Page 145 of Hard Home

"I am not pushing you toward it," said Denny.

"I know you are not. That is why I could hear it."

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They sat a while. The frost was going off the grass where the sun had reached it, but not on the wrong-colored part, which stayed white a great deal longer than the rest, which was a thing Mary had written down in October and had not understood and understood now.

"Ask me the other question," said Denny.

"What other question."

"The one you have not asked, because it is the real one, and you have been circling it since you sat down. You did not come to ask what it is like. You came to ask whether I think you can do it."

Mary was quiet.

"Yes," she said. "That is the question. And you are the only person who can answer it, because you are the only person who has held one and the only person who knows what I am, both at once. Mr. Darcy holds Pemberley but it answers him; it was made to. My father is inside a keeping that has held itself for four hundred years without anybody doing anything at all. Nobody now living has taken up a thing like this cold. But you took up nine miles at Selsey when you were one-and-twenty, and you are the nearest thing there is."

Denny thought about it for a long time. He did not answer quickly, and Mary was grateful for it; a quick answer would have been a kindness and she had had enough kindnesses.

"I will tell you what I think," he said at last, "and I have thought about it a great deal, more than you know, because I saw where this was going before you did, in about September, and I have lain awake over it.

"Holding a ward wants two things. It wants something to holdwith— a gift, a line, whatever a man has in him; that is the part everyone talks about, and it is why they send us out of families that have it. And it wants something to holdsteady— a temper, a habit of mind, a person who can do the same dull exact thing at the same hour every day for years and not be worn down by the sameness of it, and not dramatize it, and not need to be told it matters.

"The army has spent a hundred years learning that the second thing is rarer than the first. We turn away men with strong gifts every year because they cannot bear the tedium of it — they want a battle, and warding is not a battle, it is a Tuesday,and then another Tuesday, for fourteen months. The men who last are not the strong ones. They are the ones who can rule a line in a book in the same hand for four months and take a strange satisfaction in the sameness of the figures."

He looked at her.

"I have watched you go out to that wall at half past six every morning since August," said Denny. "In the rain. In the frost. Alone. And write the same measurement in the same hand, and be exact about it, and not make anything of it, and go again the next day. You have been doing the discipline of the thing for four months already, without the thing itself, for no reward at all except knowing the number.

"I do not know whether you have the gift for it. Nobody does; it has never been tried by anybody like you. But you are the only person I have ever met, in or out of the regiment, who I amcertainhas the temper for it. And I have met a great many, because it is my trade, and most of them were braver than they were steady, and you are the other way about."

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Mary did not say anything for some time.

When she did, her voice was not quite as level as it had been.

"That is a very great deal to have said to me," she said, "by somebody who would rather I did not do it."

"I would rather you did not do it," said Denny.

"You have not said so."

"No. And I am not going to, and I want to tell you why, because you will think about it afterwards and I would rather you had it from me now." He turned the whole of himself toward her on the tomb, which he did not usually do; he was a man who talked sideways, at the middle distance, and it was noticeable when he stopped. "I have wanted, since about September, to stand up in that library and say that there must be another way, and that you are nineteen, and that somebody else must do it ornobody, and that I will not sit by and watch it. I have had the whole speech. I have had it for two months.

"And it is the exact speech that Colonel Forster's wife made when they wanted to keep the ——shire out of the north, and it is the speech the man at the desk in London makes every time he writes that nothing requires to be done, and it is, at bottom, the speech every person in your family made about every single thing that has gone wrong this year:she is too young, she must be spared, somebody will find another way.

"There is no other way. I have looked. Mr. Darcy has looked, and he is cleverer than I am and has more books. If your father dies and that ground is in the churchyard and you can hold it and you do not, then Meryton empties, and I will have stood in a garden making a beautiful speech about your youth while it happened, and I have done that once already, at a desk in Sussex, and a man named Fenn is at home in Portsmouth being cared for by his sister because of the men who made speeches.

"So I am not going to decide it for you, and I am not going to weight it for you, and I am not going to tell you the thing I want, because I love you, and that is precisely the reason my opinion cannot be trusted."

The word went out between them into the cold air and neither of them reached after it.

Mary looked at him.

"You have not said that before either," she said.

"No."