Page 123 of Hard Home

"I asked you here for something else. My daughter Elizabeth tells me that in July you said you would have to see this, and that you had no right to ask and were going to ask."

He put the japanned box on the table.

"You need not ask," said Mr. Bennet. "Sit down."

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Darcy was two hours over it.

He read it first with the paperweights on it, saying nothing, for about forty minutes, in short bursts because the letters would not sit still; and then with Harrow open at his elbow; and then with Mary's Colwood, and then with a sheet of paper on which he wrote out the eleven lines in ordinary hand, twice, and compared them.

Nobody spoke. Denny stood at the window. Mary sat on the wooden chair with her hands in her lap and did not fidget once, having had nineteen years' practice at waiting in rooms.

At half past one Darcy sat back.

"Mr. Bennet," he said, "everything you worked out in June is correct, and I want to say that first, because you got it alone, out of four books your daughter bought, and it took me eleven months and a man at the Society of Antiquaries.

"It is not a deed. There is no grantor. The verb iskeep. There is no consideration named because none was given; nothing was bought and nothing was granted; a man wrote down what he had undertaken and put it in a box.

"And it is a keeping, in the old form, and I have seen the form once before — not a keeping, but the form. There is a fragment of one at Pemberley in a case in the muniment room, four lines of it, that my great-grandfather bought out of a dissolved abbey in 1746 because he liked the box it came in. Nobody has everknown what it was. I have known since about eleven o'clock this morning."

"And?" said Mr. Bennet.

"And I do not know what is under your ground, and neither does Tarrant, and I do not believe anybody has known for a very long time. But I can tell you three things about the document that you have not got, because they want a comparison, and I have the comparison."

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"The first is the date," said Darcy. "There is not one. You know that. What you may not know is that in that form there never is — because a keeping does not begin at a date, it begins when the words are said, and the man who says them is not making a record for a court, he is making a copy for his children so that they may know what they are inside.

"The second is that there is no release.

"Every ordinary undertaking in England has one. There is always a road out: on payment of a sum, on the death of a party, on the failure of a condition, at the will of the survivor. This has none. There is no clause by which it can be ended, by anybody, ever. Whoever wrote it did not want it to be capable of being ended, and he thought about it, because there is a line here—" he turned the paper "—and this bond shall not be loosed by me nor by any that come after me— which is not a form of words. It is a man saying,I know that my grandchildren will want to get out of this, and they are not going to."

"That is not encouraging," said Mr. Bennet.

"No. The third one may be."

Darcy put his finger on the sheet where he had written the lines out in his own hand.

"The condition.So long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground.

"Mr. Bennet, that is not the same sentence as the entail, and you saw that in June, and you were right, and I do not think you have gone far enough with it.

"The entail is in the ordinary form and does what it says: heirs male of the body, and in default of heirs male, over to the next in blood, and so the estate goes to Mr. Collins. That is property. It is the same clause as in ten thousand deeds and it will be construed by any court in England in the same way.

"The keeping does not sayheirs male. It does not sayof the male line. It does not use the wordheirat all, anywhere, in eleven lines — and a man writing in that century who meant heirs male had the words to hand, because he used them forty lines further down in the other clause."

Elizabeth had got up.

"Then what doesa manmean?" she said.

"I do not know," said Darcy. "I want to be very exact with you, because this is the only piece of hope in the room and it would be a wicked thing to make it larger than it is. In that centurymanis used for a person about half the time and for a male about half the time, and I have looked at every other use of it in these eleven lines and they are not decisive. I would not stake anything on it. Tarrant would not.

"But the man who wrote this was extremely careful. He usedheirs malewhen he meant heirs male, forty lines away, in a document he wrote in one sitting.

"And he did not use it here."

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