Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-One
The discussion of Mr. Collins's offer was now nearly at an end, and Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings necessarily attending it, and occasionally from some peevish allusion of her mother.
As for the gentleman himself, his feelings were chiefly expressed, not by embarrassment or dejection, or by trying to avoid her, but by stiffness of manner and resentful silence.
He scarcely ever spoke to her, and the assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of himself, were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose civility in listening to him, was a seasonable relief to them all, and especially to her friend.
The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet's ill humor or ill health.
Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry pride.
Elizabeth had hoped that his resentment might shorten his visit, but his plan did not appear in the least affected by it.
He was always to have gone on Saturday, and to Saturday he still meant to stay.
After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr. Wickham were returned, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.
He joined them on their entering the town, and attended them to their aunt's, where his regret and vexation and the concern of every body was well talked over.
To Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged that the necessity of his absence had been self-imposed.
"I found," said he, "as the time drew near, that I had better not meet Mr. Darcy; — that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes might arise unpleasant to more than myself."
She highly approved his forbearance, and they had leisure for a full discussion of it, and for all the commendation which they civilly bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with them to Longbourn, and during the walk he particularly attended to her.
His accompanying them was a double advantage: she felt all the compliment it offered to herself, and it was most acceptable as an occasion of introducing him to her father and mother.
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Kitty walked at the back with the other officer, and said very little, and was told twice by Lydia to hold up her head.
At the second stile she stopped, and put her hand on the post, and said, "I shall come along in a moment."
"You shall come along now," said Lydia, "or we shall be all day."
"Lydia," said Elizabeth, "let her alone."
She went back and gave her sister her arm, and found that Kitty was cold through her sleeve and breathing rather quickly, and that she weighed nothing at all.
"Kitty. When did you last feel entirely well?"
Kitty thought about it, with the slow effort of a girl of seventeen who has never once been asked a question that required her to consult herself.
"Before Michaelmas," she said. "I think. It is only that I am always tired, Lizzy, and everybody says it is because I am a great baby, and perhaps it is."
"Nobody is going to say it to-day."
"Lydia will."
"Then Lydia will be dealt with," said Elizabeth, and made her sister laugh, which took a great deal longer than it used to.
Fifteen yards ahead of them Mr. Wickham was making Lydia scream with laughter about a horse.
He had walked at Kitty's side from the town as far as the first stile, and had then dropped back to Lydia; and he had put his bare hand over hers on the top rail of that first stile for two or three seconds while he handed her over it, and made some very pleasant remark about her bonnet; and Kitty had thought, going down the field, how kind it was of him to notice her when nobody ever did.
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Very soon after their return a letter was delivered to Miss Bennet; it came from Netherfield, and was opened immediately.
The envelope contained a sheet of elegant, little, hot-pressed paper, well covered with a lady's fair, flowing hand; and Elizabeth saw her sister's countenance change as she read it, and saw her dwelling intently on some particular passages.
Jane recollected herself soon, and putting the letter away, tried to join with her usual cheerfulness in the general conversation; but Elizabeth felt an anxiety on the subject which drew off her attention even from Wickham; and no sooner had he and his companion taken leave, than a glance from Jane invited her to follow her up stairs.
When they had gained their own room, Jane taking out the letter, said,
"This is from Caroline Bingley; what it contains, has surprised me a good deal. The whole party have left Netherfield by this time, and are on their way to town — and without any intention of coming back again. You shall hear what she says."
She then read the first sentence aloud, which comprised the information of their having just resolved to follow their brother to town directly, and of their meaning to dine that day in Grosvenor-street, where Mr. Hurst had a house.
The next was in these words. "I do not pretend to regret any thing I shall leave in Hertfordshire, except your society, my dearest friend; but we will hope at some future period, to enjoy many returns of that delightful intercourse we have known, and in the mean while may lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most unreserved correspondence. I depend on you for that."
To these highflown expressions, Elizabeth listened with all the insensibility of distrust; and though the suddenness of their removal surprised her, she saw nothing in it really to lament.
"It is unlucky," said she, after a short pause, "that you should not be able to see your friends before they leave the country.
But may we not hope that the period of future happiness to which Miss Bingley looks forward, may arrive earlier than she is aware, and that the delightful intercourse you have known as friends, will be renewed with yet greater satisfaction as sisters?
— Mr. Bingley will not be detained in London by them. "
"Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you —"
"When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the business which took him to London might be concluded in three or four days, but as we are certain it cannot be so, and at the same time convinced that when Charles gets to town, he will be in no hurry to leave it again, we have determined on following him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend his vacant hours in a comfortless hotel.
Many of my acquaintance are already there for the winter; I wish I could hear that you, my dearest friend, had any intention of making one in the croud, but of that I despair.
I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings, and that your beaux will be so numerous as to prevent your feeling the loss of the three, of whom we shall deprive you. "
"It is evident by this," added Jane, "that he comes back no more this winter."
"It is only evident that Miss Bingley does not mean he should."
"Why will you think so? It must be his own doing. — He is his own master. But you do not know all. I will read you the passage which particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves from you."
"Mr. Darcy is impatient to see his sister, and to confess the truth, we are scarcely less eager to meet her again.
I really do not think Georgiana Darcy has her equal for beauty, elegance, and accomplishments; and the affection she inspires in Louisa and myself, is heightened into something still more interesting, from the hope we dare to entertain of her being hereafter our sister.
I do not know whether I ever before mentioned to you my feelings on this subject, but I will not leave the country without confiding them, and I trust you will not esteem them unreasonable.
My brother admires her greatly already, he will have frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most intimate footing, her relations all wish the connection as much as his own, and a sister's partiality is not misleading me, I think, when I call Charles most capable of engaging any woman's heart.
With all these circumstances to favor an attachment and nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest Jane, in indulging the hope of an event which will secure the happiness of so many? "
"What think you of this sentence, my dear Lizzy?
" — said Jane as she finished it. "Is it not clear enough?
— Does it not expressly declare that Caroline neither expects nor wishes me to be her sister; that she is perfectly convinced of her brother's indifference, and that if she suspects the nature of my feelings for him, she means (most kindly!) to put me on my guard?
Can there be any other opinion on the subject? "
"Yes, there can; for mine is totally different. — Will you hear it?"
"Most willingly."
"You shall have it in a few words. Miss Bingley sees that her brother is in love with you, and wants him to marry Miss Darcy. She follows him to town in the hope of keeping him there, and tries to persuade you that he does not care about you."
Jane shook her head.
"Indeed, Jane, you ought to believe me. — No one who has ever seen you together, can doubt his affection."
"But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry elsewhere?"
"You must decide for yourself," said Elizabeth; "and if upon mature deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is more than equivalent to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you by all means to refuse him."
"How can you talk so?" — said Jane faintly smiling. — "You must know that though I should be exceedingly grieved at their disapprobation, I could not hesitate."
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There was one paragraph more, at the bottom of the second sheet, which Jane had not read out because it was of no consequence.
Charles has been in the strangest humor these two days and has taken it into his head that the house is damp, of all things, in November — and is writing to Morris about giving up the lease, though there are ten months of it to run and he has never in his life given up anything in his own person, and I am persuaded that the whole notion is not his at all.
But you will know as well as I from whom it comes.
Mr. D. has been out of spirits since the ball and says nothing to anybody, which with him is not remarkable, and has twice inquired of Charles whether the Longbourn family are to be in Hertfordshire all the winter, which is.
Here Miss Bingley had run out of the sheet, and had turned it and written her love and her signature across the top of the first page, and the sentence was never finished.
Jane thought the passage unkind and did not show it to her sister.
Elizabeth read the letter twice, three weeks afterwards, when it was lying in Jane's workbox at Gracechurch-street; and she read that paragraph with the completest contempt, as the fishing of a jealous woman; and she was right about the jealousy, and wrong about everything else, and did not learn how wrong until a wet afternoon in a parsonage in Kent.
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At Netherfield the shutters were up by the following Tuesday.
Mrs. Nicholls kept two maids and a boy, and the plate went to London, and the great door was locked, and the ballroom at the west end stood empty with the carpets rolled against the wall and the marks of a man's knees still in the dust at the window bay, where nobody swept.
On the Thursday Lieutenant Denny walked the whole ground floor of the empty house at Captain Harding's order, in his own time, with his right glove off and his hat in his hand like a man at a funeral.
He was a long while about the ballroom.
"Well?" said Harding, in the road.
"Somebody laid a very great ward on that room, sir. Within the last three weeks. It is the best work I have ever had my hand on, and I include Selsey." Denny was rather pale. "And then he took it up again."
"Took it up."
"Not broken. Not failed. Taken up, sir, deliberate, and quick — you can feel where it was done, it is like the end of a rope that has been cut instead of frayed — and then, so far as I can make out, the man who did it stood in that room for four or five hours afterwards holding the place together out of his own line, because there is a — " he stopped, looking for the word, and did not find a good one — "there is a stain of somebody in the floor by that window, sir.
All down that side. Like a man's weight in a chair he has sat in for twenty years. "
Captain Harding looked up at the shuttered front of Netherfield House for a while.
"Do we know who?"
"The gentleman from Derbyshire, sir. It could not be anybody else in this county. There is nobody else in this county at all."
"And where is the gentleman from Derbyshire now?"
"Gone to London on Tuesday," said Denny. "With the whole party. The house is shut up till Lady day at least, and they say the lease is to be given back."
Harding said nothing for a moment. Behind them, a mile off across the fields, the pale strip in Barrett's ground lay quiet in the winter light, a hundred and ninety yards of it now, uphill, three fields from the Meryton road.
"Write it out," he said. "Every word of that, and the measurements, and send it under seal to Horse Guards to-night.
And Denny — put in at the end, in your own hand, that in the judgment of the officer commanding this detachment the only competent line in the county has this week left it, and that we are eleven officers with about two whole gifts between us, and that there is going to be a review and a Christmas and a great many balls. "
"Sir. Will they send anybody?"
"No," said Captain Harding.