Page 90 of Hard Home

There was a mention of Mr. Wickham in the second, and one in the fourth.

The second was:W. is very well and asks after you all and says Meryton has nothing to show like the Steyne.

The fourth was:W. and I walked out to the downs above the camp on Tuesday, quite a party of us, and it is the most beautiful place in the world and quite lonely and he showed me where the old road is under the grass which you cannot see unless somebody shows you, and I was not a bit tired though we were three hours.

Elizabeth read that sentence eleven times, and copied it out, and gave the copy to Mary for the book.

Then she wrote to Lydia — a cheerful, foolish, gossiping letter of two full sheets, of exactly the kind Lydia would read to the end, with a great deal about bonnets and one sentence in the middle of the second page:

And do not go walking on the downs with only one gentleman, my love, for a girl of fifteen in a garrison town gets talked of directly, and Mrs. Forster would be blamed for it and not you, which would be very hard on her when she has been so kind.

It was the best she could do. She was fairly sure that Lydia would read it.

She was quite sure that Lydia would not attend to it, and she was right, and the letter was found in July among Lydia's things at Brighton, folded into the shape of a curl-paper.

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Mr. Bennet read Mary's books.

He read them properly, which nobody had expected, including Mary; he had them in the library for five weeks and made notes in a quarto book of his own, and twice sent Mary's own volumes back up to her with a slip of paper marking a page and a question written on it in his small close hand.

He would not tell anybody what he thought.

Once, in the third week of June, Elizabeth came in to find the japanned box open on the table, and the deed out of it and flattened under two paperweights, and Harrow open beside it at the appendix where the specimen forms are printed; and her father with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, looking at the two of them side by side.

"Papa?"

"Do you know," said Mr. Bennet, "that I have had this document in this house for four-and-twenty years, and have read it a hundred times, and have never once in my life read another one."

"Is it different?"

"Every deed is different, Lizzy. Every parish has its own way of saying a thing." He put his spectacles down. "This is not a different way of saying a thing. Go away and let me be stupid inpeace for a fortnight; I shall very likely be wrong, and I have not been wrong in public since 1793 and I do not intend to begin at two-and-fifty."

He would say nothing more about it, then or before she went into Derbyshire; and she went away in August with the picture of him in her mind — an idle, elegant, wasted man of two-and-fifty, sitting in his shirtsleeves at eleven in the morning with a magnifying glass, comparing a strip of something that was not vellum against a printed form in a book his third daughter had bought for four shillings.

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The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now fast approaching; and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when a letter arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its commencement and curtailed its extent.

Mr. Gardiner would be prevented by business from setting out till a fortnight later in July, and must be in London again within a month; and as that left too short a period for them to go so far, and see so much as they had proposed, they were obliged to give up the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour; and, according to the present plan, were to go no farther northward than Derbyshire.

In that county, there was enough to be seen, to occupy the chief of their three weeks; and to Mrs. Gardiner it had a peculiarly strong attraction. The town where she had formerly passed some years of her life, and where they were now to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of her curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak.

Elizabeth was excessively disappointed; she had set her heart on seeing the Lakes; and still thought there might have been time enough.

That was what she said. It was true for about a day and a half.

What she thought afterwards, and did not say to anybody, was this.

Derbyshire was where the only person in England was, who had told her the truth about her own county before she was willing to hear it; who had measured the ground twice with his own hands; who had laid a ward and taken it up again and paid for both; who knew what Wickham was and had broken an oath to tell her; and who had gone away in May believing that she thought him the last man in the world.

She had a great deal to say to that man. She had been composing pieces of it since a lane in Kent — not apology, or not chiefly;information. That the ground had stopped moving on the second of May. That Mary had the figures. That Harding had asked for orders eleven times and been refused, and had gone to Brighton with every man he had. That her youngest sister had been walked onto the low ground five times in four weeks by George Wickham and was now in a garrison town on the coast being shown where the old road is under the grass.

She had no possible way of telling him any of it.

A young woman does not write to a single gentleman. A young woman who has refused a man in April does not write to him in June with three sheets about a piece of grass; there is not a person alive who would read that letter as anything but what it was not. She had thought about sending it through Mrs. Collins, and through Colonel Fitzwilliam, and once, at two in the morning, through Mr. Bingley; and every road came out at the same place, which was a woman making a pretext.

And now she was going into Derbyshire.