Page 5 of Threads that Remain

At this, despite everything, Marianne laughed; and the laugh, though it was a little damp at the edges, was very much her own. It was at this moment that the study door opened, and Edward came in from his round of the parish, with his hat in one hand and in the other a loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth, the gift of a grateful farmer’s wife. He stopped upon the threshold. He was a man who had spent some years learning to see when he was in the way; and he saw it at once.

“I beg your pardon,” said he. “I shall go and — put this in the kitchen.”

“Stay, Edward,” said Elinor. “Marianne has something to tell you, and I think she had rather tell it than have me repeat it.”

She told it a second time, more briefly. Edward heard her out, with his back to the fire and his eyes upon the floor, in the way he had; and when she had done, he was silent for a little while, and then said, in the diffident manner that his family, when it noticed him at all, had always taken for an absence of opinions:

“I do not know that I have any right to advise. But I have had the experience of living and collaborating with lads, primarily during my school years, many of whom were brothers, brought up in the same household, with the same rules and principles, and yet they were so completely unalike. I would suggest it is the same in my own case. One never knows what one will get from one child to the next. At least you may have the advantage of knowing what to look for that might be corrected.” He looked up, and smiled at her, shyly. “I should be more anxious about the boy’s manners. Yours have been known to slip when you find one of your brother’s orations wanting in feeling.”

“Edward!”

“And I should think,” he added, “that a household that has room in it for three Dashwood women has room for very nearly anyone.”

Marianne looked from one to the other of them: her sister, who had never once told her what to do, and her sister’s husband, who had never once appeared to think he might. And she understood, perhaps for the first time so clearly, how large a share of her own steadiness she owed to people who had been quietly standing behind her for two years, waiting to be needed.

She went home in the last of the light, in the pelisse and the pattens, with her mind quite made up, and found her husband in the library where she had left him, at the very same window, having evidently done nothing whatever in her absence but stand there.

“Yes,” said Marianne, from the door.

He turned. He did not say anything. He crossed the room, and took both her hands in his, and stood holding them; and it was some time before he said, in a voice she had not heard from him before, “Thank you,” and some time again before he was able to say anything more useful.

They set out two days afterwards, in the closed carriage, with a hamper of the cook’s providing and a small woollen coat of Margaret’s, which she had insisted was the right size, on the strength of having once, in the course of a geological excursion, been informed of the dimensions of a child of three. It rained upon the first day and cleared upon the second; and it was towards noon of that clear, cold, glittering morning that the carriage drew up before a neat, low cottage at the end of a lane, with a pear tree by the gate and a woman of about sixty at the door, drying her hands upon her apron and looking, Marianne thought, as though she had been up all night for several weeks together.

“Oh, sir,” said Mrs. Pinkins, and bobbed, and burst into tears, and begged pardon; and was led into her own parlour by the Colonel, and given a chair; and it was in the midst of this scene that Marianne, standing quietly in the doorway, became aware of a very small person on the hearthrug, engaged in an earnest and solitary conversation with a wooden horse.

He was a sturdy child, with a good deal of tangled hair and one sock coming down. He had not noticed the visitors. He was explaining something to the horse, with a surprising command of language that had a great deal of feeling, and he was quite plainly of the opinion that the horse was being obstinate.

Then he looked up.

It is not to be wondered at that Marianne’s breath went from her. She had prepared herself, upon the long road, for a great many things; she had rehearsed them in her mind like verses; she had promised herself that she would be quite calm. She had not prepared for the eyes. They were dark, and quick, and full of that particular bright mischief which she had once, upon a hillside in the rain, taken for the whole language of the heart; and they looked up at her out of a round toddler’s face with an expression of such perfect and unguarded friendliness that for a moment the room swam and she had to put her hand against the door frame.

It is his miniature, she told herself. It is very clearly his son. It is the child whom I once expected and dreamed of.

The child considered her. He looked at the pelisse, and the bonnet, and the hand upon the doorway; and he appeared to arrive at some conclusion. He got up, with the dignity of one who has taken a great many tumbles while learning to do it, and trotted across the rug, and stopped a yard from her, and lifted his face.

“You are pretty,” said he, with decision.

There was a pause. Behind her Marianne heard the Colonel, who had turned in his chair, make a small noise that might in another man have been a cough.

And then she laughed. It came out of her before she could prevent it, and it was hers entirely, and there was nothing in it of the past at all; and she went down upon her knees in her good pelisse, upon Mrs. Pinkins’s rag rug, and said, “Why, thank you, sir. And what is your name?”

“Henry,” said the child, and immediately handed her the wooden horse, as a gentleman offers his card.

It was in this fashion that the matter was decided; not by argument, nor by the sober virtues of resolve, but by a wooden horse and a word, and by the plain and, on the whole, rather unromantic fact that one cannot go on looking at a child who is offering one his horse and see anyone but the child. She did not mean that the likeness had gone. It had not gone. It sat there, plain as print, in the curve of his cheek and the set of his brow; and she knew that it would return, on another day, when she was not braced against it, and would hurt. But it was no longer the only thing in the room. It had become one feature of a person, and the person was clearly, from the first moment, a great deal more than his features.

She looked up, with the horse in her hands, and found her husband watching her; and the look on his face was such that she was obliged to look down again.

They reached Delaford in the dusk, with a very sleepy Henry in a very large shawl, and were met on the steps by Mrs. Dashwood, who had been at the window for three hours and now pretended she had only just come down; and by Margaret, who stood behind her with her hands clasped behind her back, and an expression of great gravity, and something in one fist.

“He is asleep,” said Marianne, low. “Mamma, he is just —”

“Give him to me,” said Mrs. Dashwood. She took him, and investigated the small, flushed face; and something moved across her own, very quickly, and was put away. But she said only, in a voice of perfect composure, “He is a fine boy. He must be put to bed directly. Margaret, do not crowd.”

“I am not crowding,” she replied indignantly. “I only wished to give him this.” Margaret unclasped her fist, and displayed upon the palm a small, round, banded pebble, grey and white, of the kind that Delaford’s chalk pit produced by the hundred. “It is a very good one,” she explained, in the tone of a person disclosing a matter of national importance. “I have been saving it. It is for him, to start his own collection.”

Marianne looked at the pebble, and at her sister’s solemn, freckled face, and found that it was quite impossible to speak. She put her arm round Margaret’s shoulders, hard, and Margaret, who did not care for being embraced in the presence of a footman, bore it with fortitude.

Much later that night, when the house was still, she rose from her bed and took a candle and went along the passage to the nursery that had been made ready with such haste and such love. He was lying on his back, in the middle of the bed, with both arms flung out and the pebble clutched in one fist; and the candlelight moved upon a face that was, in sleep, no one’s face but a child’s.