Page 94 of Hard Home

At length, every idea seemed to fail him; and after standing a few moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected himself, and took leave.

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He was four yards away when Elizabeth heard her own voice say, "Mr. Darcy."

He turned round at once.

She had not the smallest idea what she was going to say. Her aunt and uncle were twenty feet off, and there was a gardener with a barrow on the gravel, and there was no possible sentence, and she stood in the sun on the lawn at Pemberley and heard herself say it:

"It stopped on the second of May."

Mr. Darcy did not sayI beg your pardon.

He came back three of the four yards, and stood quite still, and his voice when it came was perfectly level and about a quarter of its usual volume.

"Where."

"Behind the church. It came up out of the low ground and over the road in the spring and it has not moved a pace since the second of May. My sister Mary has paced it every week since April in the same boots and has the figures. Captain Harding asked for orders eleven times and was refused, and the regiment went to Brighton on the twenty-sixth, and there is nobody in the county at all."

"How much of it is there?"

"A hundred and ninety acres."

There was a silence of about two seconds, during which Elizabeth watched a man do a sum he had been dreading for eight months.

"Miss Bennet," said Mr. Darcy. "Are your family at Longbourn now?"

"All but the youngest."

"And where is the youngest?"

"In Brighton," said Elizabeth, "with Colonel Forster's wife and the whole of the ——shire."

Mr. Darcy looked at her for a moment with an expression she had never seen on his face, and never afterwards forgot, because it was not surprise and it was not anger.

It was a man taking hold of something with both hands.

"Thank you," he said. "I am going to ask your leave to call on you at your inn to-morrow, and I am going to ask it in front of your aunt, so that it may be a civil thing and not a strange one. Will you give it me?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth Bennet.

Chapter Forty-One

Elizabeth had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister to visit her the very day after her reaching Pemberley; and was consequently resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole of that morning.

But her conclusion was false; for on the very morning after their arrival at Lambton, these visitors came.

She was sitting with her aunt at the window when the chaise stopped in the street below, and she knew the horses, and she stood up rather too quickly and sat down again.

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Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth; and though little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother, but there was sense and good humor in her face, and her manners were perfectly unassuming and gentle.

She was also, plainly and simply, frightened; and Elizabeth, who had expected to find that she could not look at her, found instead that she could not look away.

The girl came into the room a half step behind her brother and made a curtsey and said something that could not be heard, and then stood with her hands together waiting to be got through.

She was fifteen. She was standing at a window in a lodging-house and she turned round and said "You came" as though it were the most surprising thing that had ever happened to her.