Thomas, who had never shown interest in either girl and undoubtedly thought the two as silly and empty-headed as the rest of us did, ignored Lydia’s comment and moved on to his own sisters. For Charlotte, he gifted two long strands of mignonettes and, unable to keep from laughing, said he had selected this particular flower for his eldest sister because she smelled much better than she looked. Charlotte, who fortunately was good-humored, laughed with the rest of us and only chided her brother in a teasing sort of way for being unkind to his own flesh and blood. Towards Maria, he was comparatively more gracious and had picked for her as many shades of sweet William as our garden offered. “Because you are your father’s daughter,” he said, “and would sooner forget your own name than Sir William’s knighthood.” This account was followed by more appreciative laughter. Maria, turning as pink as her flowers, confessed that she did occasionally talk too much about her father’s title but, as she had no wish to appear ridiculous in front of others, wouldn’t mention the subject in the future.
“How shall I serve thee, Mary?” Thomas asked, finally turning to where I sat at the end of the bench. “What flower could I present to Miss Mary Bennet that would not pale and shrivel in the glory of her visage, that would in its properties encompass the breadth of her blinding beauty?” Receiving no reply but the suppressed giggles of his amused audience, he revealed the final flower in his hands, which I accepted and studied for some moments before crumpling in my fist.
“This is not a flower,” I said. “This is a weed. I dug out several like it just this morning.”
“You missed that one,” Thomas replied, bouncing on his heels.
“That may be so,” I said, “but aren’t you going to recite a poem to me now? ‘Ode to Bindweed’ or something equally ridiculous?”
“Nothing so grand,” he said. “Just that if the world is a garden, then the less weeds there are, the better. They choke the beauty of the flowers and thrive at the expense of others.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite grasp the comparison,” I replied, goading him. “Come on, quickly now. Tell me how I’m like a weed, Thomas, and choke the beauty of the flowers.”
He looked and sounded a little bored as he answered: “The fewer Mary Bennets there are in the world, the better. They add no beauty to their surroundings and will all grow up to be ugly old maids, living on the charity of their families.”
Everyone reacted quite as I’d predicted they would. Jane gasped. Lizzy and Charlotte appeared too stunned to speak. Maria squirmed in her seat and looked yearningly towards the hedgerow, and Lydia and Kitty turned so red from noiseless laughing, I wondered they didn’t rise and applaud him.
I stood. Being quite tall for his age, Thomas loomed over me, but I was too angry to care. “What have I ever done to you, Thomas Lucas, to deserve this?” I asked, nearly choking on the rage that rose like smoke from the pit of my stomach.
“A joke, Mary,” he said, turning pale but endeavoring to laugh all the same, and raised his hands in mock surrender. “It was only meant to be a joke. I was quite mean to Charlotte just now as well, wasn’t I? And to Maria, too.”
“Then I’ll also make a joke and see if you are able to laugh at it,” I replied, staring hard into his eyes. “I will treat you as fairly as you chose to treat me. This, Thomas,” I said, gesturing at the land around me, “is my garden, and you are the weed that will be cast out. You will look no more upon any of the flowers here. Now get out. I never want to see you again. GET OUT!”
Charlotte announced they should leave, and Thomas—with one last forlorn look at Jane that, under any other circumstance, would have sufficiently moved me to welcome him back into the fold—straggled after his sisters. Just before he disappeared from view, he suddenly stopped, his shoulders began to shudder, and we watched in uncomfortable silence as Charlotte and Maria were forced to guide their brother, one on each side of him, for the remainder of the walk to Lucas Lodge.
Charlotte visited the next day and found me squatting in Mama’s garden with a trowel and a basketful of weeds.
“Oh, Mary” were the first words she exhaled.
“You’ve come to tell me that Thomas is very sorry for how he behaved to me, haven’t you,” I said, tossing another weed over my shoulder and not looking at her.
“You know Thomas will say and do anything to impress Jane,” Charlotte pleaded. “He’s at such an awkward age.”
“Which, I suppose, makes everything he says and does excusable,” I replied.
“Now, you know that isn’t true. Maria and I are thoroughly ashamed of him, and being unmarried myself, Mary, I feel the insult of his words deeply.”
“I’ve been thinking, Charlotte….” I threw down my trowel and stood. “I’ve been thinking it is unfair that there should be no recourse for a woman to take in this world should she find herself singularly unsuited to marriage. It doesn’t matter for Thomas that he bears an uncanny resemblance to a monkey, because he is a man. And thanks to your father’s connections, Thomas will attend university and take up either law or a position in the church. One day, he might even become a famous barrister or a bishop, and neither of these occupations will ever discriminate against him because he resembles a hooting chimpanzee. Do you comprehend how unjust that is? If I could only seek some useful employment…but to be employed in any capacity is considered an insult to our sex.”
Though I didn’t think I’d said anything funny, Charlotte began to laugh. “I daren’t ask what kind of employment you have in mind.”
“I sometimes envision myself working in a little bookshop, collecting money from customers and wrapping beautiful books in large sheets of brown paper….”
“You’d grow tired of it after the first day.”
“I wouldn’t, Charlotte. I wouldn’t, because it was my choice. Not something that was foisted upon me, but a situation I entered into of my own free will. It angers me that Thomas will eventually be able to make something of himself, and I can’t!”
“But you can, dear Mary,” she entreated, squeezing my hand. “You can, and you will. Through marriage.”
I did not reply, and my expression must have indicated to Charlotte that further discussion on the matter was useless, for she soon sought the company of Lizzy, while I returned to the house. A view from a window caught my attention, and I looked out towards the lonely fields and the thin, uneven line of the horizon. I listened to the heaving lamentations of the cows, the unsettled cries of sheep, the scuttling of plump, edible birds being ushered from one confinement to the next, never knowing in the short span of their lives much more of the world than the few square feet of muddy earth they were born into. I felt their stupidity and the fog that effectively dimmed their minds to everything but the bottomless emptiness of their own stomachs. My own existence did not seem so very different from theirs.
Though I treated Thomas with civility on every one of the occasions in which he visited Longbourn thereafter, a divide persisted between us that prevented either party from feeling totally at ease in the other’s company. In laying bare to my sisters and friends the most vulnerable part of my soul, he had bestowed upon my private fears a certain inescapable reality. To run from it would be akin to covering one’s eyes like a child, and to face it would be an acknowledgment of everything I had ever despaired of—my plainness, my unformed education and so-called accomplishments, and my predestined dependence on the good fortunes of my sisters. I couldn’t witness his happy manners in front of others without also remembering the many hours I’d spent after the incident crying noisily into a book, unable to read a single page. The racket of my tears had eventually summoned Jane and Lizzy upstairs to my room, and they’d embraced me with consolations uttered softly into the top of my head.
“Our poor Mary,” Jane had sighed.
“What an unfeeling ass Thomas Lucas is,” Lizzy had said, squeezing my shoulder. “In fact, what
asses all men can be when the mood takes them!”
* * *
—
A FAINT KNOCKING at the door interrupted my reverie, and Mrs. Hill entered without waiting to be summoned. She looked with some wonder from Mr. Collins to myself, then back again. Her eyes glittered with poorly disguised pleasure at the discovery of her young mistress sitting alone with a male houseguest. With less decorum than was her custom, Mrs. Hill managed to utter the following few short words without entirely abandoning herself to baser feelings. “Mary,” she said, having turned by now quite pink, “you’re wanted upstairs.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hill,” I replied stiffly. “Please tell Mama I’ll be up directly.” No sooner had Mrs. Hill departed from the room than we heard a peal of gleeful chortling from the far end of the hall. I turned to Mr. Collins, who, having no concern for Longbourn’s housekeeper, had resumed his study of stone-paved Roman highways and handicapped emperors straddling the backs of elephants.
Looking discreetly at him, I thought again of his story. It is an unfortunate aspect of our society that the people whose conditions in life are the most enviable, and whose wealth and power we would most willingly emulate, should also be some of the most disagreeable, arrogant, and unsympathetic characters whom the good Lord ever determined to create in His own likeness; that while there is much to admire in their possessions and various titles and the exorbitant amounts they pay each year in taxes and death duties to the Crown, they are rendered no less reprehensible by the comfort and opulence of their upbringings. This nation’s peerage had been cruel to Mr. Collins, had belittled him and toyed with him, as though he were a plaything installed within their lives solely for their amusement. Yet a great paradox remains, which is that while Mr. Collins may have secretly hated his tormentors, he would undoubtedly have relinquished his own identity and principles at the very first opportunity in exchange for a life lived in hedonistic albeit respectable idleness as one of England’s esteemed nobility. I think he would have savored, too, with no little pleasure, the chance to turn his nose up at a beggar and her family of starving children in an alleyway or to thoroughly whip a servant who did not brush his hat and coat with appropriate deference.
Mr. Collins had faults—glaring ones that, in the eyes of other females, might have rendered him so ridiculous that the prospect of being married to such a man would have driven many to pledge their virtues to the nearest nunnery. But something in his unabashed eagerness to impress his betters, in his capacity to serenely anguish behind a mask of solicitude while others laughed at him—I confess that something in these peculiar qualities stirred in me a small but fervent admiration I couldn’t quite ignore, and I considered to myself whether I might have a reasonable chance of happiness in being married to the rector of Hunsford parsonage and entrusting my respectability and future well-being to a man who, though not as handsome as Mr. Bingley, not as rich as Mr. Darcy, and not as well-read as Papa, was also not entirely without his own hidden depths and the various miniature tragedies which lend to all our lives a little more color than otherwise would be the case. In him, I identified the same yearning to prove one’s detractors wrong. If the dream of gainful employment were to be denied me, perhaps I could content myself with helping another realize his ambitions. Perhaps, if there really existed no other means for a woman to attain success and purpose in the world, I could settle for marriage. Perhaps it wouldn’t be settling.
I rose to leave; however, feeling a small flutter in my chest upon seeing him crook his left eyebrow at an item of note in his book, I could no longer subdue the emotion which rose to the top of my throat and filled my mouth. I spat out his name with more violence than I’d intended, and like a pupil unexpectedly called upon by his instructor, he snapped to attention and stared at me. Embarrassed, I pretended to cough and, after dislodging the nonexistent irritant from my throat, spoke with as much belated dignity as I could muster. “Mr. Collins,” I said. “I’m afraid Mama has asked me to attend her upstairs.”
“Yes,” he answered. “Yes, I heard Mrs. Hill tell you so just now.”
“I just wanted to say,” I went on, faltering like an idiot. “I just wanted to say that you mustn’t take too much to heart what my sisters think of you because I think…” Again I hesitated and, like the apprentice milliner in Meryton, I focused with passionate intensity on the bottom half of his left earlobe before proceeding. “I think…that is, I don’t think you’re silly at all. I think you’re actually the most respectable and good sort of man to come into our neighborhood for a very long time. And I wanted to tell you, too, how grateful I am that you have entrusted me with the history of your acquaintance with Lady Catherine. You may be assured of my secrecy and that I will tell none of my sisters—”
“Dear cousin,” Mr. Collins cried, fortunately interrupting me just as I was in danger of dithering, “while I don’t doubt for a moment your sincerity, I wish you wouldn’t trouble yourself with these trifling concerns. Almost as soon as I entered the house, I singled you out as the one among all your family nearest in sensibility and thinking to myself. We are, I think, fated to be extraordinarily good friends, and my heart exalts at the joy of finding any true companion in this sometimes dark and confusing world with whom I may share the private thoughts and concerns of my soul.” He then stood and, removing an object from his inner breast pocket, gently took my wrist and folded my fingers around the flat parcel. “I’d meant to give this to you sooner,” he said, patting my hand in an avuncular manner, “but there was never any opportunity. These were, as it happens, the so-called letters I was working on when I excused myself from you and your family’s company early yesterday evening.”
I hadn’t sense enough to ask what the package contained. Murmuring my thanks with my eyes still pinned to the fleshy pink of his earlobe, I left the room, unsure whether my legs would take me as far as the door without giving way. I thought of looking back and smiling at him, but at the last moment, my courage failed me. As soon as I was out of sight of the library, I ran up the stairs, giggling to myself like a lunatic, his present tucked away in a pocket of my dress. On the landing, I heard the familiar, tinny laughter of not one but two voices, which, despite being of slightly different pitch, managed to complement each other in raucous harmony. They belonged, of course, to Mama and Aunt Philips, who must have come to the house while I was in the library with Mr. Collins. My feet skipped a little as I proceeded in the direction of the noise. The sensation of his thumb gliding gently across my wrist had stunned me into the most blissful of stupors.
I shouldn’t like the reader to think that I am in the custom of listening at other people’s doors or that my doing so in this singular instance is indicative of my taking after the bad habits of my two younger sisters. However, the substance of Mama and Aunt Philips’s conversations never failed to please as a source of frivolous entertainment, and if one had just been reading an academic tome filled with many vague and heavy philosophies with words of several syllables each and origins in ancient tongues, then it would do well for that same person to sit and sip a cup of hot tea while listening to my mother and aunt opine on subjects which, despite the pair’s extremely limited purview and the unlikelihood of any of their theories being actually true, made them no less scandalously thrilling. Standing just outside the frame of the door, I caught the rattling of cups being brusquely returned to their saucers amid passionate chatter, and I entered into their conversation a silent and unseen audience.
“…and I am told they were witnessed by the housemaid, holding hands—” Aunt Philips said.
“Holding hands? No!”
“And…”
“And?” Mama asked expectantly.
“And leaning into each other!” my aunt declared.
“No! I won’t believe it,” Mama cried in jubilation. “I refuse to believe it! It can’t be! Oh!”
“Yes, sister,” Aunt Philips continued with relish. “I
t is just as I say. I knew this would happen. I predicted it as soon as I set eyes on that girl. I said to myself, ‘This is a bad one. This one will be up to no good.’ And look what has happened now! Naturally, poor Mrs. Horbury has had to let her go and without a letter of reference, too, but it really is for the best, you know.”
“Of course it is! Just think of the shame!” I heard the grinding of jaws working away at hard biscuits.
“One can always tell,” Aunt Philips said with her mouth full. “You’ve never met her, I know, but you could just tell from the artful little way she’d take your hat and coat from you in the hall that she’d get mixed up one day with, well…”
“A man!” Mama practically shouted.
“Yes, dear,” Aunt Philips said. Again, I heard the clattering of china. “And so it has come to pass, just as I said it would. How awful that one can’t trust one’s servants anymore. They’re so emotional now, so needful of companionship and such passionate creatures.” She clicked her tongue and sighed.
“This is true,” Mama replied sadly. “We had, you’ll remember, that small incident with Sarah, the housemaid, a few years ago. If I’d known that was how she intended to make use of her room…well! I’d have had the door removed from its hinges.”
“I’ve never heard of anything so vulgar,” Aunt Philips exclaimed cheerfully. “On a pleasanter subject, how is Mr. Collins? What a charming man! So wonderful in his little, elegant manners. I wonder where he picked those up.”
“I’m sure he’d be very happy to hear you say so. He could talk of nothing and nobody else for a whole hour! I thought he’d never stop going on about how wonderful you were.”
“And do you think he means to make good on his word to choose a wife among one of your daughters?”
“Oh yes, sister. I have every confidence he will make a proposal before he leaves for Hunsford on Saturday.”
Mary B Page 8
