Chapter Forty-Four
Mr. Bennet came home on the Thursday.
He came in a hired chaise at four in the afternoon, having sent no word; and he got out of it stiffly, like a much older man, and stood in his own gravel for a moment looking at his own front door.
He had been eight days in London. He had been to Epsom and to Clapham, and to every inn on the Barnet road, and to the turnpikes, and to Bow-street twice; he had advertised in two papers; he had sat in his brother Gardiner's parlor in Gracechurch-street in the evenings with a map of London on his knee.
He had not found one thing.
"Well, Lizzy," he said, when they were in the hall and Jane had taken his hat. "You may tell me I was wrong. It will be a novelty for us both."
"Papa—"
"No, do not spoil it. It is the only pleasure I have left and it is a very small one." He went into the library. "Send Hill in with something. And your sister Mary, when she has a moment, and tell her to bring the green book."
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He would not be spoken to about it that evening, and to Mrs. Bennet, who sent down four separate messages from her room, he sent up four separate answers of perfect civility and no information.
But at nine o'clock he sent for Elizabeth, and when she came he was standing at the window with his back to the room, which he never did.
"I have been thinking," said Mr. Bennet, "about what I said to you in June, in this room, about my way of managing. Do you recollect it?"
"Yes."
"I said that I find out how bad a thing is, and look at it very steadily, and then make a joke and go into another room, and that it had answered for twenty years.
" He did not turn round. "I have had eight days in London to consider that, in a great many inn parlors, and I have arrived at an emendation which I shall give you and then we shall not speak of it again.
"It did not answer. It never answered. It only looked as though it answered, because for twenty years nothing happened.
"That is the whole of my life, Lizzy. I was not a philosopher. I was a lucky man with a bad habit, and my luck ran out in August, and now everybody will say that I was very unfortunate."
He came away from the window at last, and Elizabeth saw that he had been crying at some point in the last day and had stopped a good while ago.
"Let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame," he said. "I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."
"Papa. It is not over. She is not—"
"No," said her father. "It is not over. That is the other thing I have thought about in eight days, and it is why I sent for you and not for your mother.
" He sat down at the table and pulled the japanned box toward him with one finger.
"Sit down. To-morrow, when your young man from the regiment gets here — and do not look at me like that, Mary told me at six o'clock, she is the only person in this house who tells me anything — to-morrow I shall want the whole of you in this room. Jane, and Mary, and you, and him.
"Because I have had this thing out of its box eleven times since June, and I have read four of your sister's books, and I am two-and-fifty years old and I have worked out what I have got, and I am not going to say it twice."
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Lieutenant Denny arrived at half past eleven on Friday morning, on the gray mare, having ridden from Brighton in a day and a half in a plain coat.
He came up the drive slowly. He had, Elizabeth thought, watching from the window, the manner of a man who has made a decision at a great distance and has now arrived at the place where it becomes a thing he is actually doing.
Mary went out to him.
Elizabeth, at the window, saw her sister cross the gravel in her old brown gown, and say something; and saw Denny take his hat off and say something back; and saw the two of them stand there in the sun for the better part of a minute, saying nothing at all, in the particular manner of two people who have written each other four letters and have never once been alone in a room.
Then Mary took the mare's bridle, which nobody had asked her to do, and they went round to the stable together.
"Well," said Jane, at Elizabeth's shoulder.
"Yes," said Elizabeth.
"You knew."
"I have known since Tuesday, and I have not said one word about it to anybody, and I do not intend to." Elizabeth let the curtain fall. "Jane, I have laughed at that girl for nine years. I am not going to begin again now on a better subject."
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They were in the library at two: Mr. Bennet in his chair, Elizabeth and Jane on the settee, Mary at the table with three books and the pocket-books, and Lieutenant Denny standing by the door until Mr. Bennet told him twice to sit down.
"Mr. Denny," said Mr. Bennet. "Before anything else.
You have thrown away a commission and nine years to come to a house where nobody has any claim on you, and I understand that you have done it partly on my daughter's account and partly on the account of four hundred people in a town that has never once thanked you for anything.
I shall not make a speech about it. But this is my house until I die, and while it is, you are welcome in it, and I shall write to anybody you like and say so. "
Denny went scarlet and said something about it being nothing.
"It is not nothing," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have had eight days of finding out exactly how much a man's word is worth when he has never spent any of it, so let us get on."
He put the deed on the table.
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"Four points," he said, "and I shall be as short as I can, and Mary will stop me when I go wrong, which she has been doing since June and has got rather good at.
"The first. This is not a deed."
He let that sit for a moment.
"I have read four-and-thirty specimen forms in Harrow's appendix and eleven in Colwood, and I have had Philips send me two more from his office — a Yorkshire grant of 1502 and a Devon one of 1478, and he thinks I have gone mad and I have let him think it.
Every one of them is the same animal. There are two parties.
There is a thing given and a thing had in return.
There is a date, and there is a place, and there is a name at the bottom of somebody who gave it.
"This has none of that. There is no grantor. There is nobody on the other side of it at all. It is not an agreement between a family and anything whatever."
"Then what is it?" said Jane.
"It is an undertaking," said Mr. Bennet. "One man's. Given in the first person and never answered."
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"The second point. The verb.
"Every one of those forms says shall have and hold, or shall hold and enjoy, or in the older ones shall hold of us. Property, you observe. Having. Enjoying. What a man gets.
"This one says keep."
He turned the strip round on the table so that they could see it, though the letters would not sit still and nobody but he had ever been able to read them for more than a few seconds at a time.
"Shall keep. Nine times in eleven lines. It does not say what he is to have. It never once says what he is to have, and I have looked for it for two months, because a man does not undertake a thing of this weight for nothing, and there is no consideration named anywhere in it.
"He is not being given Longbourn. He is being left with it."
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"The third point is the one that took me longest and is the one I like least.
"It is not perpetual. Every entail I have ever heard of is either perpetual or runs to a stated number of lives. This runs to a condition."
"What condition?" said Elizabeth.
Her father looked at her.
"So long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground," he said.
The library was very quiet. Somebody was mowing, a long way off.
"Not while the male line continues, which is what every attorney in England would write and what your cousin Collins believes it says," said Mr. Bennet, "and not in default of heirs male, then over to the next in blood, which is the operative clause and which is in it, and which is why Mr. Collins gets the house.
"There are two clauses, and they are not doing the same work.
One of them disposes of two thousand a year and a lawn and a paddock, and that is the one that has been read aloud in this family for four hundred years and made your mother's life a misery.
The other is about a ground, and the not failing of a man upon it, and it does not say one word about who owns anything. "
"And when it fails?" said Jane.
"It does not say," said her father.
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"The fourth point," said Mr. Bennet, "is not mine, it is Mary's, and I am going to let her make it, and I want everybody to attend to her, because she has been making it in this house since she was eleven years old and nobody has ever once listened to the end of it."
Mary put her hands flat on the table.
"It is an oath," she said.
"Go on," said her father.
"I can hear whether a spoken thing has weight in it.
That is the whole of what I can do and it has never been the smallest use to anybody, and I have known since I was eleven that it is worth about as much as being able to tell the color of a horse in the dark.
" She was speaking very quickly, and she did not stop.
"It only works on things that are said. A written thing is only ink.
You may put the most binding form of words in England on a piece of paper and it is nothing at all until somebody says it out loud, and then it takes or it does not take, and I can hear which.
"So a written oath is a peculiar object. It is not binding. It is a set of instructions for a binding. It is — it is like a musket that is loaded and not fired.
"And in April I read this one out. I was alone in this room; my father was at Meryton; I took it out of the box, which I ought not to have done, and I read the first three lines aloud to see whether there was anything in the form of the words.
"And it did not take, because I am not of the blood in the male line and I was not undertaking anything, and there was nothing whatever in the room.
"But it rang."
"Explain that," said Denny quietly. It was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes.
Mary looked at him.
"When somebody swears a thing," she said, "there is a — I have never had to describe it.
There is a note. It is like a struck glass.
And when the thing is discharged, or run out, or the person is dead, the note is gone and the words are just words, and I have read out a great many old oaths out of books and they are all quite silent.
"This one is still sounding."
She put one finger on the edge of the paper.
"Somebody said these words out loud, on this ground, and meant them, and they took," said Mary Bennet, "and they have not stopped.
It has been going for four hundred years and it is going now, in this room, under everything, and I have been able to hear it since I was eleven years old, and I thought until April that it was a thing about me. "
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Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Denny said, "Sir. May I say the professional part? It is not much and it is not learning, it is only what we were taught."
"Say it."
"There are two kinds of work on ground and they are not the same trade," said Denny.
"There is warding, which is what I was trained to.
A ward is a thing you build at a place — a door, a bridge, a nine-mile line at Selsey — and you build it out of what is in you, and you go on mending it for ever, and when the man who laid it stops mending it, it goes.
"And there is the other kind, which we were told about in a fortnight of lectures and which none of us ever saw, because there has not been one made in England since before the rolls.
The old courts did it. You do not build anything.
You put a keeping on a place: a thing that holds, of itself, without mending, because the whole of it was paid for at once. "
"Paid for with what?" said Elizabeth.
"With a life," said Denny. "Or a line of them. That is why we were told it is not done any more."
He looked at the strip on the table.
"Sir, I have never seen one and I would not know one if I sat on it.
But I have spent nine months in a county where nothing has ever wanted mending, and that is not a thing that happens, and I have said so eleven times in writing to men who are paid to know.
And if you are asking me whether a keeping would look, from the outside, exactly like four hundred years of quiet ground and a family that must not fail of a man—"
He stopped.
"Yes," he said. "It would look precisely like that."
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"Then let us have it plainly," said Mr. Bennet, "since we are all being brave this afternoon, and put it in the shortest words, and I shall do it, because it is my family and my name and I have had the longest to get used to it.
"Some man of my blood, four hundred years ago, swore an oath upon this ground and paid for it with everything he had and everything he was going to have.
Whatever the old courts would have bargained for in this county, he got there first, or they would not touch it, and he did instead — I do not know which and I do not suppose anybody ever will.
"And the price of it was that there should not fail a man of his blood upon this ground; and there has not, in eleven generations, until me.
"And I have five daughters, and I am two-and-fifty, and I was ill in February and again in April, and I made a joke about it.
"And in October, when I had been fifty-one for four months, the grass beyond Barrett's began to go the wrong color."
He folded the strip along its old creases and put it back in the box, and shut the lid, and sat with his hand flat on top of it.
"So there it is," said Mr. Bennet. "I am the door.
I have been the door since I was thirty-one and my father died, and nobody told me, because nobody has known for a very long time — my father did not know it, he thought it was an entail and a nuisance and he told me to get a son and laughed about it — and the whole of what I have done with my life is to sit in this room and be amusing about a piece of paper I could not read.
"And I am wearing out. And when I am done, it opens; and Mr. Collins will inherit two thousand a year and a paddock and will not be able to open the front door, and something that has been shut in this county since before the rolls will not be shut any more.
"Unless," said Mr. Bennet, "somebody has been clever enough to think of another way to get in, in which case he will not have to wait for me to die at all. He will only have to marry a girl of my blood, in a warded room, with the words said over him."
He looked up.
"Which is what your Mr. Wickham is doing," he said, "in a lodging in London, this week, while we sit here being clever."