Chapter Two The Neighbourhood Verdict
In the week that followed, Hertfordshire gave its opinion of the Netherfield party with the thoroughness of a county that had very little else requiring its immediate attention.
Mr. Bingley's sentence was swift and merciful: he was declared everything amiable, everything friendly, a young man of large fortune and good temper who danced every dance at the assembly and remembered the names of daughters he had spoken to for fewer than five minutes and had already expressed his intention to give a ball at Netherfield before the autumn was fully gone.
The neighbourhood received this last piece of intelligence with approximately the enthusiasm it would have given a general peace treaty.
Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst were assessed more carefully and found to be handsome enough, fashionable beyond what Hertfordshire strictly required, and possessed of manners that managed to be technically irreproachable while leaving everyone they met vaguely conscious of having been weighed.
Mr. Darcy was found guilty on all counts.
The evidence was comprehensive and well-documented.
He had not danced with a single unacquainted young lady.
He had declined two introductions. He had stood apart from the general sociability of the room with the evident conviction that standing apart was itself a species of communication.
He had spoken, as far as anyone could establish, to approximately four people, and the four people in question were connected to his own party or above the general run of the company in ways that made the selection pointed.
The verdict: insufferably proud. Not countermanded, as far as anyone could tell, by anything he had actually done, since the absence of action was precisely the charge.
Elizabeth heard all of this over a period of three days at five separate dining tables and two morning calls and a chance encounter outside the lending library where Mrs. Long held forth on the subject with the unselfconscious authority of a woman who did not distinguish between confirmed fact and confident inference.
She listened, and agreed where agreement was easy, and deflected where deflection was preferable, and said, to Charlotte, walking home from the Lucases' on Wednesday, that she found him more interesting than if he were simply disliked.
"That is not a compliment," Charlotte said.
"It was not intended to be one. I only mean that if he were straightforwardly unpleasant, there would be nothing to look at. As it is, he is a kind of puzzle."
"And you enjoy a puzzle."
"I enjoy almost everything," Elizabeth said, "when it does not require me to actually know the person."
She was not, she told herself, thinking about him particularly.
She was watching him the way she watched all new things in the neighbourhood: with the attention of someone who suspected the world contained more information than it volunteered and considered it her private project to extract it.
It was observation. It was the kind of thing she would have done with anyone.
He was, she observed, at the Lucases' card party on Thursday evening, exactly as the neighbourhood had described him and in some ways additionally so.
He stood near the fireplace with the quality of a man who had decided that his particular piece of the room was not available for general occupation.
He spoke when spoken to with an efficiency that was not rude, precisely, but that had about it the affect of someone who had concluded that most conversational overtures did not warrant the full cost of a response.
He was watching her.
She noticed this the way you noticed things that your peripheral vision declined to stop supplying: without committing to the noticing, without confirming it by looking, in the manner of a person who has filed a piece of information under present but not yet relevant.
He looked at her twice while she was playing at the table with the Longs, and once when she was standing at the window with a glass of wine she was not particularly drinking, and once more during the general movement between card games when the room rearranged itself and she ended up, briefly, in his direct line of sight.
She found a conversation with Charlotte at each available interval.
It was not, she was clear with herself, because she was avoiding him. It was because Charlotte was the most interesting person in the room. This was nearly always true and did not require defending.
Charlotte, for her part, had been watching Elizabeth all evening with the quiet persistence of a person who had known her for twenty years and understood that the things Elizabeth said most easily were very often not the things she meant most deeply.
"He has looked at you four times," Charlotte said.
"Five, but I was not counting."
"And yet you have counted."
"One naturally registers things," Elizabeth said, with great composure. "It does not follow that one assigns them significance."
"And do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Assign them significance."
Elizabeth considered the room. Darcy was at that moment in conversation with Sir William Lucas, who was, as always, delivering a speech he found thoroughly satisfying and to which his audience appeared to be offering the least participation his politeness would tolerate.
"He is proud," she said. "He finds everything beneath him.
He stands in a room full of perfectly acceptable people and manages, without saying anything particularly offensive, to suggest that he would prefer to be elsewhere.
I find him interesting in the way that an unusual species of bird is interesting. I would not like to keep one."
Charlotte smiled into her glass. "I did not ask if you wanted to keep him. I asked whether you assigned his looking at you any significance."
"I think," Elizabeth said carefully, "that a man who is bored tends to look at whatever is moving. And I tend to move a good deal."
This was the answer and she intended it to be the answer and she considered the matter, on the whole, satisfactorily closed.
Across the room, Sir William had reached the portion of his speech that concerned the assembly, and the ball at Netherfield, and the general perfections of the county, and the excellence of dancing as an art.
Darcy was bearing it with the air of a man enduring something by the application of a very specific internal resource.
At some point during Sir William's remarks on the harmony of the figures, he appeared to reach a decision.
He turned toward Elizabeth.
He did so with the directness of a man who had not rehearsed the action, which was itself a kind of information.
He took two steps away from Sir William in a way that somehow managed not to be a desertion, and then he was moving through the room toward her, and Elizabeth was quite certain he intended to speak to her, and something in the back of her mind produced, without being asked, the exact quality of sound a voice made when it had never given a single thought to who might be standing in the dark.
She turned to Charlotte.
She did so without urgency, without the appearance of anything other than a woman who had simply thought of something she wanted to say to her particular friend, and she said it, whatever it was, she could not afterward have reported it precisely because the words were less important than the direction, and she did not look back at him, and Charlotte looked at her once, very briefly, with the expression of someone who had noted something and would not be saying so just now.
She was aware, after a moment, of the sound of his movement stopping.
She kept her eyes on Charlotte and continued the conversation.
When she allowed herself to look, perhaps two minutes later, he was back near the fireplace.
His expression had not shifted from its usual composition.
He held a glass he had not been holding before and was reading a title on the bookseller's shelf that ran along one wall of the Lucases' particular sitting room, the kind of activity that occupied the eyes without troubling the mind.
He did not approach her again that evening.
She did not permit herself to notice the absence, because the absence was not significant and she was not tracking his movements.
She danced. She spoke to Mary about the music and to her father about Lydia and to Mrs. Long about the assembly and to Charlotte, once more, near the end of the evening, about nothing of particular importance.
But at the carriage, waiting for her mother to finish a sentence that had begun sometime before the second rubber of cards and shown no particular signs of concluding, Elizabeth stood in the cool night air and looked back at the lit windows of Lucas Lodge and had a single, very quick, very quiet thought that she did not complete before pushing it thoroughly to one side.
He had started toward her. He had changed his mind, or she had changed it for him. It did not matter which, because she did not assign it significance.
She had decided.
On her way home she listened to her mother's report on the state of play between Jane and Bingley, which was detailed and optimistic and only moderately accurate, and she attended to Lydia's story about Lt.
Denny and a remark he had made about her ribbon that Lydia found worth reporting in full and at length, and she looked out the window at the dark Hertfordshire lanes and noted that it was, on the whole, a very fine night.
She noted also, without intending to, that the carriage passed the assembly rooms on the way home.
She did not look at them directly. But she knew exactly which window faced the passage, and which angle the candlelight came from, and exactly how dark it would be, in that particular stretch between the corner of the wall and the side door.
She looked at Jane instead.
Jane was glowing, quietly, the way she always glowed when something real had happened to her, and Elizabeth looked at her sister's profile in the dark of the carriage and felt the clean, uncomplicated warmth of love that was the simplest and least qualified feeling she was capable of.
"He danced with you twice," she said softly.
Jane turned from the window. Her smile was the kind that tried not to be visible and failed entirely.
"He did," Jane said.
Elizabeth smiled back. "Good," she said, and meant it completely, and let that be the entirety of the evening's most important thing.