Chapter Forty-Seven
Mr. Gardiner did not like it.
He said so at nine o'clock on the Saturday morning in his own back parlor in Gracechurch-street, standing on his own hearthrug in his own house, to a gentleman of ten thousand a year who had come to him at that hour without sending in a card, and he said it four times in an hour and a half.
"Sir, you must see how it stands. I am to write to my sister and my brother Bennet and tell them that I have found them; that I have settled his debts; that I have paid down a sum which — Mr. Darcy, I have not asked you the sum and I am not going to, and that is the very thing I object to.
I am to take the whole of it upon myself, and be thanked for it, and be believed. "
"Yes."
"And in ten years, or twenty, my brother Bennet will die, and the girls will remember all their lives that their uncle Gardiner did that for them, and I shall have to sit and be looked at."
"Yes," said Darcy.
Mr. Gardiner sat down.
"Give me the reason," he said. "Not the delicate one. I am a plain man in a plain way of business and I have been fitted up with a great deal of delicacy since Thursday and I should like the reason."
"There are two and you may have both.
"The first is that if it is known in Hertfordshire that I have done it, then within a month it will be said in every parlor in Meryton that Mr. Darcy of Pemberley bought a Bennet out of a scrape in London; and within two months it will be said that he did it because he means to have one of them; and Miss Elizabeth Bennet will be a woman who was got by obligation.
She refused me in April, sir, in terms that left nothing standing, and she was entirely within her rights, and I have no intention of making it impossible for her to go on refusing me. "
Mr. Gardiner looked at him for a moment.
"And the second?"
"The second is that I have known what that man was since the summer before last, and I said nothing, and he walked into your sister's drawing-room in November on my silence.
" Darcy's voice did not alter. "I am not paying a debt of honor, Mr. Gardiner.
I am paying a bill. A man who has run up a bill does not get to have his name on the receipt as well; that is having it both ways, and I have had it both ways for fifteen months and it has cost other people a great deal. "
Mr. Gardiner turned that over.
"That is a better answer than the first one," he said.
"It is the true one. The first is also true."
"Yes." Mr. Gardiner got up and went to his writing desk.
"Very well. I shall lie to my own family in my own hand and I shall be thanked for it, and I hope you understand that I am doing it because of the second reason and not the first, because the first is the reason of a proud man and I have no patience with it. "
"I understand you."
"And Mr. Darcy — one thing more, and then I shall write. My niece Elizabeth is not a fool, and my wife is a great deal less of one than I am." Mr. Gardiner cut his pen. "You will keep this for about six weeks."
---
The letter reached Longbourn on the Monday morning at ten, and the household had it by five past, because Hill was in the hall.
My dear Brother,
At last I am able to send you some tidings of my niece, and such as, upon the whole, I hope will give you satisfaction. Soon after you left me on Saturday, I was fortunate enough to find out in what part of London they were. I have seen them both.
Mrs. Bennet came down the stairs.
She had not come down since the Monday before. She came down in her wrapper with her hair anyhow, holding on to the rail, and got into the small parlor and sat on the edge of a chair and said, "Read it again, Jane. Read it from the beginning and read it slowly."
Jane read it again.
They were found. They were not married, but they would be married; Mr. Gardiner had seen them; Mr. Wickham's debts were to be discharged; a sum was to be settled upon Lydia; there would be a wedding, and it might be very soon indeed, and it wanted only Mr. Bennet's consent and a very little money — a hundred pounds a year, no more, secured after his death.
Mrs. Bennet did not say one word for about half a minute.
Then she got up off the chair and stood in the middle of her own parlor and began to cry in a way that none of her daughters had ever heard, which was not the crying she did about her nerves or about Mrs. Long or about the entail; and Jane got to her and put her arms round her and she went on for a considerable time.
"My dear, dear Lydia!" she said at last. "This is delightful indeed! — She will be married! — I shall see her again! — She will be married at sixteen! — My good, kind brother! — I knew how it would be — I knew he would manage every thing. How I long to see her! and to see dear Wickham too!
"But the clothes, the wedding clothes! I will write to my sister Gardiner about them directly.
Lizzy, my dear, run down to your father and ask him how much he will give her.
Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring the bell, Kitty, for Hill.
I will put on my things in a moment. My dear, dear Lydia!
— How merry we shall be together when we meet! "
Jane looked over her mother's head at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth looked back, and neither of them said anything at all.
---
Mr. Bennet read the letter twice in his library with the door shut and then sent for Elizabeth.
"Sit down," he said. "How much do you suppose your uncle Gardiner is worth?"
"I have no idea, papa."
"Nor have I, precisely, but I have a fair notion, and it is not this.
" He put his finger on the second sheet.
"Wickham's debts in Brighton alone will not be under a thousand, and there will be more in Meryton — there is always more in Meryton — and his commission is to be sold and another bought, and there is a settlement of a thousand pounds on Lydia and a hundred a year besides.
Your uncle has four children of his own and a business that wants capital in it, and I have known him five-and-twenty years, and if he had ten thousand pounds lying loose in the world he would have lent me some of it in 1798 when I asked him and he could not. "
Elizabeth said nothing.
"And there is the other thing," said her father, "which is that my brother Gardiner is an excellent man of business who could not find those two people in eight days with me helping him, and then found them within thirty-six hours of my leaving London — in a part of the town where he has no more acquaintance than I have — and has neglected to say in three sheets how he did it. "
He folded the letter.
"Well?"
"Papa—"
"Lizzy, I am not going to make you tell me, because it is perfectly plain that you have been asked not to, and I find at two-and-fifty that I have some small use for a daughter who keeps her word.
" He put his spectacles down. "I shall only say this.
Whoever has done it has done it in a way that leaves your uncle Gardiner to be thanked, and has therefore made certain that no one in this family will ever be under an obligation they can feel.
"That is not the act of a man who wants anything. It is a great deal too well arranged for that. And I have spent my whole life among people who wanted things, and I do not perfectly know what to do with it."
He got up and went to the window.
"And I shall now write to my brother Gardiner," he said, "and thank him with all my heart, and mean it, and be a liar in my own house, which will make three of us."
---
The wedding was on the Monday.
Nobody at Longbourn knew that. The letter said only that it would be soon; and on the Wednesday there came a second, briefer, in Mr. Gardiner's hand, saying that all was done, that they had been married on Monday at St. Clement's, and that they had gone out of town on the Tuesday for the north.
Mrs. Bennet had to be told about the church.
"St. Clement's," she said. "Which St. Clement's? There are three."
"St. Clement's in the Fields, mama."
"I never heard of it in my life," said Mrs. Bennet. "In the Fields. Well. It is a very odd sort of name for a church in London and I am sure it is a shabby little place and there was nobody there and she had nobody to give her away but my brother Gardiner, and I dare say she had no flowers at all."
She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, in a very different voice, "Well, and she is married. That is the thing. She is Mrs. Wickham and nobody can take it from her."
And she went and told Mrs. Philips, and Lady Lucas, and Mrs. Long, and everybody in Meryton, three times, within four days.
---
Mary went out on the Monday morning at half past six as she had gone out every morning for four months, in the same boots, from the church corner.
She went out again on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday.
On the Wednesday afternoon she came into the library where her father was sitting with Elizabeth and Denny, and put the pocket-book on the table.
"It has not moved," she said.
"Since Sunday the twelfth?"
"Since Sunday the twelfth. Fifteen days." Mary sat down. "It did not move on Monday. It did not move on Monday night. It has not moved."
Elizabeth let out a breath she had been holding since Sunday.
"Then whatever was done in London—"
"Yes," said Mary. "And that is what I have come to tell you about, because it is very good and I do not understand it and I dislike not understanding it."
She turned the pocket-book round.
"He married her on Monday. Everybody in this house has spent a week frightened of exactly that, and my father and Mr. Denny and I sat in this room a fortnight ago and worked out that a wedding was the thing that must not happen, and it happened, and nothing happened.
"A binding does not fail. That is the whole of what a binding is.
It is the one thing in the world that cannot be got wrong by accident.
Four conditions, and if you have the four it takes, and it does not care in the smallest degree whether anybody understood the words — Colwood is very clear and I have read the chapter about a hundred times.
"So either they are not really married, which they are, because there will be a register and my uncle Gardiner saw it.
"Or one of the four conditions was wanting."
There was a silence in the library.
Mr. Bennet said, quite mildly, "Which one, do you suppose?"
"It cannot be the words; a curate says the words. It cannot be the witnesses; there were two. It cannot be that neither of them meant it; he meant it a great deal." Mary looked up. "There was no ward on that room."
"In a London church?"
"There is a ward on every church in England," said Mary. "There has been since the twelve hundreds. It is the first thing that is done and the last thing that is let go and there are parishes in Wales that have not had a roof since the Civil War and still have their ward.
"Somebody found a church in London with a dead ward and put my sister's wedding in it."
She closed the book.
"I should like to know who," said Mary Bennet, "because there are perhaps forty people in this kingdom who would have thought of it and about four who could have found out which church, and I have been sitting up thinking about it for two nights, and every road I go down comes out at the same place, and it is a place I am not going to name in front of my father. "
Mr. Bennet said, "You may name it. I got there on Monday."
---
Denny walked back with Mary as far as the churchyard corner that evening, which had become a thing they did without either of them proposing it.
He had been at Longbourn nine days. He had written to his colonel and to his father and had answers from neither; his commission was gone or going; he slept at the Philipses' because Mrs. Bennet could not be told why a lieutenant of the ——shire was in the house, and had been told instead that he was a friend of Mr. Gardiner's, which she had accepted instantly and improved upon within a day into a connection of the Gardiners of Cheapside on the mother's side.
At the corner Mary stopped and put her hand out — not to him; to the churchyard wall.
She stood like that for a while, with her palm flat on the stone, which was a thing Denny did and she had begun to do about a week after he came, on the grounds that it cost nothing and that people who can hear things should put their hands on things.
"Miss Mary?"
"It is quieter," said Mary.
"The ward? It has never been much—"
"Not the ward." She took her hand away and looked at it. "The other thing. The one under everything, that has been going since before the rolls, that I have been able to hear since I was eleven and thought was a noise in my own head.
"It is quieter than it was in April."
Denny did not say anything for a moment.
"How much quieter?"
"I do not know. There is no way to say it. It is like—" she stopped, and tried again. "When you have a fire in a grate and you go out of the room and come back an hour later, and it has not gone out, and you have not put anything on it. It is exactly the same fire. There is simply less of it."
She began to walk again.
"My father is two-and-fifty," said Mary Bennet, "and he has not been out of doors in a fortnight, and I have not told him and I am not going to, and I am telling you because you are the only person here who will not immediately want to do something about it."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Walk back with me," said Mary, "and to-morrow at half past six, and the day after."