Page 73 of Hard Home

"Get out."

"I ask because it is not always so much as people suppose, and it does come back in some cases, and you will want to know, and there is nobody in England you will be able to ask." He picked up his hat. "It comes back if it is taken slowly. Mine was not taken; it was never there; that is a different case and I am the only man living who has studied it. There. That is the last civil thing I shall ever do for your family and you may make what use of it you like."

He stopped at the door.

"You could have given it to me," said George Wickham, without any heat at all. "That is the whole of it, in the end. Your father wanted to. He said so to my face in the library in the October before he died, in front of the fire, with his hand on my shoulder —it shall be yours, George, whatever that ground has to say about it— and he died in the January and you had eleven months to do it in and you gave it to a man from Kendal.

"I would have been warden of the western ground. That is all I ever wanted in my life and it was a small thing and you had eight hundred years of it and I asked for a thread.

"And you looked at me across your father's coffin and you decided that the ground knew best."

He went out. They heard him on the stairs, and the street door, and then a boy in the road being asked to carry a bag to the George.

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Mrs. Younge was less pleasant.

Elizabeth got only a piece of that conversation and was glad of it: a composed woman of forty in a black dress, sitting perfectly upright in a chair in the back parlor, explaining without embarrassment that Miss Darcy had been very much in want of society, that she herself had been engaged as a companion and not as a gaoler, that her own character had now been ruined for no reason, and that she should be obliged for the quarter's wages.

Two things came out of it, and both went into Elizabeth like nails.

The first was the answer to a question Darcy asked twice, in the same words, in a voice which by the second time had gone somewhere Elizabeth had not known his voice could go: whether Wickham had at any time worn gloves in that house.

Mrs. Younge said that she was sure she had never observed. Then she said that now he came to mention it, no, she did notbelieve he had; that it had been a very warm August; and that she hoped he was not going to make something out ofthat, since a great many young men went about bare-handed in the country and there was nothing in it, and she would thank him not to look at her in that way.

The second was that Mrs. Younge had known Wickham eleven years, and that this was the fourth time.

She did not say it as a confession. She said it as a mitigation — she said that on the other three occasions there had been no unpleasantness whatever, that the families had been perfectly satisfied, and that if Mr. Darcy chose to make a great deal out of a matter which better people than himself had settled quietly, that was his affair.

He asked her the names.

She did not give them. She was still refusing, in the same composed voice, when Elizabeth felt the memory begin to go thin at the edges, the way a fire goes down.

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The last of it was the third evening.

They were at Pemberley by then — Elizabeth knew it without being told, from the size of the stairs and the light — and Georgiana had been quiet for three days and had eaten nothing to speak of, and after dinner she got up without a word and went to the instrument in the long room and sat down and played.

Elizabeth did not know the piece. It was slow, and not difficult, and Georgiana had played it on the day their father died, and everybody in that house knew it.

She played it exactly right.

There were four people in the room and a housekeeper going in and out of the far door with the plates, and Elizabeth — sitting where Darcy sat, seeing what Darcy saw, holding perfectly still with his hands on the arms of his chair — heard, through themusic, quite distinctly, the small honest domestic sound of china being stacked.

That was all. That was the whole of it. Nobody exclaimed and nobody wept and Mrs. Reynolds went on with the plates because there was nothing whatever in that room to stop her.

Georgiana got to the end. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.

Then she said, in a very small polite voice, "I think I shall go up now," and closed the instrument, and went out; and Darcy sat where he was for some time, and did not follow her, because he could not think of one single thing to say that would not have been a lie.

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Elizabeth came out of it on the fallen elm with her right hand flat on the paper and the sun in her eyes.

She was extremely cold. The blackbird was still at it. She had, by the church clock at Hunsford, been sitting there nineteen minutes.

She got up, and walked about four yards, and was sick into the nettles at the foot of the hedge, and stood there afterwards with her hand against the trunk for a while, quite calmly, thinking about a great many things in no order at all.