Chapter Eight
At five o'clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half past six Elizabeth was summoned to dinner.
To the civil inquiries which then poured in, and among which she had the pleasure of distinguishing the much superior solicitude of Mr. Bingley's, she could not make a very favorable answer.
Jane was by no means better. The sisters, on hearing this, repeated three or four times how much they were grieved, how shocking it was to have a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked being ill themselves; and then thought no more of the matter.
When dinner was over, she returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room.
Her manners were pronounced to be very bad indeed, a mixture of pride and impertinence; she had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty. Mrs. Hurst thought the same, and added,
"She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild."
"She did indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very nonsensical to come at all! Why must she be scampering about the country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair so untidy, so blowsy!"
"Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office."
"Your picture may be very exact, Louisa," said Bingley; "but this was all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well when she came into the room this morning. Her dirty petticoat quite escaped my notice."
"You observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure," said Miss Bingley; "and I am inclined to think that you would not wish to see your sister make such an exhibition."
"Certainly not."
"To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ancles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum."
"It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing," said Bingley.
"I am afraid, Mr. Darcy," observed Miss Bingley in a half whisper, "that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine eyes."
"Not at all," he replied; "they were brightened by the exercise."
A short pause followed this speech, and Mrs. Hurst began again.
"And there is another thing in it that nobody has said, and I shall say it, for it is not unkindness but simple fact.
No woman of any line at all would have crossed Barrett's fields on foot this month.
She would not have needed telling. She would have got to the second stile and her own blood would have turned her round.
" Mrs. Hurst spread her hands. "That is what we mean, Charles, when we say no old family. It is not the mud."
"And what," said Mr. Darcy, "is in Barrett's fields?"
Mrs. Hurst was somewhat at a loss. "I am sure I do not know. Nothing. I speak generally."
"You spoke very particularly. You named the field.
" He was turning the stem of his glass and did not look up.
"I walked it at eleven this morning. I should be glad to know what it was that you expected her blood to have told her, since mine told me nothing whatever, and I have been given to understand that mine is tolerably old. "
Mrs. Hurst laughed, and said something about his being too droll, and the subject was got away from with the skill of a woman who has been getting away from subjects for twenty years.
Miss Bingley returned to the charge with the Cheapside uncle, and was more successful, everyone being glad of it.
"I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet, she is really a very sweet girl, and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with such a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no chance of it."
"I think I have heard you say, that their uncle is an attorney in Meryton."
"Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside."
"That is capital," added her sister, and they both laughed heartily.
"If they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside," cried Bingley, "it would not make them one jot less agreeable."
"But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world," replied Darcy.
To this speech Bingley made no answer; but his sisters gave it their hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of their dear friend's vulgar relations.
---
With a renewal of tenderness, however, they returned to her room on leaving the dining parlor, and sat with her till summoned to coffee.
Elizabeth let them in because there was no possible way to keep them out, and stood by the window with her hands behind her back and counted the minutes, and when they had gone at last she shut the door and came and knelt by the bed.
Jane's hands were cold. That was the thing nobody else would have thought to notice, in a room with a fire in it and a fever in the bed: her hands were cold as stones out of a stream, and had been cold since morning, and grew colder when there was anybody in the room and warmed a little when there was not.
"You must not let them sit with me," said Jane, without opening her eyes.
"I know it."
"I do not mind it. It is only that it goes on rather, and I cannot—"
"I know. Be quiet."
"Miss Bingley is very unhappy," said Jane, in a small clear voice, "under all of it. Did you know? She is the unhappiest person in this house by a long way, and she has been unhappy so long that it has got into the bones of her, and she came and sat by me for one hour and I am so tired, Lizzy—"
"Yes."
"—and she is kind to me. That is what I cannot make anybody understand. She is quite kind to me and she does not know she is doing anything at all."
Elizabeth put her sister's hands between her own and held them there.
---
The evening below was got through by cards, which Elizabeth declined on coming down, taking a book instead, upon which Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.
"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."
"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader and has no pleasure in anything else."
"I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth; "I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things."
Miss Bingley, having exhausted the subject of her brother's library and the ball he meant to give, arrived by the usual road at Miss Darcy.
"How much of a woman she is grown! Such a countenance, such manners, and so extremely accomplished for her age! Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite."
"It is amazing to me," said Bingley, "how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are."
"All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?"
"Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover skreens and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished."
"Your list of the common extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too much truth.
The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a skreen.
But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general.
I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished. "
"Nor I, I am sure," said Miss Bingley.
"Then," observed Elizabeth, "you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman."
"Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it."
"Oh! certainly," cried his faithful assistant, "no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved. "
"And she must be able to hold a room," added Mrs. Hurst comfortably. "Not by talking. Any woman may talk. I mean hold it — so that when she goes out of it, it is duller, and nobody can say why."
"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."
"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women," said Elizabeth. "I rather wonder now at your knowing any."
"Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?"
"I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united.
" She set the book down in her lap. "But that was not my objection, and I think you know it was not.
Let us take Mrs. Hurst's article, since it is the honest one.
To hold a room. Tell me, sir — can it be learned? "
Mr. Darcy did not answer at once.
"Because the languages may be learned," said Elizabeth, "by anybody, with a master and enough money and a great deal of dull work.
And the drawing, and the pianoforte, after a fashion.
My sister Mary has practiced one concerto four hundred times and she plays it better than any woman I have ever heard, and when she has finished, the room is exactly as dull as it was before, and everybody talks through it, and she knows they do.
She has known it since she was eleven. And you would none of you call her accomplished. "
"Lizzy—" said Bingley, distressed.
"You would not. You would call her diligent.
" Elizabeth's voice was perfectly pleasant.
"So I put it to you plainly, and I do not mean it as an impertinence, though I am aware it will be taken as one.
When you say that a woman is accomplished, do you mean that she has done anything at all?
Or do you only mean that she was born with a thing that cannot be got, and has since been taught to bring it into a drawing-room and set it down where the light falls on it? "
There was a silence.
"Miss Bennet," said Miss Bingley, with a laugh, "is very fond of making little speeches."
"That is a fair hit," said Elizabeth, "and I withdraw nothing."
"Nor should you," said Mr. Darcy.
Everybody looked at him.
He was standing by the fire, and he seemed for a moment on the point of saying something considerable; and then he said, "It is a just distinction, and it is not usually made, and I have nothing to answer to it tonight," and bowed slightly, and took up a candle, and went to the door.
Miss Bingley talked for some time afterwards about the impossibility of arguing with people who mistake rudeness for cleverness, and was not attended to by anybody, including herself.
---
Mr. Darcy did not go up directly.
He stood a while at the foot of the great stairs with the candle in his hand, because Pemberley had taught him a habit that he could not put off in another man's house: to know, before he slept, what the building was doing.
Netherfield was doing something.
Not much. Not badly. It was a good enough house and it had been standing a hundred and forty years and the ground under it was ordinary Hertfordshire ground, and there was nothing in it that any sensible man would sit up over.
But there was a — drag. Low down and westward, under the cellars and out past them, in the direction of the fields he had walked that morning: a long slow pull, like a current under still water, of the kind that does not trouble a strong swimmer and drowns a tired one.
And upstairs, in the second room on the west passage, somebody was pulling back.
He stood there for a considerable time.
She was not doing it deliberately; he knew that much; nothing done deliberately is that steady.
She had been doing it since she arrived in the rain, all through the fever and the visits and the arrowroot and Miss Bingley's kindness, without waking to it and without stopping — a young woman with no training, no notion, and no idea in the world that there was anything under Hertfordshire to hold, holding it.
Because the room was cold, and she made rooms warm. That was all. That had always been all.
Mr. Darcy went up to bed. In the morning he wrote a letter to a man in London whom he had not written to in four years, and did not mention it to anybody in the house.