Chapter Fifty-Seven #2
"No. And I am not going to, and I want to tell you why, because you will think about it afterwards and I would rather you had it from me now.
" He turned the whole of himself toward her on the tomb, which he did not usually do; he was a man who talked sideways, at the middle distance, and it was noticeable when he stopped.
"I have wanted, since about September, to stand up in that library and say that there must be another way, and that you are nineteen, and that somebody else must do it or nobody, and that I will not sit by and watch it.
I have had the whole speech. I have had it for two months.
"And it is the exact speech that Colonel Forster's wife made when they wanted to keep the ——shire out of the north, and it is the speech the man at the desk in London makes every time he writes that nothing requires to be done, and it is, at bottom, the speech every person in your family made about every single thing that has gone wrong this year: she is too young, she must be spared, somebody will find another way.
"There is no other way. I have looked. Mr. Darcy has looked, and he is cleverer than I am and has more books.
If your father dies and that ground is in the churchyard and you can hold it and you do not, then Meryton empties, and I will have stood in a garden making a beautiful speech about your youth while it happened, and I have done that once already, at a desk in Sussex, and a man named Fenn is at home in Portsmouth being cared for by his sister because of the men who made speeches.
"So I am not going to decide it for you, and I am not going to weight it for you, and I am not going to tell you the thing I want, because I love you, and that is precisely the reason my opinion cannot be trusted."
The word went out between them into the cold air and neither of them reached after it.
Mary looked at him.
"You have not said that before either," she said.
"No."
"You might have chosen a warmer place to say it than a tomb, in November, with a dead ground nine yards off."
"I have been trying to say it since September," said Denny, "and there has not been a single hour in this whole business that was not a bad time, and I worked out this morning that there is not going to be one, and that if I waited for a good hour I should wait for ever, because your father is dying and the ground is in the churchyard and that is simply the weather we are going to be in for the rest of it.
"So. There it is. In a bad hour, in a bad place, with everything wrong. I would rather have said it to you like this and true than in a rose garden and waited for.
"And it does not come with a claim on you," he said.
"I want to be very exact about that, because you are trying to decide something enormous and I will not put my thumb on it.
Whatever you decide, about the wall, about all of it — you decide it as a free woman, and I am not standing here to be a reason on either side of it.
I only did not want to be one more person in your life sparing you a true thing. "
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Mary Bennet sat on the table-tomb with her cold hands in her lap and looked, for a while, not at him and not at the pale ground, but at the church, which was small and gray and four hundred years old and had a dead ward on it now that no one living could mend.
"I am going to tell you what I have decided," she said, "and it is not the thing you are afraid I have decided, and it is not the thing you are hoping I have decided; it is a third thing, and I worked it out this morning at the wall, and you are the first person I am telling."
Denny waited.
"I am not going to take up the oath while my father is alive," said Mary.
"That is settled. Mr. Tarrant told me not to decide anything because somebody I love is dying, and he is right, and I will not do it in grief and I will not do it in a hurry and I will not do it to buy him a summer he would not thank me for.
"But I am going to learn it. All of it. Everything you know, and everything Mr. Darcy knows, and everything in Colwood and Harrow and the two books Tarrant is sending, and I am going to go out to that wall every morning and learn to feel the thing the way you feel a ward, not just hear it — and I am going to do it steadily, for as long as it takes, which may be years, and I am going to be ready.
"So that if the day comes when it must be done, I shall decide it as a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and not as a frightened girl who read three lines out of a box once and felt something lift its head.
"And if that day never comes — if my father lives, or Mr. Darcy finds a thing in a book, or the ground stops of itself — then I shall have spent some years learning a hard exact thing very well, and being the only person in England who could do it, and I find," said Mary Bennet, "that I do not think I should regret that, whatever else. "
She stood up off the tomb.
"You may write that down," she said. "I should like it written down, in your hand, with the day and the hour, because it is the first decision I have ever made entirely by myself, and I want a record of it that is not in my own book."
Denny took out his pocket-book, and wrote it down, on the table-tomb, in the cold, with the day and the hour; and when he had done he tore the leaf out and gave it to her, and she read it, and folded it, and put it inside the back cover of the pocket-book where the letter from Kent already was, at page four hundred and eleven.
Then they walked back up to the house together, not touching, in the ordinary way of two people who have settled a thing and have the whole rest of their lives to be less careful in.