Page 34 of Hard Home

"Good heavens!" cried Elizabeth; "but how couldthatbe? — How could his will be disregarded? — Why did not you seek legal redress?"

"There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to give me no hope from law. A man of honor could not have doubted the intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubtit — or to treat it as a merely conditional recommendation, and to assert that I had forfeited all claim to it by extravagance, imprudence, in short any thing or nothing."

He turned a fish-counter over in his fingers.

"And it was not, Miss Bennet, only a living. I do not know how much you may know of such matters, and it is not a thing one likes to explain, because it sounds so exactly like a man complaining of a fortune he never had. But at Pemberley the incumbency carries with it an office — the wardenship of the western ground — and the office carries abond. Not the Accord itself; nobody supposes such a thing; a share of it. A thread. Enough that a man may feel the boundary he is set to keep, and be answered a little when he speaks to it." He smiled slightly. "It was the whole of my education. From four years old I was walked over that ground twice a week by a man who loved me, and taught the marks of it, and taught what to do at the two places where the wall is thin, and told — by him, in his own words, a hundred times — that it should be mine to keep. And when he died, his son gave it, within the twelvemonth, to a gentleman from Kendal who had never in his life set foot in the county."

"That is quite shocking," said Elizabeth. "He deserves to be publicly disgraced."

"Some time or other hewillbe — but it shall not be byme. Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or exposehim."

Elizabeth honored him for such feelings, and thought him handsomer than ever as he expressed them.

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"But what," said she after a pause, "can have been his motive? — what can have induced him to behave so cruelly?"

"A thorough, determined dislike of me — a dislike which I cannot but attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father's uncommon attachment to me irritatedhim I believe very early in life. He had not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood — the sort of preference which was often given me."

"I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as this — though I have never liked him, I had not thought so very ill of him — I had supposed him to be despising his fellow-creatures in general, but did not suspect him of descending to such malicious revenge, such injustice, such inhumanity as this!"

After a few minutes reflection, however, she continued, "Idoremember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition must be dreadful."

"I will not trust myself on the subject," replied Wickham; "Ican hardly be just to him."

Elizabeth was again deep in thought, and after a time exclaimed, "To treat in such a manner, the godson, the friend, the favorite of his father!" — She could have added, "A young man too, likeyou, whose very countenance may vouch for your being amiable" — but she contented herself with "And one, too, who had probably been his own companion from childhood, connected together, as I think you said, in the closest manner!"

"We were born in the same parish, within the same park; the greatest part of our youth was passed together; inmates of the same house, sharing the same amusements, objects of the same parental care.Myfather began life in the profession which your uncle, Mr. Philips, appears to do so much credit to — but he gave up every thing to be of use to the late Mr. Darcy, and devoted all his time to the care of the Pemberley property. He was most highly esteemed by Mr. Darcy, a most intimate, confidential friend. Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself to be under the greatest obligations to my father's active superintendance, and when immediately before my father's death, Mr. Darcy gave him a voluntary promise of providing for me, I am convinced that hefelt it to be as much a debt of gratitude tohim, as of affection to myself."

"How strange!" cried Elizabeth. "How abominable!"

"The ground never took to me," said Mr. Wickham.

He said it quite lightly, looking at the card table, and it went past her as such things do.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It is nothing. It is a thing that is said of me — was said of me, when I was a boy — by people who wished me out of the house, and I have never been able to get it entirely out of my head. Old servants are great believers in that sort of talk. A boy runs about a park for eighteen years and the park is not obliged to have an opinion about him." He set down the counter. "But the old man ought to have insisted. That is my whole quarrel with the world, Miss Bennet, if you will have it plainly: heought to have insisted, and he was too gentle, and he let it be said, and his son heard it said, and made a wall of it. A great house will always find a reason to keep out the steward's boy. They do not even have to invent one. They only have to wait until the boy is old enough to be told that the walls do not like him."

Elizabeth looked at him.

She had not meant to. It was rude, and he was a pleasant man telling her a painful thing, and she would have been ashamed to be caught at it. She did it because his voice had altered on that last speech — the polished thing had gone out of it — and because two-and-twenty years of a gift that came unbidden had taught her nothing at all about not using it.

And she saw straight down into the middle of him, and it was true.

Not partly true; not true as men's grievances are true, with a bruise at the bottom and a great deal of decoration over it. It wastrue: a genuine wound, dealt young, still open, still bleeding at the edges after eighteen years, and no more capableof dissembling itself than a broken arm. He believed every word he had said to her. He believed it the way she believed her own name.

Elizabeth Bennet sat back in her chair with the ivory box in her lap and felt the last piece of the thing drop into place, and knew, with the complete and settled certainty of a woman who has looked and seen, exactly what Mr. Darcy of Pemberley was.

She was right about everything she had seen.

Her mistake — and it would cost her a good deal, and cost other people more — was a small one, and it was this: she had asked her gift whether the man was lying, and her gift had told her that he was not, and she had understood that to be an answer to a question about Mr. Darcy.

She had not asked, because it had not occurred to her that there was any such question, whether a man may be perfectly sincere about a door, and still be the reason it was shut.

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Their attention was called off by Mr. Collins, who had discovered from Mrs. Philips that Lady Catherine de Bourgh was Mr. Darcy's aunt, and who was in a state of considerable agitation about it.