by Jane Austen
“Ah! Elinor,” said John, “your reasoning is very good; but it is founded on ignorance of human nature. When Edward’s unhappy match takes place, depend upon it, his mother will feel as much as if she had never discarded him; and therefore every circumstance that may accelerate that dreadful event must be concealed from her as much as possible. Mrs. Ferrars can never forget that Edward is her son.”
“You surprise me: I should think it must nearly have escaped her memory by this time.”
“You wrong her exceedingly. Mrs. Ferrars is one of the most affectionate mothers in the world.”
Elinor was silent.
“We think now,” said Mr. Dashwood, after a short pause, “of Robert’s marrying Miss Morton.”
Elinor, smiling at the grave and decisive importance of her brother’s tone, calmly replied,—
“The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair.”
“Choice! how do you mean?”
“I only mean that I suppose, from your manner of speaking, it must be the same to Miss Morton whether she marry Edward or Robert.”
“Certainly, there can be no difference; for Robert will now, to all intents and purposes, be considered as the eldest son; and, as to any thing else, they are both very agreeable young men: I do not know that one is superior to the other.”
Elinor said no more, and John was also for a short time silent. His reflections ended thus:—
“Of one thing, my dear sister,” kindly taking her hand, and speaking in an awful whisper, “I may assure you; and I will do it, because I know it must gratify you. I have good reason to think—indeed I have it from the best authority, or I should not repeat it; for otherwise it would be very wrong to say any thing about it,—but I have it from the very best authority,—not that I ever precisely heard Mrs. Ferrars say it herself, but her daughter did, and I have it from her,—that, in short, whatever objections there might be against a certain—a certain connection, you understand me,—it would have been far preferable to her,—it would not have given her half the vexation that this does. I was exceedingly pleased to hear that Mrs. Ferrars considered it in that light; a very gratifying circumstance, you know, to us all. ‘It would have been beyond comparison,’ she said, ‘the least evil of the two; and she would be glad to compound now for nothing worse.’ But, however, all that is quite out of the question,—not to be thought of, or mentioned. As to any attachment, you know, it never could be: all that is gone by. But I thought I would just tell you of this, because I knew how much it must please you. Not that you have any reason to regret, my dear Elinor: there is no doubt of your doing exceedingly well,—quite as well, or better, perhaps all things considered. Has Colonel Brandon been with you lately?”
Elinor had heard enough, if not to gratify her vanity and raise her self-importance, to agitate her nerves and fill her mind; and she was therefore glad to be spared from the necessity of saying much in reply herself, and from the danger of hearing any thing more from her brother, by the entrance of Mr. Robert Ferrars. After a few moments’ chat, John Dashwood, recollecting that Fanny was yet uninformed of his sister’s being there, quitted the room in quest of her; and Elinor was left to improve her acquaintance with Robert, who, by the gay unconcern, the happy self-complacency of his manner, while enjoying so unfair a division of his mother’s love and liberality, to the prejudice of his banished brother, earned only by his own dissipated course of life and that brother’s integrity, was confirming her most unfavourable opinion of his head and heart.
They had scarcely been two minutes by themselves, before he began to speak of Edward; for he, too, had heard of the living, and was very inquisitive on the subject. Elinor repeated the particulars of it, as she had given them to John; and their effect on Robert, though very different, was not less striking than it had been on him. He laughed most immoderately. The idea of Edward’s being a clergyman, and living in a small parsonage-house, diverted him beyond measure; and when to that was added the fanciful imagery of Edward reading prayers in a white surplice, and publishing the banns of marriage between John Smith and Mary Brown, he could conceive, nothing more ridiculous.
Elinor, while she waited in silence and immovable gravity the conclusion of such folly, could not restrain her eyes from being fixed on him with a look that spoke all the contempt it excited. It was a look, however, very well bestowed; for it relieved her own feelings, and gave no intelligence to him. He was recalled from wit to wisdom, not by any reproof of hers, but by his own sensibility.
“We may treat it as a joke,” said he, at last, recovering from the affected laugh which had considerably lengthened out the genuine gaiety of the moment; “but, upon my soul, it is a most serious business. Poor Edward! he is ruined for ever. I am extremely sorry for it; for I know him to be a very good-hearted creature,—as well-meaning a fellow, perhaps, as any in the world. You must not judge of him, Miss Dashwood, from your slight acquaintance. Poor Edward! His manners are certainly not the happiest in nature. But we are not all born, you know, with the same powers,—the same address. Poor fellow! to see him in a circle of strangers! To be sure it was pitiable enough; but, upon my soul, I believe he has as good a heart as any in the kingdom; and I declare and protest to you, I never was so shocked in my life as when it all burst forth. I could not believe it. My mother was the first person who told me of it; and I, feeling myself called on to act with resolution, immediately said to her,—‘My dear madam, I do not know what you may intend to do on the occasion; but as for myself, I must say, that if Edward does marry this young woman, I never will see him again.’ That was what I said immediately. I was most uncommonly shocked, indeed. Poor Edward! he has done for himself completely,—shut himself out for ever from all decent society! But, as I directly said to my mother, I am not in the least surprised at it: from his style of education, it was always to be expected. My poor mother was half frantic.”
“Have you ever seen the lady?”
“Yes; once, while she was staying in this house, I happened to drop in for ten minutes; and I saw quite enough of her: the merest awkward country girl, without style, or elegance, and almost without beauty. I remember her perfectly. Just the kind of girl I should suppose likely to captivate poor Edward. I offered immediately, as soon as my mother related the affair to me, to talk to him myself, and dissuade him from the match; but it was too late then, I found, to do any thing; for, unluckily, I was not in the way at first, and knew nothing of it till after the breach had taken place, when it was not for me, you know, to interfere. But, had I been informed of it a few hours earlier, I think it is most probable that something might have been hit on. I certainly should have represented it to Edward in a very strong light. ‘My dear fellow,’ I should have said, ‘consider what you are doing. You are making a most disgraceful connection, and such a one as your family are unanimous in disapproving.’ I cannot help thinking, in short, that means might have been found; but now it is all too late. He must be starved, you know, that is certain; absolutely starved.”
He had just settled this point with great composure, when the entrance of Mrs. John Dashwood put an end to the subject. But though she never spoke of it out of her own family, Elinor could see its influence on her mind in the something like confusion of countenance with which she entered, and an attempt at cordiality in her behaviour to herself. She even proceeded so far as to be concerned to find that Elinor and her sister were so soon to leave town, as she had hoped to see more of them; an exertion in which her husband, who attended her into the room, and hung enamoured over her accents, seemed to distinguish every thing that was most affectionate and graceful.
CHAPTER VI.
One other short call in Harley Street, in which Elinor received her brother’s congratulations on their travelling so far towards Barton without any expense, and on Colonel Brandon’s being to follow them to Cleveland in a day or two, completed the intercourse of the brother and sisters in town; and a faint invitation from Fanny, to come to Norland whenever it should happe
n to be in their way, which of all things was the most unlikely to occur, with a more warm, though less public, assurance, from John to Elinor, of the promptitude with which he should come to see her at Delaford, was all that foretold any meeting in the country.
It amused her to observe that all her friends seemed determined to send her to Delaford; a place, in which, of all others, she would now least choose to visit, or wish to reside; for not only was it considered as her future home by her brother and Mrs. Jennings, but even Lucy, when they parted, gave her a pressing invitation to visit her there.
Very early in April, and tolerably early in the day, the two parties from Hanover Square and Berkeley Street set out from their respective homes, to meet, by appointment, on the road. For the convenience of Charlotte and her child, they were to be more than two days on their journey; and Mr. Palmer, travelling more expeditiously with Colonel Brandon, was to join them at Cleveland soon after their arrival.
Marianne, few as had been her hours of comfort in London, and eager as she had long been to quit it, could not, when it came to the point, bid adieu to the house in which she had for the last time enjoyed those hopes, and that confidence, in Willoughby, which were now extinguished for ever, without great pain. Nor could she leave the place in which Willoughby remained, busy in new engagements, and new schemes, in which she could have no share, without shedding many tears.
Elinor’s satisfaction, at the moment of removal, was more positive. She had no such object for her lingering thoughts to fix on; she left no creature behind, from whom it would give her a moment’s regret to be divided for ever; she was pleased to be free herself from the persecution of Lucy’s friendship; she was grateful for bringing her sister away unseen by Willoughby since his marriage; and she looked forward with hope to what a few months of tranquillity at Barton might do towards restoring Marianne’s peace of mind, and confirming her own.
Their journey was safely performed. The second day brought them into the cherished, or the prohibited, county of Somerset; for as such was it dwelt on by turns in Marianne’s imagination; and in the forenoon of the third they drove up to Cleveland.
Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure-grounds were tolerably extensive; and, like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding round a plantation, led to the front; the lawn was dotted over with timber; the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain-ash, and the acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices.
Marianne entered the house with a heart swelling with emotion from the consciousness of being only eighty miles from Barton, and not thirty from Combe Magna; and before she had been five minutes within its walls, while the others were busily helping Charlotte to show her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of hills in the horizon, and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna might be seen.
In such moments of precious, of invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony to be at Cleveland; and as she returned by a different circuit to the house, feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty, of wandering from place to place in free and luxurious solitude, she resolved to spend almost every hour of every day, while she remained with the Palmers, in the indulgence of such solitary rambles.
She returned just in time to join the others, as they quitted the house, on an excursion through its more immediate premises; and the rest of the morning was easily whiled away in lounging round the kitchen garden, examining the bloom upon its walls, and listening to the gardener’s lamentations upon blights,—in dawdling through the greenhouse, where the loss of her favourite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,—and in visiting her poultry-yard, where, in the disappointed hopes of her dairy-maid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment.
The morning was fine and dry, and Marianne, in her plan of employment abroad, had not calculated for any change of weather during their stay at Cleveland. With great surprise, therefore, did she find herself prevented, by a settled rain, from going out again after dinner. She had depended on a twilight walk to the Grecian temple, and perhaps all over the grounds, and an evening merely cold or damp would not have deterred her from it; but a heavy and settled rain even she could not fancy dry or pleasant weather for walking.
Their party was small, and the hours passed quietly away. Mrs. Palmer had her child, and Mrs. Jennings her carpet-work: they talked of the friends they had left behind; arranged Lady Middleton’s engagements, and wondered whether Mr. Palmer and Colonel Brandon would get farther than Reading that night. Elinor, however little concerned in it, joined in their discourse; and Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
Nothing was wanting on Mrs. Palmer’s side that constant and friendly good-humour could do, to make them feel themselves welcome. The openness and heartiness of her manner more than atoned for that want of recollection and elegance which made her often deficient in the forms of politeness; her kindness, recommended by so pretty a face, was engaging; her folly, though evident, was not disgusting, because it was not conceited; and Elinor could have forgiven every thing but her laugh.
The two gentlemen arrived the next day to a very late dinner, affording a pleasant enlargement of the party, and a very welcome variety to their conversation, which a long morning of the same continued rain had reduced very low.
Elinor had seen so little of Mr. Palmer, and in that little had seen so much variety in his address to her sister and herself, that she knew not what to expect to find him in his own family. She found him, however, perfectly the gentleman in his behaviour to all his visiters, and only occasionally rude to his wife and her mother; she found him very capable of being a pleasant companion, and only prevented from being so always, by too great an aptitude to fancy himself as much superior to people in general, as he must feel himself to be to Mrs. Jennings and Charlotte. For the rest of his character and habits, they were marked, as far as Elinor could perceive, with no traits at all unusual in his sex and time of life. He was nice in his eating, uncertain in his hours; fond of his child, though affecting to slight it; and idled away the mornings at billiards, which ought to have been devoted to business. She liked him, however, upon the whole, much better than she had expected, and in her heart was not sorry that she could like him no more; not sorry to be driven by the observation of his epicurism, his selfishness, and his conceit, to rest with complacency on the remembrance of Edward’s generous temper, simple taste, and diffident feelings.
Of Edward, or at least of some of his concerns, she now received intelligence from Colonel Brandon, who had been into Dorsetshire lately; and who, treating her at once as the disinterested friend of Mr. Ferrars, and the kind confidant of himself, talked to her a great deal of the parsonage at Delaford, described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant to do himself towards removing them. His behaviour to her in this, as well as in every other particular, his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence of only ten days, his readiness to converse with her, and his deference for her opinion, might very well justify Mrs. Jennings’s persuasion of his attachment, and would have been enough, perhaps, had not Elinor still, as from the first, believed Marianne his real favorite, to make her suspect it herself. But as it was, such a notion had scarcely ever entered her head, except by Mrs. Jennings’s suggestion; and she could not help believing herself the nicest observer of the two: she watched his eyes, while Mrs. J
ennings thought only of his behaviour; and while his looks of anxious solicitude on Marianne’s feeling, in her head and throat, the beginning of a heavy cold, because unexpressed by words, entirely escaped the latter lady’s observation,—she could discover in them the quick feelings, and needless alarm of a lover.
Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shrubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had—assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings—given Marianne a cold so violent, as, though for a day or two trifled with or denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of every body, and the notice of herself. Prescriptions poured in from all quarters, and, as usual, were all declined. Though heavy and feverish, with a pain in her limbs, a cough, and a sore throat, a good night’s rest was to cure her entirely; and it was with difficulty that Elinor prevailed on her, when she went to bed, to try one or two of the simplest of the remedies.
CHAPTER VII.
Marianne got up the next morning at her usual time; to every enquiry replied that she was better, and tried to prove herself so, by engaging in her accustomary employments. But a day spent in sitting shivering over the fire with a book in her hand, which she was unable to read, or in lying, weary and languid, on a sofa, did not speak much in favour of her amendment; and when, at last, she went early to bed, more and more indisposed, Colonel Brandon was only astonished at her sister’s composure, who, though attending and nursing her the whole day, against Marianne’s inclination, and forcing proper medicines on her at night, trusted, like Marianne, to the certainty and efficacy of sleep, and felt no real alarm.
