CHAPTER 3 #3
Kitty and Lydia were less philosophical.
To them, an officer required no defence beyond his coat, though Kitty’s admiration, after its first general flutter, settled with surprising steadiness upon a Lieutenant Carter, who had the advantage of a pleasant voice, tolerable manners, and a story about his family’s stables which she seemed in no hurry to have concluded.
Lydia listened to the same account for nearly three minutes, pronounced the horses “very well, if they were spirited,” and then transferred her attention to every other red coat in the room with a fairness that did credit to her impartiality, if not to her constancy.
Pom-Pom had come in a dark claret velvet evening coat lined with cream and was borne into the room by Elizabeth with the composure of a gentleman too used to scandal to fear it.
Mrs. Doddridge followed with the basket, as inevitable as dusk.
“It is a mercy,” murmured Mrs. Philips to Mrs. Bennet, not very low, “that the little monster is dressed, for I am sure without it he would look positively indecent.”
“He bites,” said Lydia helpfully.
“Only where he is disappointed,” said Elizabeth.
Mrs. Philips laughed because she was not certain whether she ought to, and then laughed more because uncertainty had never prevented her before.
She received Elizabeth with unabated pleasure, Lydia and Kitty with indulgent triumph, Jane with every possible hint of Mr. Bingley, and Mary with the sort of cordiality one offers a young lady who may be relied upon not to overturn the room.
Mrs. Bennet’s pride in Jane required no assistance.
Her pride in Elizabeth required an audience.
Within half an hour, Elizabeth heard her own carriage, servants, London house, parcels, generosity, and the extraordinary educational arrangements for her sisters recounted in fragments to three ladies and one aunt by marriage, each version more affectionate and less accurate than the last.
“My sister Phillips must not exaggerate,” Mrs. Bennet said loudly while exaggerating.
“Lizzy is not proud in the least, though anybody would forgive her if she were. Such an establishment in town, and yet she comes back to us quite naturally. Family feeling is everything. And now there is to be improvement for the girls, though not, alas, portions, which would have been far more sensible.”
Elizabeth, seated at cards, played a wrong card on purpose rather than turn her head.
Cards, at least, gave the hands something to do while folly moved about the room.
She played well enough to avoid disgrace, ill enough to avoid reputation, and soon found her attention wandering.
Jane and Bingley, without ever seeming to seek one another, still found ways of proximity which suggested that nature, when she means to be kind, can be shamelessly efficient.
Lydia laughed too loudly at a lieutenant’s remark.
Kitty listened with pink-cheeked seriousness to Lieutenant Carter’s account of a mare with a temper.
Mary sat near the pianoforte with her new gloves folded in her lap, listening to everything and pretending to listen to nothing.
Elizabeth’s one real relief came later, when the card tables shifted and somebody remembered there was a pianoforte.
Miss Lucas, after declaring she never could play before company, played before them for several minutes with a caution that justified the fear.
Lydia begged for something lively. Mary said that music lost dignity when made only an inducement to jumping.
Mrs. Philips declared that nothing was so charming as a little taste after cards, though nobody had yet shown much of either.
Then Elizabeth was asked.
She consented, not from vanity but from the very natural wish to do for ten minutes something she actually liked.
She played well — not with the finished brilliance of a woman for whom music had been made an accomplishment of first rank, but with feeling, wit, and enough command to remind the room that pleasure, unlike cards, might occasionally possess shape.
A country parlour full of over-warm people and under-ripe conversation became, for a short time, bearable.
Jane listened with quiet affection. Bingley listened because Jane listened, and then because he found he liked it for itself. Lydia and Kitty endured the opening until the tune was spirited enough to suggest dancing in miniature.
Mary watched Elizabeth’s hands.
Mary did not admire Elizabeth’s playing.
Admiration would have been a waste of energy.
She resented it, studied it, measured it, and by the end of the second piece had privately determined that, with proper instruction, a better instrument, and enough seriousness, she might yet become superior to it.
This determination improved her spirits so much that she forgot, for nearly five minutes, to disapprove of Lydia’s whispering to an officer.
When Elizabeth rose, Mrs. Philips pronounced her charming, Mrs. Bennet proud, Lydia impatient for reels, and Mary still said nothing.
This was so unusual that Elizabeth looked at her.
“Mary?”
Mary started. “Yes?”
“You look as if you have discovered a defect in the instrument.”
Mary glanced at the pianoforte.
“Perhaps only a practical one.”
Elizabeth understood and nearly smiled.
“Then we shall have it judged.”
Mary’s hands tightened around her new gloves. “And a master?”
“And a master.”
Mary nodded once, with all the gravity of a woman entering into war.
“Very well.”
Pom-Pom, who had slept through the greater part of the performance in an attitude of compressed grievance, woke only to bare his teeth at a gentleman who proposed to stroke him and to sneeze so violently that Mrs. Philips nearly lost a card from pure alarm.
Mrs. Doddridge, from behind Elizabeth’s chair, said in her flattest tone, “He is over-stimulated, miss.”
“That makes two of us,” said Elizabeth.
When they returned to Longbourn that night, the house was quiet in the way houses are only after too much noise elsewhere.
Mrs. Bennet was tired enough to be affectionate, Lydia and Kitty loud enough to carry the evening home with them, and Jane silent in that absorbed manner which with her always signified a mind too full of sweetness to speak.
Elizabeth went upstairs thinking, not for the first time, that all this might suit many people very well and herself not at all.
Jane could be happy here, perhaps, if Bingley took her out of it kindly.
Lydia and Kitty could certainly be amused, though amusement was beginning to look in Lydia like a horse no one had thought to bridle.
Mary might spend a lifetime observing folly and calling it wisdom unless someone taught her the difference.
And Elizabeth? Elizabeth could be amused by Hertfordshire, generous in it, even fond of parts of it; but she could not belong to it again.
The fortnight Mr. Bennet had named still had some days to run.
This fact ought to have consoled her. Instead it merely produced that peculiar species of dread by which a future nuisance, not yet arrived, succeeds in occupying present air.
Mr. Collins remained absent, but in a family such as Longbourn absence had never prevented influence.
His name came up whenever the estate did, which was often enough to make any thoughtful woman wish either to reform inheritance law or leave the room.
Mrs. Bennet, who had at first remembered him only as entail in human shape, began by degrees to think better of the connection.
A cousin was at least a gentleman; a clergyman, however trying, was still a profession; and a man who stood one day to inherit Longbourn ought not to be entirely neglected by a family full of daughters, one nearly established and another too rich to be quite safely left to herself.
Elizabeth, hearing these things in fragments over breakfast and needlework, did not yet choose to be seriously displeased.
She did not yet choose to quarrel with Hertfordshire, but it was beginning to presume upon her patience.
If it meant to entertain her much longer, it would soon have to attempt something more decisive than card tables.
Pom-Pom, stretched before the fire the next afternoon while Mrs. Doddridge adjusted the fastening of his rain-cape, lifted one eye as if in cool agreement.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, looking down at him. “I believe we have not yet reached the worst of it.”