I Loved Eliza — Sense and Sensibility

Mrs Jennings comes in smiling, a letter in her outstretched hand, sure it will do Marianne good. For one moment Marianne has already read it. It is from Willoughby, full of tenderness, and he himself is coming to confirm it at her feet. The next moment the hand is her mother's, never till then unwelcome. The letter, when she can bear to read it, still trusts his constancy and asks only for greater openness. Marianne weeps through it and is urgent to be gone. Elinor will not choose between London and Barton. They will wait for their mother's wishes. Mrs Jennings goes out alone, to make the Middletons and the Palmers grieve as much as she does, and Elinor sits down to write the account she knows will hurt.

A rap. Marianne says it is Colonel Brandon, and that they are never safe from him. She is wrong about his motive, and right that he will come in. Mrs Jennings met him in Bond Street and sent him on. He wants lasting conviction, not present comfort. The lady he once said resembled Marianne was Eliza, an orphan in his father's care, loved from childhood. At seventeen she was married against her will to his brother. Her fortune was large, and the estate encumbered. They were within a few hours of eloping to Scotland when her maid betrayed them. Brandon was sent away. She was kept without liberty until the marriage was accomplished. He went to the East Indies. The divorce, about two years later, was the blow that remained. Years afterwards he found her in a spunging-house, held for debt, so changed he hardly knew her, and he was with her when she died. The story, he says, has been untouched for fourteen years.

She left him her only child, then about three, a trust he calls precious and says he has discharged imperfectly. Three years ago, when she had just reached fourteen, he placed her with a woman in Dorsetshire. Last February she was allowed, at her own desire, to go to Bath with a friend, and she disappeared. For eight months he learnt nothing. Her letter reached him last October, on the morning of the Whitwell party, which is why he left Barton so suddenly. Willoughby had left her, after promising to return, with no creditable home, no help, and no knowledge of his address. He neither returned, nor wrote, nor relieved her. Elinor may use her own discretion in what Marianne is told. The comparison, Brandon hopes, will lighten the regrets, because Marianne's suffering comes from no misconduct and can bring no disgrace. He and Willoughby met once in town, one to punish and one to defend, and both returned unwounded. The meeting never got abroad. The girl is in the country now, with her child. Will the sentence he uses against his own trust be the one Elinor keeps, when she chooses what to repeat?