Chapter Two
Netherfield Park was let at last, and Mrs. Bennet had the whole of it before her husband had finished his egg.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said she, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
"But it is. Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it."
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
"Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently.
"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."
This was invitation enough.
"Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.
" She paused, and then delivered the material fact, which was not the fortune.
"And his line is Bingley. Of the Yorkshire Bingleys.
Three generations landed, and Mrs. Long says the Accord is sound in him — sound and easy, she says, the sort that answers before it is asked. "
"What is his name?"
"Bingley. Are you not attending?"
"Is he married or single?"
"Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year, and an Accord not thirty years old, and no sisters' claim upon it that anybody knows of. What a fine thing for our girls!"
"How so? How can it affect them?"
"My dear Mr. Bennet," replied his wife, "how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his braiding with one of them."
"Is that his design in settling here?"
"Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may braid with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes."
"I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for as you are as handsome as any of them, and your line ran as strong at your marriage as ever a Gardiner's did, Mr. Bingley might like you the best of the party."
"My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of line, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown daughters she ought to give over thinking of her own."
"In such cases, a woman has not often much left to think of."
It was said lightly, as he said everything, and Mrs. Bennet did not hear it as it might have been heard, and Elizabeth, sitting in the window with a book she had stopped reading four minutes previously, did.
---
It is a thing not much spoken of in company, though every woman in Hertfordshire knows it.
An Accord runs in the blood, and a woman's blood is spent twice: once in the braiding, and once in every child she bears.
Mrs. Bennet had come to Longbourn four-and-twenty years before with a gift that could quiet a room — not compulsion, nothing so grand, only a warmth, a way of making people wish to be agreeable — and she had spent it five times over on five daughters, and what remained of it now was noise.
She had been very handsome. She had been, by every account but her own, rather charming.
Nobody said so any longer, least of all her husband, who had married her for it and had never once in four-and-twenty years said thank you.
Elizabeth had worked this out at fourteen and had never been able to unwork it.
"Mr. Bennet," said her mother, "how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves."
"You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least."
"Ah, you do not know what I suffer."
"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year and a sound line come into the neighborhood."
"It will be of no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them."
"Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them all."
---
Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of four-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.
Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.
When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous.
The business of her life was to get her daughters braided; its solace was visiting and news.
And she was, in the one thing that signified, entirely right, and everybody who laughed at her was entirely wrong.
For Longbourn's Accord was entailed upon the male line.
Elizabeth had been shown the deed once, at eleven, when her father was in one of his moods for instructing children in things that would only frighten them.
It was not a deed. It was older than deeds.
It was a strip of something that was not vellum, folded three times, and the letters on it moved a little if you did not look at them directly, and her father had held it up to the window and read out the operative clause in the tone of a man reading a bill from his wine merchant.
To the heirs male of the body.
Four words. What they meant, in the plain language nobody at Longbourn used, was this: the land had bargained with a man, and would be held by a man, and when Mr. Bennet died without a son the bargain concluded.
Not transferred — concluded. The Accord would sever, and Longbourn would pass to the nearest male of the line, a clergyman in Kent none of them had met, and the land would consider his claim and either take him or not.
And the five Miss Bennets, whose gifts came to them through their father's bond and not their own, would find, on the morning after his funeral, that they had none.
Not diminished. Not weakened. Gone, as a fire is gone when the log is taken out from under it.
Jane would lose her steadiness — that quality that made a frightened horse stand and a crying child stop, and which everyone in Meryton called sweetness because they had no better word.
Mary would lose whatever small thing she had never been able to do properly anyway and had studied so grimly to deserve.
Kitty and Lydia would lose things they had never troubled to name. And Elizabeth would lose her sight.
She did not think about this often. She had a system for not thinking about it, which was to be amusing, and it had served her very well for six years.
Her father was one-and-fifty.
---
"You must go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighborhood," said Mrs. Bennet, some hours later, having gone away and come back with the same subject entirely undiminished, in the manner of the tide.
"I will not."
"But consider your daughters. Only consider what an establishment it would be for one of them.
Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no new comers.
Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him, if you do not. "
"You are over scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his braiding with whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy."
"I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good humored as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference."
"They have none of them much to recommend them," replied he; "they are all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters."
"Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me."
"You mistake me, my dear."
"I do not," said Mrs. Bennet.
There was a small silence. It was, Elizabeth thought afterward, the only true thing her mother said that day, and nobody in the room remarked it.
---
She went up to dress before dinner and stopped on the landing where the light came in, because her mother was below in the hall giving orders about a chicken in a voice that could be heard in the orchard, and Elizabeth — for no reason, from idleness, because she was two-and-twenty and it was a Tuesday — looked at her.
That was all it was, when she used it. She looked, and she saw what was underneath, and she had never been able to explain to anybody how little effort it took or how impossible it was to undo afterward.
She had expected vanity. She had been expecting vanity for six years, and had built a considerable quantity of wit upon it, some of which she was rather proud of.
What was underneath her mother was terror.
Not a figure of speech; not a mother's ordinary fretting; a white, flat, sustained, unsleeping terror, the kind a man has in the last two hundred yards of a wardline, running underneath the chicken and the lace and the nerves and the four-and-twenty years of noise, and it had been running there so long and so steadily that Elizabeth understood, standing on the stairs with her hand on the rail, that it was not a thing her mother felt.
It was a thing her mother was. It had eaten everything else and put on her clothes.
"Lizzy!" said Mrs. Bennet, from the hall, in her ordinary shriek. "Lizzy, do come down, I cannot make Hill understand me about the chicken —"
"Coming, mama," said Elizabeth.
She came down. She was perfectly agreeable at dinner and made her father laugh twice.
But she did not laugh at her mother that evening, and Jane noticed it, and asked her about it that night with the candle between them, and Elizabeth said that she was only tired.
It was the first lie she had ever told her sister, and she told it because the truth was this: she is right and we are all of us wrong, and she has known for four-and-twenty years what I have known for six, and she has known it alone, and she is not clever enough to say it in any way that would make us listen — so she says chicken, and lace, and nerves, and Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Bingley.
Elizabeth lay awake some while.
Somewhere south of the Thames, though she did not know it and would not for eleven weeks, a regiment that had no business north of the river was striking its tents.