Page 107 of Hard Home

"Unless," said Mr. Bennet, "somebody has been clever enough to think of another way to get in, in which case he will not have to wait for me to die at all. He will only have to marry a girl of my blood, in a warded room, with the words said over him."

He looked up.

"Which is what your Mr. Wickham is doing," he said, "in a lodging in London, this week, while we sit here being clever."

Chapter Forty-Five

He was in London by ten on the Wednesday night and at Edward-street by nine the next morning, and Mrs. Younge was not at home to him.

She was at home. He could hear a floorboard over his head while the girl was telling him so; and he gave the girl his card and went away, and came back at two, and was told the same thing, and went away again.

He did not force it. There is no forcing a woman of that kind — he had learned that in a back parlor at Ramsgate, sitting opposite her while she asked for her quarter's wages — and a gentleman making a noise on a doorstep in Edward-street would be all over that street by dinner-time and in Wickham's ear by Saturday.

So he sat in a coffee-house at the corner from three until seven, where he could see the door, and read the same page of a newspaper eleven times, and was aware the whole while that this was the fourth day, and that a common license takes fifteen minutes and seven pounds.

At half past seven a boy came out with a jug. Darcy gave him a shilling to carry a message up, and the message was six words long.

I am not come about Ramsgate.

He was shown up at eight.

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Mrs. Younge's front parlor was a very respectable room. That was the thing about her that had disconcerted him at Ramsgate and disconcerted him again now: everything about her was respectable — the room, the cap, the workbox, the two lodgers' bills folded on the mantel-piece — and she let houses to singlegentlemen and had done for eleven years and had never once been in any trouble whatever.

"Mr. Darcy."

"Mrs. Younge."

"You may sit down, since you have been on my step twice and in Bilson's window since three, which is not what I should call discreet." She sat down herself, and folded her hands. "I have nothing to say to you about the summer before last, and I shall not, and if you have come to make me feel anything you have wasted a journey; I have thought about it a good deal and I have arrived somewhere and I am not going back."

"I have not come about that."

"Then what?"

"He is here," said Darcy. "In this house or in one you have found for him, since Sunday or Monday, with a girl of fifteen from Hertfordshire, and he is looking for a curate and a room."

Mrs. Younge's face did not move at all.

"That is a great deal of information," she said, "for a gentleman who has come to ask a question."

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They were an hour and a half about it, and Darcy afterwards thought it the most disagreeable ninety minutes of his life, and did not include the ballroom at Netherfield in the comparison because that had at least been honest work.

She began by denying everything, in a tone of mild and slightly injured surprise, and she did it well; and then, when he had put down on the little table the four things he actually knew — the date of the flight, the hackney-coach at Clapham, the name of the girl, and the fact that no coach going north had carried them — she stopped denying it, and did not admit it either, and began, with perfect composure, to bargain.

"You understand," she said, "that I am not saying such a person is here."

"Yes."

"And that if I were to hear of such a person, and were to put a note into a certain hand, that would be a service to you and no benefit at all to me, and would very likely be the end of a business I have kept going for eleven years without one word of complaint from anybody."

"Yes."

"Then what is it worth to you?"

He asked her what she wanted, and she told him, and it was a great deal more than he had expected and a great deal less than he would have paid, and he agreed to it in about four seconds, which was a mistake and which he saw her notice.