Page 25 of Hard Home

Her sister made not the smallest objection, and the piano-forte was opened, and Darcy, after a few moments' recollection, was not sorry for it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.

Elizabeth, for her part, went up early.

She sat on the edge of her bed for some time with her candle unsnuffed, being annoyed, and not perfectly certain what she was annoyed about; and told herself that a man who announces his own implacability at a fireside has said nothing but that he is proud of it; and found that this did not answer as well as it should have done; and thought,wilfully, and then,no, that is very unjust, that is grossly unjust; and blew the candle out with rather more force than was needed.

In the next room her sister slept for nine hours together, and woke on Thursday very much better, and was pleasant and serene and lovely at breakfast, and Mr. Bingley looked at her allthrough it and could not for the life of him recover the thing he had been so certain of on Tuesday night.

Chapter Twelve

In consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth wrote the next morning to her mother, to beg that the carriage might be sent for them in the course of the day. But Mrs. Bennet, who had calculated on her daughters remaining at Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which would exactly finish Jane's week, could not bring herself to receive them with pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at least not to Elizabeth's wishes, for she was impatient to get home. Mrs. Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly have the carriage before Tuesday; and in her postscript it was added, that if Mr. Bingley and his sister pressed them to stay longer, she could spare them very well.

Against staying longer, however, Elizabeth was positively resolved — nor did she much expect it would be asked; and fearful, on the contrary, of being considered as intruding themselves needlessly long, she urged Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley's carriage immediately, and at length it was settled that their original design of leaving Netherfield that morning should be mentioned, and the request made.

The communication excited many professions of concern; and enough was said of wishing them to stay at least till the following day to work on Jane; and till the morrow their going was deferred. Miss Bingley was then sorry that she had proposed the delay, for her jealousy and dislike of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.

The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were to go so soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that it would not be safe for her — that she was not enough recovered; but Jane was firm where she felt herself to be right.

To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligence — Elizabeth had been at Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he liked — and Miss Bingley was uncivil toher, and more teasing than usual to himself. He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration shouldnowescape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behavior during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her.

It was, he considered afterwards, the longest half hour of his adult life, and he had once spent a night in a mine in Derbyshire with two men who were probably going to die.

---

On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable to almost all, took place.

Miss Bingley's civility to Elizabeth increased at last very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane; and when they parted, after assuring the latter of the pleasure it would always give her to see her either at Longbourn or Netherfield, and embracing her most tenderly, she even shook hands with the former. — Elizabeth took leave of the whole party in the liveliest spirits.

They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother. Mrs. Bennet wondered at their coming, and thought them very wrong to give so much trouble, and was sure Jane would have caught cold again. — But their father, though very laconic in his expressions of pleasure, was really glad to see them; he had felt their importance in the family circle. The evening conversation, when they were all assembled, had lostmuch of its animation, and almost all its sense, by the absence of Jane and Elizabeth.

"I am glad you are come back, Lizzy," he said, from behind the library door, without getting up.

That was the whole of it. It was, she reflected, a good deal more than most fathers managed, and considerably less than she could have done with.

---

They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature; and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of thread-bare morality to listen to.

"I have been reading," she said, "in Colwood'sDiscourse Upon the Binding Word— it is in father's library, though he says nobody has cut the pages since his grandfather — and there is a chapter upon oaths sworn in ignorance, which is very curious. Colwood holds that a binding taken by a person who does not know that it is a binding is binding notwithstanding. He compares it to a debt contracted by a minor, which the law will sometimes void; only the ground is not a court of law, and voids nothing, and does not care in the least whether you understood the words when you said them."

"Very true, Mary," said Kitty.

"He gives an instance of a young woman in Suffolk in the last century who—"

"Mary, my love," said Mrs. Bennet, "not before dinner."

Mary shut the book and put it under her arm and said nothing else about it, and it was in her room on the shelf above her wash-stand for another nineteen months, and nobody read it.

---

Catherine and Lydia had information for them of a different sort. Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officershad dined lately with their uncle; a private had been flogged; and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.

"He is going to bemarried!" cried Lydia. "Only think! And to a girl not above sixteen, they say, though I am sure Denny said seventeen. We shall have a wedding, and she will be at every ball, and I mean to be her particular friend from the very first day."

"And what was the private flogged for?" said Elizabeth.

"Oh! that was nothing at all. Only itwasrather droll, Lizzy, and you will laugh." Lydia set down her tea. "He was found in a field. In the middle of the night — at three in the morning, if you please — sitting down in the middle of Barrett's long field with his coat off and his boots off and his feet quite bare, and no more notion of how he came there than the man in the moon. He kept saying that he had been called for.Called for!And they asked him by whom, and he could not say, and then he cried, which for a man of six foot two is the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of, and Captain Carter says the whole mess was in fits."

"And for that he was flogged."