A little after noon, when Darcy came back, Anne was in the library, writing. The news was all over the country, he said, for everyone had seen the newspaper, and everyone wanted to know whether Miss de Bourgh would stay at Pemberley, or go to live with Dukes and Duchesses, and marry a Lord, at the very least.
His wife told him of Anne's ambition; could they rent her the cottage? Could she live in it, alone? “Certainly not, impossible,” he said.
“Well, I do not know,” Elizabeth said. “With any other young woman, I would say so. But it is a very unusual situation, and she is a very unusual girl.”
“All will be well, you will see; only wait a few days.” And he would say no more.
But once she was alone in the library, Anne had to give way to the question that was uppermost in her mind, all the time. What would Edmund think about it? Would his mother write and tell him? How long did it take for a letter to get to the West Indies? If indeed he were there, and she did not even know whether he had arrived.
If only she could get on her horse, and ride, ride straight up the hillside, to his home, and find out! But that was impossible. Could she, on some excuse, go into Burley, and perhaps visit his parents? Every kind of fantastic idea presented itself: she should make believe that she was ill, and must go to the warm bath; perhaps there was some shopping that could only be done in Burley; the bookshop; maybe there was an assembly—but no! he never went to assemblies. Oh, but of course—he was not there! she was becoming foolish! Well, she would not wait until he came back; she would sell her pearls and get on a ship, and go to Barbados! But she did not know what he thought, or how he felt, it was all conjecture; one could not ask a man a question, on a conjecture: “I am free of my wealth; will you marry me, here or in Barbados?” The very thought made her blush. Indeed, no woman could ask a man any question; women must wait, in silence, to be sought out, to be asked.
In short, the confusion of her thoughts echoed the confusion of her feelings. All she could do, she decided, was to provide herself with a way of living, and wait: If Edmund never came back, if he did not want her, she would marry no one.
In the end, she thought that to do nothing would be cowardly. She took the best alternative that had occurred to her, in an hour of hard thinking. She packed up the manuscript of her novel; it was not nearly finished, the end was merely sketched, but this was not the time to quibble. She addressed it to Mrs Caldwell, and wrote a letter:
She had already been planning, she said, to publish her work, but her situation had changed, as they would probably have realized on seeing the notice of her mother's re-marriage. Her circumstances were much reduced, she was planning to live independently, and she wanted to know whether some money could be made from publication of her writing. Would Mr and Mrs Caldwell “and any other interested person” oblige her by reading the manuscript, and giving their opinions as to whether it would appeal to the reading public; and if so, whether there were any changes that ought to be made?
It was the best she could think of, it must do; and after all it was perfectly true—she did need to find out whether anyone would pay money for her book, for her cousin Darcy had warned her, when she mentioned Mrs Endicott's letter to him, that sometimes publishers paid very little, or wanted the author to pay the costs of printing.
Mrs Caldwell would certainly write to her son, sometime or other: Edmund would know of her situation. She would not feel comfortable until Edmund knew. Why? What did it matter to her? She did not know. Whether he would do anything, what he might do, or how long it would take him, she could not imagine. All that mattered was that she had done all that she could.
The package was made up; she took it to the butler, and arranged for it to be sent. It struck her that, in the future, in the little cottage, there would be no Forrest, and no servant to take things to the post for her. Well! She had done it, when she was first in Burley with her mother; she had got to the post office, and then she was ill and alone. She could do it again; and she would.
“Come, Minette!” and she was off again, along the end of the terrace, past the formal grounds, and toward the stream. Edmund had been right about Minette: in the past few weeks since she had owned the dog, Anne had become a very good walker. She was healthier, and stronger, and now she seemed impelled by some new energy. The little dog, released from its leash, ran ahead of her. The path climbed, she went up, past pools and waterfalls, past rowan trees and limestone rocks, up and further up; she had never climbed so high! The ground grew steep, she had reached a dark, cavernous place, where the stream fell off a high rock, almost a cliff. Moss and delicate ferns grew there, the ground was always damp; the path went no higher; she turned back, and saw the whole of the valley spread out before her in a blaze of sunshine.
As she began to make her way down, stepping carefully on the wet ground, she saw that someone was coming up the path toward her. It was a man, she thought—yes! it was certainly a man. Visitors never came so far; it might be one of the gardeners; but she could see a gentleman's hat, and a brown coat; it must be her cousin, or a visitor. She came further down; the unknown man came up; a turn of the path revealed him to her. It was Edmund Caldwell.
Chapter 26
When people as much in love as these two meet in such scenery and such circumstances, they cannot be long in reaching an understanding. Before a quarter of an hour had passed, Edmund had asked Anne to marry him, and she had said “yes.”
It was exactly as she had thought: he had fallen as deeply in love with her as she with him, and, they were delighted to discover, at precisely the same moment: when they had smiled together, over the little blue dish.
“But I did not know it,” she said.
“Neither did I. I thought it only friendship, and admiration, until I found you in distress over the money from your father's will. Then I knew. But what could I do, other than what I did? I could not allow myself to see you again, until today.”
And why had he decided to leave for Barbados? Again, it was as Anne had suspected. Even before the Duchess and her brother visited Pemberley, they had been discussing the possibility of a marriage with Lady Catherine's unknown daughter. Lord Francis's voice was extremely loud, and the Duchess's hardly less so. Naturally, in their hired lodgings, everything they'd said had been overheard. They had been interested, yet puzzled; Lady Catherine had seemed to be half eager for the match, and yet in no hurry; there had seemed to be some hesitation. They had thought Anne might be ugly, or deformed, or stupid. As soon as they had been to Pemberley, and had seen her, and knew that she was a pretty, lively young woman, his only question was, how much money he might obtain with her.
The Duchess had urged her brother to press on, and marry Anne, for she was bound to have thirty thousand pounds, let alone what she would eventually inherit. He objected that his debts were so large, and his way of life so expensive, thirty thousand pounds would hardly be enough, and the mother would give her no more, and might live forever. But she had persisted, and got him to agree. Every servant in the place had known about it; and soon the whole of Burley knew that Lord Francis was to marry the young lady who was staying at Pemberley. Then Edmund had met them in the street: “I know, we were arm in arm, and laughing,” said Anne. “I was never so mortified in the whole of my life; and you cannot imagine how stupid his conversation was.”
“That settled it for me,” said Edmund. “Gossip I could ignore—at least, I could try, I could remind myself that it was only rumour; but this seemed like proof, irrefutable proof. All I wanted was to be gone, to be out of England before your marriage took place. But somehow I delayed, and waited, for what, I did not know. Twice I told myself that I could not leave; I turned back because there was some question at work, something only I could deal with. Then I was advised not to go, for the ship would run directly into the hurricane season. This week, I was really going. Tomorrow was the date set for me to leave; and the end of the week for the ship to depart.”