I had now such a load on my mind that it kept me perpetually waking; to
reveal it, which would have been some ease to me, I could not find
would be to any purpose, and yet to conceal it would be next to
impossible; nay, I did not doubt but I should talk of it in my sleep,
and tell my husband of it whether I would or no. If I discovered it,
the least thing I could expect was to lose my husband, for he was too
nice and too honest a man to have continued my husband after he had
known I had been his sister; so that I was perplexed to the last degree.
I leave it to any man to judge what difficulties presented to my view.
I was away from my native country, at a distance prodigious, and the
return to me unpassable. I lived very well, but in a circumstance
insufferable in itself. If I had discovered myself to my mother, it
might be difficult to convince her of the particulars, and I had no way
to prove them. On the other hand, if she had questioned or doubted me,
I had been undone, for the bare suggestion would have immediately
separated me from my husband, without gaining my mother or him, who
would have been neither a husband nor a brother; so that between the
surprise on one hand, and the uncertainty on the other, I had been sure
to be undone.
In the meantime, as I was but too sure of the fact, I lived therefore
in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an
honest wife; and though I was not much touched with the crime of it,
yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my
husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me.
However, upon the most sedate consideration, I resolved that it was
absolutely necessary to conceal it all and not make the least discovery
of it either to mother or husband; and thus I lived with the greatest
pressure imaginable for three years more, but had no more children.
During this time my mother used to be frequently telling me old stories
of her former adventures, which, however, were no ways pleasant to me;
for by it, though she did not tell it me in plain terms, yet I could
easily understand, joined with what I had heard myself, of my first
tutors, that in her younger days she had been both whore and thief; but
I verily believed she had lived to repent sincerely of both, and that
she was then a very pious, sober, and religious woman.