Page 125 of Hard Home

Denny came away from the window.

"I read three lines aloud," said Mary Bennet, "and when I stopped, the note under everything — the one that has been going since before the rolls, that I have heard since I was eleven — got louder. For about two seconds. And then it went back to what it was.

"Like a dog in another room lifting its head."

She sat down again.

"That is all," she said. "I have not said it before because there was nothing to be done with it and because everybody would have said I imagined it, and because I did not want it to be true.

"I do not want to do anything about it. I want to say it in a room where somebody will write it down."

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They went out at two o'clock, and Mrs. Bennet met them in the hall and said that she was sure she did not know what Mr. Bennet could have to say to anybody for three hours, and that dinner would be at four, and would the gentlemen stay; and Mr. Bingley said that they would with the greatest pleasure before Mr. Darcy had opened his mouth.

Elizabeth walked out to the gate with him at half past two while the others were in the shrubbery. It was the first time they had been within ten feet of each other alone since a lawn in Derbyshire in August.

Neither of them said anything for about twenty yards.

Then Elizabeth said, "I know what you paid him."

Mr. Darcy stopped.

"Not the money," she said. "Anybody may pay money. I know what else. My aunt wrote to me and told me two sentences that my uncle said, and I have had a fortnight, and I worked it out on a stile in the paddock on Saturday and I have not slept properly since.

"You gave him the western ground."

He did not say anything.

"You will not confirm it and I do not need you to." Elizabeth's voice was not steady. "I have been very angry with you for five days, and I have not been able to say so to anybody, and I want to say it now and have done with it.

"You went into a room in London and gave away a piece of your own blood for a girl of fifteen who has never once thought about you and who called you a proud disagreeable man to yourface in a lodging-house in Wapping, and then you got into a carriage and came into this county and sat at the end of my mother's parlor for forty minutes and were spoken to like a tradesman, and you have not said one word, and you were not going to.

"And I cannot thank you," said Elizabeth, "because you have arranged it so that I have nothing to thank youfor— my uncle has done it all, and it is in his hand, and my father will write to him, and in ten years my mother will be telling people in Meryton how good her brother Gardiner was to us.

"You have made it impossible. Do you know that? You have taken very great care that there should be nothing in this for you at all, and the consequence is that there is nothing I can give you either, and I have been walking about this house for five days with something in my hands and nowhere to put it."

Mr. Darcy stood in the gateway of Longbourn.

"Miss Bennet," he said at last, "if you have something in your hands, I am not going to be so dishonest as to pretend I do not want it. But not to-day, and not for that.

"Your father is dying. Your sister is nineteen and has just told a room full of people that a four-hundred-year-old oath lifted its head at her. There is a hundred and ninety acres behind your church that has not moved since the twelfth of August and I do not know why it stopped and I am afraid of the reason.

"I have been in love with you for ten months. It will keep another fortnight. Nothing else in this county will."

Chapter Fifty-One

Mr. Bingley called every day.

He came on the Friday to shoot with Mr. Bennet, who did not shoot and said so, and who sat on a stile at the edge of the home field for two hours and let a young man of five-and-twenty tell him about coverts; and he came on the Saturday for no reason at all; and on the Monday he came at ten in the morning and stayed until eleven at night, and had dinner, and played at commerce, and looked at Jane for a great deal of it.

Mrs. Bennet's maneuvers were of a kind that Elizabeth had thought she was hardened to and found that she was not. On the Monday evening she got Kitty out of the room by a device so transparent that Kitty said "mama" in the doorway, and then got Elizabeth out by pretending to want her upstairs about a pattern, and Elizabeth went, and stood on the landing being ashamed of everybody including herself, and came down again ten minutes later to find that nothing whatever had happened and that Jane was making tea.

It was the Tuesday morning.

He came at eleven and asked Jane to walk out, and they went into the shrubbery, and Mrs. Bennet stationed herself at the parlor window and gave a running account of a piece of laurel hedge for three quarters of an hour.

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