With every repeat of the name—Miss Steele—the pain recurred, amplified it seemed by its repetition.
“They was stopping at the door of the New London Inn. I happened to look up as I went by the chaise, and so I see directly it was the youngest Miss Steele.”
Pain—the pain grew nearly unbearable. Elinor endeavored with all her ability to keep her attention upon the servant’s story, so she could know of the fate of Edward.
“So I took off my hat, and she knew me and called to me, and inquired after you, ma’am, and the young ladies, especially Miss Marianne, and bid me I should give her compliments and Mr. Ferrars’s.”
“But did she tell you she was married, Thomas?”
“Yes, ma’am. She smiled, and said how she had changed her name since she was in these parts. She was always a very affable and free-spoken young lady.”
“Was Mr. Ferrars in the carriage with her?”
“Yes, ma’am, I just see him leaning back in it, but he did not look up—he never was a gentleman much for talking.”
Elinor’s heart could easily account for his not putting himself forward; and Mrs. Dashwood probably found the same explanation.
“Was there no one else in the carriage?”
“No, ma’am, only they two.”
“Do you know where they came from?”
“They come straight from town, as Miss Lucy—Mrs. Ferrars told me.”
“And are they going farther westward?”
“Yes, ma’am—but not to bide long. They will soon be back again, and then they’d be sure to take a convenient and well-armored ship out to the islands, and call here.”
Mrs. Dashwood now looked at her daughter; but Elinor knew better than to expect them. She recognized the whole of Lucy in the message, and was very confident that Edward would never come near them.
Thomas’s intelligence seemed over. Elinor looked as if she wished to hear more.
“Did you see them off, before you came away?”
“No, ma’am—the horses were just coming out, but I could not bide any longer; I was afraid of being late.”
“Did Mrs. Ferrars look well?”
“Yes, ma’am, but to my mind she was always a handsome young lady—and she seemed vastly contented.”
Mrs. Dashwood could think of no other question, and Thomas and the tablecloth, now alike needless, were soon afterwards dismissed; Thomas returned downstairs to begin slicing up crayfish for to-morrow’s breakfast.
Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters remained long together in a similarity of thoughtfulness and silence. Mrs. Dashwood feared to hazard any remark, and ventured not to offer consolation. She now found that she had erred in relying on Elinor’s representation of herself; and justly concluded that everything had been expressly softened at the time, to spare her from an increase of unhappiness, suffering as she then had suffered for Marianne. Elinor, for her part, experienced such pain as if her head were captured in a vice.
She felt at last that it was appropriate to explain to her mother and her sister that the source of her pain was not merely the violent tugs upon her heartstrings occasioned by the information regarding Edward and the new Mrs. Ferrars; she finally told them of the odd symbol that had first appeared in her mind about the time of the Steeles’ first arrival among them in the islands; she further explained how it had re-occurred intermittently in the months since; and how, finally, she had glimpsed it one other place only—on the lower back of Lucy Steele, when they changed clothes after the Fang-Beast’s attack.
“I am at sea, my dear,” said Mrs. Dashwood with a puzzled expression. “What can it mean? What connection can there be between this recurring pain in your brain, and this girl?”
“I shall tell you what it means.” Sir John suddenly stepped into the shanty, looking very serious indeed; Mrs. Jennings stood beside him, wringing her hands together.
“What it means,” Sir John continued, “is that she is not a girl at all. She is a sea witch! And Mr. Ferrars is in the gravest danger.”
CHAPTER 48
“SEA WITCHES WANDER THE EARTH when it suits them, but their true habitation is in undersea grottos, where they live and thrive for many centuries,” said Sir John with a grave look. “But they are not an immortal race, contrary to what is commonly said of them. Indeed, the rest of us might well be counted safer if they were—since the only certain way for a sea witch to prolong its foul existence is by consuming human bone marrow, which is therefore, to them, the most precious of elixirs. Hence their occasional appearance, in the guise of attractive human women, among the terrestrial world—where they make love to an unknowing man, marry him unawares, and then, when the opportunity presents itself, kill him and suck out his marrow.”
Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood heard this oration in stunned silence, struggling to reconcile the picture in their minds of charming Lucy Steele, who had lived among them for so many months, with this new picture, of a devil-spirit who had emerged from a watery cavern to drink the juice of human bones.
“And what of the elder Miss Steele,” wondered Marianne. “How could she not know that her sister had been replaced by a sea witch?”
“It is impossible that she did not know,” Sir John answered, “For a sister to a sea witch is certain to be a sea witch herself.”
“And yet, Anne Steele did not find a man to marry her!” protested Mrs. Dashwood.
“As I said, the witches take the physical form of human women,” explained Sir John. “There is nothing they can do about their personalities.”
Elinor, consumed with concern for Edward, and hoping to find some justification for disbelieving Sir John’s counsel, inquired as to how he had arrived at his dire conclusion. “It is the five-pointed symbol you described, and its accompanying distress,” came the reply. “Certain sensitive souls can sense their presence of sea witchery; they come to sense the distinctive presence of a witch, and it causes them a searing, throbbing pain, precisely as you have described it.”
As if to confirm this conclusion, the pain returned to Elinor again, and she was overcome by a twisting pain, that gripped her body from her head to her guts. Edward—Edward—was all she could think.
“If your friend has indeed been so fool enough to wed a sea witch,” Sir John concluded, “then she has already come upon him sleeping, snapped his bones, and feasted upon the precious white fluid within as if it were mother’s milk.”
Elinor realised—even as fresh waves of pain coursed through her body—that the hope she had harboured, in spite of herself, that something would occur to prevent Edward’s marrying Lucy, was grounded in some instinctual understanding of the horrid danger that his engagement posed; if only resolution of his own, some mediation of friends, or some more eligible opportunity of establishment for the lady, had arisen to assist the happiness of all, and prevent his being turned into an immortality-preserving snack for a sea witch! But he was now married, and thusly doomed. Except—
“Wait a moment,” she managed to say. “If the pain and sensitivity you mention function as a sort of alarm of a witch’s foul intentions—”
“As indeed it does.”
“Why am I, even now, wracked by it—if Lucy Steele has already found her mark, and consumed him?”
Sir John, for once unsure of his answer, was trying to fashion one when Mrs. Dashwood beckoned them both to the window. The figure of a man clambering from a skiff, just tied to the dock, drew her eyes to the window. He approached their gate. It was a gentleman—it was Colonel Brandon! But why would Colonel Brandon, who had swum so nobly to Marianne’s rescue and, they thought, shed his embarrassment of his fishier qualities, now arrive onboard a skiff? No—it was not Colonel Brandon— neither his air—nor his height—and no mucous-dripping tentacles. Were it possible, she must say it must be Edward. She looked again. He was at the bottom of the steps now. She could not be mistaken. It was Edward. Intact! And here!
The pain evaporated from her mind, but still Elinor was overwhelmed. She mov
ed away and sat down. “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself.”
She saw her mother and Marianne change colour and whisper a few sentences to each other. She would have given the world to be able to speak—and to make them understand that she hoped no coolness, no slight, would appear in their behaviour to him; but she had no utterance, and was obliged to leave all to their own discretion.
No further syllable passed aloud. They all waited in silence for the appearance of their visitor. His footsteps were heard climbing the rickety wooden steps of the gravel path; in a moment he was in the passage, and in another he was before them.
His countenance, as he entered the room, was not too happy, even for Elinor. His complexion was white with agitation, and he looked as if fearful of his reception, and conscious that he merited no kind one. “My God!” muttered Sir John. “He is half consumed!” But a closer inspection revealed that he was walking upright and breathing normally, which would be impossible if several of his bones had been snapped and sucked upon.
Mrs. Dashwood, uncertain of the social requirements of a situation in which an acquaintance is newly married, but (unknowingly so) to a witch of the deep, met him with a look of forced complacency, gave him her hand, and wished him joy.
He stammered out an unintelligible reply. Elinor’s lips had moved with her mother’s, and, when the moment of action was over, she wished that she had shaken hands with him too. But in the next moment she resolved that she could not let her friend not know the truth about the woman he had wed. Elinor, resolving to exert herself to caution her old friend, though fearing the sound of her own voice, now said:
“There is something we must tell you about Mrs. Ferrars! Some most terrifying information, so you best brace yourself.”
“Terrifying information? About my mother?
“I meant,” said Elinor, taking up some work from the table, “terrifying information about Mrs. Edward Ferrars.”
She dared not look up—but her mother and Marianne both turned their eyes on him. He coloured, seemed perplexed, looked doubtingly, and said, “Perhaps you mean—my brother—you mean Mrs. Robert Ferrars.”
“Mrs. Robert Ferrars!” was repeated by Marianne and her mother in an accent of the utmost amazement; and though Elinor could not speak, even her eyes were fixed on him with the same impatient wonder. He rose from his seat, and walked to the window, apparently from not knowing what to do; took up a pair of scissors that lay there, and while spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting the latter to pieces as he spoke, said, in a hurried voice, “Perhaps you do not know—you may not have heard that my brother is lately married to—to the youngest—to Miss Lucy Steele.”
His words were echoed with unspeakable astonishment by all but Elinor, who sat in a state of such agitation as made her hardly know where she was.
“Yes,” said he, “they were married last week, and are now at Dawlish.”
Elinor could sit no longer. She ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease. Edward, who had till then looked anywhere, rather than at her, saw her hurry away, and perhaps saw—or even heard, her emotion; for immediately afterwards he fell into a reverie, which no remarks, no inquiries, no affectionate address of Mrs. Dashwood could penetrate, and at last, without saying a word, quitted the room, and went for a happy walk along the beach—leaving the others in the greatest astonishment and perplexity on a change in his situation, so wonderful and so sudden.
Marianne, though, ventured to add one note of concern: “Doesn’t this mean, however, that Robert Ferrars will be, or has already been, consumed by the sea witch?” But none present felt that possibility was much to be concerned with, or regretted.
CHAPTER 49
UNACCOUNTABLE AS THE CIRCUMSTANCES of his release might appear to the whole family, it was certain that Edward was free; and to what purpose that freedom would be employed was easily pre-determined by all. For after experiencing the blessings of one imprudent engagement, contracted without his mother’s consent, as he had already done for more than four years, nothing less could be expected of him in the failure of that, than the immediate contraction of another.
His errand on Pestilent Isle, at the rickety house known as Barton Cottage, was a simple one. It was only to ask Elinor to marry him—and considering that he was not altogether inexperienced in such a question, it might be strange that he should feel so uncomfortable in the present case as he really did, so much in need of encouragement and fresh air. He paced on the beach for a full five minutes, as Mrs. Dashwood peeked at him through the bay window. She once shouted “Watch out!” and would later relate that Elinor’s moment of great happiness was nearly undone before properly contracted, when a giant bivalve mollusk tried, and barely failed, to snap itself shut around his unprotected ankles.
How soon he had walked himself into the proper resolution, however, how soon an opportunity of exercising it occurred, and how he was received, need not be particularly told. This only need be said—that when they all sat down to table at four o’clock, about three hours after his arrival, he had secured his lady, engaged her mother’s consent, and was not only in the rapturous profession of the lover, but one of the happiest of men. His situation indeed was more than commonly joyful. He had more than the ordinary triumph of accepted love to swell his heart, and raise his spirits. He was released without any reproach to himself, from an entanglement which had long formed his misery, from a woman whom he had long ceased to love, and who (he was now informed) was an immortal and evil spirit, who had emerged from a cave many fathoms below sea level to secure a victim, from whom to suckle the very stuff of life for her own diabolical use. He was brought from misery to happiness—and the change was openly spoken in such a genuine, flowing, grateful cheerfulness, as his friends had never witnessed in him before.
His heart was now open to Elinor, all its weaknesses, all its errors confessed, and his first boyish attachment to Lucy treated with all the philosophic dignity of four and twenty.
“When first I met her, Lucy appeared everything that was amiable and obliging. She was pretty too—at least I thought so then; and I had seen so little of other women, that I could make no comparisons, and see no defects. I did at times notice, now that I think of it, that her eyes, on odd occasions, would flash the deepest, most crimson red, and that when she laughed at a jape, she would cackle rather alarmingly. Considering everything, therefore, I hope, foolish as our engagement was, foolish as it has since in every way been proved, it was not at the time an unnatural or an inexcusable piece of folly.
“And now,” he concluded, his eyes firmly affixed on Elinor’s beaming countenance, “I feel that the world has shifted under my very feet.”
There was a long silence, in which all present realised that Edward’s choice of phrase, if accidental, bore a literal as well as a figurative accuracy; the room had, in fact, shifted beneath their feet; and even as they all adjusted to this slight but discernible tilt, it jerked in the other direction, and they all were thrown violently to the ground.
“My God!” cried Sir John, emerging from the instinctual barrel roll he had gone into at the room’s first moving, and standing with legs spread far apart, firmly balanced himself against the alarming angle of the floor.
“Goodness,” echoed Mrs. Jennings from under the tea table. “What is happening?”
“It is beginning,” came a raspy voice from the doorway of the cottage, and all eyes turned to find young Margaret—although no longer did she look young, nor even like a girl at all—but like a fearsome, troll-like creature of the darkness: Her head pin-bald, her cheeks caked with dirt, her eyes squinting against the daylight.
“Margaret!” said Mrs. Dashwood with a wail. “My darling!”
At her approach, with arms outstretched, Margaret hissed like a snake, baring razor-sharp teeth at her mother. “Come no closer, woman of earth! Leviathan wakes—we must be girded for its waking!” And then
, throwing back her head and screaming in a loud, unnatural voice, “K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!”
This ejaculation received the predictable startled reaction; all present exchanged concerned expressions, before they were distracted as the house trembled once more, and tilted dramatically, from forty-five to eighty-five degrees in the opposite direction. Mrs. Jennings rolled wildly out from under the table and slammed with a resounding thud against the pianoforte.
“It was all true,” Sir John moaned. “Palmer warned me—I wouldn’t listen—it is all true!”
“K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!” shouted Margaret again.
Elinor, having tumbled from the heights of happiness into a miasma of terror—and from one end of the parlour to the other—found herself now staring wide-eyed out the southerly aspect of the cottage. There she saw Mount Margaret, a streak of grey-black smoke pouring forth from its top, while all along the craggy hillside hideous troll-like creatures crawled like insects towards the summit.
“What?” she cried out to Edward, who was bleeding copiously from a cut he had received in the first roll of the room. “What is happening?”
This was the last phrase anyone was able to emit for a long time. In the next instant, the entire house and all inside it, were lifted a hundred feet up in the air, and tossed into the sea.
* * *
Elinor surfaced in the cold, choppy waters off of the Devonshire coast, grasping for a scrap of furniture on which to secure herself, and thinking longingly of the Float-Suit she had worn in Sub-Marine Station Beta. Bits and pieces of Barton Cottage were borne past her by the agitated churning of the water: wood beams from the doorframe, several steps from the rickety wooden staircase; the piano bench; her collection of driftwood sculptures—all of it so much sea-borne rubbish now, as, she feared, was she herself.
And then—straight ahead of her—Elinor saw the most horrible sight her vision had yet comprehended. Pestilent Island, her home, was lifting itself out of the water—in a long, fluid motion the four-mile sweep of the island rose and rose and rose, revealing beneath the surface the irrefutable aspect of a face—it was a beast of impossible size, and the island that had been their home was merely the head—no, merely the crest of the head. Up it rose, with sea-water streaming down around it on all sides, a wall of mighty waterfalls crashing into the ocean.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters Page 33
