Page 142 of Hard Home

That was the cruelty of it, and the household had a whole day of it: he woke, and was weak, and could not stand without the bedpost, but he was entirely himself, and querulous about the laudanum, and asked for his spectacles and the newspaper andthen could not hold the paper up for long and was cross about that too; and Mrs. Bennet, who had sat up the whole night, wept with relief and told Lady Lucas at eleven o'clock that Mr. Jones had said it was a chill and nothing more, and believed it by noon.

Mr. Jones came again and saiddeclineagain and privately, to Elizabeth, in the passage, said that he could find nothing wrong with the heart or the lungs or any organ of the body, and that he had been forty years in the profession and had seen old men go like this and never a man of two-and-fifty, and that he did not understand it and would send to Hertford for a physician if the family wished, but that he did not think a physician would find anything either.

"It is as though," said Mr. Jones, who was not a clever man but was an honest one, "he were a much older man than he is. As though he had used up more years than he has lived. I do not know how to write that in a bill and I shall not try."

He went away unhappy.

Darcy came at ten and sat with Mr. Bennet for an hour, at Mr. Bennet's own request, and no one else was in the room; and when he came out he would not say what had passed except that they had talked about the deed, and that Mr. Bennet had asked him a question, and that he had answered it.

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Mary would not be in the front rooms that day.

She sat in the library with the deed and the three pocket-books and Colwood and Harrow, and she did not read them; she sat with her hands flat on the table and looked at the window, which was what she did when she was thinking, and Elizabeth found her there at four in the afternoon and sat down opposite her and did not say anything for a while.

"I have been doing what Mr. Tarrant told me to do," said Mary.

"Deciding what you would say."

"Deciding whether I have anything to say at all, which is a different thing and comes first, and which nobody has asked, because everybody has gone straight to the other question." She turned her head. "Lizzy, will you let me talk without being kind to me? I have had a great deal of kindness this week and it stops me thinking."

"Yes."

"Then I shall say it in order.

"The oath wants a man of the blood. I have listened to that word for two months and I have watched Mr. Darcy and my father argue about whether it means a male or a person, and neither of them will stake anything on it, and they are right not to, because it is not decisive.

"But there is a thing they have both missed, and I have missed it too until this morning, and I missed it because I have spent my whole life being told that the thing I can do is worth nothing.

"It does not only want a man of the blood. It wants somebody who canundertakeit. And undertaking is not a thing you do with your blood. It is a thing you do with words, said aloud, and meant, on the ground — and that is the one part of this whole business that is not about lineage at all. It is about whether the words take.

"And I am the only person in England who can hear whether words take."

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Elizabeth sat very still.

"I read three lines in April," said Mary, "and they did not take, and I told everybody it was because I am not of the male line and because I was not undertaking anything, and I gave those two reasons as though they were the same size, and they are not.

"The second one is the whole of it. I was not undertaking anything. I was a girl reading aloud out of a box to see what would happen. If I had stood on that ground andmeantit — if I had said the words as an oath and not as a curiosity — I do not know what would have happened, and neither does anybody else, and that is exactly the point I have been circling for two days.

"Because the blood may not matter as much as they think. The keeping was made by one man saying words on this ground and meaning them so hard that he spent his whole line on it. It did not ask him to be anybody's heir. It asked him tomean it, and to pay. He happened to be of a family, and the paying happened to run through his blood because that is what he had to pay with, and everybody for four hundred years has read it as a thing about blood because the blood is the part you can see in a parish register.

"But I do not think the ground cares whose blood it is. I think the ground cares whether the words take. And I am the one person alive who was born able to tell."

She looked down at her hands.

"I do not say I am right. I have been wrong twice. I say that everybody in this house has been assuming that the only person who could take up this oath is a man of my father's blood, and that when he dies there is no such person, because Mr. Collins does not count and there is no son; and I do not think that is true. I think there may be a second door, and I think I am standing in it, and I have been standing in it my whole life calling it a noise in my head."

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"Mary," said Elizabeth. "What is it paid for with?"

"I know what it is paid for with."

"Say it to me the way papa made Mr. Darcy say it to you."

Mary was quiet for a moment.