Page 113 of Hard Home

Wickham was quiet for a long moment.

"About a tenth," he said. "Perhaps less. It was not a taking, on the down; it was — a door being tried, and it opened further than I meant, and I did not have anywhere to put what came through it. Most of it went past me." He rubbed his face again. "It comes back if it is taken slowly. That went slowly. She will be tired for a year and she will not know she has been tired, and by the time she is twenty she will be exactly what she was, and she will have got there without ever knowing there was anything to get back.

"That is the truth and you may hang me if it is not, and you have no way on earth of checking it, and I am telling you the truth because I find that I want to."

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The oath took about ninety seconds.

Darcy made him say it standing, and made him say it twice because he ran the second clause into the third; and when it took — and it did take, at once and completely, in the way that Mary Bennet had once described to a room in a library and nobody had listened to the end of it — Wickham put his hand out and held the back of the chair for a moment.

"Well," he said. "That is a strange sensation. I have never sworn anything in my life."

"No," said Darcy. "I did not think you had."

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They settled the rest of it in about half an hour, in the flat voices of two men doing business: the debts in Brighton and Meryton, which came to something over a thousand pounds; the commission, which would be sold; the license, which was gotalready and would have to be got again for the other parish; the day, which was Monday.

At the door Wickham stopped, with his hat in his hand.

"One thing," he said. "And then you may be rid of me for thirty years, which I dare say is what you have paid for.

"Are you going to tell her?"

"Tell whom?"

"The girl. Lydia." He said the name with an odd carefulness, as though he had not used it much. "She is going to be married on Monday and go to Newcastle and be Mrs. Wickham, and she is fifteen, and there is a keeping under her father's house that is coming apart, and she is the youngest of five and the least spent and she is the reason all this has happened.

"Is anybody going to tell her what she is?"

Darcy said, "No."

"No," Wickham agreed. "Of course not. Nor her mother, nor her sisters — well, the little one knows, she will be told, she has earned it. But not Lydia. Lydia will be sent to Newcastle with a green gown and a set of pearls and she will be tiresome about it for the rest of her life, and in forty years she will die without ever having been told one true word about her own blood.

"And I shall tell you the funny part," said George Wickham, putting on his hat. "I am the only man who ever told her. Up on that down, with my hands on hers, and I told her exactly what she was — I said,there is something in you that there is not in anybody else in England— and it was the first true thing anybody had ever said to her, and I said it in order to rob her.

"You have all been protecting that girl from herself since the day she was born. I am the villain of this, and I have no complaint of it, and I shall take your hundred and forty a year and your boundary and be extremely glad of them.

"But you might consider, when you are being noble about it in Derbyshire, that the only difference between your family and me is what we do with the silence."

He went out and down the stairs, and Darcy heard him whistling in the yard.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Mr. Gardiner did not like it.

He said so at nine o'clock on the Saturday morning in his own back parlor in Gracechurch-street, standing on his own hearthrug in his own house, to a gentleman of ten thousand a year who had come to him at that hour without sending in a card, and he said it four times in an hour and a half.

"Sir, you must see how it stands. I am to write to my sister and my brother Bennet and tell them that I have found them; that I have settled his debts; that I have paid down a sum which — Mr. Darcy, I have not asked you the sum and I am not going to, and that is the very thing I object to. I am to take the whole of it upon myself, and be thanked for it, and be believed."

"Yes."

"And in ten years, or twenty, my brother Bennet will die, and the girls will remember all their lives that their uncle Gardiner did that for them, and I shall have to sit and be looked at."

"Yes," said Darcy.

Mr. Gardiner sat down.