Chapter Four
When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister how very much she admired him.
"He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, "sensible, good humored, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! — so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!"
"He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, "which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete."
"I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment."
"Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us.
Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.
What could be more natural than his asking you again?
He could not help seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman in the room.
No thanks to his gallantry for that." She put down the brush.
"And you have not said the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"That he asked you first whether you would object.
Before the second." Elizabeth watched her sister in the glass.
"Nobody does that, Jane. Not here. A man asks, and a girl may say no and be talked of for a fortnight, and so she does not say no, and everyone calls it a triumph.
He asked you in such a way that no would have cost you nothing. "
Jane was quiet a moment.
"Yes," she said. "I noticed that."
"Well then."
"I noticed it, Lizzy, and I have been trying since eleven o'clock not to build a house upon it."
---
It was, Elizabeth thought, the most characteristic thing her sister had ever said, and also the saddest, and she did not say so.
Jane's gift had no name in the family. It had never needed one, because nobody in the family had ever admitted it was a gift at all — it was simply Jane, the way the weather was simply the weather.
Put Jane in a room and the room grew easier.
A colicky child would stop; a bolting horse would slow and stand and let itself be caught; two men three sentences from a quarrel would find, obscurely, that they did not much want to quarrel after all, and would go home and be unable to say what the argument had been about.
At the assembly she had done it for two hours without pausing, because a hundred people in a hot room with their blood up is a thing that wants steadying, and Jane steadied it, and every single person in Meryton went home saying what a very pleasant evening it had been and not one of them said her name.
Elizabeth had once tried to explain this to her mother.
"Well," Mrs. Bennet had said, "and what is the good of it, if nobody knows she is doing it?"
Elizabeth had had no answer then. She had one now, seven years later, and it was: none. There is no good in it at all. That is what makes it worth something. But it was not the sort of thing one said in the breakfast parlor, and so she had never said it anywhere.
---
"You are too apt," she said instead, "to like people in general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life."
"I would wish not to be hasty in censuring any one; but I always speak what I think."
"I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others!" She hesitated, and then, because she could not help it, "And what did you make of the friend?"
"Mr. Darcy?"
"Mr. Darcy."
"I did not speak to him."
"Nobody spoke to him. That is rather the point."
Jane turned round on the stool. "Lizzy — you will laugh, and I would rather you did not, only for a minute.
When he came in, and stopped at the door — everything went quieter.
Not the noise. Underneath the noise. I have spent my whole life making rooms quieter and I know precisely how much it takes out of a person, and I felt it happen and it was not me.
" She frowned. "And then it went on being quieter, all evening, in the corner where he stood.
He was not being disagreeable in the corner. He was being careful in it."
"He said I was tolerable."
"Yes," said Jane, "and that was unpardonable, and I do not defend it, and I would not have him in the house." She began to plait her hair. "I only say that a man who does not wish to be looked at will often say a thing designed to make people look away, and that it generally works."
Elizabeth laughed at her, and kissed her, and blew out the candle, and lay a long while in the dark composing three separate replies, each better than the last, and did not sleep well.
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Mr. Bingley had inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate but did not live to do it.
Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.
The Bingley Accord was one-and-thirty years old.
That is a difficult thing to be, in England.
A new Accord is not a small one — Bingley's answered him readily, warmly, without reserve, in the manner of a young dog — but it has no weight, and weight is what the great houses trade in.
A man with a young line entering a room of old ones feels it the way a man with a new title feels his own name in another man's mouth.
He is not despised. He is simply, everywhere, junior.
Which was some part of the reason that Mr. Bingley, who was in all things his own master, had never in four years disregarded the opinion of Mr. Darcy.
He did not think of it as deference. He thought of it as trust, and it was that too; and Darcy was cleverer than he was and knew it and did not much conceal it; and on the strength of an understanding of the very first class Bingley had come to rely upon Darcy's judgment as upon something structural, like a beam.
Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of a great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own. Darcy was continually giving offense.
The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic.
Bingley had never met with pleasanter people or prettier girls in his life; every body had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful.
Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure.
Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.
Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so — but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they should not object to know more of.
Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as he chose.
---
Later, when Bingley had gone up and Mr. Hurst was asleep with his legs out, Miss Bingley did the accounts.
"The eldest is very sweet," she said. "Let us be quite fair to her. And the Longbourn Accord — Louisa, do you recall what Mrs. Long said of it?"
"Entailed," said Mrs. Hurst comfortably. "Heirs male."
"Heirs male, and five daughters, and the gentleman is one-and-fifty.
" Miss Bingley turned her bracelet round her wrist. "So.
Not a line at all, in five years or fifteen.
A candle in a window with the wax nearly out.
And before that — the mother is a Gardiner.
Which is to say, an attorney's daughter of Meryton, whose brother lives in Cheapside within view of his own warehouses.
There is no old blood in that house from any direction.
There is a small county Accord that will sever, and there are five girls who will not have so much as a parlor trick between them by the time they are thirty. "
"They dress very ill," said Mrs. Hurst.
"They dress as people dress who have three generations behind them and know it.
Really, it is not their fault, and I do not blame them in the least, and I hope I am not the sort of woman who—" She stopped, and began again, in a different voice.
"Mr. Darcy. You said nothing all evening.
Say something now, and settle it, for Charles will be at Longbourn by Thursday and I would rather he went knowing. "
Mr. Darcy was standing at the window with his back to the room, which was where he had spent most of the evening at the assembly also.
"There is no old blood in the house," he said. "You are correct."
"There! You see, Louisa."
"Their connections are, as you say, in trade and in the law.
" He did not turn round. "As, at two generations' distance, are your own; and as, at a rather shorter distance, are Bingley's; and it is a curious thing, Miss Bingley, how much more offensive a warehouse becomes when it is somebody else's. "
There was a silence of a quality not often achieved at Netherfield.
"I am sure," said Miss Bingley at last, with a laugh that came out at the wrong pitch, "that I did not mean—"
"No," said Mr. Darcy. "I do not think you did."
He wished them good night and went up.
And Miss Bingley sat some while with her bracelet in her fingers, being, though she would not have used the word about herself and could not have borne to hear it used, frightened — for she was six-and-twenty, and her fortune was twenty thousand pounds, and her line was one-and-thirty years old, and there is no amount of contempt for a Cheapside warehouse that will make a line older than it is, though she had spent eleven years trying it.