The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 21. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

I had the road out of Hunsford nearly to myself again, the maid in her corner, Mary beside me with a philosophical treatise on her knees. I had come into that county in March carrying half a truth. I left it with a coffer-full: what Mary had confessed in the dark and must believe forgotten; what Mr. Darcy had believed of my mother, and what he had asked me notwithstanding; why Mr. Bingley had been taken from Jane, which Jane must never learn while I lived; and a possible poisoner quartered a mile from my father's door. Somewhere past Bromley I had the inventory sorted into the half that could be spent and the half that must be locked, and the lock tried, and the key put away; and the hedges gave out, and Kent let us go.

Longbourn received us at full volume. My mother had Mary's bandage off-set within the hour — "for you have a hat-brim, child, there is no occasion to look like a pensioner" — and the attack itself arranged, by supper, into a form she could use: the wickedness of Kent, the idleness of Kentish magistrates, the mercy that it had been nothing worse, and the very great pity that such a thing should happen to a clergyman's wife, for it would look ill if it got about wrong, and she should write to her sister Philips directly so that it got about right.

My father looked up when I came into the library. "So Kent has returned both my philosophers. I am told nothing improves a young woman like travel." He looked at me a moment over the spectacles — longer than his habit — and what he saw I do not know, but he only said, "Mary is to have the blue room and quiet. I have asked Hill to see to it. Please keep your mother from troubling Mary."

Jane I had kept for last, the way one keeps the most difficult sum in the lesson. She had come out to me before I was well through the hall door, and embraced me, and I her. She was thinner under my hands than the winter had left her.She said into my bonnet that she was glad, so glad, that I was home, and that I was not to fret over her looks for she was perfectly well; and I stood in my sister's arms possessing the entire ledger of her unhappiness — every reason, every author, every honest mistaken word of it — and paid out what I could afford, which was: "I am home, and I am not going anywhere, and you are to help me unpack the gossip before the trunks."

It was Lydia, at supper, who set my clock for me. The regiment was not yet gone to Brighton — three weeks more, she and Kitty were in mourning for it already — and the officers were all asked to my aunt Philips's on Thursday se'ennight, and everyone would be there, and — "and Wickham asked after you twice, Lizzy, twice, and Maria Long heard him do it!"

I said that Mr. Wickham was very obliging, and asked my father to pass the ham.

It was late that night, with the house gone quiet and Jane brushing out her hair at my glass for old times' sake, that I spent the half of Kent that could be spent.

"Jane. Are you too tired to be astonished? For I had rather astonish you tonight and have it done."

"I am never too tired for you." She went on brushing. "Though I cannot think what Kent can have left to astonish me with, after all your letters."

"My letters were edited. Hear the unedited portion." I sat down on the end of the bed, where bad news has been delivered between sisters since the world began. "While I was at Hunsford, Mr. Darcy made me an offer of marriage."

The brush stopped. My sister turned on the stool with her hair half over her shoulder and her mouth open, and for a moment she looked sixteen.

"Mr. Darcy."

"Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. In form, in the parsonage parlour, with Mr. Collins's sermon-books looking on. He has loved me, by his own account, more or less since I came to Netherfield to see you. Against his judgment, against his family, against, I believe, his own express instructions to himself, all of which he explained to me at the time with great thoroughness."

"And you—" Jane had not yet arrived at breathing. "Lizzy, you refused him."

"I refused him."

I watched my gentle sister race through three emotions inside half a minute: astonishment, and concern for me, and then, because she is Jane, pity for the man in the case. "Oh, poor Mr. Darcy," she said. "To have loved you all this while, and said nothing, and then to be refused. However he may have deserved it — Lizzy, was it very dreadful?"

"You will make me repent my refusal out of pure pity for the refused, which is an economy of yours I have never mastered. It was dreadful enough. He told me at generous length how hard he had struggled against the inclination, and I told him with equal generosity what I thought of the struggle; we parted on the worst terms two civil people can manage; and the next morning—" I had come to the boundary, and stepped along it with care— "the next morning he took the trouble, before he left Kent, of correcting my history of a gentleman of our acquaintance. Jane, the rest of this is about Mr. Wickham, and you will like it less."

I gave her the half I could share: the living resigned, at Mr. Wickham's own asking, for three thousand pounds in hand; his studies in law abandoned the day the money was; the debts in every town that had trusted his face; the slander he had poured into my willing ear at my aunt's party. I did not say poison. I did not say a word about a girl at a watering-place. That history was not mine to shared — it had been trusted to me unnamed, and I would keep it unnamed — and so the worst of what I knew stayed in the locked half of the coffer, and what I laid before Jane was only sponging and malice: the small, shabby, daylight sins of an agreeable man.

It was enough. Jane heard it the way Jane hears everything, looking for the door by which everyone might still escape blameless.

"There must be some mistake," she said at last. "Interested people may have misrepresented each to the other. Perhaps neither is so much to blame as—"

"You may try, my love, but you will not get them both out. There is exactly one good man's portion of merit between the two of them, and it has all sat down on the one side of the scale, and we have spent a twelvemonth bowing to the other."

"But to take in everybody — the whole neighbourhood — Lizzy, he was liked. There was such an expression of goodness in his countenance."

"Indeed, I never checked further. He admired me, and I have a regrettably soft heard for everyone who has ever done it." And that silenced us both a moment, for it was truer than I had meant to say aloud, and Jane is too kind to agree with true things of that sort.

She braided her hair the whole way down before she spoke again. "Ought it to be known? If he is what you say — Lizzy, the regiment is asked everywhere. The Harringtons, the Kings, my aunt's parties. Ought we to tell?"

"Tell what, and on whose word? The half I have given you was given me in private, by a man this whole country is agreed in disliking, with no proof I can put on a table; and the parts I have not given even you, are under a confidence I will not break for anybody's card-party. Set it about, and Meryton will weigh Mr. Wickham's smile against my secondhand story, and the smile will carry the parish. And in three weeks the regiment is gone to Brighton, and the whole question marches away with it. We will say nothing; we will watch everything; and Mr. Wickham may keep his happy manners until they are Brighton's trouble."

"You sound like a magistrate," said Jane, and yawned, and kissed me, and stood at the door a moment with her candle. "Lizzy. At my aunt's on Thursday — he will come straight to you, you know he will. What shall you say to him?"

"I shall be perfectly civil," I said. "Civility costs nothing."

"You have never once believed that," said Jane, and went to bed.

She was right, as Jane is right about everybody but herself. I sat at the glass a while after she had gone, looking at the woman who knew everything in the house and could spend almost none of it, and tried faces for Thursday — the cool one, the blind one, the one that gives a man back exactly the coin he offers — and they were all of them wanting in some article I could not name. Eight days. I blew out the candle and did not choose.