The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 30. Narrated by Bingley, from his diary.

London, the 12th of August

I wrote last at Pemberley. I was meaning to drive over to Lambton and say to Miss Bennet the thing I had been eight months not saying. I never made the drive.

I was at the breakfast table feeling like spring when Darcy came in looking like winter.

"The Gardiner party is gone," he said. "They left for Hertfordshire before it was light. There has been—" and he stopped, which Darcy does not do, and began again. "The youngest Miss Bennet has gone off from Brighton with Wickham. There is no marriage. There is not going to be one, unless I can arrange a better one for Miss Lydia."

I sat with the toast going cold in my fingers. Lydia Bennet is a loud, harmless, silly girl I have sat across from at half the tables in Meryton — and Wickham is the man Darcy has been hunting since April, and somewhere between his two sentences I watched the whole of it come down on Jane. On Jane's house, on Jane's name, on Jane. I was on my feet before I knew I had stood.

"Then I must go to her — to Longbourn — she will be—"

"And do what when you get there?" said Darcy, not unkindly. "You cannot walk in at Longbourn in the thick of this. You would simply be one more caller they must find a chair and a countenance for, on the worst morning of their lives. And there is nothing at Longbourn to be done. If the thing can be mended at all it will be mended in London, quietly, by the few who can be trusted to hold their tongues."

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I stood there hunting the flaw in it and could not turn one up. So I took the only ground he had left me standing on.

"Then I am coming to London with you."

"There is not the least use in your coming to London."

"None in the world," I said. "I know it. I am coming regardless. I will not sit in Derbyshire shooting your birds while that whole house comes down over a child's folly, and you walk into God knows what alone. Give me nothing to do, and I will do the nothing at your shoulder."

He looked at me a long moment. "You are the hardest man in England to be rude to," he said, and he did not tell me no again.

So here we are, the pair of us, and I am finding out what use good intentions are in a business that wants a cold head. Caroline, at least, is making herself useful at Pemberley by amusing Georgiana. The one thing I have that might have served — money — Darcy would not take.

I put it to him the first hour. "Whatever it costs," I said. "To find her, to settle her, to buy the fellow off if it comes to buying, you can draw on me for the whole of it, and not a word said to a soul, now or ever."

"I know it, Charles. I thank you. And I will not touch a shilling of it."

"Why in Heaven's name not? It is only money. I have a great deal more of it than sense, as you have told me to my face—"

"Because this one is mine to pay." He said it in the voice that shuts a subject like a drawer, and I have not tried it again. There is a reckoning somewhere under all this that is his own and no other man's, and he means to settle it with his own hand and his own purse and be hanged to anybody who offers to help.

So I make myself what use I can, which is a small and homely sort of use and beneath the dignity of the thing, and has taken the absurd shape of my keeping house for a man under his own roof. I chivvy his cook; I have opinions now on his coal and his candles; I send his footman to bed and sit up in the fellow's place. Darcy suffers the whole invasion the way he suffers weather. I have watched clever men go stupid for want of a dinner at the very hour they had most need of their wits; and if the one thing I am fit to be in a business like this is an unpaid and unwanted steward to the best man I know while he saves a family that is never to hear his name for it, then I will be that, and reckon it no bad week's work.

This afternoon the drawing room acquired a Colonel.

Fitzwilliam — Darcy's cousin, whom I have met over cards and liked — came straight from some review or field-day in the whole of his regimentals, scarlet and gold from his stock to his boots, with a sabre that took the umbrella-stand off at the knees on the way in and the general air of a man who has ridden through the door rather than walked. He filled the room the way a fire fills a cold grate.

"Well," said the Colonel, stripping off his gloves and casting about for the map he had plainly expected to find laid ready. "Where are we, then."

"Sit down, Fitzwilliam." Darcy looked at me, and I watched him weigh, for the half of a second, whether to send me out of the room.

"I'll see about something cold," I said, to spare him the deciding of it, and rang for the butler. Then I stayed.

What passed between the two of them after was carried on in a shorthand of names and streets and sums that meant everything to them and next to nothing to me, and I will set none of it down, partly because I could make no shape of it and partly because it was plainly never mine to overhear. The Colonel grew graver by the minute, his splendour sitting stranger and stranger on him as the talk went into low and ugly places.

"You are certain it is he?"

Darcy said, "I have been certain of him for a long time. The difference is that now I can prove it."

And the Colonel looked away at the middle of the carpet and would say nothing.

Twice a day Darcy goes out. He will not take me, and I have left off pressing him; a man wants no genial fool at his elbow in the places he has been going, which are, by the state of his boots when he comes in and the set of his mouth, not the sort of places a gentleman commonly leaves cards at. He goes in hired hackneys — Darcy, who keeps as good a carriage as any in town, rattling about this business in coaches no one would look at twice — and comes home later each night, and grimmer, and says less.

He came in near two this morning and stood a moment in the hall with his hat still on, as though he had mislaid the way to his own stairs. I told him there were cold meats kept back in the dining-room against his coming.

He looked at me a moment. "In my own house," he said.

"Somebody had to see to it, and it was plainly not going to be you."

"I keep a cook for that, Charles. I keep, unless I am greatly mistaken, a butler. I had the two of them a good many years before ever I had you." But he ate the cold meats standing at the sideboard while I held the candle for him, and when he had done he said "Thank you" in a different voice from the one he had said the rest of it in, and went up. I do not know where he had been. I know it had cost him.

This morning he was at the street door before eight, drawing on his gloves with the Colonel behind him, and I came down in my dressing-gown feeling every inch the passenger on another man's ship.

"You are off, then," I said.

"The game's afoot," said Darcy, with the ghost of his old dryness, and to Fitzwilliam, "Come. We have an hour before the office opens, and I mean to be on the step when it does."

"Is there truly nothing I can do?" I asked, for the twentieth time in a week.

He paused with the one glove on. "Keep yourself out of mischief, and be here when I come back. You know my methods."

"Darcy, I give you my word, I have not the least idea in the world what your methods are, and never have had, in all this time of watching you at close quarters." It fetched half a smile out of him at eight in the morning on a black day, which I count among the better works I have done in this life.

Then they were down the steps and into a waiting hackney and gone, and I came back up to write this and to wait, which is the whole of my employment now. Somewhere in this enormous town Lydia Bennet is in the worst trouble a girl of sixteen can come to, and does not know that the most dogged man in England has made her his one concern; and her sisters at Longbourn, sitting up behind drawn blinds over a disgrace they take for the end of them, do not know it either. And they are not to know. On that one point he has been plainer with me than on anything: that if this is mended, no soul at Longbourn is ever to learn whose hand mended it. I gave him my word. So I may be the one man in England who could carry a little hope down to that house, and I am sworn not to. I shall wait up for him instead, and hold my tongue, and be there when he comes in.