Page 68 of Threads that Remain

“A declaration can be taken back in words, perhaps,” added Marianne, “but it cannot be taken back in feeling — not entirely, not between two people who must go on meeting at the same tables and the same assemblies for years afterward. I would always rather you girls risk a slower happiness than a quicker wound, where there is any choice in the matter. And there is almost always a choice.”

“That does not seem very fair,” said Anne. “If you are sure, you are sure. Why should sureness have to hide itself?”

“It is not hiding,” said Elinor. “It is only not announcing. A person wants to come to his own feeling in his own time, without the pressure of knowing yours have already arrived and are standing there waiting to be matched.”

Marianne said, “I promise you it grows easier with practice, and that the waiting, when it is finally over, makes the end of it very much the sweeter for having been earned rather than simply handed over before anyone was ready for it.”

Mary, who had listened to the whole exchange, offered the only comment that occurred to her as strictly necessary. “It seems to me,” said she, “a great deal of trouble.”

Sarah said nothing further. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, in the blue dress that had so lately taught her something new about herself, and turned their advice over in her mind with the same quiet, private thoroughness she brought to everything that mattered to her; and if there was a particular face in her thoughts as she turned it, and a particular sureness she had no present intention of revealing, since she had, after all, just been given very good reason to go on hiding it a while longer, she kept that, too, entirely to herself, and asked no further questions on the subject that afternoon.

Chapter XXXV.

The letter came from Cambridge; it had been four days on the road; and it lay, by an unusual accident, upon the breakfast table, beside the Colonel’s plate, and was seen by everybody before it was opened.

He had passed his examination. He had taken his degree, at the end of three years, in a very high place; the tutor had said that he was the best man of his year; and there was to be a ceremony, in a fortnight, at which he should be given his hood. He did not think that it was in the least necessary that anybody should come. It was a dull affair, and the journey was long. He would be home before the end of the month. But there was one thing, at the bottom, in a hurried postscript, which he thought that he had better mention. His father had written from Combe Magna to say that they should both be extremely glad if he might come to them, for a few days, on the way; and he had said that he should. It was only a week. He should be at Delaford by the twenty-fifth.

Give my love to everyone. How I have missed you dear folk! I cannot believe that I have not seen the Ferrars for these three years complete. We shall have a jolly time when I come home.

“Well!” said Marianne when she brought the news to the parsonage. She looked round the table, with shining eyes, and her voice rang. “He has done it. My dear boy. Elinor, he has done it! And our boy is coming home to us!”

In the corner, with her tea half-raised, and her face turned very slightly towards the window, Sarah had not moved.

“How very gratifying,” said Sarah, in a slightly hoarse voice resulting from a recently acquired summer cold. “I said that he would. I also cannot believe I could not persuade my parents to take us to Cambridge while he was there! Well, he is to be home soon, and we shall make a merry party once again.”

Combe Magna in the last week of June was a house at its best. It stood upon a gentle rise of ground, with a wide slope of park before it, and a belt of beeches behind, and a long green vista opening from the drawing-room windows to the far blue line of the Quantocks; it had been, in the days when the whole place belonged to a careless bachelor, a somewhat neglected and rather melancholy mansion, full of draughts; and it was now, in its second youth, under the hand of a mistress who could not endure a leaking gutter, as comfortable, and as trim, and as handsomely appointed, as a house could be. The drives were raked. The roses upon the south front were in their first full bloom. And in the great hall, upon the black-and-white marble, in the light of a golden evening, stood Mr. John Willoughby, who was seven-and-forty, and rather grey, but with much of the same lively energy of his youth, with his hand out and his face alight, watching his eldest son come in at the door.

“My dear boy,” said Willoughby. “My dear fellow. Let me look at you.”

“You will have your fill of it, sir,” said Henry, “before I have done.”

He was one-and-twenty. He had been for three years, in a small stone room in a Cambridge court, at the top of a staircase, in the company of a great many books, and a great deal of both interesting and dull studies, and had emerged, as the tutor said, in a very high place; and he stood, tall, and thin, and brown, in a dusty travelling-coat, with his hat under his arm and his hair on end, looking about him at the well-known hall with a smile that had all of the old radiance, and something in it that was quite new. It was the look of a person who has learned to be sure. He had his father’s height. He had his father’s frame, broad in the shoulder, and narrow in the flank; and he carried them with a kind of unconscious grace, like a man who has never in his life been afraid of a room; and Willoughby, who had been looking at that particular figure, in one form or another, for the better part of eleven years, felt his heart give the same small painful leap that it had given, once, in a library in Brook Street, to the sound of the words How do you do, sir.

“You look like my father,” said Willoughby, rather unsteadily. “I never told you that. It has struck me every time. He was a great dark tall man, and he could not go into a room without being noticed, and he hated it.”

“I do not hate it.”

“No. You have not the sense.” He laughed. He put an arm across the boy’s shoulders, and turned him about, and marched him across the hall, towards the sound of a great many voices. “Come and be looked at. Sophia has been counting the hours. She has told the cook to do a saddle of mutton, and a plum pudding; she says that a man who has been eating college fare for three years is entitled to be fed like a Christian. Charles! Where is Charles? Madeline!”

They were a very happy party. It was the general opinion, both in the county and in the family, that there could not be a house in Somersetshire where so much was said, so loudly, by so many, upon so few subjects at a time; and it was not in the least like the picture of a reconciled household that a person at a distance might have conceived. There was no awkwardness in it. There was no sentiment. There was Sophia Willoughby, in the great chair at the head of the table, small, and upright, and a little grey now, with the same sharp bright eyes and the same brisk decided manner, who said, upon seeing Henry come into the dining-room, in a voice that she attempted to keep dry, “Well, sir. You are very late,” and immediately gave him the whole of the best end of the mutton. There was Madeline, who was fifteen, and very small, with a cloud of light hair, and a pair of grey eyes which were her mother’s, and a look of sharp, amused, penetrating attention that made the guests, on the whole, a little uneasy; and there was the Captain.

He was eighteen, and had lost, in the course of the last few years, a very great deal of the swagger; he had kept, to make up for it, all of the command. He was taller than his brother, and rather broader; he had a square, brown, good-humoured, resolute face, and a black eyebrow that went up when he was about to say something outrageous; and he stood, when Henry came in, with his hands in his pockets and his weight on his left foot, and looked at him for a moment in the most steady and affectionate manner.

“Well, Lord Chancellor,” said Charles.

“Well, Captain.”

“You have got thin.”

“You have got fat.”

“It is muscle,” said Charles, with dignity, and gripped his brother round the shoulders, with a hug that nearly knocked the breath out of him.

They ate the mutton. They talked, all of them at once, of a great many things: of the last days at Cambridge, and the hood, which Henry was obliged to describe in some detail; of Cambridge, whither the Captain was going in October, upon condition that he should not be sent down before year’s end; of the new mill-race, and the black mare, and the elm, which the Captain announced that Henry might climb after dinner, if he had not lost the use of his legs. They were, upon the whole, in the best of spirits; and it was only at about the third course, when Sophia had gone through the whole of her list of questions, upon the subject of Henry’s clothes, and Henry’s health, and Henry’s linen, that Madeline, who had been quiet for some minutes, with her chin on her hand, lifted her head, and remarked, in a clear voice, to the table at large:

“You talk more than you used to. You must have got a lot of practice talking to the ladies at the balls.” She smiled, with great sweetness. “Charles could use some help in that corner.”

“Madeline,” said Sophia, warningly.