Chapter Thirty-Two
It was not like reading, and it was not like remembering, and it was not in the smallest degree like a dream.
Afterwards she thought that the nearest thing was standing in a doorway of a house one has lived in, and being unable to go in or to go away.
She put her bare hand on the paper and there was a moment of nothing whatever — long enough for her to think well, and there is the flaw, it is a piece of theater and it does not work — and then the elm and the field and the blackbird went a very long distance off, and did not stop being there, and she was in a room in Grosvenor-street on the eleventh of August in the year before last, at a quarter past nine in the morning, with a letter in her hand.
His hand. She could see the knuckles and the cuff. She had no control of it whatever and no wish to try.
The letter was in a round, careful, girlish hand that had been taught by somebody exacting, and it went crooked at the fourth line and stayed crooked.
My dear brother I have done something and I cannot tell whether it is very bad or whether I am being a child about it and if you are angry I do not think I can bear it but I would rather you were angry with me here than that you should hear it from somebody else.
I have said that I will go away with Mr Wickham.
I said it yesterday. Mrs Younge says that you will be very glad in the end and that all families are so at first and that we are not to mind it, and I did not think that I minded it, and then last night I could not go to sleep and I have been sitting up since four writing this and tearing it up. Please come. Please do not be.
And there it stopped, and there was a great deal of white paper, and then in a different ink, plainly hours later:
Please come. G.
The whole of the feeling that went through the man holding that letter came through Elizabeth like water through a sieve, and there was not one part of it she had expected.
There was no anger in it at all. There was a single spike of pure fright, and under the fright — this was the thing that made her want to put the paper down and that she could not put down — there was relief, enormous and shameful and immediate, because his sister had written to him, because she had written to him, because in the four years since their father died he had never once been able to make her tell him anything.
He was on the road within the hour.
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She was in a chaise for a long time. She was aware that in the field in Kent it was not taking that long; the two things ran alongside each other, the way a fever does.
He did not think in words for most of it.
What he did instead was a thing Elizabeth recognized at once and had never known anybody else did: he went over conversations.
Six weeks of letters from Ramsgate, one a week, and he took them apart sentence by sentence looking for the place where he ought to have seen it, and found four, and did each of the four several times.
Mrs Younge is very kind and lets me do as I like.
We have met a gentleman here who knew papa.
You are not to trouble to come down as I know how busy you are with the Kympton business.
I am very well and very happy and I am practicing.
At Dartford he stopped thinking about the letters and thought instead, quite clearly and at length, about a boy of nine being walked out to the western boundary at Pemberley by a man in a green coat, three times in one summer, and coming back the third time crying; and about what his father had said at dinner that night, which was: the ground is a fool and I shall not be governed by it.
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The lodging-house was in a terrace with a view of the sea. The stairs were narrow and had a smell of salt and cooking.
Georgiana was standing at the window in the first-floor sitting room when he came in, and she turned round.
Elizabeth had never in her life felt anything like what went through the man in that doorway, and she had no name for it, and the nearest she could get afterwards was that it was the feeling of coming into a room and finding that the furniture has been taken out.
She was fifteen. She was thin, and very tall for her age, and she had been crying and had stopped, and she said, "You came," in a voice of such flat astonishment that it was worse than anything else in the whole quarter of an hour.
He said, "Of course I came."
And then there was a great deal of it that Elizabeth could not afterwards put in order — Georgiana's hands, and being sat down, and the whole of it coming out in about nine minutes in the wrong order, and he was kind to me three separate times, and nobody has ever wanted to talk to me for a whole afternoon, and I know I am stupid twice, and Darcy on one knee by a chair in a hired room saying nothing at all, because he had discovered within about forty seconds that anything he said would be heard as anger, and had therefore stopped.
And under it, running the entire time, the thing he could not attend to and could not stop noticing: that his sister's hands were cold, and that the room was ordinary, and that when she had turned round from the window there had been nothing coming off her at all.
He had known before she finished. He had known standing in the doorway. It had simply not been available to him as a thought until she had done talking.
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Mr. Wickham came in at about two.
He came in without knocking, which Elizabeth understood at once was habit and not insolence, and he had his hat in his hand, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw who was there.
Nobody shouted. That was the part Elizabeth could not get over, then or afterwards.
Darcy stood up. Wickham looked at him for a moment, and then at Georgiana, and then at the floor, and said, "Ah."
He was not in the least frightened. Elizabeth, riding inside a man whose whole body had gone as tight as a drumhead, could see that quite plainly and could feel her own — his own — recognition of it: he has done this before, and he has been interrupted before, and he knows exactly how long it takes.
"Georgiana," said Darcy, "go into the other room."
"Fitzwilliam—"
"Go into the other room, dearest."
She went. Wickham watched her go, with an expression of such tender concern that Elizabeth, who had sat beside that expression at a card table in Meryton for two hours with her gloves off, felt something go over her that had nothing to do with the memory at all.
Then the door shut and the expression came off him like a hat.
"You have not brought anybody," he said.
"No."
"No. You would not." Wickham put his hat on the table and looked round the room in a mildly appraising way.
"Well. There is nothing to be got by staying, then.
I shall want something for the lodgings, which are paid to Michaelmas, and I shall be gone by four; and you may tell yourself whatever you find comfortable, but you might consider being civil to me for ten minutes, because I have not done one thing in six weeks that a magistrate in England would take an interest in. "
"Get out of this house."
"Presently." He was not moving. "She is very fond of me.
You know that, do you not? That is not a thing I did.
She was fifteen and by herself in a lodging-house in a wet August with a paid woman for company and a brother who writes to her on Tuesdays, and I sat and listened to her talk about her mother for six weeks, and I never once told her that she was too young to be interesting.
"You may hang me for the rest. I shall not argue with you about the rest. But you might have a care what you tell yourself about that part, Darcy, because I have thought about it a good deal, and I do not believe you can get from the beginning of it to the end without arriving at yourself."
Darcy said nothing.
"How much has she lost?" said Wickham, with what sounded, to Elizabeth, appallingly like professional interest.
"Get out."
"I ask because it is not always so much as people suppose, and it does come back in some cases, and you will want to know, and there is nobody in England you will be able to ask.
" He picked up his hat. "It comes back if it is taken slowly.
Mine was not taken; it was never there; that is a different case and I am the only man living who has studied it.
There. That is the last civil thing I shall ever do for your family and you may make what use of it you like. "
He stopped at the door.
"You could have given it to me," said George Wickham, without any heat at all.
"That is the whole of it, in the end. Your father wanted to.
He said so to my face in the library in the October before he died, in front of the fire, with his hand on my shoulder — it shall be yours, George, whatever that ground has to say about it — and he died in the January and you had eleven months to do it in and you gave it to a man from Kendal.
"I would have been warden of the western ground. That is all I ever wanted in my life and it was a small thing and you had eight hundred years of it and I asked for a thread.
"And you looked at me across your father's coffin and you decided that the ground knew best."
He went out. They heard him on the stairs, and the street door, and then a boy in the road being asked to carry a bag to the George.
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Mrs. Younge was less pleasant.
Elizabeth got only a piece of that conversation and was glad of it: a composed woman of forty in a black dress, sitting perfectly upright in a chair in the back parlor, explaining without embarrassment that Miss Darcy had been very much in want of society, that she herself had been engaged as a companion and not as a gaoler, that her own character had now been ruined for no reason, and that she should be obliged for the quarter's wages.
Two things came out of it, and both went into Elizabeth like nails.
The first was the answer to a question Darcy asked twice, in the same words, in a voice which by the second time had gone somewhere Elizabeth had not known his voice could go: whether Wickham had at any time worn gloves in that house.
Mrs. Younge said that she was sure she had never observed.
Then she said that now he came to mention it, no, she did not believe he had; that it had been a very warm August; and that she hoped he was not going to make something out of that, since a great many young men went about bare-handed in the country and there was nothing in it, and she would thank him not to look at her in that way.
The second was that Mrs. Younge had known Wickham eleven years, and that this was the fourth time.
She did not say it as a confession. She said it as a mitigation — she said that on the other three occasions there had been no unpleasantness whatever, that the families had been perfectly satisfied, and that if Mr. Darcy chose to make a great deal out of a matter which better people than himself had settled quietly, that was his affair.
He asked her the names.
She did not give them. She was still refusing, in the same composed voice, when Elizabeth felt the memory begin to go thin at the edges, the way a fire goes down.
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The last of it was the third evening.
They were at Pemberley by then — Elizabeth knew it without being told, from the size of the stairs and the light — and Georgiana had been quiet for three days and had eaten nothing to speak of, and after dinner she got up without a word and went to the instrument in the long room and sat down and played.
Elizabeth did not know the piece. It was slow, and not difficult, and Georgiana had played it on the day their father died, and everybody in that house knew it.
She played it exactly right.
There were four people in the room and a housekeeper going in and out of the far door with the plates, and Elizabeth — sitting where Darcy sat, seeing what Darcy saw, holding perfectly still with his hands on the arms of his chair — heard, through the music, quite distinctly, the small honest domestic sound of china being stacked.
That was all. That was the whole of it. Nobody exclaimed and nobody wept and Mrs. Reynolds went on with the plates because there was nothing whatever in that room to stop her.
Georgiana got to the end. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.
Then she said, in a very small polite voice, "I think I shall go up now," and closed the instrument, and went out; and Darcy sat where he was for some time, and did not follow her, because he could not think of one single thing to say that would not have been a lie.
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Elizabeth came out of it on the fallen elm with her right hand flat on the paper and the sun in her eyes.
She was extremely cold. The blackbird was still at it. She had, by the church clock at Hunsford, been sitting there nineteen minutes.
She got up, and walked about four yards, and was sick into the nettles at the foot of the hedge, and stood there afterwards with her hand against the trunk for a while, quite calmly, thinking about a great many things in no order at all.
She thought about a man in a road in Meryton in November with no gloves on, shaking hands with a girl of fifteen and a girl of seventeen while she stood by and thought him uncommonly easy in his manners.
She thought about Kitty, who had said he was the only person in the whole world who asked me about my cough, and who had been tired since Michaelmas, and who had a cough by Christmas, and who was at that moment three days' travel away in a house with nobody in it who knew anything at all.
She thought: the fourth time.
And then she thought — and sat down again on the elm rather suddenly, because her legs would not do it — about Lydia Bennet, aged fifteen years and eight months, of Longbourn in the county of Hertfordshire, four hundred years in the male line, who had told her in the winter that the officers had been ordered not to go past the mill after dark and that Denny should pay no attention to it and no more should she.
And I did not get the promise, thought Elizabeth Bennet. She laughed at me, and I let it go, and I have not thought of it since November.