This letter forced an answer from him, by which, though I found I was
to be abandoned, yet I found he had sent a letter to me some time
before, desiring me to go down to the Bath again. Its contents I shall
come to presently.
It is true that sick-beds are the time when such correspondences as
this are looked on with different countenances, and seen with other
eyes than we saw them with, or than they appeared with before. My
lover had been at the gates of death, and at the very brink of
eternity; and, it seems, had been struck with a due remorse, and with
sad reflections upon his past life of gallantry and levity; and among
the rest, criminal correspondence with me, which was neither more nor
less than a long-continued life of adultery, and represented itself as
it really was, not as it had been formerly thought by him to be, and he
looked upon it now with a just and religious abhorrence.
I cannot but observe also, and leave it for the direction of my sex in
such cases of pleasure, that whenever sincere repentance succeeds such
a crime as this, there never fails to attend a hatred of the object;
and the more the affection might seem to be before, the hatred will be
the more in proportion. It will always be so, indeed it can be no
otherwise; for there cannot be a true and sincere abhorrence of the
offence, and the love to the cause of it remain; there will, with an
abhorrence of the sin, be found a detestation of the fellow-sinner; you
can expect no other.
I found it so here, though good manners and justice in this gentleman
kept him from carrying it on to any extreme but the short history of
his part in this affair was thus: he perceived by my last letter, and
by all the rest, which he went for after, that I was not gone to Bath,
that his first letter had not come to my hand; upon which he write me
this following:-'MADAM,--I am surprised that my letter, dated the 8th of last month,
did not come to your hand; I give you my word it was delivered at your
lodgings, and to the hands of your maid.
'I need not acquaint you with what has been my condition for some time
past; and how, having been at the edge of the grave, I am, by the
unexpected and undeserved mercy of Heaven, restored again. In the
condition I have been in, it cannot be strange to you that our unhappy
correspondence had not been the least of the burthens which lay upon my
conscience. I need say no more; those things that must be repented of,
must be also reformed.