The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 5. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

The following is the first of several leaves I have taken from a private journal kept by my great-grandfather, Mr. Charles Bingley, which reached me through my wife's labours among the family papers. I set them in where Mrs. Darcy's account, by the nature of the thing, could not see. A word upon the document, once and then never again. My great-grandfather wrote as he talked, at the gallop, his words running one into the next, his stops left out altogether, and his blots standing in for whatever stops he might otherwise have made. I have ventured the punctuation and left the rest to him. — J. H. W.

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Netherfield Park, the 15th of November

We were out the whole of the morning after the birds, and I have never in my life seen shooting like Darcy's and never shall. He does not appear to try at it. He puts the gun up as though he only meant to point a thing out to you across the field, and the bird comes down, and he has the next one before I have got my own heart back into me — and he takes no more pleasure in it than a man takes in setting down his hat. I brought home two brace and was as pleased as a schoolboy and said so, and he said they were good birds, which from Darcy is a speech, and I went warm on it the rest of the day. The dogs worked beautifully. There is a young liver-and-white bitch of mine, Juno, that I had half a mind to leave at home for green, and she quartered that ground like a duchess and shamed the old dog outright. I shall keep her by me all the season now. I mention all this first because it was the best of the day and I would rather write it than the other thing.

The other thing was said on the walk back, in the mild way Darcy has when he has settled a matter already and is only being kind about the telling of it.

"You know how Miss Bennet came to be under your roof," he said. He did not put it as a question.

"She came to dine and was caught in the rain and was too poorly to go home. The whole house knows it."

"That is what happened," he said. "How it came about is another thing." And then he laid it out for me the way he lays out everything, one thing set down after the next and so close together that a man can find no room to get in between them.

"The invitation was for the one evening we three were engaged from home to the officers. A lady asked for that night sits down with your sisters, and is handed back into her carriage, and is gone before ever we return — unless she should be kept."

"She might have been asked for any night," I said.

"She came on horseback. Longbourn keeps a carriage, she is the eldest daughter of the house, and she was sent the three miles on the old riding horse in spite of both."

"The carriage may have been wanted elsewhere—"

"Under that sky? There was rain standing in it from breakfast, and any man who has kept a season in the country could have read it off the morning." He let that go a step before he set the last of it down. "A lady put up on a horse under a wet sky, three miles from her own door. The rain was the design. Mrs. Bennet sent her daughter out to be caught in it and kept."

"That is a hard thing to lay on a mother who only wants her girls well settled," I said.

"I lay nothing hard on her. It was a stroke of generalship, and I admire it." We walked a little way. "A scheme wants two to work it, Bingley. Mrs. Bennet may load the piece, but Miss Bennet had to walk out under that sky and let herself be sent. A daughter who will do so much — who will be pointed at a rich man and marched at him through the wet because her mother wishes it — will marry where her mother directs her. A man she likes well enough. She will never trouble to ask herself whether she likes him best."

I had no word ready, and he said the rest of it plainly, as a thing he had reasoned and not a thing he took any pleasure in reaching.

"That is your Miss Bennet. Amiable, biddable, and her heart not greatly in the business either way."

Well. I could not sit under the whole of that, and I said so.

"You have reasoned yourself clean past the one article that signifies," I told him, "which is Jane herself. There is no scheming anywhere in her. She would sooner walk to Scotland than manoeuvre a man a single inch. If she was in the rain, she was in it because she had been asked, and would not give the pain of a refusal."

"Then how do you explain the decision to ride a horse out under that sky?"

"I have no answer to the horse and the sky, and I will not pretend to one." He had me there, and I knew it as I spoke. "But you have proved how she came to be wet, and you have not come within a mile of what she is. That part you are guessing at, and guessing low."

He heard me out. He always hears me out. What I did not say to him — what I will set here and nowhere else — is that if Jane cares for me, she cares on my own account and by no arithmetic of her mother's.

"I hope you are right," he said at last, in the voice of a man who has settled privately that you are not.

There is a saying of Darcy's, that a man may look at a thing the whole of his life and never once observe it. You see, he says, but you do not observe. I had that put to me tonight without his troubling to aim it, and it went home all the same. For I have sat beside Mrs. Bennet across a dozen dinners and seen a fond, silly, kindly woman fussing over her girls, and observed nothing whatever underneath it — and here is Darcy reading her off like a printed page while I sat at her elbow and studied my dinner. So it may be he sees where I am blind. But seeing is not the whole of a man, and there are things a fellow takes in by an instrument that is not his eyes, and about Jane I will back my instrument against his any night of the week and think the wager safe.

I mean to think no more of it. I observe that I have now told this page as much twice over, which is once more than a thing wants telling if it is going to hold. Darcy is below at piquet with Caroline, losing on purpose to be let alone. I shall go down to him. The birds were very fine.