Page 10 of Threads that Remain

“I care for it excessively, in small doses. But I have never yet found a hedge that could hold a conversation, and I own that I have a weakness for conversation.” He looked at her, and there was in the look something a good deal less light than the words. “I find I am having one now that I am rather sorry to see end.”

She found Margaret before the carriages were called, in the little anteroom where the wraps were kept, and seized both her hands.

“Margaret. Margaret, I must tell somebody or I shall burst. I have met him.”

“Met whom?”

“Him. The one. Mr. Wren — Thomas — oh, I do not even know that I am permitted to call him Thomas, but I have been doing it in my head for the last hour, and I do not see how I am to stop.” She was flushed, and bright-eyed, and entirely unlike the composed young philosopher who had promised her mother a catalogue of manners. “He is heir to an earldom, Margaret, and he did not say one word about it until I asked; he would so much rather talk of anything else. He laughed at my camel. He asked me a dozen questions and listened to the answers, which I do not think any man has ever troubled to do in the whole of this Season. I wished the second dance would never end. I am persuaded I made the greatest fool of myself in the whole of Lady Colville’s ballroom, and I find I do not care in the smallest degree.”

“Cecilia, you sound as though you were in love.”

“I believe I am,” said Cecilia, with an expression of the most complete astonishment, as if the idea had only that moment presented itself to her in words. “I believe I am, and I have known him two hours and forty minutes, and I do not care what that says of my understanding. Oh, Margaret, is it not the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?”

“It is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” said Margaret, and kissed her cheek, “and I have never seen you look so well.”

He called the next afternoon. He called, indeed, every afternoon for a fortnight, at an hour that grew gradually and quite unapologetically earlier; and it became the settled custom of the household in Bedford Square that at four o’clock precisely there should be heard, in the street below, the particular smart rattle of a very well-sprung curricle, and that Cecilia, who had generally been dressed and ready since half past three, should go down to be driven round the Park, once, twice, sometimes three times about, in the high spring sunshine, with her colour up and her bonnet-ribbons streaming and Mr. Wren beside her talking a great deal of pleasant nonsense and asking, every day, some new and searching question about Sicily, or Thebes, or the particular quality of the light on the Nile, as though he meant, by patient accumulation, to have the whole of her history by midsummer.

It was in the third week that he came properly, in form, to call upon her parents.

He was announced at five, in a coat of exceptional cut, with a bouquet for Mrs. Aylmer and, for the Professor, a small parcel which proved, upon opening, to contain a fragment of Purbeck marble that he had gone to some trouble to procure, having been told by Cecilia that her father collected such things. He sat for the better part of an hour in the drawing-room in Bedford Square, with Mrs. Aylmer pouring the tea and Margaret in the window-seat with her sewing and pretending very hard not to listen, and he was, the whole of that hour, so easy, so well-bred, so genuinely diverted by the Professor’s account of the Theban tomb, and so unmistakably unable to keep his eyes from Cecilia for more than a minute together, that by the time he took his leave there was not a person in the room who did not privately hope to see a great deal more of him.

“Well,” said Mrs. Aylmer, when the door had shut behind him, in the dry, level voice with which she was accustomed to deliver her most serious judgments, “I have crossed two deserts and a great many customs-houses with that girl’s father, and I flatter myself I know good stone when I am shown it. That young man is sound all the way through.”

“He asked me,” said the Professor, turning the Purbeck marble over in his hands with an expression of real tenderness, “whether I thought Herculaneum would ever be properly cleared in my lifetime, and then he listened to the whole of the answer, twenty minutes though it was, without once looking at the clock. I do not know what he is worth a year, and I find I do not care to ask. I like him.”

Margaret, from the window-seat, said nothing at all; but she put down her sewing, and watched her friend’s face, which had not stopped, since the door closed, being lit from within like a window with a candle behind it, and thought that she had never in her life seen anybody so entirely and so simply happy.

They were engaged within seven weeks. “I knew in five minutes, Meg,” Cecilia said, when it was over, with a look on her wide, bright face that made Margaret turn away to the window; “it was quite absurd. I had never been so sure of anything. It is a great inconvenience, to know one’s mind so quickly; but I do not think I should have missed it for the world.”

Chapter VIII.

It was on the same evening, and in the same ballroom, that Margaret Dashwood was introduced to both of the gentlemen who were to occupy her thoughts for the best part of the ensuing year; and she was introduced to them within a quarter of an hour of each other, without any suspicion whatever of what was in store.

The first was Mr. Rupert Fanshawe. It was quite impossible not to notice him. He was six feet tall, with a great deal of fair hair and an open, laughing, brilliant countenance, and the most graceful manner of bowing that she had seen that Season; and he had a kind of ease in a ballroom that made every other man in it appear to be standing on one foot. He waltzed like an angel. He knew everyone. He had, within five minutes of their being introduced, made her laugh so heartily at an observation about a lady’s turban that a chaperone in the next chair frowned; and Margaret, who had not laughed like that in a ballroom in her life, found that she liked him extremely.

“I am told you broke into a chalk pit in your good gown, the day you met Miss Aylmer,” said Mr. Fanshawe. “Is it true?”

“Quite true.”

“And what did you find?”

“A piece of flint,” said Margaret, “that proved I was right, and Cecilia was wrong.”

“Ah,” said he gravely. “I shall not inquire further into Miss Aylmer’s connections. But I shall insist on knowing everything else. You must tell me all about it. You must tell me from the very beginning, over supper, and you must not on any account leave out the flint.”

She told him. She told him a great deal of it, over supper, and he listened, and laughed, and asked the right questions; and it was some time before she noticed that his questions were always about the people, and never the thing itself; that he wished to hear how Cecilia had looked, ruining her gown, and whether Mrs. Jennings had been very much shocked, and whether it was quite proper for a young lady to be seen with a hammer; and that when she began to describe the stone itself, with some warmth, he interrupted, very kindly, to say that she must on no account say “stratum” at supper, since it frightened the Duchess. It was all done so good-humouredly that she laughed again. But there was a small cold moment, in the middle of the laughter, when it struck her that she had never, in a conversation of an hour, been asked what she thought.

“What do you do with your mornings?” she asked him, later, during a country dance.

“I ride in the Park,” said Mr. Fanshawe promptly. “Then I dress. Then I call upon people. Then I dress again.”

“And in the afternoons?”

“In the afternoons,” said he, and his eyes danced, “I do the same things over again, but faster.”

She laughed; she could not help it; and she went home that night in a state of great pleasure and lay awake for a full hour trying to decide why the pleasure felt, on reflection, so very like the sensation of having eaten too much cake.

The second gentleman had been standing for a quarter of an hour at the far end of the room, alone, with a glass of lemonade in his hand, gazing with the deepest attention at the chimneypiece.