Chapter Thirty-Five
They were to stay four days in Gracechurch-street, and on the first evening there was no talking of anything, because the children had to be admired and Maria Lucas had to give an account of Rosings which took an hour and a quarter and contained the chimney-piece three times.
But at eleven, when the house was quiet, Jane came into her sister's room with a candle, as she had done every night of their lives when there was anything to say, and sat down on the end of the bed and put her feet under her.
"Well," she said.
"Well," said Elizabeth.
And then found that she could not begin.
She had arranged it all in the carriage from Sutton.
She had four days, and a plan, and an order to put things in, and she had got as far as Jane, I have something to tell you about Mr. Bingley about eleven times between Bromley and the turnpike; and now her sister was sitting on the counterpane with her hair down looking pleased to see her, and Elizabeth discovered that every road into the subject went through a room she could not take Jane into.
"You have been unhappy," said Jane.
"Yes."
"For about a month, from your letters. The last three were very amusing." Jane pulled the shawl round her shoulders. "You are only ever that amusing in a letter when something has happened."
"Mr. Darcy made me an offer of marriage."
There was a pause of some length.
"Well," said Jane again, in an entirely different voice.
---
It came out over the next hour, in pieces, and not in the order Elizabeth had planned.
Jane's astonishment was very great — she had not, it seemed, ever suspected it, and said so with the particular horror of a woman discovering that she has been in a room with a great deal going on in it and has been thinking about something else.
And then, when Elizabeth had told the manner of it, and her own answer, and the shape of what she had said about his being the last man in the world, Jane was silent for a while and then said, quietly:
"Poor Mr. Darcy."
"Jane—"
"I know. I know he deserved it, and that he said unforgivable things about our family, and I am not going to pretend that I do not mind them, because I do mind them very much.
" She turned the candle round on the little table.
"But he was in love with you for six months and thought about nothing else, and he must have been very sure of you to say all that, and he went away from that house at nine o'clock at night into a lane in Kent. That is all I meant."
"You are the only person alive who would have said it."
"I am not," said Jane. "I am only the first."
---
The rest of it was harder.
Elizabeth told her that Mr. Bingley had never known she was in London; that the concealment had been Miss Bingley's and Mr. Darcy's between them; and that Mr. Darcy had confessed the whole of it, in writing, without excuse.
Jane took that better than Elizabeth had feared and much worse than she had hoped.
She said several charitable things, in a very steady voice, about how it was natural for a sister to consult her brother's interest, and about how a friend of long standing must be supposed to know his own friend's character; and then she stopped in the middle of one of them and said, "It is only that four months is a long time," and did not finish it, and had to be given a handkerchief.
"There is one thing more," said Elizabeth, "and I have been trying since Bromley to find a way not to tell you, and there is not one, and it is the worst thing in the letter and it is not about him at all."
"Then say it."
"Mr. Darcy separated them because he was persuaded that you did not care for him."
"Yes," said Jane. "Well. That is not so dreadful. He was wrong, and I did not show it, and I was brought up not to show it, and I have thought a hundred times since November that if I had been a different sort of girl—"
"Jane. You could not have shown it."
"I could have—"
"You could not have shown it," said Elizabeth.
"You have never been able to show anything in your life and it is not your fault and it is not modesty and it is not shyness, and I have known it for seven months and I did not tell you, and that is the thing I have to tell you now, and I would rather do almost anything else. "
---
She told her what Charlotte had said in the field in October.
That the gift does not choose. That it goes out upon everybody in a room alike, without asking, and it soothes; and that what it soothes most thoroughly, and first, and always, is Jane.
That a man looking at her sees a young woman who is composed and pleasant and glad — exactly as composed and pleasant and glad to see him as to see the apothecary.
That it is not a veil she could lift if she were braver.
That it is the thing itself, sitting on top of her, ironing her flat.
Jane listened without moving.
When it was done she sat for a while with the shawl in her hands, and then she said, "Say the last part again."
Elizabeth said it again.
"Every room," said Jane. "Everybody. Always."
"Yes."
"Since I was four years old."
"Charlotte thinks so. So do I."
Jane got up and went to the window, which had nothing outside it but Gracechurch-street and a lamp, and stood there with her back to the room for a long time; and Elizabeth, who had expected tears, and had a whole apparatus of comfort ready, sat on the bed and found that she had been entirely wrong about what she was doing to her sister.
"Lizzy," said Jane at last, and her voice was quite level. "Do you remember Mr. Halliwell?"
"Halliwell?"
"He curated at Meryton for a year when I was nineteen. He used to come on Thursdays."
"I remember him a little. He went to a living in Norfolk."
"He was in love with me for eight months," said Jane, "and I knew it, and I liked him very much, and I could not make him understand.
Not by anything I said, because I said everything a girl may say without shaming herself, and I said it three or four times.
And at the end of it he came and told me, in the shrubbery, very kindly, that he was going into Norfolk, and that he had at one time hoped, but that he had observed that my manner to him was the same as my manner to everybody, and he did not choose to make a fool of himself, and he wished me extremely well.
" She was still looking at the lamp. "And I have thought about that conversation once a fortnight for four years.
I have thought that I was cold. I have thought that there must be something wanting in me.
There is a — Lizzy, I cannot tell you what I have thought, because it is all very stupid, and I have never said any of it aloud, and I am seven-and-twenty in four years. "
"Jane."
"Twice," said Jane Bennet. "It has happened twice, and both of them were kind men who told me plainly that I had shown them nothing, and both times I believed that it was my own coldness, and it was not, it was never once—"
She stopped, and put her hand flat against the window frame, and Elizabeth got off the bed.
But when she got there her sister was not crying at all.
She was standing with her forehead nearly touching the glass and her eyes wide open, and she was — Elizabeth had no other word for it — angry; and Elizabeth had never in two-and-twenty years seen Jane Bennet angry, and had not known it was among the things she could do.
"I have been very good," said Jane, in the same level voice, "for a very long time, about a thing that was never mine to be good about."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "You have."
---
They sat a while after that without saying much, which was the right thing.
And then Elizabeth, who had been turning it over since the third sentence of the whole conversation, said:
"Jane. It is gone now."
Jane looked round.
"You told me at supper on the way to Kent," said Elizabeth. "Nine weeks in this house, and nothing going out of you at all, and Maggie screamed for six minutes and you could not stop her, and you have slept every night since Candlemas."
"Yes."
"Then you are — " Elizabeth found she had to stop and start again.
"Jane, for the first time since you were four years old, you are a woman whose face shows what she feels.
You have been in London for five months being perfectly legible to every soul who has looked at you and not one of them was anybody who mattered. "
Jane sat down slowly on the end of the bed.
"He is three miles from this house," said Elizabeth.
"He does not know I am in it."
"No. He does not." Elizabeth took her sister's hands, which were warm, and which had not been warm in November.
"And I am not going to say anything comfortable to you, because I have said a great many comfortable things in the last five months and every one of them turned out to be wrong.
I only want you to have the fact. Whatever it was that has stood between you and every person who has ever tried to look at you — it is not standing there at present.
That is all. It may come back. I do not know what makes it come back. "
Jane said nothing for a moment.
Then she said, "It came back at Longbourn."
"What?"
"In February. When I went home for the fortnight, before you went to Kent.
" Jane's hands had gone very still in her sister's.
"I did not tell you because there was nothing to tell, and because by then I had persuaded myself that the whole notion was nonsense and that I was a girl who had been jilted and was making a mystery of herself.
But I was tired at Longbourn, Lizzy. From the second day.
I slept badly, and I was heavy in the mornings, and Kitty came into my room on the Thursday and sat on my bed and cried about nothing at all, and I put my arms round her and she stopped, and I went to bed at nine o'clock that night and could not get up till eleven the next day.
"And I came back to Gracechurch-street on the Monday and slept nine hours and woke up perfectly well."
The candle had burned down a long way.
"Say that again," said Elizabeth.
"It is worse in that county," said Jane.