Chapter Forty-Two
There were three.
Two were from Jane, and one of them had been mis-directed to a wrong street, the direction being remarkably ill written; and the third was in a small exact hand that had never in its life been ill written about anything, and had been sent by a different post, and had got there first, and Elizabeth put it aside and opened her sister's.
The first that had been written was the one she read first.
Since writing the above, dearest Lizzy, something has occurred of a most unexpected and serious nature; but I am afraid of alarming you — be assured that we are all well.
What I have to say relates to poor Lydia.
An express came at twelve last night, just as we were all gone to bed, from Colonel Forster, to inform us that she was gone off to Scotland with one of his officers; to own the truth, with Wickham!
Imagine our surprise. To Kitty, however, it does not seem so wholly unexpected. I am very, very sorry. So imprudent a match on both sides!
And then the second, written a day later.
By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried letter; I wish this may be more intelligible, but though not confined for time, my head is so bewildered that I cannot answer for being coherent.
Dearest Lizzy, I hardly know what I would write, but I have bad news for you, and it cannot be delayed.
Imprudent as a marriage between Mr. Wickham and our poor Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has taken place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone to Scotland.
Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left Brighton the day before, not many hours after the express.
Though Lydia's short letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand that they were going to Gretna Green, something was dropped by Denny expressing his belief that W.
never intended to go there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was repeated to Colonel F.
, who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B.
intending to trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham, but no farther; for on entering that place they removed into a hackney-coach and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom.
All that is known after this is, that they were seen to continue the London road.
I know not what to think. After making every possible inquiry on that side London, Colonel F.
came on into Hertfordshire, anxiously renewing them at all the turnpikes, and at the inns in Barnet and Hatfield, but without any success, — no such people had been seen to pass through.
With the kindest concern he came on to Longbourn, and broke his apprehensions to us in a manner most creditable to his heart.
My father and mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him.
Many circumstances might make it more eligible for them to be married privately in town than to pursue their first plan; and even if he could form such a design against a young woman of Lydia's connections, which is not likely, can I suppose her so lost to every thing? Impossible.
My father is going to London with Colonel Forster instantly, to try to discover her.
What he means to do, I am sure I know not; but his excessive distress will not allow him to pursue any measure in the best and safest way, and Colonel Forster is obliged to be at Brighton again to-morrow evening.
In such an exigence my uncle's advice and assistance would be every thing in the world; he will immediately comprehend what I must feel, and I rely upon his goodness.
---
Elizabeth was on her feet and had rung the bell before she was aware of having done either.
"I must find Mr. Gardiner this moment — where is he — this moment—"
The servant went. She stood in the middle of the room with the two sheets in her hand and found that she could not think at all, and then that she could think perfectly, and that the thing she was thinking was Mary's third column.
She sat down and broke the seal of the third letter.
My dear Lizzy,
You will have Jane's by now or you will have it to-morrow. I am to write what happened and not what I think about it, and I shall keep to that as long as I can and I shall tell you when I stop.
Lydia left Colonel Forster's house at Brighton in the night between Saturday the eleventh and Sunday the twelfth of August, at some hour before three in the morning.
Mrs. F. found her note at eight. Colonel F.
reached Longbourn at four on the afternoon of Monday the thirteenth.
My father left with him for London at seven this morning, Tuesday the fourteenth, with two shirts and no plan.
Now the rest.
On the morning of Sunday the twelfth I went out to the ground as usual, at half past six, in the same boots, from the church corner as I always go.
It has moved.
It went eleven weeks and four days without moving one pace.
Between my measurement on Friday the tenth and my measurement on Sunday the twelfth it has gone forty-two yards, north and west, up the rise toward the town.
Forty-two, Lizzy. It never did above eleven in a week in the whole of the spring and it has done forty-two in two nights.
It has not moved again since. I have been out at half past six every morning and it stands where it stood on Sunday.
I have written all this to Lieutenant Denny at Brighton and told him the dates and asked him one question, which is whether anything was done or said in that camp on the Saturday night; and I have not had an answer and I do not expect one before Friday.
Now I shall stop writing what happened.
Lizzy, everybody in this house is saying that he will not marry her.
My mother has been in her room since Monday saying that he will not marry her.
Colonel Forster says that Denny said he never meant to.
Jane says she cannot think so ill of him and my father said nothing at all in the carriage and has not spoken since Sunday dinner except to ask Hill for a candle.
They are all wrong and I am the only person in England who knows it and I have nobody to say it to, so I am saying it to you.
He will marry her.
He will marry her as fast as he can find a room and a man in orders, and everything else — the running, and the hackney-coach at Clapham, and the not going to Scotland, and letting Denny say what Denny said — is because a man who is doing what he is doing wants three weeks in which nobody is looking for a wedding.
You know why. I have written it in the still-room in March and you did not believe me then and your aunt Gardiner explained to you very kindly why I was a foolish girl with a book, and I have thought about that a great deal since Sunday.
There is exactly one door and it is braiding.
Not seduction, not an elopement, not living with her, not ruining her: none of those things gives him one single thing he wants and all of them are a great deal easier than what he is doing.
He wants her name said over him in a church with the words in it.
And when it is done it cannot be undone by her, or by my father, or by any court in this kingdom, or by God.
I am going out again at half past six.
Your affectionate sister,
M. Bennet
P.S. I have not told anybody about the forty-two yards. I do not know who to tell. My father is in London.
---
Elizabeth got as far as the door and had to put her hand against the frame.
"Lizzy!" cried her aunt, coming in. "Good God, what is the matter? — Where is your uncle? — My dear child, sit down—"
"He will marry her," said Elizabeth.
"What?"
"They are all praying that he will marry her, and my father has gone to London to make him marry her, and Colonel Forster is at every turnpike in Hertfordshire hoping to hear of a wedding, and that is the worst thing that can happen—"
And then the door opened, because Mr. Darcy had been shown up, and he had heard the last nine words of it from the landing.
---
Elizabeth was past caring.
She had had, in some earlier part of that morning, an intention of receiving him with composure; and she had been intending since Thursday to be shy of him, and had constructed a whole small apparatus of manner for the purpose; and all of it went, and what she said, in a hurried unnatural voice, was:
"I must speak to you at once. Aunt, will you find my uncle — please — he is at the river, they will know at the desk—"
Mrs. Gardiner looked once at her niece's face and once at Mr. Darcy's and went out and shut the door, which was, as Elizabeth reflected long afterwards, the single most sensible thing anybody did that week.
"Read these," said Elizabeth.
He read Jane's first, standing, in about ninety seconds. Then he read Mary's, and he read Mary's twice.
When he had done he laid the three sheets down on the table and squared them, and stood with his hands flat on either side of them, and said, in a voice from which everything had been taken out:
"Forty-two yards in two nights."
"Yes."
"And nothing since."
"Nothing since."
"Then it is not finished," said Mr. Darcy. "That is the only good thing in this letter and I want you to hold on to it, because I am going to say some things now that are not good and you are going to need it."
Elizabeth sat down.
---
"Your sister Mary is right in every particular," he said, "and I want to say that first, and I want you to write it to her to-day in those words, because she has been alone with it for four days and she is nineteen.
"He will marry her. He has never wanted anything else. There is one door into a line for a man who has none and it is the only door there has ever been, and everything I have ever known him do has been an attempt at it.
"Ramsgate was not an elopement. It was an attempt at a wedding, and it failed because a girl of fifteen wrote to her brother in the middle of it.
The three before that — Mrs. Younge said four, and gave me no names, and I have spent eleven months trying to find them and have found one — the one I found was in Shropshire, six years ago, a young woman of a small old family, and it did not come off, and the family have never spoken of it and never will.
"He is patient. That is the thing nobody understands about him, because he is charming and idle and in debt, and the world cannot hold both pictures at once. He is extremely patient. He has been at this for eleven years."
"Then why has he not done it? He might have married a dozen girls in a dozen counties—"
"Because it is not enough to marry a line," said Darcy.
"He has tried that and it does not answer.
A braiding gives him a share of what the woman holds; and what a woman of a small old family holds is a small old thing, and Mrs. Younge's three others got him — I imagine — a little.
Enough to keep at it. Enough to be sure of the method. "
He stopped, and Elizabeth watched him arrive at it and dislike it.
"Your sister is not a small old family," he said.
"No."
"Four hundred years in one blood, unbroken, in a county where nothing has ever needed mending.
And she is the youngest of five, which means she is the least spent of any of you, and she has never sworn an oath or made a promise or been braided or borne a child, and there is not one person in that house who has ever told her what she is.
" He came away from the table. "And he has had her out on that ground five times in four weeks with his hands bare, and on the night she went away with him it moved forty-two yards, and it has not moved since.
"Miss Bennet, I think he has begun. I think what happened at Brighton on Saturday night was the first half of it, and I think the second half is a wedding, and I think we have as long as it takes him to find a curate in a hurry and a room with a ward on it — and that in London, in August, with money, is not long. "
---
"Then he must be found before—"
"Yes."
"My father is looking for a man who has run away with a girl.
He will go to the inns. He will go to the turnpikes.
He will—" Elizabeth stood up again, and put both hands over her face for a moment, and took them away.
"He is looking in entirely the wrong places, because he is looking for a seducer, and every hour he spends at a turnpike is an hour—"
"Your father will find nothing," said Mr. Darcy, "and I do not say that against him.
Neither would I, looking as he is looking.
Wickham is not at an inn on the Barnet road.
He is in a lodging in the east of London with a woman called Younge, who keeps a house in Edward-street and who has kept it for eleven years out of exactly this business, and who has never once been asked a question by anybody with any means of making her answer. "
Elizabeth looked up.
"You know where he is."
"I know where he will have gone. There is a difference and it may be four days' difference." He picked up his hat. "I shall be in London to-morrow night."
"You cannot—"
"Miss Bennet."
"You cannot go into that," said Elizabeth, standing very straight, "on my family's account.
You have already broken an oath for us and paid for it and I have never once thanked you properly.
My uncle Gardiner is the best man in England for this and he is at the river with a rod in his hand and he will be in London by Friday, and this is a Bennet matter, and I will not have—"
"It is not a Bennet matter," said Mr. Darcy.
He said it quite gently, which made it worse.
"It has been a Darcy matter since the summer before last, and I concealed what he was, from everybody, for fifteen months, at my sister's asking and for my own comfort — because it was not my secret to give and because I could not bear the county to have it.
Every person in Meryton who welcomed that man into their parlor last winter did so because nobody had told them, and I was the only person alive who could have told them.
"I have had that in front of me since a road in Meryton in November, and I have arranged it in a great many ways, and it comes out the same every time.
"He walked into your mother's drawing-room because I let him."