Lord Frederick himself meanwhile watched vigilantly over his own interests, and was abundantly importunate and encroaching. Miss Arnold, indeed, continued to affect prudent counsels; but while she offered me such feeble dissuasives as rather served to excite than to deter, she procured or invented intelligence, which, with every expression of indignation, she communicated to me, that Lady Maria had so far misrepresented my indiscretion at the masquerade, as to make my marriage with Lord Frederick a matter of prudence at least, if not of necessity.
Thus goaded on every side, without steadiness to estimate the real extent of my difficulties, or resolution to break through them, having no special dislike to Lord Frederick, nor any conscious preference for another, I sanctioned in weakness the claims which I had conferred in folly. I gave my lover permission to believe that I would soon reward his constancy; if it can be called reward to obtain a wife, whose violation of her early ties gives the strongest pledge that she will disregard those which are new.
Still a lingering reluctance, the constitution of my sex, and the expiring struggles of duty, made me defer, from time to time, the performance of my engagement. But I was hurried at last into its fulfilment, by one of those casualties which are allowed to decide the most important concerns of the thoughtless and unprincipled. My father one day surprised Lord Frederick at my feet; and, glad perhaps of an opportunity to mark his contempt for the artificial distinctions of society, as well as justly indignant at the disregard shown to his injunctions, he dismissed my lover from the house, in terms more decided than courtly.
As my father had four stout footmen to enforce his commands, his Lordship had no choice but acquiescence. He therefore retired; and my father, raising his foot to the panel of the room door, shut it with a force that made the house shake. His sense of dignity for once giving way to indignation, my father, instead of taking his well-known posture of exhortation with his back to the fire, walked up to me, and strongly grasping my hand, exclaimed, 'What the d--l do you mean, Ellen Percy? Did not I tell you, I wouldn't have this puppy of a lord coming here a fortune-hunting? Don't I know the kidney of you all; Don't I know, that if you let a fellow chatter nonsense to you long enough, he is sure of you at last?--Look you, Ellen Percy, let me have no more of this. I can give you three hundred thousand pounds, and I have a scheme in my head that may make it twice as much;--and I'll have your eldest son called John Percy, ay, and his son after him; and you shall marry no proud, saucy, aristocratical beggar, to look down upon the man who was the making of him; d----n me, if you do, Ellen Percy.' Then throwing my arm from him, with a vehemence that made me stagger, he quitted the room.