Chapter Ninety-Four
The house was strangely quiet, Mr. Bennet thought. He had long thought his home too noisy for any man to retain his sanity, but now he found himself wandering the house, searching for…something. Finally, he realised that he was searching for his missing daughters.
He retreated to his study to contemplate this.
Jane, Lizzy, and Mary! All gone in the space of one day!
That, he thought, was just wrong. If one daughter left, and then a few years later, another daughter left…
well, that would give the parents some time to adjust, would it not?
But this – this nonsense of letting three girls go at once!
Why had no one warned him that it was the wrong thing to do?
He rose from his chair and went in search of his wife, with whom he hoped to discuss this new situation. He found her in the drawing room, trying to teach Kitty to embroider. “No, no, Kitty, you are not paying attention!”
“You have made me pull the stitches out three times, Mama! It is no use!” Kitty flung the offending scrap of cloth to the floor.
Mr. Bennet strolled over and picked it up. “It is a…flower, is it, Kitty? For a handkerchief? ”
“Why, yes, Papa!” Kitty smiled at him. “You recognised it!”
Mr. Bennet would rather have had his tongue cut out than confess that the first embroidery project was always a flower; instead, he said, “Kitty, it is entirely recognisable as a flower. I do hope you will finish it, as I would be honoured to carry it in my pocket.”
Kitty coloured with pleasure, and returned to her needlework at once.
Mrs. Bennet smiled at her husband; he winked at her. “And where is Lydia?” he asked.
“I believe she is in the schoolroom.”
Mr. Bennet’s eyebrows rose. Lydia in the schoolroom? This had to be seen to be believed. He climbed the stairs and opened the schoolroom door. Indeed, there sat Lydia, poring over an old mathematics book. She looked up when he walked in and slammed the book closed, looking embarrassed.
“Lydia?”
“It is nothing, Papa, only…” She trailed off.
“It is only what?’
“Well, I realised that I am quite an ignorant girl, and I thought – I thought –“
“It is easy enough to overcome ignorance,” he said, when it seemed that she could not finish the sentence.
“It seems quite difficult to me,” Lydia confessed.
“Not at all; it is just that it is difficult to learn alone.”
“Alone?”
“Yes; without a teacher! Come, Lydia, tell me what interests you, and I shall be happy to help you learn it.”
It turned out that Lydia had a sudden and inexplicable passion to learn mathematics and languages. “All the things that Lizzy knows!” she finished in a rush.
Mr. Bennet opened his mouth to ask what had spurred this sudden interest, but an unexpected thought stopped him.
Perhaps Lydia had always been ready to learn, but that no one had offered to teach her.
He had been entirely occupied with Elizabeth from the time she was three, when she had begun to recognise letters, until she had been twelve, when he had shut her out. Never had he approached Lydia!
“Lydia, my dear,” he began, swallowing past a sudden lump in his throat. “Let us go down to my study and talk about how we shall begin. No need for you to sit alone in the schoolroom.”