Page 50 of Hard Home

Mrs. Gardiner watched him for two evenings and did not say anything for three days.

She watched other things also, being a woman who had raised four children of her own and had eyes in her head, and on the second morning she said to her sister:

"Fanny. What is the matter with Catherine?"

"Kitty? Nothing on earth is the matter with Kitty. She has a little cough. She has always had a little cough."

"She has not always had a little cough. She had none in June."

"Well, and it is December," said Mrs. Bennet, "and she will sit in drafts, and she frets, and she has always been the one that frets. Lydia has never had a day's illness in her life and theyare but eighteen months apart, so you may see it is nothing but temper."

Mrs. Gardiner said no more about it to her sister. She did say something to Elizabeth, on the Thursday, in the passage, in the low practical voice of a woman who has decided not to alarm anybody: that Kitty ought to be got to town in the spring and looked at by a proper man in Harley-street, and that if the thing were mentioned to Mrs. Bennet as anoutingrather than as an illness it might be managed without a fortnight of hysterics.

Elizabeth said that she would see to it, and meant it, and did not do it, because in the spring a great many other things happened.

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But it was on the evening after Boxing-day, when the two of them sat late over the fire with the others gone up, that Mrs. Gardiner said the thing that mattered, and it went past Elizabeth like a coach in the dark.

They had been speaking of Derbyshire. Mrs. Gardiner had spent the greater part of her youth at Lambton, which is five miles from Pemberley, and had not been there in fifteen years, and had that evening the pleasure of finding a niece who wished to hear about it.

"Then you knew the family," said Elizabeth.

"I knew the outside of them, my dear, which is all anybody in a village knows and rather more than they suppose. Old Mr. Darcy was very much respected. He came into the shop on his own feet, which is a thing people remember for forty years." Mrs. Gardiner turned her work over. "And I knew the steward, Mr. Wickham, by sight, and there was a boy."

Elizabeth put down her needle.

"You knewhim? You never said—"

"I did not know him. I saw him about the place when I was two-and-twenty and he was a child of eight or nine, and there isnothing in the world to tell you." She smiled at her niece's face. "I remember him because of the talk, that is all. And you must understand that a village will talk about a great house the way other people talk about the weather; there is not a word of it that is evidence of anything."

"What talk?"

"That the old gentleman meant to make him warden of the west ground," said Mrs. Gardiner, "and could not."

Elizabeth sat quite still.

"Could not?"

"So it was said. It was said a great deal, one summer — I think I must have been three-and-twenty — that Mr. Darcy had taken the boy out to the boundary three times, which is a thing that is done, and that the ground would not have him. Three times, Lizzy. That is the part that was talked of. Once is nothing; a child of nine may be frightened or tired or sickening. Three times is a thing the servants counted, and the servants told the village, and the village said what villages say."

"Which was?"

"That the land at Pemberley knew something the old gentleman did not," said Mrs. Gardiner comfortably, "and would not be argued with; and that it was a great pity, for he was a beautiful boy and everybody was fond of him. And then we came away to town the year after, and I have not thought of it in fifteen years, and I should not have thought of it now if the young man had not sat at that table on Tuesday and told your uncle he was intended for the church."

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Elizabeth said, after a moment, "Aunt, that is exactly the sort of thing old servants say."

"It is exactly the sort of thing old servants say."

"They said it because they wished him out of the house. There is always a party in a great house that resents a favorite, and a steward's boy who is petted by the master—"

"Very likely."

"—and it is a cruel thing to say of a child of nine, that thegroundwould not have him, as though a piece of land could sit in judgment on a boy who has done nothing at all." Elizabeth heard her own voice rising, and did not much like the sound of it, and went on anyway. "He told me himself that it was said. He told me the whole of it, unprompted, at my aunt Philips's, and made no secret of it, and it has been used to hurt him his whole life. If he were what such talk makes him, would he mention it?"

Mrs. Gardiner considered this.