Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 49: Found, and to Be Married

Two days after Mr. Bennet's return, an express arrives from Gracechurch Street, and Jane and Elizabeth run through the grounds to find their father. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 49 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the fugitives are discovered at last and the rescue turns out to have a price nobody will name.

Mr. Gardiner writes that Lydia and Wickham are found, unmarried but willing: Wickham will make her his wife if Mr. Bennet guarantees her equal share of the five thousand pounds settled on the children, plus one hundred a year during his life. Terms so light stagger her father, who does the real arithmetic aloud: no man in his senses would marry Lydia for so trifling a temptation.

• Mr. Bennet's questions cut to the center at once: how much money has his brother-in-law laid down to bring this about, and how is it ever to be repaid? Wickham, he reckons, would be a fool to take her for a farthing less than ten thousand pounds.
• Jane pleads the happier reading, that the couple will marry and something of Wickham's meaning to do right; Elizabeth marks what the terms actually prove about what he has been.
• The news travels upstairs, and Mrs. Bennet's recovery is total and instantaneous: from her dressing-room of suffering to raptures, wedding clothes, and the sweetest of all her daughters married at sixteen.
• She is for spreading the news through Meryton within the hour and canvasses the neighborhood's great houses for the couple, Haye Park perhaps, or Stoke, while her husband dryly reserves the questions of money and welcome.