IV.
In as short a time as fresh horses can convey them, the party are at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner repairs to London, and induces Mr. Bennet, whose researches have been fruitless, to return home.
At last, after a period of wretched suspense, the news reaches Longbourn from Mr. Gardiner that he has discovered the couple. For Lydia’s sake, little as she has deserved it, they are married from Mr. Gardiner’s house. Certain stipulations have been made on Wickham’s part, that the bride shall in time inherit her share of her mother’s few thousand pounds; that her father shall allow Mrs. Wickham a hundred a year during his lifetime; that Wickham’s debts shall be paid, and a commission procured for him in “the regulars.” Withal, little real happiness could be expected from such a marriage. Wickham has only turned to Lydia when he was repulsed in other quarters. His debts have been the compelling cause of his flight from Brighton. Her fondness for him is made up of giddiness and a foolish passion on which she has put no restraint.
But Mrs. Bennet is as elated at having a daughter married at last, and married at sixteen, as if the marriage had come about in a more honourable way.
Mr. Bennet views the matter in a different light. He is satisfied that his brother-in-law has kept back the amount of money furnished by him to Wickham, which Mr. Bennet must somehow, sooner or later, repay.
Her father has told Kitty, in the driest of sore-hearted jesting, that no officer is to be allowed to enter his house again, or even to pass through the village. Balls are to be absolutely prohibited, unless she stands up with one of her sisters; and she is never to stir out of the house till she can prove that she has spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner.
Kitty has received those threats in a serious light, and begins to cry.
“Well, well,” cries the incorrigible humourist, “don’t make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.”
At first, Mr. Bennet refuses to permit a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Wickham before he shall join his regiment in the North; but, on the earnest representations of his two elder daughters that to withhold the forgiving countenance of Lydia’s family from the young couple will be to lessen their slender chances of respectability, he allows the culprits to come for a short time to Longbourn, on their way to Newcastle.
The arrival of the Wickhams is in perfect keeping with what went before it, and is a splendid bit of serio-comedy. Jane blushes and Elizabeth blushes; but the cheeks of the two who cause their relations’ confusion suffer no increase of colour. Lydia is Lydia still, untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. Wickham is not at all more distressed than herself; but his manners have always been so pleasing that, had his audience not known his character, the smiling ease and grace with which he claims their relationship would have delighted them all. Elizabeth had not before believed him quite equal to such assurance, but she resolves thenceforth to draw no limits to the impudence of an impudent man.
I hope I may be pardoned for drawing particular attention to the exquisite truthfulness of the couple’s behaviour. The correct definition of it is specially valuable at a time when slightly-altered versions of such conduct are classed differently, and passed off on inexperienced and thoughtless readers, to the grave detriment of their standards of good morals and good taste.
Lydia, in her total want of proper feeling and modesty, cries out, “Oh, mamma, do people hereabouts know I am married to-day? I was afraid they might not; and we overtook William Goulding in his curricle to-day, so I was determined he should know it, and so I let down the side glass next to him and took off my glove, and let my hand just rest upon the window-frame, so that he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like anything.”
When the family party go in to dinner, Lydia, with eager parade, walks up to her mother’s right hand, saying triumphantly to her eldest sister, “Ah, Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.”
After dinner the bride retires to show her ring, and boast of being married, to the housekeeper and maid-servants.
When the ladies are all together again in the breakfast-parlour, which a hundred years ago did duty as a drawing-room, unless on state occasions, Mrs. Wickham patronises her whole family by giving them a general invitation to Newcastle, where she hopes there will be balls, and she will take care to find good partners for her sisters. After her father and mother go away, one or two of the girls may be left behind, when their chaperon expresses a sanguine hope that she will get husbands for them before the winter is over.
“Thank you for my share of the favour,” says Elizabeth, “but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands.”
“Sour grapes! spiteful thing!” we can imagine Lydia saying, hardly below her breath. Do we not see her before us, as large as life, in all her native colours, the pert, hoidenish, vulgar-minded girl—as destitute of delicacy as of dutifulness, or sweet unselfishness, or gentle affection—who has become, by some strange, sad chance, a favourite in the literature of the day? I appeal to my readers—Is she not still the same, though the fashion of her dress, or the manner in which she wears her hair, and a few of her phrases, may be altered, and though—alas! for the lower tone of much modern English fiction—she is now held up to approbation instead of reprobation.
In the course of her shameless boasting about her marriage, Lydia lets out before her sisters that Mr. Darcy was present.
“Mr. Darcy!” exclaims Elizabeth, in utter bewilderment.
“Oh! yes, he was to come there with Wickham, you know. But, gracious me, I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised them so faithfully. What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret.”
“If it was to be such a secret,” says the honourable Jane, “say not another word on the subject. You may depend upon my seeking no farther.”
“Oh! certainly,” says Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity, “we will ask you no questions.”
“Thank you,” answers Lydia coolly, “for if you did I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry.”
Elizabeth has to run away from the temptation. She has one resource, however; she can write and ask a private explanation from her kind aunt.
Elizabeth learns the whole truth, though Mrs. Gardiner does not conceal her surprise that the information is required in such a quarter. After Darcy’s parting from Elizabeth in Derbyshire, he had gone immediately to London—and, in fact, done everything. It was he who, through his previous acquaintance with Wickham’s habits and associates, had discovered the couple, and brought them to Mr. Gardiner’s knowledge. It was Darcy who had conducted all the negotiations—in fine, it was Darcy who had insisted on paying the necessary money—a thousand pounds for Wickham’s debts; another thousand to be settled, in addition to her own, on Lydia; and the purchase-money for her husband’s commission. The reason which Darcy had urged for being allowed to take the lead in the matter, and to furnish the money, was that it had been through his own unjustifiable reserve, and want of consideration for others, that Wickham’s character had not been known, so that he had been received and noticed in respectable society.
But Mr. Gardiner would not have yielded up his right of making some sacrifice for his niece—or, rather, for her family—had he not been persuaded that Mr. Darcy of Pemberley had even a nearer interest in the affair, by being either actually engaged, or on the point of being engaged, to Lydia Bennet’s sister Elizabeth. Indeed, Mrs. Gardiner is still so convinced of the truth of the impression, and of the happy prospects of one of her favourite nieces, in a marriage with a man of much worth, as well as of great social consideration, who only wants a little more liveliness—which a judicious choice of a wife may supply—that, in closing her letter, she gaily begs Elizabeth not to punish the writer’s presumption by excluding her from Pemberley, since she can never be quite happy till she has been all round the park—an expedition for which a low phaeton, with a nice pair of ponies, would be the very thing.
Elizabeth is greatly moved by the efforts and the sacrifices of feeling—still more than of money—which Darcy has made on Lydia’s behalf. It could not have been for Lydia alone. But when Elizabeth asks herself, Were the Gardiners right in arguing it was for her—Elizabeth’s—sake? she is met by the humbling reflection that the assistance he has rendered must, and ought to be, the last tribute paid by Darcy to a loyal, disinterested regard, which has proved in every way unfortunate. The idea of the proud, sensitive master of Pemberley voluntarily seeking to become the brother-in-law of Wickham, the son of his father’s steward—the man who has so wronged him and his, who has outraged Darcy’s every principle and instinct—the man whom of all others Darcy most abhors, and has reason to abhor—is not to be thought of for an instant. Yet Elizabeth is half-pleased, in the middle of her pain, to see how confidently her uncle and aunt have reckoned on her marriage with Darcy.
Mrs. Bennet is consoled for the Wickhams’ departure by the news, which quickly circulates in Meryton, that Mr. Bingley is coming down to Netherfield for the shooting. At once she resumes all her former projects for her eldest daughter, and poor Jane, in addition to the conflict in her own heart, has to submit to her mother’s pointedly looking at her, smiling at her, or shaking her head over her, every time the tenant of Netherfield’s name happens to be mentioned—which, for the present, is incessantly.
The old argument as to Mr. Bennett’s calling immediately at Netherfield is renewed.
Mr. Bennet stoutly refuses. “No, no; you forced me into visiting him last year, and promised me if I went to see him he should marry one of my daughters. But it ended in nothing, and I will not be sent on a fool’s errand again.”
In the middle of the doubts as to what brings Bingley back, and whether he comes with or without his friend’s gracious permission, Elizabeth thinks in her own merry way, “It is hard that this poor man cannot come to a house which he has legally hired without rousing all this speculation. I will leave him to himself.”
On the first morning after Bingley’s return into Hertfordshire, Mrs. Bennet has the joy of seeing him, from her dressing-room window, riding up the paddock to Longbourn House. She calls her daughters to share her exultation. Jane sits still. Elizabeth, to satisfy her mother, goes to the window; she looks, she sees Mr. Darcy with his friend, and sits down again by her sister.
“There is a gentleman with him, mamma,” says the unconscious Kitty, and then adds the next moment, “La! it looks just like that man who used to be with him before, Mr. What’s-his-name? That tall, proud man.”
“Good gracious! Mr. Darcy; and so it does, I vow. Well, any friend of Mr. Bingley will always be welcome here, to be sure; but else I must say that I hate the very sight of him.”
These are some of the many expressions of dislike to Darcy and misconception of his character, for which Elizabeth has partly herself to thank, since she had helped largely to originate them. She has now to listen to them in silence, while she alone is aware of the benefits he has conferred on the whole family, and that he has saved her mother’s favourite daughter from destruction.
Elizabeth had meant to watch closely Jane’s first interview with Bingley on his return; but the attention of the young watcher is sadly distracted by her own position and that of Darcy, while she has nearly as many doubts of Darcy’s intentions as of Bingley’s. Darcy’s coming there at all might have been supposed to have only one significance, but Elizabeth will not be sure.
As it happens, the double awkwardness of the situation is so great that all those most concerned in it labour under the greatest constraint—a constraint which, unhappily, is only too likely to be misconstrued.
Jane is pale and sedate.
Bingley is looking embarrassed as well as pleased.
Darcy strikes Elizabeth as more like what he used to be in Hertfordshire than as he had seemed in the pleasant days in Derbyshire.
Of Elizabeth’s own unwonted gravity, naturally she can have no just conception.
Matters are made worse by Mrs. Bennet, whose fulsome civility to Bingley, on the one hand, contrasted as it is with her cold politeness to Darcy, on the other, fill both her elder daughters with distress and mortification; though it is only Elizabeth who suffers agonies of shame from Mrs. Bennet’s most mal à propos dwelling on her youngest daughter’s marriage, and her hit at Darcy when she reflects, in reference to Wickham, “Thank Heaven! he has some friends, though, perhaps, not so many as he deserves.”
In the vehemence of youth, Elizabeth Bennet is persuaded that years of happiness—supposing they should ever come—could not make Jane and her amends for moments of such painful confusion. The first wish of her heart, Elizabeth declares to herself, is never more to be in the company of either of the gentlemen again. “Let me never see either one or the other again.”
Yet Jane Austen remarks with quiet fun, in the very next sentence, the misery for which years of happiness were to offer no compensation received material relief when Elizabeth was able to observe how speedily Bingley’s admiration for her sister was reviving in her presence. No doubt, also, Elizabeth derived some pleasure from the fact that both visitors engaged themselves to dine at Longbourn, on Mrs. Bennet’s eager invitation.
“Mrs. Bennet had been strongly inclined to ask them to stay and dine that day, but though she always kept a good table she did not think anything less than two courses[17] could be good enough for a man on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride of one who had £10,000 a year.”
After the visitors are gone, Elizabeth asks herself again, “If he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent, why did he come at all?”
The dinner brings no satisfaction and enlightenment where Elizabeth’s private affairs are concerned. Bingley, no doubt, is renewing his attentions to Jane beyond the possibility of mistake, so that Mrs. Bennet may be almost excused for fully expecting him to come and propose next day; though the sensible and amiable Jane still nervously assures herself and her sister Elizabeth that any apparent partiality to her only proceeds from Bingley’s pleasing manners; and that, as for herself, she has become most desirably and comfortably indifferent with regard to his sentiments. But Darcy at the dinner-table is entirely separated from Elizabeth, and seated at the right hand of Mrs. Bennet, with whom he only exchanges an occasional formal word. In the drawing-room he does show an inclination to stand by Elizabeth, at the table where she and Jane are making tea and coffee, in the old, pretty, genial fashion; but the mere accident of the ladies of the party gathering about the table, and of a girl moving closer to Elizabeth with the stage whisper, “The men shan’t come and part us, I am determined; we want none of them, do we?” is sufficient to cause him to walk away. His tongue may have been tied, and yet his eyes might have spoken; but as far as Elizabeth could discern he looked as much and as earnestly at Jane as at herself, both on this occasion and on that of his call. It is all a tormenting puzzle.