The Way of the World
Go, hang out an old frisoneer-gorget, with a yard of yellow colberteen
again, do; an old gnawed mask, two rows of pins, and a child’s fiddle; a
glass necklace with the beads broken, and a quilted night-cap with one
ear. Go, go, drive a trade. These were your commodities, you
treacherous trull; this was the merchandise you dealt in, when I took you
into my house, placed you next myself, and made you governant of my whole
family. You have forgot this, have you, now you have feathered your
nest?
FOIB. No, no, dear madam. Do but hear me, have but a moment’s
patience—I’ll confess all. Mr. Mirabell seduced me; I am not the first
that he has wheedled with his dissembling tongue. Your ladyship’s own
wisdom has been deluded by him; then how should I, a poor ignorant,
defend myself? O madam, if you knew but what he promised me, and how he
assured me your ladyship should come to no damage, or else the wealth of
the Indies should not have bribed me to conspire against so good, so
sweet, so kind a lady as you have been to me.
LADY. No damage? What, to betray me, to marry me to a cast serving-man;
to make me a receptacle, an hospital for a decayed pimp? No damage? O
thou frontless impudence, more than a big-bellied actress!
FOIB. Pray do but hear me, madam; he could not marry your ladyship,
madam. No indeed, his marriage was to have been void in law; for he was
married to me first, to secure your ladyship. He could not have bedded
your ladyship, for if he had consummated with your ladyship, he must have
run the risk of the law, and been put upon his clergy. Yes indeed, I
enquired of the law in that case before I would meddle or make.
LADY. What? Then I have been your property, have I? I have been
convenient to you, it seems, while you were catering for Mirabell; I have
been broker for you? What, have you made a passive bawd of me? This
exceeds all precedent. I am brought to fine uses, to become a botcher of
second-hand marriages between Abigails and Andrews! I’ll couple you.
Yes, I’ll baste you together, you and your Philander. I’ll Duke’s Place
you, as I’m a person. Your turtle is in custody already. You shall coo
in the same cage, if there be constable or warrant in the parish.
FOIB. Oh, that ever I was born! Oh, that I was ever married! A bride?
Ay, I shall be a Bridewell bride. Oh!
SCENE II.
MRS. FAINALL, FOIBLE.
MRS. FAIN. Poor Foible, what’s the matter?
FOIB. O madam, my lady’s gone for a constable; I shall be had to a
justice, and put to Bridewell to beat hemp. Poor Waitwell’s gone to
prison already.
MRS. FAIN. Have a good heart, Foible: Mirabell’s gone to give security
for him. This is all Marwood’s and my husband’s doing.
FOIB. Yes, yes; I know it, madam: she was in my lady’s closet, and
overheard all that you said to me before dinner. She sent the letter to
my lady, and that missing effect, Mr. Fainall laid this plot to arrest
Waitwell, when he pretended to go for the papers; and in the meantime
Mrs. Marwood declared all to my lady.
MRS. FAIN. Was there no mention made of me in the letter? My mother
does not suspect my being in the confederacy? I fancy Marwood has not
told her, though she has told my husband.
FOIB. Yes, madam; but my lady did not see that part. We stifled the
letter before she read so far. Has that mischievous devil told Mr.
Fainall of your ladyship then?
MRS. FAIN. Ay, all’s out: my affair with Mirabell, everything
discovered. This is the last day of our living together; that’s my
comfort.
FOIB. Indeed, madam, and so ’tis a comfort, if you knew all. He has
been even with your ladyship; which I could have told you long enough
since, but I love to keep peace and quietness by my good will. I had
rather bring friends together than set ’em at distance. But Mrs. Marwood
and he are nearer related than ever their parents thought for.
MRS. FAIN. Say’st thou so, Foible? Canst thou prove this?
FOIB. I can take my oath of it, madam; so can Mrs. Mincing. We have had
many a fair word from Madam Marwood to conceal something that passed in
our chamber one evening when you were at Hyde Park, and we were thought
to have gone a-walking. But we went up unawares—though we were sworn to
secrecy too: Madam Marwood took a book and swore us upon it: but it was
but a book of poems. So long as it was not a bible oath, we may break it
with a safe conscience.
MRS. FAIN. This discovery is the most opportune thing I could wish.
Now, Mincing?
SCENE III.
[_To them_] MINCING.
MINC. My lady would speak with Mrs. Foible, mem. Mr. Mirabell is with
her; he has set your spouse at liberty, Mrs. Foible, and would have you
hide yourself in my lady’s closet till my old lady’s anger is abated.
Oh, my old lady is in a perilous passion at something Mr. Fainall has
said; he swears, and my old lady cries. There’s a fearful hurricane, I
vow. He says, mem, how that he’ll have my lady’s fortune made over to
him, or he’ll be divorced.
MRS. FAIN. Does your lady or Mirabell know that?
MINC. Yes mem; they have sent me to see if Sir Wilfull be sober, and to
bring him to them. My lady is resolved to have him, I think, rather than
lose such a vast sum as six thousand pound. Oh, come, Mrs. Foible, I
hear my old lady.
MRS. FAIN. Foible, you must tell Mincing that she must prepare to vouch
when I call her.
FOIB. Yes, yes, madam.
MINC. Oh, yes mem, I’ll vouch anything for your ladyship’s service, be
what it will.
SCENE IV.
MRS. FAINALL, LADY WISHFORT, MRS. MARWOOD.
LADY. O my dear friend, how can I enumerate the benefits that I have
received from your goodness? To you I owe the timely discovery of the
false vows of Mirabell; to you I owe the detection of the impostor Sir
Rowland. And now you are become an intercessor with my son-in-law, to
save the honour of my house and compound for the frailties of my
daughter. Well, friend, you are enough to reconcile me to the bad world,
or else I would retire to deserts and solitudes, and feed harmless sheep
by groves and purling streams. Dear Marwood, let us leave the world, and
retire by ourselves and be shepherdesses.
MRS. MAR. Let us first dispatch the affair in hand, madam. We shall
have leisure to think of retirement afterwards. Here is one who is
concerned in the treaty.
LADY. O daughter, daughter, is it possible thou shouldst be my child,
bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, and as I may say, another me, and
yet transgress the most minute particle of severe virtue? Is it possible
you should lean aside to iniquity, who have been cast in the direct mould
of virtue? I have not only been a mould but a pattern for you, and a
model for you, after you were brought into the world.
MRS. FAIN. I don’t understand your ladyship.
LADY. Not understand? Why, have you not been naught? Have you not been
sophisticated? Not understand? Here I am ruined to compound for your
caprices and your cuckoldoms. I must pawn my plate and my jewels, and
ruin my niece, and all little enough—
MRS. FAIN. I am wronged and abused, and so are you. ’Tis a false
accusation, as false as hell, as false as your friend there; ay, or your
friend’s friend, my false husband.
MRS. MAR. My friend, Mrs. Fainall? Your husband my friend, what do you
mean?
MRS. FAIN. I know what I mean, madam, and so do you; and so shall the
world at a time convenient.
MRS. MAR. I am sorry to see you so passionate, madam. More temper would
look more like innocence. But I have done. I am sorry my zeal to serve
your ladyship and family should admit of misconstruction, or make me
liable to affronts. You will pardon me, madam, if I meddle no more with
an affair in which I am not personally concerned.
LADY. O dear friend, I am so ashamed that you should meet with such
returns. You ought to ask pardon on your knees, ungrateful creature; she
deserves more from you than all your life can accomplish. Oh, don’t
leave me destitute in this perplexity! No, stick to me, my good genius.
MRS. FAIN. I tell you, madam, you’re abused. Stick to you? Ay, like a
leech, to suck your best blood; she’ll drop off when she’s full. Madam,
you shan’t pawn a bodkin, nor part with a brass counter, in composition
for me. I defy ’em all. Let ’em prove their aspersions: I know my own
innocence, and dare stand a trial.
SCENE V.
LADY WISHFORT, MRS. MARWOOD.
LADY. Why, if she should be innocent, if she should be wronged after
all, ha? I don’t know what to think, and I promise you, her education
has been unexceptionable. I may say it, for I chiefly made it my own
care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to
impress upon her tender years a young odium and aversion to the very
sight of men; ay, friend, she would ha’ shrieked if she had but seen a
man till she was in her teens. As I’m a person, ’tis true. She was
never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats. Nay, her
very babies were of the feminine gender. Oh, she never looked a man in
the face but her own father or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to
put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments, and his sleek
face, till she was going in her fifteen.
MRS. MAR. ’Twas much she should be deceived so long.
LADY. I warrant you, or she would never have borne to have been
catechised by him, and have heard his long lectures against singing and
dancing and such debaucheries, and going to filthy plays, and profane
music meetings, where the lewd trebles squeak nothing but bawdy, and the
basses roar blasphemy. Oh, she would have swooned at the sight or name
of an obscene play-book—and can I think after all this that my daughter
can be naught? What, a whore? And thought it excommunication to set her
foot within the door of a playhouse. O dear friend, I can’t believe it.
No, no; as she says, let him prove it, let him prove it.
MRS. MAR. Prove it, madam? What, and have your name prostituted in a
public court; yours and your daughter’s reputation worried at the bar by
a pack of bawling lawyers? To be ushered in with an _Oh yes_ of scandal,
and have your case opened by an old fumbling leacher in a quoif like a
man midwife; to bring your daughter’s infamy to light; to be a theme for
legal punsters and quibblers by the statute; and become a jest, against a
rule of court, where there is no precedent for a jest in any record, not
even in Doomsday Book. To discompose the gravity of the bench, and
provoke naughty interrogatories in more naughty law Latin; while the good
judge, tickled with the proceeding, simpers under a grey beard, and
fidges off and on his cushion as if he had swallowed cantharides, or sate
upon cow-itch.
LADY. Oh, ’tis very hard!
MRS. MAR. And then to have my young revellers of the Temple take notes,
like prentices at a conventicle; and after talk it over again in Commons,
or before drawers in an eating-house.
LADY. Worse and worse.
MRS. MAR. Nay, this is nothing; if it would end here ’twere well. But
it must after this be consigned by the shorthand writers to the public
press; and from thence be transferred to the hands, nay, into the throats
and lungs, of hawkers, with voices more licentious than the loud
flounder-man’s. And this you must hear till you are stunned; nay, you
must hear nothing else for some days.
LADY. Oh ’tis insupportable. No, no, dear friend, make it up, make it
up; ay, ay, I’ll compound. I’ll give up all, myself and my all, my niece
and her all, anything, everything, for composition.
MRS. MAR. Nay, madam, I advise nothing, I only lay before you, as a