Page 24 of Threads that Remain

“I have not got any mud on it,” said Sarah.

“You have got a great deal on your knees.”

“That is not the frock,” replied Sarah. “That is my knees.”

There was, upon this point, a certain difficulty of jurisdiction, which was resolved by Henry, who observed that in his judgment mud upon a knee was a private matter, and that the Admiralty had never in history been known to interfere with it.

“Nonsense,” said Mary.

“It is not! I had it on the authority of a very distinguished sailor,” replied Henry.

Sarah, age five, stuck her tongue out at her sister in triumph. She seized the moment, and sprang up on to the low stone kerb of the pond, with her hands on her hips, and cried:

“Then it is settled! We are pirates! I am the Pirate Queen of the Round Pond, and I have hidden treasure in the middle of it, and Henry is the wicked Admiral who has come to take it, and Mary is the Governor of the Island, and Anne is the Court Painter, and Ned —”

“I am the inner-peter,” said Ned, from his grandmother’s knee, without looking up from the duck he was engaged in feeding.

“Yes! Of course. You are the interpreter. You are the only one who can tell what the ducks are saying.”

“They are saying,” said Ned, in his grave little voice, “that it is not enough bread.”

Anne Brandon, who was five years old, and was sitting cross-legged on the grass with a board on her knees and a stub of charcoal in her fist, made no comment. While what she had drawn only she could say for sure, she later explained her picture contained the Pirate Queen, the Admiral, whose hat, she thought, she had got very nearly right, and who had acquired a wooden leg and a large stuffed parrot, which he was employing with great effect to alarm the Governor. It was a peculiarity of Anne’s that nothing, whether the ducks, or a war, or the end of the world, could induce her to look up from a drawing until it was done; she was fair, and absorbed, and definitely the tidiest of the children, even more so than her cousin Mary. She had her mother’s curls but her father’s fair colouring, and her mother’s quick, restless, changeful mouth and warm eyes; and it was remarked, not for the first time, by Mrs. Dashwood, that she bore an extraordinary resemblance to a certain sister at the age of seven who had also drawn in the most alarming circumstances and been found by the whole family in the loft of the barn at Norland, at midnight, in a blizzard, with a candle.

“She has the very same look,” said Mrs. Dashwood, loud enough for her daughters to hear and looking at Marianne.

“I know,” said Marianne, and laughed. “She is such an even-tempered child, like her father, so I only hope she has a better character than her mother.”

“She has a mother with better understanding,” whispered Elinor. “Which is not the same, but it does a great deal.”

Marianne looked at her sister with an expression of quick and unaffected pleasure. It was a thing that Elinor did not often say. She said it now without a trace of emphasis; and Marianne, who had learned in ten years to hear the things that Elinor did not say, laid her hand for a moment upon her sister’s hand, and hoped it proved to make a difference.

The Admiral of the Round Pond, it was soon discovered, was in no respect a vulgar villain. He was, in fact, a gentleman of considerable presence, and of an unusual and sympathetic character; he conducted his campaign, so far as anyone could discover, entirely by means of comic speeches; and when the Queen’s forces had taken up their position on the kerb, and the Governor, in a dreadful voice, had commanded that he should surrender, he merely removed his hat, and bowed, and said that he would do so with the utmost pleasure, upon condition that he might first be allowed to make a short remark upon the subject of parrots.

It was a very long remark. It was delivered with a straight face, and in a variety of voices; it introduced the parson, and the Colonel, and Mrs. Jennings, and a bishop, and a large and extremely indignant goose; ‘and the ducks,’ Ned had shouted. His speech was accompanied by a series of movements so peculiarly and unaffectedly ridiculous that by the end of it, Sarah had fallen off the kerb, Mary had sat down on the grass patiently watching with amusement, and old Mrs. Dashwood upon her bench was laughing helplessly into a handkerchief. Even the gentleman with the telescope had lowered it.

“He is quite the funniest child in London,” said Elinor, with a sigh.

“He is,” a smiling Marianne agreed.

He had been in the middle of a sentence when he heard a sound of that particular kind.

Ned was standing at his grandmother’s knee with his lip beginning to tremble and his muffler in his fist. He had, in his anxiety to hear the parrot, leaned too far, and had been splashed; and it was one of those small disasters, of no consequence to anyone else, that are, at four years old, the very end of the world.

Henry dropped his hat. He crossed the grass in six strides, and knelt, and said, “Here. That will not do. Let me see,” and wiped his cousin’s face with his own sleeve, briskly and thoroughly, in a manner that was somehow neither patronising nor over-kind; and then, without a word, swung the small figure up upon his shoulders, and walked along the edge of the pond, holding him by the ankles, while Ned, at a great height, considered the ducks from a new angle.

“There,” said Henry. “You can see all the way to Peru.”

“Is that Peru?” said Ned, awed.

“It might be. You had better ask them.”

It was seen by everyone; it was a small scene and lasted no more than a few minutes; and it passed, with the rest of that bright morning, into the general reservoir of family life, and was not particularly remembered. But there was one person who saw it, and remembered it, and who had not been supposed to be there at all.

Chapter XVIII.

He had come by Bayswater Road. He had left the carriage at the Palace Gate, at a quarter to ten, with a groom to walk the horses; and he had come up the gravel walk between the elms with a small boy on one side of him and a small girl on the other, and a nursemaid, in a state of some bewilderment, a pace or two behind.

It had not been at all easy. It had required, on his own part, a good deal of preparation, and a good many small manoeuvres of which he was privately a little ashamed. He had begun with his valet, a shrewd, discreet, unsentimental person named Harker, who had spent the previous Friday at the Rose and Crown in Brook Street, in the company of the Colonel’s second footman, and had returned at midnight with three pieces of intelligence. The first was that the Brandon nursery took the air at a quarter to ten every morning in Kensington Gardens, weather permitting. The second was that the boy was said to be the best-natured young gentleman in the household. And the third, which Harker had delivered with a very slight cough, was that the second footman had thought it a great pity, considering the resemblance, that nobody would say to whom.