Chapter Thirty-Seven
Longbourn smelled of itself, which no other house in the world does; and Mrs. Bennet was in the hall before the steps were down, and had told them about the Collinses’ poultry and Mrs. Long’s nephew and the shocking price of a leg of mutton before anybody was out of their bonnet.
Mary was at the top of the stairs.
She said, “You are come, then,” and went into her room; and Elizabeth, who had spent nineteen days composing a speech, understood that she was to follow, and did.
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The pocket-book was on the bed.
It was a plain one, ruled in three columns in a small exact hand, and it began on the twelfth of April and it ran to the sixth of May, and there was not a day missing.
Day. Hour. In company with.
"I could not do the hours exactly at first," said Mary, standing with her hands behind her.
"There is only the kitchen clock and the church, and Lydia does not tell anybody where she goes.
So for the first week I have written morning and afternoon, which is not good enough.
After the eighteenth I began asking Hill, because Hill knows everything and nobody has ever asked her anything, and after that it is right to the quarter hour. "
Elizabeth sat down on the bed and read it.
It took her a quarter of an hour, and Mary stood the whole time.
There were four-and-twenty entries. Most were nothing: Meryton, with Kitty, to the milliner; my aunt Philips's, with Kitty and Mrs. Forster; church; the Gouldings'. Eleven of them had Mr. Wickham's name in the third column, which was fewer than Elizabeth had feared and quite enough.
And then there was a second list, at the back, in the same hand, headed Low ground.
It had five entries.
April 14. Evening, abt. 8. Barrett corner as far as water. L., Mr. D., Mr. W.
April 19. Afternoon. Along water to mill and back. L., Kitty, Mr. W., Mr. Chamberlayne.
April 26. Evening, abt. 9. Barrett road to corner. L., Mr. W. (K. asked to go, not permitted by L.)
May 2. Morning. Church fields, edge of the pale ground. L., Mr. W.
May 11. Night, abt. 10 to 11. Barrett road, by moonlight. L., Mr. D., Mr. W.
Elizabeth read the last entry three times.
"She told me about the eleventh," she said. "In the carriage. She told me the whole of it — the moonlight, and the corner, and Denny going cross and quiet on the way home and not giving her his arm. She named Denny. She did not name Mr. Wickham."
"No," said Mary.
"Did she forget him?"
"Lydia has never forgotten a man in her life."
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"Sit down, Mary. I cannot talk to you while you are standing up like a footman."
Mary sat down on the wooden chair by the wash-stand, which was where she always sat, and put her hands in her lap.
"Now," said Elizabeth. "I said in my letter that I would tell you the whole of it when I came, and I am going to, and it will take an hour, and there is one name in it that I have promised not to say and I shall not say it, and you are not to guess at it aloud."
"Very well."
"And when I have done, I want everything you have found out since Easter, in order, and I do not want you to leave anything out because you think I shall laugh."
Mary looked at the floor.
"I have got out of the habit of expecting people to laugh," she said. "It has been rather uncomfortable. I do not recommend it."
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It took an hour and ten minutes.
Mary heard the whole of it without once interrupting — the ballroom and the ward taken up, the letter, the field, the antiquary's rolls, Wickham and the gloves, Mrs. Younge and the fourth time, the man Fenn who was written down a deserter, and Anne de Bourgh in a phaeton in a Kentish lane spending three sentences.
At the end she said, "Say the part about the rolls again."
Elizabeth said it again.
"Four hundred and eleven entries and no gap," said Mary. "No gap. He is certain of that."
"He is certain that the clerks left no space."
"Then it is not that the county was passed over," said Mary.
"You may pass over a thing and the clerks will still leave the county's name and write nil, because a clerk is paid by the entry and he likes to be seen to have gone down the whole list. There is no space because the county was never on the list. It was never brought before them at all. "
"Which means?"
"Which means somebody had already had it," said Mary Bennet.
---
She got up and fetched a second book from under the mattress, which she had evidently thought about a good deal.
"After Easter I did three things," she said. "The first is that I went and looked at it, on the twentieth of April, in the morning, with Hill's boy for company, and I have been six times since."
"Mary—"
"I did not go on it. I went to the edge and I walked the edge and I paced it and I wrote the figures down, and I would like you to look at them before you say anything, because I have done it the same way every time and I have used the same boots."
The figures were in a column, with the dates. Elizabeth ran her eye down them and stopped.
"It has slowed."
"It has stopped," said Mary. "On the second of May it stopped.
It went nine yards a week from Michaelmas to Lady day — I have got the earlier part from Denny, and I shall come to that — and then it went eleven yards in the last week of April, which frightened me a good deal, and then on the second of May it stopped, and it has not moved one pace in a fortnight. "
"Then that is—"
"It is not good," said Mary. "Lizzy, I want to be very careful here, because I am nineteen and I have read four books and I have never in my life seen anything of this kind, and a person who has read four books is exactly the person who says a stupid thing with confidence.
But a thing that has been coming steadily for eight months does not stop because it has got tired. "
"Then why does it stop?"
"Because it has got where it was going," said Mary.
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The second thing was Denny.
"He would not talk to me at first. He talks to me now.
" Mary said it without any expression whatever.
"I did not do anything clever. I went to the church on the Tuesday after Easter and he was sitting in the porch by himself, and I sat down at the other end of it and did not say anything for about twenty minutes, and then I asked him what the marks are that you look for. And he told me."
"He told you?"
"He has been in this county since November with a thing in his head that he is not allowed to say to anybody, and his commanding officer will not discuss it with him, and his friends are all at cards.
" Mary turned a page. "He is two-and-twenty, Lizzy.
He wanted to say it to somebody so much that he did not care that it was me. I have four pages of him."
"What is in them?"
"The whole of the measurements from Michaelmas.
What was done at a place called Selsey in Sussex, which I did not understand at first and understand now.
What happened to him there — he gave a great deal of himself into the ground to mend a line and it did not come back and it is not going to.
" Mary's voice did not alter at all. "The names of two other places in Sussex where the same thing has begun since Christmas.
The fact that Captain Harding has written to Horse Guards eleven times and has had four answers and none of them said anything, and that the regiment is going to Brighton in a fortnight and Harding has applied twice to be left here with a corporal and a horse and has been refused both times.
"And that he — Denny — asked for leave to warn the town in March, in writing, and was refused; and that he thinks about the man Fenn every day; and that when he was ordered to write deserted in the return he did it, and it took him three quarters of an hour to write one word."
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"The third thing," said Mary, "is Lydia, and it is the one I have not known what to do with."
She put the pocket-book back on the bed and opened it at the second list.
"Look at the third column and forget the rest. Every time she has been on that ground, he has been with her.
Every time. And on the twenty-sixth of April Kitty asked to go and Lydia would not take her, and I heard it happen on the stairs, and Lydia said—" Mary stopped, and then went on in the same flat voice, "Lydia said, he does not want you, he wants me, and you are always coughing. "
Elizabeth sat quite still.
"She thinks she is being singled out," said Mary.
"She is fifteen. It is the first time in her life that a man has preferred her to anybody and she would go into a river for it.
And I have thought about it every night since the second of May, and I cannot make it come out any way but one, and I would be very glad if you would tell me I am wrong.
"He is not taking her there because it is a pleasant walk.
He has taken her onto that ground five times in four weeks, and the ground stopped moving on the second of May, and she is a Bennet of Longbourn, four hundred years in the male line, and she has never sworn anything and she has never promised anything and there is not one soul in that house who has ever told her what her own blood is worth. "
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Elizabeth went down to the library at eight o'clock that evening.
Her father was in his chair with the candles lit, and he looked up and said, "Well, Lizzy. Kent. Was Mr. Collins as fine as we hoped?"
"Papa, I want you to hear something and not to be funny about it for a quarter of an hour."
"That is a great deal to ask of a man of my habits, but I shall try."
She talked for forty minutes.
She left out Georgiana, and she left out the proposal; and she gave him everything else — the field, the figures, Tarrant's rolls, Mary's columns, Denny, Fenn, the eleven letters to Horse Guards, the regiment going in a fortnight, Wickham and the five walks and he does not want you, he wants me.
Mr. Bennet did not interrupt. He did not smile. When she had done he sat for a while with his fingers together, and then he got up and went to the high shelf and took down the japanned box and put it on the table, and did not open it.
"Do you believe me?" said Elizabeth.
"Yes," said her father.
She had expected to have to fight for that, and found that she had nothing to do with the strength she had brought.
"Then—"
"Sit down, Lizzy, and let me be honest with you, which I have not been in about twenty years and shall probably not manage again.
" He sat down himself, rather heavily. "I believe every word of it.
I believed the first third of it before you came into this room, because I have lived in this county for one-and-fifty years and I have known since I was a boy that there is something wrong with the low ground beyond Barrett's, in the way that one knows a thing that everybody knows and nobody says.
My father would not shoot down there. His father dug a pond and filled it in again.
It is not knowledge. It is the sort of thing a family has instead of knowledge. "
"Then you will stop her going to Brighton."
"No," said Mr. Bennet.
Elizabeth stood up.
"Sit down. You shall have the reason, and it is not a good one, and you are not going to be able to argue with it, which is what will make you angriest." He put his hand flat on the box.
"Lydia is going to Brighton because Mrs. Forster has asked her, and because if I forbid it there will be such a scene in this house as you cannot conceive, and it will not last a day, it will last until August; and because Lydia at Brighton is Colonel Forster's affair and Lydia at Longbourn is mine.
"And because — attend to this part, Lizzy, since it is the only piece of sense in it — the regiment is going to Brighton.
Mr. Wickham is going to Brighton. That ground is here.
You have just spent forty minutes telling me that the danger to your sister is a piece of Hertfordshire, and now you wish me to keep her in Hertfordshire. "
"He will be there. He will be with her every day and there will be nobody—"
"He will be in a camp with two thousand men and a colonel's wife who is fond of her," said Mr. Bennet, "and she will spend six weeks buying bonnets and being ridiculous, and she will come home in September no worse than she went, which is the most that any of us has ever been able to say about Lydia. "
"You do not believe that."
Her father was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "I do not know that I do. But it is what I am going to say, and I shall go on saying it, and by the middle of June I dare say I shall believe it very comfortably."
He turned the box round on the table with one finger.
"I have had one thing in my life that I could not do anything about," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have had it since I was thirty-one, and I have made a way of living out of it, and the way is this: I find out exactly how bad a thing is, and I look at it very steadily, and then I make a joke and go into another room.
It has answered for twenty years. It answered in November, when your mother was right about your cousin and I let you refuse him. It is answering now.
"You have brought me a thing I can do nothing about, and I have done what I do."
"You can do something. You can say no to her."
"Yes," said her father. "I can. And I am not going to, and in about ten weeks one of us is going to be very sorry about that, and I am fairly certain which."
He opened the library door for her.
"Go to bed, Lizzy," he said. "And tell your sister Mary that she is to bring me those books in the morning. Not the notes — the books. I should like to read them myself, and I have not read anything in nine years that was not written to amuse me."