Chapter Forty-Nine
Mrs. Gardiner's answer came on the Saturday, and Elizabeth carried it out to the little copse at the back of the paddock, where nobody went, and read it sitting on a stile.
My dear Niece,
I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole morning to answering it, as I foresee that a little writing will not comprise what I have to tell you.
I confess myself surprised by your application; I did not expect it from you.
Don't think me angry, however, for I only mean to let you know, that I had not imagined such inquiries to be necessary on your side.
If you do not choose to understand me, forgive my impertinence.
Your uncle is as much surprised as I am — and nothing but the belief of your being a party concerned, would have allowed him to act as he has done. But if you are really innocent and ignorant, I must be more explicit.
On the very day of my coming home from Lambton, your uncle had a most unexpected visitor. Mr. Darcy called, and was shut up with him several hours. It was all over before I arrived; so my curiosity was not so dreadfully racked as your's seems to have been.
He came to tell Mr. Gardiner that he had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were, and that he had seen and talked with them both; Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once.
From what I can collect, he left Derbyshire only one day after ourselves, and came to town with the resolution of hunting for them.
The motive professed, was his conviction of its being owing to himself that Wickham's worthlessness had not been so well known, as to make it impossible for any young woman of character, to love or confide in him.
He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him, to lay his private actions open to the world.
His character was to speak for itself. He called it, therefore, his duty to step forward, and endeavor to remedy an evil, which had been brought on by himself.
He had, he said, some knowledge of a woman in town who had once been a servant of his sister's, and who kept a lodging house; and he went to her and got the direction, and it cost him something, and he would not say what.
Lydia he saw once, and would not see again.
He told your uncle that he had proposed to her to remove her at once to Gracechurch-street, and that she had refused, in terms which he repeated and which your uncle would not repeat to me; and that he had then, in his own words, "stopped attempting to persuade a person who was not going to be persuaded, and gone to work on the part of it that could be moved. "
Wickham he saw at least twice, and I believe three times.
Now, my dear Lizzy, here is the part I cannot make out, and I set it down honestly rather than pretend to a knowledge I have not got.
There was money. The debts are paid, in Brighton and in Meryton and elsewhere, and they are above a thousand pounds; the commission is bought; there is a thousand settled upon Lydia.
Your uncle knows those figures because he wrote the drafts and he has told me them, under protest, and he means the whole of it to look as though it came out of his own pocket, and he is very unhappy about it.
But money was not the whole of what passed between those two men, and your uncle knows it, and it is the reason he has been silent and out of spirits since the wedding.
Mr. Darcy came away from the second interview and sat down in our back parlor without being asked to, which he had never once done, and did not speak for some minutes; and when your uncle offered him wine he did not seem to hear it.
And your uncle said to me afterwards — and I give you his words — "Something has been paid in that room that was not out of a bank. "
He would not be asked about it. Your uncle did ask, once, at the door on the Sunday, whether it had cost him more than he had let anybody see; and Mr. Darcy said, "It is not of a nature to be repaid and I would take it very kindly if you did not inquire," and shook his hand, and went out.
One thing more, and then I have done with the disagreeable part.
He chose the church. He was extremely particular about the church, and it was not the parish either party belonged to, and he would give no reason at all; and your uncle, who is an obstinate man on a point of business, objected to it twice and was overborne twice, and told me that in five-and-twenty years he has never been so completely and so politely refused an explanation by anybody.
St. Clement's in the Fields. I have looked at it since. It is a shabby, cold, half-shut-up place with a curate from Aldgate, and there was nobody in it but ourselves and the clerk. I cannot conceive why a man of his fortune would insist upon it, and Lydia complained of it for two days.
Will you be very angry with me, my dear Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold enough to say before) how much I like him?
His behavior to us has, in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire.
His understanding and opinions all please me; he wants nothing but a little more liveliness, and that, if he marry prudently, his wife may teach him.
I thought him very sly; — he hardly ever mentioned your name. But slyness seems the fashion.
Pray forgive me, if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far, as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low phaeton, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.
But I must write no more. The children have been wanting me this half hour.
Yours, very sincerely
M. GARDINER
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The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits, in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the greatest share.
The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's match, which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be just, from the pain of obligation, were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true!
He had followed them purposely to town, he had taken on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a research; in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and despise, and where he was reduced to meet, frequently meet, reason with, persuade, and finally bribe, the man whom he always most wished to avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to pronounce.
He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem.
Her heart did whisper, that he had done it for her.
But it was a hope shortly checked by other considerations; and she soon felt that even her vanity was insufficient, when required to depend on his affection for her, for a woman who had already refused him, as able to overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with Wickham.
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She read the letter a second time, sitting on the stile, and then a third; and at the third reading she stopped at two sentences and did not go on.
Something has been paid in that room that was not out of a bank.
It is not of a nature to be repaid and I would take it very kindly if you did not inquire.
She sat looking at the paddock for some while.
There were about four things it could be, and she went through them in order, and three of them she could dismiss.
It was not information; he had none that Wickham would want. It was not a threat; a threat is not paid. It was not a place, or a living, or a house — those come out of a bank, in the end, and Mr. Gardiner would have written the draft and known the figure.
The fourth thing she arrived at with her hands quite cold in the September sun, and it was this: that the only currency in the world which a man like Fitzwilliam Darcy possessed and a man like George Wickham wanted, and which is not of a nature to be repaid, is a thread out of an old line.
The ground would not take him. It does not have to. A bond in the old form is given by the holder, out of what he has.
She had heard him say something very like that in a parlor at an inn in Lambton in July, about somebody else entirely, and had not attended to it because they had been talking about Hertfordshire.
Elizabeth Bennet put her face in her hands.
She stayed like that for some minutes, and what went through her was not gratitude, or not chiefly; it was a hot and entirely unmanageable rage at being told nothing — at a man who had walked out of a room in Aldgate having given away a piece of his own blood, and had come to her uncle's parlor and sat down without being asked, and had then written I am not at liberty to enter into particulars into the whole rest of his life.
"He might have told me," she said aloud, to a field.
And then, because she was two-and-twenty and had spent a summer learning things:
"He might have told me, and I refused him in April in a way that made it impossible, and I have not written to him since, and there is not one thing on this earth that gives me the right to be told."
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She had scarcely got in when there was another letter, from Kent, in Charlotte's hand, and it had been written in great haste and had no beginning.
Lizzy. I have four minutes before the boy goes.
On Tuesday her Ladyship had a letter at breakfast which she read twice and did not comment upon, which she has never once done in seven months.
She then asked Mr. Collins nine questions about your family, in order, beginning with your father's health and ending with your age; and Mr. Collins answered all nine and was very much gratified to be consulted.
At dinner she said, apropos of nothing whatever, that there were connections which could not be permitted to take place, and that it was the duty of persons of rank to prevent them while they were yet preventable, and that she had never in her life shrunk from a disagreeable interview.
Yesterday she ordered the traveling carriage for Thursday and would not say where.
I do not know what she has heard or from whom, though I could name the woman in Meryton if it would do any good, and it would not. I know only that she is coming, that it is you, and that she will do it in a room with nobody in it.
Do you remember what I told you in the lane in November about a man who does what he is told? It applies more particularly to a woman who has never been refused.
Say nothing to Mr. Collins if he writes, which he will.
C. C.
Elizabeth read it standing in the hall.
She will get you into a room or a garden with nobody in it, and she will ask you to promise her a thing. It will be very reasonable. Do not promise her anything.
Nine-and-twenty years of it, spent in a lane in Kent on a woman she would never see again.
"Very well," said Elizabeth.
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On the Monday, Mrs. Bennet came into the breakfast room with her cap crooked and her voice going before her.
"Well, Jane, I have such news — Mrs. Long has just been here — Netherfield is taken again!"
Jane put down her cup with great care.
"Taken by Mr. Bingley, mama?"
"By Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Darcy along with him, and they are to be down on Wednesday or Thursday — Mrs. Nicholls was in Meryton yesterday ordering the meat, and she told Mrs. Long's cook that there is to be a great deal done to the house and that the gentlemen are to shoot, and that Mr. Darcy has taken the lease himself and Mr. Bingley is only staying with him, though I am sure I do not see why, when it is Mr. Bingley's house by rights and always was—"
"Mr. Darcy has taken it," said Elizabeth.
"So Mrs. Nicholls says, and much good may it do him, a disagreeable proud man, and I am sure I do not care if he never sets foot in this house.
But Mr. Bingley! Jane, my love, you must have the muslin done up, and — oh!
but I am not going to say one word about it, for I am sure I have learned my lesson, and if he means nothing by it he means nothing, and it is nothing whatever to us. "
She said nothing whatever about it for the rest of the day, at intervals of about four minutes.
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Elizabeth went into the library that evening and found her father asleep in his chair at seven o'clock, which she had never in her life seen.
She stood in the doorway a moment.
He had come in from the shrubbery at four, having walked to the end of it and back, which was the whole of what he now did out of doors; and there was a book open face down on his knee, and his spectacles had slid, and he looked exactly like a man of two-and-fifty asleep in a chair, and she stood there and made herself look at him properly, in the way she had learned to look at people, which she had been avoiding in that room since August.
There was nothing wrong with him. That was the thing.
He was not ill in any way that Mr. Jones could have found or that a physician in Harley-street would have named; there was no hole in him and nothing had been taken; he was a healthy man of two-and-fifty with a good constitution and a bad habit of sitting indoors.
He was simply — going out. Steadily, evenly, without pain, the way a candle that has been burning a long while in a still room goes out: not because anything blows on it.
"Do stop doing that," said Mr. Bennet, without opening his eyes. "It is extremely uncivil and I have been aware of it for a full minute."
"I beg your pardon, papa."
"You have your mother's hands and my manners and Mary's eyes, and it is a great pity, because you would have done very well with any other combination." He opened his eyes and pushed his spectacles up. "Well? Am I dying?"
"No," said Elizabeth.
"That is a lie, and it is a very poor one, and I want you to know that I have never once in my life minded being lied to by you.
" He shut the book. "Netherfield is taken, I understand, by a gentleman who does not want it, in a county he has told everybody is unhealthy, for a shooting season in which he does not shoot.
"Sit down, Lizzy. Let us have twenty minutes before your mother finds us, and you shall tell me what you think he is coming for."