Page 21 of Threads that Remain

Brandon beamed. “No. I had this especially commissioned and have been waiting to give it to you on this very particular day. The design contains a secret.”

Marianne studied it and turned it over. “You will have to show me.”

Brandon smiled and reached for her hand. “It is called an acrostic ring,” he began to explain. “The sapphire represents you, since it is your favourite colour. Then, starting at the top and working clockwise, each stone represents its first letter to spell a word, such as A for amethyst.”

Marianne began to work it out. “A for amethyst, D for diamond, O for opal, R for ruby, E for emerald. It spells ADORE!”

“It does,” said he in a hushed tone. “Whenever you look at it you will see the secret message reminding you that your husband adores you.”

She lifted her face to meet his and kissed him.

There was nothing more the Colonel could ask for than what he had at this moment in time.

Chapter XVI.

They wintered in Philadelphia, in a house on Chestnut Street, where Mr. Maclure came every Thursday to talk of the geology of the Alleghanies, and where Mrs. Aylmer, to her great satisfaction, was invited to join a committee of ladies who wished to collect Roman coins; and it was in the second week of January that a letter came from London, in a round, laborious, exulting hand, which Mrs. Aylmer read at the breakfast table, and put down, and read again.

“Well,” said she. “Well, I never.”

“What is it, my dear?” said the Professor.

“It is Cecilia. She writes that she is going to have a child. In August.” Mrs. Aylmer took off her spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on again. “She says that Mr. Wren is beside himself, and that she has never felt so well, and that if I mean to be a grandmother I had better come home, for she does not intend to have it without me.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the Professor said, in a queer thick voice, “We shall sail in February.”

“Do the packet ships go out in February, my dear?”

“I believe the Black Ball Line does. I shall make inquiries this afternoon,” said the Professor; and blew his nose so explosively that the tea-things jumped.

They sailed on the twentieth. It was a rough passage, and a short one, with a strong westerly wind behind them; and it was in the last week of March that the Courier, battered, salt-streaked, and beating up the Thames on a cold blue morning of scudding cloud, came to her moorings at the London Docks. Margaret was on deck before dawn. She had been up half the night, sorting her specimens; she had put on her best gown, and tied her bonnet twice; and she had slipped one hand into her left pocket, where, for the last time, it lay against a small round pebble, and stood, with her heart going like a drum, at the rail.

She saw her mother first. She would have known her among a thousand; she was on the quay, in the same best bonnet, with her arm raised, quite straight, in the very attitude in which she had been left; and she was not alone. Beside her, a taller woman, pressing her bonnet against the wind, with dark hair, and a face that in youth had a serene kind of beauty, and which was now, in her thirties, something a good deal rarer.

“Elinor,” said Margaret, and her voice cracked.

“They have been sent word,” said Mrs. Aylmer, at her side, with a satisfied nod. “The Colonel has a friend at the shipping office; I daresay he had the Courier signalled from Gravesend the moment she was seen. It seems the entire party came up to town for the Season a month ago, with the Colonel’s carriage, and two wagons, and a great many children.” She peered. “Where is the Colonel? I do not see him. There is a very tall man in a grey coat, and a lady beside him who —”

“That is Marianne.”

“And the boy?” said Mrs. Aylmer. “The dark boy, with the hat, upon the bollard? He appears to be waving a piece of paper.”

Margaret looked. There was a boy upon a bollard at the end of the quay, ten years old, or a little more, lean and brown, in a coat that was too short in the sleeves; and he was waving, with both hands, above his head, with all the concentrated vigour of a boy who has been told that he must not shout and has decided to do something equally effective instead, a large sheet of folded paper. He was, at that distance, the image of somebody, and for one wild, misplaced instant she could not think of whom. Then the wind took his hat, and his hair flew up, and he opened his mouth, and a voice came across the water, high and clear and cracked with the effort, that she would have known at the ends of the earth:

“Have you got it?”

She took it out. She held it up in her fist, above her head, for the whole quay to see; and her mother, on the stones, put both her hands up to her face.

He reached her before the gangway was down. It was afterwards a subject of some wonder, in the family, how a boy of ten had contrived to run the length of the quay, dodge a stevedore, and pass a dock official of very fixed views on the subject of unauthorised persons, and arrive at the foot of the plank at the very moment it touched; but it was a thing that Henry did as a matter of course, and by the time Margaret had reached the bottom he was standing before her, breathless and hatless, with his hair all on end, and one hand held out, palm upward, without a word.

She put the pebble into it.

He shut his fingers over it. Then he opened them, and turned it over, and considered it very gravely from both sides, and held it up to the light, and, after a moment, smelled it.

“I smell smoke,” said Henry.

“It has been up a volcano.”

“It is worn.”