Page 101 of Hard Home

"I have had that in front of me since a road in Meryton in November, and I have arranged it in a great many ways, and it comes out the same every time.

"He walked into your mother's drawing-room because I let him."

Chapter Forty-Three

They traveled as expeditiously as possible; and sleeping one night on the road, reached Longbourn by dinner-time the next day.

Elizabeth had the length of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Bedfordshire in which to decide how much to tell her aunt and uncle, and she decided about six times.

In the end she told them the whole of it, on the second morning, between Stevenage and Welwyn, with the blinds up and Mrs. Gardiner's workbag on the seat between them; and it was the fourth time she had told the story to anybody and much the worst, because these were the two people in the world she could least afford to have think her mad, and because one of them had heard the essential part of it in March and had been kind about it.

Mr. Gardiner heard her out with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor of the carriage, and asked eleven questions, of which nine were about dates and two were about who else knew.

Mrs. Gardiner said nothing at all until the end.

Then she said, "The still-room. In March. She had it in March and she told you, and you told me in my own parlor at nine in the morning, and I told you to go and look at the country."

"Aunt—"

"I want you to attend to me, Lizzy, because I shall not say it twice and I am not going to be sentimental about it in a hired carriage." Mrs. Gardiner's hands were quite steady in her lap. "I was not stupid. That is what I keep coming back to. Everything I said to you was sensible, and I would say every word of it again to any other girl in England on any other Tuesday, and it was all perfectly true, and it waswrong.

"I am forty-one years old and I have been proud all my life of not being taken in. And I sat in my own house and I explained to a clever girl of two-and-twenty, very kindly, exactly why her plain little sister of nineteen was not to be attended to." She looked out of the window. "There is a lesson in that and I have four days to learn it in and I do not much like the taste of it."

"You could not have known."

"I could haveasked," said Mrs. Gardiner. "That is all it wanted. I could have written four lines to Mary Bennet and asked her to send me her reasons, and she would have sat down that night and written me six sides, and I should have had it in March."

---

The house was in an uproar of the peculiar kind that has been going on for four days and has settled into a routine.

Jane came out to the carriage. She was thinner about the face and perfectly composed, and she had been running the house since Monday, and she had the accounts of it in her head — who had called, what had been said in Meryton, what her mother had eaten, what letters had gone.

"Papa is still in town. There has been nothing since Thursday. My uncle Philips has been very good. My mother is in her room and will not come down and is not to be argued with, and Kitty—" Jane stopped. "You had better see Kitty."

Mrs. Bennet received them upstairs, from her bed, in a state which Elizabeth had seen a hundred times in miniature over a chicken or a bonnet and had never once seen in earnest.

"If I had been able to carry my point of going to Brighton with all my family,thiswould not have happened; but poor dear Lydia had nobody to take care of her. Why did the Forsters ever let her go out of their sight? I am sure there was some great neglect or other on their side, for she is not the kind of girl to do such a thing, if she had been well looked after."

She said a great many other things. She said that Mr. Bennet would fight Wickham and be killed, and that Mr. Collins would turn them out of the house before he was cold in his grave, and that her brother must find them and make Wickham marry her.

"That is the great thing," she said, four or five times. "He must be made to marry her. Nothing else signifies. If he will only marry her, it is all made right, and she may hold up her head as well as any of them."

Elizabeth stood at the foot of her mother's bed with her hands folded and said nothing whatever.

---

Kitty was in the back parlor.

She had been crying for four days and had reached the stage beyond it, and she looked up when her sister came in and then looked away again.

"You are going to ask me what I knew."

"No," said Elizabeth, and sat down.

"Everybody has asked me what I knew. My mother asked me for an hour on Monday and would not stop, and Colonel Forster asked me, and Jane has been very kind about not asking me which is worse." Kitty pulled her handkerchief through her fingers. "I knew she wrote to him. That is all anybody wants and it is all I have got. I knew there were letters and I did not tell, because she said she would never speak to me again, and because—"

She stopped.