Chapter Forty-Eight
Mr. Bennet had very often wished, before this period of his life, that instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. He now wished it more than ever.
He had also, since the Wednesday, been refusing to receive them.
"They shall not come into this house," he said. "I have kept a fool's holiday for twenty years and it has cost me a daughter, and I am not going to sit at my own table and be pleasant to that man."
Mrs. Bennet wept, and argued, and appealed to Jane, and stopped eating, and finally — on the Friday, in the small parlor, with the whole family present — said the only thing she had ever said in her life that her husband could not answer.
"Then she may never come home," said Mrs. Bennet.
"That is what you are settling. She is sixteen in a fortnight and she is going to Newcastle, which is three hundred miles, and if she does not come now she does not come while you live; and you will be very fine and very right about it and you will never see her again, and neither shall I, and I have had five and I have got four. "
Mr. Bennet looked at his wife for a long moment.
"Write and tell her she may come," he said, and went into the library.
So the invitation was sent, for a fortnight on the way north; and the answer came back in Lydia's own hand, three lines and two blots and no punctuation whatever, and it said that they should come on Tuesday.
They did not.
---
She arrived at four in the afternoon on the Tuesday in a hired chaise, alone.
Mrs. Bennet was at the door before it stopped, and Kitty behind her, and Lydia was out of it and had her mother round the neck and was talking before anybody had got a word in — and she was, Elizabeth saw at once, entirely unchanged: pink, and loud, and delighted with herself, and wearing a new bonnet and a wedding ring which she held up at arm's length for inspection about eleven times in the first quarter of an hour.
"La! Are we all here? Mary, you are grown quite thin — Kitty, you look ever so much better, I declare you do — and Jane! Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman."
"And where," said Mrs. Bennet, looking past her at the empty chaise, "is Mr. Wickham?"
"Oh! now, that is the greatest joke in the world, and I have been saving it the whole way from Hatfield."
---
She told it at tea, twice, with her feet on the fender.
"We came up very well as far as Hatfield and dined there, and then we were to come on, and he was quite well and in the best spirits you ever saw — he had been making game of the waiter for a full half hour and I laughed till I cried.
And then we got into the chaise and went perhaps two miles, and he told the man to stop.
"And he got out. In the middle of the road! And he stood there with his hand on the door, and he was as white as that cloth, and he said, I cannot come on.
"So I said, Whatever do you mean, you cannot come on, and he said — mama, he said the strangest thing, he said, I have made a promise and I cannot come on, and I said, To whom?
and he said, To a man who will not be spoken of, which is exactly the sort of thing he says when he is being provoking.
And I said, Well, if you do not come I shall go by myself, and he said, Do, and gave the man money for me, and got back into the chaise and went to Hatfield again. "
She was enormously pleased.
"So there it is. And I dare say he was in a fright about papa, which I told him he need not be, and I dare say he owes somebody in Meryton — he owes everybody in Meryton, it is quite scandalous, Denny used to say — and so he has gone round by London and I am to meet him at Barnet in a fortnight, and it is the best joke I ever heard in my life. "
"He would not come into the county," said Mr. Bennet.
He had not spoken since she came into the house.
"He could not, papa. It is all one; he is very odd about some things and I have quite given over minding it. Do you know he will not — " and she went off into an account of Wickham's objection to some person in Brighton, which lasted four minutes and had no end.
In the library that night Mr. Bennet said to Elizabeth: "Two miles beyond Hatfield is the county boundary."
"Yes."
"And your Mr. Darcy," said her father, "does not appear to have relied entirely upon a gentleman's word."
---
Lydia's fortnight at Longbourn was, in the memory of every person in that house afterwards, the strangest fourteen days of their lives.
She was perfectly happy. She had no notion of having done anything remarkable; she had no notion of having been in any danger; and she was affronted, genuinely and repeatedly, whenever anybody attempted to treat the business as anything but a great piece of good fortune and a great deal of fun.
She said "when I was in Wapping" as another girl might have said "when I was at Ramsgate." She said that her uncle Gardiner had been very cross and her aunt very kind. She said that London was hot and that the lodgings were shabby and that she had thought it very hard she could not go out.
And she was, all day and every day, at her mother's elbow, being congratulated.
Mrs. Bennet took her into Meryton on the Thursday, and to the Philipses', and to Lady Lucas's, and Lydia sat and displayed the ring and gave her opinion on married life to four women who had all been married before she was born, and it went all over the parish in a day, and Mrs. Bennet came home from every one of these expeditions in a state of triumph that Elizabeth could not watch.
Jane bore it very well. Kitty bore it worse, and cried twice, and was found by Mary in the still-room and dealt with in Mary's own manner, which was to say nothing at all for twenty minutes and then remark that Kitty had walked to Meryton and back that day without sitting down, which was more than Lydia had done, having gone in the chaise.
---
It was on the Sunday, at breakfast, that she said it.
They had been talking of the wedding — Mrs. Bennet had asked about it perhaps thirty times in six days, and Lydia had given thirty different accounts, all of them chiefly about her gown — when she said:
"—and my uncle was to give me away, and I was so afraid he would not be there in time, for he had been out, and if he had been late the whole thing must have been put off till the next day, and I do not know what we should have done then, for Mr. Darcy could have done it just as well and it would have been no matter—"
"Mr. Darcy!" said Elizabeth.
"Oh! yes — he was to be there, you know, and he came with my uncle, and — la! I forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised them so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!"
"If it was to be a secret," said Jane, "say not another word on the subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further."
"Oh! certainly," said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; "we will ask you no questions."
"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."
On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her power, by running away.
---
She got as far as the shrubbery and then came back and went up to her own room and sat down and wrote to Mrs. Gardiner, and the letter was four sides and every line of it was a demand.
I must know how it was done. I must know who found them, and who paid, and what he paid, and why he was in that church; and you may tell me that I have no right to ask, and I have none, and I am asking.
Do not be delicate with me, aunt. I have had a great deal of delicacy this summer from people who were sparing me, and I am so tired of it that I could scream.
She sent it by the Monday post and then had to wait five days, which she did very badly.
---
But there was one thing she did in that fortnight that she never told anybody about.
It was on the second Wednesday, in the afternoon, in the small parlor, with the rain coming down and everybody sitting about.
Mrs. Bennet was asleep. Jane was writing.
Kitty and Lydia were on the window seat with a paper of ribbons between them, and Lydia was explaining, at length, why Kitty's blue would not do.
And Elizabeth put down her book and looked at her youngest sister properly for the first time since May.
She had been afraid of doing it for a fortnight. She had been afraid, quite specifically, of finding a hole; of finding the thing she had felt in the letter at Ramsgate, the room with the furniture taken out.
That was not what she found.
Lydia Bennet was entirely there. She was sixteen in nine days and she was noisy and vain and unkind about ribbons and enormously alive, and there was no more damage in her than in Kitty and a great deal less than in Jane; and Elizabeth, sitting with a book open on her knee, discovered that she had put her hand over her mouth.
But there was a thinness.
It was very slight, and it was low down, and it was exactly as Mr. Darcy had described it to nobody at all: a small draft, as though a window had been left open a little way in a room behind her.
Elizabeth would not have found it if she had not been looking for it, and would not have known what it was if Wickham had not put his hands on that girl's hands on a hill above Brighton and told her to say her own name.
A tenth. Perhaps less.
And it was going back.
She could not have said how she knew it.
There was no measuring the thing. But she had looked at people for fourteen years, and there is a difference between a wound and a scar, and this was — very slowly, over months, in a girl of fifteen with an excellent constitution who had never in her life been unhappy for longer than a day — beginning to close.
By the time she is twenty, thought Elizabeth, without knowing that she was repeating a sentence spoken in a tavern in Aldgate, she will be exactly what she was, and she will never know there was anything to get back.
"Lizzy," said Lydia, "you are looking at me most particular. Is it my hair? Mrs. Forster says I do it too high."
"I was thinking that you are very brown," said Elizabeth.
"I knew it," said Lydia with great satisfaction. "It is the sea. Everybody is brown at Brighton and nobody minds it in the least, and I do not care a straw."
---
They went on the Monday.
The chaise came at nine and Lydia was two hours late in being ready, and there was a great deal of running up and down stairs, and Mrs. Bennet cried at the door, and Kitty cried, and Lydia said "well, good-bye" about six times and did not cry at all.
At the very last, with her foot on the step, she turned round and said:
"Mary. Come and stay with us at Newcastle."
Everybody stopped.
"You are the only one of them who has not said one word to me about any of it," said Lydia, "not one, not in a fortnight, and I know quite well what they all think and I do not care, but you never said anything and you have been perfectly civil and you got me the blue ribbon.
So you may come at Christmas, and there are officers, and I shall find you somebody. "
"Thank you," said Mary. "I shall not come at Christmas."
"You never do anything," said Lydia cheerfully, and got in, and was driven away.
Mary stood in the gravel until the chaise was out of sight, and then said, to nobody in particular, in her flattest voice:
"I have written her name and the day and the hour four-and-twenty times since April. I hope somebody tells her one day."
She went in to fetch her boots. It was half past eleven, and she had not been out yet, and she was three hours late.