Page 32 of Hard Home

Lydia screamed with laughter and said that Denny was a wretch and had never said a word about them, and Wickham said that he had, and Kitty laughed too, and the whole party stood in the road being delighted for four or five minutes.

To Elizabeth he bowed, and offered his hand, and she gave him hers, which was gloved; and he held it a very little longer than the thing required, and looked at her with a warmth that she found, on consideration afterwards, extremely pleasant and not quite explicable.

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet," he said. "I have heard your name already this morning, from three separate people, which in a town of this size I take to be a sort of fame."

"It is a small town, sir."

"It is a very fortunate one," said Mr. Wickham.

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The whole party were still standing and talking together very agreeably, when the sound of horses drew their notice, and Darcy and Bingley were seen riding down the street.

On distinguishing the ladies of the group, the two gentlemen came directly toward them, and began the usual civilities. Bingley was the principal spokesman, and Miss Bennet the principal object. He was then, he said, on his way to Longbourn on purpose to inquire after her.

Mr. Darcy corroborated it with a bow, and was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger; and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed color, one looked white, the other red.

Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat — a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return.

What could be the meaning of it? — It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.

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Three other people on that street understood a part of it, and none of them understood the same part.

Mr. Bingley, who felt nothing whatever, observed that his friend's horse had gone up on its toes and was being held very hard, and thought that Darcy was uncommonly severe with a good animal.

Lieutenant Denny, standing at his friend's elbow with what remained of a small gift after eleven months at Selsey and one night at the ninth stake, felt something go past him at about the height of his chest: a fast, thin, silent pull, there and gone, in the direction of the man on the horse — the way a draft goes under a door when a door somewhere else in the house is opened. It lasted less than a second. His hand went to his hat before he had decided to move it.

He looked at Wickham, whom he had known for nine days and liked enormously.

Wickham was smiling up at the gentleman on the horse with an expression of perfectly open, wounded, forgiving civility, and he had gone red to the ears, and Denny — who was two-and-twenty, and had been taught in eleven months how much of a man may go out of him and never come back — thought, quite clearly and with no evidence at all:he was not blushing. Something in him just tried a door.

Then Miss Lydia Bennet asked him whether he had brought her the ribbon from town, and he said that he had, and put it out of his head.

And Mr. Darcy, who had his hand full of a good horse that had begun to fight him and his face arranged in the manner of aman returning a salutation from a stranger, sat quite still in the saddle and did the only two things he could do in a public street in front of six people: he kept his temper, and he kept his mouth shut.

He would have given a great deal — he thought this quite consciously, in the four seconds it took — to be permitted to say one plain sentence aloud in that road.

He had sworn not to. Not vaguely, not as a manner of speaking, and not to himself. He had sworn it in a room in Ramsgate fifteen months before, to a girl of fifteen who had been shaking too hard to hold a pen, and it had been the only thing he had left to give her, and he had given it; and it had taken, as such things take, at once and completely, in the way that Mary Bennet could have told anybody about if anybody had ever let her finish a sentence.

So he sat on his horse in Meryton, and said nothing, and looked exactly as proud as he had looked at the assembly.

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In another minute Mr. Bingley, without seeming to have noticed what passed, took leave and rode on with his friend.

Mr. Denny and Mr. Wickham walked with the young ladies to the door of Mr. Philips's house, and then made their bows, in spite of Miss Lydia's pressing entreaties that they would come in, and even in spite of Mrs. Philips's throwing up the parlor window and loudly seconding the invitation.

Mrs. Philips was always glad to see her nieces, and the two eldest, from their recent absence, were particularly welcome; and she was eagerly expressing her surprise at their sudden return home, which, as their own carriage had not fetched them, she should have known nothing about, if she had not happened to see Mr. Jones's shop-boy in the street, when she was called on by Kitty to attend to something else.

"I am tired," said Kitty.

"You are always tired," said Lydia.

"I am not always tired. I am tirednow, and I was not tired before, and I have done nothing but stand in the street." Kitty sat down rather suddenly on the window seat and put her hand up to her collar-bone, and then took it away again, having no idea what she had been meaning to do with it. "It is very close in here, aunt."

"It is not close in the least," said Mrs. Philips. "You want your dinner."