Page 15 of Threads that Remain

“And then the flag would blow into the river, and I should have gone all the way up for nothing.” She frowned. “I should tie it on first. With a rope. Round the branch, so it could not go, and then I should have both hands. And I should tell Papa I was going, so that if the branch broke there would be somebody who knew where to look.”

“That,” said Elinor, “is exactly what I should have done myself.”

Sarah went off with the rope in the highest of spirits. She tied the flag, with a thoroughness that would have shamed a sailor, and reported to her father before ascending; and the flag flew from the topmost bough of the oak until the following spring. Mrs. Dashwood, who had watched the whole proceeding with her head a little on one side, observed that Elinor was too careful. Elinor said that perhaps she was. But she was looking up at the flag as she said it, and there was in her face a quiet and settled content, of the kind that comes to a person who has, at very long last, and after a great deal of thought, found the way to do a difficult thing rightly.

Chapter XII.

Henry was nine years old now and would be ten in the summer; a lean, brown, laughing boy, with his hair always in his eyes and his hands always in something, and the general appearance of a person who has just done a thing he will presently be asked about. He had grown, in the last few years, to be exactly the boy Delaford had expected him to be, and rather more. He was clever, in the sense in which his cousin Mary was clever; he was not steady; he was, to say the truth, extremely troublesome. But there was in him a quality of such perfect and unstudied good humour that the most exasperated adult in the parish, encountering him with a torn coat and a hen under his arm, was found on the whole to forgive him before the inquiry began. He was funny. He could not help it. It was the gift of his face and the gift of his tongue; he could do the parson’s voice, and the Colonel’s, and Mrs. Jennings’s, and a very fair imitation of a cow in distress; and there were days when the Delaford nursery could hear him laughing through three closed doors.

Now he had climbed to the very highest bough of the oak, where no one had authorised him to be, and was hanging from it by his knees, with his hat over his eyes, in the character of the guide.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” cried Henry, in a voice of enormous Italian confidence. “Behold the mountain of Peru! It has not erupted since Tuesday! It has only made a little noise!”

“You cannot be an Italian in Peru,” said Mary, without looking up.

“I am a very well-travelled Italian, and there are no other kind.”

“Henry, come down.”

“I am not in the least in any danger.”

“You are hanging by your knees from a tree.”

“That is not the same as danger. It is method.” He swung himself upright, with great agility, and bowed to the assembled family, and lost his hat, which sailed down through the leaves and landed with great precision on the head of Mrs. Dashwood. There was a roar of laughter from the tree. Mrs. Dashwood put up a hand, and, quite without meaning to, laughed with them.

“He is dreadful,” said Mrs. Dashwood, wiping her eyes.

“He is exactly what he ought to be,” said the lady in the second chair, in a dry, hard, carrying voice, “and a good deal better than he has any right to be, considering the stock.”

She had been sitting there for the last hour, upright as a poker, in a black silk gown of a fashion ten years gone, with both hands folded upon the head of a stick; and she had not, in that time, been observed to smile. This was Mrs. Smith of Allenham. She was seventy years old, and she had been, since a certain wet spring some six years before, Henry’s great-aunt in every sense in which that relationship can be made to serve; for she was Mr. Willoughby’s aunt, and Henry was Mr. Willoughby’s son, and she had determined, at the age of sixty-four and against every inclination of a hard and solitary life, to know what had come of it.

“He is method,” said Sarah emphatically, from her bough, with deep approval.

Mary looked at her sister and shook her head. “Do you even know what it means?”

“No,” admitted Sarah, without a care. “But if Henry says it, then it must be true.”

Mary shook her head again.

Henry slid down the trunk with great ease, singing something out of tune, to retrieve his hat. He retrieved it from Mrs. Dashwood’s head, with an elaborate bow. Then, with quite a different manner, he crossed the grass to the second chair, and stood before it.

“You may kiss my hand, sir,” said Mrs. Smith, “provided it is clean.”

He examined his own. He wiped it down the front of his coat, with great care, and kissed hers, and said, “Good afternoon, Aunt Smith,” in a voice that had no mischief in it at all; and Mrs. Smith, whose face was made for severity as a plank is made for flatness, was seen to soften, all at once, in every line, like wax near a fire.

“Sit down,” said she. “Tell me what you did in your Latin.”

He sat at her feet, on the grass, with his back against her chair; and she laid one large-knuckled, ringed hand upon his hair, and left it there. It was all the household saw, and it was, perhaps, everything they needed to see. It was known in the county, as such things are always known, that old Mrs. Smith had sent in the autumn for her attorney from Blandford, and that the attorney had stayed to dinner; and Mrs. Jennings, who had it from her cousin’s housekeeper, was of the opinion that a certain will had been made, and that the first letter of the heir’s name was H.

Marianne had been watching from the terrace steps, where she had sat down some little time before with her sketchbook upon her knee and had not drawn a line. Beside her sat Elinor, sewing a button on to Ned’s second-best coat, and for some time neither had spoken.

There are certain moments in the life of every family when the whole truth of it is set before one in a single frame, as in a picture, and one has only to sit still and behold it. Here, under the great oak, in the sun, was Sarah in the branches with her flag; and Mary on the trunk with her book, with her back like a poker; and Ned in the treehouse, in the exact centre, with his thumb removed, explaining to a solemn audience what the other man had said. Here was Anne, who was five, and dark-eyed, and had been sitting the whole of the afternoon in the fork of a low bough with her tongue between her teeth, in the process of drawing, with a stub of charcoal on the back of an old envelope, every person within sight. And there was Henry, coming down the tree, with the sun on the side of his face.

She had learned to see it. She had learned to see it as one learns to look at a scar, which is to say as a part of the whole body, at first with attention, and afterwards without; and there were days now when she did not see it at all. But there was a moment, quite often, in the light, when he turned his head a particular way; and it did not any longer catch her breath, as it had once done, but it did catch her a little; and it was in the same instant that the whole of the boy came round it, the bad hat and the scabbed knees and the hen and the laugh, and she found that she loved him in the very place where the pain had been.

“He is going to be very like him,” said Marianne.

“In looks,” said Elinor.