Chapter Forty-Three
Mr Collins came down off the step of the chaise toward them with his hat in his hand.
“Mr Darcy, sir—Mr Darcy—I had not thought to find you abroad, but it is the better that I have. I had been preparing myself to wait in the house, but I have been kept at this step these forty minutes for the want of your housekeeper’s leave to enter—I beg you would not blame the housekeeper, sir; she had no instruction in the matter.
I have come up on the night mail with intelligence of the most pressing nature, and I shall beg of you, sir, the favour of a private word at the earliest—by your leave, before any further part of the morning’s business is taken up, for I should rather speak to you, sir, in such terms as do not bear telling before—”
He had been bowing in the saying of this, and the bow had been directed at Mr Darcy and had not, until now, permitted his eye to take in much further than Mr Darcy’s coat.
At do not bear telling before his eye had taken in the further matter, which was Elizabeth’s hand through his arm.
The hand had been there some little while and looked likely to remain.
He recovered.
“Cousin Elizabeth.”
She inclined her head only marginally. “Mr Collins.”
She did not give him cousin. She did not release Darcy’s arm.
She had given him the syllables that were owed him and nothing else; and Mr Collins, who had been preparing his speeches on the road from Bakewell for seventeen hours, could not take what she had given him for anything but his cousin’s acknowledgment of having been caught out at last under another man’s roof.
“By your leave, sir—Mr Darcy—the matter is the gravest urgency. I shall represent it more fully in the proper place. I should rather not lay it before the present party.”
“Mr Collins, you are speaking out of place.”
This was Mrs Marsden, who had come round on the colonel’s arm. At the saying of his name from this quarter Mr Collins’s voice altered for the second time. He had supposed his elder cousin to be at Longbourn with her mother.
“Mrs Marsden—cousin Jane—I had not—but you are then also at Northmere?—I shall be the more anxious to convey what I have come to convey, for there is a great deal in the matter that touches upon the family. Mr Darcy, sir.”
Mrs Marsden gave him a small formal bow, but Richard gently pulled her back.
Mr Collins’s eye, in the interval, had run over the rest of the persons on the gravel.
He had given Georgiana the bow due her age and her brother.
He had given the colonel a bow rather warmer than that, with a flicker of the head Darcy understood to signify that the present matter was one the family would smooth out in due course.
He had given Mr and Mrs Hadley no bow at all; he had taken them, Darcy supposed, for tenants.
He had not bowed at Mr Ellison either; he had not, Darcy could see, been able to place Mr Ellison.
There remained on the gravel Mr Gardiner and Mrs Gardiner, who had come up from the lane behind Elizabeth and were standing some little way back.
Mr Collins did not know them by sight. Darcy watched him take them in.
The bow that resulted was the half of a half bow, given to the two of them between them on the strict form; and the bow told Darcy what Mr Collins had taken them for—a city tradesman and his wife, come up on some matter of business which the gravel of a country gentleman’s drive must be enduring out of Mr Darcy’s habits of charity.
Mr Collins’s eye lifted off them at the same rate his head completed the bow.
The lift told Darcy further: that Mr Darcy should not, on a morning of any social character, have suffered such persons to be in the open of his drive at all.
“Mr Darcy, sir, by your leave —”
“Mr Collins. You shall not, this morning, have a private word with anyone on this gravel, and most particularly not with the lady on my arm. You shall have what I propose to give you, in such order as I propose to give it. Mr Hadley. The gentleman’s chaise may go round to the stable for the present. “Mrs Reeves.”
Mrs Reeves had come down the step at her name.
“Sir.”
“Mrs Reeves. The ladies shall take tea in the parlour. Mr Ellison shall come with me into the study.”
“Sir.” She bowed and went up into the house.
Elizabeth gave Mr Collins, as she went up the step on her uncle’s arm, the same inclination of the head she had given him at Mr Collins, and gave him nothing else.
She did not look at her husband as she passed him.
Mrs Gardiner went up after her, with Mrs Hadley behind.
Mrs Marsden went up with Georgiana. The wedding-party went into the house, and the door went to, and there remained on the gravel Darcy and the colonel and Mr Ellison, with Mr Hadley at the bridle of Mr Collins’s near horse—and Mr Gardiner, who had come back down the step after his niece had passed into the hall.
They came into the study—Darcy first, then Mr Collins, then the colonel, Mr Ellison, and Mr Gardiner. The door closed.
“Mr Collins, you shall take that chair.” Mr Darcy indicated the chair at the side of the long table. “Mr Ellison shall remain. Fitzwilliam, Mr Gardiner. You shall give us the room.”
Richard scowled faintly, casting a glace at Collins, then stepped close so that only Darcy could hear him. “Darcy. You shall not be in a room alone with him.”
“I have, in this house, been alone in a room with more dangerous persons than the present one. I require, by the leave of those who have given me their leave in many previous matters this winter, to do this matter on my own.”
Mr Gardiner came forward then. “Mr Darcy, sir. I respect what you have said. I shall not, however, leave you in a room with the man whose name has been a thing for my niece to dread in the post these many months.”
“Mr Gardiner, I shall account to you, sir, after the matter is done. Mr Ellison is my legal counsel and shall be in the room with me. He shall report to you every particular of what is said before any step further is taken on the strength of it. The colonel may stand at the door if it suits him; but he shall stand on the other side of it. Sir, you shall go up to your niece.”
Richard was staring at Darcy. Then his cousin did something Darcy had not, in the course of their adult acquaintance, seen him do: he stood down, in front of another gentleman, in a room of his cousin’s house, on his cousin’s order. He inclined his head, and they closed the door.
Darcy went to the south window and stood with his hand on the sill.
He had determined that he should let Mr Collins lay out the whole of his case before he should reply.
He should not, by any premature interruption, give Mr Collins occasion to suppose he had been heard and rebuffed before the rebuttal had been delivered, because Mr Collins had ridden seventeen hours to deliver and would, in any rebuttal, only return to the matter in the language of a man who had not been allowed his full say.
Collins should put down on the floor of every article he had brought up from Hertfordshire, and Darcy should pick up each article in turn after he had set them down.
“Mr Darcy, sir. I shall not, in your hearing, mince the matter, for I know your time is precious, and that the truths I have come to lay before you are not truths you should wish to hear on any day of the year. I have come at considerable cost to myself—I have left my estate in the hands of my steward, only recently brought on and terribly necessary, I daresay. I have travelled by the night mail, which is a vehicle little suited to the dignity of the clerical character—but the present matter is not one that admitted of any delay. You are, sir, the most deceived gentleman in the county of Derbyshire.”
“Am I, indeed?”
“I shall give you the particulars in such order as I have prepared them on the road.
The lady whom you have, by your generous nature, sheltered under your roof for these many weeks is not the person you have been led to suppose her.
She is Miss Elizabeth Bennet, of Longbourn in Hertfordshire—which intelligence I had from your housekeeper not three minutes since, who was kind enough, before I was set down upon the step of the chaise, to acknowledge the name when I put it to her.
But she is, sir, a great deal more than that name.
She is a young person whose conduct since the death of her father—my own predecessor in the entail, who in the great wisdom of providence was carried out of his library by his own daughters last October—has been the conduct of a woman who has put off, in the matter of her person and her conscience, those restraints by which the female sex is preserved from the wreck of itself.
“I shall give you the act itself, sir, plainly. She forged a paper. She forged it in her father’s hand, on the strength of his late acquaintance with our local lender, within a month of the laying out of the corpse and before the entail had been properly passed.
The lender—by what I shall not call providence, sir, though others might—died two months after my late cousin; the paper was therefore not contested; and the debt that was the only call upon the estate at the time of my cousin’s death has stood since as paid, when by every truth of the matter it was not paid by a single farthing, and the sum of one hundred and forty pounds owing upon the note has not come to the hand of the heir to whom by every right of inheritance it ought to have come—that is, sir, to me.