Page 4 of Threads that Remain

“You may have as long as you need.” He drew in a deep breath. “Or perhaps we should put an end to it now and not even consider the matter. I was being a sentimental fool to have even allowed my thoughts to wander in that direction. It is my own guilt and fresh sorrow behind such thinking. I will do what I must to find the boy a home.”

“No, wait,” said Marianne. “As you say, the situation is very new, and we should not make a hasty decision. But I must — I must think, and I cannot think here.”

He understood her perfectly, as he generally did. “You will not go out in this?” said he, and there was in the words the ghost of a smile, and behind it the memory of another wet afternoon and a long walk and a fever in a stranger’s house. “Marianne —”

“It is almost stopped now, and I shall wear my thick pelisse,” said she, with dignity, “and my pattens, and I shall carry Mamma’s umbrella; and I shall go no further than the parsonage. I have grown extremely sensible. I hope you have noticed it.”

“I have,” said the Colonel, and this time the smile was quite real. “It is among the things I most admire in you.”

She was gone in a quarter of an hour, in the pelisse and the pattens and with the umbrella, and Mrs. Dashwood watched her go from the drawing-room window with an expression that no one saw, for Margaret had returned to her stones. The way to the parsonage lay through the shrubbery and along the edge of the glebe, and Marianne, who at sixteen would have flown the distance in ten minutes and arrived half-drowned and wholly radiant, took twenty-five, and arrived dry, and very pale, and wholly grave.

Elinor was at her table in the little study that looked out upon the garden, with a sheet of Edward’s sermon before her and a pen in her hand, and a look about her brow of gentle and unhurried attention that no household calamity had ever yet been able to shake. She heard the gate. She looked up, and saw her sister coming up the path, in the light but steady rain, without her usual quickness of step; and she laid down the pen.

By the time Marianne reached the door it was already open.

“You have had news,” said Elinor.

Chapter IV.

Elinor did not say another word until her sister was seated by the study fire, with her wet things taken away, and a shawl of Edward’s about her shoulders, and a cup of tea, which she had not asked for, placed between her hands. It was among Elinor’s particular gifts that she always knew what could wait. When she judged that the tea had been sufficiently addressed, she drew her chair a little nearer, and said, “Now.”

Marianne said it in order and told it well; for grief, which in her sixteenth year had made her incoherent, had in her twenty-first only made her exact. She told of the letter, the loss of a young mother who meant a great deal to her husband, and the boy who asked for his mother; and Elinor, who had known the girl only by report, and had never quite been able to think of her without a kind of ache, closed her eyes for a moment, and said quietly, “Poor child.” Then, as her sister went on, she opened them again and was very still.

“And he asked you to take him?” said she.

“No, Brandon did not ask me. But Elinor, it was as if I could see his thoughts. He was tormented by his conflicting emotions. I know — you know, we have spoken of it before — of how ashamed Brandon was of his family’s treatment of Eliza. I could clearly see that he thought he had no right to ask me to take in the boy.”

“He has not,” said Elinor. “But it is a good deal to his credit that he knows it.”

Marianne looked into the fire. “I asked if he resembles — I asked him if the boy looked like —” She stopped, and then said it, quite plainly, as one steps into icy water, “Willoughby. And he said yes. He said it directly, and did not soften it, and I loved him for it, and I could have struck him.”

“Both, I imagine,” said Elinor, “and neither for long.”

There was a silence, which a new downpour of rain filled.

“I do not know what the matter with me is,” said Marianne presently. “I thought it was gone. I was so happy, Elinor. I was so entirely happy that I had supposed the whole business was closed and swept up, like a broken plate. Like a ribbon that has been cleanly cut. And now I hear that there is a little boy in Dorsetshire with his — with that face — and I find I am afraid. And I cannot tell what. I am not afraid of loving him. I am afraid, I think, of not, and that would be so much worse. Or of loving him for the wrong reason. Or of looking up one day, across a table, and seeing —” She shook her head. “I do not even know how to finish it.”

Elinor took a little time, as she generally did, before she answered.

“May I tell you what I think?”

“I have walked here in the rain to hear it.”

“I think that you will feel it,” said Elinor. “The likeness. I should be deceiving you if I said otherwise; and I do not think you would thank me for it. There will be days when you look at him and it will strike you, all at once, and it will hurt. I do not believe it will always hurt, or always in the same way; but you must not suppose that when it hurts it means you have chosen wrongly. You have been hurt before by things that had no fault in them at all. That is not a reason to refuse them.” She paused. “Instead of it being like a ribbon that was cleanly cut, it is more like one that was mostly severed, but there are threads that remain. There are names one goes on hearing, you know. When a letter comes to this house from Mrs. Ferrars and there is something in it about Robert and his wife, I do not pretend that it is nothing. It is a great deal less than it was, and it grows smaller a little more each year, for as long as one goes on living carefully and kindly beside it.”

Marianne had turned her head and was looking at her sister as though she had seen a new colour.

“You have never told me that.”

“You never asked, my dear. You were busy being happy; and I would not have interrupted it for the world.”

“And you would not say it to me now if you thought the boy would be a grief to me.”

“I should not say it to you if I thought he would be only a grief,” said Elinor. “It is not the same.” She smiled a little. “He is three years old, Marianne. Whatever else may be true of him, he has not yet had the opportunity to do anything at all. It seems to me that you cannot look at a child of three and see the sins of a man of five-and-twenty.”

“That is fair; but how can I be sure I will not be fooled once again by that Willoughby charm?”

“Because you have had plenty of practice. No one can be that gullible.”