Page 11 of Threads that Remain

It was a handsome chimneypiece, of some dark grey stone streaked with cream, and it was evidently the pride of the house; but Margaret, coming round the room on the arm of Mrs. Aylmer at the end of a set, had no idea, until she came quite close, what could have so engaged the stranger. Then she saw it. The stone was full of ammonites, in coils the size of dinner plates, grey against grey; and the stranger, with the air of a man who has been counting them, and has lost the count, and is beginning again, was moving his lips.

“Nineteen,” said Margaret, before she could stop herself. “And two more, behind the candelabrum.”

He turned. He had a plain, thoughtful face, but with no distinguishing features; a quantity of dark hair which had escaped from whatever discipline had been applied to it before he came out; and a pair of brown eyes, which lit, at the sight of her, with a sudden and quite unfashionable delight.

“Twenty-one,” said he. “You are perfectly right. I had made it eighteen. I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was — you must forgive me. It is Blue Lias. It is from Lyme, unless I am much mistaken; it has the true look of the Charmouth beds. Some person has been very extravagant.”

“It is from Lyme,” said Margaret, “because I have seen the quarry. I was born in Sussex,” she added, “but I have lived in Devon and Dorsetshire since I was a child, and I have walked the beach at Charmouth for five years. I have a small tooth from an ichthyosaurus in my pocket, at this moment, which I bought from Miss Anning for eight shillings.”

He looked at her for a moment as though he had been struck.

“You have,” said he, “Miss Anning’s?”

“You have met her?”

“I have been at Lyme three times, and I have never yet succeeded in being sold anything,” said the stranger, with rueful reverence. “She says I ask too many questions. But I have a great regard for her. She knows more about what lies in that cliff than any man in the Geological Society; and there are a good many of us who would be glad to say so, if we were not afraid of being thought ungallant.” He seemed to become suddenly aware of himself, and of the ballroom, and coloured to the roots of his hair. “I am Simon Tregarth,” said he. “I am extremely sorry. I had no business to speak to you. I have not been introduced.”

“You have been introduced,” said Mrs. Aylmer, sailing gravely up. “By me. Mr. Tregarth, of Cornwall, who is a fellow of the Geological Society and a very sound mineralogist. Miss Dashwood, who has broken more rock in Dorsetshire than the rest of this room put together, and, I think, would rather not dance, either. I shall leave you to it.”

She left them. They talked until another young gentleman, with very distinguished features but not so interesting conversation, asked Miss Dashwood for the next dance. She accepted, but throughout the night, between dances, she looked for the interesting mineralogist and found herself in conversation with him again and again. He never asked her to dance, which she did not wonder at until after the night ended. She would not be surprised if it were the case that he did not dance in general. He obviously considered other matters more important. However understandable that was to her, she would have liked to have been asked, as it would have given her more opportunities to ask him further about his own collection.

If this account should seem to suggest that Miss Dashwood, on that night, had fallen in love with Mr. Tregarth, it would be doing her a gross injustice; for it was not at all the case. She had thought him unfortunately rather plain. She had thought him a good deal too diffident. She had thought that he had the most agreeable talk that she had heard thus far this season, and she had found, upon going home, that she was in the most cheerful frame of mind that she had known in London, and had been so for an hour without noticing.

That was all. It was the sort of pleasure that one takes in a new book. She did not think of Mr. Tregarth as a suitor, for he had not the least appearance of being one; and he, poor man, who had spent three days rehearsing the various ways in which he might ask to be allowed to call, and had discarded them all, presented himself the following afternoon at the house in Bedford Square with a box under his arm, and asked, with a face of the most alarming solemnity, if he might have the honour of showing Professor Aylmer a piece of Cornish fluor-spar.

It was a most respectable pretext. The Professor, who was in the library, with his feet up and The Times over his head, sprang from the sofa like a boy, and had his visitor into the study in a moment; and Mrs. Dashwood, who had witnessed the arrival from the window, and who had at the time a good deal else on her mind, observed to her daughter that it was pleasant that the Professor should have a friend.

He came again the next day, and again the day after; and by the end of the month, it had become so much a matter of course to find Mr. Tregarth upon the library sofa at any hour between two and six, arguing with the Professor over a tray of stones, that Mrs. Aylmer had a chair made expressly for him. It was in that chair that he sat, on an afternoon in June, as Margaret came in from a drive in the Park, with a bouquet in one hand and a note in the other, and both, for reasons of which she was hardly aware, immediately hidden behind her back.

“Miss Dashwood,” said Mr. Tregarth, rising. “I hope you had a pleasant drive.”

“I had a very pleasant drive,” said Margaret. “Mr. Fanshawe drove slowly, for the park was full of carriages. I was told about a great many people whom we met along the path.”

“That must have been a great pleasure.”

“It was a great pleasure,” said Margaret; and, to her intense surprise, she found that she did not in the least believe herself. “The weather was very fine.”

Chapter IX.

Cecilia was married on the last Saturday of June, at St. George’s in Bloomsbury, in a plain white gown that she had insisted upon designing herself, with a wreath of white roses upon her dark hair and a nosegay from the succession-houses at Ashworth, sent up by the bridegroom’s mother, in her hand. It was a smaller wedding than the Earl’s man of business had privately hoped for, the Countess of Ashworth having taken one look at her new daughter-in-law and declared, with evident relief, that she had never seen the use of great crowds at these things either. The Professor, who gave away his daughter in a state of pride and terror, was obliged, at the words who giveth this woman, to be assisted by his wife in finding his voice; and Margaret, in the front row, in pale green silk, with a handkerchief in each hand, saw her dearest friend go up the aisle on her father’s arm and thought that she had never seen anything so perfectly right in her life.

They were to live in Portman Square, in a tall handsome house with a great many windows, until such time as Ashworth itself should be theirs; and it was privately agreed between them, within the first week, that they should go down to Wiltshire as often as the old Earl and Countess could be prevailed upon to have them, for Cecilia had discovered, to her own considerable surprise, that she did not object to a hedge nearly so much as she had once supposed, provided the right person were standing on the other side of it. Margaret kissed her, at the breakfast, in a corner, and told her that she was a perfect fool to look so happy; and Cecilia, with a look of transparent joy, said she knew it, and that she did not mean to stop.

It was that evening, after the last guest had gone, and the house in Bedford Square had settled into the queer, echoing quiet that follows a great event, that Mrs. Aylmer sent for her.

She was in the library, alone, in a chair by the empty hearth; and she looked, in the twilight, older than Margaret had ever seen her. But she looked up as her guest came in, with the same keen, direct, weather-beaten gaze that had once been turned upon the roof of a Theban tomb, and said at once, without preamble:

“Sit down, child. I have something to ask you, and I want you to give me an honest answer, and not a polite one.”

Margaret sat.

“I have made up my mind.” She drew a breath. “Our daughter is settled. She is as happy as any creature I ever saw. We have done everything we set out to do for her, and we are, neither of us, growing any younger; and if we are to see the other side of the world, my dear, it must be now. We are going to make a tour of some of our favourite destinations, such as a certain volcano we have talked of for some time. We leave in August.”

“Oh, Mrs. Aylmer —”

“I have not done.” She leaned forward. “We should like you to come with us.”

There was a pause, in which Margaret heard, distinctly, the clock in the hall, and the sound of a carriage in the square, and her own heart.