Chapter Two
But then she stayed. Elizabeth, that is.
She was there at dinner, though the other sister was too ill, and had to stay abed.
I said little; she said little. The conversation was carried almost entirely by Bingley, who has the ability, and I will say this for him, to speak about nearly nothing in an amiable way for a long period of time, and to do it in such a way where it is quite engaging, not boring at all.
He is very good at making uninteresting things seem interesting, and not because he is, in fact, interested in them, for—near as I can tell—Bingley is interested in absolutely nothing, but because he is simply an amiable sort of fellow who one finds enjoyable.
After dinner, Elizabeth got up immediately—and I was already calling her Elizabeth in my head, not Miss Bennet or even Miss Elizabeth, just Elizabeth, which was improper, and I didn’t care—and said she must go and see to her sister, and she left the table, leaving the rest of us there.
“I cannot believe we have been obliged to house that one,” said Caroline Bingley.
“She is abominable, a mixture of pride and impertinence. No skill at conversation has she. No style, either in dress or in manner or in… her hair?” She gestured at her own head and shuddered.
Caroline was the younger of the Bingley sisters, the unmarried one.
Of all the people in the family, I tended to like her the best, I have to say.
She and I were perhaps the most alike. This was maybe the first time she’d said something I disagreed with.
Truth was, I spent most of my time in the presence of the Bingleys poking fun at them in my head and ascribing various levels of censure to all of their behaviors, and Caroline said all of these things aloud.
She was rather severe on both her brother and her sister, and most especially her sister’s husband, and she had a shrewd sort of biting wit that might have been a bit mean-spirited on occasion, but which I found genuinely funny.
But this was all likely just another point on a list of things that would prove that I was not behaving at all like myself and that it was quite strange for me to be in the country with these people, anyway.
But Mrs. Hurst, her sister, was laughing in agreement. “Oh, yes, just as you say. She has nothing to recommend her, nothing at all.” A pause. “Oh, except that she is an excellent walker, that is.”
Both sisters burst into laughter together, thinking this a very witty joke.
Caroline turned to me, expecting me to be laughing. I laughed at her jokes often, and they were often at the expense of others. I was not laughing; she noticed.
Something passed between us.
She sniffed, looking down at her empty plate.
“She is indeed that, Louisa, an excellent walker. But she is nothing else. And I do not pretend to even understand why she is here. She need not be scampering all over God’s creation simply because her sister has a cold.
There is no reason for her to have walked, what was it? Five miles or something?”
“I don’t think it’s that many miles,” broke in her brother.
“But her hair, so blowsy!” said Caroline.
“Yes, and her petticoat, the mud,” said Louisa. “Six inches of mud.”
It had not been six inches. Why are women always so bad at estimating measurement?
“She may not have looked presentable when she arrived this morning,” said Bingley, “but she looked remarkably well, I thought. One thing I was not looking at was her dirty petticoats.”
Ah, he’d seen it too. Had it been the light, then? Or the way the color had risen against her cheeks?
“Remarkably well, yes,” I agreed, my voice gruff.
Caroline turned to me in something like horror. “Oh, but Mr. Darcy, what if that had been your sister, walking all alone, through the countryside, with her hair like that?”
I grimaced. She didn’t know about Georgiana and Wickham, of course.
No one knew. “Insupportable,” I bit out, wanting to get the conversation as far away from my sister’s impropriety as possible.
But it should be known that Georgiana had a chaperone, had a lady with her, and that lady had simply failed us all.
That was why the lady had been let go without a reference.
“At any rate, what could she have meant by it?” said Caroline. “Walking alone, in the dirt, for however many miles it is? It’s some kind of conceited independence.”
“It’s the sort of thing one does in the country, I warrant,” said Bingley.
“Well, yes, there you are. She is that. A country miss, backwoods, indifferent to decorum, whatever you will,” said Caroline.
“She cares about her sister,” said Bingley. “I think that is very pleasing.”
“I am afraid, Mr. Darcy,” observed Caroline in a half whisper, “that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine eyes.”
And this moment was when I remembered I had even said that to Caroline about Elizabeth. I had not given the exchange any merit or mind, but the fact that she remembered it, and that she was bringing it up made a dull bit of an alarm come to the forefront of my mind. That did not bode well.
Here was what had occurred: I had asked Elizabeth to dance, she had denied me, and I had been thinking about that when Caroline appeared and asked me what I was thinking of, and I told her exactly what I was thinking of, how pleasurable it could be to look at a woman with fine eyes, and she asked who, and I told her, and she went immediately to teasing me that I should be asking Elizabeth to marry me and talking unfavorably about Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth’s mother.
We shall come to that woman eventually, I suppose, but I shall not digress further to explain her here. Suffice it to say that she has an abrasive manner about her.
Now, at the dinner table, Caroline tipped her chin up at me, and I said, “Not at all. They were brightened by the exercise.”
Caroline’s nostrils flared, only barely, not too much, but I noticed.
Damnation.
How had I allowed that to happen?
But there was little time to dwell on that for we were back to discussing Elizabeth again.
Mrs. Hurst wanted everyone at the table to know that she had an “excessive regard” for Miss Jane Bennet, who was very sweet, but that the other sister, the Elizabeth girl, she was something else.
“Well, I do, of course, wish for Jane to be settled,” said Caroline.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Hurst. “But with the low connections they have, and with such a mother as they have, I think that there is very little chance of it.”
“True, they are related to nobodies. One uncle who is a country attorney, I hear,” said Caroline.
“Yes, and one in Cheapside, as I understand it,” said Louisa.
“That is capital,” said Caroline, smirking, turning to look at me.
What? Why was she looking at me like that? Why bring up their being settled? I certainly wasn’t entertaining any thoughts of marrying Elizabeth Bennet, even though Caroline apparently kept thinking I was about to do it.
“If they had uncles enough to fill all of Cheapside, it would not make them a jot less agreeable,” said Bingley firmly.
“But it must materially limit their chances of marriage,” I said, glaring at Caroline. I am not going to marry her. Why would you even suggest that?
After dinner, we all went up to look in on the sick sister, Jane, and then went back to a sitting room to play cards.
Eventually, Elizabeth came down, said she would only be there a short time before she had to look in on her sister again and then retire for the night, and said she would read.
I resolved that I should not find Elizabeth attractive anymore, that I should go back to finding her as I had found her before, as nothing entirely special, pleasing but not overly so, no one of consequence. Thus decided, I ignored her during the conversation, speaking very little.
Caroline talked a lot; she always did. She went on in an overly obsequious way, praising Pemberley, my estate, praising the library at Pemberley, talking about how her brother must have a house exactly like Pemberley, and I didn’t say anything at all, though I could not think of a thing less likely to be well accepted amongst good society than blatantly copying someone else’s house.
Bingley’s attempt to say he’d rather buy it was likely an attempt to get her to drop it, but it was also his way, the way he liked to throw around how flashy and liquid his cash was.
I had an income larger than his, but I had a great deal more responsibilities than he did.
That income had to do a number of things, keep a great deal of people, a number of servants, a vast amount of lands and buildings, all of that.
And it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have money if I needed it, it was more that I didn’t carry about money, throwing it here and there as if I could just have fountains coming out of my coinpurse at all times.
Hmm.
Hearing me go on this way, one might get the impression I didn’t like Bingley.
I did.
As I have said, Bingley had a manner about him, something that put people at ease. He was amiable, easy to talk to, easy to be around, a great deal of fun to while away the hours with. He was, on the whole, very likable.
Did I approve of Bingley, however?
Well… perhaps not.
But then this only begged the question, if I did not approve of Bingley, did I approve of myself, here, in a conversation about buying my family home, which was entailed and not for sale, not ever for sale?
The nakedness of it, I suppose, that was what was so awful about these people.
How dare they, truly?
How dare the Bingleys be so open about what they wanted?
We want to be you, and we are setting about doing exactly that.
We shall worm our way into your society, ingratiate ourselves to you, copy your houses, buy what we can from you, be amiable and make you laugh, and then, well, when it comes down to it, our money is just easier to get to than yours.
It’s not tied up in things. It’s there for spending.