Chapter Fifty-Two
She came into the small parlor, and sat down, and was introduced to Mrs. Bennet, and answered her with an inclination of the head; and Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a guest of such high importance, received her with the utmost politeness.
After sitting for a moment in silence, Lady Catherine said very stiffly to Elizabeth,
"I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose, is your mother."
Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.
"And that I suppose is one of your sisters."
"Yes, madam," said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to a Lady Catherine. "She is my youngest but one. My youngest of all is lately married."
"You have a very small park here," returned Lady Catherine after a short silence.
"It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my lady, I dare say; but I assure you it is much larger than Sir William Lucas's."
"This must be a most inconvenient sitting room for the evening in summer; the windows are full west."
Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner; and then added,
"May I take the liberty of asking your ladyship whether you left Mr. and Mrs. Collins well?"
"Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last."
Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for her from Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for her calling. But no letter appeared.
Lady Catherine sat for a further two minutes, during which Mrs. Bennet said a great deal about the weather and the harvest and Mr. Bingley; and then she got up.
"Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favor me with your company."
"Go, my dear," cried her mother, "and show her ladyship about the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage."
---
They went out through the hall, and the carriage stood in the sweep with the servants at the horses' heads, and neither of them said one word until they were past the paddock gate and into the little grove of hornbeam that Mrs. Bennet had called a wilderness for twenty years.
Then Lady Catherine stopped and turned round.
"You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I come."
Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.
"Indeed, you are mistaken, Madam. I have not been at all able to account for the honor of seeing you here."
"Miss Bennet," replied her ladyship, in an angry tone, "you ought to know, that I am not to be trifled with.
But however insincere you may choose to be, you shall not find me so.
My character has ever been celebrated for its sincerity and frankness, and in a cause of such moment as this, I shall certainly not depart from it.
"A report of a most alarming nature reached me two days ago.
I was told, that not only your sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that you, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all likelihood, be soon afterwards united to my nephew, my own nephew, Mr. Darcy.
Though I know it must be a scandalous falsehood; though I would not injure him so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you. "
"If you believed it impossible to be true," said Elizabeth, coloring with astonishment and disdain, "I wonder you took the trouble of coming so far. What could your ladyship propose by it?"
"At once to insist upon having such a report universally contradicted."
"Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family," said Elizabeth coolly, "will be rather a confirmation of it; if, indeed, such a report is in existence."
"If! Do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a report is spread abroad?"
"I never heard that it was."
"And can you likewise declare, that there is no foundation for it?"
"I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your ladyship. You may ask questions, which I shall not choose to answer."
"This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"
"Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible."
"It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in."
"If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it."
"Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this. I am almost the nearest relation he has in the world, and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns."
"But you are not entitled to know mine; nor will such behavior as this ever induce me to be explicit."
---
Lady Catherine walked four paces and turned round.
"Very well," she said. "You are quick, and you are impertinent, and you are not stupid, and I am too old to spend a morning on it. We shall have the truth, then, since you will not be brought at it sideways.
"He has offered for you and you refused him."
Elizabeth said nothing.
"In April, in Kent, at the parsonage, on the evening you had a head-ache and did not come to me.
" Lady Catherine's face was perfectly composed.
"He went out at eight and came in at nine and did not speak at dinner the next day and left the county in the morning eleven days before he intended.
I have had four-and-thirty years of that boy and I have buried two of my own; do you imagine I could not read it?
"And he has been at Netherfield a fortnight, and he has taken the lease himself, and he does not shoot."
"Then your ladyship knows a great deal more than she came to find out."
"I came to find out whether you had said yes to him the second time.
You have not, or there would be a letter.
" Lady Catherine sat down on the wooden seat under the hornbeams, which nobody ever sat on because it was damp, and arranged her hands on the head of her stick.
"Sit down. No — stand, if you would rather; you will be more comfortable disliking me on your feet.
"Now. You believe that I have come to tell you that you are the daughter of a country gentleman of two thousand a year, with an uncle in Cheapside and an attorney in Meryton and a sister lately married in a great hurry, and that the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted."
"I did rather expect something of the kind."
"So did I, when I set out," said Lady Catherine de Bourgh. "I had it composed as far as Hatfield. It is a very good speech and I have made it twice before in my life, to better-connected girls than you, and it worked both times.
"And then I came into this county."
---
She sat quite still under the hornbeams.
"Two miles past Hatfield," she said, "I put my hand on the window frame of my own carriage and the ground went out from under me. Not the road; the ground. Like coming off a made floor onto a bog in the dark.
"It is nine-and-twenty miles from the boundary of this county to your father's gate, and I have felt it under me the whole way, and it got worse for the last eleven, and I sat in a stopped carriage in your sweep for one full minute this morning because I was not certain that I could stand up in it.
"How long has it been like this?"
Elizabeth found that she had put her hand on the trunk of a hornbeam.
"Since October," she said.
"Since October." Lady Catherine's mouth moved.
"And in April I had a girl of two-and-twenty at my own table, four times, who had crossed it every day of her life and thought that was what standing up felt like.
Well. That accounts for a good deal that I put down to insolence and shall have to put down to something else. "
"Your ladyship knows what it is."
"I know what it was," said Lady Catherine.
"There is not a house in England with four hundred years in it that does not have some memory of the old keepings, and Rosings is older than most and I was brought up by a woman who could read the forms. I do not know what is under this ground.
I do not want to know and I shall be out of the county by four o'clock.
"I know that it was held. I know that a keeping is paid for with a line, and that when it fails it does not fail politely.
And I know — because I asked Mr. Collins nine questions at his own table on Tuesday and he answered every one of them and was very much gratified to be consulted — that your father is two-and-fifty, and has five daughters and no son, and has not walked beyond his own shrubbery since August."
She looked up.
"So we may leave Cheapside out of it," she said. "That is not why I have come."
---
"Then why?"
"Because I have one child," said Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
The wind moved in the hornbeams. Somewhere beyond the paddock, a long way off, somebody was calling a dog.
"Rosings has a keeping of its own. It is a small one, and it is late, and it is not four hundred years old — it is a hundred and eighty, and it was not a court that made it, it was a de Bourgh, and I know exactly what it cost him because we have the paper and it is not in a box, it is in a case, and I have read it every year since I was nineteen.
"It runs to three lives. It is in the fourth.
"My husband was the third. He died at eight-and-forty and everybody said it was his heart, and it was, and it was also that he had spent three-and-twenty years being a door.
He knew it when he married me. He told me on the second evening, in a room at Rosings, and I was one-and-twenty and I did not sleep for a week.
"And I have one child, and she is the fourth life, and she has been the fourth life since the hour she was born."
Elizabeth said, very quietly, "That is why she has never sworn anything."