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.