Chapter Six — The Silent Restart

Six

They were found on the eleventh day, in lodgings off Edward Street, and the terms upon which the thing was settled were sent down to Longbourn in a letter from Mr. Gardiner, and the letter was read aloud in the small parlour, and Mrs. Bennet came downstairs for the first time in a fortnight and asked what was to be done about lace.

The terms were these. The debts were cleared. There was a commission purchased in a regular regiment in the north. There was a settlement upon Lydia. And there was to be a marriage, at St. Clement’s, on the Monday.

“Well!” said Mrs. Bennet. “Well! I always said he was a good sort of man at bottom. Married at sixteen! And a commission! Depend upon it, he was fonder of her than anybody supposed, and it has all come right, and I shall write to my sister Philips directly.”

She was, within a quarter of an hour, entirely restored; and within two days was telling Meryton that she had never had a moment’s real anxiety; and it must be said, since almost nobody ever says it of her, that she was not being a fool. She had been carrying a thing that would have ruined five lives, and it had been lifted, and she had put it down instantly and completely because she had never in her life been able to hold two states at once. It looked like shallowness. It was the only method she had.

Jane cried, and was glad, and believed every word of the letter.

Elizabeth read it twice and went for a walk.

She got as far as the second stile before she stopped, because the arithmetic had begun somewhere around the bottom of the first page and would not now be put down.

Her uncle Gardiner was a man in trade with four children of his own and a house in Cheapside. She had known his circumstances all her life in the vague, unexamined way one knows the circumstances of a relation who has always been kind. She knew them well enough for this.

The debts were cleared. All of them — and there had been a great many, in three counties, accumulated over five years by a man who had never intended to pay any of them.

A commission purchased. Not obtained. Purchased, in a regular regiment, which was a figure she could very nearly name.

A settlement upon Lydia, in a family that had been unable, in twenty-three years, to settle anything upon anybody.

She stood on the stile and did the sum properly, twice, in the cold, and arrived both times at a number that her uncle Gardiner did not have and could not have raised, and which — this was the part that took her breath — no man alive would lay out to purchase a wedding for a girl he had met four times.

He would have to have been paid. Wickham would never have married her for less than he was owed and a great deal over. Somebody had bought him. Somebody had sat in a room with that man and bought him.

She stood quite still with her hands in her pockets.

And whoever it was required that nobody know.

The letter from her aunt came ten days later, in answer to a question Elizabeth had put in terms she was afterwards ashamed of, and it explained everything in the plain, slightly impatient prose of a woman who had assumed the girl already knew.

He had found them. That was the first thing, and the thing nobody afterwards would give any weight to. Mr. Bennet had gone up and failed. Mr. Gardiner had gone up and failed. Mr. Darcy had gone up to London on a day nobody could account for, and had gone to a woman called Younge who had once been in his employ and had been dismissed, and who had lodged Wickham in Meryton and followed him to town for what he owed her, and had paid her, twice, and had got the address on the second attempt, and had walked to Edward Street alone.

He had seen Wickham. He had sat with him for some hours, more than once. It is not recorded what passed between them and Elizabeth never asked; but the man had entered that room owed nothing by anybody, and had left it married, commissioned, and paid.

He had done all of it, arranged all of it, stood up at the wedding — he had been at the wedding, he had stood in the church, and Lydia had mentioned it in a letter as a piece of gossip and thought nothing of it whatsoever — and had then required, as the single condition of the entire business, that the family be told it was Mr. Gardiner.

He had asked for nothing. He had not written to Elizabeth. He had not caused her to be told. Her aunt had told her only because she had asked, and had assumed she was asking about something she already understood; and if Elizabeth had not sat on a stile in the cold and done the arithmetic, she would have gone to her grave believing her uncle had ruined himself for Lydia’s sake and been quietly grateful about it for fifty years.

Now.

It has been established what this man does when he is moved. He had done it in front of the entire county in November: he had been reached, and had answered with a wall, and had built the wall as high as money can build a wall, and had let it be the last thing anybody in Hertfordshire ever knew about him.

This was the same event.

He had been moved — considerably more, and by something considerably worse — and this time he had gone up to London on a Tuesday, and had done the most humiliating available thing, twice, with a woman who had every reason to despise him; and had sat down opposite the man he hated most in the world and negotiated with him, at length, on the man’s own terms, and paid; and had stood at the back of a church at a wedding no one wanted; and had come home; and had told nobody.

The warmer you get, the higher I build. That’s the flaw, sugar, and it’s mine.

There was no audience for any of it. That is the whole of the correction and it is not a large one; he did not become a different man, and he had not stopped being proud, and he would be stiff and difficult in company until the day he died. He had simply, once, been moved and gone quiet instead of loud.

It is a very small distance. Most people never travel it in a whole lifetime, and there is no way to be seen doing it, because being seen is the thing it consists in not doing.

“(the silent restart)” — the band, for nobody: an underscore, and it does not sing. The chapter has already ruled on this — being seen is the thing it consists in not doing, and a number is a performance; a voice here would repeat the error he made on the terrace. No brass, no choir, no arena — the King register with the room taken away: un-miked, close, almost nothing behind it. Only the Rhodes figure from “Always There,” played alone, with nobody singing over it — her tune, under his silence, stating the pairing in music instead of about it: the male answer to the bettong, reliability as devotion rather than domination. He does not know he is being heard.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

Elizabeth read the letter through three times and then sat with it in her lap for a long while and did not cry, because that was not the thing that was happening.

What was happening was that a woman who valued exactly one quality in the world was discovering that the only man who had ever demonstrated it to her in its pure form was the one she had refused on a terrace with a full band behind her.

She had been right about him. That was the difficulty. She had been right in every particular — he was proud, he had been insufferable, he had dropped a continent rather than let a woman get close to him, and she had been correct to say so and correct to say it publicly and correct to leave. Nothing she had said that night had been wrong.

She had simply been shown one mode of a man and had priced the whole of him from it.

I don’t kill what’s mine to prove I’m mighty, she had sung at him. I just don’t fall.

And he had gone away and, without telling her, without telling anybody, at a cost she could not calculate and would spend the rest of her life failing to make him discuss, not fallen.

She went to find Semper.

He was under the sideboard, where he had been more or less continuously since December. He came out when she crouched down, because he always came out, because coming out when called was the entire content of his character.

She had not asked him a question since the autumn. She had been afraid of the answer, which was an absurd thing to have been afraid of, given that he had never once given an answer that was not the answer.

“Semper,” said Elizabeth.

The whiskers moved.

“Is Mr. Darcy to be trusted?”

There was a pause of perhaps a second and a half — the longest anybody had ever known him take — and in it Elizabeth had time to remember a hot morning at a breakfast table, and Lydia laughing, and the small brown animal being sick on the floor and retreating under the furniture for the whole of a day, because the question had had no answer in it and there had been nothing he could do but crash.

The eyes lit.

“True,” said Semper.

Elizabeth sat down on the floor of her father’s dining room, in the middle of the afternoon, with her back against the sideboard leg, and stayed there for some time.

Lydia came home in the third week of September, married, and exactly the same. She was very well pleased with herself. She showed her ring to the housemaid before she had taken her bonnet off, and asked whether anyone had heard about the wedding, and was disappointed to find they had; and she said not one word about her husband that she could not have said about a horse.

Her husband was charming to everybody for nine days and borrowed money from three of them.

And a half-second behind her, dragging nothing, having left the rope and the book somewhere in a lodging house off Edward Street, came the bird.

He was greyer. He had picked up, somewhere in nine months, an upward flick of the shoulders on certain words, and a habit of saying look at me when nobody was looking at him, and a way of laughing about a quarter of a second before a joke arrived. He did all of it badly. He had never done anything well.

He stood next to Lydia in the hall and did not come further in.

At the far end of the passage, on the hearth in the small parlour where he had lain since November, a tiger got up.

The Balcony

“He was at the wedding,” said Miss Austen.

“He was.”

“He stood at the back of a church, at eleven in the morning, and watched a man he despises marry a girl he does not care for, having paid for the whole of it himself, and then went home and did not mention it.” She was quiet a moment. “In my book that is one sentence in a letter from Mrs. Gardiner. It has always been one sentence. Nobody has ever noticed it.”

“It is the same sentence, madam.”

“It is not the same sentence when the man has spent the first half of the evening standing on a balustrade shaking the ground.” Her mouth moved very slightly. “You have made it cost something. I gave him ten thousand pounds and a distaste for the business; you have given him the woman Younge, twice, and a room with Wickham in it, and no one to tell.”

“Would you have written it so, madam, if you could?”

Miss Austen considered the question with more care than she had given anything all evening.

“No,” she said at last. “It would not have been believed. A man of that fortune may be redeemed by a large cheque and a stiff apology — my readers required that, and I was not in a position to instruct them otherwise, being obliged to sell the book.” She smoothed the glove. “But I know what it costs to do a thing well and let it be attributed elsewhere. I published four novels without my name on any of them.”

Below, in the dark, the passage was empty, and the tiger had gone as far as the parlour door and stopped.

“The bird has come back,” she said.

“He has.”

“He has come back worse, and he has come back to the same house, and there is a starving creature standing in a doorway who has never harmed anything in his life.” Miss Austen sat back. “Do not make me wait until the wedding for this.”

“You will wait until the wedding, madam.”

“I wrote the wedding.”

“You did,” her companion agreed, “and there was no tiger in it.”