Page 112 of Hard Home

"The wardenship of the west boundary at Pemberley," said Darcy, "with the bond that goes with it — a thread of the Accord, in the old form, for your life and not to be recalled. Havell keeps it now and Havell is one-and-fifty and has wanted to go back to Kendal for four years and will be glad of a pension. The house is the one you know. The salary is a hundred and forty a year and there is coal and a horse.

"That is the thing my father intended you to have. You have said so in every parlor in Hertfordshire and you were right, and I have never once denied it and I do not deny it now."

Wickham's face had gone perfectly white.

"You cannot give it," he said. "The ground would not take me. It would not take me at nine years old and it will not take me now, and your father tried it four times, and that is the entire—"

"The ground will not take you," said Darcy. "It does not have to. A bond in the old form is not given by the land, it is given by the holder, out of what he has; that is what makes it a bond and not a keeping. My father knew that perfectly well. It is why he thought he could do it, and he was right, and he died in the January before he did it.

"It comes out of me. Not out of Pemberley — out of my own line, permanently, and it does not come back, and there will be less of it in my children than there would have been.

"I have had four days to think about that and I have finished thinking about it."

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Wickham sat down in the chair very slowly, like a man who has been on his feet longer than he knew.

"Eighteen years," he said.

"Yes."

"Eighteen years, and I have asked you for it once — once, in the library at Pemberley in the February after he died, and I was twelve years old and I did it very badly and you were four-and-twenty and you said—" he stopped. "Do you remember what you said?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I said that my father had been a very kind man and that kindness was not a title," said Darcy.

"That is right. That is word for word." Wickham nodded slowly. "I have had that sentence in my head for eighteen years, and I have said it to myself in a great many rooms, and it has done me more harm than everything else in my life put together.

"And now I may have it. Now. Because you want something."

He looked up, and Darcy saw that his eyes were wet, and that he was furious about it.

"You understand that you have ruined it," said George Wickham. "You do understand that? It was the one clean thing I had. It was the one thing in the whole world that was owed to me and not got by any of this — and I could have taken it at twelve, and I could have taken it at nineteen, and I would have gone out on that boundary four times a week for forty years and been better at it than any man since the courts, and you have waited until I am thirty and a thief and have a girl of fifteen in a room in Wapping, and you have put it on atable, next to a price."

"Yes," said Darcy.

"Is that all you have to say?"

"You are entirely right, and I have known it since Bedford, and I am doing it anyway," said Darcy, "because there is a girl of fifteen in a room in Wapping."

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"What are the terms?"

"Four.

"You marry her. That is not a concession, it is a requirement; her name is gone otherwise and her sisters' with it, and I will not have that.

"You marry her where I say. I have found a church. It is St. Clement's in the Fields, which has had no incumbent of its own since 1794 and is served from the next parish, and the ward on it has been dead for thirty years and there is not a soul alive who could put it back. I have looked at it myself. It is a room with a roof and a license and nothing else whatever. She will be married as well and as legally as any woman in England and there will be nothing in it to take.

"Third. You will swear, aloud, in this room, before we leave it, that you will not at any time attempt the words with her orwith any woman of that blood, and that you will not go into the county of Hertford again while any of them live in it."

"And the fourth?"

"You will tell me what you have done to her, exactly, and how much you have taken, and whether it comes back."