Page 84 of Hard Home

Mary looked at the floor.

"I have got out of the habit of expecting people to laugh," she said. "It has been rather uncomfortable. I do not recommend it."

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It took an hour and ten minutes.

Mary heard the whole of it without once interrupting — the ballroom and the ward taken up, the letter, the field, the antiquary's rolls, Wickham and the gloves, Mrs. Younge and the fourth time, the man Fenn who was written down a deserter, and Anne de Bourgh in a phaeton in a Kentish lane spending three sentences.

At the end she said, "Say the part about the rolls again."

Elizabeth said it again.

"Four hundred and eleven entries and no gap," said Mary. "No gap. He is certain of that."

"He is certain that the clerks left no space."

"Then it is not that the county was passed over," said Mary. "You may pass over a thing and the clerks will still leave the county's name and writenil, because a clerk is paid by the entry and he likes to be seen to have gone down the whole list. There is no space because the county was never on the list. It was never brought before them at all."

"Which means?"

"Which means somebody had already had it," said Mary Bennet.

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She got up and fetched a second book from under the mattress, which she had evidently thought about a good deal.

"After Easter I did three things," she said. "The first is that I went and looked at it, on the twentieth of April, in the morning, with Hill's boy for company, and I have been six times since."

"Mary—"

"I did not go on it. I went to the edge and I walked the edge and I paced it and I wrote the figures down, and I would like you to look at them before you say anything, because I have done it the same way every time and I have used the same boots."

The figures were in a column, with the dates. Elizabeth ran her eye down them and stopped.

"It has slowed."

"It has stopped," said Mary. "On the second of May it stopped. It went nine yards a week from Michaelmas to Lady day — I have got the earlier part from Denny, and I shall come to that — and then it went eleven yards in the last week of April, which frightened me a good deal, and then on the second of May it stopped, and it has not moved one pace in a fortnight."

"Then that is—"

"It is not good," said Mary. "Lizzy, I want to be very careful here, because I am nineteen and I have read four books and I have never in my life seen anything of this kind, and a person who has read four books is exactly the person who says a stupid thing with confidence. But a thing that has been coming steadily for eight months does not stop because it has got tired."

"Then why does it stop?"

"Because it has got where it was going," said Mary.

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The second thing was Denny.

"He would not talk to me at first. He talks to me now." Mary said it without any expression whatever. "I did not do anything clever. I went to the church on the Tuesday after Easter and hewas sitting in the porch by himself, and I sat down at the other end of it and did not say anything for about twenty minutes, and then I asked him what the marks are that you look for. And he told me."

"Hetoldyou?"

"He has been in this county since November with a thing in his head that he is not allowed to say to anybody, and his commanding officer will not discuss it with him, and his friends are all at cards." Mary turned a page. "He is two-and-twenty, Lizzy. He wanted to say it to somebody so much that he did not care that it was me. I have four pages of him."

"What is in them?"