Page 88 of Threads that Remain

It became, within a fortnight of the family’s settling into Berkeley Square, one of the small, fixed habits of the household that Henry should walk out most mornings before the rest of the house was properly awake, and that Sarah, upon three separate occasions that nobody remarked upon and everybody privately noticed, should discover that she, too, had an errand which took her in precisely the same direction.

On this particular morning — a fine, blowing, uncertain sort of morning in the middle of March, with a high pale sky and the first daffodils coming up along the Park railings — the errand in question was a book that Sarah had promised to return to a circulating library in Piccadilly, a distance that did not, by any reasonable calculation, require crossing the whole of the Park to accomplish; and Elinor, applied to for a chaperone, had looked at her daughter for a moment with an expression of perfect and unhurried understanding, and had volunteered herself for the office with a promptness that suggested she had been waiting to be asked.

She proved, in the event, a chaperone of very accommodating habits. She found, within the first ten minutes, that a particular bed of early crocuses wanted a closer inspection than could be managed from twenty paces; and she sat upon a bench, well within the letter of propriety and a very great deal outside its spirit, and showed not the smallest inclination to close the distance.

“Your mother,” said Henry, glancing back, “appears to have developed a sudden and very particular interest in botany.”

“My mother,” said Sarah, “has developed a sudden and very particular interest in leaving us alone together for exactly as long as she can manage without being caught at it. I do not think you ought to feel flattered. I believe she would do exactly the same for any two people she had decided ought to be talking, whatever the subject.”

“I choose to feel flattered regardless.”

They walked on for a little while without speaking, in the comfortable, unhurried silence of two people who had known each other too long to feel any obligation to fill it; and it was at the turn of the path, where a fallen branch had left the gravel uneven, that Henry put out his hand, without any great deliberation, to steady her over it — and found that he did not, once he had her hand in his, have any very pressing reason to let it go again, and that she, for her part, made no particular effort to reclaim it.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world. It lasted perhaps four seconds, and required no comment from either of them, and yet Henry was conscious, for the length of the next twenty yards, of very little else in the whole of the Park besides the small, warm, ungloved weight of her hand where it had rested in his; and when at last she drew it back, to gather her shawl more closely against a gust of wind, he found himself, quite unaccountably, missing it.

“You are very quiet this morning,” said Sarah, after a while. “You are generally quiet when you have something on your mind that you have not yet decided whether to say.”

“Am I so easily read?”

“By me, yes. I do not think you are easily read by very many people, which I have always privately thought a great pity, but I have had a great deal of practice, and I do not think you have ever once succeeded in concealing a low mood from me, whatever face you have shown the rest of the room.” She glanced sideways at him. “What is it?”

He was quiet for a few paces more, turning the thing over, in the way he had of never quite saying a serious matter until he had examined it thoroughly enough to be sure of his own mind.

“I have been thinking,” said he, at last, “of Fernley. Not unhappily — I do not mean that. Only that I find, now the house is full of noise again, and there is nothing whatever required of me before breakfast beyond deciding which coat to wear, that I have a great deal more leisure than I have had in two years to think back over the whole of it, and I am discovering that I did not, at the time, allow myself to feel the half of what I was feeling.”

“Tell me.”

“I did not know, until I went away, how much I should miss home. I do not think I let myself know it, if I am honest; I had made up my mind that I was going to be useful, and sensible, and entirely equal to the charge that had been put on me, and I did not think there was room for a young man who lay awake some nights simply wanting his own bed, and his own family, and the particular sound of Delaford in the evening, which I had never once, in one-and-twenty years of taking it for granted, troubled to notice I should miss.”

He looked out across the grass, at nothing in particular. “I was very homesick, Sarah, for a very long time, and would not have admitted it to a single living soul, least of all to myself, because I had decided that admitting it would be a kind of failure.”

“It would not have been a failure. It would only have been true.”

“I know that now. I did not entirely know it then.” He was silent a moment. “There was a cottage, at Fernley, in my first winter there — a family named Dyer, a labourer and his wife and four children, in a house the size of the drawing-room at Delaford, with gaps throughout the thatch on the north side, and a floor that had flooded whenever there was a hard rain for more than a day. I went to see about the roof, because that was the business I had come for, and I found, before I had properly finished with the roof, that the older two of the children had no shoes at all, in December, and the smallest had nothing that could properly be called a coat, only a piece of an old blanket pinned about her. I do not think I have ever in my life felt quite so useless as I felt standing in that cottage, with eight thousand a year to my name and a child in front of me with a blanket for a coat. I was never so ashamed in my life.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent for a boot-maker from Blandford the next morning, and had the whole family fitted, and had a local woman come to assist the mother in choosing materials to get the family fitted up for the winter.”

“That was good of you, Henry. They must have appreciated the help very much.”

“They did. When I went back to see how the work was progressing they had me sit down to tea,” Henry said. “And I felt a great deal better for perhaps a week, and then felt considerably worse again, because I had understood, by then, that the Dyers were not the only family in that condition, nor even the worst of them, and that the help, however gladly given, was not an answer to the actual question, which was a great deal larger than one cottage, or one winter, or one very fortunate young man with more money than he yet knew how to use properly.”

He glanced at her, half-rueful. “Do you remember, when we were children — you cannot have been above eight or nine — telling me that it was not fair that Tom Hollis had no boots and I had three pairs, and that somebody ought to do something about it, in that very decided way you had of announcing a fact and expecting the world to catch up with you directly?”

Sarah laughed, a little unsteadily. “I remember it very well. You told me that when I was grown up I might do something about it myself, since I seemed to have such very firm opinions on the subject, and I told you that I intended to, and that you had better watch, because I meant it. And then you gave him a pair of your own.”

“I find that that moment has stayed with me and made an important impact on me. And I have noticed you,” said Henry, “and I find I am not in the least surprised by anything you have become.”

They had come to a halt, without either of them quite deciding to, at the edge of the water, where the early light lay flat and bright upon the surface and a pair of moorhens went busily about some errand of their own among the reeds; and Sarah, turning to look at him, found that he was not looking at the water at all.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Henry, and found, for the first time in the whole of the conversation, that his careful composure had rather more difficulty holding than he had expected it to, “that I went away five years ago and left behind a clever, quick-tempered, thoroughly unmanageable girl of thirteen, whom I was very fond of in the way one is fond of a person one has known one’s whole life, and I have come home to find a young woman with the same quick temper, and the same very firm opinions, only now delivered with an ease and a warmth and a — ” He stopped, and began again, more carefully. “I do not know precisely when the change came about in you, Sarah. I do not think it can have happened all at once, and I am sad to say I was not there to see the greater part of it happen. But I find that I cannot now look at you across a breakfast table, or watch you fall behind on a walk to speak to a child, or hear you say something sharp and perfectly just about a matter that wants mending, without being entirely and helplessly struck by it, and I do not quite know what to do with being struck so, at this hour of the morning, with your mother twenty yards behind us pretending an interest in crocuses.”

Sarah did not answer at once. She looked at him for a long moment, with her colour rather high and her eyes very bright, and when at last she answered him, her voice was not perfectly steady either; but it was quite clear, from his face, what her answer had been.

Behind them, at a discreet distance, Elinor had straightened from her third and most protracted inspection of the crocus bed, and was observing the pair of them across the gravel with an expression of the most complete and private satisfaction; and finding that neither of them showed the smallest inclination to notice her, or to continue on toward Piccadilly, or indeed to do anything whatever beyond standing very still at the edge of the water, looking at one another, she sat back down upon her bench, and made an entirely unnecessary adjustment to her boot, and did not hurry them in the least.