The Curious Case of the Kentish Clergyman, Chapter 2. Narrated by Elizabeth Bennet Darcy.
"And what," said Charlotte Lucas, appearing at my elbow with two cups of punch before the first dance had ended, "is a Mr. Collins? Maria swears your mother has one staying at Longbourn, and my mother is in agonies for want of facts."
"He is my father's cousin," I said, "and heir to Longbourn after him, the estate being entailed away from us girls. He has lately taken orders, and got a living in Kent from a great lady called Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of whom you are to hear a very great deal whether you wish it or not. He has come to look us over."
"To look you over."
"He calls it an olive branch. I believe he means to choose a wife from among us, and feels that the entail entitles him to one, the way it entitles him to the silver."
"That is not the worst arrangement a woman might make."
"You have not heard him on the subject of his patroness."
"I have heard worse men on smaller subjects," said Charlotte, "and known them make easy enough husbands once the courting was done. A clergyman with a living, and an estate to come, is not nothing, Eliza, whatever he sounds like across a supper table."
This was an old argument between us, and I had never once won it, so I directed her attention to the man himself instead.
The assembly rooms at Meryton were never large, and that night they were smaller still, for half the county had crowded in to be disappointed by them. I have been in finer rooms since, and colder ones, and one or two I would give a good deal never to have entered at all; but I remember that room as it stood that evening, low-ceilinged and over-warm and loud, the whole neighbourhood having got hold of a single piece of news and resolved to make a winter of it. The news was that Mr. Bingley had taken Netherfield, was young, was unmarried, and had five thousand a year. My mother had it by heart within an hour of its arrival — five thousand, Mr. Bennet, and very likely more — and had recited it across the breakfast table every morning for a fortnight. My father received these communications as he received most of her communications, from behind a book; and he received the assembly itself by staying home with it.
Mr. Collins had attached himself that evening to Jane, the eldest and the handsomest of us, the entail having furnished him a choice he meant to make from the top down. Charlotte and I drifted near enough to hear him at the work. He had arrived at the chimney-piece in the drawing-room at Rosings Park.
"—eight hundred pounds, Miss Bennet. I have the figure from her ladyship herself. Eight hundred pounds, for the chimney-piece alone."
"It must be very fine," said Jane.
"It is beyond anything I could convey. I despair of conveying it."
He did not, however, despair of attempting it, and was some minutes about the work. Jane bore it with the sweetness she brought to everything, including bores; and I loved her for it, and did not envy her, and drew Charlotte off before I could be caught laughing at my own kin.
Then Mr. Bingley came in, and the chimney-piece ceased to matter, though nobody yet knew it.
He was everything the neighbourhood had ordered and a degree warmer than it had dared hope — easy, open, quick to be pleased, the kind of young man who enters a strange room as though it has been got up entirely for his enjoyment and is delighted to find his friends already in it. He was introduced down the line of us, declared he had never met with pleasanter people or prettier girls in his life, and was believed, because he so plainly believed it himself. He danced every dance. And within the half-hour he had found Jane, and after that he found very little else.
I watched it happen from one dance away: a beloved sister and a likeable stranger discovering one another in public, each convinced they were the soul of discretion. He brought her lemonade she had not asked for — the second man that evening to bring her a drink unasked, and the first to be thanked with a blush. He stood up with her twice, which in Meryton was very nearly a banns-reading. My mother watched the same scene from across the room, and I saw the very moment her eye left Jane and travelled to Mr. Collins, and from Mr. Collins to me; and I understood that I had just been promoted in the order of business.
For the present, however, I was occupied with Mr. Bingley's friend.
He had come in at Mr. Bingley's shoulder and had not warmed by a single degree in the hour since. Mr. Darcy was the taller man and the handsomer, with a keen aquiline face and piercing blue eyes; he had ten thousand a year to Bingley's five; and the room had established all of this and then fallen out of love with him inside ten minutes, on the grounds that he would not dance, would not be pleased, and looked at Meryton as a man looks at weather he must presently go out into. I had given him no great share of my attention once it was clear he considered himself above his company. I record this so that what follows may be understood to have been entirely his own doing.
I was resting between dances, half hidden by the angle of a pillar. The wall of seated women lay in my view — the chaperones, the visiting aunts, the ladies past dancing — and among them a stranger I took for someone's formidable relation up from the country, a widow by her dress, who held her chair as though the room had been set out around it and watched the dancers with an openness no woman of the gentry is taught to allow herself, keeping one face and then another past the moment courtesy returns a look to its owner. Mr. Bingley had come up to his friend a few feet from me, flushed from the dance and bent on sharing his good fortune.
"Come, Darcy. I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner."
"You know how I detest it, unless I am acquainted with my partner."
"I would not be so fastidious as you are for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening — and several of them uncommonly pretty."
"You have been dancing with the only handsome girl in the room."
"She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."
Mr. Darcy looked at me. It was a brief but unhurried look. I have been looked at a great many ways in my life, but never before, that I could remember, as a question someone was working out.
"I think not," he said. "I cannot suppose Miss Elizabeth Bennet would be tolerable company. Her father I take to be a gentleman of a reclusive type, who cannot be bothered with social events. And her mother is clearly the spoiled and ignorant younger daughter of someone in trade. A country attorney, I would guess."
He said it quietly, and not unkindly, and that was the whole of the trouble. There was no spite in it. He was not paying me out for a slight, nor jabbing at his friend for dragging him to the ball. He had looked at me, read off what I came from as another man might read a signpost, and concluded that the destination of our acquaintance would not be worth the journey. And in his guesses as to my family he was unfortunately correct. My father did despise the assembly and was at home with his books. My mother was the younger daughter of a Meryton attorney and was, that very evening and at some volume, both of the other things he had named her.
I had expected, if ever I were to be slighted by such a man, to be told I was plain. Every woman keeps an answer ready for that, and a witty one keeps three. I had no answer ready for being read correctly and found not worth the reading; the sting of it had an edge I had not met before, and I disliked him from that moment with an interest I should have found harder to account for than I cared to try. I gave my attention back to the room and resolved to think no more of him — a resolution I kept for the better part of an hour.
What I did with the hour was tell the story. I told it as a joke against a proud man — the gentleman from town who could name your grandfather's profession at twenty paces and found nothing in the room worth standing up with — and it earned the laugh it was built for, every time, which was the only shape I could bear to give it. Charlotte heard the performance twice before she had it from me plainly, behind the pillar, with the laugh left off.
She did not look surprised.
"He is right about your father, you know," she said.
"Charlotte."
"And about your mother at these things. You have said as much yourself, and worse."
"When I say it, it is filial honesty. When he says it, it is ten thousand a year being clever at a country assembly."
"A man who says only true things and none of them kind is a tiresome guest. I grant you that. But I would rather sit by a man who sees clearly and holds his tongue half the time than by one who flatters and sees nothing at all. You will meet a great many more of the second kind than the first." She took my arm. "Now stop attending to the one man in the room who will not dance with you, and come and watch your sister fall in love. It is by far the better entertainment."
It was, and we watched it together until the musicians were sent home.
The carriage afterward held the seven of us and my mother's happiness, which wanted the greater room. Twice, Jane — he had stood up with her twice, and his sisters so elegant, and five thousand a year, and her father should hear every word of it that night whether he would or no. Jane ventured that Mr. Bingley was just what a young man ought to be, and blushed in the dark where she thought it could not be seen. Mr. Collins pronounced the evening a credit to the neighbourhood, though inferior, he must in honesty observe, to the assemblies at Rosings; that her ladyship attended no assemblies did not appear to weaken the comparison for him.
And then my mother fell silent for the length of a mile, which was so far against her custom that I looked over. She was studying Mr. Collins. Then she turned and looked at me down the length of the carriage, the way she looked at a room before she rearranged the furniture in it.
I knew that look of old, and I knew there was no arguing with what came behind it.
But that kept until morning.
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