Page 70 of Hard Home

Not on the Tuesday of the week she was ill — the one evening in three-and-twenty years when everything Jane Bennet felt had been written on Jane Bennet's face, when Bingley hadsat by her for three hours and gone away the happiest man in Hertfordshire and could never afterwards say why. Elizabeth had stood at the side of that room and thought,look at her now, and go on looking, she will be well by Thursday.

Mr. Darcy had not been in that room. He had come in late, and gone to the window, and spoken to nobody.

And so he had watched Jane on every other occasion in the whole of his acquaintance with her — at the ball, at Longbourn, at dinner, at church — and had seen, with perfect accuracy, exactly and only what Jane's gift permits the world to see; and he had reported it honestly; and he had been wrong; and there was not one sentence in his account that Elizabeth could contradict, because she had watched the same woman for two-and-twenty years and had needed to betoldby Charlotte Lucas, in a field, in October, what it was that she was looking at.

Her heart was not likely to be easily touched.

"Oh, Jane," said Elizabeth, out loud, in an empty lane in Kent.

The rest of that part she read with a cooler head, and found in it what she had expected and worse: the total want of propriety betrayed by her mother, by her three younger sisters, and occasionally even by her father. It gave her pain. She could not deny the justice of it, and it was not to be denied; and the compliment to herself and Jane, which she read twice, did not much mend it.

He wrote that he had joined with Bingley's sisters in pointing out to him the evils of the choice; that he had concealed from him Jane's being in town; and that in this concealment he had been wrong.

There is but one part of my conduct, in the whole affair, on which I do not reflect with satisfaction; it was that I condescended to adopt the measures of art so far as to concealfrom him your sister's being in town. I knew it myself, as it was known to Miss Bingley; but her brother is even yet ignorant of it. That they might have met without ill consequence, is perhaps probable; but his regard did not appear to me enough extinguished for him to see her without some danger. Perhaps this concealment, this disguise, was beneath me. It is done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer.

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The second part began at the top of the second sheet, and it did not begin with Wickham.

You asked me, last night, what is unhealthy in Hertfordshire. I could not answer you, and you were pleased to understand me perfectly, and you were wrong; and this is the part of the letter which I have been three hours writing, and which you will believe or not as you see fit.

There is a strip of ground running out of the north-east corner of the field which your neighbors call Barrett's, down to the water and up toward the Meryton road. You have crossed it. I know that you have crossed it, because you crossed it on foot at eight in the morning on the twelfth of November, alone, when your sister was ill at Netherfield; and I walked it myself at eleven the same day, having spent the intervening three hours attempting to find a reason why a gentleman might follow a young woman's route across four fields without giving offense, and having failed to find one.

The grass in that strip is the wrong color. It is not blighted; it is ordinary. That is precisely what is wrong with it. Under sound old ground the grass runs a little pale and a little cold, and every countryman in England knows it and no countryman inEngland thinks about it, any more than he thinks about the sky being up.

In that strip there is nothing. It is not thin. It is not weak. There is nothing there at all, and there is more of it now than there was in November.

I measured it twice. On the twelfth of November it was one-and-thirty yards. On the fourth of December it was rather above a hundred. I do not know what it is now. I have reason to believe it is moving uphill, toward the town, at something in the region of nine yards in the week, and if that is so — and I beg you will do this arithmetic yourself, and not take it from me — then it reached the Meryton road at about the turn of the year and it is now somewhere in the fields behind the church.

Elizabeth stood in the lane with the paper shaking, and did the arithmetic, and got the same answer.

I wrote in November to a Mr. Tarrant of the Society of Antiquaries, who is the only man living whose learning on this subject I would trust across a room. I asked him what bargains the old courts made in Hertfordshire, and with whom.

His answer is that there are none. Every county south and east of the Trent is in the rolls — four hundred and eleven entries, what was given and what was taken. Hertfordshire is not among them. There is no gap where the entries should be. The clerks left no space. The county was never bargained for.

And yet its wards have never once been renewed in four hundred years, which you may verify at any parish in the county in an afternoon, and which no person of sense has ever done, because there has never been anything there to alarm anybody. Your mother said as much to me at Netherfield, in November, with great satisfaction, and I have thought aboutit almost every day since. Ground that never needs mending is not sound ground. It is ground that nobody has ever been able to reach.

I laid a ward upon Mr. Bingley's ballroom. It took me four days. On the ninth night I took it up again, in the middle of the second dance, for a reason I shall come to; and the room stood open for four hours afterwards with a hundred and four people in it, and I held it, and I have no wish to discuss the manner of it.

I then advised my friend to give up the house, and did not tell him why, and could not; and I told my cousin that the neighborhood was unhealthy, which was the largest true thing I could say to a man I had not the right to frighten. He repeated it to you as a piece of folly. I do not blame him. In his place I should have laughed at it myself.

Madam, I am aware how this reads. A gentleman who has been refused writes to the lady the following morning with an account of some grass. I have no evidence that would satisfy a magistrate and I am not asking you to believe me. I am asking you to do three things, and if you do them and find me a fool you may burn this and think of me exactly as you thought of me last night.

Walk out to that field when you go home, and take your sister Mary, who has read Colwood and Harrow and is the only person in your family who has understood a word of any of this, and let her look at it.

Do not go into any low ground in that county after dark, and do not permit your youngest sister to do so, and I am aware that you will find the second harder than the first.

And ask Captain Harding of the ——shire what his orders are. He will not tell you. Ask him in front of a window and watch his hands.

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She had come to the bottom of the second sheet, and there was a fold at the end of it, and then the third paper, sealed, which she had been holding all this time between her fingers and the leather of her glove.

The last lines of the second sheet were these:

There remains Mr. Wickham, and I find I cannot write it.

That is not a figure of speech and I ask you to attend to it. Fifteen months ago, in a lodging-house at Ramsgate, I swore an oath to my sister that no one would ever know what had been done to her. I swore it properly, in the way that such things are done, with her hand in mine; she was fifteen years old and had asked me for it herself, and I could think of nothing else in the world to give her.