Chapter Twenty
Chapter Nineteen
The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn.
Mr. Collins made his declaration in form.
Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the observances which he supposed a regular part of the business.
On finding Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, and one of the younger girls together, soon after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words,
"May I hope, Madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honor of a private audience with her in the course of this morning?"
Before Elizabeth had time for any thing but a blush of surprise, Mrs. Bennet instantly answered,
"Oh dear! — Yes — certainly. — I am sure Lizzy will be very happy — I am sure she can have no objection. — Come, Kitty, I want you up stairs." And gathering her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth called out,
"Dear Ma'am, do not go. — I beg you will not go. — Mr. Collins must excuse me. — He can have nothing to say to me that any body need not hear. I am going away myself."
"No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. — I desire you will stay where you are." — And upon Elizabeth's seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about to escape, she added, "Lizzy, I insist upon your staying and hearing Mr. Collins."
Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction — and a moment's consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again, and tried to conceal by incessant employment the feelings which were divided between distress and diversion.
Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as soon as they were gone Mr. Collins began.
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"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections.
You would have been less amiable in my eyes had there not been this little unwillingness; but allow me to assure you that I have your respected mother's permission for this address.
You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken.
Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life.
But before I am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying — and moreover for coming into Hertfordshire with the design of selecting a wife, as I certainly did. "
The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him farther, and he continued:
"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish.
Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly — which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honor of calling patroness.
Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford — between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh's foot-stool — that she said, 'Mr. Collins, you must marry.
A clergyman like you must marry. — Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way.
This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her. '"
"And fourthly," said Mr. Collins.
Elizabeth's needle stopped.
"Fourthly, my fair cousin — and I mention it last, as being the least of the considerations that weigh with me, and by no means the one which has been uppermost in my own bosom — there is the peculiar situation of this estate, and the circumstance, which nobody can regret more sincerely than myself, that the ground of Longbourn has been in one blood four hundred years and is inclined to be shy.
" He inclined his head. "Her Ladyship, who considered the whole matter with a condescension I shall never forget, was of opinion that of the various remedies proposed by writers upon the subject, there is but one which is at once certain, respectable, and agreeable to all parties.
I need not name it. I have the happiness of addressing a young lady of that very blood, in that very house; and I flatter myself that the arrangement is not less advantageous to my fair cousins than to myself, since it converts what must otherwise be a most painful severance into a mere — as it were — continuation. "
He beamed.
"And thus, you see, the atonement I spoke of in my letter is not an empty form of words. Your mother, I am sure, apprehends it perfectly."
"My mother," said Elizabeth, "has never in her life had it explained to her by anybody who was not laughing."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Mr. Collins. At the ball on Tuesday. You asked me for the two first dances."
"I had that honor."
"Why the two first?"
Mr. Collins looked mildly surprised at so simple a question having so much made of it.
"Because her Ladyship recommended it," he said.
"Her Ladyship was most particular. She said — I have it in my pocket-book, and I could show you the very entry — that a private ball in a house lately warded, if the county be present and the two first dances properly secured, is in some parishes considered as good as a settlement, and that it would save the expence and delay of a license, of which she has a very poor opinion, licences being in her Ladyship's judgment a modern contrivance and a great encourager of imprudent matches. "
"And you did as she said."
"I always do as her Ladyship says," said Mr. Collins simply. "It has never once turned out ill."
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Elizabeth sat very still.
She had woken that morning with the whole of Tuesday flat and strange in her mind, and had spent an hour of the night persuading herself that a hot room and a bad partner and a great deal of negus will produce a giddiness in anybody; and she had very nearly succeeded; and it had all come apart now in about ninety seconds, in the little parlor at Longbourn, over a piece of needlework, with the pigeons on the roof outside.
He had done it deliberately.
That was not, she found, the frightening part.
The frightening part was that he had done it deliberately and did not know what he had done — that a woman two counties away had written a line in a pocket-book, and a foolish man had carried it into a warded room and performed it exactly, the way he had put up the shelves in his closets; and that if Mr. Darcy of Pemberley had not been standing at the west end of that room for reasons of his own, she would this morning be —
She did not finish the sentence. She never afterwards finished it, in eleven years.
"Mr. Collins," she said, and her voice came out perfectly steady, which surprised her very much, "you forget that I have made no answer.
Let me do it without further loss of time.
Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me.
I am very sensible of the honor of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them. "
"I am not now to learn," replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time.
I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long. "
"Upon my word, Sir," cried Elizabeth, "your hope is rather an extraordinary one after my declaration.
I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time.
I am perfectly serious in my refusal. — You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so.
— Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation. "
"Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so," said Mr. Collins very gravely — "but I cannot imagine that her Ladyship would at all disapprove of you.
And you may be certain that when I have the honor of seeing her again I shall speak in the highest terms of your modesty, ?conomy, and other amiable qualifications. "
"Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary.
You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the compliment of believing what I say.
I wish you very happy and very rich, and by refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise.
In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn estate whenever it falls, without any self-reproach.
This matter may be considered, therefore, as finally settled. "
And rising as she thus spoke, she would have quitted the room, had not Mr. Collins thus addressed her,
"When I do myself the honor of speaking to you next on this subject I shall hope to receive a more favorable answer than you have now given me; though I am far from accusing you of cruelty at present, because I know it to be the established custom of your sex to reject a man on the first application, and perhaps you have even now said as much to encourage my suit as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the female character. "
"Really, Mr. Collins," cried Elizabeth with some warmth, "you puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as may convince you of its being one."
"You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course.
My reasons for believing it are briefly these: — It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.
My situation in life, my connections with the family of De Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favor; and you should take it into farther consideration that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you.
Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications.
As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females. "
"I do assure you, Sir, that I have no pretension whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
I thank you again and again for the honor you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible.
My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer?
Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart. "
"You are uniformly charming!" cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; "and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of being acceptable."
To such perseverance in wilful self-deception Elizabeth would make no reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew.
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She did not go to her mother, whom she could hear in the hall already, nor to Jane, who would have been kind about the wrong thing.
She went up two flights to the cold little room over the porch, where Mary Bennet sat with her feet on a footstool and three books open on the bed, and shut the door behind her.
"Mary. I want to know about Tuesday, and I want the whole of it, and I am not going to laugh, and if anybody calls up the stairs we are not going down."
Mary put her finger in the page.
She did not look pleased, exactly. She had waited a long while to be asked something, and now that it had come, she was frightened; and she said, in her flat voice, "You had better sit on the bed, then. It takes a while."
It took forty minutes.
The essential of it was short, and Mary gave it first, because she had discovered at nineteen that people will not wait for the reasoning: an acknowledgment is not a contract and cannot be made by accident complete.
What had begun on Tuesday had not finished.
Elizabeth was not bound. Nothing had been given away.
"Then it does not signify," said Elizabeth.
"I did not say that." Mary turned the book round on her knee, though her sister could not read it upside down and would not have understood it right way up.
"Harrow says — and Colwood says the same thing in a note, and he is very grudging about it — that the ground does not forget having been asked.
It is not that a mark is left upon you. There is no mark.
It is that a question was put in that room, out loud, in front of the county, and it was not answered, and questions of that kind are not usually put once. "
Elizabeth said nothing.
"He will ask you again," said Mary. "Not in words.
He is going away on Saturday and he will come back at Easter or he will not come back at all, and either way there will be another warded room somewhere with music in it, and he does not have to understand any part of it, Lizzy. He only has to be told again."
"By Lady Catherine."
"By anybody," said Mary. "But yes. By her."