Chapter Fifteen #5
“They are in the safest hands I know,” Mrs. Annesley replied, with a look that took in both brother and sister. “Provided you do your part, sir, and do not stay away longer than you must.”
“I shall not,” he said, and there was a fervour in his voice which made Elizabeth look away.
He addressed Mary next.
“Miss Mary, I am to pass through Meryton on my way, and shall go on from thence to town. If you or Miss Elizabeth have letters for home, I shall be honoured to take charge of them. If there is any commission, any book, any small article that London can supply, you have only to command me.”
Mary thanked him with proper gravity and began at once to consider which of her favourites she might wish to possess in a fine edition. Elizabeth could not, at that moment, think of any want that London could supply.
“You are very good,” she said. “I shall certainly write to Jane. Beyond that, I believe we are in no present need of anything.”
“Do not let any consideration restrain you,” he returned quickly. “You and your family have already done more for mine than a lifetime of commissions could repay.”
Elizabeth coloured, and glanced, half-uneasily, towards Georgiana and Mary. “Pray do not speak of it so,” she said, in a tone of playful reproof. “Miss Darcy will begin to think we invited her to Hertfordshire in hopes of earning the right to trouble you.”
“She will do no such thing,” he replied, but his look was grave, and the subject dropped. He turned again to Mary, enquiring what books she most desired from town.
“I shall return as soon as I am able. Above all, I hope, when I return, to find that nothing has altered here.”
The words, innocent as they were, touched her heart. Nothing altered! She answered only with another slight curtsey.
After dinner, she went to the library for a book she had left upon the table. As she turned to the door, Mr. Darcy entered from the opposite side. There was no retreating without marked haste. She curtsied, and he advanced.
“Miss Elizabeth,” he said, “I am afraid I expressed myself rather ill this morning. I did not mean to distress you by speaking of what passed last winter.”
“You did not distress me,” she answered quickly. “Only—” She hesitated, then, seeing that he waited, added, with more seriousness, “I could wish you would not speak of it at all. My family did nothing that deserves to be made so much of. We are not entitled to such gratitude.”
“I had no intention of displaying you,” he replied. “If I have done so, it was unpardonably clumsy.”
“It is not display that I fear,” Elizabeth said.
To own how much she valued his good opinion would be folly, while she remained so unsure of the nature of his feelings.
“It is when you talk of repayment, you make a favour of what was only our duty.” She stopped there, aware she may have already said too much.
“Pray, Mr. Darcy,” she added, with an effort at composure, “let what my father’s house was so fortunate as to do for your sister be forgotten.
We neither expect nor desire that you should think of us as people to whom you are indebted. ”
There was a pause.
“If I have given you reason to suppose that I so considered you,” he said at last, with evident mortification, “I have been more clumsy than I knew. I am grateful—deeply so—but I do not regard you merely as one to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. That is far from the whole of what I feel, however I will not offend you by speaking of it again.”
His tone was perfectly composed. There was a restraint in it that she had not heard since the days of their earliest acquaintance.
Now she understood too well that it was of her own creating.
In wishing only to refuse a gratitude she had not earned, she had seemed to refuse every warmer feeling with it, and he had believed her.
They had been drawing nearer—she could see it now—only to be thrown back again by a few ill-chosen words.
He would “not offend her by speaking of it again,” and she was not at liberty to tell him that such an offence would be very willingly borne.
The distance, which she had herself insisted upon, was now unwelcome.
Yet it was necessary, it was proper, and she had no means of lessening it that did not begin with him.
Darcy quitted the room with as much deliberation as he could command, yet the steadiness of his step did little to compose the tumult within.
That he should have driven her to such a declaration—that she would “neither expect nor desire” to be thought entitled even to his gratitude—was a mortification he had not looked to feel again.
He had meant only to prove that the obligation was all on his side, yet every attempt to speak of it seemed but to wound the very delicacy he most valued.
He had erred. She had drawn back from him, and he was left to wonder whether any acknowledgement that went beyond the common forms of civility must, in her eyes, be an offence.
He took leave of them the next morning, with all the proper expressions and none of the particularity he might desire. He shook Mary’s hand, bowed to Elizabeth, and kissed his sister. To say more would have been beyond his power. To say less would have betrayed, at once, how much he wished to stay.
As the house disappeared behind the trees, his mind flew over every hour of their visit—the walks, the music, the quiet occupation of the little sitting-room, the moment on the higher path when she had owned that she knew him better now.
The recollection was no soothing companion.
A hundred times he had checked himself, from a fear of saying too much, and had ended by saying either nothing or precisely what must pain her.
His endeavours to recommend himself had produced restraint.
His explanations had produced formality.
She had seemed happy at Pemberley. His sister had never been so much at ease.
The house itself had never been so much of home.
One thing had grown too plain to be denied.
He could not be content to bring any other woman back to those rooms. He wanted only to hear her voice in his own halls and call her his wife.
Any other outcome was an absurdity which his pride and his heart equally rejected.
Mrs. Littlewood had told him that courage, not consequence, must decide his happiness.
He had submitted all his life to his aunt’s summons at Easter.
He had borne his family’s expectations with as little complaint as might be.
But as he turned from the lodge into the high road, he owned, not for the first time, that there was one claim superior to Lady Catherine’s, and one choice that no aunt, however determined, had the right to make for him.
The moment he was restored to Pemberley, and to the sight of Elizabeth in his home, he would not waste the second opportunity.