Chapter Fifty-Six
Elizabeth did not go to bed.
She sat up in the library with Darcy until two, and then made him go back to Netherfield because there was nothing to be done at two in the morning that could not be done better at seven, and because Mrs. Nicholls would talk if he did not sleep in the house; and then she sat up alone.
At half past five she went up and looked in at her father.
He was asleep, and breathing evenly, and looked exactly like a man of two-and-fifty asleep; her mother was in the chair by the bed with a shawl over her, also asleep, holding his hand on top of the counterpane in a grip that had not slackened even in sleep, which Elizabeth stood and looked at for some time.
At six she and Jane were in the kitchen making tea that nobody wanted.
At twenty past, Mary came down in her boots.
"I would rather go alone," she said, before either of them spoke.
"Mary—"
"I have gone alone four hundred times. If you come, you will watch my face, and I shall watch you watching it, and I shall not be able to hear anything at all." She put on her bonnet. "I shall be three quarters of an hour. If I am longer than that, come; and if I am not, do not."
She went out into the dark. It was not raining. The sky in the east over the church was the color of a pearl and there was a hard white frost on everything, the first of the year.
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She was gone an hour and ten minutes, and they did not go after her, which was the hardest thing either of them did that week.
She came in at half past seven with her boots white and her face pinched with cold, and she went and stood at the kitchen fire with her back to it for a while before she said anything, holding her hands out; and Elizabeth had the sense, which she had learned that year at a considerable price, to let her.
"It is louder," said Mary at last.
Elizabeth put down the cup.
"It was gone last night. I told you it was gone; I stood there a quarter of an hour and there was nothing.
And at half past six this morning it was there again, and it was louder than it has been for a fortnight — not louder than the spring, nothing like the spring, but louder than last Tuesday.
Clearly louder. I stood there forty minutes to be sure and I am sure. "
"Because he has slept," said Jane.
"Because he has slept, and the laudanum has gone off, and he is beginning to wake.
" Mary turned round to the fire. "Mr. Darcy is right.
It is him. When he goes down it goes down and when he comes up it comes up, and last night when they gave him the draft it went out altogether, and I stood at that wall and thought it was over, and it was only that my father was very deeply asleep. "
She was quiet a moment.
"And the ground is in the churchyard," she said.
"I paced it this morning in the light. It is nine yards inside the wall, along the north-east, and it is up to the third row of stones, and the grass on the graves is the wrong color, and I stood on Sarah Longbourn's stone — 1704, she is the oldest one I can read — and it was under my feet, and there was nothing there.
"Four hundred years of us are in that churchyard, and it has got in among them, and it did it in a night."
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Mr. Bennet woke at nine and was better.
That was the cruelty of it, and the household had a whole day of it: he woke, and was weak, and could not stand without the bedpost, but he was entirely himself, and querulous about the laudanum, and asked for his spectacles and the newspaper and then could not hold the paper up for long and was cross about that too; and Mrs. Bennet, who had sat up the whole night, wept with relief and told Lady Lucas at eleven o'clock that Mr. Jones had said it was a chill and nothing more, and believed it by noon.
Mr. Jones came again and said decline again and privately, to Elizabeth, in the passage, said that he could find nothing wrong with the heart or the lungs or any organ of the body, and that he had been forty years in the profession and had seen old men go like this and never a man of two-and-fifty, and that he did not understand it and would send to Hertford for a physician if the family wished, but that he did not think a physician would find anything either.
"It is as though," said Mr. Jones, who was not a clever man but was an honest one, "he were a much older man than he is. As though he had used up more years than he has lived. I do not know how to write that in a bill and I shall not try."
He went away unhappy.
Darcy came at ten and sat with Mr. Bennet for an hour, at Mr. Bennet's own request, and no one else was in the room; and when he came out he would not say what had passed except that they had talked about the deed, and that Mr. Bennet had asked him a question, and that he had answered it.
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Mary would not be in the front rooms that day.
She sat in the library with the deed and the three pocket-books and Colwood and Harrow, and she did not read them; she sat with her hands flat on the table and looked at the window, which was what she did when she was thinking, and Elizabeth found her there at four in the afternoon and sat down opposite her and did not say anything for a while.
"I have been doing what Mr. Tarrant told me to do," said Mary.
"Deciding what you would say."
"Deciding whether I have anything to say at all, which is a different thing and comes first, and which nobody has asked, because everybody has gone straight to the other question.
" She turned her head. "Lizzy, will you let me talk without being kind to me?
I have had a great deal of kindness this week and it stops me thinking. "
"Yes."
"Then I shall say it in order.
"The oath wants a man of the blood. I have listened to that word for two months and I have watched Mr. Darcy and my father argue about whether it means a male or a person, and neither of them will stake anything on it, and they are right not to, because it is not decisive.
"But there is a thing they have both missed, and I have missed it too until this morning, and I missed it because I have spent my whole life being told that the thing I can do is worth nothing.
"It does not only want a man of the blood.
It wants somebody who can undertake it. And undertaking is not a thing you do with your blood.
It is a thing you do with words, said aloud, and meant, on the ground — and that is the one part of this whole business that is not about lineage at all. It is about whether the words take.
"And I am the only person in England who can hear whether words take."
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Elizabeth sat very still.
"I read three lines in April," said Mary, "and they did not take, and I told everybody it was because I am not of the male line and because I was not undertaking anything, and I gave those two reasons as though they were the same size, and they are not.
"The second one is the whole of it. I was not undertaking anything.
I was a girl reading aloud out of a box to see what would happen.
If I had stood on that ground and meant it — if I had said the words as an oath and not as a curiosity — I do not know what would have happened, and neither does anybody else, and that is exactly the point I have been circling for two days.
"Because the blood may not matter as much as they think.
The keeping was made by one man saying words on this ground and meaning them so hard that he spent his whole line on it.
It did not ask him to be anybody's heir.
It asked him to mean it, and to pay. He happened to be of a family, and the paying happened to run through his blood because that is what he had to pay with, and everybody for four hundred years has read it as a thing about blood because the blood is the part you can see in a parish register.
"But I do not think the ground cares whose blood it is. I think the ground cares whether the words take. And I am the one person alive who was born able to tell."
She looked down at her hands.
"I do not say I am right. I have been wrong twice.
I say that everybody in this house has been assuming that the only person who could take up this oath is a man of my father's blood, and that when he dies there is no such person, because Mr. Collins does not count and there is no son; and I do not think that is true.
I think there may be a second door, and I think I am standing in it, and I have been standing in it my whole life calling it a noise in my head. "
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"Mary," said Elizabeth. "What is it paid for with?"
"I know what it is paid for with."
"Say it to me the way papa made Mr. Darcy say it to you."
Mary was quiet for a moment.
"A life," she said. "Or a line of them. And I am nineteen, and I shall not marry, and I have no line to spend; I have only the one life, and it would be the whole of it, and it would not be quick.
"I have thought about that. I want you to know that I have actually thought about it and not merely said the brave thing.
I have thought about being a woman of forty who has spent twenty years going out to a wall at half past six, holding a thing shut, growing thinner, while you are at Pemberley and Jane is at Netherfield and Kitty is married and my mother is with my aunt Philips; and about being fifty and doing it still, and sixty; and about dying of it slowly the way my father is dying of it, in a still room, with nobody able to say what is wrong.
"And I have thought about the other thing, which is worse, which is being the woman who could have held it and did not, and living out a comfortable life somewhere while Meryton empties, a family at a time, and there is a very good farm nobody wants and a church with no roof.
"I do not know which I could bear. That is the truth, Lizzy, and I have been sitting here since noon and I have not got past it, and I am not going to pretend to you that I have."
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Elizabeth did not tell her not to think about it.
She did not tell her that it would not come to that, or that papa might recover, or that Mr. Darcy would find another way, or that she was too young, or that no one would ask it of her — all of which she had ready, and all of which were the things everybody in this story had always said, and every one of which had turned out to be a way of not telling somebody something.
"Then here is what I think," said Elizabeth, "and you may do what you like with it.
"I think you are probably right about the second door. I think you have been right about more things than anybody in this family and been thanked for none of them, and I think if you tell Mr. Darcy what you have just told me he will go very quiet and then agree with you, because it is true.
"And I think that if it comes to it — if papa dies in the spring and the ground is in the churchyard and there is nobody else — then it will be your choice, and yours only, and I will not let anybody make it for you, including papa, and including me, and I will fight anybody in this house who tries.
"But I am not going to tell you to do it.
And I am not going to tell you not to. Because you are the only person who is going to have to go out to that wall, and the one thing I have learned this entire year — the only thing — is that the people who love you are exactly the people who cannot be trusted to decide what you can carry.
"So it is yours. The whole of it. And I am sorry, because I think you would rather I took it off you, and I am not going to, because that is what we have all been doing to each other since October and it is how we got here."
Mary looked at her for a long moment.
"That," she said, "is the first time in nineteen years that anybody in this house has treated me like a person who can do arithmetic."
"I know."
"I do not know whether to thank you or not."
"Do not," said Elizabeth. "I have got very tired this year of being thanked for things."
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Mary got up and put the books away, squaring them on the shelf, and put the deed back in its box, and closed the lid.
"I shall talk to Mr. Denny," she said. "Not because he will tell me what to do — he will not, it is the thing I like best about him — but because he is the only person who has ever done the actual work, and I want to know from somebody who has held a ward what it is like on the inside, hour to hour, before I decide anything.
Mr. Darcy holds Pemberley but he was born to it and it answers him; Denny built a thing at Selsey out of himself and mended it for a year and lost it, and he knows what I am asking about in a way that nobody else does. "
"That is very sensible."
"I am always sensible," said Mary. "It is the only thing anybody has ever granted me and I have got a great deal of use out of it.
" She picked up the box to carry it up to their father's room.
"Lizzy. When you are married, and at Pemberley — will you write to me?
Not about the ground. About the ordinary things.
Who dined, and what the country is like, and whether the peaks are as they say. "
"I promised you that in July," said Elizabeth, "and I have not forgotten, and I have been saving up Derbyshire for you the whole autumn, and I shall write every week, and I shall be extremely dull about it, and you will love it."
"Yes," said Mary Bennet. "I shall."
She carried the box out and up the stairs to sit with her father, who was awake, and who liked her to read to him now, which he had never done in his life; and Elizabeth heard, through the floor a few minutes later, the small even sound of her sister's voice going steadily on, reading something out, in a house where the light was going.