Page 57 of Threads that Remain

“And did he?”

“He screamed,” said Sarah, with the deep and uncomplicated joy of an artist describing her finest work, “like a scalded cat. He would have woke the whole house if anyone had been asleep. Papa came out in his nightcap, thinking the house was afire, and found Ned standing on his own bed in his nightshirt, pointing at his pillow and howling that there were beetles in his bed, and Papa picked up the jar, and looked at it, and looked at Ned, and said, in the driest voice you ever heard in your life, ‘I see that you have taken up natural history, Edward. I had no notion.’ And Ned went the colour of a boiled ham and could not explain the jar at all without admitting that he had kept it from Mamma for months, so he had to simply stand there being lectured about beetles while everyone in nightclothes looked on.”

Anne had stopped drawing entirely. She had both hands pressed over her mouth, and her shoulders were shaking, and a small, helpless, entirely undignified sound was escaping from behind her fingers that grew, by degrees, into a proper laugh, the kind that doubles a person over and will not be reasoned with; and Sarah, watching the effect of her own story with enormous satisfaction, abandoned her pose altogether and came to sit beside her on the window-seat, delighted.

“Was he very angry with you?”

“He has not spoken to me since breakfast, which I consider a great triumph, since he generally cannot go an hour without telling me something I did wrong.” Sarah grinned, and then, more quietly, leaned her head against Anne’s shoulder, watching the rain streak sideways across the glass. “You are the only person I have told the whole of it to properly. Mary only said that I should not tease my brother, in that voice she has, and Mamma does not know yet, and I should like to put off that conversation as long as I possibly can.”

“I shan’t tell.”

“I know you shan’t. You never do.” Sarah looked sideways at the sketchbook, tipped half shut now against Anne’s knee, and then at Anne herself, with an expression that had, for once, gone perfectly still. “Do you know, you are the only person that I would ever have come to on a wet afternoon just to talk a great deal of nonsense at, and know that she would not mind it, and would laugh in the right places, and would not once tell me I ought to be more like somebody else. I think you are my very best friend, Anne. I have thought so for a long time.”

Anne, who did not often say a great deal all at once, closed the sketchbook altogether, and turned, and looked at her with the same steady, grave, entirely sincere attention that she generally kept for the drawing itself.

“You are mine too,” said Anne. “I have never had to think about it at all, which I believe is how one knows.”

They sat so for a while, with the rain going on outside, and the fire low, and the half-finished sketch lying forgotten between them — a quick, laughing, not entirely flattering likeness, all elbows and loose hair and a mouth open in the middle of a sentence, which was, as it happened, very exactly like Sarah — until there came, at last, from the passage beyond the door, the sound of a door opening, and footsteps, and a boy’s voice, several years older than either of theirs, groaning aloud about algebra to nobody in particular.

“There,” said Sarah, scrambling up at once, with every trace of stillness abandoned entirely. “Henry has finished at last. Come along, Anne, before he escapes us for the stables,” and she was out of the window-seat and across the room before Anne had so much as closed her sketchbook, exactly as she did everything, at a run, with her whole face already halfway into the next story.

Chapter XXXI.

The letters had come by the morning post.

There were two of them, which was the number that Margaret, upon principle, always sent; one to Delaford, one to the parsonage; for she had discovered, early in her married life, that a single letter to the family generally gave rise to a great deal of confusion as to who should read it aloud, and that a pair, containing much the same news, in a slightly different order, might be enjoyed by all. They lay now upon the tea-table between the sisters, one open and one folded, in the wide, hasty, sprawling hand that had once covered the margins of a copy of Captain Cook. They were dated from Cairo, the 3rd of April, and they had been seven weeks upon the road.

“She has been to the Pyramids,” said Elinor, with a look of resigned amusement.

“She has been up the Pyramid,” said Marianne. “The large one. It is much higher than the Coliseum in Rome, and she says that she was carried up the last part of it by two Arabs, in a kind of chair, with her feet dangling; and that it was very like being elderly Mrs. Smith.” She read on, with her lips twitching. “Simon says that it is the finest piece of masonry in the world, and that he should like to be permitted to take a sample from one of the stones for analysis; and the Arab who was in charge of the party has said that he will do so, if he is paid, and that the Sultan has not been told.”

“I hope Simon has not been arrested.”

“He has been warned.” Marianne turned the page. “She says that they have found, a little way below the Great Pyramid, in the sand, a sort of dry ravine, in which there are shells, actual sea-shells, thousands of them, in a layer of limestone, one hundred feet above the level of the river; and that Simon spent the whole of Tuesday upon his knees, and could not be induced to eat, and that the Professor, who has come with them, and is quite past being carried up anything, sat upon a camel, under an umbrella, and shouted directions.” She stopped. She read a line to herself, and then, with an exclamation, read it aloud. “And Mrs. Aylmer has taken me to Thebes, Marianne, to the very tomb where she once held a lantern for eleven hours, and it is exactly the size that she said, and the wall — she says it was Ptolemaic — has a painted crocodile upon it that is looking at me with the most perfectly evil expression. She has stood beside it for twenty minutes, and told me the whole story, and it was the happiest afternoon of my life, except two.”

“Which two?”

“I do not think that she says.” Marianne laughed and put down the letter. “It is the wedding, and the falls, I suppose. Or Vesuvius. I think that she has too many to choose from.”

“Mamma will be beside herself,” said Elinor.

“Mamma has already been beside herself. She was in the drawing-room when Mrs. Jennings and the Palmers called on us. She read the letter aloud to them, with multiple sighs and exclamations. Mr. Palmer said that in his opinion it was a great deal too much excitement for a lady of her years, and that he would not have a daughter of his own go up a pyramid in a chair for a thousand pounds.” She smiled. “And then he said that she ought to write and ask for a piece of it.”

“Of the pyramid?”

“That is what Mamma asked. He replied, ‘Of the chair,’” said Marianne. “He is the most sarcastic man!”

They laughed, like two girls; and the sound of it carried down the lawn, where Sarah, who had a keen ear for any conversation not intended for her, looked up sharply from behind the wicket, and remarked, in a clear voice, to no one in particular, that Aunt Margaret would come home with a mummy in a trunk, and that in her opinion it would be a very good thing.

There was a note upon the hall table, in a large, sprawling, wavering hand, with a great blot upon the last word; and it lay there, on the silver tray, until the Colonel, coming in from the stables, took it up, and read it through, and laughed.

Brooks Green, Tuesday.

My dear Colonel, Charlotte insists that you are all to dine on Thursday. Mr. Palmer says that he does not mind. It is to be a family party. The Ferrars are still with us, for another week, and I cannot help it, for she is my cousin. Bring all the children. Bring Mrs. Dashwood and see that she is not told anything more about pyramids until she has eaten. I have something to say.

Yours, M. JENNINGS.

P.S. I am seventy-nine. I have a good deal to say. I have been saying it for sixty years, and I think that it is time somebody listened.