Chapter 23 #2
He had known his sister was improving. He had known it as he had known that the weather was mild that winter, or that the south windows were cleaner than the north—an observation held at the surface, remarked upon by other people, considered by him as a fact of the season.
He had not put the fact of it together with anything else.
A gentleman did not go about assembling explanations for his sister’s recovery from complaints she had been mercifully spared from enduring a further winter under.
He was putting it together now.
He recalled the morning after Aldridge had refused to take the leg—Georgiana had walked to the hall on her own feet, which she had not done in a month.
He recalled the afternoon Miss Bennet had first sat up against the pillows for an hour without tiring—Georgiana had practised twenty minutes at the pianoforte, which she had not done in six weeks.
He recalled the evening Miss Bennet had first taken a proper dinner from her tray—Georgiana had eaten a full plate of mutton stew, which she had not done since October.
He had been attributing these improvements, when he had attributed them at all, to the general warmth of a household now possessed of two young ladies rather than one.
He was no longer able to believe that.
He set down his cup. From the parlour door down the hall, he could hear Georgiana laughing again.
Miss Bennet was laughing with her. Outside the south window the lower meadow lay pale in the rare winter sun and the dripping hedges were beginning, in places, to put out their first green points a full fortnight ahead of any previous account his steward’s book contained.
The valley itself, he could no longer pretend he had not seen, looked less ill than it had done a month ago.
He got up from the table under some pretext of the study. He went into the study and closed the door, then stood a long minute with his hand against the mantel. Then he crossed to the desk, took down the meadow ledger, and turned back three weeks to the entry he had made the day after the ice.
He read the entry. He turned two pages forward.
He read the entry at the head of the second week.
He turned two pages further. He read the entry at the head of the third.
The Pemberton boy, entered in the second week as losing ground, was entered in the third as holding it.
Old Mr Ashby’s cough, entered in the first week as winter-worsened, was not entered at all in the second or third.
Two of the lower field lambs, entered in the first week as unlikely to last to February, had lasted. One was presently with its mother.
He closed the ledger.
He did not know what he had read. He knew only the facts as verified, and he knew that the pattern it described had not been invented by him, and he knew that the pattern extended from his sister’s breakfast plate to the old mother at the cottage to the lamb in the lower field to the leg that, twelve hours ago, had answered his fingers with clean muslin where no answer ought to have come.
He went back to the parlour before noon because he could not, at present, be anywhere else.
Miss Bennet was in the bed. She looked up when he came in.
Her face altered—not in a way he could have described to another man, but in the way he had begun to know her faces altered when she saw him—that expression belonged to him, he was sure of it.
And shining over it, there was brightness that had been new since yesterday—a conversational eagerness pitched half a degree higher than suited either of them, the grave humour edged with something courting, something covering, something he could not put words to.
She asked him after Hadley and the lower carrier with an attention she had never previously extended to hydraulic questions.
She laughed at something he said which had not been witty enough to earn a laugh.
He did not know, for the length of the morning, whether she was endeavouring to court him or to distract him, and by the evening of the second such day he had concluded that she did not know the difference herself.
He suspected the truer answer was that she had guessed, as nearly as a woman in her bed might guess, what he had begun to know in the study before noon.
And that she was attempting, by the only instrument she had to hand, to keep him from arriving there openly for as long as she possibly could.
On the fourth day—by the crudest counting, the twenty-sixth since the ice—he was in the steward’s room off the passage when he heard, from the parlour, a single small sound—the tap of a crutch-tip setting down on floorboards. Setting down once. Not twice.
He rose and went to the parlour door.
Through the gap at the hinge—for the door had been closed rather than shut, which at Merebank signified nothing—he saw Miss Bennet standing at the south window.
She had not heard him.
She stood without the crutches, one hand against the sill, the line of her body favouring the leg that, by Mrs Hadley’s last report, ought not to be bearing any weight at all.
She was not walking. She was standing. She had, by the arrangement of the crutches laid flat against the writing-table, crossed the room on foot to reach the view.
He stepped back from the door before any additional eye in the room would touch her, and returned to the steward’s book.
He did not confront her. He was not ready for the conversation. He suspected, with a discomfort he had not previously permitted himself regarding his own character, that if he did confront her he would emerge from the conversation having agreed to keep the new offence as he had kept the old.
The bag began, about this time, to trouble him more than it had before.
He had seen it first on the morning of her arrival, clutched against her chest like something she would rather have died than let go of. He had seen Mrs Marsden set it under the bed on the second day, and had seen no one touch it since. It had sat, motionless, for three weeks.
It was no longer motionless.
On the day of the fall it had stood against the wall at the bed’s head.
By the fourth day following it had retreated under the bed proper and a hand’s-breadth from where Mrs Marsden had first set it.
By the sixth day it had come back again, but not to the position it had begun in—a hand’s-breadth to the right, which was a distance large enough for a man watching to mark, and small enough for a woman moving it to believe it had not been seen.
He watched the bag.
He was not proud of watching the bag. By the seventh day he had begun to dislike the quality in himself that had taken up this small domestic surveillance as if it were a matter of character.
It was the quality that required truth. It was the quality that had not, in three weeks of gentlemanly restraint, lost its ordinary edge.
It was the quality that had begun to wonder whether he had been silently purchasing the lady’s presence in his house at the cost of a scruple he had, until this month, assumed he was incapable of selling.