Chapter Fifty-Eight
They were married on the eighteenth of November, both couples together, in the small gray church at Longbourn, at eleven o'clock in the morning.
There had been a question, which nobody had spoken aloud and everybody had thought about, of whether it should be that church at all.
Mary had gone out on the sixteenth and paced it and put her hand on the wall, and had come back and said that the pale ground was nine yards inside the churchyard at the north-east and had not moved further in five days, and that it did not reach the church itself, nor the door, nor the aisle, nor any part of the ground a wedding party would stand on; and that the ward on the building — the ordinary parish ward, the one that had never in four hundred years wanted mending — was still there, and still whole, because it was fixed to the stone of the church and not to the ground beneath, and the church stood on the old hard rise where nothing had gone wrong.
"It will hold," she said. "For an hour, on the eighteenth, it will hold, and the words will take, and it will be a true marriage in a warded room, which is the whole of what Lizzy asked for."
So it was that church.
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Darcy had written to Georgiana on the night of the proposal, four hours, nothing softened; and Georgiana had written back, as he had said she would, within four lines and by return of post, and had then written a second letter three days later that was six sides long and had plainly cost her a great deal, and in which she said the thing properly.
Elizabeth had that second letter by heart and never showed it to anybody.
I have thought about it for three days, Georgiana had written, which my brother told me to do and which I have never once been asked to do about anything, and I find that I am not frightened for him, though I have tried to be, because he asked me.
That is the whole of it and I know it is not sensible.
He put the four possibilities in front of me and the one about the horse and did not make any of them smaller, and I sat up with it, and what I keep coming back to is that he told me.
He has been deciding things for me since I was eleven, always the kind things, always the safe things, and I have loved him for it and it has made me smaller every year, and this is the first time he has ever stood in front of me and said, here is a thing that may cost us both, what do you think.
And I find that I would rather have a brother who may be diminished at forty-four and who asks me, than a brother who is safe and does not.
I do not think Miss Bennet knows what she has done for me by making him write that letter, and you are not to tell her, because she will say it was nothing, and it was not nothing.
Georgiana came for the wedding, and stayed at Netherfield, and played the pianoforte on the sixteenth evening for the whole party, badly, being nervous, and then well; and Elizabeth stood by the instrument and turned the pages and did not once compliment her, and made her play the difficult passage three times, and Georgiana, going up to bed, said to her brother that she thought Elizabeth Bennet was the only person who had ever treated her exactly as though she were ordinary, and that it was the greatest compliment she had ever had.
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The morning was cold and very bright.
Mr. Bennet gave both his daughters away.
There had been a great deal of quiet worry about this, and Mr. Jones had come at eight to see whether it were possible, and had said that Mr. Bennet might stand for a quarter of an hour if he were let sit before and after, and that it must be got through quickly, and that somebody must stand close on his other side.
He got through it.
He came into the church on Elizabeth's arm — which everyone was allowed to think was gallantry, his walking his second daughter up on his own arm, and which was in fact the only way he could walk up the aisle at all — and he stood between his two eldest girls at the rail, upright, in his good coat, for eleven minutes, with Darcy on one side of Elizabeth and Bingley on the other side of Jane, both of them placed, though nobody said so, where they could catch him.
He did not need catching. He stood the whole time.
And when the curate came to the giving away, and asked who gave these women to be married, Mr. Bennet said "I do" — once, for both of them, which was not the form, and which the curate had been told in advance to allow — and Mary, in the second pew, went perfectly still, because she was listening, and afterwards she told Elizabeth the one thing about that morning that Elizabeth kept for the rest of her life.
"It took," said Mary. "When papa gave you away.
I do not know if anybody has ever told you that the giving is a real thing and not only words — it is a small binding, it is the oldest one there is, a father putting a daughter out of one keeping and into another.
And papa has almost nothing left; I have been listening to him go for two months and there is almost nothing there.
"And he spent some of it. On purpose. I felt him do it. He could have said the words flat, the way most fathers do, and let them be only words, and no one would have known, and he would have kept what little he had.
"He did not. He gave you away properly, with weight, both of you, and it cost him, and it took, and you are married in the old full sense and not only the parish one, and it is the last binding he will ever make, and he chose to make it a true one."
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The rest of it was as weddings are.
Mrs. Bennet cried, and was magnificent, and wore a great deal of new lace, and told four separate people that she had always known how it would be; and for once in her life the county did not laugh at her, because for once in her life she was indisputably, gloriously right, and everybody in that church knew it.
Kitty was a bridesmaid and did it beautifully and cried at the correct moments and was, Elizabeth thought, watching her, entirely well now — brown from a summer out of doors, taller, and being looked at by a curate's son from Stevenage in a manner that Elizabeth resolved to say nothing whatever about, having learned that much at least.
Sir William Lucas was there, and made a speech at the breakfast about jewels of the first water being carried to the court of St. James's, and everyone let him.
Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long and Mrs. Philips sat together and said, as they had said for a year, that it was a great match for the Bennet girls and more than anybody had looked for; and if there was an odd note under the day — if the older people in that church glanced, once or twice, out through the plain glass toward the north-east corner of the churchyard where the grass on the old graves was a color grass ought not to be in November, and did not say anything, and looked back — then that was Meryton, which had for four hundred years had a great many things it did not say, and had lately begun, in a few of its wiser heads, to half-know why.
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Wickham was not there. Lydia was, and had come down from Newcastle for it, and was pregnant, and delighted about everything, and said "when I was first married" a great many times in a manner intended to establish seniority over two sisters who were being married that morning to five and ten thousand a year respectively; and nobody minded, because there was, in Lydia's total and unshakeable happiness, a thing that was easier to be near than to explain.
Elizabeth watched her across the breakfast table.
The draft was almost gone. The small open window low down, that she had found in the parlor in September and been sick over — it was very nearly closed now.
Three months, and an excellent constitution, and never one unhappy day, and a thing that Wickham had said in a tavern in Aldgate and had turned out to be telling the truth about: by the time she is twenty she will be exactly what she was.
She was sixteen and a half and most of the way there already, loud and pink and pleased, with a husband three hundred miles off who could not come into the county and whom she wrote to twice a week and adored, and a child coming, and no idea at all, ever, of what had nearly been done to her or of what she was.
She would never be told. That had been settled by everyone, and it was the right settling, and it was also — Elizabeth made herself hold both of these at once, because that was the discipline she had chosen in the copse with Lady Catherine — exactly the kind of kind silence that the whole novel of that year had been made of.
"Lizzy," said Lydia, catching her looking, "you are staring at me most particular, and I know why, it is because I am the only one of us with any figure at all now, and I do not care a straw, and you may all be as jealous as you like."
"I was thinking," said Elizabeth, "that you look extremely well."
"I knew it," said Lydia, with enormous satisfaction, and went back to her cake.
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They were to go different ways that afternoon: the Bingleys only to Netherfield, three miles; the Darcys to London for two nights and then north to Pemberley.
Elizabeth went up to change, and Mary came with her, and did up the back of her traveling gown, which was a thing Jane usually did and which Mary had asked to do; and the two of them were alone in the bedroom they had all four grown up sharing, for the last time, in the middle of the day, with the noise of the breakfast coming up through the floor.
"You will write," said Mary.
"Every week. About the roads. I have told you a hundred times."
"I know. I like to hear you say it." Mary settled the collar. "There. You will do."
Elizabeth turned round.
"Mary. Come to Pemberley. Not now — I know you will not come now.
But when — after. When you can. There is a wood there that I promised to tell you about and never have, because it is not the sort of thing you tell, it is the sort of thing you stand in, and I want you to stand in it. Say you will come."
Mary was quiet for a moment.
"I will come to Pemberley," she said, "when this is finished, whatever finished turns out to mean; and I will stand in your wood, and you shall tell me nothing at all about it and let me find it out. That is a promise, and you know I do not make them lightly, and you know I keep the ones I make.
"But I am not going to make it into a thing that means I am coming soon, or that everything will be well, or that we shall all be sitting under your trees in a twelvemonth being comfortable.
I do not know what is going to happen in this county.
Nobody does. I only know that I am going to be here, at that wall, learning it, for as long as there is a reason to; and that when there is no longer a reason to, one way or the other, I shall get on the northern coach and come and find you, and it may be a year and it may be twenty. "
"Mary—"
"Do not cry, or I shall, and then we shall both go down with red faces and my mother will say something.
" Mary took her by the shoulders, which she had never done.
"Lizzy. You did a thing for me this autumn that nobody has ever done.
You gave me the arithmetic and let me do it.
You are the only one who did not try to take the sum off me.
I am not going to forget it, and it is the reason I can stand here and let you go and be glad about it instead of afraid, and I want you to carry that north with you and not spend the whole journey worrying about me, because I am, for the first time in my whole life, exactly where I mean to be. "
She stepped back.
"Now go and be married and go to Derbyshire," said Mary Bennet, "and write to me about the roads."
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They came down. The carriage was at the door.
Mr. Bennet was in the hall, in a chair that had been brought out for him, because he could not stand at the door to see them off and had refused to be upstairs for it.
Elizabeth knelt down by the chair, in her traveling clothes, in front of everybody, which she would once have thought a great piece of theater and now did not think about at all.
"Papa."
"Now, Lizzy. None of that." But he had hold of her hand.
"You have done very well. You have married a better man than your father and a richer one and a kinder one, and you had the sense to refuse him first, which is the only part of the whole business I am unreservedly proud of, because it is the part that was yours.
"Go to Derbyshire. Be happy. Write to your sister about the roads, since she will plainly perish without it.
" He lowered his voice, so that it was only for her.
"And come in the spring, if you can, and do not leave it too long, and I shall say no more than that, because your mother is three feet away pretending not to listen and I will not have a scene.
"I have had five daughters," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have done almost nothing right by any of you, and it has come out better than I had any claim to, which is the usual way with people who do not deserve their luck. Go along. You are letting the cold in."
Elizabeth kissed him, and stood up, and did not make a scene, because he had asked her not to and it was very nearly the last thing he ever asked her.
Then she went out to the carriage on her husband's arm, into the cold bright afternoon; and as it turned in the sweep she looked back, and saw the whole of them in the doorway and around the chair — her mother and Jane and Bingley and Kitty and Georgiana, and Mary a little apart with Denny beside her, and her father in the chair in the middle of them with his hand up; and beyond the house, past the shrubbery, the gray church and its churchyard, where the November grass on the oldest graves lay pale and still in the low sun, exactly as it had lain since the twelfth of August, waiting.
The carriage went down the sweep and out at the gate and turned north, and Longbourn passed out of sight behind the hedge.