CHAPTER 39
THE MISS DASHWOODS HAD NOW BEEN living in Sub-Station Beta for more than two months, and Marianne’s impatience to be gone increased every day. She sighed for the air, the liberty, the noxious but comforting sea-wind of Pestilent Isle; and fancied that if any place could give her ease, rickety old Barton Cottage must do it.
Elinor was hardly less anxious for their removal, but she was conscious of the difficulties of so long a journey, which Marianne could not be brought to acknowledge. She began to turn her thoughts towards its accomplishment, and had already mentioned their wishes to their kind hostess, who resisted them with all the eloquence of her good-will, when a plan was suggested, which, though detaining them from home yet a few weeks longer, appeared to Elinor altogether much more eligible than any other. The Palmers were to remove to their houseboat, The Cleveland about the end of March, for the Easter holidays; and Mrs. Jennings, with both her friends, received a very warm invitation from Charlotte to go with them.
When Elinor told Marianne what she had done, however, her first reply was not very auspicious.
“The Cleveland!” she cried, with great agitation. “No, I cannot be moored upon The Cleveland.”
“You forget,” said Elinor gently, “that it is not in the neighbourhood of . . .”
“But it is moored off Somersetshire. I cannot go into Somersetshire! No, Elinor, you cannot expect me to go there.”
Elinor would not argue upon the propriety of overcoming such feelings; she only endeavoured to counteract them by working on others; represented it, therefore, as a measure which would fix the time of her returning to that dear mother, whom she so much wished to see. As they spoke, they noticed various of the household servants rushing by in great haste—Elinor endeavoured to stop one to inquire as to its cause, but was rebuffed; whatever the cause of their hurry, it could not brook surcease, even for a moment’s conversation.
Elinor returned to her entreaties. From The Cleveland, which was within a few miles of Bristol, the distance to the Devonshire coast was not far; and as there could be no occasion of their staying above a week aboard The Cleveland, they might now be at home in little more than three weeks’ time. As Marianne’s affection for her mother was sincere, it must triumph with little difficulty, over the imaginary evils she had started.
Mrs. Jennings was so far from being weary of her guests that she pressed them very earnestly to return with her again from The Cleveland. Elinor was grateful for the attention, but it could not alter her design; everything relative to their return was arranged as far as it could be; and Marianne found some relief in drawing up a statement of the hours that were yet to divide her from their beloved shanty high atop the wind-swept cliffs of Pestilent Isle.
The issue was settled, and now Elinor was allowed luxury to discover the cause of agitation among the servants, who were still rushing hither and thither, and one of whom was donning his Ex-Domic Float-Suit and being outfitted with a pair of shiny gutting knives. By way of answer to Elinor’s enquiries, the newly costumed servant merely gestured with his knives to the back wall of the Dome-glass, where a half dozen swordfish were tapping steadily, and with military precision, against the glass. As Elinor watched, a seventh joined their school, and then an eighth. Looking closer, Elinor saw the true root of the servants’ distress and quick action: A clearly discernible and rapidly spreading network of tiny cracks in the Dome-glass, with its epicenter where the swordfish continued at their unending labour.
Tap, tap, tap . . . tap tap tap . . . taptaptap . . .
She gave the servant an encouraging smile, and watched as he disappeared down the small hallway that led to the emergency exit chamber. By then, Colonel Brandon had arrived, and Mrs. Jennings had apprised him of the Dashwoods’ plan for Ascending the Sub-Station and returning home, via a visit to the Palmers.
“Ah! Colonel Brandon, I do not know what you and I shall do without the Miss Dashwoods,” was her plaintive address to him, “for they are quite resolved upon going home from the Palmers—and how forlorn we shall be, when I come back! Lord! We shall sit and gape at one another as dull as two cats; one old, slightly crazy cat, and one cat with a mass of writhing slimy tentacles in place of whiskers!”
Perhaps Mrs. Jennings was hoping, by this vigorous sketch of their future ennui, to provoke Colonel Brandon to make that offer which might give himself an escape from it—and if so, she had soon afterwards good reason to think her object gained; for, on Elinor’s moving to the aquarium glass to watch the knife-bearing servant’s efforts to dispatch the ever-multiplying number of swordfish, he followed her to it with a look of particular meaning, and conversed with her there for several minutes. But his subject was not, as Mrs. Jennings hoped, romantic affection; all over the Sub-Station, Colonel Brandon confided to Elinor, outer-ring residents were reporting similar pecking swordfish massing outside the Dome, and all were sending out their own servants to do battle with them.
Preferring not to contemplate the possible outcome of such an unwelcome event, they conversed on other topics for several minutes. And though Mrs. Jennings was too honourable to listen, and had even changed her seat, on purpose that she might not hear, to one close by the pianoforte on which Marianne was playing a tender, melancholy, high-octave arrangement of “Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum,” she could not keep herself from seeing that Elinor changed colour, attended with agitation, and was too intent on what he said. Still further in confirmation of her hopes, in the interval of Marianne’s turning from “Rum” to “A Pirate’s Life for Me,” some words of the colonel’s inevitably reached her ear, in which he seemed to be apologizing for the badness of his house. This set the matter beyond a doubt. She wondered, indeed, at his thinking it necessary to do so; but supposed it to be the proper etiquette. What Elinor said in reply she could not distinguish, but judged from the motion of her lips, that she did not think that any material objection—and Mrs. Jennings commended her in her heart for being so honest. They then talked on for a few minutes longer without her catching a syllable, when another lucky stop in Marianne’s performance brought her these words in the colonel’s calm voice: “I am afraid it cannot take place very soon.”
Astonished and shocked at such a speech, Mrs. Jennings was almost ready to cry out, “Lord! what should hinder it?” So engrossed was she with these snippets of conversation, she did not notice that the servant outside the glass had been run through on the rapier-like horn of a swordfish; two of his fellows grasped him beneath each of his armpits and hauled him hastily upwards; the other fish, thankfully, did not offer chase; they continued instead with their steady, determined rapping upon the Dome.
On Elinor and Colonel Brandon breaking up their conference soon afterwards, and moving different ways, Mrs. Jennings very plainly heard her say, with a voice showing strong feeling, “I shall always think myself very much obliged to you.”
Mrs. Jennings was delighted with her gratitude, and only wondered that after hearing such a sentence, the colonel should be able to take leave of them, as he immediately did, with the utmost sang-froid, tentacles tipping politely by way of farewell, without making her any reply! She had not thought her old friend could have made so indifferent a suitor.
What had really passed between them was to this effect:
“I have heard,” said he, with great compassion, “of the injustice your friend Mr. Ferrars has suffered from his family. If I understand the matter right, he has been entirely cast off by them for persevering in his engagement with a very deserving young woman. Have I been rightly informed? Is it so?”
Elinor told him that it was.
“The cruelty, the impolitic cruelty,” he replied, with great feeling, “of dividing, or attempting to divide, two young people long attached to each other, is terrible. I have seen Mr. Ferrars two or three times in Harley Piscinca, and am much pleased with him. I understand that he intends a career as a lighthouse keeper. Will you be so good as to tell him that the lighthouse at Delaford is his; as I am informed by this day’s post that it is now vacant, the old keeper having been dragged off by the Pirate Dreadbeard for some trivial slight; anyway, the post is his, if he think it worth his acceptance. I only wish it were more valuable. It is a lake, merely, and a small one, with only one or two tiny monsters within it, and a couple of villages surrounding that live in mild terror of same; the late incumbent, I believe, did not make more than two hundred pounds per annum, and though it is certainly capable of improvement, I fear, not to such an amount as to afford him a very comfortable income. The lighthouse itself can hardly be deserving of the name; it is really just a tumbledown cottage, with a couple of torches kept burning in the tallest branches of a nearby sycamore tree. Such as it is, however, my pleasure in presenting it will be very great. Pray assure him of it.”
Elinor’s astonishment at this commission could hardly have been greater, had the colonel been really making her an offer of his hand. The preferment, which only two days before she had considered as hopeless, would enable him to marry—and she, of all people in the world, was fixed on to bestow it! Her emotion was such as Mrs. Jennings had attributed to a very different cause; but whatever minor feelings less pure, less pleasing, might have a share in that emotion, her esteem for the general benevolence, and her gratitude for the particular friendship, which together prompted Colonel Brandon to this act, were strongly felt, and warmly expressed. She thanked him for it with all her heart, spoke of Edward’s principles and disposition with that praise which she knew them to deserve; and promised to undertake the commission with pleasure. She could undertake therefore to inform him of it, in the course of the day. After this had been settled, Colonel Brandon began to talk of his own advantage in securing so respectable and agreeable a neighbour, and that it was that he mentioned with regret, that the house was small and indifferent.
“I cannot imagine any inconvenience to them,” said Elinor, “for it will be in proportion to their family and income.”
By which the colonel was surprised to find that she was considering Mr. Ferrars’s marriage as the certain consequence of the presentation; for he did not suppose it possible that the lighthouse at Delaford could supply such an income, as anybody in his style of life would venture to settle on—and he said so.
“A simple lake-side lighthouse can do no more than make Mr. Ferrars comfortable as a bachelor; it cannot enable him to marry. I am sorry to say that my patronage ends with this; and my interest is hardly more extensive. If, however, by an unforeseen chance it should be in my power to serve him further, I am ready to be useful to him. What I am now doing indeed, seems nothing at all, since it can advance him so little towards what must be his principal object of happiness. His marriage must still be a distant good—at least, I am afraid it cannot take place very soon.”
Such was the sentence which, when misunderstood, so justly offended the delicate feelings of Mrs. Jennings.
As they all departed the room, the swordfish continued to mass; now a dozen, now two dozen, now three dozen beady-eyed beasts, some as small as cats, some big as horses, all with their cruel sharp bills clattering away against the glass. All over the Dome it was the same, and by nightfall there were a thousand pairs of deadly golden fish-eyes glowing eerily in the darkness, just outside the protective glass shell of the Sub-Station. An army of malevolent fish, mostly tapping, but some simply staring— staring, staring coldly in from without.