Page 25 of Threads that Remain

“Thank you, Harker,” said Willoughby. “That will do.”

He had been silent a good deal at dinner. He had drunk rather more than usual; and it was Sophia, sitting opposite, in her grey silk, with her sharp, small, intelligent face, who had looked at him across the candles for some time, and then said, in the dry tone that in twelve years he had never learned to answer:

“You are very quiet, Mr. Willoughby. Have you lost a bet?”

“I was thinking,” said Willoughby, “that the children need some air.”

“Do they?”

“I thought I might take them to the Gardens tomorrow. Charles is fond of kites. It is a fine time of year.”

“At ten in the morning,” said Sophia. “You.”

“I do not see why not.”

“You have never been out of your bed before twelve since the year of the coronation.” She looked at him, for a moment, a little longer. There was in her face an expression that he could not read and did not like; it was not suspicion, exactly; it was more like the look of a person who has been given a very long sum to add, and has reached the last column, and does not care for the answer. Then she said, quite gently, “Take the children, by all means. I shall be at home if you want me,” and rang for the fruit.

He had told himself that it was for the boy. He told himself so all the way up the gravel walk, with Charles skipping upon one side and Madeline, who was four and very solemn about it, on the other; he told himself so at the edge of the trees, as the Round Pond came into view, a wide sheet of dazzling water, with a hundred small figures upon its shore; and he was still telling himself so when he saw, at the far end, quite plainly, in the sun, a tall, straight, dark-haired woman in a dove-coloured pelisse, standing beside a bench.

He stopped.

He had not been prepared for Marianne. It was a very odd thing; he had prepared for the boy, and for the Colonel, and for the old bitterness, and the old regret; he had rehearsed, at some length, the various expressions that it would be right to wear; but it had not occurred to him, in twelve years, that she might be more beautiful. He had carried in his mind a slim girl of seventeen, all fire and unreason, with her hair coming down and her hands out; and here was a woman, at a distance of two hundred yards, with the sun on her face, standing perfectly still, with her head a little to one side, watching the children at play; and it struck him with the force of a blow that he had never seen her before. He had never seen her at all. He had seen a girl who loved him. He had not seen this.

“Papa,” said Charles, tugging at his hand. “Papa, look, there are kites! May we go and fly one? Papa!”

“In a moment,” said Willoughby. “In a moment, Captain.”

He led them down to the water. He did it, on the whole, rather well; he chose a spot, upon the eastern shore, some two hundred yards from the Brandon party, behind a small clump of thorn; he set Charles to work with the string, and engaged the nursemaid in conversation, and stood, with his hat low upon his forehead and his hands behind him, in the attitude of a man who is merely taking the air. And from that place, in the leaf-shadow, for an hour and a quarter, he watched his son.

He watched him do everything. He saw him laugh and heard it; he saw him fall off a kerb into the grass and get up again, unhurt, roaring with delight; he saw him doff his hat to a duck. He saw him pick up a small boy in a muffler and wipe his face and set him on his shoulders and walk with him along the water’s edge, like a young Hercules. And it was, he afterwards said to himself, that little scene, more than any other, that did the thing to him: the plain, quick, unconsidered kindness of it, done without an eye to anyone, and forgotten as soon as it was over; and the extraordinary fact that this, of all things, should have been the one that he had not passed on.

“Papa,” said Madeline, in her clear, small, penetrating voice. “Who is that boy?”

“Which boy?”

“The big one. He is like Charles. He is like you.”

“He is nobody, my love. He is a boy at the pond.”

“But he has got your face.”

“Nonsense,” said Willoughby. “Look at the kite.”

It was at that moment, with a queer, cold, sinking sense that he had been in the wrong place for a good deal too long, that he became aware that the woman in the dove-coloured pelisse had turned her head.

She had done so quite slowly; she had been looking at the children, and something, some sixth sense, some cold small draught of recognition, had made her look across the pond. He was nearly two hundred yards away. He was behind a thorn-bush, with his hat pulled down; no face could possibly have been made out at that distance, and he knew it. But she stood quite still. He watched her stand. And it seemed to him, in the bright, clear, noisy morning, that all the sound about him died away, and that there was nothing in the whole of the gardens but that one straight figure, and the width of a piece of water.

Marianne did not, in the event, cry out. She did not put her hand to her heart, or turn pale, or do any of the things that at seventeen she would have done and thought herself justified in doing. She stood quite still, with the sun in her eyes, and looked across the pond at a man who was standing behind a thorn-bush with two dark-haired children; and she said, in a low and perfectly composed voice, without turning her head:

“Elinor.”

“I see him,” said Elinor.

“I do not think he can see me.”

“I think he can.”

“It is only a man on a bench,” said Marianne. “It is a public garden. He has every right.”