Page 77 of Hard Home

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The week passed. Mr. Collins was in great spirits about the leave-taking, and made a considerable ceremony of it, and Elizabeth found that she could bear him now with a patience she had not had in April, and was not sure whether this was charity or fatigue.

"My dear Charlotte and I have but one mind and one way of thinking," said he. "There is in every thing a most remarkable resemblance of character and ideas between us. We seem to have been designed for each other."

Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was the case, and with equal sincerity could add that she firmly believed and rejoiced in his domestic comforts.

"Give my best compliments to your father and mother, if you please," said he, "and tell them that I hope they are well. And you may tell my fair cousins that I have had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Collins settled in a manner which — but I need not enlarge upon it, for they will hear it from herself. And, cousin Elizabeth, may I say — for I do say it without the smallest resentment, and I hope I know my duty as a clergyman better than to harbor any — that I have thought of you sometimes, in my walks, and have reflected that things fall out for the best; and that when I come into the Longbourn property, as in the course of nature I must, it will give me sincere pleasure to be of any service to your mother and sisters that may be in my power."

He meant it. That was the thing about him that Elizabeth had never got used to and did not get used to on the doorstep at Hunsford: he meant every word of it, and would have kept it, and it would have cost him nothing, and there was not a grain of malice anywhere in the man.

"I am sure you will, sir," she said, and shook his hand, and meant that too.

Charlotte walked with her to the gate.

"Write to me," said Elizabeth.

"I write to you every week and you answer once a month, and I have made my peace with it. Write to methistime." Charlotte held on to her hand a moment longer than she ever had. "Every week, Lizzy, whether there is anything in it or not. If there is a week when I do not hear, I shall know something is wrong, and I shall be able to do a great deal from here that you cannot do — I dine with a woman who knows every family in six counties and I am the dullest person she has ever met and she says a great deal in front of me. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

"Yes."

"Say it back."

"Every week," said Elizabeth, "or you will know."

"Good," said Mrs. Collins.

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They set out at nine in the morning of the sixth of May, Sir William, Maria, and Elizabeth, in a hired carriage from Bromley.

They had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile down the Hunsford lane when there was a phaeton in the road ahead of them, drawn up under the hedge with its two gray ponies cropping the bank, and a woman in it in a great many shawls, holding the reins.

There was nobody with her.

"Bless me," said Sir William. "Is not that—"

"It is Miss de Bourgh," said Maria. "Ought we to stop? I am sure we ought to stop."

They stopped. Sir William got down and bowed and made a considerable speech about the honor and the fineness of the morning, and Miss de Bourgh inclined her head to about half an inch, and Maria curtseyed from the carriage step, and there was then a pause of the sort which nobody in that lane knew how to fill.

"Miss Bennet," said Anne de Bourgh.

Her voice was quite low and perfectly clear and had almost no color in it, like a voice heard through a wall.

Sir William, who had spent his life in the study of what great persons wish, understood at once that he was not wanted, and got up into the carriage saying something about the ponies; and Elizabeth came down into the road and walked the six feet to the phaeton, and stood at the wheel.

Miss de Bourgh looked at her.

At this distance she was not a gray woman at all. She had her mother's bones and a much better mouth, and her eyes were an ordinary hazel and entirely awake, and she was — Elizabeth saw it plainly and without doing anything at all — furious, and had been furious for a very long time, and had it under a degree of control that no one else in Kent could have imagined.

"I have three sentences," she said. "I have been three days deciding which three. Do not interrupt me and do not answer, because I shall not be able to hear it properly and I have not the leisure to be moved."

"Yes," said Elizabeth.

"My cousin is not what you think. That is the first, and it is spent now, and it was the one I could least afford, because you have found it out already and I have paid for it notwithstanding."

She shifted the reins in her fingers.