Page 3 of Threads that Remain

He bowed to Mrs. Dashwood, who had laid down her needle, and he went out; and the three ladies remained looking at the door, which he had closed behind him with the gentleness of a man who is holding something very heavy and does not wish to spill it.

“It is bad news,” said Margaret, with the calm of one who has not yet learned to be afraid of such things.

“It is his business,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “and he will tell us of it when he chooses.” But she looked at her second daughter as she said it, and there was a question in the look.

Marianne gave the Colonel the better part of an hour. It was, for her, a considerable act of self-command, and she performed it by going to the window, and moving three of Margaret’s labelled stones an inch to the left and being scolded for it. At the end of that time, she went across the hall and knocked at the library door; and receiving no answer that was quite an answer, she went in.

He was standing at the window with his back to the room. On the desk lay the letter, and beside it a second sheet, begun and abandoned after two lines. He turned when he heard her, and she saw that he had not been writing at all.

“Come and sit down, Marianne,” said he. “I have had a letter from a neighbour of Eliza’s; and I had rather you heard it now than after I have learned how to say it well. I find I never shall.”

She sat. He did not; he stood before the cold hearth with his hands clasped behind him, as she had often pictured him standing on the day he had told her sister everything, and she understood, with a small cold shock, that he was about to tell her something of the same kind.

“You know something of her constitution,” said he. “How I have worried over her since the birth of the child. Her neighbour, Mrs. Pinkins, upon calling on her recently, found her with a high fever and in distress from a severe pain in her side. The doctor was sent for, but as he was attending other tenants some distance away, it was several hours before he reached her. When he arrived, he was met by Mrs. Pinkins, who informed him that Eliza had begun shivering violently and screaming in pain, and had subsequently lost consciousness. She died shortly after,” said he, his voice breaking as he finished speaking.

Marianne rose from her seat and quickly crossed the room, pulling her husband into a comforting embrace. “Oh, my dear! I am so sorry.”

Brandon was not one to lose his composure; yet his eyes filled. He tightened his arms around his wife as they held each other in silence.

Marianne had never met the girl. She had, in the days when she believed herself to have been the most injured creature in England, hardly allowed herself to think of her; and it had been one of the hardest lessons of her recovery to learn how very much smaller her own grief had been than she had supposed, and how very much larger the grief of a seventeen-year-old in a strange town, with a child, and nobody.

“Oh, my dear Brandon.”

“When I saw her in the summer, she was well then, though thinner than she should have been. She was quieter than she used to be, but very lovely, and quite recovered, I thought, from everything. She laughed at something the child did. I thought she is going to be happy.”

“The child,” said Marianne.

“A boy. He was three years old in August.” The Colonel released her from their embrace, taking her hand in his, and turned again to the window. “He is well. He has been, by all accounts, very good, though he keeps asking for his mother. Mrs. Pinkins is a kind woman; but she is sixty-three, and a widow, and has the care of two other children besides her own grandchildren; and she writes, very properly, that she does not know what is to be done with him.”

The rain went on against the glass. Marianne was aware of a curious sensation, as though she had been standing on a stair in the dark and had put her foot down expecting one more step than there was.

“You will travel there,” said she. It was more a statement than a question.

“I must.”

“I know.”

He turned. She saw that his hands, which were so seldom anything but steady, were not entirely so now.

“I could place him with a family. It would take some time, for I would need to make inquiries. I could do that, and it would not be wrong. It is just — I am grieved with how I have failed them. First Eliza, then her daughter, and now the boy. He has no one, Marianne. He is three years old and has no one. I tried to begin a letter but find that I cannot bring myself to write the letter that would make him a charge. But no — a child of three wants a mother, and I cannot make you one for him. And he is —”

“And he is Willoughby’s son,” said she.

“He is.”

There it was. It had been in the room since the first moment, sitting quietly between them, and now that it had been named, Marianne found that she was neither surprised nor, as she had half expected to be, wounded. It was only there.

She heard her own voice, and it was steadier than she could have supposed. “Does he resemble him?”

The Colonel was an honest man and could not for the sake of comfort be anything else. “Yes,” said he. “Very much.”

For some time neither spoke. The rain was down to a drizzle, and on the lawn the last of the leaves were coming down, one by one, lying where they fell. She thought of a wet hillside and a pair of ankles turned upon the grass, and his hand held out to lift her; and she thought, with great clearness, that this was a memory belonging to the girl she had been three years before, and whom she could pity, and even love, but was decidedly no longer. She thought of another girl, in the lodgings, with the last few years lived in shame of her circumstances, and of her final hours in agonising pain.

“I do not know what I feel,” said she at last. “I shall not pretend to you that I know. I only know that if I were to say yes, this instant, out of pity, or pride, or wishing to show that I could, it would not be fair to him. Nor to you.”

“Nor to you,” he replied.

She turned her face up to her husband’s. “I need to think it through.”