Chapter Forty-Three
They traveled as expeditiously as possible; and sleeping one night on the road, reached Longbourn by dinner-time the next day.
Elizabeth had the length of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Bedfordshire in which to decide how much to tell her aunt and uncle, and she decided about six times.
In the end she told them the whole of it, on the second morning, between Stevenage and Welwyn, with the blinds up and Mrs. Gardiner's workbag on the seat between them; and it was the fourth time she had told the story to anybody and much the worst, because these were the two people in the world she could least afford to have think her mad, and because one of them had heard the essential part of it in March and had been kind about it.
Mr. Gardiner heard her out with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor of the carriage, and asked eleven questions, of which nine were about dates and two were about who else knew.
Mrs. Gardiner said nothing at all until the end.
Then she said, "The still-room. In March. She had it in March and she told you, and you told me in my own parlor at nine in the morning, and I told you to go and look at the country."
"Aunt—"
"I want you to attend to me, Lizzy, because I shall not say it twice and I am not going to be sentimental about it in a hired carriage.
" Mrs. Gardiner's hands were quite steady in her lap.
"I was not stupid. That is what I keep coming back to.
Everything I said to you was sensible, and I would say every word of it again to any other girl in England on any other Tuesday, and it was all perfectly true, and it was wrong.
"I am forty-one years old and I have been proud all my life of not being taken in.
And I sat in my own house and I explained to a clever girl of two-and-twenty, very kindly, exactly why her plain little sister of nineteen was not to be attended to.
" She looked out of the window. "There is a lesson in that and I have four days to learn it in and I do not much like the taste of it. "
"You could not have known."
"I could have asked," said Mrs. Gardiner. "That is all it wanted. I could have written four lines to Mary Bennet and asked her to send me her reasons, and she would have sat down that night and written me six sides, and I should have had it in March."
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The house was in an uproar of the peculiar kind that has been going on for four days and has settled into a routine.
Jane came out to the carriage. She was thinner about the face and perfectly composed, and she had been running the house since Monday, and she had the accounts of it in her head — who had called, what had been said in Meryton, what her mother had eaten, what letters had gone.
"Papa is still in town. There has been nothing since Thursday. My uncle Philips has been very good. My mother is in her room and will not come down and is not to be argued with, and Kitty—" Jane stopped. "You had better see Kitty."
Mrs. Bennet received them upstairs, from her bed, in a state which Elizabeth had seen a hundred times in miniature over a chicken or a bonnet and had never once seen in earnest.
"If I had been able to carry my point of going to Brighton with all my family, this would not have happened; but poor dear Lydia had nobody to take care of her.
Why did the Forsters ever let her go out of their sight?
I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing, if she had been well looked after. "
She said a great many other things. She said that Mr. Bennet would fight Wickham and be killed, and that Mr. Collins would turn them out of the house before he was cold in his grave, and that her brother must find them and make Wickham marry her.
"That is the great thing," she said, four or five times. "He must be made to marry her. Nothing else signifies. If he will only marry her, it is all made right, and she may hold up her head as well as any of them."
Elizabeth stood at the foot of her mother's bed with her hands folded and said nothing whatever.
---
Kitty was in the back parlor.
She had been crying for four days and had reached the stage beyond it, and she looked up when her sister came in and then looked away again.
"You are going to ask me what I knew."
"No," said Elizabeth, and sat down.
"Everybody has asked me what I knew. My mother asked me for an hour on Monday and would not stop, and Colonel Forster asked me, and Jane has been very kind about not asking me which is worse.
" Kitty pulled her handkerchief through her fingers.
"I knew she wrote to him. That is all anybody wants and it is all I have got.
I knew there were letters and I did not tell, because she said she would never speak to me again, and because—"
She stopped.
"Because?" said Elizabeth.
"Because I was glad it was not me," said Kitty.
"There. I have said it now. She would come in and tell me about the walks and I would lie in bed afterwards and be glad it was not me and be sorry it was not me, both at once, all night, and I have never in my life been able to tell which of the two I was. "
"Kitty—"
"He liked me first," said Kitty Bennet. "In November.
He asked about my cough and he handed me over the stile and he liked me first, and then I got thin and dull and could not walk to Meryton without sitting down, and he stopped, and she is fifteen and never tired and she can dance till four in the morning.
So he took her instead. And I have known that since April and I have never said it out loud because it is the ugliest thing I have ever thought. "
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.
"Kitty. Look at me." She waited until she did. "That is not why he stopped."
"It is exactly why—"
"It is not," said Elizabeth. "I am going to tell you the whole of it before this week is out, and you will not like it, and it will be a great deal better than what you have been carrying since April.
He did not stop because you were dull. You were dull because of him.
" She took her sister's hands. "You got better in the last week of June. Do you know when he left Meryton?"
Kitty stared at her.
"The twenty-sixth of May," she said.
"Five weeks and one day," said Elizabeth. "I have it written down with the dates. I have had it written down since June and I did not tell you because I thought I was sparing you something, and I have got very tired this summer of people sparing one another things."
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She went up to Mary before she took off her bonnet, which she reflected afterwards was the only wholly right thing she did that day.
Mary was at the window with the third pocket-book and a sheet of paper ruled into a plan of the fields.
She did not get up. She said, "You are come, then," which was what she had said in May, and then: "It has not moved since Sunday the twelfth. Nine days. I went out this morning."
"Mary—"
"There is a letter from Lieutenant Denny.
It came at eleven and I have not opened it because I could not do it by myself, and I have been sitting here since eleven o'clock.
" Mary put both hands flat on the table.
"That is a stupid thing and I know it is a stupid thing. I have opened a great many letters."
Elizabeth took off her bonnet and put it on the bed and sat down.
"We shall open it in a moment," she said. "First I am going to tell you about the roads."
Mary looked round at her.
"Lizzy, there is no time for—"
"There is exactly time for it. I promised you in July and I have thought about it every day for three weeks, and if I do not do it now I shall never do it, because after we open that letter there is not going to be a quarter of an hour in this house for anything as long as any of us live.
" Elizabeth pulled the other chair round.
"The road from Hertford goes up very gradually for a day and a half and you do not know you have been climbing until you look behind you.
The inns are worse than ours as far as Northampton and better after it.
There is a place beyond Ashbourne where the road comes round a hill and the whole of the Peak is in front of you at once, and the man on the box did not say anything about it, and I understood that he does not, because it does it by itself.
"And Derbyshire is not green like this county.
It is a colder green, and there is stone in it — walls instead of hedges, going straight up the hills in a way that looks as though somebody very obstinate did it on purpose — and the light comes down between the hills in the afternoon in long pieces.
And the water is faster. Everything I saw for three weeks was going somewhere.
"There was a wood at Pemberley that we drove through for a mile and a half, and I have never in my life been in a wood like it, and I shall tell you why another time because it is not the sort of thing you tell in five minutes."
Mary Bennet sat perfectly still with her hands in her lap.
"Thank you," she said.
"Now give me the letter."
---
Madam,
I have your letter of the 14th and I shall answer it plainly, which I have not been able to do to anybody for nine months, and I am past caring what it costs me.
You ask whether anything was done or said in this camp on the night of Saturday the eleventh.
There was a party of eight went up to the downs above the camp after dinner. It was got up by Mr. W. He has got up four such parties since June and I have been on two of them and I did not like either.
There is an old road up there under the turf.
You cannot see it in daylight unless somebody shows it to you and I could not see it at all until the second time, my own gift being what it is now.
It runs about half a mile and it is not a road.
I have paced it twice and it is the same ground you have in Hertfordshire, the same color, the same nothing under it, and I have written that in a return and had no answer.
The party came down at about eleven. Miss B. and Mr. W. did not. Chamberlayne says they were on the down until past one and that Miss B. was in great spirits and would not come away.
I do not know what was done there. I want to be exact with you: I was not on that walk, I was on picquet, and everything above is from Chamberlayne and from my own two walks.
But I was on the west side of the camp at about half past twelve and I felt something go past me at the height of my chest, going up the hill, and it was the same thing I felt in the road in Meryton in November when he first came, and it lasted the better part of a minute instead of half a second.
Madam, I have written eleven returns in nine months. This is the twelfth thing I have written down and it is going to you and not to London.
I have applied for leave. It has been refused. I have applied again and stated a reason which I shall not put in a letter and it has been refused again and I have been told to consider the matter closed.
I shall be at Longbourn on Friday or Saturday.
I am aware what that means and I have thought about it since Sunday and I find that I have stopped minding.
I gave the best part of what I had to a field in Sussex before I was two-and-twenty for four hundred people I never met, on the orders of men who have since written to me eleven times to say that nothing requires to be done; and I am not going to sit in a tent at Brighton while a girl I have danced with is taken up that hill again.
Do not answer this. Burn it, which I know you will not do, so put it where you put the other one.
I am, madam, your obedient servant,
R. DENNY
P.S. His name is not George Wickham in the regimental books before 1806. I have seen the old returns. I have not been able to find out what it was before, and I would give a great deal to know.
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Neither of them said anything for a while.
Downstairs, Mrs. Bennet's bell rang twice, and Hill went along the passage, and somebody in the lane was driving cattle.
"He is deserting," said Mary at last. "He is a lieutenant of nine years' service and he is going to walk out of a camp on the coast and come here, and they will take his commission and everything else he has, and there is nobody at all who will speak for him."
"Yes," said Elizabeth.
Mary got up and went to the window and stood with her back to the room, and Elizabeth, who had known her sister for nineteen years and had spent about eleven of them not looking at her, understood a thing that had been in front of her since the church porch in April, and had the sense to say nothing about it whatever.
"Then somebody had better speak for him," said Mary Bennet.