Chapter Eighteen
By the third day after the surgeon’s reprieve, the house began to conspire against Elizabeth’s confinement.
Not by proposing that she be permitted to move to a chair.
Mrs Hadley had put an end to that folly before breakfast with a look so contemptuous that even Mrs Reeves had let the subject drop.
But the curtains were drawn wider to admit the best of the afternoon.
A third pillow was brought. Then a fourth and a fifth until Elizabeth was nearly sitting up properly.
Georgiana’s notes, more frequent and easier now, referred to the pianoforte downstairs as if it had been personally injured by neglect.
Mrs Reeves declared that if Miss Bennet must lie abed, she need not do so in an aspect of permanent punishment.
Jane, standing between these authorities and her sister’s restlessness, yielded inch by inch and called it prudence.
“If the leg swells,” she said, “or the pain worsens, or she is overtired, everything is put back at once.”
“Aye,” said Mrs Hadley.
“At once,” said Elizabeth.
“You have a lamentable tendency,” said Mrs Reeves, “to repeat good sense as if repetition improved it. Martha, bring the smaller table here. Nan, the blue shawl, not the brown. If Miss Bennet must be confined, she shall at least be confined decently.”
“I shall be everything respectable,” Elizabeth promised.
“For now,” said Mrs Hadley. “If you wish to remain so, you will lie still and let sensible people better your circumstances.”
The business of bettering them proceeded at once.
A small table was drawn within reach of the bed.
The screen was moved so the draught from the passage should not creep at her shoulders.
A clean cloth went over the table, then a book, a glass, a dish no one expected her to finish, and the workbasket Jane had taken up more from need than inclination.
By the time Mrs Reeves was satisfied, the room looked less like a place in which one waited upon pain and more like a place in which a human creature might be expected to continue living.
Elizabeth ought to have been grateful.
She was grateful.
It did not lessen the humiliation of lying still while everyone else improved her life around her.
When the women had withdrawn as far as the hearth and the door, Jane came back to settle the coverlet once more over the injured leg, though it had not moved.
“You look as if we had sentenced you to purgatory.”
“You have. Only with cleaner linen and better management.”
Jane’s mouth altered. Weariness had worn the laughter thinner in the last days, but it still answered when Elizabeth contrived to provoke it. “I am only going to speak to Mrs Reeves about the tray. You are not to attempt anything in my absence.”
“What a singular warning to give a woman whose greatest enterprise is turning a page.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jane went out.
Left alone, Elizabeth became aware how different the room had become merely for having been arranged as if convalescence, and not only suffering, belonged in it.
The light reached farther across the floorboards.
The polished legs of the little table shone.
Beyond the half-open door came the muted domestic movement of a house not entirely governed by one body’s pain.
Relief was immediate.
So was fatigue.
She might have slept had not a door opened above, then closed again with care. Silence followed, not empty but listening. A light tread crossed the landing, began the stair, paused once, then came on. It stopped just beyond her door.
Elizabeth turned her head.
The door stood open enough to show first only the passage and the farther wall. Then the opening widened by an inch and a face was at the door—pale still, fair hair simply arranged, eyes larger than Elizabeth recalled from the fevered glimpse beside the upstairs bed.
The girl looked caught at once, though not guilty exactly. Merely discovered in an act of caution she had hoped to manage more elegantly.
“You must be Miss Darcy,” Elizabeth said.
Colour rose at once in her face. “I beg your pardon. Nan told me you were awake, and I thought—I did not mean to look in without leave.”
“Then I am glad you failed. Come in, if you have not been forbidden more severely than I was.”
That won her two steps, then three more.
She came into the room slowly, one hand resting for an instant on the back of a chair as if the house still required negotiation at certain points, though pride would not let the movement appear timid.
She wore a dark shawl over a gown too fine for carelessness and too plain for vanity.
Illness had sharpened rather than blurred her face.
“I was not forbidden,” Georgiana said. “Only advised. Fitzwilliam always advises most on the exact points where advice is least convenient.”
“It is a defect in brothers, I believe. They are never so certain as when their certainty is a nuisance to others.”
A smile almost broke, was reconsidered, then came properly. It changed the whole countenance. “You speak as if you have had practice.”
“Not of brothers. Of people generally. The fault is widely distributed.”
Georgiana came at last to the chair nearest the bed, though not so near as to presume. Before she sat, her eyes went to the little table, the book, the folded note lying there.
“I am glad they have made you more comfortable,” she said. “Nan said Mrs Reeves had declared war upon your room.”
“Mrs Reeves conducts all benevolent designs as if they were campaigns.”
“She does. It is one of her charms.” Georgiana lowered herself into the chair, and a faint colour rose at once in her cheeks.
“I had meant only to ask whether you had done with Miss Edgeworth. If you had, I could send another down. Only not history, unless you particularly desire improvement. Fitzwilliam always believes history improves the mind and never notices what it costs the spirits.”
“I do not object to history,” Elizabeth said. “I object to being improved against my will.”
“Then we are exactly agreed.”
They spoke first of books, because books asked little and revealed much.
Then of rooms, because illness had made both of them students of rooms whether they wished it or no.
Georgiana preferred south light in winter because it promised indulgence.
Elizabeth preferred west light because it made even the commonest chamber look, for an hour, as if it kept a secret worth learning.
From there they came, almost without noticing it, to the smaller things confinement sharpened into consequence—what one missed most when shut indoors, whether silence comforted or oppressed, how much of a house one could know merely by hearing it rather than entering it.
“I used to think,” Georgiana said softly, “that what I missed most was music. It is not. It is hearing life continue just beyond the door and knowing one may join it if one has strength enough.”
Elizabeth frowned thoughtfully.
“When I was worst in October,” Georgiana went on, her eyes lowered now to the tassel on her shawl, “I asked Nan to leave my door unlatched so I could hear the servants crossing the landing. It made the house seem less like a place in which one had been put aside to die.”
The plainness of it did not strike Elizabeth as morbidity. It struck her as accuracy. “I understand that perfectly.”
Georgiana looked up. No fever now. No mediation by note or sister or brother. Only recognition.
Before either could speak again, a footstep sounded in the passage and Darcy came in.
He stopped.
The whole of his reaction crossed his face too quickly for anyone but a sister, perhaps, to have read it from beginning to end.
First concern—immediate, involuntary, absolute—for Georgiana downstairs, out of her own chamber, beyond the strict borders illness had laid about her.
Then assessment—her colour, posture, the distance from the stairs, the chair, the signs of calm or strain.
Then, beneath both, something else at the sight of Georgiana beside Elizabeth’s bed, the room holding them together as if no one had thought until this instant how naturally that might occur.
“Georgiana?”
He said only her name, but it contained enquiry, care, caution, and the self-command Elizabeth had begun to recognize as peculiarly his.
Georgiana looked up without alarm. “I am in a chair, Fitzwilliam. This is generally thought the least rash of all possible undertakings.”
“But… you are downstairs.”
“The staircase survived me. I did not descend it unaided, so you are spared the gratification of horror.”
He came farther in. The afternoon had been cold and damp outdoors. It clung to him still in the darker tone of his coat and the clear colour at his cheek. Papers in one hand had been wholly forgotten upon his finding them thus.
“Mrs Hadley permitted this?”
“Mrs Hadley permitted nothing,” Georgiana said. “Nan assisted me, and Mrs Reeves was diverted elsewhere, which proves only that households are imperfectly governed.”
Darcy looked from one woman to the other and found, Elizabeth suspected, not the scene he had expected on entering his own house.
“Then the failure lies in the house’s arrangements,” he said at last. “I shall have to speak very severely to the staff.”
“Do,” said Georgiana. “They will enjoy it.”
His mouth altered, very slightly. It was not quite surrender, not quite amusement, but something near both. “How long have you been here?”
“Ten minutes,” Georgiana said.
“Fifteen,” Elizabeth said at the same instant.
Georgiana turned to her with sudden interest. “You see, Fitzwilliam? We are already intimate enough to contradict one another.”
Darcy looked at Elizabeth, and beneath the brother’s care was astonished amusement close to her own. “I perceive I have entered an alliance already formed against me.”
“Not against you,” Elizabeth said. “Only beyond your management.”