CHAPTER 6
True to their word, a week later, Jane and Mr. Bingley returned from their wedding tour.
With the arrival of the newly married couple, the house resumed its accustomed cheerfulness.
Jane glowed with the happiness of newly married life, while Bingley seemed determined to convince everyone within sight that no man had ever known the true meaning of contentment.
Elizabeth rejoiced in seeing them so perfectly delighted.
Though, her satisfaction was not confined to witnessing their felicity alone; she was equally pleased to stay at Netherfield long enough to help Jane settle into the unfamiliar responsibilities of mistress of the estate.
She knew Jane possessed every quality necessary to excel, and Elizabeth also knew that Jane's kindness and good sense did not always prevent uncertainty in the beginning.
"You will manage it beautifully within a month," Elizabeth assured her sister, the morning following her return, smiling at Jane’s anxious expression.
"And within two, you will wonder that you were ever uneasy about it at all.
But I am very glad to remain and see you through the beginning, for I think even the most capable bride deserves to have her sister at her elbow for the first few weeks, if only to be reminded that she is doing everything admirably before she can persuade herself to believe it. "
Mr. Darcy, meanwhile, had likewise prolonged his stay, aiming to complete the drainage project that he had started, and aid Bingley through it.
Indeed, Darcy had reasoned that Bingley, newly married and inexperienced in the management of an estate the size of Netherfield, needed his counsel upon matters of business.
Darcy told himself, Bingley cannot be left to safely run things in the first weeks of his marriage; and it would be no great sacrifice, he reasoned thoughtfully, to remain another fortnight, or perhaps three, in assistance to fixing the drainage problem, as the neighborhood would benefit for it, and the neighbors themselves, are less tedious than I expected.
However, Darcy did not examine the question of why a neighbourhood he had privately judged, upon his arrival, to be sadly wanting in society should have improved so markedly in his estimation within the space of a month; nor did he permit himself to observe how frequently his counsel to Bingley concerning drainage, tenant leases, and the proper rotation of crops seemed to conclude, by whatever route, in the drawing-room where Elizabeth generally sat with her needlework and a book she was rather more often reading than sewing.
One day, a week after his return, Bingley pointed out an interesting habit he had observed in his friend. "You are very often in the drawing-room of an afternoon, Darcy. I had thought you a creature of the library."
Darcy was quick to refute his friend. "I find the light better in the drawing-room for reading, and the wall hangings are still being fussed over in the library; it is altogether disruptive."
"Is it?" Bingley asked, though it was more of a statement than a question, and he said nothing further. And yet, the look he gave his friend suggested he found the explanation considerably less persuasive than Darcy appeared to find it himself.
***
The days that followed settled into a pattern that surprised none of the four principal persons at Netherfield.
Jane and Bingley, absorbed in the particular happiness of a marriage still new enough to feel like a discovery, spent their mornings variously occupied about the house and grounds, and were frequently to be found, in the afternoons, walking arm in arm about the shrubbery, as people who had nowhere else they wished to be.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, found her days filled more agreeably than she had anticipated when she first agreed to the stay. She filled her time, in no small part, by a continuation of the debates with Mr. Darcy that had begun before the wedding and showed no sign whatsoever of concluding after it.
In the mornings, Elizabeth and Darcy often walked together, ostensibly because the exercise suited them both and the grounds at Netherfield were extensive enough to accommodate two persons of strong opinions without either party being obliged to give way to the other upon a narrow path.
In the evenings, they sat near one another ostensibly because the arrangement of the drawing-room made any other seating inconvenient; and they disagreed, on both occasions, so often that Jane began to observe her sister with a deeper understanding of the heart.
One evening, Jane ventured to address Elizaebth on the subject, while the gentlemen had gone out to smoke and the sisters were left briefly alone. "Lizzy, I have come to believe that you do not dislike Mr. Darcy as much as you did.”
Elizabeth, who had been staring absently into the fire, turned her attention to Jane at once.
"I dislike him precisely as much as I ever did," said Elizabeth, "which is to say, not very much at all, beneath the surface of it, though I would thank you not to repeat that observation to anyone, and particularly not to Mr. Darcy, who would make insufferably too much of it. "
Jane's brows furrowed slightly. "Why, I had not thought you disliked him, not of late at least.”
"Jane," said Elizabeth, with particular firmness, "you have been married three weeks, and have already begun to imagine romances in every drawing-room you sit in.
" She rose from the settee and crossed the room, not looking at her sister, but seemingly caught up in some deeper thought she did not care to share.
"I assure you there is nothing here beyond two people who find they cannot agree upon anything, and have, I suppose, grown rather accustomed to disagreeing. "
"Very well, Lizzy." Jane raised her needlework, a small, private smile just touching the corner of her mouth.
"Do come and look at this stitching. I cannot decide whether it is very badly done, or only badly enough to be mended.
" And she said nothing further upon the subject, content, for now, to let time furnish its own proof.
***
Elizabeth, for her own part, found herself less able than she liked to maintain, even to herself, the fiction that nothing lay beneath the sparring but the sparring itself.
She had set out, from the very first, to dislike Mr. Darcy, and had settled upon it almost before he had done her the injury of mistaking her for a servant, as though she had known that here was a man who would require disliking if she meant to keep any peace of mind at all.
He is proud; she had thought so from the first day, and she had not, in the weeks since, found sufficient cause to strike the word from her private accounting of him.
Mr. Darcy carried himself like a man who had never once been made to doubt his own judgment, and said what he thought with a bluntness that wanted, in her opinion, a good deal more softening than he troubled to give it.
And yet.
Elizabeth found she was inclined to reflect on the nature of pride, which was a very inconvenient word to go on applying to a man who listened to her, actually listened, thoughtfully considering what she said as though it mattered, before it was his turn to speak again.
He is grave, certainly; she did not think she had ever seen him laugh outright, or even smile without some effort of restraint. But, she had begun to suspect that his gravity was not entirely coldness, but perhaps something else entirely.
She recalled what Mr. Bingley had let fall, in his easy, unguarded way, of his friend's situation, the magnitude of his estate, a sister still young enough to want guiding, a family name that had carried in honor for generations before Mr. Darcy had ever been born to inherit the keeping of it.
She thought that a man raised to such expectation might well have been taught, early and thoroughly, that his conduct wanted watching as closely as his words.
She thought of his principles, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she liked him rather better for it than she had expected to.
It was not so very different, she considered, from her own habit, save that his reticence expressed itself in silence, and hers, more often than not, in speech that arrived already sharpened.
Though, he is not unkind. That, at least, she could say with some confidence, however much else remained unsettled.
Elizabeth had watched Mr. Darcy with Bingley, whose happiness he guarded as jealously as a brother might; she had watched him, once, gentle almost to tenderness with a child of one of the tenants who had run across his path on a walk, correcting the boy's manners with a patience she would not have credited him with beforehand.
These were not the marks of a man who thought himself above the ordinary decencies of the world, whatever his manner in company might suggest to a stranger.
What troubled Elizabeth most, if she was honest, was not that she had been wrong about him, for she was accustomed enough to error. It was rather that she could no longer say with any certainty what she was right about how she judged Mr. Dary.
She had told herself he was insufferable within an hour of meeting him, and she had meant it.
But now, some months later, Elizabeth found herself arranging her mornings around the likelihood of his company, and she could no longer convince herself that this was an accident, or a habit, or anything so easily dismissed as either.
I do not even know that I like him, she told herself, more than once. I know only that I have grown accustomed to looking for him in every room I enter, and that the rooms that I cannot find him in seem, for reasons I cannot satisfactorily explain, empty.
Elizabeth knew this was not an admission she was prepared to make to Jane, or even to Charlotte, nor to anyone else who might be tempted to make more of it than she was willing to allow; but she could not, on the strictest examination of her own heart, call it anything other than the truth.
***
One evening, in his own room, Darcy reflected on Miss Elizabeth Bennet. He had known, almost after the first fortnight, that his admiration for Elizabeth had begun to outgrow whatever bounds he had originally set for it, and he had known exactly why that admiration was a problem.
While Elizaebth was a gentleman's daughter, the connection ended there in every particular.
Her mother's family were in trade; and her mother herself possessed a want of delicacy that Darcy had witnessed on more than one occasion. It was not only her mother though, for Elizabeth’s younger sisters ran wild in a manner that would have mortified any other careful parent.
Elizabeth had no fortune to speak of, and the connections she did have would furnish an unkind observer with material for a season's ridicule, should he ever be so unwise as to bring her into the circles he was accustomed to move in.
Thus, he repeatedly told himself these things believing, for the better part of two months, that discipline alone must eventually answer the case.
Darcy had been raised to a certain idea of what was owed to his family's name, to Pemberley, to the memory of a father who had trusted him to preserve what four generations before him had built; and no share of wit, however dazzling, and no pair of eyes, however fine, which he had been obliged to concede that they are very fine indeed, could be permitted to outweigh considerations of his family’s expectations.
Indeed, Darcy had seen young men of his acquaintance undone by exactly this species of imprudence, marrying where inclination led rather than where judgment approved.
And, in many instances, the young men would end up living out their lives in diminished consequence and family estrangement.
This would certainly not be the ase for Darcy, as he had promised himself, long before he had ever set foot in Hertfordshire, that he would not be numbered among them.
And yet the discipline, which had served him faithfully in every other department of his life, seemed to begin to secretly fail him.
Each day, he would resolve, walking down to breakfast, to be easy and indifferent in her company, and to answer her with the same cool civility he extended to any other young lady.
How was it then, that he would find himself, within the quarter hour, seeking out her opinion on some point of no consequence whatsoever, merely for the pleasure of hearing her contradict him.
On several occasions, Darcy resolved to shorten his stay at Netherfield, to remove himself from a temptation his own reason told him he ought never to have permitted to take root, and would discover, examining his correspondence for some plausible pretext, that he had invented three separate reasons why his departure must, after all, be delayed a little longer.
This will not do, he told himself standing at his bedroom window, holding a letter he had not the smallest intention of finishing.
This is precisely the situation I have always despised in other men, and I will not be made a fool because the lady in question happens to possess an understanding I have not encountered in the whole of my acquaintance, he told himself, firmly resolved.
But the resolution, however firmly made, had a way of dissolving the moment she entered a room; the moment her eyes met his with that particular light of challenge she seemed to reserve for him alone, as though she had already anticipated some objection he had not yet troubled to voice, and was prepared to demolish it before he could raise it.
Darcy had spent a good portion of his life believing himself a man governed entirely by reason, proof against the sort of ungoverned feeling he had observed, not without some private contempt, in weaker men; and he found it a humbling thing, at eight-and-twenty, to discover that reason, confronted with Elizabeth Bennet's good opinion, mounted a defence a good deal less formidable than he had always supposed it capable of.
He did not yet know what he meant to do about it. He knew only that the battle, which he had entered with every confidence of an easy victory, had begun to feel a good deal more evenly matched than he wanted to admit.