Chapter Thirty
Chapter Twenty-Nine
More than once during her stay in Kent, Mr. Darcy called at the parsonage.
He came in the morning, alone, at an hour when it was tolerably certain that Mr. Collins would be at work upon his garden; and on the first occasion he sat for ten minutes and said perhaps forty words, and Elizabeth could not conceive what had brought him.
Charlotte could.
"My dear Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he would never have called on us in this familiar way."
But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely, even to Charlotte's wishes, to be the case; and after various conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from the difficulty of finding any thing to do, which was the more probable from the time of year.
All field sports were over. Within doors there was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard table, but gentlemen cannot be always within doors; and in the nearness of the parsonage, or the pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither almost every day.
On his second solitary call he asked her, abruptly, whether she thought Mrs. Collins was happy in Kent.
"Extremely, I believe."
"She is fortunate. It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a distance of her own family and friends."
"An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles."
"And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance."
"I should never have considered the distance as one of the advantages of the match," cried Elizabeth. "I should never have said Mrs. Collins was settled near her family."
"It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Any thing beyond the very neighborhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far."
As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered,
"I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying circumstances."
He drew his chair a little toward her, and said, "You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn."
Elizabeth looked surprised.
"I have been at Longbourn my whole life."
"Yes," said Mr. Darcy. "I know."
He seemed to feel that he had said something curious, and got up, and looked at a print over the chimney-piece for a while, and then took his leave and went away; and Elizabeth, who had been about to say something quite cutting, was left holding it.
---
It was in her rambles that she saw him most.
She had made a great point of telling him, on the second occasion, that the plantation on the far side of the park was a favorite haunt of hers; and how it could occur a second time therefore was very odd, and it occurred a third and a fourth.
He never said a great deal, and did not oblige her to talk much herself; but it struck her in the course of their third rencontre that he was asking some odd unconnected questions — about her pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks, and her opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins's happiness; and that in speaking of Rosings, and her not perfectly understanding the house, he seemed to expect that whenever she came into Kent again she would be staying there too.
That was one thing.
The other, which she attended to less because it was of no interest whatever, was that Mr. Darcy walked with his right hand out of his glove.
He did it always. She noticed it on the second meeting and confirmed it on the third and the fourth, and she noticed too — being a person who could not help noticing — that he did not walk anywhere in that park at random.
He went along the same line each time: from the gate at the mount, down inside the pales, past the stew ponds, and up the long field to the corner where the Bromley road runs; and he walked it at the same pace, and at the corner he stopped for a while, and then came back along it.
Once she came on him at the far end of it, standing quite still at the pale, with his bare hand flat against the top rail, looking at nothing whatever.
He had it behind his back before she was within twenty yards, and said good morning, and asked whether she found the mornings cold.
He is bored to death, thought Elizabeth, and rich, and has nothing in the world to do but walk about his aunt's land counting the fence posts; and she went home and made Charlotte laugh about it for a quarter of an hour, and it was a very good imitation, and Charlotte laughed a great deal.
---
More than once did Elizabeth meet Colonel Fitzwilliam also, and rather liked it.
He was, she thought, the pleasantest man of her acquaintance in Kent, which was not a high standard and which he would have been the first to say so; and on the day in question he joined her in the lane and they walked a mile together, and talked of Rosings, and of his own prospects, which were those of a younger son.
"Younger sons cannot marry where they like."
"Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often do."
"Our habits of expence make us too dependant, and there are not many in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to money."
"Is this," thought Elizabeth, "meant for me?" and she colored at the idea; but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, "And pray, what is the usual price of an Earl's younger son? Unless the elder brother is very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds."
He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped.
To interrupt a silence which might make him fancy her affected with what had passed, she soon afterwards said,
"I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for the sake of having somebody at his disposal.
I wonder he does not marry, to secure a lasting convenience of that kind.
But perhaps his sister does as well for the present, and as she is under his sole care, he may do what he likes with her. "
"No," said Colonel Fitzwilliam, "that is an advantage which he must divide with me. I am joined with him in the guardianship of Miss Darcy."
"Are you, indeed? And pray what sort of guardians do you make? Does your charge give you much trouble? Young ladies of her age are sometimes a little difficult to manage, and if she has the true Darcy spirit, she may like to have her own way."
As she spoke, she observed him looking at her earnestly, and the manner in which he immediately asked her why she supposed Miss Darcy likely to give them any uneasiness, convinced her that she had somehow or other got pretty near the truth. She directly replied,
"You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her; and I dare say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world. She is a very great favorite with some ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that you know them."
"I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man — he is a great friend of Darcy's."
"Oh! yes," said Elizabeth drily — "Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr. Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him."
"Care of him! — Yes, I really believe Darcy does take care of him in those points where he most wants care.
From something that he told me in our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted to him.
But I ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose that Bingley was the person meant. It was all conjecture."
"What is it you mean?"
"It is a circumstance which Darcy of course would not wish to be generally known, because if it were to get round to the lady's family, it would be an unpleasant thing."
"You may depend upon my not mentioning it."
"And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be Bingley.
What he told me was merely this; that he congratulated himself on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage, but without mentioning names or any other particulars, and I only suspected it to be Bingley from believing him the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer. "
"Did Mr. Darcy give you his reasons for this interference?"
"I understood that there were some very strong objections against the lady."
"And what arts did he use to separate them?"
"He did not talk to me of his own arts," said Fitzwilliam smiling. "He only told me what I have now told you."
Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with indignation.
After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she was so thoughtful.
"I am thinking of what you have been telling me," said she. "Your cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the judge?"
"You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?"
"I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his friend's inclination, or why, upon his own judgment alone, he was to determine and direct in what manner that friend was to be happy.
" She stopped herself, and continued in a lighter tone, "But as we know none of the particulars, it is not fair to condemn him.
It is not to be supposed that there was much affection in the case. "
"That is not an unnatural surmise," said Fitzwilliam, "but it is a sad lessening of the honor of my cousin's triumph."
This was spoken jestingly, but it appeared to her so just a picture of Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer; and therefore, abruptly changing the conversation, talked on indifferent matters till they reached the parsonage.
---
He had said one other thing, in the middle of it, that she did not attend to until much later.
She had asked — lightly, out of nothing but the wish to keep the subject open — whether the objections against the lady had been to the lady herself, or to her family.
"Neither, as I understood it," Colonel Fitzwilliam had said, "or not chiefly. I had the impression that a good deal of it was the country."
"The country?"
"So I understood him." Fitzwilliam had laughed, comfortably, the way a man laughs at a friend's known absurdity.
"It is entirely of a piece with him, Miss Bennet, and you must not think it means anything.
Darcy has notions about places. He has had them since we were boys — he will not sleep at an inn at Melton and cannot tell you why; he took my brother's shooting box off him for a season and then would not go into it.
He came back from Hertfordshire and said the neighborhood was unhealthy, in a tone that would have suited a plague town, and would not be got to say another word about it.
Whereupon he removed his friend, and gave up the house, and there was an end of it.
He is the best man I know and the drollest, and one gets used to it. "
She had said, "Unhealthy."
"Damp, I imagine. He never explains himself. It is the one vice he has."
---
Elizabeth got into her own room as soon as they were gone, and thought without interruption of all that she had heard.
That it was Jane there could be no doubt. There were not two men in the world over whom Mr. Darcy could have such boundless influence, and she had never doubted his being concerned in the measures taken to separate them.
To Jane herself, to her modest, gentle, unresisting sister, and to Jane's four months of misery, she gave the whole of the first quarter of an hour.
Then she gave a quarter of an hour to the rest of it.
Some very strong objections against the lady.
No fortune, no connections, an attorney in Meryton and a warehouse in Cheapside, and a mother, and three sisters — she went through them all, in order, and made herself sick with it, and every one of them was true, and she found that she could bear them; they were the ordinary contempt of the ordinary great and she had heard them at Netherfield in November over a card table.
What she could not bear was the country.
He had gone away from Hertfordshire — from her home, from the only place she had ever lived, from two-and-twenty years of walks and fields and stiles and the wet green lane to Meryton — and he had described it to his cousin in a tone that would have suited a plague town, and had removed his friend from it, and had given up the house, and would not be got to say another word about it.
Unhealthy.
Elizabeth Bennet sat on the edge of the bed in the parsonage at Hunsford with her hands in her lap and was as angry as she had ever been in her life, and the anger had a curious quality that she noticed even at the time and could not explain: it was too big for the offense.
It had a great deal of fright in it, and she did not know where the fright had come from, and she went over the sentence again and again — he said the neighborhood was unhealthy — the way one goes over a step in the dark that was not where one expected the floor to be.
Her head ached, and it grew much worse toward the evening; and, added to her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined her not to attend her cousins to Rosings, where they were engaged to drink tea.
Mrs. Collins, seeing that she was really unwell, did not press her to go, and as much as possible prevented her husband from pressing her; but Mr. Collins could not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine's being rather displeased by her staying at home.