Page 51 of Hard Home

"No," she said. "I do not think he would."

"Well then."

"I only observe," said Mrs. Gardiner, "that he mentioned it to you rather early in the acquaintance."

Elizabeth looked up sharply.

"My dear, I am not saying anything against him. I liked him very much; he is the pleasantest young man I have met in a twelvemonth, and if he had five hundred a year I would not say a word to you on any subject. What I am saying — and I shall say it once, because I am your aunt and it is my office — is this. He has no money. You have none. A young man in that situation who is very charming is not wicked, but he isdangerous, and chiefly to himself. Do not let him make you an object of talk. And do not be drawn in by the pleasure of hearing about a great family, which is a pleasure I know something about, having spent five years at Lambton listening to it."

"I am in no danger, aunt."

"Then that is settled, and we will have no more of it," said Mrs. Gardiner, "and you may tell me instead who this Mr. Darcy is that everybody in this house has abused for six weeks, for Iremember a very silent little boy at Lambton church who used to be brought in late and taken out early, and I have often wondered what became of him."

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The talk turned. It was midnight; the fire wanted making up; and Elizabeth went to bed with three-and-twenty separate arguments in her head, all of them good, and the whole of the Pemberley boundary walked three times over by a man who loved the boy and could not make the ground take him — which she had put away in the same drawer asthe ground never took to me, because Mr. Wickham had told her about that drawer himself, and had told her what was in it, and had told her what to think of it, and she had believed him, and there was no more to be said.

It is a very great deal easier to disbelieve a stranger than to disbelieve oneself.

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The scheme for Jane going to London was settled on the Friday. She was to go up with the Gardiners after the holidays, and to stay in Gracechurch-street; and Mrs. Bennet, who had opposed the plan for two days on the grounds that it took Jane out of the way of Mr. Bingley, was won over by being persuaded that it took Jane a great deal nearer to him.

"It is not that I have any expectation," said Jane, on the last night, sitting on the end of her sister's bed. "I want you to be very clear that I have none at all. Miss Bingley will call, or she will not call, and I shall be glad to see her either way."

"You are a shocking liar, Jane. It is the only fault you have and you have never been any good at it."

Jane laughed, and then was quiet for a while.

"Lizzy. Is it wrong of me to be glad to go?"

"Glad to go?"

"I have been so tired," said Jane, "since November. It has not gone off. And it is worse in this house than it is at my aunt Philips's, and worse in the fields than in the house, and I do not want to say so, because it sounds like a girl complaining that she has been crossed in love, and Ihavebeen crossed in love, and everybody will say that is the whole of it." She smoothed the counterpane. "It is not the whole of it. I do not know what else there is. But I should like to sleep in a street in London for two months with three thousand houses round me, and I am ashamed of how much I should like it."

"Then go," said Elizabeth, "and sleep, and do not be ashamed. You may be as ashamed as you like in March."

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They went on the Monday.

On the same day the ——shire lost a private soldier called Fenn, of eleven years' service and a good character, who was sent from Meryton to Ware with a packet and did not arrive; and the horse came back on the Wednesday, unhurt, with the packet still on it and the near stirrup gone.

They searched three days. Captain Harding put out that the man had deserted, and applied the usual language to it in the returns, and stopped Lieutenant Denny in the yard on the Thursday evening and said, without preamble, "He went by the Barrett road. Nobody is to be told that."

"Sir, if we said it plainly — if the town knew that they were not to go past—"

"If this town is told plainly," said Harding, "then within a week there will be a hundred and forty people standing along the edge of that ground in the dark holding lanterns and looking at it, because that is what people do, Denny, that is exactly and invariably what people do."

He went in.

The next day the officers of the ——shire were at the assembly rooms, and Miss Lydia Bennet danced four dances and pronounced it the pleasantest evening of the whole Christmas.

Chapter Twenty-Four

It took him nine days to be fit to ride.

He said nothing about it to anybody, and there was nobody to say it to; he went out very little; and on the fourth morning his man, who had been with him eleven years and had the sense to be silent, brought his coffee and observed that it was very raw weather for December, and that a gentleman who had lately been in a damp county might do worse than sit in this week.