Beauty, of course, is for the hero. Nevertheless, it is not always he
on whom beauty works its most conquering influence. It is the dull
commonplace man into whose slow brain she drops like a celestial light,
and burns lastingly. The poet, for instance, is a connoisseur of
beauty: to the artist she is a model. These gentlemen by much
contemplation of her charms wax critical. The days when they had hearts
being gone, they are haply divided between the blonde and the brunette;
the aquiline nose and the Proserpine; this shaped eye and that. But go
about among simple unprofessional fellows, boors, dunderheads, and here
and there you shall find some barbarous intelligence which has had just
strength enough to conceive, and has taken Beauty as its Goddess, and
knows but one form to worship, in its poor stupid fashion, and would
perish for her. Nay, more: the man would devote all his days to her,
though he is dumb as a dog. And, indeed, he is Beauty’s Dog. Almost
every Beauty has her Dog. The hero possesses her; the poet proclaims
her; the painter puts her upon canvas; and the faithful Old Dog follows
her: and the end of it all is that the faithful Old Dog is her single
attendant. Sir Hero is revelling in the wars, or in Armida’s bowers;
Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle; the brush is for the rose in its season.
She turns to her Old Dog then. She hugs him; and he, who has subsisted
on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his
grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging
sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is
she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there is a
paragraph in the newspapers concerning the extraordinary fidelity of an
Old Dog.
Excited by suggestive recollections of Nooredeen and the Fair Persian,
and the change in the obscure monotony of his life by his having
quarters in a crack hotel, and living familiarly with West-End
people—living on the fat of the land (which forms a stout portion of an
honest youth’s romance), Ripton Thompson breakfasted next morning with
his chief at half-past eight. The meal had been fixed overnight for
seven, but Ripton slept a great deal more than the nightingale, and (to
chronicle his exact state) even half-past eight rather afflicted his
new aristocratic senses and reminded him too keenly of law and bondage.
He had preferred to breakfast at Algernon’s hour, who had left word for
eleven. Him, however, it was Richard’s object to avoid, so they fell
to, and Ripton no longer envied Hippias in bed. Breakfast done, they
bequeathed the consoling information for Algernon that they were off to
hear a popular preacher, and departed.
“How happy everybody looks!” said Richard, in the quiet Sunday streets.
“Yes—jolly!” said Ripton.
“When I’m—when this is over, I’ll see that they are, too—as many as I
can make happy,” said the hero; adding softly: “Her blind was down at a
quarter to six. I think she slept well!”
“You’ve been there this morning?” Ripton exclaimed; and an idea of what
love was dawned upon his dull brain.
“Will she see me, Ricky?”
“Yes. She’ll see you to-day. She was tired last night.”
“Positively?”
Richard assured him that the privilege would be his.
“Here,” he said, coming under some trees in the park, “here’s where I
talked to you last night. What a time it seems! How I hate the night!”
On the way, that Richard might have an exalted opinion of him, Ripton
hinted decorously at a somewhat intimate and mysterious acquaintance
with the sex. Headings of certain random adventures he gave.
“Well!” said his chief, “why not marry her?”
Then was Ripton shocked, and cried, “Oh!” and had a taste of the
feeling of superiority, destined that day to be crushed utterly.
He was again deposited in Mrs. Berry’s charge for a term that caused
him dismal fears that the Fair Persian still refused to show her face,
but Richard called out to him, and up Ripton went, unaware of the
transformation he was to undergo. Hero and Beauty stood together to
receive him. From the bottom of the stairs he had his vivaciously
agreeable smile ready for them, and by the time he entered the room his
cheeks were painfully stiff, and his eyes had strained beyond their
exact meaning. Lucy, with one hand anchored to her lover, welcomed him
kindly. He relieved her shyness by looking so extremely silly. They sat
down, and tried to commence a conversation, but Ripton was as little
master of his tongue as he was of his eyes. After an interval, the Fair
Persian having done duty by showing herself, was glad to quit the room.
Her lord and possessor then turned inquiringly to Ripton.
“You don’t wonder now, Rip?” he said.
“No, Richard!” Ripton waited to reply with sufficient solemnity,
“indeed I don’t!”
He spoke differently; he looked differently. He had the Old Dog’s eyes
in his head. They watched the door she had passed through; they
listened for her, as dogs’ eyes do. When she came in, bonneted for a
walk, his agitation was dog-like. When she hung on her lover timidly,
and went forth, he followed without an idea of envy, or anything save
the secret raptures the sight of her gave him, which are the Old Dog’s
own. For beneficent Nature requites him: His sensations cannot be
heroic, but they have a fulness and a wagging delight as good in their
way. And this capacity for humble unaspiring worship has its peculiar
guerdon. When Ripton comes to think of Miss Random now, what will he
think of himself? Let no one despise the Old Dog. Through him doth
Beauty vindicate her sex.
It did not please Ripton that others should have the bliss of beholding
her, and as, to his perceptions, everybody did, and observed her
offensively, and stared, and turned their heads back, and interchanged
comments on her, and became in a minute madly in love with her, he had
to smother low growls. They strolled about the pleasant gardens of
Kensington all the morning, under the young chestnut buds, and round
the windless waters, talking, and soothing the wild excitement of their
hearts. If Lucy spoke, Ripton pricked up his ears. She, too, made the
remark that everybody seemed to look happy, and he heard it with
thrills of joy. “So everybody is, where you are!” he would have wished
to say, if he dared, but was restrained by fears that his burning
eloquence would commit him. Ripton knew the people he met twice. It
would have been difficult to persuade him they were the creatures of
accident.
From the Gardens, in contempt of Ripton’s frowned protest, Richard
boldly struck into the park, where solitary carriages were beginning to
perform the circuit. Here Ripton had some justification for his jealous
pangs. The young girl’s golden locks of hair; her sweet, now dreamily
sad, face; her gentle graceful figure in the black straight dress she
wore; a sort of half-conventual air she had—a mark of something not of
class, that was partly beauty’s, partly maiden innocence growing
conscious, partly remorse at her weakness and dim fear of the future it
was sowing—did attract the eye-glasses. Ripton had to learn that eyes
are bearable, but eye-glasses an abomination. They fixed a spell upon
his courage; for somehow the youth had always ranked them as emblems of
our nobility, and hearing two exquisite eye-glasses, who had been to
front and rear several times, drawl in gibberish generally imputed to
lords, that his heroine was a charming little creature, just the size,
but had no style,—he was abashed; he did not fly at them and tear them.
He became dejected. Beauty’s dog is affected by the eye-glass in a
manner not unlike the common animal’s terror of the human eye.
Richard appeared to hear nothing, or it was homage that he heard. He
repeated to Lucy Diaper Sandoe’s verses—
“The cockneys nod to each other aside,
The coxcombs lift their glasses,”
and projected hiring a horse for her to ride every day in the park, and
shine among the highest.
They had turned to the West, against the sky glittering through the
bare trees across the water, and the bright-edged rack. The lover, his
imagination just then occupied in clothing earthly glories in
celestial, felt where his senses were sharpest the hand of his darling
falter, and instinctively looked ahead. His uncle Algernon was
leisurely jolting towards them on his one sound leg. The dismembered
Guardsman talked to a friend whose arm supported him, and speculated
from time to time on the fair ladies driving by. The two white faces
passed him unobserved. Unfortunately Ripton, coming behind, went plump
upon the Captain’s live toe—or so he pretended, crying, “Confound it,
Mr. Thompson! you might have chosen the other.”
The horrible apparition did confound Ripton, who stammered that it was
extraordinary.
“Not at all,” said Algernon. “Everybody makes up to that fellow.
Instinct, I suppose!”
He had not to ask for his nephew. Richard turned to face the matter.
“Sorry I couldn’t wait for you this morning, uncle,” he said, with the
coolness of relationship. “I thought you never walked so far.”
His voice was in perfect tone—the heroic mask admirable.
Algernon examined the downcast visage at his side, and contrived to
allude to the popular preacher. He was instantly introduced to Ripton’s
sister, Miss Thompson.
The Captain bowed, smiling melancholy approval of his nephew’s choice
of a minister. After a few stray remarks, and an affable salute to Miss
Thompson, he hobbled away, and then the three sealed volcanoes
breathed, and Lucy’s arm ceased to be squeezed quite so much up to the
heroic pitch.
This incident quickened their steps homeward to the sheltering wings of
Mrs. Berry. All that passed between them on the subject comprised a
stammered excuse from Ripton for his conduct, and a good-humoured
rejoinder from Richard, that he had gained a sister by it: at which
Ripton ventured to wish aloud Miss Desborough would only think so, and
a faint smile twitched poor Lucy’s lips to please him. She hardly had
strength to reach her cage. She had none to eat of Mrs. Berry’s nice
little dinner. To be alone, that she might cry and ease her heart of
its accusing weight of tears, was all she prayed for. Kind Mrs. Berry,
slipping into her bedroom to take off her things, found the fair body
in a fevered shudder, and finished by undressing her completely and
putting her to bed.
“Just an hour’s sleep, or so,” the mellifluous woman explained the case
to the two anxious gentlemen. “A quiet sleep and a cup of warm tea goes
for more than twenty doctors, it do—when there’s the flutters,” she
pursued. “I know it by myself. And a good cry beforehand’s better than
the best of medicine.”
She nursed them into a make-believe of eating, and retired to her
softer charge and sweeter babe, reflecting, “Lord! Lord! the three of
’em don’t make fifty! I’m as old as two and a half of ’em, to say the
least.” Mrs. Berry used her apron, and by virtue of their tender years
took them all three into her heart.
Left alone, neither of the young men could swallow a morsel.
“Did you see the change come over her?” Richard whispered.
Ripton fiercely accused his prodigious stupidity.
The lover flung down his knife and fork: “What could I do? If I had
said nothing, we should have been suspected. I was obliged to speak.
And she hates a lie! See! it has struck her down. God forgive me!”
Ripton affected a serene mind: “It was a fright, Richard,” he said.
“That’s what Mrs. Berry means by flutters. Those old women talk in that
way. You heard what she said. And these old women know. I’ll tell you
what it is. It’s this, Richard!—it’s because you’ve got a fool for your
friend!”
“She regrets it,” muttered the lover. “Good God! I think she fears me.”
He dropped his face in his hands.
Ripton went to the window, repeating energetically for his comfort:
“It’s because you’ve got a fool for your friend!”
Sombre grew the street they had last night aroused. The sun was buried
alive in cloud. Ripton saw himself no more in the opposite window. He
watched the deplorable objects passing on the pavement. His
aristocratic visions had gone like his breakfast. Beauty had been
struck down by his egregious folly, and there he stood—a wretch!
Richard came to him: “Don’t mumble on like that, Rip!” he said. “Nobody
blames you.”
“Ah! you’re very kind, Richard,” interposed the wretch, moved at the
face of misery he beheld.
“Listen to me, Rip! I shall take her home to-night. Yes! If she’s
happier away from me!—do you think me a brute, Ripton? Rather than have
her shed a tear, I’d!—I’ll take her home to-night!”
Ripton suggested that it was sudden; adding from his larger experience,
people perhaps might talk.
The lover could not understand what they should talk about, but he
said: “If I give him who came for her yesterday the clue? If no one
sees or hears of me, what can they say? O Rip! I’ll give her up. I’m
wrecked for ever! What of that? Yes—let them take her! The world in
arms should never have torn her from me, but when she cries—Yes! all’s
over. I’ll find him at once.”
He searched in out-of-the-way corners for the hat of resolve. Ripton
looked on, wretcheder than ever.
The idea struck him:—“Suppose, Richard, she doesn’t want to go?”
It was a moment when, perhaps, one who sided with parents and guardians
and the old wise world, might have inclined them to pursue their
righteous wretched course, and have given small Cupid a smack and sent
him home to his naughty Mother. Alas! (it is The Pilgrim’s Scrip
interjecting) women are the born accomplices of mischief! In bustles
Mrs. Berry to clear away the refection, and finds the two knights
helmed, and sees, though ’tis dusk, that they wear doubtful brows, and
guesses bad things for her dear God Hymen in a twinkling.
“Dear! dear!” she exclaimed, “and neither of you eaten a scrap! And
there’s my dear young lady off into the prettiest sleep you ever see!”
“Ha?” cried the lover, illuminated.
“Soft as a baby!” Mrs. Berry averred. “I went to look at her this very
moment, and there’s not a bit of trouble in her breath. It come and it
go like the sweetest regular instrument ever made. The Black Ox haven’t
trod on her foot yet! Most like it was the air of London. But only
fancy, if you had called in a doctor! Why, I shouldn’t have let her
take any of his quackery. Now, there!”
Ripton attentively observed his chief, and saw him doff his hat with a
curious caution, and peer into its recess, from which, during Mrs.
Berry’s speech, he drew forth a little glove—dropped there by some
freak of chance.
“Keep me, keep me, now you have me!” sang the little glove, and amused
the lover with a thousand conceits.
“When will she wake, do you think, Mrs. Berry?” he asked.
“Oh! we mustn’t go for disturbing her,” said the guileful good
creature. “Bless ye! let her sleep it out. And if you young gentlemen
was to take my advice, and go and take a walk for to get a
appetite—everybody should eat! it’s their sacred duty, no matter what
their feelings be! and I say it who’m no chicken!—I’ll frickashee
this—which is a chicken—against your return. I’m a cook, I can assure
ye!”
The lover seized her two hands. “You’re the best old soul in the
world!” he cried. Mrs. Berry appeared willing to kiss him. “We won’t
disturb her. Let her sleep. Keep her in bed, Mrs. Berry. Will you? And
we’ll call to inquire after her this evening, and come and see her
to-morrow. I’m sure you’ll be kind to her. There! there!” Mrs. Berry
was preparing to whimper. “I trust her to you, you see. Good-bye, you
dear old soul.”
He smuggled a handful of gold into her keeping, and went to dine with
his uncles, happy and hungry.
Before they reached the hotel, they had agreed to draw Mrs. Berry into
their confidence, telling her (with embellishments) all save their
names, so that they might enjoy the counsel and assistance of that
trump of a woman, and yet have nothing to fear from her. Lucy was to
receive the name of Letitia, Ripton’s youngest and best-looking sister.
The heartless fellow proposed it in cruel mockery of an old weakness of
hers.
“Letitia!” mused Richard. “I like the name. Both begin with L. There’s
something soft—womanlike—in the L.’s.”
Material Ripton remarked that they looked like pounds on paper. The
lover roamed through his golden groves. “Lucy Feverel! that sounds
better! I wonder where Ralph is. I should like to help him. He’s in
love with my cousin Clare. He’ll never do anything till he marries. No
man can. I’m going to do a hundred things when it’s over. We shall
travel first. I want to see the Alps. One doesn’t know what the earth
is till one has seen the Alps. What a delight it will be to her! I
fancy I see her eyes gazing up at them.
‘And oh, your dear blue eyes, that heavenward glance
With kindred beauty, banished humbleness,
Past weeping for mortality’s distress—
Yet from your soul a tear hangs there in trance.
And fills, but does not fall;
Softly I hear it call
At heaven’s gate, till Sister Seraphs press
To look on you their old love from the skies:
Those are the eyes of Seraphs bright on your blue eyes!
Beautiful! These lines, Rip, were written by a man who was once a
friend of my father’s. I intend to find him and make them friends
again. You don’t care for poetry. It’s no use your trying to swallow
it, Rip!”
“It sounds very nice,” said Ripton, modestly shutting his mouth.
“The Alps! Italy! Rome! and then I shall go to the East,” the hero
continued. “She’s ready to go anywhere with me, the dear brave heart!
Oh, the glorious golden East! I dream of the desert. I dream I’m chief
of an Arab tribe, and we fly all white in the moonlight on our mares,
and hurry to the rescue of my darling! And we push the spears, and we
scatter them, and I come to the tent where she crouches, and catch her
to my saddle, and away!—Rip! what a life!”
Ripton strove to imagine he could enjoy it.
“And then we shall come home, and I shall lead Austin’s life, with her
to help me. First be virtuous, Rip! and then serve your country heart
and soul. A wise man told me that. I think I shall do something.”
Sunshine and cloud, cloud and sunshine, passed over the lover. Now life
was a narrow ring; now the distances extended, were winged, flew
illimitably. An hour ago and food was hateful. Now he manfully
refreshed his nature, and joined in Algernon’s encomiums on Miss
Letitia Thompson.
Meantime Beauty slept, watched by the veteran volunteer of the hero’s
band. Lucy awoke from dreams which seemed reality, to the reality which
was a dream. She awoke calling for some friend, “Margaret!” and heard
one say, “My name is Bessy Berry, my love! not Margaret.” Then she
asked piteously where she was, and where was Margaret, her dear friend,
and Mrs. Berry whispered, “Sure you’ve got a dearer!”
“Ah!” sighed Lucy, sinking on her pillow, overwhelmed by the
strangeness of her state.
Mrs. Berry closed the frill of her nightgown and adjusted the
bedclothes quietly.
Her name was breathed.
“Yes, my love?” she said.
“Is he here?”
“He’s gone, my dear.”
“Gone?—Oh, where?” The young girl started up in disorder.
“Gone, to be back, my love! Ah! that young gentleman!” Mrs. Berry
chanted: “Not a morsel have he eat; not a drop have he drunk!”
“O Mrs. Berry! why did you not make him?” Lucy wept for the
famine-struck hero, who was just then feeding mightily.
Mrs. Berry explained that to make one eat who thought the darling of
his heart like to die, was a sheer impossibility for the cleverest of
women; and on this deep truth Lucy reflected, with her eyes wide at the
candle. She wanted one to pour her feelings out to. She slid her hand
from under the bedclothes, and took Mrs. Berry’s, and kissed it. The
good creature required no further avowal of her secret, but forthwith
leaned her consummate bosom to the pillow, and petitioned heaven to
bless them both!—Then the little bride was alarmed, and wondered how
Mrs. Berry could have guessed it.
“Why,” said Mrs. Berry, “your love is out of your eyes, and out of
everything ye do.” And the little bride wondered more. She thought she
had been so very cautious not to betray it. The common woman in them
made cheer together after their own April fashion. Following which Mrs.
Berry probed for the sweet particulars of this beautiful love-match;
but the little bride’s lips were locked. She only said her lover was
above her in station.
“And you’re a Catholic, my dear!”
“Yes, Mrs. Berry!”
“And him a Protestant.”
“Yes, Mrs. Berry!”
“Dear, dear!—And why shouldn’t ye be?” she ejaculated, seeing sadness
return to the bridal babe. “So as you was born, so shall ye be! But
you’ll have to make your arrangements about the children. The girls to
worship with you, the boys with him. It’s the same God, my dear! You
mustn’t blush at it, though you do look so pretty. If my young
gentleman could see you now!”
“Please, Mrs. Berry!” Lucy murmured.
“Why, he will, you know, my dear!”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Berry!”
“And you that can’t bear the thoughts of it! Well, I do wish there was
fathers and mothers on both sides and dock-ments signed, and
bridesmaids, and a breakfast! but love is love, and ever will be, in
spite of them.”
She made other and deeper dives into the little heart, but though she
drew up pearls, they were not of the kind she searched for. The one
fact that hung as a fruit upon her tree of Love, Lucy had given her;
she would not, in fealty to her lover, reveal its growth and history,
however sadly she yearned to pour out all to this dear old Mother
Confessor.
Her conduct drove Mrs. Berry from the rosy to the autumnal view of
matrimony, generally heralded by the announcement that it is a lottery.
“And when you see your ticket,” said Mrs. Berry, “you shan’t know
whether it’s a prize or a blank. And, Lord knows! some go on thinking
it’s a prize when it turns on ’em and tears ’em. I’m one of the blanks,
my dear! I drew a blank in Berry. He was a black Berry to me, my dear!
Smile away! he truly was, and I a-prizin’ him as proud as you can
conceive! My dear!” Mrs. Berry pressed her hands flat on her apron. “We
hadn’t been a three months man and wife, when that man—it wasn’t the
honeymoon, which some can’t say—that man—Yes! he kicked me. His wedded
wife he kicked! Ah!” she sighed to Lucy’s large eyes, “I could have
borne that. A blow don’t touch the heart,” the poor creature tapped her
sensitive side. “I went on loving of him, for I’m a soft one. Tall as a
Grenadier he is, and when out of service grows his moustache. I used to
call him my body-guardsman like a Queen! I flattered him like the fools
we women are. For, take my word for it, my dear, there’s nothing here
below so vain as a man! That I know. But I didn’t deserve it.... I’m a
superior cook.... I did not deserve that noways.” Mrs. Berry thumped
her knee, and accentuated up her climax: “I mended his linen. I saw to
his adornments—he called his clothes, the bad man! I was a servant to
him, my dear! and there—it was nine months—nine months from the day he
swear to protect and cherish and that—nine calendar months, and my
gentleman is off with another woman! Bone of his bone!—pish!” exclaimed
Mrs. Berry, reckoning her wrongs over vividly. “Here’s my ring. A
pretty ornament! What do it mean? I’m for tearin’ it off my finger a
dozen times in the day. It’s a symbol? I call it a tomfoolery for the
dead-alive to wear it, that’s a widow and not a widow, and haven’t got
a name for what she is in any Dixonary, I’ve looked, my dear, and”—she
spread out her arms—“Johnson haven’t got a name for me!”
At this impressive woe Mrs. Berry’s voice quavered into sobs. Lucy
spoke gentle words to the poor outcast from Johnson. The sorrows of
Autumn have no warning for April. The little bride, for all her tender
pity, felt happier when she had heard her landlady’s moving tale of the
wickedness of man, which cast in bright relief the glory of that one
hero who was hers. Then from a short flight of inconceivable bliss, she
fell, shot by one of her hundred Argus-eyed fears.
“O Mrs. Berry! I’m so young! Think of me—only just seventeen!”
Mrs. Berry immediately dried her eyes to radiance. “Young, my dear!
Nonsense! There’s no so much harm in being young, here and there. I
knew an Irish lady was married at fourteen. Her daughter married close
over fourteen. She was a grandmother by thirty! When any strange man
began, she used to ask him what pattern caps grandmothers wore. They’d
stare! Bless you! the grandmother could have married over and over
again. It was her daughter’s fault, not hers, you know.”
“She was three years younger,” mused Lucy.
“She married beneath her, my dear. Ran off with her father’s bailiff’s
son. ‘Ah, Berry!’ she’d say, ‘if I hadn’t been foolish, I should be my
lady now—not Granny!’ Her father never forgave her—left all his estates
out of the family.”
“Did her husband always love her?” Lucy preferred to know.
“In his way, my dear, he did,” said Mrs. Berry, coming upon her
matrimonial wisdom. “He couldn’t help himself. If he left off, he began
again. She was so clever, and did make him so comfortable. Cook! there
wasn’t such another cook out of a Alderman’s kitchen; no, indeed! And
she a born lady! That tells ye it’s the duty of all women! She had her
saying ‘When the parlour fire gets low, put coals on the ketchen fire!’
and a good saying it is to treasure. Such is man! no use in havin’
their hearts if ye don’t have their stomachs.”
Perceiving that she grew abstruse, Mrs. Berry added briskly: “You know
nothing about that yet, my dear. Only mind me and mark me: don’t
neglect your cookery. Kissing don’t last: cookery do!”
Here, with an aphorism worthy a place in The Pilgrim’s Scrip, she broke
off to go posseting for her dear invalid. Lucy was quite well; very
eager to be allowed to rise and be ready when the knock should come.
Mrs. Berry, in her loving considerateness for the little bride,
positively commanded her to lie down, and be quiet, and submit to be
nursed and cherished. For Mrs. Berry well knew that ten minutes alone
with the hero could only be had while the little bride was in that
unattainable position.
Thanks to her strategy, as she thought, her object was gained. The
night did not pass before she learnt, from the hero’s own mouth, that
Mr. Richards, the father of the hero, and a stern lawyer, was adverse
to his union with this young lady he loved, because of a ward of his,
heiress to an immense property, whom he desired his son to espouse; and
because his darling Letitia was a Catholic—Letitia, the sole daughter
of a brave naval officer deceased, and in the hands of a savage uncle,
who wanted to sacrifice this beauty to a brute of a son. Mrs. Berry
listened credulously to the emphatic narrative, and spoke to the effect
that the wickedness of old people formed the excuse for the wildness of
young ones. The ceremonious administration of oaths of secrecy and
devotion over, she was enrolled in the hero’s band, which now numbered
three, and entered upon the duties with feminine energy, for there are
no conspirators like women. Ripton’s lieutenancy became a sinecure, his
rank merely titular. He had never been married—he knew nothing about
licences, except that they must be obtained, and were not difficult—he
had not an idea that so many days’ warning must be given to the
clergyman of the parish where one of the parties was resident. How
should he? All his forethought was comprised in the ring, and whenever
the discussion of arrangements for the great event grew particularly
hot and important, he would say, with a shrewd nod: “We mustn’t forget
the ring, you know, Mrs. Berry!” and the new member was only prevented
by natural complacence from shouting: “Oh, drat ye! and your ring too.”
Mrs. Berry had acted conspicuously in fifteen marriages, by banns, and
by licence, and to have such an obvious requisite dinned in her ears
was exasperating. They could not have contracted alliance with an
auxiliary more invaluable, an authority so profound; and they
acknowledged it to themselves. The hero marched like an automaton at
her bidding; Lieutenant Thompson was rejoiced to perform services as
errand-boy in the enterprise.
“It’s in hopes you’ll be happier than me, I do it,” said the devout and
charitable Berry. “Marriages is made in heaven, they say; and if that’s
the case, I say they don’t take much account of us below!”
Her own woeful experiences had been given to the hero in exchange for
his story of cruel parents.
Richard vowed to her that he would henceforth hold it a duty to hunt
out the wanderer from wedded bonds, and bring him back bound and
suppliant.
“Oh, he’ll come!” said Mrs. Berry, pursing prophetic wrinkles: “he’ll
come of his own accord. Never anywhere will he meet such a cook as
Bessy Berry! And he know her value in his heart of hearts. And I do
believe, when he do come, I shall be opening these arms to him again,
and not slapping his impidence in the face—I’m that soft! I always
was—in matrimony, Mr. Richards!”
As when nations are secretly preparing for war, the docks and arsenals
hammer night and day, and busy contractors measure time by inches, and
the air hums around for leagues as it were myriads of bees, so the
house and neighbourhood of the matrimonial soft one resounded in the
heroic style, and knew little of the changes of light decreed by
Creation. Mrs. Berry was the general of the hour. Down to Doctors’
Commons she expedited the hero, instructing him how boldly to face the
Law, and fib: for that the Law never could mist a fib and a bold face.
Down the hero went, and proclaimed his presence. And lo! the Law danced
to him its sedatest lovely bear’s-dance. Think ye the Law less
susceptible to him than flesh and blood? With a beautiful confidence it
put the few familiar questions to him, and nodded to his replies: then
stamped the bond, and took the fee. It must be an old vagabond at heart
that can permit the irrevocable to go so cheap, even to a hero. For
only mark him when he is petitioned by heroes and heroines to undo what
he does so easily! That small archway of Doctors’ Commons seems the eye
of a needle, through which the lean purse has a way, somehow, of
slipping more readily than the portly; but once through, all are camels
alike, the lean purse an especially big camel. Dispensing tremendous
marriage as it does, the Law can have no conscience.
“I hadn’t the slightest difficulty,” said the exulting hero.
“Of course not!” returns Mrs. Berry. “It’s as easy, if ye’re in
earnest, as buying a plum bun.”
Likewise the ambassador of the hero went to claim the promise of the
Church to be in attendance on a certain spot, on a certain day, and
there hear oath of eternal fealty, and gird him about with all its
forces: which the Church, receiving a wink from the Law, obsequiously
engaged to do, for less than the price of a plum-cake.
Meantime, while craftsmen and skilled women, directed by Mrs. Berry,
were toiling to deck the day at hand, Raynham and Belthorpe slept,—the
former soundly; and one day was as another to them. Regularly every
morning a letter arrived from Richard to his father, containing
observations on the phenomena of London; remarks (mainly cynical) on
the speeches and acts of Parliament; and reasons for not having yet
been able to call on the Grandisons. They were certainly rather
monotonous and spiritless. The baronet did not complain. That cold
dutiful tone assured him there was no internal trouble or distraction.
“The letters of a healthful physique!” he said to Lady Blandish, with
sure insight. Complacently he sat and smiled, little witting that his
son’s ordeal was imminent, and that his son’s ordeal was to be his own.
Hippias wrote that his nephew was killing him by making appointments
which he never kept, and altogether neglecting him in the most
shameless way, so that his ganglionic centre was in a ten times worse
state than when he left Raynham. He wrote very bitterly, but it was
hard to feel compassion for his offended stomach.
On the other hand, young Tom Blaize was not forthcoming, and had
despatched no tidings whatever. Farmer Blaize smoked his pipe evening
after evening, vastly disturbed. London was a large place—young Tom
might be lost in it, he thought; and young Tom had his weaknesses. A
wolf at Belthorpe, he was likely to be a sheep in London, as yokels
have proved. But what had become of Lucy? This consideration almost
sent Farmer Blaize off to London direct, and he would have gone had not
his pipe enlightened him. A young fellow might play truant and get into
a scrape, but a young man and a young woman were sure to be heard of,
unless they were acting in complicity. Why, of course, young Tom had
behaved like a man, the rascal! and married her outright there, while
he had the chance. It was a long guess. Still it was the only
reasonable way of accounting for his extraordinary silence, and
therefore the farmer held to it that he had done the deed. He argued as
modern men do who think the hero, the upsetter of ordinary
calculations, is gone from us. So, after despatching a letter to a
friend in town to be on the outlook for son Tom, he continued awhile to
smoke his pipe, rather elated than not, and mused on the shrewd manner
he should adopt when Master Honeymoon did appear.
Toward the middle of the second week of Richard’s absence, Tom Bakewell
came to Raynham for Cassandra, and privately handed a letter to the
Eighteenth Century, containing a request for money, and a round sum.
The Eighteenth Century was as good as her word, and gave Tom a letter
in return, enclosing a cheque on her bankers, amply providing to keep
the heroic engine in motion at a moderate pace. Tom went back, and
Raynham and Lobourne slept and dreamed not of the morrow. The System,
wedded to Time, slept, and knew not how he had been
outraged—anticipated by seven pregnant seasons. For Time had heard the
hero swear to that legalizing instrument, and had also registered an
oath. Ah me! venerable Hebrew Time! he is unforgiving. Half the
confusion and fever of the world comes of this vendetta he declares
against the hapless innocents who have once done him a wrong. They
cannot escape him. They will never outlive it. The father of jokes, he
is himself no joke; which it seems the business of men to discover.
The days roll round. He is their servant now. Mrs. Berry has a new
satin gown, a beautiful bonnet, a gold brooch, and sweet gloves,
presented to her by the hero, wherein to stand by his bride at the
altar to-morrow; and, instead of being an old wary hen, she is as much
a chicken as any of the party, such has been the magic of these
articles. Fathers she sees accepting the facts produced for them by
their children; a world content to be carved out as it pleases the
hero.
At last Time brings the bridal eve, and is blest as a benefactor. The
final arrangements are made; the bridegroom does depart; and Mrs. Berry
lights the little bride to her bed. Lucy stops on the landing where
there is an old clock eccentrically correct that night. ’Tis the
palpitating pause before the gates of her transfiguration. Mrs. Berry
sees her put her rosy finger on the One about to strike, and touch all
the hours successively till she comes to the Twelve that shall sound
“Wife” in her ears on the morrow, moving her lips the while, and
looking round archly solemn when she has done; and that sight so
catches at Mrs. Berry’s heart that, not guessing Time to be the poor
child’s enemy, she endangers her candle by folding Lucy warmly in her
arms, whimpering; “Bless you for a darling! you innocent lamb! You
shall be happy! You shall!”
Old Time gazes grimly ahead.