CHAPTER 53 #2
Not monstrously wrong. It still belonged to her, still named the house correctly, and would not have disgraced a bankrupt duchess.
But it was not Mrs. Darcy’s card. It was Miss Bennet’s, and had no business whatever continuing in circulation after so material a change in the legal and domestic arrangement of her existence.
“What is it, madam?” said Mrs. Doddridge, who stood at the farther table engaged in some dull but necessary office with linen tape and a drawer of gloves.
“This,” said Elizabeth, holding up the card between two fingers as if it had personally offended her, “is intolerable.”
Mrs. Doddridge considered it.
“Yes, madam.”
“I have been married this long and have not yet put my cards into proper order.”
“Yes, madam.”
“Yes indeed. It is a horror.”
“Very good, madam.”
Elizabeth looked again at the offending object.
“And Mr. Darcy’s cards will be wrong as well.”
“Indeed, madam.”
“His direction has changed.”
“Yes, madam.”
“He cannot go about London pretending he still lives where he does not. It would be socially irregular and geographically false.”
“Very serious, madam.”
“He is at chambers.”
“He is.”
“Then I must go to the stationer’s at once.”
Mrs. Doddridge, to whom all roads in life seemed equally likely to require bonnets, said only, “Shall I come with you, madam?”
“Certainly. And Pom-Pom too.”
Lord Pomington, hearing his name and supposing himself in danger of being consulted on principle, opened one eye, yawned without modesty, and stretched one narrow leg from beneath his blanket.
“Do not pretend indifference,” said Elizabeth. “You are to represent the house.”
Pom-Pom growled once, very low, as if the house ought to represent itself, but he endured being dressed in a little wrapper of pale brown merino, lined and bound with a narrow braid that happened, by no coincidence at all, to answer the colour of Elizabeth’s pelisse rather well.
“There,” said Elizabeth, surveying him. “You may now enter public life with dignity.”
Pom-Pom disliked public duty and admired himself in equal measure. He submitted with the injured gravity of a creature long accustomed to sacrificing private ease to household consequence.
Bond Street was full of spring pelisses, wet wheels, pale gloves, and shop windows newly ambitious with ribbons.
The stationer’s had all the proper air of a place where names might be rendered respectable in several sizes and on good paper.
Elizabeth entered it with the composed determination of a woman who did not mean to be hurried into a vulgar hand merely because other women lacked principles.
Mr. Darcy, still at chambers, could not be asked whether he preferred his new direction in one form or another.
This was all to the good. Elizabeth had already discovered that he could be made very grave by the smallest proof that Portman Square had absorbed him, and she did not think a man should be consulted on every comfort he was intended to receive.
Mrs. Doddridge remained dutifully in the background. Pom-Pom, set upon a chair by the counter after demonstrating that the floor was beneath him, surveyed the establishment with unfriendliness.
Elizabeth was not alone in the shop.
At a table somewhat farther in, a very young lady stood over several sheets of ruled music paper, touching the staves with the absent care of someone who understood their use. Beside her, an older companion examined card-cases with more interest than the younger lady seemed to take in them.
Elizabeth noticed them only as one notices other customers while entering a place of business: the girl fair, slight, and very carefully dressed; the companion more fashionable than quiet usefulness generally required.
There was nothing openly amiss in the woman’s appearance, only too much arrangement, too much consciousness, too much of the world in the air of a person whose proper business seemed likely to be the guarding of youth rather than any personal concern with being observed.
Elizabeth had no reason to know them.
She returned to the more urgent matter of not being represented in London by the wrong name.
“No, not that one,” she said, rejecting a sample. “It looks as if I mean to bully my correspondents.”
The stationer bowed.
A small sound, quickly suppressed, reached her from the farther table. It was not enough to be called laughter, but enough to be called amusement. Elizabeth glanced up and saw the young lady colour faintly, while the companion gave her a look which had not much warmth in it.
“And that one,” Elizabeth continued, as if she had heard nothing at all, “looks too apologetic. I am not ashamed of being married.”
“Certainly not, madam.”
“That is well. It would be a little late to discover it.”
Another card was produced. Elizabeth considered it, held it farther off, and shook her head.
“It has the air of a woman who has become solemn in three directions at once.”
This time the half-stifled laugh from the farther table was clearer. The companion turned again to the young lady with the kind of composed, corrective look by which cheerfulness is reminded that it has not been invited.
Mrs. Doddridge, from behind Elizabeth, said gravely, “Yes, madam.”
At length the stationer, who had already begun to understand that Mrs. Darcy’s taste was precise and her patience not inexhaustible, ventured upon a cream card of moderate thickness, with a hand neither too ambitious nor too meek.
“This is much better,” said Elizabeth. “It does not look like a woman who either overspends or repents.”
The stationer, who had certainly met both, agreed respectfully that it did not.
“And on the same paper, cards for Mr. Darcy must be made.”
At the words Mr. Darcy, the young lady at the farther table looked up with such fixed and startled attention that all amusement vanished from her face at once.
“The direction, madam?” asked the stationer.
“Portman Square.”
The stationer wrote it down.
Mr. Darcy. Portman Square.
It was a small act, black ink upon an order sheet, but Elizabeth felt the force of it more than she had expected.
There were rings, rooms, breakfast cups, gloves in trays, a cane in its stand, a coat upon its hook, and still the world required pasteboard before it would consent to know where a man belonged.
The young lady hesitated, said something low to her companion, received in return a look and what seemed a permission not warmly given, and then came slowly forward.
“Have I the honour,” she said, with visible effort, “of speaking to Mrs. Darcy?”
Elizabeth turned fully toward her.
“You have.”
The young lady’s colour changed a little, but she held her ground.
“My name is Georgiana Darcy.”
It would have been difficult to surprise Elizabeth more completely had the stationer announced a sphinx at the door.
For one instant the room rearranged itself.
The fair hair, the shy gravity, the startled attention at Mr. Darcy’s name — Miss Darcy.
And the companion, smooth, watchful, modish beyond the needs of her office, could only be Mrs. Younge.
But astonishment in Elizabeth was never long without management.
“How do you do, Miss Darcy?” she said, and made her voice so perfectly natural that Georgiana, who had perhaps expected either confusion or ceremony, looked almost more discomposed by ease than she would have been by either.
“I hope you will forgive the liberty,” said Georgiana. “I had not expected — that is, I only wished to know whether I had been mistaken.”
“You were perfectly right.”
Georgiana’s eyes fell for a moment to the cards and papers on the counter.
“I had heard,” she said, in the same careful tone, “that my brother was married.”
“He is.”
“I see.”
The words were slight enough, but there was so much in the manner of them — curiosity, constraint, a certain involuntary pain at having put the thing into speech at all — that Elizabeth, who though not soft was quick, understood at once that this was not a girl who could be rushed toward comfort merely because comfort might be due her.
“Mr. Darcy is very well,” she said, after a pause short enough not to look like design and long enough to avoid seeming eager. “He is at chambers today, or he would, I think, be sorry to have missed you.”
Georgiana looked up.
“He is well?”
“Entirely.”
A little of the guarded tension in the girl’s face altered then, though not into ease. It became something more painful and more touching — relief checked almost at the moment of appearing, as if she were not accustomed to trusting the right to feel it.
Mrs. Younge had now drawn near enough to make overhearing certain. She smiled with an urbanity Elizabeth disliked more on second sight than first.
“Miss Darcy was struck by the name, madam,” she said. “One does not hear it every day without some natural interest.”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “I dare say not.”
Georgiana said quickly, as if afraid the matter might now be taken out of her hands, “I hope you will forgive me. I did not mean—”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
Pom-Pom, who had hitherto confined himself to contempt from the chair, now stretched his neck toward Georgiana and gave one suspicious sniff. Georgiana, startled, actually smiled.
“What is his name?”
“Lord Pomington,” said Elizabeth.
Mrs. Younge raised her brows very slightly; but Georgiana looked not amused only, but charmed.
“Does he always go out with you?”
“Only where the dignity of the household must be maintained.”
“Yes, madam,” said Mrs. Doddridge.
This, delivered from the rear with complete seriousness, would have been enough to betray the whole spirit of Portman Square to any intelligent observer.
Georgiana’s eyes moved from the dog to Mrs. Doddridge and then back to Elizabeth, and in them Elizabeth thought she saw the first small sign of something beyond surprise.
Not trust yet.
Perhaps only the beginning of wishing for it.
Mrs. Younge’s attention lingered too long on the order book, the counter, the cards. “Miss Darcy, we ought not to detain Mrs. Darcy from her business.”