Page 58 of Hard Home

"You could have done nothing about it. Your mother would have to be brought to it."

"Then bring her in the summer. Say it is a scheme for taking the girls to town, and say it in front of Lydia, and Lydia will want to go, and my mother will want Lydia to go, and Kitty will be got in at the same door without a word about her health."

Mrs. Gardiner laughed and said that her niece would have made an excellent attorney and that it was a great pity about her sex; and it was agreed for the summer; and Elizabeth got into the carriage with the comfortable feeling of a thing arranged.

It was the twenty-ninth of March.

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They traveled the twenty-four miles to Hunsford in good time. Sir William was in raptures the whole way. Maria was frightened of the horses.

When they turned in at the lodge, and Elizabeth saw the parsonage — the garden sloping to the road, the green pales, the laurel hedge, everything precisely as it had been described eleven times — she was very near laughing, and had to look hard out of the other window.

Mr. Collins and Charlotte appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the small gate, which led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst the nods and smiles of the whole party. In a moment they were all out of the chaise, rejoicing at the sight of each other. Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the liveliest pleasure, and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with coming, when she found herself so affectionately received.

She saw instantly that her cousin's manners were not altered by his marriage; his formal civility was just what it had been, and he detained her some minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after all her family. They were then, with no other delay than his pointing out the neatness of the entrance, taken into the house; and as soon as they were in the parlor, he welcomed them a second time with ostentatious formality to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife's offers of refreshment.

Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its aspect and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her, as if wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him. But though every thing seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him by any sigh of repentance; and rather looked with wonder at her friend that she could have so cheerful an air, with such a companion.

When Mr. Collins said any thing of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear.

After sitting long enough to admire every article of furniture in the room, from the sideboard to the fender, to give an account of their journey and of all that had happened in London, Mr. Collins invited them to take a stroll in his garden, which waslarge and well laid out, and to the cultivation of which he attended himself.

Elizabeth admired the command of countenance with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercise, and owned she encouraged it as much as possible.

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It was in the garden that she began to feel it.

They had gone down the gravel walk to the point where Mr. Collins was in the habit of pausing, in order that his visitors might have the full effect of Rosings — which was visible over the laurel hedge and across the lane, a handsome modern building well situated on rising ground — and he was saying something about the number of windows in the front, and what they had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.

And Elizabeth, standing on the gravel with her hands folded in front of her, understood that she was leaning.

Not her body. She looked down at her own feet to be certain, and her feet were where she had put them. It was that everything in her — attention, hearing, the ordinary forward pull of a person standing in a garden — had turned a few degrees toward the house on the rise, and had been turned since she came through the gate, and would go on being turned; the way a room full of people turns toward the door when somebody important is expected, except that nobody was expected and the room was a parish.

She put out her hand, without deciding to, and laid two fingers against the frame of the little green gate in the hedge.

There was nothing in it at all. It was a wooden gate. It had been painted the summer before last.

She looked past it, up the slope, at Rosings, where every window was catching the last of the afternoon.

"Is it not a fine prospect, cousin Elizabeth?" said Mr. Collins.

"It is a very fine prospect," said Elizabeth Bennet.

She turned round, and found Charlotte watching her from six feet away with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and perfectly attentive and entirely unreadable.

"You feel it," said Charlotte, when the gentlemen had gone on ahead.

"What is it?"

"I have no idea," said Mrs. Collins. "I have lived here five weeks and I have felt precisely nothing, which is exactly what I bargained for and exactly what I have got, and I have watched every soul who comes through that gate to see whattheydo." She began to walk. "The people of this parish lean, Lizzy. All of them, all the time, and not one of them knows it, and if you told them they would think you were making a joke about her Ladyship's consequence."

"And what do you do?"

"I keep the accounts," said Charlotte, "and I count the poultry, and on Wednesdays I dine at Rosings and answer whatever I am asked. And I have three questions I have been saving for you since the second week, and you are not to be sent for until to-morrow, so we shall have to be quick."

Chapter Twenty-Seven