Page 27 of The Cheapside Runners
In vain did Elizabeth endeavour to check the rapidity of her mother’s words or persuade her to describe her felicity in a less audible whisper.
She was rather limited in what she could say and how emphatically she could say it with Mr Darcy sitting next to her, and she was similarly limited in her discussions with him, because they could not avoid the matron’s effusions.
Kitty and Lydia, naturally, could not allow the few minutes of pleasant conversation they might have enjoyed. They had obviously made at least a half-dozen trips to the punch table. Elizabeth excused herself from Mr Darcy for a minute andbeggedher father to do something about it, not because she expected him to, but she wanted to exhaust all efforts before she did something desperate.
Poor Mary did not have the sense to limit herself to one song on the pianoforte and then had to endure the further humiliation of her father’s chastisement. Elizabeth felt bad that she had not helped her sister in that regard. It was too late for that evening, but she started giving serious consideration to bringing Mary to London. Her father’s prohibition against interfering with her sisters had always prevented the others from visiting, except for some brief stays with Jane once a year, but perhaps it was time to be more aggressive.
Mr Collins tried to make some sort of long-winded speech. Elizabeth tried to ignore it by speaking more pleasantly with Mr Darcy, but by then, his face had become stony, his countenance when observing her family looked grim, and she had to sigh in resignation. She hadhoped, rather than believedshe might beable to make a friend of the man. Now, she would be unsurprised if he left the county in the morning and dragged Mr Bingley with him.
On the other hand, she thought if Jane lost Mr Bingley because of her family, there was plenty of blame to go around. Jane spent far more time at Longbourn than Elizabeth, and had the full backing of the matriarch, and yet in all that time she had made little effort to curtail her younger sisters.
Elizabeth knew for certain that ifshehad been born the beautiful one that was supposed to save her mother from the hedgerows, she would have been able to work her mother into curtailing Lydia and Kitty. As it was, Jane made no real effort at all. In addition to that, if Mr Bingley could be dissuaded from Jane by someone else’s opinion, no matter how well or poorly founded, then he would be weak husband material anyway.
Elizabeth knew she would be gone herself within the week, so it would have negligible effect on her if the party departed, but she did feel bad for Jane.
By the end of the evening, she had endured enough.To Elizabeth it appeared that, had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success.
As thecoup de grâce, Mrs Bennet manoeuvred to have their carriage last and even kept the Netherfield party a quarter-hour after everyone else departed. Elizabeth thought the strategy of annoying people had little to recommend it, but it seemed her mother’s favourite (or only) tactic, so there was that.
One of her uncle’s men had to carry Lydia to the carriage, and a maid had to steady Kitty. Elizabeth surreptitiously handed each man a guinea of extra pay and suggested they raise a pint to their health at their leisure. She especially enjoyed the fact that the Guinea in question had come from the Netherfield party.
The men briefly outlined their activities for the night and rather enjoyed the idea that Captains Denny and Sanderson would wake up well after noon with a powerful headache from a surfeit of laudanum. It had been a necessary step to protect her sisters, and she did not feel bad about it. She would not have felt bad if they threw the soldiers down a well, for that matter. She had seen worse.
She spoke briefly to Mr Darcy and thanked him for the dance with little hope they would ever share another. It was unfortunate, really, but just the way things were.
He indicated he had to return to town to deal with some family matters, and Elizabeth wished him Godspeed. She did not mention that she would be in town soon, but imagined if he called on her uncle again, she might or might not see him, but she would certainly not invite his attention. She had enough problems already.
She was uncertain how much disappointment she should feel for the end of the acquaintance. He had become at least an interesting person in her life, and she would rue the loss of a friendship that likely would never have been anyway.
11.The Blue Devils
The next morning demonstrated every possible meaning of the term ‘blue devils’for the residents of Longbourn. Its most common definition was the pain, horror, and regret that came as the inevitable result of over-imbibing. Unlike Denny and Sanderson, none of the Longbourn residents had been double dosed with both alcohol and laudanum (to Elizabeth’s knowledge, anyway), but at least some of them had certainly had their fill of drink. Mrs Bennet and her two younger daughters were sullen, loud, shrill, tetchy, and generally unpleasant. They felt terrible and that apparently compelled them to make everyone else suffer along with them. Even the patriarch had sampled a bit more spirits than was wise, but at least he managed to suffer mostly in silence.
Of course, Elizabeth, Jane, and Mary felt fine, but that did not allow them to avoid enduring the lamentations.
Mr Collins was blissfully quiet at breakfast, not thateven hewould have been able to slide a word in edgewise between the whingeing of the overset parts of the table. He left immediately after breakfast and returned after dinner engaged to Charlotte Lucas. That naturally stirred up the hornet’s nest and triggered the second definition of blue devils: extreme melancholy. The wailing, lamentations, and gnashing of teeth were so long and loud that Elizabeth tried to hide in her room for several hours, though that did not do much to assuage Mrs Bennet’s fury. She threatened to ban Elizabeth from Longbourn forever, but since her majority was coming up in a few months, and she planned to leave for London within the week, that threat had no real power.
Elizabeth spent the bulk of the day (when she was not enduring her mother’s harangues), trying to get to know Mary better. She found her sister was not quite such a zealot as her habits suggested. She was probably mostly shy and justtrying to be noticed in a very loud family. Elizabeth could not condemn her for that, since she spent half her time in London to avoid Longbourn, but wished she could steer Mary away from Reverend Fordyce. The man was an idiot, who wrote long, boring, nonsensical sermons about how women should behave—when he had never married or fathered children, and in fact had no women at all in his life except a long-suffering sister. According to that reverend, nearly everything Elizabeth did was wrong, and she hoped she could wean Mary off his drivel. She considered her sister’s rejection of Mr Collins to be the start of a possible reformation, but she had a long way to go.
That said, Mrs Bennet’s assertion that Mary knew nothing about running a house was truer than not. Mary wouldnotbe among Elizabeth’s list of accomplished women, by either definition. That said, by the end of the day she decided that Mary was not so set in her ways as to be beyond amendment.
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On the morning of the second day after the ball, the chickens all came home to roost, and the bill for the Bennet family’s poor behaviour came due.
Jane received a note from Caroline Bingley indicating the entire Netherfield party had gone to town and would likely remain there for the winter, and in fact, might not return at all. The note was mostly fiction, since Miss Bingley made at least two claims that were pure fantasy.
The first claim was that Jane was her dear friend, and the only thing she would miss in that county. She even twisted that lie a bit by asking Jane to engage in correspondence, but Elizabeth could see through that with the greatest of ease. It seemed obvious Miss Bingley looked on the idea of associating her family with the Bennets with abhorrence—and to be honest, after the ball, Elizabeth could not really blame her. As far asanyone at Netherfield knew, any man foolish enough to marry Jane Bennet was more than likely to end up housing the rest of the family as well, even assuming neither Kitty nor Lydia shamed them, which was not a bet Elizabeth would take.
The second spurious claim was that Mr Bingley was to court Miss Darcy. Miss Bingley must have assumed Elizabeth knew nothing about the Darcys, since the only interaction she had witnessed was one dance and one card game. That might even have been true if she always lived at Longbourn. As it was, she knew far more than she ever wanted to about the wayward heiress. She supposed it waspossibleMr Darcy was fed up with Miss Darcy’s intransigence after the elopement attempt the previous summer and wanted to marry her off, but she doubted it very much. She strongly suspected that was just wishful thinking on Miss Bingley’s part, since she naturally knew nothing about the debacle in Ramsgate. Miss Bingley might hope one wedding led to another, but Elizabeth thought that was just plain silly.
Jane however, poor naïve Jane, took the letter at face value. Jane had always been Elizabeth’s favourite sister, but with Elizabeth spending only half her time in Longbourn, they had lost the close relationship they’d enjoyed as children. Mr Bennet had prohibited her from enlightening her sisters about the uglier aspects of the world, despite repeated requests, and Elizabeth obeyed, to the family’s detriment.
Mrs Bennet made it clear that she had now endured six calamities in a row, all at Elizabeth’s feet. She took a good hour to work through the list: the early exit from Netherfield, the complete lack of effort to capture the viscount, the same for Mr Darcy, the rejection of Mr Collins, the future ascension of Charlotte Lucas, and finally the last nail in the coffin—Mr Bingley’s defection. Compared to her assertions about how ill-used she was, and how much of a bane Elizabeth was onher existence, and the miserable life she was set to endure—Elizabeth eventually became nostalgic for dinner at the Netherfield ball. At least there, the endless spasms and fluttering were aimed at someone else.
By the end of the day, Elizabeth was fed up, and she decided to take the bull by the horns.
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