CHAPTER 4 #2
Kitty, delighted to have secured the attention of a married gentleman from Netherfield, began at once upon Lieutenant Carter’s account of his father’s stables, the spirited mare, the clever little cob, the unfortunate thunderstorm, and the toad Lydia had declared must have frightened the horse more than the lightning.
Mr. Hurst’s interest survived the mare, weakened during the cob, and expired entirely at the toad.
Fortunately, tea arrived before disappointment could become public. By the second sandwich, he had forgiven Longbourn for misleading him.
“Excellent cake,” he said, with the first sincerity anyone had yet received from him.
Mrs. Bennet accepted this as tribute to the family.
The call left the room fuller than it found it.
Mr. Bingley departed reluctantly, having taken leave of Jane with such visible satisfaction in the act of being near her that Mrs. Bennet’s triumph required both hands and a handkerchief to contain it.
Miss Bingley departed with civil speeches, Mrs. Hurst with relief, and Mr. Hurst with a final look toward the tea table which did more honour to Hill than to the company.
When they were gone, Mrs. Bennet began immediately to interpret everything.
“He is more in love than ever. Did you see him, Jane? No, of course you did not; you never see anything when it concerns yourself. Lizzy, you saw him. Kitty, do not touch those cakes. Lydia, if you repeat that story of the toad at Netherfield, I shall never forgive you. Miss Bingley was all civility, all kindness. And Mrs. Hurst too, though I think her complexion wants country air.”
Jane bore this with a blush and a smile. Elizabeth said little. She had seen too much to dismiss Miss Bingley and too much of Mr. Bingley to fear her yet.
A little later, when Mrs. Bennet’s attention had been drawn away by the piano tuner’s bill and Lydia’s discovery that dancing lessons could not be had before luncheon merely because she wished them, Elizabeth found Jane by the window in the back parlour.
The note from Miss Bingley still lay folded in her hand.
“Jane,” said Elizabeth, “may I ask you something without being accused of solemnity?”
Jane smiled. “I shall try not to accuse you.”
“How do you feel about Mr. Bingley?”
Jane’s colour rose at once.
“Lizzy.”
“No — not how Mama feels about him, nor how Hertfordshire feels, nor how he appears to feel. You. Are you happy in his attentions? Or are you only being carried forward because Mama has harnessed herself to the possibility and means to drag everyone after her?”
Jane looked startled, then softened.
“I am not being dragged.”
Elizabeth studied her face. “You are certain?”
“Yes.”
“Because if you are not, you may come to London with me when I return. I cannot promise quiet — Pom-Pom has strong views — but I can promise that Mama will not be there to interpret every look before breakfast.”
Jane laughed a little, though her eyes had grown bright.
“You are very kind.”
“I am very practical. There is a difference, though occasionally the results resemble one another.”
Jane looked down at the note in her hand.
“I like Mr. Bingley very much,” she said, and then, as if honesty had surprised her, added more quietly, “I believe I like him more than I ought to say. He is so kind, Lizzy. So open and warm. I do not feel afraid with him.”
That answer did more to quiet Elizabeth than any declaration of romance could have done.
“And Miss Bingley?”
Jane hesitated.
“She is perhaps a little sharp around the edges.”
“That is a generous name for the instrument.”
“But I think she means well.”
Elizabeth, who thought Miss Bingley meant several things and well was not the first among them, only said, “Then I shall hope you are right.”
Jane looked at her with gentle reproach.
“You do not.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “But I shall hope it for your sake.”
Jane smiled, but the smile trembled a little. After a moment she reached for Elizabeth’s hand and pressed it once, not as she had done when they were children, in quick apology or secret affection, but with a newer gratitude which hurt Elizabeth more.
“I am glad you came,” Jane said.
Elizabeth had not expected that.
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
The answer was too simple to be defended against.
Elizabeth was spared the necessity of reply by Lydia’s voice from the hall announcing that Mr. Hurst had eaten four sandwiches, which proved either that Longbourn’s cook was excellent or that married gentlemen had very little romance in them.
Jane laughed, wiped at one eye as if there had been dust there, and went out.
Elizabeth remained by the window for another moment.
It was an unwise thing, she thought, to discover one still wished to help where one had resolved only to observe.
Mr. Collins arrived that afternoon in rain too thin to command attention and too persistent to be ignored.
By then Longbourn had already spent itself upon improvement, Netherfield, cake, horses, toads, and maternal prophecy; yet the house received him as houses receive new troubles when old ones are not exhausted — with no proper room for him and no power to refuse admittance.
He was tall, heavy, and plain, with dark hair, watery blue eyes, and a face which might have passed very well for respectable had its owner not felt obliged to keep using it.
His person did not announce absurdity. A stranger, seeing him silent in a churchyard or seated behind a sermon, might have thought him a decent young clergyman of somewhat solemn habits.
It was speech that ruined him.
“My dear madam,” said Mr. Collins, bowing to Mrs. Bennet with a gravity that seemed to require more floor than Longbourn possessed, “permit me first to express my most sincere gratitude for the civility of my reception, and my most heartfelt regret that circumstances of inheritance, over which I can claim no control and for which I must nevertheless feel the delicacy most acutely, have placed me in a relation to this excellent family at once intimate and painful.”
Mrs. Bennet, who would have preferred him intimate in silence and painful at a distance, smiled with heroic effort.
“You are very good, sir.”
“Not good, madam,” said he, bowing again. “Only sensible, I trust, of what is due.”
Mr. Bennet looked at Elizabeth over the rim of his glass.
“A rare disorder,” he murmured.
Mr. Collins, having heard only the word rare, bowed as if complimented.
Jane was gentle.
Mary attentive.
Kitty curious.
Lydia unimpressed.
Elizabeth rose with the others and made her curtsey with that composed readiness which Mrs. Marwood had always said was the only way to meet tiresome people: one must give them every form due to civility and not one inch beyond it.
Pom-Pom, from Elizabeth’s arm, stared at the visitor for one long moment and then gave a sound so low and sincere that it could scarcely be called a growl. It was more nearly a private doctrine.
Mr. Collins looked down.
“My cousin keeps a small dog, I see.”
“He keeps several of us,” said Elizabeth.
Pom-Pom’s evening garment for the arrival of company was a sober little coat of bottle-green cloth with black braid, contrived by Mrs. Doddridge with grave ingenuity and no visible irony.
From a distance it gave him the air of a foreign dignitary received against advice.
From nearer, he appeared what he was: fragile, half-bald, offended by nature in several respects, and committed to the position that strangers ought to be regarded first with suspicion and only afterward with regret.
Mr. Collins bowed toward the dog, then toward Elizabeth, and resumed injuring himself.
He began with family feeling. He passed to duty.
He proceeded to the regrettable nature of certain legal arrangements by which the Longbourn estate must one day pass away from its present female inhabitants.
He expressed such sorrow on this point, and in such language of carefully arranged benevolence, that Mrs. Bennet, who would have preferred less sorrow and more silence, sat quite still beneath it and smiled from pure resistance.
“I assure you, madam,” said he, inclining himself toward her with solemn civility, “that I have long felt the peculiar delicacy of my position. To stand, by operation of law and not by any wish of my own, in possible succession to a house now so gracefully occupied by a family of daughters, is a circumstance which a feeling mind must regard with mixed emotions.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Bennet, with a brightness sharpened by pain, “I am sure any feeling mind must.”
Mr. Bennet said nothing, which was often his most complete contribution to domestic life.
Mr. Collins continued with increasing ease.
Longbourn was a handsome place. The grounds were respectable.
The breakfast parlour admitted light with judgment.
The approach might perhaps be improved by one or two modest alterations when the property changed hands, though he begged them not to suppose him a man given to innovation except under superior direction.
“Never,” said Lydia. “It is dreadful to innovate, I am sure.”
“Lydia,” said Jane softly.
Mr. Collins smiled upon Lydia as if she had displayed rustic vivacity of a harmless kind.
“Youth,” said he, “is naturally impatient of instruction.”
“Not always,” said Mary, who felt instruction had claims.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Collins, turning to her with encouragement, “a serious disposition in a young lady is always to be commended when joined to proper humility.”
Mary’s mouth closed.
Elizabeth, who had been disposed to pity her sister’s solemnity only ten minutes before, found herself suddenly more loyal to it.
Mr. Collins, uninjured by the small silence following this remark, proceeded. His thoughts turned naturally, and with no apparent power of resistance, toward Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Rosings, it appeared, was magnificent beyond ordinary language, which did not prevent him from using ordinary language on it for the next half hour.