Page 55 of Hard Home

And in Meryton, in the third week of January, Miss Mary King came into ten thousand pounds.

Her grandfather died at Ware after a short illness, and left her the whole of it, and within a week she had come to stay with her uncle in the town and had appeared at the assembly in mourning that everybody agreed was a great deal more becoming than her ordinary clothes.

Mr. Wickham was at her side by the second dance.

Elizabeth saw it happen, and had the honesty to be more amused than injured. She had not been in love with him; she had thought about him a great deal, which is a different complaint and recovers faster; and by the end of the evening she had arranged the whole business in her mind under the head ofa handsome young man must have something to live on, and had said so to Charlotte, who was in the last fortnight of being Charlotte Lucas and had other things to think about.

"He is very sudden," was all Charlotte said.

"He is very poor. It is the same thing and it is not a crime."

"No," said Charlotte. "It is not a crime."

Lydia declared that Mary King was a nasty little freckled thing and that she wondered at Wickham's taste, and said so loudly and often enough that it got round Meryton in nine days and reached Miss King herself, who was seventeen, and cried about it, and had nobody to tell either.

Kitty said nothing at all about it, and stopped going into the town.

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Elizabeth found her one afternoon in the back parlor with a piece of unstarted work in her lap.

"Kitty."

"I am not crying about him," said Kitty. "I hope you do not think that I am crying about him, because I am not, and Lydia has been saying it all week and I am sick of it. I did not think he liked me particularly. Nobody thinks anybody likes them particularly, when there is Lydia in the room."

"Then what is it?"

Kitty was silent for a while.

"He was kind to me," she said. "That is all. He talked to me on the road that day when nobody else did, and he handed me over the stile at the second field, and he asked me about my cough — Lizzy, he was the only person in the whole world who asked me about my cough — and I have been telling myself since Michaelmas that at least there was one person, and now there is not, and I do not think there was ever one person at all. I think he asks everybody. I think it is a thing he does."

Elizabeth sat down beside her sister and did not say anything for a while, which was the correct thing, and which she had learned from Jane and had never once managed before that afternoon.

"He does ask everybody," she said at last. "But I did not ask you, and I ought to have, and I am asking now."

"It is worse in the mornings," said Kitty.

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Mr. Collins came back into Hertfordshire in the second week of February, and the wedding was on the Thursday.

Elizabeth stood up with her friend. The church was cold and full of Lucases, and Sir William made a speech at the breakfast in which he mentioned St. James's twice, and Mrs. Bennet was civil throughout in a manner that cost her more than anybody there could have understood, and cried in the carriage going home and said it was the cold.

Charlotte Collins went into Kent on the Friday.

She wrote at the end of the month: a good, dry, entirely characteristic letter about the parsonage, and the poultry, and the road, and the shelves in the closet, which were exactly where they had been described. In the middle of the second sheet, in the same even hand, was this:

I have dined at Rosings three times. Her Ladyship is everything I was told and a great deal more of it. She asked me forty questions on the first evening, and I answered them all, and by the second course she had put me down as a sensible woman of no family whatever and has not looked at me since with any particular attention, which is precisely what I wanted and I have had it. You may tell your sister Mary, if she is interested in such things, that Miss de Bourgh does not speak in company, at all, ever; not one word in three evenings; and that when the servants bring her anything her mother answers for her.

Come at Easter. I ask it in earnest. My father and Maria come in March, and if you will come with them I shall be very glad, and if you will not I shall write again in a fortnight and ask you less politely.

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It was Mary who put the last of it together, and she did it in the still-room, over a jar of blackberry cordial, in the third week of March, and Elizabeth remembered it afterwards with painful exactness.

"Lizzy. What is Miss King's money?"

"Ten thousand pounds, and a great deal of talk about it."