Page 95 of Hard Home

Elizabeth got up and went to her and took her hand, and said:

"Miss Darcy — I am very glad. Your brother told me at Netherfield in November that you play, and I have been dreading it ever since, because I have been complimented on myown playing all my life by people who have never heard anybody good, and I have a horror of being found out."

Georgiana Darcy looked up.

"Oh," she said. "But you — I have not heard you, but my brother said—"

She stopped, in acute confusion.

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "and I should very much like to know what he said, and he will not tell me, and if you tell me I shall be your friend for life."

Georgiana laughed. It came out of her in a way that plainly astonished her, and she put her hand up to her mouth; and Mrs. Gardiner said something kind about the weather, and the thing was done, and they all sat down.

Elizabeth did not look at Mr. Darcy for some time. When at last she did, he was looking at his sister, and his face was doing nothing at all, and she understood that this was what it looked like when it was doing a great deal.

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Mr. Gardiner was carried off within the quarter hour.

There was a stream at the bottom of the Pemberley woods which he had admired aloud on the previous afternoon within Mr. Darcy's hearing, and Mr. Darcy now recollected it, and pressed him to come and fish there as often as he chose while he remained in the country, offering at the same time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of the stream where there was usually most sport; and Mr. Gardiner, who had not had a rod in his hand since April and had a business in Gracechurch-street that gave him three weeks a year, went off with him for an hour before dinner in a state of simple happiness.

Elizabeth was quite certain, watching them go, that it had been arranged before either gentleman came into the room; and she was right.

Mrs. Gardiner took Miss Darcy to the other window to look at the drawings of the Peak in the innkeeper's portfolio, and was extremely thorough about it, and asked a great many questions.

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They had, by Elizabeth's reckoning, about forty minutes.

"Tell me the whole of it," said Mr. Darcy. "From the beginning of May. Nothing left out because it seems foolish."

She told him.

It took eighteen minutes, and she was afterwards rather proud of it — the figures, the dates, Mary's two lists, the five walks and the third column, Kitty's recovery and the paper with the dates on it, Harding at the window and his hands and the four things he had said, the eleven letters and the four answers, the gentleman at the desk who had never been north of the river, Lydia's fourth letter and the old road under the grass on the downs above the camp.

He did not interrupt except twice, and both times to ask for a date.

When she had finished he sat for a moment with his hands on his knees.

"Your sister Mary," he said. "Has she ever been taught anything?"

"She has been laughed at for nine years and let alone. That is the whole of her education."

"Then she has done in four months, alone, with four books and a pair of boots, what the Board did not do in Sussex in eleven years with three officers and a Government warrant." He said it without any particular emphasis, as a man states a rate of exchange. "I should like to write to her. May I write to her?"

Elizabeth discovered that she had to wait a moment before answering.

"She will not know what to do with it," she said. "She will read it forty times and put it in a book and answer it in three lines and be certain she has made a fool of herself."

"Then I shall write again."

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"Now," he said. "What I have done, and what I mean to do, and then what I think, which is the part I am least sure of and shall give you last.

"I wrote to Tarrant in June and again a fortnight ago. I have written this morning to a man at the Board of Ordnance whom I dislike and who owes me a considerable favor, and to my cousin Fitzwilliam, who has a desk at Horse Guards and who has seen your Captain Harding's returns — he has seen all eleven of them, Miss Bennet, and could do nothing with them, and has known since March that there was something in Hertfordshire and has not been able to say so to me because it was other men's paper.

"That is the whole of what can be done by letter, and it is not much, and it will take three weeks to produce a gentleman in a coach who will look at a field and go home.