SENSE AND SENSIBILITY by Jane Austen

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

224

“Watched us out of the house!”

“Even so. You would be surprised to hear how often I watched you, how often I was on the point of falling in with you. I have entered many a shop to avoid your sight, as the carriage drove by. Lodging as I did in Bond Street, there was hardly a day in which I did not catch a glimpse of one or other of you; and nothing but the most constant watchfulness on my side, a most invariably prevailing desire to keep out of your sight, could have separated us so long. I avoided the Middletons as much as possible, as well as everybody else who was likely to prove an acquaintance in common. Not aware of their being in town, however, I blundered on Sir John, I believe, the first day of his coming, and the day after I had called at Mrs. Jennings’s. He asked me to a party, a dance at his house in the evening.–Had he NOT told me as an inducement that you and your sister were to be there, I should have felt it too certain a thing, to trust myself near him.

The next morning brought another short note from Marianne–

still affectionate, open, artless, confiding–everything that could make MY conduct most hateful. I could not answer it. I tried–but could not frame a sentence.

But I thought of her, I believe, every moment of the day.

If you CAN pity me, Miss Dashwood, pity my situation as it was THEN. With my head and heart full of your sister, I was forced to play the happy lover to another woman!–Those three or four weeks were worse than all. Well, at last, as I need not tell you, you were forced on me; and what a sweet figure I cut!–what an evening of agony it was!–

Marianne, beautiful as an angel on one side, calling me Willoughby in such a tone!–Oh, God!–holding out her hand to me, asking me for an explanation, with those bewitching eyes fixed in such speaking solicitude on my face!–and Sophia, jealous as the devil on the other hand, looking all that was–Well, it does not signify; it is over now.–

Such an evening!–I ran away from you all as soon as I could; but not before I had seen Marianne’s sweet face as white as death.–THAT was the last, last look I ever had of her;–

the last manner in which she appeared to me. It was a horrid sight!–yet when I thought of her to-day as really dying, it was a kind of comfort to me to imagine that I knew exactly how she would appear to those, who saw her last in this world. She was before me, constantly before me, as I travelled, in the same look and hue.”

A short pause of mutual thoughtfulness succeeded.

Willoughby first rousing himself, broke it thus:

“Well, let me make haste and be gone. Your sister is certainly better, certainly out of danger?”

“We are assured of it.”

“Your poor mother, too!–doting on Marianne.”

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

225

“But the letter, Mr. Willoughby, your own letter; have you any thing to say about that?”

“Yes, yes, THAT in particular. Your sister wrote to me again, you know, the very next morning.

You saw what she said. I was breakfasting at the Ellisons,–and her letter, with some others, was brought to me there from my lodgings. It happened to catch Sophia’s eye before it caught mine–and its size, the elegance of the paper, the hand-writing altogether, immediately gave her a suspicion. Some vague report had reached her before of my attachment to some young lady in Devonshire, and what had passed within her observation the preceding evening had marked who the young lady was, and made her more jealous than ever. Affecting that air of playfulness, therefore, which is delightful in a woman one loves, she opened the letter directly, and read its contents. She was well paid for her impudence.

She read what made her wretched. Her wretchedness I could have borne, but her passion–her malice–At all events it must be appeased. And, in short–what do you think of my wife’s style of letter-writing?–delicate–tender–