Page 150 of Hard Home

She has not mentioned you,wrote Charlotte,since November, not once, which from her is a form of respect I would not expect you to recognize if I did not tell you. She has, however, twice mentioned "the sister who listens," and asked Mr. Collins whether she is spoken for, and Mr. Collins did not know, and I did not enlighten her. I do not know what her Ladyship intends by it and I thought you had better have it.

Elizabeth read that part aloud to Darcy.

"She wants Mary," said Elizabeth.

"She wants a person who can hear whether an oath takes," said Darcy, "and there are perhaps four in England, and one of them is your sister, and Lady Catherine has spent thirty years being the only person who understood this and is about to discover that a girl of twenty in a Hertfordshire churchyard has understood it better, alone, in a winter." He almost smiled. "I would give a great deal to be present when those two women are in a room together, and I am fairly certain I never shall be, because your sister will decline the invitation, and my aunt will respect her the more for it, and they will circle each other by letter for twenty years and neither will ever quite say what she means."

"They would like each other."

"They would detest each other," said Darcy, "in the particular way of two people who are the only two of their kind, and it would be the nearest thing to friendship either of them ever had, and it would kill them both to admit it. Write to Mary and tell her my aunt is asking after her. She will want it for the record, and she will know exactly what it means, and she will file it at page four hundred and eleven with the rest."

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The winter turned, the way winters do, without announcing it.

There was a day at the end of February when the water came off the hills all at once and the stream at the bottom of the wood ran brown and loud for a week; and then a still cold spell; and then, in the second week of March, a morning when Elizabeth woke and knew, before she was properly awake, that the year had changed under her in the night, that there was a different light on the ceiling and a bird doing something in the bare wood that it had not been doing in January.

Mary's letter that week said:Sunday, half past six. Nine yards inside the wall. No change in the ground. But the note islouder, Lizzy, and it has been getting louder for a fortnight, and it is not because papa is better, because papa is not better, he is worse; and I have thought about it and I am afraid I know what it is.

It is spring. The ground is waking, the way it wakes every year, the whole living county coming up green — and the thing underneath is waking with it, because that is what it does, and it has done it four hundred times, and every other year there was a man of the blood on this ground in the fullness of his strength to hold it down as it woke.

And this year there is a man of two-and-fifty in a bed who cannot hold up a newspaper.

I do not want to frighten you three hundred miles away where you can do nothing. But you asked me at the start never to keep anything flat, and I am not going to begin now.

Come, if you can. Not because it will help. Because I think it is going to be soon.

Chapter Sixty

They were three days on the road, and it was the wrong time of year for it, and the roads were bad from the thaw; and Elizabeth sat in the corner of the carriage and watched the country change from the stone-walled north to the hedged south and thought about a July when she had done the journey the other way with her aunt and uncle and had asked, with what she believed to be perfect carelessness, whether Pemberley was much visited by strangers.

Darcy came with her. There had been no question of it; but he had also, before they left, done three things, quietly, in the space of a morning, and told her of them in the carriage on the first day, because of the article between them.

He had written to Tarrant, to come to Longbourn if he was well enough to travel, and had enclosed money for the journey so that the old man's poverty could not be the reason he refused.

He had written to his cousin Fitzwilliam at Horse Guards, a long letter, the substance of which was that the matter in Hertfordshire was now of a nature requiring something, and that the gentleman at the desk who had eleven times written that it was not could now be shown a family of consequence — his own — with a direct interest, and might be moved where a lieutenant's returns had not moved him.

And he had written to Georgiana, to tell her where they were going and why, and not to soften it; and Georgiana had written back by return, and the letter was in Elizabeth's reticule, and said only:Go. Take care of him and of her. I shall pray, which you will say does nothing, and I shall do it anyway, and I am glad you asked her to be consulted last autumn because it has taught me that I would rather be told a dreadful thing than kept from a true one for the rest of my life. That is your doing,Elizabeth, and I do not care that you will say it was nothing. Go.

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They reached Longbourn at four on the third day, the twentieth of March.

The house looked, from the sweep, exactly as it always had; and that was the first blow, and Elizabeth had not been ready for it, because she had spent three days imagining a house with something visibly wrong with it, and there was nothing wrong with it, it was only Longbourn in the early spring with the crocuses out along the drive that her mother planted the year Jane was born, and Hill opening the door, and the smell of the house that no other house in the world had.

Jane was in the hall.

She had come from Netherfield and was more or less living at Longbourn now, and she came forward and put her arms round her sister and neither of them said anything for a moment, and then Jane said, against her ear, "He is glad you have come, and he will pretend he is not, and you must let him."

"How is he."

"He is dying, Lizzy," said Jane, simply, because they did not keep things flat any more, any of them; the year had cured the whole family of it, at a price. "He is quite clear and quite himself and he is dying, and it is slow, and it is not painful, and it is the most peaceful and the most terrible thing I have ever watched. Go up. He has been asking since your letter said you were coming."

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Mr. Bennet was propped up in his bed with a book he was not reading, and the window open a little way on the spring afternoon, and he looked at his second daughter come in at the door and said:

"Well. Mrs. Darcy. You have left your ten thousand a year and your park and your husband's beautiful trees and come three hundred miles over bad roads to watch your father not get up. That is very inefficient of you and I am extremely glad to see you, and we will not make anything of it, because I have not the strength to be embarrassed and neither, I hope, have you."