Page 52 of Hard Home

"Yes," said Darcy. "Thank you, Hobbs."

He sat in that week.

The thing recovers as an ordinary strength recovers, which is to say slowly, and unevenly, and with the particular humiliation that nothing whatever can be done to hurry it. He knew the arithmetic better than most men, having been taught it at fourteen by a father who believed that a boy who would one day hold Pemberley should be told the price of everything before he was old enough to want to spend it. A great ward, well laid, out of a strong line: three weeks. A great ward taken up again, from the same line, on the ninth day after: that has no figure in any book, because no sane man does it, and the answer turned out to be nine days on a sopha in Grosvenor-street reading the same page of Coke upon Littleton eleven times.

He would have paid it again. That was not in question and had not been at any point.

What occupied him, in the nine days, was a different sum, which he did over and over with the discipline of a man determined not to arrive at the answer he wanted: that he had spent the whole of Pemberley's advantage on a ballroom in Hertfordshire, and had done it in nine seconds, and that if anyone had asked him at the time to justify it he could not have said anything more respectable thanbecause a fool wasstanding up with her and the room was beginning to look at them.

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Georgiana was at the house in town with Mrs. Annesley.

She came into the room when he arrived, and stopped, and then came the rest of the way and was embraced; and she asked after his journey and whether the roads had been bad, and hoped that he had not taken cold, and sat down opposite him with her hands in her lap.

She was sixteen and a half. She was very tall now, and would be handsome in about two years, and there was a great deal of their mother in the shape of her face.

"You are thin," she said.

"I have been in Hertfordshire, where the cook is indifferent."

"Fitzwilliam."

"I am perfectly well, Georgiana."

She looked at him for a moment with an expression that he found, as he always found it, entirely intolerable: not doubt, and not reproach, but a kind of careful watching — the look of a person checking whether it is safe to believe a thing, in a house where she had once believed something and been wrong.

Then she said, "Shall I play?" which is what she said when she wished to stop a conversation, and he said yes, which is what he said when he wished to let her.

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She had been a child who could hold a room.

It was not remarkable in a family such as theirs; there are perhaps forty houses in England where such a thing turns up in a generation, and it is generally in music or in horses. It had been in music with Georgiana since she was five. She had sat down at the instrument at seven years old in a room containing thirty people and their aunt Fitzwilliam's dinner party had stopped talking within a bar and a half — not politely, not by an effort ofmanners, but the way people stop talking when a window blows open — and old Lady Metcalfe had cried into her glove, and been perfectly unable to say why, and been rather cross about it afterwards.

That was nine years ago.

She played now for twenty minutes: a Clementi, and then some Scotch airs because she knew he liked them, and she played beautifully. Her fingering was very fine. Her time was exact. Mrs. Annesley, who had heard a great many young ladies play, listened with real pleasure and turned the pages at the right moments.

And the room stayed a room.

It had been so since the autumn before last. Nobody outside the family knew it; nobody inside it had ever said it aloud; and Miss Bingley continued to describe Miss Darcy's performance as exquisite, which it was, and to marvel at her accomplishment, which was now the correct word for it in every particular, and which had not been the correct word for it before Ramsgate.

Darcy sat and listened to his sister be accomplished.

He thought — and he was not proud of the thought and could not prevent it — of a young woman in a drawing-room in Hertfordshire, with a book in her lap, saying:do you mean that she has done anything at all? Or only that she was born with a thing that cannot be got, and has since been taught to bring it into a drawing-room and set it down where the light falls on it?

He had told her he had nothing to answer to it that night.

He had had nothing to answer to it any night since.

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The thing itself had taken about four minutes, in a lodging-house at Ramsgate in the August before last, and it had been going on for six weeks before that.

He had all the particulars now. He had had them within a day, from Mrs. Younge's own mouth, delivered with thecomposure of a woman who considered herself to have been the wronged party in the business; and he had gone through them since, in the small hours, more times than was of any use to anybody.

The essentials were these. Wickham had been at Ramsgate. He had been introduced by Mrs. Younge, whose acquaintance with him went back some years and was of a nature the world has an old word for. He had been kind to a lonely girl of fifteen who had lost her father four years before and had a brother twelve years older whom she loved and could not talk to. He had been ungloved, always, at every meeting, for six weeks — which Darcy had established afterwards by asking her, twice, in a way that he was still ashamed of.