Page 152 of Hard Home

"I thought you would. You are the only one who would." Mary looked at the pale ground among the graves. "It is a strange thing to have found out at twenty, that the people who love you cannot help you decide the one thing, and that you have to hold them off precisely because they love you. I do not think I couldhave understood that a year ago. I did not have anything worth deciding a year ago."

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Mr. Bennet was worse on the twenty-ninth, and better on the thirtieth, and on the thirty-first he had a good day, a genuinely good day, the best since Elizabeth had come; he sat up, and had the whole family in, and was funny, and made Mrs. Bennet laugh until she cried and then could not stop crying, and he let her cry and held her hand and did not send her out.

And in the evening, when it was only Elizabeth in the room, he said:

"I want to say a thing to you about your sister Mary, and I want you to carry it, because I cannot say it to her — she would argue, and I have not the wind for an argument, and it is not a thing that can be argued anyway, it can only be handed to somebody.

"I know what she is going to do. Do not tell me she has not decided; I know my daughter, I have watched her all winter reading me poetry she despises in order to sit in this room, and I know what she is, now, which I did not for nineteen years, God forgive me, and I know she is going to hold that ground when I am gone.

"And I want it understood, by somebody, that I do not think it is a tragedy."

Elizabeth did not say anything.

"Everyone will think it a tragedy," said Mr. Bennet. "The plain sister, the one nobody wanted, spending her life in a churchyard holding a thing shut so that a lot of people who never noticed her may go on selling each other ribbons. They will be very sorry for her, in the way people are sorry, which is mostly relief that it is not them.

"They will be wrong. I have had two months to think about this, which is longer than I have ever spent thinking about any of my children, to my shame, and here is what I have arrived at.

"Mary is the only one of the five of you who was born knowing that she was not the point of the story. The others of you — even you, Lizzy, even Jane — grew up expecting, at bottom, that life was a thing that was going to happentoyou, and beaboutyou, and it has, and quite right too. Mary never had that. She was told from the cradle that she was the spare, the dull one, the one to be got through; and it half broke her, and made her tiresome, and I let it, and did not lift a finger.

"And it also made her the one person in this family who can do a thing that is not about herself, and be steadied by it instead of destroyed, and find in it — I have watched her find it, this winter — not martyrdom butwork. Real work, that is hers, that no one can take, that matters, and that she is the best in England at.

"I spent two-and-fifty years being clever and idle and I was the point of nothing and I held nothing up and my whole life fit in a japanned box that turned out to be a death-warrant I could not even read. My daughter Mary, whom I neglected, is going to spend her life being necessary. I do not call that a tragedy, Lizzy. I call it the best of the five endings, and I am ashamed that it took my dying to make me see it, and I will not have her pitied.

"Carry that. Give it to her when it will do some good, which is not now, and not at the funeral, but some day when she is forty and tired and out at that wall at first light wondering whether she was a fool. Tell her that her father knew what she was, at the end, and thought it the best of us. She will pretend it does not signify. It will signify."

He was quiet, and tired, and shut his eyes.

"Now go to bed," he said, "and send Mary up, and do not tell her what I said, and do not cry on the stairs where Hill will seeyou and start the whole house off. There will be time enough for all that. There is going to be a great deal of time for all that, and precious little for this, so go along."

Elizabeth kissed him, and went down, and sent Mary up; and stood in the dark hall of Longbourn for a while, not crying, because he had asked her not to, and then went up the back stairs so that Hill should not see her face.

Behind the house, past the shrubbery, in the churchyard, the pale ground lay among the old graves in the spring dark, and the note that only one living person could hear ran on under everything, and was, that night, a little louder than it had been the night before.

Chapter Sixty-One

Mr. Bennet died on the ninth of April, a little before six in the morning, which was first light.

He had been failing for a week, since the good day on the thirty-first; he slept more and more, and woke less clear, and by the seventh he did not always know the day, though he knew the people, always, to the end. On the eighth he was very quiet and slept most of the day, and in the evening he woke and asked for Mary, and she came, and he said something to her that she never told anybody, not even Elizabeth, and Elizabeth never asked; and then he slept again, and did not properly wake.

They were all in the house. Mrs. Bennet would not leave the room and did not, for two days, and slept in the chair, and was, in the event, magnificent — quiet, and useful, and calm, in a way that none of her daughters had ever seen and that made Elizabeth understand, too late to say so, that the woman had been capable of this the whole time and had simply never once in her life been in a situation that called for it instead of for noise.

Jane and Elizabeth took turns through the last night. Kitty sat up too, and would not be sent to bed, and had grown old enough in a year to be allowed to stay.

And Mary was not in the room.

Mary was in the churchyard.

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She had gone out at half past four, in the dark, in the cold, an hour before first light, in the same boots.

She had not told anyone she was going, except Denny, who walked with her to the churchyard gate and no further, because she asked him to stop there, and he stopped there; and he stood at the gate in the dark for the whole of it, which was an hour and a half, and did not go in, because she had asked him not to, andbecause he understood, better than anyone alive, that this was a thing done alone or not at all.

She went to the north-east corner, where the pale ground lay among the graves, and she stood at the edge of it — at the hard line where the grass changed — and she put her hand on the churchyard wall, and she waited.

She was not waiting for courage. She had settled that. She was waiting for the note, because she had understood, in the study of that winter, a thing that she had told no one, not even in her letters: that the note tracked her father, and that when her father died the note would change, and that there would be a moment — she did not know how long, a minute, an hour — between the ending of the old holding and the full waking of the thing beneath, when it would be, for the first time in four hundred years,unheld; and that this was the moment in which it could be taken up, or not; and that after it, it could not.