Page 27 of Threads that Remain

“It has,” said Mr. Tregarth gravely. He had gone down upon one knee, in the middle of Mrs. Dashwood’s Turkey carpet, so that his face was upon a level with the child’s; and Marianne, who had come in from the window, noticed that his broad brown hands, which had been so restless with his hat, were quite still. “It has got a very fine one. It used to swim with it. You see that one there? That is the bit it steered with.”

“What was its name?”

“I do not know,” said Mr. Tregarth. “It has not one. Nobody ever named it. I thought perhaps you might.”

Ned considered this, in silence, with his head on one side.

“Frederick,” said he at last.

“Frederick,” said Mr. Tregarth. “That is a very good name. I shall write it in my book.”

He did so, there and then, upon the carpet, with a pencil; and Marianne, who had been watching him with a good deal of attention from behind her needlework, found herself, for the second time in a week, taking a long look at a man she had not meant to look at. He was not handsome. She had been told that he was not, and had expected something plainer than the reality: for the reality was a long, brown, angular, thoughtful face, and a quantity of dark hair; and he looked, as he knelt there, entirely unconscious, upon a strange carpet, writing a child’s name on a page beside a very old fish, like nothing so much as the lower branch of an old oak.

She had no reason to think of the Colonel. It was only that she had seen that look before. She had first seen it in a drawing-room in Devonshire, upon the face of a tall grave man who had sat quietly by while a pianoforte was played and had said nothing all evening; and she had disliked him for it, poor thing, and called him old.

“Miss Dashwood is upstairs, I believe,” said Miss Tregarth to nobody in particular, with a sweet, comprehensive smile, and an air of having taken the situation in immediately. She had not stopped talking since she came through the door, but she said so much, and so gaily, that it was hard to mind. “Oh, I am so pleased. My brother says that she is quite the cleverest woman in London, and I said, Simon, I do not believe there is such a person; and he said, you will see. And I do see! You are all so exactly what he said. He has talked of nothing else since April; I said to Papa that I have never known him so tiresome; and Papa said, leave the boy alone, Morwenna, he is in a fair way to be happy. Oh, I beg your pardon. Is that a secret? I do not think it was a secret. I am always being told I ought to keep the secrets, and I never can.”

“Morwenna,” said her brother, without looking up, in a low and heartfelt tone.

“Yes, dear.”

“Be quiet.”

“Yes, dear,” said Miss Tregarth, and smiled at Marianne with the most complete, radiant, unrepentant good humour; and Marianne, who found, to her considerable astonishment, that she had begun to smile back, understood in that moment that the Tregarth family was going to be a difficulty; for it was going to be impossible to dislike any of them.

It was at Lady Colville’s musical evening, upon the twenty-third, in a drawing-room lit by a hundred candles, and hung with the finest family portraits that money could buy, that Margaret was introduced to Mr. Grant. He was tall and handsome and, she soon found, was well travelled, having been to many of the major cities throughout Europe. They conversed easily about places familiar to them both, and Margaret enjoyed his company. Mrs. Jennings was in attendance and when Margaret stepped away from the gentleman, she was quick to make her way over to her young friend.

“I see you have been speaking for the last half hour with Mr. Grant,” Mrs. Jennings said in an excited tone which only she considered quiet. “He is from a fine family and has five thousand a year. I thought you had set your cap on the other one, but if you have not, then do consider Mr. Grant. You would make a handsome couple to be sure,” she finished, giving Margaret a wink.

Margaret blushed deeply, though she was not sure if it was because she had been wrongly accused of setting her cap on someone or if it was startling to have been found out.

At the same moment, Marianne Brandon, being pressed, and against her private inclination, sat down to the pianoforte.

She had not intended to play. It had been, for some years, a matter of taste with her to play in the evenings only at home, for the children, and her husband, and the pleasure of the thing; and she had said so to her hostess and been not at all listened to. There was a small crowd. There were three ladies, a clergyman, and Lady Colville’s eldest daughter, and a great many other persons who wished to hear the celebrated beauty and had been told that she played; and she had at last risen, with a slight laugh, and moved across the room.

She played a sonata of Mozart’s. It was not a showy choice, and she had made it deliberately, with something of the old defiance; and for the first few bars she was rather stiff, and conscious of her hands. Then, without knowing how, she forgot them. It came back. It was the thing that had never left her, in all those years: that peculiar fierce, surrendered attention, in which the room and the candles and the faces went out of sight, and there was nothing whatever in the world but the next phrase; and she played, as she had always played, with the whole of herself, but with something new in it, a firmness, a clearness, a kind of rightness, like a river that has learned its banks and is more of a river for them.

There was silence when she finished, of about three seconds.

Then Lady Colville’s drawing-room broke into applause. It was very loud. There was a good deal of “Bravo,” and “Charming,” and “How very affecting,” and Mr. Grant, who had been standing at the back with a glass in his hand, came forward with both hands outstretched, and a rapt, brilliant, delighted face.

“Mrs. Brandon,” said he. “Upon my soul. I have never heard anything like it. I do not know what to say. It was like being scolded by an angel.”

“You are very kind,” said Marianne, and laughed.

“I mean it. I take back every civil thing I ever said to a young lady at a pianoforte.” He made her a very elegant bow. “I recall Miss Dashwood telling me that you taught her all she knows, and I now perceive that it must be perfectly true.”

“Miss Dashwood,” said Marianne, “taught herself, and stands by it.”

He roared with laughter.

They spoke for some time, and Marianne could not help but remark to Elinor the next day, that Mr. Grant smiled a great deal, and seemed in a very jolly mood as they said their good-byes.

She was aware, as she moved away from the instrument, of a movement in the far corner; of a dark angular figure, with a glass of lemonade, who had been standing by himself, half in the shadow of a curtain, and who had not, she noticed, applauded, but had put down the glass, and clasped his hands behind his back. He did not speak until she came near. She had almost passed him, on her way to the door, before he said, in a voice so low that she had to stop to hear it:

“Mrs. Brandon.”

“Mr. Tregarth.”