Page 87 of Hard Home

He was perfectly still for a moment. Then he took up another bundle and began to square the edges of it on the table.

"That is not a question I am able to answer, ma'am."

The window was behind him. It was a good window, the whole width of the room, looking down into the market place with the sun full on it, and Elizabeth had walked into that parlor and put herself where she was standing for one reason.

She watched his hands.

They were quite steady, and they went on squaring the papers; and then, for perhaps two seconds, they stopped, both of them flat on the bundle, and the knuckles went white, and then they went on again.

"You have applied to be left here," said Elizabeth. "Twice. With a corporal and a horse. And you have been refused twice, and you have written to Horse Guards eleven times and had four answers, and none of the four said anything at all."

Captain Harding put down the papers.

He turned round and looked at her, and Elizabeth found that she had been quite wrong about his face, which she had seen four or five times across assembly rooms and had thought sour.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody who did anything wrong."

"No," he said slowly. "No, I do not suppose he did." He let out a breath. "Miss Bennet, I am going to say four things to you and then I am going to ask you to go away, and I want you to understand that I shall deny every one of them if you repeat them.

"The first is that I cannot tell you my orders and you must not ask me again.

"The second is that my orders do not require me to be silent about thefactof them, and so I shall tell you this much: they are to observe, and to report, and to preserve the public calm. There is nothing in them about acting. I have asked for something about acting eleven times.

"The third is that I march on Tuesday with every man I have, that no troops are to be quartered in this town beforeMichaelmas, and that I have been informed, in writing, by a gentleman at a desk in London who has never been north of the river in his life, that the matter isnot at present of a nature requiring the retention of a detachment."

He stopped.

"And the fourth?" said Elizabeth.

"The fourth is a question." Harding put his hands behind his back. "Is there anybody in this county with any line at all?"

The market place went on below the window. Somebody was calling out about strawberries.

"I do not perfectly understand you," said Elizabeth.

"Yes you do, or you would not be standing in this room." He was not unkind about it. "I have eleven officers and about two whole gifts between them, and on Tuesday I take all of it away. There will be four hundred people in this town and eleven hundred in the parish and not one warded doorway that has been touched by a competent hand in four hundred years. So I am asking, before I go, whether there is anybody here — one person, ma'am, of any age or sex or condition — who has anything in them that answers when it is spoken to."

Elizabeth stood in the middle of Mrs. Forster's parlor with her hands folded in front of her.

"There is my sister Jane," she said. "She quiets things. She has no idea that she does it and it has been making her ill since November, and she is three-and-twenty and I would not have her told for anything in the world. There is my sister Mary, who can hear whether a spoken thing has weight in it, and who has read every book on the subject in three counties and is the only person in this parish who understands one word of it. There is myself. I see what people are.

"And there is my sister Lydia, who is fifteen, who has more of the old blood in her than any of us because she is the youngestand it has not been spent, and who is going to Brighton on Monday."

Captain Harding closed his eyes for a moment.

"Four hundred years in the male line," he said. "Bennet of Longbourn. Yes. I looked it up in November." He opened them again. "Miss Bennet, I am not permitted to advise you and I am going to. Keep the second one — the one with the ear — near the third one, and both of them out of the low ground, and if you can contrive that your eldest sister leaves this county for the summer, contrive it.

"And write everything down. Everything, with the day and the hour, in a hand that a stranger can read. When this becomes a matter of a nature requiring something, there will be a man sent down from London who has never been here, and he will want to know what happened in April, and there will be nobody left in Meryton who can tell him. Somebody must be the record."

"My sister Mary has been keeping it since Easter."

"Then your sister Mary," said Captain Harding, "is of more use to the Crown at this moment than I am, and I have been eleven years at it."

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He stopped her at the door.