to have been so long married was not difficult at all,in a country where we had been seen together about that time, viz.,eleven years and a half before, and where we had never been seenafterwards till we now returned together: this being seen together wasalso openly owned and acknowledged, of course, by our friend themerchant at Rotterdam, and also by the people in the house where we bothlodged in the same city, and where our first intimacies began, and who,as it happened, were all alive; and therefore, to make it the morepublic, we made a