Page 120 of Hard Home

But money was not the whole of what passed between those two men, and your uncle knows it, and it is the reason he has been silent and out of spirits since the wedding.

Mr. Darcy came away from the second interview and sat down in our back parlor without being asked to, which he had never once done, and did not speak for some minutes; and when your uncle offered him wine he did not seem to hear it. And your uncle said to me afterwards — and I give you his words — "Something has been paid in that room that was not out of a bank."

He would not be asked about it. Your uncle did ask, once, at the door on the Sunday, whether it had cost him more than he had let anybody see; and Mr. Darcy said, "It is not of a nature to be repaid and I would take it very kindly if you did not inquire," and shook his hand, and went out.

One thing more, and then I have done with the disagreeable part. He chose the church. He was extremely particular about the church, and it was not the parish either party belonged to, and he would give no reason at all; and your uncle, who is an obstinate man on a point of business, objected to it twice and was overborne twice, and told me that in five-and-twenty years he has never been so completely and so politely refused an explanation by anybody.

St. Clement's in the Fields. I have looked at it since. It is a shabby, cold, half-shut-up place with a curate from Aldgate, and there was nobody in it but ourselves and the clerk. I cannot conceive why a man of his fortune would insist upon it, and Lydia complained of it for two days.

Will you be very angry with me, my dear Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold enough to saybefore) how much I like him? His behavior to us has, in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire. His understanding and opinions all please me; he wants nothing but a little more liveliness, and that, if he marry prudently, his wife may teach him.

I thought him very sly; — he hardly ever mentioned your name. But slyness seems the fashion.

Pray forgive me, if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far, as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low phaeton, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.

But I must write no more. The children have been wanting me this half hour.

Yours, very sincerely

M. GARDINER

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The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits, in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the greatest share.

The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's match, which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be just, from the pain of obligation, were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true!

He had followed them purposely to town, he had taken on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a research; in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and despise, and where he was reduced to meet, frequently meet, reason with, persuade, andfinally bribe, the man whom he always most wished to avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to pronounce.

He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem.

Her heart did whisper, that he had done it for her. But it was a hope shortly checked by other considerations; and she soon felt that even her vanity was insufficient, when required to depend on his affection for her, for a woman who had already refused him, as able to overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with Wickham.

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She read the letter a second time, sitting on the stile, and then a third; and at the third reading she stopped at two sentences and did not go on.

Something has been paid in that room that was not out of a bank.

It is not of a nature to be repaid and I would take it very kindly if you did not inquire.

She sat looking at the paddock for some while.

There were about four things it could be, and she went through them in order, and three of them she could dismiss.

It was not information; he had none that Wickham would want. It was not a threat; a threat is notpaid. It was not a place, or a living, or a house — those come out of a bank, in the end, and Mr. Gardiner would have written the draft and known the figure.

The fourth thing she arrived at with her hands quite cold in the September sun, and it was this: that the only currency in the world which a man like Fitzwilliam Darcy possessed and a man like George Wickham wanted, and which is not of a nature to be repaid, is a thread out of an old line.

The ground would not take him. It does not have to. A bond in the old form is given by the holder, out of what he has.

She had heard him say something very like that in a parlor at an inn in Lambton in July, about somebody else entirely, and had not attended to it because they had been talking about Hertfordshire.

Elizabeth Bennet put her face in her hands.

She stayed like that for some minutes, and what went through her was not gratitude, or not chiefly; it was a hot and entirely unmanageable rage at being told nothing — at a man who had walked out of a room in Aldgate having given away a piece of his own blood, and had come to her uncle's parlor and sat down without being asked, and had then writtenI am not at liberty to enter into particularsinto the whole rest of his life.

"He might have told me," she said aloud, to a field.