Chapter Forty-One #2
"Consider what that would account for," said Mr. Darcy, still at the window.
"It accounts for the entries not being in the rolls: the courts never bargained for Hertfordshire because Hertfordshire was not theirs to bargain with — somebody had it already, and had had it before the rolls were begun, and the clerks left no space because there was nothing to leave a space for.
"It accounts for four hundred years of wards that never wanted mending.
A ward is a thing you put up to keep something out.
Nobody in that county has ever had to mend one, because for four hundred years there has been nothing at them.
Something was holding the whole of it, underneath, all the time, and every threshold in Meryton has been sitting inside that like a cup inside a cistern.
"It accounts for the manner of the failure.
It is not coming from a point and spreading.
It came up out of the low ground, which is where such a thing would be thinnest and go first, and it has spread along the line of the water, and it has now taken as much as it is going to take at present and stopped, because whatever is holding the rest is still holding the rest.
"And it accounts for the one thing that has troubled me since November more than any other, which is why it began at all.
A thing that has held for four hundred years does not begin to let go in an autumn for no reason.
Something changed. Something that was doing the holding has become—" he paused, and chose the word with some care— "less able. "
Elizabeth had got up without knowing it.
She was standing in the middle of the parlor of an inn in Derbyshire, and there was a hot pressure in her ears, and she found that she had put out a hand and taken hold of the back of a chair.
"Mr. Darcy," she said, and her voice came out wrong. "How old is my father?"
He turned round.
"Two-and-fifty," he said. "I asked at Netherfield in November, of Sir William Lucas, who did not know why I wanted it."
"Say the rest of it."
"No."
"Say it."
"I will not say it," said Mr. Darcy, "because I do not know it, and because if I say it in this room it will be a thing you have been told by a man instead of a thing you worked out yourself, and you will believe it too completely and so shall I; and there are four other explanations and I have not been able to get rid of two of them.
" He came away from the window. "Miss Bennet. Sit down."
"I do not want to sit down."
"No. Nor do I." He stood on the other side of the little table with his hands behind him. "I will say this much, and it is all I will say until I have seen the deed with my own eyes.
"Four hundred years in the male line, in one blood, on a small estate in a county where nothing has ever needed mending.
That is a very odd shape for an ordinary entail, and I have looked at a great many deeds and I have never seen a term of years like it on two thousand a year.
The entail on Pemberley runs eleven generations and it is written like a settlement of property, because that is what it is.
Yours has outlasted it on a fifth of the land and there is no reason in the world why it should have been thought worth doing.
"Unless it was not a settlement of property.
"Unless somebody four hundred years ago wanted a particular blood kept on a particular piece of ground without a break, and wrote a deed that would do it, and did not put in it any word about why — because a man does not write down in a document that his children's children are to be a bolt on a door. "
---
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"He has no son," said Elizabeth at last.
"No."
"And he is two-and-fifty, and he has been ill twice this year and made a joke of it, and my mother has been frightened out of her senses about this for four-and-twenty years and everybody in the county has laughed at her, including me."
"Yes."
"And on the day he dies," said Elizabeth, "the Accord severs, and it goes to Mr. Collins, whom the ground would not answer at the door frame, and whom Lady Catherine de Bourgh has instructed to marry one of us in order to be let in."
Mr. Darcy said nothing at all.
"And in April," said Elizabeth Bennet, "you stood in a parlor in Kent and offered to braid your line to mine, and I told you that you were the last man in the world."
"I offered it," said Mr. Darcy, "on the twelfth of April, for entirely private reasons, and I did not know one word of this, and I will not have it turned into that in your head.
I am going to say this once and then we will go back to the maps.
Whatever is under that county, and whatever your family has to do with it — it has nothing to do with what I said to you in that room.
I asked you because I wanted you. If it turns out that there is a use in it as well, then the use may take its chance; it was not the reason and I will not have it be the reason afterwards. "
"That is a very fine distinction, sir, for a woman in my situation."
"It is the only one I have got," said Mr. Darcy, "and I am holding on to it with both hands."
---
Mr. Gardiner came back at half past four with three trout and a very high opinion of his host, and Miss Darcy was pressed to stay and would not, and there was a great deal of civility in the doorway.
At the last moment, on the stairs, Georgiana turned round.
"Miss Bennet — my brother says you will dine at Pemberley on Thursday. I hope you will. I have not — that is, there is nobody, and I have been at home since February and—"
"I shall come on Thursday," said Elizabeth, "and I shall make you play, and I shall be perfectly odious about it."
Georgiana Darcy went down the rest of the stairs with a face her brother had not seen on her in fifteen months.
And Elizabeth went back into the parlor and stood at the window and watched the chaise go up the street, and thought about a small painted face in a good frame still hanging in a gallery in Derbyshire, and about her father at eleven in the morning with a magnifying glass, and about a hundred and ninety acres of Hertfordshire lying perfectly still since the second of May.
She wrote to Mary that night, and to Charlotte, and went to bed at two.
In the morning there were two letters from Jane.
Here ends the Second Volume.