Chapter Forty
They entered the park at one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.
Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view.
They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound.
It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; — and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance.
Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned.
Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.
They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
That was the sentence that came into her head. It was very nearly the last frivolous thing she thought that day.
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She had felt it at the lodge gates and had said nothing.
It was not like Rosings. That was the first thing and it took her three miles of woodland to find words for, and the words she found were these: at Rosings, the whole parish leaned in, and one leaned with it, and one did not know one was doing it; and here nothing leaned at all.
What happened here was that the leaning stopped.
She had not been aware of carrying anything.
Nobody is. She had been two-and-twenty years in a county whose wards had never been renewed and whose low ground was the wrong color, and had walked over it every day of her life, and had thought of the small constant effort of it — if she had thought of it at all — as being what it is to be awake.
Inside the pale at Pemberley she put it down.
She found herself, half a mile into the wood, sitting in a carriage with her hands loose in her lap and her shoulders somewhere they had not been for a long while; and she thought, quite distinctly, oh — this is what Jane meant about London, and then, a moment later, with the whole of the thing arriving at once, no.
This is what Jane has been doing for other people since she was four years old, and nobody has ever done it for her.
Mrs. Gardiner said, "Lizzy, are you quite well?"
"Perfectly," said Elizabeth. "It is a very fine wood."
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The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking, elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her.
They followed her into the dining parlor. It was a large, well-proportioned room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went to a window to enjoy its prospect.
Mrs. Reynolds took them through the rooms in the order she had taken people through them for thirty years, and gave them the dimensions and the dates and the name of the man who did the ceilings; and Mr. Gardiner asked intelligent questions about the estate, and got very good answers, and said afterwards that he had never in his life met a servant who understood a drainage scheme.
In the second saloon Mrs. Gardiner asked whether the family were much at Pemberley in the course of the year.
"Not so much as I could wish, ma'am; but I dare say he may spend half his time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months."
"Except," thought Elizabeth, "when she goes to Ramsgate."
"If your master would marry, you might see more of him."
"Yes, ma'am; but I do not know when that will be. I do not know who is good enough for him."
Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, "It is very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so."
"I say no more than the truth, and what every body will say that knows him," replied the other.
Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far; and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added, "I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old. "
This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her ideas. That he was not a good tempered man, had been her firmest opinion. Her keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more.
"He is the best landlord, and the best master," said she, "that ever lived.
Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves.
There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name.
Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw any thing of it.
To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away like other young men. "
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It was in the long gallery, at the west end, that Mr. Gardiner asked about the ground.
He asked it as a business man asks a thing, having been shown a great deal of good farming out of a window: whether the estate was all in hand, and how far the boundary ran, and who kept it.
"The whole of the west ground is in hand, sir, and Mr. Havell has the keeping of it. He came to us — let me see — eleven years ago at Lady day, from near Kendal."
"And is he a good man at it?"
Mrs. Reynolds considered.
"He is a very careful man, sir, and honest as the day, and he has never had a night's trouble out there in eleven years," she said.
"He is not what the old warden was. Mr. Havell learned it.
He learned it very well and he does it by the book and he walks it four times a week whatever the weather, and the master goes out with him at the quarters.
But there was a boy here once who could put his hand on that wall in the dark and tell you the yard he was standing at, and Mr. Havell will never do that, and he would be the first to say so. "
"And what became of the boy?" said Mrs. Gardiner comfortably.
"He went into the army, ma'am," said Mrs. Reynolds.
There was the smallest pause. It was not the pause of a woman who has said too much; it was the pause of a woman who has said exactly what she has decided to say for eleven years and has just been reminded why she decided it.
"There is a great deal of nonsense talked in a house like this," she added, "and I have never repeated any of it, and I am too old to begin."
Mr. Gardiner said something civil about the dairy, and they went on.
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Elizabeth walked in the long gallery in a kind of daze.
There were the pictures, and there were the windows, and at the far end of it, under the third window, there was a pianoforte with the lid down and a stool pushed in square to it.
She stood and looked at it for perhaps half a minute.
Four people in the room and a housekeeper going in and out of the far door with the plates. She played it exactly right. And Elizabeth had heard, quite distinctly, through the music, the small honest domestic sound of china being stacked.
She turned round. Mrs. Reynolds was at the other end of the gallery telling Mr. Gardiner about a Vandyke.
That is her, thought Elizabeth. That is the woman with the plates.
She was in this room; she is in this room now; she was eleven feet from a girl of fifteen who had just lost nine-tenths of everything she had, and she went on with her work because there was nothing whatever to stop her, and she does not know to this day that anything happened at all.
And then, because she could not prevent it: and if she knew, she would have got it out of Mr. Wickham's own account within a fortnight, from somebody in the village, and it would have been all over Derbyshire, and that is precisely why she was never told.
She looked at the pianoforte again and found that her eyes were stinging, and moved on to the pictures.
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There were many good paintings, but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art; and from such as had been already visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss Darcy's, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and also more intelligible.
In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her.
At last it arrested her — and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her.
She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery.
Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his father's life time.
There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation toward the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance.
"And this," said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures below, "is the other gentleman, that used to be with my master. He is now gone into the army; but I am afraid he has turned out very wild."
Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, and Elizabeth did not return it.
She looked instead at the small painted face of a boy of about fifteen, hung a little lower than the rest, in a good frame, still on the wall of that house eleven years after everything; and she thought about a man who kept his father's arrangements exactly as his father had left them, including the ones that must have cost him something to look at every day of his life.
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"Is your master much at home in the winter?" said Mrs. Gardiner, as they came down.
"He was not, last winter, ma'am. He was away in the autumn — Hertfordshire, I believe it was, with Mr. Bingley — and then he was in town, and when he came down at Christmas he was—"
She stopped, and smoothed her apron.
"He was very much fatigued," she said. "He had been doing too much, whatever it was; gentlemen will not be told.
He sat in the library a great deal in January and would not have the horses out.
It went off by Lady day and I have said more than I ought and I will thank you not to repeat it, for he cannot abide to be talked about. "
"Of course," said Mrs. Gardiner.
Elizabeth stood in the hall of Pemberley with her hand on the newel post and did not say one word.
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They then went out; and it was agreed that they should walk about the grounds.
As they walked across the lawn toward the river, Elizabeth turned back to look again; her uncle and aunt stopped also, and while the former was conjecturing as to the date of the building, the owner of it himself suddenly came forward from the road, which led behind it to the stables.
They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight.
Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush.
He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immoveable from surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced toward the party, and spoke to Elizabeth, if not in terms of perfect composure, at least of perfect civility.
She had instinctively turned away; but stopping on his approach, received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be overcome.
Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener's expression of surprise, on beholding his master, must immediately have told it.
They stood a little aloof while he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused, scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what answer she returned to his civil inquiries after her family.
Amazed at the alteration in his manner since they last parted, every sentence that he uttered was increasing her embarrassment; and every idea of the impropriety of her being found there, recurring to her mind, the few minutes in which they continued together, were some of the most uncomfortable of her life.
Nor did he seem much more at ease; when he spoke, his accent had none of its usual sedateness; and he repeated his inquiries as to the time of her having left Longbourn, and of her stay in Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke the distraction of his thoughts.
At length, every idea seemed to fail him; and after standing a few moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took leave.
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He was four yards away when Elizabeth heard her own voice say, "Mr. Darcy."
He turned round at once.
She had not the smallest idea what she was going to say. Her aunt and uncle were twenty feet off, and there was a gardener with a barrow on the gravel, and there was no possible sentence, and she stood in the sun on the lawn at Pemberley and heard herself say it:
"It stopped on the second of May."
Mr. Darcy did not say I beg your pardon.
He came back three of the four yards, and stood quite still, and his voice when it came was perfectly level and about a quarter of its usual volume.
"Where."
"Behind the church. It came up out of the low ground and over the road in the spring and it has not moved a pace since the second of May.
My sister Mary has paced it every week since April in the same boots and has the figures.
Captain Harding asked for orders eleven times and was refused, and the regiment went to Brighton on the twenty-sixth, and there is nobody in the county at all. "
"How much of it is there?"
"A hundred and ninety acres."
There was a silence of about two seconds, during which Elizabeth watched a man do a sum he had been dreading for eight months.
"Miss Bennet," said Mr. Darcy. "Are your family at Longbourn now?"
"All but the youngest."
"And where is the youngest?"
"In Brighton," said Elizabeth, "with Colonel Forster's wife and the whole of the ——shire."
Mr. Darcy looked at her for a moment with an expression she had never seen on his face, and never afterwards forgot, because it was not surprise and it was not anger.
It was a man taking hold of something with both hands.
"Thank you," he said. "I am going to ask your leave to call on you at your inn to-morrow, and I am going to ask it in front of your aunt, so that it may be a civil thing and not a strange one. Will you give it me?"
"Yes," said Elizabeth Bennet.