Page 154 of Hard Home

She was at peace.

"Papa is gone," said Elizabeth.

"I know," said Mary. "I felt him go. It was how I knew the moment had come." She was very calm, and very tired, and her voice was steady. "He went easily, Lizzy. I want you to know that, because you will wonder, and I felt it — there was no fear in it and no pain, he simply — stopped holding on, and it was the gentlest thing, and the thing under the ground let go of him at the same moment, and I do not think he suffered at all, and I do not think he was afraid, and I think at the very last he was — light. Set down. I felt it. It is the one part of this I can give you as a certainty, and I give it to you."

Elizabeth found she could not speak.

"Come away from the wall," she said at last.

"In a moment. Not yet." Mary looked out over the pale ground, which in the strengthening light was — Elizabeth saw it now too — no longer white with frost, no longer quite so dead a color, though it would be a long time, Mary said, a long time, years, before anything grew there that should; the county did not mend in a night, it had not broken in a night; but it washeld, and holding was the whole of the work, and the mending would come after, slowly, under her hand, for the rest of her life. "I have to feel it settle first. It is new to it and so am I and we have to learn each other, and this is the hour it is quietest, and I would ratherdo it now, while it is only me and you, than later with the whole house awake and my mother's grief in it."

Elizabeth stood beside her sister at the wall, in the cold, in the first light, and did not touch her, because she understood that Mary was working; and after a while she put her own hand on the wall too, next to Mary's, not to feel anything — she would never feel the note, that was not her gift — but so that her sister should not be entirely alone at the edge of it in the first hour.

They stood there together as the light came up, the one who saw and the one who heard, at the wall of the churchyard where their father lay newly dead in the house behind them and four hundred years of their blood lay in the ground before them; and the note ran on under everything, steady now, held; and neither of them said anything at all, because there was nothing that needed saying, and they had both, at last, in a hard year, learned the difference.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Mr. Collins came into the Longbourn property, as in the course of nature he must, and it did not matter in the least, which was the last and quietest of the year's reversals.

He came down in May, all civility and condolence and self-importance, prepared to be delicate about the widow and her daughters and the melancholy necessity of their removal; and he found a house he could not open.

For the entail had done exactly what it had always said it would do — the estate, the two thousand a year, the lawn and the paddock, all passed to him, correctly, by the operative clause that ten thousand deeds share — and the other thing, the keeping, the thing that had no grantor and no release and the verbkeepnine times in eleven lines, had passed to nobody, because it was not the estate's to pass; it had been taken up, in a churchyard at first light, by a person the deed had been waiting four hundred years to describe, and it did not answer to the owner of the house any more than it ever had.

Mr. Collins put his hand on the door frame of Longbourn — the same frame Lady Catherine had touched, the same one that had refused him in a ballroom eighteen months before — and felt nothing, and was puzzled, and concluded that his feelings were too much affected by the solemnity of the occasion; and Mary, standing in the hall, watched him do it and said nothing at all.

He was, in the event, not unkind. He was a fool, but there was no malice in him, and there never had been; and when he understood that Mrs. Bennet was provided for, and that three of the girls were married and gone, and that the fourth was going to her sister at Pemberley, and that the fifth — the plain one, the one who read — proposed to stay in the neighborhood in asmall way and keep herself, he was positively relieved, because it spared him the expense of feeling responsible; and he settled a small annuity on Mrs. Bennet with a great deal of ceremony, which Mr. Darcy had privately arranged to make up to a sum that would keep her comfortably, in such a manner that Mr. Collins believed the whole of it was his own generosity, and told everyone so, for years.

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Mrs. Bennet did not go to Netherfield after all, nor to Pemberley.

She astonished everyone, which she had been doing at intervals of about twenty years her whole life, by taking a small neat house in Meryton, near her sister Philips, with two servants and the annuity and her four thousand pounds; and she was, in her widowhood, a different woman, or rather the same woman with the noise turned down, because there was no longer anything she needed to be frightened about — her daughters were settled, the thing she had worked at for five-and-twenty years was accomplished, and she found, having accomplished it, that she had a good deal of ordinary sense that had been drowned out for two decades by the sheer terror of the entail.

She was still silly. She was silly about Lydia's babies, and about Jane's, and about the honor of being mother-in-law to Mr. Darcy, which she mentioned in Meryton with a frequency that her sisters bore with because she had, after all, earned it.

But she never once, to the end of her life, said one word to anybody about what had really been under the low ground, or what her daughter Mary did out at the churchyard wall at first light; because Mary had asked her not to, on the morning after the funeral, plainly, as one grown woman to another; and Mrs. Bennet, who had never in her life been trusted with a secret because everyone knew she could not keep one, kept this one, for thirty years, perfectly, out of a fierce and wordlessunderstanding of what her strange third daughter had taken up, and what it had cost, and that it was the most important thing anyone in her family had ever done.

She was, Elizabeth came to think, the person the year had changed the most; and the change was only that she had, at last, been given something true to be strong about, and had turned out to have been strong all along.

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Kitty went to Pemberley, and did very well there.

Removed from Lydia's influence, and her mother's, and given air and horses and Georgiana Darcy for a friend, she grew into a sensible, healthy, good-humored young woman, and the cough never came back, and she married, at three-and-twenty, a clergyman with a good living near Lambton and a kind face, and was happy in an ordinary way that nobody who had known her at fifteen would have predicted, and that Elizabeth, who had once writtenshe is better; there is no other thing that has changedin a paper she showed nobody, watched with a private satisfaction she never explained.

Lydia and Wickham lived as such people live: always a little in want, always removing, always affectionate and always dissatisfied, on his pay and the settlement and what could be got from Jane and Elizabeth, which was more from Jane, who could not say no, than from Elizabeth, who could.

Wickham kept the western boundary at Pemberley for the whole of his life, and kept it well; it was the one thing he had ever been given that was truly his, and he did it, and Elizabeth learned in time not to be surprised by it. He never came into Hertfordshire again; the oath held, as Mary could have told anyone it would. He and Lydia came to Pemberley once a year, and he and Darcy were coldly civil, and once — only once, years on — Elizabeth came upon the two men standing together at the west boundary at dusk, not speaking, both with a hand onthe ground, doing the same silent work; and she went away without letting them see her, and never mentioned it, because some things do not resolve, and she had married a man who had taught her that, without meaning to, in a copse in Hertfordshire.

Lydia never knew. She lived to be old, loud, brown, and content, and died without one true word ever having been said to her about her own blood, exactly as everyone had arranged; and Elizabeth held that, all her life, in the two hands the year had taught her to hold things with — that it had been a kindness, and that it had been the other thing too, and that both were true and neither canceled the other, and that this was simply what it was to have lived through something and understood it.

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Jane and Bingley stayed at Netherfield a twelvemonth, and then — for Netherfield was three miles from a churchyard, and Jane was going out of herself into the ground a little more every season she stayed, though slowly, so slowly — they bought an estate in Derbyshire, thirty miles from Pemberley, and moved north; and away from the failing county Jane's gift came back into her, over about two years, gently, so that she was once more a woman who quieted a room without knowing it.

But she was legible now, permanently; something had been used up in her that did not fully return, and she did not want it to, and said so. She had been seen once, worn out, in her mother's shrubbery, and she had married the man who saw her; and she would rather be a woman with a face that showed what she felt, a little too tired, than go back to being the loveliest and most unreadable woman in any room she entered. She was happy. She was the happiest of all of them, in the plainest way, and had always been going to be, from the first page.

Georgiana grew up. She came out, and was not destroyed by it, because she had a sister now who treated her as though she were ordinary, which was the only thing she had everwanted and the one thing no one had thought to give her; and Elizabeth's influence over her was such that she learned to be laughed at, and to laugh, and to disagree out loud, and to sit at an instrument in a full room and play badly and not mind; and she thought, to the end of her life, that the best thing her brother had ever done was to write her a four-hour letter one November night asking her opinion about a thing that might cost them both, and that the second best was marrying the woman who made him do it.