ABSTRACT
Had not all these circumstances followed each other with a rapidity that gave Althea no time for recollection, the dignity of conscious worth, and the contempt she felt towards Mohun, might have enabled her to have gone through the scene with calmness, if not with courage; but now too many uneasy sensations assailed her at once, and suddenly. She apparently was come to ask a favour of a man, whom she had always detested; and who had been the cause of the coldness and separation between her and her father. But these injuries were light, compared to those he had since inflicted on her by the tyrannical attempt to withhold her fortune in conjunction with Lady Dacres, and the cowardice and cruelty with which he had first insulted and then confined Marchmont. Instead of addressing herself to him, she wondered how she had suffered herself, by the sudden and mistaken zeal of Dr. Warrington, to be hurried into the presence of a man, whose very sight was odious to her: and when (his countenance expressing at once his triumph, and all the hateful passions he felt) he asked to be favoured with her commands, Althea was unable to find words to answer him. Mohun, who, whatever other motives he had for distressing Marchmont, had never hoped it would throw her into his power, now began to see that it might very possibly have that effect; he therefore softened his voice, and, desiring her to recollect in what he could serve her, rang, and directed that some glasses of ice, and other refreshments, might 396instantly be brought. Althea found her voice to decline them, and arose to go; but Mohun was by no means disposed to let her. He thought that the confusion and distress in which he saw her were occasioned partly by her repentance of the indiscreet step she had taken in marrying, and partly by her wishing to repair it by regaining his favour. His presumption, his total want of principle and delicacy, carried him still farther; and he believed it possible, that Marchmont, weary of poverty and imprisonment, from which he had no other means of escaping, had sent his wife as an advocate by whose eloquent beauty his chains would drop off.189 Exulting in this idea, Mohun could hardly help saying aloud, ‘Marchmont, thou art a more sensible fellow than I took thee for!’ But the species of satisfaction his tongue forbore to utter, was expressed by his eyes, as, directly fixed on the varying countenance of Althea, he waited for an answer to his question – ‘What were her commands?’ ‘It was Dr. Warrington, Sir,’ said she, ‘I did not myself think of troubling you …. but the Doctor … having … I having met the Doctor, he thought, he supposed …’
