For, as Geoffrey Barry, with contempt in his cold voice, and contempt, too, upon his handsome features, had calmly presented the Beau to the real Ariadne Thorne, the other had become almost beside himself--had, indeed, exhibited so awful a picture of a man transformed by rage and despair as to appal all those who looked upon him, various as their characters and experiences of life were.
"You!" he cried. "You!" addressing Sir Geoffrey, his features distorted, his lower jaw working horribly above that monstrous chin, "You in it, too! You beggarly sailor! You! You!" Then, before any could suspect to what length his fury would carry him, he had wrenched the dress sword he carried by his side from out its sheath, and would have made a pass at the other--indeed, did half do so. But, swift as lightning, that pass was thwarted--by two people! By his newly made wife, who seized his arm even as he would have plunged the blade into Sir Geoffrey's breast, she being aided by Lewis Granger, who, with his hat, which he still carried in his hand, although they were by now outside the church, struck it up--he knocking it from out his hand, so that it fell clattering on the stones at his feet.
"Madman! Fool!" Granger whispered in his ear, "do you wish to finish your morning's work with murder? To end your days at Tyburn?" Then, turning to one of the friends of overnight, he said: "For God's sake help me to get him into the coach. He is mad."
Somehow it was done; in some way the deluded rogue was pushed and hustled into the carriage which had brought him in triumph from the spot where he had met Mrs. Pottle and Anne, and half-delirious with rage, Bufton was borne away. Yet not before he had shrieked such awful objurgations, such curses and blasphemies on the heads of all around him, including Ariadne and her lover, combined with such terrible threats of vengeance, that more than one of the women present stopped their ears.
"Now," said Geoffrey, "now, let us begone, too. Come, Ariadne, I will take you home."
Then he turned to Mrs. Pottle and Anne--who stood close by her mother's side--and bade them also return to the house in Westminster.
"Yet, my poor girl," he said to the latter, "I fear it is but coals of fire you have heaped on your own head. Your revenge for your sister's wrongs has been terrible, nay, supreme; but at what a price to you! What a price! You have closed the door against your own happiness for ever."
"I care not," Anne said. "Care not at all. When her body--poor little Kate's body--was taken from out the river--oh, mother! you remember--I swore that if ever the chance came, I would avenge her. Ah! Sir Geoffrey, Sir Geoffrey, if you had known how she besought him to fulfil his promise--to marry her--to make her an honest woman--then--you--would not----"
"I am not surprised," Geoffrey Barry answered, "knowing all, as I do now, from Miss Thorne. Yet, I fear you have paid too dearly for it."
"She would do it, Sir Jaffray," Mrs. Pottle moaned between her sobs. "She would do it, though I told her there was no call. Oh! why, why, should that monster have had two of my daughters for his victims? One of whom he undone and drove to her death, the other who can never be no honest man's wife now."