One
July 1804, Hertfordshire
The morning at Longbourn possessed that guided tranquility which may sometimes be achieved, though rarely maintained for long, in a household where five lively daughters—ranging in age from eight to fifteen—were accustomed, by turns, to play, to race through the rooms, and to practice their music with an enthusiasm not always proportioned to skill. At such hours, Mrs. Bennet governed the domestic economy with a zeal that might have done credit to a Roman magistrate newly instructed by the Senate in the particulars of the evening’s dinner; her voice rang through the house with cheerful authority, issuing directions to the kitchen while her thoughts ran, as they often did, rather beyond it.
Yet even in the Bennet family there existed intervals of decided calm. On this morning, the elder girls—Jane, Elizabeth, and Mary—were separately employed in the sitting room, each absorbed in her reading and studies, for they took genuine pleasure in adorning their minds with improvement, just as readily as they delighted in contriving ornaments and little inventions for their gowns. Mr. Bennet, seated near the window with a book open upon his knee, was reading in a low voice to the younger ones, endeavoring, as he was accustomed to do, to awaken in them a taste for books, reflection, and the exercise of understanding; but Kitty and Lydia, less patient and more restless by nature, listened only by fits and starts, and soon abandoned the attempt in favor of livelier amusements.
It was upon such a morning—whose serenity seemed almost to resent interruption—that intelligence reached Longbourn. The sky wore that particular brightness which belongs to the gaiety of high summer, and the air itself appeared disposed to cheerfulness rather than alarm.
Mrs. Bennet was the first to take possession of the letter; for though Mr. Bennet’s correspondence was ordinarily delivered into his own hands, there prevailed in the household a habit—sanctioned alike by long usage and by that domestic confidence which is at once the strength and the weakness of married life—of permitting Mrs. Bennet to receive what she pleased, provided she surrendered it when required. She possessed, moreover, a quicker apprehension of anything that might possibly affect the feelings of the family; and it must be acknowledged that from such apprehensions she derived an animation of spirits which the quieter and more settled hours of the day were seldom able to inspire.
Holding the letter with an eagerness sharpened by anticipation rather than knowledge, she seated herself at once, prepared alike for delight or agitation, as fortune should decide—entirely unconscious that this intelligence, arriving so innocently amid sunshine and order, was about to disturb a tranquility more delicately balanced than she herself supposed.
Mrs. Bennet broke the seal with an eagerness not wholly unjustified by experience; for the very superscription—bold, uneven, and crowded into one corner of the paper—had an air of importance which suggested either some new folly from Meryton, or some old inconvenience revived by the intervention of relations. The paper itself, however, was of good quality, neatly folded and carefully sealed; the hand was regular and disciplined, the ink evenly laid, betraying a writer longaccustomed to conveying intelligence with precision rather than ornament. Yet before she had read a dozen words, the effect upon her countenance was immediate and striking; for though the characters were composed with method and restraint, the matter they announced admitted of no softness. So visible was the alteration in her expression that one of the younger girls, idling near her father with a ribbon threaded between her fingers, looked up at once—less from curiosity than from the instinctive expectation that such composure, once broken, rarely yielded tidings of an ordinary kind.
“Sir—” Mrs. Bennet began aloud, for she could never endure the restraint of silent reading when the prospect of attention offered itself; but she broke off almost at once, her eye arrested by a phrase so unmistakable that she scarcely required its conclusion.
“Martha Collins—deceased!” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bennet—she is dead!”
At the sound of the word dead, there was a brief pause in the room. Small occupations were suspended, and attention, however imperfect, was awakened. Mrs. Bennet, though she had known the fact for scarcely an instant, was already fully alive to the propriety of being affected by it.
“Dead?” repeated Mr. Bennet from behind the book he was reading to the girls, without raising his eyes—less because the event was indifferent than because, in his philosophy, the worst news could be made no better by immediate spectacle.
“Dead, yes—dead, upon my word! It is all here. The Collinses’ solicitor writes that she is gone, poor creature, and what is to become of them, I cannot conceive. He says—oh! listen only—he says the inn is in a dreadful way, and William is quite worn down—William! I had forgotten there was a boy—do you rememberhim?—a pale, quiet little thing, always with a book in his hand—and now he is sixteen or seventeen, and made to do everything—everything, I assure you—”
Mr. Bennet at last lowered his book, not with the agitation which Mrs. Bennet, in her benevolence, would have liked to see in him, but with an attention which, when it chose to appear, was at least genuine.
“Give it to me, my dear,” he said.
Mrs. Bennet surrendered the letter, though not without a sigh which was meant to express both sympathy for the departed and indignation at the hardship of being compelled to relinquish a subject while it still promised amusement.
Mr. Bennet read with that composed rapidity which belonged to him whenever he wished to master a matter without being mastered by it. The widowhood—or rather the widowerhood—of a cousin did not of itself possess sufficient interest to engage him long; but as he proceeded, the tone of the writer, and the circumstances which unfolded themselves with a certain clumsy urgency upon the page, began to create in his mind a more serious train of thought than was common to him in domestic communications.
The letter bore throughout the unmistakable stamp of professional discipline. It stated its purpose with economy, avoided sentiment, and confined itself to such particulars as the writer judged necessary to establish fact and obligation. Yet it was precisely this restraint—this careful abstinence from comment—that gave the communication its gravity.
Mrs. Martha Collins was dead. The date and place of her death were given, some ten days past. The arrangements alreadyundertaken were briefly noted. Of her character, her conduct, or her influence within her household, nothing was said.
But Mr. Bennet, who had known his cousin’s wife well enough, required no elaboration.
The solicitor proceeded to matters of estate. A modest sum was enumerated, together with such movable effects as had been judged proper to liquidate without delay. It was then stated—without emphasis, but with unmistakable clarity—that Mrs. Collins had, by a provision made some years earlier and now formally executed, named Mr. Bennet as the person entrusted with the oversight and proper application of these funds, to be employed solely for the benefit and education of her son, William Collins, during his minority and at the trustee’s discretion thereafter.
This, too, was stated without ornament; yet Mr. Bennet felt, as he read, the full weight of what was not explained. Mrs. Collins did not trust her husband, the father of her child.
There followed a brief account of the present circumstances. Richard Collins, the father, was alive and in possession of the premises, but the management of both household and business was described as irregular. Certain debts were noted as recent. The boy was said to be of delicate constitution, inclined to study, and unsuited, in the writer’s opinion, to the demands presently placed upon him. Beyond this, the solicitor declined to speculate, observing only that the child’s interests would be best served by immediate and considered intervention.
Mr. Bennet laid the letter down.
The hand that had written it was sober, correct, and impersonal; but the truth it conveyed required no excess of language. What the solicitor could not properly say, Mr. Bennetunderstood at once. Martha Collins had been the order of that house. Whatever its narrowness, whatever its discomforts, it had been held together by her vigilance. Her death had not merely removed a wife and mother, but the single principle of regulation upon which everything else depended. Richard Collins, released from restraint, had not risen to responsibility. The boy—quiet, bookish, and never robust—had been left exposed to circumstances he could neither govern nor endure. And she, with a foresight born not of sentiment but of necessity, had known precisely whom to name—a distant but reliable cousin of her husband.
The obligation admitted of no delay. This was not a matter to be settled by correspondence, nor one to be discharged with advice alone. Whatever was to be done—for the boy, for the money, for the future—must be done in person. Portsmouth could not wait.
Mr. Bennet read those lines twice, not because they were artfully phrased, but because there was in them a rough acknowledgement—half complaint, half confession—which struck upon his mind more forcibly than any flourishes of sorrow could have done.
When he had finished, he laid the letter upon the table with a deliberation which drew Mrs. Bennet’s attention in spite of herself; for though she did not always understand her husband’s silences, she had long been aware that they sometimes preceded action.
“Well?” she cried, after a moment. “Well, Mr. Bennet? Are you not shocked? Are you not grieved? Do you not think it monstrous that a woman should feel herself obliged, even before her death, to place her child beyond the reach of his own father?—a husband living, and yet treated as unreliable, as if he werealready proved unfit! It is beyond anything! I always said that cousin Collins was not like a normal father—”
“There is one point,” said Mr. Bennet, “upon which you and I are likely to agree with equal warmth.”
