Chapter Forty-Five
He was in London by ten on the Wednesday night and at Edward-street by nine the next morning, and Mrs. Younge was not at home to him.
She was at home. He could hear a floorboard over his head while the girl was telling him so; and he gave the girl his card and went away, and came back at two, and was told the same thing, and went away again.
He did not force it. There is no forcing a woman of that kind — he had learned that in a back parlor at Ramsgate, sitting opposite her while she asked for her quarter's wages — and a gentleman making a noise on a doorstep in Edward-street would be all over that street by dinner-time and in Wickham's ear by Saturday.
So he sat in a coffee-house at the corner from three until seven, where he could see the door, and read the same page of a newspaper eleven times, and was aware the whole while that this was the fourth day, and that a common license takes fifteen minutes and seven pounds.
At half past seven a boy came out with a jug. Darcy gave him a shilling to carry a message up, and the message was six words long.
I am not come about Ramsgate.
He was shown up at eight.
---
Mrs. Younge's front parlor was a very respectable room.
That was the thing about her that had disconcerted him at Ramsgate and disconcerted him again now: everything about her was respectable — the room, the cap, the workbox, the two lodgers' bills folded on the mantel-piece — and she let houses to single gentlemen and had done for eleven years and had never once been in any trouble whatever.
"Mr. Darcy."
"Mrs. Younge."
"You may sit down, since you have been on my step twice and in Bilson's window since three, which is not what I should call discreet.
" She sat down herself, and folded her hands.
"I have nothing to say to you about the summer before last, and I shall not, and if you have come to make me feel anything you have wasted a journey; I have thought about it a good deal and I have arrived somewhere and I am not going back. "
"I have not come about that."
"Then what?"
"He is here," said Darcy. "In this house or in one you have found for him, since Sunday or Monday, with a girl of fifteen from Hertfordshire, and he is looking for a curate and a room."
Mrs. Younge's face did not move at all.
"That is a great deal of information," she said, "for a gentleman who has come to ask a question."
---
They were an hour and a half about it, and Darcy afterwards thought it the most disagreeable ninety minutes of his life, and did not include the ballroom at Netherfield in the comparison because that had at least been honest work.
She began by denying everything, in a tone of mild and slightly injured surprise, and she did it well; and then, when he had put down on the little table the four things he actually knew — the date of the flight, the hackney-coach at Clapham, the name of the girl, and the fact that no coach going north had carried them — she stopped denying it, and did not admit it either, and began, with perfect composure, to bargain.
"You understand," she said, "that I am not saying such a person is here."
"Yes."
"And that if I were to hear of such a person, and were to put a note into a certain hand, that would be a service to you and no benefit at all to me, and would very likely be the end of a business I have kept going for eleven years without one word of complaint from anybody."
"Yes."
"Then what is it worth to you?"
He asked her what she wanted, and she told him, and it was a great deal more than he had expected and a great deal less than he would have paid, and he agreed to it in about four seconds, which was a mistake and which he saw her notice.
"Well," said Mrs. Younge, and got up and went to the writing desk. "Now I shall tell you something you have not paid for, and you may make what you like of it.
"He is frightened."
Darcy said nothing.
"I have known George Wickham eleven years and I have seen him in a good many corners and I have never seen him frightened before, and it is not of you.
" She was writing an address. "He has been in this house since Sunday and he has not been out of it above three times, and he has not been drunk once, which if you know him at all you will understand is the most extraordinary thing I have ever told anybody about him.
"He sits up. I have taken him a candle at two in the morning twice this week. And he has asked me — Mr. Darcy, he has asked me, who let rooms in Ramsgate and cannot read Latin — whether I have ever heard of ground that does not take a ward. Twice. In this room."
She blotted the paper.
"He has got something by the tail," said Mrs. Younge, "and he does not know what it is, and he cannot let go of it, and I have not liked the look of him since Monday. Here."
She held it out.
"And the girl?" said Darcy.
Mrs. Younge's hand stopped for a moment.
"The girl thinks she is on a wedding journey," she said. "She has been at that window since Sunday telling my maid about the assembly rooms at Meryton."
---
The house was in a street off Wapping High-street, up two pair of stairs, and the room was clean and very small and had a bed and a table and a window that would not open above four inches.
Wickham was out.
Lydia Bennet was sitting on the bed with her feet up under her, turning over the leaves of a fashion book that was three years old, and she looked round when the door opened and said, "Oh!" — and then, with a shriek that could be heard in the street, "Mr. Darcy!"
He had not, in the whole of the journey from Derbyshire, thought seriously about what he would do when he saw her.
"Miss Lydia."
"Well, this is the greatest joke in the world," said Lydia.
"Whatever are you doing in Wapping? La! Do sit down — there is only the chair and it is not very good.
Is Lizzy come? Has my father found us? I told Wickham my father would never find us in a hundred years, he is not at all clever about that sort of thing, and Wickham said—"
She went on for some time.
Darcy stood inside the door with his hat in his hand and looked at her, and did the only thing he was there to do, which was to see how much of her was left.
It was not as bad as Ramsgate.
That was the first thing and it took him about four seconds and it very nearly made his knees go.
It was not Ramsgate. There was a great deal of her still there — she was noisy and pink and entirely herself, and the room was full of her the way a room is full of a girl of fifteen who is enjoying herself — and whatever had been done on that down above Brighton had not been the finishing of anything.
The second thing took longer, and he got it by watching her hands while she talked.
There was a thinness in her.
Not of body: she was as sturdy as she had been in a road in Meryton in November.
It was the thing he had felt at Netherfield in the second room on the west passage, and in a lodging-house at Ramsgate, and it was very much slighter than either — a sort of draft, low down, as though a very small window had been left open somewhere behind her.
She had lost something. Not nine-tenths. Perhaps a tenth.
And it was still going.
"—and we are to be married directly," said Lydia, "as soon as ever he settles about the license, only he has been so put about with the lawyers, and it is the most tiresome thing, but he says it will all be arranged by Monday and then I shall write to Longbourn and sign myself Lydia Wickham and only think what a joke it will be — Mr. Darcy, why do you keep looking at me like that? "
"I beg your pardon."
"You look exactly like Mr. Jones did when Kitty had the fever." Lydia laughed. "Am I very brown? I dare say I am. We walked a great deal at Brighton."
"Miss Lydia, will you come with me to your uncle's house in Gracechurch-street? To-day. Now. I have a carriage at the end of the street and I will take you there myself, and your aunt will—"
"Good gracious, no," said Lydia.
She said it perfectly pleasantly, and went on turning the leaves of the fashion book.
"But I am very much obliged to you," she added. "It is very kind, and I dare say Lizzy sent you, and you may tell her that I am perfectly well and that she is not to be so managing, she has been managing me since I was nine years old. And I am going to be married on Monday."
"You may be married from your uncle's house. It is a better thing in every way. Your family—"
"My family would take me home to Longbourn and there would be such a scold as never was, and my mother would cry for a fortnight, and Mary would look at me, and Wickham would be talked to by my uncle Gardiner, and then perhaps it would all be put off.
" Lydia looked up, and for one moment there was something in her face that was not fifteen at all.
"I know how it goes, Mr. Darcy. Jane's Mr. Bingley went off to town for three days and there was an end of him, and everybody in that house is very sensible and very kind and nothing ever, ever happens.
"I am the first of us," she said. "I am the youngest and I shall be married before any of them, and I shall have a house, and Lizzy will have to give me the wall in a doorway for the rest of her life. I have thought about it every day since Saturday."
Then she laughed, and said something extremely silly about a green gown, and asked whether Miss Darcy was as tall as she was, and whether the roads had been dusty.
---
"Miss Lydia," said Darcy, at the door. "One question and I shall go.
"On the Saturday night at Brighton, on the down above the camp — did he ask you to say anything?"
Lydia's face lit up.
"Oh! that," she said. "Now that is the oddest thing and I shall tell you, because you are a great friend of his and I dare say you know all his ways. He asked me to say my own name."
"Your name."
"My whole name, and my father's, and of Longbourn in the county of Hertford, all out loud, standing up on the top of the down with his hands on my hands, and he said it after me.
And I laughed so much I could hardly get through it and I had to do it three times.
" She hugged her knees. "He said it was a thing they do in his family.
He said it was a sort of promise and that nobody would ever be able to take me away from him afterwards, and I said that was a great deal of stuff and nonsense, and he said, very likely it is, but say it again.
"So I did. And then we came down and it was ever so late and Mrs. F. never knew a thing about it."
She was radiant.
"He is the only person in the whole world," said Lydia Bennet, "who has ever wanted me to say my own name."
---
Mr. Darcy went down two flights of stairs into the street.
He walked to the end of it, past his own carriage, and out onto the stairs at the river, and stood there for some time in the smell of the tide with his hand on a post.
A sort of promise.
Not a binding — not by itself, not out of doors, not on a down with no roof and no ward and no man in orders and no witnesses. Mary Bennet's four conditions, and three of them wanting.
But a thing said aloud, and meant, on ground that had nothing under it. And forty-two yards in two nights.
He thought: he has not married her because he cannot yet.
He has done the part that could be done in a field, and it has answered better than he expected, and it has frightened him, and now he is sitting in a room in Wapping at two in the morning with a candle asking a landlady about ground that will not take a ward — because he has found out that he is not opening a door into a line.
He has found out that there is something behind it.
And then, with the tide going out under the stairs:
And he is going to do it anyway. Because he has been at this for eleven years, and he is thirty years old, and he has nothing, and there is nothing else in the world he knows how to want.
He went back to the carriage and gave an address in Gracechurch-street, because Mr. Gardiner had reached town on the Thursday and would have to be told something; and then he changed it, and gave the name of a hotel, and sat back in the corner.
There were three days.
He would have to see Wickham. There was no version of it in which he did not have to sit in a room with George Wickham and offer him something, and he had known that since Derbyshire, and he had been arranging the possible offers in his head for four days and had arrived, on the road somewhere past Bedford, at the only one that would answer.
He did not much want to think about it yet.
He thought instead, deliberately, for the rest of the drive, about a lane in Kent in April, and a woman standing in a lane with a letter in her hand, and how much of it he would have to keep from her afterwards; and concluded that the answer was all of it, and that this was going to be, on the whole, the easiest part of the week.