Page 2 of Threads that Remain

“You are very obliging. I have not said it to anybody else.” Cecilia looked at her, sidelong, with a small, considering smile. “I daresay that others would think me very frivolous.”

“I think that you climbed down a chalk pit in your good gown for the sake of a piece of flint, not an hour after we met,” said Margaret, “and I do not call that frivolous at all.”

“That,” said Cecilia, “was for the sake of you, and not the flint. I do not care the least in the world for chert. But I find that I should be very glad to be your friend, Miss Dashwood, and I have at times observed that a friendship formed over a pit of ordinary rocks and stones has a great deal to recommend it; and so, I got down into the pit.”

They were inseparable within the month. It was, upon the whole, one of the more joyful alliances that the neighbourhood of Delaford had lately produced, and it was watched, by Mrs. Jennings and others, with the liveliest interest: for it was very soon apparent that the two young ladies, who spoke tirelessly of every subject imaginable, were each found wanting when the other was not by. Cecilia went to the chalk pit to sketch, and was happy to speak of ammonites, because Margaret was there.

Chapter II.

Margaret and Cecilia became regular visitors to the drawing-room at Brooks Green.

Cecilia, on her side, having spent much of her childhood away from England with her parents at their digs, longed to know the very particular intelligence of the latest fashions and people in English society, in which her mother had not much interest. She found that Margaret knew a great many things that enlightened her as to all matters of importance in English society, and those little nuances of drawing-room etiquette that one simply must know.

The young ladies found a particular pleasure in putting on their second-best gowns, and going to drink tea with a very fat, very deaf, and very delightful old lady, who told the most extraordinary stories, and knew the whole history of every family in three counties, and who declared, within a fortnight, that Margaret Dashwood was the most sensible girl of her acquaintance, and the best listener.

“You are the only persons under thirty,” said Mrs. Jennings, filling her cup for the third time, “who have ever asked me to finish a story. I am interrupted at the best part. Now, where was I? Yes — Colonel Brandon’s first love, and the whole sad business of Eliza.”

“You told us that one a fortnight ago, ma’am.”

“Did I? Well, I daresay I shall tell it better today.” And she did; and Margaret and Cecilia, who thought Mrs. Jennings quite the most interesting person in the neighbourhood, bar no one, sat sipping their tea and indulging in cream puffs, and would not for the world have been anywhere else.

The Aylmers’ library was a marvel. Professor Aylmer, a broad, weathered, cheerful man, whose knees had been ruined by thirty years of kneeling in trenches, and who regarded Dorsetshire as a very pleasant place to be buried in, had brought with him seven crates of plans, drawings and potsherds, three globes, and a collection of other men’s journals which he had been acquiring for forty years; and he gave the two girls the freedom of it with the readiness of one who had waited a long time for an audience. For the whole of his young manhood he had been at one excavation or another, at Herculaneum, and in the valley of the Nile, and among the ruins of Greece; and when he had accepted a chair at one of the London colleges, at a time when his daughter was five, it had been for a reason that everyone who knew the family could give in a single breath, which was that his wife could not endure to be left at home, and he could not endure to leave her. He had held it until they moved to the country for the air and the quiet, which they were finding, Mrs. Aylmer observed, a great deal too quiet.

Mrs. Aylmer was the reason for it all. She was a tall, handsome, weather-browned woman of five-and-fifty, with a great deal of iron-grey hair, who had followed her husband into the field at two-and-twenty and had never seen the least occasion to apologise for it. She had held a lantern for eleven hours in a tomb at Thebes while he made up his mind whether a certain wall was Ptolemaic; she had carried Cecilia, at the age of two, in a basket, to a dig in Sicily; and she regarded England as a rather small country, with too many hedges in it, and did not scruple to say so. It was a matter of the greatest interest to Margaret, who had never before seen a woman do anything of the kind, to watch her in her own house; and within a few weeks of their first meeting she found that she stood in Mrs. Aylmer’s presence in an attitude of respectful awe that she had never felt for any mortal before, and which was soon, under that lady’s brisk and unsentimental kindness, softening into something more like the affection of a daughter. Mrs. Aylmer, who had one child of her own and had not, she said, supposed there was room in the world for another, took Margaret’s whole enthusiasm into the house as she might have taken in a stray dog, without comment, and gave it a place by the fire.

It was Cecilia who first spoke of the Grand Tour, upon a wet afternoon in the schoolroom at Ashgrove, with a map of Europe spread out upon the floor between them and her father’s atlas open at the plates of Herculaneum.

“Mamma meant to go again,” said she, “but I said surely it will not happen until I am —” she gave a pleased look — “out. Mamma finally agreed, and informed Papa, as if she were the one behind the idea, that a girl who has been dug out of three countries before she was ten has to also experience a Season, and that for their only daughter they should do the Season first, and the volcanoes after. I am sure Papa was secretly pleased to hear it, as aching knees and back had become a regular complaint, poor dear. And so here we are! And as you are one year older than I am, if you would be so good to wait just one year longer when the time comes, until I am seventeen, we can enjoy our first Season together. Oh, please tell me you will wait!”

“I will not only wait for you,” Margaret replied, with as much air of sophistication as she could muster, “but when our debut comes, I will not be satisfied until you and I have each worn out at least six pairs of dancing-slippers.”

Cecilia looked at her with a twinkle in her eye. “Of course, when we are completely swept off our feet by gentlemen who are tall, mysterious, and excessively handsome, and become beautiful brides, then my parents will have to go on without me.”

Margaret sighed dramatically and paused for effect. “I was once described as a good-humoured, well-disposed girl who was not likely to equal her sisters at a later period of life. I confess that my pride was affected,” she admitted, with a most serious expression. “However, I believe it may very well have been the catalyst that made me the person you see before you now. I am not without hope, or confidence in myself.”

Cecilia’s eyes widened in shock. “What bad manners, to have said such a thing! I can only assume that whoever said such a thing must have been jealous! You are a beauty, and the most impressive person. I have no doubt you will have a great many suitors, and I hope we will both be well married and settled near each other” — she gave a definite nod, putting an end to any doubts on the subject.

Cecilia rolled up the map, and continued: “However, we will prove to our relations, and all those who choose to be ill-mannered” — she paused, raised her brows, and rolled her eyes — “that we are not desperate, but ladies of good sense. If the Season presents us with only dull-witted partners to choose from, we can always have a second Season. I for one will not be easily persuaded to form a match with just anyone. I can wait for as long as it takes.”

“Indeed, we shall,” Margaret agreed wholeheartedly. Lowering her voice, she added, “No Mr. Willoughby shall be permitted to call on us.”

“Never!” said Cecilia.

It was in this manner — over a wet map, and a cooling teapot, and a friendship that neither girl had expected and neither now could do without — that the whole great scheme of hopes and dreams was first laid down, in that comfortable and unhurried way in which the largest plans of youth are generally laid: to be taken up in earnest years later, when both of them had grown a good deal taller, and a good deal surer.

Chapter III.

Delaford was never so quiet as in the wet weeks of November. It was on such a morning, some eighteen months after the wedding that had made Marianne Dashwood the mistress of that house, that a letter came for Colonel Brandon by the early post; and the little party at the breakfast table, which had been as cheerful as any party in Dorsetshire, was made to understand that happiness is not a wall, but only a roof, and that roofs may be entered by weather.

Nothing was amiss before the letter. Mrs. Dashwood was at her needlework by the window, in the chair she had long ago claimed as her own and which the whole household now regarded as a feature of the room, like the fireplace. Margaret had laid out upon the sill a row of specimens gathered from the chalk pit beyond the home farm, each labelled in a hand that grew smaller and more scientific as the row went on. And Marianne, who could not be in a room with a pianoforte for a quarter of an hour without being drawn to it, had left her tea to grow cold and was playing something quick and bright and not at all suitable for the hour, while her husband, at the head of the table, pretended not to listen and listened with his whole attention.

She was one-and-twenty and married; and if it be true that the changes of the last two years had taught her a great deal, it is also true that they had not taught her to be quiet. Her laugh was as ready as ever it had been at Barton. She still played too loudly when she was pleased and too slowly when she was not. She still, upon hearing some wonderful piece of news, was liable to spring up and cross the room without any clear idea of where she was going. But she had learned, and at a price she did not like to remember, that a heart may be given freely without being given carelessly; and there was now about all her liveliness a kind of steadiness, as of a river that has been taught its banks and is no less a river for them.

The Colonel opened his letter with his usual composure. It was a composure that Marianne had once, in the folly of her sixteenth year, mistaken for dullness, and which she now knew to be the outward form of a very great deal of feeling kept carefully in order. She saw him read the first lines. She saw him read them again. She saw the colour leave his face, not all at once but by degrees, like a tide going out; and her hands stopped upon the keys, and the bright tune stopped with them, in the middle of a bar.

“Brandon?”

“It is nothing that need alarm you, my love,” said Brandon, rising; and this was so plainly untrue, and so plainly meant kindly, that she felt no inclination to reproach him for it. “I beg you will excuse me. I must go to the library. There is an answer to be written, and it should go by today’s post.”