Elizabeth went to bed with little prospect of sleep. She lay awake thinking of her father's slip, and the locked drawer, and the grandfathers who could not have been the man he meant, because both had died before she was born. The family bible remained shut in his desk, the key never leaving his person. He said she had nearly destroyed it as a child, though she could not remember either the crime or the danger.
Church, Mr. Collins, and the ordinary business of the following day did nothing to settle her thoughts.
She rose on Monday before the house had properly stirred, dressed in the quiet dark, and thought of very little beyond the certainty that she should see him. Jane was already in the hall when Elizabeth came down, dressed for walking, which was not a habit of hers at half past six in the morning, nor one she had previously cultivated with any enthusiasm.
“I thought I might join you this morning, if you do not object to company. I have been indoors so much lately.” She smiled. “You do not mind, do you, Lizzy?”
Elizabeth looked at her sister and felt again that quiet sense of entrapment which Jane's kindness so often produced. Jane met her look with nothing but calm sincerity. That, precisely, was the difficulty.
“Of course not,” she said.
They went out together, and Elizabeth turned them west without seeming to choose it, away from the northern fields and everything they might contain. Jane spoke of the assembly, of Mr. Bingley, and of everything she hoped the evening mightbring; Elizabeth listened, answered properly, and kept both her eyes and her thoughts to herself.
Whenever Jane smiled, Elizabeth felt again the older, easier affection of habit, and with it the uncomfortable suspicion that habit itself was part of Jane’s advantage.
At the far edge of the lower meadow, where the land rose gently toward the eastern fields, she saw him; a figure on horseback at the crest of the rise, too distant to be clearly distinguished, and yet not so distant as to be mistaken.
He saw Jane beside her and turned his horse without the slightest alteration of pace that might invite notice. A moment later he was gone, and Elizabeth felt the disappointment of it more keenly than she had any right to admit.
They walked back in the same pleasant conversation with which they had set out. Elizabeth said everything that was required and betrayed nothing, and was not entirely certain whether she was proud of such composure or merely weary of maintaining it. An hour later she presented herself in her father's book room at the proper hour, the week's ledger beneath her arm.
Mr. Bennet signed without reading, as he always did. She gathered the ledger, closed it, and said, without looking up, “I should like to speak with you, sir. About Mr. Darcy.”
“Should you,” said Mr. Bennet.
“You have not told me your reasons.”
“No,” he said. “I have not.”
“I think I am entitled to them.”
He set down his book and regarded her over his spectacles. “Since you ask, a man of his consequence does not attach himself to a woman in your position without calculation. He may feel itvery sincerely at present; men of his sort generally do, while the novelty holds. But novelty fades, Lizzy, and when it does, a man of ten thousand a year finds he has rather more options than a woman with nothing to recommend her but a sharp mind and a knowledge of harvest figures.”
"I am doing this for your own good," he said, taking up his book.
“You do not know him,” Elizabeth said.
“I know his kind. I have known it longer than you have been alive,” her father said. “You have obligations to this family that have nothing to do with your own preferences, and I will not have them set aside because a wealthy gentleman found you diverting for six weeks at the seaside.”
“And if I disagree?”
“Then you disagree quietly,” he said, “and you do nothing about it. I cannot prevent your attending the assembly this evening; it would cause more talk than it settles. But I expect you to conduct yourself properly. You are not to seek out a man I have expressly asked to stay away.”
He returned to his page.
“That will be all, my dear.”
She stood a moment longer than was necessary. Then she said, “Yes, sir,” and left him to his reading, and went to dress for the assembly.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The assembly rooms at Meryton were lit and warm and already in full voice when they arrived. The Bennet party was received with the usual mixture of welcome and curiosity, the curiosity on this occasion rather more pointed than usual, asMr. Collins had been at Longbourn for the better part of a week and his particular attentions to Miss Elizabeth had not gone unobserved by anyone who had happened to pass the house or speak to anyone who had.
Mrs. Bennet settled herself at the matrons' table with the satisfaction of a general taking the high ground, and was joined in short order by her sister Mrs. Philips, Lady Lucas, Mrs. Long, and, somewhat to her left and slightly outside the immediate circle of consequence, old Mrs. Hayes, who had come with her son and his wife sat with the air of someone entirely indifferent to the room's opinions.
"Jane will do very well tonight," Mrs. Bennet announced, to the table in general. "Mr. Bingley is expected, and she is looking particularly well. That shade of blue was always her colour." She glanced about the room with the satisfied air of a woman surveying an investment. "And of course Mr. Collins is already engaged for the first two with Lizzy, which is very proper."
"Mr. Collins," said Mrs. Philips, with the attentive interest she brought to all information that might be further distributed, "has been very particular in his attentions, I think."
