Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases, and again during the chief of the day, was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen to Mr. Collins.
Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her.
"It keeps him in good humor," said she, "and I am more obliged to you than I can express.
" Charlotte assured her friend of her satisfaction in being useful, and that it amply repaid her for the little sacrifice of her time.
This was very amiable, but Charlotte's kindness extended farther than Elizabeth had any conception of; — its object was nothing less than to secure her from any return of Mr. Collins's addresses, by engaging them toward herself.
Such was Miss Lucas's scheme; and appearances were so favorable that when they parted at night, she would have felt almost sure of success if he had not been to leave Hertfordshire so very soon.
But here, she did injustice to the fire and independence of his character, for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House the next morning with admirable slyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw himself at her feet.
He was anxious to avoid the notice of his cousins, from a conviction that if they saw him depart, they could not fail to conjecture his design, and he was not willing to have the attempt known till its success could be known likewise.
The business was quickly settled. Miss Lucas perceived him from an upper window as he walked toward the house, and instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.
In as short a time as Mr. Collins's long speeches would allow, every thing was settled between them to the satisfaction of both; and as they entered the house, he earnestly entreated her to name the day that was to make him the happiest of men; and though such a solicitation must be waved for the present, the lady felt no inclination to trifle with his happiness.
The stupidity with which he was favored by nature, must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that establishment were gained.
Sir William and Lady Lucas were speedily applied to for their consent; and it was bestowed with a most joyful alacrity.
Mr. Collins's present circumstances made it a most eligible match for their daughter, to whom they could give little fortune; and his prospects of future wealth were exceedingly fair.
Lady Lucas began directly to calculate with more interest than the matter had ever excited before, how many years longer Mr. Bennet was likely to live; and Sir William gave it as his decided opinion, that whenever Mr. Collins should be in possession of the Longbourn estate, it would be highly expedient that both he and his wife should make their appearance at St. James's.
The whole family in short were properly overjoyed on the occasion. The younger girls formed hopes of coming out a year or two sooner than they might otherwise have done; and the boys were relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte's dying an old maid.
Charlotte herself was tolerably composed.
She had gained her point, and had time to consider of it.
Her reflections were in general satisfactory.
Mr. Collins to be sure was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary.
But still he would be her husband. — Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.
This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it.
---
She thought also, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, about the braiding.
There was nothing much to think about, and that was the whole of her advantage, and she had known it since she was about fifteen.
Sir William Lucas had a Warrant of the Crown, which is a fine thing and confers precedence and may be inherited and is worth, to the ground of England, precisely nothing.
Lady Lucas had come out of a Bedfordshire family with a small county Accord in it three generations back, of which what remained in her daughter was a little quickness with figures and a facility for remembering faces.
There was no line in Charlotte Lucas that any house in the kingdom would have crossed a room for.
Which meant that when she went up the aisle at Hunsford there would be nothing to merge, nothing to spend, and nothing whatever for the ground to take an interest in.
It would be a wedding; it would not be a braiding; and Mr. Collins, who had come into Hertfordshire under written instructions to find blood that would open a shy door, was going to walk out of it with a woman whose blood would not open a garden gate.
He did not know that. It had not occurred to him to ask.
Charlotte had understood within eleven minutes of the proposal that this was the one thing in the transaction she could never mention to anybody as long as she lived, since it would have made her look either very cunning or very pitiable, and she had a horror of both.
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Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been quitted by the Gardiners and Jane; but as he took up his abode with the Lucases, his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs. Bennet.
His marriage was now fast approaching, and she was at length so far resigned as to think it inevitable, and even repeatedly to say in an ill-natured tone that she "wished they might be happy. "
But that was afterwards. On the Saturday, the news came to Longbourn in the ordinary way, which was Lydia, at a run, in the middle of the morning.
Mrs. Bennet said that it was not true. Then she said that Lady Lucas had been laying a trap this fortnight past and she had seen it and said nothing out of delicacy.
Then she said that Charlotte Lucas would never have a day's health in that house.
Then she cried, and had to be taken up to lie down, and came down at four to say that she supposed people who liked plain wives were entitled to them.
Mr. Bennet observed, with the greatest composure, that he had never in his life been so much gratified by anything; that he had always considered Charlotte Lucas tolerably sensible, and was now happy to find that she was as foolish as his wife and more foolish than his daughter; and that he looked forward with real pleasure to the day when Mrs. Collins should be mistress of his library.
Jane said that she was sure Charlotte would be very happy, and that Mr. Collins was a respectable man, and that everybody must be allowed to know their own mind; and she said it twice, and then went upstairs, because she had had a letter from Gracechurch-street that morning and had been keeping her face in order since ten o'clock.
Elizabeth said nothing at all.
---
Charlotte came herself, on the Monday, and asked for her, and they walked out toward the Oakham mount.
"You are angry," said Charlotte.
"I am not angry."
"You have been unable to look at me since the gate."
Elizabeth stopped in the middle of the field.
"Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, — impossible!"
"Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman's good opinion, because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?"
"Charlotte — you cannot. You have listened to that man for a fortnight and you know what he is.
You told me yourself, in this very field, what a braiding is and what it costs and that it cannot be undone by consent or by law or by any court in this kingdom.
And you have gone into it with your eyes open with a man you cannot respect, in a parish belonging to a woman who—"
She stopped.
"Go on," said Charlotte.
"I cannot go on. I do not know enough to go on.
That is the whole of my difficulty, Charlotte, and it has been my difficulty for a fortnight, and I have not slept properly for a week.
" Elizabeth's voice was not steady. "You are going to Kent.
To her parish. To be within a lane's width of a woman who writes instructions in that man's pocket-book about how to get at a house, and who has kept her own daughter from swearing so much as a christening oath in nine-and-twenty years, and who will have you at her table twice a week for the rest of your life. "
"Yes," said Charlotte. "I know."
"Then why?"
"Because there is nothing in me for her to want," said Charlotte Lucas.
The wind went over the field.
"That is the answer, Lizzy, and you may have it, since you asked me plainly and I have never lied to you.
" She had her hands in her muff and her eyes on the hedge, as she always did when she said anything that mattered.
"Every one of you at Longbourn has something.
Jane has a thing so rare that nobody in Meryton has even got a word for it.
You have the sight. Mary has an ear that would be worth a great deal to somebody in a court of law, if she were a man, which she is not.
And I have a good head for accounts and a memory for faces, and there has not been a drop of anything else in my family since my great-grandmother, and my father's honor was handed to him by a gentleman with a sword in a room in London.
"So I am perfectly safe. Do you see? Not brave — safe.
I can go into that house and eat that woman's dinners twice a week for thirty years and she will look at me exactly once, on the first evening, and never trouble to look again.
There is nothing in me to take. It is the only advantage I have ever had over you in my life and I intend to spend the whole of it on a parsonage with a good southern aspect and a closet full of shelves. "
---
Elizabeth was crying, which she had not done in front of anybody since she was nineteen, and was extremely angry about it.
"Charlotte. Did you do this for me?"
Charlotte Lucas looked at her for a long moment.
"No," she said.
"Because if you—"
"No, Lizzy." Very flat. "I did it for a house with five bedchambers and four hundred a year and a pew of my own, and because I am seven-and-twenty and my father's fortune will be divided among five, and because in eleven years the only man who has ever proposed anything to me at all is that one.
I will not have you make it beautiful. If you make it beautiful I shall have to be grateful to you for the rest of my life and I would rather have the house. "
"Very well."
"Very well."
They walked on a little.
"He will not be at any ball in this county again," said Charlotte, to the hedge. "That is all. I mention it because you will hear a great deal about him at Christmas and I would rather you heard that first."
Elizabeth said nothing whatever, and did not trust herself to, and they went up the mount and came down the other side talking about the weather and Maria's new gown and whether Sir William would insist upon the wedding being at the church rather than the chapel; and by the gate they were nearly themselves again, and it was ten years before either of them mentioned that field to the other.
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"I hope you will think well of it in time," said Charlotte at the gate. "You will come and see us in the spring. I shall want you very much, and I shall write and beg, and you will be obstinate for a month and then you will come, because Jane will tell you that you ought."
"I shall come," said Elizabeth.
"You will not like Rosings."
"I do not expect to like Rosings."
"You misunderstand me," said Charlotte. "I mean that you will be seen at Rosings, and that a great deal will be made of you, and that her Ladyship will ask you eleven questions in the first quarter of an hour and remember all your answers.
" She opened the gate. "You have never once in your life been the only interesting person in a room, Lizzy, and you are not going to enjoy it as much as you suppose. "
She went home to Lucas Lodge to be congratulated by her mother for the ninth time that day.
And Elizabeth walked back to Longbourn across the fields, past the corner of Barrett's ground where the grass had gone the wrong color, which was now two hundred and twenty yards long and had reached the near side of the Meryton road, and which she did not look at, because she was thinking about her friend.