Chapter Sixty #2
"—and it would be exactly the kind of kindness this whole family has been ruined by, a true-sounding thing said to spare somebody, and I will not do it.
I will not decide my whole life in order to give my father a comfortable death.
He would not want it; if he knew I had done it he would come back and be sarcastic about it.
So I am holding the decision away from him, on purpose, with both hands, until he is gone and I can make it about the ground and the people and myself, and not about grief.
"That is the most selfish thing I have ever done and it is the only way I know to do the unselfish thing honestly. Do you see?"
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "I see exactly."
"I thought you would. You are the only one who would.
" Mary looked at the pale ground among the graves.
"It is a strange thing to have found out at twenty, that the people who love you cannot help you decide the one thing, and that you have to hold them off precisely because they love you.
I do not think I could have understood that a year ago.
I did not have anything worth deciding a year ago. "
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Mr. Bennet was worse on the twenty-ninth, and better on the thirtieth, and on the thirty-first he had a good day, a genuinely good day, the best since Elizabeth had come; he sat up, and had the whole family in, and was funny, and made Mrs. Bennet laugh until she cried and then could not stop crying, and he let her cry and held her hand and did not send her out.
And in the evening, when it was only Elizabeth in the room, he said:
"I want to say a thing to you about your sister Mary, and I want you to carry it, because I cannot say it to her — she would argue, and I have not the wind for an argument, and it is not a thing that can be argued anyway, it can only be handed to somebody.
"I know what she is going to do. Do not tell me she has not decided; I know my daughter, I have watched her all winter reading me poetry she despises in order to sit in this room, and I know what she is, now, which I did not for nineteen years, God forgive me, and I know she is going to hold that ground when I am gone.
"And I want it understood, by somebody, that I do not think it is a tragedy."
Elizabeth did not say anything.
"Everyone will think it a tragedy," said Mr. Bennet.
"The plain sister, the one nobody wanted, spending her life in a churchyard holding a thing shut so that a lot of people who never noticed her may go on selling each other ribbons.
They will be very sorry for her, in the way people are sorry, which is mostly relief that it is not them.
"They will be wrong. I have had two months to think about this, which is longer than I have ever spent thinking about any of my children, to my shame, and here is what I have arrived at.
"Mary is the only one of the five of you who was born knowing that she was not the point of the story.
The others of you — even you, Lizzy, even Jane — grew up expecting, at bottom, that life was a thing that was going to happen to you, and be about you, and it has, and quite right too.
Mary never had that. She was told from the cradle that she was the spare, the dull one, the one to be got through; and it half broke her, and made her tiresome, and I let it, and did not lift a finger.
"And it also made her the one person in this family who can do a thing that is not about herself, and be steadied by it instead of destroyed, and find in it — I have watched her find it, this winter — not martyrdom but work.
Real work, that is hers, that no one can take, that matters, and that she is the best in England at.
"I spent two-and-fifty years being clever and idle and I was the point of nothing and I held nothing up and my whole life fit in a japanned box that turned out to be a death-warrant I could not even read.
My daughter Mary, whom I neglected, is going to spend her life being necessary.
I do not call that a tragedy, Lizzy. I call it the best of the five endings, and I am ashamed that it took my dying to make me see it, and I will not have her pitied.
"Carry that. Give it to her when it will do some good, which is not now, and not at the funeral, but some day when she is forty and tired and out at that wall at first light wondering whether she was a fool.
Tell her that her father knew what she was, at the end, and thought it the best of us.
She will pretend it does not signify. It will signify. "
He was quiet, and tired, and shut his eyes.
"Now go to bed," he said, "and send Mary up, and do not tell her what I said, and do not cry on the stairs where Hill will see you and start the whole house off.
There will be time enough for all that. There is going to be a great deal of time for all that, and precious little for this, so go along. "
Elizabeth kissed him, and went down, and sent Mary up; and stood in the dark hall of Longbourn for a while, not crying, because he had asked her not to, and then went up the back stairs so that Hill should not see her face.
Behind the house, past the shrubbery, in the churchyard, the pale ground lay among the old graves in the spring dark, and the note that only one living person could hear ran on under everything, and was, that night, a little louder than it had been the night before.