Chapter Twenty-One
The fire in the billiard room had burned down to its second hour, and Bingley had not touched his cue in twenty minutes.
Darcy had noticed his inaction some time ago, after he finished recounting the meeting he had with his aunt that morning.
It was not a meeting that he recalled with any pleasure.
Lady Catherine had received him with determination, having arranged herself for an argument concerning Rosings, family, duty, and expectations.
He had done his best to listen to her calmly until she had concluded.
Then he had told her, in no uncertain terms, that he was engaged to Miss Elizabeth Bennet and would be marrying her.
His aunt had hoped to find the arrangement less settled than it was, and laid out her objections.
The lack of fortune, connections, and the reputation of the Bennet family were all abhorrent to her.
Darcy had quietly asked her to speak more respectfully of Mrs Bennet, who was the mother of his soon-to-be-wife. He heard Lady Catherine’s arguments, found them to be insufficient, and reaffirmed his intention to marry Elizabeth Bennet.
Bingley had applauded him for standing up to his aunt, receiving the summary of Darcy’s visit with amusement. Then he had gone quiet.
Darcy had continued to play; standing in silence waiting for a man to say what he was working up to saying was not a courtesy either of them would have appreciated. He made his shot, straightened, and waited.
“I am going to ask you something,” Bingley said finally, “and I should like you to answer it honestly, rather than carefully.”
Darcy set the cue on the table. “Those are not always different things.”
“With you, they frequently are.”
This was accurate enough that Darcy did not contest it. He looked at his friend and knew that for once, Bingley could not be diverted.
“Ask,” Darcy said.
“Are you happy?”
The question arrived simply, without preamble or softening.
Darcy considered it with genuine reflection, examining his emotions plainly. “No,” he said. “Not presently.”
Bingley nodded, as though this confirmed something he already knew. “And do you intend to remain so?”
“I do not generally intend unhappiness.”
“Darcy.” The tone was patient and firm in equal measure. “That is exactly the sort of careful answer I asked you not to give me.”
Darcy looked at the fire. Outside, the night was absolute; the grounds consumed by impenetrable winter darkness.
“What is it that you actually want to ask?”
Bingley absentmindedly picked up his cue, set it back down again, and came around the table.
He did not sit. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at Darcy with the directness that was perhaps his most underestimated quality.
People saw Bingley’s warmth and assumed softness. They were wrong.
“Lady Catherine came to that assembly,” Bingley said, “and she stood in the middle of the room and she spoke to Elizabeth Bennet in a manner beyond insulting. And you—” he paused.
“You moved to her immediately. You stood beside her and you answered your aunt in a way that I have never heard you speak to her before. Not to protect yourself. To protect Miss Elizabeth.” He regarded him steadily.
“I know of no one else whom you would treat so protectively, save for your sister.”
Darcy said nothing.
“And then you took her to the anteroom. You were in there for ten minutes, which is longer than any formal apology requires. When you came back —” Bingley stopped, gathering his thoughts, working through how best to deliver his next words to Darcy.
“When you came back, you looked like a man who had just been permitted ten minutes inside a place he has wanted to enter for a very long time and has been told he must leave.”
The fire settled. A log shifted and sent a brief column of sparks up the chimney.
“You are asking whether I care for her, are you not?” The words fell with a little bitterness.
“No,” Bingley replied. “I am asking why she does not know that you do.”
Darcy stopped short. Unaccountably, his heart was racing.
“I have conducted myself with what I believed was appropriate restraint,” he protested.
“Miss Elizabeth did not choose this engagement. I have tried not to impose on her a set of feelings she did not ask for and has given no indication of returning.”
“Yes,” Bingley said. “I know. I have watched you do it. Has it occurred to you that she might read your restraint as indifference?”
“Surely that is better than humiliating myself and discomfiting Miss Bennet with an unwanted display of passion,” Darcy protested. “Yes, I have concealed my desires; that was always my intention. Indeed, I thought I had concealed them better than this conversation would suggest.”
“From Miss Elizabeth, I believe you have,” Bingley said.
“Only not from me.” He said it without heat or satisfaction, as a simple correction of an error.
He leaned against the billiards table and looked at his friend mercilessly, though not unkindly.
“Darcy. You silenced Mrs Pearce in a room full of people because she implied something unkind about the engagement. You stood beside Miss Elizabeth at the assembly and told your aunt, in front of forty witnesses, that she was your decision. These things are visible, at least to me. To Miss Bennet as well, I think. I am not certain they are visible to the person they are intended for.”
Darcy was quiet for a moment. He thought about how Elizabeth had acted in the sitting room at Netherfield.
Her stalled wit, the careful pleasantness.
He thought about what Bingley had said at the card evening and what he had done with it, which was to hold it alongside everything else and find the other evidence more compelling, because the other evidence required less of him.
He thought about Elizabeth in the entrance hall, her voice low and carrying further than she knew.
I cannot bear that he should suffer. He had taken it as the language of compassion for a man she pitied.
Darcy had been painfully certain of it. He examined the certainty now, with Bingley watching him, and found it rather less solid than it had once appeared.
“She believes I want to be released,” he said.
Bingley nodded gravely. “I think she does, for you have given her a considerable amount of material to support that belief. Darcy, what you have been calling consideration for her feelings has also had the effect of making her believe you are at best indifferent, and at worst reluctant.”
The accuracy of this was not comfortable.
Darcy had spent much of the past several months being uncomfortable in ways he had at least been able to categorise.
Unhappiness he understood; restraint he could manage.
This was different. This was the discomfort of understanding that he had caused the very harm he had been working to prevent.
It was humbling indeed to take an honest look at oneself and conclude that one has acted wrongly at almost every turn. “I had believed that silence was the appropriate form of consideration,” Darcy said weakly,
“Silence is appropriate when it protects someone from something they do not want,” Bingley said.
“It is less appropriate when what it actually does is leave them to draw their own conclusions from insufficient evidence. What conclusions would you draw, in her position, from your behaviour these past weeks?”
Darcy thought about it, and arrived at the image of a man who had conducted every interaction with the careful evenness of someone managing an obligation.
Who had moved to her at an assembly and defended her, yes, but who had also maintained, in every private moment, an equally careful distance.
In every particular, Darcy had behaved exactly like a man of honour who wanted to be elsewhere, and who restrained himself from saying so only with difficulty.
Dread and remorse coiled in his stomach, cold and nausea-inducing. “She thinks I am enduring it,” he said.
“I believe so,” Bingley agreed.
“And in trying not to burden her with my own feelings, I have instead produced something that looks, from her side, like a man counting the days until his execution.”
“That is a fairly accurate summary of it.”
Darcy moved to the window. The frost on the gravel caught what little light came from the house.
He stood there for a moment with the full weight of the past weeks and months arranged plainly before him, stripped of the justifications he had applied to each individual decision, and saw the shape of it whole.
He had been so intent on not placing himself in her way; he had meant it for the best, and produced the worst. Darcy had been so careful not to use his feelings as a claim on her that he had inadvertently hidden the only thing that might have changed the nature of what she was enduring.
And she had been enduring it. He knew this. He had watched her endure it with a grace and a wit and an integrity that had cost her something every day, and he had admired it and said nothing, and the admiration had been invisible and the saying nothing had been all she had to work with.
“She does not know,” he said. She does not know my heart; I have made it impossible that she could.
Bingley said nothing. He did not need to speak.
Darcy turned from the window, knowing that something must be done. He had told himself that he would not speak unless she asked. He had thought it for the best, and he had been wrong.
Elizabeth deserved to know. Not as a claim, or as pressure, and not as something she was required to receive or respond to in any particular way. But she was carrying a weight that was partly his to carry, and she had been carrying it alone under a misapprehension that was largely his fault.
“I need to speak to her,” he said.
Bingley looked at him with a crooked smile, like a schoolmaster pleased with a slightly slow student who has finally grasped the lesson. “Yes,” he said. “You do.”
Not through a letter, even though it would be more comfortable, as it would spare him of having to reveal in excruciating detail all the ways he had been wrong.
A letter could be drafted and revised and reduced to the version of honesty that required the least exposure.
Elizabeth deserved more than that. “I must speak to her in person.”
“That would be my recommendation,” Bingley agreed.
Darcy looked at the fire. He thought about what he would say, and found himself equally terrified and elated by the thought of finally, finally laying bare his heart.
Elizabeth might not return his feelings; that was an eventuality that he must accept.
It was entirely possible that Bingley was right about what she did not know, but wrong about what she felt.
That he would speak and she would receive it with nothing more than kindness, and that the kindness would be worse than the silence had ever been.
So be it; Darcy would still speak. Tomorrow he would call at Longbourn and say what he should have said weeks ago.
“Thank you,” he said to Bingley.
“Don’t thank me,” Bingley said. “Go to bed. You look terrible.”
Darcy smiled ruefully. “You are not much improved yourself.”
“I have my own difficulties,” Bingley said, finally laying his cue stick on the table.
This was true, Darcy noted, and suggested a conversation they did not need to have tonight but must have soon. Bingley’s situation with Miss Bennet also needed attention.
One thing at a time. Darcy bade his friend goodnight and went upstairs, though he knew sleep would be long in coming. Tomorrow would require all his courage; tomorrow would define all his hopes.