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“You dare!” She had the good sense to stop just then, and to reconsider her inquiry. “Darcy, you will tell me that you have no designs upon that girl.”

Darcy straightened and said, “I will tell you nothing at all.”

The silence that followed was of a kind the Colonel could not have described; the silence seemed to hang between the old woman and her nephew like smoke after a volley, and neither of them moved, and in the middle of it the Colonel, who had been shot at in four countries, sat in a chair by a fire and felt his heart beat against his ribs like a fist upon a door.

Lady Catherine rose. She was a large woman, and she did it slowly, with a rustling of silk and a stiff deliberate grandeur that would have done credit to Queen Elizabeth in a rage. She looked at Darcy. She looked at the Colonel. Whatever she saw there, in those two faces, she seemed to take for an answer.

“Very well,” said Lady Catherine de Bourgh, with perfect calm. “I see how matters stand. I shall not argue with a young man in a temper. But I will tell you both this, and you may make what use of it you please. I have, in all my life, never permitted an impropriety to pass unchecked within ten miles of my own house, and I do not intend to begin in my sixty-third year.” Her voice raised, and she added, “I now know how to act.” The statement was more or less a declarative one; she indicated that she was to take action, but neither gentlemen knew what she planned to do.

Their Aunt drew up her shoulders. “I shall call upon Hunsford Parsonage myself,” she said. “Tomorrow morning. I shall see this young person with my own eyes. And then we shall see what is to be done.”

The Colonel seemed to think that Lady Catherine was not entirely sure what she was to do, but knew that she would certainly do something. She went out, and door closed behind her with a soft, enormous finality.

Darcy did not move. He stood by the mantelpiece with his shoulder against the stone, quite pale, and still looking at the door. Then he turned his head and met the Colonel’s eyes across the dim room, and his face did something strange. It was not fear. It was not even dismay. It was an expression of such bleak, steady, bitter amusement that Richard, who had known him all his thirty years, did not at first recognise it as a smile.

“Well,” said Darcy. “There goes your campaign.”

The Colonel stared at the closed door. He had planned, he reflected, for a great many contingencies. He had arranged for the parson, and the agent, and the weather. He had provided for an indifferent lady and an obstinate cousin, and a bad road and a wet season. He had not, God help him, provided for the arrival on the field of a more formidable commander than himself.

“I think,” said Colonel Fitzwilliam slowly, “that we have just been outflanked.”

CHAPTER 11

Lady Catherine de Bourgh called at Hunsford Parsonage at eleven o’clock, in the barouche, with two footmen, and sat for exactly twenty-two minutes in the best chair in Mrs. Collins’s drawing-room with her stick planted before her like a sceptre.

Elizabeth had been warned. Charlotte had come to her chamber at half past nine with a face the colour of tallow and said that the carriage had been seen at the end of the lane, and Elizabeth had dressed with great care in her plainest gown and come down to find the whole household drawn up in the hall, Mr. Collins trembling like a leaf, Maria Lucas visibly considering the cellar. She had thought, with a curious sinking and lightening of the heart, very well. It is come.

The interview was very strange. Lady Catherine asked a great many questions and listened to none of the answers. She enquired into the size of the Longbourn estate, and the manner of its entail, and the number of Elizabeth’s sisters, and what had been done for their portions; and when she learned that the sum of the whole was four thousand pounds to be divided among five, she gave a short hard breath through her nose, as of a woman who has discovered a bad smell and confirmed its source.

She surveyed Elizabeth through her glass, and she also remarked upon the plainness of Elizabeth’s muslin. She said, in a voice that carried to the passage, that she had always held it a point of duty to observe the company that gentlemen of her family kept, and that she had observed, with some surprise, that her nephew had lately been in the habit of keeping a very odd sort.

“It is possible, ma’am,” said Elizabeth lightly, “that he has found it an agreeable change.”

The glass lowered, and the lady spoke. “My nephew is a man of fixed purposes.” Lady Catherine seemed firm about that notion.

Elizabeth replied, “Then I am sure he will be glad to be spared the trouble of explaining them to me.”

Elizabeth was aware of what she had said, the moment she had said it; and, of the small agonised sound of Mr. Collins behind the door. But, she held her ladyship’s eye with perfect civility, and the old woman held hers, and for a moment the whole drawing-room seemed to hang upon some thin and invisible wire.

Then Lady Catherine rose, with a rustle of silk and a glare that would have blistered paint, and said she should wish her good morning, and went out in a manner that left the question perfectly open. It was only after the barouche had gone that Elizabeth discovered her hands were shaking.

***

A letter came by the afternoon post, and she knew at once from the direction that it was Jane’s. The letter was a short one, and she pondered it, for it was not like Jane to be short. Jane usually wrote as she lived, with a slow, sweet, careful fullness that gave every person in Meryton their due and found something good to say of the weather; but this was a single sheet, and there was a blot on the corner where she had begun again, and the sentences were unusually plain.

Dearest Lizzy —

I do not wish to alarm you, and Papa says I am not to write of it, but I believe you had better know. There has been a letter from Mr. Sharp, the attorney in Hertford. Papa has been obliged to sell the Highfield meadows, which as you know were not in the entail, to meet some debts he had let run on with the wine-merchant and one or two others. It is not a great sum. But Mama was in the room when the letter was read, and has been in her chamber since, and I have been trying to understand the figures, which Papa will not discuss.

Lizzy, I had not known. I knew we were not rich, but I had thought there was something laid by. Papa says there is not, that there never has been, and that he has always been meaning to. He says Mama’s four thousand will be ours when she dies, and not before, and that we are to think no more about it. But I cannot help thinking. If anything should happen to Papa, we have nothing, nothing at all.

Mr. Collins will have the house. We shall have the clothes we stand in and what our uncles may give us.

Do not tell Mama that I wrote. And pray do not be anxious. I am sure everything will be well.

— Your loving, J.

Elizabeth read it twice. She laid it on her knee and looked at the wall. She had known, as one knows that the sea is cold; she had gone about all her life in the vague, comfortable awareness that the Bennet daughters were not heiresses and that there was an arrangement, somewhere, which her father understood. She had been taught to laugh at it. She had been taught that a girl with a good heart and a quick mind could make her way, that Papa would think of something, that these things came right. And all that time, under her feet, the floor had been exactly as thin as it looked.