Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister as well by nature as education.
The Netherfield ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable.
Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger than Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips, was an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favorite with all her Longbourn nieces.
Between the two eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a very particular regard.
They had frequently been staying with her in town.
The first part of Mrs. Gardiner's business on her arrival, was to distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions.
When this was done, she had a less active part to play.
It became her turn to listen. Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of.
They had all been very ill used since she last saw her sister.
Two of her girls had been on the point of marriage, and after all there was nothing in it.
"I do not blame Jane," she continued, "for Jane would have got Mr. Bingley, if she could.
But, Lizzy! Oh, sister! It is very hard to think that she might have been Mr. Collins's wife by this time, had not it been for her own perverseness.
He made her an offer in this very room, and she refused him.
The consequence of it is, that Lady Lucas will have a daughter married before I have, and that the Longbourn estate is just as much entailed as ever.
The Lucases are very artful people indeed, sister.
They are all for what they can get. I am sorry to say it of them, but so it is. "
Mrs. Gardiner, to whom the chief of this news had been given before, in the course of Jane and Elizabeth's correspondence with her, made her sister a slight answer, and in compassion to her nieces turned the conversation.
Afterwards, when she was alone with Elizabeth, she spoke more on the subject.
"It seems likely to have been a desirable match for Jane," said she.
"I am sorry it went off. But these things happen so often!
A young man, such as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty girl for a few weeks, and when accident separates them, so easily forgets her, that these sort of inconstancies are very frequent. "
"An excellent consolation in its way," said Elizabeth, "but it will not do for us. We do not suffer by accident."
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Christmas at Longbourn was as it always was, and better than usual, because there were officers in it.
Mr. Wickham dined there twice, and was made much of, and had a manner with Mr. Gardiner that was exactly right — deferential without servility, and interested in the London trade in a way that Mr. Gardiner, who was accustomed to gentlemen who pretended to be interested in it, found unexpectedly agreeable.
Mrs. Gardiner watched him for two evenings and did not say anything for three days.
She watched other things also, being a woman who had raised four children of her own and had eyes in her head, and on the second morning she said to her sister:
"Fanny. What is the matter with Catherine?"
"Kitty? Nothing on earth is the matter with Kitty. She has a little cough. She has always had a little cough."
"She has not always had a little cough. She had none in June."
"Well, and it is December," said Mrs. Bennet, "and she will sit in drafts, and she frets, and she has always been the one that frets. Lydia has never had a day's illness in her life and they are but eighteen months apart, so you may see it is nothing but temper."
Mrs. Gardiner said no more about it to her sister.
She did say something to Elizabeth, on the Thursday, in the passage, in the low practical voice of a woman who has decided not to alarm anybody: that Kitty ought to be got to town in the spring and looked at by a proper man in Harley-street, and that if the thing were mentioned to Mrs. Bennet as an outing rather than as an illness it might be managed without a fortnight of hysterics.
Elizabeth said that she would see to it, and meant it, and did not do it, because in the spring a great many other things happened.
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But it was on the evening after Boxing-day, when the two of them sat late over the fire with the others gone up, that Mrs. Gardiner said the thing that mattered, and it went past Elizabeth like a coach in the dark.
They had been speaking of Derbyshire. Mrs. Gardiner had spent the greater part of her youth at Lambton, which is five miles from Pemberley, and had not been there in fifteen years, and had that evening the pleasure of finding a niece who wished to hear about it.
"Then you knew the family," said Elizabeth.
"I knew the outside of them, my dear, which is all anybody in a village knows and rather more than they suppose.
Old Mr. Darcy was very much respected. He came into the shop on his own feet, which is a thing people remember for forty years.
" Mrs. Gardiner turned her work over. "And I knew the steward, Mr. Wickham, by sight, and there was a boy. "
Elizabeth put down her needle.
"You knew him? You never said—"
"I did not know him. I saw him about the place when I was two-and-twenty and he was a child of eight or nine, and there is nothing in the world to tell you.
" She smiled at her niece's face. "I remember him because of the talk, that is all.
And you must understand that a village will talk about a great house the way other people talk about the weather; there is not a word of it that is evidence of anything. "
"What talk?"
"That the old gentleman meant to make him warden of the west ground," said Mrs. Gardiner, "and could not."
Elizabeth sat quite still.
"Could not?"
"So it was said. It was said a great deal, one summer — I think I must have been three-and-twenty — that Mr. Darcy had taken the boy out to the boundary three times, which is a thing that is done, and that the ground would not have him.
Three times, Lizzy. That is the part that was talked of.
Once is nothing; a child of nine may be frightened or tired or sickening.
Three times is a thing the servants counted, and the servants told the village, and the village said what villages say. "
"Which was?"
"That the land at Pemberley knew something the old gentleman did not," said Mrs. Gardiner comfortably, "and would not be argued with; and that it was a great pity, for he was a beautiful boy and everybody was fond of him.
And then we came away to town the year after, and I have not thought of it in fifteen years, and I should not have thought of it now if the young man had not sat at that table on Tuesday and told your uncle he was intended for the church. "
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Elizabeth said, after a moment, "Aunt, that is exactly the sort of thing old servants say."
"It is exactly the sort of thing old servants say."
"They said it because they wished him out of the house. There is always a party in a great house that resents a favorite, and a steward's boy who is petted by the master—"
"Very likely."
"—and it is a cruel thing to say of a child of nine, that the ground would not have him, as though a piece of land could sit in judgment on a boy who has done nothing at all.
" Elizabeth heard her own voice rising, and did not much like the sound of it, and went on anyway.
"He told me himself that it was said. He told me the whole of it, unprompted, at my aunt Philips's, and made no secret of it, and it has been used to hurt him his whole life.
If he were what such talk makes him, would he mention it? "
Mrs. Gardiner considered this.
"No," she said. "I do not think he would."
"Well then."
"I only observe," said Mrs. Gardiner, "that he mentioned it to you rather early in the acquaintance."
Elizabeth looked up sharply.
"My dear, I am not saying anything against him.
I liked him very much; he is the pleasantest young man I have met in a twelvemonth, and if he had five hundred a year I would not say a word to you on any subject.
What I am saying — and I shall say it once, because I am your aunt and it is my office — is this.
He has no money. You have none. A young man in that situation who is very charming is not wicked, but he is dangerous, and chiefly to himself.
Do not let him make you an object of talk.
And do not be drawn in by the pleasure of hearing about a great family, which is a pleasure I know something about, having spent five years at Lambton listening to it. "
"I am in no danger, aunt."
"Then that is settled, and we will have no more of it," said Mrs. Gardiner, "and you may tell me instead who this Mr. Darcy is that everybody in this house has abused for six weeks, for I remember a very silent little boy at Lambton church who used to be brought in late and taken out early, and I have often wondered what became of him. "
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The talk turned. It was midnight; the fire wanted making up; and Elizabeth went to bed with three-and-twenty separate arguments in her head, all of them good, and the whole of the Pemberley boundary walked three times over by a man who loved the boy and could not make the ground take him — which she had put away in the same drawer as the ground never took to me, because Mr. Wickham had told her about that drawer himself, and had told her what was in it, and had told her what to think of it, and she had believed him, and there was no more to be said.
It is a very great deal easier to disbelieve a stranger than to disbelieve oneself.
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The scheme for Jane going to London was settled on the Friday.
She was to go up with the Gardiners after the holidays, and to stay in Gracechurch-street; and Mrs. Bennet, who had opposed the plan for two days on the grounds that it took Jane out of the way of Mr. Bingley, was won over by being persuaded that it took Jane a great deal nearer to him.
"It is not that I have any expectation," said Jane, on the last night, sitting on the end of her sister's bed. "I want you to be very clear that I have none at all. Miss Bingley will call, or she will not call, and I shall be glad to see her either way."
"You are a shocking liar, Jane. It is the only fault you have and you have never been any good at it."
Jane laughed, and then was quiet for a while.
"Lizzy. Is it wrong of me to be glad to go?"
"Glad to go?"
"I have been so tired," said Jane, "since November.
It has not gone off. And it is worse in this house than it is at my aunt Philips's, and worse in the fields than in the house, and I do not want to say so, because it sounds like a girl complaining that she has been crossed in love, and I have been crossed in love, and everybody will say that is the whole of it.
" She smoothed the counterpane. "It is not the whole of it.
I do not know what else there is. But I should like to sleep in a street in London for two months with three thousand houses round me, and I am ashamed of how much I should like it. "
"Then go," said Elizabeth, "and sleep, and do not be ashamed. You may be as ashamed as you like in March."
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They went on the Monday.
On the same day the ——shire lost a private soldier called Fenn, of eleven years' service and a good character, who was sent from Meryton to Ware with a packet and did not arrive; and the horse came back on the Wednesday, unhurt, with the packet still on it and the near stirrup gone.
They searched three days. Captain Harding put out that the man had deserted, and applied the usual language to it in the returns, and stopped Lieutenant Denny in the yard on the Thursday evening and said, without preamble, "He went by the Barrett road. Nobody is to be told that."
"Sir, if we said it plainly — if the town knew that they were not to go past—"
"If this town is told plainly," said Harding, "then within a week there will be a hundred and forty people standing along the edge of that ground in the dark holding lanterns and looking at it, because that is what people do, Denny, that is exactly and invariably what people do."
He went in.
The next day the officers of the ——shire were at the assembly rooms, and Miss Lydia Bennet danced four dances and pronounced it the pleasantest evening of the whole Christmas.