CHAPTER 7
It was not long before the wider neighbourhood took notice of what the household at Netherfield had already grown accustomed to, and began, with the particular relish a small society reserves for any entertainment not of its own making, to look forward to an evening in company with Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.
"You must sit near them at dinner, if you can contrive it," Mrs. Long was heard to advise a visiting cousin, at a card party given by Sir William Lucas.
"They will not disappoint you. I have not laughed so well at any dinner these two years as I did last month, hearing Miss Eliza tell Mr. Darcy his opinion of the militia wanted nothing but experience of an actual battle to recommend it. "
"And Mr. Darcy?" asked the cousin. "Does he take it well?"
"He takes it very ill, my dear, which is the whole of the entertainment.
He grows so grave, and argues back so earnestly, that you would think his honour depended upon it, and then Miss Eliza says something sharper still, and he grows graver yet, and so it goes, back and forth, until one hardly knows whether to laugh or to send for the surgeon. "
This report, whatever its exaggerations, was not far from the general truth of the matter, as Elizabeth and Darcy had become, without any design on either side, the settled entertainment of every dinner, every card party, and every small evening gathering to which both happened to be invited, which was, by now, very nearly every one that Hertfordshire's limited society had to offer.
Their disputes ranged as widely as their company permitted, from the merits of Mr. Cowper's poetry against Mr. Pope's, whether a woman's understanding was improved or injured by too much reading, the proper conduct of a gentleman toward his tenants, and, upon one memorable evening at Lucas Lodge, the entire question of whether pride could ever be accounted a virtue, which occupied the better part of an hour and left half the room uncertain which of the two disputants had prevailed.
"I maintain," Darcy had said, upon that occasion, "that a proper pride is a just sense of what is due to oneself and one's family. There is no vice in it at all, but is the very foundation of good conduct."
"And I maintain, sir, that what you call a just sense of what is due to oneself is very often nothing more than vanity wearing a more respectable coat, and that the gentleman who prides himself upon his own correctness is generally the last person in the room to notice when he has been wrong."
"You accuse me of vanity, then?" He asked gravely.
Elizabeth, always quick to reply, said, "I accuse you of nothing, Mr. Darcy, beyond a fondness for winning arguments. Though, I will confess that I share that sentiment much more than I ought to admit in company."
This last remark, delivered with a smile Darcy had come to recognise and, though he would not have owned it, to watch for, drew a laugh from the surrounding company and a look from Darcy himself that was not entirely displeasure.
***
What the neighbourhood took for entertainment, however, Jane was certain was something rather more considered, and she was not alone in the observation.
Charlotte Lucas, calling at Netherfield one afternoon while Elizabeth was occupied elsewhere in the house, remarked to Jane over their tea that she had never seen two people argue so constantly and so evidently enjoy it.
"I begin to think, Mrs. Bingley, that your sister and Mr. Darcy have found in argument what most people find in agreement.
They cannot converse ten minutes together without disputing something.
However, I have also never seen either of them leave the other's company looking anything but sorry that the conversation had ended. "
"I have thought the very same thing," said Jane, "though Lizzy will not hear a word of it from me. She insists there is nothing beneath it but two people who cannot agree, and grows quite cross if I suggest otherwise."
Charlotte offered a ready and knowing smile and a dry reply. "That is generally how these things begin, I believe. A lady, like our Eliza, rarely admits to liking a gentleman until she has first exhausted every possible argument against him."
For his own part, Darcy had begun to observe that his opinion of Elizabeth Bennet had undergone yet another change, his motivation in speaking and debating with Elizabeth.
He found that he did not merely enjoy disagreeing with her; he had come to value the disagreement itself, as a kind of testing-ground upon which he trusted his own opinions more, and not less, for having survived her scrutiny.
Elizabeth contradicted him, he began to understand, not from any wish to wound or to win, but from an honesty of mind that would not permit her to agree where she did not, and he found, upon further reflection, that he could not think of another person of his acquaintance, man or woman, whose disagreement he valued half so much, or whose good opinion, could he once be certain of winning it, he would value more.
He said as much to Bingley, one evening, as they enjoyed several liberal portions of port together, celebrating the successful completion of the new drainage system.
"I begin to think, Bingley, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet possesses the finest understanding of any woman I have met, though she exercises it chiefly in contradicting me."
"I could have told you that a month ago," said Bingley, "and, in fact, I begin to think I did, if you recall, though you did not thank me for it at the time."
Darcy reflected honestly. "I did not think it worth remarking upon, at the time.”
Bingley took a sip of brandy before asking, "And do you think it worth remarking upon now?"
Darcy did not answer this directly, which Bingley, who had grown considerably more perceptive upon this particular subject than his general habits of observation would have suggested, took to be answer enough. They remained silent for a moment, enjoying their drink.
That same evening, Elizabeth sat with Jane in Netherfield’s comfortable drawing room, where the family often retired in the evenings after dinner.
However, on this night, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy went to the former’s study to enjoy some port, while the ladies sat together in the sitting room, awaiting the gentlemen’s return.
Elizabeth, for her own part, began to notice small things she had not troubled to notice before, like the particular attention Darcy paid when she spoke, even upon subjects of no great consequence; the care he took, amid all his disputing, never once to belittle an opinion of hers even when he thought it entirely wrong; the manner in which his gravity seemed to soften by some unmistakable degree whenever she entered a room he was already in.
"You are very quiet this evening, Lizzy," Jane observed, as they sat near each other in silence.
"I am considering my next argument, Jane," said Elizabeth, returning from her woolgathering. Her comment was not, strictly speaking, true, and she suspected Jane knew.
Jane looked at her sister thoughtfully. "You need not consider it so very hard, as I think you have found a partner equal to the exercise."
Elizabeth took a settling breadth and shook her head, "I have only found an opponent, Jane."
Deciding to change the subject, Jane asked, “Why don’t you play a little this evening, Lizzy?”
Meanwhile, the two gentlemen having lingered rather longer over their port.
"You seem displeased, Darcy. I hope my cellar has not disappointed you."
Darcy shook his head precipitously. "Your cellar is excellent, as you know very well. I am only considering how long we may decently remain here before we are missed."
"Missed by whom, I wonder." Bingley's look was entirely too innocent to be believed. "Jane will not mind if we take our time. She is occupied just now persuading Miss Elizabeth to play for us, and I do not think either of them has spared a thought for where I've got to."
"Miss Elizabeth plays?" Darcy asked, sounding surprised.
"A little, and indifferently, by her own account, though I have heard her, and thought it a great deal better than indifferent.
She does not care to be pressed into it, however.
Jane has been at her these ten minutes, I should think, and Lizzy has refused her twice already, which I am reliably informed is her opening position upon every such occasion, and means nothing at all beyond the fact that she means to be properly persuaded. "
Darcy set down his glass with rather more attention than the action required. "Then we had better go through, or we shall miss the persuading."
Bingley grinned into his port and said nothing, though the look he gave his friend as they rose from their chairs suggested he had drawn precisely the conclusion Darcy would have preferred he did not.
At that moment, Jane was encouraging her sister to play the piano. "You have played for us before, Lizzy, and very prettily," said Jane. "I do not know why you should suddenly grow so shy of it."
"I am not shy, Jane, I am honest, which you would do well to distinguish more carefully. There is a difference between playing prettily for one's own family, who are obliged by blood to think well of it, and playing before a room that has no such obligation."
The men entered the family room at that moment to find it arranged much as Bingley had predicted, Jane seated beside the instrument, and Elizabeth standing a little apart from it, protesting that her performance would disgrace the company far more than it would entertain it.
Darcy, having heard Elizabeth’s protests, remarked, "I think you underrate your audience, Miss Bennet. I do not know that anyone in this room is so easily disgraced as you suppose."
Elizabeth turned to him with the particular light in her eye that he had come, by now, to watch for. "That is very handsome of you, sir, though I notice you have not yet heard me play, and so cannot properly judge what you are being so generous about."
"Then let me hear you, and judge for myself, rather than take your own poor opinion of yourself upon trust. I have generally found your opinions upon every other subject to want no defending at all. I confess myself curious to discover whether this is the single exception."
It was, in the end, this, rather than Jane's gentler urging, or the polite entreaties of Mr. Bingley, that carried the point, though Elizabeth could not afterward have said precisely why a challenge from Mr. Darcy should have succeeded where a sister's affection had failed.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth seated herself at the instrument with a small, resigned laugh, remarking that she hoped Mr. Darcy would remember his own confidence in her when it proved entirely misplaced, and began to play.
As she played, Dary thought that Elizaebth was not, in truth, a very great proficient, and would have been the first to say so; however, there was in her playing an unstudied ease, perhaps a want of self-consciousness that Darcy had rarely encountered in the more accomplished performances he had sat through in London drawing-rooms, where every note pressed for effect and every performer's eye strayed to gauge the impression being made.
Darcy thought Elizabeth played as though the room had ceased, for the moment, to exist at all, her attention given wholly to the music, her countenance unguarded in a manner he had not yet seen it, the sharp readiness she generally wore in company softened into something, to Darcy's eye, very much more affecting for being entirely unintentional.
He could not look away from her, and did not, for some considerable time, trouble himself to try.
Darcy had told himself, not a fortnight past, standing at the his window with an unfinished letter in his hand, that reason must eventually prevail over inclination, as it had always done before in every other trial of his life; and he understood now, watching her hands move over the keys with an absorption that owed nothing whatsoever to any wish to please him, that he had been arguing a case already lost.
Whatever defence he had constructed, of family, of fortune, of connections his relations would consider beneath him, seemed, in that quarter of an hour, to possess no more substance than the last note that faded into the general murmur of the room once she had done.
Darcy did not know, watching her rise from the instrument amid the company's polite applause, whether what he felt could properly be called falling, or only the final and entire admission of a thing that had already fallen some while before, and waited only for him to notice it.
He knew only that his heart, which he had spent months instructing with every argument reason could furnish, had ceased, in that quarter of an hour, to listen to him at all.