CHAPTER 1 #3
Mrs. Doddridge considered this without visible agitation.
“The house is very quiet now, ma’am.”
“Yes. It is quiet in exactly the wrong places.”
Pom-Pom lifted his head, sneezed with tragic violence, and looked at Elizabeth as if she had personally arranged the silence and ought to be ashamed of it.
Elizabeth crossed the room and took him up.
He offered no objection beyond an expression of aggravated endurance and tucked the narrower portions of his anatomy immediately into the fold of her sleeve.
Because his garments had almost always been made from remnants of her gowns, ribbons, linings, pelisses, and wrappers — Mrs. Marwood allowing nothing good to be wasted, and Elizabeth insisting that delicacy in a dog no more excused nakedness than delicacy in a Christian — Pom-Pom seldom appeared in any colour not faintly echoed somewhere upon her person.
Today the relationship was particularly plain.
Her sombre gown had nothing of his green, but the ribbon at his throat had once belonged to a bonnet she had worn before illness turned the house inward.
The sight pricked more sharply than it deserved.
She set him down again with care.
The rent abstract waited on the table. Elizabeth drew it toward her, because work was safer than memory.
She wrote a note authorising the roof repair, another refusing the proposed blue shopfront with all possible civility, and a third asking Mr. Beaker to inquire whether Mrs. Coulson at Number Nine required time, a new agreement, or simply a reminder.
Mrs. Marwood had always said that arrears were like coughs: sometimes nothing, sometimes the first sign of a collapse, and always worth hearing early.
Elizabeth sanded the notes, folded them, and felt no more occupied than before.
“There,” she said. “I have preserved half a street from rain, vulgar paint, and uncertainty. Surely that ought to satisfy any reasonable woman until dinner.”
“Very proper, ma’am,” said Mrs. Doddridge.
“That is precisely the difficulty.”
Pom-Pom, hearing no immediate praise directed toward himself, rose, turned twice, and collapsed in a posture of expensive despair.
Elizabeth rang for the maid to prepare him for a walk.
The maid came; Pom-Pom was equipped; Elizabeth put on her pelisse and gloves; Mrs. Doddridge observed that the air was of a changeable character and that his smaller coat might after all be safer than the one first chosen.
The dog, now protected by every effort decency could require, descended the front steps with the air of a creature condemned.
The walk lasted eleven minutes.
In the first three, he objected to the paving stones.
In the next two, he objected to a passing dray.
In the next one, he objected to a child with a hoop.
By the seventh, he had decided the day itself was structurally defective, and by the eighth he refused all forward progress and sat down with a firmness that, in a larger animal, would have been heroic.
Elizabeth stood over him while a gust worried the edge of her veil and sent the smell of wet straw, horse, and coal smoke along the pavement.
“Pom-Pom,” she said, “if you persist in this mode of life, you will oblige me to choose between carrying you and abandoning you; and I know already which of those would be more agreeable to you.”
Pom-Pom blinked and trembled delicately in the wind.
A footman, stationed at enough distance to preserve forms but near enough to rescue what dignity remained to the family, looked away with the conscience of a man who had been present at this species of negotiation before.
Elizabeth took the dog up.
“That is what I thought.”
Pom-Pom settled into her arms with immediate and complete victory.
By the time she returned to the house, she was in a humour to condemn every architect in London, half the weather, and nearly all domestic arrangements not invented by herself.
Mrs. Albright appeared in the hall long enough to determine, without inquiry, that Miss Bennet was damp, Pom-Pom triumphant, and the footman insufficiently quick with the door.
All three conditions were corrected before Elizabeth had removed her gloves.
Mrs. Bennet’s letter, which had arrived before the walk and been improved by neglect into something almost interesting, still waited upon the tray.
Elizabeth recognized the hand before she sat down.
There were very few hands in England that could make her feel, in the same instant, resistance, amusement, weariness, and a species of family obligation so thin that it scarcely deserved the name. Mrs. Bennet’s was one of them.
She broke the seal.
The letter was not long, but it accomplished a good deal in little space. It began with illness, proceeded to servants, touched briefly upon fashion, and ended, as Mrs. Bennet’s letters very often did, by making Elizabeth’s independence sound like a household offence.
My dear Lizzy,
I hope this finds you well, though I cannot think London agrees with young ladies when they have no mother near them to observe whether they are pale.
Lydia has taken it into her head that her blue ribbons are too childish for any young lady who means to be admired, Kitty coughs whenever I most require quiet and then agrees with her, and Jane is all goodness, though goodness, my dear, does not replace a cook.
The new under-housemaid has a face I cannot like, and if she is not a thief in fact, she is certainly one in countenance. Mrs. Long’s cousin has been seen in a yellow curricle, which everybody agrees is too much, though Mrs. Long calls it elegant.
If you, now so very grand and so entirely mistress of yourself, could spare a little time to those who loved you first, Longbourn would be very happy to receive you.
Your poor aunt was always particular in her ways, and I am sure no one would wish to complain of what cannot now be altered; but it is a comfort to think that what is in one branch of a family may still be made a blessing to the rest, if only there is proper feeling.
A daughter with so large an establishment in town ought not forget her family, and I am sure a little country air would restore your colour, your spirits, and perhaps your proper gratitude.
Elizabeth read the letter through, then once again from the point at which gratitude was introduced, and a third time from the sentence in which Mrs. Bennet magnanimously forgave a dead woman for leaving her own fortune as she pleased.