Page 115 of Hard Home

Elizabeth said nothing.

"And there is the other thing," said her father, "which is that my brother Gardiner is an excellent man of business who could not find those two people in eight days with me helping him, and then found them within thirty-six hours of my leaving London — in a part of the town where he has no more acquaintance than I have — and has neglected to say in three sheets how he did it."

He folded the letter.

"Well?"

"Papa—"

"Lizzy, I am not going to make you tell me, because it is perfectly plain that you have been asked not to, and I find at two-and-fifty that I have some small use for a daughter who keeps her word." He put his spectacles down. "I shall only say this. Whoever has done it has done it in a way that leaves your uncle Gardiner to be thanked, and has therefore made certain that no one in this family will ever be under an obligation they can feel.

"That is not the act of a man who wants anything. It is a great deal too well arranged for that. And I have spent my whole life among people who wanted things, and I do not perfectly know what to do with it."

He got up and went to the window.

"And I shall now write to my brother Gardiner," he said, "and thank him with all my heart, and mean it, and be a liar in my own house, which will make three of us."

---

The wedding was on the Monday.

Nobody at Longbourn knew that. The letter said only that it would be soon; and on the Wednesday there came a second, briefer, in Mr. Gardiner's hand, saying that all was done, that they had been married on Monday at St. Clement's, and that they had gone out of town on the Tuesday for the north.

Mrs. Bennet had to be told about the church.

"St. Clement's," she said. "Which St. Clement's? There are three."

"St. Clement's in the Fields, mama."

"I never heard of it in my life," said Mrs. Bennet. "In theFields. Well. It is a very odd sort of name for a church in London and I am sure it is a shabby little place and there was nobody there and she had nobody to give her away but my brother Gardiner, and I dare say she had no flowers at all."

She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, in a very different voice, "Well, and she is married. That is the thing. She is Mrs. Wickham and nobody can take it from her."

And she went and told Mrs. Philips, and Lady Lucas, and Mrs. Long, and everybody in Meryton, three times, within four days.

---

Mary went out on the Monday morning at half past six as she had gone out every morning for four months, in the same boots, from the church corner.

She went out again on the Tuesday and on the Wednesday.

On the Wednesday afternoon she came into the library where her father was sitting with Elizabeth and Denny, and put the pocket-book on the table.

"It has not moved," she said.

"Since Sunday the twelfth?"

"Since Sunday the twelfth. Fifteen days." Mary sat down. "It did not move on Monday. It did not move on Monday night. It has not moved."

Elizabeth let out a breath she had been holding since Sunday.

"Then whatever was done in London—"

"Yes," said Mary. "And that is what I have come to tell you about, because it is very good and I do not understand it and I dislike not understanding it."

She turned the pocket-book round.

"He married her on Monday. Everybody in this house has spent a week frightened of exactly that, and my father and Mr. Denny and I sat in this room a fortnight ago and worked out that a wedding was the thing that must not happen, and it happened, andnothing happened.