Page 75 of Hard Home

The compliment to herself and her sister, was not unfelt. It soothed, but it could not console her for the contempt which had been thus self-attracted by the rest of her family; — and as she considered that Jane's disappointment had in fact been the work of her nearest relations, and reflected how materially the credit of both must be hurt by such impropriety of conduct, she felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before.

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At two o'clock she went back to the parsonage and found that the gentlemen had gone.

They had left Rosings at eleven. Mr. Collins had walked up to pay his respects and had been received by Lady Catherine with a good deal of conversation about the dulness of everything now that her nephews were away, and had come back gratified.

Elizabeth heard it standing in the passage with her bonnet strings in her fingers, and felt the floor of the day give way a second time, and was surprised at herself.

"He is gone, then," she said.

"At eleven," said Charlotte. "Lizzy, sit down before you fall down. Where have you been for four hours?"

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She tried three times that afternoon to write to Jane, and burned all three.

The first was seven lines and read like a madwoman. The second was four sides and read like a woman who has been imposed upon by a plausible gentleman and is repeating his nonsense with the earnestness of the newly converted; she read it over and heard, in every sentence, her aunt Gardiner's kind voice in a London parlor sayingsay it aloud and hear howit sounds. The third was very calm and very reasonable and contained nothing whatever, because every fact in it was one she had promised to keep or could not prove.

She could not writethere is a strip of dead ground behind the church and it is coming toward the town, because Jane was in London and would show it to her aunt, and her aunt would be frightened, and would write to Longbourn, and Mrs. Bennet would have it round Meryton in a day and a half as a piece of news, and Elizabeth had lived in that village for two-and-twenty years and knew precisely what it would do with it.

She could not write about Georgiana Darcy at all. She had been asked not to. It had not been an oath and he had said so, which made it worse.

And she could not write the only sentence that signified —keep Lydia out of the fields and away from Mr. Wickham— without a reason attached to it, because a letter of that kind, arriving at Longbourn from Kent, would be read aloud at breakfast by her mother and laughed at by Lydia and would produce, as certainly as anything in this world, the exact opposite of its object.

She sat looking at the fourth blank sheet for a long time.

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She told Charlotte after supper, in the little back parlor, with the door shut, and Mr. Collins at Rosings.

She told her the whole of it except Georgiana's name — the field, the measurements, the antiquary's rolls, the ward at Netherfield and the taking up of it, the acknowledgment in the second dance, Wickham and the gloves and the four times, Mrs. Younge, Kitty's cough, and the promise Lydia had never given her.

Charlotte Collins listened without moving for the better part of half an hour, sitting quite upright with her hands in her lap, and at the end of it she said:

"Thank you."

"That is all you have to say?"

"No. That is the first thing I have to say, and I said it first on purpose, because you have spent four hours in a lane deciding whether you are mad, and you are not, and I have five weeks of my own evidence and you have just made sense of the whole of it." Charlotte got up and put a piece of coal on the fire with the tongs. "Now. The second thing. You cannot do anything from here."

"I am going home."

"You are going home on the sixth of May with my sister and my father, in a carriage that is already ordered, and you are not going home on Thursday alone in a hired chaise, because you have no money for it, and because if you go home three weeks early with no reason your mother will conclude that Mr. Darcy has offered for you and been refused—"

"She could hardly—"

"—and she will beright, Lizzy, and she will find it out inside a week, because Maria Lucas has eyes and Mr. Collins has a tongue, and then it will be all over Meryton that you have refused ten thousand a year on top of two thousand, and every word you say to anybody about anything for the rest of the summer will be the word of a girl who has gone strange after a disappointment." Charlotte sat down again. "You have exactly one thing that is worth anything, and it is that people believe you. Do not spend it on a chaise."

Elizabeth put her face in her hands.

"Nineteen days," she said.

"Nineteen days. And in nineteen days you will be at Longbourn with your father, who is not a fool and who reads Latin and who has a deed in a box that he has read a hundred times; and you will take your sister Mary out to that field on the first fine morning; and you will go and stand in front ofa window with this Captain Harding of yours and ask him a question." Charlotte's voice was perfectly level. "Those are three things you can do. There is no fourth thing, and sitting in Kent inventing one will cost you sleep and gain you nothing at all."

"Charlotte. If you are wrong about it and something happens in nineteen days—"

"Then it will have happened in nineteen days whether you are in Kent or Hertfordshire," said Charlotte Collins, "because you cannot save a girl of fifteen by knowing things about her. Nobody has ever done it. You can only be in the room."