Page 146 of Hard Home

"You might have chosen a warmer place to say it than a tomb, in November, with a dead ground nine yards off."

"I have been trying to say it since September," said Denny, "and there has not been a single hour in this whole business that was not a bad time, and I worked out this morning that there is not going to be one, and that if I waited for a good hour I should wait for ever, because your father is dying and the ground is inthe churchyard and that is simply the weather we are going to be in for the rest of it.

"So. There it is. In a bad hour, in a bad place, with everything wrong. I would rather have said it to you like this and true than in a rose garden and waited for.

"And it does not come with a claim on you," he said. "I want to be very exact about that, because you are trying to decide something enormous and I will not put my thumb on it. Whatever you decide, about the wall, about all of it — you decide it as a free woman, and I am not standing here to be a reason on either side of it. I only did not want to be one more person in your life sparing you a true thing."

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Mary Bennet sat on the table-tomb with her cold hands in her lap and looked, for a while, not at him and not at the pale ground, but at the church, which was small and gray and four hundred years old and had a dead ward on it now that no one living could mend.

"I am going to tell you what I have decided," she said, "and it is not the thing you are afraid I have decided, and it is not the thing you are hoping I have decided; it is a third thing, and I worked it out this morning at the wall, and you are the first person I am telling."

Denny waited.

"I am not going to take up the oath while my father is alive," said Mary. "That is settled. Mr. Tarrant told me not to decide anything because somebody I love is dying, and he is right, and I will not do it in grief and I will not do it in a hurry and I will not do it to buy him a summer he would not thank me for.

"But I am going to learn it. All of it. Everything you know, and everything Mr. Darcy knows, and everything in Colwood and Harrow and the two books Tarrant is sending, and I am going to go out to that wall every morning and learn to feel the thingthe way you feel a ward, not just hear it — and I am going to do it steadily, for as long as it takes, which may be years, and I am going to be ready.

"So that if the day comes when it must be done, I shall decide it as a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and not as a frightened girl who read three lines out of a box once and felt something lift its head.

"And if that day never comes — if my father lives, or Mr. Darcy finds a thing in a book, or the ground stops of itself — then I shall have spent some years learning a hard exact thing very well, and being the only person in England who could do it, and I find," said Mary Bennet, "that I do not think I should regret that, whatever else."

She stood up off the tomb.

"You may writethatdown," she said. "I should like it written down, in your hand, with the day and the hour, because it is the first decision I have ever made entirely by myself, and I want a record of it that is not in my own book."

Denny took out his pocket-book, and wrote it down, on the table-tomb, in the cold, with the day and the hour; and when he had done he tore the leaf out and gave it to her, and she read it, and folded it, and put it inside the back cover of the pocket-book where the letter from Kent already was, at page four hundred and eleven.

Then they walked back up to the house together, not touching, in the ordinary way of two people who have settled a thing and have the whole rest of their lives to be less careful in.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

They were married on the eighteenth of November, both couples together, in the small gray church at Longbourn, at eleven o'clock in the morning.

There had been a question, which nobody had spoken aloud and everybody had thought about, of whether it should be that church at all.

Mary had gone out on the sixteenth and paced it and put her hand on the wall, and had come back and said that the pale ground was nine yards inside the churchyard at the north-east and had not moved further in five days, and that it did not reach the church itself, nor the door, nor the aisle, nor any part of the ground a wedding party would stand on; and that the ward on the building — the ordinary parish ward, the one that had never in four hundred years wanted mending — was still there, and still whole, because it was fixed to the stone of the church and not to the ground beneath, and the church stood on the old hard rise where nothing had gone wrong.

"It will hold," she said. "For an hour, on the eighteenth, it will hold, and the words will take, and it will be a true marriage in a warded room, which is the whole of what Lizzy asked for."

So it was that church.

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Darcy had written to Georgiana on the night of the proposal, four hours, nothing softened; and Georgiana had written back, as he had said she would, within four lines and by return of post, and had then written a second letter three days later that was six sides long and had plainly cost her a great deal, and in which she said the thing properly.

Elizabeth had that second letter by heart and never showed it to anybody.

I have thought about it for three days,Georgiana had written,which my brother told me to do and which I have never once been asked to do about anything, and I find that I am not frightened for him, though I have tried to be, because he asked me. That is the whole of it and I know it is not sensible. He put the four possibilities in front of me and the one about the horse and did not make any of them smaller, and I sat up with it, and what I keep coming back to is that he told me. He has been deciding things for me since I was eleven, always the kind things, always the safe things, and I have loved him for it and it has made me smaller every year, and this is the first time he has ever stood in front of me and said, here is a thing that may cost us both, what do you think. And I find that I would rather have a brother who may be diminished at forty-four and who asks me, than a brother who is safe and does not. I do not think Miss Bennet knows what she has done for me by making him write that letter, and you are not to tell her, because she will say it was nothing, and it was not nothing.

Georgiana came for the wedding, and stayed at Netherfield, and played the pianoforte on the sixteenth evening for the whole party, badly, being nervous, and then well; and Elizabeth stood by the instrument and turned the pages and did not once compliment her, and made her play the difficult passage three times, and Georgiana, going up to bed, said to her brother that she thought Elizabeth Bennet was the only person who had ever treated her exactly as though she were ordinary, and that it was the greatest compliment she had ever had.

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The morning was cold and very bright.

Mr. Bennet gave both his daughters away.