Page 136 of Hard Home

Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply; and at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.

"Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy."

Then he sat down, rather heavily, and was quiet for a moment.

"Now shut the door," said Mr. Bennet, "and sit down, because we have not begun."

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"He told me the whole of it," said her father. "The four possibilities, and what my sister-in-law Lady Catherine said about a horse, and the church in London with nothing in it, and that he offered you that and you would not have it.

"He was fifty minutes about it and he did not once try to make any part of it sound better than it is; and at the end he said,Sir, I have told you this because if I do not she will, and she will tell it better, and you will have had it from the wrong person."

"That is exactly what he would say."

"It is what a man says who has worked out, rather late in life, that he is going to spend the next forty years married to somebody who will not be handled." Mr. Bennet took off his spectacles. "I liked him better in those fifty minutes than I have liked anybody in a great while, and I have not told him so and I do not intend to; he is quite pleased enough with himself.

"Now. Lizzy. I am going to ask you one question, and you are going to answer it, and I shall know if you do not, because you have my face."

"Ask it."

"Are you marrying him," said Mr. Bennet, "to save this family?"

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The clock in the hall struck the quarter.

"Because you might," said her father. "It would be very like you. You are the only one of the five of you with any spine, and I have leaned on it since you were fourteen, which was a great convenience to me and a shocking thing to do to a child.

"And you know what I am. You know that when I go, it opens. You know that his line is the fourth in England and that it is the only thing anybody has suggested that might hold this ground, and you were in this room in September when he said out loud that a keeping in its last life may be carried on if there is enough put into it.

"And I know my daughter. If you had decided in that hornbeam grove that the way to keep your mother in her house and eleven hundred people in this parish alive was to marry a man of ten thousand a year and braid his blood into ours, youwould have done it. You would have done it if you had disliked him. You would have gone up the aisle with your chin out and been perfectly charming about it for forty years and never told one living soul, and I should have died in the spring thinking you were happy.

"So I am asking. Once. And I shall believe you."

Elizabeth found that she could not answer at once.

"You are quite right that I would have," she said.

"Yes."

"If it had come to that, and there had been no other way, and he had been a decent man — I would have done it, and I would have made it look like a love match, and I am not ashamed of that." She had her hands very tight in her lap. "I have thought about it. In April, in Kent, before I understood anything, I sat on a stile and did arithmetic about my sisters. So you are not wrong about my character.

"But it is not what has happened.

"Papa, I refused him in April. I refused the whole of it — Pemberley, and the braiding, and the line, and my sisters kept safe for ever — in a parlor in Kent, in the plainest words I have ever used to anybody, at a time when I knew exactly what the entail meant and had known since I was eleven. I had every reason you have just named, and I did not have one of the ones you are afraid of, and I said no.

"And then I found out what he is, and I have spent five months finding out, and now I want him. That is the whole of it and it is not a very edifying story. I turned him down when it would have saved you, and I want him now that it may kill him."

Mr. Bennet looked at her for a long moment.

"That," he said, "is the most convincing thing you could possibly have said, and I do not believe you constructed it, and I am going to stop being frightened now."

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"There is one thing more," he said, "and then you may go and tell your mother, which I am not going to do at any price.

"I want you married before Christmas."