The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [32]
CHAP. XVII
Though my father travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the best of moods,---pshaw-ing and pishing all the way down,----yet he had the complaisance to keep the worst part of the story still to himself;—which was the resolution he had taken of doing himself the justice, which my uncle Toby’s clause in the marriage settlement empowered him; nor was it till the very night in which I was begot, which was thirteen months after,1 that she had the least intimation of his design;---when my father, happening, as you remember, to be a little chagrin’d and out of temper,——took occasion as they lay chatting gravely in bed afterwards, talking over what was to come,——to let her know that she must accommodate herself as well as she could to the bargain made between them in their marriage deeds; which was to lye-in of her next child in the country to balance the last year’s journey.
My father was a gentleman of many virtues,—but he had a strong spice of that in his temper which might, or might not, add to the number.----’tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,—and of obstinacy in a bad one:2 Of this my mother had so much knowledge, that she knew ’twas to no purpose to make any remonstrance,—so she e’en resolved to sit down quietly, and make the most of it.
CHAP. XVIII
As the point was that night agreed, or rather determin’d, that my mother should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the famous Dr. Maningham1 was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her mind,——notwithstanding there was a scientifick operator within so near a call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five shillings book2 upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,——but had likewise superadded many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the fœtus in cross births, and some other cases of danger which belay us in getting into the world; notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely determined to trust her life and mine with it, into no soul’s hand but this old woman’s only.—Now this I like;—when we cannot get at the very thing we wish,-----never to take up with the next best in degree to it;---no; that’s pitiful beyond description;—it is no more than a week from this very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the world,---which is March 9, 1759,3——that my dear, dear Jenny4 ob—serving I look’d a little grave, as she stood cheapening5 a silk of five-and-twenty shillings a yard,—told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so much trouble;—and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of ten-pence a yard.—’tis the duplication of one and the same greatness of soul; only what lessen’d the honour of it somewhat, in my mother’s case, was, that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extream, as one in her situation might have wish’d, because the old midwife had really some little claim to be depended upon,—as much, at least, as success could give her; having, in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought every mother’s son of them into the world without any one slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.
These facts, tho’ they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father’s spirits in relation to this choice.—To say nothing of the natural workings of humanity and justice,—or of the yearnings of parental and connubial love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind;——he felt himself concern’d in a particular