CHAPTER 8
The rain began before breakfast was properly cleared away, and showed, by noon, with no inclination whatsoever of relenting. It was the particular steady rain of a looming English autumn that settles in for the length of a day and disrupts every plan made against it.
The rain that day, thus, defeated a scheme of Bingley's to ride out to look at a piece of drainage he had been meaning to inspect and a scheme of Jane's for walking into Meryton with Elizabeth to call upon Charlotte Lucas.
"There is nothing for it," Bingley declared, watching the water run in sheets from the eaves outside the morning-room window.
"We are none of us fit to be seen out of doors today.
Jane, you must come and tell me whether the account-books can be made to look any less alarming than they did yesterday, for I cannot make head or tail of them alone, and I begin to suspect the steward is concealing something from me to see whether I will notice. "
Jane laughed knowingly and allowed herself to be led away upon this errand, leaving Elizabeth in the small drawing-room with a book she had been meaning to finish for above a week.
Unfortunately, she had not yet managed above two chapters, as the general liveliness of Netherfield proved a good deal more distracting than she generally found conversation with a book to be.
She had not been alone above a quarter of an hour when Darcy came in, a volume of his own under his arm, and stopped short upon finding the room already occupied. "I beg your pardon, Miss Bennet. I had thought the room empty."
She stilled, and offered him a warm smile. "You may stay, sir, if you can bear the company of someone who has read the same two pages of her novel four times over without the smallest notion of what either of them contained. I confess myself glad of the interruption."
He hesitated a moment, she saw it and wondered at it, though she could not have said why, and then he took the chair opposite hers, near enough to the fire to be sociable and far enough from it, she noted, to suggest he had chosen the distance with some deliberation.
What followed was a conversation unlike any they had yet had, in the whole of their acquaintance, not because it lacked disagreement, for it did not, but because the disagreement, on this occasion, did not seem to serve a clear purpose.
There was no company to entertain, no neighbourhood gossip to furnish tomorrow's report, nothing at all to prove; and finding themselves, for the first time, without an audience of any kind, they talked as Elizabeth could not afterward remember having talked with anyone, upon subjects that ranged from the book in her lap to the library at Pemberley, which Darcy described with an unguarded warmth.
"It has been assembled over several generations," he told her, "my father and grandfather both adding to it a great deal more than either of them read, I think, though I have tried to be a better custodian of it than that.
I spend more hours there than anywhere else in the house, when I am at home. "
"You are fond of reading, then, beyond what you have shown me in argument. I had begun to suspect you read only enough to furnish yourself with opinions to disagree with me over, rather than for pleasure."
He offered a ghost of a smile in admission. "I read a great deal more than that, and I do read for pleasure; though I confess the opinions I have gained for them have proved useful on many occasions."
She, in turn, raised her eyebrows precipitously. "What do you read for pleasure, when you are not arming yourself against me?"
The question had been a light, teasing one, but he considered it with his usual seriousness. "History, chiefly. And some poetry, though I do not own to it generally, for fear of being thought a worse critic of it than I am."
"You need not fear that from me, sir. I am no great critic myself, only an enthusiastic one, which I have always thought a more honest position than pretending to have a discernment that I do not always possess."
Darcy seemed almost to smile at her words. "I think that is very nearly the most sensible thing I have heard said upon the subject of poetry in a twelvemonth."
They spoke, after that, of a great many things, of Cowper, whom they discovered, to their mutual and unspoken surprise, they both preferred to the fashionable poets of the present season; of the management of an estate, upon which Darcy found himself explaining, at rather greater length than he had intended, the particular satisfaction of seeing a tenant's cottage properly repaired, and finding Elizabeth listening with an attention that owed nothing to politeness and everything to genuine interest; of Georgiana, whom he mentioned only briefly, and with a tenderness in his voice that Elizabeth had not yet heard him direct toward any other subject, before recollecting himself and turning the conversation elsewhere.
"You speak of your sister very differently than you speak of anything else," she observed. "I think I have found the one subject of which you do not care to be contradicted. You have only affection for her; it is very plainly stated."
"She is very dear to me," said Darcy, simply, and Elizabeth, watching his face in that unguarded moment, felt a reluctance in his face.
The rain continued; the fire burned low and was made up again; and neither of them, for the better part of two hours, thought once to wonder where the time had gone, nor to regret its going.
***
It was only after Elizabeth had been called away, Jane returning at last from the account-books, flushed with pink cheeks, that Darcy remained behind in the drawing-room, coming to terms with what he had spent the better part of two hours refusing to acknowledge.
He stared at the fire, and said to himself bluntly, I am in love with Elizabeth Bennet.
Darcy had suspected it before, had fought the suspicion at his window, had felt his resolve give further ground still at the pianoforte, but he had not, until this rainy afternoon of ordinary and unguarded conversation, understood the whole extent of it.
It was not her wit that had undone him, he reflected, though her wit is considerable; nor her fine eyes, though he had long since ceased to pretend he had not noticed them.
It was that he had talked with her, for two hours together, about nothing of any particular consequence, and had felt, in the whole of that time, more entirely himself than he generally permitted himself to feel in any company; more himself, indeed, than he had felt in the company of anyone since his father died.
She had asked nothing of him, and she had wanted nothing performed. And in the absence of any requirement to be anything other than what he was, he had found himself, for two hours, happier than he could readily remember being.
The realization, once fully arrived at, brought with it no gentle joy, but something considerably nearer to alarm.
He knew what he was; he knew the weight of the name he carried, the expectations attached to it, the particular alliance his aunt had spoken with his cousin since his cradle, as though it were a settled matter.
He also knew what Elizabeth was not. She was not an heiress, not a woman of connections, not a match that any sensible accounting of his duty to Pemberley and to those who depended upon it could readily justify.
His thoughts went back to the other men he had watched, those he had privately judged, and judged harshly, undone by precisely this sort of feeling, marrying beneath what their families had a right to expect of them.
I have allowed this to go further than it ought, and I will allow it no further. Whatever I feel, I am master of it, or I am nothing at all that my father raised me to be.
Darcy decided, then and there in the quiet of the empty drawing-room, upon a course he told himself was the only one available; he would guard himself, from that hour forward, against every occasion of intimacy that had brought him to this present difficulty.
He would seek her company no more, and he would return to the reserve that had served him, before Hertfordshire, as a perfectly adequate defence against every inconvenient attachment, and he would trust to time, and to distance, and to the settled habits of a lifetime, to restore him to the man he had been before a pair of fine eyes and a ready tongue had very nearly persuaded him to forget himself entirely.
It is a reasonable resolution, arrived at by a very reasonable process of his thought. However, Darcy did not, in the whole of that day, examine too closely why a resolution so reasonable should have left him feeling entirely and comprehensively wretched.
Nevertheless, his change in behaviour, when it came, was not sudden in the manner of a door shut, but a gradual change in manner, so gradual, in fact, that Elizabeth could not afterward say when she first noticed it, only that she woke, some few days after the rainy afternoon that had passed so agreeably, to find that Mr. Darcy had somehow become very nearly a stranger.
He no longer sought the sitting room or the library when she was known to be in it. He no longer joined her on the morning walks that had become so settled a habit that Elizabeth had begun to order her own mornings around them.
He answered her at dinner with a civility so correct, and so entirely without the sharp edge of genuine engagement that she found herself glancing up from her own plate in the frank hope of catching some sign that the correctness was assumed rather than felt, and finding, each time, only the same grave and impenetrable reserve he had worn upon the very first evening of their acquaintance, before either of them had troubled to disagree with the other about anything at all.