Page 16 of Threads that Remain

“In looks,” said Marianne. “Yes. I think I have made up my mind to it. It is not the smallest part of being a mother, is it, that one is obliged to see one’s children for what they are and not what one would have wished, and to say, well, this is you, then. And it is such a comfort to find that he is not at all what I feared. He has all that charm, and none of the —” she hesitated — “none of the direction. He has never wanted anything he might not fairly have. He would give away his dinner. Last week he gave his new boots to the shoemaker’s boy, who had none, and walked home in his stockings, and told me quite calmly that it had seemed the only thing to do. I did not know whether to scold him or to weep. The Colonel did neither. He took him down to the cottage the next morning, and showed him the roof, and the well, and the state of the boy’s father’s wages, and asked him whether, since he was so ready to give, he had ever considered why there were no boots; and Henry has been very quiet ever since.” She was silent for a moment. “I cannot think where it comes from.”

“From you,” said Elinor. “And the Colonel. And Mamma, and the oak, and a great deal of natural disposition.”

“And from Eliza, I suppose. Though I never met her. Brandon says he has her way of looking down first, and then up.”

“Yes,” said Elinor gently. “I have noticed him doing it, too. It is very charming.”

Marianne turned her sketchbook over and looked at the blank page. “There is a letter from Margaret this morning,” said she. “You have not heard the end of it. Mamma has it upstairs; she said she would read it at dinner. But I had a look. Sicily is quite done with. The Professor has had a letter. Three, in fact, from the gentlemen of the American Philosophical Society, in Philadelphia; and a fourth, which is a most extraordinary letter, from a person in Ohio who claims to have found an entire hill full of earthworks, made by a race that nobody has ever heard of, and would like him to come and look at it. He has been quite unable to think of anything else for a week. They are to sail from Falmouth this summer, and cross to America directly; and after that, she says, there is no saying when we shall hear from her again above once a month, for the ocean does not care in the least for anybody’s convenience.”

“So far.”

“So far. And she does not sound in the least sorry for it, which I find is generally the surest sign that a person is exactly where she ought to be.” Marianne laughed, a little unsteadily. “Mamma is to go down to Falmouth to see them off, if the dates can be made to answer; she says she cannot be easy unless she has seen the ship with her own eyes and satisfied herself that it is a very large one.”

“Mamma will make herself ill with worry, and enjoy every moment of it,” said Elinor.

“She generally does.” Marianne looked down the orchard, where the pulley was once again in service. “And we are to stay at home and be told about it.”

Below them, the children were lowering Ned, by the pulley, in a basket, to the ground, with a great deal of shouting and Mary in the character of a sea-captain. Marianne went on: “There is Anne, and the rest of them, and the Colonel’s rents, and Edward’s parish; I do not see how any of us could leave the nurseries for a fortnight together, let alone follow her to Falmouth. It is very odd, Elinor. I used to suppose that to be married was to go about the world, and I find that I am seldom further from Delaford than the turnpike.”

“Do you mind it?”

“Not in the least,” said Marianne; and it was quite true. “Only I confess I think of her a great deal, out there on the water, with nothing under her but a ship and nothing over her but the sky. I had not thought about it until I read the letter, and then I thought about it all at once, and I do not know why.”

Elinor put down her needle. She did not say that she knew why; it was one of her gifts that she did not always say what she knew. She clearly remembered a girl of seventeen having long, animated conversations with a certain young man, about travelling to places both near and far. She said, instead, “At least you saw Paris and Italy on your wedding tour. That is more than I have done.”

Marianne smiled brightly at the memories. “You are right, Elinor. Oh, Italy was quite beautiful!”

“And you shall go about the world farther yet, Marianne, when the children are grown; and I daresay you will find that it has grown a great deal smaller by the time you do.”

Marianne’s face lit up as an idea occurred to her. “Let us make a promise, Elinor! When the children have grown, we are to go somewhere wonderful together, the four of us, you and Edward, Brandon and I!”

“What a lovely scheme, Marianne! I shall look forward to it above all else on days when Dorsetshire is rather too hot and dull,” agreed Elinor happily. “In the meantime, our youngest sister is to write to us of America, and Mamma is to worry beautifully over every word of it; and I think, Marianne, that Margaret has done everything else she set out to do. I do not see why she should fail at this.”

The wind blew, and Ned’s basket bumped upon the grass, and from the orchard came the voice of Sarah, announcing with great ceremony that the whole company had now safely arrived at the bottom of Peru. Marianne opened her sketchbook. She looked at the blank page; and then, after a moment, and to her own surprise, began to draw.

Chapter XIII.

Old Mrs. Ferrars died in the winter, in her own bed, in her own house in Park Street, and she went about it with the same firmness with which she had gone about everything else.

She had been a formidable woman for so long that it had become hard, for those who knew her, to believe that she could be anything else. She had been formidable when she had disinherited her elder son for an engagement she disliked and later when she permitted the same elder son to be forgiven and settled upon him ten thousand pounds from her own dowry, allowing him to draw on its yearly interest in the meantime, to live more comfortably with a family of five.

She was formidable now, at seventy-six, propped upon a bank of lace-edged pillows, in a great four-post bed hung with green damask, with a cap upon her head like an admiral’s hat, and a face like a carved ivory cameo. And upon the second day of the new year, after a night of coughing so severe that the physician, an anxious little man in a bag-wig, had begun to speak in undertones, she had turned her head upon the pillow, and said, to the astonishment of everybody in the room:

“Send for Edward and Elinor.”

“Mamma?” said Robert Ferrars. He had been standing at the foot of the bed with a look of pained gentility.

“I said, I want Edward and Elinor, Robert.” She coughed.

Mrs. Robert Ferrars, who had been sitting on the other side of the bed, smiled. She had smiled for so many years that it had become, like a coat that has been worn too often, a sort of second skin; and there was no change in it at all.

“Of course, dear Mamma,” said Lucy. “I shall write directly.”

Edward and Elinor, along with the children, arrived by the mail on the fifth, with a small trunk, and a pot of the Delaford quince jelly that she knew her mother-in-law was fond of.

Elinor read aloud. It was chiefly what the invalid wanted. “I have been thinking about you, Elinor,” said Mrs. Ferrars.

Elinor laid down her book. “Ma’am?”