The Role of a Gentleman #2
“No idea.” Richard shrugged. “One term, came back, wouldn’t do it. Pretended he didn’t know what we were talking about. In general, I think he just grew up. He was quite changed, so serious, and you and I both know how long that stuck.”
***
The evening of the twenty-third was when the Darcys made up their servants’ boxes, preparing for Boxing Day.
This activity took place in Darcy’s study and, by tradition, they drank a decanter of sherry together.
The fire popped and settled, brown paper rustled and, every now and again, the chop of the shears marked the cutting of string.
Far away, they could hear Georgiana’s playing as she entertained Richard in the music room.
During a pause in the undertaking, the couple moved from their chairs on either side of the great desk to a convenient couch with their glasses in hand.
Abandoning several tactful approaches she had been considering to discuss a matter too crucial for her to ignore anymore, Elizabeth simply observed, “I heard your Falstaff as I was coming up the stairs yesterday. How jolly! The children loved it.”
He reacted quite normally, neither flinched nor looked uncomfortable.
That was, she thought, the mark of the true gentleman.
Never to do anything one would be ashamed to have done, even if one thought oneself unobserved.
It comforted her that, though she had not known about Darcy the mimic, it was a part of Darcy himself and not some other, larger concealed identity.
He looked down at his half-empty sherry glass, smiled briefly, and then finished it, setting it aside on a table.
“Yes, they did.” He agreed. “I was rather pleased to have an excuse to play the schoolmaster. I miss reading to them; I should do it more. Do you remember how Ellie loved the fox and the crow for months on end? She stopped wanting it and I let that discourage me.”
“I had not heard you do anything of the kind before, it was quite brilliant. Better even than Drury Lane.”
“Thank you, my dear,” he said, soberly. He took a breath. “No, I suppose you have not heard me do so before. It was…something I did as a boy.”
Elizabeth had the sense that she should stay quiet and let him speak. The clock ticked on the mantlepiece.
“I remember…I think I was twelve. I was humming to myself, lower and lower, lying on my back on the floor. I suppose I was relaxed, my chest supported, and I found a…perhaps ‘resonance’ is the right term in the chest and the throat. It sounded just like my father when he sighed. He was a good father on the whole, but busy. We did not speak a lot. I thought of the thing I heard him saying most often, ‘Bryant!’, his valet. I mimicked it. Next thing I knew, Bryant rushed in the door, bowed, looked puzzled and asked me where Father was. I was so frightened, I think I sent him off to the stables, or said I did not know. I cannot recall.”
She gave a low laugh and he caught her eye and smiled in that rare way he did when he was acknowledging, though not necessarily sharing in, a joke at his own expense.
“I stuck to safer people after that, and found to my surprise that it was just as easy. Tenants, servants, people at school. I didn’t really have to think about what I was doing with my voice, I just thought about them; pictured them speaking, their mouths moving, their shoulders lifting when they breathed, their gestures…
expressions. At Eton, I took requests! People would write characters…
situations… on bits of paper and have me perform. I made a complete fool of myself.”
A disagreeable expression did pass over his face then: a frown and a pursing of his lips at the memory of himself, as though he were an adult watching himself misbehave.
“How do you know you made a fool of yourself?” Elizabeth asked, lightly. “Did anyone say so?”
Rather than answer directly, he leaned his head on the low back of the settee and looked at the plaster moulding where the wall met the ceiling. His hands clasped one another on his stomach, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles.
“A gentleman’s only task, really…is to be a gentleman. To be himself completely, without wanting to be anything else. I’ve thought about it often and really…a talent like that could not have found a less appropriate person to inhabit.”
“Well, I’m not sure…” She demurred as to provoke further comment on his part.
He looked at her, eyebrows raised, and responded.
“Actors, of course, make their living by such artifice, courtiers no less so, politicians…even doctors must have their bedside manner. An officer must sometimes summon the voice of God, the King, rather than his own. A pauper might raise himself by mimicking his betters, a lawyer…” he gestured vaguely before his hands fell back to his stomach.
“My father heard me once. He wasn’t angry exactly, but he did tell me not to do it.
He pointed out…” Darcy indicated the half-finished boxes lying in rows on the floor “…all the work that is done on the gentleman’s behalf: grooming him, dressing him, working his estate, cleaning his house.
This…odd pretence we have that some men are born above others, when really it is only the fortune of circumstance, a purely material accident first that then fulfills its own prophecy by means of…
good food, diligent education, time for thought and rest. It only works if those so favoured are uncomplicatedly themselves.
Duty is not there to oppress them. It is there to render their actions sufficiently predictable that they may be properly served, in order to dignify all that service and good fortune with a sufficiently… splendid result. Do I make any sense?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It is like having one’s hair dressed.
One quickly learns one must stay absolutely still; one is the canvas not the co-creator.
Young girls -those who are even remotely pleasant, that is- mean to be kind and move their heads in ways they think will be helpful, and yet the maid is counting on stillness and is quite thrown out.
Nothing infuriates a good servant more than an amateur’s attempts to be helpful!
To…in a way, I suppose, impersonate them. ”
“Precisely, my dear. Indeed, you put things so well. I do congratulate myself on marrying you. Daily. How clever I was to do so.”
This was an accustomed remark between them, and they laughed together, eyes meeting fondly.
“So,” said Elizabeth, standing up to resume their task, “what I have gathered is that you would be quite happy to do such droll voices again among family only, and when no servants are present? As, for example, will be the case on the twenty-sixth. Three days from now.”
“Why of course,” he said, as though to another jest. He busied himself with Mrs. Reynolds’ rather splendid gifts while his wife refilled their glasses.
Ah Lizzy, she told herself ruefully, you have joked your way out of a solemn moment, and in doing so, too, out of making your final point. How little we really change.
***
Elizabeth awoke early on the morning of the twenty-fourth.
It was utterly dark outside the window, but a new fire flickered merrily in the grate.
Even so, there was a mist to her breath where she lay in bed, so she got up and sought her dressing gown.
She donned her slippers, lit a candle with a spill, and went to her writing table.
She folded a sheet in six, scored the folds, and tore it into strips.
She wrote something on two of them, took up her candle, and padded into their shared sitting room and through the door to her husband’s chamber.
He was still asleep, but he awoke quite naturally as she approached the bed, as though her presence alone called him.
“Good morning my dear,” he said, drowsily. “You have come to find me.”
She set her candle on the bedside table and slipped under the covers as he held them up for her. She handed him the two slips of paper on which she had written, then laid her head on his chest. He squinted as he read them.
“Napoleon,” he mumbled, and unfolded the next. “On receipt of a hubble-bubble.”
She began giggling, and he could not long resist mirth himself.
“How am I to know what Napoleon sounded like?” he asked.
She shrugged. “French. Well, Corsican. Tyrannical.”
“And what on earth is a hubble-bubble?” he replied.
“Some manner of Turkish tobacco pipe. Richard has sent one to your Aunt Catherine for Christmas.”
“No!”
“I know!”
When his chest ceased bobbing up and down from his laughter, and when he did not immediately oblige her with Napoleon, she said, “I’m sorry to go on about it.
I don’t mean to make you perform. I suppose I was…
not hurt, but I felt left out when you read in your normal voice again once I was there.
I’m really no better than John, am I, when he sees Ellie having fun doing something that he is not?
And yet…if it is only the servants that trouble you, and since we are just a family party this year, and the children enjoy it, I thought… why not?”
He was silent.
“Unless there is some other reason that we didn’t discuss last night?” she ventured.
He inhaled to speak, but then held the breath. She pushed herself up on her elbow to look at him, at his mouth, as though to read on his lips whatever he was hesitating to say.