Chapter Seven
Mr. Bennet's property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother's fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his.
Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.
Four thousand pounds is a great deal of money and no line at all.
It will keep five women in a small house in a cheap county for a considerable time.
It will not buy back a single hour of what severs on the morning of the funeral, because there is nothing in England to buy it from: the ground does not sell, and the old courts that might have been argued with went away when Elizabeth's great-grandmother was a girl.
She had a sister married to a Mr. Philips, who had been a clerk to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in London in a respectable line of trade.
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The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to their aunt and to a milliner's shop just over the way.
The attention of the younger girls was particularly directed to the last object; and happy indeed was the day on which Mrs. Bennet learned that a regiment was to be quartered in the neighborhood for the whole winter, and Meryton the head quarters.
Their visits to Mrs. Philips were now productive of the most interesting intelligence.
Every day added something to their knowledge of the officers' names and connections.
Their lodgings were not long a secret, and at length they began to know the officers themselves.
Mr. Philips visited them all, and this opened to his nieces a source of felicity unknown before.
They could talk of nothing but officers; and Mr. Bingley's large fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of an ensign.
"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking," said Mr. Bennet one morning, "you must be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced."
Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer; but Lydia, with perfect indifference, continued to express her admiration of Captain Carter, and her hope of seeing him in the course of the day, as he was going the next morning to London.
"I am astonished, my dear," said Mrs. Bennet, "that you should be so ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think slightingly of any body's children, it should not be of my own however."
"If my children are silly I must hope to be always sensible of it."
"Yes — but as it happens, they are all of them very clever."
"This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree."
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Nobody in Meryton thought to ask what a regiment was doing there.
It had a colonel and a band and a paymaster and it took lodgings and ran up debts at the milliner's and stood about in the market place looking well, and that is what a regiment is; and if some of its officers were of an age and a manner not quite usual, and if the Colonel's second went out at odd hours with a corporal and no horses and came back at four in the morning with his boots ruined, then Meryton, which had the ball and the officers and the wonderful new interest of it all, did not inquire.
Lieutenant Denny was much admired. He was young, and had a good address, and danced willingly, and Lydia declared within a week that he was one of the pleasantest men she had ever met with.
He touched the lintel of the assembly rooms on the first evening, out of the habit of eleven months, and felt nothing at all.
He stood there rather longer than the man behind him thought necessary.
Then he went in and was charming for three hours, and got Miss Lydia Bennet a glass of negus, and laughed at everything she said, which was easy, and thought about the ninth stake at Selsey perhaps four times, which was fewer than the night before.
His mother had written to say that she was very glad he had been posted somewhere agreeable.
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Mr. Bingley's invitation to dinner was received by Jane in a note from his sister, and Mrs. Bennet had the great good fortune of a threatening sky.
"Can I have the carriage?" said Jane.
"No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night."
"That would be a good scheme," said Elizabeth, "if you were sure that they would not offer to send her home."
"Oh! but the gentlemen will have Mr. Bingley's chaise to go to Meryton; and the Hursts have no horses to theirs."
"I had much rather go in the coach."
"But my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure. They are wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are not they?"
"They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them."
"But if you have got them to-day," said Elizabeth, "my mother's purpose will be answered."
She did at last extort from her father an acknowledgment that the horses were engaged.
Jane was therefore obliged to go on horseback, and her mother attended her to the door with many cheerful prognostics of a bad day.
Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it rained hard.
Her sisters were uneasy for her, but her mother was delighted.
The rain continued the whole evening without intermission; Jane certainly could not come back.
"This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!" said Mrs. Bennet, more than once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own.
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Till the next morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity of her contrivance. Breakfast was scarcely over when a servant from Netherfield brought the following note for Elizabeth:
My dearest Lizzy,
I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday.
My kind friends will not hear of my returning home till I am better.
They insist also on my seeing Mr. Jones — therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear of his having been to me — and, excepting a sore throat and head-ache, there is not much the matter with me.
Yours,
"Well, my dear," said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note aloud, "if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness — if she should die — it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of Mr. Bingley, and under your orders."
"Oh! I am not at all afraid of her dying. People do not die of little trifling colds. She will be taken good care of. As long as she stays there, it is all very well."
Elizabeth said nothing, and folded the note, and went to the window.
She was afraid of something, though not of a sore throat, and she had no way of explaining it that would not have sounded like nonsense in that room.
Jane was ill, and Jane was in a strange house, and there were five people in that house — a woman who was anxious about her brother, a woman who was anxious about nothing in particular and never stopped, a man asleep, a man in love, and whatever Mr. Darcy was.
And Jane, lying in a bed in a room in the middle of them with a fever on her, would be doing what Jane had done every hour of her life since she was four years old, without deciding to and without being able to stop.
You cannot ask a fire not to warm a cold room. You may only take the room away from it.
There would be nobody there who knew what she was, and nobody who would think to sit further off, and Miss Bingley would come and be attentive at her bedside for an hour together and go away enormously refreshed, and say to her sister on the stairs how remarkably little trouble dear Jane was, even ill.
"I must go to Netherfield," said Elizabeth.
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"How can you be so silly," cried her mother, "as to think of such a thing, in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get there."
"I shall be very fit to see Jane — which is all I want."
"Is this a hint to me, Lizzy," said her father, "to send for the horses?"
"No, indeed. I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing, when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner."
"I admire the activity of your benevolence," observed Mary, "but every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required."
"We will go as far as Meryton with you," said Catherine and Lydia. Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off together.
"If we make haste," said Lydia as they walked along, "perhaps we may see something of Captain Carter, before he goes."
In Meryton they parted; the two youngest repaired to the lodgings of one of the officers' wives, and Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.
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Between the second field and the third there was a strip of ground perhaps thirty yards long where the grass had gone the wrong color.
She noticed it because she noticed things.
It was not blighted, and not burned, and not trampled; it was simply a different green from the green on either side of it — an ordinary, cheerful, unremarkable green, of the exact kind that grows in every field in Hertfordshire — and it ran in a line, straight as a hedge and without a hedge, from the corner of Barrett's ground to the water.
Elizabeth stopped for perhaps four seconds. It was very cold in that strip, and then it was not, and then she was over the stile and thinking about her sister.
She would remember it in April, in a parsonage in Kent, when she was made to remember a great many things.
Behind her, half a mile off and out of sight beyond the rise, a man in a plain coat who was not out of uniform for any reason he would have given to Meryton was walking the same line with his bare palm held out at the height of his hip, counting his paces, and finding — as he had found in four fields since Tuesday — that there was nothing there to feel, and that there ought to have been, and that whatever had gone quiet under this county had not been laid down by anybody the Crown had a record of.
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At Netherfield she was shown into the breakfast parlor, where all but Jane were assembled, and where her appearance created a great deal of surprise.
That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.
She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their brother's manners there was something better than politeness; there was good humor and kindness.
Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst nothing at all.
The former was divided between admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as to the occasion's justifying her coming so far alone.
He was also, though he did not say this either, doing the sum that she had not thought to do: three miles, unaccompanied, at eight in the morning, across four unfenced fields in a county whose wards nobody had renewed since the Restoration, in the week that a warding regiment had come north of the Thames for the first time in living memory.
He asked her nothing about it. He had no right to, and he was not a man who took rights he did not have.
But he went out at eleven and walked the same three miles back toward Longbourn with his hand at his side, and returned before dinner, and said nothing to anybody, and was noticeably grim over the fish.