Jane Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins Page A

Marianne allowed Elinor to accept for them an invitation to go with Mrs. Jennings to the Palmers' house at Cleveland: because Marianne wanted to be at home and thought that this would be the quickest means of getting there. The Palmers were wealthy enough to have a house constructed on the rules of taste. It was "situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and like every other place of the same importance, it had its open shrubbery and closed wood-walk; a road of smooth gravel winding round a
    plantation, led to the front; the lawn was dotted over with timber; the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain ash and the acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices." Marianne, whose heart "swelled with emotion" to think that Willoughby's seat, Combe Magna, was not thirty miles distant, determined that she would make her stay endurable with the relief of
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    long walks alone in the twilight; and "while the others were busily helping Charlotte show her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, and stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of the hills in the horizon and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna could be seen."
    The long course of wretchedness in which Marianne had indulged made her so low in health that when she caught a chill it developed into something serious. "Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had--assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings--given Marianne a cold so violent, as, though for a day or two trifled with and denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of everybody."
    The cold and sore throat having developed into what the apothecary diagnosed as a putrid fever, Mrs. Palmer, nervous for her baby, left the house for a relation's and took Mr. Palmer with her. Mrs.
    Jennings and Colonel Brandon remained to help and comfort Elinor, and when at last Marianne became desperately ill the Colonel went off in his own carriage to fetch Mrs. Dashwood from Barton. While he was actually gone, Marianne took an unexpected turn for the better, and Elinor, who at first scarcely dared to believe her eyes, longed with passionate impatience for her mother to arrive and receive the good news herself.
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    "The night was cold and stormy. The wind roared round the house, and the rain beat against the windows; but Elinor, all happiness within, regarded it not. Marianne slept through every blast; and the travellers--they had a rich reward in store, for every present inconvenience."
    "The clock struck eight. Had it been ten, Elinor would have been convinced that at that moment she heard a carriage driving up to the house; and so strong was the persuasion that she did , in spite of the almost impossibility of their being already come, that she moved into the adjoining dressing-closet and opened a window-shutter, to be satisfied of the truth. She instantly saw that her ears had not deceived her. The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view. By their uncertain light she thought she could discern it to be drawn by four horses; and this, while it told the excess of her poor mother's alarm, gave some explanation to such unexpected rapidity."
    "Never in her life had Elinor found it so difficult to be calm, as at that moment. The knowledge of what her mother must be feeling as the carriage stopped at the