Page 56 of Threads that Remain

Henry’s face, as he listened, went through no confusion at all. It lit, plainly and immediately, at the second of the two names offered, in a way that left no one in the room in any doubt of his answer before he had given it.

He wrote to his father himself, a few days after, in a hand that had grown steadier and more assured than it had been even a year before.

Dear Sir,

The Colonel and my Mamma have told me I am to choose a name, and I have chosen. I hope you will not be sorry to hear I have chosen Brandon.

I do understand what it means, and I did not choose it lightly. I have been a Brandon in everything but name for as long as I can properly remember, and it seems to me only right to make it so in truth as well. But I do not think, and I hope you will not think either, that it changes anything at all between us. We both know that you are my father. The Colonel is my Papa. My Mamma says there is room enough for both in one person’s heart, and that the more people who love a person, the better off he is for it. I believe her, for I have found it to be true.

I remain, dear Sir, your affectionate son,

Henry

It is a fact, and one that no philosopher has yet been able to explain, that the years of a family’s life pass at two entirely different speeds: very slowly for the people who are in them, and with the most astonishing rapidity for everybody else. To Marianne Brandon, who had watched a great many days go by at Delaford, one after another, each with its tea and its lessons and its small domestic dramas, the three summers that followed Margaret’s wedding seemed to have passed like a single long afternoon. To the outside world, they had produced a great deal of change. The elms had grown. Ned had lost his front teeth. The little brown pony named Sausage had been sold, with much grief, and replaced by a large grey named Black Knight. And upon a warm June afternoon, in Henry’s fourteenth year, the two sisters sat upon the terrace at Delaford, at the round iron table, with the silver teapot between them, and looked out over the lawn at their children, and it struck them both, at the same instant, that the children were no longer small.

They were playing cricket. It was a game of mixed and irregular rules, devised by Sarah, who had a low opinion of any system that did not allow for the intervention of a dog; and the players comprised, upon the one side, Henry, who bowled, and Mary, who kept the score in a book, and Anne, who had been assigned to the far boundary and had, for the last half-hour, been sketching an elm; and on the other, Charles Willoughby, who was up on a visit from Combe Magna, and stood in front of the wicket with a bat far too large for him and a face of thunderous concentration, and Sarah, who kept wicket, and Madeline, who fielded, and Ned, who was in general charge of the ball. It was the sort of afternoon that seems to have been poured out of a jug: still and golden, and full of the hum of bees.

“He has got so tall,” said Marianne.

“He has grown two inches since spring.”

“I know. I have measured him against the door.” She lifted her cup, and set it down again, untasted. “Elinor. Look at him.”

She did not say at whom. It was not necessary. Down the lawn, in his shirt-sleeves, with the sun on his dark head, Henry was running up to bowl; and it was one of those small plain movements of ordinary life that carried, without warning, a whole world in them. He came in at a long easy stride, with his left arm swinging, and his chin lifted; he checked at the crease; he sent the ball down with a flick of the wrist, and at the instant of the release, with his weight thrown forward upon the left foot, he pushed the hair back out of his eyes with the back of his hand and laughed. It was the laugh of a boy who has never in his life had a reason not to be confident. It went up into the golden air.

“It is his walk, I think,” said Marianne slowly. “And the way he throws back his head. And the way he comes into a room, as though he has been expected. I saw it in London, when he came into the dining-room at Mrs. Jennings’s, and it startled me; but I said that it was a chance. It is not a chance.” She stopped. “I do not mean the face. One has grown used to the face. I mean the man. I see the man in him; I see him almost every day; and it does not frighten me, Elinor, it does not frighten me in the least, and that is the strangest part. I only wonder what I shall do on the day when I stop being able to see the boy.”

“You will not stop.”

“You cannot be sure.”

“I can,” said Elinor. She said it in her quiet, level voice, without emphasis, with her hands folded round the warm cup. “I have watched him grow up beside my own children, and I think I know him as well as I know Mary. It is a likeness in the wrapping, my dear. It is not in the thing that is wrapped. I have never seen Mr. Willoughby lower his voice to speak to a small child in a crowd or notice who was left standing at the edge of a game or stop in the middle of a laugh to see that another person was not hurt. Henry does all three before breakfast.” She smiled, faintly. “And there is another thing. I think that he has caught it from the Colonel, though he would be astonished to be told. There is a way that the Colonel looks, when he is quite sure of something, and does not mean to say it. I have seen Henry do it, over the top of a book.”

Marianne was silent. She looked at the tall brown boy on the lawn, and he glanced up, at that moment, and caught her eye across the grass, and grinned, and waved the ball at her, with a gesture that meant, quite clearly, look at this; and she found, to her considerable surprise, that she had put her hand up and waved back.

“Yes,” said she, with a queer little laugh. “I think that I see it.”

It had rained since breakfast, steadily and without the least sign of remorse, and the schoolroom window at Delaford had gone the colour of a pewter plate; so that Anne Brandon, who was nine and had been given leave to sit in the window-seat with her sketchbook while her brother finished his mathematics two rooms away, had very little to look at beyond the grey garden and the grey sky, and was obliged to make do, instead, with the person sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her.

“You are not holding still,” said Anne.

“I am holding extremely still,” said Sarah, who was also nine, and was holding nothing of the kind; she had got as far as sitting in one place, which she considered, on the whole, a very creditable effort, and had not thought it necessary to go further. “I have not moved my legs in a full minute. You may draw the legs with perfect confidence.”

“It is your face that moves. You cannot tell a story without your whole face taking part in it.”

“Then you had better draw it quickly, while it is doing something interesting, instead of complaining about it.” Sarah shifted, not at all with the stillness she had just claimed, and wound a loose piece of her hair round one finger. “Besides, you have been drawing me for a quarter of an hour and have said nothing else the whole time. I begin to think you have forgotten how to talk and only know how to look at a person very hard and move your pencil.”

“I talk when there is something to say.”

“I talk whether there is something to say or not, and I find it answers a great deal better, because by the time I have finished, I have generally thought of something.” She considered this for a moment, with great satisfaction, as though she had only just discovered it to be true. “I have not told you what I did to Ned.”

“What did you do to Ned?”

“It was not unkind,” said Sarah, in the tone of a person laying careful groundwork for a defence she expected to need. “He is six, and he is the single most irritating person I have ever had the misfortune to share a nursery with, and he has been telling Mamma for a week that I am afraid of the dark, which is an outrageous lie, I am afraid of nothing whatever. He is the one afraid of the dark and so I decided that he should be taught a lesson in exactly how little I am afraid of.”

“What did you do?”

“He keeps a jar of beetles under his bed. He thinks that nobody knows about the jar. Everybody knows about the jar; Mary has known about the jar for months and has simply decided not to mind it, because Mary does not mind anything, when it has to do with Ned, which I sometimes think is its own kind of irritating, but that is a different story.” Sarah waved this consideration away with one hand, as being a matter for another afternoon. “So last night, when he had gone down to supper, I took the jar, very carefully, so as not to let any of them out — I am not a monster, Anne — and I put it under his own pillow instead of under the bed, so that when he went to turn it down he should get the fright of his life; and then I went to bed myself, perfectly innocent, and said nothing at all.”