“Oh! my love, I could not then talk of hope to him or to myself. Marianne might at that moment be dying.
But he did not ask for hope or encouragement. His was an involuntary confidence, an irrepressible effusion to a soothing friend–not an application to a parent.
Yet after a time I DID say, for at first I was quite overcome–that if she lived, as I trusted she might, my greatest happiness would lie in promoting their marriage; and since our arrival, since our delightful security, I have repeated it to him more fully, have given him every encouragement in my power. Time, a very little time, I tell him, will do everything;–Marianne’s heart is not to be wasted for ever on such a man as Willoughby.–
His own merits must soon secure it.”
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“To judge from the Colonel’s spirits, however, you have not yet made him equally sanguine.”
“No.–He thinks Marianne’s affection too deeply rooted for any change in it under a great length of time, and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age and disposition he could ever attach her. There, however, he is quite mistaken. His age is only so much beyond hers as to be an advantage, as to make his character and principles fixed;–and his disposition, I am well convinced, is exactly the very one to make your sister happy.
And his person, his manners too, are all in his favour.
My partiality does not blind me; he certainly is not so handsome as Willoughby–but at the same time, there is something much more pleasing in his countenance.–
There was always a something,–if you remember,–in Willoughby’s eyes at times, which I did not like.”
Elinor could NOT remember it;–but her mother,
without waiting for her assent, continued,
“And his manners, the Colonel’s manners are not only more pleasing to me than Willoughby’s ever were, but they are of a kind I well know to be more solidly attaching to Marianne. Their gentleness, their genuine attention to other people, and their manly unstudied simplicity is much more accordant with her real disposition, than the liveliness–often artificial, and often ill-timed of the other. I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with HIM, as she will be with Colonel Brandon.”
She paused.–Her daughter could not quite agree
with her, but her dissent was not heard, and therefore gave no offence.
“At Delaford, she will be within an easy distance of me,”
added Mrs. Dashwood, “even if I remain at Barton; and in all probability,–for I hear it is a large village,–indeed there certainly MUST be some small house or cottage close by, that would suit us quite as well as our present situation.”
Poor Elinor!–here was a new scheme for getting
her to Delaford!–but her spirit was stubborn.
“His fortune too!–for at my time of life you know, everybody cares about THAT;–and though I neither know nor desire to know, what it really is, I am sure it must be a good one.”
Here they were interrupted by the entrance of a
third person, and Elinor withdrew to think it all over in private, to wish success to her friend, and yet in wishing it, to feel a pang for Willoughby.
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CHAPTER 46
Marianne’s illness, though weakening in its kind, had not been long enough to make her recovery slow; and with youth, natural strength, and her mother’s presence in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her to remove, within four days after the arrival of the latter, into Mrs. Palmer’s dressing-room. When there, at her own particular request, for she was impatient to pour forth her thanks to him for fetching her mother, Colonel Brandon was invited to visit her.
His emotion on entering the room, in seeing her altered looks, and in receiving the pale hand which she immediately held out to him, was such, as, in Elinor’s conjecture, must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being known to others; and she soon discovered in his melancholy eye and varying complexion as he looked at her sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza already acknowledged, and now strengthened by the hollow eye, the sickly skin, the posture of reclining weakness, and the warm acknowledgment of peculiar obligation.