Page 24

The barn that evening was hung with sheaves and green boughs, and lit with a hundred lanterns, and so full of warmth and noise and the smell of roasting that it struck the senses like a blow. Long tables ran down the length of it. At the far end, on a low platform of planks covered with a Turkey carpet, stood the high table with its white cloth and its chairs; and in the chair at the centre, upright and magnificent, in a gown of purple velvet that had been the talk of Kent in 1805, sat Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The Colonel took his seat on her right. He cut himself a slice of beef, and did not look at the door.

They had come in a cluster, the parsonage party; Mr. Collins in front, glowing with importance, then Mrs. Collins, then Miss Lucas, and at the back, in a plain dark gown with a little sprig of Michaelmas daisy pinned at the breast, Miss Elizabeth Bennet. She had seen the high table. He knew that she had seen the high table, because her step checked, and she looked, very quickly, from one end of it to the other, and the Colonel saw her eyes find the tall figure at the left of Lady Catherine in the half-second before it rose to its feet.

Darcy had risen, as he would have for any lady. He bowed. She curtseyed. They did not speak. And then Miss Bennet turned, quite deliberately, and went down to the long table at the bottom of the barn, and sat among the wives of the tenant farmers with her hands folded in her lap, as though she had not the least interest in anything above the salt.

Richard poured himself a glass of ale. There, he thought, with satisfaction. No harm done. It was perhaps ten minutes later that he began to feel uneasy.

He could not have said why. The supper went forward as suppers do. The Tarrants were there, very clean, with their six children in a row; and the old man had risen with his mug to propose the health of the “gentlemen at the high table,” which was received with a roar, and Darcy, who had been addressed by name, had stood and bowed and said a few brief words in a voice so quiet that the Colonel could not hear them from three chairs away. He saw Elizabeth look up at the voice. He saw her look down again. It was all quite correct.

But Lady Catherine had not spoken in a quarter of an hour. She sat with her hands folded on the head of her stick, and she had that gleam in her eye which the Colonel had learned, from childhood, to associate with a sudden dismissal of the governess.

“Aunt,” he said carefully, “will you take a little wine?”

“I will take,” said Lady Catherine, “a little air. Richard, you will be so good as to give me your arm.”

And she rose. It was the longest walk the Colonel had ever taken. It was perhaps forty feet. It led, with the slow and stately progress of a ship of the line coming about, down the steps of the dais and along the central aisle of the barn, between the long tables, past the Tarrants, past the miller and his wife, past the carter and the ploughman and three generations of the village, who fell silent as she approached as a field of corn goes silent before the wind. It ended at the lowest table, beside a plain young woman in a dark gown with a daisy at her breast.

“Miss Bennet,” said Lady Catherine.

Elizabeth looked up. She rose, with great composure. She made her curtsey. “Lady Catherine.”

“I should be glad to know,” said Lady Catherine, in a clear carrying voice that had been trained, over sixty years, to reach the back of any church, “what you imagine yourself to be doing.”

The barn went still; it was a very particular silence. The Colonel had heard it once before, on a battlefield, in the moment after the guns stopped and before the wounded began to cry. The fiddler had lowered his bow. Somewhere near the door a child asked a question and was hushed. A hundred and fifty faces turned toward the end of the barn and held there, quite round, like plates.

“I beg your ladyship’s pardon,” said Elizabeth. “I do not quite understand.”

“I think you understand perfectly. You are a young woman without family, without connexions, and without fortune, who has been admitted to this parish out of charity and condescension, and who has taken it upon herself to attach to her own person a gentleman who is, as you must be perfectly aware, so far above her in rank and consequence as to render any attention on his part an insult to his own relations.”

“Lady Catherine!” began the Colonel, attempting to defend Elizabeth’s honour.

The Lady’s voice raised above her nephew. “I have not finished, Richard. I have made enquiries, Miss Bennet. I know the circumstances of your father’s estate. I know the character of your mother’s family. I know the situation of your sisters. I have heard of the manner in which a gentleman of my own blood has been seen to walk about a country lane with a person of your sort, and I have come here this evening, before these good people, to ask you, in the plainest words I can command, whether you are conscious of the figure you cut.”

It was not possible, Richard thought; it was not possible that a woman of sixty-two, of good family, of the first fortune in Kent, should stand in a barn at a harvest supper and say these things aloud to a girl of twenty, in front of her own tenantry. The Colonel was aware of an enormous, slow, incredulous horror; the horror of a man who has watched a cannon being laid and cannot, for his life, remember the word of command.

Elizabeth was quite white. She stood without moving, with her hands clasped before her, and the Colonel, who had seen brave men taken in the face with a ball and not flinch, thought that he had never in his life seen anyone bear anything so well. Her head was up. Her eyes were very bright. Her mouth, which was a mobile mouth, was set in a line so steady that it seemed to have been carved.

“I am conscious of nothing, Lady Catherine,” Elizabeth replied, attempting to do so as lightly as she could muster, “but that I am a guest at a harvest supper, and that I have done no one any harm.”

“Insolent!” Lady Catherine began.

However, at that moment, Darcy stood and called out in a low, hard, flat voice. “Ma’am.”

The word came from the dais, with every particle of warmth squeezed out of it, and it cut across the barn like the crack of a whip across a frozen pond. Darcy had come down off the platform. The Colonel had not seen him move.

He stood at the foot of the steps with his hands at his sides, quite still, in his black coat, with the lantern-light thrown up under his face; and he was looking at his aunt with an expression that the Colonel, who had once seen a French colonel look at a battery of guns, would have recognised anywhere. It was the face of a man who has decided, finally and without appeal, to do the one thing he has dreaded all his life. “You will not speak to Miss Bennet in that manner,” Darcy demanded coldly.

His Aunt looked at him in disbelief, and said, “Darcy!”

He looked furious and said, “Miss Bennet is a guest of this parish. She is a guest of mine, in so far as I have any standing in it. Her presence here is not a matter for your approval. It is not a matter for your enquiry. And I will not stand, in a barn full of your own tenants, and hear a lady insulted by a woman who has no more title to do it than the fiddler.”

The barn had stopped breathing. “I have the highest respect for you, Aunt,” Darcy explained, his voice still low and cold. “I have had it all my life. But I tell you, once, before these people, that if you speak of her again as you have spoken of her tonight, I shall leave your house within the hour and I shall not return to it, ever.” He emphasized the last word and did so in a tone that sounded perfectly quiet and perfectly final.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh stood in the middle of her own barn with her stick in her hand and her mouth open, and for the first time in the Colonel’s recollection, nothing whatever came out of it. And then, the fiddler, a man of unusual delicacy, struck up Sir Roger de Coverley.

Richard found Elizabeth at the back of the barn, by the water-trough, in the dark. She had slipped out, in the confusion, by the little side door that led to the cart-shed, and she stood with her back against the wall and her face turned up to the stars, and she was not weeping.