Chapter Seventeen
Elizabeth related to Jane the next day, what had passed between Mr. Wickham and herself.
Jane listened with astonishment and concern; — she knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr. Bingley's regard; and yet, it was not in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham.
— The possibility of his having really endured such unkindness, was enough to interest all her tender feelings; and nothing therefore remained to be done, but to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each, and throw into the account of accident or mistake, whatever could not be otherwise explained.
"They have both," said she, "been deceived, I dare say, in some way or other, of which we can form no idea.
Interested people have perhaps misrepresented each to the other.
It is, in short, impossible for us to conjecture the causes or circumstances which may have alienated them, without actual blame on either side. "
"Very true, indeed; — and now, my dear Jane, what have you got to say in behalf of the interested people who have probably been concerned in the business? — Do clear them too, or we shall be obliged to think ill of somebody."
"Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.
My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father's favorite in such a manner — one, whom his father had promised to provide for.
It is impossible. No man of common humanity, no man who had any value for his character, could be capable of it.
Can his most intimate friends be so excessively deceived in him? oh! no."
"I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley's being imposed on, than that Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself as he gave me last night; names, facts, every thing mentioned without ceremony. If it be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his looks."
"It is difficult indeed — it is distressing. — One does not know what to think."
"I beg your pardon; — one knows exactly what to think."
Jane was quiet for a moment, folding a shawl she had already folded.
"Lizzy. When you say there was truth in his looks. You do not mean that you thought so. You mean that you looked."
"I do."
"And what did it tell you?"
"That he was not lying," said Elizabeth. "Not in the smallest particular. Jane, I have never in my life seen a thing so plain. He is telling the truth as he knows it, entire, to the bottom."
"Yes," said Jane slowly. "That is what I do not understand, and I have been trying since you came in. Because that is not the same thing, is it? As his being right."
Elizabeth opened her mouth.
"You have always said it yourself," Jane went on, in her mild way, without the least idea that she was doing anything at all.
"When you were sixteen and dreadful, you used to say that you could tell a liar in a room but not a fool, and that it was a great pity, because there were so many more of the second.
And a man may believe a thing entirely and have been told it by somebody.
Or have arrived at it himself, in the wrong order, when he was young. Or—"
"Jane."
"I only mean," said Jane, "that your gift tells you what a man is holding. It does not tell you where he got it."
Elizabeth stood at the window with her back to the room.
It was a very good objection. It was, she recognized with some annoyance, a great deal better than anything she had thought of herself; and she was in the act of assembling an answer to it, and had got as far as understanding that she had not got one, when Kitty came flying in to say that a carriage was at the gate and it was the Netherfield party, all of them, come in person.
The thought went out of Elizabeth's head like a candle in a draft, and did not come back for four months.
---
The two gentlemen and their sisters were shown in, and Bingley — who could have sent a servant with a card, and had spent some time that morning constructing reasons why he should not — delivered his invitation to the ball at Netherfield in person, and was very happy.
It was fixed for the following Tuesday.
The two ladies were delighted to see their dear friend again, called it an age since they had met, and repeatedly asked what she had been doing with herself since their separation.
To the rest of the family they paid little attention; avoiding Mrs. Bennet as much as possible, saying not much to Elizabeth, and nothing at all to the others.
Mr. Bingley looked at Jane a great deal.
She was quite well now. She had slept properly for six nights, and eaten, and taken the air, and she came into the room and the room settled the way a bird settles, and everybody in it was a little easier and nobody said so; and she sat down opposite him and was serene, and glad to see him, and perfectly kind, and exactly as glad and kind as she was to his sister Louisa.
He talked to her for half an hour, and enjoyed it more than anything that had happened to him in a fortnight, and went away obscurely troubled, and could not have said what about.
Mr. Darcy was not with them. Miss Bingley, asked after him by Mrs. Bennet with great civility, said that he was engaged.
"Engaged!" said Mrs. Bennet. "At Netherfield? In November?"
"He is engaged in the ballroom," said Miss Bingley, "and has been these two days, and has desired that nobody should go into it, and Charles has given orders accordingly, and I am sure I have no notion what he is about and have long since given over enquiring."
"He is doing something to the room," said Bingley cheerfully. "For the ward, you know. He would not let it alone."
"How very odd," said Mrs. Bennet.
"Is it?" said Bingley. "I dare say it is. He is generally right about that sort of thing, and I have found it saves a great deal of trouble to let him get on."
Elizabeth, who had been about to say something perfectly polite, found that she had not said it, and sat with the words in her mouth for some seconds while the conversation went past her.
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Elizabeth's spirits were so high on the occasion, that though she did not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins, she could not help asking him whether he intended to accept Mr. Bingley's invitation, and if he did, whether he would think it proper to join in the evening's amusement; and she was rather surprised to find that he entertained no scruple whatever on that head, and was very far from dreading a rebuke either from the Archbishop or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to dance.
"I am by no means of opinion, I assure you," said he, "that a ball of this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people, can have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing myself, that I shall hope to be honored with the hands of all my fair cousins in the course of the evening; and I take this opportunity of soliciting yours, Miss Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially. "
Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in.
She had fully proposed being engaged by Mr. Wickham for those very dances: — and to have Mr. Collins instead!
her liveliness had never been worse timed.
There was no help for it however. Mr. Wickham's happiness and her own was per force delayed a little longer, and Mr. Collins's proposal accepted with as good a grace as she could.
She was not the better pleased with his gallantry, from the idea it suggested of something more.
It now first struck her, that she was selected from among her sisters as worthy of being the mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.
The idea soon reached to conviction, as she observed his increasing civilities toward herself, and heard his frequent attempt at a compliment on her wit and vivacity; and though more astonished than gratified herself, by this effect of her charms, it was not long before her mother gave her to understand that the probability of their marriage was exceedingly agreeable to her.
Elizabeth however did not choose to take the hint, being well aware that a serious dispute must be the consequence of any reply.
---
Mary followed her upstairs.
She did it in her usual way, which was to arrive in a doorway and stand in it until she was noticed, and Elizabeth, who was in a very good humor and had a ball on Tuesday and a great deal to think about, said, "Well, Mary?" rather more kindly than usual.
"He asked you for the two first."
"He did. It is a great trial and I mean to bear it nobly."
"Lizzy," said Mary, "is it a binding-night?"
Elizabeth turned round.
"It is a private ball," she said, "at a hired house, given by a young man who has been in the county nine weeks.
Of course it is not a binding-night. There has not been a binding-night in this neighborhood since Aunt Philips was married, and that was at the assembly rooms, with the whole parish in it, and a settlement signed in the morning. "
"A binding-night is not a thing that is declared," said Mary.
"That is what everybody has wrong. It is only a room with a ward on it, and music, and two people standing up first, and enough of the county present that it may be said to have been done in the sight of the neighborhood.
Colwood is very clear. There are four conditions and none of them is that anybody should mean it. "
"Mary—"
"They have put a new ward on the room," said Mary. "You said so at dinner. You said Mr. Bingley said his friend would not let it alone."
Elizabeth stood with her hand on the back of the chair.
"That is nothing," she said. "That is a man being careful of a house that is not his."
"Very likely." Mary was looking at the carpet, as she always did.
"Only, the first two dances are the only ones that carry any weight in them at all, and the rest are nothing whatever, and everybody thinks it is the other way about because the first two are the dull ones.
And a man in orders, of an old parish, who has the keeping of the offices annexed to a living — standing up first, in a warded room, before the neighborhood, with a daughter of the blood of a house he is to come into—"
She stopped.
"Go on," said Elizabeth.
"It has a name," said Mary. "I have read it.
I cannot remember it, and it is not in the Discourse, it is in the other one, and I shall look for it.
" She raised her eyes for a moment, which she hardly ever did.
"I am not saying that he means anything by it, Lizzy.
I do not think he is clever enough to mean anything.
I am saying that it does not signify in the least whether he means it. "
Then she went away to her room, and Elizabeth heard her moving about over her head for a long while, taking books down.
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At Netherfield, in a long room with the carpets up and the chandeliers down and every window shuttered against the light, Mr. Darcy had been on his knees since Thursday.
He had done the threshold, which took four hours, and the four corners, which took a day and a half between them, and he was now at the window bay at the west end, where the old part of the house joins the new, and where there was — he had known it within a minute of coming into the room — a thinness the width of his two hands.
He had laid seventeen wards in his life. Two of them at Pemberley, which does not count, since a man's own ground helps him; the rest for other people, in other counties, at his own expense, without mentioning it to anybody.
This one was the worst ground he had ever worked on, and it was the ground of a ballroom in Hertfordshire, one mile from a village, in a county where nothing had ever needed mending.
He put his hand flat on the boards and gave it another hour's worth, and felt it take, and sat back on his heels in the dark with his ears ringing.
On Tuesday there would be a hundred people in this room for six hours.
He thought, without any particular emotion, that it would hold; and then, with a great deal more emotion than he was prepared to examine, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet would be inside it.