CHAPTER XXXI
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."
CHAPTER XXXII
Adrian really bore the news he had heard with creditable disinterestedness, and admirable repression of anything beneath the dignity of a philosopher. When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them: their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more comical still. On this intellectual eminence the wise youth had built his castle, and he had lived in it from an early period. Astonishment never shook the foundations, nor did envy of greater heights tempt him to relinquish the security of his stronghold, for he saw none. Jugglers he saw running up ladders that overtopped him, and air-balloons scaling the empyrean; but the former came precipitately down again, and the latter were at the mercy of the winds; while he remained tranquil on his solid unambitious ground, fitting his morality to the laws, his conscience to his morality, his comfort to his conscience. Not that voluntarily he cut himself off from his fellows: on the contrary, his sole amusement was their society. Alone he was rather dull, as a man who beholds but one thing must naturally be. Study of the animated varieties of that one thing excited him sufficiently to think life a pleasant play; and the faculties he had forfeited to hold his elevated position he could serenely enjoy by contemplation of them in others. Thus:—wonder at Master Richard's madness: though he himself did not experience it, he was eager to mark the effect on his beloved relatives. As he carried along his vindictive hunch of cake, he shaped out their different attitudes of amaze, bewilderment, horror; passing by some personal chagrin in the prospect. For his patron had projected a journey, commencing with Paris, culminating on the Alps, and lapsing in Rome: a delightful journey to show Richard the highways of History and tear him from the risk of further ignoble fascinations, that his spirit might be altogether bathed in freshness and revived. This had been planned during Richard's absence to surprise him.
Now the dream of travel was to Adrian what the love of woman is to the race of young men. It supplanted that foolishness. It was his Romance, as we say; that buoyant anticipation on which in youth we ride the airs, and which, as we wax older and too heavy for our atmosphere, hardens to the Hobby, which, if an obstinate animal, is a safer horse, and conducts man at a slower pace to the sexton. Adrian had never travelled. He was aware that his romance was earthly and had discomforts only to be evaded by the one potent talisman possessed by his patron. His Alp would hardly be grand to him without an obsequious landlord in the foreground: he must recline on Mammon's imperial cushions in order to moralize becomingly on the ancient world. The search for pleasure at the expense of discomfort, as frantic lovers woo their mistresses to partake the shelter of a but and batten on a crust, Adrian deemed the bitterness of beggarliness. Let his sweet mistress be given him in the pomp and splendour due to his superior emotions, or not at all. Consequently the wise youth had long nursed an ineffectual passion, and it argued a great nature in him, that at the moment when his wishes were to be crowned, he should look with such slight touches of spleen at the gorgeous composite fabric of Parisian cookery and Roman antiquities crumbling into unsubstantial mockery. Assuredly very few even of the philosophers would have turned away uncomplainingly to meaner delights the moment after.
Hippias received the first portion of the cake.
He was sitting by the window in his hotel, reading. He had fought down his breakfast with more than usual success, and was looking forward to his dinner at the Foreys' with less than usual timidity.
"Ah! glad you've come, Adrian," he said, and expanded his chest. "I was afraid I should have to ride down. This is kind of you. We'll walk down together through the park. It's absolutely dangerous to walk alone in these streets. My opinion is, that orange-peel lasts all through the year now, and will till legislation puts a stop to it. I give you my word I slipped on a piece of orange-peel yesterday afternoon in Piccadilly, and I thought I was down! I saved myself by a miracle."
"You have an appetite, I hope?" asked Adrian.
"I think I shall get one, after a bit of a walk," chirped Hippias. "Yes.
I think I feel hungry now."
"Charmed to hear it," said Adrian, and began unpinning his parcel on his knees. "How should you define Folly?" he checked the process to inquire.
"Hm!" Hippias meditated; he prided himself on being oracular when such questions were addressed to him. "I think I should define it to be a slide."
"Very good definition. In other words, a piece of orange-peel; once on it, your life and limbs are in danger, and you are saved by a miracle. You must present that to the Pilgrim. And the monument of folly, what would that be?"
Hippias meditated anew. "All the human race on one another's shoulders."
He chuckled at the sweeping sourness of the instance.
"Very good," Adrian applauded, "or in default of that, some symbol of the thing, say; such as this of which I have here brought you a chip."
Adrian displayed the quarter of the cake.
"This is the monument made portable—eh?"
"Cake!" cried Hippias, retreating to his chair to dramatize his intense disgust. "You're right of them that eat it. If I—if I don't mistake," he peered at it, "the noxious composition bedizened in that way is what they call wedding-cake. It's arrant poison! Who is it you want to kill? What are you carrying such stuff about for?"
Adrian rang the bell for a knife. "To present you with your due and proper portion. You will have friends and relatives, and can't be saved from them, not even by miracle. It is a habit which exhibits, perhaps, the unconscious inherent cynicism of the human mind, for people who consider that they have reached the acme of mundane felicity, to distribute this token of esteem to their friends, with the object probably" (he took the knife from a waiter and went to the table to slice the cake) "of enabling those friends (these edifices require very delicate incision—each particular currant and subtle condiment hangs to its neighbour—a wedding-cake is evidently the most highly civilized of cakes, and partakes of the evils as well as the advantages of civilization!)—I was saying, they send us these love-tokens, no doubt (we shall have to weigh out the crumbs, if each is to have his fair share) that we may the better estimate their state of bliss by passing some hours in purgatory. This, as far as I can apportion it without weights and scales, is your share, my uncle!"
He pushed the corner of the table bearing the cake towards Hippias.
"Get away!" Hippias vehemently motioned, and started from his chair. "I'll have none of it, I tell you! It's death! It's fifty times worse than that beastly compound Christmas pudding! What fool has been doing this, then? Who dares send me cake? Me! It's an insult."
"You are not compelled to eat any before dinner," said Adrian, pointing the corner of the table after him, "but your share you must take, and appear to consume. One who has done so much to bring about the marriage cannot in conscience refuse his allotment of the fruits. Maidens, I hear, first cook it under their pillows, and extract nuptial dreams therefrom—said to be of a lighter class, taken that way. It's a capital cake, and, upon my honour, you have helped to make it—you have indeed! So here it is."
The table again went at Hippias. He ran nimbly round it, and flung himself on a sofa exhausted, crying: "There!… My appetite's gone for to-day!"
"Then shall I tell Richard that you won't touch a morsel of his cake?" said Adrian, leaning on his two hands over the table and looking at his uncle.
"Richard?"
"Yes, your nephew: my cousin: Richard! Your companion since you've been in town. He's married, you know. Married this morning at Kensington parish church, by licence, at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty to. Married, and gone to spend his honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, a very delectable place for a month's residence. I have to announce to you that, thanks to your assistance, the experiment is launched, sir!"
"Richard married!"
There was something to think and to say in objection to it, but the wits of poor Hippias were softened by the shock. His hand travelled half-way to his forehead, spread out to smooth the surface of that seat of reason, and then fell.
"Surely you knew all about it? you were so anxious to have him in town under your charge…."
"Married?" Hippias jumped up—he had it. "Why, he's under age! he's an infant."
"So he is. But the infant is not the less married. Fib like a man and pay your fee—what does it matter? Any one who is breeched can obtain a licence in our noble country. And the interests of morality demand that it should not be difficult. Is it true—can you persuade anybody that you have known nothing about it?"
"Ha! infamous joke! I wish, sir, you would play your pranks on somebody else," said Hippias, sternly, as he sank back on the sofa. "You've done me up for the day, I can assure you."
Adrian sat down to instil belief by gentle degrees, and put an artistic finish to the work. He had the gratification of passing his uncle through varied contortions, and at last Hippias perspired in conviction, and exclaimed, "This accounts for his conduct to me. That boy must have a cunning nothing short of infernal! I feel…I feel it just here, he drew a hand along his midriff.
"I'm not equal to this world of fools," he added faintly, and shut his eyes. "No, I can't dine. Eat? ha!…no. Go without me!"
Shortly after, Hippias went to bed, saying to himself, as he undressed, "See what comes of our fine schemes! Poor Austin!" and as the pillow swelled over his ears, "I'm not sure that a day's fast won't do me good." The Dyspepsy had bought his philosophy at a heavy price; he had a right to use it.
Adrian resumed the procession of the cake.
He sighted his melancholy uncle Algernon hunting an appetite in the Row, and looking as if the hope ahead of him were also one-legged. The Captain did not pass with out querying the ungainly parcel.
"I hope I carry it ostentatiously enough?" said Adrian.
"Enclosed is wherewithal to quiet the alarm of the land. Now may the maids and wives of Merry England sleep secure. I had half a mind to fix it on a pole, and engage a band to parade it. This is our dear Richard's wedding-cake. Married at half-past eleven this morning, by licence, at the Kensington parish church; his own ring being lost he employed the ring of his beautiful bride's lachrymose land-lady, she standing adjacent by the altar. His farewell to you as a bachelor, and hers as a maid, you can claim on the spot if you think proper, and digest according to your powers."
Algernon let off steam in a whistle. "Thompson, the solicitor's daughter!" he said. "I met them the other day, somewhere about here. He introduced me to her. A pretty little baggage.
"No." Adrian set him right. "'Tis a Miss Desborough, a Roman Catholic dairymaid. Reminds one of pastoral England in the time of the Plantagenets! He's quite equal to introducing her as Thompson's daughter, and himself as Beelzebub's son. However, the wild animal is in Hymen's chains, and the cake is cut. Will you have your morsel?"
"Oh, by all means!—not now." Algernon had an unwonted air of reflection.—" Father know it?"
"Not yet. He will to-night by nine o'clock."
"Then I must see him by seven. Don't say you met me." He nodded, and pricked his horse.
"Wants money!" said Adrian, putting the combustible he carried once more in motion.
The women were the crowning joy of his contemplative mind. He had reserved them for his final discharge. Dear demonstrative creatures! Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest check their fainting fits. On the generic woman one could calculate. Well might The Pilgrim's Scrip say of her that, "She is always at Nature's breast"; not intending it as a compliment. Each woman is Eve throughout the ages; whereas the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam in men has become warier, if not wiser; and weak as he is, has learnt a lesson from time. Probably the Pilgrim's meaning may be taken to be, that Man grows, and Woman does not.