Chapter Sixty-Two #2
It mended, under her hand, over the years — slowly, as she had said it would, the pale ground drawing back from among the graves a yard or two a year, the wards in the parish going quietly whole again, the wrong-colored grass greening over one field at a time; and nobody in Meryton ever quite knew why the place, which had felt for a while in the twenties as though it were failing, had come right again; and the few who half-knew never said, and the plain Bennet sister who had never married and kept herself so oddly, walking out to the churchyard at dawn, was thought a little strange, and pitied, in the way people pity a spinster who has made a small dull life for herself, which was mostly relief that it was not them.
They were wrong, as Mr. Bennet had said they would be.
Elizabeth carried what her father had said, for years, and gave it to Mary at last on a visit to Pemberley when Mary was forty and had come north for a fortnight, finally, to stand in the wood — for by then the county was mended enough to be left with Denny for two weeks, Denny having married her and learned the wall himself, so that there were two hands on it now and neither need be alone.
Elizabeth told her, in the wood, what their father had said: that he had known what she was, at the end, and thought it the best of them, and would not have her pitied.
Mary was quiet for a while, among the trees.
"I knew he knew," she said. "He told me, the last evening. That is the thing I never told anybody, and I shall tell you now, because you carried his half thirty miles and twenty years and gave it to me, and you have earned the other half.
"He said: Mary, you are going to hold up something I could not even read, and I have been ashamed for a fortnight that I did not see what you were until it was too late to tell you properly, so I shall tell you improperly, now, and badly.
And then he said—" her voice was steady; she had had twenty years "—he said, of all the doors this family has ever had, you are the only one that chose.
"And then he asked me to read to him, because he could not bear to have said a serious thing for longer than a sentence, which you know, which was papa. And I read to him, and he went to sleep, and that was the last of it."
She put her hand on the bark of a tree in her brother-in-law's wood in Derbyshire, out of the old habit of a woman who put her hands on things, and Elizabeth watched her do it and understood that she was, even here, thirty miles from her churchyard, listening for something; and that this was simply what Mary was now, and had chosen to be, and was not to be pitied for.
"It is a good wood," said Mary. "You were right not to tell me about it.
It is the sort of thing you have to stand in.
" She took her hand off the tree. "I shall go home on Thursday.
He will have managed perfectly well without me and I shall pretend to be surprised, and he will pretend to have missed me more than he did, and we shall both be lying, and it is the best arrangement I know of. "
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Elizabeth and Darcy lived at Pemberley, and were happy, in the way that is not the subject of stories because it cannot be made into one: two people who told each other the truth, having agreed to it once and kept it at a cost, for the whole of their lives.
She never lost the habit of reading people, but she learned to hold her readings open, and not to let her wit finish them too fast; and he never lost his habit of managing, but he learned to ask first, and to bear the answer when it was no; and each of them spent forty years being, gently and daily, corrected by the other, which is the whole of a good marriage and the reason there is nothing further to be said about it.
Once, years on, walking in the wood in autumn, Elizabeth said: "Do you know what I think of, when I think of that year?"
"Tell me."
"I think that every single wound in it came from somebody deciding, out of love, what somebody else was not strong enough to be told.
My mother's terror, that we all laughed at.
Jane, ironed flat and never told. Kitty, drained and told to hold her head up.
Your oath to Georgiana. My own gift, that I let finish my thinking for me.
Lydia, who will die not knowing. Every one of them, a kindness that was really a theft — the theft of somebody's right to know their own life and choose inside it.
"And I think that the two people who came out of that year whole were the two who were finally told everything and left to choose. Mary, at the wall. And me, on a hill, when you offered me the empty church and let me refuse it."
Darcy walked a little way in silence.
"You are giving me too much credit," he said. "I offered you the empty church. I wanted you to take it. If you had taken it I should have been relieved."
"I know," said Elizabeth. "But you offered it as a question and not as an arrangement, and you let me answer, and that is the whole of the difference, and it is why I am walking in this wood with you and not married to a man who kept me safe.
"You spared me nothing, at the last. It is the kindest thing anybody has ever done for me, and it did not look like kindness at all, and I have thought for twenty years that this is probably true of most of the real ones."
They walked on. The wood was full of the particular light that comes down between the Derbyshire hills in the afternoon, in long pieces, that she had once described to a sister in a cold room in a failing house, saving it up, as the best thing she had seen.
Three hundred miles to the south, at half past six the next morning, a woman in old boots would walk out to a churchyard wall in the first light and put her hand on the stone and listen, and find the note steady, and held, and hers; and would stand a while, as she did every morning of her life, at the edge of the thing she had chosen; and then go home to her breakfast, in a county that did not know it had been saved, by the one door that ever chose.
THE END