CHAPTER 31
Not Wholly Unwarned
Mr. Darcy left Portman Square that evening with the very sober consciousness of a man who had been too happy and had no right to be.
Nothing had occurred which the severest judge could properly condemn.
He had dined where he was invited, spoken when spoken to, made himself useful where usefulness was natural, and departed at a reasonable hour with every form of propriety observed.
Even Lord Pomington, whose standards were neither low nor impartial, had acknowledged him publicly and without violence.
The evening had offered no extravagance to repent and no folly to correct.
That was, perhaps, precisely the trouble.
Had there been awkwardness, he might have been steadied by it. Had there been coldness, he might have been warned. Had Mrs. Gardiner’s reserve hardened into dislike, he might at least have known how to meet it. But nothing of that kind had occurred.
The room had received him. Miss Bennet had received him.
Her world—that composed, various, female-governed, professionally fortified, absurdly dog-haunted world of good fires, old friends, exact servants, newly married happiness, and comfort made dignified by habit—had opened and held him for an evening as if there were nothing in the thing at all improbable.
He walked home through the winter streets with the air of a man very much occupied and very little at ease.
It was not even the dinner itself that most returned upon him, though the dinner had been excellent.
He could have borne excellence. Excellence was a thing to be admired, judged, and left behind.
What followed him instead were the particulars by which an evening ceases to be an event and becomes, against all prudence, a form of life.
Miss Bennet in claret silk, standing in the light of her own candles as if command and youth had, for once, made an agreement.
Miss Bennet at table, having contrived not merely to feed her company but to consider every person in it.
Mr. Gardiner’s reserve, obliged to alter by observation.
Miss Hall’s sharp intelligence. Lord Pomington in green velvet and public consequence.
And Miss Bennet at the instrument.
There his thoughts became less orderly.
It ought to have been nothing. He had turned pages for Miss Bingley first. He had stood properly, attended properly, withdrawn his hand properly, and given no one cause to notice anything beyond ordinary civility.
Then Miss Bennet had taken her place, and the same office had become almost unmanageable.
She had played with less finish than Miss Bingley and more feeling.
Feeling was not the right word.
He disliked it as soon as it came. It made too much of the music and too little of his own failure of discipline.
Miss Bennet had done nothing but play. He had stood behind her and turned pages.
Yet every movement of her hand, every warmth in the line of her shoulder, every slight inclination toward the music had entered him with an intimacy he had no right to feel.
He had not touched her.
That fact, he discovered, was no protection at all.
He reached his rooms, was shown in, and found them exactly as he had left them: orderly, sufficient, respectable, and wholly incapable of consolation.
There are chambers in which a man may live very properly and never once be tempted to mistake them for home. His own were of that excellent class.
The fire had been kept in. His papers were arranged. A brief lay where he had left it. His gloves, when he drew them off, were damp with cold and street mist; his servant took his coat with the usual quiet efficiency. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been disordered by his absence.
Portman Square had been full of voices. Here, the tick of the mantel clock seemed almost impertinent in its insistence that time should continue in so small a manner.
He sat down at his desk because standing still with one’s hat in hand is too plain an acknowledgment of inward disorder.
The work before him was real. It had consequence. He opened the brief, read the first line, and understood none of it.
He closed it again.
He had been able, until tonight, to keep Portman Square in fragments: papers, Thursdays, leases, a rescued dog, a breakfast room made less melancholy, a drawing room made habitable, a dining room persuaded.
Fragment by fragment, each thing could be made proper.
Each had its explanation. Each could be governed.
Tonight Miss Bennet had assembled those fragments into a life.
Not his life.
That distinction ought to have steadied him.
It did not.
He had thought restraint would be easier if she gave him less.
It was not. She had given him friendship, trust, a place at her table, the grave courtesy of her relations, the absurd privilege of Lord Pomington’s notice, and the sight of herself at the centre of a life she had made.
None of it was little. None of it was owed to him.
None of it could be despised by any man not wholly lost to ingratitude.
None of it was enough.
He despised the thought as soon as he had it.
Friendship from Miss Bennet was not a consolation prize to be handled with masculine self-pity.
It was a gift. More than that, it was a trust. To be admitted among those she chose, not merely among those she endured; to be allowed into the habits of her house; to hear his name spoken there without reluctance; to be received not as a claim, not as an accident, but as a man whose presence might be welcome—these things were not small.
They were also, he discovered, a discipline more severe than exile.
Had she kept him at a distance, he might have been sensible.
Had she used him only for work, he might have remained safe under the name of usefulness.
But she had called him friend without saying it, admitted him without claiming him, and made a place for him in her happiness that was large enough to undo him and too small to satisfy him.
He could not ask for more.
He would not withdraw because he wanted more.
If friendship was the only honourable place allowed him, then he would stand in it as steadily as he could.
He did not know how long steadiness would suffice.
But he could protect her.
That much, at least, remained clear.
The thought brought Mr. Wickham into the room as surely as if the man himself had entered.
Darcy rose and crossed to the fire. Movement did not improve the situation. It only changed the direction of his unease.
Wickham was in London. Wickham knew enough. Wickham had asked enough. Wickham had already shown, by visiting Darcy’s chambers and smiling over his rooms as if measuring the reduced space in which his old falsehood had left him, that he had not come merely to be seen.
And Miss Bennet was rich, young, independent, and visible.
Darcy looked toward the desk, then away from it.
The thing could not be written. A written warning would either say too much or not enough, and in either case it would put Mr. Wickham’s name where Darcy could not control its use.
Paper could be mislaid, intercepted, preserved, misunderstood, repeated.
Even if no enemy touched it, a written warning would demand too much explanation and provide too little protection.
He had asked to call tomorrow.
That must suffice.
Morning came cold and pale, with one of those London lights that illuminate everything without warming anything.
His rooms looked cleaner for it and even less forgiving.
The fire, stirred early, was more dutiful than cheerful.
His shaving water steamed faintly. His cravat resisted him twice, though the fault was almost certainly not in the linen.
At chambers, Mr. Jenkins had the discretion not to comment on his punctuality, which was fortunate, as Darcy had arrived late enough to deserve comment and early enough to resent it.
There were letters to answer, a settlement draft to review, and two questions from Hartwood concerning a Manchester Square lease which required attention.
Work, mercifully, still obeyed him. He corrected a clause, amended a date, refused an ambiguity, and wrote a note to Beaker concerning the difference between a tenant’s memory and a tenant’s signature.
By noon he had done enough to prove himself still rational and not enough to make the day easier.
Then he went to Portman Square.
On the way, he found himself observing too much.
A boy with a parcel under one arm slid on the damp pavement and recovered himself with a grin.
A woman in a dark bonnet argued with a butcher’s boy over the quality of a joint.
A carriage wheel struck a shallow rut and sent dirty water against a post. Ordinary London continued, offensive in its indifference to the fact that Darcy was carrying Wickham’s name toward the one place Wickham had not yet touched.
That was unjust. Portman Square was not clean because it was innocent. It was clean because Miss Bennet had chosen what would be admitted and what would be refused.
Today he would put that ugliness before her.
No.
Not put it before her.
Only let her know that it existed.
The footman at Portman Square received him with the composed recognition of a servant whose household had already decided that Mr. Darcy was no longer an accident. That, after last night, should not have moved him. It did.
He was shown not into the dining room, which had returned to privacy after its triumph, but into the drawing room.
The house wore the morning after company with quiet competence.
No disorder remained, but faint evidence of the evening survived in smaller things: flowers still fresh but no longer ceremonious; a chair a little altered from its accustomed place; a music book closed but not yet removed.
The air itself seemed to hold the memory of voices.