Page 137 of Hard Home

"Papa—"

"Do not argue. I am not being sentimental and I am not making a joke about wishing to see it." He put his hand flat on the table. "It is a practical matter and I shall put it practically.

"Whatever happens to this ground will happen in the spring, or in the autumn after. I do not think I shall see another summer and I have given over pretending. Your mother has a hundred a year of her own and four thousand pounds; and Jane will be at Netherfield and will take her in and be sweet about it for twenty years, and it will be perfectly dreadful.

"But if you are married and settled and out of this county with a house of your own three hundred miles away, then there is somewhere for Kitty to go that is neither Netherfield nor Newcastle. She is seventeen, and she has been ill, and she is beginning to be well, and she is the one of you I have never once bothered about; and I have had two months to consider what a lifetime of her mother's company will do to her."

"I shall have her by Easter," said Elizabeth.

"Yes. I thought you would." He was quiet a moment. "And there is Mary."

"Mary will not leave."

"No," said Mr. Bennet. "She will not. And that is the other thing, and it is the thing I have been putting off since the day your Mr. Darcy sat in that chair and told this family what a keeping is paid for with.

"I forbade her. In this room, in September, in front of everybody, and I was rather pleased with myself about it — it was the first thing I have ever forbidden anybody in this house and I made quite a little performance of it.

"And I have not slept properly since. Because the whole of my forbidding comes to this: that if it is to be done, I would very much rather it were done by me, and I cannot do it. Whatever it wants, I have not enough of it left to give. I have known that since the middle of August.

"And there is one other person in this house who can hear the thing at all."

"Papa—"

"I am not asking you to do anything," said Mr. Bennet. "I am telling you where I am, because you are the only person I have ever been able to tell anything to; and because in four months you will be in Derbyshire, and I shall have nobody."

---

Mrs. Bennet was told at four o'clock, in her dressing-room, by Elizabeth, alone, on the grounds that a public announcement would very likely have killed somebody.

She sat quite still for about half a minute — which Elizabeth had by now learned to recognize as the thing her mother did before the important ones — and then she said:

"Mr. Darcy. Mr.Darcy. Ten thousand a year, and very likely more. Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it — nothing at all. I am so pleased — so happy. Such a charming man! — so handsome! so tall! — Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! what will become of me. I shall go distracted."

She talked for eleven minutes together without once stopping.

Then, quite suddenly, she stopped, and put both hands flat on her dressing table, and looked at her own face in the glass.

"He is going in the spring," she said.

Elizabeth stood very still.

"Your father. I have seen it since Whitsun." Mrs. Bennet did not turn round. "I am not clever, Lizzy. I have never once been listened to in this house, and I have been right about every single thing that has happened in it for two-and-twenty years.

"Three of you are settled and the fourth may be, and Mary will not marry anybody, and I shall have the four thousand and the hundred a year and my sister Philips.

"That is what I have been working at since 1801. I did it very badly, and everybody laughed, and I did it."

She picked up her comb.

"Now go and put on the blue," said Mrs. Bennet, "and send Hill to me; and do not tell your father I said any of that, for he has quite enough to bear."

---

At six that evening Mr. Bennet put on his hat and his greatcoat and went out of his own front door, and did not stop at the end of the shrubbery.

He went down through the paddock and out at the gate and along the field path toward the church, walking slowly and stopping twice. Mary saw him from her window, and put on her boots, and went after him without saying anything to anybody, and caught him at the second stile, and did not offer him her arm, and walked beside him.

They stood together for a quarter of an hour at the edge of the pale ground in the last of the light, and neither of them said anything at all.