Page 44 of Hard Home

Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did Mrs. Bennet give up the point. She talked to Elizabeth again and again; coaxed and threatened her by turns. She endeavored to secure Jane in her interest, but Jane with all possible mildness declined interfering; — and Elizabeth sometimes with real earnestness and sometimes with playful gaiety replied to her attacks.

"Do not think me obstinate, mama. I am not."

"You are worse. You are clever." Mrs. Bennet's hands were shaking, which Elizabeth had seen perhaps four times in her life. "I have had that said of me my whole life, that I am a silly woman and do not understand the world, and I did not mind it, and I do not mind it now, and I will tell you what I understand, Lizzy, that not one of you does. There will be a morning in this house — I donot know the date of it and neither do you, and it may be twenty years off and it may be the eleventh of next month — when your father does not come down. And on that morning there will be a knock at that door, and it will be a stranger, and he will be perfectly within his rights, and every one of you will walk out of the only warm place any of you has ever been in with nothing in your hands and nothing in your blood, and you will be five and thirty, or five and twenty, or fifteen. And a door opened this week. It was a small, ridiculous, disagreeable door and I would not have chosen it for you, and it was the only one that has ever opened in two-and-twenty years, and you shut it in a quarter of an hour before breakfast because the man was tedious."

Elizabeth stood very white.

"Mama," she said, "I know."

"You do not know. If you knew it you would have taken him."

"I know it better than you think," said Elizabeth, "and I still would not. And if I could tell you why, you would understand me in a moment, and I cannot, and that is the whole misery of it."

But Mrs. Bennet had already gone out of the room to look for Kitty, and did not hear the last of it, and Elizabeth was glad afterwards that she had not.

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Her father sent for her once more, late in the afternoon, when the house had settled into its sulks.

He was not reading. The library fire had gone low and he had not rung.

"Sit down, Lizzy." He waited until she had. "This morning, between the hours of ten and eleven, I did a thing I am not going to do again, and I find I want to tell somebody about it, and there is only you."

"Papa—"

"I considered it," said Mr. Bennet. "That is all. I sat in this chair with your cousin's voice coming through two doors, and Iconsidered whether I ought to tell you to accept him." He looked at the fire. "It would answer, you know. That is the disgusting part of it. It is a perfectly sound arrangement. He is not a brute, so far as one can tell; he is a bore, which is not the same and is a great deal commoner; and the house would go on, and your mother would have her rooms, and your sisters would keep what they have, and in thirty years' time there would be a Bennet-blooded man of God at that table telling somebody about closets. I got as far as working out what I should say to you. I had it quite well phrased. I am rather good at phrasing."

Elizabeth did not move.

"And then I found that I could not do it," he said, "for a reason that does me no credit at all, which is not that it would be wrong, but that I should have had to watch it. Every day. At my own table. I have been a spectator in this house for four-and-twenty years, Lizzy — it is the only trade I have ever been any good at — and I discovered this morning that there is one performance I will not sit through."

He picked up his book, and did not open it.

"So you will have nothing when I die," said Mr. Bennet. "Nothing at all, and it is my doing, and I have known it since before you could walk, and I have made a joke of it once a week for twenty years because the alternative was to sit in this room and think about it. Well. I have now sat in this room and thought about it. It is much as I expected."

"Papa. Look at me."

"No," said her father, quite gently. "I do not think I shall, just now. Go and see if your mother wants anything; she will not, but she likes to be asked. And shut the door."

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Miss Lucas called soon after breakfast the next morning, and in a private conference with Elizabeth related the event of the day before.

"Mr. Collins," Elizabeth said, "made me an offer, and I refused him."

"So I gathered," said Charlotte, "from your mother, who told me before I was through the gate, and from Maria, who had it from your Hill, and from my own father, who is composing a speech of congratulation for Mr. Collins on his escape and will be very disappointed if he is not allowed to make it."

Elizabeth laughed for the first time in two days.

"Lizzy," said Charlotte, in an entirely different voice, "what happened at the ball?"

"Nothing happened at the ball."

"You went white in the second dance, and Mary Bennet came through that crowd like a woman going for a doctor, and Mr. Darcy of Pemberley stood against a window for four hours and could not stand up at the end of it, which I had from Mrs. Nicholls, who had it from the man who was sent for his carriage." Charlotte's face was perfectly calm. "I am not asking out of curiosity."

"Then why are you asking?"

"Because I would like to know," said Charlotte, "what I am dealing with."