Chapter Fourteen
While at Matlock to see Richard, Darcy never settled.
He was angry at his father, and he was disappointed by him. Darcy felt some guilt himself.
It was hard at first, for he was mostly filled with reacquainting himself with Richard—letters often separated by months had been the only exchange they had enjoyed for three years.
But as he became comfortable once more with his cousin, he eventually told him about his frustration with his father, and his anger at his own failure to protect Miss Bennet, and his deep, deep annoyance that Papa thought he was in love with Jane Bennet, when he’d never given her a serious thought in his life.
In time though their conversation turned towards happier and more interesting matters—Darcy talked about his brief time in Russia and longer time in Sweden, and the course of his studies, and how he was no longer so obsessed with trying to understand Kant, Hegel, and the rest of German philosophy as he’d been when he’d last seen Richard.
He also found himself frequently talking about Lizzy Bennet, and how she had grown up very well, and how he looked forward to seeing her again when he returned.
Richard spoke about his time in India, the battles he’d fought in, and his eagerness now that he’d been made a colonel to go to Spain and serve there, as he would in another month.
Upon his return from this brief exile from his ancestral manor, Fitzwilliam Darcy found the house covered in gloom, servants downcast, weather dreary, stones cold, fires insufficient, Georgiana and Miss Wilson gone.
Elizabeth Bennet provided the only remaining brightness.
Mr. and Mrs. Wickham were still absent on their tour.
Upon meeting Lizzy, she did not give him her usual instinctive embrace, and Darcy rather regretted that. However, it was for the best.
The lecture that his father had given him, and Papa’s attempt to make him swear to only marry a woman of fortune and consequence had left Darcy with intensified awareness of the beauty and appeal of females who would make unsuitable wives for the heir of Pemberley.
No, for the master of Pemberley.
His father would be dead when he married.
Perhaps for this reason, Darcy found himself exquisitely aware of those changes in Lizzy’s body and face that proclaimed her to no longer be a child, but rather a beautiful young woman.
Her bosom and hips had grown out. Despite the caution with which she moved, often sweeping the floor in front of her with her cane, there was grace and beauty in every motion.
Perhaps because he was long used to them, the scars on her face and neck did nothing to detract from the oval prettiness of her face.
Even with all his fondness for Lizzy, Darcy would not deny that when her eyes were exposed the way that one of the eyes had sunken in, while the other was covered by white cloudiness had a rather unpleasant look made uncanny by the lack of symmetry, but he had come to even find that pleasant to look on.
And she generally kept a folded scarf wrapped around her eyes, with the pretty color chosen to match or compliment the look of her dress.
It was uncomfortable for Darcy to think that someone who he had known for many years as a child was now a beautiful woman. That awareness would have been magnified if she embraced him tightly, as had been her wont.
He was aware enough without it. And the thought refused to leave him that she would make a far more unsuitable wife, in his father’s eyes, than even Jane.
The conversation about Wickham and the demand that Papa made that he swear to only marry a rich and well-connected woman had been the first time Dacy ever seriously questioned his father’s judgement and even his character.
During his first conversation with Lizzy after his return, there was an awkwardness between them that had never been there before.
Darcy did not like it. It must have come about because of the sudden awareness that he had of her as a woman.
When he inquired about the wedding and if the couple were happy at the breakfast, Lizzy had frowned, mumbled something he could not hear, and then she barely spoke for the next minutes.
Darcy hoped, rather than expected, for Mr. and Mrs. Wickham to be happy.
Over the course of the first evening spent in the drawing room together, Darcy’s awkwardness around Lizzy slowly dissipated—he could not forget that she had grown into a beautiful woman, but they were familiar with each other, and easily able to talk.
He found her to be even more clever, more sensible, and better informed in conversation than he remembered her to be the previous Christmas, which had been the last time that he’d spent many hours able to talk with her.
There was a great change in something indefinable. Her mind had become that of a woman, and not just her body.
And it was clear to Darcy that Lizzy delighted in being the center of the conversation, in the way that a young woman, sure of her powers to please, ought to be.
He was very happy to see this. He was happy that despite her blindness she had become, at least in this way, what she always was destined to be. He was happy to see her happiness in the conversation.
Lizzy’s conversation was sharper, wittier, and she could tell jokes that even had his father laughing until he clutched at his side in pain.
“You remind me of Bennet,” Papa said to Lizzy. “More than ever before in recent weeks.”
“I remind you,” Lizzy replied laughingly, “of a man well advanced in years. That is what every woman hopes to hear.”
Papa laughed. “I expected you to turn the sentence in such a way. Bennet would have. But I am thinking of your father when we were young. He was only a few years older than you are presently when we met. I remember that day. We both stood in the college hall, and he said to me suddenly, ‘I shall always defend the name of Caesar from his detractors, for he was no dictator,’ and I replied, ‘he certainly was, and Brutus was right to kill him.’”
“What?” Darcy said in surprise. “That was the beginning of your friendship?”
“What had you thought would be the basis?”
“That is precisely what I predicted,” Lizzy said grinning widely. “Down to the intonation you gave both speeches. Mr. Darcy, now I cannot be offended at the comparison, for it is clearly correct.”
Papa smiled at her; he told Lizzy to play and sing for them, which she indulged him.
That awareness of her returned.
It was difficult to not stare at her as she played. Her voice was beautiful, passionate, and thrilling, while her practiced fingers ran over the piano with grace and feeling.
The next days were filled with long conversations with Papa and Lizzy. Often, he’d sit in the study with Papa and Mr. Wickham for four hours at a time, hearing stories of the past.
Papa began to tell stories for the pleasure of the reminiscences.
Before when Papa told stories about the past, or about his childhood, or when he met Mama, or his friendships, those stories always had a point to them, a moral.
But now Papa told them for himself, to remember one last time before there would be no memory.
It made Darcy think of a line from Shakespeare, when Richard II gave up the crown: ‘No I, I no. For I must nothing be.’
Darcy was made to take a more active role in the management of the estate.
As much as he would wish otherwise, his father could now only ride a mile or two before he was too weak to continue.
A few days after Darcy returned, they made a call in a nearby town, and Papa could not mount the horse to return, and the carriage needed to be called to come from Pemberley to retrieve him.
And then Wickham and Jane returned and settled in the dower house, and they took Elizabeth away.
The change that followed this in the tenor of their party was great. Partly this was because there were far more people now in the drawing room every afternoon, since Jane and Wickham spent the whole day there, but it was not merely that.
While his childhood companion’s hostility was never overt, it was clear to Darcy that he had made, as he thought he would, an enemy in Wickham.
For her part, once she observed [GB3]them together in company, it was impossible for Elizabeth to not suspect, a little, that Fitzwilliam was not in love with Jane.
There was a great awkwardness when the couple first was presented to him, and they sat about.
Fitzwilliam said not a word.
Elizabeth felt keenly for what he must feel in such a situation.
And then when Wickham left the room, saying that he must look into a matter with one of the servants at the dower house, Fitzwilliam’s manner instantly became easier and he spoke with Jane without any affectation, awkwardness, or hesitation.
In fact, he spoke to her the way that he always had, as a friend, but with nothing else but friendly feeling in his mind or heart.
But she could not see them. Perhaps Fitzwilliam stared chiefly at Jane, with intense glowing eyes whose meaningful gaze was worthy of a novel.
The truth is that he stared at Elizabeth frequently, and even with intense glowing eyes whose meaningful gaze was worthy of a novel, and he looked at Jane seldom.
She was a beautiful woman, and of course he was aware of that.
There was that extra interest in what she might say or do that every man will have when sitting near a particularly attractive member of the fair species.
But he had no particular interest in her, or care for her, and his chief hope was to convince himself that she could be happy once married to Wickham despite his deficiencies.