Page 5 of Hard Home

There was a small silence. It was, Elizabeth thought afterward, the only true thing her mother said that day, and nobody in the room remarked it.

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She went up to dress before dinner and stopped on the landing where the light came in, because her mother was below in the hall giving orders about a chicken in a voice that could be heard in the orchard, and Elizabeth — for no reason, fromidleness, because she was two-and-twenty and it was a Tuesday — looked at her.

That was all it was, when she used it. She looked, and she saw what was underneath, and she had never been able to explain to anybody how little effort it took or how impossible it was to undo afterward.

She had expected vanity. She had been expecting vanity for six years, and had built a considerable quantity of wit upon it, some of which she was rather proud of.

What was underneath her mother was terror.

Not a figure of speech; not a mother's ordinary fretting; a white, flat, sustained, unsleeping terror, the kind a man has in the last two hundred yards of a wardline, running underneath the chicken and the lace and the nerves and the four-and-twenty years of noise, and it had been running there so long and so steadily that Elizabeth understood, standing on the stairs with her hand on the rail, that it was not a thing her mother felt.

It was a thing her motherwas. It had eaten everything else and put on her clothes.

"Lizzy!" said Mrs. Bennet, from the hall, in her ordinary shriek. "Lizzy, do come down, I cannot make Hill understand me about the chicken —"

"Coming, mama," said Elizabeth.

She came down. She was perfectly agreeable at dinner and made her father laugh twice.

But she did not laugh at her mother that evening, and Jane noticed it, and asked her about it that night with the candle between them, and Elizabeth said that she was only tired.

It was the first lie she had ever told her sister, and she told it because the truth was this:she is right and we are all of us wrong, and she has known for four-and-twenty years what I have known for six, and she has known it alone, and she is not clever enough to say it in any way that would make us listen —so she says chicken, and lace, and nerves, and Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Bingley.

Elizabeth lay awake some while.

Somewhere south of the Thames, though she did not know it and would not for eleven weeks, a regiment that had no business north of the river was striking its tents.

Chapter Three

The assembly rooms at Meryton were warded at the door, which was a courtesy and not a precaution, and every family in the neighborhood understood the difference.

The ward was a thin gray line worked into the lintel by somebody's great-grandmother, and what it did was very small: it took the edge off. Inside it, a man of strong line could stand within a yard of a woman of strong line and feel nothing more than he would have felt at a card table. It made dancing possible. It made conversation possible. Without it, an assembly would have been a hundred people in a hot room with their blood shouting at one another, and nothing whatever would have got settled, which was after all the entire purpose of an assembly.

Everyone touched the lintel coming in. It was habit, like taking off a hat.

Mr. Bingley touched it, and smiled at it, as though it were a dog that had come up to be patted.

The gentleman behind him did not touch it. He put two fingers against it, and paused, and Elizabeth — who was standing with Charlotte Lucas at the far side of the room and had a clear view of the door because she had contrived to have a clear view of the door — saw the gray line brighten under his hand and then settle, quieter and stronger than it had been in her lifetime.

"Well," said Charlotte.

"Well," said Elizabeth.

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Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman. But his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tallperson, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.

The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man. The ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley. And Mrs. Long, who had it from her sister, who had it from a woman in the north, said the word that made the room turn:Pemberley.

"Pemberley," said Lady Lucas, "is not thirty years old, nor three hundred. Pemberley is one of thefirstAccords. It was made when the courts were still here to make them. There are perhaps four such left in England."

"And the land answers him?" said Mrs. Long.

"The land does not merely answer him," said Lady Lucas, with the deep satisfaction of a woman retailing something she has been saving all week. "They say itlistens."

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