Chapter Thirty-Eight
The first week of their return was soon gone.
The second began. It was the last of the regiment's stay in Meryton, and all the young ladies in the neighborhood were drooping apace.
The dejection was almost universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone were still able to eat, drink, and sleep, and pursue the usual course of their employments.
Very frequently were they reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and Lydia, whose own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such hard-heartedness in any of the family.
"Good Heaven! what is to become of us! What are we to do!" would they often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. "How can you be smiling so, Lizzy?"
Their affectionate mother shared all their grief; she remembered what she had herself endured on a similar occasion five and twenty years ago.
And then, four days before the regiment marched, the invitation came.
Mrs. Forster wrote it herself, in a large loose hand with three words underlined, and it was brought up to Lydia at breakfast, and the noise in the small parlor at Longbourn was such that Hill came in to see whether somebody had fallen down the stairs.
Elizabeth watched her father read it.
He read it twice, which he did not do with letters.
Then he folded it and gave it back across the table and said, "Well, my dear, you had better take a great many pins," and Lydia screamed and kissed him, and Mrs. Bennet said four things at once, and Kitty burst into tears and went out of the room, and nobody followed her but Mary.
Mr. Bennet did not look at Elizabeth at any point in the four minutes it took, and did not look at her afterwards, and went into the library at nine o'clock and did not come out until dinner.
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She got to Captain Harding on the Thursday.
It was not difficult, which surprised her; she had constructed three separate stratagems on the way into Meryton and used none of them.
Colonel Forster's lodgings were in the market place, and there was a great deal of coming and going with boxes, and she asked a servant for Mrs. Forster and was shown up to a parlor on the first floor where Mrs. Forster was not, and where a man of about forty in a plain coat was standing at a table with a portable desk open in front of him, tying a bundle of papers with tape.
He looked up.
"Miss Bennet."
"You know me, sir?"
"You are the second one. The one who walks." He finished the knot. "Mrs. Forster is at the milliner's and will be an hour. If it is about your sister's things, the wagon goes on Monday and there is room for a box and not for two."
"It is not about my sister's things."
"No," said Captain Harding. "I did not suppose it was."
He did not ask her to sit down, and she did not sit down, and there was a moment in which Elizabeth discovered that every arrangement of the question she had made in the lane sounded, in that room, like a girl being fanciful.
So she said the plainest thing she had.
"Captain Harding, what are your orders?"
He was perfectly still for a moment. Then he took up another bundle and began to square the edges of it on the table.
"That is not a question I am able to answer, ma'am."
The window was behind him. It was a good window, the whole width of the room, looking down into the market place with the sun full on it, and Elizabeth had walked into that parlor and put herself where she was standing for one reason.
She watched his hands.
They were quite steady, and they went on squaring the papers; and then, for perhaps two seconds, they stopped, both of them flat on the bundle, and the knuckles went white, and then they went on again.
"You have applied to be left here," said Elizabeth. "Twice. With a corporal and a horse. And you have been refused twice, and you have written to Horse Guards eleven times and had four answers, and none of the four said anything at all."
Captain Harding put down the papers.
He turned round and looked at her, and Elizabeth found that she had been quite wrong about his face, which she had seen four or five times across assembly rooms and had thought sour.
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody who did anything wrong."
"No," he said slowly. "No, I do not suppose he did." He let out a breath. "Miss Bennet, I am going to say four things to you and then I am going to ask you to go away, and I want you to understand that I shall deny every one of them if you repeat them.
"The first is that I cannot tell you my orders and you must not ask me again.
"The second is that my orders do not require me to be silent about the fact of them, and so I shall tell you this much: they are to observe, and to report, and to preserve the public calm. There is nothing in them about acting. I have asked for something about acting eleven times.
"The third is that I march on Tuesday with every man I have, that no troops are to be quartered in this town before Michaelmas, and that I have been informed, in writing, by a gentleman at a desk in London who has never been north of the river in his life, that the matter is not at present of a nature requiring the retention of a detachment. "
He stopped.
"And the fourth?" said Elizabeth.
"The fourth is a question." Harding put his hands behind his back. "Is there anybody in this county with any line at all?"
The market place went on below the window. Somebody was calling out about strawberries.
"I do not perfectly understand you," said Elizabeth.
"Yes you do, or you would not be standing in this room.
" He was not unkind about it. "I have eleven officers and about two whole gifts between them, and on Tuesday I take all of it away.
There will be four hundred people in this town and eleven hundred in the parish and not one warded doorway that has been touched by a competent hand in four hundred years.
So I am asking, before I go, whether there is anybody here — one person, ma'am, of any age or sex or condition — who has anything in them that answers when it is spoken to. "
Elizabeth stood in the middle of Mrs. Forster's parlor with her hands folded in front of her.
"There is my sister Jane," she said. "She quiets things.
She has no idea that she does it and it has been making her ill since November, and she is three-and-twenty and I would not have her told for anything in the world.
There is my sister Mary, who can hear whether a spoken thing has weight in it, and who has read every book on the subject in three counties and is the only person in this parish who understands one word of it. There is myself. I see what people are.
"And there is my sister Lydia, who is fifteen, who has more of the old blood in her than any of us because she is the youngest and it has not been spent, and who is going to Brighton on Monday."
Captain Harding closed his eyes for a moment.
"Four hundred years in the male line," he said.
"Bennet of Longbourn. Yes. I looked it up in November.
" He opened them again. "Miss Bennet, I am not permitted to advise you and I am going to.
Keep the second one — the one with the ear — near the third one, and both of them out of the low ground, and if you can contrive that your eldest sister leaves this county for the summer, contrive it.
"And write everything down. Everything, with the day and the hour, in a hand that a stranger can read.
When this becomes a matter of a nature requiring something, there will be a man sent down from London who has never been here, and he will want to know what happened in April, and there will be nobody left in Meryton who can tell him. Somebody must be the record."
"My sister Mary has been keeping it since Easter."
"Then your sister Mary," said Captain Harding, "is of more use to the Crown at this moment than I am, and I have been eleven years at it."
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He stopped her at the door.
"Miss Bennet. One more thing and it is not official either.
" He had gone back to the table and was not looking at her.
"Lieutenant Denny is a very good young man who gave a great deal of himself to a piece of ground in Sussex before he was two-and-twenty, and he has been alone in this business since November because I have not been able to talk to him about it and there has been nobody else.
If your sister — the one with the ear — should happen to go on writing to him from time to time after Tuesday, I should be glad of it, and I have no business saying so. "
"I shall tell her," said Elizabeth.
"Do not tell her that I asked."
"No," said Elizabeth. "I shall tell her that he would like it."
Captain Harding, for the first time in six months in Hertfordshire, laughed.
---
Mr. Wickham came to Longbourn on the Saturday.
He came with two other officers and stayed an hour, and was charming to Mrs. Bennet, and was more particular to Elizabeth than he had been since January, Miss King having been carried off to Liverpool and Miss Bennet being handsome and at leisure.
She had put on her gloves before he came into the room.
She had thought about it for a day and a half. She had thought about being ill, and about going out; and she had concluded that a woman who avoids a man tells him something, and that she could not afford to tell George Wickham anything at all for another four days.
So she sat and talked to him.
"I hope you had a pleasant stay in Kent," said he.
"Very pleasant, I thank you. I was there five weeks."
"You saw Rosings, then. And Lady Catherine.
" He smiled. "And her nephew, I collect.
Mr. Darcy is generally there at Easter — it is quite an institution, the Easter visit; he goes to be looked over by his aunt and to be shown his cousin, and comes away, and it has been going on for eleven years and will go on for eleven more. "
"He was there three weeks."
"Three! You must have had a great deal of him.
And how did you find him? I ask because you will hardly believe how curious I am.
Did he improve on acquaintance? He improves in Kent, I have always heard.
There is a good deal more of the great man about him in his aunt's house than there is in a Hertfordshire assembly room. "
Elizabeth looked at him.
She could have done it in a sentence. She had it ready — she had had it ready since a field in Kent, and it would have cost him nothing that could be proved and would have cost her nothing but the pleasure of watching his face, and the whole of her wanted it, and it went through her like a taste.
I know what you did at Ramsgate, and I know it was the fourth time.
Four days. Lydia went on Monday and it was Saturday afternoon.
Say that sentence in this parlor, she thought, and by six o'clock he will know that Darcy has told somebody; and a man who has been quiet for eleven years because nobody could speak will not be quiet after that; and he has taken my sister onto that ground five times, and the ground stopped moving on the second of May, and I do not know what he wants with her, and I do not know how long he needs, and if I frighten him now I shall find out.
"He improves in Kent," she said, "in some particulars.
I heard nothing to his credit that I had not heard before, and a good deal to his discredit that I had.
He was very civil to my friend Mrs. Collins, who is nobody, and very silent to everybody else, and he sat in a room for three weeks looking at a carpet. I cannot say I understand him at all."
Mr. Wickham's face cleared into something so like relief that she nearly lost her temper on the spot.
"There," he said warmly. "That is exactly it. That is exactly what he is, and I have never been able to make anybody see it, because they will have it that a man who says nothing must be thinking something. Miss Bennet, you are the only person of sense in this county."
"So I am often told," said Elizabeth.
He went at five, and pressed her hand at the door through the glove, and said a number of graceful things about hoping to hear that she was well, and about Brighton, and about how his chief consolation in leaving Hertfordshire was that he took so much of it with him.
She said that she was sure Meryton would feel his loss.
When he had gone she went up to her room and took off both gloves and sat on the edge of the bed and shook for a quarter of an hour, and then washed her hands, twice, in cold water, and came down and was pleasant at dinner.
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The regiment marched on Tuesday morning at seven.
Half the town was out to see it. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty went in to Meryton and cried on the pavement outside the milliner's, and Lydia was already gone — she had driven off with the Forsters on Monday afternoon in a state of happiness so complete that she had not said goodbye to Kitty at all, having said it at breakfast and considering the account closed.
Elizabeth stood at the corner by the church and watched them go past.
Colonel Forster at the head, and the band, and the waggons; and Lieutenant Denny about two thirds of the way down, on the gray mare, riding badly because he was looking at something over the hedges to the north-east; and Captain Harding last of all, alone, at a walk, with his hat in his hand and his head turned the same way, all the way to the turn of the road.
The dust settled. The town went in to its breakfast, and said what a stupid quiet place it would be all summer.
Behind the church, in the low fields going down to the water, a hundred and ninety acres of Hertfordshire lay perfectly still in the morning sun, exactly as green as everything around it, and had not moved a single pace in three weeks and one day.