Chapter Thirty #2
The look lasted perhaps three seconds: not long enough to constitute a conversation, but Mary had never required length to make a point. The look said: I see it too. The look said: someone ought to do something about this, and soon.
Elizabeth gave a very small shrug. The look said back: I know. I have done what I can.
After dinner the fire was built up in the drawing room.
James, reprieved from his bedtime by the disorder of Christmas, sat on the hearthrug between his grandfather and his father, conducting further experiments with the wooden blocks.
Mr Bennet, cross-legged on the floor with the unconcern of a man who had given up performing dignity, provided architectural suggestions.
Darcy accepted them with a seriousness that had somewhere in the past two years stopped being ironic and become genuine.
Elizabeth sat with her embroidery and did not do any of it and was happy.
Except that Lydia and Fitzwilliam sat at opposite ends of the room, perfectly pleasant, with the precise distance of two people who have established each other’s range and stay carefully within it.
Mrs Bennet was making visible efforts not to look between them too often, and making those efforts with only partial success.
She was also visibly not saying something, which was perhaps the most effortful thing Elizabeth had ever seen her do.
The block tower fell. James made a sound of profound satisfaction and began demolishing the remains.
Darcy started rebuilding without comment.
Mr Bennet glanced once across the room at Fitzwilliam, very briefly, with the expression of a man confirming a suspicion.
Then he looked back at the hearthrug and assisted James in redistributing the wreckage into a more promising arrangement.
Outside, London was very quiet under the frost.
The following morning Mr Bennet found Lydia in the small sitting room at the back of the house that caught the winter light. He knocked, which was not something she had expected of him, and came in, and sat down in the chair opposite without asking, and looked out at the garden for a moment.
“How is General Lewes?” he asked.
Lydia looked up from the letter to Kitty she had not been writing.
“We correspond, occasionally. He is very fond of you,” Mr Bennet said obliquely, which Lydia took to mean that her father liked to receive news of her from someone a little more impartial than Elizabeth might perhaps be.
“He has been a very great friend,” she said honestly. “A remarkable man.”
“When did you last see him?”
She had known, from the moment he sat down, that the conversation would go somewhere she did not want it to go. She had not expected it to arrive so directly.
“He has not been well,” she said. “Confined to the house for some weeks. I have been meaning to call on him.” She stopped. “I shall go soon. Before the season resumes properly.”
Mr Bennet looked at her for a long moment. The silence was not comfortable and not uncomfortable. He had always been a reader of rooms. She had always known this, and had wished, from childhood, that he had applied it to the people in them with equal care.
He was applying it now.
“Papa,” she said, with a lightness she did not feel, “you are looking at me as though I have said something significant.”
“You have said nothing significant,” he said. “That is occasionally the same thing.”
He did not press further. He asked about Matlock, and she told him, and the conversation became ordinary.
He stayed half an hour, spoke of Mr Pearce with the dry fondness of a man who has made peace with a curate for a son-in-law, and made one remark about the frost that made her laugh properly.
Then he rose to go in search of Darcy’s library.
At the door he paused. He had the quality, she thought, of a man who kept his most significant remarks for exits.
“You look very well,” he said. “Not merely elegant, though you are that. I said it when we arrived to please your mother, but I mean it differently now.” He looked at her with the steadiness she had rarely had from him.
“You were always my most difficult child. I spent too many years finding that merely amusing, and not enough years considering what it cost you, or what it might have meant, if I had been more attentive.” A pause.
“I am aware that this is an overdue observation rather than a useful one. I make it anyway, for what it is worth. I am very proud of you.”
He left before she could answer. She heard his footsteps along the corridor, unhurried, and the distant sound of the library door.
For some time she sat looking at the frost on the garden.
She would write to Lewes today. She had been too long about it, and she knew it, and she had let her own feelings about his letter keep her from correcting it, which was unworthy.
He was old, and he had been unwell, and none of what she felt about his advice weighed anything at all beside the simple fact that she had been neglecting a friend who had never been anything but good to her.
She knew better. She should have known better sooner.
Somewhere in the house, James was being brought downstairs for breakfast, his progress audible by degrees.
Lydia took out a fresh sheet of paper, picked up her pen, and began to write.