Page 80 of Hard Home

"Charlotte thinks so. So do I."

Jane got up and went to the window, which had nothing outside it but Gracechurch-street and a lamp, and stood there with her back to the room for a long time; and Elizabeth, who had expected tears, and had a whole apparatus of comfort ready, sat on the bed and found that she had been entirely wrong about what she was doing to her sister.

"Lizzy," said Jane at last, and her voice was quite level. "Do you remember Mr. Halliwell?"

"Halliwell?"

"He curated at Meryton for a year when I was nineteen. He used to come on Thursdays."

"I remember him a little. He went to a living in Norfolk."

"He was in love with me for eight months," said Jane, "and I knew it, and I liked him very much, and I could not make him understand. Not by anything I said, because I said everything a girl may say without shaming herself, and I said it three or four times. And at the end of it he came and told me, in the shrubbery, very kindly, that he was going into Norfolk, and that he had at one time hoped, but that he had observed that my manner to him was the same as my manner to everybody, and he did not choose to make a fool of himself, and he wished me extremely well." She was still looking at the lamp. "And I have thought about that conversation once a fortnight for four years. I have thought that I was cold. I have thought that there must be something wanting in me. There is a — Lizzy, I cannot tell you what I have thought, because it is all very stupid, and I havenever said any of it aloud, and I am seven-and-twenty in four years."

"Jane."

"Twice," said Jane Bennet. "It has happenedtwice, and both of them were kind men who told me plainly that I had shown them nothing, and both times I believed that it was my own coldness, and it was not, it was never once—"

She stopped, and put her hand flat against the window frame, and Elizabeth got off the bed.

But when she got there her sister was not crying at all. She was standing with her forehead nearly touching the glass and her eyes wide open, and she was — Elizabeth had no other word for it —angry; and Elizabeth had never in two-and-twenty years seen Jane Bennet angry, and had not known it was among the things she could do.

"I have been very good," said Jane, in the same level voice, "for a very long time, about a thing that was never mine to be good about."

"Yes," said Elizabeth. "You have."

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They sat a while after that without saying much, which was the right thing.

And then Elizabeth, who had been turning it over since the third sentence of the whole conversation, said:

"Jane. It is gone now."

Jane looked round.

"You told me at supper on the way to Kent," said Elizabeth. "Nine weeks in this house, and nothing going out of you at all, and Maggie screamed for six minutes and you could not stop her, and you have slept every night since Candlemas."

"Yes."

"Then you are — " Elizabeth found she had to stop and start again. "Jane, for the first time since you were four years old, youare a woman whose face shows what she feels. You have been in London for five months being perfectly legible to every soul who has looked at you and not one of them was anybody who mattered."

Jane sat down slowly on the end of the bed.

"He is three miles from this house," said Elizabeth.

"He does not know I am in it."

"No. He does not." Elizabeth took her sister's hands, which were warm, and which had not been warm in November. "And I am not going to say anything comfortable to you, because I have said a great many comfortable things in the last five months and every one of them turned out to be wrong. I only want you to have the fact. Whatever it was that has stood between you and every person who has ever tried to look at you — it is not standing there at present. That is all. It may come back. I do not know what makes it come back."

Jane said nothing for a moment.

Then she said, "It came back at Longbourn."

"What?"

"In February. When I went home for the fortnight, before you went to Kent." Jane's hands had gone very still in her sister's. "I did not tell you because there was nothing to tell, and because by then I had persuaded myself that the whole notion was nonsense and that I was a girl who had been jilted and was making a mystery of herself. But I was tired at Longbourn, Lizzy. From the second day. I slept badly, and I was heavy in the mornings, and Kitty came into my room on the Thursday and sat on my bed and cried about nothing at all, and I put my arms round her and she stopped, and I went to bed at nine o'clock that night and could not get up till eleven the next day.

"And I came back to Gracechurch-street on the Monday and slept nine hours and woke up perfectly well."