Page 140 of Hard Home

They carried him to his room. Mr. Jones came at six and was very grave and entirely useless, and used the worddecline, and spoke of the damp, and of a low fever, and prescribed something; and Mrs. Bennet had hysterics in the passage and then stopped having them, abruptly, and went in and sat down by the bed and stayed there until eleven.

At about half past nine Mary went out.

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She came back at eleven with her boots and the bottom eight inches of her gown soaked through, and she went straight into the library, where Elizabeth and Jane and Darcy were.

"It has moved," she said.

Elizabeth stood up.

"Mary, it is dark, you cannot possibly have—"

"I have paced that edge every week since April and eleven times in the dark and I know the four corners of it by the hedge and the mill and the church buttress and Barrett's gate," said Mary. She was perfectly white and perfectly level. "I do not have a figure. I could not do it properly and I am not going to giveyou a number I am not sure of. But it is past the buttress, and the buttress is the north-east corner of the churchyard, and on Tuesday it was eleven yards short of it."

"Then it has come into the churchyard."

"It has come into the churchyard," said Mary Bennet.

She sat down on the edge of the wooden chair, and put her hands flat on her knees, and looked at them.

"There is another thing and I shall say it once and then I should like somebody to give me a glass of water.

"I put my hand on the churchyard wall on the way back, at the corner by the gate, where I have put it every week since May.

"The note has stopped."

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Nobody said anything at all.

"It has not gone quiet," said Mary. "I want to be exact. It has been getting quieter since the spring and I have told you so, and quieter still since August, and last Tuesday it was so faint that I stood there four minutes to be sure of it.

"To-night there is nothing.

"I stood at that wall for a quarter of an hour in the rain with my hand on the stone and there is nothing there, and I have been able to hear that thing every day of my life since I was eleven years old, and I did not know until this evening that I had been listening to it the way you listen to a clock in a room."

Jane went and sat down beside her and put an arm round her and Mary let her.

"Then it is done," said Elizabeth. "It is finished, it has run out—"

"No," said Darcy.

He had not spoken for several minutes. He was standing at the window with his back to them, and he turned round.

"Miss Mary. When your father is asleep — is the note quieter?"

Mary looked up.

"I do not know," she said slowly. "I have never — nobody has ever asked me anything about it at a particular hour, and I have not thought about hours."

"Think now."

She sat quite still for the better part of a minute.

"Yes," she said. "In the mornings it is stronger. Always. I go out at half past six and it is stronger at the wall at half past six than it is at four in the afternoon, and I have known that for years and I put it down to my own head being clearer.

"And in February, when he had the cold and slept the whole of two days, I could hardly hear it, and I thought I was sickening for something."