Page 119 of Hard Home

She could not have said how she knew it. There was no measuring the thing. But she had looked at people for fourteen years, and there is a difference between a wound and a scar, and this was — very slowly, over months, in a girl of fifteen with an excellent constitution who had never in her life been unhappy for longer than a day — beginning to close.

By the time she is twenty, thought Elizabeth, without knowing that she was repeating a sentence spoken in a tavern in Aldgate,she will be exactly what she was, and she will never know there was anything to get back.

"Lizzy," said Lydia, "you are looking at me most particular. Is it my hair? Mrs. Forster says I do it too high."

"I was thinking that you are very brown," said Elizabeth.

"Iknewit," said Lydia with great satisfaction. "It is the sea. Everybody is brown at Brighton and nobody minds it in the least, and I do not care a straw."

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They went on the Monday.

The chaise came at nine and Lydia was two hours late in being ready, and there was a great deal of running up and down stairs, and Mrs. Bennet cried at the door, and Kitty cried, and Lydia said "well, good-bye" about six times and did not cry at all.

At the very last, with her foot on the step, she turned round and said:

"Mary. Come and stay with us at Newcastle."

Everybody stopped.

"You are the only one of them who has not said one word to me about any of it," said Lydia, "not one, not in a fortnight, and I know quite well what they all think and I do not care, but you never said anything and you have been perfectly civil and you got me the blue ribbon. So you may come at Christmas, and there are officers, and I shall find you somebody."

"Thank you," said Mary. "I shall not come at Christmas."

"You never do anything," said Lydia cheerfully, and got in, and was driven away.

Mary stood in the gravel until the chaise was out of sight, and then said, to nobody in particular, in her flattest voice:

"I have written her name and the day and the hour four-and-twenty times since April. I hope somebody tells her one day."

She went in to fetch her boots. It was half past eleven, and she had not been out yet, and she was three hours late.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Mrs. Gardiner's answer came on the Saturday, and Elizabeth carried it out to the little copse at the back of the paddock, where nobody went, and read it sitting on a stile.

My dear Niece,

I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole morning to answering it, as I foresee that a little writing will not comprise what I have to tell you. I confess myself surprised by your application; I did not expect it from you. Don't think me angry, however, for I only mean to let you know, that I had not imagined such inquiries to be necessary on your side. If you do not choose to understand me, forgive my impertinence.

Your uncle is as much surprised as I am — and nothing but the belief of your being a party concerned, would have allowed him to act as he has done. But if you are really innocent and ignorant, I must be more explicit.

On the very day of my coming home from Lambton, your uncle had a most unexpected visitor. Mr. Darcy called, and was shut up with him several hours. It was all over before I arrived; so my curiosity was not so dreadfully racked as your's seems to have been.

He came to tell Mr. Gardiner that he had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were, and that he had seen and talked with them both; Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once. From what I can collect, he left Derbyshire only one day after ourselves, and came to town with the resolution of hunting for them.

The motive professed, was his conviction of its being owing to himself that Wickham's worthlessness had not been so wellknown, as to make it impossible for any young woman of character, to love or confide in him. He generously imputed the whole to his mistaken pride, and confessed that he had before thought it beneath him, to lay his private actions open to the world. His character was to speak for itself. He called it, therefore, his duty to step forward, and endeavor to remedy an evil, which had been brought on by himself.

He had, he said, some knowledge of a woman in town who had once been a servant of his sister's, and who kept a lodging house; and he went to her and got the direction, and it cost him something, and he would not say what.

Lydia he saw once, and would not see again. He told your uncle that he had proposed to her to remove her at once to Gracechurch-street, and that she had refused, in terms which he repeated and which your uncle would not repeat to me; and that he had then, in his own words, "stopped attempting to persuade a person who was not going to be persuaded, and gone to work on the part of it that could be moved."

Wickham he saw at least twice, and I believe three times.

Now, my dear Lizzy, here is the part I cannot make out, and I set it down honestly rather than pretend to a knowledge I have not got.

There was money. The debts are paid, in Brighton and in Meryton and elsewhere, and they are above a thousand pounds; the commission is bought; there is a thousand settled upon Lydia. Your uncle knows those figures because he wrote the drafts and he has told me them, under protest, and he means the whole of it to look as though it came out of his own pocket, and he is very unhappy about it.