Page 106 of Hard Home

"And in April I read this one out. I was alone in this room; my father was at Meryton; I took it out of the box, which I ought not to have done, and I read the first three lines aloud to see whether there was anything in the form of the words.

"And it did not take, because I am not of the blood in the male line and I was not undertaking anything, and there was nothing whatever in the room.

"But itrang."

"Explain that," said Denny quietly. It was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes.

Mary looked at him.

"When somebody swears a thing," she said, "there is a — I have never had to describe it. There is a note. It is like a struck glass. And when the thing is discharged, or run out, or the person is dead, the note is gone and the words are just words, and I have read out a great many old oaths out of books and they are all quite silent.

"This one is still sounding."

She put one finger on the edge of the paper.

"Somebody said these words out loud, on this ground, and meant them, and they took," said Mary Bennet, "and they have not stopped. It has been going for four hundred years and it is going now, in this room, under everything, and I have been able to hear it since I was eleven years old, and I thought until April that it was a thing aboutme."

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Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Denny said, "Sir. May I say the professional part? It is not much and it is not learning, it is only what we were taught."

"Say it."

"There are two kinds of work on ground and they are not the same trade," said Denny. "There is warding, which is what I was trained to. A ward is a thing you build at a place — a door, abridge, a nine-mile line at Selsey — and you build it out of what is in you, and you go on mending it for ever, and when the man who laid it stops mending it, it goes.

"And there is the other kind, which we were told about in a fortnight of lectures and which none of us ever saw, because there has not been one made in England since before the rolls. The old courts did it. You do not build anything. You put akeepingon a place: a thing that holds, of itself, without mending, because the whole of it was paid for at once."

"Paid for with what?" said Elizabeth.

"With a life," said Denny. "Or a line of them. That is why we were told it is not done any more."

He looked at the strip on the table.

"Sir, I have never seen one and I would not know one if I sat on it. But I have spent nine months in a county where nothing has ever wanted mending, and that is not a thing that happens, and I have said so eleven times in writing to men who are paid to know. And if you are asking me whether a keeping would look, from the outside, exactly like four hundred years of quiet ground and a family that must not fail of a man—"

He stopped.

"Yes," he said. "It would look precisely like that."

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"Then let us have it plainly," said Mr. Bennet, "since we are all being brave this afternoon, and put it in the shortest words, and I shall do it, because it is my family and my name and I have had the longest to get used to it.

"Some man of my blood, four hundred years ago, swore an oath upon this ground and paid for it with everything he had and everything he was going to have. Whatever the old courts would have bargained for in this county, he got there first, or they would not touch it, and he did instead — I do not know which and I do not suppose anybody ever will.

"And the price of it was that there should not fail a man of his blood upon this ground; and there has not, in eleven generations, until me.

"And I have five daughters, and I am two-and-fifty, and I was ill in February and again in April, and I made a joke about it.

"And in October, when I had been fifty-one for four months, the grass beyond Barrett's began to go the wrong color."

He folded the strip along its old creases and put it back in the box, and shut the lid, and sat with his hand flat on top of it.

"So there it is," said Mr. Bennet. "I am the door. I have been the door since I was thirty-one and my father died, and nobody told me, because nobody has known for a very long time — my father did not know it, he thought it was an entail and a nuisance and he told me to get a son and laughed about it — and the whole of what I have done with my life is to sit in this room and be amusing about a piece of paper I could not read.

"And I am wearing out. And when I am done, it opens; and Mr. Collins will inherit two thousand a year and a paddock and will not be able to open the front door, and something that has been shut in this county since before the rolls will not be shut any more.