Page 71 of Hard Home

I have kept it. I kept it in a road in Meryton in November with the man standing eleven feet away being introduced to your sisters, and I kept it in Mr. Collins's parlor last night when you asked me to defend myself and I would have given a great deal to be able to.

In the sealed paper is the whole of it: not written, but as it was. You will need to be alone and sitting down, and to have your right hand bare upon the page. It is not dangerous to you. It will occupy about a quarter of an hour and it will not be pleasant.

You will understand what breaking such an oath must cost the man who swore it. You are not to concern yourself with that; it is done already, the seal is made, and whether you open it orthrow it in the fire the price is the same and was paid at about four this morning. I mention it only because you are a just woman and would have wanted to know, and because if I did not tell you, you might one day find it out and think that I had contrived to conceal it in order to be admired for it.

I would ask you to keep my sister's name out of any conversation you may ever have on this subject. That is not an oath and I have no means of requiring it. I ask it.

I will only add, God bless you.

FITZWILLIAM DARCY

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Elizabeth stood at the gate for a long time.

There was a blackbird going on in the plantation, and the sun had come round onto the top rail, and a mile off somebody was cutting wood, and the little sealed paper lay in her palm and was warm, which paper is not.

She thought, with the last piece of the person she had been at eight o'clock that morning:this is the most extraordinary attempt at self-justification I have ever heard of, and he has spent the night constructing it, and I shall read it and find the flaw.

She looked round the lane. It was empty in both directions. There was a stile into the field opposite, and beyond it, out of sight of the road, a fallen elm with the bark off it, where she had sat twice that week.

She went over the stile, and sat down, and took off her right glove.

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was not like reading, and it was not like remembering, and it was not in the smallest degree like a dream.

Afterwards she thought that the nearest thing was standing in a doorway of a house one has lived in, and being unable to go in or to go away.

She put her bare hand on the paper and there was a moment of nothing whatever — long enough for her to thinkwell, and there is the flaw, it is a piece of theater and it does not work— and then the elm and the field and the blackbird went a very long distance off, and did not stop being there, and she was in a room in Grosvenor-street on the eleventh of August in the year before last, at a quarter past nine in the morning, with a letter in her hand.

Hishand. She could see the knuckles and the cuff. She had no control of it whatever and no wish to try.

The letter was in a round, careful, girlish hand that had been taught by somebody exacting, and it went crooked at the fourth line and stayed crooked.

My dear brother I have done something and I cannot tell whether it is very bad or whether I am being a child about it and if you are angry I do not think I can bear it but I would rather you were angry with me here than that you should hear it from somebody else. I have said that I will go away with Mr Wickham. I said it yesterday. Mrs Younge says that you will be very glad in the end and that all families are so at first and that we are not to mind it, and I did not think that I minded it, and then last night I could not go to sleep and I have been sitting up since four writing this and tearing it up. Please come. Please do not be.

And there it stopped, and there was a great deal of white paper, and then in a different ink, plainly hours later:

Please come. G.

The whole of the feeling that went through the man holding that letter came through Elizabeth like water through a sieve, and there was not one part of it she had expected.

There was no anger in it at all. There was a single spike of pure fright, and under the fright — this was the thing that made her want to put the paper down and that she could not put down — there wasrelief, enormous and shameful and immediate, because his sister had written to him, because she had written tohim, because in the four years since their father died he had never once been able to make her tell him anything.

He was on the road within the hour.

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She was in a chaise for a long time. She was aware that in the field in Kent it was not taking that long; the two things ran alongside each other, the way a fever does.

He did not think in words for most of it. What he did instead was a thing Elizabeth recognized at once and had never known anybody else did: he went over conversations. Six weeks of letters from Ramsgate, one a week, and he took them apart sentence by sentence looking for the place where he ought to have seen it, and found four, and did each of the four several times.

Mrs Younge is very kind and lets me do as I like.

We have met a gentleman here who knew papa.

You are not to trouble to come down as I know how busy you are with the Kympton business.