Chapter Six The Neighbourhood Verdict
By the end of November, Hertfordshire had recovered the full use of itself.
Jane had come home and resumed the particular project of being Jane, which was to say that she went about her ordinary days with the quality of a person quietly carrying something warm.
She did not speak of Bingley often. This was itself a communication, because Jane, when she was indifferent to a subject, spoke of it with perfect ease, and when she was not indifferent, she was careful.
She was being careful. Elizabeth watched this with the attentive love of a person who knew exactly what was happening and found it, on the whole, very good news.
Bingley continued to call. He was, as Bingley was, entirely transparent in all the best senses of the word.
He brought his horse to Longbourn three times in ten days.
He asked after Jane each time first and asked after the rest of the family second, which was the correct order and which he appeared to have arrived at naturally rather than by calculation.
Elizabeth approved of him without reservation, which was not a sentence she applied to very many people.
Darcy had called at Longbourn twice while she was out.
She knew this because Mrs. Bennet mentioned it, the first time with triumphant suspicion and the second time with a more complex species of the same feeling, having had a week to develop her theory of what it signified.
The theory, as reported to the sitting room at large, was that Mr. Darcy was proud and disagreeable and yet had called twice, which meant either that pride and disagreeability were no obstacle to calling on young ladies when one chose to, or that he had come for Bingley, which was what Mrs. Bennet said she supposed was the case with an expression that clearly supposed no such thing.
Elizabeth attended to this with half her mind and the other half on her embroidery and thought: twice.
She had been out both times. She did not think she had been out intentionally, and she did not think she had been out accidentally, and the space between these two thoughts was a kind of space she had been accumulating for several weeks now and had not yet decided to furnish.
The neighbourhood, meanwhile, had arrived at its own settled opinions on the question of Mr. Wickham.
The settled opinion was uniformly warm. He had been in the neighbourhood for three weeks and had in that time managed to be liked by nearly everyone who had encountered him, which was, by local standards, an extraordinary achievement.
He had danced well at two separate gatherings.
He had listened to Sir William Lucas for forty-five minutes without visible distress.
He had said something to Mary Bennet about music that she had been mentioning ever since in a way that was the closest Mary came to glowing.
He was handsome, and good-natured, and had a way of making each person he spoke to feel that he had found them specifically worth talking to, which was a quality that spread through a neighbourhood the way warmth spread through a cold room: gratefully and without careful inspection of its source.
He called at Longbourn on a Thursday.
Elizabeth was in.
He came into the sitting room with the easy confidence of a man who had learned from three weeks of Meryton that ease of manner was his most useful social instrument and had deployed it so consistently that it had become something close to genuine.
He spoke to Mrs. Bennet with the specific attentiveness that women of Mrs. Bennet's variety found most satisfying, which was not flattery but attention, the quality of having been seen and found worth seeing.
Mrs. Bennet, in consequence, became briefly and helpfully coherent on the subject of the militia and its general benefits to the neighbourhood.
He sat, eventually, near Elizabeth. Not beside her: across from her, which was a choice she noted, because across from her meant looking at each other, which was different from beside, where the looking was sideways and easier to avoid.
They talked. She found, as she had found in the two previous conversations she had had with him, that he was not difficult to talk to, which was a quality she usually appreciated and which she was finding, with him, slightly more complicated than usual.
He was too easy to talk to, in a way she had not fully examined.
The ease had no friction in it, and she had always found that conversations with no friction told her less than conversations that caught, however briefly, on something real.
Today, though, there was friction.
He introduced it himself, which she supposed was the logical approach if you had decided the time had come.
"I hope," he said, with the careful phrasing of someone choosing a word that could be easily retreated from, "that my slight acquaintance with Mr. Darcy has not affected your opinion of the neighbourhood's general welcome."
She looked at him. He met her eyes with the expression of a man who had opened a door and was waiting to see whether she would walk through it.
"It has affected nothing," she said. "The neighbourhood has formed its own opinion of Mr. Darcy without any assistance from your acquaintance with him."
"Yes." He considered his next sentence with a care that was itself information. "I imagine it has."
"You have known him long?"
"All my life, in a manner of speaking." He stopped.
He appeared to be deciding something. "Our families were connected.
My late father was steward at Pemberley for many years and was very much valued by old Mr. Darcy.
I was brought up to expect certain things from Darcy's friendship which have not been realised. "
Elizabeth said nothing. This was her own version of the patient waiting Jane deployed so effectively, and she had learned it from a different source, which was the observation that silence was the thing people most commonly filled with what they actually meant.
Wickham, she noticed, was very good at not filling silence.
He gave her the three seconds it required and then continued in the tone of a man who was being careful not to appear to want anything from what he was saying: "I do not intend to say anything against his character.
What I have suffered from him has been considerable, but I make it a point to speak ill of no man.
And perhaps there is an argument that I ought to have been more cautious in my expectations.
" A pause. "He has a temper. It does not always serve him. "
"I have observed that he can be proud," she said.
"He can be," Wickham agreed, "more than proud.
" He looked at his hands for a moment, and then up at her, with the expression of a man who has made a decision to be honest and would prefer you to understand the cost it represented.
"There was a living. My father's patron, old Mr. Darcy, left a provision in his will for my benefit.
A living that was to be mine when it became vacant. Darcy chose not to honour it."
She looked at him.
She thought of the doorway. She did not mean to think of it. She thought of it.
She thought of what she had heard in the doorway: the voice, the ease of it, the absence of any sense that what he was saying had a cost. She thought of the Meryton street and the colour that had left Wickham's face and the way Darcy's jaw had closed.
She thought of five days at Netherfield and the library, and then she stopped thinking of the library because it was not useful here and she was not certain what it meant and this, in front of her, was something she could be certain about.
The living was real. The provision was real. The grievance had the texture of something that had happened and had weight and had been carried for a long time. She was good at feeling the weight of things. This had weight.
"That is," she said carefully, "a serious injury."
"It was." He said it without drama. The without drama was effective in the way that understatement was effective, which was to say that it landed harder than the louder version would have.
He did not, that afternoon, give her the full account. He told her the shape of it and left the details for a later occasion, which was itself a kind of intelligence, and she recognised it as such even as she received the shape and found it entirely, completely credible.
She received it through a specific filter, and she knew it, and she did not, in the afternoon's sitting room with Mrs. Bennet offering cake and Lydia talking about something entirely unrelated across the room, examine the filter as carefully as she might have.
She had built the filter in a passage in the Meryton assembly rooms on the first night of the neighbourhood's acquaintance with Darcy, and it was made of a voice and a laugh and four seconds in the dark, and everything that arrived through it arrived already shaped by what she had decided in that passage.
She had decided he was capable of the dismissal she had overheard. She had decided it because she had heard it. Therefore, the living: credible. The temper: credible. The injury that Wickham had taken care to present without flourish and therefore presented most effectively: credible.
She was not wrong about his capacity for the dismissal.
She had the evidence. She was simply not accounting for what the evidence did not contain, which was the context, the four seconds before the sentence, the specific quality of fear that made a man say the first dismissable thing that came to hand.
She did not have this information. And because she did not have it, and because she had been very careful not to want it, it did not arrive to complicate what Wickham was now telling her with such precise and patient care.
That evening, after he had gone and Mrs. Bennet had supplied her assessment of him with considerable warmth, and Lydia had agreed with everything, and Jane had said, gently, that he seemed very agreeable though she hoped Elizabeth would be careful about forming judgments on very slight acquaintance, Elizabeth went upstairs and stood at her window.
The window faced west. In the evenings, from this window, you could see the top of the ridge beyond the Longbourn fields, and in the far middle distance, on a clear evening, the very edge of the Netherfield grounds.
She looked at it.
She thought about what she now knew, which was: the living.
The provision. The temper that did not serve him.
The injury whose weight she had felt clearly and whose details she had not yet received.
She thought about the library and then she thought about the doorway and then she thought about what Charlotte had said, last week, in passing, about first impressions and the danger of finding them sufficient.
She had answered Charlotte with something she found, on reflection, rather too quick.
She reached up and drew the curtain.
She stood in the dim room for a moment with the curtain closed and the window behind it and the edge of the Netherfield grounds somewhere behind the curtain on the other side of the glass, and she thought: I know what he is.
I have heard him. I have watched him on a street.
I have sat in his borrowed library and talked about books and the specific arrangement of his dead mother's shelves, and I know what he is, because I knew on the first night, and everything since has confirmed it.
She thought this firmly.
She thought it in the specific way she thought things she intended to have done with.
And then she went downstairs to help Jane with the mending, and was witty about three separate subjects at dinner, and made her father laugh twice, which she counted, privately, as the evening's real achievement, and did not once think about either the curtain or what she had drawn it across.
This was not true. But she had decided it was, and Elizabeth Bennet, when she had decided a thing, was very nearly unassailable.
Nearly.