Part 10

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.

V.

Bingley calls again without his friend, announcing that Darcy has gone to London, but will return to Netherfield in ten days. From this date Bingley’s wooing thrives apace. He makes daily engagements to shoot, or dine, or sup at Longbourn.

Mrs. Bennet practises the most transparent manœuvres to leave him alone with Jane, so that he may have the opportunity of saying “Barkis is willin’,” or some equivalent phrase, since Barkis had not yet made his model proposal. For a short space Jane and Elizabeth defeat these arrangements.

At last, one evening when Elizabeth has gone out of the room to write a letter, believing that all the others, including Bingley, are safely seated at cards, the indefatigable matchmaker contrives to dissolve the party, sends Mary to her piano, and carries away Kitty to sit with her mother in her dressing-room, while Mr. Bennet is, as usual, ensconced in his library. Elizabeth, returning to the drawing-room, where she expects to find the family, discovers that her mother has been too ingenious for her. On opening the door she perceives her sister and Bingley standing together over the hearth, as if engaged in earnest conversation, and had this led to no suspicion, the faces of both, as they hastily turn and move away from each other, would have told all. There is a momentary awkwardness, till Bingley leaves the room to seek Mr. Bennet, when Jane is ready to proclaim herself the happiest girl in the world.

Elizabeth smiles at the rapidity and ease with which an affair that has cost them so much suspense and anxiety is finally settled. “And this,” she says to herself, “is the end of all his friend’s anxious circumspection, of all his sister’s falsehood and contrivance,--the happiest, wisest, most reasonable end.”

If Jane Bennet is the happiest girl, Mrs. Bennet is the happiest woman, according to her ideas of happiness. Lydia and Wickham are superseded; Jane is promoted, beyond comparison, her mother’s favourite child.

Meryton soon hears the tale, and after having, only a few weeks before, when Lydia ran away, pronounced the Bennet household marked out for misfortune, now declares them the luckiest family in the kingdom.

One morning, shortly after Jane’s engagement, a chaise and four drives up to Longbourn House. The equipage and liveries are not familiar. The horses are “post.” It is too early for visitors.

Amidst the speculation thus aroused, Jane and Bingley retreat into the shrubbery, leaving Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, and Kitty to receive the strangers, whoever they may be.

In a few minutes Lady Catherine de Bourgh is shown into the room. With the same arrogant ill-breeding which had distinguished the great lady’s behaviour at home, she now conducts herself in another person’s house, merely bowing to Elizabeth--the only member of the family with whom she has any previous acquaintance--sitting down, and in return for Mrs. Bennet’s fluttered attentions, putting her through a series of impertinent questions, and finding fault with the park and the sitting-room.

Elizabeth is at a loss to account for the unsolicited favour of her ladyship’s company, unless, indeed, she comes with a message from Mrs. Collins, but none is given.

At last Lady Catherine proposes that Elizabeth should take a turn with her in the wilderness, to which the girl accompanies her visitor, followed by an anxious direction from her mother to show her ladyship the different walks and the hermitage. As the couple go out, Lady Catherine opens the doors of the dining-parlour and drawing-room, and after a short survey, allows that they are “decent-looking rooms.”

The carriage stands at the door with Lady Catherine’s waiting-woman in it, announcing that Lady Catherine is on a journey taken with a set purpose.

Elizabeth leaves her companion, who is more than usually insolent and disagreeable, to begin the conversation, which she is not slow to do. “You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my journey hither: your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I come.”

Elizabeth professes her unaffected astonishment and entire ignorance.

“Miss Bennet,” says her ladyship angrily, “you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with.” Then, with a little preamble on the sincerity and frankness of her own character, she informs Elizabeth that a report of a most alarming nature had reached her two days before. “I was told,” says Lady Catherine, “that not only your sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that _you_--that Miss Elizabeth Bennet--would in all likelihood be soon afterwards united to my nephew, my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I know it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you.”

Filled with resentment as Elizabeth is, she remains mistress of the situation. “If you believe it impossible to be true,” says the high-spirited, quick-witted girl, “I wonder you took the trouble of coming so far. What could your ladyship propose by it?”

“At once to insist on having such a report universally contradicted.”

“Your coming to Longbourn to see me and my family,” says Elizabeth, with cool shrewdness, “will be rather a confirmation of it, if indeed, such a report is in existence.”

“If! Do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not been industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know that such a report is spread abroad?”

But Elizabeth is a match for her absurd inquisitor. The girl is neither to be insulted nor browbeaten into giving Lady Catherine such satisfaction as she has not the smallest right to require, or into submitting to her tyranny.

In vain Lady Catherine presses her as to the report and its origin; Elizabeth will neither confess nor deny the implication.

“This is not to be borne!” exclaims her ladyship. “Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?”

“Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible,” replies Elizabeth, with demure imperturbability.

“It ought to be so,” her ladyship protests, hotly; but then--as she hints, broadly--Elizabeth’s arts and allurements may have made the young man, in a moment of infatuation, forget what is due to himself and his family. She may have drawn him in.

“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it,” Elizabeth answers.

Lady Catherine brings forward another imperative reason why such a proceeding can never take place: Mr. Darcy is engaged to her daughter.

“If he is so,” says the unshaken Elizabeth, “you can have no reason to suppose he will make an offer to me.”

Lady Catherine is forced to hesitate, and to condescend to an explanation. The engagement is a family arrangement, based on perfect suitability of rank, fortune, and character. It had been planned by the two mothers, when the cousins were still children in their cradles. Can Elizabeth, a young woman of inferior birth, and of no importance in the world, be so lost to every feeling of propriety and delicacy as to disregard the wishes of Mr. Darcy’s friends, and presume to alter the destiny which, from his earliest years, has united him with his cousin?

Yes; Elizabeth is intrepid enough to do it, and to tell the domineering woman that if there were no other objection to her--Elizabeth’s--marrying Lady Catherine’s nephew, she would certainly not be kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt had wished him to marry Miss de Bourgh.

It is useless for Lady Catherine to threaten the penalties which the outraged family will inflict, ending in that direst indignity of all, that Elizabeth’s name will never be mentioned by any one of them; Elizabeth assures the speaker, almost airily, that though these may be heavy misfortunes, the wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness, that upon the whole she could have no cause to complain.

No wonder the incensed great lady is reduced to the somewhat undignified alternative of calling Elizabeth names--“obstinate, headstrong girl;” to telling her she is ashamed of her; to sitting down and crying--well-nigh piteously, waxing childish and maudlin, like many another baulked, irrational tyrant--that she will carry out her purpose; she has not been used to any person’s whims; she has not been in the habit of brooking disappointment; and it is not to be endured that her nephew and daughter are to be divided by the upstart pretensions of a young woman who, if she were sensible of her own good, would not wish to quit the sphere in which she had been brought up.

Elizabeth ventures to suggest that she is a gentleman’s daughter.

“True,” grants Lady Catherine; only to add, “but who was your mother? who are your uncles and aunts?”

“Whatever my connexions may be, if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you,” says Elizabeth. She could not have been without a tingling recollection that he had objected to them pretty strongly, though she had just been marvelling how she could ever have imagined a resemblance between him and his aunt--the fact being that Lady Catherine presents a striking caricature of Darcy’s original defects, without any of his redeeming virtues.

“Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?” demands Lady Catherine.

Though Elizabeth has no cause to oblige Lady Catherine by giving a reply, her own candour and self-respect compel her to answer, “I am not.”

Lady Catherine shows herself pleased. “And will you promise me never to enter into such an engagement?” She pursues her advantage with determination. “I will make no promises of the kind,” Elizabeth refuses point-blank, and Lady Catherine’s short-lived satisfaction is dashed to the ground. She resumes her reproaches. She is shocked. At last she is guilty of the meanness and cruelty of taunting Elizabeth with her sister Lydia’s misconduct, ending by crying, “And is such a girl to be my nephew’s sister? Is her husband--the son of his father’s late steward--to be his brother? Heaven and earth, of what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”

The extravagant theatrical declamation of her ladyship might have provoked a smile from Elizabeth, but she has already borne too much, and she winces under the last ungenerous stab. “You can have nothing further to say to me,” she exclaims, in her wounded feeling, with a simple dignity that contrasts well with the inflated pretensions of the other. “You have insulted me in every possible method; I must beg to return to the house.”

Lady Catherine is not to be taught a lesson: she has long outlived such a possibility. The thick skin of her arrogance and conceit is impenetrable. She assails Elizabeth with fresh abuse and importunity.

“Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say,” Elizabeth contents herself with repeating. “You know my sentiments.”

Lady Catherine talks on till the carriage is reached, when she finishes her prolonged attack very characteristically. “I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet; I send no compliments to your mother; you deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”

The interview between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth, like the scene in which Mr. Collins proposes to the heroine, is a triumph of art. It is the perfection of true comedy, as opposed to the coarse farce which frequently stands for it, not only in its wonderful exhibition of Lady Catherine’s densely stupid egotism and self-importance, but in what is so successfully opposed to them in Elizabeth Bennet’s strong common sense, racy mother wit, and sterling truth to her lover and to herself. Where a weak woman might have been cowed--at least, into a show of yielding for the time--or a foolishly sentimental girl might have been betrayed by the false glamour of unnecessary and uncalled-for self-sacrifice, Elizabeth stands firm, and comes out triumphantly. The whole passage, in its genius and wisdom, is a protest against the bathos of mock heroism, which is occasionally in danger of entrapping unwary actors in the drama of life. It is still more apt to mislead the artists who picture life, and mistake soft, even silly submission for unselfish resignation, and self-martyrdom for true martyrdom.

Elizabeth Bennet is dutiful in all the relations of life; she is even scrupulous as to its proprieties; but she is not a puppet in the hands of a Lady Catherine.

There is a curiously parallel scene drawn by one of Jane Austen’s favourite authors--Fanny Burney, in her novel of “Cecilia”--where the heroine is driven by nearly similar arguments--employed, however, by the mother, and not merely the aunt of the hero, who has also been a true friend, to whom Cecilia was deeply indebted--to give up the lover to whom she is doubly bound. In spite of these differences in the situation, which are in Fanny Burney’s favour, the opposite results of the two chapters go far to prove the immense superiority of Jane Austen as a writer.

Elizabeth has undergone the ordeal without blenching; but the reaction is to come. No doubt Lady Catherine will see her nephew in passing through London--how far may not her prejudiced version of what has passed between her and Elizabeth, with a vigorous personal appeal to Darcy, sway him as he still halts between two opinions? It is said that a woman who hesitates is lost--on the other side of the question; but the same saying does not hold good of a man. Lady Catherine is Darcy’s aunt; he must view her in another light from that in which Elizabeth regards her. It is natural to suppose she has some influence over him, while Elizabeth is only too well aware how much weight he once put on some of his kinswoman’s violent objections.

Elizabeth makes up her mind that if Darcy does not return to Netherfield at the appointed date, she will know what to think.

In the meantime Elizabeth is summoned by her father to hear a letter from Mr. Collins read. In the tallest of tall language the writer solemnly congratulates the family on the brilliant prospects of his cousin Jane. Then, after referring to what is even the surpassing splendour of the alliance said to be within his cousin Elizabeth’s reach, Mr. Collins servilely and with nervous timidity states the unconquerable opposition of his revered patroness, and implores Elizabeth not to provoke Lady Catherine’s anger.

Mr. Bennet regards the report to which Mr. Collins has alluded, as the most preposterous mistake, and calls upon Elizabeth to laugh at it, as the best joke out. “Now, Lizzy, I think I have surprised you. Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his life!”

Mr. Bennet is rather provoked because his daughter does not enjoy the absurdity of the idea as he had expected. “You are not going to be missish, I hope,” he says reproachfully, “and pretend to be affronted by an idle report.”

Poor Elizabeth! such incredulity is hard at this moment.

But Darcy returns punctually, and comes over to Longbourn with his friend; and in a walk undertaken by several of the young people, in which Elizabeth is Darcy’s companion, she musters courage to thank him as the only member of the family who knows how much they owe him for what he has done for her sister.

Darcy is surprised, but perhaps not sorry to have such an opening given to a shy man. “If you will thank me,” he says, “let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other inducements which led me on I shall not attempt to deny; but your family owe me nothing, much as I respect them; I believe I thought only of you.”

Elizabeth is too embarrassed to say a word.

After a short pause her companion adds, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. _My_ affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on the subject for ever.”

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forces herself to speak, and immediately, though not very fluently, gives him to understand that her sentiments have undergone so material a change since the period to which he has alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.

The happiness which this reply produces is such as Darcy had probably never felt before, and he expresses himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love could be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him; but though she cannot look she can listen, and he speaks of feelings which, in proving of what importance she is to him, make his affection every moment more valuable.

Various happy explanations follow. Among others he tells her Lady Catherine did visit him and relate the substance of her conversation with Elizabeth, dwelling on every expression of the latter which, in her ladyship’s opinion, denoted Elizabeth’s perverseness and assurance. But, unfortunately for his noble aunt, the effect of the communication proved the reverse of what she had intended. “It taught me to hope,” he says, “as I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to be certain that had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine frankly and openly.”

Elizabeth colours and laughs as she replies, “Yes, you know enough of my frankness to believe me capable of that; after abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have no scruple in abusing you to all your relations.”

“What did you say to me that I did not deserve?” protests the ardent, magnanimous lover, and goes on to farther penitent and grateful confessions.

In reference to the engagement between Bingley and Jane, with which Darcy declares himself delighted, “I must ask whether you were surprised,” says Elizabeth.

“Not at all. When I went away I felt it would soon happen.”

“That is to say, you had given your permission. I guessed as much.” Elizabeth rallies the speaker gaily.

Though he exclaims at the word, she finds that it had been pretty much the case.