Page 85 of Hard Home

"The whole of the measurements from Michaelmas. What was done at a place called Selsey in Sussex, which I did not understand at first and understand now. What happened to him there — he gave a great deal of himself into the ground to mend a line and it did not come back and it is not going to." Mary's voice did not alter at all. "The names of two other places in Sussex where the same thing has begun since Christmas. The fact that Captain Harding has written to Horse Guards eleven times and has had four answers and none of them said anything, and that the regiment is going to Brighton in a fortnight and Harding has applied twice to be left here with a corporal and a horse and has been refused both times.

"And that he — Denny — asked for leave to warn the town in March, in writing, and was refused; and that he thinks about the man Fenn every day; and that when he was ordered to writedesertedin the return he did it, and it took him three quarters of an hour to write one word."

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"The third thing," said Mary, "is Lydia, and it is the one I have not known what to do with."

She put the pocket-book back on the bed and opened it at the second list.

"Look at the third column and forget the rest. Every time she has been on that ground, he has been with her. Every time. And on the twenty-sixth of April Kitty asked to go and Lydia would not take her, and I heard it happen on the stairs, and Lydia said—" Mary stopped, and then went on in the same flat voice, "Lydia said,he does not want you, he wants me, and you are always coughing."

Elizabeth sat quite still.

"She thinks she is being singled out," said Mary. "She is fifteen. It is the first time in her life that a man has preferred her to anybody and she would go into a river for it. And I have thought about it every night since the second of May, and I cannot make it come out any way but one, and I would be very glad if you would tell me I am wrong.

"He is not taking her there because it is a pleasant walk. He has taken her onto that ground five times in four weeks, and the ground stopped moving on the second of May, and she is a Bennet of Longbourn, four hundred years in the male line, and she has never sworn anything and she has never promised anything and there is not one soul in that house who has ever told her what her own blood is worth."

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Elizabeth went down to the library at eight o'clock that evening.

Her father was in his chair with the candles lit, and he looked up and said, "Well, Lizzy. Kent. Was Mr. Collins as fine as we hoped?"

"Papa, I want you to hear something and not to be funny about it for a quarter of an hour."

"That is a great deal to ask of a man of my habits, but I shall try."

She talked for forty minutes.

She left out Georgiana, and she left out the proposal; and she gave him everything else — the field, the figures, Tarrant's rolls, Mary's columns, Denny, Fenn, the eleven letters to Horse Guards, the regiment going in a fortnight, Wickham and the five walks andhe does not want you, he wants me.

Mr. Bennet did not interrupt. He did not smile. When she had done he sat for a while with his fingers together, and then he got up and went to the high shelf and took down the japanned box and put it on the table, and did not open it.

"Do you believe me?" said Elizabeth.

"Yes," said her father.

She had expected to have to fight for that, and found that she had nothing to do with the strength she had brought.

"Then—"

"Sit down, Lizzy, and let me be honest with you, which I have not been in about twenty years and shall probably not manage again." He sat down himself, rather heavily. "I believe every word of it. I believed the first third of it before you came into this room, because I have lived in this county for one-and-fifty years and I have known since I was a boy that there is something wrong with the low ground beyond Barrett's, in the way that one knows a thing that everybody knows and nobody says. My father would not shoot down there. His father dug a pond and filled it in again. It is not knowledge. It is the sort of thing a family has instead of knowledge."

"Then you will stop her going to Brighton."

"No," said Mr. Bennet.

Elizabeth stood up.

"Sit down. You shall have the reason, and it is not a good one, and you are not going to be able to argue with it, which is what will make you angriest." He put his hand flat on the box. "Lydia is going to Brighton because Mrs. Forster has asked her,and because if I forbid it there will be such a scene in this house as you cannot conceive, and it will not last a day, it will last until August; and because Lydia at Brighton is Colonel Forster's affair and Lydia at Longbourn is mine.

"And because — attend to this part, Lizzy, since it is the only piece of sense in it — the regiment is going to Brighton. Mr. Wickham is going to Brighton. That ground is here. You have just spent forty minutes telling me that the danger to your sister is a piece of Hertfordshire, and now you wish me to keep her in Hertfordshire."

"He will be there. He will be with her every day and there will be nobody—"

"He will be in a camp with two thousand men and a colonel's wife who is fond of her," said Mr. Bennet, "and she will spend six weeks buying bonnets and being ridiculous, and she will come home in September no worse than she went, which is the most that any of us has ever been able to say about Lydia."

"You do not believe that."