Page 30 of Threads that Remain

“I have done it before, in a field near Kensington, a good many years ago; and I recall that at the time it seemed to me perfectly reasonable.”

“You fired at him,” said Marianne. “Elinor told me. You both missed.”

“I missed by some six inches,” said the Colonel. “I have never been entirely sure that I was sorry.”

Lady Ardleigh’s ball was quite the largest of the Season. It was held in the great house in Grosvenor Square, of which every window blazed with wax candles, and before which, by ten o’clock, a line of carriages stretched half the length of the street; and it was attended, by a conservative estimate, by three hundred persons of consequence, and seventy more who had contrived to be mistaken for them. The staircase was hung with laurel. The ballroom, which ran the whole depth of the house, was banked with white roses; and at the end of it, upon a dais under a canopy of crimson silk, sat the mistress of the house, an enormous lady in purple velvet, with a large nose, and a lorgnette, and a smile of such devastating condescension that it seemed to have been used to take the bark off small trees.

She received the Brandons with great graciousness. She observed to Mrs. Dashwood, in a voice that carried some way, that she had heard a great deal of her youngest daughter; she believed her to be a most original young woman; her own son was excessively taken with her; she supposed that the girl had a little something of her own, which was very sensible, for a second son was, at the best, a costly ornament; but that a man of four thousand a year could afford, with a clever wife, to have a hobby. It was the stones, she understood. She herself had no objection to stones. She hoped that they would be given up.

“I do not think they will,” said Mrs. Dashwood, with a certain calm.

“Ah,” said Lady Ardleigh, and smiled again, with the beginnings of respect.

The dancing had begun. Mr. Grant, who was in the highest possible spirits and had been in her company since the first quadrille, was to be seen at the far end of the room, with Margaret upon his arm; they moved through the crowd like a pair of swans on a pond, she in a gown of pale primrose satin, with a spray of white heath in her hair, he in an evening coat of extraordinary elegance, laughing, bowing, being applauded.

She heard his laugh before she saw his face; and the laugh, Margaret later reflected, was very much as it ought to be.

“Miss Dashwood!” Rupert Fanshawe crossed the width of the ballroom floor to reach her, with a lady upon his arm, and he made a bow to her of such an exaggerated and affectionate ceremony that half the room turned to look. “I had heard you were in town.”

“Mr. Fanshawe.” Margaret gave him both her hands, laughing. “You have not changed in the smallest degree.”

“Not so, Miss Dashwood! I have it on the very best authority that marriage has improved me greatly.” He turned with evident and unaffected pride, to the lady on his arm. “May I present my wife. Jane, this is Miss Dashwood.”

Mrs. Fanshawe was a tall, fair, and pleasant-faced young woman, with a manner of great natural warmth.

“I confess I have been looking forward to meeting you, Miss Dashwood. My husband speaks of Vesuvius as though he has climbed it himself.”

Margaret laughed. “He has earned the right, for he once had to sit through an entire supper listening to the whole history of it.”

“I am forever in your debt, for it led me in a roundabout way, at another supper, to Jane.”

They talked a little longer of easy and pleasant things, often finding their way back to the couple’s two children, twin boys who were the light of their lives. The ladies exchanged cards and Miss Dashwood planned to call upon them soon.

“I am very, very glad to have met you, Mrs. Fanshawe, and to find you, Mr. Fanshawe, so thoroughly and deservedly happy.”

“The gladness is entirely mutual, Miss Dashwood. We will leave you to your next dance partner,” said Mr. Fanshawe.

As Margaret let herself be led away into the set, Jane smiled and said to her husband, “I can see why you liked her.”

“I did like her,” he replied. “But I find I like you a great deal more and upon reflection, that is the best possible outcome any disappointed man could ask of a volcano.”

And at the edge of the dance, standing against a pillar, with a glass of lemonade, and an expression of quite acute suffering, was Mr. Tregarth, flanked upon one side by his sister Morwenna, who was talking to a footman, and upon the other by a broad, short, grizzled old gentleman with a face like a knot in a plank, who stood in the middle of a Mayfair ballroom with his hands in his pockets and the air of a man on the deck of a ship in a heavy sea. This was Mr. Tregarth of Penhallow. He had come from Cornwall for a week. He had been to his share of country dances over the course of his life but had never been to a ball.

“It is a great deal of light,” said Mr. Tregarth of Penhallow, to nobody, in a hoarse, resonant, carrying whisper. “I do not see how a man could work by it.”

“Papa,” said his son.

“I am saying nothing, boy. I am only observing.”

Marianne saw all this. She was, at that moment, standing at the foot of the dais, with her hand upon the Colonel’s arm, and she saw it with the extraordinary clearness of a person who is looking at everything in order not to look at one particular thing; she saw the dancing, and the roses, and Lady Ardleigh’s lorgnette, and her mother, and Elinor, in her plain grey silk, at the far side of the room, watching her across a great space, with her lips a little pressed. And it was in the midst of a waltz, at a quarter to eleven, that a very small stir at the door, of the sort that runs through a room when someone of consequence has come in late, made her know, without turning her head, exactly what she was going to see.

They had not intended to be seen. It was the thing that afterwards struck her most, when she came to think of it: that they had entered as any couple would enter a great house at a late hour, by the side door, with a very slight bow to a servant, and had made no attempt to be observed. They stood upon the threshold of the ballroom for perhaps ten seconds, in the glare of a thousand lights, and looked about them.

She was very small. That was the first thing. She was smaller even than Marianne had supposed from report: a neat, upright, sharp-faced little woman in grey silk, with a handsome set of diamonds and a very good complexion, and a pair of quick, clear, intelligent eyes that swept the whole of the ballroom in one movement, like a lighthouse beam, and came to rest, without hesitation, upon the foot of the dais. She had her husband’s arm. She held it, rather firmly, in the manner of a woman escorting a man to the dentist.

And the man was Willoughby.

He was eight-and-thirty. He had grown a little heavier; there was a faint grey about the temples; the face, which had been the face of a young god, and was still a very handsome one, had settled, about the mouth, into something more guarded. But the carriage of the head was the same. It was the way that he stood, with his weight upon his left foot, and his chin very slightly lifted, as though every room he entered had been waiting for him; and she saw him find her, across the width of the ballroom, exactly as she had once found him across the width of a field.