Page 103 of Hard Home

You ask whether anything was done or said in this camp on the night of Saturday the eleventh.

There was a party of eight went up to the downs above the camp after dinner. It was got up by Mr. W. He has got up four such parties since June and I have been on two of them and I did not like either.

There is an old road up there under the turf. You cannot see it in daylight unless somebody shows it to you and I could not see it at all until the second time, my own gift being what it is now. It runs about half a mile and it is not a road. I have paced it twice and it is the same ground you have in Hertfordshire, the same color, the same nothing under it, and I have written that in a return and had no answer.

The party came down at about eleven. Miss B. and Mr. W. did not. Chamberlayne says they were on the down until past one and that Miss B. was in great spirits and would not come away.

I do not know what was done there. I want to be exact with you: I was not on that walk, I was on picquet, and everything above is from Chamberlayne and from my own two walks. But I was on the west side of the camp at about half past twelve and I felt something go past me at the height of my chest, going up the hill, and it was the same thing I felt in the road in Meryton in November when he first came, and it lasted the better part of a minute instead of half a second.

Madam, I have written eleven returns in nine months. This is the twelfth thing I have written down and it is going to you and not to London.

I have applied for leave. It has been refused. I have applied again and stated a reason which I shall not put in a letter and it has been refused again and I have been told to consider the matter closed.

I shall be at Longbourn on Friday or Saturday.

I am aware what that means and I have thought about it since Sunday and I find that I have stopped minding. I gave the best part of what I had to a field in Sussex before I was two-and-twenty for four hundred people I never met, on the orders of men who have since written to me eleven times to say that nothing requires to be done; and I am not going to sit in a tent at Brighton while a girl I have danced with is taken up that hill again.

Do not answer this. Burn it, which I know you will not do, so put it where you put the other one.

I am, madam, your obedient servant,

R. DENNY

P.S. His name is not George Wickham in the regimental books before 1806. I have seen the old returns. I have not been able to find out what it was before, and I would give a great deal to know.

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Neither of them said anything for a while.

Downstairs, Mrs. Bennet's bell rang twice, and Hill went along the passage, and somebody in the lane was driving cattle.

"He is deserting," said Mary at last. "He is a lieutenant of nine years' service and he is going to walk out of a camp on the coast and come here, and they will take his commission and everything else he has, and there is nobody at all who will speak for him."

"Yes," said Elizabeth.

Mary got up and went to the window and stood with her back to the room, and Elizabeth, who had known her sister for nineteen years and had spent about eleven of them not looking at her, understood a thing that had been in front of her since the church porch in April, and had the sense to say nothing about it whatever.

"Then somebody had better speak for him," said Mary Bennet.

Chapter Forty-Four

Mr. Bennet came home on the Thursday.

He came in a hired chaise at four in the afternoon, having sent no word; and he got out of it stiffly, like a much older man, and stood in his own gravel for a moment looking at his own front door.

He had been eight days in London. He had been to Epsom and to Clapham, and to every inn on the Barnet road, and to the turnpikes, and to Bow-street twice; he had advertised in two papers; he had sat in his brother Gardiner's parlor in Gracechurch-street in the evenings with a map of London on his knee.

He had not found one thing.

"Well, Lizzy," he said, when they were in the hall and Jane had taken his hat. "You may tell me I was wrong. It will be a novelty for us both."

"Papa—"

"No, do not spoil it. It is the only pleasure I have left and it is a very small one." He went into the library. "Send Hill in with something. And your sister Mary, when she has a moment, and tell her to bring the green book."

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He would not be spoken to about it that evening, and to Mrs. Bennet, who sent down four separate messages from her room, he sent up four separate answers of perfect civility and no information.