Page 13 of Threads that Remain

“Mr. Fanshawe —”

“Do not say anything.” He held up a hand. “I know what you would say, and it would be kind, and I could not bear it. I am not clever, Miss Dashwood. I am well aware of it. I do not know one end of a mountain from the other, and I cannot make out what a person can find to say about a rock. But I know a good thing when I see it, and I have never before seen one laugh so much.” He put down the roses. He said, with a flash of the old radiance, that appeared to cost him something: “I shall be here. I am always here. It is my only accomplishment. If you should come back and find that you have changed your mind, you have only to leave your card.”

She could not help it; she was moved. She took his hand and pressed it, and told him, with perfect truth, that she had liked him more than she could say; that he had been the kindest company; and that she would think of him often. He kissed her fingers, and went away down the stairs, whistling. It was not until she heard the street door close that she discovered she had been crying.

And Mr. Tregarth, who had not been asked, arrived on the very last afternoon, when the whole of the house in Bedford Square was in the state of tumult which precedes a voyage, with the hall full of trunks, and the Professor’s hammer-cases being carried down by two men, and Mrs. Aylmer at the head of the stairs issuing orders in the voice of a Nelson on the eve of Trafalgar.

He did not come to the library. He stood in the hall, in the coat that did not fit, and waited; and when Margaret came down the stairs, with a list in her hand, and saw him, she found that she had stopped upon the fourth step.

“I have brought you this,” said Mr. Tregarth. He held out a small, folded paper, sealed. His voice was not quite steady, and he coloured, and looked at the floor, and then, with a visible effort, at her. “It is a letter for Mr. Maclure, of Philadelphia. He is a very great man; he made the first geological map of the United States, and he has been kind to me. He will be glad to see you. He will show you his cabinet. I have taken the liberty of saying that you know the Charmouth beds better than anyone in England, which I believe to be quite true.” He paused. “That is all. It is not a great deal. I had thought of a great many things to say, and they all seemed a good deal too large, and I find that I cannot remember any of them.”

She took the letter. It was warm from his hand.

“I have no right to ask you anything,” said Mr. Tregarth, low, “and I am going to ask it all the same. May I write to the Professor while you are away? I have no other pretext for it that would not be an impertinence, but he has been very good to me, and I find I cannot let you go without some way of hearing, now and again, that you are well.”

“I should be very sorry if you did not.”

“I shall ask him to give you, and Mrs. Aylmer of course, my well wishes, and if I have any questions about your journey, perhaps you could allow him to pass the information on to me?”

“Certainly. I shall ask him to relay any information I feel may be of interest to you,” said Margaret.

They looked at one another. It was a very short look, and she remembered afterwards that neither of them had smiled; and that it had seemed to her, at that moment, that the hall was a good deal quieter than it had been, and that she was standing at the edge of some very high place, from which one could see a great way, and not yet make out what lay at the end. Then Mrs. Aylmer’s voice rang out overhead, demanding to know who had the key to the blue trunk; and Mr. Tregarth bowed, and made a sound that was not quite a word, and was gone.

They sailed on the twelfth of August, upon the packet ship Amity, bound first for Calais and the Continent, from the London Docks, on the morning tide; and the whole of the family that could be assembled was there to see them go. Mrs. Dashwood stood on the quay, in her best bonnet, with a handkerchief that she kept folded very small in her hand and did not use. Cecilia and Mr. Wren had come from Portman Square, in their own carriage, at six o’clock; and Cecilia, who had promised herself that she would not cry, clung to her friend’s neck on the gangway, and wept for five minutes without any interruption, until she was gently detached by the Professor, who was blowing his own nose with a noise like a trumpet.

“Write to me frequently,” said Cecilia.

“I shall write to you so often that your husband begins to complain that my letters are taking up too much space on your desk.”

“I am serious, Meg.”

“So am I. I swear it.” Margaret held her at arm’s length, and looked into the round, wet, laughing, adoring face that she had known since she was fifteen, and knew that whatever else she carried across that ocean, it would not be a larger thing than this. “Enjoy every minute of London. I insist upon it!”

“You too, enjoy every opportunity offered to you. You deserve it. Look after yourself.”

And then it was done. She waved until she could no longer see those she loved best in all the world. She felt a sadness come over her, but by the time they had reached their first stop for the night, and she had already seen places her eyes had never seen before, a quiet excitement had begun to build within her.

Chapter XI.

Margaret’s letters came, as she had promised, by every packet; and it is a fact not generally understood by those who have never had a daughter abroad that a letter does not arrive as a single event, but as a whole season of events, beginning with the moment it is seen upon the hall table and ending some days later when the last member of the household has finished reading it aloud to the next. Mrs. Dashwood had a small rosewood box made for them, lined with green baize, which she kept beside her chair; and by the end of the third year the box was full, and a second was ordered, and she had learned the greater part of the contents by heart.

The first had come from Paris and had been mostly about the state of the roads. The second, from a small inn on the pass of the Simplon, was nearly illegible, being written on a knee in a jolting carriage, and full of exclamations. The third, from Naples, was read aloud in the drawing-room at Delaford on a wet Sunday in December, with the whole family gathered about the fire, and Henry lying on his stomach on the hearthrug, and the Colonel, at his wife’s particular request, holding it up to the light.

My dearest Mamma, (read Marianne, in the voice she kept for the parts that could be acted) I have seen it. I have stood upon the rim and looked down into it, and it smelled exactly as I always supposed the bottom of the world would smell, which is to say of eggs. Mrs. Aylmer was sick, and I was not, and I shall not permit her to forget it; she says that at her age she has earned the right to be sick wherever she likes, and I have told her that this is not an argument, it is only a fact. The guide, a most agreeable man named Gennaro, who had a hat like a small cathedral, assured us that it was quite safe, and that it had not erupted since Tuesday. I inquired what had happened on Tuesday. He said that it had “made a little noise.” Mamma, I have collected fourteen specimens, of which I have been permitted to bring away nine; the others were confiscated by Professor Aylmer on grounds of weight. Please tell Henry that his pebble has been to the top of Vesuvius and is a great deal the better for it, and that I keep it in my left pocket, and that it has not yet, upon any occasion, been lost.

“Not once?” said Henry, sitting up.

“It says not once,” said Marianne.

“It is a very good pebble,” said Henry, with satisfaction, and lay down again.

There were letters from Rome, and Florence, and Vienna, and from a town in Switzerland whose name Mrs. Dashwood could never pronounce; there was a long letter from Lisbon, in which Margaret wrote of the great earthquake, and the ruins of the old cathedral, and of a man in the market who had sold her, for a shilling, a piece of stone he swore had come from the Temple of Solomon; and in the second autumn there came, by a packet of unusual size, a whole bundle from Sicily, where the family had spent the summer among the temples of Agrigento; and where Professor Aylmer, as Margaret reported, had been discovered at dawn on the third day lying flat on his back in the Temple of Concord, considering the proportions of the pediment, and had been persuaded to get up only by the joint efforts of his wife, his daughter, and a goat. “He says that it is the only way to see it properly,” Margaret wrote, “and I have tried it, and he is quite right.”

Mrs. Dashwood read those a great many times. She read, over and over again, a passage in which her youngest daughter, standing on the deck of the Sicilian packet before dawn, had seen, through a rift in the sea mist, the first sight of Etna against the stars. I thought of you all, Margaret had written, and of the chalk pit, and of Cecilia’s flint. I was so happy, Mamma. I do not think I have ever been so entirely happy. I think it is because I am doing the one thing that I was always meant to do, and I am doing it with somebody who understands. And Mrs. Dashwood, who had said a great many hard things to her own conscience during the winter of Margaret’s leaving, folded the letter up, and put it back in its baize, and did not say anything at all.

It was in the second year of this absence, on a bright, blowing afternoon in October, that Edward Ferrars, standing at the foot of the great oak in the Delaford orchard, and looking up with considerable pride at a structure of timber and canvas and rope that occupied its lowest boughs, remarked to his wife that it was, upon the whole, the best thing he had ever built.

“It is the only thing you have ever built,” said Elinor.