Page 141 of Hard Home

"Then it is not finished," said Mr. Darcy. "It is asleep."

He came away from the window.

"Your father is upstairs, and he is not dying to-night, and he is not conscious at this moment because Mr. Jones has given him something with laudanum in it," he said. "And the thing that has held this county for four hundred years has gone quiet at the same hour, and has come eleven yards into a churchyard on the same evening.

"It is not running out. It ishim. It has been him the whole time, and it has been going down as he goes down, and when he sleeps it sleeps, and when he wakes to-morrow morning it will be there again — fainter than it was, and there.

"Miss Mary, I want you to go out at half past six and put your hand on that wall, and I am sorry to ask it, and there is nobody else who can."

"I was going anyway," said Mary.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Elizabeth did not go to bed.

She sat up in the library with Darcy until two, and then made him go back to Netherfield because there was nothing to be done at two in the morning that could not be done better at seven, and because Mrs. Nicholls would talk if he did not sleep in the house; and then she sat up alone.

At half past five she went up and looked in at her father.

He was asleep, and breathing evenly, and looked exactly like a man of two-and-fifty asleep; her mother was in the chair by the bed with a shawl over her, also asleep, holding his hand on top of the counterpane in a grip that had not slackened even in sleep, which Elizabeth stood and looked at for some time.

At six she and Jane were in the kitchen making tea that nobody wanted.

At twenty past, Mary came down in her boots.

"I would rather go alone," she said, before either of them spoke.

"Mary—"

"I have gone alone four hundred times. If you come, you will watch my face, and I shall watch you watching it, and I shall not be able to hear anything at all." She put on her bonnet. "I shall be three quarters of an hour. If I am longer than that, come; and if I am not, do not."

She went out into the dark. It was not raining. The sky in the east over the church was the color of a pearl and there was a hard white frost on everything, the first of the year.

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She was gone an hour and ten minutes, and they did not go after her, which was the hardest thing either of them did that week.

She came in at half past seven with her boots white and her face pinched with cold, and she went and stood at the kitchen fire with her back to it for a while before she said anything,holding her hands out; and Elizabeth had the sense, which she had learned that year at a considerable price, to let her.

"It is louder," said Mary at last.

Elizabeth put down the cup.

"It was gone last night. I told you it was gone; I stood there a quarter of an hour and there was nothing. And at half past six this morning it was there again, and it was louder than it has been for a fortnight — not louder than the spring, nothing like the spring, but louder than last Tuesday. Clearly louder. I stood there forty minutes to be sure and I am sure."

"Because he has slept," said Jane.

"Because he has slept, and the laudanum has gone off, and he is beginning to wake." Mary turned round to the fire. "Mr. Darcy is right. It is him. When he goes down it goes down and when he comes up it comes up, and last night when they gave him the draft it went out altogether, and I stood at that wall and thought it was over, and it was only that my father was very deeply asleep."

She was quiet a moment.

"And the ground is in the churchyard," she said. "I paced it this morning in the light. It is nine yards inside the wall, along the north-east, and it is up to the third row of stones, and the grass on the graves is the wrong color, and I stood on Sarah Longbourn's stone — 1704, she is the oldest one I can read — and it was under my feet, and there was nothing there.

"Four hundred years of us are in that churchyard, and it has got in among them, and it did it in a night."

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Mr. Bennet woke at nine and was better.