Page 96 of Hard Home

"So I shall go myself. I had come to that before you spoke to me on the lawn yesterday; you have only settled the day. I shall be at Netherfield within the fortnight — I mean to take the house again, which is the least remarkable thing I can do and will explain my being in the county to everybody in it."

"You gave that house up in November."

"Yes," said Mr. Darcy. "It was the correct thing in November and it is the wrong thing now, and I have spent eight months being right in a way that was of no use to anybody. I do not propose to go on with it."

"And what will you do there?"

"Walk the whole boundary of it, which will take me some days, and find out where the edges are and whether they are true edges. Look at every parish ward in the hundred, of which thereare I think nineteen. And then—" he stopped. "And then I shall have to speak to your father, and he will have to let me look at the Longbourn deed, and I have no right whatever to ask him and I am going to ask him."

"He will let you," said Elizabeth. "He has had it out of the box since June and he has been comparing it against the specimen forms in my sister's Harrow with a magnifying glass, and he will not tell anybody what he thinks."

Mr. Darcy turned his head.

"He has been doingwhat?"

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"Now the last part," he said, some minutes later, "and I want you to understand before I begin that I have no authority for it at all. Tarrant would not say it. He has written four sides round it twice and stopped short both times, and he is seventy-one and does not want to have been wrong in print.

"There are two ways of reading a piece of ground that has gone the wrong color. Everybody in England reads it the first way, which is that something is spreading. A thinness, a failure, a rot; it begins somewhere and it grows, and you may measure it week by week as your sister has done, and it will come up a road and into a town, and the language everybody uses about it is the language of a disease.

"I read it that way from November until about Lady day. It is the natural way, and my whole training is in it, and it is very likely right in Sussex.

"It does not fit yours."

"Why not?"

"Because of three things, and the third is your sister's." He held up his hand and counted them off, quite slowly. "Because Hertfordshire was never bargained for, so there is no old bargain there to be failing. Because in four hundred years not one ward in that county has ever needed mending, which does not happenanywhere in England and is not a sign of health. And because on the second of May it stopped.

"A rot does not stop. A rot goes on until it meets something. If your ground had come up against a good ward at the church it would have slowed and thinned and pushed at the edges and you would have seen it fray. It did not fray. It arrived at a line and sat down on it and has not moved a pace in eleven weeks."

Elizabeth said, "Mary said that a thing which has been coming steadily for eight months does not stop because it is tired. It stops because it has got where it was going."

"Your sister Mary," said Mr. Darcy, "is going to have letters from me whether she likes it or not."

He got up and went to the window, and stood with his back to the room, and Georgiana looked round at him once and then went on with the portfolio.

"Here is the other way of reading it," he said.

"Suppose there is nothing spreading. Suppose that what is under that county has been there the whole time — all four hundred years and a great deal longer — and that it is neither growing nor dying, and that what you are looking at when you look at that pale ground is not a thing comingin.

"It is a thing that has been held, letting go."

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The room at the Lambton inn was very quiet. Downstairs somebody was rolling a barrel across the yard.

"Consider what that would account for," said Mr. Darcy, still at the window. "It accounts for the entries not being in the rolls: the courts never bargained for Hertfordshire because Hertfordshire was not theirs to bargain with — somebody had it already, and had had it before the rolls were begun, and the clerks left no space because there was nothing to leave a space for.

"It accounts for four hundred years of wards that never wanted mending. A ward is a thing you put up to keep something out. Nobody in that county has ever had to mend one, because for four hundred years there has been nothingatthem. Something was holding the whole of it, underneath, all the time, and every threshold in Meryton has been sitting inside that like a cup inside a cistern.

"It accounts for the manner of the failure. It is not coming from a point and spreading. It came up out of the low ground, which is where such a thing would be thinnest and go first, and it has spread along the line of the water, and it has now taken as much as it is going to take at present and stopped, because whatever is holding the rest is still holding the rest.

"And it accounts for the one thing that has troubled me since November more than any other, which is why it began at all. A thing that has held for four hundred years does not begin to let go in an autumn for no reason. Something changed. Something that was doing the holding has become—" he paused, and chose the word with some care— "less able."

Elizabeth had got up without knowing it.

She was standing in the middle of the parlor of an inn in Derbyshire, and there was a hot pressure in her ears, and she found that she had put out a hand and taken hold of the back of a chair.