RELATES HOW PREPARATIONS FOR ACTION WERE CONDUCTED UNDER THE APRIL
OF LOVERS
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 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-conventional 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
before-hand'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 find 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 dockments 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 on 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
averse 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 woful 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 anywheres 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 resist
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.