Chapter Fifty
They came on the Thursday morning.
Mrs. Bennet saw them from the dressing-room window while she was doing Jane's hair, and there was such a scene in the upper passage as Longbourn had not had since August; and by the time the two gentlemen were shown in, the whole family was arranged in the small parlor in an attitude of perfect unconcern, at a cost of about four minutes of undignified running.
Mr. Bingley looked at Jane before he had finished bowing to Mrs. Bennet.
Mr. Darcy said, "Mrs. Bennet," and sat down where he was put, which was at the far end of the room by the window, and said almost nothing for three quarters of an hour.
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It was the worst three quarters of an hour of Elizabeth's life, and she had had a number of contenders that year.
Her mother was civil to Mr. Bingley in a manner so pointed and so fulsome that Jane's color did not go down once in the whole visit; and she was civil to Mr. Darcy in the manner of a woman discharging a duty to somebody she has been told is important, in about eleven words, and then not at all.
"You have taken Netherfield, I understand, sir."
"I have."
"Well. It is a very good house and Mr. Bingley was extremely comfortable in it, and I am sure I hope you will be." Mrs. Bennet turned back to Bingley. "Now, Mr. Bingley, you must tell me — how do you find the country? Is it not a great deal pleasanter than town? I always say—"
And that was the whole of it.
Elizabeth sat with her work in her lap and listened to her mother be gracious for forty minutes to a young man who had once made Jane cry for four months, and be barely tolerable to a man who had spent eight days in London in August and a piece of his own blood in a tavern in Aldgate; and she could not say one word, and would not be able to say one word for as long as she lived, and she looked at the carpet and thought about the Netherfield ballroom and the west window bay.
Once, in the middle of it, she looked up and found that Mr. Darcy was looking at her.
He looked away at once — and then, after a moment, looked back, and did not look away; and there was nothing at all in his face, and Elizabeth understood, with a small shock, that this was because he had been sitting at that end of the room for half an hour doing what she was doing, and had been perfectly aware of every part of it.
She got out of the room at last, when Bingley proposed a walk and was carried off with Jane and Kitty into the shrubbery.
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Mr. Bennet sent for Darcy at eleven.
Hill came in with the message and delivered it in front of everybody, and Mrs. Bennet, who had not the smallest idea what to make of it, said, "Mr. Bennet wishes to — but he never sees anybody —" and then, recollecting herself and the ten thousand a year, said that she was sure it was very civil.
They went into the library: Mr. Bennet, Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth, Mary, and Lieutenant Denny, who had been fetched from the Philipses' at half past nine and had been standing about the passage since.
Mr. Bennet shut the door and turned the key, which nobody had ever seen him do.
"Sir," he said, "I am told I owe you my daughter, my name, and the whole of my family's standing in this county, and I am not going to speak about that this morning because I should make a very poor job of it and I want my head clear. You may consider it said badly and taken as read.
"I asked you here for something else. My daughter Elizabeth tells me that in July you said you would have to see this, and that you had no right to ask and were going to ask."
He put the japanned box on the table.
"You need not ask," said Mr. Bennet. "Sit down."
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Darcy was two hours over it.
He read it first with the paperweights on it, saying nothing, for about forty minutes, in short bursts because the letters would not sit still; and then with Harrow open at his elbow; and then with Mary's Colwood, and then with a sheet of paper on which he wrote out the eleven lines in ordinary hand, twice, and compared them.
Nobody spoke. Denny stood at the window. Mary sat on the wooden chair with her hands in her lap and did not fidget once, having had nineteen years' practice at waiting in rooms.
At half past one Darcy sat back.
"Mr. Bennet," he said, "everything you worked out in June is correct, and I want to say that first, because you got it alone, out of four books your daughter bought, and it took me eleven months and a man at the Society of Antiquaries.
"It is not a deed. There is no grantor. The verb is keep. There is no consideration named because none was given; nothing was bought and nothing was granted; a man wrote down what he had undertaken and put it in a box.
"And it is a keeping, in the old form, and I have seen the form once before — not a keeping, but the form.
There is a fragment of one at Pemberley in a case in the muniment room, four lines of it, that my great-grandfather bought out of a dissolved abbey in 1746 because he liked the box it came in.
Nobody has ever known what it was. I have known since about eleven o'clock this morning. "
"And?" said Mr. Bennet.
"And I do not know what is under your ground, and neither does Tarrant, and I do not believe anybody has known for a very long time. But I can tell you three things about the document that you have not got, because they want a comparison, and I have the comparison."
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"The first is the date," said Darcy. "There is not one.
You know that. What you may not know is that in that form there never is — because a keeping does not begin at a date, it begins when the words are said, and the man who says them is not making a record for a court, he is making a copy for his children so that they may know what they are inside.
"The second is that there is no release.
"Every ordinary undertaking in England has one.
There is always a road out: on payment of a sum, on the death of a party, on the failure of a condition, at the will of the survivor.
This has none. There is no clause by which it can be ended, by anybody, ever.
Whoever wrote it did not want it to be capable of being ended, and he thought about it, because there is a line here—" he turned the paper "—and this bond shall not be loosed by me nor by any that come after me — which is not a form of words.
It is a man saying, I know that my grandchildren will want to get out of this, and they are not going to. "
"That is not encouraging," said Mr. Bennet.
"No. The third one may be."
Darcy put his finger on the sheet where he had written the lines out in his own hand.
"The condition. So long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground.
"Mr. Bennet, that is not the same sentence as the entail, and you saw that in June, and you were right, and I do not think you have gone far enough with it.
"The entail is in the ordinary form and does what it says: heirs male of the body, and in default of heirs male, over to the next in blood, and so the estate goes to Mr. Collins.
That is property. It is the same clause as in ten thousand deeds and it will be construed by any court in England in the same way.
"The keeping does not say heirs male. It does not say of the male line. It does not use the word heir at all, anywhere, in eleven lines — and a man writing in that century who meant heirs male had the words to hand, because he used them forty lines further down in the other clause."
Elizabeth had got up.
"Then what does a man mean?" she said.
"I do not know," said Darcy. "I want to be very exact with you, because this is the only piece of hope in the room and it would be a wicked thing to make it larger than it is.
In that century man is used for a person about half the time and for a male about half the time, and I have looked at every other use of it in these eleven lines and they are not decisive.
I would not stake anything on it. Tarrant would not.
"But the man who wrote this was extremely careful. He used heirs male when he meant heirs male, forty lines away, in a document he wrote in one sitting.
"And he did not use it here."
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There was a long silence in the library.
"There is a second thing," said Darcy, "and it is not mine either. It is Miss Mary's, and she said it in this room a fortnight ago and I have had it from her sister four times since and I do not think anybody has looked at it properly, including her."
Mary said, "Which thing?"
"You read the first three lines of this aloud in April."
"Yes."
"And nothing took."
"No."
"You gave two reasons," said Mr. Darcy. "I have had them repeated to me exactly, because Miss Bennet has a very good memory and has said it four times in the same words. You said: it did not take, because I am not of the blood in the male line, and I was not undertaking anything."
Mary sat quite still.
"One of those is in the document," said Darcy, "and the other one is not."
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Nobody said anything at all for perhaps ten seconds.
Then Mr. Bennet said, in an entirely conversational voice, "No."
"Sir—"
"No. I know where this is going and it is not going there." He had not raised his voice. "She is nineteen years old."
"I am not proposing anything," said Darcy.
"I am telling you what is on this table, and I would be a liar and a coward if I told you the first two things and not the third, and I have had a great deal of experience this year of what comes of deciding for other people which things they are old enough to be told. "
"Papa," said Elizabeth.
"Be quiet, Lizzy." Mr. Bennet put his hand flat on the box, as he had done in August. "Mr. Darcy. What is a keeping paid for with?"
"You know what it is paid for with."
"Say it in front of her."
"With a life," said Darcy, "or with a line of them.
That is what Mr. Denny was taught in a fortnight of lectures and it is what the fragment at Pemberley says in four lines, and it is why the courts stopped doing it, and it is why one man in Hertfordshire four hundred years ago put a thing in a box and never wrote down what it cost him. "
"There," said Mr. Bennet. "Now we all have it.
Thank you." He got up. "The answer is no, and it will be no on Monday, and it will be no in November, and I am the head of this family, and I have been a bad one, and this is the first thing I have ever forbidden anybody in this house and I find that I am rather good at it. "
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Mary said, "May I say one thing?"
"You may say anything you like except that."
"I am not going to say that." Mary got up off the wooden chair. "I am going to say that in April I read three lines out of that paper alone in this room because I was curious, and I have thought about it perhaps a thousand times since, and I have never once told anybody the whole of what happened."
Mr. Bennet turned round.
"What happened?"
"It did not take," said Mary. "I have told you the truth about that and I would swear to it. Nothing took and nothing was undertaken and there was nothing in the room.
"But it heard me."
Denny came away from the window.
"I read three lines aloud," said Mary Bennet, "and when I stopped, the note under everything — the one that has been going since before the rolls, that I have heard since I was eleven — got louder. For about two seconds. And then it went back to what it was.
"Like a dog in another room lifting its head."
She sat down again.
"That is all," she said. "I have not said it before because there was nothing to be done with it and because everybody would have said I imagined it, and because I did not want it to be true.
"I do not want to do anything about it. I want to say it in a room where somebody will write it down."
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They went out at two o'clock, and Mrs. Bennet met them in the hall and said that she was sure she did not know what Mr. Bennet could have to say to anybody for three hours, and that dinner would be at four, and would the gentlemen stay; and Mr. Bingley said that they would with the greatest pleasure before Mr. Darcy had opened his mouth.
Elizabeth walked out to the gate with him at half past two while the others were in the shrubbery. It was the first time they had been within ten feet of each other alone since a lawn in Derbyshire in August.
Neither of them said anything for about twenty yards.
Then Elizabeth said, "I know what you paid him."
Mr. Darcy stopped.
"Not the money," she said. "Anybody may pay money. I know what else. My aunt wrote to me and told me two sentences that my uncle said, and I have had a fortnight, and I worked it out on a stile in the paddock on Saturday and I have not slept properly since.
"You gave him the western ground."
He did not say anything.
"You will not confirm it and I do not need you to." Elizabeth's voice was not steady. "I have been very angry with you for five days, and I have not been able to say so to anybody, and I want to say it now and have done with it.
"You went into a room in London and gave away a piece of your own blood for a girl of fifteen who has never once thought about you and who called you a proud disagreeable man to your face in a lodging-house in Wapping, and then you got into a carriage and came into this county and sat at the end of my mother's parlor for forty minutes and were spoken to like a tradesman, and you have not said one word, and you were not going to.
"And I cannot thank you," said Elizabeth, "because you have arranged it so that I have nothing to thank you for — my uncle has done it all, and it is in his hand, and my father will write to him, and in ten years my mother will be telling people in Meryton how good her brother Gardiner was to us.
"You have made it impossible. Do you know that?
You have taken very great care that there should be nothing in this for you at all, and the consequence is that there is nothing I can give you either, and I have been walking about this house for five days with something in my hands and nowhere to put it. "
Mr. Darcy stood in the gateway of Longbourn.
"Miss Bennet," he said at last, "if you have something in your hands, I am not going to be so dishonest as to pretend I do not want it. But not to-day, and not for that.
"Your father is dying. Your sister is nineteen and has just told a room full of people that a four-hundred-year-old oath lifted its head at her.
There is a hundred and ninety acres behind your church that has not moved since the twelfth of August and I do not know why it stopped and I am afraid of the reason.
"I have been in love with you for ten months. It will keep another fortnight. Nothing else in this county will."