Page 37 of Hard Home

"Go on," said Elizabeth.

"It has a name," said Mary. "I have read it. I cannot remember it, and it is not in the Discourse, it is in the other one, and I shall look for it." She raised her eyes for a moment, whichshe hardly ever did. "I am not saying that he means anything by it, Lizzy. I do not think he is clever enough to mean anything. I am saying that it does not signify in the least whether he means it."

Then she went away to her room, and Elizabeth heard her moving about over her head for a long while, taking books down.

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At Netherfield, in a long room with the carpets up and the chandeliers down and every window shuttered against the light, Mr. Darcy had been on his knees since Thursday.

He had done the threshold, which took four hours, and the four corners, which took a day and a half between them, and he was now at the window bay at the west end, where the old part of the house joins the new, and where there was — he had known it within a minute of coming into the room — a thinness the width of his two hands.

He had laid seventeen wards in his life. Two of them at Pemberley, which does not count, since a man's own ground helps him; the rest for other people, in other counties, at his own expense, without mentioning it to anybody.

This one was the worst ground he had ever worked on, and it was the ground of a ballroom in Hertfordshire, one mile from a village, in a county where nothing had ever needed mending.

He put his hand flat on the boards and gave it another hour's worth, and felt it take, and sat back on his heels in the dark with his ears ringing.

On Tuesday there would be a hundred people in this room for six hours.

He thought, without any particular emotion, that it would hold; and then, with a great deal more emotion than he was prepared to examine, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet would be inside it.

Chapter Eighteen

Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield and looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty of meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of the evening.

But in an instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted, for Mr. Darcy's pleasure, in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers; and though this was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was pronounced by his friend Mr. Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant smile, "I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he had not wished to avoid a certain gentleman here."

This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by Elizabeth; and as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for Wickham's absence than if her first surmise had been just, every feeling of displeasure against the former was so sharpened by immediate disappointment, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make.

Attention, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away with a degree of ill-humor whichshe could not wholly surmount even in speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind partiality provoked her.

Lieutenant Denny, who had said his piece with a significant smile because it was the kind of thing a young man says at a ball, went and stood by the wall afterwards and was rather quiet.

He had been told to go to town by Captain Harding, and had said so, and had been told that his friend's absence was Mr. Wickham's own affair and that the regiment had no business in it; and Denny, who liked Wickham enormously and had spent eleven months learning to trust a thing he could no longer feel, had gone away with the distinct impression that Harding had known Wickham would be gone before Denny told him.

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She had come in through the great door, as everybody did, and put two fingers to the frame, as everybody did.

And stopped, because something had happened to it.

The ward on that door was not the ward that had been there in October, when the Bennets came to dine. It was not a thin gray line. It was — she had no vocabulary and no training and only a country girl's habit of touching a lintel the way one straightens a hat —deep. It went in. It sat under the wood and under the stone and it did not move when she pressed it, and it had the quality, which she recognized without ever having felt it before, of a thing recently and very thoroughly done.

"Lord," said Lydia, going past, "the door has been polished. How grand they are."

The whole house had been done. She could feel it at the foot of the stairs and along the passage and, when they came into the ballroom itself, standing in the doorway with the candles and the crush and the noise all coming at her at once, she felt it close overhead like the roof of a mouth.

Elizabeth put her hand down and made a joke to Charlotte about the flowers.

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The two first dances brought a return of distress; they were dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn, apologizing instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give. The moment of her release from him was extasy.

That is the account she gave of it afterwards, to Charlotte, and to Jane, and to herself; and it was perfectly true, and it left out the middle of the second dance.

It began in the fourth figure.

They came together and back and together, and Mr. Collins said, "I have been given to understand, cousin Elizabeth, that the mode of dancing here is somewhat freer than at Rosings, where her Ladyship is very exact," and Elizabeth said, "Indeed," and they turned; and as they turned, the room leaned.