Epilogue
After the weddings, it was soon understood that the cottage need not be given up. With two daughters married, and married so well, its small comforts could now be enjoyed with less restraint, and the whole condition of the household was sensibly improved.
Mrs Bennet retained her home, but no longer with the constant apprehension of expense that had once clouded every comfort.
A cook was engaged, a second maid added, and before long a footman too, so that the daily business of the house no longer fell in anxious fragments upon daughters and inexperience.
Everything was improved, yet so quietly arranged that generosity never wore the appearance of charity.
Mary moved into the room which Jane and Elizabeth had formerly shared, and found in that quiet promotion a greater sense of consequence than she would ever have thought proper to claim.
Mrs Bennet, who had once believed herself destined never again to possess a carriage of her own, was soon accommodated with one neat enough for comfort and respectability, and used it with unflagging satisfaction in visiting her married daughters.
Lydia, whose happiness required something swifter and less decorous, was made happier still by the purchase of Cobweb and Apricot from the Hardings; and Mr Darcy, with that unobtrusive generosity which left no room for thanks, had stabling, a carriage-house, and the necessary servants provided, as if they had always formed part of the establishment.
Every alteration was sensible, every comfort increased, yet, all was so managed that the cottage seemed not so much changed as restored to the ease it ought always to have possessed.
It was on a mild morning in March, nearly a twelve month since they had first come to Ivy Cottage, that Hill came to join them there.
Elizabeth stood outside with Mrs Bennet as the carriage drew up and Hill stepped down from it.
“Oh, my dear Hill!” cried Mrs Bennet, hurrying forward to embrace their old housekeeper.
Hill, though plainly affected, attempted propriety for almost half a second before Mrs Bennet’s embrace made it impossible.
“Ma’am—Miss Elizabeth—” she said, and then, recovering herself only enough to smile through tears, added, “I beg pardon, but I am very glad to be with you again.”
“And so you ought to be,” cried Mrs Bennet. “For we have all but perished without you. Not that anybody has done very badly, for everything is now much better arranged than it was at first; but there are some people who belong to a house, and you are one of them.”
Elizabeth could only press Hill’s hand, for she found herself less able to speak than she had expected.
“But it is Mrs Darcy now,” said Mrs Bennet, as they walked into the cottage. “Susan, where is that girl?”
Hill stopped short upon the threshold.
“Mrs Darcy,” she said, and then gave a little apologetic shake of the head. “I beg pardon, ma’am. I know it very well, only I have said Miss Elizabeth for so many years that I find it comes first.”
Elizabeth laughed then in earnest.
“I shall forgive you much worse than that, Hill.”
“And Jane, dear Jane, is Mrs Bingley,” cried Mrs Bennet, leading her in. “Only think of it. Two daughters married, and both so well. I do not say I expected less, but I own I did not always see how it was to be accomplished.”
Susan, summoned in haste and appearing with equal haste, dropped so deep a curtsy at Hill’s appearance that Mrs Bennet was obliged to command her to stand upright, and behave like a rational creature.
Pudding remained at the cottage, having attached herself too firmly to Mrs Bennet’s fire, Mary’s quiet, and Hill’s good management to be persuaded that any removal could improve her situation.
By her second Christmas at Pemberley, Elizabeth had ceased to think of the house as anything but home.
Its order no longer impressed her as something to be admired from without, but rested about her as naturally as warmth in winter.
The rooms which had once seemed too noble to belong to ordinary life were now full of it; and on that particular morning, as the snow lay light upon the lawns and the fire burned clear against the season, she sat by the nursery hearth with her son asleep in her arms and felt no want in happiness that memory itself could not gently bear.
He was a beautiful child, though Elizabeth admitted this only in private, and then with the inward caution of one who knew every mother in England thought the same of her own.
At present, however, there was no one to contradict her.
Georgiana had gone below not a quarter of an hour before; Mrs Reynolds had been summoned elsewhere; and the whole room, though furnished with every thing that care and habit had made proper to it, seemed for a little while given up entirely to quiet.
The boy stirred, but did not wake. One small hand, released from the warmth of the shawl in which he had been wrapped, opened and closed again with that grave uncertainty of infant motion which still had power to amuse her, though she had watched it every day for months. She bent and kissed it lightly.
The door opened without haste, and Darcy came in.
He paused at once on seeing them, not from uncertainty, but from that instinctive check which had grown upon him since his son’s birth, as if every entrance into the nursery must first submit itself to whatever peace it found there. Elizabeth looked up and smiled.
“You need not look so cautious,” she said softly. “He is asleep, not enchanted.”
Darcy came nearer.
“I have more than once seen the distinction vanish in less experienced hands.”
“In mine, never.”
“In yours, I believe nothing dangerous could occur at all without apologising for itself first.”
She laughed under her breath, lest the laugh be too much for the child, and shifted him a little higher against her shoulder.
“The house is very quiet.”
“For Christmas morning, remarkably so,” he said. “Your mother has only this minute been persuaded that the nursery may be approached without waking him, and has consented to delay her visit until she has taken chocolate.”
“That is a real sacrifice.”
“It appeared so to her.”
He stood looking down at the child for a moment in silence, and the look in his face, though no longer new to Elizabeth, still had power to move her.
He had loved the boy from the first with a gravity that seemed at once paternal and reverent; as if some part of him had never quite ceased to wonder that such a life had been entrusted to his keeping at all.
Elizabeth watched him watching their son, and said at last, “You have escaped. Mrs Bennet cannot have found you this morning.”
“No. Bingley was less fortunate.”
She smiled. “Then Jane will have been obliged to rescue him.”
“Repeatedly, I imagine.”
He drew a chair nearer and sat beside her. For some moments neither spoke. The child slept on between them, and beyond the windows the pale winter light lay softly upon the snow, giving even the bare branches a kind of gentleness they would not have possessed under a stronger sky.
Darcy touched the edge of the shawl where it lay folded beneath the boy’s chin.
“He has been spoken of by three different names already this morning,” he said. “Mrs Reynolds calls him Master Darcy, your mother calls him my angel, and Lydia, before breakfast, had settled upon little General.”
Elizabeth’s eyes brightened.
“And which do you prefer?”
“None of the three.”
“Then you are difficult to please.”
“I am exacting only where he is concerned.”
She shifted the child again, more from instinct than necessity. “You must blame yourself for that. He has had no chance of moderation.”
Darcy’s mouth altered with the beginning of a smile.
“No,” he said. “That, too, I think, is your mother’s opinion.”
Elizabeth looked down at the boy. His lashes lay dark against the extraordinary fairness of his face, and there was in his sleeping countenance some mixture of both their families which resisted easy explanation.
At moments she thought him wholly Darcy’s; at others, some turn of the mouth or brow recalled her father so unexpectedly that her heart contracted and opened again in the same instant.
She was silent long enough that Darcy turned to her.
“What is it?”
She did not answer at once. It was not hesitation exactly, but the difficulty of speaking aloud something that had for some days been present in her thoughts, and had grown dearer by being often considered and not yet said.
“I have been thinking,” she said at last, “that if you are still content with the name we chose first, I should like him to have another.”
Darcy regarded her steadily. “Another?”
“Yes.”
He said nothing, but his silence was invitation enough.
Elizabeth’s hand moved once, almost unconsciously, over the child’s back.
“I should like him to be called Thomas.”
For an instant Darcy did not speak. She had not looked up when she said it, and therefore did not at once see what passed in his face; but when she did, she found neither surprise nor uncertainty there. He had understood her immediately.
“After your father,” he said.
“Yes.”
The word came quietly, but not without feeling. She looked down again at the sleeping child, because it was easier than bearing directly the kindness she knew she should find in her husband’s eyes if she met them too soon.
“I thought I should like it,” she said, more slowly. “And then I thought I only liked it because Christmas has a way of making every remembrance softer than it ought. But I do not believe that is the whole of it. I should like there to be something of him still going forward with us.”
Darcy’s hand came over hers where it rested upon the shawl. He did not press it strongly; he had never needed force where understanding would do more.
“There is already much of him going forward with us,” he said.
Elizabeth’s throat tightened unexpectedly. She smiled, though not very steadily.
“You say that because you know I am weak where he is concerned.”
“No,” Darcy answered. “I say it because it is true.”
He looked down at the child.
“If you wish him to bear your father’s name, I can wish nothing better.”
That, more than any immediate eagerness would have done, touched her.
There was no surprise in him that she should remember, no jealousy of what was owed to former love, no impatience with grief altered by time into tenderness.
He accepted it as he accepted every thing most essential in her: not as a rival claim, but as part of the truth of her heart.
She turned then and met his eyes fully.
“You are very good to me.”
He shook his head slightly, as if he had long since given up correcting her whenever gratitude attempted to stand where affection belonged.
“I am your husband,” he said. “The distinction, I hope, is not inconsiderable.”
She laughed, and because the tears had risen at the same moment, the laugh trembled into something softer. Darcy, seeing it, leaned nearer and kissed her forehead with that habitual tenderness which had long ago ceased to surprise her, though it never ceased to be dear.
The child stirred again, opened his eyes to the firelight and the voices nearest him, and then, finding nothing alarming in either, regarded them both with the solemn composure of infancy before deciding whether wakefulness was worth the effort.
“There,” said Elizabeth softly. “You see? He approves.”
“Of me?”
“Of Thomas.”
Darcy looked at his son with an attention almost judicial.
“He has the air of reserving his judgement.”
“Then he is very much his father’s child.”
“And his mother’s, if he intends to make the room wait upon his opinion.”
The little face, having considered them all sufficiently, relaxed once more. His eyes closed. The small hand that had escaped before found again the fold of the shawl and held it.
For a little while longer they sat without speaking.
Beyond the nursery the life of the house would presently resume itself: Mrs Bennet’s progress up the stairs, Bingley’s laugh from the hall, Georgiana’s quieter step, the inevitable confusion of parcels, visits, messages, and those domestic solemnities by which Christmas insists upon being remembered.
But for the moment there was only the fire, the winter light, and the child between them.
Elizabeth looked from him to Darcy and back again, and thought that happiness, when it was deepest, bore little resemblance to anything she had once imagined for it.
It was not triumph, nor astonishment, nor even the end of longing, but something steadier and more inhabitable.
It admitted memory without injury, and hope without fear.
It gathered into itself what had been loved and lost, and made room for what was still to come.
Outside, the snow lay quiet upon the lawns of Pemberley. Within, by the nursery fire, Thomas Darcy slept between his parents; and in that peace, so altered from everything she had once expected and yet so entirely her own, Elizabeth found nothing left to desire but that it might endure.