Page 116 of Hard Home

"A binding does not fail. That is the whole of what a binding is. It is the one thing in the world that cannot be got wrong by accident. Four conditions, and if you have the four it takes,and it does not care in the smallest degree whether anybody understood the words — Colwood is very clear and I have read the chapter about a hundred times.

"So either they are not really married, which they are, because there will be a register and my uncle Gardiner saw it.

"Or one of the four conditions was wanting."

There was a silence in the library.

Mr. Bennet said, quite mildly, "Which one, do you suppose?"

"It cannot be the words; a curate says the words. It cannot be the witnesses; there were two. It cannot be that neither of them meant it; he meant it a great deal." Mary looked up. "There was no ward on that room."

"In a London church?"

"There is a ward on every church in England," said Mary. "There has been since the twelve hundreds. It is the first thing that is done and the last thing that is let go and there are parishes in Wales that have not had a roof since the Civil War and still have their ward.

"Somebody found a church in London with a dead ward and put my sister's wedding in it."

She closed the book.

"I should like to know who," said Mary Bennet, "because there are perhaps forty people in this kingdom who would have thought of it and about four who could have found out which church, and I have been sitting up thinking about it for two nights, and every road I go down comes out at the same place, and it is a place I am not going to name in front of my father."

Mr. Bennet said, "You may name it. I got there on Monday."

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Denny walked back with Mary as far as the churchyard corner that evening, which had become a thing they did without either of them proposing it.

He had been at Longbourn nine days. He had written to his colonel and to his father and had answers from neither; his commission was gone or going; he slept at the Philipses' because Mrs. Bennet could not be told why a lieutenant of the ——shire was in the house, and had been told instead that he was a friend of Mr. Gardiner's, which she had accepted instantly and improved upon within a day into a connection of the Gardiners of Cheapside on the mother's side.

At the corner Mary stopped and put her hand out — not to him; to the churchyard wall.

She stood like that for a while, with her palm flat on the stone, which was a thing Denny did and she had begun to do about a week after he came, on the grounds that it cost nothing and that people who can hear things should put their hands on things.

"Miss Mary?"

"It is quieter," said Mary.

"The ward? It has never been much—"

"Not the ward." She took her hand away and looked at it. "The other thing. The one under everything, that has been going since before the rolls, that I have been able to hear since I was eleven and thought was a noise in my own head.

"It is quieter than it was in April."

Denny did not say anything for a moment.

"How much quieter?"

"I do not know. There is no way to say it. It is like—" she stopped, and tried again. "When you have a fire in a grate and you go out of the room and come back an hour later, and it has not gone out, and you have not put anything on it. It is exactly the same fire. There is simply less of it."

She began to walk again.

"My father is two-and-fifty," said Mary Bennet, "and he has not been out of doors in a fortnight, and I have not told himand I am not going to, and I am telling you because you are the only person here who will not immediately want to do something about it."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Walk back with me," said Mary, "and to-morrow at half past six, and the day after."

Chapter Forty-Eight