Page 14 of Threads that Remain

“That is quite true. It makes it a great deal easier to say.”

It had been a family enterprise. The Colonel, who was never in his life seen to mount anything higher than a horse, had proved to possess a remarkable eye for joists; Edward, who had never before held a hammer, had been discovered to have a surprising talent for knots; and the design, which was elaborate, and included a rope ladder, a trap-door, a pulley for hauling up provisions, and a small flag, had been drawn up by Sarah Ferrars, at the age of four, on the back of one of her father’s sermons, and adopted with hardly any alterations. It stood some ten feet from the ground, upon three good branches, and was reached by a ladder that Mary Ferrars had twice tried to have removed, on grounds of safety, and been overruled by the united voices of everyone else.

The children were all up there or were at any rate on their way. It was a Saturday, and they had been let out after their lessons, and the great oak was a scene of considerable animation.

Mary, who was six, and by birth and temperament the eldest, sat with her back against the trunk and a book upon her knee, in the attitude of a magistrate presiding over a court of assize. She was a straight, fair, grave little girl, with her father’s eyes and her mother’s great sense of responsibility; and she was of the opinion that nobody in the world, herself excepted, could be trusted to remember that it was nearly four o’clock and that the tea was at half past.

“You are to come down by five minutes to the half hour,” said she to the tree at large. “Mamma says. And Sarah, you have got mud all down your front.”

“It is only a little,” said Sarah, from a bough above her head.

“It is up to your ears.”

Sarah was five, and her mother’s second daughter; she was small, brown, wiry, and quite fearless, with a tangle of light-brown hair that had never in her life stayed in a ribbon, and a scab upon each elbow that had been there since Whitsun. She was, it was generally allowed, not at all like her sister; she was, it was said by some who had known her aunts, remarkably like a certain aunt, in a certain year, in the way she went at life; and she had already discovered, at the age of four, that the best of all games in the world was the one in which somebody said let us pretend.

“We are pretending,” said Sarah, “that we are in Peru.”

“Do you want me to tell you what it is like in Peru?” Mary asked, trying to be helpful, having recently read two pages on the subject in a book from her father’s library.

“Aunt Margaret has told us what it is like,” inserted Anne, also age five, older than Sarah by two months.

“Yes! Thank you, Anne,” Sarah replied, now with hands on her hips. “It is a very high place, with llamas, and a river, and a great many stones. I shall be the Captain, and Henry shall be the guide, since he has brought the Colonel’s big hat, and Anne shall be the artist, who draws the llamas. And Ned,” said Sarah, with a sudden sweetness, looking down at the third occupant of the treehouse, “shall be the inter-,” she looked at Henry to supply the answer.

“Interpreter,” Henry supplied.

There was a small sound from the corner, and Ned Ferrars, who was three, put his thumb in his mouth.

He was a round, fair, quiet boy, with his father’s soft eyes and his father’s habit of looking at the floor when addressed by strangers; and he had been carried up the ladder that morning, under protest, by his father, and set down in the corner of the platform, where he had remained ever since, watching the whole affair with an expression of the most solemn consideration. He was, in company, almost entirely silent. At home, in the safety of the nursery, or at his grandmother’s knee, he was a perfect chatterbox, and would talk without pause for an hour, on any subject, with the earnest enthusiasm of a man who has been saving up; and it was for this reason, and because it made her cry a little when she looked at him, that Mrs. Dashwood, from her chair beneath the tree, had declared him the most remarkable child in England, and had said so, on the average, three times an afternoon.

“Do you know what an interpreter is, Ned?” said Sarah.

Ned removed his thumb. “It is someone that says what the other person said,” said he, gravely, “only in the other man’s words.”

There was a brief, astonished silence.

Mary, having recently taken it upon herself to help Ned with his letters, smiled proudly and gave her little brother a pat on his back.

Anne clapped. “Impressive. Clever boy!”

“Quite right,” said Sarah. “Then you shall do it.”

“Perfectly correct,” said Mrs. Dashwood, from below, to the orchard at large. “Did you hear? He is not yet four.”

Sarah, meanwhile, had begun to climb again. She had conceived the idea that the flag ought to fly from the very topmost bough, where it might be seen from the parsonage; and she was already well above the treehouse, with the flagstaff between her teeth, going up hand over hand with the intent and silent air of a small brown squirrel, when Mrs. Dashwood looked up and laughed aloud.

“Let her go, Elinor. It does a child good to be bold. I never stopped Marianne, you know, at Norland; she was up every tree in the park and see what a happy woman she is.”

Elinor, at the foot of the oak, said nothing to this; but there was a very slight movement of her eyebrows, like the passing of a small cloud, which her husband, who knew it well, did not fail to observe. She said only, in her usual level voice, “Sarah. Come down a moment, my dear, if you please.”

Sarah came down. She came down with the reluctance of a person interrupted at a critical point in a great scheme, and stood before her mother, with the flagstaff in her fist and a leaf in her hair.

“It is a very fine place for a flag,” said Elinor. “I quite see it. But tell me, Sarah: when you are at the top, and the wind gets up, as I think it will before tea, and you are holding the flag in one hand and the branch in the other, what will you do with the third hand you will want?”

Sarah thought. She was a child who could not be scolded and could very seldom be argued with; but she could be asked a question, and she was, by nature, a person to whom a question was the most interesting thing in the world.

“I should let go of the flag,” said she, slowly.

“And then?”