Chapter Twenty-one
The next morning, I had servants reporting to me that the colonel was seen leaving Mrs. Bennet’s bedchamber in the wee hours of the morning, and I simply paid them coin and told them to look the other way.
I hoped that would be the end of it, then, but I was not sure why I had thought that, for it wasn’t as if something like that tends to only happen once and the two parties are never interested in doing it again.
And then, of course, there was the way they were with each other.
They made eyes at each other over the breakfast table.
They went on walks on the grounds of Pemberley and they would start out walking with two feet between each other and drift closer and closer.
When they thought no one was looking their hands would brush and their bodies would grow close and he would put his arm around her, and she would gaze up at him with this look on her face of sheer happiness, and I wondered what it was that I had done.
I took Richard aside. “You should go,” I said.
“Go?” he said, stunned. “I certainly cannot go, Will.”
“You will find some other woman to tup back in London. You cannot be here when her husband returns.”
“Yes, but her husband won’t mind,” he said.
“We do not know that,” I said. “She concocted this idea all on her own, and he may not be the least bit pleased. It was Bingley who offered me free access to his wife, not Bennet. And Bennet does not like me, you know, he does not like me at all.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, he has some idea that I am not right for his sister, I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t like him either.”
“You don’t?”
“No, he corrupted poor Elizabeth—”
“Your wife? He corrupted her?”
“Yes, she never would have gone off with Mr. Wickham if she had not been under the influence of her brother. She wished to have some sort of love affair like her brother’s, and this is why she did it.”
Richard did not say anything.
“You don’t agree?”
“Well, what was Georgiana’s excuse, then?”
“Oh, Georgiana did not run off with Mr. Wickham. She did not go in a carriage bound for Scotland with the man.”
“No, but she was willing to marry him, Will,” said Richard. “I think you must take into consideration that it’s possible that women just found him attractive. He was a devil of a man, and I am not sorry he’s gone, but he was easy to look at. Women liked looking at him.”
I gaped at him.
“This is a revelation to you, that women find men attractive?” said Richard. “Or is it simply that you cannot bear that your wife might have ever wanted someone who wasn’t you?”
I flinched.
He sighed. “Will, you have so many advantages. You don’t even understand what it is to be a man who looks the way you do, who has so much money, and who is so…” He shrugged. “You have no notion what it is to be me, you see.”
“You are the son of an earl. You hardly suffer.”
He pointed at his face. “I am not what anyone would term handsome, Darcy.”
“That does not matter, though—”
“Eventually, it does not matter,” he said.
“Eventually, other things are more important. But if you are someone like Mr. Wickham, it’s an advantage you can use to get whatever you want.
And with you, it takes so long to get beneath to the real you, the part that isn’t just rules and stiffness and fear of being wrong, that you are quite lucky to look the way you are.
If you didn’t, you would not have been able to get by with your disposition.
You would have had to cultivate one like mine. ”
“I have no control over my disposition,” I said.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “I think you should reconsider your anger towards Bennet, that’s all.”
I sighed. “Perhaps.”
He furrowed his brow. “And when is he coming back?”
“In a week,” I said.
“A week,” said Richard, sounding disappointed. “So soon.”
“You don’t even like her,” I said.
“Caroline?” he said, turning to look off into the distance, a wistful look on his face. “I like her.”
I was taken aback by that. I did not think I had seen that expression on his face when it came to women. Especially not when it came to one woman in particular.
He was talking. “She’s not like most women, I suppose.
There’s this bravado about her, but when you get past it, you realize she’s desperately insecure and she has this shy way about her.
She wants to please you. She wants to be pleased, but she has no idea how to go about doing any of that, and she’s sort of…
bumbling, perhaps. But there’s something rather fetching about it in a way that I can’t quite explain.
” He chuckled. “And she’s sort of sad, you know, Will.
Deep down in there, there’s this painful wound in her, as if everyone has rejected her, simply everyone, and perhaps I’m the same, I don’t know.
Maybe everyone has that little sad center in them, and maybe wants to show it to someone and have that other person embrace you and hold you against their beating heart, clutch you close, kiss you, and finally accept you, once and for all. ”
Well, this was not good, not at all. I thought my cousin might have fallen in love with Caroline Bingley of all people.
He turned to look at me with another chuckle, this one a bit embarrassed. “Oh, dear, I went on a bit there, did I not?”
“You have been careful, I hope,” I said. “You have taken precautions not to get her with child.”
“I’m not a fool,” he said to me. “But I wonder what our children would look like. Hopefully, they would take after her and not me. She is much nicer to look at than I am.”
“I don’t know if I agree,” I said, for Caroline was really quite plain, I had always thought.
“At any rate, you ought not be thinking that way. I think you really must go. You must bid her goodbye. She has got what she wanted and hopefully her curiosity has been slaked and you have found it all diverting, and I think you must put her from your mind now.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and furrowed his brow.
“She is another man’s wife, Richard,” I said.
“Yes, but he hardly counts as a man, does he?” said my cousin.
“I do not think he would agree with that statement,” I said.
Richard did not leave, and the days passed quickly, and the arrival of the party from the Lakes grew closer and closer.
I told myself it would be all right, that Mr. Bennet could not be too angry about it all, in the end, and that perhaps they could come to some agreement like the one that Bingley had offered me.
I told myself that I must apologize to Mr. Bennet, make peace with my wife’s brother, for we would be associated for a long time.
I could not ever say that the bible did not condemn his behavior, I supposed, but perhaps that did not matter.
It was not my concern, truly, how it was that other people conducted themselves.
It was only my concern that I see to myself and my household.
I should leave the state of Bennet’s and Bingley’s souls to themselves and God.
After all, it was God who judged.
It was not my place.
After I thought this, I thought of only twenty other aspects of my life where I needed to take this advice, and I felt a heavy weight of shame.
I had been most exacting with a number of people, not least my own wife.
I resolved that I should do much better in the future, for she deserved a better husband than what I had been to her hitherto.
The party arrived mid-day, and they were all quite festive, full of laughter, and they spent the afternoon regaling us with all manner of stories.
Truly, the three of them did seem to be perfect travel companions.
I imagined that if my wife had married Bingley, there would have been compensations.
They would have had quite a good deal of fun together.
But she was ever so happy to see me, and I was to see her, and when we were alone that night, she whispered in my ear that she thought she might be with child, that her monthly time was quite late now, and I apologized to her on the spot, promising to her then and there that I should be a different man, that I should never subject our child to whatever it was that I had subjected her to, that I had realized that it was my job to see to myself not to tell others how to behave.
She covered me in kisses and said that we would balance each other so very well, the both of us, that sometimes it would be necessary for me to be stern when she was not, and vice and versa.
I had missed her very much.
But we were awakened in the night by a frantic pounding on the door, and Mr. Bennet called in that he must speak to Elizabeth, and I got up and yanked the door and said there had better be a good reason for waking my wife when she was likely with child, and this stopped Bennet cold.
“You never said,” he said to her.
She was yawning behind me, wrapped in the bedsheets. “I thought you would be angry. You have spent almost the entire trip insulting him, you know. Will, this would be a fine time for you to tell him what you say you wish to tell him.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “You see, I have been quite wrong to have ever put any judgment to you or to Bingley. It is not for me to say, and I must spend more time looking at the beam in my own eye and not the speck in my neighbor’s. I know that you will not—”
“It’s Caroline,” he broke in. “She and the colonel have eloped.”