Chapter ii.
Religious cautions against showing too much favour to bastards; and agreat discovery made by Mrs Deborah Wilkins.
Eight months after the celebration of the nuptials between CaptainBlifil and Miss Bridget Allworthy, a young lady of great beauty,merit, and fortune, was Miss Bridget, by reason of a fright, deliveredof a fine boy. The child was indeed to all appearances perfect; butthe midwife discovered it was born a month before its full time.
Though the birth of an heir by his beloved sister was a circumstanceof great joy to Mr Allworthy, yet it did not alienate his affectionsfrom the little foundling, to whom he had been godfather, had givenhis own name of Thomas, and whom he had hitherto seldom failed ofvisiting, at least once a day, in his nursery.
He told his sister, if she pleased, the new-born infant should be bredup together with little Tommy; to which she consented, though withsome little reluctance: for she had truly a great complacence for herbrother; and hence she had always behaved towards the foundling withrather more kindness than ladies of rigid virtue can sometimes bringthemselves to show to these children, who, however innocent, may betruly called the living monuments of incontinence.
The captain could not so easily bring himself to bear what hecondemned as a fault in Mr Allworthy. He gave him frequent hints, thatto adopt the fruits of sin, was to give countenance to it. He quotedseveral texts (for he was well read in Scripture), such as, _He visitsthe sins of the fathers upon the children; and the fathers have eatensour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge_,&c. Whence heargued the legality of punishing the crime of the parent on thebastard. He said, "Though the law did not positively allow thedestroying such base-born children, yet it held them to be thechildren of nobody; that the Church considered them as the children ofnobody; and that at the best, they ought to be brought up to thelowest and vilest offices of the commonwealth."
Mr Allworthy answered to all this, and much more, which the captainhad urged on this subject, "That, however guilty the parents might be,the children were certainly innocent: that as to the texts he hadquoted, the former of them was a particular denunciation against theJews, for the sin of idolatry, of relinquishing and hating theirheavenly King; and the latter was parabolically spoken, and ratherintended to denote the certain and necessary consequences of sin, thanany express judgment against it. But to represent the Almighty asavenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if notblasphemous, as it was to represent him acting against the firstprinciples of natural justice, and against the original notions ofright and wrong, which he himself had implanted in our minds; by whichwe were to judge not only in all matters which were not revealed, buteven of the truth of revelation itself. He said he knew many held thesame principles with the captain on this head; but he was himselffirmly convinced to the contrary, and would provide in the same mannerfor this poor infant, as if a legitimate child had had fortune to havebeen found in the same place."
While the captain was taking all opportunities to press these and suchlike arguments, to remove the little foundling from Mr Allworthy's, ofwhose fondness for him he began to be jealous, Mrs Deborah had made adiscovery, which, in its event, threatened at least to prove morefatal to poor Tommy than all the reasonings of the captain.
Whether the insatiable curiosity of this good woman had carried her onto that business, or whether she did it to confirm herself in the goodgraces of Mrs Blifil, who, notwithstanding her outward behaviour tothe foundling, frequently abused the infant in private, and herbrother too, for his fondness to it, I will not determine; but she hadnow, as she conceived, fully detected the father of the foundling.
Now, as this was a discovery of great consequence, it may be necessaryto trace it from the fountain-head. We shall therefore very minutelylay open those previous matters by which it was produced; and for thatpurpose we shall be obliged to reveal all the secrets of a littlefamily with which my reader is at present entirely unacquainted; andof which the oeconomy was so rare and extraordinary, that I fear itwill shock the utmost credulity of many married persons.