Chapter 14 #2
Jane’s smile was tender.
“I am glad that you can say so,” she replied. “I used to fear – you know I did – that you disliked him exceedingly.”
“I deserved your fears,” said Elizabeth, after a short struggle. “I fancied myself quite clear-sighted, and was very much the reverse. I shall not pretend to feel as I once did. The change, however, is altogether my own affair.”
Jane kissed her cheek and asked no more.
The influence of Georgiana and Mrs. Annesley, though withdrawn in person, had not wholly vanished from Longbourn.
One afternoon, when the girls were gathered in the parlour, Lydia was retailing, with great glee, some absurdity of a young man from Meryton, whose new coat, new waistcoat, and new importance had raised him much in his own esteem and very little in hers.
“He strutted about as if the whole world belonged to him,” she cried. “I could scarce keep from laughing in his face. Only imagine, Kitty, how he looked when he stumbled over his own feet at the door!”
Kitty giggled, then checked herself.
“Lydia,” she said, half reluctant, half earnest, “Mrs. Annesley would say it was not kind to laugh at what people cannot help. You remember how she spoke of it when we talked of that poor boy who blushed so whenever anyone looked at him.”
Lydia tossed her head.
“Mrs. Annesley is a very good creature, to be sure,” she said.
“She would have us as proper as Miss Darcy in a fortnight, if she could. She did not like it when I made her laugh about the man with the squeaking boots, and she could not help it. I shall always think that mighty diverting, whether she approves or not.”
Even as she spoke, the recollection of Mrs. Annesley’s mild, reproving look seemed to cross her, for when she began the story again, it was with less exaggeration.
When Mary observed that “ridicule should be reserved for vice, not infirmity,” Lydia contented herself with remarking that the waistcoat was certainly a vice in itself, and no more was said.
Mary practised more steadily than she had ever done before. Instead of running through a piece as fast as her fingers would go, she now stopped to repeat a passage which had gone ill, or to attend to some direction in the margin.
“I am persuaded,” she said one evening, when Elizabeth remarked on it, “that Miss Darcy would be gratified to know I have profited by her example. She showed me that true excellence does not consist in display, but in exactness.”
“I believe she would be very much pleased,” replied Elizabeth. “You honour her lessons by remembering them.”
Elizabeth could not watch these small alterations without a sensation very unlike envy.
Georgiana and Mrs. Annesley had left a better order behind them.
Longbourn was not quite what it had been.
Every improvement seemed, in its degree, a pledge that the intercourse between their houses was not to end with a single visit.
That night, when she was alone, she unfolded Georgiana’s letter once more.
She did not dwell upon the lines addressed to “my dear friends,” or even those which expressed so much gratitude to herself.
Her eye went first, and rested longest, on the sentences which began “My brother desires me to say.” The mere fact of his desiring anything that concerned her, the certainty that he had thought of her comfort and spoken of it, that his carriage would come to their very door, that she was to be under his roof, in his home – they were ideas which would not be quieted by any raillery she could use against them.
She turned the paper over and traced, with an unsteady finger, the impression of the seal.
“I must take great care,” she said to herself, with a smile that was half a sigh. “I am in great danger of becoming as romantic as my mother believes me incapable of being.”
Obligations
Darcy had seldom passed a more crowded fortnight.
There were accounts to be examined with the steward, complaints from two of the cottagers to be settled, a new lease to consider, and a vexatious question respecting a boundary hedge which had somehow agitated both tenants and labourers beyond all reason.
Through it all, the same thought returned with a steadiness that surprised him.
Every time he took up a pen, every time he spoke with his steward of dates and seasons, March presented itself not merely as a time for seed and rents, but as the month in which Miss Elizabeth Bennet was to be at Pemberley.
He had desired Georgiana to write. It was more proper that the invitation should appear to flow from her, and it spared him, in some degree, the danger of saying more than was prudent.
When he sat alone at his writing-table, he found his hand resting upon paper that had not been used, his mind framing sentences which he must not commit.
“I will take that upon myself,” he had said to Mr. Bennet at Longbourn, in speaking of the journey. “I shall send my own carriage and servants.”
The promise, once made, had grown upon him till it seemed, in his imagination, to comprehend much more than the outward accommodation of two young ladies.
He chose the carriage, ordered certain alterations in the cushions, spoke with the coachman of the pace to be kept and the inns at which they were to stop.
It was absurd, he knew, to trouble himself so minutely, yet he could not persuade himself to neglect any circumstance that might affect her comfort.
Once or twice, in the midst of these preparations, the recollection of Easter and Rosings intruded itself with very ill grace.
His cousin had written of Lady Catherine’s expectations.
There had been a time when the annual journey into Kent was as fixed a part of his year as the Michaelmas rents.
Now the obligation remained. Any shadow of patience for it had wholly gone.
He could not, with any decency, wholly absent himself.
To refuse outright would be to provoke enquiries of a sort he was in no humour to bear.
Yet he resolved, with a decision that surprised even himself, that his stay in Kent should be short, and that nothing – neither Lady Catherine’s lectures nor her plans – should prevent his being at Pemberley when the Miss Bennets arrived.
“Pemberley has the prior claim,” he said to himself, as he folded his cousin’s letter with impatience. “If my aunt must be offended, she must.”
The Nurse
It occurred to him early in these arrangements that there was one piece still wanting.
Two unmarried ladies could not, with any propriety, travel so far without a female of respectable age to accompany them.
Mrs. Annesley could not be spared from Georgiana, even had he wished it.
He had no intention of troubling the Bennets for one of their relations.
He wanted someone who belonged to Pemberley, whose presence would quiet every scruple at Longbourn.
The idea of Mrs. Littlewood came to him then, with the ease of an answer that ought to have been thought of sooner.
Mrs. Littlewood had nursed him through the mischiefs of childhood and the fevers of school-holidays.
Mrs. Littlewood had scolded and comforted and instructed him long before he knew the value of being loved with such tenacity.
Mrs. Littlewood, now living in a neat cottage on the edge of the park, with a small pension and a garden which he seldom passed without recalling how often he had been sent, as a boy, to pick her roses for her.
He rode over to see her on an afternoon when the snow lay only in patches upon the ground, stubborn in the shade and gone from the open fields.
The little house, with its low thatched roof and whitewashed walls, looked much as it had done when he had first given it to her on his coming of age, though the lilac bush at the door had grown higher in the interval.
Mrs. Littlewood received him with a curtsey which began in great formality and ended in as much affection as ever.
“Well, Master Fitzwilliam,” she said, when she had set him in the best chair and pressed a cup of tea upon him, “I do not know how I am to behave if you come upon me so suddenly. I am an old woman now, and not fit for fine company.”
“You are fit for any company, ma’am,” he replied, smiling in a manner that would have astonished some of his acquaintance. “I am the one who should apologise, for not having been here these three weeks.”
“You have had much upon your hands, I do not doubt,” she said. “Mr. Bridges was telling me there is trouble with that fellow at Hatherley farm, and I am sure the tenants give you worry enough. Your dear father always said Pemberley would keep you busy.”
“Pemberley keeps me as busy as I deserve,” he said. “Yet there is one thing I must ask of you, if you are not too much engaged with your roses and your hens.”
She looked at him with a keenness that time had not dimmed.
“You have only to say, sir,” she answered. “If it is in my power, I shall be proud to do it.”
He explained, then, in terms that were, for him, decidedly particular, the visit that was to take place: that two of Mr. Bennet’s daughters were expected at Pemberley in March.
That Mrs. Bennet might reasonably be anxious at so long a journey.
That he wished for someone, well known to himself and his household, to accompany them and to act, whilst they were his guests, as a sort of guardian of their propriety.
“I thought of you, ma’am,” he concluded, “because you have a claim upon Pemberley, and because there is no one in the world whom I would more willingly trust with the comfort of those I esteem.”
Mrs. Littlewood’s eyes, which had been growing rounder with every clause, narrowed suddenly with a very shrewd pleasure.
“Mr. Bennet’s daughters,” she repeated. “Are those the ladies with whom Miss Georgiana was so happy in the autumn? The house in the country she talks of so much – Longbourn?”
Darcy could not quite master his expression.
“It is,” he said.