Page 50 of Threads that Remain

They were all crying a little, in the dark, and laughing; and Margaret said, with her hand across her eyes:

“He read to me, you know. I do not think that either of you remember. It was in the study, in the winter, when I was six or seven, in that big chair by the fire; he used to take me on his knee and open the atlas and read me Captain Cook. I did not understand it. I understood nothing but the names. Otaheite. Kamchatka. Botany Bay. He used to say them very slowly, as though they were spices. And once he stopped, and looked at me, and said — I remember it perfectly — he said: ‘There are more places in the world, my little navigator, than any one person can see. It is a great pity; but one must choose which.’”

“He called you that,” said Marianne, in a low voice. “I had forgotten. The little navigator.”

“He was a studious one,” said Elinor. “He was forever with his nose in a book of either marvels of the living world or voyages. I used to think that Mamma did not know quite what to do with him.”

Marianne added, “They were so different. No one would ever call Mamma studious. I do not believe I ever saw her read a book through.”

Elinor nodded and looked back to Margaret. “And then you came along, and you were exactly like him; and I think it was the greatest happiness of his life.”

“I think that is why I have always been so —” Margaret searched for the word. “So restless. It is a thing I could not have explained to anyone. It was not that I wanted to get away from Norland. It was only that I had been told, at the age of six, that the world was very large, by the person I loved best; and I have never been able to leave it alone since.”

There was a very long pause.

Then Elinor rose. She did it quite silently; she went across to the door, and slipped out, and shut it softly behind her; and they heard her step go along the passage, and a door open, and shut. She was gone for about four minutes. When she came back, she carried, in both her hands, wrapped in a piece of brown paper and tied with a bit of tape, a small, heavy, oblong object.

“I have been keeping this,” said Elinor.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. She said, in her low, even voice, and with rather more pains than usual to keep it level: “I did not know what to give you. I have been thinking about it for a month. I did not want to give you anything you could buy; I wanted something that had been his. And I remembered it the other night, when you talked of the atlas; and I thought, I have it. I have had it for sixteen years.”

She untied the tape. The paper fell back. Inside, upon her knee, in the flickering light, there lay an old, brown, shabby, foxed and thumbed and broken-backed octavo volume, with a cracked calf binding and the corners of some of the pages turned down; and Margaret, who had raised herself upon one elbow, made a small sound, and put out both her hands.

“It is Cook,” said Marianne. “It is the very same. It is the volume with the folding maps.”

“I took it out of the study at Norland, the day we left,” said Elinor. “I put it under my shawl. I did not tell anybody. I knew that if it were left, Fanny would sell it with the rest of the books, and I could not bear it.” Her voice shook very little. “I should like to say that it was a fine and noble act. It was not. I only felt that somebody ought to save it.”

“You stole Papa’s book,” said Margaret.

“I rescued it.”

Margaret was turning the pages. They were soft and worn to the texture of cloth; here and there, in the margin, in a small, neat scholar’s hand that she knew as she knew her own, there was a note in pencil: Query, the tides. See Banks. Ask M. what she thinks of this. And on the flyleaf, when she came to it, in the same hand, very small and very faded, there were two lines that made the world go quiet all about her.

For my little navigator, it said, when she is old enough to go herself. H. D.

She did not say a word, but after a time she laid her cheek upon the page, and wept, quite silently, as a child weeps who has been given something that she did not expect to see again. Neither of her sisters said anything. They came, one on each side, and put their arms round her, and held her, in the moonlight; and it was Elinor, in the end, who said quietly into her hair:

“I think you are old enough, Margaret. I think that you have been going for a good while.”

“He said it,” said Margaret, into the calf binding. “Marianne, he said it. He knew.”

“Of course he knew,” said Marianne. She was crying too. She laughed, in the middle of it, helplessly. “He said it to Mamma the week before he died. I was in the room. He said that Elinor will be the sensible one, and Marianne will be the passionate one, and Margaret will be the one who goes. And Mamma said, ‘Goes where?’ And he said, ‘Anywhere. She will simply go.’”

“I did not know that.”

“I have never told you. I did not think that you needed telling.” She squeezed her tightly. “It was not a thing one could say until you had gone.”

They stayed so long. The candle flickered and went out. And it was somewhere near the small hours, when the moon had moved off the floor and the first faint light had begun to show at the edge of the curtains, that the three of them fell asleep, at last, in a row, across the wide old four-poster, with a tea-tray upon the floor and a copy of Captain Cook between them; and their mother, who had come along the passage at four in the morning, in her nightcap and her old blue shawl, to see if they were all right, opened the door a crack, and looked in, and stood there for a very long time, with a candle in her hand, and her heart very full, and did not go away.

It was a bright, still, blue-and-gold morning, with a fresh breath of hay in the air and the larks going up over the meadows; and by half past ten there was not a person in the parish of Delaford who was not there.

It was an event of the first rank. There had not been such a concourse since the Colonel’s own wedding. The rows were full to the doors. There was Sir John Middleton, purple with pleasure, at the end of the second row, and Lady Middleton beside him, thin and erect; there were Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, he in the very act of being dragged out of a newspaper by his wife; there was Mrs. Jennings, in a bonnet of prodigious size, weeping copiously into a pocket handkerchief and telling everyone that she had said it from the first. The Norland Dashwoods had come, too, and sat in the third row, in a state of well-bred approval, having ascertained on the previous evening that the settlement was five thousand pounds; and John Dashwood was overheard to remark to his wife, in a voice that carried a little too far, that Margaret had done remarkably well.

In the front row on the bridegroom’s side sat a small, grizzled, weather-beaten gentleman with a face like a knot in a plank, who was supporting himself with both hands upon the back of the seat before him; and beside him, in a bonnet with a great many more cherries than was strictly necessary, a young lady who was, at intervals, making small squeaking noises, and being pinched.

And Mrs. Smith, in black lace, had brought her ear trumpet.

Margaret came up the aisle upon the arm of the Colonel.