Page 26 of Hard Home

"For being out of quarters, stupid. It is very serious, being out of quarters, though I am sure I do not see why, when there is nothing whatever to do in Meryton at three in the morning." Lydia yawned. "And now they have all been ordered not to go past the mill after dark, which is the greatest nonsense in the world, because that is exactly where the good walk is, and Denny says he shall pay no attention to it at all, and no more shall I."

"Lydia."

"Well, I shan't. And there is to be a review on the twenty-sixth."

Elizabeth looked at her sister, who was fifteen, and eating a piece of cake, and entirely happy.

"Lydia," she said, "if you are ever out that way after dark, I want you to promise me—"

"Lord, Lizzy, you are grown as bad as Mary."

Kitty laughed, and Lydia laughed, and Mrs. Bennet said that a review was very good news indeed and that she had always thought a red coat became a man wonderfully, and Elizabeth got no promise, and did not think of it again for eleven weeks.

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They had come home in Mr. Bingley's chaise, by the road, which is a mile further round than the fields.

Half a mile short of Longbourn the road runs down through Barrett's ground toward the water, and there the horses, which were good horses and well used to that road, put back their ears and came to a stand.

The coachman spoke to them and got nothing. He got down, and took the near leader by the head, and led them forward eleven or twelve yards over a piece of road that looked exactly like every other piece of road in Hertfordshire, and got up again, and they went on perfectly well.

"Beg pardon, ma'am," he said, over his shoulder. "They don't like this bit."

"Have they not been down it before?" said Jane.

"Every day of their lives, ma'am."

Jane said something pleasant and left it. She was tired; she had been tired since Tuesday in a way that sleep was not touching; and she had not said so to anybody, because there was nothing to say.I am tiredis not an illness. It is what everybody is.

Elizabeth put her head out of the window and looked back.

The pale strip of ground was where it had been, running down from the corner to the water, and she was quite sure of two things: that it was the same strip she had crossed on foot on Tuesday morning, and that it had not, on Tuesday morning, reached the road.

She sat back and looked at her gloves and told herself that she had not measured it, that nobody measures a piece of grass, that she had crossed it in a hurry and been thinking of Jane, and that a person who begins to keep an account of the color of fields will end by keeping an account of a great many other things and will be tiresome about all of them.

Then she said, "Jane. When you were ill. Did it seem to you at all that—"

"Yes," said Jane.

Elizabeth waited.

"I do not know how to finish that sentence either," said Jane, "and I have been trying for five days." She was looking out of the other window, at nothing. "It is like when one has been holding a door shut against somebody, and they stop pushing, and one goes on standing there because one cannot be certain they have gone away."

"Who isthey?"

"There is nobody. That is the difficulty. There is nobody at all, Lizzy, and I am so very tired, and I would be obliged if you would not tell Mama, because she will send for Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones will bleed me, and I do not think that would answer."

The chaise turned in at the gate.

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A little before six, Lieutenant Denny rode down the same road at a walk, being on no particular errand and having been sent by no particular person, in a plain coat, with his right glove off.

He stopped where the horses had stopped.

Then he got down and walked the pale ground from the corner of Barrett's field to the water with his bare palm out at the height of his hip, counting his paces aloud in a low voice, the way he had counted them along nine miles of Sussex for eleven months.

At the end of it he stood a while, doing sums he was not good at.