Chapter Thirty-Four
The two gentlemen left Rosings the next morning; and Mr. Collins having been in waiting near the lodges, to make his parting obeisance, was able to bring home the pleasing intelligence of their appearing in very good health, and in as tolerable spirits as could be expected, after the melancholy scene so lately gone through at Rosings.
Elizabeth had nineteen days of Kent left, and she got through them.
She was very much recovered by the second week, and could laugh at things, and did; and Charlotte, who watched her with a steadiness that neither of them ever mentioned, saw that her friend slept better after the first Sunday and worse again after the third, and understood both, and said nothing.
Lady Catherine sent for them a great deal in that fortnight. The loss of her nephews had left a hole in the evenings which had to be filled with somebody, and the parsonage was the only thing within reach.
"You will find, Miss Bennet," said her Ladyship, on one of these occasions, "that a young woman who is much in company forms a very false notion of her own consequence. I have observed it a hundred times. The remedy is to be at home."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do not say yes ma'am to me in that voice.
Your cousin says it in that voice and it means nothing.
I am telling you something for your good, which nobody else in this kingdom will trouble to do, because you are handsome and quick and people are lazy.
" Lady Catherine set down her cards. "You are two-and-twenty.
You have no fortune. You have four sisters and a father who will not live for ever, and an entail which you understand perfectly well because I saw your face when I mentioned it, and you have refused the one respectable offer that has ever been made you, and you were pleased with yourself for a fortnight afterwards.
I know that you were. Do not trouble to deny it. "
Elizabeth did not trouble to deny it.
"There," said Lady Catherine. "That is honest, and I like it, and it will do you no good whatever. Go on, Mrs. Collins. It is your play."
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She dined at Rosings four times more, and each time she looked at Anne de Bourgh, and each time Anne de Bourgh did not look back.
It was done so completely that Elizabeth understood by the second dinner that it was being done on purpose, and stopped trying; and after that she watched her instead, in the ordinary way, with her eyes, as anybody may watch anybody at a dinner table.
She saw a woman of nine-and-twenty who did not carve, or pour, or ring, or ask for anything, or answer any question addressed to her, or decline anything either.
She saw Mrs. Jenkinson eat half a dish at her elbow and then say that Miss de Bourgh had eaten very well.
She saw Lady Catherine order a shawl fetched for her daughter, and the shawl fetched, and the shawl put on, and Miss de Bourgh sit under it.
And on the last Wednesday, when the party rose from the table and Elizabeth was three steps behind her going into the drawing room, she saw Anne de Bourgh's hand come out and rest, for the length of a breath, on the frame of the door.
The frame of that door was carved and gilded and had cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh a great deal of money and there was nothing whatever in it.
Elizabeth thought about that gesture for a long time afterwards. It was the only thing she ever saw the woman do that had not been done for her.
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The week passed. Mr. Collins was in great spirits about the leave-taking, and made a considerable ceremony of it, and Elizabeth found that she could bear him now with a patience she had not had in April, and was not sure whether this was charity or fatigue.
"My dear Charlotte and I have but one mind and one way of thinking," said he. "There is in every thing a most remarkable resemblance of character and ideas between us. We seem to have been designed for each other."
Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was the case, and with equal sincerity could add that she firmly believed and rejoiced in his domestic comforts.
"Give my best compliments to your father and mother, if you please," said he, "and tell them that I hope they are well.
And you may tell my fair cousins that I have had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Collins settled in a manner which — but I need not enlarge upon it, for they will hear it from herself.
And, cousin Elizabeth, may I say — for I do say it without the smallest resentment, and I hope I know my duty as a clergyman better than to harbor any — that I have thought of you sometimes, in my walks, and have reflected that things fall out for the best; and that when I come into the Longbourn property, as in the course of nature I must, it will give me sincere pleasure to be of any service to your mother and sisters that may be in my power. "
He meant it. That was the thing about him that Elizabeth had never got used to and did not get used to on the doorstep at Hunsford: he meant every word of it, and would have kept it, and it would have cost him nothing, and there was not a grain of malice anywhere in the man.
"I am sure you will, sir," she said, and shook his hand, and meant that too.
Charlotte walked with her to the gate.
"Write to me," said Elizabeth.
"I write to you every week and you answer once a month, and I have made my peace with it.
Write to me this time." Charlotte held on to her hand a moment longer than she ever had.
"Every week, Lizzy, whether there is anything in it or not.
If there is a week when I do not hear, I shall know something is wrong, and I shall be able to do a great deal from here that you cannot do — I dine with a woman who knows every family in six counties and I am the dullest person she has ever met and she says a great deal in front of me.
Do you understand what I am telling you? "
"Yes."
"Say it back."
"Every week," said Elizabeth, "or you will know."
"Good," said Mrs. Collins.
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They set out at nine in the morning of the sixth of May, Sir William, Maria, and Elizabeth, in a hired carriage from Bromley.
They had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile down the Hunsford lane when there was a phaeton in the road ahead of them, drawn up under the hedge with its two gray ponies cropping the bank, and a woman in it in a great many shawls, holding the reins.
There was nobody with her.
"Bless me," said Sir William. "Is not that—"
"It is Miss de Bourgh," said Maria. "Ought we to stop? I am sure we ought to stop."
They stopped. Sir William got down and bowed and made a considerable speech about the honor and the fineness of the morning, and Miss de Bourgh inclined her head to about half an inch, and Maria curtseyed from the carriage step, and there was then a pause of the sort which nobody in that lane knew how to fill.
"Miss Bennet," said Anne de Bourgh.
Her voice was quite low and perfectly clear and had almost no color in it, like a voice heard through a wall.
Sir William, who had spent his life in the study of what great persons wish, understood at once that he was not wanted, and got up into the carriage saying something about the ponies; and Elizabeth came down into the road and walked the six feet to the phaeton, and stood at the wheel.
Miss de Bourgh looked at her.
At this distance she was not a gray woman at all.
She had her mother's bones and a much better mouth, and her eyes were an ordinary hazel and entirely awake, and she was — Elizabeth saw it plainly and without doing anything at all — furious, and had been furious for a very long time, and had it under a degree of control that no one else in Kent could have imagined.
"I have three sentences," she said. "I have been three days deciding which three. Do not interrupt me and do not answer, because I shall not be able to hear it properly and I have not the leisure to be moved."
"Yes," said Elizabeth.
"My cousin is not what you think. That is the first, and it is spent now, and it was the one I could least afford, because you have found it out already and I have paid for it notwithstanding."
She shifted the reins in her fingers.
"My mother will come to you," said Anne de Bourgh.
"Not soon. When she hears something that alarms her — and she will hear it, she hears everything, there is a woman in Meryton who writes to her housekeeper — she will come to your house herself, in her own carriage, without giving notice, and she will get you into a room or a garden with nobody in it, and she will ask you to promise her a thing.
It will be very reasonable. It will be phrased so that a well-bred girl cannot refuse it without being uncivil to an old woman.
"Do not promise her anything. Not a word of any kind. Do not say that you will consider it. Do not say that you have no present intention. Say no, out loud, and go on saying it, and be as rude as you have it in you to be, and you have a great deal in you.
"That is the second."
Elizabeth found that her mouth was dry.
The ponies moved and were checked. A blackbird went over the hedge.
"The third is for me," said Anne de Bourgh, "and I am going to spend it, and you are not to make a face."
She looked down the lane toward Rosings for a moment.
"I am nine-and-twenty years old," she said, "and I have never in my life said one word that was of any use to anybody, and I have thought about it every day since I was eleven, and I did not know until Tuesday fortnight, when you looked at me across my mother's table, that there was anybody left in England who would have understood what was being done.
You did not look away and you did not pity me.
You went white and you finished your dinner.
"Thank you. That is the whole of it. Go away now, and do not write, and do not call if you ever come into Kent again, and do not name me to my cousin."
Elizabeth said, "Miss de Bourgh—"
"No," said Anne. "That is four, and I have not got four."
She gathered the reins, and the gray ponies came off the bank, and the phaeton went past the carriage at a walk and up the lane toward the park, and she did not look round.
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Sir William talked from Bromley to Sutton about the extraordinary condescension of the great, and Maria said eleven times that she had never heard Miss de Bourgh's voice before, not once in six weeks, and wondered whether she had a cold.
Elizabeth sat in the corner of the carriage with her hands in her lap and watched the hedges of Kent go by.
She spent three, she thought. Nine-and-twenty years of it, kept and covered and never touched, and she has just spent three sentences of it in a lane on a woman she will never see again, and one of them was thank you.
She thought about the door frame at Rosings and the hand resting on it for the length of a breath.
And she thought, with a coldness that she did not try to argue herself out of, about what the whole of that woman had been saved for, and about a nephew of ten thousand a year and eight hundred years who had ridden away from Kent three weeks ago having offered the entire thing to a girl from Hertfordshire with no fortune and a mother in Meryton — and who had been refused, in a parlor, by a woman who was at this moment sitting in a hired carriage between Sir William Lucas and his daughter with her hands quite steady in her lap.
They lay a night at an inn near Sutton, and reached Gracechurch-street at four the next afternoon, where Jane was at the window watching for them.