Page 26 of Threads that Remain

“Yes,” said Elinor.

“He has his children with him.”

“I see that, too.”

“I am not going to do anything,” said Marianne. She was surprised to find that it was true. She was surprised, indeed, at the whole state of her feelings, which appeared to have arranged themselves in some order without consulting her: there was a small cold hollow just below her breastbone, which she recognised, and which was very old; there was a great deal of anger, of a clean and quite impersonal kind; and there was a sensation that she could not immediately place, and which she at last identified, with an inward start, as pity. It was not for herself. It was for the man behind the thorn, who had come, she saw quite clearly, to look at a child that he had no right to look at, and who was standing there, in the shade, in the middle of a fine spring morning, with his own two children by the hand, looking for all the world like somebody who had wandered into a house that was no longer his.

She turned. She turned deliberately, with her back to the water; and there, on the green, in a flurry of rebellious hair, with a wooden sword in his fist, was Henry, who was bowing to the Governor of the Island, and had not the least idea that anyone in the world was looking at him.

“Anne,” said Marianne, in a voice that was very nearly her own. “Show me the drawing. I do not think I have seen the Admiral’s parrot.”

Marianne told the Colonel that same evening, in the small back study at Brook Street, with the door shut and the lamp turned low; and it was, perhaps, the most characteristic thing about her, at thirty, that she did it in six sentences, and did not once raise her voice. He heard her out without interrupting. He was silent for some time afterwards; and then he took her hand, and said, in his quiet, level way, that they would go on exactly as before. The Gardens were as much theirs as anyone’s. The children should not be made to give up a single morning; and if any person should choose to sit behind a thorn-bush for the sake of the view, it was a matter for his own conscience, and not for theirs.

They went on exactly as before. And it was a fact, on which Elinor was afterwards inclined to reflect, that for the whole of the following week the Round Pond saw no dark-haired gentleman behind any bush whatever.

Chapter XIX.

The kites had flown beautifully that afternoon, and the children had come home breathless and triumphant, full of the story of whose had climbed highest and whose had crashed into the elm. Willoughby had laughed with them the whole way back, had let his son ride on his shoulders the last half mile, and had felt, as he so often did in such hours, that he was a fortunate man. It was only once the children had been given over to their nurse, and the house had settled back into its ordinary quiet, that the feeling left him.

He stood for a moment in the hall and then went in search of his wife. He found her in the sitting room, at her work, and she looked up at him with the unthinking smile of a woman greeting her husband — a smile that faded almost as soon as it had formed. Something in his face stopped her. She set down her needle. “What have you done?” He did not answer at once. He crossed the room, and began, and stopped, and began again, in the manner of a man who has rehearsed a speech and finds, now that the moment has come, that none of the words he prepared will serve.

“Sophia—” said he, and then, “I hardly know how to—” and then nothing at all. “Start at the beginning,” said she.

He drew a breath. “It was some years ago now. Eleven, I think, or very near it. I was young.” He looked at her and looked away. “There was a girl,” he stammered. “And — she had a child.”

What passed between them in the minutes that followed neither of them would ever quite be able to recount, even to themselves. It was not a scene of the kind found in novels, with tears and reproaches traded back and forth like blows. It was quieter than that, and stranger, and it did not end when he stopped speaking, or when she stopped asking the questions that came first — for it did not, in truth, end for several days. She was, for the better part of that first evening, very still. She asked him little more, and he, sensing that he had said as much as she could presently receive, offered little more. He watched her across the dinner table and could not tell, from her composed face and her ordinary conversation with the children, whether she was containing a great fury or had simply not yet begun to feel the thing at all. It came to her in pieces, over the following days, the way a bruise comes up slowly under skin that was not marked at the moment of the blow. She would be sitting with her needlework, or walking in the garden, or half-listening to her daughter’s chatter, and some new question would surface, fully formed, as though it had been waiting its turn — and she would go and find him, wherever he was in the house, and ask it plainly, without preamble, and then leave him again to think.

She was, upon reflection — and she did a great deal of reflecting, in those days — less shocked than she might have expected herself to be. It should have been shocking, but the reality of it was that it was not, after all, so very uncommon a thing. She had only to look about her at the families of her acquaintance, at the highest families in the land, to know that men did this, and had always done it, and that the world had long since made its peace with the fact. Her own family was not free of it: there was a cousin of her father’s, married respectably enough, who had taken his natural son into his own house and raised him alongside his lawful children, and no one had thought the less of him for it — indeed it had been accounted rather generous. Kings had done it. Dukes had done it. It was, she came to think, simply one of the costs of having married a man quickly without taking the trouble to know all that there was to know about him. On reflection, she knew what she was doing at the time and had chosen to do it, for her own gain. She had got the charming, handsome husband who knew the workings of an estate, as well as her set of society, and had given her beautiful children. She did not repine.

What she could not so easily settle was what was now to be done. She turned the question over from every side. Had she known of it years before — had he come to her as a young husband, newly married, and told her then what he told her now — she believed, or wished to believe, that she might have found some way to receive the child. A boy of two or three years old, brought quietly into a nursery already accustomed to him, given no history to unlearn, might have grown up simply as one more child in the house, and no one the wiser, or no one troubled if they were. But that door, whatever door it had ever been, was shut now. The boy was ten years old, a stranger, with a whole decade of a life she had no part in. Her own children were of an age to understand a great deal, and to resent what they did not understand. If the boy did not take to them — or they, God forbid, to him — the harm done to the peace of her own household would be considerable and not easily undone.

And she had, besides, no wish to see her family’s name, so carefully and happily established, made the subject of talk. No — better, far better, that things remain as they were. Better that the boy continue in whatever situation he was presently in, provided it was a good one, and that her own children continue in blessed ignorance of him.

She went to Willoughby with this much settled in her mind and asked him plainly what he proposed to do. He said that he wished, at the least, to acknowledge the boy privately — that the child should know who his father was, even if the world at large never did, and that in time, carefully, quietly, they might become acquainted with one another. She asked what name he went by — his surname, she meant; whether he carried his mother’s name, or some other. Willoughby did not know. That, too, she said, would have to be settled — in time.

They spoke, in the days that followed, of what could be done for him, in the plainest and most practical terms. He could not, of course, inherit — that was beyond question, and neither of them raised it as though it were. But there was no reason a sum could not be settled on him, quietly, through a lawyer, so that he should never want; no reason he could not be started well in some profession, if he showed an aptitude for one. Beyond that, there was a great deal neither of them yet knew — his situation, his character, his very name — and Willoughby confessed, more than once, that there was much he had never troubled himself to learn, to his own present shame.

It was in the course of one of these conversations, when the worst of it seemed to have passed and something almost like planning had begun, that Willoughby found himself regarding his wife with an astonishment nearly equal to what he had felt in confessing the matter at all. He had braced himself for anger, for tears, perhaps for something that could never afterward be mended between them. He had not braced himself for this — for a woman turning the problem over as calmly as she might a household account, and setting herself, without a word of blame to him, to the question of what should be done.

“I did not think,” said he to her, low, “that you would take it so well.” She did not quite smile, but something in her face eased. “I did not think it myself,” said she, “until I found I had no other choice.”

He took her hand. “Thank you,” said he — and meant it more than he had ever meant anything he had said to her.

Chapter XX.

There was, in the meantime, a great deal else to occupy the household. It was the height of the Season. The Brook Street knocker had never been still; cards lay in heaps in the hall; and it was the settled opinion of Mrs. Jennings, who called every day at twelve to receive and dispense the news, that there had not been so promising a year for Miss Margaret Dashwood since the world began.

“I am determined, my dear, that this shall be the year we find your match!”

The Tregarths came on Thursday.

It was the Colonel who opened the door to them, having heard a knock of remarkable hesitation and gone out himself into the hall; and he came back in a moment, with a surprised and a rather pleased expression, followed by a slight, stooping figure in a coat that did not fit, holding a small box under his arm, and, upon the other, a short, cheerful, red-haired young lady in a bonnet that had a good deal too many cherries on it.

“Mr. Tregarth, my dear,” said the Colonel. “And Miss Tregarth. Mr. Tregarth has been so obliging as to call upon Margaret; he has brought a specimen for the children. It appears,” said the Colonel, with his rare, dry, almost imperceptible smile, “to be a fish.”

It was a fish. It was, more accurately, the fossilised remains of a fish, of some ancient age, in a slab of grey limestone the size of a tea-tray, which Mr. Tregarth, after some confusion, set down upon a table and explained, in the low, careful, painfully accurate voice of a man to whom explanation is a form of apology; and the children, who were called from the nursery, and who had been prepared, upon the strength of Aunt Margaret’s account, to be polite, were seen within three minutes to have been swept away. Sarah wanted to know how it had got in the rock. Mary wanted to know what it had eaten. Anne, having looked at it in silence for a full minute, went away and came back with a piece of paper and began, without a word, to draw it. And Ned, who had never in his life been known to address a stranger, edged very slowly across the carpet, and put his finger, with great solemnity, upon the fossil’s dorsal fin.

“It has got a tail,” said Ned, in a tiny voice.