Chapter Forty-Three #2
“You shall apprehend that the matter does not turn upon the sum. The sum is, in proportion to my present circumstances, not contemptible; but I should not, on the sum alone, have undertaken the night mail. I have undertaken it because the act of forgery is, in the law of England, a capital matter; and because the perpetrator of the act has, since her father’s death, exercised every species of imposition upon every person who has had the misfortune to come within her sphere—including, sir, very particularly, your own.
“Moreover, she has put it about, by such means as I have learned only by the post, that she had broken her leg upon a path in your fields in January, and that you, sir, had assisted at her recovery under emergent circumstances and at considerable inconvenience to yourself.
Indeed, sir, you must not have known of such a ploy, and I can only think such a report was put out to garner sympathy from the law.
But it is plain to me that the leg was not broken in the manner reported.
I have seen, this morning on the gravel, that the leg upon which she walked up your drive shows no impediment whatever; and I am sorry to say, sir, that this fact confirms what I had been told on the road.
The leg was a fiction. The fiction was prepared for the express purpose of explaining her presence in your house to certain interested parties which could not have brought about by any honest means.
“I am here at the express encouragement of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, my patroness, who has the gravest concern in the matter. Her ladyship has, since the first reports of the lady’s residence at Northmere reached her a fortnight ago, communicated with me on the subject in such terms as to make plain that the affair is now beyond the ordinary discretion of a family scandal.
Her ladyship has also, sir, taken counsel of her own London solicitor, who has advised her that a prosecution may be brought against the lady at the assize for forgery within the next session, unless the lady’s removal from your house can be procured by private arrangement.
“The private arrangement her ladyship has been so good as to lay out for my conveyance to you has two articles. The first is the removal of the lady from this house at the earliest, to a place where she may be properly placed. The Magdalen Hospital in London receives young women of her character upon application; a confidential placement could also be procured in Yorkshire under Mrs P—‘s direction, an arrangement of considerable advantage in retirement and modest cost. The second is the public discontinuance of the lady’s connection with the name of Mr Darcy of Pemberley, by a formal letter to be drafted under her ladyship’s supervision and signed in your own hand, which letter could be made known in the proper quarters in such a manner as to put the matter out of dispute.
“Should you undertake these two articles within the present week, I am authorised by her ladyship to indicate that the prosecution shall not be pressed at the assize. Should you decline them—as I shall hope, upon reflection, you should not—I am instructed to indicate that her ladyship’s solicitor stands ready to assist mine in the laying of the case before the magistrates upon a private warrant.
“I beg, sir, you would consider what I have laid before you not as an importunity but as the office of a kinsman who has, at some cost, undertaken to bring you the truth that those nearer to you have not, by reason of their interest, been able to lay before you.”
He paused. He had begun to sweat at the temple in the warm room.
He had given up his speech in the order he had prepared, and he had given it in his preparatory voice—confiding, paternal, weighed at every clause with the supposition that he was being heard by a gentleman who had been waiting for him to come.
Mr Ellison’s hand on the writing-pad of his lap had moved without interval through the whole of it. He set down his pencil.
Darcy turned from the window. “Mr Collins. You shall stop.”
“Sir? I had not, in the matter of the second article—”
“You shall stop, Mr Collins.”
Collins’ mouth dropped open. “Sir, I have not the pleasure of understanding you.”
“You have, in the course of the last quarter of an hour, made a great many representations to me concerning the character and the conduct of my wife. You shall not, in the next quarter, or in any quarter subsequent to it, make another.”
“Your—sir, you have used the word—”
“I have used the word wife. She has been my wife since eleven o’clock this morning, by common licence of the Bishop of Lichfield, in the church of Northmere village, with her uncle to give her and my cousin to stand for me.
I have used the word, Mr Collins, because the word is the truth.
You have ridden seventeen hours and have set down upon this table a quantity of claims concerning her character.
I shall not, this afternoon, listen to one further syllable of those claims, for I am done, sir, listening to a man insult my wife. ”
“Mr Darcy. Sir.” Mr Collins had come up half out of his chair.
“I shall—sir—I had not, by your leave—the office of a kinsman, even where the act has been, by the form of the ceremony, this morning accomplished—I had supposed—by your leave, sir, the ink upon the licence is not, by the hour, dry. The vicar at Northmere village is a clergyman, I gather, of no great consequence in the diocese, who upon the office of a fellow clergyman speaking to his conscience and to the present particulars of the case, may—that is, sir, a marriage executed within the hour, before the parties have had any opportunity, by a settling of the mind and a removing from such company as has, by certain influences brought to bear upon the lady, by certain—”
He could not get the sentence to its end. He took another path.
“Mr Darcy, sir. You shall consider, by your leave, that her ladyship Lady Catherine de Bourgh is not a person who shall, upon the present intelligence, retain the family connection which she has at her own hand the granting and the withholding of. You shall consider, sir, that by the present act, by the very form of the alliance, you have made yourself her ladyship’s enemy.
Her ladyship shall not, sir—I have it from her own hand—hesitate to see you brought down with the lady you have, this morning, married.
She has the offices, sir, the offices in London, the offices at her own table, the offices that bear upon—”
“Mr Ellison.” Darcy had turned from the south window. He had not raised his voice. He said his solicitor’s name in the way he had said Mr Collins’s on the gravel.
“Sir.”
“Lay the case.”