Page 53 of Hard Home

And on the last morning he had persuaded her to consent to an elopement, and she had consented, and had then — because she was fifteen and had never in her life kept anything from her brother for longer than a day — written to Darcy; and Darcy had come; and Wickham had gone within the hour with no scene at all, in a manner Darcy afterwards recognized as professional.

She had lost about nine-tenths of what she had.

There is no examination for it, and no physician in London who would not have thought them mad, and no word for it either; and the way they knew was that she sat down at the instrument on the third evening after and played the same piece she had played on the day their father died, and their aunt's housekeeper went on stacking plates in the next room.

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The oath had come four days later.

He had never intended it. He had gone into her room at eleven at night because he had heard her crying through a door, and had sat down on the chair by the bed, and had been intending to say a number of very reasonable things — that shewas not to blame, that she was fifteen, that no one would ever know — and had got as far as the last of them.

No one will ever know.

And Georgiana had sat up in the dark and taken hold of his sleeve with both hands and said, "Swear it."

He had said, "Georgiana—"

"Swear it, Fitzwilliam. Not — not that you will not tell people, I know you will not tell people, everybody says that. Swear itproperly." Her voice had gone up. "You do it for tenants. I have seen you do it in the office for a man about a boundary. Do it for me."

And she had been shaking so hard that she had not been able to hold the pen when they came to it, and he had steadied her hand, which is permitted, and it had taken; and he had felt it take, in the way one feels a door shut in a house at night — not loud, entirely final.

He had thought at the time that he was giving her the only thing he had left to give.

He had not thought at all — he had been nine-and-twenty and frightened and it had genuinely not entered his head — that there might come a day when the man was standing in a road in Hertfordshire being introduced to five sisters, of whom the youngest was fifteen years old.

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Mr. Tarrant's answer had been waiting for him at Grosvenor-street, having been three weeks in coming.

It was four sides, in a very bad hand, from a gentleman of the Society of Antiquaries who had not written to Darcy since a disagreement about a Roman pavement in 1807, and who had plainly enjoyed the inquiry a great deal.

The substance of it was short, and Darcy read it three times.

Sir, — You ask what bargains were made in Hertfordshire and by whom. The answer, which will not satisfy you, is none.

I have gone to the Rolls and to Chichele's list and to the two Winchester books. Every county south and east of the Trent is in them: what was given, what was taken, which houses, which waters, which stones. There are four hundred and eleven entries. Hertfordshire has none. It is not that the entries are lost. There is no gap where they should be; the clerks did not leave a space; the county is simply not among the counties.

Now, sir, the common opinion is that this signifies nothing more than that the courts found the ground unremarkable and passed it over — and I have myself written this in print, and you may find it in the Archaeologia for 1794, and I am now of a different mind and too old to care who knows it.

For I would put it to you that in four hundred years the wards of that county have never once been renewed, which is a fact you may verify at any parish in it in an afternoon, and which no man of sense will do because there is nothing there to alarm anybody. And I would ask you what holds up a thing that no one has ever mended.

You are in a county that was not bargained for. Something has kept it quiet notwithstanding. I do not know what, and I would very much like to, and if you are able to tell me what the grass is doing I shall be obliged to you and shall probably not sleep.

Do not go into any low ground there after dark. I am, &c.

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Bingley came on the Thursday.

He was in excellent spirits, which lasted an hour, and then he began to talk about Hertfordshire, and then about the ball, and then about a family; and Darcy sat with his hands on the arms ofthe chair and listened to his friend construct, in the most artless manner imaginable, the case for going back.

And then Miss Bingley came, and Mrs. Hurst, and the thing was done between the three of them in about forty minutes, and Darcy — this was the part he went over afterwards, for four months, and could never get to come out differently — Darcy said the two things he believed, and did not say the third.

He said that he had observed Miss Bennet closely, on many occasions, in company, and that though she received his friend's attentions with pleasure, he had never at any time seen in her the smallest symptom of peculiar regard.

That was true. He had seen her on the Thursday of the ball, and on the two Sundays before it, and at Longbourn, and at the dinner at the Philipses; and on every one of those occasions Jane Bennet had been serene, and glad, and precisely as glad of Charles as she was of everybody else in the room. He had not seen her on the Tuesday of the week she was ill, when she had been too spent to hide anything, and Charles had sat by her for three hours and been the happiest man in Hertfordshire. He had been in the ballroom that evening, on the far side, doing something to a window bay.

He said, secondly, that the connections were what they were, and that the mother and the three younger sisters were what they were.