Page 151 of Hard Home

"No, papa."

"Sit down where I can see you." She sat. He looked at her for a while. "You look well. You look married. There is a thing that happens to a woman's face when she has stopped waiting to find out how her life comes out, and it has happened to yours, and I am glad, because I did the arithmetic on all five of you a long time ago and yours was the sum I could not make come out, and here it is come out after all, with no help from me."

"Papa, will you stop settling your accounts. You have been doing it since I came in the door."

"I have been doing it for four months," said Mr. Bennet, "and it is the only occupation left to me that I am any good at, and you will allow a dying man his hobby. Now. Tell me about Derbyshire, and do not leave things out to spare me, because I have had a winter of your sister reading me the Rambler and I am past being spared anything."

So she told him about Derbyshire.

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She was ten days at Longbourn, and they were, in the memory of everyone who was there, a strange and not an unhappy time.

The house filled up. Bingley was in and out. The Gardiners came from London for a week, and Mrs. Gardiner sat with Mr. Bennet a great deal and made him laugh, which nobody else quite could now. Kitty was there, grown and steady, and had taken over a great deal of the running of the house from Jane without anybody quite deciding that she should, and did it well.

And Tarrant came, on the twenty-fourth, having traveled two days at one-and-seventy in the wet, and would not stay at Netherfield but took a room at the inn in Meryton so that he could be near the church; and he spent his mornings in the churchyard with Mary, and his afternoons with Mr. Bennet, and the two old men — for Mr. Bennet was old now, whatever the register said — took to each other completely and at once, in the way of two clever men who have both stopped having any reason to pretend, and would talk for an hour and then Mr. Bennet would sleep and Tarrant would sit by him and read.

Mr. Bennet said, on the twenty-sixth, "That is the best man you have brought into this house, that antiquary, and I include your husband, whom I like very much. Tarrant does not want anything from me and he does not pity me and he tells me the truth and he knows a great deal about the thing that is killing me and he finds itinteresting, Lizzy, he finds me interesting, and there is nothing in this world so restful, when one is dying, as being found interesting instead of being grieved over. Your mother grieves over me with the door open so that I shall hear it. He comes in and says, now, about this note your daughter hears, when precisely did it begin, and I could kiss him."

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Mary took Elizabeth out to the churchyard on the second morning.

The pale ground was nine yards inside the wall, along the north-east, and had a hard edge to it now, a line you could see, where the grass changed; and beyond the line the old graves stood in grass that was the color of a thing three weeks dead, and the frost that morning had lain on it long after it had gone everywhere else, exactly as Mary had written.

"Put your hand on the wall," said Mary.

"I shall not feel anything. I am not you."

"You feel people. You have never tried to feel this, because in the autumn you did not want to and then you went away. Try it now. Put your hand on the stone and go quiet and stop being clever, which is the whole of the difficulty for you, you finish things too fast, you always have."

Elizabeth put her hand on the cold stone of the churchyard wall, and went quiet, and stopped being clever, which took some doing.

And after a while — a long while, a minute, two — she felt it.

Not the note; Mary said afterwards she would never feel the note, that was a thing you were born to. But theabsence. The place where her hand, resting on a wall in the sun, expected the small ordinary warmth that a wall in the sun has, the aliveness of a made and tended thing — and found, instead, nothing; a cold that was not the cold of the stone but the cold of a thing from which the something had gone out.

She took her hand away rather fast.

"Yes," said Mary. "That is it. That is the county. That is what has been coming up the fields since October and is now among our great-grandmothers, and that is what I would be holding down, if I hold it, for the rest of my life. I wanted you to feel it once with your own hand before — before anything. So that whatever you think about it afterwards, you will be thinking about a real thing you have touched, and not a story I have told you."

---

"Have you decided?" said Elizabeth.

"No," said Mary. "And I want to tell you exactly where I am, because you will worry less if you have the truth than if you imagine it.

"I can do it. I am nearly sure now; Denny is sure, and Tarrant, who would not say it in the autumn, has as good as said it this week — he asked me three questions in the churchyardon Tuesday and at the end of them he was quiet for a long time and then he said,well. It appears the deed had a clause nobody read,and would say no more, but I knew what he meant.

"So it is not any longer a question of whether. It is only the other question, the real one, and I have not answered it, and I am not going to answer it until I have to, and I have made my peace with not knowing, which is the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than the study.

"Because here is the thing, Lizzy, and I have not said it to anybody, not even Denny. I do not want to decide it while papa is alive, because while he is alive I keep finding reasons that are really about him. That I could hold it a few years and give him — no, he is dying, it is too late for that, I know. But smaller things. That he would die easier believing the ground was safe. That I could tell him, at the end, that I would hold it, and let him go thinking Meryton was saved, and it would be a kindness—

"—and it would be exactly the kind of kindness this whole family has been ruined by, a true-sounding thing said to spare somebody, and I will not do it. I will not decide my whole life in order to give my father a comfortable death. He would not want it; if he knew I had done it he would come back and be sarcastic about it. So I am holding the decision away from him, on purpose, with both hands, until he is gone and I can make it about the ground and the people and myself, and not about grief.

"That is the most selfish thing I have ever done and it is the only way I know to do the unselfish thing honestly. Do you see?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth. "I see exactly."