CHAPTER 2
As Sir William Lucus indicated, the Netherfield party quitted Hertfordshire on Tuesday.
The move seemed, to the housekeeper at least, one of completeness, as Miss Caroline Bingley ordered that the house be shuttered and half its rooms closed.
The surprising news offered the neighbourhood a principal topic of conversation for at least some weeks, if not the season.
Darcy rode as far as the turnpike beside the carriage rather than within it, which Caroline remarked upon as fastidiousness and which was, in fact, a plain want of patience for being shut up with her opinions for four hours together.
Two days after their arrival in town, a letter came to Longbourn addressed in Caroline Bingley's decided hand, and Jane carried it up to the room she shared with Elizabeth to read it, which was itself a piece of information, for Jane read nothing of consequence downstairs if she could help it, on the theory that whatever pain a letter contained ought not to be shared with the whole table before she had first taken it in.
Elizabeth watched her sister's face while she read, and had her answer before Jane had reached the second page. It was not tears; Jane rarely gave way to tears where a great many other women would have thought them owed. It was a kind of stillness, a lengthening of the pauses between her breadths.
"They have all gone to town for the winter," Jane said at last, and her voice was admirably even. "Caroline writes that she does not expect the family will return to Netherfield again this season. She writes a great deal else besides."
"That can’t be, Jane!” Elizabeth remarked in surprise.
Jane hesitated, and then, because she had never in her life been able to refuse Elizabeth a thing, she handed over the letter.
Elizabeth found, upon reading it, that the letter was a masterpiece of a particular kind; every sentence civil, but every intention beneath the sentences unmistakable.
Caroline regretted the necessity of leaving such dear friends; Caroline hoped the acquaintance might be renewed at some happier season; Caroline trusted that Jane's many engagements in Hertfordshire would fill the winter pleasantly in her brother's absence.
And then, arriving at what Elizabeth understood at once to be the letter's true business, delivered with the particular gentleness that had the appearance of being accidental, but certainly was not, Caroline mentioned how she hoped for nothing so much, this winter, as to see her brother more closely allied with the Darcy family.
She had mentioned Miss Georgiana Darcy before, whose beauty, elegance, and accomplishments Caroline trusted Jane would forgive her for praising, as a sister might be forgiven for wishing such a sister for herself.
Elizabeth read this twice, and on the second reading felt something close to fury; she felt a growing heat behind her eyes, and a wish to say something sharp to someone who was not present to hear it.
She did not doubt for a moment that the sentiment was Caroline's own manufacture, dressed as intelligence and delivered as kindness, with no more truth in it than served its purpose.
After all, Caroline had said as much herself, plainly, and at some length, pacing twice across the small drawing-room to say it, on one of those long afternoons at Netherfield when Elizabeth had stayed to nurse Jane through her illness.
Caroline had dwelt upon Miss Darcy's elegance, and her grace, and the general excellence of her accomplishments, with a persistence that had seemed, even at the time, rather more calculated than admiring; and Elizabeth, recalling it now, felt her own temper rise afresh at the memory, sharpened by whatever fresh purpose she now suspected had lain behind the praising of it.
"You do not think, then," said Jane, when Elizabeth had finally put down the letter, "that there is any truth in it?"
"I think there is exactly as much truth in it as Caroline Bingley requires there to be, which is none at all, beyond the truth that she wishes it were so.
Mr. Bingley did not leave Hertfordshire because his affection failed.
He left because he was persuaded his affection was inconvenient, and I believe persuasion of that sort generally comes from someone standing close enough to whisper it. "
"You think his sisters mean to keep him from me?" Jane asked hesitantly.
"I think his sisters would prefer a match with thirty thousand pounds and a fine house in Derbyshire to one with you, however much they may like you.
But, I do not think Mr. Bingley wants sense, precisely, but I think he may want firmness, and firmness is not a thing his sisters have ever encouraged in him, for it does not generally serve their purposes. "
Jane considered this, reflecting on whether it might be unjust to accuse Caroline even now. "She has always been very kind to me."
"She has always been very civil to you, which she can well afford, believing as she does that it will shortly cost her nothing further.
" Elizabeth sat beside her sister on the bed and gave the letter back to Jane, gently resting it in her hand.
"I do not say he will not come back. I only say you must not spend the winter deciding, on Caroline Bingley's word, that he has already chosen not to. "
"I shall not make myself ill over it, Lizzy."
"No," said Elizabeth, and believed it, for she had watched her sister disappointed before and had never yet seen the disappointment master her. "You never do. It is one of the very great differences between us, and generally I think it does you more credit than it does me."
Elizabeth rose from the bed and crossed to the window, for the room had grown close in the low afternoon light, the fire built up rather higher than the day's mild chill strictly required, and there was nothing further, she thought, to be done with a letter save to have finished the reading of it and set it, at last, aside.
She lifted the sash a little, and the cold clean air came in, and somewhere below she could hear her mother's voice, indistinct but unmistakably animated, and Kitty's laugh answering it, and the ordinary business of the house going on exactly as it always did, indifferent to whatever quiet grief was presently being managed above it.
More gently, Elizabeth said, "Come, Jane. If we sit up here any longer my mother will conclude we are conspiring against her, and come up to conspire with us instead, and then neither of us will have a moment's peace before dinner."
Jane managed something that was, if not quite her usual smile, at least an honest attempt at its shape, and folded the letter smaller still, and slipped it into the pocket of her gown rather than leaving it upon the bed to be found and exclaimed over; and the two of them went down together, Jane a half step behind, smoothing her countenance into its ordinary composure by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs with a practice that told Elizabeth, watching her do it, exactly how much occasion she had already had to perfect the art.
The parlour, when they entered it, offered them no leisure to be anything other than immediately absorbed into its business.
Mrs. Bennet was engaged in a lively dispute with Kitty over the proper trimming of a bonnet neither of them appeared willing to concede to the other, while Mary sat somewhat apart with a book she was reading rather more diligently than the general noise of the room seemed to warrant, and Mr. Bennet, from behind his own paper, offered, at intervals, some dry observation aimed to prolong the dispute rather than settle it, for his own private amusement.
"There you both are," Mrs. Bennet said, glancing up.
"I was on the point of sending Hill to fetch you, for I cannot conceive what business two grown girls can have shut up together above stairs the whole afternoon, when there is a bonnet wanting trimmed and no one but myself with any sense to be consulted on the matter. "
"We were only talking, Mama," Jane said, taking a seat near the window with a composure so complete that Elizabeth, watching her, could not have said, had she not known better, that her sister carried anything heavier in her pocket than an ordinary letter from an ordinary friend.
"Talking," Mrs. Bennet repeated, with the particular suspicion she generally reserved for any activity she had not herself organised, before her attention was recaptured entire by Kitty's fresh objection to the ribbon, and the room's noise closed back over the moment, and Elizabeth, taking her own seat, caught Jane's eye across the small distance between them, and found in it a silent, grateful acknowledgment that needed no further words to pass between them at all.
It was not many minutes before Mrs. Bennet, the bonnet's trimming at last resolved, or more properly abandoned, Kitty having lost interest in the dispute somewhere in its later stages and wandered off to badger Mary about her book instead, found a fresh subject to occupy her, and turned to it with all the injured feeling of a woman who has been nursing a grievance in private and is only now permitting it its proper airing.
"I declare I do not know what young men are coming to," she said, to no one in particular and to the whole room at once, in the manner she generally employed when she meant to be overheard by everyone without appearing to address anyone directly.
"It is two days now, is it not, since Mr. Bingley went off to town, two whole days, and not so much as a note left behind him, nor any word of when he means to return, and I am sure I do not know how a gentleman who conducted himself with such very particular attention to this family only last week could go off so suddenly without troubling himself to call and take a proper leave of us.
It is not what I should have expected of him.
I had thought him better bred than that, whatever his sisters may be. "
"He left in something of a hurry, Mama, by all accounts," Jane said, reassuringly. “I am sure it was business, and nothing more, that prevented him."
"Business," Mrs. Bennet repeated, with the particular scepticism she reserved for any explanation that did not sufficiently flatter her own reading of events.
"I do not know what business a young man with Mr. Bingley's fortune can have in town that could not wait a single morning for the common civility of a farewell call.
I am sure if I had a daughter he had danced with twice at his own ball, and sat by at supper besides, and looked at in the particular way I observed him looking at you, Jane, I should think it very strange indeed that he could not spare half an hour to say as much to her family before quitting the country entire. "
"Perhaps he means to return within the week," Mr. Bennet offered, from behind his paper, in a tone so carefully neutral that Elizabeth could not tell, listening to it, whether he intended comfort or merely his own private amusement at his wife's distress.
"Young men of fortune are notoriously imprecise correspondents, my dear.
I would not read too much into a fortnight's silence before it has even properly begun. "
"You would not read into anything, Mr. Bennet, if the house were burning down around your ears, so long as you had a book to hand and no one troubling you to put it out," Mrs. Bennet returned, with more heat than the observation strictly warranted, though Elizabeth suspected the heat had rather less to do with her husband's equanimity than with her own private fear, not yet fully voiced, that the match she had already half arranged in her own mind might, after all, come to nothing.
"I am persuaded Mr. Bingley will write to Mr. Bingley's own household before he writes to ours, Mama," Elizabeth said, gently, hoping to turn the conversation before it could work itself further into the particular agitation her mother's nerves, "and that any news of his return will reach us readily enough through Netherfield, without our sitting up nights to watch the road for it. "
"I am not sitting up nights," Mrs. Bennet said, with dignity, though the defensiveness of the denial rather undercut its own claim, "I am only observing that it is very odd, and very ill-bred, to go off without a proper leave-taking, when a little civility would have cost him nothing at all and spared a great deal of speculation that I am sure none of us wishes to be troubled with. "
She continued in this vein some while longer, the grievance finding fresh angles to be examined from at intervals, the want of civility, the particular impropriety of quitting a neighbourhood so abruptly, a passing and only half-suppressed anxiety as to what Lady Lucas would make of it, should the whole business come, as she plainly feared it might, to nothing, until Hill's arrival to announce that dinner was very nearly ready supplied the household with a fresh occupation sufficient to draw her attention off at last, and the room settled, by degrees, into the ordinary business of getting everyone properly assembled at table.
Elizabeth, following her mother out, caught Jane's eye once more across the general commotion, and found in it the same silent acknowledgment that their mother's peace on the matter, however briefly restored, was not likely to survive a second day without news to sustain it.