Page 19 of Threads that Remain

It was not, she assured herself, a letter of any particular significance; she had only wanted, so very much, to tell someone what it had been like, and Mrs. Jennings, who was spending the winter in town, and who wrote to Margaret every fortnight with the whole of the London news whether Margaret had asked for it or not, seemed as good a person as any to be told. It had struck her, all the same, as she sat down with the pen, that there was no one alive she wished so much to have understand it as a mineralogist with a plain face to whom she had not the smallest right to write, and did not intend to try. She wrote five pages. She wrote of the gorge, and the rocks, and the terrible green weight of water, and of the odd, quiet, incredulous look on the Professor’s face; and she said, at the end, without quite knowing why she was saying it, that she did not think she could describe it a second time and do it justice, and that if Mrs. Jennings should happen, by any chance, to see Mr. Tregarth, she was welcome to tell him of it, for Margaret should like, of all people, for him to know.

She read it over. She wondered, for a moment, whether she ought to strike out the last line; and then, being Margaret Dashwood, and not a person who was easily made to strike out things that were true, she folded it up and sealed it, and sent it, and thought no more about it.

Mrs. Jennings, as it happened, did a great deal more than tell him.

She met him at a concert at Lady Colville’s, not three weeks later, standing alone near a pillar with the particular hunted look of a man who has been asked, twice already, whether he does not find the harp a very affecting instrument; and she bore down upon him with her fan going and Margaret’s letter, which she had been carrying about in her reticule for the better part of a week on the general principle that a good letter was wasted if it was left at home, already half out of its paper.

“Mr. Tregarth! There you are. I have been meaning to find you all evening. Now, you are not to say a word until I have done, for I have the very thing here that will suit you a great deal better than this squalling” — with a nod toward the harp — “and I shall be excessively put out if you do not agree with me.”

He had gone, in an instant, the colour of his own cravat. “Mrs. Jennings, I —”

“It is from Margaret Dashwood. Niagara Falls, my dear, and I do not understand one word in ten of it, all rocks and gorges and I do not know what, but I have read it through three times all the same, for the writing of it, and I said to Charlotte, whoever this letter was truly meant for, it was not me.” She had it open by now, and held it out, and there was nothing whatever in her broad, delighted, wholly unrepentant old face that suggested she considered herself to be doing anything in the least improper. “There. You may read it standing up if you like, for I shall not be answerable for what my face does if I must watch you read it sitting down.”

He read it standing up. He read it twice, in fact, in the noise and the candlelight, with Mrs. Jennings a discreet three feet off, fanning herself and looking with great interest at the ceiling; and when he had folded it again, and given it back, and said something indistinct about the escarpment, she patted his sleeve and told him, in a voice not nearly so low as she supposed it to be, that she had known how it would be since a certain evening over a fossil fish, and that he had better write to the Colonel directly, for a young man who could go that colour over a letter about a waterfall had no business waiting upon ceremony.

Mrs. Jennings replied to Margaret’s letter and gave her a full account of the young man’s reaction, implying, not very discreetly, that there was something between the two young people. She also informed Margaret of the recent marriage of Mr. Fanshawe to a Miss Jane Harvey of Lord Harvey’s family. She sincerely hoped it was not painful for her dear friend to hear.

Margaret found it was decidedly not painful for her to hear, quite the contrary. For it produced a feeling of unexpected relief to no longer be concerned about that gentleman’s favour.

Chapter XV.

The great earthworks in Ohio were in the second week of November, and they proved to be everything the gentleman of Chillicothe had said.

He was a lawyer named Cole, a long, lean, eager person, with a stoop and a wig and the fixed expression of a man who has, at last, found someone who will listen to him; and he had driven them out from the town in a wagon, over a road that Mrs. Aylmer described in her letters home as “more of a rumour than a road,” to a broad, brown, windswept plain in the valley of the Scioto. It was a plain like any other, at first sight. It was only when the Professor, who had descended from the wagon with a good deal of difficulty on account of his knees, had walked a hundred yards, and stopped, and gone very still, that Margaret understood.

There was a bank in the grass. It ran across the plain as straight as a ruled line, breast-high, grown over with turf; and beyond it, and beyond that, in a vast and perfect geometry that could not, from the ground, be taken in at a glance, ran the ghost of a wall, and of a great square, and of a circle; and in the midst of the circle, an enormous conical mound, some thirty feet high, with a tree upon it.

Nobody spoke for some time. It was the Professor, at last, who said, in the low, careful voice of a man who is afraid of frightening something away, “Who made this, Mr. Cole?”

“Nobody knows, sir,” said the lawyer. “The Indians have no tradition of it. They say it was there when their grandfathers came.”

“Nothing in Egypt,” said the Professor, “is more —” He stopped. He sat down, quite suddenly, upon the turf, in the way of a man whose knees have decided the matter for him; and he took off his hat, and looked about, with an expression of such transparent and boyish joy that his wife, coming up behind him, put her hand upon his shoulder and said nothing, and Margaret turned away, because she felt her own eyes prick.

They stayed three weeks. They dug, under the Professor’s direction, a narrow trench across a corner of the great bank, and sifted every shovelful of earth through a sieve of Mrs. Aylmer’s contrivance; and on the fourth day of digging, at about noon, upon a grey day with a few flakes of snow beginning to fall, Margaret put her hand into her left pocket, as she had done a hundred times a day, every day, since Henry gave it to her, and found that it was empty.

She stood quite still. She turned out both pockets. She turned out her satchel, and her handkerchief, and her glove; she felt in the hem of her skirt, and behind her collar, and down inside the boot; and then she went cold from head to heel, and sat down on the lip of the trench, and said, in a small, flat voice, “I have lost it.”

“Lost what, child?” said Mrs. Aylmer.

“Henry’s pebble. I promised. I promised him upon my honour, Mrs. Aylmer, and he made out a paper —”

“Sit still,” said Mrs. Aylmer, “and think. Where did you last feel it?”

She thought. It had been that morning, on the wagon. She had taken it out, and looked at it, and put it back. She had been at the far end of the trench at ten, and had knelt, and stooped, and been sick with cold, and had changed her gloves, and — there. She looked down. She looked at the heap of earth that lay beside the trench, upon which the sieve was standing; and she said, very slowly, “I think it is in the sieve.”

It was. It was lying, in the very corner, between a shard of what the Professor was to describe in the Transactions as “a vessel of unusually fine paste,” and a burnt bone, and a small flake of a dark glassy stone which the Professor afterwards pronounced to have come from the Rocky Mountains, some fifteen hundred miles away; and it was grey and white and banded, and as round and warm as a hen’s egg, and not in the least the worse for its adventure. She picked it up. She held it in her palm and looked at it a long time; and then she put her face down upon her knees, and for the first time in a great many weeks, wept without the least restraint.

“There,” said Mrs. Aylmer, quite gently, and patted her back. “It has been to the top of Vesuvius and to the bottom of an Ohio trench. It will be insufferable for the rest of its life. Come, child. You have found it, and there is nothing more to be said.”

She wrote to Henry that night, and told him the whole story, and did not omit the sieve.

Around this same time at Delaford, the Brandons’ wedding anniversary was upon them. Brandon, never wanting the children to feel neglected, began the practice of giving Anne and Henry gifts on his and Marianne’s wedding anniversary.

On this special day Colonel Brandon came into the morning-room carrying a package and books.

“For you,” said he simply, setting it on the table before Anne and opening the catches himself because of the unfamiliar clasp. “I am told it is a very good one. The man at the shop assured me there is nothing better to be had even in London, and I did not haggle with him over it, because I did not think you would thank me for a worse one merely to save a few pounds.”

Anne, who was a quiet child by nature, given to sitting a long while in one spot with her brow furrowed over a sketchbook while the noisier business of the household went on without her, had been drawing since before she could properly hold a pencil — on the backs of letters, in the margins of her lesson books, once, memorably, in chalk upon the stable wall, for which she had been gently scolded and immediately forgiven, because the drawing itself, a creditable likeness of the Colonel’s own horse, had been judged too good to be angry about for long. She was pretty in the particular way that made strangers exclaim, with her mother’s dark eyes and her mother’s quick, mobile face, though she had none of Marianne’s restless energy; she watched the world instead of rushing at it, and put down what she saw in careful, patient lines, and said very little about it to anyone.