Lessons of Advantage

by michael sand

  “Lydia will be married from this house a week from today,” the letter continued. “The question has arisen, whether she and Mr Wickham might be allowed to come to Longbourn following the ceremony. Lydia has expressed the hope that you will sanction the visit, as she greatly wishes to see all her family before departing for what may be a lengthy residence in the North. She begs to be dutifully remembered to you and her mother.”

  Hearing of a letter come from town, Jane and Elizabeth, in their anxiety, — (for they hardly dared believe Wickham could be made to keep his promise,) — ventured to knock on the door of the library, and to enter it unbidden. Fortunately for them, Mr Bennet was too incensed with the greater cause, at that moment, to divert his anger to any lesser.

  “Lydia dutifully begs! — She has always been more dutiful in begging than any other activity. Her residence in the North cannot be too lengthy for me!”

  He tossed the letter on his table, and Jane and Elizabeth eagerly plucked it up. They soon read enough to know that the worst of their fears were not to be realized. It was comfort of a sort. The sisters looked at one another. It was Jane who undertook to speak. “Will you not allow them to come, father?” she said. “Please say that you will.”

  “Come to Longbourn? — ” (with a look of incredulity.) Was Jane mad? To continue Lydia in the family after what had passed, would be an insult to all good principle. Lydia had destroyed her own character; he would make no vain attempt to restore what was past restoring. “Sanction a visit? I’d sooner sanction my throat cutting.”

  Miss Bennet did not lose courage. To receive Lydia and Mr Wickham into the house must be uncomfortable; but it would be worse for their family if they did not come. Lydia would be a married woman then, with perhaps years of respectability before her. Those weeks of error might eventually be forgot. If that were to happen eventually, — if they all wished that it should happen, — should it not to be allowed to begin at once? And if they did not lead the way, if they did not shew that they hoped to forgive Lydia in time, how could they expect others to do so? By such gentle, earnest, rational persuasion — never retreated from, despite the frequent eruptions of Mr Bennet’s ire — did Jane finally bring her father to agreement. But before giving his assent, he looked to his other daughter, who had hitherto been silent. “What say you, Lizzy? Do you agree with your sister? Shall we set an example of Christian charity to our neighbours?”

  Elizabeth perceived that her father had grown fatigued with his anger. “I do not claim to be a better Christian than my neighbour, Sir,” she said. “But if principle should fail me, I hope that I might be induced to act rightly out of interest. I believe it is to the benefit of our consequence as a family, that we recognize Lydia. — And (in tones of heightened conviction) if my uncle and aunt Gardiner — who are nothing to blame — have been good enough to countenance her presence in their house, how should we not do so?”

  Jane and Elizabeth soon received their father’s concession, — and with it, an invitation to quit the library and leave him to the privacy of his room. When they had gained the hallway, Jane, very white in the face, gave a sigh so deep as to be almost a groan. “Oh, God! (with a hand to her breast.) Did I really speak in that way to my father?” From her look of mixed horror and amazement, Miss Bennet appeared scarcely to believe that she had!

  Elizabeth embraced her sister with fervour. “Brave girl! I could not have spoken so for my life.”

  Later, when she was tolerably calm, Jane said, “I did not think that my father would have given way. He has said so very often, that he would never forgive Lydia.”

  “Oh, that was only the never of conversation,” Elizabeth replied, “which means not yet.”

  When Jane was gone off to tell her mother, Elizabeth returned quietly to her bedroom. Going to the drawer of her writing-table, she drew out a letter, tied up with a ribbon. Her name was writ across the top in strong, firm characters, and with it the date: ‘Rosings, April 10, — eight in the morning.’

  For Elizabeth, the days following the first report of Lydia’s being to be married had been days of a lowering dullness. She could not think of the past without vexation, regret, and self-reproach. It had required all her exertion to maintain a shew of spirits which would make her appear even tolerably like her usual self — sufficient to save her from remark by the rest of her family, though not to deceive Jane’s worried glance. Still, there were reasons enough for lowness of spirit that Elizabeth might avoid acknowledging — even to her dearest sister — that she had particular reasons of her own. There were two wretched failures in judgement that weighed on her mind. She had undervalued Mr Darcy’s just worth — (she blushed now to think of her unmerited gibes, and the relish she had taken in making them!); — and she had ascribed virtues to Mr Wickham, to which he had not the slightest title. In short, she had mistaken the character of each for that of the other. To be so doubly deceived! — she, whose acuteness of understanding she had supposed superior to the generality of mankind; — for prejudice to blind her; vanity to lead her to commit such blunders! — She felt disgraced by misjudgement.

  In this time of general contrition, she found a mortifying solace in Mr Darcy’s letter. This, from being the cause of such varied and exquisite pain on first reading, had become a prized possession — now that she should never receive another from that quarter. She returned to it often, eager to keep the pain of her penitence fresh in her mind, and seeming only to fear that time might lessen the sensation. The recollection of their rencontre at Hunsford, of the anger which each had then felt, and of the breaking down of all barriers to which that anger had led, filled her with the most painful of joys and bitterest of pleasures. Elizabeth could not read of how she ‘need not fear any repetition of those sentiments, or renewal of those offers’, without thinking of the exalted happiness it would give her to receive them now. The justice which he had then demanded of her, and which he had thought she would bestow unwillingly, was now entirely at his command. His treatment of Jane still had power to provoke, though his acknowledging the reasonableness of her resentment had done much to appease her ire. — But the passage which had given her greatest pain at first reading — his objections to the ‘want of propriety betrayed by her mother, sisters, and even her father’ — had now become a hair shirt worn for the purpose of profitable humiliation. Then she had thought his objections the product of pride and importance. Now she could allow that they arose from a sensible man’s distaste for impropriety.

  The sections dealing with Mr Wickham, — (Elizabeth might well have spared herself this, for events had confirmed her in their fullest credence,) — she now perused for the pleasure of doing justice to Mr Darcy’s honourable respectability, which she had formerly taken such pleasure in deriding. And when he confided Georgiana’s painful story in her; absolved her of the guilt of having allowed Wickham to impose upon her (which she could not forgive herself); and concluded by calling on God to bless her — she could never withhold her tears. How distressing it must have been for so private a man to make these revelations — and how grateful she felt that he had taken her into his confidence!

  Elizabeth came away from each fresh reading, with a sense of having a duty to review all previous judgements and consider all subjects anew. Her father was the particular object of this renewed scrutiny. He had been her favourite parent, from the similarity of their minds, but she could not help seeing how his indolence had damaged the credit of his family. He had always been disinclined to exertion; always more likely to be found reading in his library, than anywhere else. How ready he had been to leave every thing to her uncle, and come home, once his first anger was dissipated! And how welcome he had found Mr Gardiner’s arrangements, because of the trifling effort they demanded on his side — his chief wish being, to have as little to do with the business as possible. Elizabeth’s stated conviction, that Lydia’s fall was owing to her own failure to expose Wickham, could not survive rational consideration, which obliged her to admit th
at the true guilt for her sister’s derelictions must lie with those chiefly responsible for her education. Mr Bennet had taken a tolerant attitude to his children’s education, giving them a great deal of freedom —including the freedom to be idle and undirected. This attitude had also been the product of indolence.

  That her father acknowledged his responsibility, she knew; but she wondered how deeply he felt it: even at the height of his mortification, he remained the witty worldling. — “He was not afraid of feeling too much to blame,” he had said. — “It would soon pass away.” Elizabeth did not cease to love her father — the mere thought made her weep, as a sin of idea. Perhaps she even loved him more, for perceiving his failings. But she could not prevent herself from seeing the chief of these might be his want of propriety as a father and a husband.

  How had her parents come to marry? — was a question which often perplexed her. Mr Bennet was not the first to choose a wife with little sense; but for a reading, thinking man like her father to make so false an estimate of any woman’s talents or temper — how might such a thing be understood? “choose in haste and make bad bargains,” was a saying often cited. Perhaps it had been just such an instance. If so, he must soon have discovered his mistake. Such a discovery has led many men to lose their respectability, and Elizabeth felt pride that her father had not done so; but some injury of mind, he had sustained, some curdling of the temper made manifest in his mordant wit, which could verge on the lax. The indolence, the self-interestedness of his reply, when she had begged him not to let Lydia go to Brighton, was what she would never forget: “Lydia will never rest till she has exposed herself — and could do it nowhere else at so little expense to themselves. Luckily, she was too poor to be an object of temptation.” — Was money the only inducement to temptation?

  Elizabeth could commiserate with her father’s disappointment — the double disappointment of learning that neither his wife nor his judgement were what he had esteemed them. With the shame of misjudgement so vividly before her own mind, she could readily imagine, what peculiar pain it must have entailed him to learn that he could not respect his partner in life. She could understand, too, how he had adopted a style of ironic detachment, turning his disillusion into amusement, and developing his wife’s deficiencies to gratify his love of folly and inconsistency. But had not this gratification led to the loss of some part of that respectability which her father had otherwise preserved? — Ought a husband to speak thus of a wife? — or a father of a mother, in the presence of their children? Elizabeth had been ready enough to laugh at her father’s wit, and to believe that he was merely being pleasant at his wife’s expense. She had accepted his view of her mother as a woman to whom little nothings were over important, — the ludicrous prey of her own fidgety nerves; and if this made Mrs Bennet the object of satire, surely the satire was affectionately meant? Elizabeth had continued to love her mother, though aware of her faults. Lately, however, she had become sensible that these were graver than she had imagined. Her mother’s indiscretions on the night of Mr Bingley’s ball — her triumphing expectation of Jane’s marriage, and how that event would “throw her daughters in the way of other rich men!” — all expressed in the hearing of Mr Darcy! — had been singularly ill-judged. Even then, when Elizabeth had had no liking for him, — had thought there was no man she liked less, — she had esteemed Mr Darcy’s judgement, and feared his censure. Now she saw her family’s every deficiency through his eyes. But though Mrs Bennet’s failings were graver than mere silliness, Elizabeth had begun to feel a greater sympathy for her mother than hitherto. Her father’s was the superior mind: could not he have raised his wife’s understanding? Might not a more patient husband have been able to moderate her mother’s faults, checking what was narrow and illiberal? Elizabeth respected her father’s abilities, but she could not now fail to see how his breach of conjugal obligation had exposed his wife to the contempt of her children; — to perceive that, great as were his talents, their misdirection had imperilled the respectability of his family.

  Mrs Bennet was in a happy flow of spirits when her family sat down to dinner that day. The prospect of Lydia’s return filled her with joy. Mr Bennet sat, impassively eating his dinner, and occasionally making equivocal replies to his wife’s suggestions. — “Would not it be delightful if they all accompanied Lydia to the North? They might take a house near Newcastle for the autumn! Would not Scarborough answer?” — the only drawback to these ideas being their expense, impracticability, and ignorance of geography. These flights of fancy emboldened Mrs Bennet to wish for farther joys. — “Why should not they attend Lydia’s wedding? — she was sure her brother Gardiner should wish it.” It was manifest that Mr Bennet had no intention of acceding to any of his wife’s schemes. At length, even Mrs Bennet became sensible of this, and her mood turned fretful. — How could Mr Bennet be so hard-hearted? And (with a great sigh) how quiet Longbourn did seem without Lydia!

  “That is very true, my dear,” said Mr Bennet. “Our life must be dull hereafter, without Lydia to enliven it with the threat of further outbreaks. However, we must not give up hope. Kitty may run off with one of the young Lucases, or Mary take up with the curate.”

  Kitty — who never knew when her father was intending a joke — forswore any such intention: she cared nothing for the young Lucases! And Mary, (who might not have been disinclined to take up with the curate, if he had shewn willing,) felt likewise obliged to protest. “She was too aware of the instability of human pleasures, and the uncertainty of their duration, to found her expectations of happiness on earthly joys.”

  Mr Bennet inclined his head gravely. “Here endeth the first lesson,” he said. His younger daughters had often provided openings for the exercise of his wit — to teaze Kitty for being slow, and Mary for being sententious. Lydia had come in for her fair share, too; but her being noisy and silly were the only faults her father had deemed it necessary to correct. In her present mood of self-examination, Elizabeth saw that she had allowed her views of Kitty and Mary to be formed from his, and resolved to overcome that tendency towards witty unkindness which she shared with her father. Towards Mary, any increase of sympathy would be difficult even with the best will in the world. Mary had a conceited, pedantic manner. Finding no gratification to be had in the usual female spheres of beauty and charm, she had worked hard for knowledge; and by delivering commonplace truths with an air of great judiciousness, had gained a local reputation for being sensible. What a pity Mr Collins had not chosen Mary! She had been quite ready to accept him; — had admired the elevated formality of his speech, which others found so ludicrous, and seemed aware of no deficiency in his understanding, — for which reason alone, she would have made him a better wife than Charlotte Lucas. Poor Mary! How she would have revelled in being mistress of Hunsford Parsonage — and in the prospect of being mistress of Longbourn hereafter, taking precedence over her sisters in the house where her position had been so humble.

  True sisterly affection might always be lacking, but Elizabeth could feel for Mary, and resolve to pay her more civil attention. With Kitty, she might hope to do better. Kitty was not so repulsive as Mary. Though not quick-witted, she was adept at many tasks, sewed the neatest stitch in the family, and wrote the best hand, as much superior to Mary in natural gifts as Mary was in acquired ones. (And how infinitely preferable are parts without education to education without parts!) Kitty also drew well: her draughtsmanship was exact, and her likenesses good; her sketches only lacked taste in composition. With encouragement, she might improve, and Elizabeth resolved to try the effect, when next she saw Kitty take out her sketching pad. As children, she and Jane had encouraged one another to read and study, and had tried to persuade their younger sisters to do the same. Mary, indeed, had never needed persuading, but from Lydia they had encountered only opposition and resentment. If their parents made no such demands, why should she accept them from mere sisters? Kitty had followed Lydia’s example; though older, she was the weaker charact
er, and her energetic younger sister could always lead her. Now, with Lydia’s influence removed, Kitty might be less fretful, and more persuadable.

  With these resolutions of amendment, the last days of August passed, and the time for Lydia’s wedding approached.

  Chapter Three

  Mr Bennet’s letter, containing his permission for Lydia and Wickham to visit Longbourn, arrived in Gracechurch-street the following day. The period since their niece’s arrival, had not passed without strain for Mr and Mrs Gardiner. Lydia had been vastly astonished to discover that her stay was not to be marked with a continuous course of routs and revels: not a single scheme of pleasure but met with a decided negative. It was quite beyond her understanding! Mr Gardiner tried, in his kindly way, to convince her, how much it was to be preferred, for the credit both of herself and her family, that public knowledge of the events leading to her marriage should be as restricted as possible; and Mrs Gardiner, with less of kindliness and more impatience, attempted to bring home to her some consciousness of her actions — with little success, to judge from the vacancy of expression with which her words were received. But horrid unpleasant though her uncle and aunt might make themselves with their eternal preaching, they had no power to keep her from the contemplation of more important subjects, such as how she might refashion a bonnet to make a smarter appearance at her wedding.

  Wickham, in his character as promesso sposo, had been granted permission to visit his intended bride at Gracechurch-street; but he exercised the privilege less often than might be expected of an ardent lover. The gatherings of all these parties, as may therefore be imagined, were not altogether comfortable occasions; but neither were they entirely avoidable. On the day after the receipt of Mr Bennet’s letter, the Gardiners decided — or, to speak more plainly, Mrs Gardiner decided, and Mr Gardiner concurred, — that some excursion was not only allowable, but imperative for the continuance of domestic peace. The theatre was interdicted, but they might attend a sacred concert which was to be performing at St Clement’s; as this was the church where Lydia and Wickham were shortly to be married, it was thought proper that they should make an appearance there. The Gardiners kept early hours, and dinner — which Mr Wickham had been so affable as to attend — was over in good time for them to proceed to the church. Before the party could take its departure, however, Mr Haggerston, Mr Gardiner’s attorney, arrived to beg the favour of an interview. He would keep the business brief, — “But the present moment was too opportune to miss, since he had the good fortune of finding Mr Wickham among the diners. The business chiefly concerned Mr Wickham, and he had sought that gentleman at his lodging on several occasions, without the happiness of finding him home.”