Chapter Thirty-One #2
His answer is that there are none. Every county south and east of the Trent is in the rolls — four hundred and eleven entries, what was given and what was taken.
Hertfordshire is not among them. There is no gap where the entries should be.
The clerks left no space. The county was never bargained for.
And yet its wards have never once been renewed in four hundred years, which you may verify at any parish in the county in an afternoon, and which no person of sense has ever done, because there has never been anything there to alarm anybody.
Your mother said as much to me at Netherfield, in November, with great satisfaction, and I have thought about it almost every day since.
Ground that never needs mending is not sound ground.
It is ground that nobody has ever been able to reach.
I laid a ward upon Mr. Bingley's ballroom.
It took me four days. On the ninth night I took it up again, in the middle of the second dance, for a reason I shall come to; and the room stood open for four hours afterwards with a hundred and four people in it, and I held it, and I have no wish to discuss the manner of it.
I then advised my friend to give up the house, and did not tell him why, and could not; and I told my cousin that the neighborhood was unhealthy, which was the largest true thing I could say to a man I had not the right to frighten.
He repeated it to you as a piece of folly.
I do not blame him. In his place I should have laughed at it myself.
Madam, I am aware how this reads. A gentleman who has been refused writes to the lady the following morning with an account of some grass.
I have no evidence that would satisfy a magistrate and I am not asking you to believe me.
I am asking you to do three things, and if you do them and find me a fool you may burn this and think of me exactly as you thought of me last night.
Walk out to that field when you go home, and take your sister Mary, who has read Colwood and Harrow and is the only person in your family who has understood a word of any of this, and let her look at it.
Do not go into any low ground in that county after dark, and do not permit your youngest sister to do so, and I am aware that you will find the second harder than the first.
And ask Captain Harding of the ——shire what his orders are. He will not tell you. Ask him in front of a window and watch his hands.
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She had come to the bottom of the second sheet, and there was a fold at the end of it, and then the third paper, sealed, which she had been holding all this time between her fingers and the leather of her glove.
The last lines of the second sheet were these:
There remains Mr. Wickham, and I find I cannot write it.
That is not a figure of speech and I ask you to attend to it.
Fifteen months ago, in a lodging-house at Ramsgate, I swore an oath to my sister that no one would ever know what had been done to her.
I swore it properly, in the way that such things are done, with her hand in mine; she was fifteen years old and had asked me for it herself, and I could think of nothing else in the world to give her.
I have kept it. I kept it in a road in Meryton in November with the man standing eleven feet away being introduced to your sisters, and I kept it in Mr. Collins's parlor last night when you asked me to defend myself and I would have given a great deal to be able to.
In the sealed paper is the whole of it: not written, but as it was. You will need to be alone and sitting down, and to have your right hand bare upon the page. It is not dangerous to you. It will occupy about a quarter of an hour and it will not be pleasant.
You will understand what breaking such an oath must cost the man who swore it.
You are not to concern yourself with that; it is done already, the seal is made, and whether you open it or throw it in the fire the price is the same and was paid at about four this morning.
I mention it only because you are a just woman and would have wanted to know, and because if I did not tell you, you might one day find it out and think that I had contrived to conceal it in order to be admired for it.
I would ask you to keep my sister's name out of any conversation you may ever have on this subject. That is not an oath and I have no means of requiring it. I ask it.
I will only add, God bless you.
FITZWILLIAM DARCY
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Elizabeth stood at the gate for a long time.
There was a blackbird going on in the plantation, and the sun had come round onto the top rail, and a mile off somebody was cutting wood, and the little sealed paper lay in her palm and was warm, which paper is not.
She thought, with the last piece of the person she had been at eight o'clock that morning: this is the most extraordinary attempt at self-justification I have ever heard of, and he has spent the night constructing it, and I shall read it and find the flaw.
She looked round the lane. It was empty in both directions. There was a stile into the field opposite, and beyond it, out of sight of the road, a fallen elm with the bark off it, where she had sat twice that week.
She went over the stile, and sat down, and took off her right glove.