Chapter Nineteen #2
Elizabeth offered the authoress a weak smile.
How mad, that the novelist she had long admired was now sitting in her parlor, commiserating with her romantic woes!
But Elizabeth had little faith that her own unusual romance would end as happily as the novels she treasured.
“Just before he left—before the truth of the letters was made known to us—Mr. Darcy seemed as though he meant to… oh, I hardly know. I have lost all sense of what has been real and what was only pretend; I cannot trust my own judgement at such a time.”
“Then trust ours,” Marianne cried, looking round at all her companions for agreement.
Elizabeth waved away their murmurs of affirmation.
“I cannot expect him to forgive what I have done, to go up against his formidable aunt for the sake of a woman who deceived him for so long. It is all a horrid mess,” Elizabeth said, whimpering though her tears had dried.
“How could he ever trust me? How could it ever be simple and easy between us?”
A strange sound burbled in Mrs. Bevan’s throat, and Jane let out a low hum of disagreement. “Oh Lizzy, love is not simple. It is not easy.”
“It was for you,” Elizabeth said to her sister. “Mr. Bingley loved you the moment he saw you.”
“He thought me pretty, as I thought him handsome,” Jane said, her rebuke soft but earnest. “But he was nearly persuaded of my indifference by his sisters, whose exacting standards caused him to have serious reservations about the propriety of some of our relations, and after our marriage they made settling into my new life rather difficult before Charles sent them away.”
Elizabeth frowned. Of course, she knew this—Jane had confided in her about these difficulties, yet still they paled in comparison to what Elizabeth envisioned as a vast gulf between herself and Mr. Darcy, dark and raging and uncertain.
“It was not so simple for my husband and I, either,” Emma said. “We each feared the other would choose someone else—though we had merely let our fancy run away with us.”
“And think of Elinor,” Marianne added. “I cannot reassure you with my own history, but Elinor found her happiness, and Edward was once promised to that nasty little fortune hunter, Lucy Steele. Elinor loved him in silence while knowing him pledged to a grasping phony who no longer gratified the inclination of his youth. My poor sister suffered a vast deal, but it all came right in the end.”
Mrs. Bevan fidgeted with the small notebook she always kept with her, but resisted the urge to reach for her pencil.
She gestured to the display of her own books not far from where they were all seated.
“If the love stories in my novels were simple and easy, they would be only a few pages, my dear—and very dull. You are a complex creature, and a particularly interesting one—as is Mr. Darcy. I daresay you shall face many challenges together. And once you are married… well, sometimes it is rather diverting to resolve a quarrel.”
The other married women all blushed and tittered, while Georgiana leaned forward to do her own part in reassuring Elizabeth.
“She is right—my brother is just as complicated, at times. But our Fitzwilliam blood makes us tenacious, and I am sure he will fight for you. My cousin Anne is nearly of age, and I daresay once she has her inheritance, she will not wish any man laying claim to it, especially after Sir Sidney’s duplicity.
So you see, the longest you would have to wait is less than three months—and I doubt it will take William three hours to forgive you for the letters. He will be glad it was you.”
Georgiana smiled brightly at Elizabeth, her confidence unshakeable.
She reached into her pocket and handed Elizabeth the valentine.
Elizabeth gasped. He must have found it when she showed him the Bevan books—he must have recognized it.
“I forgot to give you this,” Georgiana said.
“He kissed it, so that must be a good sign.”
“We ought to have begun with that,” Charlotte admonished, laughing ruefully. Elizabeth scarcely registered her friends’ words as she brought the valentine to her own lips and then laid it atop the bundle of letters she had carried with her into the parlor.
After another half hour of letting the kindness of her friends chase away the despair she had felt, Elizabeth peered out of a window and discovered Mr. Darcy striding toward the hotel from the direction of Sandpiper Cottage.
She sucked in a sharp breath, hoping he was returning to her, but would not allow herself to observe his approach.
For several minutes she tormented herself, considering that Mr. Darcy might still be too cross to speak to her, or he may have reconciled with Miss de Bourgh, or perhaps he was walking to the stable to have his carriage made ready to bear him away forever, and she would never see him again.
Elizabeth was still lost in this anxious reverie, quite oblivious to the chatter of her friends, when Mr. Darcy appeared in the doorway, flowers in hand.
He stared at the coterie of ladies with bewilderment.
The conversion ebbed into heavy silence. Elizabeth latched onto Jane’s hand, and had reached for Georgiana, as well, when the girl sprang to her feet and declared, “I am going to go find Richard and tell him the idea that I had.”
“I will join you,” Marianne said, linking her arm through Georgiana’s as they hastened from the room.
“The rest of us ought to go and find our husbands,” Charlotte said. Jane, Emma, and Mrs. Bevan all stood and murmured their farewells before taking their leave.
And then, Elizabeth had to look up at last, for she was finally alone with Mr. Darcy.
She stood abruptly, clutching her bundle of letters, her lips parted—and no words came out.
Mr. Darcy crossed the room, stopping a few paces away from her, in front of the shelf where she had shown him her books that morning.
He lifted the wilting flowers from the vases she had put them in, laid them across the shelf, and placed the new ones in the vase, the corners of his lips crinkling upward as he arranged the blooms.
Then he looked up, and his feelings were written plainly on his face, for he gazed at her as he had in the gazebo and at the assembly, and a dozen other times that Elizabeth had lost a small piece of her heart to him.
Still holding fast to her letters, she closed the distance between them in an instant, and then she was in his arms.
Mr. Darcy said nothing, but kissed her so forcefully that she knew without a doubt he had wanted to do so many times—she had thought of little else in his company in recent days—and that neither of them felt the need for words to communicate their sentiments.
When finally they parted to take a breath, Elizabeth began to laugh. “Mrs. Bevan did warn me that reconciling after a lovers’ quarrel could be… pleasant.”
He raised his brows. “Have we quarreled?”
Elizabeth swatted at him. “Odious man! I know you were very cross, and I was mortified. Do end my suffering and say that you have forgiven me.”