Page 126 of Hard Home

Jane came in first, and went straight up.

Elizabeth found her in their room with her bonnet still on, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap, and she got up when the door opened and said, "Lizzy," and then could not say anything else at all; and Elizabeth said "I know," and that was the whole of it for a minute or two.

"He has been down stairs to papa," said Jane at last. "He would not wait. He said that he had waited eleven months and would not wait through a luncheon."

"And papa?"

"Papa said—" Jane began to laugh, which turned into something else halfway and came back again. "Papa said that he had no objection whatever, that Mr. Bingley was a very good young man of an easy temper and a great deal of money, that he was to take her at once and keep her, and that he would be much obliged if somebody would tell Mrs. Bennet, because he did not feel equal to it."

"Oh, Jane."

"He told me about London," said Jane.

Elizabeth stopped.

"He told me the whole of it, in the shrubbery, before he asked me anything at all. He said that he had been in town all that winter and had not known I was there, and that he found it out in the summer from Mr. Darcy, who told him himself, unasked, and told him also that he had been wrong to conceal it and had persuaded him wrongly on other grounds besides. And Mr. Bingley said that he had been very angry with him for about a day and a half and then could not keep it up, and that he had come into Hertfordshire in September without knowing whether I should speak to him."

"And what did you say?"

"I said that it was all a great while ago," said Jane, "and that I had never blamed him for anything, and that if he had been a man who could not be persuaded by his friends he would not have been the man I liked."

"You are impossible."

"I know," said Jane. "I meant it, though. That is the difficulty with me, Lizzy; I always mean it."

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There was a great deal of noise in the house that day and for several days.

Mrs. Bennet sat in the parlor for four hours and cried and calculated by turns; five thousand a year, and Netherfield, and Jane's beauty which she had always known must come to something; and she said "I knew it could not be for nothing" eleven times, and did not once mention the winter.

Kitty was pleased in an uncomplicated way that did her a great deal of credit. Mary said "I am very glad" and shook Mr. Bingley's hand, which was the most demonstrative thing anybody in that house had ever seen her do.

Mr. Bennet said, to Elizabeth, in the library: "I have given away the best of you to the pleasantest fool in England, and I find that I do not mind it in the least, which shows how far I am gone."

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But Elizabeth had known on the Friday.

She had known it standing at the window on the Friday afternoon watching her sister come up from the paddock with Mr. Bingley — because Jane had said something, and stopped, and gone red; and Mr. Bingley had seen it happen and had looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he has been trying to make out for a year and has suddenly got.

And Elizabeth had gone up to her room and shut the door.

Because it was the same thing that had happened at Netherfield in the November, in the drawing-room, on the third evening of Jane's illness — and it had happened for the same reason.

She said so to Jane on the Wednesday night, because she had spent a summer learning what comes of sparing people, and she said it badly and directly, sitting on the end of the bed with the candle between them.

"Jane. You are legible again. That is why he can see you. It is not that he has grown wiser and it is not that you have grown bolder. It is that there is not enough of your gift left to cover you, and there has not been since about the middle of August."

Jane did not look surprised.

"Yes," she said. "I know."

"You—"

"I have known since Tuesday fortnight." Jane pulled the shawl round her shoulders. "I was in the kitchen when Hill scalded her arm, and she screamed, and I went to her, and I did all the things one does; and she went on crying, Lizzy, exactly as Maggie did in Gracechurch-street, and I stood there with a wet cloth in my hand and I understood the whole of it in about four seconds.

"It has been going out of me all summer. Not to people. To theground." She was perfectly steady about it. "It began when I came home in May and I have felt it every day since and I did not know what it was until August, and then I did, because you told all of us what my father is and what is happening to him.