Chapter Twenty-Seven What Happens After
Bingley proposed to Jane on a Thursday.
Elizabeth knew it had happened before anyone told her, because Jane came downstairs at noon from the interview in the garden with her face in the specific state it achieved when she had received exactly what she had wanted and was still in the process of becoming equal to the receiving.
She was pink and composed in alternation, which was Jane's version of undone, and when she saw Elizabeth in the hallway she stopped and the look between them was the entire conversation, conducted in approximately two seconds.
Elizabeth went to her and held her.
"Well," she said, into her sister's hair.
"Well," Jane said back, and she was laughing, the real kind, the kind that came when something was so completely and exactly right that the only available response was the laugh.
Mrs. Bennet's response, when informed, was everything Elizabeth had anticipated it would be.
It was loud. It was comprehensive. It involved the word Netherfield approximately seven times and the word four thousand a year approximately twice that, and it achieved a volume that, Elizabeth calculated from the first floor landing where she stood and waited for it to move through its necessary stages, would be clearly audible in the kitchen and possibly the garden.
Kitty appeared from the direction of the kitchen looking simultaneously startled and delighted.
Mary descended the stairs with the expression of someone bracing for a sustained period of noise.
Elizabeth went back down the hallway toward her father's library.
She knocked. He said come in, which he said in the voice he used when he had heard everything from his library and found the hearing not unpleasant.
She sat in the chair across from him. He looked at her over his spectacles in the way he had looked at her since she was old enough to be looked at in that way, which was with the specific warmth of a man who found his second daughter the most interesting person in his household and had never quite told her so in those exact words.
"Jane," he said.
"Jane," she confirmed.
"I suppose Bingley is tolerable," he said. He said it with the quality that meant the opposite.
"He is everything tolerable," she said. "And considerably more."
Her father looked at her for a moment. Then he said, in a slightly different register: "There is another matter I had intended to speak to you about."
She waited.
"A gentleman called yesterday," he said.
"While you were out. He had some final business with the solicitor regarding the settlement.
" Her father set down his spectacles and looked at her directly, which was the posture he used when he was being serious rather than dry.
"He also asked to speak with me privately. "
Elizabeth sat very still.
"He was," her father said, "extremely particular in his account of the matter.
Both the settlement business and the other business.
He left nothing out that I would have wanted him to leave in and nothing in that I would have wanted him to leave out, which is a quality of communication I find very rare and deeply respectful.
" He paused. "He speaks of you with the kind of regard that I recognise because it is the kind that does not require decoration.
He did not tell me you were wonderful. He told me who you are. There is a significant difference."
She thought: he told my father who I am.
She thought: not the managed version. The accurate one.
"I told him," her father said, "that the decision was entirely yours and always had been, and that if you told me you had decided something, I would consider it decided.
" He looked at her steadily. "And then he said something that I have been thinking about since, which was that he hoped you had or would have the opportunity to decide in full possession of all the relevant information, because he wanted whatever you decided to be what you actually wanted rather than what any other consideration had shaped. "
Elizabeth's throat was doing something.
She attended to it.
"He is," her father said, "a better man than I gave him credit for when he stood in this room at the Netherfield ball and refused to dance with anyone."
"He is a considerably better man than he appeared that evening," she said.
"He is also," her father said, picking up his spectacles, "a man of very considerable fortune, which your mother will point out to you at regular intervals for the remainder of your natural life, and which I mention only to suggest that you attach to it exactly as much weight as it deserves and no more, and that if I had to guess what weight that was, I would say approximately the same weight you are already giving it. "
She looked at her father and felt the specific, complicated love she had always felt for him: the love that was complete and that included the parts of him that had not been adequate to certain moments, because love that excluded those parts was not love but arrangement.
"Thank you, Papa," she said.
"Go away," he said, with the warmth that was his most genuine quality, "and be happy. That is the only instruction I have left."
She went.
Darcy came in the afternoon.
He came with Bingley, because the occasion required Bingley, and Bingley came with the specific momentum of a man who had done the thing he had been wanting to do for a year and found the doing of it as good as anticipated, and the house received him with the full weight of Mrs. Bennet's approval, which was considerable.
Darcy and Elizabeth found each other in the drawing room with the natural inevitability of people who had been moving toward each other for eleven months and were no longer pretending otherwise.
They sat near the window, which was where there was the least competition for the seat and the most light, and they talked with the ease that had been building since Pemberley and was now, in the aftermath of the morning in the field, the ease of two people who were no longer managing the space between them but inhabiting it.
She said: "My father spoke well of your conversation yesterday."
"He is a man of excellent judgment," Darcy said. "Which appears to have been distributed selectively among the generation following him."
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"That," she said, "is the most interesting assessment of me you have offered without the doorway in it."
"It was not an assessment of you specifically," he said. "It was an assessment of the distribution pattern."
"And where," she said, "do I fall in the distribution?"
He considered this with the gravity that she now knew was real and not affected, the thinking quality, the quality of a man who treated her questions as worth the full weight of a considered answer.
"You received," he said, "the judgment. The wit. The loyalty. The capacity for self-examination that I have observed recently and found," he paused, "exemplary."
"And what did the others receive?"
"Jane received the kindness," he said. "Which is the better quality. But you would not have believed me if I had said so and it would have sounded like flattery and I do not flatter."
"You do not," she agreed. "It is one of your more inconvenient qualities."
"I have several of those."
"You do," she said. "I have been making a thorough inventory."
He looked at her with the expression.
She felt the expression the way she had been feeling it since she learned to read it, which was the way you felt something that was warm and specific and directed at you with the full quality of a person's complete attention.
"May I ask," she said, "whether you find me tolerable?"
She said it lightly. She said it in the voice she used for things that were not light, that were important but deserved the lightness, because the lightness was not avoidance but its own kind of precision.
He was quiet for a moment.
He looked at her.
Then he reached across the space between them and took her hand, which was the first time either of them had touched the other with the full intention of touching the other, the intention that did not require a dance figure or a social form to justify it, and his hand was warm and certain and the taking of her hand was exactly what it was: the first deliberate motion, the first thing that required no social container.
He said: "I find you exactly yourself."
She looked at him.
"I have found you that," he said, "since Meryton."
She thought about the passage. She thought about four seconds in the dark and eleven months and every room she had been in with him and the bookshop in February and the grove in April and the ridge above the river at Pemberley in June and the boundary hedge at nine o'clock this morning.
She thought: yes.
She thought it without qualification and without the filter and without the measuring device made of a wound. She thought it with the clean, specific quality of a true thing received without anything between it and the receiving.
She said nothing.
She did not need to say anything. She turned her hand in his and held it, which was its own complete sentence, and they sat at the window of the Longbourn drawing room in the September afternoon with Bingley's warmth filling the room's general atmosphere and her mother's voice in the hallway saying four thousand a year for what was almost certainly not the last time, and all of it went on around them in its ordinary, extraordinary way.
Later, much later, after the visits and the plans and the specific domestic felicity of a household that had received two pieces of good news in a single day, Elizabeth stood at her window.
The window that faced west. The window that faced the ridge and the far edge of the Netherfield grounds and all the familiar landscape of the place she had been born and had always known and was now, she thought, beginning to see clearly for the first time.
The light was going. The September evening had the quality of early autumns, which was the quality of something generous completing itself, and the fields were the colour fields were at that hour, which was not quite gold and not quite green and was its own exact colour without a name.
She was looking at the landscape and thinking about nothing in particular, which was the best kind of thinking, when she saw him.
He was crossing the lawn from the direction of the lane, having said his goodnights and gone and apparently come back, or perhaps not gone far, perhaps just as far as the lane and back, and he was walking toward the house with the walk she knew, the contained, deliberate walk of a man who knew where he was going.
He looked up.
He looked up in the way that people looked up sometimes when they were looking at a house and the house had a lit window, and he found her at the window without any searching, the way she found him in rooms.
She did not wave.
He did not wave.
They looked at each other across the September lawn with the light going and the evening coming and all of Hertfordshire going quietly about the business of an ordinary autumn evening, entirely indifferent to the two people at the window and the lawn looking at each other with the full, unfiltered quality of people who had nothing between them.
And on his face.
On his face, in the last of the September light, was the expression she had been trying to read for eleven months, that she had been reading incorrectly for eleven months because of a doorway and four seconds and a wound she had dressed as a principle.
She could read it now.
She had been able to read it since morning.
It was the expression of a man who had found what he was looking for before he knew he was looking, and had spent eleven months finding his way to being found in return, and who was looking up at a lit window in the last of the evening light and finding that the window had someone in it who was looking back.
He stood on the lawn and she stood at the window and the question she had stopped being afraid to ask was answered in the looking, completely and without reservation, in the way that true things were answered when you were finally willing to receive them.
The evening came in.
She turned from the window and went downstairs toward the warmth and noise of her family, carrying nothing from the passage at Meryton except the memory of it, which was hers to keep, and which was lighter now than it had ever been, and which would get lighter still.
This was enough.
This was exactly enough.