Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The dinner for ten persons came off on Thursday with three removes, two courses, and every candle the household possessed alight in the dining-parlour — Mrs. Bennet having reasoned, irrefutably, that a man with a famous library must be shown that Longbourn too could afford wax.
It was at the table that Caroline Bingley opened her campaign in form.
She had arrived gracious; Elizabeth, who now read the family hands closely, thought her graciousness had the look of a fair copy made from an angry draft.
Through the soup she praised the neighbourhood's hospitality in the tone of one bidding it farewell, and over the partridges she produced her matter.
"Charles, I had a letter from Grosvenor Street this morning.
The Hursts are quite fixed on November the tenth, and you are wanted, you know — you cannot conceive how you are wanted.
Louisa says the house is nothing without you.
And your own affairs will not arrange themselves while you shoot Hertfordshire partridges; you know you never can attend to anything by post." She turned her smile down the table like a candelabrum.
"My brother, Mrs. Bennet, is the worst correspondent in England.
He answers letters in his head and believes the post-office somehow apprised of it. "
It was prettily done, and the under-song was audible to everyone it was meant for: we are temporary here; the true life is in town; the packing has, in all but fact, begun.
Elizabeth saw Jane's fork pause; saw her mother inflate with counter-arguments that would do more harm than Caroline's whole design; and saw, with a sensation of watching a wager laid down, Mr. Darcy set down his glass.
"Bingley transacted the whole of his town business in three days in October," he said.
"I was with him; the most of it was a half-hour with his banker and a coat fitting he could have done without.
He is not wanted in Grosvenor Street, Miss Bingley; he is wished for, which is a different matter and keeps till Christmas.
" He paused, and proceeded with a deliberation that gave every word its own footing.
"Besides, he has given his word in Hertfordshire.
The ball is promised. A man does not leave the country with his engagements standing; and they are his engagements, of his own making, and" — the half-second of his glance touched Bingley, and it was the glance of the letter, made flesh and dressed for dinner — "in my judgment, the best-made of his year. "
"The ball!" cried Lydia, ratifying the treaty before the ink was dry. "Tuesday fortnight — you promised — Kitty, he promised!"
"I did promise," said Bingley, who had been looking at Darcy with the open wonder of a man finding the wind unexpectedly at his back, "and I'll perform. Tuesday fortnight let it be. Caroline, you shall have the ordering of everything, and London shall keep till it learns patience."
Caroline received it as social artists do, with a brilliant smile laid over a full reckoning of her losses.
The table absorbed it by degrees. Lydia's immediate ratification had covered the worst of it, but the room knew.
Mrs. Bennet, who had followed the exchange with the bright attention of a woman who cannot read the text but never misses the tone, settled back with an expression of pure vindicated satisfaction and reached for the lobster as though its excellence was also somehow hers.
Mr. Bennet, at the head of the table, had been watching over his wine glass with the particular stillness he reserved for conversations whose real content he was reconstructing; he set the glass down now with a small, inward air, as though a theory he had been developing over several Tuesdays had just found its evidence.
And Jane — Jane had not moved, but something had shifted in her face: not surprise, not even relief, but a kind of careful steadiness, as though she was adding a fact to a sum she had not quite been able to finish until now.
The talk moved on. Mrs. Bennet ascended into raptures over the lobster. And under the cover of her mother's happiness, Elizabeth sat very still, her glass untouched.
Trust your own understanding of her; it is better than you are told it is.
She had wondered, holding the draft in the library, whether the words were sentiment — fine private feeling that would die at its first introduction into society.
She had now watched them walk into a dining-room and pull out a chair.
He had said it to Bingley's face, at her mother's table, over Caroline's open opposition — paid the whole sum in public coin, with nothing to gain and his comfort to lose, and no possible knowledge that the one witness who could compare the speech to the manuscript was seated across the candles doing exactly that.
The letter, Elizabeth thought, had not been sentiment after all. It had been character — with the ink not yet dry, and now it was dry, and it said the same thing.