Mrs. Bennet brightened. “Indeed! And what is that?”
“That if Martha Collins had been less capable, her husband might have been in trouble much earlier.”
Mrs. Bennet stared, uncertain whether she was to be gratified or affronted; but Mr. Bennet, who rarely explained himself when he could instead proceed, rose from his chair.
“I shall go there,” he said.
“Go?” repeated Mrs. Bennet, as if the word had been spoken in a foreign tongue. “Go where?”
“To Portsmouth.”
The sitting room—so lately arrested by the announcement of death—recovered itself in a sudden tumult of exclamations; for nothing was so alarming, to a family accustomed to see its head perpetually at home, as the idea of his voluntary departure.
“Portsmouth!—Good heavens! What can you do in Portsmouth? You cannot bring her back to life, Mr. Bennet. You will catch your death. It is a dreadful place; I have heard the streets are full of sailors, and worse than sailors.—And the expense!—”
“The expense,” repeated Mr. Bennet, with that mild emphasis by which he sometimes recalled his wife to propriety without challenging her to a full engagement, “will be mine, and therefore not intolerable.”
“But what business have you with Richard Collins and his inn?” Mrs. Bennet persisted. “He is not your brother; he is not your friend; he is only your cousin, and a cousin at that distance! He did not even write to you himself about his loss. You may send a civil message, and that is quite enough; nobody expects more.”
Mr. Bennet’s eyes moved, not to his wife’s, but towards the window, where the world lay in its summer quiet; and in that glance there appeared something which was not quite humour, and not quite displeasure—rather a recollection, and a sense of obligation which his habits did not often encourage him to indulge.
“He is a cousin,” he said at length; “and he has a son. The boy’s mother relied on my help, and her solicitor has asked me to act according to her will.”
“A son!—as if we had not daughters enough of our own to think of!” Mrs. Bennet cried, though she checked herself at once, for the words, in their frankness, approached too near a truth which she preferred not to examine—that they had no son. “Well—yes—he has a son, to be sure, and a son who is always poring over books, and who will never be good for anything unless he marries money; but what is that to you? If Richard is a drunkard, and you know he is, that is his own fault; and if the boy is miserable, it is a pity, but we cannot relieve every miserable creature in England.”
“No,” returned Mr. Bennet, taking up the letter again and folding it with care, “but we may sometimes relieve those whose misery will otherwise be imposed upon us.”
Mrs. Bennet was silent—not convinced, but checked; for she could not, without admitting her own anxieties, press him upon the point. It is a curious truth, and one which married womenlearn early, that what they most dread to have spoken aloud is often what they most desire to have silently understood.
Mr. Bennet went on, with a composure which made his resolution the more formidable, speaking of the journey as of a thing already decided; of his departure as requiring only the ordinary arrangements; and of Portsmouth as a place unpleasant indeed, but not fatal to gentlemen who did not insist on frequenting its lowest taverns.
His wife protested, lamented, predicted, entreated; the girls alternately feared for him and rejoiced in the novelty; and yet, by dinner, it was understood as a settled point that Mr. Bennet would travel the next day.
He did so; and the very act of leaving Longbourn, which had in it something of adventure for a man so habitually domestic, seemed to shake from his mind a certain languor which had clung to him through many years of indolent contentment. The roads were heavy, the inns indifferent, the weather undecided; but he bore it with patience, and even with a species of quiet satisfaction—not because he loved exertion, but because exertion, on rare occasions, gave him the sensation of deserving his ease.
Two
Portsmouth received Mr. Bennet with all that mixture of activity and coarseness which belongs to towns where the sea and the service of the Crown shape the character of every street. There were sailors in knots about the doors of alehouses; women whose loud laughter carried more weariness than mirth; carts and cries and the smell of tar; and, beneath it all, that restless movement which suggests that nothing is stable where men are forever arriving and departing. Mr. Bennet, who had never affected to be a man of the world, looked upon it with a detachment which was half amusement and half caution, and made his way to the inn of his cousin with as much dignity as a gentleman may preserve when obliged to step aside to avoid a puddle.
The sign above the door—once painted with some pretension—was cracked and weathered, so that the wordsFountain Innwere barely legible; the windows were filmed with neglect; and even before he entered, he heard within a burst of coarse laughter, followed by a voice raised in anger—an anger not quick or spirited, but thick and obstinate.
He had not been at this inn in several years; yet memory, with that cruel accuracy which chooses to preserve what is unpleasant, supplied him at once with the last impression it had made upon him: Martha Collins standing behind the counter, her cap neat, her hands busy, her eye vigilant—contriving, soothing, commanding with the brisk firmness of a woman who must be equal to every emergency because nobody else willbe. He recalled, too, a thin boy of ten then, hovering in the background, obedient and silent, carrying dishes as if he were invisible, and then, when the room grew quiet, slipping away with a book as if it were a treasure he feared might be taken from him.
The door opened upon a scene which confirmed at once all that the letter had implied. The common room was crowded and noisy; the floor showed the stains of careless feet; and behind the counter stood Richard Collins—red in the face, swollen in the eye, his hair uncombed, his linen questionable—leaning with more of his weight upon the wood than the wood seemed willing to bear.
At the first sight of Mr. Bennet he started, as men start when surprise threatens to sharpen the edge of shame; and then, recovering himself by an effort, he advanced with an exaggerated cordiality.
“Cousin Bennet!—Well, well! This is—this is good of you. Martha—poor Martha—” He halted, and seemed to search for the proper tone, as if grief were a garment he had mislaid. “Sorry I didn’t write to you. But, since you’re here, you’ve heard, I suppose.”
“I have heard,” said Mr. Bennet, quietly; “and I am deeply sorry for your loss. Mrs. Collins was a kind, hardworking person.”
Richard Collins made a vague motion with his hand, half assent, half dismissal. “Aye, aye—loss enough. Everything is a loss now. Nothing goes right. They drink, they eat, they complain—and no one does a thing unless I shout for it.”
As he made his way through the rooms of the inn, Mr. Bennet’s eye was caught by several sheets of paper lying upona side table—lists of the ordinary dishes offered that day to the guests. Curiosity prompted him to take one up. Though the matter was of the plainest kind—mutton stew, boiled beef, plum pudding, and the like—the hand that had set it down was remarkable: the letters were even, well-formed, and executed with a firmness and proportion that spoke of steady practice.
At that moment Mr. Collins himself shuffled in, wiping his hands upon his apron.
“My lad wrote those, Cousin,” he said, with a rough sort of pride. “His mother never learned her letters, God rest her, and my own fist is none too pretty. But the boy has a fair hand—always had, even when he was little. He has a patience seldom found in a boy of his years.”
