Chapter Fifty-Four
She told Jane that night.
Jane, who could believe anything of anybody, could not believe this; and it took a quarter of an hour and a great deal of laughing on both sides before she would.
"Good Heaven! can it be really so! Yet now I must believe you," cried Jane. "My dear, dear Lizzy, I would — I do congratulate you — but are you certain? forgive the question — are you quite certain that you can be happy with him?"
"There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already, that we are to be the happiest couple in the world. But are you pleased, Jane? Shall you like to have such a brother?"
"Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or myself more delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as impossible. And do you really love him quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do any thing rather than marry without affection. Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought to do?"
"Oh, yes! You will only think I feel more than I ought to do, when I tell you all."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, I must confess, that I love him better than I do Bingley. I am afraid you will be angry."
"My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"
"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley."
Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the desired effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances of attachment.
---
Mr. Darcy came at ten the next morning and went into the library, and the door was shut for fifty minutes.
Elizabeth sat in the small parlor and did a great deal of work upon a piece of muslin which had to be unpicked afterwards.
At five to eleven the library door opened and Mr. Darcy came out, and looked across the hall at her, and did not smile, and inclined his head very slightly; and then Hill came and said that Mr. Bennet would be glad to see Miss Elizabeth.
---
Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and anxious.
"Lizzy," said he, "what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to be accepting this man? Have not you always hated him?"
How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate!
It would have spared her from explanations and professions which it was exceedingly awkward to give; but they were now necessary, and she assured him, with some confusion, of her attachment to Mr. Darcy.
"Or in other words, you are determined to have him. He is rich, to be sure, and you may have more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane. But will they make you happy?"
"Have you any other objection," said Elizabeth, "than your belief of my indifference?"
"None at all. We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him."
"I do like him," she replied, with tears in her eyes; "I love him. Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable. You do not know what he really is; then pray do not pain me by speaking of him in such terms."
"Lizzy," said her father, "I have given him my consent.
He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse any thing which he condescended to ask.
I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him.
But let me advise you to think better of it.
I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior.
Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage.
You could scarcely escape discredit and misery.
My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about."
---
Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply; and at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.
"Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy."
Then he sat down, rather heavily, and was quiet for a moment.
"Now shut the door," said Mr. Bennet, "and sit down, because we have not begun."
---
"He told me the whole of it," said her father. "The four possibilities, and what my sister-in-law Lady Catherine said about a horse, and the church in London with nothing in it, and that he offered you that and you would not have it.
"He was fifty minutes about it and he did not once try to make any part of it sound better than it is; and at the end he said, Sir, I have told you this because if I do not she will, and she will tell it better, and you will have had it from the wrong person."
"That is exactly what he would say."
"It is what a man says who has worked out, rather late in life, that he is going to spend the next forty years married to somebody who will not be handled.
" Mr. Bennet took off his spectacles. "I liked him better in those fifty minutes than I have liked anybody in a great while, and I have not told him so and I do not intend to; he is quite pleased enough with himself.
"Now. Lizzy. I am going to ask you one question, and you are going to answer it, and I shall know if you do not, because you have my face."
"Ask it."
"Are you marrying him," said Mr. Bennet, "to save this family?"
---
The clock in the hall struck the quarter.
"Because you might," said her father. "It would be very like you. You are the only one of the five of you with any spine, and I have leaned on it since you were fourteen, which was a great convenience to me and a shocking thing to do to a child.
"And you know what I am. You know that when I go, it opens.
You know that his line is the fourth in England and that it is the only thing anybody has suggested that might hold this ground, and you were in this room in September when he said out loud that a keeping in its last life may be carried on if there is enough put into it.
"And I know my daughter. If you had decided in that hornbeam grove that the way to keep your mother in her house and eleven hundred people in this parish alive was to marry a man of ten thousand a year and braid his blood into ours, you would have done it.
You would have done it if you had disliked him.
You would have gone up the aisle with your chin out and been perfectly charming about it for forty years and never told one living soul, and I should have died in the spring thinking you were happy.
"So I am asking. Once. And I shall believe you."
Elizabeth found that she could not answer at once.
"You are quite right that I would have," she said.
"Yes."
"If it had come to that, and there had been no other way, and he had been a decent man — I would have done it, and I would have made it look like a love match, and I am not ashamed of that.
" She had her hands very tight in her lap.
"I have thought about it. In April, in Kent, before I understood anything, I sat on a stile and did arithmetic about my sisters.
So you are not wrong about my character.
"But it is not what has happened.
"Papa, I refused him in April. I refused the whole of it — Pemberley, and the braiding, and the line, and my sisters kept safe for ever — in a parlor in Kent, in the plainest words I have ever used to anybody, at a time when I knew exactly what the entail meant and had known since I was eleven.
I had every reason you have just named, and I did not have one of the ones you are afraid of, and I said no.
"And then I found out what he is, and I have spent five months finding out, and now I want him. That is the whole of it and it is not a very edifying story. I turned him down when it would have saved you, and I want him now that it may kill him."
Mr. Bennet looked at her for a long moment.
"That," he said, "is the most convincing thing you could possibly have said, and I do not believe you constructed it, and I am going to stop being frightened now."
---
"There is one thing more," he said, "and then you may go and tell your mother, which I am not going to do at any price.
"I want you married before Christmas."
"Papa—"
"Do not argue. I am not being sentimental and I am not making a joke about wishing to see it." He put his hand flat on the table. "It is a practical matter and I shall put it practically.
"Whatever happens to this ground will happen in the spring, or in the autumn after.
I do not think I shall see another summer and I have given over pretending.
Your mother has a hundred a year of her own and four thousand pounds; and Jane will be at Netherfield and will take her in and be sweet about it for twenty years, and it will be perfectly dreadful.
"But if you are married and settled and out of this county with a house of your own three hundred miles away, then there is somewhere for Kitty to go that is neither Netherfield nor Newcastle.
She is seventeen, and she has been ill, and she is beginning to be well, and she is the one of you I have never once bothered about; and I have had two months to consider what a lifetime of her mother's company will do to her. "
"I shall have her by Easter," said Elizabeth.
"Yes. I thought you would." He was quiet a moment. "And there is Mary."
"Mary will not leave."
"No," said Mr. Bennet. "She will not. And that is the other thing, and it is the thing I have been putting off since the day your Mr. Darcy sat in that chair and told this family what a keeping is paid for with.
"I forbade her. In this room, in September, in front of everybody, and I was rather pleased with myself about it — it was the first thing I have ever forbidden anybody in this house and I made quite a little performance of it.
"And I have not slept properly since. Because the whole of my forbidding comes to this: that if it is to be done, I would very much rather it were done by me, and I cannot do it. Whatever it wants, I have not enough of it left to give. I have known that since the middle of August.
"And there is one other person in this house who can hear the thing at all."
"Papa—"
"I am not asking you to do anything," said Mr. Bennet. "I am telling you where I am, because you are the only person I have ever been able to tell anything to; and because in four months you will be in Derbyshire, and I shall have nobody."
---
Mrs. Bennet was told at four o'clock, in her dressing-room, by Elizabeth, alone, on the grounds that a public announcement would very likely have killed somebody.
She sat quite still for about half a minute — which Elizabeth had by now learned to recognize as the thing her mother did before the important ones — and then she said:
"Mr. Darcy. Mr. Darcy. Ten thousand a year, and very likely more.
Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be!
What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have!
Jane's is nothing to it — nothing at all.
I am so pleased — so happy. Such a charming man!
— so handsome! so tall! — Oh, my dear Lizzy!
pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before.
I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy.
A house in town! Every thing that is charming!
Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year!
Oh, Lord! what will become of me. I shall go distracted. "
She talked for eleven minutes together without once stopping.
Then, quite suddenly, she stopped, and put both hands flat on her dressing table, and looked at her own face in the glass.
"He is going in the spring," she said.
Elizabeth stood very still.
"Your father. I have seen it since Whitsun." Mrs. Bennet did not turn round. "I am not clever, Lizzy. I have never once been listened to in this house, and I have been right about every single thing that has happened in it for two-and-twenty years.
"Three of you are settled and the fourth may be, and Mary will not marry anybody, and I shall have the four thousand and the hundred a year and my sister Philips.
"That is what I have been working at since 1801. I did it very badly, and everybody laughed, and I did it."
She picked up her comb.
"Now go and put on the blue," said Mrs. Bennet, "and send Hill to me; and do not tell your father I said any of that, for he has quite enough to bear."
---
At six that evening Mr. Bennet put on his hat and his greatcoat and went out of his own front door, and did not stop at the end of the shrubbery.
He went down through the paddock and out at the gate and along the field path toward the church, walking slowly and stopping twice.
Mary saw him from her window, and put on her boots, and went after him without saying anything to anybody, and caught him at the second stile, and did not offer him her arm, and walked beside him.
They stood together for a quarter of an hour at the edge of the pale ground in the last of the light, and neither of them said anything at all.
Then Mr. Bennet said: "How far is it now, from the church?"
"Two hundred and ten yards," said Mary. "It has not moved since the twelfth of August."
"No. I know. I have asked you every Tuesday for a month and you have told me, and I have let you think it was a civility."
He looked at it a while longer.
"It is a very ordinary-looking thing," he said, "to have had a family inside it for four hundred years."
Then he took his daughter's arm, which he had never done in his life, and they walked home.