How, after this revelation, could she trust that Willoughby’s affection for her would last? With all her being she felt it would, but perhaps this other girl had felt the same. Would he, heaven forbid, discard and discount her, too? Impossible! Would he, nine months from now in some other country, confess with equal embarrassment to some other young lady that Miss Marianne Dashwood was nothing to him? Unthinkable!
Marianne could not imagine loving someone other than Willoughby. If ever she were to believe in second attachments, this would be a most convenient time.
“I do not understand you,” she said at last, for she, rarely at a loss for words, did not know what else to say. And Colonel Brandon still hovered. Why was he always near? She saw that Willoughby had gripped the railing and was looking out over the water. She turned to flee.
The movement of the boat slowed her pace after only a few steps. She stopped and felt her anger and amazement deepen. She had never thought she would desire to leave Willoughby’s side. Elinor! Elinor’s company would be such a comfort! Squinting and shading her eyes from the afternoon sun, she searched for her sister’s form in the distant cluster—they all appeared to be suffering under some monologue of Sir John’s—but she could not help glancing over her shoulder at the place where Willoughby stood.
With her feelings so affronted, she turned away from the sight of him almost immediately but not before noticing that the colonel had no difficulty at all in fixing his attention on Willoughby. Marianne imagined it was not a kindly look the colonel gave him, for when he spoke, it was not a kindly voice that broke the silence:
“You were in Bath nine months ago?”
“You obviously heard me say that I was, but what can that be to you?”
The colonel took a step away from her and towards Willoughby. “I have here,” he said, waving the sheet of paper, “the mention of a ‘W,’ who was intimately acquainted with someone I know. Much more intimately acquainted than was proper.”
“And what has that to do with me? I am hardly the only ‘W’ who was in Bath at the time.”
“I imagine not, but neither can I imagine that Eliza expected to wed and be brought to her new home, Combe Magna, by anyone other than you.”
“What?”
Marianne’s simultaneous cry came out as a squeak, and she looked helplessly at Willoughby. His exclamation had been powerful, but he looked anything but strong now—he seemed greatly agitated. And then the most terrible chant pounded in her head: Nine months ago, I might have prevented this. Nine months, nine months, nine months. It was shocking that the colonel had let those telling words slip from his mouth. She felt like a fool for having missed their significance. She could scarcely breathe. She tried her best to keep her wits, for the colonel was speaking again.
“She blotted the words,” the colonel was saying, “almost beyond recognition, but when I read the letter once more, I just barely made it out.”
“How could she think....I never said I would marry her!”
Marianne’s breath came in quick puffs as she acknowledged that this person—Eliza, had Colonel Brandon said?—must be the lady who meant nothing to Willoughby.
“No,” the colonel bit out, and for a moment Marianne could imagine his fierceness on the battlefield. “Men often do not precisely say such things, merely enough to let the woman think that is what she has heard.”
“I cannot be held culpable for that!”
“Not for that, perhaps, but for something much more serious than a few careless words, the consequences of which are the reason she wrote to me.”
Willoughby blustered and tried to laugh off the colonel’s accusations, declaring them ridiculous, but his voice sounded almost shrill in its panic. The colonel’s aspect must have been dreadful just then.
“Miss Marianne?”
Marianne started at the sound of her own name coming from the colonel’s mouth, and coming forth with such gentleness.
He had turned his head, though not enough to face her. “I know you are still behind me.” He waited a few seconds for her to confirm it.
She continued to stare at the colonel and beyond him to Willoughby. The latter looked at her with wide eyes, as if he had forgot her presence entirely until that moment.
“Please, Miss Marianne,” continued the colonel, “you must allow that the present topic of conversation is not fit for your ears. I may have lost my composure but not my sense. I apologise for what I have exposed you to thus far, but I beg you now to grant us privacy to conclude our conversation.” He turned back to Willoughby, who appeared frozen in fear. “Besides, should I lose what little remains of my control and decide to toss this bounder overboard, I should hate to see your lovely striped muslin dampened by the splash.”
“You would not hurt him!”
“I ought to call him out this instant.”
“Marianne, come,” Willoughby insisted, walking gingerly around his accuser and giving him a wide berth. “Let us leave the colonel to his mad ravings.” He reached for her hand. “See!” he pointed out. “We shall miss the beauty of our surroundings by wasting our time here. Let us join our friends.”
The shock of his touch caused Marianne to shudder. She thrust her hand behind her back and out of his reach. “Willoughby.” She shook her head and moved aside. Her tears began to blur her view of him. “Can you not comfort me? I would rather believe anything than what I am hearing!” She sounded miserable and sorry and felt immeasurably worse. “Will you not tell me this is all a horrible dream, that my ears have deceived me? Until then, I cannot take your hand. As much as I wish to, I cannot!”
“Marianne!”
“Are you,” she asked, sobbing now, “the same gentleman I have known these many weeks, or are you the libertine the colonel declares you to be? Which is it?”
“I am as ever I was, Marianne.”
“But what is it that you are? Who are you?”
“Why must I explain myself to you,” Willoughby demanded to know, drawing up in anger, “or to him?” He seemed very unlike the gentleman she knew. “This is unconscionable!”
“On that we agree,” said the colonel.
Willoughby turned and walked off before the colonel could say another word.
“If he cared for her then,” Marianne said through her tears as she watched him go, “how can he…”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“care for me now? Impossible!”
“It is possible,” the colonel said hesitantly, “to love more than once.”
She took immediate offence at his words. “Or perhaps,” she said in a thickening voice, “it was not love at all.”
“That, too, is possible.”
“You are just rife with possibilities, Colonel,” she said, fairly laughing through her tears, though there was acrimony, not amusement, in the sound.
“Of one thing I am certain: Eliza loved him, though I wish she had not.”
“And I!” She pressed her hand to her mouth and wept and wept. She wished Willoughby had never met Eliza, or that Eliza had never loved him, or that she herself had never loved him. “Why?”
“Who knows why we love?” the colonel asked, his gaze unwavering, the man himself never once shying away from her grief.
The sky was a brilliant blue, and the water…oh, but now the picture was spoilt. Sky and water alike might as well have been grey. She ought to have been enjoying this adventure with Willoughby. Yet here she was, talking of love with the colonel, of all people! Marianne could not control her sudden impulse to laugh her humourless laugh again, despite the tears flowing down her cheeks. The result, somewhere between a ragged sigh and hysteria, was not loud enough to draw attention from their friends; she supposed it, like Willoughby’s earlier cry, could not penetrate the garrulous banter of some of their party. Besides, her throat felt so constricted that no noise came forth from it now with much power.
The colonel smiled; it was a sad, sober gesture. “I must apologise again, Miss Marianne. I had no right to subject you to that scene.”
“It was awful!”
“I know. And I took an unholy pleasure, I am now realising, in exposing Mr. Willoughby’s misdeeds in your hearing. I suppose my anger on Eliza’s behalf spurred me on, as well as my wish that no other young woman be vulnerable to that man, but it was beneath me, and I am sorry for the suffering my selfishness brought upon you.”
She had suffered and did suffer still, but as the colonel continued to look at her, the seriousness of his accusations against Willoughby struck her with fresh force and brought to mind one who, she imagined, had suffered even more. “Has he truly injured your…your…friend so grievously that she is…” How could she speak plainly to this man about so delicate a topic? She ought not to have alluded to it at all! This girl that had written to him—who was she to him? Did the colonel have his own little love-child sequestered away somewhere? My word! She was not ready to hear of any more bad behaviour on the part of men of her acquaintance!
He seemed to understand her; he certainly did not appear offended by her inquiry. “She is my ward,” he said, “my cousin’s orphaned daughter. And yes.”
Marianne watched his eyes when he did not say more. He appeared on the point of speaking several times. She did not mind his silence, for his eyes fascinated her with their eloquence. She wondered that she had never seen anything in them before but dullness. They were alight now with intelligence and pain.
At last, with his mouth closed in a grim line, he held out the letter to her, and she took it without thinking.
She felt more anger at him at that moment when the paper changed hands than she had during the whole of the episode. This accursed letter! She was furious with Sir John, and with Eliza, and with every person responsible for conveying the post from London to Dorsetshire and from Dorsetshire to Devonshire. As her hand closed around the missive, she realised it was unfair of her. Colonel Brandon had done nothing but read a letter, and his world had been turned upside down. She still could not reconcile that this same piece of correspondence had disordered her world as well, but none of it was the colonel’s fault, unless he could be blamed for having trusted his ward’s companions to keep careful watch over her. ‘Oh, Lord!’ she thought, looking at the haphazard script, hardly the work of the deliberate colonel. ‘Willoughby said the colonel wrote this letter himself, and I agreed with him! I had forgot!’
“I have asked too much,” Brandon said. “I have imposed upon you enough as it is. I do not know how you can ever forgive me. I cannot expect you to read that.”
He must have noted her brief burst of fury. “No,” she began, but then she saw Elinor approaching, and she tucked the letter away. “It may be too much,” she agreed. “It is all too much! But I—”
“Marianne,” Elinor cried before Marianne could continue, “whatever is the matter? Willoughby seems in the blackest of moods. I have never seen him so out of sorts, so reserved! He said you were distressed.”
“He spoke nothing but the truth, and he is the—”
“Miss Marianne,” the colonel interrupted, “will you not go with Miss Dashwood? Perhaps the motion of the boat has been too much for you.”
“Yes, come sit here. You do look pale, dear. Have you been crying, too?” Elinor led her to a seat and sat beside her. “I thought you seemed very well when we boarded. I had thought I would be the one to feel ill.”
“I do not know when I have ever felt so wretched,” cried Marianne, melting under the solicitous care of her sister.
“Is there any way I can be of assistance?” asked Colonel Brandon.
“I cannot think of anything at present, Colonel, but thank you for your concern,” Elinor answered. “I shall stay with her.”
Marianne looked into her sister’s worried face. “Willoughby,” she said, choking on his name, “is not what he seems, Elinor. I cannot tell you now what he has done, but I shall when we return to the cottage.”
Elinor looked even more alarmed at this news but did not press her for details, for which Marianne was grateful.
Colonel Brandon did not leave them, and for once Marianne found she did not mind that he remained near her.
Marianne remembered the letter and retrieved it, staying her sister’s clear curiosity with a gesture. The colonel, when not fixing his gaze upon her, glared in Willoughby’s direction. Such a mixture of fierceness and gallantry he was, but Marianne had little leisure to contemplate this with the purported evidence of Willoughby’s offences in her very own hands.
She read quickly, and she felt wonder and sorrow and disgust. Eliza had been approached by ‘W,’ had been captivated, had succumbed to his advances though she had known better. There was Combe M—, scratched through and blotted but still visible, certainly to one who had had similar expectations—oh! the loss!—and there was the confession: Eliza was with child and very near her lying-in. She had gone to London when her condition could no longer be concealed. ‘W’ had left her with no address; rather, she could not locate him in Bath or in London, and the letter she had dared to send to him in the country she was certain had been misdirected, for she had received no reply. He had provided her no assistance. He had given her no hope. Yet behind Eliza’s sadness, Marianne could discern, was the hope that she would eventually be reunited with him, even as she refused to reveal his full name to her guardian.
Marianne, too, had hoped some word, some phrase might convert every horror she had experienced in the last half hour to nothing more than a night terror brazen enough to show itself in daylight, but these vain wishes had been abandoned almost as quickly as they had been formed. Moreover, she could not escape the truth that her own troubles, however grievous, were as nothing compared to this. “The poor girl!” she cried out. “She was wrong, and she knows it. But he used her ill!”
“Marianne? What poor girl?”
“How could he have done it? And what price will he pay? She shall have disgrace for her pains, and he merely a little distress, from which he will quickly recover.” She scowled and looked at Willoughby but only for a moment.
“Please, Marianne, I beg you do not distress yourself any further—”
“That is beyond my control, Elinor. I am hardly the author of my own distress.” She folded the letter and handed it to Colonel Brandon. “Take it. I cannot bear to look at it any longer. You will need the direction. I am glad you will go to her, for I am certain he will not.” She recalled something she had read. “All this time you knew nothing of her whereabouts?”
“I tried to find her for months. I had no idea where she was.”
“Sir,” Elinor said to Colonel Brandon with no little agitation, “what is in that letter? Have you also done something to upset my sister?”
“Elinor, the colonel is innocent in this.”
“Not innocent,” the colonel returned.
“You are not to blame!” Marianne insisted. “Another is culpable, though he will not own it.”
“I should have spared you.”
“And allowed me to continue in my ignorance? And to become another Eliza, were it possible to forget myself so completely?” She turned back to her sister. “Oh, Elinor!”
For a time she was lost to all around her as her tears returned in full force.
At last the others noticed and gathered round. Marianne did not look up. She was confident that her sister would shield her—dear, dependable Elinor!
“What is the matter, Miss Marianne?” she heard Mrs. Jennings inquire.
“Please, my dear madam,” said Lady Middleton, “do not crowd her. She is clearly upset.”
“I can see that, Mary! An’t I been a mother to you and to Charlotte these many years? I know when a girl needs mothering, and since Mrs. Dashwood is not at hand, I must do the job. Now, now, Miss Marianne, you look terribly unwell. We must get back, Sir John!”
“What was that, ma’am?” Sir John called out.
Marianne followed little more of the noisy conversation, clinging instead to Elinor and murmuring her miseries and regrets. Colonel Brandon stood and spoke and managed to deflect the worst of the meddlesome inquiries and offers of help. What help could they give her? Her heart was not merely rent in two but splintered into a million pieces, and there was nothing they could do to restore it short of proving Eliza to be a liar. But Willoughby’s own words and countenance had condemned him. There was nothing anybody could do.
Somehow they reached the shore; somehow they disembarked and returned to the carriages, this time with the sisters sat together. Marianne did not look to see where Willoughby was. She wished she could have put him entirely out of her head, but that was impossible. She dabbed her eyes with her soggy handkerchief and stared into the colonel’s concerned ones. How odd!—how she and Willoughby would have laughed to think of her sharing a carriage with Colonel Brandon after the morning’s arrangements! Yet how little she was inclined towards mirth at this moment! The colonel’s presence was very welcome and infinitely preferable to that of Willoughby.
The scenery that had enraptured Marianne on the way to Whitwell passed by in a blur, unnoticed by her. Her mind was full of another subject.
At last she spoke to the colonel. “He must be made to do right by her.”
“I intend,” he said, nodding in agreement, “to use whatever means are in my power to ensure it.”
“But you will not call him out? Say you will not!”
“Call him out?” Elinor repeated, looking shocked.
The colonel’s eyes darted to Elinor and back to Marianne. “I cannot say that, Miss Marianne. I consider our meeting inevitable.”
“You must not! You must not take such a risk! Miss Williams depends upon you!”
“Which is why I must defend her honour.” He then asked, “Do you believe I would lose such a contest?”
“He is considered to be a very good shot.”
“And I am not?”
“Marianne!” Elinor called out. “You are pale again! Please, let us leave this dreadful subject, Colonel.”
“You must not, Colonel!” Marianne whispered, ignoring Elinor’s concern. This was too important. “Please promise me! Please! For Miss Williams’s sake and…and….”
For Willoughby’s sake as well? The question was in his look, although Marianne herself was not at all certain she would have included Willoughby in her plea. But before she could go on, the colonel said, “You feel strongly about this. The only promise I will make is to consider what else might be done and not to act rashly. For Miss Williams’s sake, as you say.” He looked very sad. “And for your own.”
“Thank you,” Marianne replied.
Elinor asked no more questions save with her eyes; Elinor would soon know all, as soon as they crossed the threshold of Barton Cottage if Marianne had her way. But Mama! What would she think? How her dear heart would grieve when forced to see Willoughby in such a light! Even Margaret must be made aware of Willoughby’s unworthiness, if not the proof of it.
Marianne felt her eyes grow moist again. She closed them and wished the carriage back to Barton and herself out of it and in the company of her family, where she would find solace for the misery inflicted upon her. And then, since her wishes had no effect on the speed of the horses, she fixed her gaze upon the colonel’s steady hands as he gripped the reins.
