Chapter Forty-One #2
Georgiana had settled herself on the carpet by the fire. Elizabeth had been at the same paragraph of her book for some little while; Jane had been turning the pages of hers without reading them. They had been quiet the better part of an hour.
Jane closed her book on her finger, and the question turned her toward Georgiana with an interest Elizabeth had not seen her sister give any question for the better part of a year.
“I have ridden, Miss Darcy, though I should not say I am much of a horsewoman. My father had a very gentle old mare, of whom my younger sisters were perhaps more fond than I, but I went out on her now and again when I was a girl, and she did me very little harm. I should be very glad of an excuse to be on a horse again, if you would have me.”
“I should—” Georgiana began, and stopped, and her colour rose a small degree at having begun a sentence with so much eagerness, and she put her finger more carefully into the place in her book.
“I have been thinking of trying again. My brother has said for some weeks that the bay in the south yard is very quiet, and I have not been able to put it from my mind this morning. I do not know whether I shall manage it. I have been on a horse since the summer twice, and the two times together did not amount to a great deal.”
“I have been on a horse exactly twice in my life since I was sixteen, Miss Darcy. The two times together do not amount to a great deal either.”
Georgiana laughed. It was a small laugh, half-startled out of her, and Elizabeth caught Jane’s eye over Georgiana’s head on the carpet and held it there for some breaths.
“Lizzy?”
“Yes, Georgie.”
“Will you come out with me when I try?”
“I shall come out with you when you try. I have not been on a horse since before my father died, but I have, very recently, been on a leg I had not expected to walk on, and I am, this winter, inclined to be ambitious. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, if my brother or Richard will indulge us.”
“Your brother would run out and saddle the horse himself this very instant if he thought you would desire it. He has been praying for you to feel well enough for that for months now. Jane, you should come, too.”
“Perhaps I shall. I shall come on whatever horse we can borrow from the neighbourhood. Perhaps Mr Hadley will be willing to bring one out for me, even if it is no more than the donkey he uses for the lower garden.”
Georgiana laughed. “He has no donkey, Mrs Marsden.”
“Then I shall come on foot, Miss Darcy, and walk you both about the yard, and watch.”
Georgiana laughed again, and it was a longer laugh this second time, and she turned to her book, and she did not, when she turned, look back at the page.
The fire gave as a small log collapsed down on itself. Jane looked at the fire. “I have been turning a thing in my mind these two days, Lizzy. I do not, in the end, see any other course.”
“And what is that?”
“I shall need to go to Hertfordshire.”
“I had been waiting for you to tell me.”
“You had?”
“Our mother has not had her eldest daughter to herself in a year and a half, Jane. Of course you must go to her.”
“I shall need to write to her first. She will have things to say upon receipt of the letter that she had better say to a piece of paper before she says them to me. And then I shall need a few days to be sure of myself in the carriage. After that—perhaps the second week of April, if the roads will bear it.”
“You shall go in the Northmere carriage as far as Stamford, where uncle Gardiner can meet you if his business will allow it; or with the Colonel if it will not. You shall stay with our mother as long as is necessary, and as long as is bearable. The two will not, perhaps, be the same period.”
Jane smiled. She had loved her mother imperfectly, and she had known it, and she was—this hour—beginning to set about the loving regardless. Georgiana looked at her book. The page she had been on, all the small while of this conversation, was the same page she had begun on. She turned it now.
The library door opened. Darcy came in with some particular thing in his head, and he stopped at the door at the sight of three women rather than one.
“Ladies.”
The other two rose at the same time, which was not what he had been bracing for. Georgiana came to him first.
“Brother.”
“Georgie.”
She kissed him on the cheek lightly, and Darcy’s colour came up into his face. His hand came up to her cheek, and he kept it there longer than the kiss had needed of him, and Georgiana did not pretend to mind it.
“I shall go up to finish a letter to Mrs Reynolds. I have promised her some news of the valley and the house this evening, and I now have it. The bay is to come up to the south yard at half past ten to-morrow, with Mrs Marsden and Lizzy and myself all upon it or about it as we may manage. You shall come, brother?”
“I shall come.”
“Good.” She let herself out of the room.
Jane went next. She did not look at Elizabeth in passing—Elizabeth was the one staying. She came up to Darcy, and his colour rose a second time, a great deal further than it had at his sister’s kiss.
Jane curtseyed. The curtsey was a small, mild, careful thing, and it carried in it no acknowledgement at all of his colour, nor of the matter that had produced it, and was, in its mildness, the cleanest dismissal of the matter that any curtsey ever gave. “Mr Darcy. I shall see you both at dinner.”
“Until dinner, Mrs Marsden.”
He stood, after the door had closed, in the place where he had been when Jane had passed him, and he did not at first move from it.
“Come, Mr Darcy. Don’t stand there looking as if you have been caught at something.”
He came across the carpet at the summons, and she set her hands on the front of his waistcoat as he reached her—the colour had not yet quite gone from his face, and the arm he put about her was not the arm she had had in the water that morning.
“Elizabeth—”
“It is all right, my love. It is all right with Jane. You have been carrying it all afternoon as if it were going to break in your hand and cut you, and I am here to tell you it has been carried, and it has been put down, and there is nothing left in it for you to handle so carefully. You may put your face into your usual countenance and stop standing turning red about the ears.”
“What is all right with her?”
“You shall not pretend, Mr Darcy. I am not at present in any mood to make you a present of the thing without your knowing what it has cost me to give it to you.”
“I do not pretend, Elizabeth. I am asking, very honestly, because I should rather hear it from you than guess at it in this room for another quarter of an hour.”
“Then you shall have it. Jane has forgiven you. Both of us, really. I was there, and heaven knows I was in far greater need of her forgiveness than you were. She has not forgotten—I shall not pretend that to you—and I do not expect her to forget it for some considerable while. But the forgiving and the forgetting are not the same article, Mr Darcy. You may have the one this afternoon and trouble yourself about the other in your own time.”
He was, for a small while, very still against her hands.
“And what is the rest of it?”
“The rest?”
“You have not told me the whole, Elizabeth. I can see it in your face.”
“You can see—”
“I can. I have been learning to look at your face. I have been an indifferent student until this morning, but I have, since this morning, been making some progress.”
She laughed. “Very well. She has blessed us. Both of us. She made me promise, before she would let me out of the cottage, that I should tell you so, and I should not have told you in this manner if you had not been standing there looking as you did. She has blessed us. And she said—these were her words and not mine, my love, and you are not to put any construction upon them that she did not intend—she said that there was, after all, more than one kind man in the world; and that perhaps, in some hour of her own coming, she might meet with one. That is what she said. That is the whole of it.”
He did not answer at once. The colour, which had been going out of his face, returned in a small degree, but it was a different colour from what it had been at the door.
She watched him carry the thing she had told him, and put it down, and pick it up again from a different angle; and she watched his mouth begin to ask a thing, and stop short of the asking.
Then he laughed. It was the smaller of his laughs—the one he kept for the private rooms of the house and gave out only by half a measure, the sound of a man recognising a thing he had been half-recognising for some days already.
“More than one kind man in the world.”
“Those were her words.”
“They were her words exactly. I shall not put any construction upon them she did not intend.” He was silent a count of seconds.
“My cousin has been, in the four days he has been at this house, more inclined to defend your sister than I have ever known him to defend a person on four days’ acquaintance.
He took me to task in the library yesterday on a matter of her comfort I had not, by his own account, attended to with sufficient particularity.
He has not, in my recollection, taken me to task on the comfort of a stranger in any month of the prior twenty years. ”
“Has he not?”
“He has not. I had been considering, on a separate matter, whether to sell Merebank. I had been considering it since Wednesday, and had not arrived at a settled view. I am inclined now to consider, instead, the leasing of it. It is a thing I shall take under further consideration. I may have occasion to discuss it with my cousin, who has, on most matters that have come to me in the prior years, given me better counsel than I have, on most of those matters, given myself.”
She looked at him. “That is a great deal of consideration, Mr Darcy, for a hint Jane was very particular not to offer with any construction.”
“It is. I do not propose to act on any of it for some little time. I propose only to consider.”
“That is what she said also.”
“Then we are all three of us considering. I shall not say anything of any of this to him. I shall let him remain the man who took me to task in the library on the comfort of a stranger.”
“That is the kindest thing you could do for him, Mr Darcy. I commend it to you.”
His breath came out in something like a laugh and not quite one, and his arms about her closed in a manner they had not done since the morning at the bank. “I love you, Elizabeth.”
“I know it. I have, for some weeks, known it. Now, stop your protests and your humility and stand still. I am about to take a great liberty with the master of this house.”
She put her hand against the side of his face, and she kissed him.