Page 74 of Hard Home

She thought about a man in a road in Meryton in November with no gloves on, shaking hands with a girl of fifteen and a girl of seventeen while she stood by and thought him uncommonly easy in his manners.

She thought about Kitty, who had saidhe was the only person in the whole world who asked me about my cough, and who had been tired since Michaelmas, and who had a cough by Christmas, and who was at that moment three days' travel away in a house with nobody in it who knew anything at all.

She thought:the fourth time.

And then she thought — and sat down again on the elm rather suddenly, because her legs would not do it — about Lydia Bennet, aged fifteen years and eight months, of Longbourn in the county of Hertfordshire, four hundred years in the male line, who had told her in the winter that the officers had been ordered not to go past the mill after dark and that Denny should pay no attention to it and no more should she.

And I did not get the promise, thought Elizabeth Bennet.She laughed at me, and I let it go, and I have not thought of it since November.

Chapter Thirty-Three

She walked the lane for two hours.

She read the two written sheets again, twice through, and then a third time in pieces, standing, walking, leaning on the gate, in a manner which she was afterwards ashamed of and which she could not have prevented; and every reading took something else away from her.

Of the Bingley part she could say nothing at all. It was an honest account of what an honest man had seen, and everything in it was true, and its conclusion was false, and there was no answer to it except one which she could not have made in November and could not make now:my sister was ill for five days in the autumn and for one evening she had nothing left to hide with, and Mr. Bingley sat by her for three hours and never got over it, and you were in another room.

She could tell him that. She would never tell him that. There was no version of that sentence that could be spoken by a woman to a man who had proposed to her on Thursday and been told he was the last man in the world.

Of the second part she could say nothing either, and for a different reason, which was that she had done the arithmetic herself on the top rail of a gate and it had come out at his figure.

It was the third thing that she came back to, over and over, until she stopped walking altogether and stood in the middle of the lane like a woman who has forgotten where she was going.

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Her gift had never once been wrong.

That was the whole of it. That was the thing she had been circling for two hours without letting herself land on it. She had been sitting at a card table in Meryton in November with her gloves off, and she had looked into George Wickham,and she had seen a genuine wound, dealt young, still open, undissembled, and she had beenright. Every particular of it was right. Everything he had told her about a promise and a living and a man from Kendal was true, and he had believed all of it, and he believed it still, and if she looked at him again to-morrow she would see exactly the same thing.

And on the strength of that — on the strength of a perfectly accurate instrument, perfectly applied — she had spent five months certain that Fitzwilliam Darcy was a man who had robbed his father's godson out of jealousy.

She had asked her gift:is he lying?

Her gift had answered:no.

And she had heard:and therefore the other man is what he says.

Not one person had put that to her. Jane had — Jane had said it in a bedroom in November in her mild way,your gift tells you what a man is holding, it does not tell you where he got it— and Elizabeth had been in the very act of discovering she had no reply when Kitty came flying in about a carriage, and the thought had gone out like a candle and had not come back for four months.

Mrs. Gardiner had put it to her at Christmas and she had produced three-and-twenty arguments before breakfast.

Charlotte had put it to her in a field before either of them had ever seen the man twice:a man who is proud is at his ease, and by your own account that man was not at his ease for a single moment of the evening.

She had a very good answer ready. She always had a very good answer ready. That, she saw now with a clarity that made her put her hand out to the paling, was not a separate fault from the other one. It was the same fault. The gift told her a true thing quickly, and her wit made the true thing into afinishedthing, and a finished thing cannot be added to; and shehad gone about for six years being the cleverest person in every room in Hertfordshire and had mistaken the speed of her own understanding for its completion.

"How despicably I have acted!" she cried. — "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! — I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candor of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable distrust. — How humiliating is this discovery! — Yet, how just a humiliation! — Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. — Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself."

And then, standing in a lane in Kent at half past twelve in the day, she said the other half of it aloud, which was not in any book and which nobody had ever said to her:

"I have had a lamp all my life, and I have been holding it up in front of me, and calling the shadow behind me proof."

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From herself to Jane, from Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were in a line which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy's explanationthere, had appeared very insufficient; and she read it again. Widely different was the effect of a second perusal.

She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. — Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.

When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were mentioned, in terms of such mortifying, yet merited reproach, her sense of shame was severe. The justice of the charge struck her too forcibly for denial, and the circumstancesto which he particularly alluded, as having passed at the Netherfield ball, and as confirming all his first disapprobation, could not have made a stronger impression on his mind than on hers.