Page 97 of Hard Home

"Mr. Darcy," she said, and her voice came out wrong. "How old is my father?"

He turned round.

"Two-and-fifty," he said. "I asked at Netherfield in November, of Sir William Lucas, who did not know why I wanted it."

"Say the rest of it."

"No."

"Say it."

"I will not say it," said Mr. Darcy, "because I do not know it, and because if I say it in this room it will be a thing you have been told by a man instead of a thing you worked out yourself, and you will believe it too completely and so shall I; and there are four other explanations and I have not been able to get rid of two of them." He came away from the window. "Miss Bennet. Sit down."

"I do not want to sit down."

"No. Nor do I." He stood on the other side of the little table with his hands behind him. "I will say this much, and it is all I will say until I have seen the deed with my own eyes.

"Four hundred years in the male line, in one blood, on a small estate in a county where nothing has ever needed mending. That is a very odd shape for an ordinary entail, and I have looked at a great many deeds and I have never seen a term of years like it on two thousand a year. The entail on Pemberley runs eleven generations and it is written like a settlement of property, because that is what it is. Yours has outlasted it on a fifth of the land and there is no reason in the world why it should have been thought worth doing.

"Unless it was not a settlement of property.

"Unless somebody four hundred years ago wanted a particular blood kept on a particular piece of ground without a break, and wrote a deed that would do it, and did not put in it any word about why — because a man does not write down in a document that his children's children are to be a bolt on a door."

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Neither of them said anything for a while.

"He has no son," said Elizabeth at last.

"No."

"And he is two-and-fifty, and he has been ill twice this year and made a joke of it, and my mother has been frightened out ofher senses about this for four-and-twenty years and everybody in the county has laughed at her, including me."

"Yes."

"And on the day he dies," said Elizabeth, "the Accord severs, and it goes to Mr. Collins, whom the ground would not answer at the door frame, and whom Lady Catherine de Bourgh has instructed to marry one of us in order to be let in."

Mr. Darcy said nothing at all.

"And in April," said Elizabeth Bennet, "you stood in a parlor in Kent and offered to braid your line to mine, and I told you that you were the last man in the world."

"I offered it," said Mr. Darcy, "on the twelfth of April, for entirely private reasons, and I did not know one word of this, and I will not have it turned into that in your head. I am going to say this once and then we will go back to the maps. Whatever is under that county, and whatever your family has to do with it — it has nothing to do with what I said to you in that room. I asked you because I wanted you. If it turns out that there is a use in it as well, then the use may take its chance; it was not the reason and I will not have it be the reason afterwards."

"That is a very fine distinction, sir, for a woman in my situation."

"It is the only one I have got," said Mr. Darcy, "and I am holding on to it with both hands."

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Mr. Gardiner came back at half past four with three trout and a very high opinion of his host, and Miss Darcy was pressed to stay and would not, and there was a great deal of civility in the doorway.

At the last moment, on the stairs, Georgiana turned round.

"Miss Bennet — my brother says you will dine at Pemberley on Thursday. I hope you will. I have not — that is, there is nobody, and I have been at home since February and—"

"I shall come on Thursday," said Elizabeth, "and I shall make you play, and I shall be perfectly odious about it."

Georgiana Darcy went down the rest of the stairs with a face her brother had not seen on her in fifteen months.