Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (26 page)

Again he stopped to recover himself; tears rolled down his cheeks and mingled freely with the effluvia of his tentacles. Elinor spoke her feelings in an exclamation of tender concern, at the fate of his unfortunate friend.

“Your sister, I hope, cannot be offended,” said he, “by the resemblance I have fancied between her and my poor disgraced relation. Their fates, their fortunes, cannot be the same. But to what does all this lead? I seem to have been distressing you for nothing. Ah! Miss Dashwood—a subject such as this—untouched for fourteen years—it is dangerous to handle it at all! I
will
be more collected—more concise. Eliza left to my care her only child, a little girl, the offspring of her first guilty connection, which had been with a hirsute seaman who peddled fried cakes on the Dover boardwalk. The girl was then about three years old. My little Eliza was placed at school, and I saw her there whenever I could. I called her a distant relation; but I am well aware of rumours that she has my same unfortunate facial misfortune. Nothing could be further from the truth; she has only an unwomanly tendency to sprout hair ’pon her lip, an inheritance from the crinite cake-vendor who was her natural parent.

“Last February she suddenly disappeared. I had allowed her, at her earnest desire, to go to Bath with one of her young friends. I knew the girl’s father to be a very good sort of man, and I thought well of his daughter—better than she deserved, for she would tell nothing, would give no clue, though she certainly knew all. I could learn nothing but that she was gone; all the rest, for eight long months, was left to conjecture. What I thought, what I feared, may be imagined; and what I suffered too.”

“Good heavens!” cried Elinor, “Could it be—Willoughby!”

“The first news that reached me,” he continued, “came in a letter from herself, last October. It was forwarded to me from Delaford, and
I received it on the very morning of our intended party to explore the sunken husk of the
Mary
; and this was the reason of my leaving the archipelago so suddenly, which I am sure must at the time have appeared strange to everybody. Little did Mr. Willoughby imagine, I suppose, when his looks censured me for incivility in breaking up the party, that I was called away to the relief of one whom he had made poor and miserable. At Bath, he had met young Eliza, had saved her from the attack of a giant octopus—”

“No!”

“Yes! ‘Tis one startling coincidence among several. And then he had left the girl whose youth and innocence he had seduced, in a situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help, no friends, ignorant of his address! He had buried her in the sand in a playful fashion, as lovers do when sporting; and then, without digging her up, he had gone off, he said, to buy them lemonades; he never returned. She had been found and dug up three days later by a travelling party from Switzerland, who were in search of charming seaside English vistas and instead found a ruined girl with a faint moustache, buried in the sand.”

“This is beyond everything!” exclaimed Elinor.

“His character is now before you: expensive, dissipated, and worse than both. Knowing all this, as I have known it many weeks, guess what I must have felt on seeing your sister as fond of him as ever? On being assured that she was to marry him? But what could I do? I had no hope of interfering; and sometimes I thought your sister’s influence might yet reclaim him. But now, after such dishonourable usage, who can tell what were his designs on her! Use your own discretion, however, in communicating to her what I have told you. You must know best what will be its effect; but had I not seriously believed it might be of service, might lessen her regrets, I would not have suffered myself to trouble you with this account of my family afflictions.”

Elinor’s thanks followed this speech with grateful earnestness; attended too with the assurance of her expecting material advantage to
Marianne, from the communication of what had passed. “Have you seen Mr. Willoughby since you left him on Deadwind Island?”

“Yes,” he replied gravely, “once I have. One meeting was unavoidable.”

Elinor, startled by his manner, looked at him anxiously, saying,

“What? Have you met him to—”

“I could meet him no other way. Eliza had confessed to me, though most reluctantly, the name of her lover; and when he returned to Sub-Marine Station Beta, which was within a fortnight after myself, we were to meet by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.

Elinor sighed over the fancied necessity of this, but to a man and a soldier she presumed not to censure it.

“Such,” said Colonel Brandon, after a pause, “has been the unhappy resemblance between the fate of mother and daughter! And so imperfectly have I discharged my trust!”

Recollecting, soon afterwards, that he was probably dividing Elinor from her sister, he put an end to his visit, receiving from her again the same grateful acknowledgments, and leaving her full of compassion and esteem for him, and entirely absent the gastric discomfort that usually attended his presence.

W
HEN THE PARTICULARS
of this conversation were repeated by Miss Dashwood to her sister, as they very soon were, the effect was not entirely such as the former had hoped to see. Marianne did not appear to distrust the truth of any part of it, for she listened with steady and submissive attention, attempted no vindication of Willoughby, and seemed to show by her tears that she felt such vindication to be impossible—especially when Elinor arrived at the dénouement, in which poor seduced and lightly mustachioed Eliza was left buried to her neck in summer sand, and abandoned to the whims of the tide.

But though Marianne’s reaction assured Elinor that the conviction of this guilt
was
carried home, she did not see her less wretched. Her mind did become settled, but it was settled in a gloomy dejection. She still sang no shanties, and turned no happy reels, as Elinor was accustomed to see her undertake at odd intervals; still she sat sighing for hours out the Dome-glass, her head held in the crook of her arm, occasionally letting slip an admiring murmur regarding the midnight blues and emerald greens of the deep-sea flora.

To give the feelings or the language of Mrs. Dashwood on receiving and answering Elinor’s letter would be only to give a repetition of what her daughters had already felt and said, and would furthermore require a tremendous variety of words ill-suited for public consumption, such as those shouted by sailors off their decks while trying to keep their ship righted in a maddening gale. Suffice it to report in her a disappointment hardly less painful than Marianne’s, and an indignation even greater
than Elinor’s, and a wide vocabulary of uncharactaristic profanity. Long letters from her, quickly succeeding each other, arrived to tell all that she suffered and thought; to express her anxious solicitude for Marianne, and entreat she would bear up with fortitude under this misfortune.

Against the interest of her own individual comfort, Mrs. Dashwood had determined that it would be better for Marianne to be anywhere, at that time, than the little rickety shanty on Pestilent Isle, where everything within her view would be bringing back the past in the strongest and most afflicting manner, by constantly placing Willoughby before her, such as she had always seen him there. She recommended it to her daughters, therefore, by all means not to shorten their visit to Mrs. Jennings at Sub-Marine Station Beta. A variety of occupations and company which could not be procured at Barton Cottage, would be inevitable there, along with the wide menu of hydrophilial amusements on offer in-Station; these might yet, she hoped, cheat Marianne into some interest beyond herself.

From all danger of seeing Willoughby again, her mother considered her to be at least equally safe at the Station as back on the islands, since his acquaintance must now be dropped by all who called themselves her friends. Design could never bring them in each other’s way: negligence could never leave them exposed to a surprise; and chance had less in its favour in the crowd of the Station than even in the retirement of Barton Cottage, where it might force him before her while paying that visit at Allenham Isle on his marriage.

She had yet another reason for wishing her children to remain where they were; a letter from her son had told her that he and his wife were to Descend before the middle of February, and she judged it right that they should sometimes see their brother.

Mrs. Dashwood closed the letter by noting that, without wanting to increase the burden of what was clearly a difficult time, there was further news of their sister’s condition. Margaret had returned from her latest midnight ramble with no hair on her body. In answer to Mrs. Dashwood’s
frantic enquiries, Margaret had refused to utter a word—and, indeed, had not spoken so much as a syllable since.

As Elinor considered what psychic ailment or indisposition might have caused this further alteration in their sister, Marianne’s attention remained focused upon their mother’s suggestion that they continue in-Station. She had promised to be guided by her mother’s opinion, but it proved perfectly different from what she expected. By requiring her longer continuance at Sub-Marine Station Beta, her mother deprived her of the only possible alleviation of her wretchedness—the personal sympathy of her mother.

Elinor took great care in guarding her sister from ever hearing Willoughby’s name mentioned; neither Mrs. Jennings, nor Sir John, nor even Mrs. Palmer herself, ever spoke of him before her. Elinor wished that the same forbearance could have extended towards herself, but that was impossible, and she was obliged to listen day after day to the indignation of them all.

Sir John could not have thought it possible. “I wish him at the devil with all my heart!” he cried, gesticulating angrily with his huge, bear-paw-like hands. Mrs. Palmer, in her way, was equally angry. She was determined to drop his acquaintance immediately. She hated him so much that she was resolved never to mention his name again, and she should tell everybody she saw, how good-for-nothing he was.

What appeared to be calm and polite unconcern of Lady Middleton towards the entire affair arose in fact from her preoccupation with her latest scheme to escape and return to her home country. Some weeks ago she had discovered, in a deserted warehouse in the Dome’s northwesterly quadrant, an ancient but still operable single-hull, one-person submarine. She had laboriously dragged this hunk of ancient metal back to her docking, where it lay hidden behind cartons of unused drink packets; every night, after Sir John retired to their bedchamber, Lady Middleton climbed inside the ancient submarine’s cockpit and studied the dashboard, attempting to decipher its instruments, dreaming of the day when she
would find her moment to pilot the thing out of the Station and all the way home to her native isle.

Thus, whilst the others were assailing Elinor with their tiresome indignation, Lady Middleton was lost in thought, contemplating the details of her propulsion system or plotting her coordinates. Her apparent disregard for the situation was a happy relief to Elinor’s spirits, oppressed as they were by the clamorous kindness of the others. It was a great comfort to her to be sure of exciting no interest in
one
person at least among their circle of friends: a great comfort to know that there was
one
who would meet her without feeling any curiosity after particulars or any anxiety for her sister’s health. “Dive depth …” Lady Middleton once muttered, when the two happened to be alone. “There is still the question of dive depth …” And when Elinor said, “Pardon me?” Lady Middleton only gave a haughty, enigmatic smile and wandered away.

Early in February, within a fortnight from the receipt of Willoughby’s letter, Elinor had the painful office of informing her sister that he had been married in a great gala at Station Beta’s most eloquent catering hall before departing in an elegant forty-five-foot skiff—and, most cuttingly of all, the theme of the reception had been Shipwrecked Sailors. Marianne received the news with resolute composure; at first she shed no tears, but after a short time they would burst out, and for the rest of the day, she was in a state hardly less pitiable than when she first learnt to expect the event.

The Willoughbys left town as soon as they were married; and Elinor now hoped to prevail on her sister to go out again, to enjoy the under-sea amazements of the Sub-Station and stroll the canalside shops of the Retail Embankment.

About this time the two Miss Steeles, lately arrived in-Station, were welcomed by them all with great cordiality. Elinor only was sorry to see them—not least because, the moment her eyes met those of Lucy Steele, she experienced a sensation like a dagger’s sharp edge slashing at the edges of her mind, and felt a rising darkness in her thoughts that she struggled with difficulty to suppress.

“I suppose you will go and stay with your brother and sister, Miss Dashwood, when they Descend to the Sub-Station,” said Lucy.

“No, I do not think we shall,” Elinor replied.

“Oh, yes, I dare say you will. What a charming thing it is that Mrs. Dashwood can spare you both for so long a time together!”

“Long a time, indeed!” interposed Mrs. Jennings. “Why, their visit is but just begun!”

Lucy was silenced. Elinor, closing her eyes to gather her thoughts, experienced a resurgence of the slashing pain, along with a sudden flash— a symbol—
the
symbol—the five-pointed symbol—forcing itself before her mind’s eye.

What could it mean, Elinor wondered, her head throbbing in agony as the exchange of trivialities continued about her. Why had this misery recurred? Why did the presence of the Miss Steeles engender in her this vision, coupled with such agonizing discomfort? Elinor resolved to put the question to Colonel Brandon, who was so wise in so many ways; before recalling in the next moment the sad tale that he had lately related and determining that the misfortunate colonel had enough to worry him.

“I am sorry we cannot see your sister, Miss Dashwood,” said Miss Steele, for Marianne had left the room on their arrival.