Page 109 of Hard Home

"Miss Lydia, will you come with me to your uncle's house in Gracechurch-street? To-day. Now. I have a carriage at the end of the street and I will take you there myself, and your aunt will—"

"Good gracious, no," said Lydia.

She said it perfectly pleasantly, and went on turning the leaves of the fashion book.

"But I am very much obliged to you," she added. "It is very kind, and I dare say Lizzy sent you, and you may tell her that I am perfectly well and that she is not to be somanaging, she has been managing me since I was nine years old. And I am going to be married on Monday."

"You may be married from your uncle's house. It is a better thing in every way. Your family—"

"My family would take me home to Longbourn and there would be such a scold as never was, and my mother would cry for a fortnight, and Mary would look at me, and Wickham would be talked to by my uncle Gardiner, and then perhaps it would all be put off." Lydia looked up, and for one moment there was something in her face that was not fifteen at all. "I know how it goes, Mr. Darcy. Jane's Mr. Bingley went off to town for three days and there was an end of him, and everybody in that house is very sensible and very kind and nothing ever, ever happens.

"I am the first of us," she said. "I am the youngest and I shall be married before any of them, and I shall have a house, and Lizzy will have to give me the wall in a doorway for the rest of her life. I have thought about it every day since Saturday."

Then she laughed, and said something extremely silly about a green gown, and asked whether Miss Darcy was as tall as she was, and whether the roads had been dusty.

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"Miss Lydia," said Darcy, at the door. "One question and I shall go.

"On the Saturday night at Brighton, on the down above the camp — did he ask you to say anything?"

Lydia's face lit up.

"Oh!that," she said. "Now that is the oddest thing and I shall tell you, because you are a great friend of his and I dare say you know all his ways. He asked me to say my own name."

"Your name."

"My whole name, and my father's, andof Longbourn in the county of Hertford, all out loud, standing up on the top of the down with his hands on my hands, and he said it after me. And I laughed so much I could hardly get through it and I had to do it three times." She hugged her knees. "He said it was a thing they do in his family. He said it was a sort of promise and that nobody would ever be able to take me away from him afterwards, and I said that was a great deal of stuff and nonsense, and he said,very likely it is, but say it again.

"So I did. And then we came down and it was ever so late and Mrs. F. never knew a thing about it."

She was radiant.

"He is the only person in the whole world," said Lydia Bennet, "who has ever wanted me to say my own name."

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Mr. Darcy went down two flights of stairs into the street.

He walked to the end of it, past his own carriage, and out onto the stairs at the river, and stood there for some time in the smell of the tide with his hand on a post.

A sort of promise.

Not a binding — not by itself, not out of doors, not on a down with no roof and no ward and no man in orders and no witnesses. Mary Bennet's four conditions, and three of them wanting.

But a thing said aloud, and meant, on ground that had nothing under it. And forty-two yards in two nights.

He thought:he has not married her because he cannot yet. He has done the part that could be done in a field, and it has answered better than he expected, and it has frightened him, and now he is sitting in a room in Wapping at two in the morning with a candle asking a landlady about ground that will not take a ward — because he has found out that he isnot opening a door into a line. He has found out that there is something behind it.

And then, with the tide going out under the stairs:

And he is going to do it anyway. Because he has been at this for eleven years, and he is thirty years old, and he has nothing, and there is nothing else in the world he knows how to want.

He went back to the carriage and gave an address in Gracechurch-street, because Mr. Gardiner had reached town on the Thursday and would have to be told something; and then he changed it, and gave the name of a hotel, and sat back in the corner.

There were three days.

He would have to see Wickham. There was no version of it in which he did not have to sit in a room with George Wickham and offer him something, and he had known that since Derbyshire, and he had been arranging the possible offers in his head for four days and had arrived, on the road somewhere past Bedford, at the only one that would answer.