The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, and Other TalesMore, Hannah
General
The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, and Other Tales
More, Hannah
Christian life -- Fiction; Conduct of life -- Fiction; Short stories
His imprudent daughter Bragwell would not be brought to see or
forgive, nor was the degrading name of Mrs. Incle ever allowed to be
pronounced in his hearing. He had loved her with an excessive and
undue affection, and while she gratified his vanity by her beauty
and finery, he deemed her faults of little consequence; but when she
disappointed his ambition by a disgraceful marriage, all his natural
affection only served to increase his resentment. Yet, though he
regretted her crime less than his own mortification, he never ceased
in secret to lament her loss. She soon found out she was undone, and
wrote in a strain of bitter repentance to ask him for forgiveness.
She owned that her husband, whom she had supposed to be a man of
fashion in disguise, was a low person in distressed circumstances.
She implored that her father, though he refused to give her husband
that fortune for which alone it was now too plain he married her,
would at least allow her some subsistence; for that Mr. Incle was
much in debt, and, she feared, in danger of a jail.
The father's heart was half melted at this account, and his
affection was for a time awakened; but Mrs. Bragwell opposed his
sending her any assistance. She always made it a point of duty never
to forgive; for, she said, it only encouraged those who had done
wrong once to do worse next time. For her part she had never yet
been guilty of so mean and pitiful a weakness as to forgive any one;
for to pardon an injury always showed either want of spirit to feel
it, or want of power to resent it. She was resolved she would never
squander the money for which she worked early and late, on a baggage
who had thrown herself away on a beggar, while she had a daughter
single, who might yet raise her family by a great match. I am sorry
to say that Mrs. Bragwell's anger was not owing to the undutifulness
of the daughter, or the worthlessness of the husband; poverty was
in her eyes the grand crime. The doctrine of forgiveness, as a
religious principle, made no more a part of Mr. Bragwell's system
than of his wife's; but in natural feeling, particularly for this
offending daughter, he much exceeded her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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