Page 64 of Hard Home

Elizabeth's hands went on with the piece.

She had heard the sentence twice in one evening now, and on the second hearing it came apart in her fingers.

Had her health allowed her to learn.

Four hundred hours at an instrument. That is what it takes; Mary had told her the figure once, gloomily, over a work-basket. Four hundred hours of a girl's own attention, poured out of her and into a wooden box, day after day from the age of six — and every one of those hours a thing spent.

They had not kept her from the pianoforte because she was ill.

They had kept her from it, and from the drawing master, and from the languages, and from the dancing, and from the parish, and from the christenings, and from court, and from the wordyes, for nine-and-twenty years; and the whole of that woman was still in her, banked and covered and unspent, waiting for the one occasion it had been saved for.

Elizabeth Bennet played to the end of the piece without a single wrong note, which had never happened to her before and never happened again.

Then she got up, and said something perfectly civil about the instrument, and did not look at anybody at all; and Mr. Darcy, standing at the corner of the pianoforte, observed that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had gone white to the lips in the space of about four seconds, and could not for the life of him account for it.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

More than once during her stay in Kent, Mr. Darcy called at the parsonage.

He came in the morning, alone, at an hour when it was tolerably certain that Mr. Collins would be at work upon his garden; and on the first occasion he sat for ten minutes and saidperhaps forty words, and Elizabeth could not conceive what had brought him.

Charlotte could.

"My dear Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he would never have called on us in this familiar way."

But when Elizabeth told of his silence, it did not seem very likely, even to Charlotte's wishes, to be the case; and after various conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to proceed from the difficulty of finding any thing to do, which was the more probable from the time of year. All field sports were over. Within doors there was Lady Catherine, books, and a billiard table, but gentlemen cannot be always within doors; and in the nearness of the parsonage, or the pleasantness of the walk to it, or of the people who lived in it, the two cousins found a temptation from this period of walking thither almost every day.

On his second solitary call he asked her, abruptly, whether she thought Mrs. Collins was happy in Kent.

"Extremely, I believe."

"She is fortunate. It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a distance of her own family and friends."

"An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles."

"And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it averyeasy distance."

"I should never have considered the distance as one of theadvantagesof the match," cried Elizabeth. "I should never have said Mrs. Collins was settlednearher family."

"It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Any thing beyond the very neighborhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far."

As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered,

"I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying circumstances."

He drew his chair a little toward her, and said, "Youcannot have a right to such very strong local attachment.Youcannot have been always at Longbourn."

Elizabeth looked surprised.

"I have been at Longbourn my whole life."

"Yes," said Mr. Darcy. "I know."

He seemed to feel that he had said something curious, and got up, and looked at a print over the chimney-piece for a while, and then took his leave and went away; and Elizabeth, who had been about to say something quite cutting, was left holding it.

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It was in her rambles that she saw him most.