CHAPTER 2 #2
"I am sure Miss Bennet has kept nothing back that was worth the keeping, ma'am," said Bingley, laughing, and bowing over her hand with a readiness that won Mrs. Bennet entirely and at once.
"Though I confess I have thought of little else these three weeks besides the pleasure of this visit, and cannot now recall a single thing I might have told her to keep secret. "
This was precisely the sort of answer delivered to please, and Mrs. Bennet declared him the most amiable young man of her acquaintance before he had been in the house a quarter of an hour.
It was a judgment in which she was not alone, as Kitty and Lydia, delighted to find their soon-to-be brother-in-law neither so grand nor so stiff as they had feared a man of five thousand a year must be.
Hence, the two youngest sisters soon monopolised a good portion of his conversation with questions about the officers lately quartered at Meryton, which he had no foreknowledge of, having only just entered the neighborhood.
This deficiency in knowledge did not trouble the girls, and they were both more interested in providing him details, such as their names, their regiments, and above all their eligibility.
Mary, less easily won, ventured an observation upon the moral duties of matrimony, and Bingley received her views with such earnest and unfeigned attention that even she was obliged to own, privately, that he seemed a very good sort of man.
It was Elizabeth, however, whose good opinion he was most anxious to secure, understanding as he did that she stood nearest to Jane in affection and in judgment.
Mr. Bingley sought Elizbaeth out before the visit was half over, drawing his chair a little nearer hers while the general conversation carried on around them.
"Miss Elizabeth, I may call you so, I hope, since I mean to claim your sister as my own and cannot go on calling you Miss Bennet when there will shortly be two of you answering to the name in the same family."
"You may call me so, sir, and gladly," said Elizabeth, "provided you do not expect me to return the compliment with anything so formal as Mr. Bingley for very much longer. I find I have already begun thinking of you as a brother, which I hope you will not consider presumptuous of me."
"Presumptuous! I should be sorry indeed if you thought of me as anything less. I have wanted a sister excessively, having none of my own but Louisa and Caroline, who are very good in their way but not, I think, inclined to tease me half so well as I suspect you mean to."
Elizabeth could not help but smile at his pretty speech. "You have taken my measure very quickly, sir."
"I have had a fortnight of letters from Jane in which your name appears rather more often than my own good sense would recommend for a man newly in love," said Bingley, with a frankness that made Elizabeth laugh outright. "I could hardly fail to form some notion of you before we met."
Elizabeth found, before the visit concluded, that she liked Mr. Bingley thoroughly; he had an openness in his manners and his evident delight in her sister, along with the complete absence of condescension toward a family so evidently beneath him in fortune, pleased her.
If this was the general character of Mr. Bingley's friends, Elizabeth thought, glancing once toward the window as though some further guest might yet appear there, then Hertfordshire might find itself rather better supplied with agreeable company than it had lately been used to.
***
The following Sunday, the banns were read for the first time in the parish church, Mr. Bingley's name and Miss Jane Bennet's spoken aloud together before a congregation that received the information with every appearance of satisfaction, and not a little private calculation as to what such a match must mean for the prospects of the neighbourhood's other unmarried daughters.
Mrs. Bennet sat through the reading with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes and her chin held at such an angle, as to be seen by as many of her neighbours as possible.
A second reading followed the Sunday after, and a third the Sunday after that, each greeted with rather less general excitement than the first, though none with less satisfaction on the part of the principal parties.
Jane bore the publicity of it with her usual serenity, remarking to Elizabeth only that she found it a curious thing to hear her own happiness read aloud, as though it were a notice of livestock or land changing hands.
“This is an odd thing. I supposed I hadn’t ever noticed it before,” Jane reflected to Elizabeth one afternoon.
"Why, I think it a very fair comparison, Jane," Elizabeth returned, "since you have certainly been the finest prize in the county, and Mr. Bingley the shrewdest purchaser to have recognized your value before some lesser bidder carried you off."
Jane laughed, and told her sister she was very wicked to say so; and the two of them gave themselves up, for a few private minutes, to laughing over the whole silly business together, the way they had laughed over a hundred smaller absurdities before it, and would, Elizabeth privately hoped, go on laughing over a hundred more before either of them was very much older.
The fourth Sunday was fixed upon for the wedding itself, the banns having been completed without objection or impediment of any kind, and the intervening month given over entirely to preparation.
Mrs. Bennet's satisfaction now wanted only a wedding-breakfast equal to the occasion, and she threw herself into its planning that left Mr. Bennet observed, more than once, that he thought his wife might have made a very tolerable general, had the Lord seen fit to commission her.
One late morning, only days before the blessed event between Jane and Mr. Bingley, Mr. Bennet was sitting in his library when Elizabeth entered to look for a book she had left upon the sill.
She found her father in private reflection upon the state of his wife's nerves, which, since the news of Jane's engagement, had transformed from anxious to triumphant, without any noticeable diminishment of volume.
"Ah, Lizzy,” he began, as she entered the room.
“I was just thinking about your mother, and I have conceded that she would have had Bonaparte routed by Michaelmas," he observed, over the lowered rim of his spectacles, "purely on the strength of her opinions, and no army whatsoever.
" Elizabeth only laughed, and went to retrieve her book, and left him to whatever further reflections he cared to pursue alone.
Jane herself moved through the weeks and then days that followed with a happiness so complete, and so quietly worn, that even Mrs. Bennet's nerves, on the whole, were soothed rather than excited by the sight of her.
And if Elizabeth felt, now and again, some small private wonder at how swiftly it had all come about, though she was careful to keep the wonder to herself.
A month's acquaintance; a wedding within two more; a sister I have known the whole of my life, about to be given to a man scarcely known the length of a season.
She kept the thought private, and told herself only that Jane's judgment in matters of the heart had ever been sounder than her own caution had generally given it credit for being.
Of Mr. Bingley's promised friend, who was to arrive in time to stand up with him, nothing further was heard beyond the bare fact of his acceptance; and Longbourn, absorbed entirely activities related to the wedding, Jane’s gown, and the ordering of a wedding-breakfast, gave the absent and soon-to-be-present Mr. Darcy very little thought at all.