CHAPTER 6
A Proposal Too Convenient to Accept
Disaster began after breakfast, entirely encouraged by Mrs. Bennet and insufficiently prevented by everyone else.
The morning, which ought by every law of household decency to have belonged wholly to Jane, did not.
The ball had left its traces everywhere: a wilted ribbon on the pianoforte, one glove of Lydia’s beneath a chair, damp cloaks not yet perfectly aired, candle ends collected in a tray, and the faint, stale sweetness that follows music, heat, and too many people declaring themselves delighted.
Outside, the sky had settled into a pale autumn grey.
The gravel still showed the marks of carriage wheels.
Longbourn looked as if happiness had passed through it overnight and left the servants to put the furniture back.
Jane herself bore the morning as though happiness had only made her gentler and quieter, which in her case was hardly distinguishable from her ordinary state except by the light in her face.
Lydia and Kitty had awakened in renewed ecstasy and spent the first hour arguing whether an engagement improved a house more by consequence or by letters.
Kitty, with the reticule containing her folded horse drawing close at hand, was quieter than Lydia but no less full.
Mary, who was not insensible to the importance of the event, maintained that marriage, while often entered upon from inferior motives, might under right guidance become a school of fortitude.
Mr. Bennet read the newspaper. Mrs. Bennet triumphed in every direction at once.
Elizabeth had gone down prepared to be happy for Jane and impatient with everybody else. She had not expected herself to become, before the coffee cooled, the next item of family business.
She ought, perhaps, to have expected it.
Mr. Collins, having gone to bed the previous night full of her refusals, her escape into Mr. Bingley’s assistance, and her visible preference for any company but his own, had risen with no discouragement at all.
If anything, the public nature of the slight appeared only to have confirmed him in that delusion by which men of his sort imagine female aversion to be another form of value.
Mrs. Bennet, now delivered of one daughter into fortune and impatient to dispose of another into prudence, had that morning looked upon him with all the renewed favour due to a clergyman, a cousin, an heir, and an idiot suited to the moment.
Breakfast, therefore, was scarcely finished when she began manoeuvring.
“Jane, my love, you must come upstairs with me. I have a hundred things to say which cannot be said before everybody, and your lace must be looked at directly. Kitty, Lydia, if you tear out of the room like that, I shall know you are listening at doors before ten minutes are over. Mary, perhaps you would be so good as to fetch the volume Mr. Collins mentioned last night? It was on the shelf in the little parlour, or if it is not there, inquire in your father’s room, or somewhere.
Mr. Bennet, I am sure you have letters.”
Mr. Bennet, who knew very well when his wife was constructing a trap and generally preferred to watch its spring from another room, rose with the newspaper in his hand.
“I find myself, suddenly, all correspondence.”
Elizabeth remained where she was only because to rise too quickly would have been to acknowledge the arrangement before it had closed round her.
By the time she set down her cup, she and Mr. Collins were alone in the breakfast room except for the tea equipage, the remains of toast, one bright oblong of morning light upon the carpet, and Mrs. Doddridge, seated near the window with her basket and a piece of small dark cloth in her hand, so quiet and so much of the room itself that Mrs. Bennet had swept out without the least recollection of her existence.
Elizabeth had noticed. Mr. Collins plainly had not.
He drew his chair nearer.
There are sounds in nature more innocent than a clergyman preparing to propose to a woman who has already discouraged him plainly in public. There are few more ominous.
“My dear Miss Elizabeth,” said he, with that solemn self-satisfaction which in him performed the office of ardour, “I flatter myself that the peculiar delicacy of the occasion will excuse a degree of frankness which, in circumstances less distinguished by family interest, I might have been slower to assume.”
Elizabeth looked at him over the rim of her cup.
“I assure you, sir, there is no degree of frankness from you that can surprise me now.”
He smiled, accepting even this as something lively and feminine.
“I am not insensible to the spirit with which you are pleased to answer me. Indeed, it is one of the principal charms that has fixed my regard. A man in my situation, called as I am to offer guidance, example, and steadiness to a parish, cannot be indifferent to animation in a wife, provided always that animation be joined to submission and directed by judgment.”
Elizabeth lowered the cup.
For one brief, clarifying instant, she considered throwing it at him. But the tea was excellent, and Mr. Collins decidedly not worth it; so she set it down instead with a force that made the saucer protest.
He did not hear the warning in it. No man less anxious to hear warning had ever sat in a breakfast room.
“It has long been my intention to marry,” he continued.
“My motives are such as any rational person must approve. First, that I think it the duty of every clergyman in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Second, that I am persuaded it will materially add to my happiness. And third, which perhaps I ought to mention with the reverence due to superior counsel, that the admirable Lady Catherine de Bourgh has more than once condescended to advise me upon the subject, and has graciously expressed a wish to see me settled.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
He took her silence for permission.
“In selecting a wife,” said he, “I could not but feel that some reparation was due from me to the family from which the Longbourn estate must one day, by legal necessity, pass into my hands. Since your eldest sister is now, most fortunately, no longer to be considered in this respect, and since in you I have observed a liveliness which, under proper regulation, would render a woman highly pleasing in a clerical household, I have resolved to address you.”
Elizabeth drew breath, but he was not yet done injuring himself.
“You may perhaps consider yourself already very comfortably provided for, Miss Elizabeth. I am far from being insensible to the advantages of such a situation in a lady. An income, I understand, not much short of a thousand a year, joined to habits of genteel economy, must naturally produce in a young woman a degree of independence flattering to her sex. Yet separate means, however handsome, derive only a portion of their true consequence while unconnected to landed expectation. Combined with my present living, and with the future possession of Longbourn, they form, I think, a prospect of domestic respectability and mutual advantage too rational to be dismissed by any woman of judgment.”
It was some comfort, at least, that he thought her poorer than she was.
Even on that mistaken sum he had built himself a very pretty advantage: her income, his living, Longbourn in prospect, Rosings in patronage, and Elizabeth herself corrected into gratitude somewhere inside it.
His absurdity had almost hidden the appetite.
Almost. Had he known the truth, she suspected he would have tied her to a chaise and called the road to Scotland an argument.
He leaned nearer.
“At Hunsford, under the notice of Rosings, you would occupy a sphere at once elevated and properly directed. Lady Catherine, whose judgment on female conduct is of the first rank, would no doubt distinguish in you qualities that might, under her guidance and mine, be softened into every domestic excellence. A wife in my position must know how to receive instruction, regulate servants, preserve economy, and conduct herself with gratitude when honoured by attentions from superior persons. In all these particulars I should naturally hope to form your habits with tenderness.”
He had begun, Elizabeth now saw with cold astonishment, to design her future before she had answered a syllable.
Her money had been counted. Her conduct was to be softened.
Her gratitude was to be directed. Her rooms, servants, dog, habits, judgment, and freedom were all to be gathered up, corrected, and made answerable to a man who could not even hear plain speech when it sat across a breakfast table from him.
“Stop.”
Mr. Collins blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have counted my money, disposed of my house, corrected my habits, and proposed to soften my character under the joint instruction of yourself and Lady Catherine. I am not cattle to be appraised, nor an account-book to be balanced, nor a pupil waiting to be corrected. You forget yourself, Mr. Collins.”
The words struck him at last. Not deeply enough to instruct him, but sufficiently to offend him.
“Miss Elizabeth, I must protest—”
“You must not. You must listen.”
Mr. Collins recoiled a little from the command, but not enough to understand it.
Elizabeth stepped toward the table, not from agitation, but because stillness now seemed the only way of keeping from doing something more decisive with the tea.
“You mistake me entirely,” she said. “I have never encouraged you. I have never admired you. I have never wished for your company except as one wishes for rain to stop. If you have chosen to translate my impatience into modesty, that folly is wholly your own. I shall never accept you. I would not marry you under any condition you could name.”
Mr. Collins’s expression altered only a very little. It was not easy to penetrate self-approval so long established.
“You are warm.”
“I am clear.”