Chapter Twenty-Four
On the seventh day, he came into the parlour without knocking.
He had a letter for her from the post—that was the reason he rehearsed afterwards, and it was true as far as it went.
The remainder of the reason, which he was not yet willing to say aloud even to himself, was that he had begun to prefer arriving before anyone inside had composed herself for his arrival.
He had discovered, in the nights following the fall, a new dislike of the prepared face.
Hers most of all. The prepared face lied.
He had learned the species young. He had been twenty-two at his father’s funeral and twenty-three when the books at Pemberley had come up before him in the hand of a man he had trusted.
Hargrove had been the school. The lesson, taken once, had not since unlearned itself.
He had the equipment to read a face by it still.
He had been reading hers, in the prior two days, with the close attention of a man whose schooling did not allow him to read it any other way.
The reading had not, in those two days, recommended him to any decision a sensible man would have taken next.
She was crossing the room on crutches.
And she was alone.
She stopped when she saw him. She did not move to the chair. She did not lower her eyes. She stood where she had been crossing and kept her balance over the two crutches as a woman keeps her balance over an argument she did not intend to lose.
He shut the door behind him. The click was louder than he had meant it to be.
For the length of perhaps three breaths neither of them said anything.
The parlour filled with the quiet into which a question had walked ahead of the speaker—the fire sighing once, the clock on the mantel, the small wind at the south window.
She was upright on the crutches, her weight properly distributed between the two of them, her wounded leg held as Mrs Hadley would have required—clear of the floor, the bandage invisible under the hem.
Aldridge’s eight-week minimum had been entirely forgot before its first fortnight, and here she stood, executing the manoeuvre like a woman who had been doing it for weeks.
He had imagined this exactly. He had imagined it in the steward’s room, in the study, at the breakfast table, on the gallop up from Hadley’s lower field, and had each time arranged his face against the hour he would find her on her feet. None of the arrangements were any use to him now.
He took a step further into the room and no further. His next movement would have been to her elbow, and that would have answered nothing. The letter remained in his hand. He had forgotten he was holding it.
He set his teeth. “Miss Bennet.”
“Mr Darcy.”
He glanced pointedly at the crutch. “You gave me your word, Miss Bennet, seven nights since, in this very room; and I had supposed that to be a thing not lightly given by you. I find it this morning broken upon the carpet between us, with no Mrs Hadley in the room either to attend you or to spare me the figure I am to make in receiving it. I would be obliged, if you can find it in you, to be told what has occurred in the three days since the giving of it that has rendered the giving so soon retractable.”
"Indeed I gave it, sir; and indeed I have broken it this morning, and I will not pretend to the contrary.
I will not pretend, either, to be sorry, though before this morning I had supposed I might be.
Mrs Hadley was with me for the first turn of the parlour, and for the second; and she watched the leg take what weight I gave it without protest. At the third turn I begged her into the next corridor, on the strength of my promise to her that I should not exceed the dimension of the room she had been half an hour watching me cross.
That promise I have kept. The promise I made to you, sir, I have broken—at the time of breaking it, knowingly, and without consultation; and I would beg you to believe that I will not now insult either of us by manufacturing a reason that excuses the doing. "
“And could you not have come to me? In seven days, Miss Bennet. At any hour. The post was running. Mrs Hadley was in the corridor. I have been in the breakfast room and the library and the study and the steward's room. Could you not have said something?”
“No, sir. I could not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew what you would say. I have been feeling this healing for weeks.
I have asked you. I have asked Mrs Hadley.
I have asked Aldridge by post. I have asked Jane.
Every one of those days I have been answered with the same patient sentence—that the bone wants time, that I must be sensible, that I must wait.
So I waited this morning, sir, until you had gone down to Hadley's field. I should have known you would come back early. You have come back early every day this week.”
She had been counting his returns. He had not known. He set the letter down on the desk. His hand did not at once leave it.
“You think me unjust.”
“Not unjust. Only lacking in understanding. And who could blame you? Nobody would believe such a thing could happen.”
“Then before you take another step across this room—remember whom you are addressing. I carried you into this house three weeks ago. Your blood was on my coat in three places. Your head had no strength to lift itself off the pillow. I do not call myself lacking in understanding, Miss Bennet. I know what I have been.”
She had gone faintly pink at the throat. Her voice came smaller, but it did not shake. “I know what you have been, sir. I shall say it for you, since you will not. You have been afraid.”
He did not answer.
“Afraid for me. Afraid for this house. Afraid—though you will not allow it—for yourself, if I were to undo what was mended. I am sorry for the fear. I know its source. I have lain in this bed for more than thirty days. An eternity for me, but less than half what I owed, according to the doctor. I have remembered what I could of the night you brought me in. It is not very much, sir. But it is enough. I know what you carried. I know what it cost. I have not been ungrateful.”
She drew breath.
“But I cannot forget that I am the one being carried. The carrying must end. I would rather choose the ending myself. I have been your charge for over a month. Your guest… your patient, rather. And at times, I fancy, a friend. The line between those two has grown very thin, sir, and I need it thick again.”
He did not answer.
She stayed where she was, upon the crutches. He could see, now that he was looking for it, the small tremor in the wrist of her right hand where it gripped the bar. She had been on her feet longer than she would consent to admit.
Then she turned, and took the three crutch-steps to the chair by the writing-table, and sat. There was nothing of retreat in it.
He looked at her for longer than he ought. When he spoke, it was in the careful slowness he had not had occasion to use since the morning of Hargrove's books.
“I will be certain, Miss Bennet, to observe only what is proper between host and guest. I leave you to your own folly now.”
Ten mornings had run together since.
The first green points the dripping hedges had put out on the second day had since come properly in.
A late warm spell on the south side of the valley had coaxed three early lambs at Ashby’s.
The post had brought two letters from Bakewell and one from London that Darcy had not answered.
And in the parlour Miss Bennet had, under Mrs Hadley’s watch and under nobody’s several times besides, been permitted the crutches morning and afternoon and had lately begun taking them into the drawing room for an hour after tea.
He had grown accustomed, over the ten mornings, to hearing the thin tap-tap of her progress across the boards at hours he had learned not to interrupt.
He had grown accustomed, during the same ten mornings, to a certain manner she had adopted at the breakfast table whenever he came down—a care in her speech, a dispensing of brightness, a civility unshaken by any remark of his that ordinarily would have earned her satirical attention.
He had mistrusted the manner the first morning he saw it.
By the tenth he had arranged his mistrust into something closer to dread.
Dread because he had seen that manner before.
He had seen it on the morning Mrs Marsden had said Hertfordshire at the breakfast table and Miss Bennet’s face had gone, for the length of an instant no gentleman was meant to observe and no gentleman was subsequently able to forget, the colour of a woman hearing her own name called from a dark street.
He had seen it the afternoon Mrs Bannon had come up from the village with the careless friendly inquiry of who the lady was and where she had come from and Miss Bennet had closed her face over as quickly as a shutter.
He had seen it at the cottage the day he himself had asked Mrs Marsden, once, too directly, where their family was, and had been rebuked by the measured twice-repeated With an aunt of a woman who had learned to repel curiosity without ceasing to be kind.
There was something at the far end of her history he had not been told, and the manner she wore at breakfast was the manner she wore when that something was present to her mind.
On the morning of the tenth day, she wore it worse than he had yet seen.
Darcy knew she meant to go nearly an hour before he had proof.
The knowledge came neither by revelation nor gentlemanly instinct stronger than observation, but from the small alterations that attended a woman set on movement who wished those around her to think nothing had changed.
Miss Bennet was too careful at breakfast.
Mrs Reeves set the bowl before her.
“Thank you, Mrs Reeves.”