Page 117 of Hard Home

Mr. Bennet had very often wished, before this period of his life, that instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. He now wished it more than ever.

He had also, since the Wednesday, been refusing to receive them.

"They shall not come into this house," he said. "I have kept a fool's holiday for twenty years and it has cost me a daughter, and I am not going to sit at my own table and be pleasant to that man."

Mrs. Bennet wept, and argued, and appealed to Jane, and stopped eating, and finally — on the Friday, in the small parlor, with the whole family present — said the only thing she had ever said in her life that her husband could not answer.

"Then she may never come home," said Mrs. Bennet. "That is what you are settling. She is sixteen in a fortnight and she is going to Newcastle, which is three hundred miles, and if she does not come now she does not come while you live; and you will be very fine and very right about it and you will never see her again, and neither shall I, and I have had five and I have got four."

Mr. Bennet looked at his wife for a long moment.

"Write and tell her she may come," he said, and went into the library.

So the invitation was sent, for a fortnight on the way north; and the answer came back in Lydia's own hand, three lines and two blots and no punctuation whatever, and it said that they should come on Tuesday.

They did not.

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She arrived at four in the afternoon on the Tuesday in a hired chaise, alone.

Mrs. Bennet was at the door before it stopped, and Kitty behind her, and Lydia was out of it and had her mother round the neck and was talking before anybody had got a word in — and she was, Elizabeth saw at once, entirely unchanged: pink, and loud, and delighted with herself, and wearing a new bonnet and a wedding ring which she held up at arm's length for inspection about eleven times in the first quarter of an hour.

"La! Are we all here? Mary, you are grown quite thin — Kitty, you look ever so much better, I declare you do — and Jane! Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, becauseIam a married woman."

"And where," said Mrs. Bennet, looking past her at the empty chaise, "is Mr. Wickham?"

"Oh! now, that is the greatest joke in the world, and I have been saving it the whole way from Hatfield."

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She told it at tea, twice, with her feet on the fender.

"We came up very well as far as Hatfield and dined there, and then we were to come on, and he was quite well and in the best spirits you ever saw — he had been making game of the waiter for a full half hour and I laughed till I cried. And then we got into the chaise and went perhaps two miles, and he told the man to stop.

"And he got out. In the middle of the road! And he stood there with his hand on the door, and he was as white as that cloth, and he said,I cannot come on.

"So I said, Whatever do you mean, you cannot come on, and he said — mama, he said the strangest thing, he said,I have made a promise and I cannot come on, and I said, To whom? and he said, To a man who will not be spoken of, which is exactly the sort of thing he says when he is being provoking. And I said,Well, if you do not come I shall go by myself, and he said, Do, and gave the man money for me, and got back into the chaise and went to Hatfield again."

She was enormously pleased.

"So there it is. And I dare say he was in a fright about papa, which I told him he need not be, and I dare say he owes somebody in Meryton — he owes everybody in Meryton, it is quite scandalous, Denny used to say — and so he has gone round by London and I am to meet him at Barnet in a fortnight, and it is the best joke I ever heard in my life."

"He would not come into the county," said Mr. Bennet.

He had not spoken since she came into the house.

"He could not, papa. It is all one; he is very odd about some things and I have quite given over minding it. Do you know he will not — " and she went off into an account of Wickham's objection to some person in Brighton, which lasted four minutes and had no end.

In the library that night Mr. Bennet said to Elizabeth: "Two miles beyond Hatfield is the county boundary."

"Yes."

"And your Mr. Darcy," said her father, "does not appear to have relied entirely upon a gentleman's word."

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Lydia's fortnight at Longbourn was, in the memory of every person in that house afterwards, the strangest fourteen days of their lives.