The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 19. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 29th of April

Darcy has been a fortnight in town, and he is not himself.

He is uncivil to no one. He is not low in the ordinary way, the way a man is low when a bank has failed him or a horse has gone wrong. He dines when I ask him and answers when I speak, and both a half-beat late, as though my voice had to be fetched to him from the next street. I visited him at breakfast yesterday and tried him with the whole of my budget of news.

"Champion has thrown out a splint," I said. "The farrier thinks he will come sound with rest."

"I am glad of it." This to his coffee.

"And Caroline is set on a house at Scarborough for the summer, and having us all down to it, and being very gay."

"That is the best thing she could do."

"And I am to turn Methodist in the meantime, and go about the country preaching."

"You must do as you think right," said Darcy, and it was a full quarter of a minute before he came up out of wherever he had been, and looked at me, and said, "What was it you meant to do?" I had not the heart to hand him the joke a second time. He went into Derbyshire when he left his aunt's after Easter, and came down to town a fortnight past. Somewhere a thing was done to him that he has not told me and does not, I think, mean to.

I have not asked. We do not ask each other the large questions, Darcy and I; we have got on for years by leaving shut the doors a man wants shut. For my part, I came away from Hertfordshire in the winter and left a thing there unfinished that I have neither the courage to finish nor the sense to let alone.

Twice this week a man has come to him of a morning. A spare, quiet person with an inkstained pocketbook who appears, and is shut up with Darcy the better part of an hour, and goes away without a word to anybody. After the second of them I came on Darcy at the window with a paper in his hand that he had plainly stopped reading, and I asked him whether it was bad news.

"It is no news at all," he said. "That is the whole of the difficulty."

I waited, which I have learned to do with Darcy.

"There is a man I am trying to keep in view," he said at last. "Wickham."

"Your steward's son, who took so hard against you?" Caroline had sounded Darcy out about the man one day in my hearing. Darcy's terse summary of Wickham's character would not have helped him secure a position anywhere.

He turned the paper over without looking at it. "We were boys together, and my father loved him as a son. He was brought up on the same ground I was. He is going down to Brighton with his regiment when it removes, to be a charming fellow in a fresh set of drawing-rooms. My man there sends me word he is behaving beautifully."

"That is surely to the good."

"He is exactly where he ought not to be able to do any harm, and I do not believe it for an hour."

"Then say so," I told him. "If you know the fellow for what he is — a word in the right ear, the colonel put on his guard, the thing done."

"Because I can prove nothing, Charles." He set the paper down on the sill. "I have known what he is these ten years and I cannot lay one line of it before a colonel, or a magistrate, or a girl's father, in a shape that any of them could act upon. I can make no bricks without clay. Until he does a thing in the plain sight of a witness who will stand up and say it, I have a certainty and no case."

There was more feeling under that than the business, as I understood the business, seemed to me to carry. I have seen Darcy angry, which is a cold, quiet thing and soon over. This ran older and deeper. And I thought of the other weight he has carried since the autumn, the poor woman dead on the Hertfordshire road that he would not let lie, and I supposed the two of them together were grinding him finer than either could alone. I was sorry for him, and did not say so, there being no quicker way to empty a room of Darcy than to pity him aloud in it.

We sat a while after, not talking, which the two of us have always managed better than most men manage conversation. Once he began — "When I was in Kent—" and stopped.

"You were saying," I offered, once, when it had gone on too long even for us.

"Nothing of importance," he said, and that was the end of it.

I had "when I was in Hertfordshire" lodged behind my teeth the whole of that morning, and never let it loose either. So we passed as companionable a half hour as I have had this spring, each of us standing guard over a county he would not name.

He is at the window again now. He keeps that window a good deal this April. The regiments go down to the sea in three weeks and he means to know the day they do. I shall ask him nothing. He will tell me nothing. We will go on being two of the quietest men in London until one of us is fit to speak.