Page 48 of Hard Home

Sir William Lucas had a Warrant of the Crown, which is a fine thing and confers precedence and may be inherited and is worth, to the ground of England, precisely nothing. Lady Lucas had come out of a Bedfordshire family with a small county Accord in it three generations back, of which what remained in her daughter was a little quickness with figures and a facility for remembering faces. There was no line in Charlotte Lucas that any house in the kingdom would have crossed a room for.

Which meant that when she went up the aisle at Hunsford there would be nothing to merge, nothing to spend, and nothing whatever for the ground to take an interest in. It would be a wedding; it would not be a braiding; and Mr. Collins, who had come into Hertfordshire under written instructions to find blood that would open a shy door, was going to walk out of it with a woman whose blood would not open a garden gate.

He did not know that. It had not occurred to him to ask.

Charlotte had understood within eleven minutes of the proposal that this was the one thing in the transaction she could never mention to anybody as long as she lived, since it would have made her look either very cunning or very pitiable, and she had a horror of both.

---

Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been quitted by the Gardiners and Jane; but as he took up his abode with the Lucases, his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs. Bennet. His marriage was now fast approaching, and she was at length so far resigned as to think it inevitable, and even repeatedly to say in an ill-natured tone that she "wishedthey might be happy."

But that was afterwards. On the Saturday, the news came to Longbourn in the ordinary way, which was Lydia, at a run, in the middle of the morning.

Mrs. Bennet said that it was not true. Then she said that Lady Lucas had been laying a trap this fortnight past and she had seen it and said nothing out of delicacy. Then she said that Charlotte Lucas would never have a day's health in that house. Then she cried, and had to be taken up to lie down, and came down at four to say that she supposed people who liked plain wives were entitled to them.

Mr. Bennet observed, with the greatest composure, that he had never in his life been so much gratified by anything; that he had always considered Charlotte Lucas tolerably sensible, and was now happy to find that she was as foolish as his wife and more foolish than his daughter; and that he looked forward with real pleasure to the day when Mrs. Collins should be mistress of his library.

Jane said that she was sure Charlotte would be very happy, and that Mr. Collins was a respectable man, and that everybody must be allowed to know their own mind; and she said it twice, and then went upstairs, because she had had a letter from Gracechurch-street that morning and had been keeping her face in order since ten o'clock.

Elizabeth said nothing at all.

---

Charlotte came herself, on the Monday, and asked for her, and they walked out toward the Oakham mount.

"You are angry," said Charlotte.

"I am not angry."

"You have been unable to look at me since the gate."

Elizabeth stopped in the middle of the field.

"Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, — impossible!"

"Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it incredible that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any woman's good opinion, because he was not so happy as to succeed with you?"

"Charlotte — you cannot. You have listened to that man for a fortnight and you know what he is. You told me yourself, in this very field, what a braiding is and what it costs and that it cannot be undone by consent or by law or by any court in this kingdom. And you have gone into it with your eyes open with a man you cannot respect, in a parish belonging to a woman who—"

She stopped.

"Go on," said Charlotte.

"I cannot go on. I do not know enough to go on. That is the whole of my difficulty, Charlotte, and it has been my difficulty for a fortnight, and I have not slept properly for a week." Elizabeth's voice was not steady. "You are going to Kent. Toherparish. To be within a lane's width of a woman who writes instructions in that man's pocket-book about how to get at a house, and who has kept her own daughter from swearing so much as a christening oath in nine-and-twenty years, and who will have you at her table twice a week for the rest of your life."

"Yes," said Charlotte. "I know."

"Then why?"

"Because there is nothing in me for her to want," said Charlotte Lucas.

The wind went over the field.

"That is the answer, Lizzy, and you may have it, since you asked me plainly and I have never lied to you." She had her hands in her muff and her eyes on the hedge, as she always did when she said anything that mattered. "Every one of you at Longbourn has something. Jane has a thing so rare that nobody in Meryton has even got a word for it. You have the sight. Mary has an ear that would be worth a great deal to somebody in a court of law, if she were a man, which she is not. And I have a good head for accounts and a memory for faces, and there has not been a drop of anything else in my family since my great-grandmother, and my father's honor was handed to him by a gentleman with a sword in a room in London.

"So I am perfectly safe. Do you see? Not brave —safe. I can go into that house and eat that woman's dinners twice a week for thirty years and she will look at me exactly once, on the first evening, and never trouble to look again. There is nothing in me to take. It is the only advantage I have ever had over you in my life and I intend to spend the whole of it on a parsonage with a good southern aspect and a closet full of shelves."

---