THE PHILOSOPHER APPEARS IN PERSON
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 downward 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 waxed
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
virtue 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."