Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (24 page)

I am, dear Madam,
Your most obedient
humble servant,
JOHN WILLOUGHBY.

It may be imagined with what indignation this letter was read by Miss Dashwood. Though aware, before she began it, that it must confirm their separation forever, she was not aware that such language could be suffered to announce it; nor could she have supposed Willoughby capable of departing so far from the appearance of every honourable and delicate feeling—so far from the common decorum of a gentleman, as to send a letter so impudently cruel: a letter which acknowledged no breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection whatever—a letter of which every line was an insult, and which proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.

She paused over it for some time with indignant astonishment; then read it again and again; but every perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man. She dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement, not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an escape from the worst and most irremediable of all evils. To have been engaged to such a man was like falling under a curse more grave even than the one afflicting Colonel Brandon; to have the engagement broken was to see the curse lifted in a stroke.

On hearing the splash of oars outside, Elinor went to the front window to see who could be coming so unreasonably early. She was astonished to perceive Mrs. Jennings’s regal, swan-drawn gondola being made ready, though she knew it had not been ordered till one. Determined not to quit Marianne, though hopeless of contributing to her ease, she hurried away to excuse herself from attending Mrs. Jennings, on account of her sister being indisposed; she explained that Marianne had an aeroembolism, as the excuse most likely to be believed. Mrs. Jennings, with a thoroughly good-humoured disbelief in the origin of Marianne’s indisposition, admitted the excuse most readily; and Elinor, after seeing her safe off, returned to Marianne, whom she found attempting to rise from the bed, and whom she reached just in time to prevent her from falling on the floor, faint and giddy from a long want of proper rest and food. A glass of lukewarm water, mixed with a wine flavouring packet, which Elinor procured for her directly, made her more comfortable, and she was at last able to express some sense of her kindness.

“Poor Elinor!” she said. “How unhappy I make you!”

“I only wish,” replied her sister, “there were anything I
could
do, which might be of comfort to you.”

Marianne could only exclaim, “Oh! Elinor, I am miserable, indeed,” before her voice was entirely lost in sobs.

Just then the minnows which had been silently observing Marianne’s grief from outside the glass were consumed in one gulp by a passing marlin.

“Exert yourself, dear Marianne,” Elinor cried. “Think of your mother; think of her misery while
you
suffer. For her sake you must exert yourself.”

“I cannot, I cannot!” cried Marianne. “Leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! Drown me in the all-consuming sea! Let my bones calcify with the passing centuries and be turned to coral! But do not torture me so. Happy, happy Elinor,
you
cannot have an idea of what I suffer.”

“Have you no comforts? No friends? Is your loss such as leaves no
opening for consolation? Much as you suffer now, think of what you would have suffered if the discovery of his character had been delayed to a later period—if your engagement had been carried on for months and months, as it might have been, before he chose to put an end to it. Every additional day of unhappy confidence, on your side, would have made the blow more dreadful.”

“Engagement!” cried Marianne. “There has been no engagement.”

“No engagement!”

“No, he is not so unworthy as you believe him. He has broken no faith with me.”

“But he told you that he loved you.”

“Yes—no—never. It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never was.”

“Yet you wrote to him?”

“Yes—could that be wrong after all that had passed?”

Elinor turned again to the three letters and directly ran over the contents of all. The first, which was what her sister had sent him on their arrival in town, was to this effect:

Berkeley Causeway,
January
.

How surprised you will be, Willoughby, on receiving this; and I think you will feel something more than surprise, when you know that I have Descended into the Station. An opportunity of coming hither, though with Mrs. Jennings, was a temptation we could not resist. I wish you may receive this in time to come here to-night, but I will not depend on it. At any rate I shall expect you to-morrow. For the present, adieu.

M. D.

Her second note, which had been written on the morning after the pirate-themed amusement at the Middletons’, was in these words:

I cannot express my disappointment in having missed you the day before yesterday, nor my astonishment at not having received any answer to a note which I sent you above a week ago. I have been expecting to hear from you, and still more to see you, every hour of the day. Pray call again as soon as possible, and explain the reason of my having expected this in vain. Such is the behaviour not of a gentleman, but of a rank scallywag. I have been told that you were asked to be of the pirate party, and Sir John even would have lent you a cutlass and pegleg for adornment. But could it be so? You must be very much altered indeed since we parted, if that could be the case, and you not there. But I will not suppose this possible, and I hope very soon to receive your personal assurance of its being otherwise.

M. D.

The contents of her last note to him were these:

What am I to imagine, Willoughby, by your behaviour last night? Again I demand an explanation of it, and I will not accept the lobster attack as an excuse. I was prepared to meet you with the pleasure which our separation naturally produced, with the familiarity which our intimacy at Barton Cottage appeared to me to justify. I was repulsed indeed! I have passed a wretched night in endeavouring to excuse a conduct which can scarcely be called less than insulting; but though I have not yet been able to form any reasonable apology for your behaviour, I am perfectly ready to hear your justification of it. It would grieve me indeed to think ill of you; but if I am to do it, if I am to learn that your behaviour to me was intended only to deceive, let it be told as soon as possible. I wish to acquit you, but certainty on either side will be ease to what I now suffer. If your sentiments are no longer
what they were, you will return my notes, and the lock of my hair which is in your possession.

M. D.

Elinor lowered the letter and reflected on its contents, whilst a swordfish began to tap softly against the Dome-glass. She would have been unwilling to believe that such letters, so full of affection and confidence, could have been answered as Willoughby had done.

“I felt myself,” Marianne said, “to be solemnly engaged to him, as if the strictest legal covenant had bound us to each other.”

“I can believe it,” said Elinor, “but unfortunately he did not feel the same.”

“He
did
feel the same, Elinor—for weeks and weeks he felt it. I know he did!” The swordfish rapped ardently, punctuating the passion of Marianne’s outburst. “Have you forgotten the last evening of our being together at Barton Cottage? The morning that we parted too! When he told me that it might be many weeks before we met again—his distress— can I ever forget his distress? The shocked and saddened expression behind the portcullis of his diving helmet!”

For a moment or two Marianne could say no more; but when this emotion had passed away, she added, in a firmer tone, “I have been cruelly used, but not by Willoughby.”

“Dearest Marianne, who but himself? By whom can he have been instigated?”

“By all the world! I would rather believe every creature of my acquaintance leagued together to ruin me in his opinion, than believe his nature capable of such cruelty. This woman of whom he writes—whoever she be—must have somehow ensorcelled him—to alter his inclinations and turn his affection from me.”

Again they were both silent. Elinor paced back and forth, watching idly as a cod gobbled up a mass of cockles, and then was consumed in its turn by an orca; all the while, the swordfish tapped continually against
the glass. For some reason, its persistent presence connected itself in Elinor’s mind with the rampaging lobsters—but, before she could ponder what association there might be, Marianne again took up Willoughby’s letter and exclaimed, “I must go home. I must go and comfort Mama. Can we not Ascend to-morrow and hire some convenient submersible or submarine to take us home?”

“To-morrow, Marianne!”

“Why should I stay here? I came only for Willoughby’s sake—and now who cares for me? Who regards me?”

“It would be impossible to go to-morrow. Civility of the commonest kind must prevent such a hasty removal as that.”

“Well then, another day or two, perhaps; but I cannot stay here long, I cannot stay to endure the questions and remarks of all these people. The Middletons and Palmers—how am I to bear their pity?”

Elinor advised Marianne to lie down again, and for a moment she did so; but no attitude could give her ease; and in restless pain of mind and body she moved from one posture to another, till growing more and more hysterical, her sister could with difficulty keep her on the bed at all. Neither, absorbed in Marianne’s grief, noticed the tiny crack in the glass that had been the fruit of the swordfish’s relentless exertions, nor the tiny cartilaginous grin it wore as it swam away.

M
RS. JENNINGS CAME IMMEDIATELY
to their room on her return.

“How do you do, my dear?” said she in a voice of great compassion to Marianne, who turned away her face without answering. “Rashes? Joint pain? Itching?” she inquired, naming some of the symptoms
often attending to aeroembolism—though she knew well that Marianne’s trouble was one of the heart, not one caused by the precipitation of dissolved bubbles within the body accompanying rapid compression or decompression.

“Poor thing!” Mrs. Jennings continued. “She looks very bad. No wonder. Aye, it is but too true. He is to be married very soon—a good-for-nothing scoundrel! I have no patience with him. Mrs. Taylor told me of it half an hour ago, and she was told it by a particular friend of Miss Grey herself, else I am sure I should not have believed it. I wish with all my soul his wife may be like a tapeworm to him: May she dwell symbiotically in the digestive tract of his existence, consuming all joy, causing him writhing pain at odd intervals, until she is finally defecated out. And so I shall always say, my dear, you may depend on it; I love to repeat a parasite metaphor, once I first have invented it. But there is one comfort, my dear Miss Marianne; he is not the only young man in the world; and with your pretty face, strong back, and noticeable lung capacity, you will never want admirers.”

She then went away, walking on tiptoe out of the room, as if she supposed her young friend’s affliction could be increased by noise.

Marianne, to the surprise of her sister, determined on dining that night with Mrs. Jennings and her guests. When there, though looking most wretchedly, she managed to choke down several cubes of rack-of-lamb paste, and was calmer than Elinor had expected. Mrs. Jennings saw that Marianne was unhappy, and felt that everything was due to her which might make her less so. She treated her with all the indulgent fondness of a parent towards a favourite child on the last day of its holidays. Marianne was to have the best seat, looking right out at the Dome-glass, and to be amused by the relation of all the news of the day. There had been news of a particularly dramatic shipwreck, in which a fully outfitted French frigate was beset by a tempest and capsized in the shark-infested waters off eastern Tasmania; Mrs. Jennings relayed the tale to Marianne with particular zest, acting out the terrified “
mon dieu!
”s and “
aidez-moi!
”s of the
sailors as they were surrounded by the befinned man-consumers. But soon Marianne could stay no longer. With a sign to her sister not to follow her, she directly got up and hurried out of the room.

“Poor soul!” cried Mrs. Jennings, as soon as she was gone, “Never have I known of spirits so low they could not be raised by hearing of a Frenchman eaten by a shark! I am sure if I knew of anything she would like, I would send all over the Sub-Marine Station for it. And this weekend brings new exhibits at the Aqua-Museo-Quarium: Harbour seals that have been made to grow sideburns! Clownfish dancing the tarantella! But it seems nothing will cheer her! Well, it is the oddest thing to me, that a man should use such a pretty girl so ill! But when there is plenty of money on one side, and next to none on the other, Lord bless you! They care no more about such things!”

“The lady, then,” Elinor interposed. “Miss Grey, I think you called her—is she very rich?”

“Fifty thousand pounds, my dear.”

“Is she said to be amiable?”

“I never heard any harm of her; indeed I hardly ever heard her mentioned. But now your poor sister has gone to her room. Is there nothing one can get to amuse her? What shall we play at? You two are not fond of Karankrolla, but is there no game she cares for?”

“Dear ma’am, this kindness is quite unnecessary. I shall persuade Marianne to go early to bed, for I am sure she wants rest.”

“Aye, that will be best. Lord! No wonder she has been looking so green about the gills this last week or two, for this matter has been hanging over her head. And so the letter that came today finished it! Poor soul!”

“I must do
this
justice to Mr. Willoughby—he has broken no positive engagement with my sister.”

“Don’t pretend to defend him. No positive engagement indeed! After taking her all over Allenham Isle, and making her a gift of that sea horse, King John—”

“James.”

“Yes, King James, and fixing on the very rooms they were to live in hereafter!” After a short silence on both sides, Mrs. Jennings, with all her natural hilarity, burst forth again. “Well, my dear, this will be all the better for poor, fish-faced Colonel Brandon. He will have her within the reach of those tentacles that so unpleasantly decorate his maw. Mind me, now, if they ain’t married by Midsummer. Lord! How he’ll chuckle a gurgling, unsettling chuckle over this news! I hope he will come tonight. It will be a much better match for your sister. Two thousand a year without debt or drawback. Delaford is a nice place, I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice old-fashioned place, full of comforts and conveniences; he has a long practice of privacy, owing to his condition, and so the estate is quite shut in with great garden walls! I shall spirit up the colonel as soon as I can. If we
can
but put Willoughby out of her head!”