Memoir of Jane Austen, James Edward Austen-Leigh [e reader comics .TXT] 📗

would not hear of it; and if she did not return to the charge with unconquerable perseverance, or did not with a more passive determination walk quietly out of the room (as certainly she might have done), may she not be pardoned?  If she had no horror of a few minutes’ tête-à-tête with Captain Wentworth, may she not be pardoned for not wishing to give him the idea that she had?  She reseated herself, and the Admiral took leave, but on reaching the door, said—

‘Frederick, a word with you if you please.’

Captain Wentworth went to him, and instantly, before they were well out of the room, the Admiral continued—

‘As I am going to leave you together, it is but fair I should give you something to talk of; and so, if you please—’

Here the door was very firmly closed, she could guess by which of the two—and she lost entirely what immediately followed, but it was impossible for her not to distinguish parts of the rest, for the Admiral, on the strength of the door’s being shut, was speaking without any management of voice, though she could hear his companion trying to check him.  She could not doubt their being speaking of her.  She heard her own name and Kellynch repeatedly.  She was very much disturbed.  She knew not what to do, or what to expect, and among other agonies felt the possibility of Captain Wentworth’s not returning into the room at all, which, after her consenting to stay, would have been—too bad for language.  They seemed to be talking of the Admiral’s lease of Kellynch.  She heard him say something of the lease being signed—or not signed—that was not likely to be a very agitating subject, but then followed—

‘I hate to be at an uncertainty.  I must know at once.  Sophy thinks the same.’

Then in a lower tone Captain Wentworth seemed remonstrating, wanting to be excused, wanting to put something off.

‘Phoo, phoo,’ answered the Admiral, ‘now is the time; if you will not speak, I will stop and speak myself.’

‘Very well, sir, very well, sir,’ followed with some impatience from his companion, opening the door as he spoke—

‘You will then, you promise you will?’ replied the Admiral in all the power of his natural voice, unbroken even by one thin door.

‘Yes, sir, yes.’  And the Admiral was hastily left, the door was closed, and the moment arrived in which Anne was alone with Captain Wentworth.

She could not attempt to see how he looked, but he walked immediately to a window as if irresolute and embarrassed, and for about the space of five seconds she repented what she had done—censured it as unwise, blushed over it as indelicate.  She longed to be able to speak of the weather or the concert, but could only compass the relief of taking a newspaper in her hand.  The distressing pause was over, however; he turned round in half a minute, and coming towards the table where she sat, said in a voice of effort and constraint—

‘You must have heard too much already, Madam, to be in any doubt of my having promised Admiral Croft to speak to you on a particular subject, and this conviction determines me to do so, however repugnant to my—to all my sense of propriety to be taking so great a liberty!  You will acquit me of impertinence I trust, by considering me as speaking only for another, and speaking by necessity; and the Admiral is a man who can never be thought impertinent by one who knows him as you do.  His intentions are always the kindest and the best, and you will perceive he is actuated by none other in the application which I am now, with—with very peculiar feelings—obliged to make.’  He stopped, but merely to recover breath, not seeming to expect any answer.  Anne listened as if her life depended on the issue of his speech.  He proceeded with a forced alacrity:—

‘The Admiral, Madam, was this morning confidently informed that you were—upon my soul, I am quite at a loss, ashamed (breathing and speaking quickly)—the awkwardness of giving information of this kind to one of the parties—you can be at no loss to understand me.  It was very confidently said that Mr. Elliot—that everything was settled in the family for a union between Mr. Elliot and yourself.  It was added that you were to live at Kellynch—that Kellynch was to be given up.  This the Admiral knew could not be correct.  But it occurred to him that it might be the wish of the parties.  And my commission from him, Madam, is to say, that if the family wish is such, his lease of Kellynch shall be cancelled, and he and my sister will provide themselves with another home, without imagining themselves to be doing anything which under similar circumstances would not be done for them.  This is all, Madam.  A very few words in reply from you will be sufficient.  That I should be the person commissioned on this subject is extraordinary! and believe me, Madam, it is no less painful.  A very few words, however, will put an end to the awkwardness and distress we may both be feeling.’

Anne spoke a word or two, but they were unintelligible; and before she could command herself, he added, ‘If you will only tell me that the Admiral may address a line to Sir Walter, it will be enough.  Pronounce only the words, he may, and I shall immediately follow him with your message.’

‘No, Sir,’ said Anne; ‘there is no message.  You are misin—the Admiral is misinformed.  I do justice to the kindness of his intentions, but he is quite mistaken.  There is no truth in any such report.’

He was a moment silent.  She turned her eyes towards him for the first time since his re-entering the room.  His colour was varying, and he was looking at her with all the power and keenness which she believed no other eyes than his possessed.

‘No truth in any such report?’ he repeated.  ‘No truth in any part of it?’

‘None.’

He had been standing by a chair, enjoying the relief of leaning on it, or of playing with it.  He now sat down, drew it a little nearer to her, and looked with an expression which had something more than penetration in it—something softer.  Her countenance did not discourage.  It was a silent but a very powerful dialogue; on his supplication, on hers acceptance.  Still a little nearer, and a hand taken and pressed; and ‘Anne, my own dear Anne!’ bursting forth in all the fulness of exquisite feeling,—and all suspense and indecision were over.  They were re-united.  They were restored to all that had been lost. They were carried back to the past with only an increase of attachment and confidence, and only such a flutter of present delight as made them little fit for the interruption of Mrs. Croft when she joined them not long afterwards.  She, probably, in the observations of the next ten minutes saw something to suspect; and though it was hardly possible for a woman of her description to wish the mantua-maker had imprisoned her longer, she might be very likely wishing for some excuse to run about the house, some storm to break the windows above, or a summons to the Admiral’s shoemaker below.  Fortune favoured them all, however, in another way, in a gentle, steady rain, just happily set in as the Admiral returned and Anne rose to go.  She was earnestly invited to stay dinner.  A note was despatched to Camden Place, and she staid—staid till ten at night; and during that time the husband and wife, either by the wife’s contrivance, or by simply going on in their usual way, were frequently out of the room together—gone upstairs to hear a noise, or downstairs to settle their accounts, or upon the landing to trim the lamp.  And these precious moments were turned to so good an account that all the most anxious feelings of the past were gone through.  Before they parted at night, Anne had the felicity of being assured that in the first place (so far from being altered for the worse), she had gained inexpressibly in personal loveliness; and that as to character, hers was now fixed on his mind as perfection itself, maintaining the just medium of fortitude and gentleness—that he had never ceased to love and prefer her, though it had been only at Uppercross that he had learnt to do her justice, and only at Lyme that he had begun to understand his own feelings; that at Lyme he had received lessons of more than one kind—the passing admiration of Mr. Elliot had at least roused him, and the scene on the Cobb, and at Captain Harville’s, had fixed her superiority.  In his preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of anger and pique), he protested that he had continually felt the impossibility of really caring for Louisa, though till that day, till the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa’s could so ill bear comparison; or the perfect, the unrivalled hold it possessed over his own.  There he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind; there he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there had begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.  From that period to the present had his penance been the most severe.  He had no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few days of Louisa’s accident, no sooner had begun to feel himself alive again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty.

He found that he was considered by his friend Harville an engaged man.  The Harvilles entertained not a doubt of a mutual attachment between him and Louisa; and though this to a degree was contradicted instantly, it yet made him feel that perhaps by her family, by everybody, by herself even, the same idea might be held, and that he was not free in honour, though if such were to be the conclusion, too free alas! in heart.  He had never thought justly on this subject before, and he had not sufficiently considered that his excessive intimacy at Uppercross must have its danger of ill consequence in many ways; and that while trying whether he could attach himself to either of the girls, he might be exciting unpleasant reports if not raising unrequited regard.

He found too late that he had entangled himself, and that precisely as he became thoroughly satisfied of his not caring for Louisa at all, he must regard himself as bound to her if her feelings for him were what the Harvilles supposed.  It determined him to leave Lyme, and await her perfect recovery elsewhere.  He would gladly weaken by any fair means whatever sentiment or speculations concerning them might exist; and he went therefore into Shropshire, meaning after a while to return to the Crofts at Kellynch, and act as he found requisite.

He had remained in Shropshire, lamenting the blindness of his own pride and the blunders of his own calculations, till at once released from Louisa by the astonishing felicity of her engagement with Benwick.

Bath—Bath had instantly followed in thought, and not long after in fact.  To Bath—to arrive with hope, to be torn by jealousy at the