Chapter Sixty
They were three days on the road, and it was the wrong time of year for it, and the roads were bad from the thaw; and Elizabeth sat in the corner of the carriage and watched the country change from the stone-walled north to the hedged south and thought about a July when she had done the journey the other way with her aunt and uncle and had asked, with what she believed to be perfect carelessness, whether Pemberley was much visited by strangers.
Darcy came with her. There had been no question of it; but he had also, before they left, done three things, quietly, in the space of a morning, and told her of them in the carriage on the first day, because of the article between them.
He had written to Tarrant, to come to Longbourn if he was well enough to travel, and had enclosed money for the journey so that the old man's poverty could not be the reason he refused.
He had written to his cousin Fitzwilliam at Horse Guards, a long letter, the substance of which was that the matter in Hertfordshire was now of a nature requiring something, and that the gentleman at the desk who had eleven times written that it was not could now be shown a family of consequence — his own — with a direct interest, and might be moved where a lieutenant's returns had not moved him.
And he had written to Georgiana, to tell her where they were going and why, and not to soften it; and Georgiana had written back by return, and the letter was in Elizabeth's reticule, and said only: Go.
Take care of him and of her. I shall pray, which you will say does nothing, and I shall do it anyway, and I am glad you asked her to be consulted last autumn because it has taught me that I would rather be told a dreadful thing than kept from a true one for the rest of my life.
That is your doing, Elizabeth, and I do not care that you will say it was nothing. Go.
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They reached Longbourn at four on the third day, the twentieth of March.
The house looked, from the sweep, exactly as it always had; and that was the first blow, and Elizabeth had not been ready for it, because she had spent three days imagining a house with something visibly wrong with it, and there was nothing wrong with it, it was only Longbourn in the early spring with the crocuses out along the drive that her mother planted the year Jane was born, and Hill opening the door, and the smell of the house that no other house in the world had.
Jane was in the hall.
She had come from Netherfield and was more or less living at Longbourn now, and she came forward and put her arms round her sister and neither of them said anything for a moment, and then Jane said, against her ear, "He is glad you have come, and he will pretend he is not, and you must let him."
"How is he."
"He is dying, Lizzy," said Jane, simply, because they did not keep things flat any more, any of them; the year had cured the whole family of it, at a price.
"He is quite clear and quite himself and he is dying, and it is slow, and it is not painful, and it is the most peaceful and the most terrible thing I have ever watched.
Go up. He has been asking since your letter said you were coming. "
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Mr. Bennet was propped up in his bed with a book he was not reading, and the window open a little way on the spring afternoon, and he looked at his second daughter come in at the door and said:
"Well. Mrs. Darcy. You have left your ten thousand a year and your park and your husband's beautiful trees and come three hundred miles over bad roads to watch your father not get up.
That is very inefficient of you and I am extremely glad to see you, and we will not make anything of it, because I have not the strength to be embarrassed and neither, I hope, have you. "
"No, papa."
"Sit down where I can see you." She sat.
He looked at her for a while. "You look well.
You look married. There is a thing that happens to a woman's face when she has stopped waiting to find out how her life comes out, and it has happened to yours, and I am glad, because I did the arithmetic on all five of you a long time ago and yours was the sum I could not make come out, and here it is come out after all, with no help from me. "
"Papa, will you stop settling your accounts. You have been doing it since I came in the door."
"I have been doing it for four months," said Mr. Bennet, "and it is the only occupation left to me that I am any good at, and you will allow a dying man his hobby.
Now. Tell me about Derbyshire, and do not leave things out to spare me, because I have had a winter of your sister reading me the Rambler and I am past being spared anything. "
So she told him about Derbyshire.
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She was ten days at Longbourn, and they were, in the memory of everyone who was there, a strange and not an unhappy time.
The house filled up. Bingley was in and out.
The Gardiners came from London for a week, and Mrs. Gardiner sat with Mr. Bennet a great deal and made him laugh, which nobody else quite could now.
Kitty was there, grown and steady, and had taken over a great deal of the running of the house from Jane without anybody quite deciding that she should, and did it well.
And Tarrant came, on the twenty-fourth, having traveled two days at one-and-seventy in the wet, and would not stay at Netherfield but took a room at the inn in Meryton so that he could be near the church; and he spent his mornings in the churchyard with Mary, and his afternoons with Mr. Bennet, and the two old men — for Mr. Bennet was old now, whatever the register said — took to each other completely and at once, in the way of two clever men who have both stopped having any reason to pretend, and would talk for an hour and then Mr. Bennet would sleep and Tarrant would sit by him and read.
Mr. Bennet said, on the twenty-sixth, "That is the best man you have brought into this house, that antiquary, and I include your husband, whom I like very much.
Tarrant does not want anything from me and he does not pity me and he tells me the truth and he knows a great deal about the thing that is killing me and he finds it interesting, Lizzy, he finds me interesting, and there is nothing in this world so restful, when one is dying, as being found interesting instead of being grieved over.
Your mother grieves over me with the door open so that I shall hear it.
He comes in and says, now, about this note your daughter hears, when precisely did it begin, and I could kiss him. "
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Mary took Elizabeth out to the churchyard on the second morning.
The pale ground was nine yards inside the wall, along the north-east, and had a hard edge to it now, a line you could see, where the grass changed; and beyond the line the old graves stood in grass that was the color of a thing three weeks dead, and the frost that morning had lain on it long after it had gone everywhere else, exactly as Mary had written.
"Put your hand on the wall," said Mary.
"I shall not feel anything. I am not you."
"You feel people. You have never tried to feel this, because in the autumn you did not want to and then you went away. Try it now. Put your hand on the stone and go quiet and stop being clever, which is the whole of the difficulty for you, you finish things too fast, you always have."
Elizabeth put her hand on the cold stone of the churchyard wall, and went quiet, and stopped being clever, which took some doing.
And after a while — a long while, a minute, two — she felt it.
Not the note; Mary said afterwards she would never feel the note, that was a thing you were born to.
But the absence. The place where her hand, resting on a wall in the sun, expected the small ordinary warmth that a wall in the sun has, the aliveness of a made and tended thing — and found, instead, nothing; a cold that was not the cold of the stone but the cold of a thing from which the something had gone out.
She took her hand away rather fast.
"Yes," said Mary. "That is it. That is the county.
That is what has been coming up the fields since October and is now among our great-grandmothers, and that is what I would be holding down, if I hold it, for the rest of my life.
I wanted you to feel it once with your own hand before — before anything.
So that whatever you think about it afterwards, you will be thinking about a real thing you have touched, and not a story I have told you. "
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"Have you decided?" said Elizabeth.
"No," said Mary. "And I want to tell you exactly where I am, because you will worry less if you have the truth than if you imagine it.
"I can do it. I am nearly sure now; Denny is sure, and Tarrant, who would not say it in the autumn, has as good as said it this week — he asked me three questions in the churchyard on Tuesday and at the end of them he was quiet for a long time and then he said, well.
It appears the deed had a clause nobody read, and would say no more, but I knew what he meant.
"So it is not any longer a question of whether. It is only the other question, the real one, and I have not answered it, and I am not going to answer it until I have to, and I have made my peace with not knowing, which is the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than the study.
"Because here is the thing, Lizzy, and I have not said it to anybody, not even Denny.
I do not want to decide it while papa is alive, because while he is alive I keep finding reasons that are really about him.
That I could hold it a few years and give him — no, he is dying, it is too late for that, I know.
But smaller things. That he would die easier believing the ground was safe.
That I could tell him, at the end, that I would hold it, and let him go thinking Meryton was saved, and it would be a kindness—