Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jane's first letter from Gracechurch-street was written on the third day, and was chiefly about the journey, and the children, and a cap her aunt had bought; and it contained one sentence which Elizabeth read four times.
I slept nine hours on the first night and eight on the second, and woke both mornings without that heaviness, and I do not mean to say anything more about it because I am determined not to be a woman who writes about her health, but I wanted you to know, because you were kind about it and nobody else was.
She had been in town a fortnight before she wrote about Miss Bingley.
I am going to Grosvenor-street this morning. I have been three days getting up the courage, which is very foolish, since Caroline was so pressing about our correspondence that I am sure she will think it strange I did not come at once.
And then, four days later:
I called. She was not at home; or rather she was at home, for I am nearly certain I saw Mrs. Hurst at an upper window as I went away, though I would not swear to it and shall not mention it to my uncle. I have written a note to say that I called. Do not be angry, Lizzy. There are a hundred reasons.
Elizabeth was angry for both of them and said so at some length in the next post.
Four weeks passed. Then Miss Bingley came to Gracechurch-street, and stayed a quarter of an hour, and it was a fortnight before Jane could write about it at all.
My dear Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in her better judgment, at my expence, when I confess myself to have been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard for me.
But, my dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do not think me obstinate if I still assert, that considering what her behavior was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion.
She came, and she was uncomfortable the whole time, and she said that she was sorry not to have called before, and that she had been so much engaged; and she looked at the room twice, and at my uncle's book-case, and out of the window at the street.
And when I asked after her brother she said that he was very well and a great deal with Mr. Darcy and Miss Darcy, and she looked at me while she said it, and then she looked away.
He knows I am in town, Lizzy. She told me so, quite plainly, in the middle of something else, and I understood afterwards that it had been the object of the whole visit — that she had come three miles in a cold morning to make certain I knew that he knew, and had not come.
I do not blame him. He is not bound to me by any word or look that could be brought against him in any court in the world, and I have gone over every one of them, which I ought not to have done and did.
If he does not care for me I would rather know it.
Only I wish somebody would tell me why I was so certain in November, because I was certain, Lizzy, and I am not a fanciful person, and I have never once in my life been certain about anything else.
Elizabeth read that passage standing up in the hall with her bonnet still on, and went out into the garden and walked to the paddock and back twice before she trusted herself to go in to her mother.
---
Miss Bingley's visit was returned by nobody, and the correspondence ceased.
Mrs. Bennet said a great many things about Bingley for a fortnight and then, with the practical cruelty of a woman with four other daughters, stopped.
And in Meryton, in the third week of January, Miss Mary King came into ten thousand pounds.
Her grandfather died at Ware after a short illness, and left her the whole of it, and within a week she had come to stay with her uncle in the town and had appeared at the assembly in mourning that everybody agreed was a great deal more becoming than her ordinary clothes.
Mr. Wickham was at her side by the second dance.
Elizabeth saw it happen, and had the honesty to be more amused than injured.
She had not been in love with him; she had thought about him a great deal, which is a different complaint and recovers faster; and by the end of the evening she had arranged the whole business in her mind under the head of a handsome young man must have something to live on, and had said so to Charlotte, who was in the last fortnight of being Charlotte Lucas and had other things to think about.
"He is very sudden," was all Charlotte said.
"He is very poor. It is the same thing and it is not a crime."
"No," said Charlotte. "It is not a crime."
Lydia declared that Mary King was a nasty little freckled thing and that she wondered at Wickham's taste, and said so loudly and often enough that it got round Meryton in nine days and reached Miss King herself, who was seventeen, and cried about it, and had nobody to tell either.
Kitty said nothing at all about it, and stopped going into the town.
---
Elizabeth found her one afternoon in the back parlor with a piece of unstarted work in her lap.
"Kitty."
"I am not crying about him," said Kitty. "I hope you do not think that I am crying about him, because I am not, and Lydia has been saying it all week and I am sick of it. I did not think he liked me particularly. Nobody thinks anybody likes them particularly, when there is Lydia in the room."
"Then what is it?"
Kitty was silent for a while.
"He was kind to me," she said. "That is all.
He talked to me on the road that day when nobody else did, and he handed me over the stile at the second field, and he asked me about my cough — Lizzy, he was the only person in the whole world who asked me about my cough — and I have been telling myself since Michaelmas that at least there was one person, and now there is not, and I do not think there was ever one person at all.
I think he asks everybody. I think it is a thing he does. "
Elizabeth sat down beside her sister and did not say anything for a while, which was the correct thing, and which she had learned from Jane and had never once managed before that afternoon.
"He does ask everybody," she said at last. "But I did not ask you, and I ought to have, and I am asking now."
"It is worse in the mornings," said Kitty.
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Mr. Collins came back into Hertfordshire in the second week of February, and the wedding was on the Thursday.
Elizabeth stood up with her friend. The church was cold and full of Lucases, and Sir William made a speech at the breakfast in which he mentioned St. James's twice, and Mrs. Bennet was civil throughout in a manner that cost her more than anybody there could have understood, and cried in the carriage going home and said it was the cold.
Charlotte Collins went into Kent on the Friday.
She wrote at the end of the month: a good, dry, entirely characteristic letter about the parsonage, and the poultry, and the road, and the shelves in the closet, which were exactly where they had been described. In the middle of the second sheet, in the same even hand, was this:
I have dined at Rosings three times. Her Ladyship is everything I was told and a great deal more of it.
She asked me forty questions on the first evening, and I answered them all, and by the second course she had put me down as a sensible woman of no family whatever and has not looked at me since with any particular attention, which is precisely what I wanted and I have had it.
You may tell your sister Mary, if she is interested in such things, that Miss de Bourgh does not speak in company, at all, ever; not one word in three evenings; and that when the servants bring her anything her mother answers for her.
Come at Easter. I ask it in earnest. My father and Maria come in March, and if you will come with them I shall be very glad, and if you will not I shall write again in a fortnight and ask you less politely.
---
It was Mary who put the last of it together, and she did it in the still-room, over a jar of blackberry cordial, in the third week of March, and Elizabeth remembered it afterwards with painful exactness.
"Lizzy. What is Miss King's money?"
"Ten thousand pounds, and a great deal of talk about it."
"Yes, but what is it? Where did the old man have it?"
"He was a merchant at Ware. Or his father was. I do not know."
"He was not," said Mary. "He was the last of the Kings of Bulstrode.
My father has the pedigree in the book with the green cover, and I looked at it on Tuesday, because I wanted to see whether it went back before the register, and it does.
There was an Accord at Bulstrode. It is a very little one — it is not a great house, it is four hundred acres and a fish-pond — and it went through the female line twice in the last century, which is unusual, and it can go through the female line, which is the whole point. "
Elizabeth put down the jar.
"Mary. What are you telling me?"
"I am telling you that Miss King has ten thousand pounds and a line that a man may braid into.
" Mary's voice was completely flat, as it always was, which somehow made it worse.
"And that there are perhaps nine women in this county of whom that is true, and that you and I are two of them, and that Mr. Wickham has been in Meryton four months and has been particular, at one time or another, with four of the nine. "
"That is not evidence of anything. Every young man in a country town is particular with—"
"He was not particular with Miss Fanshawe," said Mary, "who is the prettiest girl in this parish and has three thousand pounds and no line at all. He has never once stood up with her. I have watched him at five assemblies and I have written it down."
Elizabeth said, "You have written it down."
"I have written a great many things down.
Nobody has ever asked me for any of them.
" Mary wiped her hands on her apron. "You asked me for one thing, at Netherfield, and I have been of some use to you for four months in my own head, and it has been the pleasantest four months I have had.
I know precisely how that sounds and I am not going to apologize for it. "
"Mary—"
"Listen to the rest, because I have got it wrong twice and I do not think I have got it wrong now.
" Mary sat down on the edge of the table, which she never did.
"Everybody in this house thinks Mr. Wickham wants money.
He may want money; most people do. But a man who wanted money would have gone after Miss Fanshawe in November and been comfortable by Christmas.
"There is only one way into an Accord for a man who has not got one.
It is not purchase, and it is not service, and it is not the gift of any gentleman living, however much he may love you — because the ground does not care what the gentleman intends and it is not obliged to have him.
There is exactly one door, Lizzy, and it is braiding.
That is what braiding is. Two lines are put together and neither of them is consulted and it cannot be undone by anybody.
A man may be born outside every house in England and be inside one of them by Michaelmas if a woman will stand up in a church with him. "
The still-room was very quiet.
"He is not looking for money," said Mary Bennet. "He is looking for a door."