Page 138 of Hard Home

Then Mr. Bennet said: "How far is it now, from the church?"

"Two hundred and ten yards," said Mary. "It has not moved since the twelfth of August."

"No. I know. I have asked you every Tuesday for a month and you have told me, and I have let you think it was a civility."

He looked at it a while longer.

"It is a very ordinary-looking thing," he said, "to have had a family inside it for four hundred years."

Then he took his daughter's arm, which he had never done in his life, and they walked home.

Chapter Fifty-Five

The weddings were fixed for the eighteenth of November, both on the same day, which was Mrs. Bennet's doing and the only piece of management of her whole life that nobody argued with.

October at Longbourn was a strange month.

There was a great deal of happiness in that house, and it was quite genuine, and it went on in the front rooms every day: Mr. Bingley in and out at all hours; Jane going about with a face that Elizabeth had never seen on her; Mrs. Bennet with lists, and patterns, and a running war with a warehouse in London about lace, which she enjoyed more than anything that had happened to her in twenty years; Kitty, who had grown two inches that summer and was being taken seriously for the first time in her life, being consulted about ribbons and giving her opinion with great firmness.

And in the library, with the door shut, four or five people met most afternoons and did the other thing.

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Mr. Tarrant came down from London on the ninth of October and stayed eleven days at Netherfield.

He was one-and-seventy, and very small, and extremely deaf on the left side, and he arrived with two boxes of papers and a cold and no servant; and Mrs. Bennet, who was given to understand that he was an antiquary come to look at the church, treated him with the deep indulgence she reserved for elderly gentlemen who could not possibly marry any of her daughters.

He looked at the church for a quarter of an hour and at the pale ground for four days.

He would not go onto it. He walked the whole edge of it twice with Mary — who had begun by being terrified of him and who by the second afternoon was contradicting him — and he madeher repeat the measurements from April in order, and wrote them down himself, and then made her do it again the following day to see whether she would say the same numbers, which she did.

"That is a very disagreeable thing to do to somebody," said Elizabeth.

"It is the only useful thing I know how to do," said Mr. Tarrant. "Everybody who has ever brought me a marvel has been perfectly sincere and about half of them have been mistaken, and there is no way of telling except to ask them twice a day apart and see whether the story improves. Hers does not improve. Hers has not improved once in four days and she is nineteen and she does not embellish and I would take her figures before the Ordnance Survey."

He was rude to Mr. Darcy for eleven days about a Roman pavement.

And on the sixth evening, in the library at Longbourn, with the candles lit and Mr. Bennet in his chair and Mary at the table and Denny at the window, he told them what he had come to tell them, which he had not put in a letter.

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"You have asked me twice in writing," he said, "what happens when a keeping fails, and I have twice not answered, and you will have thought me a coward. I was being careful. I am going to answer now and I want it understood that I have one instance and that it is four hundred and sixty years old and that a great deal of it is inference.

"There was a keeping at a place called Ashen Roding, in the east of this county, about eleven miles from where we are sitting."

Nobody said anything.

"It is not in the rolls either," said Tarrant. "Nothing in this county is. I have it from three sources and none of them saysthe word: a bishop's visitation of 1361, a tithe dispute, and a chronicle in Latin at Bury which is very bad Latin and which I have gone over eleven times.

"In 1349 there were four hundred souls at Ashen Roding, a church, two mills, and a family of the name of Threlfall who had held the ground since before anybody's memory. In 1361 the visitation records the church asecclesia vacua— an empty church — with the notenec est qui habitet, and there is no Threlfall.

"Now: 1349 is the plague year, and every antiquary in England would stop there, and I did, for thirty years. Half the villages in the east of this county lost their people in 1349 and a great many of them never came back, and Ashen Roding is in every list of the deserted places and nobody has ever thought twice about it.

"But the tithe dispute is of 1352 and it is between the rector of the next parish and the archdeacon, and the rector says — I have the phrase and I shall give it to you plainly — that he cannot answer for the tithes of Ashen Roding because the people are gone away and the ground issine virtute.

"Without power. Without virtue. It is a phrase used of a spring that has stopped, or of a relic that no longer works."

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