The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 26. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.

Miss Darcy called on us at the inn the morning after the dinner, with only Mrs. Annesley for escort and no brother in sight. I understood that she had not come to return a civility at all, but with the held breath of a girl who has settled on a thing and has now only to endure the interval before she may begin.

The men were on the river and Jane and Mary had walked into Lambton, so there was only my aunt to be got past; and my aunt was charmed with her, and said so in effect by being charming back. The tea came up. Mrs. Annesley had grown up the next valley but one from my aunt's own and was drawn at once into the great business of whose people had farmed what with my aunt. And when the two of them were fairly launched, Miss Darcy rose and went to the window, and asked me, in a small even voice she had plainly rehearsed against the chance of its failing her, whether I would come and stand a moment in the better light.

We stood together at the glass, with the inn yard below us where a man was backing a horse between the shafts of a gig, and she did not look at the yard, or the light, or anything at all beyond the room. She put one hand flat against the cold pane, as though to hold shut something on the other side of it.

"You saw, last night," she said. "When Miss Bingley spoke of — of that gentleman. You saw me, and you turned it away, and you did not look at me afterward the way the others would have, to see how much I had minded. I lay awake on it. I have not many people who do not look to see how much I have minded." She drew a breath that shook on the way in. "I should like to tell you a thing, if you will let me, before I lose the courage I came with. I have never told it whole. My brother knows it, and Mrs. Annesley knows most of it, but they were in it, and one cannot tell a thing to the people who were in it. One can only be careful around them forever."

I said that I would be honoured by her confidence; and I said nothing else, because I could see that any kindness larger than that would frighten the words back down her throat.

"Last summer my brother took a house for me at Ramsgate, by the sea, with Mrs. Younge, the companion I had before this one." Her hand moved a little against the pane. "I was fifteen, and I had known Mr. Wickham since I was in the nursery. He was my father's godson, and when he came to Ramsgate, as if by chance, and was everything to me that he had always been, only now looking at me as though I had become worth looking at, I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened in my life. Mrs. Younge thought so too, and said so, very often. I did not know then that she had known him a great while, and was his before she was ever mine."

She told it then. The persuasion of it. The word love, which he had been generous with. The plan to go to Scotland, which had seemed to her not a wicked thing but a romantic one, a story she was being allowed inside. That they had gone — had actually got into the chaise and gone, the two of them and Mrs. Younge, north out of Ramsgate in the evening.

"And on the first night, at the inn, I told him about the money." She said it to the window. "I thought he ought to know how it stood, so that we might plan. I have thirty thousand pounds. I told him it was thirty thousand pounds and that I was glad of it, for his sake as much as mine — and that of course none of it could be touched until I was of age, or married with my guardians' consent, my brother's and my cousin the colonel's. I thought it a small obstacle. I thought he would laugh and say we should be poor and happy. I was fifteen, and I thought thirty thousand pounds locked in a box was the same as thirty thousand pounds, if you were the one it belonged to."

She stopped. I did not fill the silence. It went on a while.

"He was very quiet after that. And that night I was taken ill." Her hand had gone white at the knuckle against the glass. "Very ill. I was sick past anything I had known, all that night and the day after, and I could not be moved, and in the morning he was gone, and she was gone with him. I thought they had gone for a doctor. I lay in that room two days thinking, between the worst of it, that they had gone for a doctor and would come back."

The coffee-things chinked across the room. My aunt laughed at something. Mrs. Annesley laughed.

"My brother came instead. I have never been sure how he knew where to come. He has never told me, and I have learned not to ask him the questions that cost him to answer. But he sees things that other people do not, and he builds a story in his head of what they mean, and more often than not it is a true story."

"Yes," I said, and thought of the time he guessed which route I'd walked by the burdock on my petticoat.

Georgiana went on. "He brought a physician from the next town who would not say very much. It was a long time before anyone would tell me plainly what had been done, and longer before I would believe it had been done on purpose, and longest of all" — and here her voice did the smallest thing, a hairline crack she sealed over at once — "before I stopped being ashamed of myself. Both for going away with him, and for telling him about the money."

"You were fifteen," I said. It was the only thing I let myself give her, because it was the only thing that was not about me.

"I was fifteen." She took her hand off the glass at last. "He did not get a farthing. I should like you to know that, since you saw last night what the world thinks it knows of him. He spent a summer and a girl's whole heart and very nearly her life, and he rode away from it with empty pockets, and within the year he was in your Hertfordshire being charming at card-parties."

"And of course your brother could say nothing of it, without risking your reputation," I said. So he let himself be thought proud, and cold, and a withholder of other men's just deserts, in a country full of people who had decided to like Mr. Wickham.

"That is the kind of man he is," Georgiana said. "I wanted one person here to know the story."

I had carried two Mr. Wickhams since the spring, the agreeable one and the smaller, shabbier one, and had spent a season unable to make them resolve into a single man. They resolved now, at an inn window with a girl's hand flattened white against the glass. I understood at last what it had cost Mr. Darcy to stand in a parsonage parlour and be refused for his pride, with this in his heart. I had guessed, that spring, that the harm done at the watering-place had been to a young woman of his family, and I had set it, in my mind, on the wrong branch, and pitied the wrong people. The girl it had been done to was standing at my elbow asking me, without asking, only to be believed.

"I believe every word, and I am glad to be the one person."

That reached her. She looked at me directly for almost the first time, a tall fair girl with her brother's keenness just beginning, far back, behind the fright; and whatever she saw in me seemed to comfort her, because she gave a small breath of something that was nearly a laugh, and took her hand down from the glass.

"Then you must come to Pemberley and hear me play," she said, "and tell my brother I played well, for he worries, and it pleases him to be told. He need not know what we talked of this morning, at least not yet."

"I shall come," I said, "and he shall hear you played like an angel, and nothing else from me at all."

By the time Mrs. Annesley had gathered her up, and my aunt had said all the things that are said to a girl of such pretty manners, the ordinary morning had closed over the half-hour as though it had never been opened. I went down with her to the inn door. She drew on her gloves on the step, and made me a small grave curtsey, and was handed up into her carriage and the morning went on as though she had only paid a call.