Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Six
Every object in the next day's journey was new and interesting to Elizabeth; and her spirits were in a state for enjoyment; for she had seen her sister looking so well as to banish all fear for her health, and the prospect of her northern tour was a constant source of delight.
That is what she wrote to Jane afterwards, and it was two-thirds true.
The journey was performed in the company of Sir William Lucas and his daughter Maria, and the party was rendered agreeable by Sir William's talking a great deal and requiring nothing whatever in return.
He had been three times through the history of his presentation before they reached Hatfield, and Maria, who was a good-humored girl but as empty-headed as her father, had nothing to add to it; and Elizabeth, who could listen to Sir William with about a quarter of her attention and had long practice, spent the remainder of the road going over a conversation she had not yet had.
They were to lie a night in Gracechurch-street.
---
Jane came down the steps before the carriage had stopped.
She was well. That was the first and best thing and Elizabeth had it within four seconds: her sister's color was good, her hands were warm, and she had put on a little of what she had lost in November.
It was over supper, with the children in bed and Sir William being taken through Mr. Gardiner's warehouses in conversation, that she said the other thing.
"It has gone away entirely, Lizzy."
"The tiredness?"
"Everything." Jane turned her glass round on the cloth. "You will think this is nothing, or that I am being fanciful. I have been in this house nine weeks and I have not once known what anybody in a room is feeling."
Elizabeth put down her fork.
"I do not mean that I have been mistaken about people.
I mean that I do not — reach anybody. There is nothing going out of me at all.
" Jane said it quite calmly. "It began about a week after I came.
And at first I thought, well, I am unhappy, and unhappy people are of no use to anybody, and it will come back.
And then I noticed that I sleep, and that I can sit in a room with my aunt when she is worried about the children and simply sit in it, and go up afterwards not tired.
And, Lizzy, I have had nine weeks of that now, and I am ashamed to tell you how much I have liked it. "
"Jane—"
"And then last Tuesday Maggie fell down the area steps and screamed, and I got to her first, and I picked her up and I held her and I said all the things one says." Jane looked up. "And she went on screaming. For six or seven minutes. Until my aunt came."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"It is like being told one has gone a little deaf," said Jane, "and finding that one is very much less tired in the evenings."
"Does it hurt?"
"No. That is what I cannot explain to anybody, and why I have not tried.
Nothing hurts. Everything is easier." She smiled.
"I am simply a very pleasant young woman who is fond of children and no earthly use to them, and I shall be perfectly happy, and I would rather be in Hertfordshire and worn out.
There. Now you know it, and I have said it once, and we need not say it again. "
---
Elizabeth lay awake a long while in the spare room over the street.
She had never once, in two-and-twenty years, considered the possibility that a gift could stop.
It had not been available to her as an idea.
Her own had come on at eight or nine and had never varied by so much as a day's strength; her mother had spent hers, which was different; Denny had given his to the ground, which she did not know about; and here was Jane, sleeping properly for the first time in a decade, with the whole of it simply gone quiet nine weeks after leaving Hertfordshire and four days after Bingley did not call.
She could not make the two facts stand in the same sentence without producing something monstrous, so she left them in separate ones, and slept badly, and was cheerful at breakfast.
---
Mrs. Gardiner got her alone for half an hour before the carriage came.
"And is Mr. Wickham still the most agreeable young man in Hertfordshire?"
"He is very much occupied at present with Miss King, who has ten thousand pounds."
"Ah." Mrs. Gardiner folded a shawl. "And what do you say to that?"
"I say what everybody says, which is that a young man with nothing must do something. I have no right to be affronted and I am determined not to be interesting about it." Elizabeth heard herself being brisk and did not like it. "Aunt — may I say something that will sound very strange?"
"You may say anything you like at nine in the morning. It is the only hour of the day when I can be relied upon."
"Miss King's grandfather was the last of the Kings of Bulstrode, and there is an Accord there, a very small one, and it descends in the female line.
" Elizabeth said it steadily. "And my sister Mary has been keeping an account of whom Mr. Wickham stands up with at assemblies, and it is not the prettiest girls and it is not the richest, and it is not — aunt, it is not the ones with money.
It is the ones with line. Every time. Five assemblies. "
Mrs. Gardiner did not laugh. She was, Elizabeth thought afterwards, the only person in England who would not have laughed.
But she said, gently: "My dear, do you know how many young women in Hertfordshire have some scrap of an old family behind them?"
"Mary says nine."
"Mary is nineteen and has a book. I should have said thirty, and I should have said that a good half of them have never had it mentioned since their grandmothers died, and that a young man who is looking about him at a country assembly will end by paying attention to the girls whose mothers make him welcome — which will be, unfailingly and for reasons that have nothing to do with any Accord in England, the girls whose families think themselves a little better than their neighbors.
" She put her hand over her niece's. "It fits, Lizzy.
It fits perfectly. That is what worries me about it. "
Elizabeth was silent.
"Say it aloud in a room in London and hear how it sounds," said Mrs. Gardiner.
"That is all I mean. In Hertfordshire in the winter, with your sister reading you a pedigree, it is a discovery.
Here it is a young woman explaining that a handsome man who dropped her is engaged in a conspiracy.
" She smiled. "I am not saying your sister is wrong.
I am saying you have no way in the world of finding out whether she is right, and that you are going into Kent for six weeks, and that I would rather you spent them looking at the country. "
"Yes," said Elizabeth.
She let it go. She was ashamed of how relieved she was to let it go — it had been heavy, and it had been Mary's, and it had made her uncomfortable in her own house for a fortnight — and it went down out of sight for eleven weeks.
---
Two other things were settled before the carriage came.
The northern tour was fixed: Mr. Gardiner's business would not release him in July, so it was put off to August, and the Lakes were spoken of, and Elizabeth was so happy about it that she said aloud that no tour of pleasure had ever begun so well.
And Kitty was spoken of.
"I have not forgotten," said Elizabeth. "You said Harley-street in the spring and I have done nothing about it."
"You could have done nothing about it. Your mother would have to be brought to it."
"Then bring her in the summer. Say it is a scheme for taking the girls to town, and say it in front of Lydia, and Lydia will want to go, and my mother will want Lydia to go, and Kitty will be got in at the same door without a word about her health."
Mrs. Gardiner laughed and said that her niece would have made an excellent attorney and that it was a great pity about her sex; and it was agreed for the summer; and Elizabeth got into the carriage with the comfortable feeling of a thing arranged.
It was the twenty-ninth of March.
---
They traveled the twenty-four miles to Hunsford in good time. Sir William was in raptures the whole way. Maria was frightened of the horses.
When they turned in at the lodge, and Elizabeth saw the parsonage — the garden sloping to the road, the green pales, the laurel hedge, everything precisely as it had been described eleven times — she was very near laughing, and had to look hard out of the other window.
Mr. Collins and Charlotte appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the small gate, which led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst the nods and smiles of the whole party.
In a moment they were all out of the chaise, rejoicing at the sight of each other.
Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the liveliest pleasure, and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with coming, when she found herself so affectionately received.
She saw instantly that her cousin's manners were not altered by his marriage; his formal civility was just what it had been, and he detained her some minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after all her family.
They were then, with no other delay than his pointing out the neatness of the entrance, taken into the house; and as soon as they were in the parlor, he welcomed them a second time with ostentatious formality to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife's offers of refreshment.
Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its aspect and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her, as if wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him.
But though every thing seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him by any sigh of repentance; and rather looked with wonder at her friend that she could have so cheerful an air, with such a companion.
When Mr. Collins said any thing of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear.
After sitting long enough to admire every article of furniture in the room, from the sideboard to the fender, to give an account of their journey and of all that had happened in London, Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in his garden, which was large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of which he attended himself.
Elizabeth admired the command of countenance with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and owned she encouraged it as much as possible.
---
It was in the garden that she began to feel it.
They had gone down the gravel walk to the point where Mr. Collins was in the habit of pausing, in order that his visitors might have the full effect of Rosings — which was visible over the laurel hedge and across the lane, a handsome modern building well situated on rising ground — and he was saying something about the number of windows in the front, and what they had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.
And Elizabeth, standing on the gravel with her hands folded in front of her, understood that she was leaning.
Not her body. She looked down at her own feet to be certain, and her feet were where she had put them.
It was that everything in her — attention, hearing, the ordinary forward pull of a person standing in a garden — had turned a few degrees toward the house on the rise, and had been turned since she came through the gate, and would go on being turned; the way a room full of people turns toward the door when somebody important is expected, except that nobody was expected and the room was a parish.
She put out her hand, without deciding to, and laid two fingers against the frame of the little green gate in the hedge.
There was nothing in it at all. It was a wooden gate. It had been painted the summer before last.
She looked past it, up the slope, at Rosings, where every window was catching the last of the afternoon.
"Is it not a fine prospect, cousin Elizabeth?" said Mr. Collins.
"It is a very fine prospect," said Elizabeth Bennet.
She turned round, and found Charlotte watching her from six feet away with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and perfectly attentive and entirely unreadable.
"You feel it," said Charlotte, when the gentlemen had gone on ahead.
"What is it?"
"I have no idea," said Mrs. Collins. "I have lived here five weeks and I have felt precisely nothing, which is exactly what I bargained for and exactly what I have got, and I have watched every soul who comes through that gate to see what they do.
" She began to walk. "The people of this parish lean, Lizzy.
All of them, all the time, and not one of them knows it, and if you told them they would think you were making a joke about her Ladyship's consequence. "
"And what do you do?"
"I keep the accounts," said Charlotte, "and I count the poultry, and on Wednesdays I dine at Rosings and answer whatever I am asked. And I have three questions I have been saving for you since the second week, and you are not to be sent for until to-morrow, so we shall have to be quick."