Chapter 7
CRACKS AND REFUSALS
Mr. Wickham told the story of the rose garden on a Wednesday evening, over cards. Elizabeth caught the seam in it before he had finished.
"The late Mr. Darcy had a garden of white roses planted under my mother's window, when she fell ill," he was saying to Mrs. Long's nieces, who had stopped playing entirely.
"He said a sickroom should have something worth looking at.
That was the manner of man he was. The whole of Lambton wept at his funeral, and I—" The pause.
The glance away, this time to the candle branch on the mantel. "I will not speak of the funeral."
The nieces sighed in chorus. Elizabeth sorted her cards and did not sigh. She was occupied with two small discrepancies, and the occupation was new and unpleasant.
The first was the roses. She had heard the history twice now, entire, and there had been no roses in it.
No mother at all beyond her dying. Certainly no garden under a window.
The detail had arrived tonight, fresh-cut, fitted to an audience of nieces, and it improved the story.
The right detail always did. Elizabeth knew that better than most, having improved a few stories of her own.
The second was worse. Aunt Phillips had asked, comfortably, over the deal, how soon after the old gentleman's death the living had been denied him, and Mr. Wickham had said, "Some months after the funeral, when I applied for ordination and was refused."
On the walk from the village, three weeks ago, he had said the ground had not settled on the grave.
It was a small thing. Memories shifted. Grief blurred a calendar.
Elizabeth told herself both of these true things.
They did not cover the difficulty, because the two tellings were not blurred.
Each was exact. Each was polished. They were simply polished into different shapes.
A man's real history has only one shape, however badly he tells it.
She watched him over her cards for the rest of the hand.
He was performing for the nieces now, some regimental nothing.
As he reached the turn of it his head tilted, a small confiding angle.
She had seen the angle before. She had seen it on the village walk, and at the supper table at the Gouldings'.
The tilt was part of the act. It was blocking.
It arrived on schedule, like the pause, like the glance away.
The nieces leaned in on cue. Three weeks ago, at the same point in the same maneuver, so had she.
He told it before, Lizzy. Word for word.
Elizabeth lost the hand, paid her fish, and was glad of the arithmetic, which gave her face something to do.
The table was re-forming. Aunt Phillips called for the good Madeira and the candles were being trimmed.
Mr. Wickham excused himself from the company.
He was gone rather longer than the errand explained and came back into the parlor from the wrong direction.
Elizabeth, returning from the sideboard, met him in the passage.
He was coming from the back of the house.
There was nothing there but the kitchen stairs and the small dark room where her uncle Phillips kept his office.
His strongbox was there, and the affairs of every family in the neighborhood worth the name. Her father's were among them.
"Miss Bennet." Not a flicker. "Your aunt's house is a labyrinth. I went looking for the company and found a wilderness of doors. I lost my way."
"It is four rooms and a passage, sir."
"And every one of them dark." He smiled, and stood aside to let her by, courteous as a dancing master. "I begin to think I want a guide."
She laughed, because the machinery of her ran on and laughed at things.
She went in to the Madeira and thought no more of it.
The house was small and the evening was long.
A man might lose his way in it, she supposed.
That was, if he had never once arrived early and learned the geography of a room before he needed it.
She thought no more of it. She would have occasion, later, to think of little else.
The next morning she walked into the village and presented herself at Aldridge's. She had the excuse of her father's standing order. The actual business was a question she had not phrased to herself until she stood at the counter.
"Mr. Wickham," said Aldridge, and stopped dusting.
It was a small hesitation, as hesitations went. But Mr. Aldridge talked about his customers the way other men talked about weather, gladly and at length. Elizabeth had stood at this counter half her life and never once seen him choose a word before.
"He has been in, then."
"He has been in." Aldridge squared a stack of volumes that was already square.
"Bought Loudon on the management of landed property, and a treatise on agricultural improvement, and paid cash down, which I will say for him.
" A pause, in which the bookseller visibly weighed his stock of discretion against his nature.
His nature won, as it had won every week since she had known him.
"Browses odd, though, your officer. Most gentlemen read a shelf.
He prices it. Takes a book down, turns it over, looks at the binding and the plates, puts it back.
I have seen men do it before, Miss Bennet, and they were never buying.
They were valuing. A man does it when he is reckoning what a thing would fetch. "
Elizabeth walked home with the parcel under her arm and two facts that would not sit down.
A lieutenant of militia, penniless by his own account, studying the management of landed property.
A charming man in a bookshop, pricing other people's books.
Neither was damning. Neither was anything alone.
But they sat beside a rose garden and a date that would not hold still.
A head tilted at the same angle in three rooms. The pile had begun to look like evidence.
Friday morning, Mr. Collins proposed.
He did it directly after breakfast, having first applied to Mrs. Bennet.
She cleared the breakfast room of daughters with a speed and a candor that left no retreat worth the name.
He began by assuring her the proposal could be no surprise.
He then enumerated his reasons for marrying.
Firstly, a clergyman in easy circumstances ought to set the example of matrimony in his parish.
Secondly, a wife would add greatly to his happiness.
Thirdly, and he might have mentioned it sooner, it was the particular advice of Lady Catherine de Bourgh herself.
She had given it between two hands of quadrille.
And fourthly, he was to inherit Longbourn upon the melancholy event of her father's death.
He had therefore fixed upon choosing a wife from among its daughters.
The loss might be softened for them all, a scheme he trusted she would find as elegant as he did.
He concluded with an assurance. No reproach on the subject of her small fortune should ever pass his lips once they were married. He waited, glowing with the modest triumph of a man who has performed a kindness.
"You are too hasty, sir," Elizabeth said. "You forget I have made no answer. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honor of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them."
Mr. Collins waved this away with a formal hand.
He was, he explained, well aware that young ladies always rejected a first offer.
They sometimes rejected a second, and even a third.
Her refusal was, properly understood, a form of encouragement, elegant in itself.
He should hope to lead her to the altar before long.
"Upon my word, sir, your hope is an extraordinary one after my declaration.
I am perfectly serious. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced I am the last woman in the world who could make you so.
Were Lady Catherine to know me, she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation. "
"Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so," said Mr. Collins gravely, conceding the one point that carried weight with him, "but I cannot imagine her ladyship would disapprove of you.
And you may be assured, when I have the honor of seeing her again, I shall speak in the very highest terms of your modesty, economy, and other amiable qualifications. "
The interview consumed twenty further minutes and settled nothing.
Mr. Collins received every refusal as a courtesy and returned it with interest. It ended only when Elizabeth withdrew in plain words and plainer haste.
The matter went at once to higher courts.
Mrs. Bennet was at the parlor door before Elizabeth reached the stairs.
What followed engaged the whole house. Mrs. Bennet argued, wept, prophesied, and took to the window seat.
She demanded her husband's authority with a vehemence that carried to the attics.
Lizzy should marry Mr. Collins, or Mrs. Bennet would never see her again.
Mr. Bennet should make her, this instant, before the man's affections strayed to some other, more deserving, less unnatural daughter.
Mr. Bennet was extracted from his library.
He heard the case from his wife at full flood and from his daughter in one sentence.
He looked at Elizabeth over his spectacles.
"An unhappy alternative is before you. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."