Page 82 of Hard Home

"Denny is grown very dull," said Lydia presently, in the tone of a personal grievance. "He would not come in on Tuesday for above half an hour and he has not danced since Easter. And he is for ever going out on that gray mare of Captain Harding's and coming back at all hours, and when I asked him where he went he saidWare, and I said he was a great liar because there is no road to Ware that way and everybody knows it, and he laughed and would not tell me. And then Harding came in and put an endto the whole evening, and stood in the doorway, and Denny went off like a shot."

"Captain Harding does not care for cards," said Kitty.

"Captain Harding does not care for anything. He is the most disagreeable man in England and he has ruined the whole spring." Lydia poured herself some more. "There has not been a proper ride since March. We were to go to the mill and see the new wheel and Mrs. Forster had it all arranged and heforbadeit, if you please, in front of everybody, and Colonel Forster would not go against him, though he is the Colonel and Harding is only a captain, which I have never understood in my life."

Elizabeth put down her fork.

"He forbade a party from going to the mill."

"He forbids everything. They may not go past the mill, nor down the Barrett road, nor along the water at all, and not one of them will say why, and Mrs. Forster says it is because a private was drowned there at Christmas, only he was not drowned, hedeserted, Colonel Forster said so himself at dinner." Lydia rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "It is all stuff. I have been down the Barrett road twice this month and there is nothing whatever there but grass."

The room went on being an inn dining-room. Somebody in the yard below was backing a horse into the shafts, and Jane was asking Kitty about the bonnet trimming, and Maria Lucas was eating a cheesecake.

"Twice," said Elizabeth.

"Twice, and once by moonlight, which was Denny's own doing, so he may keep his airs to himself." Lydia was pleased with herself. "It was the eleventh, and we walked from the Philipses' to the corner and back, and it was as light as day and perfectly beautiful, and there was nothing to see except that the grass down there is quite a different green, and Denny went verycross and quiet on the way back and would not give me his arm and I have not forgiven him for it."

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They were seated in the carriage by half past two, Mr. Bennet's coachman having been kept waiting rather longer than he liked.

"How nicely we are crammed in!" cried Lydia. "I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another band-box! Well, now let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way home. And in the first place, let us hear what has happened to you all since you went away. Have you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any flirting? I was in great hopes that one of you would have got a husband before you came back. Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare. She is almost three and twenty!"

Jane said something about there being time enough, and Lydia went on to Brighton.

She went on to Brighton for four miles. Mrs. Forster was to have a house there; Mrs. Forster had said that a summer at Brighton was worth ten winters anywhere; Mrs. Forster was the sweetest creature in the world and only three years older than Lydia herself and they were the greatest friends imaginable and it was the most shocking thing in the world that Mrs. Forster should be married and have a house at Brighton and Lydia Bennet should be sitting in a carriage in Hertfordshire.

"And I shall get papa to take us. He will not, of course. But I shall get him to. And if he does not I shall die, and it will be his own fault, and I shall say so."

"It is a great deal of money," said Jane, "for a whole family, in a season."

"Then let him send me. Only me. Mrs. Forster would have me in a moment, she said as much, she saidLydia you shall come to us at Brighton and we shall have such fun, and I have thought ofnothing else for a fortnight and I shall go, and you may all stay at home and be dull as you like."

Elizabeth looked out of the window at the hedges of her own county going past.

She was doing an arithmetic of her own, and it would not come out any way she liked.

In a fortnight the ——shire would be gone. Every officer of it: Denny with his spent gift and his gray mare and his returns in a very neat hand; Captain Harding, who had forbidden the mill and the water and the Barrett road, and had held a whole town off a piece of ground for six months by the simple expedient of being the most disagreeable man in England and never explaining himself; the returns to Horse Guards; the whole apparatus.

Gone to Brighton, to be encamped by the sea, because that is where the ——shire was ordered and no reason had ever been given for anything.

And Meryton would have its summer back. There would be no one riding the Barrett road at four in the morning, and no one to forbid a moonlight walk, and no one at all in the county who could feel so much as a doorpost — except a great deal of grass that was the wrong color, coming uphill at nine yards in the week toward a town of four hundred people who had spent the entire winter being told nothing.

"Lydia," she said. "When the regiment goes — who is to be quartered in the town after them?"

"Nobody," said Lydia. "Is not it wretched? Not a soul till Michaelmas at the soonest, and perhaps not then. Mrs. Forster says the town will be as dead as a churchyard by June."

They came down the hill into Longbourn at four o'clock, past the corner of Barrett's ground.

Elizabeth had her face at the window before they reached it, and she saw it, and she was ready for it, and it was still worse than she had been ready for.

It was not a strip any longer. It had come up out of the low ground and spread along the near side of the road and gone over it, and there was a broad pale tongue of it lying across the corner of the next field with the young wheat coming up through it in the ordinary way, green and sound and perfectly healthy, which was somehow the most frightening thing about the whole of it.

At the far edge, three hundred yards off, a man on a gray mare was sitting quite still at the boundary with his hat in his hand.

He did not see the carriage. Or he saw it, and did not turn his head, which came to the same thing.

"That is Denny," said Lydia, with great satisfaction. "Out again. I told you he was grown dull."