Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Mrs Reeves stood by the chair. She had brought the porridge expecting the small accustomed declaration—that the dish was tyrannical, or the bread medicinal, or that any further refinement of the household kitchen would render Miss Bennet an invalid in earnest. None of those things were forthcoming. Mrs Reeves went out.
The porridge had been pronounced tyrannical the morning before, and the morning before that; on the strength of those pronouncements Mrs Reeves had begun to bring it more lightly sweetened, that the protest might have a fresh edge upon which to fall. There was no protest now. The bowl was eaten.
She asked after Georgiana's sleep, Hadley's lower carrier, and whether the post had come from Bakewell.
Each question she put with the formal civility of a guest in a house she had been visiting some time, and meant to leave shortly.
Mrs Marsden answered her briefly. Miss Bennet thanked her for each answer in turn, as a guest thanks a hostess.
When Mrs Marsden said Mrs Hadley permitted another turn in the drawing room later, if the leg held, Miss Bennet replied, “As you please,” and turned her attention to her cup.
Darcy, who had come down late from a letter he did not wish to write to Fitzwilliam and had expected the usual household disorder of tea, warmth, and argument, found instead a breakfast table behaving with unnatural exactness.
He mistrusted it at once.
Mrs Marsden did not. She wore these past days an exhausted politeness, less anger in it than endurance, and at present she watched her sister's plate and the folds of the shawl over her sister's knee with an attention that signified only that she was very tired.
Georgiana, spared by innocence or protected by tact, spoke into the small space the others had left her.
“I should like to send for The Lady of the Lake from the library upstairs, Brother. Mrs Annesley wrote of it in her last letter.”
“By all means.”
“Have you read it?”
“I have not.”
Miss Bennet looked up from her bowl. The wit was on her face in the proper shape—the small lift of the brow, the slight curve at the corner of the mouth that for three weeks had preceded the dryer sort of tease. None of the warmth attended it.
“Then your education has been lamentably narrow, sir.”
He inclined his head for the compliment her tone pretended to bestow. He had, in the last three weeks, been teased by her in half a dozen tempers. None of them had sounded like this.
After breakfast Georgiana went upstairs with Nan to rest before noon.
Mrs Marsden carried away the tray and returned for the medicine bottle Mrs Hadley had left by the hearth.
Miss Bennet asked, in a tone so casual it nearly passed, whether Mrs Marsden might send Martha for the blue walking cloak from the press.
Mrs Marsden stopped with the bottle in hand.
“The blue cloak?”
“Mine was soaked through and never properly dried. I thought perhaps Miss Darcy would not object to my borrowing it if I sit in the south room again.”
Mrs Marsden looked toward the rain-faded light beyond the windows, then back at her sister. “The south room is warm enough without a walking cloak.”
“Then consider it vanity. I am tired of looking like an invalid wrapped for transport.”
Mrs Marsden’s fingers tightened fractionally on the bottle. “Very well. I will send Martha.”
She went out.
Darcy, who had remained at the sideboard pretending to choose among letters he had ordered twice already, waited until the door shut and then turned.
Miss Bennet had lowered her eyes to the book on her lap with absorption assumed too promptly.
“You do not like the blue shawl?” he asked.
“I did not know my wardrobe had become a matter of estate concern.”
He came a step nearer. “I have learned that you grow agreeable when you mean to do something unwise.”
She looked up. The look was quick, bright, and not innocent. “What vanity in you, Mr Darcy, to suppose my agreeableness must signify a plot.”
“I am not vain enough to suppose your agreeableness signifies me. I am prudent enough to suspect it signifies purpose.”
Then Mrs Marsden returned with Martha and the cloak over her arm, and whatever answer Miss Bennet meant to make dissolved into household business.
The blue cloak was indeed too warm for the drawing room.
That fact, appended to several others, completed Darcy’s certainty.
He went out into the passage because he was beginning to trust his face less than the wall.
The door of the music room stood partly open at the end of the passage.
From inside came the sound of Georgiana practising, slow and particular, a phrase she had been unable to manage a week previously and was managing today with the quiet fluency of a young woman who had, by degrees none of them could quite account for, recovered her hands.
He had stood outside that door perhaps two hundred times in his life.
He had never, in any previous stance at that door, stood with the thought he now had—which was that he did not know what would happen to Georgiana if Miss Bennet were gone.
He did not know because it had not been tested.
For three weeks and more, Elizabeth Bennet had been in the house and Georgiana had been improving.
No other conjunction of circumstances had obtained in Georgiana’s life this winter.
If the conjunction were removed, the improvement might continue.
Or it might not. Or the white line round her mouth that had been absent now for a month might come back at dusk on the evening Miss Bennet was driven past Ashby’s gate in a carrier’s cart.
He did not know. He could not know. He had only the distinct private arithmetic of a man who had watched, over ten mornings, two separate women convalesce at rates neither medicine nor prayer could explain, and who had at last come to suspect they were the same convalescence.
He did not wish her to go.
He stood at the music-room door with the phrase repeating in his sister’s hands and understood, for perhaps the first time since the ice, that this was the largest of the several dreads he was holding at once.
She was running from something he had not been told of.
She was a woman who walked too quickly into a thawing lane.
She was, perhaps, more than either of these.
And he did not wish her to go. The force with which he did not wish her to go produced in him a reaction so foreign to any previous temperament of his that for an ungovernable instant he thought he might be ill.
He was not. He was only a man who had, in the last ten days, crossed some private line he had not known he was approaching, and who had now to contend with the discovery that the other side of that line was not the composed country he had always understood his affections to inhabit.
He set his hand briefly to the doorframe. He took the hand away. He went on down the passage.
He did not stop at the parlour.
Hadley’s boy came across the yard at half-past eleven with word that the lower hatch had stuck again and must be dealt with before dusk if the meadow were not to take more water than the fields could afford.
Ashby followed within twenty minutes, muddy to the knee and implacable about the south wall.
Darcy rose to go, because going was required, and because he could not remain in a parlour where Miss Bennet had begun to conduct herself as a woman about to do something final. He stopped at the step long enough to glance back toward the bed.
She was already reaching for her book with the expression of a woman who had been waiting for him to leave.