Page 147 of Hard Home

There had been a great deal of quiet worry about this, and Mr. Jones had come at eight to see whether it were possible, and had said that Mr. Bennet might stand for a quarter of an hour ifhe were let sit before and after, and that it must be got through quickly, and that somebody must stand close on his other side.

He got through it.

He came into the church on Elizabeth's arm — which everyone was allowed to think was gallantry, his walking his second daughter up on his own arm, and which was in fact the only way he could walk up the aisle at all — and he stood between his two eldest girls at the rail, upright, in his good coat, for eleven minutes, with Darcy on one side of Elizabeth and Bingley on the other side of Jane, both of them placed, though nobody said so, where they could catch him.

He did not need catching. He stood the whole time.

And when the curate came to the giving away, and asked who gave these women to be married, Mr. Bennet said "I do" — once, for both of them, which was not the form, and which the curate had been told in advance to allow — and Mary, in the second pew, went perfectly still, because she was listening, and afterwards she told Elizabeth the one thing about that morning that Elizabeth kept for the rest of her life.

"It took," said Mary. "When papa gave you away. I do not know if anybody has ever told you that the giving is a real thing and not only words — it is a small binding, it is the oldest one there is, a father putting a daughter out of one keeping and into another. And papa has almost nothing left; I have been listening to him go for two months and there is almost nothing there.

"And he spent some of it. On purpose. I felt him do it. He could have said the words flat, the way most fathers do, and let them be only words, and no one would have known, and he would have kept what little he had.

"He did not. He gave you away properly, with weight, both of you, and it cost him, and it took, and you are married in the old full sense and not only the parish one, and it is the last binding he will ever make, and he chose to make it a true one."

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The rest of it was as weddings are.

Mrs. Bennet cried, and was magnificent, and wore a great deal of new lace, and told four separate people that she had always known how it would be; and for once in her life the county did not laugh at her, because for once in her life she was indisputably, gloriously right, and everybody in that church knew it.

Kitty was a bridesmaid and did it beautifully and cried at the correct moments and was, Elizabeth thought, watching her, entirely well now — brown from a summer out of doors, taller, and being looked at by a curate's son from Stevenage in a manner that Elizabeth resolved to say nothing whatever about, having learned that much at least.

Sir William Lucas was there, and made a speech at the breakfast about jewels of the first water being carried to the court of St. James's, and everyone let him.

Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long and Mrs. Philips sat together and said, as they had said for a year, that it was a great match for the Bennet girls and more than anybody had looked for; and if there was an odd note under the day — if the older people in that church glanced, once or twice, out through the plain glass toward the north-east corner of the churchyard where the grass on the old graves was a color grass ought not to be in November, and did not say anything, and looked back — then that was Meryton, which had for four hundred years had a great many things it did not say, and had lately begun, in a few of its wiser heads, to half-know why.

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Wickham was not there. Lydia was, and had come down from Newcastle for it, and was pregnant, and delighted about everything, and said "when I was first married" a great many times in a manner intended to establish seniority over twosisters who were being married that morning to five and ten thousand a year respectively; and nobody minded, because there was, in Lydia's total and unshakeable happiness, a thing that was easier to be near than to explain.

Elizabeth watched her across the breakfast table.

The draft was almost gone. The small open window low down, that she had found in the parlor in September and been sick over — it was very nearly closed now. Three months, and an excellent constitution, and never one unhappy day, and a thing that Wickham had said in a tavern in Aldgate and had turned out to be telling the truth about:by the time she is twenty she will be exactly what she was.She was sixteen and a half and most of the way there already, loud and pink and pleased, with a husband three hundred miles off who could not come into the county and whom she wrote to twice a week and adored, and a child coming, and no idea at all, ever, of what had nearly been done to her or of what she was.

She would never be told. That had been settled by everyone, and it was the right settling, and it was also — Elizabeth made herself hold both of these at once, because that was the discipline she had chosen in the copse with Lady Catherine — exactly the kind of kind silence that the whole novel of that year had been made of.

"Lizzy," said Lydia, catching her looking, "you are staring at me most particular, and I know why, it is because I am the only one of us with any figure at all now, and I do not care a straw, and you may all be as jealous as you like."

"I was thinking," said Elizabeth, "that you look extremely well."

"Iknewit," said Lydia, with enormous satisfaction, and went back to her cake.

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They were to go different ways that afternoon: the Bingleys only to Netherfield, three miles; the Darcys to London for two nights and then north to Pemberley.

Elizabeth went up to change, and Mary came with her, and did up the back of her traveling gown, which was a thing Jane usually did and which Mary had asked to do; and the two of them were alone in the bedroom they had all four grown up sharing, for the last time, in the middle of the day, with the noise of the breakfast coming up through the floor.

"You will write," said Mary.

"Every week. About the roads. I have told you a hundred times."

"I know. I like to hear you say it." Mary settled the collar. "There. You will do."

Elizabeth turned round.

"Mary. Come to Pemberley. Not now — I know you will not come now. But when — after. When you can. There is a wood there that I promised to tell you about and never have, because it is not the sort of thing you tell, it is the sort of thing you stand in, and I want you to stand in it. Say you will come."