Chapter 24 #3
Pained by his distress, Elizabeth barely touched his hands to still them. “As I said, a minor point. It is just something that bothered me at one point, but I already resolved it, and have not given it a single thought for months.”
Darcy relaxed his hands. “Something tells me you started with the easy things, because you still have not come to the real reason, and you feel it will either anger or pain me.”
“You are correct. It will do both, and I have been prevaricating.”
“I understand.”
Elizabeth sighed. “It… it was your proposal—well, not the proposal per se, but the underlying sentiments it exposed. You see—”
She paused, her hands shaking.
“It is the scruples, as you called them, that prevent me from accepting your offer. Nobody wants to be considered inferior. Nobody wants to be second best, tolerable, less than ideal, good in a pinch, any port in a storm, adequate, and so forth. Nobody knows the defects of my family better than I, but they are my family, and will remain so. My connections are what they are, and frankly, if they are insufficient for a Mrs Bingley, they are far, far, far from adequate for Mrs Darcy. I will not—”
Elizabeth paused. Tears pooled in her eyes, but this time she let them fall.
Darcy sighed. “I did not mean—”
She stared at him, tears spilling over.
“Of course you meant them! You could not help yourself if you tried. You said it yourself. You struggled for months to overcome your scruples, to decide whether I was good enough to be Mrs Darcy. I never desired your good opinion, and you certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I do not blame you for that. You are what you are, and I am what I am. I will marry a tradesman, or a less indolent version of my father, or a clergyman; and I will be perfectly happy. They will see me as the best thing that ever happened to them, not as something barely adequate and only acceptable in the throes of ill-advised infatuation.”
“I do not—”
Elizabeth stared hard until his words ran out. “In the end, in an odd way, as I said before, I cannot marry you because of my mother, but not for the reasons you might think.”
Perplexed, he asked, “Your mother?”
“You must remember her.”
Darcy nodded, ground his teeth, and dared not say anything.
“Do not fear saying what you are thinking. Every one of my sisters, including Jane, has said far worse than whatever came into your head these last months. But you see—well—you see—”
She took a deep breath. “As you no doubt noticed, she is a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she is discontented, she fancies herself nervous. You saw her in full flower at the Netherfield ball. We both remember the conversation, I am sure.”
Uncertain, but wishing to offer comfort, Darcy handed her his handkerchief.
“Thank you. I shall explain. Do you believe my mother was born that way?”
“Of course not.”
“It may surprise you to know she was not that way as a young wife and mother. Lady Catherine likes to ridicule us because we never had a governess, but we all turned out well enough in the end. When I was small, my mother was not as she is now. That came much later… after—”
Darcy held his breath.
“After she, in her own view of the world, failed to produce a son, as if producing 5 live and healthy children was not enough for any woman. As the years without a son piled up, she became nervous about the entail, because simple as it is, it does not make sense to her. Instead of patiently explaining it often enough, my father started teasing her about it. Instead of taking his daughters in hand, he left them all to my mother to raise. Instead of laying money aside for dowries, he wasted it on expensive books.”
She dabbed her eyes a few times, finding an odd comfort in using his handkerchief for the first and last time.
“You can rightfully blame her for her mercenary tendencies, but as awkward and narrow-minded as she is, she is doing her very best. She is right about what her daughters need. Marriage is the only route to security for a woman of my standing.”
Elizabeth stared at her feet. “My parents are very mismatched. Maybe they loved each other somewhat when they were young, or at least liked each other, but they were not well suited. My father came to resent marrying a woman inferior to him, and he made her suffer for it—for decades.”
She looked back at Mr Darcy. “I do not suppose you would do anything so terrible. Frankly, I cannot believe it of you. I do not claim to understand your character, but I cannot imagine you acting as my father did and still does. You would however, go into a marriage believing in my inferiority.”
Switching from balling her fists to tapping her foot, she continued.
“I use mathematics to make sense of the world, so think on this. You spent 80% of the words in your proposal speaking about your struggles, your considerations, your acceptance of my family, my connections, and my inferiority. In what should have been the most important speech of your life, this is what you chose to focus on, with nary a thought for how I might receive the words. I do not blame you. Nothing you said is wrong. You should not marry below you when you have all the choices in the world. You would not mistreat me, but I will not be second best—not for you or any man. I would rather be best for a man a tenth or a hundredth of your consequence.”
Darcy looked ready to cry again; it was time to end this debacle. Boldly, she reached across and grasped his hands.
“Mr Darcy, please… please… listen to me. You are not wrong to think of your family legacy. Centuries from now your family will still be well-known and important, while mine will not. That is as it should be. Your ancestors worked and fought for generations to establish your place. It is in your blood. It is in your upbringing. You can no more change your nature than a dog can change its desire to hunt. Do not fight it.”
She squeezed his hands until his eyes met hers and said the last of it.
“You have hidden from the women of your own kind for a decade. I refuse to believe they are all empty-headed flirts with mercenary mothers. Perhaps you need to look to the younger and overlooked sisters, or the intelligent but less beautiful ones, or better yet, the older ones; but there is a woman of the right station who will make your heart sing. I just know it.”
She stood, pulling him to his feet, for it was well past time for him to be gone. She took his elbow and led him to recover his hat and coat.
At the door, as he turned to go, she faced him. “Pray, do not despair. This is a setback, not a calamity. In a day, or a fortnight, or a month; you will see that I am right. Might I offer one last parting piece of advice?”
Darcy, visibly mortified, sniffled and wiped his eyes.
“I should be honoured.”
“Find the woman you can marry without apology.”