Page 23 of Threads that Remain

The room seemed to Marianne to grow very still, though in fact nothing had changed. The Palmers were laughing about the toothpick case. Sir John was telling the Colonel something about a horse. She looked down at the hand that held hers, wrinkled, warm, and kind; and she found, with a curious clearness, that she was neither surprised nor afraid.

“I had not,” said she.

“I thought as much. It is very odd, the things that never reach a person at Delaford.” Mrs. Jennings patted her hand, and was quiet for a moment, in the manner of a woman gathering her forces for a subject she considers of the first importance. “It puts me in mind, my dear — do you remember how I used to fret over Cecilia, before she was safely married? Fifty thousand pounds is a very great deal of money to have hanging about a girl of seventeen, and I said to Charlotte at the time, I said, there will be no want of gentlemen very ready to fall in love with fifty thousand pounds, and a good deal less ready to trouble themselves over the girl it is attached to. It happens more than you would credit, in this town. A young man with nothing of his own, and a great deal of charm, and no more scruple than is needed to get through a dinner — he finds out what a girl is worth before he has troubled to find out what she is like, and by the time she has discovered the difference it is generally too late to signify.” She gave Marianne’s hand a small, significant pressure, and looked at her with a directness that left no doubt whatever as to what, or whom, she had in mind. “I have seen it more than once, my love. I daresay you have too.”

Marianne met her eyes and said nothing; and it was not necessary that she should.

“Well.” Mrs. Jennings released her hand, and resumed, in her ordinary comfortable rattle, as though the small, pointed silence had never been. “Cecilia had the sense, or the good fortune, to do a great deal better than that, and I do not scruple to say I am glad of it.” She took a long breath before continuing. “Oh, he has been here all the spring, my dear. He is in Upper Grosvenor Street, with his wife and his fine children. Charlotte had it from Lady Colville, and Lady Colville had it from her maid, who was walking out with his coachman. A great fortune, they say, and the finest house in the street; and she is a sharp little woman, they tell me, with a tongue, but he is very fond of the children. There is a boy of seven, quite the picture of him, and a little girl, and they say he is never so happy as when he is teaching the boy to ride.” Mrs. Jennings paused and investigated her friend’s face with a kind of anxious tenderness. “I thought you had better be told, my love. I would not have you meet him at a party, without a word.”

“You are very good,” said Marianne.

She was silent for a moment. She was conscious that her sister, on the other side of the room, had turned her head; that her mother had stopped speaking; that the Colonel, without looking at her, had come a little nearer, in the way that he had, and was standing near the fire with his back half turned, in an attitude of perfect and courteous inattention. She thought of a hillside in the rain. She thought of a small boy in a treehouse with a hat, bowing to an old woman in black. She thought, absurdly, of the wooden horse.

“I hope they are well,” said Marianne. “I hope the children are well. I do not know that there is anything else I ought to say. But I thank you, Mrs. Jennings, very much.”

And she meant it; she found, upon examination, that she meant every word.

Chapter XVII.

Upper Grosvenor Street lies within two hundred yards of Brook Street, and it is a fact, though not perhaps a very remarkable one, that two persons living within that distance of each other in the same city, and moving in the same circle, may very easily remain for years in complete ignorance of one another’s existence. They cannot do so for long, however, after the whole of Mayfair has begun to talk. It took precisely three days.

Mr. Willoughby heard it at White’s, on a warm May afternoon, between a hand of whist and a bottle of claret, in the careless and general conversation of half a dozen men who did not know he was listening.

“Our old army mate, Colonel Brandon’s up,” said a man named Harcourt, with a yawn. “Took that house in Brook Street. A great beauty, you know, the wife. Great beauty indeed. Called on them on Tuesday last. Funniest little fellow they’ve been rearing. Some ward of Brandon’s whose mother came to grief. Fever, I believe; two or three years since. He took the child home, and the wife brought him up. Quite look upon him as their own, as they do not have a son, only a little girl.”

Willoughby set down his glass.

He did so with such extreme precision that the man beside him, who had been about to speak, changed his mind. He sat quite still. He was aware, in a remote, detached way, of the noise of the room; of a clock ticking; of a man laughing in the passage.

Was it possible that the ward was Eliza’s child? He knew nothing of her or the child she carried. He had never allowed himself to think of there being an actual child. He had known, of course. He had always known. It had been in the locked drawer, and he had known it as a man knows the position of the stars. It was a long time ago in a town far away, involving a girl he had known only in passing. He had only, on the rare occasion when his path crossed with Mrs. Palmer, heard anything of a certain family he once was close to.

“How old is the boy?” said he. It was a wonder to himself that his voice was quite level.

“Ten, I suppose. Eleven in the summer. Why? Do you know him?”

“No,” said Mr. Willoughby. “I do not know him at all.”

He rose. He left the whist, and the claret, and a very good hand; he walked down the steps of the club into the warm May afternoon, and went along St. James’s Street, and up Bond Street, and over Berkeley Square, in the direction, if he had been asked, of nowhere in particular; and it was only when he found himself at the corner of Brook Street, with the sun in his eyes and the noise of the Mayfair traffic in his ears, that he understood where he was going.

He stood upon the pavement opposite the house. It was number twenty-four, a tall narrow house with a fanlight and a black-and-white marble step, and the door stood open; there was a great deal of coming and going, of servants, and a carriage at the kerb. He should not have been there. He knew it perfectly. He had not the least right to be standing in that street; and a man of ordinary prudence would have turned upon his heel and gone home to his wife; and he did not. He drew back a little into the shadow of a doorway, and took out his watch, and pretended to consult it.

The door opened.

Several children came out with a woman he supposed was a governess. The oldest boy came out at a run, with a kite under one arm, and a great quantity of string in the other hand, and a hat at the back of his head; and behind him, calling out something about his gloves, came a tall, quiet, grey-eyed man in a black coat, whom Willoughby had last seen in a drawing-room in Devonshire, and had disliked at first sight, and had had good reason to dislike ever since. The boy paused upon the step. He turned his face up to the sky, screwing up his eyes against the sun, to see which way the wind lay; and he laughed, at something the Colonel said, with his head thrown back, in a high, easy, delighted, unguarded laugh.

Willoughby, who had been to many good places in his life, and had believed himself proof against most of them, discovered that it was perfectly possible to be struck, at a distance of forty yards, by something that weighed nothing at all.

It was his own laugh. It was his own hair, and his own way of standing, with the weight on the left foot; it was, in every particular that mattered, and a good many that did not, the face that he had once shaved in the glass of a small inn-room at Barton, upon a morning when he had believed himself to be the happiest man in England. It was ten years old. It was walking down the steps of Colonel Brandon’s house with a kite; and it had not the least idea that he was there.

He stood in the doorway for a long time, after they had gone.

The Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, at ten o’clock on a fine morning in the middle of May, is a place where the whole population of the London nursery may be seen engaged in the whole of its business. There are kites upon the grass, and hoops upon the gravel walks, and ducks upon the water in various stages of outrage; there are nursemaids upon the benches, in attitudes of watchfulness that are not quite what they seem; there are small boys in the act of falling in, and larger boys in the act of pulling them out, and an elderly gentleman with a telescope, who has been there every morning for eleven years, and has never been known to look at anything but the sky. It was to this scene that the household in Brook Street repaired, with great regularity, at a quarter to ten, upon every day that was not actually raining; and it was there, upon the morning of the fifteenth, that the whole family was to be seen in full deployment.

The elders had established themselves upon two benches at the northern end. Mrs. Dashwood on one, with a rug across her knees and a bag of crumbs in her lap, presided over the ducks; Marianne and Elinor sat upon the other bench.

The children, meanwhile, were disposed about the greensward in the following manner.

Mary Ferrars, who was six, and had been appointed commanding officer by a resolution of the whole nursery, stood in the exact centre of the grass with her hands on her hips, arranging the party into some sort of order. “Nobody is to go past the second lamppost,” said she. “That is the rule. And nobody is to go into the water. Henry, that includes you. And Sarah, if you get any more mud on that frock, Mamma will have to wash it herself, and she has a great deal to do.”