“They are to be put into Mr. Weston’s stables, papa. You know we have settled that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night. And as for James, you may be very sure he will always like going to Randalls, because of his daughter’s being housemaid there. I only doubt whether he will ever take us anywhere else. That was your doing, papa. You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her—James is so obliged to you.”
Mr. Woodhouse’s kindness and innocent self-importance are equally gratified by being reminded of this good deed. He is enticed to expatiate on civil, pretty-spoken Hannah, for whom he has procured an advantageous place—not the least of its advantages in Mr. Woodhouse’s eyes being, that when James goes over to see his daughter, he will carry her news of the family at Hartfield.
Emma spares no exertions to encourage the happier train of thought, and by the help of backgammon is sanguine about getting her father tolerably through the evening, when a frequent visitor, another near neighbour, walks in, and renders the backgammon-table unnecessary.
“Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but connected with it as the elder brother of Isabella Woodhouse’s husband.”
Did ever hero enter more unassumingly on the scene? Was ever even the merest walking gentleman more succinctly or prosaically described? And yet George Knightley is a very hero of heroes, far in advance of Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” where the highest manliness and generosity of character are in question.
I shall only pause a moment to remark that Jane Austen, in depriving Mr. Knightley of the bloom of youth, goes in the teeth of contemporary standards of age to which she herself paid deference in “Sense and Sensibility,” when she made Marianne Dashwood regard Colonel Brandon—a contemporary of Mr. Knightley’s—as quite an old man, fitted for flannel vests and rheumatism.
To Mr. Knightley Emma starts an idea which has taken possession of her susceptible imagination, and which has a considerable influence on her later conduct.
“I made the match, you know, four years ago,” she says triumphantly, in allusion to the topic of the day. “To have it take place, and be proved in the right when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for anything.”
Mr. Knightley shakes his head at her. He has known her from infancy, seen her grow up with all that is charming in her, only slightly spoilt. He has more than an old friend’s regard for her, but he is also one of the few persons among her friends who sees her faults, and tells her of them—a process not particularly agreeable to Emma, and still more distasteful to her doting father; so that she has to assert stoutly, as if she liked the censure, “Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know, in a joke, only in a joke. We always say what we like to each other.”
In defiance of Mr. Knightley’s shake of the head—indeed, spurred on by it—Emma insists that she arranged the match from the day Mr. Weston gallantly went and borrowed two umbrellas from Farmer Mitchell’s, and brought them to her and Miss Taylor when it began to drizzle in Broadway Lane. Emma boasts of the success of her scheme, and laughingly announces herself a future match-maker.