Page 92 of Hard Home

Inside the pale at Pemberley she put it down.

She found herself, half a mile into the wood, sitting in a carriage with her hands loose in her lap and her shoulders somewhere they had not been for a long while; and she thought, quite distinctly,oh — this is what Jane meant about London, and then, a moment later, with the whole of the thing arriving at once,no. This is what Jane has been doing for other people since she was four years old, and nobody has ever done it for her.

Mrs. Gardiner said, "Lizzy, are you quite well?"

"Perfectly," said Elizabeth. "It is a very fine wood."

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The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking, elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her.

They followed her into the dining parlor. It was a large, well-proportioned room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went to a window to enjoy its prospect.

Mrs. Reynolds took them through the rooms in the order she had taken people through them for thirty years, and gave them the dimensions and the dates and the name of the man who did the ceilings; and Mr. Gardiner asked intelligent questions about the estate, and got very good answers, and said afterwards that he had never in his life met a servant who understood a drainage scheme.

In the second saloon Mrs. Gardiner asked whether the family were much at Pemberley in the course of the year.

"Not so much as I could wish, ma'am; but I dare say he may spend half his time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months."

"Except," thought Elizabeth, "when she goes to Ramsgate."

"If your master would marry, you might see more of him."

"Yes, ma'am; but I do not know whenthatwill be. I do not know who is good enough for him."

Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, "It is very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so."

"I say no more than the truth, and what every body will say that knows him," replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far; and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added, "I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old."

This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her ideas. That he was not a good tempered man, had been her firmest opinion. Her keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more.

"He is the best landlord, and the best master," said she, "that ever lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw any thing of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away like other young men."

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It was in the long gallery, at the west end, that Mr. Gardiner asked about the ground.

He asked it as a business man asks a thing, having been shown a great deal of good farming out of a window: whether theestate was all in hand, and how far the boundary ran, and who kept it.

"The whole of the west ground is in hand, sir, and Mr. Havell has the keeping of it. He came to us — let me see — eleven years ago at Lady day, from near Kendal."

"And is he a good man at it?"

Mrs. Reynolds considered.

"He is a very careful man, sir, and honest as the day, and he has never had a night's trouble out there in eleven years," she said. "He is not what the old warden was. Mr. Havell learned it. He learned it very well and he does it by the book and he walks it four times a week whatever the weather, and the master goes out with him at the quarters. But there was a boy here once who could put his hand on that wall in the dark and tell you the yard he was standing at, and Mr. Havell will never do that, and he would be the first to say so."

"And what became of the boy?" said Mrs. Gardiner comfortably.

"He went into the army, ma'am," said Mrs. Reynolds.

There was the smallest pause. It was not the pause of a woman who has said too much; it was the pause of a woman who has said exactly what she has decided to say for eleven years and has just been reminded why she decided it.

"There is a great deal of nonsense talked in a house like this," she added, "and I have never repeated any of it, and I am too old to begin."

Mr. Gardiner said something civil about the dairy, and they went on.

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