Page 148 of Hard Home

Mary was quiet for a moment.

"I will come to Pemberley," she said, "when this is finished, whatever finished turns out to mean; and I will stand in your wood, and you shall tell me nothing at all about it and let me find it out. That is a promise, and you know I do not make them lightly, and you know I keep the ones I make.

"But I am not going to make it into a thing that means I am coming soon, or that everything will be well, or that we shall all be sitting under your trees in a twelvemonth being comfortable. I do not know what is going to happen in this county. Nobody does. I only know that I am going to be here, at that wall, learning it, for as long as there is a reason to; and that when there is no longer a reason to, one way or the other, I shall get onthe northern coach and come and find you, and it may be a year and it may be twenty."

"Mary—"

"Do not cry, or I shall, and then we shall both go down with red faces and my mother will say something." Mary took her by the shoulders, which she had never done. "Lizzy. You did a thing for me this autumn that nobody has ever done. You gave me the arithmetic and let me do it. You are the only one who did not try to take the sum off me. I am not going to forget it, and it is the reason I can stand here and let you go and be glad about it instead of afraid, and I want you to carry that north with you and not spend the whole journey worrying about me, because I am, for the first time in my whole life,exactly where I mean to be."

She stepped back.

"Now go and be married and go to Derbyshire," said Mary Bennet, "and write to me about the roads."

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They came down. The carriage was at the door.

Mr. Bennet was in the hall, in a chair that had been brought out for him, because he could not stand at the door to see them off and had refused to be upstairs for it. Elizabeth knelt down by the chair, in her traveling clothes, in front of everybody, which she would once have thought a great piece of theater and now did not think about at all.

"Papa."

"Now, Lizzy. None of that." But he had hold of her hand. "You have done very well. You have married a better man than your father and a richer one and a kinder one, and you had the sense to refuse him first, which is the only part of the whole business I am unreservedly proud of, because it is the part that was yours.

"Go to Derbyshire. Be happy. Write to your sister about the roads, since she will plainly perish without it." He lowered his voice, so that it was only for her. "And come in the spring, if youcan, and do not leave it too long, and I shall say no more than that, because your mother is three feet away pretending not to listen and I will not have a scene.

"I have had five daughters," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have done almost nothing right by any of you, and it has come out better than I had any claim to, which is the usual way with people who do not deserve their luck. Go along. You are letting the cold in."

Elizabeth kissed him, and stood up, and did not make a scene, because he had asked her not to and it was very nearly the last thing he ever asked her.

Then she went out to the carriage on her husband's arm, into the cold bright afternoon; and as it turned in the sweep she looked back, and saw the whole of them in the doorway and around the chair — her mother and Jane and Bingley and Kitty and Georgiana, and Mary a little apart with Denny beside her, and her father in the chair in the middle of them with his hand up; and beyond the house, past the shrubbery, the gray church and its churchyard, where the November grass on the oldest graves lay pale and still in the low sun, exactly as it had lain since the twelfth of August, waiting.

The carriage went down the sweep and out at the gate and turned north, and Longbourn passed out of sight behind the hedge.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Pemberley in winter was a different house from the one Elizabeth had walked through in August with her aunt and uncle, and she was a long time learning it.

The wood she had promised Mary was bare and black and full of water, and the stream was up, and the hills behind the house had snow on them by the first week of December and kept it; and the house itself, which had seemed in summer to stand so easily on its rising ground, revealed itself in the short days to be a thing that wasworked— that a hundred people kept, and mended, and watched, all winter, in a hundred small ways she had never thought about, because a great house on old ground in the cold is not a picture but a machine for holding weather and time at bay, and somebody is always attending to it.

And her husband walked the west boundary at the quarter days with Mr. Havell, and now with Mr. Havell's successor.

Wickham had come at Michaelmas, before the wedding, quietly, and been installed in the warden's cottage, and Havell had spent six weeks showing him the ground and then gone home to Kendal with a pension and a great deal of relief; and Elizabeth had not seen him, and did not intend to, and he did not intend to be seen, and the arrangement held perfectly, three miles of park between the cottage and the house, and would hold, she understood, for thirty years.

She asked Darcy once, in December, whether it was strange to him — to have that man on his ground, in his father's gift, holding a thread of his own line.

"Every day," said Darcy. "And it is the best thing I have done, and I would do it again to-morrow, and both of those are true, and I have stopped expecting them to resolve. Some things do not resolve. You marry the whole of a person and you take thewhole of a decision; there is no version where I have the good of it without the strangeness."

"That is a very married thing to say."

"I have been married five weeks," said Darcy. "I am learning quickly. I had a good teacher in a copse in Hertfordshire, though she was not teaching me."

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The letters came north all winter.

Jane wrote from Netherfield twice a week, in her mild even hand, and her letters were full of small good things and one large one held carefully underneath them, which was their father; and Elizabeth learned to read the underneath of Jane's letters the way she had learned everything else that year, by attending to what was being kept flat.

Papa is much as he wasmeant no worse.