Chapter Thirty-Three
She walked the lane for two hours.
She read the two written sheets again, twice through, and then a third time in pieces, standing, walking, leaning on the gate, in a manner which she was afterwards ashamed of and which she could not have prevented; and every reading took something else away from her.
Of the Bingley part she could say nothing at all.
It was an honest account of what an honest man had seen, and everything in it was true, and its conclusion was false, and there was no answer to it except one which she could not have made in November and could not make now: my sister was ill for five days in the autumn and for one evening she had nothing left to hide with, and Mr. Bingley sat by her for three hours and never got over it, and you were in another room.
She could tell him that. She would never tell him that. There was no version of that sentence that could be spoken by a woman to a man who had proposed to her on Thursday and been told he was the last man in the world.
Of the second part she could say nothing either, and for a different reason, which was that she had done the arithmetic herself on the top rail of a gate and it had come out at his figure.
It was the third thing that she came back to, over and over, until she stopped walking altogether and stood in the middle of the lane like a woman who has forgotten where she was going.
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Her gift had never once been wrong.
That was the whole of it. That was the thing she had been circling for two hours without letting herself land on it.
She had been sitting at a card table in Meryton in November with her gloves off, and she had looked into George Wickham, and she had seen a genuine wound, dealt young, still open, undissembled, and she had been right.
Every particular of it was right. Everything he had told her about a promise and a living and a man from Kendal was true, and he had believed all of it, and he believed it still, and if she looked at him again to-morrow she would see exactly the same thing.
And on the strength of that — on the strength of a perfectly accurate instrument, perfectly applied — she had spent five months certain that Fitzwilliam Darcy was a man who had robbed his father's godson out of jealousy.
She had asked her gift: is he lying?
Her gift had answered: no.
And she had heard: and therefore the other man is what he says.
Not one person had put that to her. Jane had — Jane had said it in a bedroom in November in her mild way, your gift tells you what a man is holding, it does not tell you where he got it — and Elizabeth had been in the very act of discovering she had no reply when Kitty came flying in about a carriage, and the thought had gone out like a candle and had not come back for four months.
Mrs. Gardiner had put it to her at Christmas and she had produced three-and-twenty arguments before breakfast.
Charlotte had put it to her in a field before either of them had ever seen the man twice: a man who is proud is at his ease, and by your own account that man was not at his ease for a single moment of the evening.
She had a very good answer ready. She always had a very good answer ready.
That, she saw now with a clarity that made her put her hand out to the paling, was not a separate fault from the other one.
It was the same fault. The gift told her a true thing quickly, and her wit made the true thing into a finished thing, and a finished thing cannot be added to; and she had gone about for six years being the cleverest person in every room in Hertfordshire and had mistaken the speed of her own understanding for its completion.
"How despicably I have acted!" she cried.
— "I, who have prided myself on my discernment!
— I, who have valued myself on my abilities!
who have often disdained the generous candor of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable distrust. — How humiliating is this discovery!
— Yet, how just a humiliation! — Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind.
But vanity, not love, has been my folly.
— Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself."
And then, standing in a lane in Kent at half past twelve in the day, she said the other half of it aloud, which was not in any book and which nobody had ever said to her:
"I have had a lamp all my life, and I have been holding it up in front of me, and calling the shadow behind me proof."
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From herself to Jane, from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy's explanation there, had appeared very insufficient; and she read it again. Widely different was the effect of a second perusal.
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. — Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.
When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were mentioned, in terms of such mortifying, yet merited reproach, her sense of shame was severe.
The justice of the charge struck her too forcibly for denial, and the circumstances to which he particularly alluded, as having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind than on hers.
The compliment to herself and her sister, was not unfelt.
It soothed, but it could not console her for the contempt which had been thus self-attracted by the rest of her family; — and as she considered that Jane's disappointment had in fact been the work of her nearest relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before.
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At two o'clock she went back to the parsonage and found that the gentlemen had gone.
They had left Rosings at eleven. Mr. Collins had walked up to pay his respects and had been received by Lady Catherine with a good deal of conversation about the dulness of everything now that her nephews were away, and had come back gratified.
Elizabeth heard it standing in the passage with her bonnet strings in her fingers, and felt the floor of the day give way a second time, and was surprised at herself.
"He is gone, then," she said.
"At eleven," said Charlotte. "Lizzy, sit down before you fall down. Where have you been for four hours?"
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She tried three times that afternoon to write to Jane, and burned all three.
The first was seven lines and read like a madwoman.
The second was four sides and read like a woman who has been imposed upon by a plausible gentleman and is repeating his nonsense with the earnestness of the newly converted; she read it over and heard, in every sentence, her aunt Gardiner's kind voice in a London parlor saying say it aloud and hear how it sounds.
The third was very calm and very reasonable and contained nothing whatever, because every fact in it was one she had promised to keep or could not prove.
She could not write there is a strip of dead ground behind the church and it is coming toward the town, because Jane was in London and would show it to her aunt, and her aunt would be frightened, and would write to Longbourn, and Mrs. Bennet would have it round Meryton in a day and a half as a piece of news, and Elizabeth had lived in that village for two-and-twenty years and knew precisely what it would do with it.
She could not write about Georgiana Darcy at all. She had been asked not to. It had not been an oath and he had said so, which made it worse.
And she could not write the only sentence that signified — keep Lydia out of the fields and away from Mr. Wickham — without a reason attached to it, because a letter of that kind, arriving at Longbourn from Kent, would be read aloud at breakfast by her mother and laughed at by Lydia and would produce, as certainly as anything in this world, the exact opposite of its object.
She sat looking at the fourth blank sheet for a long time.
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She told Charlotte after supper, in the little back parlor, with the door shut, and Mr. Collins at Rosings.
She told her the whole of it except Georgiana's name — the field, the measurements, the antiquary's rolls, the ward at Netherfield and the taking up of it, the acknowledgment in the second dance, Wickham and the gloves and the four times, Mrs. Younge, Kitty's cough, and the promise Lydia had never given her.
Charlotte Collins listened without moving for the better part of half an hour, sitting quite upright with her hands in her lap, and at the end of it she said:
"Thank you."
"That is all you have to say?"
"No. That is the first thing I have to say, and I said it first on purpose, because you have spent four hours in a lane deciding whether you are mad, and you are not, and I have five weeks of my own evidence and you have just made sense of the whole of it.
" Charlotte got up and put a piece of coal on the fire with the tongs.
"Now. The second thing. You cannot do anything from here. "
"I am going home."
"You are going home on the sixth of May with my sister and my father, in a carriage that is already ordered, and you are not going home on Thursday alone in a hired chaise, because you have no money for it, and because if you go home three weeks early with no reason your mother will conclude that Mr. Darcy has offered for you and been refused—"
"She could hardly—"
"—and she will be right, Lizzy, and she will find it out inside a week, because Maria Lucas has eyes and Mr. Collins has a tongue, and then it will be all over Meryton that you have refused ten thousand a year on top of two thousand, and every word you say to anybody about anything for the rest of the summer will be the word of a girl who has gone strange after a disappointment.
" Charlotte sat down again. "You have exactly one thing that is worth anything, and it is that people believe you. Do not spend it on a chaise."
Elizabeth put her face in her hands.
"Nineteen days," she said.
"Nineteen days. And in nineteen days you will be at Longbourn with your father, who is not a fool and who reads Latin and who has a deed in a box that he has read a hundred times; and you will take your sister Mary out to that field on the first fine morning; and you will go and stand in front of a window with this Captain Harding of yours and ask him a question.
" Charlotte's voice was perfectly level.
"Those are three things you can do. There is no fourth thing, and sitting in Kent inventing one will cost you sleep and gain you nothing at all. "
"Charlotte. If you are wrong about it and something happens in nineteen days—"
"Then it will have happened in nineteen days whether you are in Kent or Hertfordshire," said Charlotte Collins, "because you cannot save a girl of fifteen by knowing things about her. Nobody has ever done it. You can only be in the room."
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There was one letter she could write, and she wrote it at eleven that night, sitting up in her shift with a candle, and it was nine lines long.
My dear Mary,
I have found out that you were right, in the still-room, about doors — entirely right, in every particular, and more so than you supposed, and I shall tell you the whole of it when I am home on the seventh and not one word of it before, because it will not go in a letter and I have burned three.
Until then I ask you three things and no explanations.
Do not lend your books to anybody. Write down, with the day and the hour, everywhere our youngest sister goes and everyone she goes with, and show it to nobody, and if that seems to you an odd or an unkind thing to be asked, do it notwithstanding, and be as dull about it as you like.
And I would take it very kindly if you would find out, without appearing to want to know, what has been done about the ground beyond Barrett's, and whether the officers still ride out to it, and how far up it has come.
You were of more use to me at Netherfield than any person in England and I have been four months getting round to saying so. Burn this.
Your affectionate sister,
E. B.
She sealed it and put it on the tray in the hall for the morning post, and went up, and lay in the dark listening to the parsonage settle.
At Longbourn, four days later, Miss Mary Bennet read it twice in the passage outside the breakfast parlor, and went upstairs, and stood in the middle of her cold little room over the porch for some while.
Then she got out a fresh pocket-book from the drawer where she kept her pens, and dated the first page, and ruled it into three columns with a straight edge, and wrote at the head of them, in her small exact hand: Day. Hour. In company with.
She did not burn the letter. She put it inside the back cover of Harrow, at page four hundred and eleven, where it stayed.