Page 66 of Hard Home

"And what arts did he use to separate them?"

"He did not talk to me of his own arts," said Fitzwilliam smiling. "He only told me what I have now told you."

Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with indignation.

After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she was so thoughtful.

"I am thinking of what you have been telling me," said she. "Your cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the judge?"

"You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?"

"I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his friend's inclination, or why, upon his own judgment alone, he was to determine and direct in what manner that friend was to be happy." She stopped herself, and continued in a lighter tone, "But as we know none of the particulars, it is not fair to condemn him. It is not to be supposed that there was much affection in the case."

"That is not an unnatural surmise," said Fitzwilliam, "but it is a sad lessening of the honor of my cousin's triumph."

This was spoken jestingly, but it appeared to her so just a picture of Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer; and therefore, abruptly changing the conversation, talked on indifferent matters till they reached the parsonage.

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He had said one other thing, in the middle of it, that she did not attend to until much later.

She had asked — lightly, out of nothing but the wish to keep the subject open — whether the objections against the lady had been to the lady herself, or to her family.

"Neither, as I understood it," Colonel Fitzwilliam had said, "or not chiefly. I had the impression that a good deal of it was the country."

"Thecountry?"

"So I understood him." Fitzwilliam had laughed, comfortably, the way a man laughs at a friend's known absurdity. "It is entirely of a piece with him, Miss Bennet, and you must not think it means anything. Darcy has notions about places. He has had them since we were boys — he will not sleep at an inn at Melton and cannot tell you why; he tookmy brother's shooting box off him for a season and then would not go into it. He came back from Hertfordshire and said the neighborhood was unhealthy, in a tone that would have suited a plague town, and would not be got to say another word about it. Whereupon he removed his friend, and gave up the house, and there was an end of it. He is the best man I know and the drollest, and one gets used to it."

She had said, "Unhealthy."

"Damp, I imagine. He never explains himself. It is the one vice he has."

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Elizabeth got into her own room as soon as they were gone, and thought without interruption of all that she had heard.

That it was Jane there could be no doubt. There were not two men in the world over whom Mr. Darcy could have such boundless influence, and she had never doubted his being concerned in the measures taken to separate them.

To Jane herself, to her modest, gentle, unresisting sister, and to Jane's four months of misery, she gave the whole of the first quarter of an hour.

Then she gave a quarter of an hour to the rest of it.

Some very strong objections against the lady.No fortune, no connections, an attorney in Meryton and a warehouse in Cheapside, and a mother, and three sisters — she went through them all, in order, and made herself sick with it, and every one of them was true, and she found that she could bear them; they were the ordinary contempt of the ordinary great and she had heard them at Netherfield in November over a card table.

What she could not bear was the country.

He had gone away from Hertfordshire — from her home, from the only place she had ever lived, from two-and-twenty years of walks and fields and stiles and the wet green lane to Meryton — and he had described it to his cousin in a tone thatwould have suited a plague town, and had removed his friend from it, and had given up the house, and would not be got to say another word about it.

Unhealthy.

Elizabeth Bennet sat on the edge of the bed in the parsonage at Hunsford with her hands in her lap and was as angry as she had ever been in her life, and the anger had a curious quality that she noticed even at the time and could not explain: it was too big for the offense. It had a great deal of fright in it, and she did not know where the fright had come from, and she went over the sentence again and again —he said the neighborhood was unhealthy— the way one goes over a step in the dark that was not where one expected the floor to be.

Her head ached, and it grew much worse toward the evening; and, added to her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined her not to attend her cousins to Rosings, where they were engaged to drink tea.

Mrs. Collins, seeing that she was really unwell, did not press her to go, and as much as possible prevented her husband from pressing her; but Mr. Collins could not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine's being rather displeased by her staying at home.

Chapter Thirty