Chapter Thirty-Nine
Meryton was as dull as it had promised to be. There was no assembly in June and none in July; the milliner sold nothing; and Mrs. Bennet observed at least twice a week that it was a melancholy thing to live in a place where nothing whatever happened, and that she had always said so.
Elizabeth found the summer very long, and afterwards remembered it as the last ordinary weeks of her life, which is a thing that can only be done backwards.
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Kitty began to mend at the end of May.
It was not remarked upon at first, because nobody at Longbourn had ever remarked upon Kitty; and it was slow, and it went backwards twice; and it was Hill who said it first, in the kitchen passage, in the ordinary way of a servant giving out an opinion nobody has asked for: that Miss Catherine had eaten a proper dinner three days running, and that it was a pleasure to see.
By the middle of June she had put on some of what she had lost. By the end of it she was going into Meryton on foot without stopping at the second stile.
She was still tired. She would be tired, Elizabeth came to understand over that summer, for a long time and perhaps always; there was a thinness in her that was not the same as thinness of body, and she gave out before other people did, and had to be let alone in the afternoons.
But the cough went in the third week of June and did not come back.
Elizabeth kept the account of it herself, in a paper she showed to nobody, with the dates; and on the twenty-eighth of June she wrote at the bottom of it, in a hand not quite as steady as usual: He has been gone five weeks and one day. She is better. There is no other thing that has changed.
She never afterwards knew what to do with the fact that the summer in which her family was ruined was also the summer in which she got one of her sisters back.
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Jane would not go away.
Elizabeth put it to her three times: once as a scheme, once as a favor, and the third time, in July, with the whole of the truth attached — that Captain Harding had said to get her out of the county if it could be contrived, and that she had been ill here and well in London and ill again on a fortnight's visit in February, and that there was a house in Gracechurch-street with three thousand houses round it where she had slept nine hours a night for five months.
Jane heard it all, and thought about it for a day, and said no.
"Kitty is here," she said. "Kitty is beginning to be well and there is nobody in this house who will sit with her in the afternoons and not make a noise. Mary is out of doors half the day with her book and her pacing. My mother is — my mother. And you will be in Derbyshire for six weeks."
"Jane, it is making you ill."
"It is making me tired," said Jane. "Which I have been for three-and-twenty years and did not know it had a cause, and I find I do not mind it half so much now that it has one.
" She folded the sheet she was hemming. "Lizzy, listen to me, because I am going to say something disagreeable and I shall not do it often.
"You have found a thing out. It is a very great thing and you were right about it when nobody believed you, and I am proud of you and frightened for you in about equal parts.
But you have got into a way of thinking that everything can be arranged — that if only the right person is put in the right house at the right time, none of it will happen.
And I do not believe that is how anything has ever gone in this family.
"I am staying at Longbourn because my sister is ill in it. If that is stupid, it is the only stupid thing I have ever insisted upon, and I should like to have it."
Elizabeth did not try again.
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Lydia's letters were of the sort that might have been expected.
There were four of them in six weeks, and they were short, and they were mostly about a green gown, a review, a bathing machine, and a person called Pratt.
We had a great party at the Blue Lion and I danced with Captain Carter twice and Mrs. F. says I am the prettiest girl in the camp which is nonsense but she says it. Kitty may have my old bonnet if she likes it as I have three now.
There was a mention of Mr. Wickham in the second, and one in the fourth.
The second was: W. is very well and asks after you all and says Meryton has nothing to show like the Steyne.
The fourth was: W. and I walked out to the downs above the camp on Tuesday, quite a party of us, and it is the most beautiful place in the world and quite lonely and he showed me where the old road is under the grass which you cannot see unless somebody shows you, and I was not a bit tired though we were three hours.
Elizabeth read that sentence eleven times, and copied it out, and gave the copy to Mary for the book.
Then she wrote to Lydia — a cheerful, foolish, gossiping letter of two full sheets, of exactly the kind Lydia would read to the end, with a great deal about bonnets and one sentence in the middle of the second page:
And do not go walking on the downs with only one gentleman, my love, for a girl of fifteen in a garrison town gets talked of directly, and Mrs. Forster would be blamed for it and not you, which would be very hard on her when she has been so kind.
It was the best she could do. She was fairly sure that Lydia would read it.
She was quite sure that Lydia would not attend to it, and she was right, and the letter was found in July among Lydia's things at Brighton, folded into the shape of a curl-paper.
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Mr. Bennet read Mary's books.
He read them properly, which nobody had expected, including Mary; he had them in the library for five weeks and made notes in a quarto book of his own, and twice sent Mary's own volumes back up to her with a slip of paper marking a page and a question written on it in his small close hand.
He would not tell anybody what he thought.
Once, in the third week of June, Elizabeth came in to find the japanned box open on the table, and the deed out of it and flattened under two paperweights, and Harrow open beside it at the appendix where the specimen forms are printed; and her father with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, looking at the two of them side by side.
"Papa?"
"Do you know," said Mr. Bennet, "that I have had this document in this house for four-and-twenty years, and have read it a hundred times, and have never once in my life read another one."
"Is it different?"
"Every deed is different, Lizzy. Every parish has its own way of saying a thing.
" He put his spectacles down. "This is not a different way of saying a thing.
Go away and let me be stupid in peace for a fortnight; I shall very likely be wrong, and I have not been wrong in public since 1793 and I do not intend to begin at two-and-fifty. "
He would say nothing more about it, then or before she went into Derbyshire; and she went away in August with the picture of him in her mind — an idle, elegant, wasted man of two-and-fifty, sitting in his shirtsleeves at eleven in the morning with a magnifying glass, comparing a strip of something that was not vellum against a printed form in a book his third daughter had bought for four shillings.
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The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now fast approaching; and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when a letter arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its commencement and curtailed its extent.
Mr. Gardiner would be prevented by business from setting out till a fortnight later in July, and must be in London again within a month; and as that left too short a period for them to go so far, and see so much as they had proposed, they were obliged to give up the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour; and, according to the present plan, were to go no farther northward than Derbyshire.
In that county, there was enough to be seen, to occupy the chief of their three weeks; and to Mrs. Gardiner it had a peculiarly strong attraction.
The town where she had formerly passed some years of her life, and where they were now to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of her curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak.
Elizabeth was excessively disappointed; she had set her heart on seeing the Lakes; and still thought there might have been time enough.
That was what she said. It was true for about a day and a half.
What she thought afterwards, and did not say to anybody, was this.
Derbyshire was where the only person in England was, who had told her the truth about her own county before she was willing to hear it; who had measured the ground twice with his own hands; who had laid a ward and taken it up again and paid for both; who knew what Wickham was and had broken an oath to tell her; and who had gone away in May believing that she thought him the last man in the world.
She had a great deal to say to that man.
She had been composing pieces of it since a lane in Kent — not apology, or not chiefly; information.
That the ground had stopped moving on the second of May.
That Mary had the figures. That Harding had asked for orders eleven times and been refused, and had gone to Brighton with every man he had.
That her youngest sister had been walked onto the low ground five times in four weeks by George Wickham and was now in a garrison town on the coast being shown where the old road is under the grass.
She had no possible way of telling him any of it.
A young woman does not write to a single gentleman.
A young woman who has refused a man in April does not write to him in June with three sheets about a piece of grass; there is not a person alive who would read that letter as anything but what it was not.
She had thought about sending it through Mrs. Collins, and through Colonel Fitzwilliam, and once, at two in the morning, through Mr. Bingley; and every road came out at the same place, which was a woman making a pretext.
And now she was going into Derbyshire.
Her first solicitude on that head was very great, and she asked her aunt, on the first evening, with what she believed to be perfect carelessness, whether Pemberley was much visited by strangers.
It was, said Mrs. Gardiner; it was one of the sights of the county; the housekeeper showed the rooms on most days and there was a very fine picture gallery.
"And is the family — I only ask because I should not like to be in the way—"
"The family are hardly ever there in the summer, my dear. Nobody is anywhere in August."
Elizabeth said that she was very glad of it, and went up to bed, and lay awake for a considerable time being ashamed of herself in about four separate directions at once.
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They set out on the twenty-second of July.
On the morning of her going, Elizabeth went up to the cold little room over the porch, where Mary was writing at the window with the pocket-book — the third one now — open in front of her.
"I shall be back on the sixteenth," said Elizabeth. "You have the whole of it. If anything happens—"
"If anything happens, I write to you at the Lambton post office and to Mrs. Collins at Hunsford, and I do not write to anybody else, and I say what happened and not what I think about it, with the day and the hour." Mary did not look up. "You have said this four times."
"I know. I am saying it again."
Mary put down her pen.
"Lizzy," she said, "may I ask you for something? I have never asked you for anything and I have been thinking about how to do it for a week."
"Ask."
"When you come back — whatever has happened, or has not happened — will you come up here and tell me about Derbyshire?
Not the useful parts. I should like to hear about the roads and the hills and what the inns were like and whether the peak country is as they say.
I have never been out of this county in my life and I do not suppose I ever shall be, and everybody who goes anywhere comes home and tells my mother. "
Elizabeth stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "I will. And Mary — Captain Harding said a thing about you in May that I have not repeated, because you would have gone red and left the room."
"Then do not repeat it now."
"I shall repeat it in September," said Elizabeth, "when I come back and tell you about the roads."
She went down. The carriage was at the door, and her mother was giving Mrs. Gardiner three separate commissions in Buxton, and Kitty was out on the step in the sun looking better than she had looked at Christmas, and Jane was standing behind her with her hand on her shoulder, perfectly serene, perfectly legible, and very tired.