Secrecy is an essential capacity for accomplishment, yet uncalled for secrecy cancels work. Hiding is not supported in life when it generates a false feeling is the individual.
Eliza withholds the truth about Wickham from her family when she returns from Hunsford. She withholds the truth about Darcy and Wickham from the Gardiners when they visit Pemberley, even when it allows them to think badly of Darcy and well of Wickham. Secrecy is impermissible and provides a cover for falsehood to act in these instances. Wickham is able to use that cover to elope with Lydia and nearly ruin the whole family. Eliza’s secrecy protects a false man and enables him to act again.
Jane’s presence in London
Darcy conceals Jane’s presence in London from Bingley, an impermissible secret from his friend. Fitzwilliam inadvertently discloses to Eliza about Darcy’s interference with Bingley and Jane. Darcy’s secret is revealed because to his own inner feeling that it is an impermissible falsehood. His own inner regrets are a form of weakness through which the secret reaches the very last person on earth he would want to know about it.
Lydia’s elopement
When Eliza learns of the elopement, her spontaneous intuition is to confide in Darcy. She is unable to restrain herself. That intuition proves to be the salvation of her family. Her willingness to confide in him what should normally be kept a closely-guarded, family secret is a woman’s intuition that exposing her own weakness can further her relationship with him. Instead of apologizing for her previous offensive behavior, she makes herself weak and defenseless before him, a woman’s ultimate weapon. Having disclosed the news of Lydia’s elopement to Darcy, Eliza later regrets that she did so. Her regret for the very act responsible for the family’s salvation is an example of the vital tendency for concealment in circumstances when secrecy would have been most detrimental.
Darcy’s role in Lydia’s marriage
Darcy displays the most noble of attitudes in concealing his role in Wickham and Lydia’s marriage from Eliza and the rest of the family. It requires a supreme self-restraint not to allow the Gardiners to breathe a word of it to the Bennets. In doing so, Darcy cleanses this act of any possible mercenary motive of trying to buy Eliza’s favor with his generosity. Lydia’s inadvertent disclosure of Darcy’s role in her marriage is life’s response to his magnificent attitude. Incidentally, Lydia’s act is a reversal of Fitzwilliam’s inadvertent disclosure of Darcy’s interference between Bingley and Jane. Fitzwilliam disclosed Darcy’s deceit. Lydia discloses his extraordinary magnanimity. This reversal by life shows that Darcy’s own reversal of attitude is fully genuine.
Darcy’s subconscious urge for Eliza to know, even when he exercises full conscious self-restraint is also a force working for Lydia’s disclosure.
Eliza’s capacity for genuine gratitude is another force that demands by its very sincerity that life reveal its secrets, as Fitzwilliam did at Hunsford.
Lydia is by constitution a very poor instrument for secrecy but a very good one for fostering matrimony, so the disclosure comes naturally from her.
