The Role of a Gentleman #3
He expelled the breath. Looking up at the bed hangings, he said, slowly, “One summer holiday, when I was back from school, my uncle came to stay. It was the time of mother’s early trouble, and while father was busy, my uncle would sit with me.
Not a playful man, the Earl of Matlock, but not unkind.
Loved history. I gained much from our conversations.
One day he looked serious and asked me about my…
pastime, mimicking voices. He’d heard I’d been doing it at school.
He looked me in the eye and said, ‘We don’t do that’.
I thought he was making the same point as father, and I nodded and said, well, more or less what I said to you, to show him I understood.
But he shook his head and kept looking at me, as he said, ‘It is the sort of thing a George Wickham might do.’ It quite crushed me.
We were always united in disliking Wickham and thinking my father made too much of him; we were allies in that regard.
I thought we understood one another, and to have him say that…
I had to leave the room. I cried and cried, and mind you I was fourteen by this time, not a boy. ”
Elizabeth laid her head back on his chest.
“And you stopped after that,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I stopped.”
“But he was wrong,” Elizabeth said, earnestly. “There is imitation for the sake of mockery and deceit, and then there is something more… goodhearted, that seeks to understand people, imagine other lives, not to rob them of anything.”
“I’m still not altogether sure of that,” he said, with a sigh.
“What of that sort of artifice -that playing of a part- that we commonly call ‘charm’? Is it merely a permissible titivation, like a woman making the best of herself at a ball, or is it, in truth, as misleading as…” Then, any words he had been about to say were suddenly cut off by a series of thumps and shouts.
These were followed by the apologies of the nursemaid as Eleanor and John burst into the room, waving drawings for their inspection.
***
Finally, it was the twenty-fifth of December.
Darcy led his family into the church for the Christmas service.
The pillars of the nave were clad in holly and spruce, sprays of ivy and sprigs of laurel.
No mistletoe, he reflected, as he nodded left and right to the gathered parishioners.
It might grow anywhere, any oak might host it, however, as an embellishment, it was welcome in some houses and not in others.
The family pew was elevated from the rest, built leveled with the pulpit in the south transept that also housed the marble tomb of one of his ancestors, fenced with iron railings behind the three Darcy benches.
Once he had sat on the hindmost, later on the second.
Now, he and Elizabeth sat together on the first, their children and guests behind them.
Their party now included Mr. and Mrs. Bingley with their son Robert, who was the same age as Eleanor.
As a boy, Darcy had reflected much on the tomb of that ancestor.
The stone effigy was dressed as a knight.
Roland D’Arcy, only nine generations apart from a companion of the Conqueror himself.
He had imagined him into the battles he read about, pictured him victorious, raising aloft the standard of the Black Prince.
This dream had tarnished somewhat when he had grown tall enough to see the effigy’s face.
It looked, if anything, rather jolly. Slightly rotund, cheeks spilling over his coif.
The stone eyebrows raised almost amiably, the mouth just about sombre enough for a funeral and yet, as though the mason were compelled to include it, with the barest trace of good humour about the corners.
Uncle Matlock, his passion for genealogy extending even to families not his own, had lifted the veil entirely by informing him that Roland D’Arcy had been Steward of the Honour of Peveril under Edward III.
That meant an administrator, judge and financier -but not a warrior.
At first, he had been disappointed. A knightly ancestor who had contrived to miss the Hundred Years’ War was quite as bad as no knightly ancestor at all.
Then, as responsibility and the scrutiny of society had settled on him all too young, he had sympathised.
A fellow who wanted nothing more than his books, his work and companionable dinners with his neighbours had been made to feel he must be buried under a martial fiction that did not suit him.
Now, however, as the morning light streamed in, tinted red and amber by the stained glass, and as the well-meaning parson droned on, he had a new revelation.
Roland was neither a contemptible pretender to the honour of knighthood, nor an unmartial man forced to disguise himself in death.
He was buried as what he was: a knight in truth, a leader of his people and a good steward of his lands, and a merry fellow besides.
There was a certain fiction to the armour, but no contradiction, no concealment.
An essence of the mask was in the man, the essence of the man gave the mask its truth.
One could choose to don the armour or to lay it by.
That was the point. One could choose, and remain oneself.
When the service was over, he let the children and his guests precede him through the side gate and onto the path back to Pemberley and their Christmas feast. Elizabeth fell into step behind him, looping her arm through his and reaching into his overcoat pocket to hold his hand within it.
He squeezed it. Then, from his other pocket, he took two slips of paper and, smiling at her enquiring look, passed them to her.
The first read, ‘Edmund Burke’ and the second, ‘Finds a stray kitten on his doorstep.’
***
“One from the left hat, young Bingley,” said Major General Fitzwilliam to the boy in front of him, lifting Darcy’s upturned beaverskin in his left hand. “And one from the right.” He lifted Mrs. Darcy’s riding tricorn in its turn.
Robert, sensible of the gravity of his task, drew one folded slip of paper from each and ran to hand them to his mother to read.
A drawing room on Boxing Day is usually rather a sombre island in a cold and deserted house, in which the marooned and helpless gentleman and his family must content themselves with reading and hearing the distant sound of merrymaking from below stairs, or else absolute silence but for the patter of December rain.
There was indeed expectation and a silence as Jane unfolded both papers and laid them on her knee. The fire added a flickering orange light to the pale winter sun at the window, and every eye around the close circle of chairs before it shone with anticipation.
“Lady Catherine…” said Jane.
“That’s mine!” cried Richard.
“…on receipt of a hubble-bubble.”
“Oh, Richard,” Elizabeth chided gently, “we said no acquaintances!”
“Are we still acquainted with Aunt Catherine, I wonder? Is she still acquainted with us?” asked Richard. “Besides, you always used to do her, Darcy!”
“That was when I was young and disrespectful, Richard,” said Darcy.
“And what are you now?” Richard returned.
Elizabeth smiled, remembering the short-lived thaw she had once engineered with that august lady. It had not held, alas.
Darcy drained his glass of port, looked briefly into the fire, then suddenly sat forward in his chair and turned to face them with the slight up-tilt of the nose and the down-turn of the mouth that evoked the lady to a quite surprising degree.
“Ah, Pargeter, what is this? A gift from my nephew? Bah! Burn it at once! Oh, I see it is from my other nephew, dear Richard. Very well, I shall favour it so far as to open it, but to more than that, I cannot commit. Mrs. Collins…” he said, looking to Bingley, who was torn between astonishment and mirth, “…may benefit from my example in this matter. You will notice that I neither leap from my chair, nor cry ‘Yippee!’ Rather, with economy of movement and singularity of purpose, I shall proceed to pull both un-looped portions of ribbon at exactly the same time and, see… the ribbon…”
He mimed pulling with great force, giving the small, involuntary grunts that were so familiar to any who had seen Her Ladyship cutting her beef with knife and fork that Richard and Elizabeth burst out in loud peals of laughter which -as though setting the precedent- prompted the children and the Bingleys to do the same.
“There…” Darcy panted, “…you see, Mrs. Collins, how even the noble hand may be defeated by a vulgar knot! Have I ever occasion to tie a bow, I should do so with far greater efficacy…ah, Pargeter, yes, the scissors.”
The imaginary wrappings dispensed with, Darcy regarded his own cupped, empty hands with hauteur.
“Ah. I see.” He nodded once, severely. “It is a form of decanter, of course. I conceive it to be Venetian, or indeed Prussian; the two are very close in custom and character. It is for the elevation of wines of low character. The glass bulb admits air -note the chamber here- and this tube allows the more demotic vapours to be diverted away from the nose.”
He pretended to set it aside, then transfixed the helplessly giggling Richard with a gimlet eye.
“A very considerate gift from my remaining nephew. I shall write to thank him. But very coldly.”
Then he sat back in his chair, and all traces of Lady Catherine departed from his face. There was a quite spontaneous outburst of applause and unrestrained laughter, which he acknowledged with a twitch of his lips and a nod. When it subsided, he said, “Well, that’s my turn, who is to be next?”