Page 88 of Hard Home

"Miss Bennet. One more thing and it is not official either." He had gone back to the table and was not looking at her. "Lieutenant Denny is a very good young man who gave a great deal of himself to a piece of ground in Sussex before he was two-and-twenty, and he has been alone in this business since November because I have not been able to talk to him about it and there has been nobody else. If your sister — the one with the ear — should happen to go on writing to him from time to time after Tuesday, I should be glad of it, and I have no business saying so."

"I shall tell her," said Elizabeth.

"Do not tell her that I asked."

"No," said Elizabeth. "I shall tell her that he would like it."

Captain Harding, for the first time in six months in Hertfordshire, laughed.

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Mr. Wickham came to Longbourn on the Saturday.

He came with two other officers and stayed an hour, and was charming to Mrs. Bennet, and was more particular to Elizabeth than he had been since January, Miss King having been carried off to Liverpool and Miss Bennet being handsome and at leisure.

She had put on her gloves before he came into the room.

She had thought about it for a day and a half. She had thought about being ill, and about going out; and she had concluded that a woman who avoids a man tells him something, and that she could not afford to tell George Wickham anything at all for another four days.

So she sat and talked to him.

"I hope you had a pleasant stay in Kent," said he.

"Very pleasant, I thank you. I was there five weeks."

"You saw Rosings, then. And Lady Catherine." He smiled. "And her nephew, I collect. Mr. Darcy is generally there at Easter — it is quite an institution, the Easter visit; he goes to be looked over by his aunt and to be shown his cousin, and comes away, and it has been going on for eleven years and will go on for eleven more."

"He was there three weeks."

"Three! You must have had a great deal of him. And how did you find him? I ask because you will hardly believe how curious I am. Did he improve on acquaintance? He improves in Kent, I have always heard. There is a good deal more of the great man about him in his aunt's house than there is in a Hertfordshire assembly room."

Elizabeth looked at him.

She could have done it in a sentence. She had it ready — she had had it ready since a field in Kent, and it would have cost him nothing that could be proved and would have cost her nothing but the pleasure of watching his face, and the whole of her wanted it, and it went through her like a taste.

I know what you did at Ramsgate, and I know it was the fourth time.

Four days. Lydia went on Monday and it was Saturday afternoon.

Say that sentence in this parlor, she thought, and by six o'clock he will know that Darcy has told somebody; and a man who has been quiet for eleven years because nobody could speak will not be quiet after that; and he has taken my sister onto that ground five times, and the ground stopped moving on the second of May, and I do not know what he wants with her, and I do not know how long he needs, and if I frighten him now I shall find out.

"He improves in Kent," she said, "in some particulars. I heard nothing to his credit that I had not heard before, and a good deal to his discredit that I had. He was very civil to my friend Mrs. Collins, who is nobody, and very silent to everybody else, and he sat in a room for three weeks looking at a carpet. I cannot say I understand him at all."

Mr. Wickham's face cleared into something so like relief that she nearly lost her temper on the spot.

"There," he said warmly. "That is exactly it. That is exactly what he is, and I have never been able to make anybody see it, because they will have it that a man who says nothing must be thinking something. Miss Bennet, you are the only person of sense in this county."

"So I am often told," said Elizabeth.

He went at five, and pressed her hand at the door through the glove, and said a number of graceful things about hoping to hearthat she was well, and about Brighton, and about how his chief consolation in leaving Hertfordshire was that he took so much of it with him.

She said that she was sure Meryton would feel his loss.

When he had gone she went up to her room and took off both gloves and sat on the edge of the bed and shook for a quarter of an hour, and then washed her hands, twice, in cold water, and came down and was pleasant at dinner.

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The regiment marched on Tuesday morning at seven.