General withdrawing of heads from street-windows, emigration of organs
and bands, and a relaxed atmosphere in the circle of Mrs. Berry’s
abode, proved that Dan Cupid had veritably flown to suck the life of
fresh regions. With a pensive mind she grasped Ripton’s arm to regulate
his steps, and returned to the room where her creditor awaited her. In
the interval he had stormed her undefended fortress, the cake, from
which altitude he shook a dolorous head at the guilty woman. She
smoothed her excited apron, sighing. Let no one imagine that she
regretted her complicity. She was ready to cry torrents, but there must
be absolute castigation before this criminal shall conceive the sense
of regret; and probably then she will cling to her wickedness the
more—such is the born Pagan’s tenacity! Mrs. Berry sighed, and gave him
back his shake of the head. O you wanton, improvident creature! said
he. O you very wise old gentleman! said she. He asked her the thing she
had been doing. She enlightened him with the fatalist’s reply. He
sounded a bogey’s alarm of contingent grave results. She retreated to
the entrenched camp of the fact she had helped to make.
“It’s done!” she exclaimed. How could she regret what she felt comfort
to know was done? Convinced that events alone could stamp a mark on
such stubborn flesh, he determined to wait for them, and crouched
silent on the cake, with one finger downwards at Ripton’s incision
there, showing a crumbling chasm and gloomy rich recess.
The eloquent indication was understood. “Dear! dear!” cried Mrs. Berry,
“what a heap o’ cake, and no one to send it to!”
Ripton had resumed his seat by the table and his embrace of the claret.
Clear ideas of satisfaction had left him and resolved to a boiling
geysir of indistinguishable transports. He bubbled, and waggled, and
nodded amicably to nothing, and successfully, though not without
effort, preserved his uppermost member from the seductions of the
nymph, Gravitation, who was on the look-out for his whole length
shortly.
“Ha! ha!” he shouted, about a minute after Mrs. Berry had spoken, and
almost abandoned himself to the nymph on the spot. Mrs. Berry’s words
had just reached his wits.
“Why do you laugh, young man?” she inquired, familiar and motherly on
account of his condition.
Ripton laughed louder, and caught his chest on the edge of the table
and his nose on a chicken. “That’s goo’!” he said, recovering, and
rocking under Mrs. Berry’s eyes. “No friend!”
“I did not say, no friend,” she remarked. “I said, no one; meanin’, I
know not where for to send it to.”
Ripton’s response to this was: “You put a Griffin on that cake.
Wheatsheaves each side.”
“His crest?” Mrs. Berry said sweetly.
“Oldest baronetcy ’n England!” waved Ripton.
“Yes?” Mrs. Berry encouraged him on.
“You think he’s Richards. We’re oblige’ be very close. And she’s the
most lovely!—If I hear man say thing ’gainst her.”
“You needn’t for to cry over her, young man,” said Mrs. Berry. “I
wanted for to drink their right healths by their right names, and then
go about my day’s work, and I do hope you won’t keep me.”
Ripton stood bolt upright at her words.
“You do?” he said, and filling a bumper he with cheerfully vinous
articulation and glibness of tongue proposed the health of Richard and
Lucy Feverel, of Raynham Abbey! and that mankind should not require an
expeditious example of the way to accept the inspiring toast, he
drained his bumper at a gulp. It finished him. The farthing rushlight
of his reason leapt and expired. He tumbled to the sofa and there
stretched.
Some minutes subsequent to Ripton’s signalization of his devotion to
the bridal pair, Mrs. Berry’s maid entered the room to say that a
gentleman was inquiring below after the young gentleman who had
departed, and found her mistress with a tottering wineglass in her
hand, exhibiting every symptom of unconsoled hysterics. Her mouth
gaped, as if the fell creditor had her by the swallow. She ejaculated
with horrible exultation that she had been and done it, as her
disastrous aspect seemed to testify, and her evident, but inexplicable,
access of misery induced the sympathetic maid to tender those caressing
words that were all Mrs. Berry wanted to go off into the self-caressing
fit without delay; and she had already given the preluding demoniac
ironic outburst, when the maid called heaven to witness that the
gentleman would hear her; upon which Mrs. Berry violently controlled
her bosom, and ordered that he should be shown upstairs instantly to
see her the wretch she was. She repeated the injunction.
The maid did as she was told, and Mrs. Berry, wishing first to see
herself as she was, mutely accosted the looking-glass, and tried to
look a very little better. She dropped a shawl on Ripton and was
settled, smoothing her agitation when her visitor was announced.
The gentleman was Adrian Harley. An interview with Tom Bakewell had put
him on the track, and now a momentary survey of the table, and its
white-vestured cake, made him whistle.
Mrs. Berry plaintively begged him to do her the favour to be seated.
“A fine morning, ma’am,” said Adrian.
“It have been!” Mrs. Berry answered, glancing over her shoulder at the
window, and gulping as if to get her heart down from her mouth.
“A very fine Spring,” pursued Adrian, calmly anatomizing her
countenance.
Mrs. Berry smothered an adjective to “weather” on a deep sigh. Her
wretchedness was palpable. In proportion to it, Adrian waned cheerful
and brisk. He divined enough of the business to see that there was some
strange intelligence to be fished out of the culprit who sat
compressing hysterics before him; and as he was never more in his
element than when he had a sinner, and a repentant prostrate abject
sinner in hand, his affable countenance might well deceive poor Berry.
“I presume these are Mr. Thompson’s lodgings?” he remarked, with a look
at the table.
Mrs. Berry’s head and the whites of her eyes informed him that they
were not Mr. Thompson’s lodgings.
“No?” said Adrian, and threw a carelessly inquisitive eye about him.
“Mr. Feverel is out, I suppose?”
A convulsive start at the name, and two corroborating hands dropped on
her knees, formed Mrs. Berry’s reply.
“Mr. Feverel’s man,” continued Adrian, “told me I should be certain to
find him here. I thought he would be with his friend, Mr. Thompson. I’m
too late, I perceive. Their entertainment is over. I fancy you have
been having a party of them here, ma’am?—a bachelors’ breakfast!”
In the presence of that cake this observation seemed to mask an irony
so shrewd that Mrs. Berry could barely contain herself. She felt she
must speak. Making her face as deplorably propitiating as she could,
she began:
“Sir, may I beg for to know your name?”
Mr. Harley accorded her request.
Groaning in the clutch of a pitiless truth, she continued:
“And you are Mr. Harley, that was—oh! and you’ve come for Mr.?”—
Mr. Richard Feverel was the gentleman Mr. Harley had come for.
“Oh! and it’s no mistake, and he’s of Raynham Abbey?” Mrs. Berry
inquired.
Adrian, very much amused, assured her that he was born and bred there.
“His father’s Sir Austin?” wailed the black-satin bunch from behind her
handkerchief.
Adrian verified Richard’s descent.
“Oh, then, what have I been and done!” she cried, and stared blankly at
her visitor. “I been and married my baby! I been and married the bread
out of my own mouth. O Mr. Harley! Mr. Harley! I knew you when you was
a boy that big, and wore jackets; and all of you. And it’s my softness
that’s my ruin, for I never can resist a man’s asking. Look at that
cake, Mr. Harley!”
Adrian followed her directions quite coolly. “Wedding-cake, ma’am!” he
said.
“Bride-cake it is, Mr. Harley!”
“Did you make it yourself, ma’am?”
The quiet ease of the question overwhelmed Mrs. Berry and upset that
train of symbolic representations by which she was seeking to make him
guess the catastrophe and spare her the furnace of confession.
“I did not make it myself, Mr. Harley,” she replied. “It’s a bought
cake, and I’m a lost woman. Little I dreamed when I had him in my arms
a baby that I should some day be marrying him out of my own house! I
little dreamed that! Oh, why did he come to me! Don’t you remember his
old nurse, when he was a baby in arms, that went away so sudden, and no
fault of hers, Mr. Harley! The very mornin’ after the night you got
into Mr. Benson’s cellar, and got so tipsy on his Madeary—I remember it
as clear as yesterday!—and Mr. Benson was that angry he threatened to
use the whip to you, and I helped put you to bed. I’m that very woman.”
Adrian smiled placidly at these reminiscences of his guileless youthful
life.
“Well, ma’am! well?” he said. He would bring her to the furnace.
“Won’t you see it all, kind sir?” Mrs. Berry appealed to him in
pathetic dumb show.
Doubtless by this time Adrian did see it all, and was mentally cursing
at Folly, and reckoning the immediate consequences, but he looked
uninstructed, his peculiar dimple-smile was undisturbed, his
comfortable full-bodied posture was the same. “Well, ma’am?” he spurred
her on.
Mrs. Berry burst forth: “It were done this mornin’, Mr. Harley, in the
church, at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty to, by licence.”
Adrian was now obliged to comprehend a case of matrimony. “Oh!” he
said, like one who is as hard as facts, and as little to be moved:
“Somebody was married this morning; was it Mr. Thompson, or Mr.
Feverel?”
Mrs. Berry shuffled up to Ripton, and removed the shawl from him,
saying: “Do he look like a new married bridegroom, Mr. Harley?”
Adrian inspected the oblivious Ripton with philosophic gravity.
“This young gentleman was at church this morning?” he asked.
“Oh! quite reasonable and proper then,” Mrs. Berry begged him to
understand.
“Of course, ma’am.” Adrian lifted and let fall the stupid inanimate
limbs of the gone wretch, puckering his mouth queerly. “You were all
reasonable and proper, ma’am. The principal male performer, then, is my
cousin, Mr. Feverel? He was married by you, this morning, by licence at
your parish church, and came here, and ate a hearty breakfast, and left
intoxicated.”
Mrs. Berry flew out. “He never drink a drop, sir. A more moderate young
gentleman you never see. Oh! don’t ye think that now, Mr. Harley. He
was as upright and master of his mind as you be.”
“Ay!” the wise youth nodded thanks to her for the comparison, “I mean
the other form of intoxication.”
Mrs. Berry sighed. She could say nothing on that score.
Adrian desired her to sit down, and compose herself, and tell him
circumstantially what had been done.
She obeyed, in utter perplexity at his perfectly composed demeanour.
Mrs. Berry, as her recital declared, was no other than that identical
woman who once in old days had dared to behold the baronet behind his
mask, and had ever since lived in exile from the Raynham world on a
little pension regularly paid to her as an indemnity. She was that
woman, and the thought of it made her almost accuse Providence for the
betraying excess of softness it had endowed her with. How was she to
recognize her baby grown a man? He came in a feigned name; not a word
of the family was mentioned. He came like an ordinary mortal, though
she felt something more than ordinary to him—she knew she did. He came
bringing a beautiful young lady, and on what grounds could she turn her
back on them? Why, seeing that all was chaste and legal, why should she
interfere to make them unhappy—so few the chances of happiness in this
world! Mrs. Berry related the seizure of her ring.
“One wrench,” said the sobbing culprit, “one, and my ring was off!”
She had no suspicions, and the task of writing her name in the
vestry-book had been too enacting for a thought upon the other
signatures.
“I daresay you were exceedingly sorry for what you had done,” said
Adrian.
“Indeed, sir,” moaned Berry, “I were, and am.”
“And would do your best to rectify the mischief—eh, ma’am?”
“Indeed, and indeed, sir, I would,” she protested solemnly.
“—As, of course, you should—knowing the family. Where may these
lunatics have gone to spend the Moon?”
Mrs. Berry swimmingly replied: “To the Isle—I don’t quite know, sir!”
she snapped the indication short, and jumped out of the pit she had
fallen into. Repentant as she might be, those dears should not be
pursued and cruelly balked of their young bliss! “To-morrow, if you
please, Mr. Harley: not to-day!”
“A pleasant spot,” Adrian observed, smiling at his easy prey.
By a measurement of dates he discovered that the bridegroom had brought
his bride to the house on the day he had quitted Raynham, and this was
enough to satisfy Adrian’s mind that there had been concoction and
chicanery. Chance, probably, had brought him to the old woman: chance
certainly had not brought him to the young one.
“Very well, ma’am,” he said, in answer to her petitions for his
favourable offices with Sir Austin in behalf of her little pension and
the bridal pair, “I will tell him you were only a blind agent in the
affair, being naturally soft, and that you trust he will bless the
consummation. He will be in town to-morrow morning; but one of you two
must see him to-night. An emetic kindly administered will set our
friend here on his legs. A bath and a clean shirt, and he might go. I
don’t see why your name should appear at all. Brush him up, and send
him to Bellingham by the seven o’clock train. He will find his way to
Raynham; he knows the neighbourhood best in the dark. Let him go and
state the case. Remember, one of you must go.”
With this fair prospect of leaving a choice of a perdition between the
couple of unfortunates, for them to fight and lose all their virtues
over, Adrian said, “Good morning.”
Mrs. Berry touchingly arrested him. “You won’t refuse a piece of his
cake, Mr. Harley?”
“Oh, dear, no, ma’am,” Adrian turned to the cake with alacrity. “I
shall claim a very large piece. Richard has a great many friends who
will rejoice to eat his wedding-cake. Cut me a fair quarter, Mrs.
Berry. Put it in paper, if you please. I shall be delighted to carry it
to them, and apportion it equitably according to their several degrees
of relationship.”
Mrs. Berry cut the cake. Somehow, as she sliced through it, the
sweetness and hapless innocence of the bride was presented to her, and
she launched into eulogies of Lucy, and clearly showed how little she
regretted her conduct. She vowed that they seemed made for each other;
that both, were beautiful; both had spirit; both were innocent; and to
part them, or make them unhappy, would be, Mrs. Berry wrought herself
to cry aloud, oh, such a pity!
Adrian listened to it as the expression of a matter-of-fact opinion. He
took the huge quarter of cake, nodded multitudinous promises, and left
Mrs. Berry to bless his good heart.
“So dies the System!” was Adrian’s comment in the street. “And now let
prophets roar! He dies respectably in a marriage-bed, which is more
than I should have foretold of the monster. Meantime,” he gave the cake
a dramatic tap, “I’ll go sow nightmares.”