Page 65 of Threads that Remain

Anne shook her head, smiling, and returned to her sketch. Sarah leaned against her shoulder to watch, for all her complaints about the nose, and began offering further instructions until Henry was finally released from his tutor. Ned Ferrars, safely elsewhere for the moment, had no idea that his sister was recounting his misfortunes for the entertainment of another.

And in the warm drawing-room, with a half-finished portrait between them and laughter coming far more readily than words of affection, two girls of twelve enjoyed the sort of friendship that made an ordinary, cold afternoon seem a very happy thing indeed.

Chapter XXXIII.

It seemed the time came much too soon for Henry to attend Cambridge.

Mr. Willoughby went to Allenham and invited the Colonel to pay a visit. After some brief exchange on the welfare of their respective families, Mr. Willoughby came to his point; he insisted on paying all fees for his son’s education.

“No, thank you, Mr. Willoughby,” answered the Colonel. “We are quite capable of securing his education. I have already set aside the funds.”

“I will not allow it! It is what should be done, Brandon!” proclaimed Mr. Willoughby. He took a deep breath to calm himself. “I beg your pardon, sir. You can see how important this is to me. It is not only that the whole of England has come to know he is my son, and I have acknowledged him. I must insist on doing for him the same as I shall do for Charles. I must,” said he. “It is the right thing to do.”

The Colonel sat still, contemplating Mr. Willoughby’s words.

Mr. Willoughby continued. “I have spoken to my aunt on the subject and she agrees. I thank you for the offer, but I cannot accept.”

In the end, the Colonel, after seeking Edward’s opinion, acquiesced. At times such as this, how he wished he was Henry’s father legally, instead of just in heart.

In the first week of October, in the year that he was eighteen he prepared to leave Delaford. It was a soft, grey, golden morning, with the mist lying in the water-meadows, and the beeches turning; and the whole of the family, by ancient custom, had come out to see him go. The carriage stood at the door. His trunk, which was rather a large one, and had been packed by three different persons, each of whom had put in a different set of shirts, had been strapped on behind; his books, which included, in a place of honour, at the bottom, a small dark calf-bound volume, were in a bag by his knee. He himself, in a brand-new coat with sleeves that had to be let out, having grown in the four-week interim of purchasing it and his departure, and a hat that made him look older, stood upon the gravel, with his hair on end, exchanging farewells.

He said good-bye to everybody. He shook hands with the Colonel, who could not look at him, and kissed his mother, who had been up since five, and had made up her mind to be dignified, and had abandoned the idea at the first sight of his trunk; he shook Edward’s hand, and was told, in a low voice, to write to his aunt; he was hugged by Mrs. Dashwood, and by Anne, and slightly bowed to Ned, who had recently taken up the practice. He said good-bye to Mary, who gave him a small packet of sandwiches. It was only at the very last, when the whole of the rest had been done, and the footman had climbed up, and the horses were tossing their heads, that he turned round, and looked for the small brown person in the plain grey frock who had been standing at the back, by the linden tree, with her hands behind her.

“Sarah,” said he.

“Yes?”

“You have not said good-bye.”

“I was waiting until they had all done.” She came forward, across the gravel, with her head up. She was thirteen years old; she was thin, and brown, and all knees and elbows, with her hair in one long untidy plait down her back; and she wore her most careless, cheerful, most impenetrable expression. “I am not going to make a scene. I think that it is a dreadful piece of foolishness, to go away to a place where you must wear a gown and be examined in Latin; and if you do not write to us every single week, I shall not forgive you.”

She held out her hand, quite firmly, as if to a stranger. “Good-bye, Henry.”

He patted the top of her head, as one might a favourite younger sister. “Good-bye, little Sarah. Try to be good while I am gone.”

He got into the carriage. The door was slammed. And it was observed by Elinor, who was standing upon the steps, with her arm through her husband’s, and who had been looking, not at the coach, but at her second daughter, that the child had not moved from the place where he had left her; that she stood there, with her hands in her pinafore, and the plait over her shoulder, and watched the carriage grow small upon the long avenue of elms, quite erect, with her chin very steady, until it turned at the gate and was gone; and that then, without a word to anybody, she walked straight across the lawn, and disappeared behind the great oak, in the direction of the orchard.

Elinor did not follow her. She stood there for some time, with her eyes upon the bare place where the carriage had been; and then she said, in a very low voice, to nobody:

“Oh, my dear.”

He wrote nearly every week, certainly every fortnight, unless he was very busy with his studies, and then he did his best. It was a thing, Marianne said, which was a matter of some astonishment that a young man had become a correspondent so faithful, so various, and so entertaining. He wrote of Cambridge. He wrote of the great courts, with their damp stone, and the river going by under its willows; of the tutor, a Mr. Whewell, who was said to know everything and to have said so; of the small, cold, bare room, in the top of a staircase, with a fire that smoked, and a gyp who called him “sir” and sneaked his port. He wrote of the study of the law. It appeared, from what could be gathered, that it was a great deal drier than he had expected but still he often sat up late reading the reports of cases. It was when he discovered, at the bottom of a heap of papers, the Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children in Factories that something in him stirred. He read it four times. He thought of his own situation and what might have become of him had the good folk of Delaford not taken him in. He did not want to become an idle man. He wanted to become a man like his Papa; someone he could be proud of.

The letters that reached the parsonage were read aloud at breakfast. It was their custom, and it was one that had become, over the years, an established rite: Edward would unfold the closely written sheets, and hold the letter out in front of him to be claimed by anyone who wanted to read the news of the last week to the whole table.

It was upon one of these mornings that the reading fell to Mary, eliciting a groan from her sister.

Their parents exchanged a quick, knowing look.

Mary Ferrars could take a letter full of the liveliest matter — a description of the Cambridge May races, in this instance, with a boat overturned and a Fellow of the college obliged to swim for the bank in his gown — and deliver the whole of it in a voice so level, so entirely without inflection, that her listeners had lost all interest before the Fellow had reached the water.

“Mary.” Sarah had put down her own cup and was regarding her sister with an expression of the most profound exasperation. “There was a man in a gown, swimming. You read it exactly as you would read out the price of coal. I do not understand how you do it. I believe you could read the Second Coming in that same voice and give nobody in the room the least occasion for alarm.”

“I have read you the words,” said Mary, with dignity. “I do not see that it is my office to supply the excitement as well. If Henry had wished the letter to be exciting, he ought to have made it so upon the page and not left the work to my voice.”

“It is exciting upon the page. That is precisely my complaint. You are taking a very exciting letter and flattening it, the way one flattens a bonnet by sitting on it.” Sarah appealed to the table at large. “Is it not the most vexing thing in the world, to have a piece of news read to one correctly, word for word, with nothing whatever left out, and to come away from it feeling as though one has been read the parish accounts?”

“I thought it was a very clear reading,” said Mary.