Chapter Fifty-Five
The weddings were fixed for the eighteenth of November, both on the same day, which was Mrs. Bennet's doing and the only piece of management of her whole life that nobody argued with.
October at Longbourn was a strange month.
There was a great deal of happiness in that house, and it was quite genuine, and it went on in the front rooms every day: Mr. Bingley in and out at all hours; Jane going about with a face that Elizabeth had never seen on her; Mrs. Bennet with lists, and patterns, and a running war with a warehouse in London about lace, which she enjoyed more than anything that had happened to her in twenty years; Kitty, who had grown two inches that summer and was being taken seriously for the first time in her life, being consulted about ribbons and giving her opinion with great firmness.
And in the library, with the door shut, four or five people met most afternoons and did the other thing.
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Mr. Tarrant came down from London on the ninth of October and stayed eleven days at Netherfield.
He was one-and-seventy, and very small, and extremely deaf on the left side, and he arrived with two boxes of papers and a cold and no servant; and Mrs. Bennet, who was given to understand that he was an antiquary come to look at the church, treated him with the deep indulgence she reserved for elderly gentlemen who could not possibly marry any of her daughters.
He looked at the church for a quarter of an hour and at the pale ground for four days.
He would not go onto it. He walked the whole edge of it twice with Mary — who had begun by being terrified of him and who by the second afternoon was contradicting him — and he made her repeat the measurements from April in order, and wrote them down himself, and then made her do it again the following day to see whether she would say the same numbers, which she did.
"That is a very disagreeable thing to do to somebody," said Elizabeth.
"It is the only useful thing I know how to do," said Mr. Tarrant.
"Everybody who has ever brought me a marvel has been perfectly sincere and about half of them have been mistaken, and there is no way of telling except to ask them twice a day apart and see whether the story improves.
Hers does not improve. Hers has not improved once in four days and she is nineteen and she does not embellish and I would take her figures before the Ordnance Survey. "
He was rude to Mr. Darcy for eleven days about a Roman pavement.
And on the sixth evening, in the library at Longbourn, with the candles lit and Mr. Bennet in his chair and Mary at the table and Denny at the window, he told them what he had come to tell them, which he had not put in a letter.
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"You have asked me twice in writing," he said, "what happens when a keeping fails, and I have twice not answered, and you will have thought me a coward.
I was being careful. I am going to answer now and I want it understood that I have one instance and that it is four hundred and sixty years old and that a great deal of it is inference.
"There was a keeping at a place called Ashen Roding, in the east of this county, about eleven miles from where we are sitting."
Nobody said anything.
"It is not in the rolls either," said Tarrant. "Nothing in this county is. I have it from three sources and none of them says the word: a bishop's visitation of 1361, a tithe dispute, and a chronicle in Latin at Bury which is very bad Latin and which I have gone over eleven times.
"In 1349 there were four hundred souls at Ashen Roding, a church, two mills, and a family of the name of Threlfall who had held the ground since before anybody's memory.
In 1361 the visitation records the church as ecclesia vacua — an empty church — with the note nec est qui habitet, and there is no Threlfall.
"Now: 1349 is the plague year, and every antiquary in England would stop there, and I did, for thirty years.
Half the villages in the east of this county lost their people in 1349 and a great many of them never came back, and Ashen Roding is in every list of the deserted places and nobody has ever thought twice about it.
"But the tithe dispute is of 1352 and it is between the rector of the next parish and the archdeacon, and the rector says — I have the phrase and I shall give it to you plainly — that he cannot answer for the tithes of Ashen Roding because the people are gone away and the ground is sine virtute.
"Without power. Without virtue. It is a phrase used of a spring that has stopped, or of a relic that no longer works."
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"And the chronicle at Bury," said Mr. Bennet.
"The chronicle at Bury is the reason I am here at my age in October." Tarrant folded his hands. "It is a monk's, and it is gossip, and it is worth nothing as evidence and everything as testimony. He writes of Ashen Roding, some years after, that the people did not die.
"They went away. Over four or five years. Not in a body and not in a panic; a family at a time, in the ordinary way, to Chelmsford and to London and to the coast. And when they were asked why, he says — and this is the sentence I have carried about with me since 1793 — dicebant se ibi deficere.
"They said that they were failing there."
The library at Longbourn was extremely quiet. The fire moved.
"That is my instance," said Mr. Tarrant. "One place, eleven miles off, four hundred and sixty years ago, three sources, none of them any good. And I put it to you plainly because you have all been very brave and rather too cheerful.
"There is no monster in this. There is nothing that comes out. I have read every account of every failing in the three kingdoms and there is never anything that comes out.
"What happens is that the ground stops being able to hold anything, and then, by degrees, so does everybody standing on it.
The wards will not take. The old lines go thin.
A woman who could quiet a room finds that she cannot; a girl who was never tired is tired; a man of two-and-fifty who ought to have twenty years has four.
And nobody dies of it and nobody can point to it and nobody in that parish will ever have a word for what is wrong, and after five years they will all be somewhere else, and there will be a very good farm nobody wants and a church with no roof.
"That is what is under your feet, madam," he said, to Mary. "It is not a beast. It is a slow subtraction. And it has begun."
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Mr. Bennet said, "How long?"
"I do not know."
"Mr. Tarrant. I am two-and-fifty and I am the door and everybody in this room has been very delicate with me for two months. How long?"
Tarrant looked at him for a moment with the perfect steadiness of a man who has spent fifty years being told to be tactful and has never once seen the use of it.
"At Ashen Roding," he said, "the ground began to go in the year the last Threlfall was an old man. It was three hundred yards from the church when he died. The visitation is twelve years later and the church is empty.
"Sir, you are not the last of a line that will end; you are the last of a line that has already ended, and the thing has been running down since you were born and has only lately begun to show.
I should be very much surprised if you saw the summer.
I should be very much surprised if there were four hundred people in Meryton in 1825. "
"Thank you," said Mr. Bennet. "That is the first honest sentence anybody has spoken to me since August."
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Tarrant went back to London on the twentieth, having refused to give an opinion on Darcy's four possibilities on the grounds that he had none.
At the door of the chaise he stopped, and looked up at Mary Bennet, who had carried out his second box because nobody else had thought of it.
"Miss Bennet. The three lines you read aloud in April."
"Yes."
"You said it lifted its head."
"Yes."
"Do not do it again," said Mr. Tarrant, "until you have decided what you would say to it if it answered; and do not decide that in a hurry, and do not decide it because somebody you love is dying, which is the reason people always give and it is a very bad one.
" He got into the chaise. "And write to me.
Not to him — to me. I am one-and-seventy and I shall very likely be dead before any of this is settled, and I should like to have known. "
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The eleventh of November was a Thursday.
It had been raining for three days and Mr. Bennet had not been out; he had been in the library since breakfast with the fire made up twice, and at about four in the afternoon Hill went in with the candles and found him on the floor.
He was not unconscious. That was the first thing he said, twice, with some irritation, while Hill was calling out in the passage: that he was not unconscious and that everybody was to stop shrieking.
He had got up to reach a book down and had found, in the middle of it, that his legs had nothing in them; and he had gone down slowly, holding the shelf, and had lain there for some minutes — he could not say how many — perfectly clear in his head, looking at the underside of his own table, being unable to get up.
They carried him to his room. Mr. Jones came at six and was very grave and entirely useless, and used the word decline, and spoke of the damp, and of a low fever, and prescribed something; and Mrs. Bennet had hysterics in the passage and then stopped having them, abruptly, and went in and sat down by the bed and stayed there until eleven.
At about half past nine Mary went out.
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She came back at eleven with her boots and the bottom eight inches of her gown soaked through, and she went straight into the library, where Elizabeth and Jane and Darcy were.
"It has moved," she said.
Elizabeth stood up.
"Mary, it is dark, you cannot possibly have—"
"I have paced that edge every week since April and eleven times in the dark and I know the four corners of it by the hedge and the mill and the church buttress and Barrett's gate," said Mary.
She was perfectly white and perfectly level.
"I do not have a figure. I could not do it properly and I am not going to give you a number I am not sure of.
But it is past the buttress, and the buttress is the north-east corner of the churchyard, and on Tuesday it was eleven yards short of it. "
"Then it has come into the churchyard."
"It has come into the churchyard," said Mary Bennet.
She sat down on the edge of the wooden chair, and put her hands flat on her knees, and looked at them.
"There is another thing and I shall say it once and then I should like somebody to give me a glass of water.
"I put my hand on the churchyard wall on the way back, at the corner by the gate, where I have put it every week since May.
"The note has stopped."
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Nobody said anything at all.
"It has not gone quiet," said Mary. "I want to be exact. It has been getting quieter since the spring and I have told you so, and quieter still since August, and last Tuesday it was so faint that I stood there four minutes to be sure of it.
"To-night there is nothing.
"I stood at that wall for a quarter of an hour in the rain with my hand on the stone and there is nothing there, and I have been able to hear that thing every day of my life since I was eleven years old, and I did not know until this evening that I had been listening to it the way you listen to a clock in a room. "
Jane went and sat down beside her and put an arm round her and Mary let her.
"Then it is done," said Elizabeth. "It is finished, it has run out—"
"No," said Darcy.
He had not spoken for several minutes. He was standing at the window with his back to them, and he turned round.
"Miss Mary. When your father is asleep — is the note quieter?"
Mary looked up.
"I do not know," she said slowly. "I have never — nobody has ever asked me anything about it at a particular hour, and I have not thought about hours."
"Think now."
She sat quite still for the better part of a minute.
"Yes," she said. "In the mornings it is stronger. Always. I go out at half past six and it is stronger at the wall at half past six than it is at four in the afternoon, and I have known that for years and I put it down to my own head being clearer.
"And in February, when he had the cold and slept the whole of two days, I could hardly hear it, and I thought I was sickening for something."
"Then it is not finished," said Mr. Darcy. "It is asleep."
He came away from the window.
"Your father is upstairs, and he is not dying to-night, and he is not conscious at this moment because Mr. Jones has given him something with laudanum in it," he said.
"And the thing that has held this county for four hundred years has gone quiet at the same hour, and has come eleven yards into a churchyard on the same evening.
"It is not running out. It is him. It has been him the whole time, and it has been going down as he goes down, and when he sleeps it sleeps, and when he wakes to-morrow morning it will be there again — fainter than it was, and there.
"Miss Mary, I want you to go out at half past six and put your hand on that wall, and I am sorry to ask it, and there is nobody else who can."
"I was going anyway," said Mary.