CHAPTER 7 #2
From Mr. Collins it was the most natural step in the world to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, since Mr. Collins appeared not so much connected to her ladyship as breathed out by her at intervals.
“Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” said Mrs. Belwick, with the satisfaction of one who had been waiting to dislike a subject properly. “I remember her in town. Or rather, I remember everyone trying not to.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Is she so grand?”
“Grand?” repeated Miss Hall. “No. Grand people need not announce consequence every time they enter a room.”
“She gasps after rank,” said Mrs. Belwick, “as if she had not been born to it. That is always the worst sign.”
“She is an earl’s daughter, is she not?” Elizabeth asked.
“She is,” said Mrs. Hall. “And ought therefore to know better.”
“Her gowns were expensive,” said Mrs. Belwick, “but expense is not taste. An earl’s daughter ought to have known the difference before she left the nursery; yet rank, like fortune, is often wasted on the person born to it.”
Miss Hall nodded. “Good parents cannot guarantee good manners. Nor good houses good taste.”
“And badly received?” Elizabeth asked.
“Received,” said Mrs. Hall, “because she was Lady Catherine.”
“Badly,” said Mrs. Belwick, “because she was Lady Catherine.”
Elizabeth, who had been threatened by Mr. Collins with Lady Catherine’s improving notice as if it were an honour before which any woman must weaken, felt something in her settle back into its proper shape.
It was not pity these ladies offered her, and it was not consolation.
It was judgment; and after Longbourn, correct judgment felt almost luxurious.
“No,” said Elizabeth at last, “I am not sorry to have missed her. But I am sorry Mr. Collins did not hear you.”
“Mr. Collins,” said Mrs. Belwick, “would hear only enough to repeat us badly.”
The conversation passed, as good conversations do, from family absurdity to wider absurdity, and from that to music.
Miss Hall had been at a concert the week before and found the soprano capable but theatrical.
Mrs. Hall defended the orchestra. Mrs. Belwick thought all public music in London too full of people who came to be seen approving it.
Elizabeth, who had grown up in rooms very like these and among women very like these, felt as she had not felt once in Hertfordshire: placed.
Not fully answered, perhaps. There was a difference between being understood and being kept company by people old enough to have known one’s aunt better than oneself.
The Halls and Mrs. Belwick restored her judgment to her; they did not require hers in return.
She was cherished among them, indulged, sharpened, sometimes scolded, and always welcome.
But no one in the room needed her as an equal combatant in life.
That want remained, quiet now, but not gone.
When, at length, she rose to go, Miss Hall insisted on sending a small packet of preserved orange peel home with her because Mrs. Marwood had liked it and because one cannot properly leave old friends’ houses without being burdened by some edible proof of continued regard.
Mrs. Hall pressed her to come again sooner and not to let engagement or catastrophe at Longbourn interfere with superior company in London.
Mrs. Belwick, drawing on gloves at the door, said, “If the clergyman writes, burn it unread.”
“I shall show it to Pom-Pom first and let him decide.”
“He has already shown uncommon discrimination.”
Pom-Pom, who had slept through the last half-hour in complete confidence beneath Miss Hall’s side table, woke only to be lifted into Elizabeth’s arms for departure and accepted the indignity of movement with his usual expression of having expected less from the world and receiving it.
The rain had stopped, but the streets had not recovered.
Mud gathered wherever wheels had been, the crossings shone darkly, and every curb required either judgment or sacrifice.
Elizabeth, being only a few streets from home, chose to walk despite it.
The air was cool, the distance short, and the company behind her had restored enough of her spirits to make caution seem unnecessary.
Mrs. Doddridge came with them, carrying the basket and the orange peel as if both were equally necessary to survival.
The square and the streets beyond it were in that bustling hour before full dusk when London seems most itself: too many wheels, too many cries, too many errands, and everything somehow fitting.
Elizabeth, still half amused by Collins and wholly pleased with having seen the Halls and Mrs. Belwick, was less guarded than she might have been.
Pom-Pom, unfortunately, was more so.
They had just turned into a quieter street not far from Portman Square when a rat — large, quick, and offensively certain of its right to be there — shot out from the edge of a gutter and made for the shadow beneath a stopped carriage a little way ahead.
No one saw it at first but Pom-Pom.
Something ancient and maritime awoke in him all at once.
Whatever generations of shipboard hunting had been bred into some long-vanished ancestor chose that instant to blaze up through velvet, vanity, and upholstery.
He stiffened in Elizabeth’s arms, uttered a sound far too fierce for his size, and before she had time to close her hold, launched himself from her shawl like a projectile of offended instinct.
“Pom-Pom!”
He hit the pavement running.
Elizabeth’s cry brought Mrs. Doddridge to a halt and one footman on the far side of the street half round in confusion, but Pom-Pom had already forgotten every principle except pursuit.
He flew toward the carriage-wheel in pursuit of the rat, his little brown coat flashing once before disappearing near the line of the horses.
The horses started.
It was not a violent panic, but it was enough. The movement beneath them, the sudden darting thing, the cry from Elizabeth — any one of these might have been managed. Together, they were peril.
Elizabeth felt the whole world contract into one point of horror.