Chapter Fifty-One
Mr. Bingley called every day.
He came on the Friday to shoot with Mr. Bennet, who did not shoot and said so, and who sat on a stile at the edge of the home field for two hours and let a young man of five-and-twenty tell him about coverts; and he came on the Saturday for no reason at all; and on the Monday he came at ten in the morning and stayed until eleven at night, and had dinner, and played at commerce, and looked at Jane for a great deal of it.
Mrs. Bennet's maneuvers were of a kind that Elizabeth had thought she was hardened to and found that she was not.
On the Monday evening she got Kitty out of the room by a device so transparent that Kitty said "mama" in the doorway, and then got Elizabeth out by pretending to want her upstairs about a pattern, and Elizabeth went, and stood on the landing being ashamed of everybody including herself, and came down again ten minutes later to find that nothing whatever had happened and that Jane was making tea.
It was the Tuesday morning.
He came at eleven and asked Jane to walk out, and they went into the shrubbery, and Mrs. Bennet stationed herself at the parlor window and gave a running account of a piece of laurel hedge for three quarters of an hour.
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Jane came in first, and went straight up.
Elizabeth found her in their room with her bonnet still on, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap, and she got up when the door opened and said, "Lizzy," and then could not say anything else at all; and Elizabeth said "I know," and that was the whole of it for a minute or two.
"He has been down stairs to papa," said Jane at last. "He would not wait. He said that he had waited eleven months and would not wait through a luncheon."
"And papa?"
"Papa said—" Jane began to laugh, which turned into something else halfway and came back again.
"Papa said that he had no objection whatever, that Mr. Bingley was a very good young man of an easy temper and a great deal of money, that he was to take her at once and keep her, and that he would be much obliged if somebody would tell Mrs. Bennet, because he did not feel equal to it. "
"Oh, Jane."
"He told me about London," said Jane.
Elizabeth stopped.
"He told me the whole of it, in the shrubbery, before he asked me anything at all.
He said that he had been in town all that winter and had not known I was there, and that he found it out in the summer from Mr. Darcy, who told him himself, unasked, and told him also that he had been wrong to conceal it and had persuaded him wrongly on other grounds besides.
And Mr. Bingley said that he had been very angry with him for about a day and a half and then could not keep it up, and that he had come into Hertfordshire in September without knowing whether I should speak to him. "
"And what did you say?"
"I said that it was all a great while ago," said Jane, "and that I had never blamed him for anything, and that if he had been a man who could not be persuaded by his friends he would not have been the man I liked."
"You are impossible."
"I know," said Jane. "I meant it, though. That is the difficulty with me, Lizzy; I always mean it."
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There was a great deal of noise in the house that day and for several days.
Mrs. Bennet sat in the parlor for four hours and cried and calculated by turns; five thousand a year, and Netherfield, and Jane's beauty which she had always known must come to something; and she said "I knew it could not be for nothing" eleven times, and did not once mention the winter.
Kitty was pleased in an uncomplicated way that did her a great deal of credit. Mary said "I am very glad" and shook Mr. Bingley's hand, which was the most demonstrative thing anybody in that house had ever seen her do.
Mr. Bennet said, to Elizabeth, in the library: "I have given away the best of you to the pleasantest fool in England, and I find that I do not mind it in the least, which shows how far I am gone."
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But Elizabeth had known on the Friday.
She had known it standing at the window on the Friday afternoon watching her sister come up from the paddock with Mr. Bingley — because Jane had said something, and stopped, and gone red; and Mr. Bingley had seen it happen and had looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he has been trying to make out for a year and has suddenly got.
And Elizabeth had gone up to her room and shut the door.
Because it was the same thing that had happened at Netherfield in the November, in the drawing-room, on the third evening of Jane's illness — and it had happened for the same reason.
She said so to Jane on the Wednesday night, because she had spent a summer learning what comes of sparing people, and she said it badly and directly, sitting on the end of the bed with the candle between them.
"Jane. You are legible again. That is why he can see you. It is not that he has grown wiser and it is not that you have grown bolder. It is that there is not enough of your gift left to cover you, and there has not been since about the middle of August."
Jane did not look surprised.
"Yes," she said. "I know."
"You—"
"I have known since Tuesday fortnight." Jane pulled the shawl round her shoulders.
"I was in the kitchen when Hill scalded her arm, and she screamed, and I went to her, and I did all the things one does; and she went on crying, Lizzy, exactly as Maggie did in Gracechurch-street, and I stood there with a wet cloth in my hand and I understood the whole of it in about four seconds.
"It has been going out of me all summer.
Not to people. To the ground." She was perfectly steady about it.
"It began when I came home in May and I have felt it every day since and I did not know what it was until August, and then I did, because you told all of us what my father is and what is happening to him.
"He is going out like a candle, and I am going out beside him, and I am three-and-twenty and it is very much slower, and I have been holding a door shut since I was four years old without knowing there was a door."
Elizabeth could not speak.
"So there it is," said Jane. "And a man has asked me to marry him because for the first time in my life he could see my face, and my face is only visible because I am running down.
I have thought about that a great deal in three days and I am not going to think about it any more, because it does not alter one single thing.
"I would rather have it this way. I would rather be seen once, worn out, in my mother's shrubbery, than go on being lovely and invisible until I was fifty."
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Mary said nothing about the engagement for two days.
On the third evening she came into Elizabeth's room, and sat down on the wooden chair, and said, without any preliminary at all:
"When she marries she will go to Netherfield."
"Yes. Three miles."
"Three miles is not on this ground," said Mary.
Elizabeth put down her brush.
"I have thought about it since Tuesday and I have not said anything," said Mary, "because there is nothing whatever to be done about it and because Jane is happier than I have ever seen anybody in my life and I am not going to be the person who spoils it. I am telling you and then I shall stop.
"The condition is a man of my blood upon this ground.
There have been five of us on it since Lydia was born.
There were four after August. When Jane goes to Netherfield there will be three, and if you go anywhere there will be two, and I have no expectation of going anywhere so there will always be at least one.
"But we are not the condition. My father is the condition, because he is the man, and the rest of us are — I do not know what we are. Ballast, perhaps. Something that made it slower."
She looked at her hands.
"That is what I cannot get out of my head, Lizzy.
It began to go in the October after Lydia came out and began spending herself at every assembly in the county, and it went nine yards a week all winter while we were all of us out dancing, and it stopped on the second of May and I do not know why, and it moved forty-two yards on the night the youngest of us was taken off it altogether.
"I do not say I have it right. I have got it wrong twice before. I only say that this family has spent four hundred years being kept on a piece of ground by a document nobody could read, and that we are all of us now going away off it in different directions, very sensibly, one at a time."
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Lady Catherine de Bourgh came on the Thursday morning at eleven o'clock.
Elizabeth was in the small parlor with Kitty. She heard the carriage first and did not attend to it, because carriages came now — Bingley's, and the Lucases', and the apothecary's; and it was Kitty who got to the window.
"Lizzy, it is a chaise and four, and I do not know the livery, and there is a lady in it who has not got out."
Elizabeth came to the window.
The carriage had drawn up in the sweep, and the servant had let down the steps and was standing at the door; and the door was open, and nobody had come out of it.
It stood like that for the better part of a minute.
Then Lady Catherine de Bourgh got down onto the gravel of Longbourn and stood there in the September sun and looked at the front of the house — not at the door, but along it, up at the roof-line and down again to the ground, in the manner of a woman valuing a property she has no intention of buying.
Then she looked past it, north-east, over the shrubbery and the paddock, in the direction of the church.
She stood so for perhaps four seconds.
"Who is it?" said Kitty.
"That," said Elizabeth, "is Lady Catherine de Bourgh."
Her voice came out perfectly level and she was rather surprised by it. She was aware of her own heart going, and of Kitty saying something, and of Hill in the passage, and of the extreme clarity with which she could see the sleeve of her own gown against the window frame.
She will come to you. Not soon. When she hears something that alarms her. She will come to your house herself, in her own carriage, without giving notice, and she will get you into a room or a garden with nobody in it.
"Kitty," said Elizabeth. "Go up and tell mama that Lady Catherine de Bourgh is come, and be a long time about it, and then go and find Mary and stay with her."
"Are you not going to—"
"Do it now, please," said Elizabeth, and went out into the hall to open her own front door.