“Why should you not come too, anyway?” was Lydia’s reaction. “If you are to be kept out of the way, is Derbyshire not even more out of the way than here?”
“I think the idea was that I should be out of sight of my enemies, but near at hand, conveniently ready for the summons to resume my old duties, my darling,” replied Wickham, “and Pemberley is several day’s journey from here.”
“Well I think it is not very nice of you, George, to refuse to come with your own wife and child to see her sisters, and I think it very disagreeable of Colonel Lambton to be so exigent. Why should he expect you to be at his beck and call all the time, just because he is a colonel and you are a captain?”
“I fear that the army is rather set in its ways upon that sort of point, my dear, but do, by all means, go to Pemberley with your family. Who knows what good may come of it, and I am sure that you would find it agreeable. I will join you as soon as I may.”
“You are right, my love, as you always are. Mr Darcy’s heart will surely melt at sight of dear little Fizzy, will it not? And then who knows what may lie in his gift? But do try not to go about setting places on fire, the way Papa did when he was left on his own for just those few days.”
With such affectionate leave-takings argument was impossible, and the following Monday saw us all waving from the Doncaster Flyer as Wickham stood outside the Bull Inn in Durham city to see us off.
Chapter Thirty-three : Return to Derbyshire
I will not dwell upon the rigours of the journey, with yet another female, plus an infant to attend, and still only one homme-à-tout-faire. With the inevitable nursery-maid our party alone made up a full inside coachload, and several times we had to stay overnight on the way, until a suitably empty conveyance could be found. I weighed up the cost afterwards, and calculated that we might have been better off buying a second hand coach and horses at Durham, and selling them again at Buxton at the end of our journey. The sooner Mr Thompson establishes his rail coaches about the country the better. I mentioned this to Darcy, and, while refusing to countenance such a visionary project, so unlikely ever to be realized, he immediately volunteered that a note to him would have brought his own coach and horses to convey us. While such an offer could not be accepted, of course, I could not help noticing that it had not been made until its usefulness had expired.
We were very warmly welcomed at Pemberley, however, every one of us, although Darcy, I thought, made a point of addressing my youngest daughter as ‘my dear sister’, or ‘Lydia’, and never once as ‘Mrs Wickham’. Lydia herself drank it all in, and made as much capital among her sisters out of her status as a new-made mother as she had once done as a married woman among spinsters.
Lizzie and Jane were both now very obviously in that condition that is always described as ‘interesting’, which did not prevent them from also being interested in all we had done since leaving them, and the feminine chatter as we all sat down to tea formed a pleasant enough background to the view of the Derbyshire hills from the window.
When the day to day minutiae, the ‘who said what to whom, where, and whens’ had all been exhausted, Lydia piped up-
“But do tell Lizzie and Jane about your great adventure, Papa.”
Reluctantly, I began to recount the tragic tale of the disaster in the cathedral library, following so soon upon the previous triumph, but I had hardly begun when I was interrupted by Lydia.
“Not your silly little fire, Papa! Your adventure! Yours and George’s great adventure with the French Spy!”
“A French Spy?” cried Jane, “A French Spy! Was there really a French Spy? Who on earth could that be?”
“Indeed there was,” replied her sister, “or, perhaps, there wasn’t, but at any rate, if there was, then his name was Monsieur le Singe, was it not, Papa?”
“I fear we were never formally introduced,” I said, “but, yes, there was an unfortunate creature detained at the neighbouring town of Hartlepool under suspicion of being a French Spy, and I had the misfortune to be asked to assist W-that is to say, to assist the acting-commander of the Sunderland Garrison in his investigation of the case.”
“Now you do interest me,” said Lizzie, who had been content so far to sit and observe, catching my eye only from time to time, with that old, secret smile of hers and making me feel both ten years younger and how much I had missed her at the same time, “pray continue, Papa.”
“Well, it is a long story, and rather a sad one, too, or at any rate it has its distressing aspects, and perhaps it would be better to save it for later. I am sure Mr Darcy has no interest in the further ramblings of an old man, and would sooner hear something cheerful, such as the latest antics of his nephew.”
Alas, not even dear little Fizzy availed to change the subject, especially when Miss Darcy joined her brother and sister in pressing me to continue.
“Why should you think so, sir?” she said. “I confess myself strangely intrigued by what I have so far heard, and I am sure we all positively long to hear the rest of the story.”
There was no help for it, then, although I was sorely perplexed how to tell the tale without mentioning the forbidden name ‘Wickham’ while still giving due credit to Lydia’s husband.
I dare say I made but a sorry botch of the job, but even so the effect upon my audience was remarkable.
“You have had adventures indeed,” was Darcy’s verdict, “and I dare say have seen more wonders that you have not yet related. But tell me, Mr Bennet, this officer you were assisting, whose name you have not once mentioned, is he in any way connected with our family?”
“There is such a connection, sir,” I was constrained to admit.
“Then if he is the person I think him to be, marriage and fatherhood, and, perhaps, exile appear to have effected an unlooked-for improvement in his character. But dinner will soon be on the table, and perhaps we might wish to shift our coats.”
After such a beginning, all went well for an entire week. Darcy proved remarkably tolerant of Lydia’s frequent references to her ‘dear George’, and Lydia herself was so intent on exploring Pemberley and its surroundings as almost to forget her life in the North.
For the evenings, we had so much to relate about our travels as would suffice for our entertainment. It was on one of these evenings that I mentioned the rail carriages to Darcy.
“A fine conceit, sir,” he laughed, “coaches that move without horses in this Liliput of the North East. Next you will be telling me that they also have ships that move without sails or oars.”
“But such ships do exist, sir,” put in Mary. “I have read of at least one, built by Mr Fulton, the American inventor, for Bonaparte, which travelled up the Seine powered by a steam engine.”
“A river barge is not the same as a ship,” scoffed Darcy.
“No, sir,” I agreed, “a river barge is not the same as a ship. But do you doubt that what an American has done for the Corsican Tyrant cannot also be done by the skilled artificers and engineers of England, and done better, too? As for these ‘coaches that move without horses’ I have seen them with my own eyes. We have seen them with our own eyes, for Mrs Bennet, and Mary and Kitty were witnesses, too. Nay more, we have all ridden in one, and been glad of the opportunity. The future is coming upon us, here in our own country, far faster than we think, sir.”
It was this conversation that put into my mind the thought of putting what little money I might be able to lay aside into shares in businesses such as Messrs Boulton and Watt, and it is to the rise in those shares that my daughters will owe their competences when I am gone.
On the eighth day, however, came a letter from Wickham, the perusal of which caused Lydia to start up from the breakfast table.
“I should never have thought it of Colonel Lambton!” she cried. “He always seemed such a nice, obliging old gentleman. And now to do this! I shall give him such a piece of my mind when next I see him, although to be sure when I do so I shall cut him entirely, and never speak another word
to him.”
My desire to know how she proposed to accomplish two such self-contradictory feats was forestalled by Mrs Bennet’s
“Lydia, dear, whatever is the matter?”
The matter, it transpired, was that Wickham’s unnamed enemies, while not proving quite strong enough to insist upon his dismissal from the service, had shown themselves sufficiently capable of making his life so impossible on Tyneside as to compel the Colonel to suggest the desirability of Wickham’s either selling up or exchanging to another regiment.
“Oh, whatever are we to do?” cried Lydia. “All our friends are there, all we know is there, where else can we go? You must help him Mr Darcy, you are so good, you will find something for him, will you not, he is your own brother, after all, and you were such good friends when you were both young, why should you not do something for him now?”
Darcy’s face took on a look we all knew from long ago, and all his old hauteur returned.
“I regret, Madam, that I find myself unable to accommodate your wishes,” he said, “and, if you will all excuse me, I believe that I am needed urgently elsewhere.”
So saying, he rose and strode from the room.
‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin’ says the German poet, my peace is gone, and so it was for all of us after that. We carried on, as indeed we must. The enceinte have their rights as well as their obligations, and unless we respect the rights and obligations of our fellows then all civilization is gone.
We made shift to get along very well, considering. Even Lydia did not comment on how ‘she had thought Mr Darcy would do something for her dear George’ more than a dozen times a day, while Darcy himself remained serenely deaf on each and every occasion.
All that changed, however, as we sat at tea one afternoon.
A servant entered, and bowed to Darcy.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “there is a gentleman at the door, an officer, asking for you. His name, he says, is Wickham.”
Lydia gave a little shriek, and had to be forcibly restrained from leaping up and running after her husband.
Darcy did not so much as raise his head.
“Not at home,” he said.
We had scarce gathered our wits after the shock of this rebuff when the man re-entered.
“The gentleman says that if Mr Darcy is not at home, he wishes to speak to his wife, Mrs Wickham.”
“Mrs Wickham is also not at home,” replied Darcy, very quickly, before Lydia could say a word, and bestowing upon her such a look as caused her to sink into a swoon. Lydia has always been over fond of the swoon as a means of getting her own way. I have told her many a time, run mad as much as you wish, but beware of swooning fits. They will come back to bite you one of these days.”
In this case, the tactic proved wholly ineffectual, Darcy merely calling for salts and the rest of us stunned into both silence and immobility.
The servant meanwhile returned with the news that the gentleman without was asking for Mr Bennet.
“Mr Bennet is also not at home,” said Darcy in a bored tone, “and you may tell the gentleman that neither he, nor I, nor any of our families will ever be at home to him in this house.”
This was too much, and I found myself on my feet before I could think.
“I will not give you the lie, Mr Darcy,” I said, “and so I will quit this building immediately, by means of a side door, and make my own way round to the front, where I may, I hope, be permitted to address a few words to my own son-in-law, to whom you have just refused access to his own wife.”
And I suited my actions to my words, finding Wickham still fuming outside the door, indeed, beginning to hammer at it, and the servants at a loss what to do.
“Leave this to me,” I told them, linking arms with Wickham and guiding him down the drive.
“You have gone about this all the wrong way,” I said to him, “Tipping up at the front door like that with no warning and expecting your old adversary to take you in. Let us walk down to the village, while you tell me all your troubles.”
And tell me he did, as we ambled slowly along the path down to the Fitzwilliam Arms, where it turned out that he had already engaged a room.
“The Percy faction have won,” he said. “Colonel Lambton cannot leave me at Sunderland, nor can he have me back at Newcastle without endangering his own position in society there. These provincial cities are such closed circles! He would have me sell up, or exchange elsewhere.”
“And have you investigated either of those alternatives?” I enquired. “To sell your commission would give you some capital, after all, although I have no idea how much such thing would be worth. Even better would be a transfer to a regiment near Hertfordshire, where your wife would be able to visit, and be visited by, her family much more often.”
“A lieutenant’s colours in the second battalion of a light infantry regiment are not so sought after, for, of course my brevet rank will cease when I leave the regiment. I should be lucky to get L200 for them. And as for exchanging, the post would only be desirable, I think, to someone wishing to get out of some tropical hell-hole, or one who has had his own troubles where he is. For myself, I do not mind, particularly, but when a man has a wife and a child to care for, it changes his outlook.”
“Listen to me, Wickham, listen carefully. I have always said that I value you quite as much as I do my other sons-in-law. I dare say some have suspected an element of irony, or even sarcasm in that statement. I have become given to such things, I know. But I do value, you, Wickham. I value you in quite a different way, since our experiences at Hartlepool. What I say to you now is, stay quietly here – I almost said ‘bide quietly here’, I have been too long in the North – and leave me to work on Mr Darcy. He has lately shown less resistance to the mention of your name than previously, and permits Lydia to talk of ‘her dear George’ without taking her up on it. He has heard the tale of the French Spy, and commended the conduct of the officer involved, of whose identity, I believe, he has a fair idea. Darcy is a man who takes a deal of convincing, but he is a fair man, able to see his own imperfections as well as those of others. Give me time, and I am sure some arrangement can be made.”
“Time? But how much time, that is the rub?”
“Not so very much, I think. Darcy’s own sense of justice will already be troubling him, I believe, and I shall not be the only one disturbing his serenity about his actions today. All the Bennet family, each in their own way, will be among your supporters, I am sure. I place especial hopes in Mrs Darcy, whose good opinion he values above all others. It will not be long, I am sure, before you will be received at Pemberley, and after that, who knows.”
I left him there, complaisant but far from complacent, and retraced my steps. By now, of course, my first affront at the way Darcy had denied both Lydia and myself without so much as a by-your-leave had cooled somewhat, and I was beginning to wonder exactly what sort of task I had undertaken.
With this in mind, I resolved to do nothing more, not even to refer to the incident, until I had slept upon it. I have often found that the principle ‘never do today what you can put off until tomorrow’ is not as foolish as it is held out to be. By tomorrow something may have occurred that renders the action contemplated the day before quite otiose, or even unhelpful.
So we all passed the rest of the day carefully avoiding any mention of the ‘W’ word, and retired to bed with the main topic of the day unresolved.
I found, after such an interval, that I did not, after all, think that Darcy’s intransigence would continue, and slept the sleep of the indifferent, which is much sounder than that of the just.
It was on the following morning, however, that Lizzy and Jane confronted me in my sitting room.
I had more than half expected their visit, and could not help but be reminded of the last time I had faced such a deputation, and of its cause.
“I think I can guess what you are after, my dears,” I said, as they stood in a dutiful line before me, all beloved daughterly, if
such a word exists, and serious faces. “But I cannot help thinking that you are come to the wrong man. When it was a question of admitting your wayward sister and her husband to Longbourn, I gave way, as I am sure you both knew quite well that I would, but admission to Pemberley is not within my gift. You must ply your arts upon Darcy, not me. Still, sit down my dears, and say your piece. I dare say you will feel better for it, and I am quite at leisure at the moment, and disposed for a comfortable chat.”
“Oh, father,” replied Jane, “you must know that it is not at all the thing to deny Lydia admittance to her own sister’s house. We all value your wisdom and discernment almost as much as your kindness. Could you not prevail upon Mr Darcy to see the unreasonableness of his conduct? There may have been misunderstandings between them in the past, but, when all is said and done, we are all one family now.”
“Dear Jane,” I replied. “Has it really never occurred to you that the bitterest quarrels tend to be within families?”
“But you have suffered the same wrong at Wickham’s hands, and you have forgiven him?”
“Your mother left me with but little choice, my love, and the offense, I think, was not quite the same. But I am not the injured party here, nor, in the most exact sense, is Mr Darcy. What does Miss Darcy say to your proposal? I take it you have mentioned it to her?”
“My sister Georgiana goes to Lady Catherine tomorrow,” said Lizzie. “It is a long-standing engagement, and she is not expected back for two months. She will not be incommoded by Mr Wickham’s presence under the same roof.”
“Am I to take that to mean that you have not mentioned it to her?”
“Well, not in so many words. But she was there yesterday, when Darcy forbade Wickham the house, and did not appear unduly concerned at the news of his presence in the neighbourhood. She has not said a word to me about it since then, and, of course, it is a subject I could not raise with her.”
“We are surrounded with subjects that cannot be raised, are we not? I sometimes think how much easier life would be if all such were as open as any other, and we could all know where we stand. But a little deception is necessary unto salvation, I suppose. If we all said exactly what we think, mere barbarism would descend upon the world once more.”
More Sport for our Neighbours Page 26