Chapter Twenty
Mr. Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his successful love; for Mrs. Bennet, having dawdled about in the vestibule to watch for the end of the conference, no sooner saw Elizabeth open the door and with quick step pass her toward the staircase, than she entered the breakfast-room, and congratulated both him and herself in warm terms on the happy prospect of their nearer connection.
Mr. Collins received and returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and then proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the result of which he trusted he had every reason to be satisfied, since the refusal which his cousin had stedfastly given him would naturally flow from her bashful modesty and the genuine delicacy of her character.
This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet; — she would have been glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had meant to encourage him by protesting against his proposals, but she dared not to believe it, and could not help saying so.
"But depend upon it, Mr. Collins," she added, "that Lizzy shall be brought to reason. I will speak to her about it myself directly. She is a very headstrong foolish girl, and does not know her own interest; but I will make her know it."
"Pardon me for interrupting you, Madam," cried Mr. Collins; "but if she is really headstrong and foolish, I know not whether she would altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my situation, who naturally looks for happiness in the marriage state.
If therefore she actually persists in rejecting my suit, perhaps it were better not to force her into accepting me, because if liable to such defects of temper, she could not contribute much to my felicity. "
"Sir, you quite misunderstand me," said Mrs. Bennet, alarmed. "Lizzy is only headstrong in such matters as these. In every thing else she is as good natured a girl as ever lived. I will go directly to Mr. Bennet, and we shall very soon settle it with her, I am sure."
She would not give him time to reply, but hurrying instantly to her husband, called out as she entered the library,
"Oh! Mr. Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar. You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will not have him, and if you do not make haste he will change his mind and not have her."
Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern which was not in the least altered by her communication.
"I have not the pleasure of understanding you," said he, when she had finished her speech. "Of what are you talking?"
"Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy."
"And what am I to do on the occasion? — It seems an hopeless business."
"Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him."
"Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion."
Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.
"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well — and this offer of marriage you have refused?"
"I have, Sir."
"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is not it so, Mrs. Bennet?"
"Yes, or I will never see her again."
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. — Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."
Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning; but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.
"What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, by talking in this way? You promised me to insist upon her marrying him."
"My dear," replied her husband, "I have two small favors to request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as may be."
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Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did Mrs. Bennet give up the point.
She talked to Elizabeth again and again; coaxed and threatened her by turns.
She endeavored to secure Jane in her interest, but Jane with all possible mildness declined interfering; — and Elizabeth sometimes with real earnestness and sometimes with playful gaiety replied to her attacks.
"Do not think me obstinate, mama. I am not."
"You are worse. You are clever." Mrs. Bennet's hands were shaking, which Elizabeth had seen perhaps four times in her life.
"I have had that said of me my whole life, that I am a silly woman and do not understand the world, and I did not mind it, and I do not mind it now, and I will tell you what I understand, Lizzy, that not one of you does.
There will be a morning in this house — I do not know the date of it and neither do you, and it may be twenty years off and it may be the eleventh of next month — when your father does not come down.
And on that morning there will be a knock at that door, and it will be a stranger, and he will be perfectly within his rights, and every one of you will walk out of the only warm place any of you has ever been in with nothing in your hands and nothing in your blood, and you will be five and thirty, or five and twenty, or fifteen.
And a door opened this week. It was a small, ridiculous, disagreeable door and I would not have chosen it for you, and it was the only one that has ever opened in two-and-twenty years, and you shut it in a quarter of an hour before breakfast because the man was tedious. "
Elizabeth stood very white.
"Mama," she said, "I know."
"You do not know. If you knew it you would have taken him."
"I know it better than you think," said Elizabeth, "and I still would not. And if I could tell you why, you would understand me in a moment, and I cannot, and that is the whole misery of it."
But Mrs. Bennet had already gone out of the room to look for Kitty, and did not hear the last of it, and Elizabeth was glad afterwards that she had not.
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Her father sent for her once more, late in the afternoon, when the house had settled into its sulks.
He was not reading. The library fire had gone low and he had not rung.
"Sit down, Lizzy." He waited until she had. "This morning, between the hours of ten and eleven, I did a thing I am not going to do again, and I find I want to tell somebody about it, and there is only you."
"Papa—"
"I considered it," said Mr. Bennet. "That is all.
I sat in this chair with your cousin's voice coming through two doors, and I considered whether I ought to tell you to accept him.
" He looked at the fire. "It would answer, you know.
That is the disgusting part of it. It is a perfectly sound arrangement.
He is not a brute, so far as one can tell; he is a bore, which is not the same and is a great deal commoner; and the house would go on, and your mother would have her rooms, and your sisters would keep what they have, and in thirty years' time there would be a Bennet-blooded man of God at that table telling somebody about closets.
I got as far as working out what I should say to you.
I had it quite well phrased. I am rather good at phrasing. "
Elizabeth did not move.
"And then I found that I could not do it," he said, "for a reason that does me no credit at all, which is not that it would be wrong, but that I should have had to watch it.
Every day. At my own table. I have been a spectator in this house for four-and-twenty years, Lizzy — it is the only trade I have ever been any good at — and I discovered this morning that there is one performance I will not sit through. "
He picked up his book, and did not open it.
"So you will have nothing when I die," said Mr. Bennet.
"Nothing at all, and it is my doing, and I have known it since before you could walk, and I have made a joke of it once a week for twenty years because the alternative was to sit in this room and think about it.
Well. I have now sat in this room and thought about it. It is much as I expected."
"Papa. Look at me."
"No," said her father, quite gently. "I do not think I shall, just now. Go and see if your mother wants anything; she will not, but she likes to be asked. And shut the door."
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Miss Lucas called soon after breakfast the next morning, and in a private conference with Elizabeth related the event of the day before.
"Mr. Collins," Elizabeth said, "made me an offer, and I refused him."
"So I gathered," said Charlotte, "from your mother, who told me before I was through the gate, and from Maria, who had it from your Hill, and from my own father, who is composing a speech of congratulation for Mr. Collins on his escape and will be very disappointed if he is not allowed to make it."
Elizabeth laughed for the first time in two days.
"Lizzy," said Charlotte, in an entirely different voice, "what happened at the ball?"
"Nothing happened at the ball."
"You went white in the second dance, and Mary Bennet came through that crowd like a woman going for a doctor, and Mr. Darcy of Pemberley stood against a window for four hours and could not stand up at the end of it, which I had from Mrs. Nicholls, who had it from the man who was sent for his carriage.
" Charlotte's face was perfectly calm. "I am not asking out of curiosity. "
"Then why are you asking?"
"Because I would like to know," said Charlotte, "what I am dealing with."
Elizabeth said, "Charlotte, I do not know what happened. I am not being close with you. I have asked Mary, and Mary has told me a great deal, and the sum of it is that something began and something stopped it, and neither of us can tell you what the second was."
"No," said Charlotte thoughtfully. "I dare say not."
She was quiet for a moment, and then said something that Elizabeth did not attend to for another eleven days.
"He is a great fool, your cousin, and he is not a wicked man, and he does exactly what he is told by a woman I have never met.
" Charlotte pulled on her glove. "Those three things together are worse than a villain, Lizzy.
A villain may be dealt with. A man who does what he is told cannot even be argued with, because you would have to argue with somebody who is not in the room. "
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Mr. Collins was cold and formal to Elizabeth for the rest of his stay, and made a point of addressing all his conversation to Mrs. Bennet, who received it with an anxiety that Elizabeth was ashamed to see.
He walked out a good deal.
And on each of those days, quite by accident, he met Miss Lucas — in the lane, at the stile by the church, in the road below Lucas Lodge — and Miss Lucas, whose kindness to him was a very seasonable relief after the mortifications he had endured at Longbourn, listened to him.
She listened for an hour on the Wednesday, and an hour and a half on the Thursday, and on the Friday she asked him three questions about Rosings and one about the parsonage, and let him talk from the church gate to her own door.
"You are very good," said Mr. Collins, "to interest yourself in the concerns of a man who is nothing to you."
"I am not particularly good," said Charlotte Lucas. "I am seven-and-twenty."
Mr. Collins, who had not the smallest idea what she meant by it, bowed, and said that her Ladyship was very fond of young women who spoke their minds.