Page 89 of Hard Home

Half the town was out to see it. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty went in to Meryton and cried on the pavement outside the milliner's, and Lydia was already gone — she had driven off with the Forsters on Monday afternoon in a state of happiness so complete that she had not said goodbye to Kitty at all, having said it at breakfast and considering the account closed.

Elizabeth stood at the corner by the church and watched them go past.

Colonel Forster at the head, and the band, and the waggons; and Lieutenant Denny about two thirds of the way down, on the gray mare, riding badly because he was looking at something over the hedges to the north-east; and Captain Harding last of all, alone, at a walk, with his hat in his hand and his head turned the same way, all the way to the turn of the road.

The dust settled. The town went in to its breakfast, and said what a stupid quiet place it would be all summer.

Behind the church, in the low fields going down to the water, a hundred and ninety acres of Hertfordshire lay perfectly still in the morning sun, exactly as green as everything around it, and had not moved a single pace in three weeks and one day.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Meryton was as dull as it had promised to be. There was no assembly in June and none in July; the milliner sold nothing; and Mrs. Bennet observed at least twice a week that it was a melancholy thing to live in a place where nothing whatever happened, and that she had always said so.

Elizabeth found the summer very long, and afterwards remembered it as the last ordinary weeks of her life, which is a thing that can only be done backwards.

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Kitty began to mend at the end of May.

It was not remarked upon at first, because nobody at Longbourn had ever remarked upon Kitty; and it was slow, and it went backwards twice; and it was Hill who said it first, in the kitchen passage, in the ordinary way of a servant giving out an opinion nobody has asked for: that Miss Catherine had eaten a proper dinner three days running, and that it was a pleasure to see.

By the middle of June she had put on some of what she had lost. By the end of it she was going into Meryton on foot without stopping at the second stile.

She was still tired. She would be tired, Elizabeth came to understand over that summer, for a long time and perhaps always; there was a thinness in her that was not the same as thinness of body, and she gave out before other people did, and had to be let alone in the afternoons.

But the cough went in the third week of June and did not come back.

Elizabeth kept the account of it herself, in a paper she showed to nobody, with the dates; and on the twenty-eighth of June she wrote at the bottom of it, in a hand not quite as steadyas usual:He has been gone five weeks and one day. She is better. There is no other thing that has changed.

She never afterwards knew what to do with the fact that the summer in which her family was ruined was also the summer in which she got one of her sisters back.

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Jane would not go away.

Elizabeth put it to her three times: once as a scheme, once as a favor, and the third time, in July, with the whole of the truth attached — that Captain Harding had said to get her out of the county if it could be contrived, and that she had been ill here and well in London and ill again on a fortnight's visit in February, and that there was a house in Gracechurch-street with three thousand houses round it where she had slept nine hours a night for five months.

Jane heard it all, and thought about it for a day, and said no.

"Kitty is here," she said. "Kitty is beginning to be well and there is nobody in this house who will sit with her in the afternoons and not make a noise. Mary is out of doors half the day with her book and her pacing. My mother is — my mother. And you will be in Derbyshire for six weeks."

"Jane, it ismaking you ill."

"It is making me tired," said Jane. "Which I have been for three-and-twenty years and did not know it had a cause, and I find I do not mind it half so much now that it has one." She folded the sheet she was hemming. "Lizzy, listen to me, because I am going to say something disagreeable and I shall not do it often.

"You have found a thing out. It is a very great thing and you were right about it when nobody believed you, and I am proud of you and frightened for you in about equal parts. But you have got into a way of thinking that everything can bearranged— that if only the right person is put in the right house at the right time,none of it will happen. And I do not believe that is how anything has ever gone in this family.

"I am staying at Longbourn because my sister is ill in it. If that is stupid, it is the only stupid thing I have ever insisted upon, and I should like to have it."

Elizabeth did not try again.

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Lydia's letters were of the sort that might have been expected.

There were four of them in six weeks, and they were short, and they were mostly about a green gown, a review, a bathing machine, and a person called Pratt.

We had a great party at the Blue Lion and I danced with Captain Carter twice and Mrs. F. says I am the prettiest girl in the camp which is nonsense but she says it. Kitty may have my old bonnet if she likes it as I have three now.