Page 118 of Hard Home

She was perfectly happy. She had no notion of having done anything remarkable; she had no notion of having been in any danger; and she was affronted, genuinely and repeatedly, whenever anybody attempted to treat the business as anything but a great piece of good fortune and a great deal of fun.

She said "when I was in Wapping" as another girl might have said "when I was at Ramsgate." She said that her uncle Gardinerhad been very cross and her aunt very kind. She said that London was hot and that the lodgings were shabby and that she had thought it very hard she could not go out.

And she was, all day and every day, at her mother's elbow, being congratulated.

Mrs. Bennet took her into Meryton on the Thursday, and to the Philipses', and to Lady Lucas's, and Lydia sat and displayed the ring and gave her opinion on married life to four women who had all been married before she was born, and it went all over the parish in a day, and Mrs. Bennet came home from every one of these expeditions in a state of triumph that Elizabeth could not watch.

Jane bore it very well. Kitty bore it worse, and cried twice, and was found by Mary in the still-room and dealt with in Mary's own manner, which was to say nothing at all for twenty minutes and then remark that Kitty had walked to Meryton and back that day without sitting down, which was more than Lydia had done, having gone in the chaise.

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It was on the Sunday, at breakfast, that she said it.

They had been talking of the wedding — Mrs. Bennet had asked about it perhaps thirty times in six days, and Lydia had given thirty different accounts, all of them chiefly about her gown — when she said:

"—and my uncle was to give me away, and I was so afraid he would not be there in time, for he had been out, and if he had been late the whole thing must have been put off till the next day, and I do not know what we should have done then, for Mr. Darcy could have done it just as well and it would have been no matter—"

"Mr. Darcy!" said Elizabeth.

"Oh! yes — he was to be there, you know, and he came with my uncle, and — la! I forgot! I ought not to have said a wordabout it. I promised them so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!"

"If it was to be a secret," said Jane, "say not another word on the subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further."

"Oh! certainly," said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; "we will ask you no questions."

"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."

On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her power, by running away.

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She got as far as the shrubbery and then came back and went up to her own room and sat down and wrote to Mrs. Gardiner, and the letter was four sides and every line of it was a demand.

I must know how it was done. I must know who found them, and who paid, and what he paid, and why he was in that church; and you may tell me that I have no right to ask, and I have none, and I am asking. Do not be delicate with me, aunt. I have had a great deal of delicacy this summer from people who were sparing me, and I am so tired of it that I could scream.

She sent it by the Monday post and then had to wait five days, which she did very badly.

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But there was one thing she did in that fortnight that she never told anybody about.

It was on the second Wednesday, in the afternoon, in the small parlor, with the rain coming down and everybody sitting about. Mrs. Bennet was asleep. Jane was writing. Kitty and Lydia were on the window seat with a paper of ribbons between them, and Lydia was explaining, at length, why Kitty's blue would not do.

And Elizabeth put down her book and looked at her youngest sister properly for the first time since May.

She had been afraid of doing it for a fortnight. She had been afraid, quite specifically, of finding a hole; of finding the thing she had felt in the letter at Ramsgate, the room with the furniture taken out.

That was not what she found.

Lydia Bennet was entirely there. She was sixteen in nine days and she was noisy and vain and unkind about ribbons and enormously alive, and there was no more damage in her than in Kitty and a great deal less than in Jane; and Elizabeth, sitting with a book open on her knee, discovered that she had put her hand over her mouth.

But there was a thinness.

It was very slight, and it was low down, and it was exactly as Mr. Darcy had described it to nobody at all: a small draft, as though a window had been left open a little way in a room behind her. Elizabeth would not have found it if she had not been looking for it, and would not have known what it was if Wickham had not put his hands on that girl's hands on a hill above Brighton and told her to say her own name.

A tenth. Perhaps less.

And it was going back.