CHAPTER XLII.
One other short call in Harley Street, in which Elinor received her
brother’s congratulations on their travelling so far towards Barton without
any expense, and on Colonel Brandon’s being to follow them to Cleveland
in a day or two, completed the intercourse of the brother and sisters in town;
—and a faint invitation from Fanny, to come to Norland whenever it should
happen to be in their way, which of all things was the most unlikely to
occur, with a more warm, though less public, assurance, from John to
Elinor, of the promptitude with which he should come to see her at
Delaford, was all that foretold any meeting in the country.
It amused her to observe that all her friends seemed determined to send
her to Delaford;—a place, in which, of all others, she would now least
chuse to visit, or wish to reside; for not only was it considered as her future
home by her brother and Mrs. Jennings, but even Lucy, when they parted,
gave her a pressing invitation to visit her there.
Very early in April, and tolerably early in the day, the two parties from
Hanover Square and Berkeley Street set out from their respective homes, to
meet, by appointment, on the road. For the convenience of Charlotte and
her child, they were to be more than two days on their journey, and Mr.
Palmer, travelling more expeditiously with Colonel Brandon, was to join
them at Cleveland soon after their arrival.
Marianne, few as had been her hours of comfort in London, and eager as
she had long been to quit it, could not, when it came to the point, bid adieu
to the house in which she had for the last time enjoyed those hopes, and that
confidence, in Willoughby, which were now extinguished for ever, without
great pain. Nor could she leave the place in which Willoughby remained,
busy in new engagements, and new schemes, in which she could have no
share, without shedding many tears.
Elinor’s satisfaction, at the moment of removal, was more positive. She
had no such object for her lingering thoughts to fix on, she left no creature
behind, from whom it would give her a moment’s regret to be divided for
ever, she was pleased to be free herself from the persecution of Lucy’s
friendship, she was grateful for bringing her sister away unseen by
Willoughby since his marriage, and she looked forward with hope to what a
few months of tranquility at Barton might do towards restoring Marianne’s
peace of mind, and confirming her own.
Their journey was safely performed. The second day brought them into
the cherished, or the prohibited, county of Somerset, for as such was it
dwelt on by turns in Marianne’s imagination; and in the forenoon of the
third they drove up to Cleveland.
Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping
lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure-grounds were tolerably extensive; and
like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open
shrubbery, and closer wood walk, a road of smooth gravel winding round a
plantation, led to the front, the lawn was dotted over with timber, the house
itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain-ash, and the
acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall
Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices.
Marianne entered the house with a heart swelling with emotion from the
consciousness of being only eighty miles from Barton, and not thirty from
Combe Magna; and before she had been five minutes within its walls, while
the others were busily helping Charlotte to show her child to the
housekeeper, she quitted it again, stealing away through the winding
shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence;
where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of
country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of hills in
the horizon, and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna might be
seen.
In such moments of precious, invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of
agony to be at Cleveland; and as she returned by a different circuit to the
house, feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty, of wandering from
place to place in free and luxurious solitude, she resolved to spend almost
every hour of every day while she remained with the Palmers, in the
indulgence of such solitary rambles.
She returned just in time to join the others as they quitted the house, on
an excursion through its more immediate premises; and the rest of the
morning was easily whiled away, in lounging round the kitchen garden,
examining the bloom upon its walls, and listening to the gardener’s
lamentations upon blights, in dawdling through the green-house, where the
loss of her favourite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering
frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,—and in visiting her poultry-yard,
where, in the disappointed hopes of her dairy-maid, by hens forsaking their
nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decrease of a promising
young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment.
The morning was fine and dry, and Marianne, in her plan of employment
abroad, had not calculated for any change of weather during their stay at
Cleveland. With great surprise therefore, did she find herself prevented by a
settled rain from going out again after dinner. She had depended on a
twilight walk to the Grecian temple, and perhaps all over the grounds, and
an evening merely cold or damp would not have deterred her from it; but a
heavy and settled rain even she could not fancy dry or pleasant weather for
walking.
Their party was small, and the hours passed quietly away. Mrs. Palmer
had her child, and Mrs. Jennings her carpet-work; they talked of the friends
they had left behind, arranged Lady Middleton’s engagements, and
wondered whether Mr. Palmer and Colonel Brandon would get farther than
Reading that night. Elinor, however little concerned in it, joined in their
discourse; and Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every
house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general,
soon procured herself a book.
Nothing was wanting on Mrs. Palmer’s side that constant and friendly
good humour could do, to make them feel themselves welcome. The
openness and heartiness of her manner more than atoned for that want of
recollection and elegance which made her often deficient in the forms of
politeness; her kindness, recommended by so pretty a face, was engaging;
her folly, though evident was not disgusting, because it was not conceited;
and Elinor could have forgiven every thing but her laugh.
The two gentlemen arrived the next day to a very late dinner, affording a
pleasant enlargement of the party, and a very welcome variety to their
conversation, which a long morning of the same continued rain had reduced
very low.
Elinor had seen so little of Mr. Palmer, and in that little had seen so much
variety in his address to her sister and herself, that she knew not what to
expect to find him in his own family. She found him, however, perfectly the
gentleman in his behaviour to all his visitors, and only occasionally rude to
his wife and her mother; she found him very capable of being a pleasant
companion, and only prevented from being so always, by too great an
aptitude to fancy himself as much superior to people in general, as he must
feel himself to be to Mrs. Jennings and Charlotte. For the rest of his
character and habits, they were marked, as far as Elinor could perceive,
with no traits at all unusual in his sex and time of life. He was nice in his
eating, uncertain in his hours; fond of his child, though affecting to slight it;
and idled away the mornings at billiards, which ought to have been devoted
to business. She liked him, however, upon the whole, much better than she
had expected, and in her heart was not sorry that she could like him no
more;—not sorry to be driven by the observation of his Epicurism, his
selfishness, and his conceit, to rest with complacency on the remembrance
of Edward’s generous temper, simple taste, and diffident feelings.
Of Edward, or at least of some of his concerns, she now received
intelligence from Colonel Brandon, who had been into Dorsetshire lately;
and who, treating her at once as the disinterested friend of Mr. Ferrars, and
the kind confidante of himself, talked to her a great deal of the parsonage at
Delaford, described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant to do
himself towards removing them.—His behaviour to her in this, as well as in
every other particular, his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence of
only ten days, his readiness to converse with her, and his deference for her
opinion, might very well justify Mrs. Jennings’s persuasion of his
attachment, and would have been enough, perhaps, had not Elinor still, as
from the first, believed Marianne his real favourite, to make her suspect it
herself. But as it was, such a notion had scarcely ever entered her head,
except by Mrs. Jennings’s suggestion; and she could not help believing
herself the nicest observer of the two;—she watched his eyes, while Mrs.
Jennings thought only of his behaviour;—and while his looks of anxious
solicitude on Marianne’s feeling, in her head and throat, the beginning of a
heavy cold, because unexpressed by words, entirely escaped the latter
lady’s observation;—she could discover in them the quick feelings, and
needless alarm of a lover.
Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her
being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shrubbery, but all over the
grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was
something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the
oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had—assisted by the still
greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings—given
Marianne a cold so violent as, though for a day or two trifled with or
denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of every
body, and the notice of herself. Prescriptions poured in from all quarters,
and as usual, were all declined. Though heavy and feverish, with a pain in
her limbs, and a cough, and a sore throat, a good night’s rest was to cure her
entirely; and it was with difficulty that Elinor prevailed on her, when she
went to bed, to try one or two of the simplest of the remedies.
