Page 139 of Hard Home

"And the chronicle at Bury," said Mr. Bennet.

"The chronicle at Bury is the reason I am here at my age in October." Tarrant folded his hands. "It is a monk's, and it is gossip, and it is worth nothing as evidence and everything as testimony. He writes of Ashen Roding, some years after, that the people did not die.

"They went away. Over four or five years. Not in a body and not in a panic; a family at a time, in the ordinary way, to Chelmsford and to London and to the coast. And when they wereasked why, he says — and this is the sentence I have carried about with me since 1793 —dicebant se ibi deficere.

"They said that they were failing there."

The library at Longbourn was extremely quiet. The fire moved.

"That is my instance," said Mr. Tarrant. "One place, eleven miles off, four hundred and sixty years ago, three sources, none of them any good. And I put it to you plainly because you have all been very brave and rather too cheerful.

"There is no monster in this. There is nothing that comes out. I have read every account of every failing in the three kingdoms and there is never anything that comesout.

"What happens is that the ground stops being able to hold anything, and then, by degrees, so does everybody standing on it. The wards will not take. The old lines go thin. A woman who could quiet a room finds that she cannot; a girl who was never tired is tired; a man of two-and-fifty who ought to have twenty years has four. And nobody dies of it and nobody can point to it and nobody in that parish will ever have a word for what is wrong, and after five years they will all be somewhere else, and there will be a very good farm nobody wants and a church with no roof.

"That is what is under your feet, madam," he said, to Mary. "It is not a beast. It is a slow subtraction. And it has begun."

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Mr. Bennet said, "How long?"

"I do not know."

"Mr. Tarrant. I am two-and-fifty and I am the door and everybody in this room has been very delicate with me for two months. How long?"

Tarrant looked at him for a moment with the perfect steadiness of a man who has spent fifty years being told to be tactful and has never once seen the use of it.

"At Ashen Roding," he said, "the ground began to go in the year the last Threlfall was an old man. It was three hundred yards from the church when he died. The visitation is twelve years later and the church is empty.

"Sir, you are not the last of a line that will end; you are the last of a line that has already ended, and the thing has been running down since you were born and has only lately begun to show. I should be very much surprised if you saw the summer. I should be very much surprised if there were four hundred people in Meryton in 1825."

"Thank you," said Mr. Bennet. "That is the first honest sentence anybody has spoken to me since August."

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Tarrant went back to London on the twentieth, having refused to give an opinion on Darcy's four possibilities on the grounds that he had none.

At the door of the chaise he stopped, and looked up at Mary Bennet, who had carried out his second box because nobody else had thought of it.

"Miss Bennet. The three lines you read aloud in April."

"Yes."

"You said it lifted its head."

"Yes."

"Do not do it again," said Mr. Tarrant, "until you have decided what you would say to it if it answered; and do not decide that in a hurry, and do not decide it because somebody you love is dying, which is the reason people always give and it is a very bad one." He got into the chaise. "And write to me. Not to him — to me. I am one-and-seventy and I shall very likely be dead before any of this is settled, and I should like to have known."

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The eleventh of November was a Thursday.

It had been raining for three days and Mr. Bennet had not been out; he had been in the library since breakfast with the fire made up twice, and at about four in the afternoon Hill went in with the candles and found him on the floor.

He was not unconscious. That was the first thing he said, twice, with some irritation, while Hill was calling out in the passage: that he was not unconscious and that everybody was to stop shrieking.

He had got up to reach a book down and had found, in the middle of it, that his legs had nothing in them; and he had gone down slowly, holding the shelf, and had lain there for some minutes — he could not say how many — perfectly clear in his head, looking at the underside of his own table, being unable to get up.