Page 91 of Hard Home

Her first solicitude on that head was very great, and she asked her aunt, on the first evening, with what she believed to be perfect carelessness, whether Pemberley was much visited by strangers.

It was, said Mrs. Gardiner; it was one of the sights of the county; the housekeeper showed the rooms on most days and there was a very fine picture gallery.

"And is the family — I only ask because I should not like to be in the way—"

"The family are hardly ever there in the summer, my dear. Nobody is anywhere in August."

Elizabeth said that she was very glad of it, and went up to bed, and lay awake for a considerable time being ashamed of herself in about four separate directions at once.

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They set out on the twenty-second of July.

On the morning of her going, Elizabeth went up to the cold little room over the porch, where Mary was writing at the window with the pocket-book — the third one now — open in front of her.

"I shall be back on the sixteenth," said Elizabeth. "You have the whole of it. If anything happens—"

"If anything happens, I write to you at the Lambton post office and to Mrs. Collins at Hunsford, and I do not write to anybody else, and I say what happened and not what I think about it, with the day and the hour." Mary did not look up. "You have said this four times."

"I know. I am saying it again."

Mary put down her pen.

"Lizzy," she said, "may I ask you for something? I have never asked you for anything and I have been thinking about how to do it for a week."

"Ask."

"When you come back — whatever has happened, or has not happened — will you come up here and tell me about Derbyshire? Not the useful parts. I should like to hear about the roads and the hills and what the inns were like and whether thepeak country is as they say. I have never been out of this county in my life and I do not suppose I ever shall be, and everybody who goes anywhere comes home and tells my mother."

Elizabeth stood in the doorway for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I will. And Mary — Captain Harding said a thing about you in May that I have not repeated, because you would have gone red and left the room."

"Then do not repeat it now."

"I shall repeat it in September," said Elizabeth, "when I come back and tell you about the roads."

She went down. The carriage was at the door, and her mother was giving Mrs. Gardiner three separate commissions in Buxton, and Kitty was out on the step in the sun looking better than she had looked at Christmas, and Jane was standing behind her with her hand on her shoulder, perfectly serene, perfectly legible, and very tired.

Chapter Forty

They entered the park at one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.

Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; — and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!

That was the sentence that came into her head. It was very nearly the last frivolous thing she thought that day.

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She had felt it at the lodge gates and had said nothing.

It was not like Rosings. That was the first thing and it took her three miles of woodland to find words for, and the words she found were these: at Rosings, the whole parish leaned in, and one leaned with it, and one did not know one was doing it; and here nothing leaned at all.

What happened here was that the leaning stopped.

She had not been aware of carrying anything. Nobody is. She had been two-and-twenty years in a county whose wards had never been renewed and whose low ground was the wrong color, and had walked over it every day of her life, and had thought of the small constant effort of it — if she had thought of it at all — as being what it is to be awake.