The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

He smiled, and said he did not tell me he had money. I took him up

short, and told him I hoped he did not understand by my speaking, that

I should expect any supply from him if he had money; that, on the other

hand, though I had not a great deal, yet I did not want, and while I

had any I would rather add to him than weaken him in that article,

seeing, whatever he had, I knew in the case of transportation he would

have occasion of it all.

He expressed himself in a most tender manner upon that head. He told

me what money he had was not a great deal, but that he would never hide

any of it from me if I wanted it, and that he assured me he did not

speak with any such apprehensions; that he was only intent upon what I

had hinted to him before he went; that here he knew what to do with

himself, but that there he should be the most ignorant, helpless wretch

alive.

I told him he frighted and terrified himself with that which had no

terror in it; that if he had money, as I was glad to hear he had, he

might not only avoid the servitude supposed to be the consequence of

transportation, but begin the world upon a new foundation, and that

such a one as he could not fail of success in, with the common

application usual in such cases; that he could not but call to mind

that is was what I had recommended to him many years before and had

proposed it for our mutual subsistence and restoring our fortunes in

the world; and I would tell him now, that to convince him both of the

certainty of it and of my being fully acquainted with the method, and

also fully satisfied in the probability of success, he should first see

me deliver myself from the necessity of going over at all, and then

that I would go with him freely, and of my own choice, and perhaps

carry enough with me to satisfy him that I did not offer it for want of

being able to live without assistance from him, but that I thought our

mutual misfortunes had been such as were sufficient to reconcile us

both to quitting this part of the world, and living where nobody could

upbraid us with what was past, or we be in any dread of a prison, and

without agonies of a condemned hole to drive us to it; this where we

should look back on all our past disasters with infinite satisfaction,

when we should consider that our enemies should entirely forget us, and

that we should live as new people in a new world, nobody having

anything to say to us, or we to them.