“It’s all—” Mrs. Berry pressed at her heart and leaned sideways, “it’s all stomach, my dear. Don’t ye mind,” and becoming aware of her unfashionable behaviour, she trailed off to the shelter of the elms.
“You have a singular manner with old ladies,” said Sir Austin to his son, after Berry had been swept aside. “Scarcely courteous. She behaved like a mad woman, certainly.—Are you ill, my son?”
Richard was death-pale, his strong form smitten through with weakness. The baronet sought Adrian’s eye. Adrian had seen Lucy as they passed, and he had a glimpse of Richard’s countenance while disposing of Berry. Had Lucy recognized them, he would have gone to her unhesitatingly. As she did not, he thought it well, under the circumstances, to leave matters as they were. He answered the baronet’s look with a shrug.
“Are you ill, Richard?” Sir Austin again asked his son.
“Come on, sir! come on!” cried Richard.
His father’s further meditations, as they stepped briskly to the Foreys’, gave poor Berry a character which one who lectures on matrimony, and has kissed but three men in her life, shrieks to hear the very title of.
“Richard will go to his wife to-morrow,” Sir Austin said to Adrian some time before they went in to dinner.
Adrian asked him if he had chanced to see a young fair-haired lady by the side of the old one Richard had treated so peculiarly; and to the baronet’s acknowledgment that he remembered to have observed such a person, Adrian said: “That was his wife, sir.”
Sir Austin could not dissect the living subject. As if a bullet had torn open the young man’s skull, and some blast of battle laid his palpitating organization bare, he watched every motion of his brain and his heart; and with the grief and terror of one whose mental habit was ever to pierce to extremes. Not altogether conscious that he had hitherto played with life, he felt that he was suddenly plunged into the stormful reality of it. He projected to speak plainly to his son on all points that night.
“Richard is very gay,” Mrs. Doris, whispered her brother.