Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (19 page)

“Edward’s love for me,” said Lucy, “has been pretty well put to the test, by our long, very long absence since we were first engaged, and it has stood the trial so well, that I should be unpardonable to doubt it now. He has never given me one moment’s alarm on that account.”

Elinor, in her silent distress, so increased her grip on the beerbottle that it burst into a thousand pieces, burying shards of glass in her hand.

Lucy smiled forgivingly at this accident, took up a new bottle, and
went on. “I have a jealous temper by nature, and from our continual separation, I was enough inclined for suspicion, to have found out the truth in an instant, if there had been the slightest alteration in his behaviour to me.”

“All this,” thought Elinor, as she went about the floor on hands and knees, gathering up stray pieces of glass, “is very pretty, but it can impose upon neither of us.” She looked away from Lucy, whose attention was focused on rigging the tiny mainsail with miniature tweezers.

“But what,” Elinor said after a short silence, “are your views? Or have you none but that of waiting for Mrs. Ferrars’s death? Is Edward determined to submit to this, and to the many years of suspense, rather than run the risk of her displeasure for a while by owning the truth?”

“Mrs. Ferrars is a very headstrong proud woman. In her first fit of anger, she would very likely secure everything to his brother Robert!”

“Do you know Mr. Robert Ferrars?” asked Elinor.

“Not at all—I never saw him; but I fancy he is very unlike his brother—silly and a great coxcomb.”

“A great coxcomb!” repeated the elder Miss Steele, looking up from the card-table, where she was writing out a promissory note to Lady Middleton, the decisive winner of seven straight rounds. “Oh, they are talking of their favourite beaux!”

“No sister,” cried Lucy, “you are mistaken there, our favourite beaux are
not
great coxcombs.”

“I can answer for it that Miss Dashwood’s is not,” said Mrs. Jennings, “for he is one of the modestest, prettiest-behaved young men I ever saw; but as for Lucy, she is such a sly little creature, there is no finding out who
she
likes.”

“Oh,” cried Miss Steele, looking significantly round at them, “I dare say Lucy’s beau is quite as modest and pretty-behaved as Miss Dashwood’s.”

Elinor blushed in spite of herself. Lucy bit her lip, and looked angrily at her sister. A mutual silence took place for some time.

Lucy resumed their conversation only once Marianne and Margaret
were giving them the powerful protection of performing a very lively dockside polka on the pianoforte.

“I will honestly tell you of one scheme which has lately come into my head. I dare say you have seen enough of Edward to know that he would prefer to be a lighthouse keeper to every other profession. Now my plan is that he should find such a position as soon as he can, and then through your interest, which I am sure you would be kind enough to use out of friendship for him, and I hope out of some regard to me, your brother might be persuaded to give him the Norland Tower; which I understand is a very good one, and the present incumbent has been targeted as insolent by a pirate crew and is thus not likely to live a great while. That would be enough for us to marry upon, and we might trust to time and chance for the rest.”

“I should always be happy,” replied Elinor, “to show any mark of my esteem and friendship for Mr. Ferrars, but do you not perceive that my involvement would be perfectly unnecessary? Edward is brother to Mrs. John Dashwood—
that
must be recommendation enough to her husband.”

“But Mrs. John Dashwood would not much approve of Edward’s becoming a lighthouse keeper. The family still hopes for him to be a great politician or Sub-Station engineer.”

“Then I rather suspect that my involvement would do very little.”

They were again silent for many minutes. At length Lucy exclaimed with a deep sigh, “I believe it would be wisest to end the business by dissolving the engagement. We seem so beset with difficulties on every side, that though it would make us miserable for a time, we should be happier perhaps in the end. But you will not give me your advice, Miss Dashwood?”

“No,” answered Elinor, with a smile; her feelings were evident only in her fingers, which twirled the tiny ship’s flag in an agitated fashion, as if the wee clipper ship was sailing steadily against an ill wind. “On such a subject I certainly will not. You know very well that my opinion would have no weight with you, unless it were on the side of your wishes.”

“Indeed you wrong me,” replied Lucy, with great solemnity; “I know
nobody of whose judgment I think so highly as I do of yours; and I do really believe, that if you was to say to me, ‘I advise you by all means to put an end to your engagement with Edward Ferrars, it will be more for the happiness of both of you,’ I should resolve upon doing it immediately.”

Elinor, vexed, said nothing. At the card-table, a new round of Karankrolla was beginning, and the elder Miss Steele removed her earrings and locket to offer as collateral.

“’Tis because you are an indifferent person,” Lucy continued, “that your judgment might justly have such weight. If you were biased in any respect by your own feelings, your opinion would not be worth having.”

Elinor thought it wisest to make no answer to this, lest they might provoke each other to an unsuitable increase of ease and unreserve. Another pause therefore of many minutes’ duration succeeded this speech before Lucy ended their silence.

“Shall you be docking in Sub-Marine Station Beta this winter, Miss Dashwood?” said she with all her customary complacency.

“Certainly not.”

“I am sorry for that,” returned the other. “It would have gave me such pleasure to meet you there! To be sure, your brother and sister will ask you to come to them.”

“It will not be in my power to accept their invitation if they do.”

“How unlucky that is! I had quite depended upon meeting you there. My sister and I will be meeting some relations who have been wanting us to visit them for several years! And though I have some curiosity about the most recent alterations to the Sub-Station, and have heard of marvelous new displays at the Aqua-Museo-Quarium, I go mainly for the sake of seeing Edward. He will be there in February, otherwise the Station would have few charms for me.”

Elinor sat down at the Karankrolla table with the melancholy persuasion that Edward was not only without affection for the person who was to be his wife; but that he had not even the chance of being tolerably happy in marriage. Her mood was not improved by the rounds of play
that followed, in which Mrs. Jennings took her for three Ghahalas before Elinor had even got to shake her Pifflestick.

The visit of the Miss Steeles at Deadwind Island was lengthened far beyond what the first invitation implied. But the subject of Lucy and Edward’s engagement was never revived by Elinor; when entered on by Lucy, who seldom missed an opportunity of introducing it, she treated it with calmness and caution, and dismissed it as soon as civility would allow; she felt such conversations to be an indulgence which Lucy did not deserve, and which were dangerous to herself. Nearly as dangerous, in fact, as playing Karankrolla, which Elinor was fastidious in avoiding in future.

T
HOUGH MRS. JENNINGS WAS IN THE HABIT
of spending a large portion of the year at the houses of her children and friends, her settled habitation was at Sub-Marine Station Beta, where she spent every winter in a docking station along one of the canals near Portman Grotto. Towards this undersea habitation, she began on the approach of January to turn her thoughts, and thither she one day abruptly asked the elder Misses Dashwood to accompany her. Elinor immediately gave a grateful but absolute denial for both. The reason alleged was their determined resolution of not leaving their mother. Mrs. Jennings received the refusal with some surprise, and repeated her invitation immediately.

“Oh,
pngllgpg
!” she emitted, a phrase from her native tongue translating, roughly, to “don’t be a foolish pile of elephant excrement.”

“I am sure your mother can spare you very well, and I
do
beg you will favour me with your company. Don’t fancy that you will be any inconvenience to me, for I shan’t put myself at all out of my way for you. We three shall be able to go in my personal submarine; and when we arrive
at the Station, there will be so much to do. The Aqua-Museo-Quarium is said to have added a wealth of new creatures this season, and Kensington Undersea Gardens is expanded and more splendid than ever! I am sure your mother will not object to the journey; and if I don’t get at least one of you married before I have done with you, it shall not be my fault. I shall speak a good word for you to all the young men, you may depend upon it.”

“I thank you, ma’am,” said Marianne, with warmth. “Your invitation has insured my gratitude for ever, and it would give me such happiness to accept it. But my mother, my dearest, kindest mother—nothing should tempt me to leave her!”

Elinor understood that her sister’s eagerness to be with Willoughby was creating a total indifference to almost everything else. She therefore ventured no further direct opposition to the plan, and merely referred it to her mother’s decision. On being informed of the invitation, Mrs. Dashwood was persuaded that such an excursion would be productive of much amusement to both her daughters. She would not hear of their declining the offer upon
her
account; insisted on their both accepting it directly.

“I am delighted with the plan,” she cried, “it is exactly what I could wish. Margaret and I shall be as much benefited by it as yourselves. When you and the Middletons are gone, we shall go on so quietly and happily together with our books and our music.”

At that very moment, they heard a terrible, full-throated scream, loud and long, from the second floor.

“No!! Noooo!”

“My goodness!” said Miss Dashwood. “What—”

“Again!” cried Margaret, as she hurtled down the stairs and into the parlour. “It begins again!”

“I thought we had finished with this nonsense, dear Margaret!” cried Mrs. Dashwood.

“Mother! Mother, you must—” began the girl, her eyes rolling wildly in her head, her chest heaving.

“I said
enough
! You soon will be a child no longer, Margaret, but a woman, and these flights of fancy are no longer to be tolerated.”

“Mother,” interjected Elinor cautiously, for something in her youngest sister’s pale-white appearance and trembling shoulders led her to wonder whether there was more to Margaret’s troubled state than mere fancy.

“No, Elinor,” replied Mrs. Dashwood. “I can countenance no more such behaviour.”

Marianne meanwhile drifted towards the pianoforte, closing her mind against any further consideration of what she knew—somewhere in some dark corner of her heart—that she had seen on the day of the bluefish attack, seen blossoming foully from the peak of Mount Margaret.

“Upstairs, child,” Mrs. Dashwood commanded, “and return to your needlepoint.”

Margaret regretfully relented; she returned with heavy tread to her bedroom, to stare out the window at the same sight that had so terrified her moments ago: Mount Margaret, again issuing forth its strange geyser of steam—whilst came crawling up the hillside towards it, in uneven rows like so many black ants, hundreds and hundreds of … of
what
they were she knew not. The same uncanny, subhuman figures she had spotted on her rambles, crawling about the woods and darting in and out of the caves.

From the window, she could hear them chanting in unison, their words echoing across the island as they ascended the hill towards the grey-white jet of water:
K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!

* * *

Downstairs, Mrs. Dashwood continued as if no interruption had taken place. “It is very right that you
should
Descend to the Station; I would have every young woman of your condition in life acquainted with the sights and phenomena of life in-Station. You will be under the
care of Mrs. Jennings, a motherly good sort of woman, of whose kindness I can have no doubt. And in all probability you will see your brother, and whatever may be his faults, or the faults of his wife, I cannot bear to have you wholly estranged from each other.”

“There is still one objection,” said Elinor, “which cannot be so easily removed.”

Marianne’s countenance sunk.

“And what,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “is my dear prudent Elinor going to suggest? What formidable obstacle is she now to bring forward? What iceberg raises she to breach the hull of our collective happiness?”

“My objection is this: Though I think very well of Mrs. Jennings’s heart, and very much admire the collection of shrunken heads she keeps in a drawer of her vanity, she is not a woman whose society can afford us pleasure, or whose protection will give us consequence.”

“That is very true,” replied her mother, “but of her society, separately from that of other people, you will scarcely have anything at all, and you will almost always appear in public with Lady Middleton.”

“If Elinor is frightened away by her dislike of Mrs. Jennings,” said Marianne, “at least it need not prevent
my
accepting her invitation. I have no such scruples, and I am sure I could put up with every unpleasantness of that kind with very little effort.”

Elinor could not help smiling at this display of indifference towards the manners of a person, to whom she had often had difficulty in persuading Marianne to behave with tolerable politeness. She resolved within herself that if her sister persisted in going, she would go likewise. To this determination she was the more easily reconciled, by recollecting that Edward Ferrars, by Lucy’s account, was not to be docked at Sub-Marine Station Beta before February; and that they would likely have Ascended already by then.

“I will have you
both
go,” said Mrs. Dashwood. “These objections are nonsensical. You will have much pleasure in the journey by personal submarine, and in being at the Station, and especially in being together; and
if Elinor would ever condescend to anticipate enjoyment, she would foresee it there from a variety of sources; she would, perhaps, expect some from improving her acquaintance with her sister-in-law’s family.”