Chapter Forty-One
Elizabeth had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister to visit her the very day after her reaching Pemberley; and was consequently resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole of that morning.
But her conclusion was false; for on the very morning after their arrival at Lambton, these visitors came.
She was sitting with her aunt at the window when the chaise stopped in the street below, and she knew the horses, and she stood up rather too quickly and sat down again.
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Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth; and though little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance womanly and graceful.
She was less handsome than her brother, but there was sense and good humor in her face, and her manners were perfectly unassuming and gentle.
She was also, plainly and simply, frightened; and Elizabeth, who had expected to find that she could not look at her, found instead that she could not look away.
The girl came into the room a half step behind her brother and made a curtsey and said something that could not be heard, and then stood with her hands together waiting to be got through.
She was fifteen. She was standing at a window in a lodging-house and she turned round and said "You came" as though it were the most surprising thing that had ever happened to her.
Elizabeth got up and went to her and took her hand, and said:
"Miss Darcy — I am very glad. Your brother told me at Netherfield in November that you play, and I have been dreading it ever since, because I have been complimented on my own playing all my life by people who have never heard anybody good, and I have a horror of being found out."
Georgiana Darcy looked up.
"Oh," she said. "But you — I have not heard you, but my brother said—"
She stopped, in acute confusion.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "and I should very much like to know what he said, and he will not tell me, and if you tell me I shall be your friend for life."
Georgiana laughed. It came out of her in a way that plainly astonished her, and she put her hand up to her mouth; and Mrs. Gardiner said something kind about the weather, and the thing was done, and they all sat down.
Elizabeth did not look at Mr. Darcy for some time. When at last she did, he was looking at his sister, and his face was doing nothing at all, and she understood that this was what it looked like when it was doing a great deal.
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Mr. Gardiner was carried off within the quarter hour.
There was a stream at the bottom of the Pemberley woods which he had admired aloud on the previous afternoon within Mr. Darcy's hearing, and Mr. Darcy now recollected it, and pressed him to come and fish there as often as he chose while he remained in the country, offering at the same time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of the stream where there was usually most sport; and Mr. Gardiner, who had not had a rod in his hand since April and had a business in Gracechurch-street that gave him three weeks a year, went off with him for an hour before dinner in a state of simple happiness.
Elizabeth was quite certain, watching them go, that it had been arranged before either gentleman came into the room; and she was right.
Mrs. Gardiner took Miss Darcy to the other window to look at the drawings of the Peak in the innkeeper's portfolio, and was extremely thorough about it, and asked a great many questions.
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They had, by Elizabeth's reckoning, about forty minutes.
"Tell me the whole of it," said Mr. Darcy. "From the beginning of May. Nothing left out because it seems foolish."
She told him.
It took eighteen minutes, and she was afterwards rather proud of it — the figures, the dates, Mary's two lists, the five walks and the third column, Kitty's recovery and the paper with the dates on it, Harding at the window and his hands and the four things he had said, the eleven letters and the four answers, the gentleman at the desk who had never been north of the river, Lydia's fourth letter and the old road under the grass on the downs above the camp.
He did not interrupt except twice, and both times to ask for a date.
When she had finished he sat for a moment with his hands on his knees.
"Your sister Mary," he said. "Has she ever been taught anything?"
"She has been laughed at for nine years and let alone. That is the whole of her education."
"Then she has done in four months, alone, with four books and a pair of boots, what the Board did not do in Sussex in eleven years with three officers and a Government warrant.
" He said it without any particular emphasis, as a man states a rate of exchange.
"I should like to write to her. May I write to her? "
Elizabeth discovered that she had to wait a moment before answering.
"She will not know what to do with it," she said. "She will read it forty times and put it in a book and answer it in three lines and be certain she has made a fool of herself."
"Then I shall write again."
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"Now," he said. "What I have done, and what I mean to do, and then what I think, which is the part I am least sure of and shall give you last.
"I wrote to Tarrant in June and again a fortnight ago.
I have written this morning to a man at the Board of Ordnance whom I dislike and who owes me a considerable favor, and to my cousin Fitzwilliam, who has a desk at Horse Guards and who has seen your Captain Harding's returns — he has seen all eleven of them, Miss Bennet, and could do nothing with them, and has known since March that there was something in Hertfordshire and has not been able to say so to me because it was other men's paper.
"That is the whole of what can be done by letter, and it is not much, and it will take three weeks to produce a gentleman in a coach who will look at a field and go home.
"So I shall go myself. I had come to that before you spoke to me on the lawn yesterday; you have only settled the day.
I shall be at Netherfield within the fortnight — I mean to take the house again, which is the least remarkable thing I can do and will explain my being in the county to everybody in it. "
"You gave that house up in November."
"Yes," said Mr. Darcy. "It was the correct thing in November and it is the wrong thing now, and I have spent eight months being right in a way that was of no use to anybody. I do not propose to go on with it."
"And what will you do there?"
"Walk the whole boundary of it, which will take me some days, and find out where the edges are and whether they are true edges.
Look at every parish ward in the hundred, of which there are I think nineteen.
And then—" he stopped. "And then I shall have to speak to your father, and he will have to let me look at the Longbourn deed, and I have no right whatever to ask him and I am going to ask him. "
"He will let you," said Elizabeth. "He has had it out of the box since June and he has been comparing it against the specimen forms in my sister's Harrow with a magnifying glass, and he will not tell anybody what he thinks."
Mr. Darcy turned his head.
"He has been doing what?"
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"Now the last part," he said, some minutes later, "and I want you to understand before I begin that I have no authority for it at all.
Tarrant would not say it. He has written four sides round it twice and stopped short both times, and he is seventy-one and does not want to have been wrong in print.
"There are two ways of reading a piece of ground that has gone the wrong color.
Everybody in England reads it the first way, which is that something is spreading.
A thinness, a failure, a rot; it begins somewhere and it grows, and you may measure it week by week as your sister has done, and it will come up a road and into a town, and the language everybody uses about it is the language of a disease.
"I read it that way from November until about Lady day. It is the natural way, and my whole training is in it, and it is very likely right in Sussex.
"It does not fit yours."
"Why not?"
"Because of three things, and the third is your sister's.
" He held up his hand and counted them off, quite slowly.
"Because Hertfordshire was never bargained for, so there is no old bargain there to be failing.
Because in four hundred years not one ward in that county has ever needed mending, which does not happen anywhere in England and is not a sign of health.
And because on the second of May it stopped.
"A rot does not stop. A rot goes on until it meets something.
If your ground had come up against a good ward at the church it would have slowed and thinned and pushed at the edges and you would have seen it fray.
It did not fray. It arrived at a line and sat down on it and has not moved a pace in eleven weeks. "
Elizabeth said, "Mary said that a thing which has been coming steadily for eight months does not stop because it is tired. It stops because it has got where it was going."
"Your sister Mary," said Mr. Darcy, "is going to have letters from me whether she likes it or not."
He got up and went to the window, and stood with his back to the room, and Georgiana looked round at him once and then went on with the portfolio.
"Here is the other way of reading it," he said.
"Suppose there is nothing spreading. Suppose that what is under that county has been there the whole time — all four hundred years and a great deal longer — and that it is neither growing nor dying, and that what you are looking at when you look at that pale ground is not a thing coming in.
"It is a thing that has been held, letting go."
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The room at the Lambton inn was very quiet. Downstairs somebody was rolling a barrel across the yard.