Page 104 of Hard Home

But at nine o'clock he sent for Elizabeth, and when she came he was standing at the window with his back to the room, which he never did.

"I have been thinking," said Mr. Bennet, "about what I said to you in June, in this room, about my way of managing. Do you recollect it?"

"Yes."

"I said that I find out how bad a thing is, and look at it very steadily, and then make a joke and go into another room, and that it had answered for twenty years." He did not turn round. "I have had eight days in London to consider that, in a great many inn parlors, and I have arrived at an emendation which I shall give you and then we shall not speak of it again.

"It did not answer. It never answered. It onlylookedas though it answered, because for twenty years nothing happened.

"That is the whole of my life, Lizzy. I was not a philosopher. I was a lucky man with a bad habit, and my luck ran out in August, and now everybody will say that I was very unfortunate."

He came away from the window at last, and Elizabeth saw that he had been crying at some point in the last day and had stopped a good while ago.

"Let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame," he said. "I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."

"Papa. It is not over. She is not—"

"No," said her father. "It is not over. That is the other thing I have thought about in eight days, and it is why I sent for you and not for your mother." He sat down at the table and pulled the japanned box toward him with one finger. "Sit down. To-morrow, when your young man from the regiment gets here — and do not look at me like that, Mary told me at six o'clock, she is the only person in this house who tells me anything — to-morrow I shall want the whole of you in this room. Jane, and Mary, and you, and him.

"Because I have had this thing out of its box eleven times since June, and I have read four of your sister's books, and I amtwo-and-fifty years old and I have worked out what I have got, and I am not going to say it twice."

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Lieutenant Denny arrived at half past eleven on Friday morning, on the gray mare, having ridden from Brighton in a day and a half in a plain coat.

He came up the drive slowly. He had, Elizabeth thought, watching from the window, the manner of a man who has made a decision at a great distance and has now arrived at the place where it becomes a thing he is actually doing.

Mary went out to him.

Elizabeth, at the window, saw her sister cross the gravel in her old brown gown, and say something; and saw Denny take his hat off and say something back; and saw the two of them stand there in the sun for the better part of a minute, saying nothing at all, in the particular manner of two people who have written each other four letters and have never once been alone in a room.

Then Mary took the mare's bridle, which nobody had asked her to do, and they went round to the stable together.

"Well," said Jane, at Elizabeth's shoulder.

"Yes," said Elizabeth.

"You knew."

"I have known since Tuesday, and I have not said one word about it to anybody, and I do not intend to." Elizabeth let the curtain fall. "Jane, I have laughed at that girl for nine years. I am not going to begin again now on a better subject."

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They were in the library at two: Mr. Bennet in his chair, Elizabeth and Jane on the settee, Mary at the table with three books and the pocket-books, and Lieutenant Denny standing by the door until Mr. Bennet told him twice to sit down.

"Mr. Denny," said Mr. Bennet. "Before anything else. You have thrown away a commission and nine years to come to a house where nobody has any claim on you, and I understand that you have done it partly on my daughter's account and partly on the account of four hundred people in a town that has never once thanked you for anything. I shall not make a speech about it. But this is my house until I die, and while it is, you are welcome in it, and I shall write to anybody you like and say so."

Denny went scarlet and said something about it being nothing.

"It is not nothing," said Mr. Bennet, "and I have had eight days of finding out exactly how much a man's word is worth when he has never spent any of it, so let us get on."

He put the deed on the table.

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"Four points," he said, "and I shall be as short as I can, and Mary will stop me when I go wrong, which she has been doing since June and has got rather good at.

"The first. This is not a deed."