Page 78 of Hard Home

"My mother will come to you," said Anne de Bourgh. "Not soon. When she hears something that alarms her — and she will hear it, she hears everything, there is a woman in Meryton who writes to her housekeeper — she will come to your house herself, in her own carriage, without giving notice, and she will get you into a room or a garden with nobody in it, and she will ask you to promise her a thing. It will be very reasonable. It will be phrased so that a well-bred girl cannot refuse it without being uncivil to an old woman.

"Do not promise her anything. Not a word of any kind. Do not say that you will consider it. Do not say that you have no present intention. Sayno, out loud, and go on saying it, and be as rude as you have it in you to be, and you have a great deal in you.

"That is the second."

Elizabeth found that her mouth was dry.

The ponies moved and were checked. A blackbird went over the hedge.

"The third is for me," said Anne de Bourgh, "and I am going to spend it, and you are not to make a face."

She looked down the lane toward Rosings for a moment.

"I am nine-and-twenty years old," she said, "and I have never in my life said one word that was of any use to anybody, and I have thought about it every day since I was eleven, and I did not know until Tuesday fortnight, when you looked at me across my mother's table, that there was anybody left in England who would have understood what was being done. You did not look away and you did not pity me. You went white and you finished your dinner.

"Thank you. That is the whole of it. Go away now, and do not write, and do not call if you ever come into Kent again, and do not name me to my cousin."

Elizabeth said, "Miss de Bourgh—"

"No," said Anne. "That is four, and I have not got four."

She gathered the reins, and the gray ponies came off the bank, and the phaeton went past the carriage at a walk and up the lane toward the park, and she did not look round.

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Sir William talked from Bromley to Sutton about the extraordinary condescension of the great, and Maria said eleven times that she had never heard Miss de Bourgh's voice before, not once in six weeks, and wondered whether she had a cold.

Elizabeth sat in the corner of the carriage with her hands in her lap and watched the hedges of Kent go by.

She spent three, she thought.Nine-and-twenty years of it, kept and covered and never touched, and she has just spent three sentences of it in a lane on a woman she will never see again, and one of them was thank you.

She thought about the door frame at Rosings and the hand resting on it for the length of a breath.

And she thought, with a coldness that she did not try to argue herself out of, about what the whole of that woman had been saved for, and about a nephew of ten thousand a year and eight hundred years who had ridden away from Kent three weeks ago having offered the entire thing to a girl from Hertfordshire with no fortune and a mother in Meryton — and who had been refused, in a parlor, by a woman who was at this moment sitting in a hired carriage between Sir William Lucas and his daughter with her hands quite steady in her lap.

They lay a night at an inn near Sutton, and reached Gracechurch-street at four the next afternoon, where Jane was at the window watching for them.

Chapter Thirty-Five

They were to stay four days in Gracechurch-street, and on the first evening there was no talking of anything, because the children had to be admired and Maria Lucas had to give an account of Rosings which took an hour and a quarter and contained the chimney-piece three times.

But at eleven, when the house was quiet, Jane came into her sister's room with a candle, as she had done every night of their lives when there was anything to say, and sat down on the end of the bed and put her feet under her.

"Well," she said.

"Well," said Elizabeth.

And then found that she could not begin.

She had arranged it all in the carriage from Sutton. She had four days, and a plan, and an order to put things in, and she had got as far asJane, I have something to tell you about Mr. Bingleyabout eleven times between Bromley and the turnpike; and now her sister was sitting on the counterpane with her hair down looking pleased to see her, and Elizabeth discovered that every road into the subject went through a room she could not take Jane into.

"You have been unhappy," said Jane.

"Yes."

"For about a month, from your letters. The last three were very amusing." Jane pulled the shawl round her shoulders. "You are only ever that amusing in a letter when something has happened."

"Mr. Darcy made me an offer of marriage."