Page 54 of Hard Home

That was true also, and it was ungenerous, and he knew it was ungenerous while he was saying it, and said it because it was the argument that would work on Caroline and would therefore keep her in the room and on his side.

And he did not say:Charles, do not take that house again, and do not take a house within thirty miles of it, and do not let your sisters go into that county in the spring. There is something under Barrett's ground and it is coming uphill at nine yards in the week and I have written to a man in Londonwho tells me the county was never bargained for at all. I laid the best ward of my life on your ballroom and I took it up again on the ninth night because a clergyman with a pocket-book was three figures from getting a girl of two-and-twenty acknowledged in front of the county, and there was no other way to stop it, and I then held that room with my own line until three in the morning, and I have been nine days getting up off a sopha.

He did not say it because he had promised Georgiana that no one would ever know what Wickham was, and half of it could not be explained without the other half; and because Charles would have gone back the next morning to see about it, being that sort of man; and because a gentleman of eight hundred years does not go about the drawing-rooms of London telling people that a county is unsafe on the evidence of the color of some grass.

Those were the reasons. He had them in order. He rehearsed them at intervals for four months and they got no better with keeping.

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Georgiana asked him, on the last night of the year, whether he had liked Hertfordshire.

"Not particularly," said Darcy.

"Charles says it is full of the pleasantest people in England."

"Charles says that of every county he has ever slept in."

She smiled, and turned over a page of her music, and said, without looking up, "Fitzwilliam, was there anybody there?"

He had a great many answers to that, of which the shortest wasno, and he found that he could not produce a single one of them; and after a silence that went on some seconds too long he said that he thought the fire wanted making up, and got up and did it himself, and stood at the chimney-piece with his back to the room for rather a while.

Behind him his sister played four bars, and stopped, and did not begin again, and sat looking at the keys.

Neither of them said anything else about it, then or for a long time; but Miss Darcy went up that night in better spirits than she had gone up in eighteen months, having discovered, as sixteen-year-old sisters do, a piece of information that her brother would have given a good deal to keep, and having no one in the world to tell it to.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jane's first letter from Gracechurch-street was written on the third day, and was chiefly about the journey, and the children, and a cap her aunt had bought; and it contained one sentence which Elizabeth read four times.

I slept nine hours on the first night and eight on the second, and woke both mornings without that heaviness, and I do not mean to say anything more about it because I am determined not to be a woman who writes about her health, but I wanted you to know, because you were kind about it and nobody else was.

She had been in town a fortnight before she wrote about Miss Bingley.

I am going to Grosvenor-street this morning. I have been three days getting up the courage, which is very foolish, since Caroline was so pressing about our correspondence that I am sure she will think it strange I did not come at once.

And then, four days later:

I called. She was not at home; or rather she was at home, for I am nearly certain I saw Mrs. Hurst at an upper window as I went away, though I would not swear to it and shall not mention it to my uncle. I have written a note to say that I called. Do not be angry, Lizzy. There are a hundred reasons.

Elizabeth was angry for both of them and said so at some length in the next post.

Four weeks passed. Then Miss Bingley came to Gracechurch-street, and stayed a quarter of an hour, and it was a fortnight before Jane could write about it at all.

My dear Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in her better judgment, at my expence, when I confess myself to have been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard for me.But, my dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do not think me obstinate if I still assert, that considering what her behavior was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion.

She came, and she was uncomfortable the whole time, and she said that she was sorry not to have called before, and that she had been so much engaged; and she looked at the room twice, and at my uncle's book-case, and out of the window at the street. And when I asked after her brother she said that he was very well and a great deal with Mr. Darcy and Miss Darcy, and she looked at me while she said it, and then she looked away.

He knows I am in town, Lizzy. She told me so, quite plainly, in the middle of something else, and I understood afterwards that it had been the object of the whole visit — that she had come three miles in a cold morning to make certain I knew that he knew, and had not come.

I do not blame him. He is not bound to me by any word or look that could be brought against him in any court in the world, and I have gone over every one of them, which I ought not to have done and did. If he does not care for me I would rather know it. Only I wish somebody would tell me why I was so certain in November, because I was certain, Lizzy, and I am not a fanciful person, and I have never once in my life been certain about anything else.

Elizabeth read that passage standing up in the hall with her bonnet still on, and went out into the garden and walked to the paddock and back twice before she trusted herself to go in to her mother.

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Miss Bingley's visit was returned by nobody, and the correspondence ceased.

Mrs. Bennet said a great many things about Bingley for a fortnight and then, with the practical cruelty of a woman with four other daughters, stopped.