CHAPTER 8
The Basket and the Gentleman
Mr. Darcy left his office later than he intended, under a sky very much of his own temper.
It had been lowering all afternoon, grey pressed upon grey, until London seemed composed of wet stone, dirty vapour, and professional fatigue.
The air held that chill which did not quite justify complaint and yet contrived to make every step disagreeable.
By the time he put away the last paper, corrected the last copied error, and dismissed the last necessity masquerading as business, the light beyond the window had thinned into something neither day nor evening, and his own spirits were no better.
He was not ill-humoured. Ill-humour, at least, possessed energy.
He was only tired: tired of clauses, tired of clients who wanted certainty without prudence, tired of men who required three letters to understand what one ought to have conveyed, tired of civility where contradiction would have been shorter and more just.
His clerk had copied one passage accurately and another with invention.
A client who had come to sign had instead debated every line as if ink, once dried, might bind not merely property but immortal destiny.
A letter requiring only a simple answer had produced two difficulties, one apology, and a fresh delay.
Darcy had spent the day in that particular labour of his profession which was less the management of law than the management of men’s reluctance to be governed by it.
By the time he stepped into the street, he wanted only solitude, a clean coat, and a fire if he chose to allow himself one.
His lodgings were not far. That was one of their chief recommendations, and he had learned, in recent years, not to despise practical blessings merely because they came in reduced form.
The rooms were respectable, orderly, and narrow.
The stair was clean but worn. The drawing room had good books, good habits, and not enough space for the scale of life to which his body, more stubborn than his judgment, sometimes still expected to return.
His expenses were controlled. His linen was kept properly.
The grate could be made cheerful enough when he was not determined to be economical with coal.
There were evenings when the arrangement almost resembled independence.
There were others when it was merely exile with accounts paid on time.
That afternoon, with London grey above him and grey beneath his boots, he was within a few streets of home when the first sign of disturbance reached him.
It was not the cry.
It was the horses.
One learned, if one had been raised among proper stables, to read trouble half a second before others heard it.
A carriage had stopped a little way ahead, and the team, though not yet in full alarm, had that uneasy lift through the neck, that uncertain communication of fear from one animal to the other, which could become peril if handled foolishly.
The coachman’s attention was wrongly placed.
The street was not crowded, but it was busy enough: wheels, damp paving, crossing pedestrians, a boy shouting somewhere behind him, the rattling impatience of London preparing to be inconvenient.
Then something small shot beneath the line of the carriage.
Then came a woman’s voice, sharp with fear.
“Pom-Pom!”
Darcy was moving before the whole picture had arranged itself.
Afterward, he would remember the matter only in pieces: the horse’s head checked beneath his hand, the coachman startled into duty, the flash of a small brown coat near the wheel, a rat vanishing into the gutter, and the indignant, half-bald creature he caught up from a place it had no business surviving.
The dog objected at once. It barked, writhed, scraped one narrow paw down his sleeve, and transferred to his glove some substance from the London street which Darcy preferred not to identify.
“Be still, you infernal object,” he muttered.
The dog yipped directly in his face.
“I assure you,” said Darcy, holding it more securely, “this is not an improvement upon your situation.”
It did not obey.
It did, however, remain alive.
Then the lady reached him.
She came quickly, directly, with no collapse and no flutter.
She was young — that was his first thought, and an inconveniently strong one — and very handsome.
Her bonnet had shifted with haste; beneath it, soft brown curls had loosened a little from the weather and alarm.
Her walking dress was dark brown, finely made, and, to his momentary disbelief, matched in tone to the little garment of the creature in his hands.
But the dress, though striking, barely held his attention. Her eyes did.
They were green, lively even through fear, and fixed first upon the dog with such fierce concentration that Darcy had the absurd impression she would have scolded death itself had it dared to touch the animal.
Her brow was soft, her mouth decided, and something in the quick turn of her expression suggested a mischievous temper not absent even now, only violently occupied by terror.
“Is he yours?” Darcy asked.
She took the dog from him with both hands.
For one instant their fingers met around the creature’s narrow body: a practical transfer of an unreasonable animal from rescuer to owner, and therefore nothing which ought to have remained in his awareness.
Yet he felt the warmth and pressure of her hands with an immediacy that seemed to belong not to the street at all, but to some more private place within himself where no stranger had any business arriving.
She did not notice. Her whole attention was on the dog.
She examined him with the urgency of a woman who required certainty by touch as well as sight; and when satisfied that he was whole, she looked up at Darcy with such undisguised gratitude that, for one disconcerting instant, he felt he had become important to a stranger before he had prepared himself to matter.
What followed was, in memory, less a conversation than a swift rearrangement of his intentions by a woman who did not appear to know she was doing anything unusual.
She thanked him with too much force to be answered comfortably, discovered the state of his sleeve and glove, insisted that her house was only a few doors away, and converted his first refusal into a point requiring further argument rather than into an answer.
The older woman had by then arrived: plain, composed, and carrying a work-basket with such propriety that one might have supposed the basket, rather than the dog, had required rescuing.
Her presence made the impropriety manageable; the young lady’s gratitude made refusal feel almost churlish; and Darcy, who ought to have persisted in all the usual forms, found himself exchanging a few more lines, inclining his head, and accepting what he had not intended to accept.
Had he been less tired, less startled, or less aware of those green eyes still too bright from fear, he might have done better.
The house was indeed close, and very soon he was admitted into one of those establishments whose quality did not announce itself by brilliance, but by certainty.
The hall was good, not fashionable; old-fashioned in its arrangements, but not neglected; serious in its furniture, and polished without ostentation.
It possessed that air which Darcy had not encountered often in recent years except as a visitor admitted by business: wealth so settled into habit that it no longer needed to show itself.
There was a warmth in the place too, and it struck him almost before propriety did.
Not merely heat. His own rooms could be heated if he chose to spend coal freely enough.
This was warmth of another order: a fire already established somewhere beyond, servants moving quickly and without confusion, the faint fragrance of tea or polished wood, the sense of a house trained to receive and tend before the guest had fully understood himself received.
It touched an old habit in him before he could defend against it.
Then the machinery began.
A footman appeared. A maid followed. The young lady gave several swift instructions regarding his glove, his coat, his hand, and the dog’s condition, all while seeming to assume that refusal was only a preliminary stage of obedience.
A severe-looking housekeeper came out with such quiet command that the servants’ movement around them at once acquired shape.
Darcy heard her addressed as Mrs. Albright.
She took in his sleeve, the dog, the muddy glove, and her young mistress’s heightened colour without asking a single unnecessary question.
“Warm water,” she said to the maid. “A cloth for the gentleman. James, the coat. Carefully.”
“That is unnecessary,” Darcy said.
Mrs. Albright looked at the sleeve.
“No, sir.”
The word was so calm, so final, and so entirely without apology that Darcy, who had faced louder opposition with more success, found himself surrendering his coat.
Miss Bennet looked very much as if she wished to smile and had too much gratitude still to permit herself the indulgence.
“You see,” she said, “I am not the only tyrant in the house.”
“I had not yet formed so wide an accusation.”
“Give yourself time.”
The footman took his coat with a skill that made objection seem vulgar.
Mrs. Doddridge, without apparently moving at all, contrived to stand just where her presence made the whole scene respectable.
The dog was placed upon a cushion near the hearth, wrapped in something soft by another servant, and treated with an importance he accepted as only his due.
Darcy found himself in the drawing room.
The drawing room was warm.
That, he thought, was the first trouble with it.