Page 37 of Threads that Remain

They ate. It was some minutes before Sarah spoke; and when she did, it was in a small, clear, matter-of-fact voice, to the cobblestone.

“I heard Ned say that you have a brother.”

“How did he know?”

“He knows everything. He listens at the door.” She swallowed the last of her bread. “I have got a story about it. Would you like it?”

“I do not think I could bear a story,” said Henry, “about brothers.”

“It is not about brothers,” said Sarah, with dignity. “It is about pirates. There was a great Admiral, and he was very brave and funny, and everybody liked him; and one day when he was on an island, he found out that there was another island, quite near, that he had never seen; and on it there was a boy with a kite. And he did not know if he ought to go. He was afraid it would be a trap. And he did not know if the boy would like him.” She frowned. “So, he sat on a rock, for a very long time, and thought.”

“And what did he decide?”

“I have not decided. It is not finished. I only wanted to say that in my stories, when there are two brothers, they are always either pirates on the same side or pirates on the opposite side; and either way it is a very good story.” She considered. “You do not have to like him. But you might. It would not be wrong.”

Henry turned his head. He looked at her; a small, brown, freckled, resolute face, with a pair of very clear grey eyes, and jam upon the chin; and slowly, out of the miserable, wet-eyed set of his mouth, there crept the beginnings of a smile.

“Sarah,” said he.

“Yes?”

“You are the wisest person I know.”

Sarah nodded in agreement.

He laughed and reached over and gave her head a pat, and the two sat together on the mounting block for a long time in the sun, not speaking, watching the grooms.

It was a formidable house, in Half Moon Street; or so it appeared to a young person of ten, mounting the steps behind a large footman with a face like a bishop. Mrs. Smith had come up to town in the third week of April, upon the ostensible ground of consulting a physician, and the real one that she could not endure a fortnight without Henry; she had taken the house for six weeks, and filled it, in the course of three days, with a butler, three maids, a cook, an ear-trumpet, a canary, and a very large collection of peppermints; and she received the family in her drawing-room, at eleven o’clock, seated bolt upright in a high-backed chair by the fire, with a stick between her knees and a shawl of black Spanish lace.

She had listened to the whole of it in perfect silence.

Henry had told her himself. He had insisted upon it; he had stood before her, upon the hearthrug, with his hands behind him, as though he were saying a lesson, and given the whole account, from the beginning, in a clear, low, careful voice, without embellishment; and Marianne, who sat in a corner with her hands in her lap, and had not been allowed to say a word, watched the old face across the room, and saw it grow, as the tale went on, harder, and greyer, and more like carved stone.

“So,” said Mrs. Smith, when it was done. “He has come crawling up out of the ground.”

“He was in the park, Aunt Smith. He did not do anything.”

“He did not do anything.” The stick rapped the floor. “He has not done anything for twelve years, boy, that is the whole of the difficulty. I cut that young man off the week I learned what he had done to a girl of seventeen; I have not spoken to him since; I have not answered a single one of his letters; I have not seen his face. I said that I should not, and I have kept my word.” She drew a long breath. “I am not sure that I ought to keep it any longer.”

Henry looked up.

“I am seventy years old,” said Mrs. Smith. “I have no husband, and no children, and a great deal more money than I have ever known what to do with; and I have thought, on a number of occasions in the last six years, that I might have been wrong to shut my door on any human being. I did not think it of him. I thought of myself. It is a great deal easier to say never than it is to say come in.” She stopped, and her jaw worked. “I put this to you, child: if you wish to see him, Henry, I shall not stand in your way. He will come if I summon him, but I will only do it if you wish it. A person should be able to see his father. It is every person’s right, though many go a lifetime without the justice of being able to exercise this right; you will not be one of them,” she declared emphatically.

She paused while she considered her next words. “I shall receive him in this room, if that is what you want, with my stick beside me, and I shall be perfectly civil. And if you do not wish it, you need never look upon his face.”

“I have been thinking a great deal about it and I think I should like to see him, Aunt Smith,” said Henry, and his voice shook, “but not here. I think it ought to be at home. With Papa. Because he is the one who —” He did not finish the sentence.

“Quite right,” said Mrs. Smith briskly, and blew her nose with a good deal of violence. “Quite right. Colonel Brandon is a very sensible man. I have always thought so. I shall sit in the next room, with my ear-trumpet, and I shall not say a word.”

“You will not be able to hear a word,” said Henry, and for the first time that morning grinned.

“Impertinent boy,” said Mrs. Smith; and it was noticed by Marianne that her old hand, which lay upon the head of the stick, was shaking very slightly, and that when he crossed the room and knelt down before her, and put his face for a moment upon her knee, it came down upon his hair and lay there without moving.

The letter came at six.

It was brought by a footman in a livery of dark green, whom nobody in the household knew, and who did not wait in the hall for an answer; and it lay on the silver salver by the front door for a quarter of an hour before Marianne, coming in from the drawing-room, saw it, and stood quite still with her hand upon the newel-post. It was addressed, in a large, quick, elegant, rather blurred hand, To Colonel and Mrs. Brandon. It was sealed with a plain wafer.

She did not open it at once. She carried it into the library, where the Colonel had shut himself up with his correspondence; and they read it together, standing, by the green-shaded lamp, with their heads very close.