A Different Understanding #2
“My dearest Jane, I wish you joy with all my heart. You will be very happy together. Indeed, I do not know two people better formed to make each other so.”
Jane’s eyes filled, though she laughed a little too.
“You are very good.”
“No,” said Elizabeth, smiling. “Only very sure.”
They spoke of it a little longer, and then no more; yet when the candles were put out, and the room had fallen quiet, Elizabeth lay wakeful beside her sister, thinking that Jane’s happiness was now secure.
Her own, perhaps, might yet follow. Of her heart she had no uncertainty now.
There, everything was clear. It was only of his that she was not entirely sure.
Mrs Bennet was delighted with the match, and spoke of little else for the next two days.
That Mr Bingley had at last done what, in her opinion, he ought long since to have done, was a subject on which she could scarcely be brought to moderation; and the additional comfort of a house so near at hand appeared to her a blessing almost too great to be credited.
“It is exactly as it should be,” she declared. “A very pretty house, a very proper establishment, and Jane settled where she ought to be, among people who know how she ought to be valued.”
By the evening of the assembly, her satisfaction had lost none of its warmth.
It was perhaps fortunate that, when intelligence of a different engagement at last reached the cottage, her spirits were too fully engaged by Jane’s happiness to dwell upon it with all the indignation it might otherwise have commanded.
The intelligence reached them before the evening was half advanced, and in such a manner as made doubt impossible.
Susan, sent out upon some errand into the village and returning full of what she had heard, brought back the report that Mr Ashton’s engagement to Miss Finch was now generally understood, and had, it seemed, subsisted for some time.
Mrs Bennet stared.
“To Miss Finch? Amelia Finch?”
“So they are all saying, ma’am,” Susan answered, and then, seeing at once that she had said enough, wished herself elsewhere.
Mrs Bennet coloured immediately.
“Then every body has been deceived most shamefully. I always said poor Lizzy was used very ill.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“Used ill indeed,” Mrs Bennet continued. “When every body expected it, and no one more than I. I do not know what men can mean by behaving in such a way, unless they were all born without proper feeling.”
“My dear mama,” said Jane gently, “you had better not think of it so warmly.”
“How am I not to think of it warmly?” cried Mrs Bennet. “If poor Lizzy had given her heart—”
Elizabeth interrupted her with more calm than force. “Mama, I have given nothing that need be regretted.”
Mrs Bennet looked at her with visible relief, though she was far from satisfied.
It was at this fortunate moment that Mrs Grant was announced.
* * *
Darcy and Bingley entered the assembly rooms together, neither of them so late as to be remarked, but not so early as to have any advantage from it.
The rooms were already well filled, and bright with that mixture of candlelight, movement, and expectation which made even a familiar assembly seem, at first entrance, a place a little apart from common life.
Bingley, whose spirits had not needed encouragement for some days past, looked about him with open satisfaction. “It is better than I hoped,” he said quietly. “I begin to think everything may yet go right.”
Darcy made no answer at once. The intelligence of Ashton’s engagement, brought to him only that evening, still sat uneasily in his mind.
If Elizabeth had been attached, she had been very ill used.
If she had not, the neighbourhood had still presumed enough to place her in a situation no woman could much like to occupy.
He found her without difficulty.
She was standing with her sisters at the far end of the room, in conversation with Mrs Grant.
The gown was sage green, simply made; and he was struck, quite without preparation, by the realisation that he had never seen her in colour before.
She had come to Lambton already in mourning, and in mourning she had remained through everything that followed.
He had known her voice, her manner, her way of attending to what mattered, and all of it set against black and grey.
The woman standing across the room in sage green was the same woman entirely. That was, perhaps, what struck him most.
She did not look as a woman looks who has been hurt. She looked very much herself, composed and attentive, her attention given entirely to what Mrs Grant was saying. If the evening’s intelligence had cost her anything, she was not permitting it to show.
He was not certain whether to be relieved or troubled by it.
Bingley had already found Miss Bennet. Darcy remained where he was a moment longer, and then moved into the room.
He did not approach her immediately. There were others to speak to, and the first part of the evening passed as such evenings generally did, in the movement of sets, the exchange of civilities, and the gradual settling of the room into its own particular order.
He watched her dance with Mr Grant. She danced well, with more ease than display, and he found he was not surprised by it.
When the set ended Mr Grant returned her to her party, and Darcy, who had been making his way across the room without quite acknowledging to himself that he was doing so, arrived at her side a moment later.
She turned as he approached with an expression that gave him nothing in particular to read, which he had come to understand was not the same as giving him nothing at all.
“Miss Elizabeth,” he said. “Will you do me the honour of dancing with me?”
She looked at him for a moment, not with surprise, not with calculation, but with the particular quality of attention she gave to things that mattered.
“I will,” she said. “With pleasure.”
He offered his hand, and she took it.
They took their places in the set, and for the first few minutes the demands of the dance made conversation neither necessary nor easy.
Elizabeth attended to the figures with her usual composed enjoyment, and Darcy found, as he had perhaps expected, that standing up with her was considerably easier than observing her from across a room.
When the movement of the dance brought them together again, he said, “I hope the evening has been agreeable.”
“Very much so,” she replied. “I had almost forgotten what it was to be in a room of this kind.”
“It has been some time.”
“A year,” she said, simply.
They separated, and came back.
“You dance very well,” he said.
She glanced at him. “You seem surprised by it.”
“I had not had the opportunity to observe it before.”
“No,” she said, after a moment. “I suppose you had not.”
Something in the reply, its quietness, its acknowledgment of all the months in which such occasions had been impossible, made him less certain of what to say next. He said nothing, and she did not press it.
When the dance ended, he returned Elizabeth to her place with all proper composure. If he said little, it was because he no longer trusted himself to say what would not be felt too much.
That night, long after the assembly had broken up, tomorrow remained before him with a distinctness that would not be set aside.