Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

by Jane Austen; Ben H. Winters

  “Closer, my dearies,” shouted Dreadbeard from his place at the prow. “Who shall be my first dance partner, I wonder? I do so love the comp’ny of a lady.”

  It was then that Elinor remembered the whistle. Just as The Jolly Murderess rowed near enough that she no longer required the spyglass to see the leering faces of her foes, she produced from her pocket the long, cylindrical penny-whistle that Willoughby had so shamefacedly handed her only an hour before—though it seemed now like years gone by.

  She blew it, and blew it again, and then again, knowing not whether the device would prove effective; certain only that it was their only chance at survival. And then, in a flash, from some inscrutable depth of the ocean, a long, rubbery tentacle, bedecked with suction cups, snaked its way over the side of the pirate ship and onto its fo’c’sle. In the next moment, another tentacle appeared, and then another, and then a fourth. Soon The Murderess was surrounded by a writhing school of eight-tentacled monsters, churning the black water, banging their great oblong heads against the hull, and reaching their multitudinous tentacles into the galleys. The pirates called out to each other in their mercenary cant, confused and fearful, as one by one they were grabbed bodily by long, powerful tentacles and pulled into the water. Elinor stood frozen, awestruck, the whistle still at her lips, as the cephalopods did their grim work.

  In several minutes time, the pirates had been vanquished—all, it seemed, but for Dreadbeard himself, who still stood unbowed at the prow of the schooner, his black eyes aglow. At his feet was a pile of chopped-up tentacles, dispatched with a few swift blows of his gleaming cutlass; under his foot was an octopus’s shattered skull, which he had staved in with the heel of his massive boot. He stared unerringly at Elinor, his cutlass high above his head, a virulent gleam in his eye, as the boat continued to draw forward.

  “What fascinatin’ friends you’ve got, for a lass your age,” smirked Dreadbeard, kicking an octopus head overboard. “I am so keen to make your acquain—aaaaah!”

  Dreadbeard let out a horrid scream of pain and surprise as some-one—or something—smashed him brutally with a length of plank on the back of his massive shaggy head. The pirate captain reeled, giving the stranger time to grasp the cutlass from his outstretched hand and, with a single swift and powerful blow, chop off his head.

  The hero was Colonel Brandon. Elinor hailed him heartily from the deck of The Cleveland, and he hailed her back, holding aloft the severed head of the fearsome Dreadbeard.

  “Brandon? But that means—”

  Elinor spun around on the deck of the houseboat, and beheld: “Mother!”

  Mrs. Dashwood, whose terror, riding Colonel Brandon as he swam nearer and nearer the houseboat had produced almost the conviction of Marianne’s being no more, had no voice to inquire after her, no voice even for Elinor; but she, waiting neither for salutation nor inquiry, instantly gave the joyful relief; “Marianne lives, mother! She lives! And we have vanquished the pirates! Happy day!”

  Her mother, catching it with all her usual warmth, was in a moment as much overcome by her happiness, as she had been before by her fears. She collapsed into Elinor’s arms, right there on the foredeck, and from that position the two watched as Colonel Brandon hacked the corpse of Dreadbeard to bits with an axe seized from the deck of the ship, and threw bits of his body, one by one, overboard to the octopi who had been of such able assistance. Colonel Brandon then leapt off the deck; in an instant, had swum the scarlet-flooded water and appeared beside them on the verandah of The Cleveland.

  As The Jolly Murderess drifted slowly back out to sea, its peril decisively neutralized, Mrs. Dashwood was supported into the drawing-room between her daughter and her friend—and there, shedding tears of joy, though still unable to speak, embraced Elinor again and again, turning from her at intervals to press Colonel Brandon’s hand, with a look which spoke at once her gratitude, and her conviction of his sharing with herself in the bliss of the moment. He shared it, however, in a silence even greater than her own.

  As soon as Mrs. Dashwood had recovered herself, to see Marianne was her first desire; and in two minutes she was with her beloved child, rendered dearer to her than ever by absence, unhappiness, and danger. Elinor’s delight, as she saw what each felt in the meeting, was only checked by an apprehension of its robbing Marianne of further sleep— but Mrs. Dashwood could be calm, could be even prudent, when the life of a child was at stake, and Marianne, satisfied in knowing her mother was near her, and conscious of being too weak for conversation, submitted readily to the necessity of silence and quiet. Mrs. Dashwood would sit up with her all night; and Elinor, in compliance with her mother’s entreaty, went to bed. But the rest, which one night entirely sleepless, and many hours of the most wearing anxiety, and pirate battle, seemed to make requisite, was kept off by irritation of spirits. Willoughby, “poor Willoughby,” as she now allowed herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts; she would not but have heard his vindication for the world, and now blamed, now acquitted herself for having judged him so harshly before. But her promise of relating it to her sister was invariably painful. She dreaded the performance of it, dreaded what its effect on Marianne might be; doubted whether after such an explanation she could ever be happy with another; and for a moment wished Willoughby a widower, and visualized Mrs. Willoughby being consumed by a great octopus, as the pirates had been so recently. Then, remembering Colonel Brandon, reproved herself, felt that to his sufferings and his constancy far more than to his rival’s, the reward of her sister was due, and wished anything rather than Mrs. Willoughby’s death.

  THE HERO WAS COLONEL BRANDON.

  Marianne continued to mend every day—her boils burst and healed, her cheeks cooled and her pulse calmed. The brilliant cheerfulness of Mrs. Dashwood’s looks and spirits proved her to be, as she repeatedly declared herself, one of the happiest women in the world. Elinor could not hear the declaration, nor witness its proofs without sometimes wondering whether her mother ever recollected Edward. In turns they kept watch on the horizon for more pirates, and saw none. But Mrs. Dashwood, trusting to the temperate account of her own disappointment which Elinor had sent her, was led away by the exuberance of her joy to think only of what would increase it. Marianne was restored to her from a danger in which, as she now began to feel, her own mistaken judgment in encouraging the unfortunate attachment to Willoughby, had contributed to place her.

  Only once in this generally joyful interlude did Elinor see a shadow pass over her mother’s face—when she inquired as to the status of her youngest sister.

  “Margaret . . .” said Mrs. Dashwood, with an anxious glance to Marianne, whom she clearly did not wish to trouble with any distasteful news, “Margaret remains on the island.” When pressed on the meaning of this ambiguous reply, Mrs. Dashwood would only shake her head with a furrowed brow, and Elinor thought it best to let the issue drop.

  And Mrs. Dashwood had yet another source of joy unthought of by Elinor. It was thus imparted to her, as soon as any opportunity of private conference between them occurred.

  “At last we are alone. My Elinor, you do not yet know all my happiness. Colonel Brandon loves Marianne. He has told me so himself.”

  Her daughter, feeling by turns both pleased and pained, surprised and not surprised, was all silent attention.

  “You are never like me, dear Elinor, or I should wonder at your composure now. Had I sat down to wish for any possible good to my family, I should have fixed on Colonel Brandon’s marrying one of you as the object most desirable. And I believe Marianne will be the most happy with him of the two. If she can bring herself to forget, or tolerate, the mass of writhing tentacles upon his face.”

  Elinor passed this off with a smile.

  “He opened his whole heart to me yesterday when we stopped to rest upon a slippery rock, midway from Pestilent Isle to here. It came out quite unawares, quite undesignedly. I could talk of nothing but my child, of course, and he could not conceal his distress; I saw that it e
qualed my own, and he made me acquainted with his earnest, tender, constant, affection for Marianne. He has loved her, my Elinor, ever since the first moment of seeing her.”

  Here Elinor perceived not the language nor the professions of Colonel Brandon, but the natural embellishments of her mother’s active fancy, which fashioned everything delightful to her as it chose.

  “His regard for her, infinitely surpassing anything that Willoughby ever felt or feigned, as much more warm, as more sincere or constant— whichever we are to call it—has subsisted through all the knowledge of dear Marianne’s unhappy prepossession for that worthless young man! And without selfishness! Without encouraging a hope! The beauty of his heart, I aver, is in inverse proportion to the unbeauty of his face! No one can be deceived in him.”

  “Colonel Brandon’s character,” said Elinor, “as an excellent man, is well established.”

  “I know it is,” replied her mother seriously. “His coming for me as he did, with such active, such ready friendship, willing even to wear a little saddle upon his back so I could ride more comfortably as he swam, is enough to prove him one of the worthiest of men.”

  “What answer did you give him? Did you allow him to hope?”

  “Oh! My love, I could not then talk of hope to him or to myself. Marianne might at that moment be dying. But he did not ask for hope or encouragement. His was an involuntary confidence, an irrepressible effusion to a soothing friend—not an application to a parent. Yet after a time I did say, for at first I was quite overcome—that if she lived, as I trusted she might, my greatest happiness would lie in promoting their marriage; and since our arrival, since our delightful security, I have repeated it to him more fully, have given him every encouragement in my power. Time, a very little time, I tell him, will do everything. Marianne’s heart is not to be wasted for ever on such a man as Willoughby. His own merits must soon secure it.”

  “To judge from the colonel’s spirits, however, you have not yet made him equally sanguine.”

  “No. He thinks Marianne’s affection too deeply rooted for any change, and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age and disposition—and of course, there is the matter of the squishy—well, you know. He certainly is not so handsome as Willoughby—but at the same time, there is something much more pleasing in his countenance. There was always a something, if you remember, in Willoughby’s eyes at times, which I did not like.”

  Elinor could not remember it—but her mother, without waiting for her assent, continued,

  “I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with him, as she will be with Colonel Brandon.”

  Elinor withdrew to think it all over in private, to wish success to her friend, and yet in wishing it, to feel a pang for Willoughby. She smiled a secret smile and ran her finger over the octopus whistle, still in her pocket.

  CHAPTER 46

  MARIANNE’S ILLNESS, though multifaceted and weakening in its kind, had not been long enough to make her recovery slow; and with youth, natural strength, and her mother’s presence in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her to remove, within four days after the arrival of the latter, into Mrs. Palmer’s dressing-room. She was impatient to pour forth her thanks to Colonel Brandon for fetching her mother; and bringing her hence so swiftly with such a strong steady crawl stroke; and for decapitating the fearsome Pirate Dreadbeard; and so he was invited to visit her.

  His emotion on entering the room, in seeing the burst pustules that dotted her face and neck, and in receiving the pale hand—its fingernails yellowed and brittle from illness—which she immediately held out to him, were clear. In Elinor’s conjecture, they must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being known to others. She soon discovered in his melancholy eye and the embarrassed little shuffle of his appendages as he looked at her sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza already acknowledged, and now strengthened by the wandering eye, the sickly skin, the posture of reclining weakness, the slow but steady streams of pus from various orifices, and the warm acknowledgment of peculiar obligation.

  Mrs. Dashwood saw nothing in the colonel’s behaviour but what arose from the most simple and self-evident sensations, while in the actions and words of Marianne, even as her words emerged in a hoarse croak, her vocal cords having been ravaged by infection, she persuaded herself to think that something more than gratitude already dawned.

  At the end of another day or two, Marianne growing visibly stronger every twelve hours, Mrs. Dashwood, urged equally by her own and her daughter’s wishes, began to talk of removing to Barton Cottage. On her measures depended those of her two friends; Mrs. Jennings could not quit The Cleveland during the Dashwoods’ stay; and Colonel Brandon was soon brought, by their united request, to consider his own abode there as equally determinate, if not equally indispensable. At his and Mrs. Jennings’s united request in return, Mrs. Dashwood was prevailed on to accept the use of his fully outfitted and newly refurbished pleasure yacht on her journey back, for the better accommodation of her sick child; and the colonel, at the joint invitation of Mrs. Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings, whose active good-nature made her friendly and hospitable for other people as well as herself, engaged with pleasure to redeem it by a visit at the shanty, in the course of a few weeks.

  The day of separation and departure arrived; and Marianne, took a particular and lengthened leave of Mrs. Jennings, effusively professing her gratitude not only for nursing her back to health, but also for her part in fending off the pirates, whose attack and repulsion Marianne had only been told of after her constitution was more fully restored. She was so earnestly grateful, so full of respect and kind wishes as seemed due to her own heart from a secret acknowledgment of past inattention. Bidding Colonel Brandon farewell with a cordiality of a friend, she was carefully assisted by him onboard the pleasure yacht. Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor then followed, and the others were left by themselves, to talk of the travellers, and feel their own dullness; and Colonel Brandon immediately afterwards took his solitary way to Delaford.

  The Dashwoods were two days aboard, and Marianne bore her journey without fatigue. They flew the captured flag of The Jolly Murderess, which, whether either by suggesting that they themselves were onboard that most feared of pirate vessels, or by giving fluttering evidence that they had destroyed it, kept all potential marauders at bay.

  As they sailed into Sir John’s archipelago and the choppy waters of Pestilent Isle, and entered on scenes of which every piece of shoreline brought some peculiar, some painful recollection, Marianne grew silent and thoughtful, and turning away her face from their notice, sat earnestly gazing through the window. Elinor, for her part, felt as she examined the old mudflats, the twisted trees, the familiar peak of “Mount Margaret” that something was decidedly altered in the landscape of their old home-stead—as if something had somehow shifted—but she had not the luxury to reflect upon her impression. Her only priority was to monitor Marianne for any signs that the familiar sights would discomfit her, or restore her ill health by plunging her into a new depth of melancholy.

  But Elinor could neither wonder nor blame; and when she saw, as the yacht was moored to their rebuilt wooden dock and she assisted Marianne down the gangplank, that she had been crying, she saw only an emotion too natural in itself to raise anything less tender than pity. Upon entering their common sitting-room, Marianne turned her eyes around it with a look of resolute firmness, regarding the dripping roof and weather-beaten windows as if determined at once to accustom herself to the sight of every object with which the remembrance of Willoughby could be connected. She said little, but every sentence aimed at cheerfulness, and though a sigh sometimes escaped her, it never passed away without the atonement of a smile. After dinner she w
ould try her pianoforte. She went to it, but the music on which her eye first rested was a seamen’s lament in six verses, procured for her by Willoughby, containing some of their favourite duets, one rhyming “a lassie so curvy” with “lay dying of scurvy” and bearing on its outward leaf her own name in his hand-writing. That would not do. She shook her head, put the music aside, and after running over the keys for a minute, complained of feebleness in her fingers—and indeed, the minute action of running her hands over the keys had caused a brittle piece of fingernail to slide off and fall to the floor—and closed the instrument again; declaring however with firmness as she did so, that she should in future practice much.

  Only when Marianne had retired to her old room for a well-needed rest, did Elinor venture to press again the question that had been on her mind since the yacht brought them within view of Pestilent Isle.

  “Mother,” she asked haltingly. “Where is Margaret?”

  Mrs. Dashwood dissolved in tears, and at last gave her unhappy response: The girl had not been seen for several weeks; the night after Mrs. Dashwood penned her last missive to Elinor and Marianne, in which she had included the most distressing news of Margaret’s depilation and the newly fang-like nature of her teeth, the girl had gone out again on one of her unannounced and unwarranted midnight walks—and, this time, never returned.

  Mrs. Dashwood would fear the very worst, except for the strange incident she now relayed to Elinor—an incident which seemed to give assurance that the girl still lived, though it was a most unwelcome assurance, indeed. It seemed that on one rain-soaked recent night, Mrs. Dashwood had been woken, long past the stroke of midnight, by what she was quite certain was the voice of her youngest daughter, coming high and piercing across the rocky hills of Pestilent Isle, several times repeating the same distorted, bizarre phrase: K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!