The Role of a Gentleman #4
“Oh no!” said Richard, to universal agreement, “That is not how this is to proceed. It’s you next, for as long as you’ll indulge us.
The moment you stop, I shall sing ‘Here’s a Health Unto His Majesty’, and you may consider that a threat rather than an offer!
I’m notoriously famous in officers’ messes from here to Vienna. ”
Silence fell again, as Ellie drew a slip from each hat and scurried over to her father, lingering at his knee as he opened and read them. He nodded once, closed his eyes as though in thought, and passed them to her to announce.
“Edmund Burke -we’ve read him with Mrs. Nurry- defends the… rat-i-on-ing… of Turkish delight.”
All present laughed, Jane Bingley recognising her own scene. Richard, whose gift had indeed been impounded in the locked corner cupboard after but a single layer had been eaten, led the boys in parliamentary cries of “shame!”
In response, Darcy sprang to his feet and took the floor upon the rug before the fire with grave dignity.
“Ladies…gentlemen…children of England,” he began, his voice deeper even than usual, trembling with the emotion of his subject, “I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated consumption of Turkish delight as well as any gentleman. And yet, in its possible excess, I recognize a very great evil. Though it has pleased a father’s cousin to bestow upon us this confection, we ought to suspend our judgment until the first dusting of sugar is a little subsided, till the ribbon is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a smooth and pinkish surface.
“What of the obvious consequences of your doctrine? That you should be permitted to gorge until your bellies drag the carpet, your movements sluggish and ponderous, until at last, in the final extremities of satiety, you find punishment in your success?
“I have told you candidly my sentiments. I think they are not likely to alter yours. They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who, in his final, festive acts, does not wish to belie the tenor of his Christmas.”
“Very well, last one,” said Darcy over the applause.
“But why?” cried John from his mother’s lap.
“Rule of three,” said Darcy. This satisfied the children without further objection, having already grasped the infallible truth that anything bearing the title ‘rule’ need not make sense to deserve enforcement.
Richard violated his hat-holder’s neutrality so far as to ensure that one each of Eleanor and Robert’s papers were chosen for this final time.
Robert’s scene was conventional enough, though he had hoped to hear it performed by ‘a knight called Sir Crumpet’.
Eleanor, somewhat bloodthirsty, had wished to hear ‘a speech at the foot of the gallows’, though the personage she had thus sentenced also confirmed her as the heritor of her mother’s imagination.
“A talking haggis encounters a fair damsel,” Richard read, to much amusement. Darcy again reflected for a moment, his eyes on the pattern of the rug, his lips moving slightly. Then, he looked up.
“I believe here we will need a little scene-setting; as His Majesty showed us last summer, context is everything in these affairs.”
He stood, looking around as he took to the centre of the room.
“Let me prevail upon you to imagine…we find ourselves on a hillside -a brae, I believe- overlooking Glenelg. The flowering, purple heather is stirred by the ceaseless wind, firs toss… somewhere over there by the harp…in fact, I believe we need that, Robert, could you?”
He demonstrated the sighing of a fitful breeze, cheeks puffed out and lips pursed. Robert willingly took it up and John, an uninvited zephyr, added a higher and somewhat wetter note.
“Splendid,” said Darcy, turning to his daughter. “And Ellie, I believe there is a flock of crows -forgive me, corbies- nearby, wheeling in a sky overcast with heavy clouds.”
Ellie cawed convincingly.
“Excellent. And now there wants only…” he smiled and extended a hand to his wife, “the fair damsel. Or, rather, the bonnie lassie? Over here, if you would be so kind.”
Elizabeth set John down, still blowing, and rose to her feet, suddenly feeling all the nerves of a spectator called onstage.
“What do you suppose this lassie is doing on a brae in such frightful weather?” she asked, smoothing her skirts.
“Why,” he said, as he led her near to the harp currently doing duty as a copse of crow-haunted pines, “I suppose she is waiting for just such an encounter as we shall shortly see. Her sisters occupy the next four glens westward; thus their mother hopes they might cover more ground.”
He retreated to the far corner and began making his way slowly across the room, his solemn expression amply contrasted by the use of his two, downward-curving, outstretched arms and a wobbling, side-to-side gait to convey the fact that he was an armless, legless Scottish pudding. Tremendous laughter filled the room.
Elizabeth joined in it freely, but was silenced when he raised his head suddenly, as though beholding her for the first time.
The expression on his face made her breath catch in her throat.
A strong countenance, like a fortress formed to be invincible, betrayed from within the direction of attack it least suspected, so that certain elements of its defences -the eyes, the lips, the brows- were quite undermined, and suddenly proclaimed their openness even as the larger structure remained as closed as ever.
“Ho there, sir knight,” said Elizabeth, when it was clear he was not soon to speak.
“Nay, lassie,” he said, waddling a few inches closer, still gazing at her as if at an inner vision.
“Nae knight am I, but a free puddin’ o’ this land -boiled at Bannockburn.
We stood braw in our ranks, shoulder tae shoulder, till the broth bubbled ower.
Then, we were scattered- served oot, bit by bit, tae be devoured in sorrow.
And I hae wandered since, wi’oot purpose… till I met you.”
“La, sir! That is rather bold, upon my honour” Elizabeth glanced down. “Why, you are injured! Your leg… ah… your lower part is quite split, I can positively see the oatmeal!”
She led him solicitously to a footstool and sat him down, miming the tearing of a shawl into bandages. He did rather well, she thought, with his set jaw and soldierly wincing.
“There now,” she said, “You shall do for the present. But I must insist you come back to my…bothy at ‘Langburn’, would it be, until you are quite restored?”
She made to rise but he, having apparently grown a limb sufficient for the purpose, seized her arm and kept her near him.
“Ye must forgive my haste, ma’am,” he said, eyes only for her, “But in this hantle o’ hardship, it does not dae tae be ower mim.
Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far, but love is a fixèd star.
I love ye. Most ardently. And ne’er wish tae be parted frae ye, frae this day on. Will ye marry me?”
Elizabeth coughed, her throat suddenly quite dry.
“Well, I…I should not like anyone who might overhear us…” she glanced at Ellie, who sat on the rug, hugging her knees to her chest and clamping her mouth shut so as not to burst out in delighted laughter, “…to think one ought to entertain proposals upon so slight an acquaintance… and yet…”
“Quite right,” said the pudding. It rose to its feet and they moved -it waddling, she walking- back towards the assembled party. “Let us then repair tae this ‘Langburn’, and then see what a meal we might make of it together.”
Suddenly he stopped, and she with him. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and she, doing likewise, saw that a sprig of mistletoe had been tied to a branch of the chandelier.
It looked odd, dangling alone from the sparkling composition of cut glass.
It was off-centre, fearfully small compared to the glory that hosted it.
Its green leaves were in some ways satisfyingly regular, the shape at once recognisable.
They grew into their own patterns, however, punctuated with those strange, nacreous berries as though at random.
Entirely irregular in isolation, the mistletoe conveyed the notion that, if one could see enough examples -many sprigs over many years- a pattern would emerge that would explain the world, and the life within it in a way a geometric arrangement never could.
Inevitably, Darcy and Elizabeth set eyes on each other.
And, of course, they kissed.