Page 108 of Hard Home

"Well," said Mrs. Younge, and got up and went to the writing desk. "Now I shall tell you something you have not paid for, and you may make what you like of it.

"He is frightened."

Darcy said nothing.

"I have known George Wickham eleven years and I have seen him in a good many corners and I have never seen him frightened before, and it is not of you." She was writing an address. "He has been in this house since Sunday and he has not been out of it above three times, and he has not been drunk once, which if you know him at all you will understand is the most extraordinary thing I have ever told anybody about him.

"He sits up. I have taken him a candle at two in the morning twice this week. And he has asked me — Mr. Darcy, he has askedme, who let rooms in Ramsgate and cannot read Latin — whether I have ever heard of ground that does not take a ward. Twice. In this room."

She blotted the paper.

"He has got something by the tail," said Mrs. Younge, "and he does not know what it is, and he cannot let go of it, and I have not liked the look of him since Monday. Here."

She held it out.

"And the girl?" said Darcy.

Mrs. Younge's hand stopped for a moment.

"The girl thinks she is on a wedding journey," she said. "She has been at that window since Sunday telling my maid about the assembly rooms at Meryton."

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The house was in a street off Wapping High-street, up two pair of stairs, and the room was clean and very small and had a bed and a table and a window that would not open above four inches.

Wickham was out.

Lydia Bennet was sitting on the bed with her feet up under her, turning over the leaves of a fashion book that was three years old, and she looked round when the door opened and said, "Oh!" — and then, with a shriek that could be heard in the street, "Mr. Darcy!"

He had not, in the whole of the journey from Derbyshire, thought seriously about what he would do when he saw her.

"Miss Lydia."

"Well, this is the greatest joke in the world," said Lydia. "Whatever are you doing in Wapping? La! Do sit down — there is only the chair and it is not very good. Is Lizzy come? Has my father found us? I told Wickham my father would never find us in a hundred years, he is not at all clever about that sort of thing, and Wickham said—"

She went on for some time.

Darcy stood inside the door with his hat in his hand and looked at her, and did the only thing he was there to do, which was to see how much of her was left.

It was not as bad as Ramsgate.

That was the first thing and it took him about four seconds and it very nearly made his knees go. It was not Ramsgate. Therewas a great deal of her still there — she was noisy and pink and entirely herself, and the room was full of her the way a room is full of a girl of fifteen who is enjoying herself — and whatever had been done on that down above Brighton had not been the finishing of anything.

The second thing took longer, and he got it by watching her hands while she talked.

There was a thinness in her.

Not of body: she was as sturdy as she had been in a road in Meryton in November. It was the thing he had felt at Netherfield in the second room on the west passage, and in a lodging-house at Ramsgate, and it was very much slighter than either — a sort of draft, low down, as though a very small window had been left open somewhere behind her.

She had lost something. Not nine-tenths. Perhaps a tenth.

And it was still going.

"—and we are to be married directly," said Lydia, "as soon as ever he settles about the license, only he has been so put about with the lawyers, and it is the most tiresome thing, but he says it will all be arranged by Monday and then I shall write to Longbourn and sign myself Lydia Wickham and only think what a joke it will be — Mr. Darcy, why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"I beg your pardon."

"You look exactly like Mr. Jones did when Kitty had the fever." Lydia laughed. "Am I very brown? I dare say I am. We walked a great deal at Brighton."