The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 11. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had come a hundred miles into Kent to see my sister, and I spent the last five of them practising the truth of it.

The road into Hunsford in the last week of March was a green tunnel made of hedges, and I had it nearly to myself, a hired maid asleep in the corner of the chaise and a great deal of time to think about the thing I had come all this way in order not to think about.

I had better give the winter its due here and have done, for it does not want a chapter and shall not have one. Charlotte was buried, and mourned, and by the turn of the year had passed into the settled history of the neighbourhood as a sad business on a bad road — footpads, never taken, never likely to be — the kind of thing that befalls other people until the morning it befalls you. What would not pass so quietly into history was Mr. Collins. The verdict that had begun to gather about him before Charlotte was a week in the ground had wanted only a little more time to set into the sort of thing nobody says and everybody holds; and then Mr. Collins had upset the whole of it by marrying my sister Mary inside three months, which the neighbourhood received as either the last proof of his hard heart or the last proof of his innocence, according to the cast of the speaker's mind, and went on declaring both over the same teapot.

Jane, through all of it, said very little. Mr. Bingley did not come again to Netherfield; the house stayed shut and the knocker off the door; and Jane did not grow worse, which in Jane was a different thing entirely from growing better, and she carried the loss of him with a steadiness that alarmed me more than any amount of weeping could have done.

As for myself, I had told the world, and told myself oftener and more firmly than I told anyone, that I was going into Kent to see my married sister settled in her own home. It was true. It was simply not the whole of why I had come, and the remainder was a thing I had no name for and did not go looking to name: only that Charlotte's death had never, in all the months since, lain quiet in me; that I went about with a low, wordless unease I had agreed to call grief, because grief was a thing one was permitted; and that when the summons to Hunsford came I had taken it up rather faster than a visit to Mary, by itself, could account for. I did not ask myself why. I had grown practised, that winter, at not asking myself things.

The chaise turned in at a white gate, and there was the parsonage — a tidy, square, comfortable house with a green door and a garden already being made to behave — and there on the step, before the wheels had stopped, stood Mr. Collins.

"Cousin Elizabeth!" He was down the path and handing me out before the maid was well awake. "My dear cousin Elizabeth. You are most heartily welcome to Hunsford — most heartily. Mrs. Collins has been counting the days; I may say we have both been counting them; the spare room has stood aired this fortnight against your coming. You are very welcome, cousin. Very welcome indeed."

It was the greeting of a man honestly relieved to have his own people under his roof, and I scarcely knew where to put it, having braced myself for civility and been met with welcome three times over. If there ran through the relief a thread that did not quite answer to the words — one does not, as a rule, thank a guest so very many times merely for arriving — I was stiff from the road and let it lie. He was the same man I had refused at Longbourn, every gesture of him unchanged. Only the ground beneath the gestures had shifted, and I could not yet have told you into what.

Mary received me in the parlour, and rose, and kissed me, and held me off at arm's length to take stock.

"You are pale, Lizzy," she said. "I have always held that we were not meant to be flung the length of the country in hired chaises; a woman keeps her health best where her duties keep her. But you are come, and I am glad of it." The last of it she said quite simply, and meant, and I was reminded that whatever Mary did to a sentiment in the course of arranging it, the thing underneath was as often as not a sound one.

"I am glad to be come, and I shall be paler yet if you keep me on my feet in my travelling-dress. Let me sit down before you set about improving me."

"I do not improve people," said Mary, who did little else but try. "I say what is true and leave them the use of it." But she rang for the tea, and put me in the best chair, and asked after our mother and after Jane with a real anxiousness that her way of asking very nearly hid; and for the few minutes before Mr. Collins came in to us, we were two sisters who had not met since the winter and were gladder of one another than either of us was built to say.

The house was beautifully kept, and not by Mary. I had been raised under a mother who could govern neither a still-room nor her own nerves, and I knew the marks of a house run from the floor up rather than the top down. The housekeeper was a Mrs. Hollis, square and capable, who had kept the living's house through two incumbents before Mr. Collins and plainly meant to keep it through however many came after, new mistress or none. Mary had not disputed the ground with her. The household as a kingdom held no charm for my sister; Mrs. Hollis's competence had made that want of interest cost nothing at all.

What Mary had taken up instead, in the space the housekeeping left empty in her, was Mr. Collins. She had found in her husband a standing occasion for improvement, and gave herself to it with the thoroughness of a woman who has waited a great while for a subject that would hold still to be instructed. At dinner I saw the whole of it. Mr. Collins had hardly done with grace before he was telling me of a sermon he had lately preached upon the duties of contentment, which had been, he was glad to say, very well received.

"It would have been the better received, Mr. Collins," said Mary, "had you not preached contentment in the very week you dined three times at the great house. The poor will take a deal of doctrine from a man; they will not take it from his full plate. I have said as much to you before."

"You have, my dear," said Mr. Collins. "You have said as much." And he turned to me as though not a word had passed, and pressed me to a little more of the sauce.

It was kindly meant, every word of it. Mary had never in her life spoken a sentiment she did not hold to be improving, and she believed the whole of this one, and was, as it fell out, entirely right about the sermon. But Mr. Collins bore it with a tight, unbroken courtesy that did not slip once; and a man may be grateful to have a wife, I saw, and be no nearer content with her. I had the whole of their marriage inside four minutes — an imperfect thing that went on nonetheless, as most do, by everybody agreeing not to lean too hard upon it. It was no worse than many. In the state I was in that spring it was the kindest reckoning I had to give, and I gave it, and let the matter alone. I loved my sister. I said nothing.

Before the light went, Mr. Collins would not be denied the showing of his garden, which was his pride, and the prospect at the end of it, which was his greater pride and none of his own. He brought me to a gap in the trees at the foot of the lawn and bade me look. There, across a shallow valley and up its own rising ground, stood Rosings: a large, handsome, modern house with a great many windows.

"Sixty-four, cousin," said Mr. Collins. "I have counted them in every light. Every one of them glazed at very considerable expense by the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh. I have it on her ladyship's own authority that the cost came to a sum I should hesitate to name were the source less unimpeachable." He named it anyway, and the rooms that lay behind a number of the windows besides.

The house stood in the last of the spring light, and I looked at it some while longer than the view repaid, and thought about the woman inside it, of whom I had been hearing for half a year and whom I had never seen.

Her name was much in Mr. Collins's mouth that evening, as I had thought it would be. We were to dine at Rosings; the honour was already shaping itself; her ladyship had been told of my coming and had been graciously pleased to express a wish to see me, which Mr. Collins delivered as a man relays a summons from a throne. And when he spoke her name — and this I did mark, for I had marked it before, at Longbourn and over my aunt Philips's card-table — something entered into him that I had always set down to the awe of a small man before a great patroness. He sat the straighter for it. His voice took on the care of a man stepping where he has been assured the floor is sound and does not altogether believe the assurance.

They put me to bed early, and I was glad to go. The unfamiliar house settled and ticked around me as such houses do, and somewhere out past the dark trees Rosings stood with its many windows, and I told myself again, as I had told everyone, that I had come into Kent to see my sister; and so I had; and I went to sleep upon the half of the truth that would consent to let me.