Page 49 of Threads that Remain

“I was just about thirteen,” said Margaret, with dignity. “I was in the most acute distress. I had been told, three separate times, that I was to make myself agreeable. And I stood in the hall, and I saw her look at the stair rail, and calculate the cost of it, and I said to myself that I was not going to be in the house while she did it. So, I went upstairs. And I got into the linen press.”

“You got into the linen press.”

“I thought that nobody would look there.”

“It was six o’clock,” said Elinor, “before Mamma sent to find you. She was very alarmed. We looked in the stable, and the coach-house, and down at the pond; Marianne was in tears; and it was I, at last, who thought of the linen press. I opened the door. You were sitting on the third shelf, in a nest of pillowcases, with your knees up, and a very stern face.”

“You said —” said Marianne.

“I said,” said Margaret, “that I should not come out until she had gone away.”

“And I said,” said Elinor, “that she was not going away, my dear; it was her house now.”

“And I said that in that case I would live in the linen press.”

“And you did,” said Marianne, “for the best part of six hours. It was the finest piece of passive resistance in the history of the family. We had to send up your dinner on a tray.”

“There was a very good pudding,” said Margaret wistfully. “But that was not the best of it. I have never told you the best of it.”

They looked at her.

“It was Harry that found me. Not you, Elinor — I mean Harry Dashwood; Fanny’s little boy. He was four. He had been sent up by his nurse to wash, and he wandered along the passage, in that great house, as children do; and he opened the press door; and he stood there, in his little buff frock, looking at me. And he said: Are you a mouse?”

“He did not,” said Marianne.

“He did. And I said — I don’t know why; I was thirteen, and quite out of my mind — I said, yes. And he thought about it for a long time, and then he said: May I be one?” Her voice shook. “And he climbed in. He was extremely small. And we sat there, on the third shelf, in the dark, for an hour and a half, and ate a whole plate of sponge fingers that he had taken out of his pocket and did not say a word to each other. I have always liked Harry Dashwood since. It was the only nice thing that happened to me that autumn. Well, besides meeting Edward, of course,” said Margaret.

“It is a pity that his mother is Fanny,” added Marianne.

“He is at Cambridge,” said Elinor. “I heard it from Edward that he is very scholarly and is rather sensible. He means to travel Europe before settling in the country.”

“I am so glad.”

“You once dug a hole in the kitchen garden,” said Marianne, who had begun on the tea, “to see if it went all the way through to the other side of the world; and you got down as far as three feet and found an old horseshoe, and you were quite convinced it was Roman, and buried it again under the rhubarb with a stone on top of it, so that nobody could dig it up.”

“It was a very good horseshoe.”

“And you once measured the distance from Norland to Vesuvius on a piece of string, with my help, and made me hold one end at the sundial for the whole of an afternoon.”

“It was two thousand miles,” said Margaret dreamily. “It was a great deal of string.”

They were quiet, after that, for some time.

The candle had burned low. It was very late, and Margaret had lain down at last, in the middle of the bed, with her hands behind her head, and the ribbon that Marianne had brought coiled upon her stomach like a small blue snake; and she looked up at the canopy, in the dim light, and said, without any change of tone:

“I wish that Papa were here.”

Nobody answered. It was not a thing that required an answer.

“He would have walked me down, I suppose. I have always thought so. I used to picture it when I was small; I thought that I should be quite grown up, and in white, and that he would be very tall, and rather worn, in that old grey coat; and that he would have on his spectacles and forget to take them off.” She stopped. “I do not think I ought to mind. I have got a great many people who love me. I have got the Colonel, who has been so kind — I have got Professor Aylmer, and he cried in the study on Tuesday — but I should have liked to have him. Just for one hour. To see it.”

“He would have made a dreadful speech,” said Elinor, very gently.

“His eyes would have filled, and he would have pretended it was dust,” said Marianne.

“He would have lost the ring.”

“He would have told the entire room of people the history of the Norman font.”