Chapter 6
A minute, Elizabeth had said, and Mrs. Gardiner had given her two, and then five because a bride overcome on the afternoon of her last fitting was owed the right to collect herself without an audience.
It was the easiest thing in the world, for five whole minutes, to be nothing but an aunt of the bride at a dressmaker.
At the sixth minute she set down the veil she had been admiring.
"I shall just see how she does," she said to Jane, and meant nothing by it, nothing at all, and went back through the workroom, past the silent forms, past Madame and a girl bent over their pins, to the little room at the back.
She tapped. No one answered. She opened the door on an empty chair.
The water Madame had carried in stood untouched on the stand beside it.
The wedding gown hung finished and alone on its form by the window.
Elizabeth's day dress was laid across the fainting couch in the corner, her shoes by the side, and the low door in the corner, that anyone would have taken for a cupboard, stood open on a strip of cold, gray afternoon.
For a moment her mind did the merciful thing minds do and handed her every harmless answer at once: she has stepped out for air, she is gone to the privy, she has slipped round by another way to find us.
For that one moment, Mrs. Gardiner stood in the doorway and believed all of them at once, hard, with the whole force of her will.
Then she crossed to the open door and looked out, at the empty yard, the empty lane beyond it, the gate standing wide to the street, and the harmless answers went out of her one after another, like candles in a draft.
She did not scream. She would take a bleak little pride in that afterward, the way one does in the wrong things.
She had only turned back to the workroom and said, in a voice she did not know for her own, "Where is my niece?
", and watched the beginning of a tradeswoman's smile die on Madame's face as the question reached her.
No one had heard a thing. That was the part Mrs. Gardiner could never afterward make sit still in her mind.
A respectable shop on a respectable street in the broad middle of the afternoon, the girl at her pins not ten feet from the door, Madame within easy call, and a grown woman gone out of it into the air without a cry, without a scuffle, leaving her wedding gown behind her on its form.
What Mrs. Gardiner did next, she did very well and would hate herself for being able to do at all.
Something inside her, that had managed a household, a family, and a husband's worries for twenty years, stepped forward and took the afternoon in hand.
She did not let Madame send the boy for the watch. She got Jane, shaking and useless with terror and trying so hard not to be, out to the carriage.
She told Madame, in a voice of iron she would never have credited herself with, to say nothing to anyone, to leave the room exactly as it stood, to keep the gown, and to look for Mr. Gardiner before long.
She knew that whatever had been done to Elizabeth must not be cried aloud in a public street until someone more composed than a terrified aunt had said that it could be.
The ride to Gracechurch Street took twenty minutes and a year. Jane wept without sound, her gloved hand crushed inside her aunt's, and twice began but how could she and twice stopped, because there was no end to the question that did not make it worse.
Mrs. Gardiner looked out at the ordinary streets going by, the carters and the crossing-sweepers and the women with their baskets, the whole indifferent passing of an afternoon in which nothing whatever had happened, and held herself together by force, one street at a time.
The house, when they reached it, was still full of the morning's gladness. Mr. Gardiner was home early from the warehouse and in his shirtsleeves; somewhere in the front room Mr. Bingley was laughing at something. Mrs. Gardiner heard the laugh from the step and could have wept at it.
She got the door shut and sent the servants away. And then there was nothing left to do with it but say it, and she said it as plainly as she was able.
"Lizzy is gone. From the fitting room, out the back, into the lane, while Jane and I sat not ten feet off.
The door was open, and the yard was empty, and no one heard a sound.
" Her voice held until the very end and broke on the smallest part of it.
"She asked for a minute to herself, and I gave it to her, and I left her alone. "
Mr. Bingley went the color of ash, and then began at once to be magnificent and useless. He would go to the shop, he would rouse the lane, he would have up every constable in Cheapside, and it was Mr. Gardiner, who had said nothing yet, who took him by the arm and stopped him.
"We send for Mr. Darcy first." His voice was very level, and it frightened Mrs. Gardiner more than any shouting could have.
"Before we do a single thing that cannot be undone, Charles, we send for Mr. Darcy, and we think.
" He was already at the writing-desk. "I'll send Tom to Darcy House, at a run, and if he is not there, Tom will find where he has gone and run there. "
Darcy came within the hour, and Mrs. Gardiner, who had braced for a frantic man, was undone instead by a calm one. He came into the parlor still in his greatcoat, having plainly run from wherever the boy Tom had found him, and he stood while Mr. Gardiner told him, and his face did not break.
It closed, feature by feature, the way a house is shut up for a long absence, the shutters drawn across one window at a time, until what stood in the Gardiners' parlor was a man holding himself together at great cost.
"Tell me the whole of it again," he said. "Slowly. And leave nothing out because it seems too small to matter."
They told him. And when it was told, Mr. Bingley, who had not been able to sit, who had been at the window the whole while, said the thing they were all thinking, and none had dared.
"We have to find her. We must raise every man in London.
Why are we sitting in a parlor? Every minute she is further—"
"Because the moment it is known," Darcy said, "she is lost whether we find her or not."
He said it again, more gently, because Mr. Bingley was looking at him as though he had begun to speak in another language.
"Charles. Think. A young woman, a bride, with her wedding all but upon her, goes out of a shop in her chemise and cannot be found for a day.
For two. For a week. However it ends, whatever the truth, the town will tell only one story afterward, that Miss Bennet is gone, that she was somewhere she had no business being, with someone she had no business near, and came to grief as such women do.
The instant we cry it in the street, that story is hers for the whole of her life, and no wedding of mine lifts it off her, because the world does not hand a woman back her good name on the word of the man marrying her.
It pities him, and shuns her, and goes on.
" His voice never rose, which was the dreadful part.
"Whoever took her knew that to the letter.
They have not hidden her where we cannot find her.
They have hidden her where we are not allowed to look. "
Mr. Gardiner, who had spent thirty years learning precisely what the world's good opinion was worth, and precisely how little it cost a woman to lose it, bowed his head.
"He is right, Charles. God forgive us all, he is right.
We cannot shout. We can only hunt, and hunt quietly, and pray that it is quick. "
Even then Darcy did not sit. He took a sheet of Mr. Gardiner's paper and began, in the clear hand of a man who has found that method is the last thing left to hold to, to set down what they knew; the hour, the shop, the lane, the yard gate standing open.
He made Mrs. Gardiner tell it again, exactly, in order. The gown, the long standing, the faintness, Elizabeth sitting in her chemise alone as she had requested, and when she reached the cordial, his pen stopped.
"What cordial?"
She told him of the small dark bottle, and of the folded card that had come with it, and how Elizabeth had opened it and read it and been so plainly moved that she, Mrs. Gardiner, had asked in the way of aunts who it was from; and how Elizabeth had said presently, and put it away at her breast, and had been going to tell them when she came down off the stool.
That she had drunk it there in the room, and within the quarter hour had gone pale and strange and begged to be left by herself.
"Then no one in that room knows who sent it," he said slowly, "except the one person who cannot be asked." He wrote a single line, and underlined it once, and sat looking at it.
Then he stood. "I want to see the room," he said, "and the yard, and the lane, and whatever the girl who carried that bottle can tell me while there is still a little light to see any of it by.
And I want that card. Whoever did this took away a living woman without a sound, and I do not expect them to have been careless; but a card is paper, and paper goes where it is dropped and stays there, and if it is anywhere in that shop I mean to have it in my hand tonight. Mr. Gardiner, come with me."
Mrs. Gardiner and Jane were given over to the long wait for news. Darcy and Mr. Gardiner took the carriage to the shop while there was still a little daylight to see it by.
Madame met them at the workroom door wringing a length of muslin between her hands as though to strangle it, and the moment she saw Darcy’s face she began to weep.
“Monsieur, messieurs, I have gone over it and over it. Forty years I keep this house, forty years, and never has a lady gone from it but by the front door on her own two feet—”
“The room first,” Darcy said. “Then you may tell me everything. Not before.”