Page 42 of Threads that Remain

I shall be there. C. G.

He came at ten precisely. It was the first time in the whole of the Season that he had been known to be punctual; and it was observed by Mrs. Dashwood, who happened to be crossing the hall with a hat in her hand, that he had for once brought no flowers. He stood upon the mat, in his beautiful coat, with his hat under his arm, and the light from the fanlight falling upon his fair head, and looked at her with such a plain, grave, steady, unsmiling face, that she stopped where she was, and put the hat down upon a chair.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dashwood.”

“Good morning, Mr. Grant,” said Mrs. Dashwood, in a small voice. “Margaret is in the morning-room. I think — I think that I had better go and see about the — about the —”

“I think you had,” said Mr. Grant kindly.

She was standing at the window, with her hands clasped behind her, when he came in. She had chosen a plain white morning-gown; her hair was smooth; and she looked, as she turned, very young, and rather pale, and altogether more frightened than a woman of one-and-twenty who has faced a volcano has any business to be.

“You have not brought anything,” said Margaret, before she could stop herself.

“I did not think that you would want it.” He came across the room, stopped at a little distance, and looked at her. “You are going to say no.”

She had prepared a speech. She had prepared several; she had gone over them, in the grey hours before dawn, with the calm dispassion of a general drawing up terms; and it went out of her head, all of it, at the first look at his face.

“I am so sorry,” said Margaret. “Oh, Mr. Grant. I am so very sorry.”

“Do not be.”

“I would give anything not to — you have been the kindest —”

“Margaret.” He held up a hand. He was smiling; it was not the smile that she knew. It was a smaller and more honest thing, and it did not quite reach his eyes. “I should like to say something first, if I may. I should not like to have you say it all for me. I have known, you see. I have known for a fortnight. I do not mean that I was told; I do not think anyone told me. It was at Lady Colville’s, in the first week; you asked me what I planned to do in the future, and I said, ‘I plan to carry on as I am; I have not thought of doing anything different’; and you laughed. And I heard myself say it. And I thought, Good God, that is all I do.” He looked out of the window. “I have been trying to think of something else ever since. I have not succeeded. But it was very kind of you to laugh.”

She could not speak.

“I have not the least reproach to make,” said Mr. Grant. “You have been perfectly honest. You said, from the beginning, that you wanted something more, and I did not see it; I thought that meant a larger house.” He gave a short breath of laughter. “It appears that it meant a person. It would have saved us both a great deal of trouble if I had asked.”

“I am a very poor sort of creature,” said Margaret, and her voice shook, “to have kept you so long. I should have told you at once. I did not know. I did not know what I wanted, and I liked you so much, and it was such a great pleasure —”

“It was a great pleasure to me, too. I hope you will believe that. I have never enjoyed a Season so much in my life; and when I am old, and fat, and a great bore at the club, I shall tell the young men that I was once very nearly married to a lady who had been up Vesuvius.” He stopped, swallowed, and lifted his chin. “Would you do me a favour?”

“Anything.”

“Tell me what it means.”

“What —”

“The tooth. The mammoth. You told me, at the time, and I did not listen; that is to say, I listened, and I did not hear. I have thought about it a great deal. I should like to have it properly, once, from you, before I go. Tell me what it means.”

She stared at him. And then, slowly, with her hands twisting in her skirt, and a curious sense that she was speaking in a room that had grown very quiet, she began to tell him.

She told him of the gravel, and the river, and the great slow layers of the earth laid down one over another like the leaves of a book; she told him that the tooth had lain in the ground for an unknown number of years, and that a mammoth had walked upon the same hill on which he had ridden; that the whole world he knew had been made, and unmade, many times, by water and ice; and that it was the strangest and the most comforting thing she had ever learned, that a person might be very small and very brief, and yet be part of something so extraordinary. He stood, with his hat in his hand, and his fair head a little bent, and listened, with an expression of the most intent concentration; and when she had done, there was a long silence.

“Yes,” said Mr. Grant at last, quietly. “I see. It is really quite dreadful that I did not listen well the first time. I understood every word.”

“Sir —”

“I shall read the Encyclopaedia on purpose,” said Mr. Grant, “and it will always make me think of you...”

He put his hat upon his head. He bowed to her, with the most elegant, most graceful, most finished bow she had seen from him, so deep and so exact that it seemed to contain, in some manner, the whole of the last two months; and he took her hand, and raised it, and did not kiss it, but held it a moment against his forehead. Then he let it go.

He opened the door.

He met Mr. Tregarth upon the step.

It was a curious encounter, and it was afterwards described by Morwenna Tregarth, who had been standing at the foot of the stairs, and saw the whole of it through the fanlight, as the most perfect scene in the history of humanity. They had come face to face, on the top step, at a minute before eleven: the one tall, radiant, and elegant, in a blue coat, with his hat cocked over one eye; the other shorter, in a brown coat that had been let out at the seams, with a small square parcel done up in brown paper under one arm. They stopped, and looked at each other, for perhaps three seconds. Mr. Tregarth turned scarlet to the roots of his hair.