Page 100 of Hard Home

"And nothing since."

"Nothing since."

"Then it is not finished," said Mr. Darcy. "That is the only good thing in this letter and I want you to hold on to it, because I am going to say some things now that are not good and you are going to need it."

Elizabeth sat down.

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"Your sister Mary is right in every particular," he said, "and I want to say that first, and I want you to write it to her to-day in those words, because she has been alone with it for four days and she is nineteen.

"He will marry her. He has never wanted anything else. There is one door into a line for a man who has none and it is the only door there has ever been, and everything I have ever known him do has been an attempt at it.

"Ramsgate was not an elopement. It was an attempt at a wedding, and it failed because a girl of fifteen wrote to her brother in the middle of it. The three before that — Mrs. Younge said four, and gave me no names, and I have spent eleven months trying to find them and have found one — the one I found was in Shropshire, six years ago, a young woman of a small old family, and it did not come off, and the family have never spoken of it and never will.

"He is patient. That is the thing nobody understands about him, because he is charming and idle and in debt, and the world cannot hold both pictures at once. He isextremelypatient. He has been at this for eleven years."

"Then why has he not done it? He might have married a dozen girls in a dozen counties—"

"Because it is not enough to marry a line," said Darcy. "He has tried that and it does not answer. A braiding gives him a share of what the woman holds; and what a woman of a small old family holds is a small old thing, and Mrs. Younge's three others got him — I imagine — a little. Enough to keep at it. Enough to be sure of the method."

He stopped, and Elizabeth watched him arrive at it and dislike it.

"Your sister is not a small old family," he said.

"No."

"Four hundred years in one blood, unbroken, in a county where nothing has ever needed mending. And she is the youngest of five, which means she is the least spent of any of you, and she has never sworn an oath or made a promise or been braided or borne a child, and there is not one person in that house who has ever told her what she is." He came away from the table. "And he has had her out on that ground five times in four weeks with his hands bare, and on the night she went away with him it moved forty-two yards, and it has not moved since.

"Miss Bennet, I think he has begun. I think what happened at Brighton on Saturday night was the first half of it, and I think the second half is a wedding, and I think we have as long as it takes him to find a curate in a hurry and a room with a ward on it — and that in London, in August, with money, is not long."

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"Then hemustbe found before—"

"Yes."

"My father is looking for a man who has run away with a girl. He will go to the inns. He will go to the turnpikes. He will—" Elizabeth stood up again, and put both hands over her face for a moment, and took them away. "He is looking in entirely the wrong places, because he is looking for a seducer, and every hour he spends at a turnpike is an hour—"

"Your father will find nothing," said Mr. Darcy, "and I do not say that against him. Neither would I, looking as he is looking. Wickham is not at an inn on the Barnet road. He is in a lodging in the east of London with a woman called Younge, who keeps a house in Edward-street and who has kept it for eleven years out of exactly this business, and who has never once been asked a question by anybody with any means of making her answer."

Elizabeth looked up.

"You know where he is."

"I know where he will have gone. There is a difference and it may be four days' difference." He picked up his hat. "I shall be in London to-morrow night."

"You cannot—"

"Miss Bennet."

"You cannot go into that," said Elizabeth, standing very straight, "on my family's account. You have already broken an oath for us and paid for it and I have never once thanked you properly. My uncle Gardiner is the best man in England for this and he is at the river with a rod in his hand and he will be in London by Friday, and this is a Bennet matter, and I will not have—"

"It is not a Bennet matter," said Mr. Darcy.

He said it quite gently, which made it worse.

"It has been a Darcy matter since the summer before last, and I concealed what he was, from everybody, for fifteen months, at my sister's asking and for my own comfort — because it was not my secret to give and because I could not bear the county to have it. Every person in Meryton who welcomed that man into their parlor last winter did so because nobody had told them, and I was the only person alive who could have told them.