Page 130 of Hard Home

Elizabeth found that she had put her hand on the trunk of a hornbeam.

"Since October," she said.

"Since October." Lady Catherine's mouth moved. "And in April I had a girl of two-and-twenty at my own table, four times, who had crossed it every day of her life and thought that was what standing up felt like. Well. That accounts for a good deal that I put down to insolence and shall have to put down to something else."

"Your ladyship knows what it is."

"I know what itwas," said Lady Catherine. "There is not a house in England with four hundred years in it that does not have some memory of the old keepings, and Rosings is olderthan most and I was brought up by a woman who could read the forms. I do not know what is under this ground. I do not want to know and I shall be out of the county by four o'clock.

"I know that it was held. I know that a keeping is paid for with a line, and that when it fails it does not fail politely. And I know — because I asked Mr. Collins nine questions at his own table on Tuesday and he answered every one of them and was very much gratified to be consulted — that your father is two-and-fifty, and has five daughters and no son, and has not walked beyond his own shrubbery since August."

She looked up.

"So we may leave Cheapside out of it," she said. "That is not why I have come."

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"Then why?"

"Because I have one child," said Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The wind moved in the hornbeams. Somewhere beyond the paddock, a long way off, somebody was calling a dog.

"Rosings has a keeping of its own. It is a small one, and it is late, and it is not four hundred years old — it is a hundred and eighty, and it was not a court that made it, it was a de Bourgh, and I know exactly what it cost him because we have the paper and it is not in a box, it is in a case, and I have read it every year since I was nineteen.

"It runs to three lives. It is in the fourth.

"My husband was the third. He died at eight-and-forty and everybody said it was his heart, and it was, and it was also that he had spent three-and-twenty years being a door. He knew it when he married me. He told me on the second evening, in a room at Rosings, and I was one-and-twenty and I did not sleep for a week.

"And I have one child, and she is the fourth life, and she has been the fourth life since the hour she was born."

Elizabeth said, very quietly, "That is why she has never sworn anything."

"That is why she has never sworn anything, nor learned an instrument, nor been presented, nor danced, nor kept a dog, nor said yes to any living creature," said Lady Catherine. "Because every one of those things is spent, Miss Bennet, and she has not got it to spend; and if she goes out early as her father did there is nothing behind her, and I have four hundred people in that parish who do not know they are living in a cup.

"And she must be braided, and it must be to the strongest line I can reach, because a keeping in its last life may be carried on if there is enough put into it — and my sister's son has the fourth oldest Accord in England and eight hundred years behind it, and it has been arranged since they were in the cradle, and it is the only thing I have ever asked of anybody in my life."

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"Does she know?" said Elizabeth.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Does Miss de Bourgh know? Has anybody ever sat down with her and told her what she is being kept for, or has she been told that her health is delicate and given a shawl?"

Lady Catherine's hands closed on the head of her stick.

"That is an impertinence."

"It is a question," said Elizabeth, "and your ladyship has come nine-and-twenty miles to ask me several, and I have answered as many as I intend to, and I should like one answered in return."

"She has always known that she is to marry her cousin."

"That is not what I asked."

"She has known since she was—" Lady Catherine stopped.

And Elizabeth Bennet, standing in a damp hornbeam grove at the bottom of her father's paddock, watched a woman of seventy discover that she did not know the answer to a questionabout her own daughter, and then decide, in about a second and a half, to go on as though she did.