Page 124 of Hard Home

There was a long silence in the library.

"There is a second thing," said Darcy, "and it is not mine either. It is Miss Mary's, and she said it in this room a fortnight ago and I have had it from her sister four times since and I do not think anybody has looked at it properly, including her."

Mary said, "Which thing?"

"You read the first three lines of this aloud in April."

"Yes."

"And nothing took."

"No."

"You gave two reasons," said Mr. Darcy. "I have had them repeated to me exactly, because Miss Bennet has a very good memory and has said it four times in the same words. You said:it did not take, because I am not of the blood in the male line, and I was not undertaking anything."

Mary sat quite still.

"One of those is in the document," said Darcy, "and the other one is not."

---

Nobody said anything at all for perhaps ten seconds.

Then Mr. Bennet said, in an entirely conversational voice, "No."

"Sir—"

"No. I know where this is going and it is not going there." He had not raised his voice. "She is nineteen years old."

"I am not proposing anything," said Darcy. "I am telling you what is on this table, and I would be a liar and a coward if I told you the first two things and not the third, and I have had a great deal of experience this year of what comes of deciding for other people which things they are old enough to be told."

"Papa," said Elizabeth.

"Be quiet, Lizzy." Mr. Bennet put his hand flat on the box, as he had done in August. "Mr. Darcy. What is a keeping paid for with?"

"You know what it is paid for with."

"Say it in front of her."

"With a life," said Darcy, "or with a line of them. That is what Mr. Denny was taught in a fortnight of lectures and it is what the fragment at Pemberley says in four lines, and it is why the courtsstopped doing it, and it is why one man in Hertfordshire four hundred years ago put a thing in a box and never wrote down what it cost him."

"There," said Mr. Bennet. "Now we all have it. Thank you." He got up. "The answer is no, and it will be no on Monday, and it will be no in November, and I am the head of this family, and I have been a bad one, and this is the first thing I have ever forbidden anybody in this house and I find that I am rather good at it."

---

Mary said, "May I say one thing?"

"You may say anything you like except that."

"I am not going to say that." Mary got up off the wooden chair. "I am going to say that in April I read three lines out of that paper alone in this room because I was curious, and I have thought about it perhaps a thousand times since, and I have never once told anybody the whole of what happened."

Mr. Bennet turned round.

"What happened?"

"It did not take," said Mary. "I have told you the truth about that and I would swear to it. Nothing took and nothing was undertaken and there was nothing in the room.

"But itheardme."