Prologue #2
Mrs. Marwood turned her head just enough to include him in the inspection. The laughter died into a cough. She had never admired men who enjoyed disorder as long as women were left to pay for it.
“A principle,” she said to Elizabeth, “which, if adopted universally, would fill every decent house in England with cripples, strays, and badly conducted poultry.”
Elizabeth thought about this with visible seriousness.
“But if it was decent, it would not mind helping.”
Mrs. Marwood removed her spectacles.
There was a mind there. An inconvenient one, almost certainly; a mind that would ask questions at the wrong time, pity ugly objects, interrogate drawers, and weary the patience of anyone who preferred children ornamental. But a mind nevertheless, alive and practical and absurdly unafraid.
“And do you assist every creature you find overturned?”
“If I can.”
“And if you cannot?”
Elizabeth frowned. “Then I find someone larger.”
“A sensible answer,” said Mrs. Marwood. “Very troublesome in a child.”
Elizabeth could not decide, by the look of her, whether she had been praised or corrected. Mrs. Marwood could see the calculation pass across her face, and liked her better for it.
Over the next three days, her opinion strengthened.
Elizabeth was everywhere. Not rudely, though she had little notion of where attention became intrusion; and not idly, for idleness seemed foreign to her constitution.
If a drawer was opened, she wished to know what had been kept in it, what was kept there now, and why the alteration had been thought wise.
If a caller came, she wanted his horse, his errand, and whether he looked like a gentleman who paid his bills.
If Mrs. Marwood wrote a letter, Elizabeth drifted near with the grave air of a clerk awaiting instruction.
She climbed where she ought not, listened where she had not been invited, and pitied every injured creature within half a mile of the house.
Mrs. Bennet found her exhausting.
Mrs. Marwood found her increasingly difficult to leave.
This was inconvenient. Mrs. Marwood had not come to Hertfordshire to adopt a child.
She had come because widowhood had made Portman Square too orderly, too echoing, and too full of the absence of a man whose ledgers, letters, clerks, and opinions had given every day a proper shape.
Longbourn, however, did not tempt her into reform.
That was the danger with disorder: it made vain people imagine themselves necessary.
Mrs. Marwood was not vain, or at least not in that direction.
She knew the price of interfering in another person’s household.
A loose hinge might be mended and forgotten; a household, once taken in hand, had a way of fastening itself to one’s conscience forever.
Unless one meant to be responsible for the whole foolish machine, one had better not put one’s fingers into its works.
And she had no intention of becoming responsible for Longbourn.
On the fourth afternoon, with rain ticking lightly against the panes and the parlour smelling of damp shoes, hot tea, and the lavender Mrs. Bennet kept near her chair for nerves, the matter arranged itself without permission.
Lydia had woken fretful. Mrs. Bennet, flushed and overwrought, had declared herself unequal to another hour of it.
Jane hovered, anxious and gentle, but too young to be made into a second mother however much the house seemed inclined to attempt it.
Elizabeth, after surveying the crisis with the solemnity of a general, fetched a scarlet ribbon from somewhere and began to sing.
She sang loudly. The baby cried louder. Elizabeth, undeterred, increased her efforts.
“Go away, Lizzy,” said Mrs. Bennet.
The song stopped.
Mrs. Marwood looked up.
Mrs. Bennet sat with the baby against her shoulder, cap a little askew, face bright with fatigue.
She did not look cruel. That, in Mrs. Marwood’s experience, was the trouble with a great deal of domestic harm.
It came not from cruelty, which at least had the decency to show itself, but from exhaustion, vanity, habit, and the endless permission families gave themselves to wound one another without naming it.
“For heaven’s sake, go away. Must you be always here, always speaking, always bringing creatures, questions, noise, and confusion wherever I am? I have the baby; I have the house; I have my nerves; and I cannot have you besides.”
The room fell still.
Elizabeth stood with the scarlet ribbon in her hand.
Her face changed so quickly that Mrs. Marwood felt it like a physical correction: first surprise, then offence, then comprehension arriving before tears.
The child had meant to help. That was the whole of it.
She had come with her ribbon and her loud little song because no one else was succeeding, and in return had been told, plainly enough for any child to understand, that she was surplus to the house’s capacity for love.
Jane moved toward her sister at once, then stopped when Mrs. Bennet shifted the baby and called blindly for her handkerchief. Duty caught her before affection could. Jane fetched the handkerchief, though her eyes remained on Lizzy.
Mr. Bennet had entered just in time to hear the injury and just late enough to do nothing at all. Mrs. Bennet, already half repentant and wholly desirous of being pitied, pressed the handkerchief to her eyes and said nobody considered what she suffered.
Mrs. Marwood put aside her work.
“Elizabeth.”
The child turned.
Mrs. Marwood held out her hand.
Elizabeth came, though pride made her come slowly. Mrs. Marwood drew her near, not into an embrace--she was not a woman much given to public embraces, and there was already quite enough display in the room--but near enough to place one gloved hand firmly on the child’s shoulder.
“There,” she said, low enough that the words belonged to Elizabeth more than to anyone else. “You have done enough for the present.”
The shoulder under her hand trembled once.
That decided her.
Not sentimentally. Mrs. Marwood distrusted sentimental decisions, which so often left other people to do the practical labour afterward.
Nor did she pretend, even to herself, that the impulse was wholly noble.
There was selfishness in it. She felt it at once, and was too honest to rename it charity merely because charity would sound better.
The child interested her. The child stirred the house around her.
The child, with her beetles, questions, fierce little principles, and wounded pride, had already made Mrs. Marwood feel less like a childless widow presiding over furniture and more like a woman to whom Providence had sent an occupation with eyes.
But selfishness, properly examined, was not always wicked.
It was wicked only when it devoured another person for one’s own comfort.
This would not do that. Longbourn had daughters enough, noise enough, claims enough, and far too little room for the one child whose mind most required room.
Mrs. Marwood had been Miss Bennet of Longbourn once herself, and saw nothing unnatural in taking another Miss Bennet under her wing.
Families had always sent children where they might be better formed, better loved, or better kept; and if the present Bennets had not sense enough to call it wisdom, Mrs. Marwood had no objection to being wise for them.
Longbourn was not hers. Mrs. Bennet was not hers. Mr. Bennet’s indolence, the baby’s cries, Kitty’s coughs, Mary’s solemnities, even Jane’s overused sweetness--none of these were hers to govern.
But Elizabeth might be.
When the room had resumed its lesser agitations and Elizabeth had mastered herself enough to breathe without disgrace, Mrs. Marwood said, still quietly, “A household is not mended by every hand that pities it.”
Elizabeth looked up.
“If you interfere in a household, you must be prepared to be responsible for it,” Mrs. Marwood continued. “Not for an hour. Not for an afternoon. For as long as its foolishness can reach you. Remember that.”
Elizabeth blinked hard. “Should no one help, then?”
“Help what is yours, if you can. Help what is helpless, if you must. But do not imagine that every confusion asks to be governed by you.”
The child considered this with a seriousness that confirmed Mrs. Marwood’s judgment. She did not understand all of it. No child could. But she understood enough to feel the shape of a rule.
After a moment she asked, “Where do you live?”
“In London.”
“Where in London?”
“Portman Square.”
“Is it very noisy?”
“No.”
“Does everyone call at once?”
“Certainly not.”
“Are there babies?”
“Not unless badly misdirected.”
The child’s mouth moved despite itself. Mrs. Marwood permitted herself the smallest answering satisfaction.