It is extraordinary that Pepys, who could face with sangfroid committees of Lords and Commons, marshal his facts and figures and come off with credit, could be such a poltroon in this domestic inquest as to deny what was obviously within his wife’s knowledge. But when to terror you add a sense of guilt, a man will tell you anything. It is still more incredible that that did not finish the story--but it did not. The next day, what must he do but send W. Hewer off to Deb, “to tell her that I had told my wife all of my being with her the other night, so that if my wife should send she might not make the business worse by denying it.” The alert Mrs. Pepys made it her business to find out the whole of that, no doubt from W. Hewer himself; so that when Pepys came home the whole thing began all over again, and this time with violence. She “did fall to revile me in the bitterest manner in the world, and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair, which I resolved to bear with, and had good reason to bear it.” He was driven to call in Hewer again as intermediary; but this time the conditions were terrible. Nothing would suit Mrs. Pepys but a letter conceived in the most insulting and outrageous terms to the girl, who was not what it styled her, from Pepys, who had done his best to make her so. Even he was shocked at it, and once wrote it out without the word. Mrs. Pepys tore it up. Then, on a wink passing from Hewer, he wrote it down, and domestic fury was satisfied. It was handed to Hewer to deliver, with “a sharp message” from Mrs. Pepys. That was the climax. No man could be more deeply degraded than that; and to do Pepys credit, he knew it, and could hardly bear himself. Hewer, on his own motion, it would seem, delivered but half of the letter; the other, the injurious half, was brought back to the unfortunate sinner. Deb never knew the worst of him, and, so far as the Diary reveals, never saw him again.
Love will lead a man any lengths, and justify itself, at least to himself; but not lust. That is a sensitive plant, and shrivels in the cold. Pepys, it will have been seen, was not prepared to go a yard out of his prosperous way in pursuit or defence of the favourites of his whim. If it is to his credit that he reports at length his humiliating rebuffs, that is all that can be said for him. If he affords a disagreeable spectacle, luckily it is also exceedingly ridiculous, and the only thing about it difficult to understand is that he _does_ afford it. To me it is much more interesting to speculate upon the attitude of his victims towards these amorous advances. Concerned they must have been; but were they interested, amused, embarrassed, or bored? Did they take it as all in the day’s work; had they resentment and feared to show it; or were they, poor children, led to take him seriously? I am not thinking of the Knipps and Pierces, Betty Lanes and half-dozen Nells--hardy perennials--but of his fresh young Mercer, “decayed tradesman’s daughter,” or grave young Deb, carefully educated at Bow, come also of a good Bristol family, with established aunts and uncles, and all the rest of it--girls who certainly came new to the kind of thing. Is it possible that Deb thrilled to a possible romance? And how did she accept the discovery of what in fact it was? With the one exception of Mercer, they are almost lay figures in the Diary, mute and passive under his greedy hands. Some were baggages, no doubt, or baggages-elect. They cannot all have been baggages. Deb, with her gravity and measured speech, what was she? There’s no telling. I don’t commend her for having seen him again, certainly not for sitting with him in the coach. Then I remember that she was barely twenty years old. She escaped, however, with some smirches, and one may hope that she found a good husband. _Bocca baciata non perde ventura._