Chapter 3 #3
"I admire you. More than I ought to have permitted myself."
"That is not an answer."
His composure failed at last, cracking clean through. "I have thought of little else since you came to Netherfield. I would not offer a life I meant to make wretched."
"But you would offer one from duty."
"Duty is not contempt."
"No." Her voice stayed level. She made certain of it. "It is also not love."
Bingley turned a page in the next room. The sound was absurdly loud in the silence that followed.
Darcy looked as if she had struck him. Actually struck him, somewhere soft.
Elizabeth wished, briefly and uselessly, that she had been less exact.
Then she remembered a proposal made before he had once asked what she wanted, and let the wish go.
"I believe you mean to behave honourably. I will not reward honour by accepting a husband who believes me an obligation to be discharged."
"You misunderstand me."
"Then you have explained yourself badly."
He took one step towards her and stopped himself. "What would you have me do?"
"Trust the truth. We were trapped by rain in an open pavilion. Mr. Bingley, Miss Bingley, Mrs. Hurst, Sarah, and your own valet found us there. If gossip begins, deny it. I shall do the same."
"And if denial fails?"
"Then I will bear what is mine to bear. You may bear what is yours."
His jaw tightened. "That is not enough."
"It is my answer."
Silence held between them, thick as the rain still ticking against the window.
Darcy bowed. The movement cost him something. She could see that it cost him. "Then I will respect it."
Elizabeth left before her resolve could curdle into cruelty.
She climbed the stairs too quickly, skirts caught in one fist. Her knuckles whitened around the banister, and she did not loosen her grip until the trembling in her fingers had travelled up into her wrists, where at least it could be hidden beneath her sleeves.
The sickroom door was closed. Jane slept behind it.
Elizabeth stood in the passage and pressed her back flat against the wall, the plaster cool through her gown.
He proposed to me.
Her breathing would not settle, however she tried. She placed one palm flat against the wall and counted three breaths. Four. The corridor smelled of beeswax and coal smoke — ordinary, homely things. Her pulse did not find them the least bit persuasive.
And I refused him.
The refusal had been correct. He had spoken of honour, and protection, and the impossibility of leaving her exposed.
He had not spoken of wanting her. Not really, not in words that counted.
He had not asked whether she could be happy.
Those omissions were not small, whatever her racing heart seemed to think about the matter.
And yet his face at the end stayed with her.
He had looked as though she had taken something from him he had not known he was offering until it was already gone.
That particular expression would stay with her a good deal longer than his careful words deserved.
Elizabeth went to the sitting room and sat in the chair nearest the window, folding her hands in her lap because she did not trust them otherwise. Through the glass, the south pavilion stood in weak sunlight, its brick darkened where the rain still clung in dark patches.
She could leave Netherfield. Jane's fever had broken. A carriage could be arranged by morning, and propriety would support a swift return to Longbourn before further gossip took root anywhere. That was the safe course, and no one would blame her for taking it.
But safe was not the only thing worth considering.
Darcy had proposed badly. He had not, she was fairly certain, proposed falsely.
His admiration had shown itself in the library, on the terrace, in the pavilion before the storm made everything urgent and clumsy.
She had seen it plainly, and had begun, against every sensible intention she owned, to answer it in kind.
If she left now, she confirmed that the pavilion had ended something between them. If she stayed, she confirmed that something remained unsettled, waiting to be worked out properly.
Neither choice was comfortable. Elizabeth had never much required comfort from a decision. Only honesty, which was a considerably harder thing to come by.
She would stay. She would give him room to show whether duty had been the whole of his motive, or only the shell he had wrapped around something he had not yet learned to say plainly.
If it proved the former, she would bear the knowledge without regret.
If the latter — well. She would decide then what that knowledge deserved.
Upstairs, Sarah had laid the blue shawl near the fire again to dry properly this time. The repaired fringe had held through wind, rain, and thoroughly careless handling. Not one blue knot had slipped, not a single one. Elizabeth touched the stronger thread, turning it between her fingers.
He had proposed. She had refused. Neither fact, somehow, meant quite what it ought to have.