CHAPTER 47

MRS. DASHWOOD DID NOT HEAR unmoved the vindication of the self-satisfied treasure hunter who had been her favourite. She rejoiced in his being cleared from some part of his imputed guilt. She was sorry for him; she wished him happy. But the feelings of the past could not be recalled. Nothing could do away the knowledge of what Marianne had suffered through his means, nor remove the guilt of his conduct towards Eliza. Nothing could replace him, therefore, in her former esteem, nor injure the interests of Colonel Brandon.

Had Mrs. Dashwood, like her daughter, heard Willoughby’s story from himself—had she witnessed his distress, and seen the pitiable, semi-human expression upon the face of his orangutan, now sadly slain, it is probable that her compassion would have been greater. But it was neither in Elinor’s power, nor in her wish, to rouse such feelings in another as had at first been called forth in herself. Reflection had given calmness to her judgment, and sobered her own opinion of Willoughby’s deserts. She wished, therefore, to declare only the simple truth, and lay open such facts as were really due to his character, without any embellishment of tenderness to lead the fancy astray.

In the evening, when they were all three together, Marianne began to speak of him again—but it was not without an effort. Her unsteady voice plainly showed. “I wish to assure you both,” said she, “that I see everything as you can desire me to do.”

Mrs. Dashwood would have interrupted her instantly with soothing tenderness, had not Elinor, who really wished to hear her sister’s unbiased opinion, by an eager sign, engaged her silence. Marianne slowly continued, “It is a great relief to me—what Elinor told me this morning—I have now heard exactly what I wished to hear.” For some moments her voice was lost; but recovering herself, she added, and with greater calmness than before, “I am now perfectly satisfied, I wish for no change. Do you—do you hear that?”

Elinor could not deny that she did hear it, and could see by her mother’s troubled expression that she heard it as well: the distinct sound of voices chanting together, but very lightly as though far off in the distance. She cocked her head for a moment, but the sound died away; Mrs. Dashwood wrung her hands and looked desperately to Elinor—Margaret was out there, somewhere on the island, they knew—and whatever the source of that chanting, it also held the key to her whereabouts.

The sound faded; Marianne, too caught up in her unburdening to linger on its mystery, continued. “In short, I never could have been happy with him, after knowing, as sooner or later I must have known, all this. I should have had no confidence, no esteem. Nothing could have done it away to my feelings.”

“I know it—I know it,” cried her mother, whose natural passion on the subject of her child’s welfare was further riled by uncertainty of her youngest daughter’s situation. “Happy with a man of libertine practices! With one who so injured the peace of the dearest of our friends, and the best of men! No, my Marianne has not a heart to be made happy with such a man! Her conscience, her sensitive conscience, would have felt all that the conscience of her husband ought to have felt.”

Marianne sighed, and repeated, “I wish for no change.”

“You consider the matter,” said Elinor, “exactly as a good mind and a sound understanding must consider it. I dare say you perceive reason enough to be convinced that your marriage must have involved you in many certain troubles and disappointments. Had you married, you must have been always poor. His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together, on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses which would not be the less grievous to you—”

Elinor was interrupted by the noise, the same noise they had heard before, only louder this time, rolling across the hillside; and now the syllables were distinct enough to be heard: K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!

“My God!” said Marianne now, her attention drawn for the moment from Willoughby. “That is the ghastly refrain that so agitated our dear Margaret—and indeed, where is Margaret?

Elinor, with a cautioning look to her mother, returned the conversation to its course.

“To abridge Willoughby’s enjoyments, is it not to be feared, that instead of prevailing on feelings so selfish to consent to it, you would have lessened your own influence on his heart, and made him regret the connection which had involved him in such difficulties?”

Marianne’s lips quivered, and she repeated the word “Selfish?” in a tone that implied—“do you really think him selfish?” Mrs. Dashwood, meanwhile, stared worriedly out the window, hoping or fearing to see what she knew not.

“The whole of his behaviour,” replied Elinor, “from the beginning to the end of the affair, has been grounded on selfishness. It was selfishness which first made him sport with your affections; which afterwards, when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession of it, and which finally carried him from Barton Cottage. His own enjoyment was his ruling principle.”

“It is very true. My happiness never was his object.”

“At present,” continued Elinor, “he regrets what he has done. And why does he regret it? Because he finds it has not answered towards himself. It has not made him happy. His circumstances are now unembarrassed. He suffers from no evil of that kind; and he thinks only that he has married a woman of a less amiable temper than yourself. But does it follow that had he married you, he would have been happy? He would then have suffered under the pecuniary distresses which, because they are removed, he now reckons as nothing. He always would have been poor; and probably would soon have learned to rank the innumerable comforts of a clear estate and good income as of far more importance than the mere temper of a wife.”

“I have not a doubt of it,” said Marianne, “and I have nothing to regret—nothing but my own folly.”

“Rather say your mother’s imprudence, my child,” said Mrs. Dashwood, turning at last away from the window, for the chanting had again abated. “She must be answerable.”

Marianne would not let her proceed; and Elinor, satisfied that each felt her own error, wished to avoid any survey of the past that might weaken her sister’s spirits; she, therefore, pursuing the first subject, immediately continued:

“One observation may, I think, be fairly drawn from the whole of the story—that all Willoughby’s difficulties have arisen from the first offence against virtue, in his behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents.”

Marianne assented most feelingly to the remark; and her mother was led by it to an enumeration of Colonel Brandon’s injuries and merits, warm as friendship and design could unitedly dictate. Her daughter did not look, however, as if much of it were heard by her.

Elinor, according to her expectation, saw on the two or three following days, that Marianne did not continue to gain strength as she had done; but while her resolution was unsubdued, and she still tried to appear cheerful and easy, her sister could safely trust to the effect of time upon her health. Every day the pustules that marked her skin were healing, and the cool (though malodorous) sea winds that swept through the windows of Barton Cottage seemed to do her spirits well.

Elinor grew impatient for some tidings of Edward. She had heard nothing of him since the destruction of the Sub-Marine Station, nothing new of his plans, nothing certain even of his present abode. Some letters had passed between her and her brother, in consequence of Marianne’s illness; and in the first of John’s, which otherwise related the lingering after effects of his experiments in Station, including an insatiable appetite for grub worms, there had been this sentence: “We know nothing of our unfortunate Edward, and can make no enquiries on so prohibited a subject,” which was all the intelligence of Edward afforded her by the correspondence, for his name was not even mentioned in any of the succeeding letters. She was not doomed, however, to be long in ignorance of his measures.

Their man-servant, Thomas, had been ordered one morning to row to Exeter on business. Later that afternoon, while serving a bowl of Mrs. Dashwood’s latest culinary specialty—a lobster bisque served in the hollowed-out skull of a porpoise—Thomas offered the following voluntary communication: “I suppose you know, ma’am, that Mr. Ferrars is married.”

Marianne gave a violent start, fixed her eyes upon Elinor, saw her turning pale, and fell back in her chair in hysterics. Mrs. Dashwood, whose eyes had intuitively taken the same direction, was shocked to perceive by Elinor’s countenance how much she really suffered.

Elinor’s mind was aflame; her entire spirit throbbed with distress. The five-pointed symbol, that totem of agony, returned at the servant’s news in its most intense incarnation yet, twirling and throbbing in her mind’s eye.

“Ah,” she cried out, clutching with two hands at her skull. “The pain—”

Though desperate for further information, Elinor was unable in such a condition to ask Thomas for the source of his intelligence. Mrs. Dashwood immediately took that trouble on herself; and Elinor had the benefit of the information without the exertion of seeking it.

“Who told you that Mr. Ferrars was married, Thomas?”

“I see Mr. Ferrars myself, ma’am, this morning in Exeter, and his lady too, Miss Steele as was.”

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.”