A month had passed when Adrian wrote this letter.
He was very comfortable; so of course he thought Time
was doing his duty. Not a word did he say of
Richard’s return, and for some reason or other
neither Richard nor Lucy spoke of it now.
Lady Blandish wrote back: “His father thinks
he has refused to come to him. By your utter
silence on the subject, I fear that it must be so.
Make him come. Bring him by force. Insist
on his coming. Is he mad? He must come at
once.”
To this Adrian replied, after a contemplative comfortable
lapse of a day or two, which might be laid to his
efforts to adopt the lady’s advice, “The
point is that the half man declines to come without
the whole man. The terrible question of sex is
our obstruction.”
Lady Blandish was in despair. She had no positive
assurance that the baronet would see his son; the
mask put them all in the dark; but she thought she
saw in Sir Austin irritation that the offender, at
least when the opening to come and make his peace
seemed to be before him, should let days and weeks
go by. She saw through the mask sufficiently not
to have any hope of his consenting to receive the
couple at present; she was sure that his equanimity
was fictitious; but she pierced no farther, or she
might have started and asked herself, Is this the heart
of a woman?
The lady at last wrote to Richard. She said:
“Come instantly, and come alone.”
Then Richard, against his judgment, gave way.
“My father is not the man I thought him!”
he exclaimed sadly, and Lucy felt his eyes saying
to her: “And you, too, are not the woman
I thought you.” Nothing could the poor
little heart reply but strain to his bosom and sleeplessly
pray in his arms all the night.
Three weeks after Richard arrived in town, his cousin
Clare was married, under the blessings of her energetic
mother, and with the approbation of her kinsfolk,
to the husband that had been expeditiously chosen for
her. The gentleman, though something more than
twice the age of his bride, had no idea of approaching
senility for many long connubial years to come.
Backed by his tailor and his hairdresser, he presented
no such bad figure at the altar, and none would have
thought that he was an ancient admirer of his bride’s
mama, as certainly none knew he had lately proposed
for Mrs. Doria before there was any question of her
daughter. These things were secrets; and the
elastic and happy appearance of Mr. John Todhunter
did not betray them at the altar. Perhaps he would
rather have married the mother. He was a man
of property, well born, tolerably well educated, and
had, when Mrs. Doria rejected him for the first time,
the reputation of being a fool—which a
wealthy man may have in his youth; but as he lived
on, and did not squander his money—amassed
it, on the contrary, and did not seek to go into Parliament,
and did other negative wise things, the world’s
opinion, as usual, veered completely round, and John
Todhunter was esteemed a shrewd, sensible man—only
not brilliant; that he was brilliant could not be
said of him. In fact, the man could hardly talk,
and it was a fortunate provision that no impromptu
deliveries were required of him in the marriage-service.
