The Essential George Meredith Collection. George Meredith
He did duty in the vestry a few minutes, and then said to his aunt:
"Now I'll go."
"You'll come to the breakfast, child? The Foreys"--
He cut her short. "I've stood for the family, and I'll do no more. I won't pretend to eat and make merry over it."
"Richard!"
"Good-bye."
She had attained her object and she wisely gave way.
"Well. Go and kiss Clare, and shake his hand. Pray, pray be civil."
She turned to Adrian, and said: "He is going. You must go with him, and find some means of keeping him, or he'll be running off to that woman. Now, no words--go!"
Richard bade Clare farewell. She put up her mouth to him humbly, but he kissed her on the forehead.
"Do not cease to love me," she said in a quavering whisper in his ear.
Mr. Todhunter stood beaming and endangering the art of the hairdresser with his pocket-handkerchief. Now he positively was married, he thought he would rather have the daughter than the mother, which is a reverse of the order of human thankfulness at a gift of the Gods.
"Richard, my boy!" he said heartily, "congratulate me."
"I should be happy to, if I could," sedately replied the hero, to the consternation of those around. Nodding to the bridesmaids and bowing to the old lady, he passed out.
Adrian, who had been behind him, deputed to watch for a possible unpleasantness, just hinted to John: "You know, poor fellow, he has got into a mess with his marriage."
"Oh! ah! yes!" kindly said John, "poor fellow!"
All the puppets then rolled off to the breakfast.
Adrian hurried after Richard in an extremely discontented state of mind. Not to be at the breakfast and see the best of the fun, disgusted him. However, he remembered that he was a philosopher, and the strong disgust he felt was only expressed in concentrated cynicism on every earthly matter engendered by the conversation. They walked side by side into Kensington Gardens. The hero was mouthing away to himself, talking by fits.
Presently he faced Adrian, crying: "And I might have stopped it! I see it now! I might have stopped it by going straight to him, and asking him if he dared marry a girl who did not love him. And I never thought of it. Good heaven! I feel this miserable affair on my conscience."
"Ah!" groaned Adrian. "An unpleasant cargo for the conscience, that! I would rather carry anything on mine than a married couple. Do you purpose going to him now?"
The hero soliloquized: "He's not a bad sort of man."...
"Well, he's not a Cavalier," said Adrian, "and that's why you wonder your aunt selected him, no doubt? He's decidedly of the Roundhead type, with the Puritan extracted, or inoffensive, if latent."
"There's the double infamy!" cried Richard, "that a man you can't call bad, should do this damned thing!"
"Well, it's hard we can't find a villain."
"He would have listened to me, I'm sure."
"Go to him now, Richard, my son. Go to him now. It's not yet too late. Who knows? If he really has a noble elevated superior mind--though not a Cavalier in person, he may be one at heart--he might, to please you, and since you put such stress upon it, abstain...perhaps with some loss of dignity, but never mind. And the request might be singular, or seem so, but everything has happened before in this world, you know, my dear boy. And what an infinite consolation it is for the eccentric, that reflection!"
The hero was impervious to the wise youth. He stared at him as if he were but a speck in the universe he visioned.
It was provoking that Richard should be Adrian's best subject for cynical pastime, in the extraordinary heterodoxies he started, and his worst in the way he took it; and the wise youth, against his will, had to feel as conscious of the young man's imaginative mental armour, as he was of his muscular physical.
"The same sort of day!" mused Richard, looking up. "I suppose my father's right. We make our own fates, and nature has nothing to do with it."
Adrian yawned.
"Some difference in the trees, though," Richard continued abstractedly.
"Growing bald at the top," said Adrian.
"Will you believe that my aunt Helen compared the conduct of that wretched slave Clare to Lucy's, who, she had the cruel insolence to say, entangled me into marriage?" the hero broke out loudly and rapidly. "You know--I told you, Adrian--how I had to threaten and insist, and how she pleaded, and implored me to wait."
"Ah! hum!" mumbled Adrian.
"You remember my telling you?" Richard was earnest to hear her exonerated.
"Pleaded and implored, my dear boy? Oh, no doubt she did. Where's the lass that doesn't."
"Call my wife by another name, if you please."
"The generic title can't be cancelled because of your having married one of the body, my son."
"She did all she could to persuade me to wait!" emphasized Richard.
Adrian shook his head with a deplorable smile.
"Come, come, my good Ricky; not all! not all!"
Richard bellowed: "What more could she have done?"
"She could have shaved her head, for instance."
This happy shaft did stick. With a furious exclamation Richard shot in front, Adrian following him; and asking him (merely to have his assumption verified), whether he did not think she might have shaved her head? and, presuming her to have done so, whether, in candour, he did not think he would have waited--at least till she looked less of a rank lunatic?
After a minute or so, the wise youth was but a fly buzzing about Richard's head. Three weeks of separation from Lucy, and an excitement deceased, caused him to have soft yearnings for the dear lovely home-face. He told Adrian it was his intention to go down that night. Adrian immediately became serious. He was at a loss what to invent to detain him, beyond the stale fiction that his father was coming to-morrow. He rendered homage to the genius of woman in these straits. "My aunt," he thought, "would have the lie ready; and not only that, but she would take care it did its work."
At this juncture the voice of a cavalier in the Row hailed them, proving to be the Honourable Peter Brayder, Lord Mountfalcon's parasite. He greeted them very cordially; and Richard, remembering some fun they had in the Island, asked him to dine with them; postponing his return till the next day. Lucy was his. It was even sweet to dally with the delight of seeing her.
The Hon. Peter was one who did honour to the body he belonged to. Though not so tall as a west of London footman, he was as shapely; and he had a power of making his voice insinuating, or arrogant, as it suited the exigencies of his profession. He had not a rap of money in the world; yet he rode a horse, lived high, expended largely. The world said that the Hon. Peter was salaried by his Lordship, and that, in common with that of Parasite, he exercised the ancient companion profession. This the world said, and still smiled at the Hon. Peter; for he was an engaging fellow, and where he went not Lord Mountfalcon would not go.
They had a quiet little hotel dinner, ordered by Adrian, and made a square at the table, Ripton Thompson being the fourth. Richard sent down to his office to fetch him, and the two friends shook hands for the first time since the great deed had been executed. Deep was the Old Dog's delight to hear the praises of his Beauty sounded by such aristocratic lips as the Hon. Peter Brayder's. All through the dinner he was throwing