Chapter Twelve
In consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the next morning to her mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for them in the course of the day.
But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which would exactly finish Jane's week, could not bring herself to receive them with pleasure before.
Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at least not to Elizabeth's wishes, for she was impatient to get home.
Mrs. Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly have the carriage before Tuesday; and in her postscript it was added, that if Mr. Bingley and his sister pressed them to stay longer, she could spare them very well.
Against staying longer, however, Elizabeth was positively resolved — nor did she much expect it would be asked; and fearful, on the contrary, of being considered as intruding themselves needlessly long, she urged Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley's carriage immediately, and at length it was settled that their original design of leaving Netherfield that morning should be mentioned, and the request made.
The communication excited many professions of concern; and enough was said of wishing them to stay at least till the following day to work on Jane; and till the morrow their going was deferred.
Miss Bingley was then sorry that she had proposed the delay, for her jealousy and dislike of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.
The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were to go so soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that it would not be safe for her — that she was not enough recovered; but Jane was firm where she felt herself to be right.
To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence — Elizabeth had been at Netherfield long enough.
She attracted him more than he liked — and Miss Bingley was uncivil to her, and more teasing than usual to himself.
He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behavior during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it.
Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her.
It was, he considered afterwards, the longest half hour of his adult life, and he had once spent a night in a mine in Derbyshire with two men who were probably going to die.
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On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable to almost all, took place.
Miss Bingley's civility to Elizabeth increased at last very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane; and when they parted, after assuring the latter of the pleasure it would always give her to see her either at Longbourn or Netherfield, and embracing her most tenderly, she even shook hands with the former.
— Elizabeth took leave of the whole party in the liveliest spirits.
They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother.
Mrs. Bennet wondered at their coming, and thought them very wrong to give so much trouble, and was sure Jane would have caught cold again.
— But their father, though very laconic in his expressions of pleasure, was really glad to see them; he had felt their importance in the family circle.
The evening conversation, when they were all assembled, had lost much of its animation, and almost all its sense, by the absence of Jane and Elizabeth.
"I am glad you are come back, Lizzy," he said, from behind the library door, without getting up.
That was the whole of it. It was, she reflected, a good deal more than most fathers managed, and considerably less than she could have done with.
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They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature; and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of thread-bare morality to listen to.
"I have been reading," she said, "in Colwood's Discourse Upon the Binding Word — it is in father's library, though he says nobody has cut the pages since his grandfather — and there is a chapter upon oaths sworn in ignorance, which is very curious.
Colwood holds that a binding taken by a person who does not know that it is a binding is binding notwithstanding.
He compares it to a debt contracted by a minor, which the law will sometimes void; only the ground is not a court of law, and voids nothing, and does not care in the least whether you understood the words when you said them. "
"Very true, Mary," said Kitty.
"He gives an instance of a young woman in Suffolk in the last century who—"
"Mary, my love," said Mrs. Bennet, "not before dinner."
Mary shut the book and put it under her arm and said nothing else about it, and it was in her room on the shelf above her wash-stand for another nineteen months, and nobody read it.
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Catherine and Lydia had information for them of a different sort.
Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle; a private had been flogged; and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.
"He is going to be married!" cried Lydia. "Only think! And to a girl not above sixteen, they say, though I am sure Denny said seventeen. We shall have a wedding, and she will be at every ball, and I mean to be her particular friend from the very first day."
"And what was the private flogged for?" said Elizabeth.
"Oh! that was nothing at all. Only it was rather droll, Lizzy, and you will laugh.
" Lydia set down her tea. "He was found in a field.
In the middle of the night — at three in the morning, if you please — sitting down in the middle of Barrett's long field with his coat off and his boots off and his feet quite bare, and no more notion of how he came there than the man in the moon.
He kept saying that he had been called for.
Called for! And they asked him by whom, and he could not say, and then he cried, which for a man of six foot two is the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of, and Captain Carter says the whole mess was in fits. "
"And for that he was flogged."
"For being out of quarters, stupid. It is very serious, being out of quarters, though I am sure I do not see why, when there is nothing whatever to do in Meryton at three in the morning.
" Lydia yawned. "And now they have all been ordered not to go past the mill after dark, which is the greatest nonsense in the world, because that is exactly where the good walk is, and Denny says he shall pay no attention to it at all, and no more shall I. "
"Lydia."
"Well, I shan't. And there is to be a review on the twenty-sixth."
Elizabeth looked at her sister, who was fifteen, and eating a piece of cake, and entirely happy.
"Lydia," she said, "if you are ever out that way after dark, I want you to promise me—"
"Lord, Lizzy, you are grown as bad as Mary."
Kitty laughed, and Lydia laughed, and Mrs. Bennet said that a review was very good news indeed and that she had always thought a red coat became a man wonderfully, and Elizabeth got no promise, and did not think of it again for eleven weeks.
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They had come home in Mr. Bingley's chaise, by the road, which is a mile further round than the fields.
Half a mile short of Longbourn the road runs down through Barrett's ground toward the water, and there the horses, which were good horses and well used to that road, put back their ears and came to a stand.
The coachman spoke to them and got nothing. He got down, and took the near leader by the head, and led them forward eleven or twelve yards over a piece of road that looked exactly like every other piece of road in Hertfordshire, and got up again, and they went on perfectly well.
"Beg pardon, ma'am," he said, over his shoulder. "They don't like this bit."
"Have they not been down it before?" said Jane.
"Every day of their lives, ma'am."
Jane said something pleasant and left it. She was tired; she had been tired since Tuesday in a way that sleep was not touching; and she had not said so to anybody, because there was nothing to say. I am tired is not an illness. It is what everybody is.
Elizabeth put her head out of the window and looked back.
The pale strip of ground was where it had been, running down from the corner to the water, and she was quite sure of two things: that it was the same strip she had crossed on foot on Tuesday morning, and that it had not, on Tuesday morning, reached the road.
She sat back and looked at her gloves and told herself that she had not measured it, that nobody measures a piece of grass, that she had crossed it in a hurry and been thinking of Jane, and that a person who begins to keep an account of the color of fields will end by keeping an account of a great many other things and will be tiresome about all of them.
Then she said, "Jane. When you were ill. Did it seem to you at all that—"
"Yes," said Jane.
Elizabeth waited.
"I do not know how to finish that sentence either," said Jane, "and I have been trying for five days.
" She was looking out of the other window, at nothing.
"It is like when one has been holding a door shut against somebody, and they stop pushing, and one goes on standing there because one cannot be certain they have gone away. "
"Who is they?"
"There is nobody. That is the difficulty. There is nobody at all, Lizzy, and I am so very tired, and I would be obliged if you would not tell Mama, because she will send for Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones will bleed me, and I do not think that would answer."
The chaise turned in at the gate.
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A little before six, Lieutenant Denny rode down the same road at a walk, being on no particular errand and having been sent by no particular person, in a plain coat, with his right glove off.
He stopped where the horses had stopped.
Then he got down and walked the pale ground from the corner of Barrett's field to the water with his bare palm out at the height of his hip, counting his paces aloud in a low voice, the way he had counted them along nine miles of Sussex for eleven months.
At the end of it he stood a while, doing sums he was not good at.
Then he rode back into Meryton and wrote out a return in a very neat hand, in which he stated that the affected ground now measured one hundred and forty yards, that it had measured thirty-one on the ninth of November, and that on his own estimate — which he begged leave to say was worth very little, his gift being now materially reduced — it was widening at something above nine yards in the week and had begun to move uphill, toward the town.
He gave it to Captain Harding at eight o'clock, and Harding read it standing at the window, and then folded it and put it in his coat and said, "Thank you, Denny. Go to the assembly."
"Sir?"
"There is an assembly on Thursday and you are down for it, and Miss Lydia Bennet will be looking for you, and if the officers of this regiment stop dancing, this town will begin to ask why we are here." Harding did not turn round. "Wear the red coat. Be charming. It is an order."
Lieutenant Denny went to the assembly on Thursday and danced every dance and was thought by everybody to be the pleasantest young man in Meryton.