Page 105 of Hard Home

He let that sit for a moment.

"I have read four-and-thirty specimen forms in Harrow's appendix and eleven in Colwood, and I have had Philips send me two more from his office — a Yorkshire grant of 1502 and a Devon one of 1478, and he thinks I have gone mad and I have let him think it. Every one of them is the same animal. There are two parties. There is a thing given and a thing had in return. There is a date, and there is a place, and there is a name at the bottom of somebody who gave it.

"This has none of that. There is no grantor. There is nobody on the other side of it at all. It is not an agreement between a family and anything whatever."

"Then what is it?" said Jane.

"It is an undertaking," said Mr. Bennet. "One man's. Given in the first person and never answered."

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"The second point. The verb.

"Every one of those forms saysshall have and hold, orshall hold and enjoy, or in the older onesshall hold of us. Property, you observe. Having. Enjoying. What a man gets.

"This one sayskeep."

He turned the strip round on the table so that they could see it, though the letters would not sit still and nobody but he had ever been able to read them for more than a few seconds at a time.

"Shall keep.Nine times in eleven lines. It does not say what he is to have. It never once says what he is to have, and I have looked for it for two months, because a man does not undertake a thing of this weight for nothing, and there is no consideration named anywhere in it.

"He is not being given Longbourn. He is being left with it."

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"The third point is the one that took me longest and is the one I like least.

"It is not perpetual. Every entail I have ever heard of is either perpetual or runs to a stated number of lives. This runs to a condition."

"What condition?" said Elizabeth.

Her father looked at her.

"So long as there shall not fail a man of my blood upon this ground," he said.

The library was very quiet. Somebody was mowing, a long way off.

"Notwhile the male line continues, which is what every attorney in England would write and what your cousin Collins believes it says," said Mr. Bennet, "and notin default of heirsmale, then over to the next in blood, which is the operative clause and which is in it, and which is why Mr. Collins gets the house.

"There are two clauses, and they are not doing the same work. One of them disposes of two thousand a year and a lawn and a paddock, and that is the one that has been read aloud in this family for four hundred years and made your mother's life a misery. The other is about aground, and the not failing of a man upon it, and it does not say one word about who owns anything."

"And when it fails?" said Jane.

"It does not say," said her father.

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"The fourth point," said Mr. Bennet, "is not mine, it is Mary's, and I am going to let her make it, and I want everybody to attend to her, because she has been making it in this house since she was eleven years old and nobody has ever once listened to the end of it."

Mary put her hands flat on the table.

"It is an oath," she said.

"Go on," said her father.

"I can hear whether a spoken thing has weight in it. That is the whole of what I can do and it has never been the smallest use to anybody, and I have known since I was eleven that it is worth about as much as being able to tell the color of a horse in the dark." She was speaking very quickly, and she did not stop. "It only works on things that aresaid. A written thing is only ink. You may put the most binding form of words in England on a piece of paper and it is nothing at all until somebody says it out loud, and then it takes or it does not take, and I can hear which.

"So a written oath is a peculiar object. It is not binding. It is a set of instructions for a binding. It is — it is like a musket that is loaded and not fired.