Page 39

While all this was going forward at Brook Street, Miss Dashwood was engaged upon a matter that occupied, for the moment, a much smaller share of the family’s attention than it deserved; and it was probably as well for her that it did, for she was in no state to explain it.

She had been in town for a month. In that time Mr. Grant had called on several occasions, had been to five balls which she also attended and danced at least once at each. He had asked, and Margaret had allowed him to take her for a walk in the park twice. She did enjoy his company, but was not disappointed to be parted from him, nor did she feel an eager anticipation when expecting to see him again.

She had received, by a careful count that Mrs. Jennings kept on the back of an envelope, twenty-one bouquets, six of which were from Mr. Grant, and most recently an invitation from Lord and Lady Ardleigh to spend the last Saturday in May at their villa at Richmond. It was the sort of invitation that a girl in her position, with a brother-in-law of Colonel Brandon’s standing and a mother of Mrs. Dashwood’s ambition, could not without offence have refused. She accepted it with perfect grace. She had gone up to her room afterwards and sat on the edge of the bed for a quarter of an hour and been unable to think of a single reason why she should feel as though somebody had put a stone in her shoe.

The Ardleigh villa stood on the slope of Richmond Hill, in a garden that ran down to the river, and was as handsome and as comfortable as money and good taste could make it. There were lawns like green velvet, and a boathouse, and a summerhouse with striped awnings; and it was to this scene of leisure, on a still and golden afternoon, that the whole of the Ardleigh family was to be seen, in a variety of attitudes, disposed for the reception of their guest.

They were, she discovered, a much more pleasant family than she had been led to expect. Lord Ardleigh, a large, mild, red-faced gentleman, whose whole conversation was confined to a single subject, greeted her upon the lawn with a warm shake of the hand and an inquiry as to whether she rode. She said that she did. He said, “Capital,” and looked a great deal happier. Lady Ardleigh, upon a garden-chair, in a hat like a cartwheel, subjected her to a brief and formidable interrogation and appeared, upon the whole, to be disarmed by her answers. And there were the three sisters, in a row upon a garden seat, like a set of china figures in decreasing sizes: Lady Susan, who was nineteen, and quick, and rather bored; Lady Amelia, who was seventeen, and fair, and shy; and Lady Harriet, who was fifteen, and had spots, and stared at Margaret from the very first moment with the wide, enraptured, unblinking gaze of a devotee.

“You are the lady who has been up the volcano,” said Lady Harriet, in a whisper.

“I am.”

“Did it smoke?”

“It smelled of eggs,” said Margaret.

Lady Harriet drew a long shuddering breath. She was seen looking at her sisters with an expression of the most complete triumph; and for the rest of the afternoon, she could not be induced to go more than six feet from Miss Dashwood’s elbow.

It was during an expedition on horseback the following morning, along the towpath, and up through a lane of hawthorn to the top of a low, bare, gravelly hill, that the thing occurred.

They were a party of six. There were Lord Ardleigh, upon a very fine bay, who rode in front and said nothing; and Lady Susan, who rode beside him and said a great deal; and Mr. Grant and Lady Amelia, and Margaret, and Lady Harriet, who had been permitted to come upon the understanding that she would not talk, and had already broken it four times. They had halted upon the summit, by a gravel pit; and while the others were engaged in the discussion of a hedge that Lord Ardleigh thought might be jumped, Margaret slipped down from her horse, and walked along the lip of the pit, and looked down.

It was a habit. She could not help it. She had not gone ten paces before her eye was caught by a small dark shape in the pale gravel, near the bottom, and she went down the steep slope in a shower of stones, in her habit, with her whip in her hand, and knelt, and put out a finger; and a moment later she gave a small, choked cry.

“Mr. Grant! Come here!”

He was beside her in a moment, at a run, with his hat gone and his face alarmed. “Miss Dashwood — good God — are you hurt?”

“Look!”

She held it up. It was a piece of a tooth. It was an enormous, ridged, brown, fossil fragment, about the size of a man’s hand, with a curved crest of enamel, still perfectly clear; and it lay across her palm like something out of a dream.

“It is a mammoth,” said Margaret. She was scarcely breathing. “It is a mammoth’s tooth. Here! On a hill in Surrey! It must have walked along this very river. There were mammoths, in the Thames valley, and elephants, and — oh, look at the enamel, you could count the plates. Look at it! Do you not see what it means? It means that all this —” she waved her free hand about, at the green fields, the river, and the far blue haze of London — “was once a place with a different sort of weather. It means that there was a whole world on this very location which none of us knows about.”

She looked up. She was flushed, and dishevelled, and there was mud on her nose; her eyes were shining, and her whole face had lit, as it did, with the pure clear joy of the thing; and Mr. Grant, who had stood over her for a full minute, looking down at that face, with an expression of the most complete, earnest, honest attention, said quietly:

“Miss Dashwood. You are simply splendid.”

“But do you see?”

“I do not understand a word of it,” said Mr. Grant, and laughed, quite without embarrassment, and sat down on the gravel beside her. “I should not, you know, if I lived to be a hundred. I have tried. I have honestly been trying, for a full five minutes, to take an interest, and it slips right off me; I am the same with Latin. But I have never seen anyone so happy about a bone in my life, and I shall tell everyone. I shall do better. I shall have the whole hill dug up for you. I shall have it carted, and put in your mother’s back garden, and you may have all the mammoths in Surrey.”

She began to laugh. It was quite helpless. She could not stop, and yet in the middle of it, in a curious way, she felt something go quiet inside her, like a small light that has been turned down at the end of a long room; for she saw, quite clearly, in that moment, that it was perfectly true. He would have had the hill dug up. He would have given her anything in the world, the whole gravel pit, and a hundred more; and he would never in his life have said to her, what does it mean?

“Thank you,” said Margaret, and took his hand, and pressed it hard. “You are very kind.”

“I am nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Grant. “I am only very fond of you.” And he looked away, at the river, with a slightly rueful expression, that she was to remember afterwards.

It was Lady Susan who told her, in the garden, that same afternoon, without preamble, under the pretext of showing her the roses.

“I am going to be impertinent,” said Lady Susan, snipping a bud. She was a girl of a hard, quick, humorous, unlovely kind of intelligence, who had looked upon her brother’s entire acquaintance, Mr. Grant among them, with a jaundiced eye since the age of eleven. “I think you had better know. I have never seen Mr. Grant like this. And I have known him since childhood. He has never been serious about anyone; he has never had to be. Girls have always fallen upon him like ripe plums. You are the first who has looked at him and not been perfectly satisfied, and it is having the most extraordinary effect. He has taken to reading.”

“Reading?”

“The Encyclopaedia. Under the S’s. He was on Stratification on Wednesday.” She dropped the rosebud into her basket. “It would not do him a bit of harm, you know, to marry a person who would make him be a great deal more than he is. But I think you should be quite clear about what you are doing. If you marry him, you will have him entirely. He is the most faithful, the most generous, the sweetest-tempered man in England. But you would have to do all the serious part yourself. He would be delighted to watch.”

Margaret said nothing for some time.