“You have, dearest. You have a green strand of something at your throat that has come a long way with you. Has Mr Darcy seen you in this condition?”
“Mr Darcy has seen me, Jane, in conditions a great deal less complimentary than this one.”
“Has he?”
“He has.”
“And he still proposes to have you, with pondweed and all, in spite of the conditions?”
“He does.”
“Then he is, as I had always suspected, a sensible man.”
She was laughing then, with the laugh from the lane, and Elizabeth was laughing with her, the weeping not yet quite gone out of the laughter; and Mrs Hadley at the hearth, with the kettle she had no want of, smiled into the kettle without turning her head.
Chapter Forty-One
ThereplyfromDerbycame up with the morning post two days later. Darcy took it into his study before Mrs Reeves had finished her round of the house, and he opened it at the long table by the window with the mere lying clear behind him.
Counsel had read the copies and Collins’s original, and counsel advised—at greater length than Ellison had taken, but to the same end—that the matter was dangerous if prosecuted with vigour, and prosecution would in turn expose Collins to scrutiny he was likely to fear. The forged paper had not yet been entered upon any public record, had not been used to extract property from the lender’s heir, and had come into Wainwright’s hands by Elizabeth’s voluntary act under legal counsel. There was, counsel wrote, room to negotiate a private surrender and mutual silence rather than to bring the thing into open court.
That was the answer he had been expecting. He set it on the table and went out into the upper passage and stood at the window for some while looking down upon the south yard, where Georgiana had asked Hadley to bring the bay up for her to look at. She had not yet been on the bay. She had been on a horse twice this winter and dismounted twice within the quarter hour. Hadley had her on a leading rein at the post, and the bay was holding to the rein in a manner that did not look likely to ask anything of her.
He went back to his study. The forged paper stayed in his head all morning.
Two days more, and Gardiner’s reply came up by post.
He confirmed the underlying debt. He confirmed Collins’s pressure. He confirmed, with what Darcy could read as plainly as if Gardiner had set it down in plain words, that he had long suspected Elizabeth had forged more than one paper, though he had never been told and had never asked. He begged Darcy to believe no advantage had been sought beyond time and shelter for the women of the family. He offered himself ready to come north at once if useful.
Darcy did not, in his reply, demand it. Gardiner was tired in his letter. Darcy had no wish to be the next man in a list of men who had drawn upon Mr Gardiner’s last reserves.
By the next day, Collins had answered too, and Darcy read it in his study with the door shut.
It was not—and this was the matter—what Darcy had been preparing himself to read.
He had been preparing himself for a retreat. Ellison’s previous communication to Collins had been written in the form intended to encourage one: it had hinted at exposure, had spoken of “matters now in the hands of others,” had given Collins the opening to climb down into misunderstanding. Collins had been given the door. Collins had not taken it.
Collins’s letter did not roar. He had been working at it, very slowly, for some four nights in a row at his desk, by the light of his candle. He had taken counsel of his own from somebody—Darcy could see the hand of Lady Catherine in two or three particular phrasings, though Collins would not have admitted to it—and the four nights had brought him very gradually round to the conviction that he was now in the right.
The letter opened in the form.My Good Sir,—Whereas it has come to my hearing, by avenues both expected and unexpected.It went on for two octavo pages.
The shape of the case he meant to put was this. He had had, since his cousin Miss Elizabeth Bennet had quit Longbourn last summer under circumstances he did not propose to relate in writing, the gravest anxiety of mind concerning her welfare. Reports had reached him, by way of letters from a curate in the north and from one or two parishioners with business on the North Road, that a young woman of Miss Bennet’s description had been resident at Northmere since the second week of January with a leg broken in such a way as cost many their leg and perhaps their lives.
He had at first been unwilling to credit the reports, particularly when he was thereafter told that the young lady was seen out walking with a cane mere weeks after her initial injury. Clearly, it was an impossibility. But he had, since the first part of March, made very particular enquiries on his own and through such instruments as Providence had put into his hands. He was now reluctantly satisfied of their truth.
He was therefore moved to make Mr Darcy aware because Mr Darcy was, in the world, a gentleman of so much credit, of so much public standing, of so much private virtue, that the suggestion he had been deceived into the sheltering of a young person of Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s nature must be answered at the earliest. Collins had no wish to wound. Collins had been particularly cautioned by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who took the kindestinterest in the present matter, that no word reflecting upon Mr Darcy himself should be set down. Lady Catherine had every confidence in her nephew’s honour. Mr Darcy had, by some unfortunate combination of charity, gallantry, and the ordinary credulity of a generous gentleman in the face of a clever and unscrupulous girl, been imposed upon.
It was Collins’s office, as her ladyship’s clergyman and as the cousin most nearly related to Miss Elizabeth Bennet under God, to bring the truth.
What Miss Elizabeth Bennet was, Collins’s pen permitted itself one paragraph to describe. She was a young person of fallen nature, possessed of a quick mind and a corruptible heart, in whom unguarded reading and undue indulgence had produced a habit of self-will that no proper authority had been permitted to restrain. She had, since her father’s death, withstood the attempts of her natural protectors to bring her under proper governance. She had, by her own hand, falsified documents bearing upon the entail of Longbourn—Collins had this from sources he could not name in writing but which he could swear to under oath. She had absconded from her family in September last and had communicated with no one of them save by uncertain and infrequent post. She was, in the considered judgement of those most nearly concerned with her, a woman who had taken upon herself those licences of person and of conscience which the female sex, when uncorrected, was the most apt to assume; and the present scandal at Northmere, in which her resort to the sheltering establishment of a single gentleman could no longer be concealed, was the natural and even predictable result of so long a course.
Collins wrote entirely in the spirit of compassion. He wished, even at this hour, that the lady might be restored to such usefulness in the world as her remaining faculties permitted. The Magdalen Hospital in London would receive a young person of her character upon application; a confidential placement could be found at a school of correction in Yorkshire under Mrs P—‘s direction; in either case Mr Darcy might continue to discharge those obligations of personal generosity that did him honour, by undertaking the cost of her support without the embarrassment of her further presence under his roof.
Should Mr Darcy decline these arrangements, or should Miss Bennet herself refuse the wisdom of them, Collins had laid the entire matter before a London attorney of his own retaining, a gentleman of long acquaintance with such cases, who had assured him that the law would, in every particular, sustain him. The course of public prosecution was, Collins wrote, repugnant to his profession and to his Christian feeling. He hoped earnestly it should not become necessary.
Collins remained, he wrote, the obedient servant of Mr Darcy and the humble petitioner of Lady Catherine, whose advice in all things had been, in this matter as in others, the very guide of his hand.
Darcy did not move from the table for a small while after he had read it. He read it a second time. Then he set it down beside Gardiner’s letter and counsel’s letter, the three of them in a row on the long table, and he stood at the window and watched the mere.
